Sunsets and Silencers

Memento Mori 

They say I’m dangerous, but my chest is full of blackbirds. When the 21 guns go off, the cloud of wings scatter over the flat plains of your body. My grandfather’s purple heart beats on my nightstand. It taught me the two-step of metronomes. All the old fishermen sunk their hooks into my heart. I’m going down. Morning wraps its thick lips around the girth of grace. My hips follow into yours, motion grinds its song. Mourning has its grace. Slow dance, my grace. My morning, out of time. My hips are open in the morning, gentle as vapor. See, I’ve found out how to boil. One time I had this slant of sunlight, and in it, I found a few certain pages. The poem goes “arm, elbow, wrist.” The poem goes “reach.” I cut my tributaries off at the stream. I know how to commit to forgetting. I french kiss the shores of Normandy. I’m engaged to asphalt in Vermont, Massachusetts, even Iowa. I’ve inherited a heart that beats the royal we. Grandfather was shot in the knee. He tells me this when it rains sometimes. I hold rainwater in my backside. Where I live right now, everything curves. A half note bent in two, pressed between speakers of stereo. No one has asked about the end of my body. Beauty was this thing we locked in early twenties. I’m going to start collecting orchids now. Some say, will you? I say, the frenzy of birds. See how they all leave the tree at once. 

I’m Picking Up on the Spirit of a Little Girl 

A megaphone full of bees swarm the violent tongues of sex. My Electronic Voice Phenomenon says, keep waking until the walking stops. Every day I find a new way to pray, though I never close my eyes in sleep. I talk to my mother like she’s in the room now. I say, meet me in a Catholic place where the water makes new limbs. Mine ache so I think I might have been amputated in a future life. Everything’s a phantom. With night vision goggles, you can still see the handprint of my ex trailing down my backside. I press my pen into the table and the Jehovah's Witness on the corner screams. All the letters she ever wrote are in a landfill, spawning nests for sparrows. Swallows hoop my skirt of sleep. I don’t know what that means, but I can tell you about the electricity here. Electromagnetic frequencies and the voices time records. If I push my finger down this wall and taste it, I’m tasting you. I forgot to mention the waves. It all comes in waves. I am thirty and my face looks like Aunt Helen. In the photograph, her face collapses into the lips I wear to sing. I crawl naked across the carpeted floor, grade a paper, call that spring. Don’t let me forget the waves. There was this headache blowing a tumbleweed through a silent apartment. I was not alone. I was not alone. Because mother always said, be happy. She started as a fox. She stopped at the end of song. Girl asks, are you complete now. Girl says, I’m Pluto with 3 known moons. There, a revolution starts with death, begins with song, with sex. I just wanted to pass through a wall one day and tell you. Is anybody with me? It’s cold in here. At least, I think so. Don’t you? 
 
Poesis 

There is this firedoor between myself and losing her. On the other side, I can see a beautiful fool, letting a man grind into me. Fucking is forgetting here. I am not there, but I am wildly, awkwardly here. Ask me about the impossible. I will tell you about how I fell out of a tree in spring. Every branch draped me until my limp body sang unconscious across the limbs. Light saved me. We dilate. Even the moon sweats me into you. Every conversation sways its broken couplets. When you move your sentence forward, I echo in the sound that bird bones make when they shift on a powerline. Listen hard. I am talking about dancing, but we never dance. We are writing ourselves through a pinhole camera. Every angle, rich with the grains of shapelessness breathed. I am chipping at my breath now. I want to show you how it’s possible to live. Sunday kisses the inside of each wrist, says, “I’m glad you made it.” There is this ripple. Keturah wrote a rain as lovely as her name. I have no tattoos because it’s impossible to forget like this. Everything is under skin, the most permanent you you’ll ever know. In me, there is this shell of girls: one is falling through the tree. One fell out of time. One is dipping the last carnation into the earth. The last, crying in art history because she is a new sky. Didn't you know? New skies bend the obvious over the side of sleep. Bend me over, I’m getting off. Are you waking? I want to start walking to a certain lake with a name like a poem learns rain. Cows have one stomach with four compartments. I have four chambers, in each the old and new blood of me contracts. Michele says, “it is so full of history. There is sadness. There is happiness. There is art.” I want to visit Havana someday, too. I am falling down a tree. Are you? I don’t want to fall into you like an accident. You are not an accident, I wrote. A garden. I am lonely for a garden. A child sits with his mother. The flowers, he murmurs. The flowers. 
 
 

A System of Correspondences 

Yesterday flowers so fast the spring opens itself like an odalisque. The green plains of body collapse on body, in nude we green. Yesterday flowers. So fast the color oceans, I ocean myself. Flowers fell past. Tomorrow, pouring into. Tomorrow you'll flicker so fast. Tonight I'll fall through the family tree and into the bedrock, bones written for sleep. Tonight I'll turn the light off and tree a name, branch its syllables onto my pillowcase. No one is naming the name. I'm actually tracing subway directions to the corner of "Somewhere She Is Standing" and "Not Enough Light." I remember how to be alone more than I remember you. It is possible to forget how to be a slut, and even whimper while you're doing it. Remember the firedoor between my skin and organs? Me neither. It burned in the fire. I imagine my next so full of nostalgia, like cement in knots for trees, hardening around a heart and arrow. I will so be there, once I stop choking on this peach pit. Here, I am telling you about my city in the bedroom night. The expressway to my God. Here, I write my mother dead letters in the air, postmarked by careful mediums. They tell her what I had for breakfast, how I put all the blue flowers to my lips. I believe in softness. Like this. Liquids today. I tell her how to whole my hard. For hold. How haiku held. Old. I try to make a poem that is cold, silvering within a white heat. Shivering in the road steam. She says, you really know how to love, love. You follow through the through. And she writes, "I miss you so much my skin is cracking" and I write, "panim d'fanim: face in face." Dear mother, blue eye to my brown: she passes me in and out. The diaphanous talespin of the candle, running its tongue along a dark spine. 
 
 
 

Resonance and Ring 

"Resonance," she reaches. "Ring," my hand to her. "You are the ripple of water in stone." "The cool wet underside of stone, your palms." "Stone, you in my water." Who verbs the angel. "Look to my clouds and count your face." "Sheen of a face on the eye, iris mirror." Hand flat to hand. Iris, my mirror. "Iris, my mentor." Arrive at my chest: "I pass this language through." I bend to wind. You follow. We wisp, twist air around our fingers set to the frequency of hair slipping south on a pillow they can't hear: you and you, the we of you, the "only" to the "connect" you we. "Meet me in a place where edges grind soft." Breath. "We'll take the hours, put to tongue." Beat. "The edges of things, drift a house." Bone. "The warm basin of my breast set to rise." Breathe. Where the plaster comes down with a kiss and dust in an eyelash is battered by risk: we are back to two stones, one water, concentric circles summer the shimmer around bore, wading legs dragged to deep, "you will find me one inch beneath your finger kiss to surface lake." Oh: look at my lying here, I am under here. You look like conversation set to fire. Under here, the lights, the lights. Come: my eyes have never been so clear. Look at my face it has never been more what you wanted, translucent, the light of fish. Flush my face and it opens to you in a word. Sunlight pours my eyes come to touch. "This flower is a door." Look at my face, the light of fish. "Everyone opening in your hands.” The word. You angel. "I've got the light my stomach collects, petals in your backside." I may be beautiful here in the way of you.

Leigh Phillips’ work has appeared in Squid Quaterly, Connecticut River Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lodestar Quarterly, Fringe, and Vox, among others

The Batman Towel of Shame

I moved in with Aaron after all the men I flirted with at college went back to their girlfriends, realized they were gay, or decided immediately was the appropriate time to marry a 40-something dominatrix they’d just met online.  Aaron and I had been dating for five years and most of that was a long-distance relationship, which gave me the convenience of having someone to pay for movies on Saturday night and the freedom of collecting a harem of boys to take me out every other day of the week.  I was in-between my junior and senior year at college and needed a place to stay that wasn’t my parent’s, so I packed up my Patti Smith albums and reluctantly accepted his offer of cohabitation.

The apartment was two rooms, one large divided at the linoleum/carpet into a kitchen/living room, and the bedroom.  At any given time the kitchen contained no more than the following: crusty pink lemonade mix, ten Triscuits, a half-finished six-pack of Sam Adams still in the cardboard carrier, milk I was afraid to touch, and strawberry jelly.  Despite a strong prowess in the kitchen that netted me more than one blurted marriage proposal, Aaron refused to let me cook and was instead content to exist off ramen noodles and roll-and-bake cookie dough eaten straight out of the wrapper with a spoon in front of ESPN.  Aaron also did not understand why it was necessary to mop the floor and therefore, did not own or plan to own a mop.  His living room had a big screen TV, a loveseat lovingly donated by his parents when the recliner on one half broke and they bought a new one, a computer that I was not allowed to touch out of fear that I, in my devil-may-care millennial college youth, might illegally download a Morrissey song and the Feds would descend upon him like seagulls on a hot dog bun, and a single Batman poster tacked proudly over the television.

The wood-paneled bedroom décor consisted of a slave-girl Princess Leia lithograph hung tastefully above his bed.  The brick-and-board bookshelf contained no reading material that wasn’t a movie tie-in.  The room’s main feature was the disco-era walk-in closet, thankfully devoid of sequined jumpsuits, but instead held Aaron’s six polo shirts and three pairs of JCPenny khakis, which he wore to his office with a black belt, white crew socks and scuffed brown shoes.  Also inside was the pre-tied Yoda necktie he reserved for the classiest of occasions and the vintage dresses I was not allowed to wear because he insisted people stared at me whenever we went out, which was never.  The top shelf held the unopened S’mores maker his brother lovingly regifted me one Hanukkah, a box of read-once and bagged comic books, and the Batman Towel of Shame.

Aaron only had two towels, one for me and one for him. Mine was brand-new navy blue from Macy’s, purchased my first day in the apartment.  His was a threadbare green with college stains and a fraying hem.  Sometimes a loose thread would wrap around his hand and he’d tear it further, curses echoing from the bathroom like New Jersey tourists at the Grand Canyon.

For seven days these towels hung, damp and mildewing, in his tiny windowless bathroom, which he also never mopped.  “Aaron,” I tried to explain one afternoon while doing our laundry at his brother’s. “You need more than one towel.  One towel does not get you through the week.”

“Why do you need more than one towel?” he asked, not looking up from the TV.  “You’re clean when you dry off, so it’s not like it gets dirty.”

Aaron was not an unclean guy.  Other than the sticky kitchen floor and the seven-day-old towels, the house was well-kept, dishes were done, Princess Leia lithograph straight on the wall.  We were not poor, we could have easily afforded two more department store towels, four more discount store towels.  His parents had plenty of towels we could have borrowed under dire financial circumstances, but still he refused.  Two towels for two people, and that was final.  Company, if we ever had any, could very well bring their own damn towels.

Of course, I told my mother and she was horrified at the thought that her daughter was drying herself in squalor.  A week later a package arrived, addressed to Aaron in my mother’s spidery handwriting.  Inside was the Batman towel.

This was no ordinary Batman towel.  This was a Batman beach towel, as long as I was tall, trimmed in yellow, printed with the Caped Crusader swooping majestically over a midnight-blue Gotham City.  His square face was stern, his beady eyes were set, and he was ready to take on the plight of Aaron’s wet white ass.

“Tell your mother I said thank you,” Aaron said, putting the towel back in the box.

“Aren’t you going to hang it in the bathroom?” I suggested.

“I already have a towel,” he replied.

It was at that moment that I knew I was fighting a battle I could not win.  The Batman towel became a mark of his disgrace, his refusal to accept King Solomon’s heed that one day, his beloved college towel will pass on to shredded rags of what it once was.  If he threw out the college towel, what was next?  His fading plastic Bar Crawl mug?  The outdated computer science textbooks piled in his parent’s basement?  Perhaps, dare I suggest it, the Princess Leia lithograph that got him through so many long, lonely nights at college?

Batman kept his folded, cramped vigil over the S’mores maker for another two months, when I realized I couldn’t lived under his totalitarian towel regime another day and ran off with an art student one of my ex-romances introduced me to.  I made my getaway while Aaron was at work, leaving Princess Leia and the Triscuits to their solitary existence.  On my way out of town, I threw both towels in the dumpster, leaving only Batman to dry his tears.

Libby Cudmore is an MFA candidate with the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast graduate program.  Recent publications include regular contributions to Pop Matters, Hardboiled and a Twist of Noir, as well as Inertia, Battered Suitcase, The Southern Women’s Review, Shaking Like a Mountain, Big Pulp and the upcoming anthology Quantum Genre on the Planet of the Arts (the latter two w/Matthew Quinn Martin).  Additional publications include Sage of Consciousness, Crime and Suspense, the Subway Chronicles (Essay of the Year 2004) and Long Story Short (Author of the Year, 2004).

 The Fisherman Who Asked The Sea
                                    
Once there was a fisherman whose fishing had gone bad for a while. He finally saw no other solution than to go down to the shore and ask the sea itself. So he did.

"Hello sea! Do you have any fish today?"

"Not until next Monday," the sea replied, "but if you like we can play in the meantime!"

Gratefully the fisherman accepted.  Playing would do him good, he thought. Besides, it would be a nice change from fishing. The sea and the fisherman played many games.  They played hide and seek, farmer and the milkmaid, and more quiet games, like chess. But when the fisherman had won the third chess game in a row, the sea got furious and drowned him.

But the fisherman didn't want to die, so he decided not to. Instead, he found that he was deeply in love with the sea. He gathered some water lilies, offered them to the sea and asked if it wanted to marry him.

"Yes! I thought you'd never ask!" the sea answered.

The happy couple got married in the fisherman's boathouse. The wind held up and conducted the ceremony. They sold the bottom of the sea to a mining-company and bought a condo in Carmel.  There they lived happily for nineteen years until their marriage dried out.



And That's How We Came On Top Of Things
                      

"Okay Boss I'm up!  But I still don't get why you couldn't give it to me down on the plain!"
"Well Mo, I guess I wanted you to come closer to me!"
"I'm too old for climbing like this!  But never mind, let's get it over with!"
"Are you ready?  Here comes the first one!"
"Okay, I got it!  I took it in my right hand!"
"And here comes the second one!"
"One more?  Okay, I got it!  I took it in my left hand!"
"And get ready for the third!"
"Whoa!  You mean there's more?!"
"Yes!  There are four altogether, with ten commandments on each of them!"
"Well, I only got two hands, ya think my mother was an octopus?!"
"You have to innovate!  Think about Cleopatra, and carry the third one on your special purpose!"
"Well, I guess it's worth a try!"
"Are you thinking?"
"Oh yeah!"
"Here it comes! Ready?"
"Oh yeah!"
"See? It works!"
"Sure does! But how 'bout the fourth one?"
"You have a straight back, Mo, I'll put it right here on top of your head!"
"O'boy!  This is getting way over my head!"
"Start walking!  I know you can do it!"
"Well, if I must ..."
"You must! You must!"
"Well, if I can ..."
"You can! You can!"
"Hey! Check it out! I can! I can!"
"You are doing fine, kid!"
"Oops!  Oh oh!"
"Clumsy fool!  You dropped three of them into pieces!!"
"I just remembered that Cleopatra is dead!  And tryin' to catch that one, I dropped the ones in my hands as well!  But look Boss, I saved the one on my head!"
"Clumsy fool!  Now there are only ten commandments left!"
"But that's enough, Boss!  Really, it is!"
"But I liked number seventeen: No Tailgating!"
"But Boss, cars aren't invented yet!"
"Oh no?  But how about number thirty-four: Don't Bring Pork Chops To A Jewish Wedding!"
"But that goes without saying, Boss!"
"So you think ten are enough?!"
"Yeah Boss, I'm sure it is!"
"Hm ...oh, very well then.  But if they screw it up down there, I'll hold you responsible!"

Mikael Persson is an industrial worker who loves to read and write in the English language, and his aim is to make a living on his writing one day. So far eight of his stories have been published in Dream Forge, Long Story Short Magazine, The Online Cynic Magazine and Uptown books chapbook series.