Art: Shore of Fancies by Alexey Adonin

Oklahoma Tankas

#1
Ice storm. Close your eyes:
the wind through the last high leaves
in the trees could be
squirrels scouring nutshells or birds
pacing limbs, warming themselves.

#2
October, summer
still a stifling dinner guest.
At last, first north wind
calls through my window like a
rowdy friend: climb out and play.

#3
Just east, hundred-year
flood made a town an island.
Here, parade canceled,
we gasped with strangers at the
river swallowing its banks.

#4
Vacant lot, morning
cold a fresh linen sheet snapped
over a bed. Wasps,
drowsy in sunlight on an
old black tire, ignore my hand.

Ars Poetica

Much like making a human,
it grows quietly inside you for a time
before its delivery one morning, an odd-shaped,
miniature version of its adult self,
covered in surplus stuff from God knows where,
which you must clean away so it can breathe.

Then it cries to you for its feeding and changing,
sometimes even at two a.m.,
waking you to turn a light on low and play with it,
or just hum sleepily until it rests again.
As long as you do these things, it matures normally, mostly,
but still there are always the quirks making it unlike another—
a birthmark here, a crooked smile there.
A talent for math but not music. A perverse sense of humor.
One minute you are certain of its genius
and the next just as equally sure it is missing a chromosome.

However imperfect, the day comes when
it should go its own way in the world.
You raised it the best you could,
and you’ll both become weird and
reclusive living by yourselves forever.
Yes, you cringe when it spills family secrets in public,
or uses foul language it learned from you.
Every flaw seems the proof of your bad genes and parenting.
Friends and strangers alike may whisper,
“What went on in that home?”
But it has its own life now. You can’t make decisions for it anymore.

And if it knocks at your door some late night,
needing money for a lawyer, say,
you can choose tough love and tell it to lie in the bed it made.
Or you can sit awhile on your front steps in the moonlight,
reassuring it you had run-ins with the law yourself,
even went to jail once. But now you have this house to shelter you,
enough food in the cupboard, a quiet neighborhood,
plus such a clear view of the moon tonight,
so bright and close
you can follow the ragged lip of a crater and imagine
the shape of the meteorite that struck there
millions of years before any of us
or our strange concerns were born down here.

About the author:

Josh Parish. My writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Devil’s Lake, Bricolage, and Tulsa Review. I earned an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Washington, where my collection of short stories, Hardest Weather in the World, won the David Guterson Award. I am an associate professor of English at Tulsa Community College. I belong to the Cherokee tribe.

In the artist’s words:

An abstract-surrealist, artist Alexey Adonin has dedicated over one and a half-decade to convey his vision of hidden otherworldly realms. Alexey believes that art is not only a way to express ourselves but also a unique key to unlocking the knowledge of the hidden world. In his creative endeavor, he tries to apply a more philosophical approach and to hint at the mystical origin of all things. Alexey mostly strives to get away from banal copying of reality, preferring instead to create one of his own—something that somehow reflects his inner world.

www.alexeyadoninart.com
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www.instagram.com/otherworldlydream/