Crack The Spine - Issue 4 by Kerri Foley

CRACK THE SPINE

Issue Four

Cover Art “Wrapped In Thought” by Denny E. Marshall Denny E. Marshall draws. Recently. Art published.

Contents Luca Penne…………………………………….………..Ashes in the Urn Lily Dodge……………………………………...………….Brother/Sister George Sparling………………………………………………………Lush Rachel Kearney………………………………….………………..Burnout Anthony Ward…………………………………….…………..Burrowing Matthew John Davies………………………….Stay Under Your Sheets The Boy To Be

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.

Luca Penne lives in New Hampshire, builds barns, and runs a ski life. His work has appeared in various journals, including Otoliths, 2 River View, New Mexico Poetry Journal, 3 AM, and many others. He graduated from Southwestern Missouri State where he won the Tate-Emerson Award. He likes dogs.

Brother/Sister By Lily Dodge

Brother Our parents brought Oreos and canned soup on the camping trip because they were not interested in gutting fish, so my brother and I caught bluegill the size of our palms and tossed them back, keeping count of our catch. When he pulled up his eightysecond fish the hook was through its eye, blood mixing with slime and lake water against green-gold scales. I held the fish against the wooden dock while he worked the hook out. The fish followed his hands with slow-moving eyes, its gills pulsing a dying heartbeat. I watched my brother‟s neck tighten with every second‟s decision not to cry.

Sister When I saw you play the stage lights were so sharp they turned you into an outline sliced out of reality with a razor. I took my glasses off and you became a smeared thumbprint. You yanked at your guitar like every note ripped something out of you. I hadn‟t told you I‟d be there. When you growled into the mic I thought I heard the word sister and I asked a girl in the crowd what the song was called. She screamed don‟t you just want to fuck him! Metal flashed somewhere in her mouth. I didn‟t tell her you were my brother. Do you know there are screaming girls at concerts who tell strangers they want to fuck you?

Lily Dodge is a creative writing student whose work has previously appeared in The Urbanite, The Preface, and Hoax. For more, visit http://lilydodge.com/.

Lush By George Sparling

The frat rats rushed and accepted me, Rand Adams, as a pledge into the Krappa Dum Dum fraternity house at “The Harvard of the Midwest,” because they wanted their house filled with Wasps. At least that was what I thought. I unpacked my luggage, hung my up herringbone suit, sports jacket, ties, and shirts in the small closet, stashed my underwear away, put a framed photo of my high school girlfriend on the bureau, lit a Marlboro, sat on straight-back chair at a desk, inhaled just like John Wayne, and pulled out a half-pint of peppermint schnapps. “Hi, I was enjoying the view,” I said, turning away from watching longhaired hippies playing hacky sack, kicking the footbag, doing bag daggers and ham spalts. I never played that game, preferring darts, getting high on booze, purposely missing the target, zinging the darts into a bunch of jocks with their dates. They would get aroused from their pre-coital word-dance, come after me, they kicking holy shit out of me, I staggering outside, blood from nose dripping, my nuts screaming in pain, my body falling apart like the scarecrow in „The Wizard of Oz,” getting fixed up at the university clinic. I must love getting touched, the hard way. “Want a slug?” He looked at me as if I had violated some tribal ritual. The price of being dateless: masochism and brutality. “Hello, Rand, I‟m JQ, glad to meet you,‟ he said. His bright Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, Prada charcoal gray pants, and Armani sports coat glared at me. I glanced down, seeing flashy Barker Blacks Ostrich Cap Toe shoes. My dad subscribed to GQ and Esquire, the only reason I knew. “Nope. I only like soft drinks. I‟m studying Electrical Engineering. Hope you‟ll study hard too.” “I‟m taking business courses, accounting this semester,” I said crisply, as I chugged the remains of the schnapps, sticky fingers I wiped on my snotrag. Drunk on high school commencement day, letting the entire senior class see me teetering around, cursing and talking to classmates, scaring them, not the usual mediocre, khaki pants and rolled up sleeves guy nor the one picked on. Before the ceremony, as part of the humiliation treatment, I stood before a couple hundred students as well as the principal. I had a hangover but I made a trembling, sotto voce

apology into a microphone. Drinking booze, my first major taboo I had broken. Degradation: cost of freedom. Three friends and I used to play poker in one of our homes most Saturday nights, and after I losing time after time five or six bucks, I stood to them and swept the last pot off the table. Then my next door neighbor confronted me, punching me in the gut, another guy threw a shot to my eye. I quit seeing them, watching TV rather than being scapegoated by sadists. Friends: A social lie. JQ: six feet one, 190 pounds, muscular arms and legs, expensive aftershave, its je ne sais quoi giving him an indescribable something, bounced as he walked, erect posture, tan skin, dark eyes, crew cut black hair, steel pens clipped to his shirt pocket, charcoal gray pants tailor made, Superman psychic eyes able to reconstruct damaged structures (my emotional infrastructure, perhaps?), proud chest accentuated by his heads-up, striding fast walk. I had none of those attributes, but what I did have was withdrawing my life from persons such as JQ, drinking my forte. My first DumDUM party, a jamming rhythm and blues band hired by the fraternity, their music frantic, they, too, high. JQ set me up with a girl from a nearby college, and the four of us rode in his Buick, his “steady” as he called her, in front. JQ said to me, “Sober up a bit before you meet your date.” He drove to a drive-in and told me to get a pint of milk to go with burger and fries. I drank and ate, he saying, “The milk will coat your stomach, letting you drink more, and not get so googly-puss that your date, Millie, would get upset.” I did as instructed, feeling alright until we started dancing, the band playing fast and hard, then I weaved and bobbed to a table, Millie following me, and I puked on the table, vomit streaming onto her fancy gown. “Listen you, wise up, they‟re nice girls here, from ritzy homes, rich families--- they‟re not accustomed to queers like you, Rand.” I heard the words “ritzy” and “queer,” and, with arms leveraging myself on two others seated next to us, I finally rose, and threw a punch at JQ, he blocking it with one Superman Hand, and pushed me hard, and I fell to the greasy floor. He grabbed my armpits, lugging me upright and that was the end of the party for us. He let Millie off, and as she stepped over me next to the door, again I barfed, only this time all over her pricey gown. JQ said, “He‟s sorry for what happened, I‟ll call you tomorrow.” She turned, looking clinically in shock, and said, “I thought you knew what‟s his face, but apparently you didn‟t.” I pulled the door shut, and JQ, behind the wheel, gave me the back of his arm, not hitting me, but shoving his elbow at me. My father had done the same with me after driving me home from a high school dance, threatening me with

his big arm, blaming me for his slamming into a culvert. “If you had a real date, not some gal who was pressured my other girls, embarrassed not to have a date for the Dame‟s Dance, this wouldn‟t have happened.” I finally reached the upper bunk, sleeping in vomit-drenched clothes, but JQ pulled me down, undressed me, I naked, and then hoisted me into my bunk. I woke up Sunday, slowly walking to the two man shower, opposite me was JQ, scrubbing off last night‟s incriminating evidence. After drying off, he never spoke about his affair with “Steady.” I slipped on pajamas, slept for a couple hours, clean and relatively sober. Later, I had coffee and a bagel with cream cheese, licking my lips. The dining room empty, members studying. I stopped going to classes, throwing away any chance gaining admission to the business clique. I would rather have JQ beat me up, something I looked forward to anyway. What was a blood-soaked saint if not pleading to drain away his evil? “I‟ll have to go home. There‟s a funeral I have to go to,” JQ said. “My father‟s part Commanche. An elderly man committed suicide, rather suffer indignities of old age.” “I hadn‟t the opportunity to go to one,” I proudly said. He had no response. “It goes back to when they were warriors, fighting, warring their way of life. The old ceremony made the corpse as small and compact as possible, then threw the body into a pit.” “I read somewhere about counting coup,” I said. “Did they do that rather than kill enemies?” Damn, I sounded so inquisitive, all the while grateful that JQ would absent himself from me for a weekend. “If they touched an enemy with a stick, that meant a kill.” He packed his clothes, put on a Glen Brae sport coat over a turquoise-blue Armani shirt, and slipped into Crockett & Jones shoes. “You dress as if you‟re going to a royal wedding,” I said. “Oil money, I can‟t help it. Our family was middle class until father made a fortune in oil wells.” He never said goodbye, walked downstairs, and drove the Buick away from Krappo DumDum‟s parking space.

Now I had the room to myself. I hid a bunch of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler magazines, the sequence getting more vulgar, dirty, and sleazy. My secret little habit was trimming with small sharp scissors the outline of all the semi- or -fully naked women. It took hours, this being Sunday, and I could work without anyone knowing about my hobby. It was fun shearing closely around bodacious butts, around large-nipple breasts, cutting exquisitely down the thighs and calves, the blowjob lips and jerk-off hands, the bare feet, an oh those Hustler clitorises, how finely I edged the scissors around cobra-hooded clits. Venomous, these women‟s images hissed at me, making them dangerous if touched only softly, as feathery as I imagined NativeAmericans counting coup. I then scotched taped them to the walls, ceiling and doors, the room overloaded with testosterone. I turned on my tape recorder, saying the vilest words possible, working up to major eruption, the 1908 Tunguska comet/asteroid impacting Siberia, so powerful that Western Europeans could read at night, was humble and meager in comparison. Seize the day: my forebrain acquiesced and faintly whispered, “OK.” The Grand Old Limbic System, its amygdala: I pressed my mouth close to the mic, and rasped, “OH GOD GOD GOD GOD… Though I had at first thought Krappa was uniformly Wasp, JQ the obvious example, the frat had guys such as Huck. I had never seen him eat with others in the dining room. I was flunking out, taking only an English course, my favorite novel, “Heart of Darkness.” JQ always sat at the housemother‟s table, and I despised him for that. He always sat at her right, she at the head of the table. Why was the right hand of God so exalted, the Bible verses rife in both Old and New Testament? Latin for left was “sinister,” pernicious and apocalyptic. While JQ attended a funeral, a guest sat at her table. I had never seen him eating with the rest of us, he at her left. After dinner, walking together upstairs, I trailing them, I heard him say, “The locksmith job eats up my time away from the books.” She said, “We never had the do-ri- me, it‟s a means to an end.” He sat in the living room, reading “Heart of Darkness,” I glancing at the cover. “You‟re in my class but I never knew you were a Krappa.” “I am but live with my dad, helping him with the locksmith business.” “Do you break into many homes that you put locks in?” He smiled, his wiry body squirming a bit in the comfortable chair.

“You a pledge?” he asked cautiously. I replied I was but may not for long because I was not going to classes except for English. “JQ told me about you, how much you drink peppermint schnapps. As long as you‟re flunking out, maybe you could learn a trade like locksmithing. How about it?” “I can‟t do mechanical work. I should have gone to a vocational school, even being a mail carrier would have been fine.” We discussed Conrad‟s novella, were Kurtz and Marlow part of the Belgian Congo‟s colonial empire, or was the book a psychological study. I played the native that said, “Mistah Kurtz, he dead,” JQ an unwritten Belgian character---a nothing---in the novella. After a while, Huck got up to leave, pulling out of his pocket a key. “Here‟s a souvenir,” and Huck gave me a strange looking key. “The peaks are even, cut down to the lowest groove. If you had a hammer, you hit the key, and some locks would open. It‟s a dump key” “Why give it to me?” “I learned a trade from prisoners in the slammer. Come to the shop,” he said, handing me a card from his wallet. People opened up, telling me things they would never mention if told to insiders: My stooped back, at twenty-five finding nothing much to talk about, drinking schnapps my only escape. Easter break, all the bothers gone, I hanging around because I had not wanted visiting my parents. I liked their checks, though. Slightly sloshed, I went downstairs and finding myself alone, I walked to the housemother‟s quarters. I borrowed a small hammer from JQ‟s dresser drawers: I scrounged for money, valuables, maybe pawning them, and then fleeing to New York City, getting in the ad business, its deceit I relished as much as the schnapps. I put the dump key into the lock, hit it, turned the knob, and walked into her rooms. I searched for valuables in closets, drawers, under her bed, under couch and chair cushions, into pockets of clothes on hangers, everywhere. I was pissed, swallowing more from the fifth of schnapps. The drunker I got, fury traveled through my body, especially my solar plexus, the “seat of the soul” to some religious believers. And this soul smashed lamps, ripped up cushions with a kitchen knife, broke chinaware, hammered out glass covering photos of friends and family, cut a Middle Eastern rug with shears, broke vases containing flowers, slashed her mattress with a

high carbon stainless steel knife. I wanted to torch her apartment, the frat house going up in flames. I found typewrite paper, writing, “Thanks, Huck, your gift has brightened my life.” I deserved an eagle feather for vandalism, counting coup also my version of war. I was fed up with JQ‟s abundance. Though indelicate, I realized my hands better suited for lush work in subways. I read about it in a newspaper, how an underground existed of men rolling drunks was outdated, but using a sharp knife set free wallets of lushes slouched and snoring on subway seats. I welcomed joining a fraternity of lush workers. Even after thirty-seven arrests, I‟m at last certain that lush work was better than college or vocational training. Like counting coup, I only intended to rob victims, not slay them.

He's been published in many literary magazines including Underground Voices, Istanbul Literary Review, Slow Trains, Word Riot, Zygote in my Coffee, Unlikely Stories, Rattle, nthposition, Ascent Aspirations, The Pitttsburgh Quarterly, Drill Press, and Thieves Jargon. He is mostly reclusive, sometimes venturing out for long, undistingished walks, mulling over all the pain he both gets and receives. He rides a stationary bicycle for exercise and meditation, counting numbers, rhyming words, driving himself crazy. He's under constant surveillance, but his psychiatrist and friends don't believe him, saying he's paranoid. He has just bought Kota Cola tea, craving energy bursts so that he may not only write but also get a cheap high. He is suspicious of cops, knowing they have stripped him of his dignity. Though he has a B.A. degree in social science, the only positive thing the degree gave him was working for the NYC Welfare Department in East Harlem. He has also worked in Northern California, scuba diving for placer gold. He has been a dishwasher, having to quit after three weeks because he had nightmares, pots and pans attacking him. His best job was working in a bookstore on Times Square, even writing about his experience, "Times Square and Other Delusions," in Juked, an online magazine. His philosophy: Life will only get worse but he hopes to live to age 95, accepting what the world has done to him, maybe even getting married in the ruins of a cathedral.

Burnout By Rachel Kearney "We're gonna change things," Broken bottles, light in between; shards in the lake scattered floating Webbed in the layers of metal in strings Strummed guitars in the lot, asphalt "We're gonna change things," Burning fire by the harbor, no one to listen but the choir "Your words are kinda hollow," Wood flakes away sky happy to take them Funneling ashes into air The only tornado stirred thus far, but We're gonna change things Rachel Kearney is an author based in the southwestern United States. She is currently at work developing, writing, and rewriting her novel. Look for her recent work in Subliminal Interiors.

Burrowing By Anthony Ward

Conner often saw her through the window as he resided in the chilled darkness watching her from across the street. Myriad of people walked by in front of him, nothing more than silhouettes, but Conner noticed only her, bathed in the warm glow of light as she served those silhouettes from behind the counter while every so often brushing her hair back behind her ear to reveal the profile of her face. That face that he had been admiring for months and months, from where he stood like a streetlamp, smoking his cigarette amongst the warm breath that unfurled from the mouths of passers by in the cold November night. This was the highlight of his day, after returning from the market stall where he spent his days replacing watch straps and batteries amongst other things in the indoor market. Spending his lunch time in the Tavern that resided at the entrance close to where she worked, where he would sit fantasising of how he would approach her, rehearsing and rewriting in his mind what he was going to say; contemplating what he was going to buy. A magazine maybe? But which one? Something that would impress her, something that dealt with the arts, would appeal to her intellect. Or something rural that would draw her towards his nurturing nature and suggest he was down to earth, preferring the simpler things in life. But did she? Maybe she would find that boring. No, maybe a magazine was too revealing. Maybe he could just buy some cigarettes, show her that he wasn‟t to be swayed by what others thought of him. That he was his own man; did his own thing. But then what would she think of him? Maybe she shared their sentiment, and after all, there was nothing wrong with that; he rather favoured the idea that she was a nice girl, the type that tended to shy away from the outside world where ghouls resided in shadows waiting to pounce of the naive. Not that he was one of those. He was the good guy in this noiresque world of neon signs and vacant bus stations. He could handle himself against these wandering souls since he was one himself. Yet Conner couldn‟t handle the idea of talking to her. Not yet. He wondered whether a bar of chocolate could be the answer, then he could offer to buy her one. But no, this wasn‟t a bar. It wouldn‟t be right. It would seem cheap. Though a bar was where he would like to take her, for that was where he felt most at home, amongst people he could relate to, who left him alone as he did them. Lost souls left

lurking in limbo. Ghosts of their former selves slumped on elbows over tables, deep in the thoughts they‟re trying to escape from. Yet despite his imperturbability amongst the world of men, when it came to women Conner had yet to be dipped in the Shannon—his countenance losing all manner of coolness as it warmed with the overwhelming sensation of humility. The man in the light of his own noir lost all mysteriousness when exposed. The man who would fight any man for her honour—protect her against anything—could be reduced to a snivelling insect that could be trodden on by her response and reduce him to nothing. Conner feared rejection more than anything, as much as he feared women he liked. It would bring down the fantasy that kept him living this dream of his, playing it through his mind over and over again, with all hope being crushed, so that he‟d have nothing to live for. This is what kept him going. Although it was also what kept him standing across the street—what prevented him from entering the shop and asking her out. It wasn‟t that he‟d never been with a woman; just never the women he wanted to be with. Conner was the romantic type. The type that wanted to make love to a girl, who was only ever after one at a time—completely monogamous without even being in a relationship. There had always been someone Conner pined for throughout his life, ever since he was a boy, never having, as it were, a latent period. He always wanted to marry someone, whether it was the girl down the street, the girl sitting opposite him in class, the girl at the fairground that he only saw for one summer, the girl he passed in the corridor at college, and now, the girl that worked in the high-street newsagents, that he watched night after night. Although Conner had been with women on previous occasions, they were merely drunken affairs. One night stands that he couldn‟t stand again. But the women he really wanted, whom he never ever got with, had left him feeling sceptical when it came to women, in that he could never be sure if a woman wanted to sleep with him until after they had. And even then he wasn‟t convinced. The next day as he sat in the Tavern washing down his lunch, Conner felt like he had never felt before. A sudden confidence overwhelmed him in an instant. This was it. He was finally going to ask her tonight after he finished work. Never had Conner felt this positive before. All afternoon he was as polite and persuasive to the customers than he had ever been. Nobody got under his skin. Even the chronic complacency of some of his familiar customers he found amusing.

Nothing could perturb him. For the first time in his life he felt like he was taking control. Gone were the restraints of his self esteem, which was now steaming ahead, driving him along the rails he had often strayed from. He was on track, moving towards his destination; the giant clock teetering on the fifth hour—and then it would be time. He wasn‟t going to have a cigarette. He was just going to go straight in. Not wanting to steady his nerves in case they couldn‟t be steadied, walking off through the entrance of the market and out into the square that happened to be infested with people, swarming all about him, scuttling into crevices and openings, getting under his feet. He lurched himself towards the shop and pushed his way through the door, then forced himself towards the counter as if he were battling against the wind. But when he got there and looked up there was no-one there, there was nobody behind the counter where he expected her to be. Where he was ready for her! His heart sank as he turned around, and THUD! It leapt up into his throat as he muttered a measly apology to the body he had just bumped into. It was HER! He had bumped into HER. Had made contact with HER, and she was right there before him. He was trapped, completely at the mercy of the situation, his eyes meeting hers for the first time, his mind racing, wondering whether she knew it was him, whether she‟d been aware that he‟d been watching her all this time. What would she think of him if she had? Maybe she would think him as some sort of stalker, and that would maybe repulse her as the thought repulsed him. As he stood there in this elongated moment, his eyes surveyed her face. She wasn‟t as beautiful as he had imagined from across the road. She wasn‟t as perfect as he saw her in those isolated periods, day dreaming about them being together. In fact this girl before him was pretty ordinary looking; nothing special up close. She was certainly not the girl of his dreams. He managed a smile that was not reciprocated, which was probably understandable after all his demeanour and scrutiny of her face, and she squeezed past him in order to get behind the counter where he had so often longed for her, still longed for her—that face he thought he knew. “Can I help you?” She asked with that tired world weary sense of disparagement from having to deal with all kinds day after day into the long hours of the evening. Those that came with their stale breath fresh from drinking, not knowing quite what they wanted, what they had initially came in for.

“Twenty Marlborough please.” He replied, watching as she turned to get them, brushing her hair behind her ear and reaching for the cigarettes, handing them to him as he handed her a note, looking up at him sternly. “Thanks.” He said as he took his change, feeling his steely spine slide away from his neck as if it were a nematode. He looked closely at her, scrutinising her eyes until they became entities of their own, as if they were creatures boring through her skull, while her countenance became nothing more than a veil that obscured it while as it traced its outline. This image plagued him from then on. He would no longer stand across the street looking at her from a distance, but would go inside to buy his cigarettes and whatever magazines that took his fancy. He no longer feared her, but something kept eating away at his brain—aggravating his curiosity. Where once he could not help looking at her from a distance, he now couldn‟t help looking at her up close. His mind, acting without any intervention, began anatomising her. Every time he saw her she began deteriorating into components that were no longer human. Her hair took on a life of its own despite being dead matter. Her lips were no longer kissable, but began to slither across her mouth as if they were moving of their own accord. Her ears resembled molluscs washed up onto her cheeks. Her limbs like fleshed branches flaying about her trunk. Every time he looked at her he noticed something different. She was no longer one thing but many things composed together. She looked more and more gaunt, as if the skeleton beneath was about to strip the flesh that was draped upon her. And yet her eyes that once appeared so firm began to soften over time. The more he looked into those eyes the more he saw the person concealed within. They spoke little but more than they had done, and he found himself getting to know her over the weeks, discovering that her name was Jane—which he‟d overheard—until eventually, she smiled at him and her lips no longer slithered, but shimmered, and the braches no longer flayed, but swayed with grace as she passed him his cigarettes. As he walked down the cobbled embankment towards the vacant bus station, he imagined himself asking her out. She hadn‟t been as beautiful as he had imagined her to be, and yet now that added all the more to her allure. The real flesh and bone was something he could grasp—something he could hold onto. After all his airy fantasising he had finally confronted reality and was now left roaming in a dream, where she was far more beautiful than he imagined.

Conner felt like running back to the shop to ask her there and then for a date; but no, he thought, tomorrow, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x;ll ask her tomorrow.

Anthony Ward has been writing in his spare time for a number of years. He derives most of his inspiration from listening to mainly Classical Music and Jazz- since it is often the mood which invokes him to set his thoughts to rest. He has been published in a number of literary magazines including South, Word Gumbo, Perspectives, Message in a Bottle, and Blinking Cursor amongst others.

Two Poems Matthew John Davies

Stay Under Your Sheets

all these great poets were bedridden beyond and before Keats and Proust to sleepy-headed whiners

lying supine on the whitest of sheets softens the teeming brain for ripe foggy thoughts

hair upon the pillow wide and small brushed aside renews the white vessel

red coughs cannot undermine the snowy world of rising jagged ridges of shadowed rivulets completing the foundation

for rocky, runny thoughts in this haven for shiftlessness

when to read is only to write as time is still amongst the shafts of this tiny Himalayas

the squirm we can call a movement within the discipline of hospital corners and the wondrous white of no-further

yoked by white these three layers the dull patchwork that sighs mediocrity and takes no prisoners of ambition of fame only the occasional sock or a particle of dead skin

a tall order for the gown of a virgin

The Boy To Be

I do not need your praise or pain unless, unless, you can treat me sure and catch my innards as they spurt and bubble on your shining, shaking palms that never adventure to hide your bra strap peaking through

you choose, you choose not to believe in these ailments warm and cold so taken by the taxman's impatience are we

your slop of gall cleaned up long ago forgotten with your dealings with coke and cigarettes that so irritated your wife's professional conscience the work that made thee bedfellows and the boy to be

in the red bucket of play their troubles locked aside

Matthew John Davies is from Brisbane, Australia and has been published in journals online and off.

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