balancing a cup on the edge of a garbage can

agitated fingers long and slender twist the helix of time. these are two roads that never cross, but call his mental state a bad case of identity theft. they incriminate his coat as evidence against him. he refuses to part with it, lest we discover the truth locked in to the fibers of the fur trim he strokes at his neck.

Aleathia Drehmer 2008

Published by Nibble 9/08 (Issue 3)

They always get what they want

The thought of mating rituals has not been entertained in years and she fails to notice the dances going on around her, already captured and caged forgetting the thrill of a man’s advances; The smell of cologne, hands at the small of her back or a gentle cupping of the elbow. She has forgotten how close He’ll lean in to whisper nothings in her ear about dinner or music or even the weather, and she won’t hear words, only the treble in his voice as it vibrates across her skin. She remembers now about the loud music and its excuse for him to angle into her to smell the sweetness of her shampoo mixed with the excited musk of her flesh. In turn he knows his breath, warm and fast, will melt her in all the right places regardless of what he says. And he plays cat and mouse, easing back, out and away from her, knowing she is hungry enough to chase.

Aleathia Drehmer 2008

Published by DecomP 11/08

Quarter past eleven on the Jubilee

My Abuela's gray shoes are tight and her ankles bilge over the sides, great fresh sausages encased in knee high hose two shades lighter than her skin. They roll down forming hula-hoops of mesh on her calves. It is quarter past eleven and we are on the tube with lights flashing staccato across weary faces of travelers, foreign moons like mine, but still so strange to me. I touch Abuela's hair as it lifts from her scalp. The strands black and silver spider legs crawling in the air. I see myself in the glass across the aisle and smile at my reflection until the corners of my eyes are squinty. Abuela tucks my hair from my face and pinches my cheek softly. I lean into her with a secret whisper in our own language that I do not want to share with the others. Her apron smells of cleaning products and seems a safe place to harbor them. She straightens my favorite red coat with the white flowers, and pulls the phone from her old leather purse to show me its electric blue screen full of games and music and numbers. It plays our song and we share a small laughter into our hands, brown of earth and heritage, hands that plant the seeds of our mighty existences into the rich topsoil, in a place so far from home. Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by The Toronto Quarterly

The cat hides under the chair

Sometimes it is hard to love you when the wind rushes beneath my dress and the skeletons of hills illuminate what we already know. Sometimes it is hard to love you in the silence of this room, its roar the only music, save the savage world beating on the screen of the window. Sometimes it is hard to love you as the tea goes cold and still in the cup, when the heart is lit by a single fading candle. Sometimes it is hard to love you under the weight of the sky falling like anvils to the ground, under a night-cursed loneliness of empty arms and breath. Sometimes, it is hard to love you.

Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by In Between Hangovers 10/08

Yuthemism

for Chu bone white and smooth nothing less than hand-tooled perfection creating suspended animation time warp an extra sensory perception of youth. and we see results of her copulation with Ponce de Leon's dream the gleaming complexion to light the night in fog after hours spent under knives and screws potions, lotions and chemical reductions for Juliet's poison Aurora's cure twisted in languid states of living and perpetual prepubescence. Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by Eviscerator Heaven 6/08

War II

men will do strange things when faced with prosperity at no cost to themselves. they set about in secrecy pushing forward deviations, taking wills of others easily pushed into boxes left with darkness threats indoctrinated with fears in failing economies and good ole boy mentalities into boxes men slipping through shadows eyes darting blindly at voices thick with lust holes, warm and wet filled with greed, with certain entitlements. and the scraping of boots imbedded with foreign sands molten into glass cutting across metal, sparking reverberations, not easily forgotten. Aleathia Drehmer 2007 Published by Covert Poetics 7/08

War I

$21 billion seems a fair price in the cycle of raping that slides from the top down, a tumbling of dominos tipped with a quick stroke from the pen, each knowing how their hands touched the heads of 85,000 dead Iraqis, absolved from punishment as they sit back in the glow of burning fields, palms greased with crude, shaking hands on side deals. Aleathia Drehmer 2007 Published by Covert Poetics 7/08

Set Sail

“The world is such a wonderful place” he said, with voice trailing off into the collage of noises: bare thighs scraping down the slide, children’s laughter, dogs barking, frog song and low flying airplanes overhead. Yoshii sat with her body folded in half, knees pulled into breasts, on the wooden pylons skirting the play set, its borders creating a sea of woodchips and discarded toys. She sank her feet into it with silent delight, her eyes patiently following her son’s interactions with the American children; she somehow hoped for a better integration than her own into this land of excess. Her voice rang out in the high, clipped language full of intonations that kept him isolated like a buoy; the warnings shouted for safety, as he blindly followed the pack of cabin-fevered children all in a swarm of awkward legs and new teeth, while they chased the oldest boy on his bicycle. Yoshii thought for a moment of her own childhood, of the freedoms never tasted the way her son’s tongue has, and it filled her inside to see him grab this life with both hands, to put the world in his mouth and bite without hesitation. She readjusted the pleat of her limbs, her feet still submerged in the wooden ocean and bowed her head in thanks for the gifts of this moment. Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by Debris Magazine 7/08

Shipwrecked

It is a wall of honeyed trees; the aerial view, density personified, engulfing and pushing the girl simultaneously. Her body is pulled inward by the smell of it, something akin to seaside, and hay in mid-day heat. Its branches a delicate coral, an entanglement of water removed from the primal habitat climbing walls instead of creeping sand, and she wants to swim through it, lie in it like a simpleton as if she belonged there, pretending for moments that she is a daughter of the ocean. Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by Haggard & Halloo 4/08

North Beach

for jas Your body is bent over the sides of a high jump bed that you and that other guy have scaled leaving me curled at the bottom, half covered half insane with exhaustion. And we don’t listen to each other with music in one ear and out the other through white wires; And the phone is ringing the red phone, the hot phone the eagle phone, ringing. You and that other guy just stare at it, blankly and then smile at me. I answer it expectantly. “It’s the president,” I tell you, “he wants his brain back.” And we all look to the table where it sits as we have used it for an ashtray, butts crushed, but still glowing in the frontal lobe. I lay back down, a dog at your feet ready to sleep. And then the doorbell rings, you and that other guy kick me off the bed and I hit the floor with a thud, mumbling under your breath about it being my turn. I walk passed the television, It is on without sound, streams of violence and war footage casually displayed like cartoons. I answer the doorbell in my underwear. It was north beach. I shout to you “Hey its north beach, and its for you.” You shout back, “Tell her I’m not fucking here.” She tells you, “I fucking heard that asshole.” I watch her big white ass saunters down the sidewalk. I close the door. I climb the bed. I tell you and that other guy “move over bitches.” Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by Kill Poet (Issue 4) 4/08

The Turning of Wheels

Maria’s life felt negligible at best staring out the window of her second floor apartment at all the other replicated buildings just like her own, and she spent hours in lustful curiosity about the goings on inside the other tenants homes; wondered what secrets were held behind stately green doors and twelve paned windows. The neighbors were of the keep to themselves type, and often Maria only saw or heard their children playing in the grassy courtyard, or up and down the wide looping road that encircled the complex; the sound of wheels on pavement (bicycles, skateboards, roller blades) could always be heard and she mourned the day that those frictional tones would not be included in the arsenal of white noise she relied on daily. Today, Maria felt sadder than she had ever before, sitting in her black leather computer chair, as there seemed to be a deeper emptiness in her vigil than days previous, and she wanted winter to shoulder this burden, to take the blame, but she could not bring herself to accuse him. Her life had slowly been drained of unwanted noise and time vacuums—the sound of sports constantly on the television, the opening and closing of the porch door in the middle of the night when he snuck out for cigarettes, the raucous quality of his snoring, and his groans of obesity and aging that made her grit her teeth and beg for acts of attrition. He had taken those things with him when he left their apartment for good, when Maria had messily torn at his heart with her fingers, fracturing the long years of their marriage together; fracturing the miles of sadness she held inside over the decade of their accumulation. She traded his noise laden presence for the solitude of the world just happening moment to moment, with its quiet deaths and births that went unseen by most, except by Maria who recorded them with her eyes and ears from the dim room at the back of the building on the second floor from the creaking black chair, and she waited for a sign or some tiny acknowledgement to validate her own existence. Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by Six Sentences 3/08

"Staring down a white-tailed doe"

Small town factories put the hard line on faces. All of them in a vertical destruction of youth, skin hanging there a wrinkle of time. Generations pulling long hours sucking in black death, diamond death, poverty death. It is all tattooed on the inside of lungs, painted over eyes, along the jaw clenched unknowingly. The subconscious is the only faction aware that there were once dreams of something more than making rent and car payments, of cigarettes and six packs consumed. Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by The Cerebral Catalyst 3/08

"Lying in the Grass"

it mats down in the shape of a body forming that high wall, a fortress. impressions sink into the very earth; breath a wind clattering together with bladed chimes. heart beatings through moist ground, reverberations from the core and his eyes are nothing but pools of untouched sky. Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by Erbacce 2/08

"Blue"

For a brief moment the house was silent save the scratching of the needle on old vinyl, words floating in air from the farthest room “All I really want our love to be….” And I felt his shoulders slump when he heard the words, when the kettle whistled when the drawer slid open And water poured into the empty cup; sugar bowl scraped across the counter the spoon clinked before it hit liquid. I felt the sound of his sigh, deep and long the last of our love escaping in a breath that resumed the house to its usual noises. Aleathia Drehmer 2007 Published by Erbacce (for Gloom Cupboard) 2/08

hollow

we are a tangible child's pose twisted unto ourselves in the bottom of the shower hot water scalding old hides into scarlet costumes. we are the pain creeping into joints without remorse, the pulling of muscles flexed beyond intention, the subtle tightening a warning to us all. we are soon an empty shell pink and new found on unformed particles of glass potentials deep and tonal if only our fingers could release it to the sea. we are nothing save the loose flesh stretched over sinew and long bones; human lorica, segmented until returned to the earth a burrowed stillness, slivers of magic found in the dead of night. Aleathia Drehmer 2008 Published by Silenced Press 2/08

Atmospheric Pressure

Cold clutches her, breath visible from nostrils and mouth. She pats her chest as if this will equalize the atmosphere moving inside her, the air steeling her, the sound of rebirth in this game of ball played with five brothers and a father, whose face speaks to his offspring of light and knowing wrapped around each of them. Their unseen boundaries of victory evident in the ticking, coming from chests synchronized and loud; something born unto them, an extra machine with a perfectly calculated compass, affixed to the apex pointing them upward and outward. Aleathia Drehmer 2007 Published by The Beatnik 2/08

The River

for Gail I question the worth of my character in this moment, attempting to find some clue, a common ground to the mystery of my charm as my face takes on mixed emotions rapidly, animated in graceful but stilted movements. And he tells me quite frankly, with mouth’s edge curled upward, that all women are crazy. And somehow men find what they need amidst the chaotic flow of ever revolving faces worn without remorse to find the gentleness and grace that touches them floating in the river. Aleathia Drehmer 2007 Published by The Beatnik 2/08

The Dress

The need for attention proves agonizing the crazier Jenna feels. It assails her mind until no corners are untouched by its wickedness. She sees herself strutting through the center of town, through the business square with its one street bustle, in her full-length seventies gowns, being judged and juried by the community. The dresses are hideous, showing the degree of her mental decline, they speak to her, and she hears their language; listens to the stories about the journey the garments have made from person to person until landing on the racks at Salvation Army, waiting for her to rescue them. The automatic door opens slowly with a creaking of age. The smell of time hits her in the nose. She runs her left hand over the garments. Each gown glows with an aura making her fingers get numb and tingly. Jenna closes her eyes to avoid biasing her choices based on favorite colors or textures. A dress must be felt intrinsically to achieve the status of the midday parade through downtown. No ordinary gown can qualify. Her entire body halts as electricity arcs into her fingertips. The feeling is strong and Jenna hesitantly opens her eyes to reveal a wonder. Beneath her hand is the most glorious dress she has ever seen. It is 100% polyester, floor length, black and white calla lilies pieced together in a visual feast. The sleeves are full to the wrist, and the neckline plunging into a shift bodice that pulls the eye to the floor. Jenna quivers in anticipation of trying the dress on. “It has to fit, it has to fit,” she chants to herself on the way to the dressing room. The curtain to the small changing room slides over easily, the sound of it reminds her of getting in the shower, it smells of mothballs and old ladies, but these attributes have become enchanting. They signify impending discoveries. Jenna disrobes down to her bra, panties and black, worn combat boots studying herself in the mirror, though it never does any good. She cannot see what kind of girl she is, and the girl in the mirror never tells her anything useful. With arms up high, the dress comes down over her head, sliding easily and perfectly into place over her breasts. The fabric releases from her hands and swishes to the dirty carpet below, swallowing her boots. Her hands smooth out the wrinkles, running over hips and breasts and thighs. The dress is immaculate and fits her without question like a second skin. The African charm fastened around her neck as a choker gives the look statement, her clean-shaven skull with swaths of paprika hair, adds just the right amount of color. Jenna studies her image and feels complete. She removes the garment, carefully folds it, checks the price tag several times to be assured it is affixed. Items without price tags cannot be sold until re-priced, and they almost always are more expensive once desired. Her clothes are replaced like old friends, and she sweeps back the curtain of the dressing room with flourish holding her head high like a movie star, an heiress, an artist, a musician, a woman bent in more ways than one. Jenna lays the dress upon the counter as if handling a newborn or a fragile artifact. The check out girl roughly unfolds it, shakes it out, inspects it and looks at her sideways, screwing up her face. She’s got to be crazy to wear a dress like this. “That’ll be $1.99 plus tax.” Aleathia Drehmer 2007 Published by The Clockwise Cat 8/07

Drowning

Mikela watches Jonah blow smoke rings around his pallid face in the half darkness. The wisps trail from his lips along the bridge of his straight, long nose before dissolving in front of his eyes. Light from the television screen reflects in his glasses as he sits motionless. Jonah’s long legs fold up in front of him like stilts as he leans his back into the ratty brown couch. It is stained from late night parties and laziness, the fabric worn in places until the padding is evident. She looks at him as if he were a building whose architecture she might want to scale and measure. The shape of his limbs perfectly angular as they connect to the center of his body, beams jutting from a steel frame, his exterior slick and fragile, as if coated in a fine layer of glass. Images from the television make shapes on his face, the same as on her face as she sits directly behind him silently stroking the fine, dark brown hairs at the base of his neck. He blows a perfect ring of smoke into the silence. Mikela stares through the center at the black and white movie that has been playing for the last hour. She can see Tom Waits’ mouth moving, face contorting, arms flailing about, but she is relegated to imagining the gravel of his voice, as Jonah likes to watch movies without sound. He tells her he would rather study the language of the body in conversation than the language of voice with so many of its words wrapped in double meanings. “The body does not lie the way words can,” he says to her. Mikela tilts her head to the right towards the curtain-less windows; the squares of glass dirty from smoking. She looks at the field to the side of the house; the raspberry brambles build a fortress around the edges in the moonlight. She notices the fish swimming in the tank that is sandwiched between two low-slung sills. The off white paint slowly chipping reminding her of paper birch trees, and it makes her want to get up and start peeling it away. But the filter bubbles into the tiny ecosystem distracting her, and the light catches on the iridescent scales of her tetras. She is captured here for a minute, contemplating her arrival at this very place in time; how after all these years she would find herself alone, but not alone, watching silenced movies in the dark. She can’t touch him without the fear of drowning in his sorrow, without extinguishing her own joyfulness, and she realizes right then that he is something she cannot fix. Smoke dissipates above the crown of his head again hanging there like a soft mist and Mikela suddenly feels like an apparition. He is lost in himself in these moments and she is nothing to him. She could pass through him unnoticed except for the sudden chilling in the air that would make him shiver, but not notice her. And when the feeling of an invisible hand lightly brushing the hairs of his arm alarms him, only then will he remember she was once there. Aleathia Drehmer 2007 Published by Beat the Dust 1/08

"Throwing A Life Preserver"

for Alfaro I fell asleep On the airplane With your words Imbedded in my brain Taking hold Expanding Until the cadence Of your voice Was intertwined I awoke with words Catapulting forward How can such wings Be strong enough To carry the weight At such a slow speed? I awoke to pressure Between my ears Air pressure Word pressure A third pressure To find something On which to write It all down! The plane climbs Invisible stairs In the air The attendant Pierces me As I reach For my bag I take the magazine From the seatback Scribbling words Across the South Georgia Island Thoughts across Russia Mongolia to China And Micronesia Until I have reached The end of the world With your words On my brain Your voice in my ear A faceless, soundless voice That won’t leave Me alone. Aleathia Drehmer 2007 Published by Silenced Press 11/07