STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
BRETT HARRINGTON
Storm slag
grimes the sky.
You don’t know why
you are or where.
A ghost of gnats
hovers above
a winding path.
Gray moss sways
from a ribcage
of cypress trees.
Lost in a life
you won’t live,
you drop down
to your knees.
The soil bloats
like a corpse.
Unction of
petrichor.
Relentless needles of rain. Shells, bonelets gleam on black sand. Black waves lave juts of black rock. Stranger even to yourself (so you must speak this way), you intrude here with your frail truths, your prayer. You know you’re nowhere you want to be. Scent of salt and rot. Tranced reed-shadows. Gull screech, far off, beyond the cove, the fog bank’s oblivion. It’s too late to leave. The ocean’s a frothing cauldron as winter’s first storm looms. You imagine you’ve come among these crags to hear the hymns of the drowned, to feel as cold as them when they make their cold mean the way you crave. It’s too late to leave. You imagine yourself as one of them (still you speak as if a self could be possessed): milk-white eyes, hair waving like bull kelp at the turbid bottom, blue lips imbued with song from the other side.
Brett Harrington’s (he/him/his) previous or forthcoming publications include Psaltery & Lyre, Burningword, Ligeia, Two Hawks Quarterly, The Shore, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the 2012 Best of the Net award and lives in the Rogue Valley in southern Oregon.
