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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
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      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
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      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
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      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
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      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
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      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
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      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
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      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
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      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
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      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
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      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
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      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
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      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
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      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
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      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
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      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
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  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
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      • e Fall 2022
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      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022

Tyler Mills

Holy


The nurses have left work. The pilots have left work.
The blank blue
caelum covers us, as the split
pull of cloth. I’ve returned to a city of men
with names scrawled in ink across the throat.
Somewhere, you are hooked up to a machine. The monitor
hides your face, becomes it, black frame and flickering glass.
You sit at the head of the table in our sunroom.

I reach across my mother and touch your arm.
I kiss an area of the cold plastic
where your cheek would be, and blood
vessels prickle purple, below, at your neck.
You are tilting your head—I swear.

This is my dream. We drink tea. They paint
the station walls white for us.




Oath Detailed into a Landscape with a Crow-Quill Pen

 
It’s as though I’ve put another voice into a cache
of mango leaves in an animal’s stomach to starve
out the urine that makes the lily
yellow orbing a center ten times more blinding
than the sun. After it was unhooked from a chain
& after the hinge closed the two hemispheres,
one man without a shirt who we would call

a boy drove a vehicle carrying what looks like a balloon
compressing the metal pit inside of it. How the pilots
signed it like a cast and wrote their wishes on its charged curve,
even the fins. In one argument about a figure
stopped in time, a woman is rubbed into a silhouette—
charcoal, corseted into her board of a torso. But this is a study
for a painting. What about the ladder
of a strap, the silk textile tattooed into the blood
pattern running over her back? I have taken her,
though she turned away, closing her eyes, thinking
she gave her exposed self to a doctor
instead of the blink it takes a lens to collect the light
reflecting off her skin. Because of the crows
fighting on the roof of my apartment
in a city in the United States
directly above my dumpster in the alley
I’m promising this with an ink that has an idea of a crow in it—
the way an idea of history is a diagram
of a promise of a room
where the windows keep shifting positions.
Even these crows mark the tile with their black current
feathers: above me, military jets
cross the high clouds for air shows
as they do once a year. Let the dew point be my witness
that I do not know what this means: to look at things
like prints of fruit crate art where there is a griffin
guarding three oranges
and decide why a griffin is guarding three oranges,
its lion tail curled into an almost O. As the gray
pipe of the security camera secured to the corner of the building
is my witness, I will never be able to do anything else
but give you a photo of your own shadow
stretched out over the ground. The shadow is an airplane

low over a road that converges with another road,
splits two fields, then opens up to a town
dotting a shoreline with peaked roofs.
I only have a copy of this body

diving over a line that extends to the sea, the city
grainy as a silverpoint drawing—the oldest
way to draw a pen across a surface--
putting metal to the page:

glue mixed with ground bone.




The Muse Appears with a Moon Rock and a Tuning Fork


Me me me me. I’ve already written myself
out the car door. I’d been driving through a night
forest: pines, maples, anxious boxes of houses.


I called my father. I was lost. He said, turn
around, and there I was, at the side of the road,
the plants shaped like hands.
Bon chance. Strange

I can talk to you like this. I meant to leave
by Amtrak for New York with a red suitcase,
the zippered cloth edged with leather


shutting inside my white breath: but I woke
to ice erasing the sidewalk in a long smear. Sugar.
My lungs rustle like Mylar balloons. See,


I’m myself, written awake, in socks, cross-legged
on your bed, wondering about something...how I failed
you because I lost you in celluloid


fields quiet with soldiers, in Dr. Zhivago.
The sun will set, the clouds mottled with ink
numbers of what we owe. So, rub my


table with a rag. I can’t talk to you
like this, like I left you in Paris, where a painter
is warming her hands over a bowl of boiled water.





--
Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), which won the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have received awards from the Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Third Coast and have appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets, e Antioch Review, Georgia Review, TriQuarterly Online, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Maryland (MFA, poetry), Tyler Mills is currently a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

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  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
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  • Features
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  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022