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The President of the World Grows Thoughtful

When I was twenty-nine and by myself
an image of Mickey Mouse came to me.
I was president of the world
and Mickey was my Secretary of Defense.
He was here to tell me that the seas
had turned to blood, which we knew

was a bad sign. I was about to ask
for more information when he spit
blood all over me and collapsed.
I got up and walked to the window,
and stood there with my hands clasped
behind my back. The moon was bright.

Big Top

When I was thirty and my brother was twenty we went to a circus where a clown ran out of the spotlight and into the crowd with a bucket of water. He threw the bucket of water, which turned out to actually be full of popcorn, and then he stabbed my brother. As my brother fell off the bleachers and rolled on the hay and threw up viscous-looking bits of blood and stringy bile, I jumped up from my seat and chased the assailant. He was wearing floppy shoes, which made him pretty easy to catch.

I dragged him back by his big stupid clown ruffle to apologize to my brother, who was still on the ground. The clown apologized, and then my brother and I beat him up really good, really messed this clown up bad. In the end, you couldn't tell what was greasepaint and what wasn't. We spit and lit cigarettes and left the big top. Later that night, I was giving my brother a ride to the hospital to get examined and, we guessed, quite a number of stitches. On the way there, we heard a news report that said that a panther had mauled his trainer and escaped from the circus and was thought to be prowling the neighborhood.

Happy Halloween!

And It Was Like Nothing Bad Had Ever Happened

One day everyone woke up and the recession was over.
There were no more overturned, burning cars.
There were no more local witch doctors
and there seemed to be far fewer hexes.
People lost their appetite for feral dogs.
One man put down his submachine gun and picked up a pineapple.

Happy Halloween!

A Short Note from Management: New Awesomeness Happening at H_NGM_N!

From the inimitable Nate Pritts:

***

Citizens of the world!


H_NGM_N #9 is locked & loaded & ready to be dropped from a low flying plane on some unsuspecting country whose regime is in need of being toppled.

& if that country is CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE you can start to see how my metaphor is apt:

http://www.h-ngm-n.com/cur_ent-i_sue

Please note that we are currently open to submissions until November 30th & be sure to check out the updated info on H_NGM_N Books:

http://www.h-ngm-n.com/h_ngm_n-books/

***

Go check it out! Don't cost nothin.

Zandalee

When I was twenty and my brother was twenty, my brother died. We were canoeing through the everglades. There were crocodiles all around us. It was nighttime. The moon looked like a bloated sac of light. It looked like it could burst. We were in love with the same woman, but we were arguing about movies. We got into a fistfight in the canoe and my brother knocked me unconscious. I woke up I don't know how much later, cold to the bone, and alone in the canoe. There was a long, shallow puddle in the canoe. The moon was in a different part of the night sky. There were fewer crocodiles sliding through the mist. My brother probably isn't actually dead.

July, July (Part Two)

When I was fourteen and my brother was two, I stepped on a nail. I wasn't wearing shoes and the nail easily pierced my arch and popped out the top of my foot. I looked at it, thinking dumbly of the plastic timer on last Thanksgiving's turkey, then I started to bleed, then I bled a lot. We were playing around a loose wood pile out back. I don't know why. But when my brother saw all the blood, which was dark, fast-moving, and attracting tiny insects in the summer heat, he started to wail, which is how our parents found out and found us. My brother sitting there, red-faced, screaming his head off. And me, standing there, unable to say anything, unable to move, watching my foot get more and more covered in blood and tiny bugs.

July, July

When I was nine and my brother was fourteen, we found ourselves in the kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It was summer and there were heat waves and dense clouds of black bugs rising over the weeds that had begun to turn brown. There were popsicles in the freezer, I knew, and I thought about them often. My brother put down the knife he was using to spread his peanut butter and turned to me. "I can talk to birds, you know." "What?" I said. He didn't say anything else, he just finished making his sandwich and then took it out onto the porch to eat it. I followed him. Later, I tried to imagine him eating a PB and J in a giant nest somewhere high above the earth. It was hard to visualize. It was easier to imagine the view: cool whites and blues, and the sudden flap of wings.

Rust Belt

When I was eleven and my brother was thrity he got laid off from the plant. About this same time there were strange sightings over the farmlands outside of town. People reported seeing spinning silvery objects swooping over the corn. Other people complained of mysterious toothaches, and still others claimed to have been cured of various persistent ailments. When a baby was born with fused legs, it seemed to decide something. As my brother and I packed up our things, he asked me how I felt about maybe living on Mars.

What Do You Do?

When I was seventeen and my brother was six, we went to an all-night diner. I got coffee and he ordered some juice. We sat with our drinks talking a little when a stunning woman walked into the diner, the sort of person whose beauty is so radically severe and drastically incongruous as to make the rest of us feel retroactively out of place, confused, almost even ashamed, as if we had mistakenly wandered onto some movie set whose scene was already in progress and everyone looking at us, waiting. What were our lines? I squinted into the lights and tried to think.

The Rest Is History

When I was four and my brother was one we put out a grease fire with water. The bar of expectation was thus set.

That Was That

When I was sixteen and my brother was twenty-three, we went to an exorcism being performed to rid a small child of a malevolent spirit. We sat and watched while the child writhed violently on the bed and kicked at the priests who prayed and burned candles and incense. Afterwards we went to the A & W for chili-cheese dogs and Cokes and got sick.

Winter Sports

When I was nine and my brother was seven we went to a frozen lake to fish. We walked out onto the ice and I got scared that it would break, and we would all fall through to our icy deaths. I thought about this so hard that I forgot all about fishing and I forgot my brother was there. I forgot about most everything until the sky got dark and the trees loomed like mysterious spears.