PANK Magazine

The Mothers

Amy Schleunes — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 05:22:51 +0000

I worry about what to say to The Mothers.

Once I asked them: Do you ever wish you could eat Vietnamese food with the taste buds of an infant? I read on the Internet that babies have extra taste buds dotting their cheeks, but that time and chemical shifts and various sensory traumas annihilate the tissues, leaving the adult mouth to experience a world of muted gustatory sensations. No, The Mothers told me, you wouldn’t want to do that. It would feel like your mouth was on fire. The babies in bassinets blinked at me with uniform blue eyes and shook their nubby hands like silent maracas. Then another Mother added, Like an army of very tiny men was unleashed onto your tongue and they were wearing shoes that are like tap shoes but instead of taps, the shoes have sharpened daggers which slice into your papillae. Also, she continued, think about “salivary incontinence” and how culturally unacceptable it would be at your age.

During the next encounter I tried again. I said: Wow. Your baby’s “stranger anxiety” seems especially acute today. One baby dressed as a bumble bee was crashing her pelvis into my lower ribs, hoping to dry hump her way out of my grip into the arms of someone she didn’t perceive as threatening and irresponsible. We know it can be embarrassing, The Mothers said, especially when all of the babies seem to reject you at all times. Then they pulled the baby away from me, took it to the far side of the room. Another baby, this one dressed as a ladybug, twisted her mouth into a milky smirk, as if to say: I don’t like the smell of you or Your breasts displease me or I garner more respect and deference in a stained ladybug outfit than you ever will, you sad, shattered woman.

And then yesterday I asked: Does your baby have a heart murmur? And before The Mothers could answer, I told them I had a heart murmur as a baby, and that it went away, and then came back, louder and more forceful, and that it feels like a silver fish flexing its spine against the back of my throat. And that I wonder whether the heart, through this orchestra of extraneous sounds and sensations, isn’t trying to tell me something. But what, I asked The Mothers and the babies who glared at me, drooling, what would the heart be trying to say? And what if it isn’t the heart after all, but something behind the heart, or under the tongue? And why would this thing, whatever it is, keep sending these messages, beat after beat, year after year, a constellation of signals blinking black in the dark?

Crowds

M.R. Sheffield — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 05:22:25 +0000

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It’s a lights out kind of thing with strangers gathered naked all around you – clasping each other’s hands and genitals; a glowing growing around their eyes because there you are too – nude, tiny, suddenly feeling like a child, but for what? These are instances of proof. Evidence substantiated. Here, look: you are going to die.

In a masterful way the naked people are moving their lips to speak something all at once, but you can barely hear them at first until enough breath gathers and then they’re all like this is the day we die, which you find more than a little disconcerting.

And so you’re wondering now if they’re ghosts or about to be ghosts, and whether or not you yourself have died – if that’s even an option. And if when you were a kid you filled those scantron bubbles in carefully enough. You wonder if you’d know if you were dead. You wonder if you’re dead then how come you’re attracted to this crowd of naked strangers. Some of them not bad looking, sure, but in this freezing cold absence of setting? In this moon rock void of rationality?

Some days you wake up early and then turn over to try to fall back asleep and can’t, some days you sleep until three thirty in the afternoon and then wonder where the morning sunlight went, some days you don’t sleep at all – just sit staring out a window wondering if the green grass you see out there is actually out there at all, or if it’s just a reflection of somebody’s else’s green grass, or even if it’s just something else entirely.

You’ve been late for work four times in your life. Today makes five.

But then, how can you leave when you’ve got all these people here, all of them demanding breakfast and panties, all of them shivering with the cold and where did your kitchen go? What happened to the refrigerator?

In scene four something weird happens with Ophelia and the play breaks open like a watermelon.

Which is strange because you haven’t read Hamlet since high school and suddenly you’re all there’s something rotten in Demark, but not Denmark, more here-now, wherever here-now is. And when will all these people quit complaining? Did you tell them you lost the stove? Did you tell them there’ll be no fried eggs and toast?

Sorry, it’s just I happened to wander in and saw them all here, just sort of at you and I wondered if you needed any help, but if you don’t I can leave. I don’t know what I meant by lights out. I don’t know what I meant by moon rock void. I don’t know what happened to the sun. I’m not ready to speculate about what will happen to us without it.

Arrow

Robert Rothman — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:09:41 +0000

ARROW (1)

An arrow, even Cupid’s, carries a slant of sorrow at its tip.

ARROW (2)

The thump it makes when hitting mark is felt across the space: an arrow straight to the heart.

ARROW (3)

In the space between the letting go and arrival there is grace.

ARROW (4)

The longer the shot, the greater the loft. This is the world of gravity.

ARROW (5)

Each arrow learns the pain of time and space, the small corruptions altering its course. None ever made a bull’s eye.

ARROW (6)

When you pull back the bow, left arm extended as far as it can go right hand holding nock near chin, back arched, in that moment before the arrow’s launched, stretched to your limit, I find you beautiful.

ARROW (7)

Pierced through by your arrow I bleed bliss, unable to staunch the wound.

ARROW (8)

If there was not an arrow, this life would be a narrow and harrowing existence.

The Lights

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:36:38 +0000

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The lights have been with us a long time. We have all decided what they mean.

In groups, when first gathered, we receive direction. We are asked questions about lights. The lights we like best will be mirrored by one hand rising into the air. Our bottoms will not rise into the air. Sitting, we wait until we are asked the question we like best. We raise our hands. Some of us do not raise our hands. Some of us raise two hands. These second hands are severed with the metal edge of a yardstick. The severed hands are confiscated and placed in the drawer where unauthorized items gather. The stump is placed underneath our bottoms. Only one hand may rise. One or none.

Place your knees on our throats and we choose you. We love what is good. Place your knees. There is no you. We want you to love us. There is no you. Place your knees. Dig deeper. When we wake, you are us. There is no you. We are born deep beneath the earth. We start the fires. We love what is good. There is no you.

We wait in our seats to be asked. We know that we will be asked and this is good. It is good to practice the raising and the choosing. We must decide what colors we like. No matter how much our hands rattle in the air they will only be counted once. There is only one value each hand may assume. We know that this is good. We love what is good.

The lights have been with us a long time. We have all decided what they mean.

Break from the water; we see ourselves. We know that we become who we see each morning, organized in this pattern as the film before our eyes.

We are training our remembrances. The film before our eyes and the air around our bed is the layer of someone moving. We do not remember who we see. We do not remember because it is the same flesh everyday. We do not remember because we do not remember our own. Like we do not remember air. Like we do not remember the water we wade, waking.

The lights have been with us a long time. We have all decided what they mean.

We have organized our waking so that one wakes before the other. One stands before the other, kneels then leans. We sense this in our swimming. We feel ourselves approaching light through water. We experience one light, then another. Both our own.

Place your knees.

After count and decision we receive cakes. We receive the same cakes no matter when our hands raise into the air or which light we like best. The number of hands in each group is counted. The count is important. We all receive the same cakes. There are no crumbs. We eat the cakes together and the frosting crusts our hands but not the hands in the drawer. Our stumps stay under our bottoms until we arrive at home and can plunge them in ice water. We hope no one will notice.

The lights are important to us. We have all decided what they mean. We have not all decided on what this meaning means to us. How we are to engage that meaning. All of us can agree on the meaning but that is not the danger. The danger is the engagement.

When we have grown the importance of our preference increases exponentially. We make choices. We are happy to participate. Now we may all affix paper medals to our sternums. The safety pins the medals hang on move slightly in our skin, up and down. To ensure the safety of our choices, the medals are not to be seen. Our participation noted in the drops of blood on our shirt fronts.

There were some once that tried to change the meaning. They were unsuccessful.

But we are told of piles. We cannot reach them but we are told our choices lie in unopened piles. They arrive, they are sorted, they are not counted. We believe our choices are respected. We are told our choices are respected and due to this respect they are counted. But we are also told of piles. Instead of respect through counting and decision, our choices become piles. We imagine our choices piling. Through this we see our colors uncounted.

We recognize the imperfections of our modes. We believe in their delineations. We have decided what they mean. The lights have been with us a long time.

Have you made your answer clear? We have chosen a color. Have you chosen your color? We were not asked to choose. What we have bled into. We bring this color into our homes. We wrap our choice around our homes. We wrap it around our necks in stiff kerchiefs. We hold each others tongues, they squirm at our touch and they writhe in the pools of our color when lopped and dipped. We swap tongues and swallow. We were not told to do this. We were told to do this. Who told us to do this. We told ourselves to do this. We have made a choice.

We pick ourselves.

What we cannot agree on—

—We agree that it requires a shift in temperament. What that shift entails remains unclear. We envelop the unclear making it obsolete.

What we cannot agree on—

—We remember fire, we remember movement. We remember lights. They have been with us a long time. We know there is a swamp where our severed hands refuse to decompose.

We have all decided what they mean.

We are born. We are born deep beneath the earth. Claw our way out of sand and clay. If born too deep beneath rock we cannot move. Our nails, still too soft. We stay beneath the earth. The fires.

Above the soil, our nails can grow. But the fires spread, feeding on root. Stretch for miles. Wish to dig, we cannot. Our fingertips blister.

We are safe only in water. We are safe only in bodies of time. We carry buckets of water; we soak the ground. We create paths of water toward water.

Still our hearts before we enter the water. Dip slowly, tip by tip into the water and we still our hearts. Noses above the water, we wait. We do not stir. Any movement could be heat beneath the water. Once we recognize movement expressing heat we leave. We make haste.

We with cloth wrap our feet in the cloth and carry those young enough to be carried. Running we meet groups who carry news of the water and the spreading flames. The water we move toward, too hot. If the blood of our beloveds boil we carry them on our backs. To bury in trees when we reach mountains. We must before our buckets dry.

In the mountains we mold the fires. In the mountains we make the lights.

The lights have been with us a long time. Clockwork rings of soot and stubble. Have you seen them before? Arched back, cloaked light. Where have they been. By us, where we sleep. Alone, loosened, touching our stomachs and feeling a glow. Feeling the gurgle. The different types of boiling.

We pick ourselves. We pick ourselves until we bleed. There, there is the color we have been waiting for.

We move beneath the lights, finding correlation in dissection. We are not lost.

Do you see them?

When we are splintered what can we say. We move. Our eyes open. Our eyes close. We breathe. Not at the same time. The lights—

Quiet, we are waking. We are moving. Slowly through water. We see light and are rising. We are rising to meet you. Quiet, we are waiting to speak.

Graduation

Luke Whisnant — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:35:33 +0000

The old man flew in from Florida and is staying with the family. The old woman drove from Omaha and gets a cheap motel room. Their daughter is happy to have them there for her son’s graduation but distraught that the old woman will not sleep under the same roof as the old man. The old man offers to sleep on the sofa in case the old woman changes her mind. The old woman smiles politely, thinking about a cold day in hell. The daughter’s husband crams his earbuds in, cranks his music, and slips out to sweep the garage. The graduate sits on the short-sheeted sofa, calling the old man Pawpaw and talking baseball, though he doesn’t care at all about baseball. The old man says he’s proud of the boy, good job, keep it up. The old woman stands in the kitchen looking over the bar to the den, staring at the back of the old man’s head. His hair is completely white now, she notices, and so thin the scalp shows through at the back, and she has no feeling of tenderness or regret or pity but instead thinks one word: Good. Her daughter comes up behind her with a wooden spoon, with which she replaces the metal spoon in the saucepan, saying that metal reacts with acid in the sauce and to avoid bitterness you should always use a wooden spoon. The mother lifts the wooden spoon out and flings it into the stainless steel sink. It’s her spaghetti sauce, after all, and if it’s too bitter for their precious refined tastebuds they can just get over it; her grandson had asked her, not his mother, to make his favorite dinner, and that’s what she was doing, god damn it. The daughter turns to her nervous sister—the youngest daughter—and shrugs with one shoulder, and the sister, who has a delicate stomach, turns and walks out of the room. In the garage the husband has finished sweeping and now goes back to the far corner and begins again. Inside, the graduate is whupping the old man in a video game. The old woman dumps two boxes of spaghetti into the biggest pot in the house, a pot so big that water never quite boils in it. Maybe you could skim off some grease, the daughter says, looking at the sauce. The old man puts both sock-clad feet on the coffee table and leans back, saying he thinks he’ll take a little nap and asking his grandson wake him when supper is ready. One sock is black, one’s navy blue. The youngest daughter was supposed to toss a salad. The graduate picks up his cell phone and texts his ex-girlfriend. It’s not too late, the old woman thinks, to poison this tomato sauce. The husband reluctantly finishes sweeping his spotless garage. Then he begins on the driveway. He sweeps around the parked cars. He finds the youngest daughter—his sister-in-law—lying face-down in the backseat of her locked sedan, crying. The front door of the house opens and the old woman steps out holding a red-stained wooden spoon. Her car is parked on the street for a fast getaway. She throws the spoon as far as she can across the front yard and it lands in the pine-needle mulch around a tulip tree, terrifying the cat. The husband asks if everything is all right. His mother-in-law says she’s out of there. The old man comes to the door in his sock-feet, white hair tousled. The old woman spins, snarls, throws him a look that stops his gentle hand from reaching out to her. It’s five steps down to the sidewalk, then twenty-two steps to her car. She slams the door, jams in the key and guns the engine. It’s not so far to her motel, but she drives it slow with her cell phone in her lap, hoping they’ll call. They don’t.

Two Poems

Matthew Vollmer — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:33:01 +0000

epitaph #17

listen to this poem

here lies a man who once stood beneath an orange maple on a day in mid October when the National Weather Advisory had proclaimed that there would be winds and low humidity and therefore the perfect conditions for fire, and right there above the deceased’s head, on undulating limbs, appeared the most extravagant flames, which, as the deceased would like to admit, was probably a familiar metaphor for autumn leaves, but what else could one think in the presence of such incandescent scraps of orange flapping wildly on black branches, while smoky shadows pooled beneath and a dog (not just any dog but one belonging to the deceased’s child, which was the child’s first and only dog, a dog whom everybody—except those prone to phobias or the generally heartless—loved and who would be dead in probably ten or so years if she was lucky but was today very much alive) pulled eagerly against her leash as the deceased walked up a limb-and-leaf-strewn street towards the place where Bus 127, piloted by balding and mirthful Gene, would soon perform the miracle it performed every day at more or less 3:50 post meridian, which was to deliver back to the neighborhood its children, who had gone away for the day to learn about treble clefs and subtraction and the Lakota Indians, who themselves believed that plants and trees like the one mentioned earlier had been sent by the benevolent spirit Waken Tanka to rise from the ground, the idea of which, along with everything else the children had learned, would be more or less forgotten once they streamed down the stairs of the bus and along the windswept lane with their heads shrieking and their arms flinging off coats and backpacks without seeing (despite their obvious glory) the trees, and certainly not saying (as the deceased had said on this day to himself): I will be alive like these leaves only a short time longer, I will someday be carried away, I will turn to dirt and not know it, I will be gone and unable to return and whatever I have made will also expire and then I will be a flaming ghost in the heads of those who knew me and a mysterious face to those who view whatever photographs I leave behind and which some future person might view and wonder: did people really look like that back in the day, did they believe it was okay to dress like that, to make their faces look like that and who was this man and what did he do and what was his name and look how happy he was, look how utterly unaware he seemed to be of his own inevitable demise

epitaph #33

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here lies a man who loved outer space and who, at age eleven, had listened with rapt attention when an evangelist named Cliff (a man who appeared to suffer from rosacea and whose head, though not exactly fat, could definitely have been said to appear swollen) presented a two-week lecture series about how to correctly interpret the Book of Revelation, what with its epic sideshow of mutant beasts and harlots straddling seven headed leopards, all of which Cliff the Evangelist took time to decode, even shedding light on the mysterious 666, which, he postulated, was the exact number you’d get if you added up the Roman numerals in the name VICARIUS FELII DEI, which, in Latin, translated into “Representative of the Son of God,” but which Cliff proposed was the name of the first Pope, and that this was significant because the Catholic church had changed the day of Christian worship from the Jewish Saturday to the pagan Sunday, thereby consecrating a period of the week that was never meant to be consecrated, and that one day in the future, after God had given Satan the go-ahead, allowing him to afflict the world with a series of ghastly plagues that involved flesh-eating boils and the sea turning to blood and the sun scorching people with fire, the Antichrist would arise and perform miracles and promise the plague-weary folks into believing that the world could be cured if only everyone attended church on Sunday, after which laws would be passed that would force every Earthly citizen to engage in Sunday worship, meaning that those who worshipped on another day would be put to death, but what these seventh-day Sabbath keepers would know, because they’d read their Bibles, was that by worshipping on this falsely consecrated day these misinformed people would be receiving, in their hands and upon their foreheads, the Mark of the Beast, while those who kept the true Sabbath would—in return for suffering persecution for obeying the Law—receive the Seal of God, and would subsequently be caught up with the Redeemed on the day when Christ returned, in a cloud of glory, a sort of angel-ringed organic spaceship that would fly through the universe and, passing directly through the Orion nebula, which, Cliff the Evangelist added, was a gateway to heaven, and though the parts of this seminar that depicted the possible persecutions of the Redeemed had filled the deceased with trepidation, he couldn’t help but think Awesome whenever he imagined traveling on a cloud through space, an idea that would erode as he grew older and began to ask questions, like how could a cloud—which couldn’t exactly hold up in a vacuum—travel through space, and did Jesus have some sort of magical cloud lacquer—some kind of forcefield or something—that would allow the cloud to survive all that dark matter, and if so, would Jesus return before the sun expanded into a massive red giant and swallowed the Earth, or was it all a myth, and was the universe merely a place of light and dark and hot and cold, a question that would continue to haunt the deceased long after he’d finished school and landed a job and formed a family, a question he’d confront anew the day that a dear friend, who was well aware of the deceased’s predilection for all things space-related, had emailed him a link to download a file named “Symphonies of the Planets,” an album that’d been created by manipulating the recordings transmitted by Voyager 1 and 2 as they were slung by gravitational forces through our solar system, logging massive amounts of data, including the interaction of solar wind on the planets’ magnetospheres and trapped radio waves and charged particle emissions, all of which scientists would later convert into sound waves, the result of which was a wash of eerie music, not unlike something a couple of ragged-sweater-and-Converse-All-Star-wearing kids might concoct using tape loops and guitar pedals on the floor of a big city art gallery, the main difference being that these sounds had been made by planets, which were, even as the deceased listened, still out there, still presumably making these same or similar sounds, and it was as though the deceased had dialed into a secret radio station or was listening with a stethoscope to the heart of the universe, which meant that for days and then weeks as the deceased did the dishes and folded laundry and laced up his boots and donned a facemask and coat and gloves and went out into the bleak and snowy and frozen winterscape of his post-blizzard neighborhood, he did so with the symphonies playing through ear buds he wore and continued to wear even after they made his ears hurt, because listening to the symphonies had the almost immediate effect of transforming the mundane into the extraordinary, forcing the deceased to acknowledge everything he saw as the product of energy and atomic particles, thus allowing him—on occasion—to feel as if he were an astronaut exploring another planet; and all the gurgling and the wobbling whistles and the static and the rumblings and the droning undercurrents and the bellowing and the wind-like screeches and the faint lonely ringings and the moaning of what sounded to the deceased like lost human voices singing indifferently and perhaps unconsciously—it all made him prayerful and reflective, and even when the deceased wasn’t listening to the symphonies, even after the battery on his MP3 player had been drained, he found himself hearing them in bits and pieces when he least expected it, meaning that he would become aware of dopplering autos or the centrifugal whirring of a neighbor’s heat pump or the gurgling and hiss of boiling potatoes and think without irony or sentiment that what he was hearing was indeed the timeless and improbable music of the spheres

Breeding

Kyle Thompson — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:29:29 +0000

“The secret of improved plant breeding,
Apart from scientific knowledge,
is love.” So said
Luther Burbank one morning while strolling
The nursery grounds of Gold Ridge Farm
with that curious, bemused

Technician of consciousness, Yogananda. They’d

Been friends for many years, and were discussing
His attempts to produce a spineless cactus. “You have
nothing to fear,”
he would tell them. “You don’t
Need your defensive thorns. I will protect you…”
Not cloyingly, but in the American fashion of encouragement:

Matter-of-factly, though the facts themselves were debatable.

That afternoon, the heat was calm and total. Unevolved
rows of cacti
Bristled like migraines in the head.
Swishing past

A particularly large specimen, Yogananda’s robe caught
On a budding prickly pear. It took three strong yanks to free himself.

“It could be, Luther, they have read your book on child rearing!”
In the American fashion, Burbank had had
None from his own loins, but chased them all down

With an opinion.) “Maybe, Paramahansa, maybe. But when
I’ve finished rearing him, he really will be able to read!”

Weeks later, when the buds broke, he plucked a few and
brewed them in his tea.

Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz
Was not a beautiful woman. But marrying into royalty
In a time when beauty was a kind of

Intelligence to be cultivated by ladies and queens,
She offset her natural handicap
With dignity and good taste and charity. “The English

People did not like me much,” she said, looking back
on her reign, “because
I was not pretty.” But claimed that the carriage accident

Which broke her nose was a stroke of luck,
Since it damaged her ugliness just enough

To achieve some small corner of beauty. An
Amateur botanist, she understood

The importance of careful breeding. Kew Gardens
Was her grandchild, and Bach and Mozart
her beneficiaries.
Educator of daughters, beautiful and ugly, nursemaid

To her husband king, who wriggled like an eel
in hand, in his madness—
Her calm humor became something of an African flower

In her later years, when she was dead:
The “Bird of Paradise”,
Strelitzia Reginae, as indestructible and
slow-growing as the cactus,

And, unpredictable as its loveliness,
Official flower of the City of Los Angeles.

Babymaking

Brittany Shutts — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:23:34 +0000

listen to this story

Season One_______ ___________________________________________________________

The Pact

Three middle school girls make a pregnancy pact. They are bored and they want attention and unconditional love. The first one, Bridgina, does it with Wendell, her boyfriend of two weeks, on the school bus. A few weeks later, she pees on a little stick in the nurse’s office with the other girls watching and sees a thin blue line. The three girls embrace and high-five.

TrinaLynn, the second one, doesn’t have a boyfriend, but she has sex with a pockmarked twenty-two year old who works on a fish boat. They do it right on top of a pile of flounder, just like in the movies. When the time comes for her to go to the nurse’s office, she pees two blue lines onto that stick because she is just that pregnant. Once again, the three girls hug, kiss, and cry tears of hysterical happiness.

The third girl, Ashollee, doesn’t have a boyfriend either, so she has sex with a homeless guy. She has sex with a homeless guy three times. The first two times don’t work and she doesn’t want the other girls to have their baby parade without her bringing up the rear. She goes to the nurse’s office for the third time, so nervous she can barely pee, but when she finally does there’s a blue line on that stick—albeit a faint one. The other girls blow their noisemakers, embrace and high-five as before.

Family Conflict

Bridgina’s parents are astounded by the news that their daughter is pregnant. They took her as a fine, upstanding young woman with values and not some kind of hussy. Clearly she has been influenced by the glorification of babymaking in the modern media. They suspect that Wendell has something to do with this inconvenient pregnancy.

TrinaLynn’s parents blame themselves. Her mother got pregnant when she was fourteen and became a creditor at a young age just to pay the bills. Her father acknowledges that the divorce may have created some distance between certain members of the family. Therefore TrinaLynn’s parents are really supportive, which is great because she’s really pregnant.

Ashollee’s parents react with a nod and a sigh when she announces that she’s having a baby, even though she tells them that she did it with a homeless guy and ran over the condom with the lawnmower three times. They have six school-age daughters and they’re all pregnant. The meth lab in the basement can hardly pay for all of the diapers they’re going to need come March.

Baby is the New Black

Soon everybody at school knows that the three girls are knocked up. They become super-popular and everyone tells them how lucky they are because they’re going to have babies. Other girls stop them in the hallway to feel the gentle kick of the fetuses and shriek at ultrasound pictures. It makes them all want babies, too.

The principal and other school officials are alarmed. The teen pregnancy rate mysteriously spikes by three girls and it does not escape the notice of the local papers. The nurse says she’s done all she could do, distributing the Pill like Pez and passing out condoms only for them to be inflated and used as balloons at baby showers.

And there are quite a few baby showers. First, TrinaLynn throws a baby shower for Bridgina. Next Bridgina throws a baby shower for TrinaLynn. Not to be outdone, Ashollee throws a baby shower for TrinaLynn. Then TrinaLynn throws a baby shower for Ashollee. It was so great that Ashollee throws a baby shower for Bridgina that same day. Finally, Bridgina throws a baby shower for Ashollee, but they were all sick of spending their allowance on booties and bibs by then. Approximately eighty-five percent of the nurse’s condom stash is used as party balloons that week, leaving hardly enough for the nurse.

Season Two___________________________________________________________________

Love and Loss

Bridgina confronts Wendell about whether he plans to fulfill his parental role, as he seems more interested in video games and less pregnant women. He turns down his bowling scholarship so he can get a job and support Bridgina and the baby. Then he moves in. Wendell’s disapproving parents urge him to get a paternity test because Bridgina is clearly a fine hussy and not some upstanding young woman with values.

TrinaLynn’s parents agree to take care of their future grandchild when TrinaLynn returns to high school. Just as she was accepting her future as a single mother, the boy from the fish boat shows up on her porch with a bouquet of carnations and a half pound of shrimp. He expresses a strong desire to be a real father to the baby, the father he never had—his own was lost at sea.

There’s no more room for babies at Ashollee’s house, so she drops out of school and moves in with her Aunt Vicky. Ashollee instructs an advanced cardio-kickboxing class in the basement to earn a meager income while she studies for her GED test. She fails the test three times and swears she wishes she never did it with that homeless man.

Labor Day

People gradually lose interest in Bridgina, TrinaLynn, and Ashollee. Other girls at school get pregnant and a belly full of baby just isn’t special anymore. The girls are impatient to go into labor, so they spend a whole day jumping up and down on TrinaLynn’s trampoline. The next day in math class, their water breaks at the same time and they leave together in the same ambulance. The students lift their legs while the janitor mops up the flood of baby fluids under the desks.

Bridgina gives birth to Yazmin Starr and she looks just like her father. She brings the baby home only to discover that Wendell’s career as a video game tester was a lie, but they quickly make up. The process of making up makes Bridgina pregnant again, so the boundlessly fertile Wendell and Bridgina get married and begin their family of ten. Their trials and tribulations inspire a Lifetime movie called All My Babies.
TrinaLynn has twins, Lunesta Skye and Purina Rae—one for each of her guilt-ridden parents. The boy from the fish boat has been running around with less pregnant woman, so TrinaLynn remains a single mom. She follows in her mother’s footsteps and becomes a creditor. When she is cast on the reality TV show Teen Creditor, her financial problems are solved forever.

The Grand Finale

Ashollee raises her baby Usher Jaxson all by herself in her negligent Aunt Vicky’s basement. One day she gets a call from the homeless man, but he isn’t homeless anymore. He was washing windshields on the street when he was discovered by an agency looking for a hand model. After the world saw his hands dipping a corn chip in a salsa commercial, other businesses sought to get his hands on their caramel macchiatos and fine gold jewelry.

Now he is on every news station with reporters asking him to take his gloves off for the camera. His pristine hands are on the cover of the newspaper under the headline “Homeless to Hand Model.” He bought a house in Los Angeles and he wants to be a part of his son’s life, to pay child support and send him to college.

It’s funny how these things work out.

The Sex of the Stars

Audra Puchalski — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:10:39 +0000

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That cluster of stars over there—and when I say “cluster of stars” I mean a set of stars that are not clustered at all, but they appear to be a cluster to a human viewer on earth who can’t see perspective in outer space—

—anyway the stars in that “cluster” are of the same sex, a sex we’ll just call female for the sake of convenience but realistically it’s unlikely that any of them have a vagina or two X chromosomes. They probably don’t have genitalia or chromosomes at all. The point is, whatever star sexes there are, those stars have the same one.

The lady stars in this cluster like to get together—although they don’t so much “get together,” actually, as continue drifting rapidly away from each other as a result of the Big Bang—they get together and talk about stars of the opposite star sex, that is, another star sex, the sex of star they want to have star sex with, whatever sex that is, since there could be more than two star sexes.

The stars get together for girl talk over star Long Islands. Except for one of the stars who is generally more interested in having sex with a star of the same sex. The lesbian star still hangs out with her heterosexual star friends because she enjoys their company, although sometimes she gets bored when they won’t stop talking about stupid hairy star boys.

Of course, stars don’t have hair. They don’t have any secondary sexual characteristics, in fact, because they’re massive hypercondensed collections of gas with a correspondingly powerful gravitational pull and always on fire—that is, until they collapse or explode after billions and billions of years.

It’s hard to say whether stars have primary sexual characteristics, either. It would be rude to ask. The star girlfriends order a second round of star cocktails and the lesbian star, who is secretly in love with one of her heterosexual star friends, wonders if she should confess that love. She is feeling bold. I say “she” but star gender pronouns probably do not include “she.”

The lesbian star notices that her star crush seems less eager to talk about star boys than the others and that she always proposes skinny dipping after the second or third round, but another star always glances over at the lesbian star and says, “We’d better not.” The lesbian star would like to have same-sex sex with her same-star-sex star friend, but she doesn’t know how.

She doesn’t know how partially because she thinks there’s no way to bring it up that won’t be socially awkward, especially since the group of friends functions under two assumptions: first, that the lesbian star has only friendly feelings toward all the star friends, and second, that all the star friends except for the lesbian star are heterosexual. And partially because she doesn’t know how stars have sex because no two stars have ever gotten close enough to touch.

Life on the Dead Tree

Jennifer Pieroni — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:07:54 +0000

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They were not reptilian, though from time to time they did flick their tongues. They were a boy and a girl, resting in the forks of branches: brushing their hair with twigs, ripping bark chips from the source, always with the tree tissue, the mineral deposits under their fingernails. And they called one another “Darling.”

“Darling, I don’t eat beets.”

“I have never eaten a beet, Darling. I also don’t eat any sort of mushroom.”

“Darling, it’s been many years since I’ve eaten a mushroom. I would never eat a Brussels sprout, not if my life depended on it.”

“Your life would never depend on Brussels sprouts, Darling.”

The dead tree was on the corner of Ropes Street and Washington, where recently one man was stabbed in the thigh while another took his exit with a shoebox full of oily cash in a rented auburn sedan with numerous cigarette burns in the white leather interior. All of this read in the newspaper the next day. The boy and the girl were not in the dead tree at the time, and sorely missed the opportunity to witness a crime.

“Darling, my mother caught me applying her lipstick and told me to be home before dark today.”

“We can’t leave this tree now, Darling. What if something happens?”

“What will I say to my mother, should she ask?”

“Do you really think she will ask?”

“You’re right, Darling, she would never ask.”

Time in the tree was (as they say,) of the essence. The park across the street was part of an urban renewal initiative in the neighborhood. A goat-faced peddler of iced water was made more than once to move his shop, which consisted of a plastic barrel, from one bench to another by the police man who more than once arranged a set of orange cones around the various work sites. Trees that grew in lopsided or had been poisoned by too much graffiti were taken away in trucks. The workers had also torn away the crumbling sidewalks and were carefully positioning new granite curbs, as if the city’s very future depended on the slight expansion of the pedestrian walkway, and nothing else.

The boy was comfortable as he was, folding his arms behind his head, squinting at the people on the crosswalk and beyond. The girl, on the other hand, was experiencing a spasm in her hip that caused her right leg to become restless and tight. The dead tree had not been dead for a very long time, and though it was dramatically bare, the fibers still clung together in a pulp strong enough to hold the children safe. In fact, had the girl been more patient about the sensation spreading behind her ass and along her hamstring, she would never have tumbled to the ground, skinning her elbow so that it looked like a gory tondo.

“Darling, you were never much of an athlete.”

“I never was, Darling. Would you help me?”

“Climb back, and certainly I will.”

“OK, Darling, just give me a minute”

It felt like all of the pain she’d ever experienced in her short life had combined at this one excruciating point, this period between her upper and lower arm. Puffing through the agony, she hoisted herself over the lower forks and up to the same height as the boy. He’d moved to the fork she’d sat in previously, while she settled in his. In that moment, she thought that she and the boy might actually be interchangeable. Then, nearly laughing, she shook off the silly notion.

“You can see the water from here, just barely, Darling.”

“From here you can see the Farmer’s Market.”

“Darling, if we went just a bit higher, come sun down, what might we see?”

“I once climbed so high I saw last century, Darling.”

“Oh, Darling, I once climbed so high I saw next century.”

“I hope they don’t take this tree down, the way they took the others.”

She brought her dripping elbow closer. “Me too, Darling. Me too.”

Sex Education

Stephen Mills — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:05:14 +0000

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It was spring in Indiana when that man raped
the gray-haired lady who went to worship
with us. The one who wore purple skirts

and sturdy tan shoes like loaves of day old bread
my father brought home for us. The man snuck
into her house, tied her with a phone cord, raped her

while her dog howled in the bathroom—trapped,
waterless and scared. For days my parents
whispered over dinner boiling on the stove

and by the next week we all felt the icy current
of my mother’s fear wash over us when I left
the door unlocked on my way to the bus,

her alone inside. But by the end of May the woman
was back in her pew, an unshakable Quaker,
firm in the belief that silence heals everything.

I examined her for bruises she hid in floppy sweaters,
until summer came and melted the victim from her skin,
exposing the remains of his fingers still smudged on her

like a painter’s thumb on the back of the canvas.

****

It was the same year they took our fingers to ink,
smeared them on blue note cards, marked
with our name and picture. Placed them in files

meant to save us. It was after that little boy
vanished. The one my mother dreamt of finding
stuck in a clothes rack at J.C. Penney,

or buried beneath the tomatoes in the grocery aisle,
still breathing. The boy looked a lot like me,
blond hair, blue eyes, when they found him

in that cornfield, his anus bloodied, his nails full
of earth. But my parents believed in fingerprints,
in their ability to keep me from disappearing

into the hands of men who can’t control
their fascination with the way color leaves
the body. Men I’d take to bed, years later,

my feet bound in their neckties, scarves, handcuffs.

****

In school that fall, Mr. Brock nervously taught the boys
“reproduction” like a cold science, as if he knew

some of us would become monsters. Our desires
lurking in our groins like a disease we might succumb to.

Our blue plastic chairs scooted across the hardwood
floor of the gymnasium as the girls sat Indian style

across the hall in the dimmed cafeteria, watching a film
on the mysteries of bloody panties and sore chests.

The boys got diagrams: blueprints of bodies
meant only to produce bald, screaming babies each time

our middles touched a girl’s. Mine never did.

****

By October the rapist was caught. His mustache and beady
eyes on the front page of every Midwest newspaper:

six counts of rape, four of first-degree murder. She’s lucky,
my parents spoke in voices loud enough to hear,

but I knew better. Knew she must have his baby growing
inside her, but hoped it would stay forever trapped in her belly

like her dog in the bathroom on that spring night, or her
throat in his hands, the color rushing from her face.

Three Poems

Eugenia Leigh — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:02:09 +0000

UPON LIVING WITH A MAN NEWLY RELEASED

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A friend watches me spoon a soggy chunk
of my childhood and fling it
somewhere between my Brooklyn sink
and California. Her thoughts brake, as if to judge
the remains of a six-car pileup, or the sink,
jammed with crayon drawings of my father
in jail. Father, unconscious on bedding of stationery

marked with my name. Father, stick figure
twisted, and red. Father, fingering baloney
greased with the spit of a guard. Father’s mouth,
gorged with sores. Father’s music,
stripped from his lungs. Father’s eyes,
swollen with apology to my mother,

whose Garden Grove apartment reeks
of apathy. Her boyfriend’s roses. I sew together
syllables about trauma—a poem
about what war gifts to its witness
(silence). My words gurgle with curdled

blood, my mother’s old bruises.
My friend, who pops therapy like candy,
hounds me to see someone. But how could I
wreck another human being with the shrieks

of my father’s wars? Sometimes,
when the night is blank, I beat the new
moon with my crumpled drawings. She collects

my abuse in her belly. Waxes
until she, pregnant with rotten paper,

empties my anguish into the sky—

Still Life

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This poem is presented as a PDF in order to preserve formatting.

Testament

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This poem is presented as a PDF in order to preserve formatting.

Say When

Sophie Klahr — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:19:43 +0000

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if you are a man made of birds
if you are a bureau

if chest, if cage

if you are a lovely weather
worn out, say when

if the space between us makes
a dog named vacancy

if I contain all possible crimes

if I pay attention, if I stay very still
if I notice how stupid we are

if I sing a prayer in a meadow
if I am a prayer in a meadow
if I bury prayers in a meadow, write
on a leaf the name of your wife

vacancy begs & whines
all week without you,
restless as lying, & I don’t know
what to feed it

say, the rains will come say,
breathe say, breathe

say, I should be put in a cage

I can wait and not wait, want
and just be a seed, a glass,
a pocket, someone
you can always make laugh

the bedroom’s red light catching
sweat like cinders in your hair

if, say, I was always on fire
if, say, I could see the city from here

Blue Alyssa and the Sad Gray Crab

Amy Letter — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:11:23 +0000

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“Thursday’s child has far to go…”

We called it the Cape of Flowers, but for every bug-eaten bloom there were forty thorns and twice that number of saw-toothed weeds, and a grit-patch mined with sandspurs made the only path to the sea. The sun was ceaseless. The birds did not sing but scream. The fish that swam beyond the shore were known for their teeth, not their meat.

We sold the strip as Paradise Regained! with pictures of happy couples on the shore. We based the pictures on Renaissance paintings of Adam and Eve, before the Fall. Customers were usually not as interested in the thirty-foot Hansen-Larsen particle accelerator that took them to the cape, so we hid it behind sheets of drywall.

* * *

The day of the end of my wait was called “Thursday,” and I tried to pretend that’s all she was, a Thursday in black sweater, a Thursday in short red skirt, her brown hair bobbed and banged, her face a heart-shaped canvas the color of tropical dusk, curved lips like a bird on the horizon, two lidded eyes like the tops of clouds or a trick of the light in the sun: Thursday. “I’m interested,” she said. “But I want to know more. Basically, I’m dealing with the world’s shittiest break up. Maybe I should do this. Maybe I should shoot myself. Maybe I should shoot him.”

“I recommend this,” I said, “more than shooting. Anyone.”

“When I get back, will things be different?”

“You’ll be different. For you, so much time will have passed, you won’t remember his name.”

She smiled and took the brochure.

* * *

Most people don’t read them, they just sign. But Alyssa walked outside and read the release forms in the sun, stood still as the press of pedestrians washed past her, a golden boulder in an icy stream. I watched from beneath the slogan arched across the window: Accelerations! Eternity: Today! The cheesy salespitch cheapened the place, but in truth there was beauty on the Cape of Flowers, just not the sort of beauty that sells. It was the beauty of sun-bleached heaps of bones, of small silvery parasites blind and lost and biting, of mineral-stained stone walls left to crumble under weeds. Or so the old man told me.

A woman struggled into the shop. She had short-cropped gray hair and trouble catching her breath. “Pancreatic cancer,” she finally said. Sales often start this way. People think the cape is too dangerous. They come when the illusion of a safe and continuing life is finally taken away.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and helped her to a chair.

“Can I sign up and go right now?”

“Of course,” I said. Her eyes were cloudy, so I just asked the questions and wrote in the answers myself — a formality with customers like this one. “What makes you want to go to the cape?”

“Pretty soon I’ll be dead. It’s something to see.”

“You are aware of the distortions in time and space?”

“That I’ll be gone a second here, but there it’ll feel like eternity? Yeah. That’s what I’m looking for. I get your angle, it’s a good one, but I’m not religious. This is the only eternity I expect to see.”

I helped her put her clothes and belongings in a locker, and walked her down the chute, the hallway that narrows into the field. Arm-in-arm we stepped to the sound of the machine, a mad whirring that gets into your skull and shakes your brain. I felt like a child giving away his grandmother-bride.

Halfway there, she balked. “It’s safe, right?”

“Yes. There is a 99% chance you will immediately reappear.”

“What happens to the 1% who don’t?”

“Most reemerge an hour or a day or two later. Once a man traveled 60 years back in time, but that only happened once. The rest, well, people who’ve been say they probably like it so much they don’t want to leave.”

“They choose eternity, huh?”

“Everyone comes back pleased.” A lie. But it is necessary, sometimes.

“I know, I know, you don’t got all day.” She tried to sound angry, but it came out sad. I was just another jerk with a job to do, shuffling her along.

Towards the end of the chute the ceiling lowers and the floor rises and the walls crowd in. “You just take those last few steps into the energy field,” I said, and I helped her out of her robe. She stood nude as the day she was born, but she didn’t care. She was ignoring me now, walking towards eternity. I turned away. I don’t like to watch. Without so much as a sound or a flicker of light she was back, and I turned to help her into the robe again.

Her face was scrunched like a newborn child’s but then she focused on me, and pointed a shaking finger: “You. You’re still here.”

“On this side, you were only gone a moment.”

“A moment. Ha!” She laughed loud and long through her shivers as I wrapped her. “I was there for ever.” She enunciated the word to make me understand.

I nodded. “Yes ma’am.”

“No, I mean, for ever. Always. From the beginning to the end of time. Now I’m just once. So solitary. I had some kind of cancer right?”

“Pancreatic. Let’s get your clothes, and I’ll brief you.”

“Yes. Let’s do that. Now. Ha! It’s amazing how things happen one after the other, so orderly. Hardly seems necessary…” We went over her forms. She relearned where she lived and how to find her doctors, but she said she wouldn’t bother with the doctors. She had people to say goodbye to.

“You know,” she said, as I walked her to the door, “there’s someone there just like you. But he’s not you.”

“I know,” I said.

“It’s too bad.”

“I know,” I said.

“You’re a good kid,” she said, and she patted my cheek and left to die.

* * *

I am an old man on the Cape of Flowers. I step naked over the hot sands, wondering at my hairless body so light it seems to hover. There are no mirrors on the cape, but the sand blowing in the air is reflective, and I raise my arms to the light and squint my eyes and see a clean and glassy version of myself, round-faced with black dots for eyes, gray and small and innocent, featureless as a child.

I sit within the endless day of the timeless cape, unamused by this world without hunger or pain or anything worthwhile. I think about leaving and right away see the saltstone archway under which passes a slow stream of light, rippling like water. I march forward, planning to barrel through and complain, and there stands Alyssa. She appears to me a woman of about forty, much older than the bitter Thursday girl who came complaining of her break up. At the cape this older Alyssa is naked and translucent, and blue snakes seem to shimmer beneath the surface of her skin.

There on the cape, I forever think: she is so lovely! There, forever, I wonder: she seems so sad! There, forever, I am puzzled: why is she laughing? And there I shake from her laughter, each sound a wave of pleasure pushing through my body. And I watch her lift her knees from the ground and turn her body upside down and she dances on the currents of sand that blow in the air above us. She raises her hand and the rays of the sun divide into colors. She showers me in green light, and I feel love and happiness for the first time in my life.

I have known this story since I was ten years old.

There, forever, on the Cape of Flowers, I say, “I’m Marco.”

There, forever, she says, “I’m Alyssa.” And when she says “Alyssa,” the word crawls into my ear and builds a nest in my brain made of memories of Alyssa, who I had never known but now know fully, the truest person in the universe, more complete to me than me.

* * *

I was ten when they told me about him, the other Marco Cruz. My father spent months preparing me, making me watch science specials about particle physics and the fifth dimension and time travel. He kept suggesting to me that, “this means the same person could exist twice at the same time! You could run into yourself! Imagine that!” And I’d smile and nod and wonder why he was so hung up on this subject, but I wasn’t going to say anything: he’d broken up with the girlfriend who wouldn’t let me eat sugar or watch grown up TV, who took up all of his time and made him grumpy, and now he was mine. And even if he did spend too much of our time together talking about physics, it seemed like a great deal.

Then one day he sat me down. “You know how we’ve been talking a lot about physics and time travel and all that? Well, Marco, in the future, when you’re an old man, about grandpa’s age, you’re going to take a vacation in the fifth dimension—you know the company: Accelerations!”

I nodded. I’d seen their ads. It seemed like very boring adult stuff to me then.

“Well, every once in a while a person leaves our dimension at one point and re-enters at another. That’s what you’re going to do.”

I remember saying “Okay,” and thinking that I was hungry and wondering what it would feel like to catch your hand in a cartoon mousetrap.

“So the thing is, Marco, you’re here, and the future you is here too, in New York, and we’re going to go visit him, because he’s very old, and he’s dying, and he wants to talk to you.”

“Okay,” I said. I remember the sinking feeling beginning then, a vague unsettled sensation in my stomach as my father smiled and petted my head and went to call someone and tell them it went okay. But it didn’t fully develop until that night, when I was in bed, thinking and thinking, my head spinning, my mind slowly realizing that my dad had said that I was dying! In New York! and that my future self, the me that was dying, wanted to talk to me! What for? And why is he dying? Why am I dying! I got out of bed and wandered around the house in a manic haze, not quite panicking, but unable to stop moving or thinking faster than I could understand. I went from room to room, feeling everywhere like I didn’t belong. Strange objects, like signs too terrible to read, threatened me from every shadow and every glint of light. My heart was pounding, but I didn’t run. My ears were screaming, but I didn’t say a word. The house spun. My father found me in the morning lying on the kitchen floor, where I’d collapsed from the horror of not just my own imminent death—though that was part of it—but from the horror of time itself.

Whatever life I would have lived, it ended there, that night. And this life began.

* * *

Alyssa signed the papers and watched me. “I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me,” she said.

“Me? No,” I said. But for eternity on the Cape of Flowers Alyssa’s thoughts and mine have been, are, and will be, one. In just moments she would step through and reappear having known me, completely, intimately, for eternity. It was difficult to meet her gaze.

“No? There isn’t some fine-print clause that’s going to screw me over, or something? That’s the way these things usually work, right…?” She glanced at her phone. “Sorry, I guess I’m just used to dealing with jerks.”

“There are some jerky people.”

“It’s humanity’s defining characteristic. Tell the truth, I’m doing this because this is, I figure, the farthest I can possibly get from my fellow man.”

“You won’t be disappointed,” I told her.

“How can you be so sure?” she said, then tapped something into her phone.

Her face was closed to me, her eyes two tiny shut doors. I wanted to open them, just for a peek, and so I lied: “I’ve been there.”

“Oh, of course.” She pushed the phone back down. “So tell me—what was your name?”

“Marco.”

“So tell me, Marco, if it’s so great, why did you come back?”

* * *

Alyssa leaves me on the Cape of Flowers. She leaves me to return to the linear world. I color the sea black with the ink of my grief. I make the air soup. Hot rain falls upon us and through us. Forever on the Cape of Flowers I beg her to stay.

“We’ll always have this,” she says. “Everything we do here exists always.”

“Not if you leave,” I say, hideous with need. “You have to stay.”

“You’re so young, Marco,” she says. Her face glows electric pink, her hair hovers around her head in perfect blue spirals.

I tell her, “I’m sixty-seven!” and she laughs. “I was sixty-seven when I came here. Old and failing and nothing to lose, that’s why I’m here.”

She takes my hand, which is hard and seized as a claw, but when a woman holds your hand on the Cape of Flowers, she is both upon your skin and within you. It is ecstatic. “Marco, you don’t remember me, but I was a girl you led through the door to the cape many years ago.”

I will remember her saying this, but I am profoundly confused.

“I’m going to return to you in the world of time, and we will be together there, and you will not become the creature you are today. We’ll make a life in a place with beginnings and endings, where things matter.”

“Things matter here!” my words blow the ragged grass to its knees, knock birds screaming with biting parasites from their perches. The sea boils. I see a shadow spread across the sand like oil: insects climbing over one another in a swarm. Alyssa moves towards them, is hidden within them, is gone.

* * *

When Alyssa leaves me on the cape, I am a sickened shell of a man. The cape is windchapped raw and barren, and so am I. I tear at the flowers, growl at the birds. I wade out beyond the breakers and swim as far as I can, just to endure the punishment of sea creatures, to feel myself drown again and again, to release my will to the current and let it carry me back to shore.

I still feel her presence, I even feel other versions of me, versions that are still and always with her. They are oblivious and happy. I can almost hear them laughing. I can almost see them move. I have nothing but contempt for them. I do not want them. They do not want me.

To them I am a jagged rock on the shore of paradise one needs merely to step over and past to continue reveling in glorious eternity. The happier ones know that there is also this me full of agony, but they are willfully blind. I am nothing to him, who is happy.

I can endure no more. I enter the swarm. I am standing on the threshold of the long-forgotten departure gate.

Some nights I re-watch the video.

The old man Marco Cruz emerges from nothing and sits on the floor. He’s alone for less than a minute before a young-looking Gary walks into the frame. “Hello,” Gary says, as he removes his own cardigan. “I’m afraid I don’t remember you.” He wraps the naked old man in his sweater.

The old man’s body is shriveled and ravaged by hunger and gravity. He cringes within Gary’s sweater like it’s made of sandpaper. “Do you want to go back in? There’s a good chance you’ll end up at the right time, if you go back in,” Gary says. But the old man will not hear it. He shakes his head and is already standing, walking. Gary leads him to a recovery room, where it’s dark and cool and quiet. As soon as he’s alone, old Marco stands up and turns on the light. He stands in front of the full-length mirror, naked except for Gary’s unbuttoned cardigan falling by his sides. He’s thinking: look at me. Old and hideous. Sixty-seven and riddled with illness. Just as I’d left. Gary comes back with a tall glass of cold water and a plate with crackers and grapes. He asks the old man if there is anything else he can bring.

“I want to know the date.”

When he hears, he stares long into space, then says, “my father is still alive.”

“Is today’s date earlier than you departed?” Gary says.

The old man nods slowly as he drinks. Then he starts eating: grape, cracker, grape, cracker.

“This does happen sometimes,” Gary says. “There’s a very good chance that if you go back in and out again, you’ll get to the right time.”

But then the old man remembered what Alyssa said before she left: “I was a girl you led through the door to the cape when you were a young man.” Such a strange thing to say, since he had never even seen the door to the cape until the day he’d walked through it.

“No thank you,” he tells Gary. “I like it here. Thank you.”

“You’re sure?”

“Very sure yes. Just one more thing though…”

“Yes?”

“Are you hiring?”

* * *

I helped Alyssa prepare for her trip: gave her a locker to keep her things, then escorted her down the chute. She had all the normal questions, and I had all the normal answers: “How long will I be gone?” she asked.

“On this end, you’ll be gone for just a second” I said. But this is a lie: there is no second. They re-emerge as they go, as though their faces pass through their brains and rise from the backs of their heads. It is a profoundly disturbing thing to view.

She asked: “Is there anything I should bring?”

“It is part of the nature of the Cape of Flowers that you will not need or want,” I said. But even if it weren’t, you couldn’t bring anything. The field repels inorganic matter, drops it dead to the floor.

“What if something goes wrong and I need help?”

“It is part of the nature of the Cape of Flowers that you cannot be in danger.” On the cape we do not live, we exist, for all time and everywhere. Everything you do is another physical aspect of you, a bud in the endless blooming of decisions. You are whole, entire. There is no danger. There is no death.

“You mean, if I never come back I can never die?”

“That’s right.”

“Why does anyone come back at all?”

“Some miss their families, their friends,” I said, “some say they miss the order of time.” But I thought: you will leave to be with me, and you will break the old man’s heart. I tried to smile. We were nearing the door now.

She watched that buzzing empty space for moment. “I guess that’s what I need: something to make me not hate life anymore.” She dropped her robe, and I did not look away.

And she stepped through.

And she was gone.

* * *

I’d worked for Accelerations! for a month when I received my first time-traveler. We treat them gently as possible, then suggest they return to the cape, then contact Dr. Larsen—in that order. It’s good to collect some data, but Larsen says he’d rather send them home happy and lose the data. We’re selling vacations, not running an experiment.

The sensor at the end of the hallway went off: an unscheduled arrival. It was my turn, so I went to meet him. The time-traveler’s face was contorted by the shocks and pains, the routine discomforts of corporeal life which he, having been free of them for eternity, was no longer used to. Almost everyone returns with the same shocked expression. The only thing unusual was that I hadn’t led him down the chute a moment before.

And so I said to him, “I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’ve met.”

And he said, “where’s Lexi?”

And I said, “I don’t know, but perhaps if you return to the cape you’ll find her there.”

“She left,” he said, his body shaking. “She went back through the door.”

“They’ll tell her the same thing: to go back in and she’ll find you.”

He nodded, though it was hard to tell, because he was shaking and his head and neck were clenched to his body. I turned him around and he took a few shuffling steps and was gone.

“Try to remember to ask their names,” Gary told me after. “You got lucky he mentioned a Lexi. We’ve only got a few Lexis on file and only one that went with her husband—his name was Brayden Howe.”

I looked onto his computer screen: Lexi and Brayden Howe, great-grandparents who’d had a normal trip three years ago. Ross walked them in and they walked right back out, tired, achy, overwhelmed, and pleased. Neither of them mentioned a problem. They only said they wanted to head right off and see their family, according to Ross. We didn’t have a record of Lexi emerging without Brayden, but it will happen eventually, and we will tell her to go back in to find her husband, and she will, we know, because she did.

* * *

So I’d received a time-traveler, but no one before Alyssa had disappeared on me. These things do not feel the same. Catching a time-traveler and sending him back feels like getting the train back on the rails. Losing someone feels like you might have accidentally driven it into a mountain. In two years at Accelerations! I’d received one wayward time traveler and sent hundreds on happy, uneventful trips beyond the limits of ordinary space-time. But never had I seen someone walk through that gate and disappear.

And it was Alyssa: if there was anyone I was sure would see reverse and re-emerge through the back of her own body it was Alyssa. And I was ready to tell her, with the passion that had been building since I was ten years old: “never leave me again!” I was ready to hold her in this world of time and consequence and make her love me.

But she escaped me, just as she’d escaped the old Marco before me: somewhere in ordinary space-time, Alyssa is always re-emerging, always being told what date, what year, when? Always someone (me? Gary? Ross? or are we all dead by then?) is telling her the news. Always she decides to renege on her promise to return to this time and love me. Always she decides not to re-enter the accelerator. Always she decides to stay where she is. I know this, now I know.

I stepped away from the threshold and called to Gary through the com: “Gary, she didn’t come back.” My voice was weak, my throat dry and hoarse from the shock.

“Okay,” he replied. “It isn’t your fault. Come back to the office and I’ll show you how to make the report.”

The hall stretched long before me. My legs were leaking sacks of sand. I remembered visiting my older self in New York at the age of ten, how the hospital walls closed in, how every time someone spoke, their words sounded warped and rearranged. I turned into the doorway and found myself in a room too brightly lighted, too white, a room of glare and too many people talking. An old, shriveled hand reached out to me, a skeleton’s hand covered in a floppy glove of wrinkled human leather. “I’m you,” the old man said, and I took his hand without thinking.

“I’ve been writing for you,” he said. “Everything that happened, everything I felt. I want you to read it, and remember.” He pulled me closer and I tried to pull away, but even a weak and dying old man was stronger than my fear-shaken little body. “Remember, she’s come back to change things, change your life. Let her. Let her come back to you, and don’t ever become the person I was, the one who goes in there, me. I lived your life once. That means you don’t have to.” He slipped a small portable drive into my hand and squeezed my fingers around it.

After that he faded quickly. Dr. Larsen said he’d been resting and waiting, saving his strength to speak to me. He fell asleep, and my father led me away. Days later Dad sat me down and told me the old man was dead.

* * *

I stood and watched the void in the world where Thursday had slipped out. Alyssa, my destiny. So pretty and so ordinary.

On the cape, I thought, she becomes something different, something rare and perfect. It’s that woman I want: the Alyssa who returns, not the Alyssa who departs.

I will her to return. I imagine her returning. But the doorway stands empty. When Gary says, “Marco?” over the com, I realize what I’m about to do.

I want the Alyssa who wants me, who chooses me over him. Knowing that, how could I face him?

But I must face him. Because she is there. She is also out here, somewhere in time, betraying me. But before that one betrayal, she is forever choosing to love me. I have lived since I was ten years old to find her. I would rather die, I would rather face the other me, than give her up.

I step closer, and gate looks different, distorted, like the air is reaching forward to touch me. Never before have I really heard the sound the accelerator makes: it’s not just whirring, it’s cracking and snapping so frequently the sound blurs, but now I hear every pop and every silence between. The line between me and the me I will be when I return becomes very false and forced, and with a thought I am him, and with a thought I am not, and with a thought I am both of us at once.

And the old man Marco exists in me as he never has before. And I notice with great detachment and just a little amusement that I am angry with him for still existing.

Is this what they see, all of them, as they walk towards the door? Is this why they all become so quiet? Do they feel, as I do—with the combined desire of the multitudes I am—the inescapable draw of the world beyond the door?

And before I am even there, I know her: the Alyssa of the Cape of Flowers. Not the Alyssa who departs, not the one who returns, but the Alyssa who is there, the perfect Platonic Alyssa, the form of whom all other Alyssas are mere shadows. She is gallows humor, needful wonder, sorrowful delight. She is the glowing green tones of sunset, a soft song sung in D sharp major, a honeybee lost down your throat, every day of the week.

I pass through the doorway. I am mostly space, permeable to light and matter: matter is on me and within me, I am everywhere and nowhere, undefined by a sure limit, and I push forward. In my highest reasoning centers I know, because I have studied the equations, built the models, that as I step forward I am passing simultaneously back into normal space-time where everything is linear and measured and discrete, but it doesn’t matter, because I’ll arrive when I choose to, because a second and a century are just things that I can opt to think of or not, treats I may sample if I choose.

And now the Cape of Flowers is all around me. I hear the surf and the sound of light bouncing off the waves, a high song like crystal shattering into clouds of gas. This world is writhing with screeching birds, biting pests, octopi pulling themselves apart limb by limb, howling fish who make the sound of sharpening knives when they slash their teeth.

It is just as the old Marco described. What feels like wind runs with molecules forming and unforming and combining and reforming. I touch them and change them. The endless sea that surrounds us is made of ideas slowed to sound. I touch it with my toe, it is cold and I can taste its thoughts running through my body.

I think of Alyssa and we are together, we are the heart of a shifting machine of sand stretching into glass and sifting back to sand again. She is older here, but more beautiful. She is unique in the universe, and she is the universe and so am I.

“Where is he?” I ask her.

She shakes her head. “You’ve always known, but you didn’t want to believe.”

“He’s here, he has to always be here,” I say.

“He’s here,” she says. “They’re all here.” And she points to the shore where the wretched creatures scuttle back and forth, snapping their claws at the surf. And the screams of birds are human complaints. And the gnashing of sea creatures are rush hour shouts. I recognize my customers: the old woman with pancreatic cancer is a blind eel twisting to bite off strips of her own slimy skin; two birds tearing out each other’s feathers are Brayden and Lexi Howe. And there among the crabs, moving blindly over his brothers as though they were rocks in his way, there is a sad gray crab that, there is no doubt at all, is me. At the motion of Alyssa’s hand, it falls over in ecstasy.

“He saved you,” she says. “He got to you young enough, with his stories. But no one can save him. He will always be that.”

I watch the births and deaths of galaxies, and say, “I could crush him.”

“He doesn’t even know you’re here.”

There beyond time on the Cape of Flowers, siblings and spouses and parents of Earth crawl through a boiling sea of bile, biting and fighting and protecting small lumps of tar, their only love and treasure.

Alyssa and I are in the world now. I have seen the video: Alyssa disappears. I stand there a moment. I call Gary on the com. I stand a moment longer. And then I step forward. My clothes fall to the floor as my body passes through itself, and Alyssa emerges beside me, her hand in my hand. In the video, I look like a hero. I look like I’ve saved her from a fire.

In those first heady days I quit Accelerations! and she and I set out to see the world. We traveled two time zones before we stopped: we couldn’t remember why we were tiring ourselves. We decided to make the best we could of one small snowy square of the material world. I envy those who go to the cape just before death. After the cape, life is small and hungry.

And now I wake and walk and sleep knowing they are there, forever there upon the sand. The little crab chasing and snapping. Alyssa petting it, promising her leaving will save it, another part of it, someday—but it doesn’t understand. It is hissing and striking the sand with its claws. All is pain and abandonment. It doesn’t know about me, or care. Forever they are there, blue Alyssa and the sad gray crab, gesturing through that chaos of sand, more real than this snowy square, more real than me.

What Hangs Up, Must Come Down

Samantha LaBue — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:00:48 +0000

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Peter orders his eggs over hard so he can assure himself the pleasure of clean cuts and small bites that never endanger his shirts or hands of a yellow yolky smear. When he orders them, he is fully aware that some people think that he might be crazy, but Peter knows otherwise. Psychological disturbance may very well come from the human tolerance level and the fact that deep down, at some point, we’ve all had enough of this silly planet. But Peter is not fed up. There is no psychosis behind his solid yolk, his need for perfection. He has been categorized as obsessive compulsive, but he is simply in love. With his love may come a certain obsession, but first and foremost he is comfortably infatuated with what hangs waiting at his home.

When he gets to his house from the tidy café around the corner, he is presentable as ever for the objects of his affection, and when the door opens they surround him. Frames. From the baseboards to the crown molding and beyond to the ceilings, hung in closets, spilling into bathrooms and stairwells, the frames, empty frames, hang everywhere. Not a single Indian church, or painted feather lie within their borders. Some of them are worth three times as much as any painting that will ever occupy them, and to Peter, each has a purpose to fulfill. He is a connoisseur, a caretaker. He is a private frame collector.

From all over the continent museums reach his phone, mounted on the wall aside a small mahogany that only a Tom Thomson may fit, searching for the frame they need for their exhibit.

Peter’s frames are in mass quantity. He collects them, he restores them, and then he lets them free. 1532 Frames.

Without them a piece is like some sort of generic dream; with the wrong one it is a mishap turned to disillusionment. A rustic landscape might pair with an antiqued oak hanging in the basement closet, or a Renaissance portrait might belong with the oversized gilded currently covering the ceiling of the master bathroom. From simulacrum to statement, Peter holds the missing link and an eye to sort out a match.

He dusts them daily with precision, dreaming of a glacial Harris to fit into its borders or a certain melancholy woman to live inside. It was that kind of care that turned Peter’s classified obsession into love. Dust. Polish. Dust. Step back. Polish. The tedious tango of pure enchantment and care.

It is a process, as is Peter’s life. His compatibility with the frames stems from their ability to separate reality from imagination, something Peter himself is capable of. Without borders art is mere silliness attached to a corporeal wall. In a bordered world, events can be predicted. Sitting amidst his empty, eager frames Peter checks the forecast (a wooden frame is most comfortable at 20% humidity), takes his multivitamin, and clips his toenails every night before sleeping, then rotates which individual frame he will check over once more. On one particular night, the rotation fell on a 19^th century cherry wood painted with a thin, gold outline by his bed.

While clipping his toenails, however, he thought he could feel the floor jolt. His right hand slipped and snipped into the skin on his right toe. Peter watched a tiny drip of blood rise and fill the little snip, and again, the floor jerked and the drip slipped down his toe.

Peter could hear his house rattle with the vibration through his feet. The frames shook with symphonic vigor. He ran to his bedroom to check on his cherry, bedside frame. He ignored the earth’s shaking. He hadn’t planned for this. The cherry frame shook and jumped against the wall, growing with intensity. The frames jumped together, crashing loud against the wall. Peter stared at the cherry frame until a crack crawled down the center and it broke, at first into halves, which quickly fell to the ground smashing into tiny pieces.

Peter ran at the sight of it, ran for a shelter. His house rained frames from the ceiling and the walls. Each one falling around Peter, splintering off pieces, flying into companion frames, cracking slowly and then all at once. He took cover under a doorframe, the only frame left standing. The orchestra of lightly rattled frames, now a cacophony of mixed up wood and precious detailing.

When they’d all fallen they danced and rattled on the floor, a sea of woody, rolling waves. Peter’s eyes moved up and down with the shaking, his heart shuddered with the sound. When the frames stopped, so did his eyes, so did his legs. He slid down the doorframe and woke in the morning broken like his pride, his love.

Peter lay there poking pieces, shifting around the dust. The other houses hadn’t been such a disaster, they’re frames were filled, and didn’t bounce so freely off the wall. Peter, there on the ground, was the only thing to ever lie within the frames. He had no reason to believe he was reality now, lying where the illusion lives. His borders mixing the world and the unworldly, not gating them.

The Tragedy of Tragic Men

Tania Hershman — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:58:07 +0000

This is the time of the tragic man, not the drifting cloud. This is the time for all tragic men to come to our aid and for drifting clouds to just move on, move on. They stood in a line to shake his hand, the first and most successful tragic man. But when they came to him, when they stretched out, only air was left within their arms. What a tragic man he is! they said and were satisfied that he was the correct one. The line moved on and on and only one person left morose and ugly. I wish I was tragic too, thought this person, but she was not. Not enough. In a dim age of water she would have floated and that doesn’t make for tragedy.

We saw her pass and we got a suitcase and some smaller bags and followed her, the almost-tragic woman, and she noticed that we were there. What? she said and she was angry and we stood in line to shake her hand. What? she said and took our hands and held them and her hands were so soft as if she had no roots beneath the oil paint, she was just puff and cloud. What, she said again and this time she allowed for us to come. And inside we sat and thought about the tragedy of tragic men.

Speak

Tawnysha Greene — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:55:05 +0000

After we go to the doctor, Momma waits until Daddy comes home to tell him that my sister is deaf. We watch The Little Mermaid in the den while she and Daddy talk at the kitchen table, hunched over a hearing test marked with Xs and Os, lines connecting them low across the bottom of the page. She can still be normal, says Momma, knowing my sister can’t hear, forgetting I can.

On Wednesdays while Daddy’s at work, I go with my sister to classes in a big room with plastic orange and yellow playgrounds inside. Long smooth tables by the walls with little blue chairs. A poster by the front door, stars by all our names. Learn to follow the leader, write letters on a chalkboard, call each other friends—a word we make with our hands coming together, our forefingers interlocked. Daddy comes once, but when he sees our friends, he leaves, waits for us in the car, then when Momma drives us home, runs his hand through his hair the way he does when they talk about bills, saying, disabled, retarded, stupid.

Momma gets us books with stiff pages, pictures of hands above each word, lines around the fingers to show that they are moving. My sister’s favorite is the one about animals and she signs the words each night before bed as Momma turns the pages for her. She screams at the spider page, hands over her face, then over one another, moving her fingers, making them crawl. At night, sometimes, she signs the words in her sleep, her fingers stirring, touching her face.

In the mornings, we play in our room, pull out a box with our dolls, Momma’s fancy dresses, the ones she cut short, so that we can wear them. My sister finds a daddy long-leg hanging in the corner, crawling up the wall and she runs to the kitchen where Daddy’s mopping the floor. She pulls at the mop, at his arms, signing the word for spider, pointing, signing again until he slaps her hands away, saying, No, speak—speak from your mouth. Speak like I do.

Five an Hour

Devan Goldstein — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:52:11 +0000

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My first day on the butterscotch line, they tell me I can eat five chews an hour.

Frank says, “That’s more than on the taffy line.” Frank works across from me. He and I box the butterscotches, fifty a box.

“If they’re so worried about money,” I ask, “why do they let us eat the candy at all?”

Frank throws ten or fifteen pieces into a box. Then, he asks me if I know Kevin Mercer.

“No.”

“Kevin worked here for three months. Left a year ago, I guess, and opened up the hot dog stand outside. Know why he quit?”

“No.”

“Never ate the candy. Without the candy, this job sucks.”

I wonder how much worse this job could be than the one he has now. “I guess he eats the hot dogs,” I say.

My second week on the job, I start to make rules to pace myself. I’ve been throwing two or three butterscotches into my mouth at the top of each hour, and the long stretches after my rations run out have been murder. As the candy goes by on the line, it talks to every part of you: your hands, your nose, your soul.

The first rule I make is, one piece at a time. Last Friday, I told Frank I’ve got a big mouth, and he said, “If a whale worked the line, he’d get five an hour just like you. You think he’d bitch about his big mouth?”

I didn’t know if whales bitched, I told him, but did he have to be so rude?

The second rule is, stick to some kind of schedule. At first, I think I should have one butterscotch every twelve minutes. But then I think of Swagger, and how slow the strippers there unwrap themselves, the good ones, anyway, and make you wait for it. So maybe I’ll have one piece at the one-minute mark, then wait for at the half-hour, then one every ten minutes for the rest of the hour.

I ask Frank which system he thinks will work better.

“I just eat them when I eat them,” Frank says. “But everybody’s different.”

“You must have seen guys try different ways, though. Who’s worked here the longest?”

Frank looks at me like I just dumped his box of butterscotches onto the floor, and then says, “I have.”

By the end of my third week, I have tried five different schedules, and even messed around with eating two pieces at a time again. But the problem isn’t the schedule. It’s the candies. Too many of them go by. It just makes you want endless chewy butterscotch.

On a break, I tell these things to Marcus, the floor manager. Then I ask him: What if somebody sent the butterscotch rations down the caramel line, instead, and the taffy down the butterscotch line, and the caramel down the taffy line? That way, we’d all get excited when the candies we could eat came by, but we wouldn’t care about the ones we were cutting or wrapping or boxing. We could store up candies, too, like a bank account.

“A bank account,” Marcus says. Then he tells me to go get a hot dog.

“I hate hot dogs,” I say.

“Then just eat the bun,” he says, and I do, wishing he’d listen to my idea like I listened to his.

Over the next few days, I bring in different things to chew on in between pieces of candy. I like the springiness of balloons, but Frank complains about how loud they squeak between my teeth. A piece of my old brown belt makes less noise, but the leather makes my tongue sting by lunchtime. Silly Putty disintegrates in ten minutes, and I pick it out from the spaces around my teeth for the rest of the day. I probably swallow half of it down with my butterscotch rations.

And anyway, nothing replaces the candy, nothing makes me want it less, not even for the ten minutes between late-in-the-hour butterscotches.

Frank and I hardly talk anymore, but one day I ask him, “You ever try quitting the candy?”

He says, “This job sucks without the candy. Only reason to quit the candy is to quit the job.”

I know he’s right. You can’t quit the candy.

Soon, start to think about the candy in a different way. I imagine naked fat women swimming through grain silos full of butterscotches. I think of my grandfather’s anal medicine, and I wonder if stuffing butterscotches up my ass would keep me from wanting them so bad, or if they have to hit your taste buds to work.

Then, I have an idea: I could easily fill two boxes at a time, one box with my left hand, and one with my right, switching every so often to make up for the difference in speed between my two hands. If I can fill two boxes, I should get double rations.

The next morning, I wait in the parking lot to tell Frank my idea.

When he opens his car door, I say, “I could fill two boxes at a time, and get double rations.”

Frank looks at me the way Marcus did when he told me to eat a hot dog bun. Then he starts to walk away.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“Inside,” he says. “so I can do my job and then go back home.”

I walk after him, and put my hand on his shoulder. “Frank, wait.”

As he brushes my hand away, I notice how bony his shoulder feels, like I could crumble it in my hand. And if I did, he couldn’t work the butterscotch line anymore. Marcus would have no choice but to ask me to fill two boxes at a time.

Then I grab the collar of his jacket and pull it hard. Frank falls onto the pavement. He looks up at me, and where his eyes usually are I see two unwrapped butterscotches. As I reach for the one on the right, I think, if he has one butterscotch in each eye, his head must be full of them.

Hikikomori Romance

Reed Gaines — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:19:10 +0000

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“The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as people who refuse to leave their house, and isolate themselves from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months.” -Wikipedia

I- SEDUCTION

The girl, animated, big eyes on TV late-nightly, the one you took for wife even though she couldn’t consent or consummate. In this scene, she is at the shopping center with her friends. Everything is pastel as usual. She sees her boy by the abercrombie or foreign equivalent. Him just vague enough to be you; she scripted to stop and ogle across the complex. Pause playback and stare. After too much 3D hardcore, all you want is 2D cute. You get erect for her sake. First time hard, guilty for broken innocence, hers and yours. But she seemed unchanged, so you continued. It’s fake. Romance with training wheels. Still, you trick yourself. You and she are very long distance. She stares at you and you see her smile and get screens sticky. It used to come out like that.

II- MATURE ROMANCE

You sip beer and grow fat and she remains just the same. Her voice, too high. She looks at an angle, off-screen. What is she hiding? Is she cheating? You are. You sometimes fuck, but not like before: Lie back and leak and don’t clean up and avoid eye contact. She always does the same things, over and over. Mall, friends, boy, school, work, clean, nod-off early, wake, rinse, repeat. So responsible. You can’t blame her, but no new seasons leaves love stale. You have changed channels and she has stayed the same. Tune-out in your too-small loft and find another lover.

Three Poems

Eduardo Gabrieloff — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:12:29 +0000

Cotopaxi

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-After Frederic Edwin Church

I ask the campesino where he got his hat.
I have trouble understanding his response
as he rushes past pauses and breathes between
his words, chest heaving, his accent slanted north.

I do understand that he is confused,
is trying to find his way back to Sonora.
He doesn’t remember when he and his
burros arrived, how they came.

Senor, mire las palmas, look at the waterfall,
the way the jungle butts against the peaks
the way the leaves are withering,
birds shivering, trying to catch their breath.
And the volcán is bubbling, ready to chase
us out of the frame. He has put us here
to see how we die. We are lucky
he didn’t paint a tiger or a grizzly.
And that woman behind us? She could be
a filibuster, waiting in ambush, shackles and rifle.
We’d know where we were then.

Cotopaxi 1855

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-After Frederic Edwin Church

A Mexican and a volcano walk into a bar.
Or, maybe it was a gringo. Maybe
it was a train of donkeys
and a waterfall.
Maybe it was some palm trees
in the mountains, along
with an entire jungle,
swallowing the tall grass
before dying off.
Bartender says
kiss me, I’m German.
Or was it Scottish?

A gringo and a palm tree walk into a valley.
They each order a city,
but the bartender is all out
of Latacunga, so the gringo says
he’ll take Puebla.
Bartender says kiss me,
or at least ask for something
we have in the back.

Ecuador and Von Humboldt
walk into Nashville,
ask Andrew Jackson for a beer.
He dons his Mason robes
and they all show their rings,
perform some Masonic signals.
They spill some oil,
accidently make love.
Jackson wakes up
with a chip on his shoulder.

Simon Bolivar and William Walker
walk into a continent,
ask if the fights are on.
Oh, and it’s Friday night.
The bartender doesn’t want
to change from the World Cup,
says to go back where they came from.
They flee to Saint Helena
to plan their comeback.

Il Duce Listening to the BeeGees

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-After Irenee Shaw’s Portrait of Eric Williams

He’s got that Mussolini smirk:
sunglasses that sway cool,
that earpiece whispering every threat,
one hand in his coat pocket,
other on the banister
that is the butt of a rifle,
a strut like a Greenwich Village sidewalk,
like it’s not even hot out,
calm like he has to be calm,
like if the crowd saw him
fidget or hesitate even a little,
that body guard would be
pushing his boss on the floor
to take the bullets.

The crowd is hard to read.
Blank faces behind a police line.
I think I see myself back there,
under the flag, bored.
It looks like I’m unimpressed,
as usual, happy to judge,
contemplating being that hand,
inside a light circle
on a darkened photo,
the cadaver dragged through Bogota.

My motive would die with me,
but it would be suggested
I was a collaborator.
I’d be the traitor who died
by the righteous hand of the people’s
mob, one of those moments where
it seems ok to give in
to that seethe and gnash.