Erg After Erg

Erg After Erg 

Mark Coleman

  Whether it's the Autobahn or the Reeperbahn, you're soon to get your kicks. Speed courses. You blister your fingers on the typewriter keys. Sexual napalm sets your skin on fire. She’s all contortionist moves. A gymnast in see through lingerie. The kind with a hole in the crotch. 

  Stretching in and out. The smell of a hooker rotting too soon. Tumbling down erg after erg in the red light districts. The skyscrapers delete themselves from the skyline. Got sick of being up there stabbing snowflakes and raindrops out of the heavens.

  Wake up in a cold sweat that you mistake for warm blood. You knew a girl named Skye. All you can remember about her is a blonde peek-a-boo half shielding hazel pop eyes. Sitting on your recliner wondering at her beauty.

  Trying to wander back. Racking your mind for another clue to her incomparability. You’d think something about her figure would stand out but there have been so many whores in the intervening years. 

  The lost woman was found, and the island was taken by the military for missile tests. She wasn’t found by me, though. Some lucky fool with a steadier paycheck and a mothballed uniform is owed that honor. He lives with her out there far from the mainland. Came close to renaming her Trinity, I believe.

  From what I hear, marigolds are immune to parasites. But they’re all dead now. Something got into them and wrecked havoc. Exploded. Flowerpotted. Pedals cascading. 

  Woolf liked the waves so much she let them carry her away to a choir of angels. You stare to horizon with eyes like kelp gas bladders. Some snotty kid will surely jump on your face. Obliterate all vision. Kill the legendary at that very moment in time that it is being born. A mythical act crowning.

  You seem to recall a butterfly print. A wry smile. Always half neutral or half frown. Either indifference or displeasure always distorted her face. It was so different from the smile that you wished to place there.

  An underwater cave in the cove that is cool to the mind and the lips. Diving down to the hoop nets. Hoping to have caught something. It’s empty, of course. Shouting on the Paratrooper. Everyone else is having such fun.

  An inkfish spits in your eye, and the water won’t wash it away. Suppose it’s karma. You go out and walk along the pier. Wonder at the rockcod. It’s all a preamble to something. 

  The cormorants and pelicans circle like vultures but what they eat is alive. The bears hike to the stream for trout but find a weary traveler along the way. A broken walking stick that was fashioned after a totem pole that was fashioned after Nature. A sprained ankle. A rock slide.

  Dead children springing like weeds from the earth as the lyre birds fall out of the sky. Mimicking the sounds of the bombs they hear on the way down. Someone has to kill the children. And someone has to justify it. A paper boat floats down a gutter of blood. It’s nothing compared to what we plan on forgiving.

  Standing on the precipice looking up instead of down. An electric storm is fighting for dominance among the clouds. Scarlet lightning going up and down, side to side. The boom of thunder scares your dogs. They try to hide. But in the absence of a hiding place, they just cower against one another.

  The fear stricken eyes and the trembling bodies. Bristle pelage. You can count it all individually. A mouth full of grass seed. Dragon eggs in the backyard. Under the porch. In your hair. St. George is off for the day. Jacking off into a chalice. Making a crying, motherless child drink it.

  In the absence of pornography, you pleasure yourself to a reproduction of Rubens. The coy look backwards at someone behind the negro whom the dog has taken a disliking to. The bosom deliciously bared. The plump thighs leaving you to fill in the blanks as to what they are hiding. The crooked right angles make you want to come in your pants.

  Instead of doing this, you take out your cock and start masturbating ferociously with your teeth bared like a monkey. Baby Thailand gibbons smile out at you but all the adults are screaming. Dirty yellow fangs nailed into the roofs and the floors of their mouths. 

  Kangaroo mice jump about the fresh corpses in jubilation. They think it’s a celebration. Suburban cypress and elm uproot themselves and tear little boys and girls out of second floor bedroom windows. They can not call out to their parents. Their mouths have been sewn shut by terror. But even if they could rip out the sutures with a scream, they would only receive a beating for letting their imaginations run wild.

  Erg after erg. The hamada spreads out somewhere down below. Lost in a land of your own making. Lost in a world of your own making. A Bowles character who awaits the man who will rape her. 

  The amusements are varied. Kids measuring themselves or letting themselves be measured. Are they tall enough to ride? Of course, they are. The people in the Graviton are stuck. Helpless. The freaks look out at their audience with tired, glassy eyes. It’s always just a slight variant of the same group standing there. Night after night.

  You find yourself standing in front of the big top. Still as a statue. A bag of peanuts in your hand. Your glasses reflect the lights of the city out there. Carried to you as on a shining, polished salver by the fire in the skies. 

  The tent seems to be growing and expanding. Its shadow reaches your toes. You wish to back up but you are fixed to the spot. The shadow is a curled finger on your phalanges. Wiggling. Beckoning. Cajoling. The suspended or floating lights inside of there are both not of this world and very much of it. 

  The terrifying shouts of glee and mirth that the spectacle surely does not warrant. Despite that this should at least invite a tremble, you are incapable of shuddering. 

  There is barb wire. There are birds tangled in that barb wire. Some are already carcasses. Some are nothing more than skeletons that you’d find in an anatomical nature book. Some are still trying to fly. These are for the most part the young who have just learned how to perform new feats in the air.

  You don’t want to go in. The rabbits that played in the grass there have died at its feet. Then the grass started to turn. The Ferris Wheel looks down with a grimace at the carousel. You want to retreat back to the safety of childhood. Forgetting all the horrors that lie in that direction. 

  The deer on the surrounding hills have been affected by the malicious influence here. They are beginning to decompose by the mulberry bushes. The goats roll off their little perches on the mountains and make a mess on every rock they meet on the way down.

  There are only two options. Sparrows are raining from the sky. One narrowly misses your head. The sickening thud as the ground comes up to greet it. Your feet begin to carry you forward. The threshold looms. There will be no safety nets from this point onward. It’s not just the shadow pulling you. Something seems to be pushing you as well. A panther stocks a rattler a few feet from the entrance. Soft and soundless. Drowned by everything and everyone under that canvass. God only knows what’s inside of there. The flaps part like a curtain for an aging actor’s final bow. You step forward into the glaring lights and take yours.

Apple of Eden

  Apple of Eden

Mark Coleman

  He crawls legless through this boneyard we call a battlefield. Screaming for the lord to take him home. A home where no fists are brandished in rage. A home where perhaps there is a pretty young wife to pity him as other soldiers have. Someone who would cherish all his letters. 

  Pack them away in a chest that was once reserved for family heirlooms. Smell them on occasion in an attempt to detect the cologne and the eucalyptus sweet breath that graced the back of her neck in the dance hall that evening so many years ago. As it is, he doesn’t even have a dog who would lick his hand in joyful recognition.

  No one deems him worthy of a mercy killing. If he had feet that he could throw socks and shoes on, they would have strapped him in a chair or stood him in front of a firing squad long ago. His life has no purpose. This bleeding out was all he was meant for.

  Biting the inside of your lip at the methadone clinic. Standing in line at the needle exchange so you can put something clean in your arm, or between your toes, or in a throbbing vein in your dick as the case may be. The girl in front of you has frayed cut-off jeans that show off half of her ass cheeks. She must be wearing a thong. You want to tear it out with your teeth, bend her over the service counter, and fuck her until she bleeds.

  The grocery clerk is watching the clock. The time is not sped up due to her watchfulness. Diligence is overrated. It actually slows to the point of near nonexistence. Ringing up food that she can’t afford. Sentences and paragraphs mock her novel of starvation and dereliction. Deserted as ancient ruins that housed dead monarchs or paintings that no one bothered to restore.

  You don't know the definition of the word but you can feel it. Like a dream that tints the day. Not necessarily rosy but of some wistful color that is seldom, if ever, painted. Whether that be by nature, god, or man. 

  It sits there insulting your intelligence in a book when the dictionary has gone AWOL. Or, maybe, it stands accusing on the back flap. A word you've looked up a thousand times, but for the life of you, you can't smash together a string of its peers that would reveal its meaning.

  You hear the sullen tread up the stairs that presages the arrival of the landlady for whom you have no money. You open the cupboard and take out the bottle that was paid the rent instead. You doubt that she will be tempted by this peace offering, but it’s the best you can come up with. 

  Outside the window, a man who lost his son-in-law a week ago to the sea stops on the sidewalk to look at a poster for a missing cat on a lamppost. It frolics there. Ears perked. A ball of string between its forepaws. The untrimmed claws. The abundance of fur.

  He thinks he might look into the pet store. Find some young creature who might cheer his daughter slightly, or else, bathe itself at the foot of her misery. Being that she’s barren, all the lovemaking brought her nothing with which she could transfer the love she gave to her husband. A dumb brute is a poor substitute but he like you is at a loss for what he should do. It’s the best he can come up with.

  His eldest daughter has an attic room in his house. She sits there sewing. Slowly becoming an old maid. She envied her sister’s nights. She still does, though now, there will be no more. 

  The blue dragonflies of summer hover about the overflowing ashtray on the deck. They are not deterred by the fact that a cigarette still smokes there. They almost seem attracted to the plume it sends forth. 

  Your neighbors are chattering over their cocktails and beers. Spouting inanities that are better suited to special ed children. Peppered with obscenities that are fresh upon their lips, and which anyone with class abstains from using. Shirked as a drunken vet lying face first on the pavement. The buses passing him by. The cops sure to be called.

   There’s a girl who sits alone until midnight, every night, in the gazebo. Perhaps, this was an agreed upon rendezvous spot, and she is being perpetually jilted. Abandoned out there amongst the tired flowers. She won’t allow herself to give up because she has nothing left to hang her hopes on.

  The creek bubbles its nonsense to a bored sky in the dark of the moon. The pebbles we skipped are buried somewhere at the bottom of the lake, where as children, we fancied there laid buried treasure. We know better now when we could use it the most.

  Scraping together a little change that we will convert into liquor. Dulling ourselves in the face of adversity. The minute hand makes no more revolutions. The pictures in the locket have faded. Recollections rarely come. When they do, they come shredded as sensitive documents sometimes do.

  We try to find something to toast to. Look around the room. There’s not a single possession we like or need. This feeling extends to ourselves. All the dreams I wrapped up in you have disappeared upon waking. I know you feel the same way as you avoid my gaze. Averting your eyes in what amounts to shame. I’m ashamed at this realization too. Even though, it seems so obvious that whatever we had was bound to die. Something about this particular night seems perfect for it.

  It’s that time of night when all artificial light is imbued with some sort of mystical sagacity. Everything is pleasantly blurred in contrast to the melancholy that renders us immovable. There are no sharp edges. No rough contours. Everything has been smoothed out.

  The way that you used to smooth out your dress upon standing. I’d run a hand through my hair. Yours if it was preliminary to coition. In the doorway there with the kiss lingering on my lips. I was the one who gave it. And I was the one who took it home with me when I couldn’t sleep. The ceiling fan scattering the street lights. 

  A bar down there below this unpaid for room. The liberal pours and the loose women. Naked beneath their slickers. Something sad always on the jukebox. The seasoned barflies look intently at the mirror behind the bar. They think it must be playing funhouse tricks on them. But no, that is who they truly are. With all their accumulated years. All their lost hands. All their rotten luck. Of course, some kid who just turned 21 is sinking all the balls on the pool table. Pointing to the pockets as he does so.

  It seems so effortless for some people. It’s as though the world is at their command. You and I never really had a chance when the odds were stacked against us like this. Still there were those days when no one could see us, and we acted foolish in the most inappropriate places. Even the graveyards were transformed into playgrounds when visited by honeymooners like us. 

  You playfully pouted when I beat you to the punchline. Everyone could see it coming from a mile away. Still, I should have let you have that small victory. I understand now how important these seemingly insignificant things can be. 

  You never acted as though you were entitled to their laughter. If the joke did not land, you would simply try another. Something about a farmer’s daughter. Blinking at the tractor’s lights. Waiting for the till.

  Standing on the side of the road. Waiting for someone to take pity on a penniless hitchhiker. A fair amount of dirt under the nail of the pointing thumb. No sharpie and no cardboard to make a sign that would catch the eye with a pithy beg. The cornfields seem so grand in their simplicity. Desire has eaten its way into your soul. A worm that chewed its way in and died in the apple of Eden.

Cold Calligraphy

 Cold Calligraphy

Mark Coleman

  It all fell apart as we always knew it would. Dreamt up more gods than we could handle as we slowly made our way to hell. Tuxed up to foxtrot farther and farther downwards where no flower has ever been known to grow despite the celerity of decomposing souls. The one record everyone owns. The spattered label. The death’s-head insignia. Trademarked and cobbled into our heels.

  Your chiffon a carnation pinned to my lapel. Eyes cornflower blue. Hearts leaking. Faucets of prosaic boredom. Bored with a love gone stale from overuse. Tedious and weak the expressions of ardor become. How many ways can what cannot be expressed be expressed? No savior ever bothered to wear out his sandals here.

  The mimosa dusted monstrance holds nothing worthy of our adoration. Cannibalism belongs to tribes hidden away in their little patches of unfurrowed forest. Bulldozers waiting in the wings with femurs in their septums. Flashing buckets of viscera yet to be strewn. An alpenglow eye fixed on eradication.

  Wine, of course, is another matter altogether. Warmed to body temperature, and left in little Dixie cups on the church’s picnic layout. Next to a spread of uneaten hosts. Paltry as heaven itself must be.

  Solitary and beautiful as the flower of the crocus. Head bowed as the scylla. Not in deference. Perhaps bashfulness? I’m sure you had not been awaiting my type. But rather the type all young women gravitate towards. Dashing, twentieth century Errol Flynns. Or else gangsters. As long as they’re more Bogart than Robinson.

  With sunken hungover eyes, I took you in. You didn’t notice. Standing there like some wayward street urchin staring at your slippers. A staggering kick at a pebble as you longed on the wallflower street corner of the dance. A longing that reached back to the fairyland dreams of childhood. When all was nymphs and princes. (Eventually, the nymphs turned into frogs and the princes, attempting to slay dragons, were slain themselves.)

  The sweaty palms and palpitations. The hunger that outweighs the rumblings in the loins. Consummation must come but its arrival, at times, seems more chastisement than fulfillment. The slow courtship that holds the thrusts at bay. Jawing up this or that topic at random until it all locks up. A prisoner of silence without so much as a hum from the adjoining cell. Beaten and hosed by the murderous, Argus-eyed guards. 

  Gargoyles clinging to the steeple. Perched with wings spread. Concrete pigeons with amber inset in the sockets. The slow dawning of scarlet. Parched and miserable in half-stumble. Swearing at Notre-Dame. The admonishing facade darkening as the votives flicker about the high altar.

  Vehemence directs our supplications to a different sort of altar. A worship of the very moment. On which is laid a sacrificial future. The idolatrous hours will turn sour and wane but for the present they represent a whole. Bodies in mirthful communion. Even if it is but a slow waltz in a cheap motel. No music other than the rhythm that whiskey beats in the temples.

  Like Sati at yajna. Falling back. Reincarnation. Reconciliation. The only part that is applicable to us is a burned cupid. Mix ashes with millet and feed it all to a sacred cow. 

  You dressed as though every imagined ball was the last. The well slowly drying up. Leaving only mud and the bones of children. Children who fell in and were not deemed worthy of a search party. Lizards there. Peeking in and out of the cracks. Inquisitive but not stupid. Sensing danger, the only thing they darted out were their tongues.

  Pushed back. The pyre welcomes. The flames of love transfigured. Hate fucks in places where we worshipped. You took out your pocket mirror and rippled Narcissus. Leaving no flower to grow on the drunken pauper’s grave. 

  A flash in a pan. Taking communion in one another. I eat you. You drink me. Renunciation in sodomy and spilt seed. Semen streaming from mouth. Strange arabesques on back. Mohammedan crests. Cataracts of white obliterating clouds and thrones. Defiling great chimeras of purity. Washing our foreheads every Wednesday on the off chance that one Wednesday crucified our minds.

  You, the sweet, supple fruit. The knowledge you impart sickens me. The past immemorial. Only the scent lingers after the passage of time. If I could remember you, I would remember an innocence untarnished and undreamt of. What remains are the atrocities by which we mark the calendar.

  S&M parlor tricks. Division. The self looks on as it walks away. Transcendent jackhammering. It stretches you to the point that you become cavernous. Greedy. Diapered men beating their rattles against the balustrade of the crib. Shouting for Mother. Sure she will answer this time. Will not leave them in the hands of uncle merchants.

  Satanic deities in a whirlpool of tarot cards. Spinning through the streets as they scream in the skies. The Wall of Jericho falls.  

  We all cut the bleating throats. Taken away and presented before wrathful gods. They grow like death cap mushrooms. Infesting the fields. The Garden of Eden turned abattoir. Killing indiscriminately in the face of starvation. 

  Bringing the axe down on Nandi. Pre-teens raped in the mikveh. Writhing and screaming. Buried in tradition. Baptismal fonts spewing blood. Chimney stacks in Auschwitz sporting miters. Sabbatarian slave masters. Tombs opening. A battlefield panorama. The bombs drop. The rifles fire. The bayonets tear. The result is not thetan. It’s all so extraordinarily ordinary. 

  There are no souls to be stolen from gaping mouths. Just final kisses. Gaunt and hollow throughout. All the deflowerings amount to nothing. You laid there as I moved. Staring at a ceiling that hid the stars. The trench between your thighs bleeding. I drew back a bedraggled member. Limply dripping. 

  Performed my ablutions in a dirty, rented sink. Catching your eye in the mirror, I turned to face you. Cold calligraphy. Djinn-light on your cheeks. Question marks questioning the periods. The interminable stops that are powerless to cease or hold a second from deluge. 

   Batless eyelashes. An ocean of monotonous holocaust. The year barely out. The snowflake grazing cheek. It smarts. Standing there more lost than ever. A small girl again. In a field picking daisies. 

  I wallow away the hours away from school in search of four leaf clovers. Whether it’s the saint’s day or not. For some reason, most of us boys did. You in a book of chivalry and romance. I was reading something edifying then. Perhaps, a Horatio Alger.

 You were in an all girls’ school. Playing hopscotch at recess. Making little paper fortune tellers that you’d titter over with your girlfriends. Open. Close. Open. Close. Open. Close. Here is the name of your future sweetheart.

  I was in public. Riding down hills on my bike. Down streets past the block parties where besotted neighbors made asses of themselves. Getting in fights, more and more often. Swells of anger yet to be mollified. 

  You wearing pigtails. I had a bowl cut. Counting the pubic hairs as they began to come in. You at a chiropractor as womanhood began to pull at your chest. Learning suffering with the advent of Eve. I affected masculinity. Waiting on the nascent. 

   The first cigarette I had. Hacking on a balcony. Head spinning sideways. The first drink we both had. Spaced on cheap whiskey. Stoned into revelation. 

  You, true to your character, only slightly tipsy on fine wine. Keeping your ladylike composure throughout. Years later and this is where we find ourselves. You were there as was I. In incomplete states. Unaware of each other, and the toilsome concept of self immolation.

  Traversing paths that would converge. Yours was a flowered promenade with a view of ocean and forest. Feeding kites and seagulls bits of ration bread. Mine was showered with a manna of drugs and death. Litter in the form of needles and forgetfulness. 

  The hands that eventually fond each other. Hidden from sight. The insipid banter no longer reaching our ears. The lovemaking that brightened the nights. Until the nights darkened and fouled. Bodies that were sketched in union, now just smeared into a singular monstrosity. Undulations of putrefying flesh.

  You stand there. Naked as a babe. Ask me to show you something other than this. I lower my head in answer. Unable to remember, any longer, a time when pain and failure did not predominate. A time when all was not laggardly sinking in a remorse that the hands of the clock would turn to unbridled malice. 

  Drowning in a kiddie pool that was once an infinite sea of blue. The blue of your eyes. Those soft mirrors that I seemed to have waited my whole life to be reflected in. Like all mirrors, the pupil distorts. It did not seem to be the case at first. It seemed I had been seeing myself for the first time. The self as an ideal. The self as the self yearns to be. I wonder what you had seen in me. 

Femme Fatale

Femme Fatale

Mark Coleman

  We began to have sex. You pulled away. Not so much physically, but in an emotional way that manifested itself in your body. A physiological deprecation. It started in your eyes. A whirlpool dropping amphibian cool down your belly. 

   Your breasts turned into winter sand castles. Sculpted mud. Inside an unheated kiln, I moved. Just the tiny thrusts of an uncertain, certainly unwanted lover.

  I was determined to come if just to spite you. After Burt Bacharach, this is how you treat me? I gave you all the C.S. Lewis an atheist knows.

  The spirit you profess aloof and nonchalant as a nun in habit. Lips chapped to desiccation. Cigarette ash to the filter. Nonexistent drags. Lungs blackened by unspoken nothings. 

  The dying laurels of love make a pitiful bed. I rest my head but no one sleeps beside me. The street and field. Cold and empty. Rabbits in burrow. Cars all parked or tangled around lampposts. Both outside and inside the night is christened in virginal blood. You can’t dam the flow with your tourniquet.

  Decked this limited world of mine with all the flowers that meant something to you. A fistful of daisies. Parched sunflowers that once lit up your eyes and turned up the corners of your mouth. Such a simple flower able to add to your radiance. That natural glow that you carried through germanic countries so many years ago. Red roses with sneaky little thorns that I’d carefully snip off so you wouldn’t prick yourself. Done in private, of course, because it seemed such a feminine task. 

  Bunches of what were surely weeds wrapped up in little bows. You’d politely and carefully sniff them in the same way a sommelier would work over a sip of wine. Pensive in your consideration. The irony of a forget-me-not. Jaundiced about the pupil. I trust the lack of reflection in yours. 

  The flowers that I would adorn your head with. A May Queen half drowned in the bilious self hatred of a remorseless child. You dance. I fall behind the hedges. Not really bashful. Just unwilling and unforgiving.

  The pirouette of a music box ballerina on an unborn daughter’s grave. The tombstone looking down in indifference. Just ticking off the time in a cage of likemindedness. The stars have all gone. I embrace my own irrelevance. I will go too. Down the hangmen’s drop that no well meaning outlaw ever returned from. 

  Another vanishing act will not kill me. It may land me in a hospital bed with insolent nurses sticking I.V’s in my hand. The veins all blown elsewhere. Except where they go blue and chase each other across my chest. Pigs in wallow. Snouts abounding. 

   I tried to sail but I always confused fore with aft. The sirens belching out their once appealing tunes. They are not melodious, anymore. Glued to the rocks like fat seals. A cacophonous battle between alphorn and rainstick in throat. It comes out somewhere between a gurgle and a growl.

  You became synonymous with me. I wish it was mutual. I dreamed, last night, that the crabs were carrying all the pebbles on the beach away. They seemed so unconcerned with what it meant. Despite their hideous side-walking, they did not seem malevolent.

  Footstalks twisting caduceus. Eyes vomited upon the tile. Down the murder-hole at the waxworks. Dripping fresh. Growing. Expanding. Preparing to devour every deed done in private. Wagging tongues and beaten women.

  The faithfully still gone marionette. Playing Punch and Judy in the gallery. Cutting with surgical precision, they come down all claws and teeth. Screaming in clench. The wicket closing off the breakfast warmth. Slow splinters in pubic curls.

  Smashed together in a bed like a press. The screws spinning out. Unaided. Into the occipital bulge and temple. Making foul noise. Blood along the contours. Down nape of neck. Cysts in the socket. Knuckles branded in rage. Up and down your face.

  Crawling along the floor with a broken nose. I take a hit then aim the bottle at the knot of hair growing like an unruly tumor out the back of your head. Bring it down. Shards across the grain. In your palms and knees as you dog it to the kitchen. Stilettos in scramble. Step on a heel until it snaps. Then onto the other.

  You look more like a whore than you ever have. The mascara running with your tears as I kick you in your ribs and spit in your face. I drag you back a good five feet. Belt you. And watch you crawl again. A bachelor at the other end of the stage waves a dollar. You’ll just have to make your way across this broken glass and he’ll be yours to sell your body to for the rest of your life. The little harlot in your heart will finally be able come out and sing.

  You just stand there with a glass of water. Stare at your freshly manicured nails. A bored femme fatale behind the white rimmed shades. A bullet for every year. Another in the chamber for tonight. Wind at the curtains as I move and you play dead. It was always like this. I was a fool to think it was ever anything more.

  Always these pity fucks better suited to alleys. Hand jobs at the Drive-in. Footsy at Thanksgiving dinner. Surreptitious powder room blowjobs. Stolen quickies in filthy gas station bathrooms. The aging condom dispenser hanging on the wall. Unused. Not for lack of change. But the desire to roll the dice. Chance fate with an unplanned pregnancy and an assumed commitment to monogamy.

The Ginger Werewolf

The Ginger Werewolf

Mark Coleman

  Every year comes another eccentricity thinking it's a New Year's resolution. Really it has more in common with a Christmas present. The kind of small item thrown in a large box as a means of throwing off the guesswork of children. Even though, of course, the rattle is telling.

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  Stopped in your tracks by the growl of an angry dog. The dripping jowls. The bristling hair. Bestial fury in her eyes.

  You can't understand what you've done wrong. What cause there is for offense. It seems a minute ago you were elevated in her estimate. Now, it's as though the minute hand has swirled back and you're reliving a moment in an alternate reality. 

  One in which there is no room to err in the slightest. The tiniest fluctuation of voice, at this junction, could come back at you a hundred fold. So, you step back a pace in your mind to chew on the druthers.

  How to darn a rip in the cloth of time? A rip that bleeds, no less. You look into her eyes for a clue. What you find there is a patient brutality.

  You keep your hands stiff at your sides. Bite the inside of your lip and think. You try to grasp her perspective, and come up short. 

  Surely, there's a hint beyond the imposing posture, the unromantic dilation of pupil, the tick of lip. Surely, there's a sentence you could string together not overly apologetic but still hitting a bedroom nerve.

  You know there will be no makeup sex. For without the passion you are so tenaciously trying to light, wordlessly, there can be no making of love. The stand-in would be a pornographic fuck. Replete with the obscenity of emotion you are trying, on your end, to avoid.

  You don't want a fight. You are all to familiar with the feminine K.O. The twisting of words into a knot of vines that canopy forests. The grandfather calls out an hour. Though, an hour has not passed.

  You race through an entire vocabulary only to palm a single vowel. This you grunt then retreat. You can see the string unravel. It hangs there against her breast.

  You wonder if you should try to pluck it. But like gray hairs, you know another will only take its place. These are growing at an astounding rate.

  You picture her as a werewolf. A lupine lover refusing to bite. The jaundiced eyes of a drunk with only 40% of his liver left. She will never stoop again to leashed companionship.

  You play your own trick on time and roll back the years. The first time you called her after pacing back and forth in your kitchen. Searching for an unassuming way to start a conversation with the girl who surreptitiously slipped her number into your liquor bag.

  You didn't know what she looked like then. Could never have imagined her as the ginger werewolf you picture now. She was more like a porcelain doll. Something to be treated with the utmost care.

  You ended up with a faux pas introduction that as far as you could tell, she did not hold against you. You suggested a time and place for a date. Here you faired better, for within the unread manual was the rule that a dinner and a movie was out of the question. The first impression you evidently made would have to be followed up with something unexpected yet within character.

  No time for apprehension or insignificant pauses. You had to strike and strike quick. A fencing move that could not be parried was in order.

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  The peach pit fell from her hand. It tumbled slowly along the gutter and into the ocean. She sat on the bench with you, and took your hand in hers. 

  She did not speak and she did not have to. The bench was warm. The sun was bright. 

  You leaned in and kissed her when it became too much. The old who had lived and outlived the moment walked by and smiled.

  Later you sung her a Leonard Cohen song. She asked if you were really her man. You answered, in no uncertain terms, that you were sure of it. Doubts belong to the future anyway.

  The first time you conjoined bodies was not the first for either of you but it seemed like it. Neither of you ever put any real heart into one night stands. Herein laid the revelation.

  She was exquisite in her movements which made you clumsy in yours. You left your socks on for fear that taking them off would send you tumbling backwards. You didn't want her to notice that she embodied everything that had ever overwhelmed you.

  In Cancun, when they came out and stuck their red flag in the sand. It took you so long to swim back to shore. The waves that tugged and begged for you. You thought you were going to drown. 

  Here in the future which is the past, you are drowning in such a different way. There's a rip in her stocking. You point it out jokingly. The jeans on the floor have rips in the knees.   

  There's a little crosshatched bow on her purple bra. The three rows of semi-circular hooks you have to get past. The straps slip from her shoulders. Leaving half then the entirety of her breasts showing.

  A suckle at the teats of the She-Wolf of Rome. Tarzan like you climb up and up until you reach her lips again. You undress each other.

  Thinking back on it. It seems there was a misplaced hair. You chalked it up as a fluke of the gods. No god is perfect even when you capitalize the "g."

The Cul-De-Sac

The Cul-De-Sac

Mark Coleman

  On the Fourth of July, our fireworks show came from the heavens. We were too broke for so much as snakes, anyway.
  The wind blew back my tore up peacoat. Exposing blood stained jeans. It changed directions. Trying to knock me over like an adolescent cow tipper.
  They go off. You listen to them as you lie drunk in your room. You thought of walking down to the park. But you don't need to see them. You've seen them before. It's better to just hear the dogs reaction to them.
  Earlier it was just kids throwing poppers at each other. You thought it was funny to do it in theaters at that age. Unfortunately, you could never throw them hard enough that they'd explode against someone's head.
  They symbolize sex in the movies. You think of the sex you're not having. All the hand holding you're not doing beneath that display of patriotism.
  All the drunks in tanks with small windows and no glass feel abandoned and forgotten as the semi-elite nation fattens itself up on the Stars and Stripes with friends and family at beer cooler barbecues. You're a step away from suburbia but you haven't made it yet.
  The city is a broken shard you want to cut yourself with. A shattered reflection of the humanity you've never mustered the courage to regain.
  Godless this nation of man made meteor showers. Dreams forgotten. The Sandman an Indian Giver.
  The gun shoots peacock plumage that try as it might will never reach the stars. Duds those that are not gun powder flowers. They are impertinent enough to not give us the microcosms of color that we so desire.
  It sounds like the finale. You cross your hands over your chest. Your breathing is labored. You use sparklers to light your cigarette butts. Toast a hungover nation with vodka that could strip paint.
  It sounds like Iraq out there. A homeless vet with PTSD cowers on a bus bench wishing he could disappear. He doesn't. The war drags on and on.
  The people revolt. Their morality rewarded with bullet holes in their heads. The puddles of blood expand, and the nations fuck themselves in them.
  Hermaphroditic in self accolades. The essence pouring into their cunts from their cocks. An essence with the past stamped over its face.
  The mouths snarl as we beg for scraps. Threaten to snap and bite. The main target in the killing field zigzags. Hoping to throw them off.
  The scope that holds the murderous eye crosshairs him. A minute later, and his brains are on the asphalt.
  The brains to which a mind was knighted. A "Sir" of beliefs that the average man would not find unreasonable.
  Children of napalm run down the streets naked. The refuges lose their cubs, and cry against concrete pillars. The niggers are given syphilis. Transformed into sideshow attractions.
  Their noses fall off and their cocks turn into unruly blisters. Run down the legs of their pants. Rivers as brown as the Platte.
  MK-Ultra watches spiked johns scream and convulse. MK-Ultra erects towers. MK-Ultra drinks too much whiskey.
  The Stingray watches. The sky watches. You didn't want tan lines. You wanted to impress him, and ended up impressing them.
  They size you up, and eat your innards in the airport. Play tug of war with your large intestine. Trampoline on your udder sized breasts.
  They drag him out of their patrol car and slam his head against the wall. In the cell, they are unrelenting. This is the American way.
  Bleeding and apologizing as they strap him into the chair. Bleeding and apologizing as they spatter him with more threats that come out as spittle.
  A broken nose with a thumb driven into it. A beaten companion trying to fade away into its paws. Forgets its species and thinks its a hedgehog. The canine unit is ready.
  They round us up. The tanks run down the gardens with all their carefully selected perennials. Wives weep as they look down at their severed green thumbs.
  The tank men wail beneath the unrelenting tracks of wheel. Tiananmen Square is far from here. This is just a neighborhood street.
  That is just an arm that belonged to a mechanic. That is just a leg that belonged to a marathon runner. That is just a head that belonged to a philosopher. This is just a Cul-de-sac. You'll never escape.

Summer Showers

Summer Showers

Mark Coleman

  They tore off her hijab as well as the rest of her clothes, threw her on the ground, and gang raped her. Each seemed as though assigned before hand to a specific orifice. Switching it up, so each man could enjoy another stolen pleasure.
  I watched on in disbelief. Women like these don't own rape whistles. They ignorantly think that nothing of the kind could ever happen to them. They believe that God will protect them. They are wrong.
  God still lives in the Old Testament. Wrathful. Murderous. Willing to commit filicide. Unrepentant. Lying under oath. All the stenographer has to do is type it all out, and throw New in front of the Word.
...........................................................
  We made love with Serge Gainsbourg singing low in the background. The music of sex. The needle comes down. Finds the vein ready and willing. Concupiscent in fact. The barrel fills with blood, and the phonograph becomes sugary.
...........................................................
  Listening to the hail do car damage and drinking margaritas. An all nude strip club. An all you can eat buffet with pubic hair in the food. A touch lap dance.
  Buying strippers cognac. Stumbling home drunk. Pissed. Pelted. The cloud formations look like cauliflower. The women all want diamonds mined for by children with missing hands.
  Looking very much like a luna moth in her green and blue getup. One of those nice girls for sure. You smell of sweaty, gyrated pussy and cigarette smoke.
  Your wallet empty. Tapped. Couldn't afford to buy another woman a drink, take her to a movie, dinner. Any of it.
  Some men use a clip with the large bills on top in a cock of the walk bid. You wished you had one of those now. Filled to the brim. Full of whiskey confidence, you decide to approach her, anyway.
  Soaked through, you stumble over and slur a few words at her rather than to her. Inquiring about her relationship status and so forth in the chopped bass growl that comes after a night like this.
   She doesn't answer any of this but to your surprise, she shares her umbrella with you. Both of you under that tortoiseshell, turquoise sky. Her hand accidentally brushes yours. You want to hold it more than anything in the world, right now.
  Sweet is the adjective that comes to mind. Not a girl throwing herself all over a stage, and nearly breaking what's left of her hymen with your limp dick, dildo, Jew nose.
...........................................................
  Chalk art kids run over to the Van Gogh, and start dotting in their own stars. Throw rocks bigger than their hands up there. Taking away the rain.
  You notice that the underside of her umbrella is a simulated depiction of the heavens. It's what you'd expect to see lighted above a baby's crib or hanging in a museum. It seems to create a separate cosmos in every strand of her hair.
  It's dazzling. As stunning as any of the rest of this slim girl's natural radiance. You see that its just a light posse of fireflies. When you were a child, you used to catch them in mason jars, and watch them for hours on end.
  She walks. Looking straight ahead. Oblivious to all of this. It could be the Garden of Eden, and she wouldn't even notice the apple or the serpent proffering it.
  You're at peace with yourself for the first time in your life. All the atrocities being committed at this moment, the world over, couldn't take any of this away.
  The second hand has seized to tick. The minutes die away. The clock falls to pieces in the loss of its conception of time. It falls into the ocean of forgetfulness that steals loved ones locked away in nursing homes.
...........................................................
  She speaks for the first time. "It looks like rain." You can't understand why she hasn't noticed what has essentially become a flash flood. You're walking through rivers. No garters. But no gators either.
  Noah could be waving mankind away, and this girl wouldn't notice. She would just keep up the clip clop stride or splash away until the whole of this macrocosm parted like the Red Sea.
  Then you see she means something completely different. What that is you haven't the slightest clue. She seems to know but her head is somewhere between a coma and the wall that divides the people.
  You begin to become conscious of what is going on here. This girl can't possibly have a boyfriend or a girlfriend for that matter.
  She is nothing but a child dressed up in a woman's body. Blissfully ignorant to the point of stupidity. It's almost a certainty that she is as virginal as a Madonna.
  She has yet to look at you. Has only spoken four words. It's doubtful she will speak anymore. Her greeting took the form of a gesture. A kind one but an unspoken one still.
  What she might be thinking is anyone's guess. But she must be thinking. Right? You begin to doubt even this. There's a nirvana like quality to her. Certainly, transient.
  You pass a man sleeping on a bus bench. Or are you in a park, now. The street has seemed to fallen into the same ocean as the clock. But instead of forgetting something intangible it has instead forgotten itself.
  You would like to offer the man money. But in the absence of that luxury at least a kind word. But it would seem an affront to her own kindness. Somehow.
  Besides, you're afraid this whole land that seems wholly nonexistent would complete its dissolution and she would dissolve with it.
  The man dissolves once out of sight. The deluged brown paper bagged bottle held tightly to his chest.
  A newspaper boat floats by. You read a headline that you instantly forget. You're sure it's war.
  It is not a painful process but a slow and arduous one. He can only ascertain that certain parts of himself have begun to costively dematerialize.
  You realize how attached you've become to this woman/girl/child in such a short amount of time. She's existed in a mercurial state within your heart, forever. Before you were born or even conceived, she was there swimming within you. A mermaid with precious gems for eyes.
  Thinking of mermaids you once again look at her hair. It flows as do these tributaries along this strange but wondrous path. It has a Medusa-like quality to it. Even in the absence of fireflies. It lives. It flames.
  But there is nothing there hungry for a mouse. There is probably nothing there hungry for you either. With this awakening, almost rebirth, you begin to take in the rest of her. In pieces.
  Starting with her face you work your way down until you reach her unseen/seen toes. There is certainly an almost timeless bond. But does this bond attach in any true sense?
  Is this all just a fantasy? A drunken delusion? Very unlike those delusions of the DT variety.
  You now do take her hand. Press it. She does not squeeze yours knowingly or in acknowledgement. She unmistakably exists. Her flesh is as soft and warm as you would imagine. To your astonishment she speaks again.
  "There is a place beyond this." Again, she does not elaborate but you somehow know that she is not speaking of an afterlife.
  Is the place even a place? Does the path that you are traversing lead there? You doubt and do not doubt this, simultaneously.
  You had begun to think you were walking her home. Now, you know that this is not the case. She is walking you. There is a reason she lent you shelter beneath this umbrella.
  Perhaps, someone or some force outside of herself had commanded this of her. You rationalize that this place must be an idea. Either hers or yours. You could have not foreseen its actualization. Then you again think of the place as a place.
  There is such a confusion here. Nothing is logically sound. Nothing is as it seems. Ideas cannot be walked to with a beautiful woman who will not take your arm or even your hand.
  They are possessions that not even a prison guard or solitary confinement can take away. Are these new ideas? Sentient ideas? Revolutionary? Political? Romantic? Terrifying?
  Well, certainly not the latter. Why would such a resplendent guide lead you to them if such were the case? And besides, you are not terrified.
  You have never had feelings quite like these. They seem as new as the ideas may prove to be. Feelings of tenderness. Akin to love but not love. Well, maybe that's not quite true. What else could one label your feelings for her?
  Albeit, very rudimentary you do feel that flutter of the heart the poets speak of. Your breath catches in your throat. You try to swallow it and find you cannot.
  This could be the love of your life. The one you have been waiting for so patiently. Wanting to love. To have that exuberant feeling for yourself. Selfish, sure. And you know that love should be unselfish.
  Love should be able to be willing to die for someone else. Would you die for her? Someone that you don't even know. Well, you do seem to know her. After a brief moment of contemplation, you decide definitely that yes, you would.
...........................................................
  In the morning, a friend stops by. He's brought by a bottle and was going to see if you were up. It's not morning exactly but just a little before noon. He knows that you wake up around nine, and usually need a drink.
  It's as much a kindness as an act of sociability. He'll have one too, sure. But he doesn't need one. Especially, so early in the day when the sun, though it should be wide awake, is still dragging its feet into day.
  He knocks on your door repeatedly, knowing you should be home. He calls your phone. Tries your door. Your door is unlocked. He finds you in bed. Smiling in your sleep.
  He's never seen you smile like this. Never seen anyone smile like this before. Never seen anyone sleep like this before in fact. It dawns on him to check your pulse.
  The paramedics pronounce you DOA. After the coroner's inquest, it is revealed that you died in your sleep. Reasons unknown.