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Jose Romero – Perceptions

Perceptions

Believe me,
nobody wants to be loved.

What good lies
in the isolated knowledge of one
who loves,
one who finds himself in love?
……………………What good is it to me that you
……………………love me?
The truth is irrelevant when it
comes to individuals.
……………………What a useless thing—to be loved.

But to feel it, ah!
All souls, all spheres
of energy and matter
were created to seek it.
……………………We bathe ourselves in the
……………………hope to find it:
……………………The feeling,
……………………not the truth behind it.

For what is a color
other than the thing we see?
No reality can go beyond a belief,
becoming inconsequential.

Maybe they don’t know it,
maybe they can’t understand,
yet nobody really wants to be loved,
what they want is to feel as if they were.

– Jose Romero

A.J. Huffman – Meditations on the Half Shell

Meditations on the Half Shell
A Haiku String

Waves leave me stranded
My body recalls the pull
of salty siren

I echo remorse
My shell an amplifier
of solitude

The sun rises
My body warms to resolve
accepts stasis

Hours tick like time bombs
Metronomic visions
of feet and feathers

Owning neither
I sink further into sand
pretend I am coffin

Waiting for death
I discover a new concept
Regeneration

The world moved forward 
into perceived reversal 
I am recycled

Arms of tomorrow
embrace me like yesterday
I breath as if I am home.

– A.J. Huffman

Robin Vigfusson – My Brother, Steve

My Brother, Steve

Steve looks rested, has all his teeth and his shirt is immaculate; you would never in a million years think this guy was on welfare.  He’s my brother and we meet once a year for my birthday treat at the restaurant of his choice.  This year, he’s chosen Olive Garden.

 Aside from this splurge, I supplement his upkeep with a monthly check which he demands with the punctuality of a landlord.  I’ve paid him thousands in what might be called blood money.  

What else can I do?   Certainly, no person in his right mind wants to end up like him.  According to his caseworker, he’s anti-social.   His life has been one long con job though he was shrewd enough to avoid jail by making all his victims those who loved him; people who’d never go to the police.  

“You look good,” I tell Steve knowing how important  his appearance is to him even at this stage of the game.   One of the symptoms of his disorder is narcissism. 

“Really?” his shady earnestness is still winsome.   Another trait that marks his pathology is charm.

That  compliment launches him into his routine diatribe about loneliness and the crushing indignities of subsidized housing.   His room is not even equipped to handle air conditioning.  In this heat, I can’t help wincing.   It’s too painful for me to use the word ‘poverty’ when I tell others about him.   ‘He’s living on SSI’ dilutes the brutal reality.

He resorts to a hard sell.  “Why can’t I move in with you?  A month at the most till I’m on my feet, again?”  He’s sixty now.    I’ve heard this for ten years, since he went through the last of what my parents left him. 

“You can’t move in with us,” I tell him.   “Eric would never allow it.”  Eric is my husband.

“You have all that space, for God’s sake!”  he says accusingly.

“What can I tell you?  Eric would leave me.  I can’t destroy my marriage.”  I hold fast to what Eric told me, once.  How a parasite’s overriding instinct is always to devour its host.

We finish our lasagna and  I leave the restaurant feeling mainly relieved that I won’t have to see him again for another year.

When I get home, my two cats greet me.  Except for them, I live alone.  My husband died two years ago, but Steve doesn’t need to know that.

– Robin Vigfusson

K. M. Gibb – Something Horrible In Need of Killing

Something Horrible In Need of Killing

The three older boys hanging out behind our school said that they’d killed a rabid dog at the abandoned air force base. “We slashed at him until I got him in the stomach,” one of them said.

“Did he bleed out?” I asked, trying to sound cool.

“No. He didn’t fucking bleed out,” the tallest boy said, tossing a pocketknife between his hands. “I threw my knife and hit him between the eyes.”

I stared at his knife in awe.

“There are tons of rabid dogs there. Twenty bucks to watch us kill one.” He looked at me and then at my friends, Kyle and Thomas. “Or are you a bunch of pussies?”

“I’m no pussy,” Kyle said.

Thomas and I nodded in agreement.

The tallest boy slid the knife into his pocket and then unrolled a pack of cigarettes from his shirtsleeve. He flicked a lighter on in one motion, something I couldn’t do even after practicing all Fourth of July. “Tonight then,” he said, taking a drag.

When I got home, I counted my money slowly. It had taken me all summer to save that much, and I wanted to feel like it belonged to me a little longer. Then I looked through my closet for a pocketknife my grandfather had given me. All afternoon, I threw it at a picture of a menacing dog until it stuck every time. Then, I oiled and sharpened it until it gleamed.  

James Mulhern – A Nun’s Arse

A Nun’s Arse

“What a shame,” Nonna said when I arrived at her place after working at the family restaurant. “Mary Muldoon just called. Drunk as a skunk, asking if I knew where her husband Jim was and quite annoyed at the Happy Garden Chinese Restaurant. Said they were sending her pork fried rice and egg rolls at least three times a week. Claims she never ordered a thing.”

“Where’s her husband?”

“Molly, he’s dead. Has been for years. She found him in the living room around dinner time. Massive heart attack.”

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

“She must be having blackouts and forgetting things. Or she’s imagining that they are delivering the food. Mary has squash rot. Poor thing. Her mind’s all messed up.”

“What’s ‘squash rot’ ?”

“It means your brain is rotted from too much alcohol. When she drinks, Mary gets delusional and hallucinates.”

“She eats at our restaurant once a week and never says much unless it’s to complain. She’s nasty to me. She told my father that I’m a ‘clumsy oaf,” and said that I should be washing dishes instead of serving food.”

“You’ve got to have compassion, Molly. She’s been through a lot and can’t help herself. Addiction to alcohol is a terrible thing.”

“I don’t think it’s an excuse to be mean, Nonna.”

I excused myself, saying I had homework, and went to her bedroom where I would hang out until my parents closed the restaurant.

Victoria Griffin – Thorns

Thorns

If he had been sitting on a lazy cloud, looking down at the world, it might almost have looked nice. The patchwork of rice paddies could have been a green quilt thrown over the earth. Henry’s rifle hung heavily from his shoulder, and silently he wept—knowing that I could not weep aloud.

Guns and smoke were tattooed over his mind, blurring the image of five young faces. Even through the haze of regret, he remembered the way the eyes had looked as were jolted out of this world by soldiers’ bullets. Death should be peaceful, a gentle settling, the end to a long journey. Not accompanied by groans and shouts. Not full of agony like flares erupting in their skin. Not pain. That wasn’t the way to die—certainly not at eighteen years old. Damn kids were to young to grow beards. Now they’re dead because their skin and uniforms were the wrong colors.

Henry walked on, surveying the land and the approaching huts, his head held high, his pride evident, and his wretched guilt consuming him more quickly than war. The civilians scattered as he stepped through the settlement. He watched a woman gather up her child and set off in the opposite direction, leaving him only a hollow glance.

That’s how he felt. Hollow. Like a rotted tree. I’m a medic for God’s sake. I’m not a soldier. Henry slipped into an empty hut. He leaned his rifle against the wall and unfastened his bandoliers, letting the deathly spirits slip away from his body. But he could not dispel them from his presence. They lingered—as though they were meant for him. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead and held a cigarette to his lips, frowning at his shaking hands and the lighter that refused to catch flame.

Timothy O’Leary – The Tower

The Tower

Barry hated cell phones. He shuddered when trapped in a crowd, people yacking at maximum decibel, as if everyone within earshot was buzzed to hear about dysfunctional families or drunken golf outings.  He detested camera phones, users blocking sidewalks, or rudely delaying meals to photograph the perfect tuna melt. He considered “selfies” an addiction for the self-obsessed. It saddened him when couples, heads tilted crotch-ward, abandoned human interaction in favor of text-talk. He’d scream “pay attention” at obtuse blockheads as they attempted to simultaneously type and walk.

But the biggest reason Barry hated them?  They’d murdered his wife. Diana was headed downtown in her Toyota Prius when sixteen-year-old Becca Hughes, oblivious to the road while texting a friend, ran a stop sign and killed them both.

To add insult to injury, Barry learned of Diana’s demise via a cell phone. While he refused to own one, Barry’s publicist carried the newest Apple anything, which she handed him after he’d delivered a speech to the Missoula, Montana Rotary Club.  “Barry, you need to take this, it’s your brother-in-law,” she said, her complexion as white as her iPhone 6. Standing in a dark corner of the Holiday Inn, the air reeking of moldy carpet and baked chicken, a sniffling voice informed him that the only woman he’d ever loved wouldn’t be picking him up at the airport in Portland tonight.

Daniel Finkel – The Salesman

The Salesman

A man comes to town.  He wears spit-shined shoes and a lime-green coat.  His hair is all slicked, and there’s a pack on his shoulders.  He looks bright and flashy, like a light bulb.  I see him walking down the road, the noon sun sizzling on his head, with his feet raising little clouds of dust.

It’s a midsummer inferno outside, and all the windows in our house are open.  I’m lying on the grass on our front lawn, Hector at my side, just lazing around.  It’s too hot to think, much less do anything.  Inside, somewhere in the dim swelter, mama’s cleaning pots and pans.  

The man stops at a bakery window and looks in at a loaf baking in the oven.  They have it on a rack in there, and it’s going around and around like a little white planet.  When he sees it he whips off his spectacles and cleans them on his shirt cuff, and a greedy look gets on his face.

After he’s stared for a while he moves on, and the first thing he does is come towards my house.  He walks down the front path, and I can tell he’s nervous because he’s fussing with his hair and sniffing his breath and rubbing the sweat off his forehead.  He looks at me, lying on my back in the middle of the lawn, chewing grass, and I look back at him.  At my side, Hector sits up and starts growling.  The man gets to my front door and knocks.  No reply.  He knocks again.  Still nothing.  Bang!  Bang!  Bang!   Finally, mama answers.

Jose Romero – blueRed

blueRed

          Oh, but the physicality of my thinking is chaotic. Outside of my apartment someone is walking up the stairs. I sometimes walk up those stairs and stumble. But I wasn’t always like this.

          Nonono.

          I’m gonna write the letter. I’m sorry for not knowing if I loved you. Because things get confusing and my mind’s fucked up. The tears don’t let me write. If what matters are my actions then I never loved you. But it’s the world—this fucked up world; like a mind-rape.

          Right now someone is falling in love with someone that will never love them back. Someone just found out their mother has cancer. Someone is losing a job. Someone is killing a baby they never wanted. Someone is having sex at a bar. Someone’s daughter is crying. I can feel the world around me. So much pain. Everything, everywhere. Staring. Accusing. In the walls, liquifying through the streets.

          The bottle’s in the floor. The wine is going to leave a stain. If you were here you would clean it up. It’s not my fault. They stare. Or carefully not stare. I want you to regret me. (I’d regret me). This hybrid of thoughts and actions and sicknesses and desires and a self-destructive mind accompanied with an ever-changing personality.

          You need to know that that night wasn’t my best. Pills seemed peaceful. But I didn’t do it right. So no, you could say I never loved you.  Yes, I didn’t. Maybe I am too selfish to love. There was always too much pressure from you; to love, to be in a specific way. I never liked that part of you.

          A girl just fell outside. Should I feel bad for her? Feel sorry, only by the mere appearance of innocence? Why is it that we can’t accept that humans are predesigned to do evil? Well, to be selfish, which in a community, is evil. Yet, when faced with a deathly situation, we’ll always think about ourselves. Blood in my nails from scratching too hard. Instinct will always push us to survive. And instinct is nature, nature is good. Therefore, Love is evil?  Love goes beyond nature, it Transcends. That’s it. I can’t love you because I’m selfish, and selfish is good. Yes, I’m good. It’s not my fault.