nate east

Stronghold, Part IX

‘Fox Gate’

-

I’d rather my blood not be drawn by the long teeth of vampires and my soul never lashed

to the mead hall crossbeams where valkyries ferry the triumphant dead;

I awoke to flaring Obon lanterns behind woven bamboo, and orange paint shining 

on the remote gates of Inari Fushimi where the forest vortexes 

and the humid acres of Brooklyn under the highway near McCarren Park and Driggs,

back when any fear of night was so utterly buried that I thought the park benches were carrels 

and the smoking bakeries of Greenpoint were the floating gaslights of farmhouses 

miles inland from the desolate highways of Galway and Clare; 

how a colossal ring of anachronistic keys

clattered like weapons against the townhouse doors and I hallucinated a bundle of bamboo staves

lashed together on the stairwell with whip cord; 

how I tiptoed through the incongruous middle-room where someone slept in a parking space 

sparkling with smashed bottles and buffalo grass flattened under an absurd iron key ring 

even larger than a door knocker; many parables end with a catastrophic fire; just a hundred years ago 

this was farmland and dirt roads; there was a falcon perched there in the branches…

Stronghold, Part VIII

‘Storm King’

-

Could you, with the firebreak of your shoulders

when the heron’s wings pelted the Russian River

with firefly charges, could you in the dancing mist

just above the water where we waded out

towards the rippling moon; how just west in the darkness

the water swerved behind a wall of redwoods,

how we’d seen two boys walking the old train bridge

in the blazing afternoon, how the lights went out and vines

annihilated the rotting housegates and platforms of porches, how the snakes

of galaxies uncoiled above us, the waxy glass bottle, how the mist

rose up to our waists, up to our shoulders.

Stronghold, Part VII

‘Rampart’

-

Fall peeled back his bone mask.

He sat crosslegged in the dust, 

sharpening bright knives.

-

The body is a coal furnace.

Each season’s children 

are ravenous devils.

I wrote a new short story for Certain Demise, the latest collaborative zine by Team Punchbag.  

The zine will be available at APE & elsewhere.  Huge thanks to Team Punchbag for running this really fun project, and for inviting me to participate.

I reviewed Engine Empire, Cathy Park Hong’s new poetry collection, here at The Rumpus.

Stronghold, part VI

‘Enemy’

That Spring the rain god turned his back upon the land, and the farrows gushed ravenous worms and segmented serpents, yielding shells and bones to the harvest.  In abandoned mines was heard drumming in deep caverns, and there was nothing left alive to rot in the fields.  The flagstones of the old Roman roads cracked along their centers, and in the empty night were carted into the forest to build low walls around crude settlements.  The forest swallowed up the road.  The grey oaks bore no fruit and rattled in the wind.  There were no deer to hunt.

That Spring I dreamt of a great tiger sprinting circles atop a ring of raised earth.  I knew he was a god because of his immense size and his indifference to the twigs that snapped under my heels.  The next day we tracked a boar to a black creek far from the walls.  We emerged from the woods with drawn bows but the boar was nowhere to be seen.  Across the creek sat a wounded old man propped up against the trunk of a colossal oak.  He was fishing in the opaque, thick water with a stick pole.  He stared at us with empty eyes and we waited by the edge of the wood, watching his slack line curl in a faint wind.  The boar walked out of the forest next to the man and lay down like a domesticated dog.  The grey trees whispered: “there is nothing you can do to avert catastrophe.”

Stronghold, part V

‘Witch King / Lightning Drain’

—

A long Spring of Pabst and barbecues, firing airguns at scarecrows and

eviscerating tallcans with volleys of grapeshot; you’ll wake up

drowning in Sapporo husks, some Richard Siken lines 

about getting wrestled down onto a gravel driveway, unfiltered sunlight 

blasting through a Victorian window; they say 

a kid who wanders at night kicking over motorcycles 

is a fell ghost, that a kid who fires burning arrows 

across the face of the bright moon is a resurrected lord

—

It was a long Spring we left for dead

in the apocalyptic silence but he awoke 

in a storm of ladybugs, under old cloaks of empire, 

two clear strokes of poison 

painted onto a sake glass; the way katanas 

cry like bells when snapped from their scabbards, 

the way ground rainbows dance in the flickering weave

of artichoke fields at the base of the foothills

New zine

Cowan’s Gap #4 is finished; details and photos are here.

Stronghold, part IV

‘Plague Carrier’

The demiurge lived in a windowless tower

overlooking the greenway where three boys

shoved knives in their socks and waded into the birches;

if your companions wear bells it’s still possible

that the jingling behind you is arms in a wolf’s throat,

that the figure who reared up in Buena Vista wasn’t a ghost

and the girl with black dreadlocks drinking tea in the rain 

had blast holes for eyes, mine mouths from the witch world.

New story

here (third from bottom)