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is earning his MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work appears or is forthcoming
in The Seattle Review, Margie, The Iowa Review, Quick Fiction, Sentence, Cue, and 42opus, among others. In a prior life
he was poetry editor for The Portland Review.
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Les Petit Chanteurs A La Croix De Bois
The most beautiful boys in the world live their changeless lives in this
poster
on my bedroom wall. At night their angels’ voices fill the house while I fly in my dreams over tiny island cathedrals
that dot long forgotten Alpine lakes. In the morning I’m always another day older, but les petit chanteurs are still
exactly twelve and a half, still losing baby teeth, still nailing each impossibly high note. In their moon-white robes they
look to me like little singing Jesuses, out to save a world of souls with a song. I give them good French names like Jacques
and Armand and Olivier because they are robust and in love with the world. But in my heart I fear for them, for us all. That
devil, time, lurking somewhere just out of sight. I suspect one day years from now I’ll awaken and look up to see they’ve
suddenly become old men—grimacing, deaf, still trying to hold those hopeless notes through the long night, their ratty
robes ridiculously small on their old man bodies, their big wooden crucifixes strung so tight around their necks they chafe
and choke. My beloved Jacques red-faced, bent double with angina…Armand collapsing of a stroke and dropping out of sight…
Narrated
Things began to sour when love no longer had much to do with getting naked. Our narrator told it better than
we could have ourselves. Omniscient, he was with us in the kitchen, the bedroom, the garden, lending simile and metaphor to
our growing disenchantment. ‘Their words,’ he’d say in the car as we squabbled over some trivial thing,
‘were clumsy, careless, thrown around like fists of the drunk.’ He spoke in the past tense, always with accuracy
and indifference. He sounded a lot like James Earl Jones. One evening she didn’t come home after work. I might have
waited up all night, hurt and suspicious, creating wild scenarios and plotting revenges for each, but for the omniscient one.
‘He was alone at last,’ he said in a low, calming voice, ‘and she wasn’t coming back. Somehow he knew
this. Strangely, he felt nearly nothing—just a vague, alien sense of aloneness. Of self-ness. He was suddenly hungry.
He popped a frozen pizza in the oven and sat down on the couch. Then he turned on a baseball game—just him and the remote
control, like in the old days. Like she’d never been there.’
Puppet Master
He’d leave behind an elaborate map. They’d find it tucked in his toolbox,
but of course by then it would be too late. He’d have gone—difficult to say when, exactly—and taken his
pony with him. And they’d begin to wonder: all those weeks leading up to this, all the time he’d spent barricaded
in the basement, crouched in the lamplight at his little workbench. The endless hours he sat muttering, piecing together the
chain mail shirt, the trousers, the hood, link by tedious link, ever the quest on his breath. Always the quest. And when they
unrolled the map, there would be nothing for them to do
but trace his treacherous path with a finger and shake their heads
(and some would weep). While far away, in some other morning’s quiet hour, he’d be trotting off across the flooded
country, believing his magic pony would skim the water’s surface like a basalisk lizard. And far to the north on a distant
steppe the fabled Mongolian horsemen would be waiting silently for him—mounted three abreast in case he actually was
the one—concealing hand-woven finger puppets under their yak parkas.
NEXT
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