Alien Buddha

On the other hand, parents weren't supposed to swipe food from shops. After high school graduation, they needed to leave behind childish things like petty larceny. Obviously, Don was the sort of person who didn't give a damn about convention. This explained a lot about my own disrespect for rules. On the other hand, I'd always been soothed by my perception that Jim's pragmatic genes had contributed to my DNA in a manner that would keep me out of serious trouble. Now my illusion was shot to hell." That's how we managed to eat," Polly said. "Don talked himself into a teaching gig at the University of Chicago, told everyone he had a PhD in philosophy. It was more like he had a PhD in bullshit, and when they found that out, they canned him immediately." She emitted a loud, braying guffaw. "At least we had heat that winter." During my mother's story, I had scooted so far forward that I was literally hanging from the edge of my seat. Polly gazed sharply at my slumping posture, and I shimmied backwards until my back aligned with one of the seat cushions. She smiled and continued, "When spring came, he was out of a job and the rent was overdue. Jim stopped paying after he and Don almost got into a fistfight. Don came and went as he pleased. He was seeing a guy on the side, but I didn't really care. Sometimes the three of us shared a bed together." This last tidbit of information almost overwhelmed me with its implausibility. I'd always been aware that Polly was different from most women of her generation. In her adolescence, she set herself upon an artistic path, pushing defiantly against the will of her own mother. After high school graduation, she briefly attended the Art Institute, met Jim, and then dropped out to marry him. At least, I had been fed this narrative for as long as I could remember. Now I was forced to envision my mother as a confused but highly sexed Bohemian woman, freely enjoying the affections of several different lovers. It was both terrifying and intensely romantic. Don was flagrantly bi-sexual, irresistibly roguish, prone towards lying and theft, and a poet to boot. By contrast, Jim was staid, dependable, and scrupulously honest. Or at least I had thought he was honest. He'd participated in the farce, and it couldn't have been easy for him. "Obviously you ended up with Jim and not Don," I said. "Does Jim know he's not my father? Have you told him?" My mother nodded vigorously. "Everyone knew except you," she said proudly. "Grandma, Grandpa, your stepfather, and of course Jim. Jim figured it out himself, since we had stopped having sex months beforehand. It was a stigma to be illegitimate in 1959. We all agreed to keep it a secret until you turned eighteen." She stubbed out her cigarette and instantly lit another. My mother enjoyed her exhalations, and the first one was always the loudest. "I was honestly surprised you never discovered the truth on your own. I mean, I have blue eyes, and so does Jim. I thought you'd eventually ask yourself how you wound up with brown ones. I certainly was naive-not only had I lived eighteen years without ever considering that my father might be fake, but I lacked all knowledge of basic genetics. I should have paid more attention in science class. "Don's eyes are brown?" I asked dazedly. Polly smiled. "A shade darker than yours, actually. Good thing you have brown eyes, since it made paternity identification a snap. Of course, I was no longer sleeping with Jim, and Don's guy stopped coming around long before I got pregnant. I think I can pinpoint the exact evening you were conceived. It was my birthday. Don and I had a huge fight, and then we had make-up sex. It must have been then." So, I was the illegitimate daughter of an artist and a poet, conceived during make-up sex in a coach house behind a seedy hotel on the corner of Clark and Division. I paused for a moment to allow this information to sink in. "Is the coach house still there?"

The tiny half grown birdling flew away in the windShe crashed in and out of nests strewn with litterAnd then onto the next nest; An attempt to become at least half of what mother bird had made herself to beFinally flat on the ground, bound by bruisestied up in hand made noosesTiny; sought strong straight trees for answersTrees; with stepping stone barkTrees; with branches that bent willowy to reach herTrees which beseeched her to stop trying to heal all the other broken winged birdsTo heal herself; To deal with all the self-inflicted woundsTo become in tune with what she wanted, needed, or was fleeing fromTiny, rested, nested, and clearly became aware of the view

this arbor of my regret grown thin reaches down and in about the bog of his neglect, like withered grass against a wasting log. I keep a log, too. one, two, three times he took me on the stairs in the unfinished garage. the way he whiles it whilst adobe chunks defeated by the desert sun fall from his exterior, and dust. a fall is absorbed in me by the bodies of muskrats bathing in green jennywort and jewel-slinged alligator babies playing gaily twixt copper cedar knees that do poke out- even if they play dead when the sun gives up.

I tell himwe're holding down our own fortthat if something important happenspeople know we're here to help. I planmoves to foreign countries, send r sum sto far-away companies, long for the daywhen there's distance between my familyand the melodrama of the front lines.

There was a placard inside a beach ball inside a condor because the taxidermist had be paid to stuff things that way and a necromancer with good references was hired from the city to bring it all back from extinction in one foul swoop so that avid bird watchers with binoculars for heads would have something to look at that was not scrambled eggs.

When I look at the world today, I see animals gone astray, in a bloody struggle engaged While the sheep abstain from the fray, huddled in terror, I see bargains struck behind closed doors, where others see Occam's Blade, cutting down the probability of a spade to one in four. I know, however, that man's nature is not to be left to chance or ignored; Lucifer's deception came long before. My brain's been sodomized by democracy's occult lies. Occam's Razor isn't justified; it's just a disguise for avoiding the whys by blindfolding our eyes. Ask the right questions, never compromise, and always think twice.

I lick both sides of the meat cleaver. Her blood tastes like rusted honey. Grinning, I look at the body on the floor, felled like a weak question-mark after a joke. "I dub thee, DEAD " I shout. "Hip Hip Hooray " I feel intensely celebratory. I love excessive happiness. Irene is finally gone, forever. The sky appears brighter, & the sound of traffic, louder. The taste of her blood is really delicious, so I chop the thick blade into the other side of her wet, hairy neck. I've become a red cat: my face is a red cat's face, satisfied to the point of smiling spiritual bliss.

Alien Buddha releases this fine collection of ekphrastic poetry based on the art and photography of Red Focks Imagine a world where all images are transformed into words and ideas Imagine that world, and get a glimpse of it in Frenetic/No Contest. Freneticism is the title given to Pickering's art by himself. The cover image is a pastel painting by Dustin Pickering called "ANYTHING THE EYE COVETS, LET THE HAND GRASP".

Poems from Ryan Quinn Flanagan about Las Vegas. Illustrations by Red Focks.

Acclimated Recollections conjoins poems from my ongoing series Sedentary Fathoms, started in January, 2017. Fixated on movement, togetherness, music and the jazz of collocating improvisation and the linguistic process of metaphysical discovery, this collection works to connect language into a procedure of discovery, moving away from predetermined affirmation. Felino A. Soriano

Poetry from veteran-poet Willie Smith, with illustrations from Red Focks and Alien Buddha Press