Enjoy these two poems from Eamon Keane and Elizabeth Haddad. These poems differ in length but both embrace the intensity required of truly living life, even in the midst of fear. The ability to completely feel emotions requires a certain kind of tenacity, and these poems capture that through beautiful verse.
—The Editors
Quarry Cub Sunset
Let’s love each other
but never meet
in the middle
like a child’s hands
enjoying the polarity of
powerful magnets.
Eamon Keane is a poet and short fiction writer from Minnesota living in Bogotá.
Ode to Pteromerhanophobia Word like a dirt packed mouth, tongue forced strike of roof in gasp, throat impinged in resonance akin to being buried alive: Pteromerhanophobia. Name as fitting as fear, chemicals rush right past frayed nerve to terror— There is no escaping an hour. Who doesn’t watch birds stretch wing and yearn to fly? Pity of a fear, really, world gathered up in pleats and yet, Everywhere is possible but my mind. I do it anyway. Walk through the terminal upright. Like guaranteed, all semi-composure until I lose earth again and must await its return. Now there is nothing to do but crouch dread, sight cased in small, oval haze. I learn to antedate a din: a whistle of slacked wing, a jolt of pitched roll, an obtuse mechanical tremor, a turbine’s undulating moan. We climb space to outlandish altitude and I stalk particular precipice, the place of cut engine where life really knots into one hundred bodies or more. And it occurs: somewhere between two and five thousand feet we are freed of some impetus and begin to drift. We hover sky’s curve and watch atmosphere level—bird’s scale, Earth anonymous. Air compresses instrument and up rises buoyant longing: an earth I wish to know. I plot it in section: circle, square, and shapeless contour, everything manmade turned microscopic blemish— man’s toils condensed to misshapen pools and drab pitched roofs, lame blots on given majesty. The architects remain unseen but are assumed marching, authoritative, to nowhere. And to all of them I am bound! Even those I wish to disregard— even to that withdrawn woman in 13b averting my pleading, panicked gaze. Fear is really just a strain of struck epiphany: testimony of beating life. That is, until the fuel wanes; velocity is relentless, we cannot drift space for long. Matter must move: to hell with sudden ease and false confidence. There is descent and well-worn panic. We approach ground in rapid fall to prayer: God, deliver me to Earth! Which heaves larger now to swallow whole, gulping green trees and jagged mountain terror, an ocean swelling vacuum— a clucking drum, a mantra seeking moor: though never closer to the living than when poised to crush from above… Elizabeth Haddad works as a content writer and has a Substack called In Praise of Thought.
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Thank you!