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Rachael Thomas Carlson

Gloucester's Unicorn

I saw the army approaching from the hillside south. I was
with the troops coming from the northy side of my present
state. I was the only one between the two. Mine hadn't
approached as of yet...probably just finishing tea as I speak.
I tried to lay a few traps the night before for the front to deal
with. But I recently rose from a noxious slumber. My
memory often fails me; did I finish last night? My head was
throbbing as a sleep dazed unicorn/horn pierce. Standing
my shoes on top of each other, I realized I needed to pee,
real bad. I daydreamed as the unsteady flow mocked me.
I could hear the glass crumbling from behind me.
Screaming in agony/tears of onion milk and vinegar.
The field was ripe.
Daisy leach pods, cram apple part cakes, florid rotten
bumblebee bacon strips, candied tomatoes, and rice pudding
sleep caps. I stood watching 'all of this' from the middle of
the field. Generals screamed around me with clasps and
rasps: turning bastards into sons.
A few men were approaching me rather quickly. I was
astonished at their tenacity and bravery. One of them hit
the ribble necked green sleever steam steak; his slippery
blood creating a wonderful slide/toy for the farmer of this
field. Second of them leaped into the circle I had created for
my self to sit in...

Our Eyeless Dog

      We opened the window on the clean cool milk moon night.

     Our owl perched the sill, waiting

“Maybe she is taking the long way home?”

      In the distance I thought I heard her say.

      Each of us took a tray from Grandmother. Lemon shortbread cookies with buttermilk and coffee. “Why would she do that?”

      This time a little closer. I could feel her hesitation in asking. She was holding her apron while trying to drink the moon.

      Each pearl of moon spit could be seen exiting her mouth with each consonance but you really wanted to pay attention to her bel canto vowels—like Leontyne or Marian she was.

      I wish that I would be able to hear her voice again.

      Grandmother reaches over to the owl and removes its eyes with a melon baller. No one hears the screams over the din of the moon in its milky thistle upon the eyes.

Each transparent eye sees only the face but not the tears.

                                                                                                                            Those tears

That

                                                   Drop Like

Pearls upon the butcher's block

                                                             Or upon the

Moon's Teeth.

      At 03:37 the eyeless dog sees

The Moon as a film.

My daughter no longer has my eyes.

                                                                    But she's still my milk moon

                                                                                          .

Kitchen Utensil

Stands under the ledge
avoiding winter rain:
a smoked winston.
Elevators ascend
with a pair of legs
and a glass screen.
See the legs
do not
levitate
but rather
radiate
as if
re(warding)
the end.

Asleep With The Serpent

Why have all these pages been filled?
Screaming through a sound proof room.
Forget it!
What is happening doesn't matter.
Spaces between the cookie and its cream/
                                                                    Spelled a name in
                                        different vestiges
                                                    grew old
                                                             and tidied up a bit.
He screamed through his old Iron Curtain and bathrobe.
I lost it once/fallen through a torpedo basin in kentucky.
Roses fell from a fenced/free thinker.
The note card has asked for a certain curtain to be lowered.
Revealed through his sonic landscape and frozen arrows.
By why now frozen?
are not many things
frozen
        apathy
                dentures of
        steal
                the ship mast
                        and set
        keel
                my friend
                        it is
        the
                only
                        way
Hey!
Listen to me/scratched fever.
Her everglowingness
sorted through the basin amid ship.
Shall she see?
Or driven under the current backwash backdraft, riff raff.
Sleep with me
        he said amid ship
                rowing shapes
                        lowing spears
Let Go!
Out of hold/touch
Philomel?
Nay, but a man with a rabbit instead
forged an amulet for the sake of his rake.
Ask me first of your name?
Why? Out of driven again.
No, I searched for your face, among thralls. I saw only
flowers pinned to corner street lamp walls. Why step closer
without knowing
I thought I could only hope, but I have bashed the cauldron
to the ground in a tight ft fashion
Have you started games?
OOOH No, I have started onomatopoeias/sequenced in
phrases discovered among scattered flatters and madder
hatters.
I wanted to release upon you and drown in you
boo/who/you
        frozen
                escape
        let
                down
                        your
                                hair
        Please freeze me!
                It has started
                        and wont let up
I love INK!!!! please freeze now!
Don't look back Xavier!
[semicolon]
It is not what
        you see(
(curbed manholes
        holes in flowers
                boutique shop
        let it see(
(a hydrant
        corner
                leave))--
It is a progression, I hear
it has not stopped.
                                                                                      This dinosaur has asked me
                                                                                to do him a favor
,
give him his
        bones back--.

On Words

“You're doing it again, aren't you?”

he asked with the flip

of an eyelid.

He thought he heard a car horn honk in the response but he must have imagined it.

The post does not arrive, ever on time.

He could feel his inside stomach ache.

This stomach seemed to ask a question of our hero.

“Where are your toes?

Have they left you?

Have they vanished?:”

said stomach's reply.

Out of the dusted road he could be seen, crawling through tough tar and umbilical cords white washed through the desert rain/tread.

He laughed at my description

“What does that person know?” he asked the air.

To his astonishment, the air responded with a flickering of the desert light/switch cacti.

His crawl quickened.

Knowing his destination was a long ways away.

“Ways away...” he repeated.

His stomach churned, asking for water and coals to heat the aether/fire below.

“I am sorry,” he misheard me.

But his belly bucked as the bull before its horns.

The desert rain seemed satirical in its ever/flowing gestures of coconut oil and spare ribs.

He often/frequented that place on the side of the invisible road. How could he see in this desert dark?

Floored by his own power, he pranced over to the next page, concluding with his distinctive period. Plots of land asked for his signature 3 times before taking his life. “Always down to the pit?” he asked his stomach, clad in waffle irons.

But where did he come from, you ask?

No, his rosy cheeks do not speak of the joyless bananas of which he was hoping, but of fruit nonetheless.

She appeared.

In a coat of cacti flowers and 30-somethings.

He tried to write on her spine but found her gutter instead.

She seemed lost.

“In what are you lost, my dear?” she asked.

“Hey!” he yelled, “you can't put words into her mouth.” This didn't phase any of us, but the vibe was different after the spirits left. They embraced, after a comfortable silence between introspective eyes.

The clouds convened: pushing/shoving for a better view of this couple.

Neither of them noticed.

But there were phantoms.

Cloaks of scorpions and sand/dust in the human litter.

Frozen

in

space

they lapped

each others

blood.

Her eyes, seem on some sort of fire: branded; but it was essential to only notice the particulars.

She screamed as an Earth Rotation separated the heavenly bodies

and clouds' lip.

“Forget what you have learned of me.” Tomorrow he is a new person just as yesterday and all the nights to come.

She pleaded with the clouds and asked the earth to begin its final descent into its motherly star.

(All that has come of this has already been recorded by scholars, artists, and carpenters.)

“But how?”

He grabbed the cactus cloak/coat and saw it fit to fake it.

The music changed and changed again back again.

Through its turbulence they saw the path and entered gleefully only after the foot of the floor.

They stuttered their way into the house, for the fourth time she fit in and he out, again in the desert's drooping rain.

The Quartet continued its play: on words.

Fall From Viol Strings

Milwaukee, WI – Associated Press. Each year a new harmonic stabbing occurs on 11th and Eugenic. Those two streets that some say appear only once a year, each time covered in flooded blood that those self-same people say is derived from humans. Yet no one seems to know where the sheep come from. This journalist has decided today not to talk of the harmonic stabbings but of the sheep that stampede each March on 11th and Eugenic:
     Grey tears fall from vile strings tied to legs that bleat like the milling sheep below
     them.
     No one wants tainted wool yet we are all wearing it, blinded by those tears,
     methinks.
     But how can we know that we are blinded by tears?
     Methinks we sleep
          until March when 11th and Eugenic lights up with those un-dyed wool
          bearers.  Those
               wolves that are not woolfs.


     Or do we wake and find our clothes missing, stolen by some relatively unseen
               hand that comes around during March: tax-free.

Words are so important.

Without them we are wool bearers

for those with

words in their teeth.

Words are blown-out eye socket springblossoms------>

                                                                                                                           inedible, mind you.

Those that know of 11th and Eugenic know of Death. That Death that appears as words but exists like sheep
                                                    /
                                                     looking for a shepherd
                                                                                                    .