MOON BOOTS ZINE IS NO MONIES.

NOON. STONES EMIT BOOZE, BOZOS IMBIBE TO BOOST ESTEEM. MOIST TIME IN STEINS. SOON BIMBOS MIST IN: BONNETS, TITS. MEN MOON, OOZE INMOST NOTIONS, MONETIZE ONENESS. SMITTEN! TIME ZOOMS ON, SO SEIZE TINEST MENTION; MEET IN ZION! MOSES IS SENTIENT, NEON. SNOBS ITEMIZE NOTESNOTES INTO METER, SONNETS. OMENS IN MOST: SINS, IMMINENT TOMB, TOO SOON. TONE IS TENSE. SNOT SITS IN NOSES, MOOT.

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If you seeGINNY WEHNER today wish her a HAPPY 84th BIRTHDAY If not, please drop her a note at PO Box 118

I’m so sorry, Ginny Wehner,for not wishing you a happy birthday,and for not dropping you a note in your PO Box, 118.It was a busy day, and it was after midnight that I finally got around tothe Berkshire Eagle classifieds. I didn’t know your birthday was the 6th until it was already the 7th,and also I don’t know you.

That seems like my fault.The announcement felt no need to explainwho exactly Ginny Wehner might be. You must be the kind of personwho goes to the market, and everyone says, “Look at that Ginny Wehner,Can you believe she’s 84 today? She doesn’t look a day over 80,”and I bet you know it too. I bet you just strut into churchand the priest shouts, “Praises be!”

Maybe I’ve seen youin passing, and just didn’t realize.Or maybe in the news. I saw a story once about a womanwho rescued a family from a burning building, and went back for the dogs.They showed the pooches, smiling and slobbering at the camera, but theynever showed the woman. Was that you, Ginny Wehner?That would be just like you.

Ginny was my grandmother’s name,but I never knew her because she smoked. I hope you don’t smoke, Ginny Wehner, and I hopeyou have ten thousand grandchildren, and that someday historians will look backand say, “That Ginny Wehner, boy was she something.Boy did she turn this country around.”

Alex Wheelock

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kern: to make readable by distributing the space between, so that

even a blind man can feel the pleasant rise in the pulp of the paper

very much cradling each letter struck into the page that

individually—no, together—form the words you

nuzzle into my ear, shrinking the space between.

Val Pucilowski

AnimaliaMy lover’s moans are nothing like minuets:open-palm lashesblindfolds like sashesvibrating like muezzins in minarets

Cancer sticks

Elders are drooping like beltsbelts are flopping like flies

In mourning time mother is hovering

My lover is nothing like mine

Marina Reza

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There were no good reasons for any of it. Things happened, I got taller, I cloaked myself in ir-

relevancies that got stitched into the shape of a person.

One of my father’s business partners was Scottish. When the two of them would drink in our den late at night, get-ting loud and red in the face as their glasses emptied, I’d always peek around the doorframe and picture the land this man had been born in, the one that shaped his voice. It must be a pointy place, I guessed, and somehow sharp. Cold. Empty enough that no one had tried to ban the ugly plaid he worked into all his socks and neckties. The op-posite of my Virginia town with its veneered teeth and silk cashmere secrets. Didn’t they have moors, too? At the age of nine I did not know, nor did I care to know. Scotland was a place beyond truth. In a show of loyalty I hung its wax-crayon flag on my bedframe and told classmates I’d hatched from a monster’s egg in the Outer Hebrides.

For my next birthday my parents sent me on a visit to the business partner’s manse west of Glasgow. Not quite an

estate but a place full of hedges and dark wood paneling. The flight was the real adventure, escorted as I had been by stewardesses, pilots, plush grandmothers. They all wanted to pet my hair. I was a lone traveler. I felt older, and then I arrived. After seeing a few museum collections we went back to the house. This business partner built up a big fire my first night, gave me spiced wine while I was asked to pour him something amber.

His strange accent and the flames were gift enough. I didn’t like the way his arm crawled around my shoulder, the way he cozied up to my side and said I was growing up aw-ful fast. The slow caresses of his meaty fist. So the second night I splashed a bit of drain cleaner in his glass with the spirits. Handed it to him. His cheeks turned purple as he sputtered and gasped. Plaid ankles kicked around on the carpet. I drank my wine, thinking, Not in my country.

Scotland receded. The incident was packed away into the family attic. Children can’t do real wrong so early. School and camp, neighborhood children in gangs, Christmas presents. Time passing but somehow an emptiness persist-ing toward the center of me. My friends and I drank on the beach and threw our bottles at the lights of ships. I went on a trek in the desert one summer, far away again, and almost died of a freshwater parasite. Home wasn’t much for returning. The bad in me came from my parents, I realized. We breathed it into each other, a ghastly fog of unhappiness, over dinners and car trips. The unmentioned things between us.

Tartan

A.E Block

I dropped out of my university program. The poi-sons were too familiar, I wasn’t learning anything new. So I changed it all. For months I rode rails with kids I met in train yards. Short lengths at first, then all the way to the West Coast. We slept outside, or in a pile in the car, and felt the wind on our faces. It was like finding a new land, one you could only reach by taking your road map and flipping it over so the blank sections prevailed. I felt closer to myself when I followed them to a cannery and then a ranch edged with barbed wire. We were eerie people who laughed and cried together. Gashes of rock and river scabbed over with grass. The kind of wildness my father and mother wanted for a golf course.

Years passed. I found things I was good at and peo-ple I could stand to be around. I didn’t go back to Virginia. Men, women, music, smoke, and that part of myself that got shaped by places I’d seen, bad nights I’d made into a story. Once you have enough to talk about, actual things you’ve done, the person-ality falls away and people want to see themselves. I lived in the present, and it was only in dreams that the past washed over me.

At a bonfire toward the end of one summer, when I was almost finished with being young but someone had built a lit tower on sand, that heady mix of darkness and beach, a girl came close. Her hair was knotted like a nest, and she was drunk.

“Don’t you look like a half-shut knife,” she said. Hiccuped and laughed.

I stared. “Where are you from?”

“Outside Edinburgh. What’s it to you?”

Mentioning my trip there took a long time. I had to pry some boards off of it, and my voice was gravel. She told me she missed her city, its thinkers and art and the univer-sities, which I had never heard about, only firth, loch and skerry. She was traveling through America because she’d always wanted to see it.

“And what do you think?” I said.

The girl shrugged, her eyes glassy. “I think it’s nothing spe-cial. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met fine people, but I built it up. There’s aye a something wrong no matter where you go.”

“Sure,” I nodded, “can’t argue.” We clinked beer bot-tles and I felt a kind of liquid silver run down my spine, because I knew I had closed a chapter of my life, if you’ll believe it, and the only rock spires I needed to imagine from then on were the ones I kept shored up, out of sight.

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I like writing haiKu because they make me comBine words with nature

Leaves fall to the groundAre they okay? Someone help!Nature genocide

Warm breeze fills my lungsGrass sways, then fades to darknessAgent orange, fuck!

Stephan Stansfield

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Two Christmases ago I rode a camel into the Sahara desert with a girl I kind of loved. We watched Berbers – or at least people paid to dress up like Berbers – perform a dance, and we slept in a tent we shared with two families. The Berbers woke us just before sunrise. As dawn broke, my traveling companion told me about her family and the boy she would soon return to. I kissed her in an old building, possibly a temple, where part of The Mummy was filmed.

This past Christmas two girls with the same name sat me down in the kitchen of an apartment they rented for the week and cut my hair. I re-called learning that when someone pours both liquor and a mixer in your mouth while you are seated, it’s called a haircut. Two girls in my high school class administered my first haircut. One of those girls got engaged just before Christmas. So did a girl I met in New York four Christmases ago.

My aunt told me the real estate agent wants to get my grandfather’s house on the market by early spring. She says families look to move in before the summer and send the kids to their new school come fall. My ex-girlfriend is considering a career in real estate. She got engaged just before Christmas. Her fiancé has one of the most forgettable names I’ve ever heard.

Things I Remember Remembering

Adam Isaacson

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You are to undertake a dance of thirteen scarves. This is the end result of a process by which, for some time–your whole life, perhaps¬–there has

gestated inside of you something that can no longer go undanced. So go to the failing mall downtown. Within such humble, unassuming, and, frankly, sad environs, splendid scarves are often sold. Don’t think too much, on the way to the theatre, about the chain of events that seems to have led you, in actuality, to carry out something so pathetically iconoclastic as a dance of thirteen scarves. The driver appears distracted, your car glides through the center of town, drawn forward inexorably as if by a fa-miliar voice, and you have some dancing to do.

A single scarf descends from the rafters onto the stage, preceding your entry. This is the first scarf: scarf number one. You now stand solitary in the center of the austere stage. The eyes of the audience inflate with anticipation, but let the mo-ment breathe. Let your scarves breathe. Finally, breath yourself. Satisfy your lungs in a dignified yet puckish manner. Now stop it–time to dance. You wave the sec-ond scarf in a high, elegant arc. Nothinggaudy or desperate, just a high, elegant arc executed to an impossible degree of technical perfection. Dervish-like, you ex-tend the third and fourth scarves so as to suggest a dream you had as a child, when youdreamed you were naked in a vast field of dunes that stretched into the distance like a warm, malformed body into which you melted like a pus-ridden imper-fection that felt perfectly at peace. With the fifth scarf, demonstrate to the audience that you have thought much about this dream, enough to know its fundamental falsity, and that they are fortunate to engage a thinker so thor-ough and trustworthy as you.

Now–think about love. Love, after all, is why you and everyone else are in this theatre tonight. Florists, typists, and policemen, ordinary people with, let’s admit it, pro-saic lives, have filled the hall this fine evening. Perfectly usual people have come to you, expecting you help illumi-nate their murky and unreliable feelings. They want you to give meaning to their favorite violent stirrings.

Above all, they demand you incite such sensations anew, to make them direct the most tender, carnivorous pangs of love at your very person–passions and yearnings that can, of course, never be satisfied, least of all by a crea-ture such as yourself, who is at this moment less a person, something that might admittedly be given to such endeav-ors, than a pattern of movements and scarves, stretched artfully over nothing in particular. Secure in the knowl-edge of this peculiar amnesty, tear off scarves six through nine to reveal the whole of your spicy and terrible nudity. The audience is in fits. They can’t remember the last time they felt this much; but then again, at this moment they can’t remember very much at all, so taken are they with your potent, vulnerable form. A band, your band, the formidable marching band that is, for all intents and purposes, yours, enters. They play a deeply inspiring scherzo with impeccable synchronicity and pristine quality of tone, but quickly collapse in a single wave of insufferable ecstasy brought about by the somehow unanticipated appearance of scarf number ten. Cover their quaking bodies with scarf eleven, making aluscious rug from which you appear to sprout like a single blade of grass. Hold this posture; the audience sits enthralled and two aircrafts plummet through the roof into a smoky plume of destruction in the background. The mangled pilots stagger onto the stage and high-five, having at last sacri-ficed themselves for art, but now you’ve started to think about all the moments of your life and how they made you into someone who undertakes a dance of thirteen scarves. Looking at the crowd, you realize that there is not and could be no calculus by which the sum total of your genet-ic and experiential material amounts to something resem-bling this dance. You’re now gazing at the twelfth scarf dumbfounded as if you’ve never seen such a wisp of fabric once in your unfortunate life. Your face is color bars & static. Do not touch the scarf lightly to your quivering lips. That would be ridiculous. You’re not sure if that even mat-ters, but the audience is crying insanely; some of them just plain died and the rest are ruined forever. The thirteenth scarf got out somehow and the dance is done. Go home.

A Dance of Thirteen Scarves

Daniel Witkin

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