Lost to Pain

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JOHN KUCERA

Long ago, when I was wordless and alone, what I did know of the face I held to the mirror of my mother, how space became a feature, a form, an artifice between us.

Even now as I remember the face lost to pain, then madness, then painlessness to fire

I see the ghost I made and unmade like a bed. I hear her in the kitchen, sleepless, when I wake at night and words are far away.

And when they come, if not the words then voices, glances, cries. I call them hers. The ones she’s lost to pain, then madness. I call

and because dawn burns for those it mourns and in returning turns away, I enter a gallery of animate objects

where everything is dead and moving. The doll with its string. The mechanical arm. The beaded curtain. They are artifacts of what is here and not quite here, not quite adventure or farewell, words bereft of animals to speak them. The primordial mass cultured with light.

The slightest seizure more terrible than stillness. I call and I enter the space with two lone heads—the first with its bright complexion: the other bluish-gray—and although bound together by their hair, they do not face each other and when they move, the bright one says yes. The dark one says no and the theater is cold as x-rays are an absurd French movie, the kind my mother hated like madness and pain.

Like all who live and do not live, who unearths a self so abstract the person disappears, these abject gestures toward a deeper recognition are stilted, callous, masked as shamans who, as beasts, are never original but ancestral beyond words. I talk to my mother still.

John has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature from Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He currently reside in Phoenix, Arizona, where he teaches Writing online.

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White Elk

—for my grandmother

ALEXANDER ETHERIDGE

Listener of windy creeks, she leads her young through the wind-frosted and desolate steppes— Love is a furnace in her hooves. Half frozen, she’d lie flat with hail piling up, so the strays could follow her pulse back. Snowy elk, recalling again when she heard a greenwood note like little children sounding out names. Now coming to her end, she thinks of her first calf born on white and transparent leaves, and with a cloudward glance, sees an ancient promise begin to prove itself.

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. Some of his publications include poems appearing in The Cafe Review, The Sojourn, The Parallax, Abridged Magazine, The Dawntreader, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, and others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999.