ISSUE: Winter 2022
Ancestral or learned, such threats,
tonight’s charry staircase of heaven—
crash, storming, splitting flicker shards,
slamming shut the fickle sham of indoor light
at night, concussing awake the germ of dread,
God thundering from bed? O, small heart
sputtering near mine, funder, funder,
boom! & suddenly the mouse in the car,
the hairy porch spider, slick garden snake,
even the benign hippy plumber lumbering on the stairs—
all pale. Never mind that this one terror,
recalled, may fuel mortality’s epiphany,
strip us back to the scalp’s itching bone wands—
forked, electric, branching skyward.
