Reading Rosebud Ben-Oni’s Turn Around, BRXGHT XYXS While Listening to Tori Amos’ Cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” During the Total Solar Eclipse
Anthony Frame
Winter Garden (after Bashō)
Sheila Squillante
- for Chris Cornell
I understand, sun: every now and then, I want to disappear, too.
I’m determined to hear the birds, the soft bellows of their throats
anchoring this moment. Lost and long, I steal this day with my wife,
holding hands as we stumble along the unfinished path through
the garden. We’re told not to look directly so we look at each other
or we close our eyes and listen, sunrays washing our arms.
There’s a part of me that wants to blast “Black Hole Sun”
on the record player but she says, “Be here with me.” But I’m not,
I’m thirteen, singing in the shower, thinking about supernovas.
The moon is on the move, shadows starting to startle the birds.
As the garden starts to silence, I think, Is this what it’s like to hear
a god? I want to scream like a star exploding, but instead I sit
and hold my wife’s hand and wait. Perhaps, we need a new cosmology,
a new language, a new sequence of mysteries. As a child, I wanted
to disappear, to separate into droplets of air, rinsed clean and clear.
Sometimes, I’ve wanted to shatter so bright my light would reach
the edges of the galaxy. The sun seems to dissolve behind the moon
and the silence covers us but it lasts just under two minutes and then,
like a birth, the birds start singing again. Every now and then,
I’ve wanted my voice to rise so high it might achieve escape velocity.
I start to hum, knowing these sounds I hope to harvest can’t go on forever,
some of the waves, faced off against friction, will dissipate. But some
will shift, boiling beneath the atmosphere, turning themselves around
until they turn into heat. My wife puts her hand on my chest to still me.
The sun is a squall of fire singing itself raw within a vacuum, but the moon
holds its voice beneath its surface. I lean against my wife, wordless,
against her shoulder, against her eyes, the shadows withdrawing
as she turns me around, like a refrain, to see the second dawn.
Anthony Frame is an exterminator from Toledo, Ohio, where he lives with his wife. He is the author of A Generation of Insomniacs and of three chapbooks, most recently Where Wind Meets Wing (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). He is also the editor/publisher of Glass Poetry Press, which publishes the Glass Chapbook Series and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. Recent work has appeared in Poet Lore, The Shore, and The Indianapolis Review. He has also been published in Third Coast, Muzzle Magazine, The Shallow Ends, and Verse Daily, among others, and in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana Press, 2014), and Not That Bad: Dispatches form the Rape Culture (HarperCollins, 2018). He has twice been awarded Individual Excellence Grants from the Ohio Arts Council. Find Anthony on Instagram, BlueSky, and Facebook.
Sheila Squillante’s mixed media abstract paintings have been featured in numerous literary journals, including Brevity and A-Minor, and as the cover art for Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, and Mid-American Review. Her work has appeared in individual and group shows in the Pittsburgh region and online. She is a member of the Confluence Women’s Art Collective in Pittsburgh. When she's not covered in paint, she's directing the MFA program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, and editing The Fourth River literary journal. Her poems and essays have appeared in many wonderful journals and she would love for you to read her latest book, All Things Edible, Random and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love and Food (CLASH Books, 2023). Find Sheila on Instagram here and here, or at her website.