Spidey Sense

Spidey-Dirge by Forrest

Spider-Man, leave me the hell alone. I don’t care that your Spidey-Sense is tingling. That any part of you is tingling. Because I bought all your action figures without the luxury of kung-fu grip. Because I lost my best friend in the third grade in an argument over not differentiating the Green Goblin from the Hobgoblin. Because I sang mercilessly that you were the “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” during the 1970’s while my parents were considering divorce in another room. Because I never knew who Peter Parker really was until I grew up. Not the inconspicuous weenie who cared more about Aunt May and Uncle Ben than his All-American girlfriend. Not the good guy posing as a good guy who secretly wanted to be a good guy. A better guy.

So what of your bettering? You’ve probably already died in a dozen different ways with special limited edition covers and holographic authenticators of Marvel Comic quality assurance at five bucks a pop—only to be reincarnated later for another five. You donned a black outfit for awhile because that had to be soooo bad-ass. And some douchey-acting prick without a haircut played you in the latest sequel. I won’t be surprised if your next nemesis is yourself battling the bottle and the side-effects from Xanax abuse. Anything can be dressed up in scary colors for our entertainment now. They robbed the bank. You let them get away with it.

You can mope under my old bunk bed all you want, unitard-fucker. No one’s going to give you a parking ticket. No one sleeps there anymore. No radioactive spider under the pillow, either. You’ll see what kind of a childhood you can save when you don’t arrive just in time: something that resembled yours.

***

Hero Sandwich by William

The costume smelled like a pantry, like potatoes in a sack on the floor and celery seasoning but the smell didn’t matter. We’d tried this grift once before, setting up a tent and billing the chance to meet superman but it was just a short guy in Supe’s PJs. You were wrong when you said everything’s going to be alright.

The difference now was people could come in and sit on the little bench-bed we had set there and they could just stare at our guy in the costume and he’d just stare back, but if you waited five minutes, if you sat and stared at him for five minutes he’d tell you to take a picture cause it lasted longer.

Did you ever think about it he got sick? We took the idea from that Marina Abramovic thing where she sat in the chair and called it The Hero is Present (our thing was the hero, her’s was the artist) but he didn’t do anything heroic which we thought was the best gag about it all because he was actually really hungover and hated sitting there and would hug himself and rock with the shakes in between us letting people into the tent with him.

***

After the Storm by Alan

the subway tunnels were flooded with brackish water that sent everything underground up to the surface. What was once beneath and accustomed to great moans of night had its first glimpse of light. And the mingling, the slow getting used to, the initial shock.

I noticed the two rats climbing the stairs of the entrance at Union Square, how they squinted in the sun for a moment and sought for some downtrodden corner of familiarity/universe. Next to the well, wrapped in damp comforters and worn clothes, a man pulling red spots of alarm off his skin did not even flinch as they slipped in between the folds. I stopped to let him know. Offer a warning about what the darkness can release into the world. I urged that he be mindful, but did not acknowledge me either.

***

Spiderman's Mid-life Crisis by Johanna

Let's be honest, spiders creep people out with all those legs, crawling over furniture, hiding inside shoes. Spiders are generally disliked and no one wants to live with them. Anytime they see one, they wash them down the bathtub drain or suck them up with a vacuum. I can't blame them. Spiders bite and when they do, they're either tiny itchy annoyances or swollen painful bruises. Even a spider in the wild is a nuisance, leaving their webs suspended between two trees so someone can walk through them, squealing and thrashing to free themselves of dead bugs. Worse, I am a giant human-sized spider with a fancy costume. Everyone knows that the larger and more ornate the spider, the scarier they are. Why couldn't I embody something sexier like fire? I could have been shooting flames from my wrists instead of sticky webbing or had blades coming out of my knuckles. But, no. I had to be a giant fucking spider of a man.

***

Not quite a Sound by Lyle

Yeah, my Spidey senses were tingling but they were always tingling, y'know? Buzz buzz buzz. Hard to sleep at night, really. I suppose it was the sleep deprivation, now that I think of it. I was dog tired, actually. My bones hurt. Just a little rest. Just close my eyes for a minute, maybe? But then that tingling -- vaguely sexual in nature -- not quite a noise, not quite a feeling, would wake me back up. No REM. So I started putting on a costume, you know, in a sort of delirium and hopping from roof to roof.

The days are the worst. All the people everywhere with their not-very-savory thoughts that light me up like a Christmas tree (not quite a light, either). I tell you it's a curse, for sure. I remember one day I found myself on a school bus first thing in the morning. Now these are little kids mind you, but I was abuzz even then. No such thing as innocence. That's why I do parties now. No less exhausting but most people are cheery, or at least not thinking about the things they normally think about. The kids wear me out, but that sensation (I can't think of a better word for it) at least crawls to a stop. I'll take the noise any day. The noise and the constant battering from all those children. I still can't sleep at night, but there are those several hours of respite. There will have been, anyway I hope, before they drag off my corpse. And sometimes, if I think about it just right, even a moment to myself.

Drive

For some reason the embed link to this video is not working (linking to a different video). So here's the direct link.

Video © Mike Celona

Partial Impressions of a City in the Rain by Lyle

The residents of this city are uncomfortable with their guardrails. They're on edge; not to be found out in the streets. There is a metaphysical slippage happening around them and this makes them feel sideways (or at least slanted [the stronger of them]). They watch out the windows behind the trees -- those black markers on lawns. "The suppression of language will always create a rift," the man on the radio says. The congregation claps. "The suppression of language is the elephant in the room that cannot be talked about but must be talked upon." "Or from," someone says from the audience to stunned silence. "Or from," the man on the radio repeats to thunderous laughter. Or around or toward or of or before. The metaphysical slippage enlarges and the residents of the city crystallize. Granulate. There is a general consensus of evil -- that language is a wide open field studded with tongues.

***

Courier Times by Forrest

Union Avenue

About where snow can start looking unlikely. Sometimes difficult knowing when rain freezes into it. Or when snow isn’t cold enough. I knew his neighborhood, even through ice on the windshield. Enough ice.

Church Street

Customers. If there’s anything that separates you and me, he said, it’s this: (tapping my arm hard, harder, driving slow with left hand, hitting, shoving, grabbing my neck, grabbing grabbing driving yet). Pussy.

Longnam Drive

I’m good. For all of it. He counts. I hear a number. Houses showing. He counts. There. Her. He hands over. Still driving. Stop asshole. He’ll push me out. Even through the windshield. I’m good. I hear rain.

***

Anticipation by Alan

The mind experiences a certain kind of tremolo when anticipating something. My writer friend brought up a scene recently. It’s the eve before a very serious storm in a large city. The authorities have instructed us to stay home. But when he goes out in the middle of the night, he sees in the dead of quiet a woman searching for some take out. “There is nothing open right now,” my friend says. She mumbles something obscene and rushes away. Afterwards, he gets into his car and drives all night. It begins to rain. He ends up outside the city limits. It’s true. There is no one in the streets. It’s an eerie scene. My friend told me the story was and still is very real. He told me from the road. He’s still driving. Waiting for something, that storm maybe. Always in front of it. Or behind. And in his head, those voices telling him about the precautions and other voices telling him to never be afraid.

***

Good Deed by Johanna

You barely noticed the man waving his arms on the side of the road until you passed him. It was dark and rain drops collapsed on your window faster than your wipers could heave to erase them. You strained to train your eyes on the single white line that bordered your path.

“Go back,” your wife insisted. You considered the hour, your child asleep in the backseat. You considered how fast a man in wet clothes could become hypothermic and how many good deeds you had accomplished that day. You nearly hit a boulder on the opposite shoulder while turning the truck around.

Your wife called to the man now inside his car, “What's wrong? Do you need help?”

“I'm stuck,” he called back.

You had four-wheel drive and a tow rope. You could do it in less than five minutes. You took another look at your daughter, the way her mouth fell open when she slept, just like her mother. Outside, the rain quickly dampened your t-shirt. You called to the man as you hooked the tow rope to his car and then to your own, “When you feel the pull, gas it.”

Your truck wavered over the wet pavement sliding tenuously toward the muddy shoulder until you felt the final jerk that set his car free.

He was grateful, too grateful perhaps. He slurred his thanks. You refused his money and the remains of a six pack sitting beside him in the passenger seat. Waving him ahead, you watched his tail lights swerve across the yellow lines as he headed over the mountain pass.

Back inside the warmth of your truck, the windows steamed over, the wipers still beating their rhythmic trance, you turned to your wife. She had been watching you, waiting to ask you, “What have we done?”

Pond

Meatball by Bill

One's on the inside and one's on the outside. One's making the case and the other's losing steam, feeling run down, tired of the complaints from the moment they wake up and hearing the excuses when the others stop coming home. Calling it a washing machine is a bit of a stretch, and joking about it worse, and the water doesn't even flow into the basin clear anymore. Lights out before anyone see's the flame, and the air's all gone out of the horn calling them home to dinner.

One's on the up and the others on the side, double-olly at the skate park for the kids. It wasn't quite a single step in the wrong direction, it was more of a marathon. Several in fact, all away, every mile ever more removed.

Coming of age only in a novel and getting to the end without realizing the third age was mostly missing, but vitamins and minerals made up for it, borrowing against neglect with supplements and a bit of coaching, wondering finally if better brothers make better fathers, or would have, and still might, the all-father's street laying parallel to his wife one block over so there is maybe, in the final consideration, at least the fidelity of civil planners to sustain us.

***

Pondlife by Forrest

The only mystery is falling in—why no one has done so (to the best knowledge of campus lore), how we wish ourselves out of doing so. As a student, I had talked myself out of dipping so much as a foot in the pond on one occasion; during another, I walked a date around the perimeter, hoping to say something intelligent about the natural design of cypress roots in the Louisiana swamps. Both occasions I was egged on, the former by drunken friends, the latter by the sense of falling in. Instead, I only laughed at the relatively meager size of the still-developing gators, reminding my company how they were removed from the pond at a certain age before they became problematic. Gators falling in a new home, replaced with new hatchlings. The on-going harvest. I forgot my friends. I forgot my date. But the latest gators train their eyes on me about the same as their predecessors. The cypresses keep going nowhere but further down.

***

If I Am Not What I Seem to Be by Alan

What if I say to you that I am not what I seem to be? What if, after all this time, I am somebody else, some other thing? What if, instead of the dove, I am the predator? What if this world is a body of water and the trees the sky and all that’s illuminated on the surface this terrible and irrevocable lie? What if, after all this time, everything that was once still starts to move?

Our story might start to look like one that takes place in some muted green forest or swamp. There may or may not be sound playing in the most telling scene in which I surface transformed. 45 pregnant seconds after we go down as two, I come up as one. There may or may not be silence in the theater. There may or may not be people in the seats, but the movie of our story will play anyway if I am not what I seem to be.

***

Anthropophagy by Johanna

I began like this: smooth, peach, two-legged. Only yesterday, it seems, it was this way, leaning over counters, walking through doors, sitting in chairs. I wore galoshes in the rain, cowered under eves. I faintly remember a kiss, pink, soft, wet, but not like this wet, not damp and murky, but moist and warm. How can I forget? I thought about that kiss every waking moment, wondering where I had lost her, how she had enchanted me.

The change was slow, so slow I almost didn't notice, until the scales on my back reached over my shoulders. I hid myself indoors, listening to outside noises, cars, chainsaws, barking, but as my limbs shrunk and the green skin enveloped me, the noises no longer made sense. I crawled from my bed one morning to the hallway mirror. The transformation was complete, my eyes hooded and dark, my teeth long and sharp, my tail. I was trapped inside for days until someone came looking for me. I didn't recognize her though she called my name, at least I think it was my name. I knocked her over as I ran past, her screams echoing the length of the corridor. She will assume the obvious; I was consumed.

On the street, pedestrians jumped from my way. My feet and my nose, my skin and my tongue, all lead me to this marsh where I dove in, mouth open, and swallowed everything in my path. Now, I covet the dark, the shallow mud, and cattail reeds. I am awaiting her return. She will know where to find me, but will I still remember?

***

Finally by Lyle

It was that smug look that set me off finally. I mean that I was set off primarily by that smug look. Or that that look, after everything else, set me off. Or started to set me off and then pushed me over the edge. It was a fluid motion, my being set off. Calm, calm, calm… you know. And then, but not like I didn’t have my dander up to begin with. Or at some specific point in time. There was a tipping point. Always I’m angry but boiling, blood angry? Something must have pushed me. There was a tipping point. I don’t remember exactly when or I wouldn’t be. Floating here. This floating world of rage. And nothingness. The calm waters of perfect reflection. So peaceful. So smiley. I was not set off by any looks. Such an inward calm.

Normandie Lounge

Conflagration of Matter by Lyle

It wasn't the darkness so much as the darkness of the mahogany, the rustic oriental rugs, their patterns mashed together in a glowering silence. It wasn't so much the shock of light from between the heavily pleated curtains than the texture of the heavily pleated curtains, warm and matted like the fur of a feral bear (such imposition on light). It wasn’t so much the how as it was the why and the when. When and where most importantly. That particular day in that particular place. The rug, the curtains, the imposing desk. The imposing desk. The imposition of it all. Who had been behind that desk just a moment before? What would they possibly have been doing there? Were they hunched over work, their own shadow suppurating, oozing over the flitting shimmer of a fountain pen? Mere flights of fancy, flickering opulence, compared to the weight of the desk, the curtains, the rug (if there had indeed been anyone and their ideas there).

It was not the clarity of the glass so much as it was the opacity of death, the child ablaze amidst such reflection. The wisp of smoke that cannot be held.

***

Normandie by Forrest

In a day and a night I drank myself into sleep, into a room without light. In this room was you, I hope. In you may have been the winter I look for. When it is winter I always find myself at this hotel, and I am always meeting someone at the lounge since I resemble a business. A winter is an enjoyable thing when one has a drink with it; but then I must be meeting someone, even if nobody is business as well. A winter drink is more enjoyable with you whom I know and not her, whom I know less. With her it is admiring the black marble bar with its strong latitude, and it finding her fingers away from the drink. With you I see your fingers are curling into the snow winter leaves for the last person remaining. The lack of sameness is not disturbing to any of us should we all happen to lounge here at once. We have not been formally acquainted with each other’s experiences, and this hotel is slowing. I know this drink. The vintage where never enough must be my winter.

***

Applicable and Dark by Alan

He lived in some poet’s home outside of Brookmere. It was a museum in fact. A national historic site. And he was looking for a roommate.

A curtain is a kind of collapse of the soul. Because exhaustion, unlike a season of Birch and precipitation, clings like a muted flame in encasement, he’d wait everyday by the window whispering the name. The tall stranger he’d met at the landing. He had told him about his library and left an address.

A world of lettres might never be the same if only…this type of thing through a window of the heart. The heart a pulsing but too often quiet room. Repose, another country.

***

Agnes Martin, 1994, Taos, NM by Johanna

One day the snow fell six inches deep and the world was blanketed in white. Dog crap and mud puddles disappeared beneath the soft crystal winter fleece. The dilapidated mobile home next door and the abandoned Chrysler at the end of the road glittered, disguised in a serene mound of white and light. Wilting flowers, crackling grasses, dried out weeds, now powder blossoms and fluffy cloud sprouts. The world let out a sigh, ugly had been banished.

Agnes answered a phone call from a friend telling her that she missed her and, as she watched the snow falling outside, everything appeared perfect, pure and clear.

After that, Agnes painted white, everything white, perfect lucid canvases of white stripes on white. She painted into the spring and when summer came, she rested, the flowers and their wild decadence making a mockery of her peace.

Metal Tree

Heavy Metal by Alan

The dude dug the stuff so hard that he lived it, man. He was totally and completely in it, like full on. Sucked into the vortex, bro. Heavy metal kid. That’s what they called him. He lived right over there. There’s his yard. That’s the Pacer his parents got him. First car. There’s where he first split his head open. There’s where he lit fireworks off of Esty’s ass. And there. That’s the tree. It’s rad, bro. Never seen nothing like it before. His parents flipped when they woke up to it one morning. Like Jack and the Beanstalk, dude, only totally metal. The story is he totally climbed it, and people haven’t seen him since. He had his headphones on, someone said, and this weird psyched look on his face. In the zone. Feelin’ it. Taking off, man. He just took off. He lived the dream, dude. That shit was like a dream, man. Shit, I’d go, if I didn’t have work and shit. You know. Whatever. Fucker is probably hard to climb anyway.

---

Colloidal Silver by Johanna

1. The liquid silver came in like the tide, slow enough to go unnoticed except for the shifting boundary of shore line or, in this case, forest line. 
2. The forest had been dying from the beetles and blue stain fungus long before the wave of silver splashed against its conifers. With no known cure, the people in the village below could only watch as each year more and more trees browned from beetles furrowing beneath the bark. 
3. The Pine Beetle used to be an important part of the bio-system, killing off dying trees to make room for new growth. With warmer winters, they had become a nuisance, sticking around longer than necessary, feeding off healthy trees. 
4. Even still, it was the instinct of the villagers to try to save the already dying forest from being completely coated in a film of silver. How would the plants and animals survive without nuts and berries, flowers and chlorophyll?
5. But how do you clean trees of liquid silver? The elders suggested baking soda which was good at cleaning most anything, but no matter how much they scrubbed the silver trees, the liquid only mutated, shifting beneath their brushes so that when they were not touching it, it returned to the space it previously filled.
6. The villagers, exasperated and hopeless, could not deny that there was something beautiful about the way the pink light reflected off mirrored bark at sunset and the swishing noise their boots made when they walked through it.
7. What could they do? They decided to start marketing their town as a tourist attraction. Come see Silver Forest. Be enchanted by Silver Forest. See yourself in Silver Forest.
8. But soon they noticed, just as fast as the silver came in, it began to ebb out until it had run down the mountainside, into the river and was gone before scientists even had a chance to speculate where it had come from.
9. It must have come from the mountains like a spring welling up from deep within the earth. Silver ore must have heated up within the core or while suspended over an underground lava flow. All interesting theories.
10. Weeks later, the villagers and scientists alike noticed something else. The blue stain fungus and the beetles had disappeared completely. The silver worked like an antiseptic and cured the trees. Even those dying recovered. 
11. It was a miracle. 

---

Flash by Lyle

Such an ERECTION!                 Ahhh —
           
                                   skyward. Rise. Tear at the sky. Rend at the pornographic clouds until they are mere misty tatters that fall to the ground in sprinkles. Gouge at the moon like metal capillaries. Sparkle in the sky like...

Sparkle? Shine? Contract. Such a tumescence… petrified? putrified? Into... metal? And now has divided and split in multiplicity, the opposite vacuity of earthquakes. And I am buried in the ground. Now I see that the clouds are much, much higher than I supposed. The blood is all gone from my brain and I sink farther into the ground under the weight. Until there is nothing left of me. Nothing left of me. Me.

---

Walden Revisited by Forrest

Should one take Nature too hard on the surface of things signalled, the grotesque he wrote of while frightened of babies, would it reflect back in synapses, in the varnish of entrails or embryonic fluids? I think it would grow instead from the “I” I have desposited here, in you; and now seeing yourself extend back into empty skies, part and particle, you understand what I could not while settling into my notes, waiting to write something you will never see me in—a house, for instance.

Doll

Photo © & courtesy of Darren Bokor 

Sometime Doll by Forrest


Doll. A doll. A doll face. Not a doll face. Sometimes not a doll face. Sometimes not a doll face looking. Sometimes not a doll face looking around. Not a doll face looking around. Not a face looking around. Not a face around. Not a face. A face. Face. 

*** 

Her Best Ought to be Good Enough by Bill 

On the road the excuses are genuinely a terrible bother to crunch, the gravel kicking up around your arms, eyes squinting in the sun but it is mostly all the same brand of story, which some would call a lie, and others a framing of the reference. Blame both of them for where they come from or just let them be. There wasn’t anyone here immediately before us but there are bones around, so keep it and hold and press it to yourself like a child. 

Are one’s battles are best left waiting? Tell them to meet you in a diner while you go out to a bar across town? Is it better not to fight if it means you’ll never lose, or will it happen whether you’d wish it or not. Weave. Wove. Wow, wonders all over again stretched across your skin, tables out in the nighttime with all our sky overhead. 

Splinter post breakups, hard edges for the hardliners hardheaded holdouts for the dawn. Fait accompli. 

The old man with the dead star for an eye, and the old woman with a train that circled inside of her mouth across from you on the subway. Outside again in the rain letting it fall around and upon you watching a young girl wrapped in only a green sari spin in the middle of the sidewalk with arms outstretched into the storm as the silk clung to her body, alight in her dizzy trance feeling the world wind away, she the mainspring revolving away the tension of the planet, taking the tension off of gravity, baba yaga in the younger aspect atop the spinning dreidel of the forest spirit. Signs and wonders watching young parents stare wide eyed through an infant. 

Save the cat. Please. At the very least, save the cat. 

*** 

The Interview by Alan 

When something looks manipulated in that early 21st century way, he tends to suffer a simultaneous sense of disbelief mixed with terrific delight. “I think it’s the juxtaposition of things or, what did they use to call it, the ‘layer’ on top of ‘layers’?” he asked me when I interviewed him not long ago. There was an element of mischief in his voice. The ball had already been set in motion. He was all over the feeds. Not because of the fire. Not because of the dumpsters/junkyards/abandoned domiciles. Humans were interested because he actually worked with the physical: dolls, bottles, iron…grass even. Here was an artist not interested in the virtual but rather with actuality. Things over ideas. Or the ideas in things. “There used to be many of us,” he said. “I have outlived them all.” He was 27. This is only one of the things from our conversation that resonates when I look at the image of his work today. 

*** 

Airhead by Johanna

Puffs of stuffing fell out of holes in my seams before my cold skin hardened slowly like chocolate shell. My brain went all googly like my eyes when I had eyes to see – the slow lopsided shudder, the black speckled blue of my iris suspended in plastic glass. I prefer it this way, truly. Empty-headed can be so refreshing, except for the eerie sense that I am forgetting something. 

I remember certain things – lollipops, shade trees, spiders, writing with pencils, dog kisses, swinging until my toes touched the sky, the smell of blue nail polish and black markers, a photograph of the sea, the windows rolled down in the car, someone telling me I'm pretty. Pretty doll. Now, I am nobody's baby. I don't know what fault brought me to this wasted lot, strewn amongst the trash, translucent and perched on the neck of a milk jug #2, but I prefer it this way, truly. Empty-headed can be so refreshing. 

*** 

Baby Bottle, Baby Bottle --- Cracked My Head on a Rusty Can by Lyle 

And now I think I'm delirious. Crazy as all hell. I can feel that rust creeping into my blood. Oxidizing the iron in my blood. I feel strong for just a minute but I'm not so sure that it has anything to do with the oxidation process. Probably more to do with the wound in my head. Perhaps this is what the trepannated feel. Liberation and then emptiness.

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.

&&&

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.

&&&

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.

&&&

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.

&&&

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.