Issue 3.7

Nine of Pentacles The river is a diamond, and which doesn’t matter when you’ve got a black nine and an even blacker six that have as much to do with the board as you do with particle physics. There is an inherent violence to the bet, the thrust of a stack of chips past the line and into no man’s land, even more so when the tunnel vision is on and you see as if through a paper towel tube: your hand looks fifty miles away as if you’re up there on a promontory somewhere outside Townsend, Montana, and the buzz of the chainsaw is on the screen of your phone instead of in your bowels, but that money is in the DMZ and you know the washing machine in *his* belly is backed at least by third pair and all you can do is try to look bored until you see if what he pushes is a stack of chips or a pair of cards. Hold your breath. Don’t speak. Watch the rattlesnake watch you.

A Sin? Oh, Sure It's fine to be a cynosure. A sin? Oh sure, but there’s no cure. Badminton’s good, though bad to buy bad mint on credit—that’s no lie. Abandon ship: a slip, a crime! A band on ship should play on time. A man might flee a manatee, but man, a tea is fine with me.

The Apothecarian *after Damien Hirst's* Pharmacy enters our temple of medicine, a selective prescription, witchcraft by chemical seduction; sees the damask lining of his black toga, caught in double automatic smiling doors. Shelves are lined with card rectangles, seamless rows of palliative hopes, their strange named whiteness blinds his vision. We swallow then repeat their monikers as an incantation, as he stares upwards in confusion—the insect-o-cutor hanging from the ceiling: its blue tubes hiss above angled trays as he contemplates the honeycombed footstools, glass phials of earth, air, fire, water: the classical elements spiked by three diseases of Paracelsus; his *tria prima,* where shocked lives fall as flies.

Imperial Armory of Mutzig *forged April 1868* Back home from across the channel, one hundred and forty years away, the point now sits in its circular rest, casting a thin shadow above the fire. This implement of murder, blind to allegiance or nation, its truer edge yelling alarm and crackling terror. Sundered from bolt action Chassepot rifle, filched for use against its owners, by more battle savvy Prussian soldiers. In peaceful interim, it is transformed into decorative household accessory— ornamental tool to fulfil societal privation. Its Ottoman-inspired Yataghan curve, whose blackening fuller contains the memory of every shattered rib and ripped artery— their blood ran down its groove, at Wissembourg, eighteen seventy. The brass ribbed grip is stressed metal memoir, overexposed, the shape unchallenged— deathly ice to my touch. Whose Franco or Prussian sweat last grasped its hilt for life? On the mantelpiece, its quillon waits still at the scabbard's throat: tetchy dynamite; a wired trigger.

Birthmarks I have seen the turn of two dark archipelagos in the gulf of the neck of your impossible continent, have seen them turn and drift away from me into the morning hour of spaciousness or tremble in the wake of skiffs scrambling in the water near your shores. And where your riot of black curls fell there was my destiny below where your ear burned with silver and symphony. I perched five ridges on your neck like the mountains in Bolivia and I swear there I cupped a living fire in my hand.

If I Had Dreamt Up the Break of Dawn If I had dreamt up the break of dawn, I would kick the sky's door with my feet, pull out the iron gates of Heaven with my teeth and lay on the white, fluffy grass like lavenders on the surface of a sea, to drink to the full the brew from the sediments of life, putting a wedge between the wheels of time; I would have breathed in Aurora's return through the slow retreat of the evening clouds, whereby every curse from curse retreats and shall neither stand nor forever come to pass. Like the stars sitting at the tables of the sky, like princes at breakfast tables in their regalia, I would have flown to where my soul lies in wait on the wings of the birds of the air and water, or on the arms of the moon to install a nail, a frame and a sill, a parapet of fortune or a parachute of blue grace and mercy; that when dawn breaks upon me at last, paradise would be the only tenant in my soul. This forest of my heart would be no dark cave where I would hide the rottenness of yesterday, nor would the mountains arrive like ghosted graves. I would have licked away the injuries of the moon, knowing that no shimmering light of the night appeared to ease my deepest pains and despair. Darkness would intrude; sorrow would obstruct the silent sequestered path to glory and peace, but the hour of great trembling for joy is gone when the lilac lights of dawn descend upon those with the extra eyes to perceive it, those for whom the night’s frantic hastening would no more be the vision of a lonely day. Then there is nothing to tell of our existence but that we dreamed of the breaking of dawn when roses were rare, and the cacti abounded. I would let the soft animals of my body tread the footpaths that lead to the liberation of my soul, to where the ripening of the sky would be no sin. Still the world goes on despite our deserts.