by Carl Watson

I’ve been gone for a while and no one can find me,
They’re not looking for errors in the text they inhabit,
But like an odd vowel sound in the monk’s chant,
Unnoticed, transcendence was diverted for a time;

I was a spare syllable in a stream of propaganda.
Whose meaning wasn’t altered b y my presence,
Because the war went on despite me;
And no minds were changed because of me;

And I was a film clip from the wrong movie slipped in
To the main feature in a crowded theater
That was overlooked for the sake of a story
That everyone thought they already knew;

I was a quick blip on the black radar screen of the sky
In the ongoing search for aliens,
But the searchers couldn’t know the alien was me,
Another anomaly that left no record;

It’s been said a conversation was paused once
Because two people thought they heard a third voice
Commenting without context, and so
They could never agree who was right or wrong;

And it’s been said a stage actor stopped once,
Just for a second, because an odd face in the audience
Caused her to recite the wrong lines, but she went on
With the play anyway, and no one cared;

And there were days when I ran with a roving pack
Of predators, until they discovered I had no teeth
And couldn’t eat the kill, but they let me survive
For a while anyway, if only as a joke among wolves;

I was a painted bird in an epic poem of the Hero’s Journey,
But got edited out by scholars as a mistake
Left over from an earlier version.
I’ve been a victim of such editing all my life;

But I want to say, though I am often lost,
I am always there in the Autumn,
When the wheatfields turn to gold, the wind blows,
And the crows take wing;

Occasionally, the odd explorer on her houseboat
Would spot my displayed feathers in the forest,
But those notebooks and drawings have been misplaced,
And it will be years before anyone comes looking again;

You see, I was here for such a short time and space
That the clock makers didn’t notice any discrepancy
And cartographers thought me a fancy
Of drunken sailor stories swapped ages ago;

But I was no non-entity, no,
Because I kept interrupting this or that flow,
Without even trying, like a temporary whirlpool
Formed by an obstacle in the stream of perception;

Or a pebble thrown at the window
Of the midnight composer, bent over his piano,
Interrupting the flow of his concentration,
Forestalling the masterpiece that could change the world;

A shadow in the hall disappears when the light burns out,
The residents change the bulb but the shadow doesn’t return,
Because maybe it was never there to begin. You see,
Mostly I’ve been a memory of what never happened;

Except for you, I happened for you.
You saw my fleeting figure against the backdrop of your life
And you tracked it down, adapted my dark spark
To a bright motif in the symphony that played between us;

And maybe no one will ever play that music again,
But it really did exist once,
Because we both heard it, even if no one else could,
And as I remember, it was something close to magic.

by Carl Watson

And what about you? someone asked.
I never had much to say, I said,
About growing up and stuff,
Though I’ve imagined fantastic scenes:
My naked father hunting me like a fawn
Through the forests of The North
With his fishing spear and beer can,
Hunting me like a sewer rat through
Industrial borderlands, he being aged,
Resentful, and my mother raging
With her broken broom handle, torn dress,
And her blackened racoon eyes,
Like gothic specs tattooed to her face.
But these are dreams, not real events.

There’s much of the real I don’t remember:
It’s odd how I can’t recall, for instance.
Joy or the loving bonds of family.
They somehow got lost in the editing,
Redactions that took place amongst screams
Humiliation, and all the hiding:
Hiding under canopies of spider webs}
In the corner of our horror movie basement,
Hiding behind couches, in culverts,
In sewer pipes spilling local secrets
At the edge of town.
All my life, I’ve hid from conflict,
Even hid from love and its deceptions.
I remember that powder blue Chevy wagon
In the K-Mart lot, a sack of French fries,
And the milk shake, bought as a bribe,

While each one asked who and what I wanted.
You have to decide, they said.
But I did not.

In retrospect, it doesn’t seem much,
Compared to the lives of others,
Compared to the massive tragedies we see.
But it was life before I knew the lives of others.
People did explain this to me: you’re too sensitive.
You’re over-affected by small things.
And I was, and still am.
I remember running through fields as a boy,
Trying to break open the emptiness,
Trying to make myself a flesh and bone body hammer
Pounding at the glass walls of the prison
Of childhood, while chasing the miraculous
I knew must be out there.

I remember,
One late summer evening, punching the air
While running the streets of my town,
Wearing heavy hiking boots
With home-made chains as weights
To worry my ankles,
Because I loved pain, and wanted more,
A local law officer pulled alongside,
Rolled down his window, concerned, and asked,
“What are you running from, son?”
I said I was just running,
And I’m still just running, I said
Just let me run.

by Claire Scott

Now rotating counter-counter clockwise
and everything is surreal
the sun rising in the west
the world wobbling in time
like a child’s roly-poly toy
bone marrow biopsy, blood tests
PET Scans, more blood tests
none of this is the real me
climbing mountains, lifting weights,
head stands and tree poses
the future coming at me with needles
of poison, killing good cells and bad cells
indiscriminate as a machine gun
indifferent as a distant god
my body wasting, scales announcing
another pound lost
fatigue settles in like my mother-in-law
arriving with five suitcases
and three long-haired cats
the haze of brain fog, forgotten
doctor’s appointments
mouth sores, sick stomach
ridiculous wigs
rivaling Bozo or Lady Gaga
praying each day to a gone ago god
for the earth to spin
counterclockwise again

by Claire Scott

In that vial
on that day
held in that young girl’s
trembling hand
the girl feeling first life
smiling secretly
despite bruised eyes of exhaustion
knowing the treatment worked
that her life just took a turn
that would change it forever
no idea that that vial of blood
held in her fluttering hand
was from a woman
who hikes five miles a day
and takes her grandkids to the Galapagos
to see the giant tortoises
teaching them about preserving
the priceless living laboratory
that the girl lazily labels the tubes
and places them on a tray
dreaming of mobiles and lullabies
no idea that the white cell count
in that vial leaning crookedly
to the left would mean lymphoma
that that woman’s life
just took a turn
that would change it forever