Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

"Sitting like students in an amphitheatre watching, staring through the dark, at the red heartbeat of gore beneath the crosshatching headlamp beams."—Zak Jones

Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of new or gently-used work from an artist who's earned our respect.

There is art that moves us, and there is art that moves with us. This is Fellow Travellers.

---

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

I woke up from a dream in which
I had my arms sweating in rubber, elbow-length gloves
helping to foal a struggling mare,
surrounded by shouting farmworkers and their kids,
telling me to hold the bitch, hold the bitch down, careful! Take care!
And my knees were slipping in the blood-smeared grass
until the farmhands moved off a-ways there, and in their place were
all the loves of my life sitting on stacked skids
like students in an amphitheatre watching,
staring through the dark,
at the red heartbeat of gore beneath the crosshatching headlamp beams,
humming, maybe praying, maybe hymning.

And these sheets of ours in the streetlamped room, 4am,
scared me, stained now with slow-cooling blood.
And I panicked, held my cheek to your mouth and touched your stomach,
calmed myself and breathed-in the nauseating quiet,
feeling like I’d just pulled myself out of a cold,
cold lake where I shouldn’t have been swimming.

I noted that in the dream I could not hear the screams or huffs
of the horse, but had watched the steam from the breach
come up off her pinkened hair. I’d watched it mingle with the smoke of my own breath
suspended in the lit-up black of the thick mountain air.

Grey-blood fingerprints on this page of my little dream notebook.
Something you can’t write.

And now the gentle waking of our house.
The trying not to worry, but the coffee
hurried to be made and the morning news impatiently played,
the unfinished hour of getting ready, the in-and out shower,
and the too-fast taxicab ride to the University hospital.
And it feels strangely lonely, just the two of us,
lonely having been only partially blessed.

       Lonely the nightmares, lonely the future—
       Lonely the could-bes, lonely the wanting—
       Lonely the worrying, lonely the miracle—
       Lonely the pain for you, lonely the stress—
       Lonely the soaked white linen sheets,
       Lonely that ruined white linen summer dress.

---

ZAK JONES is the author of the forthcoming novel, *Fancy Gap* (Hamish Hamilton, 2026). His writing has won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and the Norma Epstein National Award. He also published *By Hanlan's Point I Sat Down and Watched* as a limited edition zine with Discordia Review Press earlier this year. Zak lives in Toronto.

You can preorder the handsome bastard’s novel here. If you’d like to request more foot pics like the one below, visit his Fansly (zakjones.ca).

Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

RELATED