On that lawn each morning a little girl’s sandal rests in the grass. Today the flip-flop for weeks became a pink gellie, the color of my skin disease, but lighter. The white truck gassing mosquitoes just whined by in the dark, convincing no one. I wonder, as if to say goodbye, if the driver has a newspaper on his bench seat. I just got bit. After Labor Day, the ice cream van that played the theme from“The Sting” and Bach fugues stopped making its crawling rounds. I just now noticed it gone. Soon it will be summer again, I believe for a moment. Vampires are cool. That’s why they are so cool. I could explain everything, will be my last joke. My arrangements are not up to date. I prefer Basie’s. The rumor around the mill village is that a nuclear scientist haunts my house. I have denied nothing. I like to look at salt even more than I like to use it, it is so clean and chaste, making the heavy water lighter, lighter than the sea that drained from his scalpeled cheek in the midst. That shoe, later it got rained on, almost sweetly, but too late.
Further Reading
Contributor Bios for Issue 1 Spring 2009
Issue 1 Spring 2009 V. JOSHUA ADAMS is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and editor of Chicago Review. JOE AMATO‘s recent books include Pain Plus Thyme (Factory School 2008) and Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture (Iowa 2006). His memoir, Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City, is forthcoming later […]
Contributor Bios for Issue 3 Fall 2010
Issue 3 Fall 2010 JOY AL-SOFI currently teaches English in Hong Kong. She has worked in the high-tech industry and before that practiced law in both Oregon and Texas. Her work includes poetry, fiction and non-fiction and she has been published in the USA and Hong Kong. She has done theater reviews for community radio […]
TOM ORANGE’S RESPONSE TO “SOME DARKER BOUQUETS”
Dear Kent, I’ve read over the pieces by you and this Jason Guriel quite carefully, and I’m afraid I don’t have much to say by way of response: you both make legitimate points but, as I see it, offer pretty ineffectual proposals because you both focus on a minor symptom and ignore the much greater […]
