I stood erect and listened for the sound I knew would come. Straining like a lifter to catch the first airy note. Roberta and Juan coiled like snakes around the core of their mad hope. Longstreth picking banjo and singing country songs. Felix mixing the elixer of existence. Constance dancing from fence to fix. Glen picked up a pocked and rusted chunk of castoff machinery. Some literary device long past its usefulness. He cast it upon the waters. It sank without a trace. An Indian weaver sitting stringing ancient beads to form tokens of primitivism for sale to tourists. Little Rebecca with her nose pressed to the windowpane. Ice floes with their unwilling cargoes of hapless sea lions. Killer whales surfacing, breaking the ice into daiquiris; with all the sea lion blood and their pitiful wails. Me? I was just trying to express myself in my haphazard and ill-disciplined way.
Magic Bullet Volume 4, Issue 2
Masthead
Reminder
What
lies
on
top
of
us
destroys us all.
– Johnny Cooper
He is Just Some Guy
He is just some guy
I’m assigning a whole bunch of
pleasant properties to
in order for me to hold out a little longer
towards my visions
which actually don’t exist
at least not in the absolute
states I relegate to them
and everyone else but me
can see right through them
though idealistically he may be
just the fairy to take me to them
He is just some guy
I’ve placed towering over the sky
damn, I think there’s a mote in my eye
– Candy Kaucher
Amanda
(a Legendary White Dog story)
They had been on the road for about two days when an old man in a ’64 Apache stopped and took them most of the way to Sioux Falls. A salesman picked them up on Route 90 just before the state patrol passed by and would have arrested them both for hitch-hiking and vagrancy.
The salesman took them all the way to Sioux Falls. The dog was last seen walking towards the cattle yards.
Amanda and the salesman spent a restless night at the Could 9. He left early that morning without saying good-bye. Amanda woke to the smell of the coffee he had left her and the sound of his Chrysler turning over and pulling out of the lot.
Amanda never left Sioux Falls.
She hasn’t slept much since the dog left, spending her days at the diner playing mother to too many truck drivers and her nights as the desk clerk at the Cloud 9, trying her best to ignore too many salesmen.
If you’re lost, stay put, they say. Someone will find you. She stays put and waits for a hero, thinks about the dog and Morgan, and wonders if either of them will ever pass through.
Mouse Train
Delphis
You talk to him
his eyes swivel
like two chairs aimed
at some movie
playing the private
showing room
of his skull.
You wonder if perhaps
you have a speaking part
but know you don’t
so you say anything
wild trying to snap him
back. You say
“elephant is a delicacy
in the Congo” &
“I’ve never killed anyone.”
His reply comes
without subtitles.
He says “elephants
are vegetarians”
& “once I cured
this autistic child
by carrying him to the end
of a fishing dock
& not throwing him off” &
“yes, that’s my real name
—like Elvis only
with a ‘D’ in front
and spelled
kind of different.
– Pat McKinnon
It’s All Dark
It’s all dark
Night has descended upon me
forever. All I can hear are
the wails and cries of lost
souls—Lost souls like mine,
and I am afraid of the
dark. I’m drowning in a sea
of confusion. I am helpless
and hopeless. When I look
outside I see night and
inside only Hell. My heart
is encased in an ice block
so cold it burns. I am
banished from light, destined
to live with other
denizens of Hell—in the
black of night; and I am
afraid of the dark.
– kmf
Once I used to go out on the tracks
Once I used to go out on the tracks
and camp with old Leroy
build a fire with railroad ties
howl at the world
with a vengeance, of fire
till trains went by
we used to smoke our pot
talk to friends of what was not
it’s a hard world to be alive
burning embers and ties
the smoke upon their eyes
Every night the man in the hat would walk by
staring at the moon
I saw him in town
the day the old man died
early morn 21, June
Leroy would say “We’ll never get old”
and we would sing and prance
like a shaman would
and the tribe would sing
till troubled days
shall drift away
– Carl S. Karcher
Gaither Art
