Sarah, the Winchester Heiress
read by charles musser
An ochre man appears to her and sings,
Our women and children lie beside the buffalo.
The Blue and the Grey sigh to her in unison, now.
Their voices hollow her out, slip her toward the shade;
Sarah, the Winchester heiress, is haunted by the fallen.
Each dollar of her fortune has become a tongue
printed with curses that killed her infant daughter,
then her husband. Now, she counts herself as one
among the widows of the gun. A mystic she finds
suggests a plan odd enough to capture her madness:
to escape death, she must bury her millions
in a never-to-be-finished mansion.
Saws and hammers sound around the clock,
around the calendar, as she draws walls to contain
her sanity. The wood is witness to her struggles:
doors that open over the kitchen sink or to an exit
eight feet above the garden, a window set
into the floor, parlors within parlors, staircases
dying on ceilings: one hundred sixty rooms,
two thousand doors, ten thousand windows.
Sarah builds a forest to hide her limbs within.
For thirty-eight years, the din continues.
Upon her death, at eighty-two, carpenters
down their hammers, nails half-driven.
Revenants
read by mark adkins
Two bald eagle brothers fly slow-winged laps
between pecans on both banks of the river.
Liquid krees haunt a range their kind no longer holds.
Once, lazyloops grew cottonwood aeries
and scoured pools for fish to school.
But the groans of bulldozers
and the nailgun's shock-shock-shock
silenced the purl of slackwater,
and left little to lure these visitors
on today's ditchriver,
flanked in brush mesquite and dying trees.
So they'll pass through:
two juveniles seeing the country
before parenthood weights their wings.
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