Wearing sunglasses in January, she was thin and buzzing like coffee and bumblebees with a face blurred by makeup and the vagueness that comes between thirty-five and fifty.
She was trying to write a check for something like tires or maybe brakes for a Buick but she couldn’t find her license, so in harried anger dumped the contents of her purse on top of my counter and it was all there: the lipstick, cell phone, eye liner, Ipod, wallet & a small black tiny gun that spun like a top as soon as it hit the counter.
That, she said as she scooped the gun back into her purse, was a huge pain in
the ass to get: I had to sit in a crowded
CCW class at the county building
with all kinds, young and old, white and black,
male, female, gay and straight and they
were all so happy and scared just to be
able to carry a gun and, of course,
I got fingerprinted and there was a long
line for that too, something like fifty deep
at eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning
and there I was already late for work
but I just had to have this because you know
how it is these days…
and finally, the check was written, and a few days later, bounced back.
impotence
lately, there have been no words as ideas have stopped flowing through my head even though I keep typing away like a junkie trying to tap into an overused vein.
My typing produces nothing save half-baked poems like the one I thought about this morning while stuck at the light, an ancient Chrysler minivan in front of me with it’s white paint peeling and a bumper sticker that said, My Daughter is in the US Army.
I thought about the daughter. I thought she might be short and squat and I could see her in some desert with a rifle in her hand, her hair greasy and tucked into her hat, her body shapeless and vague in camouflage fatigues.
And then I imagined the daughter coming home, getting married, driving a minivan of her own with the paint peeling away.
The light turned green, the van went straight and I turned right, the poem quickly died and I started to think what I could do to make it move.
Roberta Lawson
Cento
Finally, he wants to write…
The secrets of the girls childhood finally tumbled – especially if they’ve been mishandled.
Reassuring benefits dress in a handy, pocket-sized format. Fancy.
(You don’t need to do anything. This is not the novel he wants to write; this reassuring tracker of girls.)
These balls of community dough not recommended for pregnant women: The benefits of a fancy dress blood donor.
You don’t need to do anything for the fullest, most rewarding life.
Balls of dough, mishandled like lactating women speak of this soon…
Handy, pocket-sized secrets for a serious buyer.
Wind-Down
Later in the day than either of us knew existed. Wrapped up in quiet night-time and the slow-heat of your body, curled sage & incense wafts wind about the room with their unfurling fingers.
You ask the wrong question, and like strange magic my tears begin a silent procession.
‘Sweetie, what on earth is wrong?’ you ask me, blinking.
I guess I just felt safe.
Quincy Lehr
Apartments
No ghosts as yet, but just a hint of fever (the fan’s still in its box) and foreign noise. A virgin phone squats on its new receiver. Undusty window sills are bare but ready for clocks, for brown, anaemic plants, their poise temporary, fragile and unsteady.
There have been other places, across the river, or oceans, time zones—other furniture, with curtains cutting light to just a sliver, those old apartments populated still with women whom you recollect as ‘her’. They haven’t called; you doubt they ever will.
Each lease becomes an act of… not forgetting, but somehow letting go. Old places live with different faces in a familiar setting: lives you’ll never know, but comprehend, scenes of errors not yours to forgive, broken hearts no longer yours to mend.
Let there be light!
And in the beginning, there was nothing, or what there always was, and is, perhaps, flawed symmetry, as the child was born,
the act of birth the act of replacement implying obsolescence, the loss of vigour, blurred sight, the often-repeated joke,
the punch line like a show in syndication, the actors long since dead, floating into the ether of living rooms.
P.A. Levy
when the boys come home
the girls working in the flag factory widows-to-be out pouring all their semaphore poetry
wait for their boys with well rehearsed folds they’ve seen it many times on prime time news broadcasts
pulsing hearts pulsing he pulse half mast
Robert Lietz
Ocean Audience (2)
Should you import such images, alerted by sines and contraband, by natural restrictions,
leathers digging in, finding the sun above the house, the scythe-blade dulled and slopes
made dangerous, the shadows indoors restored, what would there be to do
except to see lives graduate, adopt their readiness to grip, except, as one absorbed, and one
with them, to seem as one within the script, and with the light let fall behind the cardinal draperies,
happy as meals were, as uninventoried light deciding on a subject? And here,
among the spellbound-still accoutrements, left-overs concentrate, in love and motion still,
and their phenomenally touched selves, seeing their lawns to snuff or pouring off their own,
in rooms where lives conceived becoming something once, in pillared rooms and sleeplessness
and dreadful circulation, warped frames and needle-stitch, their scythes
made dull for every pass through the sandgrasses, and love’s morphologies, and the kempt lawns
turned by the beach-skies to hyperscripts. Why wouldn’t you cheer with them such nights
when home-squads dominate, seeing them cheered themselves, or handing their bodies off
in lexial harmonics, thrilled by the first good tune, by the cacoons
and plastics scratching frost-hewn stones, mothers coming to be, there on the eve of everything,
and children, evolved dimensionally, gliding among the cloud-drifts and the painted trees,
over the front lawns taking time and personalized? So much for the decades practicing.
So much for the hall doors, the varnished and adult mystery, deepening
weekend dreams, deepening the hobbies woven, the skeletal awkwardness
and household interests, for living old and off, hearing the tall grass sob,
seasonally drawn and stretched, and seeing the wheat hued light assume
a steeper influence, following the scores and story-lines and satellite attentions,
the pre-venting scripts, centripetal gradients and chills, caculated back to stasis
and to outlet benefits.
Breaking In
Filling a page when he might just as well have filled a page, he likes the raw materials the ammonia-haunted bowls, expressions the old men shared among the riggings and the fiscs, susceptible to prompts, to the motions just behind the layings-on and arrogance. Verve deepens in the templates, in the course of vegetables, in every leisure to know, leaving the closed shops caught and the keen edge of argument, fingers clearing out the cache, spilling the ghostly fruit, the ghosts already gone into the lull on entering, deepening the whispers in old port and in the dream-souffles. He’ll let the barn-mice jig, he thinks, wearing the scraps of festival, perked and erudite, subverting the swaggers afterward, the children worrying their lives, and every awkward emphasis, having these ermine, egg-white, scarlet points to get across, and doubling the detachment when their good fun’s done.
Phil Lucas
The Silence of the Suburbs
The silence of the suburbs, ebony still. Coolly gazing heaven loosely fingers the half moon, and stars puff sleepily into the shawl of the dark.
The last jet of nightfall lumbers upwards, grudgingly, with 400 new adventurers tightly dreaming of what will be.
And there below is fat Jim Ferry rolling from the rumble-mumble electric train. “There’ll be a better tomorrow,” his sozzled heart grumbles, and he loosens his tie in anticipation of what will never come.
The half moon is hazy now and the stars yawn, “it’s just another jet in the clasping smoke of still.” Fat Jim Ferry looks to the skies. “Clouds,” he whispers, alone.
The silence of the suburbs, ebony still.
Lunchtime Black
She sits only for an hour. But, there is no golden revelation at the bottom of a snatched paper cup. No answer between nervous bites from a wilted balsa wood sandwich. Not even a smile to the sun, as she beats away the swarm of office edicts, will set her free. Just a hope that she is not another face amongst this conjurors’ madness of souls. That alone may see her through.
Do What’s Good For You
“Dirty seaweed,” mother says. “Put it down and eat your burger.”
Alexis Lykiard
Faking Whoopee
We’re on a mission saving you every penny! Both premise and brash promise (like how many? imply a simply vast benevolence, pace The Morrisons Experience. What lies behind those words, what truth, if any? Revalue life, the best Free Gift, and save far more by mere avoidance of a big bluff Superstore.
Epitaphs for the Blessed Margaret
Graffito For A Grave
Writ large on a wall somewhere in Brixton: IRON LADY? RUST IN PEACE
Shopping For The Nation
Her greed-grocer mind spelled Upward Mobility whatever the price
Early Learner In The Class Struggle
Young ‘Snobby Roberts’ reinvented herself, moved on, waging worse wars
Osborne at Her Obsequies
A clown’s tears, facile: they’re all in this together, Tory crocodiles!
Andrzej Łyszkowicz
Terrifying Fruit
Like a magnifying glass against the dark sun training violence and vice on a tiny speck of arm.
So the body in its minute part experiences the pain and horror of murder, torture and abuse.
To say: this is real, and real; To say: this is not real, not real.
But the seed has been sown so it will grow to bear its terrifying fruit.
Blind Night
It’s a blind night that speaks to you — let it spill under your heel
Change
The improbability of change hit him in the gut with the impact of a bullet.
He stirred his coffee carefully, looked at it, poured it into the sink.
Never again will he fool himself into believing.
The Edifices of Tomorrow
When the waiting ends the hours sigh with regret drop one by one, retired soldiers of forgotten campaigns.
It’s no longer possible to buy you flowers or go for a walk.
Let’s storm the edifices of tomorrow, fill them with cries of joy and terror.
