Avalon at the End of the Alley
I bought a book about a mechanical elephant that befriended & taught a leper how to love again. I would read it every morning on the bus on my way to work. I’d pass stoplight after stoplight and be reminded of the mechanical elephant that would reach up with its massive trunk and grab a stoplight before hurling it into outer space. A shooting star no one looks at. A man points up an alley with darkness at the end. I cannot look, so I watch his finger pointing, the nail yellowish at the end, folds of skin like an elephant's legs at each knuckle. If I took that finger between my lips, let the elephants into my valley to pound my grasslands, settle near water, I could curl there as well, listen to the breathing. If I took that finger between my lips, what entity at the end of me would it envision? Would the man curse my shortsightedness, mourn Avalon at the end of his lost alley? I’ve always been ravenous. Seeking and letting in. Always hoped there was more to how breathless I felt, some undiscovered power to affirm those who uplift monsters over their victims because they believe in the redeemability of people. I no longer know which party I belong to.
Earthly Imagination
Lit a candle: a light wind blew it out.
I rattled a gate: a strong wind blew it open,
bending the hinges. I have no affinity to wind,
its attributes, or its instruments,
except for the flute. I play it to calm my nerves
when I see black shadows walk out of the darkness.
The sky roots in around the windows.
A cry of some sort from the buckthorns.
I'm not entering the forest. Here a spider's
string, a strand, between cup and table.
Clouds like a sheet across the moon.
Beyond this planet very little light
and it has to hit something for us to see it.
Would another planet pronounce
our projections mundane? The scale of us
too mild then feeble? I imagine there’s one
looking down on us saying, their monsters
would shred in my wind, their gods
would break at my temperatures,
but then look at the beauty of the box
that contains them. The flecks of color,
the drama allowing their dreams
to exceed it? If needed, I could not hold the box,
so I look. I’ll miss its delicacies
when they go missing.
Steve Castro is a Costa Rican surrealist. His poetry was most recently published in 32 Poems; Image; The Spectacle and is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review and Bayou Magazine.
Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2022), A Family is a House (C&R Press, 2019), and Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018). He is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo where he teaches creative writing.
Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). Christopher is an editorial assistant for Seneca Review and lives in Syracuse, New York.