Inside the dead of winter
Curls a fiery soul
A little bear that sleeps defiant
Waiting out the cold.

Perhaps an existential crisis
Shook the universe’s mind,
And sent out blasted aftershocks
To certain human vines--

The shaft of sunlight through the far barn window spun the hay dust into a different kind of gold. The colour lent the old barn a sense of prestige and solemnity, like a king’s robe draped over a farmer—lifting his hollow cheeks, straightening the wrinkles on his brow.  

The house-thief strikes
When I lay the scissors down,
Vanishing them under whatever scarf
Is most forgettable.

The air stagnated in the streets. No, it rotted, like so many leaves in a compost pile. Siran grabbed her oxygen mask off her bedside table and clapped it over her mouth.

The chip salesman lurks in the dark corner of the superstore, handing out three and a half of the Product at a time.

The wolves waited with baited teeth, the leaves dripping onto the forest floor stopped mid-drop, and the little mushroom people called Caps scrunched close and still against the loam. Nothing could move under her shadow, for Bright equaled motion.

You amble outside of your in-laws’ house, the one they’ve had for thirty-four years of married life, the one you’ve driven to approximately 784 times if you count all the late-night stops when you dated your now-husband in high school. The air wavers like a mirage in a desert, and this clues you in that a dream has begun.

When the Thwaites glacier thawed, the news prattled /
about how stock in plastic water bottles fell /

The exterminators wove their bags from the vodka strength of the noonday sun, killing the shadows straight off when they stuffed them in the bags. But Culver wove his bags from the strands of dawn, from when the first few beams trailed across the fields, not too bright, but just bright enough that they couldn’t slip through the stitches.

Hailey, startled, fell backwards on her rear. She was ten, and mushrooms had never deigned to talk to her before.

She wondered if she could transform into a bear, or an ant underground, something that could burrow into the depths of the soil or rock and stay there for months in the winter, unconcerned with the cold or with cages.

Victim One: 56-year-old male Gary Beary. Balding, supervisor. Assaulted with a desk on the fourth floor of the insurance building on 10th street.

When Jan reached four years into sixty, his daughter and her son flew off into the glorious first exploration past the Milky Way to somewhere called Z-1.

Something in the way their too-small heads bobbed on their long necks stirred a primal, instinctive fear inside Georgie, like an ancestral memory passed down from a coelacanth had lit up in her brain.

Kisa wrapped her scarf around herself and folded her knees up against the window. The daytime roared outside like an endless fire, but the lights were coming soon. The black lights.

I forgot how to take off my shoes /
How do normal people /
Take off their shoes /

Every Tuesday they saunter up next to our chicken coop, mustaches twitching in unison, and blast the house full of holes. They always seem surprised when no bodies are there to pile in a heap in the yard because we knew they were coming and are down by the river. Pisses the chickens off to no end, of course.

The day that Maisy stopped believing in God, she began seeing the skeletons.

Marilka went on so many walks her arms disappeared /
regressing inside her clavicle like two large ropes /