Monkey Puzzle #7

#7 spring/Summer 2009

MONkey puzzle

featuring new work by : Keith Kumasen Abbott Margaret Randall Tim Skeen Mittie Roger Travis Cebula Nancy Stohlman Olatundji Akpo-Sani LaVonne Caesar Daniel Dissinger Alexandra Lukens Peter M. Laffin Paige Doughty Rob Geisen Kona Morris Philip Meersman Amy Pommerening Nicholas B. Morris Diane Klammer Ryan Clark Tiph Parrish Scott Alexander Jones Aimee Herman Mitch Maruade Hillary Keel And many more!

ISBN-10 0980165040 ISBN-13 978-098016504-3

9

780980 165043

71395

monkey puzzle press

www.monkeypuzzlonline.com

MONkey puzzle

monkey puzzle

MONKEY PUZZLE PRESS BOULDER, COLORADO

monkey puzzle Issue #7

Spring/Summer 2009

EDITOR, DESIGNER, PUBLISHER Nate Jordon COPY EDITOR Kade Alexander Jensen COVER PHOTO Bus Hopefest by Ben Olson

Copyright Š 2009 Monkey Puzzle Press All rights revert to individual authors upon publication.

ISBN-10 0-9801650-4-0 ISBN-13 978-0-9801650-4-3

Monkey Puzzle is currently published two times a year.

MONKEY PUZZLE PRESS 3116 47th St. Boulder, CO 80301 MonkeyPuzzlePress@gmail.com www.monkeypuzzleonline.com

contents Editor’s Note Dinner Plans

Junior Burke Sydney Arthur: Swimming Lessons

Timothy Foss

vi

1

2

The Big Wheel

Nicholas B. Morris

12

i never could make anything work out right

Michael D. Edwards

19

In a Mist

George Evans

33

The Birthday Party

Dave Moyer

34

Song #36

Nathan Antar

39

Hard Paradise

Nate Cook

40

Expatriate Interprets Economics with Alcohol

Kaen Joyler

43

Home on Leave

James Tyner

45

Time of Death: A Semi-True Tale

JA Kazimer

20

before profit or loss

Shane Clements

Tar is a Cloth for Rubber

Megan DiBello

46

25

Dear Kari,

Akilah Oliver

We Ave Plan

Travis Macdonald

47

26

Another Year Forward

Suzanne Savickas

Burma Shave Poets

Howard Winn

49

28

The Problem with America Today

Benjamin Dancer

51

another night at sea level or instructions on how to light this fire

Meg Day

30

After Work in LeConte Canyon

Cameron Aveson 54

The Creek

Peter Rugh

31

in the end

Travis Cebula

55

32

South of the Border

Henry Rasof

56

The Plunge

Laura Garrison

Quadratura Circuli

Mona Nicole Sfeir

58

Ostensibly

Kimberly Castanon

Another Day of Eid

Dr. Shurooq Amin

59

shop talk

Erica Varlese

84

God Hates Liars

Katharyn Grant

61

Last Act

Ashleigh Middleton

85

Metal Quivers

Alexandra Lukens

64

Pedaling Tides

Joel Parker

86

65

Prism Break

Nick Demske

87

The Siren of Kubla Khan

Lindsey Anderson

88

A Dusting of Memories

Rea Allen

89

Contributors

91

Submission Guidelines

98

Acknowledgements

99

among all things in particular

Rodrigo Gonzalez 76

New Books from Monkey Puzzle Press

100

full stride smear on glasses

Daniel Dissinger

79

In Memoriam

101

Pretty Lake

Julie A. Berner

82

Patron Saint

Doug Tanoury The Shoreline: A Dynamic Interface

Serena Chopra

66

A Thousand Ways

Diane Klammer

67

Bius to Tius

Shane Scaglione The Gift

Kim Nuzzo A New Member

Philip Meersman

69 73 74

83

editor’s note Dear Reader, I was originally going to pontificate about the season we find ourselves in—a time when color and life return to our environment after the harsh winter and a sense of wanderlust permeates our bodies and souls, beckoning us to venture forth into nature and on the road. However, a recent family tragedy has occupied all of my sensibilities and I can’t think of anything else.

My little sister Betina lost her battle against leukemia on May 12th.

Only twenty years old, she’s left behind a husband of three years and a dear little boy who just had his first birthday. For someone with an MFA in Writing & Poetics and a publishing company, I can’t find the words to express the loss I feel.

Life is a fleeting dream. It’s gone before you know it. Jack Kerouac said, “Life is a dream that’s already over.” I’ve always understood these sentiments, but they mean more than ever now. And now I have two lives to live.

Don’t let life pass you by. Go out there and live it. It’s the only shot you’ve got, no matter what you believe.

With that, I dedicate this issue of Monkey Puzzle to my sister, to the life we shared, and to the rest of our lives we won’t be able to.

Holoholo,

Nate Jordon Monkey-in-Chief

vi

vii

Junior Burke

Dinner Plans

Twilight.

Six year-old daughter and I, walking, on our quiet street, in our tiny town.

“Look at that star,” I say.

“That’s not a star. That’s my grandma.

She died and now she’s waiting to be born.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody told me. I was a star. I was waiting.

Then I came down to make your life complete.”

“When we get home,” I say, “let’s you and I make dinner.

How do you feel about mac n’ cheese?”

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Nicholas B. Morris

The Big Wheel

AUGUST WAS the worst month to be a carnie in the South. Working twelve-hour shifts in humid hellholes like Alabama was no way to live, even in the best of years. And this had not been the best of years for Ernest Sutton.

He felt a sudden nostalgia for the 90s, when he’d been a roadie for Billy Ray Cyrus, and lit a cigarette.

“Step right up, girls ‘n boys,” he said, an unenthusiastic version of his carnie routine. “Take a spin on the big wheel.”

Ernest was running the Ferris wheel this week and possibly for the rest of the season. He usually ran booth games, shucking singles off rubes brave and dumb enough to toss rings, throw softballs at bottles, or lob footballs at toilet lids in the hopes of winning cheap prizes. But he’d pissed off Peter Trammell, the fair’s manager, handing over a light cashbag once too often.

Trammell accused him of skimming. Ernest skimmed, sure—“You wouldn’t trust me if I didn’t steal a little, right?”

Trammell was not amused, so he was on Ferris wheel duty until further notice.

While the hayseeds spun in vertical circles, he wondered where he would make the money to pay off Trammell. In the past, he’d slung weed, meth, and even coke on the side, but all his connections had been busted over the years and since he was never anywhere more than a week, he couldn’t make new ones. Any drugs he bought now came from kids selling at the fair.

Pull the lever, open the gates, new round of rubes on the big wheel. Instead of taking dollars, he tore little red tickets and stuffed them in a wooden box.

Halfway through the night, Trammell stopped by the Ferris wheel.

“Things runnin’ smooth over here?”

“Around and around and around.” Ernest lit another Marlboro.

“Good. Prove to me you can’t fuck up a trained-monkey gig, maybe you can go back to booths.”

“Course it never hurts none to grease the wheels, huh? Zat what you’re sayin’?”

“Take it however you want. But you know good as anybody that money talks and bullshit spins a goddamn Ferris wheel the whole summer.”

Ernest flicked his cigarette and yanked the lever, bringing the wheel to a sudden stop. “Shouldn’t you be over at the pie-eating contest? Or did they

12

cancel it?”

“You so funny, how come you a carnie ‘stead of a comedian?” Trammell laughed at his own joke and waddled away.

Ernest woke up in the same green, white, and rust 1971 Winnebago he’d started the circuit in twelve years before. The walls were cracked, thin, and wet from various sources over the years: leaks in the roof, spilled beer, crude sexual malfunctions. Occasionally a cockroach would crawl across the wall, scooting from one corner to another. Either everywhere in a four state radius has the same kind of roach, he thought, or the fucking things have stowed away in my house.

He shoved a pizza box full of cigarette butts onto the floor. It skittered across the Keystone cans covering the sticky linoleum. His air conditioner wheezed and sputtered; every few minutes a drop slid off the a.c. and fell to the floor.

I got to start makin’ some money today.

He got his first break later, when one of the kids separated from his parents a few yards away.

“I wanna ride the big wheel, Daddy.”

“Got your tickets?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m takin’ your sister to the bumper cars. When yer done, go git you a snack and sit down over there.”

“Okay.”

Ernest cracked his knuckles. Showtime.

The boy started up the boarding ramp.

“Hey, kid.” Ernest leaned in conspiratorially as he took the ticket. “You wanna take a ride on the special seat?”

“Special seat?”

“Yeah, the super spinny one. You can ride it for ten dollars, but you gotta be careful—might spin over and dump you out.”

The kid’s eyes shown so bright Ernest could see his reflection. The bill appeared like a magic trick.

“Step over here,” Ernest said. “I’ll let you know which one it is.”

At the end of the day, he only made thirty bucks off the spinny seat gimmick; most kids didn’t care enough to part with their allowance money. He could only afford a new carton of smokes.

The next day, he decided on grossout bets.

Two junior high kids wandered past the wheel, smoking thin cigarettes as they gawked at the girls’ denim-clad asses ahead of them.

“Scuse me fellas, what ya smokin’?”

The teenagers looked busted. “All we could get was my mom’s Virginia

13

Slims,” the taller one said.

“I bet you twenty bucks I can smoke a Slim in one drag.”

“And if you don’t?”

Ernest produced his crumpled box of reds. “I’ll give you the rest of this pack and buy you a new one.”

“Deal.” One of them produced a slim, snickering at the prospect of real cigarettes.

Ernest hawked a loogey, spit, lit the cigarette. He took a long slow drag, watching the orange ember burn all the way to the filter. He exhaled in the boys’ faces.

“Twenty bucks.”

They handed him two tens and walked away cursing.

He did similar stunts throughout the day—eating crickets, putting cigarettes out on his tongue, once even picking gum off the underside of a seat and chewing it. By the end of his shift, he’d made almost two hundred bucks.

But when he got back to the Winnebago, he found someone had slashed his tires. He pictured an angry boyfriend or big brother with a pocketknife and crying girlfriend/sibling. He bought a set of used tires, and only had enough money left for a bottle of bourbon and a cheeseburger from the local drive through.

He’d watched big wheel turning for ten days, and Ernest still didn’t know how or where he could make a little extra cash. He thought about gambling with some of the other carnies, but knew he’d get swindled, especially if they figured out why he was suddenly so keen to bet with them. He thought about finding a blood or sperm bank, but realized nobody would want anything to do with his fluids after he’d picked up hepatitis in a tattoo parlor. Occasionally he even fantasized of prostituting himself out to the rich girls who passed him for a seat on the Ferris wheel. But he realized that a girl with money wouldn’t even glance at a graying longhair with obscene tattoos covering his sleeveless arms. I’d have a better shot at tryin’ to bed an old lady, he thought. Besides, even an old broad who needed it pretty bad would run if she saw the ’bago.

“Got any good schemes yet?”

Trammell had walked up behind him as he was staring into space.

“Be a hell of a lot easier to slip you some extra money if I was runnin’ somethin’ that took dollars instead of tickets.”

“Resourceful man like you?” Trammell’s grin was large and toothy. “Shit, I’m surprised you still runnin’ the wheel. You ain’t got no insurance you can cash in?”

Ernest lit a cigarette. “Why the fuck would I need insurance?”

Trammell laughed. “Well, I can see yo’ deep in thought. Night, Ernie.”

Ernest flipped him off. “Sleep tight, Precious.”

14

She was in line for the fourth time, her eyes boring into him again. He winked as she passed.

She wasn’t normally his type: a big shy farm girl, who had probably never seen a man outside her family, church, or school in her entire life. Any other time, he’d have looked right through her, or conned her into a blowjob behind a booth. But with the losing streak he’d been on, his standards were low and if he had a chance at prostitution, she was it.

He left her up a long time, building his courage. If I do this right, I’ll be back in the booths next week. He took a deep breath, stopped the wheel, and waited for her to come down the ramp.

One “Hey there, pretty lady” later and they were sharing grape snow cones. Her name was Amanda; she’d come to the fair with her boyfriend, who she’d caught flirting with some cowgirl. She’d stormed off, saw Ernest and was smitten. Her daddy ran a cattle farm and her momma directed the choir at church. She wanted to see bright lights, big cities, and as much dingaling as she could get her hands on.

When she paid for the snow cones, Ernest saw her wallet was stuffed with tens and twenties.

He was steering her back toward the lot where the ’bago was parked, with promises of bourbon and a sweaty good time, and would have made it if his path wasn’t blocked by Trammell.

“Ain’t you ‘sposed to be workin’ the wheel, Ernie?”

“Just takin’ a quick break. Back in twenty minutes or so.”

“Who’s yo’ friend?”

Amanda’s eyes dug into the ground, her talkative voice suddenly silent.

Before anyone else could speak, Trammell continued. “I knew Ernie here was good yankin’ a handle,” he said, moving his hand back and forth obscenely. “I didn’t know he was into judgin’ heifers too.”

Amanda tore away from Ernest’s arm and jogged sobbing into the neonlit night.

“That fat girl was gonna give me your money,” he said.

Trammell was laughing hard. “That fat girl was gonna move you into a trailer. I just saved yo’ life.”

Ernest went back to the wheel and hoped Amanda would return. He needed to get laid at least as bad as he needed money.

After the fair shut down at midnight, Ernest lay awake, sweating in spite of the air conditioner that rattled and coughed all night. His money situation didn’t make it any easier to sleep, and he was becoming familiar with the ris-

15

ing light of dawn. But as he lit his first smoke of the day, he got an idea.

He found a wife-beater that passed the smell test, already feeling better about the day. He’d be able to go back to life behind a booth instead of staring at the bottoms of shoes all day. He might even gain a little respect from Trammell, if there was any respect in the man.

He pounded on Trammell’s trailer door. Trammell opened the door wearing only boxers.

“Goddamn, you too ugly to be the first thing I see in the mornin’. Fuck you want?”

“I know how you can get your money back.”

Trammell snickered. “Why do I got to get it back? You the one that lost it.”

“You ain’t even gonna listen?”

Trammell shifted his weight from one leg to the other. The trailer groaned on its wheels.

“We fight for it.”

Trammell cracked up. His belly and man-tits jiggled as the trailer creaked.

“That’s the funniest shit I ever heard. This ain’t about the fat girl, is it?”

“Fuck you. Look, tonight we fight in the big pavilion out front and charge admission. That way, you get your money back and I get to go back to the booths.”

“You sound awful sure you gonna win.”

“You ain’t never fought a little guy before? We’ll kick your ass. Besides, we’re in Klan country. These cornfeds ain’t gonna stand for a white man gettin’ his ass kicked by some big coon.” He hoped the race baiting would work if nothing else did.

“You think I’m scared of them? Probly gonna be at least as many brothas out there as Klan.” He snorted. “You gonna get the beatin’ of yo life tonight, Cracker, and ain’t no white brotherhood gonna save you from that. You better get Jesus on yo’ side. Least he knew how to take a whuppin’.”

“So we’re on then.”

“Not so fast. You say if you win, you go back to the booths. But what if you lose? What do I get?” He paused. “I’ll tell you what—when I win, you get fired.”

Ernest stared at him, the grin on Trammell’s face growing wider.

“Deal,” he said.

“See yo’ ass at eight o’clock then.”

Ernest spent the afternoon doing pushups, sit-ups, and flexing in his hazy mirror. He thought he was in pretty good shape for a man pushing forty, except for the knife scar on his chest.

At 7:30, he left his trailer and headed for the pavilion. On the way, he

16

passed a flier he didn’t recognize.

TONIGHT Bare-knuckle Boxing Match Ernie ‘Ferris Wheel’ Sutton vs.

Peter ‘The Beater’ Trammell 8:00 @ Pike County Fairgrounds Pavilion Admission $5 Trammell had gone all out for the fight. There was a mat set up, complete with ropes. There was even a bell in one corner.

At 7:55, Trammell waded through the crowd, stepped through the ropes.

He was wearing basketball shorts that clung to his massive thighs and a t-shirt that said Your Mama Screams My Name In Bed. Sweat streamed down his face but his grin was as wide as ever.

“Ready to get your ass kicked by a scrawny white boy?” Ernest said.

“Talk shit while you still got the teeth, Ernie. D’ya see the flier? Like the nickname?”

“Thought it was cute. Not as cute as ‘The Peter Beater’ or whatever you called yourself, but cute.”

The girl who ran the knife-throwing booth stepped into the ring and made the announcements. The crowd roared as the bell rang and they stepped toward each other, fists raised.

Ernest felt the first blow knock his head back, the second one in his gut.

How’d he hit me so quick? Then another to the nose. He looked up at Trammell from the ground.

“S’matter, Ernie? Too fast?” He turned around and played to the crowd.

Ernest jumped up and rushed Trammell, who tried to move but not quickly enough. Ernie knocked him off balance, punched him once in the jaw, once in the neck. Trammell staggered, wheezing, but never fell. Ernest stepped in to cap on his advantage, but didn’t see Trammell’s fist coming. Blood welled up in his mouth. He spit a tooth onto the concrete.

“Now you always gonna look like a carnie,” Trammell laughed. “Even when you ain’t one no more.”

Ernest tried to hold his ground, thinking he could tire Trammell out, but the big man was quick on his feet, his fists hard and sudden. Ernest managed to split one of Trammell’s lips and crack his nose, but soon found himself on all fours, spitting blood and gasping for air.

Trammell laughed loud enough to be heard over the crowd. He motioned for the microphone.

“Hey Ernie,” he blasted over the speakers, “you fired!”

Then he dropped the mic, ran at Ernest, kicked him hard in the ribs. The crowd went wild.

17

“Off the lot by midnight, or I call the cops to impound that tetanusinfested hoopty.”

When he finally made it to the Winnebago, the engine wouldn’t turn over; the air conditioner had drained the battery. He thought about trying to steal a new one from one of the local yokels, but didn’t have the energy.

Ernest lit his last cigarette, looked at himself in the rearview mirror.

His eyes were swollen, his skin bruised, cut, and bleeding. He opened his mouth—three bloody gaps where teeth had been. His hair was matted with sweat, dirt, and blood.

“Fuck,” was all he could think to say.

Photo by Philip Meersman

18

Michael D. Edwards

i never could make anything work out right

and now i’m betraying

to Dave Wain

my friends.

i can’t make anything out of it

- never could. i had great visions but

never could bring them

together

i used it all up.

with reality. (it’s all gone.)

don allen is to be my literary executor - use mss at gary’s and at grove press. i have two thousand dollars in nevada city bank of america

- (use it to cover my affairs and debts).

i don’t owe allen g.

anything

nor my mother.

(yet)

i went southwest.

19

[goodbye]

JA Kazimer

time of death: a semi-true tale

MY TIME is not marked by days or weeks, but by the number of semitrucks that drive past my house. They drive by in arbitrary intervals. I glance at my watch, noting the precise time.

6:36 and 57 seconds Why I care what time it is I have no idea. It just seems fitting, like marking the moment of death at the hospital. Did it matter what time the heart stopped beating? Not really. It is just another box to check on some form.

I take a sip of my morning coffee, careful to avoid staining my shirt. Another truck rolls past rattling the wooden veranda. The loud clatter cracks the wood loosening the nails underneath my feet. I might be concerned, if I planned to stick around.

But I don’t.

The coffee is cooling as the sun heats up the morning. Brown grass and dehydrated flowers litter my yard. The summer heat is too intense to fight, so I gave up after my wife left, taking with her the garden hose and the kids.

I miss the hose.

But on the bright side, it will be harder to wash away my bullet-penetrated brains without one. Assuming the bitch doesn’t bring my hose back out of spite. I plan to shoot myself right between the eyes. It is effective—quick, clean and efficient too. The gun lies on the wicker table in front of me, ready to do the deed.

But I hesitate.

Setting my coffee cup next to the dark metal, I review the game plan.

Could I really go through with it? Could I end it all? The shrill beat of my neighbor’s honky-tonk music quickly makes up my mind. I look down to my driveway where a shiny white pick-up sits, its tires as flat as my will to live. Like a bad country song, I’d lost my job, wife, kids, hose, and pick-up all in the same week and to top it off, my cat had run away.

My hand trembles as I awkwardly cock the weapon. The guy at the pawn shop showed me how. It looked easy then, but his hands hadn’t been shaking or sweat-soaked. Click. A round is chambered, bringing me a weird sense of accomplishment in an otherwise substandard life.

In the distance, the low rumble of a semi-truck grows. My finger tightens on the trigger, barrel swinging towards my head. I press it against the hard

20

ridge between my eyes. With a smile, I depress the trigger.

7:46 and 39 seconds I search my key ring for the pickup’s key, finding it with relative ease. I wish everything could be that simple. Apparently, suicide isn’t, or at least it isn’t for me. What were the odds of a gun misfiring? One in one thousand?

Some might take the misfire as a sign, but it’s not. It’s bad luck or karma, or some other fucked up sense of worldly justice. I rise, staggering from the lame weapon to my beloved pickup. It is only right that she now takes me to the Promised Land.

The pickup groans in protest as she limps towards the garage; me, a gunpowder-burned lunatic at the wheel. Inside the garage, I press the garage door opener and the door slowly descends. In a few minutes, I will finally have my heavenly reward—no more nagging wife, whining clients, house payments, or eighteen-wheelers—only the cold peacefulness of death.

I check the gas gauge. A half tank. I rev the engine and a cloud of toxic smoke begins to build in the small space. The smell of gasoline and burning oil fills up the cab, and I inhale with every cubic inch of lung capacity. This is it. I can feel my brain swell and the carbon enter my bloodstream. A wave of dizziness rushes through me, and I close my eyes in preparation for the end.

10:03 and 14 seconds What the fuck?

I awake in the cab of my truck, engine still running. My head hurts as I lift it from the steering wheel where it has fallen. I can feel the imprint of the leather cover across my brow. Light shines through my half-opened garage door attacking my dilated eyes.

Damn, damn, damn. I must have hit the open button when I passed out.

Stupid. I’ll just try again. I press the close button and watch as a truck flies past my house, its air horn blasting a warning. Snuggling back, I await.

10:05 and 54 seconds My truck sputters, emitting a choked cough and dies.

11:57 and 11 seconds A sign? I sit on the deck, hiding from the burning sun and contemplate the botched suicide attempts. Maybe I have some higher purpose? A reason to live? A fly lands on my beer can and I stare at his big bug eyes. Is there a reason for him? A higher purpose?

A semi whizzes passed the porch, and the wood shudders under the vibration. The fly flutters but remains on top of the beer. I laugh. A fly is just a fly, a man just a man. My purpose is no greater than his. I’m just better equipped to deny the fact. Reaching for the classified section of the newspaper, I smash the fly without compassion. Life and death. It all comes down to who has

21

the biggest fly swatter.

Draining the rest of my beer, I walk into the sweltering house. A halfpainted, half-wallpapered wall mocks me. Ignoring it, I flip the air conditioner on, a cooling stream of air blows through the dusty slats. The air conditioner’s engine whines reminding me of another thing I failed to fix.

I will die today.

I look around the room, trying to find the perfect tool to get the job done.

It has to be quick and painless—a definite requirement. Drugs? I head to the bathroom and search the medicine cabinet. Damn, like a true middle-aged man’s life, decomposing condoms, Ex-lax, and Viagra are all it holds. I am desperate for death. The cracked mirror above the sink proves it so. I beg for the cure to life.

My eyes scan the room focusing on the small porcelain tub. There is a long rust stain around the top, and shiny pink flower slip pads stuck to the bottom.

Perfect. Not only is it fitting, it’s ironic as well.

Twisting the cold-water knob, I’d like to say I’m thinking about life and death, about the things that ground us, about the ebb and flow, cause and effect. But what I’m really thinking is, I need something electric to toss in the tub. My eyes slide over a blow dryer, an electric razor, and finally settle on an alarm clock radio blinking 12:00. I check the distance between the tub and radio making sure there is enough cord to fry me.

The basin fills, water sloshing over the side as I strip off my clothes. Standing in my polka-a-dot boxers, I debate removing them. The water is cold, and I might be in it for a long time. Not a pretty picture. For the sake of the poor shmuck who will discover my body, I leave them on.

I step into the icy water forcing myself to sit. The clock radio is on the vanity inches away. The song Knockin’ on Heavens Door crackles through the speakers. The sound of an eighteen-wheeler approaching makes me smile.

It is time, I think, pulling the clock radio towards the tub. Holding the radio above my head, I say a final goodbye to the empty bathroom.

12:10 and 18 seconds Darkness.

Total and complete darkness floods my senses. Is this heaven, or worse, hell? Nope, it is a blackout, my rational brain says. The air conditioner and radio tripped the faulty electrical wiring and the whole place shorted out. It’s happened before. I’d meant to fix the problem, one more thing on a long list of household chores.

I slip under the water, and suck in a breath full of cold water.

12:11 and 37 seconds Drowning doesn’t work quite like that and I come up sputtering. My lungs burn, as do my eyes and throat, which gives me an idea. Suffocation. It’s perfect, like falling asleep. I am getting desperate. Suffocation isn’t a nice way to

22

go, and it will not be anything like falling asleep, but it will work.

In the kitchen, I find nirvana in the form of a Piggly-Wiggly plastic grocery bag. The red and white lettering read, ylggiW-ylggiP as I stick my head inside the bag. The bag begins to inflate with the carbon exhaled from my lungs. Pulling a rubber band from the silverware drawer, I firmly anchor the bag in place.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I start dancing around the kitchen, baggy around my head.

Goosebumps crawl up my legs, and suddenly it hits me. I am standing in my kitchen with a BAG over my head in WET purple polka-dotted BOXERS with GUNPOWDER burns and a STEERING wheel shaped bruise on my face. Is this how I want to be remembered? As the moron who couldn’t even commit suicide right?

I tug at the plastic bag, sending shreds of plastic around the room. The rubber band holds the remaining strings close to the delicate skin of my neck. I feel reborn, almost immortal, and invincible. I’d been to the edge and lived to tell of it. From this day on, the world is my oyster. I’d find a new and better job in a new and better town, buy a new and better house, and have an eighteen year-old, blonde, d-cupped cheerleader wife.

1:15 and 27 seconds Standing on the front porch of my house, I inhale fresh air, happy to be alive. I am happy to hear the twanging sound of Carrie Underwood bragging about the Jesus driving her car. I’m even happy to hear the rumble of another eighteen wheeler rolling past my house.

Walking to my mailbox, I am ready to face whatever it might hold - divorce papers, delinquent bills, an IRS audit. Bring it on, life. You can’t beat me. With determination, I open the box and peer inside. The smiling face of Ed McMahon stares back. You, James D. Burrows, just might be a winner the envelope states.

A purring rumble vibrates up my leg, as my missing, three and a half-legged cat, Stumpy, weaves around me. I bend over and stroke his soft fur, feel the texture and heat of his slim body, feel his heart beat against my fingertips.

Alive.

A drop of rain splatters against my forehead, and I look to the sky. Big gray clouds hang overhead and streams of rain begin to fall drenching the dying flowers. Stumpy hisses in protest, scampering away. Up the street, the rumble of an engine can be heard over the pitter-patter of falling rain.

2:34 and 45 seconds “Time of death…2:34 p.m.” The coroner waves to the patrolman standing a few feet away. “Poor bastard never knew what hit him.”

The cop shakes his head before responding, “The truck driver swears he didn’t see the guy. Said he swerved to avoid a three legged cat, and boom...”

With a shake of his head, the coroner zips the black body bag over the

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town’s only psychiatrist.

A truck slowly rolls past.

Photo by Luke Bennett

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Shane Clements

before profit or loss

WHEN I finish writing this letter I’m going to swallow it started smoking again and feel like I can talk I’m learning to trust my bad habits beneath me this awful city screams though I’m sure there’s an orchestra somewhere in its black iron bowels only the most frugal worry about the cracks in the pavement preventing progress holes lead to boring prose when so much is left aspiring you have less than the full sense of confusion the greatest happiness can’t be explained by numbers but I’ll still try to make sense of joy I have seventy cents and a fortune my arms laugh and whisper ribbons of different color in the half light my eyes whistle after life and eat into you like ants the effects of time for everyone are injured by the roses but words are a cure whose feet step more in the sky than on this earth

Photo by Luke Bennett

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Akilah Oliver

dear kari,

Dear kari, I remember how bad my memory is but these are some of the things I’ll try to remember with some sentimentality, against all the rules I’ve recently adapted about the intrusive function of nostalgic memoir as an accurate record of something, perhaps a life or solidified documentation of the body’s earthly occupation, but these are some of the things I remember about you, kari edwards, with love and an admittedly embarrassing anti-critical resolution, I remember when you moved from Denver to San Fran, came back to Boulder/Denver to do some gigs and stayed at my house, and by that I mean apartment, for a couple nights. It was Spring. Someone lent you a BMW. It had speed and was squishy inside to sit in, but had a lot of zip and all that silly bohemian bourgeois currency those kind of cars hold, and off we zipped, I think to the women’s bookstore in Denver where you had a reading, and max regan was there too and that was cool, I remember on that same trip, you had stopped smoking but I believe may have sneaked in an “american spirit” with me, in my sad living room because my son had just died and I was in a new apartment and everything was a kind of disappeared sadness, if that makes sense, but we were listening to “burning down the house” and we may have smoked a cigarette together and we didn’t talk about anything “personal,” we just were, I remember when I first met you. Naropa, outside the bookstore, across from PAC, one afternoon, I don’t know who introduced us, you were just graduating from one of those programs at Naropa poets don’t understand, transpersonal psyche or reinvented egos or something, and I met you, and you were shorter than you got to be later in my mind, had on seeing glasses, a motorcycle leather jacket, and I had one too, and I liked you and wanted to be your friend but then, as now, I didn’t know I could just like someone and be their friend so I’m sure I said something lame like, “we should have tea or something soon,” when I really meant vodka and fall in love and know each other until we die, which kind of happened, but kind of didn’t, and

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someone told me you were a poet and going to the Writing Program for a degree, and you had a book coming out, some guy who was briefly a poet and used car salesman, he had started a small press, and he put out the book post pink and it was on my shelf for years but I don’t have it anymore because somebody stole it a few years later, or months ago, I’m having trouble with this sequential time thing lately. I liked the book but I’m not sure what it was about, not because it isn’t a thing to figure out, but because someone stole it and I don’t know what that’s about but what I loved about you then and now is you never stole anything, nothing I think, that would leave me with an empty space on my shelf, and you never lied to me about anything, nothing big or small, which to me is really important, ‘cause when I used to lie, I always had to do some kind of public and private ablution which was just embarrassing so I just stopped lying about twenty years ago, though I don’t always reveal what one would think of as “the truth,” and though none of this is revelation, (my that sounds biblical), it’s true, we became friends and I distrust “falling in love” but love that we loved one another, and became friends, though I’m not sure if we ever really had vodka together, but lots of coffee, which is always better than tea if you’re queer poets, and we, I think I can say that with absolute certainty and no need to explain, are queer, I remember you taught me without ever lecturing or making yourself the “exotic,” helped me to understand what it means to be trans-queer, and trans, and I hope I got it, ‘cause it’s different from being queer or gay, though I’m not trying to privilege oppressions, not at all, but I’ve lived a body you never did, and you lived a body I never did, and the sarah palins would stone us together without differential preference in the town square, though it was, I think, the camaraderie in our differences that allowed the love between us, but as gil scott heron once said, “they don’t really love you sister,” and fuck them, yeah right, fuck them, but look how the sadness of the fight, not them, but the exhaustion of the fight, takes so much out of us, We understood all that, I remember, I remember how on Dec 2nd, and still now, I can’t write about you without crying. I think it has more to do with my being a sad sap than anything else, I remember, I remember I got to get out of here, XO and love, akilah

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after Audre Lorde

Suzanne Savickas

another year forward

I Last night we talked on the phone. It does not matter how long it has been since I have heard her tone. We are the same: thing one and thing two.

But things change in a matter of months.

Refuse to grow older, but we do.

I proceed to explain how I have painted my hair red to cover the gray, only to highlight the tips pink.

She laughs. Kindly does not remind me how I once told her, her natural silver highlights brought wisdom.

Hope she does not remind me that I swore I would never paint the strands red, again.

Her hair is longer now? But hair, does it matter?

II Explains how she is sick of hearing her own voice day in and day out.

How work is draining and how reading about suicide is even more draining.

I contemplate.

When the hum-drum-nine-to-five is over, refrain from cutting the edge of her foot on a blade of grass. It will only prevent her from dancing across the floor.

Side-step: a picture may represent a thousand words, but we are voiceless for a moment.

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III The soap stars on TV have nothing on us. We dish. Reminds me that I am attracted to those men who are not good for me. I remind her that I am not good for me. “Of course.�

She does not need to remind me that I wear my shirts too low and that I laugh before I turn to her on the phone and cry.

This is a re-run. And I am sick of re-hashing the soap opera to her.

She is too patient with me.

I will spare her another hour.

I will not tell her another tale of death.

Another tale of self-destruction.

I will merely laugh and wait for her to laugh.

We can cry together later.

IV Our concentric circles have been cycling in crises together these days.

Calamity runs in our genes, no matter how much we try to deny it.

And yes, maybe mercury is in retrograde.

I know that we spin unevenly, pulling farther apart from the known.

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Meg Day

another night at sea level or

instructions on how to light this fire patagonias along the freeway this morning, brillo pad clouds and conversation i’ve got scripture stamped (a)long the lower manhattan of my abdomen & something tells me you want to hear it what I think: that a hole must be a hole in

(something)

& she must be sore from all those years of holding you back

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Peter Rugh

The Creek

THERE ARE two sides to the creek. On the north side, the path is paved. Pick up your dog shit and put it in this bear proof trash can. Men in uniform come to this side of the creek every so often to pick up Odwalla juice bottles under the eye of a guard. They recline at noon, eating sandwiches on the grassy hill below the Justice Center, watching bikers and joggers in scientific fabric huff along the trail. The guard always remains standing. At five, he collects his prisoners and shepherds them into a van.

What happens on this side is visible.

The other side is shadier. There is not one trail but many, carved out by the lost. There are no signs, save for tangled graffiti monograms on the ruins of concrete foundations. From the sunny side, this shore is hidden. Crisscrossing branches loom over the trash ridden paths like mangled archways in a dilapidated cathedral.

There is a circle of stone where homeless sit without a fire and pass poison around. A secret market where eyes don’t meet. Someone has left a can of yams on a log. Someone has left bread crumbs on a stone. Someone keeps a thorny garden back here.

At night, heading home, I sometimes stumble along this side of the creek.

Telling myself it’s a short-cut, I cross over the splinter wooden spine of an old bridge, step through a thicket and onto a path of instinct. Darkness turns the whites of my eyes black, suspending all certitude. This is the dark where the spoils of war are calculated and distributed. This is the dark from which babies bloom.

Ah, sheer grace, I see light on the other shore. Branches pose as shrouded arms waving handkerchiefs at a train leaving the station. Light moves slowly into vision as if it were treading water and secret bullets of night are grazing the hairs on its head.

The water is innocent. Like Ophelia, it babbles naive prayers to its reflection in the sky. We are the shore, the hands that clasp its prayer. It is not Ophelia who is suicidal, it is her fingers. And there is the moon (which is for everyone) and tonight it is full.

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Laura Garrison

the plunge

Blacktop heat rises, liquid sunlight reflected off a panther’s back.

Backyard oasis, soft patchwork shadow blanket unfolds as leaves shift.

Summer paradox: tiny tongues of flame swimming in a cool, green pond.

I fling myself in and sink beneath white lilies, scattering goldfish.

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George Evans

in a mist Bix Beiderbecke (1908 - 1931)

He went downriver with his teeth on fire and came back doused in gin.

Sent to boarding school he concentrated on a cornet mouthpiece in his pocket.

Everything was music and the Mississippi he daydreamed on both banks, could swim but never learned to read notes well, fearing the restriction, and heard both wash beneath the riverboat decks where he listened to Emmett Hardy (cornet wonder dead at 22, TB, forgotten, left no record but Bix) and Louis Armstrong, friendly rival.

Played by ear and memory and never a song the same way twice.

The records he sent home as evidence of his gift sat unopened in a pile.

His parents’ warnings came in nightmares: it’s not our music, it’s theirs, the sun never shined on your back, it’s not our music, you’ll always be a white boy, Bix. That may be so, he said, but neither did you invent English yet you speak it.

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Dave Moyer

the birthday party

AS FOR me, I am a guitar player.

That’s not the way I planned it. I never planned anything. I had no idea what I wanted to do. By the time I was ready for college, I decided I wanted to major in music but with no apparent purpose or goal. I played the saxophone from 5th grade on, and then in high school I picked up the clarinet so I could be more versatile and play in orchestras. I alternated lessons on both instruments.

I took some guitar lessons when I was in third grade but I didn’t really hit it off with my teacher. Then we moved and I decided I didn’t want to play anymore, I guess. My dad tried to tell me that for some reason he thought I would have a disposition for the guitar. I don’t know why he thought that, but he did. Still, I quit.

I picked up the sax in 5th grade. We lived in a rural area and I went to a small school of three hundred students, grades kindergarten through eighth grade. Our band was terrible; I was the only one who could play at all. Then our big concert came and I choked. I couldn’t play a note. I said the reed was giving me problems. My dad, who was not exactly a gentle prodder, was pissed. And I was not a confident kid. I couldn’t handle pressure the way Dad could. He was a former college baseball coach who spent his whole life competing. I wasn’t like that. I didn’t think he understood. He tried to explain that the world was full of competition, but I didn’t want to listen. I just drifted. I drifted through middle school without much motivation for anything, which drove my dad insane.

“You quit sports. You weren’t that bad,” he’d say. My liking or not liking it was not relevant at this point. “You can’t quit everything. You have to stick with something. You have to be involved in something. You can’t just sit around and do nothing.”

At that time in my life, nothing was exactly what I wanted to do. I gained weight. It was awful.

We moved again but I continued to play the sax in middle school. Then, in 7th grade, I got my first real guitar - a Fender Squire. I also had my dad’s old acoustic guitar. He took lessons for a while in high school, but he gave it up. He was a drummer and involved in sports and said he didn’t have time to practice. He was the top chair drummer in high school for four years and played in the jazz and Dixie bands at the school. Long after I became an

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adult, I found out from my grandma, not my dad, that he played in the local symphony and played in an opera once.

I began taking guitar lessons. I was pretty good, I guess, though I didn’t want to think so. He never said directly to me, though I overhead him say many times to many people, that he wished he had stuck with the guitar.

High school band is what got me through. In my freshman year, the upper classmen came to my house to kidnap me the first day of summer marching band camp. I played in the jazz band and the pit band for musicals. I met my friends there. I met my first girlfriend through the band and because of it, learned how much it hurts to break up with a girl. I got to take trips because of it—Italy and Disney World.

Happy as I may or may not have been at school, around the house I scowled through it all. My siblings drove me nuts. My dad tried to push me toward things I wasn’t ready for and as my mom intervened more, Dad gradually gave up, concluding that getting me to think differently was a losing battle. This gave me ammunition to explain how little he cared, until a given situation deteriorated to the point of him having no choice but to intercede and take the hard line, opening the door for me to complain that all he did was yell, and on and on the vicious spiral went.

When my dad’s grandma couldn’t drive anymore, he took it off her hands for cheap, and I got his car. Dad started feeling sorry for himself, drinking too much in the process. The disappointment of watching his dreams elude him while trying to manage the stress of continual financial chaos was more than he could handle. I had four brothers and sisters, and we were going in a million different directions, so a third car was not unreasonable in the year 2008. Still, I’d been to Europe and was driving a 2001 Ford Taurus, while Dad was driving a 1992 Pontiac Grand Prix. He thought I appreciated nothing and I gave him no reason to think otherwise.

I upgraded my guitar to a Gibson Les Paul. The spring of my sophomore year we got a couple guys together for the talent show. We did the Ska tune Take on Me. People liked it. The fall of my junior year, the band director selected a halftime theme featuring rock music, so I stayed on the track and played guitar, including a solo during Freebird. People liked that too, but I couldn’t wait to get it over with. I hated soloing and I hated the attention.

For the junior musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, I added an acoustic electric guitar to my collection. Everyone said they liked how I played. This was better. I was hiding in the dark, out of sight.

Throughout high school, my dad took me to concerts. Our first concert together was Alice Cooper and Cheap Trick. We saw Alice Cooper another time with my mom. We also saw Tom Petty and Pearl Jam, Bob Dylan twice (once with the Foo Fighters, once with Elvis Costello and Amos Lee), The Who, and Rush.

I finally headed off to college and formed a band with some other guys, something Dad had been encouraging me to do for some time. We played

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around the local clubs and he came to see us play rather frequently. At the time, I had no idea our band would sign a national recording contract, that people would like our records, or kids would start playing guitar because of me. I am out front in the light now. I’m okay with it. It really doesn’t matter to me. It’s just what I do. I am a guitar player.

I haven’t told you about my first gig.

Dad was turning forty. This was a real bad time for him, one that lasted about seven years. I realize now, looking back on it, that coincidence or not, he started to snap out of it around the time our band started to get big.

Dad was insistent that there be absolutely no hoopla at all surrounding his birthday. Then one day he dropped on my mom that he wanted to rent a hall and have a band. He went from no acknowledgement, no presents, no nothing, to a big blowout.

Dad was a high school principal at the time. There was a band at the school he liked. He said he wanted to do this whole party because he wanted to give these guys a chance to play. He asked them if I could sit-in on some songs.

They said that was no problem, so a couple weeks prior to the event, Dad drove me back and forth to the house where they rehearsed. I didn’t protest too much when he asked me to do it. I had just gotten my new Les Paul and was anxious to show it off. It was a complementary situation. I just blended in. During rehearsals, they talked about how much they liked my dad. He must have saved his best for other people.

One time their drummer was gone. When Dad came to pick me up, their lead singer/songwriter/guitar player, Alex, asked him if he wanted to sit in.

He said he’d rather not, it’d been twenty-plus years since he played, that he’d be slow, terrible. But the whole thing sounded like so much fun that he relented. We played a Petty song. Petty was one of his favorite guys. Dad was surprisingly good.

Alex asked my dad if he wanted to sit in on a song at the party.

“I don’t think so. That’d be embarrassing.”

“Hey, if we gotta play, you gotta play.”

So my dad played. We did a simple blues riff. He didn’t play as good as the previous night; maybe he was nervous, had too many beers, or a combination of both. That was the only time we played together.

It was almost seven years later that I would learn more about that night.

One time, right when our band was getting big, becoming a regional band and getting some decent notoriety, we came back in town to play a local festival. During sound check I saw Alex.

“Hey, Alex. Man, how you been?”

“I’m okay. You guys are getting big.”

“Well, it’s a lot of work like anything else. It’s not easy, I tell you. Some-

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times I think there’s no rhyme or reason to who makes it and who doesn’t.

We just go out and play, hope people like it, and try not to worry about it too much.”

“Yeah, well, I saw you guys a couple months ago. It was great. I’ll be by later to check it out.”

“You wanna sit in? It’s the least I can do. You know, what comes around and all that.”

“Ah, hell, why not? Sure.”

Later that night at the show, my parents were there, and everyone else I knew from back in the day. We were having a good time. The show was going well. Alex came up for a couple songs. Then we packed up and moved on, like always.

After the show, though, Alex and I hooked up for a couple beers.

“Whatever happened to you guys, Alex? Kind of fell apart?”

“One of our guys didn’t take it too seriously, and we were all working a lot and going to school. We couldn’t find time to rehearse. We just moved on. I tried to put a couple other things together but nothing ever came out of it,” he said.

“Too bad. You were good. Still are.”

“Well, your dad was great to us. He bought our CD and set us up to play at all kinds of school events. It was nice to feel supported like that. He wanted us to go for it so bad.”

“You know, he lost your CD. He was really upset. He took it to all kinds of local places trying to get you guys a shot at a booking in one of the bars. One of the places never gave it back. He didn’t know how any of that worked but he was just trying to help. He said the only reason he threw that party was to give you guys a chance to play.”

“Roger, you don’t know, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“He told us the only reason he threw the party was because he wanted to give you a chance to play. He said his parents always came down and saw your brother in his plays and even saw your other brothers play ball. He wanted everybody to see you play the guitar.”

“You mean he dropped all that money so I could play six songs in front of fifty people?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

Alex and I stayed in touch a little. When we came around the Chicago area, I hooked him up with backstage passes and things like that. We weren’t best friends, but he was joined to me by the memory of my dad. I rationalized that I was doing something for him, but really, I was keeping Dad’s memory alive.

As for my dad, I don’t know what he’d call himself. I don’t know if he could tell you. He’d probably say he was a baseball coach. He’s gone now. I never thanked him for getting my first gig. Couldn’t. Didn’t know how.

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I gotta run now. We have a show to do. Every time I play, I pray he can hear the music. It’s the only way I know how to say thanks. I’m a guitar player.

Spontaneous Chalk Art by Clarissa Butler

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Nathan Antar

song #36

I took to the road With a satchel on my back My pace it was too slow To escape the pack I don’t want to shine Just leave me alone I have no claims of my own Like a sun sinking slow To live with the world below Through the morning haze A vision slips away in the rain In the rain A friend among the clouds I cry beneath my shroud In the dark Though the light descends on me I’ll be fine On a lonely road There’s not a thing I need to be Like an ocean’s ebb and flow I will come and I will go

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Nate Cook

hard paradise

Bathroom lovers in the congregation The word of God is on these fadin’ walls Fulfillin’ prophecies of consummation I feel your body. Are you feeling at all?

Sweet Alex, won’t you put me asunder?

The love is gone, but we can work it all out.

Love is like a burning bush, spitting out words but forgets its own mouth And leads us up to the higher ground, to watch it all wash away As a man I will always proclaim, “If your body is a temple, I’ll be the sacrifice” Let’s confess to each other in the tongue of the ages We’re fuckin’ up good in a hard paradise You’re a queen with a crown of thorns Twenty odd years, you can’t take any more March with the masses to the promised land Close your eyes ‘cause I promise I can Lead us up to the higher ground, to watch it all wash away I’m moving on like a holy roller, kneel and take my savior from a bottle of vice I may be hopeless, but I hope they’re right We’re fuckin’ up good in a hard paradise The night is screamin’ and the sun is runnin’ Turn your back and it’s blown away It’s my first chance at a second coming I finally came back on a southern highway And went up to the higher ground, to watch it all wash away Now I’m the guest of honor at the police station Fight the law, but forgive the man Who turned the phrase that’ll turn generations?

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Lord knows we all do what we can I’ll be damned, but the blessings are older Build the words and then burn ‘em all down A woman is a flood, growing colder Baptized in the water though you wonder how To move up to the higher ground, to watch it all wash away The tweed suited bankers consult their silly machines The street sweepers come and they wipe it all clean Will the future ever wonder what these water stains mean?

Will they wonder about man that ain’t ever been seen?

Wait for the end, but the end it ain’t comin’ A prison full of promise so you pay the damn price Make a stand ‘cause there’s no sense runnin’ We’re fucking up good in a hard paradise And went up to the higher ground, to watch it all wash away

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Photo by Travis Cebula

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Kaen Joyler

expatriate interprets economics with alcohol

IN AMERICA we’ve got this little thing called Freedom, it’s something we like to cherish and protect, and nobody else in the whole wide world knows so much about it as we do. City boy here wants to know why farmers wake up so early in the morning. Is it because there’s that much damn work to do?

It’s responsibility that gets the farmer up, the need to milk the cows and put them out to pasture, clean the stables, slop the pigs and all the other labors of Heracles / Hercules farming is about. Freedom on a farm is the hound dogs laying under the porch all day, the kid with his slingshot down by the creek after his chores are done. You Americans, you’ve got it good, freedom of choice.

What we’ve got in Freedom of Choice is the individual right to choose, to prioritize our responsibilities and commitments, the right to succeed or fail; what you’ve got is Duty taking precedent over everything.

Let’s say you run a sardine business. You’ve got to pay fishermen to catch the fish, and pay them so they can pay the rent on their boat and slip and apartment and utilities in the off season; you’ve got to pay the processing plant crew, maintenance, and security; and you’ve got to pay that eighteenand-a-quarter percent mortgage on the waterfront property year round; you’ve got to pay a contractor to pack and distribute your product, and an advertising department to market it, and pay them so they can pay for the second mortgage they took out on their home so they can pay the monthly payments to their leasing agent for the privilege of driving a piece of handcrafted German engineering that takes so long to get replacement parts, it’d be cheaper, hell, quicker to fly that German engineer over and have him handcraft it in your garage.

This is not Freedom, though; this is Capitalism; or a Free Market Economy, which really means Open Slave Market. And what you’re facing as the owner of a sardine business is a Closed Market and you’re running out of operating expenses fast. So what do you do, fire the advertising department?

Of course you fire the advertising department, which is the first great Law of Capitalism. Why show any loyalty to a bunch of glorified propagandists who drive foreign cars?

I’ve got a sweatshop in my neighborhood, more than one; they make Nike stuff, stitching logos on socks, bras and whatnots brought in from Chinese sweatshops. Nike pays these people because it makes them look good domestically and the workers can say they work for an American company,

43

thinking that loyalty will keep them in good stead when the going gets tough and the world stock markets start puking their guts. That’s why there’s no unions here, because they still believe in loyalty, fealty – chivalry, for fucksake.

And these are the same people who make New Yorkers look courteous, Parisians look accommodating. You make L.A. drivers look downright passive in the fight for the off-ramp. Getting on the subway here is like running the bulls in Pamplona.

But you can’t do like AT&T or Ford Motor Company and lay off thirty thousand workers next week and not just because they’re all related to you (even the advertising department) and they’d find out about your golden parachute and mooch you blind, but because you have a government contract to supply sardines for the making of a certain type of soup that has been designated since time immemorial as Cultural Property #420. Corporate restructuring means giving the advertising department payroll checks postdated to the next decade and using that money to bribe a government official.

Within a week, there will be a low-level press conference called, attended by the half-dozen news media outlets in the country, and while the purpose of the press conference remains unclear, the one thing that is made clear is that the reason such-and-such soup has been designated Cultural Property #420 is because it contains sardines, and such was the wisdom of your ancestors to realize that sardines are good for your health, as if being beneficial to the male libido was not reason enough.

The next day, the front page of the lifestyle section of the newspaper contains an article on the government’s own scientific research into sardines and the purported health benefits, not only for men, but “for women as well.”

This in turn becomes fodder for the rest of the week’s morning TV talk shows, with guests ranging from the mundane “Sardine Diet Success” to the insane “Sardines Saved My Marriage” to the arcane “The Cult of Sardine.”

The following week your General Accounts department is so swamped with orders that you are able to finally fulfill the promise you made to your grandfather’s maiden aunt on your wedding day that you’d take care of her halfbrother’s niece’s daughters.

I’m going to tell you what made me the angriest all those years ago. Thursday nights, Joe would say, Hey let’s grab a beer, talk about politics, art, religion, the unholy triumvirate of conversation. And everybody would say, Nah, I gotta research an article, proof some galleys, grade papers, and Joe would say, Cool. The next morning in the faculty room, they’d all be talking about what was on TV the night before, and Joe would come in and say, How’d that research, proofing, stack of graded papers come along? Silence. If you’ve ever lived overseas, you’d understand this: how Alaskans hate all the rest of you lower-48ers. Hell, Alaskans would probably go to bat for Hawaii if they ever wanted to return to being an independent kingdom.

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James Tyner

home on leave

He’s crapped himself. Again.

A bottle of whiskey crowns his head, tall can like a scepter, empty.

Been home two days, from Iraq and friends took him out drinking.

At least he found home.

He’s snoring as I lift him, careful to avoid smearing the wetness on concrete.

But it’s everywhere.

In two more days, he’ll be back in war. Back in the desert.

I don’t undress him just let hot water pour over him, clothes damp, stained. He’s moaning now, face contorted in the beginning of a migraine headache.

And there should be a point here, but there’s none, just a twenty-two year old boy drunk until his body loosens, home from war, leaving home for war. And a brother unable to even undress him, just wash shit from face and hands.

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Megan DiBello

tar is a cloth for rubber

elephants out of the metal car parts unit wheel across art resin floor wards, easier than hop shuffle hop step delegating work time at home the elephant with the impact of freedom of speech program of free time massages the innermost rubber, effective at the time of independent arms, the elephant shares given from the hands of a grade school lesson plan underneath a three hundred million population and begging what is behind those footsteps, no matter the size of the foot urging the scared pedestrian-like victim where they are, we are, subjected to be bandits of their invasion collapsing at the waist side uniting a straddling nation at a rodeo for winner takes oil elephants dividends are spent on a worthy investment of a surname the next ward up is one no one ever goes to there is sustainable living the parts of the elephant have been collected dying can be a victory, for one having never died before ecology isn’t by definition environment where an effort is put in, not through one’s bottle down the stairwell but into the recycling bin the elephants metal parts have been recycled for good use boys and girls now have the availability to guns put into a mouth because it is constant recess and the bell hasn’t rung yet, if ever

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47

Travis Macdonald

ed. note - the preceding are excerpts from Travis Macdonald’s book The O Mission Repo

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Howard Winn

burma shave poets

There it is, in simple sign after sign.

The simple people driving past, if they look, get it.

The simple, but devious poet delivers the message and plans a volume of simple verse.

Isn’t that cute, the simple say.

Once past, the traveling reader forgets the simple statement, while looking for the next fast food outlet.

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Photo by Megan DiBello

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Benjamin Dancer

the problem with america today

SHE IS already buried under the falling curtain and, with the exception of the repeater leaning against her snow-covered body, looks no different from any other white mound on the forest floor. If I didn’t know she was here, I might have missed her. I lift my backpack out of the snow and smack it then knock the snow off the repeater. The latex rim of the yellow water balloon is still attached behind the bead of the front sight; the remainder of the bulletrent balloon is hanging from the barrel, ragged and singed. I rip it off and slip the rifle into my backpack.

My hands are cold.

I step over her snow-covered neck, step over her elbows and crouch at her abdomen. I make a small incision above her sternum with the knife then use the hook to lengthen the incision down her belly. The feeling of the sundering fibers in her thick hide is not all that different from the feeling of ripping a t-shirt. I pull the knife around the upper side of her mammary glands. The heat rising from her pink flesh feels good on my fingers.

She is lying on her left side, on the bullet hole. I push my fingers under the snow on her ribcage, against the grain of her hair. There is no exit wound.

There never is, not with the repeater.

The evisceration, apart from the fact that I am slicing along the length of her body, reminds me of the way the obstetrician sliced through Sarah’s skin and subcutaneous fat the morning Annie was born. I bring my knife back to her sternum and open the red muscle of her abdomen. The gray paunch slurps, erupting like a birthing head from the red gash lengthening behind my knife. She smells like grass. The steam rising from her guts curls against the falling snow.

I sheath the knife, push up my sleeves and thrust my frozen hands inside her hot carcass. My thawing fingers burn.

I was five when my great-grandfather shot a white tailed deer through the heart with a cane arrow in the Williams Fork Mountains. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into each of the buck’s nostrils. As he eviscerated the buck, he looked me in the eyes and said, “The problem with America today is that people no longer talk to their food.”

I puzzled over that statement for years. By the time I thought to ask him about it, he was dead. I think I’ve come to understand his meaning, though: we’ve become detached from our source.

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To my English students, meat is a cellophane-wrapped product purchased at the grocer in a yellow Styrofoam tray. They don’t think about the meat being muscle. They don’t think about how the muscle got inside the package.

They shy away from the fact that their food had eyes, that their food had a mother, that they are predators. From my point of view, their squeamishness in the presence of the blood required to sustain them is no less neurotic than my adolescent fear of the vagina.

The storm has brought an early evening. It’ll be dark soon. There’s a lot of work to do.

I squat over her hindquarter, lift her right knee onto my shoulder then open her pelvis by straightening my legs. Snow falls inside my jacket collar, wetting the back of my neck, as I make the incision around her vulva. I cut out her anus and let her right knee slip off my shoulder. Its impact raises a plume of snow.

I hold her esophagus in my hand. It is beautiful: a white, corrugated tunnel leading to her rumen, the first of her three forestomachs. My great-grandfather taught me that ruminants are the bridge between humans and the grass.

Her digestive track converts the grass to protein. That protein is stored in her musculature, which is the meat that sustains my family.

Her rumen is home to millions of protozoa and bacteria. When she swallowed the grass, the microscopic animals in her rumen shared in her feast.

The byproduct of their consumption was fermentation—a decomposition process that destroyed the cell walls of the grass. She regurgitated the cud from her rumen for further mastication and eventually passed the decomposing grass into her reticulum, her second forestomach, where the decomposition process intensified. By then, the legion of diminutive animals living inside her digestive track was producing volatile fatty acids, her major energy source.

I pull on her esophagus then reach under her huge stomach sack with my knife and sever the strands of tissue securing the paunch to her abdominal wall.

When the cud was broken down to small enough bits, it passed into the muscular folds of her omasum, the last of her three forestomachs, where water was pressed out of the grass and absorbed into her bloodstream.

It was the same water I watched fall from the sky last night as Annie and I listened to jazz on the way home from Vitamin Cottage. She consumed the snow with the grass. Her heart pumped the thawed crystals throughout her circulatory system. They sprayed from the broken vessels of her lungs into her thoracic cavity where they are now draining from the .35 caliber bullet hole in her left side. Her fluid life is melting the snow where she died. She is feeding the grass.

I splash through her abdominal cavity and sever the final strand of connective tissue.

She regurgitated the cud, squeezed the water out with her omasum and

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passed the grass, along with the feasting microbial animals, into her true stomach, her abomasum. All the animals traveling with the grass were then killed for their protein by her gastric juices. The pepsin in that lethal cocktail chemically divided the protein into peptides before the gastric acid was neutralized for transport into her small intestines by bile from her gall bladder.

Enzymes were secreted from her pancreas and liver to digest the peptides in the long, white tube of her small intestines - where the digested grass was absorbed into her bloodstream and pumped throughout her body to fuel the demands of her musculature. Any undigested food was subjected to a second round of fermentation in the caecum pouch before the digesta was concentrated into pellets in her colon.

Pinching it shut, I pull on her rectum. I feel the feces in the white tube of soft tissue. Her already excised anus falls into my hand. Her intestines are covered with yellow fat. I scoop them out of the carcass.

Her vagina is pink and muscular. Her cervix is about the length of my hand. At the ends of her fallopian tubes, is a pair of ivory-colored ovaries.

They are beautiful.

To talk to my food is not as mystical as I once perceived it to be. The elk and I share the same purpose. To talk to her is to see myself as her compatriot, to see our destinies as inseparable.

I stand up, walk over to her neck, crouch, push my knife through the long, brown hairs and open her throat. I wrap one hand around her esophagus and bisect it with my knife in the other. The microscopic organisms that used to feed her are eating her. I plug her esophagus with snow so the bacterium will not leak from her digestive track. I bisect her trachea, place my knife in my teeth and step over her snow-covered forelegs. The snow-stuffed pipe of her bisected and bloody esophagus slaps my right thigh when I roll the huge sack of her four stomachs out of the carcass and between my legs.

I cut her diaphragm. It opens like a red canvas into her thoracic cavity where I find the collapsed and broken vessels of her lungs. I reach over the bloody tissue, past her heart and wrap my hand around her trachea then pull her trachea out of the carcass. Attached, her lungs and heart follow. I drop them onto the gut pile then crawl in up to my waist, brace myself with my left palm in the blood pooled in her ribcage and scoop, with my other hand, until all that remains inside the humid carcass is the pool of hot blood.

Without looking her in the eye, without talking to her calf, without breathing smoke into her breathless nostrils, without feeling her blood cool, how can I know what it means to kill her? And if I don’t understand what it means to kill her, how can I know what it means to be alive?

I back out and push the steaming pile two yards down the hill. There is a wide, bloody trail in the snow leading from the gut pile to the eviscerated cow.

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Cameron Aveson

after work in leconte canyon The mail still hasn’t come. Neither have the pry bars, the rock drill, the hammers, or the powder. Two weeks of watching the latrine fill and the food disappear. Fourteen days since they turned around and left, assuring us of their return, their boxes brimming under the canvas and leather. The mules will labor, wishing, like me, that they were already here; the packer pulling them across the thirty miles of hard granite between us, over the passes and down into the canyon. I roll another Bali Shag, lick the glue, light the end and inhale, my nerves twittering as the chemicals bustle through the polluted streets of my veins.

Will she have written? And what? My lips pull at the paper, the nicotine skipping like a mischievous child through dim-lit alleys.

I look down canyon, hoping the mules are moving toward me in the fading light, visions of them, still standing in the corrals, their tails flicking flies off each other, hooves pushing into piles of their own shit.

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Travis Cebula

in the end

in the end what more should he have asked for? what more than this rain?

this breeze?

a modest house with a view

of the sea, of the sea. a piano, a small kitchen.

photographs

of friends.

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- for Noel Coward

Henry Rasof

south of the border

BEFORE ME is a great oak, flowering everywhere out of the ground, shading the hacienda. Before I was born, spontaneity was forbidden, also unnecessary. Musicians imitated paintings. A man my father knew—tall, with long, well-manicured nails—had trained in Russia. So my father became an irascible free-thinker, dazzling everyone when he described trees in perspective.

Though harsh, winters were well thought out. The daring got rich. Even lacking extensive resources they created religious frauds and grotesque images characteristic of the early films of Buñel—his Mexican Bus Ride, for example, about a small coastal village whose serene inhabitants support neither church nor…

On the deepest level a priest symbolizes what within me evades the embattled style of today’s sexual relationships, visually elegant but beneath the surface losing air, sinking into pulp romance, because the low level of existence, which everyone experiences now and then, is overripe and attracts a large audience of “watchers,” eyes turned in three “directions,” fearing involvement or loss of enjambment.

Still, eyes are extremely important in life, even life with a small “ell.”

Indeed, death-bed converts are rarer than ever, leading me to wonder even more about the depths of life’s ambiguities, for after all ambiguity, like hostility, being an antipode of heroism, is really no more than a lack of interest in decisiveness and the realization that while Mexico is south of the border, Mexican landscapes can appear anytime, anywhere.

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Artwork by Andrew Antar

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Mona Nicole Sfeir

quadratura circuli

There were all directions in this sphere except for one that went missing along with several manuscripts predating the big bang.

It was assumed that both were now in a private collection somewhere in Seattle or Switzerland and the sphere dwellers were too busy consuming to really care.

The odd thing was that no one seemed to recall this direction having all retired and moved to Florida or passed away into the great beyond leaving only computer voices to answer all questions even those asked in the middle of the night.

The Bodhi Tree had long been felled and on the summit of Harney Peak Black Elk proclaimed the sacred tree had withered.

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Dr. Shurooq Amin

another day of eid

Another day of Eid, and here is Yasmin with her wedge-heeled, chinchilla-lined Manolo Blahniks, her low-slung jeans in this season’s sandblasted shade, pot-glazed eyes smoldering with Arabic kohl, exuding an air of sacrilegious opulence; there goes politically-correct Salwa, in kneesocks and nautical tops, utilitarian, unadorned, loop-thin, invisibly hooked up to an intravenous drip, being propelled by a dauntless stepmother towards the made-to-order date-scones; oudh-drenched Dana with her quick-settingas-concrete foundation, green frosted-glass contact lenses, Cher-like hair extensions, and Dolly Parton cleavage scoffs at Salwa (who has succumbed to the scones, knowing it’s only a matter of minutes before she throws them up into the guest toilet basin) and billows ostentatiously across the room in eggplant-brown mock-couture, coordinated accessories clinking like aural winking.

Little Lina with her corkscrew hair (done at Jacques Dessange at the last minute) lifts her softly-tiered, polka-dotted tulle dress to sit down next to her mother, tries to itch an arm through manifold layers of softlygathered chiffon – but can’t; cries silently in frustration.

Like a sun-suffused freak in a Diane Arbus photograph, I mingle amongst the family, as translucent as a sea-gooseberry. My patience thickens like gouache when I catch sight of my bespectacled, aqueous self in an ornate mirror. I feel queasily androgynous.

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Time slithers slow as a lugworm, roils around my aura, chokes me with musk and ambergris, marabou capes and cashmere ponchos; a plethora of millefleurs and chintz generates sparks and static all around me.

As I sink into my own geek-infested waters, I glance at my watch, counting the hours until I’m back in that villa by the sea, sipping Amaretto and smoking cigars after sex, back to my wax-sealed affair with Yasmin’s husband.

X Marks Not the Spot by Melanie Miller

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Katharyn Grant

god hates liars

I AM the way, the truth, and the light. I repeat the words in my mind, trying to memorize this week’s Bible verse as I watch little Mary Gibson get up from her desk. She is the picture-perfect Baptist child, well-loved by everyone. We did a re-enactment of the pilgrims bringing God to the heathen American Indians and each girl was to carry an old-fashioned-looking doll as a prop. I volunteered the beautiful doll my grandmother hand-made for me, expecting I’d be the one to hold it during our performance. But Mary had a speaking role, so our teacher, Mrs. Eastman, gave her my beautiful doll to hold onstage. I was left with an ordinary store-bought doll.

Mary marches quietly through the rows of desks, past a poster of The Old Rugged Cross, making her way to the front of the class. She whispers something to Mrs. Eastman whose expression hardens as little Mary returns to her desk.

Eastman motions for me to join her in the hallway.

The gray afternoon seeps in through a window at the end of the corridor.

“Mary had the courage to tell me what happened.” Moving her weight from one orthopedic shoe to the other, Eastman clears her throat. “To make this right with the Lord you need to admit that you that hit Charlene Moss.”

“But it’s not true.” Suddenly the hallway feels unfamiliar.

“I’m going to ask once more.”

“I…” My throat tightens.

“You need to think about what’s happened.”

She asks our student teacher, Miss Kern, to escort me to the place where children are taken to be paddled. The Blue Room. I trail behind pretty Miss Kern who feathers her hair and always wears pink. She opens the door to the Blue Room. I can’t look at her.

The Blue Room is painted a flat pale blue made uglier by the harsh fluorescent light and absence of windows. The blue of the wall is broken up by strips of ugly faux pine paneling. I sit down on a brown metal folding chair.

It feels hard and cold underneath me. My hands are freezing. I fold my arms tight around me to try and warm up and then my thoughts start racing. Why would I hit Charlene? Messy hair, black galoshes under long black skirts, tshirts that come to her knees if she doesn’t tuck them. She’s the weirdest girl in fourth grade, but why would I hit her?

The door opens. It’s Eastman and Mary.

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“It’s time to admit the truth.”

“But…” I stammer.

“We have proof. Mary, what did you see?”

She seems perplexed, though pure. Adjusting a ribbon on her blouse, she looks me straight in the eyes. “She hit Charlene.” Mary doesn’t sound mean, just confident.

“Mary, say exactly what happened.”

“Well,” she bites her lip.

“Go ahead, describe it.”

“You were walking out of the girls’ room and you sort of pushed up against Charlene, with your hands out and…”

“Demonstrate,” Eastman demands.

Mary frowns, sticking her arms out and shoving slightly forward, as though butting against something. “See, it didn’t look real bad, but Charlene cried when it happened.”

“I’ve seen enough,” Eastman replies, then whispers with Mary by the door as she goes.

Eastman’s voice grows soothing. “Just admit you pushed Charlene. Tell the truth. Get right with the Lord. Then this can be finished.”

The room gets smaller and bigger at the same time, as though I’m falling while sitting motionless. A sick feeling knots my stomach. The room seems to be swimming because I can’t stop crying.

“Just admit what you did.” Eastman’s voice interrupts my thoughts. Sometimes it’s easier to just make them stop.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“Continue.”

“If everyone says it…”

“Take responsibility, young lady. Don’t blame everyone else.”

“Fine.”

“Fine what?”

I try to stop more tears, but it’s pointless. “I…um…I hit her.”

“Thank you for admitting the truth. After all, God hates liars.” She puts her large enveloping arms around me. “Wait a moment,” she says, leaving.

I wipe my nose with the rough edge of my sweater. God has abandoned me, I think. And the realization isn’t a feeling, but an absence. Then my thoughts race like fireflies flickering on and off, moving so fast I can’t grab hold of them.

When I woke up today it seemed like an ordinary day; I ate my cereal, put on my regulation below-the-knee length khaki skirt, waited for the bus. How come everyone else can remember me hurting Charlene but I can’t? Why had I agreed to move to this school, anyway? Public school was terrible, but at least people left me alone.

My heart is racing so fast it hurts. My stomach hurts too. If only I could have a heart attack and die on the spot. That would solve everything.

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A big cartoonish clock on the blue wall ticks off the seconds. Eastman re-enters, holding a large wooden paddle. Then pretty Miss Kern enters, stays by the door, stealing a glance at me. “Stand,” Eastman says firmly. I stand up from the metal folding chair. “Let’s pray.” We close our eyes. “Lord, help this child tell the truth, that she may get along with others and not hit, push or disobey. Thank you for blessing us with the fruits of thy spirit. Amen.”

Silence. “Turn around and touch your toes.” Miss Kern looks away. “Now.” I take ballet lessons, so I bend forward easily, touch my shoes.

Thhh—whack. Stinging. Thwack. Sharp tingling pain. Thwack.

Helix Nebula (“God’s Eye”) compliments of NASA

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Alexandra Lukens

metal quivers

While you were waiting, trains broke in two a reminder that most folks don’t like being occupied over a single loud speaker strung just above the ruins of your mother’s favorite church, a voice spoke truth gently like that of an airline stewardess dutifully calming the victims of gravity: “In heaven the plane wrecks are already distributed upon the landscape” This is not hell and, meanwhile, you held your quiver of arrows slowly realizing that there are just too many words for “walking.”

So maybe you’d found yourself a witch inside the Bible Belt, or maybe you were just in need of an accurate map to guide you through the disorientation and muscle tissue and stench of scraping metal on mud This is not hell and you are here I will take your small, gloved left hand dear, I will try to ease you into acclimation Soon enough you will see that all of this is sacred Simply because it exists, it occurs, it is real, it is heaven.

This is nothing new, this wreckage. This has been here all along.

This is heaven and you and your heavy quiver of arrows.

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Doug Tanoury

patron saint

I found a wooden Santo in an antique shop, without hands and it called to mind a passage from the New Testament, where Jesus encourages that offending eyes be plucked out and tempting hands be severed by their owners.

This Santo with tempting hands removed and paint peeling from his clothes was keeping the company of sinners who owned the shop and other lesser Santos with both hands still attached, so I asked, “¿cuánto es este santo?”

The shop owner thought for a moment and slowly replied: “tres mil quinientos.”

I paused, then complained, “pero él no tiene las manos,” and thought how much are a Saint’s hands worth that have done such good work, and I said to the shop keeper, “dos mil, no mas.”

So now “San Nolasmanos” keeps the company of a new even greater sinner, but for me it remains an object of deep devotion, a Santo with tempting hands removed is one I can pray to.

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Serena Chopra

the shoreline: an interface

NOWHERE IS the restless nature of my fingers more than when among colors — among a language between lovers. An interface is a common boundary between here and muse, where unfettered is tumbling horizon.

This is certainly an appropriate designation for the moment, singularly glanced incessantly. Here we can see the rhythmic. Rise and fall of tides constantly rolling and breaking. Constantly a fall, rolling, breaking, and tides, and rise. And breaking constantly of rise rolling tides and fall. Of rise and rolling fall tides breaking constantly. Rolling restless is the nature of my story, averting eyes. For I am only the messenger slipping by and although it may not be obvious, I too am a moment of chattering colors. Sometimes the waves knock paisley into the sand. Sometimes they only hum it.

For Alex by Clarissa Butler

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Diane Klammer

a thousand ways

Rumi said there are a thousand ways to bow down to the earth.

I can’t list a thousand, but if I could name just one it would be to notice small things that matter. Outdoors really look at Alpine Forget Me Nots for example. See those tiny flowers.

Remember to keep a sense of wonder we can lose so soon.

After that care more about making sure our big feet don’t trample those.

We may have to get a petition signed to keep from forgetting them.

Then it may take an act of congress to protect

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the park where they grow.

So on and on we go with baby steps until we really do become part of the solution to make a difference on this planet where we tread.until we really do become part of the solution to make a difference on this planet where we tread.

Kade by Ellen Elise Dillefeld

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Shane Scaglione

bius to tius: a birthday prasad for Leyla - secret inspiration and muse for the stream of consciousness flowing...

Start with harmony in my head…Smashing Pumpkins…break down 1979 It is Sunday and Sunset and I am twenty-something for twenty more hours bringing in my thirties on India’s Republic Day on Black Moon, no practice, only a sit and I’m Independent as ever My fourth consecutive birthday in India Independent like July 4th in Obama USA Independent as Skynyrd Freebird, single with Shaivaitte Monkish Gypsy Hermit, a rogue and part Irish Banshee and part Italian Flirt, Obama Young American Kadhi toting man My fourth consecutive birthday in India…

I must be mad “the only ones for me are the mad ones…” Jack Kerouac I turned twenty-six in Kerala Amma’s Ashram having long hair and AK circa Blood Sugar had it scalped on Keralan beach shack by barber who spoke only Malyam I offered it to Mahadev and waited hours in line chanting mantra on rudraksha until fingers blisterened, clad in all white, shaved head like monk and three horizontal lines with ash on forehead embodied Kali Bodhisattva, the incarnation of Divine Mother, whispered in my ear in Malyam giving me bite of apple and rose petals tossed on my head leaving me dazed I turned twenty-seven in Mysore with sore humstrings humming covered in Himalayan pain balm rub, think Ayurvedic tiger balm,

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my father was there, in on redeye from Money Makin’, Pradeep was there, you were there in Mysore or in spirit, and Kannada birthday celebration, after Ganapati Dharshan and puja to remove all obstacles I celebrated twenty-ninth birthday at best western, not hotel, but best western-style vegetarian restaurant in all of India, not at club or drunk or dancing at shore bar, or trance dance, but with family of yogis from PDX via Encitatas and their daughter, think blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these wings and learn to fly…

We had a meal at restaurant like star trek name, they are like shiva, parvati, and ganesh or shiva, and blackbird singing in…

Atha, now it comes to this I bring in my thirties, again in India, again in Goa, sitting upright like Buddha or Shiva, doing an hour sit with friend from where McCandless took Yatra, on right side, who turned me onto this practice, got turned on in Western Gujarat, and trying to keep it up, baby, sit on Shiva rocks with trident blazing in sun’s reflection This is the end of childhood This is the end of childhood This is the end of childhood A. Bharti, RF, BD, Puri(s) of Hardwar, you are my parents, and grandparents, siblings, I follow in your footsteps and appear in this incarnation with blackened feet, callused, and rough to Momma India Your India is gone, world has changed and all is becoming more like Ginsberg’s Moloch! Moloch! Moloch!

Whole Foods is Moloch in Boulder, giant Pac-Man devouring small independent businesses on India’s Independence Day, on my independence day from childhood, my Saturn return Goodbye Boulder Co-op, goodbye Penny Lane, goodbye Alfa’s when it was cool, and Whole Foods and Wild Oats merge like shakti rising to meet shiva I go into Whole Foods in twenty-eighth year with Delhi-bought Shiva tote canvas bag and make purchase, Vitamin Cottage is closed, no discount, I have to purchase one of their bags All is modern Bungalows rising in Goan and Starbucks’ presence in historic Oxford, England, the café where Blaine would go…

I’m Agenda in India, it’s worse than Niwot’s curse I own one tank-top, two kadhi pants, two kadhi shorts, a loose-leaf notebook, broken MP3 player with bhajans and satsang, and this is as young and free as I’ll ever be

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Calluses on my hand from writing too much, without mac or PC I am writing using pen bought at Gandhi’s Ashram Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad It says, “World is my family” I’m watching sunset on Goan Beach, Arabian Sea You from Tehran with Lisa Loeb glasses wearing turquoise jewelry with rainbow top, vata frame and kapha eyes You are painter Pastels and forever with sketch pad With rainbow case, rainbows, you are pot of gold and I am leprechaun, our lady, mother goddess, goddess on these rocks, with pocket Persian and English dictionary, with thumb prints, like bank robber, like Krishna who stole butter, we are thieves of heart, green hair tye, and one meter and seventy centimeters tall rainbow yarn design covers with torn Levis by your knees denim converse footsteps thru sand Chuck Taylors, samskara of my hoop dream, spot up shooter days, shade of tan, this moment together, time stops, with you this is a gift, to you and your gift to me, this moment, this fleeting moment, all is dissolving and fleeting, and all is leaving…leaving my twenties, Saturn leaves, and sun is leaving, leaving, leaving…

Crabs move side to side on rocks like sumo wrestlers opening and closing claws I’ve sat on these rocks to meditate and write for two hours daily for two months last year Ritual Surya is now taking the sun west, already away from western Australia, samskara remains, and now away from India, west to Tehran, to Calabria, to Money Makin’ to Sunny snow-covered Niwot’s curse best town in America Waves crash against rock Saturn returns End of twenties End of childhood New beginnings and I am grown One billion Indias will celebrate Independence Day One million Babas are celebrating Independence Day, some skin clad save four directions

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In the words of KV, it has all come to this I and my Tehran friend are celebrating without gifts Just silence Nature and naga of waves and birds Santosha is this Meeta is this Donkey runs after carrot in front of head and never catches it You can lay as many women as Wilt make more money than Bill put out more mom and pop coffee shops than Starbucks put out more mom and pop stores than Wal-Mart put out more Natural Food co-ops than Whole Foods make more yoga videos than Rod You can think everyday is that day in April on Folsom Field in Boulder have more songs on your iPod than Amobea’s stock in LA own more Rolls than Osho use the phrase “spiritual materialism” more than mr. demi moore says “dude” (and practice it too) read all books in Oxford’s library collection yug mercury to neptune as she rises up from muladhara to sahasrara, mercury rising like afternoons here, swimming in pools of mercury like jim and if she ever comes round, round, like a mandala formed by lou, john, nico, and any…

You are still getting away from the first limb, the foundation, santosha, the essence of practice, which is simplicity, sangha, happiness, and Mother Nature In words of Kerouac, “Everything is mine because I am poor.”

This view, this moment, this friend…more valuable than relics in British museum including Rosetta Stone Happy thirtieth, a song to myself like Whitman, a song to you, a gift, and how I wish you were here...Pink Floyd End with harmony in my head “Society, crazy indeed, hope you’re not lonely without me…” EV Shane Scaglione Shiva Rocks, Little Vagator, Goa, India, Momma Earth on the eve of my birthday

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Kim Nuzzo

the gift

the gift of the dark door is a flowering tree. the world begins likes this. we chase. we are mad. we make words. we make war. we are all one another. we are all expanding song-waves. our dreams laugh with us about what is left when we are gone. we hide in the shadows of angels. moreover than that. we need more space to die in. our buddha nature, snow on a gray afternoon. always thirsty.

Happy Monkey by Keith Kumasen Abbott

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Philip Meersman

a new member

A Wild Turkey flies fearless alongside my window on a hand-woven carpet.

His Ottoman Flyness smiles goggled at me I notice a gnome-like Ginsberg howling at the setting moon kissing the rocket launchers intensely.

On the back of the carpet, cross-legged in designer miniskirts, all the veiled women of His harem trying to complete the fraying carpet before the flock of butterflies catches up.

They need salt to survive whirling and waving, writing wonders into the brightening sky.

Just in front of them flies the whip.

Butt bitten, fearless and proud, she escaped her Felicien Rops’ Crucifix.

At the wheel of this flying circus a naked, camouflaged president erect of a bankrupted container company shoutlingly singing, “Only the wrong survive!” with a speech impediment.

Following the butterflies, a cavalcade of Apocalyptic Horsemen, Middle Earth Creatures led by Darth Vader and the Devil Himself dragging a fishing net with characters imitating “The Entry of Christ into Brussels.”

“Doomsday Redemption!” shouts the monk,

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limping at the end, waving his Red Lantern. “A penny for a partial indulgence?� cries the vomited vixen dressed in an orange overall, waterboarded and burning at her stake.

The Malleus Maleficarum lies with other burned books smouldering at her feet.

Other Dead Poets kindled the funeral pyre, after they painted Easter Eggs for fun literature spoke an elegy, silence wept, Death came.

Kyle and Nephew by Sean Hutchison

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Rodrigo Gonzalez

among all things in particular splashing out of the water to lie in the sun over warm cobblestone tiles and stillness a freewheel intuition listens somewhat differently to that half empty - half full song of how we can re-chart our vision of the cosmos together from different ways to think the weakness of each half exceeded by the contours of receding wetness on the stone in the middle nothing but brief morning air it stands less is more the dust around me more than dancing black amoebas gliding through the aqueous space of my eyes forgetting it all in favor of looking at all things disappear minute vowels in the way of light whisper to attack autumn leaves cramming the little bright whiteness husking almost mute words like vapor into narrow syllables pass through the sieve of breath meanwhile unconscious repression continues

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rediscovering no longer seemed to matter when radiance floods everything concentric diagrams into the grid the rat within the rat because nothing quite does it it puts up questions of loose beginnings and ends I know nothing of charts lest to say of something like nothing anyways it was all so beautiful like the ancient Egyptians or the way Le Corbusier was such a dandy juggling levels of engagement in open veins chugging up and down liters of blood is direct experience against dumpster experience turning the record over the disposition of the present situation takes action and the needle back on it time runs dry every day everyday it glides away like an amoeba so refine the decline of estrangement when the terrain is like a myriad dimensional net in constant reconfiguration not enough spontaneity is possible

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sometimes I feel like these days we are effectively carrying all the anxieties from every era from every part of the world all the time that’s how the world syntonic and treat yourself one time to a break of sunrise before the anthropophagic era comes before the lark call nature chain emanations of the psyche form an imagination that scatters across the circumscribed playground across bordering rivers of silence where compulsive cosmic beats keep eluding the polemic subcompact figures of a voiceless collectivism when everything’s combustive and our inner guts are lit in a cream of orange motionless volumes in their pompous costumes laugh at us sitting in impassive disbelief heavy the mucous completes its viscous cycle the impulse of victims in the molecule world await because nothing moves the folk’s sculpture of the goddess into impeccable shadows under solstices like the new opportunities that reappear confirming the oculist suspicion parallels among all things in particular

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Daniel Dissinger

full stride smear on glasses

1. under my window well that’s where he sits posture he doesn’t remember

obsessing about his

me I’m a vague nap on the floor

when I’m stupid with dreams about you …driving me around

her soft skirt saturday morning…

be released onto these walls I touch wet

paint has this flexibility to(o)

create heat on her lips his

fingers’ dance

2. can you feel it

…goosebumps…

in the oxygen

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but it’s really a landscape that smells like your bed as we fill it noise and tangles desperate to(o)

when I drink it

when the pavement gets excited I notice the water blushes out of the faucet

something lifts my stomach in hands non-specific stars…

swallowing makes an impression

3. push silence over

in this

her

cleaning my face …and wishes that burn

all this flesh around

a lake

naked body

…in the winter his legs play with the possibility of snow in her bellybutton…

4. to take my finger out of the moon and

pressure lay on my back

stare up rising combative down size music linguistically parallel

…lines focused on his pupils

.

.

.

when she undresses it’s meticulous nothing seems to dispute the softness of her birthmarks

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5.

…continually around this bend that swoop(s) in his arm under her thigh and his arm

distracted by the air

6. this dark

kissed and over her back

my neck spills

into her

eyes

water

across some slip …glass… under his hands

and

feet and cord

less

voice we all notice right

away

(red) our faces’ secret(ly)

candlelight hair to(o) belly

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Your soul grows sick with the things it has forbidden itself - Oscar Wilde

Julie A. Berner

pretty lake

I REMEMBER his armpits. How they smelled, metallic and dirty—how they looked, with long curly hair. The sun glistened on the lake, much like the sweat that trickled from his shirtless ribcage. Pretty Lake was an awful name for the muddy clouded waters we swam in all week. He was her cousin and I, her friend.

My armpits showed no signs of hair, dripping sweat, or stinky smell. He tried to touch me. Had he touched her, my friend, his cousin, last summer?

Was he glad to see that this year she’d brought a friend?

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a game of Monopoly, the pull-out sofa, and my pink satin nightgown. He pushed his hand until he found my Smurf underwear. I woke startled. My mother’s voice in my head. Be polite.

I pretended to be sleeping and rolled over onto my belly, pushing his hand away from Smurfette with my legs. Respect your elders. He took my hand in his and pushed it down his underwear onto his erect penis. When an embarrassing situation arises, help others save face. Pulling my hand from his underwear, I rolled over pretending to wake up. Never air your dirty laundry.

“Can’t sleep?”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, scratching mosquito bites on my back, legs pulled tightly to my chest.

“Here, let me rub your back for you,” he said, leaning closer.

“No,” I said, stepping my feet to the sand-dusted floor.

I latched the hook on the bathroom door and flipped the light. The fluorescent bulb hummed. Standing in front of the mirror I noticed for the first time my armpits smelled… …smelled like his.

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Kimberly Castanon

ostensibly

my love for city lights de Kooning said so frequently and bring fragments to the peripherals (significance of nods suggest the intense need to assent) now the violets are disgusting lights of black

Woods of NY by Sam Jablon

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frequently

Erica Varlese

shop talk

no pegs, no corners into which we can back ourselves, there exist archetypical replacements: portable life gaps, after work buddies, pub crawlers, street lickers, the insane who seek the intellectual diatribe, the ultimate entourage. is there a metaphysical lexicon for local dialectics? or dialecticals? or freebased community rituals, the sensation of darkness in a closed room? carting bonds, wrapped cartels of history, and wholesome seriousness. one asked about prayer, whether we are all gods talking to the saints in our heads. those we met on south street, in vfw halls of fame, remembering liquor laws, the conception of the hipster new-wave with clove-cigarettes on model lips, like chain-letters of scrutiny, paper links and soft skull cuts into community, as real. depending on those who trail along, mourning hovering like drunken ghosts seeking lonely and celestial forums for shop talk.

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Ashleigh Middleton

last act

I wouldn’t come back if I threw it all away If I walked out of this room down the hall out the back door If I lit a cigarette I’d smile you hate them I would turn my feet in whichever direction would take me furthest from you Past my car your house places you never took me into the woods I wouldn’t come back You like keeping

the story to tell All about the girl who loved you

so much she walked away

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Joel Parker

pedaling tides

PEDALING SO rapidly those resilient old legs, in a fury of pale movement the uphill battle sneered insurmountably; a simple changing of gears would have proved his efforts less challenging. His however, was the long road, the revolving stanza, an opera with no death, the sky as a canvas for all brushes and light provides the paint to adorn.

In this pestilent age our hero collects cans in a petroleum based grocery bag.

The nights of youth have faded leaving copious treasures for the old body with an infant’s soul; happy is he simply to be moving up this spoil-paved hill. The joke is resoundingly on “us” this time. For the bearded shadow the choice has never been; questions of place are merely questions of sanity, the gauge being whether you ask them aloud or quietly in a private ear…

He knew now was not the hour, for this was survival’s cloudy day and aluminum cans dispersed without value on the concrete, swore of a changing in the unfathomable fates.

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Nick Demske

prism break from Self-Titled

There is no zen in history. Just a pronoun and a simile For parable. Before the work day is over, I will have permanently Altered this skyline. This just in.

Run don’t walk. These beer goggles rearrange my reflection Into a sexy protagonist. Incessantly positive Test results. High-rises wildly embr Acing like dominoes.

There’s gotta be a way out of here.

And effect. Shackles and chains. “No centering Om,” Fr.

Causative

Time tells the monk.

Nick Demske, you are the most beautiful girl in the World Trade Center, when refracted through adequate spectrums. I for Got to eat today. I am incapable of justifying my love for You. Here is the best offering we have to burn, which disproves the old Truth it’s the thought that counts. But I shatter the glass only To mend it reordered That I might yet transcend this old mantra Forgive me.

- for Frank

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Response to STC’s “Kubla Khan”

Lindsey Anderson

the siren of kubla khan

In the sunless sea she called to me with her diamond dulcimer braided with wire and blue weeds with every strum black doves bubbled fourth with a flurry of wet wings in the ceaseless turmoil of the grey deep Her song was loud and long an elegy for an emperor who built the sea into the sky With each pluck she drew fire toward water in the span of each note the sun and moon mated one-hundred times and the wind stopped to hear itself breathe and Poseidon set Odysseus free for his Penelope

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Rea Allen

a dusting of memories Remnants of tires, broken playground swings hanging from chains. Faded pictures, along with memories of past family picnics. A time for laughter and frolicking games on the merry-go-round.

Shaded horse trails entwined along rolling hills of green grassed parks. Tall trees to climb onto and hide. Divided from relatives, separations of families, and loved ones die.

It is the process of time, that causes our childhood innocence and dreams of contentment, to spill across unknown highways. Like bits and pieces of broken glass, along with road debris, memories can be fragmented.

Dreams and goals scattered among asphalt, and collected in sewers and gutters, settling dust on everything that goes by. The decision of life is understanding where that dust settles.

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Granddad by Nate Jordon

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contributors Akilah Oliver writes and lives in Brooklyn. She’s on the faculty of the Naropa

Summer Writing Program. Her latest book is A Toast in the House of Friends (Coffee House Press, 2009).

Alexandra Lukens / lives on I-95 / sleeps in Manhattan / learns at Columbia University / edits Flaneur Foundry / featured in Fast Forward Vol. II / featured on Beehive Magazine / writes The Husband Manuscripts / marries Bruno S.

Andrew Antar paints with oils and turpentine; he is also a photographer and violinist who secretly writes poems. Originally from Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, now at Brown University, Andrew enjoys strong coffee and red wine.

Ashleigh Middleton (Ashe) is originally from the East Coast but currently lives in Colorado while working on her MFA. She enjoys singing in the shower, wasting her life online, and has discovered she has no natural talent for snowboarding. Her super powers include taming wild Clydesdales and breathing underwater.

Ben Olson was born and raised in north Idaho, in a small mountain town of hillbillies, realtors and hippies. He’s worked as a dishwasher, busboy, bartender, blender salesman, gas station clerk, golf pro, photographer, journalist, reclaimed lumber specialist, researcher, production assistant, producer, boat captain, propane filler, and finally, author. He used to live in a small cabin by the lake, where he wrote Wanderlost in 37 days, but was evicted for non-payment of rent, and is now living in total poverty, roaming around America trying to figure out what the hell to do next.

Benjamin Dancer teaches English at Jefferson County Open School in Lakewood, Colorado. He’s currently seeking representation for Fidelity, the novel from which “The Problem with America Today” is excerpted. Other excerpts from Fidelity have been published in Fast Forward Volumes I & II, G Twenty Two Literary Journal, decomP magazinE, and SFWP.org (the literary journal of the Santa Fe Writers Project).

Cameron Aveson has been constructing and maintaining trails in Kings Canyon National Park as a Backcountry Trail Leader since 1993. He lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas and is working on his undergraduate degree in English at California State University, Fresno.

Clarissa Butler received her BA in Art Studio, Communications, and Fashion at

IUP and finished school in Italy painting on the hillsides. She’s worked in post production, interior design, an underground music magazine, and currently works for an educational social networking site for teen girls. Her illustrations have been published in Language Magazine Volumes 5 & 6. She jumps on a plane any chance she gets and is fascinated with the human psyche, especially pertaining to addiction.

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Daniel Dissinger is an MFA graduate of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He’s moved back to New York, hoping to make a splash in the concrete ocean that is New York City, while still maintaining his position as the Editor of In Stereo Press – an online journal he cofounded in Boulder, Colorado. With his approach to poetry, Daniel is interested in creating an interactive, and ever-evolving, surrealist experience for his readers. If you were to ask Daniel who makes up the audience for his poetry, he’d probably quote from Jack Kerouac: “My witness is the empty sky.” His work can be seen on the recent online issue of 580 Split.

Dave Moyer is the author of the novel Life and Life Only and the recently published short story “The Tree.” Dave, who resides in the suburban Chicago area, received his doctorate from Northern Illinois University and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin where he majored in English. A school superintendent and college instructor by day, Dave is a former college baseball coach, drummer, and long standing Bob Dylan fanatic.

Diane Klammer is a native of California now living in Boulder, Colorado. She used to be a biology teacher before becoming a therapist for the chronically mentally ill. When she isn’t writing, she works as a naturalist for Boulder County Open Space or singing and playing guitar for seniors. She loves the biosociopolitical emphasis of Monkey Puzzle.

Doug Tanoury is a Pushcart nominated poet who’s been widely published on the internet and in print. He’s been featured in New York Times Online, The Detroit News, and the Detroit Metro Times.

Erica Varlese has been writing since she was fourteen. She’s an activist, student, writer, artist, and that which is yet to come. She’s inspired by collective feelings, community, the word “we,” and meditation.

George Evans is the author of five books of poetry published in the US and

England, including The New World (Curbstone Press) and Sudden Dreams (Coffee House Press). A bilingual collection of his poetry, Espejo de la Tierra/Earth’s Mirror, translated by Daisy Zamora, was recently published by Casa de Poesía, Costa Rica.

He lives in San Francisco.

Born in California, Henry Rasof has lived in Colorado since 1991. His first poem was published in Beatitude (SF) in 1960-something. He holds degrees in Music, Creative Writing, and Jewish Studies. He’s a former chef, musician, book acquisitions editor, and bread-pan washer (dead pan too). He currently teaches at the University of Denver and Colorado Community Colleges Online. He also writes poetry with first-to-fourth-graders at the Boulder Jewish Day School. His poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Kansas Quarterly, Beyond Baroque, Bits, and elsewhere. He likes exploring genre boundaries but not sure why. For more information, dig his website: www.medievalhebrewpoetry.org.

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Hillary Keel is a low-residency student at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics and is currently planning on relocating to the USA. Born in New York, she got her BA in German and English at Mary Washington College and has since lived in Austria. She’s participated at the “schule für dichtung” (Vienna Poetry Academy) and at the Paris Poetry Workshop with Cecilia Woloch.

Howard Winn holds a graduate degree from the Stanford University Writing Program where he studied with Yvor Winters and Wallace Stegner. His poetry has appeared most recently in Southern Humanities Review, Raven Chronicles, and Gander Press Review. He is a SUNY faculty member.

James Tyner was born and raised in Los Angeles but came to Fresno, California

as a teen and still considers both places home. He grew up in neighborhoods filled with violence, but strives for the life of a pacifist, generally failing. Tyner is the recipient of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, the Larry Levis Scholarship, the Ernesto Trejo Poetry Prize, and recently won the 2009 Coal Hill Review Chapbook Contest.

He thanks his wife, who is his all.

Twenty-three years old, Joel Parker grew up in the unfortunate sprawling metro area of Phoenix, Arizona. He stumbled into poetry as a therapeutic alternative to screenwriting, which was his initial professional focus. As of late, however, the poetic word has become his primary outlet in life and art. As of this past summer he is a captive of Boulder, Colorado and all its offerings. While sitting on a porch in the predominately debauched part of this college town, drinking cheap red wine, he found the inspiration for this particular submission.

Originally from Michigan, Julie Berner now resides in Boulder, Colorado with her wife and dog. She has an AAS in interpreting, a BA in Sociolinguistics and a MA in Environmental Leadership. When she’s not writing, she is earning her way in the world as a certified sign language interpreter and an interpreter educator teaching at Front Range Community College and forthcoming at Regis University. Julie loves marching bands, hanging laundry, and the change of seasons.

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, JA Kazimer escaped at a young age, and now lives in Denver, Colorado, where she received a Master’s Degree in Forensic Psychology. She’s worked as a PI, bartender, and most recently at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

A lifelong musician, Junior Burke has seen his songs performed and recorded by a range of musicians on the national scene, including Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, The Boston Pops and the Rochester Philharmonic. Junior is also a successful prose writer and dramatist. His highly original novel, Something Gorgeous, which explores the historical background of the era that spawned The Great Gatsby, was published in 2005 by Farfalla/McMillan & Parrish. In 1999, Junior won an Essay Award from New Millennium Writing, one of six writers cited nationally. He is currently chair of the Creative Writing program at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School in Boulder, Colorado, where he teaches fiction, dramatic writing, and literary studies.

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Kaen Joyler teaches EFL at Seokyeong University in Seoul, South Korea, where he’s been flying under radar for over a decade. He’s also editor of the online agora journal. Recent work has appeared in The Abacot Journal, Corpse of Milk, Fast Forward Volume 1, fre•quen•cy, The Bathroom, Brown Bagazine and Not Enough Night.

Karin Seidner is a writer, performance artist, psychotherapist, coach, adult educator, and instructor of creative writing in social and educational institutions. She studied German literature and English at the University of Vienna, participated in a variety of classes at schule für dichtung (Vienna Poetry Academy). Karin has numerous publications in German and English language publications. She lives in Perchtoldsdorf, a suburb of Vienna, Austria. Along with Hillary Keel, Karin created and held a literary performance on “exposure” (ausgesetztheit – was für ein wort!) with Italian musician Sandro Miori in Vienna. Karin and Hillary are planning a bilingual chapbook: exposure /ausgesetztheit.

Katharyn Grant’s writing has appeared in Fast Forward, Foothills Magazine, and

Orange Coast Review. She’s toured internationally performing comedy/improv theater for the U.S. military in Asia and Europe. Short films she wrote, directed, and acted in screened at BHFF in L.A. and Rome, Italy, Starz Film Center, and on IFC (Independent Film Channel). “God Hates Liars” is part of a larger creative non-fiction memoir she hopes to complete this year.

Keith Kumasen Abbott’s essay “Rhythm-A-Ning: Philip Whalen’s Rhythmic Inventions” will appear in The Beats and Philosophy from the University of Kentucky Press. Astrophil Press will reprint a revised Downstream from Trout Fishing In America, A Memoir of Richard Brautigan in 2010.

Although making the tastiest fideo and artistic cakes comes naturally, Kimberly Castanon is unnaturally good at mixing pigments, once blending the perfect shade of Nuprin yellow. She is happiest when writing in colored ink and is a semi-accomplished violinist; she also enjoys hangnails.

Kim Nuzzo is an Aspen, Colorado performance poet/actor who is co-founder and host of Live Poetry Night at the Hotel Lenado, Aspen’s longest running live poetry event. He’s a member of the Aspen Poets Society (www.aspenpoetsociety.com) and has appeared in many local theatre productions of the Hudson Reed Ensemble.

He’s currently working on a two-person play using the words of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

Laura Garrison grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and currently lives in Maryland with her husband Justin. She attends graduate school in Washington, DC, where she studies nineteenth-century American literature and nature writing. Some of her other work is forthcoming in Puffin Circus and Glossolalia.

Lindsey Anderson loves 19th century literature and poetry. She misses you.

She’s abnormally attracted to the American West and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her new puppy Mojo M’ Gill Morrison.

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Luke Bennett is a photographer from Arkansas.

Meg Day is a poet, spoken word artist, and arts educator hailing from San Diego but is currently earning her MFA at Mills College in Oakland and teaching young poets to hold their own at the mic with Youth Speaks in San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in PULP, The Greenbelt Review, Outspoken: An Anthology, Temper Magazine, Bellissima, and Flaneur Foundry. She lives and writes in Alameda with her sweet, dumb Dalmatian.

Born in New York, Megan DiBello is currently attending Naropa University for an MFA in Writing & Poetics. She received her BA from Marymount Manhattan College in Communication Arts and Creative Writing. She’s been published in Symposium, Fact-Simile, The Bathroom, and the forthcoming debut issue of Flaneur Foundry.

Melanie Miller is a former multimedia choreographer/dancer and Naropa University MFA candidate who turned to visual art, blogging, and playwriting in 2008 while battling Transverse Myelitis, a rare and debilitating neurological disorder that’s turned her into a badass-cane-walking disabilities and rare disease advocate. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Broken Pencil, Main Street Rag, Guilty as Charged, Watching the Wheels: A Blackbird, and other funky journals and online zines.

Check her out at www.neurodetour.com.

Michael D. Edwards is a poet being educated in golden mind at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In his free time he enjoys existing and not existing.

Mona Nicole Sfeir was born in New York City but raised in countries around the world. She received her BA from UC Boulder, her MA from SJSU, California and her MFA from the California College of Arts in San Francisco. Her poetry has been published in several journals and has won prizes from the Louisiana State Poetry Society and the Arlington Arts Center. She’s also a visual artist and her work has been exhibited in both the US and abroad. She was selected as one of the top seventeen students coming out of MFA programs in 2002 by Sculpture Magazine. She currently resides in Geneva, Switzerland with her husband and five year-old son and trying to avoid writing odes to cheese and chocolate.

Nate Cook is a member of Ego Vs. Id. Nate Jordon is Nate Jordon. Sometimes.

Nathan Antar says, “I recant my philosophy and retract my statement... Godspeed to all in this veritable labyrinth of sub-human jackasses...

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Nicholas B. Morris got an MFA from Naropa University, which inadequately prepared him for paying rent, buying groceries, and other harsh realities outside the Boulder Bubble. Fortunately, he grew up in Arkansas where he was equipped with survival instincts, a blue-collar work ethic, and a drawl that gets thicker when mixed with alcohol. His creative work has appeared in The Arkansas Literary Forum, FactSimile, Cliterature, Fear Knocks, The Gut, and of course Monkey Puzzle.

Nick Demske may or may not have had work in Barnaby Jones, Sawbuck, The

Bathroom, Queef, KNOCK, Pank, Fact-Simile, Arsenic Lobster, and every other journal in the world that doesn’t suck. He lives in Racine, Wisconsin where he helps curate the BONK! performance series (bonkperformanceseries.wordpress.com). Nick works at the Racine Public Library where everything is free but the late fees.

Peter Rugh used to live in Boulder, Colorado. He’s a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Philip Meersman writes in NL, EN, DE, FR, ES, multilingual and sound forms.

He creates improvisation, sound and poetry installations and performances using current affairs, socio-political and environmental issues in BE, NL, FR, IT, AT, BG, MK, RO, IL, AR. He’s been translated in AR, BG, EN, ES, FR, IT, IW, JP, MK, RO, RU. He’s been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and on the web.

He’s the co-founder of DAstrugistenDA and artiestencollectief JA. Rea Allen is an independent and self-reliant entrepreneur with over forty years ex-

perience in professional services, retail sales, and now a Bachelors Degree in History and Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno. Rea begins to reveal these experiences, perspectives and a lifetime of learning in her writings.

Rocky Balboa. Southpaw from Philly. He didn’t contribute anything, he just belongs here. (ed. note – it was either that or he was gonna break my thumbs.)

Rodrigo Gonzalez (Mexico City, 1980). Poet and musician, Rodrigo is a dedicated writer currently enrolled in the Naropa University graduate writing program.

He created and helped maintain an independent literary group in Mexico City. He contributed to the latest edition of American Environmental Leaders by Grey House Publishing. He’s an art enthusiast, meditation acolyte, and the oldest of three.

Rodrigo Gonzalez (Mexico City, 1980). Poet and musician, Rodrigo is a dedicated writer currently enrolled in the Naropa University graduate writing program.

He created and helped maintain an independent literary group in Mexico City. He contributed to the latest edition of American Environmental Leaders by Grey House Publishing. He’s an art enthusiast, meditation acolyte, and the oldest of three.

Samuel Jablon was born and raised in Binghamton, New York, where he learned to paint from his mother. To see more of his works, please visit www.samueljablon. com.

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Serena Chopra is a 2009 graduate of University of Colorado’s MFA program.

She has upcoming work appearing in the Denver Quarterly and Fact-Simile.

Born in New Hampshire, Shane Clements is currently writing poems from the Tao Te Ching, comic books, and fortune cookies. He is a student in the Writing & Literature program at Naropa University.

In December 2007, Dr. Shurooq Amin became the first Kuwaiti poet to be nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the USA. Dr. Amin holds a PhD in Creative Writing in which she analyzes (and disputes) the struggle between word and image in Ekphrasis. As both poet and painter, and as an Anglophone Kuwaiti, she has struggled internally with the paragon of word versus image, East versus West, all her life. Dr. Amin’s art, poems, and short stories have appeared in more than thirty international literary journals. Her chapbook, The Hanging of the Wind, was published in 2009 by Finishing Line Press. During the day, she works as a Professor at Kuwait University; in the afternoons, she paints; in the evenings, she writes.

Suzanne Savickas obtained her MFA from Naropa University. She’s currently writing a poetry manuscript based on Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. Suzanne resides in the Midwest where she writes poetry and works as a rehabilitation counselor. She is founder and editor of Le Pink-Elephant Press and co-editor of the press’s new subsidiary, A Trunk of Delirium.

Timothy Foss recently arrived in Boulder, Colorado after a decade immersed in the fog of the Seattle arts underground where he helped found the collective Secluded Alley Works, produced the mini-comic Seclusion, and thousands of ceramic objects featuring his cartoons. He’s currently an MFA student at CU focused on cartooning, animation, performance art, and how they all might get along.

Travis Cebula currently resides in Golden, Colorado with his lovely and patient wife, Shannon. He’s a recent MFA graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a program last seen hovering somewhere above and slightly to the right of Naropa University. His poems, photographs, and stories have appeared in The Talking River Review, Apothecary, In Stereo Magazine, Bombay Gin, and The Strip, as well as recent editions of The Bathroom and Whrrds. Last spring he was honored to be named a finalist for the 2008 Third Coast Poetry Prize. His first book, Some Exits, was published by Monkey Puzzle Press in April 2009.

Travis Macdonald works a sixty hour week in advertising. Fifty-one of them actually. Every year. In his spare time he writes and co-edits Fact-Simile Editions. His work has appeared in Bombay Gin, Hot Whiskey, Cricket Online Review, Other Rooms and elsewhere. His first full-length book, The O mission Repo, was released in late 2008 and is currently available at www.fact-simile.com.

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SUBMIT TO:

monkey puzzle #8

FALL/WINTER ISSUE

Submission Guidelines Monkey Puzzle is seeking submissions of prose (2,500

words max), poetry (1-5 pages), translations, artwork, photography, and hybrids. Experimental work welcome.

Monkey Puzzle appreciates work exhibiting intelli-

gence and creativity, socio-political-cultural awareness, and humor.

We accept electronic and hardcopy submissions. All submissions must include the writer’s contact information on the first page: name, address, phone number, and e-mail address.

Include a SASE if you would like a reply.

Address all queries and submissions to:

monkey puzzle press 3116 47th St. Boulder, CO 80301

MonkeyPuzzlePress@gmail.com

www.monkeypuzzleonline.com DEADLINE

September 22, 2009 98

acknowledgments THE EDITORS WISH TO THANK: Contributors, Friends, and Families

Nate Jordon specially thanks: John H. Jordon, John L. Yates, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Daniel Quinn, Robert Pirsig, Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder, Rocky Balboa, Henry David Thoreau, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Mahatma Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Michael Moore, George Carlin, Chris Rock, Marjoe Gortner, Dr. James Walton, Ruth Jenkins, Tim Skeen, Junior Burke, Dean Birkenkamp, Shy Mukerjee, and Fact-Simile.

Kade Alexander Jensen specially thanks: the Galactic Overlord Xenu, Barbarino, the Treaty of Versailles, and Yoda.

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new books from monkey puzzle press “Change as a constant state is given new dimension in these powerfully exciting works where spiritual and physical transmogrifications explode perception. Love is the undertow, verity its wave.”

Maureen Owen Author of Erosions Pull Paperback: 71 pages Published: April 20, 2009 ISBN-10: 0980165024 ISBN-13: 978-0980165029

“Some Exits takes the reader on a poetic road trip, a journey whose rhythms shift dynamically between movement and focus. Traveling the necessary byways of poetic thought, Some Exits leads us through the fragile terrain of contemporary life.”

Elizabeth Robinson Author of Apprehend Paperback: 41 pages Published: April 30, 2009 ISBN-13: 978-098016536

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IN MEMORIAM Betina Juliette Cline-Goettl (December 6, 1988 - May 12, 2009)

“When your parents die, you lose your past; when your spouse dies, you lose your present; when your child dies, you lose your future. But when your sibling dies, you lose your past, present, and future.�

- Dr. Cornelius

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- Nancy Stohlman, Author of Live from Palestine

- Olatundji Akpo-Sani of Baobob Tree Press

“This is cutting edge, phenomenal writing.”

MONkey puzzle

“Where is the fire and angst the poetic community was so known for, that shook the foundations and called for actual active intellectual insurgent change? Monkey Puzzle gives light to this resurgence of poetic inspiration and ingenuity. The work in this volume inspires sonically, visually, socially, and ideologically. It is a leap forward and I recommend it to any who love the art of the word.”

#7 spring/Summer 2009

“It’s so wonderful to see writers taking back the means of production from the big publishing houses, where ‘bottom line’ fixations mean that most new writers never stand a chance. As we see potential bankruptcy happening at Random House, now more than ever it’s time for writers to not rely on Big Publishing to tell us what is or is not worth reading. Kudos to Nate and the contributors of Monkey Puzzle for taking the crucial steps forward, out of the world of sanitized publishing and supporting the new voices that keep art moving forward.”

- Kona Morris, Editor with Fast Forward Press

ISBN-10 0980165040 ISBN-13 978-098016504-3

9

780980 165043

71395

monkey puzzle press

www.monkeypuzzlonline.com

MONkey puzzle