Haircut

Artichoke

v o l u m e o n e p o i n t f i v e

volume one point five spring 2011

artichoke haircut

editorsjustin sanderssaralyn lyonsjonathan gavazziadam shutzmelissa streat

layout & designadam shutz

cover artmelissa streat

Artichoke Haircut is published biyearly by the people listed above. This is our first web issue (keep it, it’ll be worth something, even though you didn’t pay anything for it), so all the info that’s usually in this space we haven’t come up with yet or we have no idea what it means. We’re poor. Can’t afford lawyers. But we’ve seen this phrase a lot so we’ll put it here: All rights reserved. Copyright © 2011. And oh yeah, watch out for our Spring/Summer 2011 issue, out soon. Happy reading and postulating.

www.artichokehaircut.com

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artichoke haircut v o l u m e o n e p o i n t f i v e

jon gavazzi

saralyn lyons

melissa streat

justin sanders

adam shutz

Unsurviving; A Signpoet r y

Rebound; Nursing Homepoet r y

E.M.T.

Prometheus, I am No Hercules; I Want to Be Frank O’Hara

f i c t i on

poet r y

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editors’ edition

It’s Almost Over (#2, 3, 4)photography

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“Lint fascinates me” -Richard Loranger

jonathan gavazzi

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Unsurviving you tired to outyell time addressing the dead now try to outyell time addressing the unborn -Zbigniew Herbert

Now the amorphous cornersof shadow-spattered boxes that contain meare constricting, letting inthe artless glint of another tuesday’s sunsetoverartless roads, populatedartlessly bydisappointed people.

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The writhing metric time& barriered hills I thinkare growing feathers. They are

about to take flight fromso long contortionlesslimbs; They long to outstretchfrom bone.

I want now totell youwhat you will never hear:

how the air lapsed that day,the brain-jerking broadcast slippingunmissed away from the steady churnof parking cars;

aboutthe slow sky’s exhalation;how the minutes swayed downward likesweat

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& stalled in front of murals;Icould hear the controlled breath of windowscommunicating,

it’s hard to admit,

but try.

I have tried so

to unsurvive myselffrom your impossible regurgitation,your translucent,impossible hands;Everything I

have ever forgotten to saycannot save them.The lid’s beensnappedperpetual

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away,the cardboard bowed,the twine in calm, volcanic knot.I am sending you

balloonsthrough the oil-hot floor, wherethe unwanted, accidental, inadvertent air inside

will sink low enough and know what to call you.

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A Sign

The neon haunting breasts that hung above us,watching,rested like ceramic kettles in thefriction-hot midair of thebar. Havinglong since cried out inreadiness,they pretended their curvysoft, and mocked your sourness I thinkfor their heaven-feigning height, theirbouldery stillness.

I did not yet understand then howhow the mix had been

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delivered—even through the tight stubbornness of your teeth—orhow many youhad even had

throughout the short, contortedhour that passed like stone througha rivery vein, though Ihad been watching you;

I imagine you were succeeding innot looking back,captivating strangers,andI think it was the neon figure overhead,her emblazoned glassarteries,that blanketed your shuttering eyes in a strangered. I did not meanto talk to you that way.

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Even if I hadI would not have.

I know it seems

there’s something always keeping me.

And later,an illusion of dawn givenoff by the alley’s incessant glow throughthe window had somehow pacified you.

The open sign Ihad stolen years before whenthe record storedownsized & quitme sulked heavy froman upward-bent nailforced immaturely throughthe unassuming whiteness of my bedroom

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walls. The radiator, too,was yawning itseemed & keeping you sweatyfrom sleep—

you

had never asked for any of what I’d never meant to give,

only fora settling breakfast.

Picturing

the unclean fridge, its impending absence of eggs, the magnets always falling away until barefoot-morning,

the

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uncertaintyof that sauce-encrusted light switch,

I saw some ingredientwas making ready to move on.

Icould not sleep throughoutthe incessantsouring.

I floated ghostly buoyantaround the house,trying not to set the blinking clocks.

Poems from a forthcomming collection from Crack Boat Press.

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saralyn lyons

“See you when you get home, just enjoyyourself for now; you’ll regret it later if youdon’t.

Yours Truly,Tibalt”

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Rebound

There is a ghost in my room.You’d laugh if I told you,but I feel it when you and I lay down,your heavy shoulder in my pillow.I feel it when you movein the morning to brush your teeth,and your voice is splintered,and you don’t want me to cook you breakfast.The ghost wants breakfast.It has always loved my pancakes.And it wipes the sleep from the corners of my eyeswhile you watch your morning ESPN.You’d laugh if I told you.

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Nursing Home

All bones and angles.This body used to be roundwith growing babies.

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I lose my balancewithout the boots I got in1943.

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I met the womanI think I would have marriedif there were more time.

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Chopin. Schubert. Bach.My old friends do not leave me,my fingers keep them.

•I don’t rememberthe faces in the frames thenurse put by my bed.

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Every day there’s oneless person in the hallway.We are all replaced.

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I walked with the nurseoutside. Winter is coming,the days get shorter.

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Black beads fall on glasswhen I open my window.This is all I hear.

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“Pain is absurd because it exists.” -Charles Bukowski

melissa streat

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justin sanders

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E.M.T

To love and EMS, read the banner draped over my old partner’s coffin at his service. I’m sitting in the back of the parlor sipping a glass a gin, which normally I hate but that day it was done in tribute. To George and three years together on the job. Three years of endless nights, and dinners of pizza and cigarettes. Three years of ser-vice and stinking uniforms, and of lies, and blood, and tears, and drinking. For most people, the term medic conjures up images of some battlefield brave-boy, patching up doughboys on the beaches

of Normandy. Or else it brings to mind squeaky-clean visions of blue and white pressed uniforms blazing a trail through the night to help some poor unfortunate. But the public perception of EMS is largely sentimentalized. Any EMT will tell you the reality of working EMS is anything but romantic. I don’t mean that it is long, difficult, and largely thankless work, it is all of those things. I mean the image of Paramedics and EMT’s as caring heroes doesn’t come anywhere close to the reality of the job. I

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don’t know that any of us really see our-selves as heroes. Sure, some guys will get self-righteous if you push em the wrong way and launch into a tirade about how they’ve saved lives, but most everyone thinks those types are dickheads and truth be told, I don’t know if even the biggest prick in the service buys his own life-saver spiel. We’re just too callous and cynical for that. Every EMT is an asshole. It’s the only way you survive the job. It’s a requirement. EMS means you learn to stop seeing people as people, and instead you learn to make fun of their misfortune. Some people might call it black humor, but that doesn’t really do it justice. If black humor is finding com-edy in otherwise sober situations, say, being at a funeral and having to stifle a chuckle at the goofy expression embalmed on the deceased’s face, then EMS humor is synony-mous with sadism. EMT slang for a building fire with four or more third-degree burn victims is BOEC, which stands for Bucket Of Extra Crispy. Picture your clean-pressed and uni-

formed heroes sitting in a smoke filled bar, all in varying states of intoxication, belly laughing at your most intimately horrifying traumas. The time you thought you were go-ing to die and when we showed up you were crying, big blubbery tears with the snot running down your face, and as we treated you, you shared some deep personal secret – how you’re gay and needed to finally tell someone, or you’re still a virgin, or, “If I make it through this I swear I’m going to find my kids and apologize to them.” We’re laughing at your secret, impersonating your voice and your hiccupping sobs, laughing so hard we – George pounds the steering wheel with his fist and almost loses the cigarette tucked between his lips, “Silly fuckin bas-tards, they don’t fuckin get it do they?” Of course your story isn’t the only one at play, we throw our own in the mix too: all the times we messed up on the job and cost someone their life but managed to hide it. All the times we arrived too late because we were finishing our burgers. All the times we refused to give someone mouth-to-mouth

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because they were ugly or smelled bad or, “I ain’t never givin no gawdam mutha’fuckin junkie no mouth-to-mouth. What I want with a mouth full of junkie puke?” All the times we were alone in the bus with some unconscious redhead and sneaked a peek at her tits. All the times we lost it with some handicapped vagrant and slugged him, then wrote off the abrasion as pre-existing when we picked him up. Granted, some of the sto-ries we play with aren’t true, but you only survive EMS by lying, to yourself, to others. Lies keep everyone guessing about us, and they allow us to push the worst calls away as not having happened or having happened to someone else. They keep every-thing impersonal. They shift the blame for death and trauma from us to our equipment or the universe at large. Lying also gives us a persona, one infinitely badder and better equipped to cope with the job than you. We get to develop a second personality – one that’s seen shit you never will – so when we do come face-to-face with horror, you can put up the façade and act brave. It’s not ex-

actly split-personality disorder but it’s just as crazy. We don’t call it insanity though; in the vernacular it’s Toasty. Going Toasty is a low-level form of insanity. That’s what we call it whenever the job becomes too much for someone. It’s always said “going toasty,” never “went toasty” or “is toasty.” The “going” is crucial, because the going in the term implies a con-stant journey towards a state of madness. Once someone gets too toasty to continue working, they’re referred to as burnt-out, as if the heat of whatever has been cook-ing them finally finished the job. We’re all “going toasty,” and it is an accepted fate that we will all eventually burn out. Some people burn out like fireworks, brilliant and short, like my second partner Jaime who suddenly stopped loading a gur-ney one night and told an 86-year-old man with a colostomy bag to go fuck himself. In Jamie’s defense, the old man had de-cided that the best time to burp his colosto-my bag was right as we were lifting him into the back. Intestinal gases that have been

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stewing for hours in a bag full of shit leave a smell so god-awful it hangs on your uniform even after two thorough washes. Jamie ended four years on the job that night, sitting in the bus drinking gin out of his water bottle and refusing to answer another call. Other people didn’t so much burn as they did smolder. George, my trainer during my third year, had been on the smoldering end of burn out for years. He had all the classic signs: too-wide eyes, rough skin, and a stare that went off into eternity. He constantly forgot things. When he ate, if he ate, if he slept, if he had finished work or just started. It was like his brain had lost its grip on the consistency and routines of the normal world. Most nights, riding with George con-sisted of him effortlessly demonstrating proper intubations or how to administer new meds, followed by him passing on some nugget of medic wisdom, “People are gonna sell ya a lotta shit in this job son, a lotta shit. Ya gonna ride with people who swear they seen angels and souls and

Christ and Holy Mary’s cherry but don’t you believe’em. Don’t you believe’em.” After that he’d take a sip from his water bottle and exhale in a way that was long and slow enough to let me know he wasn’t drinking water. Then he’d repeat the whole process from the beginning. It took nearly a month for it to set in that George was an alcoholic, but then that wasn’t saying much, everyone was an addict of some sort. You don’t work EMS and not develop some form of addiction. It’s part of the job. They hand you one along with your uniform and training materials. Alcohol, pills, cocaine and whatever else. I never brought it up for that reason and because George was a neat alcoholic. He only drank on the job when the rest of us were drinking on the job. He always insisted that I drive whenever he was too far gone. And he never really talked about alcohol or drinking or why he drank, which was unique because all the other alcohol-ics I knew would prattle on endlessly about their relationship with the bottle. It makes

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sense, the medic world is a cold world. Our addictions aren’t the colorful and tragically beautiful psychological kind, they’re cold hard, chemical dependencies. The result of too many sleepless nights and too many hair-of-the-dog cures. For George, drink-ing was just something he did, a tool in his personal medic survival kit. I knew he had gone out on a bad call and that he drank to forget it, but he never spoke about it. There were rumors passed by the other EMTs, there always were. The most popular story was that he was the first responder to a domestic call where someone had dunked a newborn into a pot of boiling water. The night we picked him up was relatively calm. I remember thinking that the city seemed unusually peaceful. No sirens, no screaming. The air was soft and warm, smelling of flowers. I had just lit the first cigarette of the night when we were dispatched for a body in the middle of the street, corner of Greenmount and 25th. It was handled as a priority, but I remember

thinking it was probably nothing more than some passed out drunk or at worst an OD. That night I was riding with the guy who was soon to be my new partner. I had never really gotten along with Jaime; he was too cocky, a little too brash. He was one of those dickhead types that would get indignant whenever he felt slighted and launch into self-righteous tirades about how he had “saved people.” Things had gotten particu-larly bad between us the night before when I ran out of cigarettes and he refused to let me bum one. Despite all that, the silence was awkward, so we tried to make as much small talk as possible. All told, it probably took us about twenty minutes to arrive on the scene, but we were still the first to arrive. The body was face down along the median strip, legs sticking out into traffic. Drivers and pedes-trians alike took only passing notice of it, just enough to steer around it or point and laugh before going about their business. Jaime was out of the bus first. I had just gotten the last piece of equipment into my

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jumpbag when Jaime came up on the side of the bus and started pounding on the window, “George! It’s fucking George man! I think – I think he’s fucking dead or some-thing!” From the look of things, George had been dead for a bit. He was barefoot but still wearing his uniform. The time it took to pull the gurney down and load his body into the bus went by in the slow breath of hours, every moment punctuated by an unspo-ken horror at finding George’s body, and a growing dread that one of us would need to ride in the back with him to keep a constant check for vitals. We drove George’s body to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. I didn’t hang around to hear the official cause of death, though someone later told me it was a case of alcohol poisoning. Outside the hospital I cleaned out the bus when Jaime walked up to me and offered me a cigarette. “Fuckin George man.” “Yeah.” “You wanna grab a drink?”

“Shit yeah.” We ended up being partnered the next week but it didn’t last long. Jaime burnt out by the end of the year and I got cycled to a different shift. Around that same time I heard about another guy from a different station, Carl, who managed to get himself fired by shooting heroin in the back of the bus between calls. Apparently he had gone out on an OD call, and after they had loaded the guy into the bus, Carl began going through the guy’s pockets until he found a baggie. He didn’t say anything to the guy he was riding with, he just pushed up in the back and climbed into the driver’s seat. Then en route to the hospital he flipped the bus in the middle of the highway. You prob-ably read about that one in the newspaper a few years ago. Some people got hurt pretty bad, and the patient they were carrying died. The story spread through the EMT community pretty quickly as something of a warning to everyone. But it also never really changed anything.

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“Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite. And furthermore, always carry a small snake.” -W.C. Fields

adam shutz

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Prometheus, I Am No HerculesI was drunk when the sky was collecting into day and you were dying

of what sounded like air

that tired coquette capricious as a mind & mouth resigning to drinkthen spit the clouds ready to strangle it.

I spoke at your empty gapeand smiled:

What terribly nice shoes

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and they were.Patented leather black.Clear even in the fog.This I think you understood.

I was your paramedic.For just such occasionsI carry sleeves of lightningbut the fear you showclinging to a hydrantwith more air than water makes me reconsider.

You must tell me there is somethingmore beautiful than life.Tell me you have seen ita summer storm under way on the horizon.

Tell me you are clothed so cleanto forget the dirtof having to walk flaton the street.

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Just show meyou have not meant to mimic my lifeclinging to an empty pipe.

Show me with a steady eyeand I will give you again fire.

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I Want to Be Frank O’HaraI don’t know how to talk to people.Their minds rarely fall to their lipsMore likely it drips to the paunch.

I have a gun in my pocket Which is shaped just like an ear.I don’t remember who said that

Or if I was even listeningLike I listen to birdsOr the whispers of a fight Coming through the vents.

The sky rarely fights That I don’t listenBut it rarely fights or singsLike a bird which I hear.

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Maybe I’m going deafMaybe muteBut surely it’s not both.

I want to cry at the disabledOr trip and tear them limb from limb.Maybe then in the sunset messSpilling from their headsI could speak to themAsk them simple questions:

What did you have for dinner? Who have you loved?

In a breath I believeThey would sound like a bird.They would chirp for their lovedFor they are so close to finding them lostThough their skin still smells of burning and onions.

I don’t know how to speakSo I stand quietly in line

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Behind my brotherWho also has something to say Tries anxious he fidgetsLow eyes and a sigh.

I am sorry for this tooAnd fantasize for a moment again of bloodBut the line to the buffet movesA step a stepA step so silent Only wishes like smells Can be heard by the crowd.

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othe r s tu f f :

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