Ataraxia
Vol. 5• May/201 4
selected literature with illustrations
Like a Bandage by Jason Heroux
Like a bandage the red traffic light keeps changing the red traffic light keeps changing and changing like a bandage on some wound the red traffic light keeps changing
Ceci N'est Pas Une Poem by Sam Alex
You and I shook hands under a sunburn sky and agreed to move me, pedicured by worms off the lawn. I grabbed at my own hands, felt the friction of fruitless labour, you eye my sense of commitment; this spade is a spadeis a blade, good for digging graves in an August shade. My grandfather was a horticulturist, I am a conversationalistas I’m pulling spare roots, making space for my boots. I lift myself a rag doll and gently let myself passlike a moment, like the calm before the storm. This is because I asked; How good is your heart? I’ve a lab coat, a grocery mart scale, and I weighed the bulk of it to no avail. It was an empty thing, made anorexic by a ring.
Did we not agree to rob banks and liquor stores? when we’re gunned down behind our car doors? and we’d take poison and asps, and wear the same identical ribthe one I feel now, crushed by your infidelity. But you are my valve you say, pig part, we shall bury you too and so we made a move of meme, where I lay- where I collapsed, and swallowed the past, taste of ash. Our love is trash, an unrecyclable truth that brought us no use. Let’s haunt ourselves, the guilt is addictive, a séance for some sycophants. Let’s take aim at us, hunt ourselves down in foxless forests, I married you for this.
Francisco
by Laura Eppinger Francisco Hernandez, seven years old and a saint, I pray he never changes. One child has a tantrum over snack choices, Cisco administers a plush sea turtle. The storm passes quickly. His stuffed squids passed around the room, running tentacles over train tracks, peeking dark eyes out of Lego towers. I’d offer up anything to know that Cisco will have a life so full of adventure. No one soothes like Cisco, the outcast kids, the biters, the criers, the ignored. A bright figurine moves from one set of brown hands to another—an iguana, a macaw, a marmoset, a tree frog—miracles, all. Before you can say abracadabra,
the tears melt away, as if unwept and the kids who just can’t focus, play. I want to tell him, Thank You, for being so just, but Cisco is busy beneath the sea (underneath a table) and I won’t pull him back to the classroom, no, not yet.
The Windhover by Colin Honnor
Sparrowhawk hovering bow fly mica hovers amber bead waterboatman cruise serendipitously of his blowsy meniscus stone drops to ripple, its wrinkled ammonite back is a flanged frog nubbed for adaptation as we observe the blind wingedbolt fly dazzled into doubleplated glass Guides that falcon, instinct, to flight an egret summer in so vivid blue sings of its fruiting, hawk above thorn tree like a flaw in lapis lazuli so that we thought there could never be a sky to over blue in Mary’s colour the hawk unbridled veers, vectors down towards that rustle in stubble above the stooked field plucks the white heart from the blue heart.
THE BRIDAL LAMENT by Zamira Rahim
Intimacy’s liquid tragedy, seeping viscous kohl adornment. Soul wrapped at cusp with ma’s filigree veil grand mater’s once; bought then beyond virginal dawn unrelated to mark gleaming upon collarbone. Begin a drunk boxed out of Delhi, pawning twenty carat bangles for sampling claret and cobalt, sweet of Eid. Middling father dearest. Slightest enunciation upward compelling maternal feet to run; voice filling physicality’s crevice. Babe traced some invisible bruise, a kiss into psyche. And in the low light conspire to spring a husband upon prodigal, proverbial Nineteen. The ellipses of stories own muffled by thought of blue moon reputation5
so conclude with me the coward, jaundiced eyes and jasmine hair prostrated within bloodline trap. Burn out all stars, scorch breeze ‘til silvered. Listen. Hearts keen anew.
Ataraxia is a monthly zine organized, edited, and printed by Rasasvada. We publish various projects online and in limited paper copies. Find more poems, stories, articles, art and info about submitting your own work at rasasvada.net
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