The Bookends Review

– Joshua Kepfer…

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The job was easy. No cutting line, no wading swamp
water with moccasins and alligators. Suburban work.
Boca Raton, mouth of the rat, more rich people than
most places, though how many more was, was
something I didn’t know. This neighborhood was not all
millionaires, but well off, complicated pension plans. We
had no assets. Long haired county surveyors. We were
tanned, in decent shape, young. We wore yellow safety
vests, jeans, no shirts. These suburban folks were wary
of us, but the logo on the truck gave us license to be
there and made us seem a bit less dangerous. We liked
to fuck with people now and then, so as we painted
targets, a grid for aerial photos, and they’d ask what we
were doing, I said the county decided this neighborhood
was getting overcrowded, so they’re going to eliminate
one household adjoining each of these circles.…

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The accomplished feat echoes in a maze of hysteria.
The stratosphere vast continuing dissonance for that attainable.
A gypsy dances the midnight hour and writes until his fingers cry crimson.
Dramatic realpolitik operas and spiritual indelibility; partnered atrophy and
God.
Lay tongue to contemporary whoa man’s dispute with universal concurrence.
Doors of perception magnify relevance; our lives as spiritual beings closes near.
The crimson covers the paper and trickles down the side of his arm in lengthy vibration.
Sound is formed, a thick gelatinous blob of atmospheric time travel.
A palate of absurdity met in recycled light.
Drips from washed-out tunnels of dharma subconscious in streaks of nostalgia.
The gypsy furls his legs in rainbow knots.
The lotus hums.
We are re-entering the universe, a path in which holiness engraves ritual.…

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– Robb Kunz…

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Rick Slickman ached from his neck to his toes, and his joints creaked louder than the wooden floor in his room, but he kept a smile on his face. At 72, every trip to the shared bathroom down the hall in the old house on Bewildered Street felt like an Olympic event.

“Hey Ron, how’s the freezer warehouse job?” They talked while taking care of business. “Nice seeing you. Well, someday, you will meet the woman of your dreams.” He advised, “Don’t get her pregnant.” The fellow was in his fifties and the son of his cousin Charley.

Rick made it back to his tiny room and dropped into the lumpy recliner.  His wrecked right knee had ruined his dream of a college scholarship, but he had stubbornly refused to have it replaced.…

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After the shipwreck had finally been pulled onto the beach, back in March, a salvage crew kept cutting up the crab boat’s hull and cockpit. The workers had shooed her off like a small girl, even though they must have seen the trash bags she carried full of the styrofoam, fiberglass, and plastic every new tide spat at the beach. If she wanted to play, they had scolded her, she could do so farther north, past where the creek emptied into the ocean. She’d kept silent through their tirades, maybe afraid of worse consequences; the beach was officially closed. The stink of leaked diesel clung to everything she touched. Yet she couldn’t stay home and kept coming back, filling bag after bag with rope, floats, and styrofoam.…

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What grace given as redemption
can this grace be now? she wonders,
walking past his corner again
in the glassy white glare of 6 o’clock,
seeing what little is left
of what he gave his life to.

This was a man who worked the same job
for twenty-seven years, fixing machines
made by other men, machines meant to break
from wear, from neglect, from war.
A man who worked in a concrete box
on the corner of Patterson and Main
in a soiled, quarter-sleeved jumpsuit,
washing away the work each night
back home – chassis grease, used gear oil,
human sweat.

He was a man who lived in ways people
couldn’t see, a “good” man, the neighbors said,
who only charged what he thought his work
was worth.…

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