Joel Brouwer

And so among the starry refineries and cattail ditches of New Jersey his bus dips from egg-white sky into shadow. When he next looks up from Kafka a blur of green sanatorium tile flows by then presto, Port Authority, full daylight. He has been cheated of the river, dawn, a considered fingering of his long and polished rosary of second thoughts. Is it any wonder children are born weeping? Out to Eighth Avenue to walk twenty blocks home to her sleeping curve beneath a sheet. He cracks three eggs into a bowl and says to each, Oh you got trouble? The yellow yolk is his, the orange is hers, the third simply glistens, noncommittal. Except to mention Kafka's restlessness before his death, his trips from spa to spa to country house to sanatorium, and that she's awake now, sweet with sleep sweat, patting her belly's taut carapace and yes hungry as an ape but first a kiss mister how was your trip and what have you brought us, and that the knowledge that dooms a marriage is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage, the poem has nothing further to report.

Each morning in the little white cabin by the river they woke to a raccoon clawing under the floorboards or banging in the wood stove. They did not discuss this. Instead they said it was a perfect day to pick blueberries on the hill, or that a hike to the old glassworks sounded good. They were beginning to speak not in meat but in the brown paper the butcher wraps around it. Brown paper around dirty magazines. Like dirty magazines, they only traced the contour of substance: silk over skin, skin over muscle, muscle over bone. What's under bone? Marrow? Their forks so small and dull. As if for dolls. You can tell dolls from animals because the latter are made of meat. Many eat it, also. Lions are interesting. Lions don't eat the flesh of their kills right away, but first lap up the blood, until the meat is blanched nearly white. White as the little cabin by the river they stayed in that summer. White as the raccoon covered in ashes, his black eyes bottomless and bright with hate.

You’re not dewy with sleep in the next room

She stepped into the tub at dawn and turned on first the radio and then the tap. The Predator operators of Nellis afb have as much or more ptsd as pilots who fly. Down the hall and oceans distant I listened to her work to wash events away as quickly as they accumulated. A sort of race. I thought of where the soap was going. Targets glowed on monitors in the base’s trailers near Las Vegas and operators in full flight suits drank coffee from paper cups and adjusted altitude as I stroked myself beneath the blankets. I don’t like to take chances and haven’t been to Vegas in years. The pilots call people who run for cover, black sperm writhing across their screens, “squirters.” Near my finish line she tugged up the puckered rubber no-slip safety mat. The sound should remind you of a time a doctor took hold of your arm for comfort or leverage and tore the bandage off. If nothing like this has happened to you, imagine it. The haberdasher in Diderot who stole his wife’s dowry (long story) plans to leave Paris for Geneva, sensing distance will make him less guilty. She wasn’t coming back to bed. She may already have left. Villagers call the drones, which make a buzzing sound, “wasps.” The radio reported to an empty room. “An assassin,” writes Diderot, “if transported to the shores of China, will lose sight of the corpse he left bleeding on the banks of the Seine.” Asia’s always such a great place to hide, but Geneva’s obviously more convenient. Say she expected her husband to return from duty in a month. Would anything we did between now and then make us any more or less wretched than we were? The drone returns to Bagram without the missiles it left with and a soldier restores its complement. Either his name is Dan or else imagine that. And that a cuckold’s rage can snuff a bomb. I came into either a tissue or my fist. This was weeks or months ago, and I can’t recall. When de Castañeda and his men clambered down into the Grand Canyon in 1540, they found the boulders which had looked as tall as a man from the rim in fact stood taller than Seville’s La Giralda. They must have marveled at distance’s power to deceive and to wake deception’s twin, oblivion. Their women and homes forgotten. You can’t hear their screams from here, but they’re there.

The Department of the Interior and Department of Homeland Security announced a joint enquiry into the explosion and sinking of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon on April 22. The us House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources have also announced investigations. Last week bp launched its own investigation into the incident and has an investigation team at work in Houston, Texas. —bp.com, April 28, 2010 Beneath three thousand feet, the sea is wholly dark. The shuttle feeds hydraulics to the blind shear ram and represents a single failure point for disconnect. Recommendation: Declare selected points on earth invisible. Affected communities have been provided with limited quantities of powdered milk and other staples. Many questions remain. Some close their eyes under water instinctively. Imagination can create a sense of peril where no real peril exists. Safety equipment tests were necessarily imaginary; mechanisms in question were wholly inaccessible. A journalist sinking into the mud was told to toss his camera to a colleague and hold extremely still. In this sense, we are our own prisoners. Investigators have salt in their hair and sand in their teeth. The hotel pool is empty. Yet questions remain. Barbeque billboards depict grinning pigs in aprons and toques. Cleanup crews recover thousands of plastic milk jugs from the shallows. Do these images appeal to the death drive? Care should be taken to ensure the highest possible reliability from that valve. Thousands in affected communities have been evicted and live in tents. Demonstrators have prevented investigators from accessing hotel stairwells. 1900: Rudolf Diesel demonstrates an engine fueled by peanut oil at the Paris World’s Fair. The Vietnamese owner of Bad Bob’s bbq Buffet tells a journalist she last drank powdered milk in a refugee camp “a thousand years ago.” Items available only in limited quantities are found in Appendix C. Cleanup crews have stacked thousands of drums of dispersant in hotel parking lots. Dominant failure combinations for well control suggest additional safety mechanism diversity and redundancy provide additional reliability. Bank of America will offer limited foreclosure deferments in affected communities. Thousands of years ago, a pronghorn ram slipped beneath the surface of a tar pit, jerking its snout for air. Recommendation: Live at inaccessible elevations. Recommendation: Close your eyes. Recommendation: Prevent access to the invisible. Engineering reports noted required safety mechanisms were unlikely to function yet were required for safety’s sake. If the committee may offer an analogy, a blind surgeon is dangerous, an imaginary surgeon harmless. Still, questions remain. BP’s 2010 Q1 replacement cost profit was $5,598 million, compared with $2,387 million a year ago, an increase of 135%. Unlimited quantities of peanuts are available. However, care must be taken to ensure continued high reliability of the shuttle valve, since it is extremely critical to the overall disconnect operation. Phenomena not meant to be accessed or imagined are found in Appendix E. Cleanup crews are sometimes idled for lack of fuel. 1913: Diesel found dead, drowned under suspicious circumstances. The investigators’ hotel toilets won’t flush. Midas turned everything he touched to gold. In this sense, seabirds cloaked in oil are rich. Cleanup crews live in tents and are provided with limited quantities of barbeque and wear white canvas jumpsuits like prisoners on furlough. If the committee may offer an analogy, the death drive resides at wholly dark depths of imagination and fuel issues from a wound we’ve opened there.

After a morning of work in separate rooms she said she was going to the municipal pool and he said he would walk along the river for a while before they met back for their lunch of tomatoes and cheese. But in fact she went to the lobby of the Hotel du Panthéon to read the Herald Tribune and drink a cup ofnthe Irish tea she liked and he to the little church of St. Médard. A couple old women in housedresses knelt in the first pews. He sat in the back, with the drunks or alone. And at lunch she said terrible, the lanes were filled with kids from the elementary school or terrific, I had it to myself. And he said a barge full of oyster shells. Then quiet sex with the curtains drawn against the chemistry students conducting their experiments in the building across the street. Incremental triumphs of exactitude and necessity. In the evenings they liked to fire champagne corks over at the vast darkened laboratory windows. Imagining the mice startling in their cages, imagining catastrophe. Turning back to their tumors with relief.

Photograph found in the road: bejeweled hand gripping a limp dick. All parties suffering from lack of ambition. The hills of Tuscany won’t dapple with sunlight, and here it is nearly noon. She didn’t much want the leather jacket, the vendor didn’t really care to sell it, she hardly tried it on, he barely praised her beauty, then everyone wasn’t hungry and went to lunch. The rubies won’t glow. The delayed train shrugs on its siding. The penis appears at ease. Osteria, osteria, osteria, osteria. I knew many words but preferred to say the same ones over and over, like a photographer shooting four frames of the same subject, hoping for one in focus. This clearly among the other three.

He startled to see a statue of blind justice really did loom over the courtroom. But remained determined to scorn symbolism. She needed a quarter to call her lover— the docket was full, she’d be late for lunch— and he gave her one. It was not a taunt, acquiescence, wager, or plea. It was a quarter. The fact that they had done this— even this!—together and cordially, late nights at the dining room table with a bottle of cabernet, sharp pencils, A Love Supreme , and an “E-Z Workbook” from the well-reviewed—the fact that they’d read reviews!— Don’t Pay an Attorney! series, as if they were learning Portuguese or origami, was not “as if” or “like” anything, but just that, a fact, and not to be pressed for further significance. This was part of the agreement. They filled out the forms. Asked lawyer friends for language. Made stacks of books and towels. Cooked dinner together, said “excuse me” passing in the hallway, and even remembered each other’s mother’s birthdays. As if. Not as if. Waiting for their case to be called, they got hungry. The bailiff pointed toward the snack bar in the basement, which was packed with a class trip from the school for the blind. In illo tempore such a gift would have caused them to turn to each other in love and wonder. Now, no. They didn’t even look to see. She asked for fish sticks, and he wondered if fish sticks were fish or like fish. The children chewed their chicken fingers with calm deliberation, staring out at what they saw, then conveyed their limp paper plates with startling grace to the hinged swinging mouths of the trash cans which swallowed everything offered saying THANK YOU THANK YOU.

He slaughtered a six of Miller in thanks when his supposed schizophrenia turned out to be mere panic, fewer than half the syllables and “easily managed with the new medications.” Chanted that mantra when his piano teacher’s voice droned on like an undertow beneath Chopin hours after she herself had gone home to Queens and when stop signs seemed to say slightly more than stop, seemed in fact to convey highly specific messages to him and him alone suggesting he assume certain key responsibilities including twenty-four-hour telephone contact with his finacée “to make sure nothing bad happens to her” and the immediate emergency closure of the Holland Tunnel…Oh, come on, Doc! If this isn’t schizo what is? And after all it took so long to nose the rental car’s savage servility through New Jersey for Thanksgiving at her mother’s that by the time he arrived he can’t possibly have been the same person he had been when he left Brooklyn and is that not a kind of multiple person- ality? It took hours. And then it was awkward. Which could describe so many things. The gangly half-dismantled turkey splayed on its platter. Her stepfather's lecture on property taxes and tougher sentences. The seven-dollar jug of Chablis which would come up later while he held back her hair. Every good boy deserves fudge and he tried to be one and earn huge loamy slabs of it. He practiced his scales on the steering wheel as he breezed by stop sign after stop sign toward the tunnel, stopped to search for the exact change, then resumed rehearsal as she, deeply soused, snored wetly beside him smelling like something spilled on a rug. He keyed each étude over and over as though there would not be many more chances or changes which I typed first by accident but had the chance to change for which I am thankful. But what am I doing in here.

She said what about San Francisco? Another second chance. There would be bridges "shrouded in fog." Streets "pregnant and glowing" with traffic. Dawn, she didn't know, would maybe "draw near." He said dawn draws near everywhere. She said a city but a city close to nature. A backyard scattered with birds he wouldn't be able to identify and something exotic rotting. Avocadoes. They'd play a game on the bridge, she'd lose control of the car, he'd kick her foot away and mash the gas pedal to the floor until she screamed and they'd have a name for the game and later it would be a story for their kids if they had any kids later. But no city is close to nature. Her body is a white slash beneath the green sheet. Or "a sterilized instrument." Last night's wine dregs are both "the color of the valley as it ignites" and in fact that color. He pulls the sheets from her again and says he'll cut their coffins from a wazi'hcaka even if it leaves a gray jay homeless. The lumber's astringency. Fuck guacamole. Deep in her knots and sap. Faster and faster. Second nature. And now a different dawn drawing near.