I touch the earth and find the ash of my mother’s hair, her breath curling into smoke, into a hymn she will never sing. The fire eats through my hands as if it knows my name as if it has waited for this moment to make a feast of my body. Everywhere I go, the animals keep my secrets. The birds stitch my grief into their wings, carrying pieces of what I can no longer hold. The snakes coil my sorrow underground, burying what I’ve begged to forget. Last night, the moon burned itself into the river, and I was there to watch it drown. Everything goes this way: the air, the body, the prayer we refuse to finish. The water cannot spit me out. It holds me as it holds the ghost of rain, turning my name into something heavy, something that sinks. I asked the water to name me, but all it gave back was silence, its voice caught in the belly of a fish long dead, long forgiven. The fire grows a mouth, and it sings my body into a psalm of smoke. I am nothing but what I’ve lost: a garden of teeth and a heart beating against the blackened wood. To live is to be buried in parts, to call each death by a different name. Here is the fire. Here is the water. Here, where the earth learns how to swallow me whole. This is what I know of living: the birds mourn another loss, the snakes keep their prayers, and the river, even in its rage, cradles me like something it forgot to destroy. 

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

The week I resigned myself to break up with him, I had to wait until Thursday to tell him in person. There seemed to be an inordinate number of deer carcasses along roadsides that week, one especially haunting, its ribcage visible, most of the flesh having been consumed by vultures. The red sinews of each meat-lined rib were seering, vibrant against the dreary wet winter afternoon. I slowed the car as I passed, mesmerized, torso aching in response: a world in which people slow down to stare at a creature splayed open, exposed, one second living, the next devoured.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I hold grievances grown so old they are
calcified, rounded, smooth-pearled possessions—
each tucked away in its own bitter sphere.
I know each by feel, by weight, by passion—
I know where they’ve been lodged and exactly 
why I keep them there. I’ve grown used to their
presence, to the collected gravity
of each and every ancient reminder
of who and what and why and when rotten
things happened. I’ve kept them all. Kept them all
this time. Felt their sharp angers dull, soften
into me, felt them become mutable
as I held them, shaped them perfectly.
And when I die I will take them with me.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

No matter how much you beat it,
the heart is a dog. It will lick any man
who looks on with adoration.
I know because it’s inevitable.
I too have beaten myself at the threshold
of desire and have tried dragging
this body back. But look,
here I am, naked knees grazing the floor
of yet another room. He says,
You look like my childhood friend,
by which he means I could be loved
if I were someone else.
Oh, trust me, I know, like a new dog
in the family

after the first one has died.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I’m curious why you have binoculars hanging
from your neck on a faux pearl string.
I kind of hope you’re not looking past
the swelling dawn to watch tenants
in the student building across the street
eat dry cornflakes with their fingers,
a buffering screen in front of them.
Not that I know anything, but if you wait
until dark, you might be able to see
into their half-furnished, unintentionally
ascetic living rooms even without the binoculars,
provided the blinds aren’t drawn, though
it seems like they always are.

I’ve lived in three apartment buildings and
have known exactly none of my neighbors.
Sometimes, as I’m locking my front door,
I hope one of them will pass in the hallway
just so I can see what they look like. I hear
their music, their breakups, their snoring, but
I don’t know their names, their faces. Sometimes,
as I babysit my boiling pasta, I hear footsteps
outside, and I run to the peephole for a glimpse.
I never see anything but the beige wall
and stained carpet, and my water boils over.

I think what I’m trying to say is
the binoculars might not be enough.
You may have to enter the building
and sit in the hallway, waiting for someone,
anyone, to emerge. They have to appear
at some point, don’t they? If you give me
some signal, look at me looking
at you for long enough, I can take
the elevator downstairs and let you in,
and together, we can find out who lives
beside me. Just give me a sign.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

there are no worries on the beach;
we can flaunt our near-naked forms,
as we build derelict sandcastles
that we pretend will last forever
on a shore lit by our ancestors’ sun;
we can find this ancient comfort,
this primal escape, only here, now

it is as if we’re reminded
by the vastness of the ocean
how frail and powerless we are,
so we set aside our conflicts,
instead choosing to navel-gaze
and sunbathe and permit ourselves
to forget the two degree goal,
less than two minutes to midnight,

the world is so fucked; sometimes
i just want — need — a cigarette
an indulgence concealed by a sea breeze;
we can linger until each dune
takes on meaning, shaped by wind,
insects, you, you from weeks ago,
us from years ago, us here now

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

“The SAP Ariba spend management solution portfolio is empowering companies to move faster and spend better. The solutions connect millions of trading partners worldwide to SAP Business Network to enable direct, intelligent connections that redefine how organizations communicate and get work done.” – SAP Ariba website.

1

Ariba, I have failed you again. I have
placed a box fan in front of a cattle fan
and called it ambition. I sent my resume
to the paltry gods and it contained 
a typo, a misplaced “y” or “i” and now
I must cleanse my relevant experience
at the river of the many-headed girlboss.
I asked a career coach 
for a smoke. Ariba, with your four-step approval
process, your sacred ladder, and me,
a mere renter comprised
of trustworthiness scores. I live in terror
of your guided buying,
as it should be.

2

Ariba, you must understand that I lived for years
in a tempest of misremembered Morse code. They refer
to it as the ancient ‘90s. Your origins lie
in a hush of patents, but my eyes
still sting with since-dead neon. I remember
the sign of the hatchery, a cracking egg.
I remember the flamingos, so many, and a wildfire’s worth
of green gas station dinosaurs. A teapot atop
a building. A water tower of painted bees. A green screen
computer with a single blinking cursor. Heretical
childhood. Modus operandi: Midwestern. O Ariba,
we are but public four-year arts majors with flapping fruit bats
for memories. Deliver us from our contract requests,
our blanket orders, too.
We ask this of you, not God.

3

Ariba, an office door slams in the afternoon
light and I cry. If the employee of the month called
eternal suffering a pain point, 
middle management may learn to practice
active listening. List the ailments: 
your upskilled heart, your quiet
quitting soul, your obsession with how even a pandemic
could not finally slow the grind. Label your faults
as a series of rooms: infinite rooms, rooms
for growth, outreach, engagement, and quality assurance.
The Voynich manuscript is now understood 
by no one but Ariba, we know you as a precision 
of timestamped pleas. 

4

Ariba, I wake in the night to pain
everywhere. I think I hear the Earth trying
to dislodge from its orbit. I will not stop
thinking of you, force of habit, fever dream
of process improvement. Ariba, I once ran
from you and saw perfectly rusted mopeds
flit down a gade in Copenhagen. I tasted the crisp 
stars against glow-in-the-dark velvet. 
I understood metaphysics. I had never been
so alarmingly sober. I returned home
to an eviction notice. Ariba, are you 
animal, lamentation, or dream? I am  
but a child at your feet.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

they’ve got me running in circles again,
spinning round the old mouse wheel, 
lunging for scraps 
and we retire at 70 now
with no time left at all
and it feels as if
the world has spun
completely out of control.
little houses for millions of dollars,
fortune-busting interminable educations
that lead to no jobs,
to mcdonalds and fat-choked arteries
because the rent is due this week.

i sit here and read 
the job postings on the internet,
all the digital madness,
all the arcane terminology and technology
that no one could possibly understand
(or would ever want to were they sane),
and reflect on what it must have
been like
to live like a real living being
in a jungle or a forest
all those millions
of years ago,
to do things that made sense,
to hunt when hungry
and sleep when tired,
and to die when the time came
instead of being stretched thin
to such obscene degrees.

and we jump through these hoops
because we don’t know
what else to do,
we are scared
and don’t know
any way out,
some of us drink
and some of us turn to stone
and some of us have families
and some of us go mad
and learn to love what tortures us.
they throw us crumbs
to pay the utility bills
and we keep churning along,
day after day after day
until in a heartbeat
20 years have gone by
and the muscles and joints are aching
and the mind is fading
and the rest is crying right along.

and cnn blares in the background
and traffic lights go green and red
and the holidays come and go,
the endless cacophony of a few
billion choking throats,
religion and money and passion
and sex,
the computers blink and run
interference
for the suits
with their fat fingers
in the cookie jars
and it just seems to 
get worse and worse
with each passing year.

the freeways are jammed,
the buildings are bursting,
the fields are burned,
there is no room for love,
there is no room for grace or simplicity,
there is only this
diabolical fear of starving
that keeps us chasing carrots,
this fear of drowning
that keeps us afloat.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I hadn’t thought “oh
I am living through an apocalypse”
until
these scorching summers,
savoring every birdsong
as if it is my last.

---

Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Tell me a bedtime story in which I don’t float away this time. Kiss my stained glass lips and let me be young again. Don’t say that the crow will gnaw off my kite strings, that God will pump me full of helium. Tell me a story that anchors me to the roots of your laughter, to the doorknob of your attic. It doesn’t have to have a happy ending. I promise not to cry when the monsters creep out of my lungs, or scream when the climax is empty. I just want to imagine myself tethered to your vocal cords, entwined in your thick arteries like a tender knot. Only then can I fall asleep nestled safely in machinery. Only then can I wake up in the morning, and look at the milky sky with a jitter of hope. 

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Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson