I Dreamt of Ravens Again Last Night

thick boned, strong footed
claws grasping like skilled craftsmen.

Wings overlooking their own shadows, the way I have yet to learn how Sweeping above and below, sweeping all that slumbers or wallows.

Cleansing into one another,
waning and waxing like self-lit moons, tugging at effervescence, their own and that of the day.

The tree which they called theirs alone was wrestling with them, their feathers and her branches
like teenagers tangled and undone by their own wind.

This went on until each four-nailed toe was content
in what it grasped.

There is no rest for the weary
but there is always solidarity.
I awoke thinking of all I love and therefore hurt inevitably
and all that return the favor. 

-from Love and Fate

painting by Eleanor Hazard

Apart • Hillarie Higgins

Not knowing where to put this

heavy glaring sense of time lost

and consciousness frayed and displaced.

Does it belong compressed, in the cavity of the body

or is it meant to be thrown off the top floor of the tallest

building in a small town or into traffic at 3AM on a Monday morning in Chicago's south side.

If released to scuttle about by its own devices a deep sense of drugged calm falls upon me. Appearances.

And so I choose wildness.

A decomposite of play in a changed world.

A bed of dust and recollections.

Stillness and death.

Loneliness like a stillborn product of labor and sweat and blood and heartache.

Sailing numbly and home again.

Bones and bloating

Sex absorbed

Canceled

Motionless and frantic and contained, hooked

in a frenetic code.

worn tightly and warm.

Clutching the fabric of images cast by an old projector unplugged and boxed in the basement beneath the holiday shit.

Glitter muppets of plausible caricatures that nod and function and collapse into the sink.

Amazed.

–Hillarie Higgins

True Moon • Heidi Koos

When you move up and 

   down you’re describing a dick,

like light finds dark.

When he goes in it’s in and

   in again but you are every size

A maximum life realized

Every time, the nothing to something

You girl, are every dick,

the definition, the maker,

true fucker moving

because he’s always the same

and you are always different

–Heidi Koos

Hungover with a Lampshade • Bethany Price

In a hotel room, I am jolted awake.

No being waits for me in the dark,

nor in the empty bed next to me,

but the color of the air is different.

I notice the walls: I am appalled.

They are covered in peeling hair.

A sound from my throat is cloyed

when no locks brush my shoulders:

I raise a hand to my head,

my scalp is floral.

Wallpaper.

Unoffending and bland.

The floor aches with a lusty flesh breath

and my figure doesn't rise or fall.

It’s hard to realize it when I touch

my body, it takes me a few seconds 

to process,

as I pick splintered wood 

from my belly.

-Bethany Price, from Terror, V.A.P. 2014

The Look • Heidi Koos

I want a press.

Isn’t that crazy?

I’m going to order it

and watch that dog

    over there-do you

think we matched on

    our way over here?

I hope not too much, God

I hate those couples, the

way you know exactly how

they are in bed together,

I’ll wear the polo, babe,

and they’ll know I spank

your ass if you keep your

hair down-or am I too sexed?

No reading at the table.

Look at me, I’m watching the

dog, I barely know you,

we’ve never done it

-Heidi Koos, from Parallelograms, V.A.P. 2014.