"Camp Fire Flight" by Nam Das
Dead Horse Bay by Katherine Fallon
Once, a slew of rendering plants tossed
processed bones, useless for glue,
into these waters. We were told we could
find teeth, vertebrae, porous boiled bits,
but instead, we uncovered broken bottles
softened by the bay, and trash glinting
in the sun like something worth something.
There were dozens of leather shoe soles
for us to sort through, their stitching intact,
all missing uppers. A horseshoe crab,
upside down, exposed the roach nightmare
of its underbelly. I did love you later, inside
your long apartment, where you brought
fish to my plate in a shining hammock
of foil. I even loved you among garbage
though I knew then, hearing you sing above
the chorus of sea glass, that I would leave.
Sometimes, without meaning to, you would
injure me. I told you so once, then not again,
which was my mistake. I still have the soles
we chose: burnished ghosts, shedding
sand. Not tooth, not bone as we intended,
because after the horses came the landfill.
processed bones, useless for glue,
into these waters. We were told we could
find teeth, vertebrae, porous boiled bits,
but instead, we uncovered broken bottles
softened by the bay, and trash glinting
in the sun like something worth something.
There were dozens of leather shoe soles
for us to sort through, their stitching intact,
all missing uppers. A horseshoe crab,
upside down, exposed the roach nightmare
of its underbelly. I did love you later, inside
your long apartment, where you brought
fish to my plate in a shining hammock
of foil. I even loved you among garbage
though I knew then, hearing you sing above
the chorus of sea glass, that I would leave.
Sometimes, without meaning to, you would
injure me. I told you so once, then not again,
which was my mistake. I still have the soles
we chose: burnished ghosts, shedding
sand. Not tooth, not bone as we intended,
because after the horses came the landfill.
Katherine Fallon’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Juked, Meridian, Foundry, and others, and will be included in Best New Poets 2019. Her chapbook, The Toothmakers' Daughters, is available through Finishing Line Press. She shares domestic space with two cats and her favorite human, who helps her zip her dresses.
Nam Das (Filipino, b. 1989) creates open-ended visual stories by arranging figurative elements into an assemblage forming a central idea, an idea that plays around Jungian archetypes of the collective unconscious or mythologems observed throughout history. He uses a limited palette of four colors in his oil paintings. Also called the Zorn palette, it's composed of: Titanium White, Cadmium Red, Yellow Ochre and Ivory Black. Nam began working as a full-time painter in 2019.
