3:AM Magazine

By Corey Zeller.

Cafeteria

Robin got his leg chopped off jumping a train when he was twelve years old. They found his black leg sticking straight up in his white, Adidas sneaker by the railroad tracks. Wait, maybe it was just his foot. Shit, I don’t remember. Robin was cool, though. One time, he took off his wooden leg in gym class and knocked some dude out cold with it. BANG, whipped it right over the mother fucker’s head and this guy was on the ground like Robin’s peg-leg was Cassius Clay and his skull was Sonny Liston taking a grand bow toward the mat. Once, this chick told me Robin fucked her on one leg in someone’s attic at a party. And I was just wondering how he kept his balance like Houdini walking a trapeze across the New York skyline. She’d fucked a lot of guys in weird places: on a washing machine, a skateboard–oh and she took Randy’s virginity when he was tripping on acid. Randy was rambling and shaking and vomiting while people watched it in the lamp light of a living room until he got up and ran into the street yelling about the shadow–the shadow! Anyway, me and that same girl snuck into this cafeteria one Sunday and it was pitch black except for the glow of the Pepsi machines. I guess we were in there looking for something to steal but all the steel refrigerators were locked. So we sat for awhile on the iron tray counters. She was afraid all the doors were chained-up but I told her there was a freight elevator in the back that they brought food down with and we could ride it up the street. I told her I’d cleaned out a storage room down there. In the back, there was a room where they stored all these old instruments and records. I told her how me and this bodybuilder were blowing into all these trombones and saxophones and laughing and blowing while they made big, deep noises that were nothing like music at all–vinyl smashing while we threw about fifty records across the cafeteria. Then, I guess she got sick of talking. We did end up taking the elevator and I remember we were laughing under sidewalk trees. I don’t know what happened to her after that. Robin is up in county for selling some guns.

Grace

We have fifty ribbons in a brown box at work. You know, those support our troops magnets people stick on their car. I was sitting on a bucket in the chemical room counting them all. Fifty. After that, I put the E-brake on inside the car wash and pulled out all the grates with a crowbar. I jumped inside the trench where all the dirt from cars collect. I used a shovel to heave it all into garbage bags. It was heavy like sand–grainy–so I’d walk the 20 feet of trench and hose what I couldn’t shovel into a pipe. Occasionally, I’d bathe the windows so I could see the light outside. It was like someone kept spray painting them. I had to do that every 5 minutes. And when it was done, I dragged the bags full of dirt out to the dumpster. It was going to be a slow day. Christmas. I stood beside the carwash waiting for a customer. A heavy, slow kid with a lazy eye was collecting garbage from the pumps, throwing it all in a plastic bin. He was singing Blue Christmas. The wind kept starting up so it was hard for him to wrap the bags. They just kept blowing off his black hair gelled back on his crown. We went on with our business. An ambulance drove by, a hearse, other cars on their way to church. He hunched awkwardly beside me on his way to the dumpsters saying: Elvis collected police badges. Once, Elvis went to his friends wedding with four guns…two in holsters…one tucked in his pants…another in his boot. Elvis collected marble statues of Joan of Arc and Venus de Milo. Elvis ate nothing but meat loaf for two years. Damn, he was the sweetest kid you’ve ever seen, with a voice like a 10 year old. He talked for awhile then went off wheeling the trash to the dumpsters–still singing Blue Christmas–doing his best imitation like everyone else–toward something kind of like grace. Or, at least, a little cross to hang it from.

A Swiftly Drawn Body-Song

Voices, the circle of ashes. A woman wrestles a ring on her finger. A man lashes through the snowy neon of a telephone booth–numbers, pages. Heels and soles scuff against the tiled floors. Someone reading a newspaper by a window. He watches the traffic, the streetwalkers, melting like tiers of wax in the sun. They grapple, they gossip, how lonely, on a chimney, someone has spray-painted Sin in snow colored letters–like feathers ripped in cruel static–shredding across heaven like snow. Sin. In a pocket, a purse–a blueprint for a body–bright, shining. The diagram your daughter colors with chalk on the concrete. A swiftly drawn body-song–the wound reminds me of you falling, of our silence, in shouting, consoling, lost spaces like snow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Corey Zeller works as the poetry editor for Lake Effect in Erie, Pa while moonlighting as a telemarketer. He’s recently been published in Poetry East, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and is forthcoming in the Snow*Vigate anthology. As of late, he was named an honorable mention in the AWP Intro Journals Project.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, August 5th, 2007.