7.08 / August 2012

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Stevens.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] “I’d like a pork pie,” I said to the old man behind the counter. “We don’t have any more today,” he said. “We have chicken now. That’s it.” “Then I will sit here until you have pork pie,” I said. “We are closing in fifteen minutes,” he said.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/McMeekin.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I’ll give her this: the black lipstick really enhances her sneer. But it’s all the further she’ll go, the sneer, at least this time.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Walsh.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/SmithStevens.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] There are the boys and girls with India ink tattoos. There are the boys and girls who wear black.

These poems are presented in PDF format in order to retain the author’s intended formatting.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Kaiser.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The summer Mikey Cotter moved into his uncle’s house we built a fairy city out of mouse bones. We put twenty traps in the woods with cheese and peanut butter and caught nineteen mice.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Duffy.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Late that fall, a young woman was killed on her bicycle outside Lola’s apartment while riding in the rain. Lola was buying coffee across the street when it happened, saw the grimy dump truck and heard the screaming.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Bunker.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I. Fever Pastel streaks bristle thick and harsh behind eyelid veils, where everything spangles red, kinetic static. It is drawing shapes and they revolve. The heat radiates both away from and towards her. It would be pleasing if she could find a position from which to endure it.

The Movie My Murderer Makes [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Shipman1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] My murderer has stalked me my entire life. He stood beside the basinet the day I was brought home from the hospital. And there he was again at my first birthday party.

What We Bury [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Victorine1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] After she left the second time I spent my nights in front of a glowing screen watching women undress down to her shoulders, her breasts, her hipbones, crying and pulling at my cock, hoping to sever her sex.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Knox.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Jenna stared at the fading orange and black tattoo on her ankle. It was poorly done with too-thick lines, and people often thought it was a bee, not a butterfly. The monarchs that inspired the tattoo had arrived thirty years before, on her fourteenth birthday.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Wolff.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] This poem is presented as a PDF in order to preserve the formatting.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Tanzer.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] You are running late, always running late to pick up the older one at daycare, and it is five dollars for every minute passed 6:00pm.

HELP WANTED Packed in a girdle like a sausage in casing, I’m not “showing.” In the window of a store where I purchase pickles and pork rinds, a Help Wanted sign leans- dog-eared as the has-been bouffant checking groceries.

It was once said by a man that the gears of the machine can be stopped with enough human bodies resting atop of them. In the end, women’s bodies are always the first to be sacrificed.

Years ago, for a spell that lasted only a few days, figurative speech confused Gretchen. The first time she noticed it, she was at the Museum of Natural History with her friend Mary. They had gone there to see the Butterfly Conservatory.

My father says it’s time to lay in provisions.  At least a month’s worth.  His voice has traveled out of the woods a long way.  The way, he has said on other occasions, we must travel if anything happens: bomb, drone, wave, fire, a great poisoning of the well.

Excuse What happened is the thing grew tired as snow & like all good blood, stopped. What I am trying to tell you is my excuse.