Arlene Ang
Process of Forgetting

When Mrs Kovacs upstairs left the door open,
we brushed it aside as carelessness. After three days,
we began to think of burglary, or worse, maggots
hicupping their way into the body. Mrs Kovacs was absent
from her home at the hour of death.
When they found her in the river, they had to find
someone to identify her. What did we know of our neighbors—
it takes less than ten seconds to forget a dream.

We didn’t attend the funeral. That night we lit a candle
and stayed until it burned down a whole forest
of shadows from the walls. Every day we stood in the park,
smoking, until the shade of a oak—shaped like a brain—
slowly filled with gaps as the leaves were snuffed
out by the gathering cold. That’s how we knew mortality
is all about forgetting. Even as we observed each other,
the holes were already in place: the skull is structured
around them, the senses merely tenants
who might suddenly choose to go for a swim
in something as absurd as ballet shoes and plastic gloves.

Laura McCullough
Button

His hands felt like paws or flippers, big and inarticulate, as if the spaces between shoulder socket and elbow joint and between the finger bones had all fused in the August sun, a kind of annealing, so what had once been uncured now had been except that mobility and utility had been replaced with one function, appendages for show,

and this is what he sees now when he looks in the mirror, a created thing, a ceramic puppet whose arms stand like glass stems, whose hands burst flower-like from the tips.

If he waits long enough, perhaps he will be visited by bees, but for now, it is only ghosts, the children he hears splashing behind him as he retrieves his tilting guitar.

If you meet Buddha on the street, kill him, he recalls some saying once. He thinks a fly has landed on his chest and brushes it away, but it is nothing but a fleck of thread sticking out of a button head come suddenly loose.