7.13 / November 2012

The Wolf [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Stokes1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] After love he cannot hear the wolf lie down outside our bedroom door or feel its wild ache twisting through the mountains inside me, this bed a terrace empty of heaven’s marble figures.

I Fall in Love with Every Attractive Woman I Meet (#5) [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Welch1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] There’s a space between us, I shout, but Cammie thinks I’m speaking in car-lengths. Above us, an aluminum net sparks & whirrs.

History of a Hymen: Age 7 Bike-riding along Kelso Road- the front spokes caught my purple purse. With the seize and stop my crotch launched banana seat into bar-hard. Pain water balloon burst and clot.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Sinykin.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Pym’s second cousin fucked her when she was still a girl, is where it started, apparently. He visited frequently during the tender nub of her pubescence. Then, Easter, 1998 or 99: years blur into each other like letters at the optometrist.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Sheffield.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Second thing she does is slide into heels so high she doesn’t have to stand on tiptoe for shit. Third thing the bitch does is throw every appliance into a snow bank. They’ll still be good in the spring.

Bonnie, Jack, and Tal take the whole case out to the dock behind the bay house, lay down under the moon and drink. The wood beneath them smells like old blood because it is soaked in old blood.

Benjamin Franklin Twitch wasn’t Alan Holman’s brother, but over those strange summer months that culminated in the burning of the Kissimmee Baptist Church, Alan came to think of him as such.

If My Housemate Fucks With Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1) [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Parker1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I didn’t come here to make friends. Buildings spit their stomachs at me and I spit back, down the sidewalk into a bitch’s hair.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Moody.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] In the television commercial for high-tech wheelchairs, the woman is basking in her new-found freedom, gazing improbably down the Grand Canyon’s chasm. I want to reach out with my finger and push her over the rim.

1. Confined in a modest apartment, My family listened to an answering machine Play the part of my uncle We heard: “He’s dead, Bobby. Our father is dead.” This delicate news, In my childish hands, Felt natural and adventurous.

Hollywood Forever Halloween came, sticky with the amniotic glow of cheap candles and slapdash saints. We went to the cemetery uncostumed so I could find his naked face among the grinning skulls. Each time he saw me, he bared his teeth.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Gamble.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. -Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”   We are eating cheap pizza & drinking iced tea from styrofoam cups under fluorescent lights.

Paige spilled milk onto her kitchen floor on purpose. She thinks, “I am doing this. The milk. My hands and my brain are allowing me to do this. This must be okay, if I can physically do this.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned since losing my virginity: [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Dodson2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] My girlfriend shaves in so many places! Holy cow! I’ve only ever shaved my face with an electric razor, not a blade, because I’m afraid of them.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Davis.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] For some, affliction is a badge. They have always worn it, affixed to lapel or strap. Their moans of pain could easily be mistaken for pleasure. Others make of themselves a house with different rooms. Here is my clawfoot tub, they say. Here is my bed.