In his apartment he ate five cookies, a bowl of cereal, and a carrot. He was anxious. He focused on what he was doing. He was washing his hands and straightening his papers and washing his hands. It was eight o’clock. He turned on the TV and nothing was on. He went to the bathroom.

In the hallway on the ceiling was the smoke detector. The red light flashed every ten seconds. Jacob saw the light and looked up at the detector, pausing half a second. His mind split in two. One side believed he exposed himself to half a second of extra radiation. One side knew nothing happened. He walked into the bathroom and froze. His breaths were short and shallow. What had he done. What had he just done. His fingers touched the counter for grounding, but there was none.

He wandered into the kitchen. He was going to die from cancer and his blood boiled and he hated what he had done to himself. There was white then a flash of red and he clenched and rammed his head into the refrigerator door. Then there was black.

There was black for one minute. Jacob came to with his cheekbone on the linoleum floor. He touched his forehead. Blood.

The next day was Thursday and he did not go to work. He followed floating particles of dust in front of the bedroom window and mourned. He was dying. He did not want to die so he replayed what had happened. There was no conclusion and he was tired and cried and slept.

When he awoke Friday he was alive, but only for half a second. He made toast. He took a shower. He unloaded the dishwasher. He was an empty shell. He replayed what had happened and he was tired and slept.

He did not go to work on Monday. He went for a walk. On Tuesday his sister called and he answered. It was the first time he talked to anyone since “The Incident.”

On Wednesday he went to work. He had seventy eight emails. Reading them reeled him in. His supervisor had read the report and said it was great.

One week later Jacob played pool, drank beer, and laughed with a friend.

© Jeremy Britton, 2012

My leg hurts,

Because I am fat says my mommy.

My friends call me “Elephant,”

Because I remember all the math.

When they play Miss Mary Mack,

They say the elephants jump over the fence.

I want to be like those elephants some day,

But my leg hurts.

© Neesa Sunar, 2012

(to sit in a circle on the floor
while the last seconds of the year
ticked away,

and made noise with whatever
we could find;

singing at the top of our lungs
so we wouldn’t have to hear

ourselves think,

or make wishes
we knew couldn’t come true)

and i’m not even in it!

it’s you,

sitting against the bookshelf
and laughing,

at the reason why
you only have one shoe on,

and how of all the moments
to take a picture, this was it.

© Andrew Chmielowiec, 2012

[others]

it was only
7

it was like god
had taken
everyone but us

the sun
should have
been out
but it was
dark like
midnight

and as we
drove back
to that small
space
we had
wrestled
from the
world—

the space
where we
fought
dreamt
and
fucked,

we stopped
at all the right
traffic lights
even though

there was
no one
there
to
notice

© Bill Winchester, 2012

In a storefront laundry
on North Clark Street
brown draperies release
this quiet man

who has my shirts.
He smiles and bows–
how carefully
he wraps them.

Before the draperies
fall back, I see,
for a moment,
in a circle swirling

almost out of sight
three kerchiefed women,
glistening black,
bending, grabbing, sorting.

© Donal Mahoney, 2012

[others]

the only news is
the weather report,
delivered daily, without mercy,
to slow moving creatures,
with brains
like rickety houses,
continuously rattled by
eighteen wheelers passing overhead,
and with faces,
like weather-beaten gargoyles,
emitting plumes of steam
through their crusty portals
all winter long,
with no relief in sight,
and no plan,
except to wait
for the sprouting of the leaves,
bringing on the heat and the stench.

© Barry W, North, 2012

I tell her I’ve just
ran the vacuum
so she takes off her shoes
and her toenails
are painted
deep red

I point to the sofa
a dirty old thing
used to skin and sweat but
I’ve turned the pillows and
we sit like royals
side by side

She tells me to get her some wine
but I haven’t any, not even bad one
so I make
her tea and
we sit
in silence
until the sound of my neighbor coming
stops flitting
through the floorboards

© Anton Gourman, 2012

[others]

It is very hard to be taken seriously without your clothes on. Last night I woke up suddenly, or maybe I had been awake the whole time. I woke up and I started bawling, gasping and hysterical, for absolutely no reason.

Em! You opened your eyes after you realized that it was not going to stop.

Em! What is the matter?

I could not respond because I was speaking.

Em! There is absolutely no reason why you should be crying, Em.

Sometimes you space out – you suddenly realize that there has been a rush of silence all along.

We are visiting my parents at my summer house on the South Fork to celebrate my graduation. So I was born into a house of glass, you tell me. Being around them brings you closer to an understanding of humanity: humanity, what they are not. Retreat to the bunker: too afraid to face their extinction, they load their clubs and disappear into the golf course. Marching through earthy knolls and toeing sandy yaps, they find satisfaction in a full-bodied swing that leaves them looking up to follow the absence of a small sphere falling away into the endless sky. Repetition is the key to getting better. They repeat their escape every mid-May until the weather turns.

I weep.

You look pained. I thought that’s what you wanted to hear?

The most beautiful place in the world, my father chokes up as we drive down the winding road that leads towards his pride, the clubhouse, this mass grave – past the first eighteen holes and acres of bright green grass touched with dew and everything is rolling, rolling, rolling, and tucked under dusk and there stands the grand grey windmill, its massive arms beckoning. The thing is, it is beautiful, and I turn towards the backseat to see if you have noticed. You look like a child: blonde and shrunken inside my father’s enormous blue blazer; your head lowered in reverence; you are reading that fat tome on your lap, The Phenomenology of Spirit.

This is, after all, the celebration, so we should not blame them for the questions. Once we are tucked in – served the first slabs of red meat; mucous-y oysters like the thick clear wall built from the back of the wet throat that makes fingers webbed; only a few roasted potatoes – the questions.

I look towards you for support. You are pressing the side of your knife against your tenderloin, watching as the blood-water that is thinned out like the spotting at the end of a period steadily emerges from the pink flesh, and pools.

Write, I respond. I am going to write.

But what have you seen?

The tiredness of our movements. I excuse myself to examine what the first helping looks like: masticated and raw and pancaked together, floating in water: grey lilies. There is heat to be garnered in the distance between a person and the toilet seat: furled over the seat, the heat of the blood rushing to the head, the warmth of the stomach rising, bringing warmth to the mouth, the humming of the rising, the brightness of heels clacking against the floor, quicker still, the gagging, the gasping, the cough, cough. Hot water under fingers. I am no longer cold. I walk through a green hall, cluttered with small portraits of great men, and head towards the tower of crustaceans.

Ooooo coo the women in front of me and ooooo is the sound of them looking at the display and everywhere in that big old room it is ooooooooooo ooooooo oooooo. Lobster upon lobster upon lobster encased in those bright red shells and inside there is the speckled flesh, those spotted pinkish inwards with the “white goop”: the blood of the lobster, calcified. Do I sound like I am getting somewhere? For every lobster had been sliced halfway in half to insure easy extraction of the meat and on some, their faces held together, giving the impression of a face intact; whereas with others, the incision occurred sloppily so that on one side there was an expansive amount of blank red before the eye and on the other, simply one googly eye, dangling. Sometimes there was a whole face there, plus a chop, like a growth, or a cheek peeling away.

Oooooo.

You come up behind me. We wait our turn to scuttle towards the chef, who stands with over-sized gold-plated instruments in his bloated white wizard’s cap. The removal of the flesh and onto your speckleless plate. The removal of the flesh and onto my speckleless plate.

Can I ask, what did you prefer? The lamb or the beef? Oysters or shrimp?

Physical effects are more believable. That night I tiptoe out of bed and loudly heave whiteness. In the morning, you take my head and press it against yours. Two heads clasped in four hands. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. You teach me the serenity prayer; you teach me what you learned in rehab as we walk on the beach.

There are only three emotions. Happiness, sadness, and fear. Anything else is not real.

I am happy, I say.

No, you tell me.

What I cannot explain is that I am the happiest that I have ever been. Or maybe I am not. But I am determined. Determined for something. Finally. Everything is becoming scenes. I hear sights in verse – a rock in the park, a day at the beach, the look on your face. What that means, of course, is that suddenly I awake with a shudder, to realize that I have been watching myself from the ceiling – a body—formless thighs pressing into rough heels, deflated triangle breasts pathetically trying to graze your sex, the ugly repetition of my neck—furled at the foot of the bed.

But I thought that I had gone through the movements well. When I push you down, when I wiggle my expanding hips out of jeans that have collected the ocean in their cuffs, I was trying to save us. I show you my passion: covering your brown eyes with my hand. We are in the bright yellow room of my childhood with my miniature teacup collection lining the bookshelves and my watercolor mural of the puppet safari and my pom-pom rimmed bed skirt that match the pom-pom rimmed half-curtains that are gathering sun motes that sift and do not fall.

I’m sorry, you say, lifting my head away from your scent. It’s just—this house. I feel like your parents can hear everything that we do. Gesturing to the bed—this bed.

So we will give up on sex for a while—it is too difficult here. People do disgusting things in bed, anyhow. One time I heard across the alleyway. A man started groaning. But it was so still, and the groans sounded spoken. Uughh. And then, nothing. And then the throat of a woman, coughing so hard it sounded inhuman.

In the mornings I tiptoe out of bed while you are still asleep. I will tiptoe off to write. But I am shitting all the time. I start a sentence, then break to shit. Long, thick shits like undiluted oil paint. Maybe because I drink lots of water. Either way, it ruins my flow.

Every day is a fresh start. Today, the day before the day before the final day, we take the bus to the Sag Harbor library. I pack everything – poetry, two novels, Plato, chess set, chess tactics, makeup, dental floss, laptop, notebook– onto my back. Just in case, I tell you. We sit across from each other in an empty round table in an empty round room. You pull out the Hegel. Every day is a fresh start. I pull out my laptop and realize that I am still tired.

Paper cups of coffee in hand, we walk through town towards the dock. There are women shoveling romaine hearts down their throats. There are tanned men in pink shorts post-nosh digesting outside The Golden Pear café, their gaze somewhere beyond the outstretched copies of The Wall Street Journal, thrusting their crossed ankles into the sidewalk. You snort.

Humans. We are born half animal and half god – but it is in flux. You choose. Whether to indulge your animal side or your god side. Most people are animals – look at them. These people. You could spend your whole life like that. People can organize their whole life around their next meal.

Munch, munch, munching at the viands.

Now we settle onto the dock. I believe that I look out at the water. I believe that you remind me that this, them, that, is why you believe in books: something about grappling with godliness. I believe that I ask whether we could not find God in the water, or in the sky. You grimace before giving me the benefit of doubt.

Maybe. But this? You gesture towards the water: a handful of ducks and a row of yachts with names like Destiny II roped to worn posts, bobbing on the grey-green surface. This? What could we find in this?

Munch, munch, munching—

We must rise up—

The mallard floated in the muck.

The world is sinking.

Let us unfold our bodies to return to the library. Everybody is becoming increasingly squirrelish. Small women in print cover-ups squirreling away outside cafes with burgundy claws full of air chips chewing them with their front teeth.

What are we supposed to do? The day finally closes and we stand waiting by the screen door, our cold bare feet against the cool wood slates. There are daddy long legs in the corners of this house. I feel one scuttle across the little bones at the tops of my feet. We watch the street. It is black out there. It is small dark leaves on hedges that are manicured every dawn. The hedges of our mistakes: if I had only trimmed my pussy hairs… Little beetles collect on the outside of the door, drawn to the cozy light of this house. Is that me, then, flicking the undersides of beetles and hearing them drop, the sound of fingernails against a screen, the distant plop of a tiny animal falling from an infinite height, waist height to floor…

I feel my chest rise and fall. I feel pooling up behind my sockets. My veins get very itchy. What could we say?

You have moved on to the next book, you tell me. You talk to me about pure reason. I tilt my head and thrust my neck forward so that I can listen better. I watch you as you speak, thinking it novel the way that you use the same gestures to talk about the universals as you do when you talk about my booty, which you want to eat with a spoon. If I lost my hearing, how would I know? Your words enter my skull and scurry around like so many pigeons in a café—frantic, frantically, hitting glass to be bounced right back against another pane. You finish, and I—reaching for something to say, then letting silence hold its weight—cough.

© Anna McConnell, 2012

My nemesis appears
and the guy I held hands with last night adds me on Facebook.

The city has become another body
a swimming pool of skin
I dive in, I kiss everywhere.

Is this some cheap Star Trek remake
with four million bodies
moving at different frequencies?

There are no slaves in my living room
only guys between jobs and the odd call centre worker.

The green bus snaking back Waitakere way floats tar.

I try my best with CNN and Assange
even when it’s sick shit like power tools in virgins.

I write down the lyrics to their marches
even when my ego disagrees.

Home is too small
I have seen things
K Road is under water.

It’s midnight in Munich
the distance they fed us in school
has becomes senseless.

The bin across the road
it sat in concrete
the whole time I was gone.

The same barefoot soldier
checked for scraps each dawning.

© Courtney Meredith, 2012

‘Cause you’re out
Somewhere

‘Thing is…
You don’t work late on Fridays
And you don’t have plans…that I know of
Why don’t I know about them?

Who are you with?  Mates?  Mates are fine.  Girl mates?  Are those fine?
Do YOU think that’s fine?
Work girl mates?  Do you have a lot in common then, hey?

7.14.  Let’s say you finished up late; 5ish.  5.15 even, and someone kept you chatting
That would take you to 6 at the latest.  Forty minutes home.
That leaves 34, now 35 minutes to account for.

7.15, C’MON!

Is 35 minutes a drink?
Is 35 minutes a phone call?
Is 35 minutes a hotel room?
Is that your car?

Yes.

What stress? What’s 36 minutes anyway?

© Karen King, 2012