EMERGING C

I wonder if he remembers from last time the bed, the plexiglass box, captain of his own starship, surrounded by machines and measurements, indicating instruments and panels of lighted shapes and signifiers--gentle, persistent alarm.

Does he remember anything?  The sounds, smells, the perspective looking at an angle up at NURSE and acoustic tile?  The feel of plastic in his nose and adhesive on his face, glued monitors and burrowing hose?

He remembers, I know, the voice of SHEHERTHEONE singing about the boat on the river so like his cushioned container adrift on a tide of morphine, hearing though not seeing.  Hearing is enough for now, and, in a dream, for now, the boat is heading gentle on the stream, to reveal to someday's merry maid the already broken hearted boy now thus unbreakable.

I Am Your Neighbor, Cunt!

Those were the words screamed out at me by a woman in her car with her two young children on Van Brunt this morning. Why, do you ask, would she scream such an ugly thing at me? Well, I'll tell you the story dear friend.

It was a wet and windy morning, as I was leaving my abode for my commute to work. This particular morning my fair gent called Ethan took the train, leaving his bicycle locked up. In doing so, my bicycle was trapped. So, it was on foot I had to go. As soon as I began my canter out the door, my hair (which I had made much effort to look decent as we had guests to arrive that afternoon) began very quickly to turn sour and fall limp and oily. I sighed to myself, but continued on my way.

I noticed that there was a back up of cars from the light at Sullivan and Van Brunt. It would seem one of the Chinatown buses we all know and love was stuck in mid-turn, with an SUV trapped in such a position by the bus, other autos behind it and the parked cars to its right. To add insult to the situation, a migrant worker had left his blue collar work truck double parked in front of the ever popular morning stop, Red Hook Coffee Shop.

There was really nothing I, myself, could have done to rectify the situation, so onward I trodded. Upon my walk, I was verbally accosted by a very... oh how should I put it? A very skeezy older man of the dark persuasion. This was in no way pleasing to me. I exchanged sordid words under my breath to him, but carried on (my wayward daughter). Shortly thereafter, I passed by another not-so-gentle man of the lighter brown credo. Once again, I was entrenched upon by what he thought was charming and an opening gesture to possibly collecting something of his want from me. Rather than before speaking under my breath, I set off to advise the man that he should, pardon my French, fuck... off.

By this final imposition, my mood had quite shifted to match that of the forecast for the day.

Onward and upward I trudged on Van Brunt. As I came to the crossing at Pioneer, I was rudely encumbered by the blaring of one Volkswagen Jetta station wagon's horn. A woman, not a very attractive woman, was most probably driving her children to school. As it is a rainy day, tho t'was not raining at the time, she felt the need to drive the few blocks to said school to dispose of -what I can only assume after the example she presented of herself to me and the people at the bus stop of what kind of person, and therefore the kind of mother to be raising- her young hellions.

As previously mentioned, my mood was wrecked so this woman was adding insult to injury. So as she was blaring her, I stopped and called out to her "There's an accident at the light. Honking is not going to change anything. Would you please stop blaring your horn." She had let up on her horn to be able to hear what it was I was saying to her. Once I had finished my statement, she proceeded to blare it again, looking straight at me with disdain. I once again told her to stop, including the statement "You're disturbing my neighbors," to which she replied -as stated in the title of my monologue, "I am your neighbor, cunt!"

Well... what was I to do?

Inside I was like a ninja from the darkness suddenly upon her, reaching into her car window, grabbing her by her ratty hair and smashing her face two or three times against her steering wheel, all the while telling her with each slam "You're (slam) No (slam) Neighbor (slam) Of Mine (SLAM)."

But... I didn't.

Instead I gave her an ugly look, and continued on my way. I was greeted with smiles by those at the bus stop, along with a "Well, good morning to you," by the neighborhood trollop, Kiki. My only response to defend myself on what I consider an embarrassing situation I regretted getting involved in just as quickly as my first words was "I hate honkers."

Now, I am trying to go through my mind who this woman is. I do know she does live in the neighborhood, tho at the moment of our dialogue I was unaware. I believe she may have a dog. I am hoping it is not the woman who lives on King St (I don't think it is) who I am neighborly with normally... I don't think she is.

She looks much older than she is. I would say she's in her early 40s, but looks to be nearing 50. Mousy brown hair that's stringy and wavy, wrinkles and dry leathery face, petite - this is how I would describe her.

Nonetheless, I do look forward to my next encounter with her. Should she say anything, I can simply tell her that she is a shameful human being who needs to get control of her patience, and who really should think twice about how she is presenting herself in front of her children. Yes... another morning in Red Hook.

Vaduzuvunt

Anthropoligical Delineation of Arse

So ass (said housed in pornography, else arse by those who love British, Irish, Scottish boys, but still, kilts and eye patches and confidence, gypsy style) is the subject of this lecture.  Sit deep in your comfy chair, children, take a sip of your special elixir and know that you are safe, in the arms of my words, and everyone will get home alright...either way, the lights go out, the moon lasts through the night, the stars come and fuck every hour until the morning brings its wayward promises...

It starts with a story about anal beads.  I think they're very overrated.  I have never found myself the recipient or the administrator of the beads of arse, but I admire the kink of it either way.  Mostly, I am not a fan of toys, nothing a cock or myself couldn't do that any plastic, non recyclable item could do better.  Seems a waste of ability, lithe comment or slow curled, little smile, outside or in.  Three lengths of rope and a strong personality can do worlds more than any fake cock toy ever could.  Do You know someone who wants to fuck a pink playdough "sex" can? The janitor who never got his college degree? He has better things to do.  Just like me.

I have some thinking to do.  First off, I think it was anal beads I once got told the story of -- think he was gay, and told me that somewhere deep in the night, one man strung the beads from the arse of the other man, and ripped clean a pearly necklace of brown shit across the wall.  How do you wake up to that, and not feel liberated, like every stain ever made within you came clean, in all honesty, in its true face? Or perhaps it's just dull, and something for someone else to clean up.  The one who didn't know about the brown activities going on that night.

It's not just about the boys.  I used to tell the girls I knew, that they had tattoos on their lower back (much like the pretensions of my upper back) that would give the fella something to read when he was behind/on top of/inside them.  I've given a few of mine own some great new ideas to sink themselves into.  Entertained, obliged, obsessed and ridiculed.  How can he look you in the eye when he's way the hell behind you?  A joke, but also a truth.  Isn't that always the way.

It came from being of a couple who were European in their style.  Even if my mother was born repressed, and my father over-exuberant about life.  We lived Euro childhoods, spending early mornings in their grand bed, lounging forever, my mother scratching my father's back for some time, like a duty she had, no judgments made of the activity.  He used to chase her and smack her arse, with hand, wooden spoon, and she liked it.  Just like I like it now.

What picture painted when the arse is struck properly.  Will no one understand the glory one cunt can feel? Thunder clap, revolt of nations, the slaves made free, of the torrent of sparrows singing ecstasy within my belly pit, take notice.  I blame those vintage adverts.  You know the one.  About the coffee the woman doesn't buy which causes the situation to occur.  It sets me still-------------He's got her stretched across his lap; she looks affright.  (I'd be smiling ear to ear).  His right hand up in the air to come down with a crack.  I cannot move for a literal 10 seconds and I feel my cunt twitch and butterflies fuck themselves silly in that same belly pit of my mythology, where the sparrows watch, drooling and coming, in the most off putting, off-key song...still, it's beautiful music.

Associate this deviant play with love.  That's how it happened.  My parents loved each other.  Guess it would have been ok and more Americana if my father grabbed my mom's tits every night --- like me, they've never been the focal point.  The man in the ad reigned down on her ass, and the wind caressed, vibrating her hips, setting My cunt in motion.  The soft, protruding cliff onto which stories were penned, soap operas kept alive, gods invoked as the Biblical sea crashed its waves on his cock and turning on the Light of the world.

The Song of Songs, the Jesus dance, the Word made Flesh.  It's all sacred in the eyes of the beloved, ain't it.  We're made into virgins, our arse made into your saviour, the tongue speaks the thoughts inside that no one else can try, and our cunt speaks highly of the impetus which keeps it red, and sore, and tender.  She'll reveal what the scriptures really had to say, at end of orange light, meal gone empty, my cunt full up with the lithe taste of him.  Truth, my friends, smack (again) smack (again) smack.  Perfection, in that lack of silence, and nothing more to judge upon that that.  The marriage that bears no name.  It's hard to find, but once you do, keep that grip round your strong and tender hand, forever.  This is the end of the arse lesson.

~ M. Lucia

The Power of Nine (Part 1)

     It was Mindy Epstein, who started every suspiciously friendly inquisition with "So.....", who began to sense what I was capable of, with my mind that is.  That summer I'd turned nine and cut my hair boyshort for the first day of fourth grade.  With my green polyester dress, kneesocks, buck teeth and baseball cap, I didn't even entertain the notion of what other people thought.  That was it, the moment in time, that lofty precipise and agile balancing on the brink of pure feeling and action before the damp blanket of puberty, comprehension and hesitation.  I could feel the energy racing through  me, BoUnCiNgBoUnCiNgBoUnCiNg, like a streak of light and my mind far flung out the window as I squirmed at my desk.  Mindy Epstein had perfect penmanship, to watch her sit dutifully and execute each letter, perfect height,size, spaced, placed properly on the linelineline was painful, my mind did the mental equivalent of swatting gnats.

       I'd hit her radar last year when I started a fight with our teacher, Mrs. Bonato, over her precious daughter, who was also in our class, because she bossed everyone around.  When I turned to my classmates for support, they clammed up and studied their desks and I swore I spoke the truth and stormed out.  Mindy loved confrontation and my stock subsequently rose.   I probably shouldn't have made such a scene, but Kelly Bonato irked me. She got everything she wanted, but she lacked the proper amount of sunshine from standing too long in her mother's formidable shadow.  Her mother bought her shoes, lots of shoes, she had about fifty pairs, but she only had two feet like the rest of us.

      I didn't waste much thought on Kelly, and neither did Mindy.  Last spring we intertwined with nature.  Discarding our shoes in the Donnelly's front yard, halfway between the busstop and home, we rolled in the grass, dangled from trees and spied on the neighbors, made full course meals out of mud and expertly built up the permanent dirt on our ankles that would eventually culminate in a summer well spent.  In the stillness of inevitable boredom our nine year old perception grew acute -  the scuttle of a chipmunk, the patter of Mr. C's sprinkler, the billow of Miss Claire's sheets on the line.  After dousing each other with the hose, we would lie in the front yard on our towels and I believe it was then that I learned to will the squirrels to jump from one branch to the next, and soon, not just any branch, but the one I wanted them to.  I'm convinced that it was the cultivating of this perception, tweaked by tragedy, heightened by the roiling hormonal soup of pre-puberty that gave me the special ability.  Some people call it a sixth sense, my mother called it luck and swore she wouldn't fly on a plane without consulting me first.

     I was only four when my father was violently killed, abrupt, beyond recognition.  My mother swaddled us, my sister and I, in love,silence and grief.  Wall to wall powder pink carpet, even in the closet, is what I remember of that room, my room and that house, our house.  Sitting bunched up, behind the clothes, among the shoes with the secret, crumpled brown bag of last year's Halloween candy.   They did make me come out eventually.  The rest of the picture I filled in with overheard conversations from the continual stream of adults tripping through that house.  I imagined my mother identifying the body at the hospital.   I imagined the funeral home, but the lighting was always harshly florescent, not appropriately dim and soothing, so I figure I wasn't actually there.  I imagined the sea of a hundred umbrellas at the graveyard on the day he was buried,  because when you die at 29, everyone comes.  I imagined God was as sad as I was, that's why it rained so hard.

     All of this was too much to carry around inside me, so I projected it outward.  The first time it happened, I was sitting in the kitchen. I had an inner turmoil so strong that I was breaking out in a sweat and I was not to be contained.  That's when I did it, I flung the shoe across the room, hitting the bird clock above the sink.  Only I didn't touch it with my hands at all or any other  visible body part, I had thrown it with my mind and I was instantly filled with relief and wonder.  After that, I willed everything; a chance meeting with a friend, lasagna for dinner, a number between one and ten, first in line picked from a hat and exactly how many jellybeans in the Library jar.  It wasn't till the fire that I had an inkling for the extent of my powers, but by then it was too late, wasn't it? 

     

To be continued.....

By: DPR

City of the Prairie

Sometimes you think,
to yourself

I want to feel everything, see, be and taste everything.
I want to see past the facades of people
of their fears, and vulnerabilities
their deaths and lives of delusion.
Just like mine.

I want to be in that moment,
in the lights of their eyes
outside myself
and inside the lucidity of the endless dreaming tale.

The truth of humanity,
and really Living.

But,
when you see into the faces bloody,
their limbs ripped apart and dehumanized
their decency and divinity
torn asunder
and see nothing but shame in their eyes,
for you.
For us, and our desperate naive need to know them.

They say "go home, child".
"They've made clowns of us all".
Put your words away.
The world has beaten the skins of tender hearts to hell.

We make ourselves to look like fools,
and they suffer for it.
While the sun sets every night.

Nothing left to do,
but takes notes by your lonesome,
know truth and love as far as you can grasp at it.
And thank your lucky stars, that
they've not come for us yet.

~ M. Lucia

If you did it where...how?

I wouldn't do it.

I know but if you did?

Why do you need to know this?

It's not so much a need to know as a fun little mental exercise.

Having fun, are you?

I am.  How are you feeling?

I feel a little queasy in truth.  I'm a little down but what's the song?  "I been down so long..."

"...being down don't bother me."  Yes!

There's the water pipe in the closet.  I'm thinking belt just like you know who.

Hypothetically, right.  See, this is what writers do.  Speculate, hypothesize, walk around in shoes not one's own, take in the scenery, describe it well...

...and grammatically correct...

Yes, if such a thing is called for.  There IS such a thing as dialect though...idiom, colloquialism...uh...

...jargon, don't forget jargon.

I would never forget jargon.  I love jargon!  Um, palaver...bombast!  Nothing like some good bombast to stretch the boundaries of convention...

...grammatically speaking that is.

Indeed.  So, the belt.

Have they ever explored why people...where does the impulse come from to do it at one's home.  To be found by the last people you should want to inflict that on?  What is that?

Yeah, and the people who like, instead, use their wife's bathrobe belt, or their father's favorite shotgun.  Something to really put a cherry on the cake.

Cherry on the cake?

Yeah, I know, cherry on the sundae just sounded wrong.  What is it anyway?

I think it's just "cherry on top."  On top of what was never really specified.

You know what I hate?  Is when people get dot the i's and cross the t's backwards...

Yeah, right...cross the eyes!

Yeah and because "cross the eyes" sounds right they don't realize they got it backwards.

And maybe subconsciously they get the reinforcement of the thing being backwards by just saying "cross the eyes" because the phrase itself makes them feel like things should be backwards.  

That might be a little too deep but I see your point.  So I don't know why people do that.  I wonder are there certain classes of people.  Some do that, others drive off into the woods or jump off the bridge.  But still never any concern for the trauma.  Even the trauma of fishing a bloated blue body out of the river.  How's the guy supposed to be able to get that out of his head?

There's definitely all kinds.  The "cries for help" vs. the genuine article.  The accidental...you know like the  autoerotic thing.  Now THAT with the wife's belt.  Maybe that makes sense.  Now, I would definitely be one who just went off somewhere.  But then there would be the thing about being found.  You wouldn't want to wish that on anyone.  And I don't want to get eaten by anything...like a bear in the woods or like a vulture in the desert.

I don't think bears eat, you know like, dead things.  Dead things not killed by the bear himself.

OK so not a bear.  There are other things out there that will eat the body.

Does a vulture shit in the woods?

View from the Passenger Seat

This road seemed to go on forever. Stasis had settled onto my soul, like a barnacle in the damp wind, holding on. Gently – it wasn’t hurting me, actually, it was more like the grip of a frightened creature, happy to be safe in your arms. But, still, I felt heavy with it there. Not myself. Like a soft, slow rumble in the pit of my belly, just quietly churning to itself, without a refrain or a crescendo. Still, even with this affixed creature’s timid legs wrapped round me, I was on the road. Which is plenty better than a lighthearted jaunt inside my own head, with its strands of life reaching out from a centre that was unknown even to me.

It was just chilly enough to wrap my shoulders in a knit sweater. A fireplace alight, and enough to warm me over from the front passenger side. I did enjoy driving these sorts of highways; dress jacked up, happily exposing my left thigh, which I liked to keep flush with the wall of the driver’s side door, knee as high as I could muster. That, and the seat as far back as I could have it for the length of my legs, and additionally an extra slice of space for them to just feel relaxed. But me here in the passenger seat, snuggled in tight with the view ahead and to the side of me, was my absolute favourite place to be. The windows were open enough to barely expose the rain – falling unevenly in a soft cloud of mist, the windshield wipers set to a constant, slow setting- about 2 to 3 good seconds in between the slightly squeaky wipe across my vision. And the heat in the car on, almost to a low crawl, and present only enough to offer a similar light blanketing of my legs, which couldn’t be covered by the loose and airy knits of the sweater.

Normally, I’d be locked indoors at this late morning hour. Eyes blinding themselves from the endless white strain of light in front of them, sucking in a dead air which neither lived nor was ever destroyed, and sitting cross legged at a desk, which was always at my thoughts for its oddly placed proportions. The knee that crossed over my other knee would always graze the desk top, with just enough pressure to cause the slightest discomfort, but never enough to cause me to do anything about it. Nothing I could do, really, since lowering my chair any more meant that I would be far too close to the ground and too low to remain properly situated (i.e. blinded) by the white screen. Those basic pains were far from me, as I looked into the distance, to the steadily remaining clouds that stood vigil for this drive across the mountains and the doubtful, low ambition of the sun’s light, diffused by the morning rain and forever at a surrendering point in its pale golden shine with shadows of grey mocking all those who eventually crossed below its path.

There was a silence, of which I always enjoyed. One I learned to wield and shape to my will, from a very early age. They used to look at my mouth, with its mute voice as if tiny ropes were sewing a knit pattern of their own across and around it, not allowing me to speak. I felt very powerful after awhile, in that it was up to me, and no one else, to find my voice and I could give and take it from the world at my discretion. Did I have anything worth saying? I think countless hours fixated upon the conversations in my head allowed me some sense of planning, and poetry when I did open my mouth and part my lips to say something.

The dark grandmother, the one from the old country, was just like me my father used to tell me. I never met either of them, but she was the one I connected to more so. Turks most likely affected the looks of my father’s family through her as their focal point. Black eyes, black hair. Amber skin. And a voice that people waited to hear, because they knew if she was going to say something to you, it was special. It Had voice, and a worth. Not like those chatterboxes who wasted words like weeds, growing around the possibility of something worthwhile and unused. The Croatian words that her father said about her doesn’t translate very well, and sounds base and plain to say, but those who knew her remarked that she would not let you know what was “in her bag”, which in old fashioned village terms, meant something much more along the lines of the soul as a satchel, that which we carry with us on the journey and where we keep our treasures, our fast held ideas and beliefs, collected raindrops which formed a layer of mist upon us from within. Spending your best all at once left many people with those worn out, dull and confused looks on their face.

I still can clearly see the only photograph taken at my grandfather's funeral, when my father went back to visit.  There was contention between my father and his, but his mother saw him for who he really was.  And nothing in this world can compare to that connection.  In the photo, my father wept openly at the grave and later remarked that the only reason he cried at his father's funeral was because his mother's grave was also there, and he was reminded of her.  Her light, in that bag of hers...I had mine too. I think I got greedy and liked the powerful feeling of having the upper hand, and judging those worthy or unworthy of my voice.

But, still, I enjoyed the light fireflies let loose inside me, and was so happy to have this drive, smooth and trusted, before me, swaddled with the heat, the low din of bluegrass banjo and the silky fingers of the rainy wind to keep me fueled on this midday escape from the light which deadened me, the human eyes which stole from me, also refusing my overactive empathy that I longed to give to all those dull, bright faces, and the squeak of the impotent wood desk top which scraped my right thigh just enough to splinter my stories, from beneath me. I was warm, and wet (rain always turned me on more than sunshine), legs outstretched across the dashboard, safe in the level footstep steering its movement of the vehicle, and engendered by the natural light that guided my eyes down the road, a million new stories to tell, and nothing impeding them from doing so, with only the whispered feeling of Yes dancing down the rain.

~ M. Lucia

Haiku for Futures

Rake my nails across
spent seams of time gone by you,
my bright burning star.

~ M. Lucia

MOTH

The odd circumstance entwined in the noticed coincidence
proclaimed the weirding way of the witch.
They all attribute hormonal swirlings and menstrual
voidings to extra-sensory perceptiblities.

I don't mind so much though,
I love them all the whole coven of which
so much to me is given to empower, to label,
to pedestal-place in a statuary sanctuary, sculpted ego, id erect.

At the curve of the bell we collect like heat rising,
gases intermingling fronts, cold and warm, storms
and rainbows and birds, lofted, some pole-sat.
She with the birds in her wings, her eyes, her mouth,

she sweeps down the curve and I am pulled on the air
after and left regarded as one of the happy few
called to belong somewhere else, exceptional,
a friend of a man with dogs beneath his souls.

Afternoon Coffee.

Tumbling down the corridors
in early autumn
brings me to a room. A white room.
Too bright, and too many eyes.

Instinct says 'hide' or come up with the story,
the ultimate one,
about god and guns
which will allow you to pass,
safety to the other side.

Mindset insists--- think very hard,
waking me up every pre-dawn morning;
chain letter of images and sunsets
to be had.
Coming round the bend at me,
in my bare feet and stockings which conceal
so much.

Both of the oppositions are wrong.
I listened to the sounds entire,
the small of a shoulder and the lap of a tongue
sneaking in the slightest sound of duduk.

Harking me back to those biblical times,
when I set up shop and all the coins
lay bare at my feet,
like I lay bare at yours.

A business's a business.
Breadwinner takes all.
And nothing left to show for it,
except this silly walk,
and the unclear idea of
words in music.

How many stories can fit inside a certain note?
The one I feel each day's end,
or times not yet had.
Texture, feeling, light and idea
all moving in broad strokes across
my thighs.

Another chime of the invisible clock
will wake me.
And more than a few lives lived rewind
the dimly lit bordello that becomes my mind.

The layering of story, and reasoning
strikes my back as the autumn wind.
Ignoring is fruitful, as gazing finds bounty.

First with words, then with fury,
everything saltier comes on the inside.

~ M. Lucia

Chin Strap

He was thinking before he jumped out the door of the plane that the chin strap was too big for his face.  He thought it was going to get in the way of his mouth as he tried to scream because he assumed he would be screaming.  Then in the back of his mind he also thought if he was going to die he would want at least to be able to scream and so it made him uncomfortable to be restricted this way.  AND he hated that he was having these thoughts when he really wanted to focus on the experience of sky-diving.  Thinking about why they put a hood over the head of the man about to be hanged and how if HE was going to be hanged and that if this was going to be his last seconds of seeing the world he would want them to last as long as possible.  Putting the hood over his head would effectively being saying "That's it!  Nothing left for you to see now!"  Or the man made to sit in the electric chair or lay down on the bed for lethal injection.  In that moment, KNOWING death was imminent you're basically saying "well legs, I guess that's it!  Not going to be doing anymore walking from here on out!  Your job is done."  So this chin strap!  This may be it for me.  I'm jumping out the plane and this strap is blocking my breathing.  And why am I thinking about this and not what I'm doing.  Am I going to be able to think about the scenery or the feeling of the wind rushing through my body as I drop to the earth?  I need to get in the moment and all I'm thinking about is the chin strap and lethal injection.  Who are these people that are just able to set aside everything that could go wrong and the million things that we all think and worry about on a day-to-day basis and just focus in the moment on the task at hand?  The hitter in a pressure filled ball game, his team down by a run in the ninth inning and needing a big hit; the heart surgeon preparing to crack the chest of an infant with a heart defect, standing literally between a BABY and certain death; even the passenger on a burning crashed airplane whose very survival depends on his ability to stand up and push people aside and be the ONE who gets away.  Where does it come from, that focus, that drive?  Do some of us have it and some of us not?  Can you get it if you don't have it and can you lose it if you do?  The strap dug into his neck and his lower lip.  He looked at the man standing behind him, the man that had walked him through the sky-diving procedures all morning, the safety checks, the amusing anecdotes about pant-shitting and flying false teeth, the predictions of how long it will feel like it lasts and then how short, and the assurances of how unlikely an accident was--and yet they always say "in the event of a water landing."  In the event that the plane LANDS in the WATER.  "In the unlikely event that your 'chute fails to open..."  The guy's smiling giving him the thumbs up.  He points to his chin trying to sign-language his discomfort.  He wants to fix it.  He wants it to be fixed.  He wants it to be perfect.  The guy - his name is Geoff (of Geoff's Jet Excursions) - is approaching him, smiling.  He's going to fix it.  But when Geoff gets to him he just turns him around and pushes, slightly but firmly enough to send him out the door.  He feels a jerk - a yank - and then black.

Mandate of Heaven

It started with an old acquaintance, an actor I worked with on a short film years ago. He was passing by the space I was, and we had a mutual friend, it seemed. Random Hawaiian shirts in a suitcase, people shuffling by, papers and lists. Looking out of a big window, reading very oddly appearing names from this list. The names seemed stale. Past. Hard sounding words like Abit, Banid. The feeling rushes over me that they are deceased. All the talk before bed about the righteous man, and society, and ruler. Different connotations of good and evil. A question is posed: are these names righteous? Or are they evil spirits? A sense of foreboding darkness is present, like a ghost in the room. The window has no glass, and I look out onto the turquoise blue sky as spirits fleeting, and languid, float and cavort back and forth. I refuse to submit to the evil, dark side of things, and I yell out “no, they are righteous souls”…my voice is not enough, and with some fear, I let them, these names I have been reading, enter into me and shout all together in a piercing, reverberating and unified voice: “RIGHTEOUS!!!!” Filled with wrath, anger, strength and power it is said. This confuses me, since I feel a darkness but am stating a positively bright exclamation.

At that moment, I am supernatural. I fly up through the huge windowless space and into the otherworldly sky. Up and up, sometimes I sink, and I have to make myself center with energy and shoot up, past the very prejudiced looking devils. They are women, dressed in red devil costumes like you might find at the drug store, skin painted red and black horns and tails. They are flying too, but I can soar up higher than them. There are also other spirits, in blues and whites, less formed and more ethereal, bounding around as they were when I first glanced them. I don’t know if they represent the names on my list or not. They point up to the endless sky (the earth looks like it is thousands of feet below; semblances of treetops and clouds, but hardly visible in this world, which looks more like a Bosch painting than anything I might actually see in life) and I keep trying to ascend. The forces in the air point to a huge white stone monument, floating in the many colours of this sky. I float and soar my way over to and around the monument, and see the stone body of Jesus, but the head is missing. Someone has taken it away, and I suppose it’s my job to get it back to its rightful place. I have devils and dark spirits at my back, but I avert them and notice the way to the next level- in the center of the immediate space, a thin stream of water flows down a small hole in the ceiling (a ceiling which is empty air, space upon space, without being anything actual). In true martial arts forms, I move around the pesky spirits, at this point not caring which are good or evil, and I take a breath in, and shoot myself up the stream of water and back through the “ceiling” drain into the next realm.

This one is more cavernous, earth-like. Dark, brown rocks and caves, yet all still floating in this level of things. These more menacing male forces are around, and as I avoid and dance about them, they prevent me from finding the same water/drain exit to the higher level. I decide, quite lucidly in my mind, to let them seduce me, since they seem like succubi, so why not engage in pleasure and keep rising to the righteous at the same time. Even in the dream world, I would never separate the two. Even though their heads seem more clear and finite than their bodies, now they appear to be only heads. One waits, while I let the other one work its tongue between my legs. Well, it turns out this is one of those dreams which affect your body in real life, and I let this activity go on and on, and then I manage to focus my attention on the elusive water stream and upstairs drain. I take one of the floating heads and throw him as far as I can, while the other one still keeps to his work. Simultaneously I came, separated myself from him and shot myself up the water stream to the next level, which was the earthly universe – the earth, the sun, the gleaming stars and planets I recognized.

My body, in its mimicking of the recent seduction, forces me to wake up for a groggy, incredibly turned on moment. I simply fell back to sleep as easily as I could, and dreamt dreams about my mother, a cottage in Ireland, boats taking us to and from the mainland, and a soft raining morning. I never found the head of Christ, and now wonder if it was the Most righteous one himself, who showed me heaven found at the top of a vertical river.

~ M. Lucia

How We Got Our New Pool Continued

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"Early" Sunday

"Can't sleep bed's on fire"
Dreams are like shit pudding thus
eight am haiku

Last Call

Horse chestnut
uncanvassed in deep green
sears my insides
and the amber liquid
dribbles down my chin
in jest (again) -

I’m staying for the night,
the whipping wind braids my hair seven times
the peat smelling up even in early morning
in September, as I walk in cold, lonely boots
down Great St. Georges Street.
Not a soul, but smoke and box-like building faces
before the eastern wave
took its place and they ceased to avert
their eyes southward, like a battered child.

My once young constitution,
six Guinness at my feet, downing
boys like water.
In the dampness of night,
the gods sing tattletales in the midst
of window panes;
ingrained into our soul code
is a story that is constantly unravelling---
hagglers want it sold, hard and fast to them,
but they’ve not the blueprints
to see it built, as it is
fashioned, ravaged and bold.

The squeak of the wooden door locks,
so our dreams don’t
descend from their rains in the sky;
we’ll meet the sunrise in
a waterfall, no one is left
in the pub, just another heavy pour,
one flickering candle, and
our circumstance.

~ M. Lucia

POTUS

There's all kinds of silliness—we work in the White House for God's sake, so it's hard to make anything out of anything; ever. 

Our attraction, to each other, was instantaneous, I'm pretty sure (meaning about the timing of it, not the intensity).  Well, I know mine was and I think hers was too.  You’d have to ask her.  Anyway, but, so life is strange and funny and unpredictable and silliness in the 21st century comes in all shapes and forms and so we found ourselves (meaning the articulation, physical, oral, otherwise, of our attraction) constrained by all kinds of things; our career considerations, the proprieties of executive branch, west-wing style protocol (which is ancient and modern at the same time), the sheer monument of the work hours (“the work is monumental when you work in a monument” was a quip I kept re-working trying to make it funny and even test driving it from time to time in the odd Saturday afternoon Senate sub-committee appropriation meetings that I occasionally got to attend; never to good effect) and the baroque, labyrinthine mouse-maze that is my ego (large) and psycho-sexual self-image (self-sabotaging, which my (ex-)therapist says is common in men in positions of power and with uncommon intellect, which made me of course immediately want to fuck her, thus the “ex-”).  I say all this to make the point that a lot, and I mean A LOT, was overcome in order for anything to have happened between us at all which is a testament mainly to what our attraction ultimately was. 

But I don’t want to go into, ultimately, what “happened” between us—in the end it’s fairly conventional stuff, if you exclude the part where the president of the United States, of all people, took one of us aside, I won’t say who, to offer some romantic advice, being a meddler by nature (the president that is), which I guess you know, and then so maybe that too is typical because there’s always someone inserting themselves isn’t there?  The fact that it was the president is neither here nor there (she would say “actually no, it’s both here AND there,” but that’s just her and, you know, an idea about what she’s like in case you were interested.

So this is all I want to say—this one thing, because it was a moment and the moment is what matters.

We were standing in the cafeteria in the west wing.  I’m leaning against a wall waiting for her to mix her coffee.  We’re talking, engrossed in the topic as we could be and often were, probably oblivious, consciously, to the pheromones  oozing out of pores and mixing, collecting in the air around us.  She crosses to me with her coffee, which apparently took a little longer to get than usual and thus she had lost her usual cool and had this tinge of aggressiveness.  She’s standing in front of me, half a step into my personal space.  Talking.  I’m cornered.  Not a position I typically like.  But I’m staring at her mouth, how the words are forming there and somehow how her entire face is focused there, her words, her phrases, what she’s saying.  I move to kiss that mouth, those lips.  And time stops. 

It’s stopped there still, despite everything that’s happened.  That moment is the last moment I can recollect.  Sure other things have happened, but nothing like that.  It’s right there behind the velvet curtain in my mind.  I step back and I’m there again, moving to kiss her lips.

Naughty Little Haiku

Homeless man mutter
moist on the inside takes time
knees up in the waves.

~ M. Lucia

Goodbye, Hello

The ides of March, they got me. They made pictures, relics and memories come alive, a broken guitar string ripping through my throat and tearing up my full heart as it left my mouth in a cough filled with spit and mucus. I saw the birth canal on Friday night.

A few hours earlier that Friday, I was hastily driving up the highway in a rental car, nails on fingers gripping the wheel as I hadn't even time to think about how much I hated driving busy highways. Kept looking for sunshine, but it only just barely promised over the far off mountains in the distance, promise never coming. J, the perfect driving companion, falling asleep and smoking, singing along and drumming to Cat Scratch Fever, as I remembered the comfort of him on top of me the day before. I didn't feel bad about that. I think my body would have collapsed internally without that fulfillment. An hour later, sitting in the hospital room, as I walked down the awful, sterile hallway, I knew my father could not, nor would want to walk out of this place. Either you were in full recovery or on some manner of your way out.

Shock and denial stretched across my face as I saw him, propped up so high no one could ever sleep that way. It smelled like shit and I was told he had just taken one, but though the rest of us knew it, he never could. He had died the day before last, after going downstairs to the basement in the unfinished house of his soul, the one that did him in and the final act inside his Coliseum, building and stopping, while my mother was out, moving from one to the next (he had told my mother to tell me over the phone about a week before that he was thinking about me all the time and loved me), not knowing what project to finish so starting as many as he could manage, to confuse the black cat that searched him out, on his way. My black cat died a few weeks earlier - he should have known it would be ok. The cat was probably only looking for a little attention, seeking out my father's world traveled hands.

I couldn't stop staring at my father's hands. They had thick needles protruding from the skin, but that was nothing compared to the tubes in his head and face. Other than being swollen, the hands were still my father's. Every mark, bruise and scar across them on display. Just like M's hands. Strange parallel these two men were on, like adjoining highways. I began to worship his hands, as my mother and I spoke, calmly. We didn't clutch ourselves together or wail. We even talked about channeling that into something better for him. Two days before, in the midst of his drilling and working on a counter top, he ate lunch: pasta fagioli, prosciutto, red wine...something in my mother's hands knew too. They talked- about the homeland, about the mountains. At one point soon after, he grabbed his head and uttered "I'm sick" (this was the first moment he let his body register with the oncoming and the last words he said) and fell back into the soft chair (which I've been sitting in ever since I came back to the house). Asleep. Of all the thoughts surrounding the reasons that could have kept him with us, I know that none of the answers could have kept the strength of him, the whole of him. He was no rotted apple, no yellowed page.

As I sat there with my mother, worshiping his hands and all they made, right down to the thumbnail, the nails trimmed by pliers and the black marks from the foundation of a house, the ground opened up in the quiet, curtained, sterile room, through the fibers in my mother's curly hair, which I did not inherit. In the empty spaces in between the machine's beeping its cheap grandfather clock ticking, I was partial to the worlds between. It was as if the walls in the cramped room had disappeared. We were waiting for the slow, learned, tedious process that occurred when ready to let go, or say hello. I was having an internal conversation with him the whole time. We held his cold, puffy hands a few times in between, but as we sat there, we were joined. Even my scared mother whose nature was to distrust her instincts her whole life, felt the calm. Like everything moving in distinct slow motion; a dance, during which he hadn't really seemed to be there with us until around that time.

Now he was mingling in and out, as the waters were lapping, retreating. We talked about how he worked harder his whole life than any man, and not for any man, but for himself, and for us. And, despite my mother's self proclaimed "bitching", she admitted to those houses he built bringing her a lot of fun, how it was all such an amazing adventure which he gave to her. Just us four - my father, mother, brother John and I - no others were ever truly HOME, like we were. To live nearly all of your childhood and coming adulthood in a house your father built (more like 5), it does things to you. It expands your mind, convinces your hands, and expedites your heart's dreaming early on. You see that sifting through blueprints and pencil sketching with his bold European hands, grows to carving out a naked piece of land and seeing, piece by piece, your home being born out of the patience of your mother and the strength and vision of your father, the same that spent Christmas hungry on the streets in Zagreb when he left home, the black sheep not wanting to be ruled by anyone, including his father, knowing that it was Christmas only by hearsay. That kind of love supporting your insecure child's feet from the floorboards beneath, constructed with you in mind, that is irreplaceable.

And so calm grew to appreciation, and at those moments, we did not need to cry. The term choking back tears is true; I never experienced that closing of the throat as your whole body is being made by your invisibles to hold itself up, rightly. My mother's legs were shaking "from the inside", as she put it, and she was overdressed for the weather (my father collapsed on the first day of Spring). Her face was flushed and red. I've never seen her try so hard in all my life. We knew my brother was having his own discussion with my father from inside His home, his head. I had begun thinking 'I will not waste time, will not fail', more importantly will not cease trying, will give the fullness of energy and love to this life and to those particular ones I had a feeling for. Something seemed so loud and clear...when I had a son, his name would be Ivan, the name of my father as a child. Without an inch of vanity, I felt beautiful. Clear and deep seated in my mother's almond shaped sockets were my father's big brown eyes of truth. Looking back at me and the world. I was a little fearful. Amidst all this otherworldly design, I thought about what A had told me. About her father recognizing her before he died. I knew the lack of oxygen left my father's brain near gone, and they told my mother from the moment he arrived in the hospital that there was no chance the massive heart attack would leave him with any ability to wake up. This man who had spent the freezing night in a sleeping bag in the woods with his grandfather and a bunch of found grenades during WWII in Croatia (and got a beating for it), who had stood atop his house's Spanish tile roof on the Gulf of Mexico at 50 years old, with a farmer's tan and hammer in hand, who kept building the foundation to this last house in the winter woods after he was told all of that was behind him, he wouldn't stand for much more of this tubes and needles business.

We thought Last Rites would be good, since he was raised Catholic (and mainly associated the traditions of it with the happiness of his youth and village more than anything else. He didn't need all that to speak to God). The priest had been at the hospital and couldn't come back out until later that night. Our natures looked between my mother and I and we knew he'd prefer it as being just us- his priests, his relics, his church, his stained glass windows, his evening sky. We talked about being awash with appreciation, thinking of the old men of the villages in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, who were massacred like pigs and left strung up in the trees outside their homes for their families to find, and of so many young, vibrant people without fathers or a chance, who had to endure this end alone.

My father had been given morphine. We had our own, coursing through our veins, like stars mining for the gold of its onlookers. They began to take out the tubes and vessels from his face. He had no teeth. We would have laughed at him had it been a normal Friday night. His gums flapped and his body grew warmer. We each held a hand. I was on the left side. His face looked so clean, more perfectly shaven than he ever managed. We started talking to him- my mother lost her embarrassment and spoke to him in Croatian, telling him to go home, that mamma (his) was waiting. I thought I felt something from his hands, but disregarded it. His face began to have a natural color and he looked alive again, in charge. His brow was sweaty and his hands clammy. It felt so good to feel the warmth of his hands. My mother had called my father 'daddy' throughout their lives; the old-fashioned style, and somehow I adopted the sense of not calling him daddy too often. I was sad to know this was going to be the big reveal, but proud to know I wasn't afraid anymore.

All of a sudden, we felt his hands clutching us; my mother teared up for a moment, exclaiming "I can feel him gripping my hand". And we kept talking and clutching. She told him that I was "here", that my brother John loved him, I said that my best friend CD and the boy M loved him too, and she made mention of my cousin who recently got to spend time with them. My father picked up my hand and pulled it up and across his chest to my mother's, with so much strength that I could see the bones and muscles in his arms light up like olive branches growing in the Mediterranean summer sun. I leaned into my father and said "I love you Daddy" and kissed him on the cheek. He sat up about a half a foot in his bed, turned to me, saw me with the black star eyes that hid beneath the clouded, sickly glow of his failing eye sockets, while I gave him one more kiss on the cheek and said "Goodbye, Daddy". And as if arms were easing him back down into the pillowed ground, the door was wide open. The grip held tight, my mother told him to go home, I told him to go get the homeland, and my father slowly went unconscious, with his eyes caught towards me, before sliding back like a snake's, half-closed, looking at me, with a bright, new tear surfacing in the wrinkled pool around his left eye. His breathing slowly lowered, quieted. His grip gently became looser. His color faded and his warmth lessened. My mother kissed his forehead and I kissed his hand, before we sat back down, in the calm. The breathing was barely audible. I listened to his chest but just heard one or two heart beats. After a few more minutes, a beautiful doctor came in and told us that she thought he may have passed. She examined him and I chuckled to myself, thinking that in his last official breaths, he got a feel from a beautiful lady. She looked over at us sweetly and nodded. And we saw him walk off, and our hands smelled like the last of his energy that came back to us to say goodbye, and the last of his structures stood.

The door closed. The noises returned. We said our less intimate goodbyes to his body, and walked off together to find J, with a faraway message of a few frustrated but pure words of love from M, who I wanted to hug so desperately then, and later that night a jug of wine that would have made my old man proud. As we exited the hospital, the sun had come out. It was swirling through the glass doors down the distance at us like a passage to rebirth, welcoming me to a place completely free of childhood. My father was light as a feather, sketching and blueprinting the clouds. I knew he'd have a lot of work to do, but I knew he had been ready, and I was ready to help him. He would soon be working from within me, and I felt like the luckiest little girl in the world.


~ M. Lucia

Tying The Knot

It was one of those nights at the bar, which started with a meeting up in the sunshine, as it shone hard through the neon beer signs and door slats of late afternoon.  We'd gather and talk about a book, sometimes we'd talk so much it seemed it could go on forever, but other times, we goofed off, and just make dirty jokes about each other, about the words at their play, and drank steadily.  Often one of us would disappear, the others run home to change or eat or feed a pet, and then the evening matches would begin.  

On this night, I was wearing my red and white polka dot dress. The one which slit far too much up the right side of my thigh. Luckily, the side facing the door.  I loved this feeling of community power, in the sense that I never gave myself away to too many people in the chit chat, swapping of bedfellows and general gossip of the neighborhood.  But I had earned my place here, survived, endured and from what I could tell people always remembered me, but couldn't think of anything bad to say, which is the way I liked it.  I was sitting there, at the end of the bar, talking to one of the many bartenders I knew and enjoyed.  We were all friends here, even when secretly we knew they couldn't pour a drink properly, or they didn't offer up a buy back like we felt they should. 
 

I was in between companions and friends at that moment, and you had disappeared after the afternoon as you usually did, living only 5 or so doors down the block.  You and I were always in between something or other, and our legendary "fights" at the bar seemed to entertain our fellow locals some.  The breakdown, as always, was the same.  You said lewd things, which disagreed with my lewd things, and I encouraged you more and more, grabbing your cheek and squeezing, or pulling your hair.  Me threatening you to stop saying what you might be saying, all while you smiled a big mischievous grin, and laughed, low, like a little boy jabbing at a caterpillar in the road.  It would drift back and forth, from talks about physics and literature to my mother and how you knew just what she felt like on the inside---hit, pull, smile, angry laugh.  I can't even now blame you for not taking my anger seriously, since I'd be grabbing your hair and I could feel my face wincing and widening, as the rest of me did, and could only imagine how big my fucking grin must have been.  Surely, it would have been an understatement to say that my grin fared so far reaching that you could have bore witness through the sunshine in its slats to my cunt, far below, practically about to jump from the bar stool I could barely keep her perched upon.  

Those nights the people talked about, they usually then included a standing encore, you and I, up from our chairs, me kicking at you far too slowly, and you always catching my leg and holding it up, just enough that you could peek up and through my stockings and dress.  I think you remembered that day one of my girl friends had slapped my ass in jest, and as I turned away, you followed suit but with the thunder of such perfect force, I stopped, put my drink down and turned back around to you, diverted my eyes to the crowd of females and asked "who DID that?"  Then looked to you knowingly, you safe in your hearty grin and satisfied eyes, as you said "I did.  It was Magnificent".

All this informed me, as I sat at the front corner of the bar, legs crossed so the slit climbed as high as it could, practically to my hips, with my slowly approaching watered down whiskey, in between conversations and friends.  Then you came in, as you always did, as if it was the first time that day.  I could always tell if you were making a night of it, or doing your special #1, which was the Budweiser drank in under 5 minutes, the half conversation or two around the faces of the bar you tried so hard to impress, and the leap into my airspace, to gaze, to frolic, to anger, or share some private tidbit of information that you had piled up somewhere, in one of your back rooms, the ones I would have enjoyed being kidnapped to on occasion, which bound you and I together.  Something about a book you found, a website about a topic I enjoyed, and how you would lend or email or send it to me, somehow.  There was always the promise of communication to come, with you.  

This night, there was that, and you had obviously gotten drunker in between reading books with us and coming back.  You noticed my dress most definitely, and picked up the ends of the long white ribbon strings, which tied in a small bow at my chest and hung down far too long, past my hips, and onto my thighs.  You talked about knowing how to tie knots, and I could see in your eyes you knew how much I enjoyed that sort of talk.  You took my hands gently, and slowly tied them into a perfect naval knot, which had them stuck together ideally, and neatly.  I sat there for a moment or two, as you quietly sipped your beer and watched me smile.  I then asked you, against my better nature, if you were able to untie it.  You did, with some chagrin, and then in a flash you were gone again, one of your many french exits, some of which used to make me so angry I would text you the most vicious of defensive retorts.  It didn't feel like me talking; you somehow brought out these things in me, or saw them and fixated just to the point of retreat.  You didn't always retreat, and those nights you didn't were quite magnificent, indeed.  But we could never ever really get past That, could we, and we both tended to always end up alone, finding each other in the variant tones of our meanings of pleasure.  

You disappeared again that night over a summer ago, I re-entered my conversations with refined hands which knew they had been brought together by yours, received a free drink, drank it and went home, erratic reverberations of you always in my dreams.

~ M. Lucia

 

Anonymous Jumper / Flag Pin

Life's violent end is
remembered as wind in my
hair as he / I fell.

Kansas City

curling limbs like a powder dry child
grouches mildew shopping list
sun curiously mild

narcotics bellow
beast of yellow-stained grace
crackling pavement
liquid petals medicine betrayed
circling town from walls misguided

inspiration fails
violence never will
curves promising
greed yielding
strums its mindful way
to hamlets trees old family ways

dull knife butters day old bread crumbs
cuts inside childrens sleep to pieces
never returning school days

before creaking bed
wicked wills
whining temples
toward little isolating room

touch of mother’s love
destroys clustering completely
nearly noon a spiraling tune
slips over and beneath conscious play
just as mistress of the house
fains ravaged claims victim
in the false blood

Kansas City back bedroom

~ M. Lucia

How We Got Our New Pool Continued

I can't tell you one way or another whether Angelica actually had hair medically implanted in her ass, whether it grew that way naturally or whether it was some new style bathing suit--it looked real to me.  It looked like she had on a thong bikini bottom and dark stalks of hair running in lines across her butt cheeks.  And Larry was right, she really did have a "nice ass," hair notwithstanding.  It had a wonderful curve along each axis, x, y & z--it was "great ass"-cubed, you could say, gentle high curves and plunges--and so I did have an immediate erotic reaction to it I will admit.  But then trying to introduce the tufts of hair into my minds-eye construction of carnal pleasure required a new kind of math, like Newton sitting under the apple tree inventing calculus.  Maybe the sine of Larry's shark-cock-codpiece + the cosine x pi of Angelica's hairy ass...I was still trying to figure it all out and must've been staring.

"Damn man," Larry slapping my back anew, "don't stare too hard.  Let's get you a beer, your tongue seems a little parched."

Alice passed walking away from me, Larry and Angelica, and on to the other side of the pool.  I think I heard her say something that sounded like "dick" as she went by which was, I knew, meant to be just barely heard.  She liked to insult me but also to leave a little mystery to the whole matter of her mood knowing that, in me, that was bound to cause the most anxiety.  So I knew I was a little out to sea as it were, and on my own.  Alice sat on another chaise and picked up a magazine from a side table.

"What's with all the cars in the driveway?"  I crossed to Larry's poolside cooler where he popped the cap off a Corona with his teeth (I know, why?  But by now though can't you see nothing with Larry would ever be easy?), pulled a perfectly wedged piece of lime from the ice and squeezed it into my drink.  I took a swig and realized that what I presumed to be the cologne from Larry's hand had somehow infused the lime giving my beer a faint flowery-spice odor that was altogether at odds with my expectations, gagging me slightly.  I looked over to Alice angrily reading US Weekly.

"Like a beer honey?" I called over.  No reaction.

"Parking's a bitch weekends like this.  I do a favor for some friends, give them a spot where they can walk to the shops without paying twenty bucks to the Arab cock-suckers in town.  Angelica, get my sweatpants would you?"

"Get them yourself.  I'm too hot."

In one motion Larry ripped the shark from his crotch, which peeled away with a rip of Velcro, and side-armed it at Angelica's chaise.  It made a whistling noise as it pinwheeled through the air and smacked with a wet slapping sound against her back over her kidneys and just above the line of hair on her right ass-cheek.

"Go in the fucking bedroom and get my fucking pants!"  He's was yelling now and there was a menacing edge to it.  I'm not sure if it's an act or the real thing.  "Do this one fucking thing for me, will you?  You've been laying on your ass all day."

"Fuck!" Angelica yelled but got up anyway with a toss of hair, both top and bottom, and crossed to the sliding door, pulling open the screen and disappearing into the low-light of the house.

"Larry, you have anything else besides beer?"  Alice was using a slightly seductive voice to annoy me now, but indicative for Larry of a certain buy-in to the whole scene.  It was just a put-on, of course, but for him it was blood in the water.

"Well there's wine," I cut in but Larry was on the move.

"I have Bacardi coolers too, here in the bucket."  He moved past the ice chest to the grill again which was beginning to smoke excessively.  It occurred to me to look then at what was left after the removal of the shark's head and I was relieved to see an ordinary Speedo.  The fact that I now found Larry's Speedo 'ordinary' was somewhat disturbing but even more so was the outline of Larry's penis which seemed to be reacting to Alice's come-hither tone.  Like a compass pin, no matter where he moved on the patio he seemed to keep it in constant 'point' towards Alice's star.  "There's also sangria in the fridge.  Why don't you run inside and see if you can track down a drink for your bride."

Smiling now, fucking with me to be sure.  His teeth shone white in the sun.  I could taste his cologne in my mouth.

"How 'bout a daquiri?"  Alice was stepping in, self-interested, not wanting to be left on the patio alone with Larry.

"I'll have to get the blender out."  Poor Larry was deflated by this complication.  Angelica appeared at the door.  She had put on a sheer green and yellow shift, which draped on her shoulders, and shorts underneath covering the ass-hair.  As Larry passed her through the door, presumably to get the blender, she handed him his pants.

"Watch the grill would you?" Larry said to no one in particular, clearly a little irritated.

Angelica stepped barefoot to the patio and stood next to me.  She took hold of the neck of my beer bottle and looked at me and then the bottle with a seductive smile then wrapped her lips around it and upturned the bottle in her mouth.

"Ugh.  This tastes like shit." She handed me back the now half-empty beer and nodded in the direction of the open screen door.  "He's pissed at his neighbor.  Something about the Armenian holocaust, I don't know.  So what do you do?"

"He's a graphic artist--self-employed."  Alice appeared behind us also now taking hold of my beer and drinking.  "This does taste like shit.  What is that Drakkar Noir?"

"Imagine sucking his cock.  Sometimes I want to puke."  They both laughed.

Larry appeared at the door a bit cheered up.  "I found the blender Alice.  How about strawberry?!"

Say It With Your Eyes

qi moves like a lion
apparently
backwards into the shadows
forwards into the fray

the same particles:::
earth ellipsing our dead skin
splinters in our hearts grip
the wood plank we set ourselves upon.

coming into us (out from us)
seems to be the only thought worth having-
that the man sipping diamonds off the ass
of a princess, shares the same incomplete
energy as the fly pouncing on the shit of a homeless
man at the side of the road, near the racetrack.

the composition mirrors
as the impossible takes us in its turn
and sews its invincible pathways into our veins,
has its way with us,
then wallops us over the head with its club,
dumping us at the side of the railway,
moist diamonds in our pockets and shit
on our shoes.

~ M. Lucia

Life Lines

It's a peculiar thing this separation.  Seeing a thing that was once a part of you just simply not be a part of you any longer.  It's like you had this whole life, taking for granted, almost, that you would always be one--a whole--and then there comes a day and that part of you is missing.  

First there's the shock of it, I guess.  And stop me if you start recognizing any of the stages of grief.  I was never good at that sort of thing so I don't know what's what, I can only describe the feelings.  There was definitely a moment of shock.  I'm laying there, on the ground, and I remember the sound the leaves made, the dried and brown leaves between my ear and the sidewalk.  A crunching noise it was.  And I tried to focus on the thing in my immediate line of sight.  Fingers.  A hand.  Reaching out to me.  It occurred to me then that there had been some kind of accident.  Something bad had happened.  And someone was there with me.  I tried to move, to lift my head.  I could slightly and then I realized that there was a hand but no arm; no body.  Nobody else there with me, just me.  And then I think "who's hand is this?"  And then the inevitable dreadful realization.  But for a moment, again, there's that peculiar curiosity of the scene.  I recognized my own hand now.  You know, I know it, right.  You know what they say about when you really know something?  Well, in this case it's really REALLY true.  I could see the scars from where I had gotten that deep cut from the deli slicer.  I could see the cuticles I had bitten to bleeding that morning.  "That's my hand."  Only you see now that it wasn't anymore.  It's not going to be with me anymore.  Our journey together was at an end.  No divorce, just separation.  Permanent.  Funny.  There wasn't any pain yet, just this odd sensation.  My brain still had two hands too so there wasn't even that.  And I just avoided for the sake of argument even looking at what was going on with the rest of me.  I just figured I'd lay there looking at the hand on the sidewalk.  Whatever was going to happen to me was going to have to be handled by someone else.  I closed my eyes and I thought I saw the fingers move.

Stolentelling

(Unrated Version)

Who hurt who. It all centered around the greatest loss of my life, so it’s hard to empathize with either of their pains, and hard to not feel I was imagining it to feel myself a hawk, an iron warrior, worthy of making a man hurt for me. A throbbing heartache for a broken cock. I had been introduced to Morris and Jack both on the same night, and knew Jack to be a deviant moments before he arrived with Mo, the boy from the desert just barely out of his teens.


Two years later. Sitting in a cheap, checkered cotton dress in premature Spring, just over a week after holding my father’s clammy hand, warming me for the last time and catapulting me into adulthood in an excruciating blink. I sat with the one who made me forget, in my shell-shocked, drunken bare feet, dirtier on his floor than on my own. Mo had called, he had been sick that morning and wanted to get a drink. But I had not said where I was. That, not less than 8 hours after my first return to the city the night before, I was naked beneath Jack’s Chinese robe, its sanctity brought down to scale down the rickety side of a bar stool due to the fact that it sat amongst long un-laundered clothes on his apartment floor all winter. That I had spent what felt like glorious black night hours with his perfect tongue in my wanting, giddy pussy. I was in mourning; I wasn’t all there. But she took over in those times, and watched every show. Danced every step, downed every shot – all the sunsets and family albums alive in a brand new way. One I didn’t show to most people.

Somehow, though, I got to showing him. Days, nights of his hands finding the blood in me, my lips curled around the diligence of his cock, his body, just fitting in with mine, even when he didn’t want it to. My secret enjoyment of his choking me, hugging my neck when I felt him coming hard, barely uttering a low moan as he pulled out and spread himself onto my belly, one day to carry a child. It’s hard to imagine your mother’s lips in a filthy kiss, the hands of a baby afloat deep inside the same place where the hardest of men’s manhoods aim to go. Compartmentalization can get you through, or ruin you. Accept that the hand you shake was up its own nose or ass – all the fluids of our grounded universe are something the angels never see, or taste. The birthing bed is the death chair is the graveyard or the office cubicle, as the lipstick, tear and spit stains of a whore’s sheets. Jesus was born in the shit and the straw, and so saves the world and we enter the Kingdom as it enters us, in the blackness of night, in the dim light of a star, wet between the edges of light. After we melt away from whiskey ice cubes and old rotted shoelaces, ruined from the rain.

Mo’s voice changed. I didn’t know then that he had met himself a perfectly plain little girl to help him forget. About all those contradictions, those evil desires that he couldn’t intermingle in his own, mine-field mind. To this day I still don’t know if he was aching to get away from me or aching to love me. I hope one day, somewhere else, in different clothes and lifetimes, I might know for sure.

“You’re at Jack’s”?

My response was feeble, so afraid of confrontation it doesn’t bear mentioning.

“I’ll come out, but…..I’m not going to get tanked with you guys”.

Jack was his friend too, more like a laid back, older brother whose freedom caused Mo jealousy. That Jack did not suffer the same. But he did, just not in the same way. Regardless of either, waves of misplaced guilt ran over me. I had first spent the night with Mo in the room next door. Again, the places change, the stains remain. Back then he couldn’t kiss me properly. We weren’t much more than strangers and his constant heavy biting on my lip electrified every Christmas tree light down my spine, so much so that my lips looked puffy and pouty as a washed up starlet the next day. But that was a long time ago.

In this room with Jack’s long hair down and his economic strength at play, I was removed from the world. It was about to be my second night there, again, and this was about to become a joining of worlds that I wasn’t at all sure about. Milling the corn with the dollar bills, stirring orange juice into the cake- it was just Off. I sighed, without the foresight of lack of grief to focus on any real decision making. Right brain fell asleep, left brain was drowning in the shallow waters. So, I looked straight at Jack in his soft, amber stare. He was never afraid to bring the undertow to the surface.

“Do you still want to stay, I know it would be strange with Mo…and I don’t want to cause any problems”.

I looked sideways at the dark, shaded cloth hung up on the windows. One of the reasons I loved this place. No light, no life, safe. A good aim at the hip kids on the street below if you could fix a shot.

“I mean, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with Mo going home at the end of the night, and me not going back to the neighborhood with him”.

Jack nodded, sensible almost always, but slightly downtrodden in the timing of his lower lip.

“Well…”, I stated simply, followed by a pause. I didn’t even gun what I uttered next through my intellectual drain pipe for a second. A ventriloquism act on behalf of my lascivious id. “We could just fool around now”. Matter of fact.

Before the next breath was taken, he seemed to move his entire body over the few hot inches to mine and our lips met our tongues and went to work. Nothing like a time deadline to force some hearty, violent lust onto a situation. The G train between Carroll Street and Lorimer & Metropolitan in Brooklyn takes 20 minutes. Mo was already walking to the train (10 minutes). It was Mo who told me about that time frame, in one of our forays there, when he would encircle me with compulsive mathematics like numbered fireflies bouncing in and out of a greedy child’s hand, wishing to capture it for a second, usually without air. I never had a problem listening, thereby letting him know I was happy as his north star. I had wanted him to know that all of his chatter, fears and sprints through the brambles was ok, since I would always be there, still. I didn’t think on this long, as Jack’s veins popped in his arms while trying to rip apart my tightly tied dress from my body. He jerked the fabric up, lifting me up as I leaned back over his desk, where his art, therapy, loneliness and late night phone calls took place, and he ran his tongue’s tip in and out of my pussy, who wasn’t surprised. She had been expecting an evening show, and always fared better early on, when the excess of drink didn’t render her mute, dizzy and a little unsure of herself. The drunker and more relaxed I would get, the stupider my pussy would become. Tonight she was strong, and proper. As Jack carried me into the bedroom, we passed the threshold and I couldn’t help some minor sarcasm.

“Does this mean we’re married now”?

He was always dependable for a retort, which I loved.

“And I’m already sick of you”.

As he pitched me down, I left it with a final statement. “Good. Now we’re divorced”.

And we spent the next 16 and a half minutes at the dance. I hadn’t showered and he grew harder at that fact. I loved his smell on my mouth and on my skin, like rolling around in the fresh mud to a pig. And I’ll never think myself too lofty to separate myself from that sort of joy. I bit his neck, hoping to swallow his skin, and climbed on top of him, as I sucked his cock, just so I could hear him bellow, watch his stomach tighten and release, and feel the taste of his cum just popping in for a split second, then back again. He pulled my hair back (we looked like a couple of gypsy-bum-visionaries, pagan extras with our split ends, covering each other like a funeral shroud) and held me down. We fucked vicious, soft and slow, then fast, sensing everything inside and out of ourselves that we could. We ate up the dust in the air, swallowed the bed sheets, snorted the grime from our feet and devoured the whole damn place, turning on even the stars that watched from behind the window. At that point, I never had sex with a boy or a man for that matter where it could move steadily from diving into each other’s pupils to the dirtiest explorations of our asses only to converge in ritualistic fucking like this. Jack and I, our fucking had Soul. He came loud, and relentless, onto my stomach and my limbs. Seconds after, I straddled him, as we embraced in our loud breaths so he could run his fingers up and down the curve of my back, light as a seagull. I buried my face in his neck and kissed it, smelling even more sugary than before. After about four low-lit minutes of this, the phone rang. It was Mo.  He was downstairs.

~ M. Lucia