Next time I act like a heartbroken Holmes,
do me a favor and let me drink it away.

Words hurt what whiskey soothes.

I catch your name drifting away on a nimbus,
past the trees of someone else’s hometown.  

Your eyes are bean sprouts and your scent
is divorce.  Your fingers are still placid,

not yet ****** from the scratch of anxiety.

Eyebrows bow to nose bone in speculative uncertainty,
confusing rainy prom nights with dreams of Hercules.

One more sip of wine will detonate firecracker cheeks.

I hold your hand in secret on desolate city streets,
remembering the practice of lost lovers and

drunk ******* in dead friend’s beds and falling down staircases
in mid-afternoon moonshine. Our pasts intertwine, just as

West-coast tourist traps fill family photo albums.

What was her name?
****, I can’t remember.

It was a boy’s name
made feminine
with a little “i” at the end
like maybe hearing it would
make you think of
some fat guy making pizzas
until you see it
spelled out or
until it becomes attached
to her lips and hair and
skin.
The “i” was not dotted
with a little heart,
(not her style at all) but
I should have a picture
in a box some where with more pictures.
I don’t.

I’ve got little notes,
tiny thoughts scribbled
on empty match book covers,
on the backs of
pretentious
business cards,
in the borders of
the mutilated,
amputated flesh
of decrepit
used up yellow pages,  
ripped from a dead and
disjointed phone book.

I woke up from this dream
and groped for something
to scrawl on,
anything,
because it seemed significant
at 2:38 am.

In the desert somewhere,
(I’ve never even been)
you were
looking out the window
and the way the parched
dry light crackled
around you
you might have been an angel
or a sign
partially occluded by glass
advertising something
I could never afford
like family or god
when suddenly you were not
a silhouette,
not back lit,
but glowing.

You were so in love, with
who I don’t know, and you
went into free fall
back
onto the bed
pulled your knees up
to your chest and
kicked your legs giggling.
I was part dead, half ghost
and still happy that you
were so happy.
I said, “you’re pregnant?”
knowing the way you
know things without
really having a way
of knowing
in a dream.

You laughed again
grabbed your little dog up
in your arms,
(I’ve no idea where the pup
came from), and baby-whispered,
“You’re going to cut
the umbilical,
aren’t you?”

and I woke with
the image of that mongrel
chewing through
the cord.

I am
waiting at the pharmacy
and the…
technician,
is reading the
cryptic symbols
penned in
indiscernible Latin,
my prescription.
She is not beautiful
but very fuckable
And in my mind
I am constructing an
image of her ******,
likening  
the shape,
size, color, etc.,
to her mouth,
when I see
my own writing on
the back
through her precise
fingers.

The tech,  
she is holding a
snapshot of her.
It might as well be
a picture of me
vomiting or
******* or
defecating.
This
is what I have left,
my version of a photo,
my dream,
scrawled on the back
of my medicine.

**** getting better.  
I ****** it from her hand.

I leave fast.  I will
never go back.
This is no chemical imbalance.
This is not my inheritance.
The loss and pain, sometimes,
that's the pill we need to swallow.

Her long brown hair hung
occluding forty-seven percent of her face
and her one eye
looked a little manic.

It was slow and sweet
for a while
but she had been
gradually gaining momentum.

I am watching her
carefully and
waiting, really
for that moment.

Suddenly she stops.

She raises her hands up
clenched.
It looks like she is going to
pull her own hair
and then her right fist
slams into my ribs
followed by a left
and a right and a left.
A barrage of little hurts
pouring out
machine gun frenzied.

She digs her nails into my chest,
her mouth is twisted,
her teeth clenched,
I can see muscles
in one jaw line twitch.
More hair falls over her
Countenance.
Her hips move furious  

and then
Sensuous wails of red light,
screams of sumptuous green,
bright yellow trembling,
and electric blue rippling
like bright neon

She cools and dims
she collapses
into me
sobbing
and I can feel
salty wet
itchy dripping down my skin

I cry too
never having seen someone
this...



Michael L Sutter

Twenty-somethings, homeless,
but with perfect fashion,

in muted greys and translucent lilacs
sit outside Union Square.

They have the coolest tattoos
and the coolest carboard signs,

all more transcendental and valuable
than the sidewalk they sleep on.

Some are tweaking, some are sleep,
some lean and have spit dribbling

from their burned lips as they drift
into a coma, like war heroes.

I want to give them a bowl
of my homemade vegan chili.

They can have cheese and sour cream,
depending how righteous they are.

I want to speak sweetly with their mothers
while they prune geraniums
along the cracked and faded sidewalk.

I wont smoke in their parent's garage
like an outcast uncle,
or have more than one beer with dinner.

The next day I’ll go back to the storefront
to explain everything I've learned, over
instant coffee and Entenmanns.

This time it's their turn to share wisdom
as 13th Street muscles from slumber,
achy under the weight of lost bodegas
and barbershops.

I’ve been told every homeless person needs a sign,
no matter what variation or breed.

Some write a new message every day, some stick to one,
but only a few don’t write anything at all.

“Not even gonna lie:
need money for bud.”

The pulse behind the sign renders words irrelevant.

The 500 year old Chinese woman captures the room
like a drunk teenager.

The oily scarecrow with a leather hat dances,
rattling his tin can.

Only occasionally will an assertive hungry hobo be satisfied
with a granola bar in place of anything less than Jackson.

“This is what it sounds like,
when the doves cry.”

Southern church bells ringing through dive bars filled with sinners.

Cold and naked like iron church bells
I rang thoughts each more hollow than the next.
Through my mind I skulled over tomorrow,
my bare-mattress weight stuck to my twenty-one-year-old
bones hesitating with the heat.

July tastes all moonshine and sunshine
until your alone without company and the fruit
of adventure decays romance from it candy sweet
fragrance leaving like a raspberry bruise,
a penalty scared on your mommas red lips:
How ya gonna make a living sweetheart?

Eh, I’ll grab a buoy and drink wine until
my teeth rot and ill say **** tomorrow,
Ill **** drunks and scribble my tin sorrows
in ***** yellow journals. I’ll bear my chest
to strangers with ******* hard against the moon.

Because I know
when I find routine,
I’ll be skin-laced and bored,
undertowed and unseen.

Walter was history's best fisherman -
history's best minnow fisherman.
He combed and cleaned his net
like a lint trap or a summer screen door
so delicate, seaweed fibers, mussel shells.
He fished more of a dance, a twirl
his arms up and down and around and always
spun in the shallows like a waterspout
he would glide his butterfly net through the lake
and capture little fish he placed
into a sand castle bucket filled halfway with water
he would always pour back into lake.
He was strictly a catch and release fisherman.

All the mothers on the beach would stare
at Walter and his water waltz and at his mother
who stood next to him so he wouldn't fall.
It was hard not to stare at Walter
always alone with his aged mother
and he had to be at least a teen by now.
Perhaps it was hard to tell, autism doesn't age well,
but we had been beach regulars for fifteen years
and Walter and his mother had for ten.

The last time I saw Walter he danced and fished.
I laid on the beach with my cousin and we observed
his patterns and his mother his rock who stood there
for ten years with the minnow fisherman.
The next day my own mother cried
more than when her own mother passed
and she told me, she died
Walter's mother died

Even now I stand in the shower skin deep in water
and think about where Walter is now.
I see him in my mind dancing in some bath tub
with a butterfly net in some foster home
without a mother to break his fall.

I hate my hands.
I'd love to write about it,
but every time I try,
they always **** it up.

I made chicken soup in August.

The timing is terrible, but
you should still try a bowl.

When you go home,
tell your parents what I said:

You look better
in a prom dress
then you ever could
in a wedding gown.

Let's bury this corpse
underneath a church
hearse and all.

If you steal a carnation
to hang like an icicle
in your bedroom,
I'll never tell a soul.

Our war kept us safe
from the dungeons
of autonomous thought.

Now every time I step outside,
my summer skin feels like winter.

We catch the sunset
while eating
breakfast: ignoring
mothers, ignoring
landlords, skinning our knees
and skipping supper,
using the kitchen with some
improvisation, forgetting to stir
the pasta, blotting bacon
with coffee filters,  
flinging linguini on the walls
and the ceilings (for
if cooked it will cling
but if raw it will fall).
“Is that pasta on the wall?”
“Is it purple?”

Outside a boy
in a dress shirt and a girl in
a paisley skirt walked past
the window, holding hands
and clutching palm
Sunday leaves.

Then the strand of linguini
began to detach itself from
the ceiling, like a break dancer,
with flimsy limbs,
and when it dropped
it fell through the air
like an Olympic
diver, twirling and curling
with two ends clung
to one another
and then unfolding
underwater.