A m a n d a   D e o

She Thought They Had Something Special

She caught my dad getting pulled over for speeding near the house he no longer lives in. He was driving a car she didn’t recognize on a stretch of road that couldn’t spell anything. There was a wealth of trees standing between the guardrail and his upside down spine. He wept onto the pavement like he was alone. He held his hands out, palms up, for the cop. He looked like he could have been asking for lashes but she knew he was trying to remember what it was like to hold their youngest son.

I’m in a City You Hate

I’m in a city you

hate. I’m in the way

you wished I kept

locked in.

I’ve got a phantom

limb that reaches

around your waist

while you sleep and

knuckles that curl

around a kidney I’ve

already taken.

It will be morning before

you even realize this.  

It will be someone else before

the tide comes in and rescues you,

wet and slippery, from me.  

When I put you down

you won’t hear the

pins of my shoulders

come back up for air.  

I’m growing as I leave.

G a r y   S l o b o d a

The Man On The Left In Hopper’s People In The Sun

Like a deer poached by rednecks

where the corn lies down

there are stains on my chest

                        -- look, stains

identical to this hand

the mother trees shook to bloom.

September Becomes

Down washed out corridors

in a flurry of curses

you will not go down in

you become beautiful           old

men gnawing cigars                lit

in the rain of fingertips

of expiring blooms.

E l a i n e   E q u i

Pegasus

How refreshing to ride

like  a statue

         on horseback.

High but

         not too high,

nor enclosed.

Listening closely

to the landscape

through the animal’s

sharp, inquisitive ears.

Sensing the shift of stars

past and future

among green clouds.

P a t r i c k   W i l l i a m s

On Departure

We men

were gifted

switchblades.

On each, a bump

to lock, a push

to the hilt

to fold its blade.

Mine broke

with decorum

in the back

of a Metropolitan

Avenue taxicab.

Left the avocado

leatherette in shreds,

a lime whose rind

was scarred for twists.

It’s never bad

to be the first

to leave, we say,

over and over again.  

Her Pose

Pointing at a single wrinkle

in at least a decade’s

bulk of dusty candlemelt.

A hectare of knotted rope

gets the same treatment,

but with flash this time.

Look, she says, I found

something little in this.

It’s a gift for you.

J o h n  G r e y

In the Makeup Department

At the makeup counter,

she's testing lipstick,

spraying perfume

on her wrists.

When she's done,

I'll come

kissing and sniffing.

There's this department

at Macy's

where I can't stop myself

from trying her on.

M e g   T u i t e

Dusty Coral Albums

Cracks seep through photos verging on brittle overkill. Each one a phantom pressed down on the clocks of family, taking all yesterdays and blasting them out of daylight savings into reverie of separate rooms. Ceilings are only floors that barely hold us  and yet our faces look skyward as though we’re not down, circle the same house without seeing the clutter of emptiness that absorbs us. Those atoms pretend to plaster us into a place on the planet with these people who fill us with history that fades before it even talks about ghosts that inhabit mouths that smirk from the right side, sniffling when there’s a stilted moment, smiling at a joke without a sound, waiting to outdo it, speaking intently about subjects we know nothing about, letting our sneakers tread over dead newsreels dad and mom tell over and over until they are cemented into memory no one and everyone has of events riddled with constant airtime like noxious background of commercials reeking in our heads.

I sit with mom as we study page after page of withering snapshots. Mom smiles and points at people I can’t locate in my brain. “That’s your grandfather. Remember when he used to give you jars full of pennies?” No. I don’t. Mom’s long fingers and stories start moving in on the photos, until a whole world erupts, crackles through the barren yard of my mind. “Look,” she says. “The Pattersons.” I see my sisters and I on a couch with kids our own age and no one is smiling. Mom talks, her eyes landmarks on another map in time. She is in her bathing suit with the parents in their backyard at a barbeque while kids are swimming in the pool. Mom is radiating an exotic happiness like a phantom limb I have never touched. Her lips are exhaling coral lipstick, her head thrown back in electric madness that looks like a lady from a magazine.

I lie in my bed that night, images blasting across my flickering closed eyes. I was nine in that photo with the Patterson’s kids. It all comes back like that coated tongue after sucking down a milkshake, so thirsty and yet why didn’t the milkshake fill that hole? We are playing hide and seek. I know I’m too old for that, but we are all so weary, shy and fall back on a hysteria we can grope through together.

I hide in an upstairs room under a bed. I pull the comforter down until it touches the floor, my internal organs galloping beneath the rotting numbness that has saturated me. I feel, I feel, I say over and over. I feel it now.

The door opens and I am a bottomless scream of silence. My eyes are wide and I hold my hand over my mouth. I wait and hear no Patterson kid. It’s that woman from the magazine with Mr. Patterson. They are vultures screeching, two monsters moaning, bedsprings raking down on me as I hear that face I saw pulsing in the photo of my mom so full of something that it wouldn’t even recognize our family if it saw it in a snapshot.

R o b   T a l b e r t

Watching

Streetlights flicker on and tighten their grip.

Some people feel followed. Chased out of malls

by security guards into dense and reflective traffic.   

The city’s skin stares right back. It doesn’t matter

that it’s snowed for days, that snow has followed us

into all structure: Charlie shelves aluminum cans

under white hair. It’s snowing in his past.

There are still miracles to get our hands on,

but a hornet’s nest of bills stirs on the table

and the tumbling candlelight sends

shadows grasping from the dark. Who sees

the drop of water escape down the bowl, the stem,

the base? It could be the flake on your shoulder.

We are still here.

Aria for the Recently Changed

Still awake at 3 a.m.

Still the apartment window

receives all broadcast

from nearby traffic.

So near the rent is cheap.

It never stops.  Never retreats.

Blood and information

coursing under halogens

high enough for their own heaven.

One car.

Just one waits beside the road,

emergency lights flashing.

Someone stirred with force enough

to delay destination.

Tell me. If it was you I saw

stopped in the lake-bottom darkness,

could you see my window?

Was your hand cupped loosely

over your mouth or packed into a fist?

B e r n d   S a u e r m a n n

from Residence

III

There are teeth under the bed where a boy sleeps. A door opens and a mother figure walks in. A boy falls in love with a secret, and a secret falls in love with a skeleton key. A lock appears and opens itself like memory. Sometimes, it’s

almost too much to bear.

IV

A father laughs nervously when a door closes and a quiet rage obscures the view from the attic window. There is a man sweeping the street. A car passes in the rain and hisses a promise which fades like the Milky Way at sunrise. A shell is pressed to an ear. Almost daily, pictures curl at the edges like incoming waves.

V

A pair of hands in the bushes flutters like a bird, and a girl’s skin smells warm in the afternoon. With her hand tucked under her head, she feigns sleep. I show her my hands and tell her to think of them as birds. She cries and I hold her weeping hands and comfort her. Years later, I learn that feathers drift to the ground like a handful of vague memories, memories of hands and the warm scent of skin.

G r e t c h e n   P r i m a c k

Gina Kim, Elevator Repair

Dear Brett,

I still like their smell. I still think about us riding up

and down. F.A.O. Schwartz past appropriate age.

Neiman Marcus, upholstered men in the corners.

The smooth cars in Brooklyn Art, bigger than my bedroom.

Remember that bedroom?

The ones I take care of are residential. Post-war, dull-walled.

I want to move to inspection. The ones I see now are always sick.

I’m the vet who lays them on the table and only sees backsides trotting out. I want to hear the oil work.

When did you fall out of love with me?

Gina

Celeste Miron, 3C

I’ve grown fat and can’t remember living

without all of these cells to keep me company.

Dull’s a pleasant syrup in the pump basting buttery organs.

Sometimes I knead the folds, but mostly I leave them

alone. On the bus, in the air, in a barn and library

and on a train, the sun is free and constricted in its turns, and I’m a freight, cargo large and stuck, sleeping and stuck

in turns. I was a little girl, unfurled until the slurs and curses

in the world furled me back up in a wrap, wrap, wrapping.

C h r i s   B u l l a r d

The Post-Lethe World

Forgetting makes everything new.

Make oblivion the new black.

Tune in for the Jerry Lewis telethon against déjà vu.

You’ll watch it over and over.

Let the name of the Caesar whose statue

wags a finger in the public square

melt like a mental snowman.

Think of him as “Ruffles” or “Quigley.”

When the world goes blue screen,

you can touch the light and dark rectangles

on that thing in the corner and be startled

because you are not deaf.

The market is casting a Shakespeare replacement.

Join an infinite number of monkeys at the keyboard.

The Unnamable, Due to the Possibility of Litigation

Divorce changed her. The change stoked her.

The bar started serving adrenaline martinis.

Shouts of Veto, Nyet, departed

like a feeble parent sent to Sun City.

Her body put up a score of ten zillion;

her mind stayed a red baseline on the thermometer graph.

She became as selfless as a name brand

while her lovers stiffened into lecturers,

dribbling the foamy word, responsibility,

from their irony-free lips like burped beer.

When they bored her with their concern,

she raised her cobra-coiffure and buzzed down Route 66.

So the chorus hummed Bobbie McGee

while everyone adjusted to freedom.

B r a d   R o s e

My Financial Advisor’s Investment Advice

Screaming Jay Hawkins put a spell on you. Of course, you can buy sex toys on line, accessorize with a Chihuahua, spend your entire working life slaving in darkrooms whose musical outpourings conjure the fist-pumping melody of European death metal, but the smart investor pro-rates mortgage-backed liability structures, sips Chardonnay with a blissful actuarial bouquet.  If you read the data carefully, you will see that they indicate only one thing: Collateralized Debt Obligation necessarily inspires revenue-neutral derivatives exchange via lump-sum bond pooling.  You, my friend, are only lip-synching.  I can accept that, but a bear market prefers an armed clock, to the earth's bullish axis spinning in mock mime.  I’m sure you can imagine a certain population who doesn’t want to join the boy scouts? I warn you, Wilson, for your own good, whatever you do, at all costs, do NOT leave the building.

J o z i e   K o n c z a l

Almost Christmas

Asked me, why don’t you just spit

in his face? All I’d done was refuse

a cigarette on a night dying in South

Carolina winter like none of the insects

do. I don’t know how to breathe good

air into the mouth of a winter night like

I don’t know how I should have answered

him. We found the road ungraced by

snow or the eyes of a deer. I later decided

that here the seasons have met like something

unfamiliar, like slipping on stairs that belong

to you. If only the seasons could join like

children do for running games, then,

maybe I would wear my face.

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