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Miles Cleveland Goodwin, Vikki C, Roy Duncan


SIMPLICITY, MILES CLEVELAND GOODWIN
SIMPLICITY, MILES CLEVELAND GOODWIN


BECAUSE THERE IS MERCY IN THE NEGATIVE

Vikki C


Its potential sweeps the auburn hair of a field. The composer’s burnt requiem floating above eye-level. Our feet sinking where soil is where we left it. A soft argument flooded around our paper skin. You insist a lunar crescent is a frozen smile, must be grief briefly inverted. Horses commune as children, drinking from the well of your thin hands. An ancestral village & its bleak eye, drawn long into a body’s landscape. Your open shirt fills with lightning — blows hard into another odyssey. 


Like all mis-miracles, we curse the oil. Then we curse the wildfires. Aspire to consummate. In the sting of dying pine. You pass your salt to me as scripture, dredging my dimming aspect. The horizon bent behind our failures. You fade. I float. Into a picture of smaller pictures. The calf inside its mother. A teal vase in a damaged temple. Whalebone inside a sea's demise. Wing in a bell jar. I curl till you can no longer hold such intimacy.


Then I lie. That I love the spirit more than flesh. And you lie. That the new language exalts your tongue. Where do we enter each other? A troubled epigraph? An extinct photograph? Each lens a mere viewfinder, translating warbound oaths. We know most accidents sleepwalk untended. A paradox of erotic valleys. A soaked nightdress draped over an upland’s breastbone. All else left nude, poised for its portrait. Its countenance startled by the artist’s mirror. 


Counting casualties,

pomegranates rain; this time

we cannot keep them.



UNVOICE

Roy Duncan


Corners where a canvas folds in frame

a language of forevers

     fallen

           beyond ground and there was a moment when my fingers pressed into the sound-haze     the rushing landscape our pieces /carved/ became the mountain a combing until there was nothing left but ear.




Miles Cleveland Goodwin's works range from brutal dirty realism to figurative flights of fantasy, but they are all deeply Southern, because Goodwin is deeply Southern. Born in the Biloxi, Mississippi in 1980, he served a tour of duty in the US Navy before earning a BFA from Pacific Northwest College in Portland, Oregon in 2007. After returning briefly to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Goodwin established a studio in rural Northern Georgia, on the eastern ridge of the Appalachian Mountains. Goodwin currently lives with his dog, Venus, in a small wood frame house deep in the countryside of Fannin County, Georgia. Fannin County is a mountain community that is 99% white with over 90% of residents living on unincorporated lands. The county seat is Blue Ridge, with a population just over 1,200. Per capita income hovers just above the Federal Poverty Level. Once an agricultural community, the county has little economic opportunity for the average resident now. But what it lacks in industry, it makes up for in natural beauty. Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, it is home to the Chattahoochee National Forest, the Cohutta Wilderness Area, Lake Blue Ridge and a large section of the Appalachian Trail. This tension between rural poverty and rural beauty is a recurring theme in Goodwin’s work.


Vikki C. is the author of two collections including Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press). Vikki’s work appears in Psaltery & Lyre, The Inflectionist Review, Stone Circle Review, EcoTheo Review, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, Sweet Literary, Harpy Hybrid, The Winged Moon, Ice Floe Press, Hyacinth Review, Dust Poetry, Black Bough Poetry & The Belfast Review, among others. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize & Orison Best Spiritual Literature.


Roy Duncan is an emerging writer from Australia, often focusing on ideas underpinning beauty, connection and disconnection. He has cats and a PhD in astronomy.

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