are you dreaming, Frederick?

"Hoplophobia"
The most common manifestation of hoplophobia
is the idea that [weapons] possess a will of their own.

--Colonel Jeff Cooper


( trigger warning: violence, war, guns, murder )
--Jamaal May


"How to Disappear Completely"

You are quarter ghost on your mother's side.
Your heart is a flayed peach in a bone box.
Your hair comes away in clumps like cheap fabric wet.
A reflecting pool gathers around your altar
of plywood sub flooring and split wooden slats.
You are rag doll prone. You are contort,
angle and arc. Here you rot. Here
you are a greening abdomen, slipping skin,
flesh fly, carrion beetles.
This is where bullets take shelter,
where scythes find their function, breath loses
its place on the page. This is where the page is torn
out of every book before chapter's close,
this is slippage, this is a shroud of neglect
pulled over the body, this
is your chance to escape.
     Little wraith,
bend light around your skin until it colors you clear,
disappear like silica in a kiln, become
glass and glass beads, become
the staggered whir of an exhaust fan:
something only noticed
when gone. Become
an origami swan. Fold yourself smaller
than ever before. Become less. More
in some ways but less
in the way a famine is less. They will
forgive you for not being satisfied
with fitting in their hands.

They will forgive you
for dying to be

a bird diminutive enough
to fit in a mouth and not be crushed.

--Jamaal May


"Fire Graffiti"
Throughout those dismal months my life was only sparked
alight when I made love to you.
As the firefly ignites and fades, ignites and fades, we follow the flashes
of its flight in the dark among the olive trees.

Throughout those dismal months, my soul sat slumped and lifeless
but my body walked to yours.
The night sky was lowing.
We milked the cosmos secretly, and survived.
--Tomas Tranströmer, translator unknown


"Words"

What has happened?
language eludes me
the nice specifying
words of my life fail
when I call

Ah says a friend
dried up no doubt
on the desiccated
twigs in the swamp
of the skull like
a lake where the
water level has been
shifted by highways
a couple of miles off

Another friend says
No no    my dear    perhaps
you are only meant to
speak more plainly

--Grace Paley


"The Abyssal Plain"
Here beneath the last revenant of light
that falls the way a man might fall asleep,
drawn through the part that hallucinates
eel and angel, the strange blue fin that sweeps
a camouflage of dust into the camera,
what good is desire. The lamps of fish
have all gone cold, dark, their exotica
scattered in tiny particles of flesh.
What this world needs is a place to drown
its refuse: old ships, derricks, nuclear waste,
the leviathan of grief. A place like time
which, in truth, heals nothing. It forgets,
taken in like a pill that makes us calm
and dreamless, beneath the silence of the rain.
--Bruce Bond


"Self Portrait"
I did not want my body
Spackled in the world's
Black beads and broke
Diamonds. What the world

Wanted, I did not. Of the things
It wanted. The body of Sunday
Morning, the warm wine and
The blood. The dripping fox

Furs dragged through the black New
York snow--the parked car, the pearls,
To the first pew--the funders,
The trustees, the bloat, the red weight of

The world. Their faces. I wanted not
That. I wanted Saint Francis, the love of
His animals. The wolf, broken and bleeding--
That was me.
--Cynthia Cruz


"Elegy for a Walnut Tree"
Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world.
--W. S. Merwin


"Desires are already memories."
--Italo Calvino, translator unknown


The world has tired of tears.
We weep owls now. They live longer.
They know their way in the dark.
--Natalie Diaz, "Prayers or Oubliettes"


"Awaking in New York"
Curtains forcing their will
against the wind,
children sleep,
exchanging dreams with
seraphim. The city
drags itself awake on
subway straps; and
I, an alarm, awake as a
rumor of war,
lie stretching into dawn,
unasked and unheeded.
--Maya Angelou


"I feel that I am just earth, soil lying helpless to move myself, but thinking. I seem to hear herds of big beasts like horses and cows thundering over me, and rains beating down; and winds sweeping furiously overall acting upon me, but me, well, just soil,
feeling but not able to take part in it all. Then a soft wind like love passes over and warms me, and a summer rain comes down like understanding and softens me, and I push a blade of grass or a flower, or maybe a pine tree--that's the ground thinking. Plants are ground thoughts, because the soil can't move itself."
--Zora Neale Hurston, "John Redding Goes to Sea"


"To write by shreds, by storm clouds, by visions, by violent chapters, in the present as in the archpast, in pre-vision, in the true chaos of verbal tenses, crossing over years and oceans at a god's pace, with the past on my right and the future on my left--this is forbidden in academies, it is permitted in apocalypses. What joy it is."
--Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts


"Herman Finley"
I didn't tell you that, in the end, he begged
For the end. Death like the bed after
The bedtime story. Death like a widening
Crack of light beneath the door.
He begged them to let him
Go so he could go. Said I want
To die. Then said kill me. Please.

You and I endure that first pain.
We just want to die. People with that
Other ultimately physical agony say
Kill me and know they won't discuss it
In therapy. Kill me. I'm thinking
Of him today because I want to die
And I am ashamed to say it. My thinking

Is red and sticky. Rather than kill me,
I'd like you to listen as I live
In a perpetual whine. Can't I still be
Somebody's baby? Say yes for yourself.
Call me some time. Every day I wish to die,
Remind me how he insisted.
Kill me. And I'll live again.
--Jericho Brown


"I suppose it is submerged memories that give to our dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulfur in the blood is a volcanic inferno."
--W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn


"Cocktails with Orpheus"
After dark, the bar full of women part of me loves--the part that stood
naked outside the window of Miss Geneva, recent divorcée who owned
a gun, O Miss Geneva where are you now--Orpheus says she did

not perish, she was not turned to ash in the brutal light, she found
a good job, she made good money, she had her own insurance and
a house, she was a decent wife. I know descent lives in the word

decent. The bar noise makes a kind of silence. When Orpheus hands
me his sunglasses, I see how fire changes everything. In the mind
I am behind a woman whose skirt is hiked above her hips, as bound

as touch permits, saying don't forget me when I become the liquid
out of which names are born, salt-milk, milk-sweet and animal-made.

I want to be a human above the body, uprooted and right, a fold
of pleas released, but I am a black wound, what's left of the deed.
--Terrance Hayes


"The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved."
--Jane Hirshfield


"sideshow"
( trigger warning: violence, guns, racism, suicide )
--Danez Smith


"My medium is poetry; my tool is American English, a language I adore for its shorthand syntax, its outrageous slop, its mongrel weirdness. I think and dream and feel in this language like the wiry old rose bush that pushes its way out from my front yard to splay its blooms above the cracked sidewalk."
--Cate Marvin


"I Don't Miss It"
But sometimes I forget where I am,
Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,
Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven't left,
The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.
Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.
And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is
I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.
Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe
In May, in seasons that come when called,

It's impossible not to want
To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,
Knowing perfectly well what they know.
--Tracy K. Smith


"Snow at Night"
I prefer it even to love,
alone and without ghost
it falls a hard weather,
a withdrawing room
that revives me to stolen daylight
in which I feel no wish
to brush a gleaming finish
over the sheen-broken glass
I've arranged and rearranged,
an apprentice of mosaics
who will not be taught but asks
to be left alone with the brittle year
so carnivorous of all I'd made.
But the snow I love covers
my beasts and seas,
my ferns and spines
worn through and through.
I will change your life, it says,
to which I say please.
--Katie Ford


"Two Men & a Truck"
Once, I was as large
as any living creature could be.

I could lift the world and carry it
from my breast to its bath.

When I looked down from the sky
you could see the love in my eye:

"Oh, tiny world, if anything
ever happened to you, I would die."

And I said, "No!" to the hand. Snatched
the pebble from the mouth, fished it out

and told the world it would choke!
Warned the world over & over! "Do

you hear me? Do you want to choke?!"

But how was the world to know
what the truth might be? Perhaps

they grant you special powers, these
choking stones. Maybe

they change the child into a god, all-swallowing.

For, clearly, there were other gods.
The world could see

that I, too, was at the mercy of something.
Sure, I could point to the sky

and say its name, but I couldn't make it change.
Some days it was blue, true, but others

were ruined by its gray:
"I'm sorry, little world--

no picnic, no parade, no swimming pool today ... "

And the skinned knee in spite of me.
And why else would there be

such terror in the way she screamed, and the horn honking,
and the squealing wheels, and, afterward, her cold

sweat against my cheek?

Ah, she wants us to live forever.
It's her weakness ... Now I see!

But, once, I was larger
than any other being--

larger, perhaps, than any being
had any right to be.

Because, of course, eventually, the world
grew larger, and larger, until it could lift

me up and put me down anywhere
it pleased. Until, finally, I would need

its help to move the bird bath, the book-
shelf, the filing cabinet. "And

could you put my desk by the window, sweetie?"

A truck, two men, one of them my son, and
everything I ever owned, and they

didn't even want to stop for lunch.

Even the freezer. Even the piano.
("You can have it if you can move it.")

But, once, I swear, I was ... And now
this trunk in the attic to prove it:

These shoes in the palm of my hand?
You used to wear them on your feet.

This blanket the size of a hand towel?
I used to wrap it around you sleeping

in my arms like this. See? This
is how small the world used to be when

everything else in the world was me.
--Laura Kasischke


"A Reason"

That is why I am here
not among the ibises. Why
the permanent city parasol
covers even me.

             It was the rains
in the occult season. It was the snows
on the lower slopes. It was water
and cold in my mouth.

            A lack of shoes
on what appeared to be cobbles
which were still antique

           Well wild wild whatever
in wild more silent blue
 
           the vase grips the stems
petals fall    the chrysanthemum darkens

           Sometimes this mustard feeling
clutches me also. My sleep is reckoned
in straws

            Yet I wake up
and am followed into the street.

--Barbara Guest


"Tender Arrivals"
Where ever something breathes
Heart beating the rise and fall
Of mountains, the waves upon the sky
Of seas, the terror is our ignorance, that's
Why it is named after our home, earth
Where art is locked between
Gone and Destination
The destiny of some other where and feeling
The ape knew this, when his old lady pulled him up
Off the ground. Was he grateful, ask him he's still sitting up there
Watching the sky's adventures, leaving two holes for his own. Oh sing
Gigantic burp past the insects, swifter than the ugly Stanleys on the ground
Catching monkey meat for Hyenagators, absolute boss of what does not
Arrive in time to say anything. We hear that eating, that doo dooing, that
Burping, we had a nigro mayor used to burp like poison zapalote
Waddled into the cave of his lust. We got a Spring Jasper now, if
you don't like that
woid, what about courtesan, dreamed out his own replacement sprawled
Across the velvet cash register of belching and farting, his knick names when they
let him be played with. Some call him Puck, was love, we thought, now a rubber
Flat blackie banged across the ice, to get past our Goli, the Africannibus of memory.
Here. We have so many wedged between death and passivity. Like eyes that collide
With reality and cannot see anything but the inner abstraction of flatus, a
biography, a car, a walk to the guillotine, James the First, Giuliani the Second
When he tries to go national, senators will stab him, Ides of March or Not. Maybe
Both will die, James 1 and Caesar 2, as they did in the past, where we can read about
The justness of their assassinations
As we swig a little brew and laugh at the perseverance
Of disease at higher and higher levels of its elimination.
We could see anything we wanted to. Be anything we knew how to be. Build
anything we needed. Arrive anywhere we should have to go. But time is as stubborn
as space, and they compose us with definition, time place and 
condition.
The howlees the yowlees the yankees the super left streamlined post racial ideational
chauvinists creeep at the mouth of the venal cava. They are protesting 
fire and
Looking askance at the giblets we have learned to eat. "It's nobody's heart," they
say, and we agree. It's the rest of some thing's insides. Along with the flowers, the
grass, the tubers, the river, pieces of the sky, earth, our seasoning, baked
throughout. What do you call that the anarchist of comfort asks,
Food, we say, making it up as we chew. Yesterday we explained language.
--Amiri Baraka


"Register of Eliminated Villages"
( trigger warning: war )
--Tarfia Faizullah

"Landscape with Hungry Girls"
There's blood here. The skyline teethes the clouds
raw, and rain's course streams a million umbilical
cords down windows and walls. Every things gnaws,
and the pink polish on their girl-nails chips, flakes
off as they continue to dig through towering heaps
of refuse. It's a story, as usual. As usual, a phone
and dead silence. Or the phone: a lobster to the ear.
Girls resigned to being girls. The softer faces they
find in the mirrors. The limp shake, a hand placed,
a flower wilting moist on the man's palm. Or hard
handshakes deemed "aggressive": snakes. O, girls.
All of them carefully watching carefully the faces
of their sleeping men, even when their own faces are
more beautiful in their watching, and if only they'd
watch their own faces beneath the revolving lights
sliding between the blinds: they are blinded from
watching their men sleep so dumbly. The headaches,
the insistent grip of a gnawing stomach, eating itself.
Thinking hunger is strength, how hurt they are, girls
picking at food on their plates. I like a girl who eats.
Careful, what you say you want. The moon is distant,
yet cousin to her face: our genders worse than alien.
Bleeding is something everyone does. You don't call.
Girls snack on skyscrapers, girls gut their teddy bears,
and girls saw their own faces off. What is it to lack
compassion? When you walk through a zoo do you
not think the animals it houses could have been you?
Who would you be, how hungry, if you were a girl
feeding only on the meek sleep of male countenance?
Would you stand vigil, would you starve if they do?
--Cate Marvin


"In the Secular Night"
In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.
--Margaret Atwood


"Teaching a Child the Art of Confession"
It is best not to begin with Adam and Eve. Original Sin is
baffling, even for the most sophisticated minds. Besides,
children are frightened of naked people and apples. Instead,
start with the talking snake. Children like to hear what animals
have to say. Let him hiss for a while and tell his own tale.
They'll figure him out in the end. Describe sin simply as those
acts which cause suffering and leave it at that. Steer clear of
musty confessionals. Children associate them with outhouses.
Leave Hell out of the discussion. They'll be able to describe it
on their own soon enough. If they feel the need to apologize
for some transgression, tell them that one of the offices of the
moon is to forgive. As for the priest, let him slumber a while
more.
--David Shumate


"Of Mutability"
Too many of the best cells in my body
are itching, feeling jagged, turning raw
in this spring chill. It's two thousand and four
and I don't know a soul who doesn't feel small
among the numbers. Razor small.
Look down these days to see your feet
mistrust the pavement and your blood tests
turn the doctor's expression grave.

Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets,
angels, chandeliers, out of the corner of your eye,
join them if you like, learn astrophysics, or
learn folksong, human sacrifice, mortality,
flying, fishing, sex without touching much.
Don't trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky.
--Jo Shapcott


"The boy I loved [in high school] didn't know I existed. Then again, he was obsessed with Camus, so he didn't know if any of us existed."
--David Levithan


"Yes, Marya thought, the smell of woodsmoke and old snow pushing back her long black hair. Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all."
--Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless


" 'They don't even know what writers are, here!'

"Baba Yaga softened, as much as she could soften. Her braided eyebrows creased together gently. 'Doesn't mean we don't know what stories are. Doesn't mean we don't walk in them, every second. Chyerti--that's us, demons and devils, small and big--are compulsive. We obsess. It's our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They're comforting. Sometimes little things change--a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it's no different, not really. Not ever.' Baba Yaga pressed the back of her withered hand to Marya's cheek. 'That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.' "
--Catherynne M. Valente


" '...You can be innocent again. It's not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It's only that most folk cannot be bothered.' Koschei the Deathless hooked his fingers into the glittering neckline of her dress and tore it with deliberation, down to the hem. Tiny gems clattered to the floor. Marya shut her eyes; her body arched toward him, the little striped animal that it had become, desperate and starving, always. This, this kept her here. Alive, aflame. At the end of the fighting this wall, this man, these chains woke her heart again.

" 'You should go with him. He will ask tonight, I think. I would ask tonight. There is a reason they all leave me for Ivans. I can never be an Ivan. I can never roll with you in the sun like a mindless golden pup. I am too old for it, for warmth and simplicity. I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.' He brought the branch down against her breasts, and the sear of it tore a cry from her. She felt her skin rising up into a scarlet welt, the molten fire of the pain showing on her flesh. Yes, I am still alive, she thought. 'When I say forever,' Koschei whispered, 'I mean until the black death of the world. An Ivan means just the present moment, the flickering light of it, in a green field, his mouth on yours. He means the stretching of that moment. But forever isn't bright; it isn't like that. Forever is cold and hard and final.' He lashed her again, across her stomach, and she smiled, arching her back to receive the next blow on her hip bones, the seeping fire of it churning, unbearable. For a moment Marya did remember being happy and sad, the pleasure of roe and pickled melons, the night in the bathhouse when she was so ill. Koschei brought down the branch again and again on her belly, and she understood. That belly, which could bear children for an Ivan but never for him, that made her different than him, that made her human, not chyerti."
--Catherynne M. Valente


" 'Now, sip your vodka, and then bite one of the peppers--see how the vinegar and the vodka war with one another? This is a rare thing. A winter thing.' Marya's throat thickened. She spoke around tears. 'You can taste summer in this mixture, summer boiled down and soaked in brine. Because that is life, Ivan. Jars on a shelf, bright colors under glass, saved up against the winter, against starving.' "
--Catherynne M. Valente


"It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones. The house stood empty. All the curtains--green-and-gold, cobalt-and-silver, red-and-white--had been yanked from their rods. Spiders' webs made a palimpsest on the walls, endless generations of spiders weaving spider-tales into silk. The house seemed so much smaller than it had, darker, an old, hunched beast past its use. A hole had opened up in the roof, dripping rain and plum blossoms into the room which had once belonged to Marya and her parents. The downstairs stove stood silent and cold, full of old ash no one had taken out. Vacant room opened up into vacant room.

" 'The Dyachenkos lived in this room,' she said to no one. To Ivan Nikolayevich, she supposed, his hand proprietary on her back. It was all wrong. She was supposed to have found warmth here, like Ivan's warmth. Life, and living. 'They had four boys, all blond. I don't remember their names. The father ate this awful pickle soup every night. The place just reeked of dill. And here--oh, the Blodniek girls! Oh, they were so beautiful. Their hair! How I wanted hair like that. Shiny and straight as wood. They used to read.' She turned to Ivan, her eyes hollow. 'They used to read this fashion magazine. They each had their hour with it, every day. They memorized hemlines, and color palettes. Little Lebedevas! And oh, there, there the Malashenkos tied bunches of flowers to sell, and Svetlana Tikhonovna brushed her hair. Oh, why is no one living here? This was a good house! I had twelve mothers in this house, twelve fathers. I ate such sweet fish in this house.'

"And Marya Morevna fell to her knees before the great brick stove in the empty kitchen. She did not cry, but her face grew redder and redder with the pain of her not crying.

" 'Zvonok,' she whispered to the floor. 'Zvonok, come out.'

"Finally, she curled up on the broken tile and went to sleep, like a ragged feral cat who has finally found shelter from the rain."
--Catherynne M. Valente


"And the kisses she had of Koschei in the dank, moldering cellar were the sweetest kisses of her life, so sweet her teeth hurt. She lay against him, or struck him with her fists and accused him of taking her girlhood, or took his body as she pleased. Sometimes, when she lifted her hands against him, he smiled so beatifically she thought he had died. But his excitement promised that he had not, and where his seed spilled on the cellar floor, strange blue plants grew. When they opened into flowers, dust trickled out, and the flowers died again. When she questioned this, and why sometimes he had wrinkles now, and sharp teeth, and long, protruding bones, Koschei the Deathless answered, 'When do you feel most alive, Marya, but when you are closest to death? That is where I live. That is what my body is made of.' "
--Catherynne M. Valente


"Look, I am holding up my two hands, and between them is Leningrad. I am holding up my two hands and between them is black space where Marya Morevna is not speaking. She would like to, because she thinks a story is like a treasure, and can belong to only one dragon. But I make her share; I will not let her have the whole thing. I have this power. I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead. Besides, what happened between the two hands I am holding up is squeezed between the pages of the books of the dead, which are written on my hands, because I died in that space where Marya Morevna is not speaking. And now it is all clear, and now you understand.

"For storytelling, a domovaya is always better than a human because she will not try to make a miserable thing less miserable so that a boy sitting at his grandmother's knee can nod and say, The war was very terrible, wasn't it, Babushka? But it is all right because some people lived and went on to be good and have children. I spit on that boy because he thinks only of his own interest, which is that he should be born. Miserable means miserable. What can you do? You live through it, or you die. Living is best, but if you can't live, well, life is like that, sometimes. So now I stop everything, and I say it is time for the dead to talk with the dead, and Zvonok has the floor, if there is a floor left to have."
--Catherynne M. Valente


"The voice of the Tsar of Birds is so sweet that should he wish it, anyone hearing him would forget the whole of her life, even her name. Of course, she must wish it. But should Alkonost speak with the smallest kindness, the littlest mercy, the richness of his voice would sweep away any sorrow in any heart, and leave there instead only the perfect world that might have been, if only the world had not invented hearts in the first place. For this reason, some folk stuff their ears with wax. Some seek out the bird of heaven all their days, praying to be drowned in him. Each of these cannot comprehend what drives the other. How can you want to lose yourself, your history, your name? How can you run from the voice of God? But of course, no amount of seeking will find Alkonost, and no amount of hiding will avoid him.

"Life is like that."
--Catherynne M. Valente


"...'The trouble with prophecy is that it is alive. Like a small bear. It can get angry, frustrated, hungry. It can lick and bite and claw; it can be dear; it can be vicious. No one prophesies. You can only pursue prophecy. So perhaps my little bear was playing a trick on me, yes? I pored over this egg long after my brother left me to pursue war and girls, which are his particular obsessions. I pored over it and tried to understand what Koschei and I had made together. Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.'

"The Tsar of Birds kisses Marya's forehead, clucks over her like a mother.

" 'You told him to take you away, do you remember?'

"Inside her heart, Leningrad opens up from a single, almost vanished point, growing bigger and colder and whiter, and a hunger begins in Marya, a hunger barely remembered, that chews at her like a worm and will not be satisfied. She groans against Alkonost, a groan so heavy, like iron crumpling. The warmth of his heart radiates out like a star in her arms.

" 'Yes, that is the sound of remembering,' sighs Alkonost, and his plumes flush violet. 'Koschei brought you to me. You were so near death that ghosts crowded around you, weeping silver tears, waiting for you with such smiles. You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews. Sometimes, when a person has starved nearly to nothing, feeding them will hurt them worse than starving did, and push them the rest of the way over into dead. My brother wanted to show you his houses again, and feed you sweet things, and put into your ashen mouth a slice of thick bread with roe shining on it like rubies. He wanted to sink you in steaming water, and brush your hair, and make you well. But he could not. You were too far gone. So instead he and I held you between us and I fed you, I fed you like a chick. I chewed up clouds and starlight and the rind of the moon and vomited them back into you, the most wholesome food we have known since the youth of the world--it could not hurt you, not ever. And you opened your eyes. And I, more fool me, nuzzled you as I would a chick, and whispered nonsense in your ear, as chicks love to hear: Allee, allai! I should have known, but the little bear of prophecy was wicked that day. I spoke, and my speaking swept everything from your heart, and you vanished like a record skipping, and where you had been was the egg. The ghosts wailed for the loss of you, and my brother wailed, too. With his nails he clawed open the egg to climb after you, and I was suddenly alone in my nest with all abandoning me. And I understood, like revelation, like death. The place in the egg, Yaichka, is a very elaborate place, a place to hide a death from its owner, and also to lead him to it. It is a perfect world, a world which could not survive outside the jeweled egg of Alkonost and Koschei, no matter how many permutations of this story the world might cycle through. (For of course you know the world tries on this story over and over, trying to make it work out differently, trying to make it perfect as an egg.) The world that is left behind when you forget what sorrow looks like, and death, too. A prophetic world that can never come true.' "
--Catherynne M. Valente