Jeffrey Jullich

stepping off the curb onto the right foot, the left foot following in due time, dragging a heavy weight that goes “thud” as if falls those few inches collective guilt cannot fit inside individualism In the cabinet under the bathroom sink, the household items, bottles and canisters of detergent, Pledge Lemon Trigger, and, along the inner corners of the cabinet and its edges,—dark stains, eukaryotic organisms, branched filamentous hyphae —screaming and pointing at the crud women whose hair was stiffened into “beehives,” as they were called,— —canceling out the odor-producing glands under their shaven armpits by spraying on chasm lice chemicals sliding the waist-line down to pierce the gluteus with the splinter of a hypodermic The dishes sparkle, they literally glitter and throw off incandescent particles barely able to eat, no appetite, not taste buds the food stays fresh for months and, even after over a year, is still crunchy when chewed holding a clean handkerchief over nose and mouth eyes irritated with a burny carbolic sensation irrigate the sunken cheeks, the sandpaper lips tongue blindly groping upward to lap at the moisture of tears droplets of a fluid dispensed from small milky-plastic bottles only a couple of inches in height might reduce the discomfort,—later tossing the expired bottle into a wastebasket, the fumes distorting whatever’s seen through the vapors, like a road on a hot summer day What started as a slight dryness in the throat soon progressed to desiccated lips crinkly as crepe paper it’s perfectly natural to ignore a faint aftertaste it involved no joke saying “Does this taste funny to you?,” very dour look on their faces, to the extent that the word “faces” still applies plants other than the desired plant life are ripped from the ground wearing a thick glove The gardener finished with his chores, and went around to the back of the shed to hose himself down with a garden hose, bare-chested, rubbing his hand over his glistening pectoral muscles, the nozzle—

Not unusual, to have therapy only one night a week, to have a professional to talk to about personal problems. Evening would be a typical time, after work. It might require traveling there by public transportation, in a city where few people have cars, and taxis have become expensive in the past few years. Some movies have a scene where a character in the movie is tapping on a wall, along a bookshelf, then suddenly, the wall slides aside. Therapists can let their clients in by buzzing a button, if they’re in a private office they don’t share with any colleagues. The wall may have ornamental architectural devices trimming it, but those stay in place when it moves and slides aside. If one client arrives before the previous session is finished, he or she has to wait in a waiting area. He can put his hands on his lap, palms down on his thighs. Upon first seeing it, you don’t realize that there is another room, a corridor, hidden behind the wall. They must suspect that there is a secret panel, because there they are tapping on the wall. They hold an ear near the wall and tap it with two fingers. The later client may see the previous client leaving, therapist shaking his or her hand goodbye, “Until next week,” and the client could develop feelings about this weekly exchange, might feel jealousy. The actors in the movie could then go inside the hidden room or secret corridor behind the sliding panel and escape from some deadly danger that has been threatening.

The seats faced backwards although the train car was headed forward. The engineers designed it that way intentionally: the cushioned seats at the front facing in toward the rest of the car,—passengers’ faces, a Japanese flower arrangement of faces. The platform began receding. Whoosh. Not in the sense of being unconscious or knocked out, but I was coming to see, that is, to understand an endurance test deep inside that things could have gone differently, the furniture. It could have turned out completely different. That’s within the realm of possibilities, as if the election were in our favor somewhere else, in the United States of Atlantis.— I left off just as I was going to make a mental note in that regard, that we were carried along, passively, in motion without walking or running, spastic reflex in the legs —To sit down in one city, stay seated an hour and a half, and then stand up in a small town Milton Bradley must have modeled its tiny green Monopoly houses and red hotels after