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Pushcart Nominees 2007
1. Narrativity by Doug Ramspeck
2. Real by David Jordan
3. Patent # 1,773,079: Method of Preparing Food Products (August 12, 1930) by Micki Myers
4. Doing Jack by Teresa White
5. Notes on Destiny and Flight by Jeff Calhoun
6. One Man's Claret by Patricia Gomes
Doug Ramspeck
Narrativity
My brother shot himself in the foot.
No, he shot himself in the other foot.
We kept saying the names of things:
Tequila. Henry. New Moon.
We believed there was a story in there somewhere.
Maybe it was hiding in the purse
of the prostitute who was eating
chocolate chip pancakes
at the diner where the short order cook
was thinking about robbing himself again,
this time at gunpoint in the back alley
at the end of his shift. Or maybe
there was a tired gray river running through the center
of the city, and no one dared to look at it.
They could hear it—which was bad enough—
especially since the rest of us kept trying to drag
the drowned people out of the river,
kept trying to give them mouth-to-mouth,
but every one single of them would roll
around or cover their mouths
or refuse any help whatsoever.
Which was why the rest of us kept falling in love
with the first person we saw on the way home
out the southside bus; but still we dreamed
we were being interrogated every night
by The Unlaced Boot, which is why my brother
shot himself, right there, there, in the foot.
David Jordan
Real
It's been a month since she dumped me and I'm still sleeping on my brother's couch. (I just don't like spending nights alone, you know?) It's Sunday -- Monday morning, really, 1 a.m. -- when she knocks. I pull on jeans, stumble to the door. There she stands, blonde and blue-eyed, lovely as the night she told me she was checking into a coast motel with the guy from the next desk.
"I spent the weekend at his place," she says, "and I needed to see you. When I'm with him, I sometimes feel like I'm not real."
I yank a shirt on and we drive across town to my apartment, where we split the last Budweiser as she tells me he listens to stereo "Rigoletto," he bought her a biography of William O. Douglas, he talks constantly of climbing their shared corporation. He has two kids. His ex-wife kept the girl, who is five. The boy is seven. He went to the coast with them. (Did the boy sleep in the next bed while they made love? Or do you rent a separate motel room for a seven-year-old so you can have privacy for sex? She didn't say.) He grew up in Yakima. He's thirty-one, had a vasectomy, wears a lapel pin advertising it. Sometimes she doesn't know what to say to him, so she just stares out the window.
"Could we go to bed?" she asks. "Could we go to bed and you just hold me?"
We go to bed. I hold her. After a while, she sleeps. She awakes at five-thirty, goes home to shower for work. She says she'll call. She doesn't.
I guess she got real.
Richard Lighthouse
filling the hole
with the noisy chaos of work
crews and a backhoe,
they've dug a hole in the street.
so i fill it with remnants of life,
one shovel at a time.
dream fragments,
discarded selves,
emptying the mind's closet.
neighbors gather to watch.
orange pylons & yellow
tape marking caution. kids offer
a wagon to help with the hole.
while psychic dumping, my anxiety naps,
falling off the couch.
the hole sinks and expectation rises.
my mental junkyard becomes a memorial.
now everyone wants a hole.
Micki Myers
Patent # 1,773,079: Method of Preparing Food Products (August 12, 1930)
It’s barely 4 o’clock but already the stars are out
this far north, and Clarence Birdseye’s lying flat
on his back looking up at them, squinting, trying
to spot one that moves. There are no satellites
whirring and blinking their way around the earth,
not even a radio wave to tune in to, the sky crystal
clear, like ice. The air slaps his lungs on the way in,
goes out a cloud. Summer seems light years away,
but the taste of fresh-shucked peas lingers on
his tongue like a mirage, bitter and sweet. It’s so cold
and he’s so far from home he wants to cry. It’s so cold
that fish freeze solid the moment they’re pulled
from the sea on a line. Imagine, peas in the dead
of winter, a November cod in the heat of July.
And then it comes to him, just like that.
He imagines each dot of light a silver dollar,
22 million of them winking at him from 1929,
more money than you’ll have hot dinners
in your whole entire life.
Teresa White
Doing Jack
When Father visited
out came Jack
Daniels and I’d match
him shot for shot
until this imposing
broad-shouldered
stranger with the space
between his front teeth
couldn’t hurt me anymore.
His brisk military questions
asked with an Andy Griffith smile
would roll off me like soap bubbles
until I was feeling so light
and empty inside
it almost felt
like love.
Jeff Calhoun
Notes on destiny and flight
There we all are and there
we'll all be. Except you, Allen.
You're going to fly.
~John Updike
Your mother is spouting philosophy,
every word ever said about flight,
how even now you are levitating
inside her womb, a penguin with feathery dreams.
Patricia Gomes
One Man's Claret
You would,
if you could
get away with it.
If you thought for one second
that you wouldn't
get arrested
or ostracized
at four-fork restaurants. You would.
You would jam a stick
up
us.
Jam the stick up
between our legs
as far as it could go.
With your face painted team colors,
you'd enthusiastically wave us
in the sky
so God could see
the rib had been put to good use.
Or maybe
you would freeze us,
a frozen sweet treat
to let melt in the sun
when the bills come due, when
air becomes a bargaining tool..
No problem, you'd tell each other.
There's plenty more in the box.
That purple smear
near the signpost
was your mother. You remember
Of course you do
the heady wine of the womb,
the degradation
of your head-first slide into mortar. Your first
failure — and shame became sin.
Purple
is always the last
eaten.
You do not fool us.
We watch you in threes,
the back-slapping, the anesthetized glaze
when we converge with our pens
and menses
prepared to storm the doctrine.
Skewered. The crows
pluck our eye sockets clean.
A swaying placard reads:
This one was a real bitch!
You do not fool us.
Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize Nominations 2006
Little Girl Dares
Behind closed-doors of bedrooms,
we practiced our magic --
sewing our fingers together with
bright needle and thread --
piÒata pink, purple, blue, yellow, red.
The trick was not to go
too deep
to nip the top layers of skin
and pull the single strand slow,
slow like a tickle,
slow like a moth's legs
under your skin.
And when we were done,
our hands were nests,
vessels of tingling heat
until we tore at the thread
with a vengeance
and reveled in our
temporary scars.
Terri Light
Dancing with Hart Crane
He didn't let on
he was
a poet but do they ever do they
even in bed
what he said what he did say was watch
this and in the middle of The Blue
Danube
he waltzed away from me
with his eyes closed and backed off the ledge
into the pool which had been drained
did he know that who knows and covered with a tarp stretched
over it so no one would fall in
and hurt
himself but dumb me leave it to me oh God
I said are you hurt and he was floating on his back in waves
of black canvas with his arms and legs
spread out like he was still
falling and he giggled like a girl
saying
hurt hurt you syphilitic cunt can't
you see
it fucking hurts all over
James Lineberger
My Date Has A Pet Iguana
Body still,
its eyes siphon off my movement.
Wherever I am in this room,
the watch goes on.
Surely its head just turned
but why does it feel as if
it was the walls, the ceiling,
that rotated on command
of that gray head, scaly hide,
razor claws, the spines along its back,
pendulous dewlap.
"He's friendly," she says.
It's good to know, up front,
what someone means by friendship.
John Grey
Art Rules
1. When depicting a landscape, a Chinese
painter must include a single human
figure, barely detectible by the eye, or,
on rare occasions, two. This demonstrates
the significance of man, as opposed to nature.
2. Animals may be included when depicting
the Holy Mother. However, if a monkey
appears he must be chained, and under no
circumstances may the artist include a cat.
3. When a quilt or rug nears perfect
completion it is advisable to create
a flaw, this signifying human humility
and failure to any spirit or power, benign
or otherwise. This tradition is common
to Native Americans, the Amish, Middle
Eastern Nomadic peoples, and Arachne
(should she get another chance).
4. Extremely complicated rules exist
regarding the depiction of saints
in association with the instruments
of their martyrdom. One would not,
for example, depict St. Lawrence transfixed
with arrows nor St. Sebastian on a grill
(however, one might do so if careful study
revealed multiple episodes of near-decease,
as in the case of the non-saint Rasputin.)
a. Care must be taken lest St. Lucyís
enucleated eyes appear to be walnuts
or St. Barbaraís breasts be confused
with muffins or hot-cross buns.
b. Similar attention must be paid
when depicting certain African
and Buddhist deities. Westerners
are often unaware of such mistakes.
5. When depicting Hell it is helpful to depict
Heaven, or, in the case of Buddhist renditions,
Nirvana. This is not as interesting
for the artist, nor the viewer,
but may provide some insomnia relief.
Kelley White
SHOOTOUT
My friend Clarita thinks sheís Salma Hayek,
the Desperado chica. Not Frida Kahlo. She fires
her hair, the color of frijoles negros, across
nixtamalado skin every time a boy calls her name.
Eyes a big case of loaded weapons. Theyíre brown
like cowís dung. She puts on her makeup
with a palette knife that Diego Rivera
might have used. And her bodyís as paunchy
as the broken down couch on the porch,
the same bulky shape as her five sisters and her mama
with the little boy mustache that turns white from powdered
sugar when she eats cuernitos, which is quite often. Clarita
tells me she loves Miguel. But I think he likes
the Frida Kahlo type, which I am.
Lori Romero
Answering Machine
The little monster crouched in the corner,
its red eye gleaming in the dark,
taking note of the way the yellow toenail
scratches the back of the calf, how the hand
swipes away strands of hair from the face,
the span of time it takes for your eyelids
to close and for you to fall asleep.
But it's the waking that scares you,
your slow pan down the length of your pajamas
and the realization that you havenít been devoured,
not even nibbled on, that nothing has changed.
At times it's as playful as a child, flailing
his arms, flagging you down as you walk
through the door after a long day at the office,
anxious to announce: Jimmy broke a vase,
or Janet said a swear at school,
desperate in the role of the good one.
You erase whatís not important,
which is to say youíre left with an empty
cat dish at your feet. And you turn
back to your first memories,
when you were the one
and even a trip to Kmart
had the potential for greatness.
You're whole life you waited
for that moment when purpose would be defined.
Gradually the troll moved out of your closet,
and you came toagree with Hoffman,
that indeed Kmart sucks. But still you wait.
The phone rings; you let the machine pick up,
and as predicted the light begins to blink.
Itís the last night of summer before seventh grade.
Your motherís standing out on the back porch
waving a cheap flashlight into the black August heat,
shouting that your friends have to go home,
where theyíll sleek into another yard to smoke
their first cigarettes and talk about the breasts
of the girl you're secretly in love with,
while you shuffle inside and get ready for bed.
That night, you lay awake thinking you
could see the orange tips of their cigarettes,
and after all this time you still think you can.
Joshua Michael Stewart
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