Twenty-Ten RuleBy John LaPine
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your boss says, her heels high, hair
black feathers. Smile at guests twenty feet away, greet them at ten. Her lips squeeze out words less sour. By afternoon, you've counted fourteen greasy coffee mugs, nine stacks of sheets, seven high, for each of five floors, nearly a foot of pillowcases, sixteen wine glasses— a windchime. And in early morning light, the word “poem” looks like “lie,” but you aren't sure if it's noun or verb, untruth or stillness. When he enters the elevator, the man with hair like shattered glass, belly of a bull, wraps tendrils around nape, seems to sniff you. He is bucket of worms, he is flesh soft in hard plastic, breath humid ghosts— breath a slug’s trail. You look familiar, he says. The 409 makes you sneeze. Let it drip from rags. Imagine it melting the floor, releasing pillars of cathedral light in shafts. Have we met? Says he recognizes you from Grindr. I've never fucked a black boy before, asks you if the stereotypes are true, asks you to open a door, to steal away to a room, blow him in a restroom or fuck right here on the lift, his breath, coffee ice cream, hand-churned thick and milky. It fills the moving room a chill. By tonight, he still will not have fucked a black boy. Ten feet away, you remember you forgot to smile. The Sound of Hair Growing is DeafeningBy John LaPine
ElegyFor Stephon Clark
By John LaPine
John LaPine has an MA in Creative Writing & Pedagogy from Northern Michigan University (NMU) and volunteered as Associate Editor of creative nonfiction & poetry at Passages North, NMU's literary journal, for three years. His work has appeared in the Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Hot Metal Bridge, The Rising Phoenix Review, & Glass Poetry's Resist series, and is forthcoming in Glint Literary Journal, Apofenie, yell/shout/scream, Petrichor, & Midwestern Gothic. He begins teaching English at Butte College in August 2018.
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