Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art
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  • Poetry
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Jim Daniels Poetry
    • Michael Chang
    • D E Steward
    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
    • David Dodd Lee
    • Isabelle Doyle
    • Kathleen Heil
    • Leonard Kress
    • Lauren Tess
    • Cesca Janece Waterfield
    • Billy Cancel Poetry
    • Scott Minar
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • Mark Cassidy, "How I Met My Wife"
    • Emily Trachtenberg, "Plum"
    • Hector Donovan-Gonzalez
    • Christopher Linforth, "Zia"
    • Jenessa Abrams, "You Never Wish That Upon Anyone"
    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art
Picture


Marcus Slease

BATHTUB

I’m not
very good
at washing
my feet, it
is a long
way
down there.
But in a bath
it’s alright.
The shower
is out
so I keep
taking baths
and my feet
are getting
cleaner
and
cleaner. It’s
automatic.
My new step sister
called
me drunk
from Belfast
at 1.30 AM
today.
she tells me
about all
the drunk men
in her life. Her
father (my
biological
father),
her two
husbands,
and I remember
all the failed
men in my life
and where
I come from.
When I was
married
my ex wife told
me to show


some emotion.
She kept
saying
show some
emotion.
I punched
a hole
in the wall
and in the door
and threw
the Christmas
tree across
the room,
and she said
that was OK,
I can stop
showing
emotion
now.
My new step
sister’s
son
told me
about
all the dis-
appointments
in his mother’s
life,
and I said yes,
I can understand,
but I thought
I cannot
make up
for it.
Her son
kept saying
she needed
someone
who was not
a prick.
Am I a prick?
I might be
sometimes a prick.
I do not
like expectations.

I have had
too many
of them
and I need
less of them.
I have worked
hard
to become
a new life.
They left the phone
running
and I could hear
all the background
noise
of people drinking,
and I just wanted
to sleep,
so I hung up
and went to sleep
at 2:45 AM.
I dreamed
about 3 very
small men
who wanted
to kiss me.
I felt obligated
to kiss them.
I was in a bathtub
and when I kissed
one the other
got jealous,
and I couldn’t
kiss them all
at the same
time,
my mouth
was not big enough.
I kissed them
and they never
left,
they stayed there,
inside
my bathtub,
taking up space

in my water
and I just
wanted
to take
a bath,
get clean.
I wanted
the little
men
in my life
to go away,
but more
came.
I am not kidding.
This is not
for a poem.
I am just telling
  you
there were more
and more
little men
piling into my
bathtub,
demanding
me
to kiss them,
and kiss them
right.
There is a right
and a wrong,
but sometimes
I just
don’t know
which is which.
I was in a bathtub
to get clean,
and I don’t
know how
to get out.


IMAGIN

ATION

I have a seat
on the train
right next to
the toilet. I
can empty
my bladder
and read
Bukowski.
I’ve waited
almost 40
years to read
Bukowski. It
was my
brother’s favorite.
I’ve waited
until middle
age after having
read 100,000
other books
of poetry
and lived
on 5 continents
and had
166 jobs.
The Bukowski
poem is about
flooding
in L.A.
I have never
been to L.A.
but I’ve
lived in L.V.
and there
was flooding
there too. It’s
a desert full
of lights. It’s
a city that
skates the
surface. It’s
like L.A.
In the Bukowski
poem
the rain in L.A.
forced all
the dysfunctional
families
inside and things
got miserable
with an abusive
father.
I understand
the misery
of childhood
but the joy
too, there
was joy
too,
in the imagination.
It is survival.
In the poem,
after the rain,
Bukowski
and the other
children
return to school
and make up
stories about
what they did
in the rain,
stuck inside
their houses
with their
miserable families.
They all lied.
They told stories,
they used
imagination.
One told
a story
about god’s
face at the end
of the rainbow.
Another of
catching fish
out the window.

I don’t
see god’s face
in a rainbow.
I see it everywhere.
And nowhere
too.
It rains
in London
and the wind
blows very hard.
I stay inside
as much as I can.
I am by myself
thinking
or trying
not to think
about what
I am supposed
to be doing
with my life.
what is my life?
It is given
to me.
It is a gift.
Now what?
The train is
starting.
It is the best
feeling
when the train
pulls out.
I can write
better
on a train
in the rain
than at my desk.
I am ready
to read
my life
in a Bukowski
book,
but I am
not Bukowski,
there are many
alcoholics

in my family
but I am not
one of them.
I have other
problems.
Ready and read
are almost the
same.
Am I ready made
or a ready meal?
I’m emptying
my bladder
on a southwest
train to Reading,
listening
to Miles Davis
It’s Ain’t
Necessarily
So.
It starts
off slow
and then swings
into action,
like a train.
There is a little
creeping trumpet
in the background,
but it’s
the drums
that get
in my bones.
It’s the drums.
I was a drummer
and I feel it
right here.
The first stop
is Clapham
Junction,
one
of the busiest
in Europe
over 100
trains per hour
on the off peak.
Now it is

Laurel Halo’s
Airsick
on my ipod.
Traveling on
don’t go away.
I am traveling
hard and I
don’t know
if I am
going away
or towards. I
am sitting
backwards
on the train
to Reading.
It has rained
for 4 days
straight
in London,
and I need
my own ark.
There is very
little horizon.
To write
while moving
is my way
of being.
Being what?
Just being.
Thank you
Bukowski
Myles
Mayer
Whalen
Brodey
Kerouac
Blackburn
Tea
&
Bellamy.


E.T.

E.T. had
just arrived
and we were
going to America.
The spaceship
in the Milton
Keynes mall
was spuming
big puffy
dream clouds.
It was the time
of the great
spaceships.
When I arrived
in America
they sent a teacher
into space,
and then it blew
up on teevee.
We were watching
it in the library.
I got greased
up in America.
First in Vallejo
in my plastic
cowboy boots
from K-Mart,
and then in Las
Vegas
where my
mother, pregnant
again, was in love
with buttermilk
dip and fried
zucchini
from a place called
Carls Jr. America
was about eating.

We were starving
for America.
We took a drive
down the strip


in our donated
car, it was donated
from a Mormon
thrift shop
called Desert
Industries.
The car was called
a Nova
and we going Nova
driving down that
strip
in search of cheap
steak and eggs.
We knew if we ate
the steak
and put a toothpick
in our mouth
we would become
more American,
less alien.
A steak
and eggs.
I understood the
aliens,
and the Russians
were the aliens.
The best Russian
was in Rocky V.
He was a big blond
alien and he was
powerful
and I wanted to be
him.
I wanted to be
the big blond alien.
I lost my accent
by age 16.
Was I leaning
into America
or was America
leaning into me?
My body was made
alien by my spirit.
My spirit

was more
important
than my body.
My body was just
a vehicle,
better keep it holy.
I heard vessels
and I thought
about my body,
a vessel.
My body
is a spacecraft
for my spirit.
Years later
I learned
where god lived,
on a planet
called Kolob.
It was behind
the sun,
that big ball of
heat.
Just like me.
The spaceship
in the Milton
Keynes mall
had a song.
It was Neil Diamond.
He was singing
about America,
going to America
today! today!
Today I am
in London
thinking
about America,
an alien country,
but a home
country too.
Just like my body.
I traveled the world
to move out
of the habitual

The habitual was
death,
it was suffocation.
Now what?
I am sipping tea
and trying to
become
less alien.
I am slowing
down
and hitting 40.
I am slowing
down
for the aliens.
Who is an alien
and do I want one?


Picture
Marcus Slease was born in Portadown, N. Ireland in 1974. At the end of 1985 he immigrated to Las Vegas to become Mormon. He is no longer Mormon or a resident of Vegas. He lives in East London and teaches English as a foreign language. He has performed his work at various festivals and events, such as Soundeye in Cork, Ireland, The Carrboro Poetry Festival in North Carolina, The Prague Microfestival in Prague, and The Parasol Unit in London. He is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Rides (Blart Books, 2014), Spanish Fork (Country Music 2014) Mu (Dream) So (Window) (Poor Claudia 2012), Hello Tiny Bird Brain (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2012), Smashing Time (miPOesias 2011) and one mini novella: The House of Zabka (Deathless Press 2013). He is a founding member of UK poetry and art collective UPTIGHT.

published by
The Department of English
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
Copyright © 2012-2022 Map Literary
Map Literary

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  • About
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
    • NJ High School Writing Contest
    • In Print
    • Subscribe
    • Links
    • Internship Opportunity
    • WPU MFA
  • Poetry
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Jim Daniels Poetry
    • Michael Chang
    • D E Steward
    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
    • David Dodd Lee
    • Isabelle Doyle
    • Kathleen Heil
    • Leonard Kress
    • Lauren Tess
    • Cesca Janece Waterfield
    • Billy Cancel Poetry
    • Scott Minar
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • Mark Cassidy, "How I Met My Wife"
    • Emily Trachtenberg, "Plum"
    • Hector Donovan-Gonzalez
    • Christopher Linforth, "Zia"
    • Jenessa Abrams, "You Never Wish That Upon Anyone"
    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art