After the rain,
we went out in pairs
to hunt the caps
that budded at night:
wet handfuls of waxtips and widows,
lawyer’s wigs, a double-ringed yellow.
We shook them out onto gridded sheets,
the girls more careful than the boys,
pencilled notes on their size and shape,
then levelled a wood-press over their heads.
Overnight, they dropped scatter patterns
in dot-and-dash,
spindles and asterisks
that stained the page
with smoky rings,
blush and blot,
coal-dust blooms.
In that slow black snow of spores
I saw a woodcut
winter cart and horse
careen off course,
the dull crash
of iron and ash,
wheels unravelling.
All day, a smell of loam hung overhead.
We bent like clairvoyants
at our desks
trying to divine the message
left
in all those little deaths,
the dark, childless stars.
Exhibit by Sadiqa De Meijer
Shattered Ali Blythe
Your eyes look like
beach glass fresh
from a pounding.
I wish I could float
you inside an empty
bottle and raise your
many tiny sails.
But one has to accept
the tense of a feeling.
You will never be
well enough again
to exist on anything
but a diet of thin ice.
You will recurrently
have the sense someone
is checking the time,
which you suspect
might be suspended
from nurse-clean clouds
by a delicate gold chain.
You will have to drink
meds from a plastic
cup. Next, you won’t
remember a thing.
