Right now, an octopus is staring at an abandoned snorkel off the coast of Mozambique. Right now, precedented times are waiting in the wings to make a comeback. Right now, the stars can be forgiven for thinking they’re living in a van Gogh painting. Right now, a woman you used to know is crying in an apartment full of bandaged books. Right now, an astronaut is spinning above his own patch of planet blackness. Right now, calumny is on trend. Right now, grapes ripen on a vine that longs to be juicy and playful. Right now, there are conversations agreeing that hereafter they will be enrobed in silence. Right now, someone somewhere is trying to read another without due respect for the story within the story. Right now, the mass manufacture of excuses threatens to flood the market. Right now, ruddiness in a newborn’s cheeks is such sweet relief.

Catherine O’Brien

I sit in the moonlit prairie cemetery
and listen to the courtship
of insects. Every creature must pay
for love with a song or a dance
or the entirety of themselves.

I have paid in years for his body
to be next to mine each night in bed.
Even as he sleeps he still waits for me
and the comfort of our togetherness.
Even as he sleeps, I still long for him.

But tonight I feel closer to the almost
forgotten dead at my feet
than the humming life around me.
For a moment I think I hear him
call out to me from the house.

The racket of crickets and field mice,
chirping tree frogs and bats hunting the dark
all pause like a half rest in a nocturne,
and fireflies glow like tiny furnaces
illuminating prairie grass and headstones.

Dana Knott’s writing has recently appeared in The…