Ice Slope Pastoral / Autopsy in Monochrome by Nate Maxson

Ice Slope Pastoral

When asked the question, “where do you return to?”

(An important question that I have yet to be asked)

I always say,

The woods behind the house I lived in when I was very young

Broad green leaves and poison ivy

So much colder than the summer outside

Like the center of the world was filled with ice and it was leaking out from the ground

That was my explanation for the fog that seemed to snake between the boughs at noon

I remember once seeing it cover my bare feet, like I was walking on a cloud above the darkened ground

This is where I return

I like to think they might find

Something I left back there,

My child self’s footprint, or perhaps a handprint made in a stumble

Petrified in the mud while in the act of running, not towards an unknown future, but maypole like, in my sunless kingdom, while outside the trucks rumbled and the concrete grew closer

Autopsy In Monochrome

Alice blue: the color of pure ice and a shade of paint reserved for ships, named after a president’s only daughter

If we make an incision along the back, where it keeps its blankness, its squamous nightshift

We can begin to understand, how vampire bats will French kiss mouths full of blood back and forth in the event of famine

But only during daylight hours when they ought to be sleeping

When the nerve just near the center but not quite there, is given a little shock, a purposeful jolt, eyes first into brightness

There’s an autonomic response

The muscle’s shadow responds

A sound: wing like flapping of flags in a strong wind

A refraction through where the skin is most thin, between the thumb and the index finger

Hands held to either dawn or dusk: binary, the silver and pooling of old films

Flickers, the dreaming animal on the table

Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry including 'Maps To The Vanishing' which is coming out in 2022 from Finishing Line Press. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.