Forty-Fifth Paradox Writing

Every ring resounds like a drum roll,

as the receiver rubs against my cheek like a noose.

When the drum roll stops,

I hope to hear, not a present voice,

but a past voice, one that’s been recorded

between 5 and 20 seconds,

with  a brief message with an even briefer excuse,

asking for my name and phone number.

I hope you don’t actually answer with a hello,

with suppressed surprise.

In fact I hope this number has been mysteriously disconnected,

saving me from a potential conversation.

There’s the two guys whose fists collided over a girl,

and there’s those students who squabbled for a week on

end over a story.

I don’t think my professor quite realized

the ramifications of signing me up for this class,

let alone taking me on this field trip.

I wish I could be remembered for a Trojan war

even if it left the cities in my hair in ruins.

I wish I could live on as the essay the professor

shows off every year.

Instead, I am the girl

who will be immortalized in laughing stories,

as the one who dropped the gum out of her mouth,

down on the pristine floor of a Willamette chapel,

during a poetry reading.

Like a surrealist painting;

She’s nothing,

but she looks so pretty.

Clocks melt when she walks by,

and male brains turn into apples.

But when she’s gone,

they revert to normal,

like the room lacking a man with a newspaper.

My ancestors journeyed over an ocean,

to what they saw as a new world,

but I think they became new,

like new pronunciation,

new religion,

a new neighborhood,

a new language,

A new identity.

___________

My mother and her sisters

wouldn’t have known that their distant

cousins wore stars of David

on their sleeves,

a few years before my mother’s birth,

or that fifth-cousins-three times-removed

wanted a neighborhood of their own,

without imposing walls or armored tanks on the other side.

__________

She wouldn’t have known that her relatives wanted their own national identity.

_________

She wouldn’t have known,

if someone had not said:

“You’re Jacob’s,

Are you Jewish?”

K

K reigns as the king of letters,

though it shares its ending proclamations with C,

and it allows Q to start the queens,

and P to get its princes and princesses started.

Sometimes K demands to be

known, and knighted,

but seldom asks to be pronounced out loud

Two friends lied on a grass hill, gazing up at the night sky. The stars gazed back, blinking occasionally. While the stars remained silent, except for the occasional breeze, the two friends allowed the wind to carry their conversation.

“What do you think that one is?” The first, a thirteen-year-old boy, asked the girl next to him.

“It kind of looks like you.” She replied, blowing a stray hair off her nose.

“What?”

“See?” She pointed. “It has your nose, with that weird bump and everything.”

“It does not.”

“Does too.”

“Yeah?” He shot back, pointing at a constellation next to it. “I think that one looks like your mom.”

“Does not!”

He laughed. Finally, he turned, glancing at her head’s profile, with the smooth nose, curved lips and a single eye. “You know what?” The boy whispered.

“What?” She continued to stare up at the sky.

“I’ve never seen the stars like this before.”

Finally, she looked at him, blinking curiously. “Really?”

The boy nodded, with each brush of his head shoving aside more blades of grass. “Back in the city, there’s all this smog and city lights that never get turned off. You can’t see anything at night.”

“Huh.” She glanced back up at the sky, as if the stars had the answers to her problems.

“And you know what else?”

“Yeah?” She sighed softly, glancing at him for just one instance.

He smiled just slightly. “The girls in city look at me like I’m crazy when I talk about leaving.”

What does tomorrow taste like? Does it taste like ripe strawberries from the garden? Does it taste like sour grapes?

Does it taste like rainbows? Like clouds? Like crisp mountains? Like fertile valleys?

Or goes it sour at the sound of war, like milk past the expiration date? Does it lose its flavor like hard-headedness? Like a love forgotten?

What does tomorrow taste like? Do I decide?

Crying thick tears,

Like drops of paint.

With cheap mascara, I probably look like a Pollock painting.

But why don’t I feel like a masterpiece?

Why do I need appraisal?

I don’t need to feel like finger-paint blotches

Yellowing on a refrigerator door,

Loved only by my mother.

I am loved by more than just her,

Perhaps not by the critics,

But what do they know about art?

Kidney for Sale! Kidney for Sale! Black market kidney for Sale! Costly kidney for sale!

Comes with pot-infected vessles, but from an otherwise healthy owner. Original owner can not guarantee his moral health or mental heath.

Kidney comes complete self-doubt, incrimination, and a lack of ethical boundaries. Buy at own risk (and the risk of others.)

The smoke gathered around the smell of cooling bodies. Everything from the last toe to the last finger laid in silence, save for the clattering of forks. Two men sat in fortified thrones on a marred hill in a scared valley, oblivious to the destruction without forgetting its cause. They licked the frosting from their fingers, ignoring the taste of blood they had been taught to crave.

One glanced at the other. “Good cake, isn’t it?”

“It is.” The other replied, as he twiddled the fork in his fingers. “Why did we never share our cake before?”

The first thought it over as he took another bite. “I suppose it was selfish impulse.”

The second stood up with a start. “Are you calling me selfish!?”

Then the first had to stand up, to defend his honor. “You dare question my judgement?”

Finally, they both threw down their forks, and abandoned their cake. And so the war began again. The two men never discovered why they never stopped to have two peaceful slices of birthday cake before.