Tina Celio enjoys crowdsurfing as well as occasional crowdpleasing via her website. She holds a bachelor of arts in English from the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Orange County, California.
How many people
How many people wish to me dead
How many people wish me to be dead
How many people wish upon me, death
Not so much wish
As they are secretly excited
Secretly excited at the possibility
Secretly excited at the possibility that
Secretly excited at the possibility that they beat out one more person
Beat out one more person that should’ve beaten them
Should’ve beaten them or mild lack of concern
Mild lack of concern or ambivalence, let’s say
Even complete couldn’t-care-less-ness
Couldn’t-care-less-ness which has a tinge of fuck you in it
How many people
Wish
To me dead
I know the feeling
For in pure numbers
It is easy to count one in
No wishing death upon any one
Individual
In particular
Not wishing
Not wishing death
Not wishing death upon
Not wishing death upon anyone
But in pure numbers
Round and conclusive
There is lung cancer
There is colon cancer
There is car crash
Jiggly back fat
Not a direct cause
But the inability
To move the torso
With explosive energy
Would lead me to ambivalence
Leads me to ambivalence
Leads me to feelings of ambivalence
Lack of feelings
Non-feeling as ambivalence
Not a leading cause
But yet a nice round number
Included in a nice round number
To be included in a nice round number
Is not to wish death
Not to wish death to be upon
Not to wish someone dead
In a similar way
I do push-ups
I am not afraid to lift up my shirt
To fix my belt buckle
In a similar way
I run sometimes
Sometimes past people
Sometimes I run past people and whisper things under my breath
Sometimes I run past people and whisper under my breath, “death is on
your heels”
Sometimes I run past people and whisper, “move, asshole”
I would not be surprised
If these people
Wished death
To be upon me
I would not be surprised if these people were ambivalent about death
being upon me
I would not be surprised if these people couldn’t care less about
death being upon me
Secretly
Keeping score
Chalking up another line
Secretly excited to diagonally cross the four pillars to make five
Secretly familiar with death
Secretly ok with it finding me first
Secretly wishing
Secretly wishing it found me first
Secretly wishing it finds the guy who does push-ups and runs, first
It’s no secret
No secret to me
No secret to death
No secret to you
That we like round numbers
No secret that we have a soft spot for the individual
No secret that we secretly wish
We didn’t
Gary Dubola Memi currently lives on Long Island and commutes into Manhattan five days a week for work. On these mornings, you can find him writing poems aboard the Long Island Rail Road. These poems are instantly posted on his personal blog, Railroad Poetry. Gary lives with his wife, dog, mother-in-law, brand new son, dust and belongings of various weight. Select works have been published by Snakeskin, ProtestPoems.org, and a handful of stones. Gary’s personal blog gets the juiciest bits, most of which are deemed as unfit to “re-publish” under the archaic notion that they are “previously published.”
New York City, February 2003 (click image for a larger version)
Jonathan Sa’adah’s photographs often deal with people and political/social topics. His favorite places to photograph are streets and within shared lives.
Both. And perhaps the others too, but more expert at ringing chimes and obtaining useless property than the ululation, the way one screams Eureka! at each new spring’s discovery of us, the interfering ones who claim transubstantiation. Where all olfactory and otherwise remain centered on texture and bouquet, the smaller people in the chapel remain suspect and therefore more intelligent than a full rack of lamb with rosemary and apple chutney on wedding day.
Either. Because nothing else matters than the idea of it, the kitsch you saw at Goodwill, brought home, cleaned with merriment. Or the handheld device, a setback to the ham radio presented at Christmas (c. 1971). Overhead a toy airplane buzzes and cuts through a common blue sky. It clips the wings of an irate crow and the crow is not a nice bird, no. As though one is chintzy with haircuts, yet expects everyone to look exquisite; a string of salons turning out bowl cuts to anxious teens who all want to look precisely insane.
Neither. Without knowledge of the poodle-skirt, the standard poodle, the poodle parlor, and the poodle princess — the way a leash can mean so much more than simple Pooper-Scooper activity — or casual sleeping felines en masse. There are too many smells of humanness on the public transport. Acceptance of same comes as folly, wherein you find yourself skank-stinky and need to get home cheap, folly where you are put in another’s position — only focused on talking the situation to death. Saying everything three times, over and over like Mother did, again and again. There. There is a flock of poodles with proud poodle owners marching down the street in poodle parade formation, as though a battle is to begin. A battle of froufrou against the odds. A turning point. An amassing.
John Vick was born in Mississippi. His family moved across the continent to Canada in the mid-60s, and when he was 11, he moved to Oklahoma with his parents and finished high school. Since then, Vick has lived in Texas, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He served in the military for two years in the mid-80s. He’s placed poems in a variety of journals, including in the upcoming issue of phati’tude, and his chapbook Chaperons of a Lost Poet appeared from BlazeVOX in 2009.
Donna Vorreyer hates crowds, unless she’s at a music festival. (Music soothes… well, you know.) She lives in a house with a spacious yard and plenty of breathing space for her husband, her son, and her dog. Visit her and view her work at her website or her blog.
The streets are deserted. A bird comes
to collect our quills; it carries wrecked
houses, ransacked school-rooms,
burnt out sanctum, smashed shops in its
beak and flies to a figment-
island with our micro-characters.
Days later, others—like me—go and
spend some sweat to bring home a
new federal policy, fresh job-hunt
papers and a leader from the mart.
The crowd is brave not to wince
when the bird scoops out topical arts
hidden in their skulls; when blood
leans on their temples.
Brian Pike is a mixed-media artist who lives and works in rural North Yorkshire. A selection of his recent paintings can be seen on his website. He also writes haiku-influenced short poems at Paiku.
Distraught about the simulation of bacteria on the floor after mopping, we leave for our respective superstores in such a hurry that we forget to shut off our TVs. We can see them, the TVs, from the road as we pass, in our neighbors’ windows, or in the apartments across the alley from ours as we peek out a staircase window or up at the tired brick facades from the sidewalks below. While we’re gone, the latest mop-replacement advertisement airs a dozen more times during commercial breaks from afternoon soaps and talk shows, informing our kitchen appliances and living room sofas of the unwanted microorganisms dirty mops leave behind.
Yet at all our Walmarts and Targets and Krogers and K-Marts and BJ’s Wholesale Clubs, traditional mops are still a purchasing option. Why?
A stray ant or two carting bread crumbs across a marble countertop we can handle. But when we’re using a broom to scoot dust bunnies from behind the washer and we discover a colony forming around the base of a ripped dog food bag, no damp paper towel is quilted enough for us to attempt a raid.
This simulation, it is the maggots in the wet cat food dish we forgot to clean out last week.
What we mean is traditional options aren’t working.
The steam vac infomercial devouring the late-Sunday-morning-to-early-Sunday-afternoon programming block on the local cable station argues against the use of the latest mop replacement, whose disposable sheet can scratch dirt and grit like sandpaper across hardwood floors. We don’t trust infomercials, but when the same product is demonstrated with only minor errors live on QVC and HSN, the phone lines are flooded with orders. A sweet-voiced woman with a southern accent tells us she is buying a second steam vac for the studio apartment her lover rents downtown for their clandestine rendezvous.
“Those floors can get so filthy,” she says to the doe-eyed saleswoman.
Meanwhile, Larry Whitmore, an Iraq War veteran from Syracuse, NY, spots Lexi, the chipper SU senior from across the hall, lugging cleaning supplies into her apartment, including the latest mop replacement with a Wegman’s bag full of disposable sheets. She’s cleaning up after a small Super Bowl Commercial party she held the night before. He offers his assistance and his mother’s steam vac, on loan to him. While he’s steaming sticky alcohol and nacho cheese remnants from the floors he overhears her apologizing to another neighbor about the previous night’s noise, reciting a line from Williams about the crowd at the ballgame moving uniformly, without thought.
“I do that to disarm people,” she confesses. “Reciting poetry usually calms people down. Or at least makes them see you in a different light.”
He tells her later, over lunch, that he only remembers Williams’ red wheelbarrow.
“I can’t imagine anything nowadays holding such weight,” he says. “Can you?” And recites for her:
so much depends
upon
a green Swiffer
mop
covered with old
dust
beside the trash
can and recyclables
They discuss the cultural, community importance of the red wheelbarrow to the implied farming family, like the bicycle in De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, so much unlike Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, which means nothing to the men who toss it into the furnace. They discuss how Kane’s wealth made all but sentimental objects meaningless to him. How this was the movement of the country Welles was perhaps trying to convey — from humble, impoverished pioneers to pretentious, community-impoverished capitalists.
Oh, we listen to them from the adjacent booths at Applebee’s, grumbling to ourselves. Who do they think they are? Who even watches Citizen Kane anymore? What kind of cultural importance does it have to anyone besides English majors and film school dropouts? Isn’t that the purpose of art? To be culturally important? To be important to a wide audience? To be important to a community as a whole?
What about our art? we want to argue. What about cavemen commercials and annoying ringtones that get stuck in your head? What about the one-liners from The Hangover or the lyrics sung on American Idol? These are the things we discuss around office water coolers. Why aren’t they important? So much does depend upon TV ratings: jobs, incomes, careers, stocks. Entire families and suburban developments. School districts supported by the sales of General Mills cereals.
Our art is a nation-wide means for sustenance.
Larry and Lexi don’t see that the steam vac brought them together. Not Orson Welles or William Carlos Williams. Not a mutual cultural background. Not love. But a steam vac. A steam vac, on loan from his mother, that Larry uses to break the ice, to impress a young woman he’d been eyeing for months. He’d come home from a day at Pep Boy’s and close his door to the empty hallway, only exchanging brief greetings with any neighbor that might happen to pass by. What kind of community is that?
We, on the other hand, gather in crowded living rooms for the series finale of Lost. We form Paris Hilton fan clubs online. Years from now, we’ll still be writing X-Files fan fic. We do things together. We make decisions about our culture, including traditional cleaning options, by fidgeting en masse on Black Fridays for doors to open. Early bird shoppers may form a semblance of a line, but by the time store managers are sweating with keys in hand we are like the simulation of bacteria on the floor after mopping: all movement, no order. Kill enough of us and things will start to sour. Shit will fester on the store shelves, unbought. Stagnant stocks will rot undigested in your portfolios.
We build cul-de-sacs and church steeples. We rent hourly motel rooms and spend fortunes on birth control and anti-abortion legislation. We donate to charities then die slowly together in nursing homes after states have absorbed our estates, our children bringing us reaching claws and sleeved blankets they ordered from a toll-free number, as seen on TV.
Danny Pelletier’s short fiction has appeared in Pear Noir!, Quarterly West, Monkeybicycle, and Night Train. One of his poems appears in the latest issue of Contemporary Haibun Online, and he has an essay at BookLifeNow.com. He lives with his wife and one and a half children in central New York, where he teaches writing.
We gathered twelve baskets of leftovers,
and then we confronted a new crisis:
what do with all the food left behind?
We slapped together fish sandwiches for all the weary
travelers. We made to-go bags
for everyone with hungry
families at home. We made sure the boy
got his investment back and then some.
We still had several baskets.
We made a picnic for ourselves.
And then Martha stepped forward.
With her old family recipe, she baked
pan after pan of bread pudding.
Some people gathered to talk mystical
theology. The rest of us helped
Martha clean up the kitchen. We wallowed
in dessert and fellowship. We celebrated
sweetness, the important life lesson.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. She has published in many journals, and Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. She currently serves as Chair of the General Education department at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. Her website, which has connections to the blogs that she keeps, is kristinberkey-abbott.com.
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