Heaven Rot
by Dylan Buckser-Schulz
In this wooded valley
where the fog rips like bandages
soaked through by a wound
I arrive with a point. These sodden paths
like patchwork dismembering
the sinews of time. Melted stitches, I find,
are just new skin. Sunlight is forgiving
like that—remembers to boil
all broken things. And the icy logs
sizzle sweetly.
Godrays lead me where groves
gather, where red bushes droop
with snowmelt and blush
with the secrecy of their yield:
if there was ever so much love
that the ripe ends of my body
snapped, the mark, now, is just
a wrinkle. A fern bending a little
more steeply. We say a body heals
but is not fixed: I could not tell you
how I felt, then, when the sky
was pulped blackberries—I was beautiful
on accident, like amateur watercolor,
I was terrible, periwinkle rot seeping
—how it is when everything is meaningful
and nothing is right. The sky a glinting brew
of lost time, poisoning, twilight stuttering
like tar as I, silent, lose the vocabulary
for decay.
The scent of flood—dewy gashes,
pollen-spangled gasoline—rises
from those that remember. Fog
is the condition of memory. I harvest
a breath. The fog and I
in our right place. The fog
carrying my fragrance
out of the grains.
Face the Razor
by Dylan Buckser-Schulz
The colder wildflowers are returning
from the pores of the earth
in a beard of ice. Your fingertips
left a feeling like frost
along the furrow of my jaw. I like
a cold bed even still. Memory
and desire stir dull roots
with spring rain. I remember you
watching the piece of blood
draw itself slowly from my chin
like my skin remembered—finally
—about breaking. You looked away.
April sun sharpens the green
of the grazing hills
that meet the moor. The razor
hits the floor. Look, no—
I am not impervious to pain.
Click to see Dylan’s work in the Fall ‘23 issue