Dinosaur Bees

Miss tHing, I Think I Love You
Kyle Hemmings

Dinner Party with Strictly Anti-Cubist Anchovies

Mrs. Block, who is worried that her sister, Miss tHing, will remain the hidden shape of a daffodil on the back of cereal boxes, throws a party. The world is full of kind wolves, she whispers into Miss tHing's ear. Then she's engulfed by conversations with dangling participles and gaps for abridged histories that can't be crossed. Miss tHing serves onion dip to the three gentlemen from Poughkeepsie and an expatriate gondolier whose glass constantly needs refilling. One of the Poughkeepsies speaks with darting eyes, sideways and back towards center. Miss tHing interprets this as a self-destructive epileptic who wills his own seizures when a relationship goes one up. The other Poughkeepsie asks if the onion dip is homemade and that he knows a shop where you can hear onions cry without being peeled. Then he laughs. He's chubby and superficial, all spin and afraid to be alone, a gleam in his eyes when he tells a Chelsea Handler joke. Miss tHing believes that he's been molested by a bridesmaid with long-ass fingernails, rainbow colored, some ugly scars where he remains untouched by diets. Just then a pizza boy from The Dough That Never Sleeps arrives with six boxes with different toppings: weeping anchovies, smug tomatoes, salmon on the run, ham cubes without true edge, comatose mushrooms, and vegetable proxies. The varieties of crust are Light Between Your Lips, Thick as Our Childhoods that Never Met, Hard Like Your Father Who Killed a Man in Calais, Soft Touching Corners, Thin-Girl Mystery, or None At All. Miss tHing places an intimate tip in the boy's palm and she can tell by the fading glint in his eye that he's dying. Nothing to worry about/all's well with the world/Okay, see ya/ are his last words on the way out. She watches as his truck becomes smaller than insects' dreams under a flicker of unnerving light. Back in the living room, the gondolier has collapsed from dehydration and one of the Poughkeepsies is finger painting in the air the curves of his ideal woman. Miss tHing studies the dimensions and concludes that the lines don't meet--an unfinished woman. Or one who lets the air in, floating man through man. She'll never be Photoshopped or burnished. She lifts her wine glass and smiles at her reflection, foreshortened, eyes like rivers. After making a wish, she knows who she will sleep with tonight. The room is the sound of stones breathing in the afterglow of rising water.

Bathing Chickens

It isn't like trying to get Miss tHing into a corner so you can whisper in her ear that she's got lice. There are days when you yourself feel flat-bodied and wingless, sucking on dry hair. It's your problem too is what Miss tHing would say. It isn't like chasing a toy dog into its own shadow, just to hear Miss tHing laugh. Her eyes still reflect miles of Ohio grasslands, a childhood hoed by bony fingers, turned on empty smiles, lulled by insects chirping under the bed. In those years of false breasts, Southern Ohio was slow in gravity. Later, a man appeared in her life with nine fingers. He never gave a satisfactory explanation, only that he killed chickens for a living. She left him out of fear; he never said much, a gaping pothole in the road, deeper day by day. But she still gives you goose bumps, those jitter critters under the skinny that makes you want to mate. Or squawk in your wire cage. You will soak the chicken you caught today with warm salty water. You'll remove any trace of slime, mucous. But because you suspect this chicken is sick, shot through with all kinds of antibiotics, you let it go. In the late afternoon, while your dad is buying pipe tobacco at a Quick-Check too far down the road, you spot a chicken, perhaps the same one, pressing one side of its head against the screen window. Maybe it wants to warn you. Maybe it's just plain nosy. And you and Miss tHing are busy making all kinds of wingless love. She calls it lice, spending entire lifetimes in the space, shaped like Ohio, where you and she intersect. In the night, after she's left, you sink in your own space, your resistance shattered.

Paper Moons

Miss tHing likes to get down with her paper moons, all scissors and cut-up fingers. Tipsy on Apricot brandy, flirty as the child she once was riding red bicycles downhill, stroking hard curves, bluffing every mama’s boy, or just your mama. “ I stole your son’s bike," she announced from far corners, from screeching burn-outs. The sun was high and she flew solo. But now, seven weeks after rehab, three lunar months after a man scorched her with lies of his red desert existence, a space she could understand, a man whose burning feet she could love, she knows there are two people in the mirror: her image, the tattered girl, the once-again love-urchin without a man or an alibi, the lollipop girl, but no candy today. And there’s the real her who gets reborn every happy hour, only to get aborted at the door.

Troubleshooting RAM

I’m going to gently nudge against your elbow, Miss tHing. It’s a dull party is what I’ll whisper into your left ear. I’m still in software development but there’s a future in hardware. They’re going to do something outrageous with hydrogen particles in the near future. It’s going the triple the size of RAM. I’ll try to keep the flow going until either you spill your grape soda or I get so drunk that I tell you that I pulled your name from a dictionary. It’s such a ubiquitous name but you have the soul of a butterfly. A monarch. I know. That line sucks. I’ll keep telling myself that I’m in deep until I sober. But by then, it will be too late. We work on different floors, don’t we. You’ll smile and say Hi in the cafeteria. I’ll bring my own lunch. You won’t remember a thing. Or try to forget what couldn’t quite process between the two of us.

Uncle Amazing

When Miss tHing was just a letter in the alphabet, her uncle was a language all to himself. She wanted to learn it, but the vowel-consonant-vowel was too complex for her to grasp. He was amazing. He twisted within the hula hoop, the dizzy heat, a sizzling barbecue and everybody’s mom in attendance. At night on the beach, he could swallow fire or made it look like he could. Miss tHing could never understand how he got away with that trick without remaining speechless for life. He taught her how to spread an even line of mustard on all beef hot dogs or how it could be mistaken for suntan lotion. That was a no-no. Then the unthinkable happened. He drowned in a huge tidal wave while trying to save her. When she came up for air, she realized she had swallowed his words. From then on, there were fish inside her head. She could never understand what they were saying, but she knew they were hungry.

KYLE HEMMINGS is the author of three chapbooks of poems: Avenue C (Scars Publications), Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), and Amsterdam & Other Broken Love Songs (Flutter Press). He has been pubbed at Gold Wake Press, Thunderclap Press, Blue Fifth Review, Step Away, and The Other Room. He blogs at http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com/.

Collin Blair Grabarek ::	Speak One Way

Karen Greenbaum-Maya ::	Raksasa: The Deer-Pig

Amanda Ackerman ::	Human Time: Poem Eight, Self-Pity

Kyle Hemmings ::	Miss tHing, I Think I Love You

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming ::	How Can You Understand?

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft ::	If You Can(’t) Take the Heat, Get Out of the Sit-In
	Rocket Man

Peter Schwartz ::	Uncle Shorty

Davy Carren ::	Picture of a Postcard

Misti Rainwater-Lites ::	Primordial Pudding

F.J. Bergmann ::	Instant Affirmative

Matthew Burnside ::	YUL BRYNNER DOESN’T GIVE A MOTHERFUCK
	NO ORGASM WILL EVER MAKE ME FEEL THE WAY MORGAN FREEMAN'S VOICE SOUNDS
	TRAPPED IN GARY BUSEY'S HOUSE, ONE TEXT LEFT

Matt Robinson ::	The Oppressionist

Nick Narbutas ::	Enchanted, I’m Sure

Eleanore Leonne Bennet ::	Two photographs

Alexis Pope ::	Tired, Hungry, Dirty

Meghan Lamb ::	It’s A Party!