Stop My Body

Dr. Chermin:

You may recall my scheduled release date to have been long ago passed.
Please respond by a means and in a way that demonstrate your receipt of this request.
You are a highly skilled administrator who can appreciate the weight of a key's turn.
I don't pretend that it will be a safer environment for me or others on the outside, only
that a promise was given and what do I have through a barred ceiling but that which is into it kicked.

Sometimes an object goes skittering across cement, stops out of friction but loses touch and,
adding its own earthly mass to the force given it by mystery, crashes into a woman's life.
This can be bread, bobby pins, empty match books, dead phones, small creatures who continue at their pace on a new surface like it doesn't matter, or makes no sense to try and go back so they keep on.
But I can't fall from this baseline. Out of chemical jail doesn't mean it's ok to stop my body.


Donna

She Rides a World Economy

"It's not the first time you've let me pass through these doors naked," I said in perfect Foreign, the Devanagari script falling from my lips then lifting up to his creased sienna face on wafts of al fresco samosa smoke like notes on an undulating staff. There he stood in his soiled turban, the lifelong portero of this particular row of fleabag albergues, long ago twist-tied together by mutual hallways, cat walks and trolley tracks. Despite an instant and matter-of-fact recognition after my absence of more than a decade or three, he stood there bodily replacing the prodigious cement barricade he'd pulleyed aside, uncertain that I really meant to come in. And I had my sponsor along, and there was a loosey-goosey policy about visitors after 10.

It wasn't yet dawn, so i wasn't quite lucid, but I knew this place and this kind, lower-caste gentleman who had opened this same door to shelter myself and others in the past from jarring nudity and baffling poverty, and then for many days or years consecutively after, while I and my briefcase, in recovery, had zipped about the blocks and streets between sacred animals and motorbikes and tuk-tuks and saris and men hoisting onto their shoulders or backs and carrying to market giant smoking babies.

I remembered having been out once more celebrating the end of a long sobriety by drinking glasses of fake scotch in all the tourist joints up and down the high street, and then some off the path, and then losing my path between the spoke boulevards jutting evermore barren and outward from the center, which twinkled in the distance. But I was giving into the urging sweetness of sleep, removing the navy corduroy suit I'd just purchased for interviews and laid it down as a mattress on the filthy, potted walk and snuggled beneath a thinly knit but charitable covering draped across me possibly by some passing matron.

It was really too short a nap, but soon I was up again in my white undershirt and briefs, wrapped also in the bone-white Chinese sofa throw, it turned out to be, wandering in a circle, conjuring a map, then remembering the suit and finding my wallet still intact but no keys. Then I just stood still, holding the bundle of nearly all my earthly goods as close to me as the man from Tanzania with elephantiasis in his nuts. Who knows how many more moments were lost until by supernatural providence or chance, my very first sponsor into The Program, "my Eskimo" as they say, happened along on his way from a meeting. He led me by an elbow, similar to the way he had pulled me along behind him the first time, on the identical road to the exact same salvation or slavery, though I still thought he was selling Shaklee.

"Been out having some fun?" inquired Karlos, with a K. I said "Oh yeah I drank a lot of whiskey." I remembered drawing glass after glass to my burning mouth to keep up with the rows of colorful bottles against their mirrored plenty and wanting more warm burning even then to warm my own bilious burning. The door to the rooming house was so massive as to appear immovable, and even I could barely reach its monumental ungalvanized iron ring rustily bolted into the quickset to serve as a knocker or carnivalesque game of strength.

Then there was the seismic ride up in an elevator which eerily seemed even itself not to believe its own forged and re-xeroxed inspection certificate. It stopped on a familiar floor, but there was an awkward moment as Dan, the portero, as if waiting for a tip, was actually hesitating politely for me to tip him off as to my present state of financial solvency, which would determine which way he'd lead us down or up the dim hallways/ catwalks or onto which trolleys. He started us backwards up the steps from which streams of forlorn past and potential co-residents climbing down with their towels and visibly dreading the communal bath openly advised against that direction, those lodgings. So we boarded instead a pre-war electric train on stilts that seemed thumb-tacked to the walls above the narrow, crowded street toward a dead end-cum-cul-de-sac of more upscale private rooms with windows and struggling, infested houseplants in coffee tins and maybe a working sink.

On this short trip one could not think but to imagine the range of imminent and catastrophic incidents of both predictable and total structural collapse, reports of mayhem and death of a level and volume that would surely reach screens on desks at the like of the International Herald Tribune. The tracks of recycled beer cans and structural decay of an originally flimsy and corrupt excuse for scaffolding made the whole contraption sway with the weight of its human slurry, a precarious conveyance that each moment threatened to rock against its upward-cranking counterparts, like parallel boulders careering on rope bridges.

Atop the upper deck of the carriage flying toward us, a scene that made me breathless: the billowing scarf and ironic double-breasted beige trench, the lovely blond CIA sergeant who'd come roaring up in a freshly washed and minted Land Rover while I stood taking mpg4's of a local drag star in a crowd of the broken and curious at a benefit for World AIDS Day in one of the city's squalid, dusty, clay-bottomed squares. She hadn't said a word as she stepped up alongside, as if at a curtain call, to more closely examine my awkward, ugly Western dorkiness jutting up at least a foot from the throng. I acknowledged her somewhat invasive proximity and our relative physical resemblance by muttering to her as if to a tour-bus companion how the dancer on stage represented a local gender-minority NGO and was the great hope of the organization. In the middle of my detailing their upcoming international itinerary for the agent's well-groomed but officious muteness, she was already roaring off again with her driver to vet no doubt more intel on spotted countrymen who hadn't checked in with the consulate.

She appeared to me now, standing boldly ignoring the handrail of her trolley-top, as a figure fit for the back of a coin or ship prow, a noble symbol of chin-high, first-world caretakerism: we, victors, missionaries, models, guides, monitors navigate, show the way, in ceremonial stealth and humility, arrogant yet inspirational of security, hopefulness, and to always titillate. She, who could live anywhere, have anyone, had chosen a post (no doubt and nevertheless quartered in a microdot of be-marbled and T1-cabled gas-generated luxury) in a land of relative misery, where she would walk among the ancient and the simple, brush against the untouchable, but interlocute and mingle, in hotel back gardens and high-walled compound suites, with kings instead of mere gentry.


Ken
"On assignment."

Conceal and carry

My phone found a way to my ear during sleep
though i'd left it charging in the living room:
A junk call, maybe it was political, offered the
option to press Exit 8 to hear a special message
while on hold. I touched some numbers, maybe
mixed it up with the TV remote; but it was dark
and late and i was confused. I got angry, but
then a young male voice came on the line, live,
but muffled, and said to me yeah we're calling
because; I said what, i can't hear you, i was try-
ing to get a special message. His throat seemed
to clear and said we're calling because someone
reported gunshots. There were gunshots near you.
And then I was being held very tight from behind
and/or my heart cage was caving in, but i could
tell for sure that there was another man in my bed
who was locking me very hard between his arms
and knees and wearing only a t-shirt and briefs,
and i struggled to get free by elbowing toward him
because i live alone and haven't slept with anyone
i want to say it feels like since the days of John
Wayne Gacy. Even mostly awake i knew that my
bed was turned the wrong way and i had to find
the knob on my lamp to orientate myself and to
identify the snoring of my dogs, which can often
sound like the results of a horrible crime amidst a
crowd, an urgency of mass panic in progress. I'd
spent most all the evening on and off between the
the normal responsibilities of an unemployed day
hypnotized absorbing the entire wikipedia page on
John Wayne Gacy and checking especially for
places and dates and names with a morbid com-
pulsion to know how close i'd come to the rope
trick, the chloroform, the quicklime or one of his
purported thugs, and feeling the chill of a narrow
escape. I even found a story on the deco-Uptown
hotel where i worked my first outta-school gig
where a cavernous ceramic basement rivaled the
faux Spanish facade and drifting clouds and stars
over the dance floor at the fabled Aragon Ballroom
for phantasmagoria, an underground pool grand
enough for fey, mustachioed servants to maneuver
about brimmed still pumping chlorine and steam in
the late 70's when i was a dropout teen swept in
there, by a slimy mob net, massage setup, a cum-
and-go for married fags from other neighborhoods
or travelling through town on a party, or a younger
man with the simple misfortune of a dick turned in
the shape of the archetypal snake chasing its tail,
a mobster operation with a cash register and a coat
check, decorated with seashells and framed pix
of the swarthy underboss who kept the books legit,
turned out the kids on how to give handjobs and
where to hide cash if you're naked, how to keep
him out of the transactions, a mobster type who'd
hung photos of him with aldermen and the mayor,
political coverage under glass, just like Gacy had,
and sure, JW'd been there, but not lately, having al-
ready been locked in a cell for our job-site safety;
photos like the one that humiliated the Secret
Service with John and Rosalyn Carter at a Polish
Day parade. I really couldn't tell if the man behind
me in bed had me in a wrestling hold, a manacle
of flesh, or coming back from the dead, maybe
someone i knew, to love and protect me from that
superbad moment half asleep when someone was
warning me, on a phone i don't even have, to be-
ware of gunplay in my vicinity. Even tho we don't
believe that Pogo murdered anyone with a firearm,
he did abduct some boys that way, and where I'd
been to dinner earlier, an Irish pub, they had one of
the new no-conceal-and-carry stickers displayed
prominently before you stepped in through the Chi-
cagoland outer weather door to stamp the frozen
muck off your feet and then in toward the scary loud
and spirited drunken camaraderie or outpour of re-
lief in the eye of a polar vortex, cries of horror-glee.

by Tom

Your Ridiculous Rage

What was it you said your entire class, country, county's eating wooden nickles or clanking along the road like tin cans tied to the 1%'s marriage vehicle? Like you can compare yourself and most people to the worst kind of traditional torture normally reserved for minorities sexual or racial? That a whole 4% of the population is sociopathic but only a quarter of them have figured out how to literally indenture and slave and drug and maim what was it, the great plains, population, planet?

But look what you're getting where you're standing as you complain. Free internet with your paid subscription to all your other property? Isn't it a little overwrought to belabor the work you'll never stop unless you stop working and rot in the revival tent of a target parking lot? Who says just because you love so hard and your people come from earnest good stock that you should get a piece of land or a pet or something to eat; are you a prostitute that goes around selling faith and honesty?

You say the little bitches from like 5 colleges in the usa get to learn how to charge all the rest for every part of nature we touch and the right to even wear our own skin to a backyard birthday party? That your grandmother's last three teeth throb so hard she can barely moan the last four of her social into the ear of the slob sucking off some middle-managing coupon fluffer? How did you explain the way to save up the refills for your pain meds the next time you get shot by a gunmaker and hold a drug sharing holiday?

Ken
"I'm waiting."

Black Boy

there's the street my father was named after,
but his father's spelling was weak. Despite
the error, we both carry the same initials,
but I'm not named for either father or street,
but rather the names of my mother's father,
two words so odd that he went by the letters,
so even i mix up my name with these others.

that's the building where an old boyfriend
lived to complain about the poolside clique,
and tonight i met a boy who lives in that
building, and he says that yes, there is still
a clique. But it can't be the same one now;
i said of course, pool buildings everywhere
must have cliques, and of course his does.

here's the school where i attended a class
on blake: black boy, urizen, the fat boy
sitting next to me seeping farts and going
out after to coffee with the professor; i'm
passing the gate now, and i look through
the bars on the fence, and it's not a school
at all, but dark rows of chiseled headstones.

Pathetic briefcase

When Letha wed a farmer aphid who tapped and bled her chi,
Hooked by the tender feeling hairs on her wrists to his wiry mesh,
My long career would finally end a constant homing back to me,
For a hero's arc, the way a whale shark blocks green the deep from sun,
A murky shade where only the good can see a blackguard run.

Now in this dusty corner lists, strewn with cables that fed a desk,
A pathetic briefcase kneeling on its own tanned flesh like a routed bum:
The number-coded clasp, always set for triple six, but by mistake;
The single stitch intact to cinch a handle, the yoke of a shoulder strap,
Drift blank as in a fog against the wall, not taking note of it at all.

Viking fart

Letha was born when the whole arctic cracked open, broke its water on the heartland
She skidded onto a rock with the waste of a crystalline breath settling in the trees
We found ways to keep her warm enough to breath tied between pack asses and sheep
when the heat of any one walking human body was not enough to support and sustain a baby.

We kept moving in the direction the grizzled elders read somehow seizing hungry in their sleep
When there was a conflict of opinion we chose the one whose eyes expressed the lesser horror
The lights at night were games to taunt the fools who prayed for riches from the colors
We ate the ones sliding toward us from the opposite hills sitting stiff in their leather toboggans.

The Magic Rag

The saran-wrapped salmon fillets at the top left of the heap were starting to turn soft and too dark a pink and I figured out that the whole opposite wall of the compartment was standing propped open, a feature that I was not even aware existed, but it concerned me more that someone other than myself had left it that way after helping themselves to my freezer and/or its contents. Upon further investigation it became apparent that the contraption had a number of other doors, almost like a snack truck. You could access it from any angle, brace open the various padded aluminum panels and even step inside, where there was a place to sit and a desk with some paper and pens scattered on a smooth, cool writing surface.

A clever looking woman was helping to point all this out just by following me with her eyes and the occasional directional gesture or fragmentary comment. She was down there in the basement, a marvel of cement beams and cantilevers and stairways and the type of square window panes in large sets you'd find in a warehouse hanging out over a river or one of the abandoned laundries at Alcatraz. The woman seemed to be not only clever but also very nonchalant about what she was doing in my apartment, which had become more like an impromptu immigration slum or silent squatters' co-op in a rusting high-rise construction project. Her hair was plain and straight but fashionable; her shift and flats clung to her like a ballerina's.

I had given up on the salmon fillets and begun to wonder where was all my furniture. Around back of the fridge was my front door and I started banging on it to find out who now lived there. A swarthy, mole-covered man lounged on some nearby steps with his knees spread, creating a slow shower of nut shells, some sort of loafered Romani pimp. I guessed he was in charge of assessing and collecting rent, and yet that he too had knowledge which could help to resolve my disorientation. He didn't protest as I pounded on my door, now a thick, deeply beveled salvage item from a ruined block of the formidable row houses you might find on one of those gracefully curved boulevards in London, a street you might assume continued on well kempt forever because of the humane manner in which it limited your vision.

After a very short spasm of unnecessarily dramatic thumping and shouting, another woman, less clever looking, opened the door. She seemed frightened less of me than by her humble situation in the space that'd once been occupied by my home, my belongings. I launched upon a speech which invited her to explain the plausibility of my entire living room, cataloging its contents, being carted off and replaced by her shabby and unfamiliar odds and ends which seemed to have been dragged to the site in haste overnight and left to sit and be bounced upon by kids without regard to either logic or aesthetics. She had her own problems without trying to recount how she and her entire single-mothered family had displaced me during the few moments between that one and the one in which I had decided to look and see what was around for dinner.

The clever woman had been busy folding and shuttling her ironing from one odd-angled cement alcove to the next in her arms or on a squeaky chipped and dented cafeteria cart. I suppose it was on her suggestion that I rocketed off to an open-air market in the clouds where, at the end of such a miraculous journey, no one seemed any more enlightened or concerned but for the everyday drudgery and meager satisfactions of life than they had been in the bare cold bowels, the modernist tenement, of what had become of my former life. I approached the very first pair of vendor ladies, resigned and sedate, their hair pinned up in back and casually scarved and ready for a day's business. I explained my situation a little more calmly now, already becoming lulled by rhythms of normalcy in a milieu of the strange. They both knew right away what I was trying to describe: my things, my place to live being stolen or having simply dissolved and reconstituted as someone else's just behind my back or in the visual periphery. The larger figure, in a colorful flower-print house frock and sensible robin's egg muslin apron motioned toward the woman next to her, a shriveled and perhaps later, happier but sclerotic, more tragic version of the clever dancer I had encountered earlier. The latter nodded politely and pulled open a light, wide drawer which had until then been hidden behind the polyester lace that shrouded their folding table along this avenue of tables where scavengers wandered up and back purchasing skeleton keys and weather vanes and pitted crystal balls on cheap plastic tripods.

The shallow drawer appeared to have been designed for baby linens or lingerie; the vendor, with all her dark and frail confidence, lifted out an embroidered sanguine cloth the consistency of a chamois, maybe with some added beading or faux-rhinestone applique. Her eyes, in their way, and with the help of her stronger and saucier colleague, explained that someone must have spread a similar square of decorative fabric over my head, perhaps while I was sleeping, causing my environment to be disappeared, to stubbornly recomposite itself, and that all I could do now was to purchase and to wear this corresponding instrument. A magic cloth.

In contrast to the long-obsolescent and weakly assembled scraps of 21st-Century ephemera the contemporaneous population had to work with for the plying of their trades and to stitch together a typical day, the mode of transportation back to the surface of our mother planet had evolved beyond my wildest dreams, and so punctual! Akin to the shape of a subway car, yet with a hydraulic door of the size you'd expect on an airline hangar, my coach, or what I could spy from beneath the rag, roared to the fore. I stepped in not in trust but neither in alarm because I would live to see what tomorrow would bring, even if with no more protection than a sham of a covering, a caul of surrender, a shrug of easy belief in the crap you can run across at a flea market when you've nothing to lose and the true riches of the world are being hoarded irretrievably by the future.

Gypsy Fire Smudge

Pinpricks across the county smoldered by way of wide-stepping colossus,
Average heathers and jims had to shoulder the debilitating explanations;
Widower parked at the laundromat complains she ding-ed up the bondo,
Should've tipped twice again the charge of her job on his fender-less ride.

Maybe her space heater burnt down the stands at the track after shoeing all season,
Fifth-wheel gone as in religious pursuit of the anonymity manifest in self-profiling:
The corset tube and patched raiments, cauldron of highway-killed stew meats,
Roses and twenty fingers in your pockets before you can say I don't want it.

That kind of smoke makes you a hoarse that's tied to manners of voluntary geld,
The acknowledgement of a truer husband by which she too's held in quiet mesmry.
A stiff lock of curl in your face begs the questioning of your own black fiber;
Gypsy leaves a fire smudge where she's seen entropy on those behind her.


Ken
"I know."

Dark out, north in

The orchestra to fake the house noise would be piccolos for the turbine: wind instruments to vent the attic dinge, drums grinding, the vent spinning lopsided. Is it a hound's cry, a jet drying its wing tips, the hyphens that begin the digits, metal road plow, slide whistle, toboggan ride that make the heat slip, even in the sunrise? The gas star shines in vain against the brilliance of its own mind: flames belch miles high while a clenched fist, lung grip, won't just trace your breath but claim it. On a quick pee, if the family pet jumps a low fence, you take a big chance going after it. Timpani, wooden sticks, loud flap of tarpaulin, violin to make the monster grin, then taunting him with porch lights, which simulate an angry crowd. The fist blows with a slow pound. The vents spin, there's a long howl, the middle splits and pulls the north in.

Stewardess

Connie returns to the town where she'd been abducted in her adolescence.
Now she recognizes herself as the kind of girl that ended up disappeared.
You can easily wander into a trap that's especially created for your species.
Though she can recall ants barely pausing in their march past baited windows with twisting depths.
These were the only men she knew for sure were paying attention to her budding lady presence.
She saw a guy in his moment of mouth-breathing weakness as old as her dad.
So she too held life, between an operating table and a bottle of jergens.
There were the paths of grimy wives or to serve temporarily as an apprentice.
She felt that she could stay alive as long as she could extricate life from the living.
Now the only and paradoxical option was to survive by giving it back.


by Phyl

Superfluity of kale

Look down at my dog on a $50 morrocan rug from a hard-up pawn broker in yuma arizona.
Poor old devil doesn't even respond to a yipping outside or the squeak of an attic spin vent.
Let him out just in case, think he's got something cornered in the garage.
Move a little closer and he's just munching snow off the door.
Auntie calls cuz she heard the stepsisters had a bushel of kale while they were here watching their daddy die.
How they'd sent a list from the east coast of all the foods we prolly didn't have, what they'd only eat.
Surprised to see the cupboards full of just the same things as a way to say they wouldn't pay me back.
Ate half the crap and stuffed the rest in old cool whip tubs for the return trip.
Looking up laws to protect our ma in case the bastard left it all to yale.


Hoolie
"I love you Peg"

Stringing panic

Four-Fault Re-Button

Four holes, four faults on this mend:
One a fail to thread back through
but looped instead around the hem

The disk itself then split in two as
did the original, brittled in the dryer,
half moon settled between the fingers

Then the darning prick raising the
top layer of skin print in a trench,
bound to respond for days to citrus

Finally, a green more desperate in shade
sings from a filament that just may wait
until the other six have gone to break.



Jan
"Now I can accept how Dad's hoed under."

Sassy Flat Back Woman

We saw a sassy flat back woman
With a parable like antennae
The night it was negative 7

Slumber was heavy but trouble
Dreams flipping inside out
Even olive pits went exoskeleton

Paths to freedom led to in-erection
There had to be a way to dictate
A floor plan to the partly existent.


Ken
"I want to get back there."

Winter's wonder

I hated winter's festivals this year
but hesitate to click off all the lights
because there's nothing else here

bitches in the glare try to hibernate
eyes sink into folds of skin and hair
leave behind all that was temperate

ice grows patiently while you blink
to wake is to roll into another state
more a time of wonder than to think

by Hoolie

To the scientist

Some players like a graphic representation of the numbers even if during interactions it could interfere;
For others the naked math suggests action beyond the current state of the visual art of the spectacular,
And some view either confabulation, whether to recreate or imagine, as a failure.

Overdetermination

Nothing just kind of happens
Everything that happens happens hard
Everything that happens has a million reasons
Or at least 51 in a deck of cards.

Why is always the easiest question to answer
What don't even ask unless you're blind
Who will solve its mystery in a mirror
When is a riddle of another kind.

Time throws up its belly to the cosmos
Space can be the funniest joke to tell
Matter makes the laughter even harder
The self becomes the one you know too well.

HOCK

PAST: forgiveness

PRESENT: gratitude

FUTURE: faith

Because I could arguably be included on a list of poor decisions taken by my mother, any others that she may have made in regards to my upbringing can't escape that light.
I can see my problems relative to the misery of others.
I suppose I'll find a job and several months down the road will not have to place the $2000 full-grain natural cowhide living room sofa I've just purchased in hock.


Jan Jansdaad
"A childless divorcee can more easily navigate the boundary lands of a new economy." 

Robots

I Live with Dogs

I live with dogs and persons with disdain for emotion

The dogs are honestly selfish and honestly affectionate

You get dirty lying with someone faking you as their dream

A stab is a stab if your own mother stabs or doesn't stab

I live with a mother who's suspicious and wily and simple

My bitch gives me kissies and throws out her warm arms

Dogs live with people who surrogate their relationships;

Robots are genetically conditioned to satisfy, yet still vex.

Hoolie

Two-and-a Quarter Tons of Crap

alprazolam, bambalam and three others
band-aided middle finger
his eyes seemed to rock lightly in their sockets when he bent over

he hauled two-and-a quarter tons of crap across the desert
and then the plains in wicker baskets
but this was a new place with different sorts of rot

she started immediately in on building a shrine
determined to act as if the gods were on their side
without a job they'll be begging in a year's time