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Avalon
  • Home
  • Spring 2025
    • Poetry
      • A Soulmate
      • All the Globe's a Stage
      • At The Water's Edge
      • Big Sisters
      • Cotton-Stuffed Heart
      • Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah
      • Foolish Lemons
      • I Know Icarus
      • nightstand as self-portrait
      • one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight days
      • Pasiphaë
      • Poem for a Stranger
      • Pilot of the Hollow Vessel
      • Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold
      • Sanctuary
      • The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack
      • Year of the Frog
      • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
      • Your Haiku
    • Fiction & Plays
      • Calculated Sympathy
      • Indigo
      • Maurice
      • The Cradle
      • The Hollow Room
    • Visual Art
      • A Farmer in Vinales Cuba
      • A Tobacco Farmer in Viñales, Cuba
      • Thank you, please come again
      • Self Reflective Self Portrait 5
    • Contributors
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        • At The Water's Edge
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        • Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah
        • Foolish Lemons
        • I Know Icarus
        • nightstand as self-portrait
        • one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight days
        • Pasiphaë
        • Poem for a Stranger
        • Pilot of the Hollow Vessel
        • Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold
        • Sanctuary
        • The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack
        • Year of the Frog
        • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
        • Your Haiku
      • Fiction & Plays
        • Calculated Sympathy
        • Indigo
        • Maurice
        • The Cradle
        • The Hollow Room
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        • A Tobacco Farmer in Viñales, Cuba
        • Thank you, please come again
        • Self Reflective Self Portrait 5
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        • Poetry
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        • Visual Art
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 Spring 2025     Poetry 

Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah

Mitchell Bauer

His parents burned to death. They didn’t suffocate, smothered between the fumes of the ignited ceiling, and walls, and boiling nylon carpet. They weren’t crushed under a collapsed beam. His parents burned to death.


And maybe it was seeing their forearms stripped of flesh like a cleaned up chicken wing, or maybe it was that the crackling fire sounded as teeth and tongue and saliva smacking around food, or maybe it was the smell of skin and fat and meat cooking in the oven the fire made of his family’s home, but he won’t eat, and he hates to watch or hear us eat. He will only take his food cold and through a straw.


He wakes abruptly from his nightmare on the little red stool, the grain of the table imprinted on his young face. He breathes hard, so I give him his motorcycle to calm him down. He picks it up and rolls it around. He relaxes, I think, but I see a heavy weight under his eyes, something tattooed deeper, more indelibly, than the grain’s imprint.


He’s had these dreams about the Earth being eaten. He says he can hear some colossal thing taking bites out of the other side of the world, like an apple made of stones and waves and people. He says he doesn’t know how many bites it’s taken, but he knows his time to be eaten is coming soon. He says the crunching in his head has gotten so loud it wakes him like the saws used to in Summer.


He says, “I’ll never eat again in my life,” and rides his toy motorcycle along the grain of the table, toward the ever-bending end of the wooden road ahead.

A Soulmate

All the Globe's a Stage

At The Water's Edge

Big Sisters

Cotton-Stuffed Heart

Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah

Foolish Lemons

I Know Icarus

nightstand as self-portrait

one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight days

Pasiphaë

Poem for a Stranger

Pilot of the Hollow Vessel

Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold

Sanctuary

The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack

Year of the Frog

you think it's easy opening doors in january?

Your Haiku

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