Tag: Solitude

Self-Portrait After Three Years in Outer Space

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

My bones thin to slivers inside my filthy rig. I’m the wheezy ghost
haunting a plastic suit of armor, the unshriven soul

expiring within an infidel. My dreams run antiseptic, anachronistic
and celibate while the past keeps unspooling somewhere

behind my pineal gland. Screws loose, I make up all sorts of stuff
to tell them, happy things with a convincing kink

of lonesome. They say it’s for the greater good as my DNA chars

like bacon at the edges and a universe tumbles past my bulletproof
porthole. A mechanical lung, a toothpaste tube supper,

the chemical toilet where every one of my clods gets categorized,

bagged and sterilized. I perform my tasks upside-down, tapping
an antiseptic keyboard or watering my million-dollar

seedlings and teaching a herd of space worms zero-gravity lessons
of reward and punishment. Mission Control applauds

these efforts remotely, electronically. On cue, I’ll smile for the kids
and urge them to work hard and stay in school, reading

with a pixilated grin from an inviolable script
plugging science, math, the digital approach to all our catastrophes . . .

But off-camera I coin better names for the Mission: Jugged Chimp.
Scrubbed Purpose. The Immaculate Reduction.

Canned Epiphany. Celestial Funk. Deficit Boondoggle. Minerva

Shrugged. Apollo Wept. My apostasy runs Ptolemaic, heliocentric,
chthonic, wrong. Patched-in and monitored, salaried

and pensioned, my pulse ping ping pings. I’m the life-support blip
on a faraway screen, another protocol, another

something else evaluated, budgeted, and all gotten down to a science.

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Self-Portrait as Someone Not Supposed to Be Here

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Brad Aaron Modlin

Because of a clerical error for which the temp agency sincerely apologizes,
today I’m a tour guide at “Jimmy’s Sistine-Chapel Warehouse Replica

and Gift Shop!” where I try to avoid laser-pointing to the Biblical genitals while children
and art critics ask about pigment-to-egg ratios of contemporary fresco restoration.

These people saved for weeks for a tour with an eloquent expert named
Albert, and I won’t tell them they got me instead. Though my father warned,

“Don’t trust someone who never says, I don’t know,” when the critics question if I’m sure
the panel overhead is titled “Then God Makes a Red Planet,” I think not of my father,

but of confident, informed Albert and shout, “Contrapposto!” which is a word
I remember from art appreciation class. “Why is that naked man building a boat?”

a child asks about Noah, and I say, “God wanted a re-do.”
When I point to Samson’s rippling thighs, I am embarrassed I wore shorts.

How often have I wished to exchange body parts—legs, stomachs—with a passerby?
One who could walk tall surrounded by all these fearless nudes.

The children are confused about God
ready to touch his index finger to Adam’s, assembling him from dirt.

“God should have used gold or rubies,” a blond boy says, “but who am I to criticize?”
A girl asks, “So Adam is our great-great grampa?” “If so,” I say, “Our great-great-great grampa

is earth.” The critics point at me, and I point at the ceiling, where, as usual,
the divine and the human point at each other.

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At Home in the Dog Days

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Elton Glaser

Featured Art by Mike Miller

The heat’s so bad the lilies put out a limp perfume
And the chipmunks sag through their holes
Like a bridge-and-tunnel crowd on their wasted way home.

I’m listening to the bees in the summer garden, their big
Furry bottoms striped like rugby shirts,
A scrum humming some sad doo-wop in the flower wombs.

I’ve been stuck for weeks in a house of grief and cable TV
And a dozen kinds of condiment,
And I’m feeling a little hemmed in, all funky and stirred up.

Soon there’ll be a sunset like an oozing wound, and then
A moon in the crotch of the dogwood tree.
In this wreckage of hours, what now can I do?

Not even weeping Jesus with a bush hog
And a weed wacker
Could push this earth around and make it work.

I’d save myself and others in their own worse way,
But words won’t do it when there’s
Nothing inside the fortune cookies but suicide notes.

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In the Morning I Wake Up Feeling Unmoved

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Lee Luan

Featured art: Into Something Rich and Strange by Caleb Sunderhaus

   In the morning I wake up
feeling unmoved   hardly
   particular   the house

around me quieted by early
   rain   I feel hungry and so
I eat   I wash  my face

   measure the relative length
of my hair    to my shoulder
   Sometimes I let myself  feel

exceptional   stretch my arms
   in open   grasses   
the suspension lasting only

   until dinnertime   or upon
learning he once loved a girl
   with collarbones   just like

mine   But today isn’t remarkable  
   I’ve stopped looking at my
body   naked in the mirror or

   washing in between my toes
It feels as if nobody   has seen
   me in days   Something in that

makes me want  to be   object
   caught in a window frame
or otherwise  violently   found

   I scatter brightly colored
candies into my palm   frame
   my hand  against the white

of the porcelain sink   It makes
   so much sense  that someone
would love me  until it    doesn’t Read More

Maintenance

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By David Gullette

Listen,
            while you were over ogling ogives and trefoils,
                                                                                           chancels and bays,
the things you left behind were quietly giving up,
flying to pieces, falling apart almost together.
            That grinding whine up front you thought was brakes failing?
It was, but that’s not all:
            the last shred of resistance is gone from the shocks,
            every bump is now like the thump of a flawed heart,
but that’s not all:
            the tires have gone slick and bland in your absence,
            unevenly worn like the martyr that marries a slob,
wait, there’s more:
             not only can’t you stop at will, you can’t get started,
             the juice is dead
             some slackness in belt or disc
            something not flowing
            the black box caked with inertia.
Listen,
            you cried at the Royal Wedding and swallowed the cream,
meanwhile the tube lost its sight: snow, garbled snow in its face
            and a twisting of speech unknown in Babel, O
things have been going to pot,
            the paint peeling off your house,
            leprous, obscene, what about that?
The food has vanished under the weed,
the path has forgotten where in the world it was headed,
the mower that might begin to set things aright
is all smoke and flame and missing parts,
shorn of its function.
            Maybe you thought as you turned away toward exotic joys
            the objects you’d secretly started to hate
            would await your return unchanged
            loyal and fixed in their whatness?
You forgot the revenge of decay, you forgot
how even immobile things, unloved, blindly careen and plummet,
how care is a constant curing,
our bulletin first last and always: Aid.

Okay
            you’re back: the fat and languor are through.
The wind has shifted to pelt what’s left of the garden.
Strange birds are swarming the shorter days.
            You dreamed and the world dissolved
            but already the perfumes of distant sugars
            begin to escape from your larder,
            and you open your eyes to the list of your derelictions,
            whelmed with the staggering costs of restitution.
It is time you accept your share in the damage
and spend what needs to be spent.
Repair.

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