Professional Documents
Culture Documents
issue seven
little white poetry journal | issue seven
words © 2009 by noted poets
lwpj.henrychalise.info
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set in gentium book basic
E DITOR’S N OTE
dissolve, motion
of a movie star
swinging, green
chewable pith.
Why I cannot
mention sitting between
cassette players, texting
celebratory punch here’s a ladle it is cold
moisture from your fingers
river | railroad:
1. Courage in Flyswatters
2. Squinted and thought there was a beard ( )
3. Game Hens Suspended in Aspic a vest, poofy, green
Megan Thoma won the Babbitt’s
Prize for Short Fiction and has work
published on mcsweeneys.net. She
created the poetry-themed theatrical
production ink , and founded the
Tongue & Ink Writers’ Conference.
Megan is the reigning Providence, RI
poetry slam grand champion and will
be representing the city at the 2009
Individual World Poetry Slam. She
writes and teaches at Hope Arts High
School in Providence, RI.
Postcards for Meg
1
I am studying what it means to love.
All across the country, trying to learn
how place molds your heart, how gravel
leaves scars, how the spilled blood of loving
soaks into sand and grass and rock.
I am studying.
I am trying.
2
In the Pacific northwest, they love in layers. Always
damp and cold, they paw through clothes, clumsy,
digging and searching for flesh, for warmth, trying
to rub bones together, trying to start a fire with want.
3
In Antarctica, they fuck like rabbits, a vicious assault
on winter. It isn’t about love; it’s about survival.
16,500 condoms for 125 people for 72 dark days.
They fuck till holes form then they slide another over.
When that rubber starts to melt, they slide on another
and another, making nesting dolls of cocks and condoms.
They are brave warriors, and when they cum, a bolt
of light shoots from their chests. For a few moments,
they burn through the dark blizzard and are reminded
that they are human and alive and are filled with something
that can, in fact, lead them through the storm.
4
In Alabama, they love like long summer
days. It’s a lazy sort of love, almost dull
in its consistency. And if you asked any
teenager, they’ll tell ya Alabama love is
just plain boring—about how love just past
the border glows neon and wears sexy shoes.
But if you ask the old folks, they’ll tell ya
how nice it is to have warm bones deep
into a January winter.
5
In the heart of every city, where sidewalk, sky,
and skin are rubbed dirty, the love is just as caked
in hard filth. Nothing comes easy here, ‘specially love.
You gotta choose your weapon carefully: fists,
chisel, hammer, or stone. Love is a confrontation,
a moment of grace too good to be believed, it must be beat
into the side of your skull with a brick. And where
the streets are stained a magnificent red, that’s where
people are still trying.
6
In the depths of the Arizona desert,
they love naked. It gets really hot there.
It’s a necessity. The desert stones
leave imprints on their hearts.
7
In Iowa, they love with quilts—
under the worn history of family and felt.
They make patchworks with rows of soy and dirt—love
that can only be seen by God . . . or
people in planes. Their hearts
have seams that sometimes catch on the fingers
of cornstalks, unraveling fast, they turn into kites.
And the mothers of Iowa are surgeons
with thimbles, needles, and thread.
8
In LA, they just forgot to love today.
Not on purpose, but they got on the highway,
and they realized the love was back somewhere . . .
somewhere . . .
between the office and the car? Maybe?
And I mean . . . traffic . . .and I mean, really?
Love’s safe in an LA parking lot for a night?
Right?
9
In DC, they love deep within sealed
manila envelopes. In secret compartments.
Where the sticky, sweaty tourists
would never know to go.
There are important matters to attend to,
and love can only be fit in between meetings,
in thirty minute increments.
They are efficient.
No time for mistakes.
No time for foreplay
deep within the shadows of lust.
10
In my home, I love like a salt shaker.
Perfectly paired. Dependably there.
I love like salt.
Simple and necessary.
So much history, so much faith.
You and I.
This is worth preserving.
I love you.
Like salt.
Christopher Higgs’s chapbook Colorless
Green Ideas Sleep Furiously was just
released by Publishing Genius Press.
Other of his work appears or is
forthcoming in many places, including:
Swink, Conduit, AGNI, Quarterly
West, No Colony, Lamination Colony,
etc. He also curates the online arts
journal Bright Stupid Confetti.
Above Below
Main Man: I’m not sure any field guide is ever “finished”.
Nicolette:
What Would Really Help Me [Part 1]
Is a tool belt
filled with some stuff mentioned in Dean Young’s,
“Hammer.”
Urban birds have to sing louder and faster than their rural
counterparts.
failures
Are you thinking about your own hands? Odds are, if you are
reading this then you’ve never operated
I
Pretend you’re living with me. We are both girls. Your
penis is gone, I don’t know where you’ve put it, maybe
it’s in your back pocket. We’re painting our toenails
Cherry Slurpee Red and eating cheese crackers. Orange
flecks our fingers. Your toes are small and dainty. I lean
down, cover them with my breath. Are they dry yet?
I curl beside you like a cat, the salt from your knees
tasting of burnt sugar. You reach for your back pocket.
Please, stay like this. A girl.
II
Imagine your sister comes back from the dead. She hasn’t
aged a day. She’s five, eleven, seventeen. Her skin is
beautiful—you can’t stop touching. Is she a ghost? She
gets out the Monopoly game, you buy all the red and
green properties. Just like Christmas, but she’s too busy
trying to land on the last railroad. You cheat, maybe
she does too. No one buys Boardwalk, the chances of
landing on it are slight and besides, it’s so expensive.
You roll, move, it’s so soothing, so familiar. When you
look up your sister is picking her nose.
III
Pretend we’re in bed. Can you remember? It wasn’t
that long ago or maybe it never happened, maybe we
never met. White sheets, sun across the ceiling. You
are wet, I am hard. I wait for the end, pillows propped,
skin damp. Our stories will outlast us, but so what.
Your cock tastes of almonds. The hangnail by your
thumb bleeds and heals, bleeds and heals. Heel, I say
to my dog and she shuffles down close to my ankle,
demure, suffering. I no longer believe in afternoons.
IV
Imagine your sister moves in with you. She’s dead but
she was always stubborn. She cleans up your messes,
cooks dinner, remembers to feed the fish. You lie naked
on the floor while she reads a Nancy Drew mystery.
Her voice is young and high. Her vowels warm you.
Imagine swallowing a paperclip, that cool metal lodged
in your throat. Maybe you’ll die this way, yes, but
not today.
V
Pretend we’ve been married for years. Our kids are
away at school, our bodies bent and ruined. Our sad
knees, our yellowing teeth. For years we struggle to
understand language, decipher pauses and shoulders.
It does us no good. Knowledge isn’t love, we learn that
too late. Curled in bed with our pajamas off. We are
no longer beautiful but still our hands clutch, our legs
tense. Oh fucking Jesus. How many years do we have
left? Passion crushes our chests, gasps our breaths.
Pretend it doesn’t matter. Just try.
VI
Imagine your sister is nursing you through a long illness.
She’s dead but so are you, almost. She feeds you chicken
soup, tells you stories, changes the TV channels. You
are afraid to sleep so she sits with you as you struggle
against the softness, the temptation of dreams. What
if you don’t wake up? Hush, it’s okay. Close your eyes.
What is the last thing you wish to see: Your children’s
faces? The mountains in the morning? Tell me. Tell
me now.
Joseph Aguilar is a Ph.D. student in
fiction at the University of Missouri.
His most recent stories appear or will
soon appear in Quarterly West #67,
elimae, Sojourn, and other places.
Worker, Blueberry Field
“skelescope”
is this perhaps death?
although the instrument is not perfect:
the new space, the new room is larger and more
beautiful
one may play a piano and one may also play poker:
all humans are also related
the cello sells its own overture,
one might develop thrush in the mouth in conjunction
with a fever
facts of dying
(two recorded instances of dying persons who speak
of light and music)
looking around, holding my bow
I hold it like a new planet
no, one of its moons
lightly I speak,
a flourish:
a fevered rush, a resonant string
spun off to a new resettlement
a small flute
a sincere apology, with my sincerest apologies:
she was a painter and an organ donor and her eyes were
given to a blind man
play, turn pages, practice past tense? no.
facts of an opera (six criteria of operatic construction)
most infected newborns have no symptoms at birth,
however with no treatment some
develop eye damage owned by the Philadelphia
Orchestra, this magnificent
19th century opera house was the oldest venue in the
United States still used for
its original purpose converted rocket ships slip
into the night sky
and beyond
chimes
the conductor sleeps in the cockpit
we have one year to complete our journey
Cento VI
Midafternoon:
I come away
from the window & the rooftops
& turn the knob on the radio—
a thin line cutting
across rows of numbers.
I would like to hear, say,
Jelly Roll playing “The Crave,”
but will settle
for a Lee Wiley record.
Except
for a station on which a voice
not easily distinguishable
from Miss Margaret Truman’s
is singing “At Dawning”
& another on which “light classics”
by a feeble string group emerge
oppressively distinct,
all the others are playing
record after record
by big dance bands:
Claude Thornhill,
Kay Kyser,
Tex Beneke,
Charlie Spivak
Vaughn Monroe.
Corruption & decay.
I switch off the radio,
go
into the other room,
pour myself
a drink.
ROBINSON SENDS A LETTER TO SOMEONE
Cento II
Sorry to be a bit slow in responding
to yr. good communication.
The period during which one waits
for the Army to gobble one up
seems to divide itself neatly
between the terrifying & the full.
Cento IV
Everyone I know who has been called up
by the draft lately has been rejected—
Cento X
California seems to debase itself
less frenetically than the East Coast.
At least my central nervous system
has responded to it rather nicely.
of a peach
is no longer
blue to midnight
but this is 1972
and Chartreuse
has not yet been
christened Atomic
Tangerine &
the promise of
a primrose is
still canary-colored.
Holophrasis