Doomsday

by Amy Gerstler

The dark that’s gathering strength

these days is submissive,

kinky, silken, willing;

stretched taut as a trampoline.

World events rattle by like circus

trains we wave at occasionally,

as striped, homed and spotted

heads poke out their windows.

Feels like I’m wearing a corset,

though I haven’t a stitch on.

Burn the place setting I ate from,

OK? and destroy the easy chair

I languished in. Let birds

unravel my lingerie

for nesting materials.

Fingers poised on the piano keys,

I can’t think what to play.

A dirge, a fugue?

What, exactly, are crimes

against nature? How many

calories are consumed while

lolling in this dimness,

mentally lamenting the lack

of anything to indicate

some faint mirage of right-

mindedness has been sighted

on the horizon? The world

is full of morbid thinkers,

miserable workers and compulsive

doodlers. Darling, my mother

used to croon, you were a happy

accident, like the discovery

of penicillin. When I sense

the zillions of cells in my body

laboring together, such grand

fatigue sweeps over me.

Once in a blue moon I smell

the future’s breath,

that purgatorial whiff

shot through with the scent

of burnt hair, like when sailors

have been drifting at sea

for a long time and suddenly

they see gulls circling

and the ripe composty odor

of land unfurls in the air,

but they’ve no idea whether

an oasis of breadfruit

and pineapple awaits them

or an enclave of cannibals.

Lost in the Forest

by Amy Gerstler

I’d given up hope. Hadn’t eaten in three

days. Resigned to being wolf meat ...

when, unbelievably, I found myself in

a clearing. Two goats with bells

round their necks stared at me:

their pupils like coin slots

in piggy banks. I could have gotten

the truth out of those two,

if goats spoke. I saw leeks

and radishes planted in rows;

wash billowing on a clothesline ...

and the innocuous-looking cottage

in the woods with its lapping tongue

of a welcome mat slurped me in.

In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex

is barely discernible pours a glass

of fraudulent milk. I’m so hungry

my hand shakes. But what is this liquid?

“Drink up, sweetheart,” she says,

and as I wipe the white mustache

off with the back of my hand:

“Atta girl.” Have I stumbled

into the clutches of St. Somebody?

Who can tell. “You’ll find I prevail here

in my own little kingdom,” she says as

she leads me upstairs—her bony grip

on my arm a proclamation of ownership,

as though I've always been hers.

A Certain Swirl

by Mary Ruefle

The classroom was dark, all the desks were empty,
and the sentence on the board was frightened to
find itself alone. The sentence wanted someone to
read it, the sentence thought it was a fine sentence, a
noble, thorough sentence, perhaps a sentence of
some importance, made of chalk dust, yes, but a sen-
tence that contained within itself a certain swirl not
unlike the nebulous heart of the unknown universe,
but if no one read it, how could it be sure? Perhaps it
was a dull sentence and that was why everyone had
left the room and turned out the lights. Night came,
and the moon with it. The sentence sat on the board
and shone. It was beautiful to look at, but no one
read it.

Barking

by Jim Harrison

The moon comes up.

The moon goes down.

This is to inform you

that I didn’t die young.

Age swept past me

but I caught up.

Spring has begun here and each day

brings new birds up from Mexico.

Yesterday I got a call from the outside

world but I said no in thunder.

I was a dog on a short chain

and now there’s no chain.

“August is also my best month to sell CDs,” said Mr. Miranda, 25, in front of his music booth. “Someone walks by looking for a llama fetus, or maybe the hide of a skunk, but if they’re young they might want a little music as well.”

What We Might Be, What We Are

by X. J. Kennedy

If you were a scoop of vanilla
And I were the cone where you sat,
If you were a slowly pitched baseball
And I were the swing of a bat,

If you were a shiny new fishhook
And I were a bucket of worms,
If we were a pin and a pincushion,
We might be on intimate terms.

If you were a plate of spaghetti
And I were your piping-hot sauce,
We'd not even need to write letters
To put our affection across,

But you're just a piece of red ribbon
In the beard of a Balinese goat
And I'm a New Jersey mosquito.
I guess we'll stay slightly remote.

In Praise of Joe

by Marge Piercy

I love you hot
I love you iced and in a pinch
I will even consume you tepid.

Dark brown as wet bark of an apple tree,
dark as the waters flowing out of a spooky swamp
rich with tannin and smelling of thick life—

but you have your own scent that even
rising as steam kicks my brain into gear.
I drink you rancid out of vending machines,

I drink you at coffee bars for $6 a hit,
I drink you dribbling down my chin from a thermos
in cars, in stadiums, on the moonwashed beach.

Mornings you go off in my mouth like an electric
siren, radiating to my fingertips and toes.
You rattle my spine and buzz in my brain.

Whether latte, cappuccino, black or Greek
you keep me cooking, you keep me on line.
Without you, I would never get out of bed

but spend my life pressing the snooze
button. I would creep through wan days
in the form of a large shiny slug.

You waken in me the gift of speech when I
am dumb as a rock buried in damp earth.
It is you who make me human every dawn.
All my books are written with your ink.

Dislocation

by Marge Piercy

It happens in an instant.
My grandma used to say
someone is walking on your grave.

It's that moment when your life
is suddenly strange to you
as someone else's coat

you have slipped on at a party
by accident, and it is far
too big or too tight for you.

Your life feels awkward, ill
fitting. You remember why you
came into this kitchen, but you

feel you don't belong here.
It scares you in a remote
numb way. You fear that you—

whatever you means, this mind,
this entity stuck into a name
like mercury dropped into water—

have lost the ability to enter your
self, a key that no longer works.
Perhaps you will be locked

out here forever peering in
at your body, if that self is really
what you are. If you are at all.

Trouble

by Matthew Dickman August 11, 2008

Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills

to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter

hung in the Tahitian bedroom

of her mother’s house,

while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes

you can look at the clouds or the trees

and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.

The performance artist Kathy Change

set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves

out of the music industry forever.

I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French

philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped

from an apartment window into the world

and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead

roles, leaped off the “H” in the HOLLYWOOD sign

when everything looked black and white

and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway

put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho

while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree

and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened

thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body

until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like

the way geese sound above the river. I like

the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.

Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter

brought her roses when she was still alive,

and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite

in his own mouth

though it took six hours for him

to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned

and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are

travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially

on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died

in prison, naked, a bag

around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer

Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.

Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues

after drawing a hot bath,

in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.

Larry Walters became famous

for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled

weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet

and then he landed. He was a man who flew.

He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush

my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.

I want to be good to myself.