Storage

Beginner by Sherisse

I’d like to go back to the fractured knot of silence, the rental furniture dimly lit, un-mended kitchen light bulb. That vacation spot in winter, the faraway and steady hum of bridge traffic, uncertain and queasy inventiveness, the pause before the tug of that boat⎯obligation.

Imagine you can’t bring the car or your shoes. You can’t tell her that she’s a product of exile, tan fea y tan contenta, or a damsel in distress. You can’t dance in the disco while high on anise and elderflowers. Or talk under a table about poems on fire, hard fingers reaching for a lick.

Imagine some long list of things to recount, the absence of witnesses, my redundant use of the triad. Imagine the anonymous hand cutting the sentence in half, emptiness that later blooms into ashes transported across oceans.

And imagine the old people that brought us here, below the big bed a stash of hand tools; recycled Danish cookie tins; a collection of quarters for spending at the casino or county fair.

“This, here,” you said, arriving and splayed and already on the way to tidying up. Only once, these elaborate deaths, particular coordinates. From now on I’d like to play the part of hysterical, bereft.

***

So You Try to Build a Wall around It by Alan

I ask the gentleman about it and he politely excuses himself. In the bathroom, I imagine, he’s reminded of his last escape and makes sure the drop is not enough to break a leg this time. Meanwhile, I eat through my own jail cell while someone laments over a Chapman Stick thick with delay.

Days later, I pretend to be frozen on my parents’ lawn. Having decided that they’d have to sell the place like so many others have gone on and done, we settle on emptying out the garage to tidy things up a bit. The visitors come like dial up (end of a court, no time for signage), but the idea lights of the suburbs for miles. It’s a storage facility. I have a tag hanging from a cuff. I wish you were here on sale too.

On the loneliest of islands is a harbor where all the boys and girls would go to kiss and smoke cigarettes and get away from the calendar for a while. Here the secrets that crawled in between garments would bite later and eventually but leave no visible mark. Instead the bump and gong of boat material against wave and itself, others. Some fool decided to build a wall around it.

My history and your history and everybody’s history rides through the night sky on the backs of meteors. And if you think we’re going to crash into a ground someday, you’re probably right. But I want to add that the ground is not solid enough to contain our histories, love. The ground is no stopping place for comets like us.

***

Now pass the wine by Lyle

Is it too late, once there’s blood in your wine, to contemplate god or some semblance thereof? If you own storage, is it too late to consider life at home? What about after the lights go out? Are your prayers overdue (but not before)? Has the chance gone to say I love you? How will I know? That dividing line that is all or nothing? Can monogamy be rekindled once the flame of syphilis has burned out? How long before all the stars are counted? Surely you will balk at all of these questions. There is not even the space for you to answer them. What if I say I’m sorry? When you read this (though I know you will not), will you be filled with anger? Surprise? Disgust? Or is it even too late for any of that? And when was it too late?

Answer carefully. Your life depended on it once the question was asked.

***

Delicate Invitations by Bill

This plane seems ordinary. Painfully so in so many ways. The lines are so often straight, collecting perpendicular angles into collapsed too small spaces, bringing what is naturally rare mundanely to wide true vistas and coaxing shadows into definite shapes. They pillared the world with uniformity.

They would be tried and charged to the end of existence if this were the merest conception of their enterprise and our initial verdict was nearly such. We must have standards after all.

But worlds exist within worlds stretching between infinities running in every direction and you do not see and what I have found inside these straight lines of ubiquity are a thousand oceans from long dead worlds suspended in air in the clear light teaming with life.