Dear Stories

My father kept going over the evacuation checklist.
We discovered someone stole my brother.

Someone should explain why there are all these naked women on the internet.

I started living with a crazy person.
She was the whole mental hospital—every floor, every ward, every diagnosis.

A plastic wrapped virgin stared at us as if she were under ice.

Birds snag their wings on the air.

I have learned to live my life but have forgotten these words: Secure your own mask before assisting others.

I put the man who told a different story on a shelf.  When I was sick of my story, I knocked on the cupboard door.

I wear the alphabet on my sweater one letter at a time.
It will be months before I make a coherent statement.

Dear God

It is difficult to take you seriously.

I am being summoned by the patron saint of bees;

I hear the sputter in the hives.

I’m rearranging the internal furniture in the

Muddiness—in the mind.

You are invited to secret entanglements—

A crumbling cosmic mystery.

As the naked woman dances, I wonder,

What does eternity weigh?

We are always waiting for the limousine doors to open.

I fear we are turning into plastic—one limb at a time.

We need to rescue the jewels out of the mangrove swamp—

Paint God’s nude portrait.  

Patrick Lawler is author of A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough  (University of Georgia Press, 1990), reading a burning book (Basfal Books, 1994), Feeding the Fear of the Earth (Many Mountains Moving Press, 2006), Underground: Notes Toward an Autobiography (2011), and Trade World Center (Ravenna Press, 2012). In addition, he has just published a novel, Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds (winner of the Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. Fiction Collective 2.  University of Alabama Press, 2012).  A short story collection, The Meaning of If, is scheduled to be published by Four Way Books in 2014.