by Andy Clausen

I think of my sister’s death
She was 7 years younger than me
How could it happen that way?
There is something fundamentally wrong
        with our national death culture
Jessica Mitford was right — the money, the illogic
        that permeates our disposal of the dead
        is scary unreal asexual obscene ludicrous
               lachrymose dyspeptic capitalism
Life is reduced to deletions from a data bank
Some agency was her guardian
Her son who lives in Holland had no other
        choice I guess
I saw her a month before she went
They took everything from her, phone
        computer a life’s collection of keepsakes
               took it all to hell and gone
No phone made it tres dificil to get her
She wrote for travel magazines, travelled the world from
        the Poconos Modern Bride to Costa Rica every
                        country in Europe Russia Australia
Later edited & wrote her own Airline industry mag
She drank with NYC’s big time journalists
She was dean’s list at SF State she wrote for
        the San Fran Chronicle
        but she died alone 40 miles south of St. Louis
I saw her about a month before she went
She thanked me for when I was in the seventh grade I’d
        walk her home from half day kindergarten
        on my lunch — St. Louis Bertrand
I thought she had more time — died alone
Money might have kept her around
That’s what she told me at that large hospice
“If there had been more money.”
My mother lasted 18 years after a diagnosis
of 4 months left
My sister died alone in Missouri

by Myronn Hardy

The runt has barely one eye.
She stays in your hand unafraid of its
closing     the cruelty everywhere.
The cruelty she knows you know.
The liquid cruelty you trust everyday     you test.
The heaving     the brine     the starfish
it flings to sand. The women
it returns naked     bloated     dead.
Your fingers are stained
with mackerel tinned in oil.
Your cats are eating mackerel in front
of your door in the
city     behind the rage of water
professing to them     you.

Drink tea with the stranger who brings
walnuts     raw almonds.
Show him photographs of your father
when he was your age.
Show him photographs of the woman
you will live with     the house you will buy
in a beach town crowded with goats.
The stranger is obsessed with mirrors.
He thinks you are your father.
He is his father.
The mineral in your irises is the same
in that cat’s     gold     lithe.
You watch gold in the waves
with the stranger.   

Nothing is settled.
We live     then again     then.

by Myronn Hardy

Going up the mountain     you notice
the green neon surrounding that holy
place     that strip of aspiration
never abandoned. It’s almost dark
but you see the gilded
grain fields then a gilded sphere
dangling from a woman’s ear.
She is next to you.
She is telling someone over the phone
not to leave. The olive trees are jagged.
You are thinking of swords going
in     opening a thing without wounds.
You feel the sting     the jolts.
Silence is agony within the agony.
The bus wheels hit every pothole
on that newly paved road.
You are weeping for what you must give up.
You pass a town where everyone
appears green neon.
The streetlights are green.
The apples they harvested were green.
The café televisions blaring football
cascade green over rapt faces.
What you have wrought will remain.
They told you this in cluttered
rooms     beneath chandleries    angel’s trumpets.
When they were brave to speak     they
were given two decades of confinement.
You are not confined.
You are leaving.
Back to a place moving backward.
That fool     his foolish followers are destroyers.
Burn it all. Burn it all down.
You foresee ruins like those here.
What was almost     pulverized to debris.
But you are not ruins.
You are placing limestone against itself.
So many blocks     fragments     the making
     the making.

by Myronn Hardy

You lead me to that place
where addicts give themselves up.
I have given myself to the linear     to
the straight line.

No longer turning.
No longer considering
that which could
have occurred.

I’m a rocket blasting into
the unknowable.
No more pondering     forever
heavy     forever sick with it.

No longer booming fados.
Or sitting in rooms with suicidal
guitarists plucking sunrise.
No more addiction among addicts.

I’m confessing this to them.
They are moaning.
They are asking me to leave.
I leave you here.