AmeliaDarland

They beat their soft wings To float higher and higher Swirling together Then drifting gently apart, Black against the cold blue sky.

last night i thought about swimming in the lake where we poured out my dad: his ashes were completely homogeneous against the rocks emphasizing the fossils by filling in the surface, making it smooth. i can’t stop wondering how they did it, if the rods and screws and plates they’d rebuilt his body with 30 years ago were recycled, and into what? the wind shifted and i felt his eyes on me, briefly. sometimes my anxiety forces me to relive these moments that make my stomach sick with rolling stones - like the summer i was nineteen and i dropped that crate and the corner cracked my toenail in half; or five years ago when i did too

snowflakes on my tongue, roses wilt under burdens that will melt by March

Weasel Skeet ----------------------------------------------- Prologue: In Which Mr Lobby Confesses Things About His Life --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Hello. My name is Vane Lobby. I am a 37 year-old male. I—" "Hold on a moment; only your surname, Mr Lobby." "I apologise, sir… Hello. My name is Lobby. I am a 37 year-old male. I attended nine years of technical school on a scholarship. My parents divorced after I was already twenty years old. I no longer have any contact with them." "And your relationship status?" "I am single, sir. I have never been married."

I miss the early morning ritual of coffee and sourdough bread at the old wooden table by the bay watching the silent ghosts hover above the water until the sun gently found a way to haunt them away somewhere inside me hide old visions of you but long ago they stopped coming out to take shape your memory like a morning fog, is lost to the rising sun silent as the dawn you turned out to be not an image but something else, real yet somehow formless. I now wonder if you remember our early morning coffee and bread. Do ghosts have memories? Perhaps that is all that memories are.

A City by the Lake In the city by the lake A warm wind echoed Through the streets, Bouncing off the buildings, Mimicking the sound of the fishermen Casting their lines to the water, Pulling back the catch Of the day, their daily bread Delivered by the cool, Open water. But every line was vacant, Each hook unbitten, With a pink and terrified Worm dangling for life, Praying that the fish Would show mercy. And the fisherman’s son, Who for so long had begged And pleaded, “teach me, daddy.” Looked at the glass surface of the lake, A blue-green sheet of untouched Snow, drawn into place with nature’s Pen, disappointed.

"From One Wretch To Another" From one wretch to another, Though be we not the same, In what we may accomplish, To bring our Saviour shame. Bring all your weary burdens, And lay them at His feet, For all He ever wishes Is you, His love to meet. He calls us ever to Him, Though be we wretched still. Our wretchedness was conquered Upon ol’ Calv’ry’s hill. From one wretch to another, Please follow me to Christ, Though be I just as wretched I keep Him in my sight. And if my feet should stumble, Foll-ow me not to Earth, But keep your eye’s upon Him In love and in rebirth. Let Christ, in grace and loving Cleanse spirit,

* it's the way the world looks on the other side, you know how water would be sky, but for the ripples so i see her in the smooth black pools of coffee cups the creases of my bed-sheets like fingerprints on glass and you here, where my collarbone meets the shoulder our lives, just as they are, but folded

Pond of swans before me i put my ear to the surface it sounds like suicide a hesitant swipe of the reset switch those noosed to the bottom floating feet-up make a maze of toes to swim between guiding the swans to the whirpool's entry I am not a swan A salmon swims toward the other side of the battery this bi-polarization just keeps it chasing the tail before it and the ones in front leap beautifully, willingly, so purposefully short of their origin into the open jaws of a jagged grizzly end and at the struggle's end the cycle resets I am not a fish Only occasionally (accidentally) testing the air- I can sense a sickness a tragedy a shorta