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perhappened mag
issue 7: SNOWFALL

walking the familiar

LANE CHASEK
                        after the music of Daniel Johnston

​
The horizon blazed for three days,
            then another three days,
            ash snowing the ground, summer
                        never loosening its grip on our small town.
 
Our memories of snow, cats, bears, cattle,
            rabbits, dogs: all lost
                        to the birds as we
            adopted the gaits and skins
                        of our familiars.
 
Mom always believed Grandma would live
            with us for just a few days more, until
                        her country home was safe from the grass fires.
 
Mom brooded, distant like the mother wolf she’d always been,
            Dad gone the way of giant camels
                        hitchhiking on the memory of the dodo,
            while Grandma made a second home of our home,
                        along with her lifetime of hoarded jars,
                                    canned tomatoes, nuts, photo albums — 
                                                never sure when a season would pass,
                                    never knowing when the fires would cease
                                    and her chipmunk could return to the singed prairies
                                    she called a homestead.
 
My brother and his sea anemone slept 
            in the aquifer and geologic records, while me and my rooster perched
                        on the roof each night, noting
            and hoping for a change of wind, an end
                        to a snow that never melted.
 
We believed everything would burn
            for the shortest possible time. A sparrow
                                    perched on the gathered
                        ash of our windowsill
            was all we could ask for.

Lane Chasek's work has appeared in journals such as Broke Bohemian, The Daily Drunk, North Dakota Quarterly, Plainsongs, Taco Bell Quarterly, and many more. Chasek's first book, Hugo Ball and the Fate of the Universe, is currently available from Jokes Review Press. 
perhappened mag
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header photo: luke flynt (unsplash)

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