eunoiareview

[eunoiareview]

Calculus of Dust and Wonder

There are, they say, two sums: the null set, and the riot of primes. One, a ledger of ash, each breath a subtraction, the world a rusted theorem, proven cold. You walk, a ghost in a grey equation, where gravity’s a grudge, and sunlight, merely photons, quantified, dead. The other, a frenzied script, where sparrows ink assemblages on the air, where rain, a brief initiation, whispers of birth. You…

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KFC Nocturne

The bucket’s red, a wound in dim light. Crispy skin, a brittle, yellow crust. Outside, the streetlamps, precise, unbright, divide the night, the fallen dust. I sit. No child’s small hand to hold. Only the echo of a student’s phrase, a question posed, a story told, lost in the restaurant’s hazy maze. Winning. A word like bone, stripped clean. What did I build? Not flesh, not blood. But sentences,…

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Sanctuary

Luminous light, a harsh, yellow radiance. The plastic chairs, fastened to the floor. A half-eaten burger, growing cold. This is my refuge now. Outside, the city mumbles of traffic and distant alarms. Inside, the air is thick with the smell of grease and something dimly sweet. Synthetic. I survey the other people. A juvenile couple, sharing fries, their faces brightened by the glimmering screen of…

[eunoiareview]

The Body's Stories

Not all stories murmur. Some scrape at the soft palate, insist to be heeded. They are not the narratives of relief, rolled from golden filaments. These are the harsh fragments, the shards of bone stuck in the throat. They taste of iron, of unshed tears. The heart, of course, holds its own. The memorable tales, worn silky by recurrence. The cradle song of childhood, the recollected touch. These…

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A hand by Rodin

is, after rain, all that remains of the dull lustre of cooling bronze in a puddle on the outskirts of town. Life, if you call life movement, has gone. The air, heavy. Each of its fingers show in the black dog’s tongue, yawning before it drinks, becoming, to you, an act of prelapsarian thought. That which it has suffered is sacred, by this you mean a form of sensual logic those religious ones…

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Mutation

after Courbet and Kizziah Burton. Woman with a Parrot. My gaze expands in unexpected ways. Faraway objects come into sharp focus. I commit unfamiliar faces in dreams to memory. My beloved places feathers on my eyelids as I sleep, a new seduction. Drapes feathers tied to ribbons across door frames. Fixes feathers to my hair. Has me dance in a raining festival of feathers. Lays a carpet of feathers…

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Calvary, Omeath

Once I visited a prayer garden with my mother. It was a blustery day, the casino style entrance sign shimmied like a salacious invitation. I followed her around the Stations wondering painfully if it was a sin to be bored in a holy place. When we crossed the threshold of St Jude’s Shrine, confounded I heard my mother whisper a novena concerning ‘hopeless cases and things despaired of’. At twelve…

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Bats Dazzling Blackly

That long time ago just after nightfall standing in the wind in the bygone sheep pasture anchoring my feet in the shallow grass at the shelf of the bay by the shoal of the town looking over at the old white farmhouse one naked spotlight burning on the outside peak inking a geometry of shadows where it does not reach throwing into relief where it does             the rounded green gleam of the ’49…

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Renting a Hopper House

Some day, I will rent a house that Edward Hopper painted for the sunlight and shadow, rectangles and squares. For the constancy of angles, for the geometry of emptiness. The spaces and objects will be plain to redress the ornateness of my being. There will be no curves or arches to mislead my eye into feelings of calmness. Nothing circular to suggest completeness. Colors, like his deliberate deep…

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New Wine

We sat in the grass at the edge of a pear orchard and ate fig spread on baguettes so fine that I was embarrassed by how pleased I was. The tagalong college girl spread out before us her catholic guilt, insisted on a visit to the Palace of the Popes, which the boys laughed off with a honeyed plan to drink wine and meet local women at the Beaujolais Nouveau wine festival in the village square. The…

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Saving Eelgrass

Blind and chairbound is my aged mother when I visit her with wounds freshly stitched. She softly skims their braille with fine fingers and makes her maternal inferences, her sight line into my depths and shallows. Deep under dark water is a meadow, unseen acres of willowy green unsung – no fluorescence of reefs in red and blue, no eerie charisma of mangrove swamps. Just a nursery for the…

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Veneers

At present, quidnuncs query without benevolence, forward myriad Questions pertaining, most often, to tactics for striving to capture Hormonal yoga with SAD lights’ essence now that universalities Repeatedly circumvent masa in favor of sliced, white breadstuff. In our times, “agency” remains lived happenstance, continues to be That which won’t disappear merely because emoluments multiply; (Note…

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The Upper Room

I stepped into the smoke on a feast day no one remembered, looking for the self I failed to carry out. I told myself the wound would open and give something back— but it didn’t. It wept through me until I felt it— the seed lodged deep in my throat, splitting open. You can’t unburn a body. The promise was resurrection. What I found was ash. A heart still smoldering under cracked…

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The Absence in Both Our Houses

The tenant moved in quietly— borrowed my shirts, didn’t ask. Its weight settled in the folds of cotton as I ironed them flat. Steam rose— like breath from the room no one enters. You are not here. You are not gone. The phone rings. I do not answer. The cord twists like something trying to remember its purpose. I say your name into the empty air. I ask: Do the wildflowers still return along the…

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Happy Hour in Madrid

It was 4 o’clock in Madrid when I walked by the two of you, young working women with dark shiny hair pulled back in loose but smart chignons, sitting on tall stools facing one another in an open wine bar whose sign above you read “Narciso”, meaning daffodil in Spanish. You were in the middle of a good laugh when I walked by, an American tourist on my first visit to Madrid, wondering what you were…

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The birds

The birds have no days and yet we count months, minutes, seconds. We feel it’s a tragedy that we can’t control the past like we have been wronged. The birds have no past. They have no future. They have. Christine Yurick is the founding editor of Think Journal. Her chapbook At the End of the Day and Other Poems is available from Kelsay Books.

[eunoiareview]

The List

There is always something on the to-do list, dishes to be washed, clothes to be laundered, a pet to be petted, a check to be written, weeds to pull, a lover to fondle, a meal to make, fresh tomatoes to be picked, a book to read, a hobby to continue, a few pounds to lose, a problem to fix, a phone call to make, tomorrow’s list to be made today, a dream to remember, a promise to keep. A sunrise, a…