Previously published in Children, Churches and Daddies.

Deb Hatcher

The last day that I saw Debbie Hatcher, she was just 15 years old. Slender and pretty and dressed in a skirt that hugged her hips, she was cute as a button. She had shoulder length light brown hair and a gold herringbone locket she’d received for her fifteenth birthday. She wore it literally everywhere; she was so proud of being in love with a boy who would bestow such a precious gift on her.

We were standing in the school library, in the Ds, somewhere between Durant and Dante, searching for a likely subject for a book report, when, madly impulsive, I approached her as if in a dream and kissed her lips. She was startled at first, but when the shock had disappeared, she let her guard down and kissed me back. I had known Deb since grade school, but only fantasized about her as a sort of forbidden treasure, lovely to admire from a distance, but strictly unapproachable.

Here I was, Tim Meese, not yet 16, and kissing a girl for the first time. And what a girl! I silently congratulated myself for starting at the very top of the social pyramid. She leaned into me and I into her, until we were both quite lost. At length, old, old Mrs. Kroger — she must have been at least 50 — the school librarian, sneaked down the aisle and coughed peremptorily. We instantly separated, embarrassed to have been found out. Although this was my initial foray into kissing, it was clearly not the first time that Deb had been kissed. She was far too expert at it to be a novice.

We glanced at Mrs. Kroger, to assess the level of trouble we were in, but she smiled her secret smile and withdrew. I felt supercharged, and Deb seemed similarly affected. She leaned close and whispered to meet her after school at her house; I hastily agreed. And what of the necklace-giving boyfriend? It turned out that his family had moved to the coast two weeks before and so at least he was no longer in contention for Deb’s affections. But I didn’t know this yet.

After lunch, I spied Deb in the corridor between classes, walking with her friends. I smiled at her, but she looked right through me. I blinked. Weren’t we inexorably linked forever, having tasted one another’s lips and even shared a breath? Had I only imagined our reconnoitering in the library? I shook my head and proceeded on to class.

After school let out, I anxiously plodded the three blocks to Maple Street, where Deb’s house stood. When I arrived, I knocked at the door and Mrs. Hatcher, a stay-at-home mom, which nearly all moms were back in the day, invited me in to wait for her daughter. We engaged in small talk and she plied me with pretzels, chips and Pepsis. Gazing about the living room, I spotted a photo of Deb and Jason, the boy who’d given her the locket. I didn’t know him well and stared at him disconsolately, enviously.

Mrs. Hatcher went on to tell me that Jason’s father had taken a job with an aircraft manufacturer in Los Angeles, and so that was the last they would see of Jason. She didn’t seem at all unhappy at the prospect, condemning him as “too progressive,” whatever that meant. Mrs. Hatcher remembered me from second grade, when her daughter and I had been matched up to perform the minuet in some stale elementary school production of a 200-year-old play. She inquired politely how my dancing was commencing. I told her that I was more into The Twist and The Mashed Potato these days, and she sniffed.

After quite a long time, the telephone jangled off the hook and Mrs. Hatcher snatched it up. She listened for some time, drew a sharp breath and said, “I’ll be there.” She looked stricken and then stared off into space for an interminable moment, and finally turned to me and said, in a choked voice, “You’d better go home, Tim,” and she disappeared into another room. I quietly let myself out.

The telephone call and Mrs. Hatcher’s behavior was a mystery to me, and I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t until the next day at school, when word leaked out. Deb Hatcher was dead. She had copped a ride on an upperclassman’s motorcycle and there had been an accident. Deb, unlike the driver, didn’t have a helmet and had suffered terminal injuries when she fell from the bike and struck her head on the pavement. The driver suffered only minor injuries.

It gave me a weird, eerie, ghostly feeling to know that I was the last boy to ever kiss Deb Hatcher. She’d had her whole life before her: additional boyfriends, a husband, children of her own, a career, perhaps. She was smart; no telling how far she might have gone. And, just maybe, she would have gone there with me. They offered a sort of rudimentary grief counseling at the school and they dedicated the yearbook to Deb and one other boy, who’d died from leukemia. I didn’t see the grief counselor and I didn’t buy the yearbook. I didn’t need the glossy photo to remember Deb. I attended the funeral. They had a closed casket.

THE BOMBED GENERATION

Bivouacking among nameless bards, sounding boards transfixed by twinges of toothache,

i summon monsters masked by pain and anguish under bombardment

skilful tightrope walkers on the strings of enchantment, or disenchantment,

intermittent comet stars.

Shunning wishes of the Maurizio Costanzo Show,

like eighties vates, we take to the streets to sing,

and to endure charges like animals in battery,

never surrendering to the scheming

created by statesmen alien to all embarrassment.

OUT OF ISCHEMS

Try, once in your life, to stop living outside each ischeme,

without constant ink interruptions to the vein’s phoneme,

so that the western crisis becomes an occipital crisis,

with the saving of ants increase the consumption of cicadas.

As you stopped reading, at least stop writing

‘public’ that doesn’t exist and forces us to sell books like vacuum cleaners,

Porta a Porta, where Novi Aldi goes on Vespa and returns Bompiani,

after abandoning Theseus’ ship, in whiff of hurricanes.

This is the century, or the millennium, of the professional artist

not knowing how to do anything, you are content to remain a figurehead,

among the various shrewd actors and actresses of the publishing market

willing to give their children to a rom in exchange for an inch of shelf space

in the prestigious Feltrinelli bookshop in your town

you don’t want to stop living out of ischems, c’aggia fa?

I DON’T CARE

For the last twenty years or so, ‘I don’t care’ has been back in fashion,

herds of brainless constipated people, all, in search of the rehabilitierung of ego,

brick by brick, in the black shirt of ignorance organising raids,

with the outcome of ending up dead, a mosquito bite away, on couch Freud’s.

The new mass, without any strength, waiting for an acceleration,

placed under scrutiny receives its models from television magazines,

moved by a self-esteem disproportionate to its actual neural entity,

ite, missa est, giving extreme unction, being a cancerous mass.

Talking to the average italian is like talking to Louis XVI,

an anencephaly patient who dreams of residing in the Medici court,

living in Masters of Florence, the Renaissance soap opera,

forcing you to surrender to the Magone as Lucius Chinchus Alimentus.

With the new ‘I don’t care’ generations we should build democracy,

stuff of exterminating homo sapiens sapiens with an attack of epizootics,

we will rely on a detailed deliberative referendum of protest,

forcing our fellow-citizens to use their heads.

ASSAULT ON THE OVENS

Panem et circensens is asked of the contemporary artist,

playing the clown at readings grants 15 minutes of impromptu success,

they read kilometres of verse, written in half an hour, with a shrewd attitude,

they would also declaim verses in arabic if Isis established a Caliphate in Palermo.

They read, read, read, all the flour of their infinite sack

and we, with our gags on, to be subjected to their dribbling to end up in checkmate,

the queen, bored, is undecided whether to fuck the king or a horse,

and the contemporary reads, reads, without allowing us an interval,

without allowing himself an interval, between one bullshit and another, without ever being satisfied

he has to bring home the bread-roll, hey, as an artist who boasts of being overpaid.

THE BARBARIAN AND THE PRINCESS

To you who observe with your bistro eyes my discontents

you defuse me with a smile, you neutralise me with a love

as enduring as a Compact Fluorescent Lamp,

becoming aeriform, neon, argon, krypton,

maybe it’s the krypton that deactivates my Superman cravings,

climbing up my spine with catlike paws,

dissuading me from gobbling, from drinking, from brawling, from stopping writing.

Princeza romana, eu sou seu bárbaro,

i keep wearing white tank tops in my black underwear

not washing the dishes, banging on the keys,

better than washing the keys and banging on the dishes,

i kidnapped you on a raid on the coasts of Gaeta,

enchanted by you, late-modern Circe,

capable of turning pigs into men,

pig’s heart is equal to the human heart,

you alone have understood this, in twenty years, with your insulinous carefreeness,

with your insecurities, with your premenstrual breakdowns, with your questioning face,

always capable of disconcerting me, square mime destined to go bald,

without replacing me.

Princeza romana, eu sou seu bárbaro,

yet without being able to dedicate Odi barbare to you,

i am not equipped to hate anyone, or to mix metres,

– what shall we do, half a metre?- better my aptitude for duelling,

Ro rocamboling, half Cyrano de Bergerac and half Socrates,

i’m convinced that you prefer me whole, and long-life,

not having the ambition of the modern woman

to turn her man into an asshole.

AT THE TAVERN OF SOLID LOVE

My little love, solid, you, today, fell

and i was not there to support you, with my aggressive biceps

of a barbarian from the northern forests, my face painted blue,

lying in the spasmodic berserksgangr of drinking from the skulls of the vanquished,

it all begins with a trembling, chattering of teeth and a feeling of cold,

immense rage and a desire to assault the enemy.

My little love, fragile, you, today, fell,

and there is a tavern behind our house, all brianzola, your new world,

there is a tavern that serves a hundred and a hundred types of risotto

to spread on your wounds and on your skinned knees,

where i, imperative man, can still interpret every amber darkness

in your wise child’s eyes, manipulating the kaleidoscope of your irises,

voluntarily uncovering my flank to the dagger of your arctic lucidity.

If not a tavern, our love, resembles us: we eat and live,

remunerating each other, victories and defeats, hôtellerie, we bustle and eat,

until the innkeeper Godan, the god of stubborn ‘poets’, slams a mug of mead on the table

invite us to dance at Walhalla, Mocambo a contrario, dance far away, to the end of the worlds,

you will return to the simple freshness of your sea, you wandering caetan siren of sand,

and to me the fog-damp earth of the valley without ascents or descents will not weigh on my zinc.

In the ancient taverns of solid love continue to mix fog and sea-water,

outside thunderstorms, lightning and thunder, liquefied by the cloudburst everything is drying out,  

and we, we eat and live, we bustle and eat, sheltered, in our reserve of happiness,

aware that, hovering in the air, in the long run,

the misty ice crystals will flow into the sea.

Ivan Pozzoni was born in Monza in 1976. He introduced Law and Literature in Italy and the publication of essays on Italian philosophers and on the ethics and juridical theory of the ancient world; He collaborated with several Italian and international magazines. Between 2007 and 2024, different versions of the books were published: Underground and Riserva Indiana, with A&B Editrice, Versi Introversi, Mostri, Galata morente, Carmina non dant damen, Scarti di magazzino, Qui gli austriaci sono più severi dei Borboni, Cherchez la troika e La malattia invettiva con Limina Mentis, Lame da rasoi, with Joker, Il Guastatore, with Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, with deComporre Edizioni and Kolektivne NSEAE with Divinafollia. He was the founder and director of the literary magazine Il Guastatore – «neon»-avant-garde notebooks; he was the founder and director of the literary magazine L’Arrivista; he is the editor and chef of the international philosophical magazine Información Filosófica. It contains a fortnight of autogérées socialistes edition houses. He wrote 150 volumes, wrote 1000 essays, founded an avant-garde movement (NéoN-avant-gardisme, approved by Zygmunt Bauman), and wrote an Anti-manifesto NéoN-Avant-gardiste. This is mentioned in the main university manuals of literature history, philosophical history and in the main volumes of literary criticism. His book La malattia invettiva wins Raduga, mention of the critique of Montano et Strega. He is included in the Atlas of contemporary Italian poets of the University of Bologne and is included several times in the major international literature magazine, Gradiva. His verses are translated into 25 languages. In 2024, after six years of total retrait of academic studies, he return to the Italian artistic world and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology) [https://kolektivnenseae.wordpress.com/].

Telepath

i

What would you choose if a look could kill,

turn the tide or save the day.

Reverse fortunes on the head of a sixpence.

Turn your only godchild to stone

(that she might have a change of heart) 

or do you stare helplessly

into the abyss – immobilized by your sense

of historical inevitability.

ii

Frau Demuth already sees what will become

of Marx’s first biographer

on the day she announces her engagement

to Doctor Aveling (since loneliness

can’t be cured by a kiss)

but for all her knowing looks, she can only study

the waltz of shades unraveling

during Sunday dinner at Regent’s Park.

Second sight – powerless to stop time,

despite the ‘sure thing’

of a spectre haunting Europe

or the shabby ghost of a third Jewish messiah

whose ideas would one day divide the world.

iii

Any wonder why Eleanor Marx fell

through the looking glass. Crashing from nervosa

to love. Love to nervosa. And nervosa

back to love again.

Impossible, in all the after dinner conversation,

to tell which from which.

Only that the phrase: ‘this looks familiar,’

goes unheard by those whom we would save

from themselves,

if only they would hear us.

Cosmic Cradle

i

What shall we do with our nameless child – 

so much a part of us? So much more, than loss of hope

for Karl and Jenny, or the burial record

of an invisible girl? She who holds both dissonance

and harmony (rose and wreath

in her tiny hands) as we lay her to rest

under indifferent skies, but no one knows why  

a dying girl’s face tilts

towards the moon.

ii

Last night, the girl we already grieve

as a lost galaxy – crawled from her crib to sing

as a star – spreading her wings

in exquisite poverty. Here at the world’s edge,

her breath leaves semitones of light

on the latticed glass.

Here, nothing is more important

than music and moonlight.

Shining Light

We have learned your name by heart,

Helene Lenchen Demuth.

And we can tell you that Demuth,

from the Middle High German, ‘diemuot,’

or ‘demuot,’ is a nickname

given for a humble or modest person.

How do we know, only because

there’s no equivalence for ‘Lenchen’

in the Indo-European vernacular,

but ‘L’ is always for love,

which you give to all you encounter.

‘E’ is for equal footing, because you meet

us all on a level playing field.

‘N’ is for necessity, because the realm

of needs, can never be breached

by the leap to freedom alone.

‘C’ is for change, because you adapt

to both ebb and flow. ‘H’ is for heart,

because you always make a home  

out of hope. ‘E’ is for endure,

because we can never forget you.

‘N’ is for nodal point, because going on

is the only option to not going back.

Prelude in E Minor Op. 28 No. 4

for Nora

What is this sadness that invites us

to withdraw into the magic

of minor keys. Are we the astronomers

of descending melodies, discovering

the faintest of stars. Is this what loneliness

sounds like. Chord chains torn

from another dimension. As if the heart,

(cleaved from the body) still grieves alone

in a Warsaw crypt. Tomorrow we smile

again, for tonight we live

our saddest dreams.

Diamonds and Water.

The book of your life is hardly written

yet you look at the world

with all the curiosity life affords.

And though you sit and watch in silence,

you reject the impasse

of a world that defies kindness.

Understanding the secret

ballot that ties the big stick to diplomacy,

or as democracy’s diary

would have it: ‘All for ourselves

and nothing for other people.’ A maxim

so deeply rooted, so definite  

in the division of worlds, it chaperones,

protects and champions

portfolio investment in art, repo-markets

and perfect competition in a face off

with the tasteless tyranny

of the ‘herd.’

You know it’s not your job to think,

only to follow orders,.

yet you have devoted your heart

to the struggle to shape your own ideas,

in your transformation

from wide-eyed peasant girl 

to radical, confidante, and public enemy 

with Soho’s most dangerous

philosopher. A dissident Jewish doctor,

forced to pawn

his only suit of clothes

to buy a coffin for his unnamed daughter – 

unwrapping the ultimate paradox

of value.

Thistle in Humble Soil

Perhaps your closed crown defies the wind

in a field where shadows bully

the faithless, but we live

here where faith is currency

to silence the Aspen’s wild pulse.

Where is the ‘doing’ word that gives us

the upper hand? We speak

while we still have use of our tongues.

In less than a heartbeat

your spiny leaves will yield

their armor under the heavy boots

of Caledonian foresters,

but your magenta crowned florets will prevail

in the field’s heart as if poised to mend

the world. You who thrive

in the barest of ground, rise up again

in winter’s drifts. Testament how we live

to fight another day.

Helene Demuth Notes A Change of Heart

Q. How do you turn down a dialectical thinker

with a hard on for a new idea?

A. Tell him the dialectics of hope turn out to be

nothing more than the interpenetration

of id and ego. You can’t always hold back

the tide, but you can always muddy the waters

by taking refuge in the greatest good

for the greatest number. One death is heroic.

Two deaths, a tragedy. Better to be dissatisfied

as Socrates, than satisfied as a pig.

A qualitative leap between, ‘I have begun

to long for you.’

And, ‘I who have no need.’

Venturing Beyond

You are not a peasant girl from Sankt Wendel,

Housekeeper or fellow traveller.

You are not your age, or even ageless.

You are all the people you touch

when other people find them untouchable.

All the smiles you bring to others

when smiling is felt subordinate to living.

You are the promises on both sides

of assonance and dissonance.

You are the discontent which belongs to hope.

You are the tears of Niobe when pride takes a fall.

You are the verity of pride

when pride surrenders to pity.

You are all children that are never lost

because you are reborn in the image of children

(the Not-Yet-Conscious and Not-Yet-Become)

on the horizon of all being.

You are the one who changes

into what they really are, what they can really be.

The forward dreamer, who is yet to break

through into words.

Van Gogh’s Irises

Even in La Villle d’Amour, the state of emergency

is not the exception but the rule.

Think of the continuous flow of empty time

and the tiger’s leap into the thickets of long ago.

Think of two hundred canon on the brow

of Montmartre. Of the sixty-four days redeeming

the past in service of the present.

Think of blue irises at the Wall of Love

and the words ‘I love you,’ on three hundred tongues.

Think of purple irises uniting springtime love

with the Communard’s Wall.

Think of the history of civilisation

written in blood. Then think of the future as a flower

turning towards the sun – rising in the sky

of a history – yet to be written.

Angelus Novus

Art does not reproduce what we see, rather, it makes us see.

Paul Klee

All art is metaphor. Even when it evokes the union

between progress and catastrophe

Time in need of salvation, an ancestor

in need of awakening, or an angel thwarted

by war and civil war. A storm cloud 

blown in from paradise –

trapped between future past and future present.

Suspended in the struggle of empty-time.

Staring towards the horizon, saying something

profound. Awaiting an answer, beyond

the artifice of perception, as she turns her thoughts

away from internal flight.

The West is the best. The West is the best.

Here! Here! Let’s hear the rest! Light at the end

of the tunnel – the only extraction now

from time in a cage.

What is the Name of this Poem?

i

Your social aims may be fashionable

and indeed, admirable, but no amount of political cheer leading

can prepare you for the darkness

of the lived moment. If semiology is a negation –  

no amount of words can expurgate, refine

or reform the shit shovel. What is

‘ghost forest’ for you is only a private metaphor

for desertification.

An exile from the ancient city of Aleppo,

might well be ‘displaced,’ but any politically correct verbiage

belies the human dimension of losing one’s home,

one’s family and being compelled

to live in a skip or public toilet like an alley cat.

A rebel from Mount Simeon, might well be a ‘job seeker’

to you, but any attempt to dress ‘stateless nationals’

as anything other than ‘stake holders’

will be met with derision from the floor. Since a reserve army

of unemployed is always good for business.

ii

If thought itself can be called a negation:

what of unsustainability and over-production?

Since no concept can articulate the whole relationship

vis-a-vis man and Nature – the semiotics

of exhuming the dead or saving the planet to secure a home – 

will be met by an irresistible canon ball

fired at an immovable post. Positing truth itself

is negative – insofar as it presupposes

something else is not true.

Shamanic Dance Sublation

for Douglas Colston & Dylan Murphy

i

O’ pliable experts in humanity. You who proclaim

the end of history. You who mop the brow

of Nero (bless the mob as you talk our dreams to sleep)

hold a noose over the past, as if to cut a deal

with the future. You who watch Rome burning 

while the tyrant fiddles, if only to observe

the facts. You who say nothing of master and slave,

lost peoples, stolen lands.  Mouthing

those heroic last words: ‘What an artist dies in me,’

as if to turn language and art into consumables – buy up

the last innocence of thought. You who procure

freedom like a bestiarii in that chamber of horrors

we call the Circus – for the age-old celebration

of ‘business as usual.’  In the prison of apprehension

we can hardly move, let alone breathe freely,

but history doesn’t end in triumphalism for one class

or nation over its rivals. It is open to the future 

precisely because we’re surrounded by possibility.

Because agency suggests the content

of the future – because the ‘mystical fire’ of the soul 

lives forever in the recall of night eyes. 

In the constellations of Orion and Cassiopeia.

Where we dream and we remember: 

Nature and human nature are opposite sides 

of the same nature because we still live in a prehistory 

that only stands because we are yet to grasp

who we are. What we might be without constructs

and aggregates – the esoteric architecture

of studio, stadia, steeple, church. The appropriation 

of man by man. Division and progress. Progress

and division.

ii

To know a thing is to know its end but the quest

for knowledge is not conquest of the unknown 

but a journey through the unknowable.

Being moves through time  – from the Servile Wars

of Spartacus to the Peasant Revolt,

from the beheading of a Cavalier King to the shootings

of the Tsar and Tsarina .But time only remains

as a function of being. The real antagonism for the cat

in the box is living. In the boardrooms of Titanic,

progress implicates itself as problem

and solution, but the solution remains the problem.

If we are to translate the world as we change it,

we must learn how observation weasels out

of objectivity. In the bordellos of objectivism,

we must renegotiate the objections to knowledge

over function. Where science serves myth

and myth maker, (which only paves the way

for more whoring) the self-encounter is not quantitive 

or absolute, but rebellious because it puts no price

on sovereignty. S is not yet P,

but when we change subject and predicate,

we change how we see the world. Age and death

can do no more to define us because the ‘Now’ 

is our time.  The locus of Winstanley’s diggers 

(which is Not Yet articulated)

is beginning to carve the skyline of the future

from the vanishing point of the past into the horizon

of the present. The sky in Heraclitus reminds us

how flow and flaw reveal the path ahead.

We find ourselves in the places where we were most lost.

iii

We find ourselves in the Shamanic dance

of ancestors, in the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee – 

in moments torn from time, because being

and time are tied to a tug of war in the infinite

possibilities of the finite. True genesis (the creation

of man by man) does not call for gods.

It is not at the starting gate but the finish line 

because freedom is not the fabled flower of immortality

but the action of picking the wild flower

from the chain – the present moment fulfilled 

in the rupturing of empty time.

In the leap between the rebel dead and the Novum. 

Fearing the past only petrifies the past

until slave and rebellion are redeemed in the present,

because the past is only a rebellion 

for memory until it is re-enacted in the world.

Rebellion not only pervades the past – it proposes

the future. Reminds us of the light

at the mouth of the cave, because the sun

(which is yesterday’s memory) ascends in the daydream

of childhood. In the homeland of all living beings

where man is yet to belong. As the slave army turns

to the sun, so the past turns to us 

before it threatens to disappear – because healing begins

in the rebellion  of the fragmented mind 

and we are the creators

of miracles. 

BETWEEN ONE AND ZERO

(Setting: An interview. Anywhere.)

Interviewer: Hello, Mrs. Reynolds.

Melba: Hazelton. I kept my name.

Interview: For the sake of this interview I’m going to refer to you as Mrs. Reynolds.

Melba: Oh, fine. Whatever.

Interview: You’ll settle for that?

Melba: Get on with it. Please.

Interview: Tell me about what happened yesterday.

Melba: That’s it? Are you serious?

Interview: Everything you can remember.

Melba: It was a beautiful day, I guess.

Interviewer: The weather?

Melba: You know I hate this season.

Interviewer: You hate all the seasons, these days. You only notice in the summer.

Melba: Still, the content was beautiful. I woke up at—

Interviewer: I’m more interested in how it ended.

Melba: In sleep, naturally.

Interviewer: And before that?

Melba: Michael barbequed. The meat came out perfectly, not too well-done. There were some fireflies in the garden.

Interviewer: I don’t care about the animals eaten or alive. Those are trivial, incidental. The details distract from the underlying truth.

Melba: I thought you wanted to know everything. Can’t you filter what you decide is important?

Interviewer: Try to focus on the subtleties. What no one but you had empirical access to.

Melba: Such as?

Interviewer: I think you know what you’re not mentioning.

Melba: I woke up. I went to work—

Interviewer: Tried to ignore it. Won’t work, won’t work.

Melba: What?

Interviewer: Boredom boredom crushing boredom. You notice your heart pumping. You’re aware when your lungs release. These things are supposed to be autonomic, but your brain sends the wrong signal. Boredom. Pump. Boredom. Breathe.

Melba: No, I like my job. It took me years to get here.

Interviewer: Not there. Not any one place. In the lining between. Underneath the perfect meat, boredom is a seasoning.

Melba: I love my children. So I love my life. I can’t be bored when I’m filled with love, I can’t. I love my children.

Interviewer: As you love your husband, Michael Reynolds?

Melba: Yes.

Interviewer: He’s someone you protect and fight for. You feel no vaginal passion and fill this gaping hole with any object you can touch. You look at fireflies and try to make them exciting. You watch your children chase them, and you watch yourself watching them. How idyllic, how artful, you force yourself to think. How lucky I must therefore be, as if life were math and you had the winning numbers.

Melba: Happiness isn’t simple, of course. But neither is its absence. There’s no vacuum.

Interviewer: I’m not suggesting you’re completely unhappy, Mrs. Reynolds.

Melba: Melba.

Interviewer: Merely less so than perhaps you should be.

Melba: What, then, should I be? Who should I be?

Interviewer: Someone who remembers when her last orgasm was. (Pause) My god, you do remember, don’t you? And you count the expanding days.

Melba: There’s always a blank spot.

Interview: Yours will grow until it consumes you, for you know you’re aging and pretend that all progress is good. You’re not quite jealous of yourself at 18, not yet. You remember her pain too clearly.

Melba: I always ache after the orgasm. All consensual sex leaves me sore, broken. My constitution wasn’t built to sustain the rush. The subsequent crash is too frequent, too immediate, to justify the high. And it always comes in that order: First good, then bad, with the latter more intense. It never goes in the other order, things never get better. The initial pleasure is invalidated by the overwhelming sharpness. And then: Despair sets in.

Interviewer: That sounds very clinical. Good for you that you’ve articulated your emptiness in a way that makes sense to you. How cleverly you’ve talked yourself out of what you choose to miss. You still miss it, though. You’re not a robot.

Melba: No. I’m definitely not a robot.

Interviewer: Still, you abstain from both peak and valley, turn your life into a flatline. Who gave you the authority to take that away from yourself? To will yourself, if not happy, then old?

Melba: Dread.

Interviewer: Dread is not an authority. It is a liar, even when proves itself right. How is that working out for you, by the way? Are you living without dread, now that you’ve essentially defined yourself by it? (pause)When was the last time you had enjoyable sex?

Melba: I took my children to the park. That is what sex is for.

Interviewer: Not for you? Is pleasure so shallow just because it touches skin?

Melba: For the children, I submitted. As often as it took.

Interview: And every day since is a “lovely” ordeal.

Melba: You should see them, illuminated by the setting sun, following fireflies off of my porch.

Interview: Well, sure. You have to notice the little buzzing things, enjoy each slowly dying second. This is what unhappy optimists do. They pretend the sacrifice is worth it.

Melba: What—what is the point of this interview?

Interviewer: I am conducting research and contrasting you to your alternate.

Melba: Who never married Michael Reynolds?

Interviewer: Correct.

Melba: Which one? There must be an infinite number of scenarios, literally infinite, where I don’t marry Michael. Am I to compete with all of them?

Interviewer: No, although you’re right that forks beget forks, I’m only observing two possibilities. This man or that man, zero or one. I’m judging you against Mrs. Robert Kane.

Melba: (pause)Bobby.

Interviewer: Do you remember that Christmas party when he came back into your life? Or potentially did?

Melba: Daily. But I’m sure I think of everything daily.

Interviewer: Don’t lie to your sub-consciousness. It never works.

Melba: I had already moved in with Michael when Bobby and I…reconnected. By chance at that party. I never would hurt him by pursuing other men.

Interviewer: Why not? There’s no such thing as being pre-married. In order for marriage to mean anything, you can’t give it away too early. But you thought you were more committed to a very specific universe than was the actual case. You were wrong. Cosmically, fundamentally. Atomically.

Melba: You can’t possibly know that. Not as an absolute.

Interviewer: At the rate you’re going you’ll wind up as lonely and sexually frustrated as you were when you were 18, only this time you’ll have no hope to look to. The thing you’ll most consistently dream of is the sound of your husband’s breathing, never knowing if you’re awake or not. Your good dreams will be the cruelest of false positives. That you’re lying next to another human will do nothing but make your loneliness OBSCENE.

All this because you could never recover from the hurt Bobby accidentally threw at you at 18. You could never give real love a second chance, for fear it would leave again. As if Bobby hadn’t grown up at all. So you settled for the plastic that would never decay. When did beauty become so frightening? Around the same time you confused orgasms with torture? You just want life boring so you’ll be less afraid of death. How morbid. You let death win.

I see Mrs. Kane, the one who chose more wisely. I’m sorry to invalidate everything you’ve worked for, but that’s the point—Her smile is less forced. Thus she’s the one I choose to let life breathe into, to close the gap between potential and forever.

Melba: I love my children. Michael’s children.

Interviewer: Take as long as you need to mourn them. But back they go, no harm done.

Melba: How can you say that? You’re not the one who has to go back to the age of 29, and break up with a man you genuinely love. God, I have to look him in the eye.  I have to watch his face.

Interviewer: No doubt this will hurt. But its prevention isn’t worth a lifetime of mediocre fulfillment, which won’t hurt so much as itch in a place you can’t reach. That would be too high an avoidance cost. Tears, though, tears are cathartic, cleansing. How healthful to the body to relieve its inner conflict. (He hands her a tissue)

Melba: (She accepts it but does not take it to her face)Why would you give me this near-complete contentment only to take it away? Do my modest joys come to nothing, for being modest?

Interviewer: I care too much about you to settle for the beta version. Not when I’ve seen you in more perfect light.

Melba: Oh, Michael. My sweet Michael.

Interview: You will miss him. But you miss Bobby more now, a truth which denying fails to fix. Cognizance is better. Dissonance is a waste of your brain.

Melba: This doesn’t feel like change, it feels like death. This Melba Hazelton, this Mrs. Reynolds, is dying. I’m dying.

Interviewer: Oh, Darling. (pause) You are.

Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, short stories, paintings, drawings and photographs have been published both online and in print. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram. Playwright’s note: Between One and Zero was originally produced at Manhattan Theatre Source, in June 2009. It starred Eliza Lay as Melba and Seth Lombardi as Interviewer.

From June to May

I have never said I love you

To me you are always new

l feel that l love you the best

Really you are not my guest.

I have never given you a rose

In literature you are the best prose

You are the best rose in my garden

You are the fairy queen in my heaven. 

l have never touched your heart

But look, you are not far apart

You won’t live without me a day

The moon says- from June to May.

I have never sent you costly gift

True love never demands any lift

I love you without the traditional world

Speaking truly, my love isn’t so called.

I have never dreamt a dream

Where is absent your cream

we walk along the path of love 

ln my sky, you are my love dove.

Peer Smits (The Netherlands), writer-prose, poetry-photographer, composer, visual artist. Likes music-punk, reggea- as an inspiration and for fun. Three books-Het hanenei, 2007, Compositions, and We do stencils-2024.Artist since 1982. Poetry published in (inter-)national magazines.

Pillow feather hunts pillow feather

The bed still remembers the shapes of our bodies

Outside the window the air turns into graves for the missing pilots

I dream of fucking you as before as before your funeral

***

I want to be the rain that washes off your skin

I don’t want to be the tear that washes away your joy

The tree controls the leaves and the soil controls the dead

You control my heart and I have nothing left but my heart

My brother Brutus is shaven and white like ivory

I’m coming from to your house to save you from my brother

I’m not going to your house so I’ll save you from myself

I never had a brother in reality and I will never betray myself again

I’m walking down the street in the middle of the day and it’s dark all around

***

ring on my finger

centenary rings belonging to a tree

I freeze unable to say a word

my hope is my leaves

months of my existence pass in anticipation of the birds

but the birds scattered all over the world in search of a new home

only the little boy inside me is still hiding in the basement

of his parents’ house trying to escape from air bombs and missiles

***

birds drink the silence

of a broken sakura

branch like for the first time

***

eyelashes tied in knots

but the eyes still see how the oak says

goodbye to yellowing leaves