It won’t just be the handshake of the ocean. It will also be the empty string of the guitar. and a woman’s voice will sound like the skin of a turtle, wishing. She will not only be wishing but pregnant also. Along with a boy she will carry a marzipan apple and the island of Krk. They will travel out of her soft center to meet the busy sun.
I carve holes in the femur bone of my former enemy. I have sucked the marrow out and cooked his tender flesh for consumption. His organs and muscle I have ground into sausage. I cook the sausage and feed the homeless in Tompkins Square Park. The media heralds me as a generous hearted humanitarian. I am a minor celebrity in my community. I have eaten dinner at Gracie Mansion and have had my portrait done by famous artists that live in the city.
The holes are for a flute. I play strange and beautiful music through my enemy’s leg. The music is dark and sensual. The music is forty thousand years in the making. My Germanic ancestors carved similar instruments from the bones of bears. I am no different from them. There is no more dangerous animal than man.
I make another flute from my enemy’s other leg. The rest of his bones I grind into powder. I mix the powder with cocaine and snort my enemy into me. I absorb my enemy’s powers in this fashion.
I play passionate and sad music on my two red flutes and have no intention of recording my songs. Nothing is permanent. Change is the only constant. I exist in the ether; eternal and illusory.
His teeth I surround with oven bake clay, one at a time. I sculpt tiny animals with the clumps of clay and bake them. I create a glaze with some of the left over blood and all of the little animals are red. I surprise the neighborhood children with my gifts and their mothers adore me. I have two dates with divorcees next week and get away with murder.
Michael S Gatlin just finished his second novel and was recently published in Splizz, Dharma Lick, and Tomato-tomato. He owns a bar in Manhattan called Verlaine—because he couldn’t bare hearing people mispronounce Rimbaud.
Couldn’t see.
Couldn’t move.
Paraplegic.
She kissed my body,
my clothes removed themselves,
he hummed “Crooked Teeth” while I cried silently
like I was at my own funeral,
wondering what I could have been,
how much time this was going to take.
She was going to be a writer, my mother would
hyperventilate, being the DJ to my death disco.
She was such a good girl, my dad would say,
not knowing that good
daughters don’t have threesomes.
I didn’t put up much of a fight,
just a few slurred Don’ts’, but don’t doesn’t mean won’t.
And I did, I really did.
I let them have their way with me like I was Thanksgiving dinner,
sweating turkey, panting gravy,
something that everyone could have a piece of.
I stared at the ceiling, 347 stars on one tile.
I couldn’t get my dad’s voice out of my head.
She was such a good girl.
I was such a good girl,
I am a good girl.
The happy days ended for you with your diagnosis
or maybe they ended years ago when your trailer
in St. Augustine burnt down,
when you had a kid and got married,
or when you started chewing the tobacco
that fast tracked you into chemo.
Remember how you pushed me into an ant hill
and my brother had to kick your ass?
You came over with purple eyes apologizing
for the bites,
bites that resembled the beginning stages
of the cancer spreading through your jaw.
If I had known then about your disease
I would have warned against using your jaw so much.
You could’ve saved it for more meaningful
conversations between you and your wife,
you and your baby daughter.
The happy days ended when you went
to the trusted family doctor who said you were fine,
he said there was nothing wrong with your jaw,
didn’t caution you to stop chewing
or quit smoking,
to go home instead of drive back to work,
or tell you that cancer is the leading killer of Americans
next to heart disease and stroke.
You carried on like any normal hypochondriac
for months before there was clearly something wrong
then you died in a hospital watching Happy Days,
wondering if you could have prevented this years ago
when you pushed me into that ant hill,
when you learned what sarcasm was,
when you started chewing.
A child finds lost earrings in the sand and puts them in her mouth. A seagull picks the corpse of a small-mouth gruntfish and crystal jellies and egg-yolk jellies lie holding in their inner folds the balance of life and decay. Seaweed pops on the rocks. Dry stubbly grass pokes from broken shells and reeds stand up ecstatic in the wind. Sand candies it all. The waves come in lashing their glass nerves at the slope before pulling back across the bay and I run to the water, take a blind fall in the wash. The blessed cold cleans me. She comes carrying my son. The baby smiles watching his parents kiss. Chip vinegar stings my lips. Toes curl down in the sand. Nature forgets itself. She feeds him as it goes dark and together we watch him roll and gurgle on the rug. Up she leaps to find something to drink and my son turns his head to her shortening silhouette. And then I see something unfamiliar in him. Someone I don’t recognise. There she comes, waving her arms so the light of a cigarette traces neon nests in the night. A large wave rolls in. We grab everything and retreat behind the line of seaweed but a bag of clothes is left to the water and I run to retrieve it, and when I return I see them together and my heart knows that it is all a lie – that he is not my child. I put my arm around her waist and she holds the bottle away from my mouth and pours. I gag as the red wine runs down my chin and she kisses me again. The baby smiles.
by Joe Evans
Joe Evans is a TV Producer who lives and works in London, UK. He writes short short fiction and novels. His flash ‘Simple’ appears in the April edition of ‘Flash: The International Short Short Story Magazine’.
your heart is a cracked accordion filling fast with salt – Patrick Rosal
My ex-wife called to tell me this.
Well, not exactly this. She called for money
I’d already paid. As an aside, in passing,
she added this: Our son cries.
He holds his face in his hands and sobs.
He stops by for food, cleansing, a couch
for sleeping on. He talks to himself.
He scratched the name “Jesus”
into his chest, says he’s fighting
the devil. He asked if he was adopted,
says Bob Marley is playing games
with his mind. His prescription
bottle’s full; he says the doctor is stupid.
Our son cries, she tells me in passing
after asking for money I’d already paid.
She cries, says she prays for magic.
I do not cry right there in front of her,
on the phone. Instead, I blink hard
and blink hard again.
Danny Earl Simmons is an Oregonian and a proud graduate of Corvallis High School. He has loved living in the Mid-Willamette Valley for over 30 years. He is a friend of the Linn-Benton Community College Poetry Club and an active member of Albany Civic Theater. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in various journals such as Avatar Review, Summerset Review, The Smoking Poet, Toe Good Poetry, Pirene’s Fountain, and Burning Word. His published poems can be found at www.dannyearlsimmons.blogspot.com.
Today,
I realized
everything I do is a joke
and God is on stage
doing stand-up
waging his finger at me
laughing
uncontrollably
while everyone in the audience
is relieved
he isn’t pointing his stubby fat fingers
at them.
by Kari Hawkey
