Cover: SNOW EYE by Guy R. Beining, 1995
acrylic on canvas (20” x 16”)
Cover and title page design by Gary R. Smith, 1986
Typeset in Baskerville by Daniel Estrada Del Cid & Johnny Estrada
Del Cid, HS Marketing Solutions, Santa Ana, California
Lawrence R. Smith, Editor
Deanne Yorita, Associate Editor
Daniel Estrada Del Cid, Production and Design Editor
Calibanonline is published quarterly. Viewing online is free.
Unsolicited poetry, fiction, art, music, and short art videos
welcome. Please direct attached WORD documents to
[email protected]
Copyright ©, 2014
Blue Car
Funny the Mushrooms
Orange Blossom
The Sons
Press-Sign 1
Press-Sign 2
Reading Levi
Speed Ratios
On My Valentine
On Safety
On Diaspora
Rio Rimac
El cielo
La Maga
Three Poems
Smile Inn
Fire Statue
Iraq Without Windows
Courting Night’s Puzzle
The End in Latvia
felt tongue 195
felt tongue 196
felt tongue 226
Deaths in Tangled Light
The Blossom Eased Against the Pane
The Red Hook
An Astonishment of Butterflies
The Lynx-Eyed Bride
Two Poems
Inquiries Overgrown
Five Explanations for Broken Breath
Dear Mother: A Dream
The Place I Want Cold Least
The Art of Narrative
The Violin-Fishers
Four Collages
Ministering the Weather
Snow Amulet, Superscription
I’m Reading a Book About a Scarecrow
A Purgatory of Scarecrows
A Circus of Boundary
Tunnels and Entering Tunnels
Who Isn’t in Love with Itinerant Emotions?
Where is the door 1
Where is the door 2
Letter to Myself I
Letter to Myself II
Pearls scatter on my bed
Still 1
Still 2
Falling 3
Cyrenaica, Fazzan, and Tripolitania
Qaddafi was in even more flamboyant drag than usual when he
pronounced his plans for a massive statue to honor Saddam Hussein
Islamic charisma is almost rock and roll
They can have themselves videoed with a Kalashnikov clambering
around a wadi in Waziristan and send it out for worldwide release
Once flew the summer solstice directly over Waziristan, still much
snow on the peaks and higher ridges
Frontier territories, the Marches, Indian country, hillbilly hollows
The whole world was once like Waziristan
There are mysterious remnants
Slim, tasseled rock-painted Bradshaw figures of the Kimberley that
bespeak a sophisticated Australian culture that predates aboriginal
Elaborate hair, extended fingers, some figures are holding hands,
they are slimmer, more graceful and much more mysterious than
Giacometti figures
“When the elves of happiness led me through enchanted forests”—
John Bennett
Pre-Clovis America
Thirty years ago there were millions of pink flamingos in the East
African Rift with flocks of thousands moving synchronously in their
saltpan dances
Their eerie behavior having absolutely nothing to do with mammalian
They are disappearing, pollution and lower water levels in Nakuru
and Naivasha, the natron lakes
During the German occupation of Paris, along with the slamming of
Wehrmacht boot studs on cobblestone, was the frequent thunk and
dying screams of rabbits being butchered, raised on balconies in the
hundreds of thousands across the famished city
In a 1940s photograph one of the armed guards flanking the entrance
to Gestapo headquarters in the 16th arrondissement was in dress
uniform and soft cap, the other in helmet and fatigues
The SS and the Wehrmacht stressed, inevitable multitudes of clumsy
fuckups going about occupying the whole European continent, Athens
to Hammerfest
Flying JFK-Brussels, three men in black are davening rapidly up front,
their families seated in the middle of the plane
Saw one sneak into the business class toilets
Probably on the 47th Street-Antwerp diamond run
Complexities and diversity
Motives, cross purposes and inexplicables
Churning away
“Croaking jealousy; bloated bigotry; coiling suspicion; warmish
blindness; crocodile malice”—as William Gass quoted a Midwestern
Three different human existences, the physical, the mental, and the
Recuperating, but not as rapidly as expected, he is beginning to push
things around on the table with his left forearm
“Since my stroke, I can’t make out which foot for which boot, so how
am I supposed to be able to do anything else? And then I look at my
feet and then the boots next to them, I can’t even make out which
boot on which foot.”
Grinning maniacally
As though it was his skull speaking for itself through his face
And he has begun to look more and more like Théodore Géricault’s
The Madman
Shaved head and macabre skinniness
A potter wasp, white and black banding, rides the back of a glaucous
green-black cicada it’s sucking dry
Mounted intensity a death-act parody of sexual frenzy
Early heat, early humidity, boding probable hurricane disasters
And a great year here for yellow-billed cuckoos
The vividly striped cap of a male black-and-white warbler viewed
perfectly from above
Paul Rée said, “We are never more delighted by nature than when
we have an audience for our delight,” and about the only reason we
admit stupidities is to show that we’re clever enough to be aware of
Gobelin blue is a grayish blue greener and paler than electric or
average shadow blue, greener and duller than Copenhagen, greener
and not as strong as old china
The chrome violet and white label of Los Cardos Malbec from
Stupendous, Andes-fronting Mendoza
Vida: The only Western Atlantic blue lobster I’ve ever seen was being
boosted out of a trap on the lobster house dock in Cutler, Maine
In Brittany blue lobsters are almost the norm
In Waziristan all blues are uncommon
At the time of the Council of Trent, mid-sixteenth century, the cult of
the saints fervidly generated new subjects for feast days
That meant work for painters like Juan Sánchez Cotán from a Church
that was then to painting and sculpture as academic creative writing
departments are to writers now
Sánchez Cotán’s paintings improved dramatically after he became a
Carthusian and gave up talking
Johann Gottfried Tulla, b. 1777 in Karlsruhe, “rectified” the Rhine
between Basel and Worms from 354 kilometers to 273 kilometers and
in the process moving so much earth devastated the river course’s
unfettered environment
Circus aeruginosus, the Eurasian northern marsh harrier, will pass prey
from one parent to the other, the returning male drops it in midair
and the female rises from the nest to catch it
Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s sonatas for violin and continuo with
their strange lingering chords enabled by scordatura, his special tuning
of the violin
Vida: Bound sooner or later for significant places not yet visited
Palmanova, Ottawa, Bergen, Rio, Melbourne, Ann Arbor, Mumbai
and Isfahan
But entering a Boots on Tottenham Court Road is the same
experience as walking into a Rite-Aid on K Street
As seen approaching Chartres, the Île-de-France is tidier but more
cluttered now than a generation ago with the paysage going suburban
Disegno means both drawing and design, plan, scheme, intention,
The world’s awesome complexity of trade, risk and betterment
Repeats in time, era after era, and in locale after locale around the
And whenever the human thrust slows from famine, all-out war,
collapse, the silence of recovery takes over rapidly
When interconnected trade and commerce collapse, all are left to their
own devices
With no factory-produced crockery after the Romans left Britain,
fundamental technologies like the potter’s wheel did not return there
for nearly three centuries
Without the three Roman urban virtues—garbage collection,
sewerage systems, and clean, plentiful water—Britain again became
filthy and hygienically dangerous
Samuel Barber’s highly syncopated Piano Sonata, Op. 26, with its
contrapuntal augmentation, inversion, retrograde, stretto
Introduced by Vladimir Horowitz in concert in 1950
Gleb Ivanov played it here last night, followed by Rachmaninoff’s
“Observing dogs and small children is as close to worship as I
come”—John Bennett
We are wherever we are, and we work out life from there
Self-defining in the manner of the truth of Celan’s “all poets are Jews”
Disegno contro Colorito
Shredded cabbage cooked with butter and nutmeg
Chukotka’s landscape, as its short green summer begins now, must be
a darkening dead gray when fully under snow
Blue Car
There is a theory that says when you drive the blue car into the sun, the
other world will fill it with gasoline and you can get there without having
to leave your vehicle. Study the previous sentence to find the road map.
The spare tire in the trunk has nothing to do with universal consciousness
and the steady skill of rebuilding it into a sleek and powerful engine to
cross the stars. The steering wheel used to have the duty of combing
God’s hair. Bringing faith into this says you should be riding a bicycle
instead. There is a theory that says when you turn around and drive it
into the moon, you must have your license in hand because the crater
never welcomes vehicles in reverse.
What if the driver wants to walk? The blue car was parked outside for
several days and was broken into one night and the classic eight-track
player was stolen, though no one could resell it because they didn’t
know what it was. There is a theory that commands an understanding
of the choice of a blue car, model unknown, and how it influenced
literary movements that kept the imagination running at full speed, the
loneliness of this obvious to the pedestrian that refuses to get into the
car when it pulls over and the driver says, “Get in”.
Sleeping belly of Rimbaud glistens with yesterday’s sperm recalculating
how long it takes to live one hundred years of crime and ambition—
mistakes making him spring for the window, a black starfish spreading
among the blasted believers. A release, an explosion, the spill invented
to spark the tectonic rock that cracks the spirit and makes it a category
in a tangle of vines where the day drinks beside the trusting child.
Elephant delicate, the cry seems whitewashed, destroyed by a long
struggle to find an orphaned realm—the peach belonging in the scream
destined for heaven’s pyramid, two nuns following the boy into the gap
between the ribs and the obsession of roaming legs.
Funny the Mushrooms
There are labor camps in the nervous system. The blister opens the
door and sweats onto a tangled network of vines that power the women
in flight from their strawberry yearning. Do you consider yourself an
apparition or merely a fingerprint in an aging file? The hunchbacked
squid was found on page 432. In the pavilion of physics, 432 means
nothing and you can try to figure it out while a woman whispers to you,
“Not by circumference again.”
The piano solo ages with a fine curtain of water that hangs in the air,
each note leading you to whimper as if your secrets are talking to God.
If so, you would reinvent your childhood to include faith in the moon.
Finger a fossil until it comes to life. The father is in consequence but
never in tears. His good foot lights the lamp. Miles away in the country,
there is a hairbrush and a folded letter dated thirty years ago.
Orange Blossom
after Picasso
The deep end of the garden keeps up with the measure of his grief.
So, let’s go see what is happening because no one believes in grief. All
lines removed from the painting. The plate is asleep in the corner, the
peas cheering up. Gouging her teeth into the wound, the bee must be
thinking. The bull and its fight for life in the arena and the bloody soil
going up into the sky. Must be the deep end of the garden trying to
grow despite the clouds dragging across the deserted streets. At the first
shove, the bull’s horn goes through the horse, though its rider will live
for 87 years, his system denying the diversity of trajectories. There are
several starfish crawling on the crimson ground. In the watermelon
slice, they light their tiny lamps.
The Sons
The son of Ulysses never lied. The son of George Custer swam the
river alone. The son of Emily Dickinson hid two dozen of her unknown
poems in an old attic, the manuscript lost to this day. The son of
Mohammed Ali fought the Army draft call and fled the country. The
son of Babe Ruth drank alone. The son of Pontius Pilate ate raw pork
in a room full of whores. The son of Salvador Dali went insane after
staring at the walls of his father’s studio. The son of Gertrude Stein
misspelled a word and was left alone in the parlor. The son of Charlie
Parker never played an instrument. The son of Joan of Arc opened
his mouth and a dove flew inside. The son of Mark Twain drowned
in a river. The son of Virginia Wolf lived a normal life without rivers.
The son of Janis Joplin stayed in Texas. The son of Charlie Chaplin
simply hated movies. The son of Rosa Parks never sat in the back of the
bus. The son of Stalin was never spoken about. The son of the oldest
woman in the Vietnamese village survived the war and came home. The
son of Federico Garcia Lorca is lined up against a wall every decade
and is shot by a firing squad. The son of Frida Kahlo painted bloody
human hearts in his grade school notebook and was punished by the
teacher every day. The son of the anonymous and cleanest politician
in the U.S. Senate will push the final button someday. The son of Jesus
changed the world thousands of years ago without his identity revealed
or anyone noticing the change had been made.
PRESS-SIGN 1 by Bruno Neiva, 2012, mixed media on
press board (110” x 81”)
PRESS-SIGN 2 by Bruno Neiva, 2012, mixed media on
press board (110” x 79”)
what is the sound of worthiness this name that piano choral the vocal
ease of an orange holying up the tree of crashing and how to spell
it what sway what intoning what in the brick of rotated sun what in
mortared opposite fugued to release magical hair spent for wind and
driven days that made men write behold! that made men string sonata
skies mourned in adagios and blues chords as paint fielded dreams
imagining unchained days and nights of flambeaued stars from which
all gaze directed remembrance as if to remember were beginning making
beginning commence as if commencement were not an old string extending
forever into transition this tongued position and the verb
to be
Reading Levi
Primo Levi said dawn came like a betrayer—
And in my dream last night some renewed
dawn of open spaces country a dog
shadows of time unfurled
the moment: innocent—
Awake I think Galapagos
as the word undone
falls from lips of ocean floors
undone to warm-forested bark beetles
chewing chewing chewing
among dead pines without
woodpecker enough
to keep the beetles in check
I think what effort against decline
remembering how
Primo boards his train and later writes
through nevertheless
Nevertheless each mother cooked
for her children
cooked away that last night
cooked and baked and packed a suitcase
and acted as though the next dawn
would be like every other
through days in which
she had so far lived and loved
Speed Ratios
1. Speed Ratio
Houses and roads are interchangeable alterations of spaces in that
they constitute one continuous chain of speed ratios:
Housing speed to road speed / road speed to housing speed
Thought speed to body speed / body speed to thought speed
Temporal Markers
THOUGHT-BODY back room
paved edge
front room
flat arch
The spouses of premonitions oscillate within the imagined fingertips
of syncopated destiny:
front room
bent road
back road
side room
The premonitions of espousals oscillate within the imagined toegrips
of syncopated choices:
It’s only an illusion that we seem to be in one space more than another
at a given point in the continuum. (SPLITHER)
The visceral need to dream during sleep is the organism’s tether to
the speed ratio dialogue. I saw an actress perform last night within a
rectangle marked by four green rose leaves. She had arrived without
any prior rehearsal or familiarity with the stage. During her dramatic
enactment, she was utterly absorbed in the performance. I asked her
afterwards if she remembered what it was that marked the boundaries
of the stage. She remembered exactly where those boundaries were and
what kind of plant marked those border points.
2. 10:00 a.m. Splice
the tethering
slippages of
the instant
raindrops massed
and splatter
as impassible—
on a slick roof
a potted
black space
whip off
3. Rest Stops (with sung acceleration)
I was in a movie theater. The person at the counter said, “It’s two
dollars.” I opened my wallet and he reached in and took two one-dollar
bills. The woman with me went ahead and found a seat. I walked into
the theater, which was fairly narrow, but (as it turned out) long. They
were showing a black and white film. It was an old favorite, but it didn’t
in any way seem familiar. I stood in the aisle, mesmerized by a woman
knitting with both hands and feet. The bed covering had little beads
that flickered and glowed as she knitted.
I was climbing some wooden beams in a building under construction. I
had to walk on a narrow board while only being able to grip one other
narrow board above me and then walk towards a very narrow entrance.
I was suddenly back in a version of Lynbrook. I recognized the streets
and buildings, though they were not exactly the same. I walked around
on the streets and ordered a dish of fried eggplant that was like an
impanema. I can walk back into the dream and keep walking around.
Waking up makes me wonder how the palpable textuality of the city
could have been an illusion.
shaking out my umbrella
hundreds of tiny worlds
4. The Trolley Problem
“and then a Plank in Reason, broke”—Emily Dickinson
Still puzzled at the pull
of affections and fate, and how
it could have turned out otherwise,
I sketch tiny skeins of
elongated figures in dirt,
obsessing over the trolley
problem: five strangers and an aging,
stocky man who is my identical twin
tied down in a splayed diversion
of Philippa Foot’s high noon.
The odd part is this trolley
won’t move until all
their friends, the ones tempted to serve
as replacements, have gathered
to watch: Of all unlikely candidates,
how did I end up throttling
the switch? And I have no answer,
malicious or benign, for them.
I can imagine the decibels
of track, but not the screeches
of disbelief as I jerk the lever,
laughing to myself: it doesn’t
do any of the five a favor
for me to kill my twin.
The rules demand that one
random survivor replace
these fingers at the switch
and I pivot and replace him or her
in the curve of survivors awaiting
the acceleration of the next
standing-room-only trolley,
the jostling whispers of its passengers
athwart their private tribulations.
Footnote 1: If one’s mother is tied as the single person on the second
track, then most people will choose the death of five strangers on track
number one, though with notable, single-minded exceptions. Norman
Bates, for instance, if presented with this binary, would say, “What five
people?” as he kept his thumb pressed tightly to track number 2.
Footnote 2: Sometimes this problem is described in terms of a situation
created by a “mad philosopher,” who has tied six people to a track, five
of whom are strangers and one of whom is a friend of the person at the
switch. But how is it that the person at the switch has gained the trust
of the Mad Philosopher so that that person can control the switch? In
fact, if I am the one at the switch, how is that I have allowed the Mad
Philosopher to tie people to the track?
5. The Gradients of Seclusion
I dreamed I was in a bakery shop and there was a large cherry pie. The
baker urged me to take a large piece. I could have as much as I wanted.
As I cut into the pie, the cherries in the pie glowed exuberantly.
I dreamed that I walked into a multi-story building in Redondo Beach.
I was supposed to go to room 374, but it wasn’t on the third floor. I
walked down a couple of hallways past cubicles where people were
talking in a thoughtful, lively manner. Many of the employees
were women, and they were smart. Then I got to the office. It had huge
glass walls and the ocean waves rolled right under the flooring. I could
see an old pier less than a hundred yards away. Afterwards, I went to
the parking lot, but don’t remember that part, although the next night
I had a dream of an underground parking lot, where I was frightened
by a stranger.
Everyone’s fate is a miniscule variant:
Jellyfish zombies yearn to suck
the insides of wetsuits into a milk
shake container. Stir rapidly and serve.
The future perfect tense imagines
this is real. You’ve never tested
yourself on syntax in a dream?
“I’ll take Jack Spicer for $300” I told
the game show host. The peer
panels flipped like those old
railroad terminal announcement
cards. A young raccoon at dawn
saunters towards the rain
gutter. Most vertebrates
can squeeze along a labyrinth,
if the interstitial squeezes back.
On My Valentine
Its velvet paw requires
always more water. Its mitt, its lip.
Tough as the pile on its russet hide.
It died, for instance, of neglect and was
Replaced with itself.
From a distance, it moved like
an animal. Up close, it drank
what it was given.
Flowering, furred foot. This creature—
—wavers between its self, self-canceling
like thirst and the drought it takes in, eases.
On Safety
The table rests inside sunlight.
Its forms are of stillness.
It wants to repeat itself, lit and warm.
To repeat, meaning: to prove its stability.
and therefore to prove that it is objective.
A table would strive to evince safety.
Safety, intrinsic in the thing that does not move.
The table’s four legs are objective because each repeats the other—
static and objective.
Safety overcomes the wish, what wish, overcomes any wish.
Repeated enough, the wish is the transformation
that creates proof. Safety is better than the movement
that evades danger. It is replicable.
The table’s dispassionate surface absorbs sunlight as sunlight shifts
throughout the day.
To be at the site of absorption. To be, and not to move to it.
On Diaspora
What is birth but the force of diaspora.
The child is forced from the mother’s body,
pushes its umbilicus away.
Fog is pouring through a crack in the hillside.
Pouring literally.
Wet; subject to gravity; squeezed by its boundaries.
Milk, too, is a dispersal.
The sweetness of it sticky, and yet the breast is not entitled to know
to which mouth its nutrients will go.
The whiteness that feeds us
fattens time, so that each margin of growth divides over
and over. It nurtures itself and so goes away, but not entirely.
If we can swallow or pass through it, it is diaspora.
RIO RIMAC by Ines Vega, 2000
graphite on paper (48” x 32”)
AMANECER by Ines Vega, 2009, charcoal, pastel,
and acrylic on canvas (60” x 55”)
EL CIELO by Ines Vega, 2007, graphite on paper (48” x 43”)
LA MAGA by Ines Vega, 1997, graphite on paper (51” x 34”)
You whisper as if this dirt
weighs nothing and underneath
the way darkness sifts for rain
once the Earth moves alongside
fondles each footstep
that is not evening
—in your low voice
an ancient sky is brought to life
as still more stars
holding on to one another
unable to crawl between
these two small stones kept together
for this hillside against your shoulder
and helpless to lift your face
in the same breath.
As if this dirt still childlike
was something new in the world
not yet the powerful side to side
and you could walk slowly uphill
the way each breeze is cradled asleep
—you wrap these stones with a mask
that is not a grave —closer and closer
they follow behind one another
tugging you somewhere that weighs
nothing —you don’t plant anymore
though your arms move softly
as you wait for the stones
and whatever they can still lift
—every Spring is filled with dirt
and one hand already hillside
—even now you open your arms
and the emptiness, by instinct, sways
with her footsteps facing the others.
Though there’s no boat the rain
waits among the waves
the way every bridge faces the ocean
then leaps into rock once water
used to tides and the stench
from a small stone wearing out
smoldering, half cinders, half
as if it was bathing her cheeks
over and over in this shallow path
remembered only as your shadow
holding down a single splash
—nothing drifts off, all these years
heading nearer to the bottom, sifting
beneath her lips for coastline
for seabirds then arms and feet and kisses.
Smile Inn
When the tractor-trailer pounds past her, she sits down in the dust, her
face wet from tears, and cries, “fuck you, asshole.” Cars are passing,
occasionally, some are beginning to turn on their lights. She holds up
her thumb. As loud as she can, she shouts, chokes out, “Fuck you. Fuck
you. Fuck all of you, you fucking, fucking assholes.” She’s sobbing, she
mumbles, “please, please, please, please, please.”
One chicken was still alive, bleeding from the neck in the chicken yard,
when he went out to close in the chickens for the night. He brought
down the spade on her neck and severed her head. He could smell the
skunk, it had taken the heads off the other birds to drink their blood,
and torn open their bodies to eat their insides. He shouted and threw
the shovel into the air like a spear, and then he walked back to the
house. The back door to the adobe house stuck in its thick frame, when
he jerked it open he saw his ancient mother fighting to close the front
door on a white girl who was struggling and pleading with her. He took
both his mother and the girl by the arm, said, “Madre, en su!”
A girl moved in and her parents moved in, small neighborhood and
frame houses rented by people without much money in spite of what
they did in their lives from day to day you sometimes couldn’t tell, a
handpainted sign said plumbing and drain jetting. They parked their
cars and trucks in front of the small houses in the ruts in the dirt parking,
it goes around two trees and two bushes, there must be a tricycle out
there, maybe it has a broken wheel. The man worked in a warehouse,
not a good job but not a bad job, he was good with a forklift but it
looks like he needed another job like he needed two jobs. The daughter
looked tough with a blank look of mistrust like the start of something
inside her that would always be there, she would have to go to school
nonetheless, she was the first girl Bruno knew up close as a young boy.
He knew he’d be made to show her the necessary things about school
and the life around there, he didn’t want to but it excited him in a way
he liked, it must be sexual as a neighbor and she was a girl, last year he
would be holding hands with a girl but he didn’t want to hold hands
with the neighbor, he didn’t like how fat she was. Her father didn’t
talk when he saw Bruno or when he saw Bruno’s parents the man was
shy and it seemed like there was disappointment in his life, he nodded
a little when he saw Bruno’s father or mother. His wife didn’t like to
talk, she would look away and not into your eyes like her husband only
looked into people’s eyes for an instant with his little nod, both had a
lot on their minds near the bottom with not much money like most
people in the small neighborhood the houses were close together with
no pattern, you might see some vegetables in a small garden more likely
there would be random weeds. The daughter was called Becka.
Bruno’s mother started the business of walking to school with Becka,
she said it would be a nice thing she told Becka’s mother it was a good
idea, Bruno’s mother was just trying to be nice to the new neighbors.
Becka’s mother agreed it was a good idea, the two women smoking a
cigarette at the table, Bruno would walk to the school bus with Becka
for three blocks. On the way he didn’t talk to her and she didn’t talk,
she could walk to the school bus by herself, she knew what a school bus
looked like but what was the point, you might as well walk to the bus
together if it was your mother’s idea it wasn’t worth it for either of them
they just walked to the bus together, what was the difference. Later they
walked home together sometimes they said something for instance they
talked about buying cigarettes or candy at the drug store with their
lunch money, Bruno said they should skip lunch. Becka didn’t want to
skip lunch, she liked to eat lunch, but she also liked to eat candy and she
liked to smoke cigarettes, they could use Bruno’s lunch money and they
could use the money they made from turning in the empties Becka stole
from the truck that filled the soda machine at the drug store, until the
driver of the truck slammed on his brakes one time out the window he
yelled who do you think pays for those, it looked like that was the end
of the candy for Becka but her friends still bought her cigarettes, Bruno
gave her candy.
Bruno had his own friends later he was with them and Becka knew a
group of kids, sometimes their cars were at her house. They both got
rides from people they knew with cars the people Becka knew drove
their crazy cars fast under the viaduct, sometimes they turned their
headlights off and left them off for one or two reckless seconds. Becka
and another girl were caught stealing pills from the girl’s mother, both
were taken to juvenile court, the girl had to go to reform school for the
rest of the year but Becka got off, instead she got tattoos up and down
her arms. Bruno was standing in the dirt outside the chain-link fence
beyond the school parking lot smoking with the others, there was Becka
with her friends, Bruno smiled with his lips when she looked Becka just
blew smoke out her nose, she reached into a boy’s shirt pocket for his
Bruno had his own car by then it was his senior year after all of that he
agreed Becka could ride with him to school. In the car he saw her hand
on the car seat with its white fingers, Bruno put his hand on Becka’s hand,
with his other hand he flipped his cigarette out the open window, when
he looked, Becka was looking out the window on her side. Bruno left
his hand on hers until it was time to shift the car into another gear when
he looked down she had put her hand somewhere else, he said what’s
up, he was driving her to school. He waited until he was in fourth gear
Bruno reached across he tried to hold Becka’s hand instead he grabbed
her wrist, Becka was strong enough though she pulled her wrist free she
said pay attention to the road asshole. Bruno was pissed, he said fuck
you, holding her hand would have made him feel better about the easy
sex he got from a heavy girl, but he didn’t want that to stop, holding
hands wasn’t worth it. Bruno wondered if she made it easy for others
besides him, he knew it wasn’t a question though and that made him
feel bad, but what was he supposed to do, about the people she had as
so-called friends. It was too bad about Becka, she never watched her
weight when Bruno saw her at least the baggy clothes she wore lately
made her look better somehow someone must have given her advice
like she didn’t care about her weight at least she cared about her looks.
What did all of that mean about Bruno though Bruno bought Becka a
carton of cigarettes to be nice then he didn’t give her the cigarettes.
Bruno’s parents went to the Smile Inn with Becka’s parents when he
was in high school he would meet them there sometimes at the Smile
Inn next to the printer where Bruno’s father worked, after work, low
building made of painted cinder blocks a row of glass blocks across the
front made the Smile Inn dark inside. The bartender always wore a
bow-tie when Bruno saw him he gave Bruno a smile like he knew he
could card him if he wanted to. They met two women at the Smile
Inn who came into their lives drinking beer at the next booth there, the
women turned and said something funny based on sex and there would
always be that humor between the four people and the two women.
Both women were named Betty when they got up one of them was over
six-feet tall, six-five and a very thin woman, she had a private smile that
seemed to say she had special knowledge or a secret. Tall Betty was
not her name of course it was natural to distinguish her from the other
Betty though if she heard someone call her that she would simply look
at him with her eyes. The other woman was also tall she was called
Betty Tobacco nearly six-feet tall but not thin, she said something to
her friend, Bruno heard part of a sentence, —wish you didn’t always—.
After that they saw the Bettys at the Smile Inn from time to time Bruno
was there. Bruno looked at Tall Betty at the next booth, Betty had a
tattoo of her own, Bruno saw a tattoo, something small he couldn’t tell,
it was on the back of her hand. Betty Tobacco touched her on the hand,
nodded in Bruno’s direction, Betty turned with her private smile, Bruno
tried to smile back with a small smile, looked away when he looked back
Betty was still looking at him, same smile. Bruno’s father wanted to
make a joke he said what’s going on here. Betty Tobacco said careful
Bruno, don’t lock eyes with her, Betty was still looking at Bruno, Bruno
was looking back, trying to look back. Sometimes the Bettys said things
to Bruno the others might not understand, Betty Tobacco said, streets
are uneven when you’re down. This easy relationship made Bruno’s
parents happy Bruno was on his own terms with the two women like
friends from school. One time Becka was at the Smile Inn sometime
later after she ran away, Betty brought her back from a house in the
valley. Bruno caught Becka’s eye, they looked each other in the eye for
one instant when the Bettys got up to leave he saw Tall Betty bend
down and say something to Becka, Becka looked up for a second, and
barely smiled.
Bruno saw the Bettys with his parents, he saw the Bettys with his parents
and their friends, Becka’s parents, sometimes they watched a football
game on the television screen at the Smile Inn, sometimes they talked
about people the Bettys didn’t know, they would try to explain and the
Bettys would try to understand, there might be a joke involved. The
Bettys had lives of their own before they met Bruno’s parents, they
talked but they would only go so far, Betty Tobacco started to describe
a complicated family, two brothers she mentioned seemed to be Tall
Betty’s brothers she said a bad car crash meant television and some
other minor things for one of the brothers in a room at the state hospital
later somehow that seemed to turn some of them against each other,
Betty stopped her with a quiet voice though she said we don’t talk about
that, do we, after she said that she reached and laid her hand on Betty
Tobacco’s hand she said Betty and I love two things, we love to ride
horses and we love to drink beer. Bruno tried to picture the Bettys on
horses. They saw the Bettys at the Smile Inn or they might call they
might meet up somewhere, the four adults went to a yard sale with the
Bettys, they came back with garden tools and the Bettys came back with
canning supplies.
The Bettys came to Bruno’s house, Bruno stopped on his way down the
stairs on his way out to drive off in his car somewhere, Betty Tobacco
saw Bruno on the stairs she said look who’s here. Bruno’s father got
the Bettys a beer, baseball was on the television, turned down low. Tall
Betty said come sit down and have a beer with us Bruno, Bruno wouldn’t
mind a beer of course the beer was a joke nonetheless he said sure,
why not, the Bettys sitting on the couch Tall Betty caught Bruno’s eye,
dropped her eyes down, at the empty place next to her on the couch,
Bruno moved one foot then decided to sit in the chair across from them,
across from the Bettys, looked up and Betty was looking at him with her
private smile. Bruno listened to the adults talk, their lives, the Bettys’ life
and his parents’ life, Betty Tobacco said we lived in Omaha. Bruno’s
mother had been to Omaha but there was something the Bettys couldn’t
get across, like you can never get across something about your life in a
conversation with other people. Bruno’s father didn’t know what to say
about Omaha he said we lived in New Jersey. Betty Tobacco said we
wouldn’t go back to Omaha though. Tall Betty touched her friend’s leg
she said, Betty.
Bruno saw the Bettys together walking on the sidewalk downtown, he
had his hands in his jean pockets across the street unless the Bettys saw
him unless they waved or called his name he wouldn’t cross the street.
Betty Tobacco rubbed her cheek on Betty’s sweater for a scratch and
Betty put her gentle hand on Betty Tobacco’s head, then pushed her
head away. Betty Tobacco laid her head on Tall Betty’s arm and left
it there until Tall Betty put her arm around Betty Tobacco’s shoulder,
she was gentle and she pushed her away to walk beside her. Or if
they saw him he would walk with them on the sidewalk, they passed a
department store, with parking on top of the building up a ramp they
passed a dime store. The Bettys might joke with Bruno, irony for the
sake of a bond they would ask him for a cigarette or they might give
him one. But Bruno made sure he took another route after he saw the
Betty’s walking on the sidewalk across the street the Bettys turned the
corner then Becka turned the corner one step behind them.
Bruno wondered where they lived, the Bettys described an area on the
edge of the city, small houses again but set back from the street up along
a steep hill of dirt erosion instead of front yards, a young guy named
Elton rented an apartment in the Bettys’s garage on the side of the
house they said the garage might slide off the side of the hill, you could
see the cement of the foundation from the erosion down the hill, it was
a joke about the neighborhood between the Bettys, how could you even
get a car up to the garage. Bruno was with Betty Tobacco, he wanted
to know where they lived. Betty Tobacco said, you know where we live
but Bruno wanted to know which house, he said sometime he might be
in the area. Betty Tobacco finally decided to write it down for him.
Bruno stands on the Bettys’ porch on the side of the street like other
brick houses seem to slide down the hill toward the street, it’s the same
erosion down from the Bettys’s covered porch with a roof and painted
posts hold it up at the two corners, the ones in the middle on both sides
of the steps not so much, when he grabs one it moves at the bottom
sometime it could break loose, it makes Bruno lose his balance and
stumble onto the porch. An exercise bike is up against a railing on the
porch and plants in pots spread out in a line along the house, Bruno
looks and the garage next to the house has a door with a door-mat where
Elton lives and a plant in a pot next to his door on a wooden pallet the
plant might not make it, a go-cart on a sheet of plywood and tools are
on the plywood greasy and out in the weather. Bruno doesn’t know if
the doorbell works on a house like this sometimes it’s broken, you can
hear it inside if it rings though he pushes the button but he doesn’t hear
the bell, he hears a big dog barking and it keeps barking when Betty
Tobacco opens the door she has the dog by the collar pulling back at
its barking she says, be quiet, looks up from holding the dog she sees
Bruno, Betty Tobacco doesn’t say anything finally she says hi, Bruno.
Tall Betty comes out of another room sees Bruno she says give me the
dog and she takes the dog out two glass sliding-doors, cement patio and
some green grass and a green bush and a cinder block wall goes around
the short yard, the dog is out there now. Bruno walks into the house
into the living room, Tall Betty says come in Bruno, she seems to be
wiping her hands on a towel or a paper towel from the kitchen puts the
towel on the brown television cabinet and she picks up something like
mail there and Tall Betty is looking through the mail for something to
say she asks how are your parents. It’s a strange thing to ask. Plants are
in the room in a long square planter like bricks from the house divide
the large room and a spider plant hanging in a pot from the ceiling with
newspapers and junk from the mail on a coffee table and some art on
the walls like native masks Bruno sees a poster of a bullfight from Spain,
a photo in a frame shows two young guys who look the same but one of
them is standing up and the other one is sitting in a modern wheelchair
with his fingers on the wheelchair controls and his head is bent sideways.
A comfortable bed in the dining room or the room behind the square
planter, he thinks dining room but he sees the small bed made up with
colorful blankets all messed up and a pillow for sleep, next to the bed
there’s a chair with familiar clothes on it and underwear and everything,
on the floor by the bed white towels piled in a heap, Bruno recognizes
Becka’s sneakers with socks stuffed in them. Betty Tobacco turns away
from Bruno she says I’ll be right back, I’m on the phone, walks away
into a hallway into another part of the house she puts a mobile phone
to her ear. Tall Betty is watching Bruno from the doorway to another
room, Bruno notices Tall Betty is watching him he puts his hands in
his jean pockets looks back at her, Bruno decides to smile a small smile,
Betty is looking back at him, he sees the kitchen counter behind her.
She turns and goes into the kitchen like an invitation to Bruno to follow
her in there. Bruno gives it a few seconds. In the kitchen is a small table
with metal legs and a plastic laminate top, four chairs, metal legs and
padded seats. Becka is sitting in one of these chairs, she has on pajamas
like a night gown and she’s holding a tiny baby up against her chest
with her tattooed arms, the tiny baby is nursing from her breast, Becka
looking down at the nursing baby. Across from Becka a young guy with
tattoos of his own is sitting leaning back balanced on two metal legs of
the chair. Betty roughly pushes his back until he lands down on all four
legs of the chair, she says don’t lean back on the chair Elton. Bruno
stands in the small kitchen, no one says anything, there’s the sound of
the small baby sucking and making small sounds. Finally Bruno decides
to leave, he looks at Betty. She’s doing some things putting some things
in the kitchen cabinets and he just takes one more look at Becka.
Betty Tobacco is coming out of the hallway as Bruno walks through
the living room toward the front door to leave. She says, what did you
expect, Bruno?
FIRE STATUE by Guy R. Beining, 2001
acrylic on paper (17” x 14”)
IRAQ WITHOUT WINDOWS by Guy R. Beining, 2003
acrylic on paper (24” x 18”)
COURTING NIGHT’S PUZZLE by Guy R. Beining, 2003
acrylic on paper (10” x 8”)
THE END IN LATVIA by Guy R. Beining, 2002
acrylic on paper (30” x 22”)
felt tongue
go with
& return
with urn
of powdery
so narrow
in fourteen
on a tray.
gowns swish
in red light,
in degrees
of silver bubbles,
& in a liquid space
felt tongue
to be packaged
or put
on a hook,
(with a note
about cleaning up)
between gilded
cages, being aware of
no one,
threading glove
with thumb
in place.
felt tongue
i enter time
as mist, one
mask over another.
the question is
to avoid the thread
as if it were
a gloomy insect,
as if a trembling
insect far out
on a leaf
was pulling out
all the questions
while all the beginnings
were wired to the head.
iron works of
the day were in
the refrigerator,
but there was no
strength in moving
being silent as a mirror,
reflecting a spotless leaf.
The lamp post at the end of this small road
expects more than I can offer—a collection
of brass buttons or buffalo nickels—
to buy passage to the inverse mountain
that lies beneath. And the rain, with its
oblique amulet, offers my empty hands
no hopeful conjuring at all.
The San Andreas fault whispers a subtle light
(not far from here) that ripens fruit on trees—
oranges, apples, and the impossible almonds—
but offers no clue to overthrow
the fortress of lamp post light.
The fruit of a lamp post is light,
but the road it guards squeezes open
only within the threads of darkness
that hold the light together.
When an Ife blacksmith anneals with
the blood of a mamba, he knows he can
hammer out a pike stronger and more
elegant than fear, the dark snake poison
a reaching hand into the forge’s fire.
I would penetrate the alphabet with that pike,
beat each letter into a rune, and with them
build streets of filigree balconies
in the rowdy quarters of New Orleans.
Buried fire is still fire, whether we can see it
or not. And the day of its arrival
will lift us with a fury that cleans
language of all meaning as it
burns the flesh right off our bones,
making obsolete every false precept
of love, history, and our vain alchemy.
BURGHERS by Ellen Wilt, 2014
graphite pencil drawing with collage (40” x 60”)
Deaths in Tangled Light
In phosphorescence, ghosts
write lists and ponder their anxieties.
They prick ears to second-hand
eavesdropping, obsess on body hair,
pluck one banality for another.
Your ghost will bio-illuminate, become
an LED billboard blinking its variations
too quickly for motorists to read
all the way through—too much, too little.
It sparks with moving static, cranes
long glowing neck parts purple and gold,
so bright I can forget my own crashes.
Torments, faulted by grace and virtue,
bring your immortal vapors, your bottled
creams. Soothe battles cells lose repeatedly.
The Blossom Eased Against the Pane
After a Sunset of Green Marble, the Moonrise was Grass-colored
as He had promised. He is sliding nearer You, His Back to the Moon,
His Hands a Tiny Blaze. Room after Room, in the Air so Green.
Room after Room, His Hands a Tiny Blaze. He is sliding nearer You,
His Back to the Moon, His Hands a Tiny Blaze.
And your Eyes two torn Leaves He circles because He is a Dog.
A Dog black behind the Dark Net of Branches strangled with Vines.
Vines into which You once dipped one tired Wing. He is sliding
nearer You,
His Back to the Moon, His Hands a Tiny Blaze.
You stand now in the same Room with Him, bent above
the Steam Beds.
The Beauty of Green Stones lay in the second Room yet it’s only
a Floor.
The third is a Low-Ceilinged Maze of Trees in the Air still so Green.
Room after Room, your trembling Body of almonds baked
in Silver Paper.
Or trapped beneath your Clothes, Clothes of colored Grass
& Silver Paper. The Moon of colored Grass even as He promised You,
sliding nearer You. His Hat casts its silly Shadow upon a Steeple Clock
trapped beneath Your Clothes. The Steeple Clock casts its
generous Shadow
upon the Garden below.
The Garden casts its modest Shadow upon his House and upon
his Hours.
Where They fall these Shadows are a Tiny Emerald Blaze, a Spark
of Calyxes.
He casts His Shadow far across a Weeping Silver Woman. Nothing
is stolen
save the Whiteness of her Skin.
Light’s Door shut upon the Edge of Her Blossom, bolted
from the Outside. A latticed & humane Bed, dirty Yellow Bed
blown into the center of the Street. A Bed wide as a Man
and nailed shut at the very Top with her Blossoms.
I fear for that dreaded Neck beneath her Glass Head.
Her Glass Head framed against Narcissus & Anemone
& Nicotine Smoke.
He is sliding nearer You, His Back to the Moon, His Hands
a Tiny Blaze.
Room after Room, in the Air so Green.
His Back to the Moon, His Hands a Tiny Blaze.
The Red Hook
A decent Distribution System would be a good beginning
to a Wedding”
thought the Panther as he penetrated the Church Girl’s Defenses.
“Nothing’s better
than telling the Old Bones to get lost, and Rifles don’t care
and eventually they will wear.”
The Church Girl alone on her Porch
had once been a local Panther Priestess,
and there sleeping still upon her Chest
was a Baby Panther, where her Bible
used to hang upon a Red Hook.
The Church Girl continued stealing & selling Rifles,
stealing & selling Apples, but she dreams of the Panther
breathing deeply halfway up the Apple Tree,
his warm Breath moving the Leaves.
A Panther is singing out there in the Apple Blossoms
at the very Top of the Tree. The Panther worries an Apple
out from the corner of the Church Girl’s Eye
and penetrates its Defenses.
“Nothing is better than telling the Old Bones to get lost,
and the Rifles don’t care, and eventually they will wear,”
said the Church Girl as she carried an Apple across her Porch,
breathing in the Scent of the Apples and the Panther.
And there sleeping still upon her Chest
was a Baby Panther, where her Bible
used to hang upon a Red Hook.
The Panther retired to Country Airs
and simultaneously removed the Apples, and now
the Panther didn’t need to hurry
towards that distant Porch. It was now an Apple Tree
and so very still, though the Leaves were moving yet.
An Astonishment of Butterflies
Once upon a Choking Desire, there existed our Grandmother with some
biscuits in the forest you can see right over there. She took a path to a
longer path and to an even longer path that led to an open door, but a
gruff voice (which lived in the forest you can see right over there) called
out “Who’s there?” and our Grandmother stopped and she listened
for a short time that led to a longer time and to an even longer time in
which butterflies having lingered far too long in that open door, caught
a chill and shook themselves to pieces onto a piece of bread just in time
for lunch.
The Lynx-Eyed Bride
Once upon a mildewed beach, the Lynx-Eyed Bride strolled with her
wet baggage toward home and a chilling plate of boiled clams. She was
quite wise and very capable as used-up persons go, and so she gave a
little rhyming speech to the ocean as she struggled along…
“Explanations are so domestic,
And choices ruin each day.
I’d rather be a schoolmarm…”
And then her mouth just blew away.
i got a job at last i’ll be gainfully employed as a deaf scribe to a mute
poet some menial philosophical duties are also involved but those only
while am on my unremunerated vacation which starts today i’m told my
periodically paid compensation is a little iffy its amount depending on
whether Anaximander had ever organized dwarf throwing orgies or
was almost gay by self suggestion
i kept not having this dream about termagant eukaryotes & of you on
top multiscrewing by division this no dream of you i had skimming
swallow-like in no direction daintily shanghaied on the last seaworthy
driftpain on earth & the true son of Ishmael pisspainting on a Baltimore
hickdive floor sawdust life deathsigns i guess reverse engineering applied
to your sidestepped demise never worked
UNTITLED by Wayne Hogan, 2014
collage, mixed media
Inquiries Overgrown
Virginia’s guise has shifted from an alarm to a doll
migration has brought imagination neatly
dried & well-bred, red-hot & undisguised, soiled &
taken down / an honest heart craftily three-score
several times, to her consternation, his brain had given
place to fortune, inquiries overgrown with apprehension
this news has gone to decay
shall we pretend the sky killed our pool of blood?
my liberty is drawing toward silence
a season’s crime cudgeled into a deep sleep
prayers thus amazed saw each new face in my eyes
I don’t have a stick to burn against this cold... what if
Portugal’s history asks about me? What then?
Five Explanations for Broken Breath
We develop in the space between revolving and breath.
Eric Baus
1. You should know, I lied about the existence of wolves on Jupiter. My
body isn’t a map—isn’t a planet of frozen lightning. My hips aren’t a
convergence—aren’t the books you keep at your bedside.
2. I read Poet in New York to remind myself of the burnt pupil you keep in
your back pocket. I bury my sternum—I bury my bookshelf-lung—in
the fur of fourteen brown eyes.
3. A passage from Breton’s Alien History of the Printing Press: “Dream owl:
although the significance is largely dependent upon the shape of the
eyelid meeting the tongue, it often, though sometimes never, means to
cut the photos out of every book your third lover ever owned.”
4. I once spent four days contemplating how I’d destroy your dinner
table, if asked. The plan involves invoking the spirit of the nineteenth
moon god.
5. Last night, the sage of everyone I’ve ever known settled onto my
Dear Mother: A Dream
Dear Mother,
I don’t know how to stop your bone
from weeping rosemary.
to teach me science.
I refused.
I’m not sorry I’m stuck
with fire ants and poetics.
I’m not sorry.
A dream:
You keep repeating
Every night I curl
my name in tens.
around Lorca’s bent spine;
he exhales
surrealism and ash.
Dear mother,
if only duende meant
I’d have the right word.
Dear mother,
I’m sorry
Fort Wayne is filled
with melting clocks.
A dream:
your grey hair ignites
and Spanish pours from your mouth.
Those six months were hell.
The hole in your bone
knows your name—
knows every name.
If the body speaks, why can’t I listen?
Dear mother,
I was a sensitive child—
those were the first words you spoke. Dear mother,
your bone wept for seventeen days.
didn’t exist: a dream.
The Place I Want Cold Least
Prudence reads tealeaves through eyeglasses of bent bone. It isn’t for
vision, she tells me; she just wants to see an answer from a part of the
body that can’t lie. We go out for drinks, and she attempts to read my
lifeline from the bottom of my scotch. The glass is empty. My hand, a
branch bending under the weight of freshly grown ice.
She tells me it might mean mispronounced vowels, or maybe it means
my spine is crying. More than likely it has something to do with how the
wind chill affects the body of all creatures, living and dead, in the exact
same way. We all feel the cold first in the place we want it least. I tell
her I see a correlation in the bilabials, hoping to avoid any discussion of
the latter. I’m afraid of the frozen that might sprout from my gut—the
place I want cold least.
It’s cold when Prudence removes her glasses—her bent bone—her
pocketful of frost. My bone—a branch too close to snapping. My
bone, a gut of ice.
the art of narrative
in America
never tell anybody
I believe
what you’re thinking
never tell anybody
outside the family
what you’re thinking
I have nothing to say
outside the family
in a land of ancient cults
I have nothing to say
but I want to say it anyway
in a land of ancient cults
the doors are open
anyway I want to say
you can act
the doors are open
you’re free
you can act
like a man
you’re free
but you don’t have much time
like a man
everybody likes sweet things
you don’t have much time
I’m from my country
everybody likes sweet things
women can be careless
my country is where I’m from
do you have trouble
and children can be careless
do you like
do you have trouble
with women
do you like
will you call me
with women
je ne regrette
will you call me
I believe in
je ne regrette
rien tomorrow
in America
The Violin-Fishers
Shadows of circling seagulls stick to the heated rocks on the bay.
Sleepy seashells blink at naked boys who drag their fishnets to the shore.
Their spines chamber out from their backs like snakes hiding under
the sand. The rope bit into their sunburnt shoulders. In the unfolding
net, along with silver fish and purple crabs, a dozen violins squirm.
Their strings are covered with seaweed and flutter in excitement, gills
discharging on their brown sides, pushing out the remaining salty water
from their bodies. One of the older boys sticks two fingers into a gill,
stretching it open, and shows it to his little brother.
“Look! It’s just like a pussy!” He winks at the kid, and the other boys
start to laugh. Seagulls swoop down to the sand, eye the fish in the net,
but suddenly the sharp sound of a horn scares the birds away. The
fisherboys look back at the road where an old truck is parked, a fat, hairy
hand hanging out the front window, waving for them to hurry up. So the
boys pick up the violins, and run to the truck—they throw the musical
instruments into the hot metal truck bed, where they keep squirming
and jumping. When they rub their bodies together, their strings squeak.
A fat man leans out of the van. Sweat glistens on his round face,
the hairs of his tiny mustache collect the salty drops. His stained yellow
undershirt is like a map leading to nowhere—and the ashes of his
burning cigar keep falling on it. The boys finish with the packing. The
oldest one runs to the driver, who fishes out some greasy money from the
glove compartment and slaps it into the kid’s palm. He nods and turns
the key. The engine roars and the truck disappears over the horizon.
The boys runs back to the shore, where one of the nets still wobbles
with a violin inside.
“Okay, let’s build a fire!” orders the biggest boy, and the other children
scatter along the beach.
“Tonight’s program: Debussy” says a poster in front of the opera
house. A truck drives into the parking lot, and when the driver honks
the horn, musicians in suits arrive, pick up the dried violins, and walk
back into the building.
The driver steps out of the car, stretching and cracking his joints.
Feeling a bit dizzy from the heat, he staggers in the stage door. In his
dressing room, he pulls off his sweaty undershirt, throws it in the corner,
then he opens a closet and takes out an elegant suit. He stubs his cigar
in the ashtray and gels his hair back. Someone knocks on his door.
“Are you ready, maestro?”
And the maestro is ready. There’s an aquarium next to the mirror
with a giant sea urchin inside. Dipping his hand into the water, he pulls
out one of its spines.
In the concert hall the musicians are tuning their new instruments—
some of them are blowing huge sea shells, others are touching the
jellyfish tentacles of a harp. As bows touch strings, the violins come to
life—their gills begin to purge, puking salty water onto the musician’s
shoulders. The audience rumbles as obese women in their choking tight
cocktail dresses, pearls clinking against each other on their huge necks,
turn to their yawning husbands and poke them with sausage fingers.
When the maestro walks to his podium, the sound of clapping rises.
The man bows, then raps the music stand with his baton.
In the meantime, flames rise on the shore, and the fire begins to
chew on some broken oars. The oldest boy is skinning the violin with a
knife. The blood of the instrument drips into the sand. He cuts out the
inedible parts, and throws the gills at the tiny boy next to the fire.
“Here ya go, marry it!” he mocks the boy. “This is the only pussy
you’re ever gonna get!”
The other boys begin to laugh, while tears well up in the corners
of the child’s eyes. He jumps up and runs into the night. The laughter
chases him for a while, then meshes with the roar of the sea’s dark
As the maestro warms up, he sweats, as if he were still sitting in the
truck. The waves of music run at the rocks wrapped in cocktail dresses
and blow into spray of notes. The musical keys turn the husbands on
they grow young again—turning into bronzed boys. As they laugh,
their penises grow hard and ejaculate inside their dinner jackets. White
pearls roll out of their trousers, and their wives begin to chase the small
spheres, trampling each other, eventually becoming entangled in the
boy-nests. The little fishermen sharp each musical note they find in the
“Okay, let’s build a fire!” orders the biggest boy, and they huddle
their seats up. The shells on their chests begin to clap. The wailing of fat
ladies drowns out the sound of the instruments. The maestro perceives
the muddle, but he simply can’t stop conducting, not even when the boys
carry away his podium and throw it on the fire. His baton smolders like
a cigar, but it doesn’t stop at his fingers: soon his whole arm turns to
ashes and drops to the ground.
The boys watch the fire bite into the meat—the cosmic notes of stars
on the mirror of the sea—under the light of the moon the violins swim
in the bay, casting a greenish light under the waves, laying their eggs in
the sludge.
On the other side of the bay, the young boy sits crying on a rock, watching
the distant glow of the instruments. Then he notices something: on the
shore, in the cool sand, a giant dark mound stirs. The boy stands and
sneaks up on it. It’s a beached piano—digging into the sand with its slim
legs. The child watches its wide, gleaming dark side in amazement—its
giant gills open and close continuously, foamy water oozing out on the
sand. The boy extends his tiny hand and touches one of its keys. The
instrument shakes in fear, its legs dig deeper pits into the sand, as it tries
to drag itself back into the water. And then the boy smiles. He sticks two
fingers into its enormous gill, stretching it open.
Colorful tourists arrive—their skins are gleaming with sunscreen—
and take pictures of the beached whale. Photoflashes sparkle.
“Poor, poor thing,” the parents say, while their children throw sand
in the animal’s small, black eyes. They argue and crawl back into their
cars, turning the keys and then disappearing down the roads, while
whale screams come out of their cameras.
Dusk oozes from the sky’s wounds. A wind arrives from the sea,
dancing a poster onto the shore. As it sticks to the heated rocks, the sign
comes legible. Tonight’s program: Debussy. Then the hot stone sets the
paper on fire and it turns to ashes.
The audience arrives. They gather around the whale in dinner jackets
and cocktail dresses. The giant mammal is almost dead—an assembly
of ghosts stirs in its fading dark eye. The recently arrived take their
seats in the sand, waiting for Debussy—scraping the wax out of their
ears, kneading tiny pearls. They hold their breath, and throw the ones
whose hearts are beating too loudly into the water. Then the mouth
of the whale opens: musicians tune their instruments in the animal’s
giant throat-hall. What beautiful acoustics! A lady in the audience pisses
herself upon hearing these semitones. A podium stands on the whale’s
tongue. Shells of hands clap when the maestro arrives. The baton goes
erect in his hand, and finally the show begins: music fills the shore—
levitating above the waves—in distant hotels, cameras in bags begin to
But then, something interrupts the program. The sound of laughter
and whoops, naked boys running between the rocks, yelling, shouting,
their penises lashing against their bare thighs. Knives glitter in their
The maestro grunts angrily, and he signals to the musicians to play
more loudly. But the waves of music can’t wash away the rampage of
the boys. The maestro can’t bear it any longer, and he shouts: “You’re
ruining the performance, you rats! This is Debussy!” He shakes with
anger, but the boys just keep laughing at him. The audience feels ill
at ease, a few ladies die silently in embarrassment, the others, when
they notice the sharp little knives in the boys’ hands, jump up and run
away. The kids doesn’t care about them, they are mocking the maestro,
shouting: “Yoouu’re ruinining the perfomance, this iiiis Debuuusy!”
One of the boys gets an erection, and he begins to sway his cock back
and forth, as if he’s conducting the music. As he rolls his hips the
musicians get confused and the music slides into chaos. The maestro
hits the podium with his baton and it breaks in two. Then he aims at
the boys with his wand, ready to throw it like a dart. (The spines of the
sea urchin are poisonous, causing temporary paralysis. The time before
the poison takes effect is about the same as the length of Debussy’s La
Mer.) He almost throws it, when the whale suddenly closes its mouth.
The boys can hear as the maestro begins to curse inside the animal,
locked in a music-storm. They give the animal a clap, and one of them
shouts: “Come on boys, let’s push it back into the water!”
So they gather around the dying whale, and start to put their shoulders
into the behemoth. The boys’ muscles ache, the animal leaves a deep
gash in the sand as it gets closer and closer to the sea. The withdrawing
waves are helping the kids, and soon the animal’s body spins into the
foam. The boys are waving goodbyes to the whale as it sprays mist into
the dark sky. All of a sudden something blocks its blowhole. It’s the
maestro, he got caught in there, shouting curses, then the animal blows
again, and like a champagne cork he flies into the night sky: “Forgive
me, Debuussyyyy!” And he disappears into the depths.
Morning arrives, all the boys on the beach open their eyes at once.
They stand, stretching as small crayfish fall from their chests. Their
morning wood points at the sea, while they kick away the black remains
of yesterday’s fire. Suddenly, they hear music. It’s coming from the other
side of the bay. The boys grab their knives and begin to run.
After a few moments, they glimpse the broken-legged piano and the
little boy. His tiny fingers are moving on the keys. Sweat is running down
his forehead, and his face shines as he plays. The fisherboys give each
other a flustered look. The little pianist smiles at his brothers victoriously.
They must be very proud of him now. His fingers keep running over
the keys, like the needle legs of a crayfish in the sand. As if he weren’t
controlling his own hands, as if the music were simply nesting itself
under his nails.
But then, the oldest boy yells, his voice is a knife thrust into the pianopiece: “Meat!” And the other boys don’t need any more encouragement:
they charge at the instrument and begin to chop it all up, slicing hunks of
meat from the piano. The little boy is horrified. He wants to scream and
run away, but his legs don’t move. He just keeps his fingers on the keys,
and he plays and plays, while his brothers throw the meat into bloody
mounds, and the instrument slowly disappears beneath his fingers.
UNTITLED by John Digby, 2014
UNTITLED by John Digby, 2014
UNTITLED by John Digby, 2014
UNTITLED by John Digby, 2014
Ministering the Weather
Eight thick components survived: one in me and seven others
mostly alive.
O, we were so green on the day of loss. Not a single wise message
transferred. My
temperate hell was marginal by degrees—a useless gilt frame, a bird
singing wet into eyes,
wilderness missing the open span of a door.
Upward into dark hill, into elliptical recess of night, I dwelled.
Why trend damnation, the sad thing, my whole self revolving
yet missing?
God’s departure beams in the mind. Or he is base.
Snow Amulet, Superscription
As death goes out also this night goes—filled with contrition, radiant—
birds sleep in the day as I slit a path upon the sun. My body organizing
lines of trees, singing wide the bird’s chest in time. I myself am time.
My hands are a kind of weight before me, the sound of flying, perched
reliquaries guiding my horizon.
I’m Reading a Book about a Scarecrow
I’m reading a book about a scarecrow. It’s a long book and the cover is
torn off. There is no title page. I don’t know who wrote it or when. So I
go to the local library and get the reference librarian on the case. He’s
fatter than he was when we were kids. And a lot older. I don’t think he’s
married. He looks like he never goes outside.
“A scarecrow?” He says and breathes out through his mouth. He doesn’t
say “why would anyone read a book about a scarecrow?” but he might
as well have. “Come back after lunch,” he says. I ask him if I can bring
him anything and he holds up a lunch bag and says “got it all right here.
See you in a few.”
I don’t really go anywhere over lunch. I just sit in my car in the library
parking lot. It’s raining a little, and the sound of the rain is good
accompaniment to my memories of the book about a scarecrow. It feels
strange not to be reading it right now. It feels wrong to have left it with
the librarian.
In the last scene I read before coming to the library, the scarecrow is
standing in a field—What else would he be doing I guess?—while the
farm goes on all around him. There is something happening between
the farmer’s wife and a farmer from a few farms over. The scarecrow
notices that the farmer’s wife’s laugh is different every time the other
farmer is around.
There are quite a few grammatical mistakes in the book I’m reading
about the scarecrow. A number of spelling mistakes. At one point it
seems like a whole page or two are missing, but I can’t tell if that’s
supposed to suggest incompletion or fragmentation in the scarecrow’s
life or if it’s just a mistake. It occurs to me that this might not be a
published book at all. That this could be a one-off. Some wannabe
writer or student of scarecrows might have put this together as a project.
I can’t remember where I got this book. If I found it on the sidewalk.
Or if I bought it at a goodwill or Salvation Army. It didn’t come from a
book store. Not in the shape it’s in. And besides, I don’t have the money
to buy new books these days.
After I sit for awhile listening to the rain and thinking, it occurs to me
that my librarian might have something for me by now. So I take a
couple pretzels from the bag I had left on the passenger seat and a sip
of the lukewarm coffee in the cup holder and head back in.
The librarian whose name I just remembered is “Doug” smells like
onions or probably more specifically more like rehydrated formerly
dehydrated onions. Like those in a soup packet. “Hey Doug,” I say and
he looks at me like either his name isn’t Doug or like he doesn’t go by
that in his workplace. And I almost say “sorry” but then say “any luck?”
“Luck?” he says, again insulted. “Yeah I rolled some dice and found
all these books for you. . . I flipped a coin and so happened to discover
the foremost authority on scarecrows and writings about scarecrows. I
wished on an eyelash and suddenly I learned all this.”
“Jeez, Doug, uh. Mr” and because I couldn’t remember his last name I
say “mister mister librarian ... Sir. I didn’t mean ..”
“No worries,” he says, “it’s all good. Not a problem.” And then he points
to all the stuff he’s pulled from the library. Just then I remember that
Doug had a sister who was so beautiful in high school that you couldn’t
think straight when you were around her but the she got pregnant,
moved away and nobody ever saw her again. I want to ask Doug about
his sister but then I think it’s been twenty or more years and who knows
she could be dead for all I know. Or she could look like Doug now. Why
mess with a good memory like that?
“Your book doesn’t exist.” Doug says suddenly and with a bit of triumph
in his voice. “What?” the almost crystal-clear image of Doug’s sister in
her cheerleader uniform fading away instantly.
“It doesn’t exist,” he says again. There is a little piece of spinach or
parsley between his two front teeth. “I looked everywhere and there
is no such book. I even called the library in the city. You should have
heard that librarian laughing. Both of us really. Laughing.”
“But I’ve been reading it for days,” I say “it has to exist.”
“For you maybe,” Doug says, and almost as if he’s gently breaking it to
me that I have dementia, that everything I believe to be true is only an
illusion. I watch Doug’s mouth saying “but all authorities agree ... In the
world of books ... In the real world ... The real world of what IS real,
there is no such book,” and then he hands my book on the scarecrow
back to me and says “sorry.”
I’m still reading the book about the scarecrow. No matter what Doug
says. No matter what the so-called authorities believe about its existence.
In the book the scarecrow is methodically putting back together the
farmer’s old motorcycle In the barn while everyone is sleeping. The
farmer has just thrown a punch at the farmer up the road, and he hasn’t
come back around again in several pages. The farmer’s wife isn’t laughing
much these days and she watches the road when she is hanging laundry.
If the scarecrow really is rebuilding this motorcycle (if it’s not just in his
head), I hope he finishes it before the place in the book where the rest
of the pages are ripped out. I want to see him ride into the sunset. Fuck
Doug and his computers and indices and search engines and authorities.
This goddamn book is real.
It’s in my hands now. I’m reading a book about a scarecrow in what little
time there is left before the sun disappears and there is no more light.
I’d read it by flashlight but I can’t find my flashlight and the batteries
are dead anyway.
After it’s too dark to read, I’ll just sit here after and watch the fireflies
and try not to think about Doug’s sister. Maybe I’ll help the scarecrow
with the last pieces of the motorcycle. Or try to see how long I can hold
my breath and not move a muscle. It’s quiet when you first start holding
your breath. But then your own stillness starts to get louder until it’s all
you hear at all. I bet
Doug doesn’t know that. I bet he has his tv on and is eating chips out
of a rattling bag. “Hey Doug!” I want to shout across town toward the
direction of what used to be his house. Used to be the house of Doug’s
sister and her smile and her breasts. “This is real. The scarecrow is real.
My book is real. It’s everything else that isn’t including you and your
pale weak hands and that parsley between your teeth.”
But I don’t yell anything. Not at Doug. Not at the sky. The fireflies
are beautiful and I have to get some sleep if going up wake up at the
first inkling of dawn so I can find out what’s going to happen to the
scarecrow and me next.
A Purgatory of Scarecrows
while we are on the subject of
(unkindness of ravens, murder of crows)
a purgatory of scarecrows
a hangover of scarecrows
a cartography of scarecrows
a mirage of scarecrows
a broken promise of scarecrows
a bon voyage of scarecrows
an alarm of scarecrows
a grief of scarecrows
an orchestra of scarecrows
a smudge of scarecrows
a bender of scarecrows
an annulment of scarecrows
a jargon of scarecrows
an auction of scarecrows
a coup d’etat of scarecrows
a triage of scarecrows
a ringside seat of scarecrows
a droning of scarecrows
a narcolepsy of scarecrows
a nickel’s worth of scarecrows
a tintinnabulation of scarecrows
a bridle of scarecrows
an installation of scarecrows
a catalogue of scarecrows
a congregation of scarecrows
an accident of scarecrows
a cache of scarecrows
a sleepwalking of scarecrows
a symphony of scarecrows
an aneurysm of scarecrows
a mimicry of scarecrows
a stitching-up of scarecrows
an autopsy of scarecrows
a smear of scarecrows
an irrelevance of scarecrows
a flare-up of scarecrows
a sigh of scarecrows
a precipice of scarecrows
a repetition of scarecrows
a sermon of scarecrows
a shortage of scarecrows
a sheath of scarecrows
a disembowelment of scarecrows
a topography of scarecrows
a kleptomania of scarecrows
a distillation of scarecrows
a suicide of scarecrows
an arsenal of scarecrows
a je ne sais quoi of scarecrows
an orphanage of scarecrows
a fermentation of scarecrows
a morbidity of scarecrows
an adjournment of scarecrows
a bildungsroman of scarecrows
a stillness of scarecrows
a pizzicato of scarecrows
a tryst of scarecrows
a poor house of scarecrows
a surrender of scarecrows
an alarming rate of scarecrows
an assault and battery of scarecrows
a dress rehearsal of scarecrows
a toxicity of scarecrows
a satchel of scarecrows
a remorse of scarecrows
a temptation of scarecrows
a trespass of scarecrows
a burnt offering of scarecrows
a taxidermy of scarecrows
a narrowing of scarecrows
a novella of scarecrows
a jury of scarecrows
a mutiny of scarecrows
a dementia of scarecrows
a vulgarity of scarecrows
a binge of scarecrows
a syncopation of scarecrows
a derangement of scarecrows
an infinity of scarecrows
a depot of scarecrows
a stain of scarecrows
a commandment of scarecrows
a hypnosis of scarecrows
a worriment of scarecrows
a curse of scarecrows
a magnetism of scarecrows
a simple plan of scarecrows
an insult of scarecrows
an acceleration of scarecrows
an on-deck circle of scarecrows
a blindness of scarecrows
A Circus of Boundary
It must be 9:00 o’clock.
The day, weatherless,
but in full automation.
Think “idea” or “ideal.”
How “God” can correlate
any two sums,
a circus of boundary.
The oak swells whereas
the pine concentrates.
A system, in this case,
a fascination with
signals and conduction.
It must be 9:00 o’clock.
The same models predict
the sophistic arguments
of those who seek election,
now that warming
has been introduced.
In some climes assembly
requires wooden pews.
The author of “Theory A”
can correlate any two sums
but not in “Theory A.”
Think “inert” or “inertia.”
Tunnels and Entering Tunnels
Tunnels and entering tunnels
then fog the complexion of heavy stones.
Hasn’t been a deer paradise
hasn’t been a paradise
the locomotive returning diesel fuel as particulate.
It darkens
there must be limits to darkening
the poles and wires
the platform, the distal walkers.
You, too, a walker
you, too, a distal shape
stepping against colorlessness.
The wind stamps your eyes
it stamps the roots of your teeth
the watery metals of an intersection
your soles and heels slippery.
You may not visit here again.
Up the block / down the block
houses harbor the warmth of electric light
as if it were perishable.
A door opens.
From Emerson in America
Dawn breaks, the sun sets,
The dome’s slate-colored clouds
Become a wreath of roses.
Or look down the river
Lined by trees, green & orderly,
A coronation of elegancy
As if in a dream.
Is this superficial?
Or is the Earth itself unsightly?
Narcissus, crocus, lily or petal,
An assemblage of bright & opake balls
Floating in space, each individual’s
A counterpart & contemplator of the whole.
Events shall shape the Earth,
Lie packed in silence, awaiting their birth.
Everything emerges, converges,
A pebble & cloud,
Scraps of thought & action.
Who Isn’t in Love with Itinerant Emotions?
I was some kind
Of a pale cloud
Pondering the value
Of absolute transparency
& you were a sidewalk
& so I rained on you
It’s ok with me, you sd
Yr head torn off
By the hurtling sounds—
Howls of the dogs!
The streets in their howling!
The idea of rain at the window
Like a book being shut
All summer we held nothing
Like a snow globe
In our hands
On one hand—
On the other hand—
A blur
WHERE IS THE DOOR 1 by Marilyn R. Rosenberg, 2013-14
art book, collage, mixed media (8 ¼” x 5 ¼”)
WHERE IS THE DOOR 2 by Marilyn R. Rosenberg, 2013-14
art book, collage, mixed media (5 ¼” x 8 ¼”)
Letter to Myself I
Looks like I’ve settled after all these years for good in San Francisco.
Really there is no better city for me and my pocketbook ethos and slander
of the spirit and breakfasting of the apocalypse. I can walk to the wharf
and the ocean and back in a day and pretend I fell off a rock and was
ravaged by seals. Say I lost my hearing aid and glasses and false teeth
and wallet and keys and a shoe like Bob Kaufman and beat up by cops
to boot. Eyes crossed out with masking tape and bare-breasted a little
paunch after all these centaur years. The computer won’t let me say
CENTAURIAN. That thin red line beneath the word telling me wrong
wrong wrong. It’s cool here, and I’m glad I was gone for 20 years so I
can fully appreciate the native city. I live in the Tenderloin district just
northwest of downtown which is in the heart, amongst the poorest and
wretched and broken and flying. I walk around a bunch through the
tunnels and fog and graft and endless chatter, avoiding the detritus as
best, and talking up the living dead, and numbing down for the warring
invisible but inevitable.
Letter to Myself II
I walk through thrum of siren and lurch of earth mover, the pile driver
seeking new routes to teeming transplants. Bolting from drought to
scathing, from muscle to musical. Market tinsel, fountain bustle. The
scent of the streets assails and assuages, grilled beef wafts, unwashed
human staggers. Smoke and bright windows and clotted sidewalks and
color miasma and small apartment dogs skittering off pulpy hands. In
the mornings to climb legions of steps up to Coit Tower either bold
sunlight or shrouded chill. I could be in a wheelchair still I’d pull it
off. A cylinder loosens in my mind as I gaze past what I know are cold
distances over the bay waters. At arm’s length from peripheral vista I
sense in the Bridges a fetal pulse. I embrace twin totems. The tourists
stream around me as if in speeded-up film. Just another among the
multitude of figures painted on the murals in the interior of the Tower.
Like some apotropaic shadow. The nights roaming elder states of lucid
debauchery, then to hole up in the paint-peeling cubby, listening to rustle
and mime of pages. Try to pick up something on the radio. There
seems a decline in quality of language or trafficking of futures—I have
to draw straws flip a coin or fall asleep to decide.
Pearls scatter on my bed
from a sky spitting pearls in trails from star to star
then threading them once more into gray wisps
thin as smoke, thin as my hair
where these pieces remain
hidden, constellations on an ocean floor.
Black pearls are as comforting as coffee
grounds when I rub them between my fingers
or large as bowling balls in my dreams.
Seed pearls spill from trees in snowy fury
or sprout from the ground as dew:
pearls of light upon the leaves.
My pearls are precious, like pearls carried in pockets
filled with holes, the pockets of orphan children who could
never afford pearls in their ears or in their jewelry boxes
where a single pearl rolls like an eight ball from corner to corner
until at last it drops unseen into a remote country,
a pocket of the world no one has mapped or visited.
Pearls sink into the necks of lilies softened by the act of growing,
pearls are nestling against my palm with its mars and slashes,
my pearls are tiny planets with their own heated cores.
STILL 1 by Lan Yuan-hung, 2014, digital photograph
STILL 2 by Lan Yuan-hung, 2014, digital photograph
FALLING 3 by Lan Yuan-hun, 2014, digital photograph
Contributors’ advice, or Free Speech Corner, or the Blind
Assemblage (being the unedited comments of contributors on
almost anything)
It’s the whole reason why, at the auction, some boxes are sold complete
and you’re not allowed to look through, pick out the best and pay less.
It’s the higher order of acceptance; it’s tolerance of junk and the way
to distribute it. There is a bacterium, Thiomargarita Namibiensis (the
sulphur pearl of Namibia) visible to the naked eye. I have personally
found no alternative to fallibility. Such is to honor abundant imperfection.
The ground is cold. Skyscrapers built as monuments to men lean into
the stars. On the top floor I pull curtains, the rings of Saturn so near I
trace them with my fingers. The plants are dying, grass hardening into
tinderbox stalks. Wind rises from smokeless fires. Those of us left here
brush moon dust from our shoulders and dream of fireflies tapping
against our windowpanes. They are fossils, cursed fairies, dropping from
the trees in cocoons. Their wings are old and moist on my lips, icy wings
nesting without heat or light, beading my hair and arms in stone.
Ideology is fixed in the formal contours of language; ideology and
form work together to frame and qualify a world. Conventional forms
have been established in the context of an official version of reality—
the ideology of late capitalism, in most of the Western World. When
you rely on conventions of language that have developed in support
of that world, you can make a make a “successful” utterance. At the
same time, you affirm ideologies condensed in established linguistic
conventions, from grammar to sentence structure to narrative structure.
This is language that has become naturalized: we don’t question its
propriety, this language is natural, we take it for granted. This principle
is supported by common sense.
Contributors’ Advice/106
Writing that flouts the rules of formal convention, and disregards
common sense, automatically challenges the ideology of the dominant
culture. By “opting out” of the normative speech situation, creating an
undisciplined, errant utterance, you place yourself in opposition to the
tradition responsible for interpreting the actual conditions of existence
in terms of an official version of reality. Your discourse is a threat to a
disciplinary society, and the various apparatus that support it. E.g., the
literary institution, the academic disciplines. Advertising. The courts,
schools, the church.
Or so I once said.
In autumn the forest arrives in the city. The rowboat descends slowly,
from cloud to cloud, and the protagonists disembark. Some may be
animals, and perhaps others are not. Your task is delivery, but what
remains a question. First the answer, then the question. Gravity
imposes. Stars fall, and ashes, and fragments. Also a reverse action,
seepage upward through the forest floor, a distillation of roots and wet
earth. Local words for local things: rovellons, girgolas, trompetas de la muerte,
ceps. Where have you been? Less light in the north now. All politics is
local. The flag with its red and yellow stripes. A story explains it. First
independence, then everything else.
The City
The City is thickest where the black trees blossom black fruit. Beneath
the boughs, the earth’s white skin…
Any city deviates from its norm by precisely the degree with which
each inhabitant desires more than they will ever receive.
A city’s contours—even when indistinct—are extravagant
approximations of a woman’s body, and a different woman for every
pair of eyes.
Contributors’ Advice/107
The crowds of the City are random reformations of countless
memories clustered about food-and-information kiosks, but no longer
about train schedule counters, because—as usual—the trains shall not
Please ignore the black-hooded bodies hanging from the green
highway light posts. Downwind of the scene are prettier trees with redhooded flowers blown open in the early spring air. Sit out one more
morning coffee in that elegant breeze. Read your newspaper until the
coffee arrives.
One approves most eloquently by sleeping. Later, the blood is
removed by a miracle product, and the cloth—with its stain—may be
discarded: we are wealthy. The newspaper is a sedative.
WHY is gold considered a beautiful object: is it because it is shiny,
or relatively rare, or fragile, or (for the most part) mainly “useless” apart
from its place as ornamentation. Since - for myself anyway - beauty lies
in a sustained interest created by unresolvable “problems” (the most
common example being the “mysterious Mona Lisa smile”), then what
is unsolvable (i.e. what resists easy solutions in gold)? Of course, its very
malleability makes it perfect for the creation of ornamental objects,
whose beauty is easily located in such a “resistance,” but the element itself
(especially in its raw state) is not so compelling. Same with diamonds,
although diamonds have multiple “exploitable” properties, as gold does
not. And—as an unworked “thing” gold is no more attractive than pyrite
(fool’s gold), which is quite shiny and—really— almost indistinguishable
from gold by mere aesthetics. I do not know the “exploitable” qualities
of pyrite, and that would answer why gold is used for jewelry rather
than pyrite, but it doesn’t explain the initial attraction. Gold is harder
to find (where I once lived - in the Mojave Desert—pyrite lies scattered
all over the desert, quite available.
Contributors’ Advice/108
Personally, I’m all for letting people (children or otherwise) grab
whatever they want in the MoMA or the Louvre and take it home to
their grandkids and parents. Then—since they won’t own it either—
allowing whoever else wants it for a time to take it from them, and so
on. Of course, the Mona Lisa would soon be a pile of shredded canvas,
but that’s a minor concern all in all.
Gloomy Sunday: no one thought the celebrity chef of the weekend
cookery program was really the leader of a suicide cult. Just after
finishing a sauce she showed the housewives how to stick their heads
into a gas oven, to get relief from everyday pain, and thousands of
husbands found their wives dead in the kitchen. Everyone started to
suspect. But of course even suicide cults aren’t what they used to be.
You join one, waiting for them to carry you into a field where a big
bald man walks around with a six-shooter between his praying hands,
kissing cyanide capsules into your mouth. Instead, they all just sit in
armchairs, eating fast food, not doing any exercise, saying that the
most efficient way to kill yourself is eating microwave popcorn. Even a
shot to the head isn’t always effective. Sometimes the bullet doesn’t go
through the bone; it just runs around inside the skull and flies out the
other side. That’s why better schools teach children that they should
look around carefully before blowing their brains out. “I’ve seen many
people who weren’t brave enough to pull the trigger, but have never seen
anyone eat popcorn with a shaking hand.” A fat cult follower burps,
proudly showing his terrible cholesterol results. The company cancels
the cooking program, desperate housewives exchange old recipes on
the black market, while a twelve year old girl is interviewed on a new
talk show. She was raped by her father and the blood on her blanket
formed the face of Christ. The dad hugs his little girl, an APPLAUSE
sign lights up, but the viewers switch to another channel and the ratings
drop. The talk show host opens a tiny door in his microphone and fishes
out a cyanide capsule. The channel gave it to him; it’s all in the contract,
you see. After a week, they start a reality show starring the suicide cult
members, so we can watch how they poison themselves day after day.
Our new, lazy spiritual leaders burp up new slogans, for instance “Life
Contributors’ Advice/109
is the new suicide.” Well, Sunday’s programs always sucked, so no one
stays at home. A small crowd gathers around McDonald’s to watch the
young girl marry her father. They pass around French fries and cola,
saying it’s the body and the blood of The Savior (and yes, it’s sugar
free). They remember Christ, who was strong enough not to swallow
the cyanide capsule hidden in his crucifix. The moment we’ve all been
awaiting finally arrives. The voice of a bored worker comes from
Ronald McDonald’s plastic statue: “Do you take this man to be your
husband?” The girl with the bloody blanket on her head looks at her
father, and when she says no, the crowd is outraged, picking up pavers
from the parking lot. The good old stoning lures some hungry cameras.
Stones fly like the bullets God once shot into his head, but didn’t kill
him—they just ran around inside his skull and flew out the other side.
They’re floating now in space—we’ve overpopulated one of them, and
now we’re searching for a new one. Our little robots carry HD cameras
on them as we switch and switch between planets. Then we switch to
another channel, where an infomercial pitchman tries to sell us a new
detergent. To demonstrate its effectiveness, he washes out the bloodChrist from the little girl’s white blanket. Then he advises us that we
should also try drinking it, to get relief from everyday pain. Who would
have ever suspected this nice infomercial pitchman?
Larry Smith began his email soliciting advice for his No 17 with “If
in the middle of all the insanity going on right now,” defining things
So: Keep your head down, stay away from radical Islamists with knives,
and from West Africa and anyone who has been since the virus broke
loose there. In the Southwest red heat zone keep a big bottle of water in
the car. And be aware of coastal flooding wherever you are. Enumerate
telling ironies to yourself and others and laugh as best you can before
you despair. Challenge stupidity and listlessness. Intelligent species
should do nearly everything to purpose. Sympathize with all younglings
because if you think you have sobering and somber things to deal with,
you have no idea, and nobody does. Cultivate the abiding fascinations.
Contributors’ Advice/110
11. The Promised Land—Id est, it had already been promised.
Please choose another location!
22. It took a bloody Indian to come up with Mr. Zero.
33. Ok, I confess; my dog is gay.
An I me I forget
In ablative
An ur pink Gstring
All gone
&2Dry4whatever we do in order to do
You are left
With the difference
Between arms
Any frothy magpie
Into an antivaccine
The fireflies
Of receding identity
Would do
(From—How to blow a Hummingbird & Never know the Nibbana of
Useless Writhing)
Dark on the Same
His face grew tired and rested because octopuses possess a chemical
that prevents self-sucking and can differentiate other octopuses’ severed
tentacles from their own, which they rarely eat. This means the tiny
centipede he found swimming in the toilet bowl fell in on its own. He
Contributors’ Advice/111
flushed it away because male Mientien tree frogs use the concrete
drainage ditches of Taiwan to amplify their mating songs and he didn’t
want to be mistaken for an environmentalist. He loved two women
at the same time because mice who over-groomed one another’s hair
into mohawks were deemed sufficiently similar to human autistics to
test treatments on. This meant he was alive with joy and allowed a
goldfish to pilot a fish tank on wheels with its thoughts. He used to
date a neurobiology graduate student who completed a project that
found that the most painful place to be stung by a bee is the nostril,
followed by the upper lip, then the dorsal aspect of the penis. He never
volunteered to find out because Portland, Oregon emptied its 38 million
gallon reservoir after a teenaged boy urinated in it. He broke up with
the neurobiologist after she told him that female cockroaches reproduce
faster when stroked slowly in short bursts by a long, barbed, motorized
duck feather. He had had enough so he went back to tiring his face by
staring at cereal boxes because the gazes of characters on children’s
boxed cereal tilt downward to meet the sight lines of a child because
kids were found to place greater trust in the Trix Rabbit when he makes
eye contact.
Get on a small press reviewers list so that you get copies of all their new
titles. I write a fair number of reviews, so I’m now getting a fair number
of free books. This summer, I picked out one title from the review books
by an author I would never have heard of otherwise—her work really
captivated me and helped me to think through poetry in a refreshed
Enmity Hath Motor: Mankind is being flung towards the far horizon
at speeds greater—and heights taller—than God ever intended. “Oh,
Why, Oh, Why,” wail the mourners, as another man flies past, overhead.
If the synagogue is where you sin, then the dialogue is where you
dial. “Help Me!” in one tongue is “Tongue!” in another langue and
“Merengue!” in yet another harangue. Lemon gets to be a risk. Grapefruits get to be a risk. The fields molder and a cry spreads through the
Contributors’ Advice/112
land. Oh Lord, why is there motor? There is motor, sayeth The Lord,
to impress thine enemy. But mine enemy hath motor. Sayeth not hath,
sayeth The Lord, for that is my very verb form. Very well then, but my
enmity ‘hath’ motor. Thine enmity hath motor? shrieketh The Lord,
thou dost bringeth the disnomer and the piss-nomer in thy protestations
and for that—I shall now smite thy fleeting moment of achievement in
sport. And The Lord smote the pilgrim’s second place finish, and the
pilgrim, in turn, smote his younger brother, with a loud clap to both
ears, and the younger brother, then suffering from a disturbance, smote
the television set with a thirty-ought-six, even as the set continued to
speak, “ . . . in corporation we trust . . . “ a minor miracle.
All surprises should be filthy with dust.