6.03 / March 2011

Movement One. “He died for our sins,” Alex said as he put the small wood-and-metal crucifix on the pressboard dresser of the Days Inn room Lydia had reserved under her name.  “He might as well get his money’s worth.

On Sunday afternoon, I go to the playground with Nathan, my two year old son. I get him out of his car seat and we run over to the plastic jungle gym which is made to look like a ship, with red and blue tunnels and slides.

SAINT ALBANS We made love, algebraic and steady. Soon, you left for work. I spent the day like foreign currency, ambling. I was an angler fish. You were bioluminescent, right past the bridge of my nose all day. I followed, and also did not follow. I bumped into things all day.

Wolf, Open Your Eyes He absolutely did it, but he can’t think why. He can’t even imagine what it would be like to kill all these innocent men. He imagines it would be something like going through a maze and, one by one, killing all the innocent men so you could live.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_3/owens.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_3/obrien.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The passenger beside him squirmed and fidgeted with the window crank. The passenger kicked his short legs. He cranked the window handle clockwise until it snapped then counterclockwise until it snicked. The pane stammered higher then lower then back again as though it caught within the chassis.

Crash Test Dummy comes home from work to find pieces of his wife scattered across the living room floor. A leg here, an arm there, her torso hiding beneath the coffee table. Crash Test Dummy finds her head behind the couch.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_3/beachy.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Andrew growled from the landing halfway up the stairs as the two men, inspectors wearing loose suits the color of ash, made for the door.

Self-Portrait with Ghosts & Projectors [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_3/williams1.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_3/tudor.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Karen used Coquina for the wings.  It was an easy decision.  She needed an easy decision.  She took a breath before placing the glue.  Another day she might have tried Spirulas or Jingles.  But not today.

[1] At night, when I finally fall asleep, exhausted with stress, scenes unfurl in black and white. I see her hand on his knee at the dinner party, laughing. I don’t miss the smirk that slips across her face as she closes the door on her way out of the apartment.

It’s a project to tell the universe the story of our lives. How it works is we all write down on slips of clean paper-perfect four-by-four squares-what it is we want to tell them: whoever’s out there, twenty, thirty, forty light years away.

First Year of Marriage [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_3/mali1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Love is the burning point. – Joseph Campbell You get up from the couch to rekindle the fire. I ask if you need a match as you twist the newspaper into a horseshoe and stick it between dim embers and logs.

I have fucked the boy that works in our office and whom you were probably saving for summer Forgive me he was delicious so sweet and so ready.

1 In the days when it was rare to push buttons for things, there was a woman who drank herself to death even though once she had been in a film with Peter Lawford. She was an eccentric all though the years: she wore lipstick to bed and lived in fear of food borne illnesses.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_3/Today.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Two squirrels obscenely rub their rumps together in some kind of warm-up for a long afternoon of frolicking. The council of crows carries on and deems the future from the fallen sticks caught in the storm drain grate.

Lament for the Shape [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_3/crabtree1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Your house abandoned you for another family. Your family replaced you with a decorative statue of a dog-butler that they keep in their foyer.

I have been taking a yoga class for grief, loss, and bereavement for a month now. The class is taught by a woman named Teal, though I have my doubts that that is her real name. She calls us her bean sprouts. “Bean sprouts,” she’ll say, “fold in to child’s pose from down-dog.

Joe Magarac is made of solid steel, but today his heart is a magnet. It keeps pulling him homeward. He’s sure of it: his heart is pumping carbonate and iron-oxide into his bloodstream, drawing him back to the heaps of ore smelting in the blast furnaces. Joe knows you can’t cheat science.

You thought it was the oddest setting. You thought it was the strangest place to meet: a phone box. I said, I am very fond of this one. You looked at me like that again.