Return of the Magus


art by Pat Jones



I came back past mill and creek, having slept
with spiders in the womb of a shotgun shack. A light shines
out of a single house-eye to the hunched back
of a stand of pine. I smell her body
as I climb the steps,

crest the landing and birth myself into the room
like a maggot from its egg. She's laid atop the bed as I left her,
bathed in a blood-syrup stench and sculpted whole with clumsy knives
that I flung when my skin peeled back.

I trundle and bob: too heavy to fly, yet too light to sink below
the surface. And I see what brought me hovering back:
a tuft of feather-fur clenched in her fist.

I collect her, toss aside her rags, stagger down stairs
through the open door, and out to moonless sky,
as unforgiving as a starling's last glimpse of an owl's belly.
Where the hemlocks squat,

I bury my burden under the breast of an elk,
and shall starve in this cove of wolves as I listen for my keep's
resurgent bones.

My torn ear gentle against a rib:
the only sounds are insects preening under leaves.



by Charles Musser