J. Alan Nelson
I am a writer and a lawyer. I published previously in Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, Adirondack Review, Red Cedar Review, Identity Theory, Hawai’i Review and Kennesaw Review, Driftwood Review, Ken*Again, Haggard and Halloo and forthcoming work to be published in the Connecticut River Review and Fulcrum.
Medusa’s Scalp
In the aurora of the electric fires
with long ago consequence
still clacking with illusion of will
the soapstones flicker with the sweet scars
of paradise;
rusty hammers
flung from the sky
against the concrete clatter.
Molten metals snap silver;
welding snakes and tufts of wire
hiss and smoke.
Paper lions convulse into stone and steel.
Later the warriors fight
over parking spot allocations
coffee makers and cubicle space,
their pain dulled not to roar, but a sigh.
Barometer
A man leans forward in his chair
stares at the mercury spangle in a desk barometer
as the metal slides a point down the tube.
A phone number of a girl
who caused his doom
lies scribbled on the desk.
He knows if he calls the number
she will be surprised
then will say goodbye again.
He glances out the window
at the skyline in the haze.
He thinks how a few points under the norm
press the bones.
In the elevator he pushes the wrong button;
the doors open to the same floor.
He wonders what displaced him in this life.
Eblaite Scribe
He can’t remember when curse words
ceased to shock,
moved into his accepted lexicon.
He presses the wedge into the clay
and moves through the fine-grained earth.
Another move connects the first.
Each stroke attempts to counter self abnegation,
the drunken joy of obscurity.
Each baked scrimshaw
details floods, prisoners executed,
cures for the rich, the fermenting grain,
the ancestors who scrabbled first here
in this hard soil, the sun scorched earth,
the descendants to come
who will scrabble with these words.
In the late afternoon,
the sliver moon rises early.
He muses on the precise neatness
when one cuts ideas in silicates.
