Nora Boxer

They were sailing back from the language of computers. Her foot ached from the salt in the sea. They learned and leaned and heard. Then the carrier pigeon came one-footed onto the ship. Thus ending their estrangement.

It is judgement that made them stand alone, like diseased elms. They shouldn’t have sold the monastery. So few places to have somatic realizations anymore, a pear landing on a shoulder, not CSS. But in their obituary you see they were a miracle. Your mind a wall full of wasps, cleaning out the barn, throwing away the threaded pillow. They have sailed on to the language of the dead.

One face looming large among hundreds gathered on the dirt, one face frozen, your judgement of the surface grotesque. Your sea ached from the salt in its foot. Thus making you rootless. They had sailed in a ship made of code from an island, a suspicion of a wooden heart filled but not filled, not unlike your own. Your barn a language of wasps. The folksinger’s husband floating in the mountain air.

Nobody has a body anymore.

Sail on, sail on, and learn and lean and hear. In their obituary you see they were a miracle. They sailed beneath the sea to the roots of a pear tree. A monastery can never be sold.

Nora Boxer is a PhD candidate in UW-Milwaukee’s creative writing program. Her writing has appeared in Fiolet and Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulism, Catamaran Literary Reader, Pilgrimage, spiral orb: a journal of permaculture poetics, and others. She is a recipient of the Keene Prize for Literature and has been a writer/artist-in-residence at the Art Monastery Project, Maumauworks Istanbul, The Elsewhere Collaborative, and the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony. She teaches at UW-Milwaukee and in the adult education program at City College of San Francisco. www.noraboxer.com