ALTERNATING INFECTIONS

The woman behind the counter argument she was having an argument with the man over how they remembered or failed to remember things, events, each other, they never forgot each other's faults no matter how hard they tried. The night before it had been the photographs in several plastic drawers and how they whispered to both of them is that how it sounded the silence narrowed into either whispers of regret or tinnitus. Bold face typed lies stuck to the inside of your jaw post-nasal dripping into eating our own thoughts the words of our own thoughts cognitive snot.

Green I want to go somewhere green and take a breath that doesn't feel like choking on half a dune more than half more than half our lives choking coughing below the line you and your counter your counter argument a command of language I can only read in a faked deeper voice disposing of phrases and turns of phrase you startle as I miss another turn distracted by that time when you found the foot of a bird and told me about how huge your backyard seemed to you when you were young and how you rode on our tricycle around the neighborhood where you lived where you wandered off where your tricycle stopped in the crack of the sidewalk of your conscience of your desire to get up and wander and wander you delightful blue-eyed dream that woke up in my forgetfulness.

"Where are you going?"
"Outside."
"Did the bins blow over again?"
"It looks like they did, but it's hard to see."
"Why don't you wait if it's hard to see?"
"I was going to invite you to go with me."
"Or did you just think of me because I reminded you?"
"You remind me of a lot of things."
"You're too generous."
"Not enough in my usual estimation. Speaking of, I found a receipt in one of your back pockets."
"A receipt? That must be an old one. Brings me back to when we could do that."
"Do what? Buy stuff?"
"That, too, but I meant when we could actually worry about you know subtraction."
"It was always subtraction wasn't it?"
"Mostly. When are you going?"
"I'm debating."
"Are they at it again?"
"Like nihilistic cats."
"Let me know when they've exhausted each other."
"If I think of it."

Destiny flattens the pillow
deflating vision into darkness
empty fruit
hollowed out 
and full of ants
musical leaking
running along the familiar paths
worn out by the same old
same old
branching out associations
like her hair growing back
from the fallout
machines crushing her body
that's all they do


- Max Stoltenberg

BELOVED PARTICLES

The math was overly haunted with multiplication and division and wrapped in burritos of noncommutative geometry stuffed with pads of steel trying to make it last as it sent its needles into her thumbs quite by deliberated tantalizing gum drooping from under the table his pants were open not that open for developments of a parenthetical kind following on the heels of their yelling all the carrying on loud parental escalation and even at the mall a word if you will now around the corner behind the what's the name for it her everyone including me have continued to underestimate her with our impatience along the way of this overlong monotonous excuse for a chapter that should close including other branches and when we stroll by if we feel like it and see their shopfront sign shrink more and more lines contemptuously peeled off.

He opened the front door and stepped out onto the sidewalk pathetically attempting to ignore his place of work's mutilated legend and removing his hat addressed the crowd that was not there that had dispersed in sporadic installments of passersby avoiding and eluding.

"I will speak in a manner possibly not familiar to some, but I would hope more in tune with those who do appreciate the esoteric references of a worker drone and a failed candidate for interim assistant manager perhaps in the tone of my mother now dead not just dead expired for close to a decade as she used to say, just because you set the kitchen tablecloth on fire doesn't qualify you to set the world ablaze with your passion. Twice I have had to emerge almost twice only once I have had to emerge from my routinely criticized weekly newsletters foisted upon me by those who deny their right to an imagination although their insults betray a taste for the unoriginal. I can tell by the looks on your faces if your heads were turned this way if any of you were actually walking down this street or anywhere in the proximity of this septic tank of a county that invoking one's familial and wounded tongue just makes it unintelligibly swollen in this mouth of the unexpelled. I have given up on stories. I was born with a brain that probably will never make it to the end of recounting and recalling to others without distracting myself before getting there. My eyes still look out the window waiting for trees to pass by but delayed by neverending stretches of waste voided by people who can't cook or make things last can never give up on hostile attachments stained humans perfumed with forgiveness that we pretend doesn't reek with memory categorized into top 10 lists moments drowned out by commentary that has been charred with another layer of analysis. What it has been about men women and children unaccompanied by description only differentiated by medication united by common pharmacies locations engraved with impoverishment. It would be better that I not return resign instead of someone else another piece of shit dislodged from between those on the floor above, but I shall slink back before the heat reminds me of my lack of composition. I can be found in Cubicle 8 toward the back adjacent to the dead cockroach which has not been disposed of yet. My colleagues prefer to compare themselves to others who have eluded being sentenced to this employ while I have chosen to contrast myself with the vermin and decaying elements that crawl and lie stalled about."

Almost an even set of years
under the stairs of abuse
darkness envelops her breath
wrapping anxious arms
about her bosom 
the timer has gone off 
and the blame runs out
into the muffled night
jets circle the inmates
housed in the neighborhood
of numbers defined
but not linking as cleanly
as understandably 
as once supposed
teeth have fallen
out and into 
the vanishing puddle


- Max Stoltenberg