How They Met
by Kyle Hemmings
After weeks, no, months of communicating
by e-mails kept secret from her invalid husband,
they agreed to meet across a Chinese noodle place
on Knob Hill, under the unveiling offered
by a scarred street light,
his heart bumping as in a game of sidecar.
She raced to meet him; he conjured her as a thousand
versions of a forty-ish Juliet in jeans;
she imagined glass snakes, their slithering lives,
or a green snake safe in its camouflage
She slapped him hard,
harder than any hello and good-bye
could ever be and said that his last
email caused a virus to crash her computer.
But I'm real he cried, I'm here.
She stormed off and how he longed
for that once kind invisible touch.
*
Monkey Business
by Kyle Hemmings
I wish I was a chimp
like all the other guys
hanging out at The Missing Link
sucking off Bush Baby bones,
this arboreal urge
and anthropoid pose
win the ladies with my pan troglodyte pout
with my promiscuous loins,
and eight kids.
I’ll play with my own dung
build a monument of it
to the god of all dung--
Cheeta Dungee.
And the fact
that I can pass a mirror test
get rewarded with a banana
or a prize Chiquita
makes me all alpha wet,
almost human.
When it gets too crowded
on the ground
I'll think I'll fly into space,
just to have a piece of primacy.
*
Origins of the Kitchen Sink Movement
by Kyle Hemmings
The apartment is three cubicles of clothes, chairs, unopened letters
from a remote father, shadows of immovable objects. Each room
connected by a tunnel of dense space. In the hallway,
one could disappear. The morning smells of burnt toast,
last night’s discount mackerel half-eaten
from a can. In flannel nightgown,
her mother is a hunchback with angel sweat-glands.
Her prayers are invisible birds and are swept
into the sink’s vortex. Today, the mother is under a pharmaceutical
funk and the girl prefers her old sneakers. Good-bye, says the girl.
She kisses the mother’s paper-thin face,
but the woman will not let go of her birds
***
Eulogy
by Christian Berntsen
When I am done I will be ash
drifting across a weed-strewn lot
across glass adorned blacktop
through smoking air
to the edge of the world
No monuments or markers will be erected
no images blazoned across a screen
In the end I will be words
scratched on a page
carried on a summer breeze
as the rain falls
lightly on your shoulder
I can hope for no
more
and want nothing
less
*
Admissions in a Cognitive State
by Christian Berntsen
And I think I should find a room, once white, now
a dull gray with age or stained
yellow by ancient tendrils of burnt tobacco.
There should be a table and a chair – which is
comfortable at first, but makes you ache after
a time –
a bed with a thin blanket, a thinner mattress,
a foam pillow, dry and crumbling.
And perhaps a window, high on the wall so that I have to drag the chair beneath it to see outside,
or maybe just move the bed below to save myself the trouble.
The stack of blank paper upon the table, their brilliance a reflection of the walls that once were, waits for
me, a row of pencils beside it.
Pencils because nothing is permanent, and their sound is soft.
And I’ll sit comfortably and write until the stack has moved from one
side of the table to the other, until my feet are covered by
balls of the forgotten pulp, until the pain in my ass and the needles in my legs beg for me to move.
When the last sheet of paper has crossed the wilds of the table, only then
will I move,
drag the chair, or hobble/walk to the bed to look out the window longing for the world outside.
Longing for the door I had removed before the quiet whisper of my pencil had first marked the paper.
***
Synagogue Graffiti
by Donal Mahoney
The kitchens of Belsen are belching again.
Ancient chefs, puffed hats askew,
storm once more
the catwalks swaying.
When the ovens are full,
the chefs dig pits
in the kitchen floor, set
silver spits, roast fryer thin
the legs and wings they’ve
cleaned and cleavered. Yes,
the kitchens of Belsen are belching again.
*
Fresh, Tinned Or Frozen
by Donal Mahoney
Father was a snap bean,
that’s all, Sis,
nothing more.
Fresh, tinned or frozen,
the greens of snap beans vary.
Neighbors in the yard,
clerks at the store,
folks at church,
you and me and bawling Ma,
for years we fed his strange chameleons
so we can swear, on the Bible,
Father was a snap bean,
that’s all, Sis.
Nothing more.
Fresh, tinned or frozen.
*
Paddy Murphy Is Fred Astaire
by Donal Mahoney
It's six below and so much snow
this January midnight.
Sunday's gone
and Monday's turning.
Yet Paddy Murphy's stepping out,
his crushed fedora all askew.
He's soused again and all aglow,
dancing along Fifth Avenue.
Tonight he thinks he's Fred Astaire
and so he's swirling in the air.
He needs a partner way up there,
someone pretty, someone fair.
If it weren't for the music
that only he can hear,
Paddy would be gone by now.
Tonight he's whistling, though,
delighted as his fingers find
parking meter posts
are an endless xylophone.
Listen to him play the posts
so all the world can hear
Paddy's favorite tune,
the jig of an ancient tippler
with one last dance to go.
***
Dyslexic universe
by Harry Calhoun
Those of us who are dyslexic must have suspected it
all along: our world, everything around us, is suffering
from rampant dyslexia. Oh, not stop signs labeled SOTP,
although we’ve seen photos of those,
or sleepless wretches plagued with inmosnia.
More that the world around us, and the people in it,
see things arranged differently than we do,
and what makes sense to us makes no sense
to them, and vice versa. I am not lysdexic,
but I do have some advice:
make your peace with Dog
an hope for whatever dyslexic justice
is out there
***
Clothesline by the Pond
by Robert Demaree, with thanks to Bob Bell
Early June: clothesline taut,
Fabric stretched between white pines,
Awaiting children’s trunks and towels,
Knots dimly remembered from scouting.
By the time leaves turn
The line sags,
The weight of memory,
Knots damp, hard,
Insoluble.
***
How Our Love in the Air Turned to Near-Miss Terror
by David Whitehouse
If journalism teaches you anything, it's that not writing is a craft that has to be relearned every day. It takes practice. You can talk about it and think about it and go to Not Writing 101, but in the end there's no way round sitting down and putting in the serious hours of not doing it.
Of course, anyone can kid themselves that they can not write, but can they get paid for it? The modern world has made things a bit easier, I will admit. Back when men were men, not writing involved plunging people's hands into boiling water and stuff like that, to make them do the writing. Nowadays, with the endless supply of cheap labour from places like India, that sort of thing isn't necessary. The need for intimidation has gone out of it. Not writing is now simply a question of discipline and personal pride.
Sex is one of the best things not to write about. People who are doing it don't need to write about it and people who are not doing it still want to read about it. The fact that you're not writing about it doesn't mean that you're not doing it, you understand, but people who are not doing it can still be forced to write about it, which is the beauty of it really.
The one thing better than sex for not writing about is airline disasters, real or imagined. The idea that your plane might be about to disintegrate keeps many of us, perhaps most, in a job. It stands to reason. I mean, if you were having sex, for example behind that curtain through to business class, where I suspect it happens all the time, if you were at it, say with one of the air hostesses, and the plane started to break up, there is no question which of these circumstances would become the most important. Would we remain locked in passionate embrace, like Icarus only better, as we tumbled into the waves? Would we part wistfully like autumn leaves as we fell through the air? I've asked Bangalore to see what they can come up with and file by lunch-time.
***
Upon Possessing a Wiggly Fish
by KJ Hannah Greenberg
Only Kathleen, who had kept the Abrams’ business books, knew the specifics of that organization’s finances or that her great Aunt Tamara, decades ago, had had to sleep on top of a body as cold and hard as cement, in order to survive a night in a concentration camp. Kathleen had a “wiggly fish” growing in her belly and as such possessed increased sensitivities. Accordingly, people spewed the viscera of their dark confidences at her.
Her contemporaries, the people who worked, as gardeners, as house cleaners, and as babysitters, for Pleasant Hills’ families, in contrast, suffered no such information overflow. They remained oblivious to the stringencies required in running Abrams’ dry goods store. Likewise, those people thought the Holocaust was something limited to Hollywood movies. Plus, those folk had no idea what it was like to be nauseous from pregnancy. Rather, Kathleen’s tribe spent the better part of its days and nights mumbling about the weather, complaining about former high school teachers, and seeking out new topics for grousing.
Nathan, Kathleen’s brother, was no exception. Employed as a tree pruner, he frequently griped about the slump in the economy, the disproportionate amount of wealth certain lineages enjoyed, and his unfulfilled quota of overtime hours. Nathan meant to work extra hours to buy a coop in which to raise hedgehogs.
Kathleen usually volleyed back her sibling’s words with curt rebukes about business responsibilities, about world citizenry, and about parenting. She frequently addended that since Nathan was younger, she did not have to heed his drivel and that since he ran with a band of men who played Frisbee, shot pool and drank beer, he ought to be more careful when editing his regards.
In answer, Nathan frequently, literally, thumbed his nose at his older sister or otherwise found ways to telegraph his disdain of her ideas. In short, the two siblings, though fully grown, continued to fight quite a lot.
After one such scrap, Kathleen tidied her phone into its receptacle and then dressed for work. Her bedroom floor evidenced all of the choices she had rejected and her dresser substantiated that she had forgotten her small pistol. Kathleen’s due diligence with marauding gangs was becoming increasingly compromised by the hormones that caused her abdomen to expand. As for flow charts graphing the income and expenditures of the family business, as for documents which proved the authenticity of her people’s near genocide in Europe, and as for coffee or scrambled eggs before two in the afternoon, she likewise could not be bothered.
Later, that particular morning, however, when Kathleen realized that she had left her gun at home, she paused from prying sconces off of a wall to question her wisdom in abandoning her bookkeeping job with the family firm. She had traded sanity for work managing a trash out squad. A glance at the diamond bracelet on her wrist, however, quieted her. Despite her increasingly awkward gate and her more and more frequent lapses into forgetfulness, as a team boss, she commanded double the wage of the other workers and had to put in only half of their hours.
Simply, since Sooner or Later Realty paid its staff under the table, employees lost no funds to taxes. They were able to work on multiple assignments most days, too. What’s more, Kathleen’s new post was not mentally taxing; she supervised players who “rehabilitated” properties repossessed by banks.
Her crew was responsible for removing abandoned items from abandoned residences and businesses. Sometimes her employees “reassigned” possession of the jewelry, the art work, and the bathroom fixtures, which they found, to themselves. Sometimes they bagged goods and left them curbside. Least often, as was their charge, they hauled those materials to municipal dumps. Their line of work, for subordinates and superiors, alike, was highly profitable.
In spite of that, their agreement to work off record meant that Kathleen and her colleagues could neither apply for nor receive health or unemployment benefits. Likewise, they could not call upon community service providers to aid them in times of crisis. For instance, once, when a rabid canine cornered a solo-flying Kathleen, she had had to resolve the problem with her M1911 instead of being able to call the town’s dog catcher.
Subsequently, Kathleen took crew to all of her assignments. She ceased to complain, too, about the dilapidated exterior paint, the failed gardens and the crumbling swimming pools around which they had to work. Kathleen even went out of her way to befriend some barn hands, against whom her team had bumped up when they had been sent to deconstruct a farmhouse. Kathleen had become resolute that harmony among the ranks and ranks among the harmony were her best insurance policies.
Notwithstanding those precautions, her weaponless day proved particularly tough. Kathleen’s people had been directed to work in tandem with Grant’s, with a group of individuals that oftenfailed to show up on time, that yakked distractingly while they labored, and that insisted on snagging the best of any mutual finds. Grant’s subordinates created more headaches than profits. Kathleen had had to supervise them not only because Grant was hopeless with crowbars and hammers but because he also had left the worksite midday to participate in a pickup game of basketball.
Many hours later, Kathleen tucked into her favorite bar to watch her friends drink and to reflect once more on the benefits and disadvantages of being a bookkeeper for her parents’ store, the difficulties inherent in having generations of one’s family tree snuffed out, and the meaning of the pain she felt when her baby kicked vigorously. While she was building a mental montage of concentrate camp faces and newborn babies’ bellies, she noticed her ex, Tommy, walk in with an unknown brunette clinging to his arm.
She greeted them with a little smile, motioned toward her table and then caught the attention of a waiter. While waiting for drinks, Tommy repeatedly hugged the mystery woman. He opined that Kathleen ought to discipline her employees when they were impertinent. As for Grant, Tommy thought that Kathleen ought to arrange “an accident.”
Kathleen silently adjudicated types of disrespect. Her parents suffered customers who invented spots or rips after paying for clothing and who puffed up with arrogance even after receiving free mending of pockets, gratis stitching of buttons or other favors. She thought about her many great aunts and uncles and third cousins who had been maimed, raped, or in other manners slowly killed because some other group of people had suddenly gotten “allergic” to her people’s kind. She thought about the babies in the bassinets, who she had observed when touring the maternity ward and who she thought looked identical. All of those crying or sleeping wee ones, wrapped in hospital-issued blankets seemed indistinguishable save for the appellations written at the foot of each of their beds. Then she regarded Tommy.
He had taught her hand-to-hand techniques and a little bit about using a bo. Thus it had been possible for Sooner or later Real Estate to hire a pregnant woman and for her team to want to abide by her requests. That day’s work, for instance, had only cost her a bruise to one arm, but had gained her a locket likely made, or at least plated with, gold, a 1960’s vinyl collection, and a fist full of silk scarves.
Consequently, Kathleen said nothing in answer to her ex’s provocations and instead chose to conjure mental pictures in which his new lady friend was tethered to tubes and pipes in an oncology ward, was overwhelmed by lawyer’s fees, or was largely unapprised of the accident in which a tractor trailer, driven by Tommy, had lethally jackknifed. Kathleen imagined paying that oncology ward’s care providers to fill the lady’s IVs with a toxic dose of saline solution and imagined herself scattering Tommy’s ashes over one of the cesspools where she and her troop regularly disposed of liquid wastes.
Tommy’s tap on Kathleen’s arm returned her to him, his lady, Kathleen’s friends, and the bar. He could be as demanding as her parents, as inhumane as the Nazis and as trying as a developing fetus. She hissed as she pulled away from his reach.
In reply, Tommy pronounced Kathleen’s plan to set aside funds for disposable diapers, for babysitters, and for pediatrician fees as poorly formulated. He declared that Kathleen ought to marry, instead. Then he began to sermonize about her working trash out and about her accepting pre-owned paraphernalia. He added that Kathleen’s job was: too much about brutality, not enough about compassion, very time consuming, and made him sad. He added that she ought to: be dutiful about her family with their store, devote more time to learning about her heritage, take her prenatal vitamins regularly.
Kathleen reached for Tommy’s beer, sloshed it across his cloths and left. She waddled to a neighborhood pet store and splurged on both a hibernaculum and a pair of hedgehogs for Nathan. While the lull in the economy had capped her brother’s arboreal work, it had enriched her pockets. Thereafter, Kathleen rang up the bar and reminded the owner that Tommy often slipped away without paying his tab.
Once home, Kathleen regarded the messages on her landline. That morning, before entangling himself with the brunette, Tommy had called and had mumbled something about wanting to try again. He had wept that he had come to know himself as less important than a minor league baseball team’s batter, but as more worthy than any important restaurant’s dishwasher. He had cried that he missed the way in which Kathleen rubbed his back and wanted to tend to her while she was yet cogent; he had heard about the tricks estrogen and progesterone play on even the most stable of women.
Furthermore, Tommy had claimed to be unsatisfied being an absentee lover and truly wanted to attend their baby’s birth. He had added that although Nathan no longer boarded with Kathleen, he felt that that Kathleen’s brother’s habit, of treating Kathleen’s apartment as though it were his own, was inappropriate. Last, Tommy had suggested that he and Kathleen ought to get engaged.
Kathleen spat at the phone. Tommy remained the warm-blooded woodland mammal she had discovered him to be. No amount of self-development courses would improve him. That man’s anxieties, all too uncomfortably, fed his control issues.
She thought about Tommy’s brand of nastiness for only a minute or so before a familiar urge hit her. Kathleen ran from the livingroom, to the toilet, in time. After wiping her mouth and then gargling with some minty-tasting mouth wash, she took her temperature. Odd; she was not ill. Nonetheless, such sensations ought to occur in the early portion of pregnancy, not in its final phase.
Restoring Tommy to her life would quash her supply of paste rubies, of imported chocolates and of other useful items she might carry away from demolition sites and would force her to focus on helping her parents during tax season or researching family genealogies. Her past efforts to integrate work, family, and biological needs had proved too exhausting. She'd parent solo and return, as soon as possible, to smashing windows, to pulling curtains from fixtures and to unhinging as many doors as her trash out team encountered. To her, life could only be a present tense occupation.
***
About the contributors:
Kyle Hemmings
lives and works in New Jersey, where he spends his free time skateboarding, falling down, and talking to cab drivers.
Donal Mahoney
lives in St. Louis, MO. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, Commonweal, Revival (Ireland), U.S. Catholic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), Snakeskin (U.K.), Public Republic (Bulgaria) and other publications.
Harry Calhoun’s
articles, literary essays, book reviews and poems have been published in magazines including Writer’s Digest and The National Enquirer. Recently, his online chapbook Dogwalking Poems and his trade paperback, I knew Bukowski like you knew a rare leaf, were published. The latter is now available from Trace Publications and on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online booksellers. He has had recent publications in Chiron Review, Still Crazy, SNReview, Orange Room Review, Bird’s Eye review, Abbey, Monongahela Review and many others. Recently, he was one of 12 poets invited to LiteraryMary’s anthology, Outstanding Men of the Small Press
Check out his Web site here:
http://www.harrycalhoun.net/
Robert Demaree
is the author of four collections of poems, including Mileposts, published October 2008 by Beech River Books. The winner of the 2007 Conway, N.H., Library Poetry Award, he is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, where he lives five months of the year. He has had over 400 poems published or accepted by 100 periodicals, including the 2008 Poet's Guide to New Hampshire.For further information see http://www.demareepoetry.blogspot.com
KJ Hannah Greenberg
gave up all manner of academic hoopla to chase a hibernaculum of imaginary hedgehogs and to raise children. Blessed to be the parent of two girls and two boys, three of whom are raging through their teen years, and one of whom is threatening to spring from preadolescence, Hannah discovered, (all things being unequal) that it is both more rewarding and more difficult to raise children than to instruct thousands of college students on the nuances of human interactions.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous international venues, including: Joyful!, Ken*Again, Language and Culture Magazine, Literary Mama, Poetry Super Highway, Scribblers on the Roof, Tertulia Magazine, The Externalist, The Mother Magazine, The Shine Journal, The New Vilna Review, and Unfettered Verse.
David Whitehouse
is married with three children. He lives and works as a journalist in Paris and edits The Lesser Flamingo.
by Kyle Hemmings
After weeks, no, months of communicating
by e-mails kept secret from her invalid husband,
they agreed to meet across a Chinese noodle place
on Knob Hill, under the unveiling offered
by a scarred street light,
his heart bumping as in a game of sidecar.
She raced to meet him; he conjured her as a thousand
versions of a forty-ish Juliet in jeans;
she imagined glass snakes, their slithering lives,
or a green snake safe in its camouflage
She slapped him hard,
harder than any hello and good-bye
could ever be and said that his last
email caused a virus to crash her computer.
But I'm real he cried, I'm here.
She stormed off and how he longed
for that once kind invisible touch.
*
Monkey Business
by Kyle Hemmings
I wish I was a chimp
like all the other guys
hanging out at The Missing Link
sucking off Bush Baby bones,
this arboreal urge
and anthropoid pose
win the ladies with my pan troglodyte pout
with my promiscuous loins,
and eight kids.
I’ll play with my own dung
build a monument of it
to the god of all dung--
Cheeta Dungee.
And the fact
that I can pass a mirror test
get rewarded with a banana
or a prize Chiquita
makes me all alpha wet,
almost human.
When it gets too crowded
on the ground
I'll think I'll fly into space,
just to have a piece of primacy.
*
Origins of the Kitchen Sink Movement
by Kyle Hemmings
The apartment is three cubicles of clothes, chairs, unopened letters
from a remote father, shadows of immovable objects. Each room
connected by a tunnel of dense space. In the hallway,
one could disappear. The morning smells of burnt toast,
last night’s discount mackerel half-eaten
from a can. In flannel nightgown,
her mother is a hunchback with angel sweat-glands.
Her prayers are invisible birds and are swept
into the sink’s vortex. Today, the mother is under a pharmaceutical
funk and the girl prefers her old sneakers. Good-bye, says the girl.
She kisses the mother’s paper-thin face,
but the woman will not let go of her birds
***
Eulogy
by Christian Berntsen
When I am done I will be ash
drifting across a weed-strewn lot
across glass adorned blacktop
through smoking air
to the edge of the world
No monuments or markers will be erected
no images blazoned across a screen
In the end I will be words
scratched on a page
carried on a summer breeze
as the rain falls
lightly on your shoulder
I can hope for no
more
and want nothing
less
*
Admissions in a Cognitive State
by Christian Berntsen
And I think I should find a room, once white, now
a dull gray with age or stained
yellow by ancient tendrils of burnt tobacco.
There should be a table and a chair – which is
comfortable at first, but makes you ache after
a time –
a bed with a thin blanket, a thinner mattress,
a foam pillow, dry and crumbling.
And perhaps a window, high on the wall so that I have to drag the chair beneath it to see outside,
or maybe just move the bed below to save myself the trouble.
The stack of blank paper upon the table, their brilliance a reflection of the walls that once were, waits for
me, a row of pencils beside it.
Pencils because nothing is permanent, and their sound is soft.
And I’ll sit comfortably and write until the stack has moved from one
side of the table to the other, until my feet are covered by
balls of the forgotten pulp, until the pain in my ass and the needles in my legs beg for me to move.
When the last sheet of paper has crossed the wilds of the table, only then
will I move,
drag the chair, or hobble/walk to the bed to look out the window longing for the world outside.
Longing for the door I had removed before the quiet whisper of my pencil had first marked the paper.
***
Synagogue Graffiti
by Donal Mahoney
The kitchens of Belsen are belching again.
Ancient chefs, puffed hats askew,
storm once more
the catwalks swaying.
When the ovens are full,
the chefs dig pits
in the kitchen floor, set
silver spits, roast fryer thin
the legs and wings they’ve
cleaned and cleavered. Yes,
the kitchens of Belsen are belching again.
*
Fresh, Tinned Or Frozen
by Donal Mahoney
Father was a snap bean,
that’s all, Sis,
nothing more.
Fresh, tinned or frozen,
the greens of snap beans vary.
Neighbors in the yard,
clerks at the store,
folks at church,
you and me and bawling Ma,
for years we fed his strange chameleons
so we can swear, on the Bible,
Father was a snap bean,
that’s all, Sis.
Nothing more.
Fresh, tinned or frozen.
*
Paddy Murphy Is Fred Astaire
by Donal Mahoney
It's six below and so much snow
this January midnight.
Sunday's gone
and Monday's turning.
Yet Paddy Murphy's stepping out,
his crushed fedora all askew.
He's soused again and all aglow,
dancing along Fifth Avenue.
Tonight he thinks he's Fred Astaire
and so he's swirling in the air.
He needs a partner way up there,
someone pretty, someone fair.
If it weren't for the music
that only he can hear,
Paddy would be gone by now.
Tonight he's whistling, though,
delighted as his fingers find
parking meter posts
are an endless xylophone.
Listen to him play the posts
so all the world can hear
Paddy's favorite tune,
the jig of an ancient tippler
with one last dance to go.
***
Dyslexic universe
by Harry Calhoun
Those of us who are dyslexic must have suspected it
all along: our world, everything around us, is suffering
from rampant dyslexia. Oh, not stop signs labeled SOTP,
although we’ve seen photos of those,
or sleepless wretches plagued with inmosnia.
More that the world around us, and the people in it,
see things arranged differently than we do,
and what makes sense to us makes no sense
to them, and vice versa. I am not lysdexic,
but I do have some advice:
make your peace with Dog
an hope for whatever dyslexic justice
is out there
***
Clothesline by the Pond
by Robert Demaree, with thanks to Bob Bell
Early June: clothesline taut,
Fabric stretched between white pines,
Awaiting children’s trunks and towels,
Knots dimly remembered from scouting.
By the time leaves turn
The line sags,
The weight of memory,
Knots damp, hard,
Insoluble.
***
How Our Love in the Air Turned to Near-Miss Terror
by David Whitehouse
If journalism teaches you anything, it's that not writing is a craft that has to be relearned every day. It takes practice. You can talk about it and think about it and go to Not Writing 101, but in the end there's no way round sitting down and putting in the serious hours of not doing it.
Of course, anyone can kid themselves that they can not write, but can they get paid for it? The modern world has made things a bit easier, I will admit. Back when men were men, not writing involved plunging people's hands into boiling water and stuff like that, to make them do the writing. Nowadays, with the endless supply of cheap labour from places like India, that sort of thing isn't necessary. The need for intimidation has gone out of it. Not writing is now simply a question of discipline and personal pride.
Sex is one of the best things not to write about. People who are doing it don't need to write about it and people who are not doing it still want to read about it. The fact that you're not writing about it doesn't mean that you're not doing it, you understand, but people who are not doing it can still be forced to write about it, which is the beauty of it really.
The one thing better than sex for not writing about is airline disasters, real or imagined. The idea that your plane might be about to disintegrate keeps many of us, perhaps most, in a job. It stands to reason. I mean, if you were having sex, for example behind that curtain through to business class, where I suspect it happens all the time, if you were at it, say with one of the air hostesses, and the plane started to break up, there is no question which of these circumstances would become the most important. Would we remain locked in passionate embrace, like Icarus only better, as we tumbled into the waves? Would we part wistfully like autumn leaves as we fell through the air? I've asked Bangalore to see what they can come up with and file by lunch-time.
***
Upon Possessing a Wiggly Fish
by KJ Hannah Greenberg
Only Kathleen, who had kept the Abrams’ business books, knew the specifics of that organization’s finances or that her great Aunt Tamara, decades ago, had had to sleep on top of a body as cold and hard as cement, in order to survive a night in a concentration camp. Kathleen had a “wiggly fish” growing in her belly and as such possessed increased sensitivities. Accordingly, people spewed the viscera of their dark confidences at her.
Her contemporaries, the people who worked, as gardeners, as house cleaners, and as babysitters, for Pleasant Hills’ families, in contrast, suffered no such information overflow. They remained oblivious to the stringencies required in running Abrams’ dry goods store. Likewise, those people thought the Holocaust was something limited to Hollywood movies. Plus, those folk had no idea what it was like to be nauseous from pregnancy. Rather, Kathleen’s tribe spent the better part of its days and nights mumbling about the weather, complaining about former high school teachers, and seeking out new topics for grousing.
Nathan, Kathleen’s brother, was no exception. Employed as a tree pruner, he frequently griped about the slump in the economy, the disproportionate amount of wealth certain lineages enjoyed, and his unfulfilled quota of overtime hours. Nathan meant to work extra hours to buy a coop in which to raise hedgehogs.
Kathleen usually volleyed back her sibling’s words with curt rebukes about business responsibilities, about world citizenry, and about parenting. She frequently addended that since Nathan was younger, she did not have to heed his drivel and that since he ran with a band of men who played Frisbee, shot pool and drank beer, he ought to be more careful when editing his regards.
In answer, Nathan frequently, literally, thumbed his nose at his older sister or otherwise found ways to telegraph his disdain of her ideas. In short, the two siblings, though fully grown, continued to fight quite a lot.
After one such scrap, Kathleen tidied her phone into its receptacle and then dressed for work. Her bedroom floor evidenced all of the choices she had rejected and her dresser substantiated that she had forgotten her small pistol. Kathleen’s due diligence with marauding gangs was becoming increasingly compromised by the hormones that caused her abdomen to expand. As for flow charts graphing the income and expenditures of the family business, as for documents which proved the authenticity of her people’s near genocide in Europe, and as for coffee or scrambled eggs before two in the afternoon, she likewise could not be bothered.
Later, that particular morning, however, when Kathleen realized that she had left her gun at home, she paused from prying sconces off of a wall to question her wisdom in abandoning her bookkeeping job with the family firm. She had traded sanity for work managing a trash out squad. A glance at the diamond bracelet on her wrist, however, quieted her. Despite her increasingly awkward gate and her more and more frequent lapses into forgetfulness, as a team boss, she commanded double the wage of the other workers and had to put in only half of their hours.
Simply, since Sooner or Later Realty paid its staff under the table, employees lost no funds to taxes. They were able to work on multiple assignments most days, too. What’s more, Kathleen’s new post was not mentally taxing; she supervised players who “rehabilitated” properties repossessed by banks.
Her crew was responsible for removing abandoned items from abandoned residences and businesses. Sometimes her employees “reassigned” possession of the jewelry, the art work, and the bathroom fixtures, which they found, to themselves. Sometimes they bagged goods and left them curbside. Least often, as was their charge, they hauled those materials to municipal dumps. Their line of work, for subordinates and superiors, alike, was highly profitable.
In spite of that, their agreement to work off record meant that Kathleen and her colleagues could neither apply for nor receive health or unemployment benefits. Likewise, they could not call upon community service providers to aid them in times of crisis. For instance, once, when a rabid canine cornered a solo-flying Kathleen, she had had to resolve the problem with her M1911 instead of being able to call the town’s dog catcher.
Subsequently, Kathleen took crew to all of her assignments. She ceased to complain, too, about the dilapidated exterior paint, the failed gardens and the crumbling swimming pools around which they had to work. Kathleen even went out of her way to befriend some barn hands, against whom her team had bumped up when they had been sent to deconstruct a farmhouse. Kathleen had become resolute that harmony among the ranks and ranks among the harmony were her best insurance policies.
Notwithstanding those precautions, her weaponless day proved particularly tough. Kathleen’s people had been directed to work in tandem with Grant’s, with a group of individuals that oftenfailed to show up on time, that yakked distractingly while they labored, and that insisted on snagging the best of any mutual finds. Grant’s subordinates created more headaches than profits. Kathleen had had to supervise them not only because Grant was hopeless with crowbars and hammers but because he also had left the worksite midday to participate in a pickup game of basketball.
Many hours later, Kathleen tucked into her favorite bar to watch her friends drink and to reflect once more on the benefits and disadvantages of being a bookkeeper for her parents’ store, the difficulties inherent in having generations of one’s family tree snuffed out, and the meaning of the pain she felt when her baby kicked vigorously. While she was building a mental montage of concentrate camp faces and newborn babies’ bellies, she noticed her ex, Tommy, walk in with an unknown brunette clinging to his arm.
She greeted them with a little smile, motioned toward her table and then caught the attention of a waiter. While waiting for drinks, Tommy repeatedly hugged the mystery woman. He opined that Kathleen ought to discipline her employees when they were impertinent. As for Grant, Tommy thought that Kathleen ought to arrange “an accident.”
Kathleen silently adjudicated types of disrespect. Her parents suffered customers who invented spots or rips after paying for clothing and who puffed up with arrogance even after receiving free mending of pockets, gratis stitching of buttons or other favors. She thought about her many great aunts and uncles and third cousins who had been maimed, raped, or in other manners slowly killed because some other group of people had suddenly gotten “allergic” to her people’s kind. She thought about the babies in the bassinets, who she had observed when touring the maternity ward and who she thought looked identical. All of those crying or sleeping wee ones, wrapped in hospital-issued blankets seemed indistinguishable save for the appellations written at the foot of each of their beds. Then she regarded Tommy.
He had taught her hand-to-hand techniques and a little bit about using a bo. Thus it had been possible for Sooner or later Real Estate to hire a pregnant woman and for her team to want to abide by her requests. That day’s work, for instance, had only cost her a bruise to one arm, but had gained her a locket likely made, or at least plated with, gold, a 1960’s vinyl collection, and a fist full of silk scarves.
Consequently, Kathleen said nothing in answer to her ex’s provocations and instead chose to conjure mental pictures in which his new lady friend was tethered to tubes and pipes in an oncology ward, was overwhelmed by lawyer’s fees, or was largely unapprised of the accident in which a tractor trailer, driven by Tommy, had lethally jackknifed. Kathleen imagined paying that oncology ward’s care providers to fill the lady’s IVs with a toxic dose of saline solution and imagined herself scattering Tommy’s ashes over one of the cesspools where she and her troop regularly disposed of liquid wastes.
Tommy’s tap on Kathleen’s arm returned her to him, his lady, Kathleen’s friends, and the bar. He could be as demanding as her parents, as inhumane as the Nazis and as trying as a developing fetus. She hissed as she pulled away from his reach.
In reply, Tommy pronounced Kathleen’s plan to set aside funds for disposable diapers, for babysitters, and for pediatrician fees as poorly formulated. He declared that Kathleen ought to marry, instead. Then he began to sermonize about her working trash out and about her accepting pre-owned paraphernalia. He added that Kathleen’s job was: too much about brutality, not enough about compassion, very time consuming, and made him sad. He added that she ought to: be dutiful about her family with their store, devote more time to learning about her heritage, take her prenatal vitamins regularly.
Kathleen reached for Tommy’s beer, sloshed it across his cloths and left. She waddled to a neighborhood pet store and splurged on both a hibernaculum and a pair of hedgehogs for Nathan. While the lull in the economy had capped her brother’s arboreal work, it had enriched her pockets. Thereafter, Kathleen rang up the bar and reminded the owner that Tommy often slipped away without paying his tab.
Once home, Kathleen regarded the messages on her landline. That morning, before entangling himself with the brunette, Tommy had called and had mumbled something about wanting to try again. He had wept that he had come to know himself as less important than a minor league baseball team’s batter, but as more worthy than any important restaurant’s dishwasher. He had cried that he missed the way in which Kathleen rubbed his back and wanted to tend to her while she was yet cogent; he had heard about the tricks estrogen and progesterone play on even the most stable of women.
Furthermore, Tommy had claimed to be unsatisfied being an absentee lover and truly wanted to attend their baby’s birth. He had added that although Nathan no longer boarded with Kathleen, he felt that that Kathleen’s brother’s habit, of treating Kathleen’s apartment as though it were his own, was inappropriate. Last, Tommy had suggested that he and Kathleen ought to get engaged.
Kathleen spat at the phone. Tommy remained the warm-blooded woodland mammal she had discovered him to be. No amount of self-development courses would improve him. That man’s anxieties, all too uncomfortably, fed his control issues.
She thought about Tommy’s brand of nastiness for only a minute or so before a familiar urge hit her. Kathleen ran from the livingroom, to the toilet, in time. After wiping her mouth and then gargling with some minty-tasting mouth wash, she took her temperature. Odd; she was not ill. Nonetheless, such sensations ought to occur in the early portion of pregnancy, not in its final phase.
Restoring Tommy to her life would quash her supply of paste rubies, of imported chocolates and of other useful items she might carry away from demolition sites and would force her to focus on helping her parents during tax season or researching family genealogies. Her past efforts to integrate work, family, and biological needs had proved too exhausting. She'd parent solo and return, as soon as possible, to smashing windows, to pulling curtains from fixtures and to unhinging as many doors as her trash out team encountered. To her, life could only be a present tense occupation.
***
About the contributors:
Kyle Hemmings
lives and works in New Jersey, where he spends his free time skateboarding, falling down, and talking to cab drivers.
Donal Mahoney
lives in St. Louis, MO. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, Commonweal, Revival (Ireland), U.S. Catholic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), Snakeskin (U.K.), Public Republic (Bulgaria) and other publications.
Harry Calhoun’s
articles, literary essays, book reviews and poems have been published in magazines including Writer’s Digest and The National Enquirer. Recently, his online chapbook Dogwalking Poems and his trade paperback, I knew Bukowski like you knew a rare leaf, were published. The latter is now available from Trace Publications and on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online booksellers. He has had recent publications in Chiron Review, Still Crazy, SNReview, Orange Room Review, Bird’s Eye review, Abbey, Monongahela Review and many others. Recently, he was one of 12 poets invited to LiteraryMary’s anthology, Outstanding Men of the Small Press
Check out his Web site here:
http://www.harrycalhoun.net/
Robert Demaree
is the author of four collections of poems, including Mileposts, published October 2008 by Beech River Books. The winner of the 2007 Conway, N.H., Library Poetry Award, he is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, where he lives five months of the year. He has had over 400 poems published or accepted by 100 periodicals, including the 2008 Poet's Guide to New Hampshire.For further information see http://www.demareepoetry.blogspot.com
KJ Hannah Greenberg
gave up all manner of academic hoopla to chase a hibernaculum of imaginary hedgehogs and to raise children. Blessed to be the parent of two girls and two boys, three of whom are raging through their teen years, and one of whom is threatening to spring from preadolescence, Hannah discovered, (all things being unequal) that it is both more rewarding and more difficult to raise children than to instruct thousands of college students on the nuances of human interactions.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous international venues, including: Joyful!, Ken*Again, Language and Culture Magazine, Literary Mama, Poetry Super Highway, Scribblers on the Roof, Tertulia Magazine, The Externalist, The Mother Magazine, The Shine Journal, The New Vilna Review, and Unfettered Verse.
David Whitehouse
is married with three children. He lives and works as a journalist in Paris and edits The Lesser Flamingo.