In the Cave of ContemplationBy Michael Mirolla
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For whoever wants to pick up the torch
When speaking – in the short squint from forenoon
to gloom – of Updike, where am I headed? There are days that fit me into footpaths no longer present, beyond metaphor. Here, leaves continue to pulse long after they’ve sunk to mulch. Here, the ball’s solipsism arcs from hand to sky and back in deltas of stillborn time. Here, waves flick their tongues and brush clean the ravages that gather around us in the day-to-day. I find myself standing bemused. In someone else’s past? A park? A bench? Schoolyard children skip into old age, run through brick walls … ascend to hallowed ground. An abandoned tire comes to rest on its flank. Oil-skimmed water quivers in a rubber pool. Sunlight sparks. I kneel. Plunge my hands into silt to scoop the sacerdotal larvae. To hold them towards the fierce radiance. They shimmer for a still moment before vanishing. I, on the other hand, am still here. Trapped thinking of Updike … rabbits … afternoons that taste precariously like dust. In the Cave of Lost LanguageBy Michael Mirolla
When rifling the pockets that hold
the day in thrall there is always some thing that slips through the fingers. No matter how tightly we grip the fabric. Or fingernail-dig into its deepest corners. Is it possible the contents change each time we reach in? Or does the pocket itself become altered by the hand as it latches onto a fistful of what was previously there but is no more? And then, one day without warning, from hand to mouth, the familiar phrases themselves decide to come and go as they please, shapeshifting before they disappear. And you’re prone to ask: What was … what is … that word once so strong, so anchored now fluttering out the window like a stale balloon’s flaccid breath? At first, you tell yourself: Worry not. So what if within your grasp “brother” of a sudden becomes anaia and “crow” returns to belex? As long as one word simply morphs into another. As long as reaching down dislodges those helpful phrases you can use as placeholders for who you might be: wolf/hirpus tongue/osvache. As long as those scratches, familiar or not, reappear on the wall at day’s end. There is that comfort of finding something … anything, is there not? Until your hand comes up empty, an open palm holding a blank space. And your heart stutters and you grope about in your Klein-bottle pocket in search of one word … one fragment that you can inscribe … just one clue that’ll keep you from vanishing. In the DenBy Michael Mirolla
I’m met by a line
of bitter dragons fire sagging in the belly tired elongated faces littered with questions what do they want to ask what do they need to know they turn from side to side in the cramped peculiar space crowns butting the dour ceiling flanks scraping the kinetic walls as if unused to their own home centipede legs barely able to carry that stratospheric bulk what do they need to ask what do they want to know more and more they fill the room like some sort of shrill metaphor until a bluefin bus with insect antennae and wavering gills pulls up to take them all away only then in this suddenly empty place do I see the scribbles on the floor where the sour dragons shuffled what do we want to ask what do we need to know “what is sky” His foot on fireBy Michael Mirolla
his foot on fire
an old war wound that has and hasn’t healed he sits in the corner away from the door the darkest part of the cave only the flame visible sucking air no hard feelings when I was your father I took the liberty of deciding who I should and should not love I took the liberty of making that choice anew each day just to be fair no hard feelings his foot flares brightly like yellowed phosphorus an anvil pointing towards no light Michael Mirolla’s publications include three Bressani Prize winners: the novel Berlin (2010); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). His short story “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, and “The Sand Flea” was a Pushcart Prize nominee. Born in Italy, raised in Montreal, Michael lives in Oakville, Ontario. For more, visit his website.
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