re: mix
Nathan Neely

...time to become God and enter the beast of history.
-- Jim Harrison

cirricula
full blown from the brow
of nirvana
no one is ever missing...

diasporhea
lacklust. understand?
or like: who flipped the switch on Hemingway's brain?

strong in the broken places
the broken places
it spells like ink

1996 © 2012
elimae

If Robert Frost Was a Bro:
The Girl Less Hit On [and]
Fat Tire and Ice
Larry Fleury

The Girl Less Hit On

Two girls sitting at the wooden bar

And sorry I could not be with both

And be one man, long I stood

And crept at one as long as I could

To where her hips curved her clothes;

Then there was the other, just as fair,

And having perhaps the hotter claim,

Because she was cute with hipster wear;

But as for the other girl passing there

Had worn her jeans about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In sheets no guy has ambled back.

Bro, I adored both of them that day!

Knowing girls lead you on, astray,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two girls sitting at the bar, and I --

I took the one less hit on by

All the bros, making all the difference.


Fat Tire and Ice (New Belgium and Smirnoff)

Some say we're drinking Fat Tire,

Some say Smirnoff Ice.

From what I've seen on The Wire

I hold with those who favor Le Tire.

But if I had to drink it tonight,

I know them girls might hate it

Now I say that Smirnoff's ice

Might be okay

And would suffice.

1996 © 2012
elimae

Peephole
Ben Spivey

How in our mid-twenties we rented an apartment. How whenever we ran water it smelt burnt. How everything we owned smelled like smoke. How we could hear the man in the room above us urinate at 5:30 PM every day. How, at the time, I hadn't smoked in eight-months. My wife (we hadn't married yet. That happened three years later) never started. But our neighbor's smoke seeped. They tapped their ceiling. They spun their loose ceiling-fans. Sounds cranked at our floor and walls. Their voices pierced all barriers. The place was affordable. We kept the television out of site. People stood outside the door at four AM. I made sure it was dark enough for sleep (the city lights shown and slipped in anyway they could) and we stepped light enough to avoid complaints.

*

I would look through the peephole before my wife would get home and after she'd fall asleep. I'd watch people come and go. Stand and talk. One night a number of people stood there outside of the door. I could only see their backs. I could only hear their whispers. They never turned around and stood there for an hour in shadowed blurs.
How it seemed one day I slept and woke again married and older.

1996 © 2012