Laurie Blauner

Over and Underover

The son is hiding, or is he? He is behind a fence, painting a mural on a wall. His brush swishes willy-nilly, globby with turquoise, a masculine red, a futile yellow, a soul-filled black. The features of his father grow on the wall’s surface, telescoping into a man he doesn’t want to become, desiring to see differently and distantly. He’s not sure what to do with his impending adulthood. Run toward it or away?  Hasn’t he been waiting all along? Is it a mirage/image? Feelings swirl. The windows with bars around him are scratched with unsayable words about abandoned gods. A stray face or two with its mouth shut appears there.

Until one opens. Hey, what’re you doing? an older woman shouts, her hair crawling on her forehead like dark spiders.

Her question climbs up his leg. Beautifying the neighborhood.

She squints. What is it?

The son steps away from his work and says, A stubborn man who talks to the past.

She slams her window shut. He listens to the flies at the windowsills, smells the rancid, dusty air. In the portrait his father is frowning. He changes the lips to a mysterious smile. The old man is surrounded by a yellow world of colorful pills, a wife, kids, a gun, the old backyard tree from their former city. The son’s hands are busy animals, spreading paint, as something besides cars, hisses in his ear. This used to be his favorite time in the city where the family used to live, a place left inside him like the energy of rush hour.

A curly haired little boy runs up to the wall and splatters his hand on the father’s unfinished mouth. Ha, ha. He runs away, down another alley.

The son stares at the portrait of his father whose mouth now resembles a plant with a few teeth. He almost likes it. It’s still better than words.

Farther Father

Father is on city streets, in the distance, staring at an architecturally flummoxed building. Mother is shopping at the well-lit, big box grocery. So many people are busy between them. Father is making something about the way people get lost and no one helps. Then how he’s seen this building destroyed, in the short time he’s lived here, even though it rebuilds itself. His spit splatters in the faces of strangers and his arms fly, stirring air. Other people glide by him. His nearby son turns his head away. When he speaks at home his daughter’s eyelids flutter like moth wings.

The son apologizes for the language no one wants to hear, even though this city is full of broken songs. The father begins to sing, something old, from their old city. The son covers his ears and leaves, mumbling that he’s a painter now. The son passes Chit Chat, the neighbor’s white cat, on his way home. She hurries, resembling a flash of sunlight, underneath some bushes.

Father is alone in the city to do what he will.

Has someone upended you, old man? A passerby comments in the park, shooing the father out of his way on a path.

Not yet, Father holds his palms upward. I’m holding these sad, sick trees up.

The man places some money in his hands. Which makes the father feel demented, as if he wants to leap away from these terrible cement walkways. What makes him angry all the time?

Father searches for his wife using his own choreography down the streets. He thinks of ~. Blames his nerves on the move, family, theft of courtesy, clouds, trees, politics. He howls inside. He forgets his wife and bangs his way home. He furiously screams his love to his children inside his house.

Another Mother

The daughter, not meaning to stare, watches the usually unnoticed woman offering books from forgotten civilizations. The girl sits at a wooden table, her head between a book cover and a page, any page. The daughter discovered a dictionary at the bottom of a shelf and ponders its grievous words for feelings although she has already returned the book to its place. Both the girl and the woman care about the future. But the woman is familiar with other worlds and the puff of her stomach is noticeable. The daughter wants to ask her about her own new cloud breasts, hair sprouting like burls and buds in unseen parts of her body, leaking blood, and her urge for a new mother.

As she walks by, the woman tucks her brown hair, a round rock at the back of her head, and smells of oranges. She stops and turns to the girl. You must like mysteries.

The daughter doesn’t know where to rest her eyes then notices the title of the book she’s holding, “Disarmed by a Hat.” Oh, she startles.  The woman’s green dress and shoes match, aligning now bumpily in front of her.

The other mother brings a finger to her lips and kindly says, I know, shush here. She points to a bookcase labelled Mysteries.

Where’s the section for destiny? the girl inquires shyly.

First you must understand your past. She walks on.

It is too quiet. The girl wants music so she can twist and spin the same way she invents companion dance partners at home, ghosts that change their forms. The city is extravagantly noisy outside, through the windows. Will she ever make something of herself?

The daughter doesn’t believe what many people say, including these books. She remains sitting, thinking of the city she and her family left, with its sidewalks and walls spelling insidious things, the neighbors’ stories that resembled poetry, and its expensive inventions.
The woman with the brown hair is leaving and a large planet inhabits the daughter’s chest where it is sinking rapidly and despondently. She doesn’t know what she’ll do without this woman. A man meets the woman near the front door and they tip through it. The girl is alone again wondering if the woman will soon be giving birth to someone just like her.

 

Laurie Blauner is the author of five novels and eight books of poetry. A book of hybrid nonfiction called I Was One of My Memories is forthcoming from PANK Books and a new novel called Out of Which Came Nothing is available from Spuyten Duyvil Press.