Three Poems
EN ROUTE TO MOUNT ARARAT
An aardvark walked up a long plank
crossed the threshold and entered the ark.
That night in the dark he fucked noisily
himself in the ass with his own nose.
All the other animals were dead quiet.
You could’ve heard a feather falling
were it not for this aardvark.
When finished he coughed.
He rested his head on the feed bunk.
The animals began shifting again.
The ark sloshed gently onward.
Driving through the park in a drizzle I see men in orange plastic hats kicking rocks from a cliff. Every mile or so a black tarantula crosses the wet road looking disgusted. It’s the off-season and the scene suggests apocalypse. I am about to pass a site called Cedar Tree Tower when at the last second something tells me to tip the wheel and turn in. An elegant Japanese woman in quilted kimono and snow boots is reading the interpretive sign, leaning in close, nodding her head in agreement. She wears enormous black sunglasses that cover most of her face. Besides me and this woman there are maybe five or six others. No one speaks. We walk respectfully among the waist-high rock walls, all of us looking for this one stone that reportedly has a big swirl carved in it. The swirl is a symbol of fertility. Or maybe exhaustion. In truth the experts can only speculate. The sun’s intense but going down. A van pulls up. Muffled barking from a parked Subaru. Out from the van steps two young men and then an older man. They are all barefoot; their feet are filthy. They step with purpose upon the gravel path. I look at my boots which are soaked and have pine needles stuck to them. The young men wear baggy basketball shorts and loose tank tops and both have small hair-buns pulled tight on top of their heads. The older man is bald, wears a grey suit and tie, is a bit shorter than the others. They have identical noses. Not one of them wears underwear. And their hairy scrotums brush the insides of their hairy legs. This story can be read (a) from the bottom up, (b) diagonally, or (c) in a more conventional manner.
TWO BABIES
1
Open with them on their separate couches,
in different cities, having breast milk.
(Milwaukee; Bologna.)
One begins to breast feed, the other begins to breast feed.
One grows tired of the nipple, so does the other.
Have them having drinks simultaneously.
Inexplicably so. Over the years.
Never crossing paths.
Prune juice, sparkling water, flat water, root beer.
It goes on for decades.
One drinks when the other does.
Hundreds of thousands of (it makes
no sense!) glasses lifted simultaneously.
Never crossing paths.
They head off to school, begin careers, get hired and fired.
Arnold Palmers and kombuchas.
Until eventually the death-bed drinks.
The drinks they’ll have before dying.
Six primary movements. Seven?
2
Two strangers on a train sit across from one another.
One has ordered a floral oolong,
the other the Pilsener from Pilsen.
Two oolongs arrive.
The strangers lift (I should add here that
one has carefully loosened his tie while the other
is missing an upper front tooth)
their cups in unison.
They glance briefly at each other.
The leading edges of these teacups touch
the edges of their lips at exactly the same time.
Zurich to Basel.
On the table a saucer, upon which
Zwiebacks rattle.
Michael Earl Craig
Michael Earl Craig is from Dayton, Ohio, home of the gas mask and the mood ring. He is the author of Iggy Horse (Wave Books, 2023) Woods and Clouds Interchangeable (Wave Books, 2019), Talkativeness (Wave Books, 2014), Thin Kimono (Wave Books, 2010), Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006), Can You Relax in My House, (Fence Books, 2002), and the chapbook Jombang Jet (Factory Hollow Press, 2012). He lives in Montana, where he makes his living as a farrier. He was the 2015-2017 Poet Laureate of Montana.
Werner Sennen
Werner Sennen works weekdays at the customer service desk of a respectable sausage company. He draws whenever he finds the time, when no one is complaining about the salt content of the sausages, or late in the evenings at his desk. He makes one-panel drawings, colour works and short comics, and is interested in the uneasy coexistence of the comic and the tragic, the strange and the everyday.