6.16 / December 2011

Lisa Lim’s Mi Madre, is presented as a PDF to best preserve the artwork that accompanies each story. Please set your PDF reader to display a two-page view in order to experience the work as intended. We also have audio for Lisa’s wonderful chapbook. [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Lim1.mp3″ text=”listen to Wonder Woman” dl=”0″] [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Lim2.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Assef.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Years ago, I loved a boy named Mathias, a film history student who did coke when he was feeling expansive. At the time, I found this aspect of his behavior normal, yet I imagined film criticism to be a kind of mania.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Deer.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I am always lusting after golden deer. It is my fate, my demon. Technically, the Golden Deer that Ravana used to lure Sita away was a demon, but that’s not what I’m saying. Or maybe it is.

The Day Before Yesterday [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Byrnes1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] It didn’t take much to rattle our small world. A dependable sun each morning, the people we knew. When we woke in our groggy beds the sky was gone, obliterated in humid August fog. We went walking anyway.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Miner.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I was not a pretty girl.  Or thin.  I was, according to Master Kim, head of the Kim Do Martial Arts Studio, the toughest young lady he had ever seen in his class.  I was eight years old.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Torzs.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] In fairy tales, women seldom look behind the unlocked doors, preferring to open onto secrets which after all are women’s territory. Folded away with the sheets, washed out of the sheets, or left to stain. Bluebeard had many rooms we never saw, such as the dining room.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Moreau.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] “Is there such a thing as being ‘fresh out of rehab’ when it’s your sixth time?” Annabelle asked as she settled into the bucket seat of her convertible, coaching the B-list reporters who followed her after she’d signed herself out of the facility.

Andalucía I [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Basile1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] When I see Alejandro I do not wear shoes.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Trembath.

She makes a point of saying the cross-street, across from the building where the famous singer lived, the one across from the park where a nut with a gun killed him, and people still leave him flowers. She used to live there but she left the city for sprawl with a beach and no winter.

Elle finished hooking together the small metal prongs of the bustier. She adjusted the straps and her boobs threatened to spill out of the stiff fabric. The elastic tops of her stockings bit into her thighs. Yeah-no mistaking it. Elle felt like a whore.

JESUS DANCES THE CHA-CHA The city is perfectly clear beneath him and there’s not an angel in sight. He does the steps flawlessly, a master of the forward and back. It does seem to give him joy though his stoic expression hints at some stubborn sadness.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Smith2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] 1. we planned to lose our virginities that afternoon. Rashell said she got off on it how a boy’s body rattles more than pumps that first time he hula hoops in a woman’s valley.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Sealy.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] They called them the Curdies.  This white trash family always came in and asked for free courtesy cups so they could split a refillable Coke six ways.  Once they were out of the lobby, the employees would all grumble: “Annoying,” the ticket taker would say.

And I am waiting for the love parade, the 11 o’clock news to tell us who’s won, who’s lost. Peace in our time, the papers promise again, to which the radio answers with white smoke, the perpetual logic of static. A girl needs a gun these days on account of all the resonant memories.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Howard.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I’m walking, half-waking on my way home, I’m reaching out my hands before my face Noticing how soft the skin between my Fingers and the patterns in my own hands. It glows like amber. It scours my neck. The grate in the fire, a net for scorched limbs.

In addition to reading the poems below, you can enjoy them as a PDF that better preserves the writer’s original intent. Strawberry Gash [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Grant1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] When my dead sister and I stop leaking and we are inside my dead sister’s mouth. And she works up a good amount of spit.

THE GENIUS GOES TO THE ART MUSEUM [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/demulder1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] He enjoys the entrance the most, but not because of the gift shop. He already owns hundreds of magnets and an impressive coffee mug collection that crowds his counters and lines his window sills.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Disappear.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Before we began a brief and terrible relationship, when we were new friends, John took me hunting. It was shocking to everyone that I did it-me, this small, liberal, artsy girl. Me, who had never touched, never seen a gun before. We didn’t kill anything.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_16/Fiona.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I. I have to admit that mechanically the term implies a dick. Some grippable skin circumferance, some handle, a thing which can be jerked on. (Off.) Fuck it. I don’t have to admit anything. Consider my hands. Jar lids. Bottle tops. Screws and seals of all kinds.

My sister’s husband looks terrified. “Does this mean I have to have sex with her?” he asks, pointing at me. Julie and I turn toward one another, but I can’t look her in the eye, because somewhere between the coffee table and her face is now the image of my brother-in-law, naked. Sweating.

Their four-year-old is in his bedroom getting ready. Since he was three-and-a-half, it has been his choice to climb into his little black suit for dinner with his white shirt-which he’d taught himself to button-and his blue clip-on.