Dear Neighbors
-- Ian Brand

I lit the M-80 after midnight,
freed the jockey from the yoke of lighting
your lawn. I snapped the sideview mirrors
off an entire block of automobiles
and dumped them in the bay.
Afterwards, I laughed
and imagined the first fish
that caught a glimpse of itself
in your Trans-Am's mirror
wore the same shocked look that you did
when you found it missing,
the same pallid face
I wear looking back on this.
Fellow taxpayers -- I am sorry:
back then I was another me, because
the total self is like a deck of cards
we rise out of magically again and again
as someone else. Once I was the little punk
who'd give you a bouquet of azaleas
from your own garden.

Bottleneck
-- Ian Brand

If you have not postered
the sky with your face, then you're fodder
for another's dream, or else

you're down at street-level
with the cars and buses barely squeezing
through the last bottleneck
of the dream's impatience, inching
past the Chinese restaurant
where every table is a desert island --

a small fire at its center, and the conch shell
of a fortune cookie. if I hold one to my ear

I can almost hear a jackpot of rain
falling inside.

who is my echo?
-- Ben Carlin

who is my echo,
and what is his problem?
a retired gambler's disposition,
only audible when bouncing off
the opposite wall, retaliating
against a mute tongue.
only a mercy rule can
end the debate.

who is my echo?
some molested soul, tortured
by years of poverty and
abuse? that does not
sound familiar.
none of it does.
when I opened my mouth to speak,
no sound came out at all.

medley
-- Ben Carlin

My back is peeling
and I'm not quite as Spanish
as I thought I was.
the bed, obviously built
only for sleep, prevents
others from sleeping;
be kind to your neighbors,
she says.

flakes of dead skin sucked
from the carpet by the maid's
vacuum go unnoticed just as
the marks of sin on the
blanket we brought from home
do not.

it was a comfortable floor,
as floors go; she fed me well
and I felt absurdly strong.
try as we might to duplicate our
favorite sins, they have
somehow become unsettling...
like a man who is always smiling.

PTSD
-- Darren Subarton

They would ask him why he was so mellow
if he was supposed to be some badass,
but after a while you have to choose which
way you're going to go, whether or not you
want to have to fight everyday, walk on that
maniacal verge, see that man's face as he's being
strangled, watch his eyes bulge, smell the urine
as it's running down his leg, listen to the dogs
barking, the yelling, the lights flickering, the
water spraying from johnny-pumps as a pistol
shoots off somewhere a block over. Instead you
get high to escape, chasing that motherfucking
scream out of your head, chasing that empty cupboard
out of your head and all the roaches and all the mice,
all the social service lines, all the back and side door
lines, and so you just get high and you keep trying to
get high, and the electricity gets high, and you're seeing
the inside of the apartment with candles during the day,
and the only question you can't answer is can you ever get soft.
Then ten years later you find yourself lost, waking up out
of a blank stare, standing there outside the bar with blood
on your shirt and lights flashing before your face, the girl is
standing next to you and the crowd is tossing jaunts, and
when you finally realize that you're sitting downtown in
Central Booking looking at murder one, all you can do is dream
as you rock back and forth on the wooden benches, smelling
the piss on the floor, listening to the crying in Mexican, watching
the crack dealing kids sliding off their cuffs from skel keys on
their wrists, wishing you were still high, wishing you weren't
dying behind the bars as you face the end of your life looking down
the barrel of a concrete gun. And now you've found the rest of you.

Self-Portrait
-- M. Freedman

around the eyes is where i remind me
of someone else, some other people --
not the ones i thought would be there.
they seem to be elsewhere, in me
i suppose, a family of predemoted
features given up on more than
miscellaneous scraps, clinging only to
third tier oddments -- the heart probably.

i was under the impression there was
no true infidelity in evolution. so what
is it I feel cheated out of? association?
the math is there: i look like someone
else somewhere; or better, he looks like
them and feels like me.

BACK TO

Click here to Visit our new publication,