THE JOSHUA PHENOMENON
by John Bennett
Velocity and gravity, those are God's juggling balls. Velocity, gravity and the speed of light.
Velocity and gravity warps space and mucks around with time like it's a yo-yo. It's because velocity and gravity speed up and slow down time that the speed of light remains constant, a brisk 186,000 miles a second. Maybe from where you're standing on a street corner in a boarded-up section of Detroit it looks like some space jockey is going twice the speed of light, but the way the space jockey sees it, he's at rest after a high-risk lift off, even if he is going half the speed of light. As far as light is concerned, its going 186,000 miles a second no matter what sort of mind game you're playing.
If the space jockey were to go exactly 186,000 miles a second, space and time would vanish. The key word here is exactly. This sort of speculation gives a new twist to the word hypothetical.
But what if the space jockey gets really fired up and exceeds the speed of light? There's no room in Einstein's universe for such a move. If the space jockey pulls that off, Einstein and Newton and the whole gang are relegated to tree monkeys in the scheme of things.
The scheme of things. God may be juggling velocity and gravity for spectators, but what's he got up his sleeve? Einstein said in all modesty that he wanted to know the thoughts of God, but I wonder if God thinks. Thinking is a tool for figuring things out, and what's God got to figure out, being the Prime Mover and all? The Prime Mover and Shaker. The Big Cheese.
What happens when space and time vanish? Any Zen monk worth his salt will tell you it's not there to begin with, string theories be damned. But let's get hypothetical and suppose it is. There are those who say that if you exceed the speed of light, you break on through to the other side. You come out in another universe as Jim Morrison. It's the old parallel world business, the mirror image, the flip side of the coin.
It's all a toss of the coin. Three coins in the fountain, which one will the fountain bless? Make it mine! Make it mine! Make it mine!
And there's the rub--the make-it-mine syndrome. Belligerent universes out the yin-yang held at arm's length from each other by the speed of light, God's Cosmic-Bar bouncer.
Only the pure of heart access other worlds. They do it offhandedly, unintentionally, while taking out the trash or kissing their babies into sleep. The speed of light has nothing to do with it.
***
Zanzibar, Shangri-la, Never Never Land--they've been with us from the get-go.
Heaven is when self-erected barriers come crashing down.
The Joshua Phenomenon, I believe it's called.
THEY HAVE A WORD
by Caleb Brooks
Three cold cups of coffee and an open
door. Here, in a linoleum dawn, there is toast
and damp white sheets hanging forgotten over
an uncut lawn. I'll do it today. The family lies
in the early shadow of their neighbors' walls.
Comfortable and informal, death wears a blue
house dress. A radio plays. Under the rusty grin
of the mill, a man kneels, not to pray
anymore, kneels and takes the other's testicles
in his mouth
as the sight of a rifle watches, rapt. Dry, hollowed
eyes, he closes, with his teeth, he tears.
At a cinder siding idled in August, the girls were taken
from the train, from cattle cars (yes, cattle cars. You can't help but hear echoes clang und strum as images couple and roll).
After the sixteenth Irregular, one more than her age, blissfully she lost consciousness. Deep in the depths of the Drina
below an ancient bridge, a cutthroat trout hangs
in a sheltering lie, breathing blood.
They have a word for the lonely and lost
places like this: vukojebina -- where the wolves fuck
a word for times when the wind slinks through trees
at the end of a rutted road, where the field falls
to wood, where the last civil rows of corn at the edge
are sacrificed, ravaged by deer and sun and sere.
Here there is a freshly turned patch of earth,
rectangular -- a postcard from Europe, summer 1993..
ENEMY OF THE WORLD
by Gerald Zipper
He awoke
muscles sore from his life of lifting
unaware he was the scourge of mankind
inhaling the energy of mornings
fueling up his daily rituals
cereal grains boiled in milk
mud-stained bus careening past fields and huts
weeveling through grimy parts of the city
unaware he was the curse of mankind
workers crowd the bus
pressing the breath out of him
like an olive press flattens the pulp
he squeezes to be smaller
hoping to be invisible
unseen is a safe place
potholes slam the bus
elbows and knees stabbing into elbows and knees
unaware he was the affliction of humanity
the bomb was a hot mushroom
eviscerating the busload of travelers
severing torsos
tearing limbs
flinging their liberated heads out of smashed windows and no one ever knew why.