Issue 3
2010
$11.95

Heraldry.

In August the sun held a coin
to the silverberries. They ripened

to cake among the gunshot, among
the wounded with their piecemeal

apples and parchment lips, who spoke
of a room held deep in the stone

fountain among plates that shone
like Bezants or hurt turtles, wherein potato

pallor gandy dancers danced, singing, gulp
what the fountain gives, give this in return.

---

Meteorological Symptoms of a Psychic Phenomenon.

The sphinx’s phalanx is but a society of ruthless words.
The chemist offers paprika for dizzy spells; gold cyanide
for the broken heart; helium for the dear departed.
Dirt holds its monopoly on this world. Above, eleven
clouds face each other but only one of them will survive.

Do they recognize they are the memory of former rains?
Maybe. Still, we see their shadow as triumvirate, their weak-
ness as windless as they aimlessly weed their vaporous
gardens raw. This weather is not spite nor ill spirit nor cain.
This weather is forecast and we are the tower to oversee it.

---

What Blues?

Horseflies hunt in the hockshop, heel
like hinges and rest like rust when dead.

They sting despite antidote, despite
aspirin, and give themselves so gladly

to every inevitable end. At this hour dust
is called for. Call it quick. The horseflies

have stung their last. In back, the blind
man’s saxophone is a sorry mess of brass

surrounded by a horoscope of household
appliances. Accordions resigned to the conspiracy

of cobwebs. Wedding rings and handguns,
comic books and collectible plates.

Dead horseflies, lucky horseshoes, defanged
hand grenades. How lost are the least of us?

In time, a bottle brings the blizzard. Ask after
an infirmary for the frostbitten. Ask another

three bars of brass, barely played in a place
where every mouth is a purse of smoke.

Someone asks for a kiss. The night
is a cash register that doesn’t know when to quit.

---

Bedtime Stories.

…

No. 3 (Addiction).

The man wore a wide-brim hat and lied as often as he smoked.

…

No. 9 (Fidelity).

The waitress made an ashtray for the traveling salesman out of a foil chewing gum wrapper. She then returned to the kitchen and proposed to the short-order cook. They eloped beside the dumpster in the alley behind the restaurant and began their new life on-the-clock. A grease fire broke out. When the television cameras finally found them, they had been married a long while. Their recollections, though lucid, gave no hint of remorse. A burned building was surely worth a well-built marriage, they reckoned.

…

No. 10 (Local Tonics).

Apoplexy was a kitchen appliance. Linoleum is a liqueur in Malta.

…

No. 14 (Cinema/Airplane).

Light bulbs lead the way to perdition.

…

No. 20 (Western Expansion).

Fourteen fumaroles intoned ash to the west. We would find the petroliferous sun more accommodating than this, though in later days it would judge us just as ruefully.

…

No. 23 (Panopticon).

Shoplifters were imprisoned in a shopping mall where they were doomed to carry out their vice at the expense of themselves.

…

No. 27 (Discovery).

Some kind of starfish!

…

No. 30 (National Holiday).

Plastic bags fluttered in the tree like birds. Brick turned flaxen in the sun. Litter was the new weather. Decay, the kindest werewolf.

…

No. 35 (Consequence).

The insomniac’s doctor gave her a jar of Tsetse flies. Even the plants slept. The heat pipes snored. The carpets collapsed. The house seeped sleep. By the time her postman came to, he had missed nine routes. He was sure to be sent to the dead letter office. It was where letters went to die.

…

No. 36 (Regret).

A hand extends from the desert floor. In it a photograph of a young woman; her hair alive with the wind. You realize: she must have really been something.

---

The Constellations Lost.  (Western Humanities Review)

The nights in question were all whiskeymouthed as if the world knew the words but lacked the lips to speak out on what I watched my neighbor do. On the other side of the fence, in his backyard, he sat on a lawn chair wearing a bathrobe and slowly reeled-in stars with some kind of machine. Once removed from their belted place, he wrapped them in wax paper and put each in a jar which was then promptly buried. He did this all night.

I forgot to mention that his wife had left him the year before over something the neighborhood collectively referred to as a “failure to suffice.” Maybe that’s why I didn’t do anything at first. I guess I just felt sorry for the guy. And I wanted to see what would happen.

By the end of the summer, the sky was scattershot with just a handful of stars. Churchgoers feared the long-awaited apocalypse. Astronomers were baffled. Stars had never been known to hide. It seemed a strange time for them to start. Finally, with Orion missing, I decided to turn my neighbor in. You can’t use pity as an excuse forever.

The police came and he was arrested for cosmic vandalism. A chain gang in yellow hazmat suits was brought in to exhume. But inside each jar, they found only ash—the littered skeletons of snuffed stars. Scientists said they couldn’t be replaced.

The police took my statement and charged me with criminal negligence. I was sentenced to a lifetime of community service. The neighborhood agreed: these things happen. And so, every night, I lead an army of equal offenders through town with flashlights, making up for the constellations lost.

---

Polaroid Utopia. (Western Humanities Review)

Seven sodden silos of gilded cacti
loom at the top of a dirt lot.
The dirt of this lot is no copper-speckled cloud.
The hedges are barbed wire. Saguaros
swallow thorns in the coarse rain.
An empty cold has shrunk the city
to a Polaroid utopia. Sacré bleu!
Winter is a gaunt gimlet, insomniac in sand,
their new gift, blue and skeletal,
thrumming, who shivers,
“That plague of clockwatchers,
that lazybones of morning commutes!”
Forgetful of impermanence, dullness
did not arrive, stuck in tinboxed traffic.
And so it is: Everyone applauds
that green sun shyly at the horizon.
For who can ignore the Jesus bug
crossing the pond? And who hides
in clouded soil, sinking to lazier bones?
No one is sick; nowhere, no
sickness. No one feels sick.

---

In Soot.  (The Southern Review)

When of a likened mind, the plaster Saints of Coahuila

reduce a perverse epiphany to yellowing, as when God

was sucked up into the madrigals fast. Do you drink

the Nova Scotia dusk? I’m sure there’s an appropriate word

for that in German. Bottle by bottle, I offer a dented doubloon

for your thoughts, a pitted cherry for this fishery of sin.

Out there, in that great relief of foamy green barbed wire,

a steamer ship steams and icebergs hiss amongst themselves

saying, Who will be the next to go? What can we take with us?

I say take it all, but let the Saints carry me home. Let the Saints cool

this errant radiator with a compress of tobacco leaf and tar paper.

Let them tell me that in the absence of fact, ritual is the sole redeemer

of faith. Let them minister to those of no better luck, of those too

bootblack to bleat for light, who break at dawn for a shilling’s

worth of black lung and a kettle calling them home.

Let the Saints move silent as rooks through cities stumbling

to life. Let them bless the buses that creep like penitent mastodons

past the marketplace, bless the windows dark as bituminous fists.

And then bless the sky. But for it the moon wouldn’t notice us at all.

---

The Mosquito Monocracy.  (Boston Review)

1.
Roll them bones
at benthic measure.
The bankers of sleep
bicker in the break
room. I find telephones
humming in their buoyant
cases everywhere along
the river, all unanswered;
all when answered yield
the voice that calls
you to waking.


2.
Josephine, I’ve just junked
a jazz band, some squall
grullo by the cobweb’s logic.
All skulls and bouillabaisse
but we’ll see come Zulu
time if it’s of goodwill
or gall the Zoroaster sings.
All this in the hallway where
July stalls jetlagged,
in the hallway where
the lemonade light lingers.


3.
Every day was Halloween
in the Middle Ages:
the cravats of betrayed
consiglieri crispened under
Carpathian sun. So long,
Main Street. So sorry.
I’ve rung you jealous
to say slender things
from this fickle well.
I think it best we
go to bed now.


4.
Upon alkaline lakes we
skate on alkaline skates.
In ermine the eel eats
the eggs of each oak tree.
I eye the exit out into
the taxi-infested night.


5.
My time in Malaria,
among the mystic
zombies who dragged
themselves like trash
through the tropics
chanting no time
like this time like
this time to waste,
was accurately reported
as an adventure in
rudimentary calisthenics.
They haunt me like
hemoglobin. From behind
bus terminals they ply
us in paper suits, watch
us like iceboxes.


6.
From the calcite
mountains of our mouths.