Ken Hada is a fourth generation Oklahoman, descendant of Danish and Hungarian immigrants: Gypsy poets, barn dance aficionados, art lovers, amateur philosophers, wheat farmers, preachers, teachers and common-sense craftsmen.

“These poems, acting as spare parts themselves, go into the making of one smooth-running, powerful engine.”

 - Diane Glancy

Author of Pushing the Bear

From an Atomic Standpoint | by T. Sage Hand

Butter bagel, swallow. Wash mug at end of workday. Drive out of parking lot. Working-class Chicano uses crosswalk in front of my car, I stare. He matches my eyes, he smiles. He’s scary, he would be happier than me in all this. I stomp hard on accelerator but forget clutch so engine just revs, car stays still. He asks questions to air and crosses street in a hurry. He raises three hard-working children on what I pay to doggie day care while my wife uses an elliptical in a row of other ellipticals with other wives who’ve dropped off other dogs at doggie day care after delivering spoiled yits to private high school, parking lot full of students’ BMWs and Jesus it’s hot in, it’s

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Hospital, not sure how long. I’m peeing the bed, it’s like waking up, feeling it soak into my gown and warm my ass. It doesn’t smell, then it does, but feels nice. I unstick electrodes and nurses enter like Swiss machinery, prepared for code but see me conscious instead, messed and dumb, laughing like I haven’t for years.

The attending physician speaks fulminate liver failure and I’m pleased it will soon be over. Deb’s not here, probably at gym preparing for copulation with future mate and breadwinner. I don’t mind, she’s her own punishment. Nurse lies, says Deb was here all night and even brought flowers, but cleaning crew must have accidentally thrown them away after your wife had to leave to take care of the kids. I like the nurse, someone caring enough to lie, it’s welcome.

Deb’s a real drag. When she sees something she can’t buy or bend, like my diagnosis, she flips. She immediately didn’t like my internist, because he gave me a disease she couldn’t manipulate. She went to the gym that day and worked out for three hours in a $200 pilates sweat suit and had sex with her personal trainer, I saw raised ass flesh where he had spanked her, she took his shorts down and licked her lips. She probably didn’t rinse because she wanted to taste it throughout the day to remember that she was in control and no one could tell her what to do and she could keep secrets and she was alive, a human being damnit, who could make her own decisions. Not just a sac of cells trying to get food, not a swirl of atoms that couldn’t care less about anything beyond entropy, none of that! She was different and special she went to a liberal arts college on a trust-fund with brand names and waxes and an asshole that responded pleasurably to probing fingertips and she with a knack for making men beg, she was a leader, and if there was something she didn’t like well by golly she just took care of that now didn’t she? So she probably kissed me with that mouth tasting of him at some time or another, but the truth is if I did taste another man on my wife I would just assume it was something salty she had eaten and never know the difference I would like to kill her, you know, just to show her that she can die, or I would like to take an arm from her so she could watch it decompose and learn that we’re just molecules, that from an atomic standpoint there’s no difference to the universe if her arm is attached to her body or detached, the atoms are unaffected, or maybe some of them will bounce off into the atmosphere but they were doing that all along, even when her arm or her ear were attached, but now they’re not and I am so happy she is learning how to accept that we’re all just atoms. I tried to teach her that there was massive violence taking place towards her body every moment in the form of sunlight, microwaves, even just inhaling and exhaling and eating were changing her molecular profile so damn much every instant and didn’t she see that? and couldn’t she appreciate that? and me excising her limbs and urinating on them and chewing on her face was not doing any damage to her atoms comparable to what she was doing to her very composition with every breath. And to say she’s no longer with us now would also be a mistake because to contemporary physicists none of us are ever really here in any sense of the word, we’re always everywhere, just a swirl of atoms, and Deb’s simply swirling in different concentrations now, some in air and some in

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The roof of my mouth burns like hot pizza, but it’s coffee, my first in days, and its odor crawls across the room to Deb, asleep in the visitor’s chair. The coffee stirs her, she creaks her bones to life under taut muscles and lotioned skin. She’s got years to go without me. We become better friends each day.