Saturday, December 31, 2016

A TEST SUBHEADING

I wanted to ask and kept it to myself like a name-tag falling down your shirt and just laying at the bottom above the belt where I wanted to ask ask the question and kept it to myself like a name-tag falling down your shirt and just laying there at the bottom above the belt come to think of it after you spent that time all that time sitting there on the edge of the tub the one with the little hairs not the curled ones the short straight one don't try and tell me you I want to ask the question and kept it to myself like a name a tag falling down your shirt and just laying at the bottom hiding behind the TV behind the wall in the back of the closet sliding down the rhetoric of a shaken soda can dropped against the edge of the table laying at the bottom above the belt waiting for it anticipating the spoon wooden in expression knowing the eyeliner of boldfaced lies canned bubbles folding around the edge curled ones short ones straight ones don't try and tell me you I want to ask the question and kept it to myself.

"You were punching yourself in your sleep."
"Why didn't you stop me?"
"I'm hypothesizing or it could be hypothesized that you were punching yourself in your sleep."
"Is that what you're putting on your paperwork these days?"
"These days."
"What was that?"
"A repetition. Filler."
"No. It sounded like an explosion."
"Just more rotted buildings collapsing about."
"Oh. I feel these ditches all along the right side of my nose."
"You were scratching yourself in your sleep."
"I did have a dream about giving a cat a bath in a sink."
"I didn't know you had a cat."
"A cat. I said a cat. I never had a cat. A decade or so ago I had a recurring dream for a period of maybe a month where every night there was a bilby in it and I began to wonder if I had one of those things as a pet, but as it turns out I thought I had those dreams because I mentioned it to this coworker at the hole in the ground I used to work at."

"Hole in the ground? When did you have a job?"
"As it turns out it was nothing official and I never got paid. Just a hole in the ground."
"Where was this hole in the ground?"
"Next to some pile of corpses."
"One of those arrangements."
"Never seemed to put a dent in it. Turns out I never mentioned any recurring dream to this coworker. Was never very good at making friends at work."
"The story keeps changing."
"What story?"

The edge of the table laying at the bottom above the belt waiting for it anticipating the spoon wooden in expression knowing the eyeliner of boldfaced lies canned bubbles folding around the edge curled ones short ones straight ones don't try and tell me you I want to ask the question and kept it to myself.


- Max Stoltenberg


Tuesday, December 27, 2016

COUGHING A BOWL OF BLOOD

Backwards from a hundred working back to a thousand a million and so on and so on it goes I go she goes on without me into the dark with her flashlight texting as the beam jiggles over where we used to walk like the time when words could convince us that things could grow into something wonderful or that it would all be destroyed and instead we have these things lying on the ground run over wrapped around violent swift replies since our heads can't do it can't even step into the chalk rectangle taking a bat to our windows on our empty eyes drawn by crayons melting in the desert. Nonsense burritos nor couches riddled with pee sprinkled from on low medium well dressed person staring at you because they have more lines more expressions rapidly starting to sound all alike and yet if you separate the shit with your hands mind you with your mind got to hand it to you there appears well it's already there nothing appears except what is already there never mind got to hand it to you hand you nothing there did it already and thus the conclusions reached by your DVD menu form a way around the shrinking room. 

She bent over the bendy straw and thought she noticed a tear along the angle-adjustable bellows and thought she saw her the one she used to be in class with in online college and imagined what she looked like until she sent her a friend request after a stream of commentary on fossilized families. 

Tense caffeine shades
alarm clock minefield
boots leering emptied
stiff laced eggshells 
anxious unraveling enigmas 
shredded DNA laundry


- Max Stoltenberg

Sunday, December 11, 2016

FIBULA: WAS THAT THE DOOR?

The two of them will find a locked door to separate to keep them both out while the rest of us attempt to figure things out distracting ourselves away from our distractions pixels of thoughts safety pins puncturing from behind towards the next step into the sewage backing up into the landscaping forgotten memories smelling rotting corpses under the buffet is that where that rank is coming from the offer letter in a format for no more revisions unless they want to interrupt your complaints the tightness in your neck now that they mention it now that you mention it.  The two of them will find a locked door an unlocked door to separate to keep them both out while the rest of us attempt to figure things out distracting ourselves away from our distractions transposing for someone else on the other side of a locked door they will find will have found the two of them will have discovered that the next thing to be possessed of a mild or moderate disjointed company protected from any voice shouting at its walls the floor creaks and thumps with adjustments making a few irregular thumps with pauses for another sex another sewing together two or three layers of pizza slices have had enough of this face tilted down at the sky reflected in the nothing that I can tell could even possibly reflect haven't thought about it and I can say it again because that is what I do if I am not tearing the skin from my fingers with my teeth when I am drunk with suspicion and envy and rot the desert rot the desert kind of rot.

The three of them will find an opened door left open by one of them the one who rushed after dragging their stinking ass behind the rest of them the other two the rest of the three including the one of them the one who rushed after dragging their stinking ass behind the rest of them feeling something fly out of his beard having scratched at his hairy neck further down the steps as they twisted to the right into the dark where the backpacks and the chew-toys the leashes the harping on not being able to find the paper where the thought of using the answer b on the multiple choice exam might have be considered as excessive or overly redundant. 

Would he go over it and discover the answer b kept reappearing? He would he had and it did the answer b kept reappearing and re-emerging in an act of resignation filling out a life made of choking down deal-breakers. Menacing eyes burned through the dark of his closed lids into his puzzled brain twisting his nut-sack into a posture of pretend engagement with the farce on the other side of the desk drooping in front of an old paint job in need of another one that comes after you quit or attempt to in your ambivalent minding of the store of the decreasing initiatives singular now they waited for it and here it is a unifying tactic ground into the powder of reduced neighborhoods refined by having only one left of everything. Touch yourself and pull hard pull until you peel off the flypaper of the universe and rise out of a sweaty bed and adhere to it again the double-sided moebius strip of shit.


- Max Stoltenberg