8.9 / September 2013

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_9/Brooks.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The fires started in the dead of winter, springing up out of the frost-coated ground like demons.  They rose up in four swirling columns, like orange swizzle sticks, unmoving in their paths and unyielding to water.

A man so rich, so young, learns to expect favor.  Youth tells him the world is an eager thing.  Wealth says it holds presents. The dog Basil had two purposes:  to scent quarry, and to unspoil his master of these expectations.  Because everything about this dog was a trial.

A Tube of Mirrors [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_9/Gavin1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I. And now I’m going to run like the ink of a mythology that’s passed through all the hands of Kumbh Mela. Who knew a single grain of vellum could record so many fingertips and palms – all lines and oil.

Option #1 The quiet boy in your office said he’d love to take you hiking. You’ve never been hiking in your life, but you told him to pick you up around dinner time.

You invent this incredible invention. You call it the Chromex. It looks like a Rubik’s cube. It takes pictures and videos then projects them up in the middle of the air, in 3-D. You show me for the first time in your room on the 26th floor at sunset. We’re naked in bed.

THIS MORNING WAS A RIVER TO WHICH I SAID [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_9/Woods1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] hello river, you are upon us. We hid behind a ledge & you threw yourself over it, sparkling. Every part of us is made of the thing that moves you.

Faith [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_9/Ruffin1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] The twinkle of the fetus randomly fades still a bolus of cells, still barely a watermark announcing the hidden river of her. Every one of two of them do.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_9/Redmond.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I drop out of night school. I go to the chop shop instead. I have things that need cutting: a new fang, a sore hoof for the rasp. I watch a man in a mask with one huge eye wield a small flame.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_9/Nelson.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I say the sea is boiling. You laugh and say I am definitely a poet. I say no it is, really. And hold my scalded toe. You walk to the edge and dip your big rightie in, the monkey-looking one.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_9/Hill.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] but you’re tired of her so you pick a fight with a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 on a bet that you’d puke neon. You do. A hipster takes a picture of it so you leave that party in a city that knows you’re unarmed.

Porn was never the plan [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_9/McArtor.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I did it because it stopped being progressive, because geometry is easy, because every triangle fits a circle in all three corners. I did it because your description of me should fit into a one-sentence caption.