If It Ain’t The Planting It’s The Weeds (revised version)

by Joel Asa Miller

His bones are rotting: sad but true. Infested with cancer. He's in a lot of pain too: aches deep all over. Doctors say he can't have more pain medication when he's on dialysis and if they take him off the machines, well you know… So I guess it's a choice: go out fast but without pain, or live with the pain a little longer.

He shouldn't have used all that spray, those chemicals you know, for the garden or varnishing or cleaning engine parts, the chain saw business he had, remember that? Or maybe it was all those years at Allis Chalmers, 15 years welding the arms on backhoe buckets. Then it was the lung cancer and surgery. After that, 18 more years of light duty in the stock room, playing cards and shootin' the shit with them genius buddies of his. Least he got a retirement almost as long as the 33 years he worked in that joint. Who knows? 'Course, maybe it's just that he's 77 and his time's up.

So now he lays in bed, down here in St. Jude's and he's tired. Doesn't blink, just wants to come home, just wants those pain killers. Says the garden needs to be turned under for the winter, mulched, protected, 'cause its per' near Thanksgiving already. I got the neighbor to come over to help with that. Raspberries and elderberries too: the ones he transplanted from the woods up north years ago same year he fell out of that tree, deer hunting.

Same year he blew a hole in the roof of the cabin with his 12-gauge pump. Nearly blew his head off, not to mention our hearing. He was so excited telling that story about spotting that darn 16 point buck was crawling 'round the forty while at the same time pumping the shells out of his gun.

Told me that story again this very morning. Just couldn't get a shot off, he says, damn buck always kept a doe between them. Ya! Ya! Tell me another bullshit story, I say and he just smiles and turns to the window at the colored leaves getting blown off the trees.

Anyways, he didn't talk to no one for days after that just went about patching the roof and the hole in the ceiling, cutting up the meat, packing sausages in beef casings 'cause I don't like the taste of pork tainting my venison.

He tells me all his memories are told in black and white: working the farm his family lost back during depression time. His ma nursing babies out in the fields at harvest time; him and his brother trapping rabbits in their own holes to put meat on the table for his folks and all them 12 kids; moving to town, taking his first job at the pickle factory or the egg factory, story changes each time or maybe I just get them mixed up; going down south Louisiana, Alabama some place like that in the service. People down there are so poor he says they eat earthworms: colored and white both.

Told me a new one after all these years, about some pretty little red head girl walked by him Sunday after church when he was stationed down there. She looked him up and down, high pockets corporal in his starched uniform, asked him if she'd see him that night at the hop. But he stayed in the barracks and polished his boots wishing he knew how to dance the Tennessee Waltz. Guess if he knew how, most likely I wouldn't be sitting here waiting for something to happen, wondering what's gonna be.

Anyways, I told him he didn't have to worry about taking care of me. I got the neighbors and my sister's not far, just over in West Allis. Maybe I'll go back and get my license renewed, just for short trips for groceries and that.

His pain seems to slip off him with the lubricant of his remembrances and he drifts off to sleep but not before telling me to close the blinds so he won't have to see the trees and sky no more.

When he gets up he'll ask me about the daughter and grandkids; when are they coming? He'll talk about taking them fishing. Something, their dad, the shittin' son in law, ex son in law never did.

He'll show them how to filet the fish proper: no bones to worry about, and fry them in beer batter and butter so they're light, no fishy taste.

Around here, there's always fish to catch, berries to pick, wild hazelnuts ripening in the fall along with grouse and squirrel hunting and the deer seasons, bow and gun. And the garden always needs tending: if it ain't the planting it's the weeds.

Copyright 2008 Joel Asa Miller. All Rights Reserved

10:03 - 8 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

A Plate of Oranges
Category: Writing and Poetry

A plate of oranges
Coffee badly brewed
Tangled sheets all night long
My arm locked around her waist
The freckle to the left of her spine
That rose to meet me like a joke that can't let go

A dip in the pool
A badly cooked meal
Burnt toast
A worn out futon
Stone cold sandwiches
Stoney silence on the couch

Passing a joint on the back porch
Smoke rising sweetly over the alley
Over tomato jungle summer
Over first furious winter snow
Over first furious flowering of trees in spring
Our misty mingled breath floating above the alley
A memory with wings.

Copyright Joel Asa Miller 2008. All Rights Reserved

08:35 - 7 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

The Wind Blows In November - Flash Fiction
Category: Writing and Poetry

by Joel Asa Miller

Now the wind blows in November. The sky changes as rapidly as he changed lovers since Marie-Anne left him that spring. He seeks warmth inside a bookstore.

A young woman leafs through one of many travel books on display. She savors the expansive cinematic photos that spread across the big slick pages. She imagines the vast promise of travel.

He thinks of Marie-Anne. How delighted she would be with the smallest things: red cabbage salad, the stroke of his hand along her spine, uncorking a stubborn bottle of wine. He smiles.

The young woman turns and smiles back. She shows him the open pages of the book revealing a lush and leafy tropical jungle.

They walk together in the chilly wind; "I never would have met you if you hadn't smiled at me." He brushes the yellow curls from her face. She tells him her name.

Copyright 2008 Joel Asa Miller. All Rights Reserved

08:37 - 7 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

Spellbound Rhythm of the Train - Fiction
Category: Writing and Poetry

By Joel Asa Miller

I'm sitting on the metro: windows glaring in every direction. They're inescapable and bounce your reflection at you from every angle like those three-way mirrors they used to have in department stores. So unless I stare at the floor, I have no choice but to see my reflection everywhere I look.

And I hate it. The weight of decades of the same routine hangs hideously on my eyelids.

It's good to be off work but its only Wednesday. What to make for dinner? Did I defrost anything before going to work? I can't remember.

A crowd of high school kids claims the aisle. They hang off the poles moving, pushing and posturing intensely, incessantly in some kind of frenzied, noisy ritual. It's 4:15. They must have just gotten out of school: all that pent up energy finally bursting out all over the place. Don't they realize there are other people on this train? There's a girl in dreadlocks sleeping like a baby in their midst.

How does she manage to do that?

A boy and a girl share a single seat. She sits in his lap. They kiss hungrily with open mouths. I feel like a voyeur so I look down but can't help catching the reflection of my own mouth. It's thin and tight. Two creases extend at forty-five degree angles from its corners to the bottom of my jaw like its rusted shut at the joint.

I want to scream.

Vendôme station. The kissing couple gets off the train. I follow them as they walk hand in hand on the platform to catch a connection to the suburbs. The train moves past them. I turn my head to keep them in my sight. How perfect they look, their faces soft with baby fat plastered generously on sturdy bones laughing easily. They could be headed in any direction off the island of Montréal, maybe Mont St. Hilaire.

Mont St. Hilaire bulges out of the flat St. Lawrence Valley like the back of a headless bull. Maurice told me it was a gathering place for extraterrestrials. He took me there on a bright blue day in May when the ground was a damp and spongy carpet of leaves rotting into indistinguishable flecks of loam. The whole mountain smelled like earthworms. The odor rose from the forest floor and mingled with the scent of sweat evaporating off his back and thighs as he slogged along the trail five feet in front of me.

The trees were flowering like crazy and the new leaves were just tiny points of color. We didn't see any signs of extra terrestrials, maybe because we couldn't keep our hands off each other. I tried resisting the urge but Maurice was persistent and we ended up doing it wild and fast pinned up against a huge tree trunk.

Somewhere within the blur of all the heat --- the dampness, the buzz of the frogs, and the rough bark of that tree scraping against my back --- I felt Daniel coming into the world. Rocketing in from another dimension. I never told anyone about that feeling, not Maurice, not even Daniel. It's just too weird a thing to share. Maybe I'll tell Juliet someday. She reads Tarot and studies Kabbala with a Rabbi in Côte des Neiges.

The three of us used to go back looking for that tree. We never could really be sure if we found the exact one. Eventually we decided on the official tree, a hefty, twisted oak that Daniel could climb when he was only three years old. His birthday is coming up soon. Twenty-five years old. Wonder what I should do for him. He's a grown man now. Wonder if Maurice will bother to call him on his birthday.

Panes of glass are everywhere on these trains. You can't escape them. My reflection is everywhere. My hair is a wreck, streaked yellow and dry as hay. I try to fix it but that means looking back in the window. It'll have to wait, I guess. Can't do too much with it anyway sitting on a moving train.

Can't do anything about my clothes either. I hate this light flower print blouse; it's so synthetic looking. I hate these cheap blue jeans. They curve over this little pouch of a belly that I can't get rid of. Guess I'll go shopping this weekend. Buy a loose skirt or something to cover it up. I'll get my hair done too, and see what I can find for Daniel's birthday.

Seeing that little newborn face for the first time was kind of a jolt. He was so different from what I'd imagined. He looked at me like he had some very important question to ask. Then he howled, all wet and waxy. But his face startled me even more than that scream. I guess I expected a replica of Maurice, or maybe even me. Certainly not that curious little face. I guess he looked a little like Dad just before he died. All scrunched up and raw.

We buried Dad back in Kingston in a black steel coffin built to survive a nuclear attack. I can still hear the echo of dirt and stone pelting the coffin's shiny enamel surface. I bought these pearls for the funeral, the little somber gray ones. I never saw pearls like these before. Bought them on the Internet and now everyone seems to be wearing them.

There's a fly on this train, buzzing around. It slams against the windows when the train stops at a station and dive bombs the lights when the train passes through the tunnels. Like that pigeon flying around the Berri Station last week. How did it get stuck down there under the ground? How will it get out?

The train jolts suddenly and slows down. The dreadlock girl wakes up. I've been so lost, spellbound by the rhythm of the train. My stop is coming up soon. The train jolts again. The driver drops his speed a second time, like he's making an emergency crash landing or something.

There's a very pregnant woman packed against one of the vertical steel poles. You can see her navel popping through her clothes on that melon of a belly she's carrying. She looks tired, trying to balance crammed in among all those raucous kids. I pull myself out of my seat. My hips are stiff and move like they're made of ice.

"Voulez-vous vous asseoir?"

The woman maneuvers through the crowd and nods at me. She plunks herself into my seat with something between a grunt and a sigh.

It's hard at that stage. I remember how it was. Have it down pat.

"Merci", she says.

I smile at her and she smiles back. I know I'm still pretty when I smile.

Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved. Joel Asa Miller

06:58 - 7 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

Exterior Day Laurier & St. Laurent - For Jackie
Category: Writing and Poetry

by Joel Asa Miller

He stands in the park bouncing his new balloon: delighted to watch it joyfully defy gravity like a dream flouting the laws of cause and effect. His mother wraps the string tight and holds his hand.

Oblivious to his wrist, under the power of its own magic, the balloon soars past the branches, past the birds, across the clouds, subject only to the wind.

He blinks twice, enthralled by his very first waking dream. Enchantment yields to the sensation of his feet hooked tightly into the earth. He knows he cannot reach the balloon.

He wants to be strong, but the tears flow anyway in silent streams down the contours of his face.

"I will buy you another" one," she says.

"It won't be the same," he says.


Copyright 2008 Joel Asa Miller. All Rights Reserved

12:20 - 6 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Back In The Day-Revised Version

by Joel Asa Miller

The bronze imp poised as if ready to pounce, flashes against its green background as the shingle its painted on hangs swaying against the gray sky, whipped by the blowing snow.

Diehard smokers gather on the corner. Drinkers assemble inside. Jaser pour jaser. The sky turns purple: a soft dusk replete with clouds. A trickle of streetlights descends down the street in a line: hot gold accents against old snow, gray and dull as sheet metal.

She sat at my computer and emailed her long distance lover right after making plans to meet me for an evening of dinner and drinks. "Françoise you can meet me when you’re done. After you’ve gone over the plans for your next tropical vacation."

I leave her at the office and walk down the shallow grade of the Plateau to Lenore’s.

Inside the tavern men squeeze together at the bar like shoats to the teat: sweet sensitive souls too soft for the world, growing more brittle with each drink.

I know I’m on my way to joining their ranks, if I’m not careful. So I order green tea and a quesadilla with extra piments. The tea draws suspicion; the quesadilla split into wedges, invites envy. I offer the plate to all present, but they raise their glasses politely. "Dinner’s right here," Mickey the drummer, says holding up a pint of coal black ale.

Françoise, boots up to her thighs, silvery leather flexing at the knees like medieval armor, walks in the bar. Heads turn. She struts across the stage in the center of an imaginary follow-spot, looking glamorous. The men gaze, but I don’t care what she looks like.

I don’t care because I remember how it was before she left town to become a star. I remember drawing crazy erotic pictures, dining out with her, on tables draped in linen. I remember slow kisses in the frozen streets on our way home. I remember falling asleep entwined like two kittens on the couch watching Singing in the Rain. I remember how she panicked when she thought she was pregnant. And how she wept when her period finally showed up.

…I don’t want your new hairstyle, Françoise. Or the clothes that he bought you. I don’t want your make-up or your lingerie. It doesn’t make a difference if you look like a whore, a movie star or a dog. Just sit down here, have a drink, and laugh with me until we cry and I will be happy.

Jeremy walks by and stares into the big plate glass windows like someone peering into an aquarium. He waves. His coat falls open, missing four out of five buttons. A woman ripped them off the winter before. She pulled his coat open on the street to reach inside and take him in her arms.

"Everybody asks why I don’t get those buttons replaced. Do I have the buttons? Maybe I’ll sow them on when I don’t need the souvenir anymore."

Jeremy asks me to buy him a beer. I can smell that he’s been to McDonalds, calculating the maximum number of calories he can buy with a $2 coin. Ten minutes on the corner of Roy and St. Denis nets the $1.99 breakfast. Then it’s off for that beer and the bummed cigarette he’ll smoke down halfway before stashing the butt in his silver cigarette case, the finely engraved cigarette case that he’s had since back in the day. Jeremy is getting through another winter half a cigarette at a time.

He sits at the bar and entertains Françoise, riffing on the sex ads in the back of the Mirror wearing his dollar-store glasses. One lens has fallen out so he is forced to squint He walks with a limp.

His shoes are decrepit, and shooting pains run up his right hip, deep into his back. His lower back never heals and it hurts like a bastard. He hopes the nerve damage will soon get so severe he won’t feel anything. Then maybe he’ll walk normal again.

"Why don’t you go to the doctor?" Françoise asks. "Doctors! All I need is a pair of good winter boots."

"Look at all these cuckoos," Jeremy blurts hunched in a round-shouldered crouch. He’s poised to pounce on the open page of semi nude women strutting their stuff across the black and white newsprint.

"The cuckoo is a pretty bird, it warbles as it flies," he whistles through his teeth, and nods knowingly. He enjoys being cryptic. He slowly draws in a chest full of air and rears tall on his barstool to speak.

"But that’s only on the surface. The cuckoo is really a lazy bitch. She takes what she wants and gives nothing in return. She dupes her rivals into caring for her young and flies off into the sky. And the young hatch early and push the other eggs, or any of the other baby birds that might have hatched, out of the nest. So even her babies end up doing her dirty work. And her beauty and her song charm the whole fucking world even while the busted eggs and dead chicks lay bloody on the ground.

"Ouach!" Françoise screws up her face in disgust.

"Appearance is everything," Jeremy declares with a slap of the rolled up Mirror on the bar. " Back in the day, when I looked the part, I got the goods, the woman, the job, the house, the drugs, booze, the dream vacation, whatever! Just like the cuckoo who lays eggs that appear to be the very eggs of the bird she’s planning on tricking. The cuckoo proves one thing: there is no truth, no justice, no love, no essence of anything, no G-d! In this or any other world, theft and deceit trump love in the end."

I’ve known Jeremy ever since I started coming to Lenore’s two years ago. I’ve heard his stories and his speeches a thousand times. Each time, there is something just a little bit different. Each time a new thread seems to fray.

I look him over once again. He’s kicked off his shoes and they’ve fallen under my stool. Almost all his socks have holes now. He’ll head up to Wal-Mart to buy a few pair. Maybe tomorrow.

He bought those jeans he’s wearing back in the day too. He wears layers of long underwear to mask the holes. But they’re still his favorites. He fingers the hole in his knee and gets up to pee. I get up and follow, filing by women who glance my way. There must be something right about me, I guess, or the clothes I’m wearing, that still attracts attention.

"The cuckoo is a vicious bird, she warbles as she flies. She stole from me, Lord! Borrowed and not repaid! And the hole is too deep. Just when there’s the promise of extricating myself, I fall back in even deeper than before. Down its slippery sides and I, I alone am at fault."

I wait outside the men’s room listening to Jeremy rant to G-d while he pees.

"Repayment is nowhere in sight. Not from her, that crazy cuckoo, or from those who can’t spare the time of day, let alone a beer ’cause they are too busy for me now. Busy choking on false friendships, friendships that stretch, back, back far back in the day. But not you my Good Lord, You are fairness, justice, and kindness. No evil comes from You and You stand by me always."

He’s taking his time and I think of going back to Françoise at the bar but I’m just as worried about Jeremy and fascinated by his harangue, as I am looking forward to being alone with her.

I just want you, Françoise. Not forever, just for a moment. Just for a taste, a drop of you. Yes, a moment will do fine.

The men’s room door finally opens. I slip past Jeremy not sure if he even sees me pass him. I catch my own reflection in the mirror. The gray haired stranger smiling back at me with the smile of a man who knows his life has already crested and is slipping softly away momentarily catches me spellbound.

I go back to the bar. Jeremy shows me the hole on the inner seam of his jeans. "This was the first one. They always rip here first. Just south of the crotch on the left leg. Some imbalance in my spine. Some twist in my body, makes them wear like that. Just like my shoes, see my shoes, how they’re wearing?" And he shows me how the soles have twisted grotesque and uneven.

Françoise is restless. She looks around the bar as two young women enter. She primps and discretely checks her makeup in the mirror behind the bar.

Jeremy watches the women too. He drifts off for a moment closes his eyes and inhales deeply. I imagine he imagines the warmth of their bodies, the cool sweetness of first French kisses from back in the day. He catches me looking at him. "Don’t think twice," he winks, "I’ll be ok."

"Take my arm, cherie," Françoise says as we step out onto the street. "Take my arm and call me darling." She buries her head in the crook of my neck.

"Sometimes when he sits at the bar, he can still make the women laugh. I’ve seen it. Last spring he found an older one, maybe 60 or so. She took him home and held him through the night hoping an erection might rise with the dawn. But it never happened. I was startled by his frankness telling this story right there in the bar with all souls listening."

We climb the steps to Françoise’s apartment. I grab her ass. She tries to shake me off and laughs sweet as a silver bell.

She stands facing me in her bedroom, her back to the full-length mirror. She lets her clothes drop one by one until she stands naked.

Her opening kisses are restrained, a gesture of loyalty to the new official man in her life. Inevitably the momentum builds and we twist and turn in her bed until the old wounds open and she comes legs locked around my hips, weeping in my arms. I hold her close and stay inside her as long as I can. The taste of her tears nearly makes me cry but I drift off in a shallow, rolling sleep instead.

She shifts out of my arms and I wake up. The world is asleep. The world is invisible. When it wakes up. When it makes itself known, known and visible I will slip away like our moment of pleasure that evaporated into thin air. She will go to the tropics with her long distance lover. And this little taste of her will last me until she comes back.

Copyright 2008. Joel Asa Miller. All Rights Reserved

07:11 - 6 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

I Cheated With Your Image
Category: Writing and Poetry

I cheated with your image
Shortcut load of your face in my song of love
Or was it song of fate?
Entwined in the high hat of my vision
Today it comes into focus
After the light starts to fade
Always too late.

Down the shimmering track
Roaring blue train rushes
Thought it would run right through me
But it passed on by
Ringing like a gong
Shattering brass bell rivets
Hammered into the iron of my skin.

Where's your smile when I need it the most?
The lines along the corners of your mouth
I followed them into the well of your fruitfulness
When the smokey winter sunlight fought through frozen fog
Staving off the urge for flight
Burning white cold coals
Ashen remnants from the cravings of the night.

Copyright 2008 Joel Asa Miller All Rights Reserved.

10:53 - 8 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

you left me souvenirs
Category: Writing and Poetry

you left me
souvenirs
intense and condensed
strong as coffee
bitter against my tongue
tasted against a back-plate of music
retro french bossa nova...

even alone it is profound
touching me like the memory of your caress
tearing through me like a searing bent-note
torn from an old guitar...

the sound resonates in my heart
I hold it there like marijuana smoke
wishing i could sing it
sing it back to you...

will you talk to me up close again?
will you let me talk to you, closely
my breath of fire grazing you
on your ear…
on your eye-lids…
on your tongue...

will you talk to me in the muffled montreal
snow
or in the rain?
soft satin snow or hard driving rain...
will you talk to me the way the rain talks to the roof…
or to the grass…
or to your face on a warm summer night?
will you let me talk to you again and will you listen?

Copyright 2008. Joel Asa Miller All Rights Reserved.

09:01 - 9 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment

L’hiver lâche prise sur Montréal (French & English versions)
Category: Writing and Poetry

L’hiver lâche prise sur Montréal
Et nous nous tenons entre les saisons
Entre l’amour et le désir
Comme la neige qui fond lentement et s’évapore
Ça n’est pas une promenade facile
Et tout aussi dur pour expliquer
Au travers la brume qui se lève au-dessus de l’île

Donc nous dansons entre les mots
Entre nos deux langues maternelles
Dans la même manière nos langues dansait ensemble
Ces dimanche matins
Avant le café au lait

Winter lets go of Montreal
And we hold ourselves between seasons
Between love and desire
As the snow melts slowly and evaporates
It’s not an easy walk
And just as hard to explain
Across the mist that rises over the island

So we dance between words
Between our two mother tongues
The same way our tongues danced together
Those Sunday mornings
Before breakfast

Copyright 2008. Joel Asa Miller. All Rights Reserved

08:38 - 6 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

the starlings

the starlings rustle busy in the trees
cracking branches like whips across her back
she buries the past in the adrenaline of the present
oblivious to the night sweats of tomorrow
as snow falls gentle muting the screams of the city
and dead martyrs silenced songs of commitment
are diluted as an emblem on her t-shirt

Copyright 2008. Joel Asa Miller All Rights Reserved

04:58 - 6 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment