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This appears in a pre-2010 issue of cc&d magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

Ash Land

Joshua Copeland

Exclamation points shout and arrow to
it, the short hand is dialed to a blunt, unsympathetic six,
and these birds outside, they sing,
their harmony dyslexicÉ
The eyes have gutted my sleep, there has been no rest
after a sudsy, animals-frolicking-beyond-the-gates day. My anger
is not described and defined properly
in today’s dictionaries; my irate slashes are not bound
by present definitions. The lexicon would flame up
into a pyre of tiny, unimportant minutiae—in the world

I dream of, I’m tip-toed on the top of
the Empire State Building, my wine glass is held up against the sky
and the blue seeps through it and the sun tinges its outline.

I am not the person I once was. Just as the ape was precursor
to man, I am ancestor to something black
and wordless, something that lashes with a

scorpion’s tail and whose soul is a fireplace
at full blast. Someone is going to be diced:
blood, flesh, soul—limp
on the chopping block. Blood. I am weary, my bones
creak like a haunted house
assaulted by a storm. A caveat: Do not kill the life
out of me because I am host to the
rabid and you will face fire when you die as I do now.

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