REVELATION

Not one of the prophets could bear
to speak of the real damnation,
the one ignored: a subway stop
where the inbound train was always
ten minutes late and the same old man,
a drunk who had never wished to be
anything else, hunched over
his red saxophone, playing badly,
not making a cent,
while in the village farthest away,
a boy still wearing his father's
softened, mud-stained shirt
lazily chewed on a reed
of sweet grass and stroked
the neck of his favorite horse, one
of the Four, in view of the barn
that looked on like a sorrowful parent
the moment before
the timely and measureless
burning

—Frannie Lindsay

Copyright © 2015 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

AIR ANIMALS

My beautiful friend is pregnant again.
Though there is the question of age.

What about my age, is what she told
the doctor. She's 34, and I'm 34.

She has a son. My children are still
air animals, things that might or might

not exist. A child is not a concept.
Nor a thing. If I believed in heaven,

I could know my unborn children
were lofting in the snow-clouds.

If I believed in science, I could know
my unborn children were "not."

In the grocery store I saw a mother
push her daughter in the cart.

She was a wild little thing,
that daughter.

Like any pet she was collared:
brown seashells strung around her neck.

I waited with peppers in my hands,
gauging my hunger.

I could not tell if I wanted to
own it or be it.

—Emily Vizzo

Copyright © 2015 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

HOW FAR

How far can a thing go and still be itself? The leaf curling,
crisping into red. My need to see you after a week apart.
A bullet from the sniper's rifle, its metal jacket a kind of buzz,
a bee, which loses itself the minute it stings. The planet
spinning so casually, its orbit so egg-shaped, as if birth were
imminent, its parallel self an airy rotation through the realm
of mountains, the shaped energy, thought streaming to
conclusions that what is here will stay, that word, intent, and vase
can be one, can be a painted porcelain valley, where entrance
beckons, where at the very edge I stare into nothingness
and then turn and turn in the ceaseless air, where limit keeps
rounding and things seem to press so gladly against my skin.

—John Allman

Copyright © 2015 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.