Charles Jensen   POEM BEGINNING WITH A QUOTE FROM HARRY TRUMAN And if you want to make a friend in Washington, get a dog. ............If all else fails, call up your Representative, .......................who has to like you for the full duration of your call, or until the Secret Service can determine your location ............and your estimated threat potential. If you’re code orange, .......................it’s best to stay at home. Code orange means you aren’t red, but could be; more importantly ............it means you’ve changed from yellow, which was better. .......................When you need to leave, may I recommend the Interstate? Our nation’s veins and arteries will pump you in and out ............of all our nation’s many hearts. It has more hearts than octopi, than cows, .......................of that you can be sure. Next year, you might try touring the American Museum of Americanic Hearts, ............which features full-scale models of a human heart .......................through which our citizens can walk. The ventricles have moving parts! The valves are said to wink! ............If you can’t make a friend within the heart of this great land, .......................I don’t know what to tell you. Even dogs can sense an earthquake right before it hits, but less reliably predict the Rapture, so ............you’re safe for now, with dog or not. If many weeks have passed .......................and still you’ve made no friends, go out into the neighborhood and knock on doors. Are people home? Does anything appear, ............like, interrupted? If it does, suspiciously? It might be over. .......................You might just be the only person still around. Where others went I shouldn’t guess. The bomb? The gas? More anthrax? ............Or maybe it was Jesus. We’ve been waiting very patiently for Jesus. .......................I think he’ll be here any minute now—     MANSCAPING Me so Sandra Dee with my summer lovers, switchplate of off-again, on-again returners to the at-bat. I knew their names, that little black book full of prophecy and numbers eager to flap its thin pages and squawk. Fast forward to me and a razor making sweet music in the john, raspy scritch of a DJ mix: chewing up errant hairs, refugee home to a family of thousands seeking actual asylum. How glum a Tuesday it was so be so shaven, sad Chihuahua in wrinkled cotton briefs. Everyone knew something was missing, this Sampsonite made oddly sterile, or near enough: a biohazard on legs. The hairs just vanished like trailer parks in stiff winds, nobody asking for Dorothy again. Beheaded, the little wonders returned in days, tips of matches nosing from the skin, begging for a scratch. Suffer ourselves these petty failures: mites drawn in, devoured. Trail of shears. Eventual recovery. David Carlson Holding Smoke 2010,oil and acrylic on wood 28" x 24.5" see more work by David Carlson LITERARY ALLUSION Fervent prayer, night: riding my big bed like a Huck Finn raft where the moon is lamplight from the house across the street. Spilling over eddies of curled sheets. Without saying a word, confessing via satellite uplink to the beyond, I give up International Male—swashbuckled men in pirate shirts, piston arms. I give up Undergear, renounce the lick of Lycra’s sensual embrace, renounce the male groin: shimmering jewels, secret booty. Fail: the raft springs a leak; trouble downriver. My hand wrangles the body, surveying the landscape for a coarse hair rubbing itself like cricket legs beneath the window, making a sad—but persistent—song.     IN LARAMIE I’ll keep loving all I’m given to love, there’s no other revenge. — Christopher Davis The body is taken from the roadside strap. The hewn ties knotted at the wrists are the worst kind of lie: the body of the boy has been removed from its post like a sandbag, heavy and limp, clotted with bits of dried grass. I lay him across my lap. I stroke his blood-soaked hair with my cold hand. He smells not human, but machine—the copper of his body is not alive. My body, mechanical in its care of him, shudders like clockwork gears, but I’ll keep loving all I’m given. There’s no other gift. The boy is taken from my arms. There’s no revenge for losing this, no mistake. There’s no remaking what is lost, and yes— there’s no other love.     Charles Jensen is the author of The First Risk (Lethe Press, 2009), which was a finalist for the 2010 Lambda Literary Award. His poetry has appeared in New England Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Field, The Journal, and Willow Springs. He is active in the arts community, serving on the board of directors of the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County, volunteering with the Maryland Humanities Council, and serving as co-chair of the Emerging Leader Council of Americans for the Arts.   Published in Volume 12, Number 2, Spring 2011.