Jeff Brooks is a RealPoetik subscriber. He writes:
I live in Seattle with my wife, son, and daughter. I have a day job writing junk mail. I also play string bass (folk-rock, classical, and certain points in between). My fiction has earned me complementary copies of literary mags that take up about eight inches of shelf space. I wrote a novel about a guy who smuggles Tupperware into Mexico; I'm afraid NAFTA rendered it obsolete.
The Ascension of Trout Fishing in America Shorty
(For Richard Brautigan)
I stepped out of an art gallery, thinking the phrase "elasticity of form." Then, my foot poised over a cobblestone that smiled like a famous glaciated bread loaf, I saw him: Trout Fishing in America Shorty. I suppose it was only logical that he'd end up in Seattle, muttering supine on a bench in Occidental Square, his wheelchair on its side in a puddle of cigarette water, his empty pants legs hanging over the edge of the bench and swinging back and forth as if they dreamed about walking. He shaped his mouth into an ellipse and made a noise like a trout fart. A trout that eats a lot of underripe watermelon and swims the sewers beneath liquor stores. The benches of Occidental Square are so comfortable--long, with looped iron arm rests and seats curved so as to support each reclining vertebra (O featherbed, O draught of rose-sweetened air for winos)--so comfortable that the City wants to remove them. They attract nuisances and eyesores like Trout Fishing in America Shorty. Iwalked on past Trout Fishing in America Shorty. He, of course, could neither see nor hear me, but his breath got up from his body and followed me--panhandling, as they say--so I gave it a dime. As it crawled back toward the bench it dragged one of its stumps through some horseshit. Struggling to wipe itself clean, Trout Fishing in America Shorty's breath painted a horseshit ideograph on the stones of Occidental Square; before it melted in the rain I translated it into English and wrote it down: "Fuck this world." Isaw Trout Fishing in America Shorty again a few days later. He was floating upward in the February mist, his wheelchair gently turning, I guess, toward a Chicago neon valhalla. As he disappeared, swallowed up in the gray sky, he sang softly to himself. It sounded like a chainsaw cutting through wine bottles.
The Ganges
Brother I'd stand on my head in the Ganges for you, he said. The Ganges? I asked. The green and stinking Ganges that looks like all the snot in the world with dead dogs bloated like footballs nosing through a film of ash blood sewage? Yes, he replied, the same. Your hands would sink into the shitty sediment on the bottom, I said. Up perhaps to your elbows. And among choking strands of algae lurk great pale crocodile-like fish and even crocodiles themselves that have been known to drag silent holymen under. Nevertheless, he maintained, that is what I would do. Well, I said, let us hope it never comes to that.
both c1994 Jeff Brooks mtic@aol.com