X-Men, and: Quotients, and: Hypnosis, and: Frank Lloyd Wright & the Last Famished Mosasaur, and: Astronomy 101, and: Road Trip

X-MEN/Nicholas Allen Harp Today in the School for Gifted Youngsters Xavier's lesson plan calls for sex education, the hows and whos, wheres and whens dispensed delicately, his bald brow furrowed serious, his students wide-eyed, chuckling, unabashedly alive and constantly, at risk from you-name-it: G-men, invasive telepathy, Plutonian radiation, slack-jawed villains, and now, he can't believe it, gonorrhea, pregnancy, AIDS, each contemporary malady less innocent than the one before, a curriculum chock-full of acronymic woe and code—IUD, HIV, RU-48f3—too many physical choices in the modern world, Xavier thinks, too many forces stitching lifeforce inextricably to doomed youth, their piss and vinegar mutated into glowy juice, concussion orbs, optic blasts, blizzards summoned by sheer merge of will, their bodies already breaking out from under themselves, pushing and yanking their skins like the colleague they call Fantastic, their young lives catapulted into flight (literally, he thinks,flight) to some fate he cannot, despite his infamous prescience, predict, a factored variable he'll have to follow, patiently, like a serial; the X of a xenophobic country, lonesome Xmases, ? ratings, the x's and o's he'll send his students when he expels them to the dangerous world. The Missouri Review · 117 QUOTIENTS/Nicholas Allen Harp Nothing less than an oriole capering and vanished in the blur screen of windshield, nothing less than the shed skin fuzz of dust atop the toaster. In Baltimore, a well-meaning scientist attempts to mass a human body as it dies, calculate the weight of the soul to fifteen significant digits as it departs wherever it is we are. An ancient iceberg bigger than Rhode Island divorces itself from Antarctica without even warning anybody, puddles meekly into the South Seas. Decimal places spool across Helsinki, Tokyo, the bedlam of Wall Street, like lemons on a slot machine, but nothing is lost. Etherized clouds of reruns lope lightspeed past stars no one's named yet, a lawyer friend in Chicago laments the French she's forgotten and Tm straining myself for that word that almost means "desire" but less gluttonous, less sad. Really nothing less than the breath of air, the gone voice that loved you, nothing less than any of us marching, shapeless, into the sky that is sometimes called empty, sometimes just called the night sky. 118 · The Missouri Review HYPNOSIS/Nicholas Allen Harp Cut a raw corncob in half with one swift chuffing motion. For a setting, choose Philomath, Georgia, and place the sun way down low, a plum turning in for the night. Note how the colors of twilight bloom like a bruise. Play Bach, poorly, in the background with only two fingers on a rickety Wurlitzer. Breathe easy. Appreciate the crows barking along the fence line, fanning across the gloppy brook in rhythm. Lose the mustache. Believe in the necessity of penmanship. Long, desperately, for the unattainable. Admire the long, loopy strokes of the founding fathers, their words etched on the mustard parchments of history. Remember the soft, worn hills of your grandfather's ears. In the future, when you want to eat a doughnut, you will immediately feel a strong urge to vomit. Search yourself for the reason you never tried out for football. Consider hurting someone you care about. Kneel to smell the patient, horologic earth, breathe in its chamomile odor. Discount any disparity between the love you give and the love you're given. Expect the gravid air to loosen its humid sag. Believe that the night will loosen you, too. The Missouri Review · 119 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT & THE LAST FAMISHED MOSASAUR/Nicholas Allen Harp "Asfalls Wichita, sofalls Wichita Falls."—Pat Metheny In the moss-green ocean of late Cretaceous Kansas lives the last famished mosasaur, his sinuous tail undulating toward dwindled pockets of fish, orange bus-body keeping close to the shallows of proto-Wichita, pea-brained but mindful of the sharper Ginsu shark, whose fist-sized knifeslick teeth predate the cans they could cut through. Mosasaur will die shortly, peckish and chomped on, and fix like a footprint into the quick-drying sixty-eight-million-year-old Western Interior Sea. Somewhat later, in 1915 A.D., Frank...