Appetite.

It is neither your tongue nor thigh
For which I long
But your singsong sigh

It is the sweetness of milk
The bone whiteness
Under freckled sinew

The plumping of peaches

Pluck!

Not consummation
But the giggling, the slurps, the untied shoe
the hand fidgeting with the cabinet knob
a thumbprint on our white wall

The memory of it
the downiness of teeth
on the tree
solid-soft and dew-dappled
suspended in light and air-

I can’t get at you

Are you there when our children flutter their eyelids just before sleep?

Listen to the pit-less wind whoosh!
Fill me up.

 – Michael Carolan

Homing

This is what we get. Weaker and weaker and sicker and sicker and then gone. Not much humor in that. The mother will soon become nothing. Gone, invisible, as if she never existed. As if it ever even mattered that she existed in the first place. He is driving to her now. The guy on the radio thinks the team made a good trade, callers disagree, how could they have let Denny go? Our Denny, friggin’ Denny. This is nighttime, when you can drive and push the scan button and hear AM radio from hundreds of miles away, from the vague mid-west, from the Yukon Territories. He doesn’t know who Denny is. The radio guys substitute friggin’ or frickin’ for fuckin’ and the censors look the other way. The mother will have a tumor the size of a lemon removed in five hours. He knows about sports but he doesn’t know who Denny is.

 

The mother needs more power strips. In her new house. Apartment. Her new apartment. Two months ago she sold their house, her house, she sold the house that her son lived in from age six-months to seventeen-years-and-eleven-months, that he visited every year since. The house now belongs to a rich, hipster New York artist who wanted to move upstate, to get away. The artist has hardly been there since he bought it, flying all over the world to art shows, following his model girlfriend to fashion shows. The son knows because the mother tells him the artist has a Russian model girlfriend married to a regular Russian guy. The mother knows because she has lunch sometimes with the artist. She says she worries about the artist, that he is naïve. The son thinks whatever. Then the son wants to thank the artist for giving the mother something to worry about besides him. The mother needs things to worry about besides him.

 

The Sign of the Promise

“What do you have for tulips,” the man said to me in a soft, burred voice.  He dropped his hands on the counter, leaned forward a little, and raised his eyes to meet mine, putting even deeper creases into his forehead.

            “Tulips,” I repeated, turning to check out the rows of flowers behind me.

            “Color doesn’t matter,” he said.  “Just so long as they’re fresh.”

            Daffodils, black-eyed Susans, lilies, baby’s breath, roses, and there they were.  Today we had yellow and red ones, some vivid, some pale but no less attractive for it.  “Here we go,” I said, stepping aside to give him a clear view.  As he studied them, his head moving a few inches closer at a time, I pretended to stretch my arms so I could sneak a quick look at my watch; it was 3:53 and Lonnie was due to relieve me at 4.  I could count on him to be on time, strictly in the technical sense – he never showed his face before 3:59 or after 4:01.  A little more leeway would have been nice, but at least I could count on not counting on it.

            “Those three reds,” the man said, jabbing his finger out at every word.  “And those three yellows, right there.”

            One by one, I touched the stems of the flowers I thought he was referring to and gave him a questioning look.  Five times he nodded; the sixth he said, “No, the one above that,” then nodded again when I got it right.  He had basset hound eyes, wet and sad, and a broken-off chunk of a nose.  A jutting lower lip was the sole indication of character in his mouth.  He could have been buying the flowers for a bedside table or a gravesite; it was impossible for me to say.

            “I’d like them in a flowerpot,” he said.

            I looked up from the loose bundle in front of me.  “A vase?” I asked.

            He pushed out a breath.  “I think I would have said ‘vase’ if that’s what I wanted,” he said, his voice even softer now, not at all angry or sarcastic.  Which made it a lot more unsettling.

            “I’m sorry,” I said, my hands out to placate him (and to allow me another glance at the watch; 3:55 now).  “I’ve just never had anyone ask for a pot for cut flowers.”

            “And soil,” he said.

            “I’m sorry?”

            “I’d like them to be in soil.  Rich and dark.  Nothing dry, nothing crumbly.  Pack it around the tulips so they stand up straight.”  His eyes flicked up to meet mine.  “I’ll pay.”

            This was going to be a project, I could tell.  Lonnie wouldn’t be around if another customer approached; I could only hope it would be just the two of us for the next few minutes.

None of Us Under 18

Land’s got an uncanny sense of our lives’ conflagration. Down the road they have their towered cakes, their landscapes and packed cities, we have Centralia. Our bootlegged mines of anthracite, metered readings, pipes hot above the washboard reasonless. Any moment, sinkholes, and some of us who once had homes, now they’re stories beneath the ground. Architecture wants to gut itself and start over. There are days we do the same. We know the numbers, the overwhelming of us gone. 10% is Alice who traded son and pick-up for perennials. 50% are households who became one. 30%’s the Jacksons who paint the benches green downtown. Specters flee the steam pipes. Trees are white, stone even, enough to burn for 200 years. Only started warning when we near lost a boy to the ground, took our zip code. We know what’s down there, something. What it is about Centralia is what it is about the heart that only happens there.

– Kim Hagerich

The Dancing Girl

Nothing is so enormous as mother. Mother, who stares and waits for me to dance; well, I won’t dance. I stick to my room. There is no place to go though I wanted a job in the conveyor belt hamburger restaurant. Here is too clean. My sister is friends with smokers who stand by the river eating lo-mein and drinking beer from Freddy Whiteread’s with the messed up jaw. I stay at home. I dance in the corner with little pink kicks. And when the door creaks, I throw myself against the wall til mother peels me with the grease in her voice saying, go outside, it’s nice. Outside the day is always nice. It’s inside that I am a fish from the bleached barrier reef. I flap across the floor. The eyes for my mother are shy eyes, are little cool eyes. She will not see me happy.

– Kim Hagerich

A Tale of Two Children

It was well-known which heads were infested. They were to stick to the blacktop while the others roamed the yard. None in the grass wanted to be flung too far so the merry-go-round spun cautiously. Liced and non-liced alike saw communities prove liquid as new alliances formed with the shifting of boundaries. A braided head and buzz cut speculated on how closely they had come to ruin. Children on the asphalt made do with chalk, drawing four-squares and bouncing rubber balls between them. They knew they were watched but maintained a charade of play. They wore knitted caps from the lost and found and shared orange wedges because it couldn’t get any worse. Even resuming their interior posts, the liced betrayed themselves with sniffles, having spent nights naked and upright, shivering under maternal scrutiny. They would later cite this as the defining moment of their lives. It’s not that they forever felt creeped upon, but that they came to see the world as intractably flat. For geography, they turned inward to their own bony fulcrums and weakening fault lines.

 – Kim Hagerich

fantastic

fantastic

 

 

pro life at

the anti abortion

rally she looks at

a baby’s

severed head.

 

plastic tweezers

grip cauterized

flesh. eyelashes flutter

in formaldehyde.

the head sinks patiently

in a plastic jar next to

poly synthetic postcards

printed as

reminders.

 

 

*

 

 

pro life at

the pro choice

rally she picks up

plastic speculums.

 

peels

them out of

sterile packages.

waterproof pamphlets

on how to perform

the procedure.

plastic gloves and

bumper stickers

about no men, fish

and bicycles.

 

 

***

 

 

 

she buys two

plastic picture frames.

one for the pamphlet and

the postcard. she uses

plastic glue to

stick them to her plastic

fridge. takes out a

plastic carton of orange

juice, pours it into a

plastic glass.

 

she lays down on the

wood plastic floor.

 

and pauses

to think about the

state of the crises.

 

–e.m. monteiro

Everyone Is Thinking

The mechanics of production elude me. We make things, that’s what we do, people. Some of us make cat litter or babies or knives. Some make Thighmasters. Some people make wars, but those that do are not very good at it, at least I don’t think they are. Without fail, the Army shows up on my front door step asking for canned goods, which I bought and will probably never eat because they just ask for the stuff I don’t want, like creamed corn and green beans. Also, they ring the doorbell every damn time I’m trying to watch The Simpsons reruns and you would think, being the Army and all, they would know The Simpsons are on. And for how long shall I be expected to support the troops? They are grown men, with government jobs to boot! Who is in charge of this operation, the president? Who could be so out of touch with the common American? But I may not be very good at making wars either. I have never tried to invade a sovereign nation or pick fights with fuming dictators. I have only made problems within my family, watching my relatives divide like crystal formations, shoots of angry hard matter. Ambient temperatures determine the size of the fact or density of the crystallization or magnitude of the explosion. Prior convictions determine length of the incarceration. But beyond pressurized family matters, creation evades me. For example, how does one go about “producing” a banana? I suppose you would need parts of the banana, like the peel and the banana meat. And then you would have to stick them together somehow, without any fingerprints, and seal it shut from the inside. It would be easier to just pull one from your trouser pocket but then you would be considered both corner-cutter and pervert. Oh, there’s lot of other things too, I think, that go into the production of some thing or other. Like producers have to be tall, so they can see what everyone is thinking and can make something new or improved, or taller. They also must have lots of cupboard space for all that stuff: not only the things they make but the things they use to make the things they make have to be stored somewhere. Ratchet sets and hat racks and various glues and banana makers don’t just put themselves to bed, you know.

- Emily Renaud

Elephant Eggs

Intestinal elephants are all the rage. I bought mine at the CVS down the street–it’s a knock off. Once the egg was swallowed, gestation took about 4 months. Fully grown, I imagine Stompy from trunk to tail to be the length from the tip of my thumb down to the first knuckle. Sometimes at night, while my cat Violet lies resting on my chest, we listen to Stompy wade through the swampy lands of my stomach, or I feel the tickle of his struggle through dense intestinal thicket of lettuce branches yet to be broken down. Violet will often claw at my stomach, wanting to hunt or play with Stompy, her spine hair flanked, her eyes wild and sharp. But I just roll onto my side and she jumps off in search of other prey. Stompy is safe in there, in my gut, and maybe lonely I think, because sometimes I am awoken by the sound of him trumpeting at four a.m., sloshing through stomach acid awaiting a response to his grey wails. But the neighborhood elephants are all asleep and too far away, even his foot stomp vibrations go unreturned, other than the Tums that get swallowed. Perhaps I will ingest another egg, a friend for Stompy, but the experts advise against this. If they mate I could explode with a tribe of tiny elephants marching out of my pasty, bloated carcass. How’s that during Valentine’s night dinner? Who wants to see that while opening presents Christmas morning? And who would support such a family, what with my lifeless body heaved prostrate over the back of the lay-z-boy to make room for dessert? No, Stompy is well-fed and has plenty of room to move. It must take him ages to roam all the way from my esophagus down to my duodenum. What an adventure, what sights he must see! When he is restless and wants attention, he tickles my throat with his trunk. When I am restless and want entertainment I swallow whole live crickets for Stompy to wrestle, but they only live down there for a short while, poor creatures, the environment too harsh to bear, his aggression too misunderstood to battle successfully.

- Emily Renaud

Perspective is a Real Bitch

Pictured below is a box

It is poorly rendered, but I think we can all agree that it is a box, or that it represents the idea of a box. Correct?

Then let us assume we all agree. The thing is a box, and it probably contains something.

Boxes that contain “nothing” probably contain “something.” The argument is easy to make.

Air is something; absence is something; nothing is something; something is something. It is all so confusing. Let’s continue.

You are inside this box. You are wearing odd clothes—whatever feels odd to you, I wouldn’t be so presumptuous to decide!—and you are hopelessly in love with me.

You are hopelessly in love with me, but I am behind the box, and perspective does not afford you a good view of me. Perspective is a real bitch.

You want so badly to see me, you can hardly contain yourself.

– Jono Tosch