Nolan Liebert lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota
with his wife, children, and pets that aren’t cows.
His work appears or is forthcoming in An Alphabet
of Embers, freeze frame fiction, and Zetetic: A
Record of Unusual Inquiry. You can find him editing
Pidgeonholes or on Twitter @nliebert.
Rebecka Skog is a restless artist, born in Sweden, raised
in the Canary Islands, and currently living in London.
Find out more at www.rebeckaskog.com.
surf
Nolan Liebert
Before, you were a marching band,
but we were never close, your piccolo so high,
a bird, a whistle, a soft breeze,
but tonight the TV nurse said “aneurysm”, and I thought
how they took a bone saw to your dreams,
how they scattered your grey in the wet blue of Bar Harbor –
you always wanted to go – and how
distance doesn’t matter so much anymore
if I am in a living room and you’re a phantom.
I pretend sometimes I am there in Maine,
and we play telephone, just two shells –
conchs, no string between, just endless echoes
between my prairie and your coast,
and the ocean is blue
instead of red sunset in your skull –
now the truth is
waves are to ashes as bomb is to ghost,
and the wheat here rolls like surf,
but silent.