January 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Prohibited
Remember the power of a single nail to talk to an obstinate wall.
Men act as a safety issue.
He has worked under the cheek.
Turn and eat! Turn and shout!
But do not worry, do not worry: the spirits of the community are trying to protect his fingers.
They learn that the secrets of the true diameter cannot be broken.
But your body is full wrath.
We will help you force a stubborn, but spiritual, oak.
In the study you can hear my friend.
But the dictator will eventually be lost.
Please dare to try to learn your enemy.
I caught a heavy cold.
If the sink was buried in a damaged and repellent beard.
We are all paid within inches of hearing of prisoners in winter.
Strike! Strike! Drive from the bees.
He was found dead of smoke.
The victim is not your problem, large or small.
The word most often heard words:
Onions, fish, the first question, why you did not hear me complain.
Primarily
As first waves crash over first faces
We realize the desk’s purpose has been compromised
By our growth. You are more than you were.
We’re looking for the right translation, but you have to turn around.
It’s the question of whether it just keeps extending in space
Or stops because you stop. But its lack of life
Offers life to another in the future
(he can keep calling that stone my stone) if you get my meaning.
We must conceive it thusly, because to do otherwise
Would be to deny the orchestra its due (they take an obligatory bow)
And it will surely be remembered that
Not a few men have been killed by trumpets to the head.
I’m watching the spray.
I’ve thought about what hat you will wear.
It’s the only thing on my mind.
You wake, at first, in the clothes of ideas
And settle finally, fitfully, into
The rushing of traffic on early rain.
January 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Emergency Room
The receptionist is calm.
An old woman
is trying to vomit
behind a figured curtain.
A white wimpled nun
slides by
automatic door
closes without sound
against rubber bumpers.
Squeal of burned baby
rises to dog whistle soundlessness
behind another curtain.
Two security guards in tight Hessian blue,
pistols on hips,
walk around a supine third
who lies,
chest bare black against white bandages,
on cold chrome trolley
for x-rays.
It is 12:32 A. M.
and the doctor is explaining test results
to the ear
of a beige push-button phone.
Pain sits in straight-backed chairs,
crouches on couch cushions,
holds its guts
before ambulance entrance,
raves in a draped alcove,
waits to vanish
one way or another.
Explorer
The man who had never eaten spaghetti,
hard to believe,
of course,
was nevertheless eager to try.
“How do you do it?” he said
to anyone willing to answer.
Ordinary to some,
it looked formidable to him,
strings coiled in whiteness
with blood sauce
like a tangle of tape worms.
Someone said around a smile,
wrap it in the tines,
twirl it to submission.
Cut it,
end to end,
another friend suggested
or just
suck it up.
Dog History
There is only pavement here.
Odors float, invisible cirrus,
from weeds in cracks
between stones or from dried urine
disappearing except to dog’s scent.
No dog is naked, although
unclothed they present
buttocks to the sun
and consider genitalia
of chance acquaintances.
Without past, each writes
present with raised leg
or natural squat tickled
by grass or capricious winds.
No heaven waits perfection of dogs
but other dogs
sniffing, running, eating.
January 2011 | back-issues, fiction
Shirley tells me that she once owned a horse that won the Kentucky Derby.
She says she had a doe living inside her house for two years until her husband said she had to let it go.
She says that after the deer peed on her throw rug she spanked it and it never messed in the house again.
Shirley says that her dog, Little One, is a beagle and that her five other dogs hate
Little One because she gets to lay on the davenport.
Shirley says she owns 19 sets of dishes and had to count each plate and bowl after her house had been broken into last year.
The thief had taken only guns, she says, 300 guns.
After her husband’s surgery, Shirley tries to kiss the heart surgeon on the mouth.
I sit next to Shirley in a hospital waiting room while doctors scrape from my wife’s womb our third attempt at parenthood.
Who can cry when a 70-year old woman is leaning in, spinning tales, yanking sleeves?
When Shirley says that she won three million dollars in a Coke bottle cap game but that she forgot her wallet at home and asks me to buy her two lunches in the cafeteria, I say sure.
There will be time for crying later.
January 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Nathan Schiller
Conversation Between Two Young White Men
Waiting for Food in Murray’s Bagels in the West Village, Manhattan,
New York, New York, U.S.A., 1 P.M., YR 2007
“So my buddy from law school, this one who
dropped out, he’s out in L.A. and started dating this girl.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, she’s like a porn star.”
“Yeah?”
“Like she’s in porn.”
“You mean, like, legitimately in porn?”
“Right, she does videos and stuff.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. I don’t know if she’s, like, a star-“
“Starlet.”
“Or starlet, or she’s up-and-coming, or what, but apparently it’s pretty serious.”
“That’s pretty crazy.”
“And it’s like, this guy, he’s this Jewish guy from New Jersey, real smart, book-smart like crazy, but he didn’t really feel the whole ‘law-school-thing’ so he just went out there and now he’s dating this girl. I mean he’s pretty good looking you know.”
“Must be pretty crazy to know your girl’s doing that. Is he cool with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Isn’t that like the most number-one question you’d be asking him.”
“It just kind of never really came up. Like, I didn’t want to be all, ‘So do you go to her shoots and check out these guys she’s banging or what?’ you know?”
“No yeah that’s true.”
“Right.”
“But still I’d want to have some inside sort of info about the situation.”
“I know, I probably should have asked him. But he did say something interesting.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, that she actually wasn’t that good in bed.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. But I’m thinking it’s this kind of expectation thing where he thought she was going to just like seriously rip him apart or have some magical powers you know and he goes in there with that mentality and then it’s like if she’s just come from a morning of having sex with strangers how is she gonna be able to rev herself up for the like mundane aspect of just normal sex with her boyfriend when her boyfriend is thinking he’s about to have like freak sex with his girlfriend. It’s just not gonna happen like that is what I was thinking.”
“Right. Exactly.”
“And the whole time he’s telling me this, I’m thinking, like, who is this girl. Like, where did she come from, how did she get into all that.”
“I’d be most interested in like how she would date normal people. Like, did he just go up to her in a bar and start hitting on her. And when she said, ‘So, I’m in the adult film industry,’ if that’s how she phrased it, what did he think, because there are like fifty things you could be thinking, and somehow one of them leads you to dating this girl. I’m making presumptions.”
“No, you’re totally on.”
“So you asked him about this.”
“. . .”
“You didn’t?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Why not?”
“It just didn’t come up.”
“So lemme get this straight. You’ve got a friend who’s dating a girl who acts in/performs in/participates in/belongs to the ‘adult film industry’ and all you know is that. Like you’re not even interested in his inner soul type of reaction to it. They’re like a different breed, man.”
“I am, but it just didn’t come up.”
“Yeah, well, that’s crazy, anyway.”
“Yeah.”
“So anyway, one of my teachers had us doing this whole thing about footnotes, and I usually hate all that crap, because, c’mon, you know, but so he gives us all this David Foster Wallace stuff, and, you know, it’s actually pretty good.”
January 2011 | back-issues, poetry
New Somalia
Wherever she walks
that is Mogadishu.
Her ruby-colored veil cascades to her knees.
Her posture is not left to nature’s vices
like these impressionable
sidewalk-tamed and -framed trees.
The crosswalk blushes beneath her feet
for she weaves a red carpet out of its common,
striped concrete and, as she glides past,
cars stand at attention on the street,
giving her all but a military salute.
As she forges ahead, resolute as a general,
the mind conjures the flourish of a trumpet
and a desert wind is felt, carried inexplicably
upon an ocean breeze. Meanwhile,
seagulls on curved lampposts sit still
and the second-story dentist looks on,
mesmerized, at his window sill.
The traffic light gives green cards
but not all take off at once.
Somalia, for one, is still learning the roads
but she is with strength and drive replete.
I do not worry about her, that Somalia,
for, though she comes as a surprise to this town,
this town doesn’t surprise her in the least.
the (snow) globe
an arab who looked up to the west
until she looked it up
got the rundown
got run down
now looking up at stars
a female under males
trying to understand them
trying to get around them
without getting around
an american idolizing
the rising sun
but damning its horizon
a zealot searching for absolutes
in a chain reaction
a civilian hoping her soldier
will not be killed
by friendly fire
his memory steeped, dyed
in cold blood
people building up walls
walls tearing people down
human aliens invading
old stereotypes gracefully aging
actors without stages staging protests
picket lines shouting for an audience
lines of itinerant workers
for hire
and hopes for higher wages
falling to the ground
foreigners working as domestics
brown eyes becoming statistics
children whose existence
is resistance
unsympathetic weather
unnatural disasters
parents beating each other to pieces
trying to stay together
a family dilating and constricting
as the light comes out a rainbow
a human trying to be humane
a predator climbing down
the food chain
a storeowner resisting a window sale
a dog chasing after its own tail
an independent girl
still a dependent
a prisoner escaping
to confinement
a misguided man who considers
all but himself lost
another religiously secular
an atheist who wants to believe again
but has forgotten how
a virgin who always chastens herself
but wants to do it now
a millionaire who flies coach
a poor man with a porche
a liberal with a crocodile purse
a mercenary unattractive nurse
innumerable iterations of 0 and 1
wars both peoples lost
ones both countries won
ignoble nobel laureates
a disunited united nations
an inoperative surgeon
leading countless operations
sky rises raising eyebrows
not standards of living
and standards waving
over double-parked cars
over double-doubles
over double standards
i stand sometimes looking
at this small curious world
in a snow globe
sometimes
in the snow globe
looking out
curiously
at the world
Epitaph
I didn’t know what to do, at first,
with their last remains
so I lined them shoulder to shoulder
and ran over the bodies.
If burning a book is sacrilege, then what of human flesh?
If burying is cruel in life, how much more in death?
This way they’ll not repel the eye should they be unearthed.
This way not gods but simple men will trigger their rebirth,
and if a chance puff of dust tempts from you a sneeze,
it’ll be a comfort to know that those weren’t arms and knees.
So bury the urn and burn the blasted coffin.
I want to be the death of a few hundred trees;
I want to be a character in your memories.
January 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Joe Hillenbrand
Man, was I hungry. There was nothing to eat in the house so I ordered a large pizza and ate the whole thing – but I was still starving. So I searched for something, anything, to eat. Couldn’t find a thing. Not a slice of bread. Not a cracker. Not even a crumb. I scoured the cupboards, the fridge, the seat cushions, the floor, behind the stove – nothin’. I had to look elsewhere
That’s when I ate my pride. It was too hard to bite or chew, so I swallowed it whole. Nearly choke on the damn thing, but I managed to get it down. It wasn’t enough though. I wanted… needed more.
So I boiled my hate. Each mouthful more bitter than the last. My stomach growled for more.
I whipped up a bowl of pity. Creamy and sweet, it went down easy.
Love? There hasn’t been any of that around here for a long time. No… I stopped looking for love. Instead, I drank my tears and belched my apologies.
Then I found a bit of hope. Stale and moldy as it was, I took a bite. That was a mistake. I couldn’t keep it down. Just made room for more.
Confidence was a tasty morsel: meaty and juicy.
That was it. There was nothing left. I’ve eaten it all and it’s left me so I can’t get out of bed (having doubled and redoubled my size). But that’s OK; I don’t need to go anywhere. I’m not hungry… for now.
Tomorrow, it starts all over again.
