Chris Gartland

Eulogy to the Eulipions

Submitted for your approval, an unintended paragraph percolating from the muck and mire beneath the false Hollywood night of a solstice moon. Tim Burton shadows of Dickens’ ghost haunt the path. A scrawny finger points to an inevitable future embracing fear and loathing from The Thunderbird Compound as a eulogy to the Eulipions. I often become lost while pretending to be a writer, an inexhaustible lure. A growl from the lake serenades the out of focus network of treely patterns in the grass. I need an adjustment to the aperture fixed by my life in the chair defined by Dimen’s neighbor, confronting a window of broken glass, a shattered kaleidoscope obstructing the truth of a disappointing woodland. Stories insinuate from the clamorous periphery of a brittle rock eroded from the stuff of stars. I endeavor to communicate a single thought like Proust’s madeleine or The Brown’s macaroon in a lifetime of scribblings. It is no longer a choice. The narrative ignores the persistent illusion, as the publishers of books ignore me, and time surrenders to the word, to the draw of the keyboard paving my journey. The faint chatter of airborne migrations is misinterpreted as surreptitious voices in the forest. The whispers of seven hundred Canada geese jostling for space on a shrinking surface rise like an advancing winter thunder. The ticking of three thousand twigs from the scarcely inanimate thicket become distracting in the quiet left by the absence of humans. And for some reason I shelve James Baldwin in the general vicinity of Computational Linear Algebra with Models.

Joseph Farina

requiem

the faces of the dead in life smile down at me. their perpetual light flickering faintly beneath their oval portraits - all of them taken in tuxedos and formal gowns. some in colour - some in black and white. the last remembrances of grieving family eternally dressed in formal wear from weddings and anniversaries of long and fruitful marriages in this corner of the mausoleum they are all of friends and family immigrants together once, sharing the hardness of labour and the hardness of fear - together here in testament that they achieved their dreams far from Sicily’s shore immortal by remembrance i read and speak their names melodious in their Sicilian tongue