PURE FRANCIS

Diabetic Birthday Cake

by Joseph Lambert

My uncle doesn’t own a body anymore.
He lost it in the syringe next to his children.
I remember
when he fell
against the fence
because his insulin
was too low and I didn’t know
what to say.
His face was hollow
like just before
the first time I dove
into the deep end of a swimming pool.
He cradled into the fence,
thick mucous snailed
out the corners of his mouth,
and he spoke in moans,
in some coded language
only the comatose speak.
Now, he sleeps
at my parents’ house
waiting for three o’clock to tap him
on the shoulder
and remind him
that Kayla still isn’t old enough
to ride the bus
and that orange juice and strawberry pop-tarts aren’t
new eyes and new feet and new hands
that touch her blond hair
and kick the ball back in June
on her birthday
after chocolate cake,
and candles with tiny flames that refuse
to stop breathing.

Joseph Lambert wishes global military conflicts were settled with some dignity.

Enlightenment

by Shanti Weiland

It’s something like those
3D prints, I’m told, where
if you stop focusing long enough
a ferocious T-Rex pops out
with a stupid grin on his face.
          
Or like the dying woman
who turns to the nurse and
says, “Will you please stop
patting my hand?  I’m done
with all this,” then promptly
flat lines. 
 
It’s to sink into the snow
globe, tumbled and unheard;
the little sensitivities that make us
cork boards, ready
to be pinned as the world
goes crazy
without us.

Shanti Weiland is tickled by the Satanic Hamster Dance.

Fire-Dance

by Jeff Calhoun

    A pack of hunters crouched low behind a rock outcropping. They leveled crude spears, nothing more than branches, rocks, some woven bark. They have no language, but when they looked at one another, they seemed to say:

    We will pierce the mastodon’s heart!

    We will eat for many moons!

    We will not starve!

    The beast lumbered by and the battle was violent, short. The beast’s blood mixed with the blood from a trampled boy.  They cut off the meat as best they could and ate and went to gather the women and children. Hidden in the trees was a chimpanzee with his palms pressed deep in his cousin’s throat. None of the men glanced at the fallen boy. They couldn’t have closed his eyelids if they had wanted. The mastodon’s kick left only a mass of blood, bone, skin.
    
    In a cave they used as a dwelling, the women prepared to gather roots.  Outside, rain fell lightly and the children shivered. But they smiled and played games. The men returned with red teeth, scars, eyes wide with the last moments of battle fury. It was a good week, three large pigs and now a mastodon. A haul. And only the spindly, sick kid as collateral. A trade they’d make a hundred times if given the chance.
     
    The men went to exchange excited grunts and hand motions and sex with the women. The children were too busy playing to notice their fathers sick with adrenaline, their mothers heavy with the weight of the next generation. The kids ran and ran and tried to catch each other in the dirt and rain and mud. They laughed and laughed. Earlier one of the girls had slipped and dashed her skull against a rock.  They prodded her, but she didn’t move.  The rainwater held a ruddy tinge and they moved their games a hundred yards away. They all had dreams of fire, a world of shadows, a dog with three terrible mouths. They did not want to think of these things now, would let them wait until night.
     
    One of the women picked up a burning limb and held it high above her head. Then, everyone gathered to watch her dance. She dipped the branch close to the ground and smoke slithered around her ankles.  The smoke swirled along her skin and curled skyward.  It drifted and drifted and they all stared at her, the smoke, the stars.
     
    A million years later, a girl put out her cigarette and ran her hand along the dead husk of a merry-go-round. It was broken and wouldn’t spin.

Jeff Calhoun was not aware misspellings and cheezburger loving kittens could make someone rich.

Exegesis

by Paul Hostovsky

We couldn't have been more than twelve
or thirteen, sitting on that green bench in the late
sixties or early seventies, me and Michael Zucker
who was much more savvy and world-weary
than I, when I asked him to please explain
the meaning of the words to a song by Carly
Simon, who was simply gorgeous--that much was
plain--after we'd resolved the essential question
of whether or not she was wearing a bra
in that photo of her with the blue top and thick
lips on her album cover. "I don't get it," I said.
"'You're so vain. You probably think this song is about you.'
But the song IS about him, isn't it?" I asked Zucker,
holding my palm up in the air like someone
trying to ascertain the truth about whether or not
it has started to rain. Zucker looked away then,
gingerly fingering the green slats, as though he were
reading the carved names of the lovers and obscenities
tactually. Then he took a deep breath and exhaled
miserably, took the album cover out of my hands
and gazed awhile at Carly Simon who was gorgeous,
famous, braless, and older than me and Zucker put
together. "That's the point," he said. "She's in love with him."

Paul Hostovsky likes to read Braille while driving to work in the morning, his eyes on the road, his left hand on the steering wheel, his right index finger deep in Dr. Ruth.

Want

by Lisa Higgs

With clouds came no storm – no thunder, no cracked
light freed and caught. The thick air’s muscles pushed
uphill, the incline long, winding, wandering
in dense, dark trees. There was no breeze, no breath
of cool, no pool not dried, no drop sliding
stem-ward in cupped leaves. Under brush, bush, brambled
thicket, animals scrounged, sucked from berries
and ripened gardens a wet, luscious juice.
What could have been called beautiful – these days
and days of temperate sun, moderate heat,
and infrequent gray – has parched once-soft soil
to hardest rock and withered buds at bloom.
Below a pale silken sky, cats drag home
starving mice and sit in shade as they feed.

Lisa Higgs wishes her daughter, age 3, would grow tired of Hampton and the Hampsters, best seen here singing a simple song.