July 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Kerry Lanigan
Amy’s voice is on the line before Ellen even hears a full ring.
“Thank God you called. I’m at my wit’s end today, Ellen – he is On. My. Last. Nerve.”
Ellen sighs into her receiver; in her ear the air reverberates with a harsh blast. “What time did he wake you up?” She pinches the bridge of her nose between her eyes, pulls her hand slowly across her temple.
“Six-freaking-AM! He wanted waffles. Wouldn’t stop yelling until I made some waffles and then he knocked over the bowl of batter and it went everywhere. He spread it around the table with his hands; it was a fabulous freaking mess.”
“Did you try playing that puzzle that I sent you a few weeks ago? Sometimes if you can get him to do something constructive with his hands—”
“I tried the puzzle! He kept getting up from the table and getting into the cupboards instead. He’s going through everything, pulling out papers and silverware and…” Amy’s voice is thick and wobbling as it trails off, fat clouds of tears gathering, ready to open and pour. “Jason can’t stand it. He can’t sleep either and then he yells at me and…I don’t know if our marriage can handle this.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s hard.” Ellen bites the inside of her cheek, a raw, smooth, sweet-tasting spot that she’s been making worse all month, an aching worry stone for these daily phone conversations with her sister. “Maybe it’s time to consider some other living arrangements for him.” There. It’s out.
Amy is silent in her ear, only breathing. Then a sniffle, a shaky breath. Ellen listens hard, her body clenched, waves of energy pulsing toward the phone in her hand. Finally: “Maybe.”
“Poor dad.”
“Yeah. Poor dad.”
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Transcendental Love
Apparently, our love
has been reading Emerson
and believes it is self-reliant.
We, who have been part and particle
of each other, daily, nightly,
minutely merging (your hair covering
my skin, my tongue speaking your thoughts,
your oversoul in my underwear,
my hammer on your anvil and your foot
in my stirrup), now sit rooms apart
and prefer not to
Will you assume
what I assume
as I celebrate myself and sing myself?
Do your atoms, belonging equally to me
as mine to you, resonate with the same frequency?
Or does your heart vibrate to that iron string—
trusting yourself, exploring the sacredness
of your own mind, your own body?
If we must each triumph in our own
principles, can we not yet hope
that Whim will lead us each
through each
other, that the
currents of the Universal
being will circulate your Not Me
through the not me
of my own body,
once more?
The Empty Set
I am still only conjecturing that
spending the night with you last night is what
did not happen, out of the set of all potential
events that did not happen between us all
night. But the graph seemed to me to lead to
your bed (which, as you recall, was just two
feet away, with the blankets thrown back).
Yet our evening was a demonstration of Zeno’s
Paradox—we could not cross the distance
to the bed because we forever had first
to cross half the distance.
When I think about that missed intersection,
I think about plotting the slopes of our lives, the route
we each took to meet in that room, and how
any previous meeting would have already
been too late for us to reach that bed;
how we would have needed to have exactly
our same experiences leading to this
precise moment together, but without
ever having passed through those other points
on the graph, that intersected with those other husbands
and wives and children. Those trajectories
are defined by the impossible—they are mapped
in imaginary space only, when we subtract
our families from our lives and take the square
root of our resulting negative selves.
Other people, I think, can compute this, but
it was a math too radical for me.
– Suzanne Lane
Suzanne began as a fiction writer many years ago, but for short forms, she has been increasingly drawn to poetry. In addition to writing poetry, she is also writing a mixed-genre memoir, All over the Map, about my experiences growing up as a military dependent, and an academic book about the rhetoric of antebellum slave narratives. Suzanne has taught literature, creative writing, and composition at Harvard, Cal State, San Bernardino, and BU. She currently teaches rhetoric and writing at MIT.
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Her vitriol is shocking
like the unfounded kick
to fat puppy
though He reacts in
teeth gnash
rabid snarl
the mean passion
of that same
fat puppy reared
on a diet of
no love and
meager bones.
Like me,
He has pissed
on the Persian rug,
shit on the carpet,
and chewed
something worth
raising Her voice.
But when She calls He
still comes running,
the calm dog who
needs a particular touch.
– Tyrel Kessinger
Tyrel lives, eats and breathes Kentucky air and work in Louisville as a Braille transcriber. He is the recent recipient of the 2011 Literary Louisville LEO award and his work has been published in the LEO magazine.
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
battered, bruised
used, overlooked
forgotten
poor yet rich in
faith unprotected
sex object in
the eyes of
bad and dark spirits,
bad and dark souls
innocent, saved, redeemed
in time
tired of working
for worth with (already)
a worthy name
short of being tall
obese yet healthy
enough to
survive, surmount, embrace
being troubled in
mind do
like to communicate
with only the truthful,
with only the wise;
a teacher, loyal friend
perplexing lover poised
in damaged purity…
Image of,
reflection of enmity
that keeps apart
two souls drawing near
E.
two shades of color
warming the
beauty of your
presence
a ray of sun-
lit sand
an island
who holds its miseries…
at a distance here
or far away
waiting, patiently
for sound to break
silence hitting
a sea called
lonely ears.
A heart
dying for hope
to have again
the true desire
of equal treasures
in a mirror of
equal measures
weighing you
into me
as an image
of we.
–Leah James
Leah James is an emerging African-American writer of poetry who writes in combinations of English, French and Spanish. She is a Midwest native who writes with the flavor of Chicago, the syncopated smoothness of St. Louis and gravity of the deep south.
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
the Forgetting Look
This late in the year she’s coughing up a bed.
With a pair of scissors and a pen
she begins to lay the flowers out.
She opens her mouth and they fall
onto the pages of her book and she’s
started to hate them.
Volume after volume full and full of petal bits;
full of stem and seed.
But she can’t bring herself to lose them
nor can she help wish them away.
No matter how deep and black her longing is
or how vicious her words want to be
when she goes to speak them
they flock from her lips and flutter down.
‘Til they are saved-
crushed in the forever there of her book
(like a bible). Always to remind her
what weakness she is capable of.
shirt sleeves.
she goes on and buffs the bone-
how sinew is gold
and ribs pristine.
her temple-legs all adorned
she’s a flaming sword away
from making her point.
I’m more than happy down here-
pouring this stuff
down the hole.
my meat is murder and
the only thing hanging
in my halls is dust and noise.
she thinks these falling apart
skins are meant for honing and
keeping clean
I just want to sin some more
and pile on the dirt-
she won’t let me do the damage
– adrian ibarra
Adrian was one of the last students to graduate from Cal State Los Angeles with a BA in Creative Writing; he took it as an omen. He wrote a poem a day, every day, in 2010. The finished project can be found at fulltimecowboy.blogspot.com.
