Issue 3.1

Ich Dien Anxious, I dress for a meeting that shouldn’t make me anxious at all. It requires a necktie (now quite unaccustomed), and so, after some hesitation, I decide on the striped regimental of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. I don’t think of it as stolen valor, but instead, as a kind of tribute, to Sassoon and Robert Graves who were both Royal Welch Fusiliers (although not in the same Battalion) in what they would have called the Great War. (And they spelled it "Welch" with a "c," archaically, like "The Welch Regiment" in which Anthony Powell served, in the Second War, as his father had served, in the First.) While half-Windsor-ing that useless adornment of silk, striped magenta and blue, instead of my meeting I’m thinking of poetry, and old books, and bravery (and regimental amalgamations— they’re both called "The Royal Welsh" now, but spelled with an "s," not a "c"), and I don’t know why my brain insists on these fizzing and bubbling lurches through thickets of useless minutiae, and I wish that I could just ask it to stop.

Western Motel *After Edward Hopper* When we came to this town we were the protagonists of uncertainty. @tab@tabLike the rivers @tab@tabwe knew nothing of direction moving westward where the land opened like a begging hand with the rain for alms. @tab@tabThe town promised nothing, @tab@tabowed nothing, so we stayed. We were young, away from catastrophe, @tab@tabneither believing in culture or age. @tab@tabWe didn’t yet subscribe to fear. At night we listened to the trains rolling like grounded thunder into the darkness, @tab@tabour bodies coupled together @tab@tabas we drifted through the tangled railyard of our sleep. Morning granted so much. The redolence of coffee and skin in unknown rooms ghosted with strangers. @tab@tabThe horizon hid nothing @tab@taband we felt our lives could be that simple, answering the grain of wood with an axe, mutually fluent in silence and desert air. @tab@tabBut something migratory hushed inside us, @tab@taband like the trains shunting west we became addicted to elsewhere, wanting always to be placeless and strangered @tab@tabaway from any semblance of home @tab@tabuntil, like the land, we had no true names.

Junk Dust, like a pollen of neglect, mantles over every untouched object until her fingers alight on what she believes might have meaning, divining the innate value of items bereft of use. Putting the child back into old toys, teasing out music from broken guitars and drums, scouring away rust from tools long oxidized by unlove. She sees—in the forgotten, lost, and oblivion-bound— what others overlook. A resurrectionist of junk lending new beginnings where most saw conclusion.

False Summits You are tuneless, teaches the trill of the red-winged blackbird. You are exposed, reminds the scarred ice of distant peaks against falling dusk. You are faithless, the wind conveys through codes that redden my ears. Sycamore branches map what’s possible, timing when to bud, but to them, I am uncharted and torn from roots. At the edge of a lot two robins play king-of-the-hill on a summit extruded by the plow, their rusted chests bragging quick as fire against old snow.

Weaving in the Ghost All I have is a broken thread of our last conversation— Do I spool it around my nerves while I wait for an answer? Should I wind it into a yarn butterfly and clip its frayed wings? Your ghost looms over as silence weaves our tapestry: I twirl loose ends between my fingers. The strand of time tacks in December, but I am snagged above the tasselled edge where peonies blossom.