fall 2020
Table of Contents
Return to Home PageRoutes on the Red Subarctic Archipelago Tongue Heather Simeney MacLeod
The Narrow Road to Deep Marriage
John Wall Barger
My Father's House
A.N. Higgins
What We Do When We Run Out of Elephants
Shareen K. Murayama
Bingo Card for the End Times
Milla van der Have
In a Dark Field
Jesse Sensibar
Fragments of a World
Dayna Patterson
Neurons, Metal, Seed
Reading Rocks and Mountains
Susan Landgraf
Pattern Recognition
Tolu Oloruntoba
Okapi Wood Bison Kristi Maxwell
Horses Innocence, Experience
Ryan Eavis
verses upon the burning of our house
Amanda Merpaw
Bracketed
A Post-Apocalyptic Nightmare
Danielle Badra
The Northern Flicker
Identic
Andrew Lafleche
One exists
The embroidering light
you learn
J.I. Kleinberg
from Vanishing Twin Syndrome: VII
James Cagney
Netsuke
When We Wake Together in a Lost City
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Neurons, Metal, Seed
I understand how neurons fire—
human race at stake. How men can smell a woman
ovulating, a woman can sniff a cotton ball
and know the man’s immune system—
his odds fighting
bacteria and depression.
I get how a neuron plugs into a machine.
The technician puts synapses into a metal arm
strapped to a monkey who learns to reach for an apple
and a paralyzed woman thinks: Pick up
a glass of water with her metal arm.
She drinks. She smiles.
I can even catch the idea of a monkey
on one coast thinking about an apple
or tennis ball, reaching with its robotic arm,
while a monkey on the other coast—monkey brain
to monkey brain over the Internet—
reaches for the apple or tennis ball.
What I don’t get is how—ovulation long gone,
sprouting of any seed impossible, how when a penis rises
and the vagina rains for the pure pleasure of it, yes,
how, in a fallow winter—
it can be like spring, even if it’s a spring
that won’t grow flowers.