Issue 3.2
Summer 2023
Buffy Shutt
Reflection
I’ve been thinking about silence. Silence in poetry can be a propulsive force, and silence in ourselves can be a brake, an agreement or a solace.
Headless in the Garden
​
The backyard is her body—
a rectangle
dark-bark limbs
torso of weeds, nettles, worms
a helicopter’s insistent thump
drops a net over her.
Her head is not on her shoulders,
in the house, backseat of the car, on its way to work
not sure.
She begs the ants to go
find her head, bring the brainstem.
The ants parading on
her spine refuse.
The sun streams down
nothing to break its fall,
a bee’s cloudy wings
beat inside her.
​
Her fingernails sheets of ice,
platters for her veins,
spleen, lungs, bones, nipples.
​
Grass replaces her.
Dirt.
Her toes fall
to earth
last.
A former marketing executive for movies and documentaries, Buffy lives in Los Angeles writing and collaborating full time. A two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in Lumina, River Heron Review, Dodging the Rain, Split Lip Magazine, Wales Haiku, Reflex Press, and Anthropocene among other places. She has published a novel and co-authored a second novel and a book of non-fiction with her Sarah Lawrence College roommate and still
best friend.
Buffy's Book Recommendations
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Maggie Nelson.
The Supertall, Stefan Al. (A series of essays on the environmental, social, and financial complications of super tall buildings.)
Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, poems by Chessy Normile