The Bookends Review

Begin with a cottage on the beach,
a faded two story house,
crusted in yellow shingles,
a block from the ocean with a roof
like a Chinese pagoda
and a screened in porch on three sides.
Outside of the front door,
sea grass and slack sand,
an unfinished game from yesterday,
mallets scattered across a lawn
surrounded by a chest high hedge,
aged and bowed from
the constant salt wind.…

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The kids at school ask where my daddy is and I tell them Bird is my daddy. They say he’s not, he can’t be, because he is black and I am white. They say who did my mama marry before she had me? I say I don’t remember, and anyway Mama told me I have to be good and do what Bird says because he is my father now. They say that’s not true. He’s not Mama’s real husband either because he can’t marry Mama because she’s white. So he can’t be the boss of me.…

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Franz Kafka moved in with me today. His hair is greasy with the slime of the grave. His bald pate, colored like a palm tree in the middle of an oasis of hair, shakes dandruff sequins from the desert mirage onto the floor. His hollow eyes, the size of a vulture’s balls, penetrate me.

“Franz,” I say, “what are you doing at an hour like this? You should be in bed.”

Franz winks and smiles wide, revealing what remains of his two teeth. They are the color of ointment extracted from a baby’s behind three days after its deposit.  …

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The crowd hovering around the entrance to the Hospital for the Incurable seemed slight at first. The hospital was the cornerstone of the city of Le Frères du Plume. Many of its citizens derived their livelihood from being directly employed by, or providing needed services to, the one hundred-twenty year-old institution.

Placards posted along the street proclaimed the hanging of Old Grimes. I thought that impossible. Old Grimes had been hung a month ago. Wasn’t he dead and forgotten? But there it was, a rare rehanging, and I hadn’t noticed the announcements at all.…

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They want the perks of death without its drawbacks.
They finance the idea
that consciousness is distorted
data, always delayed, the self
a costly entitlement, but they can fix that.
Shrink-wrap the underclass. One-time payments
to the families of liberals, with the proviso
there won’t be any more. But they too,
the deciders, in an odd fellow-feeling,
want sleep. Vast doses of sleep
are better than psychotropics
and trophy-wives. The essential
liberty is liberty from dreams.
The poor, of course, in their warehouses become
piped-in reruns, but the masters
go on buying and speculating
through clever proxies. Eventually we (in a sense)
leave earth, in a translucent block
like a plaque. Lines on graphs
go up and up, unseen. Eventually
we-in-a-sense huddle
for energy around the last stars, then
in the ergosphere of black holes,
but even those dissolve.…

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Bring me the debris of the world,
the rotten,
the discarded,
the maimed.

Bring me the dried carcasses
left on the ground after winter.

Bring me your weak,
your empty shells,
remains.

And I’ll show you
the resilience of the plants.

I’ll show you how to come back
from under earth,
dirt on your face,

how to push
your way up
and stand
in the democracy
of the weeds,

as if disaster,
terror,
history
never happened.

As if we’re here
forever
to stay.

– Claudia Serea…

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You could never get Grams out of her easy chair. She seemed to cleave to it like a limpet. She even had a chamber pot poorly secreted between it and the scullery wall beside the fire: almost on the hearth. No chance of her getting a chill – chilblains maybe. It must have been that which smelled like a stagnant rock pool.

Her face was dark and wrinkled and her chins stacked like little tyres above one of a series of floral scarves which were clandestinely replaced when they faded beyond recognition.
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