Issue 3.9

Deadspring The old wind stirs @tabweak in the haunches snout burnished hairless @tabjowls gray-whiskered Even an arthritic kick @tabis enough to send leaf litter scrambling for the shelter of roots The sound evaporates the breath on its way out @tabchills the smell a low insistent shiver of no meat and stone @tab@tabjust under water *Run down the slope once more* *rush the supple elms * The tannic piss of oak trees @tabfluttering in their little pools There shall be no more after this @tab@tab@tab@tabthe air will clamp wetly closed behind like a suckling mouth The den is empty, the hair @tabfloating warmly down

Chacmool From an overpass in town, the Sinaloas hang twelve people (Zetas and, what the hell, some civilians) with a sign: *They did not believe*. Promptly the Zetas start delivering heads, tastefully wrapped, one with a note insulting it for crying while it was kicked. You missed all that. But by the highway twenty klicks south you see a Santa Muerte, one of those statues that cut out the middleman, Mary, and drape her sky-blue robe around a skeleton. That’s where they block your car and push you, gagged, wire-bound, into theirs. When on some nameless dust they accept that you’re no one with, as you’ve said, no one to ransom you, they crush your cellphone, and let you live an hour, though not well. And, staring at their faces, you achieve total hatred for them and—at last— total belief in your life, your right to it, your superiority, the subhumanity of these men and all who buy their wares, the beauty of torturing them to death. It’s better than crawling, or Stockholm Syndrome, which at the end you see as universal. Braced on his elbows, he reclines at the entrance to plazas, castles, rooms in castles in the ruins. The enamel is gone, the head always turned 90 degrees. The bowl on his belly, lying on his hands, held human hearts, sometimes maize; we believe that blood was drained in certain circumstances into it. Here and there he was surrounded by water. Profile was noble; full face was for slaves and captives, but in his case something happened. He became a demigod.

Avoidance In the gift shop, cards reveal hibiscus king, jack of cardamom. We’re draped in the honey of an active Saturday after months of mundanity jammed on dead discs, music of an autumn era, avoiding one in which we become bubble gum stuck on the sidewalk, a slug that stops in his trail to ask directions for the meadow but never proceeds.

Dear Petrarch Dear Petrarch, Spring rain is dripping on the castle floor. I nurse my youngest as a nightingale renews his song—good lord, another male now claims me. *You* knew I was spoken for that Friday at Saint Clare. And though I wore a gold-leaf gown with pearls, you harp on stale descriptions of my eyes; still, please regale me, breezes, souls, and all: the Count’s a bore. He muscles past the servants as I lie, paws me, thrusting; grunts. I’ve mothered ten and quicken with the next—oh Petrarch, I will never mend. I much prefer your pen, so use me as the ink until it’s dry. In sickness, hoping you will write again, Laura

My Father Is a War Museum My father did not go to war because he never fought a war of blame; like his father, he sat out the epoch that unfolded and used his eyes to see history in colour. My grandfather did not go to war because women fought the bitterest war: they wielded cassava sticks like machine guns, hugged their ample breasts like Kalashnikovs; the women threw Ogbunigwe at their enemies; the women deployed their vibes for warfare; the women had soft and hardened bodies, that saved like Rachel and killed them like Esther. From the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, women have been the hand that changes destinies. My great-grandfather never fought a war because he didn’t fancy slashing human heads, in the days when bloody heads adorned the tables of men who became heroes with the aid of charms. None was a conqueror by blessing. My great-grandmother was like a submarine, with the body mass of a hundred sea lionesses, so that no river or ocean would survive her splashes. Though she wanted to engage in the cassava combat, they rejected her for her excessive brutality; my great-grandmother was too strong for war. Here was a woman whose momentum was too much. No wonder my father resisted the army and I, being a steel chip from that ancient lineage, assembled within me all these things together, and turned white, green and yellow at the outbreak of a war. My father was the repository of his peaceful lineage, where men and women had devised routes by which peace must replace the miseries of war. A friend of ours called my father a serial coward, whose family had raised the act of jittering into a ritual; but my father grinned at the man who was too blind to notice the millions of bullet holes that riddled his body, where the bloodiest wars of peace had raged like bees.