At Length Magazine

At Length is an online magazine not affiliated with any particular organization. Here's what it has to say about itself:

At Length is a venue for ambitious, in-depth writing, music, photography, and art that are open to possibilities shorter forms preclude. As a print-friendly online magazine, we create ways for readers, listeners, and viewers to interact with noteworthy long work.

Hear that? They like reeeeaaaaally long forms. Despite that fact, they've recently published some gorgeous poetry and some impish and well-written prose. Check out especially Jee Leong Koh's ghazal sequence "A Lover's Recourse": so elegant.

They'll be accepting submissions January through March.

Squash.

Tubers and fruits I will leave for the bears.
To lettuce I give the kabosh.
Who the fuck cares for persimmons or pears?
I only want to eat squash.

I Was a Naked Man

I was a naked man,
running circuits around a booming piano,
painting my bedsheets with apple juice,
finding shells under the life guard tower,
with a naked woman.

Now I am a big boy,
and I wear clothes.
The clothes look great,
If I do say so myself,
But I miss the naked man.

Twice upon a Time in an Alley

I once saw a naked man. No, twice. The same one, in public, in the same spot, at the same time of day, several days apart.

Live here long enough and you're bound to come across a naked guy or two, you might say. Par for the course when you live in an urban environment such as this one. Ok, I'll give you that, one time. But when it happens again under nearly identical circumstances, one appreciates the rapidly diminished odds of such a thing occurring and begins to wonder about the backstory leading up to this chance double meeting.

Here's how it happened (both times): I was walking down the street on my way to the parking structure when I happened to glance to my left, across the street and down an alley, and there he was - a naked man rummaging through a dumpster. "Hey, look at that," I thought, "a naked guy in an alley rummaging through a dumpster. Now there's something you don't see every day and surely never will again. Los Angeles. Poor bloke." Startled, amused, sympathetic, I moved along. A thing like that does tend to stick with a body for awhile, though. It was a naked man in public, after all. So, the next time I happened to be walking that same way to the same parking structure at the same time of day it occurred to me that, "Oh yeah this is where I saw that naked guy, right ... over ... there." And there he was again, rummaging.

What had been a rather pedestrian footnote to my week the first time around was now a cosmic omen of great import! My mind was beset with a flood of questions and theories. Had he been naked in the interim? When was the last time he had, in fact, worn clothes - had it perhaps been years? If not a perennial nudist, how had he managed to lose his clothes again so quickly? Or was it just a daily routine of his - while others clock in and clock out, day in and day out, does this man every day at 6 PM remove his garments and go for a stroll?

It may have been a glitch in the Matrix. He may have been a Terminator, sent back in time on a mission! There may have been two identical model Terminators sent back in time - the first one to kill and the second one to protect! I saw no telltale electrical discharge craters, however. Perhaps he was a CIA operative in constant need of shifting his identity and that dumpster was his drop, where every day he would find a new passport, a dossier and a fresh set of clothes. A rationale I often turn to when I see something I don't understand is that I've found an alien, stranded on our planet, in search of fuel to power his spacecraft off this rock.

Surely, the true explanation must be a much sadder one. In that instant, it wasn't among those that rushed to the front of my mind. I'd done what I believe all people to be quite adept at doing and I'd overlaid reality with much more desirable and bearable scenarios. A necessary adaptation if one insists on being sentient; a defense mechanism for awareness. Unable to cope with the chaos, at times, imposing order instead and seeking reinforcement from ourselves for our vision of how it is and ought to be out there. The creative voice in our head reassures the observational one not to panic - the two are still more or less in accord and are in no imminent danger of canceling one another out. You know, all that stuff.

I hope John Connor is safe.

Snow

The way you are is perfect
Naked, raw, indisposed
Soft like purple feathers
Safe like chocolate silk
Hold your hair, your face, your hips
Love you till the end
Naked as we came
And still, we put on our snow jackets so that we stay warm.

Sharks

The skins we'd splayed whipped
from their nylon cords. We dropped
the cliffs and buggered out; the tent
was lost. Black ropes of sky
swayed from our ears like kelp. Our steps
made pits and waned and fell
and waned and fell and were undone.
I jumped
the rise; when I got up, there you were,
white as time. Then
sharks sang in my guts, unchanged,
unphased, ten billion years.

Black mussel, I've been silent, but I have not been
unseen. Inside the sea-green husk,
things have been
going on.

A Nearly Naked Man

Why have you worn shoes in the shower?
It was a choice you made upon realizing that you forgot your sandals...
an easy choice, given the amount of foot traffic in this locker room...
an easy choice, after learning the hard way.