GLENN SHAHEEN / 3 PROSE WORKS
TRINKETTED HELL
I’m fascinated to see Mrs. Bonely Hearts, all done up in her finest.
Long black rectangle from ceiling to floor—it cannot be touched, it cannot be looked upon.
If you glaze into the abyss does the abyss not glaze you? Now you’re all sticky.
We are wrapped too tight in the rags of The Money Question. How much happiness can we reserve over the next, say, ten fiscal years?
Are sin disease and death real? They feel like the only things interesting to me these days.
Avoiding the black space in our living room that erases light, that hums and hums.
Rhombus with no dimension and it doesn’t even solve our problems.
A higher presence and I’m not talking about birds here.
Trying to grab some shuteye amidst the latest blaze, dubbed The Golden Fires by the news.
All my friends are in recovery, I wish I could join them, I wish I had done more drugs.
TSA Agents so friendly in their pat downs as I try to tell a little joke.
Who Made Who from Maximum Overdrive, a movie about killer trucks. Who made me angry, who made me Arab?
The flesh beneath the flesh.
Now the obelisk has the floor. It hums a little mosquito sound. It tells us not to cry.
ZEROS SLAMMING THE HULL HEAVEN
A million dollar idea for a horror movie. I know, a million dollars isn’t a lot when you’re talking show business, but hear me out: a murderer who specifically targets babies. People would hate that, it would freak them out and everybody would be so scared. Could you imagine?
Poetry friends online plugging away on their novels, it’s easy to make a switch if it means money, big money, big money for a poet.
Maybe the killer is a babysitter who’s changed one too many diapers.
Fame and fortune so eluded the poet they turned to anything that’d give ’em a hundred bucks and a thousand extra online engagements. The agent told me they don’t take nonfiction books unless the author has “a significant online presence.” Me, I don’t want a presence. I just want a little hole, a cave with a nice sort of moss as a carpet and maybe a mouth to shout out of every now and then.
Major studios wouldn’t even dare to show a baby get killed, what is this, Alexander Nevsky? Teutons and Tartars at each other’s throats and I forget who I’m supposed to root for until the music kicks in. Here in my movie you wouldn’t root for the baby killer, come on. The protagonist, idk, would have maybe recently lost a young sibling or cousin and takes this all personally. They’d probably make it so maybe the hero herself is unable to have a child despite years of trying, the abject failure of movie womandom, the worst possible outcome for a woman in America to face, no children, no soiled diapers and midnight screams.
Ha, no, I love babies, incapable little loaves of meat.
My wife and I are not having children, we are childfree. A choice we made, my wife in a much happier place without the stomping of uneasy feet in the hall, the hatreds all children drag home with them from general interactions with Americans. Cradle cap. Whooping cough. The impending nightmares of climate change and whatever other political harm we could foist on some life we don’t even know yet.
I have to say “my wife” because you may think it’s cruel of me to force this upon her, this inward facing movement that keeps us away from the trudgens of other parents, enemies, just bad people. I didn’t do any pushing, a baby is nothing to me, or maybe everything. Tragedies waiting to happen, someone to talk to when I’m half or mostly dead.
So many bad people on every street but at least I can’t see in through their windows as the lightning sets us aflame in a classical sort of dread state.
SLIME HEAVEN
A society in which everyone spends their lives unearthing all of the information about the dead, what they liked, what they did, and creates a sketch of them for future generations.
The actors important now, but how many actors can you name from a century ago? Two centuries ago?
If I tossed coins into the forest, could I find them? Little tiny replicas of human skulls? They could create a mystery for a wandering child.
If infinite possibility exists, then perhaps there is once again a time when we could goof off and talk trash. Would talking trash even be fun for the dead?
“Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.”
What if we live all the lives people who meet us perceive?
The video of the adorable rescued kittens, and now they’ve grown up.
And now they have died of old age.
To say I am just now middle aged is to ignore my medical history.
In the dream I have traveled back in time to see a Bleach era Nirvana show, but I had to make sure I didn’t check my cellphone in front of anyone in 1989.
Living anyone’s life I choose, floating around in all possible time. What afterlife isn’t grotesque and horrifying?
Laden with chains, walking slowly across the surface of the earth, letting my fingertips drag along the walls, the leaves, the bark.
Glenn Shaheen is the author of four books. He is president of the Radius of Arab American Writers and teaches at Prairie View A&M University.