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tempt
- Robin Powlesland

black and white long bow
or wooden pocket blade
painting of red dinner table
rabbits dancing on the plates
it is all under water from here
the long nails and hair
your drawn out look
my mistake
my wasted strong talk

please do not come here
and spread your
shortcomings
please go
I can fashion my own
weapons
and home


Why This is 11 Days Late
- Charles Clayton

Nobody thinks they’re contagious. Just like everybody thinks they’re good drivers, even as they text and guzzle cheap beer and don’t check their mirrors and don’t bother to look around. Or wash their hands. Or stay home when sneezing or hacking up green phlegm.

All I wanted was a haircut. Take some off the sides to avoid the hat wings, trim what’s left on the top so it doesn’t look like I’m cultivating a comb over. Just walk right in, no appointment. She’s from the Jemez pueblo and has cigarette breath but the price is right and the trim usually decent enough. I was feeling fine and just laughed at the sign on the door. Wished I had the camera actually to catch one of those moments that make you glad to live in this one of a kind town.

I missed out on the snapshot but caught something else. One of the downsides of civilization, of cultivation, of millennia of living with domesticated animals that taste good and allow us to forgo the hunt is the fact that close proximity with chickens and pigs and cows has resulted in the swapping and evolution of bacterial and viral predators. Chicken pox. Mad cow disease. Influenza.

That and the fact that the loss of nomadism means that we don’t get the chance to pull up stakes and leave it all behind…like the Navajo abandoning the hogan when somebody dies. So the invisible filth piles up, moves around, spreads like, well, disease.

So blame it on China, or some other transitional hub of free roaming animals and overpopulated populace. And blame it on airplanes, and the kid with his finger in his nose who touched the elevator button, and the buttons on the atm machines, the grocery cart handles, and a thousand other unwashed fingers and uncovered sneezes and the fact that too much Thanksgiving beer cheer and celebratory pie gluttony had compromised my immune system. And especially blame whoever it was that ignored the funny sign and left me an invisible gift on the door handle of the barbershop.

Lou Gehrig is the name of a person
-Eric Mack

My great grandmother died peacefully in her sleep - natural causes. So did her sister, great Aunt Mary. And great grandma Dessie, on grandpa's side. Not the cancer, not the Alzheimer's, not the Parkinson's that killed their children and their children's children - that's now killing our parents, the generations that decided death simply wasn't such a natural thing.

"A misnomer!" they cried. "Ignorance! A lack of medical and biological understanding!"

So these things have names now, mostly ending in -oma or something no doubt named for European doctors long-dead at the hands of their greatest discoveries. Really they're just all words for cancer; literally, or figuratively something eating away...

The ubiquitous phrase used to describe the last moments of the homestead generation is what consumes me now - "Peacefully in her sleep."

All of them. One moment dreaming, the next... Maybe it just bled together. Was there even a seam holding fast the images of rapid eye movements with those more ethereal?

The children of pioneers decided this could not be. They moved in to cities they had built, in homes filled with books of knowledge they had transcribed, the essentials of life synthesized, freeze-dried and worth the shipping and handling -- and "death by natural causes" left this world, peacefully, while our parents slept.


Two Ways to Acquire Elderberry Elixir
- Johanna DeBiase

1.The over-tired toddler yanking on my shirt sleeve nearly knocks over the glass bottles of herbal tinctures lining the apothecary shelves, but I hold tight so her hands do not free themselves to grab at fragile incense burners and ceramic smudge bowls. When I turn my back, she yells to me, “Mommy, I peed,” and I see the puddle of urine pooling beneath her. I grab the elderberry elixir, pay the exorbitant amount to the cashier and head home to cook dinner.

1a. Climbing over the barbed-wire fence into the neighbor's pasture, I follow the curious directions from Lena, knocking grass reeds with my boots down to the river, turning left at the acequia's head gate, over the boulder shaped like an clover until I locate the elderberry tree ripe with clusters of deep purple berries. I harvest as many as I can fit in my basket and head home to concoct a tincture.

2. I throw another load into the dryer and return to the table where my daughter is eating noodles with her fingers and wiping her boogers on the back of her hands. I feed her the elderberry elixir and she asks for more. I explain how she can only have a little at a time and she proceeds to throw a fit yelling, “More, more, more!” and tosses her bowl of noodles to the ground, which the dog gratefully licks up. I put her in time out and try the elixir. It reminds me of something. I pour myself a glass of wine and proceed to get drunk.

2a. After weeks of waiting for the brandy, honey and elderberries to smother and seep in the jar, I finally open the syrup elixir and swallow the warm goo, feeling it coat my insides and draw out any daunting ills. The taste like sweet wine lulls me into sleep and when I wake, I feel the aching desire to run, to disregard footwear and gravel and run. The pounding of bare feet against the earth is a swift flight into the sun. I flit through the village, hovering just above the ground, past the fields and foothills, past the gas station and Family Dollar where locals procure pocket-sized tissue packets and floss. They do not see me, a wisp of wind and light.

3. I wake up with a nasty hangover. My head is pounding just behind my shuttered eyes. There is a toddler jumping up and down on the bed yelling at me to get up, “Get up, Mommy, it's morning time.” As I swing my heavy feet to the floor, I notice my nose is dripping and I suck up snot because we are out of tissues. I will have to stop at the Family Dollar on the way into town to pick some up.

3a. One more loop through the valley and I head home, letting my feet grace the earth again. I flex my legs, still able to taste sweet elixir on my tongue. Inside, I dine on chocolate mints and listen to the call of the coyotes in the distance. As I reach for a mug, I notice that my body has lengthened three inches since morning. Tomorrow, I will eat rose hips turned shiny from frost and test my legs against the mountain side.