SURVIVOR’S GUILT

by Sarah Fitzpatrick

AI-generated gif by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

8:47 a.m., the world is a siren. The train folds down its newspapers in unison. A thousand dominos clack to impossible silence. Playbills flutter into ash. Billboards tie themselves into prayer flags screaming past a capsule sealed against the miasma of falling towers. A new infant surfaces to gasp blue light. Mother’s breasts engorge with the fair-weather clouds beyond the cesarean drape. Someone is screaming down the hall. The willows of Central Park shudder the sign language of calamity. The molten core of Earth constricts. The trees understand it as music. 

Saved by a teacher conference, your feet give way. You’ve stayed an enormous golden pendulum, its wire dusted with powdered glass. Enraged muscles conspire to squeeze until your tender hand is empty of blood. It runs to colorize the sidewalks of a ghastly silent movie screened only in Manhattan. The city as monolith, a scientist’s constant. The pendulum is a false prophet. You become the fixed point. Transfuse time back into the veins of every paramedic, every finance worker, every new mother, every suicide bomber. Steal back all that is magnetized by the core. Give back the seasons to the trees.

Sara Fitzpatrick works in animal welfare in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her poetry and fiction have been published in places like Merion West, Jet Fuel Review, X-R-A-Y, and Tampa Review. A collection, Bury me in the Sky, was published in 2020 by Nixes Mate Books.

AFTER THE INAUGURATION, EVERYTHING IS PORTENTOUS

by Allison Blevins

Photo by Fletcher Gravy

I think about the absolutes of motion when I’m naked,
how a pendulum swings, how a scale unbalanced
must wobble, how my skin ripples, weight unsteadies.

Something alive is buzzing in the kitchen, leg
against leg, string against bow, the sound
of nothing, boxed and electrified.  A blackness

circles in the sky above my son’s school most afternoons.
I could say blackness as if dawn or sleep
or blood rising to air were sinister, but the feeling

on my skin is more like dust, fine and granular, settling
even in my throat.  I could say the circling and flapping
and cawing will alight as sediment, in the corners,

in the morning, after God has closed his eyes,
after God has opened them again.  My children
cannot see my body unclothed.  When I walk naked,

I am emperor.  I parade the living room, parade
an ocean of blind children.  The images they steep in
invisible.  On the playground at my son’s school

children in puffed and quilted jackets gather and ring
around a solitary boy.  The children silent, the boy’s mouth
buzzes, all the feathers, dark and rustling, fall from above.

Allison Blevins received her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte and is a Lecturer for the Women's Studies Program at Pittsburg State University and the Department of English and Philosophy at Missouri Southern State University.  Her poetry has appeared in such journals as the minnesota review, Sinister Wisdom, Pilgrimage, and Josephine Quarterly.  She lives in Joplin, Missouri, with her wife and two children.