We used to leave our house
each day from the door at the bottom
of the driveway. My sister and myself.

One of us would take our little Beagle
into the backyard and tie him to the jungle gym
we always said we’d use but never did.

Then we would walk up that driveway
and then down the hill to the bus stop.
With other kids, our friends, we would wait.

We would all call one of the other kids
a name or play tag or throw snow balls.
Unless it was too cold and we’d just stand.

Our hands would be in our gloves and they
in our jacket pockets. Our hats we’d pull over
the entirety of our heads.

Those were years and times I seldom think about.
Because I’m not that boy and fear I never was.
Fear I made him up somehow, and that older sister too.

Fear that all I was in grade school was a boy
with no two teeth together. Fear that my mother
drove me to school each and every day.

Fear that on sunny afternoons all I ever did
was invent and play on that jungle gym.
Fear that I never had a Beagle.

And that ultimately he never ran away,
never found something better for himself.
Fear that there was nothing for him to find.

--Jonathan Queally

An Excerpt from Objects Places Destinations

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2.  She was all about self-preservation these days. Somehow her death drive had been thrown into reverse. And so she tip-toed through the isolated back roads of existence not wishing to bump into anything/anyone and spill her life which she had been holding like a firefly in a jar.  At night when she would come home she would place the little jar on a barren desktop in the study and inch closer to the window to see the other life that was passing by the vine-eaten trees outside like a river.  3.  Years of smiling had worn thin tears in the corners of her mouth. She was tired of having to smile, but it was now beyond her control. Her big white teeth seemed to push right out of her mouth and into one big painful smile whenever she opened her lips to speak.  4.  This is speaking in tongues, confessing the Holy Spirit until your mouth bleeds with joy.  5.  What is the use of her speaking when the fact is she’s hungry? She had a cold mean hunger that sallied up to the edges of her consciousness to drink. It was a hunger that required no meat, only gulps of water and big chunks of bread to roll over with its tongue. There was no pleasure in flavor, only in chewing.  6.  What was the use of her praying when she wasn’t sure whether or not her prayers had any lift? In her mind they were useless, bloated. And then she would ask herself, “Is God still taking requests after all these millennia?” or had the big door been bolted shut, with God behind it cowering in a corner too sad to listen.  7.  He saw fit to keep her alive. That must mean something. So she prayed. Prayed with words that would crush between her teeth.  10.  The body, her flesh wondered if somebody was coming into that terrible vastland of self- seclusion, carrying a candle or wearing a miner’s cap, to break darkness open like a raw egg.  Her tongue was sandy wanting only a drop of conversation. But still she could not come out to meet anyone. She was a prison warden who had been born with arms that were too short to reach the lock.  12.  Touching had meant so much to her as of late. Anything. Babies. Co-workers. Produce. Herself. It had all come down to this. She found herself running her fingers over peaches, and nectarines, and cassava melons. Oh the cassava melons! How she loved their wrinkles and sticky moist skin. The peaches were a little too furry; nectarines were the baldest. She would run her finger down that small divide that resembles the make-believe valley of a lover’s back.  She had even taken to caressing her own shoulders from time to time and pulling strands of her hair, letting them fall on her face. She used her eyelashes to dust the skin on the backs of her hands when she sat at her desk. She even nibbled and sucked at her wrists when she thought no one was looking.  13.  And her first sexual experience was like a trip to the wax museum. What romance needed was a tour guide.

14.  Someone slipped a card in her mother’s back, and her stiff jaws began to release themselves with the well-oiled rules of sex that she had been told as a girl.  “never let anyone screw you in the butt...”  “...and never ever put some man’s thing in your mouth, let alone have him put his mouth on you.”  (never ever take candy from a stranger or play too close to electric power lines)  15.  These were not the real reasons for the reservation that gripped her as she stood at the side of the bed. She was afraid of being naked. A nakedness which for her went way beyond being without clothes. It was unclothed anxiety.  16.  She was drowning despite the fact that there was no water.  20.  Then there is that other place. An all night diner cut out of a movie and pasted to the side of some forgotten highway. The patrons didn’t look like they wanted to be there, but their eyes stood stuck to the menu.  “What will you have next?” “Blood rare or well done?”  The dead activity buzzes right along with the fluorescent lighting. She sits alone at the counter. The people in the booths were just stiffs, life-size dummies that you thought you saw out of the corner of your eye. Well surprise. There’s no one here but her. The cherry pie isn’t even cherry, isn’t even pie. It’s ceramic. The voices you heard found their way out of a metal box.  22.  She was being hurled through the air in a big metal bus with wings. And as she flew through thin layers of atmosphere she felt that this was longing for someone; that this longing was real. And on the other side of the earth she wanted there to be someone with this exact same longing for her.  29.  There he is. A morbidly obese dead ringer for a man. He still has most of his hair and his teeth are as sturdy as they’ve ever been. Everything else on him has moved down and out. His belly has formed a steep overhang that pulls on his red sweater, taking it over the guardrail of his brown leather belt, plunging it all down to the floor.  Without any hint of cruelty, you could hold your head up and without flinching call him an asshole. There was that type of familiarity there.  Asshole.  30.  Who said all angels were beautiful?  31.  That retarded lady who cleaned bathrooms at Burger King had hid her wings underneath her uniform. And her hands. Her hands had that older woman gloss of death that is only achieved by a constant slathering of Vaseline; a kind of waking embalmer for the body.  36.  The pointless stars were hung in the sky outside her window. Maybe stars were light flashes forming an SOS pattern billions of light years long. Or maybe they were just the result of God’s need for universal beauty.  40.  The dark was not just nightfall. It was everything she could not answer--objects, places, destinations that have no name.

--Elisa Durrette

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