Monday, February 9, 2009

karl koweski, ficciones actuale/

Karl Koweski is a 34 year old displaced Chicagoan now living on top of a mountain in Alabama where he hangs on to a machinist job he can't stand. His latest chapbook, Industrial Strip, is available at www.covertpress.com. He writes a column, Observations of a Dumb Polack, at www.zygoteinmycoffee.com as ...

... well as the column, Messages From The Exiled King of Poland, at www.epicrites.org.

As far as places to get a hold of me. I have a myspace page. www.myspace.com/karlkoweski
I'm a featured writer at www.epicrites.org
other than that, I've pretty much cut ties with every other poetry type organization. hope you're well.


Karl Koweski


“Obama’s The AntiChrist!” She Cried


Sundays in Alabama can be brutal for a guy like me with no interest in organized religion, crystal meth or professional football. I cared nothing for riding horses, tractors or logs pulled by ATVs. And I had no money to pursue the one thing in life that did bring me joy. That being strange women.

So the Sunday afternoon before the Presidential election found me lying on the couch torn between the sorrow of a refrigerator depleted of beer and the fleeting ecstasy of being away from the factory for an entire twenty four consecutive hours. I was vaguely aware of my wife inveighing me to wash dishes from the night before. I was in no mood to be inveighed.

I should have never quit the hard drugs. I see that now.

As is so often the case when there doesn’t seem to be enough insanity in my life, insanity comes walking through my trailer door.

“Obama’s the AntiChrist! Oh Lord! Obama’s the AntiChrist!” Lovella heralded the end times.

Her rant began somewhere near her trailer and hit second gear in the foyer of mine. Foyer being a fancy way of describing the five foot by five foot space directly entering the front door separating the kitchen from the living room.

“Everybody! Obama gets elected, he’s gonna destroy the world, y’all.”

Lovella, the second wife of my wife’s deceased father, stood trembling in what can only be described as god-fearing Armageddon lust.

The wife peeked out from the kitchen. I raised my head off the couch pillow. Our eyes met with dual telepathic messages. You deal with this shit. Lovella stood between us like a pendulum that had forgotten to take its medication, freeing it from the constraints of logic, physics, and the polite etiquette of knocking on a door before entering one’s aluminum domicile. The wife rushed into the safe haven of the bathroom in the time it took me to get a foot on the floor.

Lovella swept her jittery eyeballs in my direction. Her hands were empty of weaponry. At least that. Usually, when the brimstone began beating a hellfire cadence against her addled brain, first thing she’d do is arm herself before warning the citizenry of hillbilly row.

“He’s gonna legalize abortion,” she caterwauled. “There’s gonna be queers marrying in the streets. The world’s goin end in a rain of hellfire!”


The end of the world bullshit called to mind one of her earlier psychotic breaks with reality. The Y2K business. At the dawn of the new millennium when the computers, ill-equipped to handle a year beginning with “2" were prophesied to come to a screeching halt, dropping airplanes out of the sky and enabling queers to make a mockery out of the sacred vow of matrimony. We were still eating canned foods from the Y2K stockpile.

Seeing my kids cowering under the kitchen table as Lovella ranted put me on edge. So I decided to prick her jesus bubble with a couple barbs I like to refer to as truth and logic.

“All right, goddammit. First off, woman, abortion is legal.”

“No it ain’t neither. It ain’t ever right to kill a young’un fore it even got the chance to be borned proper.”

“Hell, I didn’t say it is right. Which it is. I just said it’s legal. Roe Vs. Wade mean anything to you?”

“It don’t mean squat to me cause I don’t read the Satanic Bible. My good Christian Bible says abortion ain’t right. Ain’t legal. Ain’t nothing but killin innocents.”

“Okay, fine. But don’t blame that on Obama. And as far as the gays... it’s a state decision whether or not to legalize gay marriage. Obama won’t have no say in it.”

“That Obama devil’s gonna bring the whole world to an end. You wait and see if he don’t, “ she hissed. “He’s gonna end the world with his Muslim idolatry. It says so in the Bible.”

“The Bible says Barack Obama’s gonna bring on the Apocalypse?” It seemed we’d had this conversation before. Only Britney Spears was the culprit. And before that it was home computers, www.com being the new number of the beast.

“What do you really know about him? He came out of nowhere like the beast rising from the pit.”

“Well... he’s a strong proponent for hope and change. And he says he’s gonna tax the rich more. And he graduated from Harvard Law.”

I felt my blood pressure inching up dangerously high for an off day. I tried to imagine myself as a balloon tied to a sphincter, floating above this shit.

“He doesn’t even salute the flag, y’all. Anyone voting for him ain’t no Christian at all and they’s goin straight to hell.”

“So you’re voting for McCain and that crazy bitch who thinks men and dinosaurs walked the earth together.”

Here she got to shaking and tremoring all over like she’d just been snakebit.

“No, I ain’t, neither. I ain’t registered.” She said.

“You think the AntiChrist is going to get voted in and you can’t be bothered to register and vote?”

“I don’t want no jury duty. Besides, I ain’t worried. I’m goin straight to heaven in the rapture, anyway. It’s them young’uns I’m worried about.”

I laid back against the couch cushions, glanced at my five year old son who thought Barack Obama was a Star Wars character. I couldn’t wait for the rapture. She’d leave behind enough canned goods and bullets to keep the Muslims at bay from our mountain strongholds for a hundred years. And I wouldn’t have to hear her doomsday threats parroted from her crazed Baptist preacher ever again. It’d be like heaven on earth.

















picture taken by Gregory Turner, the cover to my latest chapbook Casual Cruelty