ripping the letter

this
is a
letter
to it. this
letter is to
it. this is a
letter written
down and sent
to it. this letter is
to be read by it. this
letter is a question, a
timebomb. this letter smiles
looks to it so that it can breathe.
this letter’s smell will blur and sting.
this letter’s feel, for it, is heavy. this is
Edward’s letter. this is Jeffrey’s letter. this
is Richard’s leftover in the car, waiting for him,
letter. this letter is like that. this letter is made of
chicken wire pulled tight to cut out a name. this letter
is made of ice to clean out the room. this letter is pieces
of grass, of eggs of sunlight in the glass. this letter is a rip.
this letter will take dogeared hands of understanding and place them
back on road, where Yolanda can be clear, or at least love with her feet
next time. This letter, says, yes, Inshallah, but this letter is not cotton candy.
It is not that they left this letter to crawl slowly out of that place where medication
is sprinkled on shredded minds. It is not that they left this letter to it, the whispering,“I
can’t make him love me”, and the walls running with their skirts away from the war, and
the understanding of goodbye. This letter is it.  This letter, this particular brand of cure.

__________
Nikia Chaney finds herself surrounded by very small people.  She teaches poetry classes for children and she has five children of her own.  Nikia also teaches community creative writing workshops at San Bernardino Valley College.  She has an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University, and she is currently in school for a second master’s degree at California State University, San Bernardino.  She has been published in 491, Sugar House Review, Badlands, Pearl, with upcoming publishings in New York Quarterly and Saranac.

Once You’ve Seen Anything Die, You’ve Seen Everything Die

Mercury in retrograde 
has us on a red-eye,
lipstick on the fly,
racing on the 101
to get to the empty house,
afraid to ask aloud:
what if it smells like death?

We go first to the room where she fell
and expect fluid, an outline,
not this mess of shredded paper
from the starving dog.

One bent slipper under the bed, unmoved.
The picture frame
she must have grabbed wildly
before breaking her neck
against the wall.

In the kitchen: rotten fruit,
Dishes in the sink,
a blinking light on the answering machine
that porcelain creamer cow
I have always loved.

The coroner won’t let us see her,
she’s “unfresh” – we reel.

We didn’t buy enough cold cuts,
I don’t know how to make her noodle kugel.

They play “Turn, Turn, Turn” at the memorial,
We can’t remember if she liked this song.

Someone asks if they can keep her throw pillow.
Lawyers randomly ring the door bell.
A cousin wants to grieve with the big screen tv.
Her sister searches the closet for a borrowed coat.

Later, everything is Lysol, blank, and on the market.
No one wants to pay, say anything small and true
So we tell ourselves the body is mostly just water, anyway.

___

Sometimes You Submit

Oscar the cat sniffs out death
in a Rhode Island nursing home
and thinks: life is a confluence of shambling
but not really, he’s just a cat
with a pinked nose and paw,
light-stepping biting-ball of the best way to say goodbye.

Now see the eternal hummingbird,
Jimmy
who flits the window as the couple paints
his bedroom, it’s been fifteen years
since a two by four sticking out the back of a truck
struck him dead; but they see him.

My fighting beta never did a damn thing
about the Northridge earthquake
which nearly killed me, or did he
paddle upside down, bubble like a pipe
sing like a green canary in the still darkness
while I slept?

___

Lauren Gordon grew up in Southern California and commuted between the San Fernando Valley and San Bernadino while working for the Los Angeles Times.  Her work has appeared in Midwest Literary Journal, Knocking at the Door with Birch Brook Press, Scapegoat Review, Web Del Sol, and has been featured on Iowa National Public Radio.  She holds Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from New England College, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Iowa.  She currently lives  in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband.

Dream Songs

When you sleep beside me
your dreams seep from your ears.

I see milky images of you
dressed in braided rope,

twisting down tree roots.
You pin hummingbird markers

in the bark for place,
to find your way awake.

Dreams are like this,
I think.

A song in made-up language.
Airy twine sewn of Latin,

of French and German.
A place where Columbus falls into orbit.

You are singing in your dream,
so beautifully the sun cries.

Your voice wrings water
from knotted light.

Outside our bedroom window,
the katydids saw through their legs.

What We Become

I became a man in the marbled eye of a harelipped pronghorn bound at the hooves
to the pulley of an A-frame. Tongue-splayed shock heat fogged from its open mouth.
I smelled life in those winter morning ghosts. My father gripped my hands. We muscled
a buck knife throat to tail, etching through piebald fur. He reached into steaming
yolk center and yanked syrupy twin antelopes from beneath their mother’s lungs.
He held them at arms length and became a blackening shadow.

My son will speak of rivers and of the animals that leap them. I will give him my father’s
first .240 with notches on the stock. My son will close one eye and focus on mirror
images of pronghorns and their negatives becoming one as they waver above a spring.
Trees’ leaves morph into locusts who wing away as the antelope collapses.

___

Ryan Mattern is a recent graduate of California State University, San Bernardino, where he earned his B.A. in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in THE2NDHAND, Criminal Class Review, The Pacific Review, Burning Word, as well as others. He is an active member of poetrIE, a reading series dedicated to showcasing the literary voices of California’s Inland Empire. He is the co-founder and fiction editor of The Halfpenny Marvel, a journal for flash fiction and prose poetry. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at various California universities. He lives and writes in southern California.