.

We now are so many that
The furies and the spirits are gone
And that dive into the cask
Which you wanted to be truth
Was just a thorax of hate and
Bilious killers,
But somehow life will kiss you up your sides
With new sets of smiling eyes
Because that is what it is —
An incessant orchestra of antennae
Always betting with each other on what just happened

Walking back in to do dishes
(I think I’ve washed about 50,000 dishes this year)
I encounter a guy who looks a little like a Mexican Bukowski
(I’ve been getting a lot of these lately… one was riding a bike with one hand with a 44 oz. soda and unbuttoned short sleeve flannel)
On the sidewalk
Ready to face the rest of his afternoon as he bids goodbye to some client-type person.
.
He engages in conversation with me and I’d been having
More or less a sort of nervous breakdown type thing all afternoon
In my air conditioned cave between jobs
So I stop and chat even though it’s going to make me late…
I need a way out of what I’m doing…
I say I’m from South Bend so I’m not used to this heat…
He says he was just up in South Bend…
And here it comes…
The Studebaker museum
(What kind of pompous egomaniacs would make a whole museum about those piece of sh** cars)
And Tippecanoe Place, this non-profitable restaurant with a kitchen located in the stuffy, windowless basement…
He is doing these things and discussing “South Bend” as if it’s something constructed
When all the while I grew up there and I know that its movement is lateral —
The vast majority of commerce takes place in the adjacent suburban town of Mishawaka
And even life itself,
As it passes upon any day,
Moves laterally —
With people stopping stone still and watching you like a hawk
People needing to be able to make fun of you,
People craving superiority over like a needle in the vein.
.
This “South Bend” that this guy discusses is a myth and
I placed in the upper echelon on the SAT’s and the
80th percentile on the English GRE’s but
I think I’ll go back into doing dishes because
That’s real, if only to say that in my time in this life,
Even though it was crappy, I at least did something real
And didn’t have to tell lies.
.
About three and a half hours into my shift I’m drinking some water
And this little black kid (I call him a kid but he’s actually like 22… he’s just really short and skinny like a lot of black line cooks are in Terre Haute)
Strikes up a conversation with me
And I happen to be really hungover, hot and tired so
My conversation is complete garbage
But I persist anyway,
Oh,
I work tomorrow,
Oh,
I so didn’t wanna come in today,
Oh,
My last day off was Saturday and I didn’t do anything,
Oh,
My last day off was 10 days ago and I didn’t do anything,
And deep within this thing it hits me:
It’s real.
This impossible situation we face every day
Is life,
Is what’s real,
Is what is so undeniable,
The ability to clean out your mind seamlessly to a person around you
And fully grasp the condition for what it is
Will always be a floating form.

I wrote a book and
This is what it’s called.
.
Unfortunately,
There are no pages in it.
.
I didn’t write any words.
It’s just two covers, bound,
With bright, red, unmistakeable
Rubber skins, hugging the floor and
Protruding out to arc down and poke
The opposite cover, somewhat like an
Armadillo’s snout, respectively.

In the
Bar
Is a girl working
Whose face reminds me of
The Allman Brothers song
“Little Martha.”
.
One time I caught her eyes
And I think we spoke a little and
She was friendly like
All the girls are here in Indiana,
Especially the ones who are bored bartending.
.
The breasts are puzzlingly voluminous and pronounced
On her, as is
The general trend of thin girls in the 21st century.
.
I always just talk to her clumsily,
Sometimes getting her irritability,
But the last time in,
Not expecting to see her,
I got a high-pitched “what’s up,”
Made some small chat and
This dude 10 feet to the left of me
Wearing an expensive, ornate red shirt,
Tommy Hilfiger underwear and
New-looking Air Jordan shoes
Planted on me this fuzzy gaze as if he were
An animal stuck inside a car that was
Running or not running,
Or had the chassis running and motor dormant,
I asked “Can I help you with something”
Only to get flak from his friends who
Appeared conscious and all in all
It was another crazy night at the center of everything.

We are the only class that was in high school during both
Columbine and 9/11.
We tend to talk little.
We wiggle a finger around,
Meditate and look at the wall,
Constructed of fragile fibers,
Blood flowing within vessels to
Serenade crazy, gushing thoughts that
Illuminate the empty world.
Between the good of us is an understanding:
I will only see you if you want me to.

Around the corner the woman comes like a bomb
And she is unpredictable,
With inexplicably beautiful eyes,
Eyes which give to contact,
Eyes which glow with pain and
Volcanic fury,
Volcanic understanding,
.
She articulates new words and makes cookies
And
You swear you were ok but
You want to fu** her like a thunderstorm,
You want the full sin of the gripping flesh while all the while
You can’t “make out” like you used to
‘Cause the love is gone —
.
There is no “girlfriend”
There is no laughing and
She
Just like you
Is floating around in fear,
Practicing facial expressions against blank walls and
Just feeling more, maybe,
Like an ideal of a boy playing a Rubik’s Cube at the
Bottom of a well.

Edwidge Danticat opens “Without Inspection,” for which I must thank a text-featuring e-mail from the trusty New Yorker, by introducing a character who is plunging to his death. The author then proceeds to elaborate on the character’s mindset, with little anecdotes like Arnold’s (the main character’s) aversion to having too many material possessions, things which would prevent someone from feeling “free.”
In what I found to be a curious passage, then, Danticat specifies that such a freedom is “As free as this fall, which he had neither intended nor chosen,” a fall which at the start of the story we learn involved taking “six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet.”
In general, Danticat’s technique in “Without Inspection” is one of shock and awe, complete with his enumeration of mental images in the Arnold’s mind during this brief fall (his son, his wife trying on dresses, the elementary school graduation ceremony), but the “neither intended nor chosen” line reveals something darker stirring the lurid underbelly of Danticat’s message. This is the increasing extent to which the presence of suicidal thoughts is a foregone conclusion in all who create or handle literature in the 21st century.
A couple of months ago I received a rejection notice from a flash fiction contest and got a free viewing of the winning story (the maximum word count was 800, that the only guideline of the short stories). It was for the Ginosko Literary Journal and the winner was “Sparks” by Chris Connolly, in which the main narrator witnesses a drowning victim and the last sentence of the piece is “You might say she was my first one.”
Somehow, in other words, this garish presence of an almost juvenile infatuation with death and suicide has fully saturated our literature of the world today. I read all of “Without Inspection,” not even so much because I was enjoying it, but because I knew Danticat was just so crowd-pleasing that his story here would end up benchmarking what we’d come to think of as literary “normalcy” within the next couple years or decade. Sure enough, he does things in trend and by the book: much of the prominently featured imagery is urban and cosmopolitan (“a guava pastry and a cup of coffee from the Lopez brothers’ food truck”) and the characters at the stories forefront are even immigrants sodden with a checkered travel back story, hence theoretically making it easier for us to sympathize with them.
But all this, unfortunately, is because we no longer sympathize with the American everyman, and nothing in life, anymore, is magical: he**, it takes a droll underdog noble savage minority to even garner sympathy during a fatal fall.

You will see
How the adornments of life
Are complex
But how the heart of man
Is simple —
.
You will see
Why
We
Have all these
Neon lights and
Why we have
This life in general
Of masking and
Subsuming in sound buzzing,
Smiling coyly under fathoms of clothes,
Fully glimpsing all this everything that is
Nothing, with blinders on

While game two of the 2018 College World Series Finals was going on I was busy sitting in front of my TV and watching it, continually eating massive mounds of chicken wings and working on a 12 pack of Blue Moon bottles, which I’d eventually finish. In playing, in little league, I had a couple of good years in baseball. It is, though, certainly a mental game, and I found myself going into slumps from time to time, where my hitting or fielding form would develop glitches.
It was funny — the other game I’d watched was Minnesota vs. Oregon St. (now Oregon St. had advanced all the way to the final from said Super Regional and was playing Arkansas for the crown) and I try not to hate people in life, in general, but I couldn’t help but notice that this one sort of half-Mexican half-Cambodian looking dude (who you could pretty much tell played for the Northwest team and not the Ozarks crew by his complexion) had this smooth, shapely face of incredible vapidity, motionless with cold, dark eyes that seemed to probe, to gnash, to be willing to kill if killing, in life, were called for. He was on first base in the Minnesota game. Oregon St. ended up coming back and winning in that game.
Arkansas had never won the world series. They, though, had a chance to — in the bottom of the ninth with two outs their pitcher forced a pop-up out of the Beavers (OSU) hitter, near first base, and the first baseman, second baseman and right fielder all went over, with a chance to make the grab. Neither one of them made the play. The ball landed dead, the game went on, and that same killing-faced Chicano hit the game winning homer for the Oregon St. Beavers.
Except, I have a confession to make. I filled with dread when I saw that ball up there. I filled with dread at the thought of “hope,” which Aimee Bender might cite. I filled with dread at the thought that “Our greatest fear is not that we’re powerless… Our greatest fear is that we’re powerful beyond all comprehension.” I saw the stillness of a provincial restaurant. I saw Grandma Betty’s prize-winning blueberry pie from 1982 resting there in a two-foot-wide frame on the wall, I saw that same old grizzled dude who’s in there every night drinking and looking straight ahead, cracks on his face like craters on the moon. I saw fat-faced lawyers congratulating me, a blind eye turned to the wrongly accused criminals. I saw the bevy of lights — the camera flashes, the newspapers churning in warehouses as they printed my picture next to killers.

If for some reason
You were to lose all your love,
All the magic and then just exist
As one more of these forms
In constant competition,
In constant, pointless struggle,
Trying as something separate,
Unrelated and dead
Toward the same things
As those others sames around you,
That would certainly be a tragedy