Spilt Milk Fall 2021

To My Living Wife

By Sarah Anderson

I did not know how to be dead at the beginning. Someone came to tell you right before our child was born. The airplane crashing, the force, they must have said.

No sign of the plane, only a glistening Chesapeake Bay. You are too empty to forgive me. I shout at the asphalt the wheels never hit.

My love, a crippled animal hides itself, heals itself alone. I see you have joined the fog, chestnut tree, November. The branches have what they need. To forgive me, the water, the accident.

My great uncle served on the USS Intrepid and was chief experimental test pilot at Chance Vought Aircraft in the late 1940’s. He was killed flying an XF7U-1

Find more of Sarah’s work on here site at www.thewordbarn.com

Bill

By C. Quintana

I named my inner critic Bill,

then he became my colleague

Sparkling grey eyes; salt-and-pepper hair—

Why are you here, Bill? Why are you hurting?

Across my desk in the ivory armchair—

Smile an inch from crying

I named my inner critic Bill

My inner critic Bill named I

I, Bill, inner named critic, my

Critic Bill named my inner I

The Riot

By Lily Nord

the Dudes pour lavender syrup you made by hand

into their tea with reckless abandon

say the Ito En you drink tastes like dirt

and I tap your leg- trade sushi rolls across the table laugh

at the top of their lungs pouring air into the tent

you and I, dead sober, are flying

four feet from the riot floating

behind our own heads

and I can see what you want in our mind’s eye:

ham and roast beef bitter cheese thick bread

but you watch us eat our rolls and curl up

under my shoulder

Discover more of Lily Nord’s work on her website at lilynord.com

TEN ALBUM COVERS

By Major Jackson

1.

The future is a nameless, blind piano man

fingering some groove out

of dead art from the Roman Empire.


2.

This summer, I did my best to forget

the moon, pale-faced traveler

of the skies, but remained a prisoner

to his dusty metaphors.


3.

When I can’t sleep,

I count all my likes.


4.

This morning I read Zagajewski

who recently vanished into a quantum

of light. I think I treasure most his clarity

which like my belief in art seems endless.


5.

On the kitchen counter, right now:

three sunflowers in a clear vase stretching

the day into a single filament of wonder.


6.

No one knows why sometimes

when reading a book, the face contorts

into a golden wildfire at night.


7.

What I am talking about is my funeral

where all the pallbearers are Yoruba priests passing

my body once again through a field of summer.


8.

The fate of the living is to abandon their accents,

our first instruments, then to return

home years later to retrieve them.


9.

Tack this up on your wall.

I want you to feel this energy,

cellphones smoldering

over a city.


10.

A fox is a suffering creature

fossilized in the fingers

of a piano player, exploding

into a feverish rift,

drowning God’s silence.