In The Summer Air

At This Rate
The Invisible Man in Cleveland
The Beekeeper of Franklin Drive
Taxidermy
Instant Wave
1943 Lullaby
Unknown Shadows
1956 Edward
Customs
Poe Echo
Summer Air
The End

At This Rate

A heron snapped legs back
to miss hitting electric wires
I stopped pouring gas to watch
this busy street corner riot
cars, plastic signs and noise
to watch this dinosaur glide
flapping over parking lot trees

I thought of time and how
that soft floating bird
was so out of place now
as odd and lost in time
as a rocking chair with wings

How do they survive?
There’s no swamp anymore
cattail quiet pools glistening
that world is gone
poured over by stores

What can a heron do?
Will it land and
become one of us
wear clothes and shop
for groceries?

I ache to think
where we’re going
at this rate




The Invisible Man in Cleveland

Grass grown around
the shape he left
when he slept
like a lawn ornament
crushed down
where he bent
days undisturbed
then walked away




The Beekeeper of
Franklin Drive

It was going to rain
on Franklin Drive
the sky continued
that familiar gray lake
coloring an old man
sighed into a chair
who shuffled bees
for solitaire




Taxidermy

If you’re waiting
for something to happen
you will join the ranks
of the animals
looking lifelike
but dead
to this world




Instant Wave

Opening
a jam jar
holding water
labeled
Instant wave




1943 Lullaby

The hurricane hit
the window at night
streetlamp diamonds
made of orange light
rain and the maple
branch shadows fight
back and forth
like Frankenstein
meets the Wolfman




Unknown Shadows

They’re all over
unknown shadows
known only
to themselves




1956 Edward

A sedan
from Ohio
slows down
when their
Map to the Stars
strikes gold

Edward G. Robinson
walks down the path
to get his newspaper
locking eyes
on the boy
looking back




Customs

I had
to claim
seven poems
at customs

Also these
sounds of birds
rain and trains
dreams I had
and memories




Poe Echo

I can’t see him
but I can hear him
off through the woods

Carved up trees
a raven calling
another answering




Summer Air

Low swallows
over a lulled field

Our daughter and son
go running to catch them

Their veer and swerve
like comedy
in the summer air




The End

At the end of the day
the flies hang on
the yellow windows




in the summer air
writing: allen frost
written during august 2005
in bellingham & ohio

In A Little Spanish Town

Good Deed Rain

Vic Shingles’ Ghastly Puppets
Good Deed Rain
Planet Fishing
Modern Alice
Pets
Pagoda
Why Models Stand The Way They Do
Fleas Please
Vic Shingles’ Ghastly Puppets Encore

Vic Shingles’ Ghastly Puppets

He pulled the curtain aside and the crowd
screamed in horror. All the terror that could be
expressed by human beings at seeing their
worst fears. Then he closed the curtain.
They had paid their dollars and there
were more waiting in lines outside.
They left shaking and holding
each other for support.




Good Deed Rain

The richest man in Sao Paulo had a magic umbrella.
When he opened the umbrella, an endless supply of

money green rain would waterfall out. He would let

the green pile up to his knees then shut it solemnly

and put the black umbrella back in the safe.
Nobody knew how he was getting all the money he

was spending. Before, he had nothing, but now he was

buying houses, land, cars, airplanes, anything that had

a pricetag he would buy. Except for an occasional loss

of peace of mind, the money gave him whatever he

wanted.
Lately while it poured, he strangely wondered why

he had been so lucky. He dreamed about buying the

world and giving every person a million dollars…
Sometimes, with the morning sun dripping his window

panes and collecting in a glass of orange juice on his plush

carpeted floor, the richest man in the city had a vision of

kindliness. He would pour the money out over the slums

that surrounded him and seeped through the city of Sao

Paolo like cockroach dancing.
Feeling so benevolent (he even felt above his head for a

halo) he climbed into his distinctive yellow bright chauffeured

helicopter with his umbrella on his lap and commanded in

a Moses-voice, “Hurry, off to the slums!”
Minutes later. Hovering over the crumbling poverty of
breakfast blue smoke fires and tin rust roofs. Cardboard

walls and flies crawling the faces of children who stopped

fighting only to poke their hands at the sky, to where the

golden helicopter buzzed in place directly overhead.

He opened the umbrella, leaning out the door like Zeus

with his thunderbolt. He smiled as money fluttered
down, laughing for a moment at the thought that this act

would no doubt buy him sainthood: picturing statues of

himself in town squares strewn with flowers and humbling

townsfolk kneeling before the altar of his image. He ordered

the pilot to circle round and round while he shook the umbrella

manna out of the sky.
Closing his eyes he basked in the hot Osiris sun, the roar of

blades overhead the roar of the faithful, he slowly opened his

eyes to see his pyramids below…
Instead, he was horrified to see spluttering thousands of
rotten green-brown yams the size of elephant tumors dropping
Earthwards. Screaming panic, he wrenched at the umbrella

trying to close it, the mechanics of it jammed with foul yam

slime. He shook it, rammed it against the rocking helicopter,

staining its bee yellow hide. But the umbrella wouldn’t close

and continued to spray its pestilence down on the poor people

of Sao Paolo.
Frenzy seized, he edged too far out the doorway and tumbled
out, gripping the umbrella pole handled like a lifeline in the palm

of the sky, praying in his leg kicking dervish free fall that it could
somehow parachute him safely.
But rancid yams were pouring down over him, soft thousands
sticking to his sleeves, shoulders and hair. He just fell faster to

the ground, with the yams flashing by, the whole world looking

brown and green. Instead of hitting the ground, he hit a mountain

of deep vegetable mush and he sunk down inside that gloom,

waited two days to be mined out.




Planet Fishing

Fising for the finest planets
Ernest Hemingway rigged a hook
and weight to the thick silver line
letting it trail silently wobbling
behind the ship. He trolled
through a small lake of stars
and easily caught small planets
which he reeled in, unhooked and
threw overboard again.




Modern Alice

Now she was older
things were different
anyway
Holding her hand out
to touch the circles
water made
Modern Alice
fell through
the mirror again
and found herself
in another world
where everything
was backwards

Pets

Now with science we can make our own animals,
from the circus or a zoo at a size convenient for you.
Elephants are popular, shrunk down to 20 inches tall,
holding to your leg as you move from room to room
at home. A six inch whale in a goldfish bowl, spouting
every half hour like a cuckoo-clock to keep time by.
An ostrich in a canary’s wooden cage, flapping its
wings in the sunlight coming through the window.
A hippo curling in your arms and purring like a cat
when its stomach is rubbed. With all the animal
kingdom to pick from, his possibilities were
exciting and pet stores took on a magical glow
like the colors and chrome of a dreamed 1956
Chevrolet showroom. He would carry home
a four inch buffalo scratching in a little paper box.
There were airholes poked in the top and as he
walked he could inspect through to see his pet
move. And he would let his buffalo loose on the gold
carpet of his bedroom floor, watching it roam
the prairie floor, past the toy model railroad
stretching from one corner to the other like
Manifest Destiny miniaturized.

Pagoda

It seemed to be a very small planet she was on.
Looking out the window, she could see where
the edges curved on the black forest horizon,
where there where synthetic rain clouds piled up.
Surrounded by seas of leaves and ripe berries,
the pagoda stood in perfect calm between the thorns,
as a kind of blackberry lighthouse.
She had no idea how she got to this place
all she knew was she had been asleep
and woke up here. Sometimes, she caught
memories of what she used to be. If she tried
hard enough, small moments in time would appear
and blink like fireflies. Through some magic
she couldn’t understand, she was here now,
in a self contained world of blackberries.
She had built the pagoda long ago,
a Japanese thing of dragon beauty
with green tiles and dark red wood,
tiers moving perfectly calm to a height
of over thirty feet. The rooms inside
were quiet paper walls with furniture
made of wicker. To survive, she learned
to make everything she needed from
the vines, leaves and fruit she cleared.
It was her daily ritual, sweeping forever
shifting and growing blackberry seas
around the pagoda and all the moving
twined pathways inside of the jungle.
After she was finished gardening
around midday, she would return home.
She was sitting at the loom upstairs,
making a blanket in a room lit by blue
candles, when a shooting star fell.
It went down slowly, rattling the pagoda
as orange flame settled in the courtyard.
It was not like the sparking meteors
that sometimes crashed far away
in the fields, there was something
different, it was something else.
When the fire went out and it was quiet,
she left the window and went down
the spiral stairs. For a moment,
she hung in the doorway and stared
out at the strange gleaming shape.
It didn’t look completely unfamiliar,
it was something she might have seen
before, a long time ago, something
connected to the dreams she had.
A door opened on the curved side
and what came out wasn’t that different
in shape from herself. It wasn’t wearing
the blue and red clothes she wore,
it was dressed in the same color as
the spaceship it left. Silver.
Things started to change suddenly,
like seeing through smashed glass,
or quickly melting ice, she was starting
to remember everything that happened.
She understood him when he said
“Good Afternoon, Captain Franz!”
in the language she had forgotten.
Then she could read the letters
on the spaceship: USA.
She had a name too,
Isabella Franz and things
like photographs were shuffling.
“Looks like you’ve got quite a crop going,”
he laughed, “And I like what you did to
the escape-ship.” He pointed at the pagoda.
“I almost didn’t recognize it. You’ve really
made yourself at home here.”
Isabella sat down heavily on a wicker chair.
The rocked burned the air, it was no longer
the sweet blackberry smell. She remembered
how it began, it was years earlier when
Captain Isabella Franz had walked across
this barren moon, so long ago, planting it
with blackberry seeds. Hundreds of moons
had been converted, getting atmospheres,
rich soils and crops, becoming farms
for the crowded needs of the home planet.
And this was one of them. This was
a blackberry moon she had turned into
a garden for Earth.
He was holding a clipboard,
“I’d like to take a look at the crop
before I call the harvesters down.”
She watched him walk over to the wall
and he fed the berries to a computer.
A paper with calculations rolled out
a moment later. The blackberries
were broken down into numbers.
He smiled, “I’ll go radio the harvesters.
They’re in orbit on the other side,”
he pointed at the sky, “Just waiting
for the signal to land. We can have
the surface reaped and burned back
in less than a day.” She remembered
what they did to the sugar cane moon.
“Yeah, since you’ve been here,
there are new machines, we can
triple our yield on the moons.”
He flipped through the notebook.
“It’s amazing really. You won’t
believe the statistics.” He moved
towards the rocket ship.
“Wait” Isabella got up,
“There’s something I need to show you.”
Back to the wall of blackberries and then
into the winding, he followed her down
a twisting steep path. She took him under
vines the size of tree branches. Other paths
crisscrossed and they squeezed on through
the sharp maze. She could open doors in
the green, leading to other dark hallways.
Then he turned on his helmet light,
“This is not exactly following company
specifications, Isabella.” It had all been
tunelled out of the plants. He was lost
and tired, cramped after the hour shuttle
flight to this small moon and now
she had him walking miles in the crop.
In places all he could see was her shadow
on the narrow trail in front of him.
The thorns were tearing his suit.
“What did you want to show me?”
He repeated himself, but his words
were getting to noone. She was gone.




Why Models Stand The Way They Do

She was a model, you could tell by the way she stood
at the filing cabinet. When I asked her why models
stand the way they do, she told me about Twinkies.
They had changed their recipe, she told me.
She had been eating Twinkie cakes for years
until the sugar filling was changed.
There was a loss in her voice as she talked
in terms of the tragic crumbling of America,
the self destruction of this once proud land.
To her, this was the worst of America’s crimes
and she decided to do something about it.
She wrote them what she thought about it.
A year later she told me, sadder still,
her letter never got a reply.




Fleas Please

Out along the road
where there used to be wolves
sixty years ago
they would hang out
and drink beer
on the big rock
spraypainted with
heavy metal band names
and girlfriends
who are gone
with the sounds of cars
passing headlights at night
glowing the dark woods
they would blow into bottles
and howl like wolves




Vic Shingles’ Ghastly Puppets Encore

For an encore,
he whirled the planet
in the palm of his hand.

He left it spinning recklessly
on the beak of a crow
and went out with a showgirl
on each arm


9/1/90 7:35 PM



cover picture: teresa mansfield
writing: allen frost in 1990

Mr. Thank You

Water Everywhere

Hank Williams’ Dog
Evel Knievel vs. The Snake River Canyon
The Black Sleep
The Memory Medicine Show
Dishes
Water Everywhere

Hank Williams’ Dog

Hank Williams had a dog he brought with him
touring the small towns and the lost highways
to the bars and cheap halls of America
forty years ago. Hank Williams’ Dog
lived the life of Hank Williams, getting in fights
in alleys, getting drunk and stumbling on
across the country to perform.
On a hot night in Tennessee,
the dog outdrank his passed out owner
and veered out the door, off the porch,
tripped down the gulley, unconscious
and into the open arms of a cold river
current running to the sea.




Evel Knievel vs. The Snake River Canyon

Every bone in Evel’s body
has been broken
starting as a boy
in circuses
jumping cars
on motorcycles

A thousand
human things
he’s traveled over

Now it’s nature
against the best
mankind can offer
Snake River Canyon
is a dare to him
opens its mouth
to laugh at him

Rocket motors
red white and blue
he leaves the ground
like a trip to the Moon
but something goes
wrong when he goes up

After all the tv time
sponsored by beer
and watched by millions
Hero Fever
instead of going across
the river
Evel goes straight up
like a firework
and comes down
by parachute
into the river below

Falling slowly
like anybody
Evel Knievel failed




The Black Sleep

Downtown there are holes
in the avenues
where all the poverty
falls in and fills
the underground
The dark tunnels
are not lighted
by electricity or warm
and noone in America
needs to worry about
them




The Memory Medicine Show

The Memory Medicine
was bottled in glass jars
and sold to those people
you see in old photographs
of the American Wild West.
He had a stagecoach
painted with signs
to sell them medicine by.
Empty jars filled the back
and when he needed
more medicine to sell
he stopped at the local river
and filled the jars with water




Dishes

See how she lives, now that it’s Christmas
and the lights are strung across the roof.
Her house blinks with colored lightbulbs
and it makes all the satellite dishes
on her roof seem to jump. I walk past
at night on my way home from work,
after long hours of the assembly line.
It’s a relief to see something out of
the ordinary. I just can’t understand
her need for so many satellite dishes
unless she is the eyes and ears
of the world.




Water Everywhere

More television disasters
of falling rain
as if this is the worst
that has ever been
as if water
was invented
in large quantities
for the 11 o’clock news

Like the paint
of something old
like the rust
underneath
that shows through
when water has
washed across,
everything is given
motion again
when it rains



writing: allen frost in 1990

Paying For Water

Safeway
Giant Insects
The Curse
1-800-TRUE-CONFESSIONS-ABOUT-CAPITALISM
Politics For Dinner
The Kilimanjaro Fly
No, Clarence Is Not Here
Death Of A Salesman II
Ant Attraction
Salmon Avenue

Not even a faucet
could turn it
off






Safeway

When all the money
you have in the world
is eleven dollars
and 89 cents
when you can
hold it in the cup
of your hands
you get used to
bagpipe soup
and caterpillar pie

And on
one meal a day
Safeway
looks like a church
or a heaven




Giant Insects

Giant Insects
are invading
the United States
tearing pieces
out of the cities

In the water
under the streets
they tunnel
and buildings
sink

Like unfortunate
casualties of
the 20th century
the skyscrapers
become decks of cards
and crash down

Finally the army
and national guard
are called in
to take charge
to blow all the bugs
back to the Stone Age

But not before
resting
for a moment
on the poetic
sight of burning
giant insects






Hate can be manufactured
and spun out of control
like an armored car






The Curse

The only way
she can win at love
is to steal something
She took my copy
of On The Road
and some stories
I wrote

Alright…

May a cursed pelican
with eternal tuberculosis
wrap itself around her neck
forever more




1-800-TRUE-CONFESSIONS-ABOUT-CAPITALISM

Yes, this is the truth. I was interviewed for a job
by a man who was like a robot, powered by unwinding
rubber bands. He pointed like a high tension wire
at the photocopy machine and his words slid out
slow as 5¢ copies. He told me what my hours
would be and it was like watching the inside
of a clock. Still, I would rather work for a robot
falling apart than the bosses I usually have.
Working for a product of Radio Shack
would be bearable. I was actually smiling
almost at the idea of getting this challenging
part-time job. I would be making photocopies
for $4.50 an hour. As I left, on the sidewalk
in front of me, someone dressed in white
was blubbering and being dragged
by a loaded cart down a steep incline.
“Good company,” I thought at the time,
“I sure hope I get this job.” The next day,
when I called up to see if he had made any
decision yet, I was told he had been in
a tragic car accident and wouldn’t be
returning for weeks, maybe months.






Perry Mason’s
sleeping bag






Politics For Dinner

He tossed the nachos aside
scattering them like tragedies
Zapata and failed agrarian reforms
the plight of the campesinos
and Remember the Alamo!

It looked like he would wander
all night looking for food
storming past Chinese
cursing Mao and the revolution
gone astray into genocide

I hoped for some pasta
but not him, he raged at
the employees about Mussolini
hanging their guilt upside down
from telephone poles

He refused to set foot
in a German restaurant
that old history
and so in desperation
I led him to McDonalds
but he grabbed the school kid
at the cash register and ordered
“Overthrow capitalism, you pawn!"
it was imperialist fast food

There was nowhere left,
we had exhausted all possibilities
every restaurant was corrupt
so we went home and ate
Eskimo Pies with water
(there were probably whales
dead for this meal)




The Kilimanjaro Fly

I killed a fly
the size of a dog
It barked and exploded
all over my wall
I had stalked it
all night long
like a big game hunter
in a novel by Hemingway




No, Clarence Is Not Here

Two times the strange parrot voice
called my number and asked for Clarence
and twice I told him, “No Clarence is not here.”
When the phone rang again, I decided
to become Clarence.
“Hello.”
“Hello, is this Clarence?”
“Yes, this is Clarence. Listen,
I’ve been waiting for you to call!”
“I—”
“Have you seen the news,
have you watched the television?!”
“Yes, I—”
“They’re onto us! We’re doomed,
the bloodhounds are on the way!
I hear people walking on the street,
I know they’re coming for me!”
I was really acting, laying it on good.
“Clarence, get a hold of yourself.
That’s why I’m calling, I left you a gun.”
“A what?”
“A gun. There’s a gun in the desk,
over by the window. Clarence, you must
get it.”
“What?” I looked at my desk.
“Get the gun, Clarence.”
I was walking, I was hypnotized
and the drawer came open
and inside was a black pistol
laying there. The voice
in my ear continued.
“You have failed, Clarence.
You know the consequences.
We cannot allow them
to discover our plans.
Goodbye Clarence.”
I pressed the pistol
against my temple
as he hung up.




Death Of A Salesman II

The American Polygraph Association:
Dedicated To Truth


It seems to be
just another way
of trapping you
in a room of wax
McCarthy’s ghost
they ask questions
like rate how honest
you are…Would you
turn in your parents
for smoking crack?
And after all was
said and done
I walked out
with their pen.
On purpose.






All his ideas
were returned
to the Earth






Ant Attraction

Orwell and Huxley were wrong: The Future belongs
to the ants. Workers will devote their entire lives to
the Queen. They will fight wars and build vast colonies
underground. Though desert winds will cover the Earth,
the dunes will shake and hum with the goings on
underneath. That’s where Wink Thorax has his studio
and beams out his show ‘Ant Attraction’ to eager
millions everywhere. The tunnels jam up each
Wednesday as males try to get on the program,
clawing for a chance to be permitted to sit in front
of the camera and sell themselves, knowing that
inside that black, smoked glass booth sits the
Queen, gloriously. And finally, ever slowly,
her jeweled hand will flick out and point to
the winner.




Salmon Avenue

Through the steam
and water of my shower
the salmon are moving
upstream
Somehow
they’ve taken
the industrial route
into pipes
under sidewalks
and sprinklers
on lawns

When oceans
rivers and lakes
are the past
chopped up
and polluted
memories
they find
their water
elsewhere

Swimming past
my feet
on their way
to a full bathtub
or a reservoir






Stairs
become
waterfalls





writing: allen frost in 1990

Tree Frog

The Flammable Man
Humanous Lives
Sonic Mothman
B. Franklin’s Discovery of Electricity
The Return of Flammable Man
Echo of the Humanous
Easy Mothman
Gravity Lighthouse
Flammable Man = mc(2)

The Flammable Man

She said it got her all hot and bothered. He wouldn’t have
done it if it wasn’t an aphrodisiac. He remembered the good
old days when he used to think an aphrodisiac was a hair style…
before she read that fateful article in the woman’s magazine
and said she wanted him to try it.
He was a gas station attendant. He worked there all day and
would come home Michelin black from oil and rubber and
smelling of gasoline. The gasoline smell drove her wild. She
would go crazy: touching him, caressing him, pawing him,
massage heavy burning, her breath ecstatic.
After she told him about the gasoline smell (blurting
“my aphrodisiac!”) he accepted her suggestion and rubbed
a hand of gas down across his hair before going home.
It ran greasy down his forehead, stung his eyes, but he
combed it in, his hair slicked back, black and shining.
When he got home, she crashed at him like a moth to
the flame and they rolled across the carpet, tearing at
each other, ripping at each other with their teeth and
nails, her faint gas-inhaling head glued to his shoulder,
panting like a big mile walked dog. He groaned, they
pinwheeled over the carpet, tumbleweeded with a crash
into a table, knocking books, magazines and pencils
down on top of their skin. And an ashtray fell too,
scattering gray dust down like Hiroshima rain.
And also a half burned cigarette, smoking still,
toppled down onto his head. An orange flash erupted
and the two of them woke up looking through eyeslit
bandages in a linoleum ammonia smell hospital.
“Ammonia!” he lusty looked over at her across from
him, wrapped in white and she gasped beautifully.




Humanous Lives

We became amateur Doctor Frankensteins one hungry
night, playing Gods, creating new life. What we had
wanted to begin with was simply a soup that could last
all week. “It’s okay, so it’s more of a stew than a soup.”
That wooden spoon was getting stuck as I tried to stir it.
And he kept adding more rice, “I think it needs more
curry.” Something primeval was bubbling in the pot
and finally we gave up and banished it to the frozen
wastelands of the fridge…There was still no food in
the cupboards though and in desperation it wasn’t
long before we took a daring new look at the soup/stew.
As it glowed and growed on the refrigerator shelf in
a thick, silver spacesuit helmet-like cooking bowl,
I said it was luminous.
“What?”
“I said it’s luminous in there.”
He laughed. “I thought you said it’s humanous.”
It shifted uneasily towards its name, making a sloshing
sound.
Fortunately, no vengeful mob of angry townspeople
with torches was necessary to kill Humanous. No terrifying
chase across rocks to a burning windmill. Humanous was
buried in the garbage bag and dumped like a pirate’s
fool’s gold on the sidewalk at midnight.
No mad scientist can again release Humanous onto
the world, there is no recorded recipe. There will be no:
Son Of Humanous
No:
The Curse Of Humanous
No:
I Was A Teenage Humanous
And no:
Humanous vs. Rodan
Humanous will not return like black and white 1950s sci-fis.
It will not arise from the ocean or out of a landfill. It will be
discovered by archaeologists in 3012 A.D and wrongly
identified as Post-Modern Art.




Sonic Mothman

There’s a place in South Dakota where the days and nights are
the loneliest of any place south of Nome. The Church of U.F.O
was painted over the door and a neon eye surrounded by stars
glowed on the peak of the roof. Mosquitos and moths traveled
miles in Ziebach county to flap around the eye light.
As luck would have it, he was working under the hood of his
junked Cadillac when the air split at the seams with a sonic boom.
He smashed his head and screamed, deafened and startled
beyond belief. He cursed the sky, the invention of the jet engine
and the United States Air Force, rubbing the painful tender bump.
“My name is Mothman and I’ve come to save the human race.”
A moth winged man with red eyes stared down at him from
the roof. Mothman snapped his fingers and all the weapons
on planet Earth turned into a butter. Mothman clapped his
furry hands and every politician became a flowerpot.
Suddenly, Washington D.C became theGreenhouse Effect,
the Republican Party is poison ivy. Then Mothman exploded
away and reappeared on a tall glowing 7-11 sign in
Viola, Tennessee.




B. Franklin’s Discovery of Electricity

She was a tall woman and that was her downfall.
If she’d been three feet shorter, this might never
have happened.
Bea Franklin was worried that lightning might
strike the metal flagpole saluting off the corner of
her house.
So with the dark clouds boiling over her, she went
to the roof and pulled the retractable flagpole under
the eaves.
Rain made the shingles slippery, she nearly fell.
Just as she got her balance, lightning bolted out
of the sky and hit her in the head.
Her seven foot frame tipped over the edge like
a smoking dinosaur skeleton and set the garden
on fire.




The Return of Flammable Man

“Hey buddy, got a match?”
At the gas station they laughed and joked about
his burns. He still wore the bandages and walked
around the gas pumps like the Invisible Man in his
misty London, plotting their deaths.
If the 10 Commandments had been juggling pins,
two of them (murder and adultery) flashed from hand
to hand. Adultery…He had never cheated on his wife,
never even would have contemplated it if it wasn’t for
the unexpected arrival of the circus.
A black limousine followed in wake of the circus caravan
of trucks and cars and parked next to him. As the window
rolled down, she spoke from inside. Her voice was concealed
by white cloth and asked quietly for Unleaded Supreme.
It was all she needed to say, all that the 100 million years
of the creation of petroleum mattered.
They both sensed dinosaurs of love.
She opened the passenger door for him and the two of them
disappeared…the carbon monoxide pouring silently through
the floor made them tired and they leaned on each other for
support. The car was flying. 78 mph.




Echo of the Humanous

Humanous, the luminous human, so bright and fiery
he turns his friends into their shadows on the floor,
makes anything into instant candle wax. Before him,
a thick oak door will melt into brown, and as he passes
through, the room will become a sea of colors of what
once was there. Poor Humanous hasn’t talked to anyone
in burned away calendar months…Not since he stood
at the edge of that waterfall canyon (glowing from his
heat like a lighthouse in a pack of crayons) and shouted
across to somebody who would answer him seconds later.
But it may have been just an echo.




Easy Mothman

Out of the sky, to the same ground where Dennis Hopper
and Peter Fonda were blown away and crashed and burned,
Mothman hurtled. He struck that gentle green bayou like
a meteor. A blinding explosion, a spool of green smoke, quiet.
Long minutes passed in that silence, crickets and birds held
their small breath, the wind dropped away, while the sky
turned into glass.
Finally, Mothman stirred in the round torn crater, his antenna
twitched and he rolled onto his side painfully.
Sound returned to the landscape: the baying of bloodhounds
on the trail of some wounded animal.
Wind blew through the shotgun torn wings on his back as he
flapped them hopelessly. “They shot me,” he mourned the
shattered wings and he stumbled out of the ditch.
The dogs were getting closer.
Tangles of kudzu tripped him as he tried to run from the shouting
voices down the road. A mothman attempting to run is a slow big
target, he knew he didn’t stand a chance.
A gunshot ripped overhead.
He leaped back into the underbrush.
There it was, he practically fell on top of it, wrapped in decades
of weeds and flowers. Mothman grabbed the rusty handlebars
and unburied The American Dream.




Gravity Lighthouse

He was living with a girl who was very casually lighting and
throwing firecrackers. At the balcony window, she was like
a gunpowder Rapunzel, ten stories up the tall wall of ivy.
While he was in the kitchen, pouring coins into his shoes.
He clanked heavily into the other room where she leaned up
against the opened window. “I heard that if you put a penny
in your shoe, it’s good luck,” he said. “I’ve got 15 dollars and
37 cents in these shoes!”
She stared at him unimpressed and struck a match with a
sudden flick of her wrist.
He was standing very close to her, smiling enormously.
“Awww, get lost!” she shoved him hard enough for him to
lose his balance and fall right out of the lighthouse window.
His good luck took him straight to the bottom of the Pacific
Ocean with the starfish.




Flammable Man = mc(2)

Without warning, he was prone to suddenly growing,
300 feet tall. It was his latest misfortune: a result of being
blasted with enough radioactive isotopes to boil water on
Pluto. Now he was wandering in the desert somewhere
north of Los Alamos, with only shreds of clothing to cover
his sunburns and living on lizards and cactus. For the fifth
time since Tuesday, he was a giant. He could see past the
mountains, to the oceans and smoggy cities. It was terrifying
for him to be a human skyscraper though and he had his eyes
tightly shut. (He was afraid of heights.)
At least he had been offered a job. Someone in a yellow suit
wanted him to paint ‘Fastfood, Fun, Friends, Next Exit’ on
his chest and sit by the freeway. For $4.50 an hour all day.
Even in the desert it was hard to escape.
News crews followed in his tracks, turning him into a primetime
sideshow. That’s how his wife finally saw him and immediately
she got on the first available flight to New Mexico.
Maybe she was carrying a miracle antidote in her handbag?
Or maybe she just wanted to kick his huge ankle for running
out on her. She was staring out the window at the dull clouds
as plane descended to land.
His eyes snapped open at the sound of jet engines. He didn’t even
have time to duck.
“This is flight 739er to Control Tower requesting GAAAH!!!”
But Los Alamos is used to fireball explosions.




cover drawing: aaron gunderson
writing: allen frost in 1991