Author Archives: Qu Literary Magazine

I thought Jesus had blown out my tire
like taking aim with a rubber band across the median
a line between homosexual thoughts SNAP homosexual actions
one last warning shot before damnation

I felt the thunk before I saw it
shaking the entire Subaru
thick black rubber spiraling off behind me in the rearview mirror
on my way out of town

I couldn’t tell if it was a part of me
or some other car ahead
or how I could have overlooked something that big in the road
but when I got to her house, I circled the car a half dozen times
looking for a missing piece
that wasn’t there

and when I was kissing her that afternoon
my shirt on the floor and her pants unzipped
all I could think of was Jesus and the tire
and her husband downstairs
and my husband at home with the baby
and what he would say
if he knew
about the car.

I choose the vernacular
of dance—a small silent s,

and sway with you
in oceanic nothingness

like an aquatic spirit,
ethereal, letting form

define me. I do not have
to speak. In the curve

of your body, there is
no such thing as secret.

I know you without
knowing. A mystery—

each morning,
you appear,

a little question
at my side—still

with emotion. We spin,
a lathe of love, tails

locked like slender
fingers inscribing

our names,
the tiny history of us

into the seabed beneath
coral—no other future

in sight, no other shape
for us to consider.

The woods are ablaze. We sweat in our greens
and yellows, digging a line amidst clouds
of fire-chaser beetles. Our arms become our Pulaski’s
as we hew to the black. At first, we took selfies
of the flames shooting from our drip torches,
the pines combusting. But when the burned deer
and bear cubs limped from the woods, when our lungs
scorched, we stopped. What we once called trees, we now
call fuel. Someone spins the weather, a clue
to which way the wind is blowing. Decades from now,
shoulder-high growth. Each of us dreams
of a phoenix but is too shy to mention it.
Pyrophytes need conflagrations to germinate.
We all follow orders, inner imperatives.

In the beginning, there was lite beer &

fried chicken, a potato salad with

too much mayonnaise, a couch-bound man

chained to college pigskins.

There was a myth

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A mammoth grub. A glazed croissant. Everything you wish had come full circle. A boat of
ghosts rerouted by Charon. The concluding parentheses you always forget to add. Hope’s rib. A
winter runner’s frosty eyelash. Your first sledding hill. One of God’s alleles. The toggle of a

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Red Canna, Georgia O’Keefe, 1924

You, stranger,
beside me
on the hard, wood
bench, lift your eyes
to the canvas
mirror on the dead
white wall—my garden
plot, my solitary
blossom bed. Petal
portal flames
feral red. It is always
summer here, and every
color layers fire, even
chalk-white curves
and fecund violet.
Fix your gaze
on these naked pigment
tongues. Taste the heat
of honey yellow
filament. Feel
the room swirl
pollen gold. You,
stranger, beside me
staring at your feet,
lift your head, let the oil
brushstrokes breathe you
back to life.

Mama Marilyn! Look over here! No Mama! Not there, over here!
I hear my children giggling as
I

follow their voices inducing me through the passageways of
my childhood house. The pitted walls are painted magnolia-white
and the white carnations Daddy bought are dry like
tongues in a chipped, blue vase along
the corridor cluttered with Daddy’s old Oxford shoes.

My children’s shadows leap and dance across the creaky walls:

Look over there Mama Marilyn! It’s going to be a girl!
A girl Mama! Mama, a beautiful girl Mama with twists of
sweet confetti in her hair Mama!

And a few yards across from me – my own
mother with her shock of blonde hair
like corpse hair and head buried on a stiff
pillow –

giving birth on a summer’s day. She shrieks

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You taught me the meaning of transgress,
not the dictionary gloss but averted
glances at the bar where we sat
in our darkened corner
sipping another black beer
as if anti-miscegenation laws
still hovered in the Southern air.

You tweaked my learning curve later

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Cool coffee, coagulated,
the last few sips before third
shift starts, tasting tobacco
leaves in everything. Three packs
a day, trying to hide her habit
from her mom, whose grandson
smells like he’s the one smoking.

Monotonous factory line,
tobacco bander for down
market brands, not one smoked
to celebrate a marriage
or a new baby, but palliate
middle-class anxiety, cheaper
and easier than barbiturates.

Incumbent shifts of caring
for her bed-dependent mother
despite two hardy brothers.
Twice falling asleep coming
home from work in the morning,
saved by prescient engineers
designing wide grassy medians.

Two-hour bus rides to casinos
filled with oxygen tanks
and wheelchairs. Roll of quarters,
supplemented by what was left
over at the end of the month
from a modest pension and
buying processed foods in bulk.

Was she lucky at the slots,
you ask? Think of Bishop’s poem.
One day receiving a call
from my father, uninflected
voice stating, “Your mother’s dead.”
Scat from birds draped like
a necklace over her headstone

At the edge of a shade tree,
cleaning it off, noticing
the sun’s rays like watch hands
pointing to an hour marker
as if viewed from above.
Time. What if she realized
after visiting departed

loved ones, the slow suicide
of wearing her life to the tread
knowing there were no parts left
to replace, so that her son,
young enough to understand
and do something meaningful
before it suddenly runs out?

Grey glinting all around you, like the inside
of a gun barrel illumined, how many steps
will you pace in this greasy kitchen’s stacked
circumference? How many tasks to pass the fullness
of a day? In the hewing of tomatoes into flat wet wheels,
in portioning hamburg like frankenstein fingerprinting
brains, you become lost. You fissure into many selves,
disintegrate into movement. How many dishes washed
until you figure the world like a Rubik’s Cube?

Each night, after work, you find some new surprise

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