1

History
by Greg Lytle

  Photgraphic Series: 'History'



2

Bloopers
by Don Webb

    It began with a fortune cookie, “Great Things Will Be Revealed To You In Your Dreams.” I showed it to everyone at lunch, and they all said they had never seen a fortune like that.  I took it as a joke at first, but then I mentioned the fortune to a few friends away from work, and then to family and then to the people at the Laundromat and they all agreed that it was a unique fortune, so I bought books on remembering my dreams.

    It took a lot of work, but I learned to remember my dreams. I was disappointed.  They were the standard dreams – showing up at work naked or for a test that I hadn’t studied for.

    Then I dreamt I was at the Dream Theatre.  Actors were rehearsing their lines for dreams they were going to star in.  Others were out back smoking and talking about dreams they had been in.  “It was just a bit part in one of those naked-at-work dreams, but I got a line.”  Inside a portly man was running lines.  He was having trouble with one line.  His line was “I am going to tell you the meaning of life.“

    The next night he was in my dream.  He walked up to me and said, “The meaning of life is – oh damn what was the next part?” 

    He looked sheepish. I shrugged and woke up. I avoid fortune cookies now.

3

Discourse on Night
by Don Hucks

It’s never dark on the corner of Division and Ninth. I avoid that corner mostly, preferring the dark, admiring how it climbs bravely from every crevice at sunset, conforming to every surface, smoothing every angle, muting every color a bit closer to gray.

Erin fears the dark. Thinks it a monster. Distrusts my fondness for such an ugly beast, furtive, inscrutable, not to be trusted. Like people who keep snakes and giant spiders as pets, feeding them on snuggly bunnies and fuzzy mousies. Their sympathies turned upside-out and inside-down by some quirk of genetics or some horror visited upon them as children, perhaps. Some perversion of hard earned prejudices delicately woven into the psychic fabric through unfathomable epochs in the evolution of our kind. Standards of taste writ large in the stench of countless dead, taken away by creepy and crawly things in the night. The survivors the ones hardwired to fear without reason that which slithers or crawls. And to crush with impunity that which they fear.

She disdains my penchant for late night meandering, alone in the shadows, with the empire asleep. All its decent and forthright denizens, at least. But darkness comforts me. I crave invisibility, anonymity. Empty streets. Faint shadows cast softly by streetlights in the middle distance or, during full-ish phases, by the moon. At first, she didn’t believe me. Thought I must be sneaking off to meet some woman, parked in her car and waiting around the corner. Some slut from a bar. Or worse still, some art school tramp from a gallery. The kind for whom infidelity is some brave, utopian revolution against the tyranny of monogamy. Monogamy but a patriarchal invention by which a man enslaves a woman, ensuring that the seed taking root is his own.

The marquis hangs over the sidewalk, as always. In its third life now, as church, long past its demise as movie house and brief resurrection as cabaret. I glance from the next block, passing at a safe distance, well beyond its range. The message changes every month to some new scripture. Black sermon on white field. Tonight’s message, I recall from my pre-apostatical days, is from John, about the light shining in darkness and how the darkness does not overcome it.

I find myself inside the ancient theater, among the folding seats, looking up at the cone of light, flickering above me, cutting through the darkness, expanding toward the screen, where James Dean is holed up awaiting the centurions while Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo comfort each other and weep and pray. All around me, the gnashing of teeth. The collection plate comes around, and I reach into my pocket for a couple of chocolate covered mint wafers, wrapped in foil, to drop among the popcorn and raisinettes.

And I concede that the poet intends a different metaphor altogether, of this beacon shining salvation among the decay of old downtown, just off the railroad tracks, just down from the tote-the-note lots and across from the pawn shop and around the corner from the neon advertising bail bonds to passers-by in the backseats of police cars and amid the street walkers on the way to hourly rate motels. But I counter that the message itself rests in these very letters marring the field, dark beautiful forms, stark, unapologetic, that define the light, in opposing it, and that the light carries within itself, unchanging and unchanged. I expect the sky to begin flapping in the breeze, tattered and ragged, having been shorn by the terrible magnitude of this revelation. But nothing happens.

Back home, slipping deftly beneath the sheet, I realize Erin, only ever passing that corner in daylight, would never understand, and I forsake the thought of trying to explain.

I close my eyes and sneak back to the bijou.

In the balcony, the beautiful grope verily to a litany of begetting.

Repent for the end is near.

Quiet, please. Take your seats. The second feature is about to begin.

4


waiting
by Justin Hyde

he's got lupus
fucker's ninety-three
i think he's holding on
just to spite me,
says the man
face like a
manhole cover
sitting next to me
at shooters
on a
monday night.
 
says he's
waiting for his
father in law
to die
so he can sell
his trailer.
 
then he's gonna
buy a harley fat-boy
and disappear
into the black hills
like a sasquatch.
 
i take my shoe off
slam it on the bar
and shout:
 
long live max.
 
max was the cook here
for twenty years
died of a heart attack
face first
into the fryer.
 
mondays are two-for-one
in his honor
but only if you go through
the shoe slam
dog and pony.
 
i slide
manhole cover
one of the
dead nazis
and ask what
he's gonna do
with his wife
after he gets
the harley.
 
shit rolls downhill,
he says.
 
like a toboggan,
i say
 
&
 
we smile
 
&
 
drink to that.

5


brains folding over in the heartland of america
by Justin Hyde

he only likes obama
because he's black -
i have reasons
for my beliefs -
evidence
to back them up,
says my coworker.
 
he's
tea-kettle
because one of our
black coworkers
is for obama
but doesn't know
shit about him
or the issues.
 
kind of like
your views on
homosexual marriage -
they're based on
evidence
from the bible
right?
i ask
setting him up for
intellectual edification
because the clock says
2:34am
and some people are born for
mercy killings.
 
yes yes
scripture
god's word,
he says
head snapping
crisp at the neck
in confirmation.
 
you do realize
many people
myself included
consider the bible
thin fiction -
a c-list
mind-fuck
for lemmings,
i say
chewing my pen
to keep from
laughing.
 
poor guy's hands
are trembling.
 
i feel kinda bad
 
i think his dad died
of a heart attack.
 
but i could be wrong
perhaps logic
and the quantifiable
are overrated mirages,
i say
taking my foot
off the gas
and changing the subject
to the upcoming
college football game
between iowa
and iowa state.

6


the houses stand clumsy
by David McLean

the houses stand clumsy stone and concrete,
under a sun where they were wood once
and no devils lived in them, just insecure
resurrection; and their memories then
were like the dreams of children, smoke

curling lazy from a pious and lascivious
chimney. but we have forgotten everything
and torn the seconds from the clocks
to leave them dreamless, like dead people
when nobody is listening. no body

living in them, just the life they lied about
that never continued forever, like no body
genuinely expected, some sultry eternity
for fingering grannies and grandchildren,
until incest almost seems disgusting.

but the houses stand clumsy, without loving,
and no ghosts live in them; except the living
dead already who work for their sustenance,
imagining God could be bothered to resurrect
scumbags, adventitious bastards that have fallen

from time's womb like a tranquilizer, like a
nighttime, bastards that have fallen asleep,
that have forgotten to dream, or how to dream.
their God does not believe in them - he is dead
but used to believe in women and men -

not these people, just real women and men

7


the sexiest suicide
by David McLean

the sexiest suicide must be when you wallow
in warm memories and razors live
against the unsubtle skin, bodies
spreading their legs to heaven, and homeless
hope like a god to swallow. the sexiest suicide
is living patiently through every tomorrow
like eternity was tattooed on the smelly skin
the sexiest suicide is this injurious living
and the lithe limbo within

8


we stitched night together
by David McLean

we stitched night together again from hope,
like the shroud of reason with rotting gobbets
of memory sloughing away from it, the skin
of a history or an injurious ideology
that crawled away to die like a pessimist snake,

yet still wakeful, still noticing there was nothing there
and that we were totally empty, that luscious nonentity
that fills itself with lies and noise, and whores its mourning
around this necropolis like empathy existed. we stitched
it up like industrious vampires - people are all fucking ghouls

but most of these undead bitches are titless anorexics,
though we are gluttons for suffering, and i
am frankly greedy, with so many walking corpses
stinking of oblivion like rotting toothless cunts around me
i need to be – i like the dying and their suffering

meat feeds me. my interest in pain is culinary