Age: 124
6855 days old here
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County Fair by Mary Karr
On the mudroad of plodding American bodies, my son wove like an antelope from stall to stall and want to want. I no’ed it all: the wind-up killer robot and winged alien; knives hierarchical in a glass case; the blow-up vinyl wolf bobbing from a pilgrim’s staff. Lured as I was by the bar-b-que’s black smoke, I got in line. A hog carcass, blistered pink on a spit, made its agonized slow roll, a metaphor, I thought, for anyone ahead of me—the pasty-faced and broad. I half-longed for the titanium blade I’d just seen curved like a falcon’s claw. Some truth wanted cutting in my neighbors’ impermanent flesh. Or so my poisoned soul announced, as if scorn for the body politic weren’t some outward form of inner scorn, as if I were fit judge. Lucky my son found the bumper cars. Once I’d hoped only to stand tall enough to drive my own. Now when the master switch got thrown and sparks skittered overhead in a lightning web, I felt like Frankenstein or some newly powered monster. Plus the floor was glossy as ice. Even rammed head-on, the rubber bumper bounced you off unhurt and into other folks who didn’t mind the jolt, whose faces all broke smiles, in fact, till the perfect figure-eight I’d started out to execute became itself an interruption. One face after another wheeled shining at me from the dark, each bearing the weight of a whole self. What pure vessels we are, I thought, once our skulls shut up their nasty talk. We drove home past corn at full tassel, colossal silos, a windmill sentinel. Summer was starting. My son’s body slumped like a grain sack against mine. My chest was all thunder. On the purple sky in rear view, fireworks unpacked—silver chrysanthemum, another in fuchsia, then plum. Each staccato boom shook the night. My son jerked in his sleep. I prayed hard to keep the frail peace we hurtled through, to want no more than what we had. The road rushed under us. Our lush planet heaved toward day. Inside my hand’s flesh, anybody’s skeleton gripped the wheel.
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
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Location:
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The Men by B. H. Fairchild
As a kid sitting in a yellow vinyl booth in the back of Earl’s Tavern, you watch the late-afternoon drunks coming and going, sunlight breaking through the smoky dark as the door opens and closes, and it’s the future flashing ahead like the taillights of a semi as you drop over a rise in the road on your way to Amarillo, bright lights and blonde-haired women, as Billy used to say, slumped over his beer like a snail, make a real man out of you, the smile bleak as the gaps between his teeth, stay loose, son, don’t die before you’re dead. Always the warnings from men you worked with before they broke, blue fingernails, eyes red as fate. A different life for me, you think, and outside later, feeling young and strong enough to raise the sun back up, you stare down Highway 54, pushing everything—stars, sky, moon, all but a thin line at the edge of the world—behind you. Your headlights sweep across the tavern window, ripping the dark from the small, humped shapes of men inside who turn and look, like small animals caught in the glare of your lights on the road to Amarillo.
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
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Location:
United Kingdom, United Kingdom
The Book of Hours by B. H. Fairchild
Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled and limp after waking late in her boyfriend’s apartment. And here, she notes, the Procession of St. Gregory, where atop Hadrian’s mausoleum the angel of death returns his bloody sword to its scabbard, and staring down at the marble floor, liquid in the slanted silver light of mid-morning, she ponders briefly the polished faces of her audience: seraphim gazing heavenward at the golden throne, or, as she raises her tired eyes to meet their eyes, the evolving souls of purgatory, bored as the inhabitants of some fashionable European spa sunbathing on boulders. And here, notice the lovely treatment of St. John on Patmos, robed in blue and gold, and she tells the story of gall-nuts, goats’ skins dried and stretched into vellum— the word vellum delicious in its saying, caressed in her mouth like a fat breakfast plum—lapis lazuli crushed into pools of ultramarine blue, and gold foil hammered thin enough to float upon the least breath, the scribes hastily scraping gold flakes into ceramic cups, curling their toes against the cold like her lover stepping out of bed in that odd, delicate way of his, wisps of gold drifting like miniature angels onto the scriptorium’s stone floor, and dogs’ teeth to polish the gold leaf as transcendent in its beauty, she says, as the medieval mind conceived the soul to be.
The patrons are beginning to wander now as she points to the crucifixion scene, done to perfection by the Limbourg brothers, the skull and bones of Adam lying scattered beneath the Roman soldier’s horse, and the old custodian wipes palm prints from the glass, the monks breathe upon their fingertips and pray against the hard winter, and the art historian recalls the narrow shafts of light tapping the breakfast table, the long curve of his back in half-shadow, the bed’s rumpled sheets lifted by an ocean breeze as if they were the weightless gold leaf of the spirit.
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
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Location:
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Old Men Playing Basketball by B. H. Fairchild
The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love again with the pure geometry of curves,
rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away. On the boards their hands and fingertips tremble in tense little prayers of reach and balance. Then, the grind of bone
and socket, the caught breath, the sigh, the grunt of the body laboring to give birth to itself. In their toiling and grand sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love
to their wives, kissing the undersides of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe of desire? And on the long walk home from the VFW, do they still sing
to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock moving, the one in army fatigues and houseshoes says to himself, pick and roll, and the phrase sounds musical as ever,
radio crooning songs of love after the game, the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat as her raven hair flames in the shuddering light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives,
gliding toward the net. A glass wand of autumn light breaks over the backboard. Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air.
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
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Location:
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Mrs. Hill by B. H. Fairchild
I am so young that I am still in love with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings, submarines powered by baking soda, whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually, not even them. Nobody can hear them.
Mrs. Hill from next door is hammering on our front door shouting, and my father in his black and gold gangster robe lets her in trembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow pleading, oh I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry, and clutching the neck of her gown as if she wants to choke herself. He said he was going to shoot me. He has a shotgun and he said he was going to shoot me.
I have never heard of such a thing. A man wanting to shoot his wife. His wife. I am standing in the center of a room barefoot on the cold linoleum, and a woman is crying and being held and soothed by my mother. Outside, through the open door my father is holding a shotgun, and his shadow envelops Mr. Hill, who bows his head and sobs into his hands.
A line of shadows seems to he moving across our white fence: hunched-over soldiers on a death march, or kindly old ladies in flower hats lugging grocery bags.
At Roman’s Salvage tire tubes are hanging from trees, where we threw them. In the corner window of Beacon Hardware there’s a sign: WHO HAS 3 OR 4 ROOMS FOR ME. SPEAK NOW. For some reason Mrs. Hill is wearing mittens. Closed in a fist, they look like giant raisins. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica Junior the great Pharoahs are lying in their tombs, the library of Alexandria is burning. Somewhere in Cleveland or Kansas City the Purple Heart my father refused in WWII is sitting in a Muriel cigar box, and every V-Day someone named Schwartz or Jackson gets drunk and takes it out.
In the kitchen now Mrs. Hill is playing gin rummy with my mother and laughing in those long shrieks that women have that make you think they are dying.
I walk into the front yard where moonlight drips from the fenders of our Pontiac Chieftain. I take out my dog whistle. Nothing moves. No one can hear it. Dogs are asleep all over town.
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
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Location:
United Kingdom, United Kingdom
In the House of the Latin Professor by B. H. Fairchild
All things fall away: store fronts on the west, ANGEL’S DELICATESSEN, windows boarded and laced in day-glow, BLUE KNIGHT AUTO REPAIR to the north with its verandah of rusted mufflers
and hubcaps of extinct Studebakers. The diminishing neighborhood sprawls under dusty folds of sycamore and fading elm, the high birdhouse out back starling-haunted.
Inside the cottage a bay window translates the language of sunlight, flaring like baroque trumpets on the red carpet, shadow-dappled as the house turns slowly beneath the drift
of tree branch and sun. We have come to shroud the couch in plastic, spread sheets over the fat reading chair and the piano’s mahogany gloom, the impossible etude’s
blur of black notes. Among a turmoil of ungraded papers lies the Loeb Classics Aeneid open to the last lesson. Later in the bedroom we imagine a flourish of light, her husband
loosening the sash of her white silk robe, his beard brushing the back of her neck. Amores, the art of love, of words lifting like vapors on a cold day, the dense vowels
of Ovid and Virgil almost vanished, almost risen to music. We lock the heavy door and walk away from the silence, the lone hexameters of Dido pulsing in an empty house
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
Points: 0
Location:
United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest by B. H. Fairchild
In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat of his father’s Ford and the mysterium of time, holds time in memory with words, night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make the child think of time in its passing, of death.
Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights. Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud- swags running the moon under, and starlight rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.
Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank, the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs, locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered. The great horse people, his father, these sounds, these shapes saved from time’s dark creek as the car moves across the moving earth: world, this world.
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
Points: 0
Location:
United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Flight by B. H. Fairchild
In the early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream .... One is somehow lifted free of one’s own body; looking back one sees oneself and feels a sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one’s own person, and there is no avenue of return. —George Steiner
Outside my window the wasps are making their slow circle, dizzy flights of forage and return, hovering among azaleas that bob in a sluggish breeze this humid, sun-torn morning.
Yesterday my wife held me here as I thrashed and moaned, her hand in my foaming mouth, and my son saw what he was warned he might.
Last night dreams stormed my brain in thick swirls of shame and fear. Behind a white garage a locked shed full of wide-eyed dolls burned, yellow smoke boiling up in huge clumps as I watched, feet nailed to the ground. In dining cars white table cloths unfolded wings and flew like gulls. An old German in a green Homburg sang lieder, Mein Herz ist müde. In a garden in Pasadena my father posed in Navy whites while overhead silver dirigibles moved like great whales. And in the narrowing tunnel of the dream’s end I flew down onto the iron red road of my grandfather’s farm. There was a white rail fence. In the green meadow beyond, a small boy walked toward me. His smile was the moon’s rim. Across his egg-shell eyes ran scenes from my future life, and he embraced me like a son or father or my lost brother.
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
Points: 0
Location:
United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest by B. H. Fairchild
In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat of his father’s Ford and the mysterium of time, holds time in memory with words, night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make the child think of time in its passing, of death.
Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights. Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud- swags running the moon under, and starlight rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.
Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank, the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs, locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered. The great horse people, his father, these sounds, these shapes saved from time’s dark creek as the car moves across the moving earth: world, this world.
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
Points: 0
Location:
United Kingdom, United Kingdom
Angels by B. H. Fairchild
Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college one winter, hauling a load of Herefords from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien on the seat beside him, saw the ass-end of his semi gliding around in the side mirror as he hit ice and knew he would never live to see graduation or the castle at Duino.
In the hospital, head wrapped like a gift (the nurses had stuck a bow on top), he said four flaming angels crouched on the hood, wings spread so wide he couldn’t see, and then the world collapsed. We smiled and passed a flask around. Little Bill and I sang Your Cheatin’ Heart and laughed, and then a sudden quiet put a hard edge on the morning and we left.
Siehe, ich lebe, Look, I’m alive, he said, leaping down the hospital steps. The nurses waved, white dresses puffed out like pigeons in the morning breeze. We roared off in my Dodge, Behold, I come like a thief! he shouted to the town and gave his life to poetry. He lives, now, in the south of France. His poems arrive by mail, and we read them and do not understand.
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
Points: 0
Location:
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Jab Soo Jate Hai Sari Duniya.. Jab Soo Jate hai Sari Duniya, Chupke Se Aakar Chaad, Khada Ho Jata Hai, Mere Khidki Ke Samne, Aur Muskara Kar Kehata Hai, Khooj Lo Muzmi Wo Chehara, Jiske Talaash Mai Ho Tum,
Tandi HAWAAI Pass Aate Hai Mere, Aur Kehate Hai, Bahoot Udaas Ho Na, Agale Baar Jab Lootuge, Sapno Ke Desh Se, Jaroor Lekar Aaooge, Uska Pata,
BAADAL Kehate Hai, Hum To Bhatakte Hai, Desh-Pardesh Mai, Kabhi Chalna Hamare Saath, Milkar Taalasege Tere CHAAD Ko,
Chaad,Sitare,Hawaai, Koyal, Sab Kartee Hai Tumhare Bataiyan, Mai Sunta Hu Chupchaap,
Aur Sabke Chale Jane Ke Baad, Dheere Se Booltaa Hu Ek Baat, Mai Jaanta Hu, Tum Jaha ho, Jaha Kahi Bhee Ho, Zaroor Sunn Loge Ye Baat,
Age: 124
6855 days old here
Total Posts: 18948
Points: 0
Location:
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Teray faraq kay lamhay shumaar kartay howay Bikhar gay hain tera intazaar kartay howay Tou main bhi khush hoon koi us say ja kar kah day Ager wo khush hay mujhay bey qaraar kartay howay Main muskurata howa aainay main ubhroon ga Woh ro paray ge achanak singhar kartay howay Tujhay khaber he nahi koe toot gia hay Mohabbatoon ko bohat paedaar kartay howay Woh kah rahe the sumander nahi hai aankhoon main Main un main doob gia ahtabaar kartay howay Mujhay khaber thi kah ab loot kar na aaonga Tuj ko yaad kia dard paar kartay howay...!!! x............x............x