Dashboard Horus: A Bird's Eye View of the Universe

  Colonel Kurtz Slows to a Stop Dr. Robert Hudson has seen a lot of patients who’ve said he’s the only person that listens to them. Some accuse him of listening just because he gets paid to do it. Technically that’s true, but he knows he’d do it for free. People have good stories. Hudson hasn’t owned a television since 2006. He says there’s no point. The stories told in his office are the best entertainment. And Clay Chalmers’ story, he thought, was pretty entertaining. In their first session Clay told Hudson he didn’t have anyone to listen to his innermost thoughts anymore. His parents had died young, he’d never said how, so Hudson suggested Clay write his thoughts down and send them to himself. “I don’t really believe in the mail system,” Clay said. Hudson rolled his eyes. “Tell the truth, I don’t really believe in listeners anymore either.” Clay wrote the letter anyway, and the following week he brought it to the office. “Open it,” the psychologist said. Clay did and, without he...

Bio: T amara Madison is the author of the chapbooks The Belly Remembers (Pearl Editions) and Along the Fault Line (Picture Show Press), and three full-length volumes of poetry, Wild Domestic , and Moraine (Pearl Editions) and Morpheus Dips His Oar (Sheila-Na-Gig). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, The Worcester Review , A Year of Being Here , One Art , The Writer’s Almanac, and many other publications. Her memoir-in-poems, Russian Honeymoon (forthcoming, Fernwood Press), chronicles the 15 months she spent as a very young bride as part of a US Information Agency exhibit in the USSR. Time Zones and Soldiers In two weeks I have crossed so many time zones: European, Pacific, Eastern Standard. Dazed by weeks of jet leg, I hardly know where I am. Now I’m surrounded by so many new faces, people I’ll soon know well. I don’t even try to learn their names. But at Heathrow, I spy Frank Zappa waiting near us in white bell bottoms, familiar mustache dripping down his chin. Pan Am to Mo...