4.06 / June 2009

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_6/kumar.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I remember the low moan of cattle, Their feet stirring the hay to musty gold, And the sound of a rolling boulder Like distant nursery thunder. As a child I heard sobbing in the tents: Our bodies took the vow of coming pain.

Macro-Microbe parked his car and proceeded on foot, which was a misnomer because he had no feet. Typical for Manhattan, no one gave him a second glance except for a homeless woman who tried to sell him hand-sanitizer.

Why don’t you kids dance? He decided to say, and then he said it. “Why don’t you dance?” —Raymond Carver “Why Don’t You Dance?” On the front doorsteps, he takes another shot of Scotch and looks at the bed of flowers in his living room floor.

Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there.

For just one moment the lovers are too startled to speak.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_6/grosjean.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I’m telling you, he knew. From the moment he first saw me Marty knew I was crazy for it, and then used it to get me to go out with him. Doris, he said, let’s you and I play mah jongg. Teach me, he said.

Flocks of blouses scream for you to finger their hems, fumble their buttons. Open them while you, you rush to fill them with your wide face, your cotton-seed heart. You love the wind for sending skirts skyward, blessed with peeking panties. You send them your eyes.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_6/yelvington.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Most nights, Calvin and I lie in bed and watch TV. Calvin’s stomach is a pillow, but I don’t mind. Calvin flips the channels. With each channel flipped, sound explodes. “Will you stop?” I say. “You’re making me epileptic.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_6/layden.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] In an hour, you’re scheduled to learn about the rest of your life. It’s all mapped out: a twenty-minute drive north through the winter sleet. A left turn at the looming hospital building. Before entering, you refresh your lipstick in the parking lot.

She falls off some scaffolding sparring hexagons open a tectonic drift she listens too attentively and the answer is an echo. Stars fall on her head she says she’s a falsehood all her life loquacious—her internal structure stands for no-one. Maybe she is all alone in her collective.

The name Centralia comes from the Latin root centralis, the meaning of which is: in the middle, at the center of things. There are actually thirteen Centralias, twelve in the United States, and one in Canada.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_6/McLellan.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] She slices into a pepper, dull knife popping through thick, red skin. One baby tugs her nightgown, smearing applesauce. Another crashes a talking racecar into her shoe. Remove batteries. Remove applesauce. Remove tethers. The skin separates, sprays pepper-mist over her hands and chin.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_6/marello.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] After he made love to his wife, Pearse lay on his back and waited until he could hear her steady breathing. When he was sure she was asleep he checked the time. The illuminated numbers on the digital clock glowed in the dark bedroom. It was midnight.

My organs had grown accustomed to ignoring one another, each with his own duties, et cetera, but one day the pancreas announced his intent to visit the outside world. Here I feel confined, he said. Spleen is cramping my style.

Left the game to run riot, a further school of abuse, of sorts. Trumpery to the finest, a go-for-broke mass psychology, a clammy handshake put to the test. Fell flat on our gourds, stumped in the fair fields of fair mire. We donated our tricks, bag for bag, tic for tic.

Emilie Jacobs was an unconscionable fucktard. “Literary journals,” she said, winking at me, “surely have a vested (if not semantic) interest in demanding so-called First North American Rights. It’s their prerogative we question.

  Thank you! Thank you! What a wonderful audience!   There am nothing more beautiful than the sound of rotting flesh slapping together!   That’s what she said!   Me kidding, me kidding! Me eat own penis long time ago—   Cuz that’s where’s men’s brains are! Am me right, ladies?!   Speaking of fairer

you can draw us a bath with the newest crayon colour by unseen alchemy we can leave our polka dots behind in the bath we will wave goodbye as they swirl down nether drains to populate empires of sewer fish i need caffeine in the morning and adderall at night and i am going to

Mom let it in by accident. She opened the backdoor to take out the garbage and in it came, a black flapping blur. I was sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework. When I saw it I screamed. Mom, startled, turned back and saw the black flapping blur. She screamed too.