8.02 / February 2013

Once there was a giraffe who used to get a toothache when she was going to land. And then there was this squid who couldn’t find his pants and the entire night performed like that.

Althea: On Harvey’s 150th birthday, we hosted a sesquicentennial carnival.  The boys built a tent for him to show off his Civil War dag and such ephemera.  He posed for souvenir photographs with the public.  That was the main draw, in my opinion–the photographs.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_2/Wyss.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] There was once a woman called Right Velmy, who lived in a small, crooked house that sat upon a hill. Each morning, a fog swirled up the hill where her crooked house sat. The fog swirled as high as the windows and it tapped at them.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_2/Sperber.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] The neuter down the street, Lee, is a master of psalmody.  He used to sing her psalms in church, with liquid, heartbreaking grace, and women swayed flat-heeled shoes; men nodded thick necks; everyone shone.

At breakfast I can’t eat, so I draw a topographical map of where your body was. I look for relief when you’re not here. Contour lines down your side of the bed, then up the refrigerator door, its elevation suggesting your torso, and inside it the eggs you’d break on yourself.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_2/Royce.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] He shave in long slow pulls; tighten his face so the blade can’t snare up against the skin of his neck, seventeen inches thick like a bull.

Biography of Teenagers [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_2/Sadre1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] We’ll write our biography when we’re teenagers and before we grow into our teeth. Before we meet people who will laugh at us for reasons we’ll talk about when we’re older and you’re divorced and I’m divorced too.

As she stepped into the warm Los Angeles morning, Maria remembered what her late mother, Concepción, told her each night at bedtime since María had turned thirteen: “Mija, when you kill a man, you must find the weak spot that all men have and make him suffer pain as he has never suffered before.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_2/Mulroy.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Anna and Henry Sidell fly to Athens, Greece, a trip they planned several months earlier as their last hurrah before parenthood, from their hometown of Raleigh, NC, where Henry works at a local television station and Anna sells perfume part-time at a department store.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_2/Lumans.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Plague of Left-handedness. Plague of British Teeth. Plague of Magician’s Assistants. Plague of Loons. Plague of Control Freakedness, of Quaint Rusty Farm Tools, of Loved Ones-Spurned or Otherwise. Plague of Puissance, Plague of Beached Whales, Plague of Stock Tips.

On Learning to Open My Eyes [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_2/Hoffman1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] The brightest sky is a blindfold stitched with black rain. I think of the dog pacing by the back door. Control clocks the moan sprinting past the flinch, how her teeth make me dream of doorbells crashing screams into a quiet house.

I Want To Tell You Yes I want to eat your sparrow, come here. I want to lick your sparrow claws come here. I want to cut your sorrows out you’re hollowed out. Come here. I want to suck your fingers off. Come here. I want to give you your history back. Your fingers back.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_2/Alexander.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I’m watching you watching all those cats and what I’m seeing is the big fight that happened here over two hundred years ago. All the blood and bodies that filled up the valley.