PURE FRANCIS

Netherworld

by Bruce McRae

Netherworld

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Bruce McRae, a poet-musician, has had hundreds of publications and is currently working out of Victoria, B.C.

Better Not Touch That Horse

by Jack Boettcher

This is how I like to imagine it: all day through the thicket, then the road forked before a sourgum. Each frontiersman carved his aliases and affections into the soft bark. Then the men took the leftward path, which bottomed out at a lake rimmed with piney hills. They bivouacked on the shore. They wrote letters to their wives, which they signed with only their given names. The letters would have bored you; they invoked the clarity of the stars in the wilderness, the constant attacks of the marauders. The men combed the thicket’s burrs from their scalps with blistered hands. They drank a lot and swam in the lake at night. They were going to hang this horse that had deserted its rider during the attacks by the marauders. They were going to hang this horse, but just as they finished tying the noose a man walked into camp, hand on his holster, cartooned scowl on his face. “Got a message from the governor,” the man said. “Better not touch that horse.”

However it really happened, we know that an outraged frontiersman wrote to the governor. The governor hadn’t sent the messenger, but he must have loved the guy’s bluster. We townies all knew that it was J.R. Herrin who’d defended the missing horse, and that our tax dollars had not been allocated to increased security at the state asylum. But the frontiersmen were of another generation. They didn’t know J.R or his many delusions. They’d been at the frontier for years now, hunting for a people to subjugate.

The governor was likewise out of touch, though still with us. The governor officially pardoned the horse with a stamp and a golden seal. State media reported that J.R. and the horse would now lead the expedition for a people to subjugate. I bet the governor felt great sending that message to the frontier of the known world. I bet the governor liked to say “better not touch that horse” in front of his bathroom mirror while shaping his hands into pistols, because then he decided to use this phrase as the official slogan for his reelection campaign.

He received fourteen percent of the vote. This was not unexpected. He had bullied his way into the first term. There had been a bloodless coup.

But a year or two later he continued to make frequent public appearances, ranting for hours about the horse, at stagecoaches and way stations, at town halls and saloons, before the church and the legislature - he became this cult celebrity – always punctuating every few minutes of his impassioned rhetoric with “better – not – touch – that – horse!” Huge crowds chanted along with him. The meaning broadened. Every horse was safe now. We even dismantled the gallows and stopped shooting each other in the street over minor squabbles. 

Nowadays you hear people say that J.R., the governor, or maybe even the horse transformed our republic. That we became a gentler, more forgiving people. But I’m not sure. We’re still looking for a people to subjugate. And I should know: that horse was my horse. Nobody believes it, but it’s true – I sent him out there either to die or save us all.

Jack Boettcher lives in Austin, Texas, and directs missives from the Official Dissemination Pod of the Insect Liberation Movement.

'Round midnight in the week

(after years of marriage)

by William Ashanti Hobbs

He: Sliding over to her…

She: Ugh! Gone nah, I’m sleep.

He: Why you talking then?

She: mumbles (expletive of your choice)

He: Huh?

She:  Shoulda did somethin’ an hour ago…

He: You tellin’ me to stop?

She: I ain’t hear me tell you to start.

He: …That ain’t what I’m askin’ you. 


Silence, albeit temporary. 

William Ashanti Hobbs is on the eternal hunt for the most precise description of moods and places.

Blue Beard

by P.C. Tavarez

Blue Beard
Blue Beard
You stink of
Bleach
And berries
Your eyes are
Feline canoes
Of bruised fruit
And dusty obsidian stones
You cry only
When you need to
Feel like God
And you laugh only
When you feel like hell
You sunk the
Last galleon
(Rusted cannons, splintered deck and all)
And left it to rest beneath
The reflection
Of a cloud
Which, whilst admiring itself,
Sank also into
The public pool
Of your child hood
The one between church and school
This is where,
For many years,
You lost a number of things:
Hundreds of nickels and dimes, a pair of swimmers goggles, the necklace of bones she gave you, finger nails,
The kisses you tried to steal, but hadn’t the strength to; the hands you kept behind your back

P.C. Tavarez is an eighteen-year-old student and manipulator of the English language.

She

by John Dutterer
          
            She will leave me for a man with a full head of hair, dark hair always slightly tousled like some pop stars over the age of forty. His hair will be a sensual crown right out of the Song of Songs. My hair, thin enough, has the color and texture of straw, no, cut grass that hasn't quite become straw; as such, it might be of interest to farm animals but regardless my hair is of no interest to her.
            She will leave me for some Brit, some chap with a name like Wallace or Fergus or worst of all, Ian. I will be utterly abandoned, all because I don’t make routine transatlantic flights or know anything about tea and above all because I don’t have...the accent. The “no dirt under my fingernails” accent. I have no accent, as far as I can tell.
            She will leave me for a man who swears constantly, as if angry (of course he’s angry; I know how she is). He swears like crickets chirp. No, he swears the way lion tamers whip the lions, the way lions instinctively mangle lion tamers. And make no mistake he’ll be wearing four thousand dollars worth of tattoos mostly depictions of serpents and skeletons. Me, I have an appropriate word for everything, and no blemishes of any kind.
            She will perhaps leave me not for a man (nor a woman) but for...silence, my auditory opposite, that heaven to which I am denied admittance.
            Until then, joy beyond words! She is still here.

John Dutterer thinks our worldly concerns look fairly trivial compared with this.