Read Work by
Past Featured Readers
Now Available from Final Thursday Press
Kyrie
Poetry by Jonathan Stull
Ghost Wars
Poetry by Vince Gotera
***Winner of the 2004 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry***
Laugh. Damnit.
Poetry by Ahkos
Bad Men
Microfiction by Jim O'Loughlin
Vibe
is located at 909 W. 23rd St. in Cedar Falls on the second floor of
Bought again Books.
Persons needing access accommodation should call 266-7115 by the
day before the event. For more information, contact
Jim O'Loughlin.
Counting
by Eula Biss
Sometimes I start counting and can’t stop.
When I get on the train in the morning it is full of the whispers of women reciting from gold-edged books under their breath and I have numbers running through my head. I don’t know why. I hate them. The train makes the same stops in the same order every morning.
When men talk to me in this city I always find myself saying, “Oh, I’m not from here.” For me, this explains everything. Sometimes when I am walking down the steps into the subway or stepping back from the curb as a truck cuts the corner, I discover that I am thinking, “This is not my home.”
I read that in Angola 40% of the population has at least one amputated limb. There are only 11 million people left in the country and there are more than 20 million explosives buried in the soil.
The worst thing about this—no, the worst thing about me, the worst thing about this city—is that when I read about Angola I think, “That’s what it’s like here.”
I used to have a notebook full of numbers. It was the first notebook I ever kept. Every night before I went to sleep I would write numbers in sequence in the notebook. All the way across every blue line on every page, front and back. I dreaded the notebook, it bored me, but I kept on writing numbers. I wanted to see how far I could get.
This is hard for me to explain. Why I filled a spiral notebook with numbers. Why I stay in this city.
In Angola, nothing is easy. Turning doorknobs, walking home, peeling potatoes, standing up… In Angola, the men with no arms are jealous of the men with no legs.
I was the last kid in my kindergarten class to count to 100. We had paper houses with our names on them that hung on the wall. Our teacher put a window on our house when we learned our phone number, a window when we learned our address and a door when we learned to count to 100. My house was blank. I didn’t care. Mrs. Evans reassured my mother, “It isn’t that she has trouble learning, she just doesn’t think it’s important yet.”
When I finally decided that I wanted a door for my house—when I finally became aware of my house at all—I started counting to myself before I fell asleep at night. I laid between my parents in the dark and whispered numbers. I started over every time I got stuck, until I fell asleep. I remember the moment when I had to ask, “Dad, what comes after ninety-nine?”
I am always looking at the black spots of gum on the sidewalks, on the subway platform, on the stairs. I try not to count them, I try not to think about how many there are. I try to think of them as one spot. One thin, black layer of chewed gum that covers the entire surface of the city. “This whole place used to be in someone’s mouth,” I think. Somehow this makes me feel better. Everything seems a little softer.