the INLAID EAR

Tócame             After Karl Frost Anticipation butters my skin like a hot skillet jumping garlic. You’re going to touch me and take me in. How slowness makes our thoughts come so quick! When our bodies meet—what will happen? We cook a harmonious conflict: If chilies strike, honey blocks. Who wins? Never mind. Measuring’s an ape trick. Instead, let’s will the soup to simmer. I’ve pushed the meat back and seen the bone. Your shades were parted, and your windows stood clear. Then, through my reflected face, I saw your greenest wishes glinting as my shadows passed inside your space. Your truth is true, my dear heretic: We’re ready to slough the carapace and let our whole bodies take the feast. by Gitty Duncan

Hold that time “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis…” If my seven-year-old daughter were a U.S. year, she would be 1947. Summer. While the movie’s a slog to me, she is transported on Garland’s Technicolor eyes to a time cradled tenderly in the arms of a later time that used film as a salve and an opiate. Maybe she won’t find out how glum Judy became. The plot’s struggles, in retrospect, are quick to dim. When we watch the “Making of…” reel, it opens with clips of bombers. Instead we steer on Google to The Fair and Liza Minnelli.

By Ben Walker -for L Bring our wedding cake topper onto The Antique Road Show. The expert will turn it on a felt-topped folding table with restrained enthusiasm about its monogram, filigree, pedigree and, at last, its je ne sais quoi. Though we’re amateurs, the verdict’s dramatic: Best In Show. Yes, look at us now: in bed watching TV on a Tuesday, adrift in tea, blankets and the broad seas of regular passing among office, practice and kindergarten days. Far from the wedding where we wept our joy, we land weary with few words some nights, some nights a slight furrow in the brow. The patina deepens on the worthy thing we have here in the flats and troughs equally as in the barnburners and breakers. By now we know we’ll look, and it will appear on the altar where we tend to it, sprouted and burnished, ever the bright prize we seized together before the gray. Under its still, resounding presence, think of all we’ve b...

The Half Of It  illustrated by Joe Kowalczyk “It’s human as a human eyeball,” she says, “to fumble our deep knowledge that the empty sky is teeming full beyond our view, and the oceans—huge and crowded—go all the way down. From the earliest age, we’ve drawn trees as trunk, branches and leaves—never mind the alleged subterranean activities, the unseen details we gloss over—it’s natural. But we don’t remind ourselves we forget. One practice,” she says, “is to wake up with the intention of extending ourselves into what we don’t perceive, letting our actions cross that blind edge into those other realms. How will we then modify what we do daily?”