Volume 1, Issue 4—Edited by Emily Wagner

Hello and welcome to the fourth issue of Remixt! I’m your host/editor, Emily Wagner, and I hope you enjoy these three poems. I didn’t start out with anything particular in mind, and a lot of the submitted work was calling to me. Sometime during the reading process, a friend posted a video that I’d seen before and will almost always drop everything to watch again anytime it comes up: an orchestral flash mob in a Spanish town center playing the Ode to Joy. Watching this always makes me feel light and full and happy, and completely amazed at the kind of beauty humans are capable of producing, which is always a nice thing to be reminded of when it so often feels like everything is garbage. I realized I wanted poems that made me feel the way that video does, but in a less bombastic way. What I’ve chosen are essentially three moments, with people interacting with each other and nature, in ways that made me feel the love and awe that the writers felt. I hope you agree. I hope you make something that makes you happy today.

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Bird People
We are all bird people, says your child.
What makes us like birds? you ask.
Our hands, says small goldenhair –
they’re like wings.

You, bird-mother, gorge yourself with feathers,
stuff them in your mouth till you’re choking.
Becoming a bird is harder now
with the years’ gathering weight,

but for this child
it requires nothing
but faith in their own self.
You can be a girl or a boy,
says goldenhair, you can be
anything you choose

you too can be a bird

By Sara Norja

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Because Everyone Writes Poems About Deer

My neighbor, the bow hunter,
keeps a false buck in his back yard,
he fills it with arrows from the deck.
One night I looked out and saw two—
a doe staring down the decoy’s blank eyes.
I imagined her coaxing his stiff flanks to run,
I willed her to do the same.

One day as I went for a walk
in the woods, our mutual crashing
caused me to meet the eyes
of the doe. As her two fawns escaped
up the hill behind her, we held each other’s gaze
from across the creek and I felt,
in us both, a kind of desperation—

I wanted her to stay so I could cling
to that moment, that feeling, how alive
we were together,
how wild.

She wanted me to stay
so I would not fill her with arrows.

by Eryn Killian

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Myth
Help me to name this:
You dance to Beach House in the hallway between classes,
arms out and spinning, fluid
in your own smiling ocean.
My heart is dyed and caramelized by this,
and I can taste it.
The taste of figs,
sparks of loose wiring.
The taste of skin and movement.

by Brian Keathley

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Sara Norja dreams in two languages and has a predilection for tea. Born in England and settled in Helsinki, Finland, she lives for words, dance, and moments of wonder. Her poetry has appeared in venues including Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, inkscrawl, Through the Gate, Stone Telling, and Interfictions. Her short fiction has appeared in various venues including Strange Horizons, Flash Fiction Online, and the anthology An Alphabet of Embers (ed. Rose Lemberg), and is forthcoming in Fantasy Scroll Magazine. She blogs at http://suchwanderings.wordpress.com and can be found on Twitter as @suchwanderings.

Eryn Killian is a Southern native and Midwest transplant, an archivist by day and a writer by night. Her work often deals with weird folklore, strange women, and meeting the animal gaze, and has previously appeared in The Goliard.

Brian Keathley received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The University of Tennessee.  He currently lives in Tulsa, OK where he teaches 9^th grade English.  He has previously been published in Eclectica, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Literary Orphans.

 

Emily Wagner has a Master’s in Library Science, and is currently trying to switch into a publishing career. She runs programming for Readercon, a science fiction convention in Massachusetts, writes reviews for Publishers Weekly, and was a YA librarian. Emily has had poetry published in Goblin Fruit. She likes cats and cheesecakes and bad jokes. You can find her on twitter @emilytheslayer. (If you want to see the video Emily was talking about in the editorial, it is here.)

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©2016 “Bird People” by Sara Norja

©2016 “Because Everyone Writes Poems About Deer” by Eryn Killian

©2016 “Myth” by Brian Keathley

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