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THE FUTURE OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS
by David Lawrence I figure I got about one fourth of my life left. I'm no longer looking for cheap thrills. I want the thrill of diving into myself And discovering the amateur drama Of being imperfect. I don't like perfectionists. You have to be imperfect to live your life Like a mistake. I like mistakes. That way I get used to the angular meaning of death. I scrape against my elbows and edges. I think a lot about the future of unconsciousness. |
LALIBELA, ETHIOPIA by Baxter Jackson |
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FUMES
by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois Lutz had only been homeless for a couple of months living in a box he'd built on the bed of his forty-year-old Toyota pick-up when, early one evening, in the middle of a ten-mile run he suffered a massive heart attack He managed to ask a concerned stranger to drive him back to his truck and, with difficulty, crawled into the box He wasn't sure what had happened to him He thought he'd sleep it off When he finally got to a hospital a week later 90% of his heart was dead The cardiologist gave him two months I'm living on cardiac fumes, Lutz told me Yet the remaining 10% was strong from all those years of running and he has survived well beyond those two months Now the sun is low in the sky a silver disc more like the moon than the sun So interesting, Lutz thinks as he staggers toward it |
WIDOW by Brent Wiggans |
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ONE YEAR AGO
by Viola Weinberg You wondered if there was a place Were dead men's cell phone numbers Went, a kind of heaven, perhaps? Now, you are the one laid out, dust Your phone turned off and put away like Each time you drove up our little road That time, you came from Harbin You were so sad, "The wife," you Called that crazy bitch who took Your little boys to Nicaragua, the ones You loved far more than her, left you And made plans never again to return I told you it was magical thinking to Believe she would come back, or your friends Might live again, they were gone, all gone I cautioned you that it was time to erase Their numbers from your phone, you just Kept calling until the day you wrote That poem, the execution poem, how Your trigger finger deleted their names Their numbers, those men all gone You who had been rocked so hard and often You with your soft voice and wide eyes As a child photographed with your mother and Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov From those early days in Mexico, a little boy Like those little boys, so far from home You lived one hundred lives, each one A peculiar pageant to the other, until Last month when you took leave in your sleep And left me here to write this poem One thousand times, rolling each word with My tongue and clicking it like the pull chain on a lamp |
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