Fault

Line

          for Chris

I cannot write

fiction because I

have an aversion

to conflict. Yes, I can put two people, a young married

couple let’s say, in the living room of their doublewide,

but they just stand there blinking at each other like freshman

when I explain a good story is like sex. You insist: have one push

the other. I cannot, because then it’s real and happening, that earthquake

always rumbling beneath my childhood. My trusted narrator flees dark

paneled walls splitting, orange carpeted floor pitching. In this new scene

the man does throw that green glass ashtray clean through the TV, does

raise-steady-fire his rifle that until now remained at rest across his lap

when the woman returns home from her only escape attempt.

© Jenn Monroe

Jenn Monroe is an assistant professor of writing and literature at Chester College of New England. She holds an MFA in poetry from New England College. Her work is forthcoming in the Naugatuck River Review.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New  York at New Paltz, is the author of six poetry chapbooks, including  the e-book, Police and Questions (Right Hand Pointing, 2008),  available free at http://www.righthandpointing.com/howiegood/ He has  been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of  the Net anthology.

WHY?

You never leave your family - even if you do, without a long process of painful shedding like the butterfly  who sits damp and shocked and cold for a long recovery after the confines of the cocoon. Family and its impossible demands - both the one we grew up in, and the one we later create -- Family shapes and drives us, sometimes by its absence, its malfunctions or its DNA, It’s the matter and the antimatter  in our personal explosions - the gun we use on ourselves or the one we use on each other.  Without a long process of psychological work -- there is no  real difference between staying within a families confines or fleeing it, as one friend pointed out last year in a song he wrote, because we carry it with us.  It is not our broken family pattern that is our problem  - it is our broken selves....

NEXT WEEK:

   JOEL SOLONCHE’S  “The 18th of March”

JENN MONROE’s “Two Contemporary Yankees Hike Colony Preserve”

Everything Simple Becomes  Complex

The phones are dead, our children, unreachable,

unless that’s one of them crying in the street.

Everything simple has become complex.

I should’ve known we’d be abandoned

to vandals and the weather,

and before many more freight cars had passed,

admitted to the priesthood of grief,

but my thoughts were taken up with other things,

the advantages of the gun versus the noose.

Now the three-legged black dog next door,

moved by the poor moon’s blistered face,

growls all night in grisly sympathy.

© Howard Good