A PROSE-BENT ODE: THE HEAVY VULTURES DO APPEAR, NOW

by L. Lois

Source: Florida Wildlife Trappers

The sky is empty, no hint of cloud, the heavy, dark arc of vultures sweeping low over a world of forgetting. They move in silence, gliding like quick lies from innumerable podcast hosts, words slipping through open doors, hands out for cash, voices telling us there’s nothing left but acquiescence. A slumber here, a kind of wasting, my monsters creep like political dinosaurs too ancient to roar, just the hum of their presence, the crazy crawl of flies, the air filled with echoes of something about to be erased. 

I thought once of building something here— 

an arts sanctuary or maybe a place for fragile things, the way my

 mother cupped her hands

 around a broken bird, holding it in her palms.

 Softest down cradled,

 a thing that didn’t know it could die.

 Like a passkey made of wax,

 the promise of security so thin I felt it would slip away

 under the heat of my fingers.

 But we kept pressing forward— 

as if to stave off the tragedies of suffering, 

telling ourselves that calm and order were always enough. 

This is where reason goes to sleep, 

but we forget, in the moments between dusk and dawn. 

We, too, nod along. We’re calling out, offering our liquor to the night, keeping our doors open and lax, hoping something real will slip through and fill the vacuum hissing threats. But, still, here they come— the vultures. Vile promises sweeping low over places we thought too tender and narrow for their wings. In the last pale light, I see my monsters—they may hide, too, as I fall asleep against our best interests. The faintest memory of feathers, floating where they tromped. No noise at all, except the whimper.

L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. Her poems have appeared in Alchemy Magazine, Progenitor Journal, Poetry Breakfast, 300 Days of Sun, Twisted Vine, and other literary publications.

THE MAN OF THE HOLE

by Joanne DeSimone Reynolds

The Man of the Hole was the last of an indigenous group living in the Tanaru indigenous area in the state of Rondônia, Brazil, which borders Bolivia. The majority of his tribe are believed to have been killed as early as the 1970s by ranchers wanting to expand their land. In 1995, six of the remaining members of his tribe were killed in an attack by illegal miners, making him the sole survivor. Brazil's Indigenous Affairs Agency (Funai) only became aware of his survival in 1996, and had been monitoring the area ever since for his own safety. It was during a routine patrol that Funai agent Altair José Algayer found the man's body covered in macaw feathers in a hammock outside one of his straw huts. Indigenous expert Marcelo dos Santos told local media that he thought the man had placed the feathers on himself, knowing that he was about to die. —BBC News, August 30, 2022

O! Sole man –

60ish   50ish

Thatched huts

Holed – 3ish by

10ish foot deep –

4 (or 2?) footed traps

Spiked   Did you

Hide?   Hold up?

Did you know?   O!

Macawed Carnival

Romancer –  

Web-womber –

Eons lost   You –

One with the Whole

Joanne DeSimone Reynolds has published poems in The New Verse News, Salamander, The Ekphrastic Review, Sanctuary Magazine, Ibbetson Street, Wilderness House Literary Review, Lyrical Somerville, and other journals. She has also written reviews for Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene. During the first spring of the pandemic she wrote a collection of ekphrastic poems for 2020 Art Ramble in Concord, Massachusetts.

EATING BREAKFAST AT COLONIAL AND READING HARPER'S ON THE EGG WARS

by Joan Colby

Meme source: Twitter

Reading how the hens suffer
Crammed by the thousands in metal cages,
Stacked stories high,
The air thick with dust and feathers,
Beaks clipped, thin necks bloody,
The dying decaying beneath calloused claws,
Adhering like bathmats to the wire floors.
Forced to lay seven times the norm,
Until spent, to be seized
By the handsful, gassed and ground
For pet food. Never seeing sunlight
Or spreading wings or nesting in trees
Or taking dustbaths or establishing
The pecking order. Reading that to guarantee
A normal chicken life would mean
Paying triple or more for this
Scrambled plate, I tell you
I’d pay whatever it costs to let them be
Chickens scratching in the dirt, how maybe we
Should set up the nesting boxes
In our old coop and get some
Leghorns, though I know we won’t
Bother really, and much as I abhor
What I am reading, there’s the long distance
Between slick paper and the
Long, long barns and my fork.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.