Issue Five

Body

Five a.m. wind crashing outside.
If you could put skin around it
it might look something
like a man throwing trash cans
into the street.
It might look like someone's father
on the day their mother filed
for divorce.

If you could splash paint
onto the wind, give it a body,
it might stop just long enough
to be looked at.
Of course, something else
would be missing then;
the soul,
the outrage,
the forte.

Many people think that the wind
is a blue, graceful woman with long
Scandinavian hair.
But I know it is a red genius
as bald as a claw,
playing the piano
with its forehead
which is entirely composed
of your bones.

- Martin Vest
Slipstream Magazine Issue 22

Young Girl At The Olympics

Like a salmon leaping upstream to spawn,
Her sleek body unfurls
Impossibly through the absence
Of matter. She dislodges light
Particles, her ponytail shimmers
Beauty, beauty of form and oh God yes!
She vaults the height of a house;
Spins, sausage rolls, arms squeezed tight
Over her scarce breasts. One, two, three
Seconds to be shot out of the cannon
Of her own will, then she
Lands, barely a wobble, that's
One-tenth of a point off-
Having nudged
The laws of physics with the naked tip
Of her arched foot, this little doll
With the seriously dented triceps,
Furrowed brow,
All sinew and suppressed
Hormones, whittled to a nervy lust,
Honed magnet, anti-gravity device. The second
Jump's not so good, her lip trembles,
Just a child, after all. But what an engineered
Apotheosis of the human, all that compressed
In ninety pounds of genius meat and joy,
A haze of sweat and light, screams
From a million throats,
Traveling by satellite.
Little salmon, like the last
Of your kind in our dying time, do you leap
Even higher as if to say no matter what
We've done to the earth, look at our bodies,
Look how our souls
Made flesh can flame for a moment,
See how we almost fly.

- Alison Luterman
Slipstream Magazine, Issue 22

Smokers

There's a guy in my office
who had a lung removed.
Every day at 3 o'clock
he rides the elevator
with an Orpheus complex
down to shipping & receiving

where he hovers with his fingers
twitching in their old ways.
He talks to the smokers
like he's still one of them,
moves a little closer
to the drags and puffs,
steals a lungful,
returns a familiar cough.

the folks around here
get nervous around him.
It's as if they were talking
to the fresh undead.

-J.P. Dancing Bear
From "What Language"
Slipstream Publications
2002 Chapbook
Competition Winner