5.12 / December 2010

She lies on cerulean silk, arms and legs undulating in fleshy waves over the bedcover as if pushing and pulling deep-earth water, a silk and mesquite cenote beneath a canopy of gauze. A breeze washes in from the window. It comes from the river and she imagines the air brings the kingfisher’s call.

Sweat falls from our noses, an ablution for the ink on the page. Confessions we smear with fingers blackened and bitten. “Start again,” the huntsman says and spreads new paper across the endless table, a hundred of us lined in naked silence. Chained. Blistered with the silver of other men’s fear. A thousand of us.

She describes only the Norwegian variety, forgetting the French. Their intricate clasps and long silver chains. * Again the milky-eyed beloved.   Her sense of etiquette revealing itself as innate, machine-like.   Would compare her heart to a the inside of a clock.   Its radium dials.

They sang before bringing all the waste to shore. Perhaps I am a loony on the balcony, contain irresponsible trophies in my den. I will dance outside the lone barn with cherry soda, bust into the beaded door. Counting my steps is essential, they are quick.

She comes home from work to find that her cat has died. Unlike most cats, her cat has died in the middle of the kitchen floor.

for Mike Ostendorf [wpaudio url=”/audio/5_12/Falck.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Drink a bottle of Tequila in the dining room. Expand internally. She’ll leave lipstick on the earthy portion of your cheek; lick your nostrils in multiples of four. Allow the wetness to harden.

Plastic bags rustled as if they were trying to open something in each other. I expected her worn sigh, her evening embrace, the whir of the refrigerator when she placed milk on its top shelf. That night, I heard her rough cough, the flat sound that the couch made when she sat.

This week, Andrea had syphilis.   She was busy wiping her dripping nose (acute sinusitis) onto the back of her hand when she heard the familiar choking of an approaching car over her headset. “Hello and welcome to Mc Chubby’s, would you like to try a value . . .

Cool Steve had hair that intimidated even the most ferocious of combs. His hands were impossibly ordinary. His teeth straight and malnourished. He stood six feet and one-half inch tall. And he could be heard boasting daily how that last one-half inch was the difference between him and all the suckers shorter than six feet.

Gunny does better with his legs removed.   He stands them up in front of him, on the corner of 12th and Prospect, and against them props the cardboard sign that reads Please Help a Vet.   With prostheses on, he’s a bum; with them detached, a tragic/heroic bum.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_12/Manthiram.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Superheroes are not Indian.   They don’t drown in seven yards of fabric or keep their privates cool with man skirts.   Their muscles are predestined, like neglect in a nursing home, so they don’t go to the gym.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_12/Martinez.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] My baby is born with six fingers on each hand. They’re just little nubs of skin next to the pinkies, but no hay duda they’re fingers. The doctor says the birth defect is very common, and besides the extra fingers, Ernesto is totally normal.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_12/Miet.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] that you withhold your scorn when I throw up the contents of our dinner on the rug and close my eyes, to hide from your reaction. I’d ask for the volume switch on the world, and you’d hum in my ear when it got too quiet. We’d vibrate.

‘s piece is being presented as a PDF so as to preserve the work’s original intent and your reading experience.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_12/okeefe.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] His name was Pompey but he was not the original one. This one was tender about old swords but serious when it came to storing the same sixpence in his pocket from the trousers he wore before.

we used, i think to share a pawnshop- owning uncle with a pacemaker and a brain wet with rural afterhours. a barnraising tempo nudged through the late part of our chronic october.

Sam left her apartment early in the morning despite being ill-prepared. She had brought her bag, but forgotten her phone on the charger and wore some shoes that she probably shouldn’t have. They were comfortable but not well suited to the rain.

One sunny afternoon in 1986 on the outskirts of the village Baranda near Belgrade, Krsto spied on his stepmother as she salved her legs after stepping out of the claw foot tub.

My boss was married to a beautiful Italian man.   They had gotten married, she said, so that he could stay in the country and work legally.   It was strictly business.   His name was Leo, and she was always careful to pronounce it Lay-Oh, not Lee-oh.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/5_12/tierce.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] K stands for Kavanagh and Kay, which are the respective first and last names of my only remaining offline friend or acquaintance. Even my grandmother, who gave birth to two children before the transistor was invented, has an AOL account.

0. The sea is nothing special; it is like the land only a little more difficult to imagine.   The waves are nothing special; they are like the wind only a little easier to see. 1. We slide along the surfaces of our boats, spanning whole generations with our sizes.