An Early Rust (novel excerpt) and four poems by Jeff Stewart.

It was the two of them now, and his father had again become the drunk, the juggler, hustler and petty thief he had been before meeting his wife, who had twenty-four years ago set him straight on a selfless, unfamiliar path. And no matter how worn and traveled the path had been by the old man, no matter how many sacrifices he made for his family, the hours worked to blood and bone, after the sudden absence of youth, only because he had loved a woman with faith in God, no matter how ingrained the path became beneath his heels, it slept there unfamiliar, and up the path beyond his reach lay the brightly lit shores of crime after dark, of barrooms and whores, of embalmed cigarettes and heroin, of all his lost hours, given over for the love of one woman, who was now buried, and only the boy's remaining need for him was what held his blood clean.


The boy was seventeen, that night he was seventeen, and the lobby was full of them again, the broken, the damned, the forgotten filth of women and fathers on the curbs of West Phoenix. The line of sickness, the stench of broken teeth and the smell of sweat encrusted shirts saturated with smoke, with exhaust and liquor, and the beer bellies of leather skin men and women, perched upon toothpick legs and half eaten shoes.

He stood among them, staring off to nothing, staring into nowhere like a Goddamned movie, like something that could make sense out of something else. He stood there, cut adrift, watching in the distance his childhood, laid out in the cold blood of his mother, watching an earthworm slip between the grains of pine. It broke its way in, and rolled a bubble under the thread of a sewn eye. A drunk behind him pushed the boy's shoulder forward, to get closer to the street again, to an open wasteland of civilization, an opened door into damage and filth, of gutters littered with syringes, smiling with broken glass and shards of bone. All of nature's passions spent, all of God's forgotten grace descended and rotting, the guilt of God's plan and the bloody tears of war-torn angels. All the mysteries of children lacerated.

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1


bloody mary and burger and pen
careless on a friday afternoon
candle, menu, page and ink
out the window and lifeless in dust
rot the hours and uniform, the burning
of waste and heart and index.
the hot shame and flames and fire
burning and
twisting
and
screaming
I sip my drink and watch
a wig travel
the sidewalk
while across the oceans
a lion mounts his female.


2


my dog sunbathes in the
tall grass of my backyard
he has one blue eye, which is electric
and see through, and he has a partial
blue eye, so I called him Chico.
Not very writerly of me. I guess I
could have called him Capote,
or Mailer, come to think
of it. He's a macho one, but also feminine
on a few levels. I think if Mailer and Capote
fucked, though, Mailer
would have been on bottom.
Not for loss of control,
but for total control.


3


I don't know you anymore,
but I will call you Alexandria
I will hold your body without
weight or breath or bother when
the branches break in the northern wind,
while death dangles ugly
while the warfare harvests its dead, its
brown leaves
while the sorrow usurps loneliness
I will call you Alexandria
for no other reason than you are nameless
and I am alone and destroyed
but maybe
I will call you Alexandria because
in a novel you were sweat upon
and shot upon in the back of an
old green van
I would call you Bronte or Joyce,
but you are far too beautiful
for them.
I will call you mine, here, for no
other reason than you can't exist.


4


sunday 5:45 p.m.

burning, dragging, a break in the blinds
shows the breath of Gauguin
with the metal grip of
Geiger, but not the taste
of ash or fire.

liquid screams pour
onward
leaking and
burning
and
dragging poor Gauguin
away from Tahiti
and through
the ages.