7.01 / January 2012

Letter to My Jewish Son Who Thinks He’s Black and Went to Live in Ghana and Now Regrets It [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_1/Wise2.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] A father never disseminates bad advice, not intentionally, although bad advice happens far more frequently than one would like.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_1/Speh.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] In the night after the killing, Ali washes himself in a bowl. His wife comes close and takes his hands, slowly stroking them with hers. The bowl is filled with red water, but Ali is not bleeding.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_1/Shoemaker.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] There on the screened in back porch. Steel mesh screen rust smell damp on her tongue just after the sun goes down.  Gumdrop standing there just tall enough to see over the whitewashed lathe and through the screen that keeps skeeters out.

No one tells you, when you first begin to talk about having a baby. Naively, you think it’s about love-and it is. But not just love; it is also about so much more, and not all of it is quite so fuzzy. Here’s the truth: parenthood is a relationship based on biology.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_1/Mullins.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Carl is lying in bed half-asleep with the side lamp still glowing when the girl appears at his bedroom door. She is wearing the white undershirt he loaned her while her travel-worn clothes are in the wash.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_1/Milbrodt.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Because he’s sixty-five years old, weighs five hundred pounds, and is mostly retired, my father is learning how to levitate.  He claims he’s managed to float a few inches off the couch when he concentrates hard, but that only happens when I’m at work in the shoe store.

OF NOTES [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_1/mcdowell1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] More like autumn than autumn is. Settling gravel and moonlight, and a campfire feels its way into the dark. They used to burn coffee to cloak the scent of death. One little two little three little. Bike racks. Fire hydrants.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_1/Hoffman.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The porcupine girl was born with a full set of quills, softened by amniotic fluid and slicked down by placenta and blood. The doctor didn’t make the usual announcement, and after a few moments of infant squall, he said with practical Southern gumption, “Good thing she wasn’t breech.

Farm Town: The Wolf [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_1/Farmer1.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Disguised as a lover, he was all clover.  Dressed as a December hunter: a genuine risk.  He waited me out in the snowy hedge.   I said go home, predator, but he became a Compulsive Visitor.  Knock knock he called with his teeth.

THE SURFACE OF OGLE-350c, like so many other superearths Sevin and Vulpes had visited, was composed of a mixture of crumbly xenolith and light, rubbery, frozen organics mounded like ice cream-if ice cream were ever black, and piled into geologic deposits that stood weathering in a thin corrosive atmosphere for ten million years.

They had too many drinks at the motel bar, which overlooked the freeway. She had never been there, but her ex seemed to know it. He asked for a specific room location at the back. They weren’t hungry, so they went to the room on liquor and peanuts.

Blackbox lies at the bottom of the ocean where the fish are blind and the waters dark and muddy and where lie scattered the bones of ships and sailors of the seas and of the skies. Once, after a sudden event in another world, many things descended here. The sky ship was already broken.

The real story isn’t starting yet. ### Chelsey likes things she shouldn’t like. This morning, while waiting for Lloyd to honk his horn outside her house, she stubs her toe on her armoire and finds the pain kind of nice. It’s uncomplicated, easy to fix. She likes the simplicity of it.

YOUR BLACKNESS black feet, black bill, black breath                     the crow tells me I don’t know                I don’t listen                          warn them hungry my branch back up stuck-man fly away           I don’t know the crow I don’t have time           step     pluck     babymouth     wind The crow          listen           stuck-man COMFORT Frosted windshields challenge scrapers,           white horizon blurred by flakes.

You as Insulated Travel Mug with stippled belt which is where it’s most natural to grasp you off a morning, that house in LA it was cold with holes in the walls and I thought how, your doors always open (in one sense); our blood was not the same stuff and if I handed you

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_1/Higgins.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Not sure how to begin, I will say, during college, for seven months two fellow freshman ran a prostitution ring from their dorm.

THIS IS THAT Let’s start with certainty: Life is this and then that. To reach the next thing, I’ve found, one must reduce to the simplest nature institutions of a flattening scope. We hazard our own metaphors. For instance consider the mind: a cliff, whittled by high entropy.

Elope [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_1/Gilbert1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I stop feigning virginity in the A.M. God had found us traversing New Mexico byways, His breath smelling of brimstone.

distant early warning (abbr.: DEW) noun a radar system in North America for the early detection of a missile attack 1.

Jamie, once again I’m strumming the low latitudes, plucking dark lines like harp strings-oblivion’s tropical melody. All morning I’ve been drinking the wide blue sky: cliché heaped upon cliché- each atom complicit, each molecule a temple of triteness, a dull world. But this green sea is a global original, an inimitable canvas.

the pilgrimage of mouths My throat is a winding staircase of stone, where words pace up to my teeth’s narrow apertures and dare jump. Other nights I choke on their clumsy catapult down into the roil of my belly, a cauldron stoked by slow sipping a 12-year Barbadian rum.