Featured Poems From Mythic Delirium, Issue 20, Winter/Spring 2009 Apple Jack Tangles the Maidy Lac with a Red, Red Ribbon Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Paige Wick This text will be replaced Read by Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Paige Wick This text will be replaced Read by Jessica Paige Wick and Amal El-Mohtar

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Apple Jack: You’re stubborn as the cleft in a goat’s hoof or bad living in the doctor’s final report! Come live with me by the apple-tree and I’ll brew you apple-jack. I’ll stir eggshell-stew in an old tin pan used, once, to collect rain-water from a goldriver. I’ll even bake old-fashioned lavender-spice bread. We can pretend the ribbon isn’t wrapped around our wrists, that our fingers aren’t enlaced, if only you’ll say my name, you’ll look at me, even once. If only, even once, I could look away from you, straying by the glassy pool. Maidy Lac: Egg-shell stew? Is that a joke? A crackerjack box cruelty? I’ll never look at you, never, wicked, tricking, tripping thing with your cat’s breath panting ’round my fingers tugging me away. All I wanted was a ribbon, a red, red ribbon for my wine-dark hair, not an ugly gnarled apple-lad, limp-mouthed and dry. Blast your apples, blast your trees with sky-forks and sea-salt, blast them all! My eyes are shut until I’m free to sink beneath the wide lake’s rim and find my way back home. Apple Jack: Home’s right through here. This door thick with thorn? A ruse to keep away the rubes. I want you to eat. Eat an apple at least. Look at the tree, the copper brightness of the fruit. Maybe we’ll live forever. Apple-trees wear a crown of blossom, not lightning. Oh, please, shake off the water’s curse, don’t thin off like wax in the heat. Look at me, my soda-pop, we needn’t think of the ribbon at all, just the latest radio tune, ghost stories, Old Grandpappy in the Moon visiting. Maidy Lac: This ribbon’s a tangle, not a knot, and I’ll slip free of it, see if I don’t. I don’t want your apples, don’t want your blossoms, your copper and your thorns. I want the waves, the warm kiss of depth and dream, of dripping hair on my bare shoulders. It’s cold out here, apple-man, it’s cold, and the wind is a knife on my flesh, will peel me to my core. I won’t go, I won’t — but tell you what. I’ll stuff your mouth with weeds, I’ll pull you down instead. This ribbon tugs both ways, no? My strength is not so small as my wrist, and I’ve heard that apples float.

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A Mythic Delirium Classic From Mythic Delirium, Issue 4, Winter/Spring 2001. Last One Laments Lindsey Nair This text will be replaced Read by Kate Baker

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Explosion slept, bricks glowed phantom moss and shadows dried to ash figures skulking. Somewhere above, liquids powdered to dust in veins, packed tight in roasted skins — paper people. Crevices yawned, coughed lava spatters on an ember land kindled by errors. Here in layers on steel-framed layers, inside concrete sandwiched deep, quiet pops. Hell’s belly-safe is hot and hollow, armies march a distant tread and fantasies whisper, cold tongues flicking around the ears. Really, no one’s here. The floors above and walls around are straining sick chords, dark corners hiss. The only song in this abyss is boiling from the core.

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A Mythic Delirium Classic From Mythic Delirium, Issue 17, Summer/Fall 2007. Eating Light F.J. Bergmann This text will be replaced Read by F.J. Bergmann

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It all started when I was sent to bed without supper. I was playing with my flashlight under the covers and tried shining it in my mouth. Light flooded my throat like golden syrup. Soon I was tasting light everywhere, the icy bitterness of fluorescents, a burst of intensely spiced flavors from an arc welder, the dripping red meat of sunsets. Natural light was most easily digestible, but at night I was limited to the sparse glow of fireflies and phosphorescent rotting logs, and inevitably succumbed to the artificial flavors of a strip mall’s jittering neon rainbow. Sodium lamps always had a nasty, putrid aftertaste, like rotting oranges, which is why I so frequently vomited in nighttime parking garages, but mercury-vapor emissions foamed on my tongue, aromatic, green. Have you ever had key lime mousse, or lemon-mint custard? It’s nothing like that at all. Each Hallowe’en I followed trick-or-treaters from door to door, gorging myself on jack-o’-lanterns’ sweet candlelight. Autumn bonfires burnt my lips with the pungent heat of five-alarm chili, smoky with the ghost of molé sauce. I hid strings of holiday lights in my underwear drawer, in case of a sudden craving. On a high school field trip to a nuclear facility, I was finally overcome with an insatiable hunger for the indigo twilight of a reactor pool, glowing with the underwater gradient of Cherenkov radiation, a blue light luscious as chocolate, hypnotic as a liqueur, decadent as dissolved gemstones. I am no terrorist — merely an addict.

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“Apple Jack Tangles the Maidy Lac with a Red, Red Ribbon” first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 20, Winter/Spring 2009. “Apple Jack Tangles the Maidy Lac with a Red, Red Ribbon” copyright © 2009 by Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Paige Wick. Illustration by Paula Friedlander, copyright © 2009. Voice recordings by Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Paige Wick, © 2009; all rights reserved. “Last One Laments” first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 4, Winter/Spring 2001. “Last One Laments” copyright © 2001 by Lindsey Nair. Accompanying photograph courtesy of the National Archives. Voice recording by Kate Baker, © 2009; all rights reserved. “Eating Light” first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 17, Summer/Fall 2007. “Eating Light” copyright © 2003 by F.J. Bergmann. Collage illustration by Mike Allen, copyright © 2009. Voice recording by F.J. Bergmann, © 2009; all rights reserved. These poems and illustrations may not be reproduced in any form without the authors’ and artists’ express written permission. Previous classic and featured poems by: Holly Dworken Cooley and Ian Watson Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Paige Wick David C. Kopaska-Merkel and Gene van Troyer Jeannine Hall Gailey and Charlee Jacob Theodora Goss and Sonya Taaffe Samantha Henderson and Ann K. Schwader Catherynne M. Valente and Anna Tambour Back to newest featured poems.