ISSUE TWO: Sly Early Stem | next poem →

No Sin Like Arson

Aimee A. Norton

There is no eiderdown to courage,
no husker du to truth.
Unlike falseness,
everywhere viral,
virtue stands alone in its icy prairie,
inaccessible except through
transformation, like a jersey,
unraveled, re-knit, turned inside out
and worn anew.

Lack of commitment
erodes foundations.
The jerks, only in it for a few years,
can't wait to corrode the new and fresh
with their battery-acid piss.
Men have new wives.
Women have new faces.
Chaplins have new faiths.
Molesters have new neighborhoods.
All the while the honeybees keep on
with tireless fructation.

There's no sin like arson
that burns the buildings to tender
tinder and razes all to ash.
Honesty doesn't please.
The captain no longer
goes down with the ship.
Instead the poor souls in steerage
pay the price.

Aimee A. Norton is a research astronomer and poet. She works at Stanford University researching the Sun's magnetic fields. She enjoys the parallel ways in which physics and poetry compress big, experiential truths into small spaces. Her chapbook titled Permissions was published in The Drunken Boat, Winter 2013.

ISSUE TWO: Sly Early Stem | next poem →






ISSUE TWO: Sly Early Stem

Jude Marr
   adrift
   flight—

Bill Neumire
   Water Cycle #1: To Whom
       Shall I Return

   Water Cycle #3: I Thought
       There Would Be More

Laura Madeline Wiseman
   Or To Release Death

Magus Magnus
   Payload Dump (3 excerpts
       from drone: poetic monologue
       for monotone
)

Aimee A. Norton
   Apache Code Errors
   No Sin Like Arson

Katherine Swett
   Translations of an
   Algorithmic Love Poem

Amy Schreibman Walter
   Online Dating Inbox

Paul Strohm
   Our Interregnum

KJ Hannah Greenberg
   The Sanctity of Lists
   Assistance with Quickly
       Becoming Unbearable

Susan L. Lin
   When You Are Sleeping

Ana Maria Caballero
   Another Airport Poem

Ann Skiöld
   Emily Dickinson Did Not
       Drive A Car

Jeremy Dixon
   In Retail (xxii)

Pete Coco
   Especes Perdue

Jessica Joy Reveles
   Surviving the Desert