The poems are still available on the magazine’s website.

“The Malevolent Worship of a Malign God” is another poem I wrote on my Seattle-Portland trip like Ace of Wands — same subject. However, Malevolent earned me my first Pushcart nomination.

“Flow” was from prior to the trip, I actually wrote it in the weird anticipatory creative state that produced Three of Wands.

The Malevolent Worship of a Malign God

& the shadows that fell over his face
folding like lines & spaces, writing
love stories in the hollows of his cheeks,
language carved into the ridge of his nose,
transposed through the music of him,
of his eyes more fluent than any tongue —

plot knitting through the depths of my unknowing
stitching through supposition & winding around
the brackets of his hips, exposed as he raised his arms.
So many ways to interpret the things that haven’t been
said, so much more indulgent than surrender,
than return, than dropping like a bird slammed

against a windowpane & back into the cage of cliff-faces
that hold this heart like a vice. Can’t be blamed for this
wanting, for imagining a story where even cold stars
burn, the archer for all his restless arrows warms
his hands over an imagined fire on an imagined night.

Flow

Girl look, you gotta breathe in
& make it hollow underneath
your ribs, you’ve gotta pull

your belly button up & in,
picture it like a well, a passage
through your guts & into your spine —

your spine which is a bow-string
about to launch your wishes
straight to heaven — but keep

your shoulders soft, blades kiss
as if you could feel his hand there
drumming a beat into the hollow

where your pulse reverberates,
a cathedral of bone & panic;
you gotta make space for it,

for the love you are inviting in;
gaze as soft as the first snow,
before the blizzard comes

& covers over all your exits —
pull all your walls down
& make it empty inside,

a residency for nobody;
attract the universe in
& watch him set up shop,

read him your love poems,
& write him in as a hero —
they all have the same eyes

& the same voice; the same echo,
big enough to fill your well
& flood out into the world.