4.04 / April 2009

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_4/beyer1.

As soon as my eyes open I know I am in David’s trailer. I have never been here, but I know. There is a smell, mildew and canned salmon, and the walls are covered with sun-bleached fake wood paneling. “David,” I say, but my voice hurts me.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_4/browne.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I. I want to walk Like Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Hobbs takes a vacation” while birdwatching, he’s bending his knees lower than Limbo leaving arms free to point a finger revolver At the sun II.

Luke at the foothills facing the Smokies for perspective, to be dwarfed, when this evening his flatbed couldn’t, nothing else could.

In the park, the way you grabbed me baby, and your lips, sweet as lemons. How I was spinning, swigging the night away, and baby you whispered songs, as if the trees were listening, the swings, the lampposts with their beer-glazed glow, and oh so many bottle-top crisp-packet moments.

Landing a full-time, $8 an hour summer job isn’t easy. Correction: landing a fulltime, $8 an hour summer job that doesn’t involve flipping burgers and peddling French fries isn’t easy. I believe in nepotism. Simply have your father get you a position at the company he works for.

Otis Henry bumfries the lillipad Otis Henry mustard flys the munter hitch Boo, Otis Henry. Your performance doesn’t meet my standards. Otis Henry doth not want to pay the parking meter So he shall pay the parking pentameter. Wise choice, Otis Henry. Wisdom. * * Otis Henry is a straight up gangster.

The last time Maggie made one of her semi-annual trips from the city back to her hometown in Wisconsin to visit her mother, they were watching the evening news when the newswoman reported that a 62-year-old named Henry Jankowski was caught sodomizing a calf on the Green Meadows farm.

stole a Jesus figurine from my aunt’s house in second grade. a Venus flytrap sat outside, right by it. always wondered how it was to taste without buds, how the plant sealed its lips, kissed goodbye. thought i was an insect, supplying some grim nutrition, thought there might really be a trap.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_4/AFewWords.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] He decides one day to write something new, something perhaps just slightly unintelligible. The contemporary equivalent of a personal sign, or a rune.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_4/murphy.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Suckers for the fantasy bribe come into the world each moment and never wean themselves from their accomplishing as accomplices their victimhood. The mug and half-Nelson flip sides of police records platinum. Parking lots slurp air from mall stores that wait for emergency transfusions from trailer trucks.

How was I supposed to know? I hear footsteps in the room above me and the old man’s already at work. Right? His car is gone and when I leave my pad I see a shadow moving inside his place. So I walk down the street to the Howling Dog Saloon and call the cops.

I have always hated stories where the woman gets the legs. I know what they don’t tell you, about the way she wakes early now, tiptoes to her tiny hidden box and peeks in.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_4/jsapers.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Sempe has a small blue star on her right cheek that everyone thinks is a tattoo.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_4/tremblay.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] There were never so many cigarettes smoked than the day they shut our building down for mold. We walked outside and lit up, said, Fuck mold anyway. We’ll smoke and die quicker than mold could kill us.

. [wpaudio url=”/audio/4_4/wheeler.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] During the night, the mascara she was too tired to remove migrated to her cheeks in an onyx smear, crusted in the corners of her eyes. Her skin gleams feverish and tight, etched with lines the pillow made, like sand after high tide. Once ruby lips now

  Shampoo Jerry’s Bar ‘N Barbeque is located smack dab in the festering epicenter of broken and smoky peppermint-colored streets constituting what there is of a tourist scene in Manchioneal, Jamaica.

Penelope is weaving in her towering hall. She’s refuged up there in her loyalty. Waiting for Odysseus, she unwinds her youth, and fashions it into his shrouding lace. Her dark eyes cloud under sunlit lashes, she feels again his fingers’ last brush against her hers.

Luke at the foothills facing the Smokies for perspective, to be dwarfed, when this evening his flatbed couldn’t, nothing else could.