5.11 / November 2010

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_11/bosworth.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Jonah digs holes and buries things. Jonah digs holes and buries things. Jonah digs holes and buries things. I ask Jonah, “What’s with all the holes and burying things?” Jonah digs a hole and buries me. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_11/crutchfield1.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Little Thing wants to know, “When is it our firework,” and Linda says, “Patience.” Little Thing is planted hard on my lap and her bathing suit will leave wet butt prints on my dress.  I kept her busy for two hours, while they planned their poor failed party.

I. I’m getting ready for the Tongue Party like I always do when my father’s impatience erupts.   I’m in the bathroom, in our house, and my father starts banging on the worn wooden door, pounding out a wartime beat. “Come the hell on!’ my father bellows.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_11/glass.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The baby in the bedroom has veins as thin and fine as strands of hair leading to her heart, each muffled heartbeat a whisper, her blood pressure no more forceful than the drip from a leaky faucet. The mother and father are out.

I. Her name is Elizabeth and she sleeps in a room down the hall. Her room is always blasting: with prisms, sonic flares, her pores everywhere. Eliza , the prisms whisper, Beth, the sonic flares, Eliza, her pores.  Beth. Eliza sleeps in a room. Beth listens. Sleeping unlistening, listening unsleeping, they unconflict.

excerpts from a prose-poem sequence Whoever wants to get to know a man should leave him as quickly as possible. He is in the last place to be found there where he stands. All the time he silently moves away from himself by expressing himself in the world of things.

an American werewolf, business casual, cigarette, five on Friday, zips by on a clover-green Vespa with a well-groomed bitch.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_11/mckinney.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] “The music is good and, each his own, all will make my song more pleasant.

It’s easier than you think.   First you have to cut your hair, which is probably the hardest part.   You’ve always had long hair—at least since you were nine or ten, anyway.

She would tell me when to stop and then roll over and go to sleep selfish girl but it was enough I met her at a gas station she stumbled like a colt in the glare of twenty four hour convenient lighting her unblemished skin a stiletto heel lobotomy reeling and blinking she teetered twirling

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_11/pane.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] New scientists were greeted with little fanfare inside the Large Hadron Collider, but Dr. Koltsov was assigned to the cubicle next to mine and thus became an object of my feminine curiosity.

We were sitting at the cafe on our third date. The waiter brought us our drinks: a cappuccino for me, loose-leaf tea for her. Monk’s Blend, it was called; she ordered it often thereafter.

In the felt room is a softer spot in the soft of the whole. There is there a slot for the cards that poke out each morning and afternoon. The morning card said Tongue Exercises. So the morning was for flexing and stretching, for folds. Afternoon was another easy one, Sitting Still.

To avoid self-destruction, hop. To hop, bend your legs at the knees and then push off. Take care not to bend too far, or too shallow, or you will not find the next stone. You are traversing a void interspersed with floating rocks. What are these rocks, ask. Use your imagination.

(A Story of Artifice) For CB and AH “Yo, Base-in-your-face. Open the door, nigga. I got Moet’ and liquor.” My cousin. No more odious, perfidious man ever walked the planet. To the world, he’s MC Flow Jizzton, a rapper known to champion the logical absurdity he calls “conscious knowledge.” To me, he’s just Francis Shuttlecock.

The rhinoceros I learn is called a black rhinoceros, and it does look dark, its skin a thick kind of sun-crusted hide.

Maggie left a trail of panties in bar bathrooms across Chicago. Usually the more expensive, ugly pairs: flesh colored things made of dense polyester, meant to smooth, to flatten, to fool.

Detroit, Michigan Obtuse red bolts cranked at each corner of the lot. Shirtless kids slapping hydrant-spray at largemouth bass-grins. Thin strands of water nearly blind Eastern Market cement. My wife Joy and I, we’re in the thick of it, managing to overstep their runoff. Gum-popping teen lovers and elderly couples are weeds in aisles.