Inconsequential Alchemy
Erika Meitner

It’s predictable summer again, the sun frosted and glaring like a cheap
Home Depot light fixture when it actually shines on the garden center

rife with landscaping plants that nobody loves but everyone buys as yard-filler:
pachysandra, rhododendron, euonymus, groundcover along with festive pansies

in black plastic six-packs that die by mid-July.  There’s no substitute for the figure
of a sunflower on a hill wilting past its stake, head drooped, body crucified. 

The neighbor—the minister’s wife—tried to fill in the barren clay on the ridge
our houses share to no avail.  Nothing thrives in this soil—not even the guaranteed

grass seed she bought that claims to grow on rock.  But she’s out watering anyway,
her chemo crew-cut glinting silver and ambiguous.  Last season she offloaded

ziplocks of heirloom tulip bulbs from her freezer, told us to put them in our yard
since she was too weak to plant them.  We buried them at the requisite depth

but they never came up; instead, a scourge of Yellow Trefoil entwined with the lawn.
She gives me, this week, three jars of home-preserved beets from their congregants.

Everyone must be praying for her, so that even those beets glow fuchsia on our counter,
countering the TV’s ready-made alchemy.  The local news is a strip-mall fire: remains

of an irreplaceable1950’s tricycle from the charred bike shop that had been in the family
for years.  The form was recognizable, but the vehicle was literally a shadow

of itself, isometric charcoal, long and difficult.  There are disruptions,
and there are disruptions.  The news is always brought to us by Oakey’s Funeral Home

& Crematory, and then on Sundays we get paid programming that follows:  Millenialist
news that trumpets the New World Order.  Prophecies of the ages converging.  Specific

details of the return, the eternal state of both the saved and the lost.  These exciting
last days in which we live.

Laura McCullough
Button

His hands felt like paws or flippers, big and inarticulate, as if the spaces between shoulder socket and elbow joint and between the finger bones had all fused in the August sun, a kind of annealing, so what had once been uncured now had been except that mobility and utility had been replaced with one function, appendages for show,

and this is what he sees now when he looks in the mirror, a created thing, a ceramic puppet whose arms stand like glass stems, whose hands burst flower-like from the tips.

If he waits long enough, perhaps he will be visited by bees, but for now, it is only ghosts, the children he hears splashing behind him as he retrieves his tilting guitar.

If you meet Buddha on the street, kill him, he recalls some saying once. He thinks a fly has landed on his chest and brushes it away, but it is nothing but a fleck of thread sticking out of a button head come suddenly loose.