Elaine Fowler Palencia

Reading Me

T. Dallas Saylor

Not just my tells but my takes: I lie beneath a shedding tree but you gather the truth in dying brown & yellow fragments; I let blood, let blood run from knuckles because I won’t run but you step in front of my body, eclipse me. When I’ve run my words dry, you read my lines of sight from impulse to climax, ice torched to mist & seed slung to bursting earth & mouth & pulse to pulse & climax. Order for me at lunch. Take my queen.

T. Dallas Saylor is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His work meditates on the body, especially gender and sexuality, against physical, spiritual, and digital landscapes. He lives in Houston, Texas. He is on Twitter: @dallas_saylor.

Night Without Similes

Elaine Fowler Palencia

Son, I don’t know how to tell you what is happening. Similes are worthless. Your damaged brain cannot grasp the concept of unlike resembling like.

To you, words mean only what they say and in your material world nothing is like anything but itself. Perhaps that’s the cleanest way to live. Tonight, when again your bowels let loose and your muscles go rigid and you cannot even lift your head from where you’ve fallen, I clean you up, give you pills that may or may not help, arrange blankets over your stiffly arched feet, bed down beside you on the floor to watch your nails dig into your palms, hear each breath become a sigh that I fear may be your last. No use in summoning help. The doctors are out of ideas. Your eyes signal you are afraid, so I think of what you love and say, “Outside, there are witches in the trees. They are inviting the deer and rabbits for a Halloween party. There’ll be witch’s pizza with sausage, and they’ll invite Superman and Batman, and Harry Potter will fly in on his Nimbus 2000.” Now that you have something happy to imagine your eyes shine and your quivering lips smile. At two a.m., as the rain arrives, your breathing smooths. At seven, you smack your lips to ask for witches’ pizza and hold up your arms to show me they no longer shake. I like to think it was story that pulled you through as it did me, my fractured dreams full of magic black cats stropping themselves against your wasted legs, refusing to let you go into that other world, for which we have only similes.

Elaine Fowler Palencia lives in Illinois and has published four poetry chapbooks, most recently, How to Prepare Escargots (Main Street Rag Press, 2020). Her poetry and fiction have received seven Pushcart Prize nominations, one from Tipton Poetry Journal. She is also the author of two short story collections and a nonfiction, historical work about her great-great grandfather, On Rising Ground: The Life and Civil War Letters of John M. Douthit, 52nd Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Mercer U. Press, 2021).