4.09 / September 2009

She stands on a steel girder, her feet hooked around its ice edge, her hand wrapped tight around a cabled wire, her body, pulsing in the wind. Rewind. She leans into the side of the bridge, her nightgown snaps, like lightening, in hard cracks behind her.

There’s a murder in my pocket.   A hot red bludgeoning I finger when I’m nervous.   From time to time I pull it out and throw it against the wall.   Bounce.   I catch it on the rebound. Sometimes I forget my murder, leave it on the bookshelf next to my bed.

The birth was similar to her first birth, but, of course, there were differences. It was a Thursday and Edie had Bertie with her when she went for her check-up. She was a week from her due date. She always had Bertie with her. He was three and he was her everything.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_9/half_price_mojitos.

Buck, naked, has no words. The best he can manage is a strangulated cough. His wife, who is clothed, stands before him, next to a mattress that took Buck half a day to force into the trailer. “Make a …” “Please,” says Buck. “…mischievous face. A mischievous little boy face.

“The blissful counterstroke—a considerable new message.

Seven Zen Buddhist monks Slurping bubble tea At Starbucks.

We smile and pretend to enjoy each other’s company. A little girl’s tea party isn’t the place for grudges so we sit across from one another and act civil. We make small talk and say things such as “I like what you’ve done with the dream house Barbie” then exchange thank yous and you’re welcomes.

I. He told me he jerked off in a mirror.   Yeah, I smiled, I’d do me. II. Cloning, I thought, was a waste of time and money. Then I saw twin porn. III. My test clone said he loved me our first night.   No, I said, I love you more. IV.

5.1                       What do I write, for fuck’s sake? What do I write? And who do I write it to? 0.1                       Skyler. Fans of underground hardcore know him as a genius.

Sitting at the table spinning the creamer running her fingers through sugar the kids spilled at supper, Sue suddenly says, “Don, love is another thing.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_9/Manning_Grapefruit.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I’ve conquered the punishment of soap in my mouth, sweet followed by bitter, puckering. Grapefruit soap makes me want to eat the fruit. So I do. In my mouth, sweet followed by bitter, the sliced open sun startles me. I want to eat the fruit.

She said my color is red, like bursting cherries and summertime, like her mother poised on a lawn chair at noon, hair newly dyed and curled, and the color of the Mustang shaking off dust and tree branches while a man traces his hand up the porch railway.

There are rooms with windows and rooms without, and naturally, the windowless ones are the worst. Windowers, as the occupants of these rooms are called, compensate with paper and markers, taping their representations to a blank wall. The most desperate draw curtains, and sometimes a small potted flower on a sill.

There I was, literally ready to pack it all in, folding my nondescript shirts and slacks into the colorless case I’d carried when I breezed into town, and ready to catch the train back to nowhere again when the door of the hotel room slid open and one of the bellboys stuck his chin in.

What did I think about before you touched my thigh? Let me say this: I’m going to touch you until my fingers fall off. If my fingers don’t fall off, I will hold your hand even if it’s sweaty. And let me say this: You are lovelier than clouds that look like lovely things.

“I’ve got spine cancer!” I shout from the sofa.   Lonnie’s in the kitchen dicing onions. “It’s probably spinal meningitis!” She yells back. “I’ll be dead in a few weeks!” I say.   I’ve got my thumb and fingers dug in like pincers, clawing around my lower back. “Three tops!”   She hollers.

My favorite kind of pasta is radiatore. I eat it in walnut pesto fresh from the pot and pretend that I’m eating radiators.

You call again because the beer didn’t work and the pills didn’t work and neither did the water syringe or the hanger. You call because now you have a twelve-year-old girl who is 4’10″ and 75 pounds and can’t speak.

Jody wakes some days with pieces missing. Small pieces, mostly: an eyebrow, a toenail. Sometimes the things come back, sometimes not. Last month, she woke with a hole through her right hand, a neat hole about the size of a half-dollar coin, big enough to look through.

When I move into Sheena’s place, her dog begins peeing in my gymbag. Little, marking squirts, that I don’t notice until the bag starts to smell sour in the back of my car. I ask Timmy-O at the Jade Palace what he thinks I should do.

Grab me by the back of my neck and slam me facedown on the desk, so my cheek is against the slick wood surface and the desk corner juts into my stomach. Pull my skirt up roughly (because, really, doesn’t it have to be a skirt? It’d be hard to rape someone in jeans.

Here is what I wish would happen: a windy November day, before the snow has spilled its milk and the leaves still grip the ground in their stiff handshakes, that while visiting your grandmother’s gravesite, having cleared away the autumn debris and dew dust, I wish your grandmother would break the crust and reach for