Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 14

Poems by Jessie Janeshek

Country Music

Yard’s bald of flood.

Rain botches the night

pours through Steve McQueen’s

tomb, Tennessee louvers.

I try to decide

this tight vow, your parting

since I can’t forget

the look in his eyes

when we fucked reading Nietzsche.

He stayed inside me

died once he’d braided

my legs to the side of this house.

Moon smells like danger.

Raccoons masquerade as Ed Gein.

lapping placenta

under aluminum wings.

I find the trapdoor.

humming and bleeding.

You’re born by my knife.

Hot Rood

Mrs. Japheth nails my arms

pours Dark Whore for the hounds

who lick blessed across a barn wall

tighten up my tits.

Old Grey snarls my moth ate his blister

one false hope and I’ll be cured.

Rats twinkle Esmerelda

from the nails above the chifferobe

Nerf balls dropping from the loft

as Japheth fists my sister

wiping out her snifter

with scratch-and-sniff black ink.

Jessie Janeshek's full-length book of poems is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). Her chapbook Rah-Rah Nostalgia is forthcoming from dancing girl press. An Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Writing at Bethany College, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. She co-edited the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008). You can read more of her poetry at jessiejaneshek.net. 

Poetry by John Brantingham

A Memory of Smoke

Today, these mountains are full of the smoke

coming off of the summer foothills,

summer being the moment of fire in California,

and we who were trained

about the horror of forest fire

by Smokey Bear in childhood

and then retrained to discuss the dangers

of Smokey Bear as adults

repeat our mantra

that the fires are merely

the first step in renewal

or that they are clearing the way

for giant Sequoias

or any number of platitudes that are true

but feel wrong way down

in that part of our brains

that we share with deer who bolt

at the sound of a cone falling

that part of our brains

that want us to follow the deer through the fields

and down to the cool valleys and meadows

when we hear that the foresters’ plan,

truly the wise plan,

is to let it all just burn.

John Brantingham is the author of seven books of poetry and fiction including his latest, Dual Impressions: Poetic Conversations about Art. His website, 30 Days until Done, gives a prompt a day in a unified way so that if you follow it, you will have a short collection in a month.

Poems by Daniel Crocker

City of Bones

the worst thing we've ever seen

Robert Bowcock, environmental investigator and colleague of Erin Brockovich

(speaking of Leadwood, Missouri)

I.

The bones broken

bleached cages

just down the street

the new weeds grow

a strange green

The solution to cover lead

with more lead from a town

not much better off than we are

When that didn't work they

sprayed it down with sewage

It's safe, they promised

and the bones grew to dandelions

and we were thankful

to find femurs, ribs bent

to smiles, bits of teeth

tumors spreading into

the marrow of our lives

The shit brought in from the Livestock

Sale Barn, the port-o-potty company

full of hypodermic needles biting

and then

Well, and then there was nothing

not even the sound of our cancers

This is what our fathers died for

we said

Part II

I said

The Company left us

here where the chat dumps loom

like tombstones

Left us like pigs without tits to suck

I said

The Company decided

lead was no longer viable

and left us with it, an illness

I said

and illness

It doesn't really matter anymore

what the men in suits from safer cities

say I said

When they got around to it

they hauled in dirt with less lead

to cover what we already had

and when that didn't work

they covered our town in

shit

literal shit

Months later we were still

picking out bones and teeth

from the dirt

In some yards after the rain

had washed it away

we were left with piles of bones

cattle they said

it's safe and the needles

an unforeseeable side-effect

Our grandfathers won't speak of it

won't utter an ill word toward The Company

that fed them

put shoes on their children

gave them something to do with their

backs and hands

III

What I really mean is this:

the lead runs deep

the dark waters

the tumored fish

the rough hands

run deep

Robbie killed himself

Mike killed himself

Buck killed himself

on and on

It's so simple

our town is small

there's no money

IV

We live in shit

We vote Republican

We pound our Bibles

Eat at McDonald's

drive big trucks

We drink a lot

we fight a lot

we fuck a lot

and pray a lot for salvation

The lady across the street

finally took down her Jesus

is coming soon sign

There's glory in the blood

We were all so busy

waiting on Armageddon

we never noticed

it was already here.

Full Moon

I'm in the dog food aisle

at Wal-Mart when I

am told that my sister

is going to die

I happened to run

into my mother

Well, she said

My sister has

lung cancer

and there's nothing

that can be done about it

She's fine

She's found Jesus

but when it was in

her throat

and they thought

it was gone

after the surgery

they called it a miracle

This will be the

second child my

mother loses

A lot of people

die early here

That night, I smoke a joint

I step out on the back porch

I try to imagine the woods

behind my house as death,

a passage to the other side,

even with a full moon,

it's dark.

Daniel Crocker's latest book is The One Where I Ruin Your Childhood. It's available as a free download from the Sundress Publications website.

 

More Sideways Than Up, by Sheldon Lee Compton

Tiffany Reed pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her forehead and kept walking. The hood covered all her hair except four inches of bangs showing roots grown out so long her hair looked only tipped with blonde dye and a deep but ordinary black otherwise. She felt a drop of rain hit her cheek and run in a droplet over the spot she always darkened as a beauty spot just below her right cheekbone.

The spot was actually the scar left from a capillary hemangioma she had from birth until around her tenth birthday. She was the only one of her sisters to have anything like that, and the doctors couldn’t explain it except to say the blood vessels weren’t fully formed. They told her folks they might form fully over time, they might not. In pictures it was always there, what might as well have been a boil about to pull loose in rupture. Now she covered the dime-sized pale scar over with a brown liner. Masking something ugly with something beautiful and sad, the way she always thought Marilyn Monroe looked no matter how big she smiled.

The street was gray from rain. The buildings, the sidewalks, the entire downtown landscape was dipped in gray, and the sky matched the color save for one or two streaking clouds, like primer boot-scraped along a dark wall. She fumbled through a mostly skinless purse with a ropey handle that pinched at the bone jutting up from her shoulder and came up with a lighter and lit a cigarette outside the Ashland Goodwill store. It was little wonder she hadn’t pulled in much last night.

She wore a pair of sweatpants her ass had once filled out so that the word PINK bounced perfectly enough to illicit staring and, soon enough, cat calling and, nearly without fail, a trick. Now the sweats sloughed off her backside like a mudslide beginning at the base of her spine. When she reached back to pull them from sagging, a rip in the arm of her jacket opened wider, soon wide enough she would notice and have to buy a new one. A new jacket alone meant four or five tricks for nothing more than product maintenance.

She took two long draws from the cigarette and then continued down the street, feeling the buzz in the back of her brain loosening, feeling the need for another pill, even one she had to take regular, feeling how it peeled back her thoughts until the only thing she could focus on was the cigarette and the smudged sky. It was difficult to tell if what she was going through physically was caused from the pills or the meth. There was more meth here in Ashland since they left home. Back home there were doctors to shop around at, pain clinics, emergency rooms that pretty much accepted a certain number of people were there for pain pills. Here, with its patchy city sky and buildings along Main Street dressed up in fancy architecture and the tall smoke stacks always visible out by the Ohio River they might as well have been in Pittsburg or Cincinnati, even though it was just Ashland, Kentucky. It was only two hours from Painstville and another ten minutes after that you were in Floyd County. All the same, it felt like a city, smelled like a city, put a hamper on the country heart like a city. And worse, being here meant getting the pills became a game they couldn’t keep up like they did in the Big Sandy region.

At the corner, where the Riddle’s Guitar and Gun Shop took up half a block of real estate, she made a right turn and headed toward King’s Daughters Medical Center. The cafeteria was open all hours and it was always a good place to rest and count her money. Last night had been slow and she knew Jordan would be pissed. If it had been a better night for takers she would have been able to call Jordan and get some more pills, maybe a bag of motivation if selling was going good on his end. That’s the move he said needed to be made after losing his employment a few months back, making meth and moving meth. Motivation in a bag, he called it.

It was dangerous as all hell, though, and Tiffany had said as much to him. He tried to convince her he knew what he was doing, had figured out the method called shake and bake and that he’d been around explosives enough in the mines to be careful. Jordan said he would only do the shake method until he could figure out how to set up a home lab. He had most of the stuff to set it up now. He was probably working on it now and not thinking about her at all, on the street tired, withdrawing, and so sore in her thighs from humping all night she could barely walk.

There was a fine drizzle of rain by the time she made it to entrance at King’s Daughters. Visitors walked quickly from their vehicles with umbrellas or covering their heads, but Tiffany stayed at an easy stroll. When she reached the entrance she tossed her hood off so that it landed like a thick wet dishtowel at the back of shoulders. Standing just left of the entrance, she lit a cigarette and took long draws, watched the drizzle spray in the foreground until her focus went to the mountains looming behind central park across the street.

More like hills, she thought. These weren’t the mountains of Floyd County, the easternmost tip of Kentucky. Those mountains were still mountains even after they stripped the tops off for coal. These were hills, and like everything else here, Tiffany always thought of them as a cheap imitation of home. Not really far enough away for things to seem a lot different and too close by to forget what home felt like.

A twitch started in her lower calf and branched like lightning into her upper thigh muscle. It was the meth gasping out of her, her body letting her mind know it’d been too long. She never used to run short during a shift. She made sure she didn’t. It was hard enough screwing guys for money while high to even think about it trying to manage it sober. She wiped at her nose before it ran across her upper lip and thought of how long it would be before the stomach cramps and diarrhea started. If Jordan was much longer, she’d be dealing with more than just a twitchy muscle.

Inside, the cafeteria was, as usual, a mix of slack-faced nurses and other staff, living out the last hour of the graveyard shift. But there were plenty of them. That was one of the good things about King’s Daughters. It never slept. She always preferred a busy shuffling of bodies and voices. It made her anonymous, noticeable, if at all, in a passing glance. Those glances always came with a smirk or some twisted look of outright disgust, but she could handle all that for a place to wait on Jordan that was even open before daylight, not to mention a place that served food.

Counting the money in her lap, she picked out two fives and bought half a turkey and cheese sandwich, an order of fries, and a fountain drink. The sandwich went down fast, but the fries were mostly burned and there wasn’t enough ketchup in Ashland to fix them. Still, she finished it all quickly and within ten minutes regretted buying anything. Spasms bloomed into tiny, painful explosions across her stomach wall.

Easing up from the cafeteria table, she took the pre-paid cell from her purse and dialed Jordan as she made large strides into the hallway and down to the side entrance doors. He answered on the third ring just as she managed to fix herself into a squatting position against the side of the building with her knees pulled to her chest. Rain, now at a steady pelt, coated her arms and hands from the portico gutter.

“Yeah,” Jordan answered, rushed, impatient.

“Come down here and get me,” she said. “I’m sick.”

A long pause and then, “You’re calling an hour early. It’s still dark outside.”

Tiffany closed her eyes and could only breathe into the phone.

“What do you mean you’re sick?” he continued. “You out? You already out?”

“Yes! And I’m sick!”

“Sonofabitch! You raise your voice at me, bitch?”

She pulled her ear back from the phone and tightened her arm around her midsection. She could hear his words still booming out from the phone and cutting through the rain to try and strangle her. Turning her mouth toward to the receiver, she called out loudly for him to come get her and then pushed the end call button. The quiet that came after, when the worst of the cramps had passed and the land itself seemed at rest, was as pleasant and surprising as bird song in moonlight.

Jordan Hall pulled on a pair of baggy jeans and notched his belt loosely so the buckle sagged to reveal his boxers. Tiff wasn’t going anywhere, he thought, no need to break his neck getting to her. She was early anyway. He examined himself in the small bathroom mirror. He hadn’t lost any teeth the way Tiffany had, but they were coated in plaque where each tooth met the gum line and a bottom front was loose. He wiggled the tooth with the tip of his tongue and ran his fingers through a wad of coarse hair, tying it off in a ponytail that stuck straight out like a barber’s brush. He offered a blank stare at his reflection. He tried for dead man’s eyes. He squinted harder and tried for soldier’s eyes. He wanted to get to the point that he could command a room with his eyes.

He slapped his forearm across his chest three times, widened his eyes again while staring at himself in the mirror and pulled on an oversized white t-shirt. It’s time for my next tattoo, he thought, and left the bedroom in a rattle of keys and loose change.

The house was built more than forty years ago and with two bedrooms it was easy to heat and cool, but beyond that not much good could be said. Stains crawled up the walls from the baseboards to the light switches along the hallway, and the same stains flowered out from the light fixtures on the ceiling. Jordan stepped over two large circles of dog piss and gave the new puppy a pat on the head as he passed. It lay in a pile of Styrofoam and aluminum foil likely pulled from the kitchen garbage. He took the foil and left the Styrofoam and headed to the kitchen. He passed through the arched doorway and stopped where he stood. Three months later and the setup still surprised him.

The home lab was a graduation in progress from the old shake method he first started with when the pills ran out. In the middle of the kitchen he had sat up a folding picnic table. The table was covered in bottles of Heet and packs of Sudafed bought from Alice and Kent, the couple up the street. One entire corner was covered in packs of batteries. He noticed the kitty litter stash was low, with only two bags left. The cats might have to go, he thought. Getting materials for cooking was a full-time job by itself and he hadn’t even started making anything yet. Not with the lab, not until he could figure out proper venting. Until then, it was one pot shaking, just enough for him and Tiffany and Alice and Kent, who he hoped would get on board and pitch in some space for cooking at some point, maybe even a little money if it all went down right.

Ashland seemed like a big city to both of them when he and Tiffany first left Floyd County. Now it was any other place, except when the homesickness came on full. Lately that was more and more. But he had a plan, so no worries, he told her after he lost the first job and things got tight.

This was about four months after the move. He had taken a job with CSX as a freight conductor, the youngest they had hired since first running trains through Kentucky. On every kind of shift a person could imagine he placed cars for loading and unloading for about a month. Then, by month two, he was supervising training on freights and coordinating switch engine crews, keeping up with compliance on all orders, signals, and railroad regulations and operations for FRA. It was while reviewing instructions for his dispatchers and yardmasters so they could be discussed with the engineer and the rest of the train crew the Harrison Pearson incident went down and busted his ass to the house.

It only took Jordan that first month of bossing to get comfortable and lazy. Though skilled from his time working equipment at both underground mines and surface mines back home, if he could delegate, he delegated. Sign of good leader, he figured. But Harrison was a grandson to somebody big and mouthed off at him when Jordan assigned some yard work his way. The short of it was that it came to blows and when Jordan showed up for work the next day and started replacing a set of air brake hoses, they gave him a last check in advance and sent him home.

But he hadn’t come to Ashland empty handed. He and Tiffany had shopped pills before leaving Floyd County. The week before they moved into the tiny house a few blocks from the hospital, both of them hit the five or six doctors across Floyd and Pike counties and stored up Oxys and Xanax. It was one last stocking up of inventory, but selling would be a rainy day scenario, he told Tiffany. By the end of his first week unemployed in Ashland, the two of them had sold enough to pay rent for a month and get buffet supper at Golden Corral.

Would’ve been nice to have kept that momentum, kept that job, but this is what is now, Jordan thought and turned at the gun and pawn, steadying himself for Tiffany, all the while knowing she was steadying herself for him.

Tiffany’s chin rose and fell against her chest. A security guard stopped where she sat propped against the building, started to roust her and then, shaking his head, entered the building. When the headlights of Jordan’s Honda Civic darted across her eyelids, she raised her head and tried to stand. When she did her legs bent sideways at the knees, an outward thrust that pitched her to the ground. The impact jarred everything inside her and before Jordan made it to her she had already shit herself. When he put his hands under her arms and lifted, her stomach turned and shifted again and this time she vomited.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jordan whispered. He struggled with her, keeping away from the mess in her hair and on her shirt, and finally made it to the car. She had just made it upright when the security guard appeared from the hospital entrance.

“Ain’t you going the wrong direction with her?”

“Just got released,” Jordan said, closing the car door and circling the back bumper. “We waited three hours in the emergency room just so they could give her the pink stuff that wouldn’t help a baby with a stomach bug. What are you going to do, though?”

It was a stupid excuse, but it was all they had right away. Jordan got in and pulled the car into reverse. The security guard still stood where he had appeared, but now he was on his hand held radio. He continued to stare when Jordan checked him in the review pulling out.

At the house Jordan loaded a pipe and smoked quietly while Tiffany lay on the couch. He sat at her feet and pulled her shoes off. After a minute or two, she reached up and took the pipe from him. When she positioned herself better to smoke, Jordan caught the scent of her, foul and acrid. He closed his eyes and held his breath, opened them again. Her hair still curled away from his head in matted tags, bruises still dotted the insides of her thighs. He inhaled deeply, once, twice, closed his eyes again. She took the pipe once more while he sat with eyes closed, trying to imagine a different her, a different house.

In the rapid space between heartbeats, he thought of what could have been if Harrison Pearson never came to work that day, never got his Irish up. Behind his eyelids were train cars and yardmen, the surface of the Ohio River like the sun spilled out across two states. After a time he looked again at Tiffany, wondering what she might be imagining, but she was asleep with the pipe resting hot in the crook of her arm. She was tired. Tired in the bones, not only in the heart. He sometimes remembered what that felt like.

Sheldon Lee Compton is a Hillbilly-American short story writer and novelist from Pikeville, Kentucky. He is the author of the novel Brown Bottle and two short story collections, The Same Terrible Storm and Where Alligators Sleep.

Two Poems, by Roy Bentley

Adriana Ivancich and Ernest Hemingway Beside a Stuffed Lion Head

I place this circle of stones for the living;

May we and others not go beyond it in life;

May we all live to a hundred autumns,

Driving death away from this heap.

—“Funerary Customs, Hindu” from Death and the Afterlife: A Cultural Encyclopedia

The picture was taken at Finca Vigia, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba.

And had Hemingway been asked his relationship status on Facebook—

110 years old, headless—he might have clicked, It’s complicated

because smiling Adriana Ivancich was his inamorata and muse.

He was married at the time. Reading books on Hinduism that said

we don’t die when we die. Death is just a door. So we go on and on.

All right, but then what about this lion? Baring wicked-sharp incisors,

the beast takes up a good third of the photograph. Where did this lion go

after an American on safari in East Africa in 1954 had stilled its heart?

So what if Ernest loved two women in denial of the other’s existence.

So what if some as-yet-unstuffed lion did that with lionesses. Lions

aren’t monogamous. Don’t men and women and lions go forward

into death and into light that is mostly bright and brittle forever

and wants to tell us something important, and can’t. Won’t.

If you ask why I like Hemingway enough to pause on the picture,

I might say that he reminds me of every tortured man I have known.

Of my dying father. Who liked to talk about Paul Newman movies:

Do you remember the time I took you to the Heath Drive-In to see

Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid? What was with the last scene?

In his Stratolounger recliner with the replacement release handle,

the model manufactured by Caye Home Furnishings, the whole

mechanism guaranteed for life, he would cough. Spit. Cough.

The last days and nights he barely slept. We stayed up. Talked.

He was quiet. And I read To Have and Have Not. He got worse.

And before the last coughing fit, he asked about the book. I said

something. He listened. Looked at me. Choked hard. And died.

The dark in his eyes that same manifest dark in the lion’s eyes

as if what departs like that leaves nothing. A token, a trophy.

Fire and the Fury

After midnight in July, headlights rake the orchard,

our tenancy beneath rows of obscenely fruiting trees,

the army-surplus tent we leave to lob apples at cars,

and I wonder if something in us is made of fireworks,

being young, or maybe not quite ageless or wearing

forever like a T-shirt, but made for breathless escapes.

Of all sounds, the noises of cornered boys most pulses

with the operational definition of Fucked. My cousin

Jim petitions an unspecified God. Says his neck throbs,

having been garrotted by a swimming-pool power cord.

His back aches from the fall, he says. A shoulder too.

Having to hide out like this on the 4th is unbearable.

Branchings spill into vortices of spiraling shadow,

sign and countersign in the false dawn of headlights.

A man is quarreling with Jim’s brother Bob; and Bob

is about to save himself (and us) with talk of parents,

grandiloquent half-truths voiced in light detonating

like bottle rockets under a heaven of deliverance.

Roy Bentley is the author of four books and several chapbooks. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Blackbird, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review and elsewhere—recently, in the anthologies New Poetry from the Midwest and Every River on Earth. He has received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA (in poetry), as well as fellowships from the arts councils of Ohio and Florida. He makes his home near the Jersey Shore.

When You're Hungry, You Think of Bread, by Mather Schneider

All of a sudden Noelia wanted a Moringa tree. Moringa trees were the new thing, hot on the internet. You could make tea from the leaves, they would cure what ails you, a miracle plant, like a beanstalk to connect heaven and earth.

Noelia is Mexican, and one time when we were in Hermosillo we visited her uncle Raul. People rarely visited Raul, he lived in his dead mother’s house all by himself and he tended a little garden and was a bit of a mystery. He was friendly and smiled and showed us around the house, but not all the rooms. The house was small like almost all the houses down there and it had rough wood roof beams and a wood stove. The only furniture was a table in the kitchen. No tv, no bed, no computer. Raul didn’t need any of that stuff I guess. When it came time for us to leave he didn’t want us to leave, and he shook my hand and held it for a long time. He gave Noelia a little jar of Moringa seeds that he had gathered from the Moringa trees in his yard.

That jar sat in our cupboard for 3 years until the other day, when suddenly Moringa seeds were the hot new thing. Noelia took out the jar and shook it. It’s like a jar of miracles, she said. She prepared a spot in the dirt by our patio, buried a few seeds and watered them. She was very happy and beautiful in the sunshine.

The next day happened to be the fourth of July, which doesn’t mean a hell of a lot to Noelia, and even though I’m a white American it really doesn’t mean much to me either. How I got here to Tucson so far away from where I grew up in Illinois, and how Noelia got here so far away from her family, well that’s one of those things, long stories for another time. We watched some fireworks that our neighbors set off but it wasn’t very inspiring. It all felt kind of silly looking up into the sky and waiting for the bright lights that were never quite what you hoped they would be.

The next morning, and this is where it starts to get strange, there was a dog on our patio. We don’t have a dog, but there was a dog lying right in that spot of dirt where Noelia had planted her Moringa seeds. It was a male pitbull, tan, big, old and sad looking. Dogs hate the fourth of July, and apparently this one had been frightened by the fireworks and had run away from its home and ended up there on our patio. He didn’t look well at all, he looked hopeless and lost, lying in the newly turned dirt, which must have been cool in July desert heat. We approached him, carefully, but didn’t dare to touch him. He didn’t seem aggressive, but he didn’t wag its tail either. I put a dish of water out for him, and Noelia made him some scrambled eggs. His ribs poked out and there were scars on his body. He didn’t want the eggs, but drank about a half gallon of water, and then went to sleep.

He slept all day there, and later the eggs disappeared. He didn’t seem interested in leaving, he didn’t budge. Noelia was kind of irritated about her Moringa seeds, but she also felt sorry for the dog. She has a huge heart, and is not ashamed of it. The pain and confusion in a dog’s eyes sometimes, you know? He looked like the kind of dog that had not had much love in his life, didn’t have a lot to live for, probably never had. I wondered what his name was, no collar, no clue. I imagined he had lived in the same small yard all of his life, until this one noisy night of gunshots and firecrackers when he blindly ran, somehow escaped his fence and ran the streets. What was after him he’d never know.

The next day he was still there in that same spot of dirt. I went around the neighborhood and asked some people. Nobody knew anything. I didn’t want to call the pound, I knew they would kill him. Nobody would want this ugly guy. The thought of having a dog around wasn’t so bad really. But, still, I knew he would leave shit in our yard and eat a lot of food and be a responsibility for us. Maybe he would bite us one day. I try to be realistic, I try to be practical. But I could tell Noelia was already in love with him. She went to the store and bought a bag of dog food and we put it in a bowl and he ate it up. But he still didn’t warm to us, he just looked at us like he was asking us a question. He looked at us like he was sure we understood the question and simply refused to answer, which made him sadder than ever.

I wanted him, but I didn’t want him, which is the way I am with life. I knew how I was supposed to feel, but there was a part of me that just wanted that dog to disappear and leave me alone.

It rained that afternoon, one of those hell-fire monsoon rains we get here in the summer, and how that dog would ever sniff his way home after that I had no idea. A raindog, I thought. And I thought of Tom Waits’ song Raindog and how we loved that song in high school. As young people we had thought of ourselves as raindogs, all those friends of mine back in Illinois I had not seen in 25 years. We were so melodramatic and corny, thought we knew everything.

Noelia and I had to go to work the following day, and when we got home from work, the dog was gone. Noelia cried a little. I was sad too, but I was also relieved. Feelings are confusing. It’s ok, I told her, he probably found his way home. But she didn’t believe me. She’s not THAT gullible. I’ll make you a nice dinner, I told her, and we’ll watch the novela on tv. We always watched the Mexican novela which came on at 6 while we ate dinner. It was nice watching the drama of the characters’ lives, which became so terrible and then so perfect so quickly. How the women cried and were so beautiful, the men so handsome, and how they rose to their many sudden and unpredictable challenges. It was all very corny, but somehow we loved it and it helped.

I was putting the final touches on the enchiladas when Noelia got the phone call from her sister Rosita in Hermosillo. I looked at her face while she listened and thought, Oh, shit, what? The novela was about to start. Noelia’s beautiful Yaqui face went pale. How I loved those high cheekbones and that long black hair and those huge dark eyes. She hung up the phone and walked to the bedroom. I followed her, put my arm around her where she was sitting on the bed. Mi tio Raul esta muerto, she said. Her uncle Raul was dead.

Murdered. Someone had broken into his house and beat him on the head until he was dead. He had lain on his floor for 3 days in the Hermosillo heat naked until he was bloating and stinking. Noelia’s mother had found him.

I am a cold bastard, a cold white bastard, and I am not proud of it. But I was hungry, you know, and I got up and ate some enchiladas. Noelia didn’t eat anything. I watched the novela for 15 minutes but I couldn’t escape it, so I turned it off and went to bed.

We had to go to Hermosillo. God, how my wife missed her family. She missed Mexico so much, the family, the drama, the closeness, the shared life. We lived in Tucson, where we’d ended up. I missed my family too, but that was buried deeper, and I don’t talk about it.

We drove south, through the border at Nogales, past the tarpaper shacks on the hillsides, through the small pueblos, Imuris with its smoking carts of carne asada, Magdalena, that “magical town,” and Santa Ana with its copper wares and big stone statues and fountains. It was the quietest trip we had ever taken. “Everything is so green,” Noelia said. Her history, her beloved Mexico, green from the rains.

Everyone was at the tiny funeral parlor in Hermosillo, and there was very little parking. I finally inched in between two cars on a side street and prayed our new car would not be scratched or dented. Inside was the family, dozens of them, most of whom had not seen Raul in years. Nobody knew what happened, why it had happened, how somebody could beat an old man until he was dead and leave him lying naked like that, what he had done to deserve it. The lid was closed, of course. They said he was so bloated they had to put him into a plastic bag and it took three men to shove him into the casket. Noelia joined the family and I sat alone, the white ghost among them, listening to the Spanish which I only half understood. Most of them looked at me and wondered what I was doing there, where I had come from, what my story was, and I was wondering the same thing.

After a couple of hours we all pulled out and headed to the church. Again, parking was a nightmare. The church was hot as hell, which sounds corny, I’m sorry, but it’s true. The women fanned themselves and the men mopped their faces with colorful handkerchiefs. The priest said his thing, most of which I didn’t understand.

Cemeteries in Hermosillo are not like those in Tucson. There is no grass and hardly a tree and the graves are crammed together and the headstones are crumbling and many of the graves sunken in. I couldn’t believe how many holes were already dug and ready. There were so many we didn’t know which one was ours, or rather, which one was Raul’s. There were so many you had to be careful not to fall into one.

Right before they put the casket in the red ground, Noelia’s mother leaned over the casket and started crying, very loud and theatrical. It reminded me of a novela, corny, I thought, just for show. I am not proud of these thoughts. Someone asked me if it was true that gringos buried their dead standing up, feet down. I said, No, we bury our dead the same way you do, lying down. One day you’re here, the next you’re gone, that was the prevailing sentiment. I’m not sure if it does any good to realize that.

Two Mexican kids with bandanas over their faces lowered the casket into the ground and started to shovel the dirt. You know that sound of the dirt clods hitting the coffin? With their bandanas over their faces they looked like bandits. One of them had a Superman T-shirt on.

Noelia stood very close to the burial and I stood back. It was late afternoon and the sun burned the side of my face. It was then that I had the strangest thought, which is so corny I hesitate to tell it. I thought of the dog that showed up on our patio, its sad lost eyes, and I thought that maybe somehow there was a connection between that dog and poor dead uncle Raul. I imagined the fear he must have felt when they broke into his house, and came for him, the horror of being beaten on the head and left to die, knowing no one would come to help him, knowing there was no escape. I wondered if he had tried to run. Why had he been so isolated from his family? Why had we not visited him or thought of him in 3 years, those Moringa seeds in the jar in the cupboard? I imagined him lying on his floor, feeling his life slipping away, his soul traveling through the dark night all the way to us there in Tucson, to appear to us in the form of that dog, with his eyes that looked so human, asking for help. Or maybe he just wanted to say goodbye? We were afraid to touch him, and we fed him scrambled eggs, and I wished he would just go away. And then he did.

There was a man selling raspadas at the cemetery, an old brown wrinkled man with a big smile. He scooped the ice into cups and poured the sweet syrup over them, strawberry, tamarind, vanilla… I watched him working under his little umbrella at his little cart, and thought, every day he was there, selling sweet ice among the dead.

The mourners slowly separated and started to leave and the old ladies urged everyone to get together again, and not just when someone died.

Rush hour traffic was insane in Hermosillo, and I cussed when I hit the potholes. Usually before we leave Mexico we will buy some seafood and tortillas, but this time I asked Noelia if she wanted to, and she said “No.”

When we got home to Tucson I would like to tell you that the Moringa plants were sprouting, but that would be corny, and anyway not true. There was nothing but the dark red dirt, patted down where the dog had lain. I don’t know how long it takes Moringa plants to sprout, so we’re still hopeful. Whether they can do all those things they’re supposed to be able to do, well, I’d like to believe it, you know. I really would.

Mather Schneider is a cab driver who divides his time between Tucson and Mexico. He has 4 full length books out available on Amazon and has had poems and stories published in the small press since 1993.

Jimmy the Baker’s Pocket MFA, poem by Dennis Mahagin

Reading is easy,

writing is hard;

so we watch a little

TV, sourdough

loaf, fudge

brownie, our very

souls

becoming human

scones, juicy peach

cobbler, reluctant

steam from pie holes,

each to her own

nourishing

scene,

edified, serially

and horrifically

 

scarred.

Dennis Mahagin is a poet from the Pacific Northwest.

His work appears widely, in print and via the Web.

His latest collection is entitled “Longshot and Ghazal.”

The book is available from Mojave River Press:

http://mojaveriverpress.storenvy.com/products/8421411-longshot-ghazal-by-dennis-mahagin

what i did in the war, poem by Matt Borczon

its hard

to explain

to civilians

that my

gun was

locked up

in an iso

container

for the

whole time

I was

in Afghanistan

that I

did not

fight this

war I

worked in

a hospital

at the

craziest

point of

the war

but no

I did not

fight the

war

I watched

it from

the distance

of a

severed arm

watched through

the holes in

marines chests

and stomachs

through the

eye sockets

of children

shredded by

hellfire helicopters

but I

did not

fight the

war

I prepared

gauze for

wounds and

vacuums to

suction blood

I cleaned

dead bodies

for coffins

for planes

for home

for broken

families

I bleached

mattresses

between patients

and served

meals to

soldiers with

no hands

to eat with

but I

did not

fight the

war

I searched

for missing

limbs and

spoke with

angry village

elders and

was hit

by an

Afghan prisoner

for trying

to help

him stand

but I

did not

fight the

war

and it

wasn't until

I was in

Kuwait at

a stress

debriefing

that I

ever heard

the words

compassion fatigue

or secondary PTSD

so I came home

unaware of

how it

would feel

to hear

helicopters

at night

or how

nightmares

could make

me soak my

sheets with

sweat and

how panic

would make

me ruin

my children

or how I

could lose

days upon

days in

memories

keeping

the company

of ghosts

fantasizing

about my

own death

in order

to feel

like an

end was

in sight

but I

did not

fight the

war

I inhabited

the war

was forced

by blood

to adapt

by death

to adapt

by shock

and awe

to adapt

until the

day they

sent me

home with

no gauze

no bleach

no morphine

pump no

tool or

instructions

to readjust

to turn

it off

to forgive

or forget

so no

I did

not fight

the war

but I

am still

fighting

every single

day.

lets see what can I tell you as far as a bio, Graduated from Edinboro University with an art degree and no job prospects. Started writing back in grade school been at it pretty much ever since, joined the Navy reserve in 2001 went to Afghanistan in 2010 as a corpsman in the busiest combat hospital in the world at that time. Came home and tried to forget everything I saw. That didn't work. Eventually I started writing about it and that is how it all got from there to here. In my civilian life I am a practical nurse for a social service agency and I build cigar box guitars and cookie tin banjos for fun. My work has been in/on pressure press, busted dharma, dead snakes, big hammer, hanging loose and in the collection 100 poems by the soul collective. I am working on a manuscript of my war poems that I hope to get together some time before I die.

By September, poem by Wendy Carlisle

I’m ready for the casual kindness of fall,

ready to work the angles of chill, to

close the deal on the first hard frost and wave

farewell to the sanguinivors that burrow in–

to the skin under my elastic straps

and feed on me and leave behind a histamine

that stings like sin. When they disappear, who knows

where chiggers go but ticks hang around only

the cold shuts them down. When Mary got a tick

in her armpit, she had it checked for Lyme’s

disease. That wouldn’t occur to me.

A couple good frosts and adios ticks.

By December, the dogs and I walk back down

the hill to the creek and never get a nip.

The Professor and the Rodeo Queen, poem by William Ogden Haynes

College students excel at excuses and before

I met the Rattlesnake Queen I thought I had

heard them all. She said she would have to miss

my class for two days to make some appearances

in South Alabama. When I asked what kind of

appearances, she proudly announced that she was

crowned the Queen of the Rattlesnake Rodeo in

Opp, Alabama. She showed me a photograph of

herself with a strangely reptilian smile wearing

a tiara and a large sash of snake skin. Since this

was my first herpetological excuse, I went to the

library to find information about Opp. It turns out

that every Spring for fifty years tens of thousands

of people converge on this small town where the

Jaycees have captured a hundred or so rattlesnakes.

The rattlers are milked, displayed, entered in a race,

fried and eaten in sandwiches or breaded like chicken

tenders. Souvenirs of snake skins, rattles, heads with

fangs, hats, belts, wallets and boots are bought and sold.

There is gospel, country music, funnel cakes and snake

handling. It is a veritable super bowl of snakery, the

Six Flags of slithering, a nexus of neurotoxicity. I chuckled as I

asked my dean, a Southern gentleman, if making appearances as the

Rattlesnake Rodeo Queen was an acceptable excuse for missing my

class. He became very serious and made it clear that we should be

honored to have this fine young woman in the College of Liberal Arts,

and like the other serpents, the Snake Queen was not to be trifled with.