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JJ Hutton Jun 2016
My body's on the chair.
The balloon's tied to the lamp.
It wavers and spins. There's a smell,
I'll admit, and the flies have
already left and been.
The small world outside
continues, no need of my
permission. The bluebirds,
the children, the dozers—
I listen. No dreams,
no memories, no love,
no hate, no suffering,
no pleasure, no propagate.
Jun 2016 · 940
Girl at the Gate
JJ Hutton Jun 2016
I.

I lay beside the canals in Esmeralda, city of water.
For hours a shadow and an oar and a boat approach,
and in the distance unseen girls hum a melody,
a melody not wholly unlike the sound of the lapping waves.
The sun rises and sets in a matter of moments.
My skin crinkles, molts, regenerates as fresh
as a babe's. I think of father, of mother, the words
not the people. My hands move now on their own.
The left points to the Saint Cloud Bridge and I say,
Saint Cloud. I'm in my body but outside it. A little god.
A deliberate historian. I record everything.
I think I always did. My right hand waves
to an acrobat on a clothesline. Behind
the acrobat a small stucco home crumbles
and rebuilds itself. My right palm
covers my mouth and I kiss it.
The veins running down my arms
appear to be filled with different colored inks,
reds, blues, greens. A shadow and an oar and
a boat approach, closer, closer.
A single swallow flies above the water, dipping down,
wetting the tips of its wings, climbing upwards over the
balconies, the rooftops, the sun setting, the sun rising,
blessing its flight. My right hand traces my uneven
and ever shifting face. What did I look like as a boy?
Did I have many friends?

II.

The shadow offers his hand, eases me aboard
his small boat. We push off back the way he came.
He says a few words to me, the
only words exchanged on our long journey:
I used to live in the city, he says. It nearly
drove me mad. I moved to the country.
I cultivated a garden. I installed a wood stove.
This was healthy.

III.

A small delight, to watch the shadow
command the oar, the grace in it.
I think of a woman's dress. I think
of the word rustle. I feel the word rustle.
My left hand points to the shoreline.
Spanish moss hangs from a bald cypress.
I say the word, Fire, and the Spanish moss becomes
engulfed. I say, Stop, and everything
stops, even the sun. Its position makes
me think the phrase six o'clock. While
Esmeralda, the city entire, is locked
in my rule, I step out onto the water.
I find I can walk across it. I know the
city's name, but I'm not sure I ever lived
here. The blades of grass feel foreign
on the soles of my feet.

IV.

Four has always been my favorite number,
I think. A lightning bug emits a flash of green.
It is the only creature unstuck and I follow it.
It leads me through a snow covered valley,
through a yellowed wheat field, through
a suspended dust storm. I brush away the particles
and they drop to the cracked earth.
I'm in a desert now. A woman sits with her legs
crossed. I sit with her. I feel the urge to tell her
a joke. It's apparent. She feels the same urge.
We both try to get the words out, but we keep
laughing, our minds rushing to the punchline.
Before we finish our jokes, we die. We decompose.
We turn to skeletons, our bony mouths full of ash.
We're born again, our joy and humor now with a depth centuries old.
We laugh, death much easier than we'd expected.
We try to tell the jokes again. The cycle beings and ends and begins.
The lightning bug insists that we move on.

I'm led to a gate. Guarding the gate is a girl
with a red ribbon in her yellow hair.
I ask if I can call her maiden.

I can almost see through the girl.
Rolling hills and a crystal stream
serve as her backdrop just beyond
the gate. She summons me with
a gentle wave of her hand.
I lean down. She kisses me.

You're my first kiss, she says.

I hope I'm not your last.

She takes my hand and insists we walk backwards.
The ground is uneven, my feet unsure.

There's an old saying I'm sure you know, she says.
The definition of madness is doing the same thing
and expecting a different result. This applies to more
than recurring bad decisions. It applies to death.

What are you saying? I've been expecting a different death?

You've been expecting a different consequence of death,
but you keep dying the same way, the girl says. Watch me.
Be curious. But say no more. Don't diffuse death of its
wild alchemy.

We walk backwards through the gate.
I want a secret, something
the girl doesn't know about me, one
dark moment to add dimension. But
the thought lurks that she knows
more about me than me. Time speeds
up. Day turns to night. Snow feathers
down. Backwards we walk into empty
homes, into dry riverbeds, into the unknown.
We begin to fall. From what, I'm not sure.
To where, I'm not sure.
The girl grips my hand tightly.

When will I know that I've died?

Shhh, she says. No words. Only wonder.
Jun 2016 · 1.1k
Lake Garda
JJ Hutton Jun 2016
I find myself in a coverless Italian summer.
Grass browned. Skin freckled.
I find myself impatient,
no longer willing to entertain
the destinies of the salt and sea.
I edit video of you in a cobbled basement.
There's a knowing look that lasts four seconds.
I split it into six fragments and set it in reverse,
an unknowing, a deletion.
The crook of your neck
and shoulder blade. The red of your hair.
Some nights I hang from the rails. Five minutes.
Ten. And pull myself up.
Tented and mad by August,
stabbing ice with a little
black cocktail straw.
How can I change my
How can I love my
How can I erase my
body?
The rains wet me.
The wind wrings me.
This city we used to walk
under streetlights.
Now I bike through,
pedaling, furious and blind,
toward a place I don't know until
I arrive, and I kiss a young woman
who looks a lot like me. I ask her
to say my name over and over.
I want to fully occupy the moment,
the space, this time. Her lips
remain closed and her
hands linger on my shoulders
and no music plays and
there are voices, loud and
happy, speaking a language
that's completely new.
May 2016 · 668
Conversation V
JJ Hutton May 2016
There was a time—and this wasn't all that long ago—where I wanted to be seen, loved, admonished. I wanted to be some novelist casanova, women, movie deals, et cetera. And one day it changed. I wish there was some monumental event tied to it, some clear catalyst, but to be honest this opposite idea, this idea of erasure, came to me in a supermarket. In the checkout line the cashier didn't greet me, didn't ask the usual did-you-find-everything type questions. The transaction was wholly procedural, nothing human to it. The total showed up on a screen. I swiped a card.

And it reminded me of that part in DeLillo's—I know, it's always DeLillo—in his book Zero K where he talks about the origin of "alone," and what the word really connotes. The word is a rather simple portmanteau of the Middle English phrase "all one." And when you think of the word like this, all one, it gives you a different idea. It does for me anyway. All one suggests freedom from any tie or association. It's who you are minus geography, minus desire, minus friends, minus family, minus lovers. Many people would say there is no self if you were to eliminate essentially the entire context of your life, but I disagree.

I say all of this to say, I'm hitting the red button. I'm eliminating all my friendships to regain a semblance of an inner life. I think they've become responsible for a projected version of myself, an expected version rife with inconsistencies that I wish to no longer adhere to. I know what you're thinking. I'm going to be some half-assed buddhist of the plains, but this small world I've played a small part in shaping has become suffocating, and the only way for me to exist in this space is as a vapor.
May 2016 · 951
mel oh dee
JJ Hutton May 2016
It was strange and didn't register as a serious request. She wanted to take care of me. Nothing ******. Just a meal here and there, maybe a little tidying up of the house.

She wanted me to talk. And that part, the talking, always felt transactional, a repayment of her cleaning and cooking. She didn't ask questions. Just nudged me on with emphatic nods in the living room, sitting six feet away from me in a stray office chair. She listened as if I were recounting a past life of her own.

I told her once I loved her little feet, especially in those heels. The next week she wore sneakers. She was older but not old, fifty or so. Two children a few years younger than myself.

She made a point of not staying past ten or drinking more than a single glass of wine.

I was always a little embarrassed by the state of the house. The ***** clothes strewn across the room indistinguishable from the clean. Earmarked novels, long novels, the kind you could bludgeon a person to death with, gathered dust on the coffee table, the desk, the kitchen counter. She touched them, fascinated by what secrets or sage advice might lay within, but she never read a page.

One night I realized I'd never said her name out loud. And she said, "That's impossible. Of course you have." But neither of us could think of a particular moment. And just when I was about to, she said, "Why break the streak?"

We grew more comfortable with one another. She wore less makeup and let her age show. She'd show up in sweatpants. Some nights we'd order Chinese and play that familiar game where every fortune is punctuated with "in bed." A stranger will change your life forever tomorrow in bed. Lies lead to great calamities in bed. So on.

We called them dates, our lunches in the break room, taken each day around 2 p.m. She would bring me leftovers from the night before, always making a point of saying something like, "My husband just couldn't finish it."

She brought baked ziti on a Wednesday last March. I told her it was the best I'd ever eaten as I forked it out of the tupperware container, the edges still hot from the microwave. She said she hadn't been intimate in two years.

"Is that possible?"

"It is."

*** didn't transpire immediately. We worked up to it.

I liked the way she directed me. I'd never experienced anything quite like it. She'd tell me to touch myself while she held me in her arms, she'd snag a handful of my hair, she'd dig her nails into my thigh, but her words were always beautiful, whispered, tender, spoken in the sacred and profane language of lovers.

I'd come and she'd make a comment about the quantity, comparing it to her husband's.

In the serene afterglow before we toweled ourselves off, I'd rest my head against her breast, and I'd say, "I could stay here forever."

"Every man I've ever slept with has said that."

"How many men have you slept with?"

"Has anyone ever liked the answer to that question?"

"I don't mind. We could compare data."

"Including you?"

"Including me."

"Two."

She crawled out of the bed and turned on some music, Neil Young, "A Man Needs a Maid."

"I always felt guilty for liking this song," I said.

"Me too," she said.

We drank coffee on the back porch before the sun came up. "There was a man," she said, "before I married. He was an artist, a painter. We were in college and I loved the deliberate way he spoke. He'd think, sometimes for a full minute, before he said anything. There was a softness in his voice that required you to pay closer attention to him. Your voice is not all that different."

The Department of Transportation began tearing down the houses in my neighborhood to make room for an additional two lanes of traffic. By October mine was the only house left on the block. The apocalypse in miniature. We'd drive by piles of brick and fencing and she'd begin to cry.

It was a particularly brutal winter, and she buried her car in mud and snow when she tried to back out of the yard on the day of her son's graduation. I offered to drive her.

"No, no, no no no."

We sat in the snow, our backs against her car. She leaned in and said, "Your cologne is new."

"Yes."

"You've cut your hair."

"Yes."

"Your shirt, it's actually ironed."

Silence for a beat.

"Who is she?"
JJ Hutton May 2016
Shake the demon lover
in the effulgent post-Chelyabinsk world,
where death breathes you back
into yourself and backwards you walk
through those coupled images, so posed,
charged with feigned desire,
the lighting just right,
the angle meticulous,
smushing foreheads with golden rings
on your fingers.
You had a dog.
You had a crockpot.
A kid was on the way.
Shake the demon lover,
rip yourself from her arts district loft,
where the music is in French and always beautiful,
glide down the rusted rails,
cruise past the headshops, the pawnshops,
say the word Tuesday and wonder if it means anything
other than the third day of the week.
You shared a bed.
You shared a bed.
You shared a bed.
Shake the demon lover
and her words track you,
her text reads,
"Come over, friend."
And she calls you friend,
she shouts you friend,
she pants you friend,
as you end the affair for
the sixth, seventh, eighth
time, one last couch
**** and never speak
to me again.
JJ Hutton Apr 2016
Have you been to the mountain?
No no no. But
I've been under the bridge, Mr. Jones.
I've washed my feet in Cottonwood Creek.
I've named the meadowlarks after ex-girlfriends.
Suzanne. Isis. Mel-oh-dee.
Some mornings I woke up in places I'd never
been and on those mornings,
oh I woulda killed for a pen.
The fog and the
steady gasp of diesels
surrounded me and sang sang sang.
Tall grass along the interstate
and god, he didn't talk to me,
but I pretended to be god and talked
to myself, saying This way. This way.
This way to the promised land.
On what I thought to be
the Fourth of July, mud dried
around my knees in the Quapaw,
and I stood up for four days straight before
the rains came.
And finally, in the golden dawn,
I arrived at my childhood home.
Ivy on the chimney. Rusted trike in the overgrown lawn.
My father sat in his chair. Static on the TV.
He said, "Haven't done yourself in yet?"
My mother, in cobwebs and rags said, "He's got
one classic in him, one heartbreaking work
of genius before he goes."
And I asked her for a title.
She only pointed.
I turned and that's when I saw her,
the Girl at the Gate.
Mar 2016 · 475
Conversation III
JJ Hutton Mar 2016
A breakdown? I don't know if I'd call it that. Something about that word connotes immediacy, precision, a kind of instantaneous loss of your mental faculties. No. This has been slow. Like two, three years slow. I'd welcome a breakdown. A breakdown would give me the chance to start over, to mend, to be a better ******* human being. This degradation, and, I know, I'm being repetitive here, this degradation is so slow it's almost intangible. It's so slow there's ample room for denial. I need one swift, irrefutable act of self-destruction. Don't do that. That little gesture, that go-on-just-bottom-out hand flip. You're not listening. I don't have the energy for that. I'm not reckless. Wanting and being are, in this case, mutually exclusive. You know where I am? Let me illustrate it for you. I say I love you to empty rooms. I say sweetheart, sweetie, et cetera for no other reason than habit being so strong.  I'm not beat up about her leaving. It happens. Sometimes two people just don't work, you know? But maybe I'm beat up. I haven't slept in the bed. I sleep on the couch like she used to. I buy her favorite wine—which I don't particularly enjoy—but I drink it. I drink it, I think, just to watch the bottle go empty. I drink the wine and I sleep on the couch hoping it summons the breakdown, some ******* finality. That's true. I've been many different people, but I've been the same one for far too long.
Mar 2016 · 1.2k
Who Her Is
JJ Hutton Mar 2016
I shed everything but
the pencil skirt and stockings.
I suffocate and sundry and
drift into my boy's case of
suede leather, where he
trusts me to miscalculate
his competence and its
Saturday, the morning,
and he says, I love you
in the morning, Sarah.
There's stroke and nip,
at every turn of the trail
an adoration for what
he calls my soul, and
he asks for the routine
obliteration. A violence
always whispered.
I'm velvet everything.
Velvet tongued.
Velvet *****'d.
Each portal and contour
a soft place for him to
land, to dispose of his
fear of death,
but what am I supposed to
do with it, the fear of death?
But this is my burden
with the light skipping
through the blinds. Simpler
times, there were, I think.
And a last name he means
to hang on me, always soon
and very soon. Dishes in the sink.
Eternal moonbeams and sun rays.
This is it, I'm afraid.
JJ Hutton Mar 2016
Here in the west borough, down three or four blocks from the epicenter, the shocks come to you in tides — little, electric, delightful in some alien way. Even the sounds of instant decay ring pleasant. The concrete, the bricks, the mortar, the Corinthian columns, the suspended ceiling tiles, the florescent bulbs, the coffee cups, the desktops, the family portraits all fall from their stations, screaming toward the cool pavement. It’s a temperate Thursday in January and the weathermen continue to talk in stunted disbelief. A car catches fire on Malcom X Boulevard, and weather is the wrong word, you think, for this phenomenon. It’s rage. It’s bitter. The violence of the sun-catching glass smacks of vengeance and this whole thing is man-made or, at the very least, god-made but not anything so indiscriminate as weather.

There’s still the pleasure of it though. The collapse of the old world. And there’s nothing but rubble on the corner of 9th and Dominican, and for the life of you, you can’t remember what stood there before. In your evergreen bones you know one thing: whatever anodyne brick institution reigned will be replaced by that glorious glass and that glorious steel, 100 towers impaling the sky. The future is now. A tremor. A cloud of dust.

For about ten seconds the windshield is worthless yet you speed up, hurling yourself through the fog of destruction into a **** world, feeling essential and brilliant and and and.
Feb 2016 · 1.2k
Life No. 2
JJ Hutton Feb 2016
How many times and on how many screens has JFK been assassinated? she asks a few minutes into the commute.

Someone has said that to me before, I say.

And I notice, now for the first time, even she is a rerun or a ghost
or an unfortunate reminder of the one who came before her,
from the artfully mismatched polish on her toenails to the way her wrists wrap around each other as she talks her quiet talk, her fingertips balancing her iPhone, which streams Jackie Then Kennedy scrambling toward the back of the Cadillac. Its the Zapruder footage in slow motion and somehow in HD, and she touches the thumbs up icon when the footage comes to a close.

Across from me sits a dead man. I'm sure of it—his death. He lounges in himself, his belly fat imperialistic in its expanse, moving beyond beltline and claiming a space all its own on the torn, blue cushioned seat. The dead man looks a bit like Marlon Brando, post-Tango in Paris, when the depression set in and with it the weight, but like Brando, there's still a cool magic in the deep lines of the dead man's forehead, something forlorn and knowing in the drag of his eyelids.

It's here that I remember I'm a writer. And moments like these, I'm supposed to render in belabored yet fragmented ways.

That's ego, she says, not looking up from her phone.

What's that? I say.

The way you pigeonhole me. Rerun, ghost, et cetera, she says. Maybe I've made love to a sad man like you before. Maybe you're a trigger for me. Maybe I know everyone you're going to be, everything you're going to say.  Like I was going to tell you these pants, these pants are lenin pants and I got them from Bali. And I didn't say it because I already knew your response.

Are they ethically made? we say smugly and simultaneously.

And the subway car does that screeching sound you hear in movies and the tunnels outside do that motion blur you see in movies and I try to kiss her but she says that uh-uh cowboy line you know from movies.

Brando had affairs, I say.

Kennedy had affairs, she says.

Have you ever had an affair?

It was exhausting, she says, the performance required. All the effort in your vocal affectations, those terrible 3 p.m. lunches, the pet names, your obligatory passion and one-liners, the secrecy for the sake of secrecy, the purchase and disposal of lingerie. If I could get the time back—

I'd spend it alone with a glass of red wine and a good book, we say.
Apr 2015 · 1.9k
A Master of the Craft
JJ Hutton Apr 2015
The slam poet in cords, in denim,
rambles from neon beer haven
to flybuzz brothel, cracking quiet
jokes about soup to shiny junebugs
in the relentless moonlight.
One hundred dollars in thirty-five bills
slowly retreat from wallet
toward water-cut whiskey.
He’s got a chapbook widely
available at frozen yogurt shops
across the metro; he’s got a
tour in the works, tri-county,
every middle school from
Shawnee to Seminole; he’s
got a collection of ex-girlfriends,
made up almost entirely of wizened lesbians;
he’s got an MFA from UNC Wilmington,
and he shouts this more than speaks this
from his treacherous barstool to the sleepy bartender.
One of the girls, she takes him upstairs,
and to her he says, Your freckles—islands
in the sea of your milk-white skin.

The night passes, warehouses are razed,
and he watches the loft apartments emerge.
The food trucks come. He parks beside them,
typing poems made to order out of his trunk. The
money flows in, crumpled and sweaty and
in one-dollar denominations. The Old Fashions
transfigure into Old English. And in his pocket
thesaurus he looks for a word. It’s not vagrant,
nor vagabond. It’s not homeless, nor wayward.
He lies in the long shadow of a Midwestern sunset,
starved and shaking. Up from the blackened
city shrubs comes an indifferent breeze and
just as he thinks the word Pauper, he dies one
on the corner of 23rd and Western.
Mar 2015 · 2.1k
Post-Bachelorette
JJ Hutton Mar 2015
Return trip from the borderlands
and Maria, she's driving though
she's had a little too much based
on the tremors and the listless
drift of the party bus from left lane
to right.
I'm in my Chuck Taylor's,
the Warhols, the $795 collector's,
thumbing through my girlfriend's
Facebook timeline. She just bought
a Picasso, a self-portrait. I want
to stab her with the long end
of my ****-me shoes. They're
on the carpeted floor. Jenny's
on the carpeted floor too. I roll
her on her side so she doesn't
choke on her own *****. Hero.
The path lights overhead start
blinking and somebody, Kate
or Kristen, I get them mixed up,
starts screaming, "Strobe." We're
in the left lane going ninety, ninety-five.
The right lane looks weak.
Jenny mumbles something as I step over her.
"What's that?" I ask.
"Read the quiet book. Love the quiet book.
the whole human experience captured
in twenty-six scattered symbols."
Someone's in the ****** laughing.
We go into a tunnel and everything
goes quiet and thoughtful and black.
Breathe in through the nose and out
the same way. Click the heels together
and wait.
Feb 2015 · 1.9k
Destructo
JJ Hutton Feb 2015
She ***** on a milkshake through a metal straw. Strawberry.
The place, Tom's on Western, is bare. Ash falls outside. It's
sticking to the glass windows. Glass and steel frames
and white paint and white chairs and ash outside.
A taxi cab goes up over the curb. A black woman in a headdress
gets out and tosses money, red money, blood money.
I'm here too sitting by the bathroom, noting the length
of Strawberry Milkshake's boy shorts. Is this objectification
or object reduction or reverse personification?
The siren in the distance winds down, sounds like it's melting.
Do sounds melt? She, Strawberry Milkshake, doesn't
seem bothered by what's going on outside. I want to sink
my teeth into her shoulder. Ash sticks to the glass, and a
kid, eight or nine, runs by, newspaper up over his head.
He's crying. I can see this, but I don't hear this. Water
starts leaking then pouring then falling in sheets. Ceiling
tile and insulation float at my feet. Strawberry Milkshake
pulls her wet hair back into a ponytail. I clear my throat.
She raises her *******. I walk over and tell her
there's this song she reminds me of. And a bomb hits just
down the street. There goes the glass, crashing all around
us, slicing past forearms and skipping through empty space.
The steel frames bend. She puts her hand to my face. My
face becomes her face, her hand my hand. She and I half-hum, half-sing
"Oh Destructo, you're so destructive. You're so destructive to me."
Feb 2015 · 1.3k
Undoing
JJ Hutton Feb 2015
The conspiracy's got holes, water coming in, and
everything you say on the burner, they're going
to use against you in a court of law or as
a bargaining chip to go a level or two up,
but if you get caught, who can you give up?
Whose real name do you know? You feel
it all closing in. The black sedan whose
make and model you can never peg
is always parked off to the side.
Some days it rains, and you
try to remind yourself
to cherish this. You've
killed one man, been
asked to **** two more.
The sun sets uptown and
the jewelry stores close
and the bars open,
the ones with oak tables
and longbeards serving drinks,
the ones where they look at
you funny when you pay
in cash, the ones where
the women talk loudly
about their shapes
being real, about beauty
and food and thigh gaps,
their world entire.
What a funny set of problems,
you think to yourself as
the third beer hits your head
just right and headlights
come in through the window.
You walk out the back through the kitchen
into the neighborhood with
bikes left in the street. Two, three porch lights
on. Watchers east. Watchers west.
You break your phone on the hood of a stranger's car.
You run for the first time in months.
You run past the coffee shop and the frozen yogurt shop
and the artisan haircut shop and the tattoo shop with fair trade
ink. You find yourself at your sister's on 23rd. You tie off
in the living room while your nephew yells at the
Xbox and the LCD. It's curtains. Uneven.
The warmth and softness of synthetic women swirl around
you. There's a word for this. Maybe two. You swear when
you wake you will be hunter. No more defender. No more
user. Hunter King. Dark Secret on the Wind.
Jan 2015 · 1.3k
Chinese New Year
JJ Hutton Jan 2015
Billowed and pasted, rollicked and wasted,
the night takes hold and Samantha, you remember her,
she's smoking again. This is her last pack though.
Drinks poured. Drinks spilled. Kate and I are talking
like people with scheduled late afternoon love affairs. There's
a car alarm going off in the distance. I love this blouse. Is it new?
No. It looks new. I love your perfume. You aren't wearing any?
Must be a natural—and the first to arrive at the party, Chris and
Evan, they're the first to leave, and we listen intently as one, or maybe both, tumble down the stairs. There should be waivers for second floor
apartment parties. Kate, you deserve so—I know. I know. You've got this light. Jesus. I'm just saying. Is it radiant? Yes, it's radiant. And they're lighting their drinks on fire now in the kitchen, some concoction of amaretto and 151 and a kickback of Coors. The flames reflect in their eyes, their cheeks a soft amber, and most of them are smiling, not sincerely, but when was the last time you could give yourself over completely to joy? There's a siren in the distance. Someone says they're coming for us. I'm going to the bathroom. Do you need help? And there's this ceiling fan with LCD Christmas bulbs strung around the blades. A myriad of claustrophobic yellows and whites and blues. Have you seen that video of the ****** having a baby? And he brings it up on his phone. Someone says, Oh my god I love this song from the bathroom. I hadn't noticed the music before now. Drink this. What is it? You'll see. And Samantha she says she's got to step outside for a second. And someone drops a hookah coal on the beige carpet. There goes the deposit. There's incense. There's a Scentsy. There's Febreeze being sprayed liberally. Can you drive? Can you? Do you want to? You know? I've ate a lot today. The songs keep getting skipped. Parquet Courts, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Chvrches, Miley Cyrus—wait, wait put on some SWIFTY. We're going to fire up in my closet if you want to join. It's a walk-in. Evan's back now. He kicks a mirrorball across the kitchen tile with Chris, who's also back now. Where's Samantha? She's smoking. She shouldn't be alone. You remember last—That won't happen again. I'm just saying. Well, you can stop saying. Sirens again. Closer. We're in the walk-in. Kate tugs on my sleeve. I take a pull off the bronze pinch hitter. Do little circles with my head. ****, she says. What? It all starts fading out, the rush of dark, the rush of light. Someone says trash can. Sirens. I'm just trying to—Shut up. I'm just trying to—Shut up.
Jan 2015 · 961
A Southern Ghazal
JJ Hutton Jan 2015
An overall’d uncle stabbed over homemade champagne drifts around the bend.
A commemoration quilt and the Adamsville population shifts around the bend.

There’s an old hymn torn out of Martha’s hymnal, an elegy, a black dress.
“These details seem important,” Preacher says in European swifts around the bend.

The rains come and wash away the things we bury, bodies and toy cars.
Lowlands become lakes and a lone, malaise blackbird lifts around the bend.

A boy, all elbows and knees, in corduroy everything, in the thick of it,
drives a truck with no wipers, no license, the stick shifts around the bend.

The homes with electric lose electric, and the newspaper floats off porch.
No news today, nor tomorrow these are philanthropic gifts around the bend.
Dec 2014 · 1.1k
The Shirtless Poet
JJ Hutton Dec 2014
The shirtless poet,
he writes on the fourth floor.
Corner of Bedlam and Squalor.
He’s running two experiments:
Ingesting only whiskey and
texting only ex-girlfriends.
He keeps a journal.
The title is
The Dishonest and the Deceased.
He’s seven days and forty-one pages in.
He’s sent 63 images of both himself and
empty bottles.
Three different women have shared his bed,
and each subsequent morning departed
with a similar sentiment: this never happened.
He’s drank ten liters, placed the empty bottles
on top of the cabinets. Proof. Yeah, I’ve been drinking.
I guess you can tell, he said. I’ve got friends.
Just haven’t seen them in a while.
He said he’s getting closer to the center.
Of what? Woman No. 2 asked.
Of myself.
I wouldn’t do that. Whatever you do.
It’ll help my.
Don’t do that.
My art.
This isn’t art.
I am art.
You’re drunk.
I can remember the first time.
I’m starting to.
What does.
Nothing.
You’re leaving.
No. Well.
The first time. Your grandma’s shed. 2007, 2008.
I’ve got work in.
I remember the smells.
The morning, she said.
The dew, the grass, the sweet wind.
Please.
Your husband’s no ******* poet.
I.
Let me remind you how poets love.

The air conditioner hiccuped.
A taxi door slammed outside.
A helicopter dipped past Squalor.
Through the window a beam of light.

But this never happened.
This never happened, he said.
JJ Hutton Dec 2014
I read a story the other day.
I read the headline.
It said: There is no god and we are his prophets.
We drive slowly on Saturdays.
At night in our home there are noises,
the dull thumps of ghosts.
We used to comment. Now we rollover.
I wake and return the blankets I’ve stolen.

In the mornings there is music.
A kitchen dance of tip-toes and arms at war with air.
The new car with its heated seats.
There’s a pace I like.
It’s microwaved tea;
it’s 11:30 a.m.;
it’s one more chapter before.

I listen to you get ready,
a chorus of tubes uncapped
and capped, of hairdryers
plugged and unplugged.
You sing softly.
I hear this, too.

Beyond this house,
a brook, a mountain, a trout.
Distances mapped.
Plans drawn with
parallel lines, listless and drifting.
Within,
there is no god, and he is love,
and we are his prophets.
You are my practitioner.
And I, yours.
JJ Hutton Nov 2014
The berries are poison berries, the boy said.

What kind of poison?

Bad kind.

How do you know?

Mom told me.

Dare me to eat one?

Yup.

It don't taste like poison.

What does poison taste like?

Worse than this.

I want some.

How poisonous is it?

Mom says it'll **** you.

Then why'd you eat one.

I want to go to heaven.

I thought they were a little poison, like make you **** funny poison.

I figure if I want to make it to heaven this is the only way.

I can't believe this. You didn't say anything—

Bible says all children go to heaven because they is innocent.

I'm going to throw up. You just put your finger on your tongue, right?

Further back. To the tonsil thingy.

It's not coming. I can't. I can't. This—I didn't feed the dogs.

Don't worry about the dogs. We're going to heaven.

Bible doesn't say that.

Preacher does.

Well.

Preacher said it's impossible for a rich man to go to heaven, pretty tough for a fat man—on account of the way being so narrow—and just plain hard for everyone else. The only one guaranteed is kids.

I haven't even kissed a girl.

You're not missing much.

I've only kissed Mom.

Yeah. She kisses okay.

What if the kids aren't innocent?

Kids are always innocent.

I feel funny.

Me too.

But what about kids that do bad stuff?

Like?

You know, fighting and cussing and stuff.

They don't know better. Free ticket to heaven.

Huh.

My tummy is making put-titter-put noises.

What if a kid slayed another kid? You know thou shalt not slay.

I didn't slay you.

I'm just asking.

I wouldn't slay.

You didn't tell me these berries would **** me. Seems the same as slaying me.

Throw up.

I tried.

Let me help you. I ain't losing my free ride.

Geez. You're hurting me.

Throw up.

I can't.

I'm going to punch you.

Don't punch me.

Throw up.

You punched me.

I'm going to do it again.

No.

Throw up.

You punched me again.

Let me try cramming my fingers down there again.

Ow.

If God chalks this up to slaying.

He will.

I'll find a way.

A way?

To heaven.
Nov 2014 · 1.2k
In Her Hand
JJ Hutton Nov 2014
Rain on tin
the pang and elasticity of
time and the time it
takes nature to sway
from right to left
from outer to inner
to notice the girl
on the edge of the room
with a drink in her hand
and then there's that
old lightning, self-proclaiming
its importance to the
gymnasium with grumbling
thunder then we're all
tossing dice and teaching
each other dance moves,
saying the ******* the edge
needs a pair of new shoes
and someone responds:
Isn't that the woman who kills?

And I go home with her
rain on tin and a summer
wade through Cottonwood Creek
we're in a shed
and it's musty, dangerous,
and possible
a killer takes certain care
of your body with her
cautious hands.
Nov 2014 · 980
Absolute Combustion
JJ Hutton Nov 2014
And if they get together
anything's possible,
whether instant infidelity or
absolute combustion.

One more way to alleviate tension,
to land mine
the curious,
to ooh,
to ahh.
JJ Hutton Nov 2014
I've seen a sheriff put a bullet in a deer's head in Colorado Springs,
I've lived a winter through in an unfinished basement,
I've made obligatory love to a dark-haired woman,
her red dress above her head.

I've stumbled to the karaoke bar
just to read out of a notebook of unfinished poetry,
and when the crowd complained I said,
"These are the last words I will speak."

I've thrown my wallet into my grandmother's open casket,
I've got a punch card behind the counter at the liquor store,
I've ended a job interview by throwing a fake apple through
a glass window.

I've seen the battlefield of Antietam.

I've watched the rearview mirror for hours expecting
her husband to find me.

I've hidden a gun under my shirt, and I've
got this song in my head I've been meaning to write down.

I've got a good intention and a couple theories and a
Southern affection for personal secrets.
Nov 2014 · 1.6k
Blind Date
JJ Hutton Nov 2014
My buddy Todd set us up.
Her name, I knew her name:
Isabel Fienne.
I met her outside of Byron's,
drinking a 40 out of a brown bag.
She wore black, black spaghetti strap,
black Memphis skirt, black stockings.
I told her I liked the color of her eyes.
She said her dad just died.
And asked me, "What was your name again?"
I asked her, "How about a little of that drink?"
We spent the night throwing rocks at passing cars,
dodging police, and talking about how
we liked the anonymity of night.

We woke up in an alley.

I whispered the word stockings.
She bit my lip.
We get married the first of June.
Oct 2014 · 1.3k
All of My Friends Were There
JJ Hutton Oct 2014
All of my friends were there
and their friends, too
and the friends of my friends'
cousins and their dogs
and their all-seeing aunts crammed into
ill-fitting blouses with
their husbands in New York or L.A.
and their inbetweens sending them
***** texts and someone, I think it was
my mother, she said, Why don't you
lay in the river
And I said, Of course
The leaves fell
The birds sang a four-note phrase
and all my friends, the best ones,
they tossed half-empty packs
of gum, flower petals, quarters, pens--
anything they had in their pockets
As I passed by them I said, Remember
when we ate the poison berries and
said our goodbyes. Remember when
I played pitcher on our t-ball team.
Remember when Drew took the electric
fence to his crotch. Remember when
we threw Josh's library book into the rain.
Remember when I learned to ride a bike in
sixth grade. Remember when I kissed
you on the backseat of the school bus.

And they said, Yes. And they laughed.

Those were good times.

My brother, he was there too, he hopped
in the river and gave me a push, said,
I'll see you around the next bend.

Life number two, I said.

Life number two.
Oct 2014 · 665
One More Game Before Dinner
JJ Hutton Oct 2014
The rains came.
No matter.
The Irish kids with Hebrew names
still took to the lot behind the redbrick
apartments to play a close-quarters
game of baseball.
From home plate to first base
the distance was ten yards.
From first to second, fifteen.
Runners placed one hand
on a rusted iron pole, once
used as one half of a clothesline,
a makeshift third.
Their frequency of play
rendered the space between
bases grassless.
And in the rain on that September
day, the lines became sludge.
The muck claimed shoes
of earnest feet, badged the
legs of the best hitters.
Hey batta. Hey batta.
Thunder overhead and
all around.
A lean, blonde-haired
boy, all legs and arms,
got a piece of the ball
on his first pitch.
Upward into the clouds,
upward into the invisible.
He took first, started for
second.
The others kept waiting
for the ball to come back
down.
Sep 2014 · 965
A Sequel
JJ Hutton Sep 2014
He always wanted to be one of those people, the kind that can tell a sycamore from a birch, a lily from an orchid, all without having to google it. As he finger-and-thumbs her beige blouse, he knows it isn't satin, but what the hell is it? She kisses him again, this time longer than the greeting. He thinks the name of the material starts with an R. It’s a synthetic. She ruffles the back of his hair, glides down his neck before latching to his shoulders. Of course, he’s not certain it’s a synthetic and it may start with an M. No. It’s R. R-A. Her day was good, she says. Ian was down, and Nicole was happy.  It’s the kind of fabric you hand wash in cold water. He wants to know what it’s called because everything about this moment, every loose strand of hair, the brand of her black leather boots, each elation at the corner of the mouth, and each attempt to cover up elation, must be committed to memory.

Just a few minutes earlier, she knocked a soft cadence--a cadence timeless and familiar and forever nameless, yet a cadence all her own. Not all that different from her knock nearly three years ago. She was timid then, wearing a loose, primarily red plaid shirt and black tights. Slow to drink the wine on the table. Slow to lay in the bed.

Now she takes off her blouse without pause. She wears a supportless lace bra, what he thinks of as lace, anyway. He’s not sure if that’s right. “I don’t have ***** anymore,” she says. “When you don’t have ***** you can wear these.” These? Do these have a certain name? She kisses him hard, pressing her left leg against his center. Her hair is much longer. He burrows in it. He wishes he knew the fragrance of her shampoo. It’s not coconut. Coconut he recognizes. This is subtle, like vanilla, but it’s not vanilla. He knows vanilla, too.

Along her abdomen, his fingers fall into new grooves. Three years ago, she didn't have a gut. Now she’s got even less of one. She undoes the button on his pants. He blinks. He’s pressing her against the wall. He blinks. He yanks her ******* down, presses his face into her. He blinks. She’s straddling him on the couch, her hair falling around them both. In her eyes is a look he wants to be able to describe--to pause the transfer of energy between their bodies and relate to her. But what would he say? At first, he sees eternity, but what good is that if she doesn’t believe in eternity. Then he sees their past. She’s playing a piano at her parents’. He’s just hitting keys beside her, but she continues to play, both ignoring and not ignoring him. But that’s not exactly it.

She rests her palms on the recliner. They go from behind. It’s December. It’s 2011. It’s twenty degrees. They’re half-undressed beside his parent’s out-of-sight frozen pond. Desire off the rails, going over the hill. He takes in her body. His breath is visible. Their rhythms match.

“Don’t stop,” she says. “Don’t stop.” She clenches a fistful of the recliner as soundless noise ricochets off the corners of her brain then comes together, a coagulation of tension and pain and what may or may not be love. The noise reaches its crescendo. The line between present and past disappears. What’s happening is not wholly reality, not wholly fantasy. It’s like making--it’s like ******* a ghost--she thinks. One, two tremors echo through her body.

He’s bigger, softer. He doesn't talk so much. He just looks at her like he did before. She turns around. It’s the way he looked at her when they began years ago. It’s naive. It’s hopeful. It’s discovering a million dollars free of guilt or consequence. Is it possible to fake something like that?

“Relax,” she says, meaning sit down and let her do her thing. At even the slightest touch, his body twitches. His love sounds--those yelps--are new. He grabs the pillow and covers his face. She kisses the inside of his thigh. As she did the night after he drug her into the freezing Pacific. She felt like such a part of the world. That sounds stupid, but she can’t think of a better way to say it.

He pulls her onto the couch, trying to take control. “Relax.” She gets on top. She rolls her body against his. She kisses his neck. His ear. His chest. Playfully she bites him. His eyes are wet. She’s afraid she’s hurt him, but their body--or bodies, rather, still move.

“God,” he says.

“What?”

“Just this.”

She laces her fingers underneath his neck and, leaning down next to his ear, asks, “What about this?”

What he says next sounds a lot like I love you. She wants to ask what he said. But if she heard right, what then? What is she required to say? So she doesn't ask. She rests upon his chest. He smells like he did the first night she stayed over, like mandarin and cardamom and the sour smell of the afterward. She plants her lips on his chest, conveying what she doesn't want to say out loud.

All kisses are calibrated. That’s the line. He doesn't remember what book it’s from, nor the author. Saunders or Russo, he thinks, maybe Shteyngart. I love you just rattled out of him. He didn't mean to. He means it--but he didn't mean to. Instead of saying anything, she kisses his chest for a long time. He can feel the depth, the range of her affection, but not just affection, no it’s more than that. It’s womanly love. It’s tender love. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”
Sep 2014 · 952
The Soldier Returns Home
JJ Hutton Sep 2014
Shreds of newspaper and pages from magazines
zigzagged toward the earth, feathering from the
high apartments down to the obsidian street.

Someone signed the treaty.

A brass band played behind a closed door.
Women, women, women.
More women than I'd ever seen in one space
shuffled or danced passed, twirling beads,
blowing kisses.

I was still ***** from the trenches.

An old man patted my back. A wordless, knowing nod.
Knowledge he understood and seemed to express, with time,
I would too. But in that moment,
in cheery Paris, all I felt: parceled and sold.

My body had become a vessel. This is something
you hear people say, "The body is a vessel,"
but I learned it, knew it; it was real to me.
I saw landmines and bullets have their way.
Boys, eighteen or nineteen, covered in ****
and puke and bile. I knew what bile was,
really knew.

A waiter outside a restaurant rushed over to me,
handed me a glass of wine. He looked at me like
he wanted me to say something.

It's just a vessel. This wasn't defeatism. This was.
The first time I got shot that's when I really
knew. I took one in the shoulder, went out the back,
shattered my collar bone. Pieces of me were missing.

A little girl, mousy and brunette, much like my own
niece, wrapped her arms around my leg as I walked down
the street. Eased her off. Set her feet back on the ground.
She curled her thumb and forefinger together with both hands, a pantomime of a pair of glasses. I did the same.

She lived entirely in her body.
She's endlessly fascinated by how her fingers bent and straightened,
by how far and fast her legs could carry her, the uncompromising
world, a child's ownership of time.

I wasn't floating above my body. It wasn't a bird in a dream.

When I returned home I was always off to the side, suffering
each sensation and conversation obliquely. This wasn't negative.
In a way this was a freedom: I was not a body; I was shapeless,
shifting, liquid in the hands of perceived reality and aging moments.

The girl took my hand, led me down a series of alleys until we reached
the Seine. She pointed. Men lit fireworks on the dock. They ran a safe distance.

Lines of incarnadine light shot upwards. One stream, however, fired crooked, almost a forty-five degree angle. When the fireworks sounded, all but the stray erupted invisible to the viewers, tucked away within the grey clouds. The rogue, much to the crowd's delight, exploded and scattered just above the water. A collective Ahhh. A soft fizzle.
Sep 2014 · 1.3k
Midtown
JJ Hutton Sep 2014
He's giving her a piggyback ride across Harvey Avenue.
She's barefoot, her legs tightly wrapped around his waist.
In her hands a killer pair of heels click against each other.

She whispers something to him and laughs.
I want to know what it is--but to know would
unravel both space and time--it would make this
Monday night, in this anodyne, red-brick district
partly mine. Walking past, I let them go with a nod
and a "beautiful night."
Aug 2014 · 1.6k
The Name
JJ Hutton Aug 2014
What's my name?
Take that universal,
that yeah yeah, that
ohm and play it backwards.
I'm that undercurrent,
the invisible force that pushes the hand, that pushes
the red button, that levels seven stories--for?

What's my name?
Take that post-post-modern literature,
that self-serving academia-meets-nihilism,
and think as far opposite, Herculaneum/Uruk,
and you might just find it, my name,
carved in Aramaic or Latin in a dark wet cave,
forgotten, misspelled in a dead language.

What's my name?
Look just past that buffering screen,
right before the pixelated beheading starts.
I'm between the zeroes and ones in that heaven-place,
the Internet, where people go when the final death takes.

What's my name?
Take that ever so subtle airport terminal muzak,
and listen for the counterpoint, the competing rhythm.
It, my name, swirls and mingles with that ever flowing
crowd, weary and reduced to numbered tickets and departure times,
speaking fifty different languages, a flattened and recurring Babel.
Take that ohm, and play it, play it backwards.
Aug 2014 · 1.3k
Harbinger
JJ Hutton Aug 2014
The schoolteacher had an affair in Santa Fe.
She was a schoolteacher and a tourist.
And an affair adds dimension.
It makes a place more than memory.
The notion of it inverts.
Santa Fe now resided inside of the schoolteacher.
The city had a cracked voice and blonde hair
and a slightly sagging belly and pictures
of a New York niece on its phone and
an ambivalent relationship with combing its hair
and an irrational fear of left turns.
She expected young artists with vague academic worldviews,
chainsmokers talking loudly about point of view and Heidegger.
Instead the artists were retirees, painting nothing but landscapes
of red earth, attempting to improve on the natural world.
The schoolteacher did not like this kind of art.
It was trivial.
Wholly unnecessary.
Then the blonde artist walked up behind her
in a stucco gallery. He said, "You hate it don't you?"

"Yes."

She turned. He appeared to be in his early forties.

"Tourists never understand it."

"I'm not a tourist."

"You are. You've never been within the land."

"Don't talk to me like this."

"This is how women prefer to be talked to."

"Not this woman."

"Even you. You want to be told you're wrong.
'I look fat' No. 'Everybody hates me.' That's not true.
I'm skipping the stage where we agree. I'm going
straight to the stage where we are opposites.
Plus and minus."

"The part where we *****."

"Or connect or lose ourselves."

"I bet you live in a loft. Dozens of half-finished
canvases strewn about. Dabs of dried paint on
newspapers."

"I live in my big sister's basement. She isn't home."

"There's not enough wine in the world."

"That's where you're wrong," he said.
Jul 2014 · 939
Requiem for Holy Jane
JJ Hutton Jul 2014
The immediacy of wolves
Send her home, home
Unborn benevolence
Undone pasture lifted
Dust-howled into hell
Bright iron and tongue tied
At the end of not all--but
Something
Something
Something
And it means so much
Much much more than it should
This something
And leave it at that:
Mystic bliss
And leave
Leave the voice of the prophet
to be noised and white
The IV drip
You used to wait on summer
Thou shalt not
Not anymore
Jul 2014 · 1.6k
Gaza
JJ Hutton Jul 2014
You can get used to anything--merciless debt, infidelity, death--anything, the photojournalist thinks as he stares out his open hotel window to the beach where two boys lay covered with white sheets.

The bombs fell an hour earlier. Upon impact they didn't so much make a sound as absorb it, syphoning off laughter over mimosas in the first floor cafe, blurring the start-stop of traffic into a shapeless background hiss. He was out there when it happened, on the beach, walking his morning walk.

From one hundred yards he took in the flash, the upheaval of sand, reaching for heaven and then, all at once, subject to gravity's retreat. He knew there would be a second bomb, like when you're cutting a tomato, and you look at your finger then to the knife, and think, I'm going to cut myself, and a couple slices later fulfill the prophecy.

He didn't rush to the boys. He got his camera out of the bag, grabbed the lens, adjusted for distance, for the wane morning light. Boys screamed and ran. He wasn't sure how many, four, five. The second bomb hit. One boy, smaller than the others, rode the sand upwards and back down. The photojournalist thought he tried to get up, but he wasn't sure.

He knew better than to rush over. An unidentified person pointing a vague object at the children on a satellite feed would garner backlash. So he waited, surveying the slight waves break, the gulls continuing flight.

Parents, people he assumed to be parents, moaned in an unfamiliar language. Their sounds though, both guttural and sharp, said all. He approached. A man picked up the smallest boy, his lifeless limbs, doll-like and pierced with shrapnel, hung off to the side.

He took twenty-five shots from behind the lifeguard's post, using the telephoto zoom. He lowered the camera and made eye contact with the father.

Now, in his hotel room, there's an urgent knock at the door. A voice shouts. The email sends. He drops his laptop in the bag with the rest of the gear. A taxi pulls into the roundabout outside.

When he lands he's not sure if he's fractured his ankle or just sprained it. He limps to the door, climbs in, says, "Airport."

"Maa?" the driver says.

The photojournalist punches the seat. The father of the boy, along with three other men, approach.

"Maa?"
Jul 2014 · 1.8k
Sexi Pepsi
JJ Hutton Jul 2014
The troubadour planted his last name between
a she-vegan's legs in San Marcos;
rambled north to that country of love, Oklahoma City,
where he took hits of windowsill acid every three hours
for a week straight.

To escape, to begin.

He spent his nights in the St. Cloud Hotel, trying to
sleep on a carpeted floor. He saw a color between
lavender and orange, nameless and impossible to
recreate. He knew all, including he'd forget all.
He shared a room with two high fashion,
burgundy-lipped lesbians, Viv and Jean, and
one night, the last night the troubadour, our troubadour,
was allowed to stay, Jean went out for some fresh air,
code for a cigarette.

"She never smokes just one," Viv said, little Oprahs reflected in her eyes from the plasma screen. She lay on her stomach on the bed,
atop a jungle green comforter. For your discretion and for the discretion of those before you.

Viv brought him between her legs.

"Gentle. Gentle," she said.

The troubadour thought of those Pepsi Challenge commercials as he tongued her ****. A lesbian has an edge when it comes to oral pleasure. Across the nation more people prefer Pepsi. She's got the same parts, sure, but as the troubadour wordlessly recited the alphabet with his tongue to her, he felt confident Jean hadn't put in this kind of effort, not lately anyways. And so what if he's Coke? The troubadour preferred Coke. Viv snagged a handful of his hair, "Don't stop," she said. "Don't stop."

And it all ended, as drug-addled, hetero-on-**** escapades always do: abruptly and with an "I think you should leave before she comes back," a "But sweetheart, this, us, I think this means something," an "I like girls," a "But," an "I just needed an edge," and later that night as he marveled at the  brilliance of the common streetlight, tripping his *** off on his last hit of LSD, he empathized.
JJ Hutton Jul 2014
Rachel Ray is speaking.

The room in which he lays, passed out, continues on without his permission. Dead moths feather down from the less-than-steady window unit. A cockroach delights in the cabinet. The peanut butter the man swore he wouldn't touch, on account of his lack of self-discipline, self-denial, self-awareness--maybe just self--is not sealed, the lid at an acute angle, the cockroach rubbing its antennae together.

Gluten-free fish fry with a modern, chic potato salad, Rachel Ray says.
Easy to make on a work night or after the kids get out of soccer practice.
I like easy. Do you like easy? What about fast? That's what I thought.

The power flickers as the power always does when someone on the first floor of the apartment building starts a load of laundry. The man does not stir; he dreams.

But more than that, more weighty a subject than one two three lovers or falling from heaven, the muck of common dreams, submerges the dreamer.

The scene is this: The man is a boy again, three years younger than his waking self. He is in military file with boys his age. It is raining; it is night, the sky a starless miasma of electric blue.

There are men, old men, flat-topped and heavy-browed, walking the rows, handing out hammers. The dreamer receives his.

Now, a man the dreamer knows--just knows--to be the general says, lift up your hammers. On the count of three you will strike the boy in front of you. If you should survive, congratulations. You're now a man. If you shouldn't, we say thank you and goodbye.

One, the general says.

The dreamer does not lift his hammer. Won't lift his hammer.

Two, the general says.

In anticipation of three, boys start striking, skulls fracture, an odd harmony rides the air, hundreds of arms bringing down hundreds of hammers, hundreds of minds punctured, spilling hundreds of future glories and failures.

The dreamer still stands, hammer to his side. His peers groan at his feet. He is alone.

The general, taking long, purposeful strides, approaches the dreamer. He, the general, lifts the hammer in his hand, and with a singular word, three, strikes the dreamer in the forehead.


And it's just as simple as that, Rachel Ray says, presenting the boiled potatoes, baptized in mustard and vinegar, topped beautifully with celery and finely chopped shallots. Now back to our fish.
Jun 2014 · 1.6k
The Guardrail
JJ Hutton Jun 2014
When he went through the windshield, amid the shrill fracture of glass and above the curling guardrail, he did not think of Junebug or his mother or his boyhood summers at Lake Tenkiller. He thought only of deep-grooved ritual: get in, turn the key, press power on the radio, turn the air to 1, and buckle in.

He saw the guardrail. He saw the guardrail and knew, or half-knew, what would come next.

He headed straight for it, going sixty, sixty-five.

He used to play a game to break up the monotony of interstate travel, back when he worked the night shift at Wolverine. He'd close his eyes for as long as he could while driving. He began with five seconds then ten, no peeking, eventually making it an entire minute, speeding down I-44 alongside the eighteen-wheelers and the farming crowd. It was around 5 a.m., sure, but a minute still.

Before he cut the ignition he turned off the air and the radio, always. His dad told him it made it easier on a vehicle when you started it. A mechanic later told him that wasn't true. Not even remotely. He still did it.

He saw the guardrail and thought of it in the same realm as driving blind, a game of chicken ending inevitably in forfeit although victory and loss weren't clearly defined, only the edge tangible, the heart rate going mad, the blood rushing through the tributaries of the body.

He thought brake. He even said it out loud, alone in the car. The air was on 1. The radio was on NPR, some story about "hacking" your closet. He saw the guardrail. His foot pressed down on the gas harder. He wondered what it'd be like to fly over the edge then he was flying over the edge.

He glided above the first snag of rocks, small cuts on his cheeks burning against gravity's drag. The car did not. While the engine continued to hum, pieces fell around him, shards of glass and jagged bits of the valance and bumper. The radio played Muzak. They were between segments.

He turned the air to 1. He hit the power button on the radio. Why didn't he buckle the seatbelt?

His screams came out in long monotonal bursts, automatic and not quite human. Turn the ignition, power button, turn **** to 1, click.

He didn't think about what he'd hit first, tree or rock. There was still some fifty feet to fall before that decision was made for him. He didn't wonder if the car would land on top of him. He got in. He turned the key. Radio on. Air to 1. Then he clicked, didn't he?

Marie didn't call tonight. Marie. Her shape started to form in his mind, waiting for him on the couch in that stupid shawl, her face lit, a bright blue, by the glow of the television screen.

A tree, he hit a tree first.

The rough bark tore at his face, chest and arm. He could feel the tree bend then repel him. He took a branch to the rib and continued his fall to the stony earth. He hit the ground and kept falling.
Jun 2014 · 998
All Ready
JJ Hutton Jun 2014
On a flybuzz afternoon in late June, the unshaven man in corduroy everything ashes into a shoe beside the bed. He takes another drag. He half hums, half sings "Fight this Generation." Outside he hears a car alarm. He looks through the blinds. Not his. An unopened letter rests on the night stand. He looks at it and then doesn't. His phone rings for the ninth or tenth time. He picks it up and throws it at the wall. Pieces with names like RF amplifier, microprocessor, and flash memory chip divide and shower onto the hardwood floor.

An hour and half a pack of cigarettes pass. She fiddles with her key in the door.  A few failed turns then she walks into the living room, into the bedroom.

She looks at the broken phone.

"At least I told you," she says.

"I didn't read it."

"I don't care. I already told you. That was just to soften the blow, a nice thing."

"Look for the splinters. You might see where they come out."

"We already talked about this. You said you wanted to stay together. You know and I know this wasn't completely my fault."

"Yeah."

"Yeah? Yeah. Absolutely. You've got to take care of yourself. I said nice things in the letter."

"I'm not going to read the letter."

She opens the window by the bed to vent the smoke. There's another siren in the distance. Someone protected, someone hunted.

"Your life is selected," he says.

"So select yours, too."

He runs his fingers through his hair, pushing the matted mess out of his eyes.

"For you to have the life you want, I give up the one I want."

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself. We've already talked about this. We've already had this fight."

"I want to have it again."

"Why?"

"I just need to."

"You're saying the same things."

"Maybe in a general sense, but I feel like I'm saying them better."

"I'm not going to listen to you refine your arguments for the rest of my life. We already got past this."

"Already is a strange word."

She turns her back to him and heads into the living room. "Everything is strange when you think too much, when you refine," she says through the wall.

"It's something that happened before or something that came too soon yet sounds like something inclusive, all ready to fight, to die. It's strange."

"You're not ready," she says. "I'm going to stay at Amy's again tonight."

She doesn't slam the front door. She eases it closed, locks it, and leaves.

"All ready," he says to himself. "All ready."
Jun 2014 · 1.7k
A Little Can-Do Attitude
JJ Hutton Jun 2014
a thigh gap
a peering spine
a cat eye
a cerulean highlighter
all of this and more
all of this, yours
21 mind-blowing *** tricks
5 ways to convince your doc you've ADHD
all of this and more
hack your closet
hack your pantry
your cellar door
all of this, yours
an e-thank you note
Facebook status remorse
an it's complicated
all of this and more
self-checkout
automatic hand dryer
automatic towel dispenser
automatic doors
all of this, yours
ask Siri where to bury the body
ask Jeeves where to buy the Molly
Google "the triumph of death"
and salute it with Bacardi
all of this
all of this
42 celebrities who used to have braces
8 Instagram hotties we love
42 gin recipes sure to inspire envy
all of this and more
how to love yourself
how to be a gentleman
how to make sure you marry the one
all of this yours
******* that read Angel Off Duty
boxers that read Reporting for Duty
ride the escalator all the way to
Jesus's heaven
fist bump Little Richard
and that kid from Malcolm in the Middle
watch St. Peter wave all the **** sorority girls
who've recently died in drunk driving accidents
to the front of the line
breathe, in from the nose out from the nose,
pick up a copy of Men's Health and read
an article titled
69 ways to incorporate gravy into the bedroom TONIGHT
all of this and more
all of this, yours
Jun 2014 · 1.5k
The Fictive Dream
JJ Hutton Jun 2014
The young novelist wrote in his rented room, a claustrophobic nook under the stairwell, where the ceiling sobbed dust each time the owner hurried down to work or hurried up for a forgotten prescription. Shelves crammed with the owner's yearbooks and photo albums lined the walls. He typed at a long oak desk. On which, he had one plant, a gardenia, white flowers in full bloom, and a quote by Buddha on an index card in a four-by-six-inch frame. "You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."

The sun had quit for the day. He got up and poured out his cold coffee in the bathroom sink across the hall. He dried the mug with a paper towel. Then to the kitchen, where he pressed the button on the box of Merlot, filling the recycled mug. The denouement was coming together. But he hadn't hit his stride, tapped into that secret space where words flow with natural rhythm and proper grace. His hungry or starving or emaciated mother character--he struggled with the diction, the balance between subtlety and a Coca-Cola slinger's criminal word abuse--would decide to eat her baby. Not the ******, the denouement. Critics would **** as only critics could.

He drank one cup of wine while standing in the kitchen then refilled and stepped back into his room. The plant and the Buddha quote were suggestions by his mom. She didn't like him spending so much time alone. Time alone killed her uncle. The young novelist argued it was an indiscriminate heart attack. No, his mother said, it's from all that cheese he would eat. Cheese, his mother contended, was the unitary measure of loneliness, killing you one comforting slice at a time.

Google the symbolism, his mother said of the gardenia.

Secret love.

Oh good.

That's just the first result.

I always loved them.

That was only the first. I bet they're part of the funerary tradition.

Your father used to get them once a year for Pastor Mike. Do you remember that? Around Christmas time. It was your father's way of saying we appreciate your work.

Secret love.

The quote made just about as much sense. A devout--dare he think staunch--Methodist since she was old enough to disagree and berate, his mother's selection of a Buddha aphorism begged suspicion. The young novelist assumed this was an appeal to his academic worldview, a panoramic ideology that protected him from having to value or defend anything, really. Buddhism is **** electronic dance music; Methodism is vaudeville, tired and exploitative. And if his mother was trying to be cool, that disgusted him. But if his mother was trying to meet him halfway, that excited him.

That's it, he thought, the mug now half-empty. The mother is not hungry, not starving, nor emaciated. It's a loving mother. A mother that knows the lows of living. She eats her young in an act of compromise, to protect, to prevent confusion and isolation, hell even Kraft Singles.

He sat and scooted up his chair. He wrote in a fever, a frenetic fictive dream, page by page, scene by scene through the night.
Jun 2014 · 2.1k
The Middle of Nowhere
JJ Hutton Jun 2014
I.

Up the stairs Suzann without an E went.
8" X 10" bright white rectangles dotted
the yellowing and dusty walls,
clean reminders of bad family photos.
Her parents, Bob and Theresa,
had picked out wallpaper. Lilacs
and vines and oranges. Why? She
didn't know.

She tossed her backpack on the floor
at the foot of her bed. Her senior book
was still on the night stand. Charity and
Faith, her sometimes friends, had spent
the last two weeks filling out every page
of theirs, printing hazy images on cheap
photo paper at their homes and sliding them
into the plastic holders or taping them to
the pages without.

They coerced boys they
had liked or still liked or would like if to
fill out pages. When the boys simply signed
their names or names and football numbers,
they guilted them into writing more. Give
me something to remember you by.

Suzann liked to look at only one boy,
Casey Stephen Fuchs, pronounced "Fox,"
though you know that's just what the family
said. She didn't want him to write in her
senior book. She enjoyed the space between
them. She knew what her peers didn't:
she was seventeen.
She knew she didn't know
the right words yet. She knew the heart-bursting
flutters she felt were temporary--enjoy them, she thought,
shut up and enjoy them.

Her parents set her curfew at 10:30. So
this Friday, like most Fridays, she stays
home.

She opens ****** in the City of Mystics,
a novel she's burned through. Fifty pages
or so left. She likes detectives. The methodical
stalking, the idiosyncratic theories and philosophies
that allow them to connect dot after dot.

She shuts her eyes and sends herself walking down
the streets of New York, where hot dog vendors
whistle and say, "Nice legs." She flags down a cab.
She sees Casey across the street. What are you doing
here, stranger? She waves the cab on.
The driver, a brown-skinned man from some vague
country, throws his arms up. "C'mon."

She cuts across the traffic, dodging a white stretch limo,
a black Hummer, a hearse.

Casey's straight hair hangs over his left eye. It's both
melodramatic and troubled. There's a small shift
at the corners of his lips, the corners of lips, this
is a detail she writes of often in her journal--why?

She can almost hear Casey ask her, "What brings you here?"

"Business."

"What kind?"

"None of yours."

He takes this as an entry for a kiss. Not yet, handsome. No no.

"Make whatever you want for dinner," her mom shouts up the stairs.
"There's stuff for nachos if you want nachos. Some luncheon meat too.
Only one piece of bread though."

"Okay."

"Alright. Just whenever. Dad and I are going to go ahead."

"Okay."

"Alright."

Get me out of here. Suzann's whole life is small: small town,
small family, small church, all packed with small brained, short-sighted people. She wants New York or Chicago. She wants a badge--no not a badge. She'll be a vigilante. "You're not a cop," they'll tell her.

"Thank God," she'll say. "If I were a cop then there'd be nobody protecting these streets."

II.

She's read mysteries set in the middle of nowhere, small towns like her own Kiev, Missouri. They always feel phony. Not enough churches.
Not enough bored dads hitting on cheerleaders.
No curses. Every small town has a curse. Kiev's?
Every year someone in the senior class dies.

As far back as anyone she knew could remember
anyways. Drunk driving, falling asleep at the wheel,
texting while driving, all that crap is what was usually
blamed.

This smelly boy named Todd Louden moved out of Kiev
in the fall semester of his senior year a couple years ago.
Suzann was a freshman.

A few months after he was gone, people started saying
he'd killed himself with a shotgun. First United Methodist
added his family to the prayer list. They had a little service out
by this free-standing wall by the library where he used
to play wall ball during lunch. People cried. Suzann didn't know
anyone that hung out with him. Maybe that's why
they cried, unreconcilable guilt--that's what her dad
said.

Then in the spring Todd moved back. The cross planted
by the wall with his name confused him.
He'd just been staying with his grandma. Nothing crazy.
The churches never said anything about that. He was
just the smelly kid again. Well until late-April when
he got ran over by a drunk or texting driver.
They hadn't even pulled up the cross by the wall ball site
yet.

III.

You call it the middle of nowhere, a place where the roads didn't have proper names until a couple years back, roads now marked with green signs and white numbers like 3500 and 1250, numbers the state mandated so the ambulances can find your dying ***--well if the signs haven't been rendered unreadable by .22 rounds.

The roads used to be known only to locals. They'd give them names like the Jogline or Wilzetta or Lake Road, reserved knowledge for the sake of identifying outsiders. But that day is fading.

What makes nowhere somewhere? What grants space a name?

The dangerous element. The drifter that hops a fence, carrying a shotgun in a tote bag. Violence gave us O.K. Corral. Violence gave us Waco. Historians get nostalgic for those last breaths of innocence. The quiet. The storm. The dead quiet.

IV.

It's March and not a single senior has died.
So when she hears the front door open
around 2 a.m., Suzann isn't surprised.
She doesn't think it's ego that's made
her believe it'd be her to die--but it is.

She hears the fridge door open.
Cabinets open.
Cabinets close.
She hears ice drop into
the glass. Liquid poured.

She clicks her tongue in
her dry mouth. She puts
a hand to her chest. Her
heart beats slow.
She rests her head on
the pillow. It's heavy
yet empty, yet full--
not of thoughts.

She can't remember the name
of any shooting victims.
She remembers the shooters.
Jared Lee Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho,
James Eagan Holmes, Adam Lanza.
No victims.

She hears the intruder set the glass on the counter.
He doesn't walk into the living room.
He starts up the stairs. His steps are
soft, deliberate. What does he want?
Her death. She knows this. He is only a vehicle.
Nameless until. Has he done this before?
Fast or slow?

He's just outside her room, and she doesn't
remember a single victim's name. She hears
a bag unzip. She hears a click.

If he shoots her, Suzann Dunken, there's
no way the newspaper will get her name
right. Her name may or may not scroll
across CNN's marquee for a day or two.
If it does, it won't be spelled correctly.
This makes her move. Wrapping
her comforter around her body, she
tip-toes to the wall next to her door.

She hears a doorknob turn.
It's not hers.

He's going into her parents' bedroom.
They're both heavy sleepers.
She opens her own door slowly.
She steps into the hall. She sees the man.
The man does not see her.
She see the man and grabs a family
portrait. The man does not see her,
and he creeps closer to her parents.
She sees the man standing then she
sees the man falling after she strikes him
with the corner of the family portrait.
The man sees her as he scrambles to get
his bearing. She strikes him, again with
the corner. This time she connects with his eye.
A light comes on. "Suzann," her mother says.
He tries to aim the gun. Again she strikes.
He screams. He reaches for his eyes with
his left hand. Now with the broad side she
swings. She connects. She connects again.
The man shoves her off, stumbles to his feet.
By this time, her dad reaches her side.
One strong push and the man crashes into
the wall outside the room, putting a hole
in the drywall.

He recovers and retreats down the stairs
and out the door into blackness.

Her mother phones the police.
She pants more than speaks
into the receiver.

"Suzann," her dad says. "Sweetheart."

Suzann looks at the portrait, taken at JC Penny when
she was in the sixth grade. The glass is cracked.
She removes the back. She pulls out the photo.

"Did you get a good look at him?"

This photo. Her mother let her do anything
she wanted to her hair before they took it.
So she, of course, dyed it purple.

"That's right," her mother says.
"It's about half a mile east of the
3500 and 1250 intersection. Uh-huh."

Her dad sits down next to her.

"How long do you think it'll take them
to find us?"

There's a shift at the corners of her mouth,
and she nods, just nods.
JJ Hutton May 2014
I was sitting at the computer
trying to think of a way
to describe a woman's
*** as anything other
than a woman's ***
and there were
marlboro black
cigarettes on my
creaking desk
and I had a fifth
of whiskey on the
windowsill and
I rubbed my forehead
and thought of fruits--
apples and oranges--
no, no that's overdone
and I thought of animals--
elephants and horses--
but, again, no, I'd
come across as one of
those sick ******* that
go to the zoo in  
stained trench coats
and rub themselves against
the chain link
and Eve would walk in
beautiful girl with short
hair and a sharp mind
she'd ask what I was
writing about and
I'd say women
but the women were
never her, she pointed out
and I'd say I don't want to
jinx this, what we have,
you know? and she'd say okay,
okay

I'd get lit up every evening and
I'd text other women
I'd tell them about the shapes
of their ***** and the sizes
of their brains and they'd
usually say uh huh yeah
but I was fishing, always
fishing for that compliment
that sliver of hope, that
unsatisfied wife
when you're trying to be
Bukowski you'll throw
yourself under the bus
again
and
again
for what?
a story, trivial and base,
and that good woman,
that best woman, that Eve,
one day while making breakfast
she'll say to the eggs in the skillet
I can't take this **** anymore
and you'll say so don't
and she'll say fine
and she'll walk out the front door
wearing your t-shirt
you'll feel free for a week
and alone for two years.
May 2014 · 1.9k
This One's a Freebie
JJ Hutton May 2014
Poured into the tight pants,
the grey ones with the zipper
that's afraid of heights, and
guess what? They're really
wrinkled or very wrinkled
or **** wrinkled--but they're
the tight grey ones, assumed
the thighs and calves would
handle the ironing.
Ten minutes late,
usually more. The clock
in the car, the red beat-up
'02 Cavalier, is not behind
or ahead an hour, no it's
set to some vague time
because lateness has
replaced time so why
even worry. Blood pressure, etc.
Spray on the cologne kept
in the car. Could look
up ingredients in cologne
to describe the smell
but that would take
away a little something.
So say: it smells really good
or very good or **** good--
and move on.
Walk inside, unbathed and
sun burnt--well not completely
unbathed. Washed the hair
because it's a puffy, erratic
downer otherwise.
It's all about appearance,
the bosslady said when
she made the hire.
Slipped a little.
Big woop.
Cold called the Southside
Veterinary Clinic.
They'll allow a visit.
Pack it all in the bag,
the mouse pads,
the koozies, the actual
thing to be sold:
SHEENY PUPPY, some
really heavy or very heavy
or **** heavy duty
coat treatment for canines.
The first one is on me, is said
as the package is handed over.
The vet wouldn't buy. Not then.
Probably not ever.
Ate an eighty-calorie bag of cookies.
Drank some coffee.
Stopped at the gas station, the
Conoco on 15th and Kelly,
and couldn't decide between
the fun size or the party size.
This is called the spectrum of grief.
Bought a pack of cigarettes.
Smoked three really quick
or very quick or **** quick,
like Mom might show up any
second and then tossed the pack
and the lighter.
Done with those. Forever.
This time. Or that time.
There was $20.89 in the
checking account and
a fresh girlfriend reminding
that today is one month.
Dinner. Dinner and wine.
$20.89.
You can sell only if you believe in the product.
Be really blunt or very blunt or **** blunt.
Stress is an art.
Create FUD (Fear, uncertainty and doubt).
It’s all about the presentation.

She's fresh and funny and so
self-conscious when she eats
spaghetti. Can't get
by with spaghetti
for the one-month.
No. No. No.
Be on fire and inspiring.
If you don’t know the answer, ask a question.
Answer inquiries concisely and loudly.
Humor is ****.
You can always be better. You can never be worse.

Call Mom, donate plasma or take the Xbox back.
Is this one forever?
Does forever mean dinner and wine
are necessary?
Or does forever mean that
the spectacle is frivolous?
In the cabinet at work
someone left blueberry bagels.
There's a microwave and a tub
of margarine that only
recently expired.
Apr 2014 · 2.2k
Living God
JJ Hutton Apr 2014
Hayley Fienne scattered herself a year ago today. A hammer. A trigger. I sent flowers to a funeral home in Chandler, OK. I called. Said, "I can't imagine what you are going through" and something about how time turns the past into a form of fiction. DeLillo wrote that, I think.

Her mom said, "That's not true. That's not true."

And I wouldn't have said it if I hadn't known Hayley like I knew Hayley. She used to do these oil paintings on the nights she knew she wasn't going to class in the morning. I've a layman's knowledge of visual art but even I could tell her work was real. As opposed to what? I don't know. You just felt it. It kicked you in the gut, left you spinning around the room, asking every ******* in tweed, "Can I get some water?"

There was one large canvas in particular that stuck out. She called it "Dissolution."

The work depicted a seemingly amorphous spiral of headlight blues and star whites against the murky black of space. In the dead center of the piece she painted the face of a young man, broken into quadrants. The face was nothing more than a faint veil. If you scanned the canvas, you'd miss it.

When she showed the piece at a gallery event, featuring the work of outgoing seniors, I asked her who the man was.

"It's Jesus."

"You gave him a shave."

"It's actual Jesus. It's 'I'm thinking of converting to Buddhism' Jesus. It's lonely, masturbatory Jesus. It's the Jesus who stares at a ceiling fan wondering why Peter won't text him back," she said. "And above all, it's the Jesus God asks a little too much of, the Jesus that calls in sick."

I said I was unaware such a Jesus existed.

"Exists. Dealing with impossible quotas, he has to shave."

"I think your Jesus looks like you."

"He is."



Now it's a year later. I find comfort in the painting, allowing the erratic brush strokes, both fleeing and advancing, to lull me to--what? Just lull, I grant, aimless and asking answerless questions.

I think about her at the end, at her end-- but not the violence of it all. No, I think of the release.

No intended romance. I simply wonder how she would have wanted that final let-go in life's calendar marked by letting-goes to wrap. I imagine her body separating from her mind, her mind separating from her memories, her memories separating from her name. I think of her matter fractured and dispersed, directed where the universe, in its imperialistic expanse, requires.

I call her mom. Say, "I can't believe it's been a year" and something about how outer space makes me think of Hayley.

Her mom says, "I don't understand."



After I hang up I look at the painting. I look at Hayley's Jesus. And I think in memories, memories that may or may not have happened, I think of them in my chest--not my head. I think about mercy. I think about the infinite. And is there a place where they intersect?
Apr 2014 · 2.9k
Light Pollution
JJ Hutton Apr 2014
When I lived in the city, night, true night, never came.
The natural day gave way to the artificial day,
a day made possible by streetlight, by humming billboard.
With sick pinks and near-white greys, the early hours
hiccuped away. I slept or didn't. And this time in my life,
as any time in my life, is marked by a woman.

I won't say much about her. She was a performer,
and I've never been a steady fan of much of anything.
So when I kissed her the last time, I kissed her like it
was the last time, a kiss calibrated to say, "It's been."
When she kissed me the last time, she kissed me
like she didn't know it was the last time,
a kiss not so much a kiss as a mouth half-opened eternity,
where the sun didn't shine, nor was there night.
JJ Hutton Apr 2014
His navy blue sports coat with brass buttons appeared to have been folded, again and again, as if to create ornate origami then unfolded to wear every Tuesday and Friday at his job at the Xerox call center in Colorado Springs. He kept his small, stubby fingers in his pockets, uncapping and recapping pens or fiddling with keys. As he passed by co-workers, adjusting his body to make adequate room in the narrow path between spines of cubicles, he would nod and say an almost audible hello. This was difficult for him, but he was trying something he'd read in a self-help book called Going Up.

And go up he had, ever so marginally. But up still. Despite his translucent blonde mustache, which was quite thick but only visible at a certain angle, under a discriminating light, despite his wrinkled clothes, despite the tight, Brillo pad, curly mess of hair atop his head, he'd stepped up from customer service representative to quality specialist, much to the yawning disbelief of his former spinemates.

Craig didn't have a girlfriend, but he had an ex, and, though he tried to never bring her up when talking with a woman in the break room, usually Kaley or Jewelz (spelled that way on her name badge), he did, nearly every time. He didn't know if this was an attempt to relate a yes, I've seen a woman naked in real life--so or evidence that he had, at least at one point, value.

He and twelve other quality specialists shared an office on the east side of the center. In each call he screened he made sure the customer service representative demonstrated the Three Cs: Courtesy, Commit, and Close. He no longer had to hand deliver critiques to reps because H.R. deemed it a liability risk with all the death threats he received. Instead, he sent out emails with no mention of his name. They read something like this:

Dear Customer Service Representative 216442,

Upon review of call number 100043212, which took place on 03/12/12, the Quality department noticed that while you did a super job of being courteous (great use of customer's name!) and closing (we love that you didn't just say, "Thank you for being a Xerox customer, etc., etc.," but instead said, "At Xerox it's our absolute pleasure to serve you." How true! We love that in quality), we noticed you over committed in your commitment statement. During the call, you tell the customer, "I'll have that problem fixed for you in no time." While that is ideal, there are situations in which you will not be able to solve the customer's problem. So instead of saying with certainty that you will have a solution, say, "Let me review your account and see what OPTIONS we have for you today." This tells the customer that you are concerned, yet you do not promise that which you cannot deliver.

Quality Control Team
CS Springs


Craig quit smoking two or three times a week, a hundred or 150 times a year. At 26, he woke up to wake up; he worked to work, to say yes, I have a job, to say yes, it's unbelievable how much of my money Uncle Sam gets, to say, I'm saving for a car or a new place or a full-size bed; he went to the bar after work on Thursdays and Saturdays to go to the bar on Thursdays and Saturdays; he'd say hello to say hello. Today was tomorrow is yesterday.

At the foot of Ute Valley park he lived in a home not all that different from where your mother sleeps, a white split-level with charcoal shutters and a two-car garage--though Craig slept where your mother would not: in the unfinished basement, for the home was not his but his brother's. His brother had a nice wife and a nice three-year-old boy, and they ate pizza on Wednesdays, went to the park, weather permitting, every day after supper for a nice time.

Craig observed this more than participated. He'd listen to blocks fall, his brother stepping on action figures, his brother's wife cooking--all from underneath them. As the floorboards creaked he committed each cohabitant's gait to memory. He vultured deli meat and low-fat slices of cheese out of the fridge when no one was in the kitchen.  

At night he'd drink a bottle of his ex-girlfriend's favorite wine, just to watch it go empty. He'd fall asleep on top of the covers and dream, not without some anguish, **** dreams of her.
Mar 2014 · 1.1k
muh-men-toh
JJ Hutton Mar 2014
Mom shot Jake's cat
with the screen door open,
with dirtied snow covering the
gravel drive. And Jake, bless
his little soul, watched from
the door frame as Dad took
over, snagging the bloodied
mess by the tail and dumping
it in the waiting grave. Mom
told Jake that's the way it is
as she opened the .410's ejection
port and deposited the shell into
her hand. She gave it to him.
A memento. Jake didn't know this
word at the time but years later,
four to be exact, he'd look up
memento for a spelling test,
and think of Dad piling loose dirt,
tiny sticks, and snow on the cat
while he, Jake, stared at the
discharged shotgun shell,
still warm in his hand.
Mar 2014 · 1.2k
The Butcher
JJ Hutton Mar 2014
None of the cuts of meat looked familiar to me. Eve had sent me out for T-bones that afternoon. Her folks were coming by to see the new place in the evening, and, after hearing good things about New Bhaktapur from one of her girlfriends, there was no other place to go.

A thick layer of dust covered the glass display case of boneless and shapeless red sheets. Each piece had been cut thin. There were no rib eyes, no N.Y. strips. Instead, the names of the selections suggested what the customer was to gain: Vitality, Stamina, Wisdom, Charisma, and, of course, ****** Ferocity. Under the glass, the meats sat in braided grass baskets, lined with yesterday's news.

The butcher, a brown-skinned, middle-aged man with a round jaw and soft shoulders, wiped his gloveless hands on his white apron, adding a brighter red to the overlapping splashes of dried blood already present. He reached over the counter to shake my hand.

"No, no. No T-bones," he said. "Not even in the back, no. I not do bones. Not because I don't have a bone saw--though I don't--because why? Right? Why bones? Do you eat bones? your name again? Joosh. Yes, Joosh. Good name. Do you eat bones, Joosh? Of course not. If you did, I tell you get out. You mental. Right? And I'd be right. No bones. I see confusion. No, it's okay. It's okay. No blush. No need. What's the word? Embare--embarrassed, yes, thank you. No need be embarrassed."

The bell chimed. A black-haired boy of six or seven, with round, wet eyes and what I supposed was chocolate about his lips, strolled in, chin up.

"Namaskāra, pāpā," the boy said.

"Namaskāra, baccā. Rāmrō dina ahilēsam'ma?"

"Hō."

"Rāmrō. Kahām̐ āphnō bā'ika hō?"

"Yō nala dvārā bāhira chan."

"Malā'ī ēka pakṣa kē."

"Hō, pāpā."

"Ṭhīka cha, phirtā garna kō lāgi jā'ō ra āphnō kāra khēlna?"

"Ṭhīka cha."

As the boy, chin now lowered, sulked into the back of the store, the butcher turned back to me and said, "My son. Apple of my eye. You have an apple? No? A good woman? You be blessed. A good woman hard to find, harder to keep. Right? What were we saying before?"

"I didn't need to be embarrassed."

"Yes. No need. Let me tell you about meat. All I have--I have beef."

"How can I tell what part of the cow it comes from? The ****, the ****--that stuff."

"You cannot. You choose what you want to be. I can tell you don't need Wise. You already too smart for good--for your own good? For your own good, yes."

"But you know."

"Know what?"

"Where the cuts come from?"

"In a way, yes, but in another truer way, no. Do you describe you in such words?"

"What do you mean?"

" 'Oh my **** hurts.' 'Oh my ***** ache.' 'Stop hitting my upper flank.' Do you say these?"

"Well no."

"No. Why? Why would you? You mental if you did. They awful words. Science words. I do not see myself as science. Do you? No. You don't even need to answer. You got good woman. Love pumps in your heart. You energy, right? You can feel that. If you with the right woman you feel hers too. So why not the same with what you take in? What you eat? Not to scare you, never my intention, I couldn't tell you if the cow I process this morning have spots or no. Is it real Angus? Is it real California? I do not know. This is not how I see, not what I'm looking for."

"What are you looking for?"

"I guess I'm touching for, not looking for so much. Forgive. I do this so long I feel, I know what important, what I need, and what my customer need. You think me fool because I know not the science, I have no bone saw."

"I didn't say that."

"You thought it. I touched that, too."

"I didn't mean to offend."

"You not offend me. You challenge. I like the challenge. I like to show you what enlightenment means. Not a divine moment, not a smart moment but a touch, a touch that knows the truths beyond the limit of your vision, beyond the chains of your English. I feel the Vitality as I cut. I feel the Wisdom, and Charisma. You think silly but will you try?"

"I'll try it."

The butcher wrapped up four thin slices of Vitality in brown paper. He tied the string. "This," he said, bundling up two more slices of ****** Ferocity, "this is for you and your good woman. What is her name?"

"Eve."

"Ah. The mother of the world," he said. "Joosh, my new friend, have a real day."

The bell chimed. A child's bike rested on a hydrant outside. It was overcast but that was fine. I couldn't remember where I parked my car and that was fine, too.
Mar 2014 · 1.5k
Probably a Tuesday
JJ Hutton Mar 2014
There will come a day,
probably a Tuesday,
you'll be hoeing and
yanking yellow weeds
by the handful, the
sun in the center of
the sky; Or you'll
be climbing through
your lover's window
while her husband
unlocks the front door,
thinking to yourself,
"Jesus, we didn't
even do anything
today. Just gave
her her insulin shot,"
and your heart
no longer pumps
so much as begs,
begs for silence,
but that's funny,
isn't it? because there
isn't any sound,
only the perceived
dissonance of a
scattered mind;
But maybe, if you're
lucky, it'll be at night,
the two of you in bed,
and she'll timidly ask
if you're hungry,
and you'll say what you
always say to that question:
yes, yes I am, and she'll
ask if you want a sandwich,
and you'll say, "I'll get it."

"You're too sweet."

"It's not a problem."

After spreading the mustard,
there'll be a pain in your chest,
mild at first, just at first, but by the
time you get halfway down the
hall you'll drop the plate
of sandwiches on the floor
and ***** in the toilet,
and you'll probably know
then what's happening;
But what did you ever do
to earn that kind of quiet,
relatively quiet, ending?
You've got a few things in mind,
but you've got a few more bad that
negate any kudos any kind
of god would award, so
let's be honest. That's what
you want, right?

Death will wake you up,
probably around 6 because
you've never been a morning
person, and when you wake
it won't be from a feeling, like
a physiological manifestation,
no, no that'd give you time
to remember Mom in the
hospital when she called
you by the wrong name.
No, Death will come in
the form of a headache,
and if your wife was
there she'd already be up,
and she'd say something
like: "Poor baby," and
get the Tylenol out of
the cabinet to the left
of the sink for you,
but she's not there, is she?
No, she's living with her
sister right now while
you "figure yourself
out" and your
kids, two boys and a girl,
all grown with families
of their own, think you've
been selfish, but what was the
word you countered with?
"Necessary." Yes, it's necessary,
you'll think as you pop three pills
in and run your mouth under the
facet, and you'll collapse, pills
rolling across the floor, stopping
under the cabinets where no one
will ever find them. Your vision
will burn white; it won't fade to black
like you thought, and your head, Jesus,
your head sounds like tools in a dryer,
but you know there is no sound, and
this is it, this is honestly it, you alone
on the floor in nothing but your
grey boxer shorts, the ones riddled
with holes that your wife told you to throw out,
and a fragmented halo of Tylenol around you.
Your wife. Your wife. Your wife. Your wife.
You'll say her name, you'll say "Eve,"
and your mouth will close itself, and your
fist will unclench itself, and you know what?
That'll be it, to borrow a phrase. Nobody
will find you for three days, and even then,
when they do, they'll wish they never had.
Feb 2014 · 1.2k
Sleeping Positions
JJ Hutton Feb 2014
She places her book, marked with
a coupon I've been meaning to use,
on the nightstand. She turns the light
out on her side. It's her side, her light.
The left side is mine.

Night.

Night.

We're past clutching love. We're
not married, but I think I know
what it means. It's two lonely
people; it's two sides of the bed.
It doesn't take her long to fall asleep.
I watch her forehead unwrinkle.
I listen as her inhales and exhales
become spaced and even. At this moment,
I do not know her. She's not a woman.
All the inviting curves collapse. She is
a girl breathing in, breathing out.

In a memory she related to me--I think
she related to me--she asks a boy to give her
a turn on a swing. It's toward the end of recess.
She has waited. He says no. This is my swing.
She says it is the school's. He says the school
isn't sitting in it. I can almost remember why
she told me this story or some story like it.

I can't sleep without my fan on. She can't
fall asleep with it. I'll give her a couple more
minutes. I wonder what violence she dreams
of, of what forbidden ecstasy she views in
her private night. I do not know her. She
looks vulnerable, her body now bent in an S shape,
facing away from me. Am I scared for her? Of her?
Still sleeping, she bunches up her comforter;
she brings it to her face. Maybe that's marriage: being
scared for and of.

I turn on the fan. She stirs.

I'm sorry. I'll turn it off.

You can leave it on.

I'll turn it off.

Leave it.

She pulls my arm under her neck.
She brings her bottom against my thighs.

Will you hold me? Just for a second.

I can hold you longer.

Just a second.
Jan 2014 · 2.8k
A Quiet Resting Place
JJ Hutton Jan 2014
I.

The last thing? It wadn't nothing special. Pa and me, well, we never had what I guess you'd call a real easy exchange. He kept to hisself. I kept to myself. We worked hard, and we appreciated each other. But we--and this may be sad to you, but it ain't sad to me--we didn't get touchy-feely. Didn't say "I love you" or things like that. We traded off fetching the water. Traded off nabbing clothes off the line for Ma. He taught me how to be, to live, you know? How to work the cotton. How to work the mules. He gave me three bullets--just three--every time I took the .22 out to get a squirrel. "Make it count," he'd say. "Don't bring home less than four." Making it count--that means more than that other stuff.

So, what I'm saying is, in the end it wadn't no big to-do. Before he handed Ma the shotgun and told us to get, he stuck his head out the kitchen window, the one just over the sink. He said, "It's gonna rain. Them's the kind of clouds that ain't fickle."

I said I reckoned he was right. He said yep. Handed Ma the shotgun. And that was that.


II.

Robert never wanted to live in Tennessee. He was a Kentucky boy, and if it hadn't been for my selfishness, I believe he would have died a Kentucky boy--or man, rather--at a much later date. See my mother, Faye, she got dreadful sick back in '31, and I says to him, I says, Robert, you know my sister can't take care of her--this being on account of her being touched in the head and all. He didn't say nothing, which was usual, but he didn't grumble neither and that, that right there, is the mark of a good man.

We started with just 80 acres. He built the house hisself. Did you know that? It wasn't nothing fancy, no, but we didn't need nothing fancy. It was made pretty much entirely of--oh what do they call it. It ain't just cedar. That uh uh uh--red cedar. Can't believe I forgot that.

Anyway, our place was sprawling with red cedar. Not the prettiest trees you ever saw, but they were ours, and they provided what we needed of them.

Because of us doing alright with the logging, we was able to pick up the Whitmore place. That was another 160 acres.  Robert hated Tennessee, not a doubt in my mind about that. It was his home, though, you see. It was his land. He wanted to make something of it to give to our son, Henry.


III.

Come all you people if you want to hear
The story about a brave engineer;
He's Franklin D. Roosevelt, in Washington D.C.
He's running the train they call 'prosperity.'

Now he straightened up the banks with a big holiday;
He circulated money with the T.V.A.
With the C.C.C. and the C.W.A.
He's brought back smiles and kept hunger away.

      -"Casey Roosevelt" [Excerpts]
          Folk song recorded by Buck Fulton for E.C. and M.N. Kirkland, July, 1937


IV.

Before they even started on the reservoir, the Tennessee Valley Authority started digging up the dead. I'm serious. Most frightful thing you ever saw. Hickory Road--and I swear, I swear on the country, the good Lord, anything from a ****** to a mountain--the road was full-up with buggies carting coffins. Three days straight they were carting dead folks down to Clinton. Most of the coffins were barely holding up, too. Made out that crude pine. Seeing them yellow-but-not-yellow heads poking out was enough to make a feller sick.

If I remember right, they had to relocate something like 5,000 before they dammed up the Clinch, but they made a lot more living, breathing folks than that move along. Lot more.


V.

A week before the T.V.A went and flooded the valley the sounds stopped. The duhh-duhh. The errgh-errgh. You know? The sounds of work. When you don't got all that noise going on--that routine, I guess you could say--what can you do but think?

And because of that, I believe, that last week Pa acted different. He was trying not to, trying to act just the same. But he was trying to be the same too hard. Ma would take coffee off the stove, pour it for him and he'd say: "Thank you, sweetheart." He always said thank you. That much was the same. It's that sweetheart bit that didn't fit in his mouth right. She left the kitchen. Couldn't take it.

Tom Scott hung himself, too. Clyde Johnson, his brother Jacob. There was one more. Big fella that lived down by Hershel's store. Can't remember his name. Pa's was the only body that didn't wash up on the bank.

I never did see them after they washed up. Mrs. Scott said it was appalling. She said her husband's body was all puffed up, swollen with the water. Sheriff cut the rope off her husband's neck. She said that neck was black leading into purple leading into black. Raw. Mrs. Scott didn't live too long after that. A year or so. The shame got to her I suppose.

When folks called my pa a coward, I never argued with them. Didn't see the point. What's a coward? Somebody hang hisself? Somebody that leave his wife and boy to fend for themselves? That a coward? Call him what you want. I ain't gonna argue. All he is--is dead to me.

VI.

My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places. And it will hail when the forest falls down, and the city will be utterly laid low. Happy are you who sow beside all waters, who let the feet of the ox and the donkey range free.
         - Isaiah 32:18-20

VII.**

Robert had brown, wavy hair. He had big hands with scarred knuckles. He was missing a tooth on the right side. Three or four down from the front. You could only tell when he laughed. Every day in the field he wore the same cap, a Miller's Co-op cap, with overlapping sweat stains. He never wanted to track dirt in the house so he'd knock on the side of the house anytime he needed something from inside, like a box of matches or a knife or something. The first two knocks would be to get my attention. They'd sound urgent. The third was soft, as if to say please. When we went to bed, he always waited for me to fall asleep before he even tried. He knew his snoring kept me up.

On the last day, Robert handed me his shotgun. Says, "I love you, Mary." He was so choked up, I didn't know if he was going to kiss me. So I kissed him. Says, "I love you Robert." And that was pretty much all. We got in the buggy and headed off to my mother's.

I wanted to bury the shotgun. I knew I'd need a place to visit, a place to talk to Robert. And it had to be a piece of him. I dug the hole out behind my mother's place. Henry, he must've thought I was crazy, digging that hole the very next day. He asked me what I was going to put in there. I says the shotgun. He says, "No, ma'am, you isn't." I says, "Yes, son, I is." He says we need that gun. Get squirrels. Get rabbits. Make it count, he says.

I was pretty sore about it, but I ended up throwing my wedding ring in that hole. It being the only other thing that was him. We put the shotgun over the door frame in the kitchen.

I miss him every day. I feel it in my body. Feel it down to my bones. I imagine it wouldn't feel no different if I had lost a hand. But what makes me sadder than anything, sadder than not seeing Robert every morning, sadder than knowing he don't get to see what Henry makes of hisself, is that Robert didn't get nobody's attention.

He never said that's why he had to do it. I just figured as much. He wouldn't die for nothing. That wasn't him. The paper wouldn't say nothing about him other than he was dead. I wrote the T.V.A. Never heard nothing back. It's like the world mumbled, "I'm sorry," and just spun on. That's what they give the good men: a mumble. Killers make the front page. They're in the pictures. The good men? For the good men, the world has to keep asking for their names. The world says, "Oh, Robert, right," and "I'm sorry." But the world don't mean it. The world's got dams to build, valleys to flood. Graves to move. People to uproot. Why? Do you know? Course you don't. God hisself would shrug his shoulders and tell me that's just the way it is.
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