ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

from Something a Plummetor Knows Well

1) Personal Experience:
A flap: all to marvel until it's necessary, essential.

2) Textbook Example
Height makes destination irrelevant,
as conceivable as Jill counseling Jack:
"First we'll go up, second fetch,
you'll fall, I'll tumble after"—
Jack's not fooled, although tempted:
he scents it as clearly as a rabbit sex:
as tinged as an addict's sweat,
acrid and beckoning with starlit arms.

3) Explained By A Politician
And what for and why not
hue from the heap what the know-naughts've
worked so passionately to sweep
back to the mouth of the cave.
What for before was sampled
will never be guessed,
but a Goddess of norsle
in tremor, in duress,
reminds not one of ample,
but of memoir of breast
as silent as snaste.

4) A Minister's Approval
As it was, there wasn't.
Or before, surely not.
But after, or between,
there flourished an understatement;
something grasped,
or toyed with that
the little ones loved.
It's there that your fizz,
as nonchalant as adrenaline,
will crumple in expectance
as fear herniates your checkbook.

5) The Actual
A splat's as smothered as fiction.
The pieces—there's sure to be
pieces—will be found by dogs
leading knights through a
stream of supposed glory.

Pantalooning in Drag

"Why had I taken a stagecoach," I thought,
but then remembered the cactus
and the little boy collecting thorns.
"Do cactus have thorns or spikes?"
I asked Mary, a gnome I'd befriended
who'd refused water when offered.
"Don't talk to me," she responded
and I smiled knowingly.
"Tines maybe, then? Or perhaps quills?"
It was a game we'd been playing:
a sort of strip-twenty-questions
which she said her husband had learned
years ago in a coach just like this,
only it was red with a sputtering lantern
on which he'd burned his scalp
before asking the conductor if he had
an Uno deck or maybe some dice.
It'd been twenty miles since the ache
in my forearm had started to throb
and I was tired of pretending to wave
at what I called "sea-faring men
with bandanas and such."
I feigned taking aspirin, but everyone knew better.
Hardly surprising: I was losing
and wore but my knee-socks.
"It's cacti, you fool," she spit.
We both laughed rhythmically,
ignoring the man with the knife
flipping through her bible in search of mints.