Malachi 4:6

Associate Editor Andy Sia: There is a propulsive quality to Kylan Rice’s poem and lines, as if willing toward the central desire of the poem. As the poem unfolds, it picks up on an array of material textures and particularities—from agriculture, from manufacturing, from engineering—coalescing into a felt impression of place. While the titular Biblical verse is punctuated by a punitive note, Rice’s poem ends not with an image of destruction but of strength and fortitude, enduringness. 

Malachi 4:6

Another word for it, I later learn, the dark cloud surging  
from the field and shitting as it heaves in sudden unity,  
is crèche, the starlings  
synchronized by something less than fear, more tenuous,  
a lower-grade inducement to rise up as one and shape-shift 
through the rain to other rotting acres strewn with grain the blade 
in diesel reaping flung aside, the way the mind  
decides it’s time  
to look away, adore  
some other star, intuiting a rut if I don’t turn  
my heart to you. Eliza 

I decide will be your name, if ever you are born to us,  
while I drive east, alone, toward Mexico,  
MO, where firebricks were made for years, the M-2 K/R  
insulating brick, Centurion with 45% alumina, the Alumex  
and Ozark Dry Press manufactured to withstand the heat  
of kilns and furnaces, refineries, and even blast deflectors at a Cape  
Canaveral launch, moon shot  
blistering the bafflement without reducing it to crushed  
dried flowers in a fist. My heart is made  
of myrrh and straw and mud, a swirling crèche that gathers  
in the winter fields for you, today at least  
a manger-scene of fireclay instead of porcelain. The Joseph 
indestructible. The donkey  
like a lion in the flame.