ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Poem
by Robyn Art


The Last Surviving Reality Show Contestant Addresses the Colonists from Mars

You will never have enough and you will never
have enough of wanting. Just look
at those budding elms, amped-up on chlorophyll
and their indelicate bulges and ripenings,
as of yet unravaged by the latest
epizootic brigade. Across the street,
the neighbor’s pugs schlep tumescently
down the block, busting out of their harnesses
like the Baywatch cast from their suits and what hasn’t
schlepped sweaty and trussed beneath the day’s
corporeal guesswork, its repertoire of disasters
and cache of shrink-wrapped desires?
O Friends, Countrymen,
Unsubstantiated Bioforms, I know all too much
of this body and its erstwhile trail of leavings,
its pre-appointed rounds of hemorrhages and clots,
too much of cheese-food and gout, internal organs
sprouting in trays, the river full of bodies
and the dreams of fallen ash. I never asked
for the seas to part or these fields to up
and thresh themselves,
for this wound of many colors or this coat
of burned-out gray, nor did I wish
a response to the humdrum news of my passing
beyond the jays’ dysthymic cheeps
on the pheremonic breeze.
Here’s what I know of this world
and its terrestrial dominions: Big fish
eat Little Fish eat Protozoan Life Form.
If you want to know regret,
stick your hand in boiling water.
If you want to know forgiveness, leave it in
for three days straight.


The Cynic in His Twenty-Ninth Year

Without a better half or an arsenal of cash
I have managed thus far to elude
a host of ills: crabs; tract housing;
inflammation of the gums; an address
in the subdivision out past the city line
where besmeared, aphasic one-year-olds
perambulate the block. There have been stints
hawking drywall and moonlighting
at the think tank, cases of mislaid hopes
and too little, too late. Times I was beaten
and left for dead.
Not once,
but thrice.
I have managed to hold my tongue
within its bastion of regret,
stuffed with phantasmagoric hankerings
and the fathomless sounds
of whatnot: sound of the rain’s
hydraulic clamor, backward sound
of a blown-out amp and the ossified leavings
of what beast, of what mutagenic harmonies?
Sometimes in the shower I think the craziest
things: The shark never sleeps. The bark
of the Redwood is fireproof. Oh,
there are worse things
in this lifetime or call it
what you will—I mean the time
between the wound and when
the wound begins to knit.


Why the Foreman's Girl Won't Take a Beau

She would have to wear heels.
Come equipped
with the unabridged version.
Be willing to carry a tune by whatever
means required. Things
would clot within her
like moths within a screen:
Times she got good and burned,
that crazy chthonic desire,
the multitude places she’s bedded down

to strangers in three-day beards…
various misadventures
in the corn-infested heartland gone the way
of debtor’s prison and the rick-rack
dresses of girlhood. She doesn’t tan.
Couldn’t hem for a month
of Sundays. Never could say
what scares her more,
the dream of burning hair
or the one where everyone survives.