Nighttime Fairy

In her gateway presence to dreams,
to candied fruit, steaming bodies under
scorching sunrays, daffodils and blue-silver
shiver pools, she dances in my hair and
tiptoes on my eyelashes.
She holds her iridescent wings up with delicate
shoulders, strong to carry all of our ivory
fangs: trenchant and sharp, but she’s placid and placates
the incisive ends.

Sophie P.

Separation Anxiety

1. need (a sickness)
In the sketched chapters of your memory
stained with smoke and oily fingers I exist,
round-cheeked and still.
I dream of you often, palms remain
flashing up and down,
curled around a lit match
and in sleep resting on my chest
riding the rise and fall of quiet breath.

what I want is what I once was, something urgent with you. The flavor of
2. Tangerine
in your gritted grinning teeth.
(living reflection from a dream)
A ball in a socket, a link in a chain,
being a hand covered by yours rather than this unattached limb,
disconnected as the dial tone I cling to.
My despair is a throbbing baseline.

it’s been six months and I’m
3. Forgetting your jawbone already,
forgetting how many shots in your juice,
how you sound when you cough and how
it feels. And though
these strings of colored pearls are
illuminating in masses
the twinkle of your eye is flickering down, fading out every
time I
blink.
I suppose habit becomes routine,
it’s like milk or the callous
on your writing finger; once
you realize it’s become a
part of you, you can’t
remember when it started.
she was yelling at me last night, accusations

4. Digging
into my throbbing head like maggots.
I could feel my back hot up against the wall,
the topography of the plaster bumping my shoulders, arched and stiff.
Awkwardly.
And I’m thinking about conviction,
(holding my knees to my chest and rocking)
about choosing productivity over painkillers,
picking up the pieces and paying for replacement,
about girls who cut themselves to the bone.
I bite my nails to the quick and that thin stinging blood is never enough.

5. Clean Cut
We had something. It was there,
and it flexed like a well-oiled machine
in its prime.
I will forever hold your thumb with me
in its sweep-across-the-eyelid goodnight.

Samantha M.

Minute Moment

I am in the bathroom clipping my fingernails. I am in the bathroom clipping my fingernails and my mother is doing the dishes. I am in the bathroom clipping my fingernails and my mother is doing the dishes and my father is speaking to her. CLIP CLIP CLIP; it’s always three clips per nail. No exceptions. The pinky does not get any special treatment, nor does the thumb. It’s unfortunate, but that’s just the way it works.

I hear the water spilling over each dish in the kitchen and I begin to contemplate how the nail clipper I’m using is really too small. It’s meant for toes, but it doesn’t even work on fingers. I like the big, meaty, masculine toenail clippers. Not that I have big, meaty, masculine toenails, or fingernails, for that matter. It’s just that the big, meaty, masculine toenail clippers make nail clipping (despite the appendage they grow on) much less of an extravaganza. Still, though, the small nail clipper is working its charms on me. I notice the delicacy with which each sliver of nail is sliced. No rough corners, no clumsy jagged edges. The nails look almost filed.

My father is talking to my mother about his day. I recognize the sound of the kitchen sink water sloshing inside a deep pasta pot. CLIP CLIP CLIP; I’ve got four fingers left to go. He tells her about a meeting he has had. All I gather from this select moment I tune into is that sushi was somehow involved. I’ve lost the edge of the conversation. Anyway, at this point I can hear my neighbors’ cat whining through the bathroom wall. He has sort of a drawl; he could definitely be from Texas. With each piercing “YYYYYAAAAAAOOOOOOWWWWWW” I hear a subliminal “Y’all” tucked in there somewhere. I have completely lost the thread of my parents’ dialogue, engrossed as I am with the feline on the reverse side of my wall. The cat is big, meaty, and masculine…. I hope he never gets lost like my poor old nail clippers. But the neighbors would probably find a substitute, just as I have. Clip—the last on my last finger—the pinky. Always save the pinky for last.

Maia G.

My name is Lowell
Lowell is my name
I live in Texas
And in my head
And sometimes
When it’s very quiet
I

My name is Lowell
Lowell is my name
And if I listen very closely
I can hear everyone else
And anyone else
But only if I listen very closely
And if I don’t
Well I

My name is Lowell
Lowell is my name
And I like to think
I like to whisper
I like to not listen
I’d like to

My name is Lowell
Lowell is my name
At night I sleep
Unless I can’t
And then I listen
Or I don’t
But if I don’t want to do anything
Then I

My name is Lowell
Lowell is my name
Sometimes I walk in the park
Sometimes I swim in the river
Sometimes I lie in the trees
Sometimes I cry in the bushes
Sometimes I
My name is Lowell
Lowell is my name
Unless it’s not.

Zach H.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Car

The people walked along the long rows of vehicles at the dealership. At the end of one row was a large green car.

The man’s window looked out along a small road.
Occasionally, a car would pass by.

The man stepped out of the line. He was getting his photo for his driver’s license.
As the picture was taken, all he could think about was how happy he was to get a car.

Along the old county road, Mr. Johnson’s car had broken down. He was very annoyed. This was the fourth time that the car had broken down this year. He began to walk toward the nearest town.

A car sat in a driveway, jets of water spraying over it. Its owner was watching it, looking on proudly at his car.

At a damp garage, a surly mechanic sat under a car, trying to fix it. It was a very old car.

A man sat in his garage, restoring an antique car. The man had worked on it for three years and it would soon be finished. His wife called him in for dinner, but he did not listen. All he cared about was his car.

The man was nervous about the upcoming car race. It was his first race in two years after his accident. Now the light was about to turn green . . . .

A man was driving across the country in his car. He was driving through a series of fields, and was feeling very happy.

A person was taking a driving test. He was not doing very well. He veered to the right, trying to avoid a bright orange cone, but he still hit it.

As the man approached the intersection, he saw a large crowd. As he neared, he saw that two cars had crashed into each other.

A car sat in a driveway, unused by its owner. It was in very bad shape.

At a junkyard a car sat, about to be compacted. Two hours later, it was a flattened piece of metal, sitting with the remaining cars at the junkyard.

Max H.

Haiku

Morning life is hushed
With only the tap tap tap
Of early day rain.

Elena S.

Tuesday Afternoon

The music from X-Men blares out into the room. Lights are all on; no attempt at movie theater-like darkness, full of shimmering shapes, has been made. Right now, these people prefer the light. With the lights on, they can see all around them, be sure that everything, here at least, is okay. Six people sit clustered around the television, close enough to feel that the others are there, far enough away to say without speaking: look, I’m not afraid. From all these people there comes only occasional, brittle laughter at the movie’s jokes. Anything else might break this charade of fun, or worse, be inappropriate. It is early on a Tuesday afternoon. At this time, teenagers should be at school, parents at work, but the house is full, not only with its own kids but with others who either can’t go home or won’t go home to empty houses or anxious mothers. It is better to stay in a group. With others, it is easier to ignore the world. And these parents, at least, know how to comfort without getting too much in the way, without showing their own fears. Chips and soda, cookies and dip, sit untouched, or nearly so, on the chest before the television. Nobody is willing to admit that they could be hungry, and that they all ate at the previous house they sat in. There they were the only ones home and sat alone in the house with the doors closed and the windows anxiously shut against the powdery dust already in the air, coating the cars, trees, people, streets with an imperceptible film that only draws attention to itself by its absence. The side of a car brushed with the hem of a coat, an apple just brought out of a store, these make them notice the filmy gray coat, make them remember just why the air smells so strange, tastes so thick in their noses and mouths. After entering the first house, they all washed out their mouths with water to get the dryness out of their throats. Then they sat down and watched the news, hoping to make sense of it all. The film reels, the footage from hand-held cameras, professional cameramen, tourists, none of it makes any more sense than the radio did. Images, in this case, are not worth a thousand words. One girl gets to the TV after everyone else, having shut all of the windows very carefully against the coat of dust that seems to be everywhere, even as far away as they thought they were. They can’t see it from here. But even with the windows closed, it seems to seep in through the air conditioner or the mail slot or even through the minute cracks at the edge of every door. Eventually, it is unnoticed. She sees the images for the first time and insists that they be turned off, but for reasons known to none, no one gets up and so CNN stays on, the fireballs blooming in slow motion, the steel and concrete pillars crumbling from the core. The sights appall each time, and each time they are shown again, until numbness sets in, blanketing them like the dust, sinking through the chinks and cracks in their minds and eyes. They watch these newsreels without flinching, and even quietly begin to discuss how they will all get home. The subway, after all, doesn’t work. That is when the new shots start. With just a glance, the numbness cracks and shatters, falling off in shards, shocked away by a new news item. People so hopeless that they chose flight over fear, jumping out of buildings as the smoke billows upward and out. That is when someone gets up to turn off the TV and when they leave to go to a house with parents and siblings and just a little less silence. And now they’re here in the occupied house, with parents and siblings and everyone else on the couch and the floor, not clustered as close together as before, but that space itself reassures. They can be just that much closer to being alone, to sitting apart from the huddle of before. Even the occasional laughter at this movie is better than silence. Here there is some reassurance—the movie, the chips and salsa, even uneaten—and they think to themselves silently: look, we can accept this, really we can, just give us a little more time. The movie plays on, flickering shadows lost in the room with all the lights on and the shuttered daylight seeping through the tightly-closed windows.

Alisa B.

“There was nothing so very remarkable in that: nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet….”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

(The following is an anagram of the above quotation.)

Come. Pry under hay. Go down the hatter hole.
Check if the Kat’s there. A Kitty Kat that I was told
I could trust on a vow…

I quote a vague sound.

The rabbit (that tactician) told it to a sour child
Who heard it. Well, he tried to,
But to no great shock, he eared a different tune.
The rabbit hole was hurt because of him, he then said;

Too soon to tell, for at least
Other theory yet remains.
The rabbit (that devourer) was animal at heart,
With altered veins.

Michael B.

A Letter on the Eighth of October to an Anonymous Listener

This is what I call an elegy to the frantic.
This is what I do, this is what I say,
when I lose the list that lists what I cannot lose:

I tear the pages out of all dictionaries containing the word “frustration.”
I destroy that word’s etymology by burning my Latin.
I write one-word emails to you, my anonymous.

And when Columbus got here,
he ripped apart the Niña’s sails,
and on the seventh day he burnt them.

What are books but lists of words,
and what are calendars but lists of days,
and what are we to do when we lose them both?

I am not ashamed to tell, my anonymous,
to tell the story of me as the wintergreen fir,
impaled and inhaled by a mapless wind.

I have stapled together the corners of my mouth,
so that what comes out the center
will be a list of complaints.

And every year when Holy Baseball wins,
they shed from their cubicle viewed windows
a million pages of patternless binary code.

Are you bored, my anonymous,
though I am in love with you, my anonymous,
with the fact that I make circles of the weeks and sleep on Saturdays?

That on Monday last I lost my watch,
that on Tuesday I lost my pencil,
that on Wednesday I watched the water overboil?

That on Thursday I didn’t talk to so-and-so,
that on Friday I didn’t talk to so-and-so?
Saturday I slept and Sunday I worshipped the coffeepot.

Fie on you, my anonymous, for your batting eyes and attending ear.
I do not wish to hear what Hera or Zeus did on Sunday,
while Nero watched Rome burn.

I went to see what Wayne Thiebault watered onto canvas,
but my mouth did the same and the Whitney threw me out.
Too bad you weren’t there, my lollipop, my anonymous.

There was that one night a while ago when I wandered
out into the night and shined my flashlight into the eyes of the darkened grass,
and there like a rabbit I found a tunnel back to do it over.

Julia F.

Naked Women

When I play a folksong on my guitar
I expect naked women to fall out of the sky
and land on my lap,
hearts skewed and swelled.

I look up, anticipating and expecting.

Cloud,
why aren’t you a naked woman?
What unclothed flesh do you monopolize
in your cotton?

Sun, where are your breasts?
What nudity do you enclose
in your cloth flame?
What sexual energy in your red, coarse
lion’s mane?

This poem,
so structured,
is an attempt
to massage naked women
forth from the page.
It is an edited performance
in the hope that
graceful nudes will condense from the everywhere cringing vapor—
coaxing the ever-present overripe bareness
to line streets with
openness and curvature.

While you, in
disgust or ecstasy, think of beautiful women
falling out of the sky in excess,
remember that energy is what gives
the otherwise black
and white placid,
restrictive frozen bubbles
their motion,
buzz,
and animation.
The clouds are naked women,
the sun a flaming nude.
The sky is a gaping torso,
and we are the perverted observers
of the eternal sexual intercourse,
watching from sun to sky.

Jacob E.

Wound

If attachment were as easy
As breathing,
We would be sewn together.

Sophie P.

Random Objects

Blue, fake silver cuff links in place,
bow tie wiggled till centered,
shoulders stiffly squared,
shoes just polished at South Station,
and recently ironed attire,
all on a mouth-washed, handsome young fella.

Rosy cheeks,
lips polished,
just-ironed hair,
a flat, corseted stomach,
and blisters about to form from stiff, pointed heels,
all on a long-eyelashed, pretty young gal.

Comfy red-velveted booths,
made-up servers in black-striped attire,
fresh-baked croissants,
jazz with curled French horns,
wealthy young fellas in fresh-tailored suits,
wealthy young gals with creamed faces,
all in a corner boulangerie on Winthrop Avenue.

A fortuitous rendez-vous,
clock striking two,
cuff links in place,
jazz stopped,
heads turning,
eyes greeting,
all on the faces of the rosy-cheeked gal and the bow-tied fella.

Karima H.

Even though the lamp was out, the shine of the porch light sailed in from the window and permitted Lenny to distinguish his own face curled around the glassy edge of his uncle’s empty beer bottle, his feminine lips elongated and clinging around a semicircle of condensed water beads. Tonight the world was generally a vague imitation of its usual geometry anyway; Lenny had broken his glasses in an attempt to play rugby at school and hadn’t let his mother know when he had arrived home late last night. She had not noticed the absence of his spectacles—indeed, she was one of the few who paid no attention to their presence and, on top of that, miraculously ignored the way he wrinkled his nose almost girlishly when he was confused and his avoidance of the letter S on account of his lisp.

Lenny’s mother was asleep, and the house was full of an uncomfortable and plastic sort of quiet, save for the tapping of pieces set down on the Monopoly board and the occasional dialogue between himself and his uncle over paper money. As Lenny moved his silver Scottish terrier (he had lost the racing horse with its jockey years ago) to land unfortunately on Park Place and paid his uncle the fee due for trespassing, another surge of annoyance at his uncle’s choice of entertainment for the evening made him purse his lips. Lenny was bitterly aware of his uncle’s perception of him and knew as well as his uncle did that he would never drink beer or play rugby without retreating quickly, as if from a stinging cut, into this world of pleasantly blurred edges. Still, there was something demeaning about it all and, more than anything, something almost humorously deformed and diluted about the suggestion that they look back at Lenny’s childhood games now that he was home from his school for Christmas—something hilarious about it all, come to think of it. The girlish mouth curved into an impossible sort of scornful grin, abruptly checked as Lenny winced again at the sight of his uncle’s coarse fingers caressing the curves of the tiny metallic car as it motored along the cardboard, teetering from his uncle’s lack of attention as it rocked from useless wheel to useless wheel.

Lenny picked up the dice from where they had fallen, barely distinguishable against the pale blue of the board, tossed them into the cup, and began to shake them. His movements were hurried, the rhythm of the plastic against the container’s walls quick, and yet Lenny continued for an oddly long time, frozen in the inexorable necessity of his own motion, his own delay. Finally he stopped, looked away in mild embarrassment at the amount of time he’d taken, and tossed the dice out. They rolled out of the cup and toward Lenny like small speckled passengers disembarking, tumbling out into an oddly empty world.
The dice continued off the board, pale against the dark red of the tablecloth. One reached the beer bottle, clinked against it, and almost flipped off the table’s edge. Without thinking, Lenny picked up one die to check which face had landed on top, only to be met by his uncle’s gruff cough. “I’ve got to look at it,” he said, meeting his uncle’s brown eyes—or amber, really, Lenny thought. Tiger eyes, recalling jungles or stone. “I can’t—” but here he stopped, bit his lower lip nervously. He looked back at the die to check again. Squinting, wrinkling his nose, Lenny could make out three dots striking across the white face diagonally. He breathed a sigh of relief. Then he checked the other die, and his tongue went dry with nerves.
Two parallel lines of dots, neatly paired, and a long white space creasing down the middle. Six. He looked away, bit his lower lip again out of protection. He would not try and say the number, with its second concealed S in the X, nowhere near navigable to his tongue and teeth. “Nine,” he said, searching for the most quickly accessible detour. His uncle leaned over, tried to look, and Lenny snatched the die away. “I already said, nine.”

“Is that a six?” his uncle asked. “I just want to check if it’s a six. Six means roll again.”

That was it, Lenny thought with relief, not any sort of mistrust after all, but a second chance, a double take. He breathed in lightly, noticing the feeling of air on the roof of his mouth, and ran his tongue over one lip. Holding the die with two fingers, he turned the face towards his uncle and said sloppily that yes, he was right, it was six.

Maggie W.

Ode

My father spoke to me again last night
We walked through pale green pools
Soothing his sunburned skin and
Talked, his arms linking mine
Our free hands holding Cuban sandwiches

My grandfather was a real sailor
My father walks like one

The glare was in his eye last night
Like a rabid animal
Almost foaming at the mouth
But he is just as blue-blooded
As the rest of us
Although sometimes it runs hotter
Faster
Louder like the Lamar River
In the summertime

My father wishes he was
Something he already is

We sat on the beach one night
With pacifier and beer
Suddenly his baby is swept off and taken back
To that eternal cradle
Rocking swaying wonderful
Back and forth on my small frothy back
But he wasn’t quite ready to let me go

I am
I am the apple of his fierce blue eyes
I am that simple and fictitious
I am this passionate fool
I am the terrible
I am no such thing

Si tu crias cuervos te van a comer tus ojos.
As good laughing matter, he says
Though my voice did not falter or crack

We spoke in broken phrases last night
He is fluent but
I’ve lost my interest

Lucy K.

Still clusters of gooey plates orbited around Bruno in irregular rings. The series of drinks he had downed that night, cool and jewel-tinted in tall and short glasses, stirred the dim scene into motion, into circles, tilts and waves of haziness. Glasses were still wet-lipped. Columns of alcohol ranging in height starrily blinked on dark tablecloths (some rolling under tables in the spills, Bruno glimpsed). They waited to be clinked together along with the plates and sloshed in the solid metallic flash of kitchen sink. Wavering orange lights pricked through the metal window grate, which Bruno had yanked down after scraping and prodding the last patrons (and several tipsy accordionists, he recalled) from the dance floor, barstools and tables. The wriggling, mint-and-toothpick-crunching, cigarette-fishing, eye-pawing, still-embracing mobs had tumbled, laughed and grumbled out into the first night of the year—a fresh holiday already tinged with staleness.

The bar clock gazed a red 2:31 AM at Bruno through the throng of liquor bottles. With each load Bruno would swing through the flapping kitchen doors into the last dense steam rising from the sinks and tucking under the flashing oven hoods. Next to Bruno the last few waiters and cooks bowed over drains with bleary post-midnight scrubbings. Bruno scraped gluey fettuccini, clots of walnut ravioli and red lobster shell shards into the bins, ran some steaming water and plunged back into the restaurant. As he swayed through the hall (was it narrower tonight?) on this trip past the bathrooms, the wall beside Bruno whimpered. The tones were not the wall’s but soaked through the door from somewhere behind the silver WOMEN that rippled before Bruno at eye level. (What? Hadn’t he cleared them all out?)

“Wee’re clossed now…pleasse timetuh go,” he slightly slurred through the door.

“Um…oh yes, I know…well, I’ve—there’s been an accident,” sobbed a high voice. “I’m just…well…uh…getting a stain….” It trailed off. (Could he place that voice?) “I’ll…ooh…just be a minute….” The sound of more tears leaked through the fat-polished planks. (Yes that was it! He had heard that voice…distinct.) She cried like the hens of his boyhood in Italy. Now the glimpses he had absorbed of the moaning voice’s body returned through the fog. With that hot-faced young party, the freshly preened woman had melted fast in drinks and dance, cackled loudly in high pearly laughs, danced more and then—had been rejected jaggedly, laughed at. Bruno had dipped into the restaurant from a night mostly spent over the meats, pots and pastas to see the source of a swell in the patrons’ noise around 11:15 PM. This woman had gushed and tripped, embarrassed, into the toilet and fiercely locked the door. After the ball, the confetti and several champagne glasses had dropped and Bruno was herding the crowds out, he remembered several of those same hot-faced men of the woman-with-the-hen-sob’s party chortling loudly and sloppily over something as they shoved out into the dark.

“Yeah, yeah, I can’t believe it—just flopped around like that…crazy over that accordion…and she just cra-ha-ha…cra-he-huh…crappedherpants. Juslike that. Ugh…shoulda known afterall that creamystuff and all those shots…” Sobering, Bruno replayed it now…their hot faces, hotter after all that dancing, gulping, laughing. (Would he burst in? Oh, he couldn’t…didn’t want to see any more craziness that night…especially….) The duet of the woman’s sobbing and the sink were both still seeping through the wooden barrier to Bruno.

Faintly at first, Bruno’s memories began to sharpen, to prickle with images of shoes, desks, dining halls, uniforms, all those boyish knees scrambling over the tiles, down the halls, under the bells, squeaking through the gym of the boarding school outside of Milan. (That gym he remembered…and the apparatus room with the bars…the sagging vault horse…yes.) In his mind Bruno peeled the reluctant skin from that day again, the morning of the first gymnastics meet. Bruno listened to recollected crooning of his mother, how her son was a “…tasty little noodle…always sticky from running somewhere and, oh, more bendable than a well-done penne…” But in those years he only saw her on holidays. (God knows what she gabbed to the neighbor-mothers in his absence.) She had poked him towards these gymnastics.

The boys, rising to staggering heights, black hair feathers jabbing out from turbulent sleeping or changing, had congregated early on a Saturday, as directed. Their still smooth adolescence was coated tight to the skin with pale melon green. They shivered and shriveled, blushing in the humiliating costume rinds.

Bruno began more and more to notice the violent lurchings and clawings that churned in his stomach. His toes still numbed from the feel of the hallway floor racing below them the night before. Daring each other ferociously, Alfredo and he had made a midnight dash down the stairs into the damp, deserted kitchens, watching carefully for any teachers or janitors in their mysterious after-bedtime hours. The boys had ventured through the shadowed caverns of boarding school, blissfully clear for once, and to the icy vats, the coolers. Fistfuls of ricotta were smeared and dribbling from their chins and revolving in their cheeks. Their teeth, glistening in the blue glow, left gnaw marks on hunks of sausage. Feeling twice as dense, the pair of thieves had waddled back and slept the hours until the splashing and horrible gymnastic outfits of the morning.

As the boys of the opposing orange team lanced looks and some threatening scowls across the mat, Bruno had trembled when it was his turn to dust and grip the lower bar. Twinkling with sweat that had accumulated in the last few dreaded moments, he eased himself up with feet dangling and stiffened arms. Mind drowning and stomach yanking at him, he tried to remember the simplest, slowest flips. His navel met the bar through the skin-tight pale green of his uniform. With the whistle’s shrill stab to his brain, Bruno’s brow, then shoulders, then rest of him nodded forward, upside down. Sickness, more intense than the worst at sea, than the worst induced by a streaming cut, vibrated from Bruno’s gut to head, seizing every pore, every bodily compartment. One revolution. He pictured the round-hair-flesh-pale-green blur he spun before the audience. Then there was a jump, a wobbling perch, his moist soles curling on that lower bar. With last curds of energy, Bruno flung himself at the high bar. The crunch, the fusing, the smashing of stomach with wood won this bout. A geyser—a spray of grayish brown creaminess—fanned through the air from Bruno’s lips. He collided with the mats.

Peering up with a slimy squint, Bruno saw the gargantuan judge of the meet, who had been standing as closely under the bars as possible for optimum scrutiny of the competitors. The judge was now bouncing out, furiously grinding his nose into a towel. When Bruno had been yelled and snapped into standing position, he was diced by the glares of the surrounding boys. Bruno remembered sopping the mats. Then dripping alone over one of a row of porcelain boarding-school sinks, the salty floodings and convulsings of his features reflected.

Barely had Bruno realized, sunken to the floor against the wall outside the restaurant bathroom, eyeing the now steadying WOMEN, that he had spilled out his remembrances in a rumble of words. The door cracked and a shy grin oozed down at Bruno.

Christina Porter

Adze

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think.
When the mind is pure, joy follows, like a shadow that never leaves.

—Bodhisattva Martreya

Chuck.

My porch is small, rusted, chuck, and personal. I grasp at the
brown-red handle, fumbling as the wind catches and opens it. Chuck. When
the door is ajar, and I am on the other side, I see Faulkner staring at me,
an ax in his hand.

Smooth, like worn cedar speckled with mold anger, he smiles. Cedar made dull from the touch of hands. Smooth his adze cuts through the afternoon.
Grasping towards the sun, held down by the dead. Chuck. He has planted his
coffin into my dirt, hacking at it like a dying plant.

Looking down he licks with his adze. Dark wood splinters and chucks,
rustling the red-brown ground. His years-old container leaping and falling
into afternoon with the ebb and flow of the adze, casting light and dark
across my face like antique votive light.

His face is set in me, deeper than the black and white of a photograph.
Circles of years-old mahogany intently watching me with the gaze of a
solipsist. In the cyclone of light and dark I know his face is mine and that
of my mother, father, and brother. I can’t help but want to touch and
think of all that I cannot touch.

Jefferson casts a shadow, met by the darkness of a coffin. He is that city,
an unknown world to me. With the swinging of rusted hinges, he has become a rusted hinge. In the rusted movements I have become even more what I cannot know.

He motions to me with a pull of his wrist. Glass blades are held high,
reflecting their cast in the rhythmic movements of the metallic adze blade.
I listen to the chuck. Chuck. of the adze as I approach.

Folding around the highs and lows of the adze contours, my hand clutches with the intensity of death and certainty of the same.

Graham G.

I am a grapefruit
and this situation is slightly bitter,
but succulent still.

I am tasting the dirt on his fingers,
this dusty concrete arborial graceful taste.

I am riding on something in this taxi
and I am ready rosehanded, roselipped.

We are silhouettes
in this dark room.

We are tumbled and close,
touching truly, trying to be gentle.

This is making me reexamine everything previous,
as if this is the end of our movie. This is a plot twist that I can’t quite comprehend.

As we part, he is making me make promises
that neither of us want me to keep.

But I do keep them.

Out of obligation, I am holding a telephone on my shoulder
and I am ready waterhanded, waterlipped.

And the conversation is aimless,
the subtext unclear.

And we are lost to each other,
more than we intended to be.

And now, seeing him,
I avert my eyes, flustered.

And now, after being so close,
we could not stand farther apart.

So, I am my own orb now,
and he is his.

I am a grapefruit,
and someone has pierced my skin,
and my juice flows out, bitter.

Hallie C.

Bread

Born and bred in the U.S.A.,
I was brought up surrounded with steel,
a metaloid of Greek and American,
wrought like iron
between my parents’ fingers,
taught to iron in my grandmother’s living-room,
pressing out the wrinkles,
watching the folds
of her lips, rising and falling,
rising and falling,
watching the cracks
in her cheeks contract.

Summered in the Greek sun,
sanded by its beaches,
silvered by its moonbeams,
with windows wide open to let in the breeze and the bugs,
I sit with my grandmother
and she smiles,
her lips pressed together,
her skin bread-doughy and wrinkled,
tears greasing her face, she’s laughing so hard.

Soula H.

Every year my extended family has a Hanukah extravaganza at my Aunt Barbara’s house. Barbara married a goy named John, who is heavily into hockey. The mere sight of a Christmas tree in the midst of our Hanukah celebration is enough to make the blood of any good Jew boil. Every year on the hour ride home from Barbara’s house, my dad rants about marrying out of the Jewish gene pool and the horrors of “the Christmas tree.”

This year, in rebellion against Christians everywhere (but more specifically, John the goy), the festival of lights was held at my house three weeks after the holiday’s closing.

My grandparents arrived twenty minutes early in order to apply pressure to my parents while they tried to straighten up the house. My grandmother brought with her a two-liter tub of Sauerkraut. Nothing frightens my mother more than the woman who gave birth to her holding Sauerkraut.

Upon the arrival of Barbara, the goy, and their two plastic daughters, a completely new brand of family problem arose. Lindsay, aged eight and a bitch, refused to enter the elevator, forcing John to walk her up to the 28th floor. I might have failed to mention that John has a heart condition.

My grandmother moved the conversation from Sauerkraut to pickles. I went to the stairwell for my third Lucky Strike of the gathering, unable to bear the descriptions of every type of pickle known to man. Upon my return, ketchup was the new topic of conversation. Ironically, I don’t eat Sauerkraut, pickles, or ketchup; I then resolved to return to the stairwell for another Lucky Strike.

In the month I’ve lived in my new building, I have coated a whole flight of stairs with cigarette ash. Luckily, John must have been too busy popping heart pills to notice.
When I went back down the hall, everyone was discussing their delight over the death of Jesus. When you’re Jewish, gossip never gets old. My mother still talks about the Kennedy/Monroe affair often and in a secretive tone, as if we are the only people on Earth who know.

Last night, my mother brought up Elvis’s drug problem and asked if anyone knew he was a user. I feigned surprise, and the smile of blissful ignorance on her face was illuminating.

I slipped down the hall for another cigarette, number five in fact. I heard the words “Katz’s Delicatessen” from my apartment, followed by an exuberant outburst from which I could only gather the words “pastrami on rye bread.”

When I went back, my twelve-year-old brother was scamming his Barbie cousins at dreidel, taking all of their Hanukah gelt. Dreidel is apparently only fun if you’re winning. His fat chocolate-smeared face had a huge smile on it, and both of the plastic children were trying to cry without smearing their Barbie makeup-kit makeup.

I retreated to my room to download pornography from the World Wide Web. I am Portnoy. There was a call from the dining room for dinner. I ate half of the latkes, survival of the fittest at my dinner table. I almost speared my father’s hand with a fork. It was my piece of corn beef, not his. He learned his lesson; all it cost him was a chunk of skin.

I left for another cigarette. When I returned, my other uncle was sitting on the couch, being simultaneously bitter and English. Once I asked him if he was tired or anti-social. His response was to twist my ear and curse at me in his thick British accent. His name is Brian. He chose to leave at this point in the afternoon, his bitter disposition pushing through.

The rest of the family soon followed, in an exit resembling Genesis in the Bible. My apartment is Egypt; everywhere else is the promised land.

When I went down the hall for a cigarette a week later, the jar of Sauerkraut was sitting in the garbage room.

Louis W.

The Brooklyn

and recumbent Brooklyn),
the bridge stretches
from shore to shore
in a lunge-like extension.
Here, I am a
walking-over-water
virgin:
I have never before
mounted the river
with my feet,
and I feel
biblical, almost,
in my crossing.

Maia G.

The Fruit of a Serpent

Adam

He sits in a mango tree and the round
orange fruit crowns his head like
Medusa’s snakes or a crown of thorns.
The summer’s heat, a wet, drippy heat
drips on his forehead and
mosquitoes bathe on his shoulders.
His kingdom is magic-filled and
fantastical—insects bite
his knee-pits and he itches
behind the ears.
(His fantasies are woven of women
with goddess-like proportions, long
haired and red-molded lipped—ready to
lick his wounds and sugarcoat his
cuts.)
His world likes sun, dark-brown days
in fruit trees, guava—peachy and sweet,
kiwi—bitter and mossy-skinned, apple—
scarlet and already tasted—sinful so
he doesn’t touch it—with juice and
sap, he reigns, in a puddle
at his feet.

Eve

The puddle at my feet is oily,
left on city streets.
Blue-red reflections of crying blue
eyes, see-through soles and rubber tires.
These boots are like needles in my
ankles and draw blood from my heels. My
glass eyes roll with water and
my universe is freezing.
On bad days my hair is coarse and
dry with wind, and on good days
my nails are clean, my eyes are wide-open
and lack any redness.

Adam

He doesn’t need to gaze with
black and blue eyes at the
birds and shirtless mammals around
him to know their muscles,
all freshly flexed, are ready—
and ready to leap and dance to the
beat of bark-wood drums.

Eve

In brick-brown street rhythms
he man with sad eyes and
uncut hair
behind a tin drum wails and
cries at the distance from home—
I eat a dirty cheeseburger in a rush, while I know
he eats a seedless grape—
intoxicated by the very wine of life.
I would need maraschino cherries
atop one sex on the beach,
lapping the rolling waves and
eating sand from a straw—
life just wouldn’t do it for me.

Adam

He lived alone in his world for
several days and a couple of nights.
He dreamt of delicate hands
and naked white skin
still untouched by the sun.
He felt a cracking in his rib cage
and a tug at his heart—the only pain he’s
ever felt was replaced by the only
ove he’ll ever feel when he awoke.
He rose from his bed of petals
(the kind you usually fall in love in)
marigold and dusted with dew,
stained with blood from the cut
in his chest. On the riverbank
he’d be alone with the gilled fish and
he just needed dark purple grapes
because his sex on the beach
just wasn’t happening.

Eve

I crept over paradise-green treetops
through hollowed canals, insulated in
mud-packed perfume, hallowed and calcareous,
grainy—so dark but guided by a white light:
I dove under velvet shrubs—
soft smooth petals (fuchsia pinks she’d
never seen and lemonade greens—)
and I slithered on beach sands.
My world of cold writhes in
my mind, daunting now (my father
always told me I had a tongue
like a serpent) only cold
whites and platinum aluminums.
I found a great fruitless tree at the end
of the tunnel, fruitless and as spare
as the city’s corner stores
(she knows them so well, a medley of
remedies for head colds and
heartburn).
An apple shone on a single shaky
limb, like a snake sucking, sewn
into the grass.
White-skinned, my feet are
tender like ladies’ hands, toenails lacy,
long-arched and pointed.
My wrists are old ivory bones.
I wanted a bite of this new universe—
to make it mine and more than just
a daydream.
I plucked a fallen fruit and indulged.

Adam

He sits in mangroves, white lilies
behind his ears and peonies
in his hair—
animal-skin hides strewn
over his shoulders as he sleeps
in a hut of roots and twigs in the night,
though the sun never seems to sleep,
is always reflected in bonfires.
It’s all colors (he whines). He needs a
glassy-clear light (no more of this unrelenting vibrancy—
this great ball of yellow fire has been
around for few days).
He would tell the animals—vivid and gaseous— even
beauty can become tiring.
He would like something tangible
that he could sing lullabies and
reveries with—rounded and voluptuous like the
arch in a panther’s convex, concave
back—
something pure and ice-white,
ice he can’t imagine as the sun always precedes it.
When he awoke from his dream
on the last day, he saw his world like a
fairyland.
Slumped against his fruit tree,
mostly mangoes, a creature
of silver glowing, seeming transparent
almost (he would call it a she—unlike him
she moved like a feline, slinky yet had no fur
but soft skin like he had), long and lean like
the gazelles,
pear-like, waxed long and lean, and breasted,
ate the only apple he wouldn’t touch.

Eve

I ate and ate until it was all gone.
The blossoms fell to the ground one by one.
A wind whirled and all the colors
danced away with the heat,
my taut skin so sinewy and legs
so willowy I could not move yet
to toss away this wind-whispering
in my ears.
Before I swallowed the heartless
core, I made a wreathe of dandelions;
fresh yellow dandelion seeds
strung in and everything now wilted.
I closed my eyes, so greedy and
well fed, unable to resist this life,
where no cold thrives and everything is bright.
But now it is dark and still plentiful
in the way that there is plenty that has dried and shrunken.
These vines have grown bare.

Adam

Like in drought season, everything
shriveled: leaves once full and plush,
lush with moisture, pulpy and bulbous,
snapdragons snapped (the grass, birds,
his eyes—and the rattle of
sleep early in the morning even lost its iridescent
shimmer), turned to a wrinkled red hue,
brown now and would soon be colorless—
smoky and crusted with plaque and the elemental
joys disappeared (the copper sediments oxidized
and turned a green he despised—not colorful,
but dirtied and drained).
He climbed into a coconut tree—
trunk stained with white milk.

(He loved the coconut tree for the moment
when the sap leaked onto his bottom lip,
sweet, sugarless and lactic; he swept
with his tongue to wipe it clean—it was this taste
of pleasure that could reassure him.
But this time there was no milk and only
a moist residue of before.)
Serpent rose up, up and coiled itself around
his calf, rested its head
(thin, gaunt and chiseled with cheekbone,
with slits for eyes) on his skeletal naked foot.

Eve

I’ve only seen a man seeping with
wine. It seems like life is no longer
just enough, and when we sway alone
behind the rosebushes,
I can no longer see the hibiscus,
purple and luscious, or the dahlias,
lacy and pearly—no longer hear the
animals speak, taste the salt sap of trees—
a serpent voice (coming from the bare desert land
where I wander and sing, sleep on dry
dirt and see only rain clouds overhead)
that keeps me away from the place from which
I am exiled.

Sophie P.

The Moon’s Peace

Shining brightly in the sky,
the peaceful phosphorescent moon
shimmers as it hovers by.

Dawn is slowly creeping nigh.
The orb projects its own sweet tune,
shining brightly in the sky.

A starry desert’s spread so high.
Luna, over cloudy dune,
shimmers as it hovers by.

A sphere of milk, remaining dry,
is cratered like an ancient rune,
shining brightly in the sky.

The astral body, Heaven’s eye,
revealing strange nocturnal noon,
shimmers as it hovers by.

Though it will never ever die,
this satellite, departing soon,
shining brightly in the sky,
shimmers as it hovers by.

Jonah L.