Wreck


There is a place we come to, a place we come to, a place we end or begin. It's a lot like sleep. In this place, we are more sense than we are bone, more drifter than foot and boot. We learn to come the ways without bridges. It's a lot like a dangerous lullaby, one that lulls you into water, a nice shallow shore, and you're attached to a string, each thought a filament around you, and each filament connected to something else, you hope. We all have to come the ways without crossing, each of us, come to them at our own times, when the crossing is just ours. A nightly ritual, one before sleep, toward sleep.




Apothecary with Forest


The woods are full of pills.
The trees, the leaves

are things to be washed
down with water.

These things are meant
to climb over and fall beneath

one another, tumbling toward
an edge. An edge made of ourselves.

Mirrors glued to mountain walls;
we look into the earth

and we take away something.
Crystal and rock. Mostly rock

too dense to slip through,
even with all your atoms shaking at once,

all of them carrying little parts
of you elsewhere.


Erin J. Mullikin is an MFA candidate at Syracuse University. Her work has appeared in such journals as GlitterPony, BlazeVOX, and Cellpoems, and she is the author of the chapbook, Strategies for the Bromidic (dancing girl press). She is currently the editor-in-chief at Salt Hill.

David Wojciechowski lives and dies in Syracuse, New York where he is a founding editor of Midnight City Books. His poems have appeared in Bateau, Better, iO, and Meridian among other places.