by Will Cordeiro

Hand of Fate

I hold out my closed fist

to a child of ten.

The child leans up on his tiptoes,

peers in, insistent

on seeing what he supposes

must be a gift.

I let a moment steal away

while an old jalopy blubbers by in the distance

and the light spokes out from a cloud

like a shuddering wheel

that turns the day the broken shadows drift off with.

Then I open my palm

to reveal a small, imperfect stone,

gnarled, oblong, rugged, rugose, veined with skarn,

and mottled like a lapwing’s egg.

Nothing, really,

but a hapless pebble. Here, then,

you can take it. Take it!

Carefully he snicks the tiny rock into his clutches.

Poor youngin’, poor kid,

little snot. You’re a beggar,

I say. His lips pout, shaken; the first wrinkles

crinkle up the child’s brow.

I tell him, ah! but look, this is a relic

from the ground, plucked from the bare earth,

a living stone as precious as your skin,

as impressive as your bones.

Why, it’s everything

you’ll be given,

it’s everything you can hope to become.

Postscript: Integers and Contingency

I swing aloof on my rooftop

hammock, 6:23 p.m.,

thinking, in my besotted way,

of the second law of thermodynamics.

The marled stains of sundown

sieved through rotten pink and copper,

New Year’s Eve, Guadalajara.

I lip-synch the void, thunderstruck

and tipsy with so much blundered

thinking, puzzling what it to means to say

that time keeps moving

in one direction: what other

direction is there? As if time were all leaps

sundered of any continuum, and not

this viscous muckabout flow I’m

stuck in, scuzzled and sticky.

The underbellies of liver-

spotted clouds trundle over. I nuzzle

the sweet char-barreled burn of reposada…

The colors shuffle off their habits

down damp folds of moldering

petal stuff by the lamp-glow

of the sky’s unsettled, resin’d amulet.

Goldleaf, sap drip.

Pinpricked

stipple of distant towers, mirrored stories

of marrowing dusk. Umber and sputum:

humid air’s orange afterglow tricked out.

The traffic (somewhere) rumbles by.

A horizon scoured and scumbled with

zone weather. Ah, nothing’s there—I look,

it’s there again. Neon on the church spires.

Corrugated siding, chain-links, water tanks,

rank on rank of satellite dishes, florid strips

of gutters straddling the rained-on alleyways

where packs of strays yip, bark, and yowl.

One event. And then another. And maybe nothing

happens, time is only clockwork’s sleight-of-hand.

The entire history of the universe is locked inside

the memory of time that starts right now.

Go step

across the self-effacing river, and face

this water held around you in the air,

a laced tonnage of clouds. Feel yourself

dematerialize and reassemble. Inner space

is ventilated with trembling revenants…

Or so I tell myself, mumbling half drunk.

A spillway of rubbish down the canyon’s end;

cliffside’s a furtive vertigo composed of vapor.

Silhouettes along the crevice-dark edge suggests

a glassy architecture adrift with heaven’s figures:

crepuscular gondolas, ochre and marabou and

mondo muscadine, which peek-a-boo above me,

saturated with their several spectral greens,

a summer’s antithesis.

Eyes sting.

Bodies crumble.

A year,

a decade passes. One page is ripped forever.

Some fissile matter blanking out its meanings—

the gloom assumes a chiseled ambience like under-

painting; lingers in the stranded sunlight’s ziplines.

Day rubs out subtones until they’re sunlorn and gray.

A star blinks on.

Late blue transforms to amber.

Cada vez te despiertas, los fragmentos esfuman la totalidad

en ruinas los cuales dan la luz a otros umbrales.

Vivamos en las umbrías.

—Who asks what beauty is? We caress it still,

brief masks

which falsify the skull’s decay.

Such faint illuminations we can’t express,

the light assumed into its own cross-fading.

A luster’s damage. Rust. Evening. Slight sham

of everything. Nerves leaping beyond the fray…

A nothingness that each of us are damned to.

And time, which we only imagine, is the time

that ends us. Moments our heads touch azure—

this gaunt bone-shine clamoring through flesh.

Perhaps we stammer with a retrospective will;

perhaps the past exists

as sure as future death.

The varied light that’s left now taunts me

while still I love these haunted depths I am.

Gutted

A barren landscape, a blinding expanse. As if I had fallen into the subterranean reaches of a dry cave that opened out into shadowy folds of badlands. And yet, the whole lid had been cracked off— exposed to an overcast tinged with lavender and mauve. I crawled deeper into the crinkles, deeper into the vanishing source of dimension. Each wall gave way. Perimeters revealed themselves as the squishy corridors of my cerebrations, my own brain’s cauliflower bracts. Or perhaps I stumbled in xerotic tubes and desiccated intestines, the leathery internal organs of some leviathan, which had been mummified in its papery desiccation. One would think the ground (as it were) had been sprinkled with hail, but bending down to taste it, I discovered it was hunks of salt. Maybe I was just another pucker in the gut, a particle to be metabolized. Thus, extrapolating to the eye’s edge, I concluded I’d been swallowed by a sinuating desert. I licked my arm, my breast, my little toe. These, too, possessed a stark, grainy flavor. I felt myself to be salt all the way down. Little more than a grimy suet left over from stains of sweat. Every essence had long-ago evaporated. The sun, or whatever light source hung above me, diffused a sleepy-headed anesthesia over the vacant purlieu of salt flats. Each sector of my vision vectored about, loop-de-loops along decay paths. I moped among isotopes glistering and winkled. Maybe such sparks resulted from the moisture on my eyeballs shriveling up? In any case, these bajadas tergiversated every seeming-solid fact. Somewhere, a single gnat (the only life around) kept cranking its tiny go-kart engine. It perched, it pinched me. Devoured by rankling quirks of irksome bites. My blisters, mercy, they bled out. Berserk! My blood, too, was a kind of brine, a sanguine tang, a liquid that had by now encrusted into the greater bailiwick of arid saline. Faceted, all space crizzled as it quickened and flickered in one final crystal.

Die Zwitscher-Maschine

after Paul Klee

Like a leftover

chicken

stricken of feathers,

I toddle batlike

or botlike,

overstressed, troubled

where my mind-cave,

all wreaking about, quicks

into a wreckage of dream states

& guesswork & odd raving

shadows. A screw-loose,

lettuce-head deathtrap.

Each nubble rubs off

to expose the never-

theless less

-than-nothing flesh is

reduced to: a dizzy line—a laugh-

ably blank fizzle

of cloudbanks. Reservoir

for logic’s far-gone dialectics

seesawing evermore

quizzically. A-shudder

myself, no

mere fact but something

not quite meta-

physical, I freefall

—all crankshafts &

stuttering weathervanes—

beyond

whatever’s reckoned as actual.

Poem Beginning with a Line from Zanzotto

To archaic skies acidulous as Cimbric gibberish,

—figurative, fugitive—

this neurotransmission of

the tinsel-haired senescent reveries of autumn

—liminal, luminous—

infinitive proximities

are harrowed by the serum looted from the Absolute

where the uninflected signs commune

O sleep-twisted fricatives

disrupting the nutrients terraforming their plasmids as

castoff from frozen shadows loiter in an icebound Martian noon…

any child’s smudge

or picture of a ladder /

a chicken-coop

could offer

revelation:

—each postulant made . . pustulant—

commensurate

with star-yolk slathered over nova-shatter

dark matter grizzled in

an afterbirth

an after

image

all leeway

waylaid

into the pink radiance of sinking gold

when evening rankles with its little griefs

you eavesdrop down

into a lateness, a fertile sludge

into the wind-torn corners:

this formal operation of the atmospheric systems—

transdermal cybernetics

forecasting dendritic spume:

& you bodysurf the cloud-bent distal optics

ushering an earthfast sentience—

a sub-speech a skin-to-skin noetics

a pouring forth of what is numinous—a ceaseless force that’s fated by a spooky-action-at-a-distance

BIO: Will Cordeiro has published work in 32 Poems, AGNI, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, and The Threepenny Review. Will is the author of Trap Street (Able Muse, 2021) and Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024); and is coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) as well as the forthcoming New Foundations of Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2026). Will coedits the small press Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.

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