It's a sad and beautiful world


Walker Evans, Storefront and Signs, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1936

Inevitability
-- by MTC Cronin

Everything fails.
So why bother calling it that.
It doesn't distinguish anything.
Why bother when everyone bothers.
Except for a few.
They succeed in failing before the rest.
(They know what to call it.
(And don't bother doing so.)
Success is inevitable.


The Huntsman's Resumé
-- by Angela Vogel

Oh, I'm ready for the chase. The green pelts, the headless acorns.
In the loom of an over-improved forest, I'm reminded that most
of the world has moved on to gathering. For days the slow road
to the lecturing wife, the pound-dog mother. Even my sword
overextended. Yada, yada, yada. So at word Queenie's bent
on a piece of reflective crap, I leave them home. Shalom.
(Correction: Technically I captured S.W's heart — witness her
gratitude.) I'm the hapless schmuck whose goose is never cooked,
the ten in a 90% chance of moral drizzle. The boys call me whipped
but I don't feel pain since I failed the art of sensitivity.
Yesterday someone phoned about the Fair Chase Act:
I was reindeer hunting in Greenland. They're either for me
or they're stew, and if they're stew they can't complain
about this dying anodyne that used to impress the hell
out of women once, pre-Bambi effect, pre-"You're a G.D. paleolith!"
upon a time when acquiring was hip and what you clubbed,
you knew, required goggles formed from beer.


You are Invisible
-- by Erika Meitner

and everything is tucked in twice.
It is night-time at the Waffle House.
It is night-time and the Food Lion parking lot
is mysteriously full. All our durable goods
roll like marbles down truckers’ corridors:
flashes of neon, void intervals, a clock
that doesn’t keep time but loses it instead.
Memory vanishes like an inside-out room
shaken over a trashcan: the naked space
beneath the bed, the decorative throw pillows,
paste brooches and pockmarked shoes.
You are a city of resin, of negative space,
of chalk. I am the rupture between past
and future, a TV antenna with cross-hatched
arms outstretched. I write your name
in new cursive on the condensed glass
of bus window, erase it with a trace of breath.
The floor here is littered with black gum,
with chicken bones and flattened wrappers.
I am hurtling through transparent space
beyond which there is no other.
All over town is not that far from here.
I can tell you where to find it.
You can’t go into the dark alone.