by David Lehman
25. His name was Pete.
26. Sheldon and Pete’s parents were not the kind to give their twins names that rhymed.
27. In Iraq, an Improvised Explosive Device had pulverized Pete’s legs, genitals, rib cage, and spine.
28. Sheldon could not serve in the military because he was blind in his right eye.
29. In 1980, when they were eight, and sword fighting with tree branches, Pete had accidentally stabbed Sheldon in the eye.
30. When they were children, Sheldon and Pete often played war.
31. They never once pretended to be killed by an Improvised Explosive Device.
32. Only now, in this new era, do children pretend to be killed by Improvised Explosive Devices.
33. Pete was buried in a white coffin.
34. It wasn’t made of ivory.
35. At the gravesite, Sheldon scooped up a handful of dirt.
36. He was supposed to toss the dirt onto his brother’s coffin, as the other mourners had done.
37. But Sheldon kept the dirt in his hand.
38. He made a fist around the dirt and would not let it go.
39. He believed that his brother’s soul was contained within that dirt.
40. And if he let go of that dirt, his brother’s soul would be lost forever.
41. You cannot carry a handful of dirt for any significant amount of time.
42. And dirt, being clever, will escape through your fingers.
43. So Sheldon taped his right hand shut.
44. For months, he did everything with his left hand.
45. Then, one night, his right hand began to itch.
46. It burned.
47. Sheldon didn’t want to take off the tape.
48. He didn’t want to lose the dirt.
49. His brother’s soul.
50. But the itch and burn were too powerful.
51. Sheldon scissored the tape off his right hand.
52. His fingers were locked in place from disuse.
53. So he used the fingers of his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right hand.
54. The dirt was gone.
55. Except for a few grains that had embedded themselves into his palm.
56. Using those grains of dirt, Sheldon wanted to build a time machine that would take him and his brother back into the egg cell they once shared.
57. Until he became an elephant, Sheldon referred to his left hand as “my hand” and to his right hand as “my brother’s hand.”
58. Sheldon’s father, Arnold, was paraplegic.
59. His wheelchair was alive with eagle feathers and beads and otter pelts.
60. In Vietnam, in 1971, Arnold’s lower spine was shattered by a sniper’s bullet.
61. Above the wound, he was a fancy dancer.
62. Below the wound, he was not.
63. His wife became pregnant with Sheldon and Pete while Arnold was away at war.
64. Biologically speaking, the twins were not Arnold’s.
65. Biologically speaking, Arnold was a different Arnold than he’d been before.
66. But, without ever acknowledging the truth, Arnold raised the boys as if they shared his biology.
67. Above the wound, Arnold is a good man.
68. Below the wound, he is also a good man.
69. Sometimes, out of love for Sheldon and Sheldon’s grief, Arnold pretended that his wheelchair was an elephant.
70. And that he was a clown riding the elephant.
71. A circus can be an elephant, another elephant, and a clown.
72. The question should be, “How many circuses can fit inside one clown?”
73. There is no such thing as the Elephant Graveyard.
74. That mythical place where all elephants go to die.
75. That place doesn’t exist.
76. But the ghosts of elephants do wear clown makeup.
77. And they all gather in the same place.
78. Inside Sheldon’s rib cage.
79. Sheldon’s heart is a clown car filled with circus elephants.
80. When elephants mourn, they will walk circles around a dead elephant’s body.
81. Elephants weep.
82. Jesus wept.
83. Sheldon’s mother, Agnes, wonders if Jesus has something to do with her son’s elephant delusions.
84. Maybe God is an elephant.
85. Sheldon’s father, Arnold, believes that God is a blue whale.
86. Some scientists believe that elephants used to be whales.
87. Sheldon, in his elephant brain, believes that God is an Improvised Explosive Device.
88. Pete, the dead twin, was not made of ivory.
89. But he is coveted.
90. If Jesus can come back to life then why can’t all of us come back to life?
91. Aristotle believed that elephants surpassed all other animals in wit and mind.
92. Nobody ever said that Jesus was funny.
93. Then, one day, Sheldon remembered he was not an elephant.
94. Instead he decided that Pete was an elephant who had gone to war.
95. An elephant who died saving his clan and herd.
96. An elephant killed by poachers.
97. Sheldon decided that God was a poacher.
98. Sheldon decided his prayers would become threats.
99. Fuck you, God, fuck you.
100. Sheldon wept.
101. Then he picked up his trumpet and blew an endless, harrowing note.
from The Awl
NATHAN ANDERSON
Stupid Sandwich
So yeah, we all have these moments that suck
because what they mean
is like a mystery, like the Mariners last year
good a team as any, traded
what’s-his-name, the fat one, for that Puerto Rican dude
with a wicked right arm
and didn’t even make the playoffs.
Anyway, I can see you’re a man of the world like me,
standing here I don’t know how long and still
no damn bus. But like I was saying
we all have these moments and last week
there I was after work, making a stupid sandwich,
the kind of stupid-ass food people like me always make
when I can’t figure out what I’m feeling
and I feel like being true to myself
is about the dumbest thing a man can do,
knowing how easy it is for the truth to mess things up.
So I lie in all the ways I can live with, and I go on
wondering if this shithole I keep falling into
is really my life, my own making, or what
and I put it down there nice and orderly
on the counter: turkey, white bread, mayonnaise—
three things I’d like to think
I’m in control of—and I said, like it was a revelation or something,
just loud enough so I have to hear
myself, feeling a little weird but a little good, too,
because I’m home and hungry, and I said
I’m gonna slice me some cheese
for this bastard like it was the answer
to just about everything and getting all happy
on account of some goddamn cheese
turns out I didn’t even have and was like, well, you know,
fuck the cheese, don’t need it anyhow,
I’m goddamn happy just to make a sandwich
and have a job to hate
and see my little girl once a week
after those pricks down at County let me out
and left me worse
than I ever was and now, you know, I just walk around
and want to smash things. And that’s what I did:
Aimed all I had at that tiny
ignorant white bread, slammed my fist down
like a judge—felt so good,
beating that bread like it was my own
dumb face.
NIN ANDREWS
The Art of Drinking Tea
A man has been lonely for so long, he fears he is becoming but an apparition, a ghost of who he once was. He takes up wearing a black suit and hat and studying Zen Buddhism with a black-haired woman who has mastered the art of drinking tea. She is one of the few on earth who only drinks tea when she drinks tea. She performs the drinking of tea when she is drinking tea before large audiences. When one is drinking tea, the woman explains, there is no woman, no tea, there is only the drinking of tea. Often while sipping tea and listening to the instructions on the drinking of tea, the man closes his eyes and tries to fully experience the drinking of tea. But he always fails. Instead he dreams of the black-haired woman as an unrobed woman who only makes love when she makes love. He pictures her first removing his hat, then slowly unbuttoning him from the dark coat of his life. She lifts him to her lips like a china cup and sips so slowly, a one night stand lasts 49 days and nights. In the end there is no woman, no tea, no man. Just thinking of it, he barely remembers his own name. In this way he attains enlightenment.
from MiPOesias
JOHN ASHBERY
Resisting Arrest
A year and a day later the wolf stopped
by as planned. He made conversation
about this and that but you could tell
from the way he favored his gums that all was
not well. Later the driving pool shifted.
I had no idea that you were planning
to stage an operation but it’s all right
this time. Then I read your account and
was dully impressed, right at the edge
of the sea where the land asserts itself.
He told a cheering crowd the infighting was over
at least for that day. They had more affairs
to remember than just that one time. Why,
he went over it and that was that. Plethoras
to be announced, etc. You’re telling me.
Warming to his theme he brought us in
as though we belonged. Ma and I
decided to wait it out but here again
he was unyielding, hoping to lure a big-name
retailer on the strength of our fevered gain
over the past months of quasi-activity,
dark with relative distress. That proved uncertain
and doesn’t smash it all. They liked what they heard.
No one wanted to shoulder responsibility
for the times and to slog off to uncertain
destinies in fiberglass pilot houses.
I had no idea that you meant it to be early.
The fatal tarnish of the everyday
groans and incites mobs to splendor
and wrongdoing as though a tissue of sleeping cars
were to upbraid dawn. They asked me to read
off a result or temper a calamity like I was involved
in the unfolding reaction with everything
else, they wanted me to reside at 478 Pavilion Avenue
and the story would resolve itself munificently.
Not in my receding horsepital. I paid
my dues to the city and look
how out on a limb I am and you could guess
this too, you could plan more strategically.
That’s all for now kid. Drop me a line sometime,
seriously.
from The New Yorker
WENDY BARKER
Books, Bath Towels, and Beyond
After Gary asked, “Will we ever read
any normal people in this class?” and I quipped,
“No, of course not,” and after the laughter had quieted,
we ambled through “Song of Myself,” celebrating
our “respiration and inspiration,” traveling along
with the voices of sailors, prostitutes, presidents, and tree toads,
in sync with the poet’s vision. No one
this time—not even Gary—grumbled about
Whitman’s disgusting ego, and yet when we came to the place
where God is “a loving bedfellow”
who leaves “baskets covered with white towels
bulging the house with their plenty,” I was the one who
wanted to stop. At that point, I’ve always
been puzzled. I get it that a lover could
be like a god. But towels? We’d just finished The House
of the Seven Gables, and I wondered if
Hepzibah or Phoebe ever sold linens in their shop. Yet
we never hear Hawthorne talking about blankets or sheets or
how anybody washes his face or her hands,
let alone armpits or “soft-tickling genitals”—leave
those to Uncle Walt. The store Hepzibah opened: a first step
in leaving the shadows of her cursed
ancestors, of joining the sunlit world. Last summer
when my husband and I moved back into our old house after
a massive redo, we gave away box after box
of sweaters and tchotchkes. We even disposed of old
books, including those with my neon markings in the margins
blunt as Gary’s outbursts in class: “Ugh,”
“NO,” and “Wow!” It was time to loosen the mind
beyond the nub of the old self. My mother used to huff through
the house every year like a great wind,
and when she settled down, not a doll over
twelve months old remained, not a dress, not a scarf, not even
lint wisping in a drawer. One year during
a flood, my husband’s letters from lifelong friends
drowned in the garage, morphed back into pulp. I never hoped
the past would vanish into a blank, and yet,
when Holgrave in the novel cries, “Shall we never,
never get rid of this Past!” I, too, want it washed clean, to wake
in the morning released from echoes
of my father’s muttered invectives, my mother’s
searing tongue. I’ve now torn to rags the rust-stained
towels from my former marriage and
my husband’s bachelorhood linens, raveled
threads drooping like fishnets. How Hawthorne’s Phoebe
opened that heavy-lidded house
to the light. I used to scorn her chirpy domesticity,
praying along with Emily Dickinson—whose balance
Gary had also questioned—“God keep me
from what they call households.” And yet, after
my husband and I returned to our remade, renewed house,
what did I do but go shopping
for towels. Back and forth to seven strip malls,
bringing home only to return I don’t know how many colors,
till, finally, I settled on white. And as I
pulled out my MasterCard to pay for the contents of
my brimming cart, a gaunt, wrinkled man entered the check-out
line, hands pressing to his chest
two white towels just like mine, eyes lifted
to the fluorescent ceiling as if in prayer. I doubt that Gary
would think it normal to greet the divine
while clutching terry cloth. But now I see that Whitman
knew what fresh towels could mean for a dazed and puffy
face, white towels unspecked by blood
or errant coils of hair, towels that spill from
a laundry basket like sea-foam. Like cirrus clouds adrift while
we’re loafing on tender, newly sprouted
blades of grass growing from the loam under our boot soles,
from graves of the old and decaying, all we’ve finally buried.
from The Southern Review
JAN BEATTY
Youngest Known Savior
They talk in that natural way shortcuts like: got it
or second
shelf/left side and she thinks:
oh my god, they talk alike her cousins
all have long eyelashes [each one the same
black lash, naturally curled] She feels like she’s falling
deeper into alone She goes into the bedroom
with the pink sleeping thing [baby]
she hates it for how it lies there how it
didn’t have to do anything to get those same eyelashes
[white crib, ruffles] Only a 3 foot drop,
she thinks Later she tells them [trying to approximate
their truncated speech]: She fell out of the crib
and I put her back [afterwards, in the bathroom,
she uses her cousin’s eyelash curler] How could she
learn their careful walk the way they move their heads
slight/left She is 10 one of the youngest known
saviors it’s better now Before today,
it was so tedious: blood is blood and
she was never one of them [that was
before today] before she learned the language
from Redivider
BRUCE BOND
The Unfinished Slave
after Michelangelo
The man we see writhing in the marble,
what is he without the strength of all
we do not see. A slave, we are told,
though to what: the rock, the king, the world
that, cut or uncut, we can’t remember.
To be distinct, chiseled as a number
across a grave, that was his dream once.
If only he could shake the rough stone
from his back, instead of being one.
Or if he stood naked before the tomb
he was meant to guard, perhaps then
he would wear a god’s glass complexion.
As is, he is abstract, and so closer
to us, to the life that makes a future
the anticipated past, our heads half
buried, blind, disfigured by the stuff
to which we owe our restlessness, our art.
The hand that carves its figure in the slate
abandons it, thinking it will lie
beneath its work some day, beneath a sky
that refuses to commit, to lift.
It’s in there somewhere, whatever’s left
of those who drive a hammer into us.
With every blow, a little bloom of dust
flies. Time keeps its promise to itself.
