October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Dirt
My hen Kiev has it in for dirt.
She craters the backyard with soft pumice pits,
digging an acre of ashy basins;
she scatters mulch
with backward-scratching feet,
scraping bare the trunks of crotons and ginger plants;
she slurps night-crawlers from the ground
and severs roots, but not the detested
greenbriar and potato vine—
those she leaves growing from the grey hollows
like a last cackle;
she conspires with the raccoons
to broadcast compost,
spreading clumps, unintegrated, across the grass:
coffee grounds and fetid beans,
newspaper strips and onion skins,
blue lemons and pulpy litter
all resurface in places laid out for clean feet;
she polarizes debris that’s meant to meld together into rich loam
(brown-bag bits now crinkle stiffly between my flower beds,
while lonely cabbage cores dry in fence corners).
I’m thinking of buying a battalion of worms
to blend sand and trash
and return humus to my post-apocalyptic garden
but what would be the point? Kiev would just eat them.
Metal and Drab
I had my fill of metal and drab,
at a desk in a room, in a suite, in a concrete block,
with florescent lights and plastic blinds drawn
against the tropical brightness.
I trudged the concrete stairs to the second floor
each day, I heaved open a heavy door
underlined with stubs and cigarette ash,
closed my eyes and called upon torrent,
frond, and passion-fruit vine
“deliver me from this job,”
before stepping over the threshold
into the grey corridor,
into a box in the calendar.
I stacked the data in drop-down squares,
each name on a line, in a crease, in a sliding drawer;
my mind arranged its own inventory
(“gob-smacked,” “saffron,” “tiramisu”)
to crowd out the ordinal meanness.
After work, outside beside the fragrant gardenias,
I rewrote the day,
the way I keep reworking this poem
to include all that was absent and filed-away:
body, beauty, nuance, compassion,
the way sometimes in the sickening gleam
I tore the thick pith of a backyard citrus
and inhaled the bitter smell of the sun.
Crossroad
At a crossroad on a quiet day
she does a double-take through rolled-up glass,
a startled glance and slight pull-back
that only I notice;
the older man in the blue sedan
doesn’t see more than the dull crawl
of her nondescript car as it passes through the shadows
of the laurel oaks,
but I take in her black hair, pulled back and morning-tidy,
the mouth curved confusedly on her taupe face,
the dough of impending middle age
softening her forearms into ovals,
the whole effect so regular it begs a story:
Why has she looked twice at this guy?
Is it the polished olive-brown of his cheeks,
the breeziness of his t-shirt,
the careful hold of one hand on the wheel?
Does he evoke a patriarch making a toast
at a long table by a cliff by the sparkling sea,
with bowls of tomatoes and penne and ciabatta
and even the children with wine glasses half-filled?
Does the sight of him make the clinging heat
feel like a dry mediterranean afternoon
sweetened with tipsiness and garlic?
Or maybe I watch too many Italian films;
maybe he’s really her next-door neighbor
who just came from the barber with his beard newly shaved
and she almost didn’t recognize him;
maybe the reason I think I sense a quick spark of desire
piercing her window and then his
and then her subtle fluster and regrouping
is because I myself have now stopped running
and stand at the crossroad, eyes fixed
on the white hair and glossy, sunny skin
as he drives away.
October 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Pavelle Wesser
I enter the elevator, watching the blinking red lights as I descend to lower level number nine, where I exit to face my interviewer. His gaze is so fathomless it fills me with a coldness that is absolute in its sense of…
“Zero,” he informs me, “is the sum total of your life, yet I believe that everyone has the right to calculate his or her own loss.”
He points me toward a cubicle, empty but for a desk, chair and adding machine. I sit and begin tapping out senseless strings of numbers. I look up hours later, as a shadow falls across my desk.
“Who’s there?” I ask.
“Please be advised that tomorrow has been eliminated by default,” a voice echoes from an undetermined location. Just then, the adding machine screen goes blank, and I yell.
“The sum total is zero.”
This hardly matters, I realize, as the past has washed away, the future will never and the now is not happening. I consider the elements of zero even as my mind goes blank and there is no longer anything, not even this.
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Slave Boy
We run as if an agitated earth
were breaking up behind us, and we fight
to gain our stations at the gritty trough
half-filled with corn, where each survivor’s worth
is daily measured by another’s right
to fair apportionment denied; and off
our makeshift plates of muddied, calloused hands
ensues a squealing angry vulgar rush
to suck the greasy nourishment before
there is no more, beneath the reprimands
of our possessors, who behold the crush
of vermin squirming to and fro, and roar
with ridicule at other men’s distress.
And now the furnace of the picking fields:
my sweat, like acid, so intense the heat;
the layers of my skin in merciless
assault laid bare, as one would flay the shields
of weary swordsmen crumbling in defeat.
For I am just machinery, a tool;
and I must step and lift and strip and clear,
again, again, until all hope becomes
a moment’s respite from another’s rule,
a storm-whipped seedling doomed to persevere
until its fleeting energy succumbs.
The night, at last, should be our time of peace.
Instead a tempest rises from inside
of me – my brother kneels before the fire;
and all the creatures of the darkness cease
their plaintive calls, the churlish winds subside;
to touch his breath the spirits all conspire,
as like a starry pond his amber skin
reflects a thousand beaded silver pearls
of terror; time and motion seem to pause;
a fearsome crackling – flesh explodes, the din
of horror as a scarlet vapor curls
above bewitching firelight; and the cause
of all the misery of humankind
is set aglow upon the lustful eyes
of those in witness to the spectacle;
his swelling body thrashes in a blind
contortion at the resonant reprise,
the whistlings of the lash a chronicle
of limits to endurance, or of prey
in final battle, and we both recoil
with every searing flash of brilliant white;
the wordless ritual proceeds till day
begins, and merciful the rite of toil
to shroud the distant memories of night.
The valuation: ox and mule and I
are harvesters, production’s pulse and breath;
the traders, sure as scripture of their just
and righteous task, assess and quantify,
and probe and estimate each life and death;
like seed we will be spread among the dust.
I watch my mother’s face: ’tis just as well
they hack away her arm, so great her pain;
but all her tears dissolve in scenes of mirth
and profit, as the men who buy and sell
the bucks and hands and breeders do ordain
for us a last embrace upon their earth.
Our dearest bond is cherished; as the men,
becoming restless, hurry us along.
Once more I’d like to gather a bouquet
for her, to see her smile; and once again
to drift to slumber on an angel’s song
as all my fears of darkness slip away.
Paul Buchheit’s poems have been published by the Illinois State Poetry Society, Lucid Rhythms, and the State of Nature online journal. His happiest moments are spent reading, writing, and reflecting on carefully crafted poetry. As a retired teacher, he now devotes more and more time to this blissful pursuit.
