A Magazine of Many Arts

Deborah L. Davitt

When you go to South America
and drop a lot of money
for an authentic
spiritual cleanse
and try to ignore the locals
laughing at the tourists
who’re here for an
ayahuasca high colonic
to the brainstem;
 
when you’ve swallowed
herbal purgatives and laxatives
(herbal and organic
are always better,
don’t you know?),
and have crouched, quaking,
on a toilet,
vomiting into a bucket,
while your intestines clarify
at both ends;
 
when you’ve done all these things,
in search of a sacred,
transcendent moment
of oneness with the universe,
it’s probably not a wonder,
that everyone’s spirit-animal
turns out to be impressive;
everyone’s always guided
by something fierce—
tigers and lions and bears,
oh my—
 
because when you’ve dropped
several thousand dollars
for the privilege of
feeling like you have the flu
for six hours,
no one wants to know
that their spirit-animal is a snail,
that the guiding energy in their lives
is that of a hermit crab,
and it’s hard to dress up
a jellyfish as the ultimate predator
that it is, when
most people think of them
as a synonym for spineless.
 
So, mysteriously, there’s a world
full of people out there,
with fierce and prideful totems
stalking through the universe
at their sides,
when statistically speaking,
at least ninety percent of eight billion people,
should actually be deer,
or llamas,
or the occasional inoffensive squirrel.

Jenny Blackford 

That blue-silver
origami thing with wings
inside the graceful ribbonned
globe of Christmas glass
was doubtless meant to be a swan
 
-- or maybe it's a more peculiar bird.
 
In mediaeval times
monks taught that hungry mother pelicans
would pierce their feathed breasts
to feed their young on their heart-blood,
urging their often half-starved human flock
to more self-sacrifice.
 
I’d really rather
that the silver-paper bird was anything
but a starving pelican
feeding herself to her brood.
 
Luckily, the more I look into the globe
the more the origami thing with wings
looks bony, ancient, wild.
 
Could it be the fabled
Christmas Pterosaur?

Robert Borski

Both me,
with my 278 Neanderthal variants,
and the Monarch butterfly

with its hidden payload
of vespine genes
being finer examples of this,

the latter being a "gift"
from parasitic wasps,
but repurposed through time

to confer immunity
from the predations of a virus
deadly to the survival

of both insects.
But as for my own blended
heritage, I'm still waiting

to see what advantages
the commingling has
bestowed --

the ability perhaps to subtract
from the world's noise
the approach of a saber-toothed cat,

or how best to prepare mammoth milk
so it's digestible.
In the meantime, however,

sans revelation, I continue to daub
paint in animal shape
on the prefab walls of my cave.

F. J. Bergmann

We fall into time as a dead leaf into a river.

—Don Paterson


Chrono-Man invented time travel
by accident, trying to fit too much
into one day. He stretched time so far
that when he let go it flung him
like a stupendous slingshot
across the millennia. Now he can access
any temporal continuum
just by judicious over-commitment.
Chrono-Man wears LED knitwear
that ripples where it shouldn’t.
Balding, jowly and anxious,
he has a small potbelly and a heart condition.
He is the champion of last-minute saves,
last-ditch efforts, and lost causes.
His heraldic totem is a rubber band
twisted into a figure-eight couchant—
the symbol of infinity. His motto is
I can make time for that.

Quicksand is Chrono-Man’s arch-enemy.
As fast as Chrono-Man can stretch time
like a Spandex Speedo, Quicksand
can spend it: urge it on faster and faster;
use it up. Quicksand wears a red suit
with a spinning hourglass lapel pin and has
red—scarlet—hair and eyes, to match his suit.
He is a lively date. He can make time
speed up, but not slow down. He likes to drive
the ambitious, and those who volunteer
for more than their share, to destruction.
Quicksand is the god of second thoughts
and abandoned efforts and stressing out.
His catchphrase: It is later than you think.

Speed time up as it stretches, and the elastic
of that substance will snap, as Quicksand
and Chrono-Man chase each other
up and down the time-stream. You yourself
may experience this chronological effluvium
as having some resemblance to an actual river:
sometimes the current is slow and stately,
each shore so far away that it fades
to a dark fog of treeline on the horizon;
sometimes a rapid current tumbles you
down titanic falls. You are only a marker
by which that current can be measured
when those rivals meet at the end of time
and total up their scores.