Size / / /

Hardly has the wax seal dried

on this common twilight in late September

when I long for fingertips

I've never felt, reassurance

of starlings migrating over Wal-Mart,

calligraphy of the inexplicable

silence heard ever since I could talk

and asked what it was I saw,

just there on reality's platinum fringe.

No matter that men called it foolish,

that women smirked behind fans

and pronounced it sweet

for grown boys to be so lovesick,

this full of ache for what has no name,

lacking both mass and magic

but what, under a microscope,

under the dirty thumbnail of God,

could unstop all the laws of the universe.


Michael Meyerhofer's second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, is forthcoming from Steel Toe Books. His first book, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He has also published four chapbooks. His work has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Ploughshares, Arts & Letters, Mythic Delirium, Ideomancer, and others.



Michael Meyerhofer is the author of a fantasy series and several books of poetry. His work has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Analog, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and other journals. For more info and an embarrassing childhood photo, visit troublewithhammers.com.
Current Issue
18 Sep 2023

Ama’s arm rested protectively around the girl’s shoulder as the giant bird glided above, its head angling right to left. Violet-black wings soared across a cloudless sky, blocking the sun’s midday rays and swathing sections of the village in deep shadow. Given its size, this argentavis was one of her first, but too far above for her to differentiate by name. Even across the distance, Ama could feel its heartbeat synced to hers, their lives intertwined until death.
She is leaving the world that is pink with desire, on her gray cardboard rocket ship.
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