Photograph by Madeleine MacDougal

The Importance of Bruising by Maryka Gillis

A trance blooms over me, like a puff of basidial spores.

You’ll remember, he said, like applewood smoke

curling out of his clay-sculpted lips.

Definition takes over his mouth,

As red and defined as Vardaman’s crying.

But it was me who said it, internally

Hoping with ferocity that my preconceptions would still be true,

twenty   years   later. Hoping for memory;

Too fiercely? Tied in

to my third pair of ripped jeans,

never    quite    fitting.

We ache with desperate pleas and find trust rewarded

For the first time since September twentieth, nineteen ninety three.

Hope blooms, like cherry blossoms sailing

through the purple Washington sky.

But sometimes the air is too sweet, fleeting,

Shallow waves a buffer for thought.

Locked in sturdy arms and fleece sheets,

As we freeze our toes with heating pads

And singe our brains with radioactive waves.

The Tree Elizabeth Likes (photograph) by Nicole Dahlmer

Insomniac's Night by Nicole Dahlmer

Insomniac’s Night

The sun is now asleep and once again I am left awake, staring longingly out my
bedroom window at the gleaming stars high above me, jealous of their superior state, and
as I daydream of soaring up above with them, my eyelids droop but they just will not
close, and my mind become a bit foggy as the minutes tick and tock to hours, yet I’m still
rolling around in bed and pacing around on my rug and, quite frankly, I’m tired of it- no
pun intended- like how I’m stuck with these badgering thoughts zipping around my head
like their sole purpose is to keep me from resting, and my body can’t take many more of
these nights that cause it to ache with exhaustion, but the most troublesome of these is the
Pest in my brain that keeps running and shrieking and nagging me until the insulting
remarks become so loud I feel as if my head is about to explode, but then after I think I
can’t take any more, the stars twinkle less and the sun awakes, which makes the Pest
quiet down, allowing me to finally drift into a heavenly state of unconsciousness.

Photograph by Nicole Dahlmer

Poem by Madeleine MacDougal

 Oh don't, as is habit, be vulgar or rude

Dear I caution you soundly to listen and brood

On Warnings I waken inside your own void;

The stuffs of your substance you've never employed:

Fear is the name of that unchristened fool

Who lurks in the shadow I leave like a pool

In the shallows of consciousness dabbled by death;

By gallows they leave in that flesh one request--

For the glamourie, grandeur, of unearthly pain.

Those who provoked me have died where they've lain.

Try fleeing, I beg you, and even to scream--

I'm glad for an audience to witness my scene.

Thus you will find my pursuit, fiends in tow

Savagely wreaking a tumult below

Where there I lend gladly and kindly my green

Indebting a sliver of stuffs almost free.

So hardly a hardship to slip in your pay

Which, missed, gives me rights on the subject to flay.

On many I've done this, but never once slew,

Only grimsome made mis'rabble debtor they grew!

In anger at vileness churlishness anything

Beware of my lashes in vengeance I sling.

But if you're the flogged one, old debtor, old beast,

Avoiding my sentence won't do you the least.

A multitude infantry legion of rule

I extend all my judgment the length of my arm

Where the tips of my fingers grasp only themselves

There drawing all objects they reach into harm.

As minion my drone and my worker my debtor  

I would hasten to settle my earthly vendettas.
And never endeavor to possibly ever

Anti-forces remorses imposing attack

Regret in me never could probably ever

Begin in your favor, austereness to slack!

But promise allowance to once recollect

As you wiggle your while in terror's despair

A scene of some lavishly violent project

That in its alignment of implementair

Begins to compare to the ire I’ll ware
As I pluck at your skin and then into your hair
Recalling, so swiftly, the sulfurous blaze
That like it the Hell Fires only can braze.

When I even the debt that I half-never gave
To your face that now fears like it’s lain on the grave
I will give a small thought as my fingers down-dive,
In pudding a raw flesh that's hardly alive,
That gladly I’ll do This--I’ll flog your flesh raw
But hardly I’ll feel as the glee of my law
Runs in my mind and enlightens my crime
When tardy my lumb’ring idea will incline

Euphoric elysian sweet sentience of blame

Once limbs have a million ill deeds they must claim.

New Poem by Sarah Zuidema

Alone we count our footprints, a sad total to discover,
Every step, and every sole we take
Is lost to our same second.
We make constant company:
From one a soul is born.

We shake, we shiver, we split in two.
Like Victor, a beast
We father-forth,
Of dappled origins. Of murky passion
And golden eye; of partial torture
And paternal tethering.

His feathers do we clip in prayer
And suffer the fear of fall.
Yet sole-prints that we vain collect,
Fain joy from sod and soil.
A tug-of-war we wage within
To reach the distant sky,
The wingèd beast is not our friend
But can I watch him die?