Four Poems by Mark Young

A line from Nelson Mandela

 

This is an America that is not

necessarily retreating from the

world stage but consolidating

its power through bullying &

 

dealmaking, where the influ-

ences of Christian nationalism

& the presidential vices are the

most apparent. Ushering in a

 

new golden age, says the new

National Security Strategy; but

to others it is the onset of a new

age of fear, of repression, of de-

 

privation & virtual slavery. To

oppose it is to not merely cast

off one's chains, it is a renewal

of life & liberty without pursuit.

 

 

notes from a broad

 

It's not that I think the world is broken, just that pieces keep falling off. At least, that's what I assume the debris around me is. & everywhere I go, more, & different, debris. Clips on YouTube, search results from Google, memories for sale on eBay, trivial newsbites from trivial news-sites; all mixed in with lines from millenium-old novels, fragments from mythology, subtexts, signs in shop windows, gall & philosophers' stones, lines from the decades of pop I have lived through, thoughts I & others have had. Or may still yet have.

It's a kind of bricolage, which means I'm a kind of bricoleur. I take these things I find around me & put them together; at least I try to. Not to repair the world but to see how the found objects look when rearranged—a parallel universe perhaps, a history or histories rewritten. Or, perhaps the world as it really is, because everything I write about comes out of the world around me.

We are subjected to information overload these days. So much so, in fact, that it becomes impossible to take it all in. Warhol's 15 minutes of fame has been reduced to 15 seconds so it fits as a soundbite in the evening news. Where it blurs, sandwiched between competing 15 seconds, goes digital, & we lose the last few words because the pre-programmed ads come in over the top & we end up not knowing if it was the grapple tackle or the retirement of Muttiah Muralitharan that caused the floods in, was it, Pakistan. Peccavi, cabled General Napier. I have Sind. It's a funny old world, & I milk the humor as much as I can.

 

 

Le Cicérone

after the 1948 painting by René Magritte

The temperance advocates come

knocking at my door but I haven't

had a drink for days. Nor do I

feel like one. Sorry to disappoint.

 

The pentecostal proselytizers pause

on the pathway. I instantly recog-

nize the pairing, can see more pairs

over their shoulders, say no thanks

 

politely to them before they have a

chance to open their mouths. & they,

inured to rejection, offer their equally

polite blessings & walk quietly away.

 

Then the politicians, the outliers only —

independents who seek to save the

planet; or those far to the right, want-

ing to stop immigration or gender e-

 

quality or renewable energy sources.

The mainstream parties mainly leave

us alone. Impersonal. Letterbox drops

& billboards. Polling booth handouts.

 

In the early evening the cicerone comes

calling. Said: "Saw you had a lot of

visitors today, thought you might like

to know their antecedents. What drives

 

them, what is behind their focus on a

singular cause whether it be bigotry

or hope or a need for an answer as to

why the world turned out the way it

 

has, & how it might be rearranged to

match their vision of it." "Come in" I

said "& get comfortable. Will make

you a coffee. Going to be a long night."

 

 

Melania

 

is a cheeseball infomercial of staggering

inertia, made out of car rides & cold silences,

so polished it slips out of (her) hands. I

immediately regret not buying popcorn

so at least one of my senses would be enter-

tained. It's a gilded trash remake of The Zone

of Interest, a forty-million-dollar journey into

the void, a film that should have been called

Day of the Living Tradwife, a lazy, bafflingly

incurious documentary that insults the

person it is trying to celebrate. All the money

in the world can’t make good propaganda, &

this is shameless propaganda that could put

you to sleep, a preening, scowling void of

pure nothingness, an unabashed, fly-on-the-

gilded-wall fawn job, a tedious, criminally

shallow puff piece, a Slovenian sphinx flick

nixed. Pure, endless hell, an unbelievable

abomination of filmmaking that if they

showed it on a plane, people would still walk

out. 20 stage-managed days in the life portrays

world events as B-roll between wardrobe

changes, feels entirely at a remove from any

objective reality, a face like a fist that makes

(her) look like Marie Antoinette skulking in

her cake-filled chateau. This must be the night-

mare endpoint of celebrity documentaries.

Does Melania dream of AI-generated sheep?

 

Sources:

BuzzFeed, Decider, empireonline, Los Angeles Times, MS Now, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, The Independent, The Irish Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wrap, Vanity Fair, Variety, & Vulture.

Two Poems by Kevin Armor Harris

I carry this noose

I carry this noose around in case anyone needs it, they only have to ask. After each use, I untie it, wash it thoroughly, and reconstruct it carefully. Those are sad days, after it’s been used, when I’m waiting for the fibres to dry and don’t feel I can go out. One matronly lady has tried it several times, just can’t seem to get on with it but credit to her for trying I say, it doesn’t suit everyone. It certainly suited one feller who sought to sport it, décor de moribondage, at a party that went wrong, or right, or both perhaps, things can be both right and wrong, in the end, it seems. Sometimes I think I should get more up to date, maybe offer some of these fashionable nylon numbers, you can have a range of colours, I expect the townsfolk would like that. But I’m a traditionalist, I grew up with the touch of yarn, the plies and braids of hemp, the artificial is not for me.

 

I went to the sage

I went to the sage to ask if she would take me as a student. A long journey through four seasons. She spoke quietly and simply, glancing at me from time to time as she drew skillfully on a sheet. This had the effect of making me try to keep very still, without having been asked, but it also caused me to be slightly inattentive. Finally she explained that I was not ready to be her student, and gave me the portrait, so that I understood immediately. Thus am I able to say, I have learned directly from the wisdom of the sage.

 

Kevin Armor Harris

Prose by Dominik Slusarczyk

Slusarczyk on Anne Hathaway 44: An Analysis of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ from ‘Les Misérables’

 

            Sometimes actresses do not get to decide what lines they say. If they have to say certain things they cannot communicate with us with the words they say so they have to communicate with how they say the words they say.

            This film is about poverty. The song is about dreams. The performance is about insanity, a type of dream.

            Firstly poverty and dreams are related because poor people dream a lot. They dream about being rich. They dream about living in mansions and driving supercars. Ruch people do not dream of living in mansions because they live in mansions. They do not dream about driving supercars because they drive a supercar every day. Poor people dream more because they have less and the less you have the more you can dream of having.

            The actress walks us through a psychotic break over the course of this song. First she is so quiet she is whispering and then she starts singing beautifully when she gets to the line ‘I dreamed a dream’. That means the singing beautifully is dreaming so the quiet beforehand was not dreaming. She is sane at the start of the song and then she becomes insane.

            After that there is a word ‘shame’ which increases in volume dramatically so that is talking about the intensity of the dreams, the insanity, increasing. After that is a line that is breathless so she falls in love with the insanity which is bound to happen if the delusions are delusions of grandeur. To start with their insanity is fun but it soon changes.

            Then there is a line about her childhood being taken from her and she says the line incredibly angrily so the insanity is ruining her life and that makes her angry. She fell in love with the psychosis so she spent ages doing it so she stopped living because she spent all her time in her head. After that there is a particularly loud line with an especially loud word ‘cannot’. So if it is loud she is trying really hard so she is trying to get rid of the insanity but the word is cannot so she tries really hard to get rid of the insanity but she can’t do it.

            Finally there is a line where she is crying so she can’t force the insanity out of her head so she starts crying because she has to accept that she is crazy now.

            Over the course of this song there are a lot of lines that are whispered. The start of the song is very quiet and there is a lot whispered there but there are lines all throughout the song that are whispered. So the actress has these brief periods of sanity in the middle of the insanity. She has these brief periods where she is lucid and she tries to use those periods to force the insanity out of her mind but she can’t do it. But at the end of the song she returns to speaking quietly so she does end up sane even though she couldn’t choose to be sane. So she ends up sane but not because of anything she did she just naturally goes back to being sane.

            So the points of these quite bits is that we do not have any control over whether we are sane or insane. Some people are sane and some people are insane and there’s nothing we can do about that. Some people get lucky and some people get unlucky. Just like some people are born to billionaires and some people are born in the gutter.

 

 

Slusarczyk on Scorsese 56: An Analysis of ‘Gangs of New York’

 

            This film is about war. The war is a war between two rival gangs in New York. But they are only in a very small part of New York. They are fighting over this one square, this one intersection. They are fighting over a very small area of land.

            But they are fighting for the right to live in the city. The Natives, the bad gang. want to exterminate all the immigrants. The Dead Rabbits, the good guys, are Irish immigrants. They just want to be able to live in New York. They want to call New York home.

            The sides disagree so they have to fight. It is a war because it is endless like all wars are. It doesn’t matter what you are fighting over once you start fighting over it you will be fighting over it forever. Russia invaded Ukraine years ago. They still haven’t conquered a significant part of Ukraine. Ukraine still hasn’t kicked them out of the country. They will still be fighting years from now.

            Israel has been fighting Palestine for decades. That war has been going on for years and years. Every year Israel conquers more of Palestine but still Israel has not conquered Palestine. And the war will not end when they conquer Palestine. When they conquer Palestine the Palestinians living inside Israel will fight from the inside.

            They have started fighting so now they will be fighting for the rest of time. The fighting will only end when the land they are fighting over doesn’t exist anymore and land doesn’t just stop existing so they will be fighting for the rest of time.

            Or they will fight until the other side is extinct. They will fight until they kill every single person on the other side. The only way Palestine can win the war is if they kill all the Jews. The problem is there are Jews all over the world. They cannot possibly exterminate all the Jews so they can’t ever win the war. The war will go on forever because the land will exist forever.

            So the battle between the gangs in the film is a war because it will never end. It will never end because it is a battle over land. The native gang, The Natives, think they own the land because they were born there. The Dead Rabbits, the immigrants, just want to be allowed to live somewhere. They are running away from famine. They came to America because the alternative was death.

            They must have known how bad it was. Irish people must have sent back word. They would have told everyone exactly how racist America is. They would have told everyone about the violence and the crime. And my god there is a lot of crime. It seems everyone in the city is committing some kind of crime. They steal because they need money to get food. They steal because if they don’t steal they will starve.

            The Irish couldn’t stay in Ireland and steal to live because nobody in Ireland had any money. They had to come to America because you can make more money stealing in America because Americans have more money. They moved to America because they wanted more money.

            Isn’t that why a lot of people move? Everyone is always moving to richer countries. A lot of people move to America because America is the richest country in the world. They move there because they will make more money there than they would make anywhere else.

            But every penny they make is a penny an American doesn’t make.

            That is The Butcher’s argument. He says that every penny the Irish get is a penny an American could have got instead. The Irish person stole a ring off a woman. If he hadn’t stolen that ring an American could have come along later and stolen it for himself. So every penny the immigrants make is a penny the Americans don’t make.

            So they fight. They fight over land. They fight over money. They fight over the land because if you own the land you will make money. If you live in America you will make more money than you would if you lived anywhere else so everyone fights over the chance to live in America.

            There is a man. He has a football. He plays football in his back garden every day. But he has no friends. He does not have one friend in the whole world. So he has to play football on his own.

            He has a little goal. It is made out of plastic but the net is made out of the right material he thinks. He puts the goal in the back corner of his garden and he kicks the football at the goal. He usually scores because there is nobody in goal trying to stop the football. So he usually wins but he usually wins because he is playing himself.

            But he does not always win. Sometimes he kicks the football and he misses the goal entirely.

            He wishes he had a friend. If he has a friend they could go in goal. He would even take a turn in goal sometimes. He would dive and save the ball and he would have a lot of fun because he has never tried being in goal before. You cannot go in goal when you are playing on your own.

            Every night he goes to sleep and dreams of dancing.

 

Dominik Slusarczyk

Prose Poetry by Stephen Guy Mallett

Mineral Waste

You said the amygdala-shaped part of what you expect of it is. The dots of what they are on the grid of what they will be froze into one into what you called the infinity of the crystal item always into the immobility of a point of view. Sawtooth National Forest trail 680 Gunsight Lake southeast of Chinese Wall ID 11238 feet above sea level north of line parent Calkins Peak White Cloud Mountain. Jade cut from the mountain is measured in degrees Kelvin as jade is priced for its warmth. You said he trashed the place. Shortcuts for the machinic here of what we are now and erosion and less a Melusine and Raymondin at Partenay bas-relief than I was in the heat of it. Still-life with B.T.H. CS7A silicon crystal. Still-life with no external power source. Still-life with variable condenser from [one position] to [the other] in order to cover the whole wavelength range. Still-life with series resistance equivalent to the reflected crystal load resistance; still-life with the capacitance of the aerial to earth and the aerial's effective series resistance. Still-life with a number of ex-Government surplus units. Still-life with 85 turns of 24 S.W.G. double cotton covered wire tapped at [indeterminate] turns from the earth end; the earth lead-in wire to the bolt; the [other end] of the lead-in to the earth connection on the receiver. Still-life with a .0005 mfd. variable capacitor as the tuner (soldered across the stator terminals of two-gang variable capacitor). Still-life without Germanium crystal diode (Sylvania type 1N34 (Allied 7-219)); Germanium minimum voltage is approx. 0.3 V and Silicon is 0.6 V and [a compound of silicon carbide] is 3 V (the high [silicon carbide] voltage is the reason why a [bias battery] is {necessary} to move the threshold down so that the weak RF signal voltages can be {detected}) (cf. a still-life with a filament rheostat of approx. 8 ohms max. will be required if a valve takes 5 volt and .65 amp.). Still-life with two coats of shellac. {Slowly} dragging the cat-whisker spring over the B.T.H. CS7A silicon crystal's surface with the tuning slide centred on the coil. Can't hear shit as the wind verbs.

 Stephen Guy Mallett

Prose by Mark Young

Bona Fides

 

When I entered the country, I told the immigration authorities I was a gatherer of bones, a polisher of stones, adding that I didn’t mind if the activities were reversed.  They were sceptical at first, doubting that these were legitimate occupations, but a search confirmed it so they let me in, muttering that there were cemeteries for the first, rivers for the second, that if I didn’t find a job within three months I would be deported.

 

When I applied at the employment office their records revealed that it had been years since they’d last had a vacancy for the lines of work I laid claim to.  In the meantime however, there were part time jobs available in either an ossuary or a quarry that might help keep my hand in while I waited.

 

Which is how I wound up cataloguing storage bins of bones.  A set of threes — three floors of a building in the old part of town, a common repository for the relics of three orthodox religions, & which encompassed at least three centuries of active accumulation.  It was an eclectic collection, incorporating anything that had the slightest connection with the religions without concern as to the provenance of the items.  In the first few days I recorded five femurs supposed to have come from the one saint, discovered that polydactylism seemed to be a prerequisite for beatitude, that to become a patriarch in the fifteenth & sixteenth centuries demanded a bone in the penis. I was especially intrigued by the relics of someone identified only by a sigil, whom I nicknamed Saint Fibonacci because of the way the number of his metacarpals seemed to increase, & who, it was rumored, wasn’t even dead yet.

 

Despite all this I started out with good intentions, sought diligently for the correctly labelled specimens to complete skeletons which were then interred in perspex coffins in a reliquary that had been specifically built for this purpose several years before. Then expediency — & the fact that there were so many unidentified bones lying around — took over.  I began to fill in missing parts, but still maintained the integrity of my own records, staying clear of scientific fraud in my determination to become the Bertillon of bones.  But the fact that the papers I wrote appeared in non-paying journals whilst the reliquary drew an ever-increasing number of customers finally changed my attitude.

 

I began selling to traditional Chinese medicine outlets bone fragments guaranteed to extend life expectancy.  I crossed over from The Journal of the Proceedings of The International Conference of Osteopaths to The Southern Enquiring Truth with articles such as "Widespread syndactylism a generation removed disproves the myths surrounding Saint Epimenides the Celibate." & then the activity which caused my dismissal, bringing out a calendar in which each page featured the bones of a saint whose day fell within the month, probably because of the context in which I placed them: "Miss July seeks solace with the ulna of St. Theophrastus."

 

I have been working at the quarry for three months now.  Very soon, a burial plot for a previously unknown schismatic seventeenth century sect will be discovered, complete with contemporary artifacts, their age able to be confirmed by carbon dating.  I have learnt well.

Four Poems by Mark Young

Olbers & the Okapi

 

The okapi survives

through excellent

camouflage. That

& the fact it is the

 

only antelope who

has ever puzzled

over Heinrich Ol-

bers's paradox —

 

if the universe is

infinite & full of

stars, why is the

sky dark at night?

 

 

A / newt's first / law of motion

 

The problem

with being

amphibious

is I can never

remember

whether it’s

the coach

driver or

the dive

coach that’s

supposed

to be looking

after me. 

 

 

Ambit ions

 

Using a

locator

spell, I

track down

my absent

imagination

 

& find it is

currently

a charged

particle

in the queue

waiting to

 

audition

for Ameri-

can Idol.

 

 

Open Letter Operetta

(A Tom Beckett Title)

Librettist:

You don't need a
letter opener to
open a letter when
it's an open letter.

Director:

That's great! Now if we repeat that a number of times then that's the operetta half-written already. What characters did you have in mind?

Librettist:

Was thinking of a cheated-on partner as lead, a mezzo-soprano, a bit of a Taylor Swift voice. Other characters would include the non-singing postal worker who brought a letter from the partner in which they admit their cheating & end with an unapologetic goodbye. The contents of the letter could be sung by the departing partner from a position near the back of the stage.

To go with that, perhaps partly performed as a contrapuntal overlap with the preceding:

Today the post-
woman brought
me a letter from my
ex-partner. I will

not open it be-
cause I am al-
ready aware of
what it will say.

To follow on, we have a scene where the spurned spouse sings or speaks their response as they post it to Facebook or another platform since something that appears on social media can be framed as an open letter for contemporary times.

We must, however, in order to adhere to the spirit of an operetta, retain some comedic aspects even though this is essentially a sad piece. Perhaps introduce a chorus who individually comment on the response, &, collectively, interrupt with a repetitive response such as "letter opener, open letter" or "never getting back together again."

From Equations: Antithesis by Adam Fieled

#62

Jade, like Trish, likes to zap me with past lovers. Brian, at one point, was a music industry bigwig whose appetites led him into lethargy and destitution. Jade learned all the cocaine tricks she knows from Brian— sleep quotients, food quotients, how much to buy and when. The thing that irks me about Brian is that she speaks in doting terms of all his failures— the lechery that sapped his energy, the laziness that assumed too much. Jade’s reverse mountain psychology has strange quirks— she only dotes on failures that have as their backdrop absolute material success. She loves the rags to riches to (almost) rags scenario, but she notices (and this is the crucial bit to her) Brian is cared for. He won’t starve, struggle, or implode— his material life is secure. Jade loves that for all the motions and maneuvers that have defined Brian’s existence, he’s pretty much the same guy he’s always been. That interior sameness is something I don’t particularly understand— how a human being can develop this sort of negative integrity and maintain it over long periods of time. But I notice that Jade really does change and is often stymied by her own alterations. Each new role to play effaces the last; and how many roles can one be compelled to play in one’s lifetime? Jade, like me, bears the burden of absolute sensitivity— everything lost or gained creates a new mark on an already over-marked consciousness. If Jade has a hard time doting on me, it’s only because I show her a mirror image as warped, deceptive, and evanescent as the one you see in a circus mirror, that may or may not be moving towards a new height or depth. 

#63

I have the challenge set out before me: to accept my own hollowness, as I watch Jade perform her daily tasks. There is a sense that I am watching a series of multiplications: first Jade is this person, then that person. All of this signifies that Jade sees my own multiplications when we touch. But if there is no stable center inhering in either of us, who are the two people that fuse their physical energies, in such a way that the world is briefly effaced? Multiplications can be taken two ways— as a destruction of stable centers, or the creation of variegated parts that form coherent wholes. Because Jade needs her drugs more than I do, I feel her desperate edge of a woman hovering above an abyss, a woman who cannot look down. I’m past the point of believing in myself as savior or personal Jesus; Jade must live with her crosses and bang through them on her own. My own cross is the vision of multiplications ending, simply because each ephemeral self expresses the same desires, tastes, fixations, and foibles. Jade and I can’t give each other that much— Trish could never teach me this, because our basic, shared presumption was that nothing existed but what we could give each other. As I make love to Jade, there is a charity I feel towards her predicated on her own unacknowledged autonomy— that she has more than she thinks she has. If we persist without knowing yet what our equation is, I know that much of it has to do with shared charity, expressed in a context of basic and final separation and singularity. 

#64

One night, just for amusement, I showed Jade all my mementos of Trish. I have stills of all of Trish’s early pictures; shots taken of us on vacation in Montreal (us in the botanical gardens, looking like hippies with Chinese lanterns us); notes Trish wrote to me at different times; and the shirts Trish bought me as birthday gifts. It was funny to watch Jade’s reaction; she sees in Trish a vast amount of frost, a frigidity that sullies her beauty. How did I stay with a frigid woman for so long? Maybe it’s because I enjoy crashing through ice; maybe I’m a masochist. But it’s amusing to me that I never completely acknowledged Trish’s frigidity. Perhaps I thought she could be thawed over time. I get a sense in all this of how myths are created and passed along. Is myth the final equation for the human race? Is that the only way information can be passed along? We live in our pasts, we live with the myths that have shaped us, and if there is a place for truth in myths, it is a self-created truth that can hone and separate. In truly lived moments, myths are moot— they are established afterwards to amplify and consolidate these moments. It seems to me that Jade and I are deliberately evading the mythical in our mating— there’s nothing to hold, nothing to latch onto. It’s just that the persistent ache in our bodies needs to be assuaged; whatever remains of our souls hovers around us uncertainly.

Adam Fieled

The Rescue, by Joseph Cooper

After years of living alone I finally decided to visit the shelter. The woman at the desk greeted me, and after filling out some paperwork she brought me to meet their rescues. “I’m sorry,” she said looking around. “It seems that all we have left is this purple blob.” I looked inside the cage and watched the purple blob tremble and shimmer. “Apparently, it comes from a long line of purebred blobs, but nobody seems to want it.” “Not even you?” I asked. “I have two cats,” she said, “and besides, purple blobs are very territorial.” I stuck my finger into the cage and the purple blob gently absorbed it up to the knuckle. “I think it likes you,” she said. I took the purple blob home, fed it, played with it, and that night as we were lying in bed I thought I saw a slight glimmer of light coming from inside the purple blob. I pressed my face against it, allowing the purple blob to absorb me. The light in the distance was fuzzy and seemed to be interrupted by passing shadows. When I withdrew my face it was covered in a clear, thin, and odorless fluid. Then the light seemed to expand and quiver, so I pressed my face deeper into it and once my head had been completely submerged the muscular force of the purple blob compelled me forward. I heard the muffled sounds of a young woman screaming and I was pulled even deeper into the purple blob, into the ever-expanding light. Suddenly, there were hands all over me, lodging my shoulders free of the trembling blob, the light now so bright I couldn’t even open my eyes. In a moment I was pulled completely through the purple blob and I too began screaming and crying. The hands placed me on the young woman’s breast and as she kissed my forehead I could feel the memories of my life slipping away…my apartment…my job…my first love…even the purple blob itself.

Joseph Cooper

Two Poems by Andrew K. Peterson

Year In Streaming

 

summering down

the child and siren align   

hands incomplete

as dancers waxing

in a rainbow moonstone

 

“can you stop suffering

for, like, a minute?”  

do you mean could 

burn through

wave by wave

 

at what difference?

in a spiral, crocodile

& roses aaaaallll day

teach myself (again) 

to rest is not to squander

 

lighten as the sun hits

off the cymbal nn-tsk

back in the day 

when we were planets 

to a plum, swan-swank

 

gonging in between

 

 

 

napkinful of sour patch kids

 

Seven gather in the conference room to discuss the market readiness report, so the office is mostly empty. Liv researches bathing suits that may look good on her. George is standing at his desk looking at his phone with the flat tone of a COO gone soft on matrices. Peterson returns to his desk with a third cup of coffee and a napkinful of sour patch kids, resumes listening to Dick Gallup reading poems from the evening of June 21, 1978. The crowd claps earnest and appreciative after most of them, while Dick turns a page, takes a breath - sometimes through his nose, sometimes through his mouth, some both - and then he begins again. Before “Virtue”: I seem to be missing something he says and lights another cigarette. In “Philosophy Take a Walk” Dick reads, stress is mostly bullshit. What will become of Dowling Hall, the market and its readiness? What virtue hath a man who hath not the command of his own intention? The year is 2025, and, to be sure, there is still much work to be done…

Andrew K. Peterson

Little Men, by Gordon Haber

I was in my office trying to get a few things done when I heard the sweet little voice of my two-year-old saying, Papa? I stepped into the hall and there was my little man! He wore overalls and held his favorite toy, a cement mixer truck. I scooped him up and kissed his face and I said, Where’s Mama?

Papa, I heard again. And down the hall was my little boy. What I mean is that my son was in my arms and my son was also down the hall. There were two of them. I didn’t know what to do, so I picked up the second one, and now I had my son in either arm.   

I heard it a third time: Papa. Further down the corridor, by the men’s room, my son was stumbling towards me doing his toddler robot walk even though I already had one of him in each arm. It’s very difficult to carry three squirming toddlers, but I figured that I could make it to my office. And there he was again, by the elevator. 

Now I’m pouring sweat, almost hyperventilating, when I see the mail cart. So I dump out the mail and I put the four of them into the cart. I was reaching for my cell phone and wondering who to call—my wife? 911?—when I see him in the lobby. He sees me too and breaks out a gorgeous smile and throws his arms out wide: Papa!

I put him in the cart. 

Through the lobby window there’s my son again in the parking lot, which makes six of them. The poor kids are cramped and whining and two of them are fighting over the toy. But I couldn’t worry about that, because there was one more by the security gate, and another, Jesus Christ, by the highway off-ramp.

Now I have one in each arm and six in the cart, which I’m trying to guide back to my office with a hip, until I see one more on the grass divider of the highway. This was when I thought I might start screaming. But I kept it together, and I waited for the traffic to ease so I could safely maneuver all of us across the lanes and collect my son. 

That’s right, I held it together, and you can bet your ass that I would keep holding it together. Even if there were a hundred of them. Even if there were a thousand. Because what else could I do?

            Don’t worry, I called to my little man as the cars whipped by. Daddy’s coming.

Gordon Haber

Four Poems by Mark Young

I cannot attest to the truth of this story,

 

told to me many years ago at a friend's house by Barry Humphries before he became more famous via his alter-ego Dame Edna Everage.

About being in a bar, in New York, & a drunken Jack Kerouac lookalike came up to him & invited him to a party. He declined the invitation. Was given the address anyway. Discovered about half an hour later that it had, in fact, been Kerouac. Rushed off to the address. Found it to be the premises of a removal company & that the party was taking place in the back of a moving Moving van that had left fifteen minutes earlier & was now out on the road, somewhere, anywhere, in the city.

 

 

A midnight census

 

In the background the pool pump hums. Put clarifier in the water, & now it has to circulate for thirty-six hours to let the clouding particles coalesce.                There is a smoke smell in the air. Drove around over the last few days on roads impinged upon by opportunistic grasses. A day of rain & they grow. A month later they are dry, primed for burning. Easier to set them alight than mow the strip that runs along the road- side.           The static geometry of the house separates the evening into panels. A quintych. Angular, o- blique. Trees fill in some of the gaps, but the most striking are those where there are gaps in the trees themselves, one in part- icular, bite-shaped, as if some- one had tried an apple & then abandoned it. Acute.                                       Touch yourself. Only flesh, which the hand passes through as if

& along the way     cigarettes   coffee   chicken   & rice       burnt   grass   a tart   plum           it wasn't there.

 

Meadow Saffrons (Les Colchiques)

—Guillaume Apollinaire

 

The meadow is poisonous but pretty in autumn

The cows grazing there

are slowly poisoning themselves

Meadow saffron the color of your eye-shadow of lilacs

flower there your eyes are like that flower

Violet like the eye-shadow & like the autumn

& for your eyes my life slowly poisons itself

 

School children come noisily

dressed in their smocks & playing harmonicas

They pick the meadow saffrons which are like mothers

Daughters of their daughters & the color of your eyelids

which flutter like flowers caught in a crazy wind

 

The cowherd sings very softly

whilst the slow lowing cows abandon

this great meadow ill-flowered by the autumn

 

(translated by M. Y.)

 

 

A line from Kurt Schwitters (3)

 

We were a modern family on

whom rebel militants launched

a large-scale attack following

weeks of simmering low-level

 

violence. The family began to

fall apart, particularly when we

started injecting black tar heroin.

Additional risk factors included

 

low-socioeconomic status, an

increase in gun violence, a steak

pie which says simmer on the

hob for 60 minutes. Soups are

 

also dangerous, especially when

they are served without rinsing

away the dirt. Anxieties are run-

ning high; we are spending too

 

much time in the danger zone.

Perhaps an anomaly, or will

light & visibility dictate if full

body hi-vis clothing is required?

Guests, by Barbara Anna Gaiardoni

strawberry moon
alternate universes
don't stay put

Granny comes out with a wooden spoon. “Try sweet potato instead of white potato,” she announces.
That is the signal that we should stop what we are doing because it's exactly the right time, because to enjoy his sweet potato cake on the terrace, accompanied by sweet potato chips and palm honey.
Obviously the sun disappeared in the meanwhile and pics of Grandma serving the cake are unwatchable. But we go beyond those things because our noses keep us in the present.

panic . . .
a queen bee tied
to her chin 

Two Poems by Emma Grey Rose

REMOTE AREAS

 

white withering globes of light that float above flowers, blooming. planted seasons, seasons wilting, death, light, snow on—tree branches, leaves, veil of—sun. weak strains of pink light falling on—blankets of white, heaven.

WHERE THE YELLOW RAIN FALLS

 

There are clouds in the sky that are violent. I have the steering wheel. Yes, it is strange, I say. You told me this would happen. I am talking to you. The seats are all empty. The car drives along, under the clouds, the ones that are violent. It does so even when I lift my foot, forgetting to set it back down. The sky is dark. There is a burst of lightning, which is sudden. It is cold. Up ahead is a patch of black and green. I talk aloud, looking through the windshield. The wipers are slow to work. The wipers get stuck. Do you think it will let up? I ask. Should I pull off? The windows are down. There is rain. You do not talk back. The seats are all empty. I think of where to go. Perhaps off the cliff? I ask. The roads here, they are open. You know I love you, I say. You know I miss you, I say. The clouds are violent. Perhaps off the cliff? I ask.