Archive
Rune for the Forgotten
I’ve been calling every automated line: MovieFone, Time & Temperature, the Suicide Hotline. It’s a problem — the pound key on my handset is missing. Like the vermouth; used to, it was present. These days it’s only a one-count, swirled around in the glass, then discarded. Or even just the bottle passed over the lip of the glass… what would be left on the surface splits, runs. Legs. Whispers. Lace.
And the paperdoll chains I keep trying to cut out… for some reason they just won’t hold hands. Lose their heads. Like the faces in the wall; look in the wind. All these scraps of paper, just parts. Off the hook, they call me. ?! Who, after heaving a 400-ton block of stone 10,000 feet up the mountainside, would have the breath to answer? Someone carved the features; maybe they are deathbed professions. I don’t have the key. Most people leave a note.
by Tricia Anne Baar
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Big Wave Clouds Like Fishscales
If you are inland and see these clouds, you know the surf is big, clean and good and you can race to the beach.
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Robin’s Egg Blue
Thigh to thigh on the slip-covered couch,
your legs scissored closed like the ladder
I trespassed through the neighbor’s yard
before detention dismissed you later home.
Robin’s call two days absent from the clotted
roof gutter nest. I wanted to see how another life
begins. The TV hisses between channels.
Your faded Levis I’d soon fill out myself.
Cool corrugated grip of the tallest rung turning
awkward as a zipper’s deliberate downward cleaving.
Two pale blue eggs: the heavy leaf-litter must
of something abandoned. I wanted to be shown
what my body would become. Such slight
pressure, this fingernail digging in. The first egg
gives easily, thumb shattering through.
Should I say you taught me this? To take you
in my mouth and let you grow there? How
suddenly an afternoon changes light. Your knee
floors hard against belt buckle. The second egg
opens across the driveway’s gritty tongue.
I see your skin has broken — a crescent impression
welling the blood-purple half-circle of some poor
embryo, only three exposed heartbeats remain.
The TV focuses its dimming pinpoint eye
as we empty the living room. Between two
fragile halves: that slick amber yolk relaxing
outward, darkening the sparkling gravel.
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Public Transport
There’s no one around, the center sere,
dry as the moon. No one comes near
the still terminal. Buses dispatched
like the sun overnight, doors unlatched,
sit smelling of vomit and beer. Where are
the drunks, neighborhood newstands, far
smoke from the rendering plant? My eye
from a window that never was lends the dry
look of circumstance, something like form,
then takes it back. Sunday, normal,
not sinister. Pigeons unpattern the clouds
with a wash of gray. Trains reroute,
flash like the first things alive.
In the rain, the Daily News arrives.
by Robbi Nester
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18th Street Omens
heavy sidewalk traffic
barely an open seat in Tryst
we sit and watch women squeeze
through the crowded bar, wincing at
the slow tremor of tectonic behinds
some of us have been
in solitude long enough
to know it’s a desert
where every woman so far
has been a mirage
this morning’s horoscope
said good news of a long-
awaited event will arrive soon
I look for omens everywhere
and wonder if the watermark
under my glass is a sign
of an approaching oasis
by Alan King
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V. Freeport
from “Scenes from a Westbound Train”
I thought he was her father, but
the way she pulled his hand,
heavy, limp and awkward, like a
dead koi from the black pond
of his lap; the way he couldn’t
look at her until he’d unhinged
the clasp of her watch and turned
the ticking face into her wrist;
the way they knit their brows,
concentrating on the other’s knees
in lieu of playing witness to their
teenage neighbors’ frisky schemes,
told me they were something sadder.
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Sequence #5
hold out for any pair of sockets ….. beach grass has sharp blades for ladders …. remember the plankton ……. it glittered in the sway …… come up to my hip …. cross over …. I never beg …….. except during sex …….. that was so long ago .. I’ve forgotten …… your sequential thumbnails ….. why are we restless … insects understand their motives ………… the medulla organizes brittle flashes .. you continue to break into my kitchen .. I leave the lights on all night …….. you won’t stop .. I’ll have to bait a trap …. drive you to the outskirts ……. catch and release
by Beth Coyote
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qarrtsiluni 