Jeremy Halinen
Short Short Story
Dinner
I remove my mother's hairless head from the microwave and set it on the table between me and my husband. We think it was an accident. He found her facedown in the aboveground pool out back this afternoon. I gave her a buzz cut before baring her scalp with a razor and left him to pluck her eyebrows and eyelashes and the three black hairs from the mole above her lip. I can't say we miss her, but we did love her. As I kiss her lips before chewing them, I can't help but wonder which words were her last.
Poetry
John the Baptist's Headgear on a Platter
Herodias had finished using the head as a chamber pot, so Salome proceeded to disassemble and remove the headgear for a talisman. Then, after coating with her vaginal juices the sausage fetched for her by her manservant (an orthodontist/ time traveler who'd lost his powers while fixing John's smile), she troubled the mouth and throat with it.
The wind stirred up sand in the desert. No one noticed a man walking naked through the storm, not even the man himself, for he was too concentrated on the silence entombed in each circling grain of sand.
Salome tore clumps of hair from the head. She didn't swat the flies swarming. The flies didn't speak Aramaic, and she didn't speak Fly, so no communication occurred until her eyes bulged red and she shriveled, sprouting thin wings.
The sand had no way to know the man journeyed in a state humans rarely attain, for the sand was otherwise. Inside each grain, emptiness waited for nothing.
After she crawled out of the labyrinth of her collapsed garments, all Salome the Fly could think to ask her new companions was whether they knew a flyway to the future. They gave directions; she tested her wings. All her life she kept arriving unsatisfied, thinking of her last dance and other things she could have asked for.
Prayer
When you said you wouldn't fuck me anymore,
that you couldn't love a cheat like me,
I thought of that son of yours
turned flesh to die stretched and torn on tree.
I know it isn't proper to blame you
for what I've done, but don't you suppose
I might have been more faithful if you'd
let him live, if you'd tried to solve the knot
without violence and death? I'm in a mood
again and not sure without you that I want
this life you've given. No grace? No forgiveness?
No hand of yours extending a white rose?
You are a serial killer, God, admit it.
You give us life so you can end it.
Origins
and god created the first
letter. from its own images,
it created little a. after a
while, god said to its
selves, it is not good
for little a to be alone.
let us make little a a
companion. so god made little e,
who, upside down, looked almost
like little a. but little a, who
had enjoyed being a lone
little a, climbed the closest tree
and angrily tasted its fruit.
then little a felt a little like god,
unable to distinguish cause from
effect, so little a climbed quickly
down the tree and fucked
the alphabet out of little e.
The Lollipop Testicles of Death
You like them, hard and salty as a shaker
shaking in your soft, pink mouth. You think
your tongue's a pen writing on his wanker
with all's-well-that-ends-well ink. The stink
in your mouth is a church. Your tongue
is its steeple. You let it out to distress
the other dying people. Does God the Well-Hung,
because he made them, love your dirty, toothless
gums? Spit a prayer from your deathbed
and he'll never hit on you again. He'll turn red,
too shallow to swallow, too hollow to spit.
Hit him again. It's your life now, your death.
He's just along to witness the end of it:
your mouth flowered open without breath.
