Abigail Beckel   ON MARC CHAGALL'S THE POET AND THE BIRDS, 1911 Until the birds appeared, I stared at the clouds, smooth as boulders. I watched edges blur in the new breeze, the grass go golden. Marc trusts the goat when it dictates ecstatic purples and deep reds, when it says gravity means nothing. But I know I will not levitate from this earth. If the birds are my muse it is good they can fly on their own, wheeling into the trees to speak to me. They are white, blank— only the vibrant play of color around them allows them to exist at all. I strain to hear them. If Marc hadn’t called them birds, hadn’t bound them to that tree, they would be my words, forming and reforming, flapping against an impossible sky.   PINNIPED Once there were four brothers. One of them—you—ran into the sea and became a walrus, or maybe a seal. Many years later, I married your brother. We all live in a castle-type set-up on the sea. Your mother dominates the wives, but grows old. Your father is dead now—your brothers run the place. Most nights I stand waist-deep in the water and the dolphins come with their perfect softness and rub along my legs and toss their heads. One night when the quarter-moon shone silver you swam right up to me and nuzzled my arm. You are definitely a seal—no giant whiskers like a walrus. I had only heard tell of you, the lost brother. You told me who you were, and I backed away, took refuge on the beach—it’s not often that a seal with human eyes speaks to me in the moonlight. But you flippered ashore, lay next to me on the sand, and told me of your adventures. I love your brother, I said, and also, How did you get the sea to take you in? When you dream of nothing else but salt and undulation and endless freedom, you are ready, you said. But there is always something else to dream— babies who need tending, fairy tales, a husband who hums and smiles in his sleep. You visit often. I bring you hunks of meat and household gossip. One day soon you will dream of us, and the sea will take your flippers and set you back on sand.       Susan Goldman Enchanted Summer monotype and woodcut 23" x 34" see more work by Susan Goldman     AT THE WILD ANIMAL KINGDOM... 1. We ride in a black cherry Dodge Caravan with doors locked—the animals roam free. 2. The heat index shoots over 100 degrees— tongues hang out and tails and ears flick—it’s south Florida—flick-flick. 3. Monkeys and baboons sprawl in the patchy grass along the road in suggestive positions—blushing my sister and I look away and giggle. It’s probably just nature. 4. The gazelles only start running because the car in front of us keeps laying on its horn. 5. There seem to be sections of nothing— the park map says RHINOS. 6. The lion is the color of sand and lies there on it, mane thick with sandburs. I wonder what keeps people from opening their car doors and trying to get the animals to move. Or take pictures with a lion. 7. An emu comes running up beside us out of nowhere and starts pecking the hell out of the driver’s window, angry or crazy, or wanting our Cheetos. My dad speeds up then slows down but the emu keeps pace, bashing its beak into the glass next to him. As the minutes pass, it’s hard to tell if we are laughing or screaming.     AFTER YARD EGGS, BY SALLY MANN Mama says when my hair blows like that it makes me look mythic. I say, like a princess? She says, like Ophelia drowning in air. I don’t ask who Ophelia is, but I know it feels beautiful when the wind rushes through the yard and leaps at my body, tries to steal my hat of eggs into the sky. Eggs don’t make sense, seem too fragile to hold baby birds, seems too dumb to leave them cuddled in the dirt under the bushes for me to find and carry away for frying. Their mamas think the sky will hide them, that the leaning grasses will hold them close and watch over them. My mama knows better. She is always watching. I can shut my eyes and feast on the wind, thick with sweet green smells—I will not blow away from this yard with her eye constantly whirring the world into stillness.     BEFORE NEWTON WE FLOATED Before Newton named it gravity, what did people call that force that pinned them to the ground, that made walking off the edge a drop, a dive, rather than a rise, a flight? Maybe they never dreamed dreams where the world they thought was still, but was really spinning, stopped spinning, and just like that, they floated off the ground, rising like helium balloons they couldn’t imagine either, pirouetting through the sky with their livestock and lunch, their children and tools, their spears and boats and wheels. There was apparently no gravity to their situations, except there was— that unnamed infant of a force holding them fast. No one knows who invented the word love. It was named in all the first languages— a force worthy of a label. But before you named it, I dreamed that dream again and again, always on the verge of floating away, sucked into atmosphere, a pinprick of light, untethered in the weightless dark universe.   Abigail Beckel is the cofounder and publisher of the independent hybrid-genre publishing company Rose Metal Press. She has worked professionally in publishing for more than ten years, and received her MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College. Beckel's poetry can be found in So and So Magazine, The Vanderbilt Review, and Rainbow Curve. She lives in Washington, DC.   Published in Volume 12, Number 4, Fall 2011.