5.05 / May 2010

for Patty Paine someone is always crafting something: an animal built for travel: retractable wings: rudder: engine room: and wheels: here you say love is the possibility of shapes: down a hallway and you are following ribboning lines: and you think about language: being fluid: flowing: here you say a language without love would surely

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_5/furr.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I. we wear fur, everyday, then spend our lives removing proof, shaving, the stubble clumping, like ants in the sink. shaving, like we can clean, purge the animal, the evolution, until we are pale and bald, bleeding with the blisters of our own left-overs. II.

“They dug and dug.”     —Paul Celan [wpaudio url=”/audio/5_5/Flesh.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The Angel’s Monologue Something to be said for blasphemy: it makes people sit up and take notice.   Good Lord, you’re still in the bathroom?   Allah bored.   Porco dio.

With our house in sight, I press the garage door opener, hoping to minimize the time Paul can  stare at the shutter.  I keep pressing the opener, but it’s not until we’re in the driveway that the door begins rumbling open.

I put myself through college delivering pizzas for a Chinese restaurant. The owners, two elderly brothers who wore long robes embroidered with cherry blossoms, wanted to corner the market. They sold sweet and sour curry and General Tao’s spaghetti, Asian quesadillas and Hunan-style sauerkraut.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_5/Fischer.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Mr. Supervisor, I can tell by the way you’re looking at me that you think I’m batshit. You think I’m one step away from screaming about Jesus’ tonsils and pissing on tourists on Powell Street while they’re waiting for the cable car.

She’s a fat girl. Everyone except her mother tells her she isn’t. But in the dark, when she takes off everything and unfolds the parts of her that get squished and tucked by clothes, the big white bits of skin and whatever’s underneath, Chloe knows exactly who and what she is. She is not big-boned.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_5/Heil_Tomato.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I taught the children I teach English I say tomato is code for quiet is supposed to get a finger you say mouth.

Ronaldo Wilson (From Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (Pitt Poetry Series), University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008 One house is red, up on a red mountain. The house is windowless and cold.

In the dream, I give birth in reverse. A man I don’t recognize gets younger and smaller.   I try to stop him, hold him up and keep him tall, but his adult body collapses into that of an infant in my waiting arms.

and ignore all its warnings: “It is not designed to be a hammer, screwdriver, or pry bar and should not be used as such.” Use it however you’d like, though remember it’s intended to sliver through the skin of unknown animals, to reveal the white layer of fat under flayed flesh.

“Sit down,” my husband said. “No,” I said. He was always telling me to sit down or go away or come here or be quiet. “I’m not joking,” he said. “Neither am I.” In the corner of the room, my daughter began to cry. “See what you’ve done?” he said.

Headlines, New York Times, 1-10-2010 through 1-16-2010 A gangland bus tour, with lunch and a waiver; K2: a trek to danger’s doorstep; in Fiji, dancing with sharks. More perils of ground meat: the work of war, at a fever pitch; another terrorist plot, another very long day.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_5/Powers.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The men of the 110th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Infantry Division sprinted through the Huertgen Forest, the bowels of Europe.   Bowels is a synonym for entrails.

For Penelope Krouse Elizabeth is seventeen, and an exchange student in the Soviet Union.   She has never been away from Orange County, California without her parents.

Recently she said, “Save water?   For one thing, you men can start pissing in the sink” She wears culottes and ombre-patterned silk tops with velvet godets When she’s off her Texas Spanish, she affects a slightly urban upspeak She says she wants to go to Bora-Bora and Morea, to Seville, to Uruguay But next

For Brittany Murphy In the shower, her body dies like a spider’s. The blooming flower seeds a cemetery. A pill lodges in the inner pocket of her flesh coat. Her breasts were the gifts of ghosts. Dark tarps of success. Her mouth dribbles over onto the bathroom floor. Pollock blood.

Today Martha explained how to prepare Bing cherries for a group of six or more guests. “First take a deep blue bowl,” and from under the counter she produced a bowl. (In fact it was shallow, and green.) “And then you drop the cherries in.” And then she dropped the cherries in.

The previous quiet was sub-par.   Not profound or cathartic enough.   Almost disappointing.   Just a chair, heart monitor, and syringes in a blank, bulletproof glass room.   An echo in every metal chair scrape or errant cough.   A shabby killing instead of a show. Now, there’s a choir.