August Issue
A Core Of Realism
Stuck At The Edge Of An Intrusive Morbidity
by Dale
Michael Houstman
1.
In a relaxation mode
Hipsters have hidden wounds and are quick to depress at the Opera House, hard-assed in their sincerity and contemporary by temperament. I am beginning to think in a happy housewife way that—taking boredom into account as a haunted silence—I might aggressively distill bottles of pure improvisation from a day half-clotted with existentialism's fatherly manner with a pinch of threat. You step backward and I relax. I step forward and you relax: together in this fashion we remain soulful with a pinch of bothersome jealousy. Remember (I say) there are tiny oaks growing slowly in the subway, and husband holds wife and the hipsters pretend to an insomnia cold and dark like a big wild cat in the rain. You step backward and I relax and—really really—a lot of that goes a short way, but I am relaxing now so back off and keep a sense of scale mixed with detail as I am not so much hiding my wound but rendering it sacred through mystery. So back off as I am relaxing now.
2. A Corporate Affectation
The waist has a gap and that gap has a waist and I wanted to see that gap and I wanted to hold that waist with a gap and then she kissed me and an abdomen hooked up to a tuxedo and it smelled like a can of corn. Oh dammit.
Out in the mini-van I was jumping to a conclusion that ended in a corporate affectation: she knew what I meant though idly. So that night I gave notification and turned beautiful with a festoon of metal tears. The anti-allergenic lingerie answers then lingers.
Still, beauty isn't snow and I was waist-deep in a glen of white birds. When you think about it chance happens even in crappy apartments, and what a waste. But—hell—I'm not your garden-blonde and witless wife. Oh dammit.
3. Crash
She was married in an automobile accident, crashing through the peach-colored music room in a plum-colored house. He dressed up real pretty and she sat by the crushing door trying to make sense of his rapidly failing health. The telephone rang in a retirement home up the road and she never remarried several times in her mind a manuscript formed in a dim corridor where he was planning an escape to a phone factory and she was a saxophone heiress and there were no ill fillings left and one could hear the white birds behind the baby whine of the gears that he had just bought her for Christmas instead of beige slacks in this vast and aggressive silence in the Orlando area.
