This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from How to Keep Things Alive by Beth Gordon (Split Rock Press 2023).
Mutually Assured Destruction
for Andre
Our adults were weary prophets with mouths
made of Bibles & gin. Mothers in green
kitchens learning to bake casseroles. Fathers
in the driveway: coming or going: Johnny
Cash or Johnny Rotten on the radio.
Saturday morning shoeshine. Saturday night
horror. My brother the saddest person
in the room when Godzilla burned Tokyo
down. Easter Sunday resurrection: our
familiar giant rising from a pile of lesser men.
His good hands as gentle as a reed: his good
hands like a basket cradling eggs: pastel
green: dewdrop yellow. Monday morning bus
stop with packs of belt-whipped boys. Sandwich
on the sidewalk. Winter coat beneath their feet:
milk in the gutter. There’s a runaway
truck in this story. Gravel-spit. Wild-toothed.
Building snow men with butterscotch eyes.
My knees bloody from yesterday’s brawl.
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother in Asheville, NC. She is the author of Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press), Particularly Dangerous Situation (Clare Songbirds Publishing), This Small Machine of Prayer (Kelsay Books), The Water Cycle (Variant Literature), How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press), and Crone (Louisiana Literature). Beth is Managing Editor of Feral, and Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press and Femme Salve Books.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief of beestung, Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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