Last Poem

_R(Easter morning salvia trip)

A white doorway wider than it should be – I see it
From the ground, jambs
Repainted and repainted to mimic burn-scarred skin - melted.
Door open, white white, nothing exists behind it: the
empty boom of the boom box at the feet of the man
Whose fingers are blacked at the tip like
burnt-out cigarettes, their
smokey ends limp, but gesticulating –
Over there, over there, over there,
Through that doorway.

Easter Morning

I’ve made
a life of losing.

Most recent; self.
Lubricated like
cake pans with butter,
slippery and never sticking,
fat-soluble and burning
hot. Sneezing in the
banana bread was
never a pastime of mine,
hiding my head as
breasts heave,
teeth clatter,
and screaming echos
of where’s
the fucking coke!?
Body went out
with the mind, tied
both ends to horses,
and split down the middle
at a graveled crossroads.
Mass of ripping flesh,
thrusted loose and
devolved.
Tight and sullied,
bleeding and dis-
connected,
the morning lappings-up
of frothing dogs.
And, always, hope.
The first and last thought
in the stinging crotch
of slumber, waking up
to remember
goslings all gobbled,
and passing out
without so much as an
inkling that survival
was worth it once
wrenched from the anus
of a fox.
They say,
down by the riverbed,
to go find Jesus,
and he’ll be eager
to show off his battle scars,
that if you put fingertip
to fissure,
feel around in the
wound, then there
will be a rush of
hope, overflowing.
I was never a man for
religion, and I’ve fished
around in my own spots
of emptiness. I could
run my fingers over my
lips, my tongue, my teeth
for days,
and still I won’t believe
in resurrection.

-Adam Parrow

Dropping Bombs

This is still in revision, but my poetry class liked it and so I'm posting it here. On the subject of loss...

"Dropping Bombs"

I’ve written a letter, folded it into an airplane, and I’m sending it off
to drop bombs on you.
It’s safe here in the forest. I hear the whippoorwill at night, the peeping frogs.
I still catch fireflies in the same jars you filled with sand from Desert
Storm.

It’s time to ask you again.
When I asked before I was too young to fear the answer and you
were already tired,
but you tried to protect me.
Now that you put away your uniform you don’t know what to wear.

Andy tells me stories that end with: “And that’s why they hate us,”
After the IED went off in the market,
after his gunner dropped the Iraqi family’s only TV,
after he shot a dog in the face.

You shot dogs too, in Turkey.
You picked bullets out of hostages’ pillows in Grenada.
You woke every morning in Kuwait, expecting
craters, but I’m not trying to ask you if
Andy’s right. I don’t need to know “why they hate us.”

It’s time to ask you again
—now that I am grown and you are Cochise and my fireflies have all died in their jars—
how many?

I don’t want to hear the stories about why they hate us and we hate them.
I don’t want to hear about your friend, dead on a pole with his own penis in his mouth,
how you dipped your bullets in pig fat. Revenge.

I want to know (I don’t want to know)
I need you to tell me (please don’t ever tell me)

How many lives have you ended when you told yourself you were protecting me?

It doesn’t matter.
We can still catch fireflies in jars and play our guitars together and I will still protect you, Daddy, from your monsters,
and if you listen, quiet
you can hear the whippoorwill.

~Jess d'Arbonne

March30poem: Ouch

for Adam

The thorns in my crown are my own thoughts -
I can’t get off my bed, motivation crawled out,
Leaving her black hair behind to catch around my toes,
and I’m still locked up, she had the key.

If I shower, my own reflection
denies who I knew I amiswas - my hair’s too dark, I’ve been inside too long -

My skin's transparent: a network of cyan brushstrokes
inturrupt the new bulbs of flesh, and interlaced, the artist left his
threads of cadmium, made from the crushed bodies of beetles, for the nurses
To tap, and it floods back into the tubes.

Blush-pink. The way the bedsheets are blushless white and bedsores
are hot-flashes for my hips and heels.

I don’t get out of bed.
If I must, they’ll wheel me and lie me down
elsewhere. Maybe, when they force me
out again to make room for the emergencies,
I’ll step out in front of a cab and fulfill
the requirements.



_r

Jade said...

To relearn the breath
through the heart, to notice
their consistency and rhythm
as a backdrop to all else
in the busiest of moments.

April1poem: When Someone Decided To Listen to the Answer to "How are You Feeling, Now?"

The rattling started in my chest cavity – the hollow
Clink and scrape of metal on bone: the barricade
that stopped the joy leaving, is dropping
it’s nuts and bolts though the long-bones
(they’re heavy) clattering like rats in pipes
through my femurs and out
through the stigmata bored into my soles
by my self-destruction, tourniquetting myself
on hands and knees by dragging
my spineless body over the sharp and
splintered bones of everyone I loved,
but broke – shredded - I’m trailing screws and washers
in what’s left of my footprints. The crows
are picking them up.


_rae

If my life were an orchestra, what instrument would I be today (?), asked a good man across miles and miles and miles…

…a piccolo or violin, though musically ephemeral,
depends on the rest of the orchestra the way
drums don’t. Kettle drums, snare drums, a whole caboodle of them.
Crude, but bold on their own,
the drums set foundations for the rest of the orchestra
to skirt around - they’re necessary, complementary, and
without them the orchestra would still function, nobody would point out
what's missing, though
the music may fall apart.

(notapoem, a pome, maybe)

#4

The Poets
j vogel

I get all my emotions secondhand anyway, I told them at the reading, buy
my tears from the used bookshop down the block, pickpocket
movie stars for my sniffles. Then I told them to shove it, to feel something
fresher than what I thought they’d pumped out of me.
Told them how I’d even painted my dime-store squirt gun a steely
black, held it to a homeless man’s head,
said give me your hunger—give it to me now. Told them how he
just shivered a little and didn’t do much of anything
so I shot him and he handed me his eyeglasses.
I put them on and walked away into the blur without
saying thank you.
But it was all too much for me I guess and I walked into a streetlamp.
The homeless man heard my eyeglasses break into seven
different pieces, one for each day of the week and he laughed at me.
Then I started shivering and couldn’t stop, so at the poetry
reading when I told them to cut the shit, the poets
just laughed. My friend’s watch had just stopped, the one his grandmother
had given him just before she died, before she tripped and fell over a pair
of broken eye glasses and hit her head in the street, bled out
beneath a streetlamp. So I lifted the watch from him and it brought
some tears to my eye but the poets,
the poets just kept laughing and handed me a cup of soup, something brown
with little carrot circles drowning in it. I wanted to be
one of those carrot pieces and I was about to drink it when they told me
to give it to the homeless man outside the building.
He’s blind, the poets said, the carrots might be good for him.
I took it downstairs and drank it as fast as I could. It burned my throat.
Then I took off all my clothes and tried to find that homeless man, tell him,
here, I am a carrot, maybe I can help. But by then I was
blind and couldn’t find my way out of the building.

March18poem: Horseshow

The rosettes are they
angry at me? That red.
And the horse pays no heed,
what the hell does he care he’s ferrying
the anger of my soul on his back.


_r

Nothing.

Sitting in rooms of poets on
a Monday night reminds me that I
am a low brow sit-com,
in danger of cancellation.

The booming echo of words
crystalizes in my ears. They tell me
of interludes;
how it feels to kiss a dying woman,
to stand on bridges and contemplate the fall,
to love so hard it bleeds.

After the open mic is closed,
they will go home and crash
into other bodies, nurse their habits,
and become so full they burst like overripe
tomatoes.

I will go home to switch on Gilmore Girls
and watch my breath dry over my teeth,
shared with nothing.

-adam

#3

Dearest, Variations on a Theme by L. Cohen
j. vogel

Your toothbrush is still there where you left it
the last time you were here –
so I don’t have to remember, you said.
That was when my corner of Queens
still has some leaves. And the kitchen still
looks the same – only colder now.
And I’m writing this letter because I know
it’s worse for you now and I’m wondering
if we’ll live to see spring. I suppose we won’t.

The night you left looked like Christmas
with your green hands and red eyes.
Your hair was so dark that night.
I saw how heavy your braid was, tugging
at your scalp. And I can’t even imagine you
light like a star, when we used to drive
with all the windows down.

I hear that some old friends of yours are talking.
I hear they’re laughing that you’re
with a woman. They aren’t laughing
at me. Have you told her you love her yet? Do you
love her yet? I never know what to say
when you call – the silence lasts hours and I hate
for you to hear me cry.
Have you told her you love her yet? I don’t think
I forgive you yet.

March11poem: Song

variations on a previous theme

Bring me
more to fill the channel between
my thighs that extends empty from here
to my breastbone, through the spasmodic pit
of my stomach – the drying sinew of
my hollow ribcage is thirsting
for something I look for
in books - I fill it
with ravenous intake of blades, and flesh
ripped salt-flecked and raw
from white bones of bathers, the pink meat of
prostitutes, butchers, madmen, and sleepers.
I am sucking on daemon birds baked four and
twenty into shapes shy, drooping,
unseen, and still I’m
dissatisfied. No more, bring me
touch – my belly is distended
painfully. Bring me
the all-American sod that diffused my bard-
I shall bury myself in it, naked, mad to be
In contact with it and
weeping for the want of exhalation.

Boys

for Jeff and Johnny

Men don’t learn
from their monsters.
They are content
to laugh and cheer
at the moment
of lethal injection,
to burn his paintings
in Naperville,
and to rejoice when
heads are battered in
with preacher bars
on the weight room
floor.

What of the boys?
Lying tight in their beds
as echoing booms
of vocal chords crash
slurred and rageful
through the floorboards.
They don’t wake up
in the morning
for fear of father
beating the fag out of them,
or else, their impacted
skull clots have
kept them concussed
where the swing
board hit them.

-Adam Parrow

Lent Poem # 4: Special Friend

by Adam Parrow
(found poetry from a spam Email)

The glow spoke,
hinting that
doors grew locks.
“My hands are as
toads coaching
tender fruit.”
The next week,
I saw him write
the addresses of
his young students.
A hot sick crush
not seven days
before I’d wish
to pay the DCF
a visit.

On Being Led Down The Foreign Language Hallway at 3 am.

I dreamt last night I hi-fived my high school latin teacher.
He smiled and conjugated the plurals of agricola in the nominative,
then asked me to leave.
So I walked out the paper mache door jamb, which transformed
into a statue of Caesar Augustus once my back was to it.
He pointed down the hall, walled by ivy with veins thicker than leaves.
I shuffled two and a half lengths, like I was told, and the ceiling tiles
fell in, blasting into gray powder as they hit the floor around me.
So I snaked around the wreckage and looked back. He was still pointing,
now at a clock beside me, with hands of black construction paper and a face of vanilla yogurt.
Then it beeped and I sat up.




-brendan

March5poem: Story

for simon

Three-pronged crown and a girl with
a coke addiction for his birthday – they put
every card on the table
and, if he’d cared to continue the metaphor he’ve said –
too many jokers, but he didn’t and
he held his heart to her back and
felt his breath breathe back at him
as it grew hot, and faded
with the rise
and fall
of her breathing and he
wore the crown, because
he'd forgotten
to take it off.

Rae

March4poem: Drinks with Friends

for Malinda

Talking about who we are roadtripping through ourselves to reach – the strain
of bacterial me that’s multiplying away from here with its mutations and
circadian rhythms – she said her who was some older man that never loved her back.
I said my who was the face I’ll have when the world is ended, once I’ve known
everything. Then
we hoovered some more and continued.
Taking about why we are roadtripping through ourselves – why not? It seems we all have
an inescapable compulsion for self-internalisation: one of these days
we’ll infold ourselves – anus over esophagus and vice versa – into a cherrypie mess.
Then it’ll be the worms roadtripping through us. Just to get to the other side.

-Rae x

Daisies

We sit and we talk just like we used to
About insignificant things that never matter
in the grand scheme of things,
Like my neighbor’s blaring techno music that I ask her to turn down, politely, almost every single night,
Or about the fact that the eating disorder clinic in Seattle
Is located, ironically, in the “whale” building,
(A fact that didn’t make the receptionist smile, despite my best comedic efforts,)
But the entire time I talk to you I get this feeling
That you aren’t telling me everything and I want to ask you but I can’t ask you
About your small and fragile body – your cheek bones, rib bones, collar bones, elbows, so empty and ravaged by this disorder, so wrecked by these months, years, of strange and subtle neglect, that they are sharp enough to slice through our misconceptions and take us to that bizarre and unbelievable
Truth:
You are ill
And you need me to talk to you to take your mind outside of this place for a while
So I talk: about Gatsby, our bright blue beta fish, and my red umbrella with the polka dots and frills that makes me feel like I’m eight years old again, and the daisies in our yard that we never thought would grow – and you smile and you giggle and then you laugh and when I leave you seem
A little better; and I relax a little bit,
And it dawns on me that all I can do is talk to you and tell you things that maybe actually are
Significant, after all.
-Anna

Nove

The top sheet felt of whipped egg whites,
right before the sugar is added;
something to give up.
The sunrise hit the wood floor especially sensual,
running over
the grain, smooth and orange.
It took a few hours
for it to rest on your pillow--
still warm,
even though you’ve been in the shower
twelve minutes now.

I won’t look for my car keys yet;
I’ll need an excuse not to leave
the room while you are getting dressed.

~

The steering wheel has never been
colder, and I am without gloves again.
You know of my forgetfulness
around you.
On my return I cannot turn on the stereo,
as the kiss you placed
on my bottom lip

is loud enough to last
until next Thursday.



-brendan

Anticlimactic

I write a letter to an
ex-lover who seems to stay
behind the times on who’s
let who go. And I write to him
and call him several names
I wouldn’t call my mother
or my father,
names that would never come out
of Mother Theresa’s lips and when
I’m done, I crumple it up and
think about burning it
or eating it, but my fury is
tasteless and dry on paper.
-anna

February26poem: But You Took It

I said, please don’t take both the red
and the blue blood
from my veins – I need
at least one of them. Maybe –
We can share? But she took
both and just dropped me on
the verge between
the school we go to, and
her backyard.

-Rae

Lent Poem # 3: Sexless Wonderland

by Adam Parrow

To fall down a hole
filled with cuckoo clocks and
used bits of brick-a-brack,
I have fallen so far
behind.

The doormouse isn’t home
and his teacups lay
used and dirty in the sink.
I wash them for him.

What of the hatter
so mad he ran screaming
stark naked
among the slithy toves?
Did he remember to
leave me his itinerary?

I have been trimmed and
boiled. My manhood
is a mock turtle,
crying to be spared,
but tiny turtle voices don’t carry.
The clock tick tocks on

and I have always empathized
with white rabbits. They, running
they, late. All
bramble knees and thump thump

Thump of my ventricle,
hollow echo of my ear,
In the pin pricks of my finger
tip, and the flaccid hunch of
my back. Thump thump thud.

Of Lanterns & Lighthouses

Here’s to the body that folds
and fumbles. Here’s to the cock
you weren’t born with. Here’s
to flammable nightgowns.

It’s got to do with the hard-to-find
postcards that make a place look
as dirty as it is. The unswept pile
of glass you were always
stepping around.

Here’s to the moment
you hauled your breath up
from prostration, like a suitcase
of air, and became
a bright red sail.


jade

March3poem: I was patient with it, Dad.

I was patient with it, Dad, I was
Patient with the computer, the way you
Used to say, just be patient with it when I was
Younger because it’d strike the keys and flick
The powerswitch on and off, I managed it, I was
Patient with it Dad, and it came back to me, it
Came back to me, Dad.

-Rae

March2Poem: Goodbye Dad, until next season.

Riding there – yellow of cab and smell
Of dusty upholstery trapping
Motes of ash and skin and citydirt – we sat
Silent. Talking through our sameness. Needn’t mention
The view. He’ll be thinking
The same as I.

Riding back – yellow of straining moon
And smell of wet grease and sponges
Over nostrils – I was in the minutes between
The first drop off and classroom where you fight
The effort to cry because it’s
Unseemly.

Arrived home – floor stopping my shoulders
Bouncing, nose painfully propping my pink face up:
the floorboards are so close the
tears splash back
into their own ducts to be cried again – this could be
Neverending.


-Rae

March1Poem: Home (abecedarian)

Home

Is birdhouses and broken
bird bodies buried carefully - coddled
between bulbs of clematis and daffodil,
shoe-boxed, decaying and eaten by the earth-
worms and the fungi.
See the feet and faces of the garden’s firs, see them
borrow the carbons and
proteins from broken
bird bodies - and become
bird, featherless, glideless,
hushed, infinitely useful, jade-leafed
half-bird moleculed, chimerally skinned,
feathered infinitesimally between bark-cell and
bark-cell, and inside, the soft stringy wood and soft
stringy heart muscle is kin, beating, mollified by quietude
into slow mumphs, numb throbs.


-Rae

Make Me

(Found lines are from "Othello", Joni Mitchell, and Tanith Lee)

It is the cause.

It is the cause, my soul. It is

the cause.

Let me not name it to you

O God,

who makes of me a bird.

The fire saint, She

makes the fire

burn.

It is saint fire.

O God make me a stone

so that I might not

burn.

It is the cause.

Please. O

God make me…

the fire saint, O

it is the cause.

She makes the fire burn.

Saint Fire, O

a stone make me O

fire saint, let me not name it

to you, O

make the fire burn,

my soul. A bird—

Please

O God, make me a bird of stone so I won’t burn. It is the cause, my soul. It is

the cause.

~Jess D.

Someone Please Name This No

Sometimes the feeling lingers.
The sneaking suspicion that everyone knows
I’m a poet.

On the street, people walk without slowing.
The crowds surround but never kiss.
Women don’t stop to love me.

On the bus, no one wants the adjacent seat.
Reaching Boston, nothing holds my hand.
I’m too ugly even for Boston.

Above, the sun is awkward and on its way out.
Children pretend everything is all right; fool around.
Pigeons only eat crumbs if I throw them.

I can feel myself flaking.
Every night I wait for a limb to abandon me.
Every morning, the same thoughts huddle in the sheets.

Poetry is leprosy.
Loneliness is waking
and knowing where you are.

Cafe

A dangerous delirium:
Her mouth mere inches from mine,
Smell of lilies hanging
On the delicate ridges of her collarbone.
She inhales,
And when she exhales,
The smell of smoke taints her breath.

Rising to leave,
I stumble,
Lightheaded.
Her hands catch me, lingering on my waist
A few seconds longer than necessary.

Even as she lets go,
My body holds on to the feeling.
Phantom hands
That capture me
Willingly.

-anna

February25poem: Not Waving

You see
That side-to
Side
Movement I’ve been
jerking, that
Seaweed in eddies, buffeted
Dogwood, thrashing of arms Side-
To-side twisting of my trunk with
shoulders above my ears – It’s not
waving – it’s
god help me,
It’s - take notice, it’s -
I’ve made blood happen in the bathtub -
It’s - I’m clawing -
It’s - I’ve sunk into the bile pit
Of my own stomach, I’m bogged in crude
Oil like an egret,
The feathers are slick - I’m
sliding

-Rae

A Voyante Must Cultivate Warts On His Face

The more you love humanity the more you loathe humans individually. That's what the thorny poet said, anyways. Each time you touch warm lips another word sucks from your vocabulary, a thought dissolves at your throat. The leaves with poison ivy shiver. Should we stop fishing for sacrifices? Leave the nails for wood? Stop showing our bloody palms to the fortune teller just so she can tell us every great idea has a jesus figure? The future cheapens when you try to calculate it, a moment broken into a tumult of minutes, numbers that numb an experience. The smashed telephone still rings. We can’t make a decision but we can’t stay in bed. The water running across your desk reaches for a shape and the window waits for a baseball to break it into pieces.

Corey

Gist and marrow

Have you been led away from your innermost kernel, the center
where everything sticks? The same has made me
sick: turning round and round to see the blind
ginger knot getting smaller behind me.

I have, on occasion, hi-jacked my way back, gone
plunk into the dark of my own stomach, and come up
with nerve-tangled hands.

So few empathize when you go after
the sacred channel and come up
looking like you’ve been
fucking a plate of spaghetti.



jade

#2

Michael
joanna vogel

The child’s head was more round than the cantaloupe but it looked alright, a little dented in some places, but children’s heads are apt to be a little dented sometimes. And I hot-glued some of those spiral macaronis to it to make it look like real hair only, I got to feeling a little peckish the next afternoon and picked most of them off. This made Michael look quite a bit more like a sickly infant than the almost-toddler that he was. At any rate, the cantaloupe started to rot a little after the first few weeks and I no longer felt comfortable bringing him out and about in the stroller after that. Now I’ve laid him down and sit next to his crib all day; my fingers are always crossed that he’ll take a turn for the better soon. I watch his head and it just keeps shriveling smaller and smaller, but the strange smell that’s been floating up from under the floorboards ever since I brought him home has finally all but gone and I’m hoping that when it has gone, Michael will be abe to breath a little easier.

Today, A Salvadorian Asked Me Out to Dinner, He Did, It was Sad, I've Never Been Out to Dinner

The skyscape is made of ellipticals
in my head. Calling all lips:
words are stunned.
My new shell. I feel horizontal
for being stupid. What am I
tangled in? Lent.

Roberto, Corey, Shauna

Lent Poem #1

Variations on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop
joanna vogel

The art of losing isn’t hard to master, only
it is hard – keys and continents
notwithstanding, the spaces left vacant are
firm as bodies, like cement or frozen
chewing gum and I wake each morning with hip-
bone shaped bruises and bits of blood
dripping from fresh scars in the shapes
of teeth and fingernails which I’ve bumped
into during the night-walks. My hands
outstretched, I drop each thorn
that sticks.

Unfold the Menu

In California, moist fish hooks are a rare delicacy.
The other day a man lost his daughter to a halibut.
I laughed with a belly full of cotton
as her pale heels slipped underneath:
boiled potatoes snagged by a sturgeon

The Fisher King thinks his fragments
are puzzle pieces. Each piece a gourmet slab.
The daughters scan the surface,
pick out the darker oceans for feeding.
This piece means a toenail-extension,
means a jittering reality. This piece means
certain destuction and is written in Byzantium heiroglyphics,
thought lost by some. These people are called Liars
and can light only cowardly flames.

Feeling our heels sinking in quicksand
can only be appreciated by those
who hoped to breathe their whole lives.



--Corey, Roberto, & Carlo Rossi

Lent Poem #2: Plagued

by Adam Parrow

Did you know that sunken treasures of
chipped sea glass aren’t visible through a sea of red?

Did you know that band-aids swim in a filling sink like
smooth skinned creatures that rose to plague you?

Did you know that your requests bit at
my face and my ears with buzzing wild fury?

Did you know that gin-drenched heads float on
swarming stings which fly them out the open door?

Did you know that a promise dies on contact when
it is met with remembrances of your lies, which consume it?

Did you know that blood bubbled and boiled inside
my veins as I squeezed my finger to let more of it fester and flow?

Did you know that the dull thump of a heartbeat falls heavy with
aches in my brain, hailing down on my broken crown?

Did you know that the empty boxes were left for
memorials of the ravenous devouring of their fruits?

Did you know that shoelaces act as
treacherous thrushes in the milky dark these nights?

Did you know I wrote on your wall in blood to
protect you like little lambs lost in the night-time silence?

No, you don’t know, because I scrubbed the wall clean,
and when you tell me that you are ok, I try to believe the decree,
through you’ve proven yourself a liar.

Crashing sounds

Like babes sedated on carousels with mousetraps in our hair, we watched the tide

ascend the bathroom wall, and fell over laughing. Fold of rug-burned thumbs

behind the knees, we slid to the bumpy bottom - to where paper cranes sink

like tapioca pearls, and our enamels ache like the arctic.

jade

40 Poems?

I barely have time to

breathe

so what's

the use

in 

poetry?

-Michael Lawrence

February24poem: Life Without Substance

Skin will drop off my bones

Like hot chicken off wing-

bones if

I move to quickly or fail

to tense my muscles against it but

the muscles are falling too – their tendons

Are like the tendons of mummies. I could be

made of ash, but it all feels more of a slip,

than a crumble.

Sand stilting the pendulum motion of my knees, the cockle

of my ankle. See the scalloped edges of my tongue

where I’ve bitten it. The cold the cold the 

cold in my platelets shivers vibrations

through my capillaries so they wiggle like hydra, but

my head is a furnace, threatening

to melt the metal vice clamped there.

 

When I read the pamphlets the faces suggested clarity.

The blues and greens and elegant type suggested

Rebirth. But, I am re-experiencing the days of dazes and

Dozing off in parks, and

Not being able to crawl out of bed for chapstick

When my bottom lip stuck to the top one and they tore

When I jammed a cigarette between them, and

that time I fell asleep in the bath and woke

With bruises where the ceramic had stopped me falling through the floor.

-Rae Victoria Stevenson

No One Gave Up

We all stood around and watched the bum try to hang himself. He was unremarkable—average bum height, average bum face—but was making a show of it. He sobbed loudly while tying newspapers together into a make-shift suicide; looped it around the head of a streetlamp and his own; stood shaking on a garbage can. The man to my right talked to himself: “No. No. No. They’re much too soggy for that. It won’t hold”. There was a brief sense of anticipated disappointment. The bum shouted: “Just know the world never fell on me. It was I who fell on the world!” He kicked the can from underneath and crashed into the pavement. The crowd surged forward, all apologies and pats-on-the-back. I heard a woman comfort him: “Are you ok for a second try? Maybe you should rest a while." Others attempted to re-tie the papers together. I felt sick. I reached into my wallet and left three dollars at the body: “For rope.”

Lent Poem #1: The Difference a Fingertip Makes

by Adam Parrow

I saw disillusionment

standing today

on the corner of 

Lip Hair and Thumb.

Though I nary had known

its grotesque and its gloom

my eye-skin was

already numb.

It lay there, just waiting,

grinning and cruel.

Above it a brow

so proud and so strong,

beneath it a jawline

well chiseled and coiffed, 

with some hair, not too

short nor too long.

Some eyes, autumn gold

and high cheek bones of stone,

with a wolfish boy-grin 

down below,

and an arm

tendons flexing to

move all the bones,

strained fingers 

to bed and to bow.

The hand, once so 

powerful, regal, and rough

was so dainty and

delicate then.

Dug deep to the knuckle

in the handsomest nose,

I would never see

handsome again. 

Signifying nothing

(linebreaks don't work) This is a drunken free write, so my sweet countrymen-judge tenderly of me!

It was tradition at first sight.
Your mom squeezed your nose tight
and shoved teeth in your mouth.
She said freedom of speech
will only chip another tooth.
Don’t lose your thoughts though
If you bend a straightline into a circle
then it will never end.
Or begin.

And what of lent?
I heard the chainsmoker quit coughing,
the phone booths quit ringing,
the widow at the window
stopped looking at other men,
the ghost stomached his significance
and gave up yelling,
stairs caved in,
the idiot who slept on a hammock,
slipped a note under his pillow
and gave up.
Curtains clinked closed.

Corey Barracato