by Jason Boyte

People shouting. Dad pulled the car over and went to see if he could help. Mom told me to keep looking forward—not to look. But I did. I saw the frame: metal sheets, peeled back, reflecting the sun. Waves of heat rising from the asphalt. A little later Dad came back to the car and got in. Said there’s nothing he can do.

___________________

After history, I met Dave by the fence to sneak a smoke. Mrs. Ernst gave me hell in class because I’d been ditching more and more. Maybe if she didn’t give me so much hell in general I wouldn’t be ditching in the first place. Mark was pulling his green hatchback—the “Crime Car”—around from the junior parking lot. We are the Disciples of Mayhem.

Continue Reading

by Jason Boyte

This past Wednesday, we, relatively quietly, put a man to death. By the time of his death, his name was John Allen Muhammad. Previously, he was John Allen Williams, an American military man who grew up in New Orleans.

If you don’t remember the time the way that I do, this man was responsible for perhaps the greatest amount of fear in the greater Washington DC area since the attack on the Pentagon September 11. He and his “partner”, a child he’d indoctrinated, are responsible for the murders of at least 10 people, all of whom … Continue Reading

The DC sniper was executed Wednesday, November 11 by lethal injection.

Read more at The Washington Post

I’ve been thinking a lot about patience — largely because it has been a huge challenge of mine to actually have it lately. Times have been tough, time and money short, and dreams have had to be pushed off, remeasured, and truncated too much lately. Seems that’s the case for most people I talk to these days as well. Bosses are more surly, and more and more people seem more reactionary in their daily interactions. Things get “nuclear” at the drop of a hat.

I’m vowing to chill out. It’s a good thing. Perhaps you … Continue Reading

by Jason Ward Boyte

This morning I was baptized. Now I’m lying stretched out in the backseat with my legs up on the black vinyl. It’s hot. My calves and the back of my neck stick, but I don’t have the energy to move. Pastor Sherwood said the next flood would be fire. That makes sense.

Through the window, I can see the fig trees go by. Acres and acres of fig orchards stretch for miles. That’s all that grows on this side of town. On the east its grapes, because there’s a river that comes down from Yosemite, and there’s better irrigation. Here it’s dry. Rows and rows of trees, spread out across the plots in a grid, their trunks whizzing by the window like the blades of a fan. At home I’ve got a card clipped to the spokes on the back wheel of my bike. Speed can blur things to where they look solid. Like running by a chain-link fence. If you run fast enough, it looks like a solid, silver wall.

In the front Dad mutters, “Too hot to mow the lawn.”

The church is still ten miles from anywhere in town, but the town is catching up to it. The windows are rolled down, the hot wind cooling the sweat from my hair. A chill goes down my neck. It makes my stomach turn. I’m so tired, I could dissolve. Songs are going through my head, but I don’t know the words yet. There are times that I feel like I can just separate from my body, float above myself for a while, but I always come back, even when I don’t want to.
Continue Reading

by Sonia Greenfield

If you listen close
To the shell-shaped cookie
You can hear the ocean

And the sea’s fortune speaks:
You will never know hunger.
As if it were simply enzymatic

To digest this idea.
As simple as bread in mouth
To quiet the din

Of organs consuming organs.
The noise cries up
From my belly

Even after the food gets eaten,
Because appetite does not succumb
To matters of meat.

Take for example
The flesh loneliness
Of a room solely occupied.

This crumb and water subsistence of one.
A crash diet; the sense of shrinking;
A body starved for attention,

Until we feed and give back
And feed again in the cyclical chain
Of pleasure.

As in the lover
Who consumes my orchard,
Heavy with … Continue Reading

by Stephen Gibson

This is what men do when they can not sleep:
They sit and write poems to you through the night,
Or they wander the alleyways saying your name to the universe,
Over and over again, rehearsing your name like the answer
To a question they want to be asked.
They do this again and again so that your name becomes
Foreign in their mouths.
Repeating it so often to the storefront windows
And to the blue lightning pulsing in the clouds,
Your name becomes strange,
Use has made it
Unfamiliar. Still, they search the city
All night long thinking they will run into you
At every corner and through the black … Continue Reading

By James Kerns

Another Hemingway Sunday
Eases by on a gin and khaki breeze,
The afternoon fading to caramel
And nudging unfinished hangovers
Into fuzzy recollections.
Our shirt collars are queued to another sunset,
Another black X marked on the calendar of dreams,
Another round of blurry oaths sworn to glass reports.

Gray city, who shall call you when the siege is lifted?
Who will wave-off the masses plucking your bazaars,
Fondling your customs, slipping your secrets
Into the pockets of their travel pants?
Legions of mail-order expatriates cruise
The sleekness of your nights
Brandishing independence and living from café to curb,
Throwing languages from their lips
As bread is tossed to vagrant animals.

Favorite geographies are recounted … Continue Reading

Surprise, surprise…
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Former U.S. Representative William Jefferson, who was caught with $90,000 in cash in his freezer, was found guilty on Wednesday of bribery and money laundering, Louisiana television reported.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/05/us.rep.trial/index.html

I just wanted to write a post to say that yes, ululation.com will be returning.  It has been too long since it’s been around in any real way.  Ululation was so much fun in its early years, but also a lot of work. This was before the days of blogs, and before user-friendly Web 2.0 technology.  As ululation grew, it became more and more work and it became unmanagable.  It was with great reluctance I closed shop in 2005.

I will be working on the site in the … Continue Reading