the journey
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The antlers merge into every hidden thing
beneath a purple & growing sky as Colin broadens his shoulders. We will not pass the bridge. Tracks soften. Cells go dead. My shoes like a stagnant river. I am cold, Joe says, as he loosens his hair from his hood. Spiders waking to prey on the clouds. My backpack waits like a bed. Remember when is the lowest form of conversation, so we let its warmth breed in the hourglass snow. On the way back, Colin crosses the river by stones. Ice in its arteries dance toward a harp. As we reach the town, blankets thrown over our shoulders. Forgive me, I say. Beyond this steel wool is another threshold. Its deathbed purple is alive & well. |
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relapse
Flame in my clothes
like a hangover that courses the folds
for years. Every trace of horizon
now gone. In a foreign car, painted in snow salt,
I watch myself drift out.
Then low tide where I walk ankle deep,
careful not to cut up my feet.
A bit of flame in the wind. Blood
in the flash. There is no god,
so I move my own heaven.
like a hangover that courses the folds
for years. Every trace of horizon
now gone. In a foreign car, painted in snow salt,
I watch myself drift out.
Then low tide where I walk ankle deep,
careful not to cut up my feet.
A bit of flame in the wind. Blood
in the flash. There is no god,
so I move my own heaven.
Andrés Cerpa is the author of Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy, forthcoming from Alice James Books (January 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and CantoMundo, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, Frontier Poetry, West Branch, Wildness, and elsewhere. He is the Assistant Poetry Editor of Epiphany Magazine.
Hollis Johnson was born in 1993 in New Hampshire. He began pursuing photography in high school before attending the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, which he graduated from in 2015. He is currently based in New York City. His work projects uncanny sterility to banal objects and scenarios presented in tableau — snapshots of America drenched in sunlight yet trapped in antifreeze. His images narrate a lyrical world only just slightly askew of our own.