ISSUE FOUR: Sell A Mystery | next poem →

An Imaginarian

Madeline Vardell

He left in messages, starting with cassettes to catch his voice. He cut away at the irreverent almost, unblossoms. It is this way for the chicken and egg: a mother and never, my mother. This is preference simplified. The distance of pearled milk poured down wells for sound effect.

Who does it imagine to meet? A dream fever, a preservative punch into gut. Dots! cries a curtain of polkas dancing, wildly.

There may have been Bohemia before there were records, but there never were Slavic wigs or snaggletooth women. These are the lines he left in messages on tapes. Tapes that address a mother startled by the capture of voice. The son she imagines she made-up.

Madeline Vardell is an MFA candidate at New Mexico State University. She is the winner of the 2013 Kay Murphy prize in poetry, selected by Lara Glenum. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Bayou Magazine, [Pank], Rhino, and Whiskey Island. She lives in Mesilla, New Mexico.

ISSUE FOUR: Sell A Mystery | next poem →











ISSUE FOUR: Sell A Mystery

Jesse Nissim
   Entrance and Difference
   There was a bit of dust
      named Alana

Madeline Vardell
   swept up in silver & yellow
        flashes

   An Imaginarian

Peter J. Greico
   [1401 - 1500]
   [11601 - 11700]
   [16901 - 17000]

KJ Hannah Greenberg
   Initially Thrilled to the Idea
       of Memories

Douglas Luman
   from Star/Formation

Vincent Toro
   MicroGod Schism Song

Rage Hezekiah
   Phlebotomy

Natalya Sukhonos
   Parachute

Laurel Radzieski
   X and Y Axes of Charts
       Made About T's Lover
       (The Incident)

Jonathan Travelstead
   Myopia

Emily Strauss
   White Night Terror

Les Kay
   In the Basement of the Penal
       Colony, Version 2.3,
       Rimbaud Remembers