Spotlight on Prime Number Magazine
priPrime Decimals 23.5 is the latest update of Prime Number Magazine, and it boasts flash fiction, poetry, and one short essay. To give you a sample of the greatness you’ll find there (and in the other Decimal updates and the issue, if you haven’t read them yet!) here is “Documentary,” a poem by Len Krisak. Find the other Prime Decimals here.
Documentary
The History Channel, midway through The War
In Color: somewhere in a puke-green South
Pacific, Higgins boats. One heads for shore
Prepared to hang its tongue out of its mouth.
Inside these landing craft (LCVPs),
The contents prime for what they’ve been designed
For, churning in the stomach of the seas.
They cannot see what lies ahead, and blind
As well—unsure of where his charges are—
Waits one who would deliver them: their coxswain.
The hull bites into sand he thinks no bar,
But beach, and, trained to take that for his tocsin,
He tells the bow ramp, “bite down hard.” The first
Few strike out, off and down, and down, and down,
Drinking twelve feet for which they have no thirst.
The packs they’re bound to carry help them drown
Quicker than we can fathom, weaker swimmers
Surrendering to kelp’s enormities.
There is no help there, where Medusa shimmers.
Men end up tangling with anemones.
Depth, where’s thy sting, since all must come to terms,
If not in beds, or borne up by the arms
That love, then borne down, falling short of berms,
And choking on a lethal sea of charms.
