October 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
in the blue and the purple light
on the shadowed sides
of these houses
in a room with a cracked window
and the ghost of edie
crawling naked across the floor
i am my father at 34
and his own father before him
i am the face my children fear
and the voice
and the raised hand
i am the emptiness and
the absence of warmth
and america is
its own form of violence
the boy is dead
next to his sister in the
back of the van
the father drives
with the radio on softly
with dylan’s voice dragging itself
through my headphones
as i sit at the foot of the bed
watching april sleep
and do you remember
the hill of fifteen crosses?
the girl you fucked there and
the way she couldn’t
remember your name?
and what about the man who
tells you you’re not a poet?
what about the way war feels
from 10,000 miles away?
all of the butchered
without faces or names and
the reasons you choose to hate
the people
and some of them i’ve known
and others have just written
to ask for favors and
in the end
there is only this street as it
crashes into the highway
this back yard turning brown
in the cold grey air of
september
in the blue and the
purple light of early evening
this house too cold to
ever be a home
September 2003 | back-issues, poetry
HERE IN THE SHALLOWS…
where we breathe uncomforts.
We see and hear the walklings
skip across our heads;
feel their heels dig
into our existence.
Souls are just like flesh
except unblemished.
They rip open easy–
ooze out into the air.
Where they become
less than intended.
Their rotting wounds
satiate our thoughts
until we can no longer
think and reason and sense
our beginnings and ends
hence eternity is Hell.
I felt the exact moment or thereabouts
when my soul slit open–
I found a cockroach in the kitchen.
Squashed it with the bottom of my glass.
Wiped its remains on the counter’s edge.
Poured Jack in the glass. Met it’s brim.
Drank it straight
down without a second thought.
Or maybe it was the time
when I told that lady she looked good
in that skirt. When in fact, she looked like
a deranged flamenco dancer on crack.
If not those, definitely
when I saw my son slam
his mouth into the table
and my initial reaction was
‘that’s just fuckin’ great’!
I wonder if the walklings know
they are just a thought away
from oozing their soul
into the slums of oblivion?
I wonder if they know
that when they pass a homeless lady
on the street without giving
her at least one freakin’ donut
out of the dozen they carry–
they are indeed ripping the seams
of their silver-linings?
But then again, if they knew,
they’d probably give her one!
Not to be kind
but to prevent the ooze.
Hell, they might stategize
and give her two
like stockpiling good deeds.
It doesn’t work that way you know.
The act has to come pure without self-thought.
It’s harder than one would think.
Take this for example-
A lady gave away her cab.
We watched from down here
through the grates under the streets.
She waved a cab down.
When it pulled over she went to get in
but saw an old man hobbling toward her-
waving, yelling “Hold it! Please!”
She held the door open for him. It took him forever
but she still kept a smile. When he got there,
she suggested they share the ride.
He replied “That’d be great!”
and then said he’d pay
since she was so nice to hold the cab.
She let the old man get in first and offered her arm
for support. He slid over and told the cab driver
his destination ‘the westside.’
The lady thanked the old man for his kind offer
but noted that she was going to ‘the eastside.’
She wished him well and shut the door.
But here under the layer of her reality-
We saw how she lifted her head
and wrinkled her nose
as the old man scraped by her
when he got into the cab.
His more than a day old body odor
hugged her too tight. She couldn’t breathe
comfortably.
We heard as she stood on the sidewalk
sniffing her clothes, her hair, her arm-
she cursed that old man and muttered
“G-D, I hope I don’t smell like him!
Maybe it’s just on my sleeve!”
She took off her dress Jacket
and waved another cab down.
It was easy
for her to get a cab.
Here, under the walklings-
we can see and hear them: truly.
We feel the shiver of thin slivered souls
drip down the metals bars
that barely separate
us from them.
Maggie Shurtleff
September 2003 | back-issues, fiction
by jc jaress
Forty years of cigarettes had worked her face over like a metal rake and her hair that she says use to fall like golden sunshine now sits brittle and high upon this plucked and painted landscape
But she still has legs
And an ass that stumble-dances its way from barstool to barstool like a parade of horses on their way to the starting gate carrying the jocks wearing their multi-colored silks
Prancing and snorting
All stiff legged, every step working up the lather between their cheeks
But it isn’t the body that keeps her in business, no, it’s the way she carries it
Teetering on that fine line between holding your whole world in the palm of her hand as if you are the only man that she would ever know
Or falling down piss-drunk in the street
Tonight, she’s been here too long and has worn out most of her welcome
Finishing her drink, she makes a move toward the door and, fighting with the barstool over her purse, crashes to the floor in a great heap of legs and ass
God, she must’ve had great lather a few years back
September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
you think about words and
about the places they come from
you think about meaning
about these small beautiful images
that the poets polish like valuable stones
that are worth
the tiniest fraction of nothing
and against them you place your
grey slabs of self-hatred
you talk about the burning girl
long after her ashes have grown cold
and you remember reagan
as a monster
as a vampire
but you have reached
a point in time where no one else
wants to speak the truth
about the dying
you have become
a man defined as angry because
this is what fear looks like
when seen from outside one’s own skin
and it matters that you love your wife
or at least it should
and so you act like it does
you walk an uncertain line
between making promises and
telling lies
you end up thinking about words
September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
blood on the sheets
and you laugh
blood on the walls
the daughter
in the mother’s arms and
both of them dead
the boyfriend picked up
800 miles away
says he loves her but
can’t explain the gun
can’t explain the rope
around gorky’s neck or the
poet’s need to pick at
these open wounds
the ay the buildings burn
without reason
the cities where they
begin to dissolve
into suburbs and strip malls
your smile in
the weak sunlight of an
august afternoon
the way you taste
all of these things
held together by the
sheer force of anger
September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
each day like filth
scraped from the eye of god
each moment pure
and i offer no explanations
when i tell you that
both are true
i eat dinner while paul hill
is put to death
i have seconds
and how is it that
in all the years i wasted in school
i never learned about
the babi yar ravine?
in whose blood are the names
of all the slaughtered
written?
picture the world reduced
to those who would invent the machine gun
and those who would use it
picture mercy as
being allowed to die before
your daughters are raped
remember that malevich had his reasons
for painting white on white
remember that pollock knew them
that he dreamed his own death
and does anyone care when a
pedophile priest is murdered?
is the world a better place when
his bones have been
picked clean by the crows?
it gets to the point where
every question is only a means
of avoiding the truth
where august becomes september
and none of us
can offer any comfort
and what i think about is
this waitress on her knees in a
dirty bathroom with her
pants undone and a stranger
standing over her
what i think about is
how good hatred feels
all of the ways it can be
turned into power
