DUST

INGREDIENTS A Canon of Violence Nate Fisher Serra At Work Jeffery Pethybridge Psalm Jeremiah Driver

Seven Chambers The Seven Chambers of Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle

Allison Funk

Womb to Tomb, Birth to Earth, Dust to Dust new works by Lauren Cardenas

A Canon of Violence

1. Days of Swarm Across Missouri, the corn moves on, and I walk the nakedness along the property line, the colt single action dead in my hand.

I raise the barrel and trace the path from where my third great-grandmother’s farmhouse once rested and to where the cool of the barn now lay buried, then onward horizon to the flat grass where, according to words passed on, The James Gang had rode onto the property, Jesse straddling thunder and steel, his black coat the devil’s handkerchief, leading a flurry of men that swept in from all directions, sixguns upcast, firing, chickens scattering in alarm.

Clots of blood on white feather, a maddening storm, settle into the dirt. Beneath a rolling herd of dust are twenty something carcasses gathered into a grain sack grinning wide with pitch at the bottom.

Jesse dismounts with little grace, his knock on her door tender, her answering with a scowl and dishrag hand gripping a Winchester rifle.

He removes his hat, cups it to his chest, and says he’d certainly be grateful if she’d fry up those chickens for he and the boys, that is, if she has the time.

They eat in silence, spread out like a circus making camp around the pasture. A young girl dangles her legs off Jesse’s saddle, rubbing her finger raw against its leather. He and the man who owns this past sit on the porch, smoking sweet, black cigars and sipping whiskey out of tin cups waxed with that evening’s loitering sun.

I often wonder if these founding generations, the nettled ones, ever cried out in their beds for hot coals to dull the spear that staved their backbone, or fed themselves the handfuls of hex without a nit of qualm, a diet of black oats and fried pork blood.

2. Pedigrees, Monotones The same grandfather that shared a drink with Jesse tailspinning home from the bar every few months, claiming he’d killed someone over words, then the family going fugitive cross-county.

My later grandfather working for loan sharks in St. Louis, breaking noses and cheeks for profit. His brother, my uncle, tossing sofas out of second-story windows with single, impossibly swift motions. Cousins running guns for the Chickasaw, stripping off and drowning their clothes in the Mississippi, stalking off nude into the Ozarks to live again. and myself, these limbs, quirks, instincts: never able to sleep with my back to a door, a phantom weight glutted at my right hip, always watching hands and what they say.

Taught to assume nothing, contest everyone; that there was no “dirty”, to dig knuckles into the notch behind the ear lobes; that books and home-baked goods were weapons.

On the family crest, a stone tower, stitched in honor of the man who refused to watch his city burn, who scaled the outside wall alone with a carving knife

to face an entire dispatch of English soldiers, swallowing the arrows and gashes that entinctured our blood, trademarked a coming birthmark of hotspur and ash.

I raise the revolver directly aloft, a torch, a beacon to draw closer the daydreaming stillness in the fields, draw back the hammer with my thumb, a wishbone snapping, and empty all six shells into the sky, all the while, in that escaping hollowness, waiting, wishing to shy away.

Serra at Work Astronaut-like in an asbestos-suit to caliber the forged steel-cube’s white-hot edge matter worked from the molecule up to a 77 ton ode to Charlie Chaplin no poem is ever that pure that absolute among the skateboarders and das Geschmier its weight a force a mass reforming the city

* Whipping a wax-pencil over butcher-roll muscle-memory more than instinct intends the hand a skater whose leaps and arcs over the frozen lake seek shapeliness and yet the process of seeking itself becomes a shape of leaps and arcs the skater makes over the frozen lake in time the leaps and arcs the skater and the place become one shape begun in wax-pencil and muscle-memory the frozen lake the mind that sun-reflecting lake a field walked measured by walking the simple and sensuous confidence of walking through a field or frozen lake

* After the censorship a litany of insults the griping judge’s campaign the senator’s griping campaign too the hearings and trials and rulings founded on property rights over the poorer angel of speech after the wreckage of work wrought and the engine of anger has cooled now bitter no longer the spark to work the ethic of work remains so too its image poor angelic Giacometti plaster dusting his hair and trousers and boots finally taking a night-meal though cancer has wrecked his stomach but he must eat to work against his death not yet finished its work in him this is no romance but how work rebukes

* Slow boiling pith to pulp paper-scraps run through a blender the whole soup slathered over a salvaged screen-door and deckle fan humming to dry the sheaves to gather the mind’s violence his mantra work comes out of work and the perception of work contesting the world’s gross inordinacy that work is alchemical and in its solving-actions experience and the contents of experience become known to man as a chemicalsoul remade in objects in persevering actions as downtown a park grayed by paper-ash and carcinogenic dust will not be torn out of mind so this work this autumn paper-making

* Walking the sleek architecture of the Pulitzer arts building alone except the sandwich in my pocket workbook with its obdurate gap of actual work notes for future work heard confusion for Confucian rain on sidewalks their cracks glancing lights under the façade of tenements like a Tibetan thangka last finishing the icon’s eyes animating dedicating the image from Kafka’s notebook now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon namely their silence a vivid-waiting livid awaiting then the shock of tar-like impasto paint-stick circles on handmade paper the shock of recognition incohate yet not trailing to incoherency resolved in words slow boiling pith to pulp the park grayed by paper-ash and carcinogenic dust and the second work of art taking place as words are taken down reckoned the first work of the poem attention a concentration capable of reckoning all the dates and silence is part of the process

* Moving furniture three days a week now in coveralls and gasmask to throw a ladle full of molten lead an arc and an aleatoric art

Psalm We walked down wet sand bars with sinking hiss-slosh steps into the wildness of water.

Hidden in stillness, recklessness was awakened by the lifting of our heavy legs. Wildness cascaded back into itself as tadpoles fled.

With my back turned to my cousin, the sound of splashing water baptized my disbelief.

There is holiness in dirt: boys lost in the moist silk of loam.

The Seven Chambers of Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle The First In a room flooded with sunlight, I cannot see through the earth in my eyes: dirt, grit, dust— how it stains, sullies—the shame of it—soil, loam, soot, muck. ~

-Second When I heard nothing, it was no trial to remain silent.

Selfsame.

Here

though it’s no louder than scurries of mice, cough, sigh, caught breath, step, restless fingers smoothing wool, though the call

is piecemeal

(stray words, pollen on the wind) my ear is a vestibule. ~

Third What am I waiting for?

With the wind and snow and bad roads, it can only get worse.

And yet I inch.

Unspool my thread.

A fearful, foolhardy stumbler until I remember the globe of my soul dizzy in its orbit may spin free the longer I stand on my knees. ~

Fourth Out of what’s parched:

a girl—

And over them velvet silk ribbons

Holy Holy

in petticoats.

water-becoming fold upon fold gathering sheen. the headlong plunge

to where it sweetly pools.

The Fifth An iota.

At rest. ~

Sixth If, in this crevice, the sleep of the unborn could last what’s that pulse?

but

A wick is lit, and in its spill a cubbyhole, cupboard, closet open, but dead-end.

Fire, Nectar, bless me with the spaciousness of a dome or a cell of honeycomb.

The longed-for door. ~

At Last And. And. And. So much when it rains from the downpour?

who can tell the river

AC K N OW L E D G E M E NTS Editor in Chief/Publisher/Print Designer: Lauren Cardenas Features Editor: JE Baker Writing Editor: Raphael Maurice General Inquires: piecrustmagazine@gmail.com website: piecrustmagazine.com