Fugitive

Did I stop to save us? I knew death, and I welcomed its pause. Handsome mottled neck and a long scraggly tail, riding the gravel shoulder past my immediate knowledge. I imagined myself an artist with that certainty, accurate talons and a hunger for sleep.

Then a lump of brown at the roadside, a second body, mine or some other in disguise, recurring colors and a hidden loss, identifiable by its lack of motion in the swaying grasses. I held on to the wind and the wind led me there. I cradled the still warm body and reached beyond my experience. I pressed the warmth to my belly, as I might a feathered child, and a single egg slipped from this warmth, a possibility imagined by the cup of my hand.

A crow called from a broken fence post he owned. I was delaying his meal. I was delaying the justice of such a world. I was harboring a fugitive and the storm was on its way.

The wind reminded me of my distance and the egg of my past. How this happened I do not know, but I know why, and I am sorry I cannot apologize for any of it, no matter how many deaths may arrive.

The crow rose and held in the wind. I tossed the egg higher than anyone could have and there I watched the crow catch life before it opened and devour it like a shadow in flight.

But here on the road built by man I turn and place the warmth in the grass before I even know if my offering can be returned. One life is not enough. Not even mine.

Getting Religion

And there it lies, the body of a man with no soul. Right now it's beautiful, smells sweet and holds up to a surprising amount of cloud-spitting.

Forget it. Walk on. Emptiness explodes if you touch it. Tie the sound of the wind rushing through a handful of willow branches to the silence following the swallow's passing and leave it there, hanging in the vacant air.

Or tell someone you saw it if you must. Remember where and who it belonged to, what ribbons you adorned it within your sentimental imagination. Don’t mention the industriousness of the survivalist insects. By the time you remember what they’ve done, they're gone.

Nothing about this man could have threatened your life, but maybe you're having a bad dream now, based on something that wasn’t there. Yes, I was afraid to wake up, perhaps. Or I could see myself in the expression he left with. Perhaps I'll invent another God to explain my involvement.

Long after you left, a breeze continued stuffing air into the dead man's pockets. It seemed to be saying we need a fatter horse and a larger cave. We need the story of this village in the middle of the road. We need a region of completely inconsequential involvements. We need some clerk who holds the numbers we agreed upon.

After that, I couldn’t move so I taught my mind to, but it had its own places to go.

Deep as a warm sleep on a cold night.

It stayed there and it taught me one thing and one thing and not anything else. I learned to carry the rope without stooping or complaining.

Goat to goat and sheep to sheep.

Death isn’t lonely, it’s so crowded you can’t find yourself.

Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. His story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, was one of five finalists for the 2009 Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize. In 2010 he has been a finalist in fiction at Black Warrior Review and Mississippi Review and in poetry at Cloudbank and Mississippi Review. In 2011 he is again a finalist in poetry at Mississippi Review. The Spring 2011 Bitter Oleander contains a feature including an interview and 18 of his hybrid works.