Featured

Map

It was a place where no one knew the lexicon of what had been a common charity—an embrace, a slight nod on passing, a recognition of mutual flesh and blood.

These were the trades and barters of this new arena: a bullet for a toddler’s skull at play, the snarling crouch of feral creatures who ripped away their façade as sentinels once the doors were locked, and above, clouds like a fist in the firmament, bashing shock-blows upon the impenitent earth.

And the one impartiality that held true was this: that any dream of any measure should have its own one-line obit, unsealed, unread.

The Barking Dog

The siege was in its sixth month and he was tired of hearing the dog across the street barking every morning. He lived in a second story room where he had a view of the stricken units below across the way, including the small enclosure where the dog made it’s incessant rasp heard over and over again each morning. He finally felt justified to waste a single bullet to put an end to the torture. He looked through the sight and pinned the thin, miserable canine in view. Just then he heard a sound outside his door and started, but it was most likely a rat working its way in or out of the wall. He heard the shot late and the sharp yelp below. He looked back out the window and saw the dog half-hidden under a small child slumped inert over it. He hadn’t seen the child. In horror and fear, he flew out his apartment and started running down the stairs, three steps at a time and tripping, fell, breaking his neck and yet he did not die. Nor would he. He laid there and waited. He knew. Wicked spirits would entertain themselves with a paralyzed child killer.

No Pills For This

There are no drugs to quell the fear of writing and no quick swigs to embolden the wilted ink of some valid thought. This is to say there is little to say or share and no Mahler/Bruckner/Rott sessions can tragedify my dead well. How can I be caught between the Peanut Butter Conspiracy and Schumann? Why is there such a gun as choice? Harmonies still reticulate in the grainy foyer of some 60’s garden and I want to feel the spring of wet brained Eurekas just again once over more.

No. 9

Bruckner’s cathedrals and the collapsing stations
Where venerant images tumble
Into the asymmetry of some supernal gravity
Against the usurpers’ parasitic worship;Like cultural Einsatzgruppen, disfiguring
His supplicant thunder as it leapt from the sepulcher,
entrails of dying storms lurching towards God.


A Filibuster of Crows

And the insane dawn sky after the plague’s zenith, with runners and walkers exposing nostrils and mouths, their daring patches of skin exhibited like a dirty postcard left out in the open, plastic and crude.

Above, waving wings like brushes of smoke, the crows argue and contradict our victory, their raucous calls in mimicry of the chorus coughs of the so recently dead.

They’re placing bets on when we’ll go inside for good.

To Dissemble Our Fathers Unmet

If you could, you’d smudge the garish tones of day into some sepia-scape of dust and blurred contours, like the mystery blobs you see through your almost-blind left eye.

You remember you grandfather calling to you in a comic attempt of gentle entreaty, his gruff voice gone high as he took you by the hand into his rose garden, picturing you as his own grandfather, the kind man who raised him incarnate in your light eyes and blond curls, the fair half-German mulatto who ran the health camp for dying veterans of the war between the states.

If you could, you’d freeze the childhood garden for a minute and look more closely at the hand you took for granted when you were two, at the same crooked fingers in common you’ve used for a lifetime, except his concealed many textures yours have never known, the reins of angry horses, the axe handle wielded in a nocturnal blow on the KKK cross ablaze in front of his house, the sting of chemicals he learned to master from the trash bins of offices he cleaned at night.

You’d study the hand holding your own and try to siphon off some of that strength to last you down the ugly, loud, brutally glorious incoming miles.