The Absolute as Subject (a love story)

9:05 p.m.
I found her in the back of the crowded bar, sitting with a man I’d
never met. The music was a gasoline lake—stagnant and dull like
muskrat piss. Customers stood three rows deep at the bar, passing
beers over their heads to cover orders made from behind them.

7:04 p.m.
The moon shone over the walnut trees and the stars popped like
bubble wrap. I sat outside listening to the hawks chasing rabbits. I
drank coffee and smoked a Tatuaji. The smoke drifted off in swirls,
swishing into nothing, seeking the vulnerable defect of lunar incandescence.
I hoped we were the same, she and I, separated just like
stars—or perhaps because of the stars—inside, ready to dance the
dance of indignation and embrace the incalculable options it offered.

9:09 p.m.
“Who’s this?” I asked, motioning to the man at the table. There
are people in the world who aren’t afraid to get in a cage with a wild
animal. They go in and they don’t take whips or chairs or any protection,
they just go in. I tried to act like one of them.
“Whatever happened to hello?” said Claudia.
“Hello,” I said, “who’s this?”
The man sitting at our table stared away at the crowd of people,
oblivious and uninterested. He had the words “High Times” tattooed
on his left forearm and each “I” was indicated by a drawing of a joint,
but they looked more like tampons.
“It’s a busy place, people have to sit somewhere.”
“I thought we were going to talk.”
“So talk,” she said. “I’m right here.”
“How are you?”
“The night is young. It’s too early to tell,” she said.

Trail dust

Leaving Maricopa

Driving to Tucson, I-10
tires could melt at any second,
gluing the car to the asphalt.
Around me, the dead are rising
from across the oranges, browns, purples, desert.
Zuni chiefs, from their cliff-side pueblos,
curse this foreigner cruising through their home,
top down and sweating like hell.
Dead cowboys, lost travelers,
Tom Mix, white as a ghost and his
double decapitation.
They vanish at the city limits,
falling back into their dust and sand.

by William Brent Wright

 "Prairie Magic" by Colleen Burner

Two poems

Noah's Coffee House on the River

I want to get up one midnight before the moon yawns,
and stars pull the clouds over their heads,
before dew polishes the grass seductive green,
or frost plays heavy metal in the meadow.
I want to be the first customer at Noah’s Coffee House,
pour my first cup of scalding black coffee,
and find the first line of a new poem in the vapors.
I want to see the first sailboat interrupt dawn
as it rocks past an ancient oil freighter
that’s barely piercing dingy green water.


Pureed Whiskey Shots at Dawn

I hurry out to the kitchen
to brew a brutal quart of coffee,
to sip while I wait.

I plan to be there to see the first customer
wipe the night from his eyes.

5:30 a.m.
I pour the scalding energy into my thermos
and drive down to The Place—
the restaurant where whiskey shots
lead the list of breakfast beverages on the menu,
followed by
    1 petite order of thick hickory smoked bacon
    2 lightly scrambled organic eggs
    1 slice of buttered Texas Toast
where hyacinth, caramel, and chestnut
puréed whiskey shots are served.

It’s the restaurant where Delbert
hisses orders through his gums,
and Jean Anne, his wife, wears safety goggles
so she can honor orders without routinely
wiping spit from her eyes. Matthew, their son,
audits the liquor and serves it in skinny shot glasses.
 
5:45 a.m.
I am pouring a third cup of coffee from my thermos
when the first customer arrives driving an
18-wheeler. She parks her rig on the sandy tract
behind the paved parking lot. Mack International
heaves, burps, and upchucks acid soot from silver pipes.
 
She reaches to the top of the cab and squeezes a horn
that sounds like an elephant in heat. She swabs her face
with what looks like cotton candy, and then polishes her lips.
 
She exits Mack and walks into The Place. I follow.
Delbert hollers, “Hey Jo Rose, your usual is ready.”
He brings her bacon, eggs, and Texas Toast.
Matthew serves her puréed bourbon whiskey.
 
6:00
The Place begins to live as customers file in,
wipe the night from their eyes,
and order the Jo Rose Special, and
I wonder if this is Resurrection Day.


by Mary Rogers-Grantham

Adverbs

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In the attic

When I got home from work and found only my mother, she told me that my father had turned into a sparrow and had joined the others making a mess in the attic’s drafts and rafters. She had caught him in a plastic basket and was keeping him trapped there, fluttering and frantic, with a large leather-bound atlas to cover the top. The poor thing bore no resemblance to my father, but I fixed my mother a cup of chamomile tea and put her to bed early, my hand resting on her dear, troubled head until she fell asleep. Then I took the basket up to the attic and switched the bird out for the right one. My mother’s eyesight had never been good.

by Kara McKeever

 

Slide 5, by Leanna Sparks

The Dream Ballet

CHARACTERS:
 
CARRIE: A 23-year-old girl who has just come home from a date at
the top of the play.
DREAM: The embodiment of CARRIE’s lost dream to be a ballerina.
She wears a traditional ballerina outfit and should have a magical
quality about her. DREAM should appear a few years older than
Carrie.
 
SET DESIGN:

A simple set with an entrance upstage and a couch center stage. The
set should seem like something a young college student could afford.
 
(Music from Coppélia plays and then fades out.)
 
CARRIE
Thanks again. It was a…I had a really good time.

(CARRIE shuts the door upstage and lights rise. CARRIE, giddy,
walks over to the mirror by the front door and checks her face
and hair.)
 
CARRIE
What a night! Aaah! What a kiss!
 
(CARRIE walks into the kitchen to get a Diet Coke from the
fridge and begins dialing a phone. DREAM emerges from behind
the sofa and begins dancing while CARRIE has her back turned.
Once CARRIE begins talking on the phone, DREAM stands still
in fourth position.)
 
CARRIE
Hey Laura, I know it’s super late, but I had to tell you—the date
was—out of this world. He’s a dream. A dream. We had the best seats
to the ballet, and we drank the yummiest wine at this cute place in
the art district. It’s only the third date, but this guy. This guy is great.
Call me tomorrow! Okay, love you.
 
(CARRIE turns and sees DREAM.)
 
CARRIE
Holy crap, what are…who are—
 
DREAM
Hello, Carrie.

Draining time

The Draining
After Kim Addonizio

I take the blade out of its package,
my hand trembling, though determined
as it rises towards the meringue
on my face, once gelatinous now lathered
and flooding my nostrils, a medicinal mint.
The chemical trails tickle my nose hairs
causing me to stifle back a choking cloud—
then I spray histamine upon the mirror.
I’ve anointed my chin with a slice of blood.
On the vanity sits a roll of toilet paper,
and I tear off small pieces & curses,
dotting my face like the wings of a ladybug.
As the patches saturate to red from white,
I remove & replace the obscenity of my face—
leaving my brain empty & spiraled,
the same as my drained tube of toothpaste.

by Allan M. Jones

"On the Clock"

by Nicholas Shea

No One Reads Kerouac Anymore*

I pull into the parking lot at work with the gnawing feeling/knowledge
I should be doing something better with my life. College grad
returns home, becomes convenience store clerk. The stuff dreams are
made of, straight out of a brochure promising debt and nothing. I
step out of my car and gawk for the nearest distraction before suicide
solves all of my problems.

The McDonald’s connected to Signal Convenience Store owns
a spotlight that beams into the Buffalo, MO, night sky. This baffles
me. Why does a fast food restaurant in a town of 2,500 people need
a spotlight? We don’t live in a post-apocalyptic world. No roving
bands of starving survivors seek rescue from death by cannibal. Perhaps
rural folk become entranced with the big ‘ole light in the sky. Ad
execs probably picture the Clampetts strolling inside a McDonald’s,
Jed taking off his cap, placing it over his heart and saying, “We saw
a strange ray of light up there in that big black empty thingy, and
by god if it didn’t point us right where we needed to be. Bless these 
golden arches.” Or maybe somebody got a great deal on a spotlight
and couldn’t pass it up.
 
“Jesus Christ, you’re finally here,” Rachel says as I walk into the
annoyingly bright convenience store. I recently added her to my roster
of imaginary sexual conquests. Half-Filipino and half-Mexican,
trim figure, thick black hair, and dark skin.
 
“JC is pissed, Rachel. Why the hell am I working tonight?”
 
“I had to fire Patti today.”
 
“For what?”
 
“Bouncing personal checks at work. She’d have Mike come in
and—”
 
“Yeah, I don’t care how she did it,” I say. “I mean, I knew she was
retarded, but damn, how long do you really expect to get away with
cashing bad checks at work?”
 
“Took us almost two months to figure it out,” Rachel says.
 
“I already knew this place was retarded,” I say.
 
“Most people fake being nice to their boss,” she says.
 
I look around. No one’s paying attention. People stand in line at
McDonald’s, but that’s across the building, past the chain link barrier
separating the two businesses from eleven p.m. to five in the morning.
 
“Those people don’t sell weed to their boss,” I say.
 
“Shit,” she says. “You’re gonna go to that well one too many times
and end up getting your ass fired.”
 
“Whatever will I do without all this?” I ask.
 
“Spare me,” she says. “One of these days poverty will erase that
too good for this job attitude you got.”
 
“I am too good for this job.”
 
“No, no,” Rachel says, “tell me how you really feel.” She grabs her
purse from underneath the counter and walks out.
 
Alone. Standing at register one. The chewing tobacco to my right,
the cigarette racks behind me. Pint and half-pint bottles below the
smokes. To my left, trucker speed and different variations of fake
Viagra that promise erections but only succeed in making you giggle
at funny names like Jackhammer and Bonez.

Words and image

              "And Lo, I Forgot What I Came Up Here For"

by Colleen Burner**

Mind

Tiantong Rujing, amid the tumultuous clacking
of a bamboo forest during a thunderstorm:
“Ten thousand hands, clapping
for this spectacle staged by the gods!”

The diva, Mme Brillant, in the resounding applause
of a standing audience after her solo:
“As fickle as temperamental gods—
and their clapping the only assurance!”

by Stephen E. Childress 


**More of Colleen Burner's hand-made collages can be seen at http://www.frenchforgluing.com or http://www.frenchforgluing.tumblr.com Prints of these babies are available for sale through an online shop: http://society6.com/FrenchForGluing. 

Moon Baby

There were astronauts who went to the moon very slowly, and on
the way one of the astronauts had a baby that she didn’t know
about. They all agreed to leave it on the moon because of jeopardize
the mission. Also, they had no cute little baby spacesuits.
The baby was young, though, and learned to breathe moon. It
slept in a crater and powdered its bottom with moondust. Every
moon day, the baby looked up at Earth multiple times and made
baby wishes. A moon day is almost thirty Earth days! Then the baby
crawled around in reduced gravity until it was naptime. And it had
lots of baby food, because baby food is mined from the moon. Also,
the cheese.
 
Back on Earth, scientists used a giant telescope to see the moon.
Imagine their surprise when they saw a bald baby crawling around
the lunar desert with the American flag as its diaper! The scientists
had a meeting and then became evil, and they put a cat in a rocket
and sent it to the moon so it would sleep on the baby’s face.
But when it got there, the baby and the cat became friends. No
one could talk to the baby except for other babies, because it had
made up its own official moon language: “Baby.” The cat learned to
speak Baby and the baby told it all of the moon secrets. And the cat
introduced the baby to the album “Mothership Connection,” which
the baby loved, by late ’70s funk supergroup Parliament. The scientists
saw all this from far away and scowled.
 
One day the cat and the baby had a fight about who wanted the
funk more. The cat went away to the dark side of the moon in a huff,
and it got turned into a catsicle because cold the universe. The baby
found the cat, though, who was frozen in an ice cube, and cried because
its friend was dead.
 
The baby flew to Earth crying and its babytears made a comet
tail, and the baby was now a meteor. On the way down, it pooped
through its diaper and the evil scientists saw the poop through their
giant telescope and they thought it was a humongous asteroid but
it was poop and the poop landed on the end of their telescope and
the scientists all screamed and fainted, but then the janitor who was
smarter climbed up on a ladder and said it was just poop, dummies.
But the baby also forgot everything because babies have a bad
memory and anyway the atmosphere burned up its memories. The
baby struck an unassuming lesbian couple and sank into one of their
tummies like it was gelatin. She delivered the moon baby nine minutes
later and they did a good job of raising it, because it became the
first mayor of the moon because space travel, and the two mommies
went to the baby’s skeptical grandparents and said, see?
This is why babies everywhere love cheese and the song “Star
Child.”

By Jimmy Grist

paled and susceptive to

paled and susceptive to

the slightest breeze

a slice, a sliver,

of paper is caught

on a clothesline.

the supports are bent

and only

a bleached clothespin

clings to its wire,

the spring rusted tight.

on his own order,

a boy explores,

climbs through

swiss chard and lambsquarter

and notices the parchment

quivering above.

he’s just enough to reach it

and reads well.

the paper is a note,

a message, secret of course,

and the boy realizes

only one other pair of eyes

knows it.

by Tyler Young

Starting today, we will be posting content from Volume 63 (2011) every week, so check back often!