The I.V. Lounge Reader
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The I.V. Lounge Reader edited by Paul Vermeersch
Copyright © 2001 by Paul Vermeersch All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), i Yonge St., Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M$E iE5. Copy edited by Maria Lundin Designed by Mike O'Connor
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: The I.V. lounge reader Selection of readings from the I.V. Lounge Reading Series, Toronto. ISBN i- 894663-03-9 i. Canadian fiction (English) — 2ist century.* 2. Short stories, Canadian (English).* 3. Canadian poetry (English) — 2ist century.* I. Vermeersch, Paul. PS825I.I82 2001 C8io.8oo6 PR9I94.9.I82 2001
02001-930393-9
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Printed and bound in Canada Insomniac Press, 192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, MjT 2C2 www.insomniacpress.com
Dedicated to all the writers who have taken part in The I.V. Lounge Reading Series in its first three years. May 01,1998—April 20, 2001 Christopher Alexander, Sandra Alland, Gordon Michael Allen, Jason Anderson, Phlip Arima, Tara Azzopardi, Ken Babstock, Paul Barclay, John Barlow, Gary Barwin, Jill Battson, Roger Bell, Jonathan Bennett, Moe Berg, Michelle Berry, Dennis Beynon, Deane Billington-Whitely, bill bissett, Ronna Bloom, Daniel £ Bradley, Mark Breslin, Allan Briesmaster, Steven Brockwell, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Michael Bryson, Robert Boates, Marusya Bociurkiw, Christian Bok, Stephanie Bolster, George Bowering, Alex Boyd, Nancy Bullis, Alice Burdick, Tony Burgess, Catherine Bush, Stephen Cain, Mary Cameron, Natalee Caple, Chris Chambers, Margaret Christakos, Julie Chrysler, Eliza Clark, Karen Connelly, Kevin Connolly, Ken Cormier, Libby Creelman, Lynn Crosbie, Michael Crummey, Peter Darbyshire, Lynn Davies, Lauren Davis, Sarah Dearing, John Degen, Nancy Dembowski, Giorgio Di Cicco, Tamas Dobozy, David Donnell, Dierdre Dwyer, Stephen Finucan, Beth Follett, Romina Fontana, albert fuller, Kristin Gallagher, Chris Garbutt, Jonathan Garfinkle, Camilla Gibb, Sky Gilbert, Loss Pequeno Glazier, Zaffi Gousopolous, Mary Elizabeth Grace, kristi-ly green, Phil Hall, Kate Harding, Lea Harper, Carla Hartsfield, Steven Heighten, Susan Helwig, Neil Hennessey, Sheila Heti, Michael Holmes, Debbie Howlett, Bobby Hsu, Susan louannou, Gayle Irwin, Peter Jaeger, Catherine Jenkins, Adeena Karasick, Mike Kelleher, Sonnet EAbbe, Dennis Lee, John B. Lee, Alexandra Leggat, Jason LeHeup, Jean LeMaitre, Noah Leznoff, Malca Litovitz, Jennifer LoveGrove, Merike Lugus, Laura Lush, Carol Malyon, Susan Manchester, David Manicom, Derek McCormack, Nichole McGill, David McGimpsey, Suzanne McLean, rob mclennan, Peter McPhee, Jay MillAr, A.F. Moritz, Blaise Moritz, Colin Morton, Karen Mulhallen, Alayna Munce, George Murray, billeh nickerson, Andrea Nicki, Hal Niedzviecki, Kent Nussey, Morgan Nyberg, Mike O'Connor, David O'Meara, Brian Panhuyzen, Gianna Patriarca, R.D. Patrick, Susan Perly, Emily Pohl-Weary, Mary Jo Pollak, Scott Pound, Christine Pountney, Robert Priest, Andrew Pyper, Patrick Rawley, John Reibetanz, Shane Rhodes, Ray Robertson, Matt Robinson, Stan Rogal, Malcolm Rogge, Stuart Ross, Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Linda Russo, Liebe "Libby" Scheier, John Schustyk, Ed Shaw, Ann Shin, Barbara Sibbald, Goran Simic, Mark Sinnett, Jonathan Skinner, Joan Skogan, Adam Sol, Kwame Stephens, John Stiles, Allan Stratton, Fraser Sutherland, Kate Sutherland, Andrea Thompson, Sherwin Tjia, Florence Treadwell, Mark Truscott, Jacqueline Turner, PriscilaUppal, Francis VandenHoven, R.M. Vaughan, Steve Venright, Christine Walde, Anne F. Walker, Roxanne Ward, Adrienne Weiss, Darren Wershler-Henry, Sue Wheeler, Alana Wilcox, Carleton Wilson, Sheri-D Wilson, Michael Winter, Marnie Woodrow, Eddy Yanofsky, Mary-Lou Zeitoun and Suzanne Zelazo - 5 -
The editor wishes to express his gratitude to the following people and organizations: Peter Darbyshire, Kevin Jones, Mason Chiu, Winston Simmons, Tariq Abdullah, Mike O'Connor, Jan Barbieri, Richard Almonte, Steve Venright, Jonathan Blackburn, Wendy Morgan, Adam Levin, The League of Canadian Poets, The Toronto Arts Council and, of course, all the contributors who believed in this project.
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Paul Vermeersch 11 Introduction David McGimpsey 13 Lasting Impressions Say You, Say Me, Says the Guy at the Pharmacy Tate Donovan's Credits The Gap Ads Are Killing Me Derek McCormack 18 The History of Country Music George Bowering 20 Sitting in Vancouver... Tamas Dobozy 30 When X Equals Marylou Jennifer LoveGrove 40 faultlines Fly Away Home Chicken Bone and Charcoal Sticks Andrew Pyper Dirty
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A.F. Moritz 49 The Old West Everything in Place To the Still Unborn Maynard Ferguson Playing "Manteca" To the Strangers Who Talk Loud in My Ear in Public Places Butterfly Michelle Berry 56 Little White Lie Dennis Lee 62 Deeper The Shift The Shame The Mystery
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Jonathan Bennett 66 And The Onions Lynn Crosbie 67 Roach French Fries Natalee Caple 72 The Lilac Fields at Pastroyeny billbissett 76 yuknow whats th point is ths 2 intrikate caretaking have u herd abt th crows uv chatharn cum back pleez henri marshmallow Nichole McGill 85 Blood Letting SherwinTjia 88 voodoo Treasure Hunt Children & Teens Tony Burgess 91 Monogama Me Patrick Rawley 94 Japanese Action Figure My Secret Identity Fastest Man Alive Now Playing Brown Peter Darbyshire Bread
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Michael Holmes 105 Nova Era Resolution Eddie Murphy's Aqualung Her Own Society Stephen Reid Croons
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Mamie Woodrow A Dog's Life
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John Stiles 125 Little Buggers my mom Howyadoon avnight? Scouts are cancelled Alexandra Leggat 128 The Car George Murray 130 Po-Ri: Fight-Script for the Genesis of a Canadian Poem Oscar Predictions for the Coming Year Dropped: a Baby's First Reader kristi-ly green 134 The Happy Diary Ann Shin 142 Speed Of Now Camilla Gibb 152 The Summer My Feces Floated Out To Sea John Degen 155 a girl I don't know bathurst Stephen Finucan 162 Killing Rupert Nolan Noah Leznoff 168 joining the parade Sister Flesh extra help fucking around A dragonfly Kate Sutherland 174 Measuring Up
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Adam Sol 179 You Say The Weight of Fire At the Question Market Susan Perly 182 Dogs Plus Mingus StanRogal 190 Sub Rosa Blaise Moritz 196 Dancing rhythmically, mechanically Dreams of static and cyclopean walls We are the outer space Calling planet earth via the wireless and the telegraph Stephen Cain 203 The Crystal Palace Centipede Asteroids Jason Anderson 206 Sex Comedy Steve Venright 211 Distended Aphorisms The Gated Now Brian Panhuyzen 216 Bald Man Loogie David Donnell 219 October Mick & Keith Dark Side of the Moon Red & Blue Huron Corn Did Keith Jarrett Ever Record... CBC Contributors
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227
Introduction This anthology is not intended to stand as an historical document in the purest sense. Many of the pieces included in these pages were never actually performed as part of The I.V. Lounge Reading Series, though all the writers whose work is included here have performed in the series, some of them more than once. Nor have I been able to include the work of all the writers who have appeared in the reading series in its first three years: there simply isn't enough room in this book for that many writers. This anthology is merely a sampling, one that captures the feeling and spirit of The I.V. Lounge Reading Series, as well as the wide variety of styles of writing that one might encounter there. I hope it proves to be as enjoyable to read in silence as it would be to hear the work read aloud in a room crowded with friendly listeners. A brief history of the I.V. Lounge, because its history is brief: to start with, the house located at 326 Dundas Street West in Toronto (across the street from the Art Gallery of Ontario) hasn't always been the I.V. Lounge, and friends of the reading series will remember that it began under a different name—Cafe Za Che Zu. Before that, it had been Cafe Blancmange, where poet Steve Venright (who not only contributed some fine writing to this anthology, but also created the image for the book's cover) had coordinated the Torpor Vigil Reading Series', hence the address already had a literary pedigree. Some I.V. Lounge regulars still talk of an even earlier incarnation of the Dundas Street address, a cafe called Tall Poppies, and how good the food had been in that establishment. So how did it all begin? In March of 1998 I was one of several people who received an email from the League of Canadian Poets saying that the proprietors of Cafe Za Che Zu were interested in holding regular poetry readings as a way to drum up some business. I was the only one to respond to the email. I went to the cafe and spoke with the owner, a very friendly, professional woman named Ranna. I explained to her how I thought the series should work. I suggested that it take place every two weeks rather than every week; this way, the talent wouldn't have to be watered down just to fill up the slots, and I could be more selective in my bookings than if I were running a weekly series. I also suggested that the readings take place on Friday evenings, because most other nights of the week seemed to be chock full of literary events all over town, but there never seemed to be anything literary happening on Fridays. (Later, some colleagues swore that I would never be able to make a Friday night series work, that it had never been done before, that people wouldn't want to come, that they had better things to do on Friday nights. Oh, really?) Ranna agreed with my plan, and we decided the first reading should take place at eight o'clock on the first of May, 1998. It went off without a hitch. There were five readers that night, and a good-sized crowd of people who seemed to be enjoying themselves. I have to mention that a large part of the reason things went so well in the planning stage is because my
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friend Peter Darbyshire had agreed to take on some of the workload. Peter took care of advertising and publicity, while I mostly did the booking and emceed the readings. The next two readings in the series produced similar results, with good attendance and enough fun to go around. Then, on June 12, 1998, the morning of the fourth reading, we received a phone call. It was Ranna. She called to tell us that Cafe Za Che Zu had gone out of business and closed its doors. She was sorry. I panicked. We had a poet coming in from Ottawa that night, and now it seemed his trip would be pointless. Now, Peter is about the most level-headed guy I know. While I was pacing around the living room in a tizzy, wondering what to do, Peter remained calm. He picked up the phone, called Ranna, got the name of the man who owned the building where the cafe had been, and called him. Peter explained the situation to the landlord, and it turned out Tariq Abdullah was a true lover of the arts. Tariq bought a few bottles of wine, a few cases of beer, and met us at the cafe before the reading, keys in hand. I brought some sandwiches that I'd made at home. When the crowd arrived, Tariq stayed to work the bar. We were saved. We ran the series like that until well into the fall of '98, changing its name to simply The Cafe Reading Series (which seemed to suit everyone just fine, since people were always misspelling and mispronouncing 'Za Che Zu'). In October 1998, Kevin Jones, Mason Chiu and Winston Simmons opened the I.V. Lounge, a place to relax, listen to music and have a cocktail. They redecorated the place, booked in some DJs, and rented the place out for private parties. Business picked up. And fortunately for us, they also allowed us to continue holding our Friday night readings, which brought in a new crowd to their business. With its environment transformed, The Cafe Reading Series took on a whole new feel. It felt more intimate, more arch, a little darker, more fun. It became The I.V. Lounge Reading Series, finally, and its reputation as a cool place to read grew quickly. Eventually, it became a place where writers felt comfortable trying out new material on an attentive audience, a place where people even stayed after the reading to drink together and chat about what they'd just heard. So this anthology, I guess, is meant to complement rather than chronicle what happens every other Friday night at the I.V. Lounge, which usually includes a good deal of fun and interesting writing. What this book can't do, however, is make you feel like you're at a party in a friend's living room, which is how I often describe what it's like to attend one of our readings, so if you've never been to one, you should drop by one of these Fridays and see for yourself. It's amazing what you can do sometimes with no budget and shitload of luck. Cheers! Paul Vermeersch February 7, 2001 Toronto - 12 -
David McGimpsey Lasting Impressions In the very first episode of I Love Lucy Lucy thinks Ricky's trying to kill her; in the apartment, in the hall, Ricky's desire to touch her seen as criminal lunging. Lucy ducks and dodges comedically her eyes peering over a sofa's back and right into the sweet spot of Camera One. She'd been reading mysteries. In the first chapter of Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Lucy surveys the great city's majestic shoeshops and, feeling the pinch, cries for Ricky: "come to me, Babalu, I will buy you turtlenecks till all the turtles come home." Ricky, characteristically, responds in mambo: "why do they want in you in turtlenecks? It's always about woolen turtlenecks, the women in America are funny about sex, no matter where you go, no matter who you know, she's always doing the turtleneck mambo." In the first act of Casablanca II: Rick in Beverly Hills, Lucy is living the single life. She's seeing a man, a sporty senior named Danny O'Day—
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the kind of guy who climbs mountains in margarine ads. "The ideal of beauty," she says to Mr. O'Day "is not caring how you look, it's waking up and saying here I come, world!" To which O'Day says something like "uh, we don't live in an ideal world."
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Say You, Say Me, Says the Guy at the Pharmacy She was miles above me She read books about the Louvre She was more pretentious than the first person who called Vancouver "The Couve" But she looked like Suzanne Somers So I had to move fast Think of something clever to say Or at least just stop staring at her ass Like the idiot sky To the idiot sea Say you, say me Says the guy at the pharmacy I said call me anytime Just let me into your wonderful world You called collect from Colorado Just to complain about your boyfriend "Carl" But I wasn't going to give up Not until I had myself a Scooby Snack But you're quick with the lawyers Sweet as a little pussycat Like the idiot sky To the idiot sea Say you, say me Says the guy at the pharmacy
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Tate Donovan's C r e d i t s Voice-over in a big-budget certifiable hit; Dolby sound for words that are understood, unlike over-written swells from a PhD thesis, rewritten / recombined until there's no trace of original DNA. A failed sitcom set in San Francisco; where no character comments on modern poetry's range and just whose books are shelved upstairs at City Lights— those practitioners of what the gang might zing as "the girly arts." A miniseries about multiple murder in Utah, the last place where evil was supposed to erupt; sterile twills of clean socks and wood-panel wallpaper, The Great Salt Lake swallows a million E-Z Bake Ovens. The serial role as a dressed-in-tweed love interest, off to Madison Sq., pop into a bookstore and there she is, on a magazine cover: a jeweled acrobat's outfit "America's Sweetheart" demurring to her new "Sexiest Man Alive."
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The Gap Ads Are Killing Me Tell the prime demographic they can go fuck themselves with their buying power and their buying power Gap sweaters, Christmas watches and echinacea. Their Saturday night "it sucks" politics fixing cliches to causes at drinking parties, the most successful venturing timorous allegations, misquoting Jay Leno and Hillary. At good-bye time at just such a wing-ding the hostess figures you're just off the street, a dowager invading their escape, from Scarborough, Kanata and Burnaby. She asks you to leave. "Hey fuck you!" you say, "It's not like I stole anything!" and she doesn't know what to do with that holiday package, and you rush past the 18-34 crowd and that (if you add more vulgarity) sums up your winter.
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Derek McCormack The History Of Country Music "The band needs trombones," said Steve, the Class President. "The band needs talent," said me. I sat in back. He ignored me. "The Lions needs jerseys. And the Chess Club needs boards. So Student Council has decided to hold a Halloween Carnival, to raise funds. They've asked us to organize the pumpkin-carving contest." "Goody-goody," I said. "I've divided you into committees based on your skills." He gave Publicity to the arty kids. Rich kids got Prizes. Sports got Clean-up. "Did I forget anyone?" My arm shot up. "Youdon't have any skills," he said. "Except being rude."
The old lady led me to her back yard. Pie plates clanging on stakes. To scare crows. "If you donate a pumpkin," I said, "our Baking Committee will be happy to make it into a delicious pumpkin pie for you to eat after the carnival." She signed the sign-up sheet. I cut one off the vine, put it in my wheelbarrow. The lady at the next house gave me two. She had lots. Her scarecrow was a suit stuffed with straw. My load got tippy. I started out toward the school. Then turned. Tore off my name tag. Tossed the sign-up sheet. Dumped my haul behind my outhouse. Some were heirlooms. My scarecrow was a post with strings nailed to it. Tied to the strings were crows. They were barely flapping. Too tired to caw. "Caw!" I said.
I carved triangle eyes. Triangle nose. Mouth like cogwheels coming together. Not a bit scary. I tossed it. When it hit the ground the face caved in. Now it looked scary. The contest was: The scariest jack-o'-lantern wins. I tried everything. On my practice pile I had pumpkins with one eye. Three eyes. Fangs. Squirrels like smoke inside. I pulled up a fresh one. Gutted it. Gave it little round eyes. Like Steve's. I traced his nose with the tip of the knife. Slashed out two big nostrils. Like Steve's.
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I carved a round mouth. Stuck a finger in to smooth it. Then unzipped my fly It was a little tight. I knifed it again. The knife stuck. When I forced it it warped. My hand slick with seeds. Slipped. My pinky split open. Skin peeled back over flesh and bone. I might've passed out.
Trees the colours of vegetables. I walked to the Hospital. It was three miles. By the crow. My hand held up over my head. As if I had a question. "You get a lot of this this time of year?" I said. "Pumpkin accidents?" "Actually, you're the first. Ever." The doctor swabbed it, then stitched me up with black thread. I didn't feel a thing. "You might have severed a nerve. Maybe a tendon." He mixed plaster of Paris and put a cast on me. Elbow to wrist. When it dried he stapled a rubber band to it. "You've got to exercise the tendon while it's fusing. Or else it'll get brittle." He picked up the other end of the rubber band. Stapled it to my pinky nail. My hand curled into a claw. I picked up a scalpel. It fell out of my hand. "That can be your costume," he said. "The Claw!"
During the carving contest Steve grabbed my cast. "Too bad," he said. "Can I sign it?" He signed it: Derek's a jerk. "Next," the Principal said. "The costume contest!" The carnival was in the gym. Kids piled on a stage. A bum with a silk flower. A ghost in a monogrammed sheet. Next up—Talent Contest. A guy from the Drama Club recited Shakespeare. A linebacker lifted weights. Four girls went up. Their dresses were tissue. They waved flashlights. "Shine little glow worms," they sang. "Glimmer. Glimmer." "I am about to demonstrate the limits of Human Endurance," said the next guy He cleared his throat. "My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin, I work in the lumber mills there. As I walk down the street, all ask, 'What's your name?' And I tells them 'My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin....'" The crowd booed. I jumped on stage. My rubber band was red. I plucked it. I raised my pinky and the rubber tensed. I plucked it again. Sang: "What a beautiful thought I am thinking, concerning that Great Speckled Bird..." - 19 -
George Bowering Sitting In Vancouver: Central Station Can I get a one-way to Squ'awsh, he says, bus riders, words all over their clothes. who the hell works here? offers hard-eye love at most not a ghost in this place, no real tracks, no smell of sausage this train station's a museum, like the notion of Calgary Old people with vague north Europe accent going to Kaslo, only reality I've seen. So there is, but there isnt a train with my sister on it
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Sitting in Vancouver: Gynecology Clinic, Broadway Women's names uttered quietly inane folksong radio they are pregnant or grey gone from time to time to back rooms, what is there besides thousands of files in sliding shelves
A black hat a good man sitting side by side In this women's place where woman's name "Doctor" is spoken on the phone not necessarily beauty at the door.
17/10/96
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Sitting in Vancouver: Multiple Sclerosis Clinic Dada brains young, mostly, poorly dressed or upcountry, limp beside husbands, charts mysterious on walls, plastic spine bones a motif, you might say. They think about lunch and parking meters —bacteria float in the air like words, like a simile looking for a place to land, like iambic gnats. Behind doors cheerful doctors keep up their spirits. Havent seen a politician for hours, havent read anything better than Gautier for years.
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Sitting in Vancouver: SFU Cafeteria Cant believe all the fat boys fat girls lined up for burgers fries and coke Tomorrowland rocket off the lapel yeah, yeah she says Burroughs wouldnt be here grumbling with necktie Allen wouldnt be here, Atwood she wouldnt be here no fancy basketball shoes, what's that? a slurpee! jumbo, two straws— primary idiots keep these chairs from lifting away, get the hang of it yeah, that's good, she says.
7/10/9
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Sitting in Vancouver: Children's Hospital Cafe Woman with cheap brown hair & two kids, delightful daughter, legs folded beneath her, bright-eyed over Jello & brother, head bent in isolation, no book, a video game? is he lorn or is he bud of painful lovely future, dreaming alone, being, perhaps, me? Chinese woman stares at setting sun, black cedar tips, her hands wrapt around tea. truly live?
—-Where does she Where is her life?
Where are their lives hidden? Written— Where is mine, gone? My dear woman in a machine reading her, another chapter, a good sentence or two?
21/2/97
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Sitting in Vancouver: Student Pub Noise at big windows. peculiar music pounding out of something black, more black than this beer— Where are the poets, are they over in Toronto, under the curvature, wet leaves clumped in front of red brick cubes, poets drinking coffee and newspapers. Here homely girls shoot pool. I could suicide easily. In Kiisnacht it drew dark early, here the carpet is the colour of Martian innards. If I were a pen I would be a girl pen beautiful as a grey boat in the lake, under water, insensible not writing but sitting, having forgotten language unable to grasp a chicken in my sister's yard. Hate chicken meat, grey on legs, love the word.
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S i t t i n g in Van: In Emergency they're all old & no hair combed got blue shiny shins harrup, up on bed, who knows last time they ever read like anything, a book? Is this a waste of life is this a drum with no fife Is this a revolution in the wrong country do they look at you askance or not at all Were any of them ever tall?
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UBC Hospital
Sitting in Vancouver: Vancouver International Airport Prince George passengers watching space opera on TV What's it called? Used to see it in hospital— Here healthy teens with backpacks hitchhike jet planes —hideous carpet would hide puke easy, planning we pay for, bud.
Snap coka can, stretch leg, mumble in Alien, I been there, but I never learned how to do that with my gum, lady You gotta live there, Prince George, I mean, where I'll look around ironic, sleep like a lizard on the plane back.
13/11/96
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Sitting in Vancouver: Vancouver Hospital Laurel Pavilion Fat women pushing walkers, walking wounded, whoosh of air door— One forgets inside —it's grey and looks but isnt, soft. They are, but their week is hard, hard to look at— airplanes can fall on roofs, who cares? I'll be back, she says, did you find that chart, she says — female voices still here, young in uniform, still don't know their lives are stories. I know them, know how they come out. Even these smooth thin ones, names on their chests.
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Sitting in Winnipeg: West End Cultural Centre Cold Indians on Balmoral, skiff o' Hallowe'en snow— I've been like a goose went north, why's that? —music in foreign language or some speaker inside wends black like me Who could walk to that beat? my old short time Metis girlfriend, I made her arm green wearing my ID bracelet in Manitoba. Was that history or mistake— did I play electric guitar a week ago in Port Colborne? Am I dying, meester?
1/11/96
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Tamas Dobozy When X Equals Marylou Confined to a white apartment, Henrik spends three lonely years writing a thousand stories. Needing a human voice, he turns on the radio, needing a face, the TV. The stories run to three or four paragraphs each, with titles like "A Bottle of Cash," "The Beekeeper's Apprentice," "The Erotic Acupuncturist," and occupy an entire notebook; but, no matter how Henrik tries, the stories won't congeal-won't add up-and for two years more he chases the larger narrative until it eludes him in an ocean of rough drafts. In November someone burglarizes the apartment. The following February, police apprehend Manny, a street kid who, when not in custody or a foster home, sleeps in the security tunnels of a mall on the outskirts of Edmonton. For the record, Manny tells Henrik and the police that he gave the notebook to his ex-girlfriend, Marylou, whom he broke up with, in fact, because she was a reader; books bug Manny. The search begins for Marylou. Suddenly, there are hundreds of people to see: dealers, crack-heads, hookers, street kids, the city's roofless residents. Some of the street kids help each other out, some carry knives. It's time for Henrik to fall back on half-forgotten social skills. Twenty-five pounds of beer flab disappear from his midsection, along with the drinking habit that sustained them. Migraines arrive, dense and concentrated as radiation shields. Sleep catches him unawares, when it's least expected: behind the wheel, during an interview, while trying (unsuccessfully) to masturbate. The doctor assures him it isn't narcolepsy, just a recluse's schedule he's gotten used to: sleeping and eating whenever it feels right. "C'mon," Henrik says, "don't tell me it's normal to fall asleep when I'm masturbating?" The doctor just shrugs. "Maybe you're trying too hard." After fruitless months, Henrik's agent, Nadine, says: "You must have other books planned?" "Yes," he grumbles, sipping a double espresso, "but they're waiting in line. It's not that I don't want to move on; it's that I can't." Now Henrik's a liar, too. Nadine wishes he'd do for sales figures what he does for her blood pressure. "I've been more than patient, Henrik." She scowls. "It's been eight years since you started this book! You want another advance? Get me a manuscript!" A map of Edmonton spreads across the wall, its streets, buildings, monuments and public places obscured by millions of colored pins. "Are you still alive, Marylou?" Henrik asks the map, removing all the blue tacks over avenues where kids die every winter. They freeze, shedding Celsius degrees of body heat like skin
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cells. Snowdrifts tuck them in. They die in the steaming of laundromat ventilation ducts, icicles clicking on their bodies like castanets. He finds all of Marylou's discarded friends; most of them are ex-boyfriends like Manny, or like Frankie Malone, who accepts the coffee Henrik pays for, takes a bite from his first croissant ever. Half of Frankie's glasses needs a lens, but when Henrik offers to take him to an optometrist, the boy gets nervous. The invitation's just the sort of trick social services uses to lure you into their confidence; next thing you know, you're in a foster home (and foster homes, in Frankie's personal history, are a memory of beatings, rope burns, and nights spent locked in a closet). He likes his glasses fine, thanks. Henrik hands him a fifty "She went to Vancouver!" says Frankie. "Said she loved me. But she was too much, you know? All this weird shit always happening. I could tell you some stories!" "I'll bet you could," mutters Henrik. He remembers Frankie on the two-hour flight to Vancouver: the thin triangular face Henrik could write about for three more years and still miss the story. The room at the Hotel Vancouver costs more than the flight, but what a jolt, going from the ionized, muzak-enhanced lobby to the lower east side's kiddie stroll, where child prostitutes, nine to eighteen, loiter on corners like public sculpture worn thinner with every season of rain. Henrik wades parades of addicts yapping for change, scrapping over crack crumbs, who ripped off who. Heroin trips them up. A woman injects smack, driving the needle through the upper of her shoe into the foot; she knows the map of her body's veins blindfolded. Henrik blows his last advance handing out twenties. Two winos bop each other in the head with empty plastic two liter Coke bottles; they fence along sidewalks, bottles brandished like swords. A grubby, scabby fourteen year old, scavenging a jacket out of an Army & Navy dumpster, replies to his question: "Marylou Garvey? Sure, I know her. She's with Jank at the moment, conductor-man, runs an orchestra. Called A Function ofX." A long, jagged scar runs from the corner of the boy's mouth halfway into the cheek. Henrik's handsome. Most of his curly hair has retained a lifetime grip on his scalp; it's just slightly gray. When age came, it etched corrective wrinkles into a face innocent and youthful to a fault. By the time Henrik hit forty, last year, strangers started smiling at him. They winked and let him get away with late charges on video returns, extra pounds in his luggage at the airport check-in, administrative exceptions without the correct paperwork. His grin became the universal ticket. So, although the sticker pasted over the band's poster says "Sold Out," the woman in the booth finds an extra ticket. The notebook is close now; its proximity depresses him. Finding itjust means getting back to work.
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The promo leaflets piled on a vintage radiator by the coat-check promise a show of "jazz-metal." Entering the auditorium, he crashes through a wall of music. Screeches, wails and feedback topple on him like bricks. The orchestra plays on a scarred, antique stage. Black velvet curtains flutter in the breeze of a smoke machine. Ultraviolet spotlights flurry over the band. The fans get an hour and a half of original tunes—"Black and Bluebird," "Porn Show Credit Roll," "Story of a Lonesome Skinhead"—blasted, wailed and strummed from cracked woodwinds, tarnished brass and loose six-strings. There are thirteen guys in A Function ofX, thirteen tempos and styles, thirteen flies buzzing at thirteen different stages of dying on a sticky-strip. The drums are minimal—a high-hat, two cymbals, bass, snare and a conga. They play three sets each of saxophones, clarinets and trumpets. The band veers from cacophony to cacophony, notes clattering in the air like iron birds. After the encore, Henrik strolls backstage, perfect grin in place, building confidence everywhere he beams it, and introduces himself with an expired press pass left over from his journalism days. "Oh yeah, writers are cool," replies Jank, a lean-faced impresario with sweat stains on the back and armpits of his cheap suit and shadows swinging in the hollows of his cheeks. Jank cleans a conductor's wand with an old scrap of suede until, held up to the light, it sparkles. "So are you, like, thinking of doing an article on us?" Henrik nods, pulls out a pad of paper, takes down the pen placed strategically behind his ear a minute before knocking on the dressing room door. Halfway through the interview, with Jank relating tales of females, Marylou walks in—torn cargo pants, frayed jean jacket under a puffy, down-filled coat open at the zipper, short spiky hair. Jank skips a sixteenth-note in his narrative to acknowledge her and then continues. "Hey, Jank! Remember me? Your girlfriend?" She brushes a kiss from her lips to his. Jank makes the gestural equivalent of "not now" and goes on: "You see, Henrik my friend, the ladies are, like, sick of punk rock, those boring beats and chords, the same shitty attitude on and off the stage. They like the big band thing. So do we." The rest of the thirteen just stand around, commiserate or shake their heads depending on how far their bandleader stretches the truth; but Jank barrels along regardless. He speaks in seamless sound bites, each one dreamed up and polished to perfection during those long hours touring provincial roads, making sure he'd be ready for future interviews. But when Marylou yells, she yells—"You know what happened to me?"—and everybody must listen. "You guys know the refinery? That pipe pouring yellow water out, that makes a whirlpool, bringing all that shit from the strait back to shore? There's these bottles there and sometimes there's notes inside. Messages. Me and Gavin went down there tonight. He's got a liter and we're sipping and checking out the bottles and know what?" Edward Gore (violin) snorts. "I'm serious, Ed. We found, like, two hundred dollars! So Gavin took me to the Crocodile." Marylou giggles. "They hated us in there, our clothes and hair and stuff, but we had the cash and you can't argue with that!" She lifts up her skirt to show how a normally slack and concave belly protrudes, swollen, when stuffed with food. - 32 -
"Man, Marylou, you've got horseshoes in your ass!" She smiles, hugs Jank, kisses his cheek; Jank barely accepts the affection before shaking her off and returning to Henrik, who flips the pad shut and shrugs. This treatment rankles with Marylou, and she delivers Henrik the look of a rival, of a lover who's unable to compete with fame for a permanent place next to Jank in the warm bed she's slept in these past four weeks, heating a space reserved for the ladies to come after the band lands a recording deal. If only his place wasn't so superior to life on the street. "I've got to go," Henrik says. "Maybe I could see you play again?" "Well, we're in Victoria tomorrow night." Jank rubs the back of his head with the same hand holding a cigarette, and everyone, aware of the amount of airplane glue in that pompadour, steps back three to four feet. "Why don't you come along?" Jank looks up. "You could do an article about our life on the road!" The bus motors onto the ferry's lower car deck. Working past the rusty doors that no longer fold back properly watching that last step to the iron decking, Hank Jones (ist bass) smacks against a sign that prohibits the transport of honeybees on ferries. Edward Gore (violin), the only band member with a post-secondary education (up to and including a half-finished Ph.D.) checks out the sign alongside Hank and then comments: "You know, my friend, if our world wasn't so hysterically fragmented and simulated, we'd actually be able to catch some of the foreshadowing that's, like, going on around us at all times." Hank's got no idea what Edward's on about, so he plays smart and keeps his reply to himself. The two musicians step onto the escalator. Henrik listens, jots mental notes. Everywhere Marylou goes, she carries a small, worn leather backpack off one shoulder, a large square notebook-sized shape poking at the fabric, stretching it outward from within. Jank curls his lip like Sid Vicious whenever Marylou speaks of his apartment as their place, once even going so far as to remind her that she owns nothing, contributes zip to rent and doesn't even clean or do dishes. "But I tell you stories," she says, "and then you write music." Jank scowls. He hasn't a clue as to what he's abusing in the effort to get to where Henrik is. After AFunction ofX, Henrik and Marylou have slurped up fifteen clam chowders and ninety Premium Plus crackers, they settle into a game of crazy eights. The guys play like sharks, taking it that seriously, with poker faces, sideline bets and low tolerance for wisecracks. So it's no surprise when Marylou, tired of Jank screwing her with a two or jack every time her cards get low, yells: "For fuck's sakes, guys, it's only crazy eights!" She throws down the cards and stomps off. "Aren't you going to go after her?" Henrik asks Jank. "Hey, I can't step out midway through a hand!" Styrofoam mugs go up and down from the orchestra's mouths. The shipboard intercom announces wallets found and license plate numbers for cars with their lights left on. Henrik excuses himself with a lame sentence about the men's room and walks off in search of Marylou. - 33 -
She's not on the lower or upper car decks. He stumbles outside, braced for wind and rain, lurches along the deck, gripping the railing and calling her name. On the sea, sunlight plays through the clouds, illuminating and skimming across patches of broken and jagged water. Finally, Henrik sees where someone's untucked the edge of a tarp fastened over a lifeboat. He tiptoes close, his footfalls lost amid the patter of rain and the horn's blowing as the ship enters a channel between Gulf Islands. Marylou is singing from within: "Dancing city / now you're talking / but where's your soul / you've a thousand faces / I'll never know"—the tune and words to Roxy Music's "True to Life," a song Henrik used to like before most music got old, along with most artwork, most writing. He'd overdosed on high culture in his loneliness, compensating for a lack of human contact with the little glow of life offered by art. Henrik feeds on the lives of these runaways, and it's like lead shot in his stomach. He's an addict to their pain, their immediacy—the way they gobble food as soon as they get it, the way they find a better pair of shoes in a field and put them on right away, ass to the grass. Marylou pokes her head from under the tarp and they appraise each other. He smiles and retreats, desire in his throat like a chicken bone. And he'd always thought himself so ethical; but his craving is that of a man shut-up too long, a recluse who overstayed his isolation and did himself permanent harm. A woman's voice announces over the P.A. system, "We are now approaching Schwartz Bay ferry terminal. All passengers please prepare to disembark;" Henrik rejoins the band, pessimistic about Marylou coming back. Jeff Klugman (ist Saxophone) recalls how a Vietnamese committed suicide by jumping off the upper deck a few years ago. "It's the motors," says Jeff. "You can't swim away from the boat. They suck you under. Mulch you up." Everyone except Henrik, but including Jank, laughs at this. They clamber aboard the bus and wait for the ferry worker's signal to go. Bighead Macintosh (2nd trumpet) takes out his horn after they've off-loaded into traffic and blows a slow, note-by-note lamentation that perfectly fits Henrik's frustration. Jank mutters about a "blue period" coming on, and everyone nods and sighs, because, as Edward explains to Henrik, a "blue period" means months of sad concerts where they play one long, muffled dirge after another—Jank's darkest pieces, like "Interlunar Interlude," "Spider in the Drain" and "Blues, One Million Ten." Marylou strolls the sidewalk, knapsack dangling, turning now and again to squint and scan the convoy of traffic driving up the ferry's off ramp. They pull up alongside her and she refuses to get in. So, crabby Jank jumps out and grabs her, shouting how she'll make them late for the show, how she should smarten up. "Where the fuck have you been?" he yells after pushing Marylou in through the sliding doors. "Don't yell at me! And what do you care anyhow?" Her eyes flash on Henrik before resuming their lock on Jank—"It's not like you came to look for me!" The orchestra and Henrik peer from over and under various seats in the back of the bus. "So where were you?" "I was on the lower car deck." Bighead stops trumpeting. Jank pulls out a lighter - 34 -
and sparks up a cigarette. "Hey, it's not what you think, Jank." Marylou rolls her eyes and tells a story, of which Henrik remembers every letter. She descended to the lower car deck to have a smoke. "Lady, you're not supposed to smoke on the car deck." An old man got out of a van. "Mister," she responded, "It's 'fuck' and it's 'you.'Just put them together." "Now listen here, young lady." "Now listen here, old man." She mimicked his voice in a way that made him laugh. "You wanna know why I don't like the smoke?" He put a finger to his lips. The lower car deck's clank of machinery, smell of stove oil and steam, gongs and chirpings from the engine room were like the workings of an enormous iron heart. The atmosphere was pure Nineteenth Century industrial: pistons and power, nuts and bolts, dangerous intermeshings of moving parts—the surrounding architecture a ringing fifty-foot high cavern of I-beams, thick hoses, sheets of reinforced concrete. The sliding door of the van slipped open and Marylou pressed her eyeball to the crack; inside, she saw half a dozen wooden beehives. A loud buzz bounced off the alloy walls of the van, making it seem warm inside, glowing from the insect hum. 'Are you sure it's the thrill of a lifetime?" Marylou asked inside the van, finger on her shirt's last done-up button. The old man nodded. She finished stripping from the waist up. "Okay," said the old man. She felt sugary water drying on her skin, a stickiness near the joints. He delicately opened the drawers. Soon, bees covered her whole upper torso. Marylou laughed as they crawled up and down her breasts and neck, collecting the sugar off her skin. Eventually, the beekeeper opened the drawers and the insects flew back to their honeycombs, leaving Marylou cold. She replaced her shirt and thick cable-knit sweater. "He asked me to become his apprentice," Marylou smiles. "Hold on," interrupts Jank. "You went to the lower car deck, got into some stranger's van, took off your shirt, and let a bunch of bees crawl all over your body?" Marylou nods. "Then the verdict is . ."Jank pounds his fist on the dashboard like a gavel, ". . . that you're a total idiot." Marylou's chin wobbles. "Don't look at me like that, Marylou; you know goddamn well you're an idiot." She settles into the chair with a wiggle, arms folded over her chest. "If I may say something," adds Edward. Everyone shifts attention to him. Henrik closes his eyes, shakes his head, seeing how totally the stories belong to Marylou. Instead of feeling ripped off, he feels happy for her, happy that the stories have found a home. "Considering the illegality of transporting such..." Edward starts, ".. bees. (Note my earlier remark, Hank). Considering also, Marylou, and no offense, some of the past stories you've told us. Considering also the context of this discussion (i.e. you two were fighting when last you saw each other). All these factors in mind, I—a word to the wise, Jank—would not be too concerned with the seriousness of Marylou's words." 'Are you calling me a liar, Edward!" she shrieks, her big hands already in fists. - 35 -
"Uh, no," says Edward, scared. "I was speaking more, uh, statistically." "What's that supposed to mean?" "It means, Marylou," sneers Jank, "the odds of your story being true are, like, fractions." "Is that so?" The whole orchestra nods. "What do you think, Henrik?" "I believe you," he says, earnestly. Marylou smiles radiantly at the man, her teeth slightly blue (which is perhaps an effect and afterglow from her aquamarine eyes); Henrik's passed the test. "Then you're the one who gets the gift." Marylou reaches into a pocket, extends her hand towards him, opening a fist to reveal fourteen dead bees for the orchestra's inspection. "That improve my odds any?" she asks. Henrik bursts out laughing. The orchestra falls silent, except for the in and out of breath and Jank's clean index finger squeaking as it writes in the steam on the window. Coming through Sydney, they stop at a MacDonald's drive-thru and place so many orders the checkout girl gets confused; everyone starts laughing and they drown out Jank's corrections. It takes forever. Afterwards, Gaby Norton Pawlowksi (2nd bass) sparks up a joint, passing it round. Only Bighead and Henrik refrain. Marylou wishes she'd done the same, because the dope's so killer. She thinks that nobody believes her story about the bees, that a truth can become a lie in the form of its telling, and that fiction's ugly twin, untruth, is clinging to her like an evil baby who can't suck enough milk. A streetkid's paranoia kicks in, and every word, every look from the orchestra, especially Jank, spells abandonment; so she waits, waiting for the bus to stop, for the boys to kick her out on some roadside; she's afraid to get out and go to the bathroom when they stop at a gas station because they might leave without her. Four weeks is definitely too long for Jank not to have fallen in love with her; by that time any other guy would have. Jank just loves her stories, and not even those so much anymore. Rain spatters against the windshield, one for each note played by Duke Ellington's Orchestra on the dashboard CD. The bus passes a mound of seashells piled by a roadside shanty with a sign, "Shellfish for Sale," tacked to its weather-beaten door. A pier extends over miles of mudflats at low tide. Arriving at Victoria's Cross and Arms, she flops on the bed. The dope stone subsides. Jank applies make-up while humming the prototype of a tune that will evolve—long after Marylou's moved on—into a song called "The Beekeeper's Girl." After Jank leaves for the sound check Marylou turns out her pocket onto the bed, spilling a handful of yellow jackets. She unzips the knapsack, thinking of Henrik and his commitment to the story, wondering at the man—pulls out plastic bags, each one filled with different articles—buttons, chicken bones, pieces of polished jade, a voodoo doll, vintage hockey cards, a sloughed-off snakeskin—until finding - 36 -
one that says "Bumblebees" on the tab, into which she slips the insects' corpses. The rest of her possessions fall from the knapsack: socks, panties, bra, pants, t-shirt, a sweater—enough clothes for an overnighter. Finally, she peels the cloth knapsack from around a large, hard-bound artist's sketchbook, takes a pen from the hotel room nightstand, leafs to a story, "The Beekeeper's Apprentice," and scrawls in the margin beside it, "Jank, November 3 1998." There are several names there already. She scans the pages to find a story for tonight. A Function ofX plays to a capacity crowd. Jank windmills in front of the band, baton waving like a droopy stick of licorice. The band wears the suits Marylou painted with fluorescent hieroglyphics; they turn and gyrate, flashing a hundred signals from ancient Egypt. The music pours from their horns like tap water. The crowd tries to dance but ends up moshing. Henrik sits in the back, behind Marylou, his perfect platonic love. She's rows ahead, knapsack over a shoulder, head tilted in the direction of the speakers. Over on the stage, Jank bends low, flings sweat to either side with a shake of the head, springs into the air, arms and legs to either side, brings the conductor's wand up as he hovers, and then tucks it into his stomach upon landing, which coincides with the closing note. Intermission is announced. The girl beside Marylou is combing her hair. Marylou turns, "That's my boyfriend up there conducting." "Wow. He's like so hot. I hear he likes groupies, too." "Bitch!" Marylou grips the other girl's face and climbs on top; nails tear into flesh, rip out an earring, pull up chunks of hair. The girl smacks Marylou's face with the bristles of her brush. They roll off the bleachers into a crowd of guys snorting coke, scattering the stash everywhere. Marylou rides it out, stays above, pounds the back of the girl's head into the floor tiles. The coke guys pull them apart. Marylou scrams to the bathroom, wipes her face carefully, checking a battered reflection in a mirror flecked with suds and spit. Henrik waits by the yellow, peeling door to the women's washroom, leans against the wall. A neon beer sign flickers by the makeshift bar. He tries to guess which story she'll use. Marylou goes from the bathroom straight backstage, a no-nonsense walk that takes her by Henrik without noticing him. He follows to the swinging doors where he stops to eavesdrop and spy through the plexiglass window. "What the hell happened to you?" Jank asks, running a towel around his neck in the dressing room, the stub of a roach on the edge of his chapped lower lip. "I made a mistake, Jank." "No kidding." He steps back from her, worried about blood on his suit, about the latest shit she's in, how her constant adventures tire him. It's inspiring, but also an incredible pain and worry that Jank would rather miss. "I needed to go outside, Jank," says Marylou. "Get some air. It was so smoky in - 37 -
there." She snags the towel he tosses her and spins the yarn. Since the concert hall neighboured Chinatown, Marylou crossed the streetfor cultural reasons. Paper lanterns dangled from the awning of a twenty-four hour corner store. Barbecued ducks hung from hooks in butcher's shops. Men and women played mah-jong in second story balconies. The labels on cans stacked in the windows of local stores showed pictures of exotic fruit. Large red Chinese characters covered a lit window of a shop just off Fan Tan Alley. The door stood slightly ajar. Marylou stepped into a room containing a secretary's desk and filing cabinets. She parted the beads hanging from a doorway into the white treatment room. An old shriveled Chinese man in a white lab coat slept on a chair. His snores rattled the canisters and vials in a wooden cabinet beside the bed. The old man held the end of a scroll that had fallen and unrolled along the floor. Marylou gently took the end from him and spread out the seven feet of brittle paper. The scroll contained thirty drawings of a human face, each stuck with a different constellation of acupuncture needles; beneath, and corresponding to, each of these sat a smaller drawing of a man and woman in various sexual positions. Chinese characters ran in thick strips along the top and bottom margins. "Mrs. Manson?" the physician's voice startled her; shefell from her haunches to her ass. He squinted through rheumy eyes. "I dream you not come. Good dream, good dream." He sighed, helped Marylou onto the bed. "But I keep my pan of deal; you keep yours, eh?" His hand scrounged in a pocketfor a bunch of needles. ("I was scared," she says to a sneering Jank). The first needle went under the skin above her eyebrows and caused a tingling in Marylou s groin. "For this: blood," the physician said, his voice steeped in guilt, this forbidden art amounting to a betrayal of his vocation, a misuse of it—bloodletting being the opposite of acupuncture. Needle after needle went in until, pattern achieved, sweat-drenched and con vulsive, Marylou orgasmed. The physician sat back in the creaky chair, staring through Marylou, fat tears streaming down his face. She plucked the needles out and wiped the blood away. The physician buried his face in his hands. Jank pushes Marylou so hard she stumbles and falls. "You expect me to believe that? You just want me to worry about you all the time!" Jank's biggest fear, more than anything to do with her settling into his apartment (which he can always vacate), is Marylou taking permanent residence in his head. Bighead comes into the room: "Jank, man, you're wanted." Jank scowls at her going out. "But Jank..." she begs. He shakes her off, twitches his conductor's baton and jumps out stage left in front of the band. The crowd screams. Marylou collapses into the couch. She frenzies, whips out the notebook and begins smashing it against the edge of the table, pulling up, slamming down, over and over, then just whips the book backhand, like a frisbee, away from herself; it skates along the floor to stop at Henrik's feet. He picks it up. Marylou turns to face him from the couch. "I believe you," he says, resisting an urge to flip through the book to note the boys' names inscribed by his stories, Marylou's annotations finally providing that thousand and first narrative he'd agonized over, despaired at ever finding. He stands there thinking of the trust required before a stray lets you get anywhere near her. Though Henrik rejects
- 38 -
the idea of epiphanies, he suddenly acquires a truth: he needs to hear the stories from Marylou. This is narcissism, this craving: to have the world throw his stories back at him, improved out of all comparison with the original. Marylou crouches on the couch, arms and legs drawn in to the chest in a position of potential. He wants to tell her how he killed the muse by neglect, by denying it access to life, to the people, places and experiences needed to replenish it; instead, he locked himself up and wrote and wrote until his reservoirs of material and emotion ran dry He'd like to say he wants no muse, that he never believed in it from the start, putting faith in hard work over inspiration. But the contrariness of these two statements silences him. Henrik shrugs, raising his eyebrows to Marylou, and then hands the notebook back, not because he wants her to have it but because it's hers, because she authored it. Henrik knows he's starting wrong, but he starts anyway: "After ten novels," he wets his lips, " words lose that 3-D feeling." He stops, licks his lips. After a minute, Henrik starts again. What happens next is part of a larger narrative.
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J e n n i f e r LoveGrove faultllnes she was ten, her arm laced with glass from the back door, seeping over skin a sudden latticework of red it wasn't the punching through, but the pulling back in that opened her, from wrist to shoulder, in a network of lines that intersect doors slam against the afternoon a crunch of tires roll my eyes and nothing is out of place here, but the quiet; the air stilling over me three hundred and fifty-six stitches to hold her together, a lurching tightrope walker, sister of edges a decade later, she says Someone is being mean to Bunny, a man writes me stories and poems, one every day and always he kills me at the end this family mapped in white sprawled across her forearm, grafting memory onto skin I trawl my longest nail along, here, and here, I trace this one — our willow tree, branches that cut into palms but still it was close enough to flying. and this one, my cold finger drags, this one
- 40 -
is the jagged feather earring torn clean from my lobe, who do you think you are, anyway? and this one, the arc clawed into the yard at the end of my dog's rattling chain, or the unnamed road Dad left him on. 1wantto peelit back, she says, open the scars and there will be Mother's shrieks swerving across town, the tree, that ruptured house. / want my arm back, what is still under the jigsaw puzzle of skin. write me something mean, and secret, she says, to send back —
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Fly
Away Home
Her cousin Kenny is older, maybe ten. Snakes oozing out of pockets, he raises the roof with the cock of an eyebrow. Kim's mom knows he's trouble but he's family, and who else is therefor her to play with? besides Johnny next door but everybody knows he's slow. Summer grass quivers shoulder high, sharp as a porcupine's back, claws roadmaps across their arms and the August sun scorches any hope of rain. An unhinged jaw, a door gapes. The barn abandoned before these three were born, and they squirm through, Johnny in the middle, they ;ire always careful not to lose him. Nestled in stale hay, a litter of kitten skulls. Kenny throws one at Kim who throws it at Johnny, and the afternoon lunges into a game of catch until Johnny catches one too hard and it crumbles in his hand. Kenny distracts from the drying, promises to show them both the latest secret he stole from his dad but first they must swear on one of the two remaining kittens not to tell. Tou hold it like this he scissors the cigarette between his first two fingers, - 42 -
singes it lit on the third try. They all cough and Kim knows it's not as much fun as the kitten skulls, but Kenny is a year older so she squints like this? and they have to light a whole new one when she flicks too hard. Heads buzzing, carried off by bees, their eyes sting and stomachs lurch. Kim laughs when Kenny throws up, wipes his mouth with a fistful of hay and bursts into shouts C'mon! Let's get outta here!
The hay catches first, it billows, fills the barn and pushes Kenny and Kim out, Johnny in tow, but he shakes free, goes back for the kitten skulls. They try to scream him out, he can't see to find the kittens so he stands still, just staring into flame. He's never seen anything so big and beautiful really, the way everything becomes part of it.
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Chicken bones and charcoal sticks You sleep brittle with chicken bones and charcoal sticks, share this bed with all the dead birds whose nests you plagiarize, shredded paper surrounding you, as though you want to trap yourself in my words, as though either of us could live like this. You're not as fragile as you think you are; I know you didn't snap any of those feathered necks yourself. It's all just tapeloops and backward masking, take-out wings and old Talking Heads albums — It's not so cool to have so many problems.
Took three years for your letter to arrive, all dissonance and fractured black ink, conservatory paper, listing how many minutes it took to make her come, while I waited up for you in that rattling house. Summer became Greyhound bathrooms and forgotten area codes, arbitrary rail transfers, Saskatoon train station at three A.M. The inventory of bizarre murders in prairie suburbs. Cab driver slurs Tou'restayin'inabad neighbourhood missy, one of'em found just back there.
Limbs in railyards, tufts of hair clumped along pipelines. I smile and tip him more than I should, still racing my arteries with Via Rail and cheap Winnipeg speed, knowing finally how wide the Saskatchewan sky can be when you're angry, and in love with a fire-eater. Or maybe just the fire.
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Andrew Pyper Dirty Look around: the same as every other morning — husband gone to work but the sockfarty smell of him still in the air, a suburban sun pushing through off-white Venetian blinds, the disappointing glimpse of my eight-year-married face in the bureau mirror — but with a difference. A feeling, you might say. Like a dream except more real. More real than real life, as a matter of fact, which makes me wonder again if it might be a dream. "Vet here I undeniably am, standing next to the bed, running hands down from my full breasts to my fuller hips (where the hell did I get that crimson nail polish?) and thinking I am the horniest slut on the planet! This thought shocks me. It's not one of my normal kind of thoughts, let's just say. I'm apart-time primary school teacher, I have thick calves, I was brought up a Presbyterian. On the monthly occasions that my husband and I attend to each other it is in the dark wearing T-shirts. Now look at me! Licking my lips at the mirror while parting my other lips with my fingers as though it were a procedure in some wicked physical exam. A feline moan that works its way up my throat. I take a long time in the shower. Soap, shampoo, shaving cream, that body gel my mother-in-law gave me two Christmasses ago— anything that lathers makes an appearance. I'm slippery as an eel but I can't take my hands off myself, every extra inch of flab suddenly a wondrous asset, a gift. And the whole time it feels like I'm being watched. Not that this makes me scared. In fact, I'm hamming it up, making drugged-out faces into the shower curtain. Like I'm doing this for someone else that isn't there. Afterwards I select a loose blouse and the skirt I stopped wearing four years ago because, strictly speaking, it doesn't fit me anymore. But I'm wriggling into it just the same, fusing my bottom into two baked-together muffins. Strap on those ridiculous heels that sent me to the chiropractor after last New Year's Eve. Hike the skirt up another inch and it's time for work. Part of the strange feeling is the idea that everyone around me is in on it. Yet it's the same smile as usual from the kid at the drive-thru window as he hands me my Irish Cream coffee, the unnecessarily stern "Good morn-ing, Pat!" from Principal Davis, the same wink as always from Glenna, with whom I share secrets and donuts. But behind these gestures is something new, a permissive cologne we're all wearing, along with the sense that the flimsy things that hold an everyday scene together — our words, our distances, our clothes — could give way at any second. And soon enough they do, by God! It all starts with Mr. Henkle, the janitor. One of the kids in my morning class has thrown up under his desk and instead of getting on the intercom to Maintenance I'm strolling down there myself, heels clicking out my heartbeat on
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the marble hallway. When I open the door Mr. Henkle is kneeling on the floor, pretending to fix a vacuum cleaner. He's not wearing his regulation blue overalls (what would the Board think of that, I wonder?) but a Hawaiian shirt and designer jeans instead, along with a gold chain snaking through the implausible forest of his chest hair. He looks up with a sly smile already on his face as though he's been expecting me. "Jim, I've got a puker in 103," I say. I've never said "puker" or called Mr. Henkle by his first name before in my life. "Another one?" he says, standing. There's a strange pause, as though we're waiting for direction. Then my eyes slip down to his pants and refuse to leave. I know it's rude but I somehow also know Jim doesn't mind. "You in a rush?" he asks me, stepping away from the vacuum cleaner and closer to me. His voice sounds funny, at once deeper and tinnier than it usually is. But I will say this: I've never noticed how attractive Mr. Henkle is, in a cheeseball mustache, yo's haircut, tinted glasses sort of way "I've got all the time in the world," I say. "You know what they say about how good it is to find a hard man." And then, without a thought about what the children in Room 103 might be getting up to or the implications for my marriage or the possibility of giving offence, I unbutton my blouse. Mr. Henkle watches me with a look of calm satisfaction, as though teachers coming into his broom closet and slipping out of their bras was a more or less daily occurrence. "You look fan-tar-tic," he growls, making sure I can hear the sound his zipper makes as he pulls it down. From somewhere at the end of the hallway I'm almost certain I can hear the muffled bass of elevator jazz.
It seemed to take forever. Not that it was boring! Or not exactly boring. Just expected, like working your way from one weight machine to another during your routine at the gym. Poor Jim really worked very hard, you know. I've never seen a man sweat so much doing anything other than mow the lawn. When he finished I was there for him. That's all I'll say about it. And that I felt cheap and exalted all at once. Then whizz-bang, I was gone! No good-bye or "Maybe we could have lunch sometime" or anything. One second Jim is making a scrunched-up face like he was trying to figure out some extremely difficult math question, and the next I'm having coffee with Glenna in the staff room, talking about "those little brats" who filled our classrooms. Glenna looks great, though. An outfit I've never seen her wear before: a rubbery scuba diver top (a chocolate mole peeping out from powdered cleavage) and a translucent lace skirt that offered shadows of varying darkness shifting about within. Kind of cheap-looking, actually, but in the best way possible. "You look great, you know that?" I find myself saying. They are the same words - 46 -
I might have used on any other day, but today they somehow come out bearing a different meaning. "Thanks, Pat. That's sooo sweet," Glenna says, gets up, and before I can ask what's going on slides over and pillows herself down in my lap. Well if you can't imagine what happens next I'm not about to tell you. All I can say is thank goodness the school board recently bought that leather sofa for the staff room! Although to be honest, I have no memory of them adding the floor-to-ceiling mirror or mattress-sized, clear glass coffee table. I never knew I was so flexible! Usually an afternoon pulling weeds out of the garden is about as athletic as I get. But today I'm doing things that require the kind of balance and strength you only see at the Cirque de Soleil. Glenna, too. More stretch in her than the elastic bands she likes to play with while she talks on the phone to her boyfriend, who she apparently isn't giving much mind to at the moment. And then (speaking of moments) who should walk in right then but Principal Davis himself! The gig is up: his brows rolled up thick above his eyes at the sight of us. The same face he makes when a student has been sent to his office for disruptive behaviour. "This is not acceptable," he says, stepping forward with thick hands resting on the belt that loops around his beanbag gut. "I'll have to report this. You understand, don't you ladies?" Ladies? Definitely not official nomenclature for women staff. Glenna wipes back the hair stuck to her forehead and smacks her lips. "Maybe we can make a deal, Bernie." "I'm not sure what you're suggesting." "Oh yes, you are," Glenna laughs huskily, untying herself from me and sliding over the carpet on her knees to squirrel up Davis' legs. "Don't tell me you haven't thought about this for a long time." "This could get us all fired." "Maybe. Or maybe you already are on fire, Bernie." For the second time in what seems like ten minutes, there's the unnaturally loud unzipping of a man's trousers.
Principal Davis took things very seriously, as principals tend to do. Discipline was his profession, after all. But he had the kind of stick-to-itiveness you can only admire, particularly in a man of his age. Afterwards, we all looked at each other blankly for a second or two. It was kind of strange, to tell the truth. Like all three of us were waiting for something. But what? For someone to apologize, or offer an embarrassed laugh to start up the conversation? No. It was more like we needed to be told we could put our clothes on again. After a little while I started to get cold. And then whizz-bang, I was gone again! Before I knew it I was somewhere else - 47 -
— another room with something soft to lie on, another funky jazz tune playing on the other side of the wall. After a few episodes like this things started to get a little blurry, or maybe just the teeniest bit repetitive. But I definitely remember Mr. McCracken, the Phys. Ed. director, asking me if I'd like to "have a little visit" with the senior boys' basketball team (the old devil neglected to tell me they were all in the shower room at the time!). And who could forget the kid at the drive-thru window on my way home who insisted on a very particular reading of my request for "a large Irish Cream." When I finally push open the front door it's all I can do to drag myself upstairs to the bedroom. Every inch of my body uniquely exhausted (and more than a little sore down there, to be frank). I should be worried, but somehow I'm certain that when my husband gets home he will know everything and still forgive me. Perhaps, if he isn't too tired himself, he might even slurp me down as a little nightcap. But for now, sleep claims me. Lying with eyes closed on the unmade bed, I get the feeling that the cameras I imagined following me all day have finally stopped rolling, and are now withdrawing once again into the shadows. "Don't go!" I want to shout, but my throat is too achy from shrieking and swallowing to permit it. "Please! Don't go! Watch! Watch me!" But even with my eyes closed I can see what I would look like from the end of the bed. A nearly middle-aged wife with more dimples on her than a golf ball, wearing too much cheap make-up and a bedsheet pulled around her shoulders in shame.
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A . F . Moritz The Old West Impossible even when one falls in half, into the incompetent and aspiring halves, to quit. Bifurcation is a going on, dispersion and diminishment, into the ground. The woman is left standing by the sod cabin and the man goes dwindling into the dust bowl so shallow no curvature is visible: there is no coming back, or leaving: the flat disc lion-colored opposite and under the sun is entirely closed by horizon, the whole set of horizons. Each circle is the barrel of a gun and the homesteader, old, his bones dice-rattled on his sour Dulcinante, its brutal pad over the earth, now he's turned gunslinger again, checks the infinite weapons at his disposal. No longer can he hit anything. He'll never see most of the revolvers in his belt. The bullets are for archaeologists. The sod house and the woman now are part of the dust he chases across. It's fleeing or it's waiting. Inner embrasure of the silent shell: the line where sky and desert close. Lizards, momentary flowers, and hidden beetles of pain, the administration and prosperity of red rock cities, clouds of airy suspended pathways, tenacious weed machines, stray bones,
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surpassing hunger. That body used to squeeze out its own nourishment from just this sort of error: overstatement of the self creating and the not wanting to end.
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Everything in Place Tonight, fountain of sperm, somebody's daughter has been shot to death and he is fountain of tears. She is removed from the renewal you are a part of, although only ritually, shut up in your room. I want to know how one thing can be in its place and the other thing be in its other place, such as the end and the beginning, such as a shooting and a fountain of sperm.
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To the Still Unborn You don't know me but I was once watching films and films of yet another mancaused horror germinating in the depths. I was sitting alone with a television's loud images of fear, repetitious and badly made. I was wondering why I couldn't turn them off. Always an outpost, a small and stupid crew in some corner of sea floor, void, or desert, was being assaulted by a beast that enters the human body and turns it first to a monster bubbling in pain, then finally to a blank, viscid, and implacable enemy: image of the human self-experiment. Or rather, this image as it appears to the hucksters who produced these awful movies and sold them to my nights, otherwise quiet in the hum of refrigerator engine and whistle of aural nerves decaying. I wondered why I didn't turn them off and think of you, didn't pierce through fear of the great strain it would be to compose my mind's noise, my senses' palsy the way hands can be folded or legs formed into a root, the sort of root a canoe's hull or the belly of a tern offers to water, moving on its own pressure and soft shadow. Was I hopeless because you were never thinking of me? But you didn't yet exist then, when I was sitting in my kitchen, hoping soon to turn off the companionable horror of my day and think of you, quiet, powerful, come from the future rescuing me not as I imagined you but as you will be.
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Maynard Ferguson Playing "Manteca" He tells the story of a song disdaining to stay in the range of human voice or metal instrument. How the fat gut and the white hair and the black suit and the smashed lips free themselves into a crushed tunnel to scream at the razor disappearance into silence: loudest sound, stretched and thinned as the wind never was. Something part rabbit and part steel mill is being disembowelled by a spiritual hawk, and he can't help smiling as he distorts the story, he's thrust the shafts of pistons through his fingers, it was all his own will, pain's bright obscurity, he flies with it, a forest kindles, a knife's born, purely happy, admiring, to have failed again to tear himself apart, fall back and lie knowing a great limit in his shade.
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To the Strangers Who Talk Loud In My Ear in Public Places Cursed be the frog who raised the mythical warts on the labia of the donkey that gave birth to the expert in sixteenth-century Dutch shipping law whose summa was discovered to be plagiarized from the toilet paper of the dysentery ward that inspires your conversation.
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Butterfly In the absence of women my own body impresses me as sensual and I suckle fountains and naked battles. In the presence of women, all of that flesh loosely or gently held and at its youngest, most exercised, still trembling lazily on the bones and not fat but promising fat, I see the harvest, I see the harvest and the harvest's fate in fertile depopulated countries: it's like this apple tree here where there aren't enough hungry squirrels and the autumn earth's a slush of half-eaten fruit. In that presence I'm the scrawny flittering, the spirit, assemblage of brittle wing and dark tube of worm, that can't settle long, for how here could one sip with such permanence as the hour without pleasure wants?
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Michelle Berry Little White Lie She sits with him in the restaurant, her dress flowing over the sides of her chair, her feet in thick boots, grounded on the floor, and she says, "have you ever lied to me?" They have been married for fourteen years. They know they are close. They are closer than any couple they know. They go everywhere together and talk about important things all the time. They haven't spent one night apart the whole time they've been together. When he travels for business he takes her with him and she does the same. "Sure I have," he says, his mouth full of pasta, "I'm sure I probably have." She sits up tall in her chair. Stretches her back to its fullest. Pushes her long hair over her shoulders. "You've lied to me?" "Little things," he says. "Like what?" "Like..." He thinks. He takes another bite of pasta. "I don't know." She looks around the restaurant. She sips her wine. "Is the pasta good?" "Great." He is eating with his head close to the plate. A drop of cream sauce spots his chin. He hasn't shaved since yesterday and his face looks rough and dark. "White lies," she says. "Right? Like when you tell me I don't look fat in something I'm wearing. Things like that?" "Yes," he says. "That's right. White lies." 'Anything else?" "I don't know, Sarah. I haven't thought about it." "Well," Sarah says. "Think about it." She eyes the vegetables on her plate. She spears one with a fork. The waiter walks over and fills up her water glass. Sarah notes that the waiter has sleepy-dust in his eyes and she has the urge to stand up and pick it out like she does with her cat. Clean the eyes carefully, softly. "Why are you asking me this?" "I just want to know." "Well, have you ever lied to me?" Sarah is quick with her response. "White lies too," she says. "Like when I told you that I liked that awful tie you used to wear with the ducks and flowers on it." "Youdidn't like that tie?" "David, come on." "No, I'm insulted. I loved that tie." David sits up in his seat and looks at Sarah over his pasta. He picks up his wine glass and swirls the red liquid. He looks around the restaurant and feels a bit like a diver coming up for air. The pasta is good and his appetite is overwhelming. "Whatever happened to that tie?"
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Sarah shrugs. "The point is, we've told white lies, little lies, but have you ever kept anything big from me on purpose?" "Did you throw out that tie?" "I didn't throw it out." "Where is it?" "Probably in the closet. You just haven't worn it in awhile." "Are you lying about throwing it out? Did you throw it out? I haven't seen it in about a year. I feel sad about this." "David." David bends again over his pasta. He starts shoveling it in. "I really loved that tie." Sarah sighs. She eats a snow pea in two bites. She chews slowly "Sandra's having an affair," Sarah says. David looks up. "What?" "Sandra, at work, the receptionist. She's sleeping with Charles." David looks embarrassed. "Is that so." "I think it's a power thing." "How?" David fills their wine glasses and then holds his hand up to signal the waiter. He orders another bottle of wine. "He's one of the lawyers. She's a receptionist." "So?" The waiter conies to their table and stands quietly above them opening the wine. He has trouble with the cork and when it finally comes free he looks relieved. He pours the wine into David's glass first and this frustrates Sarah. She feels a small jab of pain in her head. The waiter's eyes are still dirty but this time Sarah doesn't care. She doesn't feel like reaching up and helping him. "She could lose her job." "She wouldn't have started an affair unless she wanted to," David laughs. "Why are you laughing?" "You think one person forces another to have an affair?" "Maybe. Sometimes." "I'm sure it happens occasionally, Sarah, but not in this case. Believe me, Sandra's asking for it." "Asking for it?" Sarah leans back on her chair, holds her wine glass at chest level and stares at David. David finishes his pasta and sits back. Sarah waits patiently for him to speak. When they first got married everyone said it wouldn't last, they said that they were too dependent on each other, they said they would suffocate in the relationship, but look at them now, fourteen years later. Most of their friends are filing for divorce. Or having affairs. Sarah touches David's hand. "How is she asking for it, David? Tell me." "There are women at my office," David starts. "I know it's an awful thing to say and I wouldn't say it unless it were true, but these women dress and act provocatively in order to get noticed. Sandra's like that. She's even flirted with me once or - 57 -
twice when I've come to pick you up." "Is that true?" "Now you think I'm lying to you?" David laughs. "What would be the point of lying to you about that?" "It's just..." "What?" "What I want to know," Sarah says carefully, "is why is it so easy to accept that a certain type of woman would have an affair but no one would ever suspect me of having one?" David stares at Sarah. "You? You'd never have an affair. What are you talking about?" "Wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I?" "Youcouldn't." Sarah reaches for a slice of bread and notices that her hands are shaking. "We're always together," David says. "You'd never have time to have an affair. When would you do it?" Sarah smiles. "You're right about that. When would I do it?" "You're beautiful," he says. "Don't get me wrong, but you aren't the type to attract the kind of men who have affairs." "What kind of men are these? What kind of beauty is that?" "You know the kind of men. The ones who take control, take over, look at a woman a certain way. Like Dan, in my office, he'd be the type to have an affair. You talk to him in the hallway and his eyes are always looking at the women walking past. He's nodding his head at you, but his eyes are roaming the halls." Sarah crosses her boots under her chair, she tucks in her skirt. She pulls her hair over her shoulders. "I think I'll get dessert tonight." "You are too smart, maybe that's it. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with looks, maybe it's the way you talk to men." David puts his finger on his nose, something he does when he's thinking. "You intimidate them." "Do I intimidate you?" David laughs. "No, of course not." "What are you having for dessert?" Sarah raises her hand until the waiter is standing over them again. Hovering. "Dessert?" he asks. "Coffee?" "Nothing for me," David says. "I'll just finish my wine." "Listen," Sarah suddenly says to the waiter. "Do you think I'm attractive?" "What?" "Sarah." The waiter looks down at his shoes and then over towards the bar where some other waiters are huddling around a computer screen. "I'm sorry, I..." "Don't listen to her," David says. "She's being silly" "I'm not being silly. Do you think I'm the type of woman who could have an affair on my husband?" Sarah nods towards David. "This is ridiculous," David says. His dark face is turning red. He rubs his chin. - 58 -
"I think you are awfully pretty," the waiter says. He laughs. "You're just fine." "Thank you." "It's the hair," the waiter says. "Your hair is really nice." David clears his throat. "I think we'll have the bill," he says. "But I don't know about an affair," the waiter says. "It's really hard to tell." He studies Sarah. "Don't bring the bill yet," Sarah says. "I want dessert." She holds up the dessert menu and picks a piece of cherry pie. "With ice cream." The waiter disappears. "What was that all about?" "You're saying I'm not attractive, that I'm just smart." "That's not what I was saying." "Well, I want you to see that I am attractive. I'm very attractive." "Sarah, I..." They sit quietly, looking at each other. Sarah notices that David's face looks tired, that he looks overworked and older. She notices that he has circles under his eyes and that his eyelids are swollen. "I think you are incredibly sexy," David leans forward to whisper. "Really, I do." "But just to you?" "What do you mean?" "Am I just sexy to you or do other men find me sexy?" David sighs. He drinks from his water glass. "I haven't really thought about it to be honest." "It's like I'm safe. I'm too safe and so you don't even have to think about it." David leans back and looks at the people eating around them. A strange-looking woman catches his eye. Her head is tilted in an awkward position as if it's stuck. She is twisting her pasta on her fork with a spoon. She is sitting by herself. David stares. "David, talk to me." David looks at Sarah. Her hair is dark brown and long, it covers half her face when it falls forward. She has a small nose and big eyes and thin lips. It's the lips. If her lips were thick, David thinks, than maybe she would be attractive to other men. As it is, he's fallen in love with her thin lips, her small waist, her long fingers. What the hell is he talking about? David is so tired that he can't think straight. He rubs his eyes. It's been a long week at work. Sarah looks bright-eyed and wide-awake. He doesn't know where she gets her energy. "And besides," Sarah says. "It's a mix of the brain and the looks. It's not only looks that make a person attractive." Sarah taps her temple. "And I've got both, right?" "I don't think brains are the problem in Sandra's case." Sarah laughs. "No, I guess not." The waiter brings Sarah's cherry pie and ice cream. He smiles at her. "Here you go," he says. "Thank you." Sarah bites into her cherry pie as if she hasn't eaten in weeks. She - 59 -
eats quickly, barely chewing, the pie melts in her mouth. "This is good," she says to David, "try some." "No thanks." David is leaning back in his chair eyeing the tilted-neck woman. She twists her head around looking at the dessert specials written on the board. Her movements look painful. She is all alone and her eyes are frightened. David feels slightly ill when he looks at her, as if he's looking at a bird that has flown into a glass window and is twitching helplessly on the ground. He wonders for just an instant if she is married, if she has a lover, or if she sits alone like this night after night, her neck skewed and uncomfortable. Sarah sits back after she has finished the pie. She wipes her thin lips on a napkin. She picks up her wine and finishes her glass. "To tell you the truth, David," Sarah says. "If I can get your attention — if you'll just focus on me for a minute. I guess that I have lied to you. Some pretty big lies." David sits up. "You've lied to me? What are you talking about?" "Some real doozers. Some big, big lies." Sarah picks pie out of her teeth. "Bigger than anything you've ever done to me really. Right? You've never done anything to me." David watches her thin lips move around her finger. Sarah laughs. David laughs. "You're kidding, aren't you?" "Well," Sarah says. "For one thing I lied about wanting kids. I don't want kids." "But we've been trying..." "No we haven't. You've been trying. I've been on the pill." "Sarah. The doctors, the tests." Sarah smiles. "Never went." "You never went to the doctors? We've been trying for six years." 'And another thing. I lie about my orgasms all the time." David doesn't say anything. He looks at his plate. "I can't believe you're on the pill." His shoulders fall. "I haven't had an orgasm, actually, since we were first married. Fourteen years and no orgasm." "Why?" David says. "Why have you lied to me? I thought —" "This is nothing," Sarah says. "Wait until you hear the rest." "I don't want to hear anything else. Not here. Let's go home and talk about this." "Coffee?" The waiter is standing beside their table with his coffee pot raised. "Yes," Sarah says. "I'd like a cup." "I think we should get the bill," David says. "I think we'll be going." "I want a cup of coffee." The waiter pours the coffee and then turns to leave. "I'll bring the bill," he says. "You should clean your eyes out," Sarah says to him, "they're full of sleepy-dust." The waiter stops and turns back and stares at Sarah. "I'm tired," he says and walks away. "Why did you say that? That was mean." - 60 -
"It's the truth," Sarah says. "I'm into telling the truth right now." "Why?" "Why not? It seems," Sarah says, looking out the frosted window at the empty street, "that it's the season for telling the truth. Christmas is just around the corner." "Jesus Christ," David says. He puts his head in his hands. "I don't know if I can take this. I don't know what's making you say these things. We were having a perfectly nice dinner." Then David puts his hands on the table, palms down. He rests them there and stares at them. Sarah picks up a fork that the waiter forgot to take away. She plays with it. She turns it around in her hand. "Do you know what Sandra told me after I told her she was stupid to have an affair with Charles? After I told her that Charles was married and had kids and that she would end up getting fired for doing it, not for not doing it?" "Sandra?" "At work. The receptionist." "I don't care," David sighs, "I don't care what she told you. I care that you've been lying to me." Sarah takes the fork and holds it, prongs down, over the center of the table. She rests her elbows on the table but holds the fork high. She holds it there, lets it hover, shakes it a bit, loosely, and then grasps it tightly, squeezes it. "She told me that when she was having an affair with you last year, when you were sleeping together during those hour long lunches when you told me you were working, she told me that you called what you two were doing a little white lie. She said that you kept saying, Tm just telling Sarah a little white lie.' And she said to me, today, when I was talking to her about Charles, she said that she would always laugh when you said that because in her mind if that — sex with her — was a little white lie, than what were the big things you were lying about?" David looks shocked. He sits completely still. Sarah grabs the fork tightly, raises it up and brings it down on David's hand. She watches the fork travel from high above the center of the table, hovering, and then straight forward, finding its mark in David's large hand. She stabs it hard. The fork travels through skin and thick veins. Nothing happens at first as Sarah rushes out of the restaurant, her boots stepping hard on the floor, her skirt swishing around her. Everything seems to be moving in slow motion and all noise is muffled. She pushes past the waiter who gives her a horrible look with eyes clean of sleepy-dust. "I'm just tired," he says, under his breath. "You aren't very nice." Sarah runs out into the cold, dark night, breathing heavily, her hands fumbling in her purse for the car keys, determined to leave David stranded in the restaurant. But suddenly she stands still and all she can hear is the blood-curdling scream coming from inside the restaurant, from between her husband's lips. Her heart beats wildly in her ears.
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Dennis Lee Deeper Often at night, sometimes out in the snow or going into the music, the hunch says, "Deeper." I don't know what it means. Just, "Push it. Go further. Go deeper." And when they come talking at me I get antsy at times, but mostly I stay put and it keeps saying, "Deeper. This is not it. You must go deeper." There is danger in this, also beautiful inklings and I believe it can issue in gestures of homing; but I cannot control it, all I know is the one thing — "Deeper. You must go further. You must go deeper."
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The S h i f t The first time I heard r'n'b, it was on Buffalo airwaves, beaming the sound of the Hound through the night. Was it Screamin'Jay Hawkins? Sam the Man Taylor? I lay in a sweat on the bed. I was fifteen, I was planning to become a minister. But nasty, nasty, the slow hormonal strut came pumping juice & bad intentions, doing its downtown outlaw prowl. And the news took hold of my life, as radio gonad pulsed and faded and pulsed. This was secret information. Whiteboy meets the body. And I hadn't stopped loving math, or Jesus, but revved by the sax in the dark, I lay and sweated; I could feel the shape of the mystery shift for keeps.
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The Shame Among the thousand, or maybe the million things I know, my all-time least favourite is this: how shitty it feels, when you admire somebody for their talent, or guts, or maybe just their nifty way of getting through the day; anyway, as I keep trying not to tell you, how shitty it feels when you admire this person, and then some meanminded jerkoff starts badmouthing them behind their back, and instead of sticking up for them — and remember, this friend has never done anything to hurt you — you just stand there, while the cracks and cheap laughs get meaner and hey you laugh too and then, god help me I did I joined in the trash brigade, I got off this killer putdown, we all cracked up we were howling we were helpless with laughter and I walked away down the hall I was caving in I hated them all and myself I wanted to break something, I walked and walked I felt so helpless with shame, with the shame.
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The Mystery Can't talk about it, don't know if anybody else even feels it, animals live in it, maybe they can't tell it's there, little kids the same; grownups act oblivious, situation normal. Half the time I just mooch along, then I laugh too loud. But it comes through late at night, or in winter when branches glow with snow against the bark, or some dumb old song breaks me up and I want to go howl in the city, or smash windows, or make my life sheer shine in this miracle ache of a world.
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Jonathan Bennett And The Onions Being pigeon-chested runs in their family. Look at Gavin over there, pricking sausages on the barbecue, fat spitting up, the heat burning his face. A beer in his right hand, tongs in his left. And his chest all puffed up, like he's beginning some mating ritual, like we're all now on some barren island home to exotic birds performing a dance to attract partners. No, not the chest of a pigeon at all, but the blue-footed booby or some such nonsense. His brother Rodney is much the same. Uncle George's pigeon-chest looks about ready to collapse. Uncle George is sitting alone, watching Gavin barbecuing, who, in turn, is watching his little girlfriend waltzing through the party serving hors d'oeuvres, just like, "where is Jane?" yes... there she is, eh, Uncle George, just like your wife is doing. But you are crumpled, an ear cocked, pretending to be listening for the cricket score on the old wireless, its volume—by the time it reaches you on the verandah—is hopelessly drowned out by the gossip, the giggles, the drunk neighbours, the cicadas, by the intoxicating summer night. Some here at this barbecue, some who don't know the history, might see the need for a cricket score as a plausible distraction. And Gavin's ready for another beer. "Get another beer for Gavin, honey." Gavin glances over at his uncle. "And the onions. No, the chopped onions, honey." Not to worry, Gavin, you're doing fine, you needn't look for reassurance. Even Uncle George had to learn how to captain a party from the barbecue helm. But Uncle George is a sorry captain. With his thinning hair and his pipe he might be ninety, but he's only sixty-eight. He hunches over. Now, ten years later, the weight of Gavin and Rodney's stepfather's death, Sandy's death, still rests between his shoulder blades. Hunching's all he can do once he thinks of all that water, those rows of teeth, once he thinks of himself transformed into the boys' father-figure. And some of the people here have guessed at the circumstances of that crisp morning. Stepfather Sandy with first son Rodney tagging along. "Oh come on Gavin," they said," why don't you want to come?" But you didn't go, did you Gavin. They didn't really want you along. Fishing. Fishing half a kilometre off the point. You'd just taken up the saxophone, Gavin. Not much of a swimmer were you. Especially in big surf, in that kind of "emergency." Of course you didn't want to start fishing now. Start being the bait again, like when you were a little kid, like when big brother Rodney would whip you with a wet towel, once tore a piece of skin clear off your leg. Crack. No, of course you didn't go. Of course you let them go off together. Stepfather and eldest son. Of course you're barbecuing this very minute to show your old Uncle George that all is not lost. There, stupid, puff up your chest and throw all twelve diced onions on the hot plate at once. Go on. Show him. Show Uncle George how you're not going to cry.
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Lynn Crosbie Roach French Fries I was given this diary by my friend Michael in Vancouver in the summer of 1999. It is a spiral-bound paper notebook. On its cover is a red and yellow carton of golden, ketchup-dappled french fries against a pale blue background. The carton says FRENCH FRIES. Above these words, someone has pasted this large black sticker: ROACH. I was staying in Vancouver a few days before leaving to visit a friend in the Saanich Peninsula. I had packed a number of gourmet items—strawberries soaked in brandy; dwarf carrots, pickled in vinegar. Michael and I drove around in his Ford Tempo a lot, listening to "She's a Rainbow" with the windows rolled down. On Robson Street, I bought a short story written by a homeless kid. Two pages of foolscap, the story involved a viking named William, who "had some blondish facial hair which could easily grow into a flowing beard." Michael gave me the diary, and showed me his rock garden. Turning over the earth, he had discovered pieces of bone china, with disparate patterns: cabbage roses, vines, interlocking gold and silver teeth. I saw a pod of Orcas surface by the ferry; in Sidney, ducklings appeared in the creek. I met a black cat named Lily My friend was desperately ill. I read the diary while I was there. I have not been able to locate the owner of Roach French Fries. I tried the two telephone numbers inside. Calvin + Steve (9301 Avendale Rd., in Redmond) and "Open Distance Learning." The first has been disconnected; the second is an automated student services line. I do not know the writer's name. She is a high school student, who knows 19 gymnastic moves including "Angel, Angel, Mermaid;" "Wappidy up to Standing;" "Toothpick Move;" "Bird's Nest on Ropes" and "Becky Stag." Her poetry is fairly disquieting though I think not uncommon at this age: The loveliness I once found painted/In a flower has been erased &/The contagouse
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smile held in a childs/Eye has been terminated by vaccination. She has made the following, in my opinion, trenchant observations: Her friend Nuala should stop laughing that way. It's fake and frankly unsettling. Lisa and Dido are only interested in clothes and looking cool. Matthew has stopped calling altogether. What's wrong with him? Although there is not much that she wants from life, she has made three wishes: — I wish I had a smile that would put people at ease & make them happy. — I wish people loved me for who I am. — I wish new good 100% friends who loved me would find me. I find myself close to loving the writer I now call "Debbie" 100% and I feel at ease, happy about this. Debbie feels her mother is "bitchy & anal-retentive," that only she can see what she's really like: Debbie, I felt this too. I am looking through my 1977 diary, burgundy leather with an incomprehensible Russian insignia: at 14 I wrote poetry: Grasp the liquid eyeball melt the purple shine squeeze the black dot and poke the white sea. Scream when you see the madness and withdraw in horror... and referred to my mother with very little civility or manners. You are sitting in a restaurant, writing and drawing cross-hatched pictures of men and women falling; a tree of faces; a burning hand. There are two acquaintances beside you who do not say hello, As if you care. I drew and passed around pictures of old men with tree sized erections; a woman lifting her skirt, revealing a man buried inside, legs kicking. I was thrown out of - 68 -
class often for similar transgressions, As if I cared. You are wondering if insane people can read your thoughts; if you could read other people's thoughts, what would that be like? It would be something like this: invasive and obscene. I am thinking about you now, after your diary leaves off. Years passing, and still wanting the same things, love and ease; still wondering why people hurt you; a little lonely, and defiant: I wonder if I'm going to become some minimum wage shiftily paid blue-collar worker or will I make it. Kill me now just do it. You call these fears, what makes you "nervose," "this teendom thing": Debbie, nothing changes. I visited Vancouver again this spring—six years after my first trip, to read poetry at a little club with a bongo-player. I fell in love there too, in a way There was something about the cherry blossoms falling so sweetly and slowly, time seemed like this to me then, suspended and ripe. At the time I was working through a roll of Valium, feeling as high as you get sometimes Debbie ("I saw Jesus/and an Angel in a burst of light"), and filled with half-baked heartache: "Brians leaving for Chilli soon & if he doesn't call before he leaves, I'll cry." When I returned, I called him and he never called back. I cried and began throwing things. Donna, an old friend of mine, moved from Toronto to Vancouver, and lived on Thurlow Street—she had become a lawyer, and enjoyed shopping. I visited her and told her he never called. "I hate life & I think life hates me." My lawyer friend was infuriated by my inability to see clearly He doesn't care about you, she said. She laughed in a fake, unsettling way I'm afraid that's not possible, I told her. I went out alone and bought Chinese lottery tickets, scratched them under a tree. The blossoms fell, tumbling like paradise.
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Something that you wrote, in a poem called "On the Streets, Love," reminds me. That cities contain your feelings, shake and whirl them through the air, love, and hate— Debbie, I was saying that, recently, I visited Vancouver again. "There's no Princes so I'll save myself" The odourless cherry trees looked like plastic kitsch; my friend was not able to come to the phone. I saw an old acquaintance panhandling for junk in Gastown, and he was the nicest person I met. Riding with Michael in the Ford Tempo, we listened to Keith Richards country songs, cruel complaints. Donna and I went shopping and she gave me a dragon fruit. I wrote a poem about it later that I never finished, which was all idea and no execution—
The Dragon Fruit The deep rose oval, its flesh furled like crimson flags sat on the night table at the Sylvia Hotel For three days, simmering. I had not travelled with a knife, defenceless The dragon fruit Nestled with unanswered messages, A pink dress in yellow tissue paper, glasses filled with Sapphire gin and ice. The gulls flew straight at the window, crows and doves. "I've got some awesome ideas," you wrote. The fruit was supposed to be a metaphor for Donna, for the fight we would have, where I walked away, carrying three suitcases up the high streets and moving farther from the ocean, the mountains veiled in storm clouds. The gulls and so on represent a new interest in birds, in taking their pictures.
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At your age I would play Lynyrd Skynyrd and close my eyes: I'm as free as a bird, man— One of your rap songs mentions "the fowls of violation." Donna and I are no longer speaking. Lily was killed by a car; my friend died. I now regard Vancouver to be an ugly city, without allure. "I grew a painful soul." I wondered in my diary what it would be like, at this age, not knowing how I would feel, moving against the wind on steep inclines, immersing pain in anger, pain, like a roach in a box of french fries—you understand this awful paradox: "To be loved and to love. That is the secret. I've got half of it down." I've got half of it down.
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Natalee Caple The Lilac Fields at Pastroyeny Footsteps concatenate with shouts along the black street. Sebastian blinks. He sees the ragged outlines of clothing hanging across the iron bed rails, over damaged chairs, and loosened doorknobs. He rolls away from the window and crushes the pillow to his cheek. He covers his exposed ear with a damp arm. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, the slumped shoulders of rumpled shirts materialize as the desolate ghosts of soldiers. He hears glass breaking and then, finally, the night silences itself. "Four of us were at a table. A good-looking, shorthaired girl served us drinks from two gun holsters strapped by a leather belt to her skinny hips. She clapped a dirty highball on the table and asked me if I wanted whisky or gin. And then she took the bottle from her right hip and uncorked it with her teeth. She poured the liquor from the height of her shoulder and I stared into the brilliant jet, falling past my loathsome face," Barbus laughs. "Did you take her home?" asks the second man. Sebastian doesn't know this second man. He came into the dining hall half an hour ago, inserting himself easily into the famished gaggle of journalists eating breakfast around the long plywood tables. He smiled at Sebastian and lifted Sebastian's coffee cup to toast the group. He introduced himself as "Tamai. I am a good driver. You need me," he said. "I know where to find a dozen women like that for you. With long hair too. You should have a long-haired woman to make you strong." He grins. His front teeth are cracked. "You must see the fields at Pastroyeny for your papers; I'll take you tomorrow, twenty-five dollars each." He holds up two fingers and then five fingers and then points affably between himself and the other men. Strains of American music filter through the parted curtains in Barbus's room. The crimson fabric inflates and deflates gently with the dusty breath of day. Dust motes glisten in the rose light. Everywhere, the fermenting odour of alcohol enlaces the verdant scents of sweat and smoke. "Barbus?" Sebastian calls. "Sleeping," comes the familiar growl from the direction of the bath. The birds outside cackle at the dawn. The rumble of car motors competes with the snap, snap of toy guns fired at suspicious garbage bins, conspiring bushes, and colluding signs. "The kids are up early," Sebastian mutters. He plucks at the muscles along his neck and finds them taut as guitar strings. His spine feels crooked and ruined from sleeping twisted in the bowed palm of the antique mattress. "How many hours to Pastroyeny?" he shouts at the speckled mirror over the bureau.
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"Two," the bath calls back. When the sun rolls into the clearest region of the sky the air ripples with heat. White filaments of cirrus clouds veil the fields in spotty shadow. The light silvers the road disappearing behind them. Sebastian leans his forehead on his hand to shield his eyes from dust and turns his head to watch the landscape. Music winds painfully out from a tape, through the crackling speakers in the front, to shatter his companions' conversation. There are no animals in the leas alongside the road. No chubby sheep or stocky ponies graze the scruffy greenery. Sebastian stares into the citadel of trees set back, metres away from the asphalt divide. Occasionally Sebastian sees a soldier, lounging at the periphery, leaning his narrow length against a birch trunk. Sebastian sits up straighter to look at them. In the city they are always alert and on display. They parade their uniforms down the ruined alleyways as if the cobblestones hold pot-lights, and all the broken windows hide galleries of breathless girls. The mystery of moistened cotton glimmers behind still irises and sullen jaws set over supple necks. Among the trees, from a distance, staring into the canopy and drawing on cigarettes, the young soldiers seem like wardens for the pastoral world. They guard the forest from the city and the ground from the sky. They also seem hot and bored like adolescent boys in Sunday suits. They long for some infringement, some spark to light their consciences. They would prefer to fight. They ache to move. Their pale cheeks are always flushed, and their blue eyes are always shiny. At thirty years of age Sebastian already feels himself drying up, growing old, whenever he sees the white teeth of soldiers. "She has skin as pale and warm as Caribbean sand. I told her I would marry her when they rebuilt the church. She said that was a safe offer." Barbus laughs. He tips his head back and sips from a steel canteen. He glances back at Sebastian. He smiles and his cheeks vibrate as the car hits a hole in the road. "My friend has a fantastic lover. Tell the good driver about your wife, Sebastian. Go on. Ah, he's shy." Barbus turns back. "Never mind." The driver waves a hand, dismissing Sebastian's silence. "My mother was in a movie once, filmed over there, by those stones. You see? That used to be a long, white house where a crazy old man lived. He liked to sit outside his house in his kitchen chair and wait for someone to drive by. Whenever he saw a car coming he would run out into the road waving his arms and yelling so that the driver would be startled and pull over, thinking that he was in trouble. When a car stopped the old man would stand, waiting calmly for the window to roll down and then politely invite the motorist in for lunch. It's so lonely out here. I'm glad that they destroyed that house." "What was the movie about?" Sebastian leans in from the window and coughs. The driver's black hair ruffles in the wind. "It was about a deaf woman who had been brought to the house and locked away from everyone as punishment for letting too many accidents happen around her. The premise was, ever since she was young, people screamed for help near her. I don't know, she was cursed or something. She couldn't hear so she never looked up, never saw any of the disasters that draggled behind her one long life. Children - 73 -
drowned while she bathed. Dogs were run over while she arranged fruit in a basket. Trains derailed as she read poetry in the station, and my mother never saw anything, never knew why she was locked up in this house. She sat in his kitchen chair for months, waiting for the person who left her there to come and retrieve her. At the end of the film she drifted asleep, just as the world was going to war. The camera panned across cannons rolling over desert dunes, airplanes shedding missiles over cities already on fire, water boiling in the oceans, and my mother, asleep in the kitchen, with her head tilted toward her shoulder." "How long was your mother an actress?" "She wasn't an actress. She was in movies made by the neighbour. He had a camera shop in town. He recorded most of the scenes that he needed with a VCR off the television." The driver shrugs. "Nobody is an actress here." "How long until we reach Pastroyeny?" Barbus interrupts. "We're almost there." "Name the five most beautiful places on the earth," Tamai shouts as a truck passes their car on the left side and the car tilts as they slip onto the shoulder. "Countries or cities?" "Places like a city, or a room, or a bed, whatever is a place and also beautiful to you." Sebastian licks his lips tenderly His tongue is dry. His voice sounds coarse. "Port Saint Denis," he says. "The violet wallpaper in the cafes. Port Hope, lying in my shorts in the wild grass watching the water locks open and close. The clear scent of the water as it rises and falls. My kitchen at home; when the sunlight floods the counters Julie sits on a stool by the island and wraps her brown feet around the stool legs and reads the paper. The window seat in an expensive restaurant in Toronto, watching the stream of coloured lights along the highway, red lights indicating departure, and white lights indicating arrival." "He's very sentimental," Barbus says. "What about you, Tamai?" Sebastian asks. "It used to be Pastroyeny." The car hits another hole in the road. Sebastian grasps the frame of the window. "There was a field outside the city," Tamai starts, "where the wind scattered lilac petals from the trees across the grass, and the air was perfumed like a bordello. Boys walked home for dinner with fists full of lilac stalks for their mothers. I had a little dog named Asya, after a girl that I wanted, and we ran together in circles kicking up clouds of purple petals. There was a cafe on the V-shaped corner of a dead-end street, and the fumes from the cars gathered there, but the waitress always wore dresses, and the cakes were sweet and warm. There was a banya, a bathhouse, where I met my friends and we splashed each other and swam naked in the warm pool. There was a gymnastics hall. There were benches along the road where old men sat in rows and argued, or sometimes they recalled their youth and joined in a rain dance with their arms around each other." "What else," Barbus asks. He is writing in his notebook, sticking the tip of his thumb into the end of the metal spiral at the top. Sebastian retrieves a square of - 74 -
folded paper from his jeans pocket and gropes himself, searching for a pencil. "There were long white lines of laundry. There was a house with an orange roof that my mother always wanted, so we walked past it every day. There were schoolyard jungles filled with bullies and pretty girls and athletes and bookish children. There was a camera shop where Salman Bibolt made photograms of coins and lace, and concocted scripts for home movies starring the lovely, married Asya Chermoev. There was a hospital where I had stitches in my forehead from falling off my bicycle. There was a window where I saw a naked woman, pulling down the blinds. There was a room in the preschool where I found my numbered steel pot in the circle of steel pots and sat with all the other children to be toilet-trained at nine o'clock. Pastroyeny held all the most beautiful places on earth. Here we are." The brakes complain as the heavy car slows. Sebastian looks outside and blinks with shock. The green, the scrub and bushes, the soldiers and cigarettes, the dead matches, the hills and trees are gone. The car halts and the sound of the car doors opening and closing explode the quiet. The air smells strange, smells dusky like the smoke of ordinary objects burnt up in the human atmosphere. Sebastian swallows a stone of saliva. The birch trees are shattered. Every brick on the gray ground is broken. The horizon is unobstructed, empty. The entire city has broken down into the tiniest fragments and scattered like a trail, warning don't come this way. If the city were a body, then the body has lain down prone before the tanks, beneath the planes, under the soldiers and become demolished. "Here?" "Yes." Tamai stands stiff with his arms at his side and his chin braced against the sunlight. "Patroyeny," he says, "is Russian for cathedral. But now the city is only a patina of rust cast across the landscape. While I was driving, it really seemed as if I could arrive in the place as it was. It was like I was on my way to visit someone because I had forgotten their death." Tamai scrapes a line in the dust with his heel. "I stand here, and the sky turns to powder above me. All the past, the crying after beatings, the laughing after swimming, the snoring, and the sighing, all of it, dissolves into a monotonous ringing, a bell in my brain that sings: it's over, it's over, it's over. I wanted to be the one to bring you here because I knew that, if you found it at all, you would never believe it was real. Over there, men with tempers played cards at night. Over there, men with sunburned shoulders dug ditches. Lovers ate nothing all day from distraction. Children carried home bundles of sticks and called, 'comrade, comrade,' to each other. And the odour of the leaves?" Tamai inhales. Sebastian looks at the horizon and sees a narrow band of sepia air rising in the distance. Pieces of metal glint in the furrows of dirt. The sky is flat and indifferent over their heads. "The odour of the leaves in the fall was like the glow in your testicles after love. To remember it is obscene. It's ruthless. It's like lighting the church afire with prayer candles."
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bill bissett yu know abt th previouslee hapless prson who workd 4 a long time in th diamond xchange in sierra leone 4 a long time what we call on erth say ovr 30 yeers ovr 30 yeers evree few dayze he was pocketing a tiny diamond on th assemblee line separating th dia monds from th shinee gravl n taking them home aftr 30 yeers or sew he left quietlee unobtrusivlee had nevr reelee spokn much 2 aneewun ths was seen as a sign uv trust he thn in th most undrstatid way went 2 de beers in england cashdthem all in say wun huge bag uv diamonds wun huge bag uv diamonds
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he quietlee thn flew 2 madrid n livd 4evr in a kastul ovr looking th el grecos in th prado wch he went 2 view evree day he livd a reflectiv life he did partee wuns a month at fashyunabul art charitee events uv kours his present name was un recognizablee diffrent thn 04 eithr in sierra leone or britin n he was happee no wun cud tell that or remembr him evr from thees hi end events yet he was ther 2 b reveeld as it wer tho always an uninteresting identitee nowun botherd him
undr th Spanish stars 4evr ther is wun kastul eye know uv in madrid a gud frend hesd2me say we cud go ther we cud go ther
he was polite sinseer n at an say undrground black tie shindig he met anothr man a retird vampire with th most kongenial mind n bodee n they lookd out ovr th el grecos 2gethr from th roof uv theyr kastul
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whats th point is animal husbandree th domestifikaysyun uv men she askd n just thn th carriage ovr turnd n all th toffee n flesh n bone wishes splayd out on th torrenshul drive way thers no way 2 put it all back 2gethr she sighd looking out thru th spidr webs n frosting at them all in th dust men n women laying ther 4 sum wun 2 cum along n tell them what 2 dew o get up she spat at them iuv got 2 moov on thers burnt moons in my hands n a hungr in me that nun uv yu cud o nevr mind she shoutid ium going 2 th parkway races if yu evr want 2 join me chill ther down time down hungr down demons down lust UH WHAAT WHER AR TH UNIVERSALEE ACCESSIBUL DAY CARE SPACES WHER IS TH WAGE EQUITEE PARITEE JOB SHARING TH LONG OVRDUE TAX REFORM REINSTATEMENT UV REEL TAXES ON WEALTHEE N CORPORASHYUNS PEOPUL AR DYING ON TH STREETS HELLO o thees feelings keep on travelling show yr wares whil yu can she aveerd n yul stop sum wher sum how laying back feel th wind teer at th door n th sky hot n daring turn in yr bellee n yr mind as th brain turns 2 gold 2 blu gold 2 sweet grass 2 blessing song whethr or not yu make th journee 4 it YU CAN FEEL IT THRU TH 4EST SHADOW LITE th corgis nevr stop waving
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is ths 2 intrikate caretaking he told me his firend she was having a baybee veree soon n she wantid 2 give her dog away bcoz that partikular breed evn suprvisd can attack n eet baybeez he howevr my frend had strong feelings 4 th dog n wantid 2 save it from prhaps being put down wud yu live with th dog i askd well he sd onlee if we wer in anothr bldg as ths wun him in now he sd duz not allow pets sew what ar yu going 2 dew eye asked well he sd ium looking 4 a building that will take a dog n ask her agen if she will keep th pit bull okay i sd gud luck let me know what happns iul talk 2 yu few dayze latr message on my vois mail he sd i dont know th phone numbr heer or whn iul b cumming back 2 town iuv had an accident with th attempts 2 save th dog ium in a bodee cast n cant moov it cud b a few weeks b4 i get back iul call yu whn idew n hopefulee me n th dog can get a place 2gethr soon n yul cum 2 visit us 41
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have u herd abt th crows uv Chatham manee fathrs wer seen sitting in theyr cars what had bin th last bastion uv privasee b4 neighbours n cops decidid 2 bcum thretend by th practise uv hanging out in th vehikul away out uv th hous n all th frenzee in ther or whatevr a place 2 fart n reed th nuspapr smoke n koff n chill during th day espeshulee on week ends sistrs cud be seen playing in th front n back sects with dolls n clothes n lafftr n taunting sum times sons went in ther by themselvs as did sistrs mothrs seldom went in2 th car tho i suppose it did happn n iuv red it did wer cars such a prized possessyun a noveltee such a large place iul just b out in th car katee i wud heer my dad say n not yet assoseeatid with pollusyun n destrukshyun uv lung tissu n b4 streets wer thot uv as othr 2 outside n ther wer neighbourhoods whn did that all change probablee gradualee n we dont theorize what that meens un til thers furthr changing long aftr i gess tho in Chatham now peopul hang outside theyr guns pointid up at th sky at th omnipresent n ubiquitous crows who arrivd in numbrs 2 vast 4 counting its sd
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they came 4 th tremendous seed they like th space ther 2 drive th chathamites nuts n arint we all nuts alredee sew that word has no meening 2 drive them out uv theyr houses thers sumthing in th wood n masonree uv th houses ther that onlee crows long 4 dreem uv th tastes uv th crows ar waiting hovring flying ovr kaaaaaaa ing n perching with total presens evreewher in chatham ar th crows uv chatham fans uv alfred hitchcocks th birds othr gothik storeez ar th peopul below drivn by disastr mooveez apokolyptik vishyuns time is ticking away close up uv a noisee clock tick tick th crows n th peopul uv chatham ar staring at each othr who will outstare whom in ths crow stand off will th crows take ovr th wall paperd kitchens uv chatham invite neighbour crows in 4 t n sugar sit in th cars fart n reed th latest nuspaprs th peopul uv chatham like peopul in manee places baloon up on theyr own hot air hovr ovr th inkalkubul seed n wait wait 4 th crows 2 leev what wer theyr houses n start 2 howevr faltringlee grow wings n uttr theyr first hesitant n tremulous k k kaaaa s k k kaaaaaaaaaaa
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cum back pleez henrl marshmallow she sighd throwing up yelling out th speeding pontiak th silvr metal gleeming in th vomit n sunshine thats just th beginning she sd thers lots mor wher that came from looking out at th fjord henri henri wher ar yu o why is ths happning ium wanting what isint ther 4 me eye know i sd thats sew oftn what makes me flail n shedules changing sew oftn yet its suave 2 b wher we ar in th far distans henri cud be seen bording a terra daktyl it wasint his fault his voyage card was up altho lumbring it was pristeen scarves shone n flurreed in th amorous winds pants n skirts wer tite wher it matterd what cud b dun abt aneething sumtimez ium skard 2 go alone eye 4 get ium being cared 4 as we all ar n i need a buddee frend 2 hang with 4 sum adventur buffr 4 th awkward timez its not alwayze a sauna but th terra daktyl henri was bording was taking him 2 th fleshier parts uv th ocean hide a wayze n margaret was still freeking tho henri was onlee on embasee beurokratik biz anee way n margaret knew ths tho felt it was not impossibul 4 henri 2 show his film kolleksyun 2 sum wun els undr a palm or 2 n ths
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desperate thot knawd at her as she drank th sacrid liquids n rubbd th flamboyant ointments on her torrid n seeking limbs all nite longing iuv cum a long way from being a faktoree girl in yorkshire she sd en dangring my lungs sew n i hope 2 keep it that way a long way soothsum sweet zephyr soothsum sweet dreem song th lapidaree n moisturd fitfum skreeming end in eezsum lavishing tonguing all ovr th creemee moon slowlee errupting like suddn koffing in th treez stabilizing th vertikul hold was aneething holding tell me henri margret looking at his photo bid tresyure th adirondacks jettisoning th softest murmuring voices lush ovr th tonsil th uvulua falling 4ward out on2 th sleeping blankit n all th fires around silens ensuing til th swelling going down what dew we want alwayze intrakting sexualee n romantikalee with sum wun xcellent n getting enuff work dun 2 adequatelee xchange 4 evreething we need at leest n finding love uv th erth sky mirakuls uv lite n dark we ar givn ths is all givn 2 us a gud start fine i sd at leest thers playing with th tautness uv th suspens uv whn will henri arriv back 2 toy with 2 keep yu gessing maraget i sd its not prfekt but neithr is life as we sew far know it its sumthing n maybe its lasting evree thing is lasting until it isint thn was it lasting th event
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laison or life wch ar yu asking saying her eyez lit as radiant pools twin cigarett litrs in th dark beems both and i sd we dont know i hope 2 reelee slow down soon i sd sew i cud start agen take a deep wun megs nun uv us knows n thats okay how it is sew manee infinit unknowns detailing th amayzing qwestyuns what is knowabul all that hang in ther megs th elastisitee sew veree raging btween yu n henri ium going out now th signal fadesing sumthing els is cumming up is evreething okay evreewher uv kours not n find may we th shinee lites from th sky dazzling star klustrs wash our eyez n skin in see mor kleerlee feel mor in
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Nichole McGi11 Blood Letting Benton Harrison drove up to his ivory clapboard farmhouse at a half past five. Thirty minutes late, he fretted, and he sped up the groomed approach. The traffic had been unusually congested as he exited the bottleneck of the highway that led from downtown to the open sixteen lanes of the main city artery; then he caught the final highway that ran beyond the city limits to his isolated home. Well, it was isolated, nestled between what were farmer's fields, five years ago. Now he might be forced further north. He reached the house, grabbed his briefcase, though Benton was not a grabbing sort of man, and scampered to the front door, not bothering to remove his leather driving gloves, now lined with perspiration. He even took the front steps by twos, arriving at his front door on the wide veranda, keys in pocket. Risa would be mad if he wasn't ready. Oh, he didn't want to think about it. She would be arriving at six, with the rest of their circle following a half hour after Risa performed her inspections. She always oversaw last-minute preparations, assuming Benton had been negligent in his duties. She was like that at the firm as well but subtle about it. And she was never late. Benton fumbled for his keys, imagining her arrival in her cardinal Audi, in a razor-sharp power suit straight from the firm. His hands shook as he envisioned her disappointment. Her unyielding corkscrew curls would turn to razor wire, her caramel eyes would curdle — he was sure of this — to the colour of dried blood, and with that phantom image emblazoned on his irises, Benton promptly dropped his keys, only to have them slip through a crack under the veranda. Damn! He extracted the spare key from behind the stone plant holder and fumbled as the lock clicked open. Must clean! he thought, before beginning the inspection. He surveyed the open-concept room. All appeared immaculate with natural oak pillars and white couches with accents of candles arranged in appropriate glass and resin containers. He had spent all night worrying and cleaning and exhaled with a modicum of relief as he examined bottles of red wine lined like soldiers on the oak table. He had even thought to set out a fruit bowl of mangoes and peaches and other fruit whose juice would dribble down your chin when you sank your incisors into them. All the tools for the evening were secreted in an old travelling trunk at the far end of the room beside the hearth. A white throw over it gave it a homey feel considering the contents inside: the leather straps, the hard rope and the delightful toys. The only thing left to do was light the incense to fill the air with musk, but Risa preferred to do this herself. He removed his gloves, now quite damp with sweat, and began to dry his manicured hands on a white dishtowel.
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My God, candles! And Benton dove underneath the concrete kitchen counter and produced a box containing fat white tallow sticks that he had bought at a discount store. He had made an embarrassing mistake the first time, having bought candles that didn't drip. Benton set the box so it was centred on the coffee table. Annoying things, coffee tables — nothing but accumulators of magazines, glasses and other household detritus, but Risa said the girls liked to have an object to brace their feet on when they were laid back on the couches, so who was Benton to say. After all, Risa had been pleased with him on the phone when she told him she wanted him to have their monthly session at his farmhouse from now on, seeing as his nearest neighbours were twenty acres away, seeing as he was possibly a good host. At five to six he surveyed the scene — perfect — and glanced hastily in the mirror beside the front door. He did look distinguished, a word Risa had used to describe him the first day they met in his corner office with a view of Bay Street. His lips twitched in memory and gazing upon himself today he would say he even looked calm with his mask of assurance firmly on. But what he liked best about his exterior was his white hair, luxuriant and thick as it grew over his chin, upper lips and the base of his skull, a growth so lush that when you pulled a comb through it, it protested against the hair's thickness. He pulled out a comb and allowed himself this one vanity: grooming. This is when he happened upon a pimple in the crevice of his nostril. It was an inflamed ingrown hair and though it was the size of a pin's head, he couldrit let that redness detract from his pure whiteness. He extracted gold-tipped tweezers from the case inside his pocket. He prodded at the red bubble, keeping custody of the lonely hair, and felt a tinge of pain as the tweezers coaxed the hair out with its waxy tip followed by a shiny well of dark blood. Damn! His lip quivered and fingers twitched for a box of tissues in front of him. No. He really should watch it bleed. That's what Risa had instructed him to do. That was part of his "homework" — to not be afraid of bloodily fluids or pain. It didn't quite matter that during these workshops it was he who was meting out punishment, albeit on Risa's orders. She had decided that he should learn to endure and so he did, feeling the blood, alien to his skin, well and bubble, he expected it to fall with its weight; taint the white of his moustache. He watched the liquid bead until he began to shudder. Would she be pleased? Or would she be angry to see his spotless face spoilt? One minute to and Benton peered out the window wanting for his answer. The blood had welled into a pregnant bubble. Benton controlled his breathing so that one unexpected exhale of breath wouldn't cause it to splatter over his crisp twilled shirt. "Enjoy the sensation," Risa would have said, and he noted the blood bead itched the sensitive skin around his nose. He continued to stare out unto the dark lawn, expecting to see headlights licking the long approach to his house. The clock read past six. Inconceivable that Risa hadn't arrived. He walked to the phone; head tilted back in caution, and checked if there were - 86 -
any messages. There were none. He walked to the back door, his neck beginning to ache with the strange tilt of his head, to see if they had played a trick on him — perhaps, Amanda, the mischievous one with a face dusted with fine freckles — was waiting or hiding behind the tall Algonquin chairs on the porch. But there was no one. Panic crawled up the back of his neck like a loving tarantula that clutched his scalp. The bead of blood had burst finally and red liquid was cascading through his moustache, running the lines of his lips. He feared opening his mouth for tasting it. He decided to sit instead on the white couch, his head rigid in an upwards tilt, in case the blood decided to wander, over his chin, trickling down his shaven neck to his collar. This is ridiculous. He fantasized of washcloths, sopping up the blood, making him clean again and weighed the options. If Risa was late (Impossible, he thought), what kind of punishment would she mete out? Silence? The truck? The shackles? Or would she merely forbid him to participate at all? This last would cut him the most, condemned to a dunce's corner to salivate and perspire in silence. No. He crossed his arms in resolve. But what else could he do but await his order? He would wait, fix his gaze on the hands of the clock and will his mistress to come by quarter past, by twenty past, by half past, feeling the liquid dried now on his face until Risa emerged, an illuminated butterfly followed by minions, murmuring of traffic and he could finally weep with relief.
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Sherwin Tjia voodoo It is Wednesday, March 7, 2001 and Gail Cheshire, brown-haired with blue eyes, a pretty girl by anyone's standards, lives at 86 Buckingham Ave. in Toronto, Ontario. The postal code is M4N 1R4. Her phone number is (416) 920-1738. You can call her or write her a letter. She may be amused and invite you over, or be frightened enough by your solicitation to call the police. She has a sister named Maeve. They both attend Branksome Hall, an upper-class private school just off of Mount Pleasant Rd. in the heart of Toronto's wealthiest neighbourhood. A beautiful school by anyone's standards. At 10 Elm Ave., Branksome Hall spans both sides of the road, surrounded by green trees and bountiful bushes. You can attend Branksome as well if you are a young girl living in Toronto, whose parents are willing to spend $14,100 CAN per year on your education. By the time you read this Gail Cheshire may not be living at this address. Maybe the phone number will have been changed. Maybe she will have gone off to the university or college of her choice. Maybe she'll have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend. Maybe some calamity will have entered the lives of the Cheshire household. Maybe her dad who's a doctor will be found too late with a tumor in his brain. Maybe bad things happen to good people. Maybe dirty boys and dirty girls are calling her up and telling her astonishing things. Maybe she is receiving a lot of mail. Maybe she will become a cult celebrity without knowing why. Maybe she will blame herself. Maybe she will be kidnapped by a crazed and obsessed fan. Maybe she will be found on his shrine to her. Maybe someone has taken her picture and stolen her soul. Maybe she really feels way too open right now.
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TREASURE HUNT Hello. I am a 48 yr. old MWM, 5'11", 160lbs, dirty blond hair, blue eyes, have a nice build, am fun to be with and financially secure from the Burlington area. I am a passionate music lover and I have diverse musical tastes. I cook, am down to earth, spontaneous, intelligent and outgoing. I am looking to spend some time with my daughter, Sarah, shopping, basketball and so on. She is a SWF aged 15, 5'6", about 120lbs, very pretty, brown hair, blue eyes, slight build and a recreational smoker. Enjoys painting, rowing and museums. Avid collector of butterflies. She has been missing since Nov. 15,1999, disappearing after school. Last seen wearing a St. Mary's school green uniform kilt (Macinnnes Clan tartan) $45, St. Mary's blouse $25, school sweater $60, Club Monaco brown suede jacket $160, dark blue tights by Hanes $6, and Aldo loafers $80. She is possibly in the company of Jay Thomas Porter. D.O.B: Oct. 13, 1974, eye colour: brown, hair colour: dark brown with bright red streaks. A sharp gentleman who knows his way around the city and needs a classy-looking woman to share unforgettable times. Distinguishing features: a gothic Celtic band resembling barbed wire around his right bicep. Call 1-800387-7962 toll-free if you have any information about this missing child. For the nearest Club Monaco retail outlet near you, call 1-800-5287228. Call 212-752-7822 EXT 8194 ($1.95 per min.) to respond to this ad and leave a personal message. All calls are confidential.
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CHILDREN & TEE MS
mail @H 10, vNtite, w. 118 (bi.t Spfeftfeft a*gr $* 500, S72.S842 FMttUE Boy, 4, East Indian, ax. cord., i^ lew S50Q. 342-7475. »yg.
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BMSME Aftsocted >oys>girl3t new to country, come w/ papers wii trade, me4- ard long-haired, need good homes, More into: S45-8S62. ICRSiii Boy, 3r Asian, trained, Coned, talksth/e. Frorn good family, ^-riancing avaitaWe, $1000.^42S443.
Boy 13, tMicwn, 5'4W, slcdiy, A?;rj)pn*<1 fiA/l^^R frnm Cornwall, May be wearing Wue traetesint W ImrMj, pteasecorrt»et Ray m 542-^466, S$$ Btward
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Tony Burgess Monogama Me The pan comes down hard again. Over its edges. Urine. Below the floor a ceiling. The nurse, busy shredding documents, looks up. "Jesus Christ!" She presses a heavy apron of flesh against her computer monitor and crosses herself. Because of her size she cannot climb the stairs. The thin frail man above is pulling his bedclothes in fists dramatically up over his hips. He regards his own pee-pee on the floor with revulsion. Golden glass. Sunlight on the floor. He opens his mouth and shakes his tongue across his toothless gums. His punishment is clear. He is wasting away, leaking. Trembling. Crying. Everything around him is sharp. The smells, the light. The yellow acid he fears. Little lung sacs dry as elephants. The advance of scrotal tissue around his neck. Humps in his brain that have their own heads, their own faces. He quiets and looks to the corner of his tiny room. The speckled tile is broken revealing a diamond of black tar. He looks here for hours a day. It is a pattern he recognizes. A smudge at the base of the wall. The sunlight in a broken bar. He has figured out something about this corner and first of all, he figured out that it was aware of him. The corner knows him. Communicates with him. The broken bar of sunlight. The lower section of four inches or so is exactly the way he loved his dead wife. He knows this because it slenders, attenuates in the morning. Sometimes he thinks it is because they became narrow together, but he smiles, no, it is her, not because of resembling her, but because she has moved into it. She has placed her hair in a line though the middle, her arms unrolled like pastry underneath, part of her eye leaps up and across his face. She watches with him this way, escapes the wax light and sits, diagonally, off his chin, which he rubs when she laughs. The tar below her is the part they both reserve as a reminder that she is dead and he is dying. The smudge, a beige inverted teardrop, is the mind of the world. It is a medium more than anything else. A medium of reversals. For instance, it can make Hitler a nice person. Then it can make this true. A palm thrust up high, waving gently And before it can make him less nice again, it zags, making an oilstain resemble him. As a medium of reversal, it can only reverse once, and then must reverse the idea of reversal. He watches it, fascinated. A patch of color that having appeared once disappears. The old man pumps his mouth open and shut. He is being tormented, driven mad because of his atheism.
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Beneath the HOME lives a family of raccoons. Years ago, the staff used to keep garbage in bags on the back porch, moving them out to the end of the driveway on Sunday nights to be picked up Monday morning. Eventually they purchased a large wooden box with a hinged lid to keep the garbage in, but by then, a population of raccoons had moved in, attracted by the easy meals left for them on a nightly basis. Now that the food is vaulted away a single raccoon family remains, in its third generation. This generation, scrawnier than the last, has inherited the memory of better times, and stays in the vague belief that they will return. They are nervous and irritable, scratching at the dry ground and chip board. They fight often, and are only ever subdued by the wounds they inflict on each other. They search in the dark with their claws, scuffing nails furiously on surfaces, then listening. The eldest has just been thrown onto his back by his mother, who sunk her teeth quickly once into his leg. He looks down across his belly and sees her grinning face float away. He feels the dark throb in his lower hind leg and holds it straight up to reduce the pressure. He rocks then his thick shoulders into the dirt, becoming comfortable as he concentrates on the blood tickling his groin. There are, obviously, few pleasures left, and he will extend this as long as he can, knocking off the clot form time to time, straightening his leg to giude the blood back down into the sensitive gully of flesh inside his hip. He hears a squeak from a far corner of the foundations. His mother has found his sister. He cocks his head, shifting his back, then rolls his snout straight up. He wants to show that he is happy, so he extends both his legs upward and inadvertently drags three toes across the thin slats above him. He freezes. A sound. A noise. Not the usual dead dry sound. Something else. He reaches up again and flattens his paw, extending each toe, then with a glance in the direction of his mother, he retracts the claws, slowly so as not to attract attention. There it is clearly What is it? Volume. Metal. Water. Then inside it a distant dripping, a gurgle. Air being released. He closes his eyes. He can feel the space, the metal bladders in his toes, and he stops curling his paw down. He feels the size of it above him, an acoustic hollow, it is huge. Suddenly a furious noise right beside him. His mother's eyes widen over him, her teeth red with his sister's blood. He cannot unfreeze himself in time, and his mother's raccoon mask disappears into his neck. She crunches his throat with powerful jaws. Eighteen inches above the dying raccoon an eighty-four year old woman is lying in a bathtub. The tepid water is shallow, four or five inches deep, only enough to create icy little bays in her hips. She is shivering as the water gets cold. The scratching she feels beneath her, as if pencils are drawing on her spine make her cry A sudden squeal down there — so obviously a murder — makes her call out. She chops the side of the tub with her hands and kicks at the cold around her feet. Down the hall a terrible banging. It is the nurse, her shredding interrupted again, she is making her way up the hall toward the bathroom. "What's wrong now?" "I'm freezing" "Youcold?" "Yes. I'm freezing!" - 92 -
"Ok. Ok." The nurse, a huge woman, lowers a knee against the tub, and exhales in order to bend over and reach the faucet. She turns the hot. Wags her fingers under the water, then taps the cold. The old woman feels a growing band of heat moving along her body. She closes her eyes, smiles and squeezes the nurse's giant hand. "Ok. Ok. That better?" The nurse has to turn her hand out of the woman's clutch and push it against the wall to gain leverage as she rises. "IS THAT BETTER?" The woman doesn't answer, she is now lost in the sensation of heat. The shredder suddenly comes on again, down the hall. The nurse, resting on the toilet, slams her hands down on her red knees. "Hey! Don't touch that! Hey! Who's that?" The shredding stops, and the nurse breathes heavily. She clicks the side of the tub with a large ring. "Learn from me, Sally." The shredder starts up again. The nurse looks darkly out from under fat eye lids. "Youdon't have to write down everything you do." The paper blinds fall as teeth, and then too long, no longer teeth, they bow outward as a single body. Murderous krill. A large ring. (Osteoporosis, etc.)
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Patrick Rawley Japanese Action Figure MR. NO
(good name, like it.) after the war, no man is left, no not one. go, tiger, go, go, tiger claw! (this toy is emphatic, it has a story to tell.) WARNING: this toy is made extreme good looks priority children too small may cause parts internally to trouble watch out when playing, this toy a fine entertainment when older (this toy is considerate, the dangers are clearly outlined.) let a left hand have some dynamite, the knife also is an optional part. (this toy is good, clean, fun. educational.) all parts are movable with arrows. optional parts are also an interchangeable head. (this toy speaks my language.) Available also: Egypt Buddha, Red Devil Ninja and Say My Name! (this toy is thirty-two ninety-five, plus applicable taxes and worth every penny.)
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My Secret I d e n t i t y I never trained to get like this. It was an accident naturally smart, nobody likes a wise-guy I know lots of stuff. I can sense things I'm amazing but I'm aloof, a loud-mouth, a loner a loser I'm either a threat or a menace. Half the people hate me the other half think I'm a crook. Things explode when I'm around. I crawl the walls because I save the world and if I get the girl, I never get to keep her I've got an A.M. radio voice and a catchy theme-song I always know the wrong thing to say and usually, I say it. I've tried to quit. I've tried to quit a million times I can sense it. I'm stuck like this
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Fastestmanalive one second I'm in Singapore and then everything is blue all around and Mexico looms to the right. Hit San Francisco at 1:11:11 and am 500 miles east of Kiev at 1:11:12. I live at the speed of light. I can read every book in every library in Central City before you could dial a phone. I know all about science; when the lightning hit the chemicals, I became velocity itself, the pure and simple essence of acceleration. Some days, I lap the sunrise five hundred times before breakfast. Some days, I save the world. Some days go faster than others. Time has compressed my life into something slower than imaginary particles. Some days I don't even move. I know all about science. I know that what I do is impossible at the moment that I'm doing it. Science lies. It can't explain everything. Some things are too small or too hypothetical or too fast
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Now Playing White Christmas, strange days born on the fourth of July Garden of stone, Man of Iron bachelor in Paradise A shock to the system, the late shift. We were strangers, the Queen of the Bandits, Cleopatra Jones. Strapless moonstruck Cool Hand Luke can't stop the music The Eagle has landed, black eagle, white man's burden not quite human, good guys wear black. First love the outrage 18 again the secret of my success waiting to exhale smoke. Bedazzled persuasion, best friends, a room with a view A Christmas story, starting over, the holly and the ivy chilly scenes of winter All the king's men, the long gray line, blue collar strange invaders, better off dead, driftwood hostages mad about music, disaster in time. Carving the white, the underneath the last haven, night magic. Homeward bound, the incredible journey, the road home 42nd Street. Guess who's coming to dinner Sam Whiskey, white wolves, Black Belt Jones Rasputin, Madame X, Cherry 2000, mighty Aphrodite A special day, this savage land. Angels over broadway in the shadow of the wind hearts and souls, go naked in the world desperate women, night creatures, still in the night, white nights. sister, my sister, on the edge a song is born, a tree grows in Brooklyn one magic Christmas from Russia with love.
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Brown he was all smooth black style visual jazz, the way he moved bebop in the walk & in his hands hepcat style in the rhythm of his step man, he had threads that glowed suits like hundred dollar bills silk ties from the East Coast of Fashionville, USA pure & easy, sitting in anywhere and blowing the joint down he'd stand up and make sounds like the lunch bells in Heaven. He was cool with the ladies like a magnet picking up pins he had women like money in his pocket he earned them & he spent them one at a time, like peeling off fifties from a splendid roll that could stop a bullet and often did this cat was the baddest don't fool with the urban tiger or you get mauled he'd leave them in a wet mess thunder in the right with lightning left but easy with the laugh. Enter the dragon smiling the life of the party the main man.
They don't make 'em like him anymore.
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Peter Darbyshire Bread I was on my way to the beer store when I passed him for the first time. An old man, fifty, maybe sixty, hard to tell exactly because his hair mostly covered his face. He was lying asleep on the sidewalk outside the Happy Harbour, a bar where the lights were so dim it looked as if the people inside were underwater. He was right in front of the door, like the way you sometimes see dogs outside a place, waiting for whoever it was that left them there. There was a little margarine container beside his hand, with some pieces of bread inside it. The beer store was at the end of the street. There was a line that went all the way out the door. People lay in the passenger seats of the cars outside, eyes closed like they were unconscious. I spent the last of my money on two six packs of the most expensive beer they had. I'd heard my ex-wife was in town. I thought she might call. The man was still there on the way back, only now there was a woman with him. She was young, twenty or twenty-two, and she was wearing amber sunglasses and a Calvin Klein baseball cap. When I walked up she was shaking him and saying, "Are you there? Are you there?" I tried to walk past, but she looked right at me. "I can't wake him up," she said. I suddenly felt guilty, like it was my fault he was lying there, and I stopped. "He's probably just drunk," I told her. "I wouldn't worry about it." "He shouldn't be sleeping in the sun," she said. She looked around and shook her head at the passing cars. "I can't believe people just let him lie here." "I'm sure he's all right," I said. "Otherwise someone would have stopped by now." When she brushed the hair out of his face, though, it was clear he hadn't been all right in some time. His face was a mask of broken blood vessels, and yellowish drool coated his chin. He looked as if he'd exploded inside. The woman stroked the side of his face but he didn't even twitch an eyelid. "Who knows how long he's been lying here," the woman said. "With people just walking past." "It looks like he's breathing regular," I said. "If he's breathing regular then he's probably just sleeping." She looked up at me and squinted a little through her sunglasses, like she was concentrating. Then she stared back down at him. "We should call someone," she said. "Paramedics or somebody like that. They'll take him to a shelter. Someplace cool, where he can sleep and not have to worry about exposure." Her choice of words implied I was in this with her, so I put my beer down in the shade at the side of the building and squatted down on the other side of the man. I studied his chest for a moment. It didn't move much, but when it did it was
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regular. I thought about shaking him myself, but I didn't really want to touch him. Now that I was closer to him, I saw that he was wearing wool pants and two ski jackets, even though the day was so hot it felt like we were being sucked into the sun. "We should call someone," the woman said again. When I looked at her, I saw her skin was all flushed and she was shaking a little. She kept biting her lower lip, like she was actually worried about this man. I thought about my ex-wife calling, maybe right at this very moment. And then I thought about answering the phone and telling her how I'd saved the life of someone I didn't even know. The air inside the Happy Harbour was cool and wet. There were five or six men sitting around a table in the middle of the room, with maybe two dozen beer bottles occupying the spaces between them. They were drinking cheap stuff, mostly Wildcat and Labatt 50. They looked up at us as we entered and their conversation drifted away, if there had been one in the first place. Then one of them, an old man with no front teeth, took off his John Deere cap and slapped the empty chair beside him with it. "Plenty of room here," he said. He was looking directly at the woman. The others didn't say anything, just looked at us with eyes that reminded me of dead fish. We went over to the bar, where a Korean man wearing mirrored sunglasses was sitting on a stool, reading the paper. "There's an unconscious man in front of your bar," I told him. "Yeah, he's been there for about half an hour," he said. He didn't look up from the paper. "And you just left him there?" the woman asked. Now he stared at her. She met his gaze for a moment, looked at me, then down at the floor. But that look had put me in charge. "He wasn't drinking here," the Korean guy said. "He's not my..." He searched for the word. "Responsibility." "Maybe he just needs a kiss, darling," the man in the John Deere cap said. "Like Prince Charming." His laugh turned into a long series of coughs. No one else at the table made a sound. They stared at us like they were all mute. And they weren't all old either. There was a man in a brown UPS uniform who looked like he was around my age, and there was another man in shorts and a T-shirt who looked like he couldn't even have been legal drinking age yet. For some reason he kept grinning at us. "We need to call the police," I told the Korean guy. "Otherwise he could die or something. Because of the heat and all." "He wasn't drinking here," the Korean guy said again and returned to the paper. I looked at the woman. I was hoping she'd tell me to forget it, that she'd walk outside and down the street without once looking back. We'd tried, at least. But she kept on staring at the floor. We went over to the pay phone in the corner and I dropped in a quarter, dialed - 100 -
9ii. We both watched the traffic outside as I waited for someone to pick up. A postman walked past the man outside without even glancing down at him. A woman answered after the third ring. "911," she said. She was laughing about something. "Do you need the police, ambulance or fire department?" "I need somebody to take away an unconscious man," I said. "One moment please." I waited through three more rings. A couple of the men at the table—the young guy and an old black guy who looked as if he'd been a weightlifter once, but now seemed to be the victim of some sort of slow, flesh-eating disease—were still watching us. They were whispering back and forth and nodding at each other. 'Ambulance services," another woman said in my ear. "How can I help you?" "There's an unconscious man on the sidewalk," I said. "I tried to wake him up, but he's out cold. He's been there for hours." "How old is he?" "Oh, he's old, maybe fifty or sixty." The woman on the other end laughed. "You call that old?" "What?" "Never mind," she said. "Just give me the location." I told her the address and then hung up. "Okay, help is on the way," I said. We went outside again and waited by the old man. People drove past slowly, looking at us, looking at him lying there in the doorway, but no one stopped. After a while the black man came out of the bar and stretched. I could hear his joints popping. Then he gently took hold of the old man's arms and dragged him a few feet to the side of the doorway, up against the wall of the neighbouring convenience store. "Gus doesn't want him on the property," he explained to us with a shy smile, before going back inside. "He shouldn't have moved him," the woman said. "You're not supposed to move people when you don't know what's wrong with them." "I think that's only for people with broken backs and stuff like that," I said. "I think this guy's problems are far different from that." I heard sirens in the distance around the same time the young man came outside and lit a cigarette. Up close, I could see his white shirt had been washed so many times that it was now turning grey. He looked up and down the street but his eyes kept coming back to the woman. I stood in between them and he smiled, pulled a pair of sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. They looked like the kind of sunglasses you'd buy at a gas station. "Here they come," the woman said needlessly when the ambulance came around the corner. I started to lift my hand but the young guy stepped in front of me and pointed to the old man with both arms, like one of those guys at the airport directing planes. The ambulance drove up onto the sidewalk beside us, almost hitting the woman. At the same time, a fire truck came around the corner from the other direction. Now the people driving past slowed their cars to watch us, and a few people standing at the traffic lights down the street began walking our way - 101 -
The paramedics came out of the ambulance fast but slowed down when they saw the old man. Both wore latex gloves and belt holsters carrying scissors. The one who opened the back doors of the ambulance had a grey beard even though his hair was brown. The other one walked in between us to kneel beside the old man. He was wearing knee pads the same colour as his uniform. "He's been like this for half an hour," the woman told him. "I tried to wake him up," the young guy said. "No, I tried," I said, but the paramedic didn't pay attention to any of us. He held the old man's wrist loosely between his fingers, like he didn't want to touch him either, and looked at his watch for a while. Gus came out and squinted at the fire truck as it pulled up in front of the bar. "There's no fire here," he said to me. "Why'd you call them?" "I didn't call them," I said, but he just shook his head and went back inside, closing the door behind him. Both paramedics were kneeling beside the old man now, and the bearded one was shaking him hard by the shoulder. "I hate these calls," he said. I wasn't sure who he was talking to, though, because the first paramedic didn't pay him any attention either. Two firemen climbed down off the fire truck and came over. They were wearing those fire-resistant pants and boots, but no jackets, only T-shirts. All these people to help one man. I almost couldn't believe it. "It's all right," I told them. "We've got it under control." They glanced at me and then looked down at the old man. They didn't say anything. "You live around here?" I heard the young guy ask the woman. "He's probably just heat-stroked," I said to the watching crowd, which now numbered six or seven people. "He just needs to sleep it off." The old man chose that moment to wake up. He half sat and looked around at all of us, then pulled the margarine container of bread to his chest with both hands. "You see?" the bearded paramedic said to his partner, but I didn't know what that meant. "How are you feeling?" the other one asked. The old man didn't answer. He kept staring at the gloves on their hands. The bearded paramedic sighed and went over to the ambulance, closed its back doors. 'Aren't you taking him to the hospital?" I asked. One of the firemen—a short, squat man with a sunburned face and a lazy eye—came over to me. "You the one that called this in?" he asked. I glanced around. Everyone was watching me. "That's right," I said. 'And you couldn't wake him up?" The lazy eye drifted away from me, staring somewhere over my shoulder. "Well, we tried." "Well, he appears to be awake now." He walked back to the fire truck, his partner following along behind him. They climbed up into the cab but then didn't - 102 -
move, just sat there like they were waiting for another call. The bearded paramedic had put on a pair of Ray-Bans now and was leaning against the side of the ambulance, his arms folded across his chest. His partner was still talking to the old man. "You been drinking?" The old man shook his head and smiled, then swiped one hand slowly over his face, the way a cat does when it cleans itself. "You been taking any drugs? Methadone?" The old man shook his head and smiled again, did the same thing with his hand. "You got a place to stay? Relatives? Shelter?" The old man took a piece of bread out of his container and nibbled it, looked around. "You're going to take him somewhere, aren't you?" the woman asked the paramedic. "Where he can recover?" The paramedic looked at her. "Recover from what?" he asked. The old man pulled himself up the wall to his feet, hid the bread somewhere inside one of his jackets. He smiled even wider now. He seemed to be missing every second tooth. The black man and the one wearing the John Deere cap had come outside sometime during all of this. They were still holding their beer bottles in their hands. "What's all the commotion?" the one in the cap demanded of the paramedics. "We have a police state now? Man can't even take a nap when he feels the need?" "That's not what's going on here," I said, but he just waved his bottle in my direction and went on talking. "You cops," he said. "You just won't leave a man alone, will you?" "Let's get out of here," the bearded paramedic said, and his partner finally nodded. He put on a pair of Ray-Bans himself, and the two of them got into the ambulance. I wondered if the city supplied their sunglasses, if it had some sort of contract with Ray-Ban, or if they had simply decided to buy matching pairs. When I turned around again, the woman was gone and the other members of the crowd were wandering off, back in the direction of the traffic lights. "Someone could have been dying somewhere," the black man said to me, and then he and the others from the bar went back inside. It was just me and the old man now. He watched the ambulance drive down the street and when it turned the corner he sat down again. He didn't look at me, just squinted up at the sun and yawned. Started humming and swaying a little. I stepped around the side of the building to get my beer. It was gone. I looked over at the fire truck, but none of the firemen looked my way as it pulled into the traffic. "Did you see who took my beer?" I asked the old man, but he just shook his head and closed his eyes. I went inside the Happy Harbour. Everyone was sitting around the table again, and the man in the John Deere cap was telling some story about the time he'd got- 103 -
ten into the back of a police car because he thought it was a cab. He stopped when I walked in, though, and they all turned to look at me. "Someone took my beer," I said. "Youdidn't order a beer," Gus said from behind the counter. "That's right," the man in the cap said. "You just came in to use the phone. Remember?" "Someone took the beer I put down outside," I said. "Two six packs. I put them down in the shade and someone walked off with them." I kept watching the young guy. He wouldn't stop smiling at me. "I bet it was that drunk outside," the man in the cap said. "He probably needed a drink to get back to sleep." "You try and help a man out," I said, "and this is the way society treats you." "Take it somewhere else," Gus said from behind the bar. "You should grow up," I told the young guy. "And you should do it fast." His smile pulled back to show all his teeth, "What are you saying, man?" he asked. He got to his feet. "What are you saying?" "Hey hey hey," Gus said. "You get out of here," he told me. "Maybe I should call the cops," I said. "You get out of here now," Gus told me, "or I'll call the cops on. you."
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Michael Holmes Nova Era Call us gringos how Ricky does but that's not it, not ever. They've got other words, beery consonants going sh-sh over the way we order and Anglo guys coming on to any new slip with a tray and pastries. This is so 8 years ago, so August for me. Before being waylaid by grad school and all its fallout— the new maths and old testaments, the highway and its diesel failures— seemed realer than the real deal like Slim Shady or Stone Cold, hell yeah, whatever you say I am like a brand new bag and a big fat bow. So? So I'm drinking some Mother of Christ coffee, smoking way too much menthol Albert Freakin' Camus. And there's Easter foil, all right, resurrection pinks and blues: the first Chupa Chups on the block and all the FC Porto you need for the pool. But they'll never ask you in, never take your part. They want your money, not reciprocation. And ain't it great? All this familiar wiggle room? To say I'm back like you mean it?
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Resolution Looks bad. Be careful. —Six Million Dollar Man action figure, circa 1977 Away from the minus seven the paper says it is—stealing something for myself as simple as pretty good coffee and time enough to remember how beautiful falling in love was, Because The Night sounds, a good fucking storm can be—maybe I know it's me I'm cradling. And maybe I can breathe without guilt or the weight putting me off (responsible for this, envious of that, afraid, yes) and simply forget the last year or thirty, or the next and recall, without bitterness, a palate that knows only sweetness: wondrous apprehension. I think I must have seen things this way. There were toys like that: rip-cords I pulled to unleash the voice of cartoon play-phones or Steve Austin, the power of an SST; flexible limbs to pump up or pull out, Big Jim or Stretch Armstrong; and further back, even a purple-nosed bear-
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Grapesnout—to drink to, and keen to me. Sports, sex and geography were, I know, the same: dreams to live through to survive a body bent on disgracing itself —because it was wild, new and uncontainable— and thoughts so unfettered they'd suicide simply because that's what they thought they should do. This was before the desk. Or, before I knew what the desk was. Part trick; part key: a life sentence. (Though what it really was, of course, was a gift.) I remember tracing it's blonde whorls and ridges with my fingers until its prints and lifeline became my own; how it appeared, magically, in my small blue room on the morning of my tenth birthday That desk was what my parents gave me. More than twenty years later I'd break down and rage at it. A fucking maniac child screaming, through insane tears, that it was their legacy, not mine. Realizing that it was finished in the gloss of their expectations, that it was meant to take and temper something priceless from me—to leave me,
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their son, on his birthday, utterly alone. I don't remember what happened to the desk after I was in my teens and it was replaced: but I've sat there ever since. I've accepted its purchase and simple complexion, lied, hurt and destroyed there, become as fragile as its veneer was new, just as impressionable, tacky and small. And I'm still as alone as that desk was when it sat solitary and unloved on a boy's tenth birthday in the morning sun (willing to forgive anything, consider everything, go anywhere— alive with possibility, sturdy and singular). So in my anger I blamed that desk for me, for anchoring me to this life: all its bitter apprehension, its fear and anger, responsibility and guilt. That desk became my world and I hated it perfectly, because it belonged to me, kept boomeranging, sticking to my fingers, held me
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chained to it. Endless and so on accused and choked the grain of my rage, the helpless, wooden child I can be. And then life got in the way and the desk was forgotten, again. Until today: New Year's Day. I think of the past year and the last thirty and the next, and I remember only the desk. All I did last year, it seems, was remember the desk— nothing else, this morning, sitting alone in the sun in a small white room behind a big black desk, registers. But with the desk comes the rage and the toys and the possibility, a pretty good cup of coffee, a poem by a friend I haven't written in four years and the song that played when I fell in love with the woman I love. Today it's like my parents have snuck back into my room like it's my birthday to tell me they gave me a child's ash desk more than two decades ago
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to remind me to remember in a time-release capsule what a life's like before you're given the desk or whatever it is that takes you from yourself cradled in wondrous apprehension. In the book I've been reading at this desk for weeks now, obsessively, months actually, a small man with a tiny human office considers, in the manner of all the disappointed, people who make a bureaucracy of happiness, how much better the world would be how much more satisfying, rewarding and fair it would seem if only it were a little more crooked than it is. But there are, thank God, gifts sometimes —like love or parents or a desk— that resolve to keep you true, that raze, align, direct and teach you how to be alone with yourself, to breathe and live without bitterness, to wonder at how sweet the world was and believe, again, in how sweet a world more level might still be.
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Eddie Murphy's Aqualung Sounding like he looks, off kilter and un-placeable German or, well, Eskimo (though Scottish is always possible) a hobbled Tom Waits number a cockpit voice-recording a Madonna remix an early-warning system (Just a test? Is what they all say anyway) our guy tries the resiliency of the stump, busk, husk, and ruse— on some girl, of course. College has more to offer now the "indigenous" folk have embraced the club kids and wheatgrass set calamari and more bike posts. Used to be there was no sense to make but once the models got pretty in that unconventional way it's like I was given a secret decoder ring. Crazy is as Crazy does, see and Crazy's got a brand new bag: putting together the broken yobbos; call it: straight drag Yenta work assimilation and enumeration more consensual than Clintonesque (in the doe-eyed intern sense of that word). So Crazy's not staring at you guy, just impressed all to hell
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no need to Fuck you him no call for that kind of language don't go punching in heads or nothing and yeah, you're still beautiful, baby, beautiful.
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Her Own Society What if I just stayed here And ruined your ambition? Painted into tranquil because corners are vicious there is a past that lies there monstrous insides you decide to put aside A colour to drive each other crazy with Amniotic before dawn in shadow for the synonym disintegration or, cresson (its bodies and bloating) the light it holds at dusk or, sea-lime: as in narcosis, half-truths sickness and shipwreck a prison Bourgeon nouveau has tempers the naked eye destroys hues with lust and devotion Our kitchen sky heavy, breaking unbelievable weather having nothing to do with the summer wind the summer night everything still perfect drugs outside This pill I am too, ascensiontide measured in sublingual seconds, pastille church, extreme unction
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chemical altar; it's like fraying on dissolution, only worse crucifixion With the guts to stomach you can learn to swallow anything Bread even wine even pride The sorrow that is pain so accurate, so absolute that it can no longer be felt that it is all sense there is, feels like this: your own fists striking your own apocryphal flesh your own thoughts praying for betrayal like rain like acquittal In the sleeplessness of a green room the diaries and letters and stereo pulse with the neon of whatever bastard you want me to be (I have been them all) But when the valves of attention close with a kiss that is for once undeserved Tou liar—you Judas
you are helpless this is me /iaeeed C7C7 concussed and confused stoned because you want me to shut the door between us and sacrifice
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screaming I have not thought at all about my own reward I really didn't come here of my own accord This is all the past I have Take
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Stephen Reid Croons —afterDino Latino (with apologies to King, Stewart, and Price)
I'm more famous than Al Capone Or the kid who shined in Home Alone Because you're nothing, darling, on your own Ifou belong to me... Flash your belly just like Britney Spears Pick up the guy who sang with Tears for Fears Get him drunk on a couple of beers But you belong to me... I'd be so alone without you Maybe you'll be lonesome too And blue...
I'm getting notes from Bobby Beausoleil The chicken salad was really great today Tonight's movie stars Kid'N Play And you belong to me... Fly to Toronto to hawk your book Give Scientology a second look Don't tell the kid her old man's a crook You belong to me... I'd be so alone without you Maybe you'll be lonesome too And blue...
Got herpes 8 from my cellblock squeeze But Clifford Olson's being nice to me Just remember, darling, I've still got keys... You belong to me...
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Marnle Woodrow A Dog's L i f e Eden Howard has one particularly vivid memory of childhood. It involves a dog, and while this canine experience was not entirely pleasant, she did not refute the love of dogs ever after. She was five, possibly six, and mad for the neighbour's German Shepherd, a wild-eyed pup called "Linda." Eden was crazy about Linda, fleas, foamy snout and all, and could almost always be found squatting near the dog, whispering unconditional endearments. The dog knew everything there was to know about Eden's unhappy family. "Don't touch Linda while she's eating,"said the grown-up bodies towering over Eden. "Linda loves me," insisted Eden, and of course she reached out and patted Linda's hindquarters while the usually docile dog was having her lunch, just to prove that Linda loved Eden unconditionally. Linda also hated unconditionally, and she responded to Eden's friendly rump-slap with gnashing fangs. Sixteen stitches later, Eden got her first dose of "I told you so" from the same grown-ups. But her love for Linda, as well as her respect for Linda's personal boundaries, only deepened. In fact, this may well have been the beginning of Eden's curious preference for, or obsession with, dogs. Eden was not allowed to have a dog of her own. Her parents felt some deep protective urge regarding the white shag carpet in their house, and refused to admit animals of any kind, including homo sapiens wearing shoes. Eden learned to hate that carpet, because it stood between her and having a puppy of her own to love. Dogs, her mother said, did nothing but eat and shit and chew up antiques the minute you turned your back. "I'll keep my eyes on the dog," Eden promised, but her mother was resolute. "Your father is allergic," said Eden's mother, averting her eyes. "Does Linda shit a lot?" Eden asked the man next door, the one who fed Linda and walked her and claimed to own her. "Lord, yes," said the man, "Why do you think we don't have backyard barbecues anymore?" he pinched his nose and made a sound, "Pee-ewww!" "Maybe we could get a dog that knows how to use the toilet," Eden begged her mother. "Maybe you could get something into that head of yours that isn't about dogs. Honestly, Eden, you'll drive me mad with all this dog-chatter. Dogs do not use toilets, and I wouldn't want one in my bathroom anyway. They stink!" Eden thought of the perfume her mother sprayed on herself every day, the one that made Eden's eyes water and her throat close up, and she wondered how anyone could think a dog smelled bad.
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"We should never have taken her to see Lassie Come Home," said Eden's mother to her husband one night in bed. "She's obsessed with getting a dog." Mr. Howard rolled over and sighed, "Just be thankful she isn't one of those Horse Children, Madeline." "What are you talking about?" "You know," he yawned into his pillow, "those girls that gallop around and think they're horses. Fred Connor's kid is like that and it's cost him a bundle in shrink bills trying to get her to eat something other than apples and sugar cubes. Says she's even getting buckteeth on purpose, and won't do anything but whinny. Eden's in a phase, she'll snap out of it. Is it my turn to shampoo the rug tomorrow, or yours?" "Yours," said Mrs. Howard. Horse Children? Where on earth did he come up with that one?
Eden is far from childhood now. She's thirty-two. No children, no husband, just a psychiatrist. She tried becoming a veterinarian but when the professor put a dead poodle down in front of her and announced that they would be dissecting its brain, she ran out of the university lab and never returned. Oh sure, she could have become a groomer or a pet photographer, but not everyone can turn their pain into a career. She was declared certifiably incapable of working and has been living on a psychiatric pension for quite some time. Although her case is unusual and possibly unprecedented (or at least, other cases like hers remain undocumented, as these things often do), her psychiatrist makes sure that she is well looked after. He is an old family friend, and has an intimate knowledge of the white shag carpet that he feels is responsible for Eden's anxious temperament. He himself was once roughly banished from the Howard household for daring to keep his galoshes on, and he blames his own resultant fear of condoms directly on the Howards. Living independently at last, Eden was of course free to get herself a dog, and she did. She found Debbie at the local branch of the SPCA. Debbie, a somewhat alarming pug-collie cross, reminded her of dear old Linda. The relationship was short-lived, or "star-crossed" as Eden later described it, because Debbie met an early end. Three weeks after she came to live with Eden in her downtown walk-up apartment, Debbie took it upon herself to leap from the balcony. She would have survived the fall if it hadn't been for the sudden appearance of a roller-blading maniac on the sidewalk, who finished Debbie off as she lay confused and whimpering on the concrete. Paralyzed by grief, and deeply irrational, Eden believed that her refusal to buy designer dog food had driven Debbie to canine suicide. She vowed never to own another dog, because the pain of her loss was too much to bear. She has since satisfied her love of dogs by staring, with great fond intensity and what she imagines is telepathic dog-speak, at every dog she encounters. "How're things, Eden?" asks Dr. Gelber. It is a Tuesday afternoon and he sits back comfortably in his big black Lazee Boy chair, the photo of a yellow lab held over his face. This is their method, the tried-and-true technique they stumbled - 118 -
upon by accident one afternoon. Dr. Gelber had been trying to cheer Eden up one rainy Wednesday. It wasn't in his job description to make people feel happy, but he didn't care. His fondness for Eden made him unprofessional at times. He whimsically placed a copy of Dog Fancy magazine over his face and in a jolly voice said, "Hullo, Eden, I'm Barney The Ifellow Lab! How are you today?" For the first time in years, Eden responded to this question honestly, a feat for anyone if you think about it. "I'm crap," she said matter-of-factly She gazed directly into the eyes of Barney The %llow Lab (Dr. Gelber, she had forgotten) and continued, "Sometimes I don't want to be here." Knowing from behind the magazine that a breakthrough had been made, Dr. Gelber continued in the same imagined jolly Labrador dog-voice, "What do you mean, Eden? You don't want to be here in this office?" "I mean in the world," said Eden softly She stared at Barney and felt such a rush of love that she could barely remain seated in her own Lazee Boy chair. "I can't talk to anyone, I can't look at anyone, it's awful." "Why can't you look at anyone?" asked Barney/Dr. Gelber. "I hate what I see in people's eyes," nodded Eden, "it makes me nervous, all that boredom and suspicion and rage." "Does it remind you of someone?" pressed Barney. "NO!" shouted Eden passionately. "Dr. Gelber is always trying to make me blame my mother and father for what is wrong with me, but I know he is just full of shit from reading too much Freud in college." "Why do you think you can't look at anyone, then?" ventured Barney, trying to forget that the Dr. Gelber side of him had just been verbally attacked. Enduring such nastiness WAS in his job description, so he weathered Eden's criticism, consoled by the fact that she thought he wasn't there. "I want to kiss you," said Eden suddenly, and she leapt from her Lazee Boy chair and planted one on Barney's grinning paper snout. She closed her eyes and kissed with abandon, and Dr. Gelber held his breath behind the copy of Dog Fancy, promising himself that he would, for once, take coherent notes after Eden left the office. "I love you Barney," she moaned, falling back into her chair. This discovery led to others, as you can imagine, and Dr. Gelber found himself deeply excited by the prospect of breaking new ground in the psychiatric universe. There was nothing quite as satisfying as discovering a new form of mental illness. Today, with his dog-face in place, Dr. Gelber waits patiently for Eden to finish kissing his Barney self. She isn't late for her appointment for once. In therapy-world this is called Progress. He has an idea but he wants to wait for Eden to get things rolling herself. "How was your week?" he prompts. "Two pugs, four Jack Russell terriers and two Shitzus," Eden nods. "We had a deep communication going, at the park. We talked politics." "What did their owners look like?" ventures Dr. Gelber in a deepening Barney voice. - 119 -
"How the fuck would I know?" asks Eden, truly dismayed. "Well, uh, listen Eden, I had a good idea the other night...when I was chewing my rawhide bone...want to hear it?" "Sure, Barney, of course I do. I love you." "I love you too, Eden. My idea is, take this portrait of a dog, he's a friend of mine by the way, a nice standard poodle, has all his shots...Anyway, take his portrait with you and keep it in your purse." "Why?" asks Eden, a little confused. Is he trying to tell her something? That he doesn't want her anymore? She stiffens in her chair and holds her breath and waits. "Well, you said you were having some trouble with basic tasks and errands, so I figure if you carry.. Bounder's photo with you, you can use it to get through anxious moments." "Bounder?" asks Eden, taking the photo that Barney/Dr. Gelber is holding out. It's laminated and everything. She tucks it into her purse and after Barney explains how Bounder will help her to board buses and buy groceries and things, she asks if they can just sit quietly for a bit. "Can I scratch your belly, Barney?" she asks hopefully, and from behind his magazine, Dr. Gelber stifles a gasp. What on earth should he say to such a request? What if Benna, his secretary, has hidden a video camera in his session room so she can sue him for ten million dollars and get herself on Hot Copy? Eden is waiting for an answer, and Dr. Gelber knows he must resume his Barney persona. Barney is not the panicky type, Dr. Gelber tells himself. He lies down on the floor of his session room and waits for Eden to come over and scratch his belly, the magazine held firmly in place. "Please god let Benna be the oblivious type," he thinks to himself, reluctantly enjoying Eden's rough clawing motions.
Eden moves up to the cash register at the A&P to join her purchases, which have been motored along on the conveyor belt ahead of her. She hates the feeling that her carefully selected groceries are running away from her. Dr. Gelber told her this is called an Abandonment Complex, and that in her case it was odd, because Mrs. Howard, Eden's mother, almost never left the house. She liked to stand guard and make sure Eden didn't make a mess or walk on the fabulous carpet. In fact, on the rare occasions that Mrs. Howard did venture out to buy food, Eden was always relieved. This was proof, in Eden's mind, that Dr. Gelber is full of shit, and not the kind that could be scooped into a plastic bag. Barney on the other hand, is a saint and a sage. Seeing her food travelling down the black rubber belt at the grocery store fills Eden with alarm, but she takes a deep breath and sidles up to her food. The cashier begins ringing in the items and Eden keeps her eyes on her purse. "Nice day, eh?" says the cashier, making chitchat. Eden begins to sweat. "Yes," wheezes Eden, and she decides that now would be a good time to utilize Bounder's photograph, to test it out. She pulls it from her purse. She has affixed an - 120 -
elastic strap to the back of the photo, just as Barney instructed. "Gonna rain tomorrow," the cashier continues, trying to catch Eden's eye. "Would you mind," begins Eden, holding the photo out to the cashier, "putting this on?" "Huh?" wonders the cashier. She sees the elastic strap on the back and looks around the store to see if the manager is watching, then shrugs. "Sure, why not?" She pulls the picture of Bounder down over her face and asks, "Like this?" Her voice is muffled by the cardboard but Eden looks up, carefully, slowly, and her heart soars. Staring into the eyes of Bounder, Eden speaks in a clear and aggressive voice, "This tin of tapioca is dented, I'd like a discount."
Life has changed for Eden. Sure, sometimes people refuse to don the Bounder mask. The dry cleaner is particularly stubborn, so Eden returns to ironing her shirts herself. But, for the most part, people are quite obliging. She is happy to report to Barney/Dr. Gelber that she has successfully navigated two trips to the drug store, a podiatrist appointment and three visits to Dairy Queen, and has looked every single person in the eye, with the help of Bounder, of course. Eden is startled when Barney ups the ante. "Now, Eden," he says softly, "How about forming friendships, dating?" "NO," she shakes her head. "Don't push me, Barney, you're acting like a shrink. I'm fine the way I am." "Aren't you lonely?" he insists. Eden is thirty-two and a virgin, which is fine, of course, but Dr. Gelber is convinced that a lack of sex can lead to mental disturbances. If asked for proof, he would point to his wife, Hillary. Eden stares at Barney, "Are you asking me on a date?" "Uh, no, Eden, I'm afraid I have a special someone...a wife. We...even dogs... have those, you know." "Where does she live? What's her name?" asks Eden with great excitement. "Do you have a photo of her I can see?" Think fast, Dr. Gelber says to himself. He clears his throat in the most canine way he can muster and says, "She lives a couple of doors down from me. She's a...Pomeranian, her name is Twee—Tweety-Pie." "I want to see her picture!" insists Eden. "I don't have one here," Barney/Dr. Gelber stutters. "You have a picture of your best friend Bounder but no photo of your wife?" Eden is astute. "Dr. Gelber would call that odd. Repressed homosexuality, he would say." She leans back in her Lazee Boy and frowns. 'All dogs are bisexual," says Barney/Dr. Gelber suddenly and he balks behind the magazine. What on earth is he saying? "I sort of figured that," grins Eden. "How about you?" asks Barney in a kind and booming voice. - 121 -
"Nope. I'm nothing. Free and clear of sex, thank-you very much for asking. I feel about sex the way my mother feels about muddy shoes." Eden twiddles her thumbs and pins her eyes to the corkboard ceiling of the room. "I think I'll go now, I want to see if I can get the guy who works at Video Video to wear Bounder's picture. He's sort of pleasant-looking in that human way." "How do you know that?" asks Barney/Dr. Gelber, trying to contain his excitement. Breakthroughs often came at the end of a session. There is no time to ponder why he blurted out that bit about the sexuality of dogs. Eden is at the door now, one hand on her purse. "I can look at people across rooms, you know, it's just when they get up close that I get panicky. Have a nice day, Barney, and don't forget to bring that photo of Tweety-Pie for next session."
Video Video is empty when Eden slips in. He is working tonight, the pleasant-looking one. She pretends to look at the foreign films and steals glimpses of him. When he looks up, she looks down. "Need some help?" he calls cheerfully. Boy, do I, thinks Eden. She's had this weird tight-hot feeling in her stomach lately. It scares her and it won't go away, and she worries that she might have worms. She selects a Danish political love-story about a knitting factory and moves toward the counter, trying to breathe normally. "Haven't seen that one, myself," he says, examining the box. She keeps her eyes fastened to the countertop and says, "Would you like to?" Her heart begins to pound as if she has been chasing a ball all day long without stopping. "Uh..." he stammers, and turns to find the tape to match the box. When he turns back, Eden has the photo of Bounder out and, with her eyes still lowered, she says, almost inaudibly, "Could you please put this on?" The guy examines the mask and looks at Eden and smiles. "Well, I'm usually more of a German Shepherd kind of guy, but tonight I'll make an exception." He slips the mask over his face and muffles, "How's that?" Eden raises her eyes and smiles brightly In a low voice, in a voice Eden didn't even know she had in her, she hears herself saying, "Listen...Marcus," she murmurs, spying his nametag, "why don't you lock up and come over to my place? We'll pretend to watch the movie, have some wine." "Uh...sure," he nods. It is muffled, sounding like "Phur."
"Hullo, Eden," says Barney, trying to conceal his annoyance. Eden has cancelled her sessions four weeks in a row, and now, without an explanation, she is late for this one. He'll have to scold her for playing with her medication again. "How are you today?" - 122 -
"Pregnant, thanks for asking!" she says cheerfully. There is a long, long pause. "Oh," squeaks Barney/Dr. Gelber, "How...interesting." "Yup. I found me a real hot German Shepherd and BAM, the world's a different place for me now!" She sits on the edge of the Lazee Boy and grins at Barney The copy of Dog Fancy is trembling like a leaf in the wind. "What's the matter, Barney boy? You're shaking! Poor boy!" Indeed, Dr. Gelber is shaking. He is terrified that Eden has become his Frankenstein monster. He can see the headlines now, "WOMAN CHARGED WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT OF DOG IN LOCAL PARK." He drops the magazine away from his face and stares at Eden, who does not avert her eyes as he expects her to. "So...what's this German Shepherd's name?" Dr. Gelber asks, trying to sound casual, calm. Even psychiatrists can be shocked and disgusted from time to time. This is one of those times. "Marcus," Eden smiles. She claps her hands together, "I can't believe it, I'm finally going to have a puppy of my own!" Dr. Gelber feels faint. What on earth has he done, encouraging her to see humans as dogs and dogs as humans? His heart feels like it might pop right out of his blazer, and sweat rolls down his forehead. He is gasping, and reaches for the pitcher of water next to his chair. "Relax, Dr. G," Eden coos, "Marcus is a man. What did you think?" She sees what Dr. Gelber thought and shouts, "Jesus, get some help, Dr. G! I love dogs, sure I love 'em, but my god, what a thing to think of me!" She is flaming mad now, and rises from her seat. "I'm not sure I can continue therapy if this is how it works!" "I'm not sure I can, either," pants Dr. Gelber. "I was going to tell you how well it worked, your idea. I was going to tell you how it is with Marcus and I, how he agreed to wear the Bounder mask the first time we made love, and how I asked him to take it off, and everything was fine, how the fact that he was willing to wear it, for me, made me see that all people are not horrible...How he sometimes puts a German Shepherd mask on to make me laugh when I get home from work, and yes, incidentally, I have a job now, walking dogs for busy Yuppies... I was going to thank-you and everything, buy you Milk Bones for a joke, but now...no way!" Eden rips the door of the session room open and casts one last hateful look at Dr. Gelber. He has the copy of Dog Fancy up over his face again. In a muffled, sobbing voice, Barney/Dr. Gelber says, "Congratulations, Eden, I wish you all the best." She softens. "Thank-you, Dr. Gelber, thank-you, Barney. I'm sorry I barked at you like that." Realizing her slip, Eden giggles. She waves and pauses beside the desk of Dr. Gelber's secretary Benna, knowing she probably heard everything Eden shouted at Dr. Gelber. Nodding to Benna, Eden raises her fist jubilantly and shouts, "Long live the dog in all of us!" Benna smiles, because it is her job. "Physician, heal thyself," says Dr. Gelber mournfully, sitting in his Lazee Boy chair with the dog magazine still covering his face and the door wide open, giving - 123 -
Benna a full view of the real Barney/Dr. Gelber. "Whatever works, doctor!" calls Benna and Dr. Gelber drops the magazine away from his face at last. "Benna?" Dr. Gelber calls back. "Yessir?" She moves from behind her desk and approaches the open door. She smiles nervously and folds her arms across her chest. His eyes are slightly glassy and she is sure he has been dipping into the special-meds cabinet again. "Did you know that all dogs are bisexual, even Barney here?" he asks, holding up the magazine. Benna steps back a little. He pauses and turns his attention to the copy of Dog Fancy, casually flipping through the pages. "That will be all for today," he says, looking up, dismissing her as if nothing unusual has taken place. "Will it?" she mutters under her breath, departing. In doing so, she closes the door a little too hard. Dr. Gelber shakes his head, tosses the magazine aside, and takes up his tape-recorder. "Note to self: Barney misses Bounder more than he misses his wife. Woof, woof."
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John Stiles Little Buggers my mom Little Buggers my mom said to the three kids playing doctor under the bushes so she hiked up her skirt, took a rake and poked at them and they run like chickens through the lilac hedge Erin held a goldfish in a ziplock bag and bawled her eyes out on the porch while the dog dragged its arse across the lawn it was pissing down buckets then Peter run like a flash past the house and the window broke right by my head My mum turned right around you Big Bugger she yelled at that dark haired one who had a garbage bag draped over his back like a cape he was runnin like hell through Mums back garden with a margarine bucket full of cucumbers I imagine he was fixin to trade fer dope
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Howyadoon a x night? Jim and Rick er out back and Merle is dummer than a sack full a hammers boys oh boys some folks never do learn do they? BillWoluska was at the Ox Pull Saturday Night dancin with Rick Stinneys wife we all seen her bra peach in colour Eldon was on the picnic table wearing his cutoffs Craven A ugly twist of his smile do you remember that young ferr chisel chin wound his hockey stick up by his ear sender back for a blapper sender back for a blapper drew KIZZ on his jeans in blue marker and his mother drove the school bus right into the bandroom you boys wanna spend the night in jail? you boys wanna spend the night in jail? or pick strawberries fer fifteen cents a quart they pay five and change for drops put them in buckets they salt the smelts in siren - 126 -
Scouts are cancelled Jim Sutherland was a volunteer fireman when he wasn't our scoutleader he sure looked some stunned with a red tie and brown slacks staring at a hall full a half grown kids so he rolled up his green sleeves crouched down and played crab soccer kicked the ball hard with a smoke in his mouth Jims mother washed dishes at the strawberry suppers and died of a stroke in the fruit trees out back left Jim a front porch full of puppies in a box with his winter coat everyone who heard them guard dogs barking said it was such a awful shame me and Lio used to collect tadpoles in mason jars down at the village pond and hold em right up to the sun we were thinking of telling our mums we wanted to quit scouts and join 4-H instead wa wa wa wa
when the red firetrucks drove past us we both set to smiling cause there wouldn't be no cigattette butts floating like pond skippers in the church toiletbowl that week - 127 -
Alexandra Leggat The Car I sleep in the car. The nondescript four-door. I love that car. Even though it stopped running a week ago. Get rid of the car, said Morley. I can't. Get rid of the car, he said. I couldn't. Morley, just because it stopped running? If you stopped running, just stopped moving one day, I wouldn't get rid of you. I wouldn't get rid of you because you didn't move any more. Not if you just didn't move. Not if I loved you as much as the car. Just because the car can't move, it's still a great car. It just can't do the things it used to. It's still a great car. It's simply changed its purpose. It has a new purpose. I love that car. It's serving a purpose. Morley leaves the house at six. Rattles on the hood of the car when he passes. Just to be a jerk. It wakes me briefly I go back to sleep. Melba, next door, says, get up when he goes to work, get up and go and sleep in the house. Why stay in the car? I love the car, I tell her. I sleep better out here. I sleep better in the back seat of the car than I ever did in bed with him. I'm fine Melba. This is fine. I'm happy I'm happier out here in the car. I love this car. I've got a stack of books on the front seat. I have a reading light, runs on batteries. I read by it at night. I'm getting a lot of books read. It's good. I have a radio runs on batteries. Just plays AM. I like AM. More talk, less music. It's the speaking I like. That and the jazz station. They do a lot of speaking on the jazz station. Horn blowing. I bet Billie Holiday slept in cars. The ashtray is overflowing. Friday, I'll empty it. Open the door and dump it on Motley's shiny black driveway. It'll drive him crazy. I almost feel like puncturing the bottom of the car, creating an oil leak. Have oil ooze down his shiny black driveway. Oil slick. Morle/d go crazy. Couldn't do it to the car. Could never puncture the car. Would never hurt the car. I'm guessing there's more than fifty butts in the ashtray. More than fifty. I'm proud. Morley said, get rid of the car. I refused. Told him what I told you, that I love the car, won't part with the car just because it stopped moving. So he said fine take your goddamn love for that shitty piece of metal and live with it. Go and be with your godforsaken piece of metal trash and all the best to you. All the best to you both. You deserve each other. And I said fine. Fine and you're right Morley. You are right, we do deserve each other. You are right. I love that car and that car has never done anything to hurt me. It broke down, he said, broke down. How's that for reliable? How's that for
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dependable? Godforsaken piece of lemon shit. You and that piece of shit both deserve to be demolished. You will be demolished, he said and threw me and the keys on the front lawn. I got up and marched right back into the house and upstairs and grabbed my pillow and a blanket and my reading light and my radio and books and a sweater and warm socks and I marched right back down the stairs, out the door and into the car. Locked all the doors and went to sleep. Slept like a baby 'till Morley rattled on the hood when he passed. I opened my eyes just as his fat belly was brushing passed the windows. And I went back to sleep and slept like a baby till Melba came knocking on the glass. Her round face peering into the car like into a fishbowl. Looking for what seemed like more than me. What do you want Melba? What are you doing in there? Sleeping. Melba doesn't understand but Melba doesn't matter. I roll down the window and she hands me some hot bread she just baked. I eat it and go back to sleep. Morley comes home around four. Peers in. Wakes me when his face squishes up to the window and casts a shadow that rouses me. An ominous presence, enough to rouse me. His face pressed against the window like an astronaut in his helmet. What? Unlock the door. Why? I need something out of the car. Too bad. Open the car door, he says like he's Robo-cop. Step away from the vehicle sir, I say like I am too because I will not be outdone. What? he says, then he does because he's that stupid. I open my book. I read a few lines and stop because something's looming off to the side of me and it's distracting. Morley's standing there. Still standing a few feet away looking at the car. Just standing there waiting for his next instruction. Go into the house, Morley. What? Go into the house, I yell slowly, opening my mouth rounder with each word so he can possibly read my lips and for back-up I point to the house. Point at the house hoping that if all else fails he will follow the direction my finger is pointing and move toward the building in which he lives and enter it, close the door and never come back out. No, he yells back. I need something out of the car. He storms up to the car. Tries the door on the driver side. Storms around to the passenger side and screams. He's looking down and screaming. It's Friday. I dumped the ashtray out the passenger seat door onto the shiny black driveway. Drained the bottles I've been peeing in over the butts, the ash. It's a wet, grey clump of vile-smelling filth. - 129 -
George Murray Po-Fu: Fight-Script for the Genesis of a Canadian Poem (Dubbed into English by George Murray) I. Street in rain, neon, marching incandescent marquee a man in a long unbuttoned leather coat wearing wooden soled shoes strides from an alley, comes to a stop on the empty stone sidewalk. Tight full zoom on eyes, tight full zoom on clenching fist, sound of knuckles grinding. Abruptly: cat stance, mantis, tiger, the air is slashed repeatedly with clawed hands, with each lift and place of the foot puddles burst. II.
Old garrison surrounded by bush, garden, moonlight in the centre of a clearing is a shack, a bearded man, weathered, his face cracked with wisdom and age, his plane fashioning stakes for his protection. Tight full zoom on eyes, tight full zoom on clenching fist, sound of knuckles grinding. Suddenly: fish, crane, butterfly, the glade is filled with the wash of a breeze from somewhere beyond the close, dense woods.
III. Eyes narrow, arms descend, a butterfly makes as though to flee, and a stone moves beneath a hand.
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Oscar Predictions for the Coming Year There will be air-conditioning in the heart of Los Angeles and plentiful food kept cool by sculptures of ice — someone will be serving drinks, someone who has fled from one country and is frightened of being caught and sent back — there will be less fabric covering the women than the men, low necks and backs, classic lines, new lines, more buttock revealed than last year — watching from their homes in relative obscurity, many people will throw things at the TV and storm out of the room — sometime during the evening, someone in the audience will think to themselves: I wonder if he loves me — when a colleague, perhaps Jack Nicholson, takes too long in his speech, the crowd will blush collectively, some may raise their chins — a newly made star will be led off the stage by an apparently vacuous beautiful woman who actually has a Business degree from Berkeley — there will be rented jewellery. A political statement will be made by an award winner who, having had too much cocaine, will think his point valid — some of the tears shed will not be caught on camera but will occur at home, over the kitchen sink while wearing silk pajamas — a camera operator named Bill or maybe Ron will briefly consider pointing the lens at his exposed penis, then he will think better — in the mid-southwestern U.S. a woman will be beaten to teach Meryl Streep a lesson — there will passionate loyalty, friendship and solidarity shown between people who have never met but are great admirers of each other's fame —
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a lifetime achievement award will be accepted, but guiltily so — a deeply red carpet will run down an aisle at the exit to a white limo, which will drive to a black-tie party everyone is too tired to be at — by about 3 A.M., most stations will show only static.
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Dropped: a Baby's First Reader In the ninth month her belly began to drop and, being a simple handyman, he didn't know where it would end her stomach, having worked its way out from her torso so gradually, was now sinking quickly, as though her skin were tired of holding it in place below her breasts — and, feeling ignorant, he just quietly drove the truck back and forth from the doctor when her blood pressure rose, massaged her lower spine and widened feet, eyed her nightly, frightened, the math of her body not adding up as she lay panting and sinking in the August heat — and he began to imagine the child inside her as a payload, perhaps a heavy stone carried next to the gut in a sac, or a small bundle of wood cradled low in the arms, or even a shirt-full of bolts and washers carried to a job site, the hammock of the fabric doubling as rag and bag — any item that might slide from a grip, that might slip through a hole in a pocket and slide down her leg, until, stomach flat, ankles swollen as though with water and child, she could just shake her foot and spill it all out on the floor like keys, like nails, like small change, like any number of things he could collect — or just chase like a laughing idiot, the jangling screws and rings rolling in different directions, careening unpredictably about the room.
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k r i s t i - l y green The Happy Diary Salma sat on a chair in the kitchen, curling her feet around the table legs, staring at the tabletop in front of her. Centred on the tablecloth, there was a book. It was a rather bright book; a sort of blank sketchbook with a glossy front cover, empty pages waiting to be filled. The book had been a gift from Mavis at work. Mavis called it a happy diary and had got the idea from a magazine she read at the doctor's. The magazine was one of those new magazines, all spacey design and complementary colours, screaming inner peace and simplicity. Mavis was at the doctor's for a nervous breakdown. She arrived at the doctor's on her hands and knees like she was looking for something on the floor. The nurses picked her up and wiped her off and plunked her in one of the red felt chairs lined up against the wall in the waiting room, stuffing a magazine into her hands. Slowly, Mavis began to see through the clouds of her tears and focus on the pages in front. Are you unhappy? the magazine asked. Mavis nodded. Are you depressed? Mavis sat up a little straighter in the chair and imagined that yes, she probably was depressed as well. But it was the third question that made Mavis give a big sniff and really take note. The one that screamed, in bold orange italics, OVERWHELMED WITH THE COMPLEXITY OF LIFE? Mavis nodded emphatically The nurses, behind their workstation, threw looks at each other with their eyes that said Watch this one in nurse-looking language. But Mavis didn't notice them at all. Mavis had started to read. The article, which was written by Dr. Reba Vim on special assignment for Simple Lady magazine, was really no more than a few paragraphs in length, and had been stretched out to fill a two-page spread. At the bottom of the article, next to a byline that said Dr.Reba Vim lives her life as an expression of all she believes, there was a photograph of the author. She was a big-haired woman with a shiny bright smile and a crooked nose. One of her eyes had been caught in a squint, making it look like she was just about to sneeze. Tied around her neck just above her doctor's coat collar was a navy blue scarf sprinkled with peaches. Mavis had never worn a scarf before. Sighing, she settled in to read. Dr. Vim said that she had found the secret to joy. Not only that, but she went on to say that she knew exactly what it was like to feel completely out of control, just as the women she knew were reading this magazine did. Mavis read on. Dr. Vim told Mavis that if anyone had ever told her there would be a day when she would wake up in the morning with a smile on her face, her slippers by the bedside and the cat poop actually in the litter box, she would have laughed so hard she would have popped all the blood vessels in her eye. So how did Reba Vim, mother of three, ex-wife, sexually unsatisfied woman on-the-verge (on-the-verge of what?
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Mavis wondered), become the bright-lipped doctor on the bottom of the page with her neck all tied up in peaches? Mavis held her breath as she waited for the answer The answer is simple, the page said. Mavis scrunched her brow and reread the sentence, letting her eyes linger on the last word. Simple started glowing on the page, brightening slowly with a heavy pulse in front of her, like a neon dance club sign. And underneath it was Dr. Reba, her white coat slipping from her shoulders, hopping about in a navy blue unitard teeming with bouncy peaches (to match the scarf). It was a perfect fit. Mavis gasped and the nurses began throwing looks across the room at each other again. When the nurse told Mavis that the doctor would see her now, Mavis could hardly remember why she was there. When the doctor came out to say hello, Mavis thought he had the look of an imposter. She told the doctor she had left her purse outside, and, stuffing Simple Lady under her skirt when she thought the doctor wasn't looking, she twirled around and ran out the door. To simplify, read Mavis, means giving the most meaning to the tiniest things in your life. Mavis was standing in front of the stove in a unitard, stirring a pot of soup for her lunch. Mavis's mother had taken the kids for the day, so that Mavis could have a vacation. Mavis's mother whispered the word vacation like it was the word whore while the children waited outside, and left her daughter in her unitard stirring soup. Mavis's mother didn't know what had come over Mavis these days. But she always had an aversion to unitards. She thought they made Mavis had look like a whore. Mavis was such a rebel, her mother thought. Mavis's husband, Gene, was at the car show. Mavis was in front of the stove. Dr. Vim told Mavis that all she needed to do was to follow a few small measures everyday (like making eye contact with everyone she met) and her life would be saved from the hotbed of toil and confusion it had become. Dr. Vim even provided Mavis with a list of things to do each day. The first thing on that list was the happy diary. The happy diary, explained Dr. Vim, was the key to inner peace and newfound joy. Although the idea behind the happy diary was a simple one, the rewards would certainly not be few. The happy diary, explained simply, was a record every woman should keep describing something good that happened each day. It could be something significant (such as "roping a man"), or small (like "having good digestion" that day). By using the happy diary, women would always be able to acknowledge the good in their lives, even when everything seemed to be rotten. In her own words, thought Mavis, licking soup off her unitard sleeve. Just by turning the pages. Mavis, in a unitard in front of the stove, looked up at the spice rack, focused hard on a jar of bay leaves and said to herself, lean do this. Mavis turned off the stove and grabbed the car keys off of the shelf. On her way out of the house, she met her husband. What do you need a notebook for? he asked her. And what is that thing that you're wearing?
When Salma started temping in reception at the publishing house, she noticed Mavis right away. The publishing position was Salma's eighth temping job, and past - 135 -
experience had left her with a taste of caution in her mouth whenever she started anywhere new. Every morning she took out her timesheet, and under "8:30" Salma wrote "IN". But her hand jerked and the ink exploded from the pen like a bomb making the word look a lot more like "ILL" than "IN". Salma wiped off the ink running down her wrist with a wet-nap she found in the drawer of her desk inside an old Anger Management for Secretaries manual, walked over to the paper shredder and watched the timesheet get gobbled up inside. Timesheets made Salma feel ill. Like if she took too long to pee one day they would come looking for her and break down the stall. Like she had to prove herself over and over. Like the work wasn't something she could depend upon, and, at any moment, they could decide they didn't like her anymore because she was too tall or she took a long lunch or she wore too much hairspray in her hair. Every morning, Salma would arrive half an hour before nine to open the office for the people who worked there everyday. And every morning as she watched the elevator open up on her floor, spitting up mouthful after mouthful of employees, Salma was surprised to see just how many people actually worked there. All kinds of people, thought Salma. It was a veritable costume parade. Most of them didn't say hello to her. Most people, she thought, probably didn't even realize the other receptionist was gone. So Salma didn't pay much attention to them either, going about her work quietly, and looking for the steamy bits in the romance she found in her desk. It was there, from behind her desk, in between the switchboard, the fax machine and The Chef's Special Tart, that Salma started watching Mavis more closely. At first, it was mostly the unitard that caught her eye, bright amid the crowds of drab suits and skirt sets. But soon Salma realized there was something more. Mavis was always smiling. It wasn't the tense freeze of the face that seemed to afflict so many other people in this place when they were forced to crack a smile. Mavis's smile was relaxed, hinting at a deeply satisfying secret. Salma thought Mavis was weird. But she was still curious about the secret. It was on Salma's second week, when she found herself staring at Mavis's face again, that Mavis's face caught Salma's eye. Before Salma could pretend she wasn't staring, the unitard was coming her way. Hello, the woman beamed, I am Mavis. Mavis's big eyes bored so hard into Salma's when she said this that Salma felt like she had been punched in the face. Mavis told Salma that if she needed to know anything, Mavis would be happy to help. Then she skipped cheerily away in her unitard, scribbling something into a book as she got on the elevator, turning her head to give Salma one big exaggerated wink before the doors shut on her face. Mavis had been keeping the happy diary for almost a month now. So far, she felt, it had been going well. Her husband, Gene, couldn't understand it. He was always asking what she was writing in that thing. But halfway into the second month, Mavis noticed that her enthusiasm for the diary was starting to wane. She - 136 -
was running out of new things to write and had taken up buying new unitards on her way home from work so she could write about doing that. Lucky for Mavis, it was about this time that she noticed Salma at the desk, or more precisely she noticed Salma noticing her. She wondered if it might be the unitard. The idea that Salma was interested in Mavis made Mavis feel good. She even took to writing it in the diary. It made her feel like people were noticing the improvements she had made in herself. Like by changing herself she could brighten their day; make them look at their own selves and want to change just enough to be like her. Now, she thought proudly as she puffed up her chest, what wouldReba Vim say to that? Salma's attention was of particular interest to Mavis because Salma was one of the few people at work who had not known her before The Day of Reba Vim (that is what she called it; and it was marked on her calendar like that for the next three years). To Mavis, Salma's attention meant that her change had been truly successful, for it was impossible that Salma's interest was based on the idea of change, which could be noticed by anyone in the office who cared, or even her husband for that matter. Therefore, Mavis deduced, Salma's interest in Mavis must be based on The New State of Mavis, herself. Inside her cubicle, Mavis stopped taking calls to write all of this down. From this day on, Mavis focused much of her attention on Salma. She noticed that when Salma sat at the front desk she looked a little pale, and that her face carried the expression of being dazed, like someone who had recently been slapped. She noticed how Salma brought her own coffee into work and answered the phones and was a generally a quiet kind of person. But the most important thing that Mavis thought she noticed was the quiet kind of way that Salma sat in her chair, lowering her eyes to the ground as if she was searching for something on the floor. Mavis thought she recognized that look. Mavis thought Salma was on-the-verge. Mavis was going to bring Salma home. The next day at work when Salma got to her desk, there was a peach-coloured package on her chair. Salma was about to take it to the mailroom, when she saw that the card said her name. For Salma, it said, in big bouncy letters, From Mavis with a smiley face over the /. Salma at the kitchen table, squeezed her eyes into slits as she scrutinized the book given to her by Mavis. It was a notebook, perfect bound, probably from the IDA, with an obnoxiously fluorescent pattern on the cover. Someone, probably Mavis, had used permanent marker to write happy in bubble letters on the cover. The bubble letters were so big they looked like they were going to burst. Salma cracked open the notebook. Inside, Mavis had drawn two horizontal lines in ballpoint pen, one on top of the other. The first line was already filled; it said Salma in more of the bubble letters. The second line, which was right below the first one, said Date. Salma left the date blank and turned the page. At the top of every page of the book, Mavis had neatly written out the date for each day. The rest of the page had been left blank. Except for the stickers, Salma noticed. Mavis had stuck - 137 -
tiny stickers of dancing fruit on the bottom right corner of each page. Salma could not understand why. She closed the book and got up from the table, leaving it to lie there alone. The next day at work Mavis came by. She was wearing a yellow unitard and a scarf with a citrus fruit pattern around her neck. She wanted to know if Salma had started the diary Salma had to answer a call. Mavis moved her lips into a big understanding smile and whispered that she would return later. Salma tried not to understand. All during the day, Salma was extra busy. Salma, busying herself behind the front desk, kept one eye on the lookout for a unitard. Luckily, Mavis was the only one who wore them, so it was hard to catch Salma by surprise. And if she was surprised, she bent underneath her desk, groping around for nothing she had dropped there. Mavis thought that Salma was uncoordinated and signed her up for company badminton at lunch. After a week of seeing nothing more of Salma than her bum as she leaned over the floor, Mavis called Salma at home. How's the happy diary going? she asked. Salma said she hadn't really got started yet because she hadn't had the time. Mavis said she carried her diary with her in her purse, so she could write down the things at any moment. Salma said she hadn't started because she really didn't know what to write. Mavis said it was normal to feel intimidated; it was not easy for everyone to reach peace, so Mavis would show Salma what she herself had written, even lend her a couple of entries if she liked. Quietly, Salma said she would love to talk more, but her sofa needed to be wiped. She hung up just as Mavis was recommending a product for that. The next time Mavis called Salma at home, Salma told her that she hadn't written anything in the happy diary because nothing happy had happened to her that day. This was only partially true. Salma had had one of those days that is pleasant enough but then something happens to damn it all to hell. For some people, this one thing could be missing an appointment or coming home with a regrettable new hairstyle, but for Salma it was a little patch, only about two inches by two inches, that fell off her bum. Salma's recent mood swings, which weren't at all being helped by the happy diary, had warranted a trip to the doctor. Unlike Mavis, she didn't arrive crawling and she didn't start to cry, but after rigorous examination, the doctor had decried early menopause. For Salma, this was the one thing that damned everything to hell on that day. Salma's doctor sent her home with a pamphlet and a prescription for estrogen pads, which she picked up from the drugstore on her way home. For Salma, sticking the little patches to her bottom every day was a tiresome chore that she resented having to perform in the first place. Then there was the matter of them falling off. - 138
It appeared that Salma's skin quality didn't quite match the stick that the glue patches had in mind when getting glued onto early-menopausal bums. So while Salma was sticking them on and trying to forget about them, they were, in the interim, falling off all over town. She even caught one sliding down her pant leg at work one afternoon and had to kick it out discreetly and bend over, pretending it was her Post-It on the ground. The patches were just one more reason why Salma wasn't happy anymore. And now she was sitting on the chair at the kitchen table again, using all her weight to press the patch to her bum, staring at the happy diary again. Salma felt like she had to choose a way. At this point, she could either just go ahead and try out the happy diary so she could tell Mavis it didn't work for her once and for all, or she could quit her job and never have to see her again. Salma sighed and figured it was time to have it out with the thing. With one hand, she picked up the happy diary and splayed it open violently on the kitchen tabletop. She stretched out her fingers and picked up a pen. Salma sat there for the better part of an hour. Then the phone rang. It was Mavis on the other end of the line. Are you writing in the diary? Mavis said. Salma stood in the kitchen and held up the receiver in silence. After a long time, she started to speak. But she did not answer Mavis's question. Instead, she told Mavis she thought she was a sick fuck who should keep her irritating bubble letters out of other people's dumb lives. Then, she hung up the phone and sat down at the table with a grand flick that sent the lid flying off her pen. At work, Mavis didn't say hi to Salma anymore. But she didn't exactly leave her alone, either. Instead, she gave her winks, like there was something extra special between them going on even though Salma had tried to put an end to that. Salma spent a lot of time on the floor. Mavis thought it proved her point exactly, but never said anything, just winked. Actually, Salma's little outburst really had helped her to feel better. And she didn't have to worry about Mavis calling anymore. She even kept up writing in the diary. Things were looking brighter now that Mavis was leaving her alone. Perhaps her life wasn't so awful after all. In fact, this could be a turningpoint thought Salma. At work, she put a plant on her desk and developed perfect posture and signed up for secretary stretching at lunch. She even started to accessorize, to make something unique about each day. Salma was going to take temping to a new level! And she was certain that people had noticed, as they stopped in front of her desk to talk about the plant. Salma was getting good at conversation. And when a blue unitard flew by and winked at her, Salma stuck out her tongue out and wrote it down. The happy diary seemed to be going very well. Salma had kept it up for weeks now and actually looked forward to writing something new everyday. And it was true, just as Mavis had told her: the best part about the happy diary was leafing back through the pages and seeing all the goodness in her life. Salma was feeling pretty smug. Mavis wasn't winking at her half as much anymore, and she had even got around the problem of the bum patches, having invented, during one late night - 139 -
moment of inspiration, a special bum-sling that cradled the patches to her bum. It wasn't until the fifth or sixth week of the happy diary, when Salma picked up her pen to write something inside, that she paused while trying to remember what it was. This hadn't happened to Salma in a while. Not since the kitchen table days before the Last Phone Call of Mavis had she felt this kind of happy diary block. Salma froze and took a deep breath. What good thing, she asked herself slowly, hap penedin my life today? But for Salma, nothing came. Shrugging her shoulders she put it to the fact that she had had her rubella shot that day, closed up the book and went up to bed. The next day at work, Salma's plant looked poor. She got up from her desk for some water but the phone rang, and that was the story all day. All day long, whenever Salma tried to get some water for the plant, the phone lines would ring or the fax machine would beep or the paper shredder's jaws would get stuck. All day long people passed by Salma's desk and said things like Shouldn't you get some water for that thing. And at lunchtime she had errands to do. It wasn't until the next day when she noticed the plant was missing did somebody tell her it had been taken away because of company policy on dead plants. Salma slumped in her chair and frowned at the floor. Things were not going well, despite the fact that her bracelets matched the string of her glasses around her neck. Salma looked up at the empty space on her desk — where the plant should have been — just in time to be on the receiving end of a wink. To top it all off, the happy diary still wasn't going well. She was starting to run out of new things to write and the inspiration had slowed to a drizzle. She started getting sick of writing Woke up greeted by the sun and went through a snarky patch of scrawling Woke up alive. And one evening, while looking to past entries for inspiration, Salma noticed that she had used Found a penny eight times in thirty-one days. Eight pennies in thirty-one days. She worked it out to less than half a half-a-cent per day. Salma closed the book in despair. When work called the next day to see why she wasn't there, Salma was happy someone had phoned. She said she had the flu and they said Where is your timesheet so we can cross today's date off the list. Salma unplugged the phone and went to bed. Despite the setback, Salma had not completely given up on the happy diary. She took time off from temping so she could concentrate more fully on writing in it. That was the problem, she thought. Things had been so good for a while there that she was simply out of practice when things were not. For four days Salma sat at the kitchen table staring at the happy diary. She hardly got up except to make toast and tea. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what Mavis had said when Salma was having trouble the first time. But thinking about Mavis just made everything worse. Why did Mavis have so much to write about anyway, while Salma, whom everyone liked and who had had a plant at her desk was having so much trouble? She could just imagine Mavis scribbling so often in her book that she ran out of - 140 -
lines for each day. Salma never ran out of lines. So things weren't as good as she had thought they were, Salma shrugged. But maybe they never had been. When Salma tried to go back to work after a week of being gone, it seemed like everyone had forgotten her name. Salma tried to rationalize this by associating herself with the plant, but then she realized the plant was dead and it made her more depressed than before. There were a couple more ill-attempted stabs at going back to work before the temp agency called to tell Salma that she was dismissed. The temp agency said that if Salma was sick, it was not the best time to find a job. They sent her her papers by mail. Salma hardly went out any more, except to get more tea and bread from the convenience store every few days. Mostly she stayed home feeling like the flu. The happy diary lived on the kitchen table again. And even though there wasn't anything to write anymore, Salma turned the pages religiously, making sure that they corresponded with the date. It was her last link with the life she had before. Only once did Salma act on an impulse to return to the publishing house in a last ditch effort to reclaim the life what was once hers. She was given quite a jolt at the sight of a temp with perfect posture, standing at reception watering plants. She was given quite a shock when a unitard flew by, imprinting an exaggerated wink on her brain. The kind of shock, they say, from which one never recovers. Epilogue
Salma lived alone to the end of her days, getting up from her bed just once a day to painfully turn the pages of the happy diary with her fast-shriveling fingers. She died on a Thursday on a pile of old blankets on the kitchen linoleum floor, the exact day, the coroner noticed, that the happy diary ended. Dismissing this spooky aspect of the case as being purely coincidental, the coroner decided that the unused pages of the happy diary would make a good colouring book for her granddaughter and put it in the back seat of her car, before heading off to the morgue. Mavis worked the happy diary into a national phenomenon, and soon left her husband and the publishing house to start a cult with its own line of unitards. She lived a long and happy life, her only regret being the failed case of Salma, the secretary temp. Myra, the new temp, sat up so straight in her chair that someone told her she should take up teaching to make a little money on the side, and she began leading company stretching class on Mondays and Wednesdays at lunch. With much gratitude, her newly-stretched clients gave her so many plants on special occasions that she could not possibly keep them all at her desk and was eventually forced to quit her job, move in with Mavis and live in a big house with a solarium in the suburbs.
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Ann Shin Speed of Now a running corollary colliding flesh metal sweat I love glass noodles souped in airport stamina my cousin once saw in a village through eyes in close circuit veined telegrams dogging reasons to rush, cover all TV towers, footpaths and cells exultation in Global Positioning you know me, no everyone's nostalgia reeks and hotels are cleanest rasping under skin to be born into a flight transferred or hovering above phones a whisper is location is touch two particles accelerating escape hatches to other cities have trapped bodies recurrently can't stand it, a lost palm pilot is handless and olive trees overburdened with lichen more profitably mother earth, no parentage, just hallways and intranet hairstyles which define our most intricate possessions our selves should go public shout initial offerings of potentially immense growth curve.
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radio diffusion of integrity has led to the immediate release of childhoods across the globe swill the swell with the best of em and feelin no pain we navigate trends in keyboarding futures spring whole bread loaves and loaves of it falling off shelves a misstep never fatal air bagging we grab another and another role for 6 month contracts fulfil slim-pocketed desires losing touch fingers doing well how are you finding joy in small stairwells or under desk lamps singing top lung cresting mountains peaking silence within
coffee sex dripping ampheta-dopamine recurring itch produces rash of tender excuses groping carward into light speed crash all your guts into it - 143 -
screech fingers on back ward glances are you are you stilettoed into awareness ofyesss for now keep trying juice will find cracks in identity theory bankrupt of historical roses and wood burnt desire, the shortest espresso-laned route to needing more is say "you"re nothing and I I am dripping already millions of someones want to plug you no, plug me in first.
a broadcast of sparrows' footprints binds our hand to mouth impoverished senses, touch typing e-mails x marks the kiss where the forehead bruised, receives and transmits longing brotherhood of informative neighbourhoods we congeal social capsules of aiding the fertility of lawns - 144 -
have rights without music, life would be an error sent and never received retractable contractions of labour fallen from grace in the slim moment where 'I mean' yawns widely into a happening intended for adult use kids pick it up anyway the legacy we forgot to pick up damaged ourselves reflexive never fully out of range ing satellite mirrors help stop traffic when not looking but rushhoured alone we stare a head no fingerprints from within slow morning breath between dark and alarm dreamed flight escapes radar filling senses with timbre of soul fills your lover's eyes and returning becomes you - 145 -
a threnody of broken nerves if I asked now would you fly into a thousand shards of promised return bones recall the ache of earth's foreknowledge gathered in the sum of held breath requests to adjourn this meeting of open palms in the sun of our shuddered impulse I love despite oceans of white noise battering my eyes into submission I wish only to see you only and always .simple. could you hold me
there in the space of our knowing.
the resolution of 2 finite moments into one contradiction threatens the slap - 146 -
of left hand not knowing ring in church crowding prayer books brailled into silent hand still unknowing the way we sing shifting ambiguous lurch of love qualified by 2 yeses and 3 nos make frailty the enemy killed thumbwise into numinous scatterings bravery is i am ilive i love fill blanks with one noun close portals and closing down be free of recalcitrant language coexists with ambiguity: a handful of reverence tossed cloudless love trinity you, i/me mostly spaces in between
I caught swallows in summer whose songs flutter chittered through my capillaries river routes I lie and remember once in a while sensations of having hands, eyes and skin consumed by one thing: white clouds in the sky my lover unhooking my clasp ed attention, I runnel into thousands of thoughtful points — meet with incredulity this throat, this pear - 147 -
this blanket, this pen on paper, this faucet this ferry ride, this e-mail, this hand's lines stitching me into a moment's breath caught in the chest stops electricity by sheer force of swallow.
on a couch this morning I learned love breathed its last close my mouth stop up holes that keep spilling pray grandma will always be right my new global strategy involves positioning bodies in oblique angles allowing our selves' worst in sun lighting spasms of recognition trusting elocution is the enactment of trusting instinct when traditions no longer hold our itinerary of wants and needs
i I tried my damnedest fist all manner of conviction to squeeze this thought dry but waters keep - 148 -
coming up face to a sky's monsoon without stopping love goes by the wrong name or simply goes by 2
drink it up splash it over you scrub bathe blow bubbles dive into it and still never understand 3 clawfoot in London or spigot of chlorine to fill cup pool toilet and all tubs in between cancer as clear blue and dappling on skin I've leaked deuterium and been none the worse but for this feeling of heaviness 4 is absolution fair in the eyes of your tear some times I swear untrammels the most radiant maid of the mist. 5 the Red Sea divulged its depths and feet trampling we did her didn't we?
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6 come lie with me in oceans and I will iceberg and all swell with you, afloat to relent to the nature of water pulled by moons we even with the best therapist's telescope can't discern, but accept and again accept waves do more than sully sand or rock boats they follow principle. 7 swallowing: allowing taste to enter completely
yes the conversation was good wasn't good calamities erupt a minor stroke at dinner ingested distate is frugal extravagance, desperation! never cures the desperate live hands toes verging perpetually you me. out ed worm's shallow intestinal gestures make light of chaos out of skin and then where? between my side and yours miles of antlers the conversation never lagging - 150 -
laps it up so good we are good faced and busy despite minor incontinences doing fine thank-you the bill makes sense if not us
push the button hope ideal scenarios play against eyelids closed for the season awaiting new release of the humanly possible love pushes the span of a hand snapped tired and closed transmitting wireless into the fist
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Camilla Glbb The Summer My Feces Floated Out To Sea Although the whole nation sat down after supper to laugh at lavatory humour on the tele, and the first flush toilet was named after a man called Crapper, and the mere suggestion of flatulence sent people into hysterics, so much so that a plate of baked beans ordered in a pub was likely to provoke mocking stares and muffled guffaws, we never, I mean ever, talked about it. We might have been obsessed with it, but we never talked about it. We were English. Surely shitting was something only Americans did, along with other comparably vulgar habits like whistling and chewing gum. Old habits die hard and transcend continents. When we were on holiday in Maine then, with our newly-divorced father, and our American cousins, and the woman we called Aunt with whom Dad was sharing a sleeping bag, I had a problem. There was nowhere to go. Shit I mean. Pardon me. No, don't. After a lifetime, lean finally say it without apology. We were in two tents at the edge of a river, the second week of a three-week camping trip. The kids were in one, the grown-ups in another. Dad snoring away in the distance and Frank flopping like a live fish in a pan beside me. We'd had boiled potatoes and bacon for dinner — all cooked over a fire stoked with sticks we had collected in the late afternoon when Dad shouted, "No wood, no grub kids." We'd spent most of the afternoon trying to drown each other in the river — me and my little brother Frank and our slightly bigger American cousin Jake. Jake was redhaired and freckled and pink from the sun and called us "cuz and cuz" and went to a school where he didn't have to wear a uniform and was allowed to take in his pet toad one day to show the class. Our other cousin was a girl, like me, but nothing like me except for the fact that she was also a girl. Her name was Marilyn and she didn't like to play. In any case, by bedtime I had a stomach ache which was so bad I wondered if I had swallowed a whole potato without chewing it and it was fossilizing in my stomach. I'd heard of that happening before. Sort of like when Frank swallowed an apple seed and Dad told him he was going to sprout a tree out his ears. He got an earache and mum had to pour hot vinegar into his ears and he cried. But mum wasn't here — she was far away, holidaying on the Isle of Wight with a construction worker named Randolph who gave me a bag of Licorice Allsorts the first time I met him, and every time after that, come to think of it. As if I could be seduced into callingsome stranger Daddy through sweets. A new satchel, maybe... I was going to have to do this alone. I lay all night on my side and tried to read by flashlight about a submarine ten
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thousand leagues under the sea as my stomach tossed and turned like a toy ship on a tidal wave. I survived the storm. By the light of day I was sure that whatever animal had been roaming around my insides the night before had now crawled into the appropriate organ to hibernate for the rest of my life, or at least until we got home to our two-up-two-down with leaky faucets but a familiar toilet in Essex. Not the case. One cup of weak tea and toast and Marmite later I was about to burst again. I gravitated to the water instinctively, like some not-quite-terrestriallyevolved newt, but Dad pointed his finger and said, "Not until you've digested." An hour after sitting on the bank like a praying mantis I told him I thought I had digested. I plunged into the green and brown sinewy depths and swam through the snake-like weeds. Normally, I wasn't this brave. With my eyes open under the water I contemplated my dilemma. What if it floats? I contemplated this until my fingers and toes had shrivelled and my lips had turned blue and Dad said, "Time to come out of the water, kids, it looks as if a storm's coming." "Thunder! Lightning! The way you love me is frightening!" shouted Jake at the top of his lungs. "Ahh, come on, uncle Harry! Mom! Just a little longer, okay? It's barely even raining." I had to do it. It was now or never. "But I think I see a salmon!" I shouted. "No way," shouted Jake, swimming over to me. "Yes way," I said. "Can't you see it?" I squealed, pointing an inch beyond my toes. "That's just a weed, stupid," he chastised. "You're stirring up the dirt!" I yelled at him. "Oh my God, see that flash of silver!" "Yeah!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Holy smokes!" "Kids!" the person called Aunt yelled from the bank. "Time to come out!" The wind had picked up by then and the rain was moving toward us in a big grey sheet. "Mom — hold on a sec, we've gotta catch this salmon, it's probably four feet long!" "Okay," I said to Frank, "We've got to act quickly. Now I don't know which way he went, so you go that way and I'll swim this way." "Yeah, okay, but if you find it first we get to share it, right?" "Sure. Fifty fifty." And so I plunged and held my breath and swam for as long as I could and came up head first into hard rain. I could hardly see them on the bank anymore, and although I could hear them yelling, this was an emergency. I looked up at the sky, said sorry, and let go. If it did float, no one would have to know. I ate like a horse that night. Barbecued chicken and chips in a diner where we went because the wood was all wet and because Dad had yelled at us for staying in the water but then he felt bad. The chicken was delicious, barbecue sauce all over my fingers, and a sip of Dad's Heineken and then throwing our clothes in a dryer in a laundromat before making our way back to the campsite. But the nightmare wasn't over. I could hear sex in the next tent and I was sure - 153 -
it was my fault. It was my fault because I had done something terribly bad. It was probably floating! Worse than that — it was probably floating out to sea and would soon wash up on Brighton Beach and ruin someone's holiday and they would put out a nationwide search to find the criminal who had polluted the English coast. What if poo has bumprints like fingers have fingerprints? I would be in so much trouble. I was only ten years old but they would arrest me and make me have a press conference and I would be the first person to admit on national television that I had taken a shit. The secret would be out and I would be everyone's worst nightmare, the kind of person who people hold up and measure themselves against — "at least I've got more decency than that fecal girl from Essex. What's this world coming to?" Slowly, people who I didn't know would begin writing to me, though, telling me their own tales of anal anxiety and misdirected outpourings. Eventually I would write a column addressing many of these anonymous concerns in a women's weekly. I'd make so much money that I'd move to New York and train as an analyst and find a community of scholars unafraid to talk about bums and their business. My first patient would be a young man named Jacob who had a particular preoccupation with a fish that got away one summer. He had lost it to a girl, an experience which left him feeling so emasculated that he was terrified of ever having sex.
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John Degen a girl I d o n ' t know seven hours before the most sick I've ever been, I find myself kissing a girl on a rooftop above Queen Street it is a kiss of pure success, and fleeting; the result of work, real work; the climbing of stairs, the asking of names, turning corners in safely, and then walking back out of it I walk myself out of safety, onto a roof Queen Street flows its Saturday flow, late and tired but very good looking; she makes me think of creatures I've never seen, things with stronger eyes and webbing in places, mythic things, not entirely alive and I want to keep that; to forget about the cat-shaped clock in her kitchen, the boyfriend pictures, the rotting fruit inside, there will be the bright, bright bulb above the toilet, a glimpse
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of violet underwear against the palest of skin, a feeling of being Irish, and sudden crying about the boy in the pictures; me, in an uncomfortable Ikea chair, and she crouched and sobbing in a dressing gown I will walk a long way, still able to see her in the window, her hands always at her face; I will walk up Denison from Queen, alone and remembering success but no longer living it, the darkness helping to keep everything in that tunnel between this road and her livingroom, still lit, still inviting, and she with her hand still at her mouth, a distance now I'll have to pay attention to between the two of us on her bicycle, ridiculous down Bathurst, me on the seat, watching as she rises and falls against my lap, pedaling fast through traffic, drunk, both of us from Sneaky Dee's poisoned taps, only a matter of hours till the sickness comes and sets me shaking on the couch
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a distance now between the rooftop and this dark passageway, this distance I will begin to pay attention to I am in the middle of the road, remembering her hips rising and falling against my lap; the only thing happening in my life, even as I fly down Bathurst drunk and laughing, near enough to death to know, of everything that happens to me tonight, I'll remember this; this I'll be able to see again anytime I want and then I am circled, alone on asphalt still hot from a hot day, this road triple-shaded by trees and night and some impending sickness; a young man on a bicycle performs a quiet, imperfect circle, eyes on my eyes, an assessment, a threat-squint unmistakable, looking for weakness, stopping and restarting time his tires make an empty noise, the sound of air surrounded, and I show him my defeat, empty my pockets
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inside his circle; lay down tired, lay down drunk and sick, lay down a glimpse of violet underwear and a woman's webbed hand rising to her mouth, a night's worth of failure ringed in packaged air for him, I am empty of challenge, the center of nothing, a success
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bathurst it seemed, if you wanted to see it that way, an hour all about dying; or more likely dying that might have happened but didn't me, with a pocket full of negatives; anti-photos of men you know camping, drinking, smoking, holding fish that might die, but don't the film missing each crucial release; each bass like a smudge wiped and removed from the surface, back to mystery, men's hands a bad memory, and my pocket full of them, riding north on bathurst north past the park where jim's bike was stolen the second, and final time, north through former lives, former beds and naked struggles, north past dundas finally, and there, the twin towers of fear, my former hospital bed with its view of the funeral parlour across the street I send a finger to both and ride on into a memory of near death that, when the boy is a man, will wake him, cold and still, for reasons he might never know, make him always nervous at crosswalks, and in strange cities
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whose traffic he hasn't figured yet, but is trying to; and he might one day wonder about his mother, certain decisions she makes, like the day, with me on my bike, fish in my pocket, watching, she took his hand and threaded traffic, her car being ticketed across bathurst, his sister in her arms she lets go of his hand to wave and yell "wait," to mean "no, I'm here, in the road with children." he follows her around a van, blue, sees someone waving both arms, sees only arms crossing in the air; everyone expects him to die then — his mother, who feels she will also die, the parking officer, who has seen the speeding car and is waving both arms, the driver, me, him; all minds one on the subject of his death instead, he uses his hand to touch the car's hood, hot with a day's driving, breathes rubber and brake, stands entirely still, a city expanding from his forehead, and lives beyond all expectation, perpetually nervous, entirely alive I will make it home through traffic, hang my bike and develop my photos; fish
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on hooks, underwater in a chemical bath, sharpening, foreign against a background of trees, still alive, and bound to live longer; still swimming; still swimming
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Stephen Finucan Killing Rupert Nolan Rupert Nolan was known around St. Medard for the greenness of his thumb. The acre-and-a-half lot on which his house sat was always a sight to behold. The upper half, closest to the house and the road, was a winding labyrinth of rose bushes, marigolds, daffodils, primrose and tiger lily, interspersed with rose of Sharon and pussy willow and lilac, and protected on three sides by a thick cedar privet hedge. But Rupert always made sure that the hedge was trimmed down so that it didn't obstruct the view from the roadside. Standing there, on the dusty verge of the two-lane highway that passed in front of Rupert Nolan's house, as I often did as a child, you could look from the explosion of colour in the foreground to the almost mathematical symmetry of the vegetable patch beyond. Rows of beans and carrots and tomatoes and peas and corn so straight, so exact in their arrangement, that more than a few of St. Medard's farmers had walked away from a visit with Rupert disbelieving that he'd managed such efficiency with a simple hoe. Only in the furthest reaches of Rupert's lot, down past the faultless uniformity of the vegetable garden to where the forest rose up like an impenetrable wall, was there anything even close to disharmony. It was here that he grew his berries: raspberry, blueberry, gooseberry And no man could be expected to tame their tangle, not even Rupert Nolan. I was seventeen that summer and wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else. Away. From my mother whose voice had taken on the patronizing tone of a woman who can think of no other way to keep her growing son needy. From my father who had begun to look at me with distrust, as if at any moment I might rise up against him, and as if he mightn't, though the prospect seemed remote, be able to put down my sedition. But more than anything I wanted to be away from St. Medard, from its smallness and idle-minded stupor, from its familiarity and security. There seemed to me to be nothing there, not even in the shadows. I had a student job with the municipality, cutting grass around township buildings and along the side of the highway. We'd also been contracted out to the local Catholic parish to keep the grass cut around Our Holy Redeemer Church and in the cemetery that lay behind it. I liked working in the cemetery best because there was usually just myself and Jerry Phipps and we were pretty much left alone. If we were sent out to work on the highway we usually went as a crew of six, and Michael Gracey, our foreman, would come with us, to make sure we didn't slack off. But Gracey didn't supervise the cemetery. Jerry said it was because he hated Catholics, but I figured it was just that he didn't like being in a graveyard. For me it was perfect. I took my time pushing the mower through the head-
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stones and listened to my walkman, which was something Gracey would never let us do when we were working anywhere else. Jerry and I took a lot of breaks. On our first one we would always go down behind the mausoleum, where they used to keep the coffins during the winter until the spring thaw came and the graves could be dug, and smoke a joint. It always made the rest of the day that much more agreeable. In the afternoon Jerry and I would often sit ourselves under one of the big shady oaks that dotted the cemetery and shoot the breeze. I remember saying to him one time that I hadn't known there were so many Catholics in St. Medard. Our family was Presbyterian, though we never attended church, and Jerry said he thought his family were Anglican; the Phipps' weren't churchgoers either. It was a big cemetery, maybe four hundred graves, but it was funny, that whole summer we didn't see a single fresh plot. Jerry said that maybe the Catholics had just stopped dying. Part of our job at the cemetery was to go through and collect up any dead flowers at the gravesites. That summer started out unusually hot. There hadn't been much rain during the spring and it continued on that way. Most people were worried about drought and there was talk of the crops dying in the ground. Water levels throughout the county were low. Needless to say, in such conditions cut flowers left in the dry vases in front the headstones didn't take long to wither. Jerry and I usually waited until the end of the day before we went around with the clear plastic garbage bag and collected the wilted bouquets. This was my least favourite part of working the cemetery, though Jerry got a kick out of grabbing the parched bunches and throwing them high into air while I held the bag open to catch them. Even though his doing this struck me as somewhat disrespectful, I figured that as long as no one saw him there was no harm done. During our round of the cemetery to collect the dead flowers it never failed, no matter how hot and dry the weather, nor how singed and hard the ground, there was always one plot whose flowers were fresh and healthy, as if they'd just bloomed in that moment. It was the grave of Rupert Nolan's wife. Every time we came to this grave Jerry and I would stop for a moment. The flowers on Mrs Nolan's grave looked different than those on the other graves. It wasn't just that they hadn't shriveled. There was something more than that. It was how they were arranged, how the colours were chosen and placed together so that they accentuated one another: oranges bracketed by whites enveloped in rings of reds and purples. If I had to put a finger on it, I would say that they didn't look store-bought, which of course they weren't. Rupert Nolan had cut them from his own garden, had walked along the paths that wound through the yard and chosen just those blossoms that were at their peak. Jerry always wanted to toss them into the garbage bag with the other flowers but I never let him. At least I can say that I did that much for Rupert. I was seeing Ginny Carlson that summer. We'd started up with each other two months from the end of the school year but became serious — or as serious as seventeen year-olds can be — after she convinced her father that she should stay in St. Medard for the summer rather than go with the family to the Carlsons' cottage in Quebec. It was arranged that she would stay at her grandmother's house just out- 163 -
side of town while she worked as a clerk at the MilkMart. The situation proved more than beneficial. Her grandmother was all but deaf and unless she saw me coming in, she never had any idea when I was over. Ginny's father had also left her a spare set of keys so she could check up on the house, but had given express instructions that there were to be no parties. He'd spoken to the neighbours before they left for Quebec and they were only too glad to keep an eye out. But that didn't stop of us from sneaking in after Ginny finished the late shift at the store to spend the night together, slipping out again before dawn. On these nights we would pretend the house was ours and use her parents' bed. After we made love we would sit naked in the kitchen and eat potato chips and drink coke and smoke cigarettes that Ginny had brought with her from the MilkMart and kid ourselves that we were being adult. One night while we sitting there at the kitchen table, and Ginny was letting me rub an ice-cube over one of her nipples and we were laughing because it grew more erect than the other, a light shone through the window. We both dropped to the floor and rolled over toward the wall beneath the window. We pressed our bodies close together and I could feel Ginny's heart beating against my chest as the light played across the cold tiles. Ginny had to stifle a squeal as the beam slipped past her toes. We stayed like that for almost an hour, until we were certain that whoever it was that was outside had gone. After that we stopped going to Ginny's house. Ginny's grandmother had an old Pontiac that hadn't been driven since her husband died three years earlier. Except for a couple of flat tires and dead plugs, it was in pretty fair shape, and she said that if we could get it running she would have no problem with Ginny using it, as long as she stayed around town. Whenever we had days off together, which was usually Monday and Saturday, we would take the Pontiac and head down to Peterborough, which was only an hour's drive away, though it always felt so much farther to us. Ginny would start out driving because her grandmother was nervous about anyone else being behind the wheel, but as soon as we got a little way down the road she would pull over and we'd switch spots. Then we'd head south out of St. Medard, me with one hand draped over the steering wheel and the other around Ginny's shoulder, rubbing her arm as she leaned in close to me, her head nestled into my shoulder. Peterborough seemed like such a big city to us then; in comparison, I guess it was. Whenever we went down we would spend the afternoon walking through the mall and Ginny would try on clothes at Eaton's, though she never bought anything. We would walk through the downtown peeking in shop windows and stop for lunch at whatever restaurant looked expensive. While we ate we talked about never going back, about staying in the city and finding jobs and getting an apartment together; once we even bought the local newspaper and looked through the rental ads, circling the ones we thought we might like to see. But then the waiter would come by with our coffee and the check and I would smoke a cigarette while Ginny worked out the tip, and then we would head back to the Pontiac. We were never as happy driving back to St. Medard as we were driving away. There isn't really much to say about Rupert himself. No one really knew him all - 164 -
that well. He kept to himself mostly, would never have thought, like the farmers who stopped by to have a look at his garden, to drop in and visit anyone else. He'd worked for thirty years in the cobalt refinery in neighbouring Guthrie and had to take early retirement after an accident in the smelting house had left him with burns that disfigured the left side of his face and pretty much the whole of his left arm. My father worked at the same refinery, but he couldn't tell me much about Rupert that one time I asked him. He said that Rupert Nolan had been a little before his time; he left the Guthrie plant shortly after my father had started. He did recall that Rupert seemed harmless enough, he was quiet and didn't get in anybody's way, except for maybe the drunkard who lost the handle on the smelting pot. His wife was already dead by the time Rupert got burned, which my father said was probably a blessing, since he wouldn't have been much to look at that first little while after the accident. Which could explain why Rupert kept to himself so much after he left the refinery It might also explain why he went to the cemetery in the middle of the night rather than during the day like others. Who's to say things would have worked out differently if I hadn't been in the cemetery that night when Jerry Phipps hit Rupert over the head with the stone? Jerry still would have been there, and so would Rupert Nolan, even if I was not. But I was in the cemetery that night. I was there because Ginny and I had started to run out of places to be together. We couldn't go back to her house after the neighbour with the flashlight, and her grandmother was starting to catch on to my coming around her place. She'd opened Ginny's bedroom door on us once, and although we weren't doing anything more than lying next to one another on the bed, it was enough to set her off. She wouldn't have any of that going on under her roof, she'd yelled, and that made Ginny feel awfully bad. It was Jerry Phipps who suggested the graveyard of Our Holy Redeemer Church to me, said that was where he took his girlfriend Rachel. We were finishing up collecting the dead flowers and he said that it was perfect, that the ground was flat and there were no big rocks, except the ones with names on them, and we could be sure that the grass was short because we'd cut it ourselves. And if you stayed down at the far end of the graveyard it was so dark that nobody could see you, not even the priest if he stood up in the belfry. I told him that I would bring Ginny that night and that we would meet him and Rachel behind the mausoleum where we smoked our joints. I brought some grass and Jerry brought a six-pack of beer and the four us sat behind the mausoleum and smoked and drank and talked awhile in the dark. Jerry told us a story about how when he was a kid he used to take his brother's air rifle down to the river and shoot the frogs that were sitting out sunning themselves on the water lilies. The girls said what he'd done was terrible but I laughed because the way he told it made it sound more funny than cruel. Then, after it got a little cooler, Rachel grabbed up the blanket she'd brought along and took Jerry by the hand and led him out from behind the mausoleum. A little while after Rachel and Jerry had gone, Ginny picked up the blanket she'd brought from her grandmother's house and took my hand and led me in the opposite direction. - 165 -
I still remember the sound of that stone hitting Rupert Nolan's head. Even though I was halfway across the cemetery I could hear it as clearly as if it had struck my own skull. And I think I knew exactly what had happened in that moment that the bone-shattering crack filled my ears. Ginny started to cry. She told me later that it was the expression on my face that brought her to tears, that I looked as if my soul had just been stolen. She was only half right: not stolen, forfeited. Wfe saw Rachel first, sitting with her back against a tombstone, her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around them. She was naked except for her underpants, and in the cold moonlight she was shivering. Her eyes were wide and dry and terrified, and though her lips were moving she did not make a sound. Jerry was standing about ten feet away. Other than his T-shirt he was bare to the world, but he made no move to cover himself. He just stood there, breathing hard, his arms limp at his sides. He had a stone in his right hand the size of a baby's head. Jerry said that he hit him, maybe once or twice, he wasn't sure, that he'd been lying there on top of Rachel and when he looked up he was there, so he grabbed the stone and hit him. When I told him that I thought there weren't any stones in the cemetery he held out his hand to me and said that there was this one. Who was to blame for what happened? It's a question I've often asked myself. It's too easy to blame Jerry Phipps, too obvious. Many is the time when I've felt the blame lay solely with me, that it was somehow within my power to stop what happened. Other times I blamed Ginny, though I know that wasn't fair. It could be said that the fault belonged with Rupert himself, or with his wife for dying before him, or even the drunken refinery worker who rained molten cobalt down on quiet, harmless Rupert Nolan. Whenever I think about it now, which isn't as often as I used to, the list of culprits grows too long to count. We stood by, the four of us, and watched as Rupert Nolan died, a fresh cut bouquet of flowers clutched in his shriveled and scarred left hand. It didn't take long, or at least it didn't seem to. His legs twitched a couple of times and then there was a sound like air being slowly let out from a bicycle tire and then he didn't move. His eyes were open and cloudy, but they didn't look our way, just stared up at the night sky, as if someone above him had told him something that he didn't believe. Ginny asked is he, and I said yes. It was left to me in the end to lean over Rupert Nolan and close his eyes. Only the right one would shut. The left, stranded in the melted scar tissue of his burn, refused. We all pay for things in our own way Jerry Phipps paid for his up front with six months at the Pine Ridge Reformatory, but it never seemed enough for him. It was as if he always felt himself owing, and he paid his debt in small increments over the next dozen years until he finally slipped away in the night. Wherever he ended up, I've no doubt he's still plagued by his invisible creditors. - 166 -
I don't know about Ginny. She left St. Medard that autumn, sent by her father to an aunt in Toronto. She's never come back. I saw her briefly before she went away. I met up with her on the highway out past Rupert Nolan's place. I had to get word to her through her sister because her father had forbidden her to see me. She rode her bike out from town. I'd come on foot. That's when she told me why she'd cried that night in the cemetery We tried holding hands while we talked but it just felt wrong. She told me she would write me from the city, and she did once, but it was a short letter and I can't remember any longer what it said. I do see Rachel around town every so often. She's married now and has children. I don't know their names. She appears happy enough. That is until she sees me. Then her face goes blank and I can see in her eyes the same fear that was there that night. I always look away Now that the cobalt refinery in Guthrie is closed I find myself back working for the municipality. It was Michael Gracey, my old foreman, who hired me back. He's in the office now and I think he gave me the job because he feels somehow responsible, if only marginally, for what happened to Rupert Nolan. When I went in to talk to him he couldn't look me in the face. I'm cutting grass again, just like when I was seventeen. In the winter I'm on the snowplough. The municipality still has the contract with the Catholic parish, but any work to be done around Our Holy Redeemer Church is left to others. And Gracey's always adamant about it being closely supervised. A couple years back, when I was still at the refinery, I bought Rupert Nolan's old place. He didn't have any family and it had been left vacant ever since. The house suffered from disrepair and the gardens had grown into a tangled thicket; the forest slowly reclaiming its own. I got it cheap through public auction because there were no other bidders. Ever since I've being trying to do my best by Rupert. I've been cutting and clearing, turning the soil with shovel and hoe, planting in the spring and watering through the hot summer months. I keep the cedar hedge cut low so that people can see everything from the roadside. There aren't many that stop, not like when I was a kid. And those who do don't get to see it as it was, because try as I might, I cannot get it to grow. The marigolds dry out before their buds even have the chance to open and the tiger lilies don't get past being shoots of pale green; the lilac, pussy willow and rose of Sharon refuse to bloom and the corn turns brittle on the stalk. And the rose bushes are little more than knurls of angry thorns. But I will keep trying. I will continue to pull weeds and spread manure and work in mulch. I will continue to sow and till and toil. And maybe one day Rupert will allow me a blossom. Until then I will do as I have done since the night we killed Rupert Nolan. I will go each evening to the florist and pick out two bouquets, which I take, under cover of darkness, to the cemetery behind Our Holy Redeemer Church to lay on the graves of Rupert Nolan and his wife.
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Noah Leznoff j o i n i n g the parade the stride-musical step my nostrils widened to take in, my mouth, my heart, my drum beating it out again what a fine stretch of the inner thigh! people! our steps arching a city block, that's how full my sneakers felt straddling the harbour, an open-shirted pennant, grand shadow —then something jamming my throat hot star at the back of my scalp cross-eyed everything peripheral, I staggered, lay in the median grass and waited for the police to pass
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Sister Flesh I dread Xmas the gentility sentimentality of it usual stuff that don't redeem a year of deafness, venality, subreption, silent neglect how capital's fashioned the good philosopher's birth, fattened & reddened him, made bows of his wounds—that it's the season for suicides. I remember grade school, belting out those carols "in excelsus gloria" with a nine year-old's inward smile — that conditioned me to lying that, and the lord's morning prayer; we had to say it so I said it head bowed, yelling The best was grade eleven with Samantha, balling on that basement couch with everything off but them coloured lights making gifts of our skin. All that chi, sister, nearly made an x of me.
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e x t r a help of course she's brilliant talented young and like most of her friends wears a jacket to class (hers a silver pillowy space thing for the unpredictable thermostat or quick egression for a between-class smoke now in the quiet, just the two of them the room's huge, and halfway through Layton's If I Lie Still getting at the subjunctive, the speculative big If the same one in Williams' Danse Russe she shoulders herself out of the jacket, smiling— the revelation a cotton terror it's not till the very end, door still open, the "Thanks, that helps a lot" that he contextualizes the tight bud of her nipples, cold or appreciative, or against all will and reason complimentary so many ways that love makes victims she knows the blood and sings it without rehearsal the fluorescent lighting a chorus of flies rthis is for those who have stolen plums
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fucking around 'Fess up, said the bull— I was squaring myself twenty paces back holding out the cape (a worn red sweater, really) at arm's length, my fingers clothes-pegs; was ginger too in holding my nerve —There's more profundity in any drinking hole, you've nothing to float a stone. Watch out! Here comes pain.
Still, for a moment I was sequined in the ring; swans were swarming, explosive horseflies; pruinose bones spun like cartoon stars above a dazed David —beyond deciding, a caesura, dust sifting the spike of sunlight That was the very blink he needed; red-eyed, el toro came hoofing it, and head-on too: I turned tail, hands over my flapping culet A knock at the door, Liz pokes in her head: "It's time to kiss the kids goodnight" she's wearing a fine-fitting sweater, the fleeting glare/ patient exasperation of an overworked woman married to a fool (who's in love with her
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but poorly). "What are you doing?" she asks eyeing perhaps the grey drops plink-plonking from the ceiling tiles into our best aluminum cooking pot "Nothing Love just fucking around" and in the backdraft of the closed door I am upside-down, keister-blooded but covered in her kisses, flying over the burladero, the crepefestooned balustrade, over the second row bleachers and fat onto the deposed emperor's lap What a blue spanking there was!
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A dragonfly dying under a lawn chair is a proposition woken from pupal duplicity, ancestral egg again (fuck it): things are what they touch —the body's a shuddering, a fragment (this is sunlight or the wind's brittle fingers in the grass
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Kate Sutherland Measuring Up Doris stands in the cubicle, arms crossed over her bare breasts. Hurrying out of her top clothes, she'd felt the same fluttery panic she does at her yearly check-up, trying to get into the paper gown before the doctor arrives. But she's not at the doctor's office. She's in the lingerie department at Filene's, waiting for the saleswoman with her cold, slithering tape measure to fit her for a bra. Doris checks her watch; she doesn't want to be late back from her lunch hour. She plucks at the brown corduroy curtain. Finally, the saleswoman "yoo hoos" from the other side. "Are you ready yet, dear?" Doris resents the "dear." The saleswoman looks younger than she does, definitely under forty. The saleswoman maneuvers round Doris with the tape, clicking her tongue against large, perfect teeth. "Thirty-eight," she says. "On the button." Then she eyes up the breasts for cup size. For a minute, Doris is afraid the saleswoman will reach out and weigh one in each hand, like fruit in the supermarket. She steps back, bumping against the chill of the mirror. "C," the saleswoman announces. "At least aC." Doris is startled. She used to be a skinny girl who didn't need a bra. She'd started out with a pink and white padded one her best friend Jayne had given her when they were both thirteen. Doris had been pleased with the effect under a red cotton turtleneck, but one of the popular girls at school soon set her straight. "You're not fooling anyone," she'd said in the cafeteria line. "We all know you stuff." Jayne had dismissed this as jealousy, but Doris never wore the bra again. In her twenties, when she began to gain weight, she bought stretchy sports bras that came in small, medium or large. Thirty-eight C sounds positively buxom. It conjures up cleavage and cocktail dresses. When the saleswoman swishes off again, all silk and perfume, Doris turns to the mirror and examines herself. Her round breasts sag a little. Faint pink stretch marks evidence the tension. The right one is bigger than the left, even the nipples oddly out of sync. Her veins seem more obvious here than anywhere else on her body, except maybe her feet after a busy day at work. Everything awfully close to the surface. It used to be that Doris didn't recognize her own reflection. When she caught sight of herself in a store window, she thought it was someone else. She was matchstick thin but she expected to see a fat woman there. Now it's the opposite. She'd finally got used to herself thin, when the image solidified into flesh, curves, the woman in the mirror now. Doris had decided on a new bra late one afternoon while she was watching
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Oprah, waiting for a chicken casserole to thaw. It was a show about makeovers and one guest caught her attention. Doris liked the woman's old clothes more than the ones the fashion expert put her in, so stiff and tailored. But the woman certainly looked better; she stood differently in the new outfit. "Well," the fashion expert explained, "of course, we started with a new bra." And in an aside to the studio audience he continued: "You know, 85 percent of American women are wearing the wrong bra size. It's tragic. Their bras are doing nothing for them." Doris felt as if his remarks were addressed directly to her. The saleswoman barges right in this time, fluttering hangers and hangers of substantial, white bras. Doris is disappointed. She'd pictured the bra black and lacy. Or fire engine red, the colour of the lipstick Jayne wears. "Now try these ones for fit," the saleswoman says. She shows Doris how to lean over and shake her breasts into the cups. "A more natural look," she says, "than tucking yourself up into them." Doris feels a bit ridiculous shaking her breasts about, but in the end she has to admit it works. She's mesmerized by the twin satin cones that emerge when she straightens up. The saleswoman pronounces the bra a perfect fit. "Can I wear this out?" Doris asks. The saleswoman raises her pencilled-on brows slightly, but she cuts the tag off without comment. Doris can hear the ching of her charge card going through the machine while she puts the rest of her clothes back on. Even in her bulky sweater, these new breasts are a force to be reckoned with. Doris lingers a few minutes in the women's wear department on her way out, reckless now of the time. Usually she avoids this place. She's the sort who finds herself more often in the "Don't" column in the fashion magazines than in the "Do." It doesn't help that she works at a magazine herself, secretary to the managing editor of Women at Work. When she flips through the glossy pages, she sees her own eyes peeking through the blank spaces that conceal those of women caught on film with coats shorter than their dresses, or stripes going the wrong way. But today, with the assurance of underwire digging into her breasts, Doris feels at home in women's wear. The "little lift" she needed, just as Oprah's fashion expert advised. When she swings out into the street, Doris catches a businessman in a camel-colored overcoat staring at her, the way men stare at Jayne. "Go ahead, buddy," she thinks. "Keep staring. I could poke your eye out with one of these things." Doris figures maybe she will go to the singles dance that Jayne's been trying to talk her into. Jayne has a boyfriend, but that doesn't stop her from looking for a better one. She usually does get the best of the men at the dances, then sticks Doris with his less attractive friend. Those dances make her feel like Rhoda from the Mary Tyler Moore Show, except without the witty comebacks. Not that Jayne's a Mary Richards. She's more of a 5o's screen siren. She even added a "y" to her name as a tribute to Jayne Mansfield. Doris arrives at work five minutes late, but her boss Stephanie isn't back from aerobics yet, so it doesn't matter. Mr. Edwards, the owner of the magazine, is annoyed when he can't find her. - 175 -
"Tell her to call my office when she gets in," he instructs Doris. "Yes,sir." He pauses for a minute at her desk. 'Are you new here?" "Yes," Doris lies, and bats her eyelashes at him the wayJayne would. She watches his gray flannel back disappear out the glass doors and into the elevator, then writes his message on a pink sheet and lets herself into Stephanie's office to leave the note on her big, oak desk. Doris sits a minute in the swivel chair. She's not worried about Stephanie finding her there and getting angry. Stephanie pays so little attention to Doris, it's more likely that she'd waltz in and sit right on top of her, the way you might accidentally sit on a sleeping cat. Doris picks up one of the clay statues that crowd the desk top and rolls it around in her hand. It's a thick goddess figure with round drooping breasts and broad hips. "It's a reproduction of the Venus ofWillendorf," Stephanie had told Doris on her first day. "As you can see, I'm into female power." She'd waved at the cluster of statues, then at the framed print of a woman's symbol with a fist in the middle. "Women used to rule the world, you know." Doris had just nodded politely. The chair is not as comfortable as it looks; it forces Doris to hold her spine straighter than she's used to. She tips back a little, the way Stephanie had done that first day. She'd told Doris right off to call her by her first name. "I don't believe in hierarchy," she'd said. "We working women have to stick together." But all the while, she'd looked Doris up and down as ruthlessly as the men at the singles' dances do, her eyes as frosty as her pink pearl lipstick. Doris felt she'd been found wanting. Certainly, she's never yet been among the favorites that Stephanie invites to her aerobics class. Those are the women who get promoted first. Doris slides open the bottom drawer of the desk to see if Stephanie has any Milky Way bars stashed there. Stephanie's on a strict low fat diet, but Doris knows chocolate is her weakness. She leaves the evidence around for Doris to find, no more concerned about what Doris learns of her than any rich family is about the maid stumbling on their secrets. Doris makes sure to order a particularly tempting chocolate dessert whenever anyone in the office has a birthday Stephanie walks in just as Doris slides the drawer shut again. "What's going on?" she asks Doris, as she hangs her leather trench coat on the stand in the corner. "I was just leaving a note for you. Mr. Edwards wants to see you." "Damn, I wonder what Gary wants now," she says. "Well, Doris, I have things for you to do, but I don't have time to explain any of it. Just keep yourself busy until I'm done with him." Doris guesses that Stephanie's not a Mary Tyler Moore fan. She'd hate the way Mary always calls Lou "Mr. Grant." Doris is already done all her work, so she spends most of the afternoon on the phone. Jayne still wants to go to the dance, but she'd be willing to stay in and watch the Miss America pageant, if Doris would rather do that. The Miss America pageant has been a bit of a ritual for them since their high school days. Jayne fills Doris in on all the important details, like how the contestants use hair spray to stop their - 176 -
swimsuits from riding up, and how you can tell which of them have silicone implants by whether their breasts jiggle when they walk. Doris laughs along with her, but she always secretly cheers for Miss Massachusetts, no matter how blonde and silly she is. It's nearly four when Stephanie emerges from Mr. Edward's office. "You might as well leave early," she tells Doris. "I won't have anything ready for you till tomorrow now." Ordinarily Doris would protest that she must be able to help somehow, but today, she wants the time for herself, maybe to get ready for the dance. Jayne's always telling her she has to learn to be selfish. Outside, Doris shivers and hunches her shoulders waiting for the light to change to "walk." She should have worn a coat, not just a sweater. She stares into the nearest window, Stephanie's health club, at the row of women on treadmills just behind the glass. They're all tall with tightly muscled arms and long, thin legs. Their breasts don't move. Doris wonders if you have to look like that to get a spot at the window, maybe they even hire them for advertising. On the next corner, she's staring into a bar. It should provide contrast, but it doesn't. The windows are still full of beautiful people. Men in designer suits and bored-looking women sipping light beer or Perrier. There's a cigarette machine just inside the door, but no one is smoking. If she adjusts her eyes, Doris sees herself in the glass rather than the people through it. She straightens up and pushes her chest out, surprised again at her new profile. Doris has never been to this bar, not even with Jayne, though it's one of the most popular after-work spots in town. And she hasn't smoked in years, not since her dieting days. But just before the light changes, she decides to go in and buy a pack of cigarettes. She chooses Virginia Slims 5008, long and thin as the legs of the women in the health club window. Then she squares her shoulders and strides up to the bar instead of back out into the street. She doesn't order a light beer or a Perrier, she wants something thick and sweet, something with some substance to it. She points her breasts at the bartender and orders a bourbon. "Wild Turkey, straight up." Doris perches on one of the stools and lights a cigarette. She's pleased to find that she hasn't forgotten how to blow smoke rings. She and Jayne had spent the entire summer before their senior year perfecting the art. She thinks about calling Jayne to join her, she knows Jayne's been planning to check this place out since it opened. But she doesn't call. She doesn't respond to the overtures of a rumpled man at the other end of the bar either. She has to learn to be selfish. Doris just sips her drink and stares out the window, feeling sorry for the women rushing past on their way home from work. Home to short-tempered husbands and noisy children. Or home, like Stephanie, to solitary Lean Cuisine dinners. Doris puffs out one voluptuous smoke ring after another. Even with no back to her stool, she has no trouble sitting up straight. It's as if this contraption of satin and lace and wire has harnessed her weight and turned it into pure power. Like the goddesses on Stephanie's desk. - 177 -
A woman in a worn, grey coat stops outside for a minute. She puts down her shopping bags and clenches and unclenches her hands, criss-crossed angry red from the bag handles. She peers into the window of the bar and Doris looks back at her. Doris can't tell if the woman is staring in at her, or if she's studying her own reflection.
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Adam Sol You Say it's marmalade I made you out of plums skin fruit and juice you say goddamn would you shut up you talk so much then you say baby c'mere you say I'm sorry you say hush you say I know that you've been screwing around you say clean up this kitchen for once you say turn off that tv you say lover like the word is on your teeth and you can taste it you say words that don't have spellings words no one can hear you say where'd that money go you twitch your foot when you fall asleep your head is on my chest my hair against your cheek your hair is creeping up my neck and your mouth is open I can hear that slow breath rise it isn't what you mean that I can hear it's what you say so slow it takes all night
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The Weight of F i r e Walking down Bloor in March, some sax playing Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue and a bitter rain squinting our eyes. Our shoulders hunched like pigeons on the balconies. Foggy shop windows obscured the mannequins, and your skin already translucent from the chemo. You bought a pack of Kents and we stood under an awning while you lit up with matches you'd picked out of the waiting room ash tray Your lip curled around the filter, somewhere between a kiss and a sneer. Now the sax switching to something sweet: Satin Doll, or Just the Two of Us. Your knees buckled under the hot weight of that fire.
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At the Question Market Tou called me dog, and for these courtesies I'll lend you thus much moneys.
Don't you think it's time you exchanged that old carcass for a bag of magic beans? Here I am, sack full of pretty toys. Look: thousand year-old maternity trinkets, souvenirs from a blood sacrifice, a bottle half-full of light. What pleases you? Let's not discuss prices until you've decided on something. I can see your stomach twiddling its intestinal thumbs. %u're wondering what I've got in my pockets, but there are a few things I just can't trade, not for a wilderness of monkeys. Here, instead, make a banjo of this parchment. Use this skin from my back as a lampshade. I sell foreskins and hymena by the gross, and my fillings, well... that's real gold. Consider this wet strip of newsprint as a replacement for your damaged eye.
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Susan Perly Dogs Plus Mlngus Dogs came into the hot full lung effleurescence of swell little tiptoe frissons of ragweed death, and walked on, lonely but unable to breathe but carrying on. Dogs became denizens of pollen forecasts, with paws close to screens. Dogs walked green baseball pastures in hot dreams of cream green forever, but the season closed and dogs walked on. I've been a geek of love so long, wandering in the blue pupfish desert. I am a geek. I come to confess. I am a geek of love. I come before you to confess. I am the thing of mystery I can't even name in the human. I do not want to know names. I want to be loved. I do not want to climb the ladder. I want the beset of Love, and the blue revelation. I believe I see my exoskeleton walking before me. My love shell I moulted I want back. Children I got too over-knowledgeable & that you ever have one of those days — exoskeleton of love walked out on me. I am a geek armadillo without a shell. My own protective covering walked out on me. I am naked before you, a quivering mess of hair afraid. I am looking for love, & I do not even care if it (is) in the wrong places. For I have been to the waters of the sea & Sam Cooke said, "Everything's Going To Be All Right," and Percy Mayfield said, "Life Is Suicide," & I walked down the moss slippery stairs to ride out in the glory of the waves. I am not that nice nation's capital nurse who tried to nurse that Zombie in, remember? — / Walked With A Zombie, back to normal. I am a Zombie of Love. Friends I am a Zombie for Love. I stand before you. And I do believe I see Lester — & dogs walked. - Dogs wore furcoats in summer and begged and we were all in the coma together. Dogs in the coma, dry. Sweating that dryness wet in the drought. Bees buzzed numerically & mosquito larvae dried up and blackflies were no longer but went underground, below ice, in water & on dusk lakes we walked over the he-he plots of blackfly eggs under water & still you did not love me. And still I was a dog. I was a dog of underwear without you & a pizza box was my pillow at night.... Dogs dreamed of locusts. Instead dogs walked out & were blinded by Clouds of Optimists. August lied and said it was gone but September came and still the hot gold dust notes of summer love stayed on, and not yet did those sugar hider diers emerge, when the coverup conspiratorial chlorophyll got uncovered, & the sugar reds selfouted all over the hills. And still distant blue bent Desert deserts called me, my
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name is Mercy I am here with you tonight on the marginal prehistoric radio waves. On Radio Carrer. A Pirate Antic. Fish walked across the desert looking for an oasis of palm. Fish walked as onelegged unipod hoppers, on sand. Like gnats fish walked. And fish scales shone like the salt of the Desert. Father, I see the Heavenly Salt. I see a salt lick statue in the form of the President of Love, Lester Young. I see Lake Lester up above. I am walking to where things happened in a blue flame. Indigo. Scarlet. I am walking to I asked clouds to rain kerosene down like forgiveness & to light me with the flame. I have been in this black and white world too long, & I desire only sweet little daubs of colour. Let red rain down as black, — & green as the other black shape. Optimists in bright migraineur sun gave me headaches. I was looking for men in dark rooms fetishizing syllables and in love with letters' shapes. I wanted men in love with the music of darkness. Some kind of wonderful, in the wonderfulnesses; I have been dreaming of men made of Ozone who might talk into me like the bottom of the ocean and make me breathe again the level of the sea basin. Basing my love on nothing but that I love you. Sea skeletons walked and fish were human in an instant. Fish walked like onelegged tappings with shimmers & the seas were gone again, and fish strapped in, in planes, and fish were stranded when the sea went away and the land was mountains. Down deep the windy calling came out of the blacks & the whites in the November soothe of the greys and the rusts and the bleached yellow olives and grey ore of cement — of wet leafclad asphalt & pavement — concrete & the dried rushes by moonlight—. Past the rocky grey outcrops art is pale-greens entered into a marriage with green-greys, and colour is miscegenated without permission. Grey to black to raining black, to silver. And slivers of ice, and the high mountain pines to the spaghetti desert. The palette you wanted was the day of the rain check. You wanted a sun check. Dogs walked out like fur diplomats, shedding. They wanted a sun check, to come back when the street and the buildings had the natural sepia of the rain, & the downtown street looked like a dog; like them. Dogs got bad dye jobs and went halucious red blonde platinum desiring LosMarlin-Monrowies, of heart, and dogs looked up skirts and skirts made transmission stops as the eye of They looked down & surfed over words of English, the tongue built to be suggestive, and They said a skirt is not only always a skirt & hot might mean hot so stop it. The state made an edict that you couldn't say the word hot & be weather-legal before June 21, & in the 8os & the 908 in May & mid-June the papers, compliant, wrote that the weather was warm, & the cits dropping dead were decapitated to show them and dogs walked. Dogs walked in designer shades, black and gold retrievers on white snow, in rainbow cataracts, so bright in winter dogs had to be flying snowdogs, south, to get away from the blinding by light in winter in the north in the light on snow & go south to the dark dim black rainforest. - 183 -
Dogs flew like bats to nightflowers in the forest, the jungle. Dogs splatted on windows like fur butterflies with eyes & teeth. Dogs danced like miniatures in exquisite lime dance parades up & down glass jungle windows, like miniature lime dogs in a wedding dress. Dogs had bad complexions. But they were so pretty. Dogs dressed in orange sarongs because orange as a colour was lucky If you build your house facing a woman in an orange shirt, you will be lucky, for she will walk in the open door which is the open hand, which is love, waiting and in the house, you might hear someone singing. "If There Were Human Hurt It Might Be Lester." If there were human hurt, it might be Pres. Hurt, and forgiving in the hurt, knowing it is not his to forgive. If there were human getting-by, knowing the marvelous but knowing it is — If there were the marvelous, yes, you see, in the knowing, knowing it is not his, but in the power of something greater because, Friends, I stand before you A Geek of War. I am a War Dog, in this Desert of Peace. I was at Desert Wars & my camera shot them, & I came home with Love, for Peace, but Peace put my camera in a posttraumatic — War — Syndrome — Prison. And I only get to see my camera on weekends; get conjugal together like in Iran/Iraq or Salvador when I caught a bullet by my heart sac & where your head joins your body is not your lower neck, it's at your earline; & all night every night for many years, Humans I stand before you to say: my ears Ve been Barking like Dogs to my Heart. And far off down the whole ancient brick streams I escapaded my camera from Prison. And skells of night we walked, armadillo shells gone, like hairless tanks down nightlanes, cuddling up in old rot velour, like eyeful Peace Dog Cousins. And in every Urban Desert Vesper; & in every Desert a Cart Seat smooch makes — & in every stoop & step — verandahs, galleries, porches — The Desert of my Love for you was uninterred. — I could not help it. Dusk just came like underwear, & night rags came down like destitution. (And I came down into cities like a kerosene being), waiting for words to burn me. — In Earthly Retribution. In mystery twists. Never broken enough to the quiet of lonely Just a few things Remembering rapture. Down Rapture Way, into Beatitude City— Shocked on hills - in the wont in New Orleans — & a Monk born in France, & a French-Canadian born in the U.S. walked the New Tork Streets at the same time — & it's always seeming this jazz Jew falling for the Catholic Boys, the Catholic Buddhists — the desert souls & their inked lamb dust. And Robert Rauschenberg was born in 1926 & he is still alive today, Sunday, August 28, 1999, in the South Fla. Buddha light. & Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 & he was dead during Vietnam, before the pullout of Saigon — & Florida & I was always looking for the Buddha Boys without ambition. The ones who didn't care & so they lasted but they made it so personal, this moment. The men changed the need .... They never changed the world at all — they rearranged the heart's molecules. They saved we The Lonely, We The - 184 -
Lonely, WE THE LONELY, one by one, by transmission, into rooms, in the lonely lamb soul of art — in a chair, in a chain — they saved us for the moment & changed nothing. For only when I saw that nothing ever changes did the door open in my gut to see that the universe arranged & rearranged that the universe rearranged its starlight, over night; and we were only ever starlight for a moment. When the noise has died, who will blurb you to the lonely who despise you — for we never wanted all that apparatus under covers for a story — we wanted something personal in its time. We wanted one individual with their inked individuality, & we were drowning in the torture of everyone's book looking the same, in this sudden conformity of acknowledgment & intro backintro frontextro, & we just wanted someone to talk to us, in the new & the ancient readiness, of words. When you can't go on, it is who is a lifeline in art & who you despise at that moment who saves you, & you don't have to tell anyone. Make it be you, in this one life only. I been in that restless emboldenment of material figures hotted me. I have. Zinc children of the galvanize. Hot jasmined-up juwie-hall boppers like lockers junked up crawlers enveloped in small sweet whites under the stairs & like phone buzz scent everywhere & everywheres & mornings, rooftops seemed made of black stretches on blue & like murdered vies aromaed to heaven but not there yet, the dying of the night jasmine lingered all day long like corpses you knew & sweet remembered as mornings drove on like cars cruising. I have been thinking about Nogales. Thinking about that dry southwestern desert air. I've been thinking about how it was in Nogales oh say round and about say back in the 205 of the 2Oth century I was thinking about some hot spring. Some 22nd day. Some desert testifying, before Arizona was so Psycho I mean somedays don't those Vegas cluckers re the B & B they wish you'd take your honey-bee to. Was all the no-sex all discussion with the host rather than that nice anonymous. I was thinking (woke up with) (in my head:) "Nogales to Cuernavaca," no reason. I was thinking about that desert hot Arizonians. Got the Arizonas, this morning, I fear. But what a beautiful walking bass fear. I mean a man with a bass on the subway stairs always has a story. I mean a man with a bass 3 a.m. always has a pizza went the other way. A man with a bass may very well know a pizza who came out of the closet that very rainy Saturday night. Rain should always be accompanied by a side of a man-with-bass-fires. Fries. I was thinking beating spring sun. I was thinking of dying in Mexico. I was thinking of being, coincidentally, of being in Cuernavaca, passing through, in the year of 19 and 79 Mingus died. I was thinking of that Mexican Fever of/in January I was thinking of how I am always thinking of Mexico in January. Bad love affairs, and bad bumps. I was thinking of being down in them lower basses of latitudes and the Saints Bass. I was thinking about Saint Rabbi Charles Mingus, and them uh-hum Ah Um Arizonas. I was thinking of them curvy curvaceous bodacious bass lower string things, I was thinking of that latitude on the horizontal; I was thinking in a Mingus vein; I was in them evolutionary philanthropic heart philacanthus intellectual "Pithecanthropus erectus" rictus sun beats you out of your mind, with heat, so the sun can think, again. I was thinking - 185 -
of how the desert was like a Mingus stretch. I was waking in the freezing cold at 44 feeling like shooting somebody. I was in the cold 448 of borders, and I wanted to get back to Nogales. // I was being, in my heart, 12 again. I was in a — an "Eat The Chicken" Sunday kind of off the OH YEAH: I love where the second Booker Ervin takes shelter shall be as Kirk ist on "Devil Woman." And then I was being, in my heart, 16. I was in that thing of lake water when you don't see the lake but live like an artist or a scratch-canvas girl in its humidity; I don't care what the official sources were teaching at the time I painted, but I care mightily that paint like altitude reacts to the air. What would I be if I had been born bone dry, instead of always wet in Great lake Systems of systemic soothe me. Pores. I was feeling that thing of being 16 again and buying Miles and Monk at Newport, and buying Mingus Ah-Um. I was thinking of my early jazzcheder Rabbis of sweat. So sweet. I was thinking how Sir Charles Mingus saved my life and I swear I don't know how, or why. which is by way of saying: I come tonight before you to confess: I am — in the Geek's Dilemma. The War Geek. The Geek of Love. How can I make Peace be as thrilling as war was? How can I make art in Peace as fast & as daring as I did in War, with my camera. How do I make every breath be my last; when it isn't. If there were humans getting by in this survival which is love in its element, most human, and just how it is. To only get by and make pretty the surviving, it might be the President of Love, Lester Young, in his last days alone '59 March, sitting in his lonely Desert "Alvin" Chair, in the Alvin Hotel over Broadway in this Desert which follows you from War, & haunts you in the Urban. Blue garbage dumps became magnificent in cameras and stayed dumps of an occluded convex kind. Dumps put on blindfolds and posed on red velvet sateen passementeried studded pailletted and men's members were my palm pilots to heaven. Houses prayed for rain and went outside their own doors and sat on their own stoops to be air watchers and velvets. We were in summer comas. On the way to the grave August in the City is the best rehearsing. And night was the neon noose of my abandon. Down into the eternal progressions of salt dogs walked in waves of bent made salt blind. The Devil's Golf Course was ahead & there was Sam Cooke & Lester Young facing off & there were salt birdies & the magnificences stretched of magnificent gratitude the profane has abandoned. For children, the sacred is the street. And in heart climes we knew it slowed out of politics to Everyman. And white Datura Jimsonweed Nightshade night bells hung dowdy by day but like — perfume promises. Hanging in their white prehistoric white — nightshade saying, "Baby by night we are white perfumed ejections of all things up the laddery and back the jewels, of words." Dogs sat in velvet ring - 186 -
thrones in small pocket engagement shynesses, & the Desert shone like a multivehicle pileup, in the vehicles crashed & burned & each & everyone was heartshaped, & we left our hearts, smashed & abandoned. And our very skeletal walkers testified — our very syllabic saliva is the testimony we are here for — And I want to tell you something else, Children. Which you know already There were some who gave you the political view — who read the papers for you — there were some who went back & did you your library search — but I am not that research assistant of your avoidance — I am here to say love made me its proxy, in flesh. Love made me carry its burden. I was wandering in a long radioactive Desert and the beholding of my abandonment to it was the vision of my human heart as Lonely. I saw my heart at Zabriskie Point sitting on a lonely slim small black bench, a tiny bench from far away, in outline — I see it now— of a small stick bench on a high wall of rock & I said Bench, wash me with your love. And the sight of something in the distance soothed me. Let me look across the shadowlands & be a cape-d figure under black night, by day, with my cumbersome footed camera. I was a Caucasian Hebraic on the R & B sands. Charles Mingus raised me in a Mondriany testifying "Boogie;" and Miles Davis raised me in a Motherwelly "Delta;" and Thelonious made an isosceles triangle of Rabbis Of The Jazzing; I was a child, and jazz sounds came in me; I davened at the jazz beemah, and behemoths blew like bats to eyeglass windows. Down the old rust sheet metal lane music my camera walked me like a Dog in a Recidivistic Prison — I was back in the Urban Breeds bred blue-eyed Torah mysteries. I walked back lanes like ink smearing in old ancient illuminated night lights. And still you did not love me... And still old outback concrete block whatsises Jackie Wilson was being played as I walked. I did not know if the light spun with a man hanging or was it only the music... dreaming in the August Coma like still-water suffocation of the glory of the October red junkvines. The rustblue sheet-metal permwaves. The green doors distressed but so welcome. Out there people were rushing around, but the Lanes were always in a Coma. Tin old red mercuric fumed posgild silverized A-bomb Velour Bomb Olds 88 War Shelters... old coupe and town cars, Monte Carlos with that Drug Dealer copper, hunk trucks buckled on blocks, and visions of old Mack truck pileups — bucked old upburps & walked my face. Damaged ancients spoke from sundown desert creosote perfume garbage and carnal ether just everywhere gone but never going. And things just always being here. And night like nigh estrangulating nearer. I drove out in my Scarlet Escort to Death Valley to feel the world. I went down below the level of the sea. I was at Badwater, the lowest point in the Northern Americas. I was 300 plus feet below the level of the sea. I golfed with the Devil at his Country Club. I saw visions of fish, above, at sunset. I evaporated, and still I sweat. And the mountains were a comfort. I saw Love, like Time Itself, above me. And I was in time, moving slowly in the Valley. I was my own past moments later below me. And I looked for love and lost things, and how in war I had love, but in Peace, love was the less findable, the least findable, of things. (And): Down below I saw Death Valley stretched out like all the soul for all the - 187 -
world of personal endeavor from ripoff to rat to reliquy as if camera guys roamed & took it hardshell headbone bony brain cartilage hand made of me half hair half ostrich. But even in all things, Baby, I did love you. As I do tonight. If I could only step up to a mike and take you down into my thought process. (Deed I do. (You know I'd mike^cr you. (And I do.) I am a worldly girl but I do not belong in the worldly — help me Lust — because I am going to Dust, down your highway — I look to the men who kept on, not the quitters. I looked to the man who looked to the sound, not the bureaucrats of world. I looked to the Thelonious ones who made my heart — of my heart a spaciousness, a dry weed vacant lot to dream from. I am caught at the crossroads of the blue and the red. I am at the river junction, now. I am caught at the crossroad — scale of black & white & my registration is to no nation, I am a Cit of the Blues & I can't help myself. Help me Lord I see induced Lester of all Salt Deserts. I see the President of our daily office of Love, before me now. Don Eyes. Lady Wonderful. Mister Slow & Mistiful Excitement of My Heart. I am Caught at the corner of Lester Young's Eyes and Miro's Divine & Simple Excrement. Woman At the Corner of Miro's Mojo Shit, and Mark Rothko's White and Greens in Blue, '57, Dancing. When simplicity becomes an industry, look out. When time off is to improve yourself, Baby you'd better step down that slimy moss sea ladder to love again. For Love is the sea we have left, & Love is the coral drying we forgot, & love is the earth tremor seismic we did not size enough, & love rolled back the water & our coral coverlet broke & died & the coast of love was altered to an Alter we did not know. Dogs swam as fish & fish walked. In a hair blink became human & we loved at night. Portends of ridiculousnesses enfolded us like cucles of plain dumb moonlight ignorance drawn to each other's scent. Like moths to the nightskulls — And if this is the Ultimate — if Love is the Ultimate Pen, Lord lock me up in that wonder — Lord Pillow talk me until I sleep in the Mountain of— Love. I am looking for the sizzle of the Desert when it itches. The Desert has induced the blues to give birth. WE are the Love Children, Children, of Loving. And Jackie Wilson sang, & I heard Jackie Wilson sing —Jackie I hear you call my name out from your coma. And Jackie Wilson sang, "I'm in Heaven when you smile," and I went out on the Highway why only yesterday afternoon I went from my home, number "1037," I went from my abode "1037" & I went "1037" to Love Highway and we were in a car crash, smash 'em up & when I woke up I was dead. I was in Heaven with Jackie Wilson, & Jackie smiled down me and said Child In the paucity of fear go to the City of Love. And Jackie Wilson said, Under apparent fecundities, who knows. But give me some little light figures with your boxing spat high colour tone shores. And Jackie Wilson, said, "Jealousy will poison you with possession, & envy will poison you with grief," and Jackie Wilson said you may have died already so you can relax now. - 188 -
And if we are all dead now, what would we do different? What is this leisure called Love? What is this Ultimate Leisure called Dying? Death has been the Hound Face Portrait I painted in hospitals of the sick. In the wards of the Blues I have been Nurse of it. It is not therapy you want from art it is that offshoot of homeopathic Love Healing. Let me be a snatch of the vinyl black leather night. Give me Five Bones Baby, & love me. I have gone to the Mountains of the Desert & they cleansed me of any smarm. The altitude cleansed away that ironic attitude, for Irony is the nasty which isn't even strong enough to be bad, Irony is Modernity gone weak & the altitude made of me a Poor Heart again, to sing. I was in a Jimmy Reed dream, and my husband was whispering to me the words of love I put myself in, in my pen which was my prison. And my pen was love & my husband whispered, I'm sorry I died in the car. — Please live without me. I have felt the blues skip in and out me like a Chinese gold lock I had a jelled bevy of majesty I was conversant with — life is one long entendre — I had jelled bevies of magisterial airs I was conversant with Dogs walked into the inclemency of bevies of jellies — just jelled light in the summer
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Stan Rogal Sub Rosa Beneath the rose begins a dark correspondence As congress between the red lion & the white lily Stretches one form toward the other. Where primary appeal is to the eye Nothing androgynous confuses, even with Hair & nipples faded in the surgical light. What suggests this eerie scape beyond the body's Refusal to be disowned appears most unbecoming & flesh adjusts to the comfort of its petalled spread. In the swamp, tellurian seems to mate with itself, Voluptuousness an issue wrapped in fluorescence Making principles uncertain in respect to body limits. Whether spurred by egg, bubble, oyster or moon Desire for the hidden cause to be stripped naked Remains a dream within a dream, dreaming. Or that thing no human hand can touch Without destroying renders each fantasy Obsessive, & speculation turns to mirror gazing. On the bank of the apocalyptic pool The fiery red mandragora swells to monster fruit Primed to spoon its bare reflection. Omnia Munda Mundis: Unto the pure all things are pure. Beating madder red from the inky night, the animal Hybrid shifts at the jungled edge. Taking the waters, who seeks travel with the whorl Loses passport in the baser realm of matter. Conception gone maculate where the juices temper. The German proverb that states: "a clear conscience Provides the best pillow," has the secret life of plants Shift the hips to wonder.
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Sub Rosa T r a n s f o r m a t i o n : 1 What hoary secret whispers across the pitch to strike a body blooming? What aloed tentacle seeks to balm the sanguine wound? From any perspective hips shift & breasts heave to the cadence animal avidum generandi Aristotle's beast greedy for generation hid in a fold of legs set to grind a child ecstatic. Here is such livid music & such white light That sparks a vessel madder red parting lips with the taste of Mandrake, love apple & every other nightshade Magic. Listen. The heartfelt noise of it. The sound.
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Sub Rosa T r a n s f o r m a t i o n : 2 Where primary appeal is to the eye, nothing androgynous Confuses. Beyond the aspect of chiselled flesh Petals disclose to the ovulatory moon Erecting a clime for vampires, werewolves & further incubi whose hot breath & hotter words threaten to nightmare this chaised habit Fitful. What might appear possession, instead Embraces dizzy dreams, excited states, convulsive twitchings. Spirit neither St. Vitus nor Asmodeus could bear to dance More willing. Here is que sera, sera Arcanum That belies transgression, figuring, at base, ruby fruit secretes a thick, volatile oil inclined to purge the staunchest beholder. Maculate Christ or some other failed oyster Hell-bent on palming thighs a madder red A lifetime. From the earth, illumination issues, & at each slippering heave, paradise prompts through ritual nakedness. Takes to it. Takes it to heart like no other.
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Sub Rosa T r a n s f o r m a t i o n : 3 On the bank of the apocalyptic pool The fiery red mandragora swells to monster fruit Primed to spoon its bare reflection. Neverminding the cross between red lion & white lily meant to render any beast domestic Here exists such grand aspect that might plumb the depths of whoreson wells advancing taste for the exotic. 'Rosebud' by any other name & smelling sweetly. Just as an egg or a soap bubble, being substantial but Delicate, cannot suffer the tenderest touch without Bursting presents a form no rash few can resist. Though this is mere woolgathering where Who is most becoming emerges wholly Naked almost nippleless, against the bombast. Strange fruit grown comfortable in its early coil Blooms immaculate in the glow. Flourishes.
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Sub Rosa T r a n s f o r m a t i o n : 4 Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak. — Matthew 26:41 What suggests this scape? What makes suggestive? An outrage of petals? A whorl of fronds? An oyster of pure, unadulterate light? A moon that draws on blood fierce as any vampire? A bubble of egg symbolizing procreation & cultic promiscuity? A figure prone to excess; to access — venal, vernal, vernacular... Displays: chirrup-chirrup grind of legs slippering gurgle-purr of hips rubadub-halloo roil of breasts racket of arms belling the ears mouth huzza-hurrah a vaginal cleft intoning enchantment perhaps sudden out-of-the-blue yap-shriek intercourse of sax & violins sacral plash-clang penetration of colour mainly: red, white, black What might be made to situate the so-called consummate Virgin/whore rushes all feeling to extremities. "Beauty being in the eye; ear in the hear," etcetera... Makes plain Heisenberg's uncertain principles. As before a mirror speculation begins and ends with the fatal brash image & Shazam! we behold what we want to behold. Whether dazed & confused auto-da-fe Romantic Or some such otherWise driven Mandrake Conjures variant Autoerotic Eve, on the one hand, her teeth & lips as yet undone by the love apple. On the other, Sara, Asmodeus a bat up her ass - 194 -
Prodding thrust & shove Death of seven cardinal husbands. Interpretation few dare entertain Frames each digression an entrance Long ago & far, far away.
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Blaise Moritz Dancing rhythmically, mechanically Dancing rhythmically, mechanically — each stiff movement precisely the same in speed, span and duration but infinitely varied in type — the cat-men bound over the waves of ancient times in their ship, an enormous plastic bowl, which is both conveyance and toy. Where is the land? Not yet emerged from the sea? No. Far away the single great shore of the unpopulated ur-continent awaits them. They arrive. Reveling in their last taste of plastic (it will be millions of years before they have this taste again), the cat-men claw and chew through their birth sack. Here on the great desert plate in the great spherical sea, the cat-men sadly disassemble themselves. This is the beginning of two separate branches: that of cats, and that of men. For a time the bipedal bodies stumble about with no senses to guide them. Finally, they sprout new heads, but how poor in eye and ear these new heads are! And their teeth! No great sabre incisors. How will they survive? The cat-heads loll on the beach. All this simply to be marooned here, forever looking inland, or out to sea, or up at the sky. The men disappear across the desert. For a long time the cat-heads' only movements are the signaling gestures of their ears, the placid blinking of their eyes, and the yawning and chewing motions of their mouths; none of these can effect locomotion. But sneezing! Euphoric at this restoration of movement, the cat-heads jet wildly across the sands. Soon they become quite faint and fall asleep. When they have all awoken, one of the cat-heads speaks: "I dreamt of a reunion with my body, but the body was not rejoined to me. No, I came to dwell with it and to share the things that it had built. At first, the reunion was marked by suspicion. Think of meeting again someone long dead and forgotten, the annoyance caused by this figure whom one does not rightly remember but who tickles the memory, like an itch in the brain. "I had a new body, a humiliating body or, perhaps, a beautiful one. I seemed to crawl but not crawl, as if instead of knees and elbows, my half arms and half legs ended in soft pads. I no longer sneezed my way along but ran, with that same speed and dizziness. At the base of my spine there was an extension, a useless and distracting growth that was a torment but a pleasure also. It would not stop dancing, as I dimly remember dancing, but erratically, clumsily, as if it too were trying to remember. "In my mind, I saw a beast such as I had become but larger, a beast on all fours with a mighty tail to its body. I saw it as in a diagram, its nerves and circulatory passages neatly drawn, and at the base of its spine was a clock, ticking, causing the tail to dance, and in its head another clock, which served only to open and close its mouth. Somehow I knew this creature had lived and died but when and where?
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"I stared into the bland eyes of my body's new face. What did it think of me? Did it suffer from the delusion that I was such a being? Looking about the place where we lived, I screamed: 'You have gone mad with making things, with nothing but making things and moving about! Despite your head, you are nothing but hands and feet!' "I had thought my language incomprehensible to him, but to my surprise the man answered me: 'What about you, clock-brain, dancing toy, wanderer that I have taken in? Yni have shared all these things with me. All these things you have adapted to your own uses and I have never complained.'"
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Dreams of static and cyclopean walls Dreams of static and cyclopean walls, golden late nights talking to no one. Empty rooms, hundreds of them piled neatly, rows of matchboxes under the moonlight, with stars visible in their windows. In each room, a single chair, a single baseboard electric radiator with dangerous coils to ward off the chill of war, and a wireless set, a distinct antique radio in each, but always the same chair and the same radiator and the same square lamp shade for the overhead light, clouded with insect corpses and with one of the two bulbs burnt out and my voice in every room. I sit in the basement fearing attack from behind, looking through glass walls into a line of rooms which fill up with strangers; they perform tasks, finish, leave. Some stare at me. There is a light that flashes and clicks to signal that someone wants in. Of course, it is possible to break in but this has not caught on. The telephone lights up when it wants to be held. A telephone that simply talks to you when someone far away has a message. No rings or tones, no handset, perhaps no fibre optics or satellites, just an object with a special talent or a sense of duty Can I keep my promise, learn to ignore the tinglings, the aches, the static that fill my body? Static is everywhere. As a child, I put my ear to the table and discovered static, the sound of a radio antenna pointed to space. There was silence on the urban farm even though the mouths of the animals were open. Then I realized they were emitting static, and I was so accustomed to it that at first I hadn't noticed. Down the path came an empty space suit. It took me to a large gash in the ground. In this ditch was a fragment of a wall, red bricks beautiful with age, shaped and colored quite unlike today's bricks. The entire farm was being excavated. Much of the neighborhood around it had been bulldozed to make way for the study. In the distance, a few skyscrapers still stood, but these were to come down soon as well. A passion for archaeology had swept the globe. People now lived on the Moon and commuted to the earth by day to take part in a dig. There was quite enough work for several billion archaeologists of various tastes and levels of expertise. Every human settlement was to be carefully cleared away to reveal the magnificent sites anticipated below. In my old neighborhood, the fragment of wall was soon obliterated as part of this quest for ever deeper finds. Fanatics went so far as to suggest that if we peeled away the layers till we reached the very center of the earth, we would find the New Jerusalem or some such Utopian place. Then came the news that on the site of the former 151 Winchester, a shaft had produced a live cow: a belted galloway, a lovely breed characterized by a broad white stripe circling the black body between the fore and hind legs. The cow was unusual in that it continually giggled, a human giggle deafeningly loud, that could be heard miles away. The earth beneath the point where the cow had been discovered was impenetrable to any tool and green like the glass of some bottles.
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We are the outer space We are the outer space. Within us, the planets orbit. This was my primitive vision of anatomy: the skin a rigid shell, the exterior shape fixed. Now I know the body: a sausage, packed solid inside like a beetle in a water balloon, the human form a byproduct of skin stretched over a frame. A class exercise: the shadows the chair casts are just as important as its wooden slats and, in the final drawing, it is not so much a chair as a checkerboard. The lines that might be contours on a map are the veins and ridges of a cabbage as seen by a hand divorced from the brain, following the movements of the eyes faithfully but imperfectly. Do not equate discipline with repetition. Discipline is the assiduous denial of habit, the belief that the knife could cut more sharply if applied both more quickly and more slowly, or that the leap off the tower glimpsed from afar is neither so frightening nor so fast. (From a distance one does not realize that the leaper will die in midair or that the trampoline set up for him at the base of the recently competed mile-high skyscraper will not break his fall). One day as children, we were on the top story, and the windows in the floor, the ones that look straight down to the street, were open. You wanted to drop a penny but the guard said it could kill someone or force itself six feet into the pavement by virtue of its momentum. Out on the water there was a boat, onboard a man holding a sealed envelope. The psychic amazed us when he guessed that the phrase, "the so-called big god of the Martians," was printed on the paper inside the envelope. This is the difference in the psychic: he is no sausage person; he is like a hollow mannequin. What good would he have been in life drawing class? The teacher: "Learn to look at what is underneath — the bones, the muscles. Draw these and you will find that you have drawn the outline without thinking about it." She commends to us a student's drawing, which features cutaways in the figure. There is one in a cheek that reveals some teeth and a portion of the jaw. Inside the psychic's hard skin is a black void in which the nerves and circulatory vessels are few and widely spaced. Like great abandoned expressways, they link the radiant organs. A great clover leaf interchange surrounds the red heart, the Martian heart, but no big god here. Further down come the tubes, a labyrinth of them, terminating in his stomach, a concrete box. At the ends of his legs, a ghost town, where the air is full of all the dust he has not been able to shake off his feet. He does not so much walk as roll on great clumps of tumbleweed that function as casters. The psychic's brain is a great thoroughfare of skeletal pylons, high-tension towers cutting through vast fields, running parallel to the prime meridian, from the tundra to a boiling gulf of water. There is one pylon, crumpled and mournful, like a broken insect, to mark each time he has used his power. In the tail of his spine, at the very tip of his phantom tail, there are lingering - 199 -
traces of his time as a cat, and in the eddying air behind him, we find a summer night when we delighted in a giant red beetle there on the sidewalk. For several minutes, we knelt on the pavement, transfixed. Anxious that we might call attention to it and thus bring destruction upon it, we moved on but soon returned to coax the insect into the grass with a leaf and a stick. We learned that we were to be rewarded for this act.
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Calling planet earth via the wireless and the telegraph Calling planet earth via the wireless and the telegraph, via broadcast power and aural projection, via a host of dead technologies. Receivers may be found in the junkshop, muffled beneath mounds of vinyl, melted discs left leaning on one another for too long and too near the radiator. The sun is not an issue. The window, caked with pollution, looks onto an ineffectual air well, a narrow shaft in the midst of this great rectangular shit of bricks. The street outside, the entire town, is still being planned. A clock, arrived of late from a mantelpiece, is now the skyscraper kitty-cornered to the building that consists of the antique store and three floors of rented rooms. Visible in the apartment windows are television sets, in a pleasing variety of sizes, that repeatedly play the sporting events to which we sacrifice so much time, able to justify neither this time nor the necessarily sanctimonious and unforgivably alien judgment against it that would free us. One day I will return here. The city will have long since been finished, and it will have lived through a painful illness that will leave it much unlike it is in the giddy frontier days I experience now. I will sit in a room on the opposite side of the street, an antechamber in the office of a psychic charlatan, seeking not my own fortune but that of an inveterate shopper. The clock will have long since been demolished, in accord with the ordinance against civic beauty in the absence of utility But for now, the sides of the giant clock slope up to a crowning arc. A map of the world as it was in that time decorates its face. The map, often employed to demonstrate the sophistication of "primitive" notions of gravitation, shows a circular world divided into the three continents by the "T" formed by the Mediterranean and the Nile. Rain falls, straight down, some of it missing the planet altogether and burgeoning the sea in which the marble earth used to float. The mantel clock and the squalid apartment house are the only buildings, their intersection the only intersection. A single set of streetcar tracks stretches to the west, but the cars are unpopular because the service is unpredictable. For weeks there are no streetcars, and then one wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of wheels grinding along the rails and, looking out the window, one sees the blue flash of the occasional sparks between the car's antenna and the overhead wire. The only fine person in town (there is, in fact, only one, a stiff engraved gentleman in a top hat with arm and umbrella always proffered to his invisible lady) wanders the environs aimlessly. Lost to history is the upshot of all the time we had on our hands: we executed our magnificent plan for calling on Mars. Having ample territory, we dug trenches that formed whole pages of Euclid's Geometry, filled them with our unused gasoline and set them ablaze. This was what has come to be known as the Great Chicago Fire. At last, the dangerous fancies of our freedom and neglect brought regulation upon us. Not all at once! Burnham momentarily succumbed to our charms with his - 201 -
buildings to be destroyed and grand avenues to nowhere (which even today's energetic and ruthless growth has not fully succeeded in furnishing with destinations!). Though we lacked any real faith in the efficacy of our signal, we had successfully hailed Mars. The planet responded on various frequencies. Are radio waves and television broadcasts, jackhammers in the streets and jet engines in the skies, the insect buzz of small boats and the lighting of the city at night anything more than an attempt to jam this transmission?
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Stephen Cain from Arcadian Suite The C r y s t a l Palace "The arcade is a street of lascivious commerce only; it is wholly adapted to arousing desires." —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
The site of youthful addictions. Perhaps a Parnassus, or Fortress of Solitude. But only when school was skipped, before the crowds arrived. Mall rations, tokenism at best, anniversary adversaries. So revel without pause. That brief magic moment before it was all brought home. Colours as candy, the rotting as subliminal, darkness at the center of town. Exercision. Eye or hand, a quarter nation. No pleasure without fraternity. Two-player team-ups with the lines drawn religiously Paying to fight, just like a colony. Queen Elizabeth II confrontations. Cain my brother, Cain my enabeler.
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Centipede "Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede — sometimes attaining a length of six feet — found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters." — William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch
Psyclocibin before the birth of Mario. Shoot the mushrooms and watch the spider dance. The Hilarious House of the drugs we never took. Touching a serpent's tail ouroboros, and I'm green at venery. Tracking the trace of a woman's touch. Spin-balling at the slightest glance. Those days when morning meant awaking spent. Wasting it all in quarters, doing it all by halves. Or notes. Hydra-headed heartbeat hazards. Fecund fungi in a garden without thorns. Regeneration or clearing the screen in this high park. Stopping in Wonderland, but Alice doesn't live here anymore.
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Asteroids "another depth with other stars, the fragments of our last collision in our wake" — Christian Bok, "Krystalloneiros" Thunder boom bass line in the ear. As paranoid as before with 360 degrees of death. Fractals and fragments of a hologram pose. Armageddon equally insular, breaking it down only creates more. Once wished to fill the void, now only the urge to destroy. Rapid Heartbeat Movement. Singular vectors can get you in the back. UFO sightlines, a-whirr or a-buzz in an otherwise white-noised space. Colliding malleable objects with an irresistible force. Providence or Predestination — orbiting a lovely satellite who never learned my name. Hypertext: taking you where you don't want to know.
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Jason Anderson Sex Comedy Donna told Daniel she wanted to be more experimental sexually. "It's not you," she said one night after they made love. "It's me. I have some things to work through." "You're not alone in this," said Daniel. He held her until she fell asleep. Later, she became more specific about her feelings of dissatisfaction and boredom. She would give him magazine articles with passages underlined. "I don't think we're ideal bedmates," she told him one night. "I was reading something about that in Marie Claire. Maybe you could try sleeping somewhere else. You could fix up the garage." Daniel admitted to feelings of inadequacy and wondered whether he'd been putting on weight. "Still," he told Donna, "I'm happy we've been able to talk about this. This is what healthy couples do to stay healthy." But all this talk about their relationship worried Daniel deeply, and he shared some of their problems with Mitch, a friend and co-worker, after they played squash. "People write books about this stuff," said Mitch. "I know about one. It's supposed to be pretty short." On the way home from the racquet club, Daniel purchased the book in question. In this book were descriptions of 125 sexual positions and techniques developed by a team of Flemish sex researchers. Some of what the book described was so new that the positions had yet to be attempted. Donna found the warnings on the book cover exciting. After Daniel collected the recommended supplies, he and Donna spent the following weekend - the Victoria Day long weekend - performing the riskier positions, as well as some of the more conventional ones. Much to their consternation, Donna and Daniel discovered serious design flaws in many positions. Their injuries were minor but extensive. When he felt well enough to play again, Daniel resumed his regular squash date. "Jeez," said Mitch in the locker room, "you look pretty banged up. Are you sure you want to play today?" Daniel explained that he and Donna had experienced some book-related problems. And even though he and Donna felt a renewed tenderness for each other in the aftermath of the accidents, their relationship remained stagnant. "We still can't seem to connect," said Daniel. "There's someone who you should talk to," said Mitch. "He's a therapist for couples. My sister went to see him, said that he was very helpful. Helpful about what, I didn't want to know. I mean, she's my sister." After the squash game, Mitch called her to get the therapist's number. That night, Daniel asked Donna if they should make an appointment. "Okay," she said, "if you think we need some outside help." Several weeks later, Donna and Daniel pulled up in their car outside a town-
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house in a recently fashionable downtown neighbourhood. Waiting at the door was a slim middle-aged man who welcomed them in an English accent. Donna and Daniel were ushered into an office that was sparsely furnished aside from a burgundy sectional sofa and a large painting consisting of red and orange vertical stripes. The therapist sat cross-legged between Donna and Daniel at the corner of the V-shaped sofa. "These problems are experienced by many couples or, as I prefer to call them, love partnerships," said the therapist. "They should be thought of as temporary obstacles that can be overcome with love, patience and understanding. Your sexual life is not dead, only dormant, like a butterfly ready to emerge from a cocoon." The therapist went on like this for some time. Then he instructed Donna and Daniel to list their feelings in point form. "Dissatisfaction," said Donna, "boredom, confusion, pity, contempt. The last two are kind of mixed together." The therapist nodded and turned to Daniel. "Would you like to contribute?" he asked "Okay," he said, "frustration, inadequacy, fear, lust, panic." "Some of those are not what we call 'feeling words'," said the therapist, "but we can work on that later." Using a remote, the therapist turned on some soft jazz music. "Now," he said, "I want you to lie here and think about what you've just told each other. You don't need to take your shoes off." Daniel tried to concentrate on his feelings, but the music was so ethereal and the couch so comfortable that he drifted into a light sleep that was broken when the therapist said, "Tell me how it feels when Daniel places his hands here." "Hey! Hey!" said Donna. Daniel turned to see Donna squirming away from the therapist, who was fondling her breasts. "Hey!" said Daniel as he grabbed the therapist by the arm. "Don't touch me," said the therapist. "I'm a medical professional." Then he punched Daniel in the face. Though Daniel's vision was blurry and Donna was wedged quite deeply into the sofa, together they watched the therapist flee from the house. After a few minutes, Daniel asked Donna if she thought he was coming back. "I have no idea," she said. "I think he took my purse." On the way home, Donna asked Daniel to buy a pack of cigarettes. For a long time before going inside, the two of them sat together in the car and smoked quietly. Daniel took Friday off. On the weekend, Mitch called Daniel at home. "Oh my God," he said, "my sister heard the therapist flipped out. What happened with you and Donna?" "There was an incident," said Daniel. "I told the police but they don't know where he is. I think Donna's okay about it all, but... I'm a little freaked out." "I understand if you don't want to say any more," said Mitch. "And I apologize in advance about the thing I left on your desk. It might not be what you want to see right now." - 207 -
On Monday, Daniel found a newspaper lying open on his desk. Mitch had circled a quarter-page advertisement for the Sun Valley Adult Recreation Centre, in the middle of which was a drawing of a man and a woman in a Jacuzzi toasting each other with champagne flutes. The ad promised "an adventure for every taste in a variety of air-conditioned theme activity rooms." According to the ad, the Centre had been "serving lovers in the area since 1978." Daniel picked up the phone, intending to talk to Donna, but called the Centre instead. Two weeks later, a package of information arrived in an unmarked envelope at Daniel's workplace. Donna and Daniel met at an Indian restaurant that night. Over coffee, Daniel showed her a brochure about the Centre, which included colour photographs of smiling men and women in Jacuzzis with champagne flutes. "I know it hasn't entirely been your fault," Donna said, "and I know you're trying to address my needs. But do you really think we're right for a place like this?" "We'll never know unless we try," said Daniel, "and we're trying this weekend." Daniel drove them to the Centre, which was only 90 minutes west of the city "It's pretty," said Daniel as the building came into view, but really he thought it looked like any number of modestly priced conference centres in which he had stayed during his business career. He was worried that this was one of those places until he saw a sign with a valentine heart and a cupid's arrow pointing to Reception. The young woman at the reception desk greeted them by their first names. "I hope you're ready for an adventure, Donna," she said as she led them to their room. Daniel was pleased that Donna seemed to be taking this in the right spirit. "I think we're going to have a really good time," said Daniel. The young woman smiled in the couple's direction as she opened their door. "Oh my God," she said, "are you ever!" Daniel dropped their bags on the king-sized bed. At the foot of it were a large television and a minibar. He switched on the TV to reveal the gauzy image of a nude couple soaping each other in a shower stall. Donna glanced at the screen. "I should take a shower if we're going in a hot tub," she said. "Can I join you?" asked Daniel. "Why don't you watch some TV?" While Donna was in the bathroom, Daniel watched some more of the gauzy couple but felt uncomfortable after a while. He switched over to a college basketball game. Donna stepped out of the bathroom wearing a red terrycloth robe emblazoned with the logo of the Centre. "You look fantastic," said Daniel. "I don't know," she said. "The red's a bit much. You remembered your swim shorts, right?" When Donna and Daniel were ready, they ventured out of their room and through a pair of red saloon-style doors with the words "Recreation Zone" printed overhead. The Recreation Zone turned out to be very similar to the hallway that Donna and Daniel had just left, except the rooms were named instead of numbered. Daniel stopped in front of the second door on the right. "Do you want to see what's going on in here?" he said, pointing to the - 208 -
Detention Room. Donna shook her head. Daniel went to the next door. "Or here?" "Jungleland," said Donna. "I don't want anything complicated." They passed rooms named In the Navy and Fresh Produce before corning to a glass door marked Jacuzzi Room. The steam made it difficult for Daniel to see clearly, which made him feel apprehensive. "Maybe I should check this out first," said Daniel. "I don't want to interrupt anything sexy." He opened the door and stepped into the steam. "Why do you have to do this every time?" yelled a woman from somewhere in the mist. "The mood is like fucking ruined. Ruined!" Though it was hard to see, Daniel could discern that the woman was naked, very bosomy and not yelling in his direction. She picked up a highball glass from the edge of the Jacuzzi and hurled it across the room. "Well?" asked Donna when Daniel returned to the hallway. "Occupied," he said. "Maybe there's another Jacuzzi Room." They passed several more rooms, not even stopping to read all their names. Then a barrel-chested man with greased dark hair appeared from around a corner. "Hey there," he said. "Haven't seen you folks before. Hope you're having a sweet time." "Hi, uh, yeah," said Daniel. "Good to see you," said the man, looking past Daniel at Donna. "I was just on my way to get some ice. Lady needs a refill." He looked at Daniel. "You a sports fan?" "What?" said Daniel. "Sports fan," he said, his eyes on Donna. "I guess," said Daniel. "Good to hear it," he said. "Good to hear it." He thrust out a meaty hand. Daniel put his own out too, thinking the man wanted to shake it. Instead the man gave him a key. "See you later," he said to Donna. Then he gave Daniel a friendly jab to the abdomen and jogged back around the corner. Daniel looked down at the key. It was marked Extreme Swing Zone No. 7. "I want to go back to our room," said Donna. "Look," said Daniel, "we haven't really given this weekend a try. Nobody says vre have to spend time with these people. Let's just go in the next room that we find interesting, okay?" "Fine," said Donna. She walked a bit farther down the hall and stopped. "You want to go somewhere?" she said. "Let's go here." Daniel read the sign. Circus Room. An hour later, the young woman from reception was begging Donna not to call an ambulance — she offered to drive her and Daniel to the hospital herself. When Daniel woke up in a bed in the emergency ward, his vision was blurry but he could see Donna sitting in a chair next to him. Though it hurt to talk, he asked her several times what happened. She waited a long time to answer. - 209 -
It was a lonely month before Daniel was well enough to play squash. "Do you want to talk about it?" asked Mitch as the friends sat together in the steamroom after a vigorous match. Daniel slumped forward. "I'm so confused about everything," he said. "I don't know what I'm feeling. Donna seems so angry all the time and I can't handle all the questions from the doctors about the..." Then he began to weep. "Oh, Dan," said Mitch. "Ifou're so tense." He slid over on the bench and put his hands on Daniel's shoulders. "Here," he said softly, "let me give you a rubdown."
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Steve Venright Distended Aphorisms There's a time and a place for everything, but it's not now and it's certainly not here. Everybody has to pay the piper, but you might not have to pay him much if he happens to be non-union. Tomorrow is a new day, but the day after that has been made up of recycled moments you were too busy and depressed to notice. Intelligence is the greatest aphrodisiac, but a dab of extract from a civet's anal gland and a nice pair of shoes will usually work just as well. What goes around comes around, but don't expect to get any of it unless you've already got too much. Where there's a will there's a way, but where there's no will there's no way you're going to get anything more than a set of commemorative plates and a busted footstool. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that was before they invented drywall. The Lord works in strange and mysterious ways, but then so do serial killers and plumbers. Money makes the world go 'round, but you only get the full effect if you're dizzy with hunger. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but I never believe those travel brochures. Some people try to be tall by cutting off the heads of others, but they're usually apprehended within a few hours. There's nothing to fear but fear itself, and maybe the fear of that. Religion is the opium of the masses, but they're too addicted to television and capitalist drugs to bother trying it.
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All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind, but that's nothing compared to what the unpaid jobs do. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but you'll make more money from the pound of cure (especially if it doesn't work). To the pessimist the glass is half empty and to the optimist it's half full, but to the paying customer it's a ripoff no matter how you look at it. When the Lord closes a door He opens a window and when He closes a window He opens a door, but if he keeps that up all night I'll have Him evicted. Time heals all wounds, but I'd see a doctor if I were you just the same. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, but you only have to break one to make a baby. Life's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but death is a short certificate written by a sensible fellow with a degree in medicine. Pissing in one's boots does not keep one warm for long, but it's a surefire way to get out of a bad date. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion, but I'm just saying that to make you feel good.
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The Gated Now (excerpts) His kindly juice for nightmares, and a pliant rumba flux hovering between the glass braids and the sticky torsion fibres. It is a world now glowing with xylophonic tumescence — supreme and crustaceous, a little white meat from the steamed brains of hand-fed panthers or beagles. They start the cessation here, where all the grown men cry their various wares. Something like a stuffed trumpet — a tufted strumpet? — can be heard. Miracle dumplings. Vacuum-packed pig-hearts bazookaed into the bay, or through the windows of twelfth-storey furriers and black market hatters. Illegal swamp games can be imagined, even where signs warn against dog-teasing. I take you in my arms and address you courteously, if not correctly.
This one gets a knife right through the neck thanks to some squiddish rat thing hiding beneath the table as he hangs upside-down doing bad unlucky yoga in the Boschean superfurnace. The spongey groves are dank, welcoming of large abnormal fish, and we go there without hope of return. Trickling water on moss makes us shudder cozily. The moon comes up green and scares the shit out of us. Meanwhile, there's a wedding in which the bride is being eaten by two-legged seals with horrible fangs, and everyone present — priest and groom included — is transfixed by a feeling of terror and anguish arising directly from observation of this atrocity. A heavy white vapour blows in from the sea and envelops first the church then the whole town in its milky suffocating shroud. The organist plays on: morosely sweet hymns distended and contorted by the frightful murky circumstances. Let us crawl on our elbows over the damp grasses till we reach the cliff; there, looking down, we will stare jealously at the dreary cavortings of fisherfolk on the beach far below.
I stretch the jungle. I pummel the grottoes. I pluck the sounds of shifting earth. I remove the clouds with a wave of my goblet. I unstring the horses and the corpses of the grove. I embitter the children in their dreams. I suck the bees. I defenestrate the Cyrillic carpets. I smush the waterfalls. There is a greenly glowing figure above the cove. I listen the air out of rabbits. I decouple the goblins. I shatter the breezes. Long flowing velvet discharge of the uterine planets. I uncrunch the windows. I hypnotize the puddles and their golden flapping carp. I dream the eels from the floorboards. I deface the wind. I impregnate selected seascapes. I soothe myself through mountains. Postcards of jackal gods rotting from the sky. I enlustre nuptial torsos. I breathe leopardskin onto glaciers and slow the ages. I bluster the sap already dripping. Black soggy trees. I untangle the worlds. - 213 -
Dreamy suction and clear spineless liquid delight. A phase-shifting cellular drone reaching out across even the secret meadows. In a purple custard innocence, gliders drift above your nakedness. The avenue is empty of people, its subterranean furnaces promising more than the afternoon can divulge. Water lapping on stones and flesh, a kiss under the vines, and everyone disappears from thought save for the conjoined entities, of which you are one.
Slicing through the aluminum dome, a blue windy softness is found within, and it is the blue windy softness of a certain 1957. Vintage exotica suspended in virtual sonic formaldehyde. Night erupts upon suppuration of the shell: absolute dymaxion perfection, but with a tincture of quasi-Incan sultry salaciousness for good measure and arousal. And then a howling tubular bell eventually disrupts the gentle confusion.
You, or someone representing you, undergo brooding crenellations while I aspire to tend you. It's nothing new, except that I haven't spoken of it till now. My ego has dispersed to soon: I have nothing with which to replace it. Hence the vacuity of these lines.
Supernatural forces in a jungle environment sit well with me. All my friends are interconnected by a shimmering teleneural lattice I haven't told them about yet. I have taught the raccoons to wash my hair and groom my beard. In return I prepare them lavish culinary sculptures. The architecture of the city has attained consciousness. The birds sense this and are frightened, but the humans carry on oblivious to the change. The cats wear bandannas and scoff at helicopters. They are my new heroes.
The Ancient Ones have returned, and they're as daffy as can be. They've come to raise our spirits a little, like jesters at a wake. They're torquing our torpor, in case you didn't notice. And now for the weather: There will be a lot of weather today.
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The freeways are clogged with silver flotsam, the clouds are jingling with lacquered froth, the bedrooms of the nation are frozen solid. This is no time to lapse into a woozy bloodless lassitude — there are animals without the least notion of who they are or why we're chasing them. A state of meaty bewilderment has been declared. Are you prepared to succumb to minutiae? Or are you just bestride the geyser, dopily entranced? In either case we must ask you to return to your assigned position. The show is about to stop.
Better to strike while still asleep, in order to maintain an alibi. A cherubic barking up the wall loosens the paint enough that we can read the inscriptions underneath; however, we have discovered to our surprise and delight that we would rather just eat the paint as it peels away like the skin of a blank but meaning-filled chrysalis, the unscripted flesh of the years... While out on the horizon an orange efflorescence continues to bloom and storm and calm the sway, grating on our invidious discomfiture like an under-cooked malady greeping with slime. I can't help but be enchanted by its malevolent charms. A thrashing contrapulition. It's beautiful and it's coming this way.
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Brian Panhuyzen Bald Man Loogie There is a man in the alley whistling tunelessly. I can see him through the rusting grille of the fire escape on which I am sitting with my notebook and pencil. I am sketching the skyline, which is chrome and gold in the setting sun, backed by a mountain range of boiling cloud. It will rain in two hours. I look down between my legs at the head of the whistling man. He is bald. He is looking up the alley to the street. I let a thick gob of spit fall from my lips. It passes through the bars without touching them and lands squarely on the man's cranium. When he turns his scowl skywards I notice that he is holding a machine gun. As he raises his mirrored sunglasses to see me better a burst of gunfire erupts from the bank across the street. The man drops to one knee and pulls back a lever on the top of the gun. I hear the bolt ratchet into place. The man stands up and takes two steps up the stairs that lead to my perch. I drop my pad. I drop my pencil. I leap into the window of my apartment, impact suppressed by a mound of dirty laundry. I don't stop. I flip over on my shoulder, execute a clumsy somersault, and come up on my knees, panting. I hear footsteps on the fire escape and the thump of gunfire from further down the street. I dart through the door into the hallway, don't even close it behind me, two-step down the stairs, nearly trip twice on the fraying carpet, and bolt out the building's front door. "Ha!" a voice shouts in my ear, and there he is, Mr. Baldy Machine Gun Guy, squatting adjacent to the exit. I see the flash of his grin, the flash on his sunglasses, and expect the flash of the gun's muzzle. No time to drop to one's knees and cry for mercy. I turn and run, forgetting to do all those things you urge characters in movies to do when a gun is tracking them down the street: dodge, jump, roll, anything to keep the bead off. I turn my head slightly to see if he's following or aiming and something hot and wet spurts from my ear. I fall, think it must be my brains spilling out, how cruel for my exploding mind to retain enough cohesion to sense its own pulpy demise. Gushing from my head. I fall on my side. Lie there. Footsteps pound past me, the bald man, running away from the scene, leaving behind my leaking corpse. A few minutes of lying on the pavement of the alley, stink of rotting garbage, of motor oil, of cat piss. I look at the pockmarked brick wall, the pitted bars over a window opaque with grease. Hear myself breathing. Liquid running from my ear. I sit up, look up and down the alley. Look at the spot where my head was resting, expecting a lake of blood. Instead there's a foamy bubble where my ear was. A small worm of pale green floating in it. The bald man's loogie. That bastard. I take stock of my body, limbs, neck, feel the back of my head. Intact. I stir my
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fingers through the coil of my ear, hear the squelch of the liquid as I sweep it clear, wipe fingertips on jeans. A volley of gunfire from the street where it passes the alley, and I'm instantly on my feet, running towards it. A silver sedan roars past, rear wheels spinning and burning with friction. A man sits on top of the door, leaning his torso out the passenger window, firing his machine gun behind the car. The bald man. I clear my throat, wind up the back of my tongue like I'm speaking Dutch G words. A ball of saliva surges into my mouth. The car is gone now, heading east. I cut right, up an intersecting alley, hear the squeal of the tires and the brat-brat of gunfire. Sirens now. Just as I'm nearing the next street the sedan rips past, bald gunman within ten feet, doesn't see me as he sights down his gun. I fire. Somehow he knows I'm there or maybe he is dodging bullets, ducks and the ball of spit and snot darts over his head, just misses his skull, seems to wait momentarily in the air until the vehicle has cleared the space below it, then drops to the asphalt, splats on the road just before two police cruisers sail over it, cherries alight and sirens howling. It's all so fast I forget I'm still moving forward, put the brakes on before I stagger into traffic. I take off along the street in pursuit, again charging the cavity of my mouth with saliva. The sedan screeches sideways into an intersection, sideswipes a FedEx van, then bolts off to the right, along the plaza. The cruisers take the corner more cautiously, lose ground. I burn right too, but earlier, at the street before the turn. The plaza curves back, runs past this street at the far end; there's still a chance. Out of breath now, hard to run with mouth closed and sloshing with spit, nearly blow my nose off trying to breathe through it. I rip up the street, past flower vendors and kids playing stickball, leap over a fire hydrant and knock over some old lady with all her grocery bags. Face feels hot as I keep pumping gob into my mouth. My lungs ache, nose feels sandblasted from the inside as I puff and choke through it. Then, way up the block, the sedan rips past. No way I'm going to make it. Gone. I gear down to a trot, a walk, a stroll, and finally I'm standing still, mouth still loaded but no where to blow it, cheeks bulging with this superloogie. Nose whistling with breath. Then a screech up ahead and a bang. I take off again, sneakers scuffing the pavement as I bomb along the street. And there's the sedan. Front end crumpled against the side of a garbage truck. Looks like bald guy pulled himself inside just in time, can see four men huddled within the car's interior, muttering to one another. I dart towards the car, see the bald man turning to face the open window, ready to take this massive ball of spit square in the face. I'm almost there when I hear the cruisers skid behind me. I launch a breath from my lungs, send it up the pipe like gas exploding behind a bullet, still sprinting towards the sedan, when blam-blam-blam! A swarm of hot lead punctures the air around me and the sedan's windows dissolve. The air is alive with flying glass and steel as holes march along the sedan's - 217 -
flank from tail to nose. I smell iron and gun powder, feel shards of exploding glass and metal impinging my skin, duck my head forward, eyes closed now as I tuck it between my arms and tumble forward, drop to knees and then belly. The gunfire goes on too long, an insistent, drawn-out percussion of hammers behind me, the whisper of projectiles above me, the batter and crack of bullets rending steel and flesh. I wait with my bulging cheek against the griddle-hot pavement, wait for what feels like fifteen or twenty minutes as the magazines unload themselves through rifled barrels, send their burning cargo over my head and into the shell of the car beyond me. Finally the gunfire subsides, sporadic now between a voice that shouts, "Cease fire! Cease fire!" until the final shots and pings of shell casings striking the pavement die to silence. I lie still, hear my breathing within the dome formed by my face and arms, slowly open my eyes to see the sunlight spilling into this chamber, see just below my face a bottlecap that reads "Fanta." Purple. Grape. How I would love to be drinking a grape Fanta right now. I am seized by the arms, hauled abruptly to my feet by two police officers. A third steps before me, he is fat with a sour face and sinister facial hair, I would cast him in a film as villain not protector, this unkind figure now glaring at me. I avoid his eyes, glance past him at what is left of the sedan. Bonnie and Clyde, I think, a sieve, a colander, something you could pull apart with your bare hands, so aerated and punctuated this car, this scrap chunk of shattered tin. From beneath the front end a river of fluids, taffy-red transmission oil, lime-green engine coolant, sky-blue windshield washer juice, coffee-black engine oil. And dripping from the bottom of the passenger door, a crimson raspberry syrup. "What's in your mouth?" Officer Nasty barks, reaching for my jaw. I swing my head away, dart it left and right. The cops on each arm tighten their grip and when the fat hand grasps my neck I let it go, purge this vile bladder of fermenting spit and snot, of lung junk and nasal mucus, of tooth plaque and gingivitis, launch it forth with such force, such a gush of liquid, that it drives itself into Officer Nasty's nose and mouth, burrows into his nasal cavity, shoots down his throat, sends him backwards onto his fat ass, staggering and coughing and drowning. His henchmen release my elbows, step forward to help their commandant, and that's when I escape. In one giant, explosive leap I land on the roof of the sedan, feel its stressed and blasted posts crumpling under my weight before I spring again, launch myself beyond it where my feet roll and stagger on something like ballbearings, spent bullets that passed through the car and its occupants, expending most of their energy in destroying same and, having not the force left to continue, came to rest in the shadow of the car's frame. I maintain my balance as I slide forward, skate to the curb, then hop onto it. There are people around me, mouths open in little Os as I bolt through their midst, lips sealed tight as I race down the next alley, gob rushing into the bowl of my mouth, filling the spaces between my teeth, under my tongue, along the roof. Reloading. Footsteps behind me. But I run fast. And I am armed.
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David Donnell October Time to pull in, pull down, simplify ^es indeed, it's time, ladies & gentlemen, it's time. Time to button the blue & grey tweed overcoat up to the top & turn the collar up. Time to stop flirting & time to concentrate on almost nothing but writing great poems with those extraordinarily beautiful young waitresses e.g. Nicole, Selma, the comma is important. Commas are always important. It's October, 20,1998, A.D. Just to be precissssssssse.
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Mick & Keith Mick Jagger — who went to LSE for a while & studied dance with Lindsay Kemp — & Keith Richards always look great in their photos by Robert Frank who got sued incidentally for his film about the Stones called Cocksucker Blues or Annie Leibowitz who is related or isn't related to Fran Leibowitz. I don't know, they don't look very much alike, Fran Leibowitz is a fairly big talented girl with reddish hair. And I like them on tape. But the last time they were here in Toronto with the Steel Rails Tour Keith hung out on center stage left close to one of the big Bogan speakers & barely moved apart from playing the same 3 chords over & over. And Mick ran back & forth from one side of the stage to the other again & again & again & again for the entire concert. Keith must have been nodding in between hits, & one of the roadies must have shoved a whole syringe of cocaine up Jagger's butt before the concert. It was a little bizarre, but you could tell he was glad to be with Keith, & when they got down on Brown Sugar it was good. You could almost sense Brown Sugar's presence on stage / or at other times the presence of Marianne Faithfull the i4th or i5th time she broke her goddamn athletic heart.
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Dark Side of the Moon Dark Side of the Moon was one of Pink Floyd's 2
biggest selling albums, years ago when we were sheep etc. I think of it tonight while I'm walking around the kitchen making a huge avocado & bacon salad. 2 Hydro workers are working outside in the dark rain repairing a broken transformer. Megacity has power failures. I can see them as clearly as colour television but I haven't got the vaguest idea of what's wrong with the transformer, & our power seems to be okay but the building next door is out. Kirsten's in the shower right now, showering, it's bright & light in the bathroom, so she's singing in the rain just like David Bowie & Mick Jagger. I take off the Neil Young tape & put on Hejira by Joni Mitchell. One of the Hydro workers is above the transformer now & his friend is on a standing platform of the extended yellow crane hoist with the large Hydro equipment truck parked below. My life has been a series of repairs this week. My life My LIFE — I don't know how excited or disturbed or manic manic? I should be. I don't feel manic, I feel calm. I'm probably exhausted otherwise I'd be doing more for supper but I've got a loaf of fresh corn bread & there's soup on the stove waiting to be turned on. Kirsten comes out of the shower in a white terrycloth robe & blesses the salad & mixes up a jar of mustard dressing with an egg yolk. Picking up the loaf of fresh corn - 221 -
bread I notice the truck has gone, 'Funny,' I say to Kirsten 'It's bizarre. For about an hour they were directly across the street & as clear as colour television.' 'Good salad,' K says, 'Big mushrooms, you made enough for 4 of us.'
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Red & Blue Huron Corn I got up early this morning, Jane was asleep sheets a tangle around her ankles blonde hair all over the pillow made coffee 8 scoops of dark oily Kenya beans & went & sat on the long front porch of the farm house. Harry comes downstairs in his loose khaki shorts & sits i/2silent on the front steps. What is amazing about this point of the lake the eastern tip where in a sense it breaks up into approx. 937 islands is the sense it gives you of Ontario land not overrun with progressive suburban cottages — the children of the new working class clad in bright bermudas driving their father's cars into brick walls & through metal rails. We walk this afternoon where the Huron planted corn not far from the eastern tip of the giant lake not far from glory. Garth has brought his saxophone carrying it casually the way you might carry a child or a large brown paper bag of groceries cradled on your left arm. There he is walking off by himself now tall & mid-chocolate dark with his pale blue shirt undone & hanging down over his pants standing by the edge of a tiny cove playing to the gulls out over the lake. Harris & Tom are walking behind us, pausing, waiting for Garth to catch up, I guess, & Harris is talking about water & metaphysics & Tom is listening, skeptical, amused, i/2serious, smiles playing across his broad face like light. Canadianism is something that Jane & Garth & myself walking this afternoon - 223 -
through kneedeep grass do not frilly understand as a tangible. We understand our lives & science to some degree, & daily headlines. We don't understand the idea of Canadianism in the abstract. Jane's father is in the hospital, we understand that. The rising & falling dollar is probably a scandal. We understand darkness & light. We understand a number of these 937 islands.
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Did Keith Jarrett Record "What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Life?" The Skinhead & his girlfriend who wears 2 pairs of leggings are shopping for vegetables. I have no idea what this means do they put soy & mustard on their fingers & lick it off like cats at least broccoli tastes but you have to let the soy soak into it while it's steaming in a pool of juice beside the brown rice. Clinton says over & over that we have to discover customers in Mexico Mexico, Jesus, in order to get back the money that has been displaced because big companies like Sansui so who owns Sansui I own a 4-channel Pioneer have been shipping enormous contracts out of America & giving it to Mexican workers who do it for 8 dollars a day. Why do I have to be involved in these questions? Obviously the northern bourgeoisie are shifting their assets. I have a BA but my best job so far was a warehouse clerk. Now I'm unemployed for the winter. A huge series of chemical tank cars blew up in Mississauga last night. We were asleep. Sandy's black silk stockings tossed casually over the back of a straight backed maple chair. One of our few pieces of furniture we have cushions on the floor a classic frying pan, & the new Keith Jarrett tape "At the DeerHead Inn" recorded live at his old bar in the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania. Clear sound. There is no loose money floating around. The big companies take care of themselves like big cats. The Skinhead & his girlfriend are shopping for vegetables. There is probably no loose money floating around in Pennsylvania either. 1 have a package of frozen fish sticks & 4 tins of Heinz spaghetti. I have no idea why she wears 2 pairs of leggings & she has a large ring in her left nostril. There are no jobs, the streets are full of garbage it's hot & drivers speed up at the last second before the light. - 225 -
CBC Peter Tanye comes on at 6 o'clock in the morning & plays a Celtic dance by some group from NFLD & then Custer LaRue who sings with the Baltimore Consort & then Tanye announces one of Schubert's impromptus — #2, from the first series, in G minor played by John O'Connor who is a fabulous pianist specializing in Schubert & Chopin that everybody should go out & buy although Tanye doesn't say so the CBC is totally noncommercial that's the word no hyphen. And so far I've brushed my teeth & I'm walking around in a loose pale blue shirt & I've made some coffee. It's overcast outside but mild & it's going to be sunny by 10:30. And I think this is what Canada is it's latitudinal from Halifax west almost 4200 miles to Vancouver Island & it should be all blue with fine red lines dividing the different states & no Mike Harrises or Brian Mulroneys just tons of CBC even though they don't do visual sitcoms so who needs prat-fall humor — okay, you got one hyphen — sitcoms is a semi made up word anyway — And David Mackenzie walked almost all the way across this enormous latitude no, uh uh, he didn't get paid or sponsored by Nike they didn't have Nike in those days or trains or 7475 & Marilyn Bell swam across Lake Ontario & Vicky Keith swam all 5 lakes both ways & that's what we're all about, I guess, music & sports Moscow & Bob Dole don't exist & I head for the shower.
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Contributors Jason Anderson was raised in Calgary lives in Toronto and writes about popular culture for publications like Saturday Night, The Globe and Mail, The National Post and eye Weekly. He's currently bluffing his way through the writing of his first novel, turnaround. Jonathan Bennett was born in Vancouver but grew up in Sydney, Australia. His first novel After Battersea Park was published in Spring 2001 by Raincoast Books. His work has appeared in many Canadian magazines and journals including Descant, Matrix, and B&A. He now lives and writes in Toronto. Michelle Berry has published in numerous anthologies and magazines across Canada, including Best Canadian Fiction 2000. She has also published two collections of short stories How to Get Therefrom Here and Margaret Lives in the Basement. Her first novel What WeAllWant was published by Random House (February, 2001). It will also be available from Weidenfeld and Nicholson in the U.K. within the next year. bill bissett based in toronto recent books b leev a but char ak trs (Talonbooks) n lunaria (Granary Books) n recent cd's off the road plus (indie) n rainbow mewsik with chris meloche (Red Deer Press) storee n without storee thefuseyuns n dispersyuns work in progress 4 2002 -peter among the towring boxes/text bites (Talonbooks) from wch thees pomes ar advans views George Bowering is a poet, novelist and pop historian based in Vancouver. He won the Governor General's Award for Rocky Mountain Foot and Gangs of the Kosmos in 1970 and for Burning Water in 1980. His most recent book is His Life (ECW Press), which was shortlisted for the 2000 Governor General's Award. Tony Burgess is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author The Bewdley Trilogy, which includes The Hellmouths of Bewdley, Pontypool Changes Every thing (soon to be a major motion picture) and Caesarea. He lives in Wasaga Beach, Ontario. Stephen Cain's books include dyslexicon (Coach House, 1999) and Torontology (ECW, 2001). His sound poetry can be heard on Carnivocal (Red Deer, 2000) and his visual poetry has appeared internationally He lives in Toronto where he helps to edit Queen Street Quarterly. Natalee Caple's books include a short story collection, The Heart Is Its Own Reason (Insomniac Press), a novel, The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World (Anansi) and most recently a collection of poetry, A More Tender Ocean (Coach House Books). She lives in Toronto where she is an editor of Queen Street Quarterly.
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Lynn Crosbie's most recent book is Queen Rat: New and Selected Poems (Anansi). Peter Darbyshire lives and writes in Toronto. John Degen is a poet, playwright and arts journalist. His collection of poems Animal Life in Bucharest was published by Pedlar Press in 2000. He is the founding editor of ink magazine and ink books. He lives in Toronto. Tamas Dobozy is the author of a novel, Doggone (Gutter Press), and numerous short stories and poems in the little magazines. He also owns a Ph.D., and a variety of other diplomas. Currently, the UBC English Department is gainfully employing him. David Donnell has published a variety of books. Settlements won the Governor General's Award in 1983. China Blues won the City of Toronto Book Award in 1993. His most recent book is Dancing in the Dark. Book reviews and poems appear in various journals. Stephen Finucan is the author of the short story collection Happy Pilgrims which was nominated for the Upper Canada Writers' Craft Award. His fiction has appeared in several magazines, including Saturday Night, The Sewanee Reveiw, THIS Magazine and The New Quarterly. He lives in Toronto. Camilla Gibb was the winner of the 2000 City of Toronto Book Award for her first novel, Mouthing the Words. Her second novel, The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life, will be published by Doubleday in 2002. kristi-ly green is a writer and artist from Toronto whose prose and poetry has appeared in a number of Canadian literary magazines. Her first collection of little stories, Nits, was published by Exile editions last year. Michael Holmes was born in Toronto in 1966, but he was raised in the suburb of Brampton. He has published three books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed elegy James I Wanted to Ask You. Since the mid-9os he has edited more than 50 different titles by new and emerging writers under his own imprint A misFit Book, with both ECW Press and Insomniac Press. His first novel Watermelon Row was published in the spring of 2000 by Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver. Dennis Lee was born in Toronto in 1939. He writes poetry for adults and children. Alexandra Leggat's book of short stories Pull Gently, Tear Here was published by Insomniac Press Fall 2000 and her book of poetry is called This is me since yesterday (Coach House Books). She is the managing editor of Write Magazine. - 228 -
Noah Leznoff writes from Markham, Ontario. His most recent book is Why We Go To Zoos (Insomniac Press). A new collection's pending... Jennifer LoveGrove is a writer living in Toronto. She edits and publishes the litzine dig, runs wayward armadillo press, has a day job in theatre, and has published work in various Canadian periodicals. Her first collection of poems the dagger between her teeth, is forthcoming from ECW Press. Derek McCormack is the author of two books of short stories, Dark Rides and Wish Book. He is the co-author, with Chris Chambers, of Wild Mouse, which was nominated for the 1999 Toronto Book Award. An excerpt from his new novel will appear as Western Suit, a limited-edition book to be published by pas de chance books. He lives in Toronto. Nichole McGfll lives in Ottawa but writes in many places. Gutter Press published her collection of short urban fiction, 13 Cautionary Tales, in 2000. She is working on her first novel. David McGimpsey lives and works in Montreal. He is the author of the critical study Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture (Indiana University Press) as well as Hamburger Valley, California (ECW Press), his third collection of poetry. A.F. Moritz's Rest on the Flight into Egypt was nominated for the 2000 Governor General's Award. He has written twelve other volumes of poetry, most recently Conflicting Desire (Ekstasis Editions), and has received many awards for poetry, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and selection to the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Blaise Moritz has worked as a writer, artist and musician in Toronto and Chicago. His writing has appeared in a chapbook published by Junction Books and in Blood dfAphorisms. George Murray has published poetry in journals across North America, including: Descant, Fiddlehead, The Iowa Review, Ontario Review, PRISM international and Rampike. His latest book is The Cottage Builder's Letter (McClelland and Stewart, 2001). He currently lives in New York City Brian Panhuyzen's short story collection The Death of the Moon was published by Cormorant Books. He is an editor at Descant magazine, a typesetter for House of Anansi Press, and fixer of computers at the Canadian Film Centre. He lives in Leslieville with Kathleen.
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Susan Perly is a former radio journalist who writes fiction. Her novel Love Street was published by The Porcupine's Quill in spring 2001. She was born in Toronto, where she lives with her husband, the poet Dennis Lee. Andrew Pyper is the author of Lost Girls, winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel and selected as a Notable Book of the Ifear by The Globe &Mail, The Independent (U.K.) and The New Tork Times. Kiss Me, his collection of short stories, has recently been reissued by HarperCollins. He lives in Toronto. Patrick Rawley is Toronto-based writer and member of the comedy troupe Fukermann and host of Toronto's monthly Bite Poetry Nite. Stan Rogal is a poet, playwright, novelist and short story writer with numerous books to his credit. His plays have been produced across Canada, and he is the cofounder of Toronto's Bald Ego theatre company. His most recent book is Bafflegab (Insomniac Press). Ann Shin is a writer and filmmaker living in Toronto. She is currently working on a manuscript of poetry and a novel, Vivid Life, which is about a family that lives, works and buries its skeletons in media. Her most recent book of poetry is The Last Thing Standing (The Mansfield Press). Adam Sol's first book Jonah's Promise was published last year. He's published poetry in various journals in the United States and Canada, including ARC, Malahat Review, Kenyan Review, and Prairie Schooner. He and his wife, Yael Splansky, live in Toronto, and are expecting their first child any minute. John Stiles was born in WolfVille, N.S. and currently resides in Toronto. John has written for Saturday Night, published fiction and poetry in numerous journals, including Pagitica and The Literary Review of Canada and clips of his rock documentary the smalls...er whatever recently aired on Much Music. John's debut novel The Insolent Boy is due out in the Spring of 2001 from Insomniac Press. Kate Sutherland's first book Summer Reading (Thistledown Press) won a Saskatchewan Book Award in 1995. More recent work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Queen Street Quarterly and Write Magazine. She is currently completing a second collection of short stories. Sherwin Tjia is a Toronto-based painter, poet, journalist and zinester currently pursuing a Master's degree in Fine Art at Concrodia University. He has been published in Adbusters, Quarry, Queen Street Quarterly and dig. His books include Pedigree Girls and Gentle Fictions. His friends call him Sully. Reach him at
[email protected]
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Steve Venright is the author of four books of poetry, including Straunge Wunder (Tortoiseshell & Black, 1996) and Spiral Agitator (Coach House Books, 2000). He lives in Toronto. Mamie Woodrow is the author of two short fiction collections. Her first novel will be published by Knopf Canada in Spring 2002. She lives in Toronto.
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