Things in Light Poetry Series 2013: Robert Masterson

TiL thinks every month should be National Poetry Month. But, since it's not, we're gonna share as much goddamn poetry as we can as Songkran (ថ្ងៃ​សង្រ្កាន្ដ) approaches. Our second installment of the 2013 TiL Poetry Series shares the work of lord of language Robert Masterson. ¡Que viva!

Some Waitresses I Have Known

i.

She was a steamed pudding,

a dumpling,

a moist soft pastry with a shining face and

greasy fingers

ladling huge ladles of noodle soup,

of cabbage and potatoes,

of boiled pork and

the dark spikes of her dark dark hair

escaped from under her white white cotton cap

plastered to her skin with sweat and by steam,

followed the lines of her face, of her cheeks and

if there was ever such a thing possible

as a communist Madonna

in a white cotton apron and

revealed to us all through clouds of kitchen steam

from the communal soup kettle,

she would be one of those.

ii.

I’d sit at the dark end of the cantina

for the last hour of the evening

waiting for her to get off work

so I could drive us to her house and

I watched her steal from the drunks and

the flirts when they weren’t looking by

slipping their money off the table and

by adding my drinks to their tabs and

by altering their credit card receipts to reflect

surprising generosity, an acute appreciation

of her skills as a cocktail temptress.

On more than many more than one occasion

as we sat in my car in the parking lot and

waited for the engine to warm up,

for the heater to kick in,

she would fan her cash

in front of my face and

it was usually a lot and

she would ask me "What did you make today?" and

she knew I hadn’t made anything.

I once watched her chase a bad tipper

into the parking lot and

fling the silver he’d left her

like it was dirt to bounce off his car windows,

his mouth a frightened circle and moist,

some quarters and a dime on an $80 tab

scattered in the dust and pea-sized gravel,

dull gray in mercury-vapor lamplight.

iii.

She was a giantess among Japanese

and she was therefore obliged to buy kimono at the special gaijin kimono store and pay those special gaijin prices

but she was a natural blond.

At the bottle club in the Roppongi district where she worked,

near the Hard Rock Tokyo where she never went,

somewhere east of the enormous television screen on the side of the enormous building that showed the endless loop of dolphins swimming and leaping between

an emerald tropical sea and a turquoise tropical sky,

somewhere down there on a side street above a restaurant where it always rained or at least dripped from the innumerable gray clouds in the city’s gray sky and the innumerable drips and leaks and overflows from all the surrounding buildings,

somewhere where the streets were still to narrow for automobiles,

she would pause in the tidal ebb of the unending flood of very small people with a limitless number of umbrellas

and she would try to remember how to count.

iv.

The sound of the interstate is like a river,

white noise constant with its own rise and fall,

waves or rapids or the surge from a sudden downpour

of diesel washing a steady flow of trucks ahead and forward and past this empty crossroads with the 200-ft. sign

and from the backdoor facing south with the sun setting like it always does on the right and the first stars of another night like always on the left,

she’ll smoke another More down to its filter,

the clatter of thick dishes being washed and

a jukebox version of another hit song behind her and

she’ll look south across an unimpeded plain of soybeans and cotton, of oil pumps and feedlots full of stumbling cattle,

a perfectly flat plain spreading out and away from all highway diners and all the way to Mexico,

just another place she’s never been.

Addendum:

Born a slave, she always served,

was so highly trained, so closely educated

as to preclude even the capacity to conceive of any life

other than service and

she was bred to beauty, to a certain proportion and

scale as to bring pleasure to her masters' eyes and

sometimes to their beds though

for the longest and the most number of days in the short years of her chattel-life she was ignored as a machine or an animal is ignored,

as a device or as one among identical many

is taken for granted.

But what her masters never saw or felt

was the small clear burning of her hatred

nor did they know that

what she brought them when she served them

at their table and at their bath,

whether on her belly or on her knees,

what she gave them was poison, always poison.

Ikonography

One time we went to the river

to play with guns and

I have a photograph now

of her

She is barefoot here

on a sparkley flat part

Her dress is unbuttoned

and hitched up around her waist

The pistol is level and she has one eye closed

Here is also

a paper target

I saved I think that is

pretty good shooting

This is us

and I can see her right away

but what was me

is very hard to recognize

We were on our way back east, which shows,

and resting on her friend Jackie's porch

Simone has good color and shows her fine leg

to outline my sulleness

My sister's wedding was so funny

and here's a picture of it:

Simone is laughing

which was always something to see

My smallest cousin is hugging her knees

They became a blur of

white clothing and obscure familial relationships

Somebody wrote it all down on the back

and it says "R. w/girlfriend & Shawna (age 4), 1983"

(stanza break)

(new stanza)

Though I once had many hundreds of photographs of her

I have lost them mostly not wanting

to see Simone as a picture

or

a place to hang upon

but so more important to remember the way

she sat bold on a white tub's edge

to wash thick blood from her thighs

Imaginary Syllabus

Masterson / “Imaginary Syllabus” / page 1

Robert Masterson

146 Mansion Avenue

Yonkers, New York 10704

914.309.4303

rm505@aol.com

Imaginary Syllabus for an Imaginary Class at an Imaginary College

Eng345 – Writing With Purpose

MWF 11:00 – 11:50 am / Room 324 Spittarn Hall

[The course is designed to build upon previously learned writing skills to provide the student with a renewed sense of intention and an appreciation for the varied communicative values of language.]

Spring Semester

Learn to bake bread

Fight, break up, and make up with a romantic partner

Eat something unfamiliar

Take something apart. put it back together, and make it work despite the leftover pieces

Watch the last of the ice in the gutter dissolve under the first warm rain

Explain a feeling to a stranger

Eavesdrop constantly

Read a paperback book at least 25 years old (especially one with a lurid cover)

Remember something forgotten

Drink to excess and experience remorse

Make a mask

Buy used shoes at a thrift store or flea market and wear them

Summer Semester

Wake up late

Try to attract songbirds to your home

Give up an advantage

Wear a t-shirt backwards and/or inside out all day

Assemble a model airplane, boat, or car

Slowly reread a favorite book from childhood

Eat cold food

Experiment with musical instruments

Eavesdrop constantly

Revisit a childhood playground

Wear shoes on the wrong feet

Learn the names of 12 stars

Masterson / “Imaginary Syllabus” / page 2

Fall Semester

Destroy a favorite possession

Explain centrifugal force to a child

Pick at a sweater

Go barefoot all afternoon

Smoke a cheap cigar

Call someone unexpectedly

Read outside until darkness makes it impossible to continue

Stare at a half-glass of vodka for at least 20 minutes

Imagine what it would be like to lose a limb

Eavesdrop constantly

Run laps around something

Do something that seems like a good idea at the time

Winter Semester

Wear a friend’s shoes

Learn a new game and play it obsessively

Compose a love letter and burn it

Consider the leafless trees

Eavesdrop constantly

Exacerbate a problem

Nurse a houseplant back to health

Experiment with smoking a pipe

Read someone else’s diary; don’t get caught

Say something awkward in public

In some fashion or another, go fishing

Sit by a window with a cheek pressed to the cold glass

***

Robert Masterson, professor of English at CUNY-BMCC in New York City, has authored Artificial Rats & Electric Cats, Trial by Water, and Garnish Trouble. His work appears in numerous publications and websites, and he holds degrees from the University of New Mexico; the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado; and Shaanxi Normal University, the People’s Republic of China.

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Things in Light Poetry Series 2013: Martina Reisz Newberry

Welcome to our second annual poetry series. Last year we focused on New Mexico poets and their work. This year we decided to apply a global methodology to supplant our insular inclinations. We'll try to publish a set per day until the damn well runs dry. Our first contribution is from Martina Reisz Newberry. Enjoy.

1. ABOUT THE RAIN

Dark, rainy morning

My coat, a closeted slash

Blood-red reminder

Wet sand, so cheerless,

The desert is too honest

When it’s sad, it weeps

Ragweed sends great sighs

Lightning brings out its muscle

It’s never afraid

A white crane    out there

The sand doesn’t even stir

Crane bringing showers

2. REDHEAD

When I saw her at the Coffee Bean Café

& asked her how she was

her hair blazed crazy

& her fingers grew brittle

& she said she just didn’t believe

in the whole thing anymore

& I said I guessed things

weren’t so good then huh

& she said she was tired

of being the last clean towel

in the damn linen closet

& I just nodded like I understood

& she said making poems was worse

than shoveling shit in a chicken coop

the famous writers ignored you

wouldn’t help you with so much

as a fucking endorsement

& her work meant nothing to nobody

& failure surrounded her

came at her like a tidal wave

& was drowning her

& I said I knew how that was

& she said she doubted that

& she said she would believe

her number was up if she’d ever been

given a number in the 1^st place

which she hadn’t (been given)

& I said Sadie I’m sorry

how about I buy you a coffee

& she said yeah that would be fine

& while we drank it I noticed

her fingers     like dried vines

how they would snap off

if I took her hand

3.  JULY 2012

I can write love into this dark hotel,

talk of all that has been lived so far and

will be lived tomorrow & the tomorrow

after that.  The words, repetitive, strong,

deliberate as summer’s heat, might

stir this room into life—a kind of life—

open the blinds, turn the bed down with cool,

dreamy hands and kind gestures.  I can write

a doorway into this hotel’s bedroom

where warm stones have eyes & watch our entrance

& later, our exit.  The speechless Aspen

trees outside this hotel are waiting for

revolution and then resurrection. 

I can write purpose into them, put my

human mind into their deciduous mouths,

write madras shirts and sheets into these dark

beds. I can look into the dusk-covered sky

for some gift not like any other.  For

you, I say.  For you and no one else:  the

secret samba from this dark hotel to your eyes.

4. LAST POEM

It blew hard last night

and there was lightning

no thunder.  It rained. 

I looked out at all

that weather, saw my

years and my dreams drain

into the desert,

soaking the sand with

questions. Where did it go? 

The hoped-for peace of

nations, the release

of suffering from

all sentient beings,

the rails to snake our

sorry souls to Camp

Eden.  Where was it?

My face, wet, pillowed,

ached with ignorance.

Where did everything go?

***

Martina Reisz Newberry’s most recent book is LEARNING BY ROTE (Deerbrook Press).  She is also the author of WHAT WE CAN’T FORGIVE.  LATE NIGHT RADIO, PERHAPS YOU COULD BREATHE FOR ME. HUNGER, AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE:  POEMS 1996-2006, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND(Arabesques Press, Amari Hamadene, editor) and RUNNING LIKE A WOMAN WITH HER HAIR ON FIRE: Collected Poems (Red Hen Press). Ms. Newberry is the winner of i.e. magazine’s Editor’s Choice Poetry Chapbook Prize for 1998: AN APPARENT, APPROACHABLE LIGHT. She is the also the author of  LIMA BEANS AND CITY CHICKEN: MEMORIES OF THE OPEN HEARTH—a memoir of her father—published by E.P. Dutton and Co. in 1989. She has written four novels and several books of poetry, has been included in Ascent Aspirations first hard-copy Anthology, also in the anthology In The Company Of Women and has been widely published in literary magazines such as:  Ascent Aspirations, Bellingham Review, Blessed Are These Hands, Cape Rock, Connecticut Poetry Review, Cenacle, Counterpunch, Current Accounts, Divine Femme, Haight Ashbury, Iota,Istanbul Literary Review, Niche, Piedmont Literary Review, Southern Review of Poetry, Shot of Ink, Smiling Politely, Touchstone, Women's Work, Yet Another Small Magazine, and others.  Martina lives in Hollywood, California with her husband Brian and their best 4-legged pal, Charlie the Cat. 

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Otros habitantes de Albuquerque

Photo credit: Kevin Eddy 

by Rudolfo and Samantha Anne Carrillo

¡Bienvienido!

Come, come my friends, to the beautiful banks of the Rio Grande. Most of the geese are flying north, but come to Albuquerque anyway. Bask in the deceptively shallow waters of the river; you'll get a kick out of it and maybe you will be reminded that water used to flow through some of the arroyos here, too. You know the ones we mean, right? They're mostly up in the Heights and covered in concrete. 

The Heights is where they have all the restaurants. There's so much food up there and, one time, we heard about a grocery store that went on for miles, in the shadow of the mountain where they keep all the nuclear bombs.

You might think that's odd, but, when we looked around, that's what we saw. We've also seen other things you might not like to look at it. But, if you do, then maybe that will give you the final push you need to drop everything and come on out west. 

Don't worry—like we said—there is plenty of food. Water's getting scarce, though. But, if you keep an eye on things and don't expect a green lawn ... you'll be just fine.

Here's the first of what we saw this week. From the below picture, we can already tell the future is here. 

Photo credit: Metropolitan Detention Center

According to the teevee news, the above-pictured fellow—who goes by the name Felix Romero and has called this spinning ball of dirt home for 30 years—is a local who has been on at least two high-speed chases with la jura in the past five years. Just sayin'.

While, we're at it, this is the lady that was driving Romero around right before his latest flying metal, human-endangering escapade. She is called Meagan Fitzgerald, in case you want to know. She was arrested on our lovely, tree-lined boulevards for harboring a felon and possession of a dirty brown horse.

Photo credit: Metropolitan Detention Center

Speaking of evil chemical compounds, here's a picture of someone representing something that happened with the aid of methamphetamine. That mierda may be making Heisenberg rich on teevee, but it's a ruinous substance. From meth mouth to mental incoherence and bizarre manifestations of ultra-violence; speed kills, man. Example given: Timmithy Stover, 27, of Hobbs, N.M, who allegedly committed murder-death-kill after an intimate association with the poison.

Photo credit: Metropolitan Detention Center

Those are certainly heavy iterations of reality here in Burque town, but it's not always so dark. Sometimes, it's dusk or twilight. Young Billy Espinosa faced the long arm of the law when he tried to gank gear from a local policeman's home. He never had a chance, though he initially made off with a "...duty-issued 9 millimeter gun, bullet magazines, a police baton, handcuffs and even pepper spray." 

Photo credit: Metropolitan Detention Center

Then, there's the case of Terry Anderson, a woman—described by observers as a "crazy lady"—who came into contact with the boys in blue after breaking windows in the Heights. Police say they tricked her into coming out of her house; she exited wielding a baseball bat and attempted to hit a man with it. When responding officers tried to stop her, she began to swing at them and was subdued with a stun gun. 

Photo credit: Metropolitan Detention Center

Well, that's a bit like Bleak House on the Rio Grande, but you've got to admit it's kind of a hoot. The beauty of complexity and irony and all that jazz. Maybe next week we'll do this again, but with places instead of people. Don't worry. We're not about to ask the city for an office. We prefer the dark.

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The Colonist, Day 17803

So far, the weekend has been decent. 

The sun is visible in these here parts; now it comes into view earlier and earlier with light from yonder star filtered into invigorating shades of vermilion and other colors that have citrus analogs but begin transmuting into purples and blues once the fiery orb is aloft over the city.

I counted thirty Inca doves roosting on the dead apple tree in the backyard. I'll be good and goddamned if the tree comes back this time. The cold snap two winters back conquered it, mostly. There was one live branch left over, but I reckon those cold early-January mornings did the rest. The birds like it fine as it is, but all of them, in a grey flock like that, make the dogs bark unreasonably.

After watching them flutter and gambol like feathery hands, and when the hounds were done with nature and I with the winter light, we all retired to the atomic stove by the window. It popped a couple of times during the ignition sequence, but otherwise came on just as expected. We were all warm and I drank a mild stimulant beverage common among the planetary stewards of the era. The other animals et processed meat, by the way.

The computer was still on from last night.

For one thing, it glows. For another, it has some sort of tunnel in it. The tunnel connects to a library and information center that is like a circus, but infinite, if you get my drift. You view it all through a glass screen.

There was some snow in the mountains, for instance, but not enough to ameliorate the rage of drought that now follows the yearly solar ascent. It is possible to cross most of the rivers here by walking through them, I thought.

Just then, a woman with a neck tattoo of an eagle, the words "La Perrona" drawn in black ink above the crudely drawn predator, knocked on the door. So, I detuned the nuclear heat approximator, rose and said, who is there, as I spied her, from out the velvet-curtained window.

Well, she goes on about how she is my neighbor from four doors away, and I yell through the door that I know better because I have an electronic tube that sends me information and have heard all about the burglars and cretins combing the southeast heights. They are looking for easy prey.

You have to let them inside for crazy, unforeseen, and potentially life-threatening scenarios to arise says I to the dogs who are going crazy. One of them is biting the door knob like it is a ten pound pork chop.

After a fashion, the inky interloper crawls back to her car and it chugs off, missing on a cylinder and leaving a half-pint of dirty oil on my driveway.

I wander over to the glass screen, say hello and start reading about how two visions of public education are currently at odds and being debated by a legislative body that meets sixty miles north of here, where they still get snow once in a while.

Before you knew what happened exactly, except that it must involve celestial mechanics, it is dark again and so I sit down and type this out to let you know how my stay in your city, on your block, in your town, in your state, and ultimately on your planet, is going, more or less.

Like I said at the start, so far the weekend has been decent.

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A Reading From the Book Called February 2013

by Rudolfo Carrillo

That number above this text is difficult to look at, mostly because I never really reckoned it would get that high up on the scale.

You know the one I am jawing about, right? It is the one measured in how many times the earth has gotten around the sun since Christ passed into the other world.

Some say he came back again to demonstrate such a thing, after death, was possible — if only one had the proper inclination toward life. Here a proper inclination is defined by the dude's own transcendent passage through the grimly accurate and tightly wound clock that you and I call home for just a little while.

But I ain't going to be writing on metaphysics today, anyhow, it will be more like a sort of metacriticism. You'll see, you'll viddy that.

First though, I am going to lay a dicho on you that my abuela used to intone whenever something controversial came up.

When I'm done telling you all about that phrase, when I've transcribed it below, I will likely move on to the action part of the post where I do some writing about people from Burque who are from the past, from the now, from the future. Maybe I will also mention the beautiful galactic starlight that is beaming down on our city as I type.

Cada cabeza es un mundo.

***

First off, it has been about a year since David Craven, a gifted teacher, writer, historian, and athlete, died. Craven made his home here in Burque and we were damn lucky to have a man of his caliber working over at the University of New Mexico. I live in the same neighborhood as the professor did and I sure as hell miss seeing him drive his BMW around, usually headed for the classroom or lecture hall.

Craven published extensively and eloquently, was an impeccable researcher and authority on Latin American art; I would need to use the Krell manifestation machine, then clone myself a thousand times and program those replicants to write twenty-four seven to approach his depth and output. 

If you would like an introduction to the man's work, check this out. I think it is damn formidable, and it is about the nature of criticism and tragedy, but you give it a try and come up with your own ideas on it.

Cada cabeza es un mundo.

***
Since I'm kinda leaning toward the subject of the nature of criticism, due to the influence of Craven's writings on my thinking as I note the anniversary of his transformative flight away from this stormy orb, this section of the post could likely provide a great opportunity to write about criticism as it relates to the local arts and literary scene.

Last week, an ulta-chido literary magazine that happens to publish my work came out with a new issue that had all sorts of stuff about Albuquerque and New Mexico floating shimmeringly though it. That ought to serve as a disclosure.

Anywho, besides a bad-ass transcript of poeticized extraterrestrial encounters by Larry Goodell and some indecipherable text strings generated by the robot I play in real life, the new issue of Unlikely Stories includes a narrative that is critical of local slam poet Hakim Bellamy.

I gotta tell you that I wholeheartedly believe that criticism is necessary for art and music and poetry to maintain its edge.

Now listen, before you get on my arse or defriend me or whatever the hell, I want to get this part out first: I have spent most of my life in Albuquerque, New Mexico (except for a portion of the nineties, when I was traipsing around the world like a skylarking sailor on liberty) working, teaching, making art, and writing all sorts of stuff for all sorts of folks, sometimes playing music too. I've done this mostly in obscurity and relished that.

That doesn't mean I have not been paying attention. One of the things I've noticed is that many people within the arts community are loath to criticize each other's work in any sort of substantive or incisive way.

So, practically everyone gets touted as a high-falooting genius with an ancient connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. Any other model is considered anathema and dissent is discouraged. In case you want to know, that is a phenomenon called groupthink and I've seen it. The damn thing usually comes out in collusion with a Dionysian and insular disregard for anything that might even be vaguely construed as critical. You can see that happy and congratulatory monster too, I believe. 

On the other side of a coin that is probably fashioned from depleted uranium, there are plenty of humans outside the arts community in these parts that just love to comment on what they run into while surfing the bland infinity at their fingertips. I get people writing me about how full of shit I am, all the time. Some folks get put off by my verbosity, but I don't give a good goddamn. One dude thought I sounded just like T.S. Eliot and I had to laugh an ironic aging hipster laugh because only I know how lousy my work really is.

Honestly, though, I gotta tell you all I support the opinions expressed in that essay over at Unlikely Stories. I think Hakim Bellamy is an fascinating persona, but I don't find what he  writes or reads interesting or challenging. Like a lot of what postmodernism has to offer, there is, in the frantic attempt to express everything all of the time, an amorphous quality in his work that is reflective of a culture that too often settles on what is easy, what can be reduced to efficiently consumable fragments.

More importantly, I believe that the publication of the essay represents an important opportunity to begin a discourse that is long overdue in our community.

And if anyone here in this military outpost in the desert thinks I am some sort of loon for saying that, that I am a hack from the far reaches of the Oort cloud whose only decent work was the ad copy I wrote thirteen years ago for the classified section of this or that alt-weekly, then that's just fine and dandy. That ain't too louche, is it?

Cada cabeza es un mundo.

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The New Mexican Astronauts

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Hey carnales, two-thousand and thirteen is pretty bitchin', so far, eh?

Everyone's talking about how far they have come along into the twenty-first century. It's just plain glorious to think about where we came from to get here. All that shiny newness reminds me of a fable I heard one day at Ghetto Smith's while wandering through the dog food aisle.

It's a story about the New Mexican astronauts; los recuerden? They came from the south with their sister the scientist in an attempt to reconcile el norte with la neta, if such a thing is possible.

I imagine there is all sorts of stuff on the interwebz about all this. Maybe you ought to google it when you are done here. Anywho, this story is about the time those two, nursed on atomic infusions and the dull knife of continuously magic circumstances, were gifted with petroleum-powered caballos mecánicos.

La historia suena así.

The dirt bikes were a good idea because they introduced a format for exploration that was dangerous and therefore had to be studied, modeled, processed, and then undertaken with the utmost gravity.

Additionally, there would be no supervision or support on actual missions, just the endless sage, wrecked cars, spiders, and occasional cows encountered on trails that had been carved out by the agents of men who had been making movies about an imaginary version of Albuquerque, who wanted a way to conveniently strand their hero in the Sandia Mountains, near the end of the fifth reel, like he was el vaquero más solitario del mundo, or something like that.

One of the motorcycles was painted green; the other was red. This configuration had nothing to do with the mythos of the popular culture in those parts regarding two fruitful colors; in this case let us say that the patterns and spectral traces differentiating one vehicle from the other symbolized springtime and blood.

The devices were put to use, a process concerned with the depiction of new experience was inititated and lonesome guitar songs played over the top of things as a plain reflection of the awesome and empty mesa that folded outward from the main observation laboratory. The two New Mexican astronauts prepared a mixture of gasoline and oil, imagining the far shore as just over the looming mountains, a bright thing seen vaguely from the corner of one's eye, waiting to be fully observed and made real.

And so with their sparkly protective headgear properly applied, the two New Mexican astronauts zoomed through several very compact iterations of the eleventh dimension which were craftily disguised as this or that neighbor's back yard, and right out into the middle the desert.

En ese desierto, algunos de los cactus estaban brotando plumaje colorido, and birds made from stones and mud lept up into the air as the spacemen approached. Here was a shift in the sand where a serpent had slithered by; there was a beverage storage unit abandoned long ago by another explorer, whose size was determined to be in excess of three meters, and therefore probably from one of the moons of Jupiter.

The only problem was that the whole scene lacked music. The two New Mexican astronauts fiddled with the idea of strapping a portable radio-wave receiver to one of the dirtbikes but decided it wouldn't be the same because meaningful tuneage would just get lost out there in the vasty arroyos, sabes?

On the journey back, one of the spacemen, the one with the name like a wolf (the other was called after the highest of clouds) ran over a small rodent. Basta, each cried out to the other. They hauled ass back to their space chante, parked los motorcicletas in a dark room filled with ghosts and spent the intervening days listening to A Night at the Opera and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; smoking Salem brand cigarettes stolen from the captain's quarters.

At night they would take out their microscopes and consult encyclopedias while the wind churned and rattled as if telegraphed from a much heavier planet. The New Mexican astronauts retreated into their labyrinthine headquarters and shortly after the solstice, the dirt bikes became small birds that flew off towards the sea.

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Galaxy Four, Part One

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Jones dug the living hell out of that first semester at Coronado Hall, even if there always was some dude from Peñasco or Ojo Caliente passed out and supposedly drowning in his voluminous, yellow, post-beer-bong vomit, sprawled out in the head; like the world was over for that rascal except for toilets and tile floors.

The Grateful Dead tapestry that he put up on the window to shut out the light was a total hit with his roommate and the fellows next door, and dammit all if the food wasn't a gazillion times better than Allsup's.

Plus which, the plethora of bookish flowerpots, hippie gals, and full fledged punk rock women setting down for dinner every night and right across from the glorious water fountain straddling the indoor patio at La Posada Dining Hall where our protagonist sat, damn near made Jones smile.

And so with wow and yeah serving him as enthusiastic interjections, the semester jetted out across the world quick. That spring, Charlie Jones, Jr. made a grip of ceramic objects, read and decoded two situationist texts, learned how to tinkle out a couple of dances by Bartok, and met a server name of Katie DuBois, at the dining hall where she worked scraping the plates clean.

It happened that Ms. DuBois pretty near broke Jones heart with her sharp blue eyes and proclivity for anthropology graduate students; but that was just fine because the fragile memories he gleaned and then had to shake off like wintertime gave him time to think.

For instance, Jones decided, as sure as eggs was eggs, he could never move home again. It wasn't of any use, anyhow, living with the old man. That dude was still trying to sell folks automobiles while sporting a gleam in his good eye combined with a gin-soaked handshake. Old Charlie never seemed to get over his Afghan hound Duchess dying early. Twenty years had come and gone and it was still like living on the moon when he was around, all silent and dusty.

Reckoning the student ghetto was the way to go, Charlie began exhaustive research focused on finding a shack he could call his own, but did not have to extend himself too much into that before he ran into his pal Donna in front of the student union.

It was just about springtime around those parts and Donna was gamboling about on the lawn with a skinny black-haired lady dressed all in white, wearing a skirt long enough to sweep up the grass where they danced. Both of the women smelled vaguely of cacti and burnt rope.

After a couple of of obligatory hippie-hugs, Donna introduced Zelda and let it out that the two of them found an underground haven, a remodeled, carpeted, and suitably dark basement apartment, utilities included. The deal was they needed a third to make the rent. You gotta be fucking kidding me, Jones said as the wind came up and it started to rain like it used to do in Albuquerque before the environmental disaster of 2087.

The next morning, Jones got up early, went into LaPo, gave Katie the bird and hauled his sorry ass over to the student ghetto. It was early, with the light just coming over the jungle of tired elms that framed the place. As Charlie approached his new digs, a dude dressed as a steam-shovel operator came racing up the steps with Zelda on his heels in a fashion that mimicked the German withdrawal from Stalingrad.

Charlie just stood there while the two of them began to argue and cajole, gesticulate and weave. Finally the dude in the industrial costume raced over to his El Camino and drove away. Zelda gritted her teeth, and extended her right hand, all friendly and like nothing at all had happened around there or anywhere on earth, for that matter.

But, with her standing out there in her bare feet, toeing at the dirt nervously and clad in an oversized wifebeater and sweatpants, Jones could just sense Zelda was unsettled about the whole thing. Tell you what, he said, drawing back a ways as they shook hands, I'll start bringing my stuff over tomorrow.

It poured water from the sky for the next two days and when Charlie Jones, Jr. finally got moved in, he thought it was a sweet deal, anyway. There was a tiny kitchen at the top of the stairs, then the rest of the place really was underground; dank, dark, all the walls were very cool to the touch and hardly any light got in at all.

Donna was never home. Sometimes Jones played record albums in the big room in very back of the joint, but otherwise kept to himself, getting up early every morning and hauling his sorry ass to class and he could never tell whether Zelda worked or not. Every time he went by her room, the door was open, with Fleetwood Mac or something like that floating through there and the woman reclining languidly through it all.

She'd usually glance at him wanly, as he passed. He'd smile vaguely or give her the Vulcan hand salute. One or the other of them would tilt their head before looking away. After two months of that, a spot opened up at Fiesta-Perpetual, a collective of artists that Jones knew from school. They had a slick pad right down the street from a haunted house and a decent pizza joint.

Charlie split right away, at night, so he didn't have to make eye contact with Zelda. He didn't see her again until just after Thanksgiving, and by then, it was easy enough for both to pretend they were strangers.

Later when he told the old man about what had happened, the salesman laughed and said, man you ought to write that down, that's rich.

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