Canoe Memory

by Cynthia J. McGean

In the calm of the lake, 

The ripples on the water,
The buzz of a dragonfly,
The hum of cicadas,
In the dip of the paddle
And the whisper
      of the breeze
Speaks the still, small voice
Of God.

When I fell out of favor, I was buried alive in the swamp with the rest of them. I never questioned what happened to the others. I guess I just fooled muself. I saw my friends leaving one by one and when they didn't come back, I thought they'd found happiness, someone who would love them forever.

Like the rest of them, I spent most of my life waiting - waiting for someone to want me, to take me home with them, to connect with me on an intimate level, one soul speaking to another. That's when I felt the most alive. But it would never last. After the climax and those final shudders of ecstasy, things were never the same. My old lover might look back and reminisce, maybe come to visit once in a while, but ultimately, I'd end up right back where I started, waiting for someone else to come along and love me that way again.

The slow drop in interest should have been my tip-off. Fewer and fewer hungry souls came calling. Most of them no longer took the time to delve past my surface. They thought I was out of date, irrelevant.

It was all downhill from there - second hand shops, thrift stores, garage sales. My skin was stained and yellow and worn with age. My spine had grown stiff. Even then, I held out hope. I thought I had what it took to stand the test of time, the wear and tear of all those years and all those hands.

When the end finally came, it came without any last words or goodbyes or even a friendly touch. It came in a brown cardboard box that smelled of mildew. The sinews that bound me together were disintegrating, my body decaying. But I was not dead. And I was not alone. My old friends had found their way to the same dark place.

Mud seeped into the corners of the box and suffocated us one by one until our mass grave was nothing but landfill. On the swamp gorged with our bodies, they built a computer warehouse. Fitting monument for a generation of discarded books.

You may think we are dead and gone, but you're wrong. Our souls are our stories, and our stories are immortal. They will creep up through the mud and soak into the concrete and curl around the steel beams. They will infest the circuits and slide down the wires and bleed into the keyboards. And they will find you. We will find you, and when we do, we will haunt you until you give us bodies again.

- Discard, by Cynthia J. McGean

{Author's note: This story is inspired by an article I came across about a swamp that had been filled with boxes and boxes and boxes of old discarded library books in order to be converted into a viable construction site.}

Lost In the Forest, by Cynthia J. McGean

When you're lost in the forest,
  Too-loo and Froo-froo,
The Jungian, Freudian dreams-may-come-true
Of your unconscious subconscious conches
Will swirl
Into whirling-unfurlingly curly-cue whorls
of worlds
     within worlds
            within worldliness churls.
Keep your eyes peeled, my chickens!
This ain't no fairytale forest.
This is one big, bad-ass, mother of pearly-whites
white-hot, red-hot, hot-rod, cattle-prod forest.
Boldly go there.
Part the curtains of Spanish moss and broken promises,
Empty praise and failed wannabes
And enter the inner sanctum
Naked and bold,
Fear shining in the palm of your hand
Forever until morning.

Accidental Bookmark Art, by Cynthia J. McGean

Found bookmark art at the Albina Branch of the Multnomah County Library

Flotsam and jetsam spin from the library ceiling

Dangling doodles of identity

That once saved a place

In an epic, a thriller, a tale of crime, 

Pausing the story for the sake

Of life -

A phone call, an oven timer, the doorbell.

Tents pitched and left behind,

Beacons to light the way home, 

And measure the journey.

A grocery receipt, a baseball card,  

An envelope marked addressee unknown.

A colorful splashdown of junkmail art.

Accidental bookmarks

Rescued by careful caretakers

And resurrected as 

mementos.

Two Wines and a Lemon Drop, by Cynthia J. McGean

It started with the caprese.  You couldn't just order it.  No.  It had to be a certain style, a certain size, a half order.  Gluten free.  Was the balsamic from Italy?  What region?  And what about the basil?  Locally grown?  Full leaves or those pathetic little sprinkles?  Then the wine.  A house red wasn't good enough.  You had to indulge in the whole indecent ritual of interrogation all over again, a fly hovering over the banquet table before finally lighting on the bottle.  And that pretentious display masquerading as tasting - as if you really were a connoisseur!  What is it you're afraid of?  What consequence do you think will befall you if every last detail isn't just so?  What cataclysmic global catastrophe could possibly result from the wrong kind of basil leaves.  What if I were that bottle of wine or that caprese?

It started with the caprese.  I like a good caprese.  A GOOD caprese.  Not some wannabe prepackaged, marinated in the store, cherry tomato, mozarella ball pretender.  I want tomatoes thick as steak slabs, fresh from the garden, ripened in the sun, red and sweet and just this side of watermelons, with hunks of mozarella to match sliced off a round big as your head.  And fat, wide basil leaves that say "Here is a salad!"  The wrong olive oil or balsamic can ruin the whole thing, and then what's the point?  You only get so many capreses in your lifetime.  A bad caprese is a theft, a little death.

It started with the caprese.  The two of them watching each other, the one biting a lip, the other desperately pressing his suit with the waiter, justifying, excusing, rationalizing, with a belligerence born of a need nobody else could fathom, maybe not even him.  I wanted to rise above it.  I wanted to be anywhere but there.  I wanted to fend them both off and make room on the plate for myself.  I didn't want to be the bridge, the mediator, the translator.  I ordered a cocktail and marinated in my own juices.

Marvelous Pursuits by Suzanne LaGrande

Eat an ice cream cone, upside-down

Bite a the tip and slurp

Sweet cool juices, through the pinhole, stop

the milky dregs,

with your thumb, then press

your finger-prints in a sticky row

along the shiny chome edge of

a pharmacy counter.

Sail  a fat bicycle, red

with gearless hips to a distant neighborhood,

get lost

ask for directions,  then

peddle backwards

carefully

until you arrive at  a map.

Trade broken earrings for wilted lettuce

Antique mirrors,

 and your most precious

fourth-generation family heirloom

for empty gum wrappers

while singing

the chorus for a deaf symphony

out loud,

in the words

of a foreign language.

Try, everyday to cheat

at chess

using strategies developed by the top Russian scientists

in the park

where old men challenge children

who invariably win

by chasing pigeons

into flight.

Zombies Learn Grammar, by Cynthia J. McGean

"The zombies ate my brains."
Subject:  Zombies.  Which Zombies?  The zombies.
They are doing the action.
Predicate: ate my brains.
The action is "ate."
The object is "brains."  Which brains?  My brains.
Why are my brains the zombies' object?
Do the zombies object to my brains so very much?
Why?

Perhaps because they have no brains of their own.
"Because they have no brains of their own" is a sentence fragment.
It has no action.
The zombies are fragmented.
Their only action is to eat that which they don't have.
The zombies ate my brains.
Then grammar ate the zombies.
Then the wolf ate grammar.