7.02 / February 2012

I worry about what to say to The Mothers.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Sheffield.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] It’s a lights out kind of thing with strangers gathered naked all around you – clasping each other’s hands and genitals; a glowing growing around their eyes because there you are too – nude, tiny, suddenly feeling like a child, but for what? These are instances of proof.

ARROW (1) An arrow, even Cupid’s, carries a slant of sorrow at its tip. ARROW (2) The thump it makes when hitting mark is felt across the space: an arrow straight to the heart. ARROW (3) In the space between the letting go and arrival there is grace.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Fuentes.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The lights have been with us a long time. We have all decided what they mean. In groups, when first gathered, we receive direction. We are asked questions about lights. The lights we like best will be mirrored by one hand rising into the air.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/whisnant.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The old man flew in from Florida and is staying with the family.  The old woman drove from Omaha and gets a cheap motel room.

epitaph #17 [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/17.

“The secret of improved plant breeding, Apart from scientific knowledge,           is love.” So said Luther Burbank one morning while strolling The nursery grounds of Gold Ridge Farm           with that curious, bemused Technician of consciousness, Yogananda. They’d Been friends for many years, and were discussing His attempts to produce a spineless cactus.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Shutts.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Season One_______ ___________________________________________________________ The Pact Three middle school girls make a pregnancy pact. They are bored and they want attention and unconditional love. The first one, Bridgina, does it with Wendell, her boyfriend of two weeks, on the school bus.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Puchalski.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Pieroni.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] They were not reptilian, though from time to time they did flick their tongues.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Mills.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] It was spring in Indiana when that man raped the gray-haired lady who went to worship with us. The one who wore purple skirts and sturdy tan shoes like loaves of day old bread my father brought home for us.

UPON LIVING WITH A MAN NEWLY RELEASED [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Leigh1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] A friend watches me spoon a soggy chunk of my childhood and fling it somewhere between my Brooklyn sink and California.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Klahr.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Letter.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] “Thursday’s child has far to go…” We called it the Cape of Flowers, but for every bug-eaten bloom there were forty thorns and twice that number of saw-toothed weeds, and a grit-patch mined with sandspurs made the only path to the sea. The sun was ceaseless.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/LaBue.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Peter orders his eggs over hard so he can assure himself the pleasure of clean cuts and small bites that never endanger his shirts or hands of a yellow yolky smear.

This is the time of the tragic man, not the drifting cloud. This is the time for all tragic men to come to our aid and for drifting clouds to just move on, move on. They stood in a line to shake his hand, the first and most successful tragic man.

After we go to the doctor, Momma waits until Daddy comes home to tell him that my sister is deaf.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/goldstein.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] My first day on the butterscotch line, they tell me I can eat five chews an hour. Frank says, “That’s more than on the taffy line.” Frank works across from me. He and I box the butterscotches, fifty a box.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Gaines.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] “The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as people who refuse to leave their house, and isolate themselves from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months.

Cotopaxi [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_2/Eduardo1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] -After Frederic Edwin Church I ask the campesino where he got his hat. I have trouble understanding his response as he rushes past pauses and breathes between his words, chest heaving, his accent slanted north.

I didn’t mean to make a habit out of sitting naked on lemon meringue pies-or split watermelons.  I’d watched this soft-core sex show called “Fetishes of the British” and thought food foreplay would make my husband laugh, relieve the four-year itch. I’m on my way to London now, non-fetish business.

My mother and I lost our house in Darien, Connecticut after my father left us. He just disappeared one day – no packed suitcase, no missing cufflinks. I was only seventeen, and my mother didn’t tell me what happened for months. He’d been stealing from his company, for years as it turns out, insurance fraud.

But it’s okay that I’m an unemployed screenwriter still living with my parents, because one day I’ll turn this into a great sitcom.