6.11 / September 2011

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Briminstool.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Where I live now the churches rival shopping malls in square-footage and parking. The pastor’s are all shellac and glean, with wives made-up as if ready for burial. They don’t speak much of hell or Satan anymore, not even the Baptists. There’s no money in it.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Kimzey.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The boy never made the cover of the black and white tabloids at the supermarket even though he learned to fly before he hit puberty.

Where the Hero Contemplates Forgiveness [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Xu1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Before you there was your father who carried a hammer & fixed things.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Mellas.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Butternut says if houses wore dresses, ours would have to lift up its skirt so rain wouldn’t soak into its ruffles. Cupcake says if our house’s joists were legs, the water would be past her knees.

IF JANE HAD BEEN A RENEGADE [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Hopcroft1.

MY THROAT IS FULL [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Levy1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] And there are days when I can’t even speak. You see my throat is a second heart. You see my throat is full of cotton balls. My bloody cotton balls on the bathroom floor. My dim heart as a mess of paint.

THE LAST ASTRAL ECHO [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Frick1.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Through the car roof comes the last astral echo of our love. We sit side by side, seatbelts still fastened, chins tilted up to the place where a minute ago there was no moon roof.

Serial Killers’ Grocery Lists [wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Patalano1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I. Fred Fred is currently in the cooling off period between his murders.  Fred was a good student at Fairmount High School, in Wyoming, and was active in a local church, serving as Vice President of the Youth Fellowship.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Marshall.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Attending on the pier Vera feels swells coming to the pier coming in comes rolling forwarding moving on the inward motion as they come one then come the next and come and again.

There is a story my father tells about his father. This was in Wyoming, on the ranch. They had spent the summer together, building a cabin at the mouth of a small canyon; one night sometime after this my grandfather was in that cabin and he heard a noise.

I ALWAYS THOUGHT Cinderella Was a real story I thought She lived in Lincoln And that I would meet her Later in college I knew her mom Daylight And her sisters Tick & Tock I didn’t have to convince her To go swimming with me In the Missouri in January I couldn’t She would always

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Vitrak.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] If I get a pair of name-brand jeans my life in the seventh grade will really mean something. I won’t be just plain old Samantha Sievers with generic jeans and K-mart tennis shoes. And I don’t want no Hunt Club jeans, either.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Wilson.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] My mother had sent me the newspaper clipping all the way from Paris, Texas, and I read it that very day. My picture was beside it, almost as big as life.

It started with a drop. From ceiling vent to bathroom floor. Drops so sporadic, neither of them noticed. When Will went to take a piss, he thought the puddle by the blue bathmat was a wet footprint that one of them had left getting out of the shower.

He startles my body in ways I didn’t know it could be startled.  Drinks of water, vinegar, and cayenne pepper make my stomach turn, leave me light-headed and chilled.  Before I leave he feeds me tiny chocolate bars, laced with lavender and salt. I am cleansing, or so he tells me.

The snow under the porchlight, the sight a slow burn. The boy lies in the snow like an angel in cocaine, a slain angel put to sleep by too much white. The boy under the porchlight, he is waving his wide wings. Do not look at the snow or step on the angel.

Wax Landscape Ten years seems long to wait for coffee with you. Strollers line the front of the café, evidence of parents. If you are part of the bustle inside I won’t know.

What you need is to return to that day twenty-something years ago and kick the fat guy out of your mom’s living room.  That morning she set up a table for you along the curb in front of your house with two dozen blueberry muffins so you could have a muffin stand.

Jimmy brought nothing but a duffel bag.  He strapped the bag in the bed of my decrepit Chevy. “My last ride,” he said climbing in the cab.  “You’re riding home alone, Gary.” “You serious?” I said. “As a house fire.  Take me to the bus depot.

Tell your customers they have pretty hands, even if they don’t, especially if they don’t.  Good breath means good tips.  If you get sad, go into the break room and stick your head in the pickle bucket filled with the Mexican nail polish and you’ll get happy real quick.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Golding.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Gabby likes celebrity gossip magazines and the faint gurgling noise that a person makes when they’re getting choked with a garrote wire.

It is the end of the summer for goddesses. Cal, gray-bearded, Hawaiian-shirted, counts thirty-seven bikini bottoms, thirty-three tiny tops, fourteen perfect midriffs, twelve enchanting sets of hips, two pairs of graceful hands – the kind that can do numbers, and one supernatural mane sent from above.

I have been saving my hair in Ziploc bags, labeling in precise script the numeration of days: March 12, March 13, March 14.  Measuring the loss, measuring myself as loss.  There is something enormously pleasing about seeing myself, gathered, documented, consolidated–something so bodily in something so wonderfully plastic.

The Invention of Terrorism Just as easy to design it without windows Just as easy to say instead of a floor, a sea of tongues. Just as easy to give up the ghost of pleasure that’s been haunting the body. Easy to forget what the purpose of the tool, forget intention. Wrench. Vise. Tire iron.