Price: $6.00 The Last Place on Earth Gaylord Brewer Discard all remains of currency; what's for sale here can't be bought. Climate, terrain, your lips won't convey, only grunts of raw heaven to signify weariness, wonder, spirit hushed from its cell; whatever life means. Here the road ends, what's left are larks in necklaces of evergreen, martins dropping in arms of collapsed roofs. A local knotted over a stick, another snapping rugs in a window; they touch their heads and turn away. Your sort arrive sometimes to forget their names, always failing to forget. When Sunday comes, and you awaken to a square of crooked sunlight burning a crooked floor, if the floor holds beneath your body's weight you must reconfigure the miraculous and absurd. A child's shadow, bell and bellow of a lamb. Only then may you fill your sack with wine, and bread, and salt, a blade worn thin and useless, a wedge of cheese and a single tomato— all that you have. The path snakes north to a stream muttering in foam, to the opened valley and a chapel 1000 years old— flaking, brilliant, your destination all along. The virgin would embrace you, were she not so cold in her centuries of dust. Her hand yet extends a derelict grace; let it be. Instead, stand on the edge beneath a sun that too has no choice, stand as a man might have stood when men existed, fear in his stomach, and hunger, and the wind on his neck announcing a lonelier place than this. Into the Pharisee's House     ^ back     Luke 7:36 Stephen Cushman Those feet, for all the dust And dirt between the toes Stubbed on a temple stair, Those feet still made me want To fall on my knees and kiss Each slender ankle, heel, Uncalloused arch that leaves No print wherever it treads, Never touching our earth. Tears? How could I help them Or keep myself from crying Harder when I saw My droplets clearing paths Along his skin? Nothing From my mischievous body Washed anything clean before, So, left then right both rinsed, Of course I had to use My hair, black and softer Than any cloth, and next The alabaster flask: What else could I have chosen Except my precious unguent To salve the sandalless flesh And show how much I love Now that I have so much More for him to forgive? "For Here"     ^ back Duncan Primeaux I could see you straddling a broom, counter-weight to your cat I hadn't met, and as you rose with the teeter-totter, I promised not to let go. The wood was cold and hard and hurt my ass. While you were suspended, I could've put my foot down, held my end in place, a farmer with his heel to the back of a shovel, looking over a field, in Massachusetts, say, or Kansas. Leaves covered the ground. The jungle-gym looked new, with blocks of wood, beams secured by oversized screws, recessed like navels. How many children stuck their fingers into these holes during daylight, pretending to do work? Motionless again, the teeter-totter built to stand the hazards of the park, the weather, the deals gone good, deals gone bad, and first dates, where, on being led to a giant toy of steel and plastic and rope, one may be on the deck of a ship with nowhere to go. * I want to tell you about a boy, and no, he's not me, though I think of a polaroid of myself at his age, legs ghostly pale, as my hair, the jersey I'm wearing (too long). Hanging in my left hand a plastic football helmet. This boy's in the basement of dad's old house, from whose floor vents were heard air and music. Tony, who was eleven, would wake up bitching about the music that was playing—fifties music, I imagine, for no real reason—when he wanted sleep, and maybe the boy wanted a kind of friend in Tony; something had switched on the radio, the mini-boom box reserved for the basement in chance of bad weather, tornadoes. 'Fraidy hole, as dad called it, and it was musty and damp and he kept his fishing tackle and poles there. What I didn't think of at the time: Somebody had to go down and turn it off. * . . . I dream too. But for extra money, I went building to building and sprayed, planter to planter, tiered, big and small. The poison smelled sweet. I dropped and ruined only one begonia over forty-eight hours! The lights on dimmers in the walls, positioned carefully, slyly like cameras. To wash well after work is not to become infertile. That's how I worked: As if someone were watching me. What was seen: Light that fell through leaves as through ears, luminous and warm; my partner's shirt coming untucked. I daydreamed most of the night of the things I wanted, earned by the invisible and odorless, pure feeling of being watched. * "These girls come in, three of 'em, giggling, traipse around, sort of falling over each other to make their way to the back of the store, where we take breaks. I was managing, it was pretty late, we stay open later on weekends. I hear them first, then see that one has what turns out to be chocolate milk on her white jeans. The three of 'em almost euphoric, one tells me the van skidded and turned on its side and they're alright, wants to make a call. I walk outside and sure enough, the van's on its side, and there's a few cars around it. A ghost story would be telling you I saw three bodies being pulled out of the wreckage; but really, the girls were inside the store, safe, visibly okay, I guess. Chocolate milk." * Against good advice in not going to the lake during deer season, with the would-be hunters and rifles unaware of the air space of the camping grounds, I love to be today. The crowns of trees like pom-poms in slow-motion, being blown raw like dandelions to the wick. Where the wind, off a lake of drinking-water and shower-water and swimming-water, and rain-water and water that comes straight into the home, would rush over a fallen body on a bed of leaves. No swimming on the rocky side but I like to stick my feet in as it runs over my shoes that will squish back to the hole in the woods of the campsite that leads to the car. To a small parking lot, lit at night, messiah or spacepeople could use, there, next to the cove. The campers are also more not-yet-here but coming than non-existing, with the smell of cookers and buzz of scooters, snaps of firecrackers and kids playing soon. Like the senses, all the roads are one way and lead into one another. I can stay hours. Winters grow shorter between summers of dangerous heat. Almost back, my finger through the key chain ring like a yo-yo. As for pool-water, after she'd walked outside, where I was face down at the deep end holding my breath, bangs floating like algae, she used the word "again" with "never." The water trapped in my ear . . . would ache. The Window     ^ back     for C.K. Williams Joel Brouwer Across the courtyard: a vast, soot-stained wall blank as a blackboard awaiting the day's algebra, save for one small window: decimal from a theorem that refuses to be proven. If someone lives behind it, he lives in the dark. The glass is glossy black day and night. Starlings pulse in squalls from chestnut to sycamore in the yard below, chattering in random snips. Children scream as if scalded, then grow calm, absently sing in their sand. I turn my attention, slow and clumsy, a battleship coming about, from song to song, charting courses, marking scores, adding and subtracting. I wait in my borrowed apartment for the window— keyhole, whale-eye, cave-mouth, steamer-trunk lid— for the window to swing open and a hand to appear, waving a page of solutions. Ink-smudged and distant, but legible, and somewhat true.			Issue 8 - Excerpts The Last Place on Earth Gaylord Brewer Into the Pharisee's House Stephen Cushman "For Here" Duncan Primeaux The Window Joel Brouwer