MADELINE ROSALES

Madeline Rosales, a 2025 Subnivean Awards finalist, has publications with Onyx Publications, Querencia Press, and Wingless Dreamer. Her work has been recognized by Pigeon Pages, Literature Across Horizons, and Calyx Press. Find her here: madelinerosales.weebly.com

AND GOD STEPS AWAY

Be God. Step way back for a second. Imagine this folded earth as bed sheets dropped in heaps onto the floor. Now stick a steep winter light off to the east. Call this a landscape. Tall shadows form across the peaks and troughs. Look closer— hard mineral waters flow across rocks and roots, through duff and brambles. Watch all the forks of the rivers, sloughs, and creeks empty in the bay, and the bay into the ocean whose gray voice all things must answer to. Line the coastline with sandstone, orange clay that breaks shovel handles, gnarled shore pines. At the back of it all, thousands upon thousands of Douglas firs moan in the wind. Let the fog burn off in the morning. Add all the shadows to the trees. Let moss choke the north side of all things. Fill it with Indians, deer, and elk. Bear and salmon. Kill most of them. Call the landscape the southern Oregon coast and watch the industrialists stride forth across the earth. Come rail trestles and tunnels. Come mills and shipyards. Mine coal, fill in the marshes, dredge shipping channels, chase the steelhead upriver. Listen to the rain and sand divide and multiply in the moving parts of everything here. Reduction gears, shoulder sockets, steam donkeys. Call this The World’s Largest Lumber Port then strip the land so bare of trees that gunshots can be heard from one end of the county to the other. Watch the waterfront close down one mill at a time. Suspend the rail service. Cook some crystal. Tumble agates until they shine like salamander eyes and try selling them at the gun and gem show. Breed dogs. Sell puppies from a laundry basket near the cart return in the K-Mart parking lot. Where folks had bent to the toil of their industry, now stand patches of long, tough grass pushing through cement footprints that once shouldered buildings the size of trans-Pacific container ships. The docks sag under their own weight like a team of swayback horses on the edge of some dream the town is having about itself. The pilings bow their heads and slip into the waters like harbor seals. Water tables rise and fall through the almanacs. We get blood moons and snow moons and black moons, and everyone knows the best place to see them. Build a mile-long steel bridge over the bay. Connect the North Spit to the North Bend. Paint it green. Admire its Gothic arches rising from the bedrock beneath the water. Admire its beauty comparable to the twisting pines we capsized to build its steady arms. God doesn’t even need to look through someone’s living room window at night to fuel His particular brand of separation from the world. He doesn’t need an excuse to wander off with a shotgun and no clothes on. He shrinks and hops right into someone’s blood and swims to the spawning waters of the human heart and starts a little fire in one of the rooms there, stomps His foot and rocks in place like a mad banjo player hitting the high-lonesome.

DECONSTRUCTING A BLUEPRINT FOR ENEMIES TO LOVERS

& a house boned by fire says: we aren't

supposed to be here. today, I screw you

into a bathroom light, pressing your palms

on mine to show you the weathered threads of

my inheritance, homegrown fields where I scavenge

for bruises & papercut wounds. c mere,

you say. give it to me heavy-handed,

give it ripe. I'd like to think that hurt feeds

off loving, that my mother's century-egg soup

hasn't soured itself out another face of me

you'll never consume. we've come

here too many times to stitch reopened

wounds, sweat dressing our skin like gilded

bayonets. today, I'll be the cowherd if

you are the hunter, both of us skinned

into roles past recognition. neither of us

wants to grow into prey: distant, afraid, dead

& behind us. its eyes braised with a life long

enough to know regret, but too short to tender

you within it. today, you are a country I'll never visit,

a homeland that fractured itself beyond

my present tense. I hope you'll see this before

I go: how I unhinged your jaw for safekeeping.

how arms burn into daggers by the light.

how these walls have ruined us.

SEVEN

on the seventh day God rested

and as He slept His subjectivity splintered

skin cracking like cicada husk to powder

subdividing like cells like blistering mitosis

each cell a living god

and the breath on the water cast the seeds

like mustard like figs like twists of sycamore

spiraling

and the God-spore rooted where it landed

across the universe like yeasting dust

in the foundations and the high places

upon the rock amid the bushes

in the deep soil and the shallow

and became life

abundant and abounding

and so God woke to regard Himself

male and female created

all sex and neither

peering out of so many eyes

beneath so many secret crowns

and the politic angels fell lamenting

when they saw the empty throne

and cast at its foot their broken diadems

heaped atop scepters of iron and gold

long laid by

for of regal scepter there was no need

and god was in all

YELLOW MARROW, SQUARES OF NECTAR SUGAR

1)  the poem begins with wasps, and it will begin again, and again: entranced by the aroma of the blooming fig trees, they continue an endless tradition of sacrifice like it was interwoven into their purpose. they crawl into an opening, determined to usher in a new generation, nature judging their innate sensibilities as they move inward, bruising the fruit. meanwhile, nutrients and groundwater pierce through xylem, and burrow into the stems. there is no air inside: trapped and swallowed by the fig, the wasps never break out of the pulp, drowning inside. summer swings over, and the pollinated flower bulbs swell into a seed-filled sac, sunlight begging for the ripeness to burst, erasing the memory of what once was inside.

2)  you say you remember what it feels like to be engulfed, to have your body broken down into the beginning of what we all came from, layers of purple skin caving in. offer your body like fruit, and I’ll cradle myself into wine. you find yourself learning how fragile cartilage is—how it moves and breaks, loses the salve to snap. When the sharpness of wings and antennae mellows, and when the fleshy cuticles no longer protrude, mispronounce the gifts you've been offered.

3)  twist and pull at the fruit and it will come falling into your hand, an invisible corpse bending into something sweeter: to become something that is not yourself, yet to bear a vast reflection in its existence. in gusts of olive winds, you’ll learn how to fixate, slice your teeth into a fibrous core, and spit out the seeds from your lips to taste honey. when you question temporality, I’ll answer that you never died because you lived, even if there is no trace left of it here.

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