The Hello Girls

BY KC TROMMER

Good morning. Operator.
A few hundred calls an hour. Inferno.
Red lights: incoming white lights: connected
damn thing ablaze at all hours.

9 p.m. to 2 a.m. for the new girls, stuffing cords into
machine mouths:
Schenectady 793,
Saratoga 518,
up to the Stony Creek corner payphone.
1957: there is a script. Not Yes but Surely
to the man calling Detroit collect.
The voice was to sparkle. The smile comes through.
One ring, the metal click and
slide of ten girls plugging in.

10:15 and 3:15
could never come fast enough and
if she blinked--Hold, please--
she might miss a break, pull the plug on a man
who called her sweetheart.

Posted by nnoveno on April 21, 2008 in Current Issue, Magazine, Poetry  | 3 Comments

Firecracker

BY S.G. FRAZIER

A row of glistening kids stood under the pool lamp, gazing through the fence links as one of the witnesses, beer coolie in hand flyswatter in the other, reported to the cops that guilty boys had scattered.

I saw them, belly first, feet slapping the sidewalk running through the breezeway. And when the cops, in their shiny tactical boots, knocked at my apartment, asking what I saw, I told them the kid's name was Paul that he was dribbling down the breezeway when the M-80 went off in his face, that earlier in the day, over by the dumpster, the same boys were stuffing Ladyfingers in a calico's ...

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Posted by nnoveno on April 21, 2008 in Current Issue, Magazine, Poetry  | 3 Comments