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Crazy news, y'all.

Two of my stories, "Two Prayers Regarding Mammoths" and "Weighing Heart," are coming out in the Mid-American Review this fall. They were both editor's choice selections for the 2007 Fineline competition, which examines those prosey-poetry boundaries that we're all raging against.

Check out the MAR.

Sublimation

Sublimation is a highly desirable end; it is the passage of the human body straight from its meat form to a gaseous form. The human body in its gaseous form can no longer be interacted with in the traditional ways, such as with letters or megaphones, but there is speculation that it may be used in smoke signals, or breathed by animals.

Though tales abound, the only documented case of human sublimation was that of Nicholas Lupe, a poet from Oregon. Immediately after decimation, Lupe spent sixteen days lying on the hardwood floor of his kitchen, staring at dust motes and growing thinner. Sometime during the sixteenth night, his body rose, and he sublimated. One of Lupe’s friends saw the actual event, and said it was like a slow fading or a steaming-away, resulting in the disappearance of Lupe’s actual body, and a changed quality of light in the kitchen. A vapor hung very near the ceiling.

The vapor remained in the kitchen for several days, causing those who passed through to be gripped by a terrible sadness. Among the effects they reported were watering at the eyes, intense hunger, choking, desires for the bed and for a dim corner to curl into a ball within.

Finally, the gas escaped through cracks around an unsealed window, and it diffused forever.

To sublime in this way is a dream of many decimated people: to rise, to escape the necessity of the final decimation dance, to disappear. No-one knows where the vapor diffuses to. Perhaps with a favorable wind, it could go quite far (there has been speculation), as far as Chicago, where perhaps Delaney… but no-one knows.

Bird-Step Ladder to Outer Space

The ladder is made of wood and nails. You begin by nailing a piece of wood into the side of the highest structure—a building, mountain, or very tall tree—you can find. Nail the wood in at navel-height, so that it lays parallel to the ground, with its broadest surface touching the structure. Two nails, firmly put, should do. Wood in this posture, at any height between the ground and outer space, is known as a step.

Hoist yourself up so that you are standing on the step. Then, without pausing, nail in a second piece of wood at the present height of your navel—a height expressed mathematically in terms of the navel as N2. Climb onto your second step and make a third, continuing in this manner until the structure goes no higher.

Here, standing on your highest step yet, you may pause a moment to catch your breath and to calculate your height in terms of the navel. The highest building in the world reaches to N521.9, in terms of the average navel as calculated by Jonathan Navel and his team of laboratory assistants in 1895. The highest mountain is at N9073.44.

Enjoy the new air, but remember that you have many more navelsworth to climb.

In order to be higher than any available ground-bound structures, your next steps must be nailed to flying or floating structures. Birds are the obvious choice. When a bird flies past at navel-height, quickly nail a piece of wood to the bird. Then climb up onto that step, your first bird-step, and wait for another bird. Some manuals encourage the use of formaldehyde or nets in order to speed up the ladder-building process once it has reached the bird-step stage, but we encourage the use of patience. Keep in mind that bats, flying squirrels, and the largest of the flying insects may also be used to make bird-steps—any step attached to a non-ground-bound structure is, technically, a bird-step. You can climb in this way, bird-step by bird-step, until the air grows too fine for birds.

At these heights, you will need to make steps using airplanes, cannonballs, and outbound rockets. Along the upper limits of the atmosphere, you can use space-junk and passing satellites. Although they are invaluable in your ascent to outer space, such steps tend towards entropy; they may wander off the path of your ladder and become orphaned steps, leading nowhere.

Leaving the atmosphere, you may begin to nail wood to the moon, to comets or meteoroids, to planets, and to planet-like chunks of ice and frozen gas. Metoroids are fairly common within our solar system, but as your ladder stretches out of the solar system, and across the galaxy towards outer space, it will become more and more difficult to find structures for your steps. Don’t miss any solid chunk that passes at navel height, or you may be stranded on your step for a long time.
The steps below you, given as they are to entropy and disentegration, may no longer be reachable. Any attempt to return to the ground from these heights would imply a terrible leap, grappling at clouds of dust. Safe return is probably impossible.

It is unknown how many people are stranded out somewhere near outer space. We followed some of the first bird-step ladders up as far as we could, but in every case we found that steps in the upper atmosphere had long since disintegrated, fallen, or flown away. We could go no farther. And though our satellite dishes listen day and night, we have not detected the voices of any bird-step ladder builders. Perhaps they are beyond the reach of our machines. Or perhaps they are simply too busy, out there in the whirling quiet, to send a signal back.

The Ideal Coffee Pot

The ideal coffee pot synchronizes its timer with the atomic clock in Grenwich every night so it will know exactly when your alarm goes off, and you awake. The ideal coffee pot makes sure your coffee is ready then, even if you forgot to load it with water or coffee grounds. It has many extendable arms.

At the very moment that you hit the snooze button, the coffee finishes percolating there in the kitchen. Then, the ideal coffee pot gently lowers itself from the countertop without damaging the linoleum or spilling any coffee. It lands on its wheels and rolls down the hall to your bedroom.

It tries knocking, to be polite, though it knows you won’t be up. Then it picks the lock on your bedroom door with one extendable arm and rolls in, hallelujah, trumpeting hallelujah and waving a good-morning flag. It pours its liquid into a mug that it will have left conveniently at the head of your bed and then it adds cream, originally from a cow but now from a metal jar stored in a tiny refrigerator in the ideal coffee pot’s left side.

Using an extendable arm, it hands you the mug. I know it’s so nice in the bed, it says. You don’t have to get out of the bed right now. Good morning, I love you. It’s terrible out here. The floor is cold, and people don’t speak to each other. All the monuments are buried in snow, with icicles dripping off the moustaches of great former military leaders. There is in fact an open-air ice rink in the city center, and they just leave it out all day and all night, the ice, hulking and cold, kept solid by Arctic winds that have besieged the city and are freezing baby birds in their eggs, making icicles on the bicycles, killing cats. Oh, because I love you I want you to stay in the bed as long as possible, because I worry when you leave the house in your inadequate coat and don’t come back for hours and hours. What are you doing out there, when it’s so nice here in the bed? Please have this cup of coffee. I wish I could offer you more, but this is the only thing I know how to give.

Prayer: Molestation, Prayer Against

Heavenly father, please do not let this creepy man keep touching me (if he is awake). He seemed like such a nice old gentleman before, Lord, he even offered me a slice of his orange. But as the bus has passed New Braunfels and he drifted off to sleep (or pretended to), lo! His hand began to bob against my thigh. It’s making me very uncomfortable, Lord. Yea, I have contemplated changing seats, though the bus is quiet and dark and I do not want to insult or alarm him (if he is in fact asleep). Please, God, take my dilemma into your capable hands, as I myself am in them: if this creepy man is touching me on purpose, may he be flung from our great greyhound chariot. May his body be smitten against the asphalt, his bones pulverized by traffic, and his liver devoured by field mice.

If he’s asleep though, Lord, it’s no big deal, Amen.

Number 13 With a Visigoth Bauble