5.04 / April 2010

Rape wasn’t like another pop song. But here she was getting ahead, having lumped it with the general condition of adversity, like a puddle to walk through or a sandwich board waiting for its human meat. The answering machine glared at her in the dark.

My mother was a writer although, as best as I know, she never had a single word published. She possessed the necessary tools—stationery, a computer, lots of time—and often late at night I could hear her tapping away in the kitchen while I couldn’t sleep.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/Babcock1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Next time you fall off a cliff wind the gramophone. Light a cigarette and recite “The Harp-Weaver.” Drink coffee black as night on the settling davenport. Brace yourself for better bones. Grandmother Invites Me In [wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/Babcock2.

Tonight, a swirl of hay, loosened from its twine, rolls around and around under the orange buzz of a streetlight. The street has been cordoned off and bleachers set up along the curb and it’s empty now except for the valet manning the swinging glass door to the Palliser.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/Nik1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] There is a pretty distance between you and I: I want to say it looked like a star fish, no, jelly fish, it’s undulation in the sky, the sky a refraction of the ocean, the terrible terrain. But I will not say that, I know it’s tired.

If this were a soap opera, the music would switch on before we made it to the bed, the lights would dim as if on cue: no need for knobs or remotes, electricity would live only in the spaces where we touched.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/Hung.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Maria had made a radical career change. She cut her hair with kitchen scissors, and had her dog put to sleep. But she still wasn’t satisfied. I need new friends, she said to her old ones, I need a new outlook on life. It’s still me.

A volume of something stupid sweats in the sweat of his fingers, reading “a novel” on its cover. If you breathe garlic breath at this vampire’s pores, nothing happens. Buy him a Silver Bullet, and he’ll gag. Remember, this man said “vampire,” not “werewolf,” and that only frat boys like Coors Light.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/Lagoon.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Amelia’s eyes are far darker than the side of the chrome hubcap which affords her a vision. She is, in fact, squatting uncovered above the mirror image. It is the smooth surface of her giblet over which she runs the middle finger. She diddles it.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/Kneeland1.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] When you put your arms around me and I close my eyes, everything except your body disappears. I press my face against your chest, my eyes all wet, and sometimes I pull away and see that I have left satisfying evidence of tears on your shirt.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/Kon1.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Someone had untied the five segments of the stuffed goldfish, so the five pieces lay about the African blackwood table like assorted shapes shining in velvet and satin. It had eyes made of corduroy, a pink tulle section, a hairy belly because of the lamao, shining like tinsel.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/Menting2.

Congrats, you snagged the one job in the East Bay that didn’t require a resume during the application process.

After Street Fighter II [wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/hadouken.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Japanese schoolgirls on fire – Red bean squid pork bun Into the yawning inferno. ~ Run a finger along ’em – Those green turgid abs, That shock of coarse red hair. ~ Helicopter kick The shit out of onlookers With misplaced white thigh.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/Swirsky.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Whip me. Cut me. Maim me. Whittle me to almost nothing. What remains will always love you. Nightly at the cabaret, we take the stage together, dancing side by side. High kicks; petticoats whirling. Lights cast us blue and orange and yellow.

1. Plastic compass, about the size of a quarter. On the morning Grady extracted it from the cereal box, he overheard his dad say it wasn’t worth its price in shit. But Grady had loved it.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_4/Tarry.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] It took the entire world to fix the hole in the System. Chinese Control Officers, Eskimo Energy Anthropologists, US Department of Technology Practitioners, Canadian Space Enthusiasts, and Croatian Computer Component Manufacturers—anyone and everyone.