6.01 / January 2011

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_1/babyn.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The home above us is made of red crystal. Its inhabitants are illuminated so brilliantly they become red platelets moving about in red veins.

[1]Edit I finish telling her how the Hepa 11 filtration system gets even the smallest dirt particles out of the carpet and am on the verge of revealing to her that “Kirby is more than a vacuum, it’s an entire system of home care.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_1/cohen.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] “If we get really lost in here,” Aphra says, “I might kill and eat you.” “If we get really lost in here,” says Seth, “I’ll cut off your arm and we can roast it over a spit.

Mary froze in the front doorway when she saw Jonathan standing beside the sofa wearing a long-sleeved shirt-sleeves for the first time in his life filled with arms. The arms were plastic, as if he’d pulled them off a mannequin.

My Understanding of Love Between Women-or-La Macchina da Cucire… is a show seen on YouTube. You watch paper clothes stapled onto a naked woman with an upholstery gun. Her mouth sewn closed with a hand needle. In the back- ground, string instruments strike dissonance. A voice repeating the body is dead.

BALANCE [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_1/harrington1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] In the night, we listened for breath, nostrils flared for the sting of urine, or worse. We shoved laundry carts draped with linen, gowns, and towels, passing the sleepers by, stepping into the rooms and beside the beds of dreamers with disloyal bladders.

The Inventor of Ears [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_1/hicks.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] From the door of the inventor’s apartment, a man with small satellites bolted to the sides of his head ran out into the night.

They called my apartment complex White Harlem.  My neighbors set their trash outside their door once, an old jewelry cabinet with rings and necklaces still inside.  I stole it and wore the rings until the gold turned my skin green. My friend Gina led me to play every day.

Androgyny was in fashion.  Full frontal nudity.  Glitter bands.  Boys wore makeup and high heels.  Nixon was president. It was 1973.  Cheap sequins were in the air. Nobody wanted to spend any more time thinking about Vietnam.

The Soldier The soldier was called into the sergeant’s tent and slapped across the face. There was something the soldier had done, of course, but he was not sure what. The sergeant was yelling at the soldier, about either the shine or lack of shine on the toes of the soldier’s boots.

If Desire is Not a Theater But a Factory, I Have Made Some Marvelous Gifts for You I ankle, I ankle, I bone and I lung and I clavicle. I heart and hear, neck and timpani. The membrane expands, spleening wide to care. Grandly, I coccyx my lunula, inhale.

Olivia stares at the wooden floorboards and sees pools of water by the sofa. Her eyes focus. Her legs are bent over the arm of the sofa and her jeans are ripped down both sides. Yes they are stuck together. She is perspiring heavily and water is dripping off her.

Lori thought they should call him Rape Face.  She slid the article across the table to me and laughed.  Some guy the paper nicknamed “The Forest Flasher” had tackled a jogger in the woods, mashed his dick against her face, and run off.  She was his fifth victim.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_1/schwartz1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Your Pain is 11 Things (And I Hope I’m Never One of Them) 1. your pain is a limousine a beautiful vehicle by which to carry the less fortunate 2.

Memoir Girl #3 says Be my boyfriend? On top of me her breath smells like nothing. I look at the remote control. I look at the ceiling fan, it’s spinning. I imagine cold against her back. There is always sweat on her brow when we kiss. Girl #1 has made her Facebook page private.

You put on the sexy French maid outfit. I put on the denim jacket and the horn-rimmed glasses, then taunt you, saying you look more like a Mexican. We go to a bar where I brawl for your honor. We have a stripper pole installed in our bedroom.

Poem Composed Entirely with Last Lines in Ed Ochester Poems sunset rising on the window in the old direction of the world mile upon mile the cornfields nourished by blood stood firm against the moon slowly as the stars of a glacial lake I love I love beneath the white ring of ice Poem Composed

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_1/winter.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I went on Craigslist and I wrote the ad: Wanted: men with own tuxedos to be extras in independent film. I added, tuxedo must be clean. Responses filled my inbox. Men who owned tuxedos needed work badly. I conferred with our director, a brilliant but impatient man.