Eighteen

    Walks away does not look back.

    Looked back once. Years ago. Through the window
    of a brown Chevette. Then lost in the windings of
    Classen Avenue down unnoticeable hills to the new
    life of strangers at patio doors.

    Found again and again: carrot thrown from her high
    chair, dollar brushes, gifts of grown-up perfume.
    Eternal plumpness of her earliest smiles.

    Then Mission Avenue, where guns barked and the
    floors gave way. Her decade of gymnasts. Dove,
    fishes, gerbils, all dead.

    Once during the war she read Glamour, flames
    from the TV lighting her face. This during the years
    of her beauty which continue.

    (—Doors slammed. Boyfriends in gouts.
    Some of them kissed.)

    Newly bathed, minutes old, she
    opened her dark eyes and smiled, the
    wings of her fitted to my opened palms.

    Lara, my little blister, bearing gifts like
    Aphrodite.



    Bio Note
      Joe Ahearn is the founder and editor of Rancho Loco Press and Veer magazine. His criticism, translations, and poetry have appeared in many periodicals, including The Quarterly, Five AM, Dallas Review, Mudlark, Recursive Angel, Sulphur River Literary Review, and others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, most recently in 1996. His book-length manuscript, Folie, was a finalist in the 1997 Violet Haas Reed Prize offered by Snake Nation Press.

      Ahearn’s work has been collected in the limited-edition chapbook, Kyoko At Play (Harvest Publications, 1994) and in two anthologies: CrossConnect: Writers of the Information Age (CrossConnect, Inc., 1997) and Other Testaments (Incarnate Muse Publications, 1997).

      The poems here are from his manuscript, Five Fictions, which will be published by Sulphur River Review Press later this year. Ahearn lives in Dallas, where he writes poetry, essays, and books about advanced software development.

      New work by Ahearn and others appears on the Synthetic Web Page, which provides both examples and theory relating to the synthetic method of composition, a new way of writing poems that is being pioneered in the wild territories of Texas.


    Contents
    		 



     Joseph

     Ahearn