Buddhist Apple Pie
Unreclined at the peninsula’s end, a mile from the city where your feet become the night unveiling—too far to hear of the siege of cicadas where Sister’s coat lies perched against the dark.
If space, then inside this room one afternoon, of their own free will, cobwebs will catch conspirator souls. “Who,” you ask, “formed those liminal words?”
In the sartorial sky there are apes we know, but the other half is mired in conflict and conspiracy, the art left alone, that repulsive force bearing down upon any name, that which was begun within itself, in no other name than what dear Flavia purported: Eyes darkened by carbon—all the harsh length of a glance will stick like a thorn.
Find the other side of intolerable from the well-spring of small fictions. You may have many admirers along the well-slept and their ballads.
Climb into the work on the vine, on the apple tree’s bough; whatever pardons us, brings us home, Dear Cicada.
In The Beginning“There’s always a point to your travails,” my mother said. She had a point; mind you, I was the one who had five stars. The only other memory was steeped in tradition. She waved her magic wand at almost everything. And she always raved about the extra rations during World War Two. “No matter what weighs us down,” she said, “take that extra gust of wind.” Now I sigh, lame and tired, and it’s not that I’m preoccupied; it takes just a few seconds to recognize those pointless ordeals, the traps set long ago. But before the messages reach us, the lynchpins and the kingpins will camouflage themselves to conceal all the wounds that change the world. No we’re never sure, we never find the perfect balance; the sea is still a void containing a multitude of atoms swirling in the soup before any war. Too much of it already spills over as matter, ask the needle-toothed worms who burrow 3,000 feet below sea level. Magnify, I say. Are we destined to live a fable that will never be fulfilled? Or will we be that frog?
More MisdeedsOnce again, thinking the unthinkable—all those optimisms deserve a punishment—the supreme being flying or swimming, elusive, multi-faceted, free, hypothetical, pulverized, without an ounce of meaning—therefore a problem for the gods. Quite on the horns of the dilemma, snagged on the peaks. In a word, we’ll see what happens next.
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Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, artist, and musician. He has published eighteen collections of poetry, including, most recently, Einstein Fledermaus (SurVision Books, 2021), The Little Book of Earthly Delights (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021), and A Brief Conversation with Consciousness (Unlikely Books, 2021). He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing. He lives on a farm in rural Western Massachusetts with his wife Miriam and their Australian Cobberdog Emily Dickinson.