Pistol Poets

Morgan felt his sphincter twitch. He was going to die.

“You stupid goddamn punk.” Jones shook the pistol at him. It was an automatic with a silencer. The old man dripped, the gun glistened wet. “You said you was going to take care of the girl, and here I find she’s walking around breathing. For fuck’s sake you know what kind of position I’m in? I can’t have this dumb kid opening her yap.”

The barrel of the gun was gigantic.

And this old man was about to blow his head off. Morgan’s eyes fogged with tears, and he was ashamed to meet death so feebly. No one would come to his funeral, he thought. Not his ex-wife. He wasn’t that close to anyone in the department. He would be buried alone and forgotten like Annie Walsh.

Part of Morgan knew it was what he deserved. He was a small, sad man living a miserable little life. But he wanted to keep on living that little life.

“She won’t say anything,” Morgan said. “I know her. She won’t talk.”

“Don’t yank me off, you dumb egghead. She’s a girl. Girls can’t help blabbing their big fucking mouths all over creation.”

“Don’t kill me.”

“Shut up. Sometimes you people just don’t understand-”

He looked down at his poems spread across Morgan’s desk, plucked one from the pile with wet, bony fingers. “You wrote on these?”

Morgan nodded.

Jones looked at the changes. “Better.”

“Yes.”

Jones pulled up a chair, scooted close to Morgan, and shifted the gun to his other hand. He pointed to one of the poems where Morgan had crossed out the word is three times. “What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s a be-verb,” Morgan said. “They’re weak.”

“What do you mean?”

Morgan explained, and the old man understood.

“Are you going to kill me?” asked Morgan.

“No.”

“What about Ginny Conrad?”

“You banging her?”

“Yes.”

Jones scratched his head, exhaled. Tired. “That’s okay, then, I guess. But I’m going to keep an eye on her.”

“Thanks.”

“What about these things?” Jones meant the poems.

“They’re pretty good, Mr. Jones.”

“Okay.”

Morgan said, “How about twice a month? We’ll talk about these and whatever new ones you bring.”

“You want to help me?”

Morgan nodded. “I’d like to try.”

“Okay,” Jones said. “I’ll bring doughnuts. What do you like? You like cream-filled?”

thirteen

Harold Jenks fidgeted in his desk, looked at the other grad students who looked back at him like he was a fucking Martian.

A black Martian.

The desks were arranged in a circle, so everyone could see everyone else. He fingered the paper in front of him. His first poem. Professor Morgan had looked annoyed when Jenks had finally shown after missing the first few classes. The professor told Jenks to hand in a poem right away if he wanted to fit back into the rotation. Jenks was catching on to the routine. Half the class handed in poems one week, the other half the next week. Everybody got photocopies of all the poems. It was his job to take the poems home, read them, then come back to class and say things to help the poem be better.

It had sounded easy.

Professor Morgan shuffled into class five minutes late, sat at his desk in the circle. “Okay,” Morgan said. “Which poem will we look at first?”

Jenks’s stomach clenched. He didn’t want to be first.

“How about Belinda’s?” Morgan said.

Belinda was a tiny blond girl who was so white she was almost invisible. Jenks shifted her poem to the top of his pile. He’d read the poem five times last night. Slowly. He had no fucking idea what it was about.

Belinda sat up straight, took the gum out of her mouth, and stuck it on the end of her finger. She extended the finger, the wad of gum glistening pink, held her poem with the other fingers.

She cleared her throat and read: “This poem is called ‘Like Dust in the Wind.’ ”

Her eyes circled the room. She lowered her voice, soaked heavy with emotion. “My heart is a desert flower, blooming in season, sleeping through summer heat. Water it with your tears. Feed it kisses. Place petals on your dead eyes like pennies. Your breath is the hot desert wind, blowing only from the west.”

Belinda bit her bottom lip, looked coyly around the circle again, and settled back into her seat and waited for the commentary to begin.

Jenks decided Belinda was one sad sorry bitch.

“Thank you, Belinda,” Morgan said. “That was very moving.” He scanned the faces in the room. “Who’d like to start us off?”

Half the class looked away. Jenks made a close inspection of his fingernails.

The kid next to Jenks cleared his throat. What was his name? Timothy Lancaster. Blue blazer, penny-loafer motherfucker.

Lancaster said, “The juxtaposition of the active and the static present an interesting tension in this poem, I think.”

Jenks cocked an eye at him. Say what?

Morgan raised an eyebrow. “How do you figure?”

“It’s a basic battle of the sexes theme,” Lancaster said. “Although rather eloquently cast in nature terms. The blooming flower represents femininity, womanhood. Static and ready to receive a seed. Women have nesting instincts, roots. The wind represents the male. I think the speaker of this poem has issues with the lack of commitment males have in her life.”

Belinda glowered.

Wait. What was homeboy saying, that the flower was like symbolic of some ripe cootchie? With his pencil, Jenks circled the words desert flower and wrote the word vagina next to it. Hold on. It said her heart was the flower. Jenks crossed out what he’d written. Square one.

“Look. First thing’s first, okay?” It was Wayne DelPrego, the redneck dude who sat on the other side of Lancaster. “You can’t say ‘Dust in the Wind’ in the title. People will think of the Kansas song.”

They went on like this for about fifteen more minutes, Morgan nodding thoughtfully the whole time without saying anything significant. What the fuck? The guy was supposed to be the teacher. Was he going to explain this poem or not?

Not.

They went through two more poems. One was about a mother dying. The other one from a nerd guy with glasses thick as ashtrays. His poem seemed mostly to be about Star Trek. Most of the class hated it. They disrespected the nerd boy’s poem, and he just sat there and took it. That seemed to be what