5.03 / March 2010

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_3/Carr.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Falcon, your world would be different if Michael still lived. He would have followed your story from the beginning. He would have watched from his helicopter as the balloon floated on.

It was probably the white linen pants. I was walking behind him one day. We were going to KOHLS or some equally dreary space and he was wearing these white linen pants and the whole situation was very disheartening.

Paperclips. That was what he wanted to steal from the office supply cabinet today. Not just one, but several. Perhaps an entire box, a case, untold multitudes. He’d soon have a system that would allow him to pilfer supplies of gradually increasing value. He’d chart it in Excel.

I have become the kind of person who can order biscuits over gravy but not the kind of person who can tolerate the true definition of a Constitutional—what is, essentially, bicycle chaos.

e enjoy MySpace: Begin as a PDF.

The moon has gone ape shit. Sick of the tickling and the poking and the poetry. “You callin’ me fat?!” She howls when men write of her bountiful glow. “Your mother!” She moans as she throws waves over levees and land. She makes the streets into fountains and bites her thumb at the sun.

Wayne doesn’t want to get into a shouting match over a baby again. But beside him the stranger’s baby in the flowery stroller is wearing a white bib and a blue hat. Wayne can’t believe his girlfriend keeps staring at the baby.

Melody saw omens in everything. A spider crawling across the windshield, a withered flower swept out from under the refrigerator, an unsullied grain of rice in her curry.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_3/Hermann.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Not yet fall, orchard vines outweigh their fruit. Some of these nights my son and I sleep together, his small body and the September nights too warm. All night long our arms and legs spell out messages beneath the sheets— the wrong language for each of us.

I set out to write a poem called “How to Be a Bluesman.” This poem was to be clever and knowing and verging on funny. It would have suggested being born in the late 1800s to parents who might or might not have been slaves. It would have quoted W.C.

There are more than 2000 hash marked lines on the beltway between my house and work. I get off at 5 a.m. and the only way I seem to get home is by staring at the hash marks off my left front fender. I count them and I stay to the right of them.

I was eating candlelight, gobbling it whole as it flickered from the ends of burning wicks, five or eight candles each night, in a consumption habit that proved addictive—no amount of twelve step groups curbed my appetite for the light, and such was the rising price of candles that my addiction wrecked havoc on my

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_3/lockward1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Cover me in filth, for I have lain down with pigs. Toss me like a salad in silt and grime. Dig a ditch and bury me up to my neck. Pelt me with mud pies dark as fudge. Withhold water, soap, exfoliant, and loofah.

it’s a love poem you say, as you stab out your cigarette on my appendix. [vestigial, only suited for the stinging caused by the eyelids and cityscapes of ex-lovers.] *** lachrymose, pulsating lakes shoring up diary pages. [i pray for a groundswell to hemorrhage the ink, to leach her from your repertoire.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_3/Pashley.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Because your husband is far away. He is in another country, and you don’t even want him to be your husband anymore, but you can’t say that because he’s a soldier. To say that is un-American.

Speaking, in our company auditorium, of the smokers’ tendency to seek higher ground, he said, Of course it will all be fine in the end, so long as we can keep them off the rooftops.

e enjoy Joshua’s writing as a PDF which preserves the unique formatting of the work.