+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ T M M OOOOO RRRRR PPPPP OOOOO RRRRR EEEEE V V IIIII EEEEE W W MM MM O O R R P P O O R R E V V I E W W H M M M O O RRRR PPPP O O RRRR EEE V V I EEE W W W M M O O R R P O O R R E V V I E WW WW E M M OOOOO R R P OOOOO R R EEEEE V IIIII EEEEE W W +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Volume #9 September 16th, 2002 Issue #4 Established January, 1994 http://morpo.com/ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Contents for Volume 9, Issue 4 Burnt Offering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Doug Tanoury Composition in Blue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avik Chanda Mexican Piggy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Karyna McGlynn D as In Doughnut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chris Barnett Havre de Heart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chris Barnett On Fences of Never . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chris Barnett Desire Translated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Meyers Swimming Pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chris Duncan About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Authors +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Editor + Poetry Editor Robert Fulkerson The Morpo Staff Kris Fulkerson robert@morpo.com + kalil@morpo.com Associate Editor Fiction Editor Lori Ciulla Abolafia J.D. Rummel lori@morpo.com rummel@morpo.com +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ _The Morpo Review_. Volume 9, Issue 4. _The Morpo Review_ is published electronically on a quarterly basis. Reproduction of this magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold and the entire text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 2002, The Morpo Review. _The Morpo Review_ is published in ASCII and World Wide Web formats. All literary and artistic works are Copyright 2002 by their respective authors and artists. ISSN 1532-5784 +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Burnt Offering Doug Tanoury And it is with great haste I come to her from the altar Fresh from the sacrifice of atonement Still in priestly robes Splattered with ram's blood My face smudged with ashes When my robes fall away I wear only the smell of olive oil And incense before her and She wears only a perfume As our scents mingle and our Fragrances intertwine And our clothes left lying In heaps on the floor Are the skins shed by serpents And the discarded shells of insects That are cast off when They take on new forms +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Composition in Blue Avik Chanda An open breeziness, as in Miro, but anamorphosed so that when seen from an angle, the threads and microbes dissolve, coagulating into boats rooted at San Agustin, their stunted masts meshed against a liquid Majorca moon rising between the blue and the blue. Perfect, you think - and turn around to where an obscenity greets you, scrawled above the seats in the sidewalk, smearing the edge of the canvas where I would have signed. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Mexican Piggy Karyna McGlynn There was that piggy-bank in that slanted store in Puerto Vallarta: fluorescent flowers, ugly, but it screamed "Look at me! Look at me!" It was shaped just like a pig, a real pink fat pig. however many pesos, I didn't have it. I knew a Spanish girl who ate sugar, right out of the packets, right off the table. She like pure sweetness, concentrated, the way I like colors. Well she swallowed that pig right there in front of God, the store owner and everyone. No one said a word. At dinner she showed up with the plaster pig in her hands, and I didn't speak Spanish, but we sneaked out by the monkey cage, where I plaited her long black hair with sugar, so she could suck the sweet ends long after I'd gone. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ D as In Doughnut Chris Barnett She said "doughnut" In the cutest way A rusty bike tone Or a broken heart Over the phone She said "doughnut" And I giggled +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Havre de Heart Chris Barnett For something so pure So eloquent I'm helpless Here in my cow outfit So I sit In dejected sophistry A big thud If you will Living an interruption You exist where I do Not That is how you complete me That is why we may never find us That's why I'll keep my mouth closed While grazing... +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ On Fences of Never Chris Barnett I don't know what to do with my eyes. ....at first you're one in a million of the post-chic, donning what the magazines tell us... dodging your imaginary Paparazzi....your lacerating tresses stealing me to a still......every eccentricity quieted behind corporate digs...the "New Yawk" babe intrepid and yummy...this is what you are...of course you're just as capable of pizza chin as any pretty face... Next, I detect your cataclysmal communication devices that seem to beep, vibrate, ring, and solve very important problems...I soon realize you have that hushed kind of sugar found only in the lonely...the kind that leaves you bitter with subconscious smirks...to top off such allegations, I realize you were the one by the Chai café off Allen Street...most indeed of my memory you were...the one with the strawberry sandals...you were telling me to get a job and stop trying to commune with dead beats and other urban legends... I understand,right there in my castle in the sky, that it's you...Natasha Gurdin...Natalie Wood that is....or Wagner or Walken...it's you and your baby browns and as they start into melted chocolate chips...I feel I should leave you to yourself...but I harbor this urge to help, to somehow run with gifting hands, I want to hug you, cook with you.....but I just pick my nose instead...squawking claptrap parables about death..... For 389 shuffling steps...20 feet behind and following....inconspicuously nosy through the Lower East 5th arrondissement and I'm suddenly converted into the kind who over-rationalizes about chance and the supernatural and the strangely bizarre whilst strangely comforted knowing the mystical has happened to me...twice...twice my eyes have convinced themselves of you, Natalie....did you really think you could get away with it?....fake your own death to come to New York and mosey around in what looks to be Metallic Teal flip-flops, thinking we're not always in control of our destiny? I guess we're not in control or even at the wheel but it feels real....and my right now is telling me you're in it.... it feels good to be alive, Natalie....that the quintessence of divine virtue is inbuilt...that the timeless immediacy of "but it could happen" does indeed.... Jeepers. A dangerous place to be...especially at this time of night when vibrant imagination elbows up with you in that wayward kinda way....but I find myself following you still in this dark ghoul of an hour...as is my birthright when it comes to miracles, Ms. Fudgy Eyes...awh, Natasha, downtown for boots and your prissy button rouge...step princess step...Natalie of limited range but of heart tugging amenities...snivel Natalie snivel.... you know you're a star...but you need space...I understand....just like I am somebody's Chris Barnett or Kevin Bacon and they're behind me about 5 blocks and guessing, constructing, imagining my entire life story....I guess we're all characters...characters for each other's benign delusions...I'm just not sure if I should share you with the rest of the world....or if I should tuck you in my dreams. From behind a fire hydrant, I watch you stop in at the Chinese butcher, browsing the marinated death of ducks teary-eyed and carnivorous; a gumball pops out, you arc it to plop in your mouth, teal tongue soon...and waving to a brash clerk, you leave humming Sondheim. We go on for blocks, almost whole neighborhoods of cultural joie de vivre and I see you chew the fat with bag ladies like you were made of bags and all things pure...next you're kicking a rock in front of the picture parlor and you seem delighted the rock has kept up with you all these blocks...they miss you, Natalie. They are begging for you to re-surface...begging for one... just one more thrill... At the cigarette shop, you ask the vendor if your husband has come and he licks his finger and holds it in the breeze...his eyes a quiz away from certainty. Ms. Wood...I won't tell a soul that you chew gum cow loud or that I saw you last night under the streetlights on Stanton, status electric under an active rain with your definition of suicide...but if you didn't come back.....you came this close...this close...but I wouldn't blame you. I can see it now ...long after the artificial promises made during heartfelt cocktails... you just slipped but right before that you were on the railing, finding meaning in your own sailing expedition, and it felt good to yell, to even the score your way, finally yodeling up into that expansive nothing for a final lasting meaning....that metaphysical holiness we crave under the cape of our own sorrows....the kind of meaning we all lose the gist of until we finally define ourselves....you just slipped I know.....now it's just you and Sondheim rolling on like some anonymous parade...while the holidays and the fireworks and the affairs and the frugality and the conundrums and the news and the normalcy and the clockwork of an innocent New Yawk linger around the edges of your smallness. At 2nd Avenue, your scruples get tied like a pretzel as some chance bum recognizes you and starts quoting "34th Street". He'll enter a bar. Everyone will think he is just a mad bum, but what his beautifully mucky head knows would turn the world upside down...he will drink until he cannot stand or speak and it will be just before puke when he ventures to tell the world who he saw, and upon hearing his zealous discourse the world will pass him off as a drunkard and he will plead, kick, flail, and stomp like an irate child until he passes out burped.... Upon waking, all of his recollection blurred and disenfranchised.....he'll forget he ever saw the real Natalie...and having realized his head hurts, he will tend to that instead....and then he'll cry a lot......not because he has forgotten....but because he cannot remember. I don't know what to with his eyes.... We all know them when we see them...Natasha....we all want a piece of them....those with that miracle in their stride...that numinous trait unexplained behind the eye.....those folk where you just know....it's something about them...they've "got it" or they've "found out". They inspire the ordinary to become unordinary...the tame to get a tad wild....the caved in to resurface....the dead to rise...maybe we're all like each other in our own ways, maybe... just maybe...we're everyone in whispered waiting...or maybe we're all just ghosts trying to get hired. Only God knows...and let's pray that's the gospel...either way this unemployed ghost is taking a seat....my ankles are swollen. See you around, Natalie... +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Desire Translated Richard Meyers I slit little narrow-hipped Hope's abdomen wide open. Though thirty, she has the figure of a twelve-year-old boy. I tell her months ago to prepare for a c-section. I want to delivery it naturally, she whines, her bottom lip quivering. I tell her, Honey, I say, naturally is a relative term. She cries. I shrug and smile at the husband, lumberjack type, furry and thick, friendly like a Golden Retriever. We share smiles that say, Pregnant women, so emotional, what can you do? Randy, I say to the husband, you need to take care of this one. I pat Hope's leg compassionately. Smiles all around. Dr. Edwina "Weenie" Monroe is a doctor with a great bedside manner. Patients love me. Now I dip my hands through muscle and human muck and pull out a fat little boy, blessed with such a clear complexion and a mellow disposition. I'm always pleased that c-sectioned babies are so like an afternoon nap on a rainy day; they're spared the red-faced, cone-headed war of a vaginal delivery. I fancy myself akin to the stoic firemen who rescue unfortunate little boys and girls from abandoned water wells. I shoot entropy the bird. In short, with my miniature sword, I make it easier for this plump little boy, bewildered yet unperturbed, sticky and malleable, to enter from a world of creation to a world of erosion. Hope stutters groggily, D-Does he have all his fingers and toes. He's perfect, I answer. The sweetest music for parents is he's perfect or she's perfect, for a compliment of the child is a compliment for the parents, saying loudly and clearly: You, with all your flaws, are good enough to produce a pretty baby. Their egos want he's perfect or she's perfect, so I give it to them...when I can, when it's possible. Hope tearfully says, Thanks, Weenie. I tell all my patients to call me Weenie. They love my name. I'm so memorable. I'm so personable. Why, you're welcome, I say, my tone light yet responsible. I glance at a crying Randy, his scraggly beard sticking out from behind his surgical mask, a big lug dressed in surgical room garb. Oh, Weenie, he says, his voice cracking, the proud papa. You're welcome too, I say, giving him a wink. I'm sewing Hope up, whiting out the red spill, working on her numb, gaped open tummy with monotony, with expertise, and with a ho-hum nonchalance that puts the patients at ease. I'm in control and immersed in the Tao of my job; I'm this woman's gut, the sutures, the scalpel, the baby's umbilical cord. I'm so Now. Briefly, I allow myself to remember my first vivid experience with what I thought had to be the divine, with the experiencing of growing from the inside, with the ecstasy of life overcoming death, if only for a few seconds. I walk timidly, lightly, my high arched feet making sucking sounds on the wet, smooth concrete floor of the Boy's Shower Room at the public pool. I'm between fifteen and sixteen years old and am here to wait for Preston and for myself; for, it seems, I am not complete until he is by my side. My overwhelming desire for my life has caused me, momentarily to forget about the death I've occasioned. When I close my eyes, there she is, packed tightly inside my skull, a sort of little girl hermit crab, creeping out of her compressed home at inopportune moments: Susan White-cute, second grader, Aryan in looks, constant lisp (she says Pepthe when meaning Pepsi)-drowns in the pool today. I am her baby-sitter. She's my responsibility, my neighbor, and my fault. Susan drowns surrounded by stalactites of preadolescent and teenaged legs, girls and boys, hundreds of busy toes scraping the rough concrete floor, crazily going nowhere, hairless butts, nubbin tits and incubating vulvas, pasty pale penises with robin eggs for balls, all hanging on pelvises pivoting gracefully and gracelessly to catch flung Frisbees and tossed tennis balls. These girls and boys surreptitiously excrete without care zigzagging jets of warm piss, trailing each of them like a car's frenzied dust disturbed by a joyride on a gravelly road. Kids. Doritos. Snickers. M&M's wrappers. Baby Oil. Susan White's dead. Cindy Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" blares while Preston and I kill her; we stand on her back and legs, absently lost in each other, while her little lungs fill with pool water. Where is Preston? He said we'd meet after Saturday Night Live. I feel like crying: a little girl's response. Where is he? This room echoes my heavy breathing and my gurgling stomach, upset and empty. I haven't eaten a thing since we killed her, no supper, nothing, except for a wintergreen Lifesaver, that's all. My mother shakes her head. She's worried about me. That poor little girl. What in the hell were the lifeguards doing? I don't know, I say. I don't know. My mouth and nose are filled with the smell of chlorine, dampness, and urine. I'm still wearing my one-piece, navy blue swimsuit. I keep thinking about my clarinet. Why do I keep thinking about my damned clarinet? Hey, you say. I look up, startled and excited. I hear the heavy door to the changing room close. Oh, hey, I say. I've been waiting. I know, you say. You're still wearing your trunks. Your torso is bare and thin but taunt, like a willow tree's branch. You're tanned brown; you're hair is white blond from the hours in the sun. I feel so bad for Susan, I say, willing dejection in into my voice. Yeah, you answer. That was bad. Yes, it was, I say. You nod. We both have climbed over the fence to get back into the pool tonight. This is the fifth time we've done this. We feel special, separate, ready for the ascension to play. We are enamored. We are both ripe. I'll bet your mother about shit, I say. You look at me and smirk. You wouldn't believe it, you reply. God, she hugged me and hugged me and I'm like Jesus, Mom. I smile and giggle. I know, I say. I look at your trunks. I'm absently swinging my feet. We are sitting on one of the two wooden benches in front of the lockers nobody ever uses. I'm tilting my head, noticing the gentle outline of your penis in your trunks. By the yellowed light of the dusk-to-dawn light that has crept underneath the heavy door leading to the pool, I can see your glans, Preston, through your trunks, everything, the coronal ridge, how it curves so slightly to the left, everything: your growing opaque pubic hair matted to your lower abdomen, so dark a cloud on so light a canvas, your left ball, squeezed against your thighs lower than your right ball. She was so worried, you say. I know. I notice how your nipples are so small and wrinkly. Your broadening back and shoulders are sunburned and peeling and covered with a small splay of acne. I stand and walk behind you; you lean forward and hug your knees, like a pregnant woman preparing to receive an epidural. You know that I love to peel the dead skin from your back. I start slowly, picking at you, finding a flapping corner of white skin below a freckle on your right, wing-like shoulder blade. I dig a fingernail into you, flicking upward, toward the ceiling; I glance over your back, noticing the bulge growing in your trunks. You shift your weight to accommodate the metamorphosing member, still strange to you. You clear your throat. You're at that age, able to come globs at just a touch and never lose a bit of hardness. I peel from you, your skin, thin and delicate, like a butterfly's wing. I'd like to put it in my mouth. That would be so gross. I'd like to do it. I drop the bit of the peeled membrane, gray as a dried out condom lying on a sidewalk. I find another piece of skin, dead, lower on your spine. I push you forward, exposing the top of your ass, so bare and slick, Preston; I can see the hint of your crack. I dig a fingernail into you, pressing hard. Jesus, you say. Oh shut up, I answer, smiling. I flick my finger, unearthing your lifeless skin like I'm digging for buried treasure. I grab the skin between thumb and forefinger and start peeling. I lower to my knees, tugging dead skin with my right hand and living skin with my left. I've slipped my left hand into your trunks, encircling your swollen glans with an okay sign. I pull and squeeze and caress and you gasp in seconds; my hand disappears in white quicksand. I imagine the slit in your dick undulating, Preston, its mouth opening and closing in spasms like a feeding baby bird. You're coming, I say. You just grunt. I can see the muscles at the top of your ass contracting. I love the word come. I love saying coming to you, Preston, breathing it hot in your ear, spraying the word onto you like perfume. Um um, you say. I pull my hand from your trunks and taste a congealing part of you, Preston. I taste you, your come, Preston: slick, snotty consistency, salty and sweet, tears of joy from your cock. I pull the dead skin in one continuous piece up your back, following your spine to your neck, before it breaks off. You're so pink, Preston, underneath all the burned brown summer skin, Preston, you're so pink and new. Jeez, you say, responding like a little boy. I hear the drip, drip, drip of the showerheads, impotent now, Preston, but during the day so hard, blasting away the dead skin of so many boys and girls, their bare butts so cumulous cloud white, so daisy petal white, their youth chipped away so slowly. The showerheads kill us, so full of innocence and possibility. They melt boys and girls. Don't you see, Preston? All the jovial, if slightly self-conscious white bottoms, all of the pink bodies, so new, smelling like freshly folded towels, are blasted away, skin cell by skin cell, leaving resignation and loss. The drip, drip, drip of the showerheads mock us, Preston; they're snickering like wallflowers at a school dance, snickering at us because we dance, and they don't. The showerheads want to kill us, Preston. Your come, Preston, is already drying on my fingers, leaving a tightening grip where a wet, lapping tongue should be. Why must we evaporate? We're quiet. You drip from my hands in time with the dripping showerheads. Your breathing is strained. You don't know what to do next. Your first hand job. You'd like to leave: a little boy's response. Reciprocation does not enter your mind. I close my eyes and see Susan's bugged out eyes, her swollen face, her limp body, and I hear the white noise of a hundred kids all screaming, the radio blaring, set to Cool 101.5-your Superstation. I hear and feel asphyxiating splashing water from every direction, the older boys performing jackknifes and cowboys and cannon balls off the high dive, sporadic whistles from the lifeguards, mothers' chitchat, the arcade games beeping, crying babies, the Coke and Pepsi machines' constant drones, airplanes flying, and, louder than anything, more real than anything, are your whispers in my ears, Preston. Everything you say is hilarious or enticing or exciting, always inviting. When you whisper in my ear, I almost faint. All the Harlequin Romances, all the clichés, everything-they're all true because of you, Preston. Among legs and flailing arms and screams and whistles, you kiss my neck and you brush my lips with your own, Preston. Our first kiss and it's in the pool. You're trying to trip me, to push me backwards, I'm laughing, you kiss me again. Suddenly. With you, Preston, everything is so sudden. You spin away. You don't know what to do next: you try to dunk me under water: a little boy's response. I tingle all over, surrendering myself to you forever if you'll take me: a little girl's response. Legs are kicking us, Preston, scratching us. You're telling me a joke, whispering in my ear. You are hilarious. You are my elevator to the clouds. Your breath smells like Sour Onion Potato Chips and Dr.Pepper. My legs are being attacked by small children's kicking feet. Crowded. We move deeper, you and I, toward the deep-end. I must bounce on my toes to keep my head above water. Short little teenie-weenie, you say. I stick my tongue out. I stare at your Adam's apple, nesting in you throat, a berry ready to burst. I feel more damned kicks and scratches around my legs, annoyances, minnow nibbles. I finally look down and see Susan, limp around my feet, her eyes wide and absent, her mouth forming an O. My shins are streaked red from her scratches. She'd tried to keep up with me. I hear the lifeguards' panicky whistles. I'm pushed out of the way. I stand on the concrete, dripping water, staring at dead Susan White while a lifeguard pumps her tiny chest and Cindy Lauper's "girls just wanna have fun" fills my ears. Randy and Hope's little boy, Brice, grips my index finger and with my thumb I stroke the rest of his tiny hand, pink like a baby rabbit. With his other hand, Brice alternately grabs his big toe then his penis. Talk about an eater, one of the nurses says to me, referring to Brice. I chuckle as the baby sucks my finger; his benign little mouth searching anxiously for a nipple. What do you see, Brice, through your blurry eyes, staring back at you? Do you see a person who loves you, or just the distorted brightness of the overhead fluorescent lights? He bites so hard, says Hope, hobbling, still very sore from the incision. She's come to breastfeed. He's hungry, I say. Hope sits in a chair, uncovers her B cup breasts with her small nipples. After Brice's mouth finds his mother's left nipple, I swear I can see his eyes light up in intensity matched only by those odd creatures living so many miles below the ocean's surface, glowing from within a phosphorescent brightness that illuminates the pressure and absence of their world. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Swimming Pool Chris Duncan I slit little narrow-hipped Hope's abdomen wide open. Though thirty, she has the figure of a twelve-year-old boy. I tell her months ago to prepare for a c-section. I want to delivery it naturally, she whines, her bottom lip quivering. I tell her, Honey, I say, naturally is a relative term. She cries. I shrug and smile at the husband, lumberjack type, furry and thick, friendly like a Golden Retriever. We share smiles that say, Pregnant women, so emotional, what can you do? Randy, I say to the husband, you need to take care of this one. I pat Hope's leg compassionately. Smiles all around. Dr. Edwina "Weenie" Monroe is a doctor with a great bedside manner. Patients love me. Now I dip my hands through muscle and human muck and pull out a fat little boy, blessed with such a clear complexion and a mellow disposition. I'm always pleased that c-sectioned babies are so like an afternoon nap on a rainy day; they're spared the red-faced, cone-headed war of a vaginal delivery. I fancy myself akin to the stoic firemen who rescue unfortunate little boys and girls from abandoned water wells. I shoot entropy the bird. In short, with my miniature sword, I make it easier for this plump little boy, bewildered yet unperturbed, sticky and malleable, to enter from a world of creation to a world of erosion. Hope stutters groggily, D-Does he have all his fingers and toes. He's perfect, I answer. The sweetest music for parents is he's perfect or she's perfect, for a compliment of the child is a compliment for the parents, saying loudly and clearly: You, with all your flaws, are good enough to produce a pretty baby. Their egos want he's perfect or she's perfect, so I give it to them...when I can, when it's possible. Hope tearfully says, Thanks, Weenie. I tell all my patients to call me Weenie. They love my name. I'm so memorable. I'm so personable. Why, you're welcome, I say, my tone light yet responsible. I glance at a crying Randy, his scraggly beard sticking out from behind his surgical mask, a big lug dressed in surgical room garb. Oh, Weenie, he says, his voice cracking, the proud papa. You're welcome too, I say, giving him a wink. I'm sewing Hope up, whiting out the red spill, working on her numb, gaped open tummy with monotony, with expertise, and with a ho-hum nonchalance that puts the patients at ease. I'm in control and immersed in the Tao of my job; I'm this woman's gut, the sutures, the scalpel, the baby's umbilical cord. I'm so Now. Briefly, I allow myself to remember my first vivid experience with what I thought had to be the divine, with the experiencing of growing from the inside, with the ecstasy of life overcoming death, if only for a few seconds. I walk timidly, lightly, my high arched feet making sucking sounds on the wet, smooth concrete floor of the Boy's Shower Room at the public pool. I'm between fifteen and sixteen years old and am here to wait for Preston and for myself; for, it seems, I am not complete until he is by my side. My overwhelming desire for my life has caused me, momentarily to forget about the death I've occasioned. When I close my eyes, there she is, packed tightly inside my skull, a sort of little girl hermit crab, creeping out of her compressed home at inopportune moments: Susan White-cute, second grader, Aryan in looks, constant lisp (she says Pepthe when meaning Pepsi)-drowns in the pool today. I am her baby-sitter. She's my responsibility, my neighbor, and my fault. Susan drowns surrounded by stalactites of preadolescent and teenaged legs, girls and boys, hundreds of busy toes scraping the rough concrete floor, crazily going nowhere, hairless butts, nubbin tits and incubating vulvas, pasty pale penises with robin eggs for balls, all hanging on pelvises pivoting gracefully and gracelessly to catch flung Frisbees and tossed tennis balls. These girls and boys surreptitiously excrete without care zigzagging jets of warm piss, trailing each of them like a car's frenzied dust disturbed by a joyride on a gravelly road. Kids. Doritos. Snickers. M&M's wrappers. Baby Oil. Susan White's dead. Cindy Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" blares while Preston and I kill her; we stand on her back and legs, absently lost in each other, while her little lungs fill with pool water. Where is Preston? He said we'd meet after Saturday Night Live. I feel like crying: a little girl's response. Where is he? This room echoes my heavy breathing and my gurgling stomach, upset and empty. I haven't eaten a thing since we killed her, no supper, nothing, except for a wintergreen Lifesaver, that's all. My mother shakes her head. She's worried about me. That poor little girl. What in the hell were the lifeguards doing? I don't know, I say. I don't know. My mouth and nose are filled with the smell of chlorine, dampness, and urine. I'm still wearing my one-piece, navy blue swimsuit. I keep thinking about my clarinet. Why do I keep thinking about my damned clarinet? Hey, you say. I look up, startled and excited. I hear the heavy door to the changing room close. Oh, hey, I say. I've been waiting. I know, you say. You're still wearing your trunks. Your torso is bare and thin but taunt, like a willow tree's branch. You're tanned brown; you're hair is white blond from the hours in the sun. I feel so bad for Susan, I say, willing dejection in into my voice. Yeah, you answer. That was bad. Yes, it was, I say. You nod. We both have climbed over the fence to get back into the pool tonight. This is the fifth time we've done this. We feel special, separate, ready for the ascension to play. We are enamored. We are both ripe. I'll bet your mother about shit, I say. You look at me and smirk. You wouldn't believe it, you reply. God, she hugged me and hugged me and I'm like Jesus, Mom. I smile and giggle. I know, I say. I look at your trunks. I'm absently swinging my feet. We are sitting on one of the two wooden benches in front of the lockers nobody ever uses. I'm tilting my head, noticing the gentle outline of your penis in your trunks. By the yellowed light of the dusk-to-dawn light that has crept underneath the heavy door leading to the pool, I can see your glans, Preston, through your trunks, everything, the coronal ridge, how it curves so slightly to the left, everything: your growing opaque pubic hair matted to your lower abdomen, so dark a cloud on so light a canvas, your left ball, squeezed against your thighs lower than your right ball. She was so worried, you say. I know. I notice how your nipples are so small and wrinkly. Your broadening back and shoulders are sunburned and peeling and covered with a small splay of acne. I stand and walk behind you; you lean forward and hug your knees, like a pregnant woman preparing to receive an epidural. You know that I love to peel the dead skin from your back. I start slowly, picking at you, finding a flapping corner of white skin below a freckle on your right, wing-like shoulder blade. I dig a fingernail into you, flicking upward, toward the ceiling; I glance over your back, noticing the bulge growing in your trunks. You shift your weight to accommodate the metamorphosing member, still strange to you. You clear your throat. You're at that age, able to come globs at just a touch and never lose a bit of hardness. I peel from you, your skin, thin and delicate, like a butterfly's wing. I'd like to put it in my mouth. That would be so gross. I'd like to do it. I drop the bit of the peeled membrane, gray as a dried out condom lying on a sidewalk. I find another piece of skin, dead, lower on your spine. I push you forward, exposing the top of your ass, so bare and slick, Preston; I can see the hint of your crack. I dig a fingernail into you, pressing hard. Jesus, you say. Oh shut up, I answer, smiling. I flick my finger, unearthing your lifeless skin like I'm digging for buried treasure. I grab the skin between thumb and forefinger and start peeling. I lower to my knees, tugging dead skin with my right hand and living skin with my left. I've slipped my left hand into your trunks, encircling your swollen glans with an okay sign. I pull and squeeze and caress and you gasp in seconds; my hand disappears in white quicksand. I imagine the slit in your dick undulating, Preston, its mouth opening and closing in spasms like a feeding baby bird. You're coming, I say. You just grunt. I can see the muscles at the top of your ass contracting. I love the word come. I love saying coming to you, Preston, breathing it hot in your ear, spraying the word onto you like perfume. Um um, you say. I pull my hand from your trunks and taste a congealing part of you, Preston. I taste you, your come, Preston: slick, snotty consistency, salty and sweet, tears of joy from your cock. I pull the dead skin in one continuous piece up your back, following your spine to your neck, before it breaks off. You're so pink, Preston, underneath all the burned brown summer skin, Preston, you're so pink and new. Jeez, you say, responding like a little boy. I hear the drip, drip, drip of the showerheads, impotent now, Preston, but during the day so hard, blasting away the dead skin of so many boys and girls, their bare butts so cumulous cloud white, so daisy petal white, their youth chipped away so slowly. The showerheads kill us, so full of innocence and possibility. They melt boys and girls. Don't you see, Preston? All the jovial, if slightly self-conscious white bottoms, all of the pink bodies, so new, smelling like freshly folded towels, are blasted away, skin cell by skin cell, leaving resignation and loss. The drip, drip, drip of the showerheads mock us, Preston; they're snickering like wallflowers at a school dance, snickering at us because we dance, and they don't. The showerheads want to kill us, Preston. Your come, Preston, is already drying on my fingers, leaving a tightening grip where a wet, lapping tongue should be. Why must we evaporate? We're quiet. You drip from my hands in time with the dripping showerheads. Your breathing is strained. You don't know what to do next. Your first hand job. You'd like to leave: a little boy's response. Reciprocation does not enter your mind. I close my eyes and see Susan's bugged out eyes, her swollen face, her limp body, and I hear the white noise of a hundred kids all screaming, the radio blaring, set to Cool 101.5-your Superstation. I hear and feel asphyxiating splashing water from every direction, the older boys performing jackknifes and cowboys and cannon balls off the high dive, sporadic whistles from the lifeguards, mothers' chitchat, the arcade games beeping, crying babies, the Coke and Pepsi machines' constant drones, airplanes flying, and, louder than anything, more real than anything, are your whispers in my ears, Preston. Everything you say is hilarious or enticing or exciting, always inviting. When you whisper in my ear, I almost faint. All the Harlequin Romances, all the clichés, everything-they're all true because of you, Preston. Among legs and flailing arms and screams and whistles, you kiss my neck and you brush my lips with your own, Preston. Our first kiss and it's in the pool. You're trying to trip me, to push me backwards, I'm laughing, you kiss me again. Suddenly. With you, Preston, everything is so sudden. You spin away. You don't know what to do next: you try to dunk me under water: a little boy's response. I tingle all over, surrendering myself to you forever if you'll take me: a little girl's response. Legs are kicking us, Preston, scratching us. You're telling me a joke, whispering in my ear. You are hilarious. You are my elevator to the clouds. Your breath smells like Sour Onion Potato Chips and Dr.Pepper. My legs are being attacked by small children's kicking feet. Crowded. We move deeper, you and I, toward the deep-end. I must bounce on my toes to keep my head above water. Short little teenie-weenie, you say. I stick my tongue out. I stare at your Adam's apple, nesting in you throat, a berry ready to burst. I feel more damned kicks and scratches around my legs, annoyances, minnow nibbles. I finally look down and see Susan, limp around my feet, her eyes wide and absent, her mouth forming an O. My shins are streaked red from her scratches. She'd tried to keep up with me. I hear the lifeguards' panicky whistles. I'm pushed out of the way. I stand on the concrete, dripping water, staring at dead Susan White while a lifeguard pumps her tiny chest and Cindy Lauper's "girls just wanna have fun" fills my ears. Randy and Hope's little boy, Brice, grips my index finger and with my thumb I stroke the rest of his tiny hand, pink like a baby rabbit. With his other hand, Brice alternately grabs his big toe then his penis. Talk about an eater, one of the nurses says to me, referring to Brice. I chuckle as the baby sucks my finger; his benign little mouth searching anxiously for a nipple. What do you see, Brice, through your blurry eyes, staring back at you? Do you see a person who loves you, or just the distorted brightness of the overhead fluorescent lights? He bites so hard, says Hope, hobbling, still very sore from the incision. She's come to breastfeed. He's hungry, I say. Hope sits in a chair, uncovers her B cup breasts with her small nipples. After Brice's mouth finds his mother's left nipple, I swear I can see his eyes light up in intensity matched only by those odd creatures living so many miles below the ocean's surface, glowing from within a phosphorescent brightness that illuminates the pressure and absence of their world. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ About the Authors ** Avik Chanda [ avik_chanda@hotmail.com ] Avik Chanda is a management consultant and freelance writer with several articles, art reviews, and short stories published in Indian dailies. ** Chris Duncan [ cduncan204@aol.com ] Chris Duncan is 29 years old and lives with his wife and 2 year old daughter in southwest Virginia. He will be entering an MFA program in creative writing next year. His most recent publishing credit is a short story which appeared in the Spring 2002 edition of Intertext. ** Richard Meyers [ richmeyers88@aol.com ] Richard Meyers was active in the Berkeley, California, Civil Rights and the free speech movement of the early sixties. He went to India to serve in the Peace Corps for two years after which he continued in India, Central and South East Asia for another four years working as a teacher of English. Later in Europe and the United States he helped develop Alternative and Co-Operative communities. Participating in many aspects of spiritual community organizing, he contributed to a number of works in Journalism, Film and Fiction Publications. His short stories have been published in Moondance: Song and Story, Kenagain, Web del Sol, InPosse Review, Spinnings and SFSalvo. He has published two volumes of his collected poetry, The Journey's Loom and Striptease of the Soul through Gondarva Press. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His other works include the novels The Journey That Never Was Made, Alms For Oblivion, Under Indian Skies and A Maze for Infidels. Prolific in all genres, his short stories, essays and plays include Rivers of Babylon, Dark Rituals and Last Train to Simla. Currently he teaches English at City College of San Francisco. ** Doug Tanoury [ dtanoury@comcast.net ] Doug Tanoury is primarily a poet of the internet with the majority never leaving electronic form. His verse can be read at electronic magazines and journals across the world. Doug credits his 7th grade poetry anthology from Sister Debra's English class as exerting the greatest influence on his work: Reflections On A Gift Of Watermelon Pickle And Other Modern Verse (Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders and Hugh Smith, (c)1966 by Scott Foresman & Company). He still keeps a copy of it at his writing desk. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Subscribe to The Morpo Review We offer two types of subscriptions to The Morpo Review: = ASCII subscription You will receive the full ASCII text of TMR delivered to your electronic mailbox when the issue is published. Send a blank e-mail message to the following address to subscribe to the ASCII list: morpo-subscribe@yahoogroups.com = Notification subscription You will receive only a small note in e-mail when the issue is published detailing where you can obtain a copy of the issue. Send a blank e-mail message to the following address to subscribe to the notification list: morpo-notify-subscribe@yahoogroups.com +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Addresses for The Morpo Review robert@morpo.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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