December 2001 | back-issues, fiction
a short story by Carolyn Morris
([email]amethyzt213 [at] yahoo [dot] com[/email])
The rain beat softly on the pavement outside. It carried the scent of the ocean and the flowers in the bluffs it had crossed to get to the girl’s window. But she did not notice it. Her senses, once attuned to the sights and sounds of the world around her, had grown dulled. Perhaps it was age that had done it, closing her eyes to the brilliance she used to see in everything. More likely it was the man lying sprawled out beside her in bed, as usual taking up as much room as possible, as if even in sleep he wanted to consume and stifle her. She had grown dead to the pain, the aching, the horrible nothingness. Feeling nothing was worse than feeling something. She had found this out over the course of the years, slowly, gradually, and without realizing that her life and soul were being diminished.
Then one night she awoke to the sound of the rain and lie staring at the ceiling. Despite the darkness, she could see well enough to count the few remaining stars attached to it. They had once been constellations but they had fallen one by one, the old adhesive losing the battle with the powdery white plaster. Looking at the sad, sparse bits of glowing green, she was struck by the memory of real stars. She supposed they must still be there, right outside her window if she cared to look. But look she hadn’t. Not for quite some time. The bits of light that used to be her friends, her guide, her twinkling lovers, had gone unnoticed in recent years. The eyes once open to the world had glossed over, veiled by a mist of foggy indifference bred of … who knows.
The worst thing about the nothingness was that she did not know from whence it came or how to make it go back. In a simple world, people long for things, acknowledge the desire, and do their best to satisfy it. In a simple world, there are no choices. In this world, people sometimes create their own barriers to fulfillment. The biggest obstacles are those we painstakingly build for ourselves, stone by massive, cold, solid stone. They are at once the easiest and the hardest to tear down, because the fight is against oneself.
The girl glanced at the warm figure next to her, appreciating the heat because it protected against the chill from without, while grimly knowing that the real coldness lied within. He looked so innocent sleeping there, the poor child. In sleep she could almost forgive him. She could almost remember how they came to be there in the first place. Almost. Looking at him, she tried one last time to summon the feeling she once knew — the quickening of the heart, the warm chill down her spine, the irresistible urge to smile.
But those things were long gone, vanished into the wind after one too many insults or cold shoulders or demands or … so many things. Too hard to explain, too depressing to recall. In movies and in books writers portray love as an unquenchable passion, a soul-shaking experience, a lovely sickness. The girl, cynical by nature, was tempted to brush these off as merely the whims of fancy, brought into being by writers as lonely as herself.
But she knew better. Her spirit had not always been dead. It had once danced to a music too beautiful to comprehend. Her eyes had once shone with the light that painters have tried to capture and failed. She had known times when the world really did stand still or melted away, or whatever poetic term one prefers, and all that was left was herself and another. She knew that real love existed out there, and that people were in it, and that it was beyond words.
The rain fell, and her eyes slowly closed. It was too late for such dreams and recollections. Memories are useless. Her shy spirit retreated again and she cuddled up to the warmth of the boy she no longer loved, and never really had. The glorious stars, wind, and flowers would have to wait until a more convenient time. God forbid she should be late to work in the morning.
Previous publications: Literary Brothel (under pen name “Aine Brigit”)
December 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
What if we daisy-cut
Bin Laden to bloody mush
And stuff his corpse
Into the deepest cave in
The White Mountains
And bulldoze it into
A place so secret that
Even we can’t find it
Again?
What if we smash Al Qaeda
Into pieces so small
That Brownian motion
Will be enough to prevent
Even the hope of
Them ever talking to
Or even smelling
Each other
Again?
What if we cruise missle
The Taliban so precisely
That any possibility of
Understanding
The consequences of the
Slightest act of defiance
Against us
On their part
Is so far beyond their
Comprehension that they
Can only hunker down
And go insane
Again?
What if we wage war
So technologically clever
That in three months the
Relative body count
(from enemy action only,
Mind you, not Friendly Fire)
Is Us ten thousand, Them zero
(Not counting Alliance
Casualties, of course)
And the couch potatoes
Back home
Can keep score cards via
Satellite phone and CNN
Like it was a football game
Or Desert Storm
Again?
What if they dream up a plan
So simple and beautiful
That with a thousand dollars
They massacre a couple
Of million of us with Weapons of
Mass Destruction
Like
Sarin or Ebola or Ricin
Or a Parcel of dirty nukes
Aboard a holiday Boeing 757
Cruising over Manhattan
Again?
What if we devise
A Weapon of Mass Destruction
So diabolically complex
As to strip
From them
For our own use
Every non-renewable resource
Tucked by God into
the bowels of their desert
And preserved
For the hope of a future
That their nomadic
Stone-age little minds
Don’t even yet know exists –
Again?
What if they smack us
With a Pearl Harbor
So devastating
That our leaders are
Instantly smitten
With a perspicacity
Never possessed
By any such august body
Before or
Since Vietnam,
And will probably never
Possess
Again?
Here we go
Again.
December 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
They say that to be a poet, or even to read poetry, one must be slightly insane.
Which is not to say that the poet, or the reader of poetry, is to blame
For his or her own circumstance, predicament, or condition
Because it is really a matter of fruition.
Many a man or woman have I fervently but distantly esteemed
For the cut of his or her jib or the mire of his/her mud or the bite of her/his spleen
But whose poetic facility ranks right up there with The Best of Dick and Jane
Or Who’s Who in the World of Business, or a matchless tract on how to explain
The inner workings of ovaries or some other obscure but highly important organ,
And to listen to their patter for longer than 0.5 minutes I consider to be very borgan.
But, ah! The others, those rare bards peeking shyly out from behind their little tin shields
Who are equally at home yelling, “Grab a hunk of curb, asshole!” or yodeling odes about Elysian Fields.
There is no doubt that you are one of those not-so-closet poets that color the midst of us mortals,
And you are blest or cursed with a rare perception of what is right and good perhaps more than you ortal.
The fact that you choose to spill it all over everybody’s personal landscape, and make a few pea pickers of our acquaintance a tad disconcerted,
Doesn’t make your lyrical notions wrong or unwelcome in the minds of those of us with whom you have poetically flirted.
For it is plain as the nose above that cookie duster you call a mustache,
That poets, like everyone else, like to make a splache.
Fruition, you see. The favored friends you have carefully chosen to share the wit and wisdom of your sonnet
Are no less burdened to the task than is your ode-spreading head with the powerful urge to create laid onnet.
In other words, Screw it!
You’re constitutionally compelled to do it.
And those of us, who that one little fact doth realize and comprehend,
Consume your canticles with gusto, even if them we don’t always fully understand.
Disparaging trolls may piffle at what they consider the mawkish cutes you and I artlessly dispense,
But we sagacious souls turn our gaze to the stars and away from fools sitting on a mud fence.
If simple minded gherkins call us banal,
The are welcome to osculate the bitter end of my alimentary canal.
I like your stuff as much as you like mine, and if there is one thing I will always treasure
It is watching a man who unquestionably and wholeheartedly thrives on the pleasure
Of expressing his entire ethic in verse so that planet earth may as a place be a little bit better.
Even if he thinks it is ok to say farewell by means of a form letter.
(This poem was written in 1998 and presented to John the day after I received his form letter announcing his retirement)
December 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
There is no one such as I…
God’s own juices flow here.
The plain upon which I falter is my hell…
Peace is not an accord,
But a gift discourteously declined.
Why do you ask what I have done?
The past does not suit you, nor me.
Had I been purple at the proper instant,
I would not now be gray.
Seekers whisper wry imaginings
In front of my shoulder blades.
My only sin is distraction;
My only vice, reputation;
My only virtue, absence.
Empathy dances from spire to spire,
Futile cerulean St. Elmo’s fire.
Muse, muse, where are youse?
My lips are pinned I cannot bestir the frost.
My blood is black, my heart a cavern
I cannot fill even with a howl.
You do not feel my kiss on your lips;
I steal your shoes and you bless me.
Grace is a sham and
God is left-handed.
His embrace is less than endocrine,
More than smile.
The passing days are instant.
There is no one such as I….
November 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
a hospital in
ho chi minh city
has a wall of jars
with pickled
fetuses aborted
(they say)
by agent orange
i feel a flicker
of glee
quick as lust
still killing the
murderous little bastards…
today I discovered
the beauty
of a boy in a
round wicker boat
November 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
When my dog talks to me
I know that he is discussing
Quantum Physics
From a different
Perspective…
When he dreams
I know that he does not exist
In this world
While he dreams…
His incisors
Are perfect utensils
For cutting meat…
He allows me
To take his temperature
Rectally…
When I sing
He harmonizes
In fellowship…
When I scratch his belly
He starts his motorcycle,
And I never ask,
“What’s in it for me?”…
