Upon release from the Army, Vernon was assigned to work as a custodian. The quiet ex-sniper with ivory skin and translucent, mint green eyes kept writing to Matias, the decorated solider with whom he had a love affair. Matias never replied.
Vernon mopped the floor of a bar on downtown’s outer edge where a raucous band played twice a week. He cleaned and wiped counters after liquor spilled from broken bottles and shattered glass. Wearing a faded gray uniform, he cleaned after patrons fought, bled and collapsed, motivating himself by imagining Matias walking in. After a few weeks, a gathering of gay men noticed Vernon. Clearing empty cans one night, he heard a voice. “You there, hunny,” one of the men called as he collected trash, “come over here.”…
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“My lips are sealed,” I told Ellie as we sat cross-legged in her closet, the edges of her dresses draping over our heads. We usually laughed at how the fabric framed our faces like a nun’s habit. Nothing was funnier to us then. At almost thirteen, the world was spread out all around us, new and untried. Give that up to shut ourselves away and pray? Hilarious. But that day there was no laughter.
“This isn’t a baby secret like when I had a crush on Andrew West,” Ellie lectured, “This is real. Cross your heart, hope to die—”
“Stick a needle through my eye,” I finished dutifully.
Together we’d weathered the horrid pixie cut Ellie got in fourth grade and the time I tripped and fell on stage during the sixth grade assembly.…
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While I was growing up, my father had so little fashion sense that he often came downstairs on Saturday morning wearing a combination of items that hurt my teenaged eyes. “Dad,” I screeched, “you can’t wear stripes with plaids!” He looked down at his outfit and back up at me with little-boy innocence and a kooky smile. “Who says?” he replied.
But on holidays, or evenings when he went to Bar Association dinners, he practically glowed when he wore a fresh close shave, a crisp white shirt and a dark blue suit that fit him perfectly. Keeping his striped or dotted tie behaved, a gold charm dangled from two triangling chains in a style of clasp I never saw on any other man. Etched into the gold pendant were three not-quite-English capital letters along with a pointing finger and three stars. …
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Grey walls, and cold fluorescent lights buzzing like bees
They sit there, rubber stamps in hand,
they are gods of small power and big and important paperwork
I smile through the glass at my own misery
Forms to fill,
……………….lines to stand in, and the hell questions
and these voices, each syllable is a nail driven into my patience
I see them shuffle their piles of nothingness, like poker players with a losing hand, but
they’re not bluffing
They do not laugh, but they do drink coffee because they are people too, and they need
sometimes to take a break from breaking the human souls
Coffee cups they clutch like trophies of their small evil victories
I stand there, like shit stinking, waiting for a nod, a wink, a sign that I exist
But the clock on the wall is the only one that moves, and its ticks are louder than my
thoughts
And when I finally reach the end of this line, this torture, I’ll be free!…
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Forest roots
bulge through
the dirt road’s
four-wheel drive
tracks.
The homeless man
lies on the sidewalk
giving pedestrians
a few more steps
registered on pedometers.
– Diane Webster…
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My lover tells me the story of Laüstic, The Nightingale. In Marie de France’s lai, a noble woman listens to a nightingale on her balcony each evening in the unspoken company of a handsome neighbor for whom she yearns as beautifully and perfectly as the bird sings. Her husband, ignorant of his rival, kills the nightingale and delivers her the bird wrapped in his handkerchief. Now you will have no reason to leave our chamber and stand on the balcony. The corpse is small and warm, the linen damp and stained with blood from the arrow’s wound. She holds it until even her burning hands cannot warm the bones.
My lover is the jealous husband. His wife, who is still in the city where he used live, meets nightly with his best friend.…
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For where there is one of me, always there will be another. Either at the next stanchion or post, or following soon after, while I lay dropped and drooling over my existence, in the dark grip of a dizzying blue gas, or cold-cocked by the weak-jawed clear-browed hero of sensitivity.
For while not always strong, we are the silent type. Born we are for epaulets and chin straps and monochrome jumpers, for frayed tunics and rusty chain mail, for bulky suits bulging with implication and lead-pumping danger, for the ability to rush headlong into an order, carrying it out with feckless determination, knowing well the disposability of our movements, our trigger fingers (ever itchy), the very things we see.
For what we see is always first, and never fully known.…
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