Our Father

Over steaming plates of corned beef & sauerkraut the priest set out to tell me the story of my conception. The day I met your mother, he began, Stephen Hawking could still walk. All lunch he talked about black holes. He’d forgotten to buy Swiss cheese at the deli. & the rye. The speed of the stars, he said, is the same as the speed of our thoughts. The dressing, too, forgotten. Dark matter is an idea! Time is lumpy! As if to toast he raised his glass of water, a slice of lemon lucent amidst the ice. Look, the priest said, I’m Galileo.

Psycho Killer

She’s most afraid of the quiet smiles: green wooden clown with the toothy grin, all the dolls plucked from her mother’s childhood. In a corner she has piled her dead: wingless duck, cracked spaceman, slaughtered mermaid. The cave with blankets for walls is where her rat lives: mouthless rodent whose eyes flash red, whose belly repeats the Talking Heads. Fa-fa-fa . . . A paper plane floats through the cave’s scowl. Qu’est-ce que c’est? The plane’s no white flag. The rat’s no third arm. She’s cut off her eyelashes. From the bookshelf the skull of an owl stares down. She knows what it means to be an old man.

Feelingings

It’s lonely work, digging graves for ghost dogs. Autumn’s overcoat sulked in the east. Birdsong & the alien chatter of unearthed rocks littered the low field. She came to me then, wild black hound of my haunted eye. Old spook drooling blue. Together we squatted in the pit & howled the howl of the dead tree, silent & broken-limbed. When I took up my shovel again, she bounded off. Shudder of no one to talk to, tossing dirt in the hole where she wouldn’t lay.  



Dave Brennan lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University. He is the author of the forthcoming book Headroom in Hell (Spuyten Duyvil), as well as A Cyborg’s Father: Misreading Donna Haraway (punctum books), A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit (Bateau Press), and others. His poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Conduit, swamp pink, Tyger Quarterly, The Midwest Quarterly, AMNLY, and elsewhere.

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