The Hills We Must Climb
Luke Schrom
2003 Silver Chevy Tracker
All I hear is noise—nothing but static.
How else could I describe it? I wanted to rip off my ears
and sewed them shut. It was like everything I’d was told
was a lie. If you claim you did it for love,
can you write it off on your taxes?
Then there was silence—just the road.
All I wanted to do was shake the wheel back
and forth until life
spinning out of control. My mind
already there. Rolling, rolling, rolling—
looking at what’s was ahead.
a darkness
What had been whispered and
murmured about at school
when I was a child—I never believed
anyone who spoke of it, because
that could never happen to me.
No, I was too good for that
to happen. I prayed every day.
I followed the path God
told me to follow. I was the polite little boy
at church who held the door
and greet people. But now I’m here in the driver’s seat,
while the passenger tells me.
“Honey,
your father and I are getting a divorce.”
Fee-fi-fo-fum
One figure stands, the other sits.
One with the attitude; the other, with a purpose.
Only a quarter of their blood is shared. Each is similar but not alike.
Raised like brothers each on different branches.
In the middle. A lighthouse. Old with an unshaven beard. Thin showing ribs but never beaten.
A hat sits on top of the giant. To reach it you must crawl up the rear, through the gut, and out the ear.
The limbs reach. High but not near.
Facing away from the sun, the soft light bleeds, covering the stairs with blood. Smoothing out the ground, filling in every jagged edge.
A deep hole grows searching to go somewhere. The edges cleared from all that was taken.
Turn to dust
A crater
in the ground
I am sitting here now
looking out onto the water, thinking
how peaceful it is.
Someone might have died here
To save their people
from a tyrannical reign.
Nobody from that time
lives anymore, all have turned
to dust—
blown away.
How much
was a death worth then?
Ten,
One hundred,
Ten thousand lives?
Do you know
their names, their beliefs,
who they loved, who they hated?
All of that was forgotten.
The only ones that matter
are those
who had done
something eccentric,
to have
their names
written down.
When will a name be forgotten?
Who will be the person with this last memory?
When they die how long will they be remembered?
What is the reason people will think of me?
How can I stay in the hearts of those I love?
Where will they bury me?
Why do I have to die?
Shoat
What do you think wandered these woods thousands of years ago? Was it a man, maybe deer? Or something beyond imagination. What if the forest wasn’t here at all—what if it was a cliff face, with goats defying gravity?
What is a goat? It’s not a sheep of course, but they can technically breed. What should we call this newfangled creature? A geep, perhaps—but that might sound insulting if it were quieter than a goat or a sheep. Shoat is much more respectable.
If someone were to have such an animal, would they tour it around the world, or would they treat it as any ordinary farm animal? Yet let’s not confuse the shoat with the sheep-goat chimera—those creatures made in a laboratory. Mad scientists crammed the embryo of a sheep and goat together, like the fusion of atoms. They call them mosaics. Patches of sheep and goat like Mary Shelley dreamed it up herself.
Do they hold them captive in exotic zoos in the UAE, where they sell purses using the skin of the ones that didn’t survive. Perhaps a Cruella de Vil carpet.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
The hand reaches inside my chest
It searches blindly
pushing past the liver and kidneys
in search for its desires.
It hungers for my heart
I can feel it. It constricts
harvesting juice from the pulp
Into a glimmering crystal glass
To be swallowed by someone else.
A cat always lands on their feet,
but dies from the height
from which it was dropped.
I guess I’ll die
little by little
down the drain
round and round
into a bucket
poured out
into the streets
where I’ll starve
to eat grass and dirt
till I feel full
all this
is just a trick
to make me think
I will be rich
but all in the name of profits
pruned like a dead limb