Elias Baez

I wanna tutor Katy Perry

by: Elias Baez

I wanna tutor Katy Perry pro bono, purely in service to the fact that she’s a poet who calls herself a songwriter, and she is, but I’ve never heard her say she’s also a poet, and I’m becoming worried no poets who know they’re poets have told her. Maybe this is presumptuous, but I’m a teacher who doesn’t like school so I’ve gotta be creative if I’m gonna stay a teacher for the people that school got fucked up. I’ve been feeling like cafeteria leftovers lately. Last night, I dreamt an apple peel and a smushed carton of chocolate milk sunk a Hail Mary in the fourth quarter. Or inning, whatever. The point is, the dream told me I need to be real (which, I find being real disgusting) because footballs are made of pigskin, and pigs are super real, and smart.

I’ve got a soothing speaking voice, and I like reading till my voice gets tired, and then a little more. I don’t know what I’ve been training for, so I’m vulnerable to the thought of this being it. I’m most awake at 3:36 AM, the time when Margarita, en route to being Queen of the Devil’s full moon ball, is free to feel her wrath and pity balanced on a flying broom. I may not be Oxford, but animal and baby both tend to like me. This must mean something. Every popstar is a poet, but most don’t know it. Pop lyrics, tilted against a certain slant of light, read literally like Emily Dickinson’s letters to whatever ex-flame made her come to God and be the patron saint of celestial flies, third-floor altitudes and four-four time.

Once on the bus in 4th grade, this girl called me the Walking Encyclopedia, because I’m so annoying and love to babble about history like it’s a river in the living room or it’s a belt buckled by the sun, and I go on and on cause I get caught up in the songs that snag like ribbons on hedgerows, though this ribbon isn’t pink or blue, it’s both, androgynous and melancholy like hydrangeas. I’m trying to tell you why I wanna tutor Katy Perry, but I get so distracted I lose track of why I got talking at all. I shouldn’t have mentioned the belt and hydrangeas before, that was weird of me; I promise I’m professional, sweet yet tart like cherry pie, and like really good with computers.

I’m fully a child of the digital moment, and finally old enough to follow my father and try to become the being online they tried to trap inside my mind. They plastered my face, then made a mask and fingerpainted a smile on it. I’m grateful they made me a mask. I painted its inner wall with constellations, and named them into stories for my nephew. If he’s a sapling, I must be a tree by now. A candlebark tree molts its bark, that four-letter chunk at the end of its name (like my mother did my father’s Baez to restore her own Chaparro) and stands, remaining like a burning candle whose center never melts, but grows.

My dad was one of the first people in the city of Yonkers to beta test a cable modem, killing the bull that was dial-up. There’s a picture of him in an old newspaper clipping. He’s at the computer with all of us around him, my Mom and siblings and me with pride of place by his right hand. I’m his final boy. I’m staring at his monitor, its light blanching my face entirely, except for my dumb eyes. I look to me like I’m the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, like one of the creatures who witnessed the landing of alien technology, reached out, touched it, and so was changed, doubled alive by an alien mind. My mother’s standing furthest back, and I can tell she’s skeptical. The conditioning school gave me makes me so angry at myself when I write unclearly, or think or act unclearly. I start seeing stainless steel rulers swinging like piano hammers. That’s part of why I wanna tutor Katy Perry – professors are crazy, and no one realizes until it’s too late. What if someone makes her mind divide and double-divide, then hate itself for its divided state? If you want a reference, on Reddit, a student recommended me as ‘the chillest guy ever.’ I’d hyperlink that, but this is a poem. Let’s not be crazy.

I can’t afford the Hoffman Process®, but I like the word Quadrinity™. It’s on a free page of the website. It made me think of how God is divided into the three-part trinity, and how that’s not the full picture. A triangle’s more than the three angles that are its corners. Those are important in a boring way, but I’d bet a ton of money most people care more about the inside of a triangle than its corners. Imagine the Rugrats never spelunked the basement, or Paris, or found the worlds inside the world hemmed in by the Pickles’ playpen. I’m trying to live in four dimensions here, and I say the trinity becomes a quadrinity™ if you count the parts and then the whole, like how letters are and aren’t words, consonants, and some vowels for air.

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You gotta think like Archimedes to shrug off the planet and put it away like a raggedy coat, a pair of fake wings, or your need for people to be who you want and not who they are. Then you can fly, like Brewster McCloud spiraling the Astrodome, like a Hail Mary before it graces the wide receiver, like the love, simple as sugar and full as the ocean that carries my mother’s voice on the phone.

I couldn’t write about my Mom for years. I was trying to protect her from the hexes ciphered in chalkboard numbers, smuggled in a breath, hooded by a cough, or spelled in illegible marginalia.

In Crybaby by John Waters, the guy cries every time he has to fight somebody. He still fights. When I told my Dad someone had been mean to me on the bus (the boy who sat behind me) he told me to punch the kid square in the face. Next day, the bully spit on the crown of my head, so I punched him and he dropped. At school, I cried until they called my mother because no one wiped his spit out my hair. Shame makes you slip out the shape of yourself like a Reese’s forgot in your back pocket. I know my mind is ripe for the reaping. It’s a little bruised, but ugly fruit is perfectly good, I’ve been told. Even a bad apple is right twice a day, right? Most poets would piss on your floor and call it apple juice. Not me, I’d go to Home Depot and rent a vacuum and happily clean the mess I make to your satisfaction. All I want is to stay myself, and that means I have to ask you to let me stay inside me. Sometimes, I feel like people want the blow-up doll I (sometimes) do like pretending to be. Okay. Usually, I’m too busy hating myself to answer the phone, but know that I’m by it 24/7. My number’s 845.313.2247. The future Mrs. Bloom gets me pro bono; for the rest of you rats I’m rate negotiable. I gotta skedaddle. Sorry to love you and leave ya. Bye bye, birdies!

The Garden

by: Zach Murphy

The wildflowers wilt over their own feet as I trudge through the dusty, jaded soil. One of my legs is broken. My mouth is parched. And my stripes burn.

I wonder if the workers before me dealt with this kind of heat. I wonder if the workers after me will suffer even more. I wonder if there will even be workers after me.

The honey isn’t so sweet here anymore. The dream has melted away. This planet is no longer my garden.

As I use my last shred of will to drive my stinger into the wrinkled ground, I pray that my final moments will be graced with a cool breeze.

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Serving Service

by: Alex Andy Phuong

Help heal the helpless Do more than what one deserves Serve the undeserved

Floral Roller Skate

by: Emily Rose Schanowski

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