ISSUE ELEVEN | FALL 2018
1.
There are a million ways to name pain and grief.
A name is
an anchor, is a hitching
post in the pitching
vertigo of ocean.
On my world
all of the forests are burning
down. There are holes
in the sky. The waters,
they are rising.
If it’s a question of time
travel, tectonic drift will
shift geography against you.
Even if your switch
is jammed into a single setting
forward and steady.
Name the birds.
Name the landscape.
Even islands die after some time.
Name them anyway.
Our throats carry a water
table of contents.
It’s how we find our way
how we fill the time, how we soak
the wounds, the way we cure
and salt the meat for winter.
2.
There are a million ways to name pain and grief.
An atlas for all that is
temporal. To name
something is to hang
a stopwatch around its neck.
I do not think I understand death
but death understands me
understands us
landscape and all.
In a universe of rootless
loam, it’s dreadfully
simple to get off
at the wrong stop. To
leave early with someone
you love. Or because it’s too dark,
too rainy to see the street signs.
You have to remember the names
or reinvent them and hope that
the landscape matches the incantations
you cast into its dark spaces.
We all bendalong, until
we burn the forests down, until
oceans come for us and
islands are pulled under.
3.
There are a million ways to name pain and grief.
When the land can no longer speak,
they will wait
in the sea
like a tribe of glistening mermaids.
Wryly T. McCutchen is a poet, memoirist, and performer. Their work has appeared in Wilde Magazine, Alive With Vigor, Lady/Liberty/Lit, Foglifter, and Raven Chronicles. They were awarded an MFA in creative writing with dual concentration in creative nonfiction and poetry from Antioch University. Their first poetry collection, My Ugly and Other Love Snarls, is available from University of Hell Press.
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