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THE COUPLE He was made of glass. She was made of stone. Everyone said What a lovely couple, until they found the pieces and a note: "My next lover will be made of iron!" THE SUM Almost nothing to do. Put on this shoe and say to myself I am a man. Open this door and count the footsteps to the corner. Say hello yes thank you I will. Bathe and shave. Shit and pray that the money will be there in the morning. Day after day almost nothing to do. . . and I am doing it.

ADIPOSE Upon returning from the hospital he rolled the barrels of his extracted fat into the garage. He then walked around the house for a while, whistling dryly under his breath, his lips sticking together. Catching a glance of his face in the mirror he saw the lean rise of his jawline for the first time in fifteen years. He smiled, walked to the fridge and paused. That's right. He'd thrown out all the food before he left for the operation. The store would be closed now. He sat in front of the TV, groaned. Some programme about animals again, prey. He peered closer at what must have been something disgusting, an intestine, and then he switched the channel to sports. It had cost him all of his savings for the op. And then they had pretended that he was just another delivery driver, from yet another hospital, just collecting more medical waste. Still, it felt good sliding along the corridors, gowned in his gossamer loose fitting smock. Out of curiosity he went to the garage, opened it, flicked on the lights. It was an odd feeling, but could he have sworn that some of the barrels had shifted. He muttered and shook his head, returned to the living room and found a sedative. Dreams of the blank, bland wastelands between skyscrapers. When he woke in the morning there was somebody next to him. He could sense it even before he opened his eyes. He had wanted to peek even but, whether for fear or anxiety, couldn't, didn’t. Then the snoring he heard. It was him. He looked and it was him. Or it was his fat. Was it? Well, his fat--his fat was something like him; his fat was something like him, that kind of looked like him. It's half your god damned body weight! the surgeon had said, grinning toothily at him. He sat all of the way up now. Stared hard. It was his fat. It was his fat, and his fat--his fat looked almost exactly like him, down to the odd wart on his left hand and the missing tip of his index finger. Somebody had made an exact replica out of him, out of glue and wax, but really it just was fat. And it just was his fat. He actually wanted to touch his fat, strangely, but then he resisted. He got up and got dressed and went into the kitchen to run the taps while he thought all of this all over. He wasn't angry. He wasn't shocked. Now the snoring again, louder. It still was early, but the store would now be open. He knew from habit when all of the stores opened and closed. He got his coat and got his keys, prepared for the drive to the shop, to get himself some food. Before leaving, he once again checked the barrels in the garage. Sure enough the lids were cast open. A wet, slick mark on the floor even showed a person exactly where that stuff must have combined.

AMPLIFIER Beyond words, birds are burning, & I'm walking with nothing but a snaking horn, Singing photographs from silent stars into whisperwalls Into the camera of time's tiny bones partially buried backwards through the sound or rhythms Missing from music. When those birds can't sing above their own flames, Attempt to veil softly, reflecting any feather artifacts closer to mine. And when we are blind: Keep the birds clean, & even angels won't understand your eyelids. SALT The stampede of lost lambs tore into the painting, lost limbs coloring the sky in Artaudian ecstasy Filthy with desire, and loud So much stampede sky drizzling into every sky we drink now. The fallen chain link fence. Bodies. A field, strewn across, or sewn through the field-- Under no stars!-- A hymnal-less hymnal. A flip book of photographs: discrete, at least; images, at least; nine hours in the making, at least. Monkey Puzzle Your prayers have been answered: your boy, your boy has returned home. Your childhood’s reality, or your version of it, in another’s body-- behind your eyes once he's inside (into yourself forever) --has returned home. Where have you been, his sister asks. In language, the open hymen appears. Open hymen. It sounds too much like your surname. Sounds too much like Hinderman.

WEAPONRY Rob fired his pump-action Daisy, brought down the deaf sparrow high from the maple branch. The present was disarmed later, in the parlor. The future got a gun. Rob would someday have the gift of a BB when his kid was old enough. Thoughts not able to rid the chest of their BBs. The rifle fills its callused hands from time to time.

DORA JEAN My uncle started beating my aunt when she started to show. The baby wasn’t his, and he knew it because everyone in town knew who she was sleeping with. One night, my uncle was passed out drunk my aunt’s lover came parked outside the house and got her (Model T; with the suicide doors) helped her climb out the second-storey window caught her when she slipped It was all terribly romantic to everyone but her family. They were going to drive all the way out to California to have the baby, Anaheim the spot Disneyland was he’d get a job at a munitions factory while she stayed at home with the baby HONORING THE EUCHARIST I hold my torch before me, preparing to the chastised, criticized, turned around and sent back to my room, softly reciting Hail Mary’s to myself, backwards. All things on purpose. Sing of Heaven, or someplace far away from Hell, Mary offers me a tray of phallic-shaped hosts. I brush the monk’s spunk from my hair, sticking up the short fine strands like One’s still twitching. ROAD TRIP “Me and My Cat,” it would have a picture of him right on the cover, posing with his brand new guitar. city to city in my shitty little car, him, heavily tranquilized, me, frantically on tour trying to sneak into hotels with “no pets allowed” signs, taped to the front door I watch my cat try to play my guitar again and again. I suddenly want to buy my cat his own guitar, because if he had his own maybe we could record an album we could even drive trying to read a road map while driving, you have to make exceptions for superstars. IN THE MARGINS The tiny carnivore inside me You defy me I am standing in the outskirts of your memories by now, bloated by conquest in pages, in footsteps, in paths bloated paths, of only recent prophets of only realer pages; no, no-- not me. You fight the tiny carnivore inside me You move to the one who reminds me always of growling, always of the unattainablest men, growling. In the aquifer, in my wake, not any eye mimicks any tiny carnivore. TO BE JED SMOCK My tongue reeks of street, of preach, of cracked pots and dark church, flashing cold scrawls of subway cars rattling past. Sirens and flashing lights! Faithless, and impatient! Their own tiny painted sides: my own tiny painted names. My own tiny painted aerosol as I preach of wrapped black blue, wrapped black blue, waves of crows. IN THE OLD HOUSE moonlight around the bare bulbs like cobwebs, in the Old House like intricate blood folded over the other side of windows, draped or stretched, over the other side of the windows as with that baby type of nightmare­­--that the glass is always having­­-- the bridal lace destroys the lace patterns SATURDAY NIGHT We are watching someone pretending to die once again your arm around my waist, our hands beneath the blankets, Romance’s very setting, the very most Romantic of events a natural prelude to mashing our body parts together and, eventually, bed as if seeing someone getting jabbed in the eye with an icepick, in the eye, watching someone getting jabbed in the eye with an icepick, is about to­­--come on!­­--anything, something­­!-- that I am getting turned on by now and now I am too busy groping and fumbling to care.

4 from ALPHABETS OF DESIRE & SORROW A Book of Imaginary Colophons 2nd Alphabet of Cruelty Eyes grown tired, Marguerite Thiry took off her reading glasses and saw, in a harrowing instant of myopia, words fray – their serifs’ barbs blur against her book’s white page – a snarl reminding her of the wire that had kept her from the quiet snow asleep beyond the camp’s black ditch and iron rails – the field as immaculate as their room on Ghent’s Benardstraat, shrouded against the dust the morning they were sent, like packages wrapped in butcher’s paper, into the fatal, Polish winter. Of mother, father, sister, aunt, only Marguerite returned to uncover the horsehair sofa, walnut tables, and parlor chairs cowering like animals at the entrance to an abattoir – terrified by the indelible scent of death. Quickly, she put her glasses on again and resolved that alphabet of cruelty into merely italic characters of Bodoni or Baskerville. Alphabet of Music A young man in Rye, Edward Drayton walked the sandstone hills above that Sussex town, translating its features into facsimiles whose origin was the notation for Gregorian chant as though he foresaw his imprisonment after Saladin’s defeat of the Knights Templars in a castle outside Damascus, near the place where Jacob wrestled with the angel. In the darkness of his infidel’s cell in the year of our Lord 1179, Drayton summoned up Ypres Tower, Landgate, the ancient wall in Cinque Port Street, Romney Marsh, the river Rother and the farther sea – reconstituted not in space, but in time’s amplitude; for such is music to the mind no matter the body’s durance. Once more at liberty in Rye, Drayton composed in his old age descants on the English countryside, preferring them to what was merely visible. To hear them sung was to know that good earth as infallibly as do the blind. Alphabet of Night So beleaguered was his mind that to look on words – their black letterforms – was to see not ink but night roaring down the vast jetties of space, engulfing planets, stars, and desperate shipwrecked men dragged down by oceanic chains forged of cold, salt, and unassayable elements – or, say instead, what night belongs to the dead inside their last houses or what might remain were matter able to be squeezed of every last atom of light. So great his terror of the dark, he lived (immune from effects of earth’s rotation) in a white and windowless room on Prince Michael Street with not so much as his name set down to tell whose body it was, found hanging from a coat hook – this man, anonymous and at rest at last in an unmarked grave. 2nd Alphabet of Ruins His Greek had become like broken columns on ground beaten into dust – the characters he inscribed on parchment no more legible than a ruin, where not one stone remains upon another. (Architecture, too, is a lexicon of forms whose meaning can be read). Censured for ineptitude, Theodore Agathias was stripped of his office and banished outside Byzantium’s walls, there to sit among thieves and beggars – this once faultless scribe who had copied the dream-book of Achmet ibn Sirim, diviner for the Caliph of Babylon. None living knew that – each night in Orphic sleep – Agathias saw the walls razed, the colonnade pulled down, all imperial likenesses defiled, heroic tapestries rent by iron swords, and the Emperor’s garden with its gold-enameled birds overrun by Ottoman horsemen. Norman Lock has written novels and short fiction as well as stage, radio and screen plays. He is a recipient of the Aga Kahn Prize given by The Paris Review, prose fellowships from the New Jersey and the Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts and, in 2011, a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His latest works of fiction are Shadowplay (Ellipsis Press), Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions (Spuyten Duyvil), and Escher’s Journal (Ravenna Press). Love Among the Particles is due from Bellevue Literary Press in May and a book-length narrative poem, In the Time of Rat, from Ravenna Press in March. His acclaimed play The House of Correction is presently touring major Turkish cities. Find out more by visiting Norman's website.

MAN-EATING MYTH What one tourist encounters, on a spit above a fire ring, is life moving into night. He cannot begrudge (having spanned human leagues of graffiti) the angels who desert him. THE FORTUNATE STAR THAT ROSE So many wombs wound around them And wounds and doors and sometimes Sliding bodies sliding on other bodies As the day breaks. She can’t recall Where all the voices come from Appearing and barking Gaggled and hooked. He awakes A pimpled whatness of a morning Buffs a night’s worth of nothing From the tarnished tangled thew

FIRST GRANDCHILD The grandchild was not loved because he was a boy and his head was shaped like a pear. It had hurt the mother to push him out. A second baby came, cuter than the first. With full, pale face, and questioning eyes. The grandmother did not approve of him touching himself all the time: "Put that thing away. It's disgusting." But secretly everyone in the family thought grandma was gay. When her grandson's first tooth was about to fall out, she brought him into the living room and tied a piece of string to his wobbly canine. She tied the other end to the door handle. "Stay there!" she said, "You'll feel no pain. Tonight the tooth fairy will come and put sweets under your pillow. One, two..." But the grandson was so scared he knocked his tooth out with his fist. No door would extricate anything from his mouth. "Three!" He screamed, "Ouch!" She opened the door and peered in. "Is it gone?" He rolled the blood-covered, yellow tooth out onto his palm and did not tell her he had pulled it out himself. It was longer than he'd thought. There were thin black veins on the surface. "Let me look at that thing," said the grandma. She held it in her hand. The grandson cried as blood dripped from his gums. "Oh, it's nothing," the grandmother said. "But I'm bleeding!" he complained. "It's just blood. Blood doesn't hurt." He thought about it and realized it didn't hurt. She gave him salted water. He rinsed and spat. The grandmother recommended he brush his teeth more often. "First Grandchild" is the inaugural story to Sister Stop Breathing, Chiara's debut collection of stories, out now from Calamari Press. Chiara is a screen and fiction writer. Films written by her have been distributed in Italy, Spain, Japan, and Latin America. The most recent one, “Into Paradiso” premiered at the 67th edition of the Venice Film Festival. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Noon, Bomb Magazine, Sleepingfish, Or, The Encyclopedia Project, The New Review of Literature, The NY Tyrant as well as The Village Voice, Rolling Stone Italy, Flair, Italian Vanity Fair, and Marie Claire. For samples of her work and more information, please visit.

AMERICAN HUNGER: A SESTINA My grandfather was raised in South Florida. He once had a nest of hornets chase up his nose as he hacked at an unkempt hopbush. After collecting fallen coconuts around the neighborhood, he split them apart with his father's axe. His father would get home, drag him to the garage, and box him in the ears, yelling blunt edges. Cotton top head covered in bright blue shawl, his mother frequented the cathedral downtown. She looked the part for the Virgin Mary. She would pull my grandfather and his two younger brothers inside by the arm. She crept every other week to catch a phone call in the booth around the corner. She curled tight around her finger the phone's chord, like a snake's tail. An obstinate cockatiel bucked his head in the corner. He looked a pale ghost, a chalky, black beak. His first emulation was of my petulant wails. I was three. I cried louder at his mocking, tears flooding my eyes, cloudy. My mom reclined in one of those ivory chairs, eyes shut tight, while my aunt spooned what appeared to be honey over my mother's eyebrows, baptismal. My grandfather's brother she married when she was seventeen, only knowing five phrases in English. She called them words of love. They were: "Look out—alligator!" "God damn it," "orange," "What took so long?" and "sand." They would drink beer, talk cars and land. My aunt would bring them coffee in the morning, grown from her father's farm back in El Salvador. It was a thick liquid. Black and boiling. My grandfather would pile sugar into a cup for me, turning it flat white with milk. He would take me down the wide, sprawling streets, hunting for fallen coconuts and leading me by my arm. We would follow each other inside. I scurried first to the cockatiel's cage in the corner, gathering the lost feathers from his tail. I offered him panicles of foxtail millet in exchange for his feathers. His name was Elvis, and his cheeks were bright red. She had rounded the corner with a flat that my grandfather was fast in changing, brake dust coating his fingers. She thanked him, rewarded him with a smile, stuck her number in with a five-dollar tip, and pulled out, making smoke out of the drive covered in gravel and sand. After he mustered his courage to call, they decided to meet for sodas downtown. He did not kiss her on the first date or on the second date, but it was by the second date her parents caught on. There are times when I need to reset myself. I met Valerie in eighth grade when our school went headfirst into a fatal production of Tristan und Isolde. I worked the set like an illusionist and she worked the audience like an enchantress. I remember the way her breasts felt the first time we hugged and I remember the way her lips tasted the first time we had sex. I remember the first time I saw her on stage; I had already committed my entire being to her. I remember the first time she kissed a boy in front of me, and I remember feeling she was everything but mine. Valentine’s was approaching and I stole calla lilies from the back cooler to give to Valerie. I would ring the bell to her mother's house and have a bunch behind my back, awaiting her answer, my fingers in my teeth, biting. I want nothing more than to erase: the hours it takes to regard the toes of our shoes, hers planted on the ground, solid; the day I picked up smoking; the other five times that happened; my failure to learn from the void it twisted open; the consequential cigarette burns that forever etch up my arm. But the other day, I met Stetson Kennedy's wife. I dream frequent of Zora Neale Hurston and stew over mint juleps, trying to accept the south. I'm finding it easier to forget the years that stretched by in a single lachrymal reverie. We have an automatic coffee pot now, and a TV; these are things that matter. An older man walks his young husky down our street and our daughter shouts and yells her greetings to the dog until every last inch of him disappears around the corner, her last hello directed to his tail. She would tell my grandfather: Next Wednesday. 8PM. And he would sit in his kitchen sick with the wait. What if someone else answers? What if a tough guy caught her in his jaws while out prowling the streets for tail? She always answered. The day my grandfather arrived in Brooklyn, it was a Wednesday, his turn to call. Tonight, he thought, she really will be mine. A smart rap on the door shook her of the anxiety. Fear flung itself in its place. She could see only her reflection staring back from the glass encasing her. She squinted, finally rallying enough to stick her head out of the door, ready to snap at the intrusion. My grandfather pulled the door open the rest of the way, letting her fall to the street, into his arms where he grabbed her close. They kissed, his lips at her ear, softly biting. My grandfather found himself on the banks of East River. This was it, maybe. He hoped for a current, he hoped for lightning, his eyes blinded by silent sobs that made his whole body shake. She shouted his name from afar, having followed his storm north and was able to dredge him up by his arm. The damselflies that flicked around the savage grass surrounding the lake. I waved the electric blue insects to keep them from biting. I had in one hand a suitcase stuffed with books, a length of rope in the other. I remember thinking how the dead walk backwards. I remember thinking maybe they march. I remember reading somewhere how many were victims of love and how I would be next and I came to a halt right before the mud turned to water, the fish darting about in their world, my presence stirring it, cloudy.

HOVIK Hovik lives alone, now grown and moved away from his family in the village, no natural siblings but several in the same house; adopted by his mother, but his would-be father was unwilling to sign. He rests on a branch inside his cottage, picks orange quaking leaves, wraps them tight around his feet; they don’t stop rustling until they’re firmly wrapped; energy transfers to his feet, up his legs, torso, straight to his heart. He patches around the branches, tree still wedged in the wall, leaves inside still rustling like in the wind. Trees surround and pierce all the walls of the cottage, all patched except the one he’s working on. Feet wrapped in leaves, tattered pants and shirt, mixing more mud with spit and grass, now a paste shoved into and around holes created by trees. In the center of the village: a statue of a woman holding a snake. The only statue around, she eats its tail, body stiff and raised straight up in the air, a lightning rod in the center of Hovik’s old home. Hovik hasn’t returned in years, not since his cottage was stolen around midnight in winter and appeared the next morning on top of and around the statue of his mother. He slid into village center on skis made from the bones and sinews of unclean birds, straight into a cottage wall at speed. He left the village, cottage supplies in tow, bringing along more than he originally had, to build the cottage larger and stronger, careful not to bring any dying portion of the village with him. Hovik is still unaware of the wild beasts, but aware of the atmospheric shift wild beasts often bring. Wild beasts spit venom and lethal bacteria, singeing silverbrush and clearing a path, less stealthy as they draw near. With no tools he rubs a blunt stone along joints, breaking down tendons and sinews, until they pull easily apart. Some wild beasts of prey watch from a safe distance; none help and after awhile creep away. The wall collapses, and the entire cottage follows. Hovik exits the other side, mud, spit, and yellow tall grass rubble surrounds the statue of his mother, but doesn’t touch her at all. There is a rupture between Yasmin and her eyes and fingers, a longing of her mother’s feet for her heart, legs for lungs, arms for head, part for part: an insufficient physicality of scale that only pushes the world further inward. They took what was simple to the building, and then to its top. She felt her mother’s physicality next to her as a full stop, a definitively provisional measure: her in the building as the silence in an empty and silent building. She was there to feel the body warm, the pulse race then slow to nothing. There on that bed, Yasmin lying asleep behind her mother, she woke abruptly holding her mother’s hand, like she had every night for months. She worried about how it felt in her hand. Her mother wasn’t conscious, but Yasmin talked to her about her hand, about her body, about whatever she could to prolong the afternoon, hoping to make the nightfall, so they could sleep together and wake together, as they had for months. No stabbing, no quick movements, only light tracing of her sternum and breasts. Circle around the left on the top side, cross at the sternum, underneath the right, circle around the top, back to the sternum, and underneath the left, the blade lightly grazing the skin. Yasmin the Light, next to her mother in bed, no blood running in those veins, knife in hand, slides it along her mother’s bare chest. She slides the knife along her mother’s stomach, a figure eight; the groove deepens, the knife breaks through, air escapes in a slow leak. No blood covers the bed, her torso drips onto the floor, but air escapes, fills the room, makes it difficult to breathe. Thank you. Thank you, her mother whispers. Yasmin puts her arms around her and says, I’m going to take care of you.

God Help the Pencils and Pens On the horizon people seem awful, and art is always horizontal. It is always a pink thing that responds to needles and hands equally. A way of being criminal someone will agree to. Someone will always let you go. Some people are barely born! They want themselves so much. They tap on the glass: is this in or out? I see how small I feel. But looked at by a handsome man with some feeling from above. I said you are so handsome and he said you can’t see me. He said you like scissors because they are two knives. Even a primary feeling, even adoration or envy is a plaid of other feelings, a mass of remnants, soft shards from somewhere in your body not having recognized themselves, yet, & not without some rub of before, some other girl’s face you held first, or some first instance of yellow, or horsehair, or ice, like instruments forgetting what they played, what they wrote. Having forgotten, they feel clear, and alert. A very small vague terror. Regular. Facing it: the day shot through clean, black and white up close, the words changing. Cakes And trust defiant things, like a fruit fly or tippy boat. I went with them, dumb and open-handed. Rested next to the torture room. It’s Tuesday and it all will be different from here forward. As always. The same sidewalk I have changed across, not three feet apart, becoming other women. An emergency siren alters its pitch as I go, but doesn’t, does it. A club of maroon crepe myrtle pushed away wobbles obediently back to where it was. I push love into a void, because that is love.

WHEN SHE WAS 19 SHE FORGOT A FEW CONTEXTS There are onions in the kitchen and no one knows how they got there. They’re all chopped up and left. I washed my hands and thought, Huh. Frederick Douglass sat next to me on the couch. He turned to me and said, “There are onions in the kitchen.” I don’t like onions. They taste so sweet at first, but so sharp. * * Mom sighs. “I forgot we’re out of mayonnaise. I want to make tuna fish, but I’m so tired. I would go to the store but I don’t have the energy.” “Huh,” I say. “We have chicken.” “I don’t want chicken.” “What’s wrong with chicken?” “I just don’t want it.” “O.K.” * * Mom wants to go to Phoenix to see her dad. She thinks he is dying. She cries in the car before work and I don’t care. I don’t believe her. All I want is for Kurt Cobain to hold me, but I won’t even hold my mom. No one should read this. It’s not worth anything. * * Last night I had to show Kurt Cobain something. I made a movie. We watched it and he might have liked it. But he sat on the bed so far away. He told me my blue eyelashes looked tacky. He rubbed his eyes. * * In the kitchen at night I smile when Dad walks down in a T-shirt and boxers to tell us Mom’s dad passed away. Frederick stops eating his cereal and gets off the stool and looks down and is quiet. He points to the basement door and I follow him. We stand downstairs in silence. I can’t stop smiling. I can’t stop looking at Frederick and noticing how tall he is, how dark his clothes are today. His cell phone rings. The ringer is loud and unwelcome and Frederick can’t take out the battery. His fingers are digging at the back of the phone, but it is still ringing. He can’t get it out and I am still smiling. I am laughing so hard, Frederick looks at me. I try to stop, but my smile moves on its own. Something inside me says, “M-hmm,” on the phone and pushes Frederick away with my feet.

BOYFRIENDS I tell him again. I tell him Uncle pointed the mammary, gripped, and shot my legs with milk. I tell him in the year that I became a vivisected girl, I prayed through a field to watch Uncle milk the cows. I jumped back. He laughed. And then he sat there, longer than anyone normal would have, letting his eyes dishonor me while simultaneously forgiving them. His thick, pink tongue fumbled his lips while milk-thick, warm, and sticky milk--shifted nervously on the bare flesh of my blotched legs in the morning sun. This is where I was really born, as all the pillow talk of pillow stains for the rest of my life treed out from here. DEATH MILL First, people asked me, have you lost some weight? I said yes. Yes I have. I cut the meals down. Now I drink some milk, and eat some red peppers. They said, you look great! Later they said, maybe you should eat some more. Now no one talks to me. I think anorexia would be the least embarrassing. I hope they do not think I have a tapeworm because that would be embarrassing. They think I have anorexia. No, they think I have bulimia. The police would come. They would shine a flashlight in my face. They would bark at me. I’d say to them: No, no, no, you've got it all wrong. My grandma is dead. It’s for myself. You think you are a goddamn know it all, don't you, Chief Fuck Face? Smart little fucker. Fuck Face. But the cops didn't come. He just walked off. Maybe to the back room. Maybe he took a break, maybe he drank a coffee. Maybe he had a lunch break followed by a coffee and a cigarette. Would I sit down in there, or lay down? Would I crawl into the death mill? Probably a combination of both. But never stand. It just wouldn't be reasonable. If you are hanging out inside of a death mill I don't think you are ever standing. It just wouldn't make any sense. It wouldn't be logical and it wouldn't be reasonable. If I lay down in the death mill and my feet stick out the end that would be fine. It would probably be easier for someone to recognize. Some kid would pick up a rock and throw it at the side of the death mill hoping to wake me up with a scare. The joke would be on him because he would see his first dead body. I would be dead. My dad, he was always handy. When my brother and I were young, he built a large fort for us to play on. It was actually two stories high with a pole to slide down like a firehouse. How many trees does it take to make one piece of plywood? It has to be at least three. Therefore, if there are three pieces of plywood left over, that's three times three, that's nine trees. I say it again loudly. I bought this milk yesterday! I look towards the living room. There is still no one else in the living room. Did I check the date on the jug before I bought it? I must have. I must have just assumed it was fine. I must have looked at the date without reading it. A photo of my grandmother on my dad's side. She died of a stroke at 86. She had been living in an old folks home for years. Once she was placed in the old folks home she hated all of us. There is a photo of her with mint green ice cream dribbling through the black hairs on her chin but that isn't the one I tape to the wall. MATTHEW A senile old bastard digs up your garden and it is time to take him somewhere else where someone else will put him down. You can bury him in the same ruins of your garden. Someone else will even put his body in a crisp black sack for you. You can lay this black sack down. Puppies rarely have problems. Puppies dig up your rose bush and you stop reading the newspaper for one minute. The dog already came with the name Matthew. When you know a guy the dogs usually come with papers which usually come with wintered names. A shrug. Sometimes you are trying to be friendly. The dog never loved him. I shrugged that I know a guy. Matthew stared with eyes that seemed less set in his head than they were simply leaning against his drooping folds. When he left his chair his smell was still with it, as packages deposited into the cracking leather. From these folds from his chair, he growled, stared and stayed. It started to make my friend sick. My friend started to wash Matthew twice a day. He was afraid. He coughed. He sounded like he had been crying. You know the voice quakes. He asked me if I could come by the next day and do him the solid. I enter the Tavern and the barman said to me what do you have and I said to him, I’ll take a Bud, My friend told me he just came from the doctor. The friend called me up with a sense of urgency.

CLEANING WINDOWS Cleaning The Window And The Sill The Dust And Invisible Smudges Are Quite A Pill Now They’re Clean, Quite Clear The Self-conscious Janitor Is No Longer Ill. THE JANITOR Rubbing the smudges away Cleaning the dust from the sill Awaking to the morning The janitor dreaming of second shift. A CUP OF COFFEE Keeping Me Stirred She’s My Sugar And Cream Sweetens, Lightens Me Up Always Keeps A Pot Brewing. Danny P. Barbare resides in foothills of Greenville, SC. His poetry has recently appeared in vox poetica, Wordland 2, YARN and others. He attends Greenville Technical College. His three books are available on Amazon.com: Nature Poems, Family, and Being a Janitor.

LOOKED BACK IN TURN The plastic was a small boat made from bright orange. The man was the driver, and he had on a green life vest with a blue circle on the back. Inside of the blue circle was a white cross. The woman had the same emblem on her back and she was small, and blonde. Her hair was medium to long. They also had on oxygen tanks. The oxygen tanks fit on their backs and were hollow on the inside. The black ladder was the last thing that was a part of it: the black ladder went to the water, but there was no water; just a carpet; and therefore, the black ladder just stayed in the boat and they walked--or rather, were assisted--in walking around the carpet.