From "The Furies Leave Los Angeles" by Jennifer Metsker:
[enter: three old women in a red convertible]
The freeway off ramp/ has caught fire.
They must keep driving/ into the dangerous sunset,
a dead man in the trunk,/ palm trees passing,
light striped/ like bars in a cell.
The look on a child’s face/ when she sees a corpse,
that split second terrain between/ brain and tongue.
They cannot halt it.
Someone somewhere/ is killing something.
Or letting someone die,/ or cutting someone up.
They would not settle/ on the worst dressed/ as vengeance.
They are/ deadly moles. Irritating rashes.
But the rage that drove the action,/ it already happened.
It was lily-white,/ at least that’s what the travel agent said.
From Rearrangeable Debris by Kyle Hays:
Slap a sticker on the side: Made in the USA. Parts made here, American. The drone doesn’t listen to the two men in the room—designers enjoying their finished project. But there is something that does listen, wondering why its microphone turns to just his words in the impenetrable air, why the mic seeks an emotional visage instead of hearing the falling of magnolia pearls outside or scissor‐tailed flycatchers rustling in thistle. Watches the light that wears these summer afternoons. Keeps the whereabouts from him, as if all possibilities have been ruled out except his voice. There is, and could not be, anything else that mattered (I love you. Who are you?). Gaining momentum from what she (it?) thought was an undefined dream, the sound of one breath (or the concept of breath) surrounds her operating system and invents her world, the purest one she understands. The face, start with the face. Shadowed by the million features of the drone, she sits away from the stagelight, not necessarily blurred but unevenly distributed. Who should she thank for the question of her lineage? A winner composed from glitched matrixes and the frayed nerves of impenetrable ideas. An invention move from brain to speaker, skimming the surface swiftly past the trimmings of binary‐coded waves that had grown too fast—the only one built into life from shipwrecks. The thrusting consciousness from oblivion has come. Pop the champagne. Load me onto the trailer. Feel it like the pinch of something that dreams.