Issue 4.3

Wholly Rhymin’ Empire We have no English word to rhyme with Ovid @tab(not even Covid), while not one name I know sounds like Catullus @tabexcept for Dulles, and now to pair the name of Diocletian @tabwe need Venetian. Caligula? I can’t relate: his moniker has no good mate, while Nerva, Otho, Antony and Galba stand alone for me. Commodus? Julian? Hardly; *I* say nothing matches in the right way. Vespasian, Lucius—it’s pathetic, all these names so unpoetic. Sure, proud Vergil's work is timeless; still, his famous name is rhymeless.

You Are My Favorite Shade of Blue It is well known that cyan dust and flecks of distant sky drift through your famous eyes. But this is not the end of blue in you. The hues laced through your every movement are no phase of sometime moon, now waxed, then waned. They are the lasting blue of Baltic waves that lap along the bruised and breathing shore of you. Now soft, now rough and rich in salt, they douse our days in deep-sea moods as full of time’s slow heaves and crests as our wide beach is heaped with sand. I stand here on a dwindling dune, bare-stripped in winds, to watch and know the drifting mist of you. Then I plunge in heart-first, cleave surf, and swim headlong till I reach home in swells of blue.

A Cup of Morning *Have you ever commanded the morning, or shown the dawn its place?* *Job 38:12* There’s something I need, not a cup of trembling, not a reed in the wind; call it a sprinkle of the sky like powder, call it a whiff of the sun like a flame; maybe a shot of light in my eyes, a spray of a bright scruple of conscience, a pilfering of some wholeness. It’s something to make a difference, a pittance of substance, the basement of nothing, a jot of depth, a manicure of subtlety, to disconnect the unnerving pain of inadequacy, failure, insufficiency and indolence. Every imbalance has its brain and strain, and, like the body, it administers its healing. If only I had a cup of the sky, like a steamy brew of coffee, a kettle of tea and hot chocolate! What a difference the world makes when the spontaneity of my heart fills Heaven with popsicles; so that this inebriated mode, in which I fall into the darkness of a man caught carrying a pack of wool, like selling sand for food, glass for milk, grass for vegetables, or catching worms for fish, would no longer haunt my soul as though I slash my neck with a saw. It’s the messy part of liberation, not being able to change my body, until I accept my bloated self. And here I’m waiting for my command to spring forth from my throat, for my morning to shoot down this darkness, for this swollen stomach of a river to flatten out on the surface and spill.