INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Geoffrey Philp
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BEAUTY'S OXYGEN Beauty always seems just out of reach. Its delicate hand gestures over an unseen face, or else helps avert that same face at the precise moment it might be seen. Maybe it's a deer sliding whole from a deep hedge through morning fog, maybe a fragment from a Mendelsohn sonata torn from a closing window of night's silence, or maybe it's a stone barely balanced atop another stone with the awkward kiss of their shadows in full moonlight. You're unsure if you belong here on earth. How many times you've felt unwelcome, had nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep, nowhere to shit. There were no warm arms around you then. The day you discovered no one loved you, freed you. It was also the day someone began destroying your life. You remember your fingerprints were dusted off a yellow-spotted beetle's back and then found placed around the slashed jugulars of mountain gorillas. Learning to say no earned you this. Even as you slept, others pried open your windows, slipping in anti-you leaflets peeled clean from the unspoken tongues of spruce pine trees. In this forest, deeper than computer animation can narcoticize the big screen of our restrained imaginations, you go it alone without knowing you're never who you are. RITUAL ENCLOSURE You live within this opening. Lately, the hands you spread apart to widen it's resistant pressure, no longer seem to be your hands. At least, you don't recognize them as your hands. At times, they seem larger, more cumbersome, incapable of getting a firm grip on anything. Their thicker fingers lack flexibility and this opening, without noticing it's inching in around their swollen knuckles. It's not altogether different, of course, if they come tightly gloved, daintily frilled, or subtly cologned trying to push off with their thumbs and pinkies. They still cannot keep the opening ajar. It's unusual that you're deep inside this aperture unaware it's closing in on you. Warnings have always reached you before... You've lived believing you could go back and forth without it ever closing, but no longer. You've noticed the opening lacks a rim, is missing its edge, its handle, its slot, its tab, seam, turn-key, knob, latch, or grip to keep it from closing any tighter. On both sides of where it was, is now darkness. The difference between the two is an unknown since only one can exist. Where you used to live in view of this opening, assured by its certainty, you now not only smell what used to be your hands but also this darkness up ahead in whose silhouette your full head of tears is so uncontrollably hard to hold. BIG DAY We get a late start. Roads lined with paraders and pick-up trucks packed to the brim with ribbon winners imbue the celebration's atmosphere. Fireworks have been smuggled over state lines, while clowns bussed in from every county fair peopling the midwest rest in spacious tents with promotional executives, carny bosses and poultry judges. When we finally merge with the growing crowd, we get separated and each of us wanders alone through tractor exhibits, combine races, sheep sheering, hog saddling, goat milking, pink and pale blue dyed rabbits, food concessions limited to pale cheese curds, slathered turkey drumsticks, bubbling sweet potato pies with marshmallow toppings, crispy salted and garlic smeared fried dough, succulent pig roasts, steamy hot sausage and pepper sandwiches, vegetable quiches, steak-on- a-stick, ice cream cones, carbonated and alcoholic drinks galore, and giggling bikini topped teenage girls begging for donations to fund their senior class prom based on a white water mystique theme of rushing down Colorado River. You look everywhere for us, even at the designated spot we agreed upon near the curly fry stand in close proximity to a midway of upside-down rides and sewage streams floating cigarette butts, black tissues, and candy bar wrappers through an already clogged drainage grate. After waiting too long, you begin unwrapping your sticky and sweat-drenched hair from the blown hot-air bowl of a cotton candy maker. You put the eyes of wolves you loved having in place of your own eyes back on the fronts of day-glow t-shirts won by racing plastic ducks with the limited aim of a water pistol. The late afternoon sedation of babies crying against their mother's damp breast becomes muffled by back-up alarms, golf carts, and carhorns. Traffic's choked with dust. Behind each open bus window, the maxed-out bladders of adolescents shine their faces with those crystalline tears of too much sugar.
Paul B. Roth, Fayetteville, New York
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