August 27 - Rosa Maks’ “Slow Bye” (Chapter 1)

Now, we read about me me me
This is fantastic. I tell you about fantastic love and the nuance of nerve and thought.
You tell me about the way it looks from way outside the delusion.
Deal, deal, deal, and you’ve shook on it now.

Why do we have to conjure up man in suit when song come on
Why do we have to conjure up man in suit when wanting to write until there becomes
only one subject
Why do we have to conjure up man in suit when spiraling down into displeasures down
down down into distastes and why things are the way they are, with people, the lovely
people we wish to be around

We take this moment, three sentences in to congratulate man-
man, you’ve finished constructing the elaborate obsession. It functions complete, within
my tree.

Chapter One, Titled Normal

Two days ago Monday November 25 I thought you were mad mad mad at me because
the thing got cancelled and you didn’t want me to help clean up the bar or anything at all
and I just left so fast.

In the winter the building is colder than outside and in the summer it’s hotter than the
pavement so you wear ratty sweater or cargo shorts depending on season, but the suit
is year-round and you dress in it on the nights of the shows. There’s a long black coat,
too, to the floor, with an upturned collar, a weird metallic gold thing too, long- sleeved,
frumpy dark pants, and I can’t imagine your shoes except for the sneaker things
Silver cross-bone ring.

Silver cross bone ring tap tap tap
And I love it i love it!

You were in a war and your cousin is a guy who welds boilers and you come from
upstate
All three are true
You played guitar in a million different bands and your hair was long and you went to
school for painting
All three are true

You’ve said so much about a long ago tragedy
And a long ago fire

And our neighborhood, all built up

On the days I came that weren’t nights there were all sorts of things to do back then,
painting the stage clean black, touching up the patchy walls of a white room with a
roller, cranking the elevator to make it go, things taken care of on the internet like e-
mails and advertisements getting done, updating the janky janky website best i could,
making a text box, letting people in, letting them out, helping paint a painting following
projected lines in blue paint

_________________________________________________________________________

Rosa Maks was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is also a printmaker and is currently trying her hand at a degree in print in Tucson, Arizona. She's also a poet, freelance writer and aspiring banjo player; passions include music, creative writing and long distance bike touring. She has worked as a chess teacher, a bike frame sander, a candle maker and gallery assistant, among others. Too mercurial for her own good, she hopes her non-fiction creative writing and true-story poems speak in her place. You might find her at Rockaway Beach in Queens, dragging her bike through a dune or somewhere far from home, picturing that very image with longing.