Here and There: perplexed, unglued arrangement of timed agreement…-Traveled upon-
Mark WohlIn a dream I met a man who taught me to fly. We spoke briefly with the content of conversation not being the subject. His words and my words tangled—a conduit of inconceivable. A man of white with dulled silver streaks and weathered wear. Suddenly I’m in flight. His name was not Gary. Gary was an in and out San Franciscian with a temporary stay that’s left permanent. Coffee and cigarettes in a home open 7 days a week—with concern being the reverberated predicate. Floating like a feather—drifting in waves of wind’s currents. Without a doubt I’m in
complete control. Sailing with the smoothness of a locked in magnetic—sharing of words. A man painted by an untouched realm of consciousness and the other a painter (
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from Opaque Thought
Mark Wohl
And so I may speak
a language unknown to most
And so I may explore the
innermost workings of the
cosmic vibrations Ginsberg felt
And so I may have gone futhur
And been everywhere
while heading nowhere
in this vast confusion
of a land waiting to be found
And so I may
I just may
and so I will
and I might
But I won’t
And
what
do you
know
anyway
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on the whole
Kahlotus Lind
she strolls laughing through desperate ghettos
pointing out the colorful flowers on weeds
that grow between blocks of crumbling foundations—
of big pictures she sees little.
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so spake Kahlotus
Kahlotus Lind
know me as a flower
think of me as thorns
but remember who asked who
which path led to the garden
as we passed by
know me as a flower
think of me as thorns
but remember who asked who
which path led to the garden
as we passed by
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Frozen
Peter Marra
The flexible demon
has landed
in the room
sliding across the linoleum
the pain it felt was
electric
and soothing
it
watched the
females dancing by the water.
slowly slowly the window trapped him
as his talons scratched the glass
he looked through a pane
and started to laugh, glad
in his waiting.
one woman clothed in milk
glanced over
and smiled at him
her talons slowly fingered the
shadows coming through the
glass
she sighed
he wanted more
and she grinned
from ear to ear
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Thru Traffic
Mark Wohl
Big rolling wheels
18 to be exact
City limits
bed in the back
Smog sky
air horn sound pollution
He played for a day
A promise of 2 wheels
7 I was
As for the rest
he played dead
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ouroboros morose
Kahlotus Lind
the rearing of an anxious age of amnesiacs
the manipulation of worlds within (and without)
the driving force marching blind billions of self consuming artifacts
on an endless figure 8 on it's side
the turning of gears driving a rocket on rails to nowhere
the mass bioengineering of the ultra-violent superfreak
the quietly desperate death of the age old stop and think
the inertia of the order of disorder pushing existence to the brink
hasn't got me down yet...
_________________________________________________
On The Wing
Mark Wohl
I have to learn how to live
all over again
so I can notice the buildings
less
and the sky
more
_________________________________________________
Underground
Laura Caseley
When they told me that Masahiro had stepped in front of the subway, I only said, “There must be a mistake,” and then all I heard was the high-pitched chatter of the woman’s protestation on the other end of the line as I hung up.
Masahiro would not step in front of a train. I would have accepted the theory that he fell, although I had never known Masahiro to fall, to trip, to stumble. He was feline in his movements. It was what had attracted me to him in the first place. If I was told he was pushed, I may have believed that, but they told me a man standing on the platform said that he had very calmly stepped into the path of the oncoming train, still holding his briefcase. He would have been holding it in his left hand, I knew, while the dingy lights would glint off his slick hair.
The witness must have been mistaken. He must have had an unstable view of the world. Masahiro would never do something like that.
He would come back on Tuesday, I knew, just as he said he would, and I knew it even as I hung up on the police officer. She sounded concerned; I suppose I sounded detached, but it was only because I knew that there must have been some mistake. Masahiro would not have stepped in front of a train, a man with combed hair, ironed slacks, a fresh scentless scent, he would not do something so rash. It would be cleared up in a few days. Masahiro would come home and we would laugh about it over the bottle of wine he would bring me as he always did after a business trip. Maybe he would buy sake this time. He knew I liked it. And the police would call me back and apologize.
I went to the shops as usual.
I had to take the subway on Monday evening, coming home from a meeting. It ran late, and when I got to the station the lamps flickered on, illuminating the cigarette butts at my feet, the webs of hair across my face. I put them back into place, behind my ear. It was the humidity and I was tired. Masahiro would be back by tomorrow night, and, I told myself, listening to the click of my shoes on the stairs. MacIntosh had bought ad space on the cars, laquering them lurid pastels, pink and yellow and green, spring colors. It was not spring. It was drizzling aboveground, and down here was cool and humid, but welcome shelter. I preferred the indoors.
There were a few stragglers in the station, coats open to the fine droplets in the air, briefcases in hand. They looked at the wall on the other side of the tracks, over the smear of dark dirt, or at the ads plastered on the walls. There was a girl, with bleached hair and a swing coat covered in white polyester fur, curled like a dog’s, and men with thinning hair combed back over their shining scalps. A train passed on the express track, the Apple ads blurring into a putrid brown color, and the wind of its passing whipped the bleach-blonde girl’s coat into froth around her knees. The lights flickered. People looked up.
A man standing farther down the platform had a black, knee-length coat like Masahiro’s, shifting slightly in the remaining wind from the train. He had a briefcase like Masahiro’s, too, held in the right hand while he checked his watch, a familiar silver flash, on his left wrist. The lights of the oncoming train lit the tarnished I-beams one by one, cold white light. As it approached, packed with the rush hour commuters briefcase to briefcase, the headlights glared through the black coat like Masahiro’s swinging past the knees of the man who was not Masahiro. His foot lifted from the platform, off the yellow stripe that marked the edge over the tracks. Then someone passed in front of me, the bleach-blonde in the furry coat. I could smell her perfume, her lipstick, see the black roots of her hair beginning at her scalp. Too close. And when she passed, the train was screeching to a halt, the Apple ads separating into their repeating colors, slow enough so that the white silhouettes of people became visible, dancing to nothing behind the tired businessmen and their thinning hair, and the girl in the furry coat whose legs swung easily into the opening doors.
There was no sign of the man on the platform whose polished black shoe had left the yellow line, and the doors shut again to the automated tone, and we were sealed behind the Apple ads, airless and contained.
On Tuesday, Masahiro did not come. I waited in the apartment. I had bought a bouquet of roses for him, white, something clean that he would like. They were on the kitchen table, in the vase he bought me last year. He would call, there was a delay, an accident, something wrong with the tracks or the engine of the train coming back into the city. Perhaps there was flooding, after the rain.
I took the subway to work. I was early. I usually went in only in the afternoons onTuesdays, but since Masahiro was running late, there was nothing to do. There was no one in the station, and the lights hummed overhead as newspapers drifted down the stairs.
“Spare some change?”
The man was filthy, reeking of wet pulpy paper and old clothing, his hair long and dirty, all of him stained filthy brown, but when he turned his face with its horrible skewed grin to me, it was white and scrubbed. It terrified me, for some reason. It was like he was still trying to seem sane. He looked younger than I was and that bothered me, too. I backed up a step and wondered how it was he could have snuck up on me in the echoes of the subway station.
His body gave off the sweet stench of being unwashed for too long. His shoes were beginning to fall apart. He was disgusting. I told him to get lost, and my grip tightened on the handle of my briefcase. Soft brown leather. A gift from Masahiro.
“Have a heart, lady.” But his grin remained on his face, like he was making fun of me. I told myself he couldn’t help it. It was burned into his muscles by drugs and mental disease.
I told him again to leave, and the grin dropped. Wordless, he turned and retreated to the shadows where he sat, more a pile of dirty fabric than a human being, his face a circle of paleness as he watched me. I glared at him, and looked away when the skewed grin resurfaced. I couldn’t imagine what would compel a person to spend their time in a subway station, of all places. The train was coming, and in its oncoming hiss the man said something to me, but I was glad I couldn’t hear it.
I saw Masahiro’s coat again that evening, coming home, a man standing, looking towards the tracks, the light on his hair the same sheen, the same length. He was leaning out over the yellow line, far off down the platform. There was no one else. I had stayed late at work, finishing up some paperwork so that Masahiro would have some time to unpack before I got home.
The train was late. It would be getting dark soon, and I could hear wind above the staircase leading to the sidewalk. The man waiting at the edge of the platform did not move, just looked off down the tracks towards the darkness of the tunnel.
I wanted to call to him, but the tunnel would echo, my voice would carry, and someone might hear me.
I tried his cell phone. There was his voice, his crisp and official voice, unknowing it was his wife calling, and the long dull tone telling me when to speak, the guarantee that he would get back to me. As soon as possible.
The man in Masahiro’s coat watched the light of the train, and the thick smell of wet grit was shunted ahead of it, forced down the track and into us. The man’s coat flapped. The train lights grew stronger and for a minute it seemed as though they shone through him.
I did not really see him step off the platform, into the path of the train. It was an illusion, just a trick of the light, because the train kept going until it screamed to a halt in front of me, and the commuters filed out, shouldering past me, knocking their dust and their dandruff and their stray hairs onto my jacket. They looked at me strangely when I cried out, and I had to pretend that I had dropped my cell phone.
On Wednesday night I threw out the roses. The petals were beginning to brown at the edges, and fray like paper. Petals were beginning to litter the table. Masahiro would have hated it. I dropped them in the trash. I washed the vase and placed it back in the cabinet, back behind the set of glasses we bought together.
I went to the subway station. He would have to take the subway from the train station. I could meet him there, I could surprise him. He would like it. He would be coming home today, he would have to.
There was another call from the police department that afternoon. I let the machine get it, something about picking up Masahiro’s belongings. The man they thought was Masahiro, but I didn’t want to take someone else’s belongings when his own grieving widow should be the one to hold them. I would feel bad about doing it.
There was no one in the station, only the bright lights of the automated ticket machines and food wrappers discarded on the platform. Someone really should have been picking them up.
A train came and left, opening its doors to an empty, fluorescent inside, but no one was there to take up the invitation, and another thundered by without so much as a glance backward.
I saw the man in Masahiro’s coat at the far end of the platform only when the lights of the next train emerged from the filth and darkness of the tunnel. He was standing as Masahiro always did, with good posture, without fidgeting. I watched the train lights pass through his legs, and then his shoe, polished to a muted sheen, refined, lifted from the yellow stripe and aimed for the darkness below. The lights grew and grew until they were blinding. The man’s body fell with no sound, his coat barely flapping, into the path of the train.
I yelled something and ran forward, but the train didn’t stop. They didn’t even see him. When the doors opened a woman regarded me curiously from the seat, staring into my face like she couldn’t figure it out. She must have been crazy.
When Masahiro did not come in three hours, I thought about going home. I had watched the trains run well into the night, and there was no sign of Masahiro or of anyone. He was missing. He had no reason to step in front of a train. We had money, we were successful. We were married. There was nothing wrong with his life.
In dreams on the bench with its hard dividers I saw Masahiro from the back, stepping in front of the train, dignified in suicide before the eyes of a thousand horrified strangers. His coat moved like black water over his back. It happened again and again and though I screamed and screamed his name he never looked back.
When he left on the business trip, he walked out the door that way, with the watery coat on his back and no glance at me. I had waited for it, for a smile to keep while he was gone, but he was down the sidewalk, walking as if he never knew me.
I woke up to someone else’s hands on my shoulders, pinning me to the bench. Not Masahiro, the smell was wrong. It was dirty. Masahiro’s nails were clean, always. He was too close to me. I could see the color of the dirt under his nails, smell his scalp. He was eyeing me strangely. He’d left his pile of rags and cup of change for me.
“Lady? Are you alright?”
I yelled at him to get off me. He had done something to Masahiro, he had thrown him into the tracks. “It’s your fault,” I hissed. “You killed him.”
His eyes widened. His pale and scrubbed face grew paler. “Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you need help.”
“You’re filthy,” I told him. “You’re filthy and disgusting and crazy. You’re crazy.”
He looked down at his dirty brown clothes and his jaw adjusted itself like he was thinking, like he was capable of thinking. Then back up at me, with an unreadable expression. “You were having a bad dream. Were you tripping? Is that it? Drugs? You were yelling and—”
“You know what happened,” I told him. “You saw it. You saw him. And the train.” I reached for him and he recoiled. I swiped at him, hoping to catch him by the hair and make him listen, but he caught my wrist and held it against the bench.
“You’re going to hurt me,” I said.
His voice was soothing. “I’m not going to hurt you.” With his free hand he opened my bag and rummaged inside.
“Get away from that,” I said. “Don’t touch my things.”
“I’m going to call someone to help you, okay?” He lifted out my phone and his dirty fingers moved over the silver buttons. His other hand was still holding my wrist. I would smell like him. I would need to shower when I got home.
“I don’t need help. Not from crazy people.”
He looked up at me. His eyes were hard. “I don’t think you know much about crazy,” he said. His grip on my wrist tightened. “I panhandle and it’s crazy and wrong. You freak out on a bench in the middle of the night, yelling about trains, and you’re perfectly fine. Fuck you.” But he didn’t let go of my wrist.
There was no service underground. He cursed at the dull beeping from the phone and said. “We’re going to go outside, okay? Then I can call someone. It’ll be okay,” he added gruffly, as though I was an obnoxious child.
He stood and pulled me up. He was strong. He was going to take me somewhere, away from the platform that Masahiro might still walk across and into my arms, smelling of clean nothingness. A distant rumble started up; the subway would be here soon. Masahiro might be on it, and this man was going to make me miss it. He was dragging me along. He was not afraid of me.
I wasn’t afraid of him either, especially not when I kicked his shin and he dropped my wrist. I ran down the platform, into the dark recesses where the concrete slab grows too narrow for a crowd to stand on and crouched in the shadows. He wouldn’t see me. The rails screeched.
“Fine, go fuck yourself. Crazy bitch.” I could see him looking down into the darkness for me, and then he gave up. He picked up a worn knapsack and his cup of change and brushed off his knees. He took my bag, too, and then he was gone up the stairs, his soft-soled, battered sneakers padding fainter and fainter up towards the cold world outside.
It was really much more comfortable down here. The train came and Masahiro was not on it, but he would be on the next one, I told myself, or the one after that. He would come eventually. He would have to. And I would wait for him, here underground.
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Laura Caseley is a writer and illustrator from the picturesque Hudson Valley in New York State. She graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 2009 and can usually be found painting, writing for a Portland-based environmental news website, or simply enjoying the scenery.
Who, what, when, and how hold hordes hostage in Hell's habitual halls.
Kahlotus Lind wonders where why went.
Kahlotus Lind wonders where why went.
Peter Marra inhabits Williamsburg Brooklyn and wishes to find new methods of description while becoming an adjective. He has either been published in or has work forthcoming in Caper Literary Journal, amphibi.us, Yes Poetry, Maintenant 4 & 5, Beatnik, Crash, Danse Macabre, Clutching At Straws, O Sweet Flowery Roses, Breadcrumb Scabs, Carcinogenic and Calliope Nerve. He is currently working on his first collection of poems.
Mark Wohl is trying to defeat this cosmic, petty tyrant of a head game but doesn’t exactly understand how the game is played. He vividly dreams of a lucid new way where to touch is to feel and to hear is to listen. A new way of harmony. The dreaming of a dream that is perpetually trying to wake the eternal sleep. Other works can be viewed online at www.wideeyedgroove.com.
