I don’t dare look at anyone. I stare at the bra strap, loving it, but also wishing (for her sake) that she’d tuck it away like her hair, which is always in a ponytail. I realize that Miss Darling might even have been pretty once; I can tell by the curve of her cheeks and the way her muscles move in her upper arms. Maybe she should let her hair down. I would if mine weren’t so frizzy.

I risk a sideways glance. Donnie looks like he’s holding in a poop. Patty is asking why we take tests anyways because all we do is memorize stuff, and someone, I can’t tell who, seems itchy all the sudden. Almost everyone could be guilty. I relax a little, begin to believe my own story: No one with a perfectly bump-less ponytail and a skirt that reaches the regulation knees would be capable of copying someone else’s vocabulary test.

No one who knows to describe her arms as flabby and her hair as incorrigible and her face as unremarkable would even need to cheat on a vocabulary test anyway, unless of course she was sick and tired of being good all the time, as invisible as Miss Darling’s bra strap on a good day.

©  2013  Jessica Dur Taylor

© 2013 Dan Cuddy

After ten years of marriage, my mother made my father promise to give up beer making in the basement for wine making. Her grandfather had grown his own grapes on a small arbor in back of his two-family home on Vine Street, her father had oak barrels in the cellar, she wanted the line to continue through her husband. I was only just starting school then, my sister even younger. We were excited when my father came home one day with a trunk full of green glass bottles. These were taller than the brown ones in the basement and more elegant too: slender swan necks in emerald rows. I put the bottle on my window sill, and filled it with my favorite flower, dandelions.

Once, I found a beetle and put him inside too. I wondered what living in a bottle must have been like for the beetle: everything green and glowing and shapes warped, like living in the bottom of a kaleidoscope.

© 2013 Samantha Wallace

Las esperanzas engordan pero no maintienen. Hope fattens, but it doesn’t keep you alive.

It turned noon as David Alvarez raised the roof of the Crusher. With short little explosive sounds, the Rambler lying in the Crusher’s bed released tension from its new shape, as if it tried to pop its bones back into its joints. The compressor topped up its pressure, and when the gauge showed right for a fast restart, David turned off the diesel.

He removed his earmuffs and hardhat, and the sound in the air flipped from deadness to singing quiet. At that moment, in the time between the crush and the removal of the metal block that had been a car, things felt preternaturally frozen. Then a woman cried out.

They had parked the Crusher in a byway beside the river road, on a tributary that fed down east into the Rio Grande. The little river carried only snowmelt just now, fast but thin, quick and not yet quiet as it would be in summer. Cottonwoods stood up shaggy and gray on all sides, the emigrants who had survived in a dry canyon by burrowing their feet into the river.

They’d lined the trucks up with safety cones laid out front and back. Mickey Johnstone acted as flagman for traffic that crawled up from the flats far below. The waiting cars had been sorted into the communal parking lot of a diner across the way, and the crew stacked their auto victims one by on onto the transport semi parked downhill.

The sun held that bright sharpness that cut through with no weight. The cold air bit at their ears and noses. Real spring waited for shade; the cottonwoods had just flashed out their first sign of leaves. Across a wooden bridge and under its own naked trees, an adobe settled into the ground. The cry had come from the house.

David and the others stared across the stream. They had all heard it. They all wondered what trouble a woman had. The closed windows and doors of the adobe said nothing.

With the Rambler onboard its transport, David broke his crew for lunch. He gave Frankie five dollars and asked for a burger from the diner. The men strode stiff legged across the road to their meal, left their boss at the Crusher. He opened a toolbox in the pickup and fished out a grease gun. With one eye on the adobe, he sidestepped around the Crusher, greased fittings that didn’t need attention. He twitched his head, more than he had to, back at the house.

Like most houses on the river road, the adobe bore generational marks, but this one had been scarred by different families come and gone, from folks that had drifted in and then out. The core of the house stood square, with damaged plaster and a bad roof drain, a canaleja with its boards askew and seams opened. They had built a lean-to addition out of wood on the upriver side, and a second addition downriver, out of cinder block. Two vehicles stood in front – A Ram pickup, covered in dust but quite new, and a white Neon, showing its battered fenders and trunk to the road. The real king of the house, a grey dish for satellite TV, poised on the roof pointing south.

Before David had worked all the way around the Crusher, the screen door of the adobe banged open and a man strolled out. He stood beneath the porch and stretched, then ambled into the light. Taller than six foot, solid-built and big across the shoulders. He scratched a beard, grey and brown, with a bit of curliness to it. His eyes lurked behind a beaky nose, concealed under a cap. The man strode to the truck through the sagging yard gate, opened his door and slid in. He slammed it behind him, and backed out with a spray of dust. Within a moment he disappeared down the road towards the Rio Grande.

While waiting for his crew David checked the fluids for the diesel and then unbuttoned the metal cover to an auxiliary pump that had broken down. His brain wouldn’t leave him alone. Mierda, the feeling from that house. Just like before. A man should do something. No fix would make it right. To try?

Resolved, he turned from the pump and marched quick to the bridge, across it and the stream to the driveway of the house. He slowed past the dead flowers in their tubs on the porch. Keeping back two respectful steps from the door, he leaned forward and knocked. No sound from inside – he scuffed his boot on the sand that dusted the porch and then knocked again.

He barely heard a shuffle, like a whisper or a little prayer. Someone stood on the other side of the door, waited. He leaned forward and knocked, soft. The door crept open; a woman barely revealed, hiding in the gloom. David squinted to see her in the dark as he stood out on the bright porch. She held the door half open, with her shoulder and hip behind.

“Hello, I’m the foreman for the crew there. I know we’ve been making a lot of noise this morning. I hope it hasn’t disturbed you.”

She inched forward, and the door opened wider. She stood shorter than David’s height, five and a half feet, and she was thin. He knew what she could see, a man in coveralls, with a balding, shaved head, big through the shoulders, with the paunch of a middle-aged workman. He pulled his neck in and ducked his head so he would appear less physical.

“I know it’s noisy, and it will be for awhile more this afternoon. I hope we haven’t been disturbing you.” She had long dark hair that lay tangled on the right shoulder, pulled back around from the left side of her face.

She half-stepped forward and let the door open beside her. “No, it’s no trouble. You haven’t bothered us.” He could see now that no one stood behind her. He had a chance.

“We don’t often work right beside someone’s house unless they are giving us a car to crush. I know we can cause some noise and some dust.”

She replied with more of a hum or ahem than actual words. She lingered back in there, concealed by a dark room. David wanted a better view of her.

He knew he appeared bear-like to her, that his mustache hid his face. He wrinkled his forehead. “See, we’re required by the Department to let people know who we are, in case there are any complaints or we haven’t cleaned up or something. Let me leave you my card. It’s got the number of our office on it.” He fumbled in his coveralls pocket, came up with his wallet, dug out a business card.

She moved forward to the screen door and opened it a crack. He inched forward, card extended. She was white, not only Anglo, but also pale. Her hair, full and dark, looked unkempt but not dirty. Her face, without a sign of makeup, drawn, emaciated, and her lips, sad thin lines turned down across her face.

She reached around the edge of the screen door and pinched the card between thin fingers and thumb. “Thank you.” Even as she retreated back into the house and closed the screen, David could see her. Her hair swung back from the right side of her face. He glimpsed a cheek dark and bruised, and a new red highlight up around the eye. The door closed. The lock clicked.

The man in the truck, he must be left handed.

Across the little bridge, he found his crew straggling back from lunch, smoking and laughing together as they crossed the blacktop. Frankie gave him his burger wrapped in paper, and forty-three cents in change. He also gave David a quizzical glance. “So, you were over at the house. Maybe you were visiting an abularia, no?

“No, just saying hi.”

“David,” said Matt, “I wouldn’t be messing around that house. In the diner they say que the man there, he is muncho malo.”

“Why did they tell you?”

“We asked.” The guys gazed down at the ground or away.

“Well, that muncho malo is a big man because he hits women. I didn’t talk to him, but I saw her, gave her my card.”

“Porqué you would give her your card. How did you get cards? You never gave us no card.”

David ignored that. “It was just to get her to open the door, to see what was going on. I told her we were required to give out phone numbers if there was a complaint.”

“Sí, like we would help the guys in Santa Fe bust our chops, by wrapping up complaints like presents. But what about the woman?”

“What about her?”

The men shuffled their feet, gazed down the road. Matt broke first. “But, in the diner, they did say that tipo, he does las luchas on her, and nobody will say nothing to him. They say it’s not their business, but in the diner they all chur talk about the business in that house.”

David stared levelly at Matt, then said, “Well, back to it. Achaques quire la muerte.” Their white crew-member Mickey wrinkled his forehead, so David added, “Death needs no excuses – but we will if we don’t get back to work.”

By mid afternoon they had demolished all the cars and loaded them up on transport. The crew raked up the litter from their crushing. David stood, hands on his hips, watched the blank face of the adobe. After some consideration he said to Frankie, “I think I’ll get some water to prime the broke pump. When you’re done, get Mickey to load the tractor. I’ll be back before you’re finished. Then we’ll all go down to the highway yard to park for the night.” Lame excuse. Who needed water for a busted pump?

He trudged once again to the adobe’s door and knocked. Again, she opened it, and again stood back in the shadow, the dark of that house. David said, “Hi. I was here earlier. I wonder if I could trouble you for a bucket of water? We need to start a pump, and I don’t want to use water from the river because of the sand.”

She let a silence hang between them. He knew that silence.

She nodded. She opened the screen door. “Ok. You’d better come in to get it.” He scuffed his boots on the mat, and then followed her in, into the cuartito. The room owned sad furniture with round sags and depressions, conforming to where people had dumped their bodies down. A large, newish TV loomed in the corner, with speakers scattered around it. A swinging door sagged in the corner, led into the kitchen. She glanced back over her shoulder at him, and then shambled into the cocina through the louvered door. It banged behind her. Diffident, he trudged across the room, pulled the door back. He could smell old bacon grease.

She shuffled into the corner of the room, removed a mop from a bucket, then it at the sink. David stood back across the room from her, and said, “That’s a bad bruise you’ve got.”

The only sound in the room was the water rushing into the bucket. In a small voice, she said, “I walked into a door.”

“The door walked into you twice, on two separate days.”

She turned from the sink with the bucket bail in both hands. With a step forward she set it on the table between them. It sloshed water back and forth. She flashed her eyes up at him. “That wouldn’t be for you to say, would it?”

“Listen, in these rincónes, there is only one thing you can do. Get out.”

A long pause. She stared unflinching at him. Under the florescent lights, the mark on her face appeared much worse, green around the edges. “Assuming I had a reason to get out, where would I go? Where would we go?” He glanced around the dingy kitchen, with its tiny window and its drainer full of plastic dishes.

Now that he wasn’t fixated on her, David could see children’s toys shoveled into one corner of the room and kid cups on the table. “You can’t go on like this forever. There must be some place.”

“You’d better go,” she said. She pointed at the bucket and water. “The kids will be back real soon. They might tell my husband there someone had been in the house.” He hefted up the plastic pail of water. As he reached the front door, she said, “I need the bucket back.”

He stood in the doorway. “Look, you don’t know me, but you have my number now. If you need me to drive you somewhere.” An empty gesture. Said for her, or him?

The crew was ready to go when he got back to the Crusher. He poured the water on the ground near a tire, out of sight of the adobe. Then he handed the bucket to Mickey. “Set this down on the porch of the casita over there. Then lead by taking the first semi down the canyon.”

© 2013 Scott Archer Jones

that stretched my skin

like a canvas on a frame

that made me levitate

over your face

on tremulous wings

just once

shivering above

your lips

around your tongue

just once, eternity,

from an absinthe pipe

I touched the sky

and you

I soared

my breath on fire

my startled blood

but was it love?

© 2013 Neil Ellman

of speaking the spattered dark
of salvaged blankets,

droop as blackness
and late hour wreckage,

commanded respect:
a twinge of blinked-up

thumping, of an old filmstrip
seen through an aquarium,

of approaching cuts
and beginnings.

© 2013 Elizabeth Wylder

The heart is an engine, an engine, an engine. Four chambers thump away, an enigma, an enigma, an enigma. It is on the beach late one night, the tide full in, the shush of wave and wash full-echoing in the dark, her scarred, pitted face bright against a backdrop of cloud. In the syzygy of incoming water she is on her back, the moon in her eyes, panting, heavy-bodied, my mouth on hers, the bitter taste of coffee, fatal jabs to the heart.

The rock is a bed, the sky a cabin, the moon a lamp, and she is all I can handle and more, now one of the chambers of my heart has ceased to beat, closed its valvic opening, failed in its task. I feel sleepy, the rush of blood in my inner ear resonates with the to-and-fro of the ocean, and her body is laid out on the rock like laundry sinks into the porous sandstone, the rail of her tongue weakened, the shine of her eyes but a memory.

sapium

The scut, a young lad of no more than fifteen, sees me pouring sugar into the petrol tank. One of the intifada, he  leaves me on the flat of my back, the bullet lodged in the base of my skull, the exact spot where last summer a tick embedded itself and gorged on my blood. For weeks the skin was cracked, flesh exposed, its torsoless legs tunneled into the skin. The area around the tick hardened, crusted with yellow pus. Fingers found tweezers found tiny legs found purchase and withdrew them one at a time. The swollen area looks like a crater on a distant planet, now, the fuzzy image beamed back to earth from months away.

I am flying forward against a table by the pace of the shot, the collapse to bare floor a sinking into darkness—a signal. Even in unconsciousness the smoke spirals from the barrel, an exhausted trail of rapt witness. I am not dead, only stunned, the duck egg on my forehead caused by impact with a wall. Where the snub-nosed projectile struck is bare of hair since the tick incident. Maybe it’s the shock, maybe something else, but I blurt my pants, and the warmth spreads across my buttocks.

vena cava

The broken valves hiss and sputter and there’s a tightness in my chest from where the wires go in. Every day I swallow a cocktail of pills—blue, red, gray, white, small, oval, large, circular—and drain the tube that leads into the plastic bucket by my bed. I am spun thin in the bed, the numbers greening their way across the gray. Tongue thick, throat narrowed to a hair’s breadth, my fingers peel and crack, the tissue papery and forlorn.

The dizzying sun is behind the muslin curtain, a mirage of all the suns that came before it, the orbit elliptical, the stutter-stop-start a queer progression in the morning air. Once I lived across from a lane where we played French cricket with a tennis racket and pitched a threadbare ball through summer air. Now, the air is autumn, the systems shuts down, the last innings begun. The wind brings red hair and lost memories.

© 2013 James Claffey
Previously Published at Bong is Bard

in the rain,

in landscapes washed

by a stained canvas of sky,

quenched grass, a bruised green,

they occupy a torso of field

knowing the squall of the day will pass,

the focus of their stare

beyond hedges shaped by the wind;

from the Bucephalus of history

they sense ancestors at wars,

loaded carts and carriages pulled

through mud,

a focus within art,

the racing-reelers of cinema,

each eye haunted by echoes of arid plains

as the jewelled water exudes over them.

© 2013 Byron Beynon

I am wearing the sanitarium doctor’s pants.

That is to say, he and I are wearing the same kind of pants, and the gulf of space between our two perspectives seems all the more surreal because of it; and we notice the coincidence.

In my pants, I resemble a wretched waif from a silent film in early cinema (owing more to the rest of my appearance, perhaps.) But the doctor is distinguished, and in his pants, he has created a precisely coordinated ensemble complete with matching vest

and silk square that exposes itself from out of his jacket’s breast pocket.

The doctor refrains from remarking on the coincidence, as do I, but it is always there, this concomitance—if, in fact, that is what it is.

I try not to stare. Instead I look at the ceiling which is quite high, and curved where it meets the wall. It bares the hue of an eggshell, and cracks in the most cautious line as though something were alive behind it. I cannot help but continue staring at that space between the ceiling and the wall, and watching it curve downward like the inside of the doctor’s waist—where the flesh meets with his sinewy leg. I did this with my former therapist—focused on a part of the room and swaddled it with my eyes—claimed it, made it mine in that way. The doctor only stares at me, as though I am his part of the room. He has claimed me.

“Tell me.” he says.

“Tell you?” I answer.

“Well, yes,” he says.

The doctor leans in to reference something on his desk, as though there is some answer to the question he is about to pose. I turn my head while he is doing this and watch him unfold his upper leg from over his bottom leg. I notice how the curved space from his waist to his leg disappears under his shift in positions. I turn back to the space above me. The wall and the ceiling are made of flesh, I think.

“You still want to be a writer,” says he in voice that could be construed as neither question nor statement all the while reading whatever it is he is reading on his desk.

“…fiction,” he says.

It is true. I want to write. Ever since I learned how, I have wanted to write. There is the ring of an oxymoron in this statement, and a cliché at best, but I realize this only after I have said it.

“But yes,” I repeat, “a writer.”

I started writing journals. I wrote everyday. Everything that happened in our household was recorded in minute detail onto the pages of my old, threadbare composition books. I wore them out, referring to them every night, usually after dinner when I had a query about something that had been said or done during the day, not unlike the chart that lies, spread eagle, on the desk. Yes, I realize, they were my family’s charts.

“Is that when it started?” the doctor asks.

I pretend I don’t know what he is talking about by stopping to crease my brows, then I continue talking. But in the midst of completing a thought, I realize that I don’t know what he is talking about.

“No, Mother never read anything I wrote,” I say, but after I complete the answer I wonder if he did, in fact, ask me about my mother.

“Your pants are worn through,” she would say from her favorite side of the couch. “So it’s about time you buy a new pair.”

“Alright,” I would say.

“I’ll give you a check,” she’d conclude.

“Alright,” I would say.

This is our connection, between Mother and I, the pants; and now the doctor is wearing pants very similar to the ones I am wearing now.

My eyes have been smoothing out the space between the ceiling and the wall the

whole of this time, so I turn to the doctor at my side. He has finished reading the chart on

the desk, and now proceeds to recline in his armchair enough to fold his leg over the other one once again. He looks at me. I turn back to the ceiling.

“Pants,” he says, “Not journals, or fiction or poetry…”

He sees me writhing. My neck hurts. He motions for me to sit up. I think he realizes that I have cased over the space between the ceiling and the wall so much so that I am in danger of wearing the stucco thin. Yes, he must be aware of this through some access to my thoughts. A trick, no doubt, he learned at the university where he obtained the degree that hangs on the wall to the left of his desk.

I used to go to a department store called Montgomery Ward (with the blank check Mother had given me) to sift through rows and rows of generic, ill-made, ill-fitting pants. Once, the sales clerk, a woman with make-up the same color palette as the rows of apparel and the store décor, informed me that the certainty of the fit was determined, in great part, by the material of the pants.

I was skeptical at first, being that her idea of “fit” was not reflected in what she was wearing at the time. None-the-less, I began taking a more studied approach when inspecting the fabrics. I would eye the details in the texture, and finger the textiles as though they were the skin of a lizard, or the back of a hand. And when I did so, I always thought of she—of the sales clerk.

One day, she said, “You know there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” I took

this to mean that there was another way to find out if the pants fit other than trying them

on, fingering the cloth, or identifying which material draped best on which part of the

body.

I believe the best way to illustrate the point I am about to make is to stand. So I do. The doctor does not start. He listens as I explain to him how the Montgomery Ward sales clerk demonstrated a way to measure the waist of the pants around my neck. He listens while I remove my shoes, foot by foot, and place them neatly before the couch on which I formally sat.

His eyes remain on mine the whole of the time. He does not start when I unfasten the top button of my pants, unzip the zipper, then remove my legs, one by one, from the

pants as though they were both made of some synthetic material and detachable from the

part of my body called my waist.

The doctor is wondering where this story is going. I hold the pants at the top of its waist and proceed to wrap the width around the circumference of my neck. I turn around to show him how the two ends met evenly at the atlas of the spine—also known as the nape of the neck.

The doctor says there is a flaw in this theory. He suggests it has to do with our perception of weight, the algebra of width and the ability to convince ourselves that one thing is another when it is not. I suggest he not make undesignated generalizations like “our” and “ourselves,” and to address his observations in relation to myself if that is who he is referring to.

I ask him if he believes I’ve convinced myself that a waist is a neck? And whether

the “our” he had mentioned only moments previous included himself.

The doctor stands. He removes his pants not too unlike I had—with one leg before the other. His teeth are clenched, and the ledge of his jaw is pronounced more than usual. He has placed his shoes before the armchair on which he formally sat. I can see this clearly as I am now sitting on the couch, and my sightline meets with his boxer

shorts. When he removes the pants completely, I realize that the connection that we

previously shared has been stripped from us both. Our connections are no longer around our waists, but within our hands. He removes the wallet from his pants and places it on the armchair, I take note of that fact that we two have changed positions, and I fight the urge to take his seat. Instead, I place one leg over the other and recline on the couch.

The doctor says, “I can’t know if what you claim is accurate unless I try it myself.”

The doctor mimics my previous demonstration but looks as though his hands and legs are made of a substance unlike the rest of his body, as though they are made of the most sinewy mortar.

The doctor and I stand before one another. We both fluff out our pants as though we are housewives doing laundry. We do the experiment together. His pants fit perfectly around the circumference of his neck and he remarks on the ability of human ingenuity.

“Is that alright to say?” he asks.

I say yes. I explain that it is all right because we have both agreed on a particular lingo to which we can refer to when the nuances of communication arise between interlocutor and familiar stranger, which as we both understand, regards what we two are

discussing at the time, as opposed to the large sweeps of generalization which he had

made earlier.

The doctor sits down. And so do I. I admit that I wish my mother had taught me that trick about the pants. I admit that the day I had learned the ingenious technique, I went home and tried to tell her but she was too engaged in unwinding from work, from slipping bourbon into her soda, and only seemed more emotionally available after she and Father divorced. I had just hit puberty then, and her way of remarking on this was to accuse me of having untoward relations with the sales clerk. Her tone sounded familiar, it was the one she used on my father. I tried to convince her that I was not interested in the woman, but to no avail. She had me remove the pants and destroy them in front of her. Not long after, she began bringing home the composition books—to provide me with a medium in which to engage myself or to expel my desire to relate such nonsense to her.

After I say this, I notice the doctor writing something in my chart on the desk.

“This is what you suspect…” he says.

As with his earlier statement about being a writer, I am unsure if this is a question or a rhetorical statement. I lie back on the couch. In this position, the slit at the crotch of my boxer shorts allows for a stale breeze to enter, and I wonder if the doctor gets the same sensation when he lies half-dressed on his therapist’s couch.

I return to the space between the ceiling and the wall, and notice that it has grown thick again. It is no longer in danger of being worn thin. It has absorbed some evaporated tension that was expelled from the innards of our pants, I suppose; or it has learned how

to restore itself after years of being worn away by the condensation of insanity and tears

that the room has endured, that the place has invited, that the doctor has quieted.

“Well,” says the doctor, “you must have had much cause to write. But I don’t want to assume that that’s why you chose to become a writer…”

I say I like the way he refers to being a writer as a choice, then I say, “I would prefer you not to assume anything. I would prefer you to ask me”

He leans over. His jaw is protruding once again, but now it is as though it will penetrate the plaster of his skin and expose itself to me, only I don’t think he would even

notice. He removes something from the drawer in his desk. I concentrate on the plaster of his jaw and wonder if I can wear that away with my eyes as well. From my peripheral view, I recognize a color and a certain squareness of shape that has filled the cup of his hands. He is turning this semi-rectangular object about, fingering it and taking it apart, it seems.

“Your last book,” says the doctor, “is it fiction or autobiographical?” When he asks this the pages turning in the choke of his hands sound as though he is killing a small animal that only I can hear crying out.

But I am at my space now. I am just above me. I am there—at the paneling that curves downward like the place between his waist and his legs—the legs that are made of the most sinewy mortar.

The doctor says something about language. I do not look toward him because I’m afraid he is still holding the animal’s corpse in his hands. My book.

I realize that I haven’t said anything in quite some time. It is because I am wearing away at the space across the room with my eyes, where the wall and the ceiling meet.

The doctor mentions my mother. I recognize the word “mother”. I hear him say, “It’s your mother, isn’t it?

“Who?” I say. But I do not know why I have said it. It is like my mouth has a mind of its own.

“It is her in the book—the mother who replaces her husband with her son.”

The ceiling is wearing away. I can see this clearly because I have stood up. I hear someone saying, “It is she. It is not her—it is she.” Then I realize that it is I.

I am facing the spot on the wall that meets the ceiling, and trying to wear it away. I move closer to it. This will help in the smoothing away process. I begin to move the furniture to get to it. My hands have found a small but high stool that will fit below the space so that I can stand closer to it. So that I can approximate how long it will take to wear the spot away until I can see through it. I hear my name being said but I cannot respond.

The doctor is standing before his armchair. He is taking his pants into his hands. I can hear his belt buckle creating that metallic ring that one hears when one puts on one’s belt. He is placing his legs, one by one, into the pits of his pants—restoring the connection we two once had. He does so hurriedly. I know this, but I don’t know how I know this. I cannot see him. I only see the space before me—the space on the wall that is wearing away beneath my finger’s nails.

The doctor is at the door, still fastening his pant buttons. He opens it. The receptionist is already on the other side, having been listening behind it the whole of the time, I am sure.

He is telling her to do something—to call someone. Then, she is off.

The doctor is near me, still tying his shoelaces. He is facing me, talking to me but I cannot answer. I am suddenly equipped with some presence of mind which does not seem available to me in everyday life, and I realize that I will be here for a great deal of time. That it will be I who erodes the space where the ceiling meets the wall.

But it will take too long to do so, to wear through the stucco and the roof above it.

It will take years, day after day, of coming here—to this office, to this space where perception meets logic until the erosion thins the ceiling so much so that I can see through to the sky and the clouds that pass over my head.

© 2013 Gabriel Falconhead

—on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais

The lonely, never

Lonesome for long

Somebody always sits nearby

Opens a map, asks for a match

No one’s a Tour Eiffel

Standing solo in the rain

At a café table, young beards

drink and smoke

Stitch their old blue jeans

One perdon leads to a chat

To feet skirting puddles

Antique cobblestones

Five flights up, spiral stairs

swirl like smoke

A little this, a little that

We toast the Paris spring

We pigeons pecking

Loose-rolled leaves

© 2013 Jay Rubin

Dachau

—1933-1945

i

a bus skids to a stop

gray stones scatter like mice

from the sky, a light rain

a white, silky burden

suddenly, umbrellas

dipping through an iron gate

weathered wood, a wire fence

the words:  arbeit macht frei

ii

within the narrow hall

photos float, each a ghost

bald heads in zebra coats

a mound of chicken necks

one woman steps aside

another bumps my knee

iii

puddles pop with raindrops

   a pot of boiling soup?

steam rises off a roof

a warm cottage oven

iv

a german grabs a jewish girl

they kiss beside the stream

© 2013 Jay Rubin