The Nebuchadnezzar magazine

Its two seconds to the bell, and already I know I have him. The hook is his weakness: specifically his left flank. Yes, I am a man—but a pseudo-man, like austrolipithicenes or cromagnon. On occasion, I can be reasoned with, but I am operable on fear. That is my drive, and has always been. I will not admit it, lest I appear weak, to the insubordinate few.

As the bell peals, that sullen tintinabulation, I drive my heel into his ribs and supplement this action by burrowing my knuckles into his Adam’s apple. Stomache 9.

On the ground he flounders. He flops like a fish on dry land. Up comes a fist, but I thwart that. Through a bloodied mouth I grin. How pathetic. Let me relieve him of his misery.

*

its funy becuasse the last thing I can rembmer of my dad was his fist. It came down strong, and hard with a whooshing soun. I saw it in slo moshon. Then I heard it land:

Crack!

Right on mom’s jaw.

I never called him dad after that. Tsering, I say. That was his name and I didn’t care if id get hit for doin it..

Years later I’d hear the mantra: “Respect is a two way street.” Of course I’d heard it before, but it didn’t stick until Alice the social worker said it.

My brother and me were playing with our legos and hotweels as the bacon and eggs cooked. Mom was making pancakes, fliping them with the wooden spatula. I smelled the onions, and parsely

Mom! I called, but she dint move.she lied there still on the groun EVEN WHEN I POKED HER. Then Tersing shove me against the counter.

He say,” you stupid fuck! “ then I fell on my brothas legos. “Ouch!” my baby brother say.

i

dint

cry.

Even tho it hurt real bad. Id been hurt worse on the inside. I wispered for mom she still dint move.

My lil bro threw his legos, the enterprize ship wed just built at his head. The whole thing busted, sprayed all over the room like splintrd wood. Tsering was mad. He rolled up his sleeves, a I smelt ber on his braeth.if I hadn’t yelled, im sure he’d have hit my bro.

“Tsering!” I yell, “You the stupid fuck!”

Then he hit me again. And again. I was glad becaze he didnt hit my litle brother.

I saw grandmas shinto shrine in the corner of the living room between the hits.i saw the rice on the floor, and the incense smolering.he slapped me til I could hardly stand, but no: I wouldn cry.

I rembmer in scool they tol me to call the police. When I tol mom what I learned she said she’d handle it.she said that because she was scared, but on the flor she couldn handle it. I ran to the phone but I forgot the number.i forgt numbers becaze there confusing, and I don see the poin in them.

I now how to add sum things but I dont much get the point in it. My taecher once showed me three apples. She ask how much. I told him: three.

Then he showed me three bananas. I told him I din know. That was first grade. I took it twice.

That’s when the doctors daignsoed me with dislecksia, and dyscalcalcucalcala.

I remenber dialling the phone to call the poleece but I didn no wat to do. I tried, anyway. I knew there was a nine somewhere. Then the greasepan fell, hot bacon grease on my leg.

It didn’t fall, but Tsering poured it. I could smell my skin, saw it pucker into boils. I’ve got a burn on my arm till this day. Not that you can see it. My tattoos cover it.

Mrs. Bernson taught me in special ed then. She was old but nice with gray curly hair. I wanted to shout becaze I din know what else to do. I felt like an angry snake in a bag.

Idont care if people call me stupid, because once you got one fingr pionting, you got three more looking back. People act dumb all the time. Its not what you say but what you think.

Coach Lancer told me that.

Sports caem easily to me. I liked footabll. I was the running back. But boxing was my forte.

It wasn’t until junior high that id decided to pick it up, after getting into a brawl at school. I was expelled for two weeks.

Mrs. Bernson holds up ESL cards. I see a squirrel. I see a dove. I see a parakeet.

I like to learn English. Slowly I forget Tibetan.

After I practice in the Ring. Coach Lancer looks tired, he is missing his wedding ring – and his face is gray.

Tsering he say. Do you want to fight?

After practice I walked in. I took off my jersey, my cleats, and pads. I hadn’t noticed Tsering sitting on my bed until I’d removed my helmet, and set it on the bedstand. He sat with a vodka bottle, ninety proof.

“You a big boy now,” he said. I could tell he was fairly drunk by the way his head bobbed—his eyes danced like firelight. He gulped the remnant air. “Aren’t you?”

“I am,” I replied, “Does that scare you?” I couldn’t understand why mom hadn’t left him when I was younger. But he was a hardworker at the meat plant, with a modest income, and she couldn’t afford to raise us herself.

That’s why I think she went back to school. She took night classes, while he pitiously drank from morning to evening.

“I am,” I say emboldened. I muster my voice in a low baritone, and puff out my chest. “I’ve always been.”I wasn’t afraid of Tsering or anybody. I took pride in myself, that I hadn’t felt scared for a long time.

“No,” said Tsering. He poured the remainder of the vodka on my sheets. “Big boys aren’t scared. But you afraid of fire,” he grinned flashing ivory teeth.

For the first time, I choked. I was suddenly aware of the acrid alcoholic fumes. He plucked the joss stick from my bedside shrine, and waited.

“Your mother left me today,” he stood up. “Fffew, just like that. She vanished into thin air.”

“She’s at school.”

“And your brother. Where is he?”

“He’s studying–”

“Just like your mother.” He lumbered over to me, expelling his sour breath into my ear. “But you, you will stay. Because you’re a big, stupid boy.” He poked me in the chest.

That ticked me off enough. I pushed him. I should have thought about the joss stick in his hand before I did it, but an animal in turmoil doesn’t think in terms of reason.

I operated on fear.

The bed set on fire, and Tsering with it.

The apartment building stood at the corner of Algren, and when the firefighters responded, the entire thrid flor had turned to cinders. I’d gotten out, in the knick of time.

*

Even after the bell has rung, I pin him to the ground. I can feel his pulse—his wild drum—beat in my knee. I know I’ve won, but making him suffer is part of the lesson. I punish him for entertaining the notion that he could beat me.

The ref pries my hands loose before I realize what I’m doing. I’ve spat at him, yelled profanity. His body convulses, but he’ll live.

I’ve had a grandmal before. I remember when that happened to Tsering.

*

Tsering’s clothes were on fire. I don’t think he knew his sikn was burning until he smelled it. By then, though, despite the yips, and the jumping it was too late. The alcohol saturated his flesh, so much so that it craved for exile through his pores.

I hear the sound of the ambulance, I hear the noise of that sound – I look up at the steel of the ambulance and I hear that round. 

Peeling, reeling, dealing. 

I have no idea why I’m reeling, systems kneeling.

I hear the call. I hear sounds. I see shapes in my periphery: red draping past my eyes, draping past my eyebrow cut.

Then, I pound and I patter, and I hit with a mit

I figure it lit

On fire, 

Not bothered.

I am Tsering.

We are living in difficult times hard to deal with – the circumstances we are seeing in the world I believe is a sign of the Times. For those who have accompanied me this far, I commend you – but there are our own journeys we have to take. My words as incendiary as they have been as of late have been condemning and unbridled – unleashed without recompense into the ether of space and time. As a citizen of the United States I must take my time, and heal from all of this and I must do my utmost to get well. I am learning more about myself each day, and my Creator has kept me personally responsible for the incendiary harm I have caused to my community. Yes, in fact it has been a woodland fire. While this is by no means close to what can be contrived I owe my community an apology. And yes, as a pariah I recognize that ostracization and personal condemnation is the only way.

I must get sober, get clean in all ways here, if I am to do better.

As for abiding by Law, and for those who enforce the law, I give a personal commendation in your efforts here – but I bend towards cultural competency and not assumption in your citizens.

The man dreams of flying in a cloud-ridden heaven, where the sky bleeds sienna and blonde. He is safe here, in this vision, amidst the dawn firmament. The vapors cannot reach him. 

When he wakes he is in his bed in a hospital room. He is roused awake by his nurse, Nicole, who touches his arm. He glimpses the flash of her face, as she holds out three coconut macaroons on a styrofoam plate. With a fork, she prods the biggest one and goads him with the treat. 

“Hungry?” 

He blinks once to signal acquiescence. She places it, tentatively, in his mouth.

Moving his tongue, he plays with the stringy texture of coconut. He tastes the fluffy mixture of egg, and chocolate. Goosebumps line his arms as he probes the tang of hope and brightness. 

The gustatory appreciation reminds him of his dream; that seventh heaven between the horizon, and a patch of star-laden sky.

He groans, appreciatively. Nicole wipes the drool from his lips. 

Most days they feed him like an infant. They bathe him, and position him on his side, away from the bed sores. 

But only on special days, do they serve the macaroons. The macaroons remind him of his mother. He remembers his mother with each bite, sees her standing with her walker inside her second story Harlem flat overlooking King’s Street. 

Down, on the street, the children yell, baying towards the harvest moon. And she laughs, joyously, with a banshee’s lament. In Harlem, the dusk-coated streets harbor sounds like the ocean-sky. He remembers her looking outside, up at the pallor of the North Star, and the seething pink of the moon.

“Done?” Nicole holds the plate closer to catch the crumbs that fall from his smacking lips.

He blinks twice. Not yet. 

He imagines, between successful swallows of the coconut, that one day that he too will walk towards King’s Street. That soon, when the cocktail of morphine, and dilaudid run their course, and his mind is clear that he too will rise and watch the North Star, and see that moon. 

One day, like a stag, he will  jump up from out of his bed. He will stand again. 

After eating the last macaroon, Nicole wipes his face, and walks out for him to rest. 

He dreams of flight again. But this time, he wears a bird’s plumage, wings as wide as a small Cessna plane. They bear him soundlessly through the night. 

Then, when gravity reigns, his wings shed, feather by feather — until the moult is complete. He falls from this high heaven, a firmament of his. This is his greatest ascent so far. He’d never been much higher, but after approaching so close to the dawn sun, he plummets down like Icarus.

Thrown down to the earth, he falls, and hits the ground, careening over the tundra’s glass-splintered frost. He lands in the Black Hills.

Then, his vision blurs, and he sees the herd and the white buffalo come to him. 

By the doctor’s reckoning, he should not have lived. Should not have been breathing.

When they come, The EMT’s grasp the linens beneath him, and hoist him. His vision blurs, and again his spirit lifts beyond his body. Outside the ambulance, he catches sight of the Hills. 

He sees a pale space, where the graying light dwindles. Again, he sees the patchwork stars, and the highest heaven.

To the temple of his body.

To the body of his house.

To such a derelict, that remains his home. 

His eyes open before the storm. Outside the snow falls like cotton down, and the lights of distant cars meander near the base of the Veteran’s hospital.

His bed is too far from the window to see ground-level; and he cannot arch his neck to fight through the strain. He cannot see down below. He can only see the spectrum of blaring reds and blues, from what he supposes is the same ambulance coming and going. 

And then, he hears a clang from outside the window. There is another thump as a bird lands on the outside window sill.

The bird lands with a clump, and ricochets from off the glass. Its body clumps upon the brick and mortar sill, to the particular angle of the man’s line of sight. It is a wren.

Slowly, snow falls. It piles upon the wren.

The man closes his eyes. He takes a breath; and expels another. offers it to the 

With a corporal might, the wren rises. Like a phoenix, it is resurrected slowly from its whitened tomb.

It hops once more and swivels its head with a pivot in one large myopic glance. Then, it ruffles its wings, and ascends off towards the next building.

The man can see the bird’s arc from outside the window. It is towards the stained glass windows of a chapel.

A Binary of Opposites: 

   The Roc, or Portrait of Guilt in a Developing Photograph

By Eric-Anderson Momou

She plucks the photograph from the bathtub, She clutches the photograph from the grimy tub

Waves it in the island breeze, Sloughs off the dust, as flakes part in the wind

To baptize it in the air stream. As she raises it Dunking in the malaise of the breeze

In the Sun, Offering to the Moon

An image develops. The shadow forms

She flicks the flecks of moisture, from off Blowing the gypsum dust, from off

The chemical parchment. The papyrus

The sound is like crumbling bones, thunder snaps       The crisp semblance like a glass armonica peals

Ballistic missiles, crackling static, tap code Angelic choir, trickling water, lingua franca

Like a dentist’s drill, Like Gilead’s balm,

To the encoder’s brainstem, To quench the tongue of the traveler

Freezes his seizing  jaw with gilded grief Enlivens the bones from joyful repose 

With haunting cold, With pleasant warmth,

The image forms. The image crumbles

He sees a feathered Serpent, He sees a Christ,

A Descending God, A Rising God

Ouroboros, Sceptred King,

Clasped by mighty talons that descend from nimbus With a sword’s sheen girded at the side,

The receiver falls over, The voice spreads below,

His landline is dead. Alive as thunder

          The image is formed.                   The image crumbles

. Ekphrasis Poem — Final Revision

(From Light Radiates from the Temple Menorah by Yoram Raanan)

Fresco of a New Menorah

By Eric-Anderson Momou

On the bathroom wall

The spectral light shifts

Developing like the sight 

Of a million stars.

There are no painters

Or brushes here 

Only broad, strokes,

Beginning upon the white wall

Here: a rapid dappling of blue

Smeared to dune

Attesting to that background. 

There: a wanton squiggle of lavender,

Crimson: Prose of passion, 

Burning a grandiose hall

That spreads to scarlet shoals.

Where silver blades slice their wings

As spirits climb

Up in that sky, as avian portents

And there, rests

A golden stalk

At the temple’s base.

Growing up, it climbs to smoke

And truncates,

Tapers to,

Reach 

Twilight skies:

Offspring of Yggdrasil.

Flighted flowering branches.

Bearing up, 

The tongues of flame. 

The candle wicks

So ends the painting,

That again will blume,

To golden plume.