Monkey Business
He lived in the small apartment with his pet monkey and painted portraits of people who might have been. They sat for him in his cold rooms, glad for the attention, while he struggled to get everything right: the lighting, the skin texture, the philosophies, existential and otherwise, which guided their nonexistent days. The monkey had a friend, a monkey that never was. It had been abandoned in the apartment by one of the artist’s early subjects, and the two monkeys often got into mischief, sometimes pooping on the floor, often leaving banana peels to rot in corners or under a table. Neither the artist, obsessed with his work, nor the people who never were, could have possibly cared less. Most of them suffered from frustration, as you can imagine. Any small slight became tragic. Any favor an epic blessing. So, the men who never were called him a good fellow and patted his back. The women sometimes gave him the comfort of their potential bodies and sometimes only smiled mysterious smiles. He continued with his work, as always. In time, someone visited the studio, an actual person seeking an apartment. The visitor, a miser who lacked both compassion and imagination, found the artist, one monkey, and portraits on canvas stacked haphazardly around the place. It turned out the artist had not paid rent in quite some time, and so the new man had the monkey and he thrown into the street. This will make a fine home, he thought. It was cozy and comfortable enough, though a smell hung about the place. It was tropical and musky, perhaps a combination of shit and fruit. No matter. A good cleaning would do wonders. You never could tell what was hiding, close enough to touch, just beneath the veneer of the day. The artist found a new place to squat and kept to his task. The monkey that never was, now alone and unnoticed, was devastated. In the night, it often stood over the newcomer as he slept, ominous, waiting, with murder in its heart and silent as the Buddha. Sometimes it pissed in the man’s mouth, but he, upon waking, was not bothered in the least. He brushed his teeth, sometimes gargled, thought about nothing of importance, and went about his day.
Stephen Jarrell Williams
READY LOST
We are so alone in ourselves
Lost in the sea
Waves taking us where they will
Bone cold
Monsters below
Circling always circling
Single cell
Bobbing hell
Bloated and ready to pop
Thunder booms
Overhead clouds blackening
Rain choking
Wind howling
A whirlpool sucking
Gasping cries to God
We’re finally ready
For Him to send
A whale the size of Baltimore.
Marisa Cimbal
She does
She does, does, does. She dances in circles,
around his unpredictability, his platitudes,
his drinking and his drama, his constant
lack of accountability. She spins and swirls,
her body gyrating to the rhythm of the beat,
trying to stop the fluttering of her heart,
pins and needles in her head, the song
on the radio taunting her, “should I stay or
should I go?” She tastes the strands of her hair,
feels the sweat burning her lips, tingling in her toes
and she looks in the mirror. The reflection looks familiar,
but it’s not her, it’s him.
Dear Box Hair Color,
You make it easy to access the fountain of youth.
You never let me down. You’re not a liar like those other boxes,
“no more fine lines’ or “no more brown spots.”
As promised, you cover those greys that pop up like aliens,
trying to infiltrate my luscious brown locks and
transport me to Planet Aging on their silver spaceship.
They think they can win by gathering forces at the root,
but they are no match for the secret elixir
and never make it past the crown.
DW Chance
Trend Setters
The breeze turned cool
sometime this week,
cool enough to notice.
That’s the signal.
I’m about through here.
I owe the landlord, I owe the bar,
I owe a woman named Darlene
an apology she’ll never get.
Every bridge in town
burned down to the waterline.
The guys at the meetings call it
a geographic cure.
Pack the bag, catch the Greyhound,
start over.
But you never start over.
You just haul the same old crap
to a different zip code,
different days, different locals,
new people,
new victims.
I’ve done this enough
to do it right.
One bag. No goodbyes.
The motivation takes a while,
but it always shows up,
usually about the time
the money runs out.
Every town’s got a skid row,
or one step above it,
but just barely.
That’s where I step off the bus.
There’s always a flophouse,
rooms by the week,
a sink with a rust stain
shaped like Ohio,
a radiator that knocks all night
like somebody wants in.
And there’s always a bar
two blocks down
where the bartender learns my drink
by the second night
and never asks where I’m from.
Nobody there asks.
That’s the whole charm.
We get a few laughs.
We hook up with a few tired women
who want what we want,
a warm body and no questions,
and by Sunday
nobody’s fooling anybody.
Day labor when the rent comes due:
unloading trucks at 5 a.m.,
scrubbing pans in a kitchen
where the cook hates everybody.
Enough money, then I quit.
Then I’m free again,
free as a dog
nobody’s looking for.
We keep it up as long as we can.
The gutter takes us at fifty
if we’re lucky,
in bodies that clock in
at seventy-five.
Then a corner in potter’s field,
a number instead of a name,
the county paying for the hole.
Trend setters, every one of us.
Sooner or later everybody follows.
Daniel S. Irwin
Thoughts on a Sweet Halloween
Having kept the best part for himself
As he selected organs for his monster
Dr. Frankenstein soon became a very
HUGE hit with the ladies.
Okay, great, stuck in a rut.
Same ol’ routine every time.
Bite the neck, suck the blood.
Say, I haven’t been a vampire
All that long. Suck the blood
But maybe, sometimes, I just
Wanna lick the cunt.
The knock. Who could it be?
Open the door to pure terror.
Monsters? Gangbangers?
Racist bastards? Satan?
Young children scarred for life.
Sweet Jesus, it’s politicians!
The local bully was impressed
That the kids readily gave up
The candy they’d gotten
From old Dan Irwin’s house.
Hopefully, Butch will enjoy it.
No one else cared for the
Candy wrappers filled with
Fresh Chihuahua turds.
MK Kuol
my cousin’s ill-timed passing
has taught me to cogitate,
even on happy moments,
on things solemn.
when,
over a decade later, we returned
to baping, our ancestral home, &
my over-the-moon father,
in the ancient rites of his fathers,
slaughtered the fattest of his bulls
& gathered our kinsmen to a feast
—a celebration our homecoming,
i couldn’t take my mind off
that star-crossed bull handpicked &
slain for indulgence’s sake
perhaps that is how my cousin died:
a god
straining hard to entertain his guests
handpicked & slain him…
James Burbank
LITTLE SHAVER
The greatest problem confronting humanity is the shaving dilemma. To shave or not to shave? I hear the rusted sound of razors scraping against skin. I am transformed, repelled, terrified. I sense inevitable nicks and cuts, awful puckering stuff to be applied to these cursed shaving wounds that makes them sting, these stigmata, the scream when you douse your proud flesh with after shave, or you slash your armpits, the water and shaving creme sprayed haphazard around your bathroom, your mirror fogged, stained with bloody fingerprints. Envision all the blades, single and multiple, the wet and dry electric shavers, the cologne, after shave, the healing compote. This is not your choice, but social conformity makes it so. Either Nair or hair, or the highway. The right choice, the only choice if you want to be a decent, upstanding human being is to endure the ritual of shaving despite your pain, despite your humiliation, despite your subjection to societal norms.
This social enforcement starts early. Uncle Morris, his breath smelling of tictacs and Old Milwaukee, his red and blue checkered double breasted suit looming , hovering, menacing, leaning in close to your face, his grin full of yellow teeth, he grabs your five-year-old cheeks and pinches hard while growling, “How’s the little shaver?” Then he pinches hard again to redden your cheeks, so they look blushed up healthy. You want to take a straight razor and filet Uncle Morris. Occam’s Razor, perhaps that says the simplest solution for a problem is the right answer.
Uncle Morris was never aware that the original Little Shaver was a pencil sharpener developed in the early 1900’s. He never knew that there were Little Shaver rag dolls in 1919, or fishing lures today called Little Shavers. Despite these facts of which Uncle Morris was ignorant, and whether little or big, shavers, and by extension shaving, is the most simple explanation for all the bad stuff we go through as humans, the simplest reason for the world’s problems, and so therefore the most likely root cause for the ultimate human catastrophe.
Think of all the suffering, the calamities occurring right now, the starvation, the loneliness, the disasters, the floods, the pestilence, the lies, the corruption, the complexity of world political disorder, the savage and twisted issues that vex even the most aware problem solvers, all because good people do bad things. They yearn to conform through shaving, and that’s the plain old reason for all the world’s intractable ills, easy peazy. According Occam’s damn razor, I have peeled away the onion-like layers of complexity that guard the truth. Shaving is the cause of it all.
David John Ward
Gathering
Watch now, I have gathered
all that is needed –
a bell, a box, a broken
clock, a handful
of seeds grown mildewed and gnarled,
a nail, a pocket filled
with silence, a rusted
chain to bind them all.
Follow, and watch again,
carefully as we make our way
down the path which winds
between bushes overhanging
and pale flowers’ curious breath.
Then we will bury everything
we gathered. In the dark soil,
rich with hidden joy.
Tamp down the earth, so
none will see we have visited,
that we were ever here
at all.
At Dusk
He can be found at dusk, walking the old by-ways,
tracing the lanes, his breath a mist,
his eyes dull but blazing, seeking the trails
of creatures who passed not yesterday, but before
there were walls, were fields, were signposts, barbed wire
or furrows, but just the tug, the flow,
the slope to the river, the grey horizon and beyond.
Strange Grey Eyes
You and your strange grey eyes,
misting as clouds, so lost
and so proud, staring at nothing
you see; to my mind
you were staring at me.
You and your strange grey eyes,
speaking in silence with
nothing to say, running towards me
then walking away, and back,
always back the next day.
You and your strange grey eyes,
so thin was the thread,
how strong were the ties
that drew me towards you,
so foolishly wise, though
we knew that we’d never know why.
Royal Rhodes
WOUNDS
The wrangler works against the world
or within it, at the prairie's edge
or middle that reveals itself.
It is at times an exercise in sound,
like the crying of lost cattle
or the beckoning of sweat to bugs.
The wounds words make in the wounded,
we are told, open up with light escaping,
or is it more like cut skin needing air?
Our ravaged bodies speak to each other
about the common pain wielded in words
that gallop ahead to interpret too much.
The phrase burned into our recollection
was that the truth was "out there",
that made us miss it finally in ourselves.
The body's sores come like pauses in music
to surprise our listening pursuit of meaning
that we are all heirs to one, continuing wound.
___________________________________________________
NIGHT WALTZ
The strange sob of a jackrabbit
that lingered too long on the wet stretch
on the rancher's acres,
the pine tassels skittering down
the pitch of a grooved metal roof,
from chimney to gutter,
the naked shadows in the empty chamber
of the wood stove, gasping for air
as embers sparked anew --
these were the notes of my dream music.
I had to relearn my limbs were instruments,
my head too top-heavy
with deep grief,
while across the dream stanzas
those I knew who died sang
that they dread the living.
As I passed from sleeping to waking,
I moved in a line dance and steps
of an unfinished waltz.
And in the borderline darkness
I put on my skin like a costume
and climbed onto my saddle,
before I rose to cross into a new world,
and the sky was as wide as.heaven.
But when I stopped to camp, there were no stars.
Richard LeDue
“The Whiskies of the Past”
Beethoven playing the opposite
of a lullaby at 7:37 AM,
while my coffee chases away the night
with its sensible eight hours of sleep
(still broken
as a drunkenly dropped glass),
putting to sleep the whiskies of the past,
when blacking out felt like a light bulb
in some great cartoon colored idea
I believed must be my own
original thought, only to wake up,
knowing if I had an artist’s pallet,
then my life would be painted
chromatic black.
