Exquisite Duet (formerly Exquisite Quartet) is not so much a composition between two writers, but rather something created within the murky midlands of each author’s mind, yet set off by the same first sentence. Meg Tuite chooses two writers each month and gives them a first sentence to start with and a 250-word limit to finish an exquisitely mesmerizing story or poem. These duet-dueling writers will craft two completely different cosmos that have rotated, pitched, and blasted from the depths of their cerebral cortex to the twitching nerve endings of their digits onto dueling keyboards and separate screens until their sublime duet is prepared to see the light of an audience.
Zero as Air
by Peauladd Huy
Air puddles necessary poison between us
And a host of the unfortunate—
How many they are to a colony
Cluster, isolated:
Impossible natures—
Why rain must come
Falling? The lawn is buried with petals
I am not there to hear. I am late
Again. The moon in its early
Crescent, I stand to see
What they make it seem—
All motion. A dagger of light.
Heading westward, a sail of darkness.
A sea of night leaves unbridled, lifted
The callous air their wounds,
And the fatigue settling in
Giving up like final flood
Surrounds the last
Standing house. Nothing speaks below
A whisper. A warm breath leaving
Dampness in my ear. A cool drift
Blowing off me:
What if none of this happened?
It’s just me (too late or early).
My time is off. Often
I feel I am a breath away reaching
Emptinesses of destinations.
One amongst nobody
I can speak of—a language I’ve kept
(Hearing myself speak) like a number amongst nothing,
Amongst zero: (finds itself nothing) undefined
I am. Zero as air.
The Truth of Them
by Sara Henning
Air puddles necessary poison between us.
Each spring: the Bradford
pear tree’s merciless aroma
of sex. No matter the hardwood
mulch trafficked
for pine straw
or my grandmother’s
shearing, the smell pulses
through the yard
like cats skulking
the trenches of mulch
islands, rubbing their spare
bodies against
sun-raptured bark.
Fifty, testing positive
for chlamydia, she believed
the pearl stain
on her underwear
was some relic of her body
refusing trespass. Grandmother’s
doctor asking,
Is there a chance your
husband’s been unfaithful?—
As if faith had ever been
the fabric swathing
her body to his body.
As if infection came
from a Holiday Inn toilet,
his lie like semen-swill
staining the humid
breach of air and pear
flesh. And when she asks
again, and he heaves
her cage of zebra
finches down the stairs,
the cage’s door, like the truth
of them, unhinges
its gravity lock:
birds mated for life
veering into baluster.
Birds, jeweled
with contusions,
accelerating with the heat.
After he’s gone to bed, she’ll turn
to their map
of scat—stool’s hypsometric
tints, urate’s chalky relief
shading, some histological slice
she can clutch
between tissues like an MRI
atlas. The song, emblazoned,
she grasps for even after
the finches,
lush-stricken, seam
to the contour intervals
of plush carpet. She’ll call them
frost-softened stonefruit
severed from reverence.
She’ll watch them, blooms
muscled off her body, fruiting
in the dusk.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Peauladd Huy was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. With generosity and graciousness of the people at Connotation Press, her first poetry manuscript is due out sometime soon. She lives on the eastern coast of the U.S. with her family.
Sara Henning is the author of A Sweeter Water (Lavender Ink, 2013), as well as two chapbooks, Garden Effigies (Dancing Girl Press, 2015) and To Speak of Dahlias (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, Green Mountains Review, Crab Orchard Review, and RHINO. Winner of the 2015 Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, she is currently a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as Assistant Managing Editor for the South Dakota Review and as associate editor at Sundress Publications.
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