The Whistling Fire

AT THE ANTIQUE MALL At the antique mall, a reclaimed schoolhouse Abandoned not all that long ago: In the restroom graffiti remain intact, Unkind words and pictures about someone’s daughter, Like a fresco in the villa of the Vettii, Released from Pompeian ash By archeology’s delicate hammer, For the perusal of unintended viewers. At the [...]

Did Everett ever figure on the many people of his many worlds trading places? Briefly, discreetly, the self conscious self finds himself in the world of the rogue who shares his face – the world of a red headed stripper whose skin smells like weed and whose gaze peers outside of her own existence into [...]

Everyone wants her, she is always for sale Perfect as plastic, bubbly as the air that comes out of her mouth She’s always in the grasp of my hands, I take her wherever I go I shake her hips as they rock back and forth Her curves are flawless, complete, manufactured I’m thirsty for her [...]

This evening when I return to the hotel I see in my pigeonhole Angela’s writing on a yellow envelope. What excuse will she have for not writing? Too busy, perhaps, stirring cauldrons of soup while the cats dash about licking her calves. Or don’t the cats know enough to lick at her calves? Would that [...]

Sheep are by a goat while cattle are like swine, prodded, yet cattle go by hammer while swine are by the hind leg hung then swung about to spigot. Quicker, infinitely cleaner, is the hacksaw of sweet Susan’s laughter. © 2010 Donal Mahoney first appeared in The Miscellany: A Davidson Review Vol. 7 No. 1 [...]

You don’t know her. She doesn’t know you. Maybe she will never know you. Your forehead scrapes the underside of her spine. You spread her hips, squint into a light you have no nerves for. Through dust on the window a fly crawls, etches the state of Texas on the glass, buzzes to the wall [...]

the poisoner’s wife in the cool like lemonade of a hot summer’s day he went as though it were unto a pool the sodium he administered made us a great salt cellar with appurtenances of a modern-day Cellini the furnishings and fixtures round the pool © 2010 Christopher Mulrooney the ask it man in his [...]

Let me do this, now: I’ll drag you down there, down, down, where you will feel lonelier than I, and less delicate, less alive, somehow, jealous of my moving body, in the lights, itself a shifting light. See, love, this is what you missed. What you will miss, are missing out on – it’s passing, [...]

awake The furnace-black odor of cigarettes made acid shadows where you slept — it took me days to smell the cotton clean. It’s a scarred pleasure of mercy to stop feeling you near me, finally. I may have spit the waxwork gristle of collapsed probability, but tinfoil dreams still wire through my unteachable delta rhythm [...]

are gunfire in a schoolyard at three pm her words are like snorting the ashes of what was once new york city after a nuclear holocaust no bullshit her words are strange sexy lethal and beautiful— © 2010 Steve Calamars