SurVision Magazine

Arca de Noé

After the surrealist painting by Leonora Carrington


My body is seasick with rot,
a few suns burn under my ribs
and bubble up to boil out my eyes.
I'm half a blown-out moon –
bone-brittle, cratered.

How strange to see
there's a version of myself
over there behind the rock
bent double in selfish grief.
Is this what I get for thinking I could die?

The red deer are waiting
to climb aboard.
Where do they think I can take them
when I'm so twisted in on myself,
my boards white as bone,
and my stern mocking me?

Who are these birds
that light on my other half,
and these cloud apparitions in the rain?

I dreamed of three brothers
throwing rocks off a rooftop.
The youngest had something to prove.
He threw too hard and as I watched,
he fell ten stories to the ground.

What have I done, bringing children
into everything?




Tammy Tommy


The library flooded.
Did you hear the sirens?
Friend I have not seen you,
didn't know how close you were to disaster,
the way the town is laid out.

Thank you for driving me.
The moon, a square
framed by linear clouds.

I show you how I make tarragon chicken.
You have everything I need,
the green apples and dried apricots,
their candy slice,
your scallion and lettuce.

We scoop the blueberries out of potluck muffins
with our hooked fingers.
We are that privileged.

You call to me from your individual sleeping tent,
resonant as spoken music,
and you hope you don't take on the oily smell
of your habitat.





Jessica Purdy is from New Hampshire, USA. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared in The Wild Word, Bluestem Magazine, The Telephone Game, The Tower Journal, and The Cafe Review. Her chapbook, Learning the Names, was published in 2015 by Finishing Line Press. Her full-length collection, STARLAND, was brought out by Nixes Mate Books in 2017.