Tony Mancus
Bars

Now it’s a streetful of them—and it’s my head
they’re talking in. Take the weather away, take all the nights
where the moon could be a streetlight, could be a bare bulb
with a red fade, while under it tiny cars move around, wavering.

The taste of stale gin, a bottle tipped and You they keep saying
You only know so much about one thing—Kenny’s Pub, and The Bog,
Danny’s, and Jack ’s and The Garter—
gaping, they all garble together.

They shut their mouths.
They moth.
They stop up oil, voice, lower back pain.
They stand in the moonlight aflutter like questions.

One word in neon spits its color
out on the street like curdled milk.
It’s an invitation. It’s temptation, this early hour.

The sounds of a guitar neck, tabletops
dripping, a crowd wet with its gathering breath.
Consistently the cash drawers open. A mirror
splashed with light, with all the happy customers.

A man of hazy outline sits, stilling his hands at a bus stop.

He waits to hear a night bird warble him home. Other
passengers come off the late shift. They file like paper:

A pack of kids with their bodies and voices aching
from a sporting event. A small woman with a creased face

runs her fingers slowly over beads. A mother with her tiny daughter
in tow from the grocer—their plastic bags drag behind.

They can smell his breath from ten feet at least. No one
whispers decently. So he sings:

You know if a bird come home,
you ain’t have to worry bout them

going off again. They trained
to be still, they trained to sing,

sometime you can train ‘em to stop
talking, but that’s not a good thing.

The girl’s eyes lift up at him, she points a tiny finger.
Her mother swats it back.

I don’t know                                silence too much

His voice gets crushed by the exhaust
from the bus.

The song he waits for etches itself along the floor,
the sound of a door opening.

The last thing he hears each night
is her cage, its rattle.

Empty lock, empty living-
room. Outside nothing
but bars for miles and miles.

Laura McCullough
Button

His hands felt like paws or flippers, big and inarticulate, as if the spaces between shoulder socket and elbow joint and between the finger bones had all fused in the August sun, a kind of annealing, so what had once been uncured now had been except that mobility and utility had been replaced with one function, appendages for show,

and this is what he sees now when he looks in the mirror, a created thing, a ceramic puppet whose arms stand like glass stems, whose hands burst flower-like from the tips.

If he waits long enough, perhaps he will be visited by bees, but for now, it is only ghosts, the children he hears splashing behind him as he retrieves his tilting guitar.

If you meet Buddha on the street, kill him, he recalls some saying once. He thinks a fly has landed on his chest and brushes it away, but it is nothing but a fleck of thread sticking out of a button head come suddenly loose.