4.10 / October 2009

I imagine breakfast he and I ordering the eggs- gelatinous yolks, pregnant with possibilities, plopped atop their white rubbery volcano. Our sandpaper toast brushing the membrane igniting the slow motion eruption of hot yellow magma running rapidly through the hash browns.

I regret having to post this on the mirror, but someone’s dog keeps depositing their material in the handicapped parking spot which—since the unfortunate “ultimate fighting” match during last year’s annual potluck, at which I lost partial rotation of my left hip—is primarily used by myself and my ailing grandmother.

Madness to step from the warm house. Still — cold lung-flooding air brings a tinny pain-pleasure, piercing the back of his jaw like the taste of a spoon under ice cream. The forest is dry and cold and ripe for harvest.

Our house was a body cinderblock feet, a gauge for a heart limbs leading out of the furnace belly puffing warm air through white mouths in our bedroom walls I was afraid of the furnace room its missing ceiling a skeleton of wood and wire I thought the entire world began down there Eleven years

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_10/Flors_ars.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] ‘”Æ’ (z) = 1/2 If a boy is no longer z, or is negative z, then what is he? To heck with z and your negativity but if you really want to know, beg. I am, you see? I’m on my knees. Well, then, let’s begin.

“Charlotte wasn’t a good dog for me,” she says. That’s the name of her dog, Charlotte. This is the first I’ve heard it. “She was good at first, but lately I noticed that her affection is waning. She just doesn’t love me like she used to. She walked around with her tail between her legs.

I had to find this Jed Skinner, a love-letter-writer, a man of few words, my wife’s first flame. I had time to find this Jed Skinner, fired from my life’s work, told my wife it was job performance, better than the truth.

A large gentleman Daniel Barker sat atop his round-cut log and dipped his fingers in a can of baked beans—unbaked—and as such they were merely called beans.

The winner of the latest contest highly recommends crack cocaine. “…like chugging nine cups of coffee at once,” he says, “a lot of words will pour forth if you allow them.

Honey scorched our lips full fraught with lines and arguments of love I was not afraid to tell you of: a lucent hazard I cannot avoid: unsuspected large blank spaces. Words go there. And there the link between ecstasy and ethos shines with sunshine life.

Koforidua, 1957 My dress, handmade, melts in the heat of a cocktail party. My legs run with turquoise, my hands and arms turn green. The batik dye is made with wax; I’m flammable, warned away from the gentlemen smoking Pall Malls, pretending not to notice my slow dissolve.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_10/Jemc.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I hated when they made me wear the bear suit in public and hated it more for how comfortable it was when I was alone: a conundrum. The heat had been turned off in my apartment for almost a week.

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?   This is the question my older brother Trey, who was flipping through a psychology magazine that belonged to our father, posed to my six-year-old self in our den one day in my childhood home in

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_10/Bandits.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Naomi and Nadia are outside where nothing’s happening but flowers wilting on the sidewalk marking the end of the world among the shadows of pedestrian waltzing and an esoteric guitar solo. They stain cigarettes with shades of shoplifted Color Girl and say casually caustic things of passers-by.

I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the pavement. I see it is there. I fall in — it’s a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. I walk down the street. Go through the grind, the routine, the humdrum. Keep to the mundane, I know this.

You have no choice. It is the thirty-first birthday party for a close girlfriend of your boy’s ex-fiance. As such, you were not exactly invited. But you were all friends in college who had stayed in your college town. The town is small.

She sees the little girls in the yard through her front window. They’re as naked as the day they were born, not far from the event itself. They dip backward and forward like pitchers, laughing, balling up their little white fists and shaking them like they’re playing craps.

Daylight belongs to the wives. They stroll about the development swinging canes to demonstrate the doling out of blows. “Dick made a lopsided birdhouse,” says the one named Elizabeth, thrusting her lightweight aluminum like a pool cue to kidneys.

Malmoud, the village leader, grabbed Betsy by the hand, the loose skin on his thin arm purple beneath the white glare of the sun.   His head was covered in thick shocks of white hair, his obsidian eyes sunk deep within their sockets.

So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear. —Milton I Often we use the same thing to escape what has gotten us into it in the first place — like punching a face to stop it from bleeding. And that’s how he’d come to see this candle she lights, because it reminds him.

Erwin Ermine is a schedule, a plan, a timetable that smoothly, relentlessly executes each moment from minute to minute, day to day to day to day. Every 24-hour schedule carefully written in a graph paper notebook. Every five minutes placed into 288 little blue squares on the page.

Through the bottom of a beer bottle the sun appears flaccid, incapable of fusion, and, I’m beginning to think, unworthy of human sacrifice. Betrayed I accuse my friend, my right hand man, “You’re a puppet, I cry, a dirty puppet!” Ashamed, he twists away a loose thread dangling from his button eye.