By Dan Oberbruner
I.
What powerful part are you missing?
look!
here!
i can write it for you,
i
n
d
e
c
i
s
i
o
n
see?
II.
shit!
they're following us.
fooling us with words.
notice their geometry?
it's mysterious. i know.
but you have to understand!
you can't understand.
you felt foul in the water.
i stepped you out.
everything good reminds you of autumn.
every good tragedy begins in autumn
and settles somewhere else.
everything loose reminds you of change.
i will see you there if i die trying
something new
on the weekends.
i'm awfully lonely.
shredded paper bothers me repeatedly
though it's nothing i ever do--
which is perhaps the reason it bothers me.
i halve silly
and am spending it.
III.
try now.
it's different.
i swear.
try now.
it's different still
and will never be again.
later it will be the same.
trust me, i'm trying.
i spent years in detention.
i was never in detention.
fell flat? i guess.
meet me in the garden.
now there,
that's a place i can really tell you.
awful.
awful again.
paranoid?
if you mention it.
like:
who!
just now!
where?
i get it.
then i give it away
because i can't handle the concentration it takes.
IV.
my flowers are colors that don't exist--
which attract the bees and other things.
my songs are bird songs.
when i sing them, we ebb and flow.
repeatedly.
i miss you in the garden.
it's been hours.
meet me still in the garden.
see something i do not
and hold it for me
okay?
forever.
okay?
i miss you when you're gone forever.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
The Reason Why If You Should Happen to Live as a Good Christian, You Ought to Always Dress Your Best
By Artie Nosrati
After years of preparation, when it finally occurred he wasn’t at all ready. He was standing in the kitchen wearing old boxers worn to threads in the crotch and a dirty white t-shirt. He was slathering mayonnaise on a sandwich when he felt it happen. At first he thought it was a stomachache or a cramp until he felt the rest of his body move, not up as he imagined, rather forward and backwards and slightly to the left all at the same time. And with that, he was ripped from existence. There was a hole, a void, for half an instant before the world filled in his shape like a flooded footprint in the mud.
Living as a pure Christian is a very difficult endeavor, which was perhaps the reason he found Heaven a great deal lonelier than he had anticipated. He was also mildly disappointed to see his supernatural body appear just as it had on earth, even down to his clothes. It’s just a matter of how you remember yourself last, something less than a voice but more than a thought spoke to him. He had purchased a suit for just this occasion, and in retrospect felt like an idiot for assuming there would be some notice or warning, and time to get changed.
His decades of pious living yielded a particularly insignificant number of acquaintances in the physical world, though there were those who noticed his disappearance—three exactly. They were his manager, his landlord, and his mailman and they were concerned with filling his position, what to do with his furniture, and where to put his piling bills, respectively. Soon his job was replaced with a slightly less motivated worker, his apartment was filled with a slightly noisier tenant, and his mail was stacked and stored neatly in the garbage.
At first the whiteness was blinding, but once he realized he was no longer hindered by eyes, he was able to see the entire planet at once and magnified like a universe-sized panorama. He scoffed at those who were left behind, and tried desperately to convince himself that he didn’t miss the feeling of gravity tugging at his flesh. He could watch them as ants from afar or so close that their eyes were the size of suns, but, he being little more than a floating idea, they paid him as little mind as they did when he was among them. Not only him, but they didn’t seem to mind a thing. He wanted to shout at them, he wanted to climb inside their brain and manipulate their thoughts to tell them that they’re oblivious, that they’re cursed and damned to live on that smog covered rock for what they won’t realize is eternity. But he couldn’t. The rest of the world continued eating, breathing, and sinning without a hiccup, unaware that there ever even was a rapture.
After years of preparation, when it finally occurred he wasn’t at all ready. He was standing in the kitchen wearing old boxers worn to threads in the crotch and a dirty white t-shirt. He was slathering mayonnaise on a sandwich when he felt it happen. At first he thought it was a stomachache or a cramp until he felt the rest of his body move, not up as he imagined, rather forward and backwards and slightly to the left all at the same time. And with that, he was ripped from existence. There was a hole, a void, for half an instant before the world filled in his shape like a flooded footprint in the mud.
Living as a pure Christian is a very difficult endeavor, which was perhaps the reason he found Heaven a great deal lonelier than he had anticipated. He was also mildly disappointed to see his supernatural body appear just as it had on earth, even down to his clothes. It’s just a matter of how you remember yourself last, something less than a voice but more than a thought spoke to him. He had purchased a suit for just this occasion, and in retrospect felt like an idiot for assuming there would be some notice or warning, and time to get changed.
His decades of pious living yielded a particularly insignificant number of acquaintances in the physical world, though there were those who noticed his disappearance—three exactly. They were his manager, his landlord, and his mailman and they were concerned with filling his position, what to do with his furniture, and where to put his piling bills, respectively. Soon his job was replaced with a slightly less motivated worker, his apartment was filled with a slightly noisier tenant, and his mail was stacked and stored neatly in the garbage.
At first the whiteness was blinding, but once he realized he was no longer hindered by eyes, he was able to see the entire planet at once and magnified like a universe-sized panorama. He scoffed at those who were left behind, and tried desperately to convince himself that he didn’t miss the feeling of gravity tugging at his flesh. He could watch them as ants from afar or so close that their eyes were the size of suns, but, he being little more than a floating idea, they paid him as little mind as they did when he was among them. Not only him, but they didn’t seem to mind a thing. He wanted to shout at them, he wanted to climb inside their brain and manipulate their thoughts to tell them that they’re oblivious, that they’re cursed and damned to live on that smog covered rock for what they won’t realize is eternity. But he couldn’t. The rest of the world continued eating, breathing, and sinning without a hiccup, unaware that there ever even was a rapture.
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