Six Poems
by Oliver Nash
Final Ledger
Twelve sacks of grain.
Two fowl.
Eighteen hundred cubits of hempen rope.
Five talents, twelve minas of Alashiyan bronze in oxhide ingots.
Three minas of Egyptian gold.
One talent of Elamite tin.
One traveling girl—two-&-two-thirds cubits tall—identified by way of a tuft of unburnt hair found under the ash (reminiscent of her visage).
Five talents of sorghum flour.
One lapis lazuli necklace: silver chain, copper wire.
Two cedar carts, spokes recovered (damaged).
Four fingertips on my right hand—I have dressed them with oil & wine but each day the flesh blackens.
Both oxen (leads cut, theft assumed).
All the dried Kitano fruit that’d sustained me since Ahhiwaya.
Fifteen leather belts, scavenged from the dead (boiled).
Two silas of blood: mine, spilled, in the sand.
Your scarab pendant, with the hair inside. Hair assumed lost with it.
Fifteen laden packs but there is only me, now.
A scrounged handful of drachmas (given to a runner); if this reaches Qadesh before the sea peoples crack their scourge upon it, take Nikaure & Shemay & depart for Emar. It is my guiding star.
It is my last redoubt.
Till my clay returns to the riverbed & the ships become clouds above.
You Are Become Death, Destroyer of Self
When the hurricane comes
Sail into the mangroves
Where turkey vultures sleep
Where the bark lattice blocks
All outside seeing/being seen
Where gender dies in mangled roots &
Quiet is the sky in labor
You’ll know only thyself
In the melt-storm of chrysalis
Where the sole survivors are
Bodies like air or water
Your chitinous birthrights’ll
Abrade to carbonate silt
In cloudy mirrors dark
When the hurricane comes
Know that it too leaves bits of
Itself behind & keeps on
Squalls of self reflection. Self
Erosion. Self birth, fluid slick
Gossamer selves chipping
In the mangrove’s second womb.
Waver Prints
Trails becoming rivers
Nature’s debt on loan
All joint custody
Lichens green in the pit of us—
The forest breathes a new name
Hot morning lover’s breath
This winter heat wave
Blind leather boots walked
Spring Summer Fall
In Winter ice uncovers a seam of
Marbled horizons below the frost
People envision snow sheets as plastic
Over boats in the harbor
The trails are veins, all being-in-being
Names meant to pacify a place where
All wood turns to soil
If I were to cut down the oldest pine
Ford it down the stream for dissection
Could I discover its succession of names?
All the ways it’s metamorphosed?
What it means to you, & you before
Beige walls & city parks, a
Trojan War, Phoebe Bridgers’ lament.
Linda’s Garden; Heron’s Hunt
I always thought Herons an Ohio bird
Great blue & harpoon pointed
Bone-black legs rising bowed from mom’s
lily pad
That one time—
She ate all the goldfish &
we thanked her
Under the Little Miami jumping bridge
I swam neath the omen-flock’s roost
Turkey vultures swarming the scent of
dog blood
Finches on mulberried asphalt
Herons still as scalpels of feather flesh
(It was a summer of drugs, a ritual death
A jumping off. All my pretty, dirty friends)
Marrs Spring is a soup bowl of drain water
Struggling towards lakehood
While cars drown its thrush
with their own
A heron strafes undergrads & golf carts
To do me the grace of benevolent disinterest
It holds the guppies wriggling at beak’s end
while it says grace
Before whip-snapping them down
In your garden is a morsel of Eden; being young;
changed & unchanged
Deer pass through fences
From orange beaks
water drips
drips
drips blood into gullets
gore unseen.
Stanislov Petrov
“An investigation would later discover that Soviet satellites had mistaken sunlight reflecting on clouds for intercontinental ballistic missile engines.” 1
Our decade is one of racing history
It nips at my coat tails, death-drunk and
Splayed so wide that even apocalypse
Tastes like too-strong Kool-Aid
Cherry-red, packetized, and I
Think he missed the message—
Mr. CVS Street Preacher
I think he must’ve he says
“The savior comes soon second”
Like he owes him money
Like maybe he hasn’t heard—
Yeah, he been round a couple times
Doting on his dividends
You just missed him
“My cozy armchair [in the bunker] felt like a red-hot frying pan and my legs went limp. I felt like I couldn't even stand up. That's how nervous I was.”
150,000 years ago and with little
Fanfare our mitochondrial eve opened
Her brown eyes somewhere in East Africa
For the first time, and few
Remember her name
In 1939 our mutually assured Adam
Did the same, blue eyes in Vladivostok
A month before his sixth birthday and
600 miles away Hiroshima met that
First pale horse, and he was marked—
His manger our retrospect, and few
Remember his name
“I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it.”
I want to grab the preacher by his
Comfortable longing and shake
The gilded calves from his pockets
I want to atomize them
Fill his arms with tales of the nuclear
Messiah, force our calendars anew
On the eve of September 26th, 1983
In Cold War winter we limped
Through the great filter of
Our age, the burning hunger of
The atom, when Stanislav said:
No.
“That was my job. But they were lucky it was me on shift that night.”
He died of pneumonia
Too good for the cross.
The Bimbofication of Christ
God’s rusted remains cloistered in Barbie dresses
O father who art in hiding, frontal lobe’s dark convent of
Shame. We are those who bodge and tinker with
Bequeathed mythologies, sugar-stirred and Easy Bake Oven’d
We are mindfulness and water fasts, mass produced
Communion wafers spilled for pigeons in the street
Tugging the leash of God at the dog park
O mother, I am only twelve years old
I can search for salvation in pink rubber oceans
I can line my teeth with microplastic veneers
I can cut my fingers open
And show you the blood.
BIO: Oliver Nash is a writer of the weird currently living in Alabama and working on two novels: a southern gothic sendup of swamps and academia, and a New Weird epic about a shapeshifter in a company town turned metropolis. They are a Truman Capote Literary Fellow at the University of Alabama's MFA. They were a 2024 Pushcart Prize Nominee, Judge's Choice for Queer Sci-Fi's 2023 Flash Fiction Contest, and placed as a Finalist or Semi-Finalist in several 2022 chapbook contests. Their work appears in Susurrus, Words&Sports, Queer Sci-Fi, Unspeakable Horror 3, The Offing, Spectrum Literary Journal, and The Santa Ana River Review, among others. They can be found online on Instagram @olivernashwrites, and at olivernashwrites.com