Tag Archives: Prose Poems

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.

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.

Gloria Frym

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Sense

Some people don’t know what needs to be done. Perhaps they can’t sense what needs to be done. Montaigne says that it is only through the senses that we know. Such people who don’t sense what needs to be done don’t do the thing that needs doing and avoid knowing about it. There are others who know what needs to be done, always know. They sense the needing, such as the dirty metal ring staining the wood floor that the base of the old pole lamp has made over time until one day, though previously unseen, the etching of metal on wood is visible. As if carved. Greasy, even. Though it’s not. It’s solid. If it were greasy, well. The viewer of this ring, reclining in a recliner some five feet away, gets up and repositions the old pole lamp so that it once again covers its own orbit. The viewer is just too tired to make a fuss; and besides, he rationalizes, who cares, I’m old, I’m busy, I’m young, I have better things to do. One who sees clearly could be deemed responsible for remedying the situation, the needing that something should be done to remove the dirty metal ring from the wood floor and prevent the base of the lamp from carving further scars on the living wood. After all, rust never dies, just goes deeper. Living wood, haven’t you heard the floorboards speak, the entire frame speak at night? But, and after imagining several possible solutions or not, probably not, the reclining one takes the nap he had started before interrupted by the unsightly circle eating into the pale oak floor.

Faced with such knowledge, other people know what needs to be done, imagine it, and do it. Their first attempts may fail. He thought he could simply spray a cleaning solvent on the floor to eliminate the grease. However, the stain is not grease. The second attempt is floor polish. He rubs it in well. But the stain does not disappear. Then he cuts out a circle of carpet pad from a nearby rug and places it under the lamp base. This he is sure will prevent the stain from spreading. However, he is in a hurry, his thoughts have already leapt beyond his perceptions, he takes no measurements of the carpet pad, just cuts out a jagged circle smaller than the diameter. When he places the scrappy pad under the lamp base it wobbles. He makes a mental note to do it again more carefully, with exact measurements. But he doesn’t. He forgets. Time passes. Seasons change. He moves to Portland
or Sweden to throw pots.

Another member of the family, or occupant of the household (whose precise roles shall remain unnamed for anonymity, to avoid stereotypic gender assumptions), notices the circle made by the lamp. Didn’t M buy that for $15, so long ago, at a flea market or garage sale in the last century, when such events offered the contents of a garage or grandmother’s castoffs collecting nothing but dust and spiders in an unventilated attic, or the recently acquired products of a journey to a country that produced tribal textiles, basketry, beadwork, etc. At the very least, the material remains of a marriage the former wife of which sits on a folding chair next to her youngest child who beckons other children his age to visit his collection of miniature action heroes. “Two for $5,” he says shyly, to the first looker.

This member of the family or the household endowed with historical memory unplugs their earphones, whips out their self-retracting tape measure, and measures the diameter of the stain. My Business is Circumference, they recall with a smile, and note the dimension. The next day they visit a hardware emporium. Such places, with names like Passed Time, Time on My Side, Kingfisher, Do It Best, Bricorama, carry everything one can imagine for home improvement, which, in a country of dreams, is practically self-improvement. They ask for a piece of felt cut to a specific size. A clerk behind the counter cheerfully inquires as to the “color of the felt.” “It doesn’t matter,” they—the person who knows what needs to be done—reply. “What sort of glue do you recommend for adhering felt to ah . . . .old metal?” The cheerful clerk senses hesitation, knows it through her senses of course. “Brass?” she offers. “Oh yes, that’s it, or it’s pot metal that looks like old brass.” The clerk leads the person who knows what needs to be done to the appropriate aisle of the store, embarks upon an explanation of glues, which stick to what and for how long, the price of each, and though the person who knows what needs to be done—this has become a bulky assignation we could acronym to TPWKWNTBD, which hasn’t a single vowel and seems impossible to pronounce, not unlike the Hebrew alphabet, which also relies strictly on consonants, so we’d better shorten it to TPW, perhaps a bit corporate, something one would notice on the side of a truck in traffic, akin to the menacing CVS or KGB or PMS—enjoys details and specifics, is tiring of glues, though finds the expertise and bright visage of the clerk suddenly enchanting.

They both blurt out nearly simultaneously a similar thought: Why don’t you/I bring in the lamp! TPW knows by now that the lamp is brass but wants to 1) get the job done right? 2) see the cheerful clerk again? Who knows and who cares about this part! TPW rushes home, etc. The lamp is brass of course, and so TPW returns to the hardware emporium to purchase both the perfectly cut circle of felt and the appropriate glue. Whatever happens next is collateral, and though may well be the story that begins the rest of two lives—that has nothing or everything to do with the simple observation which began this rumination. We can establish, however, a “bond” between TPW and the job they set out to accomplish. We’re done now.

Recycle

One transgression against the self may beget another. This is evident in persons on strict diets who take a second piece of cake then a third, deceiving only themselves. She threw the book into the recycle, she said, for its own good. Of course I’m against censorship, she insisted, but this piece of shit was remaindered and anyway, it was a galley proof. The late author was a famous experimentalist but these narratives were the awful mean-spirited dregs of his late life, good for nothing but the dump. He said nasty things about the physiognomy of old people. He reviled the few friends he had left. However, the guilt of throwing away a book nagged at her. It burns me, she said, that the book was even published. She had no such guilt about another book on gems and precious stones which arrived in her mailbox without her having ordered it. It was nothing she was interested in, so she put it in the bathroom where it sat for years, along with 501 Slovokian Verbs, until she finally dumped both into the recycle.

When she was a child, her father taught her never to desecrate books, never to write in them, fold their pages down, break their spines—all of which she began to do once in the world on her own. First it began with pencil—checking off certain passages, even underlining them. Then as the prohibition gradually lessened in her she took up the pen and would bracket sections. In the 1950s, during the “Red Scare,” her mother, not a recipient of the same training, found a box of “Communist” books in the garage just after they’d moved into a new house. She ripped them apart and put them into the incinerator, only to be severely chastised by her husband who came from a long line of Torah scholars most of whom had died in the Holocaust. A book is a holy thing, her sad father muttered, watching the bonfire. It was the first time she ever heard him use the word holy, as he was not just a secularist but given his history, he had no use for god.

When she initially began to read what she eventually trashed, this writer had high hopes for the book and thought it might give her ideas. But the only idea that she had was to get rid of it. First she tried to leave it in a restaurant, but the waitress came running after her. Then she tried to find a trash receptacle and there was none in sight. The one thought in her mind was that no one else would or should read this book because they might get the idea that its lack of merit was ‘experimental.’ Au contraire, it was lousy writing. After all, she told me, we know good writing from bad, don’t we? The back cover said that the author worked on it until his death but she joked that it must have killed him when he finished the last word. Crossing the street against a red light with the book in her hand, she said, nearly killed her.

She was determined to rid herself of this book not just because it repulsed her. Ultimately, she felt that it tarnished the reputation of an otherwise interesting writer, and if she could, she would buy up all the copies of this now-out-of-print abomination and throw them into the recycle too.

And yet, she confided, if it was so easy to throw away something an artist had put himself into, might it not start a habit? Might she not get rid of the dreadful painting that depicted a scene out of Things Fall Apart, a black man hanging, which a student gave her in lieu of a final paper? Or the imposing portrait of an artichoke fifty times the size of the real thing as a wedding present that arrived in the mail fully framed? Would such actions precipitate a clean up of all the books and artworks and odds and ends that no longer held meaning for her, even offended her sensibility? Would she accelerate her desire to rid the world of bad writing? Would she actively seek out other books like the vigilante “book ripper” of Herne Bay, England, who targets books in a store whose proceeds go to charity, books out of sight of the cash register, particularly in the true crime section, who rips their pages in half and puts them back on the shelves? Was destroying what one deemed a bad text the gateway to further moral lapses? A future of dangerous infidelities to one’s soul? After all, it had to start somewhere.

Gloria Frym lives in Berkeley. Her most recent book is The True Patriot, a collection of proses, from Spuyten Duyvil. She is the author of short story collections, Distance No Object (City Lights Books) and How I Learned (Coffee House Press), as well as many volumes of poetry. She is professor in the Graduate Writing Program and the Writing & Literature Program at California College of the Arts.

Benjamin Paloff

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    A Trick of Certain Ambassadors

Symbiosis, my daughter explains: I charge the electric toothbrush, and the electric toothbrush keeps my mouth clean. Fuck it. My Talmudic approach to writing has made me afraid of writing, and while writing, too, I am afraid, as in the ritual that precedes a run or lift or sex, the artful lacing and unlacing and readjusting, the learned wariness of the gerundial, the participial, the abstract, of their frailty against more muscular expressions, though they are everywhere, and genuinely both human and nonhuman—afraid of falling somehow short, or of falling, like Holden Caulfield, into a void with every step, though it’s only ever the stepping I wish for. Too much, you say, a guy’s book. You prefer the other. And I’m hung up on the sound of approaching engines over the sea, nature’s sound machine. An airplane, but too slow to be an airplane, the kind of undertow that can pull you so far out and down and fast, if only in my fears, that I’d have to plan an entirely different way of life, while the actual day is petty annoyances, the music frustrated by you reading silently to yourself. The street light we know is broken by its remaining on in daylight. The bullfinches’ begging we take for song. Not everyone has to sing for his supper. But the bullfinches face each other on the landing, heads low, wings splayed, and approach, retreat, approach again before parting ways, seeing reason the way a horse, fresh from the farrier, sees wonders in the sparks rising from her feet. People like me, on the other hand, are always looking out for people looking out for an angle, or else taking things for what they are, which usually means someone getting hurt. It’s excruciatingly difficult not to be distrustful when people declare April the cruelest month, when what they really mean is that April is the cruelest month for them, and the starfish-shaped shimmers along the invisible edge could be anything. Ships. Or some animal’s idea of a miracle. Or some jokester’s idea of a joke.

What They Do to Cowards
Around Here

Urine is cleaner than saliva, my wife has been telling me for twenty-five years, apropos of no latest study, wilderness first aid, no kink or would-be kink, just trying something out, and I have no reason to contradict or doubt anything said by anyone who has taken care of me. Even the surly, handsome pigeon walking laps around the backyard seems to agree that the world is everything that is a stat, that a dream about the inner lives of bees can end with an actual bee stinging me on my actual mouth. Peeing on the wound is out of the question, so I wake up every morning afraid that my father is already dead and beyond the ease of his casual 1940s racism, his enviable void of introspection, his hazy friendship with Mudcat Grant. Blues singer, two-time All-Star, pitches Game 1 of the ‘65 World Series, Yom Kippur, Sandy Koufax refuses to pitch for the Dodgers, so Mudcat beats Don Drysdale, later a Hall-of-Famer. You can still be afraid of something that has already happened. The Twins lose the series in seven. My father laughed every time he mentioned that Mudcat had a brother named Swampfire, who also played pro ball, because he could never remember what he had or had not said. Had I seen, with today’s documentary precision, the bees flying in and out of a hole in the ground and wondered what it was like inside? Was Mudcat grinning down at me as I opened my eyes, awed by how the earth’s blackness is lined with workers working toward a common purpose? I had been holding an eye to the ground, innocent eclipse, and felt lightning only after pulling away. Somewhere, I am still in crisis. The bees are still in crisis. We are all still ringed by trees, though it is only the outermost ring of the tree that’s alive.

Twenty-Nine Sonnets

As we speak, most of the animals in Australia, which is no more an island than any other continent, are thinking of new ways to kill us. I am thinking about the garage’s postapocalyptic Zen, its diorama of a world where you just let things be. There are indeed other geographies. The planet where the wind moves so fast you wouldn’t call it “wind” if you were there—that’s also the planet where it rains hot glass. Where it rains diamonds, everyone is filthy rich, and dead. The planet that’s blue is not really blue. It’s a trick of the light, the atmosphere, the mood, an artist’s conception. The planet where people kill people for land, or for what’s beneath the land, is covered in lead and peace signs. People will do what the wind tells them, they’ll flee to where it flees. Australia, I liked my youth, the stupid clarity of my youth. We used to be primordial, too. The moon used to be closer. Pure sentiment, calling other planets’ moons moons. Dig deep enough, and you’ll hit roots that form stairs. Proximity matters, especially where winter is the price we pay for spring. As surely as there are loves that bring no joy, there’s no right way to be young. There being no Hebrew saints as such, I became possessive. I wanted to track down the guy who took it upon himself to decide what size fun is and not exactly kick the shit out of him, as if mentions belonged to me alone. I imagine plenty of others escape their pasts, you have to carry your trash with you till you find where to throw it away, but the Sargasso Sea is mine, so I have to ask what the point is of any sex or famine going on in my absence. I have to wonder about the invisible artist who keeps the plants alive on the landing, rearranges the dead butterflies daily, and comes and goes with the giddiness of gulls, loud and cruel. Silver dollars being worth more or less depending on the manner of death, I want a leisure-pages poolside funeral, cucumber coins on my eyes, on everyone’s eyes, for fun. We follow the devoted marketer; we’re dying to be revived. Yet I’d to innocence submit in truth, if doing so might give me back my youth. Which to our hope then gives the lie, that sleep’s a property of the eye. In the twenty-first century, slow seeing’s sorry art is excited by the ex-president’s paintings. They’re consistent with the technology of the time, yet patchwork, like Luke Skywalker’s mechanical hand or, really, anyone’s mechanical hand. The angels have faces quite unlike those in art books. The sirens are singing their baited hooks just to drown you on the sand. To see the forward-facing footprints of the backward-walking man.

Benjamin Paloff’s books include the poetry collections And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon, as well as a critical volume and many translations. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Conduit, New American Writing, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and others, and he was the guest editor of the Fall 2019 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. Twice a fellow of the NEA, he lives in Michigan.

Rich Ives

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An Inevitable Territory

Black Swallowtail Butterfly

I try not to have any beliefs that don’t nibble on who I am or at least climb outside my inner territory, where they can become more than mere bright worms of knowing, like an exotic flavor perhaps; anise, fennel, caraway. When the ideas are forming, they look like bird droppings, and dangerous ignorance from my enemies falls away. This follows a pattern. I always question them three times to give them a sense of bold black and yellow stripes along their fresh green youth lines. They become an undulating tube of matter that walks on many legs to its own escape. It feels like a beautiful dark rising after its isolation, a flight of erratic testing careening softly above its own body.

Of course inside was once outside and outside will soon be back inside before it’s released altogether. Nothing under the sun is really new, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling completely reborn. Once I collected imaginary pianolas, one of them anyway, and pounded on it and teased it different ways to make it deceive me into multitudinous emanations that you’d swear had another source, a grand variety that was mine and not the pianola’s after all, but I felt rich with it and freed.

It’s what apologies do to you. When you make them to yourself, for your ignorance. Voluptuous tired little savages they are, and they can surround you with melody until you think you’re going to explode with such sacred knowing, but with such a record of silence, God will surely shut up soon. The little celery-worm ideals will turn back to what they once were, back to protecting their escaping flights from hungers with the smell of rancid butter. These cannot be everyone’s beauties that I experience, and I take upon myself a drab coloring to match the season. Sometimes my winter restrains me, but a warmth like two rows of yellow dots, bright, progressive and oozing the warmth of Spring, calls me back to my anchored body.

My beliefs are larger than the others now, feminine and blue, the yellow spots joined with orange, behind me in an imitation flight that follows and balances me. I can see two males fighting with their soft wild beautiful wings. I am the territory they will claim, and it’s more like my fulfillment and completion than you might imagine. I watch them pursue red-wing blackbirds, black t-shirts, anything beautiful or invasive, and I’m drawn deeper into myself with their impulsive desires.

And No More

Blister Beetle

I’ve been a parasite, I admit, but I’m growing. Life comes at us in stages. At first I couldn’t even use my legs, but I shed that skin and dug a chamber to live in while I built my final form, soft-bodied, short-winged, long-necked, brightly colored, and even iridescent, it seemed to me.

I worked on an oil rig where the locals called us oil beetles. We felt it inside us and oozed. Our body oil, we joked, made a kind of Spanish Fly, poisonous in larger doses. It stimulates hair growth in the right dilution.

We watched the cattle on the plains, wading below the cutbank like bored children. We offered them our own boredom, and they entertained it. Our little yellow dog was out there all day, looking for something he couldn’t understand. We waited for a more human wilderness.

The boys liked to break things because we were broken, and we still wanted to make something of ourselves, but Hayden, the one we thought of as our leader, wouldn’t crack, so we filled his boots full of rain. He stood outside himself and watched us, breathy, a great expanse shrinking toward maturity, where the hiss of his lithium gave just this much and no more.

The work gave us blisters. Weeks descended, and the grand tendon of Hayden’s neck still twitched while we tended at a distance his remarkable ardent fits of attention. The house his papa left him, long after his papa left him, brought the garden of a separated man into Hayden’s life, shaded and rife, slipping muscular and lean between unguent and Montana trillium.

That life he carried like meat, packed in and beaten against itself. When one of us passed the dream around, he let his cigarette down, and his eyes said, This is the last stick, and the last stick falls just hard enough to continue.

His deliberate downward motion fell against the earthy tendencies of his own body.

Just this much now and no more.

Rich Ives’ books include Light from a Small Brown Bird (Bitter Oleander Press–poetry), Sharpen (The Newer York—fiction chapbook), The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books–stories), Old Man Walking Home in the Dark (Cyberwit-poems), A Servant’s Map of the Body (Cyberwit-fiction) and Tunneling to the Moon (Silenced Press–hybrid).

Jeffrey Hecker

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from Ark Aft

Boar & Cow

Boar notices Noah’s wife’s name varies depending on source text. Haikal
introduced herself to me as Percoba, says Cow, yet Vesta to Boar. You
think Emzara’s trying not to be identified? You think Norea doesn’t know
who Tytea is? asks Boar. Both ideas can be true, says Cow, I believe she’s
twenty names deep so we remember her husband, who never talks to us.

Ferret & Hamster

Ferret posts I feel everything I ever fancy or require within reach.
Ferret’s alcoholism perturbs me, posts Hamster. I clench apexes,
zeniths, vertexes, apogees, pinnacles, Ferret re-posts. Hamster
re-posts Ferret intakes so much Stolichnaya vodka, her eyelids
Alice blue, after a gown Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter danced once.

Hedgehog & Horse

Hedgehog wakes ready for a four-hour day of listening and smelling.
Horse wakes not quite ready for a twenty-two hour day of monitoring.
Hedgehog is lactose intolerant. Horse cannot vomit. Hedgehog road-
fatality is highest in Ireland. Ancient Egypt and Late Middle Ages ate
Hedgehog. Horse subtracts and adds up to four. Horse hates violin.

Hyena & Kangaroo

Male nipples aren’t broken doorbells, chimes Hyena. Kangaroo
contrasts more to evolutionarily defunct switches, perhaps once
allowing the chest cavity to unfasten or lock. Was the body too
open, and needed shut? Hyena says surgeons removed mine.
After non-profit research, I firmly reckon they were sand dollars.

Tiger & Lion

Tiger asks Lion what type fire should we be, if we die wise?
Lion answers the class D metal kind. Rain upon us, we just
accelerate. Lion asks Tiger what type water should we be if
we die dim? Tiger answers I want us triple filtered, reverse
osmosis, sprayed, Delta Maidenhead ferns convert us to air.

Mouse & Skunk

Mouse accuses Skunk of eating the whole honeybee population
in Brattleboro, Vermont. Skunk’s burrow is busted. Millions
of bee wings coat the inner walls like high-quality Muscovite
windows. The tubular house smells embalmed. Mouse cracks
a few wings for ventilation. Fertile clay sand silt buries us all.

Jeffrey Hecker is the author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011) and the chapbooks Hornbook (Horse Less Press, 2012), Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside Press, 2013), and Before He Let Them Guide Sleigh (ShirtPocket Press, 2013). Recent work has appeared in La Fovea, LEVELER, decomP, Entropy, BOAAT, Dream Pop Journal, and DELUGE. He holds a degree from Old Dominion University. He’s a fourth-generation Hawaiian American and he currently resides in Norfolk, Virginia, where he teaches at The Muse Writers Center.

Brad Rose

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What We Can Name

I have thoughts, but I don’t write them down. Something is watching me. I wasted most of my luck in the daylight. Once, I saw a horse drown in a lake. I don’t think it was acting. A lake is a body of water, surrounded by land. Water has no color or shape, it’s true no matter what it does. They say ants speak to each other with chemicals, even when they whisper. There are 120 thousand kinds of ants, some as big as a bullet, others no larger than a secret. When I called the help line, the voice said, Please continue to hold. So, I did. I’m clean-cut, even when time isn’t on my side. When they answered, I told them I needed to speak with an experienced attorney, one who knows about the death penalty. Most nights, I pretend to sleep. That way I don’t need to wake up. They say anything that can be done to a person will be done. Go ahead, turn the lights back on. We only see what we can name. By the way, what do your enemies call you?

After Dawn

I’ll bet the people in the car ahead of us have thoughts, although there’s no such thing as a perfect translation. Once, while hiding in my basement, I drew a picture of a whisper. I used an ordinary pencil. I had no choice. It’s quiet inside a mountain—coal-dark, the aftertaste of ants. Some people see God. Thirteen feet deep, I saw a hole in the light. I’m handpicked and reliable, no stranger to the undertow of chance. I’ve learned not to bite the hook that feeds me. Becky said they discovered human remains, but in a good way. You still have to boil them before they’re sterile. I’m an e-citizen in the digital world, I lead a quiet life. You can read about it in the Great Big Picture Book of Problems, or just send up a trial balloon. It can be any color you like, as long as it isn’t black. Be sure to keep an eye out. You wouldn’t want it to get tangled in the shadow puppets’ strings. They can be real mean. Just because the puppets don’t have bodies, doesn’t mean you can’t hear them thinking. Sure, they can be hard to hunt down, even harder to erase, but they’ll circle back this way, sometime after dawn. Don’t worry. This time, we’ll get them.

Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is a sociologist, and author of a collection of poetry and flash fiction, Pink X-Ray (Big Table Publishing, 2015) His new book of poems, Momentary Turbulence is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. Brad’s website is: www.bradrosepoetry.com. A list of publications is available here: http://bradrosepoetry.blogspot.com/. Audio recordings can be heard at: https://soundcloud.com/bradrose1.

Howie Good

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Murder! Fire! Plague!

The next morning you insisted, “There’s no such thing as love. There’s only fucking.” If you heard the gray gulls, their shrieks like symptoms of dementia, you gave no sign. It was a bit like that time the sun crashed down, flinging up dead cats and dung, and foreign words were blowing everywhere. There was this feeling among householders that something even more terrible — hooded gunmen with Kalishnikovs firing on police, a mom leaving her baby in a dumpster to freeze to death — would eventually happen. And, sure enough, darkness and flies entered despite the jar of buttercups on the table brightening the room.

The Heart of It All

Her eyes were sometimes blue, sometimes green with flecks of gold, all the things, restless things, I was instructed from early in life never to do. We found a high window filled day and night and laid down under it and moved slowly, so slowly that by morning we had rubbed each other as smooth as sea-smoothed shells. And when we rose up, the world looked strange. It was a place of beauty, I can tell you that, a circular path, spiraling even, and no one was really sure why but us.

From the Middle of Nowhere

No one could say when it was that the hospital began admitting children. At that time of night, the road is dark, and pedestrians don’t really go there. The next day only brought more illegibility, a slow-creeping rain during which bankrupts leaped out of windows. The police recommended calling if it happened again. Look around. A horse is not a metaphor. If I were you, I wouldn’t go out without a companion. What I assumed was the Atlantic, greasy and barely moving, a gull resting its head under a wing, may have been a new god seated on a throne of razor wire.

The Desert of the Real

It was a downtown full of ugly glass towers. I have never been able to understand the attraction to tall structures, have you? One evening I attended the city’s famous theater. A series of nudes rode across the stage on ostriches and camels under the admiring gaze of former Nazis in tuxedos. Afterward, in a reflective mood, I decided against taking the metro and to walk back to the hotel despite the fog and drizzle. A friend had recently killed herself. Pills. At her memorial service, the first eulogist had proclaimed, “To hell with facts!” I shook my head at the memory. About five minutes later, I stepped into the brightly lit lobby with an odd feeling of relief, only to discover that none of it had happened, that it was all merely a collection of words, some bandaged, others still bleeding.

Blip

No one had ever told us what would happen in the event of defeat. Then the tornados showed up, sometimes alone, more often in pairs and small groups. Even the crows fell — or, rather, were blown — out of the sky. At least one man in attendance regarded it as a baleful omen. The rest assumed it was just a blip. But, very soon, antediluvian gods faded into rain, the flickering surface of uproarious dreams.

Howie Good’s latest poetry collections are Bad for the Heart (Prolific Press) and Dark Specks in a Blue Sky (Another New Calligraphy). He is recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his forthcoming collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.