Tag Archives: prose poem

Mark DeCarteret

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John Walker.Seal Point Series #VIII

The Year I Went Without Winning at Anything

—for John Walker

I started with the letter that I never sent. How it might tell one about the sea. And the ease in which I steered through it to shore. Tried to put it all to rest. How from here on in, it will return to us not only in song. Churning up notes. That go back far as stones. But in the way that the boats sway in time. Keeping beat against their algae-d slips. Their oars sworn to a now unheard-of silence. As a gull laughs off a near fall. And then I tried settling into an inlet for a spell. Where at low tide another side of this world might be shown. Almost worshiped by sunlight. And its unceasing stare. Where I might be relocated for life. Shot off like a flare. And continue on as an afterthought. Opting out of these poetic doings. And thus, stop looking, so steely and tele-eyed, out past the sea. Where it straightens out its act and then esses, endlessly loops and then pools, spends the rest of eternity either too tired denying the moon’s influence or eddying. The colors slow-heated, steeping like tea, or cooled off and foolishly seen for themselves, charmed back to earth. Miracles are like this. Not worth the ink one tried thinking them less than true. Chances are you have found yourself in the same spot. Sitting atop a hill. A sound down below you. Unimaginatively still except for that gull, its near-falling. If not, I will send you a clip. Or better yet, see that I pencil you in.

The Year I Went Without the Sun Was From

the fire. Or so it was formulated. A monster sun though not big on details. Or getting it right. Not really into anyone’s suffering. Or even having some fun with them. I saw it first thing this morning. Right here where the surf is frustrating the sand. And a tiny bird’s landed. This wren or that. Seemingly new to the area. New to this mess we’ve recreated. With the eye of the same god. (Aren’t there are always some willing to be seen as blameless?) But still singing its way into my memory. How I’d fuss over it! Have a little fun. It was truly, truly frightening. How the sun was from the fire. How it gets like this. When it hasn’t been fed. Read to. These deafening winds. Storms in name only. Alabaster. And Betty Lou. Confused with the thing itself. Or the fleas that have taken us up as their own. Recasting us. Only to find ourselves signed in again. Aligned with the bored and the cross. Light is like this. Reformulated. Nothing but the details. So, let’s get this right. Life is suffering? Too monstrous to get in a word? Yes, you heard it here first. Early this afternoon. We’re so over the birds. And their tiny little songs. There’s more than enough room for no one. What fun. O what fun.

 

The Year We Went Without Frozen Particles Forming in our Mountains

Another easeful though sometimes nuclear proclamation is that of the pogonip or “dense winter fog”—that old standby métier of numbskulls and/or others like them, who’ve long been researching this sort of prefrontal thankfulness for those almost funereal directions we’ve been given to sample—the U standing for upbeat and the “Pneumatic 14” maybe attempting to re-define how for each U that you are thankful for, you picture the 14th upbeat following it in your diet, then repose that same U with its original. So that, in other words—“Mighty oaths from little acrimonies grow” becomes “My tie owes its lack of money to its many gurus” so that later the latter’s dewpoint is not only enveloping, but apparently medicinal, apparently unprofitable, along with others like them, seeming to echo the pogonip’s further researching of fronds and their charged opinions—a polemic that promises to be both pestilent and well worth excerpting.

The Year I Went Without Starring in My Own Life

—for Marguerite T. White

The word always was. Truth be told. That in a family of runts. And runt afficionados. I had the best smile. Which worked out well since I worked on a farm. Where the rest of the crew had but one tooth between them. Earlier on, I was reared by an astronaut. Which had lasted for hundreds of years. What with all the time changes. And after that, was pursued by a human in a turnip suit. Who wanted to include me in their supper plans. But I denied them. Ending any chance of dessert. Or a slow dance. Only to be left with this acre of well cared for seedlings made from felt. So lonely, I’d settled for the cranes all a-blush in the field. And what was far less this dance. Far more this commentary on flight. And the word often was. That of all the towns run by farmers. We either had us more stories to tell than the rest of the towns. Or more arms to deliver them. And that because of this. We would not only be shadowed by our own thoughts. But those of the owls. Our town fathers would lower down with wires. If the towns people got to being well-oiled enough. And how that would be followed by this untoward sun. Cut out from foil by the town mothers. Along with this fourth wall. Thrown together by the town children. And the word sometimes was. That in a city of rivers. We sold as canals to the runts. And as lakes to the farmers. We were not drawn to scale. Even though we had won us an award. For this drawing we’d done of me. Doing my best to smile. Play host to those ghosts who had outstayed our charades. That we’d working titled “The Lame Took to Walking While the Mail Took to Talking” but then switched to “The Turnip Returns Their Suit for a Pint of Ale and an Air Tank.” And the word never ever was. Unless we figure in our curiosity for the sea. And sea captains. And the ships that oft-punished them. Softened their fortitude. But then would raise them like light and as asterisks in the same breath. That the world was as flat. As any mention of death. And where I’d be welcomed back to the stage. As its sidekick, designated sickly presence. Stick-figuring in all of its grievances. Oh, how I had howled and sung. And fronted the band. Had even handled a joy buzzer. As well as a toy sword and gun. Even once, stunt doubling for my guest star’s one solo. Who, in fact, had never had her an acting class. But still went on to become. In a word. A bit of an ass.

The Year We Went Without Fables

We were shaking. Well before the black death. Well before there were babies conceived in the lab. We would carry this broken history on our backs. And the crowbars we’d need. To uncrate them. Let the sun read all kinds of things into them. We had aches where our chairs were. And chairs where our aches. We held our breath for weeks at a time. Then watched as it circled our heads. Thought of us only in terms of a funeral wreath. Or some crown. They’d have a child labor. To punch out of cardboard. And then have a teenager. Hand out free with our fries. We had cable. And nuclear blasts. Labels on our clothes. From countries we’d never heard. Or had ever showed interest. We were wearing out sacks. Well before the class action suits. And wore our shoes without socks. So far after Labor Day. The locals would bray at us. As if we had rabies. Or bared our asses to their ancestors. We were too ecstatic for our own good. Best, by now, at the art. Of chatting up strangers. And then forming stranger attachments. We would carry so much cash on us. Cross our foreheads so often with ash. What we had for faith ate at us. Had for hope developed sores. But to our credit, we shook. Well after it looked cool. Well after it was. Saw our likeness in each lens. Our finest traits in everyone we befriended. Even though we lacked words for everything. Thought the world of next to nothing. We loved hating it. Less it fit in a text. Outwaiting yet another thing. To blur into another. Be rubbed wrong. And then wronger. Growing so tired of dieting. Of the miracle food that might tide us all over. We would throw out our voices. For what little it was worth. And then would black out. In the back of a cab. Dribbling our ABCs on our bibs. Where they’ll eventually crab. Into yet another brand. To refreshen the void.

Mark DeCarteret was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. On “The Road Ride” at the Jack Kerouac Theme Park. And studied with Sam Cornish, Bill Knott, Tom Lux, Mekeel McBride, Charles Simic, and Franz Wright. (See: Representative at the Greater Boston Poetry Festival, Recipient of Thomas Williams Memorial Prize…) He’s worked a third of his life installing tile, a third teaching, and a third selling books. (Going on 13 years at Water Street in Exeter NH…) And has hosted and organized two reading series. Co-edited an anthology of NH poets. He was Poet Laureate of Portsmouth NH. Twice, a finalist for NH Poet Laureate. And his poems have appeared in over 500 magazines including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, BlazeVOX (which recently published the first chapter of his novel Off Season), Boston Review, Caliban, Chicago Review, Fence, Gargoyle, Hole in the Head, Map Literary, On the Seawall, Plume, and Nixes Mate (which recently published his seventh book of poetry, lesser case). As well as 30 anthologies. Among them, American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press). He performs with the Dadaist troupe Carteret Voltaire. And plays drums and sings with Codpiece. His latest book Props: Poetic Intros, Praises, Co-conspiraceis, Pairings was released last month by Bee Monk Press.

Howard Good

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Spooky Music

I feel the tingling in my chest that usually signals the onset of a panic attack, but instead, your nakedness spills like a crackle of lightning across the sheets, and I’m suddenly aware of the difference that makes and how without it social constructs would collapse and there would be shocking new twists to ancient myths, lifeguards drowning in kiddie pools, churches embracing sin and heresy, and the patron saint of shopping mall Santas, accompanied by spooky background music, sucking at Christ’s wounds, and first thing in the morning, too.

The Clock Strikes Thirteen

Fleeing for their lives, families brave oceans in paper boats, only to be turned back on reaching their destination. Caw-caw-caw, white crows cry, but less as frantic warning and more as bitter recrimination or desolate testimony. The living and the dead, the real and the imagined, the seen and the hidden, merge in a mirey mix at the behest of the home audience. Smoke from distant wildfires blots out the sky. None of those responsible will be held liable. The ancient Babylonian spirit that murders babies in the womb clings to the souls of mothers and speaks through their mouths.

Gosh

While seagulls swirl in the bright summer sky like silver foil confetti, I’m trapped under a boat dock. The water is up to my neck and rising. My dead cousin Rhonda miraculously appears. She looks down at me through the gaps between the wood planks. By now I’m struggling to keep my mouth out of the water, which reeks of gasoline and motor oil. “Why would you do this to us?” she scolds. I can hear people walking around above as if nothing terrible is happening. The worst atrocities aren’t on the news. I’m beginning finally to understand something about it.

Criminal History

The children in mandatory attendance have faces like wilted flowers. Poor humanity, always preparing for something that won’t ever happen or that already has. Investigators assigned to the case plant false evidence, intimidate witnesses, solicit bribes. Then one night the chalk outline of the body is mysteriously erased from the sidewalk. It doesn’t change the fact that every street is a crime scene, every person both a suspect and a victim. No one is perfectly innocent. My own heart rattles with bottled-up rage. Just before pronouncing sentence, the judge wipes his blubbery lips on the sleeve of his black robe.

Post-Op

I start hearing loud clanging and wake up in the hospital, where a face floating in and out of focus is saying, “You’re lucky to be alive.” “Oh?” I reply. I’m not there even though I am. Chimpanzees living in captivity will angrily throw their turds at their keepers. I just lie half-dazed under a thin blanket barely big enough to cover me. Beyond the curtain surrounding my bed, I can hear the visiting dead conferring. The ceiling when I glance up is swarming with their gray shadows. Yes, I fuzzily think to myself, I’m all but through. I can’t remember the life I had, only the one I should have.

Howie Good’s newest poetry collection, Frowny Face, a mix of his prose poems and collages, is now available from Redhawk Publications He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

Grace Smith

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Sadder and Deeper

I dropped off a lover at the sad train station. He got us coffee and I waited in the little street wishing it was full of morning people and would be full of night people but there were just two men by a doorway talking about war.

In the translation seminar people asked how to find a text. Translators told the stories of how they’d found their texts. I found a big white dog in the street. She was cheerful. We knocked on all the doors until somebody knew her house. When they opened the door, they said, Magic, I didn’t even know you were gone–

Outside the grocery store a woman recognized a man in the street. You work at the shelter, she said, you’re funny as shit. It was sunny. I want to be related.

On the bus a girl said to a boy, If my pussy stinks so bad then why is your friend in it all day long? A man yelled about language. A tiny lap-sized girl looked. The yelling man said, This man has a daughter! Later I tried to joke about it in the lawyer bar with the math teacher by titling it A Feminist Issue on Bus 28. I thought I might love the math teacher but I have whatever that sexuality is called where you fall in love from coming until you don’t. When the girl and her friends got down off the bus, she reminded us through dirty springtime windows, We are kids.

At a clinic the man waiting across from me said with a sheepish grandma-flirting smile, You don’t want what I’ve got. Maybe I do though, I think I was thinking. In my mind the chair beside him’s empty, but I know he was talking to someone he knew.

The city was taking people’s houses if they hadn’t gutted them by the date after the flood. One day the homeowner was with us volunteers, touching everyone with his bright attitude. Under the drywall we found plaster, old plaster on old wood laithes, and none of it looked moldy. The house had been in his family for generations. He said, this is beautiful. This must be hundreds of years old, even older than I ever knew, historic. Your beautiful house, we agreed, your beautiful laithes. In my mind I said, your beautiful eyes. They were gold like fall and trying. On the porch he kept trying. I’ll never see the street he saw. There were people there, he said. There were people. There.

She Says She’s Sure My Soul Mate’s Out There

I’m so happy. It’s Saturday night.
Drank a 5PM can in the shower.

By the lamp I’m back at it. Planning summer, new
lives. I turn off the radio coming from France.

In the glass museum I was wrong about the
blue arrival of winter nights. Factories

didn’t interpret these kitchen window skies, but
I left without a souvenir cup to compare. I’m 38.

It’s February. Is this attitude or feeling?
My mother, alive, picks up the phone.

Astrology for Small Potatoes

Some people have a rain cloud above their heads.
And that is why, french fry, their thoughts are frizzy.
The water goes down and floats back up.

Some people have a light bulb dinging just above,
rattling when it’s used up. They stop. They start.

Some people have a spotlight shining down upon
them, tater. That’s why they must keep dancing.
They must keep dancing.

Some people have a forest hovering above the
tops of them. Dirty roots drop worms on them,
and furry worm gobblers. These people are lost
underground, reformed hunters, never going back.

Some people have a bright pail of blood balanced on
the air above them, always about to topple. That is
why they laugh so easily.

Some people have a handsome hawk above them,
but they don’t see the shiny killer because they are hooked
over their phones, reporting me to my boss instead of listening.

How about you, potato? What’s just above your head?

Flying

Our parents are not our real parents. I used to have a
lovebird. Crossed the Bay Bridge to get her.

I’m on a creek bridge in snow with orange gatorade and
an aging spit swan talons boy wet and clawing in my chest.

I wake up again in bird song. I can’t honestly stand it
when indigo morning grays and the day is everyone’s.

Everyone who might mom talks genetic screenings at the cookout.
Why I like past lives. My dog’s tongue is purple and the croci.

Wind moves the purple croci. I wrote about Baisat hearing her
song. Her whole face changed, her whole body, she went fast

to somewhere good. I can’t write about songs. I was seven
when I won the dove in the lottery. I was twenty-one tortured

by thoughts of fourteen. I was the one girl in motorcycle class.
The old men, the young men. They cheered when I passed.

Grace Smith is a writer and teacher. Her poetry has been published in Muzzle Magazine and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol.

Kylie Hough

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Prognosis Uncertain

This monotony rampant in the suburbs. The constant hum of electric drills and the wringing out of Op Shop cocktail dresses. It isn’t the way I imagined I would go. I light a Red Head and watch it fizzle to black. With my butcher’s knife, I slice and dice my way to the dog park. Someone swing high ahead of me and look back smiling on the upturn. Bring your philosophy and your poetry books. I am an unrealised nobody moulded from midnight. I have the potential of a hand grenade and the attention span of a clown fish. By day I scrub toilets. Boats power past, a tabby meows at a magpie. At night I talk with moving shadows. Who’s there? Oh, it’s you. I act like silence, breathless. To be heard is so close to being loved, it is almost impossible to tell the difference. This is not akin to some field trip to the zoo. No, this is warfare. This is sculpting a tin man with gloved hands. My liver poisoning someone else’s blood. Trevally in a tidal wave. I am two hotels away and freedom looks like walking fully clothed into salted black water. The tunnel of light after the feeding frenzy. A shark shaped shadow slips through the lip of a wave and I dash from the seashore. Surely someone will notice I’m playing at opposites. Somebody maybe wants to dance with me in the dunes.

Diary of a Dead Poet

The kale tastes like cardboard smells and I’m telling you, I’m trying. You stand under a deluge of cold water ripping into you like road spikes because it’s good for your immune system. Or something I can’t put my finger on that jabs like an uppercut to the jaw. I pick Aloe Vera from the garden and smear it on my skin under a pre-midday sun. You spoon magnesium into a plastic glass and watch me swallow until there’s nothing left. But the baby girl, initiated into this patriarchal prison. I don’t tell you about my dream. The one I have where your nervous system shuts down in the middle of the night and despite outside attempts to bring you back to life, you can only watch from your position on the ceiling of Accident and Emergency. Get on with it, you say, and I run around the neighbourhood in circles until I’m stopped by a man who asks me to Cocktails and Dreams. Because it’s a club, Love, and you know you want to. You’re looking down on your fitting body in horror now, two-one-shock, limbs flying, me—smiling. I’m someplace else and I’m telling you, I’m trying. But when you’re already dead, there isn’t much you don’t have to smile about.

No Place Like Home

I have this idea for a story. In it, there are two people. There is you, with your broad chest and your muscled arms. There is me, with my perky breasts and my dimpled smile. It’s a story of high school sweethearts and Disney endings. There is this castle made from yellow bricks set amongst rolling meadows of daisy and clover outside a township that glimmers green and gold. Surrounding the stronghold is a mote filled with angry alligators looking to chomp men who hurt women, children and other domesticated animals. I live in the top chamber on the thirty-fifth floor at the end of a spiral staircase you climb with the force and passion of a steed half your age. There is a white mare I feed oats to in the stable. It necks with a black stallion. The same one you ride into the sunset, me on my white horse galloping beside you. Side by side we journey, toward everything bright lights, white-picket-fences, kinky sex, two-and-a-half-kids, safe jobs, a fixed mortgage, Prozac, bullshit and banter at TGI Fridays, tantrums and track marks, rehab, unemployment, cutbacks, setbacks, climate change, Smirnoff, despair, sex trafficking, glacial melting, and grass-filled-billies smoked Saturday nights which morph into Monday mornings. And it’s lovely. And it’s wonderful. And it’s all we hoped for. Except it’s not. But we don’t mustn’t can’t. Instead, the story ends. Back it up. Reel it in. Edit. On a Sunday morning in Spring, light streams in on a gentle breeze trailing through curtained windows. Blueberry pancakes and freshly squeezed orange juice are served in the super king by adoring, impeccably-behaved, A-grade children with white teeth and sparkling eyes. A kiss, a hug, a dozen lies swallowed.

Kylie Hough writes on Yugambeh land. She was a finalist in the Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction 2018 and long listed in Room Magazine’s 2021 Creative Nonfiction Contest. Kylie received a 2021 CA/ASA Award Mentorship, was a finalist in the 2022 Page Turner Awards, and shortlisted in the 2022 Woollahra Digital Literary Award. Her stories, essays and poems are published in literary journals OyeDrum, Litro Magazine, Posit, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and others.

Elise Houcek

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Whose Shirt Was Surely Fleece

I gave up all my charms. Now, on Friday nights, I go to the grocery store and my charms are the soupboxes, the people I see when I look around. I go with my boyfriend and buy him a little treat, something bubbly but uncaffeinated, something with tropical packaging. DO I MEAN DEATH IS MAKING US GET INTO KIDS’ STUFF? Kind of, but not really. Its aspect ratio is kiddie, but the pixels themselves have much more sheen. They let things slide off of them, like a plate, the plate on which I serve dinner to the children I’ll never think of having. Sometimes I wonder if this is the real cause. That it’s not just death’s fault? That I might actually live in the world again, go out to parties, etc? Our bubbly water could be caffeinated. Cruel trick that all cool women will have to face. All women whose faces lag and lapse over the pixelated cart BECAUSE THEY HAD SOME BRIGHT IDEA. MOMMY TOLD YOU NOT TO DO IT! Mommy showed you curdled drinks! But I was too young, a baby who was already a baby. That’s enough, I thought, and went back to sleep. I went back to sleep, since I was the child and the mind of the child at once, since I was just a touch away from snuggling bliss. Mentally. Physically (I looked down at my cart, then at my boyfriend, whose shirt was surely fleece). I told him I wanted us to consider this a date idea. I wanted him to consider that I had come up with this idea and what that meant for us. I had a sneaking suspicion that he himself was into the tropical treats idea, but I learned as a child that men aren’t into sticking with.

“Guarding”

Another evening walk with him in this frenzy-ornamented town. Another lapping lag while on the sidewalk as my blood huffs to get the baton around (too much coke, too much sugar in the break). We pass, among other things, a statue of a lion, who guards the right edge corner of the small white house’s driveway. The statue of the lion is weirdly shaped, as in it’s got its legs folded under it, as in, it’s lying down. I wonder if the lion’s posture is contingent on the kind of home it plays in front of (mine certainly is)–when I’m at LEE’S, all my back can do is lie down and breathe, since it’s not random that they have those things. This house is random, too, but not the words I sent to you while noticing that lion, or that that lion sent to us in the space between our recognizing. “Guarding’s” the word. Guarding’s got fur. As in it came to us in the space between. As in it deputizes the Land of Nod(t) (furry, sleepy children nodding out with the gesture of a paintbrush amidst granite spires, sighing, the gesture of a mouse–baby blue snuggie… baby pink…). So you were saying the lion was doing not that, v lax in front of the port-style house with its trinkets parked in the loading belt. Also, the lion was granite, and so didn’t have any fur. I wondered, or was wondering, after you pointed to the lion weirdly not-guarding his home, his friends (might as well have pointed into the air) looking for the word to describe his failure NOT what word should be filling in the gap but whether it was worth mentioning at all. Whether you were worth it, this breath. Plus, I wanted to save it for myself. I discovered it, I unearthed it in its real beauty, which was not its clicking into this particular question but its clicking more generally.

Semordnilap

Pressing the bulb in the corner of my eye, a bird got caught in a snare, a flare, skittered, then I lay back down and thought I would never get up again. Then I lay back down into the white of my bed’s turf, down through the square of it, the plane, then down again, through the sheets of clouds, the elevation changing, turbulence-sans. I would never return to work again. Would that be a change? Or would it be anti-change? Inertia? I preferred to think the latter, to feel dead momentarily, though still fuzzy. Here from my Saturday-morning casket I watched various phenomena of the eye play in front of me like seeds in the air and a giant red bar of light. Like scenes in the air. Like deconstructed tableaux. How do I do that. I recall the people who have used the term, summon/re-imagine them in my mind like ancestors traveling in a great backwards-flowing line. Xuaelbat detcurtsnoced. The act is noble of itself and light enough to sustain Semordnilap. Is that my name? I do a lap around my sea-bed backwards and upwards-facing, arms outstretched. The names of teachers, mostly, come to me, the names of all my dead teachers. They fall into my open mouth like gently dropping fruit and taste, mmmm, like cherries. Cherries mixed with cream, so less red than pink. O yeah, xuaelbat detcurtsnoced. They’re trying to teach me something. To unteach? Every time I swallow another one, the scenes I watch in front of me on the bed become more and more meshy, less opaque. But no sooner than I think the word MESH, someone whispers YOU GOT IT, then I’m dead.

Elise Houcek’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in NOMATERIALISM, New Delta Review, The Comstock Review, DIAGRAM, Prelude, Afternoon Visitor, Always Crashing, Action Books Blog and other journals. Her poetry chapbook, So Neon Was the Rope, was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse and will be published by Osmanthus Press in 2022. Her poetic novel, TRACTATUS, is now available for preorder from Spuyten Duyvil. Find her at elisehoucek.com.

Kylie Hough

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If I’m Honest

If I’m honest, the sky feels different depending on where I stand. You eat chocolate cake before the movie begins. We all want freedom but I am too scared to ask and you are too stunted to know. I have the feelings I have. You label me a conspiracy theorist but I think the parts of you you don’t show sprout wheatgrass. The earth spins on its axis in a matterless universe and I would like to give it up. You don’t talk behind my back and from time to time we meet and embrace like old friends. I converse with dead people. You come to my thing and insist on paying for copy that wouldn’t exist without you. I brush my teeth and smile white foam when I think of you. There’s a space in your chest where my heart used to be before I gave it to the comma. I sign a blank page with the words, For You Love Me, because I believe in something. You don’t have the feelings you don’t have. I read somewhere that to love a thing means wanting it to live. If it can’t be scientifically proven, you won’t leave the bedroom. It’s the way of us, but if I’m honest, the pursuit of liberation is an oarless raft on a flooded highway.

The Problem with Eggs

I told you it works like eggs. You shrugged your shoulders, said you never knew. I thought, there are a lot of things you don’t know about eggs and guar gum and binding and being bound. You insisted you didn’t feel trapped and questioned me about why sex worked like eggs. Not the polysaccharide composed of two sugars whose composition you would have quizzed me on had I given you the chance. Guar gum is frequently used as a food additive in processed foods. I nodded because we were bound and I couldn’t articulate an answer, only watch you chew steak or tune into the voice in my head that whispered I needed the bathroom or to feign a headache or to go outside and shoo the Great Dane defaecating on our front lawn. None of which I did because it wasn’t my turn and if there was anything more to sleepwalking in clingwrap without a compass, I needed to explore it. Yesterday. Like an egg navigates the oiled sides of a wok there was this feeling I got with you. A join consists of two ropes. One lead from you to race, reach, rage toward me. A gypsy unawares. Last year. There was the way I placed you on the top shelf with the strawberry jam and the Jarlsberg. The way you encouraged me. With a look, you took me by the hand and led me up the carpeted stairwell to the waiting king bed. Splice with me, you said and I placed your hand between my thighs. Instead of thickening, though, you split. This is the problem with eggs.

Her Last De facto

Can you see you’re torturing yourself? he said. Yes, she thought and took his right leg and plucked it from its socket much like she would a carrot from her vegetable garden. She stuck it on a cardboard rectangle by a pane of glass beside a wooden frame on the kitchen counter. You’re not thinking of the future, he said and she raised an eyebrow because she was always thinking of how good it would feel to disarticulate him. She removed his left arm with a lurch and placed it beside his right leg. Do you hear yourself? he said, which was strange because all she ever heard was the sound of his voice. He collapsed into a bar stool, with the face of a chastised puppy, and patted the empty space beside him with his remaining hand. She smiled, took his right arm in her left hand and shook it until it plunged pool-like from his shoulder into her waiting lap. I give and you take, he said. She waggled a finger then took a hacksaw to his head. His left leg came away with a tug. She pondered his parts on the counter and poured herself a gin. Pieces of him she arranged into patchwork. You’re mad, he mouthed mounted on the wall, and to a future replete with framed men, she lifted her glass.

Kylie Hough studies Arts at UNE in Armidale, Australia. A Vice-Chancellor’s Scholar, in 2015 Kylie received the Lucy Elizabeth Craigie Award, the Richard B Smith Memorial Prize, and the Australian Federation of Graduate Women Inc. (AFGW) NSW (Armidale) UNE ARTS AWARD. She was a finalist in the Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction 2018 and is published with Feminartsy, the write launch, Verity LA, and Other Terrain. Kylie is a grateful recipient of a 2021 Australian Society of Authors (ASA) Award Mentorship in Fiction.

Thomas Fink

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Dusk Bowl Intimacies 36

Leave the fig leaf alone, and everything could be fine. And she lives to dress up, and she has the right clothes—to milk the province’s uncombed masculine goofiness. Oh, this has been a terrible era for the ardent designer of outcomes reassessment. Fish come swimming up at any hour. To gawk at how bumbling “sapiens” sap sincerest intentions. Call me ancient, uncorseted and uncoveted by fresher generations, but I hereby spurn the charge

of
pickling rust-
plated American tenets.

Dusk Bowl Intimacies 37

That mind is always super-crowded. Yet I don’t want to rue all those particles, if I’ve brewed them wrong. I have to pursue another purse. Pilar has taken the wrong pillar. Indolent fit. Altogether, I think the alimony should turn out fine. But she’s much more than that. She insists on snaking her way out of the cloud sum of blaring indulgences. Bartenders and assorted bystanders hunt for every dent in the reconstituted. Instead, I prime to be a doer. Will you enjoy whatever opening? And the color, too?

Each
time I
see you flush

with
investments, I
get slap happy.

Thomas Fink, a professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, is the author of 11 books of poetry, most recently A Pageant for Every Addiction (Marsh Hawk Press, 2020), in collaboration with Maya D. Mason, and Hedge Fund Certainty (Meritage & ie Press, 2019), as well as two books of criticism. He has also edited two critical anthologies.