NAP 1.1
Edited by Chad Redden
Copyright 2011 NAP Literary Magazine and Books
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NAP Literary Magazine
Volume 1 Issue 1
January 2011
Editor: Chad Redden
NAP Literary Magazine and Books: Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.A.
&
Twitter: NAP_Magazine
NAP Volume 1 Issue 1 © 2011 NAP Literary Magazine and Books
All rights revert back to authors upon publication.
Contents
Mark
Cunningham
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Things You Don’t Have to Do
Nobody Means to Hurt Your Feelings
I Made This on a Saturday I Felt Ill
Beneath the Beautiful Mind of a Blossomed cherry tree
Those Reassuring Susurrating Sentinels
Mark Cunningham
The officer who opened fire couldn’t tell the difference between the suspect’s front and back, even with the suspect’s hands raised. We tried to recycle the “plastic conception” into a new form, but that only made it more plastic. All my stories are Möbius stories, so there. He hit me so hard I saw double, and then he said, “That’s just who I am.”
He said he’d be more communicative later, but I was getting the message right now. They radioed in to say they could be reached only by letter. No matter where it comes from, no sound is distant. “The sound of small aircraft makes you hum.” To the person who said, “Don’t forget me”: whoever you were, I haven’t forgotten.
Oh, everybody likes you, just not the way you like them. “Speak for yourself,” the ventriloquist said. Dust is always superficial; we are all dust. The speck of dead skin stopped being part of my eye and became part of the visible world. One symmetry = a symmetry.
I could hardly see the moth against the brick wall and, when I finally found it, it had spot-like gaps in its wings, so figured it was near its half life. “It’s like radio. It makes sound.” She said she had been a follower of Baba R.E.M. Dross, but now she followed Baba ROM DOS. We couldn’t tell if it was a real tree or made out of wood.
The test was on the uncertainty principle, but since my mind works on the uncertainty principle, I didn’t do so well. I turned on the light, which made me have to shut my eyes. It’s cold enough in the kitchen that I can see my breath; therefore, air exists.
Mark Cunningham has published three books, 80 Beetles (Otoliths); Body Language Tarpaulin Sky); and 71 Leaves (ebook, BlazeVOX). A newish chapbook, Georgic, with Eclogues for Interrogators, is on the Lamination Colony site.
Libiamo
You will never be poor
You have the laughter of a woman,
I am the source of many women’s laughter
But unlike you, it is never shared
With them behind closed doors.
Boy Toy for June
Take
me out for a conversation,
Promenade this mouth for a talk,
I
am willing, flexible, hand me
Subjects and give me ears to wear
Down until they understand
The origins, the definitions,
The closing of the is/ought gap,
Such is the powerful joy I run
Through my mouth for nights
Measured out in our empty glasses.
Ben Nardolilli currently lives in Montclair, New Jersey. His work has appeared in the Houston Literary Review, Canopic Jar, The Delmarva Review, Contemporary American Voices, SoMa Literary Review, Gloom Cupboard, Black Words on White Paper, and Mad Swirl. Ben was the poetry editor for West 10th Magazine at NYU. He maintains a blog at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com.
Nick Monks
On the path into the forbidden wood
I tread on scented rotting pine needles
My breath born into the frosty air
Between and in then on into the trees
A shower of dew from a branch
Unlike Hansel and Gretel being an adult
I found my way back to the car park
But saw the ghosts in the ruined house
Nick Monks was born in Lancashire, England, in 1965. He studied philosophy at Hull University. He has spent about six years working and travelling abroad. Nick has been published widely in small press magazines. He likes mountain walking.
Things You Don’t Have to Do
You don’t have to be cheerful
when you’re blue, vivacious
when you’re tired, sympathetic
when you’re bored. You don’t lie
awake listening to snores. You need
never turn out your light
no matter how late. No one
lingers in the tub when there’s only
just time for a shower. You have
life’s great blessing, a bathroom to yourself.
Nobody Means to Hurt Your Feelings
Your family might wish you’d acquired
a husband instead of a desire
to find your own life, but nobody
means to hurt your feelings. Accept
the idea of poor little me, and you’ll only
be a bore. Ladies who expect orchids
get orchids while you’re sniffing
a single gardenia. Fill your time
with amusing things—parties,
hobbies, and books to keep you
interested and interesting.
The evening is a party, all the requisites
at hand: a good thick book
or a stack of magazines. You’ll have
more fun than anywhere else—
we’re not being vulgar. There’s nothing
more rejuvenating than dinner
in bed, a bowl of hot soup.
It’s scarcely worth the trouble
to get up—might as well
make an art of it, but don’t forget
your bedtime ritual to help
resist the dust-filled air and hard water
of most cities. Your schoolgirl glow
won’t survive on its own.
Amanda Laughtland lives north of Seattle where she teaches at Edmonds Community College and publishes books and zines through her Teeny Tiny Press (http://teenytiny.org). Her book, Postcards to Box 464, was published by Bootstrap Productions in 2010 (http://www.spdbooks.org). Her chapbook, Take It, can be downloaded for free from Ungovernable Press (http://ungovernablepress.weebly.com).
Howie Good
Your tongue,
a swirling storm,
finds me,
and, Bingo!
the Ukrainian church
shouts,
flowers pop
heart pills,
the fish can’t
sleep because
of the noise,
the leaves
so green
they’re almost
black.
Howie Good is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as 22 print and digital poetry chapbooks.
Bon Vivant
I will make the tongues of your
bridges lift
to the roof’s of their mouths,
treads of tires
cooling to a
pause.
And my sails,
stitched with poetry
and stuffed with
songs,
will force apart your highways’
eyes,
reuniting the river with its barefoot intentions.
Those suffocating hair-do’s,
crumpled like forgotten-dollar-bills
on your heads,
will hatch out of automobiles,
inconvenienced;
tiny swine ringlets will
uncoil down to your foreheads
in warm incubations
of sunlight.
Sounds from the sea will spill
from the conch of my shanties,
landing like drool on the pillows of your
ears.
Your docile hearts
will somersault
on rinds of brine
as the dolphin freshly leaps
and as hangnail teeth of sharks
dangle
from your lips…
She was thirty-five
cents
for a
chocolate milk.
Her smiling freckles
dot the galaxy
of my memory.
We pushed each other
at recess
and talked half-seriously
about
the tests. Her eyelashes
were like a swimming cilia
over a mingling sea of
jade.
I can still feel the shirt
clinging to my back
after she shoved me
down
the
slide.
We found brown caterpillars
and let them tickle
the insides of our elbows…
Her laugh was like a dripping oar…
Now that the bells echo is defining
distance
and our chlorine summers are stiff towels,
I wonder where she is,
where I am,
who we were,
and why(or if?)
these questions
matter…?
Turning my morning doorknob
into the bronze lit hallway,
I would yawn at flights of golden dust
threatened by Lysol rags.
I exhumed the
stillness
of the just-unsealed tomb;
pancakes began hissing and syringes of syrup
dribbled upon my
youth.
Torn like Velcro
from the living-room rug,
my cooked pajamas
were swapped for cuffed trousers.
Off to summit the black ice steps of Church!
Plastic Jesus,
that cracked corner of eucharist,
couldn’t anoint my creasing folds of
boredom. Acoustic songs
blew out the candles of prayer.
We set off to celebrate our hunger:
pewter’s of donuts, warm bagels,
bottomless vats of serrated butter,
lettuce fringed subs.
Once home,
the windows blued by lesser angles of sunlight,
taxes resumed at the kitchen table.
Crumbs trembled next to
palpitating calculators.
I would creep around the cloak
of the corner,
turn my doorknob counter-clockwise,
slip empty homework into the pocket of
some folder,
and finally approach the quadrant of
windowsill
where I could exhale the
secret fog of my dreams.
Michael Murphy does not consider himself a poet, and yet, he writes poetry. He is an anomaly, an aberration. His poems have been featured in Portland’s street paper, Street Roots, and he can be found at times peddling poems with his typewriter.
Peter Branson
(The curlew is on the red list of species judged to be on the road to extinction.)
“O curlew, cry no more in the air” (W. B. Yeats)
The Peak District National Park
This tearful horn-anglais refrain haunts like
old Irish pipes, high-bubbling trills as shrill
as tribal widowhood. St Beino blessed,
his sermons rescued from the waves, tale goes,
blurred like a needle’s eye by candlelight
and lost again before you know, they weave
between two worlds, of living and of dead.
These browns, burnt olives, duns add clout: hard times
abound, present and past; echoes of fly-
blown gunnels and consumptive back to backs;
of guttersnipe, folk old before their span –
famine, disease, debilitating dust;
of gamekeeper, mill owner, magistrate,
pawnbroker, rent collector, tallyman.
The Common Swift: Apus apus
Not here this year,
lost souls, homes worn away,
handhold to fingertips,
like spent pueblos.
They don’t die back
or hibernate, but cruise
vast distances above
the turning world.
July evenings, they side-
step, scissor-kick
thin air, etch pen
‘n’ ink invisible
tattoos. Banshees,
dust devils in wet suits,
anchors on skeins
of rising light, they’re soon
shrill specks in your mind’s eye.
Time lords, stealth craft
hot wired to while away
brief summer nights,
they preen, breed on the wing,
use what the wind blows in
to feed, fix nests
under house eaves.
Broadcast, they silhouette
the urban sky,
shape-shift, in one heartbeat,
present and past.
Peter Branson’ poetry has been published in Britain, USA, Canada, EIRE, Australia and New Zealand, including in Acumen, Ambit, Envoi, The London Magazine, Iota, Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Nottingham, Pulsar, Red Ink, The Recusant, South, The New Writer, Crannog, The Raintown Review, Barnwood, Able Muse and Other Poetry.
Her Last Sentence
She thought about Tom, and how the rancidity of his breath was infused with stale beer in the mornings, how little hairs poked out from his big ears, which reminded her of cartoon elephants. She thought of his confessed infidelity last spring with that slut from work, Tiffany —the one who looked like she was still in high school—and then she put the razor to her ashen, tattooed wrist while the tub dripped tepid water, then she sliced a vein, maybe it was two veins, maybe more; the opening was a gash that emitted a red hue clotted with what reminded her of mucous, and she sighed, she scowled, she allowed her mind to drift, the water imbuing with a tinge of pink, reminding her of babies, of the one Tom inculcated her to finally forget about; and right before she closed her eyes, the blood became, at least it seemed, vermilion.
Michael Shannon is a technical writer in Pennsylvania. His work has been published by Enigma, Steam Ticket, Down in the Dirt, The Oak, AntiMuse, Barfing Frog Press, Wisconsin Review, Midway Journal, The Foliate Oak, Gloom Cupboard, The Griffin, Seven Circle Press, Xenith, Word Catalyst, and The Hamilton Stone Review.
Transport
here you can exchange
anything for anything
out the back door
to the Oriental Lanes
and Spanish colonial times and buy a college course
in wallpaper hanging
the muscular tissues come in sample cases
so you can decide
before you paste the whole port for the salts
who never go anywhere
only ship the goods
unbought unmade
untaxed
and all the while a comical parade of yes men
a defile
nothing but a few farmers
dirt farmers subsistence farmers
and the broken soil
around a general merchandise store
where the cracker-barrel philosophy is bare
as stubble and weeds
The Caper
the panel discussions engender a species of reflection
ready for the next move just the opposite
a likely maneuver then you string up all the locals
install your own people
that’s when the strings get pulled
you have clear sailing
The Heist
the format is in high dudgeon
first smash all the windows
and gut all the buildings
subdivide to keep up appearances
sell the lot in blocks
and now you have an income share
that drops off in next to no time
right next door
Christopher Mulrooney’s poems have appeared in Burning Houses, The Delinquent, Turbulence, Paragon, 322 Review, and holland1945.
Sonoran Sojourn
By the brick fountain
bus door opens with a squeak—
Oranges and dust smells
Waiting cloudless afternoon
One man holds out a dry hand
Under an old truck
loudly arguing chickens--
Baskets of red chilies
Brown eyed child asks questions
A gift to keep the sun off
Room with pink plaster
old walls and faces with lines—
Deep shadows help…some
Desert sky broken glass stars
Windowsill cricket singing
Dry land farmer
asks what this woman can do?
Looking for water
Dusty facts gather in dust
The well driller talks too fast
New pipes take the flow—
An old man holding up a bowl
water for the Sun
Voices by the brick fountain
Again the squeaky bus door
Grey ad purple washed out
A few left over dark clouds
Torn loose from the sunset
By the shoving wind that kicks out
A final passing threat
Shaking free the last fat drops
That clamor down as idle agents
Harmless except against
Beds of daisy faces again turned up
Little wide eyed wonders
Linda Mills was born with less than 7% vision words have always been her gateway to the universe. Impatient as child and adult, shorter forms of poetry appeal to her. Over the years, as Linda Trujillo and later as Linda Mills, she has had poetry published in the US, England, and Japan.
Hey man…
….isn’t murmur a rum old word?
I’ll have mine backwards, a double of course
and drown it with coke if its white and its pure.
Golden’s like nectar, so I’ll drink it alone,
while navy’s so dark I’ll have it with black.
Don’t say a word, not even a rumrum
just sit yourself down and we’ll drink a toast,
to the sugar, the cane and the drink you like most.
Rosie’s cheeks are red it’s true,
but only time will tell,
whether the cause is Cupid’s arrow,
or the cider, beside her, inside her.
David Supper has been writing poetry for about 12 years. He is now retired and living in Nottingham where he founded Serpent’s Tooth, a poetry writers’ group, which meets regularly in West Bridgford. He has had a number of poems published on-line and in print. David also directs and designs sets at The Lacemarket Theatre in Nottingham.
Clearly Mumbling
I found a corner where my mumble is clear and appreciated
Followed closely by applause from the perfect audience,
Finally I’m not entirely incoherent,
This is me you hear.
I hear me too.
I start off – “so sorry” – to all the clapping hands
And like clock-work to the jokes on who?
I am able to speak my thoughts,
So just hear me out,
get a clue,
this isn’t an attack,
it was never planned,
so don’t even try to map it out or trace a contour.
Let’s just say it’s my own kind of Mouth by Math,
a common explanation, but an uncommon equation.
An answer to
Just what am I fighting with this beat-box slap?
Breaking down how I’m slapping such a face
On the road to destroying this repetitious beat
knocking sense at your door from the back seat of the streets?
Thomas Jordan lives in Portland, Oregon. As well as a writer, he is also a painter, and photographer with numerous shows around the Portland metro area displaying his mixed media work. Thomas is also a musician and has a 7” vinyl EP out with his former rock band The Wittdrawls.
The Ghost
Ben Sully is a ghost. Let us clarify. Ben Sully is the ghost. He is the only ghost there is. He is the only ghost that has ever been. When you hear about hauntings. When you hear about poltergeists. When you hear whispers in your ear and it wakes you and makes you shiver in the cold, dark night. It is not your dead grandmother. It is not an angry demon. It is not the angels from up above. It is Ben Sully. It has always been Ben Sully.
He is here now, and he is trying to scare you. He is making eyes spring from his face. His face is a skull in front of you. The boney hands reaching for you will soon crumble on your dining room floor and, clattering against the tile, they will turn into dust, and then nothing. You will not know for sure this happened, but it did happen. Wait for it.
Ben Sully couldn’t tell you how long he’s been doing this – maybe he’s forgotten. Or maybe he’s lost the words to explain. Ben Sully can take many forms. He can dissolve into vapor and mist. He can travel through sound waves. He can be in two places at once. Three places. Four. But he is incapable of telling you the why. Try asking him next time he appears next to you in your full length mirror, shaped as your dead uncle.
Say: “Why, Ben Sully?”
He will make you scream, but you will see that he will not be able to tell you.
Understand:
There are times when Ben Sully doubts. He will not admit it, but we will for him.
He had just scared a baby in a crib. He had appeared over her and looked down at her small blue eyes, and he didn’t even mean to, but he scared her, because he was part vapor and part Abraham Lincoln, the top part of his body with a bullet hole in his head, dripping blood onto matter, onto nothing. He had scared a family of tourists at Lincoln’s childhood home. He had appeared on the bed there, over the mantelpiece, smiling. People will speak of this for decades. He had forgotten to change his form. It wasn’t his fault.
He appeared over baby Michelle’s crib, just looking at the beautiful thing, admiring her puny hands, and almost scared her to death. The baby, not even two weeks old, screamed and choked on her own fear, and if her mother wasn’t in the bed ten feet away, if her mother hadn’t run to her, right through Ben, right through his half-Lincoln body, not even seeing him, she would have gagged, thrown up in her mouth, drowned in it, and died.
She grabbed her baby, and hit against her back. “It okay, baby,” she said to the baby. “It’s okay.” And ten minutes later, though there were still tears, the baby was okay.
This was a time when Ben Sully doubted his purpose.
There are other times too. Like when he scared the couple by forming a figure in the backseat of their car. He had a hook for a hand and he scratched that hook against the back of the woman’s neck, softly. She screamed, and the man driving screamed, and they crashed into a tree and they died.
Ben Sully does not try and take life, but it does happen. He does not try and take life because he sees what happens after someone dies.
Nothing.
Ben Sully sees a person take their last breath, sees through their skin to their heart as it takes its’ last beat. And then there’s nothing. He would stay over their bodies for hours at times, hoping that they would become something like him. But there is no one like him. Ben Sully doubts because Ben Sully is alone.
If he could make people like him he would kill the world. No one would be able to stop him. He would kill everyone and they would be like him and they would live in three places at once, dissolve into the wind, become whispers, skeletons, living memory. He would be able to talk to them, to guide them, and he would have an answer for them when they asked, “Why?”
“Because,” he would tell them. “There is a purpose here. We are part of that purpose. We are here to create wonder. Fear. Comfort. We are one with the plan.”
And if there were others like him, others in this state of existence, he would believe it too.
Ben Sully is collapsing in front of you, but there’s still time. Instead of screaming, grab onto his skeletal form. Tell him that he need not be alone. Tell him that just because he doesn’t see it, doesn’t mean there is nothing beyond death. Tell him that there is a reason that he is here. That there is purpose. There’s still time to tell him.
But you don’t. You just scream.
They always just scream.
Timothy Moore is an army brat and has traveled across the United States. He’s wanted to write fiction of all kinds since his father picked him up a Batman comic at age six. He is currently an editor at the online Ghost Ocean Magazine. He also blogs feverishly at www.tim-readmyblog.blogspot.com.
Untitled
As the plane taxied
on the lit runway,
in the mute pause before
the imminent impossible act
to follow, I caught myself
reading a line with the same absorption
as one in prayer; realized a form
of prayer was actually taking place.
I Made This on a Saturday I Felt Ill
thanks to Laura Cumming’s “A Face To The World”
The key by the sink opens a door
to...Who knows what? - it starkly points
to something. Albrect Dürer chased a whale,
was an obsessive observer, diarist, noter
of the bizarre and everyday- and time itself:
“nothing must be lost to dust and oblivion.”
Down to “Self-Portrait in the Nude”:
a diagnostic aid, words (for his doctor) appended
to his gesturing hand: “There, where the yellow spot
is located, and where I point my finger,
there it hurts”. Art isn’t just struggle
with the world, but involved response.
Michael Lee Rattigan was born in Croydon, England. He studied at the University of Kent and Trinity College Dublin. He has lived and taught in Cancun, Mexico and Palma de Mallorca. Through Rufus Books he has published Nature Notes and a complete translation of Fernando Pessoa’s Caeiro poems.
Beneath the Beautiful Mind of a Blossomed Cherry Tree
Beneath the beautiful mind of a blossomed cherry tree my annual
pilgrimage of 6.8 miles by car ends at your grave.
Each year I am embarrassed that the moss has occupied the headstone more, so today I bring plastic gloves, a bucket, brush and soap, and draw the water from a stand pipe among the graves in the next aisle.
As I scrub to uncover your name, my thoughts come back to the same point: in eye-scope is the street where you were born, then moved a short way up into your married home where you gave the last of your rations to two hungry sons; then years later babysat their children whilst one daughter-in-law studied late medieval crucifixion art with the OU and the other cleaned the Co-op offices of an evening.
A shocking proximity, no more no less and always the same, is your green wooden door (now white UPVC) with this silent plot of land hummocked by forgotten decayed presences where you came to stop.
A life with the same death context
as anyone’s, including ours,
yet doubly so through the ruthless window.
You studied no philosophy-
working class and female
would have you kept you from that-
but I guess you knew all the same
being as all we are
being unto death.
Those Reassuring Susurrating Sentinels
The reassuring susurrating sentinels of my childhood who shooed me along the school drive
after my pencil-lipped slap-handed father had dropped me at the gate in a dust bloom
“Are dying,” he says
(thus the Head of Biology)
I look in disbelief though I am no tree surgeon and would not know an elm from a beech,
but even to my uncultivated eye, it is palpably true:
the crustaceous Cryptococcus fagisuga coating
he diagnoses as terminal
the o-mouthed wounds of green blood
where lopped
limbs
once
were
decide it for my layman’s eye
me the teacher now not the pupil
duty on the same gate I ran through
the same drive the length of my once ambition
hard skinned too
too many false starts,
weatherings
infections
and amputations
one day dying like this curtained chorus line
of my youth is doing
tall and ready to fall
fall fall
fall fall
fall fall
fall fall
felledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelledfelled
yet the branches still dip and rise
like cartoon rollercoasters
for me for me for me
they whisper new things now:
shush and hear the heavy breathing air balloons
of your mind break from their moorings
there is still time to dream and be
shush
Everything was ready for Alison’s arrival. Michael had followed her stipulations exactly. The frying pan contained a tablespoon, and no more, of olive oil. The garlic lay on the chopping board in thin slices. So too the broccoli, the mushrooms, the onions, the peppers and the tomatoes. All the vegetables were organic. The tuna was dolphin-friendly and tinned in spring water, not brine or sunflower oil. All these ingredients were tumbled into the frying pan as soon as she arrived and cooked for ten minutes on a low gas to prevent the vegetables’ vitamins and minerals from being destroyed. The organic brown rice was already cooked. It was kept warm in the rice cooker. Such was her will.
Michael’s apartment had never been cleaner. The last time Alison had visited, she had sat by mistake in a pile of crisp crumbs he had dropped unnoticed on the sofa. That morning he had been late in getting up and those crisps, along with a hurriedly swallowed Colombian filter coffee and half a digestive biscuit that had crumbled in the coffee, had been his improvised breakfast before crowd surfing through the rush hour. When she stood up to go at the end of the evening, he had been in two minds whether to tell her, but anticipating her greater wrath if she discovered she had walked home in such a state, he told her just as she placed her gloved hand on the door handle. Her first instinct was to shriek that he was repugnant, loathsome and nauseating, for bludgeoning series of synonyms were her weapon in arguments. She soon apologised and once the crisp crumbs were brushed from her skirt into the kitchen bin’s undiscriminating mouth, she resumed her foreign policy of careful smiles and politely articulated boundaries.
This time Michael was certain he would pass inspection. The toilet exhaled the fragrance of ocean blue. The bath admired its shiny white coat in the polished bathroom mirror. The bed reclined confidently, dressed in its clean, unwrinkled duvet. Dirty clothes skulked in the linen basket and the vacuum cleaner had tormented the carpets and sofas of their dirt. He’d avoided crisps and other crumbly foodstuffs altogether by eating nothing all day. He made the requested changes to his appearance and odour too. He shaved off his goatee beard and properly ironed, this time, a dark purple shirt and a pair of black jeans. His hair was parted on the right and not in the middle, a style Alison castigated as supercilious. He had exchanged his Lynx deodorant for a splash of Old Spice.
During their first meal together, she had been irritated by the television left on in the background. He’d wanted to catch the last highlights of the British Grand Prix, but the tungsten whine was, as she described it through a constricted mouth, “unrelenting torment.” This time a recording of Chopin’s Nocturnes in E flat major and B Major and his Preludes in D Flat Major and E Minor waited to accompany their meal. She claimed Polish ancestry on her mother’s side and for that reason, Chopin was her favourite composer. He’d never asked whether she had aesthetic reasons for her choice.
She was a teetotaller and therefore a one litre bottle of mineral water sat on the table beside the two tumblers. It was a lighthouse in the middle of a sea of table cloth warning of the sharp cutlery below. He had a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc 2007 put to one side just in case she changed her mind, and if she did not, for him to drink after she had left at nine forty-five pm. If he could not sleep, which sometimes happened, one or two glasses would be enough to help him put out into the dark, unbroken sea of the unconscious.
He considered lighting candles, but decided not to as their gentle radiance would have suggested a much greater intimacy than they had established, something she had stated when he had tried to kiss her during their first date. She was a great believer in relationships being allowed to develop naturally. He’d not asked for her definition of natural development, but nodded his acquiescence in response to her steady gaze.
He sat in his armchair, chin on hand when her rapping on the door machine-gunned his skull. He leapt from the sofa, checked once more for crisp crumbs, smoothed his fringe back from his face and opened the door.
“Hello Michael,” she said, “I said I would be here at seven, didn’t I?” Her tone of voice sounded as if he had issued her with the challenge of punctuality and she had risen to it successfully.
“Yes, of course,” he concurred, “I do not think I have ever met someone with such a sense of time as you.”
He helped her out of her jacket and hung it on the wall peg near the door. She removed her hair clips which let her dark, abundant, chestnut hair swing down across her shoulders and back. She placed a hand on the doorframe to balance herself as she eased off her shoes.
“Where they normally go?” she asked.
“Yes, of course.” He took her shoes and placed them next to his trainers on the shoe rack.
“Do I have time to do some work before we eat?” she inquired holding up her laptop in its black leather case. Her name, Alison Barnes, was in capitals on a name tag.
“Yes,” he replied, “of course. Is it important work?”
“Yes. It’s my final assignment for my MBA. It is due next month, but I thought if I could get some of it done now...” He nodded his assent and walked into the kitchen to begin cooking as she sat, legs curled beneath her, on the sofa, her fingers tapping the keys.
He slid the chopped ingredients into the frying pan and stirred them with a wooden spoon. Soon the kitchen and living room suffused with the odour of cooking fish, vegetables and warm rice. He enjoyed the smell of tomatoes cooking. It reminded him of his mother’s full English breakfast on Saturday mornings. She insisted on saying ‘Grace’ before they ate. The prayer went as follows: For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly grateful. She was not a religious woman and had married his father in a registry office, but she retained a sense of some Being’s presence that she approached through this Christian prayer she had learned at junior school. He looked at the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall and noticed that it would be his parents’ wedding anniversary in a week’s time. He reminded himself to buy them something.
“That smells nice,” she opined, still tapping away.
”It is what you asked for,” he called back.
“Good,” she replied.
When the tomato juice rose to the edge of the pan, the mushrooms softened and the garlic sharpened the mix of odours, he extinguished the gas, scooped rice onto their plates and added the contents of the frying pan. After he placed their plates on the table mats, she suddenly stood up, stretched and looked intently at what he had served.
“Do you have any grated cheese?” she asked, her eyes glittering at what he had prepared.
“Yes, I’ll go and do it now.”
“You mean to say you have cheese, but you have not grated it yet, so technically you do not have grated cheese,” she smiled.
“Well, something like that,” he scowled.
“I’ll do it,” she offered as she padded her way into the kitchen.
The meal was, by his own admission, very good. He enjoyed the amalgam of herbs with tomato source and was careful not to spill it over his shirt. She ate hungrily too, not saying much between mouthfuls and lavishing her bread portions with low fat spread. He made the mistake of overfilling her glass and had to pour some of the water back into the bottle. He watched her as she parceled the food neatly before taking it on her fork and raising it carefully to her mouth. At one point she caught him watching her. When he suddenly remembered Chopin, he excused himself and went to turn the CD on. The first piece was Prelude in D flat major, or Raindrop as it is also called. He returned to his seat as the delicate pattern of right hand notes ascended above the repeated raindrop note.
“Whose music is this?” she enquired.
“Chopin’s. Your favourite.” He felt he must have sounded surprised that she didn’t know, for she lowered her eyes and frowned while spearing a large slice of mushroom. It was then that he noticed something strange about her, something he perhaps should have noticed right from the start, but in the first bloom of attraction had not: a line of dark hair that followed the figuration of her upper lip. Surely it was a shadow created by the lamp to their right-hand side, he thought, but as she folded her napkin to signal she had finished, he saw the line of hairs again.
“Is there something wrong?” she demanded as she raised her glass, a bracelet slid down to the extent of its width on her thin, vein-flecked arm.
“No, nothing,” he answered,” I am really enjoying myself.”
“So, why are you looking at me in such a strange way?” By now the sombre, ethereal mood of Nocturne in E Flat Major trickled from the speakers. Its beauty contrasted with the flat white aspect of her face that demanded not the truth, but another fact. She is not a lover of Chopin, he concluded. She is not the lover of anything, not the uncompromising stars, the narcissistic moon, the shore-slapping night lake and not the folding waves. No, her face was flatly pugnacious and he thought of Molotov’s profile from his Soviet history textbook from school. And now that line of hair too? What does she take me for? He put down his knife and fork with sarcastic care.
“My dear Alison...” he began.
“Don’t say dear,” she interjected, “it’s so patronising to a woman.”
“Alison,” he continued, “I have merely noticed one of your idiosyncrasies, that’s all.”
“Stop talking like that. You don’t normally talk that way.”
“But this is a momentous occasion of portentous discovery,” he teased, enjoying her confusion over his sudden loquacity.
“And what idiosyncrasy is that?” she asked, her eyes narrowing as she reached for her glass again and finished the remaining water. The Nocturne became more urgent as the notes curved higher in a dolorous arc.
“I am sure that a beautician would have the answer,” he said, his fingers lightly tapped at one of the legs of the table.
“What do you mean?” she demanded as anger and anxiety rose in her.
“I mean the hairs above your lip.” Her fingers went immediately to her top lip and then she covered her mouth with her palm.
“I never noticed before,” he continued, “and I think they are cute.”
“All women have hairs over their mouth,” she retorted from behind her palm, “and you are exaggerating.”
“No I am not. There is an unmistakable line of hairs above your lip. And they all point the same way.” It was the tipping point. Alison stood up, walked around the side of the table to where he was sitting and placed her face against his.
“And you are bum!” she screamed, the spittle settling on his nose.
“I thought you ought to know,” he smiled.
“What have you done with your life?” she continued, “what’s the big plan? Watch telly in your boxer shorts for the rest of your life?” He said nothing as she packed away her laptop and then strode into the hall. He followed and watched as she struggled with her shoes and threw on her coat. She turned to look at him coldly one more time and then left. She slammed the door so hard, it bounced back open, and finding his keys in his pocket, he closed the door and double locked it. He returned to the dining room, switched on the television and then went to pour himself some Sauvignon Blanc 2007. As he sat sipping his chilled wine, he reached to phone lying on the coffee table. He punched in a number and waited for the response.
“Hello?” said a voice from the secret garden.
“It’s me,” he announced.
“And?” asked the voice.
“Yes,” he said.
To pay the mortgage, Peter Harris teaches English and for fun is studying for a PhD in philosophy. Since 1993, his poetry, critical articles and reviews have been published in a wide range of literary magazines. Flarestack Publishing published a collection of his poems called Touching My Father in 1999.
Shoulder
She bought me a ham.
It was a peace offering of sorts.
Even offered to cook it.
Which I declined rather graciously I thought.
Her eyes didn’t appear to agree
to disagree we use to say.
Seal it with a kiss and a roll on the floor.
We’d laugh at the reddened cheeks
and blistered legs.
That night I stuck it in the oven.
Her ham glazed to perfection.
I ate it naked.
We made love in the belly of a rhino.
Half drunk he was more than willing
us to break the bonds breathed before God and hungry friends.
I remember her dress was purple and filled a room
with empty cans. The corners smelled of pee and sex.
So when Reggie offered his insides we didn’t hesitate
and he could crush you. A sensitive soul he was
more than rough skin and pointy horn.
He was a poet and a tradesman, with a voyeuristic streak of course.
With that in mind we did make love inside his velvety belly.
It started out slow as he just stood in the alley behind the arena
But we picked up as he moved off. I’d slip slap into her with each step.
I imagined he tromped down Euclid in the dark of the night.
When she climbed on top, he upped and galloped.
She held onto his Paper Mache organs, heaved and bucked.
I swore I heard him buying drugs at one point
She came heavy and pulled hard on his small intestine.
He roared as she rolled off and vomited.
Sometime later I finished myself and woke up outside my apartment
I tried to apologize for her behavior or at least the vomit.
He laughed it off “It smells like candy”
That was Reggie for you, always on the bright side.
As he walked off the giant gray hard-on was evident
Roaming free down a barrio
or untethered in midtown Hialeah.
It’s hard to imagine a donkey on the streets of Hialeah, Florida
(or love for that matter.)
As kids we chase it withered and decrepit it still managed to escape.
You can call out of character names “Lu Lu.”
Louder: “Loo La!”
Ragged: “Chin Chin”
Whispered: “Jill”
There’d be no luck whatsoever.
We threw petals and various bits of trash
-ed hotel rooms each night.
In vain.
(In vein) needles poked.
Dropped a few pounds and
Awkward pauses between bites of rice.
Cilantro kisses
On butter rimmed lips
sealed a lifetime of worry.
We beat it without mercy
T.V. Doctors cry “You hurt the ones you love!”
And so we do,
Push our beds together.
We wrap our tortillas and hold hands through the fireworks
Over and done for the night I’ll say “Love is a donkey.”
But at least it’s our donkey.
James Evans Remick II is a Cleveland poet, playwright, and wearer of animal noses. Among his accomplishments is tricking his wife into naming their cat (Csonka) after legendary Miami Dolphin running back Larry Csonka. Also, he is a veteran of many a space war. James hopes to one
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