Poetry of Issue #4                        Page 45
Table of Contents	A Couple of Posthumous Landscapes Daily you sport a new skin tougher than the old one. Rain sluices off you like fish scales. Insults, if anyone dared, would crackle and die before penetrating that Kevlar self. While I dream of the tropics dripping mangoes and breadfruit you’re accumulating layers of armor like a pine cone’s scales So every day I measure myself by the nearest, tallest pine and cast my shadow against its. I declare myself taller, taller, and the wind in the pine-top agrees in a language cats and dogs if not people understand. Then I spread my arms as wide as creeping arthritis allows and touch with one hand the cold green Atlantic, and with the other the Pacific blue of your childhood. Meanwhile you conceal your skin under the plainest possible clothes and enter the only world large enough to absorb your rage. The errands of the day, like the labors of Hercules, focus your strength and affirm your thick new hide. Despite my favorable height and width my tropical dreams weaken me more and more. Soon I’ll stand only moments at a time, sinking to my knees in drapes of blubber so loose they could be parchment stolen from the holiest graves. Will you attest to my innocence if an asteroid arrives to crush the good and evil out of us? Your skin would trampoline the smash, but my tropics would flood and drown; and when I next measured myself against that pine an army of ants would march through my shadow, sparking reddish crystals in the depths of their tiny tracks. William Doreski __	Grounding Me The electricians arrive with copper pipes and rolls of heavy gauge wire. They’re here to ground me. No more indecencies of spark and crackle of short circuits. No more unexpected shocks in the bathtub. No more self-ignited brush fires. They wrap me in woven metal strapping, then solder the wire and run it to the copper pipe, which they’ve driven ten feet into earth. Now I’m leashed to the world. Whatever energy the universe offers will filter safely through me. The electricians intend to bill my insurance company for their work, but even if they never get paid they’ve earned great satisfaction for this public service. Without doubt, my ungrounded condition had menaced the American middle class. Women shrieking in public places. Children bullying each other in playgrounds. Business people cheating at business. All that excess voltage now pours through me to extinguish in the bosom of the planet. Yes, it’s inconvenient to be tied to a pivot point, but I’m pleased to contribute to the common good. And besides, the occasional lightning stroke focuses me on our afterlife of cinders and ash, a reckoning to make us proud.         William Doreski__ _____________________________________ The Bruise of the Cosmos Frost in flavors of stone. A brisk young woman squares herself in beige, as if hardy mums weren’t being hardy. The streets stick out their tongues and say AAAH. Parked cars leak dismal fluids. Their tires flatten so gradually no one cares. The brisk young woman plants herself at a table and unfolds a laptop. On the screen, the face of God. She erases it with a keystroke and a giggle. She wants to be alone with the universe. A cry from beyond sizzles in the ether, but the coffee shop crowd hears only the faintest yellow hum. The brisk young woman types so vigorously she sheds her clothes, and by the time she has finished a paragraph she’s as naked as a capstan. No one notices or cares. Such dedication to one’s work is common now, and pointed like a stick. She types and types, and after another paragraph her face blues with the bruise of the cosmos. No pain, only an aura of success. She posts on her web page an honest account of her life in a distant galaxy. The sparkle and crack of shorted neurons light entire cities. Such energy flatters everyone. She completes her work with an exclamation point. Now with a simple gesture she’s fully dressed again and closing her laptop, crushing a million egos left exposed.         William Doreski__	Tool Users Morning dark as an armpit. Our favorite crimes recurred as we slept, leaving residue for someone else to scrape up. Chisels and knives, pliers, tongs. Always that metal on metal gnash or clang. Always the pain seated in some private place where no one takes the trash out or changes the blood-stained sheets. Someone walking on the road sports a beret, mocking us. Someone else in the secrecy of his man-cave loads and unloads a pistol, places it to his head, and imagines pulling the trigger. This person doesn’t mock but expects us to testify when he renders the world abstract. The morning brings too much news— stalemate in the desert, drama in the ballpark, highway deaths in colors too livid to share. We nod over breakfast, barely speaking because so warped by sleep we can’t quite disarticulate. Chisels rasp into wood or stone. Knives simper through breakfast meats. Pliers twist a stubborn wingnut. Tongs pluck toast from a toaster. How do you feel about evolving into a tool-using mammal? We’ll discuss this when we’re awake and the rain has finished rinsing all incriminating evidence from our secretly naked sky.         William Doreski__