mary when i saw you and lisa in the
building today by the jewelry shop i
didn’t recognize you at first i was
waiting for lisa to introduce me to
her friend turning to you i saw that it was
you for a moment i thought you were about
to hug me or maybe for a moment i
thought you were a dream come true i could easily
fall for you were we twenty years younger and
were you not married but it wouldn’t be you i
fell for you remind me awfully much of
someone i did fall for when i was twenty
years younger the music of your voice your laugh
the line of your smile the very expressions
you sometimes carry on your face and your
very face yourself you
may as well be her
you could be her ghost come back to life she was
a long time ago in a time that didn’t
have what i would call a happy outcome
today trying to be witty i was
inept instead asking you what you were
doing in my part of town it wasn’t you that
i was trying to push away hard by the
jewelry shop hard to get to the ages we
have got to without ghosts dogging our heels
pestering us getting in the way
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
my father loved the deer of colorado’s western slope.
he drove carefully at dusk along the rural two-lane blacktop, counting those he saw— doe, buck and fawn—one hundred seventy-five one evening, by his count.
he’d fought in korea and vietnam, killed strangers and had his young friends
die beside him.
he loved the deer for being alive and free,
allowing him to tend to them by driving carefully at dusk.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“Fiction ultimately is the art form of human yearning, and that is essential to the work of fictional narrative art. A character who yearns is not the same as a character who simply has problems. A lot of characters have problems, but the problems have not yet resolved themselves into the dynamics of yearning for this writer and this character. That yearning is at the heart of all temporal art forms.” – Robert Olen Butler (interviewed by Heather Iarusso in Close-up: Characterization)
a bumblebee
bounces
off the office
window by my
desk
tapping the glass
with a small
soft thud
silhouetted
against the sky
the bee
resembles a flying
black thumb
two hundred
feet above the street
zagging cloudward
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
do you have a dollar?
i was there fifty-six fucking
fifty-six fucking days and sister julia
pissed me off
could i have a dollar?
i ain’t doing anything
i’m a viking bitch
a viking bitch from hell
am i registered to vote?
i’m a viking bitch from hell
my cigarette broke
could somebody please have a cigarette?
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“I think of all suicide bombers as children, though most of them are considerably past the age of twelve. Terrorism implies, to me, a childlike singularity, a capacity for dividing the world into good and evil, and a disregard for other lives—an almost conceptual inability to fully acknowledge the lives of other people. Children are cruel—or, more accurately, unempathic—in a way most adults are not. Just spend an hour on a crowded playground.” – Michael Cunningham (interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson in Close-up: Characterization)
Today we’re going to take the A-train
And ride it on down to B-town,
Get ourselves a couple of C-sections
Across the street from the D-home,
Check in and check out our E-mail
At the concrete kiosks by the F-stop,
Buy a big roll of red nylon G-string
Just in time for cocktails at H-hour,
Smoke ourselves a big fat J
And munch out on surplus K-rations
Slathered with steaming L-dopa
Hot out of the beeping M-wave
And cooked to the Nth degree,
With a side dish of crispy O-rings
Sprinkled with well-minded Ps and Qs
Of the highest discernable R-value
To be found along the S-curve
That wends its way around the T-square
Down by the harbor filled with U-boats
Crewed by sailors wearing V-necks,
Who pipe us aboard and hand us W-9s,
Then line us up for annual X-rays
Before we head back to our rooms at the Y
To settle in and catch ourselves some Zs.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
the full moan rises
as the sin is setting.
the bids are settling in
for the nought. house-cots
begin their evening wonderings,
bets flitting overhead,
pursuing incest. watch-dugs
hail and burp at passing
shatters. livers bond their
buddies to gather, empensioned
ones swatting and mooning as
head-lice arc across their boardroom
walls. stirs spackle
the nought-time skis. son,
the tune will slap, its
inheritance at rust under
the shunning full moan.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses.” – D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr
jack took jill right off the pill,
and then he made her holler,
but when he found he’d knocked her up,
he wouldn’t even call her.
mother took the hanger’s crook
to make jill’s belly smaller.
her lover’s mound was emptied well—
see mother scrape with choler.
now get out! her mother’s shout
sent jill to live in squalor.
jack came round to see his jill,
him thinking he might ball her.
jack, you wait here by the gate,
said jill, you are my scholar
who’s taught me sweetly love’s swell tricks—
i’d kill you for a dollar.
here’s ten bits, jack said, and it’s
to call your bluff and price you.
jill cut him down with kitchen knife—
you should have known i’d slice you.
jack screamed and fell against the gate,
cried out, you filthy cunt!
jill stood her ground and spoke to jack,
her knife held out in front.
your good looks, and cock that cooks
inside the girl who wants you,
won’t help you now, she sliced again,
it’s time you see what ‘cunts’ do.
jill lay jack flat on his back.
her lover-boy won’t gall her,
she fixed him well—nowadays he swells
a smidgen, but no taller.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
she says the sweetest thing
she says
i love it when you come in me
i love it too
i say
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“We cannot define anything precisely! If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other, ‘You don’t know what you are talking about!’ The second one says, ‘What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?,’ and so on. In order to be able to talk constructively, we just have to agree that we are talking about roughly the same thing.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I (emphases in original)
sun-dress
flip-flops
perfect figure
long shiny hair
crinkle-nosed smile
prim and pretty face
there is no price you can pay
you cannot have this girl
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
o
my dick is sore
last night
i was fuckin the duck
dreamin of my wife
no foolin
she’s a wrinkled old thing
but she loves me muchly
and her smile is a bright light shining
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“Our most precise description of nature must be in terms of probabilities. There are some people who do not like this way of describing nature.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I (emphases in original)
when we crack open atoms
or stare into space with x-ray eyes
or break another genetic code
we think we’re discovering the what behind the what
but we’re not discovering the what behind the what
it’s all just different versions of the what
and it’s all very fascinating when you first get into it
but after a while you just need your what to hold still long enough
for you to get your plow in
that’s the what
anybody got a light?
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
something happened outside my house last night,
i don’t know what, it started when i was
asleep. there were bright lights when i woke up,
blue and red flashing police lights, police
car headlights and spotlights, footsteps running
clat-clat up the sidewalk right outside my
bedroom window, the silhouette of a head,
haircut like a police man’s haircut
silhouetted in the police lights on my
bedroom window curtain. and all at the same
time a police car turning and speeding
into the alley behind my house. you
can walk down this alley and pound on my
bedroom wall, i’m right there. and police car
headlights sweeping across my curtains.
a man’s voice saying stop! put your hands up!
and another man’s voice saying i was
just— this all happened real fast whatever
it was. less than a minute is all it took.
the police were on the street, their blue and red
lights flashing for a while longer. the police
helicopter came over, its searchlight
shining down on the alley and my wall
and my kitchen window, where i stood in
the dark inside my home, peeking out through
the blinds at i don’t know what. this morning
there were shattered beer bottles on the corner
down the street, near where the blue and red lights
were when i was at the kitchen window.
shards on the concrete just across from
the playground at the lutheran school,
next to my friend mary the retired
librarian’s house. me and mary
and the lutheran children, all safe now
in the bright daylight from we don’t know what.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities.” – James Clerk Maxwell (quoted by Richard P. Feynman in The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I )
i ordered some chaos the other night
but when it arrived
it was piping hot
and had been sliced into squares
i sprinkled it with black holes
stirring them in well
kinking and curving all its straight lines
cooling it cooler than the coldest ice
edible it was not, so i drank it
wiping my vanishing mouth
with the back of my disappearing hand
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
new orleans drowns
new orleans drowns and i sit in a coffeeshop
new orleans drowns and i sit in a plastic wicker chair
at a dark green table on the patio of a coffeeshop in a city in new mexico
new orleans drowns and the cries go up for help
please help us god we are drowning
we are forsaken, stranded, dying of thirst
water everywhere but none to drink
we are awash in the poisoned sea
new orleans drowns
new orleans drowns and the faces and voices on the television news
are black if they are in new orleans
raising their voices and their hands to plead for help and deliver us into their rage
new orleans drowns and a black man sits at a table just to my right and reads the paper
and i am a white man and i am afraid to look at him
damn straight i am afraid
new orleans drowns
new orleans drowns and i have no boats
no emergency supplies
no heavy lift capacity
no politicians in my pocket all wound up and set to dance
set to make their crazy sounds, they smile, they look concerned
new orleans drowns
new orleans drowns and people sitting at a table just to my left talk about
the wine festival last weekend, it was fun
there was plenty of wine, lots of cheese
someone even got to be interviewed on television
new orleans drowns
(Copyright 2005, 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“[T]he requisitioned civilians. This concerns a category of witnesses, often children or adolescents at the time, of whom one finds no trace in official reports or archives. Neither victims nor executioners, these people were often requisitioned at their homes on the morning of the execution by an armed man; sometimes they were requisitioned because they had a wagon, a shovel, cooking utensils, a bag, or a sewing needle. This invisible group, undoubtedly, make up one of our principal discoveries, all the more so as they appear nowhere in written documents. At most, they are referred to in the passive form: ‘The graves were dug,’ ‘the clothes of the Jews were taken off,’ and so on. But by whom and how? These requisitioned civilians were not hiding at their windows watching the columns of victims marching toward the graves. Neither were they perched on trees in the distance. They were at the place of the crime, very often well before the Jews were brought there. And this anonymous labor assisted the executions from start to finish, beside the victims and their murderers, sometimes sitting on the grass, only several meters from an open and screaming grave. A vital point is that these requisitions were not simply improvised. They were made an integral part of the implementation of the crimes. At times more than 150 children were used. Forced actors, these requisitioned locals shine a light on these dark events and allow us to gain an accurate understanding of what happened.” – Father Patrick Desbois, “The Witnesses of Ukraine or Evidence from the Ground: The Research of Yahad-In Unum” (collected in The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, 2013) (emphases in original)
i bicycle through the city in the
pre-dawn faint blue light from the wakening
sky, in the blue, white, yellow and red light
from buildings, signs, lamps and cars. down streets and
along sidewalks i roll on my ten-speed.
a man gets into his pickup truck, turns
on the headlights and starts the engine, puts
the truck in gear and pulls away from
the curb right away. i pass and think that’s
no way to warm up an engine and i
hope he doesn’t run me down. he’s behind
me as i carefully run a stop sign
he has to stop at. he passes and he
doesn’t stop at the next stop sign, he runs
it carefully. i am a leader of
men this morning, setting the example
for others to follow. i bicycle
through downtown, along the red-brick sidewalks,
using the wheelchair ramps at the street
corners to smooth and speed my passage.
across the street, at the army recruiting
center, a woman soldier stands outside
in the yellow light from the building’s lamps.
she stands in her camouflage uniform
and smokes a cigarette, i think, or
maybe she doesn’t but she should and i
want her, in her uniform, with her
muscular butt and her short blonde hair
under her army fatigue cap. i
bicycle by fast, hoping she sees me
and longs for civilians and i am a
fool, but a happy fool am i.
ahead of me at the next corner a
man digs angrily through a garbage can.
he has long, dirty blonde hair and is bald
on top. he wears the scruffy clothes of
america’s lowest and most-lost class,
the inmates and homeless, interchangeable.
he’s throwing garbage around, looking like
he’s looking for something of some value,
maybe an empty can for recycling
or a full one for drinking from, and as
i pass him he looks up and throws a piece
of garbage at me—a small, wadded up
piece of what feels like a junk food package
when it hits my leg. part of me wants to
turn around, stop my bike, get off and get
in a fist-fight with him for his insult,
but i am forty-seven years old this
month and long past brawling in the streets so
i console myself with the thought that he
has probably not been long out of jail
and will probably be there soon again,
while i will not be if i behave
myself; if i am careful which stop signs
i run and who sees me run them; if i
am careful to commit my worst crimes in
the privacy of my own home, toward
which i pedal my bicycle, rolling
slowly uphill into my neighborhood.
(Copyright 2005, 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
landlord mowed the cats.
landlord mowed the welcome mat, grasses, bushes, seedling trees and twigs,
small rocks.
the small rocks.
cats batted small rocks. fresh-mown cats howled thin yowling cat-howls
after landlord mowed their water dish.
cats batted small rocks, pirouetted feline pirouettes with slender twigs.
slender twigs littered the cats’ back yard.
slender twigs littered the fresh-mown cats.
bushes of cats danced along the edges of the lawn.
small rocks rolled across the welcome mat.
small rocks rolled.
small rocks rolled between the cats’ paws, under the soles of landlord’s feet.
unmown hose was rolled, safely stowed upon the drive.
landlord rolled the fresh-mown cats across the welcome mat,
down the drive through splintered seedling trees to where the bushes dance,
where the twigs pirouette at night, under the vulpine moon.
(Published Pearl 43, Fall/Winter 2009. Copyright 2009, 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“What was your reaction when you saw the blood? This simple question can stimulate the witness to describe the scene to us, adding new elements. In a general way, during all the interviews, it is a question of keeping the focus on what the person saw or heard. To that end, an inalterable rule: to remain fixed on the objects of everyday life, all the while respecting the viewpoint of the witness in such a way that does not bias the witness’s account. That, incidentally, is the irreplaceable contribution of oral history, which offers precisely the possibility of “looking” through previously unseen points of view.” – Father Patrick Desbois, “The Witnesses of Ukraine or Evidence from the Ground: The Research of Yahad-In Unum” (collected in The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, 2013) (emphasis in original)
my boss is getting divorced
mid-life crisis time for him and his wife
childhood crisis time for their kids
what went wrong i don’t know
usual stuff i guess
little things big things
little things that become big things
like this thing he does at the office
he stuffs two or three pretzels in his mouth
then stands behind me where i sit at my desk
and talks to me with his mouth full
little pretzel pieces fall out and litter the carpet
i found one on my shoulder once, too
i wouldn’t want to be married to that
but most mornings i’m pretty flatulent
sometimes it’s pretty bad
i wouldn’t want to be married to that, either
and in fact
i’ve been divorced for years
farting away
the boss should be careful about standing behind me
eating pretzels or not
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
i know a place where the snow still sleeps
i know a place where the ice still creeps
up your spine
and to thine
ownself
be true
do
whacka-do whacka-do
oedipus, baby, you’re all heart
but your light bill
is due
you cast a pall on the palace
when your
hanged
bulbs
unscrew
do
look yourself in the eye
if you dare
do
if you dare
oedipoo
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“What is time? It would be nice if we could find a good definition of time. Webster defines ‘a time’ as ‘a period,’ and the latter as ‘a time,’ which doesn’t seem to be very useful. Perhaps we should say: ‘Time is what happens when nothing else happens.’ Which also doesn’t get us very far. Maybe it is just as well if we face the fact that time is one of the things we probably cannot define (in the dictionary sense), and just say that it is what we already know it to be: it is how long we wait!” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I (emphasis in original)
when the sun shines
i can finish my cheese sandwich
step outside in my heavy coat
gather up fat brown sparrows
and pitch them across the street
throwing them hard at the neighbor’s spiny yucca
soft feathers ruffling as the sparrows zip through the air
i tally up the points
so many for bull’s-eyes
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
i’m reading about kosovo
its unmiks and kayfors
its pee-ohs and various constitutions
and i truly want to care about all this
—i am an educated, liberal man—
but i dreamed last night of a girl i had sex with
twenty-five years ago
(i will spare you the details i will not spare myself
or maybe i’m just being selfish)
then there was the girl i saw yesterday walking slowly away from me
she had a tattooed hip showing above the low waistband
of her pull-me-down pants
sex fractures my fragile concentration
leaving me just another of the world’s lost causes
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“An object has energy from its sheer existence.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I (emphasis in original)