Carson Pytell & Zebulon Huset
Grimm Testaments
We defy and deify—
prominent teeth
make for proud grins
once they're all gone.
When rendered toothless
we grow barbed quills
for safety and fun to
show brave little kids
why so many folk tales
end with funerals.
Hurt People Hurt People
A blue whale's heart is the size of a bug,
a Volkswagen that is. Mine's about a fist,
the same one to find a former friend's face
for their dalliance. There were others
to flit in and out of existence, to float by
on a wave of gravity or happenstance,
but throwing bones with those you know
passes time, and it blows to be lonely—
almost as much as to intentionally be broken
into tiny bits of smashed glass by someone
whose heart has already been smashed
or never was there at all. Brains
trick us into thinking matter's molecules,
with all of their empty space, is solid,
or that a heart, no matter its size, can mend
itself even given all the time in existence.
Eventually Gravity
Five teenage boys packed in the hatchback
hotboxing the biggest blunt they ever rolled
never made it to the cliff dive. The reservoir
saw only its waterfall that evening. Broken
by rocks long-before broken from the face
while that vista and a Tik-Tok challenge
decided upon a golden hour blackout. Boys
know little save for impressions. Fathers, girls,
and eventually slip, surprise. Eventually gravity.
Eventually the entirety of their lives, and...
on the way down it is only a memory. Roadkill
makes you feel sad since it’s mostly still there.
That bend of road only bears a sun-blanched
cross, occasionally dead gas station flowers.
Note: The pieces resulted from “Stanza Trades,” a collaborative poetry project where collaborating poets write alternating stanzas.
Carson Pytell is a writer living outside Albany, New York, whose work appears in venues such as The Adirondack Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Grain Magazine. He is Assistant Poetry Editor of Coastal Shelf, Founder and EIC of Northern Grit, and his most recent chapbook is Willoughby, New York (Bottlecap Press, 2023).
Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. His writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Rattle, The Southern Review, Fence, Texas Review and Atlanta Review, among others. He also publishes the writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the literary journal Coastal Shelf.
