Machado, Venus and Me by Mark James Andrews
Jorge Machado was inmate number 3861977 from the infirmary ward and was wheeled into the Wayne County Jail law library by Deputy Venus Spivey. Machado looked like he pumped iron. Little Venus had got herself a tit job. Both were short in the leg department.
Spivey pushed Machado at me announced that the attendance today was 12 inmates ETA 15 minutes and bounced herself out. Machado chose to be the strong silent type. So there I sat, civilian, good citizen and law librarian with time to knock off a bagel creamed and a tall double-double French Roast coffee.
The transport crew showed 2 minutes early pushed 11 bodies thru the cat-walk gate and I was swarmed before they turned the key. I was just a skosh from squaring up the crew with databases and legal forms to freedom when Machado wheeled up to me screaming. SICK! GO HOME NOW! HEADACHE! PUKE! The last one got my attention and cleared the decks for me to get Spivey on the phone to come get him. Machado then began openly weeping and moaning so I got Deputy Lucci in Master Control to remove him to a holding bullpen in the visitation area.
Within minutes Lucci calls me screaming Machado is running his wheelchair and his head into the bars and has opened up a bleeding gash. Lucci is bitching that it’s not his job to babysit the law library inmates and to never fucking call him again when he says OK Aphrodite just showed up and the psycho’s out of here.
Machado was transported back to the infirmary by Deputy Spivey without incident and Venus agreed to meet me at the Bulldog later for a drink.
Class Of 69 by Ed Markowski
Every time we skipped Mister Whitlock‘s geometry class, me and Lucy Rose practiced on the floor in Johnny Munro’s black light room fallout shelter his old man dug on the second day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, between and below Jimi ‘s thin fingers warping and sculpting his guitar strings into napalm swans that screamed in the night halfway through if 6 was 9 , and Grace Slick oozing sex and smirking approvingly above us, all wrapped up in a cherry red Girl Scout uniform .
When May became June, and June became the time to lay our cards on the table me and Lucy was true blue bonafide angle wizards . We could twist and contort our bodies, tongues, lust, and desire better than every green Gumby inside or outside of every dime store from Daytona to Seattle, from San Diego to Philadelphia, from New York City to Tokyo, and from Earth to Eternity .
Lucy Rose and me drove each other way up, over, above, and beyond the peak of Mount Everest. We could do it rolling down hills crawling stretching standing sitting dogging walking jogging running from the cops blowing bubbles in church in the trunk of a Corvair at the Diamond Drop Drive – In eating cheese fries on a toboggan during the national anthem and from the seventh inning stretch right on into hockey season .
We rocked at right acute obtuse supplementary interior obscure chartreuse reflex rebound fringe left and center angles in boxes cones cubes circles ovals squares rectangles trapezoids rapazoids apazoids pazoids voids oids triangles quadrangles pentangles and sextangles , but Mister Whitlock flunked us anyway .
Ashes in the Urn by Luca Penne
When I picked up the urn from the mantel, Dad protested “Put me down or scatter me with your mother.” Dad had been a traveling salesman his whole life and had never been home for more than a few days at a time. He’d pass through the house like a big wind on weekends, the doors slamming, dishes breaking, knick knacks falling off the shelves onto the carpet. I placed him down. I didn’t want to engage in that conversation as Mom had floated away months ago, some of her ash and bone clinging to rock, some catching on the wings of the birds poking on the shore, some clinging to the scales of catfish that surfaced for only a moment and some determined to make New Orleans, where she might mingle with the molecules of Louis Armstrong. I cradled the porcelain teacup with little red and blue birds, the teacup that was my sister, and smelled the steam rising from the chamomile and lemon. “Dad needs to get out of the house,” she said. When I sat down on the red chair, Nasser, my brother, bellowed in pain as if I had hurt him terribly, so I jumped back up. “You’ve put on a good 20 pounds. Why don’t you get some exercise and stop eating all the desserts.” I jumped back up. “Nellie’s right,” he said. “You can’t keep Dad in an urn. His real home is Memphis.” And then I walked back into the kitchen to get some agave for my tea and suddenly Mom was back, holding a bag of groceries. “Better get Dad. Somebody’s gotta pay the bills.” I ran outside with the urn, tossed the contents up in the air, and Dad showered over the herbs and flowers—dust, bone and light. When I returned, the teacup had a crack in it; my brother had broken a caster, and the grocery bags were still on the counter. And for once, the whole family was strangely silent.
Born in the USA by Alan Catlin
“Clancy and I were out deer hunting up in the hills, North of Berne, minding our own business, doing what millions of hard working, honest, taxpaying, licensed to hunt, citizens do every day. Unlike many of these so called ‘red blooded’ Americans, we were well into our third joint of excellent Colombian grass, still, we were washing it down with Coors Light, so everything was A OKAY.
We hadn’t bothered a single soul, living or otherwise, when all of a sudden, we’re assaulted by a troop of crazy, wide-eyed anti hunter types, stomping through the woods and carrying on, like a rogue boy scout troop zeroing in on some Brownies. I never saw so many certifiable lunatics carrying air horns before in my life, making more noise than a home crowd of Dallas Cowboy fans in a sudden death overtime game against the 49ers.
I suggested to this guy, who looked as if he might harbor some latent leadership tendencies, if he thought he was more than a little crazy making all that noise in amongst all those trees, crawling with heavily armed, extremely serious, dedicated sharp shooting, good ole boy hunters. He gave me his best “No com prende?” look so I decided to explain the facts of life to him in simple English:
You know, accidents happen all the time in the woods. Sometimes even mass accidents. What with all these inexperienced geeks coming up from the City, shooting anything that moves, anything could happen.
Now, take my partner over there, he’d be more than happy to blow your brains out. Not that he’d actually do it. On purpose, that is.
Actually, only facing ten to twenty is stopping him right now. Personally, ten to twenty, doesn’t mean that much to me. I’m not married and I don’t have two kids like he does. All, I’ve got going for me is a dead end job I hate, a couple of car payments and an itchy trigger finger. You know, I’ve even been told that I have severe anti social tendencies. At least, that’s what the last company shrink said before I scared her three shades of white with some really serious shit.”
Well, that sucker turned real pale in a hurry. Maybe, it was something I said. I don’t know, I’m told I have that effect on people sometimes. Nothing personal, a man’s just got to do what he’s got to do. I always pride myself on being a real straight shooter, you know what I mean?
It turned out to be a real nice day for hunting in the long run, after our little story telling session with the anti hunter types. We didn’t see a whole lotta of game but it sure was nice and quiet.”
Tuesdays with Mimsey by Wayne Scheer
Mimsey Sue Mathers always had peculiar ways about her.
And in Flippen, Georgia folks cotton to peculiar about as much as they take to a rattlesnake in the schoolyard. Or a woman preacher.
Blame her daddy, Parnell. He was always writing his crazy ideas in the town newspaper, which he published. Like when the Methodist church burned, he thought the Methodists and the Baptists should pray together since they worshipped the same God. And when the government closed the old colored school, Parnell said it was a good idea for the children to be together.
It’s no wonder Mimsey’s head overflowed with foolishness, growing up in a home like that.
Even though her mama died when she was a baby, Mimsey always loved to sing and tell stories. Too happy, is the way most folks described her, believing something was wrong in her head.
But she took care of her daddy, who grew more cantankerous with each new wrinkle on his craggy face. He made her promise to keep up his work–whatever that was. He even wrote about it in his last column in the newspaper where he quoted a poem by some colored man named Langston Hughes. He called the column, “What Happens to a Dream Deferred?” or some foolishness like that. I remember the poem ended this way:
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
None of us had any idea what he meant, but Mimsey kept right on smiling at everyone, even at her daddy’s funeral.
And she got more and more peculiar, wearing big floppy hats and pants with glittery stuff on them. She worked in our town’s library where she read books to the children and told them stories. Their parents would stick around to make sure Mimsey wasn’t spouting the nonsense her daddy used to.
Funny thing, the adults enjoyed her stories about as much as the children. So she made Tuesday nights story time for the grown-ups. Black folks would sit on one side, whites on the other, and she would stand in the middle, telling her stories and singing until both sides began whooping it up like they was all one family.
Mimsey always ended the festivities by singing, “Amazing Grace,” without music, but with the most tearful voice you ever heard. More than once grown men would cry. Then they’d eat the cakes brought by the women. And, later, the men, black and white, would put away the chairs and wish each other to drive home safe.
Mimsey would wait until the last person wrapped up the last piece of cake. Then she’d take her daddy’s picture out from her big handbag, and have herself a good cry.
Driving By Limerick by Joseph Farley
Passing the cooling towers, I ask the engineer riding shotgun, “Are we out of the kill zone yet?”
“The kill zone?” he asks.
“For the meltdown,” I say.
“Oh,” he says. “Let me tell you, if that goes, it will take the surrounding five counties with it. You’ve lived your whole life in the kill zone.”
Maybe it’s good to know this little fact, then again, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut while I was still dumb and innocent and lived in a house by a stream and not a wasteland in the far corner of the neighboring county.
SEX by F.N. Wright
He fucked her like she’d never been fucked before.
She finally cried out, “ENOUGH! ENOUGH! Jesus, that was great,” she sighed.
It wasn’t until he was dressed and standing beside the bed when she said, “Honey, you didn’t cum. Wasn’t I good enough? Can I give you a blowjob? God, I want to feel like I was worth it. Hell, no john’s ever made me cum. Not like that anyway.”
He picked up the hundred from the night stand then pulled out a Colt .45.
He shot her between the eyes and felt the stickiness of his sperm on his leg as it stained his levis.
Brautigan and the Plastic Buddha by Scot Young
We stumbled around the corner and found ourselves in Chinatown. This stretch of street was experimental poetry with Peking duck hanging in the window. The rain had stopped and the naïve world was washed clean by green tea and paper dragons.
We were on a mission for dim sum. We wandered down an alley with the sweet fragrance of opium hanging in the air. We settled in at Hang Ah, one of the oldest dim sum restaurants in the city. I pointed at the noodle rolls, tarts, and dumplings as the carts rolled by.
“Smell that coming in?” I asked.
“Opium. The Chinese smoke opium in their bathrooms,” Brautigan said.
“Put that on a postcard and send it home,” I said. “Hey, try this noodle roll.”
“The old people sit in the tub,” he said taking the last swallow of his beer.
“That’s just bizarre, man—the bathtub?”
When we got up to pay the ticket, Richard said something to the busboy in Chinese and we were nodded and motioned to the kitchen area. In a darkened storage room off the kitchen a clay pipe was passed around. It was a dream scene set in a Chinatown fog. Old Chinese were sitting in the tub and young children gathered around on the floor. Paper lanterns were stretched across the ceiling on fishing line and bobbed to the sound of an Erhu breeze coming from the alley. A plastic Buddha sat winking on the window sill. I listened to the ping, ting, sing, for minutes, hours or days. Time did not move when the Erhu played.
Finally, inching our way out of the alley, we saw a Chinese princesses riding a lotus flower to the sun weaving down Grant Street in a slow motion display of waving silk. This image stopped us along with a head of cabbage being yo-yo’d down on a string from a balcony above. Smiling elders grinned and waved at us on from above. It splattered at our feet and plastered bits of damp cabbage on our jeans. The old Chinese celebrated from their loft—smiling, nodding, and clapping.
“Ah, man–look at my jeans” I said. “Now what?”
“I need to find a paper, he said.”
Brautigan put the coin in my hand and disappeared behind the paper dragons.
Breaking Wood by Jenny Pinkas
I’m an episode of reality TV, audience one hundred strong. Standing alone in the center of the gymnasium, feet bare, blue belt tight against my taekwondo uniform, I am ready to give evidence that aging has not diminished me. With furrowed brow, I shape my foot into a knife’s blade and kick. The block stubbornly remains whole.
The room is a gloomy chamber, burdened with the weight of my failure. A moan breaks the silence. It’s my young son, head buried in hands. When I laugh out loud, I feel a new brand of strength emerging from my declining form.
Incredulous by Michael C. Keith
The woman struck by the speeding pickup truck while crossing Route 1 stared back at her severed legs as if looking in an aquarium filled with iridescent jellyfish.
OLD McDONALD PARK By Mark Barkawitz
My little brother Bruce and I were renowned as Speedy and Swifty in 
the tackle football games at McDonald Park in the early-to-mid ’60s. I don’t recall who of us was which—Speedy or Swifty?—but I do remember that I learned to swear like a barroom brawler, while playing in those games.
If you go to McDonald Park today, you’ll find a square-block of grass fields for youth soccer and football, lots of park toys for the younger kids, basketball, handball, and volleyball courts. But back in the ’60s, the geography was quite different. The northernmost area of the block bordered by Bell Street was actually a fenced-off, covered reservoir, which of course had to be totally flat to accommodate water storage. That created a steep drop-off on the southern half of the block, which was then the accessible park. A few swings and a small merry-go-round, benches, and the concrete bathroom were at the top of the evergreen-lined hill. But the largest part of McDonald Park in those days was its grass-covered hillside on Mountain Street on which we waged merciless tackle football games on weekends and after school in the football season. I say merciless because we played without helmets or shoulder pads and the out-of-bounds line on the downhill side of the field was the sidewalk—and there were no referees—which made for brutal, high-speed tackles onto concrete, plenty of unnecessary roughness, and the accompanying profanities.
“Get off me, you mother *#x#/*!”
I broke my left wrist there and was in a cast for six weeks. So I switched to offensive lineman and used my mortared forearm to block.
I still remember the de-cleating tackle I put on my seventh-grade classmate and good friend Gary Mercado, which separated him from the football when he landed upside-down on his head. He was a big guy at tight end but I hit him just right from behind while he was still in the air after catching a pass. Luckily, he didn’t break his neck.
“Oh-h-h, *#x#!” he swore.
My little brother and I were small for our age. But we were both quick-as-a-puma ball-carriers, who could reverse course at will, running thirty yards—up and down that hill—to gain ten yards from the line of scrimmage, thus wearing down our larger opponents. We earned our nicknames as two impossible-to-tackle halfbacks—Speedy and Swifty. Thirty years later, a guy named Cal Yocum—who reads scripts for the studios now and still lives on Mar Vista Avenue just up the block from my mother and the park—recognized me as Speedy. “Or was it Swifty?” he asked. I couldn’t tell him.
We played pick-up games with Bobby Hatch and his Michigan Avenue buddies, the fraternal twins Alvin and Melvin Johnson, who lived on Bell Street, and Chris Swayne and Michael F_____, who was a few years older. Tall and strong-armed, Mike played quarterback, launching field-long, end-zone bombs. He later changed his name to Michael L__ because the FBI was after him for draft evasion. He sang in a rock band called Dust and played lead guitar—a Jimi Hendrix wanna-be—with Swayne on the keyboard. They were pretty good, too. And though they always bragged of a pending record deal, it never materialized. Hard drugs and alcohol did. The last time I bumped into Mike was at Memorial Park. He was homeless—an alcoholic-crack head wrapped in a dirty blanket—and didn’t even recognize me.
“Remember—McDonald Park? Speedy? Swifty?”
He just shook his downcast head slowly—no. “You gotta unnerstan’,” he said, barely above a whisper. “I’m not right no more.”
I heard he died a few months later.
