Harbingers
By CJ Scruton
Once on mushrooms, I convinced everyone tripping around me
to close their eyes, for hours. As our neurons
populated the dark, I took everyone’s hands,
took the spectra of transformed light
as heralding our future, some truth
I don’t remember. This became a big joke later,
at parties, that I of all people would ensnare
those close to me, bare my horns,
my poison skin for them.
He was more bothered though,
and drove me to the river to tell me
if I ever came to lead a cult, a real one,
he’d do everything in his power to stop me. He said this
in the same voice he said he planned
to pull the pews up from the floors of every chapel in the world
by their old steelwire nails, one by one, to refashion them
into bookshelves and sell short stories and bread
from the gutted choir.
The same voice too he said
the boy he first had sex with came back
to his home years later, having lost his family,
his whole family in a car wreck, told him god had come
to show them, what they never should have done.
When I think of him now
I think of his head lowered, speaking quiet from a corner.
I think of him climbing over the boulders
on the shore, down where the breakers could touch him.
I think of the sea legends
that come to land each solstice, a prophecy, calling
that one more must go with them to their watery hell,
to return balance to the earth and waves.
I reach for their webbed hands,
so soft green and porous.
About the Author
CJ Scruton is a trans, non-binary poet from the Lower Mississippi River Valley. They currently live on the Great Lakes, where they teach English and research ghost stories. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, New South, The Journal, Puerto del Sol, Juked, and other publications.
A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers & Artists
Taken from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and the poem “Rooms,” our series title appears in the line: “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.”
All Accounts & Mixture is CutBank’s annual space for queer writers and artists, and we’re incredibly proud and honored to present this year’s bunch of daring, earnest, and straight up wild pieces. Our sincerest thanks to the contributors, as well as to each and every submitter to this year’s feature. Reading your work is a privilege, one we hope to continue undertaking for a long while.