Predators
Anne Haven McDonnell
A scream is made to cut
through the mind’s fog,
all rescue circuits flipped on –
any kind of baby animal will do.
When his sleep was sliced by sounds
from the gulley, deep in the woods outside,
he moved towards the yawl, a flashlight
tunnelling into the dark, searching the cry,
and he knew before he saw the tawny warm
fur, speckled white, folded in a thicket of salal.
The fawn’s mouth was open, her fresh
pink tongue hanging out while the cry looped
itself out from her belly from where her eyes –
wide open and hardened to whatever she saw
outside – were already living inside
wherever this cry cut from.
And what could he do?
He thought how the sound must pull
all the blood in her mother, hidden
and waiting. The wolf must also be waiting
to finish this, listening to this cry
light up a tunnel of hunger.
He loved to listen to the wolves
when they sang to each other across
the water, stitching this island and that,
sometimes swimming across, surrounding
the youngest wolf in a circle as they swam,
the arc and hang of their howls, the pull
inside him towards this sound that peeled
the air, and the silence after, the night
full and undone. He thought of carrying
that speckled fawn home but left it –
all of it – the sound of his own footsteps
through the brush all he heard in his long
walk back to the porch light he left on
in his cabin with a door that doesn’t lock.
Singing Ice
Eleanor Hooker
Across the rigid icescape they heave
and haul colossal cables to the shadows
on the opposite shore. We shudder at the echoing
crack and coil of tensile steel on the cold lid of winter.
Back and forth the spectres murmur.
We hear them hum the hymns of the dead;
ceremonial chants that rise and fall for hours,
that, gathering volume, resonate like breathless
air across empty glass. We venture out a foot or so.
beneath us air-sharks drop and dive through
slivers of thickening water, then rise to slam
the frozen under-surface. They tear long rips
that roar along the night, tracking us and splitting
the marbled floor at our feet. The percussions
petrify the living and the dead sing on.
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Images
(Top) Daemon, Lucy Kerr
Photographic illusion
(Bottom) Quest, Lucy Kerr
Handmade illusion with household objects
Constructing low-fi illusions, I connect to something hidden, confused, lost. Manipulating everyday household ‘stuff’ evokes both inner and outer landscapes. The process, always unpredictable, unspools through playful interactions with the ordinary – music, the bath, steam, torches, magnifying glasses, prisms, foil, cling film, collected objects. The sense of dislocation that ensues, infused with ritual meaning, brings me no answers – only a sense that I am holding my eyes wide open, waiting.
‘To see the world in a grain of sand’
– William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
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Anne Haven McDonnell’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Orion Magazine, Terrain.org, Tar River and elsewhere. Anne lives in Santa Fe, NM with her partner and their rescue dog. She teaches as an associate professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Eleanor Hooker’s second collection A Tug of Blue (Dedalus Press) was published in November 2016. Her poetry’s been published in journals including: Poetry, PN Review and Poetry Ireland Review. She won the Bare Fiction Flash Fiction Prize (UK) 2016. Eleanor holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin. She helms Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. eleanorhooker.com
Lucy Kerr creates illusions, in various forms – images whose ambiguity pulls the viewer into a dreamlike experience, inviting a meditative dislocation from the everyday. Kerr’s work brings a sense of the unknown to the familiar. lucyrosekerr.com
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