Short, Fast, and Deadly

Short, Fast, and Deadly
i22
Edited by Joseph A. W. Quintela
9 May 2010

Featuring:
R. S. Bohn
David Flint
Howie Good
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
Ray Scanlon
Victoria Tishman

Copyright © 2010 by Individual Authors
All Rights Reserved

Canon

The cases of musical instruments littered the floor. She tried to find the one she could fit into: flute, clarinet, oboe. She believed she was the ghost of a woodwind, you see. I convinced her to let me try; a diagnosis upon her neck, first joint, second joint, a lingering kiss on her bell.

 

In the end, she ran away with a violin player. If I never hear another concerto, it will be too soon.

 
by R. S. Bohn of Dearborn

The Weight Of His Tongue

She went on a hunger strike
to force my proposal

(the Gandhi of marriage?)

Now she’s so skinny
the weight of my tongue
hurts her nipples

by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming of London

Brighton Beach

It’s my turn to make the borscht. Babushka sends me to the store without aisles-just stacks of Russian boxes and fruit near the wall. I hate the dead fish smell but Babushka claims the new owner has since renovated. Inside I notice a chrome ceiling fan. I find myself beneath it, colliding into a woman with a mermaid on her wrist. By the time I remember the beets, I already have her number.

 
by Victoria Tishman of Livermore

Linotype

Consider a mutant typewriter on steroids, orders of magnitude more complex than Rube Goldberg's worst nightmare. Think of a sort of self-organizing spidery intelligence emerging from the seeming chaos of hot lead slugs falling into a galley, surrounded by a myriad of large-postage-stamp-sized brass matrices marching ant-like up and down the machine. There is no way a Linotype machine could possibly work, but it did.

by Ray Scanlon of Rehoboth

I'm Going to Grow Porcupine Quills and a Turtle Shell

What are these words?

Keys to the locked doors of souls, psyches, and hearts.

I'm a stone I'm a stone I'm a stone. Am I a stone? No. You are the soft vulnerable underbelly of the agile animal. The one without a shell. The one that relies on a quick wit and a generally untrusting nature of things.

Anymore, the keys aren't keys. It's passwords in asterisks.

Anymore, we can't unlock anything, can we?

 
by David Flint of Scotia

Prescription for Poets

Steal words from others, blame the royal tutor if caught, miss the beginning of movies on purpose but notice the first buds, try painting it all one color and then stop somewhere on the road and sit waiting silently for her among strangers and dirty tables and the slow, agonized waltz of maladroit busboys.

by Howie Good of Highland

No place

to put my mouth. The quills have done their job, more than skin-deep. You opened your shirt just to prove it, your pants, your head shaved to show us all: untouchable, having been so touched already. One hundred points of blackness, smashed upon your bones. You’re all covered, and I

 
have nowhere to put my mouth.
 
by R. S. Bohn of Dearborn