Torture
by Laura Kasischke

From the Latin, torque: to twist. 
The infliction
of it, as
well as the experience of 
its 
infliction.

Rumors, thunder
rumbling, some 

wild applause in a small 
auditorium
after a child’s 
terrible 
performance.

Or the detonation 
of a bomb. 
The hiss
of a missile. 
“The ground 
shook, but we 
didn’t feel it.”

No one was killed.
No matter what they did. 
No one survived
no matter where 
they ran or hid.

ISABELLE CORREA
Desire

Bronze statue in cowgirl, little puddle
of tears on the hardwood floor, silo
of wheat and lost lightning. Desire
is fruit flies clinging to horse reins.
Rattle and whip and frenzy. Charm
my chemicals. Call me your most
beloved ache, like hopes hatching
under the feet of porcelain chickens,
like the hair clip dotted by pink
frogs when you were just a girl
and didn’t know what a woman was.
A woman is desire dressed in flames.
Desire is a bask of crocodiles gutting
the carnations in my chest. I come
to you sorry from the hips, crawling
uncocooned, brain burdened, bent
solemn as a palm tree. Dismembered
doll hunger. Teeth painted red. I am
telling myself lies. I am terrified
of love, its velvet-fucked hands.
Forgive me for needing something
to believe in—the moon, my mother,
a kind true god who doesn’t wish
me dead. Forgive me, desire, for living
in your belly like an unsaid prayer. 

NICK LANTZ
Baba Yaga

For centuries I was small and gray as the peel
of a mouse. I sucked ice to stay warm, washed
my clothes in streams as cold as a tsar’s heart.
Imagine my surprise, then, at this swamp, so hot
the gutters burped roaches with every rain,
and storms swept down like pogroms.
When the whole neighborhood lost power,
I wrapped myself in the hurricane’s itchy wool
and walked to the local gas station mini mart.
I watched a fistfight break out over milk, a woman
weeping by her stalled car. They couldn’t see
the mud on their feet, but I had known that mud
for a thousand years. It never comes off. I walked
home. The sky was a broken window. That’s when
I found him, the baby, toddling in the roadside ditch,
a little toupee of mosquitos on his bald head.
I tucked him in my mouth for safekeeping. He didn’t
cry. Later, when I spit him out on my kitchen table,
he was asleep. I petted him with my mouse claws.
I tried to clean his feet, but the dirt wouldn’t
come off, so I dressed him in socks and an old shirt.
On the news, the king was cutting the ribbon
at the newest mass grave. That could be you someday,
‍I said to the baby, pinching his bug-bit cheek.
He looked up at me then, and grabbed my hand
so hard my finger broke. Was it love I felt?

JULY WESTHALE
Ode to Stepmoms Stuck in Washing Machines 

She would get the flowers herself.
Someone must be in want of a wife.
Someone in want of a fortune must be
in want of being a wife. A green & yellow
bird trapped in a corner yells Allez vous-en!
‍Many years later, she did not reminisce
about the day her father took her to see ice;
it is highly unlikely she ever faced
a firing squad. In her younger and more
vulnerable years, yes, it was her father’s advice
that haunted her. Happy families
may very well all be alike, what does she know.
About flowers, yes. Call her anything
you’d like. To women, all alike in dignity.
A call to the goddess of memory. It was always
the best and worst of all times. When she woke
from her bed, she found herself transformed
into a monstrous vermin. Can she still
get the flowers herself? I should mention
she was sleeping in what once had been
the gymnasium. They’re out there. She’s in here.
It was a queer sultry summer when they executed
her, not by firing squad, but by tedium. What
choice did she have, but to reach inside?

            "the soul got to choose. Nothing else
            got to but the soul
            got to choose.”
            -       Brenda Hillman
 
 
I could never make you mythical 
 
Not Demeter who mourned that her son might live half his life in hell after tasting the bliss of the juice bursting from the seeds in his palm
 
Nor Niobe who wept like a stone after losing her sons to beauty and ambition
 
Perhaps I ought to have imagined you as a nameless mother, that of Orpheus who sang such verses to the dead they opened the very gates of hell for him
 
But myth does not do in the nights where it’s you who has gone from this world, flown from your shape into whatever is next
 
We turned the machines off at dusk and commended you to the earth the very next morning
 
At the graveside it was I, the Orphic son, who climbed into the ground to shake your shoulders to remind you it was time to leave this shape of earth to earth, that these forms were your home no longer
 
The verses sung from above were not of my making or my tongue and none from my own mouth came that day or since
 
Did the Greeks know something essential? That even were the soul immortal without the shape that held it close it would wander inaccessible lands forever, that it was the body left behind that would dissolve and rejoin creation
 
That borderless I might lose you to god, the single bright spark of you racing to rejoin some divine Whole
 
It had been dusk, I held your hand, we knew some part of you was gone and yet you lived and breathed
 
All I had were not words but gestures of body: I held your hand, rested on your shoulder, kissed your face, was that you or not you that I turned on your side in the grave, making a pillow of a chunk of earth so you could rest facing that mosque you loved on the other side of planet 
 
Does the soul get to choose? Did Orpheus’s mother know he relinquished women and spent his days drunk with poetry and song?
 
And who was she really, maybe no muse at all, but an ordinary woman, a tomboy from Hyderabad who sang and climbed trees and stole her cousin’s bike to ride around the neighborhood, laughing the whole way?
 
And what angel or devi who slipped a coin under her son’s tongue, cursed him with the knowledge he might reach past the screen separating the lived-in world from the dead?
 
He knew what happened when he looked back—he lost love forever, he was torn limb from limb by a world enraged, that even dismembered his body floated down the river singing those same syllables that moved ghosts to breathe again
 
If it were a myth I could nearly imagine that ragged screen of grief fluttering, somehow hearing a scrap of a voice in the wind, a flutter of wing. Could it all be more than ancient lies? Could it be perhaps now having left the shape of earth behind you are singing to me still
 
But it is not a myth and we are not mythical. 
 
You are you, both enveloped by this earth and gone
 
And I am I, torn asunder and cast adrift, 
no words left in my mouth with which to bewitch the king of the dead

be honest with God, he who presumably already knows?
Better to be honest with your postal worker or cashier—
someone who can't call your bluff and therefore the honesty
means something. Honest to Sarah who scans my shopper's card.
Honest to Joe who delivers my bills, which is another
accountability. Yesterday the three half-wild mutts
that always get loose got loose, ran havoc through the neighborhood,
chased the mail truck down the cul-de-sac like archeologists
after the ark. I didn't remember God giving
Moses specific measurements for building it, but he did.
And what was the point of all that gold just to fill the ark
with dust? Honest to God I can only imagine
I would have been one of those at the foot of the mountain,
such little faith—worshipping the calf, then drinking its ashes.

To unlock the lock, you offer a key. To insert the key, you offer your hand. To turn the hand you offer your arm, your shoulder, your body. And what is it that’s behind that body? What initiates the motion which, we hope, will extend the arm, rotate the wrist, turn the key, exonerate the lock?  Attached to the body is a life. The life in question follows the body in question like a shadow. Inside a shadow are childhood traumas, interest payments, tension headaches, desire, friends you’ve forgiven, and long walks in the autumn of your memories where the leaves change color and continuously fall but never seem to come to rest on the observable ground. All of this—the arm, the shoulder, the shadow—is contained inside the motion to make the thing turn, to open the thing that’s presently shut. The thing that’s presently shut is a door.  In Ancient Rome, the god of doorways was Janus. All prayers had to pass through him before reaching other gods. Each of those other gods has made the long journey from being real to being mythology. It is painful to be forgotten, to fade from the public record. The old gods are very much like us. We who stand in front of a door, a door that is only now beginning to open.

making the elegy all about himself, as if he 
were the one to drink his liver  
into oblivion without so much 
as a Pushcart to show for it. He  
is only half as pathetic as he 
makes himself out to be (the 
deceased), whispering sweet 
 
nothings to his new bride (the dirt) 
while she nods her many meal- 
worm heads to their soft rhythms. He can’t 
(both of them now) keep going on 
about death like this, it’s 
indulgent, it’s low-hanging (overripe, 
now rotting) fruit. It’s so pregnant 
(aborted) with self-doubt and ego, which is 
 
a gross balance to achieve.  
I don’t envy him (anyone). 

The dream says it’s more stripper 
than costume. More black light 
than bandage. You’re up to 
ironweed and the dream 
has stepped out of its shorts.  
Jewelweed jack in the pulpit 
jacaranda. Knapweed. 
The dream begins 
to hiss disconcertingly. 
It shakes its paper bag of seeds.  
See what I mean? 
Throws its shirt on the floor.  
Love in a mist. Lupine. 
See how it compensates? 
It gets sloppy. It spills 
down its bra. It’s sticky. It howls. 
Milkweed. Remember? 
You’ll be enmeshed soon. 
You bring the tea cake, 
the sweet demeanor.
The dream accepts devours 
offers up your favorite failing. 
It won’t leave you alone. 
Be comforted. 

You apologize, like a boy 
on a dock who has just let 
his catch slip back beneath 
the surface of a lake. 
I don’t mind. Bring me 
your smallness, your 
tender disappointment. 
Pajamas around my ankles, 
I smile, wipe my slick thigh 
with your shirt. When I lie 
about reading or doing dishes
when I’m doing nothing,
you catch me the way a dancer 
catches another dancer from 
not-falling. We leave 
the curtains drawn, windows 
open; I hope someone sees 
the tender constellation of 
pimples on my bare ass, 
the way you shrunk like good
fresh vegetables in my oven. 
I never knew how small
we had to reveal ourselves
to be, to be this loved.

It feels as if we’ve come from empty, the portal is a mother.
The dark of the cosmos grant us breath, the origin’s mother.

The babies before the babies before earth’s beginning suckled 
stardust, shaped themselves of clay, resisting hands of a mother.

The unborn are Gods, born outside of the mind, the skin, the womb.
The most mortal of us nurture their leaving, still—forever mothers.

They cry with us, laugh our lungs free from grieving their going.
They watch us, hold us, soothe us, carry our heavy, becoming our mothers.

The desires stay swallowed, pressed against the soft spot of the cheek 
tend to the body, test the blood, wait and wait, wonder how to mother.

The body is a mystery, no, the miracle cannot be fathomed, 
there are no answers for the way the spirits guide us to mother.

There was once a baby blossoming my womb alive, she called me
her Mother, drank of me, loved of me, she left me, a mother.

She opens her sovereign heart
to the machete of the world
closes her eyes
already somewhere else 
bending a field of wheat 
to the wind
scanning for collapse 
of sturdy things
wings folded in her lap
wings like prayer-
steepled hands.
In her softest parts
she is rosy cheeks 
and bone meal
feeding all the rivers 
that cut through the earth 
bleeding auburn hunger 
down her legs
running toward any joy 
that will have her
stumbling upon it
like she didn’t know
it was there 
like it wasn’t always
digging its chafed finger 
into the gash and asking 
to be healed.

I barely manage to brush my teeth
before sleep. I neglect to wash
my face. In the harshest of mirrors
pink discoloration on my left cheek.
The grim reaper rapturing your dog
is too much. Ghost Sims haunt burnt
down houses. They abandon you.
They contain free will until you
determine they don’t. I did play
The Movies. Acted as stylist,
choosing avatars’ hairdos,
premiere gowns, jewelry.
I’d clay the stars glam.
I’d pay for their rehab.
I’d make them filthy rich.
I played on sandbox mode.
I didn’t want to run a studio
either. I only want to run
headlong into that which
wounds me.

Because I hated what winter, cruel and astonishing,
required of me. In the red snow, I picture white irises

that detonate in my sleep. I don’t actually know what
they sound like; I trust you. For centuries, I exiled myself

to this bed, painted on the walls the flowers plum blossom,
lily, limonium. At night, I stare at the square of a woman

I stole from my father’s wallet. I tuck myself into concrete.
In my dreams, a snowstorm photocopies a field of faces.

Blue and brilliant flashes of light. I pluck off their petals
around the apartment, as if all these adversaries, too,

will explode without me knowing. Springtime and so
I return home to my mother. On the coffee table,

above the streets laced in black ice, she concentrates
on the thousand pieces of a botanical jigsaw puzzle.

It’s incomplete. Algae and wildflowers void of parts
and holding the hot tea she spilled everywhere

between those green bodies. Because hunger stirred
in my stomach, small and violent, begging to be held.

Come on. It wants a name. I wonder if you loved me more
before I had a name. I always loved easier than I let on.

                              — After Angels in America by Tony Kushner

I respected the delicate ecology of my delusions;
I mistook it for Rapture. If God abandoned us,
I abandoned Him first. Ha! Book of Revelatio–
I skimmed it. Got bored of biblical. And did
I hallucinate the angel’s billion-eyed airstrike?
I acid-tripped into Aleph: a firebomb squad
I called anything but death. Glittering death.
I doomscroll: baby-amputees, carbon-sinks.
I stop & I shouldn’t. Took sixty-seven shots;
I chugged gasoline & transformed into AK-47.
I woke from that stress-dream into another.
I prayed. God served moldy loaves. Rank fish.
I gobbled it up, pretended to puke. At age 10,
I hyperfixated on the apocalypse. Seriously,
I imagined myself as Katniss Everdeen. Ha!
I wanted the world to end without an ending. 
I progressed like a tumor. Terminal, crazy &
I mean, I was too young to believe in sickness.
I refused to drown in the poisoned ocean. But
I fished in it. Caught botulism from bad beef.
I deregulated. Free market and I’m worthless.
I star-spangled my coffin then refused to die in it.
I lost my voice to the rocket’s red glare. Damn!
I forgot imagination can’t create anything new.
I took my time. I took dollar-store painkillers &
I woke up groggier, less capable. Less possible.
I tough-loved the world until it loved me back.
I paid my taxes. I believed in it: our goodness. 
I do. I still do. I can’t tell if that’s a lie. Perhaps
I could call myself oracle. Oh, what a shitshow!
I wound up as oracle? World’s shittiest prophet?
I refuse Rapture and Heaven. Enter Angel: Hark!
I Arrived! Great Work Begins! Anti-apocalypse,
I believe in you. So forgive me! But you can’t! 
I witnessed the flies rotting in the corpses, then
I heard grown men laugh at the sight of it. Ha!
I will do the great work! God willing, I will try!
I felt God spit in my face & I kissed his cheek.



                                                                         I’m not brave.

It was during one of the long exhausted silences in the cancer ward—between drugged naps, between doctor rotations, my bad prognosis having been made carefully but terribly plain—that I began my theory. It was all about life’s density, not length, I said, addressing your outraged tears. I saw a beaver swimming under the dory on the Green River, then looked up to see a bald eagle snatch a fish. We floated through a canyon of ancient Vishnu Shist, dark and shiny as obsidian. We took turns as you sat at the foot of my bed: we drove through that apocalyptic storm in canyon country, purple lightning blasting sideways through green-glowing thunderheads—rain on one side, clear sunset on the other, throwing hot dusty arms through the windows on the highway to catch the giant raindrops. You saw a tornado of fire jump a valley. I saw a herd of wild horses running across the Mojave. We swam naked, alone as Adam and Eve, in Havasu Falls. Now I hardly remember the hospital room, thin and disposable as a sheet of blue lined paper. I think you held my burning feet to your chest. I forgot to say I saw a pack of wolves in the Yellowstone backcountry with my brother, just after sunrise, making coffee on the camp stove. The wolves seemed enormous. Seven or eight or eight of them regarded us. When you’re that vulnerable, fear is senseless. I stood looking into the dark one’s eyes. We kept looking. In time the black wolf broke my gaze, and in unison, without a sound, the pack turned down the path and loped away, behind a hill, and left us blinking in the light.

I heard on the radio this morning that someone commits suicide in the US every eleven minutes. Children between the ages of ten and fourteen are particularly vulnerable. Also at risk, children who experience medical trauma or repeated surgeries. 

I underwent six eye surgeries between the ages of one and twelve. Once, during an eye operation, I became a ghost and looked down at my body as the surgeon sliced open the conjunctiva of my left eye.  When I told this to the doctor, he suggested I see a psychologist. 

Back then, I thought I was the only girl with a death wish. What saved me: animals. A farm child, I loved cows, horses, chickens, dogs, cats, pigs, birds, mice. I rescued baby starlings that fell from nests in the eaves of our house and raised them on Alpo. Birds, I thought, were small angels. 

My parents didn’t believe in therapy, said it was unscientific—a modern-day religion.  My father, a philosophy student, loved to quote Nietzsche and announce to his Christian friends, God is dead.  Once, when one of my baby starlings woke my father at dawn with its raucous cries, he flushed it down the toilet. 

Both Nietzsche and my father suffered from depression, mood swings, chronic pain, and visions of grandeur. They believed they were supermen, or rather Übermenschen, who could rise from the ashes of despair.

When Nietzsche was forty-four, he watched a horse being flogged in the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and was so overwhelmed with grief, he never spoke again. 

My father debated whether animals suffer. The question originated with Rene Descartes, who claimed that animals lack souls and consciousness and therefore can feel no pain. Descartes practiced vivisection and insisted that animal howls and moans are uncorrelated with physical discomfort.

On our farm, horses that became fractious, whinnying day and night, kicking their stalls and riders and  rearing when approached, were first whipped, then treated with Acepromazine, an antipsychotic and mood stabilizer.  

I have often wished for a mood stabilizer.  

The effectiveness of antidepressants is unpredictable. For some, a placebo works as well as drugs. For others a drug can be a miracle—a savior in pill-form. Once, when I was treated with Prozac, I saw death as a doorway with light leaking around the edges. The light was singing my name.

When you move, dark bits of your life
are shaken into light. A Polaroid, receipts
from a place you’ve “never been,” a marble—
the midnight attic of your choices.
Such labels sink me like a stone
so I drive away with you
to “work on our relationship”
as naked as the law allows.
‍
Still, the spiral narrows deeper in
flaying me of adjectives.
Being not myself confers strange powers,
only a couple of which
I ever discern.
But I can see at night. That’s one.
All that is created
can be barely understood.
They say the big bang happened
when the devil told God to go fuck Himself.
‍
Be that as it may,
I need to find a fiction
we can agree on.
‍
This bridge,
this lonely crossing that I build for us.
‍
You can’t leave home
unless you have one.
And if your home is assembled poorly,
you will be defined
by what clings to you in your worst moments:
your anger your anchor.
‍
It’s freezing on the Avenue of the Giants.
The lightness
I thought would free me does no such thing.
Only desire returns me to a semblance,
only desire, like a tab of ecstasy,
stamps a smiley face on oblivion.
I worry your skin like a rosary.
Momentarily,
even the seals make sense and are in tune.
They sing: “As you learn, you teach.”
The past suddenly seems
rife with possibility. In the future,
I shall let my wordless heart
do all the talking.
‍
On the drive home,
I record the new names—
Arcadia, Eureka, Ukiah, and I remember
riding the LIRR when I was a kid,
hearing the magical spells chanted by the conductor—
Montauk, Patchogue, Massapequa—
‍
And when the train sometimes slowed,
I imagined jumping off unseen between
stations and walking into these strange towns,
leaving my parents behind,
a ten-year-old city boy
knocking on a Long Island door, saying,
“I am a citizen of the world, take me, rename me;
I’ll mow the lawn, do the dishes, wear the hand-me-downs,
whatever.”
‍
As each second passed, geography
would change my fate.
Every moment brought new towns, new families.
New lives.
Those were the days.
But I never did step off.
No, I don’t think I ever did.

There we were, walking the line along
death’s precipice, mother trying on hats
in heaven’s department store.
Across the street, whores whistled
bitter schlaffmusik to lull the actuaries
into hypnotic grief. We tried
calling home but the telephone wires
had been ripped out by raccoons
or the government. I held the last
dime in my sweaty palm. Father had
a way with words, commanded them
stand tall as corn in August.
Since he’s gone there’s been a loud
silence, the hum of climate control
shifting the direction of my thoughts.
Bread refuses to rise even when
I strum the national anthem
along my pelvis. Always there,
always forgotten, my coccyx
connects me to what we always were.

*

Maybe it’s the rain or the spring
in the heel of my shoe or the cicada’s
shed overcoat alone on a lawn chair,
but something’s been telling me,
whispering in my ear, dance, or maybe
it’s once, or maybe dunce. Fire’s music
whorls through the wild conifers,
spreading the latest conspiracy
darkening the dark web.
How much of the soul is metaphor?
Someone said, you can’t overestimate
the body’s desire for eternity.
A baby’s finger clenches like its pulling
a trigger. Is its first instinct to kill?
I turn away in disbelief.
Chatter like fat in a flame.

*

Corpses burst out of their wooden pods
claw their way to the surface,
and forage the forest floors for guns.
I hide among the leaves and needles,
dreaming of another kingdom, another time.
Is this what trauma does? A bed might be
a bomb, a bomb might be a bed,
or maybe just a briefcase left innocently
by the embassy door. I have so many keys,
I can’t remember what they’re for.

The dead sit hunched, nodding in agreement,
emptying their pockets, dragonflies drying
transparent wings on their naked skulls.
One pulls a bullet from his temple, sets
it down on a stump with a little tap.
There’s always an eighty-four percent chance
of winning Russian roulette
     for whoever goes first.
 
*
 
The crowd celebrates the return of
the father. Kismet, they say. Savior,
they whisper. Messiah, they think.
Each hair on my head extends its
root down into my brain where the masses
gather, staring in wonder at the dome of sky.
Mother holds a box of sea salt. Kosher,
of course. That’s the spirit! Spiritus mundi?
Make like a rabbit and burrow deep,
she says. I dig up their graves but find
only empty orange shells.
A jet plane stitches the sky closed.
I throw another stick in the fire.
Father says, stop crying
     and smile for the camera.

The bombs don’t go easy on the climate. 
The weather is too darn hot today. 
And I wonder what burns my eyes more, 
the sweat or the scenes of genocide 
from Gaza. 
At this moment, I can’t stop thinking of myself and my friends 
as sheep dragged to their slaughter, the korban of Eid. 
But God’s name this time is Yahweh.
My name is Amalekite.
Amalekite—fashionable name for a korban. 
You know I have never seen Gaza from a boat in
the middle of the Mediterranean.
And I am not daring enough to swallow my saliva and 
ask you how my house looks from a far. 
I can’t even ask: Did you see my house?
I wish I could be with you.
I wonder how humanity can be carried in a boat? 
Isn’t it supposed to be heavier, bigger? 
I wanted to thank you for carrying humanity in a boat. 
But as a recognized human animal,
I am not sure what humanity is. 
I keep asking about my other half:
What is human? 
Yours sincerely, 
The human animal, Basman