1753 c/o Scott Riley Irvine

Wind

It resides in the white on white on white. A caress across the Westerlies. A scowling portent before the squall. Its muscles contract around us, somewhat over your shoulders and hemmed to the contour of my murmuring freckles. We may have known it as a foe to have appeared in the sky. One with curls that grow through whiplashed men in robes. An atmosphere that hides itself within swollen jowls. We could have been dismembered among the doldrums.


Ward

Off a beaten road; a place hidden but with a beautiful view. Scrap metal beneath the sun dilute. I feel I’ve been wrung like syrup from some pink or purple fruit. Remote and soaking glare, our mouths quietly move for one another. An abandoned prison, concealed with the century. The damp cardboard and empty cells. You make a face behind a wall of thick glass. Bedpans and leather straps litter the floor of an infirmary. These walls would use unkind words. I think you’re right about that. If you pare the concrete from a concrete wall, what’s left except jagged steel rods? The skeleton of it all, rusting.


Wolf

We could feel the nearer enchantment of another body cleaving the wrinkled swaths of the forest. Exhaling into the noxious night. Our confluence twined closer by the hour. The sun settled; the dark grew. Somewhere in the distance, a bristled haunch caught light. Our new friend had fur. The moon proved past to move. Ugly is upon closer inspection, we realized. The diphthongs in its throat have yet to coarsen its coat but the effluvium tasted the same. The melancholy of a walk through a forest alone, the same. We can bare our teeth too. The same, the same, the same.