Thank You

Mother, since I was born I know you've done your best,
Since I was tiny, held tightly against your chest.
When you opened the door for me to leave our nest,
Reading to us before every Christmas,
"The Night Before Christmas" and "Polar Express"
You taught us about Eric Carle and Claude Monet
You read us "I'll Love You Forever" and told us everyday
Thank you for letting us be who we were born to be,
Teaching us right from wrong,  
And shaping us to be individuals
We are grown up now big and strong,
We are your masterpieces
And now you have three more,
And you are the best artist anyone could ask for.
So thank you. That silver bell still rings for me
and"I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living my Mommy you'll be."      

Justice

CHAPTER I
New York City 1985

         Archer was woken with a fright. His eyes scanned his lightless room for the source of the noise. His window was closed tight, but the city lights poked through his mangled curtain, and painted small orbs of light on the floor and far wall. The faint sound of beeping taxis and murmuring of the bottom feeders that came out at night seeped through into Archer's room, but he was used to that. Whatever had woken him was different, the noises of the world around him was not what woke him up, whatever it was was closer. There it was again, muffled shouting and screaming from somewhere not to far away. Archer pulled his blanket up over his nose, leaving only his eyes and his sand colored mop of hair exposed to the noise. Shivering Archer wondered whether he was shaking because of the noise or because of how cold he was, the blanket was thin and too small, and his feet were now exposed. Luckily he wore socks to bed, he could see his small woolen flippers hanging out from the edge of his blanket. A blanket for babies, and Archer was a big kid now, he could not just lay there and be afraid. He threw the blanket and swung his legs over the edge of his mattress. His feet hovered over the cold tiles, he sat there in his pajamas, pondering the consequences of leaving the safety of his bed, his fortress. Another crash made him jump, he lost his balance and smacked onto the frosty tiles, leaving his elbows and his knees sore.
       Picking himself up and dusting off his worn super-hero pants he shuffled his feet around his bed and scooted towards the door, and froze. The mahogany door loomed over him, looking up to where the door met the frame, he reached out slowly towards the gold knob. His fingers a fraction of an inch away from making contact he stopped. Breathing heavily he stood there, waiting. His eyes bulged with indecision, and the tips of his fingers trembled. He turned with all his might and with two great bounds was on the edge of his bed, grabbing at his stuffed dog sandwiched between his pillow and his mattress. Once Archer had his dog, he marched toward the door again. The dog under his arm, held tightly against his chest. with his other hand he turned the cold metal and pulled. The door swung noiselessly, the hallway was even darker than his room, the only source of light was from tear dropped night light further down the hall.
       The hallway was carpeted, the thick shag was matted and twisted, and if had not been for Archer's socks, his toes would have gotten caught in the loops like they always did. He walked on, the noise was coming from the living room, which was past the bathroom and on the other side of the kitchen, he marched past the bathroom and into the kitchen. When he turned the corner into the room he found it wasn't as dark as he thought; the living room lamp was on. The light from it cast Archer in the shadows, he could see into the living room but its occupants, had they looked would have only seen a tiny gleam in his eyes. He stood there frozen, holding his dog close to him, an old pillow case cut open and tied around his neck, hung just above the floor.           
        He watched as the two bodies wrestled against each other on the battered couch. They were naked and they had knocked the pillows on the ground. Where the magazines and where Archer's backpack belonged was giant mound of white powder, and his backpack on the floor. There was a small fist sized hole in the wall, and dry wall was scattered on floor. A trail of clothes were strewn from the door to the couch, like a path of sin marked off on a treasure map.
        "Wait," whispered the woman, his mother Archer realized. "Wait!" She said louder this time. "More coke," she said pushing away the man and jumping to the table.
          "Bitch! thats my coke!" he  yelled pushing her off of the mound "The deal was you fuck me for some blow, and if its good, we continue that arrangement!"
          "That was fine, until I saw that pitiful excuse for a dick," she laughed her eyes rolling around her head.
           "Fucking bitch!" He screamed slapping her across the face. Horrified, she jumped trying to get away, but he lunged after her, they crumpled over the table knocking the white powder everywhere. It dusted the room like someone struck a bag of flour with a sledge-hammer, and he sat over her in the fog and clamped his hands around her neck. She yelled out, kicked and fought but he held her down. He leaned in and kissed her, and she kissed him back. his hold loosened and hers tightened, he pushed against her no longer violent.
           "Hey!" yelled Archer, walking into the foggy air, determined to save his mother no matter what. "Don't you hurt my mom!"
            "What the hell?" exclaimed the man, jumping off of Archer's mother and falling into the couch. "Who the hell is that? Your son?" He questioned, scared by the fact that someone else was in the room.    "I'm out of here, you got a freakin' kid! God damn!" He stuttered running around the room naked, picking up his clothes. He ran out of the room with only his underwear on, his clothes in one hand and his salvaged cocaine in the other. Archer's mother just watched, her exposed breasts rising and falling with her erratic breathing.
              "Great," she said after a few minutes. "Fucking! Great!" she yelled throwing the last handful of the white powder at Archer. It hit him full in the face and he started coughing and wheezing. the powder coated his nose, his lips, and ran down his shirt in little veins. he started to feel strange. He couldn't stop blinking, and his heart felt like it was going to shoot out of his chest. His head felt like it was moving a million miles a minute, he couldn't focus on a single thing, he only saw a blur of colors, blended and bled into each other. His world was spinning until felt the crashing weight of hands on his shoulders and the soft coo of his mother, "Hey my little hero, you saved mommy!" she kissed his forehead, and it felt like every nerve in Archer's body was where her lips touched. She kissed his cheek, and licked the powder off of his nose, and then his mouth. She kissed under his chin, and snorted the powder off of his shirt. The wrinkles making perfect little vallies for her drugs to sit in. She kissed his stomach and each of his thighs, making a triangle between his them and his bellybutton. Then she kissed below his navel, Archer couldn't move, he was his mother conduit for drugs. She looked up at him, and struck him across the face.
              "Kiss your mother back, you ungrateful leech!" she seethed.
Archer leaned forward, scared and disoriented and kissed his mother on the cheek.
               "Lower,"
Archer kissed her collarbone.
               "Lower," she growled.
He kissed her breast, and she exhaled deeply.
                "Lower," almost hissing with pleasure, Archer continued to kiss his mother until he was at her feet, and she was laughing from the powder that she loved so much. She kicked him away, and he ran to his room, slamming the door behind him. The tile made his socks slip across the floor with no traction and he fell, banging his head on his small end table. Laying on the floor, he began to cry. Everything felt wrong, his body ached, his head was bleeding, and he was cold. Much colder than he was before, he felt hollow, like a oven in the arctic sea. he was supposed to be warm in his bed, he knew that but he wasn't. He was supposed to feel cold on his skin, not his heart. He crawled up to his bed, pulled his cape over his frail eight year old body, and held his dog to his face and finally fell asleep to the beeping taxis.
 

The General

“Elegant isn’t it? The orchestra of war,”

Sang the General as he crushed skulls beneath his feet.

The horizon exploded in a jubilee of heat, and thought the General:

“I the composer, for I guide and flourish in all that is war,

But there must be more, more, than bathing in a bloody shore.”

He walked past the countless cemeteries,

Past the ruined monasteries,

Past the forests of charred trees, past the skeletons

Praying on their broken knees.

Up a jagged cliff above the blackened seas,

To a stone dish, filled with seeds.

“To the fore-fathers of war, Odysseus,

Caesar, Lincoln, Hitler, Truman,

I am the last of our kin.

I have no heir, nor an enemy to fear.

For the first time my mind is clear,

We the lions of our people, were made to end the war,

But none have walked out of his Cave have we?

 Truth we have failed to see,

So I stand on my hands by the sea

For the maker knows

 There is no war without Generals.”

And the General slit his throat into the bowl,

His blood feeding the seeds, and there grew flowers

And there grew trees, and his body turned stone.

On that cliff grew “Lincoln” and “Jesus” roses,

And so ended the only war ever known,

Because the Reaper reaped what was sown.

I am

I am inside of her.
We both know it is true,
My trembling hand runs down her cheek.
Through the path of her tears past her neck-
Shy she caves toward my hand though it's familiar-
Past her breasts to her navel my palm rests-
Where I cut her mother's cable- How,
Ironic.
I am inside of her.  

The Bridge

By Tanner Bruckmann

In loving memory of all of the angels who couldn’t be themselves

          “I need the room for the night,” Jason stated rather than asking, to his roommate Dylan.

“Whatever, man” Dylan replied. Neither Dylan nor Jason were very fond of each other and while both young men always had been friendly with others, their conversations together were just as often blunt as they were scarce. Dylan left the room, leaving his roommate alone to study.
 Jason was sitting on the foot of his bed, frozen it seemed in his thought, his eyes were fixed on his spiral-bound notebook, but his thoughts were far off.

The notebook started to transform. Slowly it shifted into a computer screen, and his bed changed into cardboard boxes stacked up in the very same room. He had just finished settling into his dorm, he was a freshman at the New Jersey State College and he was now anxiously awaiting a reply message from his parents. He had just let them in on some big news, life changing truths that they never had known, that they never expected. But no matter how hard he stared at the screen they wouldn’t reply. He sat and waited, and just as soon as he was about to close his laptop, his heart skipped a beat. There was a message. Your father is proud of you no matter what Jason, as for me… We both love who you are, I just need time.

“They love who I am?” He questioned. It ate at him as he read and reread the message. He put down his computer, stood up and walked the short distance to the mirror. He was average height, average weight, he wore thin glasses that sat upon a thin and freckled nose. He had a short jaw and small lips that were set in a way that made him look as if he were always smiling. He looked down to his hands, rough and strong, that what was important in his life. His hands and his violin. They drove across metal twine to make beautiful music. He had hands shaped of gold, beautifully crafted to navigate the instrument he loved so dearly. What people saw was a smart young man and his ability to play the violin, not the Jason that he kept hidden for so long.

 He looked back up from his hands and into the mirror, He reeled in horror, knocking over everything behind him. Looking back at him was his parent’s nightmare, his fellow students joke, he saw a man who’s skin was ripped off and pasted back on, his eyes burning as red as the gunk smeared over his lips. The demon reached out in agony, and Jason fell backwards.

A knock at the door made Jason jump, his notebook scattered on the floor and his papers fell silently to the ground.

The sun swam upon the edge of the sky, painted every shade of pink and purple, preparing to take its final breath before it plunged beneath the horizon. A second knock made him sprint to the door not realizing how long he had dozed off. The door opened to a familiar face, and a warm smile.

“Excited?” the smile laughed, as they immediately fell into each others arms. They pulled apart, their eyes locked, and the pair embraced a second time. Pulling each other closer, Jason closed the door as they stumbled into the room. Their lips touched once and then again and again, until they were tightly locked, neither wishing to ever pull away. Time had frozen for Jason,  but his heart was punching out of his chest, and his lips stretched into a joyous crescent that he felt would never leave his face. 
But it quickly faded, a shiver ran down his spine, and the hairs on his arm stood on end, there was someone watching, he could feel it. Pulling away he started to search the room.

“Come back to the bed,” insisted his lover, pulling on his shirt sternly. Lust clouded Jason’s fear and as their bodies met the two fell deeply in a pit of fiery excitement.

Rays of light poked through the dorm room window, collecting themselves on Jason’s shoulders. He met them with heavy eyes and a fistful of sheets. He danced with the covers but it soon turned to a desperate struggle for comfort,  he soon gave in and shook the sleep from his eyes. Jason was awake but his day felt like a dream, he floated in and out of memories from the night before. So much so that he was yet to notice the smirks, the whispers guarded by hands and the quick double takes as he passed others, a symphony played in his brain that no one could hear except his heart.

Then somewhere in the music a note was missed, and then a chord, the Orchestra playing inside Jason was falling apart. Watching himself, he saw his music end, he saw the sun falling in the sky outside of his dorm room. He found drops of pain salted with anger dropping from his eyes. The room that once felt like a safe haven was like solitary confinement, he was alone, he was alone and no one could reach him, but there on his desk sat a secret window to the outside world. A truth that Jason could not handle, he threw the monitor across the room, the power cord flying through the air, landing on the floor after whipping against the wall. In one motion Jason left his chair and ran out of his room leaving the door swinging.

    The day’s light was growing short and the moon was beginning to cast her cold grey across the horizon. The few autumn leaves that hadn’t fallen were turned up to the heavens waiting for drops of guidance. But the chill in the air was cold as steel and was quicker to anchor the leaves to the ground than let them glide through the air.

The steely cold stung Jason’s cheek. The coiled metal cut into his body. His whole body ached, but his heart raced faster than the cars behind and under him. His feet balanced on the edge of a rusted handrail, the lightest push could have made him fall back on the hard concrete, or to the infinite depths of the black River Styx.

 Jason’s heartbeat added to the Bridge’s concerto as he teetered on the edge of despair. All the noises seemed to be amplified; but then the music was drowned out by the ticking of his wrist watch. He looked down to his arm and the starlight illuminated the glass of his watch, there he saw the man, the man with the torn face and red caked across lips, and he jumped.

Had the sun still been falling, Jason would have fallen with it, but there was no light. Only the cold glow of the moon watched his folly. The music reached its climax, but the bridge was silent. Jason heard the coo of harps, and the slow beat of wings, his wings. He was in draped in gold and his radiance reflected off of the bridge’s cold metal beams, Jason looked around as he kept ascending. Everything was brighter and looking down he saw the man with the torn face smiling his eyes bright, and his hand waving as he stood on the cold metal bridge. And he smiled back.         

I'm No Painter

I am no painter, nor photographer,

Brush strokes seldom strike what words can.

When a painting of a tree is nothing other,

I can show what you cannot see but understand,

A mother, spreading her children through the world,

A sentinel of time, the elder of shade,

The home to many furry animals curled.

To the stars it reaches, in heaven’s whisper, wades.    

Barricades to the cities, on cliffs above beaches,

A phoenix of seasons only human can hinder.

A memorial to the lovers’ eternal preaches.

Leaves painted yellow, orange, and fresh cinder.

To paint a tree on paper could not be plainer,

But to paint the mind! But alas I’m no painter.   

Goldfish

 A stroll in the park, how wonderfully mundane, the concrete path cracked and speckled with pebbles, blades of grass poking through. The lush trees danced in the autumn breeze with birds singing their twilight tune. Squirrels ran and jumped collecting summer’s last fruits and nuts, stowing them in the fertile soil for the winter. Red rosebushes climbed the wooden branches, while silent strangers sit and read their books or eat their dinner. In the distance a boy plays with his golden retriever, the Frisbee glides through the air floating on the breeze it reflects the pink and purple of the approaching night. The retriever jumps snatching the disk out of the air and with it in his maw, prances back to his boy who is kneeling with open arms. A woman with headphones on jogs past me, her red shorts swishing, and the faint smell of perfume kisses my lips and tickles my nostrils. I quicken my step because the sun is starting to get lower, mosquitoes buzz around a pond to my left, it is adorned with grey and black stones, some round and some jagged, I spot a few goldfish from where I walk, their fins lazily propelling through the water rippling the top of the pond. I look up at the clouds; they're gracefully gallivanting through the sky. My feet slowly come to a stop, the breeze rustles my hair, and my eyelids close around my cherry wood eyes. My legs tense, I jump like the retriever did, like the Frisbee I rise into the sky. Higher and higher steadily I get closer to those fluffed white pillows. Like the leaves on the trees my clothes ripple and sway as I climb above the clouds. Like the fish in the pond I swim above the earth. A sense of harmony befalls me as I glide into the horizon. I look up, the pale glow of countless stars look back down at me, now I’m going straight up, faster and faster, a dart headed for the bulls eye, I’ll never stop climbing tonight.