Giants and Nobodies

by Steve Calamars

The brass-knuckles are already on when I round the corner.  They are on my right hand, concealed in the pocket of my blue jeans.

I see Kafka on the sidewalk.  He appears to be arguing with Milena about something.  He doesn’t see me coming.

Kafka is a giant in this neighborhood.  I’m more of what you’d call a nobody.  The only element in this entire arrangement in my favor is surprise.

So I walk up quick.  I pull my fist from my pocket.  The gleam of the brass-knuckles in the sunlight is sour to his eyes.  Kafka squints.

Milena opens her mouth to scream, but it’s too late.

I catch Kafka with a right hook, like a cinderblock to the side of his head.

My left hand comes from my left back pocket in a flash.  All you hear is the metallic flutter of the butterfly knife.

I bury it in his chest 5 or 6 times, before leaving the knife in there and cocking my right hand back.  I fire it like a fastball into the center of his face.

Solid brass-knuckles bulls-eye the soft target of the nose.  An explosion of red jelly and jagged purple bone fragments.

Kafka falls back, like a flat gray sheet along the sidewalk.

I leave him lying there, bleeding out, Milena at his side, crying over him.

I slip my right hand back into my pocket.  I keep walking.  I turn the corner at the end of the street, my body dissipating like pink light and black smoke—

chuck taylors

by Steve Calamars

propped up on the
coffee table and a
chuck norris flick
flashing on the
television set

mike meraz poems
and dc comicbooks
erase the afternoon

evening passes with
pushups and patsy cline
pouring from the radio
like pinballs

as insomnia and reckless
ambition keep me pounding
words into these pages

beneath halogen stars
and a chalkboard-green
midnight—

my relationships

by Steve Calamars

end like plane crashes
nose-dives into shallow
green fields
spilling into an overflow
of flying parts and
burning wreckage
where the women
i’ve grounded spring up
like sunflowers and are
picked by more interested
men with green thumbs
and soiled minds
while i sink down into
my own fertile imagination
sprouting poems
and watching the fruits of
my loneliness rot in my skull
till they fall and ferment
in my brain
sweetening my thoughts
and allowing me to intoxicate
a new girl with my words
who gitty and under the influence
will lower her defenses
and trust that with me
at the controls
our love will soar
in safer skies—

the sound of gray

by Steve Calamars

my life is quiet
when you are
not inside of it

heavy with the
silence of
cartoon-purple ponds
in a japanese winter

or soaked in
the cool-orange stillness
of a writer's desk
supporting like a
pedestal a single bronze
shell-casing after a 9mm
has gone off . . .