Red Peter

The End

2009-07-24T06:27:00.005+01:00

Red Peter lasted a year with 59 posts but, I'm sorry to say, I no longer have the time to continue reading submissions. My thanks to everyone who contributed. My parting note is to all would-be novelists, short-story writers, & poets (particularly the poets) - read what you've written, edit it, spell check it, look online for answers to those pesky grammar & punctuation questions, put away what you have written, think about it, come back to it &, if you really feel it's worth publishing, send it off to the many excellent literary 'zines & websites. Don't just write & press send. The site will stay live for as long as it does. Cheers.

Seven Poems - David McLean

2009-06-20T09:45:00.004+01:00

time the blind eye

time the blind eye of a snake

spits on us venom

for vermin

we fall like leaves

leaving seasons

frothing satiety

nothing coming

is dust is

good

night is a liar

night the inarticulate liar gesticulates

mainly, it is not inside me

like time is like years

hours minutes

and nothing in between

the index is definitive

this, night the liar

listen

years missing

suicide accumulates

suicide accumulates in everyone

the venomous affection of mothers

and their winsome incestuous

predilections

like memory buggering

nothing. to love no one

like we don't leaves nightmares

homeless as hope

suicide she remembers its “no”

fingers fragile as tomorrow

that might not be, temporary,

trembling, she raises them to lips

that kiss the wind which needs nothing,

not even a child to die that kisses it

tonight, fingers fragile as tomorrow

sings, not mine

an old lady carries water

an old lady carries water

because the landscape is broken

monochrome, there are thousands of her

here, probably more

an old lady carries water she is young

today, the landscape is at war

we are begotten

we are begotten because some meat

rubbed meat to be meat forever

as if approximate replication might be

eternity

and we are devils who earned this death

forever. there were distances

and absences and the crippling wait

of the nipple

weighting for a baby's shoulders

which were slenderer and smaller

then, now we are devils

and absences

which means men

our own meat meant -

whores again

this life is a strip of fucking flesh

that bleeds and sweats

the brutal belly of the beast

soft white nights

tiny essence of saliva

and time, staked

between birth

from filth like vermin

and the waiting

meat rack grave

memory, man

slipping through cracks,

the dreaming meat

all these absences

the murderer,

the lack

Four Poems - Phylinda Moore

2009-06-12T04:50:00.007+01:00

Amyloid and Neurofibrillary Plaque

They thought Rita Hayworth dwelt in the stages of alcohol abuse
before they realized Alzheimer’s

Lousy to think of all that beauty– the song and dance of her–
finishing a tangle of nerves.

And what about you dad? Your rough hands that turn smooth wood bowls, fish puzzles, ink pens, birdhouses, rings, necklaces, and Model-T Fords–
all this will shrink from your limbs,
draw backward as the brain shrivels.

Never mind the forgetfulness, it’s nothing new–
what about the limpness of your hands?

There is no curative in this sentence,
but what about the daughter for whom your diagnosis
means explanation?

Forgetting the Life Domain

1.
if the brain is a computer,
and each function powers off
as a program shuts down,
slowly as with a virus, erasures,
or a damaged motherboard

2.
if the trajectory of life is as a highway
running across lanes, choosing directions,
dodging cars, spinning off exits-
sliding from one concrete spider
to another

3.
if mechanical renderings
factor down life as
wet snow on a windshield,
melt memories into winter.

4.
if memory is like filling a waffle with syrup
and Alzheimer's eats the waffle,
breaks the grid and gradually leaks the cells
before they disappear

then

Analgesic

I carry pain pills in my purse
they’re in the cabinet too.
I’ve branched out
different pills for different pain
one temporary cure

Variation

impossible to represent in thought that which is not space-occupying,
for that would be equivalent to thinking that nothing had become or was something,
that emptiness had personality,
that space itself was more than space
–Duncan MacDougall, M.D. 1907

Sometimes I slide madly to silent white noise
cognitive lapses– wearing down, out, and etc.
my nurse said,
None of my other patients self-treat. What will we do with you?
I wonder the same

of this latent condition. The whole family could use a check as
we rarely meet clear headed.
Symptoms finger many places. Longstanding

fragmented consciousness takes another slip
we both looked out the window and saw it pouring.
Less then a minute later, no rain.
We walked to the car together.
The dream shed its gossamer cover in a wilt

of every moment experience.
Rage shapes water’s properties– wells up
another’s slamming hands on a table, someone hits the floor with fists
canyon carved aftermath. I was dying

for someone to tell me something
like black and white movie banter
where champagne casts faultless light
a dream’s perfect recounting

in restful, disorienting, sepulchral quiet
I practiced, tried not to wet orchids or their leaves
watched the peony, too heavy for its bloom,
fall into itself like some high school tragedies I used to know,

heap lost petals on the ground.
We’re unaware how easily we carry our own bodies.

I must understand this melancholy, lingering infection
of other life thoughts
following sun in and out of clouds
bitter edge taste
leaves little energy to climb trenches, fill them, or grow grass along scars.
I need the surreal moment when the world is golden gauze.

I hope quiet days strung out like pebbles
plant memory a delicate perfume
back from the figurative tower
outside, or next to the world.

Interloper - Anji Reyner

2009-06-05T04:52:00.003+01:00

Kathleen is stuck in a half-circle of purple. Something she can see the edges of unseen by others. It's not a constantly oozing grape always staining her shirt. More like half of an invisible (purple) umbrella. An umbrella that envelops. The whee-woo birds are back for the season. She does her laundry at the mixed-use strip center. The bathroom there is unisex but she saw both sexes enter at the same time. She researched her condition online, finding the video game hints and costume directions unhelpful. She wants the radio to stop talking. What does she do all day? Ever since she lost the need for a job, she does nothing. Although, it's organized. In the mornings, she does nothing involving leaving the flat. In the evenings, she does nothing related to staying in the flat. She returns at 9 PM. Her brother always arrives in his motorhome and he always sleeps on an air mattress in her dining room. Some mornings, she can't get her socks open. Effort expended in the stretching. So she wears open-air sandals. Or goes without. Last week, her brother was stopped for driving his motorhome drunk. Kathleen was on the pull-out couch at the time. After he was arrested, she had to drive the home to her place. She left it a little bit on the lawn but not on the sprinkler heads. On that day, the half-circle was overhead. Whee-woo. Some days it is like an umbrella but today it's a mezzaluna, the sharp half embedded in her. It's useful in some ways, keeping her at arm's-length from doorways, vehicles, and delivery men. Other times it accommodates. There are no handles to be drug around by. On days like this one, it's best not to visit the glass sculpture garden. All those spirals fused to a pole. How does the (invisible) half-circle of purple decide to position itself? Kathleen looks for a pattern and settles on log cabin. Look at the way the snow is falling on TV. The best way to live in a big city with jobs and furniture of the highest quality. Her windows are fogged because there is no way to get in between the glass. She doesn't have a special relationship to the color purple. Kathleen has always favored green. It would make more sense to be stuck in a half-circle of green. Whee-woo. Whenever she tries to associate the color, she thinks of the dinosaur first. Dino, not Barney. On occasion she tries to dress like Wilma but fur is expensive. And hot. Just when it seemed liked nothing was going to happen, her brother calls from jail. Of course he wants a ride. Something is going on with Dr. Pepper. A pine squirrel sits on her building's front porch as she pulls away. On the porch she pulls up to next, a fox squirrel. The pine squirrel being native in this case. She stops at the event center. How many coats can a coat-check check? Soon her tiny orchids are spotted as her brother waits. Aficionados approach. The last lady pushes Kathleen into a dormant paper-mâché volcano and the mezzaluna falls down.

Deserted - James White

2009-05-26T09:10:00.002+01:00

It had been many years since I last took in the fresh, clean air and rolling, green landscape of my boyhood home. The desert was all too different, but it's never-ending sands and sky, mysterious and silent, intoxicated me from the moment I arrived. The peoples we were charged to subjugate seemed too benign for an enemy and, among the men of the regiment, there was simply no will behind our mission. Penned in like livestock, we waited behind the walls for an attack that was never coming and it was then under the cruel sun's mean heat that I determined to make a change.

Two weeks later, when my preparations were complete, I ran off into the night. Through the blackness, I stumbled into a rocky crevice, falling more than thirty feet, losing most of my meager supplies, including my rifle, and two canteens of water. My heart sank ever deeper when I realized my leg was badly cut and my compass had been smashed to pieces. I picked myself up and started out into the desert under the cover of the rapidly passing night and by daylight, I made it to outskirts of Ahura Wadi. It was fairly obvious from my torn and frayed uniform I was a deserter, but from which army was the question. My mind was uneasy; It had been more than a day since I'd last eaten and nearly all my water was gone. I forced a jagged stick into the sand and lay down in the shade of my outstretched coat to wait out the day, dozing and dreaming while both sleeping and awake. Anguish and calamity colluded with the blinding sun, magnifying my worries while a squawking vulture patrolled the white sky above me.

Hours later, long after I sweat my last drop, I saw a dark rider on the horizon making a steady approach. When he was close enough for me to see him better, I recognized his robes' pattern and reached for my pistol. When he arrived, the man dismounted and we exchanged pleasantries from a distance. He noticed my wound and in a matter of minutes had a small fire going for tea. He told me he was going east; a two days journey. From there, he said the coast was just another day's walk. I drank the tea and he offered me roasted goat meat which he produced from a leather pouch tied to his saddle. The man said soldiers were watering at Ahura Wadi before he welcomed me to join him—volunteering, in essence, to be my guide. Sadly, I could see no alternative, only his shifting eyes upon me, darting to and fro. With a weary heart and smashed leg, I reluctantly agreed.

At sunset we started off into the abyss. A soft coat of moonlight blurred the emptiness, leaving me disoriented and confused, which is why I failed to protest when we started heading west. I thought I'd try to make the best of it. During our journey through the night, I told my guide how I admired his people and he expounded on the various cultures and practices of the desert peoples, which sadly, after two years in Deluuf, I had only a superficial knowledge.

An hour before sunrise we reached a camp situated on a majestic plateau overlooking the sleeping desert. Before I knew next, my guide was speaking in a tongue I had never heard with some of the men from the camp. Moments later, I was brought to a lavish tent with thick rugs and several burning lamps. I sat down on the thick pillows when a veiled woman in black entered the tent and extinguished the lamps before she slipped back out. Unsuspecting and exhausted, as day's early light crept up over the horizon, I fell asleep, beaten from a hard night of travel.

When I opened my eyes blood surged through me in shock when I realized I was shackled and naked. Minutes after, a large bald man entered the tent and violently pulled me outside. A crowd was gathered and among them, I recognized my guide, smiling and laughing like all the others. Suddenly, I felt a crash upon my head and when I looked up, I saw three men, all of them massive in stature, hitting me with sticks. Shock gave way to pain. Several minutes into the beating, I lost consciousness of the jubilant crowd, and from then on, all I could see and hear were the terrible faces, gritted and mean, dispensing gruff laughter as they delivered the savage blows that ripped my flesh and broke my bones.

I don't know how many times this happened before I realized the beatings were administered at two points each day—just after sunrise and then after sunset. In between, an inner horror kept me company as I lay in the filthy mud where they chained me, a naked bloody pulp—shaking with fear of the next vicious session. Periodically, little boys came by to spit and urinate on me. Others kicked my face until an adult chased them away. All the while, I cowered as the sun took its course across the bitter, blank sky and when night time arrived, so did my torturers. By firelight the three men beat me once again before a gleeful crowd. In time, I lost them in this unrelenting haze of violence and drifted elsewhere on my own. Dripping blood, pouring out of my smashed head, shaded me from their mocking glare but unfortunately, like all the other times, I could hear their demented laughter as they bear down upon me with each barbaric blow. Like each savage session, it went as far as it could possibly go.

For seven days the beatings continued, when, on the eighth day, early into my morning beating, I showed signs of being out of my head that they ceased. Like every other beating, people were gathered and the bald man pulled me before them, but unlike before, no terror showed on my face and my body failed to tremble in fear. Instead, I laughed at them all and danced around, flailing my shattered, bloody limbs wildly with glee. A different man then pulled the chain round my neck and dragged me to a tent near a raging pit of fire. Methodically, he cut and shaped a sheet of tin to cover my head and body, ending just above my knees. The man cut out two holes for my arms before he fitted me tightly inside. Then he hammered the sheeting closed all around. Next, he cut a thin rectangle, less then an inch in width, and two in length for my eyes before sealing the top with another small sheet, which again, he hammered into place. When he was finished, I was completely encased inside the tin cylinder, locked inside by my own mangled arms.

Without warning or word, I was pushed to the ground and when I finally got up, I was knocked down again. Many people were shouting and pointing and when I turned my body to see what they were motioning at, I saw the vast, empty desert at the bottom of the steep, rocky hill. I struggled to get up on my feet and when I finally did, I lurched forward slowly while the people jeered and spat on me. I began wobbling as I tried to maintain my balance before I was pushed, sending me rolling and sliding down the steep, dusty hill. When I hit the bottom my arm must have broke because I couldn't use it to brace myself as I struggled to get up. Suddenly, a gunshot rang out and through the tiny hole for my eyes, I could hear the muffled whizz of a bullet fly past me. A whole new terror gripped me as I got up on my feet and shuffled along the sand as fast as my stunted steps I could go. I was sure another bullet was coming and when it's report rang out, I braced myself for the impact but when it failed to make contact I thought I migt have a chance. I groped my way deeper into the unforgiving landscape sweating the very last drops of life my captors left in my dried, limp veins. Brightness became dark, then brilliant and bold. With all I had left, I continued to trek, with no idea where I was heading. Nearly lifeless, it was fear alone that propelled me along the hot rocks and sand. My mind was racing as I went, running through all the horrible possibilities that surely lay ahead and my heart beat even faster when I thought I heard someone approaching from behind. I turned to look all around me but no one was there. The camp was now far off behind me and I felt some slight satisfaction to see I'd gotten this far. I positioned myself forward and continued to stagger ahead into the choking heat, walking for hours before I felt myself hit the ground. Thirsty, beaten and weak, I was unable to sit up and floundered uselessly, spending the last of my limited energy. I could feel my life slipping away and fought to keep my eyes open but darkness quickly engulfed me and before the sun went down, I was dead.

Ten Poems - RC Miller

2009-05-07T12:06:00.004+01:00

Alienation

Don't move the bodies browning together, grounded
And round.
Sweet onions minced in a big pot, the aftereffect of their mixture
Hides behind molasses real crummy.
And my perfect monster is 20 noodles sticking together, shredded
When finished.
I add water, spreading a few swoons revealed as coiled bargains.
Old snow showers a land of twins.
O I've got ghosts, I say anything
They require.
A part of me thinks that chicken has a fantastic rack.
I return to the oven.
Wind noodles my chore.
The bodies remove themselves.
Peace and liberty breast side up, a recipe from which
The drizzle follows.
Without you, I count its shards.

Beaver

Almost impossible to have a squirt.
My cut's on the beach, my disbelief a brand-name.
Burrito then enchilada, eight beers later I'm a stingray
I wish to blow.
The next wave of graves arrives sooner than I finish.
For them there's plenty of mothers blessed, and plenty
More sure weep after drinking.
All of us hear the speeches coming from the monitors.
Many aircrashes are proving survivable.
Lunatic oceans for centuries, I part the surf
That bites.
It's horrifying and living.
Every drip dangles war.

The Cause of Birth Is The Will To Be Born

Pets ahoy!
My poison continues my soul
Patiently waiting a week before its savoring.
The clown in there is a testicle times twelve.
My testicles bump accidentally and get zipped up
While I stand in line to buy our season tickets.
Them apples been begging me to sneak sponges there
Every New Year's.
Somebody chases us out.
The clones make love and sex seem dutiful.
Their names are on the bill.
The next time I live in New York
I'm renting a car and staying at a hotel.
Our clones watch everything to try so I
Stew them a sanity downsized.
The doors do not hold.
The doors do not.
Hold not, the doors do not.
The not do the doors hold.
And next time I live in a small town
I'm renting a small town mentality.
City gals in tight gray jeans watch my testicles jump.
They work hard and attend all the Super Bowl games.
A preparation for what evacuates often,
I bill everything I try.
On this decal
Is a sanity I do not hold.
Compartment brush of low tolerance.
About a half an ounce finishes the savoring.
I have two beers and accidentally zip up my testicles.
A lunch from this decal evacuates often.
Small towns in tight gray jeans clone every soul continuing.
Love and sex seem as dutiful as begging for the Super Bowl.
We poison experiences of objects that fact check.
Consciousness identifies itself with its embryo.
The fact that people die causes people in this world.
The cause of birth is the will to be born.
Total hours worked carry over from one calendar year to the next
For purposes of calculating
Youth during a meal or rest break.
I shoot whiskey like my body bag do
And experience its primal cleansing.
I talked this morning already.
I omit what the ribbons excuse.
Sleeves and samples explain to me
Strawberry therapy
Protected from an experience of God.

Click, Swipe, Win, Die

A heavy smoker with a broken ticker
Cradles his corpse online.
Automatically attracted, the battlefields roast up
Hippos and gorillas.
Withholding death, only the ground occupies.
Numbness changes little.

Ice drifts step back from
The trains falling asleep, farting.
Twenty more wombs to go, so
Repeat my characters, my clams
And kings.

Their meat sticks sprout, and I’m moving
And feeling weird, like a neck
Purchasing a toad, like
The batteries
Buzzing in a wolf.

My image is how I think.
This image is yours to click.
I’m out collecting firewood for guns
I cannot swipe.
There’s dairy flashed under doors
High in the air, winning.

Nuts For Sale

I must learn my murderer's song.
I must learn
Of things having fates acting against their shape.
And I declare my soul by referring to words
That do not ramble.
An intuition in the sun
Dilates as if its objects spurn their space.
For every one of my murderer's yawns,
I'm certain there's a whore who will yawn for me
As long
As I pay her flight over.
And souls act against my fate, becoming less
Mojito after dribbling on mosaics of dilated mosquito.
Intuitive curs
Unload my body, the nuts
Stay pale and shapely like suns.
Cop whistles in the rubble provide them
Great debates.
I must learn something impossible.

Pond

This ugliness rhymes with gave, physically speaking.
Advertising 30 seconds of free sex, I shit
And sell off the trans fat.
Where are these vices deduced from?
I think I'm gonna peak, come on, you
Gotta irrigate the fiends, raise
The dikes and what remains will tax
My rabbit skin and steep tasty stews
While inventoried.
It's like the way I make your eyes stalk multiplexes.
And as fish grow in the pond
We'll eat their buns too.

Try It Diet

Minds and mental things don't exist.
Only physical things exist and it doesn't matter.
Immediate knowledge is a truth.
It follows in harmony with the victorious stun.
Once we come near contact we are gone.
Death purifies the fleeting pleasures of the world.
In blotches I am teased, the fruit
Goes bad and sticks to my fly.
Teens quickly dispose of my baby, a sacrifice
To keep motion orderly.
I name this bastard art.
My nature includes everything except for souls.
The ground of existence is the self becoming.
A wound full of mirrors and running water.
The mind includes everything except its nature.
Only mental things dismiss the harmonious pleasures
Of the world.
Death comes immediately and hardly matters.

Don't Know Mind

Shadows of other planets
Hunt for worlds like mine.
The sky gets ahead of me no differently
Than what the stars say.

I gun myself down to feel my insides work, or
Maybe to prove what's temporary
In the ridicule
That takes its pants off and chews.

I will suffer on this tray.
I will suffer through life's stay.
I will suffer as if I'm a gay
Dressed up like some moldy paint thinner huffer.

Shadows wander without panic, hunting
For hopes and cares to buffer.
When I say "stars" my pants come off,
Lacking awareness of any project.

Famous Judgement

My stomach's sure a wreck these days.
I can hardly digest any substance.
Maybe it's nerves, maybe it's the answer, or maybe
I'm half God cancer.

Wandering the bramble, petrified as shit to stop reading looks,
I concentrate instead on working life without lice.
Sea turtles I meet off the coast of Kauai
Freshen my essence despite its novelty.

A new measurement of the individual is freed to chase
Puny suits pleasuring those who wail in waste.
Steamed cauliflower for dinner, my cremated tastes wither,
Yet come morning, meatier lies shall wilt this glitter.

It's Nothing

We are born flukes to become
A sanctity due, a sentiment of grace,
The persona less aware and energy.

Alive in such a dark world.
We suppose to sturdy it.
A world of such glory, the
Glorious world in one wandering.
That is all said lightly.
This must be my end alive.

A boring couple of days.
An active life is boring.
My infant daughter decapitates an air-bag
While simultaneously
A young boy mauls a mountain lion.
What will someday come rather than what now was.

I shoot the father.
I have done this before.
I am seen through the window,
I am living in his house again.
This must be a judgment.
I don't know what I'm talking about.

I can't sell the difference
Between my clothes, the megabyte, the tabloids, and my spite.
I'm out to smoke a cigarette,
Because if this internal absence continues
It might be necessary to master your language,
And I shouldn't swear by that.

I am seen through windows.
I am done judging you.
I let the night grin.

And I am sober and then the road.
Ahead, a stable of dogs and old yelling yellows.
Comic books of cross-bone spawn unfold around me.
The fathers are dead.
It's boring here.

I step in all the houses I've visited before.
I avoid all the women I've slipped inside before.
I heard the others behind me.
Along the way comes something after.

Rough neck red neck cute suck neck suck
Face dick cute suck dick fuck red dick rough fuck,
To bed junk!
You pray much too often for me.
Now was what will come again rather than what wills.

Bridge - Spencer Dew

2009-04-29T21:40:00.003+01:00

Over the weekend, up on the campus of the university, there was a seminar on writing and death, and because two of the speakers were celebrities in certain circles, and because they both knew and respected my mother’s work, and because the university intended it, in a way, to be a memorial, a tribute to my father and his years there as a professor, I went to both keynotes and the wine receptions after them, Friday’s on how language, by communicating only the idea of something, negates, simultaneously, the reality of things, Saturday’s on how narrative, no matter how nihilistic or negative, by its very existence testifies against itself, counter, as the speaker said, citing his own example, suicide.

All the bars of Knoxville were full of girls who were too young but pretending not to be. I don’t know where liability lies in such a case, but her legal identification said one thing and everything about her body and how it responded said something else.

“You have so many books,” she said, in the morning, like it was a question, walking around in her underwear, touching too many of my father’s things – his walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves, his pipe rack, his collection of model bridges.

“That’s the Fremont Bridge,” I said. “Be careful. It’s actually two pieces.”

She was tinkering with it and the locking mechanism that kept the two halves of the drawbridge together opened. Half fell to the floor. She started apologizing like crazy, and I examined the piece, still together but quite broken, various slats now leaning, the whole structure jiggly.

“I just have a thing for bridges,” I heard myself say. “It’s a dumb hobby.” I pulled her toward the bed, hating myself for bringing her there.

“Some famous professor makes bridge models. There was something in the campus paper.”

I was trying to concentrate only on her body, and I was failing. She tasted stale, and I was getting angrier at myself and at her and at him and his stupid life, his stupid theories and books, so smugly isolated, so far away from and unconcerned with what had, at least for a few years there, been his family.

“I mean, whatever helps you relax, right?” she said. “It’s good to have hobbies?”

I lowered myself on her, pushed a hand up over her chest, kneading, hard, then wedging two fingers into her mouth, where she sucked them, moaning, pushing her pelvis up against my face. I sunk my tongue into her, thinking, just shut up, shut up, and then straining to think about anything else, anything other than him and his hurtful life, anything other than all those years without him or the sound of my mother’s voice over the telephone when she told me the news.

“That’s so good,” she said. “That’s perfect.”

Sure, I thought. Sure.

Murdering Our Darlings - Ethel Rohan

2009-04-21T08:31:00.003+01:00

Stop. No running. Stick your bottom to the seat. Sit straight. Pay attention. Keep your hands to yourself. Stop scratching. Don’t pick your nose. Wash your face. Fix your hair. Clean your ears. When’s the last time you brushed your teeth? You stink. Keep that for the bathroom. Look at that underwear, disgusting.

Move along. Don’t look at me with that face. Watch your tone. Be quiet. Speak up. Why can’t you listen? What did you say? Who asked you? What are you listening at? Don’t say that. Stop sneaking around. Get in. Get out. Go outside. Get up. Get into bed. Up to your room. No dinner. Clear your plate. Stop stuffing your face. Look at that stomach. Could you get any more into you? Look at those teeth. Smile properly. Wipe that smirk off your face. Where are your manners? If you’d brains you’d be dangerous. Get your head out of that book. Clean up. Help out. Hurry. Come on. Because.

Hello? Forget about it. Useless. Don’t ever touch yourself there unless you’re wiping. There isn’t any left. Do what I say. Now. Cut it out. I don’t care. How dare you. See what that will get you. [Every word accompanied by a slap to the head and legs]: how. many. times. have. I. told. you. not. to. do. that? That’ll teach you. What the matter’s with you? Stop your sniveling. God is watching. The policeman will take you. The Bogeyman will get you. Don’t make me come over there again.

Sex and Death - Graham Rae

2009-04-15T10:39:00.006+01:00

Well she told me she
wanted to spend the night with me
in a low once-seductive rusty purr
So later on that night
as I helped her get
her top off over her head in an
obscene disgusting poignant parody
of the unknown amount of times
she’d done this before
her spent breasts sagged before me
and she was finally naked
hairless vagina a sign of her times
I couldn’t help but look up behind her
at the memory-lock pictures on the wall
of the often-forgotten family who no longer visited
and the house she could no longer recall having
despite standing at the gate in younger happier times
and shaking my head impotently at the waste of it all
as I helped her frail frame into her pajamas
leaving her to her fitful pit of depleted dreams
And as I stepped outside and closed her door
I bumped into one my fellow
minimum wage
overworked caregiver coworkers
and told her that Edith wanted to spend the night with me
“Just so long as you don’t kiss her,” she told me
with a humorless superstitious laugh
I asked her what she meant
And she said that Edith had been found
chewing on one of her own turds
earlier on that day in the bath
when she was getting scrubbed down
And I could only think to myself
for the thousandth cursed time
since starting that nursing home job
that if I ever got dementia
I would have the guts or sense to kill myself
before I ended up like that
staring silently in 80s nostalgia
at a meaningless barren wall of gone family
and feeling the merciless inescapable lapping of the sea of death
starting to creep up my helpless damaged body
as my own misplaced waste ruthlessly
stole the well deserved and earned scream
away from my
word-weary
toothless
mouth.

Four Poems - Willie Smith

2009-04-08T11:47:00.004+01:00

Ode To The South African Clockwork Automatic Shotgun

Shorter than a riding crop, no bulkier
than a plumber’s helper. Releases
a 2.6 second burst of twelve shells
into any crowd approaching too close for comfort.
Also compatible with solid shot.
Magazine may be loaded and key-wound
in less than twenty-five seconds.
At which point the crowd is ready
for another 2.6 second burst
of a couple thousand pellets
hurled faster than sound
in a pattern guaranteed
to spatter the most guts on the wall,
for your money.

Weighs under ten pounds.
May be held in one hand,
as there is virtually no recoil.
Clockwork programmed to bypass duds.
Impossible to jam. This gun is music
to the clenched teeth of Civilizations’s ears.
Intended for use against outrageous attacks.
You may want one for around the home.

WARNING: International Law strictly prohibits use of this weapon
on pheasant.

Redneck Raindance

It threatened rain,
so I got out my gun, got in the car
and gunned it on down to the graveyard,
where it was dark and nobody would know,
but I knew the clouds would see clear.

I got out and got my gun out,
fired myriad rounds at the atmosphere
and gunned down the clouds.
Fog fell in patches, then cleared.
I got my gun down,
headed for the car;
overhead stars started to appear
and I again began to breathe in fear.

The more fired at, the more the stars broke out.
I shot more and more flared up. I shot up
the sky, then drove home, sad as hell.
Shot the dog, shot the wife, shot my Playboys;
finally reloaded and waited for the sirens,
that never came. It began to rain.
I got in the car, backed out over the dog,
layed a patch on the wife’s ass,
got going real good and
gunned it on down to the graveyard,

where it was dark and nobody would know,
but I knew the clouds would see clear.

The Hypnotist Comes To

I come to as if away from certain nausea.
As a child I went through echolalia,
an ordinary stage of growing up,
a temporary mental disorder
when my brain put in the clutch
and cruised a moment through its growth.
Words repeated somnolently after people
said them to each other,
repeated deliciously inside the numb
cocoon stuffed with cotton
disintegrating continually into two people
talking to each other on the sidewalk.
Echolalia is a feeling
but not a feeling
in the same way that
word is a word for word.

Echolalia has a tinge of eroticism
and yet has nothing to do
with anything bodily at all.
I come to
through remembrance of echolalia.

Today I Go

Today I go talk to the waves.
They take right out of my mouth
and toss back in my face the words.
Think I try to talk about repetition,
but not sure; neither
of the try, nor
the repetition. Only of the talk
am I sure.

The waves repeat: Reach high.
Only then might I crash with might.
I tell the waves to suck back.
I came to talk. Now
I must hear myself think. I think,
now, in a rare trough,
they think the same thing – no thing – thing
of which nothing is the mirror.

At last make out I tell the waves
to leave time to take a long look
into the mirror, to make sure
nothing still there is not.

On the way to the void
let nothing bother you,
because nothing will.
Wave hello. Oh, hell –
wave goodbye.
Today I go.

Instinct - Lauren Becker

2009-04-01T08:22:00.000+01:00

Sometimes a choice. To inhale. To exhale. Repeat. Repeat. Oxygen

to pink organs and muscle. Oxygen to make blood run red. Oxygen to

live another moment. Another year. A natural lifetime. Commitment.

Long haul. See it through. Give it time. Things will change. It

will be easier, effortless even. There is quiet and still and no one

can force it. Breathe. Exhale. Swallow. Hold. No seconds pass.

Alone and more alone and more alone still. Breathe just this once for

me. Open your nose and throat and take some in. Good. Now let it

go. Let it go. Good. Now do it again. You promised.

Ghosts of Breath - Howie Good

2009-02-01T10:31:00.005Z

The fire engines are crying. Something terrible must’ve

happened. We sit up in bed, only to lie back down. It’s

five in the morning. Our faces are next to each other,

close enough for a kiss. We exchange medieval looks of

fear and doubt.

Yesterday I was an elderly professor shouting assignments

to hurriedly departing backs. Today I’m a house painter

balancing on an untrustworthy ladder. Tomorrow – who

knows? Hands compulsively change states, from red fire

hydrants to orange traffic cones to yellow bouquets.

They follow me with their eyes as if asking, why are you

here? It could be I’m here because of a chemical in the

urine of pregnant mares or the strange and sudden

reticence of a peeling ceiling. It could be because of the

eight-year-old girl shot in the face by an uncle when she

answered the door. There can be no solution if there’s no

mystery.

The chief inspector leans back in his chair and picks his

teeth with a matchstick. The dead aren’t missing much, he

muses. My right arm hangs dead at my side. Perhaps I’m

bleeding from somewhere as well. His men, spread out

across the plateau, rap smartly on the doors of empty

apartments. I only escape because they let me. But the

moon is chipped, and even the star-strung ladder on which

I might once have climbed wobbly toward it is gone.

Come morning, I’ll renew my flight, a hat and scarf to

hide my face and a pill sewn in the lining of my pocket in

case of capture. I’ll pass through small towns God has

abandoned, where the stoplights work, but traffic is

frozen. I’ll hear guerilla fighters scurrying about the

tunnels beneath the soybean fields. I’ll think less and

less about the future perfection of society and more and

more about dying. I’ll be hungry all the time. As in a

legend, the ravens will feed me.

Excerpt from "Tennessee Christmas" – Adam Moorad

2009-02-01T10:26:00.004Z

Vinny steps outside to a wall of ice that blasts his skin and he feels chills prickle-up his legs and spine. Walking to the corner and down the alley, he finds Beverly waiting for him behind a dumpster in the dark.

Thought ya forgotta bout me, mista – Ah girl could freeze ta death in this, she says from the shadows.

He didn’t care…perfectly happy to, Gidit here – there – Whereva, he thinks.

He’s unable to read her expression but imagines her in a spicy smile and grabs her, pressing her back against the brick wall and goes to work on her mouth with his, then down her neck and licks up to her ears lobes – drool almost freezing – before pulling her hair back and planting his maw back on hers and sucks her tongue. Beverly lets him go, not fighting back but shivering and feeling the cold brick on her ass through her petticoat. He pressed his pelvis into hers, keeping the pressure on until his nature firms as she offers-up a faux-murmur and digs her fingernails into his back, biting his tongue to back him off and milking the façade of pleasure for all its worth.

She reaches down to his crotch (to make sure) and tears open the buckle then spins him around. Before he can react she presses him against the wall. She falls to her knees, Vinny leans his head back on the brick and she plunges her lips around him as he wrangles out his hips.

Oh, baby – Take it easy with yatongue, and Beverly clutches his belt hoping he likes whatever she’s doing, and even though she didn’t approve of herself performing fellatio in such a public and impersonal manner with her boss of all people (though she had to admit that she did not have much of a choice). Besides, she thought, He seems ta be enjoying himself enough.

She worked below his belt bobbing and gargling keeping a fluid motion and digging her fingernails into his ass, stopping every other minute to check the sack with her thumb before diving again. Her mouth felt hot on his cock in the cold air and he giggled under his breath keeping his eyes closed, imaging her red gums gliding back and forth. He grabbed at her pretty blonde hair to anchor himself as she lunged more and more viciously. Her face was tense and her neck and shoulders began to burn and even in the chilly air she could feel beads of perspiration dotting her brow so she bore down and push harder and harder until she could imagine herself in another place…

…a warmer place…with light on her face and a microphone in her hand …and in front of her a crowd…and she sang from the stage…low at first – then stronger, and the audience cheered and chapped along with the chorus of her voice and praised her talent and sang with her…and loved her as she stood glowing beneath the warm sparkly spotlights. She looked out at the crowd and saw their flashing cameras and smiled at them kindly and feeling beloved…showing her pearly white teeth. The crowd went on for miles and miles into the distance and she has no idea how many of them there could be but knew that they were in love with her and she with them and they sang all the words with her and this made them love her more and she sang louder and louder and her voice grew higher and higher and she squeezed the microphone harder and harder, grinding and bobbing –

AWW DAMN, (cough, cough) watch the sack, and the crowd screamed and Vinny’s face was in the sea of people cheering her on and admiring her beauty as she held the note longer and longer, longer than anyone else could, and she fought to hold it SO hard and carry it far, then further and further than anyone before her…and the cameras flashed and spotlights whirled as she radiated brightly like a Phoenix and the cymbals crashed-out and sprayed their vibrations through her beating chest and….soon…the song was over and the lights went out.

Billy Can Have My Stutter - Dave Erlewine

2009-02-01T10:19:00.004Z

My brother Billy is a waste of space. He's so dense that some perv could stick himself in all of Billy’s holes and Billy would play along. Even if I couldn’t tell him to stop, I’d at least know to gouge the fucker’s eyes. What can someone as stupid as Billy add to the marketplace of ideas?

Billy sits around the house all day, watching “Jerry Springer” and old “Wrestlemania” DVDs. He loves Hulk Hogan, always tries to rip his own shirts. He cries when the Hulkster gets injured.

Even other Downies feel superior to him, what with his mangled ear, received after Kibbles, our old sheltie, got tired of him hugging up on her. So it's not like he has any chance of procreating. With my luck, I’ll pass along the fucked-up genes. My girlfriend wants to start churning out babies after we graduate high school next year.

I think a good challenge is what he needs, make him hunker down and focus, finally wipe that self-satisfied smirk off his down-syndromy mug. Besides, stuttering wouldn’t even be all that soul-crushing for him. He wouldn’t even know he was doing it.

He won’t lose his mind reading about restaurant employees threatening to beat the hell out of stuttering co-workers if they can’t say the orders. He won't come home from school, wondering just how much shit he can take from people before he really does something fucked-up. He won’t feel like a jackass standing in front of the mirror practicing fluent speech.

If his IQ were 25, okay 50, points higher, he’d be one of those mouth-breathers screaming at the TV, pontificating on the intricacies of the 3-4 defensive scheme.

Mom is cooking Billy’s special dinner of macaroni and cheese with green beans tossed in. Dad is sitting next to Billy, yelling with him as Hulk delivers a brutal leg drop and is declared victorious.

So, Billy can deal with all the shit I deal with every day, try to make Janine understand why the thought of having kids scares the shit out of me. And I can sit there on the couch all day, watching Hogan pretend to be hurt, not even noticing my fucked up ear.

Immersion - Erin McKnight

2009-02-01T10:14:00.003Z

You first obeyed years ago, but on this night you'll have to resist the urge to cover your ears. As he talks, you'll stare at his forehead: study the wrinkles that lie scattered along his brow like the remnants of some abandoned game of pick-up-sticks. But your scrutiny won't distract him from his story--responsible, he'll assume, for your sneer. So, before he goes any further, he'll wink, and, for your own good, say, "earmuffs."

On the playground you complied. Your friends told you not to listen, but didn't bother to whisper. You were no longer one of them; your fingers--always dirty, always fiddling with your lips--had determined it. Near the classroom, two boys pushed another's face into an overflowing storm drain. His palms slapped the grass muddied by pooling rainwater; your heart beat his shameful thump-thump against the hands you'd pressed over your ears like earmuffs.

When your husband's colleague starts gesturing with his beer bottle, you'll walk away. Your days aren't passed with an infant that relents only when clamped to your heavy breast and reaching absently for your mouth, so your husband isn't expected to follow. He will stay seated, because surrounded by single coworkers who believe the salesman's desperate-woman-at-the-bar story, he'll appreciate his luck. It's why he turns in bed when you prod him with a single finger; how you quelled his need to ever watch a son or daughter plot a playground's enduring territory.

Later, you'll remove your eye-make-up while he flosses. The sound won't bother you, but his examination of the pale morsels will. As your sink fills, he'll brush; as you wash your face, he'll wait. All traces of the evening will dissolve. Warm water will fill your ear; you could tilt your head to spill it, but he'll mention how good you looked earlier. So, you'll immerse yourself. Spiteful water will drip down your neck as the muffled sobs of a lonely man ripple against your covered ears.

Glooscap’s Butterfly - Barry Pomeroy

2009-02-01T10:06:00.004Z

Although the butterfly tried to think of it as envy, she realized that most people had disdain for her very existence. She had been a whim of Glooscap’s and that was hard to live down. He was walking along with several others—many of whom still made demeaning gestures towards her—and talking about creation. Glooscap had the ability to modify animals, but his powers were such that he never really could make one of his own. Although he was typically happy with this stricture, at this moment he felt tempted. To illustrate his point about how simple a matter it was to create life, he took up two leaves that were twirling down in the fall breezes and held them together long enough to blow life into their feeble joint. Like a miracle, his leaves began to beat, at first slowly, and then faster as they rose into the sky. The animals were appropriately impressed, although some spoke against it, and secretly called the action one of pride and a harbinger of evil to come.

Glooscap had misgivings himself, for this was a transgression of the law. But the butterfly, as he called it, was a delight, and the other animals were glad of the experiment. It was only when the butterfly began to be found trembling around couples in love, or landing on feces or dead animals, that some began to wonder. Talk circulated behind the butterfly's fragile ears, but she'd heard enough to realize its import. “She should not exist,” she'd been gently told, she was the result of a whimsical moment of Glooscap, who, it was suggested, had too much power in his unsteady hands. The butterfly’s creation came to be used to explain some of the animals’ more uncertain feelings about Glooscap. “Look at it,” they would say, “just a flappy bit of leaf, not even a proper body.”

These comments were calculated to disturb Glooscap, but they had an added effect of making the butterfly question her own existence. That is why, when Glooscap approached her with a request, she had more reason than anyone to do her utmost to fulfill it. She’d been hovering near some fir trees when the grand meeting had been called. She felt that she had a right to be there as much as anyone, but she was not confident enough to alight in the thick of the animals and make her presence known. The comments about how she didn’t have a body, which implied she was missing a brain, hurt her to the quick, although she would have been the first to deny her sensitivity.

Glooscap didn’t say it was the most important mission, but unlike the task the frog was asked to perform, the butterfly’s new responsibility didn’t demand that she be fingered by clumsy-handed scientists. In fact, such touching would kill the butterfly, which was part of the reason that Glooscap assigned her a task which was merely visual, drawing thereby upon her best talents, her airy nature and vivid colour.

The butterfly exhausted herself flying all over the forest gathering together the members of her varied tribe, although she disdained the moth who fluttered about her when he heard about the butterfly’s job. “We need colour, and you bunch just don’t cut it.” She was not known for her diplomacy and had made enemies before, although most pitied her for the lack of intelligence her comments implied.

The butterflies met near the highway to Moncton, coincidentally when the Herpetologist was driving past (although he was intent on other things and so missed this second miracle). They gathered on the mud flats of Tantramar and the Minas Basin, on the cliffs of Grande Danse and the south shore, on the moose trod uplands of Newfoundland’s wild coast, on the Lloyds insurance building in Halifax. They gathered in a huge mass and then, silently, while an amazed people watched, they settled into the perfect geometric patterns that they had practiced for hours in the deep woods.

Perhaps if crop circles had never been seen or dreamt about, the gathering of the butterflies would have meant nothing. But, as it was, most audiences had an easy time relating this magical event to the cryptic swirls and patterns said to lay flat the English corn. The butterfly dance, as the rest of the animals called it, was an overnight sensation. Some of the younger aboriginal people brought newspapers and laptops into the forest in order to prove that the Maritimes were again in the news and this time thousands of people didn’t have to die. They risked the good-natured joshing of the other animals, “I recognize that tree, that hydrocarbon,” to show them the sudden media interest. Photographers who had made their fame in the killing fields of Kampuchea and had even posed near the skull piles of Rwanda came to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, although none went to Newfoundland. The Newfoundlanders read the butterfly infestation as a sign of an ancient retribution coming back to haunt them. In their national conscience the Beothuk slept uneasily, so the Newfoundlanders said nothing. Characteristically, they made no attempt to kill the butterflies, for the mentality on the Rock demanded that reminders of past mistakes were best endured. To this day no one had forgotten Joey Smallwood and Canada's newest, and most reluctant, province.

The newspapers carried the accounts for days. Such was the subtlety of the butterfly attack, as the butterfly herself called it, that hers is the most remembered part in what some animals were beginning to label a war. The butterflies appeared in obscure roadside meadows on the old highway past Wentworth, on crowded Parlee Beach, in the potato field of the Harvey farm and most notably for the Japanese tourists, on Anne’s house in Green Gables, Prince Edward Island. The first battle, for everyone had long since forgotten about the frog’s attempt except the most passionate herpetologists, was engaged. Forces were beginning to array against the whites that they could not neither defeat nor foresee.

The butterfly herself did not strut, although many said she had a right to, but she gained an acceptance among the other animals that only the frog and the snake had hitherto enjoyed. Aboriginal youth were seen sporting butterfly tattoos. The film Papillon was dusted off in case it would explain its namesake. Symmetrical patterns like butterfly wings became common on clothing and cars, and for the first time, children were cautioned not to kill the now-sacred maritime butterfly. Rather than resting, the butterfly joined in the subsequent conferences where her wisdom in white ways was admired, and where only the dragonfly, out of an antique spite, spoke against her.

winter. night. (three) - j. a. tyler

2009-02-01T09:57:00.003Z

winter. night. they came again and again it was unusual because instead of the two or three or four of them in their gray and dark and lifeless masks taking the page from the typewriter and reading it gently and then burning it up with a chemical and dousing instead of that they took the page again and read it again or looked to be anyway and then walked out again and closed the door behind them again and took the page again. so that’s two pages now that they have and two pages now that haven’t been burned and i’m wondering what this is all for because although i did let myself wander a bit yesterday i didn’t say anything that i haven’t said before and so there is no utter reason for them to want it except for ash.

and they might be burning it somewhere else now after someone else reads it or burning it when no one is looking because they want me to feel bad or worse or like i’m dying on the inside which is how i’m beginning to feel even more in these last days. because i don’t know hwy they’re doing it. if i did that would be different. i would be different. but i don’t. and so just like that they’ve put me again into a place where i know nothing. where i don’t understand. where i don’t get it. like when i came here in the first place. How i didn’t know anything then. like that:

winter. night. because i did live outside of these walls some time or another and i had a family at some time or another and a wife and three kids named jimmy and mikey and bradley. and they were my family and i miss them and want them back they don’t even know i’ve come here except that i was born and then i died and when i died they were left wondering where their daddy went and how he is doing and when he’ll be back if at all and i haven’t seen them since i died and i miss them. and my wife because i don’t write about her much had sweet blonde hair and a brain that was focused entirely on knitting and cuddling and cooking and kissing and she was all that was me and i was all that was her and we were melting together over the years and that was good. and i was a writer and i wrote for magazines first and then newspapers or maybe the other way around and then i started writing longer things like novels and those people seemed to like even more and so i wrote more and they liked it more and we both me and the people who were reading me went on like that for some time and then i got it in my head that writing had to change something like the world and the world was in a heap of shit and so i wrote something new and longer about that and someone like always decided to print it and bind it and give it away or sell it on the streets and that or when i started that was when i died.

and now i’m here. and when i got here i didn’t know anything anymore. not until i started to see the purple and the green and the red and the yellow and the orange and the blue and the black and the white. because then i started to know things. like what they did in those rooms. and what the colors were meant to signify. and then i knew something. and i wrote on their blank pages because i couldn’t resist. and then they would come in and take the pages and read them silently and then burn them in front of me and we would all move on. Until they decided not to do that anymore and just showed up and took the page and read it and walked away shutting the door behind them. so now i’m back to knowing nothing. back to where i started when i was born and died. like that. and even if i pick up this typewriter right now and smash it to bits there will be another one here tomorrow with a blank page sitting in its roller and i’ll have to write on it because that’s what i do. and what i write will always be the same thing even as they are trying to torture me:

winter. night.

Three Poems - Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

2009-01-31T17:27:00.003Z

Fish Head Soup

I found a fish head in my pool.

I heard the fish head talk

and recite poetry in Chinese.

I cooked the fish head in a pot.

I ate the fish head. It became

my favorite food. When I

buy fish heads they don’t taste the same as

the old fish head from my pool.

All Evening

I was ever-craving fish eyes.

I had to eat 50 pair to fill my hunger.

All evening I spent hours digesting them.

I took flight of all my senses.

I laughed like a madman having

found that fish eyes caused this strange

reaction in me. I wasn’t myself.

All evening I spent hours vomiting fish eyes.

The fish eyes poisoned me.

The fish eyes saw inside of me.

All evening I spent hours cursing the fish eyes.

I should have left the fish eyes alone.

I should have fought my cravings.

I thought I was going to lose my mind.

I believed the fish eyes would fill my hunger.

All evening I spent hours downing laxatives.

The Worm

There was the time when a worm was wiggling around inside of her trying to eat its way inside her apple-shaped heart. She tried to reach the worm with a fish hook, but the hook snagged on her throat. She bled and bled. She was choking on her own blood. She was writhing on the ground like the worm she believed was inside of her.

There was the time she believed she was being poisoned. She stopped eating for days and lost twenty pounds in three weeks. She would not drink water, beer, or milk. She would not eat a thing. She tossed all her medications down the toilet. She would not sleep for days. Again, she writhed on the floor like some worm. That was her nickname.

Two Poems - Molly Gaudry

2009-01-23T13:58:00.004Z

Body

"You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first."
— Dante

I dreamed last night
of a trip delayed
a train trip
home
(sweet land of morning calm)
because of a body
found
mangled on the tracks.

I outfoxed the night
(what mind games we played)
alone
with my head trip
feet and hands frozen numb
because there was nobody
around
to say it was a dream, relax.

Easter Monday

Delivered by a boy in muddy cleats: a dozen chocolate-flavored dental dams. (For forty days Ann swore off sex and sweets; Cecile had slammed the door and said, "Goddamn!") For forty nights, alone, Ann hasn't sinned; despite her fears of being crucified, she grabs him by his belt and pulls him in before she has a chance to be denied. She kisses him on his right hip; he leans his muddy knees against her tiny neck and groans and thrusts in just the way she means until it's time to take his pants and suck his dick like Lady Luck's on both their sides and Father Time wants them to fuck, abides.

Invasion of the Body Catchers - Russell Bittner

2009-01-14T10:57:00.005Z

“Body catchers.”

“Huh?”

“Body catchers.”

I look up at B., supine on the couch, who just shrugs.

“I think you mean body snatchers, D.,” I say loud enough to be heard across the room and above the din of pedestrian havoc twelve stories below the window at which D. is perched, looking occasionally down, more often up. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was a film. Two versions. One from 1956, with Kevin McCarthy. The re-make with Donald Sutherland, 1978.”

“D.’s not up on pop culture,” B. says. “Maybe he means the limey documentary, Invasion of the Body Scratchers. More up his alley.”

“Body catchers,” D., now obviously piqued, says once again.

“Apparently not,” I say in mindless confirmation. “Not pop culture. Not even the BBC.”

“A Sky One production,” D. says. “BSkyB’s Sky One.”

“Whew!” I say. “D. may not be up on his pop culture, but he’s sure up on Brit subculture.

“This is the invasion of the body catchers,” D. says. “Not a film. Not a documentary. Just fact.”

“What fact for fuck’s sake are you talking about, D.?” B. asks.

D. initially says nothing, letting only his head speak – up, down; then up again, down again. “Come and see for yourselves,” he mumbles.

B. and I are still coming down from a break night. I can’t speak for B., but my limbs feel like lead. I can’t be bothered to get up and go see much of anything. Instead, I reach for a bomber.

After a long pause, during which D.’s attention has been fixed on something down at street level, I hear him speak again – though more to himself than to B. or me. “Oops. That one must’ve left home without it. Too bad.”

“Never leave home without it,” I say – again in mindless confirmation.

“For all the rest, there’s MasterCard,” B. says.

The three of us are just driveling now. Our all-night party of birdie powder has laid to waste any speed bumps of real intelligence and has paved our minds for one, long tape-loop of made-on-Madison ads. MOMADS – or simply MADS, I think to myself, always on the prowl for a spry acronym.

From down below, I can hear a cheap public address system calling all sinners to the Lord. Equally mindful drivel, but not so annoying as the shrill clang of police cars, EMT vehicles and fire engines – now long gone.

The shadow of what looks like a giant bird drops right in front of our window and passes quickly into and out of white space. D.’s immediate reflex is to pull his head in and duck – only to put it right back out again and look down. I can just barely hear what sounds like a bag of wet cement hitting the sidewalk twelve stories below, then watch as D.’s knees buckle – though only for an instant. “Yikes!” is as much as he has to say about the splatter.

“Wazzup?” B. asks.

“They missed him,” D. says by way of recondite commentary. “The body catchers. They’re on the other side of the street – where the real action is.” D. chuckles. “Uh-oh. Here come the purse ‘n’ poodle brigades.”

“What the fuck’re you talking about now?” I ask.

B. guffaws. “Purse ‘n’ poodle brigades? What, D., are your goddamned purse ‘n’ poodle brigades?”

“Used to be purse or pussy brigades. Woman goes out on the sly to buy pork ‘n’ beans for herself or the little ones, she’s surrounded. But it ain’t the cavalry riding in to offer comfort and aid. She gets to hand over her purse. If she hasn’t got one – well, use your own crayons to fill in that picture.”

“D.’s been doing some bad blow,” B. says. “D. imagines himself in a re-make of Night of the Living Dead.

“Women don’t dare anymore,” D. says. “I haven’t seen anything but buffers on the street in weeks.”

“Ah, c’mon—!” I say. “You’re shittin’ us.”

“Nope. True. Now it’s just guys. Hungry guys. Real hungry. Way-beyond-interested-in-a-blowjob hungry guys.”

“So, what’s up with the women and children? Gone to the ‘burbs?”

“Where’ve you been, good humor man? With your head up your ass? There ain’t no ‘burbs left. No suburbs, no exurbs, no hamlets or frilly little townships. They were the first to go – or don’t you follow the news?”

“What news?”

“Street news, twinkle-toes.”

“Street news is what I get right along with my stash – kind of a value-added.”

“So, tell us, then. What’s the beat on the street?”

“Places like Greenwich, Cos Cob, Darien – gone in an afternoon. Rye and Mamaroneck went without even a fight – town fathers in each gave the pie away in exchange for a guarantee their lives and wives would be spared. Rumor is, they bargained for their kids’ lives, too, but couldn’t make the deal stick. All that fresh young meat went instead to barbeque – after a bit of basting and tasting, that is.”

“Who’s speaking now, D., you or the street?” B. says.

“Little Madeleines, they say, are quite marvelous in marinade. Or is it ‘in marmalade?’ I forget.”

“You’re still tripping, D,” I say. “You gotta take a break from that shit.”

“I’m sober as a kite,” D. says as he looks pointedly at me. “The only real fight, by the way, is going on in places like downtown Hartford, across the park in Spanish Harlem, in the projects on the Lower East Side, and out in Bushwick and East New York. Places where they’ve got nothing to lose – so they’re gonna fight to keep that nothing.”

“Fucking niggers,” B. says.

“Got nothing to do with race, bro’,” D. says. “We’s all the same shade o’ blue now. And so, it’s every nigga for hisself.”

“Whadya call it then, ass-wipe?”

“Revenue re-distribution. Or at least re-distribution of the means of production. An old Marxist concept. Problem is, there ain’t nothing like production anymore. No production of nothing, nowhere – nada de nada. It’s dead. As is transportation. Distribution, too. Only thing left is what others’ve got and that you kin get your rascally hands on. Hey, wanna try my ATM card?” D. asks before nearly collapsing in a pool of his own bilious laughter.

“Dumb fuck,” B. deadpans. “Marx and Marxists crashed and burned eons ago. Pass me a blanket, will you?” B. says to me. “We’re outta blow.”

I lift up the skirt of my little Dutch girl tea canister and put three feelie fingers up inside. “Looks like we’re also outta blankets, B. You gonna have to run downstairs and find yousself a supply wagon.”

“Yeah, fine,” B. says. “Will do – just as soon as I find out a bit more about these purse ‘n’ poodle brigades.” B. turns the hansom of his attention back to D. “All ‘isms’ are dead, D. Died out with Rock ‘n’ Roll – or maybe when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Didn’t you read Fukuyama?”

“Very funny, B. Fuck Fukuyama. Fukuyama didn’t read Hegel – at least not adequately and sufficiently,” D. says, inverting two middle fingers as if to subvert his own little stab at esoterica. “What Fukuyama failed to recognize was that one ‘ism’ survives them all – or did, and will, until the last of us is truly history.”

“And what might that be?” I ask as I drop the Dutch girl’s skirt back in place and give it a pleasurable pat.

“Solipsism,” D. says with finality.

I’m only sorry neither B. nor I had the chance to introduce his pronouncement with a snarky drum-roll.

“Whatever, D.,” B. says. “Back to basics. This business of purse ‘n’ poodles brigades. Please, enlighten us.”

“Yeah, so what’s with that, D.?” I say. “And, while you’re at it, what’s with your fucking body catchers?”

D.’s eyes turn back to the street. “Purse ‘n’ poodle?” he asks. “What do I know? I’m just a dumb fuck, right?”

“Get over yourself, D. Just answer the freaking question.”

“Well, we’ve covered ‘purse,’ right? No pursie, no mercy.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that if a guy ain’t got the do-re-mi to bargain with the brigade, he’s dog meat. Meat for a bright and shiny pack of poodles.”

“You’re a sick fuck, D. Dumb and sick.”

“Yeah, D. A real sick fuck.”

“You think so? Come here and see for yourselves.”

B. and I walk over to the window and take up positions to either side of D. I scan the street below. It looks like the movie set of some kind of goddamned urban warfare, though without folks in Kevlar manning cannons or ducking down behind sandbags. There’s blood on the sidewalk – or maybe just a lot of shiny red graffiti; I can’t really tell from this distance.

“What’s going on, D.?” B. asks.

“Just shut up and watch, fuck-face.”

We’re standing there – just standing there for what seems like forever – and nothing is happening. I’m about to turn around and hook myself up to some blue sky blond when the raincoat wings of a giant something-or-other come fluttering down out of nowhere from above and drop right before my eyes. I quick stick my head out the window and see the winged thing land on the sidewalk in splat time flat. As if they might’ve just jumped a turnstile, four guys from out of the shadows are on it. They flip the body over and rifle through his pockets, but raincoat’s not resisting this particular arrest. As a matter of routine, I suppose, one of the four is reading from what looks to me like a police manual. The other three pause dutifully, look up to the fourth who shrugs when the raincoat gives no answer. Miranda Rights? I wonder. Nice touch.

Next, they tear the clothes off him and conduct a quick search of their booty. What? For labels for Christ’s sake? All of his clothes get chucked into a pile before they grab his limbs, grunt in chorus “One, two, three” – and heave-ho. His two arms splinter out of their sockets no problem; his legs, however, show artful resistance. The foursome regroup on the two legs to chant the same-old, same-old “One, two, three.” This time, both femurs unhinge from their hip sockets like a marionette’s – no muss, no fuss.

One of the four brigadiers reaches with serious business in mind into his own overcoat, withdraws a machete long and dry as a billabong, hacks off an arm, then moves around full of purpose to hack off the remaining three limbs, chop-chop. That’s when I see the dogs. Salivating – if white foam from a dog’s mouth can be called ‘saliva.’

They move in. The chopper-man throws them a bone, as it were – and they get all bow-wow with it.

I suddenly feel desperate for a blunt in the absence of something more substantial, and step back from the window.

“Got milk?” I ask. “If not, I’m gonna watch some ‘Animal Planet.’ I can’t stomach any more of this shit.”

“What’s the issue?” D. asks. “This is your pop culture. This is your reality T.V. So, what’s the problem with your stomach?”

“Far out!” B. says to no one in particular – almost like the whisper of an arrow. I follow his line of sight to the other side of the street, where I see that three men have just caught a window jumper. They’re frisking him – at least it would appear they’re frisking him – but coming up empty-handed. They look angry, betrayed, are clearly shouting at him; but I can’t make out what they’re saying because angry dogs are yelping, screaming their own canine obscenities, nipping at – no, actually tearing chunks of flesh out of the man’s legs. Now, he’s the one who’s screaming, though not exactly in anger. One of the three body catchers rips the man’s shoe and sock off, shoves the sock into his mouth to muffle his complaint.

The dogs go for the man’s exposed limb. One of them emerges from the pack with a foot and half an ankle in its mouth, and skitters off. The others pause to watch his retreat – but at the smell of blood and raw flesh, renew their attack without so much as ‘beg pardon.’ The body catchers push the man to his knees, jerk his head back, yell encouragement to the rest of the pack. As the dogs – teeth bared – lunge at the man’s nose, lips, cheeks and eyes, I decide to give my curiosity a breather.

“What is it?” I say as I start to move away from the window. “What does it mean?”

“The apocalypse,” D. says. “Till now, this business of jumping out of windows at the start of the Great Depression in the last century? Just apocryphal – a myth. But no more. People believe it – just as they believe Reality T. V. and the tabloids. And so, they’re mimicking.

“This, however, is no myth. This is true. We’re out of oil. We’ll soon be out of food. And then out of water – except, don’t ya know, for the Atlantic, which will shortly be pouring into and over this little island and others just like it. With any luck, the sea will take us first – unless, of course, you’d now care to jump and take your chances with the body catchers and their—,” D. leaves the end of his thought unspoken as he beckons me back to the window.

“D. likes to use words like ‘apocryphal,’” B. says apropos of nothing. “‘Makes him feel important, smart. And important’s really useful when the neighborhood’s playing musical chairs at the edge of the abyss. When that same hood’s so far down the pike from decline, decline looks like up.”

“Oh, can it, B.!” I say.

“Can it for the planet,” B. answers. I’m big on MADS; B.’s big on jingoes and rhymes. Together, we could be a team and start our own ad agency. If only—. But maybe not today.

“I need a blunt,” I say, self-mockingly crestfallen at the thought of this window of opportunity that’s just slammed down upon my eager fingers – figuratively speaking, of course. The other window’s still open, and D.’s still perched upon its hoary ledge.

“Blunt’s the last thing you need,” D. says. “Unless, of course, you wanna go on out to the street and trade. But what’ve you got to trade?”

“Nothing,” I say, still crestfallen. “Not a goddamned thing. Unless charm—?”

“Hah! Gotcha!” sneaks up and out of D. like a speed-trap. “Hey, you in the leopard-spotted bikini,” D. now shouts down to the street. “Wanna trade nookie for charm?” I glance over – just out of curiosity – and just long enough to see a hooker look up at the window and give D. the finger. “There’s your answer, Prince Charming.”

Problem is, D.’s shout and the hooker’s gesture have drawn attention to both players in this little sidewalk sideshow. Body catchers from across the street run to the base of our building, reach up to implore D. to jump and be saved. The P. A. system at the corner is blaring out the same message from a disembodied amplifier, the preacher-man having long since vanished from sight. The pack of dogs rampage down and across the Zebra crossing to the hooker; leap; take her down to her knees – a position she’s usually more comfortable in trading her “biscuits” for someone else’s beamers. Her bikini bottom’s off in a snatch and now no more than doggie dental floss – and then, just as soon as the dogs get their muzzles into it and into her face, whatever may’ve been for sale underneath or through the hole in that face ain’t enough to attract bids even at a buffer’s fire sale. She might’ve screamed – had she managed to hold onto a throat and larynx long enough to scream out of – but both went the way of the bikini bottom, its contents, her mouth. Dogs – so I’m told – know no limit to appetite.

“What about the Upper East Side?” I ask – subdued, but now calculating my odds of escape.

“Where do you think the poodles came from, Einstein?” D. answers my question with his own. “Upper East Siders got out while the getting was still good. Whadaya think got them to the Upper East Side in the first place, huh? Good looks? Charisma?”

“Jesus!” I say.

“No, wrong. And too late to come to Jesus anyway, amigo. Needless to say, he also ain’t comin’ to us.”

“What are they gonna do?” I ask.

“Who’s they?” D. asks.

“The authorities,” I say – though feeling a little weak in the knees even as I say it.

“Since when did we have any use for the authorities?” B. asks – a rare moment of insight and honesty I might’ve hankered for myself had I not lost the map, or the clock, years earlier.

“What’s left then?” I ask. “What can we do?”

“Read Hegel.”

“Hegel’s for heroes,” B. says with a smirk.

“No,” D. says matter-of-factly. “Sidney Hook’s for heroes.”

“Forget Hook and Hegel,” I say. “Serious—.”

“Seriously? Okay, then. Learn Mandarin.”

“Mardarin? Is that like Tarot?” I ask.

D. chuckles. “Yeah, smart guy – like Tarot.”

Doogie Showed Me His Cock - Michael Blackburn

2009-01-10T10:12:00.003Z

Doogie was down from Glasgow
swyving his way through the local girls 
and working the floor Upstairs 
where the aged incurables lay in baskets and beds.

Suddenly one morning we found him on our ward 
in a curtained bed where the doctors came and went
talking of Wasserman's Reaction.  
In a lull I popped in to see what was up. 

He flipped back the covers to reveal his cock. 
I think I've damaged myself, he said. 
Half-way down its length, blue-black, 
conical, volcanic even, the chancre sat.

I'd never seen syphilis before. 
And I don't think Doogie had, either.

Hide and Seek - Paul Kavanagh

2009-01-03T08:52:00.003Z

Time means nothing to a child. When I play I go missing for years. This is only the second time I have played. I have not surrendered yet and I have not been found. I am still hiding under the table. When I write years I am guessing time means nothing to a child. All I know is that I now have a beard and Benny my dog is no longer a dog. Benny went away bit by bit. Little pieces of Benny vanished over time time means nothing to a child. He was like the cookie that you pick at. With each nibble compunction taps you on the back and points to the excessive fat around your waist. I have decubitus upon my bottom. Decubitus is fun to write, but painful to sit upon. I play with Benny’s bones for entertainment, sometimes I arrange his bones to look like a man walking. A silly walking man with a funny hat. The funny hat is Benny’s skull. Other times Benny’s skull is a big ship. A big ship on a long odyssey but time means nothing to a child. I use Benny’s tail for the sea. It undulates. My father’s feet were once the feet of Polyphemos. My father’s feet no longer poke me in the back. For a long time my father’s feet poked me in the back. My father had very large feet. His father had very small feet. His father had very small feet. His father had very small feet. His father had very small feet. His father had very small feet. His father had very small feet. My feet are neither big nor small. My feet were bigger than Benny’s paws. It is only now that I wonder where my father’s feet are time means nothing to a child.. I do not miss them. They caused a lot of pain. I miss them but I don’t miss the pain. Pain is an awful thing. My mother has beautiful feet. Sometimes I get the urge to stroke them. My mother’s feet hardly peek through the table cloth. When her nails are painted my heart swoons. The absence of my mother’s smile has left a lacuna that is painful. Pain is an awful thing. Pain is black and odorless. A thing without odor is without essence. The table contains a myriad of odors. Benny’s bones reek. It is a reek I have grown to love a love tantamount to the love I had for Benny and now have for his bones. Sometimes I can still hear Benny barking. It is when I knock his bones together. The noise drives away the pain. Pain is an awful thing. My legs are filled with pain. I hardly move my legs. My toes are black. They look like black olives. Well, I think they look like black olives for I have forgotten what black olives look like. I used to like black olives. I liked black olives on pizza. When I think of pizza a pain stirs in my belly. Pain is an awful thing. Pain is black and odorless. The pain in my belly is more painful than the pain in my legs. The pain in my belly is like the pain Polyphemos must have felt would Odysseus poked out his one eye with that stick. The pain in my legs is a throb like heart ache like the heart ache I feel when I hear my mother crying about my absence. My mother’s crying is loud and goes on for days and days I think for time means nothing to a child. Sometimes I drum using Benny’s skull and bones to drown out her weeping. I have become quite the drummer.

Sheena Up A Mountain Wearing Flip-flops - Martin Reed

2008-12-27T10:46:00.005Z

Don't laugh like. Me and Sheens camping in Snowdonia. Doing the big friggin outdoors thing. Me and Sheens in a field in the piss friggin rain.

Friggin ay.

I mean why on earth are we doing this? With all that shite blowing up the other night we just can't wait to get away. The tent's coming down after I've polished off this tinnie and then we're out of here on the twelve fourteen. At twenty eight you'd think I'd be too old to get homesick, but I welled up last night when I thought of the flat. I'm even missing Birkenhead. In a way.

Not as much as we're missing our Danny mind. Sheens has spent most of the trip pining for the little man. He's all right but it's what parents do isn't it. You worry for him when you aren't with him, even though you know Lydia Worsley's looking out for him and she'd never let anything happen.

I wonder what a one year old would make of this. The whole friggin adventure of tents and rain and mountains. He'll be off for his nap about now, just starting to fight it, shaking his head. No way, I'm not tired like. Little bugger.

Of course it's just as well our Danny isn't here. Crazy women shining torches in your tent at three in the morning doesn't exactly make for a good night's sleep.

***

It's coming up on half past ten. Always a bad time for Sheens. Just one of those things. She goes into herself around this time, then slowly comes back up in time for lunch. I know there's nothing I can do. She just has to ride it like. But I unzip the tent enough to squeeze my head in. She's curled up on the floor in her sleeping bag, clothes piled thick on top.

You all right, love?

I know she isn't. She curls herself tighter.

You cold, love? I know how you're feeling like. My bollocks are like ice cubes.

I'm about to leave her but I think I know what she's thinking. Listen, Lydia Worsley won't let anything happen to him. He's all right, our little man.

She uncurls her head for a moment and whispers something. I can't quite hear but I think she says that Lydia Worsley doesn't always know best. There's no answer to that, so I just say, Keep warm, love, I'm out the front having a fag and a tinnie if you need me.

I zip her back in, safe. There.

***

It was a different picture this time yesterday morning. A bit weird like. My head was dead heavy when I woke, what with psycho woman in the night and a tin too many the day before. It took me a while to realise Sheens wasn't there and when I did I almost panicked enough to sit up. Then I heard her singing outside. Singing like. Perfect Day. I mean where the frig did that come from?

You all right, love? I called, and she like yelped, ripping open the zip and she came diving in, still in her jammies, landing on top of me soaked through with rain, giggling.

We're going up a mountain, she laughed.

The frig we are. It's pissing down.

Look, she said, poking her finger into the ceiling of the tent so it squashed against the top layer. Rain from outside trickled down her hand onto her arm, pooling at the elbow before dripping onto my sleeping bag. There were wet patches all over her side of the tent. I think she'd been doing this all night.

She said she wanted to do the big mountain because it was something she'd never done before, and she might never have another chance or get hit by a meteorite, and besides there's a café on the top where we can get a cup of tea and a sarnie.

I told her she was mad as frig but she could have her mountain.

So off we went.

***

On the bus on the way up to Snowdon she was like a schoolgirl. In the two years I'd known her I'd never seen her like that. She so often seemed distant, especially since Danny was born, making me feel like I'd fallen for someone through frosted glass. But yesterday morning there was something in her that seemed like she'd turned a corner. Something girlish like. Something fun. I watched her as she stared wide eyed out the window.

Just look at that sky, she said, it's swallowing mountains whole.

She told me when we first met that she was complicated. She told me there were things about her I didn't want to know, that I couldn't ever know, and when she said it like that of course I didn't want to. I never understood until everything came out the day Danny was born, the day we met Lydia Worsely.

Things have a habit of coming out. Like they did at the hospital. Like they did here the other night.

***

We'd been getting back to the site after lunch and seen this middle aged couple setting up their tent next to ours. I said Ay to them and the bloke said, It's a bit wet for it and I said, I couldn't agree more, mate. But his missus didn't say nothing. She just went all nervous like and disappeared to the toilet block.

Your missus a bit shy like? I asked. But the bloke just shrugged. We didn't see them again all day, then in the night just as I was managing to get some sleep at last I was woken by shouting and an angry unzipping next door.

There were voices coming closer, his and hers, babbling.

What are you playing at? came his voice. The bloke from next door.

It's her, I know it is, came hers.

It's the middle of the night.

Let go of me.

It's the middle of the night, please.

It was her, in the flat opposite Rita's, don't you know what she did to them?

All the while quick jerks of torchlight played on our tent walls, steadily getting brighter. Another angry zip. Ours this time. Someone's eyes shining in for a moment before I was blinded by the torch, shining first at me then Sheens, still asleep.

It's her, screamed the woman, it's her, look, let go of me. That bloody monster.

I was so dumbfounded I couldn't say or do anything. I hadn't a clue whether it was real or a bad dream, which is probably just as well because my usual plan is to slap first and think later.

As Sheens stirred I could hear other voices outside. The camp site was waking and the woman must have realised because she moved away from our tent, screaming the worst things, all the terrible horrible things I had never wanted to know, all the things they'd said about Sheens back then, all those friggin awful truths. I didn't dare go outside.

I looked at Sheens, lying there. She was taking it all in like. What a thing to wake to. She closed her eyes and rolled over, the accusing voices still rattling through the rain. How could she ever hope to sleep with that going on? Although maybe it was no different to always, except the accusing voices usually come from inside.

***

On the mountain, it didn't occur to us until we'd been walking an hour that perhaps we hadn't come best prepared. Sheens just laughed as she said she should've brought her trainers. I pointed out that I was friggin soaked; that I was getting wetter and colder. She told me to stop whining and the only reason I did was because it was just beautiful seeing her like this. We'd passed half past ten a while back and she hadn't done her usual.

I told a sheep staring out from behind a rock, I've never known her so happy.

The sheep carried on staring.

Mind you, it wasn't just the sheep staring at us. In spite of the crappy weather there were still plenty of others heading up, overtaking us with their backpacks and woolly socks. They nodded as they passed each other, saying its a bit of a rough day for it, all knowingly like. Then they'd spot us stumbling along and you could see them tutting, not so we could hear, but enough so we knew they were doing it.

That pisses me off, I said to Sheens.

Just ignore them, she said, they don't matter.

She walked on and when I looked round again we had the mountain to ourselves.

You'd think we'd have got used to being judged after everything that's happened, but it still riles me.

***

The first time I met Lydia Worsley was at the hospital, six hours after our Danny was born. She spoke gently, quiet like. I could hardly hear over the din of the ward so she had to say it twice. She said, In a few minutes you probably won't trust me, but you need to know I'd like to help you.

***

I stood at the edge of a drop which fell away into mist and nothingness.

Tell your Mam I saved your life, Sheens laughed grabbing my arm, pretending to push me over. Then she pretended a bit more roughly and grinned, Tell your Dad I didn't.

She ran off up the slope shouting something about the first one to the top, her words drowned by the wind and a fighter jet screeching overhead.

***

When Lydia Worsely arrived on the ward I think Sheens had seen her coming and knew right away what she was. She started to shuffle herself off the bed towards our Danny, asleep in his cot, then stopped suddenly, holding her stitches. She wasn't ready to move that quick.

Clueless me though, I just said, Hello, how's it? What else could I say? I couldn't work her out. I just thought she was one of those hospital visitors who trundle round the suicide attempts trying to perk them up.

***

It was half past ten in the morning when Lydia Worsley took our Danny away, and she didn't look back. I couldn't even see his face to wave to him. I stood at the foot of the bed, watching our little blanket bundle glide out of the ward, aware of a quiet sobbing behind me which I couldn't bare to face. I could only look at the door as it shut, hiding our Danny from view.

***

The mountain was all closed when we got to the top and Sheens went off on one. The good time was officially over. There was no café, just fog, wind, rain and a building site. A laminated sign strapped to a six foot fence said the old café had been trashed and the new one wouldn't be open till next year.

Fuck! Sheens rattled the fence, then kicked it.

Hold on, love. Don't spoil it now. There might be something else.

What? You think they'd shove two fucking cafés up here?

I don't know like. I thought there might be a little gift shop or something. You know. Postcards.

Fuck off, she muttered marching back into the wind. I nearly had to jog to keep up with her.

Come on love, I called after her. She was climbing again but up steps this time, to the real summit and when I caught up with her she was grasping a round waist high stone plinth, as though the wind would have taken her if she hadn't clung on with everything she had.

***

When Lydia Worsely told me everything I couldn't believe a word. I needed to hear it from Sheens.

What did you do to them, your other kids? Why did they take them? What Lydia Worsely told me, Sheens, is it true? It's a year later now and she's still figuring out how to answer me, which suits me in an odd sort of way. Until she tells me herself it's just other people's words and I can half convince myself they might not be true.

She's shown me photos like. Of a happy family. The kids. Christmas trees. Her ex. All the things I know we'll never see with Danny. But when I asked her why she never mentioned it before, she just said she needed someone who didn't know.

***

We stood shivering at the top for ages. Just staring out into the freezing friggin fog, wind blowing right through us, right into our bones. Completely friggin relentless. But it was where we belonged for that moment, Sheens gazing out into the nothing, and me not sure whether to comfort her or back off, not sure if the trickle on her cheek was a tear or just rain. But there she was, the daft friggin bitch, on top of ruddy Snowdon wearing a t-shirt, shorts, a Woolies kag and a pair of pink flip-flops. The state of us.

I wanted to say something but before I could she turned to me, and I saw they were tears, and she just said, Why did they do it again? Why didn't you make a fucking difference? Why weren't you fucking enough?

***

When Lydia Worsely spoke to me nine months ago she said I had a chance to make things different. We'd been meeting Danny a couple of times a week at a drop-in centre and apparently they'd been watching me.

You need to know that it isn't you we're worried about. This was Lydia Worsely all over: everything she said you needed to know. She said I could change things for Danny, if only I wasn't with Sheens.

I asked, How would you know I could change things?

I can't remember how she answered.

***

So right then. We're all packed and the bus heads off in ten minutes.

I don't think we'll be doing this again, so with the tent in its bag I look around for a hedge to dump it. It was only seven ninety-nine from Argos, cheaper than the pitch so, you know, no harm done. But then I see this kid, must be about eight or nine, standing by his tent a few down from where we are, staring at us. His Mam and Dad will have warned him to steer clear of the child molesters in the tent at the end, and he most likely wants to see how many friggin dead babies we've got in our bags.

You can't blame the kid but it's that being judged thing again isn't it. The thing that no matter how hard I try I can't quite get my head around. And you know what, it friggin fucks me off. So I grab the tent and walk at him, across the yellowed grass where mad bitch had been, on past the others, staring the lad out as I go. Then just as he looks like he'll bolt I slow down and lob the tent at him. It lands at his feet with a wet thud.

Pressie for you, son. Get a girlfriend and take her away for a few days. It's a laugh.

I turn back and make for Sheens waiting by the bags. She struggles with a smile for a moment but it's a bit too early, so it fades.

***

On the way down the mountain yesterday there was a moment when the cloud around us thinned and we could see for miles. We watched while it lasted. Just for a minute.

Five Poems - Tom Daley

2008-12-20T05:56:00.003Z

Meine Warme Flasche

Guy-soothe, scholarly and stocky,
incubator steam and feathery.

Top thatch, eleganza.
No migraine, my immaculata.

Boy so shy, winsome,
sometime regret to ask a body how it rue.

Pec-plumped, bowling ball bicep.
Disremembered nary a conjugation

or declension. Pockets packed, stark in sack.
Libido lurching girdles of Hercules.

Sweats early running
every morning, in plenty warning,

matron panties shower his shoulders,
hurled from flung sashes and Mrs. Calabashes.

A glistening listener, a thick to consider,
never one to unkilter compassion.

Loves his mother’s mother’s people,
their diagonal crosses,

their sheep stomachs tucked up with fruits and taters.
Though stepped each Sunday School

to the tintinnabulations of John Calvin’s steeple,
was child wild for Mary medals,

incense, miters, stoles and rosaries.
Pets and likes it when I bites just radius and ulnar,

or takes my chewy fingernails to scritch his spine and lumbar,
his lassitudinal kindness, his scowl and thunder.

Steeps his deepness like his counsels,
bounces between his furtive and his architectural assertive.

Snaps to sleep and creaks by crankiness, boon of humor,
my mainly rave and crave.

Gait and Grace

If you’re still singing, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man
Right Out of My Hair”, he ain’t gone yet,
baby, he is still lodging in there,
tenacious as a louse, crawling around with his saddle sores
and his bowlegged jitter, his parade sleek on two legs,
one a fraction longer than the other, so that he seems
to favor one, but done with such smoothness

that you imagine he is dipping his hipbone forward,
a gesture broken into one part mating dance
and one part orthopedic compensation, and bright,
perhaps too bright a dance
for that hour in the morning, but distinct nevertheless,
even viewed all the way down the factory corridor
like a camel caravan humping over the horizon,
maybe miragey, even friable,
but with a certain signature wobble and grace.

And it’s a distinction, yes it is, to indict him
as the inciter of your sidelong, raspberry rush towards
the miracle of his mouth, mouth broken,
like a beautiful, collapsing wave, into crooked teeth,
teeth the color of paper left out in the sun, a sweet
dinginess which he used to show you before the day you asked
one question too many.

And you blame him, too, for the sad state that plummeted you
into this week-long flu fever, replete with the sublimation
of tears, tears you refuse to cry for a shy and crazy boy
whose only vice is the helpless vagary of his eyes stalling
inevitably, soberly into those high beams of yours.

And he, oblivious to your suffering as a baker is
to her redundant slaughter of yeast, he with his cherubic
gangliness and his Potemkin village indifference, he still
blasts those fusillades in your direction, those
temptations-cum-taunt that he denied
with a St. Peter fervor.

All the livelong war, he quieted them down,
he spun them into some ginger snap confection
to chew on in lieu of cud, but when the war
has been declared victorious, when the saggy-paunch
power brokers plant their smirking knuckles
over the marble top desk at the deposed puppet’s palace,
when the generals in their desert duds whistle and say,
“The gig is up,” then he is back with it,

back with the tantrum and the doldrum,
the miracle shower of his glance he drizzles
over you, baby, like talcum powder. And if
in the blowback from his casual ministrations, if
you break out in a rash all over your nether parts,
if you prickle like boar bristle where the sun rarely shines,
well now, baby, that’s homework he wasn’t assigned.
He blows his blameless mouth harp out
to a windy lonesome, and, baby,
that man’s in your hair to stay.

Fire Alarm

Smoke lollygagging in the factory aisles, plinking and hissing like jazz, the color of down on a mons veneris

Smoke feinting and blurring through cardboard gaylords stacked to the ceiling with saxophone impertinence

The smoke has affronted, has puzzled the occupational safety nurse, her clipboard in hand pressed against her breasts the day before the snowstorm

Her hamburger breasts augmented like a major chord in the puffy, mustard-colored light, her hair straight as a fiddle bow, her hair relaxed as the last remnant of a tirade of French horns

Smoke hangs like a weatherhead, mounting and piling over the fork trucks recharging during the lunch break

Smoke eager as a spring, smoke of one piece, a continuous sheer fabric pulling itself back into raw cotton

In the shop the fire alarm commences and the man wakes up who sleeps through lunch with his chin tucked into his adam’s apple, his legs crossed and kicked up over the lathe bed, his left arm slung over his right

He puts on his coat and crosses the gravel of the railbed where the maintenance man waits for him having unlocked the gate to the parking lot

They are huddled there under the gray clouds in the parking lot, standing in their assigned areas, waiting to be counted

A hundred, or two hundred, huddled against the t-shirt cold, mortal, imprecise, jovial, with gratitude for the smoky disruption of a steel tedium.

Time jammed into them, time a solvent which sluiced them into clownish, irreverent soliloquies; even the youngest of them yellowed in the light of impending snow.

Blue Bantam

Blue Bantam hands me his small telescope. I focus on the houses on the opposite shore. In the backwash of his gin gimlet breath, I can decode the discreet inquiries women have posted to his lips and earlobes.

We stand on a dune. The telescope pans a stretch of beach—the old site of the August carnival at the Methodist girls’ sailing camp. One year when we were boys, the patchouli of the camp girls tugged Bantam there. He caught hell later for pied-pipering us to sniff the festival for ourselves.

The telescope reorganizes the site, magnifies the fossil record of intervening hurricanes and lame-duck capsizing, of slack nylons and flesh that burgeoned into girdles.

To brush against Bantam was to tingle, to be studded by generosity. In his twenties he puzzled us with poems he penned à la Rilke, treatises on angels and underworlds. In a few words on a postcard he sent every year or two he detonated something daring in between my sinuses and cerebellum.

As they follow women, Bantam’s eyes pulse with the synchronicity of a lighthouse. If he catches their attention, he dons a boyish fragility. He lets on that he can be collected and, there he is, fetching as a sand dollar bleached on a shelf of low-tide afternoons.

Bantam’s latest girlfriend actually bothered to keep up with his liquoring. “Make that two!” she would insist when he was ready for another drink. Calibrating an exact duplicate of his intoxication, her mission was to engineer a reversal of the magnetic field repelling her intimacy.

Wrapped in towels that day on the dunes, she shivers, blurts, “I’m going on the wagon.” Suddenly, I am scanning the shore with the telescope turned the wrong way. Everything—the old campground, the houses on the peninsula across the bay—has midgetized.

In my sights, Blue Bantam ’s cockscomb crystallizes, darkens like burnt dessert. Once a sturdy and piquant applejack, in the heat of the telescope’s inverted lenses our boy reverts to cider. The cider slides down the throat quickly but without any spank, dreggily, like the backwash of a wave that shakes itself apart before it reaches shore.

Star Island Saturnalia

A musician-pilgrim perches between a sharp and a slope, her sincerity bruised to a stir, her bereavement worn out by the moon. Here is Miss Maguff’s Cliff, where the island schoolteacher was heaved out to sea on a rogue wave. Rogue wave in the heartlight, rogue wave menacing a Chinese junk moored in the harbor, menacing the slit-eyed turret that still conjures U-Boats and torpedoed ships, ships that hang against the sky at the horizon before they tilt into the deeps.

From far away as Atlantis clouds shuffle in on a weather that scatters over the stone walls of the parsonage. The weather worries the glass of the upstairs bedroom window like the parson fidgeting between Corinthians and Ezekiel.

In the hotel lobby, battered by the hunger of old varnish, piano chords saturate the gaps in one’s agnosticism. Insouciantly trendy clerks beg off the ten spot for the lobster until tomorrow morning. They are simultaneously wary of their own cheerfulness and irked by their dour-faced comrades who stand in crisp caution beside steam tables.

One might meet a Unitarian priestess here with her hair frizzed and incongruously dyed the color of tooth decay, her cheeks nudging her eyes into the aspect of a heartfelt and selfless agitation.

And there is always a blonde Rapunzel whom a day-tripper will compare to Sara Jessica Parker but she inevitably has more of a Lorelei-perched-over-the-Rhine feel to her, a diminutive Wagnerian madchen with accompanying ringlets and marvelous, beneficent smiles.

Some visitors to the island lift surprised eyebrows at the notion that the specificity of chipped creamed cod might trump, several ways to Sunday, the generality of meatless Fridays in their memoirs. Like a rogue wave, the odor of childhood meals suffuses the dining hall and rinses away, if only during the dinner hour, a vague tang of creosote in the pitchers of heated wash-bowl rainwater collected from the hotel roofs.

In the camera screen the outline of the lighthouse and its island presses deeper into the purple night, the backdropped purple night. The little cemetery huddles with its headboards shading its prone skeletons. From there, bits of bone wash like fever down to the ferryboats where lithe adolescents, their wet bathing suits outlining their pudenda, their hair shiny as seal-skin, race to serenade disembarking and sometimes even departing pilgrims.

Iron Lung - Jason Jordan

2008-12-13T10:54:00.004Z

I’m in bed, still half asleep, when I feel a light tap on my shoulder. I turn over to look at what appears to be a lung, which has sprouted eyes, ears, a nose, a mouth, arms, fingers, legs, and toes. It’s flesh-colored, of course, but it’s holding its hands on its hips, or what I think are its hips, and scowling at me.

“Uh, hi,” I say.

“I need a drink,” it says.

“What?”

“I said I need a drink.”

“I’m still dreaming, right?”

“No. Now let’s go.”

“It’s 11 AM…on a Tuesday. By the way, where’d you come from?”

“I crawled out your ass.”

I position myself so I’m on my side facing my lung who’s standing on the bed. When I do this, though, I feel pain and soreness down around my ass like never before, like I just took the biggest crap in the world.

“You really did crawl out my ass, didn’t you? Why didn’t I feel it?”

“You did, but you fell back asleep afterward. Either way, a sore ass is better than a sore throat,” it says.

“You’re telling me. And what’s all this talk about drinking?”

“You haven’t drunk in weeks, and we’re sick of it!”

“Who’s we?”

“Us organs. The cool ones. The ones that can get out in the world and enjoy themselves. The

ones you have two of, in other words.”

“Oh, so like my kidneys and tonsils?”

“Yeah, exactly. The right ones are a drag, so we’ll invite the left ones to go with us. Plus, you need at least one of each to stay around and man the fort.”

“And how are they supposed to get out?” I ask, afraid of the answer I know he’ll give.

“Well, what you’re about to do is go into the bathroom and give birth to your left kidney. The

left tonsil will just crawl out of your mouth.”

“And if I refuse? If I push you off the bed and go back to sleep?”

“World of hurt, son. On my signal, every organ in your body that’s on my side will attack the ones that aren’t. You’ll be in more pain than you can even fathom, so it’s best you do what I say.”

“I guess I don’t have much of a choice then. I’m off work today anyway.”

I get up and head into the bathroom where I sit on the toilet, figuring that the left kidney will know what to do. The pain is excruciating, but momentary. It’s like giving birth, as my lung said, or like passing a kidney stone. I hear a plop and immediately feel drops of cold water hit my ass, which lets me know that the kidney is out. I glance down to see it crawling out of the toilet bowl with its miniature arms and legs. Once on the seat, right in front of a sitting me, my kidney turns around and halfheartedly salutes. I wave, not knowing what else to do. Similar to my lung, my kidney also has facial features. Different, however, is the fact that my kidney looks like a kidney bean, which is fitting, I guess, and maybe too obvious to mention. It jumps off the seat and darts out of the bathroom before I have a chance to really study it, though.

I’m feeling better—despite the soreness—when I sense something walking up my tongue. I hear and feel a few knocks on one of my front teeth, so I open my mouth as wide as I can to let out my left tonsil. It jumps from my mouth to my leg to the floor and out the door, which I catch in my peripheral vision.

After I get dressed in my bedroom, I walk into the living room where I see the three organs gathered by the door, conversing about stuff I can’t quite make out.

“So you guys are serious about this?”

“Yeah,” says my lung.

“What am I supposed to call you all anyway?”

“Call us whatever you want,” my kidney says. “In fact, make up names for us. It’ll be fun.”

“You’re all dudes, right? Not chicks?”

“You’re a dude, aren’t you?” my tonsil asks in a squeaky voice.

“Yeah.”

“Well so are we,” my tonsil says.

“Okay, fine.” I point to my lung. “I’m gonna call you Iron.” I point to my kidney. “I’m gonna call you Bean.” I point to my tonsil. “I’m gonna call you Hockey. Now, where do you guys wanna go?”

“The Ole In ‘N Out,” Iron says.

“Why there?”

“It’s open and it’s a cool place.”

“Fair enough. Let’s go, but I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

The Ole In ‘N Out is a standard bar, though it’s split into two halves—In and Out. The In side has booths and the bar itself, the shelves behind it littered with bottles of every shape and size, containing liquids of every color imaginable, while the Out side has pool tables, arcade machines, pinball machines, and a jukebox, plus a few tables and chairs. Even though it’s broad daylight and the In door is propped open, the place is still dimly lit due to the closed blinds that cover the three, large windows on each side.

We walk in, and because I expect Chuck to be behind the bar, I’m surprised when he’s not. He always works the day shift on Tuesdays, or at least he did when I was a regular, drinking almost every night. No one else is in the bar either, but the mounted TV’s on, though the sound is off, and Coldplay’s blasting out of the overhead speakers, so I know someone’s around here somewhere, or was until recently. I grab my organs gently and place them on the bar before I take a look around. I venture toward the back where they keep all the stock, but there’s no Chuck. I push open the door to the women’s restroom, since it’s right next to the stockroom, but there’s no Chuck. I push open the door to the men’s restroom, and there’s Chuck, passed out on the floor.

“Shit,” I say. I take my seat at the bar beside Iron, Bean, and Hockey, who are standing on top of the bar since the stools are too low for them to reach the bar from. “Chuck’s passed out in the bathroom again.”

“Well,” Iron says, “what are you waiting for?”

“I dunno. Should I call somebody?”

“Who cares? He’ll come to soon enough. I meant get me a drink!”

“Oh, all right,” I say, not really sure about what I should do. I mean, we’re paying customers, and Chuck isn’t dead, so I don’t technically have to call anybody. Why not help ourselves this once? Still, I’m a little apprehensive about going behind the bar, especially since another customer could come in anytime. “What’re you guys drinking?”

“Iron City,” says Iron.

“Falls City,” says Bean.

“151,” says Hockey.

“Comin’ right up,” I say. I open the beer cooler, take out an Iron City and a Falls City, and pop off their caps. “How do you want your 151?”

“On the rocks,” says Hockey.

“Sure thing,” I say. I serve all their drinks in shot glasses because their hands and arms are so small.

After I finish preparing the 151, I grab a Blue Moon, which I pour into a beer glass, for myself. There’s a tray on the bar that has lemon, lime, and orange wedges in it, so I pilfer an orange wedge, squeeze the juice into my glass, and drop the wedge in. A long time ago, whenever I was waiting for a drink on a busy weekend night, I’d lift the lid of the tray when the bartender’s back was turned. They’d always close it when they noticed the open lid, but when they turned around again, I’d lift it again. I wasn’t ever caught red-handed, but I suspect they knew it was me.

“What’re you having?” asks Hockey. “Kool-Aid?”

I laugh, about to sit back down. “No. Blue Moon. It’s good stuff.” I realize I’ve forgotten about the money, so I remove fifteen dollars from my wallet. I get up from my stool to write a note about what we had, which will help keep us out of trouble, unless Chuck is actually dead. I thought I saw him breathing, however, and now I’m too afraid to check a second time. I put the note and money next to the cash register. Afterward, I place an upside-down tumbler on top just to make me feel more at ease, perhaps trying to further ensure that nothing will happen to the note and money.

“Turn that shit off, will you?” Iron asks. Thinking he’s talking about the TV, I reach for the Power button, but he says, “No, no no. Coldplay. Turn that Coldplay shit off!”

“Hey,” Hockey says, “I like Coldplay.”

“Coldplay sucks,” Bean says.

“Yeah, they do,” I say, which makes the vote three to one. I turn the sound system off, but unmute the TV.

We sit and drink and talk. An hour goes by, two. We have seconds and thirds, fourths. Eventually, shots. I have a difficult time keeping track of what we drink—the longer the note gets, the messier the handwriting becomes—plus I had to take a hundred out of the in-house ATM to convince myself that I wasn’t shortchanging the place. Iron calls it a night, even though it’s only dinnertime, and hands me a small, red pill. I pour a glass of water and take it.

“It’s about time,” Iron says. “We gotta be getting back.”

“Okay.” I just sit there, occasionally taking a swig of my beer.

“You know what that entails, right?” Iron asks.

“Yep.”

“We gotta crawl back up your ass, so have another shot. Actually, two more.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” I down the two shots and finish my beer. This makes me feel like I might vomit, so I barge into the bathroom where I step over Chuck, who’s in the fetal position, and into the stall. I close the door, lower my pants, and sit on the toilet where I pass out.

Sometime later, I wake up to discover that my ass is even sorer than it was before. I figure that Iron, Bean, and Hockey returned to their rightful places in my body, and I kind of miss them already, although they aren’t exactly gone. I take a moment to gather myself. Once the stall door is open, I notice that Chuck’s no longer on the floor.

“This is not good,” I whisper, my head still reeling. I think about possible explanations for Chuck’s absence, as well as my own obligations at this point, but I’m too antsy to stay in one place, so I exit the bathroom.

I’m halfway to the bar’s entrance when I hear, “Back from the dead?”

I instantly recognize Chuck’s voice. I stop dead in my tracks, turning my head slowly in the direction of his voice, which came from behind the bar.

“Yeah.”

“Me, too. You still driving that blue Accord? The one with the flames?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s gone now. Towed, I’m sorry to say.”

“How do you know?” I ask, nonplussed.

“When I woke up, I saw your shoes, so I opened the stall door to see who was in there. You’ve

been here a while, eh?” He holds up the note. “I checked the street to see if you parked there, and like I said, I didn’t see your car.”

“I parked right in front.”

“It’s gone then.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah, it does.”

“So, can I get you anything else?”

“Sure.”

“What’ll you have?”

“I’ll have a taxi,” I say.

“Very popular choice,” he says. Then he walks over to the phone on the wall and picks up the receiver.

Four Poems - Sarah Sarai

2008-12-06T06:30:00.007Z

Go Figure  

My head is a goldfish bowl, which, no problem,  
must be filled with water and stocked if I am to have
a life of any interest. With 360+ optically powered 
points of reference coming going rushing by, I do.  
Erectness is a plus. Who needs sleep? Perfect posture
is compensation. Goldfish flit in a calibrated solution
of rocky depth and so many viewpoints. With water  
as the brain mostly I intellect steamers, ebb and flow,
good tidings, day long. Almighty I am Queen Royale 
of my castle, dipping pink-finger probes in murky me.

Pyramid Theme

Stored in your hothead attic, fired by
your generator belly: a pianissimo voice, gutsy. 
Conflagration twines to this high neuronic playfield. 
A winged archeologist excavating
the Pharonic cache, spies through windows
to your soul. Ah! A telltale crate, pried. 
A insider job? A coup interuptus?
A push to reverberate where you live?

Courage, like Leonardo's rivers
seeking their source, 
flows up.  

Long Distance

Thursday I talk with my mom. 
She's answered the phone: 
she's receptive; 
has lain on her side 
to hear the ring.

She says she and Pop walked Manhattan 
for years: Wall Street, Harlem, parks.

I ask how she's doing.
"They feed me.  Nice food, water each day.  
The meals are delicious."

Again. "How're you doing?" 
I'm proud I ask twice. 
"It got worse. My face twisted
last month, I can't leave my room.

"She's had operations.  

"Makes me cry, Mom." 

"Don't."

Her face melts, hardens, melts.  

Friday, I'm lost in Tribeca. 
Heat bonds to my skin
like a man I shouldn't love.  

Mom's in L.A. 
She lies on her back 
feeling its skin
grafted.

You Say You Did?

My face fell in. 
One cheek collapsed.
Cancer nibbled 
from my jaw up
for twenty years.
Christian Science
failed me. Not one 
practitioner 
said, Help, get help, 
see a doctor
to heal flesh, bones
use medicine 
not faith alone. 
Faith did not work.
Oh, my heart broke.
Yes, yes a fool, 
your mother is  
a fool. Bandaids.
I used a web 
of Bandaids, more
each year to hide
black knobs, disease 
called Mortal Mind 
which spread across 
my cheek and life.
You girls, you didn't
try to stop me. 
You say you did?
I don't recall.
I'm eighty-one.
I'm so ashamed. 

Iced - Sara Crowley

2008-11-29T08:17:00.003Z

Freya stretches her arm through the gap, gripping the needle so hard that her fingers ache. It’s better than risking dropping it. She’s inside the head, can feel the hard ching of enamel and the soft jelly of lip. She begins to sew, careful stitches that won’t be seen by the mourners. Closing the mouth gape, ensuring fluids stay inside. She has seen corpses with tear drops forming, and thinks there is not a more mournful sight in the world. It’s the chemical mix she uses, but even so it changes everything. The body becomes a person. A person who weeps at their own demise.

The stitching done she can relax a little, let her mind wander as she begins to massage cream into dry patches of skin on the dead woman’s body.

She smears colours onto the face, trying to recreate a lifelike appearance for the sake of the family. She does the job to help the left behinds, to fool them into thinking that death isn’t messy, mucky and ugly. Freya knows how the bodies leak and stink, how the colours drain away with the life. She is adept at hiding the bruises and rips, the stains and dehydration. She grooms the dead, combs their hair, lipsticks their mouths, and she takes pride in it.

Freya won’t wear make-up. She is a wash and go gal whose naturally curly hair bushes around her head, and whose skincare routine consists only of soap and water. She avoids ointments, unction’s, salves, potions and any other goop that people try to enhance their appearance with. Being alive is the most beautifying treatment of all.

She shaves the deceased, tidies them and trims their nails. She varnishes them a pale ‘lifelike’ pink. She doesn’t cut her own nails but files them into points. She won’t shave her bodily hair. People assume it is a feminist statement but she only wants to see growth. The hard scratch of her nails, the fur of her vagina, the long dank hair of her armpits, all reassure her.

Tonight in a bar some guy will gesture expansively.

‘Champagne? Red? White? Whatever you prefer.’

‘A glass of iced water please.’

‘Water?’

Freya will gulp the drink, feeling it rinse through her, so cold. Exhilarated by the chill sensation she will shine a smile, watch him melt.

Later, she’ll push two fingers into his mouth, skating across teeth, touching warm, wet tongue, thrilling to the pull of him sucking hard on her. Her blood pulsing, hot.

Two Poems - Howie Good

2008-11-22T09:00:00.004Z

ALMOST HOME

Wait a minute. This is not my home.

I began much – the whirlwind,
the world whirlwind,
carried me and my work away.

Whose house is this? What street is this?
Hello. Is there anybody in the room?

I can’t sleep. Too dark. . . too light.
I am seeing things you know nothing of.

It isn’t so bad. Just a little dreamy anxiety,
which world you’re really in, that’s all.

Oh look,
see how the cherry blossoms fall mutely.

What does it signify?
How much longer will it last?

Four o’clock. How strange.
So that is time. Strange.

Hold me in your arms.
Time is short. Agony grows.
Hope lessens.

Softly, quite softly.

UNGRATEFUL TRAITORS

Twenty-seven letters! What is the use?
This subject is too much for me.
Everything has gone wrong, my girl.
The play is finished. The chariots and the horses!
I am not able to explain myself.
Don’t let the awkward squad fire over me.
Don’t let the children forget me.
Don’t sole the dead man’s shoes yet.
Nothing matters. Nothing matters.
Sing to me, if you have the heart.

Note: These poems are assembled from death-bed sayings attributed to John Abernethy, Miguel de Cervantes, William Cowper, James M. Barrie, Rupert Brooke, Pope Alexander VI, Ludovico Ariosto, Jacques David, William Cullen Bryant, Draza Mihailovoic, Joseph Pulitzer, Sir Charles Bell, Henry Morton Stanley, Victor Emmanuel II, Hideko Tojo, William Allingham, Warren G. Harding, Stephen Crane, Sir William Parry, Louis B. Mayer, Paul Verlaine, Sir Horace Mann, Irving Thalberg, Louis Agassiz, Robert Burns, Arnold Bennett, Frederic Bastiat, Edmund Clarence Stedman, William Eyton Tooke, and Tommaso Masanieollo. They are part of a series of poems titled “Last Words.”

Three Poems - Karl Koweski

2008-11-14T06:48:00.007Z

Brewster and Georgie

he calls it staph infection

the livid red camel hump
jutting off his lower jaw
like a pimple of Biblical
proportions

but I call it Georgie
and pretend it is his
twin brother unfortunately
absorbed into his face during
the last trimester of
his mother’s pregnancy

Brewster tries to keep Georgie
sequestered under a monkey
pile of pus-stained bandages
he refers to it often
yet refuses to imbue Georgie
with personality traits or
acknowledge Georgie’s needs

take the bandages off,
I tell Brewster
(I can’t tell Georgie
to take the bandages off
for Georgie possesses no
opposable thumb)
you’re stifling Georgie
he needs to run free
and breathe the air you
so selfishly take for granted

but Brewster keeps Georgie hidden
as well as you can keep a
golf ball sized protuberance
on your face hidden

in the bathroom at work
when Brewster thinks he’s alone
he uncovers Georgie and
squeezes him mercilessly
you can hear Georgie’s
tortured screams and
Brewster’s contented sighs
when he leaves the bathroom
it looks as if they’ve
both been crying
Brewster says Georgie
is going away and won’t be back
the miracles of modern medicine
confounding imperfections
regardless of how beneficial
but I know Georgie
is only a dirty needle away
awaiting his glorious return
I imagine Brewster and Georgie
together again
a crimson and ivory tandem
for the leprous set

I imagine Brewster and Georgie
fighting crime
exchanging witty banter
and viscous fluids

I imagine Brewster and Georgie
in an existential love story
exchanging passionate endearments
and bodily fluids

but Brewster imagines himself
free of Georgie, free of
the unwanted stares and
whispered jokes
no cop partner
no clinging lover
pulsating off his lower jaw
hanging on his every word
a captive audience
to Brewster’s shame

Cold Cash

if I were to paint Jordan
I’d daub watercolors on silk
to soften her skin
and ease her edges

I would paint Jordan
with her back to me
the curvature of her spine
dividing the words
COLD CASH
tattooed above her ass

in Jordan’s painting
she would regard me
from over her shoulder
with eyes like
two untenanted portions
of space/time

I’d whisper my fingers
down the smooth horizon
of her watercolor hips
and recite the days
until the arrival of
my unemployment check

Sunrise

mom’s brains omeleted across
the breakfast table
body slouched in the chair
her head an empty cereal bowl

the gun’s in my hand
with the sense memory
of a pulled trigger
and mom’s dead
somehow it all ties in together
and I’m the knot

I sit in the chair across
I take the phone and dial 911
and tell them what I’ve done

mother’s blood seeps
into my shirt and jeans
wets my back and ass

I think how many times
we’ve sat at this table
me and her against the world
how she’d do anything for me
work two jobs so that
Christmas wouldn’t be lacking

and then I think how
she was before I shot her
how she wouldn’t piss
down my throat if my
guts were on fire

well, my guts are on fire
and all I needed
was twenty dollars
to ease the inferno inside me

twenty fucking dollars
to get me to the end of the day
and just thinking about it
gets me angry all over again

and I tell the cops
when they come for me
better come armed
and loaded for bear

Three Poems - Felino Soriano

2008-11-08T19:27:00.010Z

Ceiling

Surface clarity upon resting silence.
Dangling construction bouncing
light shadow breezes back
into the origin of surrounding
hypothetical nuances. Collection noises
rumble distanced from peered
stillness, randomly allocated along
the distinguished homes,
circa meditation within outer
destruction. Forecasted overcast
blankets the preoccupied vellum
already covering existential exaggeration.

Essence of Self Denial

Late the climate change effectual happenstance
or predetermined motive understood
beneath ledges of verbalized worldly
opining. Said of essence peel its opening
layer delicate blend the visual with prior
night's dream connotation. Preference
width layer next advancing nicely perhaps
reflectional toward self sacrifice of prior
once. Walls surrounding apprehension
a denial to progress a denial of simplistic
hands to shape future monochromatic tomorrows.

Movement Forgotten

Verbatim wind repeats its solitude
dragging alerted crawl hitherto
among the most impressive of invisible
beings, temperature cast about
net to gather flutter, conversational
data, the leaf of a cliché. Spirals
roam in the walk along sequence
of side sliding era becoming day ahead's
forgotten footprint.

Seven Poems - David McLean

2008-11-01T07:49:00.004Z

# animals that move

animals that move can smell the world turning
and they accept it as everything feeding them
and nothing, a void entirely empty of the meanings
that molest us, that touch us tremulous as uncertain
priests or amateurish perverts. animals are predators
not murderers, except the ones who are meat
and made of dreams, that the lion might lie down
with the lamb forgetting his every sexuality
and pretending to be that what he is not -
that is what is evil, not his rending claws
and terrible teeth, not his reasons -
evil is placidity is what he feeds on

# medicine and psychiatry

medicine is still regulation
and punishment. even the pills
that discipline these unruly
bodies to forget their arrogant

self-assertive sin by being loveless
nothing a while, since salvation
is exercise and mindless diversion,
'til a patient reaches those peaks

of normalcy and purity
when she is anyone, just a cunt
on the market, a cretin who believes
that even these regulators, even the

hamster masters of this new society,
this fraternal patriarchy of dickless rapists
and faithless saviors, that even these demons
know how to feel, that even they dream

# capricious god

night is a capricious god who devises life's
brutal devices, clawed fingers raking Sheol's dust
into tasty piles for these dry skulls to munch
when we decide to be that nothing
stored in piles of time and platitudinous
murders, psychopaths who bore their victims
dead with plastic axes.

the ravens on the god's sloping shoulders
are blind too, but lie so convincingly to him,
easy, they say, for he is but an idiot
and the muscles and thews of his love
bind him tight to our tortured bodies
for through us flow his orgasms
and only in our shattered hearts
can he mourn himself, this god
this self-pitying idiot, but we let him
do it, being benign
nit-wits

# ship of fools

the benches in this ship drunkenness
and delirium are wet with blood and fervent
sweat, they are ecstasy and our fingers
around the oars are empty as mourning,
they weigh nothing against the twisted
oars that tear the sea of normalcy we leave
like sound that replaces the cathedral quiet
of life, the sinful catechism is a tool for heroes,
heroines, and murderers, we love to see
exhilarated children slashing the flabby
throats of policemen and other criminals,
priests, psychiatrists and other pedophiles,
so that madness may be a throaty hopeless
orgasm burning murder in the night -
a lot of deaths we need to dream today
in the name of life

# overpopulation

flakes of sky fall free above me
and turning float through the earth
we are, they are forgetful
of their night time duties but
heaven is still written over them
largely untruthful text that
promises forgiveness though no
absolution is proffered or
required, nothing judges
or is judged but
each iterated
judgment,

the crass obligation of
elective rejection
when we tear ourselves to pieces
because we do not believe
lies that never convinced children,

about sin and the pristine
hungering penis, totem
and fetish best wielded
as weapon, swallowing god's
lead itself in all its blissful
nihilism, death's sweaty friend
that toils in the flesh-trench
until he vomits, spits his truth
in gobbets of bitter
oblivion, smaller and less deadly
than machine guns, but self-cleansing
and self-replicating, much less
deafening, they have germ
warfare as a less user-friendly and
secondary application,
and even serve an anorexic a tasty low-calorie
luncheon, they fulfill thus efficiently
so many functions,
though we forget them and us
in the self-serving categories
of selective affection,
wherein we apply these fuckers as undercover
weapons in orgiastic murderous hecatombs
and the womb's roomy suicide that fells night
tonight, the billion little death's that fill world
and earth with all this psychotic life -
it's not very nice

# of a stupid seminar

it was terrible he said that i stood there shaved head dressed all in black and raped Descartes with the utilized resources of feminist object relations theory because this was either a strap-on or a form of psychoanalysis and Descartes had not read even Freud and i stood there at a loss to see how my critique had been answered and damn it! i was rapidly losing my erection Descartes could not give me head he was obviously very dead had apparently even lost his unpleasant smell

#bye-bye, smelly signifier

the signifier is no smelly fleshy phallus
today, but a nice plastic strap-on -
vampires and zombies are my fantasies
and good at chasing away angels
and nightmares. god does not care,
and that is fine by me. neither of us
is here, neither of us exists or is real.
mankind too, we forgot how to be lonely,
we have no reality to share. reason
is still all it means to us, all it seems -

just shit - too many memories
to forget, too many orgasms,
too many deaths

The Project - Savannah Schroll Guz

2008-10-26T08:38:00.005Z

As soon as her two sons celebrated their respective May 15th birthdays (Randall's second and Issac's first), the scientists asked Rachel if she was prepared for the project’s next phase. It would, of course, involve another child.

Rachel balked. “I…I don’t think I’m ready for another baby. Two pregnancies was enough.”

A gaunt-looking doctor with sandy hair frowned with patent displeasure. “It’s your duty, Mrs. Steadman. You understood that when you began the project that there would be a great deal of responsibility involved. This is not an arbitrary course in the study. It is a direct link to the data we require.”

“Do my payments increase then? If I’m to have an extra child, my payments must be greater.”

“There is a small increase for a second child.”

“How much?”

“An additional five hundred per month.”

Rachel made a snorting noise to indicate her disapproval.

“You must also appreciate the constraints on our allocations.”

“Do you have any idea what the pregnancy was like, the labor? We’re not even out of the diaper yet, and already I’m supposed to have another one? No. No. I never agreed to this.”

“Mrs. Steadman, you understand that we have the somatic material necessary to conceive another Isaac. We need only a female to carry it. We would like it to be you, but if you are unwilling…”

“So, what you’re really saying here is that I’m just the baby factory and the diaper changer for your experiment?”

“Not at all,” one of the female technicians quickly stepped in. “You are absolute protection, comfort, and maternal presence. Even unconsciously, you influence the fetus. Between you, there is vital chemical communication and exchanges science may not yet even be aware of. You, Mrs. Steadman, are the mother in this project. We want most of all to do this with you.”

Rachel was softened, but sat reflecting, pokerfaced, for a moment. “In order to make expenses at home, we would almost have to have an extra eight hundred a month.”

“We’ll see what we can come up with here. But we are agreed then?”

Rachel paused, thinking. “Okay. Yes.”

Isaac-2 (also referred to in some instances as Randall-3) arrived in March. While Rachel’s body did not reject the pregnancy in the first trimester, her body had a difficult time acclimating itself to the fetus. While she had no genuine sense of foreboding, a deep, black depression hung over her like a malevolent weather pattern. She could not eat and was nauseous well into the seventh month. “This baby doesn’t like me,” Rachel said, jokingly, to one of the technicians.

Rachel’s husband, David, noticed the change in his wife immediately. Rachel’s eyes looked heavier-lidded than before. She seemed to lack the power to concentrate. David began to come with her on each of the lab visits. He helped her out of the car and up the stairs, always holding an elbow and a hand to support her. She had turned, he thought suddenly, into an elderly woman. According to the technicians, all the sonograms appeared to show the child would be normal, and the very risky amniocentesis revealed that there was no danger of Down’s Syndrome, no possibility of retardation. Every technician bore a reassuring smile when Rachel and her husband stepped into the lab’s offices. She thought, although she told herself it was only her imagination, that she detected an undercurrent of pity, of deeper knowledge, in their gazes. But she was too ill and weak to care. She felt she might now be growing paranoid. Just forge on, she thought, collect the pay and things will get better.

Often, when she lay in bed, under a welter of physical and emotional misery, Isaac would wander into her bedroom. Because of the density of her wretchedness, she said nothing to him. He would always begin by standing in the doorway, gazing at her for long minutes. And she would gaze back. It was as if she were having some secret communication with him, but she sensed nothing, understood nothing that came from his blank little expression. Eventually, as was his way, he would approach her bed and sometimes, if she felt well enough, she would put out a hand and touch whatever was closest: his arm, a shoulder, a sleeve. Not once did he respond. As the ritual progressed, she began to do nothing at all except lie against the pillows and watch him, never breaking eye contact. He simply continued gazing at her, looking deep into her eyes. And then, without warning, he would turn his back and leave.

Once alone, Rachel always felt an overwhelming sense of exhaustion and slept immediately afterward. And while her sleep was profound, it was not calm. She dreamed of little girls bursting into flame and dissipating to smoke and ash that settled on wet laundry and clay roofs. The descending effluvia, inhaled by children, made them ill, and she watched them die individually, by the thousands. She herself was forced, by soundless Isaac, to stand at the bedsides of children she did not know—children, she thought, who belonged to a time long before her own, who writhed at the smell of their mothers’ cabbage, who vomited at the odor of the gruel cooked for their benefit.

On waking, a cavernous sense of doom always descended on Rachel, and she considered, for the first time, how she might now get out of the project. How she might get rid of Isaac.

Porn is like Pot Noodle - Sarah Hilary

2008-10-19T09:50:00.002+01:00

Porn is like Pot Noodle. There’s really nothing to it, no substance, until you fetch up with the boiling water. I’ve tried explaining this to my husband, who prides himself on his tolerance for my chosen career but secretly wishes his wife didn’t earn her keep writing screenplays for people with names like Victor Stallion or Stormy Blue. I’d be more impressed by his tolerance if he didn’t keep distracting me, mid-flow, with village gossip.

I’m typing, “CLOSE-UP SHOT of Stormy’s nipple –” when, ‘Joanna’s invited you to a coffee morning, Kate.’

‘What..?’

‘Joanna. Two doors down? Lady with the retriever.’

Oh… balls. I backspace, deleting the accidental intrusion of Joanna’s dog into the intimate moment between Stormy and his Stallion. Multi-tasking’s all very well but you try writing banging hardcore action when your neighbour’s baking a sponge-cake. I can see my next blockbusters now: Tea with Pussolini; Lay Her Cake.

FADE IN :

EXT. COTTAGE – DAY

The door is opened by JOANNA, a sprightly 50-something with a face like a King Charles spaniel. She smiles at her visitor.

JOANNA: Kate! How lovely to see you!

KATE: Lovely of you to ask me.

CUT TO:

INT. COTTAGE – DAY

KATE’s P.O.V. The sitting-room is chintzy. A dog is lying on the hearth-rug – retriever, golden, obese. There’s a coffee-table in the centre of the room, spread with a linen cloth embroidered with a fringe of flowers. Seated around the room are six women of a certain age, well-dressed, sensibly-shod.

WOMEN (in chorus): Hello!

KATE: Hello.

CUT TO:

WOMEN’s P.O.V. as KATE approaches and finds her place in an empty armchair. KATE sits and sneezes, reaching into her handbag for a tissue.

CUT TO:

CLOSE-UP SHOT: KATE rummages through the bag, removing items and placing them on the corner of the coffee-table: a Mason Pearson hairbrush; a Rain Jayne; an old-fashioned enamelled powder compact; a large neon-blue translucent latex phallus complete with ‘realistic head’.

ZOOM TO:

CLOSE-UP SHOT: KATE’s hand as she stands the DILDO on the table next to the fairy-cakes and Royal Worcester. Being latex, it wobbles a little until it finds its balance. KATE withdraws her hand and delves into her handbag. Sounds of delving. Otherwise, complete silence in the room.

CLOSE-UP SHOT: KATE retrieves a tissue and blows her nose, loudly.

Focus pulls back to DILDO which is catching the sun and shining, filtering the light to a blue tincture which stains the doilies and ginger-loaf.

CUT TO:

LONG SHOT: the room of women all sipping coffee. The sound of gulping. The dog gets up and walks arthritically towards the table, where it sniffs at the DILDO, wrinkling its nose. Chink-chink of bone china as cups meet saucers unsteadily. Blue shadow of DILDO being drawn by sunlight, like an obscene sundial, across the linen table-cloth into the neat laps of the seated ladies.

FADE OUT.

ENDS.

Burning Flesh - Mikael Covey

2008-10-11T09:36:00.003+01:00

What happened was I was tired of being in love with this girl who I never told that to because I was too shy and besides she always went out with all these other guys and that hurts so bad seeing her with them you don’t wanna live anyway and especially not when you know you’re such a timid little mouse dropping, so who’d want to keep that pathetic piece of disgusting scum alive anyway. So I decided to go for broke. Get so wasted I’d never return or maybe go up to that girl and say ‘y’wanna go out with me.’

At the big dancehall it’s so crowded you can’t move because if you put a couple of thousand wasted kids in a huge dancehall, it gets crowded no matter how big it is. I got no acid as usual, but combine enough chlorpromazine with speed to get the same effect but without the delusions and add as much reefer and beer as possible. I think when I fell over the wooden bench somebody’d set up in front of the band is when my bag of reefer musta fallen out of my pocket. Too bad but when you go all out, that sorta shit happens.

I see Katie there but don’t say anything to her so I guess the drug and alcohol effect isn’t quite working yet but knowing there’s gonna be a party later at her brother’s little old farm house him and another guy are renting out in the country, so there’s still time. Just have to hook up a ride out there with Zelmo and thinking fuck this shit, now that I’m totally wasted I’ll grab Zelmo’s hot little sister who’s a skinny little blonde wench not all that pretty but all that young slutty teenybopper anyone could ever want and just take her bluejeans off and forget about Katie, for tonight anyway.

But now the fog sets in. Apparently there’s a certain point in getting fucked up when you have the capacity to act outside your normal reserve, freeing the ego from the id as it were, but if you don’t act quickly, you get past that and start on the nod and just say fuck it, who cares. Don’t remember seeing Katie or Zelmo’s slutty little sister or much of anything. I do distinctly recall taking a hit of that incredibly explosive amyl nitrate and with a shit-eating grin handing the little bottle to a friend who with a shit-eating grin was handing me a lit up joint.

And they say there was this loud explosion and me spinning around with that lovely dark blue shirt I always liked, on fire now and that’s that. You have these instantaneous ideas running through your head, like fuck it man, I’m on fire and that’s gonna ruin my lovely shirt. Then in Zelmo’s old pickup truck going to the hospital, you’d think it’d be cool to ride in an old ‘49 pickup with the split windshield and antique charm but not if you’re screaming at the driver to get the fucking truck going faster than 50 mile an hour.

It’s twenty minutes to the nearest town with a hospital and we make it in forty. My arm in the styrofoam cooler full of ice that momentarily numbs the pain until I start screaming again and trying not to. You can’t know how bad third degree burns hurt unless you third degree burn yourself. But trust me, it’s bad. And wake up in the sunny hospital room with my arm all bandaged and tied upright to the railing of the bed. Ask the doctor when he walks in “are all my fingers still here” now that I’m sorta glad to be alive again.

Excavation - Vanessa Gebbie

2008-10-03T17:15:00.004+01:00

“Male, six-five-eight-zero?”

“Yes”

“You know why I’m here?”

“Yes. Does it hurt?”

She kneels beside me, runs her eyes over me, speed-reading. Her voice softens.

“No. It won’t hurt. I promise you that.”

This is what they do now. They send one of these personal archaeologists to plumb you before you die. To excavate your hidden places, dig through the scar tissue; to lay bare and gasping things that haven’t breathed for years, before you snuff them out. I lay on the bed, naked, little bloodless trenches all over, my archaeologist kneeling at my side. She runs her finger between my nipples, winding her fingertips in my chest hair, pulling it gently. She runs the finger down over my sternum. She pauses it above my navel. She is watching her hands. They are small, square, purposeful hands, slim fingered, short nailed, the backs are freckled. Some of her fingers are calloused at the tip, I can feel them, tiny, dry and scraping over my skin like so many arthritic spiders.

She kneels over me. It would not take much for this to be another place, another time, and she, paid, pretending interest in these bones. She is young, small, lithe. Her fingers work fast. Her hair, undefined, wispy, tied back but escaping, looks like straw. She has small even teeth, at least, mostly even. I like mouths. They have told me, taught me a lot. This mouth is relaxed, generous, unthinking. The one uneven tooth catches inside her top lip. She moistens the lips to slide them over the unevenness. There is something heartbreaking about that mouth, about the action. Her face is fine featured, intelligent. Unplucked eyebrows over grey eyes. Almost expressionless, she has remained for hours working in and over my body. Only the eyes have moved, flickered, shadows passing over them like the wind ripples the surface of the sea. Those lips have moved, speaking my body away into her microphone.

Now, her hand moves over my belly and she cups me gently. “Have you always been kind, I wonder?” she says, not looking at me at all, holding me. I feel my skin contract, shiver.

“I feel kindness,” she says, her head lowered slightly, her voice disappearing. “I feel kindness,” she says again, disbelieving, looking up at my face now. I try to smile.

There has always been kindness. Never anything less. Sometimes more, but maybe she has not plumbed that. I have not raped. I have paid, sure, but they were always women, not things. Always people, not ciphers. Always a girl, a woman with as much need as I. Different, but as much.

She pushes her fingers underneath the skin at the top of my thigh, bloodless, painless. “I wonder why?” she says, almost to herself.

Why? I close my eyes. There are so many, many answers. Because I have loved. Because I liked. Because I needed. Because I was so sad I thought I might never resurface. Because I needed company. Because the solitude of living in this body might have been enough to finish me were it not for the warmth of sliding into another. It reminded me I was alive, sometimes.

I am erect. She ignores me, feeling beneath my skin, closing her eyes, relying on touch. I feel the movement, small scrape of callous, the probe of her flesh. Her eyes snap open.” I have you,” she says. “Just once. There are adhesions. Did you know?” Scar tissue that runs from groin to lung, which tugged at me for years, which stopped any other woman coming close. I do not speak, but my eyes have filled. She takes out her fingers, and leans over me. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I have to collate…”

She kneels up, and leans over me, both hands now flat on my chest. She is weightless, like a bird. I can see small blonde hairs on her upper lip. The lip has dried again, the single tooth catches it. I want to moisten it for her. She catches me looking at her mouth and runs the tip of her tongue over her lip, pulling it back against the lower. She smiles, her lips slicked, small, her jawbone fragile, as though I could crush it between my fingers.

“Here,” she says, rubbing the tips of her fingers below my left nipple. “We are nearly done. This will be the last excavation.” Her eyelashes are tiny straw spikes. Her eyes are grey. Pale grey like clouds.

She has done well. We don’t hear much about these excavations, only hearsay. They collect the body’s imprints, the buried memories deep in the tissue and bone. The torn, broken and mended. The invasion of disease, the counterpoint of serum. All those life prints left in us like so many fading impressions on sheets of paper beneath a letter.

She has collated my body, spoken it into her microphone. Joining it to a million others. There is not room for us all to live late, like they used to. We have bartered health for longevity, planning and collation for a spontaneous end.

She straddles me, excavating my heart. Her small fingers move inside my chest, lifting, feeling, palpating. She speaks into her microphone. The words begin to blur, to fade. I can no longer catch the whole, but the gist. “A good man…kind, who has loved only once.”

“No, not just the once,” I say, forcing the words up and out from where I am drowning. My little archaeologist finishes her whispering, and sits back. She lifts herself, bends forward to my mouth, her small tooth caught again. This time I moisten her lip as she slides onto me.

“I wish,…” she says.

Nine Poems - Jeff Crouch

2008-09-27T09:21:00.006+01:00

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

yolk sky sunshine eats its nirvana

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

wilt

vulture roaded from
odorously sun

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

flabshow

spine loaf cold cut
conducting backseat
from phonebook

marshmallow swamping
velour

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

through

glass finger
print
laundry
smells clean
starch
white shirt
wiping

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

sugar beet

her skirt loaded—
her skirt undone
by farming hand
sweet ruin

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Kennewick Man

Follow this road into the desert,
Hector’s corpse.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

von Hagens

spinning
like a rotisserie chicken
bare blade
up
and iceless eye open
skate, skate
frozen

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Western

“Tonight,” says the do-jo master,
“My daughter asks you.”

“What’s she asking?” asks the cowboy
“For the chuck wagon and the whiskey—,”

Missy tears up and continues—
“Are you going to miss me?”

“Gretchen’s pregnant,” says her sister.
And I think to myself, High Plains Drifter.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
naked on linoleum

witch of subatomic white
the tiger fluorescent
remains a bad haircut

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Memento - Joseph Ridgwell

2008-09-19T09:38:00.007+01:00

I’d been driving long into the day and night. Over nine hour’s non-stop and I was beginning to feel it. Signs of exhaustion had begun to surface. Over tiredness, drooping eyelids, minor hallucinations. Yet there were still over a thousand kilometres to my ultimate destination, Kings Cross, Sydney and home. I’d also reads the signs that flashed by the roadside every few kilometres,

STOP REVIVE SURVIVE

STAY ALIVE

TAKE A BREAK EVERY TWO HOURS!

I pulled into the slow lane of the Pacific Highway and kept my eyes peeled for a cheap motel, or any motel for that matter, somewhere I could hole up for the night. The vast southern sky was splattered with blinking stars and the eucalyptus trees stood tall and haunted. I wondered why I’d even taken the trip in the first place. A two thousand kilometre drive to see Queensland’s Big Pineapple. What a waste of fucking time. The Big fucking Pineapple, a huge fibre-glass structure stuck out in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

Then, I saw it, the sign, Motel, next right, two kilometres. I flipped my indicator on and turned off the highway. Immediately I was plunged into total darkness. There wasn’t even a cat’s eye to guide a driver. I rubbed my face, yawned, and peered into the inky gloom. The white lines in the middle of the road were devoured by the vehicle with monotonous regularity. ‘Only two k to go,’ I told myself over and over. ‘Let’ hope the place is open.’

An enticing image of me lying in a soft bed, clean sheets, TV flickering, maybe even a cold beer, floated before my bleary eyes. My eyes began to close. I forced them open. It was a struggle, a battle of wills, sleep versus survival. Then I saw it, the other sign,

‘WELCOME TO SERINITY POP. 67’

Pop. 67? Holy Moly, a few deaths and the place would be a ghost town.

I drove on and on. The two kilometres felt more like twenty, but eventually I saw it, the third and final sign of the long, weary, and woebegone night. It was a neon sign, flashing on and off,

BATE’S MOTEL, BATE’S MOTEL, BATE’S MOTEL.

The name rung a bell, but I was too tired to reflect on the matter. ‘At last,’ I sighed happily.

I pulled the rental car into a deserted car park and cut the engine. The motel consisted of a row of somewhat dilapidated cabins and a small reception. Perched atop a small hill and set some way back from the cabins was a large wooden house. In the gloom the house looked haunted. Spooked, I grabbed my bag and headed to the reception.

Outside I felt an odd atmosphere in the stultifying air. It was hard to put a finger on the oddness, but it sent a cold shiver rippling along the length of my spine. The whole place had an eerily, abandoned quality, and suddenly I wondered if I hadn’t made the wrong decision. ‘Well, shit, I had to stop somewhere, ‘I reassured myself.

I walked up to the dark building. There wasn’t a light on anywhere. I peered through a dusty window. The interior was like something out of the 1950’s, a living museum piece. Fuck, maybe I’d just steeped into a time warp? Then I saw the bell. I gave it a hard press and it rung out loud and clear. Nothing stirred. I rang the bell twice more, but still nothing, aside from a deathly silence.

I wandered over to one of the cabins and peered inside. There it was, a bed, the clean sheets turned back neatly. Maybe I could somehow break in? I rattled the door, it was firmly locked. I returned to the reception and rang the bell, several times. Then I called out,

‘Hey, anyone in there?’ I yelled, my voice reverberating into the velvet night.

Once again nothing stirred.

I slumped onto a wooden bench. My body ached and my bones creaked. I needed to sleep. I stood up wearily and was about to give up the ghost, when a sudden flicker of light caught my attention. It emanated from the rear of the reception. I got up close to the window. There was some movement, a body. It was a woman, a middle-aged lady, bleached blonde hair, dressed in a silk kimono. ‘Touch,’ I thought. ‘Now I might be able to get some rest.’

Seconds later, after much unlocking of bolts and rattling of chains, the door creaked open,

‘Hello,’ I said.

The woman squinted, ‘Jeez, you’re travelling late ain’t cha?’

The woman’s full figure hugged the kimono; a pair of large floppy breasts easily discernable. A cigarette hung lasciviously from the corner of her mouth, and despite her age she oozed sexiness. In fact she looked a little like Mae West,

‘Yeah, sorry, underestimated distances, is it possible to get a room?’

At the sound of my voice the woman’s eyes sparkled with a strange intensity,

‘Oh, a Pom are we?’

‘Yep, London originally, but I now reside in Sydney.’

The woman grabbed my hand and led me inside the reception. As she did, her kimono fell open slightly and I copped a decent view of cleavage, even a bit of nip,

‘We don’t get many Poms out here, in fact we don’t get much of anyone out here, a town in terminal decline is Serenity.’

‘Yeah I noticed the sign, Pop. 67.’

‘Soon be none of us left, now if you just sign the register I’ll show ya to your room’

And the rates?’

The woman smiled and flashed me a cheeky wink, ‘For you Pom, $50 per night.’

Bargain, I thought.

I signed the register, noting I was the only customer. All the pages were blank,

‘Looks like I’m the first customer.’

The woman laughed a hollow laugh, ‘First customer in months.’

I wondered how the place managed to remain open.

The woman led me to a cabin nearest the reception. She unlocked the door and showed me the facilities,

‘Clean bedding, en-suite bathroom, TV, fridge,’ she pointed out as we took a miniature tour of the room.

The place was dusty and smelled musty, but it would do the job. I eyeballed the bed with tired eyes and then the woman came close to me. Her breathing was heavy and her cheeks were flushed,

‘Now, is there anything else I can do for ya Pom?’

I stepped back a little, and remembered the ice-cold beer,’ Any chance of getting a drink?’

‘A drink?’

‘Yeah, ideally a cold beer or two.’

The woman’s eyes sparkled with that strange intensity once again, ‘Yes, we’ve got some out back, I’ll bring you some, don’t worry.’

At that the sexy Motel owner disappeared. I chucked my bag on the floor and jumped onto the bed. I found the TV remote and switched the box on. I flipped through the channels, but as usual there was nothing on, just turgid programmes, and irritating advertisements. I switched it off and closed my eyes.

Moments later someone shook me awake. It was Mae West. She was holding a longneck of beer,

‘Here’s your drink.’

I rubbed my nose and eyeballed the large bottle, ‘Cheers.’

‘D’ya mind if I join you?’

I spoke without thinking, ‘Yeah, why not.’

The woman had placed a large whiskey tumbler on the bedside table. The tumbler was full. She picked up the glass and lay beside me on the bed,

‘Jeez, it gets so lonely, all here by myself.’

I took a long pull on the bottle and wondered what was going on. The woman was sending out all the signals for a no strings attached shag. I took another long pull from the bottle. Well, I was up for it,

‘I suppose it must get lonely, out here all alone,’ I said.

The woman finished her drink in one extended swig. Then she put her glass down and leaned across me,

‘Yes, it does, it does,’ she breathed huskily, ‘I haven’t had a customer in over nine months.’

‘Nine months?’

‘Yes, so I always like to get a memento from them.’

The woman’s lips were almost touching mine, her heaving bosom pressed against my chest, ‘A memento?’

‘Oh God!’ gasped the woman, and then she thrust her tongue into my mouth.

Within seconds my trousers and shirt were off and the woman had straddled me. Her Kimono flapped open free and easy and I reached out and grabbed a floppy breast, shoving a cigar-butt nipple into my mouth. Moments later my iron cock entered her gaping slit, right up to the hilt.

The woman moaned and groaned. It was a wild and wonderful shag, one of my best rides ever. I arched my back and drove into her again and again. The woman reached a frenzied state. She clawed and scratched my chest. Then she leaned back her head and roared,

‘Yes, I always have to have my memento!’

It was then that I saw it, the flash of silver. What the fuck? The knife plunged deep into my chest. I felt blood gurgling along my throat and out of my mouth. Jesus, I was going to die and I hadn’t even reached orgasm! I reached out my arms to try to deflect the blade, but the knife kept hitting home. Then darkness fell.

The Motel owner gazed at my corpse with a strange sense of satisfaction.

‘Yes, I always have to have my memento,’ she said aloud.

Hidden in an old dusty cupboard in the attic of the house on the hill was a row of glass jars. Inside the jars were various pickled body parts. Noses, ears, eyes, fingers, etc. At some point the woman appeared and placed a jar alongside all the others. The jar contained my nose.

Body - Fiona Barham

2008-09-12T08:23:00.004+01:00

Cynthia feels a warm glow growing across her cheeks, places a gentle grip on her slender neck as her chest and face flush with a steady, peach-coloured radiance. She bows her head to watch the ruby fissure curiously thread itself from the cave mouth of the perfect straight cut she has made and explore its way into the open air. She watches its glossy sheen coil around the roots of the delicate hairs around the open wound and cautiously begin to make its way down towards the crux of her arm.

She loves this time of day, when her only companion is the synthetic yellow of the light bulb, her only conversation its intermittent crackle and low buzz, cutting through the hush of the early hours. The lime-encrusted opening of the Melamine mixer-tap dribbles an icy spurt of water. The drips drum noisily on the ridged enamel of the bathtub then gurgle away back into the peaceful haven of rusty pipe work and travelling spiders.

Outside the open window, conifers whisper like brushed cymbals: a proud trio of evergreens, waving their tips like Motown backing singers for a sleeping audience.

Just her now, her hot flush swept away by the arctic chill of the bathroom. She pulls the hand towel around her bare shoulders as the window latch rattles against the swirl of air, stretches her deadening leg out ahead of her, and leans back against the clucking radiator, breathing calmly. As hundreds of erect hairs fall under her dark, sticky spell, she thinks of volcanoes: their restless magma, spewing spectacularly to the surface of a filthy crusted earth then oozing down blackened mountain sides, devouring leafless trees and flattening ugly corrugated tin houses in its hungry wake. Sometimes stuff just needs to come out.

The sharp tip of a dried paint drip scratches the back of her head as she lowers her eyes to the human lava, rolling itself over the raised white fluke marks in her pale skin then drying in watery clouds along her arm.

She closes her eyes and breathes slowly through her nose, one nostril still blocked from a recent bout of weeping. There is a faint stinging sensation now as the cold air writes its way along the wiggling scarlet line and traces its path down to the blue-veined landscape of her outstretched wrist. She pulls the corners of the hand towel together under her chin and shivers, becomes suddenly aware of her fatigue and discomfort. A breeze throws the heavy scent of hand soap across her dirty face. She wipes the remaining smudge of damp kohl from her cheeks with a curled up thumb, rubs it into the skin of her palm and scrapes at the drip of blood that falls on the brushed cotton of her pyjama bottoms. Another speck lands just beside a printed monkey’s head. She scrapes at this too but even though a puce-coloured residue collects under her nail, it has left a stain. Now the monkey has two heads; one smirking, one faceless.

She shifts her weight again. The paint drip scratches her head sharply. She puts her finger up to it: no blood. She strokes the inside of her forearm. A tiny smudge follows the movement of her hand, but mostly it feels dry. The cold air has seen to that. Her ribs feel heavy and her nose feels full and stuffy. She remembers why she came in here and cries, looking up towards the corners of the room, as though the Deity will reveal himself there, among the bottles of shampoo and festering terry-towelling face cloths.

She wonders why she cries as though she is a movie star when nobody else is around: why it has to be so melodramatic. Why does she always look up for example? Why make so many appeals to a God she does not believe in? Why clench her fist underneath her chin that way? Why massage her brow and tug her hair with such desperation when no-one can see? Why strike these curious poses of floppy hands rested on kneecaps, of head propped up or protected with trembling hands? Why care what her pain looks like?

She rubs the circulation back into her shoulders with the towel, straightens her pyjamas down across her blotchy goose-bumped calves, picks a tiny spec of black sock fluff from under her big toenail. Funny, these moments of preening. Does making her nails clean and tidy disguise the collection of raised white lumps across her arms and thighs? Does it detract from the grey tissue paper-thin skin beneath her raw eyes? Will the next person she stands before, thinks to himself, after the initial interest of erect nipples and exposed pubic mound has passed what lovely neat toenails?

Hemingway's Dick - David E. Oprava

2008-09-10T10:20:00.004+01:00

She’s screaming bloody from the bottom of her vulva ricocheting shots so the neighbours can call the cops and I’d beg them, please take me away, she’s just about ripping it off pounding my ears with the mantra, over and over again, do me like he would, do it like HIM! How the hell should I know how he fucked, but then she begs me, go to Key West and use a magnifying glass to find a few pubes that the historians have forgotten to use in displays that belie cracked board walls in the shack where he drank himself to suicide, so I conspire with plane tickets in hand to find out how the man screwed, only to get there and discover a goddamned hurricane has blown the place away leaving a hole in the ground crowded with other guys looking for a damn public hair in what used to be there, a ruin wreck of palm fronds and blue balls bouncing jive wired trying to discover the trick of MFA literary chick instant-cum-magic. What should I do, I turn to a freak who is wringing his bottle neck with Jack smacking lips grunting, dunno he grins, but I am gonna’ die just like him, yeah, ok, so I got laid in the back of a bodega with some sag who looked about a hundred and ten, but at least the hair was grey and stole a strand of the wiry ones telling her it’s part of the fun, slap tickle wiggle squirm YOINK! closing my eyes not worried about sperm going anywhere useful inside, I hear them scream, you tricked us you bastard, what the hell are we supposed to do up here, fuck! So I get back on the plane speaking to a woman who hasn’t been laid in ten years and she tells me she stays up late at night watching cable news fretting about the level of post-consumerist malaise and universal fucking fear whilst eating ice cream, I suggest she might just turn it off and go find someone, anything as long as it’s either living or vibrates, she thanks me upon landing cause I let her use my trophy in the lavatory THEN there’s my girlfriend whom I don’t have time to kiss as she molests me in the cab ride like a tiger being circumcised, have you got it, have you got it, the secret to his fuck? You’re in luck baby as I pull out that soiled bottle of Jack with the pube inside that belonged to the since departed freaky guy, give it to her as she bucks and grinds, yes, oh yes, Ernest, she whines, this is the best fuck ever, and I keep quiet looking at the bucolic suburban yards knowing he was too drunk to get it hard.

Return Of The Congenital Pilonidal Dimple: A Love Story - David E. Oprava

2008-09-07T08:42:00.005+01:00

My wife, the laundry maven, asked me cautiously if I had bled. In her hand my understandably soiled pants (I work hard) with the merest of spots not larger than a dot but an odd un-mistakable red. Here, let me have a look she said, but immediately I turned and fled, like an adulterous cad I sped to the doctor, now old with grime that time and rich living on a walloping NHS deal had made of him, and said, I think she’s back. He didn’t remember me now thirty years on and twenty stone more the man, but I dropped my trousers and soon made him understand that I could FEEL her back, there in cleft of my deep soul scar, she wept. In his office, now closed for the day, a small cry seeped out, no more than a whimper, the kind a dimple might make. Hello, are you there? He shook his head, there’s nothing we can do, this happens time to time, it’ll close back up, you’ll see. No you fat old fool, don’t you understand, the moment’s at hand to throw away this farce, so I rushed home, took the dog and moved into a basement flat where we communed until the divorce came through. She comes and goes as she pleases, the alimony is HELL but worth the reason I stay with her, it was always meant to be, because more than any other personified female congenital protrusion, she gets me.

Congenital Pilonidal Dimple: A Tragedy Of Pilosebaceous Glandular Proportion - David E. Oprava

2008-09-05T09:11:00.005+01:00

I have, rather had, one. In this symmetrical sphere of bipedal predominance, it was lonely. She tried to speak to me as a child and hearing clearly I listened to the seep of her evolutionary obliterated tale, it’s dark, it smells, I can’t see anything, so on and henceforth she bitched, but she was mine. UNTIL, a man who didn’t have one and coveted the close relationship she and I had found expounded on the potential risks to a young man with something called a CYST, which she thought would be bliss because she always wanted bigger ones than the shallow cup she was given, oh please, oh please she whined, let me have it, just this time, but being only seven and not understanding the workings of the pilondial mind, I acquiesced to the man’s unscrupulous scalpel, sent to la-la land as the gas scrambled me without toast or marmite, childish choo-choo trains cranked on nitrous excised her as they sang twinkle-twinkle anal star, how I loved you from afar, down below the waistband tight, snug and dark and out of sight...she was gone. A week with my arse in the air as the loss scabbed over and feelings fell away, the scar’s still there, but she went to the contaminated waste incinerator in the sky, torn from me I drop kick tears, RIP my dear, RIP my soul cyst-a-love.

The Womb Garden: Part Six - Max Dunbar

2008-09-03T10:03:00.002+01:00

The next night I’m just finishing off a report for work (I’m a research assistant at a local authority) when my phone goes clangalangalang and it’s Serena, bidding me by text to meet her in the Cornerhouse at half four. I clock off at four, walk down and she’s already there.

‘I don’t want to see you any more,’ she says. ‘I wanted to tell you face to face.’

‘Is it because of what I did to Neal?’ I ask. ‘Well, he started it.’ Memo to self: women are rarely impressed by mindless violence.

‘Not really. I only went with you because I fancied you and you should always at least snog someone you fancy. I was getting bored with Neal anyway. It’s just that you need help, and I’m not in the business of rescuing people.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘All that stuff you were saying the other week about your poetry and your imaginary girlfriend. It really freaked me out.’

‘So I prefer imaginary women to real ones,’ I say. ‘So what? Reality is overrated.’

‘That’s the danger of idealism,’ Serena says. ‘People in the real world are never going to be as beautiful as people you invent in your head. Real life involves compromise and settling for things.’

‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘I want no part of it.’

‘You’re, what, twenty-five? Are you going to go through the rest of your life holding on to this imaginary friend? You’re a sad, pathetic freak. If you’re not willing to compromise, if you’re not willing to risk, then you’ll die alone, and worse, you’ll never have been born.’

And with that she tosses off her wine and walks away. It’s a fine exit, I’ll give her that. Complimenta, complimenta!

But I’m a little sad about being rejected and about the things she said - indeed, there’s even a tear in my eye! Luckily, Nina is of course on hand, and the bar manager gives me a few sympathetic moments to talk it on. We have another few pints, and then Nina takes me home.

Serena said she wasn’t in the business of rescuing people; but I am, and as soon as I’m over this sadness I’ll be out there again, fighting against fascism and spreading romance and love. But everyone needs time out.

I think of those lines from Jim Morrison:

Urge to come to terms with the "Outside," by absorbing, interiorizing it. I won't come out, you must come in to me. Into my womb-garden where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe within the skull, to rival the real.

Good old Lizard King. He understood everything. He could do anything. And I like to think he wasn’t alone in his view. None of us have porous minds. If your mind’s too open, anything can get in. We all have a time to work, a time to fight, and then, when we’re hurt and tired, we can take the hand of our imaginary girlfriends and walk back up to the womb garden, to rest and bathe our wounds. And then it’s back into the fray.

The Womb Garden: Part Five - Max Dunbar

2008-09-02T06:55:00.003+01:00

The week passes quickly, and on Friday I meet Serena again. This time there’s no pretence that this is a literary chat, and we’re kissing heavily after the third pint, carried away in the Cornerhouse. I find time to tell her I’m five years older than her, which doesn’t faze her at all; after all, Neal is six years older. Women like older men, which is one of the reasons why marrying young is such a silly idea.

I live behind an abandoned fire station off Salford Crescent, and at night the view across the square in beautiful. The light from the car park slants through the window, making a set of bars on the facing door. My neighbours are all retired suburban types who can’t understand how I got to be renting here. After making love I rest in my favourite sleeping position, my head curled into the nape of her neck. We drift off to the sound of early morning goods trains.

The next morning we shower together before I take her out to lunch. Lunch is perhaps not such a fantastic idea, as I’ve been drinking heavily and the outside world gives me the jitters big time. I grasp onto Serena’s hand, trying to hide the desperation, and just thinking Cornerhouse Cornerhouse Cornerhouse.

A couple of beers with my pizza sorts me right out. We have a couple of drinks before she heads off to get her train. Serena is going to see Neal’s band tonight, playing in the student union in Lampeter University. I walk her to Oxford Road station. A brief kiss on the lips, and she’s gone.

Nina materialises beside me, and we have a few more drinks to celebrate our victory over the misogynists and predators. Systemata, systemata.

I saw myself in a panoramic wasteland

The beauty redundant, since I was alone

And then I turned and you were there

I’ve always loved you.

Myself and Nina have a long session in the bar, reading Belle du Jour and Girl with a One-Track Mind. Okay, not exactly literary classics, but it’s encouraging to see the amount of sexually liberated non-fiction out there. Only thing about Abby Lee’s book I object to is the amount of rules and regulations in there. Ten rules about being a fuck-buddy; ten rules about one night stands. I mean, come on. We’re libertines. Let’s not wrap ourselves in red tape.

This night passes without incident except that I get into an argument with some pseudo-leftist who objects to the idea that we should give asylum to Iraqi translators who are being threatened with death for working with coalition troops. Opposition to the war is where the purist left meets the little-England right. I argue along but it becomes pointless when he claims that Saddam’s was a secular regime with free healthcare and education. To be able to debate someone you need a point of reference, and I don’t have that with anyone who supports fascist dictatorships.

The next day I feel incredibly panicky as I’m walking up to town. This is how it started last time, and I don’t plan on another breakdown. I have to choke this off at its source, so I drop into the Samaritan’s, which is just past Revolution on Oxford Road. I explain my history and my situation. The advice is the same as I got last time; don’t drink too much, and think positive thoughts. Hardly original, but at least the man doesn’t accuse me of schizophrenia like the last crisis-line guy I spoke to.

But I don’t plan on a second breakdown, so the coming week I take it easy, abstaining from alcohol bar a quick pint after work. This was a good idea; I’m thinking more clearly, and my skin looks better than ever. The panic symptoms are receding.

It’s a good job I’m detoxing, really, because when myself and Nina are walking back from work on Thursday we find none other than Neal Price, on our doorstep, large as life. He’s not very happy. Apparently Serena has told him of our little tryst, and he’s come to beat the shit out of me.

At least that’s the general idea. And give the guy credit, he does make a pretty good start, throwing a punch to my jaw that knocks me off balance. But one thing people don’t realise about me is that I’m fairly strong, and I wade in with a flurry of punches to his face and torso. He’s got three inches and several stone on me, but my sheer force and persistence soon grinds him down. A man can’t help his build, and a lot of people have made the mistake of thinking that just because someone’s slim means they’re weak. It’s not a mistake many repeat, I grant you.

Before I know it the guy is curled up on my driveway and the jolly old man from next door has come outside to see what the fuss is about.

‘What’s going on here?’ my neighbour asks.

‘Caught this fellow trying to case the joint,’ I tell him. ‘You can never be too vigilante, Graham!’

To show I’m not a sour winner I phone Neal a taxi and make him a cup of tea while we wait for it.

The Womb Garden: Part Four - Max Dunbar

2008-09-01T09:57:00.002+01:00

So on Saturday myself and Nina are up at the Cornerhouse. We had taken the train from Salford Crescent, instead of walking, because the walk route takes you past all the chain bars on Quay Street which by six are full of gurning arseholes. There are a tremendous amount of fascists and predators in this world. But we’ll get them. All of them.

We enjoy a Cornerhouse pizza, along with three pints and Byron’s Don Juan. Now there was a fucking poet. Made women physically faint just by reading his verse. At about nine I hit the street.

It’s such a balmy, beautiful evening that myself and Nina walk all the way to Neal’s place in Fallowfield. The sun goes down and it’s beautiful. People rhapsodise about the countryside, but its views have nothing on the awesome spectacle of a city at night. Nature is bullshit, and nature-worship has spawned some extremely nasty political ideologies. I take some photos on my mobile phone.

Neal’s house is opposite a Spar, and I go in to buy a case of Corona and a bag of limes before entering the party. It’s in full swing. There are about twenty people there with a male-female ratio of about 60-40 – not bad for the Group. There are even a couple of single women here. In films and novels the single people always get set up on blind dates by well-meaning friends, leading to a series of humourous encounters with a variety of unsuitable men, before a finale where the girl eventually meets Mr Right and learns some insights into human relationships. That doesn’t happen with the Group because a) they’re too lazy, b) they don’t know anyone outside the Group and c) where would we be if we didn’t have single people to feel superior to?

Nina looks absolutely amazing tonight; tall and well-built, with a shock of dark curly hair and a face that just radiates love and good times. I remind myself how lucky I am to even know her.

Now, there are rules when attending a Group party. One: stay in the same place, drinking constantly, letting people gather around you rather than following the conversation around. Two: leave after the first person leaves. So myself and Nina are drinking Coronas in the garden, which slowly but surely becomes the centre of the gathering. Neal, by contrast, is running around like the proverbial blue-arsed fly, keen to share his small victory with people from his uni and secondary school.

I end up chatting away to Serena in the garden. Now, I should explain here that I am stunningly handsome (chest sculpted by six and a half years of weights, Nina says, sun-dappled dark hair, tanned skin, gorgeous, deep blue penetrating eyes) and that in recent years I’ve had some success with writing, regularly publishing fiction and journalism and being shortlisted for prestigious competitions. This is another example of the common ground myself and Serena share, as she’s a writer too. We talk about books and literature while Neal is in the front room, doing PlayStation karaoke with five other Group arseholes. Def Leppard and Sinead O’Connor drift out onto the back yard; it’s ironic, which makes it okay.

Anyway, I offer to have a look at Serena’s work and give her my email address. We arrange for her to send some stories and then we’ll meet up during the week to chat. Having arranged this, there’s not much point in sticking around and so myself and Nina take our leave. People are already disappearing in ones and twos.

We walk through Fallowfield for a cab. People shout, spill out of bars and takeaways, snog in the streets, fight over taxis. The Islamists say that the city is decadent, the symbol of Western corruption and godlessness. And they’re right. It’s that decadence which makes cities worth fighting for.

I’m relieved to be out of the 1980s timewarp that is the Group party.

No need to suspend yourself

In innocence, virginity and childhood

It’s not a search for the teenage pastoral

But a quest for the Elsewhere and the unknown

The pleasures of love are adult pleasures

The qualities of love are adult qualities

So, my love, let’s put away those childhood things

Take my hand, and walk into the sunset

And let’s enjoy those adult pleasures together.

During the next week I’m critiquing the fiction that Serena has emailed to me. On Thursday we meet at the Cornerhouse. I buy her a pizza and a glass of wine. Her delight and surprise suggest that she hasn’t been treated this way by Neal, or any other man.

Serena is twenty and graduating next year. She says she has no idea of what to do after uni; or rather, she’s got too many ideas. ‘I feel like if I go for one then the rest of those possibilities will vanish,’ she says, ‘but if I hesitate too long it will be too late to do anything.’

‘The problem with our generation,’ I say, ‘is that the conventional wisdom is that you have to find something safe and then never let it go. And this applies not just to jobs but to romance and relationships. We’re suffering from this Bridget Jones idea that what you have to do is find a partner and get settled down as soon as possible, regardless of love, lust or whether you’re ready to sacrifice your life in that way.’

‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘it’s as if life ends at twenty-five.’

After going through her stories, we quickly hit a stride and began talking of more temporal matters. Midnight we’re snogging outside the Cornerhouse. I don’t push for anything more, and she’s the first to break off, giving me a cute little wave as she walks away.

The Womb Garden: Part Three - Max Dunbar

2008-08-31T08:38:00.002+01:00

I got up the next day with a sense of renewed purpose. I was between projects at the time, and Nina’s words inspired me. Here I was, in a state of happy and requited love, not caring about all the unhappy people out there, either lonely or in restrictive and loveless relationships. I resolved to be a knight errand in shining armour.

Apart from work, the only thing I had on at the time was my idea of writing a book of love poems. This was another area in which romance was dying; poetry and song. The tortured piss-artists that I listened to on XFM in the morning sang about relationships, but their lyrics were always bitter and resentful towards women with a subtext of misogyny that very few people picked up on. I would change all that. I’d write about the positive aspects of love; the joy of requited love, and the beauty of the superior sex in general.

To give you a better idea of what I’m on about I’m going to quote a New Humanist interview with Richard Curtis that I believe is relevant here.

I really do believe that there is a tremendous amount of optimism, goodness and love in the world and that it is under-represented. But if you do feel it and experience it then you should write about it. The dark side is always dominant. What is the nastiest thing that has happened to me? What is the worst thing I can imagine happening to me? What were the worst three days of my life? Ah. I shall write about that. It is a sort of sentimental conspiracy about violence. You write a play about a soldier going AWOL and stabbing a single mother and they say it is a searing indictment of modern British society. It has never happened once in my entire life. Whereas you write a play about a guy falling in love with a girl which happens a million times a day in every corner of the world and it’s called blazingly unrealistic sentimental rubbish. It has always been that way.

I’m not a big fan of Curtis but he does strike a chord here. Although anger is constructive, and good things can come from negative emotions, it was definitely time for me to accentuate the goodness. My poetry book would be in the spirit of this celebration of ‘optimism, goodness and love,’ as he calls it. That’s what I’d call it: Aspects of Love. Of course, such a book was hardly going to get me down to London, but I reckoned I could send it off to some small press who could publish it and get it nominated for a prize. I take a notebook everywhere I go so I can scribble down lines whenever they occur to me.

But I’m digressing. The ideal first mission, as I saw it, would be to release Serena from the confines of a relationship that was unsatisfying on just about every level. However, my antipathy to the Group would prove a problem here. I never saw the point of male friendship, and when I go out I’m either with a woman or on my own. This is an ideal state of affairs for me but not so much for the fair Serena – for how am I going to see her when I am out of the Group’s loop?

On Tuesday Neal solves that problem himself by sending me an invite on Facebook for a party he’s having this weekend. Even better, it’s a leaving do as Neal’s band have somehow got themselves a touring schedule, doing student union gigs. This will obviously involve the man being away for some time and Serena’s studies will make it impractical to come with him. Appreciata, appreciata.

The Womb Garden: Part Two - Max Dunbar

2008-08-30T09:32:00.003+01:00

Nina puts my mind at ease. Don’t worry, darling. I like a bit of cabaret in the early evening!

I find myself chatting to Neal’s new girlfriend. Neal is an aspiring ‘musician’, who, lacking in looks or charm, has discovered the benefits of appearing sensitive. His new girlfriend is a slender, ethereal type about five years his senior. We’re talking about Phillip Pullman and instantly find some common ground on the fact that The Amber Spyglass is the only book we’ve both cried over. Complimenta, complimenta.

Now, Group men tend to go for insecure and slightly messed up girls whom they can easily control. Not one of them, Neal or Rob or Jan, could handle a woman who had a strong character and an independent mind – or even a woman over five foot five. Neal in particular likes to pick up his girlfriends in clubs, preferably while they are too pilled out of their minds to notice who they’re going back with. These girls are predominantly short and slim, a little chunky on top, with dyed hair and clear skin. They look so similar to each other that, had I not once seen two of them in a room together, I would say that Neal had been going out with the same woman all along, in a variety of different wigs.

This new one, Serena, seems to fit the pattern, but in her I intuit a wild streak that might give Neal a surprise. Nina whispers her agreement; I’m a good judge of character. Look at a person once and I’ll know the dreams that they had in the womb.

The man himself intrudes into our conversation.

‘So, any sign of a partner for you, Steele?’ he asks me.

‘Not at the moment, pal,’ I reply, and deftly change the subject. ‘So how’d you guys meet?’

He tells me that he met Serena at Glasto this year and it was just a lucky coincidence that they were both living in Manchester; her studying English lit, he working at that call centre.

There’s a last round of drinks before people start drifting off, mainly to the cinema or for Thai food. Rock and roll, these guys. Soon myself, Neal and Serena are sitting here in a weird little threesome. Complicata, complicata. She’s still merrily chatting away but Neal finishes his drink quickly and makes his move.

‘Come on, we have to meet Dave and Susan at eight.’

Serena stands up. The obedience in her movements breaks my heart a little. Then she bends down to kiss me.

Neal shakes my hand. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll find happiness someday.’

The comment throws me slightly. ‘I’m already there, pal,’ I say, and feel Nina’s squeeze on my hand.

Myself and Nina spend the rest of the night drinking in our favourite bar. We’re reading bits of Baudelaire out to each other. I also have a drink and a chat with the bar manager, a tall, silver-haired beauty in her early thirties.

Hiding from the world, Nina is saying. It’s not enough. You have to change it. Look around you; there’s so little romance, so little love… we have to put the romance back into this world.

The Womb Garden: Part One - Max Dunbar

2008-08-29T07:47:00.005+01:00

Saturday night I was feeling a bit low and fragile, probably because of the excess of the previous evening. Woke up at around nine, and stayed in bed with Nina until around midday, thinking of the words in that Guardian strip:

Nuclear winter

Terror attack

No work to go to, no bills to pay

Just stay in bed, with you, all day

The hangover became manageable as the day slipped through my fingers, but no less bad. Worse – and this is something I’ve noticed over the last couple of weeks – my panic symptoms were beginning to recur. A sense of derealisation; the urge to grab on to walls or crossing boxes to anchor myself more strongly to the world; a fear of large conurbations and main roads. I got up to the Cornerhouse only through Nina holding my hand and whispering comforting words, which I may turn into a poem. The Panic Song:

You’re okay, you’re beautiful, you’re alright

You’re really real, and you’re really you

I’m here, I love you, I am with you

I am with you forever.

Nina’s verse soothed me, but all the same it was a somewhat frazzled version of myself that mounted the central staircase in the Cornerhouse bar, and I found it difficult to go through my usual bantering chat with the bouncer. Getting to the bar (and just about managing to pass a few words with the gorgeous student girl behind it) I grab at my pint as if it’s the cord of a parachute.

Turning around, I’m immediately spotted by a Group member, who waves me over to a big table that they have commandeered near the window. I scrape up an empty chair and join them. Now, I do not like the Group, but in my febrile state even they seemed like good company. I drink my pint, feeling the panic symptoms and stabby head dissipate with every swig.

I grew up with the Group; same high school, same small town. With honourable exceptions, they are a bunch of predatory inadequates, and naturally many of them – despite being well into their twenties, or even thirties – are still living in that small town. However, some have managed to migrate into Manchester, mainly Fallowfield or Whalley Range. I’m not sure if I want Group people living in my city, even if it is in a shit area known for rapes and gun crime.

And yet it is good to see them. It’s good to see anyone that you used to know, purely so you can see what has changed. And there have been changes, mainly on the relationship side of things. Even the most ugly and repressed Group specimen, which is saying a lot, now seems to have a girlfriend.

We chat about jobs and nights out and shit like that, me still genuinely enjoying it. However, I anticipate that after a couple more beers the novelty will wear off and be replaced by a grinding contempt – my usual attitude towards the Group, and indeed that of any sane and intelligent being.

I find myself the recipient of several pitying glances. I think they imagine, or want to imagine, that I’m self conscious about being the only bachelor in the room. Thing is that I actually have a girlfriend and, pretty as some of the Group women are, she makes all of them look like Ellen MacArthur on a comedown. Although they can’t see her, Nina is here with me, drinking white wine, laughing at some of the Group men’s more idiotic remarks, and making witty asides on their appearance and opinions – I have to struggle to keep a straight face at one point.

But this puts me in something of a moral quandary. The Group guys are mainly misogynists, who see women as purely a means of relieving their sexual desires and maintaining their status within the Group. Tonight is a case in point; the men are doing all the talking while their girlfriends just sit there, occasionally striking up a tentative conversation with one another. Because of this I tend to keep all the women I meet, real or imaginary, away from the Group, as it would degrade them to be, however briefly, part of their value system – and here I don’t even mention some of the nastier chapters of the Group’s history.

His Story - Melissa Mann

2008-08-22T08:41:00.006+01:00

This is a story with no beginning or end. There’s just a woman, old, staring up at the bedroom ceiling of her council flat in Manchester. A woman seeing her death flash before her eyes. And then there’s me here in this closet, the place where secrets you can’t let go of live. I’m on the floor at the back wrapped in a quilt, waiting for an end to the past I know isn’t coming.

Outside the closet it’s early evening, the day’s shadow turning into the vast black shape that is night. There’s light coming under the door, that sudden kind of light you get from a bare glass moon hanging itself from a ceiling. Her head’s all you can see, the rest of her embalmed in a pink candlewick bedspread with daisies carefully embroidered along the top edge. Her hair, draped across her skull like centuries-old cobwebs, is fanned across the pillow. She’s lying there, eyes pretending to be eyes. Slowly, patiently, she’s learning how not to be here anymore. She’s still substantial though, a definite shape on the bed. Death has not diminished her yet, content for now just stealing the shadows to become itself. And there are plenty to feed on thanks to the clutter in the room – cardboard boxes, piles of clothes, stacked furniture. They give the impression she was in the middle of packing for her death. It won’t be long now. I know this the way some people know it’s about to rain. I can feel her coming to me…

… she’s coming to me like a reflection walking out of a mirror. Here I am, mother. But she knows this of course, she knows exactly where I am; I’ve been here for years. Every time she opened the box, she dug me up. I’m her baby, an old baby now, an old baby that died of young age. I’m the product of a stolen fuck, a fuck stolen from a shy fifteen-year-old in the middle of an air raid. I’m the stillborn child a child gave birth to alone in a shed at the bottom of a garden. I’m both her son and her brother.

But I’m not a ghost. I am bones that once had flesh and a full head of hair, black hair she snipped a lock of and slipped inside the silver locket with her mother’s picture. Think of me as conscious bones, bones that never stood or walked or ran. She carried me into the house in the newspaper her father used to wrap the lettuces, newspaper that for the rest of her life would always be the feel of death. She carried me inside and buried me here in this shoebox. Buried me, yes, but never laid me to rest, not really. How could I be with her constantly there, pressing her fingers to my lips, missing the breaths I never took? How could I rest with her lifting me out the box all the time, whispering, ‘if you loved me you’d come back to life’? Mother made a life’s work of my death, every day giving birth to the past with her remembering. Yes, I am conscious bones, bones with a conscience because although mother is dying in the room next door, really she died of me 68 years ago.

Not much longer now. There’s a chill in the air. I can feel it despite the quilt I’m wrapped in. Mother made it for me. It’s a memory quilt made from bits of material she collected over the years: white satin from the sleeve of her mother’s wedding dress, the pocket from a favourite cardigan she used to wear, a piece of the skirt mother was wearing when she gave birth to me. She’d sit for hours, sewing the quilt, the fingers she broke shaped like the scullery steps her father threw her down. She’d sit on the end of the bed, closet door open in front of her, sewing memories together to make a life. I could hear her, the snap of cotton between teeth, the crisp precision of the scissors trying to cut out her grief in squares of fabric. But it was the kind of grief you only ever get round, never over.

We’ll be together soon. I can feel the ghost of mother’s hands touching mine, holding me tight. I’m all she has. There’s no one else, never has been. For mother, everything had the potential to leave and so she never let it arrive. She’ll not be missed, not really. In time her absence will be noted. By the woman at the post office perhaps who used to chat to her through the glass. Or the butcher where she’d go each week for her corned beef. Yes, her absence will be noted but not for weeks, perhaps longer. Eventually, when the council set about clearing her life away, evidence of mine too, however brief, will come to light. But I shall be long gone, my heart beating somewhere else. I’ll be with mother, reminiscing about the life we would have lived if we’d both lived. Poor mother, such a waste. Perhaps when she sees me though, she’ll be reborn. Perhaps by seeing me I’ll give birth to her and at last she will live.

Yes, eventually they’ll find me in this closet, they’ll find me here in my cardboard grave. But they’ll never know my story, how it began, how it ended. They can only guess.

Three Poems - Haidee Kruger

2008-08-15T11:01:00.002+01:00

curretage

In a swimmingpoolgreen room

I am

a white starfish on white marble under a white ceiling

freezing into five points measuring the distance to

dead centre

as I leach colourless jelly into

my veins fossilising like dry rivers

until

I fluoresce out in strobes clinging to

the voices, the steel ebbing against my back,

the weight of my

b e l l y

then

_________________________________________________

I emerge on

the other side

into rain evaporating off hot tar.

I have been cured of

my body.

the Body rearranges

the Body rearranges
itself around
the other. points of entry and exit,
embraces. Embraces. the
thrill of skin. density
surrenders to Liquid. semen, blood,
mucous, milk. the Body yields to

its double. it takes One into,
lets One out. it breathes only
in reflection. in between,

the Body grows into
the swell of a question mark. then.
Then.

pain pinballs echoes,
cell to amnesiac cell. the Past fleshed
unexpectedly. the Body

is a superconductor, pure
light leaping. Time pours
out of it, a warm rush of
presentness. Inhale. the beating
world. Exhale.
Again. Again.
Again.

and after
the Body shrinkwraps
loss, ties it with red ribbons. the Body
rearranges, leaks, empties
itself of
Itself. demands to be
mopped up. staunched,
stoppered. yes. Yes.
the Body returns to

the shape of a comma. a breathless
Pause.

never mistake

never mistake
slipped for sliding . to find

the sweet damp fleshy knot of
knickers , stomach , tongues , you need
the chafe of loop over cord ,
noose over wrists , nylon down legs ,
body in body – bent tautline underhand slide
into bliss . however ,

once doubled over
itself ( slipped , stoppered ,
dressed ) the seam sets into
calloused bight , forever
looped , spliced ,

sutured –

hitched right down
to the bitter end .

A Shape - Sarah Stodola

2008-08-08T09:40:00.004+01:00

People always tell me I am pretty, although I wouldn’t know. Just the other day, while I was sitting in a café eating a croissant and drinking my coffee, a man approached me and told me that I have one of the most beautiful heads of hair he’d ever seen, then there was an awkward silence and he apologized for maybe seeming forward and excused himself. It’s usually more subtle than that, or less.

An example of more subtle: a friend will say something about how she’d do anything to have my [insert body part]. It’s usually the legs or the nose.

An example of less subtle: A kid who lives down the street once whistled as I passed and then said, “That’s the one hot piece of ass who won’t say ‘no’ to me the minute she lays eyes on me.”

Another example of less subtle: People have often told me that I am pretty for a blind person.

And that makes me wonder what it is about a blind person that makes them less attractive, and do I possess that bit or not.

I know first hand that my skin is smooth and I have asked and been told that this translates into pretty skin. Same with my hair, although people have told me that it isn’t just the sheen, but also this color, blond, that is a color that only hair can possess, never another object, like a shirt or a house.

I am told that I am tall and thin, and that these are important traits to possess. I have felt a fat person before, and the thing confuses me a bit, because the fat person feels comfortable and safe and therefore to me he feels pretty. I have kissed men both taller than me and shorter (so it doesn’t make much sense that people tell me that I am the tall one), which is easy for me to understand, because I do respond to gravity, just like everyone else. I know which way down is, but why that way is unattractive is another story and a mysterious one.

A man once told me that in spite of, “you know,” he felt he could see into my eyes and right through to my soul. To which I answered that I was quite sure that my soul lay somewhere quite unconnected to my eyes. He said he was sure I wouldn’t say that, if only I could see my eyes with my own eyes. To me, that man was beautiful because I could feel the shapes of his muscles. Very firm, almost like a sculpted piece of wood. Other women have told me that they, too, find such things appealing.

I am happy when people tell me I am pretty, even though I don’t know what pretty is. Even though it means nothing to me, I can tell that it means a great deal to them. And so I do what my mother and sister and girlfriends tell me, and I go to the salon, and I let people do my makeup and pick out clothes for me. My friends know what kind of person I am. They never pick out clothes that they say fit my body, only that fit my personality, which wouldn’t you have to agree seems counterintuitive?

One time another man told me I was beautiful, which set off a conversation on the topic of what beauty is, and a week or so later he had built a kind of light that projected the shape of a star, because he knew that I can just barely, sometimes, pick up on light if it is very, very bright, and he wanted me to understand. He said that he’d acquired a special lighting system, so that the outline of the star shape would be extremely sharp and bright. He sat me in front of it and turned it on and told me to look straight ahead, which I know means don’t strain the neck, just let your head sit naturally. At first I couldn’t make anything out, so he turned it up, and then up some more, until finally, I did start to make something out. And he had set it up so it was symmetric, and he explained to me why it was so.

“Do you see it? Isn’t it beautiful?”

And I told him, “Yes, yes, I think I see now.”

But I didn’t, not really. I sort of saw, but I didn’t see, as in understand. Because I still can’t figure out what something like that might have to do with something like me; it’s just a shape, just a line here and a line there that I can barely make out. I’d rather not think of people that way.

Finding Lunula - Kevin O'Cuinn

2008-08-01T09:24:00.004+01:00

She chewed at her fingers and her fingers bled. From across the classroom I watched her smear blood across the tip of her tongue then sit back, calm for a while. The others showed no interest, their faces in their books and out the windows. She was new, showed up from a place she never mentioned. Mentioning wasn’t her thing; neither talking nor mixing; she was though, it seemed, a cutter. She’d catch my stare and stop, her teeth still deep in cuticle; she’d hold my stare and tear further, pull back more skin till one of us looked away.

When I approached her in the corridor, outside class or in the yard, she’d swerve and blank me, maybe raise a raw finger and hiss through crimson teeth, one time she held a finger to her mouth and gagged.

One Friday when I couldn’t stop myself anymore I followed her to the gate of her house and stood in her way and pulled up my sleeves. Blade? She asked. Knife, I said and opened the hand where it sat. Blade, she said, What you need is a blade to get it flowing.

It became like me and her were a population of two.

We went to hers after school and drank pints of aspirin, Thins the blood, she said, Pints of Aspiring. Then we’d scratch and bite. She’d point here, me there and that was it. She’d say stirring me was easier than stirring coffee and bite me till I bled. So it went till one of us said Stop, till someone said ’Nuf. Then we’d lie on the bed and smoke fags as if we’d been screwing.

It was weeks before she told me about lunula. We were smoking and she was examining my fingers as she often did. You’re going to be okay, she said. You’re going to lead an enchanted life. The fuck you on about? I said. Your whole life is written on your nails, she said—Look here, your lunulae. My, huh? Lunula, she said. The half moon at the bottom of the nails, it dictates how well you’ll deal with crap and yours is fuller than any I’ve ever seen. Bollocks, I said, The fuck did you read that? You’ll see, she said. And then she held her scarred fingers to my face. None; the skin was chewed back further than was good for her but no half-moons. Weird, I said. Yeah, said she, Fucking right, like a sky without a moon.

I didn’t step up to blades right away. That first day she came back from the bathroom and held it up. Dad’s, she said, Unused, and placed it beside the fishbowl where it lay for a month. What are their names? I asked. Fish don’t have names, she said and squeezed a drop of blood into the water.

Then, that day. She picked it up, said, May I? Course, I said and lay back on the bed and she started tracing the veins on my arms with her nail, then with the blade, parallel to the veins like a blood bath on a dual carriageway. Usually I went home by dark but that night things got late. Time escaped out the window and into the sky and the last thing on my mind as I lay there having my arms opened was my mother but there she was when the door opened, stood on the landing with fuck knows—her old man, I think, brothers, and the lot of them shrieking their gills out and tearing at their hair. That’s what started us too, and what with the drama, the blade twisted deeper.

I came to, hooked up to a drip and strapped down. Pale bedside parents not looking like they’d had much sleep. The fuck? I said and my mother up and left in tears, the old man behind her. The fuck? I said again and good thing the brother was there. Did we have a suicide pact? he wanted to know. The fuck? She lost it when she thought she’d done me in, he said, and, well, ended it, end of story. Nearly. There was one more stop, the funeral parlour the next evening. She looked different, don’t know, larger, just different. Some knob had wrapped a rosary beads around her hands, her fingers. The fingers looked well, probably touched up with something. I held her face and blew a hair from her eyes. Her cuticles had retracted in death to show them—her lunulae. They looked like surfboards and flying saucers and hand grenades and I thought and wondered, and wished she could have been there.

4 Poems - Ray Succre

2008-07-24T08:56:00.003+01:00

Dick

In marrow and hook-tongue more a minister than a man,
and he could dance, consuming brains,
and enchant the holes from even mild, less-tormented ladies.

He wore an uptaking cock in the natural boast
by which fuckers of so many nations toyed historically—
such people were boys, each feathered in said-vulgar surplus,
as we often obtain and take hard, give the harder.

It is a great assembly, fuckers—
Poise, counterpoise, poison, counteract,
sex as people gather lusting, tits as tit-barons tryst in view,
twisting with any new day.

Did he stick it into wicked custom all these years?
The world turns, to her he turns or else,
therewith, thereby, therefore.

Anatomy and Turned Milk

Near dawn, when first I drink the milk,
my surprise is but tertiary—
Have I ingested a urine?
Platelets in a redly champing sauce?
No, cow-berry fluid, mucoprotein,
but too thick. Turned.

There are tribes that leave their dead laying sick.
They drink animal milk, too.

The sheriff wakes up in my tastes
and his dorsal aspect shows much tread.
I clutch.
He has walked miles by the thousand,
in me, tasting things,
looking for his tin, insignia star.
He looks intima, media, adventitia.
Sour.

I turn on the lights in the milk in his squad car,
and soak up shivers from a cold corona radiata—
_Sheriff in lungs, inferior aspect:
The shoots creep near to closed. Poison
is waving hello. Can't I breathe?

_Sheriff in cardiothoracic bin, ventral aspect:

His cop boots bounce like drum-mallets
over the bloodways. Can't I slow?
_Sheriff in stomach, anterior view:
He lifts the fluid, Atlas starting up;
it runs through his fingers until he
closes them and paddles it up the chimney.
_Human throat bundle, longitudinal section:
The surf rises, a zippery lift, can't I... can't I...
A straw's slow elevation from a pit
of glass-encased fizz. Then eject,
the whole flippered jug upended,
emptying my guts from as from
a deft kick in the prostatic collecting trunk.

For anatomy and bad milk,
and life in the morning,
and life after.

Eating from the Froth

These crabs sidle a peculiar, stained rock
and recall my mother in me,
from a tangled drowse.
Each split, affrighted claw is a memory
from the sucking reef.

I thought to shingle my youth’s shed
with dry bone, shuddering her presence
into a sack of sleep— they come
from the floor, see. It’s never dry.
These fucking crabs beneath my nails,
under my lids, climbing my hoisted spine
and eating from the froth—
I have to wear them all?

The memory of her, my first endurer
swarms sudden like flies from a warm skirt.
I was born in July, or rather extracted
like a molar, Caesar’s method, and cancerian.

There she is. Brown hair, long.
Until she vanished into an unknown volume.

These crabs are the flits of a thin mind,
scuttling and gorgeous, secretive, motherly.

There she is.

Propellers in a Gale

Sprayed rim of a month
talking the notion
tick tick
“I want to have a baby.
Do you want to have a baby?”
auburn lips and ignition
more brass than gold
one minute has passed
we haven't made a baby
tick tick
“I want to. Several.”
the baby the babies but
what lives in this layaway
is by no matter a being
and shrubs in small boxes
ought not invite forests
tick tick
we have somehow set
alarms to wake us
despite foreknowledge
that cloaking our minds
does not make them
any craftier
tick tick
but she
“oh, don't we want to have
a little baby?”
tick tick
these panties full of names
one minute has created another
we haven't made a baby.

Body Shots - Yu-Han Chao

2008-07-12T08:17:00.007+01:00

1
The skin prickled with beads of water,
or sweat. A sweaty butt. The candle
blushing in the background.

2
A groove down the back. Shoulder blades.
A curved ass, pointy elbow. Smoothness.

3
Turn the torso, breasts point in different directions.
Square nipples, rounded ribcage,
square knuckles. Belly button a teardrop.

4
Bit of a blur. Round tits, one of them
staring, a bit rude. Belly button laughing.

5
Back. An hourglass, mane, deep groove.
A hint of a crack, a hint of a heel,
a hint of the front of a knee.

6
Overflowing candlelight. Strands of hair.
Wrinkled water and light spots on the body.
A crooked heart.

7
The right breast is a star, illuminated by
radiating light. Soft lines, round, dark nipple.
Kneeling very straight.

8
Standing now, posed, open, light in crotch.
A smooth, glaring light-bush.
What's above and beneath fade out.

9
Strange angles and lines from the belly
to the thigh: straight legs, curved tummy with
connect-the-dot outline.

10
Leaning, balancing, falling. Thick thigh-
tops dripping upwards to tip of teat.
Dark body-lava and knee-calf.

11
A distorted butt, large as balloons,
like pigeon-toed maracas;
from downwards-up, cock-and-balls.

12
Dark chin, pouty nips. The right
clavicle on fire.

13
Shield the light; diffuse glow.
Back folded like the beginning instructions
of an origami piece.

Wired: Part One - Vera Chernova

2008-07-07T06:43:00.008+01:00

I look up and a hyperbolic light bombards my head from the tops of trees; then sequesters into holograms and sensory simulators.

Black, dead space of an unfathomable size drapes around my finger. It makes me want to slit my fucking throat.

During our rather abrasive colonization of space, some of us install duplicated reproductive systems to demonstrate fecundity as an instinctual reaction to the exponentially plunging birth rate. Although you can say we colonized space as much as the white Europeans colonized black Africans. It’s also a matter of adaptation—malaria and cholera for chronic depression; incomplete knowledge of physics for linguistic miscommunication; lack of food for lack of food because nothing grows in this place—just pieces of metal crashing into fragile pressure pumps broken off the diseased whore that bore them. For the sake of historic precedent, I honestly believe our dark outer space will also rebel against this pathetic hegemony, and go on to become its own warring nations, oppressed people, and cruel dictatorships—on an atomic level. However, this time, we have nowhere to go back to.

The trade-off is at the mechanical level. There are lasers undetectable by the human lens that are hypersensitive to minute deviations—the slightest air vibration could disrupt the sol-gel; while the giant dreadlock wires, where they’re housed, mirror-coated on the inside, are sometimes too heavy to lift and disentangle. It takes a smart mechanic. A strong mechanic. While they mould their bodies to preposterous proportions, I bear the burden of contemplating how brittle our system is. At absolutely any moment, we could be slowly leaking oxygen; our computers could go dead; we’ll stumble on a pot-hole vacuum; or someone up in the chain of command—some brilliant, sensitive intellectual will embrace neurosis in some justifiable metaphysical ideal, making his way into the intaugumentary power plant and breezing by the security maintenance, for the purpose of cutting a 3mm-wide wire that will expedite the heads of newborns to the expanding corners of the universe. They’re damn lucky I didn’t pass the psychiatric evaluation for an authoritative position.

Personally, I prefer to take ecstasy and swim in the ocean, face-up to the sun.

Surfing, hiking, rock-climbing, sky-diving, camping, snow-boarding, swimming.

I don’t know how many years worth of salary went into this. Not into the trendy double-vaginal canals—although money has a slick way of disappearing in there, even if there’s only one. I, on the other hand, love the rapids of the simulated Colorado River kayaking; rock climbing on the plasticized terrains of Utah, sprinkled evenly with red brick crumbs that rub off on my palms as I smell the inner city ghetto trapezes, which often times than not, ruins the mood. At the very top, they seep oxygen out of the room and I feel the feather-pluck of adrenalin, so I forget. Euxiquio is at the top, spotting me with his muscular legs. He has a turban wrapped around his head so the ultraviolet doesn’t fry his little, white pussy. He looks like a Turk from my parallax. My life’s in his hands, but it would be easier if he had helped me those years ago with a place to stay when I needed it. In our world, there aren’t benches or parks to sleep in; that’s an entirely different hobo fantasy that people pay good money for. Now, he’s holding me up and we’re friends again.

I inhale the red dust and it makes me cough and my eyes water and swell, so I can’t see anything. The inside of my mouth starts to itch—gums around teeth. My foot slips off one of the mountain studs. I’m strapped like a starfish. Euxiquio’s screaming, Hold on! What else can I do? Death’s down there. It will rupture my heart. Funny the way that works: When a child is born, one ventricle and one atrium shut down while the remaining pump blood to the lungs and support the respiratory system. In that first minute when the baby takes a breath, the lungs open, demanding oxygen, so the heart breaks and re-arranges itself in origami. So, too, going into death. Many have died like this—fallen off these holograms. The heart breaks like a pomegranate.

Euxiquio scoops me up like an eagle a field mouse; or the monolithic jaws of a crocodile carrying new hatchlings to the safety of the swamp. We’re panting under the merciless pangs of the virtual effects that congratulate for reaching the top in effeminate monotone. It asks us to resume the setting for the climb down.

“That’s enough,” Euxiquio hits the big, red, lobulated clitoris on the control panel, that says STOP! The tapestry of scenic flesh degenerates. “You scared the shit out of me, Andy.”

“My teeth are itching, Euwey.”

“Your teeth are itching?”

“I think it was an allergic reaction.”

“Fuck. Oi! Have you heard of the tent they came out with?”

“Yeah.”

“I just bought it.”

“Me too.”

“Have you tried it?”

“Not yet.”

“Of all the people—I thought you’d be the first to have a go.”

“I’m waiting for the right occasion.”

“A girl?”

“Are you kidding? Vacation. My first one in two years. It’s going to be big. Two weeks.”

“Alone?”

“Yup. Just me and the howling stars.”

“You’re insane.” Euxiquio runs his hand over the ground and fingers the metallic dust that illuminates under the scathing light. It’s colored grey, or black, or white, or silver, like everything else on this giant chunk of metallurgic labyrinth that provides shelter to human life. “Could be anything. You’re the techie. You should know.” he says.

Euxiquio’s father is a senator. I met him once. Ptolemy Euxiquio (after his grandfather) Xerxes. Name worthy of such short and corpulent stature. Scream that during sex. Like a miniature decorative dog—they’re real nervous things. But, he passed the psychiatric evaluation. I’d love to say that he’s an irreverent demagogue as unforgiving and predatory as space itself—and his eyes are empty of rectitude and he does nothing other than sit on his post and theorize. Unfortunately, he has quite a bit on his plate—a lot of people have been making complaints. Recently, people have been making telegraphic threats. Toxicity is rampant. Rattlesnakes under the bed. Scorpions in the slippers. I can feel it in the wires. If there’s ever an outage, it’s usually from a source of vibrations. Perhaps it’s the entire mental procession of the people that vibrates these walls. These paper-thin, deathly-dense walls. If you press an ear to one, you’d hear the ocean. I love the feeling. It’s nothing. These things subside. A Glorious Revolution. One drop of blood; one fight; one fart in the wrong direction and there’s an entire outage throughout the department. Hell, once the hood stopped working and they called me in to fix it. This aerial toilet that sucks the air and ventilates it back out so that we don’t suffocate in our own sulfur.

We had one conversation before our session finished.

Euxiquio was nervous. I could tell. He doesn’t go out with me often. He is short like his father, but strong. Years of holographic rock-climbing, indoor sports, and vitamins has made him Spartan. He is opting for marriage to a likewise bumpkin.

Lucky bastard. Women are a commodity here. Only natural birth is legitimate. Euxiquio focused his eyes on the transparent oblivion of the ceiling; something’s up.

“Listen, Andy—Lysander, I want to talk to you. Seriously.”

“What is it, Euxiquio?”

“Have you been hearing anything strange—in the walls—the wires. Do any of the other techies—I mean, your colleagues, do
they say anything to you?”

“Of course they say things to me.”

“What do they say to you?”

“They say things like,” He leaned closer, “I have an important mission for you… there’s been a chlorine leak detected in sector
57.” And I started laughing, but Euxiquio’s eyes were savage with space.

“Fuck you, man. I’m serious.” He said.

“Don’t be like that, Euwey. I’m not sure what you’re asking. I don’t know how to help you.”

“Sorry. It’s just that my dad asked.”

“Then no. I haven’t heard anything.”

Wired: Part Two - Vera Chernova

2008-07-01T19:41:00.004+01:00

Can’t wait to come home to my baby.

I’m going to pull each of her straps up as high as it can go, until the straight taut string sensually stops the circulation, lifting her up off the floor; dangling delicious. Then slice it rambunctious releasing the tension. I’ll hear it smacking against her sides. Pinching poignant.

When I lay her out on the floor, she’ll be complacent. She’ll stare at the ceiling like a rape victim; no eye-contact, as I run my fingers up and down; then I’ll tear the covers apart with my teeth and expose her to the cold air. Flip her over and do the same.

I’ll push all her buttons.

I’ll blow her up so good, she whistles.

I watched the square meter cardboard box and admired her figure. Robust. Tight. Young—fresh from the factory. Voluptuous, from various angles. Damn! She puts the ass in hourglass.

I kneeled beside her.

Put my ear to her side. No heart beat. Just the ocean. I love it. I could hear my heart accelerate and wrench the muffler.

I stood up.

I went behind her salutary label and gave her a good slap. I lacerated the adhesive with my identification card. The flaps of the cardboard box deflowered. Styrofoam smell like bitter rubber aphrodisiac. I looked inside. She was packed in more tight than a hydrogen bond. When I pulled her out, she was bustin’!

I laid her out on the bed. Wrapped in clear cellophane, from head to toe. Mouth hole open. Bubble wrap like caviar. Pops so appetizingly between my fingers. Get each and every one of those little bastards. Like welts, loaded with pus; combative.

They squeal like oysters in boiling water.

Then I tear the plastic, and there she is in all her glory. Rippled, plastic, metallic, navy blue.

My tent.

And her manual is at the bottom, along with the remote. Buttons labeled with numbers and letters. Combinations perform tasks. Reenact the battle of the bulge. Solve differential equations. Copulate orgies of molecules.

The only real place to take her is outside the living quarters. That’s where I’m going on vacation. For two weeks. She comes with a wireless autopilot that can navigate in outer space—like a rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

Cool, huh?

Every day, after work, I read one utility at a time, counting down the days to my vacation. Somehow every single morning, in self-consuming labor like an Aztec god, and what breadcrumbs of the day are left in twilight are spent preparing for the next morning—continuously, without a break; without hope. But, vacation! One or two weeks allocated to your disposal. Suddenly, everything is forgiven. Life is worth living again. Two weeks supplant a lifetime of servitude. We are all cheap and stupid. At least I have her with me. She makes life livable. She gives power massages and oxygen deprivation at the same time, while chilling a beer. Everything, short of a blowjob. That’s my baby.

I keep her in the closet, thinking: What is more beautiful than the abstract female symbol of a tent? Her shape is a womb is a triangle. I want to be inside her. Look out at the cold dark space expanding gigantic. Not dying, not living. Just space. I reach inside her and it’s dark. I can’t stretch my legs out; remain in a fetal position.

There’s a knock on my door interrupting my session. I get out of the tent. Even if I open the door just a crease, he’ll see what I’ve been up to. She’s on my bed. She makes squeaking noises under my feet. I let all her air out. I cover her, decently.

It’s Euxiquio; he looks worried, uncomfortable.

“Andy, my man. I have news.”

“Euwey, my brother.”

“My father wants to invite you to dinner.”

“I’d be honored to come. What’s this about—what we talked about last time?”

“Yes…I think so.”

“I’ll be there. I have nothing to hide.”

“I didn’t say that you have anything to hide.”

“I know.”

“So, I see you’ve been testing out the new tent.”

“Yup.”

“How are her circuits?”

“They’re good. Don’t you know? You have one.”

He could feel the hostility in my voice. Its semantics protruded subconscious.

“I haven’t tried it yet. I see I’m interrupting something.”

“Not at all.”

“No, I have to run, anyway. They’re having a meeting in sector 39.”

“Goodbye.”

“I’ll see you, then.”

“Of course you will.”

When have I chanced to be the main course for the tastes of a political liaison? This can only mean one thing. I’ll be forced to put on my best—my tightest—spandex spacesuit, like a scuba-diving monkey. The only animals I can’t stand to think of are monkeys—they remind me too much of human beings. The only sport I can’t stand is scuba-diving. It reminds me too much of space--dead, dark, deaf. Although it’s the opposite: As ejaculations of prokaryotic debris float in living water, unashamed, into every orifice they can penetrate, while space is barren; as the cubic tons of volume implode grape-like bronchioles like winemaking, instead of exploding the lungs and the rest of your anatomy, bite-sized into the jaws of the void.

I sit down on the bed, careful not to graze her brazen circuits. She buzzes a little as her nightlight flickers. She’s winking at me. She lets air out quietly as water. I look out the window. It’s nighttime. Always.

I lie back down in her belly and turn on residual depressurization. Let the oxygen seep out as high as the Andes. She will trace my REM sleeping pattern and monitor my heart rate so I don’t wake up with a migraine.

The next night, I had no time for her after work. The spandex spacesuit pinched the hair on my arms and corseted my balls. It made me stand up straight. One can only look so undignified with a great deal of pride. I smiled into the mirror and it broke.

The dinner table was set gregarious, but I tried not to show my enthusiasm for such a crystalline assortment. The senator Ptolemy sat at the head. His wife sat beside him—tall, beautiful, stately—but I couldn’t trace the hint in her smile or eyes of a duplicated reproductive system. Euxiquio sat beside me, waiting for his father to talk.

“Thank you very much for coming,” said the senator, fingering the stem of his wineglass, “I’m glad you can appreciate the urgency of this request. Makings of a true patriot.”

“Sardines?” offered his wife, Lucretia. Fish. I’ve only read books about it. Their morsels shone splendid in viscous yellow liquid.

“I’ve never had one before.” They were an acquired taste, I thought, swallowing the crushed mass and backwashing it with
wine.

“Now, Lysander,” the senator said, “I realize that you don’t exactly snoop around your job, but I—and the other senators—have been concerned about a rebellion, from inside the system. I realize that the hours are long and the work is hard, but it’s indispensable to keep this society running. I have to work just as long and hard, if not more so, to maintain peace and make sure everyone gets allocated a fair amount of vacation time. You have to agree, this isn’t exactly a dictatorship. I’m not the bad guy. The human race is only trying to survive out here. Do you agree?”

“I completely agree. I don’t know, senator. I never really thought about it. I realize you’re trying your best and I appreciate it. But I’m not involved in politics. To answer your question, I haven’t heard anything at all. In fact, this is completely new and surprising to me.”

“No one’s approached you?”

“No.”

“No suspicious behavior?”

“Not at all.”

“So, what do you think?”

“I think people look out into this void and become lonely, depressed.”

“Of course, that’s only natural. However, I was talking about the system we have organized here. Is it productive? Is it
progressive?”

“I don’t really think about it.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s fine.”

“I know once you tried to enter the field yourself. It’s a shame. You’re a very intelligent man. And my son’s friend.”

“I didn’t pass the psychiatric evaluation. But, I’m not bitter about it.”

“You could always try again.”

“Nah.”

“Well, alright, Lysander. If the great human race perseveres, then my work will be done. Satisfaction and patience must be maintained. Now. Let me ask you this. Since you have my audience—me, sitting in front of you—what would you change about the system? Speak for the people. You could make a difference. I am always open to criticism of our constitution. I’d appreciate the input. Is there anything that particularly bothers you?”

“Do you do any hologram sports?”

“Yes. Golf.”

“Have you been to the Utah rock climb?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Well, besides the simulators, they sprinkle the surface of the wall with a red powder—it’s not really red—but when in play mode, it is. It’s sandy. Reminds me of brick, a little. It gives me an allergic reaction.”

“So?” The senator’s heavy eyebrows flummoxed.

“One track mind, this guy.” Euxiquio rolled his eyes backward like lottery balls.

“Can’t you do something about it?” I whined.

“I suppose I’ll look into it. Why—did you get sick?”

“Don’t listen to him, father, he’s just being—”

“Euxiquio Ptolemy Euxiquio Xerxes. If this is important to Lysander, I’ll see about it. But. Tell me, is there a chance that someone can manipulate the system? From the inside? From the wires?”

“Look senator,” I was annoyed, “I work with the wires. I know how sensitive they are. The people that work with me know it too. There’s absolutely no fucking way—pardon me—that a rebellion can happen. Think about it. Every day, we’re swimming in a sea of instability. Any time one of the wires goes out, we’re on the brink of death. A rebellion would completely destroy us and isn’t the purpose of rebellion to make way for a new life? Give them what they want; negotiate. I’m sure it’s all just rumors, anyway. Honestly, that dust is what really bothers me. Especially on my favorite climb. Anyway, I swear if I heard any absurd, suicidal talk about rebelling, you’d be the first one to hear. I’d come straight to you.”

Of course, the next morning the IFC, or the Intergalactic Freedom Coalition—as they called themselves—informed me of their plans to mutiny the senate and overthrow the governor on grounds of incompetency, favoritism in rationing, negligence of the public, famine, abuse of labor, cronyism, in other words, the usual; by means of intercepting a supplies crate from the outside, in economic, bloodless recession… and when I asked the details of such an auspicious operation, they emphasized secrecy, but hinted at the ingenuity of the “plan” with the smitten faces of idealists and propagandists which I could equate to the black-and-white daguerreotypes I’ve seen, depicting war on earth. Then they cornered me with predatory stares, with one hand on their hearts, and the other, on a manual nuclear solder, and said it would be solely my choice to join them in their struggle. I said I’d think about it only because I didn’t want to die before my vacation.

What a day! I come home and take off my shoes near the sleeping tent. The window of my cell reveals the perpetual. For once, I’d love to see a cloud or a tree, although I realize the previous generations of humans weren’t always so lucky. Especially when I read Hemingway. At least I can say that the stars and galaxies look like…a flower field of white…lilies, phantasmagoric and…acaulescent, wrapped in a golden zenith…of a halo…like brilliant zephyrs, and…cosmic titans…whose light doth…elucidate the, the, the…destiny of man in the intricate calligraphy of…portentous constellations…and having…eased the souls of humans for eternity and a fortnight…exhausted from consciousness…and having eased the soles of humans, for a seeming moment, in dreams, exhausted from life.

Wired: Part Three - Vera Chernova

2008-06-28T16:02:00.008+01:00

Tomorrow is the first day of my vacation. Today was the last day of work.

They nudged and they nodded; they winked and they whispered; they even threw me an intergalactic gang sign, which had a grotesque twist with six fingers. Yet, it came from the congenital anomaly of a co-worker, not evolutionary de-development. He was an old guy named Achilles. Real pioneer with these wires. I’ve never noticed his six fingers. I’ve never noticed their cowed expressions. In league for months, years. Was I under the sea; in outer space?

But to hell with all of it! Tomorrow and for two weeks, I can forget about all of this. Better yet, if the rebellion goes well, sites will be closed, and I can have a prolonged vacation.

All I could think about was the way pine needles and the fresh ground—soft soil and sharp rocks made me feel alive; pleasantly antagonizing and teasing the nerves—bare feet more exposing than bare genitals; how easy it was to fall asleep, at a high altitude, on a full stomach, to the monotonous inflations of birdsong. Living, breathing ecosystem, an unsheltered cradle. The tent will do all this for me.

I can’t wait to take my baby out for a ride.

“Have you thought about it?” Achilles asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you with us?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On your plan. How viable it is.”

“We can’t tell you the plan until you’re with us. In order for that to happen, you must be marked. I’m going to call the others. But we’re all friends here. No one else understands what we do,” he reached for the nuclear solder.

“Don’t. Tomorrow is my vacation, anyway. I’m not going to be here for two whole weeks.”

“Vacation. That’s tough luck. What were you planning to do, kid?” He was handling the burning solder.

“I’m going camping with my new tent.”

“Vacation, eh?” he said, “You enjoy, then.”

“Thanks. Good luck.”

“You too.”

The fact that they let me go meant it was all out of my reach. Thank god. I’m the scared woman that watches a battalion marching through the city with a handkerchief around her old face like a tent, making the rosary and praying: Thank god. Thank god I’m not one of them, and I don’t have to fight, or kill, or the opposite….

I’m coming baby. Don’t you worry. Daddy’s gonna blow you up nice.

I was so scared they wouldn’t let me go. I kept looking at the clock like a water mill, milking time. I watched it once for a full hour, as the minutes accelerated zero to 60, with a poker face.

I came home and I blew her up so nice, I thought she’d pop, but didn’t. Quality. I ran my hand over her walls. Frictionless, impenetrable. A work of art.

It was evening and it was already dark—as if it ever wasn’t—and I wanted to be on the road; out in space—in her arms, as far as she could take me. Hibernate in her lull of illusion and simulators—the most realistic up to date. Then I saw the grim stance of a shadow outside my cabin and the dreaded knock quoth itself upon my door. It was Euxiquio. He was out of breath.

“The tent!” He cried. Yes, cried. Red. “You have to destroy the tent. They’ll—I don’t know what they’ll do to you if they find it.”

“What’s going on, Euwey—what happened?”

“The rebels. They’ve attacked!”

“I don’t care! I’m on vacation. I’m going out right now. No one’s hurt me because I’ll be out there—bobbing around in space.”

“You don’t understand. They’ll kill you. They’ll shoot at you. They’re in the tents.”

“Who’s in the tents?”

“The rebels are in the tents. They’re aiming to highjack our supplies.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. So give me that fucking thing. Deflate it! Put it back in the closet—in a bag or something. You can’t go anywhere.”

“Fuck you, man.”

“Don’t be like that, Andy. That’s crazy. That’s suicide.”

“You won’t tell your father?”

“Of course not.”

“You promise you won’t tell anyone?”

“I promise. I love you, man. Don’t do anything stupid. I want to watch you deflate that thing.”

“No.”

“Why not? Do it! Now! Or I swear I’ll tear that fucking thing apart.”

“Relax, Euwey. I’m not going anywhere. I only want to lie inside her for a while. If I’m not going out there, then I’d like to just lie down. I need it. I just came home from work, and, you know.”

“You’re fucking crazy, man. You better deflate that thing right now.”

“Yeah. Thanks for letting me know.”

“Just don’t take your time. I don’t want them to find you like that—You’re like a brother to me. Promise me you won’t go out
there?”

I promised and he left. I pulled my knees in tight to my chest and hid my head between them. Slowly, I relaxed and stretched diagonally like a primordial serpent that uncoils from hunger, about to hunt or give birth to the world. I sympathized with the senator, Euwey’s father, who did nothing wrong other than lead a public life, because he was my friend’s father; and I wish I could’ve done something to alleviate the grievances of the people who showed me my craft—how to ringmaster these strange anaconda wires that crawl and pulsate and hiss energy throughout this place. That place. It was the most beautiful thing in the world, that place. It came into view as I drifted farther apart. That’s what the rebels must have seen as well. I wondered if they felt sorry, but were too proud to turn back. Perhaps they felt even more enthused for the cause for how corrupted, in their minds, or otherwise, the place had become, and they floated on, in their tents, the way fireflies fly through the night air, and over the dark water, and everything is one perfect homogenous, organic, natural black. We popped all over, inadvertently, intermittently, in a perfect mathematical random pattern, which is what made us all so beautiful. I didn’t feel the oxygen deprivation, and I didn’t need holograms anymore, and I didn’t care—didn’t wait for them to shoot.

Waveson: A Monologue - Jo-Ann Whalley

2008-06-21T11:38:00.008+01:00

Goods floating on the surface of the sea after a shipwreck

My lover will leave me tonight.
I know this as surely as if I had read it in the whorls and wrinkles of my water-logged skin. The soft rush of waves across sand echoes it back to me and I hear his valediction in the shriek of the gulls wheeling away towards the rubbish dump.

My lover will leave me tonight.

Fathoms
The length of a man’s arms around the object of his affection

It is as ineluctable as the tide, this movement of our desire. We have slipped innocently through shallows into the chop and shift of deep water, pulled by the rip and undertow of passion. We have bathed in the salt sting and drenched ourselves in the fluid wash of sex and words.

Limbs must be separated if one is to stay afloat. It is too hard to tread water with arms and legs entwined. Twinned bodies drown under their combined weight. He will raise his knees and kick me away, and all the grasping flailing of my arms will not hold him.

My lover will leave me tonight.

I will squirm upon the boning knife of his betrayal, gutted and filleted by this leaving of love. My flesh cold and still upon the steel of the blade.

If your breath should touch me, raise hairs upon my nape, my skin will split and I will slide peeled and new down to the dry soft sand. The stinging grains clinging to my wetness, scouring the corded sinews.

My lover will leave me tonight.

Becalmed
To be left without wind and thus without the power of movement

I have done a foolish thing. After speaking on the phone I went online to his Website. I wanted to feel that connection with his work I get when I listen to him speak. A childish whim that has left me hurt and bewildered. She is there in the photographs of his paintings. Not her alone of course but here and there throughout the site I see her, staring out of my computer screen enmeshed and entangled in his art. Her image is like a promise or a threat; still and perfect and immovable. I obsessively search through the images, counting and cataloguing her appearances. There are several where the face is obscured or turned away. I am convinced that each of these ambiguous portraits is her, must be her. That line of shoulder blade, those lips or cleavage, each smooth white angle holding his avid gaze. Hot angry tears burn my eyes but do not fall.

Things do not arrive gently. They slice into me – such immanence to every moment.

I hold this feeling, this anticipation of a feeling, the edge of an unknown emotion. The trembling moment hovers, tiny dips and shifts from left to right, as pregnant with motion as the upward tremble of raindrops on glass.

I am a scale of thought and skin. The bones of my hips ache for the touch of my lover’s hands. They echo, resonate, are hollow with longing – they sound the vibrations of my desire in long deep tones.

Take up my bones, pick clean the flesh and drill down to the center, where the marrow has dried to dust from your absence. Place your lips to the jutting blade of my hip and play the breath of my sorrow through the length of its frame. I am an instrument of longing.

Heart
The inner yarn in a strand of rope

These things must take the form of rituals, little ceremonies of repetition and return. In this way we reaffirm our desire for each other. It is through the minutiae of our interactions that I am able to continue with the possibility of love.

My lover walks into the room and all eyes turn to him. He is both innocent and conscious of this sudden interest. Later, when I quiz him, he turns his blank gaze upon me and blames his white hair. This sudden lull in the conversation betrays the electric ripple of desire that follows him into the room. He carries an internal gravity, his presence so solid he seems to drag the air behind him as he walks. I follow; my hand lost in his as the crowd near the bar cleaves before him. They part like water; liquid as my thighs on the balcony of his apartment an hour earlier as he fucked me from above, my long fish-hemmed skirt thrown up, stocking slick legs spread wide. He kneels before me and the moment before he enters me is exquisite with anticipation. Standing demurely at the bar I glance down and notice the white of dried semen powdered onto the black cotton of my skirt.

There is a woman at the bar. She is vaguely familiar and I stare for a few moments trying to remember where I have seen her. She smiles at my Lover and her face is suddenly known to me. I have watched her review movies or introduce Nature documentaries on television, I can’t quite remember which. Her gaze drops to our linked hands and her smile disappears.

Chain
The formula for the safe load of a chain
D=√9W or W=D²⁄9

This is the ocean. Or perhaps it is a sea, a small part of a greater salt whole. It is a linkage between land and land. Cold water mumbles gently against the beach. Tiny flecks of volcanic sand tint the shoreline grey. It is night and the water is black satin. Lights from fishing boats move in a string along the horizon dividing sea from sky.

The woman faces the man across the chipped laminate surface of a table. Bent metal chair legs dig into sand. The man and woman face each other through the soft yellow glow of candlelight. A moment before their fingers were joined, entwined on the gold splattered red laminate table top. One hand covering another. They watch as air currents move the flame of the candle.

My Lover’s lover is not me. She is my shadow, the unknown scent upon his pillow. I breathe her in as he enters me, my face turned away from him, buried between her absent breasts. He has told me only this; that her breasts were ‘magnificent.’.

To say she is blonde is not to do justice to the Nordic whiteness of the long straight hair I once found in his bathroom. Staring at my reflection I wound the pale strand around my fingers. Cupping my own small breasts I searched vainly for cleavage and longed for the heavy magnificence of blue-veined breasts and long blonde hair.

Her being is known to me through these three things; her scent, a strand of hair and the story of her breasts. She carries the cargo of his emotion the way he carries mine.

We are a chain of desire.

It is not, as you might think, only the points of intersection that define a chain. Much depends upon the shape of the links. Direction too is important. To obtain the greatest resistance the sides of the chain must be kept parallel to the line of strain. There is a formula to determine the safe load; how much can be borne.

Lost day
The day which is lost when circumnavigating westward

Here be Dragons. My love you come to me with teeth and fingers, tearing, rending my flesh and heart. I am consumed, and marked by your passage. The sand prints of your hands splay blue across my bones. I am wound as tightly around as canvas. My limbs pinned and locked beneath your gaze. Devour me.

When we first said “I love you” – you lied and I lied and yet we both told the truth. She was unknown to me in that perfect moment and I was free. I am an anchor chain in the tumult of the storm – one touch of your hand and I will snap – be lost beneath the waves.

As he enters me his thumb slides between my lips. I suck the nail towards the back of my throat, feeling it scrape sharply against the soft palate. My legs wrap around him, locking him to me and we rock on the white deck of the sheets. I am full, my mouth and throat almost blocked with the length of his thumb

The Bitter End
The last part of a rope of chain

Why does this pain come in waves? Is it to render it bearable, to allow the catching of breath between each violent swell, this surge of agony that breaks the desolate shoreline of my chest?

Washed on to the sand of this strange new world, I lie drenched and tangled, caught in the ghost net of our love.

I would cast off my skin by moonlight if I could, sinews, muscle, bone exposed beneath her frigid beams of light…cast off my longing as a skin of unwanted mortality. Live soulless beneath the icy gaze of moon and stars. Like the sirens after Odysseus’s escape I long to drown – Give up my feathers for scales, exchange these endless eddies of the air to float within warmer currents. Replace the harsh abrasion of the air to swim within the comforting cradle of the water.

I am uninhabited.

Kneeless - Lee Klein

2008-06-19T22:29:00.003+01:00

Responsible for so much ache, kvetch, ouch from leg to mouth, the war between cap and pit began when he associated the scar down father’s knee, an injury sustained twenty years past, with the zipper of skin along Frankenstein’s monster’s neck. This led the impressionable boy to open the fly on his prepubescent jeans, which when down, emitted clangs of foul warfare warming up, a battle that simmered for thirty years, till hostilities began when knee cap and knee pit claimed possession of patch of neutral flesh and bone between the two, a clash prophesized long ago when he opened his pants to pee and heard high-caliber battle blares, sounds understood when battlefield turned to excruciating jelly so many years later. Oh the war between cap and pit, the ruined hinge between hip and foot, the right angle of despair, the cracked crook, the jangled joint. Oh ugh! The hurt! The limp! The gimp I’ll be, he roared. Assured of a lifetime of leapless rehabilitation, thousand-degree whirlpools, obscene wraps and braces, obesity, diabetes, death. The war between cap and pit, miasmatic displeasure and a lifelong disparity of sex appeal. Who admires the H along the back of springtime knees? Only those devout to Catholic skirts know such pleasure. Fast forward five years and the uppermost hatch of womanly H opens like a sheltered harbor propelled by fast currents out to Hamstring Sea, as the eye shoots toward the over-loved overlord, Queen Rump. But if we concentrate on the space between Royal Rump and Workmanly Foot, there’s the woeful, forgotten, old faithful Knee, neither he nor she but a killing spree manifested bodily, a mutiny, a site of sorrow, where rounded, overprotective, oft-admired cap fends off shots from unsuspected, tender pit. Cap and pit, captain pit, capitulated prick—that is, capsized patience with all this whimsical shit. He hereby quits this snap and presses abecedarian daggers into the enormous, bloated float between overwriter and whoever reads this. Or maybe there lies between the overprotected and the under-understood important lies, tries, dies. Trials, death, breath of exalted joint. Oh how once we limp we hate on headless sprinters upon their daily morning rush! Even we envy the black nails of curs scuttling from the kick. The doomed giraffes loping from the lion pack, we want to be their legs. From now on we shall stand as braced and royal as a stand of oak, our thousand arms wide, palms open, fingers spread, contemplating a peaceful, kneeless eternity.

Was He One of the Ones? - Jack Selber

2008-06-19T12:37:00.007+01:00

I’d probably spent the best part of an hour down there. Well, I mean, I kept coming up and asking her, ‘How many?’ ‘Seven,’ she said. ‘Seven?’ I replied. ‘Well, I suppose that isn’t that many, when you think about it. Not that many in the scheme of things. Not as many as I’d had. But seven? You could remember seven. Remember their names. The size of their penises. The way they kissed and fumbled with clasps.

But every time I lowered myself to her pubic hair, I got a view of the crown of some other guy’s head. On one occasion, I could see the flakes of dandruff settled there like resting ptarmigans in a winter spruce forest. I had to come up again. I looked her in the eye. She was smiling. I knew I had to banish the guys who’d been before me. It was like forgetting friends, losing your address book, deleting your contacts’ list.

I made some excuse about my sinuses playing up but she wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer. I’d promised. It was her birthday. So down I go. And I’m in. Fine hair, tickly on my tongue, she’s wet, and I nip her labia majus, run my tongue inside her labia minus, slip her clitoris from the vestibule and rub it with my thumb. I lick her. I kiss her thighs. Move back up. Kiss her belly. Probe her navel, taste salt, the matchstick flare bitterness of her sweat. I’m pulled back down there by a fine line of hairs like gunpowder.

I open her lips as if they were Martian figs. I look and I see on the inside a blue mark. I realize it’s a tattoo. I can just make out through the vaginal juices the name Jeremy. It’s like looking through my glasses, wet from the rain, at a neon sign that reads ‘death.’ I bite down and feel her bulbocavernosus muscle contract. I sit up and, pulling a stray hair from my tongue, I ask, ‘Was he one of the ones?’