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After Monica McClure Ms. Nafis underwent a repeat pelvic ultrasound today the final report is not available Preliminary reports suggest a normal right ovary The left is enlarged and contains 2 separate complex cysts one measuring 3.6 centimeters the second measuring 1.8 centimeters B — Black or African-American

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing, The one large statue in this quiet room. The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb. The docents praise my elegant design Above the chatter of the gallery. Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts— The perfect emblem of futility. Mendoza carved me for a country church. (His name’s forgotten now except by me.) I stood beside a gilded altar where The hopeless offered God their misery. I heard their women whispering at my feet— Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead. Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall, And I became the hunger that they fed. I broke my left wing in the Revolution (Even a saint can savor irony) When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel. They hit me once—almost apologetically. For even the godless feel something in a church, A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is? A trembling unaccounted by their laws, An ancient memory they can’t dismiss. There are so many things I must tell God! The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high. But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch, A crippled saint against a painted sky.

Angelfish perturb the area around pink gauze, are the details of a threaded diamond string and its fake catachrestic applause. Like that of the angelheaded beast spreading its wings, as if to swim under the light of the glowworm and hyacinth, the fish are oratory and not. The pulchritude of bombazine on a shattering geoidal mid-afternoon, dribbling from sea rock to splint, the wing tips are hardly bleak accoutrements, their own swinging by the bay of a chest and a previous rock. Here we are stranded, pelagic with clot, and the fish burble with oratory and I kind of like them a lot.

In the redcoat she (who is I) was an angel, dark and bright. Mama chose the drama: pretty scarlet to subdue the white walk, a world dumb with snow, patentleather shoes to shine the path over ice. My father paid the way. His teeth salt inside the grin. I (who’s she) had a manner of leaping toward a light suddenly running into ecstasy or heat, exquisitely blind in the body racing inside it- self. A little fit of imagining. Thin arms, cropped wings, to hold the bristly branches of fir, and sing- ing, sisters and brothers itching, happy from angelhair fine as a strand of cat hair split six ways and brushed into the skin to itch and itch again. We were wild and giddy with gifts. It was then and always as all souls itch and spin in lit-red coats that float down this narrow vein, so we spin in O, to someone who loves us and suffers the world for each turn before a mirror, quiet as ice, we fall all through at last here in memory’s tiny Paradise.

Had I remained in innocent security, I should have thought all men were born my slaves, And worn my power like lightning in my eyes, To have destroyed at pleasure when offended. —But when love held the mirror, the undeceiving glass Reflected all the weakness of my soul, and made me know My richest treasure being lost, my honour, All the remaining spoil could not be worth The conqueror’s care or value. —Oh how I fell like a long worshipped idol Discovering all the cheat.

Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college one winter, hauling a load of Herefords from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien

They have little use. They are best as objects of torment. No government cares what you do with them. Like birds, and yet so human . . . They mate by briefly looking at the other. Their eggs are like white jellybeans. Sometimes they have been said to inspire a man to do more with his life than he might have. But what is there for a man to do with his life? . . . They burn beautifully with a blue flame. When they cry out it is like the screech of a tiny hinge; the cry of a bat. No one hears it . . .

The epitaphios of Thessaloniki From those few famous silkworms smuggled Into Constantinople in the head of a walking stick Silk waterfalls Poured from the ancient bolts Into now-destitute reservoirs Of church treasuries in Aachen, In Liège, in Maastricht, in Sens, In the Sancta Sanctorum of the Vatican, Bright rivers seeping past The age when a teaspoonful of Silkworm eggs the size of one grain Could endow a church, The age when the letters in the words Of sacred testaments were Unreeled in the coastal cities of Asia Minor, When a bookworm conspired To wrest a maze of empty roads Through the words My Lord— That ancient, flickering text Once permanently affixed By blind but face-picturing, speechless But law-breaking wooden shuttles, Now a heap of gold wires displayed With a crumbling silk vestment someone Plucked from a shovelful of dust During one of those treasure hunts conducted In the burying grounds, in other eras, A shovelful of dust Now blowing into your eyes, As if a storm wind from Paradise Blew the rumors of this death So hard you must cover your eyes Before the museum case. The late afternoon tugs At a gold thread you can hear fraying When you close your eyes, A thread you feel your way along, A thread at which the invisible globe pulls, Leading you to the end of the world Where there is a pile of Clothes stolen from the grave, Where your fear is relegated To a masterwork of silk slaves— That He is dead. Here death is only a flash of worlds Unfurled from a rifled Church treasury, and you are invited To walk this alluvial wave of gold, To walk in the labyrinths Of the angels’ howls, To run your hands along the walls Of the silk thread’s passageways, To feel with your fingers The angels’ barbaric, stifled, Glittering vowels Tightly woven with gold wires. If you were to tug at one, Unraveling the angels Into a vivid labyrinth of thread From the fourteenth century Backwards to the scissors blade A seraph takes to a fragile Filament of gilt According to a law still unrevealed, The shroud would disappear In the gust of a little breeze From this door left ajar Into the next life, The threshold we cross with closed eyes— Where angels hide behind their backs The saws with which they mean To saw the present from the past, Oblivious to the scarlet threads That prove to be hidden among The filaments, those red rivers Running through the theme of time So shockingly—so before you set foot there, Take heed. This is the work Of Byzantine silk slaves confined To the palace grounds at Constantinople, And you must beware. There was a way station On the Silk Road Where the authorities executed Traitors in a wooden box In innumerable, unspeakable ways. When you touch this shroud from the east You take that hundred feet of road. You must walk softly past. You must try not to look. The torrent of words—later, later. Here tongues are cut out, And that is why the howling Is mute, Gilded, herringboned. Because although this is death, It is the work of slaves Whose task was only To expose the maximum amount of gold thread To the ceiling price of so many nomismata Per square inch, in a swift mischief Of curious knots, of mazes Flashing past, of straight paths Made inextricable, So look again. The angels wring their hands Over a statue. They are deranged, But not by grief. They mourn Not a body, but a work in bronze. They do not bring a mortal to the grave. But we onlookers who grieve and grieve— We cannot relegate this thought To a glory woven cryptically In heavy silks; We cannot consign it, sweep it off, For we cannot weigh In our palms the empty cocoons, We cannot study Within the secret workshops Of the silkworm, We cannot touch the boiling Water where the spools whirl, We cannot learn firsthand The bleakness of the craft With which God made the world, We cannot recount the legend that, When they met face-to-face, both God and the worm laughed.

I When in a farmhouse kitchen that smelled of old rinds and wet cigarette butts I hoisted the shotgun to my shoulder and aimed but did not fire it at the man who had just taken my virginity like a snack, with my collusion, but still — When I sat in a conference room in an inquisition at the “newspaper of record,” across from the one slurping his pipe, the one arching her eyebrow, and I felt the heat like a wet brand in my chest, repaid insult for insult and left their fancy job like a squashed bug on the floor — When I was twelve, too old, the last time my father spanked me, pants down, because I had “distressed” my mother and my vision went red-black and I did not forgive — When, during my travels along the Gulf Coast, the intruder returned in the night and I did not call the cops again but stood with a butcher knife facing the door, yelling, “Come in!” although this time it was just the wind flapping and banging the screen door — When across a skating-rink-sized glistening table I told the committee chair and her brooch I was a fan of Marx and lost the fellowship — When I threw a pot of hot coffee and it just missed a man’s head, and the black-brown spatter stains were still there four years later long after he’d left me when I finally moved out of that East Village hole — II I would have had to be thinking in order to have thought — loaded, not loaded? — and I was not thinking, I was only dripping hot and oh the pleasure, I can still feel its prickling, crackle over the furnace of my rage, to see his face go pale, his eyes widen, his “put it down, put it down” — and I put it down and allowed my life as well as his to go on. III I miss my anger. Decades go by when all I can muster is absent-minded invective, you know, directed at the news; or a brief fantasy of shoving someone in front of a bus. Yesterday I slammed my fist on my desk and then apologized, to the desk. Consider the tapestry of the seven deadly sins, at Saint-Denis: Anger, wild-haired and half-dressed, picked out in blue and silver thread bunched against the crimson, rough against the fingertips, she rides a black boar dappled with blood and waves her double-headed axe — Yes, I remember her. I always lie when I always say I didn’t know the gun was loaded.

—kept losing self control but how could one lose the self after reading so much literary theory? The shorter "i" stood under the cork trees, the taller "I" remained rather passive; the brendas were angry at the greed, angry that the trees would die, had lost interest in the posturing of the privileged, the gaps between can't & won't... Stood outside the gate of permissible sound & the wind came soughing through the doubt debris (soughing comes from swāgh— to resound... echo actually comes from this also—) we thought of old Hegel across the sea—the Weltgeist—& clouds went by like the bones of a Kleenex... it's too late for countries but it's not too late for trees... & the wind kept soughing with its sound sash, wind with its sound sash,    increasing bold wind with its sound sash, increasing bold—