#decomp magazine

[mortalpractice]

My friends are sad a lot. How did that happen? Rename the Dead Sea the Shut Up, It’s Fine Sea. --- Bradley K Meyer, from “ ‘I’m Never Drinking Again for Two Days’ ---D. Wagner,” published in decomP magazinE

[mortalpractice]

--- Aviva Englander Cristy, published in decomP magazinE

[mortalpractice]

Ache I am the sky. People talk about me when they can say nothing else. They jab a finger toward a sliver of moon, as if their attention could make it full. Aircraft buzz the horizon, and children point at it, excited to be new and to live. Others gather up the clouds in their vocabulary. They try to differentiate between cirrus and cumulus. I could care less. I ache toward space above me, where stars noisily enter with sizzling lights. I wish I could join them, hide myself away, where there’s nothing but the dark, for centuries on end. --- Donald Illich, published in decomP magazinE

[mortalpractice]

the barefoot the cellist draws bow over string as ready as throat and so willing to pour light bones under some heaviest commandment a mother drawing the knife across the neck of her firstborn that kind of love with beaded friction and a rich ocean to spring forth her hands a fox so fast you dream of catching it in a snare of lightning so you can eat it without fire hands as fast as time and you slaver to taste what makes the fox legs twitch in fresh death and you wonder if you would fall inside her if she’d play you anything like that --- Annie Virginia, published in decomP magazinE

[mortalpractice]

It’s a thing we all are at some point— crushed on the roadway, crushed in silence, crushed red in love. This is the problem or not the problem. It’s the thing. The thing in the roadway smashed that has to be held. You have to go to it, stop the car, get out, get down on your knees with it hoping the oncoming traffic won’t get you in the process, knowing damn well it will.

Matthew Lippman, from “Live Things in the Road,” published in decomP magazine

[mortalpractice]

It's a full house, and you try to give me your chair, but I want to sit here at your feet which is a little like wanting to take you home or to breakfast or to Oaxaca, wanting to somehow explode it all to find our own pieced together ways to fight, to bless our tiny humanness, our dark hungers, these tough hearts we wear inside.

—Marty Williams, from "Delegados Ceros," published in decomP magazine

[mortalpractice]

It’s not that I don’t love myself; I love myself. The world wants not to have it in for us; it has it in for us.

Matthew Lippman, from “Holiday,” published in decomP magazine

[mortalpractice]

When it happens, this is how it happens:            moss spilling out of his mouth when he breathes. Shadow backing into                  skin.            It's not his fault—he saw the way ultraviolet and earth danced around each other like mid-morning lovers. The shadow between them. All he wanted was to introduce soil to sunlight and sing about the opposite of intervention. All he found was a way to stop drowning. To become the sea instead. The boy opens his mouth to apologize            but finds clover sprouting from his lips. He wants to be a greater good so he lets it grow. Here is how it happens: boy gets tired of bleeding            and becomes the ground instead. He can't help it. He gives boyhood over to earth            and makes of himself an elegy.            This is how the body decides                       it is not a thing worth keeping            and pins blades of grass                                     in the place of veins,                       replaces reflections with tinfoil. Here is how boy buries himself            before he is born. Watch for the ground: find him beneath it, turning the body to springtime.

—Ezra Lebovitz, "Devolution," published in decomP magazine