5.09 / September 2010

Abby holds love in her right hand. Walter kneels on the cement. She dangles the love, the size of a marble, over his grease-fumed hair, rolling it around her meaty and sandy palm as she decides what to make him do first. Roll over, she says. Walter hesitates.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_9/bitner.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] It is late at night and I am lying in my bed willing the aliens to come to me, throwing my voice out into the night like a lifeline, looking for a catch. My pillow smells like musty baby powder. I want you to come.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_9/bradley.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Chapter 1—Life on Mars Aulus Minucius Plautus stretches the slaughterhouse of his body in his bedchamber.   He looks at his shield, craning his neck to catch the reflection of the notches.   Aulus counts each one with his fingertip.   49.   49.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_9/brinson1.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Demiurgic living space, cows are rooms who roam. Sometimes found in the closet, sometimes found in the den, once in the kitchen, twice in the bed. Sacred objects imperturbable, wonderful as houseboats. One never knows when one will open a room only to stumble into a cow.

In 1987 a German engineer developed a clear plane.   He did not forge in response to public criticism, did not weld.  He blew.  He tempered, said it must be clear.  The frame and fuselage were constructed from reinforced glass.  The seats—inflated plastic balloons mounted on heat-hardened transparent resin.

Imagine an opossum in headlights. Loop that image. Now imagine watching the loop. You’re at your desk. You can’t concentrate. Imagine if not concentrating was concentrating. That time you took drugs and thought a piece of tin foil stapled to the wall was a fish tank.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_9/estes1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] The cowboy had broad shoulders Like Jeremiah Johnson And red hair like brushfires. His nose broke like the Flint Hills. The traces of barbwire In his palms—dead trees At the edge of a lake. The cowboy said: “I slit the throat of a calf Caught in the fence.

Thinking of me while inside another woman must feel like sitting in the new neighbor’s dining room, saying you preferred the people who lived there before. THE LUCKIEST She blushes from his knuckles. Her lips become busted strawberries. The vessels lining her eyes surface as if trying to tell us something.

My friend Ari tells me he’s going to tell me something he does not want me telling anyone. I agree and he tells about going to a philosophical discussion about aesthetics that took place at a house in the hills. Most of the people had never met before.

I   said: “Vegetable.” “Turnip?” you said. “Nope. Ask a question.” “Are you a root vegetable?” “No,” I said. “Ask again.” “Are you in salads?” you said. “That depends,” I said. “Depends on what?” “On what you like to put in your salad.

Introduction: The first line should be exciting, intriguing, baffling. It should fully engage the readers straight-away, drawing them inextricably in both by the artistry of its construction and by some inward, elemental need to explore the questionable (at best) connection to experienceable reality it suggests.

u ·ni ·tard (yo?o?n?-tärd) n. A one-piece leotard and tights combination, sometimes with foot straps. [uni- + (leo)tard.] I love unitards. Floral unitards. My mother’s maternity suit from Hawaii circa ’92. Back when Barbie still had class. Before Barney said “Fuck” on National TV.

Lucy started calling the baby Ludwig, as a joke, and when she got far enough along that we found out it was indeed a boy, she thought the name was fitting, cute even. Lucy is the musician.

There is a small space between her being alone and her working where she stores up small talk.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_9/medina.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] A bowlegged guy with bloodshot eyes stands two urinals away in scuffed Frye boots, a black ball cap, a cell phone tucked between his shoulder and cheek. It’s 8 a.m. He smells of sweat and whiskey.

Ode to my Corrective Footwear It is bent bow-like, a wooden plank linking two out-turned baby shoes, a way to find my feet, a degausser, silencing the magnetism of my toes towards each other, heels kicked out like desolate city gates, two slotted bullets bolting each shoe to the thing that meant Walk, the prayer

There are People In My House I Don’t Know and I am Drunk and they are Drunk and I hope no one falls off the front porch roof because we have No Railing except the two strands of lights I have looped around the corner posts and one of the lights has burned out and

Gums moved to town with her gorgeous mother and sister to live with a grandmother, an unattractive woman of Gums’ type though with prominent features all her own.

The Eskimos of Brazil are causing problems. They must have felt their bones were too dense for the air, their skin too thick, because one night they visited the Puerto Alegre Zoo with swords of carved bone and lifted the only polar bear in Brazil from his cement hole.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_9/pethy1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] 3:00 AM. After daylong labor. For restoration of his powers and to process the day’s complexities. The Sleeper elaborates. His breath’s rhythm, the breathing of those sleeping next to him. The memories swimming through their separate persons. The house’s dark and temperature. Into the stuff of dreams.

To say farewell to you— fare well as you make your way from who you are to who you used to be, fare, a passage for which a price is paid. Bon voyage, good travel, travel safe. To say goodbye, adieu, adios, God be with you wherever your atoms realign.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_9/serafin.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I have been married. I have been divorced. I have been pregnant, since I was last with you. I have sat on the banks of Hoan Kiem Lake in the afternoon–the lake in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, whose waters are a mysterious moss green.

It so happened that we took a class together on the poetics of desire. The professor gave us our first reading assignment, the poem Kubla Khan. He asked us each to develop a perspective on the matter of desire in the poem. He suggested we read the poem somewhere unexpected.

You are a smart girl who waits for the rustling bags, the black gloves, and the key hanging from my mouth as I lock you into the long elastic leash.

After the revolution, she sews a new flag.   Her young lover teases that with needle and thread she looks the picture of femininity.   They smile and drink bitter coffee.