Hollow What was unclear, surrendered, fallow, this morning when you woke with the thick taste of cheap brandy and menthol cigarettes in your mouth? The sidewalk shifts beneath your feet in staggering patterns of blurry gray honeycombs. The thin sky hangs as blue as you've ever seen it, the tomato sun seeming more of a trespasser than master of its house. What have you left? What stifled sounds are lonely there? They were sleeping in troubled innocence when you left them to night's receding shadows, morning's sound of pigeons beginning their early, endless hunt for food, garbage men banging aluminum trashcans, the hollow, shrill sound, reminding you of every no you'd ever heard. You pick up the receiver from the graffitied phone booth at the corner grocery, kicking aside paper restaurant cups, flattened cardboard six-packs, twisted, empty cigarette boxes. The phone is answered on the seventh ring. You tell him that you have money, there's a pause, then a muffled "waiting on you." Back on the sidewalk, you thumb through the bills, stepping quicker, your breath slamming your lungs. He promised not to do it, again, to them, if you got your ass back to the apartment in a hurry. A moment later you think you hear your daughter screaming in your head. For an instant, you stand as still as death. Not Yet Written As I heard you drive away for work, I thought of sex, love as well, but last night it was sex, while walking through the still house, into the backyard, through the fence where the dead pine forced several of the wooden rails to the ground last winter. I stood among old oaks stripped bare of leaves, grey-purple mountains eclipsing my western sight, bare feet trying to negotiate the new snow in numbing, quick, sucking gasps. The December crispness exaggerated my breath, cigarette in one hand, squirming words in the other. I took those words from a poem not yet written, and crumpled them, tossed them into the cold, charcoal-grey air, watched as each one descended, making mental notes as to how they tumbled, any eager sounds that escaped, which leaves they grazed as they touched the frozen ground, amber, yellow, mauve with a hint of teal. How they rested upon the earth, edges up and sharp, or flat and square, keeping an eye open for those that existed softer, though once on the ground, grew legs, repositioned themselves, began to confess their sins in whispers within tiny rooms of twig and stone. these I scooped up, allowing the others to drift away in search of sequined greens. I walked back to the house through transparent curtains of winter-mist, breathing you as much as the thick crystal air. Her Sky How many times did her screams mean nothing to them? Mean as little as the shards of stone and glass that bored into the flesh of her face, chest, the thick blood running away from her thighs, to them, them, through their hyena laughter and rough hands grasping? She plead silently, how, why, strip and consume a life, scattering pieces of a soul? They dismembered her sky. To them it was fascination and greed, a nervous game of growling joy. She looked at the garbage cans filled with yesterday's coffee, old clothing, tabloids covered with spaghetti sauce, telling herself she was somewhere else, said this to the small rectangle of pale blue streaked with white atop three cold walls of chipped alley-stone above her. Then they were gone, and she was left to remain. (c) 2002 Michael Ladanyi

Michael Ladanyi lives in the foothills of the North Georgia Mountains with his wife and two daughters. Widely published online and in magazines. His favorite poets are Dylan Thomas and Virgil Suarez.