perhappened
  • the mag
    • the issues
    • submit to the mag
  • the press
    • the chapbooks >
      • CALIFORNIA IS GOING TO HELL
      • body in motion
      • sun of daedalus / song of anticlea
    • submit to the press
  • support us
perhappened mag
issue 3: HEATWAVE

the last night of the holocene

MK STURDEVANT
the 6th arrondissement, Abbaye de Saint-Germaine-des-Prés: 2003


Skin bears its salt, its fibrous scent 
like silver gelatin locks light. 
I call to mind a bed

where fingers laid.
How the blazing morning bore down
and yet we went out.

Corners of shade were crowded
on the last afternoon of the Holocene. 
Every Rue exposed to sun was a hollow shell.

We saw the empty afternoon through
wilting up and down the Seine, our hot hands
latched. Other faces cut the water frowning

heaving, it was hard to inhale.
A concierge collapsed. A waiter laid 
down with his clattering tray 

white porcelain blasted handles
crema pooled and one flying spoon 
wore the bridge on its back 

then slid, all the way down.
The river was no reprieve 
the old river, a river so seen, so warm.

Melting wires frayed trains’ pantographs 
and the city declared: cathedrals 
are thermalrefugia now. 

No fees no rules. Doors the size of houses 
opened portals to the old earth 
showing cool wombs of dark.

We sat in the wooden chairs of Germaine-des-Prés
setting our stuff softly down. The silence 
magnified my love’s whisper

sang his pencil’s mark. A scratch of chairs 
moving across the crypt
vaulted through the painted canyon.

He would try to get the arches everywhere,
for these are arcs of ancient oak, he said,
describing perfect parabola.

Hold my hand, where has the world gone?
Hold me up, the centuries sank
my friend, this life, where will your skin go?

It’s just us and Christ at the Eleventh Station 
hovering on the wall in the holy dark, nothing but body
story, and the light that carries it will remain. 

Even when the sun was long down, heat 
had killed the day heat had crowned the first
summer that burned like new summers

pas normal, he said. His mouth
has a place, and his words, far down the middle 
of my own eternity forever, I am flung open.

I see the hour now. We dug up francs 
for one candle, we held the cold red glass between us
a tiny seed of fire inside.

The walk back to his apartment 
was still hot, the bed 
still simmered. We begged for air 

for remembering: winter, old summer, 
at least our smells, even a tongue.

MK Sturdevant's work appears in Orion, Newfound, Kestrel, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, The Lily Poetry Review, The Great Lakes Review and elsewhere. She is a fiction reader for the Maine Review and was a finalist for the Montana Prize in Fiction 2019. She lives in the Midwest. Twitter @mksturdevant.
perhappened mag
← back    issue 3: HEATWAVE    next →
header photo: anh q tran (unsplash)

© 2020-22 perhappened LLC
  • the mag
    • the issues
    • submit to the mag
  • the press
    • the chapbooks >
      • CALIFORNIA IS GOING TO HELL
      • body in motion
      • sun of daedalus / song of anticlea
    • submit to the press
  • support us