#david mohan

[erikvelema]

Uitstappen in gebed voor de ander.

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[pankmagazine]

PANK Magazine :: 9.9 / September :: The Blues Motel by David Mohan

They have got dead-beat chicks on reception, ripe from Vegas rehab, necking pink gin. They have got peeling absinthe wallpaper and creaking beds in every guest’s room. They’ve got flyers about missing children pasted on notice boards; failed novels of suicides stuffed behind bureaus. On the jukebox they play country music about dirt poor folk who play fast, die young. Most nights flies scratch their legs like violins. [MORE...]

[pankmagazine]

PANK Magazine's online issue 9.2 :: February 2014

RAWR, puuuuuuuur :: Some rage and ecstasy for LUV Month from Matthew Fogarty, Leigh Camacho Rourks, John Smolens, Joanna Novak,  David Mohan, Geoffrey Miller, Heather Knox, Cherie Jones, Gabe Durham, Laura Donnelly, Brian Clifton, and Talin Tahajian :: [PANK] loves to love you, lover :: http://pankmagazine.com/issue/9-2-february-2014/

[lighthousekeepings]

The Lazarus Dream

The dream started when I came back, interrupting the night ward with a  wildcat's screech, the bed jumping  like a gallery of tin cups in the county jail. I was dreamless and serene as long as I soaked my sleep with liquor or morphine.  The dreams cut off like an unplugged TV.

Earl came back first from the goon-swamp  of the rain country. He wore his hunting cap backwards like a warning- he talked about a cave full of snakes he'd crawled through  to make out appointment. I sat in the dream-camp watching the bombs pepper the mountains  like fireworks. I threw a ball in the net first go.

The next from the mist was Leroy Wallace, our sergeant, who said he lived for four weeks on raw frog. He had lost his medals  in the long grass, went on his knees to fetch them, his nails as long as a village magician's. He said, 'There's not much point coming back when no one knows you were gone.'

Each time the dream brought back new faces. I couldn't sleep still for reconciliation. My pillow got so squeezed it almost burst.  Jimmy the Tiger and George Evans, Mike Dreyden, the Lowell Twins. All grinning, sheepish, bruised,  as living as my heartbeat.

It got too much, the room in my head got filled up.  There were too many voices, too many cheers like a squad when a plane hits with rations. But they kept coming,  whole armies of them, each one strangely penitent, apologetic for being gone so long, or for making a fuss when the world wanted silence and manliness.

I couldn't take their bashful smiles- truth be told, it got to me. Returned, each man seemed at a loss,  too much a stranger to himself to ever quite come home.

That's why I take beer before bedtime, each night, as sure as prayer.  That's why I've moved to the city as far from the land as possible.  I've covered the mirrors to stop the faces (too much like mine to be reliable), the sound of scratching behind the glass.

The books say you need to find  yourself an occupation, a fresh start, a nice wife, some good weed.  You've got to try to live in your times. But I am as old in my head as veteran implies, my dreams all buried in what happened. I don't fit.

Folks look past you on the street if you stop frozen in thought,  as though you were a ghost, or someone they faintly recognize just lately resurrected. 

David Mohan

[lighthousekeepings]

A dog barked outside, somewhere further up the beach. The sound was picked up and wrung through the sea winds and waves. Ben though about tides, and the phases of the moon; about wax and wane. It was hard to keep track of time in such a place, even with calendars and clocks. Dunes cascaded and changed shape. 

The god stopped barking. Ben stroked his hand across his face. He took his coffee outside and sat on the doorstep. High above, oblivious, ever-hungry, the gulls swam through air like kites. 

David Mohan, Foundations

[lighthousekeepings]

A Foreign Language- David Mohan

Words slide out of themselves- snake into long field grass. They leave a trail we barely see-  the sloughed skin becoming the landscape.

How a word takes wing from itself, and becomes its object. How it glides out of reach-  sly bird accustomed to camouflage.

We no longer see the cup of cup, the river of river, the sky of sky, until we are lost inside it, until it's lost again- a mist, a cloud- in azure, cataract, tankard. 

[the-library-and-step-on-it]

In between cities, on the run from border police, we met a stranger, his cloak so white it seemed it had been washed in cloud. He took the road with us for a time, talking a little of the storms and floods, the riots in broken towns, the guards placed on every port. It was a time of darkness he said, of armies bleeding over maps like spilt ink, a time to walk the roads looking for better skies. He was a sort of freelance envoy he said, took letters across the continent, as quick as thought itself. A treaty was something he made in his sleep; a bargain in the market, a stolen purse, a broken heart, all of these, he said, he could manage, as easily as blinking. He smiled at that and said Go well on your way. Stay off the main roads. Take the paths through mountains, he said, paths no army knows about. Goat paths for hard times, he said, where only gods and madmen go.

Hermes, David Mohan.

[enjambing]

A Clod of Earth | David Mohan

(after Dürer's the Great Piece of Turf)

That was the study the painter made in a time of virgins and saints. He painted earth instead, filamenting grass stems with brushes, studying seeds. No altars, pillars or kings; just a patch of garden, clay slipping off a spade. If God was a blueprint folded up by patrons, a sketch for practising backgrounds to crucifixions, his patch of earth would be untrampled grass.