amphibi.us

I realize now
what I’ve known all along.
I must give you this
so you will care
about my father,
how he lay—
his bright body
a Gauguin nude—
all afternoon
on the last day
of our final road trip.

When we reached
Mississippi again,
he opened my mother’s
car door, and we—
brother and sister—
watched, sweating
into each other’s
dependencies
from the muted heat
of the backseat,
as they tangoed
across the windshield,
arms arrowed to winter,
and never came back.

© Mallory Bass, 2011

I can still remember how
annoyed she got the first  time
I used it, “Door mat,”
the way her mother let a brute
of a man walk all over her.
“Door mat”—you’d think I
called her mother whore or
bitch. Not strange, I went on,
so many women are at times.
I started a list of them: the
ones who faked orgasm to
keep some man, the ones who
say nothing when strangers
look and call their husbands,
“charming, so nice.” Door mat
I say. I like the word. The ones
someone else wipes their feet,
their penis all over: what
woman I want to say without a
job, a good job and kids hasn’t
had a stint keeping her mouth shut,.
making excuses. One friend has
taken to buying cheap sexy
clothes, bustiers and fish
net instead of painting. Door
mat, dour mat.  Door mat
I want to scream at my
aunt who coddles her 45
year old son who probably
steals her money. Even Hilary
was, I hiss, standing up for
him with his penis in who
knows whose mouth. I want
to say, maybe because I feel
so tired and hardly an Amazon
today, walking about, some
one not me, afraid like all the
other D.M’s to say what I
am really thinking

© Lyn Lifshin, 2011

[others]

I wish you could have lived
in my era, father said. There

was the Depression. It taught
you what “Rough” was.

Thousands of men had
to sell apples on the street.

And those apples weren’t even
high quality, like MacIntosh,

more like those little crab ones
that grew in someone’s backyard.

Try convincing a prospective
buyer they weren’t sour

but sweet. You didn’t have
to just wait in line for the soup

if you were unemployed,
but there was a longer line

for the silverware. There
was a third line for the salt

to give the soup some taste.
I passed my time counting ears.

If everyone had two, you could
divide the total by the same number,

and make a reasonable estimate
of how long you had to wait,

unless you weren’t good in math.
Then you just counted faces.

Men had several but they put on
the same face when they had to look humble.

© Hal Sirowitz, 2011

Run, you yelled, run.
Others chose suicide.

The only dreams
I seem to remember

are the nightmares.
Barbed wire and concrete,

shaded in the summer
by young maples.

© Howie Good, 2011

[others]

1.
I had a discussion with a friend
over monitors
about Freemasons,
who is one and who isn’t.

I said I didn’t know what
the big deal was.
People always say artists sold their souls to the devil at a crossroads
to get the talent they have,
whatever talent might be.
He said,
who knows.

Instead,
maybe they sold their souls to God
in the back alleys of their minds.
Because eventually the road ends,
and it’s either death or nothing.

People start to believe things they said they’d never believe.
People curl into themselves under sweat-soaked bedsheets.
People tousle the clouds under their feet as they walk upon high,
on rooftops so gilded,
they strip soles of humanity.
People smoke cigarettes and flick ash into the fire.

2.
I have measured out my life with IM boxes.
I have cried onto my keyboard,
drawing myself into a cube with tears running a river through Qs, Rs and Ts.
I have confused names and old faces and
I have forgotten who I am.

I have imagined defenestration
and masturbation
and a different nation,
one run entirely by machines,
leaving people like me
to capacitate and then undo their demons,
all while in their pajamas
or maybe never getting dressed at all.

3.
I am a Freemason.
You are a Freemason
And you and you and him
and his yellow dog too.
It’s one of those things
we can never disprove so it may as well be true.

God is a Freemason.

4.
The fall is nearly as thrilling as the high,
and it’s a cheek turned to God.

Because eventually the road ends.
All the parts you thought made you
shut off at once.
The grinding halt reverberates off slick bricks,
the rooftop blown off.

You’re left barefoot and childless.
Loveless neon signs vibrate through whiskey glasses,
wooden stools steal your shirts,
people tell you things but you can’t remember.

You remember when you used to hope,
but the feeling is distant
like a city you read about in a book but never visited.

5.
I think you’re crazy maybe,
but worse yet I think you’re dead.
Every day is a memory of the next.

I have seen you beg for your soul,
stirring it around in a bucket of shit,
over and over to the tune of a harp
that’s strung with the hairs of the people you loved
who didn’t love you back.

6.
At the end of the road,
there’s a sign.
It is the same in all languages, at all times,
and it reads:
What do you live for?
What do you live for?
What do you live for?

7.

I live for a newspaper pressed into seedy cement on the street in Harlem.
I live for nights spent with strangers on SoHo benches.
I live for my mother, who said you can always come home!
I live for saltwater seeping into my skin as I step onto the floor of silent seas.
I live for must, and do, and will, but never should.
I live for the guiding light of glow in the dark stars stuck to the ceilings of our skulls.
I live for muzzles butting mirrors and stretching to their ends.
I live for a saxophone in a subway station squealing syncopated sadness.
I live for reflections in rocking cars, breath beating upon bombs planted in our bellies.
I live for my disembodied spine dancing in the dark to an invisible drum.
I live for church organs and choirs and stained glass thrown across my chest, broken.
I live for visions and revisions and reversing my decisions.
I live for the smell of your incense, your insensitive hands throwing me against the wall.
I live for the fucking Freemasons.
And I live for myself,
The only person who will never leave me,
Because I won’t let her.
The law of their God is in their hearts.

© Meghan Blalock, 2011