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Martin Narrod May 2014
It's like this, and then there was total recall. Fast like a safety plan made wrong and then bouncing in and out all the way down the hall. Up through cable cars, Korean fast food market, wet fish, soupy street, concrete cracks filled with crab meat and **** heads. Just a square, a five block, two street, sideways quadrangle, beat of the Tenderloin, hour of the dove. Every one's dead on these loose ends. Hills of the back of her backside, skin of the back of her neck. Rapture is the grave of the sunset, memory is that thing that I said.

No one cans in carnivores, no one runs moves like a shepherd. Sunday, daft as candy, luck in the ways of the prophet. Canon of the blaze of every woman that died today. The sleep setting, the motorcycle bending the hollow, the ravines noisy interlude, up through the rough and the tangles, huddles in a six pack, three or four walking up the block to meet the rest of them.

The skin doesn't fit right, it wears wrong, the shoulders stiff, the masseuse excuses himself. Buckets of flowers hang from the ceiling like stripped cat christmas decorations in suburban mastermind serial killer resort town. Everyone is quiet because they gotta. They move their feet like they were hurrying death into a red volcano, like they were the errand of red from the top bell to the bottom of the town.

I sit on a roof top, baking in the noon day sun. Stripping sticks and stems off the side to sideways, just roasting away, laying, low in the afternoon light. I see a girl with her hands on her skirt, wobbling, scooting a priest card on a periwinkle terra-cotta.  I move my head, turn it upside round to take a better look. No one counts to ten when they see me. The gangster that woke up isn't the gangster that went to sleep last night. My wickedness ended my words mean your bright decay. So I ride the pavement exhausted, burying my coughs in an L-shaped arm
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
Yesterday she was nowhere to be found
In the earth or under the earth.


Suddenly she is all here - a bright soon
Of a tomorrow in earnest and potluck joy, embers and pyres, iris and the merriment of ochre.


A star groomed by outer space - spilling wet ash
And fissured out by the tailored saw of the wood.
Now something is stirring in the smolder.
We call it a girl.


Still wowed.
She has no idea where she is.


Her eyes, chalcedony stones, explore ripening doomsday and an ivory moon rock.
Is this the world?
It confuses her. It is a great numbness.


She pulls herself together, rousing to the new weight of things
And to that maternal figure nuzzling her, and to her down burrow.


She rests
From the first infinite shock of light, the empty laze
Of the curious and their curious questions -
What has happened? What am I?


Her ears keep on inquiring, blissfully.


But her legs are impatient,
Mending from so long nothingnesses
Her tiny hands are restless with ideas, they start to try a few out,
Swaying this way and that,
Grasping for balance, learning fast -


And she's suddenly upright


And stretching - a giant hand
Strokes her from top to toe
Perfecting her outline, as she tightens
The knot of herself.
Now she comes to -
Bold, beautiful - Argentina
Over the weird world. Her nose
crimson and magnetic, draws her, consciously sounding,
A petite yaff, aimed towards her mother. And the world is warm
And gentle and softens her daze. Touch by touch
Everything fits her together.


Soon she'll almost be a woman.
She wants to be a Woman,
Pretending each day more and more Woman
Till she's the perfect Woman. The immortal Woman
Will surge through her, weightless, unbound, a twirling flame
Beneath silver gusts,


It will coil her eyeballs and her heels
In a single outlaw fright - like the awe
Between mortar and firework.


And curve her neck, like a crocodile emerging from the placid pond
Among lilies,
And fling the new moons over her shimmery banner,
All the full moons and the dark moons.
Booming, ineffable delight.
Lua Mar 2014
Much too calloused,
I’ve become.
Throughout this endeavor
Obviously I must be strong.
Above most and
Only higher than some,
Despite attached strings
That drag me hastily along.
I must accept
What is to come:
The fall that is fleeting long.
Balloons can be people too..

— The End —