6.09 / August 2011
The Sting
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It was only natural Gwen should feel nervous on the first day at her new job. A short, simple man in half sleeves led her around the office, pointing out all the wrong things while neglecting the important ones: “this is where we keep the office plant,†[...]
Chunk
Leonard is a food whore; a slave to the fat hand pinched at the wrist by a tiny watch; a doughy child of habit, like his mother, I’m sure. There he is, sitting right across from you on the blue-line train to Springfield. Just like every other day of the [...]
Winter by Heart
A low moon slummed among the briars, providing nightwalking light but not much else. In the dead end of the year, dark came so early. Dark and the desire to dig up the slimmest fringe of heat, coax it out of the surface of any cooling object: car windshields, polished [...]
Two Poems
The Savage Curtain
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Kraków, Poland
Through beaded portière curls
pink nails – a shout: chod?
dziewczyny. Giggly Ukrainians,
the stray Pole, line the wall.
From between oak-hard women
I choose the dark, apple-breasted
girl. Fresh, guitar-shaped, lively
eyes that do not survey water stains
and flaking ceiling beneath
the boulevard -
in perpetually overcast Kraków,
I am daily there – [...]
Two Poems
Looking at
the picture he sent me of his cock, I send him his cock back..
Now he has two imprints of his fingers wrapping
himself in light in a lit box in his pocket. Dear Grandmother, here where we are
it is hard to lose things. What I mean is: he gave me [...]
V
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This is not a secret. No man has ever touched me. No man will ever kiss me, want me, fuck me, feel me up. It’s not that I’m religious. It’s not that I’m romantic. It’s not that uncle touched me. It’s panic. It’s deep in my gut. [...]
Four Poems
The Cnidos Venus
The goddess herself came to see the statue,
asked “Where did Praxiteles see me naked?”
Scabbed with ejaculate, the first
monumental representation of woman,
the first woman marble, the first Venus,
is now lost. The men who adored
and jacked off to her are dead.
She, assertive stone, all that
ivory Galatea was not: implaccable.
Oh, [...]
Do You Understand, Perfectly, The Weeknights? Positively Mean Them?
I.
The worst days were the ones when I could hear everything. The best, nothing. I spoke out loud when my heart jumped its start, and the sentences sent people’s faces contorted.
It is scary to think about, though. A blending of language. Something private. It was not the loss of language [...]
Questions by Fire
We say cross my heart and hope to die, but two out of three know they lie.
“No,†she whispered as he doused her body with gasoline. How had she gotten to this point? She knew it represented a climax of some order of despair or activity of attrition, [...]
Three Poems
Woman
A woman’s got to deal
with many caves, she’s also
got to do the dishes, care
a lot about the amount of
fuzz on the floor. A woman
could slice her breasts off
at any moment, she’s strong
enough to tug her hair
free from her head. A woman
like my mother had the capacity
to kick her infant daughter, [...]
Our Song
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Escucheme Baby, ’cause this is how it goes:
This is me.
A big-mouthed, little-bodied Latina with no tits, but that doesn’t stop me from buying the big-girl bras at Macy’s. You know, the ones with the lace and frills that itch, but look sexy during a strip [...]
Two Poems
Flood Loot
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I am oakbark tired and wiry from exertion
swimming pirogues in viscous water I have lost
shoes in every parish in Louisiana or stolen
them tied to a rod like a birth sac or host
of missing leather animals I carry them like lanterns
and they glow four months of munching [...]
The Woman Who Was a House
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There was a woman who was a house.
Not as big as. Was. A house. A vinyl-sided exterior coating her limbs, a sloped roof over her head. Her insides made of wood paneling, framed dusty pictures hanging on the wall of her chest cavity. Clinging to the back [...]
a third floor 11:47 story
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this is a third floor
eleven-forty-seven
story.
here,
secrets hide
in empty
mint tins
addled with dents
smelling of places
we shouldn’t have been.
we wear
sunglasses in the dark
we sing
when no one listens
we know
how to find treasures
at the bottom
of lost and found buckets
because it’s true
that the higher you
climb
the farther you fall.
and every shoe size
we outgrow
the world shrinks
just [...]
All The Things You Think You Need But Really Don’t
I met this girl at Egan’s Bar one night, and she was wearing a sundress and had bloody knees joining her skinny calves to her skinny thighs. Her dress was short enough so the blood didn’t stain it, and when I squeezed in next to her at the bar, I [...]
Christina Heppel
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One day Christina Heppel was sent home from school after turning up in knickers affixed with apple blossoms. Another day, she wore a top hat and crinoline, but wasn’t sent home. On a third occasion, she was paddled for sporting a horse-hair mustache. After that, she arrived [...]
Three Poems
CREEK
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We have no accent. The way we say room
is contingent upon the room.
We took this class once, on how nurses say loss.
The way we say loss, we learned, never varies:
Arm or mother.
Blood or hearing.
It sounds like the word for topsoil
distributed by wind.
People ask us where we’re [...]
Two Poems
Mutually Naked Condition
That’s what I’ll call it
from now on. That state of being
collectively hideous:
skinsweat bodyglove obvious
to self and to other
self. I am not okay
with tongue this and tongue that.
With saliva cocoon.
With this awkwardly
impulsive immediacy.
The stratosphere is lopsided,
the view from above an earthquake
of curves. But we share this
Shiva contortion act,
this mutually [...]
Three Poems
The Worst Part
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isn’t the hard car hood,
the wrist burns
you wear home.
The worst part is the dream
that he comes in
while you’re watching TV
with your folks, tells them
I fucked her good.
When you can’t sleep
you creep downstairs,
a blank blue unfeeling
amid Oreos, chocolate
chip ice cream, last
slice [...]
Two Stories
SALT
She has a request, the mother tells her children. She cannot put the request in her will, because it’s probably illegal.
All five of her grown children stand around the edges of her hospital bed and listen, not knowing what to do with their hands. Their mother is not dead yet, [...]