© MMVIII All rights reserved The Benefactor Magazine

 THE CREDIT
BENEFACTOR
IS DUE

Chief Editors: Ashley d’Avignon Goodwin & Marc Saleme

Creative Director: Ashley d’Avignon Goodwin

Contributors: Cessa Cantrell, Lindsey Baker, Zachariah d’Avignon Goodwin,

Eric Wilson-Lopez, Marc Saleme, Amanda Huckins

Illustrations: Ashley d’Avignon Goodwin

questions, comments & submissions:

thebenefactor@thebenefactormagazine.com

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©MMVIII All rights reserved The Benefactor Magazine
 August/September
an edition of poetry

Contents

“To the Lover” and “From the House”...Cessa Cantrell.................................................................6-7

After He Moved to California, the World Kept Growing...Lindsey Baker.........................................11

An Autobiography...Zachariah d’Avignon Goodwin...................................................................12-20

Love Letter to Brooklyn...Lindsey Baker...................................................................................22-23

Getting Out...Eric Wilson-Lopez...............................................................................................24-25

List of Words...Marc Saleme.....................................................................................................26-30

Location...Amanda Huckins...........................................................................................................32

Communicable Dictionaries...Amanda Huckins.............................................................................33

This One’s About Me, Cooked...Cessa Cantrell.............................................................................35

 “To the Lover” and “From the House”
Cessa Cantrell

Milk-white sacrifice:

(Listen) I’ve got a terrific idea.

You and me and a bottle o’ scum—
We’ll become a one big Pangaea.

We’ll be bedroom mascots,

Duct tape as our pinion vice.
Sucking residue like apricots,

Fucking sweetish fruit.

Taking breaths only when
The clock kicks eleven’s boot.

We’ll play an anchovies accordion.

Float some shrimps, seasoned cuisine:

Our lupine Creole love-envy…

Whore-Taker:

Knowing what they is

(And hating what they isn’t)
But, digging that abyss
And trying to make it fission

Is like playing cards with cumquats

And shearing sheep with acid pulp,
Them trembling with combustion spots
And forgetting how to gulp.


“It

Ravaged me for 3 days straight”;

(Your thoughts couldn’t let go
And your appetite got slight.)

Your 20/20 vision realized

The “bystander” sandpaper
Scuffing the fuck out of your eyes.

But, what he doesn’t know

Is that you’re a sonofabitch.

And, you know how to shoot

Those sadist injections,

Taking your passion into the world
And outside of bedroom inspections

Singin’:

The gun came down

On Freddie’s crown
With the violence of
A Timbuktu Monsoon.

Yes.
You know I’ve been singin’:

The gun came down

On Freddie’s crown
With the violence of
A Timbuktu Monsoon.


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After He Moved to California, the World Kept Growing

Lindsey Baker

He was digging,
he said, to clear
overgrown morning
glories out
back—Shoveling the only bare
patch, pushing, green tip
down, just to break something, so many
round clods of dirt—
He never intended to plant.

At night, Nebraska:
rows and rows of corn.
Every stalk an even height,
he dreamt of oceans without
waves, full of order,
plenty.

8 a.m. and already the steady

scrape of metal on stone.
One foot in the flowers,
one on the shovel’s shoulder:
turn, pile.
At noon, reverse—
How many holes he made, then filled,
then made again.

11
 Love Letter to Brooklyn

Lindsey Baker

You would reduce

all cacophony to an anthem of Manhattan,

a girl’s giddy squeal

to a crumpled paper hat the hour after Chinese New Year.

You would believe

each sweep of littered sidewalks sacrilege—

You don’t believe in cleaning up—

You inventory, itemize.

I don’t want to know the things you’d find

in my home’s crippling disarray;

I cannot bring myself to sort trinkets from trash,

baffled one small girl could generate such mess—

I am moved by fear, a wish

to wisely choose the things I should discard,

to, in view of everything, not miss or touch a single thing—

I miss you. I cannot touch you.

Once, you wrote a list of all the words you did not know,

even though in doing so, you learned; you lied.

I’d not be better writing I don’t know you,

22
your litanies, those lengthy prayers I’ve almost memorized

as mine—In truth,

we don’t know anything. We find less, say less than that.

You exist in my excess: gold hem, hairpin, flat palm.

You are what you took away. I am what you left.

23
 Getting Out.

Eric Wilson-Lopez

sitting on the veranda of

the middle of

the city.

looking up at trees

I wonder how long it takes

for them to produce the oxygen

that I’m breathing

this symbiotic relationship

as I dream up new ways to make money

the entities who die to make it are being tied

to the back of a barge in south america.

well

I never planned on saving the world

only living in it until

I die myself

I see a building I used to live in

and wonder

if it’s only me who can’t seem

to separate memories from eachother

24
I try I try I try I try

to pick out one distinct instance

but can do no better than seeing the cat

in the window

her face through the window

christmas with an aluminum tree

walking through the parking lot

watching her wash dishes

doing the laundry

her red sheets

as she put lotion on after

a shower

her clothes that spilled out

all over her bedroom

my fumbling hands

shaving her legs

I never meant to save the world

only to

live in it

until I die myself.

25
 List of Words

Marc Saleme

So I went to the doctor because I felt funny, or rather not so funny, and after careful examination he
says, “You’ve got, uh, blue spots.”

“Blue spots?”

“Yes, tiny ones, like freckles only smaller. But they’re there.”

“I didn’t think... I didn’t think you could get blue spots. I sure as hell didn’t think it could happen to
me.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what do we do?”

“Well, there’s some medicine you can take--”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” I said. “I can’t afford commercial medicine. So uh... like do you have any other
ideas?”

“I’m only trained in commercial medicine.”

“Huh,” I said, and that’s how it was. I was glad to know that I’m on my own. You know, remanded to
deal with life with nothing more than the tools the good Lord gave me. Back on the streets.

“I see,” said Bosley. “So what–did the doctor say what the blue spots are?”

“Yes, in fact. They are deposits of crystallized metabolite... I don’t have quite all—I’m one enzyme
short of a protein complex. Heh, I’m one codon short of a gene sequence. Got a screw loose!”

“You’ve had some screws loosened since you started taking death.”

“I know! Just look at what it did to Keanu Reeves.”

“Right. I mean it’s not that kind of death.”

“Just like it’s not that kind of adrenachrome.”

“Never is.”

26
 “Just like the movies.”

“That’s why they call it the silver screen.”

“I think you mean movie magic or cinematography. The silver screen is a term referring to an actuality
that those projection screens are kind of a silver tone.”

The sulky silk-shirted late-seventies-throwback-haired scuzz-festival death dealer couldn’t stop staring
at the back of a head across the Starbucks where they were doing the deal. He swore that head looked just
like a friend’s and even though it wasn’t the exact person, he wanted to study the face, but all he got was a
long look at a hairy occiput. There’s a brain in there. “Why are you telling me all this,” he asked.

“Because, well, my point is that I think the death has begun to prove deleterious to my daily thought
process.”

“Wouldn’t be worth the money if it didn’t.”

“Uh-huh.” I sat there with these two crystal gems in my hand that I couldn’t actually see very well.
Maybe I’m getting old. I need glasses. Maybe my visual processing center is being eroded away so that
everything just kind looks amorphous and fuzzy. Funny how in fact, it’s all or nothing.

Maybe I’m just dehydrated. Low on B-vitamins. Maybe I’m a monster.

The phone rang.

So what, right?

No, but I picked it up against some better judgment. Would it be a creditor? I know so many of them,
and they call and make me feel bad. My grandmother is a creditor.

“You just want it to be right.”

“I know!” Relief. It’s Josie. “And everybody acts like there are so many choices.”

“Take it easy.”

“Thanks.”

“Thanks for what?” Mom said.

“Oh, I guess I was just remembering another conversation. One where I felt good.”

Everyone’s a therapist.

“Do you have any pills?”

27
 “I have aspirin.”

“No, that’ll give the Reye’s. You know Mom, life is kind of a headache, because I can’t work in these
conditions.”

“You know it sounds like you’re living in the past, with all those overlaps in narrative.”

“You’re disjointed and hackneyed!”

“Are you on drugs?”

“Well, yeah, always, but now that we’ve identified that living in the past thing, hopefully I can try some
new things.”

“You should try some new things, if you CAN,” she said ominously.

And then it hit me. This is so freakin’ weird. It’s like I’m dreaming all the time.

No, wait, that was a movie too. There are so many movies.

Here’s one. There’s one. He shows blue chicory to the one he’s loving as they ride along concrete in an
automobile.

I like tender things, they tell each other with what they don’t say.

If you say anything sweetly enough, it makes me melt like molten mountains of gold lolling through
space without form or function.

Softly.

And I like to see other people enjoying things, like carefully eating some tasty morsel from glistening
fingers, because it reminds me of what it’s like to be alive.

Who writes this stuff!? Who said what should make me happy? Abraham.

I just want to say one word to make the whole idea appear in your claptrap mind.

Salacious.

Ahhhh. I’m talking to myself again.

“Psst.”

“What!?”
28
 A trench-coat and fedora with eyes gestured him over into the alley with a head jerk.

He entered, couldn’t help but think of sex.

“Hey buddy,” the fedora said, “Do you find yourself slipping back and forth between metaphor and
literality?”

“All the time! I have absolutely no control.”

“There’s a loaded statement.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking around for something better to do. These conversations always bore me. “And
besides, what’s the difference?” I said, knowing that this would only make the conversation longer, but not
wanting to be rude.

“Between what?”

“Literality and metaphor.”

“Well, I guess it’s in the eye of the beholder.”

“Then where does communication become necessary?”

“Communication is its own end.”

“A ha,” I said, satisfied. “Well, I’m glad we talked. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Yeah, well... I’m gonna go... unless we were going to have sex, or get a drink, or both, probably in that
order...”

“Uh, no, not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“Hey, buddy.”

“What?”

“You want to buy some information? I got good shit.”

“Oh yeah?” I said cautiously, because I’ve definitely been burned before. “What is it?”

29
 “Heavy meditation.”

“Ah!” I groaned heavily. “Yeah, I don’t know. It’s just that I’ve heard that can ruin my life, because I’ll
change, and even though I may not like myself, I have all these really decent reasons why I-- You know
what?

I don’t talk to hippies.

Let not your left hand know what you’re right hand is doing. Asshole.”

And I walked on.

There’s a river and some buildings, and sometimes I stop, sometimes I walk.

I’m dying. Unless I can find the philosopher’s stone.

And then I’ll pull my hair from roots and shout, “Meaningless! Meaningless, Ahhhh!”

I think what I’ve learned from this promenade is that if you keep moving, you see things that can’t be
seen sitting still. Things that upon cessation of movement cease to exist.

List of things that cease to exist out of context

Everything

30
 Amanda Huckins

32
33
This One’s About Me, Cooked
Cessa Cantrell

Steaks, cooked on black rocks, such a waste.

Stakes to post the dead, body pocked and gone:

(Just the head, maligned and red).

Stakes, to gamble by, to beat the boss;

Cop shot, feeble flight, neck to ground—-

in the street.

Cops popped their cherries at a troubled kid

on the highway.

They cut their steak.

And, they stole his shoes.
And his cocaine.

Stakes, to claim, to claim a name

Fooling fools and gaming games;
One, two fingers taked—-

The big man boss condones that loss,

Pulls up his cuffs and flings the toss.

“Woof-Woof” see the steaks.

Finger-lickin’
The dog thought they tasted like chicken.

Licks his chops and takes the bait—-

Taste so good he cain’t see straight.

35
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