Apostrophe Unsaid
After “There’s really a very simple explanation of how it got there,” a line from the Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 1963.
Here/s the earth doing its best to explain
how we got here & parked right in front of the
fire hydrant named /sweet ecology/, how
we dined on the pollen count & took summer
trips for weeks in bright azaleas cached through
swollen country, tickled to death by news of
the cash register/s Judas feast. Here/s the earth
attending a lecture on how peace tumbles
through the chaos of the fields/ corn, because we/re
not up to it & because our headquarters
have moved again for upland game, where
newspapers print images of animals/
wild guesses. Here/s the earth forecasting our am-
bitions slipping into its hot bed unsaid.
Sowing Love Songs in our Heads
We are allies, hip-handled by the rising
tide of night and star spray stages marking our
mutual discovery of each other’s
organic cores. I am delighted by this, by
our household strengths and restful periods that
tell us more about the world, about its whole
artistic heart and strains, its shower of stones,
the endless rain of news, those anxious firsts, which
my American friends are keen to plunder
just to get some rest. Invite them to dinner
and collapse those few hours discussing less
the chronic illnesses that indispose us.
Rather, tap each heart to bring back all
the hungry ghosts of our pasts riding packed trains
in from invisible cities, then have their
interviews during our repast. I have not
strayed far from the dead. I see their hip favored
executives and can pick them out from big
crowds, given that my breaths are but brief
wrinkles in time, given that my eyes were all
washed-up before and now detect the bloody,
whipped, defenseless, drying out like chaplains’ robes
stained from sin. What’s opportunity’s message
to America, to those desperate to find
its shores, to those already birthed into its
fathomless chaos? What seems sublime but is
really the isolation of souls overtaxed
and staged for nights with no return? I go from
birth to death childless. I’ll never know
what it means to lose a child or hear its soft
heart beating with life against my ear, my cheek,
this hopeful mark of a sustainable world that’s
sowing love songs in our heads while still raising
hard questions about our faith in nature’s fine
champagne garden. Often I get to thinking
that destiny points at sincere truths, saying
I’ve had a good run and now am close to being
finished. Life is metafictional: I wrote
its bold script and have a leading role in its
long-running play. Here’s to my American
friends, all-stars gushing with accolades!
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Twice Pushcart nominated, Ignatius Valentine Aloysius earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University. He is the author of the novel Fishhead. Republic of Want, and his prose and poetry are forthcoming or have appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Olney Magazine, Trampset, Thanatos Review, Roi Fainéant, Tofu Ink Arts Press, and the Coalition for Digital Narratives, among others. He is a host and curator of the long-running reading series Sunday Salon Chicago, and he serves on the curatorial and diversity boards at Ragdale Foundation, an arts residency in Lake Forest, Illinois. Ignatius lives in Evanston and is a mayor-appointed board member of the Evanston Arts Council. He is shopping his second novel and a poetry collection he co-wrote with David Allen Sullivan, poet laureate of Santa Cruz, CA.
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Giuliana Eggleston is a writer and photographer living in Acme, Michigan.
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