THE APOSTLE
*Julia Roberts
The sun crumbs that feed a world are nothing
in light of the glaze that resonates and woos us
through you. Even as some bird of paradise,
you are not, ascending through our upturning,
we forget you are a creature too. Not suffering
as we, flung into the opened light of intimacy
dying, it should be us, no more totally, unseen
in the seats, awakening parts of ourselves to woo
you, and grow you in the warm ardency
of the familiar emotions your smile tells us
are a part of this entertainment’s cost.
Who would contain you? Everywhere
the thin housings of self intensify
and multiply the promises affirming
yes, as we wake in our seasons, grasping
your reward in our beds, warm and nude,
as the dreams of all movements must be
to succeed. We keep you in our heads,
fragment of you, changing you
even as you, yourself, remain forever
where you have always been most
intense, in patterns of idea cast open
on the infolded black of a full house
approaching you. In the emptiness
we call for you to mend us to your side,
in intensities blessed, yet surpassed
by the act of watching you breathe.
Here is where you know you own us. Lost
unto you, you grant us a being, we
who are equal to you only in our passing,
while your veins effervesce with the external
hopes, forming and formless, perceived
as a part of you, resented that you are
drenched in it from all of us who perceive
you as greater, disinherited from humanity,
an unstooped angel whose shining teeth
point us to your ceaseless vision, striving
to demur this is the cathedral of want.
In this time the wooing commences. Again
such currents swirl, as shadow leaves
in the undead fall, filling with direction
downward. We accept our oneiric selves,
the body as the brokedown home of the thought
of you, who remain in front of you, there
and defenseless. Still. Wooed and wooing
from where we sit, created and broken
from uncertain evenings in which we return,
timid children, to follow you where we know.
Copyright © by Dan Schneider
THE FINN
*Sari Sotamaa
Who would understand the remote dream of difficulty
into the star, equal with its temperaments, stung
The importance of all this is merely the eloquence
And does the goat understand it is dreamt, by the girl
It seems natural as it is. The girl and the beast,
It is moments as these which recall her abandon,
In the torpor of her fingers she senses union, and thinks
Copyright © by Dan Schneider
save the dreamer? Sailing in to her body past
a single moment of sky and sea made one,
under the violent pastiche of indigo and sun, which will not set
this time of year, in the saltless ego made
an instrument of space, pressed into the flowers
she bears. She glares devoted meaninglessness
into orange and violet hues her eyes gather phosphenes
from the singular suffering of and, and its lack,
as she dreams behind the rote blue of her computer
screen, circling about the world, breaking
into fragments, motions of springs replicating
away, as she hacks into universes where gulls circle
over dead buffalo husks, and gophers swim free
in some Baltic Sea. Identical to a dream
she once had, when her name was unworn by years
or bones, when she was six or seven, or not.
in which she skips to the barn, and strips
to her self, at the center of the blue-tinged eye
of a goat. She becomes one. With the roll, in the pass
of time, all things align in the dream and the real.
in the dream, as it bleats or brays or makes
some kind of sound, in tones Neolithic
as its breast baring heat into this pile of meat it meets
remembering a time when it was flesh and more?
as they lay in the sun, as she used to lay
on gravestones when young, to sense the power
of death, terrifying and breaching ethics with fragility,
postulated arrangements of bare whispered presence, the dawn
unmentioned with her own hard kiss into living with this flesh,
this beast under the sun's demure hands slowly heating them one.
by father or mother, or other such things, as she wakes
from the seem of a mind, pressing the fresh darkness
of her face into the void, the meaning of beginning,
and the questions therein, abandoned and undone
by not one instance, as the computer flashes, her mischiefs
sing of flowers, and malls, and things European, under it all
alone as a lion in a drought-filled land, plagued
by hyenas, as this rogue imagining, and its absence
of fear through indigo flares, the sun, and the union of all things.
of the moonlit reunion of the thing and the thought, the keys
of a half beating whole, rising to be her emissary
to brilliance, till the other calls, in its bray she is comfort,
on her knees she writhes, vertebra becoming constellations
made flesh. The rim of her moon curves her shape into its.
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