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Chris Mink

Chris Mink was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, AL. He presently sweats buckets in Tallahassee while pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Florida State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Greensboro Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Anti-, The Offending Adam, and la fovea. Earlier work can be seen in a folder his mother keeps. 

 

 

 

The Mauling of a Poet

 

Once I pass 13^th Street and MLK, I better know somebody

or know my way out.

You’d never go there. You’re like me,

in a smoke-filled wine bar reading poems.

I take notes, wanting only to be nothing like you,

my tongue over the edges of my teeth,

 

how I sharpen them just now, unnoticed, the way blades

drag across rock without much effort

from the hand that holds them. Know this: on Sunday

there were Blue Nose pit bulls in the yard, and everything

on that red clay earth

 

was a chew toy: Tonka trucks, teddy bears, pig bone and glass, blood

dried black in the dog food. They paced the same paw path

until the trench was so deep a person could get buried.

 

Hookmaster and Pete brought me to the barbeque.

A red bone girl licked rib sauce from the corners of her lips.

One-sixteenth Choctaw. The rest: butterscotch dipped in cinnamon.

Pits tied to quarter-inch chains strained against their handlers, pulled back

 

onto their hind legs. Ears up, the dogs stared each other down,

their barrel chests swollen. I think as they did: tear of tendon, ripped

muscle, snout, neck, and every little moment of life that rises and falls

              in the final pulse.

Tonight I sip my beer, pull my cigarette until my insides fill with fire.

 

You’re on to children now, or hotel employees, whichever one you blame

for betrayal. That horrible scarf you got for your birthday.

Oh, yes, one more story about your birthday, one more plug

for your published works, your travel, your love of cuisine,

 

especially from brown people. Any shade will do. I shift my chair

and remember Hookmaster’s reply when I mentioned how tough I felt

being on the wrong side of the tracks. His arms like battleship cannons,

hands that could jerk a rhino by the horn through a gopher hole.

 

I’ll stay in this chair

until you finish your villanelle about the trials of a writer,

or I could tell you

the weight of a pit bull’s final breath in my arms.

You better hope my chain holds.

 

 

 

 

 

Mr. International

 

On Thursday my fantasies are tall women

with lipstick like blood from a bullet wound

and toenails to match. August

 

isn’t even a full day old. Just through those branches,

a sky

 

with the orb weaver in the foreground,

and a notion that I could be

an architect:

 

stacking rebar, spit, and steel until

curious clouds become territorial.

 

Every time I see really nice luggage

in an airport I think about the swimming pool

at my apartment complex, the taller women there

burning like solar flares covered in oil.

I bet they like men that stack things.

 

I bet they go their entire lives staring at buildings

at the blue that backs their angles,

and it never occurs to them to see how fast

 

an object might fall, or how the body trembles

just before you let it go.

 

 

                        ~these two poems originally appeared in the Chattahoochee Review

 

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Rankin Willard
New York, United States
Website: www.rankinwillard.com
Email: rankinkin@aol.com

Rankin Willard is a native North Carolinian. He enjoys exploring different mediums, but much of his work is based in vernacular style photography. These pieces from his "Paper Work" series began as a senior thesis at High Point University where he was an individualized studies major. Currently, he is developing a series of night photography of New York City called "The Goodnight Pictures."

 

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Martina Reisz Newberry

Martina Reisz Newberry’s most recent book is What We Can't Forgive.  She is also the author of Not Untrue and Not Unkind (Arabesques Press) and Running Like a  Woman with Her Hair on Fire: Collected Poems (Red Hen Press). She has been included in Ascent Aspirations first anthology and has been widely published in literary magazines such as: Amelia, Bellingham Review, Blessed Are These Hands, Women's Work and others. Martina lives in Palm Springs, California with her husband Brian and their benevolent dictator/cat, Gato.

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1.  PRAISE

 

Say prayers where it is dark, unfathomed, unworthy. 

Whisper them in a quiet, desperate voice

as if—instead of God—you were talking to a scientifically-

tuned stranger. 

Say the prayer of the gap-toothed man

who touched the stripper’s shoe, knowing—if caught—

the bouncer would have him shaking blood from his hair like

a dog emerging from a lake. 

In any case, that would be the prayer to say.  It will not,

cannot keep you from dying,

but may give you enough time

to stop cringing, perhaps change direction, change the color of your body,

learn to give off some kind of light the way animals do,

the way birds do when they check under each wing then

praise, full-voiced, their ability to fly through the great skies.

 

 

 

 

2.  PAINTING OF HIGH TEA WITH ONGOING

     MELANCHOLY

 

This is the day a woman wakes

with a stone for a heart.  She awakes

in silence or to birdsong but her

chest houses a stone and she is

mystified by this.  She drinks her tea,

she sniffs the air, turns on the TV. 

Her stone sits so heavily inside her

that it makes her shoulders slump.  Soon she

surrenders, weeps, bends double, begins

to taste gravel, to vomit sand.

 

 

3.  PHILOSOPHY

 

The bald man at the reading told me

“You’re not particularly

Existential are you?” 

I stuttered, I guess not. 

But the truth is I am.  I do

all the things the other Existentialists do: 

I write, slip on icy sidewalks, get lost on

the freeway, watch porno movies,

spill mustard on my blouses,

sit in bird shit on park benches, bang my

head on cupboard doors, burn my tongue on hot

soup, weep into the space where wind blows through. 

Maybe he couldn’t see it, but I’m as

Existential as the next guy.

 

 

4.  OTOŇIO (AUTUMN)

 

A woman walks west on Hollywood Boulevard. 

She wears flat shoes, baggy jeans.  She is full of terror and longing.

She tries to remember her last good dream, but all she recalls

is her recurrent nightmare:

 

the one in which her belongings are lost and she can’t find

her clothes to put

on to go find it. In the nightmare, she ventures out anyway,

holding a small

hand towel in front of her naked body.  The fear in this

nightmare is enough

to keep her honest. 

 

This woman is a loner.  She loves museums, hates travel. 

Sometimes she stops for a coffee and when a siren wails past,

she wonders why her children cannot love her and why

her new skin

cream isn’t working and why a well-crafted, correctly

metered line will not save or even comfort

the belittlement of age

or the failure of mythos.

 

 

 

5.  SLEEPING GODDESS

        December 2008:  Martha Crawford “Sunny” von Bulow died after 28

        years in the coma her husband once was alleged to have caused with

        insulin injections.

 

 

Who said lies are ugly?  That’s bullshit. 

I have embraced one thousand lovely lies. 

 

The unlit rooms in my head keep them safe

so that, when I do turn a flashlight beam

 

on them, they are in pristine condition.

No cracked canvasses here, no soft mold.

 

The radio always on in this room—

music, news, midnight talk shows.

 

I live and will continue to live

In my lies—my buttered, beautiful lies:

 

What was done to me

What was done for me

What was not done at all

What was fractured

What was healed

What was offered

What was eaten

What was worn

What was taken off

What was said

What was left unsaid

What washed over me during lovemaking

What I washed off after fucking

 

What was discovered through the looking glass

What ascended

What fell

What splintered

What did I wish for

What did I vote for

What did I conceive

What grieved me

 

Which goddess have I served—Danu or

The Sleeping Lady of Malta

 

And in serving,

what have I forgiven

 

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Meera Singh
New Jersey, United States
Website: www.meerasingh.com
Email: meera@meerasingh.com

Meera Singh is an artist living and working in New Jersey. Her main medium of expression is glass. Her involvement with glass started in the glass department at the Massachusetts College of Art in the early 1980's. She moved to New York in 1982 and received her BFA from Parson's School of Design in 1985. She spent the next 20 years as a founding partner at Inc Design in Manhattan where she has received awards from Art Director's Club, Print Magazine, AR 100, International ARC Awards and AIGA. She sold her share in the company in 2007 to return to fine art full time.

 

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Teague von Bohlen

 

Teague von Bohlen is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado, Denver, where he also serves as Faculty Advisor for the student newspaper The Advocate. His writing has been seen nationally in Village Voice Media outlets, including the Denver alternative weekly Westword, and his first novel "The Pull of the Earth" won the Colorado Book Award for Fiction in 2006. He's currently finishing a collection of flash fiction/photography called Flatland, including the two pieces featured here.

 

 

 

Nu-Life

Someone’s washed out their tie-dye in the sink again, leaving me a pink ring to clean up. This is my job, scrubbing out someone’s mess on a Saturday night, making change for the washers and dryers, ensuring that some frat boys don’t stuff one of their plebes into a machine and hit “spin.” Working at an all-night Laundromat near campus isn’t a great gig, but I’ve been here for almost two years now, so it must be good enough. Nu-Life Cleaners. Or, as Christie likes to call it, No-Life.

            Christie is the girl I want to be. I don’t say that out loud. If she wasn’t my best friend, I’d hate her, with her shampoo-commercial hair and her cleavage, especially in that red dress she wears when we go out. My ex-boyfriend, the one I finally had the guts to dump a few weeks ago, once bragged about a dream he’d had about Christie coming on to him, said that he’d turned her away. He told me this like it was something I’d be happy about. He was a guitar player, and that’s all he ever was. He strummed, skipped classes, and slept with me because I let him, because I said yes. But he really wanted Christie. I know that he did. And now he’s gone, moved to Arizona or somewhere ridiculous like that, so good riddance to him, I guess. I was the one that told him to go.

            I decide to scrub the sink later. I grab the box full of little detergents that I was refilling the coin-op with, and sit down on the end chair in the row, lay the box next to me. The TV mounted in the corner is showing an infomercial for stain-remover.

            It’s not like I’m not pretty. Guys hit on me. Just happened last week, when Christie was sitting here at the counter trying to make me feel better, telling me that this bass player she knows thought I was cute. I told her that there was no way I was going out with another guitar player, and she told me to stop being a Dorothy, like from the Wizard of Oz, all wide-eyed innocence. So this guy comes over, just to have something to do during his rinse cycle, and says, “Man, I always wanted to bang Dorothy.”  Christie breaks him down with a look hotter than the speed dryers and says, “Jesus, was that line supposed to work?” I didn’t want to tell Christie that it might have. He had good hair.

            I don’t know what I’m going to do about school. I wish I had a plan. Christie’s always got one. She’s a Poly Sci major, says that nothing’s going to get in her way. She’s going to go to law school, maybe go into politics. I can see her doing that, too. I hope she does.  Would be cool to have a friend of yours be a Congresswoman or whatever, with all that power. Me, I’m an art history major. Once I get my degree, it will qualify me to work right here at Nu-Life Cleaners. I usually say that like its funny, but it’s really not.

            I should do something. Do anything. Go someplace. Find someone. Ask them what I can do, what they would do, why there aren’t more options than yes or no. But I’m alone at Nu-Life Cleaners, and the irony of that name is not lost on me, sitting in a row of hard plastic chairs, each connected to the other with a steel bar umbilicus. I’m watching someone else’s delicates spin around in the front loader before me. People do this, throw their stuff in and leave to get a beer. There’s too much detergent, despite the signs everywhere that explain that front-loaders only need a third of what you’d put in a top-loader, but people don’t care. And they don’t listen. They just think about themselves, and what their next move is. And they leave, they all leave, and even if you told them to leave, it still sucks.

            I watch the suds escape from the front-loader. I’m going to have to clean this up, too. I can feel the suds tickling my toes, and I wonder how much will emerge, how much it could cover me. It hits the rinse cycle, and starts to drain. It’s suddenly important to me that the bubbles don’t stop, so I grab a stack of tiny boxes of soap, dump them into the three front-loaders in front of me, and start them up. Washers hum this rhythm that’s almost like sex. Christie said this once, and now it’s all I can think about when I hear them running, which of course is most of the time. Okay, so it’s not all I can think about. I also think about what the world will look like in a hundred tomorrows, my ex, my Mother, the fact that I know that I’ve heard you can have a false positive, that I’m glad for having to work tonight so I don’t have to make up an excuse not to go out drinking with Christie and her red dress.

            It’s growing now, this bright cloud of foam, climbing me. It feels good, like a bath of small kisses. It’s clean, I know that, because I did this, I did this and no one else. I want it to take me now, to envelop me in this white brilliance that sparkles like the fairies that I believed in when I was a kid, when I really was a Dorothy, before I’d ever heard of Nu-Life Cleaners, or art history, or sex, or Christie, or this new world coming that I don’t know.  I can feel my skin relax into it, dropping into the rhythm of the wash cycles.

I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Cut Grass

Originally appeared in Six Sentences

 

This will be the last time I’ll mow this lawn.  New owners take possession on the first, and even though my friends say I owe them nothing, that I shouldn’t even still be here, I can’t stand to leave the grass uncut.  My wife wouldn’t have wanted it that way, wouldn’t let me leave it ragged and uneven—she liked the grass best when it was freshly mowed, and so I cut it for her often, though it’s now clear that it wasn’t often enough.  Our eighteen-month-old daughter is crying inside, I can hear her in her bedroom—she cries a lot, doesn’t understand where her mother is, and what’s worse is the fact that I can’t tell her anything, can’t even cry anymore, can’t even show her that she’s not crazy for missing her mother, that she’s right in feeling lost and alone since the car accident that blasted our golden lab right out of the way-back part of the hatchback and into the back of my wife’s head. They found the dog lying on my wife’s lap, his tongue out, her head bowed unnaturally over his, my daughter crying like she was a newborn all over again.  I sold the house because my wife is everywhere here—I smell her in the cut grass, and in the gardens too, amongst the flowers whose names I don’t know, and she’s in my daughter, who’s all I have and all I’ve lost, and I keep thinking that I have to get away, get away and start again, but I’m afraid that I can’t, because there’s grass everywhere, and besides, no matter where I go, no matter how I begin again, I know that she’s the place I’ll start.