SUMMER 2006

DISPATCH II

SUMMER 2006

COPYRIGHT 2006DISPATCH LITAREVIEW& STATED OR CREDITED

PEOPLE HEREIN.WHY MESS WITH US?

& ANYWAY, WE’RE GETTING SICK OF COPYCAT

SHITBAGS, SO PLEASE DON’T MAKE

US DEVOTE OUR BRAINPOWER TO SOLVING THAT PROBLEM, BECAUSE YOU KNOW WE’LL COME UP WITH SOMETHING

(we usually do).

updated 8.1.06 or thereabouts

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Dear Reader \ tenRevues \ two-nineteenApprecationotes & Artistic Crediting \ two-thirty-oneLetters & Policy \ two-twenty-sixContribudex \ two-twenty-sevenAdvertising \ two-thirty-sixTerminal Definitions \ (below)

D.I.S.C.O.N.T.E.N.T.S

“mastuff” -- Similar to a masthead, this is the listing of things not directly related to the content, more related to the actual magazine.

“frose” -- Much like prose, frose is short for “fiction & other prose.”

“poesetry” -- We’re quite tired of the term “poetry,” but we do like the term “poesy,” but not enough to replace “poetry,” so we decided to mix them.

“dispatch” -- Very important message, or magazine.

“litareview” -- At one time we were called a “literary journal,” at another a “literary review,” but we didn’t like the way these words made our tongues stick to the roofs of our mouths, so we combined them and came up with this, the second half of our galley christening.

“contribudex” -- Much like a rollodex, except flat, cool, and listing our contributors.

“appreciationotes” -- Our way of thanking the various influential forces which by the laws of physics are forced to be involved in this meandering project of ours.

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f r o s eA Case Of Too Much Beer \ sixty-sixA Musical Relationship \ seventy-fourAfter The Flood \ twelveA Printer’s Tale \ fortyConfession \ ninety-fourDick Damone \ one-ninety-twoEast to West \ fifty-twoExcerpt From Janitor \ two-thirty-twoFaith Glory \ twenty-sixFinding Cooper \ one-fifty-eightGeezer \ one-fourteenHabitus Rictus \ one-fifty-fiveHow The Hopes Like Horses Scatter \ thirty-sevenHomefront \ sixty-fiveIndia’s Tryst With ‘Amby’ \ one-twenty-twoInnocence Lost \ one-thirty-sixIn Women’s Hands \ two-hundred-oneJoint Possession \ one-hundred-eightLosing Momentum \ seventy-eightOf Cats, Landlords, And Bats I Sing \ fifty-fourRed Snow \ one-forty-fourRefractions \ ninety-eightScenes From A Marriage \ forty-fourThe Ex Drops In \ twenty-oneThe Maltese Beercan \ one-eighty-eightThe Patron \ one-twenty-sixThe Old Maths Teacher \ one-forty-oneViolation Of Faith \ thirteenWhat He Misses Most: Their Fights At KFC \ one-thirty-nineWhat I Do For You, Man \ one-fifty-one

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A Call From The Atlanta Airport \ twenty-fourA Man With The Virus \ one-twenty-fiveBad Knees \ forty-twolues \ ninety-threeCloudy New Year’s Morning \ seventy-sevenDrought \ one-hundred-fiveEating Man \ twenty-fiveEverything Is Political \ one-hundred-sixFour Quarters For Sex... \ forty-nineGrey Slave \ one-tenI Created You Again \ forty-threeInfluence Of The Moon \ one-eighteenMessage From A Friend \ forty-eightMows The Grass At 83 \ one-thirty-threeMy Words \ forty-sevenOysters \ twentyPenny Ante Devotions \ one-fortyPotential Forest \ fiftyprospective sleeves \ one-twelveRemoving The Mask \ thirty-eightShe’s In Albany...\ one-fifty-four

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Sunday Morning \ one-sixteenTears Of Kali \ one-ninety-oneTechnological Arrogance \ sixtyThe Days...Like Empty Boxes \ sixty-onethe earthlings \ sixty-threeThe Gift \ thirty-sixThe Future \ one-thirty-fiveThe Stars, My Detestation \ fifty-oneThe Woodcutter \ one-ninety-nineTickets \ one-seventeenTwo-Faced Mirrors \ one-fifty-sevenVerbs, Lost In Their Transitive Cases \ sixty-fourWhen Dawn Comes Wish Me Forgotten \ one-sixty-threeWithin The Forest Of Remorse \ one-twenty-one

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If life has any meaning, I don’t think you’ll find it here. If there are any misconceptions about the staff of this magazine, I don’t care to correct them here. This isn’t about money, though we have tossed out an anchor called DIS-PRESS to keep the galley in good standing. We’re still a baby, and we thank you too much for reading. Still learning, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Seems to me we all reach a certain level of intellect, and then something scares us away from it. So I’m just going to keep my opinions to myself. Whatever with all that. At the end of the longest day, I hope you understand that we’re in this because we like you. Please have a nice day.

D��� R�����,

P. H. Madore / ������

SUMMER 2006

12

I ring the bell. It is the only sound in this empty world, and I am its only voice. I pass Miss Roberts from across the street, but death ignores life, andshe does me. Eyes open, skin white like dough. She was my mistletoe kissthree years ago, and now she is gone. I turn away and see Mr. Peters, although he doesn’t see me. We buy his fruit every Saturday. Bought. We kept his head above water when the supermarkets invaded town: now, nature keeps him afloat. Irony, even in death. The water stole away my Tracy only moments ago. Mother Earth’s current was stronger than she. Stronger than me. I couldn’t hold on. Baby, I’m so sorry. Her scent still lingers. Purple bruises stain my wrists, but they will fade, unlike the bruise upon my heart. I said goodbye, come back, I love you, I need you, don’t go, a thou-sand times over as the rush tore her away, but the decibel of her own de-mise was louder than my parting pleas. Rain begins to fall. It is a cruel epitaph. I wade on, trying to forget, searching for a why. I ring the bell again.

After The FloodBRIAN G. ROSS

13

Faith Limmer was an unconcerned idiot for the first eighteen years of her life. She went through the many stages of youth with the unen-cumbered vacuity that only obliviousness could bring. Her life was a ka-leidoscope of events that she experienced like a five year old. Everything appeared and departed rapidly, without making an impact on her sensibili-ties. Faith got up each weekday morning, stumbled into her clothing and shuffled off to work. The people who knew her couldn’t imagine how she ever managed to enter the great world and its affairs, but they saw her shuffle home each evening with her strange, disjointed, from-the-knees walk. After she had supper, on warm nights, Faith would sit on a low brick wall that surrounded her apartment house and talk to the young children, the only ones who gave her any attention. Faith’s parents were rarely seen in the neighborhood, but her mother would accompany her when she had to do something different from her plodding day to day routine. One spring night, Billy was coming home from the Falcon’s hangout, when he passed Faith, who lived on the same quiet street that was gener-ally deserted after 10:00 P.M., as it was this night. Billy knew Faith’s name and he had seen her many times, but he had never spoken to her before, ashamed that he might be seen talking to an idiot. This particular night there was no one else around, so he said hello to her. “Hi, Faith.” “Hello, Billy,” she nasally groaned. “Why are you sitting here, Faith? It’s late. Are you waiting for some-one to pick you up?” “No,” she lowed. Billy looked at Faith for the first time with appraisal in his eyes. She was thickly built, but not fat, with large breasts and big hips. She wasn’t particularly appealing, except to a horny, urgent youth. He looked around to make sure that no one was watching them. “What’s the matter? Don’t you have a boy friend?” he asked. “Nobody likes me,” she replied, “except the small kids.” “Aw, I like you Faith,” he said winningly.

Violation of FaithGARY BECK

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She stared at him as placidly as an ox at rest after plowing, while he looked around constantly, afraid that someone would catch him talk-ing to Faith. He had a feeling that she would let him do something sexual with her and kept urging himself to try to get her to go someplace where he could be alone with her. He was generally too timid to make opening advances to girls, always fearing the shame of rejection, so he frequently cursed when he talked, to see how girls would react, figuring that if they didn’t mind the cursing, they might let him get a feel, or even more. Billy pointed to her slightly sagging, sweatered breasts and asked: “Did anyone ever touch you there?” “What for?” she replied. “Well, it feels good.” “Why?” “What do you mean why? It just does.” “No,” she said. Not knowing exactly what her “no” meant, he kept talking. “Don’t ya believe me?” he demanded. “I don’t know.” “Do ya want me to show ya?” “No.” “Why not?” “I don’t know.” “Come with me and I’ll show ya that it feels good. Come on.” Billy walked towards the inclined ramp leading to the storage rooms and courtyard of the apartment house. Faith obeyed his instructions and followed him. Billy led her to the doorway of the laundry room, where a small bulb was the only light in the passageway. “Don’t make so much noise when you walk,” he urged her.“Somebody will hear us.” She just stood there, watching passively, as he unscrewed the bulb. “It’s dark,” she protested. “I don’t like dark. Why did you put out the light?” “It’s better in the dark,” he replied quickly, trying to reassure her. “Why?” “It just is.” He reached out and awkwardly started rubbing her breasts, without even trying to kiss her. After he rubbed her breasts for awhile, he began to get an erection.

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“Does it feel good? Do ya like it?” he asked. “I don’t know. What are you doing?” “Holy shit. Don’t you know anything?” “I don’t know,” she answered vaguely. Billy lifted her sweater and fumbled with her brassiere until it opened. She stood there unmoving, indifferent, while he rubbed her bare flesh and flaccid nipples. He was nervous and kept asking: “Does it feel good yet?” but she no longer responded. He slid his hand down her flabby stomach, until it was under her panties and moved slowly until he touched her wiry hair patch. He moved his hand across her tufted crotch and realized that she wouldn’t stop him. He slid his fingers inside her and churned them around, which excited him. He opened his fly, took out his penis, put her hand on his erection and said: “Rub it.” “No. I don’t want to,” she said, protesting against something that she was unfamiliar with, but which seemed unnatural and disturbing. “Go ahead,” he said encouragingly. “It won’t bite ya.” “I don’t want to,” she insisted. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like my pecker?” “No. I don’t want to stay here.” “Aw, just rub it for a minute.” “No. I want to go upstairs.” “Awright. You’re not mad at me, are ya?” “No. I just want to go upstairs.” He didn’t want to risk being discovered if she made a fuss, so he be-grudgingly mumbled: “Okay.” Billy, feeling self-conscious, put his penis back in his pants and zipped his fly closed. He turned the bulb until it lit again, then started to go. Faith was standing against the wall with her sweater pulled above her bare breasts. “Hey, you can’t go upstairs like that. Close your brassiere and pull your sweater down.” She obeyed, but still stood there, waiting for him to lead her. “Did it feel good?” he asked hopefully, “I don’t know.” “What do you mean you don’t know. Can’t ya tell?” “No.” “Well, do ya want me to try again, some other time?”

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“I don’t know.” “Well, I’ll see you. Go ahead upstairs and don’t tell anybody.” He watched her shuffle through the doorway and go up the stairs. Then he walked home, saying over and over between fits of laughter: “Holy shit. What a dummy.” The next night he was hanging out on the parkway with the Falcons, sitting with the lesser luminaries, since he was still a newcomer. He started bragging about his sexual exploit, exaggerating the details, but Joe Shlitz looked less then convinced. Joe Shlitz was short, with straight brown hair that hung down over his mottled face His constant look of disbelief and cunning gave him a sly and scheming appearance. His nose, wedgelike and pimpled, made him ap-pear more repulsive then he was. Girls were rarely interested in him, so he chased after fat, ugly girls, who everyone else neglected. His lack of success with girls caused him to doubt everyone elses’ and made him caustic and cynical. “Well, I was going to do you a favor, Joe Shlitz,” Billy said, “and bring you along next time, but since you don’t believe me, there’s no sense in try-ing to convince you.” Joe Shlitz immediately backtracked. “I didn’t say that I didn’t believe you. I just meant that I wanted to meet her.” Billy considered the situation for a moment. “My folks won’t be home for a few hours. Let’s go to my street. If she’s there, I’ll get her and bring her back to my house. Okay?” “Sure,” Joe Shlitz agreed. “Let’s go get her.”“Okay.” They walked the short distance to Billy’s street and found Faith sit-ting on the brick wall in front of her building. Billy looked around to see if anyone was watching, then went to her. “Hi ya, Faith. Is your mother going to call you soon?” “No. She lets me sit here ‘til 10:30.” “Come with me then,” he said. “Where?” “Whadda you care? I’ll show ya something nice.” Billy took her arm and led her across the street to his house. He grew nervous as they walked up the steps, afraid that some of the girls on the block might see him with Faith and tell everyone that he made out with an idiot. He closed the door behind them with a sigh of relief, then led her to

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the bedroom. “Faith, this is my friend, Joe Shlitz.” “Hello,” she said. “Billy told me a lot about ya, Faith.” “What?” “Oh, that ya like a good time. Do ya?” “I don’t know.” “Jeez, Billy, she really is a prick. Did you ever see a prick, Faith?” “I don’t know.” “Billy said you saw his last night. Did ya?” “I don’t know.” “Cut it out, Joe Shlitz! Go put the light out and close the door.” Joe Shlitz closed the door to Billy’s room and clicked off the light. “Come’re and help me to take her clothes off,” Billy instructed. They undressed her and she stood naked and indifferent in the darkness. They undressed and stood next to her, and started rubbing her breasts, moving probing fingers up and down between her legs. “I’m first, Joe Shlitz,” Billy said, as he led Faith to the bed. “Awright. I got sloppy seconds.’ Billy sat her down on the edge of the bed, lifted her legs and swung them around, until she was forced to lie back. He lay down next to her and started to rub her limp clitoris. She lay next to him, bewildered and unre-sponsive, without getting excited. Billy became erect, rolled on top of her and tried to get his penis into her vagina. He prodded her clumsily, trying to get inside, and ejaculated all over her. She lay silent and unmoving, like an apathetic corpse. Billy got off her, stood up and wiped his wet thighs with his hand. “Awright, Joe Shlitz. It’s your turn.” “How was it?” Joe Shlitz asked smuttily. “Like fucking a log,” Billy replied, trying to sound cool. “She didn’t move once. Boy, when I gave her the old pecker I thought that would get her, but she didn’t even move.”

“You just don’t know how to do it, Billy. Watch and see how she feels after I get through.” “Stop talking and do it then,” Billy muttered sullenly. Billy pulled his pants on and walked into the living room. He sat down on the worn couch and lit a cigarette. For the first time since he

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Faith he became aware that what he was doing was wrong. “Oh, Jesus. I was trying to fuck an idiot, and she didn’t even know what was happening. Shit. I’ve got to get them out of here.” He thought quickly and yelled: “Hey, Joe Shlitz. Get dressed. It’s getting late and my folks will be home soon.” “In a minute,” Joe Shlitz called back. “I’m not finished yet.” “Get dressed now,” Billy insisted. “I don’t want to get caught.” “Take it easy. I’ll be through soon.” Billy realized that Joe Shlitz was stalling. “I don’t wanta take it easy. Get up now.” “Whatsa matter? I didn’t rush you, did I?” “No, but I don’t want that idiot here anymore.” ”What are you getting excited about? She’ll be out soon.” “Goddamnit. Get dressed! And get her dressed, before I drag you out.” “I’ll be out as soon as I’m finished,” Joe Shlitz mumbled. Billy’s impatience got the best of him. ““Come out now, or else I’ll beat the shit out of you.” “Awright. Awright. I’m coming.” Joe Shlitz came out of the bedroom closing his pants, a smug ex-pression forming around his mouth. Billy walked into the bedroom and saw Faith lying on the bed, as if petrified. He went to her and gently helped her dress. When she was ready, he took her to the door and led her outside. Not knowing exactly why, he said: “I’m sorry, Faith.” She didn’t answer and shuffled down the steps and went home. Billy went back in, feeling guilty about what they had just done to Faith. Joe Shlitz sat on the couch, a cigarette drooping from his mouth, and watched Billy from under almost closed lids. Billy paced restlessly, then sat down in a chair facing him. “Listen, Joe Shlitz. I don’t want to go near her anymore.” “Why not?” “I don’t know. Maybe because she’s an idiot, or because she doesn’t feel it, but I feel lousy about doing that to her.” “Awright, Billy. I’ll take her someplace else next time.” “You’re not going near her again,” he snapped. “Can’t you see she don’t know what’s happening?” “That didn’t stop you,” Joe Shlitz pointed out reasonably. “It’s stopping me now. And it’s making me stop you. Don’t go near her anymore.”

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“And if I do?” “I’ll beat the living shit out of you,” Billy said menacingly. Joe Shlitz got up, stretched, walked towards the door, stopped with his hand on the knob and said: “I’ll see ya, Billy.” “Awright. Don’t forget what I said.” “I won’t.” Joe Shlitz closed the door softly behind him and said to himself: “I won’t forget, but we’ll see what happens, you son of a bitch.”

Joe Shlitz slowly walked towards the gang’s hangout on the parkway, brooding about Billy and how to get even with him. He knew he couldn’t take Billy in a fight, so he’d have to find another way. He thought he could find a way to start trouble between Tom-Tom and Billy. Tom-Tom could probably take him, but he wasn’t sure, and if Billy beat Tom-Tom he’d re-ally be big shit with the gang. Besides, if they did fight, it would probably divide the gang and they’d all blame him. Joe Shlitz turned onto the parkway and saw the gang hanging out in the middle of the block. Some of the girls were there. He walked toward them, forgetting about Faith, hoping that he’d get lucky and one of the girls would really like him for himself. He filed Billy under ‘scores to be settled’, and sat down on a bench with the Falcons. After Joe Shlitz left, Billy sat in the darkness, silent and ashamed, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the burning red reflection of the coal flickering on the venetian blinds. The more he thought about what he did to Faith, the dirtier he felt. He made a vow to himself: ‘I won’t do anything to Faith again and I won’t let Joe Shlitz touch her.’ He knew that he couldn’t erase what he had done, but he felt a little better in deciding to protect her and not take advantage again of her helplessness.

20

Polka dots sleep in broad daylightAs if catering a surprise a little later.Affections sleep at the topLike oil on water. Sleep never rests.Frying eyes look to us allA constant polka dot surpriseIf only the answer tasted this good.

They are coupons at the bottom Of the ocean.Promises like vouchers.A prenuptial with infinity,Each is here for a short timeBut they are always here.Daylight swindles duskTo darkness and we are All alone for a short time.

And then gone, but always somewhere.On a menu, Rockefeller,Or waiting for our pearl discovered.

OystersROBERT SALUP

21

I answer the door and she’s standing there, mute, staring at me with big hazel eyes under tweezed eyebrows, black and too thin, with secret stubble forming if you look close, and her dry pudgy lips, maroon, a little cracked from the cold. In my peripheral vision I see breasts I knew so well (and still know, thoroughly – catalogued sensations, waythey feel, dark-skinned, in my palms) as they’re tightly hugged by a black chenille sweater, and dark stone-washed blue jeans on her thighs and ass and ankles and calves and cunt, she never trimmed her cunt, black mess of a V, black upside-down triangle chaos of pubic hair, curly thousands entan-gled, faint scent of sweat and urine and shampoo, and brown inner thighs baby-smooth when I slid my palms up them, and all this detail in one quick whiff of her scent and, in one instantaneous swing of the door and immedi-ate recognition of her physical image, all in the two seconds after the swift opening of the front door, she, standing there, looks evenly at me and hesi-tates in a rush of half-composed anxiety, it’s been too long, her image there – to both of us, I can tell – is like an index finger flicking my heart in my chest, surreal, and then, stupid and high-pitched, “Hi.” I pause, but not too long, and respond, stupid too, “Hi,” thinking, ‘wa.. wa..’ A fake smile distorts her round face: “How are you?” Retarded. Then I speak, flatly, “I’m fine, ___________, how are you,” all very delib-erately flat. The rest of the details are dumb and vague, wasted afternoon of in-sincere conversation, sick meal of fajitas and red rice, Coca-Cola and little silent concealed belches, her nervous toying with her earrings, small round silver things, brushed matte silver, nothing gaudy or overreaching, soft application of eye shadow, some shade of green (vain – it’s to bring out the big hazel with gold specks of her eyes, strangers were always praising her eyes, exoticism of the East or whatnot). I notice her ears and remember episodes of her psychological disorder where if even a drop of liquid ac-cidentally enters her ear she panics and angers, traumatized again, to an extent, and hurt, really emotionally hurt if I caused it, a mishap in the bath. I remember once when her round head lay in my lap as I sat upright on the couch with a cold glass of Coca-Cola in my hand years back, I accidentally let it tip too much and a bit leaked over the side and slid in a fine caramel stream down the clear glass and, momentarily hesitating at the curved base, dropped, and fell (fatefully) right into the tiny swirled black hole in

The Ex Drops InEDWARD SALEM

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her left ear at which she sprang up, psychotically shocked, as if electrocut-ed in the cunt by a metal poking stick, her two hands frantically disassem-bling her ear, working to dry the inner ear from the intrepid, penetrating drop of cola, her face and heart contorting against the quick effect of shots of adrenaline to the brain, her pudgy maroon lips tightening and tremu-lous and she wanted to mutilate me in that moment, she hated me. She resented me for having let it happen to her. She was cold and quiet the rest of that night, years back. All the other details of the afternoon at my apartment when my ex dropped in are unimportant to our end. Awkward but kind of emotional, what-we’ve-been-up-to talk, career changes, rambling stories and chewed-up words and an over-awareness of our speech. Where to put the hands? Where to put the knees? Avoid humiliation, contain the sneeze… She spent a prolonged amount of time in the bathroom checking and double- and quadruple-checking her face in the mirror, no doubt, as I did just before she dropped in. She willed herself into composure in my bathroom, regain-ing some forced harmony, reentered the room and walked to me with leg in front of leg in front of leg and with long black hair freshly parted, rich black and wavy the way I love a woman’s hair, the way I used to love her hair, she knows that, she stills knows that. It’s not her favorite look on her: when we lived together in college she spent an hour on her knees every morning af-ter hasty showers in front of a full-length mirror with a turquoise hairbrush in one hand and a hot electric hair-straightening device gripped in the other brown palm, fighting her hair, working the natural curls and black waves out of it, you could hear the hiss of the device as it clamped down on the hair, sound of a little killing, an act against her culture if you ask me, early morning aggravation at having to spend an hour, a full goddamn hour, straining to straighten her naturally wavy-curly black hair, having to wake up an hour early and do this, do this, she hated it but she kept do-ing it and I could never understand that about anyone. And the God-white stick of deodorant smeared into her mud-brown armpit below the arm raised straight up into the air, one at a time, three seconds each, smear smear smear, and the smell of it in the air as she sniffled and inhaled, then a calm exhalation, (the scene asserts itself in my head – mud-white and God-brown in my head), a poking of the middle of the forehead twenty-one consecutive times with the index finger in practice of an adopted Bud-dhist technique to steady one’s nerves, then the spreading of the pale peach cream on the short legs, early morning rituals, work before work, her

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thighs just a little meatier than I liked, just a little, her flat feet, I swear I re-member everything in detail. She was always shy of her asshole. Always too timid to let me spread the cheeks in the midst of standard sex acts, never willing to expose that tiny squinting hole she so fervently hid, the asshole she had an absurd fear of revealing, and poor girl too ignorant with youth and naiveté to know that modern women in America are supposed to wax or shave or at least trim and shape their pussy hairs, but she left it natural, wildly bushy and black, puffed out under cotton panties, a cute puffy bulge of pubic hair mashed down underneath white or lavender panties, I often patted and secretly laughed at the mashed puff, and I’ll never know why I never overtly demanded that she shave it off. I think of all of this – per-haps not so thoroughly – as she sits at an angle on my grey couch in the afternoon and talks to me about Pricewaterhouse Coopers or some pig-shit company she works for, confessing she still keeps a credit card under her father’s name, _______, if you’ll believe it, talk about ethnic. But nothing else of the afternoon she visited is meaningful, noth-ing worth the attention to detail, especially not the crushing of her breasts against my chest as we hugged, a good long hard hug, full of emotion, all that, tears slipping from their hazel source and dripping from her drenched chin into the black shag of her chenille sweater, a hug so hard and cathar-tic, we’re the same height, and I felt it again, nearness of her cunt, nearness of the cunt I adored for so long, the virgin cunt I broke, the faint air of light sweat and urine and shampoo of the virgin cunt I broke open and here note such lasting pride over, the sneaking of the index finger in the lavender cotton panties in her stone-washed jeans, the warm fluid cooling on the rounded flesh of my finger as I bring it out, and the ancient blend of fra-grance – faint sweat, urine, soap – leaking into the black hair on my chin. And then leaning back, concealing a smile, leaning back, lunging forward and spitting a gorgeous ball of spit right into her ear, the left one, directly into that tiny swirled ear-hole of hers, inciting her absurd psy-chological disorder, my warm spit cooling in the dark hole of her ear as she frantically disassembles her ear with the squirrel-like panicking of her fingers and hands, her head of extremely wavy rich black hair springing up from my lap as if she was jabbed and electrocuted in the cunt by a hot elec-tric metal poking stick, shots of adrenaline pouring into her brain, splash-ing everywhere in there, her heart-rate psychotic, accelerated pulse, I’m sorry, I’m really very sorry for everything.

24

my son calls from the Atlanta airport while passing through but Linda and I are in bed and it is late and he hangs up fast I think he called just to hear my voice or maybe he is feeling alone because his marriage is falling apart he probably needs to talk to me about being afraid though he is thirty-two his voice still sounds like my child’s now it’s early dawn and there’s a train blast far away and I’m the one alone I won’t be here forever still there are the ones who need me and there is this life in the darkness before dawn there are things to consider and Celtic music and cricket sounds in my head and poems to write there is a call from the Atlanta airport now I am awake

A Call From The Atlanta Airport PATRICK FRANK

25

Six continents in six days.A stranger among the Romans,I consume distance. My footstepsmark appetite, my solethe motion of inchesmovement and momentum, balancingon mountains, the cities, the sea.

Your topography is mypath, your culture my quest.and, beyond all, I must feast onyour flesh, your wisdomand your providence.

Tantalus has nothing on me.

I am still hungry.No time for rest.

Eating ManDAN NUCCI

26

We are all Faith Glory fans. When we think of her films, whether the com-edies alongside William Powell or Clark Gable or the powerful dramas like Wind from Valhalla and The Fates Lead Him Who Will, there is no deny-ing her star power, even these many decades later. But no one was a bigger Faith Glory fan than Theophile Rightclench. He loved her like he loved no other film star and Theo Rightclench loved film like the Katzenjammers loved pies. Cute like Carol Lombard. Sexy like Jean Peters. Exotic like Pola Ne-gri. That was Faith Glory, all-in-one. Theo was a bachelor. He lived alone. He was overweight and well past 35 so he figured he was pretty much unlovable and settled into a semi-comfortable aloneness which he buffered by renting movies at an aston-ishing rate. Most nights he watched at least two films; most weekends he averaged nine or ten. Some movies he watched over and over, memorized frames the way science majors memorized the periodic table. He had seen all of Faith Glory’s films at least five times each. He had seen Afternoon to Dawn, his favorite, sixty-seven times by his last count. This was obsession, a loving, lonely man’s obsession. But, a man obsessed is a man alive. He worked at a car wash during the day. Alan’s Clean Right Down to the Tie Rod End. This was not the old-fashioned run-your-vehicle-through-and-chamois-it-off kind of car wash. This was the modern version with what had come to be called “detailing.” That is, they cleaned your car with a toothbrush, a minivac, a water-pik. Theo was a master detailer. One car often took up to an hour to detail and in those long stretches of time he dreamt of the movies. He danced with Marjorie Reynolds, shot pool with Eddie Felson. He sat on intercontinental trains with Basil Rath-bone and Nigel Bruce. And he took Faith Glory on long romantic dates to swank nightclubs and at the end of the evening kissed her in a drawn-out, lingering Warner Brothers way, mouths pressed tight but closed, hands gripping wrinkled sleeves in passion. One afternoon at the car wash, one balmy Spring afternoon when he was there alone, a woman pulled up in her brand new PT Cruiser. Theo was used to this. Cruisers were the hot car right now, even more than last year’s Beetle, and nearly every owner didn’t trust gas station car washes or even themselves to clean them. They brought them to Alan’s. This woman emerged from her car and everything seemed to be in

Faith GloryCOREY MESLER

SUMMER 2006

slow motion, a Sam Peckinpah film if Sam Peckinpah loved women. She was a butterfly breaking its cocoon. She was of medium height, shapely like a bass viol, brunette, and she smiled at Theo, a smile like a sweet June rose. Her pleasantly balanced breasts were tied up in a Daisy Mae shirt, knotted under knockers. Her midriff was smooth as an oiled thunderbolt, a place of easement. Her shapely hips were packaged in taut shorts that accented her tanned and perfect legs. And her feet, and this was the thing which tipped the scale into divine desirability, were bare. Theo got an erection looking at her. He couldn’t look at her. She kept smiling. “Hi,” she trilled. Theo looked beside her as if she were a Gorgon. “The works,” she said. “All over, in and out.” Her voice was music in the desert. “Yes, ma’am,” Theo said. “You c-can wait in there,” he added, ges-turing with his toothbrush toward the reception room, as Alan insisted on calling it, with its crappy black and white TV and car lovers’ magazines. “Righto,” the woman said. Theo worked on her car with extra vigor, with a surgeon’s care. He was sweating and it wasn’t just the temperate day. When he had moved the car into the sun to chamois it off she appeared at his side, leaning close to him watching him work, as if what he was doing was the most fascinat-ing thing she had ever seen. “You’re good with a rag,” she said. Theo didn’t answer. He buffed. She leaned over the hood of her car and her bosoms, wrapped in checkered, cotton cloth, rested on the damp, bright surface. “This is quite a car,” she said, straightening up. Theo straightened up. He looked at her and he was turned to stone as he feared he would be. Her thin shirt, damp now, was as of the sheerest gossamer and her breasts, full and round as lotus flowers, hung there in front of his eyes, a guillotine blade. Her nipples were thimbles. And then, like a dream, like a nightmare, she put her hand fully under one of those luscious fruits and bounced it in front of Theo’s esurient eyes. He looked and looked. How could he not? Her face was full of mis-chief, her smile now the slice out of a jack-o-lantern.

DISPATCH II

“Nice, huh?” she said. “Take your time looking.” “Oh,” Theo said. “What’s your name,” the temptress asked. “Oh oh,” Theo responded. The woman laughed like water running over stones in the River Styx. “I-I want you,” Theo said. It was the speech of a sad man. It was a lifetime’s worth of inappropriateness gathered into a short phrase. The woman kept her hand to her wet breast for a beat or two longer, thumbed a nipple. Then she dropped her hand and moved between Theo and her car door. “Don’t be absurd,” she said, stepping into her car like Cinderella en-tering her vegetable coach. Theo stood there in the yellow sunlight and watched as she pulled away and as if she hadn’t done the damage she came to do, as she spun her shiny tires, she hung her comely arm out the window of the shimmering PT Cruiser and flipped him the bird. And right there on the macadam, in the brightness of mid-day, with no one around and no one to hear his wails, a Sylvan squonk, Theo burst into tears. He rented five Faith Glory films that night.

We can forgive Theo his excesses, his need. Is he not flesh? If cut, does he not bleed, etc.? So he barreled into the video store, knew exactly where he was going, just as the clerk knew exactly what he came for, his eyes misty (Theo’s that is), and he returned home with his films and a fro-zen dinner. Man-size. And as Theo sat in front of the two adobe slabs of salisbury steak and the fake potatoes he commenced his movie-watching medicament with, of course, Afternoon to Dawn. And as soon as Faith Glory’s over-lit face filled the television’s reformatted screen Theo felt a slight lightening of heart, a rent in the mist over his eyes. Clouds parted. This was real. This was compensation for a life lived lonesome. It had to be. Theo’s second choice was a lesser known Faith Glory film entitled Stateside Blond, directed by John Sturges, a gangster film with Faith, a tad bit older but still exuding a sensual musk which the camera transmitted. Theo had only seen it a few times (six) though he still knew most scenes

SUMMER 2006

and the order in which they fell and the lines his star would speak, espe-cially a particular bedroom speech in which she said, in husky urgency, “I’m as hot as monkeys.” It unhinged our hero. She still had it. Even in this less than stellar vehicle. She still had the power to stop men’s hearts. It was about midway through the movie, and a few scenes past the bedroom bit, when Faith turned to her co-star, an actor with a square chin whose career never quite made it, an actor who ended up doing television, his series set in the wide open spaces of the American west, an actor who didn’t deserve to sleep with Faith Glory even in make-believe, she turned to him and this was supposedly post-coital, she turned and said, “Call me. Burnside 6, zero zero three and seven.” Theo sat up straight. He had a strange prickling sensation on the back of his neck. He knew that moviedom used a certain fake phone num-ber when needed, one that if dialed, gave the caller a “non-working” mes-sage. He knew this. But the way Faith Glory said that code, that plutonic sequence, woke something up inside Theo, a sleeping behemoth, forged like Pyramus. How had he never noticed it before, the validity of that con-secution of numbers? It sounded like a real phone number. Of course, she was such a good actress. He found it ridiculous to consider anything else, and also found himself figuring out the area code for the part of the country where the movie took place, presumably the West Coast, perhaps just plain old Holly-wood. What harm could come in dialing a number dead for decades? Why not do it? He picked up the black, Bakelite receiver and held it in his hand, which was suddenly sweating. How absurd, he thought. And as he thought this recalled that this was the exact word harpy used that afternoon to belittle him, dehumanize him. Absurd. Anger pushed him into the realm of the supernatural. He punched the ten-digit code, punched it hard as if through force he could make it happen, the magic he needed so badly, so his finger hurt. It rang three times. It rang four. At the other end space contracted and expanded, quasars died and black holes opened and closed. There was the hum of gases being released along star belts. It rang six times. “Hello?” came a tentative, kittenish voice. “Hello, hello?” Theo swallowed, a bucket going into the well at the center of the world. “Faith?” he whispered.

DISPATCH II

“This is Faith Glory,” the voice said, the unmistakable voice. Theo’s mind went all wonky. His mouth was dry; his teeth, chatter-ing. “This is Theophile Rightclench.” “Who?” “I’m your biggest fan.” Here Faith Glory laughed a laugh like mercury, a euphony which acted on Theo like a muscle relaxer. “Oh, you’re my biggest fan,” she said, finally. “I’ve been expecting you.” “I am. I do. I mean, I adore you.” This was met with a necrotic silence. Theo thought she was going to say something awful like the woman at the car wash. “How did you get this number, Theo?” “I was watching Stateside Blond, and―“ “Ah,” Faith Glory interrupted. She sighed a sigh as deep as Heaven’s reservoirs. “I’m sorry,” Theo thought to say. He wasn’t sorry, though. “No, no,” Faith said and she sighed again. “The past is, what Theo?--the past is so insistent.” And now Theo had to say what he had to say, even if it broke the spell, even if the dream went away. “Aren’t you, you know, dead?” “I’m talking to you, aren’t I, Theo?” “Yes, but, I―“ “Come see me, Theo.” Theo thought surely that he hadn’t heard her right. It wasn’t pos-sible, surely. “Come see me. I get so lonely here.” Faith Glory: lonely? Impossible. “Of course, of course I can, if that’s what you want,” Theo said. “It is. It is, Theo. It’s so hot―“ Don’t say it, Theo thought. God help me. “I’m hot as monkeys.”

He had some money in savings, had worked long hours for many years and spent little on himself except video rentals and now that account

SUMMER 2006

was his salvation, his path to the Promised Land. He flew out on an early morning flight, the directions to Faith Glory’s rendezvous site clutched in his hand. If he let them out of his sight they may disappear, disintegrate, return to dreamland. Theo was still cautious in his excitement. He was still unsure how real his life was at this point. The cab he took from the Los Angeles airport seemed as old as the Hollywoodland sign and the driver as foreign as the curlew’s song. When Theo gave him the address the driver nodded up and down, up and down. Was he signaling that he knew the place well, or that it didn’t matter? Once ensconced in the cab’s aromatic back seat Theo repeated the direc-tions and again the head went bobbing like a gewgaw dog’s. Theo tried to relax. The neighborhoods they traveled through were blasted ghettos, as barren as the moon’s surface, all concrete and twisted wire and debris. The occasional human face seemed masked in either hatred or bewilderment. Then suddenly, like the sun bursting through a thunderhead, they hit a street of verdant green and sparkling dew. There were rainbows in the lawn sprinklers. The driver made a few quick turns, quickly, as if he were performing a sleight-of-hand, and then pulled up abruptly at a curb. The house was obscured by large shrubbery or small trees, something leafy at any rate, a veritable jungle to pierce before gaining admittance to the residence. “Sere,” the driver said, his accent making the announcement a puz-zle. Was he Pakistani? Polish? Bulgarian? Theo got out and handed the driver a couple of large bills, overpaying him but not caring. When the cab pulled away, the driver’s arm waving out his window in warning maybe blessing, he stood in the bright sunshine and pondered his surroundings. He felt as if he were on a set, a closed set, an empty one. The silence was the silence at the beginning of the world, bro-ken only intermittently by the squawk of a bird. Theo looked at the foliage obscuring his destination and he strode toward it like Mungo Park. Deep in his vitals he felt the quiver of anticipa-tion mixed with wonder and doubt. Theo was a bag of emotions. But he found that with just one swipe of his beefy arm he opened a vista that seemed as unreal as the Emerald City, a glittering mansion like the one in Sunset Boulevard, pink like a birthday cake and surrounded with the lushest garden he’d ever seen. Theo stepped through the opening he had created and the world around him whirred and hummed. He had

DISPATCH II

walked into a fairy tale. As he ambled down the brick sidewalk, bricks as red as a danger signal, Theo was afraid, of course he was, but he also felt predetermined as if his life had pointed to this moment. He anticipated that he would have to pass a gatekeeper, some sour-faced servant or butler, someone used to deflecting admirers. He took a deep breath and pushed the doorbell. The music within was a brief portion of the theme from Afternoon to Dawn, that famous balalaika tune. A painful sixty seconds passed. Another fifteen. He heard steps light as a hare’s. The door opened. Faith Glory stood before Theo Rightclench, a vision from somewhere south of Sat-cit-anan-da. She glittered. She glimmered. She glowed. It was Faith Glory, as glorious in the flesh as she was when lit by professionals. She looked like a Kobal photograph. Theo’s heart seized up with love. Faith Glory was bare-foot. She was wrapped in an Oriental housedress, fringed at the seams, a sash tied loosely about her still shapely hips. She held out a hand as slim as a young girl’s. “Faith Glory,” she said. Theo took her hand. He held it as gently as Lenny’s mouse. “Theophile Rightclench.” And he bowed slightly. “So nice of you to come,” the vision sang. “Come in, come in.” Theo crossed the threshold into the most beautiful house he had ever seen. Even the foyer was dressed like a princess for a ball. “Come, sit,” Faith Glory said, gesturing toward a couch in a spacious living room, the walls decorated with paintings and festooned with Ori-ental swatches of silks and Shantung. The overall effect of the room sug-gested tromp l’oeil, tastefully lit and decorated in colors as deep and rich as blood. It really was a palace. They sat knee to knee on the couch and the proximity made Theo sweat and his heart beat a ragged tattoo. He could not help but stare. And Faith Glory seemed to take in his worship with a gentle understanding, her smile as sweet as that which is forbidden. “Lemonade?” she asked after a moment. Sitting on the coffee table was a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and ice.

SUMMER 2006

Theo drank his first glass in one long drink. He was dehydrated with desire, with stupefaction, with walking through a reverie. “Now, Mr. Rightclench―“ “Theo, please,” he shot out, too rapidly and eagerly. He begged his heart to slow. “Theo. Dear. You’ve come a long way.” “Yes,” Theo said. All he could do was wait. The gods were in control now. “Whatever do you think of me now? Was it worth the years, the years of watching and optimistic devotion?” “Oh my God, yes,” Theo said. “If you only knew…” “I do, dear Theo. I am aware of what you must have felt. Dreams can be painful or hopeful or fantastic.” “Yes,” Theo said again. “But rarely do they come true.” “Mine has,” Theo said. It was an astoundingly romantic statement from a man washed clean by loneliness, scraped raw by isolation. “Sweet man,” the beautiful actress said and she lay back against the pillows, pushing her knees harder against Theo’s. She was languor and concupiscence, a human form of immaculate design. And she seemed to be pondering something. “Theo,” she said finally. “Are you in love with Faith Glory?” She spoke of herself as if she were a figment of their collective imagi-nations. “Oh, yes, yes, I am. Oh, Faith,” Theo said and he burst into tears. Faith studied the large man in front of her. She took in his unkempt hair and unfashionable clothing, his large midsection and his broken black church shoes. She took him in whole. And she saw only tenderness, only love. She pulled the sash of her robe away and the robe opened and she shrugged it off quickly. She was dressed in a low-cut satin dress with spa-ghetti straps, her glowing bosom ripe under the thin material, her breasts revealed whole in the dress’s well calculated stricture. Her bare thighs were gold, like the presage of dawn. Theo gasped. When he found his voice he spoke. “The Savage God,” he said. “You remember,” Faith Glory said.

DISPATCH II

“You wore that in that extraordinary scene with Montgomery Clift. It was desire and lust and resplendent love carried on beams of light. It is my most cherished sexual fantasy, my surefire masturbatory image.” Theo’s tongue had been loosened, his honesty greased. “I have carried that image with me every day of my life,” he added. He continued to whimper gently. “Have you, Dear?” Faith purred. “You are the most perfect thing I have ever seen,” Theo said. And he meant it, this vision of his hidden desires, this version of Faith. Theo could not see crow’s feet or loose skin. He saw Eve, the template of womanhood. It was the moment his life became real. And when Faith Glory lowered the straps of her dress and her breasts spilled out and later when she was unclothed in his arms and he circled her like the rings of Saturn and his hands felt the perfect curve of her un-derside and the moist loam of her center and when he had entered her and made love with her long and hard as if he had been doing it his entire life, made love with her so perfectly she gasped and choked and begged him to stop, to not stop, to keep his enormous erection inside her, for more, for even more, until he finally burst inside her, seemingly hours later, like a star dying, Theophile Rightclench knew that it was right, it was all all right, and the world turned more freely and it welcomed him aboard, in just that moment, that joining of his flesh with his beloved’s, and the detonation of his seed within her.

Years later, after Theo Rightclench had become as famous as any movie star or bestselling novelist―his Sunday morning “cultural” program, I Lost it at the Movies (a title he appropriated from Pauline Kael) at least as popular as Friends or Wild Kingdom--he would often stop and remember that afternoon on the elegant couch in Faith Glory’s mansion. He would remember and he would smile. It was like the opening credits to their life together, a threnody playing behind it, perhaps a simple tune on a balalai-ka. And when their child was born the couple named her Eve, because she was to them the beginning of another world, a new place where images from the mind and corporeality mix in easy decoctions, where figures of bona fides walk beside the sons of men. And Eve, well, she became the light of their conjoined existence, even as she grew older and it was apparent that she would be as ugly as the

SUMMER 2006

devil’s dam. Even as they hid her away and answered reporter’s questions about her with small, tight smiles. She lived on, their daughter, like an egg in an ootheca, a princess in a tower, waiting for a new morning, knowing new mornings were plentiful in this best of all possible worlds, where mira-cles were as common as bad television, or black and white movies. Did you expect a different ending, sadder hence truer? O ye of little, etc. Let us not let cynicism touch our heroes and heroines, our Faith, our reborn Theo, our revered and auspicious Eve.Eve loved black and white movies. She seemed to almost fall into them, a swoon as deep as myth.

36

I was looking in my drawer for something I hadn’t seen in years, when I found it, wrapped in its tissue paper shroud. It was a wrinkled leather book, an old relic from my grandfather. It still had his scent - that old musk I still remember him wearing when I sat on his knee. I read the words, the expressions of thought and feeling he saved for me. I guess he’d thought they’d be my compass, guiding me to the places that I’d know just like a map of memories, leading me to where I need to be.

The GiftCHRISTIAN WARD

37

I still do laundry for the Illuminati. They’re fussy people, the world’s elite. I remember a German billionaire with eyebrows like beer foam. Once, I forgot to bleach his socks. He sputtered and sneered: “Such lazy Americans!” He stopped bringing me jackets. The slacks he brought came stuffed with tacks and marmot pellets. Then he had my daughter killed. Sometimes I will dream about him. He is above me. I am wearing gloves. Between us floats a gigantic grater. Rinds of him plunge through the holes and I grab them. Then my hands smell like warm towels, but is it just the gloves? My daughter smelled of honey and brine. Often, I try to dream of her. But what force have I on the engine?

How The Hopes Like Horses Scatter MIKE YOUNG

38

Creature of the night

Evolving into a vision of light

My eyes deceive me once again

As my hands trail along

The porous surface of your identity

I feel as if I am blindfolded

As you lead me into the unknown

Subconscious delusion

That now surrounds me

Courage builds within my flesh

Moisture develops on my palms

A race begins within my chest

Pounding away like a drum circle

I hear voices in every direction

All of them seem to be calling to me

You stop leading me

I now feel a sudden chill

Rush from my head to my feet

Removing The Mask TIFFANY STARR LUCIOTTI

SUMMER 2006

The air is frigid and damp

I can only hear the howling of the wind

My breathing has become unstable

I try to speak, but my voice has diminished

All I want is to be able to see

I want to escape from this darkness

I desire to bask in the abundant light

That I know is trapped in truth

I must remove the mask

And expose the real identity

Of this creature of the night

I am no longer afraid

I grasp the mask and tear away

Only to reveal my own face

40

Geoffrey Chaucer is known by some as that English poet who was so won-derfully portrayed by Paul Bettamy as a penniless bard with a gambling habit in the movie A Knight’s Tale. To many more, his renown comes from a little collection of stories which took place during the plague, the Canter-bury Tales. But, what of the man who first introduced the English-speak-ing world to Chaucer and made such renown possible? What of William Caxton, editor, translator, and printer extraordinaire? Since records of the time period were kept casually at best, most historians agree William Caxton was born in 1421 or 1422 in Kent, Eng-land, and died in 1491 in Westminster. What happened during those years in between brought us a standardized version of the English language and England’s first printer. Caxton didn’t set out to accomplish such goals when he was a lad of sixteen or seventeen. At that time, he was destined to be a textile man. Apprenticed to Robert Large in 1438, Caxton found himself studying un-der the next mayor of London and well on his way to becoming a respected member of the merchant community. A few years after Large’s death, Caxton apprenticed himself again, this time as a mercer at Bruges in the Low Countries, where he eventually became governor of the Merchants Adventurers. The king appointed him head of this commercial association because of the prominent textile trade Caxton had established between the English and the Flemish. Already in the process of translating The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye from its original French, Caxton put aside the project when trade negotiations soured with Phillip, the Duke of Burgundy. His reputation suffered for several years because the duke refused to renew a wool treaty with England. It was only after Charles the Bold took power that the treaty was finally renewed. The new Duchess of Burgundy, for whom William had been hired as an adviser, personally asked him to finish his transla-tion of The Recuyell. As the former Princess Margaret of York and sister of Edward IV, the duchess’s request was not to be denied. Once he completed the French romance, translated other French and Dutch works, the English merchant traveled to Cologne to learn the print-ing process. For almost two years, Caxton played at apprentice once again until returning to Bruges in 1474 and ‘75 to set up a press with associate Colard Mansion. A Flemish calligrapher, Mansion was fascinated by this

A Printer’s TaleHEIDI RUBY

SUMMER 2006

new way of scribing that allowed works to be mass produced. The pair be-gan with The Recuyell and The Game and Play of Chess Moralized, the lat-ter known for its many beautiful woodcut pictures. Within a year, William Caxton returned to England and set up a printing business in Westminster, where he printed Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres, the first dated book printed in England. From 1476 to his death in 1491, Caxton printed around one hun-dred books with the help of several of his own apprentices, including the colorfully-named Wynkyn de Worde, his predecessor. Many of his books were his own translations and most dealt with religion and chivalry. Cax-ton didn’t stop at simple translations, though. He felt a stirring of a muse within himself, which often prompted him to write a preface or epilogue to many of the works he put into print. Often he included his own literary criticisms within these additions. It was perhaps fitting, then, that Caxton’s fellow countrymen criti-cized him. Only, they didn’t direct the criticism at his writing, but rather at the choice of works he chose to print. They were primarily foreign works about foreign lands, like the French-penned Recuyell. Many Englishmen felt Caxton was under-representing his own country. Poet Geoffrey Chau-cer would change all of that. Printings of Chaucer’s prominent works like Troilus and Criseyde and the famous Canterbury Tales, along with Confessio Amantis by fel-low English poet John Gower, brought Caxton back into good stead with his compatriots and brought English works to the literate world. In 1485, he printed Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, six years before his own death. Historians estimate perhaps eighty of the original books printed by William Caxton still survive in museums and in university and private collections today, many in the Old English typeface he innovated. These books remind the world that England’s first printer should be remembered not only for his careful editing, his multi-lingual translations, and a pref-ace or two of literary criticisms, but also as the man who gave writers like Chaucer a worldwide audience.

42

Oak leaves bright as rubber noses tumble across the lawn reminding me I’ll never be a rodeo clown

Bad KneesMICHAEL KRIESEL

43

I dropped by the island perfume shop with your scent still on file, bought half an ounce to inhale as if you still run beside me in the rain, share the shower you make hotter, stand elbows together, fists against cheeks until I pull you to me and you make that low, soft sound & hip; I dripped on a pillow so I could turn tonight and imagine you, connect freckles to the mark an inch above your hip bone & hip; I went out for some red-leaf lettuce to tear and tomatoes to slice, another Van Morrison just to bear as if they were your fingers and ears & hip; I ground some Sumatra you adore, found those white-chocolate-chip-macadamia cookies as if they were your nose and tongue & hip; I scuffed through gold, matted leaves by the bay road, hand in my pea coat pocket as if it was yours & hip; I only notice all the robins are gone then reappear in fluffs of snow when I stop to consider.

I Created You Again MICHAEL TEMPESTA

44

I fell asleep reading a book that I realized, several chapters in, I had read before, back in a period of my life characterized by forgetting, squan-dered days that would too routinely start with a drink and end question-ably in the proximity of questionable girls, most of them claiming to be artists, their bedrooms strewn with proof – the ubiquitous red canvases, slashed; the reliquaries for abortion receipts. None of this was new or shocking, just a different level of banal from coming to the Golden Nugget for the early bird special, listening to the ads on the smooth jazz station with earnest attention. The radio is full of slogans. Lose weight while you eat. Join your local Y. It warns of delays on the Expressway, southbound, and says that today is the coldest day of the year, not mentioning that it is only January 5. Rain passes for snow. I am at the Golden Nugget, a ball of whipped but-ter melting over my eggs, their split yolks congealing. Across the street the residents of the Sunrise Assisted Living Community squint at large-font menus, screw up their faces, move the menus closer, farther away. I’m wet from the weather, sweaty from the walk, trying to hold some strand of an idea in my head. Maybe I should join my local Y – a gym for flabby, sweat-soaked guys like me, not one of those polished steel and mirror assemblages like the one I walk past twice a week pre-dawn: toned yuppie girls doing pilates, guys strapped into muscle machines… By the cash register two waitresses discuss the day, several weeks ago, when that plane skid off the runway onto that car. One of the wait-resses explains a premonition she had, about her son, who drove down Central several times that day. It was his first time driving in snow. The book was about art and dying, about how we see things accord-ing to our abilities to see, according to our vocabularies for perception and expression. It was about AIDS, which was what made me remember – AIDS and the inclusion, in one chapter, of star charts and a scientific ar-ticle about the interior temperature of a comet’s tail. At two AM last night my girlfriend called to tell me she was leaving the train station and walking down the street to our apartment. I had been asleep for several hours. My alarm was set for five. I asked her how work had been, got out of bed, turned on the living room light. She asked

Scenes From AMarriage SPENCER DEW

SUMMER 2006

what time it was and I said it and she said, “goodbye.” She rang the buzzer twice, came upstairs, threw down her coat kissing me and smelling of vodka. She went into the bathroom and there was the sound of her purse being thrown against a wall and shoes and when she came out she didn’t have a shirt on, taking off her scarf. I got back into bed and she came into the bedroom and fell against the dresser and onto the ground. I asked if she was ok. “Don’t be a jackass,” she said. She’s been saying this for months, not in response to anything, just as a refrain, a warning. “Don’t be a jackass,” she said again, louder, angrier. I asked her what was wrong, what she was talking about, and she said, “It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow I won’t remember any of this and you’ll go to work and I’ll still be sleeping and then I’ll come home from work and you’ll be sleeping and we won’t speak for days, till the weekend, and then all we’ll do is fight.” She crawled into bed, naked, and I tried to kiss her. She pulled away, rolled over with her back toward me. “Why are you still awake?” she said. “Because you woke me up,” I said, and it was all. I could tell from the shift in her breathing that she had gone to sleep. I stayed away from an hour or so, thinking about this and about the book I had read and forgotten and was trying to read again. It was the sort of melodramatic book that I used to like, especially in that period, post-sui-cide attempt. There was something too hopeful about the book, too vivid, too celebratory of sensual pleasures, of the angle of light, of the ambient noise in ICU wards. This, I thought, lying in bed, was the lie of melodra-ma: it raises the stakes, makes things seem worthwhile. I woke with my alarm, covered in sweat. A radio alarm, and the ra-dio was saying something about diagnosis, disease. Then I showered and walked down to the Golden Nugget. I ate my eggs and listened to the host of the smooth jazz show say that this was the coldest day of the year, mak-ing no mention that it was only January 5. A semi truck pulls up into the one-way street between the Golden Nugget and the Sunrise Assisted Living Facility. The driver puts down a ramp and starts unloading dry goods. On his third trip, maybe because the rain is turning back to snow, his dolly slips, spilling several bulk bags of sugar down onto the concrete, one of which ruptures open, leaving a big white stain. I was wrong, I realize. What she said wasn’t “Why are you still awake,” it was “Why aren’t you asleep?” The difference is important. The

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negative matters, makes the implied request more absurd, the anger less rational, removing her own agency in the events all that much more.But I over-analyze. I’m like those old people straining over their menus which aren’t menus at all. Not lists to choose from, just announcements of eventualities. The food described therein will come whether you can read it or not.

47

My words no longer breathe. The constant push of the pen tires their lungs; thoughts gasp and wheeze. Their world strangles in blue skin.

My WordsCHRISTIAN WARD

48

Your blacknesspools into my green,and my first thought is flight.

Then I feel themass of it, how itignites, beautifies the yellow,blues, and maroons on ourperiphery,

and I remember why I’ve read.

Message From A Friend THOMAS ZIMMERMAN

49

A gas station and its public roomthe vending machine black, butflavor filled, chocolate, cherry,lime, and grape. They come

in sequence. For quartersfor sex and why not here,against the pimpled walls,amid toilet paper scraps thatprance across the floor whenthe door opens or the hand-blower is turned on.

What’s more romanticthan pleather, the door’slatch pressed into a backand the rattle of partitionwalls while fountain sodassell outside and people pump

gas? Right there. Fourquarters for sex, and youcan close your lids to curiossmears and dried up deodorizers,to rust spots and signs thatremind employees to wash up.

Four Quarters For Sex And Other Reasons For Abstinence

ALLISON CAMPBELL

50

Escaping the doldrums of summer heatis not an option for claustrophobic allergy suffererswho’ll never know the pleasure of gum on seats, stale popcorn or temperamental movie reels. No,instead their world is made of windows, doors. They wait for dreams to be delivered by mail, telephone. Email. When the knock comes there’s no way of knowing whetherit’s a dream or someone with car trouble looking for a way home. No, the choice is to ignore the knock like a bad Secretary hoping it will just go away or to give intocuriosity hoping it pays off.

The Potential Forest L. B. SEDLACEK

51

Before pressure-cooked school work, on nights, lit up closed eye-lids like the back-drop to a planet at the galactic core;before SF became Sci Fi, to crowd channels with noise like hi fi on tap;before furtive thoughts of alien space junk made states beach-comb this island earth;before cold space became hard cash;before Aldiss ( that “flash lamp” ) mis-captioned The Stars My Destination, The Stars My Detestation,a child knew not those night lightsas out-of-reach partnersin the tremulous waitingon a dance with wordless hopes.

The Stars, My Detestation RICHARD LUNG

52

And you were the president and you knew that the slaves were being raped. You knew that democracy was a word without meaning. You were a soldier in the black light of 4:00 a.m. You were drunk. Pulled a torch out of the fire, threw it into one of tepees, and you had your orders. The babies were easy, fragile skulls beneath your boot heels, and the women were fun. Tied them to the beds, raped them with rifle barrels, beat them to death. And most of the men killed in their sleep, and the ones that ran shot in the back. Not war, but freedom. Dark red flowers falling everywhere. And you were a trader, and the blankets were infected. The villages were burned to the ground after everyone had died. Every day was Christ-mas. And is this the story, this need to destroy, this need to conquer, this absolute hatred? No. The story is the beauty of what we built with the bones that the dogs refused to eat. The beauty was the mini-marts, the topless bars, the all-you-can-eat buffets. Do you remember fucking the woman downstairs when her husband was at work? Do you remember how she locked the baby in its room? Told you she loved you, and then it got boring, and even this isn’t the story. There was a young girl down the street, and then another two blocks over, and both of them dead of cancer within a month of each other. There were 40,000 gallons of poison dumped into the soil, and 200 houses along the path it followed to the river. There were lawyers, and there were letters, and no one ever paid be-cause nothing could be proven. And there were three more children dead and there were tests, but nothing conclusive. There were the Indian babies along the border born without eyes, without arms, without skin. We gave them casinos. We gave them alcohol and cigarettes. All was forgiven. And what I’m talking about here are my sons. What I’m talking about here is fear. And the story isn’t told because the machines all run on blood. The machines are useless, but they’re chrome-plated. They’re beautiful and they’re loud and, when I dream, I dream of undressing you in Wal Mart. I dream of flowers raining down around us like fire. Your wrists, which taste of vanilla.

East To WestJOHN SWEET

SUMMER 2006

And so the story ends up being a history lesson, and nothing is learned. A woman is found in the closet of a building that’s been burned to the ground. She’s naked, and her arms and legs have been tied with clothes-line. The vice president makes money off of the corpses of every dead sol-dier, and we smile. We believe in democracy because it’s easier than be-lieving in revolution. To speak out is to risk losing what you already have, and what would we do without our video games, without our 200 channels of cable, without our Internet porn? And this is finally the story. I was 14, riding the bus home, looking out the window at a kid I knew as he was chased down the sidewalk by 4 others. They caught him as we passed by, knocked him to the ground, began kicking him in the head. And were there houses around? Yes, but the doors stayed closed. Did the bus driver see? Yes, but he had other worries. A pregnant girlfriend maybe, or old scars of his own. He was a coward like the bullies were cowards, but knowledge isn’t always power. This was a friend of mine, and all I did was watch. Never visited him in the hospital afterwards, never spoke about it when he got out, and then three years later we both went away to college and I never saw him again. Waited for the story to end, but it didn’t. The Indians with money turned on those who wanted nothing to do with it, and more soil was poi-soned and more wars declared. Nobody won, but everyone claimed victo-ry. Everyone claimed to have at least one god on their side. Every day was Easter. But listen. My older boy wakes up this morning in tears. Says he dreamt that I no longer loved him. That I told him he had to leave. Six years old and crying, and this is the story. This is all I had to say.

54

Before beginning a “tour”, so to speak, of my apartment, I always think it a good idea to issue a couple of warnings. You can picture me saying this over my shoulder, a foreboding concierge with key raised to the lock. You may even notice a quick flash from the key ring, a gift from my partner, that flash a blue rhinestone chip beside an engraved silver schooner. In any case, as you may have guessed , I smoke, Native Lights actually, a mi-raculous inexpensive Indian Reservation import, and even though in sum-mer with windows open and fans blowing, the trace of cigarettes is pretty undetectable, it is now only March and the apartment’s been closed up all winter long. True, in every room and passage there are “powder fresh” stick ups and “ tropical rain forest” scented plug-ins, but they are scarcely a match for the miasma of my vice. This is not an apology. I’ve enough useless guilt as it is. This is just a statement of fact. Between the deodorizers and cigarettes here is a chance here for spontaneous combustion. The other warning is probably no more of a surprise than the first. I also have two cats. Thomas and Speedy are their names. Thus, when I open the door, scoot in fast, for Speedy especially lives up to his namesake. Also, and I do apologize, but watch your feet, because one or both cats might be trying to run in between them, rubbing your ankles and purring. At least that is if they think you’ve come to worship them with food. Furthermore, Speedy has a sensitive stomach, and I wouldn’t want you to run into any cat vomit. If that weren’t enough, Thomas must be part rabbit for, when excited, (plus he is overweight), has been known to drop a small pellet turd here and there. Don’t say you weren’t warned. I mean I try to keep a clean place. I come home from work every day and with typi-cal obsessive compulsion take a lint brush to de-fur the furniture. (I really should start saving these collections and knit them into outfits so I can get on “Believe It Or Not”.) And it’s not like I deliberately leave these feline fecal and/or intestinal calling cards lying about. I just might not have been present at the time they appeared. A person does have to get out of the house once in awhile. One morning as I was leaving for work, lugging my usual heavy back-pack, Speedy was sitting on top of the stairwell having ominous stomach heaves. I therefore attempted to catch the upchuck in mid-stream with a handy waste basket. In the process, juggling backpack and waste basket, I

Of Cats, Landlords, & Bats I Sing STEPHEN MEAD

SUMMER 2006

nearly threw my back out. If there is one lesson in life which I have learned it is that puke must be allowed to fall where it falls. Funny, the cats don’t seem to be bothered by any of this, and I guess that out of all the “prized possessions” around here these two are the most problematic. Who am I kidding? These two own me. I am their thing to be sat on and jumped on and even scratched like a post when the mood strikes. It is also evident that they own me due to the fact that my partner has developed an allergy to them, and can now only stay here for two hours at a time. Yes, they’ve interfered with my love life and I still keep them around for fear of hurting their feelings since they seem so comfortable here. Is there a “Co-dependent No More” group for this sort of thing? What’s funny is I never sought out either of these animals as pets. What’s also funny is that the year when they both separately arrived in my life was a year when I was coming out of a long term relationship, silently vowing never to have any sort of live-in entity in my space ever again. Thomas came first, a skinny four month old charcoal black and gray tabby. He’d been abandoned by college students of an English professor acquaintance I knew. There I was in, a Border’s Bookstore Reading Group, trying to start my life over, single and free, when in comes this harried pro-fessor with a tale of woe about this kitten’s plight. The next thing I know I’ve got myself another cat, Thomas. Thomas is named after a patient I’d struck up a closeness with while working as a Hospital Aide. Speedy, a lighter grey flannel hue, with shimmers of white and big golden pear colored eyes, arrived shortly afterwards. He was dropped off by a former roommate frantically banging on my door one morning af-ter I’d just got done with a night shift. Half asleep I listened to this good hearted woman excitedly explain how her husband was kicking Speedy about, and how she was afraid for the cat’s welfare, and wouldn’t I take it awhile? “Ok”, says I, wanting more than anything just to go back to sleep. Good thing she didn’t show up with a family of illegal aliens. I’ve made some of the worst decisions in my life due to feeling either groggy or sorry or both. In any case, quick as an apparition for one of my past evil deeds, my former roommate left, most likely chuckling to herself, and I’ve scarcely

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seen her in the years since. But of course Speedy stayed. This is how I’ve come to view poor Speedy, who is, after all, very sweet if slightly brain damaged. I view Speedy as the cat who came to visit and stayed. Unfortunately I also think Speedy’s self esteem has been stunted a bit with this subliminal message. He certainly skulks about skittishly enough. Thomas, moreover, didn’t exactly give him the warmest of wel-comes. More like a spitting, hissing tornado Tasmanian Devil of claws, than anything else. At the time I was living in what one might call an Efficiency. I’m not quite sure what was efficient about it. I called it a one room skid row for roaches. Then, like now, I was residing on the third floor of an old rooming house type of building. (I seem to have an affinity for third floors, the tree house life. Perhaps this is due to some-thing aerial, bird-like, or just plain spacey in my nature.) Yes, there I was living in a third story one room roach motel with two battling cats, one of whom had a pair of broken legs. Ah, forgot to mention that. Since that place was so small and stuffy I often had the windows open and the windows either lacked or didn’t have the best screens. Also, since the leaky efficiency fridge and kitchen was so small I often put things on the kitchen windowsill. In fact, I should have had some inkling of dan-ger my very first night when I placed a gallon jug of punch on the sill and then tried to sweep, the place being so small that the broom handle collided with the jug and sent it ricocheting off somewhere into the night. (Hopefully not on to anyone’s head.) I like to think Thomas didn’t have a similar experience, but I really don’t know how he wound up falling three stories. I know he did love hanging out on the roof, drawn to both sounds of children in the day school play yard next door, and to the menagerie of squirrels and pigeons who were his neighbors. Even with the screens shut he would pull and pry at them to gain access, thus Thomas either fell while in the midst of one of his antics, or one of the crotchety people in the building pushed him when he popped up in their window. In any case, he was missing for over a day when I finally found where he dragged himself, and he was wearing two front casts at the time of his first

SUMMER 2006

meeting with Speedy. (You might find it of interest, or not, that the vet, who chuckled a bit when showing me Thomas’ s x-rays, comparing them to a Wily Coyote Road Runner mishap, said that in a NYC study it was cats that descended from third floor heights who usually break limbs, whereas ones who fall from higher or only second floor ones, tend to make out all right. I wondered how they got the results of that study. Were people all over NYC dropping cats out windows to test Newton’s Gravity theories?) I guess it was a bit fortuitous that Thomas was a little incapacitated during his initial meeting with Speedy. That way he only had his back legs to bat with while his front ones were sort of mummified. He actually did look rather Egyptian with the casts, and I toyed with the idea of paint-ing them in gold leaf but feared blood poisoning. Speedy, being the one on new turf and somehow aware of the squatter’s rights Thomas had, did his best to be placating. He did not avoid Thomas at all, but instead made these little ingratiating tribble-like mews from his throat, and followed Thomas about with his head sheepishly lowered. Good strategy. They became pals in less than a week, and even now still play that crouch mew chase me chase me game, which can really get on one’s last nerve at four in the morning. Of the two, Speedy is the one to let Thomas have first go at the food dish or sit on my lap, before staking claim, yet can also be more needy and gregarious, happily running to investigate and be petted when company comes. Speedy wants the attention the way a dog would, whereas Thomas mainly wants to show who’s boss or be left alone. Speedy also can be terribly vociferous and whiny, often sitting at one’s feet repeat-ing the same sort of nails-on-chalkboard banshee hell cat squawk, or wan-dering from room to room doing the same thing. He’s like some sort of pathetic orphaned Edward Gorey waif. Thomas, meanwhile, is still the on who tries to be mischievous dare-devil, the one whom I have to electric tape the screens against. Yes, even in this new third story place, he has a thing for the roof. In fact, one night he did get out there, and from there to a nearby tree where he called and called at the moon, waking me up instead. I went to the fire escape and called back, but of course his meows just got more woebegone. Not until I went to rescue him with a ladder did he react: scampering over my head and off down the street. He only returned when I lost my balance and the ladder tipped over and I lay on my back looking at stars. This is why I can never seem to have enough electric tape to seal up

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the screens, but even so, once or twice every summer, I still wind up with a baby brown bat somewhere in this attic apartment. The cats are of course thrilled, an angel mouse to play with, they think. Me, I recall ev-ery vampire movie I ever saw, pull the pajamas up over my head, slam the door of whatever room the bat is in, and call the landlord. One night the landlord wasn’t able to find the bat in the bedroom where I’d trapped it, so I slept in the living room with a light on until Fall. My partner has been very butch and dear about this, not only com-ing over to catch one of the bats, but also helping me get some plug-in bat repellents for each room. They have a night light which emits a comforting green hornet glow, and hypersonic pitch only bats can hear and be warned away by. Quite useful, and quite a different technique than the one my landlord adopted, usually coming over with a very big toolbox, wanting to socket- wrench the creature I suppose. He mainly laughs about my fear, thinking of the free entertainment value the bats provide, or says I should just spray them with water. Funny, I never seem to have a garden hose handy at the time. This is the typical sort of advice I’ve received from landlords wher-ever I’ve lived, and whatever the problem may be. I was also told that the reason I was so cold one winter was because my furniture was too close to the radiators, not the fact that there wasn’t any heat coming up the pipes. It wasn’t until I called Code Enforcement, and my landlord was given a citation that he, none too pleased with me, discovered that the thermostat wiring had been chewed threw by squirrels. I stay here because it’s cheap and I have a built in resistance to the work of packing that a move would entail. I may have even stayed longer in my last third floor roach motel, but the ceiling developed leaks that all the contact paper in the world could not seal out. (I know. I tried.) Yes, when it comes to landlords, I pay my rent on time mainly to keep them away. Even the current one, who is certainly nice enough, but whom, when he comes to make repairs, does things like tie a rope around his waist and the other end of it around a wooden plank which he then props floor to ceiling across a room, sort of like bungee jumping, just so he can paint the trim outside my windows. Very nerve wracking stuff. I asked if he could caulk around the windows too, as long as he was out there, to seal up the cracks where the bats sneak in, but I’m afraid he found that idea rather silly.

SUMMER 2006

Still, “How are your cats? Especially that fat one?”, he always asks when I do see him, and I do my best not to think of the stereotypical would-be witticisms others have made when they’ve heard my landlord ask this. You see, my landlord happens to be Chinese. He’s also often thoughtful enough to ask how my art is going: “Been discovered yet?” In addition to being my landlord one of his hobbies is carving jade, so I suppose he is not without understanding of my struggling artist persona. I can imagine him sometimes, painstakingly widdling away at the phosphorous emerald stone. He is creating a dragon perhaps, or even a bat, something grand and misunderstood, something kind of mythic and maybe even lucky.

60

2:30 pm to 4:30 am.

Second shift.14 hour days, 4 days a week.

Fridays spent sleeping, catching upwith the rest of the week. Errands.

The roar of the machines invadeslumber, the finger, the handsshake from repetition, routine.

Week by week we find out if there’senough work to go around.

The machines take over. They don’tneed coffee, soft drinks. And no oneever sees it, no one ever stays in touch.

Not even with email.

Technological Arrogance L. B. SEDLACEK

61

I peel away layers of skin of anxiety As the jack hammer days greet me With sounds of machines, sounds of men And sounds of birds The days spent watching clocks, watching walls Watching women, watching the past and the space In between the boundary of things The days of our skeletons The days in which our bones can march, run, walk, Bend and lift things Days of towering ambition and body and mind Wanting to be aggrandized And where is the heart? Is it floating down the Seine? In a haze of romantic bravado I met a few people this day Who were thinking of sex: they had Sexual faces, eyes, bodies and they even Moved sexually, and this was communicated With an animal—like telepathy, delivered With no propositions or courtship It was just there and inevitable as rain Hitting bodies faces and windshields outside People work and people sleep even lust and dream Before it is beaten out of us with the forty-hour workweek And dreariness and ennui

The Days...Like Empty Boxes

DAMION HAMILTON

DISPATCH II

And where are the gamblers? Do they have a chance? Are you selling your body for well—fed and bored men? Are you holding up a bank high on heroine or crank? Or are you all ready behind bars

editorial notation:

Damion Hamilton is a working-class genius you may not yet be aquainted with. We like him so much that we’ve published his first poetic tome, entitled Some Days Are Without Magic. It’s available for only $9 through our pressing wing,

press.litdispatch.net:thanks.

63

with their white yards & green teeth chewing, slowly chewingmystery white meats, cubed & processed food product stuff

the recipe was right on the box& there was a coupon Iforgot to clip. that’s35 cents I could’ve saved. the price of a postage stamp - I could’ve written you a letter in my shaky handwriting telling you about how I want to explode.

your pensive gaze troubles me,young one. grown tired, have you?

the earthlingsJ. D. NELSON

64

As I remember it, the whole thing begins after a palm branch scars the horizon deep enough to bruise its skin. In turn, that causes a crescendo of lavender scent to leak all along the naked limbs of an apricot wind with its passport at hand. Next, the mirror of white pearls pluses on the way to Lourdes and then takes the wrong turn in dense fog pressed against the hip. Coffee table leather jacket. Golden gate lazy earthquake. Cloak and dagger hillside town. Or a stale box of animal crackers falling out of the vast spree of redemption. Either way, it all adds up to a raspber-ry beret of colored fingernail polish much too flesh to bread or thoroughly soaked in a railroad crossing where a horseshoe on a dashboard has access to any dusk coupling riddle and can activate it by repeating this narrative in a foreign language as written on a red enamel bedside table or by tenth grade students who say, “Wow, that was an awesome lecture.”

Verbs, Lost In Their

Transitive CasesMAURICE OLIVER

65

During the worst of it, the people formed somnolent ranks in the aisles of the local merchantplex. Some wore protective masks. Those who removed them were stunned by bright colors, the bounty of the land swathed in foil and butcher paper. Through the lingering blare of sirens and shellburst, familiar melodies threaded from unseen speakers. If they could ignore the taste of ash and rawness in their throats, it could’ve been any day, any week. Out of habit, they browsed, patting pockets for curren-cy, sorted through bins of pastel eggs, domesticated pine, fluorescent roll-ing hoops. At curfew, they still wandered between displays. Dust sloughed from their skin, streaking labels and protective seals, sifting mutely from resilient corners of cardboard and plastic.

HomefrontPEDRO PONCE

66

Awoke to a day so phoney even the pigeons outside on the curb affected French – kissing each other like 8-balls on imaginary felt. The phone rang; had been ringing. I sat up in the sack. Groped across the night stand. Clawed receiver off hook. “This you, Bob?” a husky female voiced. I muttered I prefered Robert, unsticking eyes, some dream through a stifled yawn escaping. “Hear that, Bob?” Over the line came a rustle. “I’m taking off my blouse. Pure silk. What’s your favorite color, Bob?” “Off-white,” I heard myself croak in tones I recognized as first thing, no coffee. “Beige,” I added blearily. “Whatever you call it. Who’s calling – do you realize what time it is?” “Do you?” A snap; another rustle; a sigh, “That’s me removing my bra.” I glanced – blood flooding penis – over at the clock. “It’s, uh, 00:00… flashing… Are you a solicitor? This number doesn’t accept…” “I’m certainly no,” she interrupted, chuckling, “British mouthpiece! I’m tweaking my nipples – they’re beige with a buff ochre blush, stand up a full centimeter. You got sharp teeth?” “Zero-zero?” I muttered absently. “That midnight…? Noon? Why’s it flashing? Sharp?” I became aware of an erection. “I’m flashing you right now, Bob. Lifting the beige leather mini so you can ju-u-st see the lacy edge of my ecru satin panties – like it?” “Nuts. Must’ve been power out in the night. Hey, lady, you know what time it is? – my clock broke.” “Time to have a good time,” she cooed. “Don’t fret if it’s broken – Angela’ll fix it.” I thought of the pigeons up above, lining the gutter, cooing broken French. Largely to get my hand off my cock I reached over and rattled the digital, which kept flashing 00:00, of course, because it needed to be reset just like I needed Folger’s crystals and neither of us was going to get to first without the other. I staggered nude out of bed, still clasping to my ear the phone. The cord just let me get to the jar of Folger’s perched on the edge of the sink. Unscrewed lid. Spooned into my mouth a dozen grams of jagged

A Case Of Too Much Beer WILLIE SMITH

SUMMER 2006

powder. Tossed spoon in sink. Turned on and let run the hot powder. Tossed spoon in sink. Turned on and let run the hot. Crunched. Swallowed. Angled head under faucet. Filled mouth. Straightened up. Gulped. Growled into the phone, “Why’s your voice familiar?” I bent back down, grabbed another mouthful to chase the last of the crystals from between my teeth. “I do a job for you once?” “Don’t be silly, hon – I got your name outta the phone book, like all my customers. Never called you before. To me your just a dick that’s a sucker for off-white.” “I’m also a dick that packs,” I gazed at the holstered .38 sat beside the flashing digital, felt the last of the coffee plash into my gut. “Say… what kinda racket is this?” “Ooh – a dick that packs!... OK, look, Dada,” the throaty throb fell to a whisper, “they’ve switched the monitor elsewhere. ‘Natch I sound familiar – this is Gene Enema. Look, Dada, you got to help.” “Enema – the Channel 5 news anchor?” “Right. Aliens got me. Happened two months ago. Since then all the female newscasters have been replaced by robots – the real women forced into phone-sex slavery.” “At least,” I slumped back onto the bed, “the men are still giving us the truth.” “Oh no. They replaced them with androids, too; but they killed all the men.” “But you’re…” “I’m a counter-tenor. When I hipped to what the aliens were about, I slipped under the counter, changed into women’s clothing. First insert-ing my penis into my anus. I don’t have testicles. Mom castrated me early on; she was a radical libber fixated on rape. I don’t remember the details; maybe she caught me one day petting the dog too hard. Whatever, at age six I got nutted. A blessing in disguise, as I was thus able, merely by main-taining a constant Hollywood loaf, to make my penis resemble an anomaly of flesh between the genitalia and the anus. These aliens aren’t too precise about sex. They don’t have it back on M87, their native galaxy, that gi-ant elliptical at the heart of the Virgo Cluster puts out the radio beams. Whatever, my life hangs by a thread here in this boiler room. I want you to spring me. Then help me trash the robot currently filling my spot, so I can get back to broadcasting the news like always, even if I will have to do it in drag, emphasizing the high notes and with my dick up my own ass.”

DISPATCH II

“I charge,” I said slowly, “two hundred a day plus expenses.” “Sure, hon,” Gene raised her voice, “you can put it on plastic. But let me get my panties off first.” Nuts, I thought. Monitor must be back on. Maybe I should at least don underpants. Kinda chilly down here. Wish I had a window – for moments like this; clock broken; use sun to guess time. “Hear that, Bob? – that was me twirling my buff satin panties across the room. I am naked. Slouched in an overstuffed off-white vinyl chair, legs spread up over the arms, bare ass dug deep down in the seat. What would you like to do to me right now?” “I’d like you to agree to my terms. I’ll also need a $500 retainer. In addi-tion to the expenses tacked onto the two hundred a day.” I hobbled into my underpants, switching the phone from ear to ear. I was sick of taking Enema’s shit. Felt like I’d been taking it all ten years I’d lived in this town. Night after night the evening news with Gene Enema. “Turn on your tv!” he hissed, between her cooing, “I’m tickling my big fat clit, Bob. Tongue it, OK?” I got into my socks, thinking I’d step the ten feet over to the far side of the room and lick the portable, where it sat on the floor beside the gas heater. Thought better, picking yesterday’s slacks off the floor beside the bed. Grabbed the remote – between the .38 and the digital – off the stand. “What channel?” “My clit needs right this instant – oh I’m so hot! – five quick licks!” Thumbed on channel five. Light was let. The screen filled with Gene Enema. The man himself’s voice lunged into my hovel. Enema was a white guy of thirty-five with wonderful eyebrows and per-fect hair. His nose was run-of-the-mill WASP. Brow middle-of-the-road. A shallow dimple pocked a weak chin. Eyes like pistols aimed at the camera, with the casualness of blueberry milkshakes. His lips set in a perennial hangman smile. “Now the special – you’ll be surprised how small it shows on your bill – : Scrunch the phone against your groin. Hold me to your scrotum. You haven’t lived, hon, till you’ve had Angela do you a yodel job.” I placed the earpiece of the receiver firmly against the crotch of my slacks. At least that way I could hear Enema better. The Enema on the tube, that is; the robot Enema.

SUMMER 2006

National crisis time – that’s what time it was. The Arabs had attacked. Or the Martians landed. Or the International Communist Conspiracy final-ly reared its Jewish head. Whatever, it was constant news. No ads. Maybe somebody had shot another Kennedy. Couldn’t pin it down. Because the instant the phone started yodeling the sound on the portable died. A coincidence. Sound on the portable always cutting out; leave the set on another minute, sound comes back. Hitting doesn’t help. I think my frequently hitting the console to get the picture to stop rolling made the sound start cutting out in the first place. Clamped together thighs – to trap phone against groin; wrestled into a shirt I rescued off the floor at the foot of the bed. While buttoning front and cuffs, I frowned at the tube, struggling to read Enema’s lips. What the real Enema was doing over the wires – although crotch-muf-fled – resembled gargling more than your classic Alpine rebel yell. Tucked in shirt. Returned hand to receiver. Straightened back up. Set-tled into picking up every fifth or so word from the robot’s twittering yap: M87… aliens… do as told… further notice… scientists aware for half a cen-tury… strongest radio galaxy ever observed. I became aware Enema was hissing. Puzzling over a word on the android’s lips – either astrophysics or as-phodel or asphalt hell…? I heard, or rather felt, Enema’s voice – no longer Angela – hiss into my manhood, “Dada – take the phone out of your groin! Put me back up in your ear! I’ve got less than a minute to tell you every-thing! Are you listening? Say something… Dada, quick – get me outta your balls!” “OK, I’m here – all ears, Mr. Enema. And say, look, about that retain-er…” A hiss came over the line, an electric hiss backgrounding Enema’s hissy voice hissing, “Dada – hear that hiss?” “Yeh – so? Should I clap the receiver back over my scrotum?” “Subject hears fine – go ahead on your end.” Then into my ear burst a robot voice claiming to speak for the United Galactic Emirates of Messier Object 87. Without further ado, I lunged for the .38. Yanked the snub free of its holster. Fired three shots rapidly, blasting the protable to smithereens. When my ears stopped ringing from the reports, I realized the aliens were off the line. Enema was struggling to cover up, nonchalantly describing lathering

DISPATCH II

herself for the next specialty – an in-the-mike pubic shave. “You’ll hear, hon,” she cooed professionally, “the razor scritch those chestnut curls pres-ently draped over my labia.” I saw it all in a flash. Sure the power had failed. Knocked out by extra-galactic intrusion. My returning senses – combined with the coffee plateau – told me I had just dodged a bullet. Metaphorically. Quite literally, the aliens had not. Enema didn’t know me from Adam; never had; now, thanks to the little god Snub Nose, never would. She/he was working phone books off the internet – calling blindly down the alphabet. Interface with online yellow pages revealed me for a dick. So Angela tailored her patter to that media-honored profession. Another split sec of hiss seeding my auditory nerve and I myself would’ve been snatched – doubtless whipped into a phone-sex slave – maybe beamed into the same boiler room Enema sweated out of. The routine about my fave color had provided a key fitted to the lock protecting my brain from just such an invasion. A simple – yet highly per-sonal – quirk like color-preference left my mental back door wide open. Until I blew the circuit with those three slugs to the tv, I teetered maybe one femto-second from losing ownership of my skull mush. On the psyches of how many unwitting victims had the trick already turned? A hellacious scritching then assaulted my brain. A straight-edge harvest-ing dozens of lathery follicles at a stroke. Just as the crotch yodel resonated with the robot on tv, Enema was now attempting to hook the aliens up through the razor swipes; synching the wiping of the blade to after-images of the lip-reading robot sinking through the wet circuitry of my thinker. I slammed down the phone. Realized I was wet. Blowing out the tv I’d shot more than hot lead. Well, I consoled myself, gazing moodily at the shattered Motorola con-sole, stepping back out of my pants, better – most mornings – to change your shorts than your personality. Or whatever those Virgos had verged on short changing. Peeled off soiled shorts. Kicked the boxers over into a dirty area of the room. Pulled down and loosely knotted shirt tails into a bachelor’s breech clout. Reholstered hot pistol. Turned digital around, so wouldn’t hafta watch it flash quadruple goose eggs. Shuffled over to mini-fridge on counter beside sink. Extracted baloney.

SUMMER 2006

Rolled three slices into cylinders. Secured each floppy tube with a tooth-pick. Ignited hot plate. Removed from sink my Salvation Army skillet. Placed same on hot plate. Nestled baloney in pan. Used left hand to jiggle handle to prevent scorch. With right unscrewed Folger’s. Tilted up jar. Shook in a second mouthful of crystals. Chewed wincingly, thinking: Maybe breakfast help forget. It was a case to forget. Total profit one free whoopee not even noticed. Minus the cost of three .38 rounds. Plus the destroyed tv. Although now at least I wouldn’t be able anymore to watch Gene Enema. Did that put me in the black? I shrugged. Couldn’t tell – too close to the event. Reason, as always, a house of cards best constructed in retrospect.

72

Sitting on a truck with 18 Marines a convoy traveling highway 9 for Dong Ha. Three days in country, I’m thinking “man can’t wait until my first firefight.” I listen to the conversations I can hear figure most of these Marines have been here awhile. These salty Marines have a look about them something in their eyes or the lack of it They just seem to look right through me it’s freaky. I know only the two Marines either side of me, we have been friends since boot camp. We look so out of place, our new jungle utilities and boots. On the sides of the road are rice paddies, water buffalo being worked by the south Vietnamese farmers. Along the road are young children, old people with conical hats in their out stretched hands yelling, “Hey GI give me chop-chop” “Hey GI you got Salem” some only four or five years old. The old salts watch these people intently, anyone might be VC. Suddenly a deafening explosion. The truck rocks violently, comes to a stop. There are men yelling “I’m Hit”! Men jumping from the truck returning fire.

Be Careful What You Wish For JACK NEELEY

SUMMER 2006

I see JP heading for the back of the truck, he stops then stares past me. I start to rise, reach for my friend Jim. I turn in his direction, Time stops. My friend Jim is dead the lower half of him sitting on the wood bench seat.

74

The screeching of tires, honking of horns, low yet sonorous sounds of the passing cars – all in all, a cacophonous and motley mixture of sounds that one comes across while driving on a busy road. Yet, even while driving, the only sound ringing in my ears was that of a flute. Yes a flute, and it was a long, long time since I had heard it. Seven years is a long time, but all through those years, some time or other, particularly when I found my spirits low, the musical notes came riveting back. Probably, it had etched a permanent place somewhere in my mind. I first heard it a long time ago, late one evening. We had just shifted to this new staff quarter adjacent to the central jail, where my father had joined as the Superintendent. I was deeply immersed in my studies, pre-paring for next days examination at the college, when this sound reverber-ated through the air. It was thin a very full music of a flute. It acted as a soothing balm to my mind, which was crammed up with academic infor-mation. The notes of the flute constantly refreshed my brain, thus helping me absorb more information. It seemed there was a direct relationship between the music and my studying. In tune with the music, I effortlessly went through all my notes, and didn’t know when I had fallen asleep. Next day, I did extremely well in my test. Even in the examination hall, all the answers to the questions appeared to my mind along with ac-companiment of the enchanting music. I just went through the motion of penning the answers on the answer sheet. Thereafter, the phenomena would take place regularly. The timing of my study and the music would synchronize exquisitely, and I would through my books and notes as if I were floating on the waves of the music from the flute. It was as if time had become still. After a couple of days of my first encounter with the music, I met Banshi, the musician. Actually it wasn’t very difficult – everybody knew him. He was prisoner, serving his term in the jail. With my father’s permis-sion, I went to see him. He was in his sixties, a thin-bearded man, his eyes filled with warmth and compassion. I didn’t even try to find out why he was there… why he was sentenced, … what was his crime and whether he had actually com-mitted it. It really didn’t matter to me. Everything else paled into insignifi-cance before the music for me.

A MusicalRelationship SANJAY MISHRA

SUMMER 2006

“ I taught music at the school. Of all the musical instruments, I re-ally fancied the flute. It is so simple, just a piece of bamboo. And yet, it has such a fine voice.” “But it is mute, until it is in your hand,” I said. “Oh yes, it needs to be coaxed a little,” he replied, smiling. My father told me Banshi was a reticent character, always in a world of his own. The Jail Officials were at a loss as to how such a simple man could be sentenced for crime. My father had no objection to my meeting with ‘The Flute Master’, the tag, by which he was known to everybody in the Jail. “Will you teach me how to play the flute?” I dared to ask one day. He laughed at my suggestion, almost dismissively. “Why not? What is wrong with my learning this art?” I persisted. “You are a grown up girl.” I firmly believe that music should be learnt since childhood. Only then does it give you the time to assimilate it into yourself subconsciously. As children are free of inhibitions, they allow themselves to be dragged by the power of it. Also, they instill their own subtle nuances in it, giving it a form of their own and a whole new mean-ing. I could not fathom much of what he was saying. “Is that the only rea-son?” I probed. “No, that is not all. Besides, all that I have said, I also feel that the flute is an instrument for the man and doesn’t suit a young lady like you.” He said with a wide grin. I didn’t feel offended, although his last statement of his could have been perceived as of male chauvinism. “Like the fact that the ‘Veena’ doesn’t go well in the hands of a man.” He added as an afterthought. So in his mind, he had specified instruments for different sets of people. It could be just .his opinion or may be he was avoiding teaching me since he was a prisoner, I thought. “But I have a proposition,” he continued. “I can teach your son.” “What?” “Yes, I can teach your son, when the time comes.” This bewildered me. During the time we stayed there, the music of the flute had become part of my life, enchanting me every night. Eventu-ally, my father was transferred and I also moved to the university. When I met Banshi before leaving, he presented me his flute.

DISPATCH II

“Give it to your son.” He almost commanded. Years later, I got married and became the mother of a lovely boy. But all through the years, the music and Banshi had remained alive in my mind. I had been in constant touch with the jail authorities and was actu-ally going to greet him. He was to be released today. As I drove along the streets with my son, now five years old, hold-ing the flute given by Banshi, I relived the blissful feelings of being floated away by its music. I stopped the car in front of the prison gate, and en-quired about Banshi at the reception. “May I know who you are?” the clerk asked. “Can I meet Banshi?” I queried. “He is no more Madam…he suffered a massive heart attack yester-day.” I was stunned, too overwhelmed to speak. “Where is he?” “He had been shifted to the hospital. His dead body might be in the morgue. There was nobody to claim it.” Without uttering anything more, I drove to the hospital, tears welling in my eyes. All ambitions of my son getting the chance to learn flute from “The Flute Master”, diligently nurtured through all these years, had been shattered. As the musical notes floated in my senses, I realized how our rela-tionship had developed a one-foot long bamboo stick, yet it was so solid and everlasting. The music echoing in my mind was no longer the soothing mellow tune I had known all my life. It was now being filled with pathos. Would I ever be able to make my son aware of this sweet relationship? I entered the morgue and proceeded to claim Banshi’s dead body. “How are you related to him?” the morgue official asked. “He was my father…step father. “ I replied.

77

Surely last year she left someone or someone left her,the way she sits on the bench by the 69th street pier,slowly tossing crumpled bread to the gulls.She even tries feeding the manna from her open palms,but the feathered Israelites refuse her handheld charity,preferring to peck on the ground. Thus with downcast eyes and slumping posture, she anoints herself the center of the gulls’ attention.Attention, and so I move toward her.And what am I doing here this cloudy New Year’s morning?We two alone together on a pier so desertedthat even the daily fishermen are absent.I walk past her and instead of happy new year,I blurt, “It will be better this year.”And she raises her head and we we’re eye-to-eye.And I stop. And I hope; and I hope.But her eyes whisper, “Thanks, but please move on.”And so I leave, through a flock of grounded gullsnot yet ready to resume soaring.

Cloudy New Year’s Morning RICHARD FEIN

78

January 15, 2006

Momentum art show yesterday…worked long for no profit, the lit Review trying something the world doesn’t get, that bleeding on a page, forgotten soon…the people, artsy, pretentious, cocktail benders, Nichols Hills…No one bought anything, hell, shouldn’t it be like this? Many are called few are chosen, like mass consumption, consuming the masses. Friends didn’t come, the day and night before, barroom talk, beer translation, “oh yeah we’ll be there”…but really, no respect from friends that are frat boys who think they are the shit,… so I’ll get the apologies, the pathetic ones, from six of my friends not showing for my readings…They’ve said it before, don’t respect what I do, see it in their eyes, they can’t hang a dollar sign on it. There’s a lot of shit that’s hung with diamond ornaments, popular and grotesque…. but I’m trying something beautiful in a black cave of a world. Stood out of the way….I like the corners of solitude, don’t like public read-ings, small spotlights, they make me nervous…rather have them say, “Have you read that shit by P.L. George?”…dream one day they say “Hell, I knew that drunk, I used to drink with him”…and they’ll still be sitting in their shitty little cave bars, living the same lives they were meant for. Don’t have to push Brian my editor. Not like David, local filmmaker, bohemian, content with coffeehouse talk and musings on David Lynch…Shoved an eighteen-pack in Brians’ backpack, downed six before the show started. Don’t want to tell people about January twenty-first, my CD

LosingMomentum P. L. GEORGE

editorial notation:

This is a diary P. L. George wrote over two weeks a�er being disap-pointed by the launch of his friends’ literary magazine, Momentum. I feel it is an accurate and picturesque depiction of the mind of a budding writer, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

:thanks.

SUMMER 2006

release, let them guess where I am…don’t want to pull teeth…good quote from my girl, an adage really, “If they wanna come, they’ll come. If not, fuck ‘em”…a nice slice of words. I’m in the sea, surrounded by writers I pretty much have no respect for, but I hang around, I got no other choic-es…The warehouse that hung the Momentum art was a maze, twenty five hundred people squeezed into a claustrophobic closet, but didn’t realize, being toasted by seven…Me and my girl will travel to my readings, se-cretly let the rest all wonder where I’m at, this is how it should be. I was born for misunderstanding, this is how it should be. Removed that cloud of Momentum hanging for forever. Get on with my own shit, promote a little, gain some ego and balls and wait for fate or chance…and then be a hero somewhere in some corner of some bar or a quiet room. It’s always gone like this…choose the thing a tiny few that you could hold in a thimble would give a damn about…I shove all this back in my ambitious mind, to fuck them over when I’m big…keep the ones, treat them holy, that were sympathetic and came to dwindlling readings as the night wore on…to the others, they can fuck off, at least this week, until I’ll need a drinking buddy. I get mad and then forget…all that liquor. I need that…to get away from the seriousness of art and putting something down.

January 17, 2006

So the apologies came, at least two…one I expected, one not. Not, An-dreas’ mom forgetting the Momentum show was Saturday, my semi- com-ing out. She had a toothache. Me understandable on the phone. Trying every corner to get notice, respect. The other, won’t name names, with a bitchy, needy girlfriend, who’s hooked on coke, craves attention, as if the world spun around her. I’ve stomached his frat boy stories from Norman, OU football games, drunken stupors, treating women like shit. Now, no balls, she won’t let him go out without her… oh how the mighty have fallen. Another friend, Jason, the best man at my wedding, he’s been missing for three months, not returning my phone calls. Comes out of the shadows, me drunk at Hudson’s pub, thought I saw a Fatima vision…he, dressed immaculate, Adidas white, angelic. Through all that beer, said he had two hours before his new girl started bitching. I don’t think men live anymore, dress, demeanor, submission, only the young college kids, but they exhaust me with their trashed, drunk fuck stories. Skye, Jasons’girl, left a kid in Dallas with the father, divorced. Within a month, her name was on the

DISPATCH II

checking account, she stays home or goes to school, the same thing…Jason just wants love, someone to take care of, someone to put up with his pills, his personality of neediness and suffocation. He used to open and close Hudsons bar down… now just a ghost…if this is adult, grown up, stick a knife in me, I’m done. She’s pregnant, second child, my reaction, shit…ev-erything usually ends in a train wreck for him…suicide or love, they may be sisters. Our wedding video, Jason made comments, “P. L., dead man walk-ing”…I never walk dead. My girl lets me be, things only change slightly, no overhauls of life…Andrea, my wife, a saint, no bitch or control in her body. So I go to the artist, or he used to be, now a graphic artist, whatever the hell that means, too much capitalist in him now I suspect…said he’d be at the Momentum show, wasn’t…though he and his girl drag us to mid-night bowling out in the outskirts of Edmond…drunk I always turn there, “This is boring, let’s hit that new bar Bakers Street, somewhere out on Me-morial Road”…”We’re having fun,” his girl says. I am, but I want to turn up the gears…what’s happened to everybody? Age, I think…maybe they’ve been there, done that…me, chained in Catholicism for most of my life, now I extend adolescence out into a dream…I like my strange development. Got my CD release, a collection of tired stories, I’ve gotten better over the two years, should be a drunken mess out at the bookstore on the south side of OKC, where no one ever goes. I’m not telling anybody, only my girl, who’ll be there, because she knows what I am…keep working, building, get a spotlight for the stories. Hell, “Brokeback Mountain” was a short story, published in the New Yorker…. make the theme gay, handicapped, trans-gender, they lick it up in Hollywood, these themes makes the dollar signs rise, the grease… So the graphic artist who never calls, in his youth days, wins a schol-arship to the echelons of an Atlanta art institute, even more prestigious than New York…he suffers from that resting, on past youth laurels still gleening ego from it, I’m turning towards to hate…I know I’ll turn drunk one night, I know me. To our circle of friends…and cut an irreparable string…I really have no needs.

January 18, 2006

I call Brian (the editor), he returns it… he wants to take over the Red Cup prose night, first Thursday of every month. Now run by a girl that’s drugged on the poetry scene, the pretentious, the Galilean coffee-

SUMMER 2006

housers, the poets…I’d like to tip them over, spill their guts, and find noth-ing inside…everytime I see this girl…she teaches at one of the schools in the city…I get them mixed up, OCC, OCU, UCO, hell no one cares…she speaks two minutes not wanting to be sullied by the red dirt faces, that’s doing something more ambitious than the stick up the assers of education. We go like Jesus, out to the masses, away from the university temples, to the people. Bukowski you saint, you uncommon, ordinary, deep, you had all the answers in your alcoholic lungs. I want a fire, to upset some ce-mented, established tables, offending the ones I don’t respect, to make a name…

January 19, 2006

Hungover…went out midweek to take my girl two stepping to country music. A friend of hers, Travis Linville, plays acoustic at the Wormy Dog saloon. My disposition defeat…seventy-five bucks I’ve made in three days waiting tables…failure…writing and art a bitch, a poor one at that. Ques-tioning everything now, those tumbling doubts, no escape, as I push the forty- year marker. But there is no other way for me…when in the darkness of my mind, some light springs and drags my weariness to the top. God or me, something invisible I can’t define…Travis came through with a line, I’ll paraphrase, “can’t do the nine to five, I want a beauty grave”…Guth-rie, Thoreau, something they’ve said, but rings true at the Wormy Dog tonight…My girl always encouraging…tells me about a talk she had with her friend before the Momentum show. Stacy C. says she’s never met a guy like me, at my age (thanks) who will hold out for art when others have given it up for a prosperous road…maybe that’s who I am, a definition, the reason in a bleak world, the fool who keeps doing it, keeping a flame in a windy age, it’s been blowin’ and thundering this week…but I needed these messages, pulling bootstraps, growing rejuvenated balls, stick the stories in hungry eyes, save someone. There’s hope in this book I’m writing, the memoir, the philosophy, I’ll never self-publish, like some friends who have, who will never make it…I’ll peddle it, get the critiques, this writing is com-ing easy, flowing, it must be right, gonna attach the story “Bullet” at the end, not because I’m lazy, because what I am can’t be said any better. To-day’s my Friday, gonna wait the dreary tables for four hours, come home to my girl, lay naked, rent a video, get ready for my CD release at Book Beat, fifteen minutes of my small pure glory, read the “Dinner” story, an anthem

DISPATCH II

to an artistic path, make someone take notice, I believe in this. “Dinner” starts, “another purgatorial holiday was approaching, and my brother, Phil, with his new silicone wife, was coming to Christmas dinner. He’s every-thing the American male dreams for. A hot sixth sense for business, trophy wife, houses on both glistening coasts. The life for him, the life for most, but death for me.” That says it all.

January 20, 2006

So I sit in the midst of a lazy Saturday at silenced Galileo’s bar in the cor-ner, scribbling, smoking, wasting time for my CD release tonight out at Book Beat. Came unglued last night in the midnight hours of two-thirty a.m., indicting my wife’s friends with my insecurities as an artist. Mostly hurt, with my slivers of pretentiousness, me always painting myself with the misunderstood, undiscovered genius brush that I think I am. All my drinking buddies, that which I’ve labeled them now, and only that, I don’t think they have it in them to support anything cultured, so non-evolved. Hell, look at me, so evolved? I shouldn’t be saying such things in all my fucked-up hangovers, the tumbling regrets of Saturday and Sunday morn-ings. New friends I’ve met, maybe seven months I’ve only known them, support me more than a lot of these fucks that have insulted me a trillion ways. But they don’t know how I take these slight cuts, so hard, as rivers of forever. They want me to come over, to look at their dogs or cars or new couches or boats, to drink. I’m not such an enigma to do this, so hermetic as a writer, no preten-tiousness lingers along these lines. I can get drunk with the best of them. I’ve got a long record of wobbling and sleeping in bars. Maybe it’s suffer-ing fools moderately. Maybe it’s the scars of abandonment from my family that I draw on, at even the hint not caring. And my tongue got loose last night, hurting my wife. She’s always supported me regardless of dreary, artsy readings or whatever. Only love she is, a true definition. But I let anger get the best of me. I felt thrown out, left in a cold blood rain, isolated in my mind. And my heart was a splitter and poured all the acidic words on her because she was the closest. For this, I’m sorry. I talk a big game, but one, I think, of my good qualities, is too forgiv-ing, too quickly. Angry quick, but in the end, temperate. I’m not inviting out anyone again to anything of art or writing. I’d rather have two that would want to be there than a trillion pulled by their

SUMMER 2006

teeth out of guilt and obligation, Shilo, my publisher and bookstore owner, and my girl. But Shilo was the only one before the stage in support at Mo-mentum, giving me confidence. And while he’s new and fresh, I still cling to him in love as a brother. Those I thought, now labeled pseudo-family, didn’t have it in them. Exchanging my important debut for a mechanics’ birthday, though this guy never showed up for our wedding, planning a camping trip or something like it. So I indicted last night, everyone on the face of the suffering earth, that could be…and I’ll probably regret, I do that, dividing in my head of what was appropriate and what wasn’t. Many a time though, I’ve had to endure a lot of get-togethers I had to be coaxed in to. Drunken OU foot-ball bullshit, suburban get-togethers, cars and motors…all those things. Dragged to the city of Edmond in a blurr, way out to midnight bowling…which I had fun, no doubt…put twelve beers in front of me and I’d think poets were brilliant. Then I go back in my mind about karma, mostly by my girl’s accusation that I didn’t show up to a shitty local friend’s bands in dingy bars. Yeah, she’s right, maybe I’m doing penance now to the magical force of Indian mantras. My one saving defense is that I’m not shitty as far as writing is concerned…the bands are, save Headroom, I always think my brothers are gods, though they never call, mostly cause they’re money has left…hopefully. I’m an extrovert but have a lot of introvert pondering in me…maybe that’s what makes people leary…they pick up the judgement I exude, some-times. But pleasing almost to the point of pandering, to other’s views, keeping quiet with a head nod…I’m an actor, a good one, you have to be to hide sometimes the contempt you have. I’m by nature a pleaser. Maybe that’s why writing is, as Robert’s book is entitled, “The Last Lethal Outlet”, at least for me. To corral all that hate and contempt till it’s about to bust out of my brain and veins, and then, finally, at it’s most lucid point, bleed it on a page, the pen a scathing rapist. I’ll go back today, apologize, because I know at some point I took the wrong path, insulted, when I should have understood…my girl makes me nice and societal, women, the smooth-overs, tape the frayed relationships, glue the fabrics of society, apologize when all I want to do is throw a Mo-latov into them and throw them over the cliffs and dash them on the rocks forever. But somehow, she’ll keep it all together, the grounding. I’m not ready to hang out with them, not just yet… I’ll miss a few of their so-called important occasions…maybe drop a birthday, an

DISPATCH II

anniversary, Lake Eufala on the Fourth of July, hell, let them just sit there, knowing inside, but wondering through their mouths of why I didn’t show… And a so-called artist friend, resting on laurels and awards of a teen past, that didn’t show, who couldn’t call for going on a week and a half now, though he blowhards over beer in bars at how talented he is…this to me is disrespect for what I do. I gave him the website for “Dinner”, it says it all…he could have been a theme, either Phil or with a little more time, one of my dead uncles in the story, kissing their demise at the end as I wish they all would do…Hell hath no fury like a writer scorned… I don’t think women can compete…I know what motherhood is, protecting your art and ways, like a mother bear. When this so-called artist, who gave up the dream, commented on my work with this sentence, “Don’t you think ‘Dinner’ is harsh?”, maybe he fell under conviction. I preach with the fervor of a camp meeting preacher under a tent in a dust bowl prarie. So this day has turned into, at least on this page, my anthem and mantra, these rude thoughts. And I’ll write them, till I make amends. I’ll go to Veronica’s birthday party at Hudson’s because she came to hear me read, wanted me to be there. Drink a couple of cheap draws to take the edge off, sell some CD’s on the outside, where I don’t want any of my friends to attend, save my wife, because she’s rose. I’ll make amends, only to her, because she and my mom know somewhat how I bleed in the quiet moments of holy. Isolated, alone, reading in front of people I barely know, as it should be, these are the ladders, monichers, genes, growing pains of a man non-normal … a writer.

January 22, 2006

Well, got a call from a friend who asked Andrea if my CD release was to-night, a guy who runs with my friend’s band, just found out a girl he’d been dating gave him an STD, he wants to talk. A mutual friend’s birthday was the same night and Andrea was going. So was his girl, or ex-girl, he didn’t call her back after finding out she gave it to him. Told Andrea not to drive to the south side of OKC just for a fifteen-minute reading. I just wanted to focus, not have to entertain anyone. He didn’t like the crowd. Before, I went to Teddy’s bar to take the edge off then bought a twelve pack at the liquor store and all the edges came off…became drunk…

SUMMER 2006

the people, a hundred or so, Goths, fags (not a derogatory term, just de-scription), lesbians (same as the latter), too cool for school, such attention to what they wear and to pretentiousness, I never fit here…was shitfaced by the time Shilo called me up to the mic. The mic at the table was so close I kept hitting the bill of my cap on it…got some laughs, then good responses. All that balled-up hurt in the pit of my stomach, let loose with I-don’t-care, misunderstood drunk, a fuck you type of gesture. I’ll get better next time, take it more seriously, this seems to be a qua-si-career, the one thing that I do well, an identity…Brian (my friend) didn’t like the opening bands or the scene, felt like I had to baby-sit, which was the reason I didn’t want anyone to come, didn’t want to check if everyone was having a good time. Didn’t wait around, Andrea gave me a guilt trip, maybe one I deserved. I’d dissed Robbie and his band five times, maybe all this was karma, rode ten miles to the north side to hear him, (still no D.U.I.) make an appearance, get the karma leaning towards me again, stayed for twenty minutes, did purgatory, drove home, and crashed.

January 24, 2006

Called Shilo, asked him if I sold a CD…eight…what did I expect? No sup-port for art in this city, can’t rely on it…apologized for leaving. When I hit a wall, I just leave, no goodbyes, like I’m on a mission, a bed…I thought he’d be pissed, but he wasn’t…told me I was slurring, but people got it…af-ter I left, some professor said he knew a publisher that may be interested. I’ll call him, see what’s up, hopes high, but usually they crash. Watch the television on mute, then pump up the volume when James Freys’ scared face is plastered on the screen… I’ll defend Frey, so what if he lied? If a writer’s good, he has to lie…reality is a bore. Frey committed the unpardonable sin in this age…made Oprah look bad. Don’t fault him, he was trying to build a myth as a writer, which is noble, like Hemingway or London or Kerouac…can’t fault him for that. We don’t indict these three gods, though they benefited from the “tales” of how they lived…before we all get sanctimonious and stick up a self-righteous banner, we should stop and examine. Kerouac’s “On the Road”, though fiction, still didn’t happen like that, so exciting in pool halls and what not…but he benefited as a rugged, Ameri-can man, the myth. London didn’t drive dogs out into a snowy wilderness, he listened to bar stories of the men who did, though we paint him with

DISPATCH II

a rough, sea-going adventurous brush, half true, half not… Hemingway, hell, he may have lived everything, seems to be the last author that had any balls. And Frey, he was just trying to build a myth, and you can’t fault him for the attempt, what was he supposed to do, be a janitor the rest of his life?…

January 29, 2006

Rent’s due tomorrow. I get up early, 6:19 a.m., check the e-mails. Three drunk, really drunk days in a row, this last weekend the starting early trifecta trin-ity, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday…didn’t have it in me to see a societal face on Sunday, to work…Goddamn, I get so low, scraping my face on the asphalt…called in, made up a story, “Yeah, Andrea’s got car trouble in Anadarko, I’ll get there when I get there”…waited those tables like a zom-bie. I cried in her lap on the couch, “I’ll never be anything”. She strokes my hair with comfort and understanding. Wasted a semi- restful Sunday, hung over like a wino. My friend wanted to build a steroid TV stand from scratch on Satur-day. So the three of us, Travis, Chase, and I, christen it “Man’s Day”. Our girls went to get makeovers. Travis calls at 12:30, “Let’s do it! I’ll buy your CD.”, his becoming born again as a friend. Travis, quick wit, acid tongue…go to the bookstore…Shilo, burly, red face, hung over, red beard, red eyes, debauchery in little, I think last night. Get the CD, hung over like a bitch at Lowe’s for four hours, picking out wood to build the TV stand. I guess the three of us are bonding… Chase can’t decide on the wood…Shit, I think, go to Target and just get one, make it easy… Spend the day building…hell, I don’t know any-thing about constructing, only the words in my head for stories, but the show becomes funny…Chase has his power tools…got them for Christmas…go through a case of beer like water…me, twelve…I stop counting… Chase holds the saw up like the texas chainsaw massacre…me 911 on my mind...the girls pop in, all the purple eye shadow like south-side hookers, like des-tiny child. They’ve been garage sale shopping too…Andrea picks up a book for me, can’t remember the title... obscure book by Bukowski.. she always thinks of me…the first one who has.

SUMMER 2006

February 5, 2006

So I have this fight, this huge, ethical fight with an editor friend of mine. I’ve written this essay on Frey that’s getting good responses, ten reviews want it so far. I tell him I want a critique, which was a mistake. He’s a rehabber who considered Frey a priest and guru and put his faith in him. “He lied to me,” he says, like a girl, like he’s just been dropped on earth yesterday, doesn’t know how it works. So what if Frey lied, I tell him, the world is a lie in general, my nihilistic argument. He comes out of hiding, he’s becoming hand wringer, … So he starts to list my sins, according to Saint Editor: 1. You simultaneously submit stories. My argument: So I’m supposed to sit for six months on my ass, el-bows deep in half-eaten slop, bussing tables for only an apathetic editor to finally get around to my fiction or non-fiction and then dismiss it out of hand. Submit to one place? Hell no, I want a lot of eyes to find me. He wants me to do this inhuman act to these lit journals and in the end never get paid. What are they doing for me? Put me on their home page for three weeks, and then bury me in the archives forever? Ambition won’t let me… 2. You wrote “Implosion of a Poet”. (His argument was plagiarism. I think he’s doing meth again, and I’m the receiver of his aftermath-cooked brain.) My argument: I’ll explain “Implosion of a Poet” to the readers. A poet tells me my writing is shitty. Said poet shows me his writing, one of which is…”We enter through wombs and exit through tombs.”…That’s the whole poem. In the story, I go to the bathroom and flush his poem down the toilet, pry the window open and go home. His argument was that I used his poem in my story. Yes, as an example of a shitty, artsy, pretentious, bohemian, wanting to be a Beat, but isn’t, poetry.. Hold on, let me get my Webster’s. Plagiarize- to steal and use the ideas or writings of another as one’s own. I tell him I don’t claim his poems, don’t put my name on them, in fact attribute them to the shitty poet (all rights reserved) and then murder them in the piece. Then said editor starts to shit on me, his thoughts of me come out of hiding…asks me where my ethics are. He’s a Buddhist, stayed Buddhist. Me, I don’t care.

DISPATCH II

History, I think, is from where this envy comes…Said editor takes creative writing class, submits to a review in the college he attends, and can’t get in…Me, no classes, submits to the same review at the same col-lege, and get in the anthology…Said editor gets in a bigger university’s review, mostly because both colleges are affiliated and they were mostly accepting students’ work…Me, submit to the same university, don’t get in, but later find out they lost my submission, me in web hell…Said editor sends e-mail, telling me he gets in with an attached, “can’t win ‘em all, ha, ha”…Me, in my mind I say, give him one…Said editor has been working on a novel for five years and is still not done…Me, decide to write an autobi-ography and churn out one hundred pages in four days…Said editor, pub-lished once…Me, twenty five…Advantage, me.

February 14, 2006

Valentine’s Day, went home yesterday, they overscheduled at work, forty-five bucks in my shrinking pockets…couldn’t afford to go home, thank God for income tax returns, three days away. Prose night, missed it, the editor is running it now, the way he want-ed it, me not caring…I didn’t show, got a mass e-mail from him about prose night, no call after the fight about Frey and ethics. What the hell does he have to be offended about? He’s the one who impaled my ethics, morality, everything…I made one comment to him in the heat of the moment about Thoreau not living up to the legend of himself, just to make my point. Thoreau, a god to him…as if I killed his mother…He said, “I’ve studied the Transcendentalists, don’t fuck with me…” I love Thoreau, read Walden through at least six times, the tattoo of his name on my arm…no one bleeds like me. Every author, when he writes fiction or non-fiction, in some psy-chological way, a need really, to want to say, “Here I am, my views are brilliant, I’m the only one who can write and live in the earth.” Ballsy, ego-driven, narcissism…this is in the heart of the writer. No sin, it’s just nature. Found a quote by a scholar, which I said in my essay, that he could not accept in laymans’ terms because english degrees don’t line my walls.. Joseph Wood Krutch, in “Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Tho-reau”, said, “Though the very intensity of Thoreau’s own imagination made the retreat to Walden Pond a legend and a symbol, he was no Robinson

SUMMER 2006

Crusoe…” And then he had to go…don’t they all. His review’s release party is February 18, no call, no nothing from him yet. Every time I get published, I credit this fucks’ review, got him listed on a big blog which is Kilimanjaro for lit journals, put my own money into t-shirts to advertise his review, came up with the idea for the docu-mentary film he shot, everything… He’s jealous I think, he wants his own private kingdom, the review, so he can say yay or nay, measuring his dick. He wants to workshop at prose night, what the hell, are we women? Write it, send it out, get on the scales, grow some balls, my anthem. If I go, I feel like I’ll be sucked into the vacuum of a writer’s society, which will be the end of me. I don’t want to be in any classified group, labeled, why would I go? These people can’t do anything for me other than to critique my writing with their take no chances lives and writing and make me lose hope and confidence. I don’t need someone else’s mind, I do well with my own thoughts, they’re a cir-cus, a rocket… I’d be lowering myself, which I feel I do every time I go to Galileo’s poetry night, the ranters, the anti-Bushers, the stereotypical wannabes, the look-at-me-I’ve-renamed-myself-with-one-word, like “Tapestry”, “the no one understands me” mentality, these are the fiascos. So this is my road, I’ve marked it, pissed on it, I’ll stay here alone, it’s always been like this. Do the things that are attributed to great writers (the loneliness). Happy Valentine’s Day to me, love, P.L. For Andrea, I’m making crème brule and paninis, two staples of our honeymoon in Paris, trying to recreate it. When’s the honeymoon over?… they say it should be here by now, it’s late. Just want to be romantic, she’s done so much for my insides, mostly, completely, the validation I’ve been seeking.

February 15, 2006

Got a collection of short stories out, the examples of my writing…hate to be so naked, thumbs up or down, the guy at a webzine in the U.K. who runs a big press and a Gail at Word Warrior, who may have gotten to it by now…God, I’m on the scales, broke as I’ve ever been…still holding out, like I’m waiting for a royalty check or something, anything to supplement the small change I get waiting tables…I don’t know what I’m looking for…

DISPATCH II

someone to give me a job …I feel I write critique well, but no diplomas to hang on the wall…but what great writers have? Wait for the e-mails, somewhat obsessed…I’ve put it all over the pages…Zygote in my coffee, which I know a lot of people read, see if I can stir some shit up with the essay…got it out to Salon.com, too, a big paying market, shooting at fish in a humongous lake, see if it will fall on the right eyes that can actually do something for me and get me out of the hell job that I’m in…I wasn’t built for normal labor. I do it, like pulling teeth. It’s either I’m an idler or an artist, the jury’s still out in my head… I war in my brain, I’m a man, have to support my girl, we got those curses…She’s making obscene money as a PA, but don’t want any of it…if I do I feel like I’m selling out or mooching, these are the same to me, the same money boat to hell…all the people that know me think I’ve gotten lucky, a well-off girl, I can take it easy now…nothing ever easy for me.

February 16, 2006

Well, two other web lit journals want the essay on Frey, that makes fif-teen…that editor (ex-friend now) said it sucked…I knew it was good be-cause it was my naked honesty, stripped down of any carefulness, let it fly, the “fuck yous”..the true voice…he’s a flaming wreck, going down with the ripped wings of his ethical tirades. My girl gave me the deluxe edition of the Writer’s Market 2006…that book’s not me…six hundred odd pages of hoops and chains to jump through…I hate the guidelines, one of which, or should I say a lot of which, want single spaced, name on every third page of the piece, specific font, cover letter, including contact info, send three copies because one edi-tor likes the piece to look this way, then the other two editors split on their particular whims and have their own preferences with a whole host of other specific guidelines like page numbers on all the sheets with your name on the bottom next to the number, then I get through all these guide-lines and in bold type they say, “no e-mail submissions” or “send 3 SASE” and by this time I’m exhausted. They say they’ll get back to me in six to eight months, and by this time I’m really tired…they want no simultaneous submissions, like I’m supposed to wait for close to a year for them to get back to me while I’m elbow deep in uneaten food, bussing tables for small dollars, they’ve got to be kidding…. Inhumane. In the Writer’s Market I go to the advice for writers with pictures of freelancers, glamour photo shots, which give slivers of good advice, but

SUMMER 2006

I get the hints that they write for W.A.S.P.S. up in Connecticut or some-thing…. they got those looks.. so successfully, educated with scarves wrap-ping their white necks, and most are women authors which, truthfully, have no hope for me. “You need to write that which is appealing to get a large audience.”the slogans say… I start to feel like I’m on the Oprah show, some suburban hell, writing that takes no chances. So I put the Writer’s Market aside, go to my lit magazine index, and scroll the university presses, which have some lighter guidelines, some even accepting e-mail submissions…scatter my short stories around, the young aren’t so rooted in procedure. Go to Missouri Review, who have given me encouraging feedback...

February 27, 2006

So we went to the Coldplay concert last night which was other worldly…I’d bought the tickets for Christmas for Andrea…but once again her sister, who I do love as a sister (I can’t find it tonight), can’t recall when she’s coming over to our house, so wrapped up in the glory that is herself, wants me to spin around her universe…I don’t spin around anybody else but me…so once again, she becomes the definition of selfish. She, her boyfriend, and his sister and father are all going to coldplay(the next U2…we’ll see). We decide to meet them for drinks downtown, which I know we’ll end up being shit on, but decide to take the chances. She bops in, her glory…I’m sitting around the bar, Andrea outside chain smoking, we’ve run in to the wait-resses from Hudson’s bar, having fun, the place is filling, the downtown is filling…tell them to sit at the round tables next to us, the food and beer will come faster, sounds rational…she dismisses, says no, wants a long table in the third tier of the yuppie bar. I tell her again there’s no service up there, she say’s no, come with us. So I tab out, make the blurry walk up, we sit for twenty minutes, no hint of a waiter…I’m in déjà vu…it’s the same booth where we had met four couples a year ago in a dreary rain, one of which threw a kickass Halloween party and thought they’d be fun…they weren’t, talking of houses and money and jobs…that night we waited for an hour and a half for drinks and food, same booth, it’s got those curses…so Cap-tain Obvious(the sister) says “no service up here, we’re leaving”. I grow some balls and tell her that’s the reason I didn’t want to come, she shits on me again…but I keep it down, go to the Ford Center, to see Coldplay, Fiona Apple first, drinking beers between us…

DISPATCH II

The lead singer breaks into “Ring of Fire”, a little pandering, he thinks we’re dumb hicks, Southern stupid, Lynyrd Skynyrd, but the crowd goes nuts, he pays tribute to Flaming Lips, born and bred here…crowd nuts…I’m thinking, is this Coldplay…me surprised at the crowds’ re-sponse…me and my girl swaying and dancing in the upper balcony with the candlelight of neon cell phones blinking…but I turn, an hour later at home, on her sister…calling her a bitch, that she always does this, never comes to my readings, never comes through with anything, flake, so it turns into a twenty-four hour fight. I draw the line, it’s about time for a lesson…I tell my wife I don’t want to be around her sister, everything she touches turns to shit for me…I get worse…I pull my hung over ass to work, full day, I needed the money…she calls, I hang up, I call, she hangs up…a mess. My wife shows up at my work, crying, I still won’t give in, like a pit bull grind-ing in to a kids leg…and then finally, at home it subsides. My wife bitches her sister out, the sister cries over the phone.

March 2, 2006

So the “poet” that I impaled in “Implosion of a Poet” calls, blows up the phone…he still doesn’t know I wrote it about him…Becky called too, who I met him through weeks ago, tells me he tried to commit suicide…he’s on pills since fifteen, now twenty-six. He wants to hang out, show me his new poetry. He’s moved back in with his parents, they must be long suffering saints, he lives in the complex next to mine. So I decide to swim…he says he’ll buy the beer…never again…I pick him up (he’s got no car). He’s jump-ing around, won’t sit still, fucking with his pants. “Can I bum a smoke?” is the first thing he says, mooch forever, trying to be Burroughs with just the junk… So we get to Galileo’s, midday, the place a desert. He pulls out some napkins, wrote a short story. “Whaddya think?” I’m divided…don’t want to crush him, the light. He might finally do it... I say it’s good, trying to keep him alive, feeling like a drug priest…tell him keep working…all this purgatory I’m in, I must be paying for sins of a past life. I tell him my ac-colades, got a job, maybe, columnist for a lit review, paid finally…his pilled head blows me up…”I’d never do that, I’m gonna be big.”…I hold in the rage, don’t want to push him over the edge…”I wanna go,” I say. It’s only been thirty minutes. He dumps two pockets full of change on the table like a ragged bum…the goth waitress wags her head…in my mind, never again.

93

Blue bluesDark with clouds of grey,Hover over long nights,And slow, creeping days.Bluest bluesBlinding sad,Beat heavy on my heartLike an old punching bag.I’m getting too old toWeather them blows.Mean bluesBeat me senseless,No use fighting no more.My eyes is black.My lips are bust.Turned my last trick for bluesLying down in the dust.Can’t blame it on my manOr the hard times I had,Just got the mark of the bluesSitting on my forehead.

BluesLISA STAFFORD

94

It was late. The station was mostly empty, just a few patrol cops coming off duty and a desk sergeant out front. The only one who didn’t seem exhausted was the young man sitting at the scarred Formica-topped table, his skinny wrists in cuffs. “So that’s it, huh?” Henderson threw up his hands, looking pained. “You gonna tough it out, not let us help you out of this jam, huh? Last chance.” He put a pen on the sheet and slid it towards the kid. “Just sign it, we can all go to sleep,” said Laguna, “come on.” The kid slowly slid the paper and pen to the edge of the table and pushed it off. When it landed on the floor he deliberately spit on it. Hen-derson sighed. Laguna tensed –back in February this was the point where Henderson drove his big fist with the West Point ring into a perp’s temple, which meant lots of paperwork and a hearing. “Well,” Henderson said softly, “I guess we’re done. We’ve done all we can do within the law.” He took a key out of his pocket and unlocked one side of the handcuffs. The kid smirked until Henderson jerked his arm down and snapped the open cuff around the chair leg. Out of his pocket came a second pair of cuffs that he used to cuff the kid’s free hand to the other chair leg, which put the kid in a slump-shouldered position. “My lawyer’s gonna have your job,” the kid sputtered, red-faced, “and I’m gonna have your fuckin’ house and your car…” Laguna thought again about the business proposition his brother-in-law had floated by him – start an industrial security company. It was start-ing to appeal to him. He couldn’t bear the pointless repetition of chasing the same bad guys who always seemed younger and stronger than him. “Goodnight, Laguna. I’m clocking out. See you Monday.” The door closed behind him. “What the--” Clocking out? They weren’t done, not by a long shot. “Hey! You better get these motherfuckin’ cuffs offa me LaGooney! You hear me?” “Shut up…” Laguna said tiredly, waving him away. “I’m--” the kid stopped yelling when the door opened and a large figure in a blonde Marilyn wig, bright red lipstick and tinted ski goggles entered. “Uh…Henderson?” “Henderson’s gone,” Henderson lisped huskily, “Henderson’s gone to

ConfessionDAVE MORRISON

SUMMER 2006

the moon!” He giggled into his fist, then, out of a small black duffel bag he removed an Emeril Live apron and put it on. Putting his hands on his hips he turned to the kid and whispered “Ooh, Mister President, how did you get in such a fix?” “You better keep this freak offa me…” “Henderson – let’s put him in holding, let the day crew take a whack at him.” “No no no no no! It’s too late.” Henderson took out a disposable razor, and clamping the kid in a headlock he shaved the area around his temple. “Ah fuck! Get him off!” “…we’re the only ones who can save him now. The devil is in his head, and he’s got to come out!” “Henderson -” “Either help me or leave!” Laguna and the kid were dumbstruck by Henderson’s furious bellow. Laguna slumped into his chair and the kid’s eyes got big. Henderson went back to the duffel bag. “I’ve told him about his temper…” he whispered, taking out a pair of pantyhose, “but he will not listen to me, no sir!” He fit the panty hose on the kid’s head like a winter hat. “I want my phone call now, I want my lawyer, I want someone else in this fuckin’ room!” Henderson gripped the kid’s head in his big hands and brought his lips close to his ear. “Who on earth could you possibly want to call at this hour?” he whis-pered. “If I’m alone late at night and the phone rings I go eeeeaaaaahhh-hhh!” When Henderson shrieked the kid thrashed, letting loose his own scream until Henderson slammed his head into the table. “Ah, Jesus, man. Let me go…” moaned the kid. “Henderson, come on…” “The Devil is in his head, and he’s got to come out. Simple as that.” From the duffle bag Henderson took a cupcake, some lighter fluid, a drill with a large wood bit and a package of birthday candles and set them on the table. “Happy birthday,” he sang quietly, while putting candles on the cup-cake, “to you…” He gently kissed the shaved spot, and then squirted lighter fluid on the panty hose. “Happy birthday to you…” He lit the candles on

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the cupcake. “Enough. Enough.” The kid’s eyes were wide and he stared at the candles. “Stop. Please.” “You’ll thank me some day,” Henderson sing-songed as he squirted some gel from a tube onto his finger and rubbed it on the kid’s temple. The kid jumped. “Ah! What is that?” “Topical anesthesia. Can you say that five times fast? Topicalanes-thesiaTopical anesthesiaTopicalanesthesiaTopicalanesthesiaTopicalanes-thesiaahhhahahaha!” The kid looked wigged out, and Laguna felt beat, and confused. He was starting to think that Henderson had gone to the moon―he’d heard stories about cops snapping.Henderson squirted lighter fluid on the drill bit. The kid thrashed so hard that he knocked the chair over. Henderson held the drill bit over the flam-ing candles until it was a spinning torch, and brought it towards the kid’s head. “Happy birthday, Mister President…” “Damn! Fuck! Help me!” “You’re the president.” Laguna was surprised by his own indifferent tone. The kid’s eyes were closed, and he moaned “Okay, I’ll sign, I’ll sign, I did it, please-” “Stand back – out comes Mister Devil!” Zzzzz, the flame spun, the point of the drill bit drawing blood. “I’ll sign! Let me sign!” “What?” Zzzzzzzz. “I’ll sign, it was me!” “Promise?” Zzzzzzzz. “Yes!” “Cross your heart and hope to die?” “Please! Help!” “Stick a needle in your eye?” The kid was weeping, his eyes pressed shut. Henderson unlocked his right hand. The kid reached for the pen and with a shaky hand signed the confession.

In the locker room Henderson took off the blond wig, ski goggles and

SUMMER 2006

apron, and wiped off the lipstick with a paper towel. Laguna stood a safe distance away. “Arnold? You okay?” “Yeah, great. Wanna grab a bite?” “Grab a―“ Laguna looked at the bigger man incredulously. “What the fuck was that all about?” He pointed toward the interrogation room. Henderson balled up the paper towel and tossed it in the trash. “Let’s see him bring that up in court.”

98

When I blink my left eye I can see the crowd gathering around me like chickens to a spray of feed. Once they see my bent body, hear my low sounds, and then my quiet, they stand back. A tight uneven ring forms. A vigil. I blink again. There are slivers of light on the ground – no, glass – not light. Cracked light that seems bright but it’s getting dark, and the horns of frustrated cars are blaring from all sides. Tall buildings and sky. The chickens seem to want to stay, but not near to me. Their faces tell me it’s bad. “This is awful,” I hear them say. “Such a dangerous corner.” “The car drove away.” “I hope someone got the plate number.” “She’s breath-ing.” “Hold on, honey.” “I think someone called an ambulance.” My brain twists around their words and thrashes against the walls that have started to rise. When I blink my right eye, whiteness.

Arnoud We were on the subway and I stood so close to her that I could have bitten off the hair barrette pulling back the smooth hair at the top of her head. It was two inches from my mouth. I imagined its pink taste. Cheap bubble gum like what we used to get from the gum machine at the corner store when we were kids. When the doors opened the train was so full, and I made sure to get in right behind her. I had been watching her all that time on the platform, reading her magazine, holding it in one hand and licking her index finger to turn the pages. She had opened one of those perfume ads and rubbed it on her wrist. We were pushed with the flow of people into the middle area around the pole, I grabbed with my right hand above her shoulder. Her body fit neatly under mine, and she put one hand on the pole too, and she continued to read the magazine. I stared at her barrette. She got off at the stop before the one I usually get off at. I was going to stay on the train, but I followed her instead. I wasn’t ready to let go of her yet because she made me feel warm all over – skin pink warm.

Jane I ride the bus in a single seat by a window that’s slid open a few inch-es. City at dusk – no barrier. It’s nice. Makes me wonder how I’d handle wearing glasses. Always a barrier to the world. No sooty air searing eyes in the gusts of wind in winter. The bus pulls in for a stop, and I trade glances with a man who walks through the crosswalk. When he slows to let a

RefractionsEMILY S. TAYLOR

SUMMER 2006

bicycle pass I realize that I know his face. Sharp nose, smiling creases by the eyes, long lashes for a man. Billboards? Television? He’s an actor. That’s what it is. Soap opera, maybe, or national commercial. Yes. Per-fume ad. Like pornography, almost, and he runs his fingers over the skin on her neck. That’s why his face is so familiar, him smelling her neck is the whole commercial. My eyes lock with his, and without the barrier window I can’t pretend to be aloof. He turns away at the corner to walk uptown. Head down. He keeps an expressionless face which I sense is practiced. It’s like when I go to the small amusement park set up for children in the summer. I like to watch the rides because I still feel the thrill of them, and I stare at the older men, and I wonder if I’m standing amongst the per-verts. The bus turns a corner and the brakes are a crescendo of noise, loud-er than they should be, and I look up and I can see very clearly that there has been an accident, that the emergency services haven’t arrived yet, that someone with unsteady heels and business casual dress, a pleated skirt, has been struck down. The glass doors of a nearby building are shattered, and there are skid marks, but the car is gone. It’s like a giant struck down with a boot and stomped away. There is blood on the street, and a young man is running, running, to her side, wrapping her head in his arms, soak-ing up the blood into his shirt. I wonder if he is a boyfriend, a brother, a stranger.

Elliot On a Thursday evening we heard the sound of tires screeching from outside. We are on the third floor, so we are used to this, but it was louder, closer than usual. The suggestion of glass shattering. The sounds reg-istered faintly in our ears, we each looked over our partitions and said “what’s that?” and went back to closing our affairs for the end of the day. The angle of our office windows is such that we can’t see the street. We can see across, but for most of the day, the view is only sun on glass. At noon, the sun moves directly above into the space between our building and the one across the way. There is no glare and we can see the figures moving in the windows directly across like dark blue shadows. At dusk the building across looks like rectangles of lava, burning boring architecture. I stood with Todd and Gwen at the doorway to Gwen’s office for al-most a half hour discussing the key points for the morning meeting, Todd’s parasailing vacation, Gwen’s son’s distaste for candy – rare for an

DISPATCH II

eight-year-old, and then I took my time assembling my papers, stopping to check the weather and the baseball scores on my computer. A fly ball into right and straight on till morning, when it will be overcast, bring your um-brellas, folks. The heat will break this time.

Miranda An honest sun on the sidewalk today. In the early evening -- even though the light grew weak -- it was hot and I wondered if it could burn my exposed shoulders. I could wake up tomorrow with a new mass of freckles over the ones already imprinted on my mottled arms. Connect the dots, find the constellations. I tried to walk under all the awnings, the sun hurt my eyes because I emerged from the bowels of a thrift store. The clothes and records all smelled like the dust collecting on old lampshades. The same smell of a family vacation in Maine. Visiting a great-uncle. My brother and I stayed together in the room that used to belong to Uncle Sandy’s children, the ones in the picture frames who lived in California and never came to visit. Everything in the room, including the lampshade be-tween our beds, had a thick layer of dust. My brother is prone to allergies, and the dust filled his sinuses. His whole head looked puffy and swollen the next morning. We went to the beach that day, and he lay on his back and breathed in the ocean air, decompressing. Uncle Sandy died a few years later, but that was the last time we saw him. I’m walking and smelling the thickness of the air, and thinking of my brother, who I’m meeting at the train station. He’s going to stay in my apartment to see what it’s like to be in college in the city, cramped together in a place that shouldn’t be holding so many people, with windows that open to ledges that are dangerous when still more people are crowded in for parties. With disorienting drugs the ground looks so close, and the fountain with a pool of water isn’t far, and it’s appealing to think that if you spread your arms out you won’t hit the concrete. A person struck down on the concrete engulfed by a crowd is before me and I wonder if I’ve some-how conjured her. I do not join the people around her. I hear the shaking in a woman’s voice in front of me, and I wonder if I have only missed this accident by only a few moments.

Harriet She was very young – around the age of Natalie. And her red shoes just like Natalie’s too. But Natalie’s more petite. Fine wrists and ankles,

SUMMER 2006

not like the girl on the street. The glass was all around her on the ground from the windshield, and from the doors of the building the car ran into. Little slivers of it got caught on her clothing and they looked like rhine-stones. So beautiful, really. Like a piece of art, if you don’t think about the young woman who is lying there. I made myself think about how it was beautiful, so I wouldn’t think about Natalie. So I wouldn’t think about this girl’s mother. So I wouldn’t think about myself, and that phone call, if it were Natalie, and not this girl who has her red shoes. “Let’s go, Herb,” I said to my husband. “What are you waiting for.” He was carrying all the packages from the store. He has a heart condition but still he insists on carrying the packages. I knew from the way that he looked at her that he was thinking about Natalie too. He didn’t have to say it. Some things you know a person is thinking after being together this long. It does no good to stay and watch. The ambulance arrived and the medical people were all working on her, so it was no good to stand around while they’re trying to do their job. “Come on, Herb. We have to put the ice cream away.”

Arnoud “Come on, Herb,” the old woman behind me squawked at her hus-band. I wanted to spit at her. I wanted to kill everyone who was moving along with their day, as I held my sweatshirt to the bleeding wounds on her head. The medics worked around me, let me stay with her. They pumped air into her lungs. There was hissing sound from somewhere. Air escap-ing. The barrette fell out. I couldn’t find it anywhere, but I knew that if I did I would start to scream or something. I saw it again in my mind. She was walking away from me fast, try-ing to get away, and she wasn’t looking, and the car came too fast right into her. I looked down and saw that some of her hair was sheared off – from being dragged along on the cement. Some of it caught in her mouth. I brushed it from her mouth. Her eyes shut. They had been open for a little while when I held her head still. She fell from the hood of the car and started rolling, and then she stopped rolling right in front of me. Her eyes opened and she was shaking a little, and moaning some. There was blood dripping from her mouth, her ear, what was left of her nose. “Don’t move,” I told her. My cousin was paralyzed from the diving board, head hit div-ing into the swimming pool. Blood in the water. Water turns from blue to grey. Blood on the pavement, pavement stays dark.

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I thought if I hold her so she won’t move maybe she’ll be okay. Her eyes began to close and I pulled off my sweatshirt and held it up to the wounds on her head, hoping that someone was calling 9-1-1. I knew that she could hear me, so I told her I was praying for her, and that’s what I did. I held the sweatshirt to her head and prayed and prayed until I could hear the sirens of the ambulance. Then I started screaming at the people to make way for the paramedics. One guy who is doing chest compressions asks me if I know her, if I know if there’s some family to call. I shake my head. No. Don’t know. Just met.

Jane The bus is stopped completely and I can smell the exhaust pouring in through my little crack in the window, but I don’t close it, because my at-tention is on the mess of a broken person in the street, the emergency ser-vices crawling around the woman like blue ants, pulling out the stretcher and heaving her with her hip bone exposed. The slivers of glass are catch-ing the light that is still coming from the west horizon, turning pink, and they are also catching the light from the ambulance and police cars, red, white, over and over again, mixing with the pink, all reflecting off the sides of the bus, the sides of the buildings, the sweaty shining skin of the crowd gathered. Still, I don’t reach forward to close my window. “It’s such a shame, such a shame,” the man across the aisle from me is muttering, he is standing, leaning over, so I can smell his breath – damp cheese – trying to get a glimpse. The bus is motionless, and the engine has cut out, so it does seem like time has stopped. The air is beginning to heat and pull close to my skin. “Sorry for the delay, ladies and gentlemen. As you can see there has been an accident ahead of us. I hope to be moving shortly,” the bus driver says from time to time. She sits slouched back in her seat, arms crossed, legs swinging lightly. She is short, and I wonder how tall one must be to drive a bus. She must have to move forward in her seat in order to reach the pedals when she drives. I am forcing myself to look at her, to look at anyone else, so I don’t have to keep watching the scene on the street. I open up my folder from work. A spreadsheet on grant budgeting. I force the numbers in front of my eyes.

SUMMER 2006

Harriet When Herb and I got home we put the groceries away, me standing at the refrigerator – reorganizing what we already have so that the new purchases will fit. Milk on the door, juice on the top shelf, lettuce, peppers, and tomato in the crisper. Herb doesn’t know the system as well as I do, or he gave up on it years ago. He put the cereal away on the top shelf, onions in the basket, potatoes in the bottom cabinet. Then we both went into the bedroom, and sat on the bed. Our light summer comforter looked dingy. I thought that maybe we should get another. Herb walked over to the win-dow and turned on the air conditioner. He came back over and sat on the bed and looked at me expectantly. I picked up the phone and sat beside him and dialed Natalie’s number. He sat and watched. He doesn’t like to be the one who calls her, who talks to her first. He likes to wait his turn.

Miranda I’m walking away, far and fast, from the accident, but the sirens are closing in on me. I pass by the train station in a haze and must circle around, late to meet my brother. Like how he’d stand to wait for me at the school bus, not wanting to get on unless I was there, but I wouldn’t sit with him. When I find the train station, the heat is forgotten in a matter of mo-ments, it rises up from my skin and is replaced by the chill. The accident is erased just as quickly as I step from the pavement to the reassuring mar-ble. I make my way to the information booth in the middle of the station, I see my brother in his high school slouch, and I reach out to embrace him – awkwardly, lovingly – because we are not used to embracing, but we are not used to being apart either. Instead of leading him to the streets to the more direct subway, I take him on the underground line right out of the train station, so we don’t have to see the accident again, so he doesn’t have to see a casualty of the city that I have made my home. When we come out of the subway there is only a band of light left in the sky. I buy us ice cream and we sit on the curb to eat and to hope that a cooler wind will come through.

Elliot I got in to an elevator car that was already tight, people pressed into the corners. As we dropped I felt the pull of work ebb from my mind. In the lobby we discovered the police tape surrounding the areas where the

DISPATCH II

doors used to be and the debris of glass and dented metal, we asked the se-curity guards what happened. They retold the story for us with animation, not getting tired of the telling, though it was the fortieth time that evening. The car careening, striking the woman, striking the door, peeling away. We felt humbled, appreciative of their work, glad for them that they should see something as exciting as this (while secretly wishing we had) in a posi-tion that normally does not allow for anything other than extended days watching the doors of a building. How nice, we think, that these men and women who live with such sameness can do something this evening other than check IDs and pass a sign-in sheet for deliveries. I myself am glad to be only inconvenienced as far as taking a few minutes to skirt around the scene of the accident to make my way to the train station. I buy a magazine there, a travel journal, couples in white in front of flapping sails on beaches.

Viktor My grandmother let go of my hand in order to cover my eyes with her hand instead, but I spun away from her and opened my eyes big, crouching down low and getting to where the people’s legs were spread apart in a tun-nel, so I could see the lady bleeding on the street. It’s just like when I cut myself on the playground, and my leg right under my knee started to bleed so hard that it felt cold and then hot when it was coming down my leg into my shoe. I was crying and my tears felt like that too – cold then hot. What else feels like that? When you get stung by a bee, when you slam your fin-ger in a door, when you get spanked. But more than the hot and the cold, I felt like the time I put a pebble in my mouth and it stuck to the roof of my mouth, cutting the tip of my tongue. The ambulance came. The people started to move away, but me and Grandma stayed to watch for a long, long time. So did the man stand-ing with the bloody sweatshirt. Some of the blood got on his arms, but he didn’t seem to notice. He caught me staring.

105

Journalists asked the bean farmer how string theory had influenced performance art on both U.S. coasts & over in Europe. Regrettably he’d never been much of a physicist so his reply cost him important grant funding as well as the respect of his peers across the Atlantic.

DroughtBRIAN BEATTY

106

Did you ever notice how the onewith the whiter floss-n-glowincisors will always hogthe pirouetting thrill of the treadwheel whenever the profitableurge for spin percolates throughthe dark twisted labyrinth of the gerbil brainThe cameras will clickThe bright lights beckon& Chip N Dale reporterswill thrust carbon blackmikes of questionable intentunder his pink & quavering gerbilnostrils to inquire“What is your favoritetoothpaste flavor”& his beady eyesdark & mysterious as alienglobes will blink with inquisitorialperspiration“I may have flossedbut I’ve never swallowed”Then the approving red carpetsroll as he waddles up to podiumssoy ink flying in V2 shrapnelwords tearing down great redbricked edifices of opponenmentalreputation with a sneeringgerbil smirk

Meanwhile the other lessvirtually endowed in the backend of the rodentile departmentthe lesser incisedor the slightly dandruffed

Everything IsPolitical E. P. ALLEN

SUMMER 2006

with pieces of cedar curls adheredto their white fur livein reporterless amnesic darknesscount each round taxatedgerbil treat with tremblingpink & white clawed pawseven as they plot& counterplot how to overthrow the great elephantineendowed one with a singulardisdainfulvote

108

The hotel room was cheap and dark, as I sensed it should be. Every time I met him there I noticed another detail, each a bit more shameful than the last. Today it was the tattered carpet near the edge of the bed. As Michael’s chest hair brushed my bare back, I focused on an oval-shaped spot in the carpet, frayed from wear. I imagined an infinite sequence of naked feet touching down from the bed, creating a perfect heel-shaped hole in the commercial grade nylon. I never felt guilty for being distracted during sex with Michael. He was so easy to please. It was routine now, but never dull. Each of us focused on our own pleasure, sometimes barely ac-knowledging the other’s participation. There was a purity about it -- physi-cal sensation void of emotion and attachment. I paid the hotel clerk cash, then made my way out to the Camry, where Michael was waiting for me to drive him to the train station. He dug around in his backpack, then sighed and ran his hand through his thick black hair. “Shit,” he said. “What?” “Out of cigs.” “Good.” He stuck out his tongue. Thick juicy tongue. I wanted him again. “Can we stop?” he said, just short of whining. Inside the convenience store, I flipped through a Newsweek and watched Michael’s ass as he grabbed Doritos and a Mountain Dew, then made his way to the counter. He asked for Marlboro Lights and a quick pick lotto ticket. “Pot is 60 million tonight,” he said. Walking back to the car, he slipped the ticket into my pocket and said, “Our first joint possession. If we win, leave her and run away with me.” He batted his long eye lashes and blew me a kiss. I weighed the odds and said, “Sure.”

I slipped off my jeans in the dark of the walk-in closet and tip-toed into the bedroom. It was only 9:30, but Tess had drifted off to sleep watch-ing The Iron Chef in bed again. All these evenings with my research as-sistant were beginning to cross the line of normalcy. Yet she never ques-tioned. I was devoted to my research and an excellent mentor to my

Joint Possession MARY LYNN REED

SUMMER 2006

graduate students. She knew that; ten years ago, it had been her. I slid into the bed next to her -- ashamed -- but still comforted by her warmth. Tess moaned as I spooned her from behind, my breasts brushing her back, my arm resting on her waist. She was soft where Michael was hard, constant where he was sporadic. And I loved her more than I could bear admitting. The next morning I sat at the kitchen table eating Raisin Bran and drinking a Diet Coke, staring across the table at the newspaper hiding her face. “Have you and Michael finished that paper yet?” I was staring a hole through the newspaper in her hand as I read the headline “One Lucky Winner.” Tess folded the edge down and stared at me over the top corner of the front page. I’d forgotten what she said as quickly as I’d heard it. She shook her head at me with that look of utter disap-pointment, drawing one step further away from me and into herself. She finished reading and shuffled off to the bathroom. I grabbed the paper and scanned the lottery article. The sole winner was a widowed grandmother in Valdosta. I sighed and leaned back in the wooden kitchen chair. I was a statistician. I knew the odds of winning the damn lottery. Yet my heart was beating out a rapid rhythm and my toe was tapping spastic on the cold tile floor. Michael had suggested something more than dispas-sionate physical stimulation. And I’d said yes. A highly qualified yes, hing-ing on 23 million to one odds. But even so, I’d weighed those odds and replied in the affirmative. I felt parched. I reached for another Diet Coke. I went to the bedroom and retrieved the worthless ticket from my jacket pocket. I never played the lottery. Just having a ticket in my pos-session was suspect. I tossed it in the trash can next to the bed, knowing tomorrow was trash day. Approximating the odds that Tess would find it there. And she’d ask about it. I stared down at my fate balanced on top of tissues and crumpled plastic wrappers. And I left it there, for chance to decide. Then I slipped off my clothes, tossed them in the hamper, and went to join Tess in the shower.

110

To laugh at you is to know I own you,You are the grey; I am the red and beating,Thinking, with sparks and ideas,But deep in your world you know you belong to me.

My slave, do not attempt a fight, a war,Such a struggle cannot bring victory for the philosopher poet,He who tries and never learns, with haste you seek and strive,To find new dreams, but they cannot hold you, dear shadow,For I keep wanting, and what I want, I get.

You long to forget,I long to rekindle,You find new, and I drag you deep to the old and hurting place,Of fire and screams and letters of love tainted now with hate,All is lost, my slave, for that is what you are.

A toy, a puppet, to pull the strings and play is what I can do to you,Crimson overwhelms the dim,The beating always beats, not losing rhythm,You want to lose these… needs,I won’t let you, never shall you breathe.

He sees her again, under the shadow of the awning,You say you care not; I drown out your pleas.

My slave, this is the end of all things,The time is here and now, but tears for the past are compelling,You want the new,Bold,Good and true and wishful,The right thing to do…

He has found the letter, reading,I weep,Forever weeping it seems I shall be, for I cannot let go,

Grey SlaveRICHARD A. WEBSTER

SUMMER 2006

Cannot learn to misplace these feelings,He bites,You wonder,I cry.

It is a strange thing to know,That you will always reside in my shadow,I am what he wants, you see by his words,These words are mine, from me,From the red and thumping,They cover these pages.

My slave, grey and electric slave,I own you; his mind is my child, an infant under my bleeding wing,And she will not leave me, for as long as I let her stay,You will be bound to this pain,This fiction, façade, fantasy,By whatever name you give,The situation is the same.

My slave, my love,I apologise for the ownership, the deed I hold is not wavering,Not until the sun sets in the east and the world is turned upside down.

Shake it up, and you will be free of my chains,He will be free,Then I shall be free to long for new things,As a breeze, as a bird,He and we shall fly.

112

Birth collapses into black star fountain.Water cascades from the abovein upside down foam-spurts.Prospective sleeveslaugh up their Jokers.

Amused Dogsfearlessly lift rear legsand point at the up-pour.Then, mistaking the dropsfor early snowflakes,make Canine Angelsin imaginary beds of snow.

They try to fetch fleeing bubbles,for the leash holding,fantasy figures,who are masquerading as cementmasters of five-sense certainty,convinced that the existence of clockssignifies the never-ending deathof the now.A beliefwhich renders them incapableof unwrapping the presentof the moment they are in.

Flying beneath the radar,you pedal backwards,until you reachthe baby, barely born forestof sapling innocence.

You complete a packof grinning Dogs,who are pad-walking

prospectivesleeves DOUG STONE

SUMMER 2006

across the crumbs of soil. Yawning, scratching,celebrating the newnessthat breathes the blades of green -devouring its joy.

Upside-down inhalingits unflinching energy,into your rolling,celebrating back.

Natural as a Bumble Bee,drunkenly capsizing againstthe swaying petal reefsof honey-scented, singing, flowers.

Lights of warmth andshivers of cold,embrace your pink covering,as you shed your skin.

114

“Milk the cloud, and rain will come,” the grizzled old farmer muttered as he milked Bessie. Dust motes floated on shafts of sunshine, seeping between the boards of the barn wall. “Or was it milk the cow today and more will come tomorrow?” Once he’d had the finest herd in the valley, and little Bobby and Betty had tagged along after him, eager to help with the milking, eager to be just like Daddy. Then the droughts came, followed by the dairy industry with their government backing. There was no room for independent farmers anymore, he thought, yanking too hard on Bessie’s teat. Her gentle moo turned into a bleat. Just like them demonstrators, he thought, telling me my cattle was too crammed together, telling me that animals have rights and ain’t just for slaughter. I know that. First they give milk. Let them demonstrators fill my shoes for a while afore they tell me what to do. He slowly raised himself from the stool. Let them government officials get a few cow patties on their Florsheims afore they judge a man’s life and slap liens and such on his land. The old man no longer kept milking machines. He auctioned them off, preferring the rhythm of milking, the soothing cadence of man and beast working without interference. City folks didn’t understand. They thought country meant suburbs. City folks wouldn’t survive a week living off the land. Nor would his son, who had forsaken farming. Someday the terrorists would come back. They’d knock out the power grids and then people would flock to him, begging for lessons in how to live without electricity. He left Bessie’s stall, milk pail in hand, and headed towards the east-ern exit. A single, sharp crack reverberated. It was dark in the barn, and maybe that’s why he did not see the hay bale that his boot smacked into, hurling him forward. His chin dug into the floor on the far side. His boots reached for the sky. “Help!” he screamed, though there was no one left to hear him. Cows and horses cannot help a fallen man. No woman waited on the front porch anymore. The geranium pots on the windowsill had been untended for years. His daughter no longer brought dinner. His son let the shingles flap. The old geezer tucked his left shoulder under himself, then inched his torso

GeezerB. LYNN GOODWIN

SUMMER 2006

around. With his right hand he reached out and felt his body thunk off the hay bale and onto the ground. His legs flopped into the hard, dirt floor. He tried to stand. Nothing. He tried to call out and thought, I cain’t’a broken my talking muscles. Crimson seeped across the floor, staining the dirt. So tired, he thought. I’ll just grab a quick nap before supper. Behind him a cowboy with dusty boots shook his head, holstered his revolver and turned. He walked away, a crisp, black profile against the set-ting sun. As he slammed the door of his red pickup he thought, I did the whole county a favor, you stubborn old bastard. He looked in the rear view mirror. His father’s eyes stared back.

116

A formidable odor begins to generate Eggshell-colored stains appear like old age A wet brow. A sweaty back. Four tan arms and two glistening human figures Breasts eager like children on Christmas morning Two pairs of hot pink lips smiling As the two creatures look into each others eyes smile. And fuck each other in front of a bathroom mirror. The moon keeps following me

Sunday MorningCHUCK CLENNEY

117

Like magic beans they cost you everything your lover your liver your future they expire at midnight tonight tickets to the movie they were making of your life the one where immortality’s your drinking buddy

TicketsMICHAEL KRIESEL

118

there is an essence in us,a vagrant,a hold-up man,a differentiation from Einstein, foreverone thing after another,genetic text, confluent, spilled overscenes, of copulationhidden deep,in stains beneath your fine Bellini print.

the human soul itself expressesherself, illuminates her devotionson a woman, the age of 20,smiling at Peter,drinking deeplyfrom the water, of his transmutationinto fish, drunk godliness.

there is something terriblyintriguing about it,the mystery and urge,of this passion,this paired transmutation, of manfrom an eggmaninto joys,into the Lilith, seduction.

Fallen, i just died in your armsa crowing, a vertebrate drinkingfrom a shaft, of lightburst suddenly, like a visionfrom a mass, from a massof dense organic compounds.

influence of the moon JIM BENZ

SUMMER 2006

an old woman looking, youngthen a screech, of brakes,gives pauseto the vagrant muse, of immortalityhe, of all thingshe is the most disturbing.

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121

Drenched within the light of her savior As natures Waterfall sprays Angel dust against her bare breast A woman’s soul extends into bliss Shackles that man laid upon her feet are now released Ejaculated semen that once spawned evil no longer exist Society no longer controls this bitch Her life story will be in all lyrics Embracing the unseen *seraph, as six angel wings comfort her spirit Twirling towards an eternal life of abundance Trails of her bygone liquefy into puddles – The sun dries her pain away No longer living yesterday Rising to unpredictable possibilities which settles her soul Im talking about Gods soil Reminiscing this de-ja -vou affair has complicated any further eruptions as Jesus weeps Tears remain stains of sin His death and resurrection is your key to heaven Within the forest of remorse a woman’s soul watches her sins evaporate as she beckons the light to the holy land

Within The ForestOf Remorse MELANIE C. JORDAN

122

For more than five decades, she has kept her date with Indian masses and classes alike. She’s bulky and imposing, accomodating and comfortable, steady and faithful. No wonder, in an age when things change within a matter of seconds, she has held court unfailingly. Meet the Ambassador or ‘Amby’ as she is affectionately called, India’s very own brand of car. She happens to be one of the most important icons of post-independence In-dia, with the honour of being the official carrier of the country’s politicians and bureaucrats. She is to India what Chevrolet is to America and Holden to Australia. The only thing foreign about her is the original design, which was based on the British Morris Oxford of 1948. It all began in 1946, a year before India became free of British rule. A company called Hindustan Motors began importing the Morris 10 in kit form and began assembling it in the Eastern Indian city of Kolkata (then Calcutta). In 1949, the company began importing and assembling the Mor-ris Oxford and named it the Hindustan Landmaster. It was the first car to be manufactured in India. But this indegenious baby had to wait for six more years to get its present name. In 1957, Hindustan Motors upgraded its operations and started importing and assembling the latest Series Three Morris Oxford and christened it the Ambassador. The car’s sturdy character made it well-suited to the rugged nature of the Indian terrain. Hence it didn’t face any difficulty in becoming popular with the Indian people. And remained so over a span of fifty years and more. Although its largeness might appear unwieldy to the foreign eye, ‘Amby’ has been an ideal family vehicle for Indians. The car is commodious and whereas is designed to officially carry five people, she is used to ferry-ing as many as fifteen people at times. The bumper and big front engine act as effective shields against collision. The steering wheel happens to be below the chest level unlike many cars in which the steering almost collides with the upper torso. Moreover, the mechanics of the car happens to be one of the catalysts for its ubiquitous appeal across India. What goes on inside it is fairly sim-ple to understand for most roadside mechanics, the parts don’t look alien, and almost any problem can be fixed with a hammer and a wrench. The government of India has more than 5,000 Ambassadors in its fleet. From presidents and prime ministers to the bureucrats who are

India’s TrystWith ‘Amby’ BHASWATI GHOSH

SUMMER 2006

responsible for crystallizing the government’s policies, all have been loyally served by dear old Amby. Only recently have other cars sneaked into the official corridoors; but these have at times been abandoned by their mas-ters in favour of the old favourite. For years, in fact decades, the Ambassador monopolized the Indian roads. Besides it, the only other car visible was the Fiat. But since 1991, things began to change. Globalization and market reforms marked the entry of newer, sleeker cars and the Ambassador was suddenly faced with stiff competition. Its demand dropped significantly, and Hindustan Motors was forced to lay off a section of its workers. In order to keep its fleet running on the streets, the company has started producing a more contemporary version of the car, adding features that appeal to the younger generation. Consequently, the model 1800ISZ has a sleeker design and is equipped with the benefits of cars with ad-vanced technology. Apperance wise, the lady has undergone little change – with a few alterations to the headlights, taillights, grille, bumpers, front gurads and bonnet. Once a people’s car, the Ambassador is now usually overlooked by the average Indian customer, and jazzier counterparts are fast replacing her. However, she has stepped offshore and found new takers in countries like Bangladesh, Egypt, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Mauritius. Despite the eroding customer base and therefore her less frequent appearance on the Indian roads, the Ambassador continues to be a proud emblem of Indianness. In scores of films made in India till the ‘80s, it con-tinued to make its stately appearance. Many famous Indians still ride it, refusing to switch loyalty to fancy-looking models. One gentleman’s impression best captures the car’s stature. Shortly before he died in 1999, the famous Indian photographer Raghubir Singh wrote, “As I journeyed all over India, I came to understand that if one thing can be singled out to stand for the past 50 years of India…it has to be the Ambassador.”

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editorial notation:

Points are much more o�en found between numbers than they are between lines. So why do you keep trying?

:thanks.

125

a man with the virus gets in my car he needs a ride to his momma’s he’s been sleeping for three days he weaves in my direction at the black convenience store I throw my junk in the back seat so he can sit down everybody makes him wear gloves I shake his bare hand I stop in the middle of the road at a house next to a field and open the passenger door a car slows and folks watch what is going on he asks for my number and I write it on a slip of paper he says he may need somebody to talk with again his face is blotchy and his eyes look bloodshot and I can barely understand his speech but I am not afraid

A Man With The Virus PATRICK FRANK

126

Charles Mulcahy folded the pieces of paper into a neat square and inserted it in his lapel pocket. At the coat closet, he spent more than a mo-ment with his car keys, holding the biggest one between his knuckles and brandishing it like a street-weapon, a blade that could be hidden in a fist aimed straight for the eye. Then he headed out of his elaborately wood-worked doorway into the clean morning sun, but this time Cass took note of him. She even left her bead-strings and ornaments, zipped up a winter vest and saw him to the garage, where she took his arm and held onto it until he pulled away. “So where are you going?” “So why do you ask?” His finger hit the button and the garage moaned and gaped. Charles and his wife stepped into the dark opening together, the first of four yawning bays, each containing a different style of chariot, all of them European and subject to quite the luxury tax. He went to the silver one, the one whose long, strong hood reminded him of the nose of an airplane. She stood close as he climbed in. “It’s the weekend, it’s the season, your grandchild will be here. You have that faraway look.” “Well I’m not going to Timbuktu,” he said to her. “I don’t have the fuel.” “If it’s Boston you can pick up something. We could use a really strong cheese.” “I’m not going in for a cheese,” he said. “I’m going to the old neigh-borhood.” His voice dropped into shameless self-pity. “Since no one else around here wants to.” “You could still pick up a cheese.” It was the last thing he heard her say as he swept up the driveway past the now nearly yachtless cove, and it was either the words or the tone of her voice or something else in the air that put him in a zombie zone, the shadow-land of delirium just before ex-haustion or fever or intravenous anesthesia takes you under. He came alive again at Logan Airport, vaguely recalling the dopplerized drone of Cass’s call for cheese but nothing else at all, not one instant of the fifty minute trip in through the crawling, bleating traffic, even though he had been at the wheel the whole time and the car was unscathed. He parked in one of the lots and boarded with a straggle of other passengers. But what he entered and took a window seat on was not a plane headed away from Boston; it was a subway car headed into its depths. The old train squealed and

The Patron PAUL SILVERMAN

SUMMER 2006

clattered like an old man with false teeth. It tilted its nose downward and bore into a hole black as a mineshaft, tunneling under the harbor and the wharves, burrowing beneath the decades. Charles could have gone in by car, and if Cass or any of his now-grown children had shown interest he would’ve. But they were happiest out with the Saturday Home Depots and Sunday Frostbite Regattas. And since he was doing a solo he would do it the way that seemed the original way, by train, trolley, and foot. HHHTThTHe eventually came out of the ground squinting, not a half mile from where he had walked to school in the days when they taught him the right way to spell words. The instant his foot hit the top step of the stairs at sidewalk level he became part of the noisy, fast-moving crowd that stretched from one end of the square to the other. But his was the only white face in it, and he felt for the pointed end of the key in his pants pocket, making sure it was ready if needed, although the only assault that came his way was a slap of wind announcing the sea-son’s first shower of snow. As he ventured forth from the subway entrance he turned his head this way and that, seeking landmarks. The Cathedral stood gray as ever, but now it was shuttered by a Vatican cost-cutting purge. Over sporadic storefronts there were still signs in unreadable for-eign letters, as there had been decades before, but instead of the heathen but familiar Jewish the characters had become either inscrutable Asian or menacing Arabic. Lurking and shirking in doorways or alleys were clus-ters of the kinds of young men Charles could easily picture shooting hoops in a jailyard or each other in a schoolyard, perhaps the same schoolyard he had looked out on while some spinster teacher droned on about their continent, their dark continent. His right hand stayed on alert in his right pocket, clutching the key with greater or lesser pressure depending on how close these gang-boys got to him. After walking a couple of blocks without a hulking one of them paying him much more than a shrug, he felt a wave of something come over his deeper self. The feeling couldn’t be called re-lief, nor was it disappointment. It was worse, a kind of mourning for a lost whatever – now that he was evidently too old to be worth even a fusillade of verbal race rage, if not a real true mugging. Charles pulled his overcoat tight against the thin drilling of snow and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. He crossed a side street and moved onto a new block where the bars and liquor stores and steel-grated pawn shops were more abundant. So were the loiterers, but they were older and shaki-er. The mouths showed more gum than teeth; the eyes more yellow and

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spidery red than white. The men, and some women too, seemed to have glue or molasses in their legs. They struggled with the sidewalk like flies who have just landed on a strip of flypaper. He crossed to yet another block and came to a neon sign, The Sham-rock, which dated from the days he used a fake driver’s license to quaff at the bar. But the fluorescent letters flickered and trembled, as though hungry for electricity. Passing close to the steamed-up front door he took a good whiff, expecting the ancient tang of spilled ale and overcooked corned beef. Instead he got a nose full of muscatel and piss and a mule-kick of nausea from his offended guts, and Charles Mulcahy jumped to avoid tripping over two feet in torn sneakers. The legs they were attached to were bare from the ankles to the calves, and one of them was swollen blue-purple. What remained of the man’s pants was ripped and sodden and unapproachable. What cloth there was on his chest could have once been a green team jacket; could have been on him for decades too, old as the grates imbedded in the sidewalk. The body itself, the skin―where it wasn’t bruised or pestilent―was the color of dark walnut furniture. But the stranger was alive. The lips and nose labored under thickets of dried blood, sucking and gulping air and water from the steady white drizzle. Repelled as he was, Charles took heart at having found what he came for, and he wasted no time unbuttoning the collar of his overcoat. He thrust his hand into his lapel pocket and took out the neat square of folded bills, a thousand dollars in all. He fell to one knee and there, from the length of a well-stretched arm, he studied the man’s stained rag of an athletic jacket, planning his move on the one exposed pocket. Then he reached forward and inserted the bills swiftly and cleanly, all without actu-ally touching the fabric. Charles stayed a little longer with his knee on the cold sidewalk, watching and listening for any sign―an eye flutter, a deeper gasp―any-thing to acknowledge what had just taken place, but there was only the same sleep, the same dried blood, the same misting snow. He stood up abruptly and crossed himself. After re-buttoning the top of his overcoat he marched double-time back to the dark and welcoming hole of the subway, wondering for a moment what might happen to him in this cab-forsaken territory if the hole suddenly sealed up, or just disappeared. The thought returned to pester him as he rode the old train under the storm-whipped harbor and its sunken world of moorings and anchors and pilings. He stared at the blackness outside the window and thought of the groaning

SUMMER 2006

buoys high above and the weight of so much water pressing against the barnacled skin of the tunnel. At one point the train came to a sudden halt and he looked around, a little too wildly, alarmed that there were no other passengers he could see, not even a conductor. For an eerie instant every-thing inside and outside the train went black, except his racing mind, and in the first flash of returning light Charles saw the forward door between cars slap shut behind something shiny and green that flitted away, leaving the hint of satin or a disappearing arm. At last there was a snap, a clank and the slow, shuddering climb that returned him to Logan, where Charles wasted no time finding his car and at last using the key, the key he had kept at the ready like a miniature bayo-net, from the moment he entered the old neighborhood to the moment the subway turnstile swung shut behind him. By now the threads of snow had begun to gather on sheet metal, and he was glad―brimming with prow-ess―to feel the spasm of the ignition and hear the big engine rumble at his command. The feeling only got better as he negotiated the ramps of the airport exit system and made his way onto the highway going back up north. His north; his side of the train tunnel. The very air pooling out of the climate system of the car gave him a sense of welcome and comfort, like a familiar coat slipping around his shoulders, and he grew excited and restless―im-patient to return to his Cass and his holiday and sip of rarest malt, such a malt that could never, ever be found on the shelves of The Shamrock. The road ahead seemed exceptionally clear―nothing in sight to slow him down. It was the holiday, of course. Its onset had swept the highway clean of the usual commuting traffic, and the last of the afternoon light was rapidly going home too. To his left were the Park ‘n Fly lots, silent as cemeteries; to his right, a sooty hill capped by a tall Madonna statue and shrine, standing exactly as they had when he was a schoolboy. As the bill-board lamps and neon signs came on, the snow glistened like tinsel, and the traffic signal turning from green to red struck Charles as almost playful, because there were no other cars surging behind or beside him. No police either, he reckoned, and he saw it would be a cakewalk to simply keep on going and run the light. For an instant he leaned on the pedal but in the next instant he came to a resolute stop, applying his brakes in a voluntary act of gratitude and civic decency, even reverence. He found himself giv-ing prayerful thanks to the law for bringing him to where he now sat, both hands on the wheel, both eyes enjoying the merry red circle of light and the

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silvery ice-threads pelting and melting on the windshield. Charles bit his lip, readying himself for the blink of an eye when the red would turn green and the car would burst forward like a race horse. But the thrust that came and shocked his body was different and opposite in every possible way. A crumpling slam from the rear, not caused by the action of his own engine and gears but some large foreign object ramming against his trunk. It flung him towards the windshield like a crash dummy and instantly stiffened the seat belt, which slapped him back into his place. Before he could think to unbuckle, before he could get used to the fact that the previously empty rearview mirror was now filled with blaring light and a hideous metallic mass, a hand shot towards the left side of his head and knuckles rapped against the driver’s window. Next came a voice, loud and pleading. “Are you okay?” The fist pushed its index finger at him. “You, you…okay?” Charles fingered the button on the door, dropping the window half-way. He caught a blast of breath as rank as a brewery. Now the voice was even louder, an urgent bellow, repeating its plea. And behind the jabbing finger was a brawling, boozy face, thirty or forty years his junior―a white face, Irish as his own with head shaved as clean as the snow. It was the anonymous lout’s head Charles saw all over his warehouse, attached to scores of neckless beef―bodies running his forklifts, pumping his crates, shimmying up and down ladders like a colony of young apes. If Charles Mulcahy knew anything, he knew how to be the CEO of men in the trenches. “What the hell happened, son?” He made the front part sound threatening and the last word fatherly. It left no doubt as to who was in command. “I hit an ice patch, man. Jesus, I’m sorry, I wrecked your beautiful car. Are you okay?” The images ran through his head like a river of poison. He would be late for the home crowd, his triumphant mood gone sour, his car ugly and maimed. Everything had turned upside down, all because of some gorilla in a shitbox. And his gorilla friends. In the rearview mirror he could now make out the shapes of two other neo-Neanderthals. He imagined the reek of the interior and its occupants, every inch of skin, clothing and uphol-stery steeped in pot fumes and cheap beer, their adolescent ideal of holi-day ambrosia. He knew it because he had lived it himself, back in the days when he was a warehouse monkey too. Chugging longnecks up on the hill behind the outstretched arms of the towering bronze Madonna.

SUMMER 2006

“Do you have insurance, son?” Charles contained himself. There was no point in making it worse. “Hey, I’ll call 911 if you want me to. Shit, I can’t believe this. My fault, definitely mine. Hey. But the ice, I’m tellin’ you…” “I don’t need any 911. I’m not that far gone. Let’s pull over to the shoulder. Do you have your papers?” “Thanks, man. I’m sorry. Damn, I wasn’t tailgating you, I swear it. What a holiday, what a freaking holiday. ” Charles watched him turn and jog back, like a private who’d been caught on a bender by the MP or drill sergeant. As they crossed the road to the shoulder, Charles in the lead, he noticed what a true crap-heap the as-saulting car was. An ancient Lumina, dented, rusted, sagging and groaning. It was his luck, tough luck. But it could have been anything. A falling mete-orite, a piece of shrapnel crashing down from a million miles away. He could still smell the driver’s beer breath as he inched the car into position, as far off the road as he could get it. The stench was in his lungs and head and worse, it was circulating in the cabin. He saw it as causing yet more damage―not the kind a body shop could fix –oozing into the hand-tooled leather of the seats and dash; infecting the shiny burl of the wooden driver’s wheel. With a flick he sent the window down all the way, and the passenger window too, to create a cross-draft. He kept the motor running and turned the fan dial to its highest position. The idea was to be quick about it, perform his due diligence with the paperwork and just get the hell out of there; no dressing the boys down, no threatening to press charges―he’d keep his mouth shut, decide all that later. From the glove compartment Charles extracted the black calfskin folio that contained his ownership papers. Glancing at the mirror he saw the driver and one of the two companions, milling oafishly between the two cars, pointing to their bumper and to his trunk, shaking their heads. He climbed out and joined them, very relieved at what damage he found. Incredible, his rear bumper was intact, more scraped than mangled or bruised. The Lumina was less lucky. You get what you pay for, Charles thought. “You have a pen?” The driver shuffled and shrugged. He looked haplessly at his friend. “It’s okay. I’ve got an extra one―take it. Let me see your license and registration.” The way Charles said this made him feel like a policeman, a feeling he didn’t at all mind. He slid his own papers out of a pocket in the

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calfskin. And then the meteorite did fall from outer space, fell and struck―but in two pieces―slamming him from more than one direction. The first slam he saw. It was the same fist that had rapped on his window―only this time it smashed into his mouth and teeth. The next blow was from behind, the crunch of stone or hard steel cracking the back of his skull. The pain cut all the way through to his eyeballs and filled them with fiery colors and hellish shapes. He thought he had been thrown from a building when a third wallop came. It seemed to be from the earth itself, as the cold rubble of the roadside rose and drove the full force of the planet into his face. Through the swirl of agony and visual chaos, a tiny part of Charles stayed alive and battling. It was a beam of something no wider than a sin-gle cell, but it kept sending information. The calfskin being snatched from his hands. His haughty silver car throwing back a roar and a screech as it pulled away and took off without him. The ragged Lumina screaming and racing to join it. The two vehicles barrel-assing down the highway, exhaust pipes firing like guns in celebration. Hot as the pain was, it grew even more searing as he lay there, beg-ging his hands to find the cell phone he had left on the seat. He tasted the gossamer snow as it danced onto his lips and melted away, erased by the stronger substance, the bubbling blood.

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mows the grass at 83, he’s out smoothing new cement on the walk, just bought himself a new car to drive about town, and ladders and roofs don’t scare him

smokes half a pack a day, down from a pack before the first granddaughter was born, and a pack and a half in the infantry in 1943

lunches on convenience store burritos, eats fried chicken for dinner, and there are always pan dulce in the glass cake dish on the table

leaves the pills to his wife, who had a triple bypass five years ago and leaves the doctors to his wife too, because he doesn’t trust them or need them

It’s as if the old man expects to live to 100, as if people did it all the time

as if expectation were medicine and steps were currency, each one he takes buying two more

and then comes the heart attack they describe as massive, the way a large heart attack is always described,

Mows The GrassAt 83 CLAY CARPENTER

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and he is surprised he had it, and the doctors are surprised he survived it, although the family isn’t

docs tell him he’ll need a quadruple bypass, especially risky at his age, and he survives it, too, and no one’s very surprised

and they’ll put him on a regimen of diet and pills and they’ll forbid strenuous activity

but no one will be surprised if he leaves the diet and pills to his wife and mows the grass

135

The other day I was thinking you never see a robot wearing a fez when you’re looking for one. Then I drove by a yard decorated with a big painting of exactly that. Like it was the future. But it wasn’t for sale — not for any price. I didn’t even have to ask. The owner read my mind.

The FutureBRIAN BEATTY

136

My body tenses behind the wheel as I approach the familiar brown house. I scan the area for any signs of life. There is no car in the driveway and all the shades are drawn. The house could use a fresh coat of paint and the lawn is overgrown. My mother suggested I pay this place a visit. Just as she had sug-gested many years ago. “Poor Mr. Harris must be so alone inside that big house. You should go spend time with him. Be the son he never had.” He didn’t want a son. I get out of my car and make my way up the walkway I walked a hun-dred times as a kid. Each time, my stomach would be turning and sweat would form on the palms of my hand. Silently, I begged God to save me from this. He never did. As I climb the steps, I remember that fear that would engulf me. I wanted to turn and run home and tell my mother everything. But I was too afraid she wouldn’t believe me. Too afraid she’d think it was all my fault. Too afraid of Mr. Harris. “Remember, this is our little secret.” I always hesitated before knocking on his door. Usually, Mr. Harris would open it before I could summon the courage. That sick grin on his face. Now I knock loudly. A tiny window on the door reveals the hallway behind it and the adja-cent living room. It hasn’t changed in twenty-five years. The top floor still looks like every other house in the neighborhood. But the basement. The basement held a horrible secret. Its cold, cement floor stole my innocence. I can still see the support beams that grew out of the floor like barren metal trees and the boxes piled under the stairs. In the center of the room sat an old, damp mattress, reeking of mil-dew and stained from the horrors inflicted upon it. Hidden within the mattress were photographs. Pictures of me and pictures of others. Older and younger. Glossy magazines covered the floor, spread open to pictures of flesh I never knew existed, and acts I’d be requested to imitate. “It’ll only hurt the first time.”

Innocence LostTHOMAS J. MISURACA

SUMMER 2006

I pound on the door even louder this time. A shadow appears in the hall-way. A figure approaches behind it. Even with a walker, his movement’s slow. “Mr. Harris just came home from the hospital,” my mother told me over dinner, “He had a stroke last month, you know.” I didn’t. If she had mentioned it, I blocked it out. “You should pay him a visit,” she suggested, “He’d love to see you.” Just like she used to tell me. “You haven’t seen Mr. Harris in a few weeks. Bet he’d love to see you.” The figure who struggles to open the door looks nothing like Mr. Harris. He is smaller. Thinner. Older. Weaker, he squints at me in confu-sion. I say who I am. “Oh, Kerry!” He exclaims with a toothless grin, “How good to see you.” Nothing like the whispers I remember: “Doesn’t that feel good, Ker-ry?” He lets me in. I close the door behind me. “So,” he says, “How you been?” How’s he think I’ve been? “Fine,” I say. “Come in,” he gestures, moving slowly toward the kitchen, “I just put some coffee on.” I follow his slow movements into the kitchen, take a seat at the table. Look around. Somebody must have been in to help him because the house is much cleaner on the inside than the outside. Funny how time reverses things. He serves coffee and store bought cookies. His wrinkled, liver-spotted hands shake as he brings the cracked coffee cup to his lips. So weak are these hands that used to firmly hold my body. I realize I could hurt him now. “How’s your mother?” he asks me. “Fine,” I tell him, “She’s thinking about moving.” She’s been thinking of moving for ten years. “Don’t blame her,” he says, “This neighborhood isn’t safe anymore.” I want to laugh. It was never safe.He proceeds to tell me who has moved out and who has taken their place. I’m not listening. My mind drifts toward the door that faces the kitchen

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entrance. I think of how many years have passed since I last descended the steps behind that door. I wonder how many boys were lost down them since. His body quivers like an autumn leaf. He can never hurt me or any-body else again. The door will remain closed. I still know the mattress lurks in that dark, damp basement.

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In line they’d argue in spit whispers about thighs versus wings. Did he want a leg or breast–a discussion that almost always strayed into some-thing else, right there in the line. It deterred them from further issues such as cole slaw or beans, eight pieces or twelve. Even a decision on original or crispy was hard. She’d stomp her foot once or twice. He’d fold his arms and look at the gumball machine, a child in leg braces staring back at him. They were like chickens running around the yard trying to avoid the ax. When he was little, his mother fried up the one chicken heart for a treat. Fine for his older brother, who was given this treat at every Sunday dinner. But when he came along, she had a problem – two boys, one heart. So she fried up a piece of gizzard and told him it was a heart. He’d been eating gizzards his whole life, believing they were hearts. Counter-bound, finally, they both approach, both clench the edge. The girl in the red apron looks at them with high school apathy, her front a world map of grease splatters. He starts their volley, while the girl readies her hand over the register’s keypad. “Twelve-piece dinner.” “Beans and cole slaw.” “All dark.” “Add a breast.” “Only one.” “Potatoes and gravy.” “I thought that wasn’t on your diet.” “An order of potatoes and gravy.” The words zing out. Their relationship is like loose bones thrown out for a dog. No tissue left, no muscle. Still, they’ll try to repair – eat their chicken in a park where he’ll refer to it as Kentucky Fried Colonel, trying to get a laugh. Trying to forget that everything is so hard, the skin so thin.

What He Misses Most: Their Fights At Kentucky Fried Chicken

MARTHA CLARKSON

140

Not a candy drop, licorice stick, or chocolate kisscan be bought for a penny nowadays.But accumulate enough and one could buya soul, all souls, a nation, all nations, the souls of all nationsor thirty pieces of silver and a kiss on the Messiah’s cheek.Hold a new penny between the fingers,brilliant in copper splendor, but soon to be sulliedas “IN GOD WE TRUST” passes through a million hands Thus each transaction is a prayer, and commerce the cathedral.How much we render unto Caesar.

Penny Ante Devotions RICHARD FEIN

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I am thirty-five years old, teaching in an exclusive boarding school, trying to instill French grammar and vocabulary into the heads of boys I call by their last names. These boys are fit, young and spare, with families who send them to Bermuda or Hawaii on long weekends and term holidays. Nearly all will go on to prestigious colleges. Sometimes one of them comes back here to teach. Mostly I instruct them in verb conjugations, feminine and masculine modifiers, adjectives, and adverbs; the differentiations of pronouns, object, subject, reflexive; the nuances of tense and mood, of transitive versus intransitive and passive versus active verbs. In the upper classes we look at extracts of literature as illustrations of these delicate, grammatical implications. I alternate two pair of trousers and a cardigan sweater vest day in and day out. My hair is ebbing and will soon be noth-ing more than a dark band running around the back of my head from one ear to the other. My skin is slightly eczemic and I suffer the occasional red patch at the nose. I already wear bifocals and when I coach crew I have to have binoculars to see what the rowers are up to out on the lake. One of my colleagues is an elderly maths teacher who works hard and whose lanky frame always wears the same tattered corduroy jacket with worn leather patches at the elbow. The boys seem to like him better than all the rest of us. In addition to maths, he teaches them computer skills, a coming thing and something they all want to know. He is very up to date. Smoking is not permitted on campus for the students, but the old maths teacher stokes a pipe on the lawn or in the faculty room. Perhaps it enhanc-es the image the boys have of him, an air of fatherliness they miss while away at school. His hair is quite gone, except for a thin layer of espaliered wisps covering an oily dome. He always carries with him a volume of some-thing mathematical or technical as well as a novel, Joyce or Faulkner, or a volume of poetry. He’s never without something engrossingly intellectual. I have to admit, I admire this in him. In the faculty room we laugh over student antics. We try to sound in-dulgent, amused, measured, as if we were tycoons in the deep armchairs of our club, sitting before a roaring fire, sipping sherry, and pulling on cigars. I sometimes feel we are in a play set in a boys’ boarding school, chatting in a scene that will give way to something life-changing for the main charac-ter, one of the boys, of course. Or possibly a scandal involving some other teacher and an employee, surely not a student, will be revealed. The old

The Old MathsTeacher MARGOT MILLER

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maths teacher puffs thoughtfully on his brown bowl of fragrant tobacco. He’s retiring at the end of the year. He says he’s “past it.” He admits this humbly. I know why. He knows he cannot keep up with burgeoning tech-nology much longer. He’s already begun to lose a step now and then, forget a student’s name, lose an assignment. He accepts that he’s at the end of his career, a bittersweet kind of grace. We teach all day, attend faculty meetings at lunch, coach sports in the afternoon, mark papers all evening. We are more polite than servants to the students whose parents pay our salaries, and to the Head of School, whose hand rests on the lever that can eject us if students or parents are not pleased. We slip between the buildings and among the students almost without being noticed. We teach our classes, guiding the explication of a poem or an elegant geometrical proof, separating the example from its bones and showing students how form and function combine in choice of images to make a sum that is greater than its parts. It sometimes feels as if we are performing magic tricks. On school holidays we visit family briefly; I stop in to see my aging parents, he visits a nephew and his family. The old maths teacher’s wife died very young and he’s never looked for another. Mine didn’t like the life at school; it’s been ten years now. In summer, we might make a pilgrimage to some European capital or try to write (for we think we are writers in our hearts), and always we read, catching up with our fields to prepare a stimu-lating course for the next term. Earning our keep involves a certain amount of entertainment now. It’s no good recycling the same material year after year. Students are more sophisticated than that. One of us is much the same as another. It’s our evening to share study hall surveillance duties. We take turns walking among the hedgerows of bowed heads; he offers assistance on maths and sciences, I on English, French or History. At the end of the prescribed seat time, the boys go nois-ily off to their dormitories and we turn off the lights. A straggler glances back at us. One of us shoos him off with a gesture and we collect our books and papers before slipping out of the main building. He locks up and pock-ets the key as the night porter comes by to check that we have followed procedure. We exchange polite pleasantries with the watchman. The old maths teacher offers me a book he’d mentioned earlier in the day, and I thank him. It’s Elliot’s Waste Land, from the school library and he knows I will return it when I’ve read it. He pushes the long wisps of hair that have been lifted by the wind back into place above his ear. He pats me on the

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back, a comfortable gesture. At last we say goodnight and each of us dis-appears up a stone staircase and into his own rooms, adjacent to a hall of rowdy boys. This is the close of our day; this is always the close of our day. Like the old maths teacher, I set my briefcase on the floor, loosen my tie, and sink into my worn and faded reading chair, and we are each quite alone. Our scholarly, avuncular fraternity can be shed for the night. From the gates far out the long driveway, moonlight can be seen on the lake; the ven-erable old buildings disappear as the “lights out” ritual settles the boys, and us, into darkness.

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My girlfriend Jill was outside, naked in the snow, jumping up and down on the hood of my old truck like a kid on a trampoline. The hood was giving a little, bending with her weight. Her white skin was turning pink from the cold and snow spotted her dark pubic hair. She yelled something I couldn’t make out and then she looked in my direction and shot me a double bird. When a light came on across the street, I stepped away from the second floor window, chewed a little on my strawberry Pop-Tart and figured she’d calm down in a few minutes, then I’d let her back in. It was after six on a Sunday morning, and we’d stayed up all night pushing morphine into each other’s veins. Jill had brought the drugs home from the Surgical Trauma ICU where she worked as an LPN. The charge nurse had told her to give the morphine to the patients in rooms #1-3. Jill said she wasn’t supposed to handle any narcotics, but Charlene, the nurse, was too busy reading People to get up and do it herself. So Jill halfed it with the patients, shooting a mixture of morphine and saline into their IV’s. The snow had started a little after midnight. It fell soft and white as we sat in the bed watching infomercials and playing with her cat, a little tabby named Rex. One of the infomercials had a tall guy with an expen-sive suit and slick-backed hair talking about making money on the Internet from the comfort of your own living room. Lots of money, he said. We thought that sounded good, except we didn’t have a computer. Around five, she got up and walked to the back wall of the apartment. The wall was one large window without curtains. The snow and reflection of the streetlights made it look bright outside, like the middle of the day. Directly behind us was another brownstone and to the right you could see a park with a baseball diamond and football field on top of a hill. Beyond that, the Roanoke Star stood metallic and unlit. The snow fell all around her naked body’s outline. Her back didn’t look so good. There were pockmarks on both shoulders. Her ass was flab-by and flat. Her black hair was chopped short, curled up and matted like some un-kempt bird’s nest. She turned to me and said, “Gary, let’s fuck.” I didn’t want to, felt so good floating on the morphine high, and knew that if we started moving and sweating the good feeling of my buzz would go away. But I also knew I

Red SnowSTEVE CUSHMAN

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had to give her what she wanted. “Not yet, baby,” I said. I wasn’t sure what would happen, wasn’t even sure if it would work. I couldn’t really feel much down there. It felt like right after I got shot when everything went numb. She took her tampon out and started rubbing against me, working me with her hands, kissing my chin and chest and whispering “oh baby’s” like they were going out of style. She straddled me, got it in, and moved up and down a couple times before it fell out, all soft and bloody, looking like some just-born little ani-mal, maybe a baby squirrel or bird. She climbed off and said, “Good for nothing.” Then she ran into the bathroom. I wiped myself off with the white bed sheets. The room smelled of old blood and cat piss. The scar on my belly had healed pretty well but still looked like a zipper that ran from the middle of my chest to just below my belly-button. It was my first winter this far north. I’d spent all thirty-four years of my life in Florida. The falling snow looked beautiful and weird and mysteri-ous out there with me in this warm apartment. It was like a dream where the details didn’t matter. A little black bird fluttered outside the window. He was just hovering there as if looking at me or trying to get in, asking for some warmth. But when I stood to open the window, he flew away. Lying back down in the bed, I wished Jill would just go out into the liv-ing room and sleep on the couch. She was tired. She’d just worked three twelve’s in a row, had made me feel good with the morphine, and all she wanted was a little loving, but I couldn’t even give her that. She walked back in the room holding a steak knife with a wooden handle up to her neck. She said, “I ain’t good for nothing.” “Put that down.” “Can’t even satisfy my man.” “Jill, baby, it’s all the morphine. Too much, just floating. Stop the hys-terics.” She charged at me with the knife and I caught her hand and pulled it back, the momentum dropped her to the floor. She laughed, then started crying. She got like this when she was tired and high. I had a little hole in my right shoulder from a fight two weeks before. I wanted more morphine so I could keep floating, but we’d been out of it for a couple hours. I wanted to sleep. I wanted this to stop. I thought about when I got shot at my cousin’s wake. The funeral and wake had gone fine until it came time to divvy up the left-over alcohol. Three of my

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cousins started fighting and yelling and next thing you know my uncle pulled out his .38 and started shooting. My sister warned me about com-ing up here. She said this part of the family was all drunks and good-for-nothings. But it was the middle of summer and I wanted to get out of Flor-ida, wanted to see something else. I was tired of frying on a roof, throwing shingles and tiles. I was tired of an ex-wife who came by offering me her body whenever she needed money. I don’t think my uncle meant to shoot me. He sent me a get-well card in the hospital. The doctors told me I was lucky, said the bullet just nipped my spine, a centimeter or two to the right I would have been paralyzed. Lucky, I thought laughing that day after they left the room, I ain’t ever been lucky. “It’s not my fault. It’s yours,” she said. I shook my head, knew she couldn’t, wouldn’t, let it go. “Yeah, Jill, it’s mine. I know it is. You’re a beautiful woman, sexy. I just can’t right now. We did too much.” “I want you to leave.” “Ah, come on.” “No, I want you to leave. It’s my apartment.” Her words were clipped, short. I knew she was bobbing her head at the end of every sentence as if to say yes, I am saying exactly what I want to say. That’s how she talked when she was high and pissed and sad and crazy. She was right about the apartment. Though I’d been living there for three months, I didn’t pay rent or do much of anything. She’d thrown me out twice before, but both times let me back in a few hours later. “It’s snowing,” I said. “Get out.” “Where am I gonna go?” I sat up in bed. She was lying on her back star-ing up at the ceiling. I looked up and saw nothing but the white blanket of drywall above us. I wanted it to be like it had been two months before, be-fore the weather changed. We’d get high and walk over to the park and lay in the grass and stare up at the red, orange and yellow fall leaves and watch the squirrels chase each other and she’d lean over and kiss me. I felt good when she did that. I wanted to make her feel that good. “I don’t care, Gary. Just go.” “Come on,” I said. She picked up her cell phone and started dialing. I pulled it from her hand and pushed the OFF button. She surprised me a little by grabbing it

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back. Then she threw it at me, hitting me in the head, just above my left eye. I climbed out of bed and she ran out of the room, threw a plate at me in the kitchen, a cookbook in the hall, and then a lamp in the living room. The lamp hit my right shoulder and stung. I grabbed her arm, but let go when she stabbed me in the chest with one of her long nails, drew a little blood. She ran down the stairs, opened the front door, and stepped out-side, shutting the door behind her. Why did it always end up like this? Things so good for a while and then I start fucking up. Like somebody up there was saying okay Gary boy things have been going a little too well for the likes of you. I didn’t want to screw up anymore, but here I was doing it again. I couldn’t help but think of how we met. Through smoke, at a bar, she smiled at me. I smiled back. She looked all right from a distance in jeans and a tight pink shirt, her hair done up nice and curly. I’d been out of the hospital a week, staying with my aunt, wasn’t supposed to be drinking. Jill asked if I’d been in the ICU recently and I said yes and she said that she took care of me there and I said it’s possible because I’d seen about a hundred nurses and she asked how I was doing and I said fine and showed her my stitches and she said they looked pretty good, should heal up real nice. That night, in her apartment, I told her how things were a little strained over at my aunt’s, with her son dying and her husband in jail for shooting me. I told her that I was still in recovery. The doctors had taken six inches of my large intestine. Jill said I should just stay with her. A week later I realized why she’d asked me to stay. Her ex-boyfriend, a little scrawny guy with a crew-cut and leather jacket, showed up and started yelling, banging at the door. We walked down the stairs and she stood behind me and said, “I got a new boyfriend now.” She lifted my shirt and showed him my scar. His eyes got all big and I never saw him again. I should have just gone back to Orlando when I got out of the hospital, moved in with my sister and got my old job back. But roofing in Florida is hell. Hot, long, grimey, shit work. Now, I was thinking about getting my own place over on St. Pete Beach. A little apartment where I could see the blue-green waters of the Gulf through my front window. Gulls and terns dancing in the surf. Kids running around on the beach making sand cas-tles. I’d like that. Maybe Jill could visit. There was a knock at the front door. I walked down the stairs and stepped up on my tip-toes to look through the diamond-shaped window at

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the top of the door. It wasn’t her, but Darren, the guy who lived below us. He was on probation and had long black hair. “Gary,” he said, catching sight of me. “Open the door.” “I can’t do that.” “Just open up.” “No.” “What the hell is going on?” “Mind your own business.” “Don’t make me call the cops.” “You do,” I said, “and I’ll tell them to check the safe under your bed.” We scored a lot of pot and acid from Darren. He walked away, over toward the truck. His wife was there talking to Jill. I walked back up the stairs and opened the window, facing the street. A gust of cold air blew in like a ghost. Darren and his wife stood by the front of the truck with their arms out like they were trying to coax Jill down, or were ready to catch her if she fell. “Jill,” I said. “Come on.” Damn, it was cold. She shook her head. I wondered how she could stand the cold out there with nothing on. If she was numb to snow like she told me she was numb to the suffering of her patients. If being a nurse had made her numb to the world. If it was the morphine. She shook her head and folded her arms across her chest like a big pouting baby. Man, she was beautiful like that. We’d made plans to drive down to Florida next month to visit my sister, and I pictured the two of us sipping Pina Coladas in my sister’s heated pool while her Rottweiler chased lizards and blue jays in the backyard. The sky screaming soft blues, cotton ball clouds sailing above us. The February Florida sun tanning her pasty white skin to a golden brown. And the two of us having our picture taken with Mickey Mouse as little happy families ran around us. “I’ll change, baby. Come on.” She looked up at the naked branches of the elm above her. For a sec-ond, I imagined her jumping up like Superwoman and grabbing a branch, swinging high in the air, hanging there as if held by a parachute, over the whole neighborhood, flying into my arms at the window. Then the two of us going back to bed, me hugging her until she warmed up, sleeping the day off, and later between bites of a fat sirloin laughing about what had happened. “You’re nothing,” she said, as she spit on the front window of my truck. “You’re everything.”

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“Impotent.” Across the street, two doors opened. I sat back down on the couch. The cat lay in one corner by the mangled lampshade looking up at me, yawn-ing. I’d just wait and see what happened. She’d come around, call out my name, and then we’d be like we were an hour ago, high and happy. I closed my eyes and tried to nap but couldn’t. When I looked back out the win-dow, five people were standing there at my truck, below her. One guy was holding a gray wool blanket up to Jill. She had her hands in the air and was laughing or crying. It was hard to tell which. A friend of mine down in Sarasota called last week, said he had some work coming up if I was interested. I thought of the heat on top of a roof, of baking in the sun, of frying eggs in a pan over the tar boiler. Maybe I could get a job as a painter instead, less heat, the possibility of shade. There ain’t shade up on a roof. It’s like you’re a human, heat magnet. But anywhere there wasn’t snow—where I could work and go home and have a few beers before bed—would be better than this. I had to go and pull her off the truck and drag her in the house. She was gonna get sick out there, and I didn’t want that. This had gone on long enough. I’d explain how the drugs stole my sex drive, how I’d stop drink-ing so much, get a job here with a local roofing company as soon as the doctors told me it was okay to go back to work. Walking back to the bedroom to get some clothes, I passed the fridge. There was a postcard on it that my sister had sent me. It was a picture of a beach chair between two palm trees in the middle of some soft-looking, white sand. In the top corner of the card, in orange letters, it said FLORI-DA. On the back, my sister’s simple and direct message: come home. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, I went outside and looked around, but Jill wasn’t on the truck anymore. I figured she’d probably gone into Darren’s apartment. She’d be protected, safe in there. I felt a little better about that. It was so damn cold outside. I reached into my pocket and pulled my keys out. I considered going back for my jacket but knew if I did, if the warmth of that apartment sur-rounded me again, I probably wouldn’t leave. On the hood and windshield of my truck were four spots of blood. It was like red snow. I turned the engine over and the heat up full-blast. I shivered and turned the wipers on and Jill’s blood smeared in front of me. I pushed it into Drive and headed out, slid a little in the snow, then made a left at the corner and idled past the park. I’d send her a postcard,

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telling her thanks for everything, telling her we just weren’t good for each other, that she deserved better than me. I took a final glance at the back of the apartment and then looked to my right at the park. That’s when I saw them. A half-dozen people were chasing her through the fresh snow like a pack of hounds on a scent. I stopped the truck, put it in Park and watched as she summitted the hill, waving her hands in the air. The truck stalled under me. As she ran, the blanket on her shoulders flew up behind her like some superhero’s cape. After she disappeared at the top of the hill, I turned the key and the en-gine whined a couple times before catching. I threw the truck in Drive and eased down on the pedal. The back tires spun. The harder I stepped on the gas the more I spun in the snow, and the back end of the truck slid over into the curb. Then I looked up and saw them—Jill and the people chasing her—all running straight toward me.

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I wanted to slap him across the face but only laughed—knowing full well he felt like shit, sitting there drunk and depressed. I wanted to laugh at a power I’d never had over him. It was ‘too difficult’ to be with him, his girlfriend said. To me that was funny. It was something the two of us would have laughed at before. “Fuck girls” is right. But he’d tripped up some-where along the line. I gotta tell you a little about the two of us first. Well, him, I guess, since he’s the one. He’s the guy. He’s the one you say those words about. He had all the plans and ideas about how to change the world and he was one of the guys you’d follow to see where you’d end up. We went to school together, he earned a 4.0 without trying at a prestigious school in Seattle, not that that necessarily means anything. He was smart; the first person I called brilliant; could have been a genius if he wanted. And what I mean by that is he could produce what it took for total strangers to agree he was a genius. This girl screwed him up, though. They dated for 6 months and from practically day one she was all he knew or cared to know. They met in Bue-nos Aires. I’m not sure what she was doing down there, school-related I think, but he was down there for the fuck of it. That’s what he did. He went places thousands of miles away, this time because he wanted to become fluent in Spanish. He was already a master in French and spoke some Ger-man and was teaching himself Spanish. Again, I only mention that because that’s how smart he is. He speaks perfect Spanish now. After six months with 1980’s textbooks, reading Pablo Nerudo and Octavio Paz and 8 years of training in Romance languages, he left, came back after 2 months, and had it.

He was spontaneous and mad. He met her after week one of a planned two week stint and then stayed for six more on a shoe-string bud-get. He came back and started slipping, giving up on things. Historically he’d try new arts and sports or tasks or whatever. He’d try his hand at a new skill and perfect it, get outside appraisal and accolades and then he’d trash it for something new. His latest thing was film. He bought a camera and got his own public access show in Seattle; it was a fucking good show, people watched it and wore t-shirts we’d made. Juxtaposition was his trick. He’d film the most depraved, deranged, and desperate scenes and then cut

What I Do For You, Man JOEL VAN NOORD

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them straight to the ‘American Dream’. A junkie. Then a girl in a bikini. A dead rabbit on the ground next to a smashed beer can then an orgy of red necks spinning the earth into a pile of loose dust with ATV’s. He’d film himself riding his bike around a perfectly flat construction site where the trees had been removed a day before and now the bulldozers and forklifts lined up, righteously, after a long day at work. Then he’d transition to the ‘hippest’ Seattle bar and show the bathroom graffiti then slice to the most exclusive sushi bar where men in suits laughed with a table full of annual progress reports. All the while playing a deranged 80’s futurist documenta-ry music, like the kind you’d hear in EPCOT. This was the mortar between the actual stories and skits we did, between the stories which held his mes-sage.

Everything’s wasted now, though. I actually despise the kid… laying there falling over-himself. Chronic Wasting Disease. He doesn’t give a fuck about anything except again being able to rest his head between her legs and run his tongue up and down her thighs. No longer the television show which had the main goal of ‘making people think’. No longer the astro-physics he read with the passion of prov-ing how absurd Christianity was. No longer the ice-climbing trips into the North Cascades. No longer the long walks and talks of literature and phi-losophy, travel, or moving to San Francisco and making movies. No more eco-terrorist night adventures. There was nothing left of him but his limp need for an average bitch from Vancouver. He was disappearing fast. I had to do something.

Anyways, this fucker turned his enthusiasm dial down to zero and the Canadian rightfully told him she wanted a break to head back to Cana-da and see if the north had anything better to offer, girls or guys. And that was the funniest thing about it. She became disinterested in him when he became exclusively interested in her. He’d ruined himself: first with me and then with what he gave me up for, her. And that was the truly hilarious paradox that he would’ve had a riot at if he’d been in his ‘right’ mind. Which is where we were: him lamenting about his tragic fate as he trashed himself on beer, the bastard was so unreal to me now; it’s hard to explain given what he’d been and what he’d become, all because of the pungent stink of fermented fake-European pussy. Inoffensive instead of of-fensive, passive not aggressive, quiet instead of explaining, calm not

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threatening, meek instead of commanding. He was lame and I treated him like so. “Mayn… fecken b-itc’ LOR-en… proba’ly en Canu-da fecken, sum… ha’ry… dyke. Wh’t h’ hell.” He said desperately, his body language match-ing his speech. “You know man.” I began tentatively. Knowing what I was going to say even before I’d thought the words. Knowing, because it was what I had wanted to say since he came back with her and gave up on life. Gave up on his dreams and forgot his views. “I fucked Lauren and her friend Diane last month when you were gone.” I told him as he stared at me. “She was around and we watched a porno together.” I said it for a poetic effect. I’d wanted to snap him out of this com-plete and loathsome apathy he’d fallen in. It was too much. I hadn’t fucked his girl. She actually intimidated me. But I said it without knowing I was going to. I knew the result I wanted from him; and now these words were the perfect tool. It should’ve been funny. I’d fucked a girl of his before after he laid an ex of mine and convinced me that it was “awesome.” We laughed about it, eventually. Talked about her annoying love-panting. But this time a bottle flew past my head and shattered against the wall. Looked back and he was charging. Already away from the low and de-jected self he had seconds before. I was thinking about the fractured skull I would have had if the bottle would have been four inches to my left; he threw me to the floor and punched me in the face twice in a row before he stopped and asked me if I was serious. “Her pussy stinks like onions,” I said to him for some reason and started to laugh, deranged; my head slammed against the wood paneling of the floor. Everything went black.

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If the train would stop in Camdenno one would ride.It does. I’m alone.My fiancé is in Albany with Billy Collins.They both have the flu. She caught it from him.I here it’s going around.I’m not inoculated. I heard both of them were.

Hearsay. The Horse that lived next doormoved to Vermont. Sure beats Camden.They shoot horses, don’t they?Probably not in Vermont.Definitely in Camden.My dead grandmother is in the arms of Walt Whitman.She died of the flu in Camden,while riding a horse from Vermont.

Damn, I missed my stop.

She’s In Albany.Call Her

On Her Cell.ROBERT SALUP

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He left the office a few minutes after five and went to the library’s main branch. Inside he found a corner chair. He didn’t have a book and he didn’t grab one off a shelf. He just sat in the small chair in the corner and stared. There was the occasional patron who would stroll down the aisle and, in turning the corner, find him sitting there. He would not look at them, but he knew they were looking at him, could feel their eyes on him, if for a moment. As if they acknowledged his presence but didn’t ask anything of it, just that a person was sitting in a chair in a corner and posing no threat. After an hour he left the library and went to his apartment and drank a glass of water and went to bed. The next day was one he did not have to work at the office. He got up late and rubbed his eyes, then went into the small kitchen and drank a full glass of water straight from the sink. The water did not taste fresh, but he’d never minded this. He set the emptied glass on the counter beside the sink and sat at the small table in the kitchen. The sky was overcast and there were no sounds he found exceptional. The sounds he heard were the sounds a day makes when it begins. He heard them almost every day. He was not surprised, was not impressed. After a few minutes of sitting at the table in the kitchen, he rose and stepped outside on the front porch. The porch was very small and had a gloss black railing across the front. The railing needed painting. There were various places where the paint had chipped due to weather, frequent han-dling, etc. He stood and looked out from the porch at the street just beyond the edge of the front yard. There was a stop sign there, marking part of a three-way intersection. A car drove by but didn’t stop at the sign. A few minutes later, another car did the same thing. But he wasn’t surprised by this either. No one ever stopped at the stop sign. But he did. He always stopped. When he got tired of standing on the porch he went back inside the house and sat in a ratty recliner he’d found at the end of someone’s drive-way years before. There was a television about seven feet from the recliner. He got up from the recliner and turned on the television without the re-mote, because he didn’t own a remote. A news program came on. He sat back in the recliner and let the news program run. He wasn’t watching the news program. He felt like the

Habitus RictusJEFFREY S. CALLICO

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newscasters were watching him, testing to see if he was listening. He wasn’t. He wasn’t listening or watching. He didn’t know exactly why he turned on the television. He was looking over the top of the television, to-ward the blank paneling behind it, where there was nothing but the outlet and the cord from the television which plugged into it. He got up and unplugged the television without turning it off first, saw the little flash of electricity inside the outlet. It looked like miniature lightning. As he held the plug in his hand, he decided to do it again, to touch the lightning produced in the outlet when he unplugged the cord. One two three, he said, holding a finger near the plug. Yanking it out, he felt a sharp burning sensation both on the finger and in his hand, his arm. What a jolt, he thought. He smiled.

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Reflective persona pinned to windowpane Etched with glaziery crackerjack squiggles Fragile opaque eggshells brittle cover-ups Thinning hairline fractures bald-faced lies Intricate frostwork patterns seemingly endless Spidery mazes no exit meltdown Heavy breathers exhaling spare dreams Chance encounters sloppy pillowslip kiss-offs Feverish sweat spiky icicle slivers Perpetual wink faking insincere smile Bleached snowy graveyard spellbound absence Sculpted water churned shades drawn

Two-Faced MirrorsCHARLES FREDRICKSON

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Cooper was three when I lost him. And I don’t mean lost him in the euphemistic, I-just-don’t-want-to-say-dead sense. I mean lost him, as in, God oh God, where’s my kid? Has anybody seen my kid? The day started out typically enough. I went to pick Cooper up at the special preschool he attended for autistic kids, and saw him sitting at a table with the aptly named Merry, a new classroom aide who wore an idi-otic smile almost continuously. “Look who’s here!” Merry said to him when she saw me standing at the door of the room. She pointed with her finger, but Cooper just looked at her hand. He didn’t get the whole concept of pointing. Somehow, nor-mal kids understand automatically that it’s a directional cue. But to Coo-per it was meaningless. “Look who’s here,” she repeated, turning his face with her hands. I stood and waited for recognition, knowing that if she just said the word “Mommy” he would think to look toward the door for me. Merry still had a few things to learn. His teacher, Miss Nicki, looked up from the colored paper heart she was cutting. “Mommy’s here, Cooper,” she said. That did it. My sweet-faced boy glanced quickly out the corner of his eye and came running to me. I kneeled to greet him. “How was your day, Cooper?” I asked after hugging him. “Did you have fun in school?” “Bub-bub,” he said. “Bubbles? You played with bubbles?” I looked at the aide who nod-ded in confirmation. “Yes, Mommy,” I modeled, “I played with bubbles today.” I stood and addressed Merry. “How was he?” “Wonderful!” she gushed. “He wrote the whole alphabet.” I nearly rolled my eyes at this. Cooper had been writing the alphabet since he was eighteen months old. “He said ‘Zach’ today,” Miss Nicki added, walking toward us. This was big news. Cooper’s vocabulary consisted almost entirely of the names of inanimate objects. The fact that he’d said another child’s name nearly constituted a breakthrough. I bent over to face Cooper. “Did you say ‘Zach’ today? I’m so proud of you! Should I arrange a play date with Zach? Look at me, Coop. Do you want to play with Zach?”

Finding CooperELLEN MEISTER

SUMMER 2006

He didn’t respond, but I didn’t expect him to. I rose and said good-bye to his teachers. Merry laid a hand on my shoulder. “You’re doing God’s work,” she whispered. Tell God to do his own damn work, I wanted to say. I’m just trying to have a life here. Then I understood the beatific smile. She thought this was all part of God’s design. I squeezed Cooper’s hand and fought back my fury. How dare she. How dare she think the misconnected synapses that ruined this child’s life are part of God’s grand design! I gritted my teeth. “C’mon Cooper,” I said, as I pulled him down the hallway. I took a deep breath and tried to center myself. “We’re going to the library.” It was Friday, the day we always went to the public library after school. Our routine was to go the Children’s Room first, where I would read to Cooper. If I let him pick out the book, he would choose Trollo Takes a Train. Every time. The story was starting to get on my nerves, and I even considered asking Mrs. Stiles, the persnickety children’s librarian, if she would hide it on Friday afternoons. But I was pretty sure she’d have about ten strokes and drop dead at my feet if I asked her to do anything that wasn’t etched in some ancient book of rules they kept hidden behind a ceiling tile somewhere. When we got there, Cooper headed straight for the shelf where Trollo lived while I tried to find something else he would like. I spotted an over-sized alphabet book with big, lush illustrations, and thought it might do the trick. “How about this one, Cooper? Wanna read this one instead of Trollo today? Look. Look at the pictures.” Cooper shoved the Trollo book at me insistently. “Okay,” I relented. “We’ll read Trollo first, and then we’ll read the alphabet book. Does that sound like a plan?” Cooper hit the front of his book with his palm, a signal to get started. He was getting anxious, so I opened it and read, silently editing as I went along. “Trollo took a train. A train, a train, a train.” Mommy took some poison. Poison, poison, poison. After we finished, I read him the alphabet book, not even realizing there was a picture of a train on the “T” page. Cooper went nuts. “EEE-eee-ee!” he squealed, flapping his arms, which is what Cooper

DISPATCH II

does when he’s excited. I grabbed his hand and gently stroked it. “Okay, Coop,” I said. “Qui-et down now.” I was, of course, a beat too late. The ever-vigilant Mrs. Stiles rushed over. “Is there a problem?” Yes, I wanted to say. My son is autistic. Apparently, according to some people, God thought it was a great idea to short circuit his brain so that this beautiful, creamy-skinned boy would find it excruciatingly dif-ficult to learn simple things, like what it means when someone points a finger. And nearly impossible to make the natural human connections that you and I do a hundred times a day and take completely for granted. Things like looking another person in the eye or understanding that your mother isn’t just an object that offers comfort and food and brings you to school, but a living, breathing feeling person who loves you so fiercely she would do anything for you. Anything. So yes, Mrs. Stiles, I guess you could say there is a problem. “He’s excited,” I simply said. “He loves trains.” Mrs. Stiles brought her lips together, as if to say she’s seen this type of indulgent parenting before and simply won’t tolerate it. She turned her attention to Cooper. “I bet you’d like to take this book home, wouldn’t you?” Her way of saying, don’t let the door slam you in the ass on the way out. “He likes to read them here,” I explained. “That’s fine,” she said, laying her hand on Cooper’s arm, which he pulled away. “But you have to be quiet in a library.” Cooper patted the book again, indicating that he’s done with her. He wants me to read. Mrs. Stiles straightened up and walked off. After the Children’s Room, we headed upstairs to where they kept the videotapes. Miles, my husband, and I liked to watch a movie on Friday nights after Cooper went to bed. It was our version of a date, since Cooper didn’t do too well with babysitters, making it hard for us to get out. This is where it happened. I held Cooper’s hand as I scanned the cardboard videotape boxes for an interesting title. But he tugged in the opposite direction. Something had caught his eye and he wanted a closer look. “Just a minute, Coop,” I said. “Let me find a tape.”

SUMMER 2006

He was insistent, pulling and whining, and I feared he’d throw a fit. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Show me, Cooper. Show me what you saw.” I let him drag me toward the front of the aisle where he grabbed a box off the shelf and patted the title, indicating that he wanted me to read it out loud. “Strangers on a Train,” I said. “That’s very good. You read the word ‘train,’ didn’t you?” He pulled from the shelf the plastic case that was behind the box, the one they keep the actual tape inside. The title was printed on it, and I think Cooper recognized that it said the same thing as the cardboard box. He held the two side-by-side, looking from one to the other. He sat down on the floor and laid them in front of him, transfixed. “I’m just going to the end of the aisle, Cooper. Can you sit here qui-etly for a minute?” He didn’t respond, of course. So I just left him there while I walked about twenty feet away. I went back to scanning the titles, glancing back over at Cooper every few seconds. A certain tape caught my eye, and I picked it up to read the copy on the box. I guess I got engrossed for a mo-ment longer than I should have, because when I looked up, Cooper was gone. “Coop?” I ran to the end of the aisle and looked in both directions. “Cooper?” My heart started pounding, but I was sure I’d find him any sec-ond just around a corner.“Cooper!” I was getting louder, and people were starting to look at me. All at once I didn’t give a shit. “COOPER!” I yelled. Nothing. “My kid’s missing!” I shouted to the air. “Did anybody see a little boy?” “What does he look like?” someone asked. Like a lost kid! I wanted to scream. Somebody find him! People started rising from chairs and looking around. I ran down the center of the room looking frantically into each aisle. “Cooper!” I shouted. “Where are you?” “Cooper!” I heard from people who had joined in the search. I did a quick lap around the perimeter of the room before dashing down the stairs. “Keep looking!” I shouted over my shoulder. I almost ran smack into Mrs. Stiles. “Cooper’s missing,” I said. “What?” “My son, he’s missing.” I swallowed hard. “He’s autistic.”

DISPATCH II

Mrs. Stiles’ face went white. “Lock the back door!” she shouted to a small woman behind the desk. “I’ll get the front.” Now it felt real. I imagined headlines. Posters. Did I have a current picture of Cooper. Oh God, what am I thinking? I ran to the Children’s Room, where Trollo Takes a Train was still on the table where we left it. But the alphabet book was gone. Did that mean anything? I imagined, for a second, my life without Cooper. But the picture was blank, like a sheet of photographic paper with no image developing. I’d wake up, have coffee, do stuff. Then I’d go to sleep and do the same thing all over again. What was the point? Without Cooper, my life had no shape, no color. Without Cooper, my life was a meaningless blank. I knew, then, that I needed him as much as he needed me. I sat down on the floor and started to cry. The dam burst, and I cov-ered my face as heaving sobs took over. And then. Then I felt a tiny hand on my knee. I opened my eyes and saw Coo-per sitting under the table with the alphabet book on his lap. Thank you, I thought. Thank you, thank you, thank you. “Mommy sad,” Cooper said. Maybe it wasn’t the hand of God that dropped a gift into my lap at that moment. But it was a gift just the same. I laughed and crawled under the table to hug him. It was his first sentence. But it was so much more. He’d recognized emotion. He had acknowledged me. As a person. And, perhaps most important of all, he had felt the very human need to say it out loud. To me. To make a connection. “Yes, Cooper,” I said. “But I’m happy now.” Just then, Mrs. Stiles rushed into the room and saw us. “We found him!” she shouted to the crowd by the door. She kneeled down. “What are you two doing under there?” she asked. “God’s work,” I said. “We’re doing God’s work.”

163

1I’d ratherglimmer and faderecede into the nightbe a voyeur of kicks

2rather beon a shiptrainbus, planerooftops fromtangier to paris juke jointsin new orleansdigginvoodoo girlswhere thealley cats and hipsters roamhow about riothe beat of love

3tibetwhere buddha criesjapanwhere girls have secretsto whisper in my eargulf of mexicowhere I was bornand diednaked insad ocean bluewhere her lips

When Dawn Comes Wish Me Forgotten WAYNE MASON

DISPATCH II

moist and redtasted like sangria

4down theredrunk shivering wetunder solemn wonderful skyI died

5spit backmother ocean’s wombme, naked and cleanborn to dieagain

6here I sithipster girllanguid beside meeyes rolled back highbrother acrosswith poet eyesmy hands wrappedaround a quart of malt liquorin a brown paper baglike hip black boyskillin timedowntown

7so here’s todead heroes allalcohol puddle stainingground at my feet, I lick my lips

SUMMER 2006

here’s tobeginninghere’s to endthis roomwherelost dreamers nodcryptic smilesgroovin onthe secret we’reall dyintoknow

8O’ tis aglorious shameminutes tohours todays, we meltlike the tickto the tockeagerly watching withjaded curiosity (slanted smile)watchingour bodies go to hellmeasuringtime by decayremembering to cherishyesterdaylove today andtomorrow isjust a fleeting notion

9so I’ll beattentive to nowreverent to you

DISPATCH II

fair skinned girlwho entersonly at nightwhen I’ve lostmyself in dreamsI’ll breath deepthink of nothingI could love youif Iknew your name

10your nameis a dove, bitingthe endof the bitch headI’m in love withnothing

11and hey, sheslinks across bare floor withphone to earhalf top flauntingswishing to thesway, dreams madelike crushed velvetto teaseold drunk poetsvoyeursin the cornerlivin lifegroovin lifeand allits discontent

SUMMER 2006

12this mosaic ofbars, I driftfrom scene to scenewatching people playingtheir daft gamesyuppies, hipsterswomen reveal fleshleaving scent of perfumehanging inthe air ofa homeless nightbouncers and poetslovers and playersrock music blaresmoonlightshowers faces ofecstatic and downtrodden alike

13pole to polecoast to coastlost dreamers singthe same ole songinto each othersears, voicesflow like honeyunto enraptured hearts....one moredrink then we’ll gobut now I’lltalk to the golden heartgirl with the lightin her eyeswho like Ihaunts these places to watch

DISPATCH II

people pass by

14we being butpassing thoughtsin each other’sheads, bornunto each otherto fulfill amomentjust oneon one nighta cellblock earthvalidation comesfrom placestoo dark to seeone smiles from ear to ear

15when they swaggerthrough smoke likehaggard heroes in anold midnight flick intheir mind leavingstink of cologneor odor of sexflashing bigugly smilestheir eyes glancethinkingwouldn’t youlike to knowbut I dowe being loversholy mystics

SUMMER 2006

in this churchour forlorn heavenof decadencewe call home

16sometimes tho’I see clearmy skinis the placeto be, black lightshines down likesalvationfrom a godwaxing poeticilluminatingme and my spaceon this big sadbeautiful earthit allhas worthI know thesecret and I’vegot a hunchI’d do it all again

17that big alonelooms largerthan life, shootingstraight though your headsayingdo you roundshave a drinkmake the scenelive and lovegrasping blindly forcompassion from

DISPATCH II

every passing soul inbeautiful humanity muckbut when you’re readyI’ll always be here for you

18for ‘tis not a sinto live alonebut simply not to livesoul to soulbar stool todance floor tosweaty summer parking lotsand all the peoplescattered to and frounified underabysmal blanket of nightplaying with each other’sfears, joys, ecstasieslost dreamers allwith no placeto bejust smilin’ knowinthey just gots to go...

19into the clubs, bars, cafesthe streetswhere we alwayshave the starsmultitudesto gaze aloftfrom hereto budapesttwo days to dazewith the gypsy girl

SUMMER 2006

sweet eyes thatbeckon something moreseeping, bleedinginto meneeding and kneadingflesh of egomoonlight skin

20I’ll meet youat the wavestumbling andreceding atour toesunapologetic asit washes the world awayexcept uswild eyed dreamersmellowedfrom mind to voiceto waving limbsframed between starsand brown earthbeer bottlesand clothesin the sand

21too easy todream awayour dreamers heartsa million miles awayher and herher and sheocean, memy heart and oblivionlike night from daymeeting at

DISPATCH II

gray fringes of dreamsin the backof our minds

22and the grandest of memoriesare of nightday is passintime, thegreatest pomesworth knowingare the secret pleasuresdeep dark kickssorrows and religionone seekspomes(shrouded) in thewombof velvet darkness

23...and wind swishand car varoomand diamondabitch goddesswail blues in my eartell me what Iache to hearugly sexy nothingsfrom youto mecradle to gravehere to infinityhark unholy soundsholy angelspeak from the vulva voidto bottleto wet

SUMMER 2006

chapped lips

24And I think youreally ,reallyhear mewhen I speakto youwithout wordsunspeakable words fromunflappable tonguethe holiestholy speakclean your earspeck out mine eyesgutter trashcan bluesI’m the hobowith the rusty halo abovelike this blackhole nightworn with dignityon my head

25and I think you knowfutile is afutile wordtonightis infiniteand you and mehim and herare passin throughtime to digestno time to dwellangel on your shouldershe sayslove and suffersuffer and live

DISPATCH II

jovial buddha love sayingyou’re way too seriousand that devilperched on your shoulderis a martyrstretched in dawns gleam

26cuz when dawn comeslike a punchlinecheesed and tiredI’ll be forgottencuz when dawn comeswill you rememberme, I hope todwell in the excessof subconscious mindcuz when dawn comeswish me forgottenmy job is doneall is wellmy ashes spreadfrom new yorkto osakalove and breath me sensual and deepI wish you well

27the secret liesfrom o-townto old augustineto brunswickto greensvilleto charlotteto cold nights of west virginiaalienation in steelpissing beside

SUMMER 2006

long gone highwaysslack jawed casualties on bended kneefrom hereto jewettsaddest song to sing‘till you’re goneand then lost dreamer’s heartdwells withingleaming steelheroic beast of the eastern forgotten night

28or maybenaked huddledat old royalty inngazing through the windowhuddled soulsfloating through matteras if withouta carelover to your left perfectionmolded to thismoment, your caresare maintenanceof this momentand whathappens nextis anyone’s guessI am youif nothing ifonly tonight

29dammit! dreamersbe anythingbut dreamers tonight

DISPATCH II

buzzand swooshthrough mydreamers headdharma but this momenttogetheralaslove and be kindhate and be adamantI opposeonly to embracethe secretdig?lakeland to moscownashville to homewhereverthat may be

30when one lacks to find itthey’re lookingway too hardlook!you’re enveloped insmothered inlife, look! listen!seven strippersin old cardingy parking lot nightin tampagreen tea and quartsputting on masksto butterbuttery foolsthey know the secretFreudonly pretended to know

SUMMER 2006

31quivering meat wheelof sexualityreligion for a buckunder neonglitter temptressslither and crawltattoos and jaded tongueyour bodywail like birdyou’ll besuperstarin my gone head tonightlike pinkvelvet creaminessan islandin sea of skin

32flicker in glistening eyetonightpeople come and gohustling like ants racingfor the holiest prizebackpacksand ticket stubsmy lips dance alonetonightmy soul is solotonightlonesome in lakelandmy mindsketches people flowingfrom border to border

33wandering watery lipsbig brooding lips

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arms outstretchedinfinity toyesterday totomorrow amazedsorrowfulangel wings quiverchilds memorymournsmagnificent slaveryfree to mocktoday

34yesyeah, yah, ayesaturday nightsurely ain’t the nightto be aloneunless tonight you digresidue, essencesalty warm tearsdrip droppingonto oily pavementwith a thudthwack, boomunless tonightyou’d rather wishyour dreamersheart toinfinity dreamer

35tho’ every nightI but just a notiona legendary daydreamshe sighs(belts out really)from her belly

SUMMER 2006

to throatshe blinksand tiny toes crinklebreathingthe essence of mefrom nowto dawn forgottenand head reelsheavy hung and dizzyfrom heart to mesweat and neuroses glimmerof a nameonce sung clear

36cuz in dusty ole chicagotheir red hearts shinecapone fantasiesflounder and floptheir blues and sad dharmadreamsand whisperswish from dusk ‘till dawnthinking, breedingrepugnant romantic thoughtfrom akronto st. petewhere wavesoverwhelm andcrawl back oversexedand witheredfrom hereto thereaugustato cleveland

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37I’ll be forgottenmove slick slantedthrough shadows and crackseager exact secretsongs only Igrasp in a hole in timebeer number who knowstonight I pray tobebop jazzcowboy saintsburning candlesat both endsmeltingfrom the inside outplip plop dropform formless formwhere you may

38sun don’tdeceive me tomorrowmoon don’tignore me tonightguide me quiet, smugtonightanswers are neveras interestingas the questionssecretsare sincere smilesnever much for riddlesmuch more for rattlerazzle dazzlehum over drumrattle on refugeesin our so lonesome

SUMMER 2006

corner of nowherelet the stars guide us on

39it’s the wantingthat gets us through the dayit’s the needthat cuts us downat nightI needto wantwant the starry night plinking blinking bulbsshooting acrossbarren skyI needto wantto be themor under themrocketing down back roadscracking upin city streetsI need to wantto notbe alone tonight

40razorsbladessleeping pillssubdue till dawncaffeinealcoholfallfallfallingdreams are sweet

DISPATCH II

you’re sweeternectar is as sweetas the thirstnone number thanthe numbest onethe dumbest onedriftingto and frowished Iwas as sweet

41morals, smoralstruth...is gained in sleepwhen triedit all dies anywayrather be in cairodeath tombs, trianglesriddle me thispiddle me awayrattle me onpharoah me thatbartow I triedhere I melttombstonesteenagership unto deathcasket to basketliquor to beersmashed, litilluminated

42yeah I’m a conKerouac’s gonejenny’s a sham

SUMMER 2006

tonightmaryann befuddles my puzzlemy cup of joeis a flanneled punk rockertonightpolk to delandI am the drunksaint clownjazzed on futile hopethe jester throwingpiesin my own face

43the best haiku arewritten in darkness aloneby a silent phone

44the truest haikuare the silent clankingof lonelinesswithout rhymenor reasonmute tearsin a vacuumtimes two

45times like thesewoe to look aroundsee nothingfeel nothingand nothing worth doinganymore, all been doneand felt

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monkey dancing on your backis only your shadowcigarette upon cigarettesmolderingin my ashtray bluesbut my heartsat oceans edgelike standingon the threshold of all that’s ever gonna matterwidest darkest highwaystretched lonely acrosssuffocating time

46apartments, duplexescrash padsalienated charactersgrasping youtheach hipperthan the nexteach beaterthan the beatestcigarettes coiland bottles pileevening to dawn among friendsall smilesall big talkers finishedwith big talkall more tuned tosecret odes echoingthrough collective mind

47generation blackwhite, japanesespanish eyesblue, black, yellow

SUMMER 2006

white and amber hueswe’re all so tiredmore alienated mercy oh mercy pleasesounds aroundaboundguide usgently loveto this bedfree of shameblameguilt, fullon desire, alcohol, green teaI see masseshuddled arounda flame translucent, ambivalent

48america dreamssighs, flashmine long pastI sitin America’s dreamdon’t mean much‘cept quiet utterancedeep in my throatsayin the dreamslong gonesix in the mornhustling, bustling, stiffsilent moansweetest bluestomorrowI’ll be borntonightdawn I’ll beyour fantasy

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49poetic gleamstrite wordsfumbling, only timefor tumbling truthtonighthumid blueis the most vivid memorycurling varicosekids laughat jaded kicksif only tomorrowI’d existmothers milkmuscle, crunch, cracktake your apathya scarwith pink honor

50when I blinkand sinkshiver and crythis is itdestiny is coldshakes and bakesit’s all rightsmileloose, glad, and ambivalentfleetingin one time momentsmile againI’m here forgottena masochistpainted blueshoulders giveweight and angst

SUMMER 2006

no time to have notrather be anonymous

51rather becalifornia dreamingflorida weepingdeep and longrather bein hanoiin munichin you rather be breathingair in madridI’d rather matterheavy and dulllight and sharprather notmattertomorrow

188

“In Sicily, it’s fine, you can change money everywhere,” the lanky traveler lectured, popping the tab on his beercan, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. A white floppy sunhat, popularized by British sunbathers in Brighton, shaded his head from the fierce Mediterranean sun, though we were all hidden in the subterranean hold of a ship bound from Syracusa to Valletta. He reminded me somewhat of an Australian Version of Gilbert Pinfold, Arthur Gordon Pym, and Prufrock rolled up into one. “I don’t like arriving in a new place without being able to change money!” he reemphasized with a Braque-like cough, staring at the strange beercan label, rocking slightly back and forth like he’d picked a winner. “I just don’t like it! It’s not on!” “Maybe you can change money on the boat. Or after the boat lands in Malta,” I ventured, wondering what currency they used (or what language they spoke) at our final destination. Some said French, some said Italian, some said English. “I tell you, it’s just not on! Not being able to change money,” he tersed again much later, apropos of nothing, his tone trebled up a notch. “I don’t like it when I can’t change money!” he groused again, getting slightly hysterical for a split-second, then quickly waving down a belch as if refus-ing a bartender’s free drinks. “It’s not on!” His near panic was repetitive, but infectious. The boat landed at night, the gangplank was lowered, and the passengers debarked the ship. Met by a sea of taxi drivers waving signs. Our Australian friend was accosted and kidnapped by a friendly cabdriver, who asked me,”Aren’t you coming too?” He looked very concerned about my health and well-being. “No, I’d rather find my own place in town.” “You will sleep outside my friend!” the taxi driver crowed, accelerating the cab with madcap fury toward an uncertain future, with its passenger’s floppy hat billowing in the oblong rearview. Within ten minutes of walking cobbled streets, amid the lamplit pastel colors, red phone boxes, and bright shops and taverns of the downtown I’d located a pensione. I noticed with a start from the exquisite castley archi-tecture everywhere that I was in fact in the land of the Knights of Malta, crusader country.

The Maltese BeercanJOHN M. EDWARDS

SUMMER 2006

Head hit pillow, sleep, followed by the not unpleasant surprise of being awake at daytime. As usually happens, I bumped into Prufrock in a drinking establishment elsewhere. “Hey, were you able to change money?!” I cooeyed. “Lots! There are banks everywhere in this place! Bloody excellent, it is!” “I’m thinking of going on to Libya!” he added (no, crowed), throwing back his oil can as if drinking before twelve were an acceptable activity. His free hand scratched idly at his D.H. Lawrence beard. “I don’t really want to, but I couldn’t face my friends if I didn’t. I told too many people I was going there.” “Er, is that a good place for a holiday? I don’t know much about it except that Americans aren’t supposed to go there.” I didn’t know what else to say. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go. I couldn’t face my friends if I didn’t. . . ”

DISPATCH II

191

In the sanguine earth of Kali’s tears you can smell the skin of the cremated dead, the dark mist of black wine on her breath while she dances in the ashes of children below a red moon their spirits hidden in a coquina of bone where they die whispering of suicide.

The Tears Of KaliBOBBI SINHA-MOREY

192

The first guest to arrive was Dick Damone and he took a big whiff when he stepped in side the rental. “Oh, Jesus, I can smell it. Oregano and cilantro.” He handed Chet a shopping bag that was taped closed. “It’s a ball and a mitt. I got the pitch back in my trunk. I’ll put it together before I leave. You know what a pitch back is?” “No”. “It’s a net thing with a strike zone and you stand back and throw the ball at it and boom, it comes back to you.” Dick Damone was looking around the room. “Where’s Rita?” “In her room.” “Yeah,” he sniffed again, looking down at Chet. “She dress you?” Chet nodded, embarrassed in his blue trousers, white shirt and red tie. “Theme of this party patriotism?” “I don’t know,” Chet said. “She told me to wear something red. I don’t own anything red. I went all the way to San Luis to buy this fucking red belt. Does it look stupid?” “No.” “What she doing?” “She’s getting ready.” Dick strolled into the kitchen, looking twitchy. “Who else is coming?”“I don’t know.” He picked up the wooden spoon and fished a piece of meat out of the Chili Coronado. He opened the refrigerator and removed a beer. He was a wiry man with the blue eyes of a just dead bird. They fixed on Chet. “For Christ sakes, open it, boy, and see if it fits.” Chet tore a hole in the bag and pulled out the glove and baseball. “You’re a righty, right?” Chet fit the glove on his left hand. “Yeah, you are. It’s a Wilson glove.” “It’s stiff.” “Got to break it in.” “It’s nice.” Chet flung the ball into the glove. “What position you play?” “I don’t know.” “You know anything about baseball?” “No.” Dick closed another drawer. “Where’s the flipping church key? Hey, RITA…”

Dick DamoneM. FRIAS-MAY

SUMMER 2006

“Be right out.” “The can opener, where is it?” “On top of the refrigerator.” “What’s it doing there?” “That’s where you left it?” Dick Damone popped open his beer and took a long swallow. He hadn’t shaved and his blue eyes seemed to be getting bigger and brighter. “I’m getting you a TV.” “I don’t want a TV,” Rita said. “How’s the kid going to know anything about baseball if he can’t watch a game?” “You teach him.” “You sure you want me around that much?” “You’re right. Buy us a TV.” Rita came out and Dick Damone died for a few seconds. She was wearing a white Flamenco-styled dress that showed off shining skin. Dick told Chet to close his eyes and advanced on Rita. “No,” she said. “Come on, one little squeeze.” She stood him away with her hands and he inhaled deeply. “Rita Helena Del Turo,” he said, drawing out her name like it was the label of a good wine. She laughed. “Rita Helena Del Turo, I can smell the garlic on your fingers.” “We don’t have time.” “There’s always time,” he said pressing in, and taking hold of her by the waist. Chet burned with a strange delight. Her resistance was playful and he sensed this was different from her public embracing. This was private and she wasn’t pretending. She wasn’t even looking like his grandmother. Someone else had come out of the room in her body. Someone fresher, taller, darker. He backed away. They seemed to have forgotten about him but he wasn’t upset or disgusted. He was beaming. A party was happen-ing and more gifts were coming, gifts for him—the possibility of a TV tak-ing up space in their creaky two-bedroom box thrilled him. The doorbell rang. Rita jumped back, whispery and breathless. Dick Damone uttered his name. “Chet. We have company.” The woman was blonde and pale, dressed for selling real estate to men who like tits. “Hey,” she said, squatting, her breath like sour milk, “you must be the birthday boy.” Chet took a rectangle package from her. “Monopoly,” she said, kissing his cheek. “Best board game on the planet.

DISPATCH II

Ask Dickie.” “Hey, Sugar,” Dick called out. “Whatta you having?” The woman straightened up and licked her frowning lips. “Since you’re taken, guess I’ll have a martini. Hi, Rita.” “Sugar.” “Nice place.” “It’s a dump,” Rita said. “Hey, hey,” Dick said. “It’s an investment and there’s plans.” Another woman walked in, winked at Chet, and handed him a pack-age. “It’s a puzzle,” she said. “You like puzzles?” “Yes,” Chet said, “Thank you.” The woman squealed. “Oh my God, Rita. I love this place.” “Liar,” Rita said. “No,” she said. “It’s…” “A dump,” Sugar said, sitting in a chair and leering at Chet. “Isn’t it, birthday boy?” “You hush up, Sugar,” said the smallish woman with the biggest butt Chet had ever seen, which she didn’t try to hide. She wore those stretchy pants that Rita liked but this fabric was thinner and see-through. Her hair was curly short and she had on pointy black glasses and spiked heels. Her name was Isabella. “The boy is a prince,” Isabella said, walking into the kitchen, “an ab-solute Prince.” She kissed Rita on the lips. “You look gorgeous.” “Thank you,” Rita said, handing her a glass of red wine. “How much have you lost?” Isabella did a dancer spin. “Twenty pounds since New Year’s.” “Good for you.” Sugar wobbled in her chair, scowling. “I’m dry, Dickie.” From a silver container Dick Damone poured clear liquid into Sugar’s glass. “That’s it until dinner.” “You’re no fun,” Sugar said, focusing on Chet again. “You’re so cute I could eat you.” Chet blushed. “Join the party, little man,” Dick Damone said. But Chet held his ground. “Come on, Sugar won’t hurt, will you?” Dick said, grabbing hold of her blonde bob and pulling it off. “Oh, for God sakes,” Isabella said, “What are you two doing?” Rita laughed when Dick put the wig on and sashayed toward her. “Who’m I?”

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“A fool,” Isabella said, swiping at the wig. Dick heaved it into the liv-ing room and the wig landed in front of Chet. His grandmother was waving at him like she was on a boat pulling away from the island he was on. “I’ll give you fifty bucks,” Dick Damone yelled out, “If you put it on.” It wasn’t in Chet to be a clown. “Fifty bucks,” Dick Damone taunted. “That can buy a lot of shit.” The bald-headed woman snarled at Chet. “Come on you little faggot, put the fucking thing on so I can get another martini.” A vicious flush engulfed Chet. “For God sakes, Rita,” Isabella said, “He’s your grandson.” “It’s just a wig,” Rita said, laughing. Chet snatched up the wig, plopped it on his head. It sunk down to his eyebrows and their laughter exploded. It didn’t hurt like he expected so he left the wig on and approached Dick Damone with his hand out.

Dick Damone’s aroma of flesh and onions permeated Grandma Rita Helena Del Turo’s cottage and Chet for several months. And then his stink, his gutturals, and his promises to play catch all evaporated from the house-hold. He suspected he was the reason why Dick Damone stopped coming around. But the man himself set Chet straight on that suspicion giving him a ride home one day after school. Chet sat in back of the Cadillac with Sug-ar and Isabella, the ladies at his belated birthday party. They were dressed in bathing suits and smelling of apples and baking spinach. Sugar pawed at him while Dick drove with one hand and chewed on an unlit cigar. “How’s your grandma?” “Fine.” “And you?” “Okay.” “You mad?” “No,” Sugar answered, poking him. “He’s a Pooh bear.” “Don’t.” “Leave the kid alone,” Dick said. “He keeps staring at my tits,” Sugar said. “Is that true, Chet?” How could he not look at them? They were almost falling out. “Hey, Chet…” In the rear-view mirror, Chet could see Dick Damone’s one-sided grin. “Don’t be mad, okay.”

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“I’m not.” “Good.” They passed the brick bank building and Ralph’s Gun Shop and the one-pump 76 station. Chet saw some high school kids talking to a skinny Mexican in front of the pink Venus Arms apartments. He knew Dick Da-mone was taking the long route home. He had no idea why, but he wasn’t scared. “What do you think?” Dick Damone asked. “I don’t know?” “Girls are in their bathing suits and it’s cold outside—what do you think of that?” Chet shrugged. “Think it’s weird?” “I don’t know.” “Well, it’s more convenient than weird, for me, anyway. I got urges. Do you know what urges are?” “No.” “Well, they’re like little voices, saying, `Dickie, you’re blue and…’” He laughed, a thick burry noise. “Never mind. You’re young.” “He’s a baby,” Sugar said, poking him again. “Am not.” Dick tossed his cigar out the window. “Aggravating, isn’t she, Chet? Damn Aggravating. She isn’t satisfied unless something’s in her mouth and you know what that something is?” Chet could see Sugar making weird faces at him. “I bet you do,” Dick said. “I bet you heard the word wiener before, right? ‘Course you have. Everyone talks about it on the playground. Well let me tell you something, boy, this girl here likes to suck ‘em.” Chet could hear Sugar slurping. “It’s an art,” Dick Damone said. “It’s really what got Lillith tossed out of the Garden. You know Adam and Eve, right? Well, before Eve, there was little Lil and Lil and Adam lived like they never had a honeymoon and one sunrise she surprised him and sucked fifty IQ points out of his head. He liked it, of course, but where in this garden of delight did she learn such a thing? And that suspicion got them in a fight only God could settle and boom, Lil got booted, and Eve was brought in and everything was restored until boredom set in. Isn’t that right, Izzy?” The woman on Chet’s right sighed. She was squinting and her mouth was making little grimaces. “I’m not here,” she said. “Yes, you are and you can’t deny that you’re not,” Dick Damone an-swered back. Chet glanced at Isabella. She was perspiring like a movie star

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in hot lights. “Don’t look at me,” she said. “He won’t remember what you look like,” Dick said. “Hell, I don’t even know what color eyes you have.” “They’re topaz.” “Doesn’t matter, does it, Sugar?” “Nope, not to you and your kind,” she said. “See.” Dick had pulled off in a spot near the county bus stop. It was a turnout of rubble and asphalt and overlooked the highway. Cattle grazed on the little green hills and afternoon light defined the bumpy lay of the Santa Lucias. Chet was only a few blocks from his house and his mouth was dry. Dick had tweaked the mirror so he could eye the woman called Isabel-la. “C’mere, baby,” Dick said. “I can hear you fine from here.” He twisted around, his voice rough, brash, intimate. “C’mere.” She scooted forward on the leather seat, her bare thighs squeaking as she moved. “Closer”. His hand cupped the back of her neck and she let herself be pulled toward his lips. As they kissed, his hand snaked down and tugged on the back of her white bathing suit. The woman wiggled and Dick Da-mone said, “Tell me what you see, boy.” He’d seen his grandmother drop her robe and enter the shower once. The door was ajar, a red nightlight defining her lean spine and generous hips. It was like the last frame of a long dream before waking. But seeing what he was seeing now was taking his breath and thickening his heart. His hands trembled. Surely someone was going to drive by and crash just be-yond the biggest, tightest, roundest cheeks on the planet, bared, and shim-ming. “I think he’s in shock,” Sugar said. “It can be disconcerting,” Dick said, “if you were a bicycle seat.” Dick roughly massaged and patted her fleshy buns. “Chet,” he said, “is this going to mess you up because if it is, I’m sorry, and, I swear, I’ll never say a word to you or your grandmother again. Chet? You there?” His meek “yes” was full of air. “Is that a yes to messing you up or is that a yes to being there and fucking stunned by the size of this ass. I mean, how can someone with such tiny hands and tiny feet have such a big beautiful ass?” “I don’t know,” Chet whimpered. “It’s okay, really. I mean, consider your future, what you’re going to be like, in say, junior high, when the state can legally talk about cocks and cunts. Oh, by the way, that pretty little slit between those humongous

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cushions is called a pussy in polite company and a cunt in a crasser crowd.” Dick paused, and glanced at Sugar. “What was my point?” “De-mystifying body parts, I think.” Isabella yelled out, “my legs are cramping.” “Shush,” Dick said, his eyes riveted on Chet. “Am I freaking you out, boy?” “I think you asked him that,” Sugar said, yawning, “and that car that just slowed down… it’s backing up.”

199

Eve’s theory of gravitycombines a water color with sundryforms of poetic justice

retaliation theory in a graded washedible garnish, masking fluidspoetic visions of the female pelvis

swept by theories of colorevolution, craft wordsand prehistoric young women

with braided hair, linear transformationsimprinted on abstractionsinvariant theory, grid structure

bestowed, an artistic interest in nutsthe opportunityto speak from a sandalwood box

on her own behalf, readsthe image, the Offspringof Coco-de-Mer analyzes, influencesreclination of the tonguein the cheek

on the Chinese dragon chairbemusedthrough the window

on a summer day, the Woodcuttersunlit rhythm unhidby clothing or gravitational

The WoodcutterJIM BENZ

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attraction, a factor of theoryquote menever dwarf the little man

201

As often as he could my father left me in women’s hands. I suppose he wanted me to acquire some civilization and manners from first my grand-mother and then my aunts, to soften the hard edges that being raised only by your father is supposed to leave attached to you. That he abandoned me with them is not surprising when I consider all he had to deal with year in and year out, and I say, even aloud to myself at times, that he did the very best he could; yes, there were times when I welcomed the upheaval and movement because it meant the end of the long silences that usually char-acterized our days together. That first summer after Mother died, he went with me on the bus to Morganville, riding up from south Alabama for most of one day to hand me over at the bus station to my grandmother. I was five. He had me sit down, took Grandmother’s arm and walked off a few steps with her. They argued– about me, I suppose–and it ended with my father giving me the last hug I can remember. “Listen to your grandmother,” he said. “I’ll come soon and get you.” Then he stepped up and into another bus to take him home again. In Morganville summers with my grandmother were successions of days filled with her judgments about my father sprinkled throughout the chores around her house and yard, in the flower and vegetable gardens, her considerations made plain about my upbringing, about how I was just like him–too quiet for my own good and too still for a boy my age. “Your daddy never liked to move much either,” she would say, “go outside and play some.” Mostly then I remember waiting for the mail carrier to work his route, hoping for a letter for me. But my father wrote only to his moth-er once a week to send money for my keep, and if he asked about me, how or what I was doing, Grandmother never said. I have to assume that she kept him informed and no doubt informed him of her opinion of me as an individual and of himself as a father. Hardly flattering is my estimation of what she may have written. “Mothers always know better,” he said in later years when I asked about her, “especially when they’re grandmothers.” After Father died, my aunts had pretty well cleaned up his apartment before I reached home. By cleaning I mean throwing away the debris in his refrigerator and waste baskets, washing his sheets and airing out his apart-ment, and disposing of the letters he had stored away in his trunk, the few he had in the desk; they had enough time to claim for their own any

In Women’s HandsDAVID ALEXANDER MCFARLAND

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pictures of him, of their mother, any pictures of he and them. There were certainly far fewer photographs handed to me than I knew he had kept in cigar boxes, what he had usually referred to as about all his legacy to me would be. “We wanted to spare you going through it all,” Aunt Grace put it to me. I had been out of the hospital only a week; I was hardly able yet to do anything. So any letters from Grandmother to him or his letters to her which he may have recovered after she died are vanished. What they man-aged to leave for me was a stamped but unmailed letter to me and a copy of my father’s handwritten will which–as my aunts well knew–left everything to me, his letters and pictures and the few pieces of old fashioned furniture he had managed to buy and which his sisters knew I would ask to be re-turned. Death had caught him by surprise, caught him in bed, but he had kept himself ready. There really had not been much for them to do, but their curiosity about him was finally exploding through the cleaning. The disposal, the salvaging from among his effects was how they maintained the illusion that it was for him, for me. My father left a meager wardrobe of two suits neatly hung in his closet, and his shirts, his socks, the rest folded and stacked as properly as ever in his drawers. As Grace and Han-nah took out his suits, folded them carefully in the old cases for the Salva-tion Army, they went through the pockets. “Habit,” Hannah said shyly, “I always have to do that for Willis.” And Grace laughed, too. “All men are like that,” Grace said. But his pockets were empty.

II

Mother died before my memories begin, so there are only vague im-pressions and the photographs in this album I have made up: In the best of them she is an attractive woman, with a baby identified below in my father’s hand as myself. She died in an car accident, the family story goes. I believe the story, since there has never been from any person a hint of illness or martial difficulty. Even my aunts and my grandmother acknowl-edged that Father loved her greatly, spent far too long mourning her, and they all say he should have married again if only for my sake. But he could never, apparently, bring himself to do so. Whether Grandmother simply refused to have me again after three summers, or if she felt herself too old or infirm to care for me another sum-mer, I do not know. The change was never spoken of. I simply was

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informed that this year I would be shared between my aunts. I would spend five or six weeks with Aunt Grace, and then I was to be shifted over to Aunt Hannah. Grace was the taller, the beautiful, and throughout her house she at-tempted to display her sense of beauty and grace, if not outright elegance. There was, for instance, in every room a mirror surrounded (perhaps cap-tured is better) by a gilt frame–the size of the mirror (including the frame) depended upon the overall importance of the room to her design scheme. The mirror in the living room stretched from one end of the long sofa to the other. In the mornings Grace would attempt to see herself in this mir-ror as she supposed others might see her if only glancing in her direction. This came after her overall inspection in the full length mirror in her room. (It can only be described as her room and her husband, Jackson, as merely having some space in it.) Grace changed her shoes more often than her dresses, and her first choices never became the final selection. And when the dress and the shoes (and belt, if worn) finally displayed the correct coordination with the day, with the weather (and with her mood), in the little mirror beside the door she would make the final adjustments, tugging one way or another at her dress or buttoning or releasing the top button to show tiny amounts of her soft, white flesh. Satisfied at last, we would set out to accomplish the scheduled events of her day. I, who had been dressed beforehand and thus became the witness to all these shifts and re-versals from my seat on her bed, pronounced the final judgment: “You look fine, Aunt Grace.” But that was insufficient. “Are you sure?” she would say in her throaty voice as if my opinion did possess merit, and I said, as deep-ly as I could and with what force I had, “You look great.” That was enough and off we went. I suppose she gained some social currency by having me along, showing her maternal instincts though she and Jackson were child-less. She had no desire for children of her own, though she said more than once through the summers, “If children only came like you,” a compliment from her, even if what she meant was If children were only a certain age and quiet and departed after a time. So she bought me nice clothes each summer, educated me every morning about colors and patterns, the abso-lute essentials of what not to do, and she taught me to comb my hair prop-erly. “You could be my own little boy,” she said occasionally, “you look so much like me.” And I gathered in the manners she used at lunches with her friends; because I was quiet she took me along. The women forgot I was there, and they talked cruelly of men without embarrassment, of their

DISPATCH II

husbands in disparaging terms though always careful to state directly, “I really do love him, you know.” Of course, came the chorus, Of course. “He’s fine,” Grace would say to any questioning looks towards me, “he’s a quiet boy,” meaning He’s not one to talk, won’t tell secrets. With Aunt Grace, I was the favored one. One of the mysteries surrounding my father is that he never asked about my time with his mother or his sisters. He never asked about them, their habits, their handling of me. The weeks of staying with Aunt Grace and Aunt Hannah took more weeks to wear off, the altered habits and rou-tines slowly dissipating into what seemed to me the lethargy and emptiness of our customary lives. When he saw changes in my behavior of which he disapproved, he corrected me gently and always with great patience. The most he would say of his sisters (both several years younger than he), es-pecially of Grace, was that they did not know yet what life was about and that it was unlikely they would ever learn. He never spoke of his childhood as having any connection with theirs; they might have come into existence forever married to their husbands. And, when Grace divorced Jackson, Fa-ther said only, “She must have been bored with him.” That was, I believe, his final judgment of her.

III

Father and I moved many times. He and Mother had lived in south Alabama before she died, and when he brought me home after the first summer with Grandmother, we went on the bus as far as Decatur. We were never far away from Morganville, sometimes in Huntsville or Deca-tur, sometimes moving to Birmingham. We never had much more than his bed and mine, two or three small tables, our clothes. Many times he moved us in the summertime while I was away, and in each place I had school and he had work and we lived simply. He never spoke of what ar-rangements he made for me, nor of how he managed his sisters’ acceptance of me each summer. I was informed and he delivered me to them, usually to Grace first, one or two days after school was out for the summer. The summer I turned ten, he gave me five dollars for my own before taking me to Grace’s front door. “Spend it for what you want,” he said. “Put it away for now and when you see something you’d like to have, you can get it.” This was the usual way he changed our relationship, our habits, by sudden announcement or some action that forevermore became customary. The

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next summer he gave me another five dollars and the summer after it was ten. With Grace I never had any need for money. She bought for me the few things I said I wanted, and I always arrived at Hannah’s house with my money intact. Hannah’s oldest child was a girl, and she had a boy two years younger than me. In Hannah’s house there were toys already aban-doned by Carol and not interesting to Johnny. Here I had great freedom. Hannah did not allow Johnny to trail behind me. Her children stayed indoors or in the yard, and I believe with Carol it was a matter of her choosing to stay inside most of the time. Carol was, as Hannah put it many times, disparagingly in the early years, studying how to be like her Aunt Grace, and Carol changed her clothes and her shoes nearly as many times in a day, tried on her mother’s jewelry when Hannah was out of range. Hannah and Willis lived on the edge of Morganville, and I spent much of my time moving in the woods across the road, pretending I was fishing in the stream at the bottom of the hill, pretending to hunt with a stick I had picked up or poking it into holes I found along the banks of the stream. Hannah complained often about the mud and grass stains that would not come out of my pants, but Willis always said to her, “At least he’s getting some exercise. Boys are supposed to be like that.” But Hannah worried aloud of what my father would say about my clothes when he came to fetch me for the new school year. “His clothes were nice enough when he came,” she said, meaning acceptable, but not the best, not as good as . . . and Wil-lis would take out his wallet every summer and say to her, “Take him down to Tolliver’s and get him a couple of pair of jeans. He probably needs some new ones anyway.” So, I knew what everyone in the family believed about my father: He was incapable of raising me without their help. My father, and I by extension, were part of their family and Christian duty. But he never spoke of that to me, and after his death both of my aunts said that he had done a wonderful job raising me, that it had been hard on him, meaning there had been problems, difficulties kept secret by him of which they had knowledge but not permission to share with me. I did not believe them. They said that I am very much like him, both in looks and in the way that I act. I said to them that his only problem was that we were poor, but they insisted on their view of him, that he was deeply troubled. They and their husbands believed that poverty is caused by one’s troubles, not by any lack of education or by circumstance. Which means, too, they believed he did not work at his various jobs hard enough,

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nor try hard enough to overcome his troubles. There we stand, eternally divided, equally positive. “But you’ve done well,” they say when I come on one of my brief visits, intending a compliment, “you’ve got a good job. You’re a responsible person.” I say quietly to them, “Father was always working. He always worked hard. He was responsible.” He left some money, much more, they said themselves, than they had thought he might have saved. But they shy away from altering their image of him as shift-less, not quite capable, and say, “He never wanted you to be like he was.” Which might, even from their perspective, be true.

IV

By the time I reached my teenage years, I looked forward to my sum-mers, the changelessness that seemed to be the hallmark of my aunts and uncles. Grace remarried one winter, and the four of them seemed never to grow older, never any gray touching their hair, but always solid, unvarying in their attitudes and expectations. Willis said, “Children keep you young,” but Father had been growing old, grey, thinner and slower. He was qui-eter than ever, and he took jobs that brought him home after I had gone to sleep, though he always tried to see me before I left for school. These were the years when he tried hard to save money. He walked to save bus fare, and he did not eat meals when on the job. I knew he saved money; he became secretive about it. He opened a savings account, and when we moved, we only exchanged one neighborhood for another in Birmingham. I later tracked his employment across the city and found what I expected, that we always lived within a mile of where he worked. I never made friends because I never stayed in any school for very long; it never seemed worth the effort. There were girls I loved secretly, but they vanished within days of a move. A phone call across the city was a dime, but Father taught me, preached to me that my dimes were too precious for a moment of the phone company’s time. “They’re selling you a way of using their time, son,” he would say, “and time is too valuable to have it sold to you.” A way to use time was time itself to him. So he had no hobbies that required him to slide money across a counter to someone else. The few books I remember him reading came from the public library (he always had me return them); he knew where he could daily get an abandoned newspaper. Usually his evenings were watching me with one eye do my homework and glancing over the paper with the other.

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He bought his good furniture then, in this period of his life, heavy, solid pieces he came across that were being moved out discarded junked in favor of the newer, lighter, the modern, whenever changing jobs brought a temporary increase in pay. And, as our permanent furniture replaced our landlords’, our moves became fewer, and by the end of my junior year in school, I had moved with him for the last time. It was that summer when Grace was considering divorce again, and her house was full of strain. “It’s all that,” she said while rubbing cream over her face before putting on her makeup, meaning that the stress of arguments and yelling was ruining her features. “I only ever wanted to be happy,” she said many times. “Are you going to be happy, sweetie?” I thought about that, anticipating the end of high school, seeing freedom and yet seeing ahead of me the years of responsibility for myself, making my decisions, and too the end of these summers. I said, knowing how impor-tant the answer was to Aunt Grace, “I want to be happy.” I was not sure how to be happy, if happiness was love or freedom or merely the absence of need or desire. “You’re handsome,” Grace said, “and that means you can be happy. If you want to be. You just have to want it.” And I said, “I want it,” which I suppose satisfied her, and I suppose also that it meant to her that I saw the world in the same way as herself. So, for the weeks I spent with her, she introduced me to her circle in Morganville, saying aloud and with some energy, This is my boy. She was proud of me, hugged me in front of everyone, and I was groomed by her, taught by her to show myself to every advantage. The hard edges of my appearance were worn down, and I noticed her friends responded to me differently. I began to see my summers as an education of a different sort. The next summer my cousin Carol was preparing to leave home. Hannah was spending much of her time getting Carol’s clothes ready for the university. Carol had been accepted at the university despite medio-cre grades in high school: I never believed that she was going to school for more than a husband, a common, routine method in those days for attrac-tive girls to find and possess a boy becoming a lawyer, doctor–any kind of professional person would do. So Hannah was constantly cutting out material, fitting and refitting Carol into one dress after another, comparing one pair of shoes to another, making trips into Huntsville for more, ever more to pack into the enormous pile of things to be hauled down to the university in September. When Willis complained of the expense, Hannah said to him seriously, “She’s got to get off on the right foot down there.

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You know how important that is,” and Hannah continued to remake her daughter into the magazine-promoted image of the ideal coed. Willis took me out for coffee in the afternoons, though he was not looking for cama-raderie but any excuse to avoid the madness of the women in his life; one afternoon he said to me, “Son, never marry someone like that,” waving his hand in off in vague directions but meaning Carol and Grace and all women who constantly attempt to glamorize themselves instead of merely living. He and I spent a good part of every Saturday and Sunday in the café beside the bus station and the pool hall on the east side of town. Han-nah would not let Johnny come with us, “Because I know where you’re going. Boys ought not to be taken in places like that. They’ll learn soon enough about them.” But I, two years older than Johnny, being my father’s son, made me different in her eyes. So, Willis and I sipped at bad coffee in the café and discussed my future as he taught me how to accomplish a two bank shot. I said, “I don’t have any good ideas yet,” and he said, “Construction’s usually good in Birmingham. You could get on as an ap-prentice easy enough.” One day it was construction, and another day he suggested retail, and then it was trade school, if I could qualify for a loan. “But that’s not a problem. You’d fit into that,” that being the financial requirements for aid and the class of people for whom survival and even dignity was trade school. This class of people, black or white, could never rise above their station, according to my aunts’ and uncles’ beliefs, because they had neither the desire to sacrifice nor the willingness to accomplish and would, accordingly, forever be laborers. Hewers of week and draw-ers of water for people such as themselves. “I see it all the time,” he would say, “people who want to be handed an opportunity rather than making one for themselves. My daddy made me work for what I have.” Willis had inherited some money from his father and Grace had married well enough twice, and this was when I finally drew the line between myself and them. Forevermore I understood the separation between them and my father and me, and I was glad this was my final summer with them. I had grown up, I believed, and was ready to emerge into the world and to be done with all of that.

V When my father sent me to the university, he said, “Here,” and hand-ed me quite a bit of money. “It’s enough for a while, but you will have to work, too. Don’t be ashamed of that.” His philosophy was that work was

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the only salvation in life, that there was no life after death, and life was full of disappointment and pain. Simplicity was the only mode of living which could bring any kind of serenity. Work gave dignity, and learning was only so one could find his own place in the world. He believed in place. He be-lieved that you had to make a place for yourself, and he accounted himself a failure. But he had made me apply to the university in the spring, though I believed that to be a futile gesture, though we had applied for aid. “All right,” I said, still unbelieving it was possible, and I stepped up and into the bus. Before I could go any further, he said, “I have always been proud of you.” Then he motioned me to go on and he turned to leave. So I never lived with him again. He wrote in the spring and said, Work there through the summer. Save your money. I’ll send in the fall what I can. And always there was enough. I never asked how he managed, knowing what he sent me was the little left to him by his mother and what he had saved by walk-ing and not eating. His address changed twice during those years, and he discouraged any visits. He wrote, Son, make friends and enjoy them. Stay with them, talk to them, become part of their lives. Coming to see me after all the ex-citement there would be dull beyond belief. He only counseled work. Work, son. Work is what can relieve the tedium of having to fill up the hours of your life. Your work may not be satisfying to you, but it can keep you from wasting those hours when you begin to despair. Of course he was not writ-ing to me. But I could not see that, and I began to think he did not love me, had never loved me, that I was and always had been only a duty and obliga-tion as much as he was the duty and obligation of his sisters and their hus-bands. I began to see my summers and the whole of my life as a duty finally discharged. I wrote to Aunt Grace at the end of the summer, when I had time be-fore school began, and she wrote to me, saying, Yes, of course, come for the weekend. Stay a week, two weeks, whatever you can. It was loneliness that caused me to write. I was adrift. For the first time there I had no home to return to, no one to welcome me. Nothing had changed in Morganville. Grace was still contemplating divorce, still spending money on gilt mirrors, thinking of putting an ad-dition on the house if she did not actually divorce. “You’re sweet to come and see me,” she said, hugging me. We had lunch with her girl friends, who talked of clothes, shopping for them, talked of their husbands and whose parents had died, and we shopped in the afternoon for a new fall dress

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in Tolliver’s, snacked at the Main Street Café for supper. “You’re such an angel,” she said, and never asked about my father or what I was doing. “Carol’s getting married, you know, a boy from school. She’s such a beauti-ful girl, you know. She’ll be very happy.” I had not known. I had not particularly avoided her or any place where I might likely see her, but we poorer people, we the working stu-dents servicing the more fortunate from the kitchens and with push brooms, formed our own mutual aid society centered on classes, books and jobs. “She’ll be happy,” Grace said again. “He’s going to be a dentist, I think.” And I said, “Yes, I expect she’ll be happy,” thinking of how she, Carol, had made herself into what she and Grace and perhaps Hannah too had al-ways desired, a beautiful girl whose notions of propriety and style mirrored those emanating from the higher social classes. And I saw too the mystery of my father’s life, how different from his sisters he had been and how the quietness and solitude around which he had formed his life was not mourning for my mother but a deliberate choice, a need. “Think about it,” he often said to me, “think hard and the answer might come to you without you having to ask someone the ques-tion.” So, I began to pity him a little in that moment, which was foolish. He would have said Never pity any man or woman who has clearly chosen a certain way. Even if it is wrong.

VI In my own house I have begun sleeping in my father’s old, dark, massive bed. In my bedroom I have my father’s furniture–which has be-come valuable, genuine antiques, and his few pictures, his last letter to me replaced in his desk. When I am tired or lonely or begin to believe I have not yet done enough, I sit in his chair and read his letter again. I hear him sometimes saying aloud each word as he writes Be content, son. Be content with what you have and what you are doing...I was always afraid you would come to envy your cousins and what Willis and Hannah could do for them, but you have made me proud...and then I realize afresh that the residual questions I have about him–about the way he saw life and why he deliber-ately chose to live as he did–are meaningless, because there are no answers when questions vanish like the dew. A contentment comes to me when I sleep in his bed and I wake up in the night not knowing fully where I am, when I think he is here beside me sleeping still. Sometimes I dream of Hannah and Willis, of Grace and Thomas.

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Carol and Harold Trevor married in the spring of the next year, and his dentist father set him up in practice during the summer, and by the fall they had a new house in Greenville, a baby on the way. I was envious of her, at how circumstances had woven themselves around her so that the coming years must have seemed to her a golden road to ease and content-ment. One year at school and, success taken by the hand in the flesh of Harold Trevor, she had vanished from my sight as surely as day replaces night. Because she was gone, I was only envious at memory, green at the thought of the comfort in which she was certainly housed, hostile to her and her family and to Aunt Grace because they had all accomplished for Carol in one simple stroke all that was denied to me. I hated my father then. Thereafter, when his infrequent letters ar-rived, I barely read them. Father never wrote about himself, how he spent his time or whether his routines changed after my leaving him. He wrote advice, counsel, instructions for living that infuriated. He sent money oc-casionally, ten or twenty dollars, usually saying with it Treat yourself to something you want but that you won’t buy for yourself. I hardly noticed whether he had changed addresses, since I rarely wrote to him, sure that he was informed well enough of grades and that he was not interested in the mundane ordinary boring details of jobs and classes and the constant inadequacy that plagued someone constantly looking upward but terribly unsure of where he was actually standing. One evening in a fit of rage I burned all of his letters. On this last anniversary of his death I cried. Because of that. Remem-bering that night, hearing Father’s patient baritone voice rolling around in my head saying as I knew he would Be patient...wait...Earn what you want to have because it’s the only way to value anything, feeling the rage rise up inside me like an long overdue eruption, conscious thought vanish-ing, finally letting go and becoming who I believed had been hidden locked away smothered for two decades under a veneer of politeness and routine and careful orderliness that he had said would give dignity, respect, virtue, that might give happiness in the end when there was no perceivable cause otherwise. I believed it all lies. He was not happy, had not been since my mother had died. I believed his sisters, that he was only existing to make sure that I was well away from him and safe. So I laughed when fire fell out of the wastebasket and spread over the floor, laughed my drunken laugh to see how easily it all burned, vanished into smoke and ash, screamed when fire ran up my thighs.

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VII I have become too much like Father I wrote recently to Aunt Grace. She had written to tell me she was getting divorced again, the fourth time, that she was finally done with men. At seventy she wanted to be alone. She said, I cried and I cried when I thought I might die alone–that there wouldn’t be Thomas or Harry or somebody there to hold me, to make sure that I don’t suffer. I couldn’t stand that. I never suffered like your daddy did, and Ben had all the years after your mama died. I haven’t suffered like you did after your fire. But it doesn’t matter, not when you’re ashamed of how you’ve lived . . . but she said nothing of how she came to this state of mind. But she sent to me all the photographs she had taken after Father died, sent nearly all that she had gotten herself when Grandmother died. And she said that I would inherit her house, her little bit of money, because I deserved more out of her. She has not changed; she is doing as she wants, bored with what she has been. And this is how I have lived, doing as I want, and how Father lived, doing as he saw fit. He lived better than I have. He came to see me in the hospital. The fire was under investigation, and I was in custody while we, the police and prosecutors and I, waited for the State Fire Marshal to render his verdict. The policeman on duty let him in, a small man in a blue suit, no tie, a tidy man too pale in the artificial light. “You’re better, Son, they tell me.” “It’s not bad,” I said. The doctors were keeping me on pain medica-tion; I had lots of sleep and only dull sensations when awake. “Were you foolish?” Because foolishness was the limit next to stupid-ity, and it was too insulting to any person for him to ask Were you stupid? “Yes,” I said, “I was.” “I’m sorry.” He stood still, silent a moment, as inert as living flesh can be, and I wanted him to ask, to say Why? or What happened? or even to say as he had when I was a boy, Can I help you? “It will pass soon enough,” he said, turning to the window to gaze at the red brick wall of the next wing of the building only a foot away; the window gave nothing more than light to the room, not air nor sound nor view. “You’ll be done with it and you’ll get on to other things,” he said, stat-ing the whole of his philosophy that dealt with trouble in one measured breath.

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“I’m sorry,” I said. “You have not hurt me,” he said. “You have hurt yourself inside and out–it will forever show on your skin.” He sat in the chair next to the win-dow, pulled it closer, spoke in a voice just above a whisper. “I have been waiting for this,” he said, “a long time waiting. I knew that sometime or other you would come to regret me. Do you hate me, Son?” “No,” I said, because that was true. “You know that I have always loved you.” “I know,” I said, holding it back, holding it all in, “I know.”

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This is my final recovery these are my last cigarettes this is an end to self-destructive habits these are letters strung together this is me strung out no more.

This seems like a poem— words dancing on top of white lines losing meaning & finding something else.

I like all music so this is my new favorite song.

I refused good posture my whole life so this is uncurling my feet & straightening my back.

This is grit & ink-welled determination or a broken cigarette plus a mind half-busted by banshi memories or a world renewing itself plus nicotine climbing up the walls in clouds— worries & self-edits.

This is me cleaning up my life small steps after each other & learning to say “ya’ll” but wondering why no one ever truly leaves high school.

This is too many bad memories— countless or more.

Letters Strung Together& Strung Out No More

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& here is the crooked undeniable truth: I love women more passionately than the “middle-class,” the “lower-class” & the “upper” to “upper-most” class & everything in between & have been told that I’m the most passionate lover this woman, that girl’s ever had & this is probably true because I rarely make the first move & even when they’re “practically throwing themselves at me” I wait still longer.

& I hope D. C. reads this & finds that I knew before I met her & again when I met her & again spending time together that she is the one I want to end up with (& this could be a prayer that we’ll wait for each other) because this is a tear drop in the ink pen & this is me missing my chance again though one day I’ll be ready for her, and bet your wasted life I’ll go after.

This is called “growing up” & rolling with the punches as many as there may be & moving on into the day another one, they sometimes run together.

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This is a little boy being introduced to drugs being introduced to evil being introduced to sex being introduced to chaos being introduced to sadness far too long before he could handle these by one he was supposed to trust & look up to & knowing that this bastard fucked others up in addition including one who looked up to a little boy still lost & this is how guilty we all felt & this is how cold that son of a bitch must be-- let this grown man (who’s seen the bottom ) get inches from him again let’s see what happens because it just might just maybe take only three to five minutes for this grown man who’s been too close to death to fear it to finish up what so many others have already tried to do.

This is me admitting what I’ve always said— that I love life & hate death & turning eighteen, hitting the road a week later & repeating my mistakes

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This is me losing sleep for as long as I can remember— growing up wanting to be my sister’s savior.

This is me boring company but hating lonliness but never wanting to be alone but always being alone though lost in memory much of the time or so it seems.

This is pulling strength from deep within & still being comfortable in my own skin & knowing poverty better than many.

This is me making a fool of myself falling in love a thousand times letting my body go to hell saving it again & again accomplishing goals pretending to remember all the things, names, places events, bastards, thieves good men, good friends being exploited & dealing with addiction & conquering it one last time yet this looks just like a bunch of jargon or indeed an English language sabbatical perhaps a break from history.

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I suppose, though, given the rain outside as it dries & I suppose, though, given that I’ve been good at everything I’ve ever tried & given this forever poem as it dies& I suppose, though, given my final recovery an end to relapses cigarettes drugs lies an end to being an outlaw perhaps a chance at being an inlaw& I know, though, that this is a final recovery for someone with no diseases bad posture & fading addictions.& I suppose, though, given that he’s the most admirable guy I’ve ever known & given that he’s halfway across the world fighting for a cause I can’t believe any of us anymore supports that this is one more for my hero Master Chief Paul H. Madore, Jr.

P. H. MADORE

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Reviewing PolicyDISPATCH LITAREVIEW will review anything translatable into words, such as literature, magazines, music, movies, and so on. We do not hold that our reviews are necessarily “objective,” we tend to avoid heedless negativity, and we don’t guarentee something re-ceived for review will be reviewed or when it will be reviewed. We do promise to do our best.

Reviewers WantedWe are looking for a core of individuals well-versed in the various arts, including film (television), literature (including poetry), mu-sic, performances, politics, nutrients, education, software, games (board, card, and athletic), the internet, and more. If it can be taken in and this taking-in can be put into words, we want to give it a try, but it has to be done in as original a way as possible. We’re not just looking to push the envelope, we’re looking to develop a new enve-lope from the vibers of it. If you are interested in a freelance asso-ciation with DISPATCH as a reviewer, please submit two or three sample reviews to editor@litdispatch.net at your earliest opportu-nity. Use the words “Submission” and “Review Position” somewhere in your subject line, please.

Review NoteAll reviews this issue were written by Malon Edwards (former fic-tion editor here at DISPATCH) and P. H. Madore (current editor).

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JT—Terry Rogers \ $15.00US \ ISBN 978-1-59975-368-3 \ Menda City Press (mendacitypress.com) 2005

As a reader, I like to believe I am the not-easily-impressed type. This could be a result of my position as chief dispatcher. Nevertheless, the opening addictive image of a seemingly guilty man falling to his death, spun by a voice simply loaded with realistic edgy humble not-fucking-with-you tones, was one that had me turning pages in a way I haven’t since I read Norman Mailer’s An American Dream. “JT” is a term you’ll have to read the book to get the meaning of, I’m not here to rat out The Organization. Time is used well although at first glance you’ll get the impression that Rogers’s verbosity is an at-tempt to waste yours—after awhile you don’t mind, though, you’re liking the character too much to be spiteful. My only complaint about this book, other than that it had me late for work and up with the midnight oil more than once, is that the first-time author seems to overshoot his real ending by a few dozen pages. Worse literary follies have been levied—examine the bestseller list—so if only on my reccomendation, give this tough guy a shot.

The Last Days of Publishing—Tom Englehardt \ $24.95US \ ISBN 1-55849-402-2 \ UMass Press (umass.edu) 2003

I went two years with this book somewhere at the back of my mind having seen the author interviewed by chance on BookTV in the latest part of 2003. I’d forgotten the author’s name by the time I was bookshopping on Amazon, but it was impossible to forget the title. The price for the hardcover (it’s now also available in paperback) was a bit steep, but I had a good gut feeling about this one. Part statement on publishing’s never-ending conglomeration, part sixties reverie, part unfinished yet well-done story, this book has a quality which isn’t easy to give verbiage. It has all the makings of a cult classic on the or-der of Orwell’s 1984 or Bradbury’s 451. Its two weak points are that it can, by an uncareful sucker reader, be read in a single prolonged sitting (I was left wanting 400% more) and that the narrator doesn’t seem to care that the end is at hand. In Englehardt’s world there are constant comparisons of biological extinction and the diminished role of the editor (which the narrator is) in publishing. Its strongest points are clarity and well-used, crafty language. It ends with a question, after going metafictional in the style of Camus’s The Plague, as all boldly titled, monumental works of literature should: “What else could one wish for?”

Pseudo-City—D. Harlan Wilson \ $29.95 \ ISBN 1-933293-10-1 \ Raw Dog Screaming Press (rawdogscreaming.com) 2005

Buying the first edition of Professor Wilson’s latest book was one of the most en-joyable judgement lapses I’ve made in my entire life. The idea is to lose track of things between the leaves of this well-clad satire of contemporary society. The idea is to not be sure what the hell’s going on right up until the last minute, and then still be unsure of yourself. The idea is to read countless elipses (the only low point of this lesser-attended genius’s writing on the whole)... at least as far as I can tell. The best part is that you are free to read the loosely inter-connected stories (there are more than fifty, it’s a good deal)

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in any order you like, and though the imagery is quite surreal and seems one truly weird cloud adventure, you will enjoy most of them. The ones you don’t enjoy will just be a mystery to you—these will differ for every reader. Machine guns. Abstractions. A fucking brilliant piece of art.

The History Of Vegas—Jodi Angel \ $16.95US \ ISBN 0811846253 \ Chronicle Books (chroniclebooks.com) 2005

Graphic. Raw. Disturbing. Wrong on so many levels. That’s what my wife said about Jodi Angel’s The History of Vegas after just reading the inside jacket, compelled to do so when she saw the book cover on our shelf. My wife’s initial vibe of Angel’s collec-tion of short stories is only reinforced when the last story has been read. Angel’s PR and marketing people knew what they were doing when they designed the book cover for The History of Vegas. Slightly out of focus, what looks to be a blonde and gangly pre-pubes-cent girl in a two-piece swimsuit seems to be looking directly at a camera while sitting in what is probably a 1970’s VW bus. There’s something very unsettling about that picture, and the seedy, not-quite-right feeling you get from looking at it permeates each story. But that’s a good thing. Angel writes seedy excellently. From the first story “Portions,” to the last story “Rounding Third”, Angel introduces us to teenagers who have serious problems ranging from obesity and domestic violence, to incest and homelessness. But these are not your typical teen angst fuck the world and don’t ask me for shit stories. The protagonists are realistically depicted with depth, emotion and humanity, and often find themselves genuinely altruistic despite having very little themselves. This doesn’t mean Angel’s stories have saccharine, twenty-three-minutes-and-everything-is-nicely-resolved sit-com endings, though. As Tommy found out in the title story, what happens in Vegas isn’t always a good thing, but it for damn sure stays in Vegas. (M. E.)

Kittens In The Boiler—Delphine Lecompte \ $12.95US \ ISBN 0-9770750-0-1 \ Thieves Jargon Press (thievesjargon.com/press) 2005

This incoherent life story will seem without hope. What life stories aren’t incoher-ent? Using most dreary and potentially depressing language, it is a tale of eerie tragedy, ultimate truth. But what I took from this novel was a lesson in hope. Adaptability. Assum-ing that Delphine is the narrator, you can’t help but admire her back-and-forth honesty. I owe the author countless laughs, and despite her rebellion against conventional form (apparently for the sake of rebelling against conventional form), you probably also won’t regret giving this vibrant, first-time novelist a chance.

Top Ten Stories—Kemp Jones \ Self-Produced \ Contact jonesllk@bellsouth.net to order.

“Each year’s top ten stories / Top the last” --title track. Kemp Jones looks a little like John Lennon. Let me preface the rest of this review by saying that I have no experience in reviewing music, but I listen to a lot. This album, which was professionally produced, has an undercurrent message of peace at a time

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when so many are screaming more and more for war. He writes in the booklet that he’s “trying to take the edge off, thanks,” and having listened to the album over and over, I find that it’s something I can relax to. I recommend this album to all who like folksy mes-sages. The single-most brilliant song on the album, in my opinion, is “Eleven Eleven,” which softly speaks on the nature of technology’s most recent takeover of nature.

The Empire Strikes First—Bad Religion \ Epitaph Records (epitaph.com) 2004 \ $13.95

Bad Religion began in 1980 by starting their own record label while the members were all still teenagers living in Southern California. I will not deny that they are one of my favorite punk bands, so it is no surprise that this review will come off as glowing. At this point in their career, it only makes sense for them to release an album if it’s going to be better than the last. Their main singer/songwriter, Greg Graffin, in my opinion, writes the most refined lyrics in his genre. He is a philosopher and has been accused more than once of performing “thesaurus rock.” That being as it may, the lyrics of Empire will move even the staunchest conservative whose hearing aid is not broken in the process. If given the chance, I would quote the entire album here, but here are some that pop from the top of my head (I can sing the whole thing along, it’s one of those albums that never seems to get old): “Here we go again to stage the greatest show on heaven and earth.” This album was very much needed when it was released, and unfortunately it’s even more important today. Scope BadReligion.com for more on the band, especially including an inspirational album they released with Atlantic records in 1999, The New America.

Dada After Math—Willie Smith \ $5.95US \ no-ISBN\ One-Legged Cow Press (oneleggedcowpress.org) 2004

note: this review was origiinally written by P. H. Madore and published on the publisher’s website in September; I will not deny that OLCP and DISPATCH have close ties. So it goes.

Willie Smith writes, generally, the sort of prose that jumps out and bites you, that flows so easily and naturally you eventually get the feeling the whole thing is a dream being whispered in your ear. Dada After Math, his February, 2005 collection of related stories, is no exception. Rather, it is unleaded inspiration at a costume party, cocktail in hand, trying to hide its brilliance. The first line is worthy of a writer’s envy, and it is also an amazing hook: “I arrived with a cabbie I could trust.” Without getting off track, the reason this makes such a good hook is the number of questions it raises in my mind as a reader: What cabbie? How did you know you could trust him or her? Where did you arrive? And for that matter, who are you? Once Smith’s prose bites you, however, you’re going to giggle, no, you’re bound to giggle. It tickles you with phrases like, “‘But maybe I’d best think it over first,’ I thought.” (In some circles such a sentence might be called needless, but I think Willie would tell those circles which spider they can fuck.) Or, “Fur-thermore, it states in my contract, I do not fuck on the clock.” Now that it’s bitten you and made you giggle, Dada also wants to bring thoughts to that empty space between your ears. Near-nude societal philosophy, at one point, comes from a dwarf in the form of this true gem: “‘There are no heroes,’ said the elevator operator as I got on.” Other gems

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include “Although I sniffed after the roast, chewing, in my imagination, remnants of sanity.” Or, “In a crisis of insight, I shattered the lookingglass. Plunged further.” Now that you’re thinking, Dada will toss some metaphors and interesting phraseology in your direction. If Dada is not “commandeering kamikazes” or seeing Bishops who look to be lost in translation, he is charming you with fresh perspective: “The bodyguards blipped me into a cathedral.” I was reminded of many books while I read Willie’s, but there is not one, be it a story collection or novel, that I have read in the past that really compares or is on the “same level.” It is the sort of work that couldn’t be dissected for a class, there’s sim-ply too much there to process. It is the sort of work you can read twice, three times over, and each time you’ll find something new, or many things new, that you didn’t see before. It is a breed of its own, this story collection, and for the price I wonder why you didn’t already know that.

ProgressChrome—Brian Mihok (editor) \ $10.00 \ ISSN 1559-1921 \ Kitchen Table Press (progresschrome.com) 2006

I bought the debut edition of PC on reccomendation of one our first contribu-tors, who happens to appear in it. I went to the website and was impressed that a start-up could manage to fully produce its own journal with little or no stated backing. I was disappointed when, having paid them the money directly via PayPal, I received a package from the print-on-demand website lulu.com. I was further disappointed to find the feel of NUMBER 1 VOLUME 1 to be rushed (much like the first issue of DISPATCH, make no mistake). Aside from a few highlights, such as poetry from Kiki Denis and Christopher Mulrooney, and some interesting photography here and there, I found that the journal brought nothing new to the form, although I do hope they’re simply in the learning stages (as are all independent literary organizations, this one included).

Opium.print1 & .print2—Todd Zuniga (editor) \ $11.00 & $10.00 \ ISSN 1556-8903\ Opium Magazine (opiummagazine.com) 2005 & 2006

Last year when I got wind that Opium was going to start a print edition, I had mixed emotions. One side of me has enjoyed the magazine’s web content (they have been pumping out high-quality hilarity online since 2001) and I’ve read almost all of it. Some-times I’m not sure what the editors were thinking, but I bet my life our readers feel the same way about me now and then. The other side of me was iffy about this whole “print anthology” business. To me it seems like just another scam to pump money into the arts, which isn’t in itself a bad thing, but there ought to be new content. What I realize with Opium is that they are taking the opportunity to reach an ever-wider audience, although currently (and, I’ll add, independent of much reciprocal networking--basically they stand on their own) they reach a massive audience as it is. Indeed, to get something into Opium has been a goal of mine since I began submitting works for publication (and at the time of this writing, one I have still not conquered.) I pre-ordered the first print edition with a few dollars scrounged up from collecting bottles around the house back in Maine, and was quite pleased with what I received: a whopping collection of fanatical literary bril-liance, a couple pins, and some postcards as well--all for eleven dollars! The “whopping

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collection” was their terminology, and while it would generally be a turn-off, I personally found it to be spot-on. One story in particular from the first edition still makes me laugh outloud though I’ve read it over a dozen times: “It is What Fiction” by Pasha Malla. The second issue was gifted to us by madman Todd Zuniga, and while I feel the larger variety of names, lower price, and more precise selection of content is a definite improvement, the design by David Barringer seems almost trying too hard. But not too too hard. It’s sort of like Barringer got lost in the minute-most details and forgot some of the important ones. But it does look sharp, don’t get me wrong, it’s top-shelf. And most of these accusations are nothing that couldn’t be stuck to this journal as well, so what the hell? At the end of the day, I would reccomend .print to anyone travelling or going to school especially, it definitely will keep your spirits up, and there’s an ever-present yet true reminder to “call your mother, she misses you,” which almost makes it seem that the magazine is intended for travel. Opium will remain one of my favorite magazines for as long as it is produced, it has a place in my heart even right next to DISPATCH itself.

Mad Hatters Review—Carol Novack (editor) \free/online \ ISSN 1556-147x\ (madhattersreview.com) 2004-06

I’m not going to lie to you. Back when I first got involved in the online literary field, I was at first highly impressed with the stated mission of MHR. It is indeed a quirky magazine with a new idea here and there. I was so impressed with editor Carol Novack’s first “rave,” that I purchased a yellow t-shirt of theirs at first opportunity. When the sec-ond issue came out, I read it and was then convinced that MHR is, minus a few highlights (including C. Allen Rearick and Maggie Shearon), generally loaded with senseless scary bullshit centering more around the artist than the art. The guidelines are ever-chang-ing, the site lacks any down-to-earth simplicity. Once I realized this, I subversively wrote some senseless bullshit I figured would be perfect for the magazine. I submitted it and first received a scolding for the manner I’d submitted in (I had not submitted enough material or something like that), so I submitted more senseless bullshit (I do seem to have a penchant for writing that) and roughly a week later received a rejection notice so full of praise it had to be a form letter. The music is sort of spooky and there always seems to be something shockingly anti-American going on there. Which is perfectly acceptable under the law, mind you, I’m no neo-McCarthy. I feel truly sorry for all those who’ve been suckered into helping this lit-capitalist venture which, I believe sincerely, is headed for a wreck on the order of Titantic. Mark my words, Mad Hatters Review will not be around in any capacity worth mentioning five years from today, and if it is, it will be a one or two-man operation, much like this one, or the editor will have passed on and it will be run by a more moderate maniac. To put it simply and bluntly, if Carol Novack were a coin, she’d still be one-sided and bent-out-of-shape, much like the quarter depicted below:

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FRiGG Magazine—Ellen Parker (editor) \ free/online \ no-ISSN\ (friggmagazine.com) 2003-06

I was introduced to FRiGG by means of a classified ad in Poets & Writers maga-zine. It was the first online magazine I ever read, and the first piece I read in it was by one of my still-favorite writers, Heather A. Fleming, entitled “Promiscuties” (which is also a saga that can be read at http://promiscuities.blogspot.com). What I found in that, Issue Eight, was a stunning array of impressive artwork, poetry, and more, not to mention a wide variety of styles. Ellen Parker is one of the editors in the field whom I model my-self after, very even-handed and honest in her critique. With the help of Sean Farragher, FRiGG continues to produce the highest-quality content, issue after issue, and is continu-ally improving. It, like Opium, is one of the magazines I hope never closes its doors. Per-sonal favorites include the works of Steve Hansen, Dave Morrison, and Richard Grayson (this whole project is starting to make a bit more sense now, isn’t it?) If I had to choose one online magazine to read every year, I would choose FRiGG because I have never once felt disappointed, there is never too-much content, the staff is friendly, and the navigation is straightforward.

Backwards City Review—Gerry Canavan (editor) \$7 \no-ISSN\ (backwardscity.net) 2005-06

Incidentially, in that same issue of P&W, I saw an advertisement for the first is-sue of a funky little magazine called Backwards City Review. They had a special for a subscription, so I dropped the cash in the mail and received my first issue pretty quickly. I was blown away by the amount of funny packed into a brand-new project put together by “five refugees from the UNC Greensboro creative writing program.” Much like Opium in its use of comics as a staple, the design is simple yet elegant, and I admit that I have dog-eared that first copy, and have resorted to buying individual copies for lack of funds (someday I’ll go for a lifetime subscription). BCR truly is one of the rising stars in the world of lit-zines, and for seven dollars you’d be a fool not to give it a chance. Especially memorable was a pictorial story in the first issue involving the man in those crosswalk signs, plus the manifesto of a clown. Seriously, if I were you I’d give this one a whirl.

Instant Pussy—Misti Rainwater-Lites (editor) \$2-monthly \no-ISSN\ (site unknown) 2006 \ contact speediergonzalez@cashette.com to order

IP hails from the Zygote In My Coffee tradition of true-to-punk-roots, in-your-face, pushing-the-boundaries narcissism. I have read four issues of this copy-machine poetry magazine, and they were all stimulating, to say the least. Grammatically it tends to lack, but for two dollars, are you really going to complain? Bold poetry, color-in-the-liners need not apply. Two pinkies up.

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Sender: Corey CampbellSubject: MadoreDate/Time: May 13th, 2006 / 2:34AM EST

You’re too good of a writer to be up at 1:30 AM (E. S. T.) on the ThievesJargon message board. I’ve been drinking as well and I fully realize that I shouldn’t be sending this mes-sage because I’ve submitted a story to DISPATCH. (Spare me the waiting and reject it now, it sucks. I submitted it because “phm” impersonated you and called for submissions on your behalf.) Fuck. Anyway... I’ve been studying your writing. It’s very good. I’m not blowing sunshine up your ass, it’s legitimately good. God bless you. So...Why are you up so late posting crap on Thieves Jargon at 1:30? You gotta rest my brotha. Save yourself for creative functions. God damn it. What am I doing? You sleep well. Maybe one day we can converse and I can pick your brain a little. Vodka is a bitch goddess.

Letters PolicyDISPATCH LITAREVIEW accepts letters year-round and prints all received on a steamrolling basis, starting with hate-mail and negativity. Letters should not be sent to editor@litdispatch.net (they won’t be printed that way), they should be sent to letters@litdispatch.net.

Letters NoteWe received only one letter during this period, and we are glad that it was a word of encouragement for our head editor, though it seems ill-placed, we must stick to our policy.

editorial response:

Corey, I don’t know who you are. It’s very possible that we could sit down and talk some time--you made me laugh. My work is not legitimately good, stop bullshi�ing. Either way, thanks for the kind

words. --P. H. M.

SUMMER 2006

E. P. Allan has an MFA in Creative Mis-Spelling from UW-Milwaukee, has won the American Poet’s Prize, the Cole Younger Poet’s Award, and has published in numerous magazines, both electronic and print. Currently he is teaching at Matsuyama University in Japan. His website is epallan.com. Brian Beatty’s jokes, poems, and stories have appeared in numerous print and online publica-tions. He lives in Minneapolis. Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director and worked as an art dealer when he couldn’t earn a living in the theater. He has also been a tennis pro, a ditch digger and a salvage diver. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway and toured colleges and outdoor performance venues. He currently lives in New York City, where he’s busy writing fiction and his short stories have recently appeared in numerous literary magazines. Jim Benz, resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota, is who he is and nothing more. Some of his work has been seen floating around at Haggard and Halloo, Unarmed, Loch Raven Review, Unlikely Stories, TMP Irregular, and Sein und Werden. Jeffrey S. Callico has resided in Atlanta since 1975. His first book of short fiction, “Fighting Off The Sun: Stories, Tales, and Other Matters of Opinion”, is available on Amazon and at various booksellers worldwide. Much of his fiction appears online at The New Absurdist, and his prose and poetry in online literary journals including Dreamvirus, Insolent Rudder, The New Dodsley Pages, TFU Magazine, Eyeshot, FRiGG Magazine, and Johnny America. Allison Campbell teaches and studies creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Her work has appeared in Papyrus and is forthcoming also in The Hollins Critic. Clay Carpenter is a copy editor in Corpus Christi, Texas. His poems have appeared in Facets, The Apple Valley Review, and The Banyan Review. Martha Clarkson designs corporate headquarters and is a University of Oregon Alum. Her poetry and fiction can be found in Crab Creek Review, Literary Salt, Clackamas Literary Review, Seattle Review, pindledyboz, Portland Review, descant and forthcoming in Nimrod and monkeybicycle. She is a recipient of the Washington State Poets William Stafford prize 2005. She receives mail in Kirkland, Washington. Chuck Clenney is an English junior at the University of Kentucky. A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, he spends his time writing poetry, creating art, and enjoying the world. After reading so much poetry that seemed to take the passion out of sex, he felt he had to come out in defense of the beautiful reason that we are all here. Carl Miller Daniels just turned fifty-three. On three separate occasions, he’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. That’s a polite way of saying he never won one, though. He has appeared in Poetry Super Highway, FRiGG, and the final Chiron Review, among others. Spencer Dew lives in Chicago. Some of his recent work has appeared in Thieves’ Jargon, Turk Magazine, VerbSap, Wandering Army, and Word Riot. John M. Edwards has traveled worldwidely (five continents plus). His work has appeared in Salon.com, Escape, Grand Tour, Islands, Condé Nast Traveler, Endless Vacation, International Living, Trips, Big World, Travelmag, BootsnAll, Coffee Journal, Literal Latté, Lilliput Review, Poetry Motel, Kit-Cat Review, Richmond Review, Artdirect, North Dakota Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and North American Review, among others. He has just written a novella, Move, and a travel book, Fluid Borders. Richard Fein was a finalist in The 2004 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. He has been published in many web and print journals, such as Oregan East Southern Humanities Review, Touch-stone, Windsor Review, Maverick, Parnassus Literary Review, Small Pond, Kansas Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Exquisite Corpse, and many others. He also has an interest in digital photography. Samples of said photog-raphy can be found on http://pbase.com/bardofbyte photo album. Patrick Frank is a published poet, country-folk songwriter, essayist, counselor and teacher from Seneca, South Carolina, currently working with so-called “at-risk” kids, who has served as an advocate for the poor for many years. He is married. His primary recreational interest is basketball. Charles Frederickson is a Swedish-American Pragmatic Idealist, Daring Experimentalist, and Restless Nomad who has wandered intrepidly through 206 countries, an original sketch for each presented on imagesof.8k.com. Spreading revitalized roots and wings in Thailand, he has devoted the past yea to vol-unteer tsunami relief and providing child-focused comforting support. He’s garnered over ninety publica-tions on five continents.

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P. L. George is a hardworking writer in Oklahoma. B. Lynn Goodwin writes and edits for WriterAdvice. She is a contributor to the Danville Weekly, and writes reviews for the California Writers Club and the Small Press Review. Damion Hamilton is from Saint Louis, Missouri, and works in a warehouse. He believes writing should be honest and written in blood. He’s widely published, Google proves it. Please see editorial note on page 59. Melanie C. Jordan, also known as Soulfulpen, is an author to two poetry collections, “Open to the Elements” and “Literatim.” She is the owner and founder of Looking within Poetry Board, which is a forum for survivors of child abuse. Kamuran Kelly graduated from The College of New Jersey with a degree in English Teaching. Most weekends, she reads voraciously and writes experimental poetry. Her favorite poets are E. E. Cum-mings and Emily Dickinson. Michael Kriesel, 43, is a widely-published poet and reviewere living in the countryside of central Wisconsin. His reviews are in each issue of Small Press Review, and his poems have appeared in over 200 journals including Free Verse, Bitter Oleander, and more. He lifts weights, collects antiques, and studies Qabala. Tiffany Starr Luciotti currently resides in Atlanta, GA. She is the Director of Operations at a Marketing Firm, but actively pursues her passions on the side: Writing, Photography, and Film. She is also the Founder of the Atlanta Girls and Bois Club and leader of the troupe Bois II Men. Richard Lung’s poems have appeared in British small press poetry magazines, anthologies, news-letters. He also has a new poetry web page courtesy of: You Had To Be There: uhad2bethere.co.uk. His own poetry site is dedicated primarily to the Poetry and Novels of Dorothy Cowlin: lit4lib.sky7.us. P. H. Madore is a writer who founded this magazine one year ago. Wayne Mason is a writer from central Florida. He has most recently in appeared in Remark, Instant Pussy, Zygote In My Coffee, and others. M. Frias-May lives in Cambria, CA. His novella, “The Longest Suicide Note by Stanley K.” can be accessed online at The King’s English. He writes non-fiction for the Rogue Voice and edits for Solo Press. He can be reached at mfriasmay@charter.net. Stephen Mead is an artist/writer living in northeastern New York. A resume and samples of his artwork can be seen in the portfolio section of Absolute Arts. He also has several title pieces of e books on-line at Photo Show. These pieces incorporate both image and text. Ellen Meister’s first novel, “Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA,” will be published by Wil-liam Morrow in August. Her short fiction appears in numerous print and online journals. Corey Mesler is the owner of Burke’s Book Store, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He has published poetry and fiction in numerous journals including Pindeldyboz, Orchid, Thema, Mars Hill Review, Poet Lore, and others. He has also been a book reviewer for The Memphis Commercial Appeal and The Memphis Flyer. A short story of his was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, published by Algonquin Books. His first novel, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue appeared in 2002. His second novel, We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon is just out. He also has 9 chapbooks available. Most importantly, he is Toby and Chloe’s dad and Cheryl’s husband. Margot Miller holds a Ph.D in French literature from the University of Maryland. She is an independent scholar and occasional lecturer, specializing in contemporary women writers. She is currently writing fiction and memoir as well as teaching French women writers in translation at the Academy of Life-long Learning, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, St. Michaels, MD. Miller divides her time between the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay and the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. Sanjaya Mishra works as a geologist in India. Reading and writing have been his hobby and pas-sion. His field trips to remote, underdeveloped areas for ground water exploration often provide the footage for his fiction. He has been published in local papers and online as well. Tom Misuraca is a Boston native currently living in Los Angeles. Over seventy of his short stories have been accepted for publication in literary magazines all over the world, including Byline, Thema, and Spoiled Ink. He’s also written and edited young adult books for Angel Gate Press. Last summer, Midnight Times profiled him on their website. In early 2006, a screenplay he co-wrote with James Ferguson was produced. When he’s not writing, he works as a graphic designer.

c o n t r i b u d e x

SUMMER 2006

Dave Morrison is like a carpenter missing fingers—do you worry about his ability or applaud his devotion? A high school graduate and above-average guitar player, he is working on a novel, Camaro, which is a collection of linked stories. Others have been published in DISPATCH (Jan. 2006), FRiGG, Thieves Jargon, rumble and Mad Hatters Review. A Bostonian in his heart, he lives in coastal Maine. Joel Van Noord lives in Utah. Previous publications include Laura Hird, Word Riot, and Unlikely Stories. Dan Nucci likes puppies and rainbows. He dislikes drinking from styrofoam, wire coat hangers, and ego trips. J. D. Nelson’s poems have appeared in many small press publications, both print and online. He lives in Colorful Colorado. Visit his website for more information: madverse.com. Jack Neeley is a Vietnam veteran and recipient of the Purple Heart. He wrote his first poem after visiting the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC. Maurice Oliver returned to America in 1990. Then in 1995 he made a lifelong dream reality by travelling around the world for eight months, recording his experiences in a journal instead of taking pic-tures. And so began his desire to be a poet. His poetry has appeared in The Potomac Journal, Circle Maga-zine, and many others. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and can be reached via bloxster.net/mauri-ceoliver. Jenny Patel was our first art editor. She is an insolent youth with a bright and spunky future ahead of her, and we wish her the best. We are, if you were wondering, looking for a replacement art editor. Pedro Ponce’s fiction has appeared previously in Ploughshares, The Beacon Best of 2001, Wit-ness, DIAGRAM, 3rd bed, and other publications. Mary Lynn Reed lives near Washington, D.C. Her short fiction has appeared online at The Sum-merset Review, Southern Hum, Identity Theory, VerbSap, The Dead Mule, Thieves Jargon, Ten Thousand Monkeys, and Quiction. She’s working on a novel and a short story collection. Edward Salem is from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but lives in Michigan. His uncle, who worked as a painter of religious iconography for churches across Palestine, mentored him and nourishedhis interest in vivid imagery and taboo themes. His father is a factory worker by day and an Arabic oud guitarist by night. Edward has also been active in the world of independent cinema. He currently works for an internet marketplace. Robert Salup does not like to communicate with our poetry editor, from what we can gather. L. B. Sedlacek’s poetry has appeared in Edgar Literary Magazine, Poet’s Canvas, Inkburns, Texas Poetry Journal, Gin Bender Review, ART:MAG, The Hurricane Review, Tales of the Talisman, and Blue Col-lar Review. Her chapbooks include “Alexandra’s Wreck” (Kitty Litter Press) and “Hemlock Suicides Planned by Well-Dressed Men in Suits” (Assume Nothing Press). L. B. has been nominated twice for the pushcart prize and is listed as a poet in Poets and Writer’s Magazine’s Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writ-ers. Paul Silverman has worked as a newspaper reporter, sandwich man, olive packer and advertis-ing creative director. One of his commercials won a Silver Lion at Cannes. His stories have appeared in The South Dakota Review, The North Atlantic Review, In Posse Review, The Pedestal Magazine, The Timber Creek Review, The Front Range Review, The Adirondack Review, The Paumanok Review, The Summer-set Review and others. Byline Magazine and The Worcester Review have nominated recent stories to the Pushcart Committee. New work was recently accepted by Tampa Review, Thieves Jargon, The Jabberwock Review, and Jewish Currents. M. Blair Spiva lives in Athens, Georgia and is a great poet whose first collection, The Art of Past Lunacy, was released in April from DIS-PRESS, and who happens to edit poetry for this magazine as well. Doug Stone was born in Toronto, Canada, and spent the 60’s to 80’s hitch-hiking, making candles and pine furniture, working in factories, toiling for IBM. John Sweet, born in 1968, is a single father of two. His has appeared in over 150 publications (both in print and online, in the U.S. and internationally), over the past 20 years. His first full-length col-lection, HUMAN CATHEDRALS, is available from Ravenna Press. Bobbi Sinha-Morey is an archivist, secretary, and a poet. Her poetry can be seen in places such as The Beltane Papers, Circle Magazine, The Poet’s Pen, RB’s Poets’ Viewpoint, Shemom, Snowbirds in Cloud Hands, and Aoife’s Kiss, among others. In addition, her latest book of poetry Snow Petals in May can be seen at ebooksonthe.net.

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Emily S. Taylor is currently studying creative writing in the MFA program at The New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Recently, her work has appeared in Peeks and Valleys and Great Big Magazine. Michael Tempesta’s poems have been published in The Aurorean, Red Owl, and Italian Ameri-cana. He belongs to two poetry groups on Cape Cod, and a fiction writers group. He’s been writing poetry since 1978 when he was inspired at Northeastern University by poet and Professor Joseph DeRoche. His daily runs along the ocean in Falmouth inspire quite a bit of his work. Christian Ward is currently studying the second year of a degree in English & Creative Writing at Chichester University, England. His interests include writing poetry and prose, films and reading. Richard A. Webster is twenty years old and lives in Cheshire, England. He is a writer of poetry, short stories, and novels, but this is his first published piece of work. He is hoping one day to become a full-time writer. Mike Young‘s pupils are for sale. They are plump with salt. His work has appeared or is forthcom-ing in Pindeldyboz, Lorraine and James, Opium Magazine (print #2), SmokeLong Quarterly, Whistling Shade, WordRiot, 3AM Magazine, and Prose Ax. He co-edits a Northern California literary and political magazine: NOÖ Journal. Thomas Zimmerman teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. More than 300 of his poems have been published over the years, most recently in The Shantytown Anomaly, Wanderings, and Triptych Haiku. David Alexander McFarland has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and has published short stories, poetry and essays in print journals such as Stories, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mississippi Review , and Southern Humanities Review , and on-line with Slow Trains, SubtleTea, The Paumanok Review, and Southern Hum. Originally from Alabama, he now lives in Illinois and teach composition and literature on the college level in both Illinois and Iowa.

c o n t r i b u d e x

appreciated

appreciationotes We would like to thank Adobe for creating a truly wonderful program with which to produce this li�le rag of ours. We’d like to thank Josh @ crache.org for all the hosting (we’re hoping to get on our own bandwave-we-mean-width soon). We’d love to thank our sponsors, Thieves Jargon, One-Legged Cow Press, and edifice Wrecked (all admirable institutions we look up to). We’d like to thank Zoe-trope.com for evicting our mentally handicapped editor. We’d like to thank Patrick Dilloway for being a punk. Special thanks to all of our contributors, solicited and un--without you, we’d be nothing. Also to Google for running down some of the fonts used. So... guess that means it’s about time we did thank them, huh?

THANK YOU!

artistic creditingVadim Bystritski comes from the part of the world where a strong bias exists toward the art that is inarticulate. {pages 20, 25, 47, 64, & 200}Jeff Crouch lives in Texas. {page 140}Uriel Aurelio Duran is a freelancer from Mexico City, who has been known to enjoy drawing silly pictures. He usually is available for comissions --you can visit his web-site at www.garabatorama.com. {pages 39, 46, & 191 }Miles Fitzsimmons is a creative genius living in the UK. {page 190}Vinnie Furman is a cousin of Jenny Patel. {page 42}Geny is one of those artists who doesn’t need a last name, apparently the same as Alex. {pages 6, 12, 35, 36, 37, 124, 133, & 143} Sara Holt is an artist living and working in California. See her site. {pages 59 & 135}Tom Meyer is a friend of Jenny Patel. {pages 50, 138, & 175}Andrea Peron lives in Italy. {page 120 }Alex Nodopaka is an eternal student & an active creator with life. {page 150}Charles Talkoff is an utter mystery {pages 23, 65, & 125 }

NOTE THAT ALL OTHER ARTWORK IS PROVIDED BY THE EDITOR.

232

I felt horrible when I drove to work the next day. I didn’t want to hurt Gerald or Ron. Neither of them had ever done anything bad to me. The quarrel wasn’t their fault. It was mine. I just snapped. I told myself I would apologize to them. I wanted to start our relationship from scratch—anew. I walked into the quiet office. I saw Gerald sitting at the table, next to Glory. They looked at me when I walked in. I waked over to the table and sat down. “Listen, Gerald, I’m really sorry about last night.” “That’s’ all right, Mike,” he replied embarrassingly “I was just a little frustrated about some personal things. I took it out on you guys. I’m sorry.” “Really, it’s fine, Mike.” He really did understand. I could tell by the way that he spoke that he wasn’t of-fended. That made me feel so much worse. I felt like crying. I lit a cigarette and put my head down. I was so ashamed of myself. How could I hurt another person like that? Ron and Gerald were only trying to be nice to me. Then Ron and Dorra walked in. I prayed that he hadn’t told her what I said. If she knew, I knew, she’d flip. “Mikey, man,” Ron said as he approached the table, “any women last night?” “Hey, Ron, listen…” “Did you see that movie… with that guy?” Ron was babbling about nonsense. I thought he’d hate me, or punch me, instead he fed me drivel. I didn’t feel so bad any-more. “Yeah, I saw that one,” I responded, having no clue what the hell he was talking about. I just knew that I didn’t want to hurt these two guys again. They were good peo-ple, honest people. They were at the lowest echelon in the Courthouse, but their hearts were on the highest rung of the morality ladder.

JanitorMICHAEL SHANNON

editorial notation:

As a special addition to DISPATCH TWO, we have included an exclusive preview of an upcoming DIS-PRESS novel, Janitor, by Michael Shannon of Pennsylvania. The following is Chapter Twenty.

:thanks.

SUMMER 2006

My aunt walked in and sat down near me. “How are you?” she asked. “Not bad. You?” “I’m all right. I heard you been partying with these guys,” she declared. “Yeah. How do you know?” “Dorra told me as I walked in.” She knew. Dorra knew. I knew, she knew. I looked over at her. She was leering. She knew. Old man Bill walked in. Everybody turned their eyes to him. He was stagger-ing. He was drunk; it was obvious. I saw him drunk up at the Juvenile Detention building a couple of times.Bill said something to Jed. Jed threw his head back in confusion. Then, still tottering, Bill sat down in a chair near Jed’s desk. Nobody ever sat in the chair that Bill had oc-cupied. Bill was wasted. Bill looked around the room. He put his right forefinger in his mother and picked something out of his teeth. He looked at the masticated food, now in his fingernail, and ate it. The crowd was enthralled. The office was silent. While analyzing his surround-ings and trying to get his drunken mind acclimated to the office, Bill began coughing profusely. Then, bending over to cough into his hand, a beer can fell out of his pocket and onto the floor. Jed looked at the beer can. Jed’s face was immediately imbued with a ruby-red color. He looked like the Kool-Aid man. Bill was caught. Poor old man Bill was finally caught. “Everybody out of the pool,” Jed demanded. People finished their cigarettes slowly. Nobody wanted to miss the action. “Everybody out of the pool!” Bill rose to leave. “Not you, Bill. You stay here,” Jed whispered. The rest of us left. We walked around the Courthouse, trading gossips, talking about what could or should or would happen to poor Bill. Everybody felt horrible for him, but they all loved the controversy too. The other Building & Grounds workers, who were in other buildings, were calling Gerald on the first floor to hear Bill’s fate. Gerald, Gary, Red, Willie, Willie’s thumbnail, and I were gathered on the first floor. Gerald, Red, and Willie refused to work until they found out what happened to Bill. Gary and I couldn’t work because we had to wait for Jed—the boss—to tell us whatto do. “What do you think is going to happen?” Red asked the crowd. “Damn,” Willie mumbled to himself, and then spoke to the crowd, “I hope noth-ing. He’s a good guy.” Willie was right. Bill was old and dirty, but we all liked him. “He’s going to get fired,” Gerald disclosed. “How do you know?” asked Red. “Did you hear anything?” “No,” Gerald replied. “I just know he will. Jed hates him.” “He’s not going to get fired,” Gary added. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Ten minutes later, there were ten Building & Grounds employees standing

DISPATCH II

around in the first-floor hallway: me, Gary, Gerald, Red, Willie, my Aunt Lorrie, Jerry, Ron, Glory, and Stephen the sad bathroom guy. We looked like a group of disgruntled janitors. But, we were actually a group of concerned janitors. For the first time, standing there in the hallway, I was proud to be amongst these people. I was proud to be a janitor. “Hey, you guys,” my Aunt Lorrie yelled. She was standing near a window, look-ing out. “There’s an ambulance here with its sirens on.” We all ran over to see.

SUMMER 2006

&muchmoregoodstuff

@press.litdispatch.net

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WE’LL SELL YA A WHOLE PAGE FOR JUST FORTY-ONE BUCKS. A HALF-PAGE IS GONNA RUN YA TWENTY-FIVE. MUCH LIKE A DIME BAG, THE ONLY WAY TO GO SMALLER IS TO BRING FRIENDS.

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SUMMER 2006

“...watching

our bodies go to hell

measuring

time by decay

remembering to cherish

yesterday...”Wayne Mason