6.15 / 50

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_15/Martin.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] he is parking a car under a tree he doesn’t know is about to fall.

For the last few months I read submissions for this special Stamp Stories edition of [PANK], and with each new submission, the realization came louder: writing stories in 50 words or less is not about condensing beginning, middle, and end into an amuse-bouche.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_15/Spivey.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I made notes of the noises in the music that sounded like words. Angelic tongues I could only draw as shapes. The home dialed noise-scribbling ants and turning clocks.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_15/Ridge.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] & the explosions expedited the eradication of mountaintop pornography, somehow suctioning batches of bad cocaine through the rebels’ nostrils. Still, they were  “winning.” You behaved glowingly, despite it all, in our room above the gas mask factory: smoking electronic cigarettes like a battery champion.

The certainty that I am alone ensures nothing. And then the girl is gone, and I’m alone with myself again. I thought I was supposed to be with God, and wasn’t God supposed to be most apparent on this night of greatest darkness? But I don’t see him here.

The sound above me: nothing. The sound below me: less than nothing. It is October in Florida, which means it feels like Virginia in July. My sister breathes quietly in winter. My sister is dead and it is not winter. I can’t remember the last time it snowed without her.

When the moment arrives the moment is weary. and then it’s gone just like us. Just like love which is like following a dead person into the forest when you should be tending to your cabbages. Putting up the wire fence that will save them from the rabbits.

Those who scale the black mountain where He lives return charred and faceless, their fine outfits tattered funeral clothes. We bury them in our yards. The soil hums. The bushes glow and throb. And from the light comes choir sounds, mangled, and rusted harps, until the light speaks no more.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_15/Tomaloff.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The soil, it dreams of one day the wood. The wood, it dreams of one day a tree. When the tree the heart, &the heart a sun, she that whispers in prayers the telephone sings &she as if all of this would every tomorrow &she sings &she-.

1. The universe is a breathing being. The earth is tiny, but contains crystals the sun is drawn to. The universe allows the sun to become pulled by what is buried in the earth’s crust. The sun wants a specific colored crystal. 2. From the universe’s perspective, the earth is a speck.

When I was little When I was a little girl, summer brown, puffed nipples bracing to bloom breasts, an “uncle” paid me money to itch around his injuries.

Because he could not remember his name, he remained nameless, and so he wandered the streets searching for someone, a stranger even, who might recognize him and give him back his name.

I’m no one in a conversation. Nothing says Cover is over with an average grade. You’re in my yard when it’s me. Neighbors don’t wrap presents, poets wear out the stairs, you’ve never left to come back.

Prologue Trees. Seasons. Birds. Symbolism. Chapter Childhood home. Chapter Clouded breath and stinging hands. Chapter Memories of the snow-sifted forest, small plastic sled erasing the scattered tracks of local rabbits. Chapter Headaches and vertigo. Thoughts of antlers, axes. Epilogue Eavesdropping on parents’ quiet conversations. The locusts’ steady rasp.

Our first howl signifies the loss of our only known home. We learn breath, the boundaries of flesh against flesh, unlearn the rumbling rushes of our mothers’ bodies. Our genome is the afterglow of fireflies in the brush, a rock paused on a slope, a child pushing to get out.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_15/Stern.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Materials: Fugue, jar. Procedure: 1. Trap fugue in jar. 2. Dismember the chords. 3. Extract the melody. 4. Bury the notes.