down in the dirt
internet issn 1554-9666
(for the print issn 1554-9623)
Janet K., Editor
http://scars.tv.dirt.htm
http://scars.tv - click on down in the dirt

In This Issue... Fritz Hamilton Eric Burbridge Liam Spencer John Ragusa Eleanor Leonne Bennett art Marlon Jackson Allen M Weber Travis Green D.S. Maolalai Brian Boru Ray Kemble Cassia Gaden Gilmartin Robert Heath Nathan Zackroff Janet Doggett Mike Brennan Carol Smallwood Harry Noussias Willis Haul Ben Macnair Doug Downie Michael D. Brown Dennis Humphrey Robert McHale Danya Goodman CEE Janet Kuypers

Note that any artwork that appears in Down in the Dirt will appear in black and white in the print edition of Down in the Dirt magazine.

Order this issue from our printer as an ISSN# paperback book:

Trudy is watching from her rocker Fritz Hamilton     BabyTrudy is watching from her rocker. She is playing with the ribbon in her blonde hair. Her dark blue eyes are ever watching, watching.     She watches when her dad comes home with the other woman soon after Trudy’s had her lunch. She watches when he quickly strips off the woman’s clothes & opens his fly. She watches when he puts her on the floor & gets on top of her. He does the same with her that he does with her mommy. They pant & moan. Sometimes she screams. They bounce up & down & move around. Then they’re still, & she strokes his hair. Quickly they rise speaking softly to each other. & Trudy watches this. Nobody talks to her, as she’s watching, watching. She listens to the car driving off. Her father returns to the kitchen & gets his whisky out of the cabinet. He picks her up saying nothing to her, as he drinks whisky from his bottle.     Soon her mother enters carrying groceries. She looks haggard after waitressing two shifts at the Lazy Barron. She goes to Trudy & kisses the top of her head.     “How was your day?” she says to the father.     “Hard! Hectic!”     “I had a good breakfast trade. Good tips. Almost nobody for lunch. I had to stay late & help clean up.”     He puts Trudy down & stands. Her mother looks frightened. He reaches out & slaps her hard.     She falls back, her hand on her cheek. “Do we have to do this again?”     Slowly, he walks toward her.     “Please, Tom, not in front of Trudy.”     He grabs her arms & shakes her. Her eyes gape with terror. He hits her head & knocks her down. She covers up whimpering. She shivers in a ball. Trudy crawls toward her. “Mommy?” His foot buries in her mommy’s ribs knocking her wind out.     He sits back in the chair & chugs several ounces from his bottle. He looks at his wife in her anguished heap, as Trudy is watching, watching ... #

I sit on Mission St as it crumbles Fritz Hamilton I sit on Mission St as it crumbles/ how much longer, Athena, must I wait for you?/ my heart, that I shall give you, bleeds in my hand. The birds sing desultorily hopping through despair. The seeds beneath them have lost their sustenance/ Athena, my sweet darling, where is your song?/ are you singing it elsewhere ... to someone else?/ are you just a dream with which the gods torture me? Are they laughing at me?/Am I their fool?/ am I the kindling for their derisive fire to send my love & hope up the smokestacks of Auschwitz as they pound my drum of Jewish skin & dine on my soul, who’s one & last desire is to love you before the earth cracks open & all is immolated in its core?/O darling, do not leave me/ we’ve just begun/ or is all this the nonsense of a tattered fool?/Should I pull the door closed & chain me with Francis to the dungeon wall, as the rats nibble my feet, & No one cares ... ?

Revenge with Sausage and Pepperoni Eric Burbridge     The knuckles of that backhand aroused Holly, but it wouldn’t leave an impression. Her tough, but smooth, skin had exceptional recovery power. She fell back on the bed, her legs and skirt flew up and exposed her nakedness. His six foot muscular frame stood, erect in both places, over her. She tingled with anticipation. Her stomached growled and snapped her back to reality. She stepped closer to the counter for her order, adjusted her clinging blouse and enjoyed the lustful eyes that undressed her.     Arturo Stamps, MD, sat in the corner of Goodies Pizza, rolled up his sleeves and loosened his tie. Management ignored his request to turn up the air conditioning. At fifty, he became less tolerant of the rowdy younger crowd that packed the place, but the price and quality of the food made the inconvenience worthwhile. He leaned back, rested against the window and let the sound of the thunderstorm drown out the racket.     A stocky moonlighting cop stood vigilant and scanned the crowd. Arturo knew the feeling. For years, former Police Officer Arturo Stamps chased the bad guys. His reward, a slug in the chest, that when it rained, spoke only a language only he could feel. His true destiny, medicine had to be postponed for financial reasons, so he joined the force and ended up staying longer than planned. But, thank God, he did his residency before he got too old. The late start kept him from pursuing a specialty, but primary care fit.     When Holly stepped to the counter Arturo looked. An ex-inmate in her mid-forties and a hood rat. There you go Dr. Stamps, thinking like a cop.     Arturo’s phone rang, turning heads. He fumbled in his pockets to find it. “Hello.”     “Where are you?” April Hamburger Stamps voice trembled.     “Ma, are you ok?”     “No, somebody stole my wallet. I got to the checkout and no wallet. Embarrassing.”     Arturo sighed. He hated thieves, of any kind. “Well, they’ve started using the card by now. You called them in, right Ma?”     “No. I couldn’t find the numbers. I was tired, I went to sleep, and I’m still looking. I hate this. I ain’t paying for whatever they charge. Let ‘em sue me!”     “Ma, relax. Don’t get your pressure up.” Of course, she wouldn’t listen, but he said it anyway. “I’m at the store. I’ll be there in a while, ok?”     “Ok, bye,” she said.     Arturo slammed his phone shut. He went to check his order when a young Hispanic employee worked his way through the crowded kitchen and placed several boxes on the ready rack. He snatched a ticket and spoke into the microphone.     “Order for Hamburger, Hamburger.”     Holly stepped over and claimed the order. The young guy recognized her and winked. “That’s four family sizes at seventy-five bucks.” He swiped her card.     She signed the receipt, thanked him and got a grip on the order. She turned and gave the stranger with the hate filled eyes a slight grin.     Arturo couldn’t believe he stood next to the person who stole his mom’s wallet. Grab her before she’s out the door...no don’t do that. He steeped over to the cop and whispered, “That hoochie just used my mother’s stolen credit card. Arrest her or something,” he demanded. The cop cut his eyes at Holly as she meandered through the crowd.     “My hands are tied, sir. I’m on their clock,” tilting his head toward the window. “Not the city’s. Anyway, by the time the cops get here she’ll be gone. I know what you are thinking.” His icy stare didn’t faze Arturo. “Don’t do it, just cancel the card, she won’t be liable.”     Arturo shook his head in disgust. He was right. “I hate a thief.”     “Me too. Didn’t you work out of the 1st District?”     Arturo blinked, surprised. “Yeah, years ago.” He didn’t remember this guy.     “I knew you looked familiar.”     “I quit for personal reasons.”     “A slug to the chest, by your partner, will do that,” the husky cop said.     “You remember that? It was an accident, but still, you know how it is.” The cop nodded and broke eye contact watching the customers enter and exit. Arturo sighed. “I tried to forget. I’m a doctor now, MD.”     “Really?” He looked surprised. “Cop to a doctor. That’s unheard of.”     “Stamps, order for Stamps.” The clerk shouted.     “I’m gone, be safe.” He got his order and walked out. The thief and her accomplice pulled out the lot in an early model Chevy with the big wheels and tires. Nothing but cop magnets. Stupid. *     Dr. Arturo Stamps waited a minute then eased through the pot hole filled unpaved lot and tailed the thieves. He reached deep into the past to retrieve his training. They took advantage of the wrong senior citizen. Her health wasn’t the best and this could kill her. Now that vermin would pay. What punishment would be appropriate? He couldn’t let disdain cloud his judgment. Caution executing his plan was paramount.     Keep it simple, shoot ‘em.     He could put one in her without being lethal, but he might have to kill her accomplice. So that was out. Forcing them to hit a parked car or pole, sounds good. But he didn’t want to risk hurting innocent bystanders. That was out too. It would come to him later.     Don’t lose them. *     “Ma, I didn’t wake you did I? You sound groggy.”     “No. I’m looking for that number to the credit people. I thought you were coming over.”     Wind swept rain and the fierce pace of the wipers made it hard to talk and drive trying to keep with the speeding thieves. “Ma call directory assistance, two dollars won’t kill you.”     “I still need the account numbers. You coming by or what?”     “I got something to do. I’ll call.” Arturo’s finger stabbed the off button. The older she got the more stubborn. The thieves slowed and turned into a strip mall.     Arturo raced down 115th street, and then he saw them. Thank God. He pulled into the lot and parked between two cars on the opposite end, opened his food and waited. The hoochie let the liquor store struggling with a large box. She shouted to the driver and the trunk popped open. She slammed it and snatched the door open, hopped in and punched the driver in the head. Hs hat flew off his head and bounced off the window. He countered with a punch she blocked, but she didn’t avoid the next one that grazed head shifting her wig. Their arms clutched together, intertwined like two wrestlers tugging at each other then the shouting stopped. He overpowered her, shoving her to the door. She adjusted her wig and didn’t move.     Arturo savored another slice of pizza, and watched the embattled couple exit. He hit the speed dial.     “Hello.”     “Ma, did you call or—-”     “I just got off the phone.” She interrupted. “They bought wheels, tires and pizza. The thieving bastards, but thank God, I’m not liable. If you’re still busy, I’ll see you tomorrow.”     “Ok, Ma. Love you.”     So, they like to fight. Now I know what to do to that vermin. *     They entered the rust belt on 115th street with a quarter mile jump on Arturo. He closed the gap and zoomed pass abandoned steel companies and warehouses. Their signs dangled off rusted barb wire fences, broken sidewalks and two-foot-tall weeds that replaced landscaping. They made a hard left at the light into the residential area. He saw the photo-enforced sign, hit the brakes and slid on the slick pavement. He eased ahead, but the apartment building on the corner blocked the view down the street, moving any further would trip the sensors. When he turned, he saw several sets of tail lights.     Damn, he lost them.     Years ago he patrolled this middle class area, but now the recession had left every other house abandoned. Darkness set in and every other block appeared blacked out. That vermin had to be within a six block radius. The plan; cruise down each block and pay attention to the so-called street pharmacists. They’ll be at or around a crack house.     The torrential rains stopped and left portions of the street flooded with large puddles. Arturo cruised fast enough not to arouse suspicion, but slow enough for observation. He rode pass the park and the following blocks; nothing. He went down another stretch; the same. Then he remembered the area by the commuter that had just a few houses and vacant lots.     If he didn’t see them, forget it.     Whistling winds shook loose water droplets off the leaves giving the impression the showers had returned. The distant thunder and crackles of lightning drew closer. A couple of vehicles were parked at the end of the block. He slowed and approached the intersection. He saw the glimmer of custom wheels on a car parked between two cars under a street light. The remaining lights were obstructed by several huge oak trees. A perfect cover.     He circled the next block so he could park on the street perpendicular from his object. Two cars sat far enough from the corner for him to pull in and still see. Both cars looked abandoned, the one in front had deep tinted windows, a bad idea if you got pulled over, the other sat on two flats. Arturo reached under the seat for a small dagger that he wrapped in its sheath around his ankle.     Concentrate and get the job done.     The rain slackened, and he saw shadows through the cloudy windows. He wiped the window with his sleeve in time to see a guy slap someone. A closer look revealed the thief. He cracked the window and heard a mixture of pelting rain, cursing and screaming that would bring the police if it continued. “Where’s my shit?”     “I don’t have it, you had it, with your drunk ass,” he shouted. “Go get some sleep.”     She circled the car looking for something. “I didn’t drop it.” She ran at him swinging, he ducked and reached in his pocket. She tried to run, but he grabbed her and threw her to the ground. She re-bounded like a cat and swung at his head. He ducked and wrapped his arm around her waist and pushed her away. He pointed, shouted at her to go back to the house. She gave him the finger and staggered down the street.     The ex-cop had a small window to execute his revenge. He opened the door and ran across the street and hid in the shadow of a tree. The rain returned and he saw the thief run to a house midway down the block. Arturo wiped his face and eyes and sure nobody was in sight, before he moved to the next tree by the target. He stooped, took the dagger and stabbed the front tire. A loud hiss followed.     That was for stealing my mother’s wallet.     He crept to the back tire.     And that, for the stress and anguish you caused.     He peeked over the trunk; the coast was clear and he went to the other side. He slipped and broke his fall when his hand landed in a puddle by the curb. He felt a wallet, picked it up and shook off the water and shoved in his pocket.     This might be what she was looking for. These next two are for the other victims of your treachery.     He loved the hiss of deflating tires and watched the car to rest on its stolen rims.     He ran retracing his steps and panted out of breath. He leaned on the tree, ready to dart across the street. Jesus. How in the hell did that happen? The car in front had moved back and hugged his bumper. He had only a foot in back to maneuver. He hit the alarm button and ran to the car.     Who and why was he being blocked?     Whatever the reason he wasn’t leaving his car. Back and forth, back and forth. At this rate he’ll get made. Arturo slammed his hands on the wheel. Somebody must’ve seen him. He turned on the wipers and the defroster on high. The car in front door sprang open. The hooded occupant walked back and motioned to roll down the window. Arturo cracked the window, blinking while drops of water hit him in the eyes. He looked up at the moonlighting cop from the pizzeria.     “You know why I didn’t see what you did...don’t you?” The cop’s eyes narrowed into a laser like focus. “I wonder who will get the blame?”     Arturo shrugged and grinned. “The one who deserves it?”     “Agreed. Stick to medicine doc. Good bye.” He disappeared behind the tinted windows of the raggedly vehicle and pulled up.     Arturo Stamps, MD pulled off and looked in the mirror. Embarrassed. He should have spotted the surveillance.     Oh well, that was that.     The rain stopped, Arturo rolled down his window and continued to accelerate and ignored the stop signs. He got to 111th street and made a right turn into a gas station. He pulled up to an air pump and kept his eyes on some teenagers loitering by the washroom. He took out the wallet and fingered through at least eight driver’s licenses and bank cards. All belonged to the elderly and the last one to his mom. He started to toss the cards, but some dumpster diver might find them. That would defeat the purpose. He had a better idea.     He squeezed in his parking space, thanks to his no parking drunk neighbor. It happened every time he came home late. He ate his last slice of pizza and his shredder ate the cards.

Understanding Liam Spencer I never fully understood Bukowski’s “Genius of the Crowd” Until I had a relationship I actually wanted to keep.

VS Liam Spencer Scientists that have access to all levels of research done for decades or even centuries to test and test and retest and retest proving this and that building on knowledge and advances Marching society ever further and faster than the now proven evolution those that we all owe so much to in our daily lives Yet, on tv and radio they are reduced to begging people to understand varying dangers from climate change to food safety They sit opposed to quacks with narrow and incorrect views of the bible The tv and radio shows treat them as equals instead of the opposites they are; The Sane vs the stupid

A Unique Ring John Ragusa     “Do you think your wife suspects we’re having an affair?” Serena Bilson asked Orson Malph, cuddling up to him.     “Definitely not,” he replied. “She believes that I’ve been faithful to her. She has no idea that I’ve been seeing you behind her back. There’s no reason for her to be suspicious.”     “I’m afraid that she’ll find out about our relationship somehow.”     “I don’t think she will,” Orson said. “I’ve been careful to keep it secret. There’s no chance of her learning about it.”     “We’ll have to keep on being cautious.”     “The only way she’ll know about us is if an acquaintance of ours sees us together and tells her of it.”     “We’d have to tell the person that it’s confidential.”     “Let’s just hope that he won’t blackmail us.”     “We’ll have to bump him off if he does.”     Orson patted Serena’s hand. “I’d take care of that.”     “Have you ever met anybody like me?”     “No, I haven’t. No one is as beautiful as you are.”     “Do you suppose we’ll get married someday?”     “You know that we can’t do that, because I can’t divorce Nancy.”     Serena pouted. “That’s a shame. I’d sure like to be your wife.”     “I know. But it’s just not possible.”     “Nancy has a hold on you that is almost obscene.”     “Maybe she’ll kick the bucket soon. Then we would be free to wed each other.”     “I doubt that she’ll die now. She’s as healthy as a horse.”     “Yes, unfortunately, that’s true. She might slip in the bathtub and hit her head on the wall, though. That might kill her.”     “We don’t have that kind of luck.”     “But we can go on seeing each other on the sly.”     Orson and Serena finished their dinner at the restaurant. The steaks had been delicious. His meal over, Orson went home to his wife.     “Where have you been, Orson?” Nancy asked when he came through the door.     “I had to spend more time at the office to get some work done,” he said.     Luckily, Nancy believed him.     One day, Orson stopped at a diner on his lunch break to grab a bite to eat. He was consuming a hamburger when a fat, pale man walked up to his table with a briefcase.     “Good afternoon,” Orson said. He pointed to the briefcase. “Are you selling something?”     “Well, that just depends on what you need,” the man said, in a thick Bronx accent.     “I don’t think you have what I need,” Orson told him.     “I sell occult items. What do you need, sir?”     “I’m seeing another woman behind my wife Nancy’s back. I want to marry this other woman, but I can’t divorce my spouse.”     “Why not?”     “Because her father owns the company I work for. If I left Nancy, he would fire me. I’ve made Nancy think I adore her so she won’t guess the truth. She thinks I’d be unhappy without her, but actually, if she were dead, I’d be delighted. I’d be able to marry Serena.”     The man took a ring out of his briefcase. “Then you can use this piece of jewelry. The person who wears it will want to commit suicide.”     “You mean if Nancy wears this ring, she’ll kill herself?”     “That’s exactly right. Your problem would be solved.”     “That would be great! How much does the ring cost?”     “It’s yours for $200.”     “Is a check okay?”     The man shrugged. “That’s fine with me.”     Orson wrote out a check and gave it to the man. He handed Orson the ring.     “I’ll give it to Nancy as a birthday present,” Orson said.     “That’s a good idea,” the man said. “Well, I’ll leave you to your lunch now. And it was nice to do business with you.”     The man picked up the briefcase and left the diner.     Orson knew that he would soon be rid of Nancy. Then he’d marry Serena and live happily ever after.     A month later, Orson gave Nancy a gift-wrapped box. “Happy birthday, darling,” he said.     “You bought a gift for me?” Nancy said. “How sweet!”     “Open it.”     She tore the wrapping off and opened the box. “It’s a ring! Oh, it’s lovely!”     She put it on her finger. Suddenly, her mood turned somber.     “It’s no fun being old,” she said. “I’m over the hill now. I don’t want to live this way.”     She walked over to a desk, opened the drawer, and took out a gun.     “I’m going to kill myself,” she said. “And because you wouldn’t want to live without me, I’m going to take you with me.”     With that, Nancy shot Orson before turning the gun on herself.

broken 0122, art by Eleanor Leonne Bennett

Eleanor Leonne Bennett Bio (20120229)     Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 16 year old iinternationally award winning photographer and artist who has won first places with National Geographic,The World Photography Organisation, Nature’s Best Photography, Papworth Trust, Mencap, The Woodland trust and Postal Heritage. Her photography has been published in the Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC News Website and on the cover of books and magazines in the United states and Canada. Her art is globally exhibited, having shown work in London, Paris, Indonesia, Los Angeles, Florida, Washington, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Germany, Japan, Australia and The Environmental Photographer of the year Exhibition (2011) amongst many other locations. She was also the only person from the UK to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus run See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010. www.eleanorleonnebennett.com

Goodness Gracious Marlon Jackson So soothing a touch can be... comfortable and calm like a tranquil blue color like the beautiful sky intertwined with life...beautiful... how I just wish the soothing touch would last...

The Borrow Pit Allen M Weber When Earle would say, Need you, Little Bro, I’d always come running—that’s the way it was. On a visit home from the Navy, he tells a tale of swimming from torpedo tubes, how his men take fear to folks you’d never read about in the Daily Gazette. Growing up, Earle could tread water forever—had to be tough in the pit by the blueberry fields: the water gets dark, real fast; the steep mud bottom holds your feet, so there’s no way to rest. A neighbor boy drowned there—cramped up, maybe, slipping right under, without calling to his friends. We weren’t allowed, but some nights we’d sneak down, with a six-pack, to skinny-dip till the farmer’s hounds got to howling and we’d know that soon the screen door would bang shut, and we’d see his flatbed Ford as bouncing balls of light, clattering down the dusty path. Tonight a black Buick glides in—One Nation Under a Groove and something like joy pulsing from the open windows—some city boys muling uncut coke from Chicago. I take one look at Earle—those blue lips, how they stretch across his berry-stained teeth, and even before he lifts the grocery bag of money and glinting metal from the trunk, I understand: not everybody’s leaving this field tonight. Then Earle tosses a shotgun and laughs, Hey Brother, still like to climb trees? The lonely maple quivers and startles my skin with an earlier rain. Hugging a lower branch, oiled steel ices my cheek. Between leaves I make out that Earle’s showing off—got all three flocked together, bowed down and kneeling, facing the edge of his still moon water.

Allen M Weber Bio     Allen lives in Hampton, Virginia with his wife and their three sons.     The winner of the Virginia Poetry Society’s 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Prize, his poems have twice appeared in A Prairie Home Companion’s First Person Series, as well as in numerous journals and anthologies—most recently in The Quotable, Snakeskin, Prick of the Spindle, Terrain, Loch Raven Review, and Unlikely Stories.

A Changed Woman Travis Green I saw you last night, in the moonlight. You had a glow that I vaguely recognized. You were no longer one-dimensional, insignificant, but rather shimmering, another galaxy of music spooling from different destinations. You had risen upward, luxuriant, much like sapphires, smooth stone or majestic. More like an instrument, like a harp. From that night on I was simply rapt, pumping soft notes into the iridescent air, all bright light, a place of compassion, spewing the world. You had transformed, everything had flooded through open cracks. You were a seamless sea wave.

Hell is where you can see D.S. Maolalai She’s in her middle forties and worked with me part time selling wine and whiskey. She laughs too loudly and makes jokes with the men that come in to the shop. She has a bitterness about the world and hates those she judges less than her but she claims to love her work and I have heard stories that suggest her bitterness may not be entirely unjustified. I think she once had an unhappy love affair that drove her to cliffs edge and closer, to rag doll anger and drunken four o clock answering machines and since then nothing. No children, of course little money no success no love, just small pleasures, television serials. She likes to talk about her dog and about her youth. Even for a hard old woman you can tell once she felt young. I think when people talk of hell, they talk of the obvious hells, booze, madness, illness. But spare a thought for the other kind of hell the kind that leaves you unhappy and terrified paralyzed from the waist up serving a man with a dripping nose and laughing too loudly. I once hated her and I believe she may have hated me, but now I would like to say, Miriam, if you ever happen to read this that I have never looked more kindly upon you than when I thought of hell, even though I doubt you’d like to hear that.

Blasted Tower Brian Boru     When Sean was six years old, his parents died and he was foisted upon his only living relative and black sheep of the family, his aunt Carly. She was extremely reluctant to take him in; a young boy had no place in the torrid, chaotic life of a barfly seeking out Mr. Right or at least Mr. Right Now. But when she learned of his meager college trust fund, she snatched him right up. The estate lawyer informed her that as legal guardian she could use it sparingly to pay for Sean’s necessities. All she heard was she would be getting extra money to help pay some of her outstanding debts and bar tabs. She would finally have some breathing room even if she’d have to put a little food in the brat’s stomach, and put some second hand clothes on his back. “If you didn’t have family, what did you have,” she chuckled as she signed the adoption papers.     Carly had abandoned Sean in her cold, dank apartment for days, leaving him to fend off a battalion of cockroaches and a few rats that outweighed most cats. When Carly finally stumbled home from her weekend of debauchery, the landlord caught her in the hallway, and threatened to call the police on her if she ever left Sean alone again. He didn’t want to evict her now since she was finally able to pay rent, but that kid didn’t deserve that. No one did. Not wanting to risk losing the extra money, she was forced to make a decision. Changing her lifestyle wasn’t an option, so Carly dragged him behind like a ragdoll from bar to bar in pursuit of chemical induced happiness and a temporary reprieve from the delirium tremors.     During his first year of captivity, dozens of men drifted in and out of Carly’s life. Thankfully, none stuck around long enough for Sean to learn their names. Some of them were relatively harmless, looking for any port in a storm. Unfortunately, most were of the garden variety of abusive assholes. They’d shack up with Carly for a few nights and then the yelling and beatings would start. Once they’d tired of using Carly for a punching bag, they’d come looking for him. Over a short period of time, Sean had accumulated a grotesque roadmap of abuse- cuts, bruises, cigarette burns and broken bones. He’d hide under his bed or in his closet and pray to God to rescue him from this life of misery, but every morning he awoke in the same situation. Sean wondered if there really was a compassionate God in the universe, why had he forsaken him?     He spent the next few years in smoky dive bars that reeked of stale vomit and fresh urine. They were the kind of bars where everything goes and the cops looked the other way for a small donation to the police retirement fund. So no one batted an eye when an underfed nine-year-old went around collecting empty drinks and overflowing ashtrays. In exchange, the bartenders would buy Sean a cup of soup or a sandwich. One night, Sean felt someone behind him staring a hole through him. He whirled around to find an elderly woman sitting in a previously empty corner booth. The same empty booth he’d just passed. Cigarette smoke hung around her like a shadow obfuscating everything but her wraith-like eyes and her gnarled hands shuffling oversized cards. An icy chill ran down his spine as he met her piercing gaze. Sean did his best to avoid that corner like the plague. Every time he glanced in that direction, her eyes her stalking him like a bird of prey. Quietly staring and shuffling. As the night dwindled on, she ran out of patience waiting for him and beckoned him over with a twisted, crooked finger. Sean vehemently shook his head no, and then she croaked out, “Sean. Come here.” Sean hesitated but his feet moved on their own inching towards her. Sean fought with every ounce of his willpower but she pulled him like a moth to a flame. She spread the cards face down across the table.     “Hello Sean,” she rasped. Her ancient face was lined and wrinkled from unknown decades of hard living. Her steel-grey hair was wrapped up in a tight bun atop her head.     “H-how’d you know my name?”     “Sit. I’ve been sent to give you something and I’m running out of time.”     He stared up at her, afraid to get any closer.     “I haven’t come all this way just to hurt you. Now stop this foolishness at once,” she commanded.     Sean meekly climbed up on the chair across from her.     “Sean,” she said and ran her fingers over the cards, “You have great potential.”     He stared at the cards because he couldn’t meet her soulless eyes.     “I can only start you on the path.”     “Path?”     Her gnarled fingers separated three cards from the spread and slid them in front of him.     “The Blasted Tower.” She flipped the first one over to reveal a picture of a crumbling medieval castle. “The Devil,” she flipped the next showing a picture of a large dancing goat. “The Magician,” she flipped the last card to reveal a young man kneeling at the edge of a big circle with a star inside. Inside the star was a tongue of flame. He stared at the tarot cards in awe, “What does this mean?” When he looked up, she was gone. The only thing left were the three cards and a haze of smoke.     “Sean!” Carly screeched from across the bar. “We’re leaving,” she slurred and stumbled out into the night, hugging onto Mr. Right Now. Sean hesitated then snatched the cards off the sticky table and chased after his aunt.      Sean managed to get through the next few years reasonably unscathed. He attributed his newfound good fortune to those three tarot cards, which he kept in a zip lock bag to protect them from the elements. Just as they had protected him. Sean would keep them in his pocket whenever he left the confines of the apartment. When Carly drank herself into a coma, which was every weekend she could, Sean would sneak off the library. He read every book he could find on the subject of tarot and the occult. Although, it had a sparse selection, he was able to gain rudimentary education on the esoteric arts.     By his freshmen year of high school, he’d scrounged up enough money to buy a tarot deck and a few books on witchcraft. During his sophomore year, he did everything he could to fit in to the cutthroat world of high school popularity, for he had fallen for Mandy, the head cheerleader. But, no matter what he did, he couldn’t break out of the poverty stricken, geek caste he was forced into. Sean performed several tarot divinations for guidance on this matter and they all told him that it was not the right time to act. Over the next few weeks, Sean ran out of patience and took matters into his own hands. He delved into his books and put together an attraction spell from a mish-mash of sources. He’d never done one before so he employed the three cards for extra luck. He did everything right, so he thought. The spell was done outside in the day and hour of Venus using three green candles. Then he waited and dreamed of and lusted after her from afar.     The morning of Halloween, he awoke and felt that the day had finally come. So he decided to divine for guidance to make sure. Instead of his normal tarot spread, he shuffled in the original cards and drew only three cards face down. He closed his eyes and turned each one over, and then hoping with every fiber of being, he slowly opened his eyes. Sean’s heart stopped when he saw the original cards laid out before him—the Blasted Tower, The Devil, and The Magician. Tears of joy rolled down his emaciated cheeks and he said a heartfelt prayer of gratitude. He put on his favorite black shirt and well-worn corduroys and slipped the cards in his pocket.     When he got to school, the student body was buzzing with news that Mandy and her boyfriend, Zach, the captain of the football team, had broken up. “Gods be praised,” Sean whispered. He’d planned and rehearsed what he was going to say to her at least a hundred times in his head. But when he saw her standing at her locker, his mind froze. He took several deep breaths to ease the anxiety, and rubbed his sweaty hands on his cords. Sean pushed out his scrawny chest the best he could and approached her with the swagger and coolness of a dead fish. When he was close enough to smell her perfume, he tripped over his own feet and spilled out across the hall behind her. Sean scrambled back to his feet as she looked at him with those beautiful hazel eyes. “Mandy?” He could feel and hear his blood pumping. Panic set in and he blurted out, “Will you go to the prom with me?” Time stopped and he forgot how to breathe. Mandy turned her nose up at him. “Eewe! No!” You are so gross! Get away from me!” She turned and walked away laughing at his expense.     Crestfallen and heartbroken, he slumped against the lockers and went over everything in his head, trying to figure out what went wrong. Then Zach turned the corner and punched him in the stomach. Sean doubled up, fell to his knees, and was thankful for not having money for breakfast. “I’m going to beat the shit out of you after school, dork!”     All throughout the day, he tried to discern what went wrong but couldn’t figure it out. So he plotted out a different way home to hopefully avoid running into Zach. Then he skipped his last class and snuck out early to avoid getting his brains beaten in. The new route was longer, but well off the beaten path. He zigzagged through burned out and dilapidated buildings to arrive at the halfway point, the abandoned train station. He stopped for a minute to catch his breath and take in the unfamiliar surroundings.     The train station had been a major thoroughfare decades ago when major industry flourished in the city. But when the plants closed and moved to other cities, there was no need to keep this station alive. So it was closed and boarded up. The two-acre plot behind it was comprised of a warehouse and several smaller storage units fell into decay and disrepair and was fenced off. Sean tried to peek through cracks in the boards to get a glimpse inside the station when the slate-gray October sky unleashed a frigid downpour on him. “Shit!” he exclaimed, and rattled and pounded on the locked doors in vain. Within seconds, he was soaked to the bone. “Dammit!” he screamed out in frustration. Of all days, why today he asked.     He hung his head and began the second half of his waterlogged, arduous journey home. The rain came down in sheets now. Water squished between his toes with every step. He sloshed through puddles and piles of dead autumnal leaves. The once-proud and majestic oaks looked meek and embarrassed, unable to conceal their naked vulnerability; having shed their once-bright yellow and fiery ochre coats. His teeth chattered and goosebumps rioted along his skin. Sans coat, he empathized with the unprotected trees as the cold October wind buffeted him.     Behind him, Sean heard the squeal of tires breaking on wet pavement and whipped around. Zach and three other football players emptied out of a late model sports car. Each of them easily outweighed Sean by eighty pounds. A lead weight of fear lodged in his belly. “Thought you were going to get away?” Hatred and malice beamed from Zach’s eyes. “Oh shit!” Sean exclaimed and broke pell mell for the fence. He reached the razor wire-topped fence to cries of “You’re dead geek!” Sean hopelessly searched for a hole in the fence but couldn’t find one. He glanced over his shoulder; they were only a short distance behind him and closing fast. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Sean dug his fingers into the rusted, diamond segments and climbed to the top but hesitated at the razor wire. Then a hand clamped onto his pant leg and Sean envisioned them pulling him down and beating him to death. So he reached into the razor wire coils and pulled himself out of their reach, cutting his hands and arms to ribbons. He flipped over the fence and ran as fast as he could into the heart of the storage area.     Sean heard the rattle of the fence behind him as he snaked through derelict buildings leaving a trail of blood in his wake. His hands were torn wide and deep and a rivulet of blood ran down his left arm, where he must have nicked an artery. His lungs burned and black spots dotted his peripheral vision. He’d have to stop running soon, but needed somewhere to hide. Then he saw it – the Blasted Tower!     The derelict warehouse had been built with red and brown bricks, opalescent windows and a massive set of steel doors. Through the years, the bricks had accumulated a patina of grime and black mold. Most of the windows had been shattered and the doors were tagged with assorted gang paraphernalia. Sean dug into his pocket, winced as he exasperated his wounds, and pulled out the three cards. He extracted the tower card from the bag and held it up for comparison. So, he reasoned, this is where I’m supposed to go.     Strewn about its perimeter was a kaleidoscope of broken bottles; shards of green, brown and clear glass cracked and echoed from under his feet. He did his best to minimize the noise by not stepping on the larger pieces. A ruffle of feathers from above drew his attention. He looked up to see a murder of crows standing sentry along the crenelated rooftop like petite feathered gargoyles. Dozens of bright-orange eyes peered down at him with contempt. He put a bloody finger to his lips in askance of their continued silence, but his luck ran out and in unison, they let out a series of “caws.” “Fuck!” Sean whispered, stared daggers at them and silently cursed their existence. “He’s over here!” Zach yelled and spiders of panic pounced into Sean’s brain. Catcalls and high-pitched hyena laughter filled the damp air. Sean scrambled to the steel doors, but his heart sank into his stomach when he saw a rusted and padlocked chain barring his entrance. He slumped against the door and was about to let blood loss and exhaustion take him under when he saw his salvation. One of the ground floor windows was broken, leaving just enough room to crawl inside. The sound of crackling glass announced that he had company, so he quickly darted under the guillotine of broken glass.     The warehouse smelled moldy, of stagnant water, of rot and decay. The sparse illumination came from a single florescent tube light hanging from the ceiling. The sickly pale luminescence cast monstrous shadows of broken train engines, axels and gutted seats onto the walls. Rain cascaded through the gaping holes in the ceiling, creating oily black puddles on the floor. “I think he went in here,” Zach said and kicked out the window Sean used. The icy fingers of death closed in around him as more of his blood escaped from his body. He glanced around and saw his only possible sanctuary – the gaping maw of a stairwell descending into the bowels of hell, probably.     With the last of his reserves, he pushed to towards the stairwell. Half loping, half running, he slipped and tumbled down the steps, landing in a shallow pool of stagnant, brackish water. The pain was immediate and intense, but thankfully no jagged stabbing pain of a broken bone. A miniscule bulb encased in a wire cage flickered above him casting light onto a steel door next to him. Sean got to his hands and knees when windows shattered and voices echoed through the warehouse. Zach and his crew were relentless. Their riotous laughter and murderous howls further solidified their intentions.     Bleeding, sopping wet and almost dead, Sean threw his body into the door with reckless abandon. Its rusted hinges screeched from ages of unused, but the door swung open. He winced at the sharp noise and sprawled into the pitch black room. Footsteps slapped the stairs behind him and Sean frantically pushed and leaned into the door. It clanked closed behind him, sealing him in a dark tomb. Sean slumped down against it; hands and feet pummeled it but its thickness buffered their attacks. His short, pain filled life flashed before him and he wept like never before. The end was near. He took out the tarot cards and ran his diced fingers across them one last time, leaving steaks of blood across each one. He whimpered while tears ran down his face. A merciful darkness washed over him, blotting out his consciousness and stealing his breath.     The blood soaked cards fell from his hands and fluttered to the floor. When they kissed the floor, a brilliant white spark jumped into the air. Then a pinprick of light sputtered to life in the center of the room. It expanded into a tongue of flame then grew exponentially, until it was a raging column over five feet wide and touched the ceiling. A glossolalia choir cut the silence and impregnated the room. Sean’s wounds stopped weeping and he felt the icy grip of death release him. His breath returned to him and he gasped and pried open his swollen eyes. He looked down at his hands and arms, which were healed, leaving only a slight scar here and there. “What the fuck?”     The column of fire exploded, sending spurts and gouts of fire across the empty room. Sean shielded his eyes and was assaulted by the stench of offal and burning flesh. It was so potent that his stomach churned and bile caught in his throat. Sean looked up and saw a tall, alabaster Goddess, beautiful beyond comparison standing naked in the center of the pentagram etched into the floor. She was perfect in every way, until she approached and he noticed a pair of small, bone-colored horns poking out from under her silken, white-blond hair. Then he saw her scythe-like claws and cloven hooves. “Magician,” she purred, “What is thy bidding?” Her sensual voice made him weak in the knees and strong elsewhere. Sean stared agape for what seemed like an eternity then managed, “What?” He couldn’t take his eyes off her and ran through hundreds of erotic fantasies.     She strutted closer. The sound of her hooves click clacking on the concrete snapped Sean from his lust filled trance. She smiled and showed off sharp canine fangs that gave her an otherworldly seductiveness. The sensual heat she produced was stifling. “You called me?”     “Did I? How?” Sean stammered.     “You caught my attention with that attraction spell.”     “But that was for Mandy...”     “Magician, you are more powerful that you realize,” she smiled again, “Would you rather have her or me?” With that, she raised an eyebrow and ran a clawed finger between perfect breasts that defied gravity. Sean blushed and averted his eyes, she giggled at his embarrassment. “You are cute,” she said and reached out towards him when a red spark burned her hand. She glared at the lines of the confining pentagram and let out a guttural, demonic growl of frustration that reverberated off the walls.     Sean scrambled back from the pentagram and pressed himself against the door. “I will not hurt you, man-child, unless you want me to.” She smiled again and leaned toward him. Sean stared into her ink black eyes and shook his head “no.” She sighed and strutted around the confines of the pentagram.     “Fate drew you here with those cards,” she pointed to them with a clawed finger. “This pentagram and your...” she hesitated as if tasting the words then purred out, “blood,” and licked her lips.     “Eons ago one of your ancestor bound me into servitude. Every generation of your lineage has an opportunity to call upon me on All Hallows Eve using those cards.”     “But I didn’t mean to,” Sean argued.     “Yes, well you were about to die and I am bound to protect you until you have made your request of me,” the succubus said matter of factly.     “What?”     She sighed again. “I stopped you from dying from those wounds. Consider yourself extremely lucky. I am bound to grant you one Earthly bound request.”     “You’re like a genie?”     “Do I look like a jinn?” she snapped.     “Well, no more like a porn star,” Sean replied.     She smiled with otherworldly seductiveness, “sex?”     Sean shook his head “no” and she pouted at him.      “Can you bring back my parents?” he blurted out.     “No. Their souls have moved on, besides that would be beyond my capabilities.”     Sean sadly exhaled and said, “Ok.”     “So. What will it be? Money? Fame?”     “Gimme a few minutes, ok?”     She rolled her eyes, shook her head, “Whatever.”     Sean contemplated what he’d read about a demon’s abilities.     “I could arrange a night with this... Mandy,” she said while admiring her claws.     “That’s quite alright,” Sean said while looking at his hands. “I almost died from that endeavor.”     “True,” she replied.     Sean thought long and hard, and then it came to him. A wolfish grin crept across his face while he stared at her.     “What?” she asked with a look of surprise.     As Sean informed her of the request, her eyebrow arched. “Man-child,” she said, “I have never heard such a request in all my years.”     “So is it a deal?”     She paused, “Man-child, are you sure?”     He nodded and said, “yes” with total confidence.     They discussed the details of his request; when they were done, she called up another column of fire with a series of hand gestures and phrases in some ancient language. She glanced over her shoulder with a smile and said, “I suggest you stay here tonight for your safety. Until then...” Then she stepped into the flame and was gone. In the morning, Sean safely made his way home.     Months later, there was a knock at the apartment door. Carly, half-drunk stumbled to the door, unlocked the puzzle of locks and pried it open. The succubus was wearing a slinky, tight fitting black evening gown replete with black stiletto heels. All visage of her being a demon were concealed. “Sean!” Carly screamed, “There’s a very expensive-looking call girl here. Where did you get the money for her?” Sean emerged from the bathroom wearing a rented tuxedo, holding a corsage. He pushed past his aunt, “That’s not a call girl. She’s my prom date.”

No Bull Ray Kemble     Nothing happens. Then something happens.     From the cabin’s porch I can see all there is to see, from the pale green flatness of the Guinn Valley where this cabin sits, to the tumble of pine-forested hills at the valley’s far end, to the towering peaks of The Continental Divide some twenty miles distant. The cabin is our rented Heaven, the cabin and its prospect of the big Guinn Valley, our taste of the Genuine West. To this transplanted New Yorker’s eyes and to the eye’s of my life partner, this is the West the way it should be: wild, muscular, humbling in its vastness.     Sitting on the weather-bleached wooden porch on this, a visit without my partner, I take mental snapshots of sights I am seeing for the first time. There, to the left, Mt. Neva, thirteen thousand feet. Neva, the southernmost summit of those visible, is a ragged mountain, displaying with seeming indifference a drape of early snow. And there, to the right, Mt. Bancroft. The northernmost of the big peaks in view, Bancroft is loftier than Neva by a few hundred feet, but round shouldered, blunt. Between Neva to the south and Bancroft to the north a half dozen sister summits vie for secondary dominance. Together they make a towering wall separating our piece of the Genuine West from the world beyond.     I can see below the peaks that make up The Divide, in the middle distance, what seems an equally formidable barrier of forested hills. It is into this lush cul-de-sac of hills that the Guinn Valley vanishes, some ten miles from where I’m sitting. Before it vanishes, though, between here and the hills, the Guinn Valley narrows until at its last visible point it is no longer a valley but a tight-shouldered canyon.     I look down from taking mental snaps of the peaks, hills and valley, and at the book on my lap, Patrick Kavanagh: Selected Poems. The book is one of those delicate Penguin paperbacks, its pages yellowed to a venerable frailness. I’m careful to protect the pages from the valley gusts that hit without warning. It even has, this old Penguin paperback, if you lift it to your nose, the scent of age.     I’m reading Kavanagh’s “The Self-Slaved,” transfixed by the first eight lines:     Me I will throw away.     Me sufficient for the day     The sticky self that clings     Adhesions on the wings.     To love and adventure,     To go on the grand tour     A man must be free     From self-necessity.     The poem throws me to the mat. Me I will throw away/Me sufficient for the day. Have I the courage to discard myself — my old self — to toss aside everything that’s held me together all of my adult life, to look for a new life? Recently retired, my insides are crawling with doubts about my ability to start over, my guts to start over. Am I sufficient for the day? I’m not so sure. To go on the grand tour/A man must be free/From self-necessity. But I’m filled with self-necessity. I’ve been stockpiling it for years. Can I possibly rid myself of self-necessity? Now, at 67, can I do it? A breeze pulls at the page and I look up.     I spot the two snake-like features that follow the length of the Guinn Valley. One is nature-made, the other man-made.     Jasper Creek is the nature-made feature. The creek claims headwaters high in the lap of Mt. Bancroft, dropping precipitously from its birth-pond, through the hills at the mountain’s feet and into the Guinn Valley near where the valley becomes a canyon. From there, Jasper Creek zigzags east, a roiling stream of virgin water carrying fragments of the Guinn Valley away forever.     The man-made feature coursing through the valley is one-track Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway. Largely rusted-over, the track is relied on only when BNSF’s heavily trafficked mainline in the neighboring valley is overburdened.     Both creek and track are “down the hill,” a few hundred yards from the cabin. Nearer of the two is the BNSF track, cutting a straight path through the tall valley grass. Just beyond and almost hidden in a rocky depression of its own making is the creek. Hidden through in may be, its bubbling Whoosh! is ever in the ear.     We’ve rented this cabin, my partner and I, without a rental agreement, without even so much as having met the owner. My partner’s neighbor had been the previous renter, and when the neighbor found it necessary to move back to Iowa, she arranged with the owner, by letter, to have my partner and me take over the rental. So, as I sit here on this, a solo visit to the cabin (my partner having to stay in the city), I’ve yet to meet the owner.     The owner is not only the owner of the cabin, but also the owner of ninety-nine percent of the Guinn Valley. In a larger sense, the owner is not an individual but the Carr family, one of the state’s patriarchal families, a cattle ranching family with roots in the 19th century, whose major acreage lies outside of the mountains. The Guinn Valley with its average elevation of 9,000 feet is the Carrs’ late summer pasturage, when grass in the high country is generally more plentiful than that down below.     I know that local spokesperson for the Carr family is the eldest son, Bob Carr, a man my partner and I are looking forward to one day meeting.     The breeze subsides. I’m drawn back to the page. To go on the grand tour. Have I been on my grand tour? Is it all stay-in-place from here on out? And if I’ve already been on my grand tour, when was that? What was it like? Was it all it should have been?     A mechanical sound distracts me. The sound of an engine, an internal combustion engine, not a smooth-running one. It seems out-of-place in the valley. I close the Kavanagh and look up.     A pickup truck has entered my part of the valley. At first a long ways off, it continues to mow through the tough grasses, coming my way. Its driver is steering an evasive course, dodging concealed chuckholes, nonetheless, all the while coming closer. When within a hundred yards, the driver is visible, at first a silhouette, two hands on the steering wheel. I’m able to see him bounce with each undetected chuckhole, up and down, side to side. Closer still, I can see other silhouettes in the truck’s cab: dogs, two or three maybe, perched and lurching round and round on the cab’s bench seat. The truck now only a hundred feet off, the driver and his dogs distinct, I stand. With a metallic shudder and a long sigh from the engine, the truck stops. I’m waist-pressed against the porch rail.     “Hello,” I call, as the truck’s door creaks open. “Hello there.”     The driver emerges, awkwardly, carefully, one leg at a time. The dogs spit past him, bound, barking in my direction. “Stop it!” the driver, both feet on the ground, yells. His thumb adjusts his peaked cap. The dogs though pay no attention; they collect before the porch, barking their defiance. The driver takes a first few stiff steps toward them. His legs are acutely bowed, making even a few steps a careful movement. His face is tipped down, his whole head nods from side to side at each step. Then he turns about to face me. He laughs a shy man’s laugh, hesitant but friendly. “Yes’m,” he says, and then takes one more step toward me.     “Bob? Bob Carr?”     Again the laugh, “Yes’m,” with a quick side to side shuffle of his boots, an even quicker adjustment (imperceptible) of his peaked cap (the words “Tony’s Petroleum” embroidered on the crown), a tug of belt loops, a sweep of both hands down well-worn jeans, and in a half-second the extension of a friendly hand. “That’s me.”     “I’m Ray. Glad to meet you, Bob. I was hoping we’d meet before too long.”     “Yes’m, well, yes’m,” and after an earnest handshake, a second quick touch to the cap’s peak, this time with a slight lift, a gesture of howdy-do. “Me too, yes’m.”     It looks to me Bob Carr is not a big talker. I decide to go first. “Would you like some coffee? It’s hot.” It’s hot? I felt like I’d said a stupid thing. Of course, the coffee is hot.     Bob Carr shies, shuffles again, grins a grin. “Oh, thanks, no, I’ve had plenty.”     The dogs are at my feet, ill-at-ease, two staring up at me, the third trying to insert its muzzle under my pants cuff.     “Sure, okay. Well, let me say first off ‘thanks’ for leasing to us. This is going to be great fun. It’s beautiful up here. I mean, just look. Especially for us city folk.” I figure folk is the right word. “What wonderful country. What a change from home. We’re really going to enjoy it up here.”     “Yes’m,” is all Carr says, although he pumps his head vigorously, in effect concurring: Yes, this is wonderful country.     He doesn’t look back, though, at the country. He doesn’t need to. He knows this country. It is his backyard, his workshop. He knows it is beautiful, but working it every day — moving cattle from pasture to pasture, bringing in strays, restringing barbed wire fences — makes an extra look unnecessary.     The dogs, too, are now displaying their nonchalance, having decided I’m not an intruder needing to be bitten hard. They’re exploring the ground immediately around the cabin in ever-widening, muzzle-down circles.     “Yes, well, we’re really appreciative,” I say.     “Any problems?” Bob Carr asks.     Problems? What does he mean? Cattle rustlers? Marauding Indians? Dangerous banditos? “Problems?” I say. “No. No, I don’t think so. No, no, everything is just great. No problems.”     “Good.”     “How often are you up here, Bob? I mean, your main ranch is down on the ‘flats,’ isn’t it?”     Answering takes second place to bringing in the dogs. “Red, get back here. Pecos, Rodeo, don’t go running off.” Bob calls his dogs. They pay no mind. They dart and sniff the rough pasture grass in ever far-reaching circles.     “Oh, I’m up here a couple a days a week, I guess. Keeps a guy busy, yes’m.”     “Lots of chores, I’ll bet.” Chores. Another good choice. “What’s got you busy today, Bob?” I’m curious, what does a man do when all he owns — land, livestock, roads, creeks — and dogs — seem to get along just fine without human interference.     “Oh, this and that. Got a gate up that way,” he says, a snap of his thumb over his should. “Fixed it.” Just then he spots something behind me he doesn’t like. “Pecos, dammit!” Then to me, “Sorry,” he says. “Dogs. Can’t let them run wild.” He looks to his pickup. “I should leave you alone. Yes’m,” he says, and starts a slow turn.     “Oh.” I’m at a loss. This is a true Western meeting, I imagine, a first meeting between property owner and property renter. I feel the need to say more, something, some closing flourish. “Say, Bob, look, if ever I can help you, you know, lend a hand — anything — you’ll ask, won’t you? I may not know much about this sort of work, you know, but I know I can do something. Anything. I’m willing to help. I’d like to help. I want you to know that.”     Bob Carr stops shifting and turns back. No swipes of the peaked cap. His hands relax at his sides. He seems curiously touched. “Yes’m, well, thanks. Yes’m, thanks.”     And with that he taps his cap’s peak and turns again to go. He calls his dogs. “Red, Rodeo, Pecos, come on, let’s go!” The dogs, somehow knowing he means business, snap up, look in Bob’s direction. They vault in unison across the meadow toward the pickup. Carr hobbles in the same direction. He opens his driver’s door, and, at that, one, two, three the dogs leap in. They snuffle to the passenger’s side.     I am expecting Bob Carr to climb in and drive off. He doesn’t. He stands there beside the door. I see him lift his cap, rub his scalp, then resettle his cap and turn to me, his eyes downcast.     “Well,” he says in a slow, shy way, “maybe there is.”     “Yes?” I say. There’s a beat during which neither of us speaks.     “I dunno,” Carr says.     “No, really, anything,” I say. Another beat.     “Well . . . “     “Yes?” I say.     “ If you have the time,” Carr says. “Maybe an hour?”     “Heck, yes, Bob, I can give you an hour. I’m just sitting here. Just reading.”     “Well, if you’re sure.” He remains looking down, shifting slightly. Accepting an offer of help, it appears, is a surrender of sorts. Then, “It wouldn’t take more’n an hour.”     “That’s fine.” I’m honestly excited. “Should I lock up the place?” I ask. Without waiting for an answer, I turn back, pull the cabin door tight and snap the lock. Before I do, though, I place the Penguin Kavanagh safely inside. I leave the thermos on the porch. I’ll be back in an hour, after all, as Carr has said, maybe less. I divert to my car — I’m moving fast — and pull a pair of working gloves from the trunk. I’m not sure what Bob and I are off to do, but I figure working gloves, with working gloves I’ll be ready for anything.     I approach Bob at his pickup. “So what are we going to do?”     He looks at me squarely for what seems like the first time. “I’ve got this bull,” he says.     “A bull?” I say, with an obvious question mark. A bull? I’m embarrassed for making it a question. “A bull,” I say with a good, solid downward inflection. To punctuate it, I slap my gloves against my leg.     “He’s dead,” Carr says next.     “Dead?” Dead? I’d done it again. I repeat myself, quickly, “dead.” Period.     Bob steps back and perches sideways on the truck seat. “Yes’m, he been dead for a while. I been meaning to get up here and bury him. I could use a hand, if you’ve got the time.”     “No problem,” I say with a snap, suggesting I’d buried bulls before. I point to my car. “Should I follow you?”     “No,” Carr says, twisting into the truck. He gestures toward the passenger side. “Hop in.” He turns to the dogs, “Make room, dammit. Settle down.”     Climbing up into the passenger’s seat, I slide into a near impenetrable tangle of dogs, machine manuals, parts catalogues, Styrofoam cups, lengths of rope, fast food sacks, and assorted tools. The dominant of the dogs insists on pride of place, climbing onto my lap. He watches through the dust-streaked windshield, panting hard, as if commanding, Let’s go!     I know I’m safe in Bob Carr’s care, yet there is this odd feeling of being kidnapped. I watch the cabin drift away in the sideview mirror. I have this queasiness knowing I’ve given myself over to a stranger. A cowboy, no less. A cowboy who I’m sure has a couple guns in the truck. Six-shooters. Loaded six-shooters. An armed cowboy who travels in the company of feisty dogs. Dogs who are traveling with their first New Yorker — and who probably don’t like my scent.     I dig through my brain for something to say. “Where is this bull, Bob?” I look at Carr. He doesn’t answer. He continues to smile, though, watching the meadow ahead for hidden drops. The truck’s engine is a deafening growl. I try again, louder. “WHERE IS THIS BULL, BOB?”     He flicks his head, a neck spasm, but still doesn’t look at me. I think he knows I said something, though, because, still grinning as he watches the ground approaching us, he calls out, “WHAT?”     “THE BULL?” I yell.     “OH, YES’M,” he yells back. “HE’S DEAD.” He grips the knob of floor shift and fights the transmission into an angry gear.     “YES, BOB, I KNOW,” I yell. “BUT WHERE?”     “WHAT?”     “THE BULL, BOB,” I repeat. “WHERE?”     “HE’S DEAD.”     We go on like this until we’ve reached the meadow’s terminus, to where the Guinn Valley begins to narrow down. The two dogs at my feet have curled into a breathing, shifting pile. The one called Red, though, keeps his muzzle pressed to the dash, his wiggling rump in my lap. Reaching the end of the meadow, we arrive at a double-gate. Bill climbs out, undoes the double-gate. Proceeding, we rock into the grooved tracks of an old valley road. The going is easier now. I can still see our cabin in the rearward distance, now a Monopoly cube against its backdrop of spruce and pine. The Divide is still up ahead, appearing not much nearer.     The valley is now seriously narrowing down, the hills encroaching. The BNSF track and Jasper Creek, which farther back had paralleled one another at a respectable distance, are taking turns crossing one another. Along with our road, we make a three-strand braid, track over creek, creek under road, road over track. As the landscape is becoming more restricted, I’m thinking we’ve fewer good places for burying a bull.     One more bridging of Jasper Creek and one more thump-thump over the BNSF track and Bob pulls the truck into a mere trace of side road and gears down. We move now at a slower pace. A quieter pace.     “We must be getting close, yes, Bob?” I can say now without yelling.     “Just ahead.”     I begin to imagine the scene: a massive carcass, lying on its side (its back?), the disturbing realization of rigor mortis, legs stiffened at grotesque angles; the onset of corruption, vast sunken patches of bull-flesh, with the tissue ripped in choice places (coyotes?), the exposed meat fetid, gray. Above and around and everywhere, a cloud of flies. And the stench! I’d almost forgotten the stench. I prepare myself for the worst.     Bad as this experience may prove to be, I smile to myself: less than an hour ago I was at our cabin reading poetry, musing on my self-worth, wondering if I was up to the challenge of the years ahead. And now look at me: in a truck driven by a cowboy-stranger, nearing what I’m sure will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience: burying a bull.     “Well . . .” Bob says; then a long, long pause, before “ . . . this is it.” He crushes the brake pedal, twists the ignition key, and with a last bounce we stop. The dogs spring to life: Red down from his crow’s nest with a deep Bring it on! bark; Pecos and Rodeo up, doing cramped circles at my feet. “Dammit, dogs!” Bob shouts, while reaching for a pair of cracked, dirty calfskin gloves. With a rude kick of his elbow he pops open the creaky driver’s door. “Over there,” he points with his chin, then twists out onto the grass.     We’re at a high place, a grassy dike dividing the north bank of Jasper Creek from what little remains of the meadow. The side road disappears here, washed level and overgrown. Ahead is yet another gate, this one looking as though it hasn’t been opened in centuries. The two of us, clutching our working gloves and skipped about by the three dogs, walk forward. Bob undoes the gate latch, an antique affair made of wire and odd shapes of rusted metal, and we go through. Beyond the gate, the ground falls off, the dike is channeled through left-to-right—an arroyo, according to Bob.     “I got ‘im this far,” he says.     I’m guessing the bull is just ahead, in the depression. The arroyo, I mean.     We come to the edge where the ground slides away in a tumble of round stones. What I see is not what I expect. The bull has been dead for a long, long time. What I see are bones, big bones, overlain in places with dried hide, heaped in an elongated mound such that shape and features of a living bull can’t be easily made out. No flies. No stench. Just a motionless pile of old death. “That’s it,” I say, softly—not a question, really, because I know that’s it.     “Yes’m,” Bob Carr says. “He got kinda busted up, me dragging him here, then animals done the rest.”     He eases down the slope toward the pile, using his heels to keep from sliding. I do the same.     “That’s the head,” he says, his toe lifting a plait of dried hide. I see the skull beneath. It’s pitched to one side, the lower jaw gone; a long row of thick upper teeth, an eye socket, empty but for some black detritus. “The rest’s under there,” Bob says, pointing with his boot toward the mound’s high point. “Shoulder, ribs, backbone, legs — we got a whole bull here.”     An honest question grows in my mind. I look at the loneliness of this place, the distance from human traffic, the protection afforded by the arroyo. I consider, too, how long this bull’s been dead. “How come, Bob, you want to bury this bull?” I ask. I’m wondering why here, why now.     Bob nods. He seems to see my question a fair one. He doesn’t answer, though, not right away. He pulls on his gloves and squints around, not at anything in particular — at the far side of the arroyo, at the sky, at his boots. I follow Bob’s eyes to his boots. It’s then I see how the world is slipping into late afternoon, how we’re losing light fast. I’m sure Bob is thinking this, too, that we’d better get on with the work at hand.     I’m thinking this when Bob says, in a measured way, “I bury this bull because I do.” He pauses, then adds, “All we got to do is cover him.” He swings a gloved hand to show the scraps of ranching debris lying in the arroyo, scraps I’d not paid attention to until now: old timbers, sheets of warped plywood, tatters of tarpaper. “We give him a good cover, that’s all,” he says.     The burying goes fast. The scraps make it easy. It seems this particular depression has been a dump-hole for years. We drag worm-tunneled fence posts, mummified lengths of finish lumber, old bleached plywood, discarded hewn beams — every remnant of junked ranch structure we can, singly or together, pull and heft over the bull. We finish with an arrangement of good-sized stones, for weight, a defense against the land-lashing winds that scour the valley. The job, from the first scrap set in place to our tired retreat back to the pickup, takes the short side of an hour.     I reach the pickup a few steps ahead of Bob, whose bent legs make the uphill going a slow pick-and-place affair, one boot here, one boot there. I go right to the passenger door and stop. I look back. Bob has stopped in front of the pickup. He pulls off his gloves, then his cap (I see his buzz-cut hair for the first time). He massages his scalp and then reseats his cap with comical vigor. We stand there, me at the passenger door, Bob at the pickup’s nose, neither of us speaking.     Bob finally breaks the spell with a laugh and a smile. His smile grows until it’s valley-wide. “You done good,” he says. He holds the pose, looks at me squarely, steadily, not shifting about in his usual shy way. “Yes’m, you done good.”     The drive back to the cabin goes fast, or so it seems it does. There’s a residue of daylight — although the setting sun, resting now only inches above the glaciated hump of Mt. Neva, is throwing mile-long shadows over the meadow grass, long dark premonitions of night in the direction we’re heading. We’ve only Red in the cab, a breathing, quiet curl on the seat between us; Pecos and Rodeo have taken to the bed of the pickup for the ride back.     By the time we reach the cabin the sun has sunk below the Divide where it has refracted into a concealed orb of burnt orange light. In a quarter hour the whole of the Guinn Valley is awash in this light. The cabin itself, when we pull up alongside, its west-facing wall is glistening orange. Us, too, as we take leave of one another, we’re awash in orange light. A handshake. A Thanks from Bob, a No problem and See you from me. I climb out. Bob and the dogs roll away. The day’s work done.     When the pickup has cleared the farther gate and disappeared behind a wall of tall scrub, I go about checking things, readying nighttime things so I’ll not have to search about in the dark. When I have supper laid out, my lantern primed with fuel, and my sleeping bag spread in a smooth place, I see I’ve still some daylight left; so, I retrieve the Penguin Kavanagh and settle back on the porch. I have to zip up my vest as the temperature is sinking. I know I’ll not be able to remain outside for long. I return to the page, to “The Self-Slaved,” and read again:     Me I will throw away.     Me sufficient for the day

Goodnight Cassia Gaden Gilmartin     I pull his window closed until I hear it click shut, and then I pull it just a little tighter. I shiver. I’d fooled myself that by shutting the windows I had stopped the cold from reaching him, but I was wrong. The cold is inside already.     “Do you want a hot water bottle?”     My son doesn’t answer. He stares at me, the duvet pulled up to his chin, his eyes the blue-grey of the sea in winter. Like the colour of the ocean when we drove to the beach last week, that day when we found dead things by the water. Starfish turned bone-dry, the same dirty brown as the sand around them, splayed out inches from the rising tide. Jellyfish streaked with purple, torn into shapeless blobs by the waves. A fish tail and a severed head – they didn’t match. One was thin and grey, the other green and bloated. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pretend they came from the same fish.     “Aidan?”     He says nothing. I open the wardrobe. I try not to hear the creak of its hinges, like the sound of something breaking in slow motion. The hot water bottle sits on the highest shelf, the one that only I can reach. I pull it out.     “I don’t want it.” His voice is low, like the sound of a wave gathering, and I want to cry out in protest. He’s only eight years old. When he speaks, he has always sounded excited, his voice high like a girl’s, the words spilling out so fast I can barely hear them.     “You’ll be cold. I’m going to get you an extra blanket.”     I have always kept the pile of blankets in my room, and I can’t remember why. I wonder if he ever wakes up cold while I sleep, if he wishes for the warmth I have kept from him.     “Stay.” His fist grips the duvet until his knuckles turn white. “Just for a little while.”     I sit on the edge of his bed – not so much because I want to as because the strength has fallen out of me. “You said you didn’t want to talk about it.”     “I don’t.”     I reach out and flick the switch on the lamp beside him. As a little boy, he always wanted it turned on. He thought monsters were hiding in the dark. Now, I know he doesn’t need it. But he says nothing as its light surrounds us.     I look into his eyes and think of Nadia. Her sad smile, the faded pink of her shirt. The graze where her cheek hit the wall, a deeper pink streaked with red, and her eyes the same blue as his. The way, when I asked him last night what had made him want to hurt her, he couldn’t remember her name.     I dreamed last night that I was Nadia and I was falling. The world seemed to flip upside down as he shoved me, as my hands reached out in the wrong direction in an attempt to save myself. When my face hit the wall I felt the wound open, felt the rough pattern of the bricks pierce through my skin. The bricks of a wall we had leaned against for years, at the edge of our school playground. I’d never expected him to hit me. He had called me fat and ugly, he’d called me a nerd and a loser, but now I felt uglier than ever before.     “It’s five past ten. You need to get some sleep.” We should both be sleeping, but I can’t. I’m wide awake and already I can’t stop dreaming. Tonight the colours will be brighter, the pain sharper than yesterday. I know I will relive the same nightmare. We have to talk to the principal tomorrow. She is twice my age, and wears her hair scraped back in a bun, so tight it looks like it must hurt her. She’ll expect me to be angry. I’m not angry. I don’t have the energy for that.     Last week at the beach he kept tossing stones at a starfish. I told him it was already dead, but he wouldn’t listen. The noise of the pebbles hitting its body was like stone against stone – the pebbles rebounded, as if they’d hit something harder than they were. I had no idea death could turn a creature so hard. All I could do was stare up at the clouds above me. They flew past as if racing towards some unseen destination. I imagined they could take me with them.     But we’re not floating in the clouds or on the ocean; we’re not listening to the crash of waves breaking or breathing in the scent of saltwater. We’re here, in his dark bedroom, and the air stinks of dust.     “You have to sleep.” I know I’ve said it already, but that feels like an age ago.     “You, too.”     I watch his eyes bore into mine. I see him take in my matted hair, the shadows beneath my eyes. A shadow crosses his face, as if it has passed from me to him. Sympathy deepens the frown lines etched into his skin. I almost reach out to touch him, to smooth them away, but I don’t. I know he would hate me for it.     “Is Dad still coming on Saturday?”     “Of course he is.” This time, he’ll come. I have to believe he will. It was Aidan’s birthday last week, and he promised he’d bring a present. Something like the train set he brought last year, with its grey foldaway tracks, which he said had been his own as a kid even though the box was still covered in plastic. It made Aidan’s face light up.     When Aidan speaks again, his voice has shrunken. “You’re going to tell him, aren’t you?”     “Not if you don’t want me to.” The words surprise me, but since I’ve spoken them, they are the truth. Tonight, I won’t lie to him.     “Okay. We can go to sleep now.”     As if he were the parent and I the child, I stand to obey. On my way to the door, I think of the blanket I have yet to fetch for him. He doesn’t need it. I will leave it in my wardrobe, let it gather one more layer of dust.     “Goodnight.” Don’t let the bed bugs bite, I used to tell him, but they will. They’ll eat him alive, disfigure him, as they have these last few weeks, and I’ll try to love the new boy who greets me in the morning. I’ll try harder than ever before.     At the beach last week I saw seaweed drifting by the water’s edge. It had caught on a rock and clung on for hours, tugged back and forth by the waves. But as we turned to go home, it finally came away.     I breathe in and turn away. I shiver. And I close the door behind me.

Looking Inside a Car on a Winter Sunday Robert Heath Looking inside a car on a winter Sunday is Exorcism and deep and biting as any snow Drifting off of the Peaks like crystalline Blankets Laid out to cover everything except the truth Its only when you have nothing, you notice that Everything is owned. Walk amid the clamour of near Christmas Shoppers giddy in a whirl of purchase Like it was a drug and you are Invisible Indivisible As wanted as a chipped mug. Always left in favour of something else You want to know who your friends are? Try being homeless or going to prison Or failing that a mental asylum See who turns up in The magnesium glare of your nadir See who is not Too busy Or on the cusp of a meeting Or just about to partake of dinner And they have had a hard week and You know how it is? Maybe next time – yeah? And they wonder why you drink. Why you hit needles in your arm. Why you try to make it all go away. Ever been to a shelter to be told you can have a bed So long as you don’t drink And tell the guy on the desk that you drink Because you literally have nothing and it hurts And then watch his thin, implacable smile As you realise it’s a no. “Come back when you are clean buddy” Chicken and egg they call it I call it being pissed on and left to rot. So looking in cars on a winter Sunday is exorcism and God. A moment reflecting on an inner sanctum The brief ecstasy of somebody else’s world A world free from the cloying ache of want And whatever ills befall its owner It’s not this Sitting in doorways and drinking Yourself to death Fuck, how you imagine yourself in that car Hands on the wheel like it was girl’s ass Just lording it up as you see the you You thought you could be, An owner of things, A doer A success of sorts And you dream your dreams and hold time still But fleeting Like clasping water in your cupped hands Until a voice rises behind you A siren of the fates “Hey – get the fuck away from my car you fucking dirty piece of shit”

A Man at a Counter Nathan C. Zackroff     “Do you have any of that maple bread,” he said, pointing his finger forward.     “I am afraid we are all out today Mr. Fredrickson.”     He cupped his hand around his mouth and eyed the stacks of bread behind the counter like books in a library. The choices overwhelmed him: marble, pumpernickel, wheat, rye. His finger extended towards one but quickly retracted back to cover his mouth.     “So you have none of that maple today?” he spoke muffled through his hand.     “None left I’m afraid.”     He rolled his shoulders forward and retrained his eyes. A line was beginning to form behind him. He lowered his hands to the ends of his tattered scarf and shuffled it back and forth across his neck. The thin piece of cloth flossed across his neck as if it might unravel due to the small amount of friction.     “Maybe I’ll try the rye,” his eyes now fixed upon the loaf.     “Good choice Mr. Fredrickson,” he smiled as the young bread baker reached for the loaf on the lower shelf.     The waving of Mr. Fredrickson’s hand stopped him.     “No, not the rye, not today,” his hand retracted again to his mouth. His eyes searched somberly.     “What about the sourdough? It’s fresh,” the baker vowed.     “How fresh?” Mr. Fredrickson’s eyes remained fixed on the bread behind the counter.     “Just out of the oven sir.” The line grew two people deeper. The Impatience was obvious.     “No maple though?”     “No maple sir, not today sorry.”     His hands moved from the scarf and his mouth and they reached into his pockets. For a moment they stayed there. He looked cold, the scarf around his neck and his hands tucked into his pockets. You could see his fingers move, his jeans struggling against his effort.     With his right hand he grabbed his left wrist and drew his left hand from his pocket. He opened his palm and ducked his head down close. With his right index finger he moved around a quarter and two nickels. From afar it looked as if he was reading his own palm, his own destiny.     His eyes rolled up from his slouched shoulders and neck. He stared at the baker with vacuousness.     “No maple today then, eh.”     The baker shook his head and leaned to the side to check the length of the line behind.     “Well, maybe tomorrow then.” Mr. Fredrickson closed his hand around the coins and returned them back into his pocket. He turned and stepped away. His hand withdrew back to his mouth and his shoulders and neck never fully uncurled.     “Maybe tomorrow Mr. Fredrickson—probably tomorrow,” the baker announced receiving the next customer’s order.

Film Noir Janet Doggett Lightning strikes and an old oak splits in two. Mother stops ironing; hovers above a badly wrinkled landscape. Dad bangs in the door bringing with him the sweet smell of gardenias. Crosses the den in three long steps. Picks up the screaming phone that is tethered to the wall with a spiral cord. Caroline, with her ebony hair and Snow White face, is dead. Extracted from a pile of twisted metal and broken glass; she survived for two short December days. A Christmas Eve funeral. Ice encapsulates Every rose falling from her casket. That night and for the next 29 years, she speaks to me in dreams. Always sitting in a green-painted, wooden chair. The room, plain and dark, she turns to me: Her face becomes a movie reel, shows details of a life I didn’t know all that well: tent camping on white-sand beaches in France, dancing ballet with grace and fluidity, a tender first time making love, and a rape last year on the Country Club’s freshly mowed lawn. She turns to me and plays for me a Christmas Special: “Things Worse Than Death” The hot, naked paunch of a filthy man suspended over you. The sweat from his hair falling in your eyes, his fluid tacky, pooling on your stomach and inside your ripped underwear, the cool, slick edge of a sharp knife meeting the thin skin at your neck so that you swallow all screams

an Exotic Encounter Mike Brennan     This morning began like any other I had experienced docked in a foreign port during the first year I had been stuck in the prison system which masqueraded as the United States Navy. I awoke around ten in a seedy Thailand hotel room. It had cost me about twenty bucks a night in American currency. I shook off the dregs of last night’s late night booze binge, to enjoy an absolutely perfect bowel movement, a hot shower with a little masturbation included, and a close shave with no nicks or cuts. I dressed slowly, smoked a Camel Light, and drank a cup of instant coffee. My window overlooked the city of Bangkok, which I admired for the strange beauty of the foreign metropolis which seemed like an entirely different realm of existence when compared to my parent’s small-town in bum-fuck, Michigan. I relished the confusion and loved the disparity.     My buddy, Bobby, who I had left the ship on liberty with, was lodged in a separate hotel about a block away. We both chose clever pseudonyms to check in with and arranged to meet back on the ship later on. It made perfect sense since neither of us wanted to cramp each other’s late night festivities and it was an order to have another sailor with you at all times I you wanted to leave the ship at all. My thoughts quickly shifted towards breakfast and where to eat it. I knew there was a McDonalds around the corner and decided fast food would suffice. It was an obvious choice compared to accidently consuming some spicy hot Thai food I might encounter in another restaurant. It also would aid in counteracting the scorching hot dinner and river of whiskey I had consumed the night before. I reached the joint, with some smoker’s cough struggles, and ordered up a plate of hot cakes. It was simply a bit of light food to counteract a throbbing head and quivering stomach. Since drinks here cost only about a U.S. dollar a pop, and a woman’s company cost just barely a bit more, it was quite easy for a red-blooded American male to overindulge.     The meal was enjoyable, but I still had difficulties digesting the pancakes drenched in maple syrup. I left about fifteen minutes later, as I had been savoring my cheap coffee, and absolutely loved the fact that I could smoke inside here and everywhere else I went in this country. In some ways I often found more liberties in strange and often communist countries. Liberties outside of United States customs and morals are my constant goal and drive in life, hence, why I joined the damned Navy in the first place.      I knew I had to drink a Bloody Mary or something similarly vitamin rich to calm my jangling nerves. Of course there was a bar about two doors down, although it wasn’t much more than an umbrella covered cabana surrounded by a half-dozen stools. I walked up, took a seat, and ordered up some medicine just as I have done so many painful mornings before. Five people sat at the bar, but I was the only American, a fact I absolutely cherished. I prefer to be a stranger in a strange land. I concentrated on receiving my vodka and cranberry juice, since they didn’t have tomato juice, and after a downing a couple good swallows, I noticed the beauty sitting across from me.     Her hair was as black as midnight; her skin was as olive as if she had French-kissed the sun with her entire body. She took notice of my obvious attentions and slowly walked over to me.      “You like what you see honey?” she asked with a heavy Thai accent, while licking her lush lipstick laden lips.     “You know it, honey. You really are beautiful,” I responded, wondering how much this encounter was going to cost me. I was a military man after all, and after three weeks at sea, I had money to burn but still didn’t want to lose it all to a manipulative yet attractive whore.     “Do you have a room around here where we can go?”     “Yeah, babe, I got one just down the street.”     “Well, would you like some company?”     “Definitely,” I replied, before she leaned over and kissed me, causing an eruption of excitement in my crotch, as if I was a teenage boy slow-dancing for the first time at the junior high school prom.     I paid for both of our bar-tabs and guided her down the street to my room. As soon as I closed the door, she stuck her tongue down my throat. She slowly undressed me. Finally naked, I pulled her shirt off with little effort, and struggled with the snaps of her bra. I finally got it off and licked at the nipples of her perfectly supple little breasts. She moaned slowly while I fumbled with her mini-skirt. I dropped it down around her ankles and then off her bare feet, and it was then that I noticed the strange bulge in her panties. This woman was a fucking man!     “What the fuck!” I screamed.     “Whatever honey,” she yelled back. “I know you love it baby.”     Without thinking, I picked up the bedside lamp and hurled it at the monstrosity posing as a beautiful woman. I didn’t intend to hit it in the head, but I did, ultimately bashing the left side completely in. I was surprised how I could be so hung-over and still manage to hit an object dead on target. She fell like a thrown stone, bleeding all over my cheap hotel carpet. Fearing that I killed it, I knelt besides it and tried to take its pulse, as the blood oozed everywhere.     Fearing retribution from God, I gave the creature mouth to mouth CPR though it disgusted me to the point of vomiting. It took me about a minute till I realized it was dead. I gave up and decided I needed a drink. I drained the dregs of last night’s Chivas Regal bottle, while staring at the horrific mess I had created.     I took the elevator down to the front desk and told the clerk that I wanted my room for another night. It wasn’t a problem. There were no pending reservations. I paid for it in cash and was extremely thankful that I had initially booked the room under a fake name. It was a rush for me. My ship was setting sail first thing in the morning. I never would have dreamt I would ever want to, but I knew now I was going to get away with murder.     The creaky elevator took me back up to the second floor and I entered the room. I threw the body in the bathtub, and attempted to clean the carpet with some hot water collected in a little white ice bucket. I quickly packed up my meager possessions, catching myself zoning out about the situation during the packing process, and finally realized what I had actually done. I never would have thought I was capable of anything quite like this. All I had with me was a back-pack worth of filthy liquor, ocean spray, and sweat tinged clothing and a small shaving kit. So with what little I was carrying, I knew I wouldn’t draw suspicion from anyone as I was leaving.     I hit the streets running, wandering from bar to brothel to bar and back again, until somewhere close to the stroke of midnight. I found my liberty buddy, Bobby, swaying around drunkenly and talking to a street walker on the main street of the red-light district and told him in no uncertain terms, since it was very obvious that I was way more wasted then him, that I had to get back to the ship so neither of us would get in trouble. We staggered back to the ship and up the gangway as I stumbled along in a haze. He helped me into our divisional berthing quarters and aided me while I tried to get myself ready to sleep. Once in my bunk, I thought about possible fingerprints, DNA evidence, and anything else I could have left behind. I reassured myself with the thought that I had only killed a man that manipulated me, and that this was as accidental a killing as I could possibly imagine. It still wouldn’t work. I thought about how my next five months were going to be sent sailing around the Persian Gulf. It was going to be hot as hell but no one over here would know we were there. This I could be sure of but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the real and eternal hell was awaiting me. I was sorry. I had never been so sorry.     But I knew I would sail away from here in the morning. Karma could kill me but I knew all I could do was sail away from all this...

Mike Brennan Bio     Mike Brennan was born in San Diego, lived in London for seven years, and then spent most of his formative years in Los Angeles. He was an United States Navy Aviation Bosuns Mate Handler 3rd Class(E-4) and served onboard the USS Kitty Hawk and USS Carl Vinson, was stationed in Yokosuka Japan; Pensacola Fl; San Diego Ca; Pearl Harbor Hi; Bremerton Wa; and Norfolk Va. He was honorably discharged from the U.S Navy in 2009 after serving five deployments in support of The Global War on Terrorism. He holds a BS in English and Film Studies, was a Freshman Composition writing instructor at Northern Michigan University, and received his dual MA in English Literature and Creative Writing on May 8, 2012. He has had both poetry and prose appear in The Chiron Review, The Eunoia Review, Down in the Dirt Magazine, and in the Scar Publications anthologies Blood Heart Cadaver and It Was All Preordained. He is currently a founding member and editor for Military Veterans Writers & Artists, and is desperately trying to finish one novel and publish another.

Looking for Other Routes Carol Smallwood Excerpt from Lily’s Odyssey published with permission by All Things That Matter Press     On the way to a dental appointment to stave off seeing strays, I recited one of Aunt Ida’s holy card verses: “The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord shine His face upon you” and since I’d forgotten the rest of it I continued with: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” picturing the church-converted-hospital scene in Gone With The Wind before the huge stained glass window shatters when Atlanta is invaded. I pictured Aunt Ida saying her rosary, the worn pearl beads rattling like bones against wooden pews made of trees once with green leaves or needles.     When waiting in the dentist’s waiting room, I noticed a request in a magazine to take part in a study about child incest survivors. The two other women there were discussing how cleverly Julia Roberts had faked her death to escape an abusive husband in Sleeping with the Enemy. Covers of magazines read: “Be His Very Best in Bed,” “What Men Won’t Tell You.” I recognized the toothpaste advertised on television by a woman in a desert using the last of her water to brush her teeth. After she collapses, the sparkles radiating from her smile attracts the attention of a Tom Cruise look alike overhead. The magazines there were the kinds that women pored because they had models whom never aged—they were constantly being replaced with younger ones representing “today’s look.”     For weeks I thought about participating in the incest survivor survey. My family was the only one I’d ever have and wasn’t the illusion of a good one as necessary as breathing? Yet shouldn’t what happens when it becomes twisted be told to stop churning out women like me? But wasn’t it human nature—men are stronger than women are and the strong have ruled the weak from the beginning of time. And doesn’t the Bible admonish wives to obey their husbands and honor their fathers? But wasn’t there a wider truth that’s corroded by silence?     Muriel Rukeyser might have written that if a woman told the truth about her life “the world would split open,” but I feared I’d hear: “So what? Abuse’s as common as chicken pox, and like the poor will always be with us. You think you can fix the world? Think again, lady.” Still, even if this was so, why not do myself a favor and get rid of the burden of carrying it around? But wouldn’t I always—so what difference would it make?     Aunt Ida’s priest saying, “Accept things the way they are because it’s God’s will,” often came back to me; at times I thought it was solid wisdom, other times the easy way out even though I’ve come across the same idea in other major religions and Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man ended with, “Whatever is, is right.” Did the old women in Aunt Ida’s church still recite rosaries hoping it’d be the one that’d tip the scales for them?     Still, how would I know if I didn’t tell? But wouldn’t I be a snitch, one speaking ill of the dead in the bargain? And if no one cared, wouldn’t that make it worse when I lost my illusion of how things would change when I did? What if no one would have anything to do with me?     And yet, if I didn’t face it, symptoms would continue because they were attempts to get things right—to rescue and thereby feel rescued—to make sure plants had enough room and water to grow so I did.     I read that a little more than one out of ten women in the United States will get post-traumatic stress disorder. But when I got enough courage to ask a physician when I had a physical if it could be what I had, he told me it was what soldiers got—predisposed soldiers because not all returned traumatized.     How much should I tell Mark and Jenny? If they knew wouldn’t it ruin the memory of their father and my adoptive father? Wouldn’t I be angry with them for not taking my side, feel guilty if they did?     But I had a 99.99% certainty that I had post-traumatic stress disorder: it was like finding a hidden picture in one of those children’s puzzles—once you knew where it was, you couldn’t believe you hadn’t spotted it right off. To borrow Betty Friedan’s phrase “the problem that has no name” now had one. I still didn’t accept it all the time because it turned things upside down more than if I’d lived during the time the Copernican Theory became known. But the knowledge that anyone could get it gave me assurance that I hadn’t started out “half-baked.”     In the meantime, I continue to be grateful for Rite Aid greeting cards: new occasions continue to be added even though the parents of girl babies still receive pink cards with “sugar and spice and everything nice”, and boy babies illustrations of toy soldiers with blue drums.     I walk Rite Aid greeting card aisles often when the White Rapids Humane Society I helped start gets too frustrating—times when I thought I’d do as much good cutting out pictures of cats and dogs from magazines. When getting in my car, I talk to myself like I talk to Kitty: “You’re a F-I—N-E girl. Yes, you are. You’re a pret—ty girl. Yes, a pret—ty, pret—ty girl. Aren’t you a pret—ty, pret—ty girl? Yes, yes, you are. My! You ARE a handsome little thing you sw—wee—ty delight. You’re a F-I-N-E girl” And sometimes I liked the way “Sufficient onto the day the evil thereof” rolled off my tongue.     Whenever Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is on TV, I can’t watch it because the snakes trigger the dream of being with Uncle Walt in a dim basement with snakes writhing in and out of me when I was about five. It’s the dream Doctor said “had everything in a nutshell.” I feel his hair tumbling on my face and he uses his pet name for me: “Dolly, this is our secret. If you tell you won’t be my girl anymore.” I concentrate on a narrow shaft of light from a small window, but the more I struggle the more the words suffocate in my throat. I scream so loud that the dust particles in the narrow shaft of light explode; we turn into butterflies and escape through the window.     Because the book reveals so much, when I put the book down my walk is unsteady as if a dentist had exposed nerves to reach deep decay. I walk away surprised that the floor supports me, not unlike when my first grade nun at St. John’s told my class that if we talked the cracks in the worn wooden floor would separate and we’d fall into the fires of Hell.     I keep Trauma and Recovery out where I can see it and touch it, proof that my problem without a name now has one.     When obsessions hit me upon awaking I remember the thickness of the pages, the weight of the book on my lap, the feel of the thick yellow marker in my hand with only a few remaining faint black letters. I have a later edition of Trauma and Recovery in paperback but the hardcover feels more secure. It probably is the security Caroline felt from her worn Bible, the security Aunt Ida hoped I’d have in her authorized Catholic version. The yellow marker’s always by Kitty’s brush and I like the sound it makes capturing words like Virginia Woolf’s: “...the public and private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”     Yes, the places in White Rapids look different from Nicolet City, so fear should elude me like grease on Teflon. Regretfully I can’t say anymore, “Things will be different when I’m out of Nicolet City.”     Still, there must be other routes I haven’t explored and I’d just kept looking.

About Carol Smallwood     Carol Smallwood co-edited Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching (McFarland, 2012) on the list of “Best Books for Writers” by Poets & Writers Magazine; Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing (Key Publishing House, 2012); Compartments: Poems on Nature, Femininity, and Other Realms (Anaphora Literary Press, 2011) received a Pushcart nomination. Carol has founded, supports humane societies.

The Fallen Soldier Harry Noussias     I observed him as I had done so many times before.     He sat with a bottle gulping the wine, GULP, GULP, GULP, with each gulp keeping perfect rhythm with the dripping water from the bridge above him, DRIP, DRIP, DRIP. His Adam’s apple was going up and down with each swallow as if not wanting to emerge from beneath the dirty collar that surrounded it. Who could blame it? But, I wasn’t feeling sorry for him. There is always help available – at a reasonable hourly rate.     He sleeps at his usual spot beneath the bridge in that cardboard box which was once used to ship a refrigerator. I wonder; does the thought of the box’s former function cool him in the sweltering summer heat?     He probably doesn’t smell the stink of the sewer anymore or bother to notice those little whirlwinds of dust that occasionally sweep across the pavement beneath him. He pays little attention to the lone pigeon that always seems to hang around. There used to be hundreds of them. A lot of things used to be.     Maybe it would have been better if a bullet had taken him. Instead he was taken by the bottle. And now he has to forever fight the war over and over again in his own mind with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Is there no rest, not even in his dreams?     Or is it something else? Poverty? Or?     No, it is the war. It’s that god damn war. He is a has been, messed up, discharged soldier. No, he’s more than that. He is a hero. Guys like that can’t stand being called heroes. They think people abuse the term. But, who cares what they think? Who cares about them at all? Maybe I shouldn’t say that. Some people care. There is always help available – at a reasonable hourly rate.     A three legged rat used to come around. He named it Corporal (your guess is as good as mine). He would feed it. But, one day Corporal went out and never came back. The three legged rat met a four legged cat. Corporal died in battle. It is an honorable death to be taken in battle. Battle. Bottle. There’s only one letter difference. One insignificant letter separates honor from disgrace. A lot of things are insignificant.     Off in the distance the ringing of a church bell. It chimes the time. Churches used to be a place for comfort, help and relief. That was before religion evolved into the time clock business. But, to be fair it must be noted that they still offer help – at a reasonable hourly rate.     Soon the evening would arrive and sometime just before the sun sets the street light will come on. In the night the insects will be flying near it. But, the hero won’t see them. His blood shot eyes cannot focus that far.     It is the same old thing, over and over. I got tired of looking and thinking.     I turned my back and lifted my collar not wanting to feel the barely perceptible yet stabbing intrusion of the stench filled breeze. Off I went in silence, trying not to think at all. I set my feet before me tapping the sidewalk beneath me being ever so careful not to step on the weeds growing in the cracks of the cement. Weeds have meaning. It is better that I think about that. Weeds have purpose.     At least I was comforted by the thought that help is always available – at a reasonable hourly rate.

Perhaps Willie Haul What color, shape,         Form of guise today? Irresistible, roguish, persuasion         Well coached in seduction Holds us close         Whispers sweet nothings Hot, moist lips         Linger here, there Trifles with our heart         Absconds with our treats Pray,         Just one question before you leave us Will we see you         On the morrow?

The myth of Snowflakes Ben Macnair So much unused magic lives in Silence, when we hear the quiet clash of ice-bergs. Temporary, monstrous, melting, and gone, before their existence goes unnoticed.

Janet Kuypers reads the Ben Macnair poem the myth of Snowflakes from Down in the Dirt magazine

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading this Ben Macnairpoem in Down in the Dirt magazine live 4/24/13 at the Café Gallery poetry open mic she hosts in Chicago

The Killers Doug Downie     They were four adolescent boys and they were walking down the sidewalk of a suburban street on a gray overcast day. The rain had stopped some hour or two before and the shrubs and hedges drooped with their load of raindrops and the trees dripped with great plocks of water beneath them. Sometimes they walked four abreast with one walking over lawns and another in the street while the other two held the sidewalk, sometimes they walked two in front and two behind, sometimes one fell back, temporarily out of the group. They constantly jostled for position and they constantly goaded and taunted one another.     They were four friends and they knew each other well and this was a familiar journey, with familiar landmarks and familiar activities.     The one on the lawn side of the sidewalk was talking. The walkway cut through a small hill here and he had to walk along the side of the hill with a sort of independent suspension, one leg taking the high side and the other the low side.     “The Dodgers are gonna go all the way! They can’t miss! Sandy Koufax! Drysdale! Maury Wills! Koufax is my man! Did you see him last night on TV? The batters looked like jerks!”     His arms waved about as he talked, he pitched an imaginary ball as he spoke of Sandy Koufax, his hero.     “Aw, they’ll never get by the Yankees!” the tall lanky one said. Dark-haired, walking along the grassy strip between curb and sidewalk (dogshit territory), his bony hand waved off his friend.     “The Yankees? Forget the Yankees!”     Looks were being exchanged though. Up ahead a large and dense privet hugged the sidewalk, saturated with the day’s rain it stood directly in the path of the Dodger fan. The foursome shifted as they came up to it and the Dodger fan found himself on the sidewalk now with Billy in dogshit territory and Earle and Keith in the street. As if by telepathy and before he had a chance to realize his predicament, the other three joined in a robust block, like a 300 pound linebacker to a puny quarterback, sending Jack the Dodger fan sprawling into the dark, green soaking cavern of the privet. The others knew that clambering out of that cold and soggy jungle was even more uncomfortable than being thrown in.     This too was familiar, almost tradition, which made it all the more funny when someone could be caught with their guard down. The other three were falling out laughing all over the place.     “Goddamnit! I forgot again!” Jack bitched.     “Hoo! Hoo!” Billy had fallen onto the street and was rolling around, gripping his stomach with one hand and pointing at Jack with the other. “Hoo! Got you again! Got you again!”     “Yeah, yeah...you’ll get yours Slade.”     It was the mid ‘60’s in a fairly well-off bedroom community not too far from New York City. It was the definitive suburb: a place where people went to escape the crowds, the dirt, the noise, the crime, the general grime and grit of the big city. They went to get a little taste of the country, to have some trees about, and some green, and their little plot of land. But they didn’t want too strong a taste of the country. They wanted their conveniences. They didn’t want the feeling of being overrun by the country any more than they wanted the feeling of being overrun by the city. So they kept migrating and creating their dream homes. And what they got was not much; what they created was a people tied not to the land and not knowledgeable in its ways and lacking a deep reverence of its life. What they also created was a people isolated from the great cultural assets of the great cities of the world. They were an amorphous sort of people, neither here nor there.     But Jack Dugan, Billy Slade, Earle Twig, and Keith Herman knew nothing of this yet, at least not consciously.     Their path had intersected with the railroad tracks and they turned off the street and followed the tracks. Billy’s head was now as wet as Jack’s from the shower he’d gotten when Jack, full of grace, had jumped up and shaken the branch of a soaked sycamore. Keith and Earle walked the rails, seeing how far they could tight rope them. As usual Keith didn’t get very far. He’d teeter along, full of determination, careen forward and fall off the rail, tripping along the ties.     “Stanky (his nickname), you’re so uncoordinated!” Earle couldn’t quite believe this persistent lack of coordination.     “Yeah...well...your mother!” blurted Keith.     No one knew what this was supposed to mean but you used it when you were helpless and needed to be nasty.     On one side of the tracks was the newest housing development, on what had recently been a cornfield. On the other was an avenue of factories and warehouses. On that side of the tracks was a different town than theirs, which you knew if for no other reason than the fact that industry was not admitted into their town.     Up ahead was the overpass where Central Ave. sailed over the train tracks. You could see pigeons flying from under it and returning; the concrete pilings were pelted with their droppings.     Looks were being exchanged.     “Let’s.” said Billy.     “Yeah.” said Jack.      They moved quickly, but not loudly, taking up positions under the bridge, up the slope near the bottom of the roadway. Pigeons were perched all along the girders and cross-struts and posts of the bridge. Jack was the first to throw. He’d been studying Sandy Koufax and he demonstrated his best imitation of the master. His rock sailed straight and true, a fastball that knocked a pigeon off a guy-wire to fall splat on the tracks below.     “Alright!” shouted Billy.     “Yeah, Jack!” from Earle.     “Good shot!” now Keith.     Then Billy threw, with more a quarterback’s technique, trying to grace a stone onto a pigeon’s head. He missed.     “Damn!”     Earle threw side-armed and flattened a bird against the side of a huge I-beam.     “Oooo.”     “Yeah!”     “Ah-ha, ha, ha!”     Keith’s shot fell short, not even reaching within ten feet of the target.     “Jesus, Stanky!”     Pigeons were flying everywhere. Grey and white feathers fluttered to the ground, long stiff ones, small soft ones. The birds would disperse but always come back. The boys would wait.     “Watch me get this one in mid-air!” shouted Jack. Rearing back in full wind-up he threw and missed.     “You’ll never get one on the fly.” said Earle.     “Yes I will.”     “Yaaah!” Billy battle-shouted, pegging a pigeon with a sharp rock. The body fell onto a piling with a small exclamation of red trailing from its beak.     “C’mon, let’s go.” said Keith. They’d killed nine pigeons by this time. It was a record. “Let’s go down to the Black Diamond.”     “Alright.”     “Yeah, let’s get something to eat.”     Jack had one palm-sized stone in the heft of his hand and his eye on one bird about to alight from its perch. The bird flew, its wings outstretched, flying, really flying, defying gravity in an act that no human could match, and as the others climbed from under the bridge Jack threw his stone, leading the bird in flight, a beautiful thing, and the stone and the bird flew to meet at a certain point. With a thwick they met and the pigeon crumbled into a mass of bent wings and flying feathers and fell out of control directly toward Jack. The dead thing hit him on the side of the head with force and fell to the ground at his feet.     One red and malevolent eye looked up at Jack from the shit-strewn soil beneath the Central Ave. overpass. Something vile oozed out of the bird’s asshole. A trickle of blood coursed down Jack’s forehead.     Jack was frozen looking at that pigeon.     The pigeon twitched.     So did Jack.     “C’mon Jack! What’re you doing?”     He ran from under the bridge. They were all going to get hamburgers down at the Black Diamond.

Drawing a fox Michael D. Brown Begin with the triangle for a face. Collar, the fox stole, with the circumference of a woman’s neck: tired eyes; -two perfect drops of blood. - design the eyes to dart -Lateral movement Side to side- -How clever, how clever...

Janet Kuypers reads the Michael D. Brown poem Drawing a Fox from Down in the Dirt magazine

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading this Michael D. Brown poem in Down in the Dirt magazine live 5/22/13 at the Café Gallery poetry open mic she hosts in Chicago

Michael D. Brown Bio     Award winning American author/poet of 17 books, including 6 volumes of poetry, Michael D. Brown, PhD currently lecturing and providing literary reviews internationally is teaching Chinese PhD’s English in the former capital city of Nanjing. Brown’s latest book, “Brown’s Simplified English Grammar.” Is available with Mandarin translation. Brown’s new poems have been featured in 22 journals between November 2011 and June 2012. His work appears in: The Tower Journal, Igdrasil, Mad Swirl, and Velvet Illusion.

Negligent Discharge Dennis Humphrey     Exhibit C: 15-6 Investigation of the Suicide of SGT ████████ █. █████, 1 MAY 2012.     Description: Transcript of Sworn Statement Taken During 15-6 Investigation of Negligent Discharge, 1 MAY 2011, Forward Operating Base Echo, Diwaniyah, Iraq. \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\Sworn Statement///////////////////////////////     I was doing my pre-combat checks like always. You want to make sure your weapon will function when you need it. I know the M240B door gun inside out, forward and backward, I mean I’m the unit trainer on the freaking weapon system. Nobody knows this gun better than me. Nobody. I honestly don’t know how I let the ammo belt anywhere near the feed tray any more than I understand how my wife didn’t know my voice when I called her the night before, after I stood in line at the MWR phone center for two hours. It’s like I’m already a ghost in my own house. Anyway, the pilots were doing their preflight checks too, going down the checklist, just like we’re trained from day one, just like we do every day. I mean, when you do something every day, it’s hard not to do it. Right? It just comes. That’s why I can’t figure any of this. She heard my voice every day for seven years. And I know for a fact she must’ve heard my voice every day even since I left for deployment, with Phoebe, our three year old, walking around with that picture frame I got her, one of them you put your picture in, then you record yourself saying something, so I said “I love you Phoebe.” My sister told me little Phoebe walks around pushing that freaking button all [expletive deleted] day. “I love you Phoebe. I love you Phoebe. I love you Phoebe.” Anyway, the guns were mounted in the aircraft already, slewed forward so nobody would walk into them accidentally. See, I think of things like that, trying to get ahead of things that might go wrong, like somebody hitting his head on the gun barrel hanging out the side of the helicopter. If you can get out ahead of accidents, you can stop them before they happen. It’s the surprises that get you. The things you don’t expect. The things you’d never expect, like how could she not know it was me on the line, saying “Hey baby?” Who else calls my [expletive deleted] house saying “Hey baby?” Anyway, I wasn’t even messing with the gun, had no intention of even touching it, and maybe right there was what did it. If I’d had it in my mind to touch the gun, I’d have done it very deliberately, but I was just reaching in the gunner’s window for the tool bag in the gunner’s seat when I guess my shoulder brushed the butterfly trigger. It’s just like that call. I never meant to start a fight with my wife, but when she didn’t even know me, it caught me by surprise. The words just came out. Little Phoebe always used to try to get between us when me and her mama used to fight at home, between deployments. Phoebe would say “I sorry—I sorry—I sorry!” trying to get us to stop by taking the blame herself and apologizing. “Sorry” is one of the magic words, right? Anyway, when I brushed the door gun trigger with my shoulder, the gun went off, three, maybe four rounds before I could get off the trigger. You know, I didn’t even notice when my wife gave the phone to Phoebe. I was still screaming at what I thought was my wife. Next thing I know, I hear Phoebe cry, not the kind of cry a parent can tell means a kid is cranky or is just trying to get her way. The kind of cry that wakes you up out of a dead sleep, the pitch just a little too high, the tone that gut punch of a tone that tells you your baby ain’t faking it. Anyway, after I cleared the weapon, I ran around to see what damage had been done. That’s when I saw 1LT Snowe on the ground at the nose of the aircraft. I ran over and picked his head up out of the dirt. Bright blood gurgled out of a bubbling hole in his throat, and darker blood ran from the corners of his mouth. He was trying to say something. I think he was mouthing the name of his own little girl. We’d talked about our daughters before on the long flights across the empty Iraqi desert, those miles and miles of sterile sand and lifeless dust. Cockpit chatter to pass the time, you know? We figured out our daughters were about the same age. His girl is named Samantha, I think. I screamed, “Medic! Medic!” until I heard other voices take up the call. Then I rocked the lieutenant as his blood dropped on the dusty ground in gobs the color of liver, the color of the prune baby food I used to feed to Phoebe when her little tummy wasn’t right. It’s the color that tells me that anyone who says we humans dream in black and white is a [expletive deleted] liar. The blood beaded up at first on the fine powder dust that is everywhere in that place, like the desert didn’t know what to do with all that life. Then it sank in, slow, like the ground was drinking it, turning the dust back into the red-brown Euphrates River mud that was there before any of us. It’s still there, you know. Still there. I rocked him and I rocked him saying, “I sorry—I sorry—I sorry” until they came and pulled me away. I haven’t spoken to my wife since that happened. My sister says the house is empty. I guess even my ghost is gone. For now. \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\Nothing Follows/////////////////////////////

The Brink Robert McHale     A clutch of spineless creatures, the rags they wore bonded with raw, seeping skin waited in the valley below, sniffing the air for death. The blind scavengers shifted their maggot like bodies, their screams echoing up as they slid down into the blackness. There was a wind. It whipped up a fist of dust from the basin below and slammed into me. It smelled of metal and death. “This is it!” I scream into the void, as I watch the world around me turn into an oil painting.     My incessant dreams of fame and immortality slip from me as the swirling dust dances in chaotic grace. My mind is numb, it is scattered throughout a thousand realities, a thousand realties better than this. What is a reality anyway? I think to myself, a nice word for a concept so nebulous it has no objective existence. When one has nothing to blame but the indifferent, emotionally neutral forces of nature - the cosmic coldness of an uncaring void - an explanation is found, and however scientific and useful this explanation might be, the pain becomes something deeper, somehow, because nothing and no one can be blamed, just understood. There is no causal agent. There is no scapegoat, only being.     I smile. There is peace in this moment. As the end draws nearer the power to control the inevitable makes me shake uncontrollably. Before now and the inevitable I find that I can slow time so that it seems like forever.     But why? I feel no pain, no fear and no remorse. In these final moments all I see is simplicity where others see complexity. I worry not for I know that I will be forgotten, such is the way of all things. I take one step forward and spread my arms. I fall through every universe seeing my eternal life from above, I see myself clouded in an infinite number of realities. Every award, every failure, every kiss, every stumble, every fall, every sonnet, every lie, every death. I see myself become a famous racing driver revered as having god-like reflexes, and at my funeral entire nations mourn me. I see myself become a revolutionary hero who united people from across the world and had my name written in the history books. I lived a million lives and died a million deaths in a heartbeat.     As I fall I am flanked by an eternity of lives, lives that choose the same fate as me. I reach out my hands and feel their tight grasp, I cry like a child. We are a spiralling unification of consciousness. A single mind with myriad roots, stretching upward, seeking the sun. And just so, my motives, everything that led me here, they are an irrelevance. Yes, how I see that now. The probabilities, the tantalising variables. I leave not a world behind, but seven billion thoughts of what a world should be. Perhaps I managed to change just one of those thoughts. My mind unravels, I become emotionally unchained.     For just a second I’m gripped by a fear, death, the very cessation of existence, the base fear from which all other fears are born, but only for a second. Every Sun engulfs every Earth. Entropy ceases to exist, life ceases to exist.     I float forever in a sea of nothingness, sampling the memories and emotions cast off from those who couldn’t maintain their sense of self, flying apart upon entry into the realm of death. Nothing but the thoughts of others keeps me company for a hundred billion years. Long enough to drive me mad. I stumble under the weight of infinite nothingness; my mouth opens to cry out and collapses around me. I peruse the information of the universe forever, in order to learn every secret of every universe, in order to find my way back. But I am too late, a large crack echoes throughout the universe, as every law is broken and cosmological background noise shifts from randomness to a perfect B flat, signalling an end.     Then I see a light. I’m pulled towards it. Pulled back from the Void and poured into a physical body once again, half mad with the accumulated knowledge of eternity. Blinded by the flood of sensory input that assaults my atrophied senses. All I hear is screaming, a horrible wailing in my ears. There is a searing pain, like every single piece of me is being burnt with a blowtorch. I can feel myself ‘booting up’; at first it was just sensations, and then the realisations that I’m having them, which means I’m a separate entity. The little self-discoveries continue to build up until memories start to flood back, and I remember who I am and why I’m in an ambulance and why I feel like I’m on fire and why I can’t move no matter how hard I try and why that horrible wailing only stops when I take a breath.     “Death”, I hear you scream, over and over. “Why?” I hear you ask. “Close your eyes my friend” I whisper back, “And you too will feel the wind beating against your face. A wave of unstoppable force. The end drawing nearer.” And then I remember the Void. I remember nothingness. I’m scared.

Entanglement Danya Goodman     You say we aren’t out of the swamp. Like I don’t notice the mud still gumming at our stolen boots, sucking. The mosquitoes’ tantrum. I wonder if our sweat salts this marsh. If the crayfish and the crane will die of the taste, then seize and sizzle, slug-like. No one would mourn them, either. You stop, your breath catches, but it is just a frog who bellows again. It rumbles in my gut.     “Come on, Rachel.” You say, with as much gentleness as you can. “The sun is almost up.”     You diminish, your head cocked. You are why we are here, covered in darkness, with filth up to our thighs. Yet, your left braid is undone, the wet hair veined across your forehead. Your scar hides under the mud on your cheeks. Those cheeks! Still, you look defiant in this muggy moonlight. You reach for me, but I pull back. Later, I would remember this moment and wonder how things would have been different if I had not shrank from you, there in the reeds. You turn and once more we slurp through the muck, our petticoats drenched in swamp, the ground clutching for us.     It isn’t that the thirst is worse than the hunger, it is that they merge into an ache without edges. Even in the barn, late at night with you, I’ve never known this desire. Cattails break as we push through. We suck at the fibrous green stems, but they are bitter, salty. The lily pads, the green skin of the swamp. Even in the minor relief of dry land, the leaves are starved and crack. No water to be had. You try to catch a catfish, your brown fingers plunge into the muck, but there are no watery shelves, no holes. No place for the catfish to curl up and hide. Instead we envision them swimming, skimming the bottom just beyond our fingers. After a day you sing little songs to them. “Mr. Catfish!” You call, defiant of the dogs and our pursuers. “Supper time!” Your volume makes my pulse pound until I am sure I hear their hooves and paws upon us. You stare at me. Dare me to sing as well. My tongue dries.     “Don’t be afraid.” You say. “We must be miles away by now.”     The swamp murmurs its hum, muddled by my hunger. Your eyes are so vivid, I want you to flutter at my adventures, to stretch on tiptoes and blush to glimpse my brazenness.     You pull a bramble from my hair.     “I’ll protect you. You know that.” You say.     But the song loses grip in my throat and drowns in my stomach. You turn away, ashamed for me, still. The birds stop to hear you call death lullabies to fish we are sure are there, taunting us just out of reach.     Leeches. Horseflies. Weasels. Cat-like shapes. We disturb sleeping fowl. Too swift trout that knock against our knees. Willow trees. Roots. Rocks. Spiders skimming on the skin, walking as if Jesus. But also, of course, snakes.     “I didn’t plan this.” You say, as you rest your head against the bark of a tree. Your breath is rough, but it has been days since we have ran. The heart is, Rebecca, I said, yes yes yes, I did. Despite myself, despite the prayers. You reach and I contain. They say you are brazen and foolish and I am calm and wise, and that is why we always try to work besides each other in the field. Yet this time, I reached as well. I wanted to reach for you. That is why we are here, moving through tree trunks. You opened your silver tongue and these stories of us up North, free within each other and I think that my cup runneth over. When we coil in the thicket during the day, sleeping in fits, I dream that you are a witch and you have come for my liver. Do I serve it to you gladly?     The dragon flies are out in cascades. The twilight catches on their needled-bodies, and they flicker for an instant, lizard green. They glint on and off leaves. One hovers near your ear, then lands in your hair looking in the fading light like a bow. You tied a strip of your dress around your forehead yesterday to keep the sweat from blinding you. A crown of cotton. You are knee deep in swamp, as if rising from it. Born of the muck. Fireflies have begun to wink. In the past few days, your cheek bones stand out even more sharply. I would trace your scar with my tongue, then follow the line of your jaw down through your collar bone, between your breasts. But I don’t. You look like a queen, with the dragon flies adorning you, and the last drips of sunlight catching on the moisture on your skin. You are bejeweled in your loss. I shrug. I do not kiss you.     “We’ll be there soon.” You stare up at the glow behind the clouds, the stars are there. They must be, somewhere. This is called faith. “Another day. Two at the most.”     “Another night.”     “Remember watching the stars through the slats in the barn?”     “I would count them waiting for you.”     “You were brave then. We could have been caught then.”     “The barn was protected. Otherwordly, somehow. Not of the plantation. Blessed.”     “Oh, sweetheart.” You say, and the light catches in your eyes like you are praying.     “They would never have caught us. We would have had years wrapped up in each other every night in the barn.” My pulse quickens, and I feel the unholy hollowness expand inside me. This emptiness that is only ever filled by your fingers.     You don’t say anything then, like the only thing to say is that of course they would have caught us, and of course they would have peeled our skin slowly from our flesh for loving each other like we did. Hung our self-shaped skins from the fences as flags to other slaves who may consider their bodies free. The dark water parts before us, and seams perfectly behind us, leaving no path, no trace that we were ever there.     I see the knotted oak tree again, its side burnt from a long past fire. But so many trees have knots, that is way of trees, I hope. So many trees carry scars. Part of me recognizes these knots, the particular dips and folds of this bark like that dog with a pointed face that at this point part of me would be glad to see. I dare not tell you, Rebecca.     Traveling by night, the stars shift and are hidden by clouds. Each night of fighting through this, we follow the North Star. We borrow each other’s bravery in small sips. I drink more heavily from you. We do not speak of our mothers. We do not speak of who we left behind. We do not say what will become of us if we are found. We both are versed in pain. The ache in our muscles, finger tips bleeding, the scratch of the cotton branches against our bare legs. What would be new to us would be the promise of each other and of waking with each day yawning before us. The ability to learn the language of each other’s bodies. To speak through flesh. To be the arbiter of what each hour should contain. Only we would reckon our own misdeeds, the small selfishnesses, the flinches and shudders. I would never have burnt porridge again, unless it pleased me. I would never sleep alone, never ache with need for you at night. We do not talk of why we left, and why we left those behind.     When we left that night, it was sudden without thought. You had unfolded under me and there was this moment when we both understood that this unfolding was too large to be tidied. We were unkempt, tremulous. Sinful. We could not return to our families’ quarters. We could not marry. We would not lie with men. We would instead, give ourselves to the forest.     “If we follow the North Star, eventually...I can sew. You can clean houses. These hands are so artful with a broom.” You had said, your eyes liquidy, kissing my palms.     “If you go, you will lose everything.”     “You are all I have anyway.” You said.     “It’s too much. I’m not everything to anybody.”     “You are.”     “It’s too much. All of this.”     “Don’t say that.”     “We’ll grow out of it. We’ll love men. We’ll pray harder.”     “I don’t believe you want to pray this away. You rejoice in it.”     “Isn’t that more proof of this sin?”     “See me.” You said, your wide brown eyes, your soft skin marked by the scar on your cheek, your dainty chin. Your peach lips, quivering. “What is there to fear?”     I looked up through the crack in the barn, but there were no stars visible. I thought of my mother and my brothers and sisters turning on their mats. I saw my whole life unroll before me like a field of unsown wheat. I saw it wither.     “I’m not like you.” You who had talked back, you who did not recoil when the whip came down upon your face. Rebecca, you don’t know what it meant to me that you never lowered your eyes. That you insisted on cup after cup of water in the heat.     “Just try.” You said, in this voice, like a mewling kitten.     So, Rebecca, I do not tell you about the tree. Even though the knowledge that this march, through the swamp must tilt towards starvation, weighs down my ankles. We watch constantly for gators. The hunger has carved its place. You no longer sing to catfish. The trees jag our skin. Our blood flavors the swamp. Our ears prick prick prick for the shadow stomp of a boot.     You shake me awake. The sun rushes against my eyes. I am aware of the harsh welts on my neck, itching as soon as I am conscious. My thigh burns where a branch scraped. My throat is parchment. Sawdust.     “Don’t hate me.” You whisper. “Another night. I read the stars wrong. The path that we take should only be one more night away. Please, please don’t forsake me. It will all be worth it if we can still be together.” I don’t know if you really believe this, or if this is what the swamp begs you to say, wrenches from your throat.     I don’t have the strength to panic that you are speaking in daylight. My ears bristle for barks and shouts. I turn my back, crawl deeper into the thicket. The thorns catch in my hair. I tumble back into sleep.     The rain! The rain! We laugh again! Tilt our heads back and drink in salvation. We pour the water caught in the wide ivy leaves into each other’s mouths. My throat sings, and I feel the water through my stomach all the way to my toes and finger tips. I engorge. We splash. The swamp gurgles gleefully, and swells with pride. It is up to our navels. Fat, juicy beetles crawl on logs floating past and I dare you to eat one. Manna. You do and smile. We clutch each other and your flesh slipping against mine in this wetness eases the rawness from journeying in a place that would scrape us against its teeth. Your heart beats with the rain. For the first time since we left, your mouth on me. We might reach, I think, as the rain lashes against that burnt tree. The dog face is familiar and somehow comforting.     There is certainly a gator here. A large one. We hear him swimming. The tiny ripples, the soft moist inhalation of his snout. The current of his mighty tails sweeps against our shins.     “It will be quick.” You say, through your teeth. “Stop your trembling.”     I wonder if I prefer the dogs or the gators. Or the fever that warms the wound on my leg. I look at you, teeth bared, muscles clenched and I hope that warrior-you will be the last image I see. I hope that maybe by then I will finally have stopped trembling. I will come to you as sturdy and strong as you have been for me and I will say “Yes, I will. I am ready.” I will rescue you from the fear that I do not love you as you love me.     You collect willow leaves and press them against the gash in my thigh.     “Here,” you say, offering a piece of willow bark in your hand but not meeting my gaze.     You are thinner. Your collar bone is etched out of your neck as if you were made of stone, not flesh. Your eyes so much larger without the flesh of your face to rest in. You are stripped of any artifice, any comfort, any ornament that might obscure the truth of your hard edges. You could slice with me with your hipbones, which I can now see jutting through the scraps left of your dress. I see you, the breadth and weight of you. It is like you were born of this journey. Like maybe you are already home.     By the end, you carry me.     The dogs that haunt our dreams bite our ankles. We start, but it is too late. This patch of thicket beneath that burnt tree does not conceal us. The swamp, itself, our ultimate master, seduced us with promises that it would eliminate our scent. We have not traveled far in distance. You reach for my hand while we hear the hooves and the rough voices tramp through the branches. I let go when they find us.

The Big Duck Opines: The Occupy Movement CEE There is a day for every child Usually in the summer In some year between the day When the doll or bear fade to object And the day when hormones murder Who the person might have become, This summer day, the child Alone, or with others having their day Contrives the creative; usually, acting Sketches, skits, comedy bits, plays With costumes and lines whipped up In a bruised gravy moment, The child tries Very Hard For half an afternoon (or more) The artistry is debuted, to gods respected, Who—usually—love the child But see the effort for what it is, And the child sees reflected a dirty thing Called “Truth”, and defends with, “Well...! This is just the practice!” This defense being but response to injury Because Usually The practice this day, coordinate ‘tween Dreams and excitation Is all it ever is And it lies there

The Pirania (Secondary School Litmus) CEE Do you know who the piranha, are? Did you attend high school For more than 4 days? Do you blot out that time? Then, in 4th grade, You got pushed into mud puddles; Do you laugh about that time? Then, in 4th Grade, you did the pushing; Do you smile, wan, and pass off any pain With aphorisms and Dr. Laura bullshit? Then, in 4th grade, You got pushed into mud puddles Told on the bullies Who were punished And who then pushed you into the puddles, again The next day Do you instead remember With impossible longing, But with a look on your face and in your eyes Like Bruce Dern had, in Coming Home? I know who the piranha are Or, who they were Who they still are, this very second In rooms never given to change

Tanya’s Story Janet Kuypers (spring 1995)     (tanya’s middle name is marie, and her sister’s name tasha anna negron. she likes her sister’s name, but i told her that her name was nice, too. this is a story tanya made up for me at logan beach cafe. she was eating nachos with salsa. tanya is nine, going on ten.)     this is a story about summer. phil was riding his bike. phil is my brother. (how old is phil?) phil is 17, going on 18 years old. so he was riding his his bike in the park, and it was sunny, and joe-joe, he’s my other brother, he shot a bow and arrow at phil’s tires. and he hit the tires!!!! and phil got MAD. phil fell over, he hit his arm, but he was okay. so, since phil was mad, he ran after joe-joe, and he caught up to him and threw him on the ground. they started fighting, and my sister tasha came and told them to stop. but they didn’t stop, and so she called my dad. dad came came with the belt (ooh! -that’s my addition to the story. sorry.) it’s really a mexican belt. (what’s the difference between a mexican belt and a belt, say, not from mexico? am i asking too many questions?) it really big, and i got hit with it once. (ouch. -that’s my addition again. sorry.)     (oh, wait, she had to go get a drink, she was thirsty. making up stories is hard work.)     (okay, she’s coming back now.)     (so, what’s the end of the story? what happened?)     my brother joe had a black eye, phil gave it to him. so dad came and he hit them. and they stopped fighting then.     (okay, so we got the good-guy/bad guy thing covered, and an action scene, and a resolution. so most stories have a moral, so what’s the moral of this story?)     not to fight.

King of the Universe Janet Kuypers February 15, 2000     I used to be king of the universe. I used to have meaning and order and direction in my life. People came to me for ideas and answers and I gave them exactly what they needed. Some times I even gave them more. Some times they were pleasantly surprised with the knowledge, with the intelligence, with the fact that sometimes pieces fit together so well that it almost seems they were meant to fit that way. Less often they were disappointed; they didn’t see why my answers were better; they held my ability and my triumph against me. They could have been unintelligently avoiding the truth; they could have thought like a communist, thinking that someone else should not be revered, but the capitalist in them would think that it should have been THEM.     But it CAN be done. I used my brain and I proved them wrong. I was invincible. I produced RESULTS, and I did it with three times the speed of everyone else. People were amazed with me. I had a following.     There are many questions I ask. Maybe it is creativity in me that asks them and the engineer in me to want to find the answer. I have always been both. But when you get to the top, when you see the vew from the top, well, when you see it all, what more do you have to ask?     Although I do not claim to be God, I wonder: what would she do to this? If she finds someone like this, what does she do? My guess is that she would drop it, not kill it, because she is not a vengeful God, but she could punish it unjustly so that God could ask them: so now what? You’ve had all of the answers before, so what do you do now? When they get you out of the hospital, everyone will think that you are fine, but you are not; I DO that to you. And you’ll have to deal with it all, and you’ll have to remain strong, because that is what you do, you’ll have to be strong for everyone else, and inside you’ll be falling apart, and no one will understand. Who’s your messiah now?, she’ll ask. Will you have an answer?

(6:52) King of the Universe and Changing Garments from the show 6/11 06/11/02, from the Internet Archive

Watch this YouTube video live at 6/11 in Chicago 06/11/02

Watch the YouTube video live in Death ‘n’ Rebirth 07/11/10 at Beach Poets

Watch the full video of the full Death ‘n’ Rebirth 07/11/10 show at Beach Poets, from archive.org

Daisy Janet Kuypers spring 1991     Every time he invited me over, we’d open the door and there would be that ankle-biting dog barking it’s head off. If she was human, I’d say she was screaming bloody murder, but she’s a dog, and "barking bloody murder" doesn’t sound right. Besides, she doesn’t really bark. She yaps.     She’s one of those dogs that yaps at everything. We’d always hear her, even before we’d get inside the door. It’s the kind of bark that makes you want to drop-kick her across the room.     “Yipyipyipyip!!!Yapyapyapyapyap!!!”     Her bark reminds me of Dino from the Flintstones. It’s a contrived bark, and it’s annoying as Hell. It’s a bark that doesn’t quite sound like a dog.     Her name is Daisy, but she doesn’t connote any of those images of happiness and simplicity a daisy creates. I think any notions of happiness would be too annoyed with her bark to stick around, anyway.     She’s a Chihuahua, which makes her look like a fat tan dachshund with big ears. She’s no longer than eighteen inches, but I think she thinks of herself as a Doberman protecting her territory. She growls at passing traffic, snaps at an outstretched hand and yaps at a stranger’s voice.     “Don’t talk until she sniffs you,” he’d always say. “Let her get acquainted with you.” Wondering what the appropriate waiting time was for Daisy to get acquainted with someone, I’d get tired of the conversation being stifled and would eventually whisper something to him. Daisy would then immediately start yapping with all the fierceness an eighteen inch Chihuahua could muster up. The conversation would be halted for another five minutes until she was finished with her canine tantrum.     Suddenly I thought of my sister. She always had to have her way, too. And my sister’s voice is almost as annoying as that damn yapping noise.     But this time while I was over he told me said he had to run to the store, so he asked me to stay and “keep Daisy company.” As I stood in the window and watched his fire-engine red Hyundai Scoupe drive him away, Daisy jumped on the back of the couch, poised toward the window. She yapped bloody murder.     I sat down in a chair. Daisy sat in the adjacent couch, probably choosing her seat so she’d have a view of the passing traffic she could yap at if she so chose. She stretched out on the couch like a queen, amongst pillows that were bigger than her bed. I thought of my sister again.     She then turned her eyes toward me and squinted, as if to say, “ha ha, bitch, I’ve got the couch and you have to sit in a chair.”     She put her head down and closed her eyes. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be her -- to have a couch as big as the living room to crawl on to, to have nothing to worry about but the passing traffic.     A car turned down the street and started driving toward the house. Daisy picked her head up, looked out the window and started to growl. I attempted to show an ounce of authority to the dog: “Day-zeee,” I said, as if I were actually about to reprimand the thing. She stopped growling and turned her head half way toward me, pausing just for a moment before she turned back and continued to growl at the Buick.     I couldn’t see her face, but I’m sure it had a look on it that said, “You bitch, how dare you yell at me... Who are you anyway??”     She couldn’t even bother to turn her head around entirely to look at me.     I just sat there, looking at Queen Daisy in all her glory. I sat back in the chair and tried to relax. I twisted the ring on my finger. I looked out the window and waited for him to come home.

Knowledge Janet Kuypers spring 1991     I hated going into these God damn gas stations in the middle of nowhere, but we’d been driving for so damn long that I think I lost all feeling in my ass. Besides, I had to go to the bathroom. It couldn’t wait. He said he’d pump the gas this time, so I got out of the car and began to stretch when I saw the attendant staring at me through the window from behind the counter. It was an eerie stare. A sex stare. I stopped stretching.     I walked around the side of the building, where the dingy arrows pointed to the washrooms. I really didn’t need the signs, for the smell of shit that has been sitting around overpowered the smell of the dust in the air as I walked closer and closer to the bathrooms ... I walked past the men’s room and up to the ladies room to find that the door was... gone. It was propped up on the inside of the bathroom wall. “A lot of fucking good it does me there,      I mumbled in the stench.     “How the Hell am I supposed to go to the bathroom when there isn’t even a God damned door to the damn bathroom??” I thought as I stormed into the store where he was paying for the gas.     He was buying two bottles of Pepsi for the road, to keep us awake. “The door of the women’s washroom is off,” I whispered with exasperation. “Well, that’s no problem, honey -- just go into the men’s room. I’ll watch the door for you,” he said back. The look in his eyes told me that he thought it was such a simple and obvious solution that anyone could figure it out. He thought he had the solution for everything. I wanted to tell him that the women’s room frightened me enough for one day, and that I didn’t want to risk my life by venturing into the men’s room. Besides, men go in there. That attendant probably goes in there. I finally shrugged and waited for him to pay for his Pepsi and gasoline. I turned my head and followed him out. The attendant looked at me as I left. I could feel his stare burning into the back of my head.     We turned the building corner and followed the signs. My shoulders suddenly felt heavier and heavier as I walked. He checked the room to make sure it was empty for me. He even held the door open. What a gentleman.     I closed the door, but I really didn’t want to be left alone with the smell. It smelled like shit. But I could also smell sweat, like the smell of dirty men. I wondered if this is what the attendant smelled like. I lined the toilet bowl seat with toilet paper. I had to use it sparingly -- there wasn’t much left. I got up as soon as I could and walked over to the dirty mirror, almost hitting my head on the hanging light bulb. There was light blue paint chipping next to the mirror.     I strained to see my image in the mirror. Instead, all I could focus on was the graffiti on the wall behind me. For a good time call.. So-and-so gives good head... Did that attendant ever call that number? I wondered if I was ever put on a bathroom wall. I wondered if I was ever reduced to a name and a phone number like that. I probably had been.     The floor was wet. I always wondered when the floors of bathrooms were wet if it was actually urine or just water from the sink. Or maybe it was from the sweat of all those men. I didn’t know.     I stepped on something under the sink in front of the mirror. I looked down. It was an open porn magazine. I looked at it from where I was standing. I didn’t move my foot. It was hard core shit, and it looked painful. Women with gags on their faces... I remember someone telling me that porn was okay because the women in it wanted to do it. But there was no smile on this woman’s face. I pushed it back under the sink.     I stepped back. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to hit the graffiti on the wall, the porn on the floor. I wanted to smear the urine from the stall all over the place. I wanted to pull the light from right out of the fucking ceiling.     I put my hands up against the wall. I put the top of my head on the wall. I tried to breathe. It hurt. With my eyes closed, I knew what was there, behind me. It didn’t scare me anymore.     When I walked into the bathroom, I was afraid to touch anything. But then I just leaned up against the door, feeling the dirt press into my back, into my hair. I wanted to soak it all in. All of it.     I shook my head and realized that he was waiting for me outside the door. I turned around and grabbed the door knob. I didn’t worry about the dirt on my back. I opened the door.

Watch this YouTube video 12/04/10 from the TV camera in Lake Villa at Swing State, live in her show the Stories of Women

Watch this YouTube video 12/04/10 in Lake Villa at Swing State, live in her “Visual Nonsense” show the Stories of Women

See Kuypers’ full show video with this & more from the TV monitor in the the Stories of Women show, in Visual Nonsense, live in Lake Villa 12/04/10 at Swing State

See the full show video of Kuypers reading this & more in the the Stories of Women show in in Visual Nonsense, live in Lake Villa 12/04/10 with this writing at Swing State (last line of last story cut off)

Janet Kuypers Bio     Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.     She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.     She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org and chaoticarts.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images.     Since 2010 Kuypers also hosts the Chicago poetry open mic at the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).     In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the 2013 ISSN# color art book Life, in Color, and Post Apocalyptic. Three collection books were also published of her work in 2004, Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art).