…and they hovered over the heat vents, glistening.

I walk through the ashes

of Egyptian rivers

berserk-armored in whiteouts.

The casket earth is breeding

giant skeletons

in the corners of caves.

Dark flowing quantifications

grow dangerously below mountains,

catalytic and creeping.

Over my shoulder,

faces stare frightened

at the numbers on the bodies…

Kelcey Parker

Kelcey Parker, assistant professor of English at IU South Bend, has been recognized as Artist of the Month for November 2009 at Image Journal.

Frances Hwang at IU South Bend

Frances Hwang, author of Transparency will be reading at IU South bend. Her story collection, Transparency (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Company, 2007), received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Hwang teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

Location: IU South Bend on the 3^rd floor “Bridge” of Wiekamp Hall.

When: Monday, Nov. 23, at 7:30 p.m.

*This event is free and open to the public. There will be light refreshments and a book-signing.

“All the grown-ups burst out laughing, and then my aunt turned to look at me. ‘So you think I’m not as pretty?’ she said. My fingers trailed along the sofa as I moved away from her. ‘You think your mom is prettier than me, hey?’ All at once, she lunged, squeezing me tight. When she suctioned my face with kisses, I could feel the hot steam of her emotion. She was a tyrant in that way, her passions swirled messily together, making me afraid. To love and to hate was the same, and even the dog was scared of her.”

–From Transparency “Giving a Clock”

When I'm Alone

I am

Surrounded

By sharp objects

I am alone

I struggle

For comfort

Should I play

A game

Or read

Maybe lie down

Or should I dig

Through the old

To find gold

I want

Invisible hammers

To strike strings

And save me

From this silence

I want to live

In a microcosmic

Village

With polar bear

And Penguins

And baby tiger cubs

And wolf pups

I want all

Of the animals

If I cannot

Have them

I will

Create them

In my mind

And I will

Dream of a garden

And surround

Myself

With memories

In the Orchid-Head Epicenter

*

I am angle-stripping my joint system of the larynx jacket. The meat houses open up for the gore sparrow. Their flapping faces polish my leopard skin innards with wave pressure, with shore hair, with nekton in the mohole, with amputated doctors grinding supine below the Sonoran desert mantle.

*

40 eagles track axe movements with eyes wedging. They have come to drink the nectar of the womb-fruitings, to weather in the hill-creeping, to grabber in the chasm-flesh, to spit out the fossil wax and ice-pack the blood scabbings.

*

They have found themselves in an ideal situation, another food cycle with puppets in the firing squad, the whole unit pulsing in the flowage fold. There is an exotic flailing in the instinct direction, eroding the crater darkness and spewing ejecta into the ecosphere.

*

Arachnids dig pelts from cheeks and remove loaves from the market-abundance. They are communicating in limb shaking masses, shoulder-breeding through the river-thunder. I am coming in the tree-layered structure swelling. I surveyed the leopard princess in a swamp hole. Her fur was surging…

In the Dead Waiting

Paws reach, shaking. Noses poke from the blood-crate houses, searching with tongues. Mouths shiver for the bitter-yuck, gaping. On the shed-littered piss-linoleum, arboreal mother lips whimper declawed and tree plucked with bellies like berries; emptied fruits trembling with stitch-achings. Spiraling mammalian eyes gaze from bolsters, from the corduroy breeding, from the egg embedded surface-dampness. Then, stillness in madness—a sudden silent knowing. The shedding blades are coming. Rattling through the catacombs, the shedding blades are coming.

Inside the Magnetite Tombs

I want to amalgamate my star-gazer essence

with the anomalies of crop circles.

I can tell by the shapes in the sky

that this is not another psychedelic nightmare.

I am standing-burning; holes in the darkness

of my bedroom floor.

I left my shadow in the desert of Nevada

And made an incision with a sledgehammer.

I walk through a gray Egyptian snowstorm

to meet myself at the crossroads.

My body lies docked, charging.

Something is waiting

to possess me, but I am already dead.

I push against tectonic plates; paralyzed;

body-locked in reef-chains.

Mountains communicate my faces.

Jagged helmets point at my feet.

Dead soldiers weep

a cold wolf-cry

into the canvas of a blood-moon sky.