We Know Our Conscience

You dream the night bird
bragging his mad
tune at plain faces. His
colour is power and wave.
You absorb every shock
and signal awesome.
Dream like a cave
through the clouds.
I am a dog that keeps running
time and space;
Kant scratches my intuition
from the grave like a new perennial.
It blooms, this sensory apparatus
grows into an observation room,
but who gardens? Not us.
Not anything but
a vacuum. God,
or sometimes faith,
a human brain
filled to the grey.
I challenge you to be
the necessary reason.

Jessica Van de Kemp, from Issue 2

Canvas

My words create shawls—
they cloak the crazies
on empty nights
like this.
So I pick up a pencil
and press it to my palm—
rendering my thoughts clichéd.
But being welcomed back
will never really be clichéd
as long as my return to the village
is kept to
myself.
I sense the weight now
of Euterpe
gnidnib ym no gnitirw;
pins and needles at a party
unwrapping my fingertips
like a Kolossus.
I suppose this would be
a nice place to
Stop.
But the six-month-old curse
needs pushing from my pitiless tongue.
I’ll spit air into streaks of lead.

Jessica Bell, from Issue 1