MECCA

She dances death magic in white linen dress, careless eyes, sad, blue fire, her speech the slow, easy prose of alleyways and lost marks slain, she thinks in poetry, dreams of songs, forgotten bodies that bore them to silence, till now they rest in the manifest depths of her conquering heart. Cracked brickwork walks and writhing iron trellises, sleazy bars and decadent eateries, never slowing, never closing, comes our royal line in perpetual stream: teamsters and legionnaires, artists and lunatics, actuaries, newlyweds, angels, and devils, not so accidental pilgrims any of them, all her lovers just the same. Gawking at two-bit sins, screaming in consumptive joy, praising dead gods, we order another round, another tray of aperitifs of the apocalypse: Hurricanes and Mudslides, Tornados and Tsunamis. But never Famine. Never Pestilence, War, or Death. Staring, consuming, gazes naked, spent desire and spare change, creased bills and idiot leers. All dance to the bayou city beat, the zydeco slave haze heat, all sing to the sound, play to the backbeat of her synthetic heart. Sipping drowning sleeping dreaming, all come to be made and remade in the image of capital and Christ, magic and money, all come to darkest beginning and brightest end, all come to American Mecca.

TSARIST POP STAR

Signet Classic, blurred sketch, ill-set, black/white, tiny type, skewed, weathered pages, a conjury of dust into a tiny suburban storm. Cough and read. Cough and read. Yosnaya Polyana was his pad, it says. Mad count, mad writer, War and Peace, that twofer was the greatest ever, it says. Look at all these pages, all that bearded genius. He was big, it says, until he wasn’t. That beard, she still is. Big. Tolstoy’s memory must have seemed worthy of history once-upon-a-Signet-Classic-time, deserving of odes or at least reprises, some summary poet’s lyric soulship to carry the spirit of genius ‘cross ruined land, ruined world, ruined history, a chariot littéraire, to bear solace grace witness, comfort the ears of the god’s true believers, candles slim, bottles fat, raising fire in drunken November night. Morning come someday sometime, the future would sow their seeds again, cloak their fields in carpets of blazing dawn, no more to bear the litter of lost lives, misremembered loves. Fin de siècle close at hand and where to turn for an image to take the place of their beloved Czar, beloved count, their god literary, their Tsarist pop star, where to cling but paper icons cast in black and white. Fearing to lose a ready truth they must trust they can pray, pray they can sleep.

GOD AND JUDY GARLAND

God started thinking about the end the day Paris fell to Hitler. He knew the Nazis were killers, that they would destroy everything He loved. Art and Hope, Peace and Charity, and so on and so on. For better or worse, God knew on that day that his time with man was coming to an end. Still, it took God almost a decade to accept his fate, self-imposed though it was, because, after all, he’d been God for quite a while and as we all know, it’s hard to give up something you’re used to. It’s hard to give up something you love.

Kurt Baumeister has written for Salon, Electric Literature, Guernica, The Weeklings, The Nervous Breakdown, The Rumpus, The Good Men Project, and others. An Emerson MFA, his debut novel, a satirical thriller entitled Pax Americana, was published by Stalking Horse Press in 2017. He is currently a Contributing Editor with The Weeklings. His Review Microbrew column is published by The Nervous Breakdown. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, or at https://kurtbaumeister.com/.