Jack Bates

SUSPECT HAS A HISTORY

TWO-TWENTY-THREE
ARE YOU CLEAR?
OVER

Two-twenty-three
Copy
Headed west on Hollywood
Over

TWO-TWENTY-THREE
RESPOND TO ADDRESS
OVER

Two-twenty-three
Copy
Suspect
inside address
Over

TWO-TWENTY-THREE
BE ADVISED: SUSPECT HAS A HISTORY
OVER


And over
It goes

Different perp
Different crime
All the same

Night after night
Over and over


TWO-TWENTY-THREE
SUSPECT IS ARMED WITH A
KNIFE
OVER

Two-twenty-three
Copy
Awaiting backup
Over

TWO-TWENTY-THREE
BE ADVISED: SUSPECT HAS A HISTORY
OVER

Two-twenty-three
Copy
Backup has arrived
Over


And out
Of the car
Into the house
Full of children
Big, frightened eyes
Filled with tears
You gonna shoot my daddy?


TWO-TWENTY-THREE
SUSPECT ON FOOT
OVER

Two-twenty-three
Copy
Suspect
now in custody
Over


But it's not
Never will be

Suspect has a history
And history repeats


Alison Dasho, Thomas Pluck, and Gerald So perform "Suspect Has a History":



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Jack confesses: "Over on Google+, Christa Faust posted a link for youarelistening.to/losangeles. I had it on and was catching snippets of police calls mixed with music. A 2-2-3 actually means traffic lights are out, but my mind was wandering over a story I'd been trying to write."

JACK BATES writes with bloody knuckles. He has an ongoing series about a slacker PI in Detroit. A couple of his stories have appeared in anthologies like Discount Noir and Grimm Tales. Check him out at his blog: http://flashjab.blogspot.com/

Kimberly Poitevin

RAILWAY SESTINA

You and I had walked along those tracks
just months before. The dead brown leaves
crunched beneath our fearless feet. Our path
glowed beneath the moonlight. We held hands.
Far off, a whistle blew its shrill alarm.
The train approached, then passed. We went our way.

It's summer when two more come by this way,
perhaps already doomed. The railroad tracks
lead from a party to her home. His arm
wraps close around her waist. This time the leaves
are lush and green. She tucks one of her hands
in his back pocket. In wait, the psychopath

watches their approach and blocks their path.
He takes their money, finds a cunning way
to use their belts and his to bind their hands
and feet. He boldly stops them in their tracks
with just an old screwdriver. When he leaves,
they work the knots, but he's back soon, one arm

cradling a large rock. She sees alarm
flash across her lover's face, the path
splatter red with blood and brain, believes
she’ll die here too. But no—he goes away
once he's raped and beaten her, backtracks
the way he came. On the news, her hands

still shake. As cameras pan her face, those hands,
I think of us, nineteen, of how your arm
wrapped round me then. I think of those tracks,
the ways we might have crossed the psychopath.
of how, unlike them, we'd have walked away
unscathed. The heart believes what it believes,

and stubbornly, naively, mine believes
so long as you're with me, his brutal hands
can never touch me. You always find a way
to subdue him, or maybe we disarm
this man together, choose a path
of more resistance: fight, then flee those tracks.

But when you free my hands, say, "Run away!"
I cannot leave without you. We must go arm in arm
or not at all. Our paths are joined. We follow in their tracks.


Alison Dasho reads "Railway Sestina":



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Kimberly confesses: "In 1997, two college students in Lexington, Kentucky were attacked near some train tracks by a serial killer dubbed 'The Railway Killer.' A one-time boyfriend and I had walked the same tracks together just months earlier. Back then I still believed that being accompanied by a man was enough to guarantee a woman's safety."

KIMBERLY POITEVIN lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her husband and two sons. Her poems have most recently appeared (or are forthcoming) in Poetry Quarterly, 14 by 14, elimae, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change.