Joannie Kervran Stangeland
When It Is Blue

First she found a lump no bigger than a pea
or a preposition—a small verb: to be.

The danger lies in conjugation
and the tenses—

is, are, would, could.
Will. She kept the will, a world.

I will, we will.
A synonym for tomorrow.

The shape of here is loss,
or a trade—flesh for life.

Her new body: built now for water—
sleek, streamlined—

a seal or a porpoise
(think of dolphins around the bow

as a schooner races along the coast
and the sails are full).

The wind makes a web on the water.
The body makes a plot.

The pain makes her tired. When
it is blue, the sky makes her sharp.

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.