Happy New Year

Every statement
is a political one,
even the one explaining
how great a new pony would be
in the six-year-old's letter to Santa.
Here comes the cough.
You have a coffin in your eye.
It looks kind of pretty.
The sky, I mean,
the webbing of celestial veins.
Don't even try
to hide the fact that you
are an agent of a faction
bent on destruction.
The question is not when
but whose.
Which faction, take your pick
and also hello.
I always liked you.
The sad woman turns off her phone.
Progress is just
around the corner,
the coroner.
Here comes that cough again.
Is it true that you
are an instrument of death
and if so, what does
that make the rest of us?
Cannon fodder, a bluebird,
a stoolie too much in the sun.

Paying Rent

The self flees from the self.
Hide behind this shower curtain.
Drive this tractor into that bog.
These people are happy to see you.
It isn't even your country.

A Few Words Regarding Momentum

We dropped out of school so we could spend more time in the clearing in the forest. Most of us go there to fall apart in one way or another. At first it went slowly, shy and awkward, like a middle school dance. Then we gained momentum and things started progressing more and more rapidly. Sometimes we are asked if we miss our family and our friends, and we say that we do. But we know things now, like how inside the ocean there is another ocean, one that is deeper and colder still.

The Murder in the Backyard

Last night
there was a murder

in the backyard.
While it was happening,

the forest got
just a little deeper.

The Most Beautiful Shoes in the World

Snow gathers in the corners
for an indeterminate span of time.
Opera music fills up
all the extra space in the room
the way air expands a balloon.
The most beautiful pair of shoes
in the entire world:
there is nothing
to say about them, they
are indescribable,
they make us feel as though
we are witnessing a ship
passing over the horizon
and we are also that same ship
in which there is a radio
broadcasting our beautiful sorrow.

You Are There

There used to be a brown bird here,
a sparrow, maybe, but now it's gone.
There used to be a family of six deer
beneath the apple trees
but they too have fled
to other frozen fields.
Someday, I will place a telephone call
across time zones and an ocean
and I will try to explain to you
my understanding of everything I did wrong,
and you will lean against a pinball machine
trying to make out my words.

I Believe In Bradley Liening

I was a Baron in a strange and mysterious land. I was moving through the mountains and it felt good. I was the lichen covering the rocks that comprised the mountains, I was swimming with the whales and we were loving and gentle. I was Oktoberfest and then I disappeared.

Time to Get Going Already

This is the punching hour,
when we punch and get punched
under the swinging lights
in the sting of burning leaves.
That would explain a lot, anyway.
Look, everyone is waiting.

The Human Heart Is a Dark and Terrible Thing

This loaf of bread doesn't look quite right. Where did it come from? Who placed it on this kitchen counter? We look at each other and then back at the bread. It is covered in tiny seeds. The bread appears to be too dense or dark or something. It appears to have an unnatural heft. We stand and consider the bread some more. We do not approach it. It makes us think of fairy tales. Forests. We begin to think of those things that frightened us as kids. We examine the bread from various angles and it occurs to us that is possible to be frightened of something as innocuous as bread. We wonder what is scaring us more: the mysterious bread that just keeps looking somehow more and more wrong or the idea that we can or could be afraid of something like bread. We wonder if there are other things in our lives that we should be afraid of. We look around the apartment. We consider sexual history. We glance sideways at chipped coffee cups. We eye the magazines on the coffee table. There is a glossy picture of a taco on the topmost magazine. The pico de gallo is composed of perfectly symmetrical cubed jicama, radishes, and topped off with a little parsley. We consider the double helix and the human genome. The bread is still sitting on the kitchen counter. The sky is another thing. We look outside the apartment window and begin to consider the water tower just visible in the distance. We turn and look at the door. We begin to consider the policeman standing outside.

Fire Safety

When We Were Happy

We held each other close. We didn't know what we were doing. Emptiness opened up somewhere in the room, which was frightening. It was a feeling, like watching someone trying to perform opera without a script or proper training. The stage seems so huge and ready to echo mercilessly, and then there's this person standing there looking very small and in a silly costume, while from the balcony flutter down pages and pages of stage notes and scores impossible to read from such a distance.

It's Starting to Get Dark Early

The sun’s sure pretty
setting through

colorful clouds
like that.

I could dream
forever and still

not be within
150 million kilometers

of such sloppy beauty
and who knows

how many miles that is.
It’s the nature

of beauty
I guess

to offer no scale
or conversion

you know
or you don’t

and if you don’t
you won’t ever.

Is it also
the nature of beauty

to blind you
via axial tilt

and oblong orbits?
Are we too tied

to amassing ash?
If we

get separated
now you’ll let me

know how it all
turns out, won’t you?

Travel Plans

I said I'd never ever join a drum circle,
nuh uh, which was true
until I did join a drum circle
and was forever changed.
That was back when every Thursday night
we got drunk and dangled from the battlements
and then went and got drunk all over again
on the fluff and phlox
when you still put your change
into an honest-to-goodness piggy bank
for reasons that were a mystery to everyone,
even Lou down at the bar who
agreed with pretty much everyone.
Now we sneak around while the dogs are down.
Somebody nailed the orchid to the wall.
We'll never know when the melons
stopped being green and pretty
and started looking like dentistry,
like a tiny airport covered in snow.

What Happened Next

A couple races up a steep winding road. The road is truly winding, dramatic curves bending through the mountains, probably somewhere out West. That is sufficient. Also, it is probably beautiful where they are. The mountains are maybe not technically mountains after all; they are huge land formations, though, staggering, really, incredibly old and composed of silty-looking red rock and dust, dotted with the occasional green shock of hardscrabble plants that look as though they could easily thrive nearly anywhere, that their green could even be glimpsed in white Arctic expanses. The couple, they are beautiful as well and well-dressed. They drive a convertible, a very expensive blue car provided by other peoples' money -- one of their parents, who made a fortune developing opulent golf courses in southern Florida, the kind in which a crane or two might be found splashing down in a water hazard, their dramatic grace and beauty not simply tolerated but seen as deserved, almost ordinary in this environment, a validation of the golfers' paunchy affluence. Back to the couple: the top on their car is down -- it is a convertible, after all -- and night is almost upon them, the wind is whipping into the car, they are dressed too lightly, in summertime clothes, and they are driving much too fast. It is their beauty that makes them do this. The girl is thinking something but only vaguely, that she must be in love, she looks at the immense dusty red rocks and thinks to say something about them, and she reaches down to touch her bare calf before she speaks.

Announcement from Management: Happy Birthday to You, InDigest

David Luke Doody and Dustin Luke Nelson are currently celebrating InDigest's first birthday. Issue 9 is up and running with past contributors contributing again.

Congratulations to them and their hard work. The official announcement is below. Don't forget to go check them out.

***

There is a brand new issue of InDigest up online, right now!

We are celebrating our one-year anniversary by having some past contributors showcase some of their newest work.

Here is the scoop on the issue:

InPoetics:
New poetry from Stephen Burt, Ada Limon, Brad Liening, Meggie Elder, Jess Grover, and Erica Wright

InNarratives:
"The Town Secrets," an excerpt from a novel-in-progress, Kings of the Wild Frontier by Meakin Armstrong.

"Interior Illusions," an excerpt from a novella in progress of the same title by Lech Harris.

"Hunting Bambi," a new short story from J. Albin Larson.

InErratica:
In Blunt Force Trauma, a new column about underrepresented books and authors, columnist Joe Finck tackles the legacy of Jim Thompson, the classic pulp novelist.

In Bedside Stacks, Ashleigh A. Lambert takes on The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg by Geoff Herbach and Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth.

InMusic:
InDigest editor Dustin Luke Nelson interviews composer Ted Hearne, and John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats.

InGallery:
Paintings from Kara Hendershot.

Thanks, once again and always, for reading. We can't overstate how pleased we are to have the opportunity to publish new, interesting, and compelling work for just over a year now. And a special thanks to all who have lent a hand to make this past year possible. First, Dustin and I would like to thank Jesse Sawyer and Chris Koza, two of the founding editors of InDigest. This magazine would not exist without their presence in the beginning. And thanks to all who have given their time in some way or another over the year: Jeremy Smith, Reina Podell, Jay Peterson, Alex Lemon, Charles Greene, Ashleigh Lambert, Jess Grover, Ryan Thompson, Chris Thompson, Dan Wieken, and Neil Reiter - there are a probably a lot of people we are missing here, and we're sorry if we missed you. Suffice to say that David and Dustin are not InDigest by themselves, it takes a whole lot of people to keep this running. Thank you all. And thank you for reading.

David and Dustin
Editors, InDigest Magazine

Your Likely Story

Finally, Iago shuts up. 500 years later: NASCAR. A man rushes through the night to another, a race against dying battery power. We have seventeen million songs for you to enjoy. Enjoy. The new godhead is this tech display that gets only one channel: it's a whole bunch of luminous snakes that can breathe underwater and can remember details and events for eons. This water bottle: more indestructible than your destroyer. Offstage, the dagger is withdrawn.

Hagiographical Selections

The president is not feeling his best. He cries a little and the gardens fill with brightly colored birds. He sniffles a bit and clouds part etc heavenly rays and so forth. His eyes contain rolling hills and a vast vaulting dome of sky. He turns to consider a painting, the brushwork done with the pile of skulls, and then moves a little way down the hall to consider the vast machinery of governance. Vaguely he thinks of whirling constellations. In early part of this past century the president felt his calling playing a pick-up game of baseball in a sandlot. He turned to the horizon, positively visionary. The other children knew something important was happening and were frightened. In his late teens he revolutionized umbrella manufacture and brought umbrellas into style. He retains youthful elegance and ebullience. His pulse is steady. His favorite color is blue. His love of classic Hollywood films is well known and he even knows some dance routines made famous by Fred Astaire. If pressed, he would name Charles Dickens as his favorite writer. When he was a young husband and father he and his family were once was attacked by a coyote in the desert-ish western plains. Dust rose in menacing whorls above the open fire. The future president successfully protected the new born babes from the coyote. According to some accounts there were many coyotes, a pack of vicious, snarling coyotes. The babes were successfully protected. By all accounts they barely even woke up, only a coo or two escaping the folds of swaddling clothes color-coded according to gender. One boy and one girl. They would grow up and assume the greatness that even then flowed through their baby-ish veins and arteries. The president is haunted during the nights by the awesome weight of responsibility and the occasional coyote howl. He claps his hands to his ears. The president in his middle years became an expert on the inner workings of the human heart: superior vena cava, semi-lunar valve, tricuspid valve, right ventricle, inferior vena cava. The president eats an apple and we are changed men and women. He excels at tennis. He sings in the upper registers. His pockets are full of stones. He will be the same age forever. He turns cartwheels when happy and is strong in his grief. Next to him we are as ordinary as a potato, we are the single note of his great silver trumpet.

Easy Does It

This man absorbs our silent glares, our furtively whispered insults. We are afraid of him. His talents include a green thumb, marvelous tomato plants. He owns several properties in the area and we suspect he plans on buying more. Maybe even this very house, that lamppost over there. There is no telling.

This man absorbs our vitriol stoically, the way we imagine a glacier might. He does it with upwards of 7/8 ths of his mass treacherously underwater. If we didn't hate him so much we'd admire his stoic awesomeness but our hate is too huge, too pure. Our hate is the glacier, 9/10 ths of it underwater! Ha! Ha ha ha ha!

This man knows all the addresses of his friends by heart: 110 West Eleventh Street, 2840 Samuels Avenue. What do you do with a man like this? Marge suggests that we hide garlic in his underwear drawer. Glen takes this a step further and suggests an inexpensive but dead fish. Tammy wonders if he is the kind of man who would even wear underwear. He is too carefree, she says.

We realize that Tammy is probably right and our wondering takes on a new dimension, as does our hate. Our hate steals cutely through the night like raccoons. Ha ha ha!

There! I Said It

You look ridiculous. You look like a clown. You look like the mud I scraped off my tire because I couldn't stand to have such a disgusting piece of mud on my tire. You know what I did then? I wiped that mud on a squirrel's ugly butt and that's what you look like, scampering up a tree. You're like a Panzer Division VI but with way worse gas mileage. You're so full of angry Germans. It's not even funny. You're feathered like a finch but not as pretty. Your song sounds nothing like bird trill and you're not the Iowa State Bird and your song sounds like an kangaroo's pained yowl. You smell like the inside of a kangaroo's pouch. You ever smell that? Not so good, compadre. You're the opposite of a misty forest. You're the opposite of a summer thunderstorm watched by lovers at midnight and you're not the green lichen everywhere that makes me love the Pacific Northwest, either. You're a hypothetical love note left by Floyd for Nicole in a building under hypothetical insectile siege. Maybe. You're a police probe that stirs painful memories, a foul gas that's probably pretty toxic, the low budget Tunnel of Love dried up and empty at the fair that closed last fall, pi to the twenty-ninth decimal, i.e., no one cares, the whole stupid town packed up and moved away, the next town moving in.

Formula

1

The MRI reveals minor amounts of damage in the left knee. Silence settles over the countryside. Somewhere, a dog barks.

2

A new tradition is being established. It is a tradition that requires no people or participants and a minimum of actions. Everyone believes it will be a great success.

3

Bees! Bees everywhere!

4

We have seen different formulae for the rate of surplus-value and we remain skeptical. Still to consider is the question of the cat: did she eat that rubber band that we swear we left on the kitchen table?

5

One person turns to another. A thing is about to happen.

The Emperor's Dog

I was teaching my dog how to shake. The teaching would go like this: I would say "shake" while simultaneously holding out my hand to him as he sat in front of me. The great marble halls in which we practiced were often chilly and sunny and it felt in these times as though we would live forever. I would hold out my hand to him in a way that I will describe as: exaggerated. The dog's name is as unimportant as the lack of success we experienced in executing this simple but also very stupid "trick," and soon we quietly returned to our life of tyranny and extravagance.

My Trip to the Grocery

I went to the grocery store for supplies. The previous day I had purchased a large quantity of oil and a substantial length of rope. I had also purchased several large pieces of cloth that could be used for a variety of purposes. And then I was going to the grocery store. At the grocery store I was going to procure supplies: flour, sugar, cornmeal, salt, maybe even some honey. On the way I passed a nursery. They (the nursery workers) were selling small trees that would presumably grow into larger trees that could hold, possibly, birds. Maybe even a small and furred quadruped. A snake? There were mostly evergreens for sale. I did not purchase those small trees though I may sometime in the future and who knows what will happen in the future. Maybe we will all be sitting under a large conifer in which there is a snake. At the grocery store there were many aisles full of goods, more or less anything you could imagine. Canned clams. Chocolates and olives. That juice that is a blend of clam and tomato juice. This is just for starters. I was momentarily thrown, unable to remember my plans, which had been more or less meticulously prepared at my own kitchen table by me over several cups of coffee and much careful planning in the yellowy light of late morning. I had made a list in my head. But now here are giant pyramids of canned goods and very bright lights and squealing children and a low-register but continual beeping. Physically I felt okay. I felt fine. The floor of the grocery was well-trod but clean. Things weren't going too poorly, after all. Mentally I was just thrown a little though in fact I had been to this same grocery store many times before as well as other groceries besides. There was a family near me who looked like their surname could be the Maxwells or possibly even the Doogins. The daughter reminded me of a spider somehow. The son looked like the brother of a blonde spider-girl. The less said about the parents, the better. They were wearing what they probably unconsciously thought of as their "weekend clothes." It may have been the weekend. They looked tired. They looked surprised by their progeny, or, more accurately, they looked stunned by their own ability to do what they currently engaged in doing, i.e., buying multi-garishly-colored and highly-processed children's cereal with pirates and cartoon animals -- dogs, parrots, no snakes -- all over the box in ways that were and still are absolutely and positively language-destroying. In the corner of the grocery store there was a vending machine. It held small toys meant for children. It held some candy. It accepted only quarters. In the Plexiglas there was a reflection of the automatically sliding doors that opened out not into the world but the world buffered by an acre of parking lot which was also reflected in the Plexiglas over which dozens of white and gray seagulls whirled, their very yellow beaks flashing briefly into view then disappearing, then another, then that too disappearing.

The Mailman's Sadness

The mailman's sadness worries us. He delivers the mail reliably and within the same half hour time frame six days out of the week and then he sits on the steps for several minutes. Some days he merely sits there, looking off into the indeterminate middle distance, a forlorn look on his face. Can we say that he looks haunted? Some days he sniffles a little. Some days he does cry. One day, a Saturday, he really sobbed, just totally lost it, face buried in his hands, his chest heaving, the whole bit. Then, after a few minutes of this, he gets up and moves to the next building and the process repeats itself. It must take him the whole day and on into the night to deliver the mail. This is worrisome. Does he sleep? If so, when? Does he ever finish delivering the mail? We have sat and peered through our windows and watched him for most of a day, a sad, sad man in blue incrementally disappearing down our ordinary street.

Five Facts About Satan

1

On Saturday nights the devil often dresses in disguise and plays upright bass in a jazz combo on the Lower East Side. He doesn't do this because he cares about humanity or being accepted or tapping into his soft side or whatever. He's just bored.

2

Loves fruit salad. Loves it.

3

The devil actually looks a bit like Whistler's Mother when viewed in profile. When viewed frontally, however, he resembles a parrot. Or a squid. Like a parrot-squid-dog holding a gun or something. Anyway, he's also kind of a dusty rose color.

4

He wears reading glasses and likes Blake.

5

He likes to walk aimlessly around at night and listen for sirens. He is a fan of Woody Harrelson, professional basketball, and is an appreciator of fine Victorian notions of architecture. Most of the time the devil walks around inside out.

A Half-Week in Grassroots Community Action

1

Today we inveigh against corruption. This is our position. Several actors come out of the wings and mime a dumb show about the evils of corruption. The dumb show ends with everyone dead. Apparently it's a tragedy.

2

Today we inveigh against shark attacks. It is our humble contention that people should not be eaten, maimed, or in any other way done injury by sharks. It is unfair and more than that it strikes to some deep elemental fear that we would rather not reckon with. The paper runs a scathing editorial against sharks and their need to always be swimming and their many rows of sharp teeth.

3

Today we inveigh against stupidity in children. If it is true that children are susceptible to our lies because they have no accumulated experience against which to measure the relative veracity of our claims then that is no fault of ours but is a failing on the part of the children. In an effort to raise our children in this harsh psychic tundra where even the governor stays up late and plots our doom, we resolve from now on to tell our children nothing but lies.

4

Today we inveigh against nothing much. Splendid, splendid.

Partial Catalogue Re: Action v Inaction Re: Massive Influx of Potentially Dangerous Insects

Intro/Fact: As of the time of this writing, specifically 9:55 PM/CST, we have no idea what's going on. Better to make this clear and official at the start so that we are at least slightly less inclined later to fudge certain details so that we may present ourselves as some sort of authority, no matter how weak.

Exposition/Fact: Cockroaches are in fact entering the building in huge, positively huge numbers. It is unclear what has driven them here in such large quantities. The numbers are so large that at first we devised alternate theories for the faintly clicking brown influx.

Exposition/Theories: Sewage, specifically excrement-based sewage (this would account for the color and the immediately and viscerally powerful reaction against it), rats (which while still irksome and noxious and potentially dangerous and the like still remained (and even still remain according to a quick and harried general consensus) somewhat more palatable if only for the fact that rats (Rattus and related genera) share some attributes with humans including four limbs, discernible teeth, whiskers, and the like, which have roughly human equivalents, even their shiny black eyes might possibly remind one of a lost love and thus send one to one's desk, to scrabble a frantic love note)

Exposition/Frantic Love Note/Purely Hypothetical: Nicole, I'm so sorry for everything I've thought of you all these years I love you I've never stopped and now, now this may be the last you hear of me for reasons which must certainly seem fantastic to you but you must understand I've never felt more sorry I just didn't know I must go if you hear from me again that means I'm alive I've survived and we can let our love grow again. (Signed) Floyd).

Solution?/Theory: There is something in the building they want -- (food, shelter, something more sinister, what are the mental capabilities of cockroaches, does anyone know?) -- it is the driving snow they wish to escape -- their collective action is based upon some kind of heretofore unknown/undocumented animal instinct.

Solution?/Theory: They are here for one of us...

Solution/Conclusion: We will wrap ourselves in the warmest and most colorful clothes we have, we will ransack the closets for anything that may prove to be of use -- rags, cleaners, thick buckets, lighters, light bulbs -- and we will run over the frozen fields to the distant highway which just over the clicking that works its way up floors and elevator shafts, we hear it distantly, we can almost see it, we imagine we can feel it thrum from here.

Your Fortune

The sleeper sleeps in the dark. He has a good job and such. The dark has a strikingly similar quality to the dark in which his mother now sits half a continent away. The dark does not expand or contract, nor does it billow or wave or settle or smell of anything in particular. It is not cloth-like nor does it embody or otherwise represent human emotions or primal feelings of a deep and complex nature which may ultimately be what unites human beings of different times, places, cultures and philosophical attitudes. It is not tart. The sleeper sleeps on, dreaming of nothing interesting in particular: there is an odd shape, some sort of animal maybe. Impossible to parse. The dreamer's mother wanders into the kitchen, which is also very similarly dark, and wonders distractedly about the nature of unhappiness. In the corner there is a flyswatter and a jar of lard. Are we unhappy?

Future Former Deconstruction

The future former president stares at his hands. He looks out the window and absentmindedly sucks at his teeth. He thinks he may be developing a cavity.

Among the things that are far away from his thoughts: the qualities of clemency and love, the relationship between the two, also dancing, deliriously or sedulously, stars and tropical parasites.

Among the things far away from the future former president's thoughts: his youth, books, trees.

The future former president sighs and looks at the paperwork he must fill out. He is impatient. He wonders where his aides have all gone. Surely the halls outside his office were once more populous than they are now? Or is it his imagination?

The future former president surprises himself by thinking without discernible reason or cause of a large carnivorous lizard. The moment passes.

The future former president sighs and looks out the window again. Without giving it much thought he makes shapes out of the clouds: a baseball, a marshmallow. Did he dream all that hectic bustle that was always invigorating?

He has notes on this, he's sure.

The future former president looks at his desk. The desk gives the impression of being solidly built, a quality piece of work, of being difficult to move and impossible to disassemble.

The wood is dark and expensive-looking, polished to a high sheen so that when the future former president shuffles the papers aside and looks admiringly at his desk he sees also himself.

He does not think about language or the future contingent.

Some Thoughts Regarding Our Fear

Our fear is a great feathered bird that looks like a rat and eats like a horse. It molts, leaving fear-droppings for us to inadvertently step in and thusly feel unfixed dread for the rest of the evening.

Like a great feathered bird our fear has a tendency to roost in high, inaccessible places. We shield our eyes and scan the sky. We squint and point. The younger among us begin to cry, softly at first.

Our fear is cold-blooded. It is sluggish in the winters, which are long and dark enough as it is.

Our fear can frequently be seen sunning itself on flat and dusty rocks, on the great stonework tilings of our town square. We sensibly give it a wide berth.

The smell of our fear is much like that of buttered corn so that in the summers we can smell our fear and very nearly almost crave it then turn to find it gone, our fear carried away by warm easterly winds.

We Are Looking On the Bright Side

Thought: We are rapidly losing intellect at a rate of 10% per 10 million cells or so, though that's just a guess of course, a more precise stab at the retrograde intellectual capacities we cannot help but acknowledge, higher brain functions experiencing a loss of rapidity and control similar to when the car loses traction, gives way to ice, begins to speed sideways sliding into the curve.

Action: What action to possibly take in dealing with such incontrovertible decline, the sludge we feel like a congested drip down the back of a raw throat? Clutch head, sigh then groan, weep bitterly, silently compare/contrast ourselves to this guy, that one.

Action: Stare at rocking chair in the corner desperately trying to think of something interesting to think about that chair. What. What. What. What.

Alternate Thought: This decline represents nothing new or in any way out of the ordinary. Totally and completely natural. Ha ha. Higher brain functions normal, new cells emerge according to laws known to life and the larger universe but which still remain nebulous (root word -- related to nebula -- good, getting better, connections coming to sharp relief, good good) to us owing to our limited vantage point and historical/temporal location, ie the small scope of the now.

Alternate Thought to Previous Alternate Thought: But what is the purpose of our ability to think other than to expand that scope, to no longer happily dwell within the now-known, eg, "What is a man" Hamlet says in his great and late soliloquy he gives to the plains of Denmark before boarding the "star to every wandering bark" (Shakespeare again, yes, "Sonnet 116", another connection, good) to England, it's late in the play "if his chief nature be but to feed", no, not quite, this has taken a terrible turn.

Action: Compose new works. Good, good. We begin here: a terrible turn.

The Radio Host on Dogs

The Radio Host on Dogs:

If people don't pick up after their dogs which is the legislation right now why what are we coming to, are we supposed to sit there, you know, in our hammocks with our day-old hot dogs and our fermented lemonade and you know watch this country go you know where, hell, that's where, that's just what they want you to think!


The Radio Host on Imaginary Dogs Wearing Kerchiefs Patterned After the Flag:

...


What the Radio Host Secretly Feels About the Above-Mentioned, Kerchiefed Dogs:

He feels as though he has swallowed a swimming pool full of lime gelatin, like he has expanded effortlessly to make room inside for all that swimming-pool-sized lime-gelatin-like love, he is made of wonderful marble that has all day been warming in the sun, he has twin suns behind his eyes effortlessly providing all the light anyone would ever need in this world.


The Radio Host's Producer:

Behind the soundproof glass, he raises his arms in a gesture of victory. Slowly he begins to weep.

Future Board Members

As children we looked up to the Board of Education thinking that they were the ones in whose hands our destinies were cradled. As we grew older began to suspect that our destinies were indeed in the hands of the Board of Education (and how could they not be? the Board, holding its meetings in secret, always in a different location, always issuing their commands, judgments, decisions, imperial whims via a new method of communication: important-looking Latin in skywriting, Sanskrit nicked into hardwood floors at the City Hall, they always did love the dead languages) and also in other places quite beyond our imaginings: the University rumored to be on the other side of the rolling green hills, the rolling green hills themselves, our parents (who wrung their hands and flew to the windows, perching, thoughtful, sometimes scared whenever the Board issued a new decree in a series of strange musical blasts that sent the neighborhood's dogs into fainting spells), and other places/entities all quite unknown to us. Someday we will be older still, we think, we posit, and at night we stay awake dreaming about what it will be like when we become a member of the Board (who we have come only recently to realize may not be a Board of Education at all, might be some other kind of Board, perhaps even a Board of multiple things and pursuits or most horrifyingly not really a Board at all, maybe a Vague Quorum, maybe a loose band of drunks) or we leave this place forever.