6.05 / May 2011

A very smart man tells me the thing I have written is too much about my self.  Too much “I.”  Could I please write something else?  Differently?  He needs something he can publish for the wider literary community that is not so self-centered.  Perhaps something about craft.  More about literary practice.  In general.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/archer.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] It all starts at the drive-in. He sucks her toes. The night’s hot and dark. She’s thankful he can’t see her face. They keep the windows rolled up and the radio going. Some Willie Nelson song is on, about a girl with blue eyes.

A DEATH It’s midway through the final turn, when she’s just relaxed her hands from underneath her seat, that something cracks in the steering column. Before he would have laughed at the suggestion that he was driving recklessly or going too fast. “I know this car, babe.

SHOT-SILK EFFECT, NO. 1 In the morning we wake to sharp sunlight through the lone pine or hemlock outside our motel window. “What is that?” you say. “I don’t know what kind it is, if that’s what you’re asking.” We can’t come to any conclusion. The trees are tall here, ambitious.

Two months after the wasp sting, the bruise is hard and small, the size of a button on a men’s dress shirt. A faint ring shadows the bruise, and she touches the center. Its hardness grows into her arm, toward the bone, and she feels the burn under her fingers.

Flying She knew she didn’t have long before her husband found out about the debt, how deep the roots of it went, so she pushed for a trip, naming the kids in the twins’ third grade class who’d already been overseas.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/Evenson.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Dad raced his thundercar and made Mom get the races on tape until the summer I turned twelve when Buddy Nightingale slammed Dad into the wall of the third turn at Meridian Speedway.

Heroine Never trust a humble hero, a meek man recounting with a shrug his part in overthrowing a terroristic gunman in the mall as if his blood hadn’t bloomed into bouquets of ferocious roses sprouting from the soles of his cheeks and he never feared hell fire.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/Moody.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] 1. Calculating your way to good health A bag of ridge-cut, salt & pepper potato chips contains 16 servings. One serving contains 4% of your body’s daily iron needs.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/Gobble.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I thought I saw my mother laying in the road with those death chalk lines around her. Some kids were kicking a ball around her. I heard a teenager laugh around her.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/Jones.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Carol decided to burglarize her neighbor’s house. She was a friend of the family, but there were things she wanted that the family had. She was tired of seeing the things, leaving them for the family. She wore a ski mask and used a flashlight.

what one eats is destroyed and no longer real – a grievous error on earth but in heaven one consumes & is consumed by god {muscularly not our} god & god’s will to seize us {Ecclesia 1} my dove in the cleft of the rock my hiding place my city the beginning of my face,

Honeymoon The sky is gathered wool laying too close to their faces, their breath burning the small space between their lips and their disgraceful mouths. Even the lizard hanging on for dear life in the left hand corner of that hallowed room can recognize mistakes when he saw them.

Michael Jackson Americans skipped a generation. When they came back they were different from before, shinier, more likely to take you by the hand and tell you a bedtime story you didn’t ask to hear, stories without wolves. The rest of the world watched through binoculars as the Americans changed.

Most of the Things I Have Thought Today She has so many knots in her hair because we are desperate in our fucking. Maybe desperate is not the right word. Think: necessary. Think: éclat. Think the opposite of mediocre and then continue to think that until you grow bored.

WHAT IT WAS The waterfall was a waterfall. That’s really all. I want to say it was like a river tipped over, or a slippery tongue blasting outwards from a rock face, or a translucent liquid finale to a dream in which I loved you. But it was a waterfall. Water, falling. Dropping. Down. Down.

Diagram of the Carnal Male [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/barrett1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Top It’s not enough to want him open you have to pry, wrench, lie, spit, sidle your tongue-noise along his hear-holes, beg like wolf to pig: I will fry you in your own grease.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/holub.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] You watch fake news. You say it’s because you hate the real news. And you claim the real news is faker than the fake news, the fake news being the only news that tells the truth.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/communion.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I smiled nervously and thought, This is strange and funny but sort of sexy… I thought of my new lover and how this could make a great kinky scene. I knew he was waiting. I never did well with silences.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/MayDay.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I chipped my bottom front tooth wrestling with Codrut in his fancy flat in the center of the city.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/ansorge.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/winnette.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] In one story, the two sisters met in high school.  One was a senior, the other a freshman.  For whatever reason, they were drawn to one another.  The senior was excited each day to see the freshman pass by her.

My mom’s friend, who thinks she’s my therapist, asked me the other day- “Naomi, why all the affairs?  What’s that all about?” I tried to smile and shrug it off but my therapist was very serious.  She wanted a deep answer.  Before I could say anything though, she raised her hand to silence me.

He left school at thirteen and joined his brother’s jitney business, carrying passengers during the day. At night they delivered whiskey to juke joints in Deep Ellum. Laughter and her blues floated out into darkness, where he sat alone with the goods, listening, clutching a razor and his brother’s gun.