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  • Offering: Construction, and: Offering: Tactile
  • Ashley E. Booth (bio)

Offering: Construction

And somewhere a man gets blackout drunk in a bar in a tiny town in one of the many flat states. He will argue with the bartender over the quality and type of wood his drink sits on. There will not be a clear winner. He knows if he could have gotten just a quarter inch closer the story would have been different. Instead he navigates his way home. He will reduce you to your essential parts. Grain of hair like oak, limbs piled to construct hash marks or not a metronome, but the shortest distance of its arc. Its line. [End Page 15]

Offering: Tactile

And somewhere, it's got to mean something. Cleaning fragments of tobacco. The blind cat immediately navigating new territory. How the weather keeps changing, a change of worlds you were, and you will be each one, and others. Like a scaffold. Or a body. Or a scaffold of a body. A dress frame with precise dimensions. To the man who soldered each joint the sound was simply the distant cry of an unknown bird or his own imagining of two bodies wrestling, wishing he was one, or both. [End Page 16]

Ashley E. Booth

Ashley E. Booth is currently in the Library and Information Science program at University of Illinois. She received her MFA at the University of Illinois in 2011. Her work has been published in Mid-American Review, and right now, she's probably drinking a glass of whiskey.

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