Logan Anthony
more than the memory
each morning brings the hay bales & their shadows closer.
pillowcases of rotting wildflower clippings & a head crowded
with bees. haunted. i’ve remained still too long.
i can’t stand at the window & anticipate the approach
of something never coming. my voice consumes the room,
chilling & vacant as an evening drizzle. the air smells of wilt-
ing hyacinths. outside, i’ll scatter poppy seeds beneath
the bird-nested alders & hope for something to return to.
consolation—i’ll admit, i still need something to believe in.
years ago, you told me about the romance of a person
prettier in pieces. the need to be broken to be lovable.
your teeth held my name like a promise. smoke in your eyes
& fire in your hair. you were the closest i came to burning
for someone else. i should have defended a love that builds,
because now, collecting my shards from the garden,
i wouldn’t mind some help. someone with strong hands.
someone to remind me to be gentle, who knows of more green
than what we have left dwindling in us. past the narrow streets,
beyond the neatness of cornfields & ordered, obedient trees.
i want more than the memory of wild. somewhere untamed,
where solitude still means peace. somewhere to be alone, together,
with pockets of chipped glass & a head emptied of bees.
angelic in a mistaken hue of light
1.
years after the stone shackles shook loose
their jowls, skittish and ivory-gowned,
the angel rubs raw their wrists and wishes
for a room big enough to swallow the coarse
salt from their secrets once spoken into existence.
for the last lick of flame to healed flesh, still tender.
the last of the silence, that panicked discomfort.
if only the room would listen. if only a voice
like smoke, unfurling in tendrils, could be heard.
2.
light withers a mere step into the dark,
as quickly as the body reverts to the old
ways—where failure is a home i cannot
rebuild. the gold in your voice flakes away.
i realize, after all this time, a shadow only
appears angelic in a mistaken hue of light.
3.
this world remade isn’t what i stayed behind
for. all these limbs scattered in the streets.
voices festering in the walls.
the smoke and yellowed grass—all that’s left
to fill our throats and hands.
4.
skinless, homeless, we are no longer ghosts.
we are no longer alone. i enter only windows.
only trapdoors. our bodies writhe beneath
the ground on which we stand.
fingernails full of soil. skeletons of sorrow.
5.
under flickering fluorescents in a stone
-shattered mirror flecked with gods-know-what,
you scream your secrets to white bricks
that wall you off from the world. salt spills
from the ceiling. lost in the burning, thunder echoes
around you and rattles loose shards of glass
that rain to the tiled floor, shattering into drops
that glisten like water.
6.
in the mirror—a warped reflection of lightning.
a storm gapes outside like a wet mouth,
panting breath, painting a film of fog
over the single uncovered window.
hungry, searching. all the gold in the world
couldn’t convince me now. the limbs haven’t
left the streets, nor the voices from the walls.
7.
the angel collapses beneath white light
to a beach of salt, echoes of the past
rattling their knees, and the knocking
so like stones—like teeth,
like worlds colliding—
linear time in a cascade.
either the hammer or the nails
they say take time, all you need.
the time i’d take has passed—long-since
disappeared over the horizon. now
snaking away from memory, too.
the hammer drops apologetically,
despite the steel and heft.
the nails are steel, too,
just a different kind.
as if frozen, the wood shattered
instead of split, limiting our supplies
to a mound of kindling.
minutes to burn away.
ashes ride the breeze over the valley,
on to live other lives as soil
and dust and if it’s lucky,
maybe even
bone.
Logan Anthony is an American queer writer and transgender artist from Indiana. Anthony holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing & English and works as a freelance writer. Find Logan’s work in Thin Air Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, The Madison Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Write Launch, and more. You can read their work at www.thewritinglog.com and follow them on social media @the_writing_log
