"Return No. 2" by Laurel Milburn

We step outside an axis where the magnets scrape to a dry thinning spark. Things to do: Things to do to turn a nocturne to a waltz. Today is red.A fine stretch of all our secret madness shouting about the infinite the length of pi.Coda. Break. We won’t repeat this, but we do:we feel like kissing—Stomach turns to bubbles acid, unoxidized like stones.A hungry bird can shriek the loudest being hollow. Ablood clot closes up the loop downtown. In the chaos, we think we are a pixel, a pigment, and we look closer and closer toward our hearty cords until we hear a fleshy echo: to, to.Two wolves become a falcon’s wings become a shell become the net behind our eyes. See the man of science teach anatomy. However painful the object, he feels this knowledge is pleasure, and where there is no pleasure, he has no knowledge.A poem’s arrhythmia e-rupts because it is in pain.We give more speedto push the trauma quickly as a mist around our ankles where we walk—gate to gate tucking ugly phrases between our toes so no one will know their weakness as an ease.

Laurel Milburn holds her BA in English and Spanish from Florida Southern College and her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has recently appeared in The Ilanot Review, Birds Piled Loosely, Right Hand Pointing, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Watercolor painting by Tony Whedon. He is the author of "A Language Dark Enough: Essays on Exile" from Mid-List Press and "Drunk in the Woods," a nonfiction collection forthcoming from Green Writers Press. He’s published four poetry collections. His poetry, critical essays, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Agni, American Poetry Review, Harpers, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, ThreePenny Review, among other publications. His website is https://www.tonywhedon.com/.