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issue 5: LIGHTS OUT

sue nocturne

HEATH JOSEPH WOOTEN
           after Suzanne Vega’s “Rusted Pipe”


Sound of crickets in which
I split the horizon open and see
what is left inside:

                                         a bird with no tender
                                         beat left in its heart. The measure of time
                                                       by your stride. An acorn pressed
                                                       into my bare foot.

The rules: we must run until we forget
                    our lungs. We must run to a place so deep
                    not even instinct could remember
                    the way.

                         An us in which the knife is the only instrument
                         sharp enough to cut our beginning from the vine.

The vine: a something that knows
movement as a deer—  
The beginning: a something of us founded
​upon that movement—  

​                                         in which
                                         when the fire is done breathing
                                         we can ink through the vigil of no more
                                         than starlight.

             In the place we find the bird, we wash
             its feathers until they shine beyond light. The beginning rots
             and the vigil rots and the deer rots.

                                                    Without the deer we have no use of movement.
                                                    The vigil ends and
                                                    even the dark.
                                                    The bird

                     does not. The bird is a quiet and therefore
                     rests beyond the ending. That deep
​
                                         place in which it is the only existence. The flicker
                                         in the empty, the beak that cuts
                                         ​the horizon like a knife.

Heath Joseph Wooten is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University. He is an avid collector of cassettes and other obsolescences, and you can find his work in or forthcoming from Lammergeier, EX/POST, [sub]liminal, and others.
perhappened mag
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header photo: viktor talashuk (unsplash)

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