Issue 4.1

In the Waiting Room Time folds into corners where chairs meet linoleum, and the clock ticks like a patient surgeon. A child clutches a stuffed fox, seams worn, eyes careful. A man hums under his breath, a melody only he remembers. I breathe antiseptic air, thinking of all the things that arrive too early, that linger too long, how waiting itself frays the edges of us without apology.

Chloe, in the Woods of Staten Island *After Horace,* Odes *1.23* *and thence Anacreon 408* Out here, Mom, if the berry bushes rustle and I jump— well, he stalks me, you know, that boy, who spied a lizard on our fence and fashioned, out of summer grass, a snare. I just wanted some sun; now I’m “ripe for a man.” I don’t like how they fawn all over me. Mom, are you listening? Mom?

Nugae Celticae There was a department called Classics for reading belles-lettres Jurassic. @tabThe essential ingredient @taband translation expedient? Enough coffee to make this poor lass sick.

The Celibate Satyr With a goat’s hind quarters, pointed ears and priapic posture, I’m no maiden’s dream—or at least, not her mother’s—but things aren’t always as they seem, especially when it comes to lovers. I’m supposed to spend my life getting drunk and chasing nymphs whose purpose is to be raped? Are our brains so ineffectual? It seems thoughts too can be ill-shaped, the erotic anti-intellectual. To be honest, I eschew (which, if you’re literary, you can do) the body’s grosser needs, a distasteful source of fun. I’m loath to spend my life sowing seeds in a quim or a boy’s bum. I think I’m somewhat refined. I love poetry and classical music and I’m comfortable wearing pants; I don’t see flashing as at all artistic, the gymnastic antics of Bacchus’s sycophants somewhat less than mystic. There’s a world of knowledge to enjoy, the foreplay to lasting satisfaction found in truth and beauty, not in groping whoever’s next. Whatever the good life is, it includes duty, not an obsession with sex.

Antlion All my life I was ferocious living at the bottom of a spiral Sharp-jawed, sand covering everything body thick as a short fuse Every day the spiral would carry visitors, scrambling, down to my exposed mouth I hurled the shiny black bones over the wall where I couldn’t see them anymore It was that easy—I felt like an infernal prince squatting in gravity’s navel The hemolymph of all those swallowed warriors kept my belly tight as a drum When I strained against the inside of my skin, I would scrape it away against the sand and grow bigger After years, there was so much blood in me I turned it into silk and wrapped my ferocious body in it covering myself with crystals of sand And when I pulled myself wetly out of the spiral my hips were long and narrow, with four tall windowed wings a body too beautiful not to use up right away I was an angel of sex I was the biggest thing I had ever seen