and when I asked
for the waking
to stop, a frost gauzed over
every nerve
that could answer, who,
a slit of clear was barely
scraped from the window-ice,
small rune, chipped away
by the beak of some
liquid breathing god, whose
seedblood-soaked tongue licked
visible oil palimpsests, thumbprints
on glass, floes ripped, bobbined to
red threads, new wet, in chest, who,
I can never codify, cut, cull or
love appropriately, what
lashes over me, clotlight
staining, knifing through eyelid,
constant as the sinuous
wet contortions of your sleeping
anatomy, who, gone still
on French leave, dunes dry to
ruins, Colombian, Chinese,
to re-summon your
jasper calves I’ve touched
is like excavating
a fear, described once under
hypnosis, the sudden
fury of ten proud horses,
the cruel tongue-prick of juniper

—Justin Wymer is co-director of staff writers.

Flat-colored gecko, sun-bathed
       mossy back, shovel nose, one eye gleaming,
       the other half-asleep and twitching
                                behind damp eucalyptus leaves.
                    Tail curls into
the corner of the cell, whipping green to glass.

       Twitching,
          the runners race on treadmills to the clouds,
           a whirring, gasping rush, sabotaged air streaming.
              Their backs are leaking, nostrils bloom and collapse,
                             one eye is glazed,
                             the other, rolled toward the clock.
                         The effort and the heat foam,
                             gurgling over
                                reddened cheeks and spinning
                                   strips of rubber.

                       So, tap,
                               the crush of green and smooth, shrill
               translucence, mime cages with real glass,
                the other side, untouched snow,
            white even in shadow.

Leaping off the supply of sweat-heavy air,
         like stepping from Earth’s atmosphere
              to watch far planets swim in thick jelly,
                     large marbles in a deliciously
                                                              silent jar,
                               sealed tight,
                                  not one breath
                                    to move the space,
                                      nothing
                                         to break it.

—Stephanie Wang is an associate editor.

A pilgrim wind claws out the weathervane;
Another turn, and brittles branches
Of a young elm tree to the west, as if to start again.

A step loaded against the leaf.
Vibrating the gray grass.
The light squeezes out their whole shape.
Step by step, in unspoken studies.

And the hour, and the day,
And my lips not cold.
Grasses are gardened; the tree sways to a stop,
I go where I forget to go.

You never tell me swim more slowly. Try to harbor
that little ship wobbling left of my intentions. And if you
have the gulf to tell me, “Lay still,” watch the ripple heaving
its signed vapor, quietly, without fear of
erasure—a solid—the night’s unquenchable black.
I still believe you’ll watch me huff and weave
ignition from my mouth. An ethnic firework of city lights
vaunts flexures of colors and the water has
a hundred layered skins. I love them like Zanzibar oil,
which is just as mesmeric in the way it spills, iridescent.
Wafts of salt and elegies. You write them, as well,
though you never let them out
to play with my children. Though I have no children.
And you don’t have the lung to house our sordid visits
to the Gauley where our veins made bracelets
from our fingers, grey quartz animals dipped in river
purling, listening to Rachmaninoff with his
own sound of opiates. Our lives are not ashtrays
though they hold some equal, immeasurable taste
of flaring skins past their burning points.
My soot-black sock ebbs far below my ankle. Luna-
pale skin saying wait til dusk so you won’t crackle
humanly. There is hope in waiting.
There is peril in fastening oneself to things
that won’t leave their hermit caves.

—Justin Wymer is co-director of staff writers.