Ben Henry
Fish

I live in a buidling owned by the government and occasionally they send someone by to assure everyone individually that if a bomb was ever dropped on the building and it was a dud and it bounced around on top of the building for a while and then dropped to the ground and got kicked around by the neighborhood kids in their football game out in the street, that we shouldn't steal it before we each got to have our pictures taken with it, like we had caught a really big fish at a lake.

They assure us individually that those children would be beaten if any such occurence ever happened. But secretly I've bought my own bombs, because I know the beatings my government administers really aren't that good.

Hot Lover

Tonight I'm going to shave
for the first time in fifteen years.

Tonight I'm gonna tell those birds
they'll have to find a new place to roost.
[But I'm fairly attached to the beard,
so maybe they can still live in it if I hang
it up in the closet. Or maybe I'll hang it outside,
so they don't have to knock on the closet door to get out.]

Tonight I'm gonna shine my shoes and brush
my lone snaggletooth, floss it and gargle and
make it real nice.

Tonight I'm gonna patch my pants, and change my shirt,
and color my hair, careful to comb the longer strands
over my gleaming, waxed dome.

Tonight I'm gonna break out my glasses, the kind
with the motorcyle bridge, and clean 'em and put
new scotch tape over the hinges, just in case I get into
a barroom brawl.

Over a woman.

A woman who loves me.

A woman who loves me and is not my mother. Yeah.

And tonight I'm gonna cut my nose hairs, and my ear wisps,
and maybe keep them in a
vase on the center of the dining room table.

And the woman who loves me will ask where I got those lovely puss willows.
and I'll tell her I grew them. Yeah.
She'll think I'm a gardener, someone who lives a hearty life in tune with the land.
She won't hear me when I say I collect bottles under the highway overpass.

After consulting her earth crystals, she'll stay the night.
And we'll have sex, or whatever hot lovers do.

<< Back to Issue 6, 2004