Earwigs, Midges
A Generative Theme
Rapture Letter
The Guitar
Golden Eighties
Offseason
John Train
From the Twenty-Sixth Floor
Digital Love
A Sheen of Wax
I waited till my 50s to finish Ulysses. To celebrate having given Joyce a portion of my valuable time, we sat in our favorite sushi restaurant. I had the idea that the last two pages should be read aloud—after the miso, before the yellowtail. But I could never get through the text. Always an interruption. More water, more ice. Extra wasabi. A family sharing an aria from Galuppi, two tables over. We talked about Christmas, a month out. A pile of tiny dreads like graduate degrees. We waited almost 37 minutes for the check, but with a light glow of satisfaction. For now, we have enough in savings.
I wake, remembering the house piled with boxes. How we came into the world. Squeezed like caulk on a crack, low to the baseboard where earwigs get in. Our new place, a day’s drive north from the stormed coast. I agree to make breakfast, scatter creatures searching through plates and forks in the drying rack. The dark would prefer to drown us all in darkness. This week, we have three proud pears, early in their season. Not yet mealy, not quite a meal.
You bring me out onto the back porch for a haircut. We endure the heat of Oklahoma August, study the unmown lawn. The profusion of midges. I don’t know their local names, and won’t seek details of their habits on my phone. The claw of cigarettes from our neighbor’s driveway. The thin kid who circles under the carport, sucks in his salted air. Inside, we’re sure, his grandma is dying. Or at least leaving the earth. Leaving droughty oaks, dry lion-shaped drinking fountains at the city park.
I want a good room. You will be busy there, with your translations. Soon enough you will look up and ask a question about Italian number games. The sort children play with their fingers. Years, decades later. They are old men now. Not so easy to kneel in the indifferent dust, to make their bets.
The water-hose stilled, on the grass.
Old growth has fallen.
The new knows something slow.
It stiffens, a shout.
I see what sort of shout you mean.
The crowd, we used to say, grows bold.
These blades I won’t touch, with either hand.
Study their movements and the shadows upon them.
The roots are shallow.
Easy to kill some part of their number.
And I’m not ashamed of killing.
At least certain quiet things.
Must determine the offense relevant to their case.
I have a book that counts up the votes.
You’ve seen it on the shelves many times.
But have asked nothing of it.
This one will only answer when addressed, by name.
And I know that you have heard the name, spoken it.
Our friend has found his way out of hospital.
It was you who told me of the good news, a week ago.
He lives in a shrinking country, but not this one.
I see that you have begun the record of our first meeting.
The police did not require this of you.
And yet already the document takes most of your time.
I am having tea at the Grey Owl—
they’re playing your Fairport Convention,
the one with the long solo.
You used to say, it takes us out to sea.
Where knuckled worms churn and skim.
You think we danced to this stuff, in the yellow kitchen
making Betty Crocker blueberry muffins.
I could reach up and touch your belly,
but not your hungry mouth,
kicking and cussing.
Halfway on the tea, now.
You always said I’d never hold a child close.
But I was listening all the while.
The way your two sisters
came for coffee and folded their wings,
stuffed them in Kroger bags
under the sink.
On the countertop TV,
grey-black images of Beirut
bombing campaigns.
One sister would say,
“What a beautiful city that was.”
The other would snort. Slurp and spit,
“I did my nursing shifts there, not you.”
I know now, neither were ever nurses,
never finished school. Every year they had more stories
of Aleppo, Cairo, Dubai. Sometimes towers
I couldn’t find in the World Book atlas.
Their cigarettes never burned down,
though the cups grew quickly cold.
I have not grown a new tail,
or learned to play my mandolin.
Let’s be honest—the mandolin was pawned
years ago, funded half my trip to North Dakota
where a dream said a job
would be willing. I bought the ticket
but never boarded the bus.
Today is sharped different.
A saint slid into the blank seat opposite,
shifted a pile of scone plates licked clean.
She flickered all YouTube No Wave NY, maybe a drop
of North Texas State. “What are you reading?”
she asked me. Saints know only one book,
and it isn’t the apocalypse.
More like a treatise on celery,
that medicinal aid to the soothing of nerves.
Near closing time.
They’re washing the cups, taking up the last-chance
half-price pastries from yesterday.
The world I’m leaving for
is only halfway down the cliff face.
A thumb-shaped indentation
I can pour into like pride.
.
My saint sitting with me,
Sunday afternoon. Before she stood
and sloped away, she said:
When the hurricane came in ’85,
you pulled the curtains back, alone in your bedroom.
Sat cross-legged, face pressed to the glass.
When the eye passed over, you refused to stand
outside on the soggy grass.
Soon there would be more lashings,
limbs and powerlines down.
No fences, anywhere
in the earth.
I don’t remember how the guitar came to me.
The strings were old—would not hold their shape for long.
Sat on my bed, strummed absently, thinking of amethyst, chalcedony, tiger’s eye.
Dead books, musky and bitter.
The missing link, descent of man.
Jagged ridges as of a Scandinavian coastline.
News murmuring in the den.
I could hear the anchor say: half the warriors for Freya, half for Odin.
Cesar Pavese arrived, weary from an afternoon’s teaching students at Music World.
He was ready to show me his favorite chord.
You have to build up calluses, he said.
It only takes time.
I fell off the bed and into nothing.
When I came back, he was gone.
TV was silent.
The strings on the guitar had been replaced.
Six exquisite plain steel Ernie Balls.
On the way back from the party
our brakes
give out
We sail
slow and sweetsauce
into mounded grass
Laughter
like lighter fluid
James is halfway
through his story
How they broke into Robert E. Lee
and released all the science project
valedictorians onto our sleeping nation
We sit in the dark a long
loused time
Flip over the engine
and listen for a thread
of bitters running
through the low end
Concentrate our wills
into a silvery knot
Spend a quarter of the effects budget
and Cassavetes explodes
into delicious juicyfruit
James says
the closing credits
teach you how to conjure
wortwords
for lastday
bottomless chips & salsa
served steady
at the barricade
pencil smear blinked and wiped away
boots in the attic
crash through plaster over the great American songbook
quick arrest with twist-wrist-ties
and a red sash slipped over our eyeline
knotted tight as twilight crowds in summer shorts
pocket stuffed with blackhoe rental receipt
spoon-scooped sacred earth
bedsheet spread coolside on the public green
forty years of wince across shoulder blades
gas giants more breath than ore
slant storm rhymes with rim
with salt chocolate and heavy mangoes
monsoon tastes like two cheap guitars
open trapdoor and climb out into June
prayer of smelted sockdamp
hummingbirds long gone as the feeder is drone dry
watch propellers shudder by on the interstate
wind Gullivers for the panhandle plains
we are waking everywhere now
shopping or slipping only what we can carry in our private hands
John Train promises
to cook dinner, every Sunday. Real Panhandle corn, ham hocks, Blue Bell after.
Takes an hour with the onions, washes thumb-blood
from their stiff curves.
John Train is painting
the TV room, again. Rust out of Atacama. He’ll only roll from 9 to noon.
All his workshirts are mark-downs from the winery. The Grape Eclipse. He sat sweating
with strangers, sipped under the moon’s godly shadow.
John Train claims
he closed Winterland. Curls like a custom pickup on the couch.
But he can’t sleep, can’t breathe easy. Fat pile o’ keys in his pocket.
Whistle breath, gerbil teeth.
John Train won’t go
barefoot on the porch, the lowing lawn. Says he’s deathly feared of mutant ticks,
the kind that cling to ankles and teach you weird chords. Says the science don’t lie—
when you crouch for a shit they start screaming, high and siney.
John Train hangs
towels in the master bath. Thinks of closing the door. Leaves it open.
An orchid thrives on the window-sill, no longer thirsty. Thinks of closing the door.
Leaves it open, for now.
John Train once ran
a roller rink into the ground. It was magic, he says. I took each present
from the birthday boy, processed past kiddos holding Kroger cake on their laps. Made sure
they really saw. Called out hokey pokey, flipped disco to dollarstore.
From the twenty-sixth floor
I can see museums and steak-flavored stadiums
lascivious investment towers
layered restaurants like fleck fungi
and royal oaks
lined along university boulevard
but further out on the margin
I recognize vapor from the second circle
seaward refineries flat on their saltmarsh
slices of grey steel spewing chemlove burnoff
no explosion this afternoon
thank cost
no bodies crisped
only flush workers working steady
with their wondrous cyborg hands
makin’ good moneys
so their kids can frunk
it up on LSAT
bottlecaps
from the twenty sixth floor
we feel a brutal breeze
luckily the wise word of Krishna
pulls us back
inside
where dinner simmers
and there is singing in metchorus
of justice
we stand
with elgin marble floor
as the elevator sinks
toward bacon bits
on our iceberg
sweet and low statins
mustard grit
howl of jealous feral cats
in flash freeze backyard
February killed off the sagos
now brittle ivy corpses
hang from freeway overpass
witgrease slimes down our peeling noses
onto grocery plastic
stuffed with breakfast grapefruit
emergency butter
heartstone avocadoes trucked in from over-state
picked so early they know only the emperor’s first verse
plucked by prongs
ladders staves rakes lawnknives
lawngloves
resting all summer
in moldstained drawers
check for spiders or scorpions
before you slide the left in
study the phrase “brown recluse”
pry a thumb of masking tape and smooth down the edges
wine-coolers on the porch
twenty-six newly dead composers
tributes playlists revelations
waiting for hot chicken breasts
to arrive on paper plates
with slaw of oily mac/cheese
a dozen papertowels to keep fingers
honest
whereupon mother shares her favorite
oaths and her favorite recipes
for brilliant almondine florets blanched
before roasting
and exotic powders
sourced from back of the van on Sun Street
gotta watch for unwelcome visitations
wash your hands both before and after preparation
of the sacraments
mother whooshes in
from backyard where she’s been pissing
on the azalea stumps
trying to revive them
goes on about fried onion ring
charred coating costs only $11.99
special offer from coupons in back of 7-11 newsstand
swerves on linoleum
then lifts off to circle round our perfect hairs
lands on redbrick over the fireplace
and slips through homecrack to lay lowing eggs well fertilized
all night we wait for her to climb out again
so we can take one to the head
Settle beside my son, as he clicks through the employment form. Lucky
the air is cool in this place, clean as Candy Crush, migraine taste of high score.
Remember, I played the dragon in the last act of senior year. Died slow but not sad.
My long soft velvet tail was too weighty for twitching. I wondered, can’t the dragon
just learn to swim, head south for sainted Yucatan? Now the portal is asking
for son’s Social. Pull the card out of my purse, slide it over. Waxahachie.
Wichita. Willow Weep. Make it up, mug for the security cameras,
curl your boot tips with those shiny new steel fingers, break
both lazy ankles. Good enough for a GRE.
But it’s only Arby’s. Luby’s. Taco USA.
Count fresh 21st century twenties
in my wallet. Gift cards. Hole-
punched customer codes.
Library privileges. A passport:
would they give me one? Son points out, you have to prove
you’re fertile. Or is it the other way round, no longer
full? Of eggs? He shows me a video
on the computer screen.
Mamma wasp
spitting her nest.
Like this.
Wads
of sticky
paper. News-
print ink
on my palms,
smeary
and sexless.
I sat behind a pair of Manchester cricket pensioners. The sky was flat and low. Ozone hummed in my right ear. A heavy balding man in his mid-thirties stepped over the row above, then settled on my left, my better side. He held a palm-sized notebook in one hand, opened halfway. Elaborate scratchings in black ink. Calculations, names of prized players. Blobs of red, raw rootings or gouges across lined pages, like welts on punished skin. At lunch we crossed to the nearest pub, ordered gristly burgers and wide-cut fries. He counted, easily as he sipped his pint, the early beats of his birth. How, on coming forth, the cord wrapped tight round his throat. How, when they cut it free, everything came with difficulty thereafter. Swallowing, tasting, reading. Trusting the contour of bedposts, doorframes, table-legs. His father would not hold him, grew a sheen of wax across lips and lax tongue. We finished our second rounds, thankful we had no sons. Stood under the awning, watched grey rain glisten and dapple on the field. When the drizzle slowed, we followed a few runs before I turned and shook his hand, well-pleased. He followed me out to the sidewalk. His neck was frogbelly pale, where the eye could follow. As we parted, he called out—An American! An American spent the day with me!
James Miller is a native of the Texas Gulf Coast, now settled in Oklahoma City. His work has appeared in Best Small Fictions (2021), Hopkins Review, Broadkill Review, San Pedro River Review, Heavy Feather Review, The Atlanta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Psaltery & Lyre, Soundings East, and elsewhere. Follow on Bluesky @jandrewm.bsky.social. Website: jamesmillerpoetry.com.
