Vplume 1 Number 4
November 29, 2016
horrifying to realize how fucking semi-literate most people I talk to really are. It's frightening. This, of course, includes America's liberals and not just her conservative troglodytes. Happy voting, suckers.
P. T. Barnum is the father of everything we engage, indulge and endure, sociopolitically, socio-economically, in, through and by the media. You do know that, don't you?
I recalled the fair my Uncle Martin and I had gone to one afternoon one summer how many years
Nobody Knows How It Can Be Like That
ago I could not count the same Uncle Martin who would get on his knees by his bed to say his prayers every day of his life since he could. I learned how to
by JVR
pray in French, believe that I don’t know how to mean it any other way. He wore pajamas.
Train letter D approaching from Bay Parkway. Car after car, soot dulled silver.
He kneeled by the side of his bed and prayed every night of his life since he was old enough to
It pulls in, the D I board.
mean something by praying, old enough to know
I sit, I open my book, I look across the aisle
what prayer meant, he too prayed at the side of his
from me, sun brilliant off blonde hair in disarray
bed on his knees on the floor asking God to
over the seat perpendicular to how I sit across the
intercede for him in case he died before he would
aisle she is facing in the direction opposite to the one
wake, his soul to take, Now I lay me down to sleep,
the train is going.
the prayer I learned as a boy, I pray the Lord my soul
Station after station passing slowly here on
to keep, words taught to me by parents by cousin
board as the Manhattan-bound D rides clink-clank
Betty, we used to walk together to the store by our
along to the 9th Avenue turn, where it slows onto the
home in East Flatbush, up to the Avenue of stores a
Fourth Avenue line, 36th Street Station.. How do I
few blocks from our then three-room ground floor
say what I want when I want it, wanting so often
apartment, step on a line, break your father’s spine,
what is not . . . day bright sun strong skies clear
step on a crack, break your mother’s back, we
breeze faint and warm.
hopped and avoided as many as we could, if I should
A person shifts between a totalized being that determines it incomprehensible that there should
die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take . I always kneeled on the floor by the side of
be any room left for any other human being and a
my bed, lights out, the one in the dining room or the
singularity that is as a result isolated from her own
hall outside my door on, maybe the bathroom across
natural plurality of being, separate from all others,
the hall from my bedroom I remember up the block
desiring to cleave to another, to hold on to another,
from the three-room ground floor one, he said. The
not to let go of this other whenever; I never
one flight up first floor, two bed room apartment
attempted the brass ring on the merry-go-round
across from a Public School, with its backyard
when I was a boy, a young man, I said to her one
adjacent to the empty lot lawn of the Synagogue
night.
around the corner, the one I heard the Cantor sing
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The Falling Leaf Review
Vol. 1 No. 4