The Bookends Review

weapons aren’t just blades, knives and swords
they’re eyes that throw glances
sharp enough to cut through your ego

make you think of the ruins you’ve created

weapons are words we don’t swallow
that we allow to come up
through the broken and cracked pipes
that might burst with emotion

weapons are moving towards
uninhabitable lands filled with toxins
designed to kill the human spirit…

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my fire is not for symbolism
for your joint or cigarette

it is to make me a martyr for the war
the fight forced on those on the bottom
of the color wheel

my fire is not for symbolism
for white women to try and put out
with their tears made of punishment
and pride

it is for brown and black girls
who have never seen a way out
who have never had guidance…

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“Take me fishing,” Sherri said. “I’ll fish you under the table.” She scrunched up her face and nodded, agreeing with herself. “Let’s hit Skokie.”

“Here I was hoping you could drag me out to brunch followed by hours of thrifting.”

She lit up. “Brunch!”

“No.”

“Thrifting?”

Nolan wondered why he still used words. “Where to?” he asked. “Skokie or Lake Michigan, at Belmont? Or your dad’s?”

“Skokie. Or brunch.”

“Nobody said brunch,” he said.

Sherri arched an eyebrow. “You keep pronouncing the word wrong. It’s ‘jasslight.’ Skokie.” She won.

North of Chicago, pretty far north of Skokie, even, was a designed chain of lakes called Skokie Lagoons. Longtime Potawatomi marshland prone to flooding, the lakes were carved out in the largest Civilian Conservation Corps project ever undertaken, from 1933 to 1941.…

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Tom Jefferson’s mind careened from liberty to human events and every which way, so he took a break from his declaration drafting to go shopping.

Tom loved clothes, as all the finest men do, and he especially loved books, but when he got to the marketplace he wanted a little more of the bustle of common humanity. That was the whole point, after all, and a little elbow rubbing would clear his mind all the better.

He headed to the noise of the auction block. It was a slow day, but there were enough lookers and buyers assembled to occupy him. He shook some hands and said hellos and chatted a bit.

Then his attention turned to the block. A beautiful specimen had been led up, looking strong, healthy and young.…

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You were a person, you lived, and
you tried to avoid pain. But pain is entangled in life, and
can’t be extracted. Still–
like every human being, you tried.

You were a woman, deified and dismissed, both angel
and monster, always through a lens, always
compelled to be beautiful.
Beautiful to whom?

You were a mother. Your heart was split open
like a pomegranate– sacrificed,
though it never felt like a sacrifice.

You were a writer (possibly)
every tender meat hook of an image on the page,
reality poured through the sieve,
and so little made it through in the end.

You are tired.
No longer care to continue unpacking
mysteries, rising and falling with the karmic wheel—
up and down, the lesson never learned.
This page, too, will be turned.…

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A thread of sky breaks through the trees. Meriwether Lewis, Captain of the Corps of Discovery Expedition, strides out of the shadow and into the light. Raising his free hand, he shades his eyes and overlooks a great grassy plain. The Captain can see the sapphire Missouri River snaking toward the snowclad southern mountains.

He turns his attention to vast flocks of young geese. The birds have become completely feathered in all areas except for one crucial spot.

Their wings still lack the feathers needed for flight.

Descending the hill, Captain Lewis plans a hike to the bend in the Missouri that he had spotted from above. Rounding a boulder, there are at least one thousand buffalo grazing and drinking on the river.

Captain Lewis stands his 1792 Contract Short Rifle upright on the western wheatgrass.…

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my dad died two days before trump was sworn in for the second time. i’m not sure i ever saw myself in his face but i thought I’d at least recognize the pieces of me that came from him. etched somewhere against the life he’d lived and the things he saw. maybe side by side id be able to ware down the hardness of his eyes and see them in my own. I’m still a child, his child, one that has not known much else but ease, and ease looks different, it feels different. ease to me is, never being limited. I think your hardness came from the potential for so much more. the things you didn’t get to live and the things you didn’t get to see.…

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