David Luntz
1. THE DISPATCHA Defiance of Juxtapositions
Uncle Kev often licked the tip of his index finger and stuck it up in the air when searching for a particular word or phrase. So, after I tell him, “Fuck college, I’m going to make music,” that’s when the damp digit went up and he said, “Music’s no loose girdle of soft rain, no wakeful nightingale singing her amorous descant,” after which he probed my face like a blind person’s fingers over braille and finding nothing there, said, “Jeez, do you even fucking know what poetry is?...Oh, fuck it, never mind,” and with his free hand squeezed my arm and said, “Listen up, music, music’s not just clashing cymbals and rhythm bones…it’s watching snow glow blue after a blizzard behind the warmth of a kitchen window while peeling an orange…a suspension bridge quivering like Saint Vitus over an abyss, a rocket burning itself to pieces, mocking gravity, sailing to the stars…it’s, it’s a defiance of…of…of…incongruities,” and his finger sagged because he’d failed to find the right word to complete the phrase, which by then didn’t matter because he’d got me where he wanted, standing before a grey-haired, ponytailed busker outside a subway entrance, which was his lame punt at showing me where I’d be in thirty years if I persisted with the demo tapes and arena-sized dreaming, though, for a moment, I thought I’d clocked it wrong, because he was shouting “bravo, bravo, encore, encore,” and tossed a hundred into the scuffed guitar case, even though the guy wasn’t exactly kindling fire out of the chords, which I understood later was the kind of cruelty Uncle Kev inflicted to protect those he loved, because, as the paper floated down, I saw the word he’d been seeking was “juxtapositions,” which was when I then saw the bridge cables snapping and gyring down into the gulf, the flaming debris from the rocket skipping across the inky stratosphere, the busker’s blue guitar abandoned in a snowbank, its broken strings curled up like shriveled satsuma peels, because the C-note actually had the guy believing he was good, his eyes for a second blinking like the last gleam of light at dusk, until he saw my stupid Metal T-shirt and Bon Jovi hair and knew he’d been paid off again.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYPic of cairn terrier "Biscuit"
Watercolor/pastel of Gloucester Harbor, Massachusetts
HP laptop
Books for school
Winter light on chair.
3. BIOGRAPHYDavid’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Vestal Review, Reflex Press, Scrawl Place, Best Small Fictions (2021), trampset, X-R-A-Y Lit, Atticus Review, Rejection Letters, Fiction International, Heavy Feather Review, Variant Literature, Excerpt Magazine and other print and online journals. Find him on Twitter at @luntz_david.