Cindy Hochman & Bob Heman
COLLABORATION #34
The house on the corner leans to the left.
The house on the corner is made out of straw.
The house on the corner contains empty rooms.
The house on the corner has shingles shaped like feet.
The house on the corner has trapezoid walls.
The house on the corner is still alive.
The house on the corner has closets full of bones.
The house on the corner was once a machine that could count.
The house on the corner has no address.
The house on the corner is repeated until it reaches the horizon.
The house on the corner is upside down.
The house on the corner is filled with dark songs.
The house on the corner contains a madman.
The house on the corner is no longer filled with words.
COLLABORATION #52
Love is not a fruit, is not a fish,
is not a hand full of water.
Love can be fluid or dry or bloody.
It can be called by many names.
It can be written in granite
or the vanishing sand of the beach.
Love is the rocks, is the fin of the whale,
is the machine that measures the passing time,
which is heard as the clock’s hand sweeps across each hour.
Sometimes love rushes by more quickly than time itself
as we get swept up in lust’s undertow.
Love is not a jar of jam, nor the description of a magnet,
nor the page you just read in the book of love
that remains too difficult to understand.
COLLABORATION #59
the question could be constructed in many different ways
but who, what, where, and why were not included
nor was the color red, even though it was hard to exclude
making us think of rubies and roses
it was the only question we had ever had
and no one really knew the answer
at least not until the words were rearranged
in a coded anagram that only some could decipher
that seemed to cast no shadows
and didn’t cause the wind to blow
and would never be able to be asked again
because no one even remembered the question
once they thought too long about it
and forgetting seemed like the only answer
Collaborations by Cindy Hochman and Bob Heman have appeared in Otoliths, Unlikely Stories, Mannequin Haus, and Have Your Chill. They have written 75 of them since June of 2017 and are currently hibernating.