my drug dealer sells coke to this big shot downtown. He had a strange job offer looking for a punk to flip switches. good pay thank christ, but thousands of empty switches suspended by shotty wiring. fake plastic flicks, bulbless and darkness. waivers and hard hats, flashlight fatigue from daytime swimming. the commute is the only time for sunshine.

astounding are my expectations, scanning the ceaseless switches, counting their numbers and building an army of added ones. they are charging the gate, mindless shits. I flip the switch of my kitchen light dozens of times in the evening. I have installed many switches with the money I’ve made. They are programmed to flash rapidly to heavy metal.

I orchestrate the clicks of switches into an concerto. after tying everything to the tiny levers, some were increasingly unused. the switches developed emotions and discovered guilt. every switch was torture from then on. burning coils, calloused fingers, fire retinas, sensitive sorry for needing one more switch to soften the light. it is a powerful switch inside somewhere too outside to describe.

no more blind switches. I will leave mine at home on, and move from room to room without touching the wall.

The county’s leading liquor clerk tapped gently on a pile of wooden legs — waiting

When the sails licked the cliffs, the clerk twisted the blinds and broke off the boards

He used the boards of the broken window and fashioned wooden legs

A tiny swan and a criminal, both ash and white striped and burdened by their own kind of shackle

Drank tequila sunrises and milky dusks

It was what they did before stealing wooden legs

The nightmare walked sideways on the walls, head backward, back backward, thinking backwardly towards the Chardonnay

The nightmare brushed past the tiny swan and crook with a stunning wooden leg and a sparkling red, the embodiment of death, love and armchair shenanigans.

Her ID was legit and tragic and growing inaccurate by the second. The clerk obliged out of the darkness he felt and the booming business of his carpentry project on the side.

He sells the nightmare a leg and she ties it tightly with hemp wire

And the next morning

Untied from the port, a rhythm creaks from the oars and ship pores and backward she rows

She left her sweater on the crook’s dresser

An Armchair from 1928

the clerk found a map in his grandfather’s armchair

buried savings from the great war

4 and a half feet under around the corner of a liquor store

lived a box of woodgrain and papyrus notes, all of

which read “for safe keeping”

the old parchment glued to the clerks legs and sawdust

mummified him

he sat numb behind the liquor store

waiting for the crooked log driver to bring cedar

and aspen and sometimes sandwiches

the laminate map on the counter

served a placemat for crumbs and cigarette ash

freckled and brown like the blinds with sunlight flakes

or riddled and old like the pile of porous wooden legs

a few minutes before close, the nightmare comes home

with a bottomless liver and leg she’ll soak in the tub

the tub leaks slightly over the whiskey

the tub is closing time, is bucket time

is the bucket out back near an armchair from 1928

grandfather’s are frugal men and men that say

“build it yourself”

save money, fix faulty machinery, i.e. an armchair

that takes the legs of nightmares when they sleep

kitten curled feet tucked

far from liable

obligingly, you put her together with a wooden leg

Tiny Swan

usually caught in a paper smoking jacket

with the demeanor of someone that has permanently forgotten something

of importance

a tiny swan with salty tuffs plays with

wiry feathers

and anachronistic Bukowski shorts stapled into cedar paneling

just beside the bed frame where weeks of crusty feathers have been

caught in the splinters

every ornery morning, the tiny swan

wakes to the lick of sails on the cliffs

he crawls into the ceramic tub outside -

an old bird that plots long cons

and watches shitty daytime melodramas at a local convenience store

sometimes he doesn’t get out

sometimes he just sits in his dirty tub or dirty truck

a picture of a lady swan hangs from the rear view mirror signed

by Burt Reynolds with notes from last Wednesday’s local labor meeting

a picture folded twice that no one talks about

even the pigeons on the corner don’t ask, don’t beg for crumbs,

don’t eat sawdust off the back of a log driver’s truck,

They taste the difference

the tiny swan drives with wooden blocks on the pedals

following a scar at the water’s hips made from the

daily commute of a secret lover

by the time the cliff has been climbed

the crooked log driver will tell the tiny swan about the next step

to ripping off island inhabitants

the secret, he says, is knowing when

the tiny swan dreams of big scores, big breasts, and redemption

all of which award him a routine trip to the liquor store

The only indoor plumbing contractor on this side of the ocean is a tiny swan

He sucks at his job and never fails to piss off the liquor store clerk

Raising a Kid

the port authority raised an extra set of hands, that grew to be

a bigger set of hands

hands with sweaters stretched at the wrists, often splintered

panelling dock planks and planning revenge against rubber boots, the panelling of rubber faces that spit and grow hair and sink and look at a kid that is just a set of hands

the port authority thinks bribery substitutes apologies

they speak at supper time

take a sip son, everyone feels that way

how can they, says a pair of hands

if they aren’t hanging from the harbor and biting waves

while a shadow puppet flickers on the wall, say bite, say hands folding, say anxiety, say biting waves, say harbor, say harbor

the shadow puppet leaped into the sea and happened upon a log

out the window, balancing wakelessly, teeterless

trustworthy of an atom bomb, weighing just as much

with the control of an alcoholic tiny swam

the pair of hands followed the shadow

onto logs and quit being a pair of hands

he took log driving courses at the YMCA

and business classes at the community college

and business classes from the working classes

and gave business classes to the working classes

they nod at him from healthy pensions, wages, and bellies

the port authority got sick from swallowing waves and shadow puppets

a shipwreck and an orphan sign up for classes

to be something other than a pair of hands

A Bottle of Whiskey is $50 for You

a son to the port authority worked

pulling planks from the harbor

feeling pruritus on skin that was bark

and accustomed to touching other bark

the envy of trees

he never shivered

at the vacant taste of weak coffee or sheerness

a quality most people don’t see as fair

they hid vacant glances over cardboard cup masks

orphaned sentiment, unorphaned quiet

lone log driving llc.

the only employee smoked cigarettes on a lucky strike

and refused opportunities that called

waiting for one ship in particular to fall apart

the ship that rides the hip in the water

and never wavers

she docks by herself

unloads barrels of empty thoughts and wrinkled sweaters

drops them off at an orphanage and takes a cab

to lone log driving llc

a lone log driving worker comes off strike to be a crook and ends up getting a call around noon

an order for carving wood

“I only deliver logs by the sea,

it won’t be worth carving when it gets there”

the liquor clerk says it’s fine

“I’ll board the windows first while they dry”

the clerk wonders if he’ll hear the nightmare at the other end

the telephone grows darker with chameleon shadows

“I won’t charge you,” the log driver says

“I still won’t give you a discount” the clerk says

Small town, big armchairs

brothers split after a great depression

after starting a carpentry venture just before the market crashed

on a cliffside island town

three decades and a second or two

a nightmare was born as a granddaughter

spawned by sea fire

and a house full of uncomfortable seating, assets

spilling extendable iron leg rests

and scratched armrests

over rugs, quilts, and other carpet substitutes

a great thing for kids to jump over

as she got older, she kept her childhood

in a belief that leg rests were lava and books

read better with her feet warmed under cheeks

or tucked in chair folds

Papa believed in American manufacturing

shipments in storms, in shitstorms

believed in taking, being loud

while the softer brother

that gets sea sick

sticks to workbenches, whiskey brewings, and stomach ulcers

the nightmare stomachs and she stomachs well

stomachs small towns, shitstorms, whiskey and wine,

she stomachs tiny spaces, gory mystery novels, stomachs

the sight of blood, she stomachs the sight of blood so well,

stomaching iron on the back of her throat or iron through

her leg, stomach in a cliffside sawmill stomach in a

tub, stomach donated to an orphanage that’s too big for its

own good, stomach and sweet belly, translucent sheerness, stomachs

sold behind liquor store counters, stomachs beside bedsides and other stomach looking furniture, dead stomachs too many stomachs

in a small town of stomachs

and a few armchairs left after the great depression

I wouldn’t suggest buying one unless you have the stomach for it

artwork by: Danielle Pratt

photo by: Andy Gordon

thanks to SFY at BU