Tag: NOR 26

Morning Rig

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Angela Sorby

Featured Art: Ophelia, 1851-2 by Sir John Everett Millais, Bt

The moon knows the laws—
the factors, the forces,
and is at peace. Look,

it’s unconscious up there!
Meanwhile, my brother quits
being a bankruptcy attorney

to get his Class B Trucking license.
Why? Let’s wake the moon
to ask why other people make

their weird other-people-decisions.
This is the origin of all religions.
An important part of the story:

the moon never responds.
It lies languid, bathed
in darkness like Ophelia,

while big rigs turn their engines
over as dawn breaks pink
with pollen and pollution.

So much is broken,
but never the largest laws—
how wheels set in motion

spin unless something stops them,
but never skid over the line
from speed to freedom.

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The Dog in the Library

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Catherine Stearns

Featured Art: Sleeping Bloodhound, 1835 by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer

“We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries,
seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no
inkling of the meaning of it all.” —William James

On sunny, cerulean days I go all the way
to eleven when I stretch and sniff among the leaves,
whereas you stay inside, hunched over
your moral universe. Old girl, if you
stopped trying to decipher those fossil bird tracks,
you might see the thermal-gliding hawk above
or that zaftig possum gnawing on fallen
persimmons under the window. I’m just saying
your preference betrays a certain fear
of your own nature. Remember
last summer when you left me in the car
to pick up a book they were holding for you,
and a page or two in you recognized
your own penciled and may I say
obsessive marginalia, although you had
no memory of the text itself?
Whatever made you think your mind
could be disenthralled with words?
As a pup, I once took Mark Strand’s
injunction in “Eating Poetry” to heart,
devouring one or two slim volumes,
but soon realized I prefer the raw
material of life, what e e cummings
calls “the slavver of spring”: smells
of fresh earth, the ghostly scent of
rabbits, even the mounds of dirty laundry
piled up on your bed. If you found answers
to your questions, do you truly believe
those answers would transform you?
So many of your species seem
susceptible to revelation. We’re all
browsers, old girl, without an inkling,
waiting by the door for a treat or to be forgiven
until our unleashed immortal part bolts
for that hit of dopamine. Then
all good dogs go to heaven.

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Anti-Confessional

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Catherine Stearns

Featured Art: Girl in a Blue Dress, c. 1891 by Philip Wilson Steer

In one photo, she’s wearing a sapphire blue dress,
a black cloche posed rakishly over one eye,
a corsage of pink rosebuds around her wrist.
On the back it says JB & RPS, the man
in shadow next to her. This was before the war,
before they reinstated the marriage bar
and she lost her job when she married my father.

One hot summer night, maybe five years after he died—
we’d stripped down to our underwear to play Scrabble—
I asked her about grad school and her fifth-floor walk-up
with Mary Maud, about eating oysters at the Grand Central
Oyster House every Sunday, and the gold lighter engraved
in the Tiffany font at the back of her jewelry box, and I asked her
if she’d ever slept with anyone besides my dad.

She took an extra long sip of her G&T and told me to
mind my own business. Then reached over
to put her X on a Triple Word.

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Exile Queen

.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Bethany Schultz Hurst

the trees
                  flaunting their flowers                      after a while
their blooms will die and then
swell into a fruit             and I submit to you                 dear viewer
               this process is not monstrous

we’ve spent too much time

at night watching these shows where the queens
               keep making bad choices
like torching the city with their pet dragons
               or with sickly green fire
                              lit in tunnels underneath                  because they are mothers

they love their children too much or is it

                                 not enough         the flowers this spring
are ridiculous              on the way into the theater alone in broad daylight
               for some comic book sequel                I can’t stop
shoving my face           into the showy pink organs
               of the parking lot trees

at night I’ve been balancing like a knife on my side
of the couch            the bed because I’m
too tired already to have anyone really
                                               touch me

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