Qua Literary and Fine Arts Magazine, Winter 2022

Ask The
Brook Trout
ROBERT VIVIAN
How to sunrise and sunset more colorful as human dawn and radiant the rest
of your days, wet and shining with tears as the brook trout are lifted writhing
out of the current in terror only thunder and lightning know and maybe the
prophets choking with hot coals in their mouths, bask back and reflect the
glory of creation from your open dripping gaga mouth, ask the brook trout is
the water in my heart clean enough to live in, is it see through to forever and
also partaking of forever, ask not when will I die but how will the delivery of
awe take me in maybe the soft opening of a flower circa always the
gobsmacked moment, ask the brook trout, wonder the brook trout quietly
aloud even if you faith the answer, what kind of shining, wondrous love
made you? May I bow down before that icon also perhaps what tender
feeling, umileniye, they say in Russia, umileniye, or rained upon by the tears
of saints—and as a friend once said, If you even look wrong at a brook trout
it will die so sensitive are they, ask the brook trout, wonder the square tail,
murmur an obscure northern Michigan stream where all trembling is holy
and the tiny birds know you as their finally recovered own back to second
childhood, ask the brook trout what else is there but beauty, beauty, beauty
manifest galore all around except for manmade strip malls, talk to the brook
trout, shadow box with them, is there truly any more glorious colors in all the
world, wormhole and vermiculation, not even Vermeer could paint this, I am
going down in sundown myself, I am on fire and glowing all an-ember, ask
the brook trout about lemons, about vodka tonics, about what it means to be
a recluse, an almost holy fool, to grow out your hair and eat roots,
umileniye again, somewhere my former Russian student Elizaveta is smiling
near Vladivostok, she’s sitting in one of my classes not for credit but for
wonder, the most ideal student I ever had whose ancestry was native
Siberian, somewhere deep inside I am grooving a holy 4 weight, I am using a
bow and arrow cast because there’s no other way to deliver the immaculate
fly, umileniye once more and all around, ask and stutter the brook trout, dare
to murmur a cold, clear stream sinuous as a woman’s body, tell the brook
trout about your demons and watch them evaporate in the hot summer air,
watch the brook trout dart for cover, for holy structure, for those fallen limbs
that are redeemed by their hiding, by their instinctual fear and trembling
again, let the brook trout lead you back to hope and wonder again, back to
first innocence and the baptism of awe, ask the brook trout finally what any
human life is made for except this, trembling before the wet and shimmering
beauty of this world so quick to get away, so beautiful it lasts forever.
In The Field
BENJAMIN SMITH
In the moments leading up to sex,
(Or something of the sort) we are poised,
Balanced on a cliff of civility and,
Tipping, we flood from your Volkswagen
Into rural air, thick and black, gnats attending.
Fitting to find myself low amongst
Twigs, calves tapped by stalks,
Grass-vermin genuflecting
Toward some dunce as my spit
Drags like a cord.
Selfishly you spill. I withdraw,
Easing back on my haunches thinking
This must be beauty, truly;
Reticent in the weeds with
A veil of mosquitos,
A mouthful of stars.
20 | Prose Poetry | 21