Scott Zieher (bio)
from Impatience
What Mallarmé Said About Hamlet
Hangover Cure For Men
And our hero incurs a new item for the room service staff at the Hotel Allerton Annex. (Felix Liquor Rex)— Signing on with you! Yes, the King of Happy Juice says “Insure a clear head for that morning householder’s meeting with the Hotel Allerton Annex’s Late-Night Sandwich Green-Light, our Greedy Belly Special, heaped high and seething with melted Heartland Cheese layered between electrifying slivers of a gigantic shank of bologna. Make your last meal a tasty one for sure!” Supper side dish options include Uncle Glen salad, with frozen peas and carrots in a tempting mayo-toss. All mayonnaise, all the time. Or try our Western Omelet with Coleslaw. Teach your stomach the ultimate lesson. Each sandwich comes with a Kosher Dill Kenosha Pickle. Call Russ at Reception to order now and he’ll bring you your yellow paper receipt with proof of purchase! Collect a dozen of these and win a free night’s stay in the Secretary’s Suite. Only available midnight or later weeknights in the deepest of winter-times, not available at our Las Vegas location.
An Unconvinced Volcanologist
For those wishing to enjoy a unique spectacle, clamber up the steps and peck the espaliered whiskers herein: to wit, all aboard for contribution to the spores of circumnavigation. And so we don our helmets steadfast in this year of our lord and only doff our helmets forward to the ladies we go to war for. Dumb as fish are we. We make no noise when murdered, like they. Like water caught in a window jamb. Like sands in a baby’s beach bucket, like smiling ferry-boat captains in overalls. How would everybody like to take a little side-trip to that patch of acne called an archipelago? Good! Hop on! Here where everything’s eruptive, adaptive, brackish and the cough is full of lava from our very deepest of calderas. This beast of truth and its brutal spewing. Forsooth, that lump of an island, that pimple like a rash, like phlegm with all the peace of a fleet of demons. What succor contained in these secretions. Here’s a frenzy in the sea, the difference between whalebacks and white water. A small wave dies and looks like a drowning.
What
Mallarmé
Said About Hamlet
Like as dust between the slats of a long upward stairwell, I looked through the horny heart of the liquor store delivery man who passes me on the way to the forgotten great aunt’s apartment down the block (every day) and looked through the empty shaft-way of an elevator and looked past the sunken smile of that young girl who works her mornings away behind the desk of my nearest competitor. I looked toward Alabama, my new friend’s young heat and hunkered down concentrating at drifts long lost in Michigan’s uppermost reaches. I needed to better understand the deft workings of construction men and their swift movements through rock and steel and the boredom of age-old walls made of concrete. And needed some platinum vein that wasn’t swollen and empurpled and desired some small notion not purchased in an airport notion and sundry vending machine. But the street smells like burnt curry tonight, like as milk clogged at the nipple like as sands wedged immovable in the neck of a glass cornucopia. Being satisfied is not a figment of the imagination. All life is a conflict of interest. Low expectations do a body good. Surprise is for always. At one time I chopped through snow like it was juniper in a summer truck and then suffered the paroxysms like a wealthy whore with wicked vaginismus.
Barney Street
Once upon a time Aunt Hilda sat down on the cold Milwaukee porcelain hinged with a Chicago faucet sold to her by the man from Waukesha who married her niece and (or so the story goes) a rat came up from the depth of tubes into the toilet underneath her chamber music. She turns to smooth the water anew and there’s a rat floating there in the water she has created. Now Lord knows (only) what sort of noise Aunt Hilda might have made there in the quiet of her most private convenience. But it was Uncle Pete who got all allegro agitato about the rat in the water of the toilet. Seems he couldn’t shake the story from his mind and dreamed, not just in waking, of a live rat piercing the small wrangle of civic arteries upward and disemboweling him hollow from the bottom up, coring him like a soft October apple. It was in the basement, Pete died. It was in the glass walled parlor porch on Barney Street, where Aunt Hilda told this story, over chestnuts wrapped in bacon and pinwheels of ham and cream cheese. Through the window spy the gazebo. Out the back see clearly the tar paper shack. Remember Wabash Avenue and the Dopp Park thrills on sled blades and the screaming of younger sisters coming from near the fence.
