Somehow, she’s perpetually out of gas. She takes the red can from her garage and makes the three miles trek to the gas station. The walk is familiar to her— through the neighborhood where she grew up, past a baseball field where once, her father played intramural softball on Thursday nights. She waves to the people she passes, stops to pet the dogs on the way.
On Thursday nights, during softball season, she’d come to all the games. Often, her mother was out of town on business from Wednesday on, and she and her father spent the weekends together. She remembers the joy she felt each time he made a hit, caught a ball, anything. She remembers walking home together, hand in hand along the unetched sidewalks. How much she liked the crickets and the weeds.
And then, the season ended, and her mother continued the trips. She’d sit on her father’s lap in the dark living room and he’d sip a beer, and they’d watch television. He’d ask her if she could keep secrets. She always said she could, and she did, even when she knew better.
When her mother came home, she never said a word about what happened while she was away. Her father winked at her at the dinner table, over yams, and she tried her best to wink back. They were partners in crime. Secret spies. She liked it.
At the gas station, she fills the can and talks to Herb, the guy behind the counter with the baseball hat. They talk about weather. About whether or not she’ll be able to lug the gas can home.
“I think I’ll manage,” she says. Herb has seen her manage before. This gas can pilgrimage is a regular occurrence. Walking back, she feels her cell phone vibrate in her pocket. She puts the can down, shuffles in her pocket to retrieve it, though it’s too late. She waits a moment, then checks the message and hears her father’s scratchy voice. He is not the man he was. He’s better now, though he’s dying. Voice scratching, he tells his daughter he loves her and he hopes to hear from her soon. She never calls.
When she gets home, she takes the gas can into her kitchen. She strips down to flesh, folds the clothes neatly on the chair. Next, she pours the contents all over her naked body and puts her thumb and forefinger on the gas stove once again, purses lips, decides which way to turn it.
–
bjh
Just a quick announcement, we have added a new section for prose. If that’s the team you play for why not head on over and give us something to ponder.
Newest Edit:
my sea star sister is an evaporating tide pool,
so badly wishing she were an anemone.
I am an urchin and you are the dogfish,
your heaven is two miles offshore;
we are both seven.
Your red skin lies upon last night’s bonfire,
torn as a geoduck is unsheathed.
scaling and trolling
for a muscle, to cleave
consumeconsume consume
–
tjq
I have a time machine in my pocket
devoted to and run on rainbows,
the kind that are solid
and deep,
the cone of ashes,
having masked for an hour the stench of recurrent failure,
steeling my neurons
against resurgent reactionaries
demanding an end, futile
desperate
a cold cello in falsetto will greet you,
the joy of my tears, morbid
as our glorification of us.
prisms in ninth grade physics
proving that astigmatism is a disease of the soul.
your face is a slideshow on loop,
pause is reluctant, and stop,
apparently, can’t make a right.
my clumsy initials stutter,
unsure how to explain a life lived
without those they prepare to join.
–
tjq
edited 2/27/07 – changed morbid simile
olives and garlic
at cafe iberico
a fun time was had
after sangria
some beers at justins
then we hit the road
short walk in the cold
a fun convo on the bus
what a great roomie
had a beer at home
we had a minor detour
then went to beat kitchen
what awesome music
sitting in the living room
now it’s time for bed
you wanted haikus
will this suffice dear timmy
for now anyway
–
kn
sometimes i wish i was comic book guy,
but then i worry:
eventually people would reject my message
and nail me to a couple of pieces of wood
resembling a very bad x
–
tjq
I know we’re not together
(You have yet to find me in Zanzibar)
We never were, despite the coiling.
When you talk about L’s I cringe,
as if watching my hand wrenching yours
in a vice. (was it?)
I’m not trying to buy it;
It’s been given anyways,
creating, begetting, destroying itself all at once
Our personal cold fusion.
So I tell you it will work, (and I Know)
It won’t
What we did was crass (my mother said),
Feeling quite the opposite my perfect aunt picked up the tab
and quite alone went back to her need to know husband
(His security clearance won’t let him see us,
in Mary’s or Swazi’s land)
I don’t like him (I’m realizing presently) for fear
I should become him, complete with birding, bad
kneesperfectunlovedwifeshitvanbald,
doctors who won’t give me the knife, and a family
whose existence I recognize only when my own is disputed.
What I mean then is we really don’t need that,
so go,
I’ll practice Kundera’s lovemaking
earn scout’s badges washing windows, digging wells
and farmer’s wives
(feeling nothing of it, naturally)
while telling them all about your love
that
I haven’t got.
–
tjq
I can’t really talk
about the in between
our alphas and omegas wouldn’t allow,
somehow it’s just not right
with you.
I tried, scribbled and scrawled
but your name,
it just wouldn’t come
out right. At least not after the words
it was supposed to follow.
–
tjq
edited 2/20/07: changed line breaks
has bounced to the back
of the underground city;
we’ve established life.
–
dbr
I saw Devin Davis today
I told him I wear his lonely
not only on my sleeve
but right on my chest
in pink, on brown.
He didn’t look that impressed,
I guess it’s hard
coming from the basement,
(he said Britney’s a real nature freak)
a moosehead for company, into the bright lights
my local celebrity.
(how does he make his hair do that!?)
I guess
he’s not lonely any more
(he must work out)
like kanye not being broke,
Devin’s H to the izzo:
a theramin and a turtle.
–
tjq
We’ve asked you here to join us
All together we sit around the fire
Singing songs about birds; for Jesus
and his glory. I hope you brought a fox
for the hunt’s tomorrow, and all know
how well our lord loves the chase.
Our friend, huntsman Chase:
“Gentleman, so glad the whole us
and them thing hasn’t, well you know,
kettle boiling over, dampened the fire,
as it were, (har har), but come morning don’t be foxed
lads, lest we spurn dear baby Jesus.
“Brothers, let us pray: Oh Jesus,
St Hubert and all the Sts, as we chase
the dawn I beseech you send nay the fox,
child, but she begotten us
from damnation and hellfire,
she so well we have all known;
(winknod, a certain’s virtue) Ahem, “Know
that we shall not wilt under; like Jesus
carrying our cross: her fire.
The shame that is our nature: the chase,
let it though Lord, only die with the last of us.
Amen.” “The sacrificial fox,
if you will.” [Pan cut to the fox
led by the hand, undressed] “Know
that gathered here we have with us,
resplendent in [quick cut to commotion] “Jesus
H. …” reverse Weird Science, the chase
delayed, the quarry absconded, the hall on fire.
“There! At attention, take aim, fire!”
“Alpha hold, delta roundabout, fox
trot out the front and give,” “Chase!?”
“Yes sir?, well sir, I know sir I know,”
“Hmm, I suppose he’s savvy then?” “What Jesus,
sir?”, “Hmm” “Rather, sir” “Well?” “It stays, sir, between us.”
Relive the chase of aught seven like it’s still on fire
Catch all the drama with us, right here on Fox
where: “We know fair better than Jesus”
–
tjq
One of the most difficult and complex of the various French forms, the sestina is a poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy. It makes no use of the refrain. This form is usually unrhymed, the effect of rhyme being taken over by a fixed pattern of end-words which demands that these end-words in each stanza be the same, though arranged in a different sequence each time.If we take 1-2-3-5-6 to represent the end-words of the first stanza, then the first line of the second stanza must end with 6 (the last end-word used in the preceding stanza), the second with 1, the third with 5, the fourth with 2, the fifth with 4, the sixth with 3–and so to the next stanza. The order of the first three stanzas, for instance, would be: 1-2-3-4-5-6; 6-1-5-2-4-3; 3-6-4-1-2-5. The conclusion, or envoy, of three lines must use as end-words 5-3-1, these being the final end-words, in the same sequence, of the sixth stanza. But the poet must exercise even greater ingenuity than all this, since buried in each line of the envoy must appear the other three end-words, 2-6.
Thus so highly artificial a pattern affords a form which, for most poets, can never prove anything more than a poetic exercise. Yet it has been practiced with success in English by Swinburne, Kipling, and Auden.
(from www.writing.upenn.edu)
Listen: haikus are
experience compressed in
silence, emptiness…
Sound in numbers strung
through threes: holy and fathered
not by god but space.
Pause and quick release.
You can breathe under the press
of words like stone, here.
-
dsfm
Hey, please stop stealing
my cause and path (ways); then I’ll
stop yanking your porn.
–
tjq
my gold plated zinc is yearning
to meet your inlaid folds,
the rest of me thinks about this field;
end of a single track climb,
got to sculpt more than clay.
the flamingo stapled to the tree told me you’d be here,
the teddy bear zap strapped next to the bog
told me otherwise;
but when it comes down to a flamingo vs. a teddy bear
who would you trust?
–
tjq
get up and go,
oh run,
coming on strong now,
a waterfall seeping
slowly that first crack
the damn sandbags won’t do.
so
over, you.
here and the now so mild,
there and the then, not quite so.
only, what? the whisky, the wine,
3 or 4 six packs, and something about football,
remember, every last bent braincell.
–
tjq
No? But i asked oh
so nicely; bought this daisy
salt on my knee, please?
–
tjq
