Kyle Hemmings

 Mannequin Envy: Sartorial Totem

If you drove a whole basement of illegal immigrant dress makers to hate their own clothes, to discard thimbles and swallow safety pins, to want only the darkness contained by walls of any kind.  If you wasted years exiled to the deepest fold of your brain shaped like a florescent vagina [white matter vs. grey matter, why be so superficial?] If you reduced your father to a cold vegetative state by refusing to wrap him in his own handmade linen and snug  lies....then you must kneel before the mannequin that has your mother's closed-lip smile, barely one at all, the mother who became so brittle from years of pulling you from chemically-induced sleep, the mother/mannequin with one stump for an arm, and beg forgiveness. And wait. And wait.

---

Mannequin Envy: The Mannequin Euro-Trance Rag

I tried to talk to her but she wouldn't speak.

I called her Gretchen in three languages.

She still wouldn't respond.

I tried to tango with her.

She was submissive

but her drag was all wrong.

I finally threw her against

the gurgling radiator,

opened her up with a knife

and several clumsy cuts.

I reached inside her

felt the burn of melting candles

the echo of a little girl's voice

the one I had rescued

from a Russian soldier in Potsdam

only to give her away to a childless old man on a bridge.

I  withdrew a swelling hand.

I bled everything out in warm thick drops.

I became too light to hold anything down.

---

Mannequin Envy: Bad Orthopedics

In a low bed, one mannequin spoons the other: joint to crevice,  peeling hand to perfect-lady jaw. Speculations: neo-plastic noir, fiberglass concubine with missing crotch,  Mad Man and Audrey Hepburn look-a-like not articulated enough for anal retentiveness and high gloss repent. The night is heavily erect but sad in the dim neon glows.  Perhaps the world is a window, we can never quite see through. At 45 degree angles, the mannequins could be mistaken for drowning victims or dolls in a desert never resuscitated by an ironic mist of love/unknowable essence. They can both bend to the will of egoistic gods who never project ideal sex without unwanted children.  They are too worn to be for sale. Their mute de Chirico despair is a lasting thing of beauty. At the very least, even to an untrained eye, they will not leave stains on the sheets. 

Kyle Hemmings

Cat People #12: Tell-Tale Nights in the Heart of the City

At the club, we’re knee deep in dusk, pockets of post-despair. The D.J. is spinning a remix of Cash’s Ring of Fire. But I and my cat brother, with his genius love of green, have already fallen in. We have codenames: He’s Puma Boy; I’m Lucky Cat. Later, we’ll rip off the straights, air brush tiger insignias on their leather jackets, now ours. Nothing is really ours unless it’s under the skin, like connective tissue, like memories of disco strangers in my bed, my false confessions to them. Was it quick-spit love? All friendly fang and chipped tooth? I use to flatten their tires so they'd remember me. Later, Puma and I will have sex in Soho’s back alleys. The pigeons will drop us condoms. We’ll blush before strangers. The city is a tea cup that leaks us. I need some coffee. Deep, dark, Columbian. On the subway, girls without claws, ones with hollow eyes, stare out of windows. I study the curl and length of their fingernails. Not enough city love, too short, too pale. I need to paint them a green that glows in the dark. Long enough to scratch against the night.

Cat People #13: Noir

I wake up screaming. I can’t remember the exact content, only the gross shadows and the girl falling from the wharf. She was young with a voice that could charm dolphins, kingpins. Was that girl me? I’m bleeding. I always cut myself when I dream. It’s my way of telling myself: Hey, wake up! You’re nowhere in sight. My white Persian with the blue eyes no longer answers to her French name: Jolie fille. The psychiatrist who speaks in shades of monotone, whose eyes scare me like ravens, says It’s all the result of stress. Stop working so many hours he says. But I tell him: There’s a war. There’s a war going on. I suspect that in secret rooms with fly-a-way women, he’s a fascist with heavy necrophilliac eyes. The phone rings. It’s the same man I met yesterday at Frankie’s diner. He said his name was Dana Andrews. He handed me his card. He said tailing people was his specialty and asked whether anyone was giving me a hard time. I watched Frankie sling some hash, yell out to 86 the ham steaks. Now I remember. Dana Andrews was the man in my dream. He pushed me in. I believe he did. Then he swam after me. On the moonlit dock, I was shivering. He held me, kept calling me by my childhood nickname: Bleau. His eyes looked through me. Hooked through me. He had the eyes of my cat.

Cat People #12: Burlesque Cat

I finally did it. Took Mr. Tibbs to the vet and had him put to sleep. It was getting to the point of no return, him, not able to hold anything down, walking in circles at the foot of bed, the constant whine at night, his gutteral directives to get up off my ass. Mr. Tibbs and I were together for some 16 years. On stage, we made a great act. Mr. Tibbs was a schizophrenic cat, a Siamese with deep blue acid eyes, a fawn-colored coat. He'd love to churn out kit-cryptic neologisms. During our stage act, the audience must have thought I was the puppet and Mr. Tibbs was a little man inside a cat. For his burial in my backyard, I dressed in the stage attire of my  comedian persona: bowler hat, neck tie, pinstripe suit and spats. I spent the rest of the afternoon sweeping Mr. Tibbs from under the carpets, the sheets, his hairs clinging to my clothes, the way I once clung to him, as if by static electricity and some invisible threads. 

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and prose: Avenue C, Cat People, and Anime Junkie (Scars Publications), and Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction (NAP). His latest e-books are You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press and The Truth about Onions from Good Samaritan. He lives and writes in New Jersey.

Kyle Hemmings

The Green-Eyed Shwemyethna
 

Eyes that flash a beautiful anger,
 two green moons,
an anger endless as dog day shadows.
I watch this moon-girl, bare bellied, waist wispy,
gyrate on the dance floor, as if she‘s possessed
by fever or the ghost of a scarred ancestor.
The DJ, too stoned to get off his ass,
can't  stop playing West End Girls.

Moon-girl spins around & around
drunk on her outrageous momentum
as if she could make the world rotate

 on its own fables.
Spin.

 Spin along the edge of your own spoon.

She weaves her crazy limbs under the dash of lights
until they blur into four or eight arms
& her strange dance taunts me,
robs me of all false name pretense,
the body no longer a shock absorber
to sudden love.

Back at my apartment,
a grotto of night,
I embrace her quiver,
mimic her trilogy of sighs,
grip her arms white as heroin,
a shade of Alice, a shade of sugar.
Her love is hard & fast,
sand & death & moon-dust kisses
but she soon evaporates from the room,
past the wall of white sleep,
perhaps too, from the agenda
of stonewall rules & shallow breathers.

Tomorrow, the city will wake with the bustle,
the roar of downtown buses, the grumble
of impatient commuters & scam artists.
It will rain green, the weathermen predicted it,
everywhere it will rain green droplets,
& people will think green rain,
shake off green rain at bus stops,
this green rain, its tragic love affair with the earth.
& somewhere a water-sister cries over her brother-lover
addicted to solids & city street maps.
I know that story.

& the world will know green
but it will not remember
the green-eyed Shwemyethna
who died in my sugar-deprived sleep.

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and prose: Avenue C, Cat People, and Anime Junkie (Scars Publications). His latest e-books are You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press and The Truth about Onions from Good Samaritan. He lives and writes in New Jersey.

Kyle Hemmings-

Mingus I

Mingus swimming in the exhaust of unreal engines, staggered in the double-talk of suicide traders. Thoughts are hard twisted pretzels. After receiving a tip from a hot dog vendor, an ex X-Corps veteran of the Irish Buddha Wars, (hands stained with yesterday's Dijon mustard,) Mingus searches the city for a terrorist's bomb in the shape of heart failure. Or maybe an oversized pippin. He interrogates ex-Go No Go dancers turned white collar mutes. In dim lit rooms, after the jamming of laser copying machines, Mingus has sex with a pharisaic ex-nun. After hissing orgasms, she rattles off names: Pradeep, Andrew Void, Yucheng, Mortimer Leaks. Her eyes reflect the blue-black mania of 30 years in adjacent closets.

What do the names mean? asks Mingus, hope like a young herring.

It means, she says, that all our pasts are rooted in our presents. Can't you see, I'm just a rhizoid bitch clinging to old vows?  

Mingus leaves, hangs a hard right on Moot. 

Mingus II 

Mingus leaves a snitch, who lost her panties to a blind post-Impressionist on Viagra, wailing against the elastic sides of her own bubble. He passes the Sulfate Wards, the Aluminum Ghettos, the Electric Dead, the Brilliant Silence in the core of the North Ward. He descends into increasingly deeper bars, built for the aftermath. Still without answers, but something ticking within his distant spaces, he becomes drunk on Hannibal's Fables & Flaming Rousts. Women's hands turn saurian. Strange men attempt to French kiss him with tongues of white crystals. Mingus breaks glasses, staggers out of the bar, the ticking so loud now that it owns him the way that Maud the Green Hunger woman once did. He thinks: When the bomb does go off, it will turn everyone invisible as if they are all blind.

When the bomb does go off, there is only a casualty of anyone, a bursting of a woman's very personal concrete wall & a ringing of the ears that will stay forever as if the past went aphasic.

Mingus III

Wearing the city's scabs or walking alone in the dark, bruised-eye soul, under gas-powered zombie households. 3-family units, one autistic to every cookie-cutter mom with severe cuts/those look-away denials. The father sheds selves as if pulling sponge rubber gaskets. As a gifted boy of radio frequencies, Mingus is a cash cow of desperately departed ideas. Catching paper planes on the subway. Stuttering in the St. Agnes Choir. Believes in Green Lantern and a gay version of The Madonna. His medications are generic and endorsed by some ex-psychedelic aviators who crashed into Lysergic wishing fields. Some still have their beards or keep being rediscovered as homeless in smokeless post-transit roar Penn Stations. On the streets or cruising open-ended detours, Mingus, all of 17 floating integer years, can detect Strontium in urban gnomes. With just one wrong word, living on tip toe for years, he can ignite spontaneously with human exhaled air.

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poems: Avenue C, Cat People, and Anime Junkie (Scars Publications). His latest ebook is You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press and The Truth about Onions from Good Samaritan Press. His favorite band of all time is Love and he is a big fan of Roky Erickson.  He lives and writes in New Jersey.

Kyle Hemmings-

Cheng & I

Salvation at the edge of the city. In ratty-tat bars, where Cheng tries to pick up men whose eyes remind him of sad lemurs, souls of suicidal leaf monkeys at typewriters. By break of tri-color stream of sky, no one can afford meat. No one can afford to lose. Beyond perimeters of broken fences, in an alley reflecting fragments of sky & passing face, Cheng is raped by a man with scissors for lips. I chase the man down East Houston until he is nothing but night without plasma, laugh & spark in pre-war doorways. Cheng says that it is alright. He knows the man, the Agony of Tawain in his eyes, the smile that reminds Cheng of sinusoidal waves of happiness & ennui. He leaves trails at laundromats, dropping quarters, stealing someone's warm colored socks & greasy tails. For Mr. Tawain, sex is car chase & flick your death. I clean Cheng up but his glasses are cracked beyond repair. I lead him by the hand into the protoplasm of night. We bleed from mercury spill of memory. In late night bars, we rip off rueful jokes from plastic strangers with fruity breath. Cheng's favorite: Life is like finding out your mother was a whore with nice teeth and false knockers. You spend the rest of your life, shaken, outside the hoops, in the dither. Ha Ha.

 

Some Random Thoughts of Joan d’Arc Before Being Burned as a Witch
 

I will name my soft-burning side, my unborn child in thought only—-Paris

Last night, I dreamt of having anal sex with the wind. I awoke penniless.

If Lord Vergy cornered me in my secret tower, lifted me with his thick lust, I would blind him with my seeping virginity. I would sound like a wounded nun, those high-piercing cries of love/hate.

I flaunted my fleurs-de-lis for the army at Blois. I expelled the prostitutes who kept the soldiers warm in the rain. Made the women confess to me their memories of being raped, the sodomy forced by motherless Counts. Each woman described herself as a leper craving fire. With their words, I turned into a trumpet of God. St. Catherine of Alexandria hovered over me & smiled. A mute peasant shook his head, offered me his ruined hands.

My army plows along over grainy landscapes. In the night, the sky is lit by distant torches. The moon is causing the ocean to lick low leftover clouds. Our hunger, our bloody feet, is our reward. In the morning, we will claim Burgundy, the bodies of unforgiven women, no longer susceptible to wine, no longer able to resist. 

Kyle Hemmings was born in New Jersey. He writes all kinds of weird shit that no one reads. His latest chapbook is Anime Junkie up at Scars Publications. His latest ebook is You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press. Kyle's philosophical slant on life is Fuck 'Em.

Kyle Hemmings-

In the Junkyards #13

The Junksters unleash their dogs underground. I am found crouching in interminable shafts, guilty of selling my solo horns without mark-up, slightly bereft of pompous tea ceremonial manners. I am accused of causing slow murders in four-way traffic. At scrapyard #3, the Commandant of Scar & Detail posts me by some burnt Rambler bodies, circa 1963. Three women ask him my going price. The second one says Lower! The first one says He reminds me of the first angel-faced boy who raped my fingers only. The second one says My Husband could only have sex in the backseat of stolen cars, that's why we always traveled with spare license plates. The third one says the best way to do it is by wind & shattered glass. SLAVE CYLINDER/WHEEL STUD/MOTHER/MASTER/VAS DEFERENS STRIPPED OF SPACE RINGS/ THE PURE OIL OF DESERT TURMOILS/CARJACK THIS LIFE & FUCK OFF!/ I say.

All three have orgasm on the spot.
 

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poems: Avenue C (Scars Publications), Cat People (Scars), Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), and Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction (NAP). His latest ebook is Moon Down Girl from Trestle Press. He blogs at http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com/

Kyle Hemmings-

City of Love #1

I'm scouring my pots and pans so hard my reflections

 are turning steel wool. In a few weeks I'll be as thin

 as my finger nails, stuck in a cave of sticky memory.

 She left me for a 40 yr. old kid who lives under a bomb factory.

 Muttonchops didn't even say Good bye, just emailed:

You and I have always been on the fence, but I have

 always loved the smell of dandelions. They even grow

 in the back lots of the city. Dandelions are tough.

You can't be soft here. You can't be like spoonbread.

Why does love hit like an artillery punch? I worry about

sleeping alone, about my ambient snores, the white stereo

 of my sonic dreams, what the cat will think of my pajamas.

 I'll live on lobster colored crumbs and bones minus flesh.

At the bedroom door, my feet stutter. I wonder if there

 is a planet that quivers like Jell-O. I sense an alien presence

 in my bed. Snoring just like me.

Bartleby

His wife discovered he had hung himself,

 swinging from the last full-hunger moon of winter.

 She carefully cut the celestial rope, a brand

he had purchased online, a site called Hitch_A_Comet.com.

 With his limp body freed, stars crashed around her.

 She dragged him back to the house, cursing both him

and her tight-fitting shoes. She removed his best Sunday suit,

an imported tweed from Hungary, his suede soft-sole shoes

and searched his pockets. They were not empty, were full of night,

the distant voices of women, laughing, spilling from unmanned satellites.

Mean Streets #5

She has you strung on orange wang tang
and psychological orgasms. You'll die
for artificial sweeteners but she loves
getting kinky with a top hat just when

 you're hung upside down, internal clocks blind.
 Again, she leaves you feeling trapped
inside  your own urine samples.
You've always been addicted to the rain.
On the streets, a ratty girl is spreading
rumors that you're already dead.

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poems: Avenue C (Scars Publications), Cat People (Scars), Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), and

Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction (NAP). His latest ebook is Moon Down Girl from Trestle Press. He blogs at http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com/

 

Kyle Hemmings-

Post-Op

The best tools are the ones she leaves buried in their bellies: rasps, trocars, intraosseous drill bits. Even love letters in her mother's handwriting. She tells Tuesday's lover that there's nothing wrong with cheap thrills without anesthesia, gives false testimony that her kind of love is only minimally invasive. One of her thin-skinned loves calls from Osaka’s underbelly and tells her It still hurts. She once used a head mirror to diagnose his sickness. Friday's goat-man brings only famine and ruined metatarsals. To soothe him, to make him forget, she hands him a retouched photo of herself dressed as a WWII army nurse. When her lovers don't return, she dreams of spreading the ribs of Tokyo, cross-clamping its aorta to block traffic. Thoughts down a Penrose drain, Shibuya can no longer be seen from above. She loves the sound of car crashes. From tonight's dinner menu, she orders a wound, a shattered-spine, a hopeless case of bradycardia immersed in ice. She will break open a new victim, remember her mother's surgeons who practiced without a license, recall the whoosh of closing curtains. A number. The hollow. She couldn't be numbed. In her room, they appeared in threes, never answered any of her questions. We need, they said, the experience. She will continue to pull sponges from the bottom of her soup.

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poems: Avenue C (Scars Publications), Cat People (Scars), Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), and

Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction (NAP).  He blogs at http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com/