Ex-Prez

Photo © & courtesy of Nicole Provencher

Road Dream by Nicole Provencher

I am driving through the desert. It is hot and the cotton fabric from my t-shirt is wet and wadded against the small of my back. In the seat next to me my husband rests his elbow on the ledge of the car window. He is grinding his teeth and refusing to look in my direction. We left all conversation somewhere between Nevada and this stretch of highway 50. The strangeness of our silence blends with the images blurring past my driver’s window. I see a fifteen foot tall wooden nickel half fallen into the sand, 1,000 shoes perched in the branches of a tree, a gnarled buzzard ripping the entrails from something once warm and covered with fur, and finally a trio of high school boys pissing on a curb.

The gas station looks passable. We need directions. I watch his face in the passenger side mirror. We sit in the car for a full minute before he acknowledges me in the reflection and fumbles with the door handle to exit the car. He walks toward the door of the gas station and stretch my legs, rolling my ankles back and forth as they pop. In my rearview I see trio of boys walking into the lot. One of the boys raises his chin in the direction of the store. The others quicken their pace.

They catch him as he is coming out. The first boy pushes him up into a wall. The drink in his hand appears to float before falling, creating liquid branches in the sand at his feet. The second boy shoves a palm into the back of his head, catching hair in a fist and snapping his head back. He rolls my husband chest first into the wall and presses his neck against the rough seams of the brick. I watch and cannot move. The backs of my legs itch against the vinyl of the seat. I hear only one sound when the third boy moves something into his side and moves the body to the ground. The boys run into the desert. They disappear into the sun.

Later I would dream of the same stretches of road. A fifteen-foot tall nickel, shoes rocking in the wind, the gnarled buzzard, three boys, and what could have been, but was not quite, a sound.

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Republican America by Lyle

Mother ballooned up in the summer 1987. Reagan stepped up the war on drugs in 1986 making mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offences. I don’t mean ballooned figuratively. Father, a good ole boy to be sure, had “accidentally,” as the story goes from the rather one-sided perspective, jabbed her with a some kind of needle connected to a tank of helium. What were they doing with helium? The prisons were filling up with people arrested on drug-related charges. Many were non-violent offenders. That’s the story my father told to his sheriff buddy: “I tripped with the thing in my hand and... it just happened so fast.” Reagan was in office for eight years. My father never shed a tear and neither did I, always the obedient son: inculcated, indoctrinated, inseminated. My father still tells the story of his wife, the Democrat, and the canister of helium. Kaboom, he says.There’s never a dry eye in the house.

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Preside by Forrest Roth

They kept the stockyard of American Presidents forever full, lined by barbed wire, under lock and key. From a distance you could still see Reagan first, then Kennedy, then Washington and FDR and others jostling for favorable position, then a hidden assortment of the better-knowns, the lesser-knowns, the mostly forgotten, the terminally mediocre, and the non-existent. Was McKinley despondent because everyone wept for Lincoln in a theater while he was merely killed on a promenade in Buffalo? Could Carter dream of toppling the Ayatollah in Tehran with a gung-ho squad of Navy SEALs? Did Nixon wish he had Teddy’s big stick during the lonely hours of evening? Would William Henry Harrison ever find himself? When we cared to write our papers about them, our teachers had told us, “Stand there. Be in their presence. The topics will come through the chain-link fence.” And so they did, but we felt the need to shower instead before returning to class empty-handed. We were academic failures and miscreants. Disrespectful. Unworthy. But the American Presidents were all out there, we protested without success, awaiting the casual visit of our flashlights. We could be students of the ceaseless yet.

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Over It, With or Without by Bill

Isn’t that made to wonder, with awe set to scale growing as the proportions strain out, leaving a viscous paste on the bottom on the bowl. I won’t get inside of your head. I don’t want to take anything away from this, using the puddles at your feet to wash clean my short term memory so I never have to think about it because you are getting too good at this and I need to live, which i can’t do with that awareness taking up the floor of my brain’s living room. You’ve already set fire to one bookshelf in there and flipped over my desk. I’m pretty sure you’ve been reading my signed comics, since there are smudges on the bags and the tape is torn. Time meant never having enough furniture. No, it didn’t actually mean that, how could it? Where would time put a chaise lounge? How many crystal punch-bowls could you possibly hope to keep track of once you start storing them in extinction event limestone cave bunkers?

Madness is a brain full of hope, saturated by blindly impotent will and encased in a rose-colored case sitting atop an ivory pedestal in front of a waterfall. Upstream is a missile plant and the turtles are so full of PCBs they have to be declared toxic waste sites. That tingling you feel when you bath in the pool isn’t a mystical healing solution so much as hydrochloric acid. All of your turbines are coated in soot and all of your tears have more sodium dioxide in them than saline.

The future to you is essentially a sandwich. It’s lunch. It’s being caught up in the middle of the day and not wanting to make much of a fuss so you slap a couple pieces of bread around someone’s dreams, spread a little of their past around it, and dip in a soup you had made from their ambitions and the sweat of their brow. You leave half the sandwich uneaten and wait until it has grown stale before you throw it out. When the cleaning lady comes in to empty the trash you grope her, and slap her across the mouth because you thought she looked at your shoes, then you settle back down in the fine leather chair behind the desk and get back to work.

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The Head and the Fence by Alan

The head rose above the fence in broad daylight, and it was (not only for this particular head but also for all the heads like it in its general vicinity) a kind of daylight that might make a person cry for, indeed, these heads had not seen daylight for quite a long while. No. These heads had not suffered capital punishment but rather punishment for the capital and of the capital, and for this reason, these heads were special heads. And for this reason, quite a long time is a relative statement understood only by a person (or a head) on a certain side of the fence.

Niccolo Athens :: Piano Trio

This month we decided to do something a little different. We used a short musical piece on which to base our stories. It's a piano trio by the talented, young Niccolo Athens.

Niccolo Athens :: Piano Trio

Reminisce by Johanna

She stepped onto the train and into the future, but her past refused to join her. She tried to coax her past forward with promises of success and spiritual growth, but the past refused, rooting herself in youth. She progressed with the future, establishing a stable marriage, two kids and a lucrative career. But in the past, she still worked as a barista at the coffee shop on Capitol Hill. Though her future self had broken up with that drunken tattoo artist years ago, her past gave him another chance, and when it looked unlikely to succeed, she wove him with fantastical merit. He became more handsome, intelligent, kind and adventurous until her future self began to wonder if she had made an awful mistake breaking up with him.

The past built a house of animal bones and peacock feathers and wove clothes of rainbow silk that she harvested from her worms. She made mulberry wine and sold it for gold. In the future, she could only reminisce, full of regret for the life she could have had.

One day, very much in the present, she called the past to a meeting, hoping to reconnect, but the past appeared more ragged than she remembered, more plain. The past was settling in around her. Their chairs hard and their coffee cold and bitter. She soon lost interest in this unlikely self, disappointed that she was no more than who she was.

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Wisteria by Lyle

The wisteria vines outside my window on the second floor snarl and explode in the scent of purple. It is late spring and already hot but I have my window open because I can hear the buzz of bees that way. The sun warms my face, the beginnings of sweat beading on my forehead; I have pulled the chair up to the window, my knees against the wall, my hands on the window sill, rough, cracking paint against the softness of the palms of my hands, which tingle just so from only now having washed my coffee cup, my bowl, the hot water and abrasion of steel wool. My day is over. My day is just beginning. Light glow of orange, an umber perhaps, from the beams against my eyelids always closed. Suddenly the sharp chirp of a cardinal and everything goes stunningly silent. The heat is gone and I am divested of myself.

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The Other by Forrest

Let’s give me a taste. Let’s give me in, he would say. There were other ways saying this he would not say, but it was too late. She had tasted him. She had given him in. And instead of something she would not say in return, there was another taste letting her give her a him he would say in the other ways.

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Nickel Time by Bill

We live in a strange world made stranger by our memories. Time spits chance out of its memory, gravity dragged along and stretched too thin or compressed too high. Gravitational equations map to boring curves until you pull a dense magnetic field upon them. Music dropping you below the map inside of your mind, down into the caves hiding shiftships and an armory of weapons fashioned from the bones of gods while open windows on the world tell you more than you need to know about your neighbors and the earbuds you bought because they were cheap buzz buzz buzz letting you stay aware of your station.

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Your Scene by Alan

There are curtains in this scene that fall extemporaneously over windows pulsing with light. Outside there’s a sidewalk, a patch of grass, and yards of street. There’s a child on a bicycle. When you get a closer look, you’re relieved to find that you don’t know him.

You decide to step outside into the weather and almost feel like you forgot something. But rather than turn around, you go forward without further hesitation. This decision might be informed by the fact that you feel the pressure of a time frame.

Some kind of desperate longing hums inside you. It’s the fear of conflict raising its ugly head again. You’ve been through this. You always do everything to avoid it, want everyone to like you to a certain extent because you like everyone. You really want to. But you know that may seem an artifice in a way to others and perhaps even to yourself.

The child is gone but there are lawns. You continue to not look back, but it’s difficult. In the middle of this thing now, you can only attempt to shape it. Make a statement. Something like, “I wish I could get over this,” or “How did I get here?” But again, nothing comes out. The morning or afternoon can be any morning or afternoon and your suffering any and all suffering.

Don’t look back. This is the beginning of adulthood. You can title it “Growing Up” or you can wish it never existed. Why is everything so stately and robust and so full of whispers? The whispers, you think, yes, that’s it. Go to the whispers. They will tell you that the others aren’t talking about you. They’re talking about justice and what’s right and what’s wrong and that when you take a stand some people may get hurt. And so, this is what hurt looks like. It makes other people hurt and writhe and twist and incessantly wander the outside.

This conversation you’re having in your head is not always good for you. Today, sure fine. But tomorrow. The next day. When will it end? When you step back inside yourself, a home? But what will be there if not emptiness and despair? Despair. Such a 19th century word.

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Check out Et in Arcadia Ego, another wonderful musical piece by Niccolo Athens, and an article (including a short interview) from WNET New York Public Media about a composition. He also has a new website.

Winged

Super Frog by Alan

Super Frog ducks the angels. He doesn’t have time for that kind of stuff. Sure, they spy on him with their holy surveillance mechanisms, but Super Frog doesn’t pay them no mind. His missive is to fight crime. Evildoers beware. S is for Save. F is for freedom. In the dark alleys. In the moral ambiguities. In the in between. That’s where Super Frog lives. Wherever there is injustice, you will find him. Wherever there is suffering, he’ll be there. Wherever liberty is threatened, you will find…Super Frog.

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Francisco by Johanna

The desert rains came hard and fast that spring, a sudden rush of precipitation that flooded cracked wash basins and resurrected arroyos in one day. The Salton Sea splashed over the lip of dykes and sent the salty farm chemical waters into the Borrego. With it, tiny tadpole spawns that knew nothing beyond murky puddles, dripped into the arid back-country where they settled in the shallow indentation of an old pack rat's hole. There amongst the shiny things – a sequin from a baby shoe, a chip of abalone, a vending machine ring – only one tadpole survived the evaporation of lengthening days. Not merely survived, but evolved as if the universe depended on such things. There is no way to know for sure if that frog realized it was different from any other. He had no parents, no mentors, no examples, only an urge. But the first day that frog spread his reptilian wings and took flight, it rescued a coyote from a rattlesnake advance and Francisco the Super Frog was born.

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I Spy with My Little Eye Something that Is Gold by Lyle

A bell, he responded. Around that flying toad. Dumbass.

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Tunnel by Forrest

My son and the milk carton viewfinder. These two were never meant to be separated. Because the kid won’t let go of it—that is, he won’t let me wash his head during bathtime out of fear of loosening the duct tape around his head. He sleeps with it on. He goes to school with it on. He eats meals with attempted precision of fork-to-mouth. But, of course, I’m more than welcome to navigate him through our home while his peripheral vision has been completely negaged.

I’ve reached the point where I want to confess to him, “We never talk anymore.”

I’ve reached the point where I want to call her and say, “Look, our son has given over his life to a milk carton viewfinder—what do I do here?” And probably she’ll only say, “Your problem.” And unlikely she’ll say, “Therapy.” Though most assuredly she’ll say, “Your problem, and you’re welcome to it.” She knows my feelings often succumb to the occasional validation.

“Your mother says you’ll go blind with that thing on,” is what I want to say to him instead. To instill a slight fear. Then again, he may already be blind. I can’t tell what’s going on in there. 

I put up some crazy-looking paper mache flying frog in the living room, an Indonesian clearance item from the World Market. I want to test a theory. The kid parks himself underneath and trains the viewfinder on it. Stays there for hours on end. I go to bed before him that night, and he’s still there in the morning, sitting cross-legged in perfect contemplation of the object.

“What do you think of the frog?” I ask him while looking up from my cereal. “I might get rid of it—looks too silly up there.”

He gets up awkwardly. A moment to stretch his legs. He swings the viewfinder at me with my spoon suspended in mid-air, and I, unable to take a bite with him watching, search for anything moving about all the way at the end that will let me move again.

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AMP'D by Bill

The seas dark and reminding the mirrors of the great old ones slumbering. Back is forth, hands circle light inscribing fourth walls all falling down. It’s so relieving in the seattle scene, off and odd then off and on and off again working in a factory making coal-fired political pottery. The call for the ticket, dropped into the fish tank outside to hide from the sharks. The trains are lonely; three back of the line in a bad order - an incontinent old man leading off. The loss is in the heart and the mind seeks out the phrases and the hymns that cast down the eyes.

The street with the soundtrack of life in the ear, tiny little spheres of the future wedged into ears granting mood and atmosphere, but only ever reflecting what is and what was sacrificed, cut from the core, carved from the heart, leaving the scarred wings and the gnawed legs on the plate instead of taking them home for the dog.

Red Room

Orange & Yellow by Forrest

There was a room something like a room so very red she stayed in wanting to read in, and in there, somewhere, as what could be seen through the window, she read as if the something like a room had two windows overlapping the first and foremost, not seeing the person watching her reading as if she were reading, as if she were in a room otherwise so very orange, until the person not seeing any reading now saw the yellow cloud above her head, above something like a fine litter of pages from her wanting hand.

***

Deployed Upon that Plain by Bill

Rooms smell of the body in repose, in response, in rage and blithering delirium. Rooms smell like the tiniest portion of blood a cutter allows to spill. Smelling like cheap beer sweat, recovery sports drink, and greasy chinese food. Waste basket basketball played without a round-rimmed receptacle, just kind of tossing shit where for and letting it be two points. Eyes red from lack of sleep or herbal infusion camouflaged in a blood meridian wash across the glass. The creaking of bodies stiff jointed with blood clotting in the lower portions of their legs, bodies in heat and who puts a giant pane of glass up in a space clearly designed to allow for frustrated spontaneous carnality? Still, ghosts of gratuitous grunts and groans still linger have no doubt, joining dull head-to-desk thumps over consideration of early colonial American alcohol consumption and the quadrahedrial crystal lattice structure of silicates. The sound believes itself being spoken into existence, buffets the wall of dead air channeled soundproof construction and dies. Redrum of sound. Red room where sound goes to die. The Reading Room.

***

Reading Room (A Short Novella in 5 Acts) by Alan 

“The third person is inherently limited because…well, indeed, it is a small room.” Professor Lufowski paused as if to soak in the thought.

Randall shifted his way through the garden outside the library strategically overstepping the newly-planted begonias but not without the suggestion of mass extermination Godzilla-style.

Midnight on campus. Where else could they make out and anything that follows?

Nabokov dazzled Helena, and she in turned dazzled all that spied her, reading Lolita, alone (hardly), in the bookstore, across the street.

The questions grew larger (like a flock of birds or a plane getting closer) before they broke off (like the necklace around Si’s neck) and were lost to her (but not to someone else) for approximately 5 years until they circled back and were found and were, subsequently, lost again.

***

Red Room by Johanna

R stared at the door to the room. She could see the red light shining from behind the window shade. She was waiting for her husband. He had entered the room an hour ago to fill a prescription for anti-fungal cream. Her mother exited the room. She nodded at R. R watched her leave down the long hallway. Still no sign of her husband. Her brother exited the room. He stopped to ask her what she was doing there. “I'm waiting for J,” she answered. “Oh,” he responded and exited down the long hallway. Her sister walked out of the room. R asked her what she was doing there, “I went for a run,” she said, “I needed some exercise.” “Oh,” R said. Her sister left down the hall, sneakers squeaking against the vinyl tile. R checked her watch. Her son walked out of the room. “I didn't know you were here,” R said.

“I had to take an algebra test,” he answered.

“How did you do?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Good.”

She watched him bob down the long hall, books under his arm. She began to feel hot. Sweat dripped down the back of her knees. She tapped her heel on the floor to calm herself but it only made her feel more anxious. She stood and stared at the door. “Where is he?” she asked the door. “How should I know?” it answered. “That's it,” she said, “I'm going in.” R opened the door to the red room and went in.

***

Dimensions (by Lyle)

Red reading room: 6’x5‘x10’.

300 cubic feet mostly of air but also including a desk, a very shallow shelf, two chairs, my orange juice, my papers laid out in order on the desk and me (this room is filled with my thoughts — it is the perfect size for that). There is also a plaque that reads

Dimensions

Red reading room: 6’x5‘x10’...

Evening

Bottle by Lyle

Had I considered that I was on an island (and you will rightly object that I must have known) I would have reconsidered it as the location for the dinner. I set up the table while my companion strung the lights from the palm trees. The boat was moored along the other side of the island but, despite being able to traverse the island in a matter of a couple of dozen steps, hidden by a small copse of palm trees (the very ones my companion decorated). Once I had set the table I took several photos and gave the camera to my companion who left me to wait for my girlfriend’s arrival. She never came though the high tide did. As the water rose, the palm leaves suddenly looked too seaweedy. This is a drawing of the photo I liked best. It is from memory:
 

It’s not very good. The shadows are all wrong.

***

Plurality by Forrest

That shade of her, coming to clear and only again. That setting down, sitting down, all around of her: the good sport. She would set the table and I made the meal. Once, long before that, I made the table from beams of wood and she set the meal elsewhere away, somewhere off to the immediate side of her side. If we ate that meal, it was while I worked and she ate with someone else inside her inside—hence the third person indeterminate. One uses the fork, one uses the knife, and one uses the reflection of utensils against each other, caught in time sparingly for the last evening light.

***

The Latter Days of the Golden Boy by Bill

I’ve got my train up to speed running through the Discworld. The whole series of books stacked next to my bed, which is a deflated air mattress thrown onto the floor of this ‘loft’ in a converted warehouse and there is a red light in the corner of the ceiling that I cannot reach which never goes off. There are times it looks like glowing watermelon, as if the summer’s in this moisture saturated concrete masoleum of manufacturing will not be vibrantly maleficent. The books at the bottom of the stack are leeching up the fluids, and when I think about how few of those fluids might be water the light turns into a dim, far-away sun, weak and dying just barely able to sustain itself and much of its solar system long long ago having plunged into the near absolute zero range as the void surrounding them sucks the heat like giant wasps raiding a beehive, crushing them into solid, unmoving death. I can’t bear to look at the light directly then, and only chance to glance askance lest it finally, fatally, goes out for good.

***

“MIAMI” + “SOUTH BEACH” + “UFO” by Alan

UFO delivers final hours of... 

BULIC - 2 hours ago

“I think, …makes it alright to believe in such things as UFOs because, ... famed Professor Reginald George of the University of Florida, …

Crew flee as boat smashes against…

EIGHTmsn - 13 hours ago 

... the northern wall of the Seed Bar on the New South Collins border, ... the breakwall at, … near Null Heads, … Eight News reported.

UFO sightings off the charts worldwide in wake of historic solar storm

BULIC - 5 days ago

Locals here at this popular UFO sighting location at Salient Point -- and down the state coast at nearby, … said they “breathed an, …

Gold Coast police find French man's body

EIGHTmsn - 18 hours ago

... at Fisherman's Cove at Main Beach about 8pm (EST) on Sunday, police say, ... it could be anything from an underwater Stonehenge to a crashed, ...

I Shall Be Released: A New Beginning

NewCityBeat - Oct 6, 2023

... Idlewild East in 1998 and the nearly inconceivable heights achieved by, .... of similarly inspired friends have turned their love of The Beach Boys, ...

Stay up to date on these results:
Create an email alert for “miami” + “south beach” + “UFO

***

Almost Outside by Johanna

Writers write about coffee shops because that is where they spend their time writing. Writers believe coffee shops make them more productive even after spending ten minutes discussing the differences  between espressos, cappuccinos and machiattos with the barista who went to coffee college. Writers believe they are more productive in coffee shops even after spending ten minutes pretending to type while they eavesdrop on a couple of tourists speaking in Spanish about how this town is overrated and they should head back to Santa Fe. Writers like the way Spanish people say Santa Fe, putting the accent on the first syllable instead of the second. Writers like to hide themselves inside of their characters, illuminating the things they would otherwise keep to themselves. Writers in coffee shops hate the way the sunlight through the window creates a glare on their laptop screen. Writers in coffee shops like the way the sunlight through the window makes them feel like they're almost outside. Writers are almost outside, like the reflection of street signs in their utensils. Writers prefer to write in coffee shops with wooden stir sticks instead of reflective utensils.

Texas 287

Christmas Light Larger This Year by Johanna

The light of Christmas was larger this year according to holiday researchers. As usual, women toiled through the menial but loving tasks – baking, wrapping, addressing envelopes – while men forged ahead with warrior stamina amongst the forthright commercialism of the dark side. Even with so large a light, Christmas remained dim as people everywhere borrowed from the light to feed the darkness.

Even Santa Claus was unable to resist the dark forces. Giving the elves the year off without pay and blaming it on the recession, he opened a factory in Chengdu where he didn't have to provide employee health care. “No one believes in me here anyway,” Santa Claus said about his move to China.

The Obama Administration called a state of emergency. “The little light that remains will have to be protected from the well-intentioned but prolific screenwriters of Hallmark Christmas movies, in order that future generations of Americans might still be able to enjoy it,” President Obama said during a press conference yesterday. When asked how he was going to do this, President Obama replied, “All I can say for now is that the light will be kept safe.”

Early this morning, Wikileaks resurfaced temporarily to bring us important news. According to emails sent between the Obama Administration and Santa Claus, Americans everywhere have been unknowingly hiding the Christmas light out in the open where no one could have suspected. Apparently, people have been stringing it from rooftops and tossing it over ornamental bushes in their very own backyards. The Obama Administration has yet to respond to these allegations, but Santa confirmed late this afternoon that the emails are true and apparently all of those Christmas lights were made in China. 

***

Untitled by Bill

The albinos have gotten whiter and the drunks have gotten drunker. Holidays in the Legion Post bar start seemingly as a tradition and turn into the chance to view people turning into their parents. The moms are bombed since they stood in their robes for their graduation pictures with a seven month bump and everyone, us included, have thickened just like the gravy we’ll have tomorrow at dinner. We’re rounded out in the face. This is not a puffiness. There is no botox here. There was no air pump hooked up to the sides of our heads. More a callous. A building up of the weary worries. Fresh-Scent spray polish smell of divorce court desks poisoning us; the tightrope walk of staying as close to zero in the bank without going over like our lives are game shows in reverse; staring across the table at in-laws you cannot stand to look at and you hope that one of these times they fall off the stool just a little bit harder, a little more dramatically, and do some real damage when they hit the floor. Eventually we’ll all drag ourselves off to mass around midnight.

***

Krikor’s Closet by Alan

In the room there were candles. And in the candles there was light. And in the light there was hope. A kind of trinity. A kind of memory.

He loved the number three. This I remember about Krikor. And he loved memory. He loved to get swept up by it during midnight shifts, revel at the dips and brace himself for the uphill climbs as if it were a ride at an amusement park. If life were to end in 2012, he’d think, there is nowhere else I’d like to be. He’d dance with his mop. He’d romance the air.

I know this because he used to confide in me. It was during the holidays, always during the holidays, when we’d gather in the basement of the church and Sonia would made boreg and someone would bring the right kind of lahmajoun from Jersey and all of our mouths would stink from the garlic and onions and feta, especially Krikor’s. I know this because he’d lean in real close and tell me about how this place, this place was his home, and I’d forget the ride in, upstairs, the world outside, my family, everything even, until he disappeared in the dark.

***

multiplicity by lyle

the audacity of hope is what i thought first
audacity
paucity
something i was pretty sure
a second opinion is for failures and there were 287 of them so many second opinion all second opinions so many candles so many failures so little control
but in all probability so much relief something i know nothing about
even after shitting there is not so much relief as exhaustion and shitting in a shrine bathroom?
it must be part of the shrine if it is called the shrine bathroom
about on par as far as exhaustion is concerned actually i thought it would be more — more something the way religion is always more
something

in the mirror i practice furrowing my brow just the slightest twist up — down concern pain anger happiness though i don’t recognize this one so well — over and over — i don’t actually feel any of those emotions as i do them but i imagine someone seeing me and think they might feel those things just watching as i do them

my own empathy with someone watching me do something that may mean something to someone empathetic but not the emotions

the brief concatenations of drunkenness though i cannot say that i was drunk for it may have been the inevitability of humanness and are they different? drunkeness/humanness: the state of being something? being something which is to say asking for something lighting a candle so to speak the flame eating at the wax until either it so slowly expires or the proprietor snuffs it out so that someone else can so quickly light it again — their own failure then flickering and licking itself

287 candles
so specific
so specific a number of failures in a little town in texas
but i’ll believe it if only for a moment.

***

Tithe by Forrest

I don’t like to recall you. This is when you are quite improper in your offertory singing behind me once you were done singing in front of me. Your mild despicableness. Knowing I am perfectly known by no one. I—if I’m allowed to talk in here—I have my ways about me, the same as keeping an uncharged fire extinguisher next to all those content, glowing votives. Where does my attention go, sent scattering over the floor at your heels, supposedly? Not anywhere today. Today I put a slip of special paper, a donation in your name, in the collection box. I just got a saint I haven’t seen who gave me something like hard-earned money.

PossumNotes

Bruce by Alan

Bruce the possum was the kind of handsome that would make all the boys swoon. This particular quality to his being was enhanced every time he was on stage. Something about a microphone, a piano, three chords, and his brand of leveling truth, which was gutteral, sweet, and complex enough to liven curiosity’s prick. This worried Javier. They had been together now for six and a half years. Things were wonderful in a way. They were best friends. They were confidantes. They challenged each other intellectually. But the love had indeed fizzled as evidenced by the intermittent sex and the dimming physical charge. Bruce would spend more and more time in the garage, manipulating pedals and sifting through their “trash” for ebay prizes that would fund his travels. Javier felt for sure that this next tour would be the end. Bruce would be lost to him. Found by another. Javier’s therapist cautioned him against this kind of thinking. It will paralyze you, he warned. Go out. Do something. Treat yourself well, Javier. You deserve it. These words reverberated in his head as Javier wrote down what he thought would be a fitting ending on a few pages of his notebook and scattered them throughout the house while Bruce showered. And while Bruce was toweling off, Javier stepped out into the cool November air and considered his options. He wanted to run – down the block, to his parents’ house, to an old lover, to 10th grade, to anywhere, forever, never. Instead, he opened the garage door and paused. The wind swirled through the gossamer at the entrance while Javier said his name over and over again. Bruce. Bruce. Bruce.

***

Possum Notes by Johanna

He came and went with the moon. Like the moon, he was still there when you couldn't see him. A trail of crumbs to closet recesses, the smell of wood shavings on winter clothes, creaking in the attic on windless mornings. When he returned, I opened my palms to him, offering what little I had. I stepped on dainty toes, left the lights on at night, cleaned voraciously. Gone again, I felt uneasy like tiny feet tread across my chest while I slept. I never knew which to prefer, the pale glow of midnight or the revelation of restless comets.

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Whispy Things Strewn by Lyle

Part I

Wispy felt trapped in his life. Feels trapped in his life. Had felt trapped in his life. Would have felt trapped. Did not. Etc. Detritus, he told himself. But he had grown accustomed to the detritus of his life, things strewn around him, things strewn behind him, long since gone but not. Things. Strewn. Goodbye, he said but he didn’t move. He tried sarcasm: Nice knowing you. Take care of yourself. But he was paralyzed through no fault of his own. Well, partially it was his own fault this linguistic parallel. Things had been strewn around so much through his life and he had done nothing to stop it. Things are strewn around so much. He strews so many things about his life.

Part II

...have an inaccurate temporal understanding of when an even occurred. It should always seem that they happened much later or much earlier than it actually manifested. Temporal-photographic memory means that the patient is not actually “living” while only “not-knowing” constitutes profitable post-conception. This in an of itself, however, presents several problems. Primarily, what should one use as a reference? Or put another way how can one be sure to know that one is misperceiving? One could use said temporal-photographic persons though this would perhaps be construed as cruelty, though on whose part is arguable considering that this person would have to be with the living at all times of day and conscious of everything that they perceive and this does not take into account interpretation of this stimuli, an entirely different debate. But I digress. Considering the temporal and spatial nature of possums...

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Best Possum by Forrest

The best possum of my life walked out on me, on us, while I slept, and now this life seems a tawdry cheat. I can see him with a half-full whiskey bottle on the table—our last fifth, as it were—scribbling, tasking, trying to find the perfect five words to write on a piece of notepaper to leave on the kitchen counter, and this is what my betrayed eyes find: “Cant figure you—outta here.” These are the sort of sentiments one expects of lesser possums, but not my best possum who made a private Xanadu out of Styrofoam coolers. In kind, I wanted a heart-rending testimony of his pain and anguish over the inner conflict of him abandoning me condensed into a syntactically precise vehicle of pure literary merit; instead, I get the cheapest De Profundis ever composed. And I let him wallow through my neighbor’s overripe trash can for this? No, this will not do. I cannot allow myself the indignity of having the best possum dismiss me that easily. There will be repercussions. The next possum of indeterminate ability to wander through my yard at night—I will ask him to have the Book of Ages clasped in his little pink paw. He will try as he might to please me, but he must never think he is the best possum by my bedside lamp.