Bumping Around

May 9, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

by Eileen Pettycrew

Featured Art: Vaider, by John Schriner

Then I saw a man sheltering from the rain
inside a concrete circle meant to be
a work of art. I didn’t want to think
he was homeless, just a commuter waiting
for the light rail. Forgive me,
I’ve seen trash spilling from hillsides,
tents popping up like mushrooms in the dark.
Mattresses, ripped tarps, lamps, rugs,
metal and plastic twisted into a pile
reaching the top of a broken-down RV.
Last week I saw a flag flying at half-staff
after another mass shooting,
and underneath the flag, an electronic billboard
that said Walk Away from Joint Pain.
Forgive me for thinking it was a signal
to drag my sorry body up and over the wind,
to rise like vapor, like water cycling
around the earth, sky to land and back again,
one big circle that never ends.
Let me feel a little love for everything.
The steaming pile of wood chips, the barren
stumps, the grove of trees still bearing
open wounds from February’s ice storm.
The days I shivered in a cold house,
bumping around in the dark with a flashlight,
hoping the batteries would last.

I Should Know a Millionaire

June 11, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Erik Wilbur

Featured Art: Family by Harry Grimm, Nancy Dick, and Carolyn Williams

two-jobs-having-scrubbers-of-piss-stains-from-pitted-grout-in-fast-food-bathrooms.

I’ve met my fair share of honest hunched-over-the-dish-pit-scraping-
nibbled-on-fork-fucked-duck-confit-into-trash-bins-SOBs.

You’ve hauled that trash to the alley tons of times. I’ve seen beads of sweat
on many American faces. I’ve seen a bead of sweat catch the right light

on a man’s brow and then fall into a scrap-metal bin like a lost diamond.
Each of us should have how-we-made-it stories, instead of stories about waiting

all day in a line that runs down a city sidewalk for nothing. Man, I’m tired
of only knowing broke-ass-just-tryin-to-get-by-motherfuckers,

tired of seeing skinny dudes my age at intersections twirling cardboard arrows
or watching mothers put items back on grocery shelves after silently adding up

the contents of their shopping carts. America, by now I thought
I’d know one millionaire, at least, ‘cause I’ve seen enough bootstrap-pulling

to pull whole ghettos out of crab grass and chain link, enough to pull the bars off
every window and every kid off stray-bullet-stray-chihuahua-streets—

if no one were pushing down on them, I mean.

Second-Hand Tongue

May 26, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Tamara Miller

Once I bought a beautiful tongue at a second-hand store. It was an impulse buy; I probably paid more than it was worth, if it was even worth anything at all. After I got it home I felt a little ashamed and regretted my purchase. What did I need a second tongue for while my own just wasted away in my head, unused? But the thing about this new tongue was that it liked to wag. When my god-given tongue locked down tight against my teeth, this second tongue would start in, first about righteousness and then about salvation, until I realized something terrible: my new tongue had caught religion. It was a preaching kind of tongue, silvery and sly as the devil. I tried to silence it, with candy and pride and fear, the way you do with tongues, but it would not deviate from the path of righteousness it liked to march up and down my esophagus like a parade of Stormtroopers. Shut-up, I called with my other tongue. Please. Shut-up before someone hears us. Before someone realizes we are not who we say we are.

Wants

April 9, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Chris Greenhalgh

I want a punchbag hung in my office and / people to hear the first thump straight
after they leave. / I want you to call me. I want the linctus with / the double action
that both soothes my throat and / brings back memories of a time when I was loved.
/ I want the road below me, the sun above me / and beside me, you. I want to wipe
the legend / “You Will Die” spelled backwards from the bathroom mirror / each
morning as I brush my teeth. I want you / to drive while I change gears. I want my
life story / voiced by William Shatner. I want a belle dame / with plenty of merci.
I want a view of the sea. / I want the future with you and me in it. / I want my
doctor not to have a personalized / number plate. I want my coffee hot, my mattress
/ hard and my maps beautiful rather than useful. / I want small hard bits of chocolate
snapped off. / From mind, I want world. From lips, I want the madness / of kissing.
I want to know where businesses / end and scams begin. I want to confuse salesmen
/ by offering more than the asking price. I want to / stand in an elevator shaft
of rainfall / and look up into the light. I want to know where / you were last night.
I want this confederacy / of selves dismantled and slowly made whole again.

You Are My Sunshine

October 5, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alpay Ulku

Featured Art: Landscape by Paul Nash

We’re in the Taqueria Uptown. People are eating, or gazing out of windows, or talking to each other. The food is delicious and the coffee hot and fresh. A man walks in with a cheap guitar and pleads for our attention, then fumbles through three mangled songs.

You can hear the pain in his voice. If he were drowning in Lake Michigan, he would flail and grab the lifeguard in a bear hug.

How much do we owe this guy, who’s interrupted us at dinner? What is it we owe each other? Nothing at all?

Bless you all, I hope I’ve brought some sunshine to our lives. He looks around. All that playing has made me hungry for a nice steak taco.

Everyone tenses and ignores him.

It’s my dream to be a paid musician.

A jornalero says something in Spanish. The waitress shrugs and writes the order.

Could I have a side of sour cream with that? he asks her. You see, the peppers burn my mouth. He looks over to the jornalero. My mouth is very soft and sensitive.

The jornalero ducks his head, embarrassed and a little pissed. He nods okay.

It’s terrible to be so lonely, he says to no one in particular.

The waitress has laugh lines around her eyes, she likes to laugh. But her face is neutral now. She brings him the sour cream in a saucer with a plastic spoon, and the taco.

Everyone is hoping that nothing more is going to happen next.

My Mother’s Neck

September 20, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sarah Suhr

Trailer parks as a winding tire swing,
as Zigzags and a one-dollar wine cooler.
Trailer parks as an ice cube in sweet tea.

Trailer parks as a drunk dad on a dirt bike,
and that chunk of flesh gone from his head.
Trailer parks as a shatter, as a fist, as a scream.

Black–Camaro trailer parks.
Black Sabbath, black leash.
Ticks-on-the-dog trailer parks.

Fingers-in-a-pussy trailer parks.
Good-Lord-Grant-us-Grace trailer parks.
Trailer parks as Dad who called me shithead.

Naked-Barbie trailer parks,
Moon-Pies and Welch’s Grape Soda.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry trailer parks.

Fish-smoker trailer parks.
Pot-in-a-closet trailer parks.
An aluminum shed full of porn.

Trailer parks as loose underwear,
lawn mattresses, CoverGirl.
Trailer parks as half a box of tree ornaments,

as a repossessed Ford Taurus (cream),
as a shatter, a fist, a scream.
Trailer parks as cans of peas.

Piss-in-a-5-gallon-bucket trailer parks,
cinderblocks and plywood.
Trailer parks as three shredded tires.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry trailer parks.
Wild poppies growing alongside weeds,
and that police photo of Mom’s choked neck.

Unpaid-propane-bill, cold-water trailer parks.
Trailer parks as a grip, a gasp, a little hand on a loaded gun.

A-phone-call-from-jail trailer parks.

Mitigation

May 28, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: by Romina Farías

Somehow it’s good to know
the wildfires have not touched the face
of our local TV anchor
delivering her lines
with a touch of sadness that never approaches
despair, even as her bangs cascade
onto her forehead like evening clouds
descending the Coast Range.
I think of her in her dressing room
before she offers her face to us—
the one that will help us fall asleep—
while a line of flames somewhere far away
descends the ridge and licks into a kitchen,
melting the refrigerator magnets,
popping cans of spray oil, and setting
the dog out back to howling, jerking
against its chain.
I see her in front of the mirror,
surrendering to the ministrations of tiny brushes—
a makeup artist leaning in like a lover.
Foundation first, an A-side attack
on brow furrows and laugh lines.
Then concealer to suppress the advance
of crow’s feet into the Botox buffer zone.
Within a half-hour, the spread of creases
and fissures 95% contained.
The brushes flit across her face
like prayer flags, and I can almost smell
the warm breath of the girl who sticks out
the tip of her tongue, leaning close
to line the boundary
where the fullness of a lower lip
begins its concave plunge
into smooth white chin.
Our TV anchor practicing her lines,
mastering her face.
We need to love her for this.
For the way she shows us how to keep
a chin from trembling, an eye from twitching
even while the chained dog
curls in on itself in the burning.

The Double

May 28, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Gary Dop

Featured Art: by Tim Mossholder

When I order fast food, I feel superior
to the place I am in, the people
who serve me, and the grease
about to grip my gut, but
the cashier asks “Is that poetry?”
pointing at the distressed volume I hold.
I say, “Yes,” and she says, “Yes,
I thought so,” her eyes bloom,
no longer machines. Her hand rests
on the input screen as she quotes Frost
or Dickinson: something about “long sleep,
a famous sleep,” and she adds, “Was ever idleness
like this?” Flustered, I reply: “I’ll take
the double with mustard and pickles.” She sees
into me, a mass-produced poetry patty
stamped for the look of flavor. She sees
my surprise and knows that beneath our exchange,
burger for cash, is deeper change:
The life I’ve slept inside, she takes, discards,
and watches me wake.

Blood Buzz, AZ

October 30, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Shane Lake

Featured Art: Fifth Avenue Nocturne by Childe Hassam

A Red Cross bus gets hit by a truck
and lands on its side, the driver unconscious.

Blood spills from the broken glass,
coats the pavement in bubbling rust.

It is 1977 and the theme for summer is .44 caliber.
It is one hundred fifteen degrees.

A crowd forms in the contagious heat,
pulls back as the red pool expands.

I watch from the ailing shade of a palm tree,
the sweet taste of blood in the air, on my tongue.

Someone tries to rescue the driver
but the mix is slippery. He lands on his back.

His impact speckles the closest few,
who scream and cover their mouths with their hands.

Sirens sound, and soon the fire trucks are here,
hosing donations into the street drain.

Secretly, we all enjoy this,
being here at the scene of the crash

where news vans make stars of us all.
We want our trauma to trump everyone else’s.

We want to be able to say:

“You weren’t there. You wouldn’t understand.”

My Mouth Versus Your Mouth

October 29, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Devon J. Moore

Featured Art: Miss Loïe Fuller by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Gwyneth Paltrow is on the air again
saying something about the difficulty of being
a mother on set is more difficult than being
a mother in an office, on a train, commuting
to those 9 to 5s. She says you have it easier
when your life is synchronized to the needs of mouths
that are not your mouth, to the needs of bosses
that don’t know your name. You have it easier when
you’re alone in a room with a baby,
when the sun hasn’t risen and your chest is dripping milk
and you wonder if today is the day the paycheck
or the 7 o’clock bus or the sun won’t come.
Gwyneth, I don’t have a baby,
but my dread is bigger than your dread,
my breasts are bigger, heavier, than your breasts.
Do you still feel the need to compare?
How about this? My cat would be cuter than your cat
if it hadn’t been for that sick neighbor and his box cutters.
My lover left and his back got smaller,
more quickly, than your lover’s back.
My dad dying sucked more than your dad dying sucked.
I could do this ridiculousness all day. But, Gwyneth,
the memory of my mother needs me
to say, that novel she always wanted to write
never got written. I was a needy daughter,
maybe even needier than your daughter.
I demanded
she look at me instead
of a book or the movie on the TV,
and maybe, Gwyneth, you were
in it, being thinner than my mother
but not prettier. There were days
my pretty mother didn’t look at me
because she couldn’t see past the dark
space in herself and I hated her.
There was a day my mother cried in the laundromat
when a woman, another mother, asked her what she did
for a living, and when my mother said she was a home
health care aide, the woman said that meant
my mother was nothing
but a maid.
The color of blood is more vivid and harder to clean
in my daydreams than in your daydreams,
and a powerless life is harder to describe to the powerful
than the sound of my mother crying on the rug.
But I’ll try.

Royalty

August 27, 2011.Reading time 2 minutes.

by George Bilgere

Feature image: Odilon Redon. The Beacon, 1883, reworked c. 1893. The Art Institute of Chicago.

So this young couple, overweight
and seriously tattooed, comes into the café,
and each of them is actually wearing a baby
in one of those tummy-papoose things,
and they have two enormous dogs
designed to kill elk and wolves,
not sit under the table at a coffee shop,
and as I watch them smile at their babies
which are now screaming bloody murder
while the great slobbering mastiffs
begin earnestly licking their own privates,
something terrible happens to me:
it’s like The Manchurian Candidate,
when Lawrence Harvey suddenly realizes
the reason he’s been acting so strangely
is because he’s been brainwashed by Soviet agents:

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