DOGZPLOT

ARLENE ANG & MEG POKRASS

2010-04-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

JUST LIKE MAGIC

One

One a.m. was “Out of the Grave”—Lloyd’s standard. He turned plastic cans into a pile of chirping, miniature zombies. He watched them crawl toward the audience’s shoes hissing the word “brains” and marveled at God’s lack of creative flair.

Two

The Tassle Club show kicked in at half-past two. He pulled the rabbit out of someone’s hat only to find it dead. “Pussy!” he shouted in annoyance. The crowd laughed, burped, fumbled with their zippers. A woman fainted and left a dull thud in the room.

Three

As if things couldn’t get any worse, playing cards came pouring out of his extra large wireless breasts unexpectedly. The trained showman in him turned it into something which seemed entirely planned.

By three a.m., people were easily pleased. “Zombies and fake breasts. What else could a guy want?” thought Lloyd, Star Magician and sometimes One-Man Escort Service, trying to convince himself that he had never applied for a sex change operation. He was happiness incarnate—with large magic breasts, that was true.

Four

His assistant’s lips were huge, the size of lily pads. It was her most attractive feature—and the reason he hired this otherwise plain and rather silent woman. For his meditation, he imagined all sorts of big-lipped creatures panting for air inside a small, windowless room.

His obsession with the assistant’s lips led to Lloyd’s most well-known trick at four a.m., “Floating Ecstasy”, in which he would decapitate his assistant with a chainsaw, but keep her bubble lips in place. They would float over the headless body in swollen perfection before zipping around like a burst balloon.

He and his assistant performed this many times as a crowd pleaser. They were tried twice on charges of public nuisance. Loud and unruly, the assistant’s lips sang irritating songs injected with curses between words.

Five

By five a.m. Lloyd had an epiphany, wire cutters. Nabbing a bronze sculptor from the audience, he used the man’s tools to weld wire cutters to his mouth as lip replacements.

Some called this lethal mouth—a mouth that could cut a bicycle lock—Splendiferous. Others, thought that he had clearly lost it.

Six

Six was a period of loneliness, as it is sometimes the case with the rich and famous. He was neither and somehow that made it worse, especially with a day job like magazine subscription sales.

“Pussy!” Lloyd shouted alone in the street. The word had always helped him.

HARDY JONES

2010-04-17T14:02:00.000-07:00

BATTLE ROYAL – NOVEL EXCERPT

Rubin Lopez was the first playmate I had over since two months ago when James and Roger Thompson pinned me on the trampoline in front of Dad. At ten in the morning I began checking for the Lopez’s car. I didn’t see it, but I made regular looks out front every ten minutes or so, hoping he’d arrive a little early. On my last look for them, I saw James and Roger across the street in their grandparents’ front yard throwing a baseball.

Rubin didn’t arrive early; in fact, he made it closer to noon.

“Call me when you’re ready for me to come pick him up,” Mr. Lopez said.

“I might decide to keep him,” Dad said, laughing.

A man afraid of me, his only son, being kidnapped, but he joked about doing it to someone else’s son? If he did kidnap him, Dad would only hold Rubin long enough for him to teach me all the Tae Kwon Do he knew. Once I could not learn anything else from Rubin, Dad would let him go.

Rubin and I went straight to the trampoline. I wanted to put off the pool as long as possible. I only had to take off my shoes for the trampoline, but for the pool I’d have to take off my shirt, and with my flabby chest, I was in no hurry. Rubin jumped high and performed flying kicks like Bruce Lee. Rubin was too good to believe.

I heard our dogs barking at the front gate. Our German Shepherd Pal was on his hind legs and Mounty was poking his head in the space where the two sides of the gate met.

“Can we jump on the trampoline with y’all?” Roger asked.

“Did you call and ask Dad?”

“We were going to, but we saw you outside on the trampoline and decided to come on over,” Roger said.

Roger and James knew how Dad was, so they understood the importance of Rubin, a face they hadn’t seen before, at the house, and they came over to see who was threatening their privileged position as my only playmates. I held the dogs while Roger and James met Rubin at the trampoline. Rubin and Roger were the same age – sixteen –and I was afraid they would hit it off and leave me having to entertain James, who, like me, was twelve.

“Rubin and I take Tae Kwon Do together,” I said.

“When’d you start taking Tae Kwon Do?” Roger asked.

“A while back.” I didn’t tell them that their pinning me in front of Dad were the reason.

We all jumped on the trampoline, minus the fancy kicks, in silence. Since no one was talking, and I was the host, I decided we should play a game, a game in which I could get back at Roger and James for embarrassing me in front of Dad. He was in the house now, but I knew he was watching us and I was going to show him that his investment in Tae Kwon Do was paying off.

“Y’all want to wrestle?” I asked. “Me and Rubin against you two.”

“Why do you get Rubin?” Roger said.

“Because that’ll even out the ages,” I said. “One older, one younger.”
“But what about size?”

“James is the smallest,” I said, “so no matter what, there’s going to be one pair that has two big people.”

“I don’t wanna wrestle,” James said. “Let’s play baseball, two-on-two.”

“You scared?” I said.

Without uttering a word, James dove and caught me around the neck; he strained and struggled and cursed a few times, but I didn’t fall. While he held on to my neck, I lifted him above my head and dropped him behind me. With all of us standing on the trampoline, there was no bounce, and I heard James grunt as he landed on his back.
Roger, paying attention to us, was caught off guard by a leg sweep from Rubin.

“That ain’t wrestling!” Roger yelled. “Play by the rules.”

“Ain’t no rules in wrestling,” Rubin said. And to prove his point, Rubin, before Roger could get up, jumped on him, rolled him on to his belly, and made a half-cross with Roger’s legs.

I was in awe of Rubin’s skill and quickness, but while I was being amazed, James grabbed my legs from the back and rolled me over. James held me in that position, my feet up and my shoulders pinned. To make matters worse, he rose to his knees and applied extra pressure on me. It was difficult to breathe and I didn’t know how I was going to get out of the fix. I feared that this would be the time when Dad emerged from the house to see me twisted like a cheap pretzel.

Rubin left Roger and pulled James off me and hip tossed him on to his older brother, where they lay on top of each other in a human X.

“I’m gonna tell your daddy,” James said.

“Tell him what?” I said.

“How y’all are being mean to us.”

“We’re only wrestling,” I said.

“You guys can’t take it, so you’re gonna go tell?” Rubin said.

“We can take it,” Roger said, “but can you?” He pointed at me. Roger the big brother was taking charge and taking back their respect. “Come on, rich boy.”

I jabbed, caught him on the nose, which I felt the tip of between my first two knuckles, and snapped his head back. The punch startled Roger, and I knew I had broken the number one wrestling rule: no punches. Now all bets were off and it was truly a free-for-all. Roger punched back, a wide looping cross that took forever to get to me, and when it did, I simply blocked it with my forearm and countered with a punch to the ribs that dropped him.

James rolled his brother off the trampoline and helped him put on his shoes. “You buy your friends,” James said. “You damn little rich boy.”

I started jumping on the trampoline, going high and higher, until, with a final bounce, I sprang over their heads. Roger was standing and holding his side, and James sat on the ground tying his shoes.

“What’d you call me?”

“Damn little rich boy,” James said. “You’re spoiled too. Trampoline, swimming pool....”

His knees were up, his legs spread, and his crotch was an open target. I stomped, and James let out a scream that made me think all the life had left his body.
“What’s all that damn racket?” Dad said.

James, with tears running down his face, walked spread-legged toward Dad carrying his shoes. “Wesley kicked me in the privates.”

I was about to tell my side of the story, when Dad said:

“If he did, you deserved it. Now why don’t y’all take your asses back across the street. Wesley has another friend over today.”

“You ain’t got to worry about us coming back,” Roger said, still holding his side. “You can have your new-bought friend.”

“You’re just mad you lost,” Rubin said. “Sore losers, that’s what you are.”

Roger stopped and faced Rubin. I feared that he might want to finish the fight, but he took James by the arm and walked across the street.

“You boys handled yourselves well,” Dad said. “But, son, you should’ve been paying attention when James rolled you up from the back. You gotta always be alert, don’t let no one grab you from behind. Remember: be more aggressive than the other man.”

I heard Dad, but my eyes were on Roger and James as they entered their grandparents’ home. Seeing them disappear into the house, I realized that I’d lost them as playmates.

HEATHER FOWLER

2010-04-17T14:00:00.000-07:00

SID, ME, AND THE SEA

Sid was an odd man I once thought I loved with smooth black hair and tan skin; on his belly was a panel of ocean. He had no bellybutton, which should have been disturbing, but I was too dumb when I met him to recognize this problem. If I lifted his shirts, which were often tacky neon Hawaii numbers, I could watch his waves crash and break. When placing my hand on his panel, which was rectangular like a TV screen, I could almost touch them. He said he was born this way because his mother was a mermaid, the sort who gave up her tail for true love and who could not laugh, even after she went human, because laughter was forbidden to mermaids and, in her heart, she had never left the ocean. I found her story fascinating.

Sid said after her legs split apart and her tale cracked and fell off, she had moved into the suburbs with his father, who was never a prince among men, more a middle manager, and she now drove a Lexus and did home decorating consultations for money. He said he didn't know what they did, professionally, before they had him, hardly knew what they did after, because he had enjoyed a lot of nannies. He said this with lascivious intent, detailed how he liked how they stroked his hair and kissed his small cheeks, saying again and again what a cute kid he was. But they were always asking him where he may have hidden things like their hairbrushes or backpacks. Sometimes, he explained to me, he had a trick he performed where he turned his back to them and made a gone thing reappear. They liked this. It was his panel, which they liked, said they could watch it for hours and hours. His main problem with nannies was that he wanted to keep them all, so was always sad when they had to go.

He had other unusual talents. One was coring apples. Also, he was a dynamo in the sack and could sense bad seafood in the way of most master-chefs. Many times, he had saved me from food poisoning. “My mother was a mermaid,” he said. “Of course I know bad fish.”

After much lovemaking, Sid told me all about his lovelife before me, with the sort of limited telling most girlfriends moving up into the “significant” realm receive; at first I was flattered. His first lover liked to watch his waves while they fucked. That ruled this out for me. He said he was eleven when they first did it and that it had soothed her, put her into a trance.

I said, "Who was she?" and he promptly dropped the subject.

We were together three full years before he finally told me that she was a mermaid, too, like his mother, that she had been riveted to the ocean on his belly for a reason, and that their first sex involved not his penetration of her, but her penetration of his panel with her tail. When they lingered in the ocean together, she could swim into him, often did, until one day she found something deep inside his biosystem, deep within his inner panel that horrified her so thoroughly she swam out of him at once and said, her blue eyes squinted in speculation, "You are one nasty person, Sid," and she never came back.

He said this broke his heart. He wrote songs for her. He sang them. He didn't know anyone could swim away so quickly. He told his mother all about it. He didn't know what his ex had seen inside him, he told me, but he was glad I didn't see it too. "We're all quite horrifying," he said, "when the real things inside us roll out into the open."

I told him I had no idea what he was talking about.

"I love your yellow hair," he then enthused. "Your big red heart!"

I told him maybe my heart was blue like his panel.

“No it’s not,” he said.

“Yes it is,” I replied. He couldn’t see inside me. Fuck him.

Still, he scoffed. But he introduced me to his mother one day not long after at one family holiday gathering he prepared me for with hours of pre-training and spot testing, and when we got to her house, it was just me, her, his father, and Sid-- and she spoke in some strange tongue with Sid for all of ten minutes at the front door before she would even open it. When she did reluctantly move aside, she mysteriously cried.

I tried not to take it personally, but she hated me. I wore red thigh highs and a red velvet dress with little black shoes. I had a black cross on my neck. I probably looked like a shark bite. We all sat at the table and his dad was really nice, but a kind of leery nice. “You picked a pretty one, Sid," his dad then said and winked at me like he thought I was cute. His dad looked just like him, except older and fatter.

"You have a panel, too, Sid’s dad?" I replied.

"Nope," he said. "I’m Malcolm. You can call me my first name."

"Sid’s hybrid," his mother then explained. "Part sea and part earth. So, did you meet our son at school?" Her subsequent look toward Sid's father was cold, yet practiced.

"No," I said. "At the Frosty Freeze."

Sid said, "Dad, I love Bethany, and I plan to marry her."

It was after this announcement of Sid's that his mother took me into the back room. "I want to show you my tail," she said. "The one I gave up for all of this..."

I agreed to look at it. Sid smiled and I flushed as he goosed my rear when I walked past him to follow her. When we got to her room, she opened the closet, but what I saw was not so much a tail as a dried thing with an end fin, kind of blue and green. "Sid doesn't do well with anyone leaving him. Do you really love my son?" she asked, lifting her perfect brown-green eyebrow and meeting my eyes for once.

"Yes," I lied. "I do." Now, I had just been pondering this very question in the car. He had a broad jaw and a nice physique. He was moderately interesting and had asked me to marry him—but I had said yes not due to heart-booming love, but because no one else had asked before and this seemed a good enough opportunity.

"Well, I must tell you," she said. "He's not normal."

"I've seen his panel of sea, mom," I said. “Lots of times.”

"I understand," she said. "But have you seen what's inside?"

I told her I had.

"No, you haven't," she said, smacking me on the back. "Because if you had, you'd be running! You’d be taking my tail and not saying no. Do you want to be a mermaid for a while, just until you're sure about things?"

"No," I said.

"Being a mermaid was great," she enthused. "And to think I gave it all up for this shithole. For Sid's dad. What a waste! I could put the tail back on now, but I don't belong anymore. I’d just be an old sea cow."

When Sid and I left that day, I said, "Your mom is ominous. She warned me about something inside you."

"She did?" he asked, lifting his eyebrow like her. But he didn't say more, so for a few days I stared into his ocean and hoped for a clue. I wondered if I should go back to his mom's and agree to be a mermaid, just for a brief glimpse, and then go back to being a girl. She had told me it was painful, that transition between mermaid and girl, but if I was going to marry Sid, maybe I should know. “Being a woman is all about pain, honey,” she’d told me. “No matter what species. Get used to it.”

It turns out, it didn't really matter how painful that transition would be because I didn’t try. I kept picturing my leg bones melting and breaking as some weird fin thing glommed around them and then how I’d start gasping for water and have to live in the sea—and so I freaked. Then I freaked on him. Although I knew I didn’t love him enough to endure that switch, I still started to demand what was wrong inside him, because I didn’t want to not know: I was wearing his ring, after all.

Sid kept showing me his panel, but he knew I was panicking because he kept saying, too, "I don't know what it is either! I really don't know."

This not knowing and repeat asking went on for a while. But one day, I got a call from his mother. "Ask Sid about Nancy," she said, somewhat nervously. "But come and get my tail first. I've been soaking it. It won’t hurt too bad." And this was all she said before the line went dead.

So when he got home from work, I didn't go to her house, liking just fine the new tan on my human legs, and said to Sid, "Who's Nancy?"

"What?" he asked.

"Nancy. You know, Nancy?"

"She was one of my nannies," he said, wringing his hands. "I really loved her. But I've told you all that."

Well, sometimes there's something weird between two people and it's not validated or anything, it's not even clear what it is, but the distance just starts to feel insurmountable. So Sid wasn't touching me so much after that, and then he didn't touch me at all. When he said he loved me, despite that he couldn’t touch me, I told him I was leaving, said I had had enough of his non-touching loving that felt more like ignoring and that it bugged me that he wouldn't tell me anything about Nancy. I said that he had to know what was in his ocean panel because it was inside him, after all--a space both vast and small because an entire mermaid had swum around in there, yet it was a setting localized enough to fit inside him and be entirely situated within his own body. And what was in there, Sid? I said. Plus, I didn't think I could marry him anymore. I had to know what was what.

It was in this moment that he said, "Stop. Look into the panel!"

And I did. The waves crashed and broke as I watched them, but I felt myself shrink. I was shrinking! And when I got small enough, he picked me up between two fingers, like I was a flea, actually pinching on a bit of my sweater, and then flung me at a diagonal into his waves.

This is when I saw the other women, dead on the shore. .Some were dead a long time with bleached bones. Some had died recently enough to still have flesh clinging in moist clumps. He took his finger, put it inside himself, and edged me further over so I was out of view of his panel. “Stay there,” he said, leaning close to his belly. His voice boomed in like a God's: "Don't be visible in the main panel, and I won't crush you. You should have listened to my mom and been a mermaid. Then, when I got in the water, you could have at least swum out. Now, you can't."

"You need to let me go!" I shouted.

But he just replied, "What?" like he really couldn't hear me. It was an interesting thing to be stuck in the off-view section of his waves and sand. There were no people and no buildings. I would have to learn how to fish, for it was a fully developed eco-system, like any other ocean, but I found a stick and did this, poking them with the sharp end.

I had a lot of alone time there on his shores, looking at the carcasses of his former women. It was funny how their clothes were still around in many of their cases, and these clothes reflected the time when they had passed. Almost all the nannies had on big colorful eighties jewelry and belts or shirts with space age geometrical shapes. The newer girlfriends, the women more fresh, these had on items that more looked like today.

As many memories come back long after they are needed, mine reminded me then of that first night he and I had lain together after sex, how there was a moment I had nearly forgotten about when a woman, tiny, like me now, had walked onto his panel-front and shouted, "Run! Quick! Don't let him love you!" But I couldn't hear her that well, could hardly believe I’d seen her, and his hand had slapped down onto his ocean panel (to quash her I later realized).

"I'm hungry," he'd said then to me, me who admittedly still swooned in the aftermath of our pleasure. "Did you want a bite to eat?"

"Yes," I said then, ignoring the strange vision. But I remembered her now; she’d been so pretty. And now, on this invisible shore where her body lay, I was determined not to be her. Still, there were quite a few women on this invisible beach, so I decided I would do something to warn the new ones due next.

I would throw the early lovers' bones onto the panel proper each time he took a new lover. Maybe, as they’d watch the bones gather, they'd have a clue. While he was sleeping, I decided, I would spell out two messages to them. The first would say, "Be a Mermaid when Mommy asks." The second would say, "Ask about Nancy."

I thought about this a lot. But, this idea struck me as too complicated before I implemented. Also, there was the bones thing. Yuck. I didn't really want to touch the other dead women. It was far simpler to spell out one message on his visible sand: "Kill Him" or "He Killed Me." It bothered me not a bit that I wasn't dead when I would write this! I was speaking with bones for his former women, in their gone voices. I was a saint. A channel!

So I tried this bone spelling in both ways, but Sid's next two girls didn't even notice. It was a good thing he didn't like them much, him the one who broke it off. But this next girl, Brooke, she made his heart stop with how “amazing and gorgeous” she was. He told her everything he'd told me, repurposing compliments that worked. He took her to his mom's. "Dad, I love Brooke and I want to marry her," he said.

Lazy fucker, I thought. I wondered if he was going through a spate of women with names that started with B to make things easier. I wondered if he’d go next to C names, or let the subsequent letter be random. It’s not like there were name cards on the corpses. Now, there were about twelve dead women on the shore where I stood, he really liked Brooke I could tell, and I had begun to grow desperate to warn her.

His mother didn't even show the girl the tail. Maybe she'd been warned. Maybe she needed no more guilt. After all, her intervention had really caused Sid's paranoia and the resultant murderous events in our case, one might say, kind of backfired her intent. But Brooke didn't watch his panel much, couldn't even see the bones, so I experimented with a more drastic step. I actually threw one out.

The one I threw sailed free from his panel and landed right on her chest. It was tiny. "What's this little white thing?" she said.

Sid looked close, smacked his belly, and said he was hungry. A warning smack? I ignored it, threw out a skull next. And then another. When Brooke woke up, there would be eight such skulls I'd tossed, sitting on her breasts, but I left his place while she slept so didn't see her reaction.

When I realized the bones could leave, I tried to jump out a few times and finally succeeded. I landed on her left breast and slid down it's curvature to walk along her soft belly until I could get to the sheet beside her, then to the mattress side, then to the carpeted floor. Of course, I thought: Sid wouldn't tell me I could free myself. Why would he? But, maybe he didn't know this was possible, this dry land escape.

I was still small, but as I walked away from his apartment, after two days of dusty carpet safari to his door, where fleas were a constant terror, when I got under his door and to the other side, I felt myself enlarge. By the time I reached the outer doorway of his building, I was terrier sized, full-sized upon arriving home.

The next time I saw Sid in public, I had already discovered that Brooke had left him. He told all his troubles to the coffee house barista we knew, the same one he chatted up about all of his women, not like this was hard to figure out. He went to the same place every day, she was gay so he couldn’t have her, and she was convenient. Anyway, when I saw him, I punched him right in the stomach and left a bunch of red food coloring in his waves.

“Red ocean. Red ocean. Redrum!” I said to him.

"Shhh," he said. "Shhh." He meant, "Don't tell the police."

I walked away.

He wouldn't bother me again, but at least the waves that broke inside him would tell his story. They'd be crimson. Or maybe his story wouldn't matter any more. Did I mention I put a bit of cyanide there, in his water?

Well, that is a different story. One best saved for later.

It's so nice to be large again. I don't go for panel men now. Especially ones with pretty things in their panels. Not really. Not ever. Now, I like a flat, smooth bit of abdomen, a little hair there. A mole. A freckle. A normal rumble after food. And a visible belly button.

Sometimes a little belly fat.

Yes, that.

ALAN STEWART CARL

2010-04-17T13:59:00.001-07:00

INCUBUS

I stand eight miles outside of Carlsbad, my arms outstretched in a scarecrow’s stance. Or, perhaps, the crucified man’s. Over on the stripped dirt of a road sits my car, headlights on, casting unnatural light into this six a.m. space, a yellowed glow catching cactus and scrub. All the spiny things that know how to survive. The seasons unable to break them as they were once unable to break me.

“Don’t get out of the car,” I say, seeing Suzanna’s long legs slipping out of the passenger side. She is the latest of my women. A wannabe showgirl who’d been too clumsy to get a gig. I found her feeding quarters into a bar-top poker game – slow, one every few minutes so the barman wouldn’t charge her for the vodka. I asked her if she was lonely and she said she couldn’t afford company like mine. “I’m not playing that,” I said, smiling, as if she’d given me a compliment. Then I touched her shoulder.

It’d been decades since I’d allowed myself a woman. I told myself I didn’t want much. Just to touch her hand. Feel her lips against mine. But she was so young and alive in all the ways you want a woman. Skin like something oiled. Legs that gripped tight around my hips. She screamed for me that night. She called out my name. And, afterwards, when I held her so close I could feel her heart against my chest, she traced her fingers over the ridge my spine and said, “It’s like I fell into you.”

She’s lasted two days. Now the sickness has taken hold. A fever yellows her skin. Coughs send her into convulsions, eyes watering and hands filling with mucous, with blood. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to make myself jump from the car, set her free. “I did this to you.” But she didn’t believe me.

We’d fucked three times that first night and twice again that morning in the darkness of a parking garage. We’ve been driving ever since and even as she’s grown weaker, not six hours have passed without us pulling to the side of the road and ripping our pants away, our screams so loud the passing cars must have heard everything. And thought we were just a couple. Ordinary. Alive.

“You’ll get sicker,” I yell at her across the New Mexican dirt and scrub. I can see her bare feet dangling from the car, not moving but not retreating either. She coughs and the rattle of her chest expands through the airlessness of the night, crawling across my skin. I want her to run. I want her to be twenty miles down the road, already forgetting the sound of my voice. But I can’t bring myself to send her away. Thousands of women. Millennia of hunger. Never once have I been able to send a woman away.

“Come here,” I say.

Suzanna rises from the car. Still so beautiful even in sickness. Even with her hair gone to string. Her face swollen with boils. She doesn’t even know how much her beauty pauses life, how much she makes your breaths hurt. “Suzanna,” I say as she picks her way towards me, my arms still outstretched in my attempt to touch nothing, feel nothing. If I had the will, I could hold my arms here for days. For weeks. She has made me so strong.

“Take me to Miami,” she says, close enough now that I can hear her wheezing, see the blood pooling in her eyes. She’d do well in Miami. Grow tan and confident. Grow happy. But I know she’ll go nowhere without me. She touches my waist. “You didn’t make me sick,” she says and wraps her arms around me, her cheek pressing against my chest. I want to lift up her skirt. To take her one last time before the sunrise. Leave her fallen.

On the horizon, the first line of gray sunlight spreads upward. “Go,” I say.

“But I love you,” she says, holding me tighter.

“No you don’t.”

“Yes,” she says. “You want me. Even like this you want me.” She says nothing more. As if that explains everything. Explains all my women. My phosphorus desire burning away their loneliness – for a day. For two. I want to tell Suzanna that there is no grandeur in me. No lasting hope, but she feels so warm. I put my arms around her waist and pull her as close as I can. She smells of sex and of flesh beginning to rot, and I grow hard thinking of the thousands I’ve found in bars and on corners and alone on afternoon walks. How I’ve needed them. Loved them. Lost them all to this savage eternity. This demon. The incubus. This fool.

On the horizon dawn expands. I lean towards Suzanna’s ear. “I love you,” I say and hope she understands the truth of that. The sunlight cutting down through my skin, my bones. No thorns. No salvation. I see her out in the heat of Miami. Tan. Laughing. And I hope she sees it, too. In this moment. As I lift up her skirt. Enter her. And burn away everything she’s ever had.

THOMAS MUNDT

2010-04-17T13:53:00.000-07:00

THIRTEEN DUDES NAMED ORLANDO

Thirteen dudes named Orlando are skinning fresh halibut right now, each representing his own pushpin on a map of Earth. Some of the Orlandos live in towns and villages and hamlets but most live in cities, residing in studio apartments others find sad and shrinking but the Orlandos consider palatial. They uniformly believe dusk to be the cruelest time of day, the way it drowns the sun in the black waters of the horizon.

I.

One of the Orlandos is Orlando Cepeda, but not the Orlando Cepeda you’re thinking about. This Orlando Cepeda lives in West Palm Beach and while he did play baseball in high school, his madre insisted he’d be a better jazz pianist and made him quit the club halfway through his sophomore year. He is neither a jazz pianist nor a baseball player these days, hasn’t so much as looked at a job posting in the last eight months. He is currently in his friend Raymond’s kitchen, baked off his ass on Maui Times Kush and dragging a very-sharp blade along a fish’s bone structure, starting at the gill plate and following its spine until he reaches the tail.

II.

Orlando Dupree is a sous chef at Xerxes, a Persian seafood restaurant in Rochester, New York. He has just been assigned the task of preparing the Lowrimore family's entire meal and his head is crunching numbers while his hands cut. It is becoming increasingly difficult for him to keep the number of fillets, lemons, and garlic cloves he needs straight in his mind because his thoughts are with his neighbor Don, who is recovering at St. Luke's Presbyterian after being assaulted with a tire iron in a CVS parking lot early this morning.

III.

Eleven-year old Orlando Peña isn't so much skinning fresh halibut as he is jamming a Phillips-head screwdriver into a still-living fish, carving out enough space in its side in which to fit a small explosive. Once he has a cherry bomb securely lodged inside his victim, he most certainly intends to light its fuse and obliterate the very-unlucky piscis in the presence of Mrs. Blum, his neighbor from across-the-way.

IV and V.

Two of the Orlandos (Thigpen and Baker-Meinhoff, respectively) are students at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Chicago, Illinois. They are standing at adjacent workstations, immersed in their current Seafood Basics assignments. As Chef Randy lectures from the front of the room, they independently calculate the odds of two Orlandos from Western Manitoba moving to the same Midwestern city with the same aspirations of landing Second City auditions, only to enroll in the same culinary arts program eighteen months later (and after a few near-callbacks and series of never-stood-a-chances). When they discuss the same over slices at Lou Malnati's after class, they settle upon a billion-to-one.

VI.

Former NBA power forward Orlando Woolridge has invited his friend and former teammate, Bill Laimbeer, over for dinner and is trying out a new seafood recipe he picked up watching Barefoot Contessa. He hopes the meal will help the two mend fences and move past last month's ugly pool party incident. He also secretly hopes he will be reimbursed for the destroyed barbecue pit.

VII.

A self-described romantic, a shirtless T. Orlando Jenks, Esq. is in the kitchen of the Lower East Side efficiency he keeps for the sole purpose of banging his paralegal Kiersten, preparing a post-coital snack to Phil Collins' No Jacket Required.

VIII.

The less said about the pile of putrid fish carcasses threatening to consume Orlando With An O's rumpus room, the better.

IX.

Belgian rapper Lil' Orlando has grown tired of the "thug" label that has prefaced much of his career, so today he is participating in a cooking demonstration with model Ingrid Parewijck on Geraardsbergen Public Access Television, in an attempt to soften his image and increase his marketability to Females Aged Thirty-Five to Fifty. Proving that you can take a man out of the streets but not vice-versa, Lil' Orlando becomes enraged after he catches Ms. Parewijck adding too much fennel to the bouillabaisse, threatening to toss her sorry ass into the Hoëgne River in front of a live studio audience.

X.

Orlando "Big E" Smalls swears he was just trying to do some prep work for this afternoon's fish fry and slipped. No, he would never do anything to hurt himself. Not with the baby due in June. Yes, he should get those wrists looked at right away. And yes, he really should be more careful.

XI.

There is absolutely nothing Whitney can say to her youngest son, Orlando, Jr., to make him feel better right now. He is inconsolable as he examines the mangled fish on the plate, prying its gills back with the dull knife that started all this trouble in the first place, wondering how he managed to botch simple Wikipedia instructions this bad. She wants to tell him that it doesn't matter, that she will still have the best Mother's Day ever, that she will always remember how hard he tried to make his Mama proud with his fancy cooking. But she doesn't tell him any of that, knowing that her words will only drive him to sprint into the living room and take up with that fucking Xbox for the foreseeable future. So, Whitney simply plants a soft, dry kiss on Orlando, Jr.'s head before reaching for the drawer with the take-out menus.

XII.

Tony Orlando, while technically a dude, is more accurately a five-year old shelter cat whose weight has recently ballooned to over twenty-six pounds. He is curled up on the ottoman in his owners' living room, in a deep sleep. He is having a dream in which he obtains a small business loan from JP Morgan/Chase, one that he uses to lease a storefront in a gentrified neighborhood and fulfill his dream of owning and operating Tony Orlando's Quality Meats and Cheeses. He is now wearing a white lab coat, humming as he de-bones today's shipment. He discusses the prospect of socialized medicine with Mrs. Kumar until the vacuum starts up and he's just a morbidly-obese tabby again, yawning and stretching his legs against the loveseat.

XIII.

James "Orlando" McAfee is a native Floridian, now living on Raspberry Island, Alaska. Today he is in nearby Kodiak, getting his picture taken with Kodiak Fish and Game Advisory Committee Chairman Oliver Holm. A staff photographer from The Kodiak Daily Mirror is snapping shot after shot of the duo working a two-man crosscut saw across the great belly of The Largest Halibut Caught in Kodiak, Alaska in Nearly Forty-Five Years. Two days later, when one of the photos graces the front page of The Mirror, Mr. McAfee will deny his wife's allegation that he was fighting tears and instead blame seasonal allergies for the picture's wistful, glassy eyes.

JOHN MINICHILLO

2010-04-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

THE LOVE KOAN

Love on Wednesday, blue moon new. Picasso painted Degas’ dancers, maypole twirled lovingly. Amo animus amus. Heterogynous optimus. Love whispered, love kissed, caressed. Lovers try words like smocks spoken, sneakers of grown-ups over little kid shoes. Altar white wearing, stripped ornately, sparingly adorned, sunny yellow accents, lifted lovers loving.

Mocking bird sweet potato pancake. Sour cream smothered love, squash soup. Valentino Philistine April June Springtime intimate. Por avec vellum veritas poisonberry. Worth risking for the ripe juice and baby face bitter. Inuit words, 27 Chinese characters, three expert calligraphers adept at the 44 brushstrokes of love. Writing on your back, writing backwards, mirror writing, and writing on your front. A dictionary definition and thesaurusy-listed descriptions. Moods and feelings. Nectars and spells.

Love on a Tuesday. Lovebird puppies nestling. Bright beetle bugs, buttons, bashful boys. Semitransparent demi-revealing mid-thigh sheer-stockinged red temptress desire. A pebbled path. A mossy underbrush. A cradling limb. A creek.

Monday in the workweek. Absolutely not-in-a-million-years last-man-on-earth dead leaf pile smoking love. Friday and payday. The worst motherloving headache. A tincture and a cure. A fizzydrink potion.

All sundaes covered in crushed walnuts. Schnauzer pug Labrador love. Dog daddy face-licking love. An irrepressible irresistable irreligious unambiguous unpretentious unkind unfaltering unabated urgent love. A scheduled, timetabled, holidayed, measured love.

A Portuguese word approximating pre-ads. A hieroglyph from the crumbling chapel. A bedtime without sleep. A brasserie on Sunday where no one has bathed, no one prayed. An itchy feeling of localized contagion. A brain hemorrhage squirreling as thoughts won’t hold still. Pop-culture characters surrendering life for love. An idiomatic expression for a place where love resides. A series of Greek letters arranged to mean one kind of love and rearranged for another. A Czek phrase for love beyond reason. A rhyming poem for an intended. A recipe for love. A Sanskrit saying assumed to be true. A painting with a Russian accent. A trope. A singer practicing in Italian. A tomato-based fish stew only served in season. A night alone together, sleeping. A night apart and awake. The science of magnetism, the science of light. Sound traveling through wires, the electricity of our hearts, the gasses given off as bread bakes, the gasses from cakes. A likeness, or a person she resembles. Time that passes quickly, and time frozen. Seasoned lovers, green lovers, and lovers knowing every combination. A word for a feeling that art gives. A word for seeing clearly. A word for happiness and confusion.

Everybody on board. All hands. On again / off again. Purply and swole. Abstract and pointy. Unbuttoned, unbeetled, unbouyed, unboyed. Not unpleasurable, not unsentimental, not drunk, not unhappy. Reproductive fitness on hold for a short long time, organ cells tricked by contraceptativery. Rinse and repeat. A very Thursday kind of time. In the morning. In the afternoon.

In the mouth. Tasting bumpy strawberry and peachy fuzz fruit. Chocolate vanilla banana cream frosting whipped. A meaty well-prepared thick-crusted molasses pie. A cold leftover. Flat sugar sassafras, grease fries ketchup and side-mayonnaise, side-pickle. Hands across America tug-o-war.

Side-by-side. Where love resides. In my top. In my toes. Big toes and little toes. Tiny toes and miniatures. Where love goes. And also comes.

NEIL DE LA FLOR

2010-04-17T13:34:00.000-07:00

MINKOWSKIAN SPACETIME: THE GEOMETRY OF META
-for Bjork

On Black Friday Meta and I bought matching pink barrettes and goldfish because it was the stupidest thing we could do with two bucks. I had long hair then and when we walked out of K-mart we looked like two freaks from Timbuktu or Miami. They just stared. She curled her finger at me and morphed into Marilyn Monroe, but less attractive. It was the fattest thing I remember about 1984, besides Ryan White. Watch this, she said. And gave them the finger.

The next act is bizarre. Patience isn’t a virtue and I won’t make it painless. Z is the boy looking for answers. The boy is the boy looking for z. Both are mirror images of each other and are obsessed with mathematics, specifically infinite geometry. For example, if Z were to take the place of the real-number system, in any significant case, then the Boy would have to be very large so that ‘z+z+...+z=0’ would not show a serious discrepancy in observed behavior. These two boys are bound by Meta, the mother to both but related to only one. I hold the barrettes.

When inappropriate Meta would sound like a trucker to give her more credibility in public. At McDonald’s she once peed on the floor because they only allowed customers to take a leak. She is not afraid of consequences or humiliation. She would have been Nan Golden or one of the subjects of Nan’s art.

The crowd by now must be restless, but keep in mind you are invisible to both z and the boy, who are not concerned if you are unimpressed and bored with what you’ve heard so far. [Thrust your head around.] Giant show poodles guard the foyer and they are invisible to no one, not even ghosts. The usher guarding orchestra right is radiating an electromagnetic field, sort of, under her black & gray streaked wig and black lace lingerie. She is utterly enthralled by the performance because this is her first gig as a volunteer. It beats sitting on the porch of her one story gentrified cottage. It’s all around you, she repeats to the customers as if they’re not aware they are inside-out.

When I contacted the National Archives in Copenhagen, or Rigsarkivet, they resisted my call for information and such. They said, in Danish, Meta didn’t exist. But she did, I said, I swear. I thought part of me would speak Danish and reveal secrets to the other part of me in sonar. I still have her wigs and stolen pink barrettes.

Z: Boy, were you the archivist? The boy with two faces and elbow grease?

Boy: No. I’m not a fan of Grease, but I’ve always been in love with Olivia Newton John. I don’t collect nor have the desire to claw through potash anymore.

Z: Then why waste your breath?

Boy: For habeas corpus perhaps or respect for cumulous nimbuses, Cyclops and my missing shoelaces.

Z: Are you obsessive compulsive?

Boy: About the past. About the boy called z who was left to roll boulders up stairs.

Z: Why waste your breath?

Boy: Because I can. Because I left.

Z: Meet me on the moon.

Boy: In your dreams.

Z: I love you seismograph.

I know. I am going back and forth for no reason at all. The fact that I went back and forth to Denmark without a shred of evidence of Meta’s existence, or the Boy’s, or the boy z, or their father’s doesn’t mean I’m sitting on my porch thumbless. I went over and over it again with the staff but to no avail. They treated me like I was an ugly duckling dress. The Rigsarkivet, they said, is not for wimps.

Once, in Vegas, Meta saw Cher and I saw the Rhinestone Cowboy. Neither of us knew what each of us felt at that moment. Star struck or shot down perhaps because we were not the center of the universe anymore, two brown fish in the Pacific. We refueled on Root Beer floats and had to pee so bad we left the strip for the all you can eat buffet at Harrah’s restroom. The chance meeting of legends in Vegas meant, we decided, we were holy again and bigger than the biggest universe, or Birds of Paradise at least. My boy, she said, the things you’ll fight against are earthquakes compared to this.

She was clairvoyant too.

I have an inalienable right to lie? I am not a liar nor afraid of spacemen. I’m not afraid of using words that provoke the wrath of the almost mighty gods and goddesses. I’m not afraid of magic or grooming vans, or moving vans. It wasn’t 1986 anymore. Martin, in the end, informed me of Meta’s surrender to light. She abandoned her search for life, he said, on this planet.

It wasn’t a normal night because she didn’t win the jackpot. It wasn’t a normal phone call because she never called. Meta telegraphed the end zone, the final hour, the court jester, to me. (See: Mary Queen of Scots.) On Sundays we’d watch football at the Orange Bowl. She’d order me a hot dog and call me a wiener with mustard on her face. She called the shots from the 40-yard line. I had no idea which tight end did what but it didn’t matter. I screamed at him anyway.

You seem to have gone overboard with this, she said. [As if ghosts can speak to the dead or vice versa.] Your responses are near manic at best, she said, breakneck and full of dust. [I’m not even wearing a dress, I said.] I know, she said, but you should. [When I left Rigsarkivet I found the lost geometry of z.] Please, she said, confess your stones and spaceships to the wind. [I never went. I couldn’t afford the round trip plane tickets across the pond to Rigsarkivet.] They have grants for this kind of stuff, she said. The rest is ancient history.

As I said before there was an artifact of sorts, a tiny boy-craft perhaps, a small boat for fishing, a flick of the wrist, a war and a wicked witch. Pink barrettes. K-mart trips. Even Vlasic pickles. Well, there wasn’t a witch, but there were wolves and a concentration camp. She did women’s work—

in Froslev.

She said: I worked in a soup kitchen full of children and small men disguised as women. Others hung by their toes just because or just in case we wanted to run. It was 1944 and I just counted the sheep in my bed.

She never knew what hit her. She never knew I stopped going to the Orange Bowl and no longer shop at K-mart. She never knew I became the archivist. She never knew I’d grow up to be a gay boy or temporarily gothic and punk at the same time. I’m somewhat ridiculous without her. She never knew I wanted to know more about her magic shoes and the stuff that made them move. She never knew the complex nature of Minkowskian spacetime, or what comforts inanimate objects in a vacuum.

She wrote: We were smashed together—sardine like and salted. For the hell of it I painted the sky with imaginary pigment. The daily bread just fit in my shoes. It took awhile to adjust to push up bras in the 50’s but when I got out I used them to summon arthropods on weekends. My Boy, swear off helicopters. Tiptoe on the ledge of disaster.

*

A week before Thanksgiving she wouldn’t lay off the algebraic equations:

q, she said, equals the sum of my ancestors.

p, she said, equals antipasto, which is like the ancestor you never wanted, but have, like uncles.

You better learn your ps and qs because, she said, you never know.

*

Finally, almost the final act: The crowd is utterly complex and seated at the edge of their seats while the stagehand is on stage, stationary as ever before, and staged. For no reason the giant poodles begin to chant, or om, or make sounds that are somewhat chant-like and omish. They bark. The audience leans in (stupefied?) as if the one and only Judy Garland emerges from the gates of Oz, but it is not Judy Garland per se, or Liza, but the Judy that is and/or was once called Meta before she came to America who is now dressed in black lace lingerie and wearing a black & gray streaked wig. The crowd begins a round robin of whispers—the usher and I can’t believe it and woman and bondage.

All stop.

She says: Bones of goldfish, archive the past.

This is what happened: She shuttled Jews across the arctic; she didn’t shuttle Jews across the arctic; there’s no archive of this in Rigsarkivet but there are ancestors; there are eggs & spermatozoa; she was a klutz; she peed a lot; enjoyed sex incognito and wore sexy lingerie; distributed glossy propaganda against the occupiers while she was occupied herself with the impossible pregnancy of z; she was a collaborator; was not a traitor; buried her first-born in secret; followed her husband to the ledge but stepped back; buried him too; traded bees for honey; honed her hunting skills; played helmsman/woman of fishing boats; scrubbed boat decks with remarkable precision; five finger discounted; threatened football players with pistols and whips; whipped ass; played mouse.

Her favorite dance was the hula.

ANDREW BORGSTROM

2010-04-17T13:30:00.001-07:00

THE PRECURSOR TO MY LIFE IN MOVIES

Dad buried Sable, legs tied and still barking. His first magic act, or the first time he assured me my pets were in magic limbo. His raised middle finger always punctuated his “Abracadabra.” So I flipped the bird at my teacher when she said, “Who’s ready for a surprise?”

Then I snuck out to Goldin’s box. Then I saw the remains of my thirteenth pet—a Balkh Hound, Simon Theodore.

Dad always said shit with emphasis on the vowel. Like two vowels with a hyphen between them, consonants pronounced as vowels, pets pronounced as dead, my shoeprint forced into the cement long after the cement dried. Dad’s Firebird on top of my foot. Dad threw the keys over the roof to mom and said, “You’re going to need to back her up.”

Dad said he couldn’t move one night, said his limbs were paralyzed. Mom smiled, and dad hit the smile in its mouth. Dad said someone pulled the covers from him in the direction of the floor. Said he reached for the blankets and felt an arm, even though he couldn’t move his limbs. Said he pulled the arm and found a boy. A ghost boy who said, “Help,” and dad hit him in the mouth too.

Then I jumped off the roof in dad’s unused ski boots. Then I kicked in the floor with a ski boot.

Mom forgot to open the vent before lighting a fire. The smell of campfire through our house, in all my school clothes. The kids at school told campfire jokes. I joined dad on the roof for his next magic trick, and “Don’t forget to bring Tully.” Dad put a Santa Claus hat on my Alaskan Husky and shoved her into the chimney. When dad opened the vent, my clothes smelled like burnt dog. The kids at school told hotdog jokes. Eventually the smell of cigarette smoke returned to my clothes. I guess they didn’t know any cigarette jokes.

I sat on a skateboard and pushed myself across the blacktop with dad’s unused ski gloves. Our backyard became a makeshift pet graveyard where half of dad’s magic awaited resurrection. Silence. “Out of respect,” mom said. “Out of secrecy,” dad said. Dad told me he would bury mom here. I promised not to tell anyone there was a human corpse in the pet graveyard. The magician’s tricks die with me.

Then I learned how to add color to the print by stencil. Then I learned how to digitally generate sets.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: DAVY ROTHBART

2009-10-30T22:57:00.000-07:00

Davy Rothbart might be best known for creating Found Magazine (this shit makes me laugh every time): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkEifboqGXk

but he's also a kick ass writer. His story collection The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas is one of Dogzplot editor Barry Graham's favorites (mine, too), which is why I decided to interview Davy about it:

EE: The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas was published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in 2005 but you self-published it in 2002 with 21 Balloons. How did you make the decision to self-publish initially? Had you tried finding a publisher/agent/etc first, or did you go directly to self-publishing?

DR: I hadn't even realized i'd written a book! i was telling my friend paul hornschemeier in chicago that on a Found tour i was gonna pass out photocopies of a few of my stories. he said, "hmm, can you send me the files? i want to read 'em." i sent him the files for 5 stories, and the next thing i knew he'd designed this beautiful, amazing-looking book! without even asking me! so we hooked up with chris young at west-can in winnipeg and had 5,000 copies printed for an extremely reasonable price. i remember seeing the books for the first time - what a rush! i had a box shipped to my brother mike's house in madison, wisconsin because i was headed there on tour. he brought them to the bar where we met, and the waitress was admiring how dope they looked. she asked if she could buy 3 copies! what a crazy and glorious feeling it was when we left the bar, seeing the big bouncer at the door perched on a stool, reading my book. i still maintain that 80% of the copies we sold were due to paul's exquisite book design and cover.     

EE: How many copies did you sell with 21 Balloons?

DR: over about 18 months we sold all 5,000. maybe half on Found tour, and the other half at the maybe 20 indie bookstores who were carrying it. skylight books in LA sold 500 copies! literally, darin klein and kevin awakuni over there, here's what they'd do-- if someone came up and bought a stack of books, they'd slip The Lone Surfer in their bag as well and charge 'em the 8 bucks! it's one thing to 'suggest' a book or 'recommend' that shit -- it's another to charge 'em and send the book out the door in their hands! that's why those guys is my homeys for life. that's support.
 
EE: Would you recommend self-publishing for other writers, either starting out or producing works that aren't seen as commercially viable by most of the larger publishing companies?

DR: absolutely. you don't need to wait for someone else's permission to have a book. you can print your own -- just do your best to make it the most beautiful-looking object possible. and check the grammar, spelling, punctuation 90 times. i feel that having a great-looking book (with decent writing too) makes for an easier leap of the imagination for mainstream publishers who might want to get on board with it than sending them files or giving them some Xeroxed-type shit. self-publishing is a great way to start (and continue... and finish), no shame in your game.   
EE

EE: How long did you spend writing the stories in The Lone Surfer? Did you write them while at the University of Michigan?  

DR: i wrote one of those suckers "First Snow" in 1998. the other stories i wrote in about 4 months in 2000 when i lived in new mexico and focused only on writing. i graduated U-M in '96, and while i wrote a ton in school and had awesome, kick-ass teachers, but the stuff i wrote then wasn't really that hot, though i still have a certain fondness for some of it.

EE: Did you earn an M.F.A. there? What are your thoughts on M.F.A.'s?  

DR: i didnt get an MFA, just went to undergrad. i think MFAs are cool. im jealous of my friends who are in MFA programs. i wish i was in one. i think it's a blessed gift to yourself to say "i am just gonna focus on writing for 2 years." and to be there and do that. maybe i will one day. having deadlines and someone waiting to read what you've written is a huge motivator. 

EE: The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas is an amazing title. How did you come up with it? And did you think of it first and then write the story?  

DR: A few years ago, I was driving on a small two-lane highway through rural Kansas when I saw a bizarre and riveting sight—-a teenage kid had slung a surfboard between two dead tractors in the middle of a cornfield and was balanced on top, like he was practicing how to surf. Here he was, thousands of miles from either coast, the sun setting in glorious colors behind him—-I was mesmerized and sat there watching for ten minutes or so, and then I drove away; I don’t think he even saw me. But that image of him surfing in the cornfields stuck with me, and my curiosity about him kept growing more intense, so finally I decided to write a story about him, imagining what his life was like and what might have happened had our paths intersected. I called the story The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas (Montana is the name of the tiny town in Kansas where I saw him) and it ended up as the title story of the book.
 
EE: The stories are written in first person and some are set in places like Chicago and Ann Arbor, cities in which you've lived…You must then get asked frequently (and I'm asking again now cuz Barry's makin' me), how much of the stories are taken from your actual life and how much from imagination and does it/should it matter?  

DR: Half of what happens in the stories is real; the other half might very well have happened.

EE: Probably my favorite story in the collection is "A Black Dog," which is set in Chicago, where you lived for a few years, and is about a dude who's been working as a ticket scalper, which you did. How important would you say setting is in a story? Now that I'm thinking about it, setting seems to be an important factor in all your stories…  

DR: That story is the one based most fully on my actual experiences. every thing that happens in that story is exactly what really happened. me and that girl nicole are still dear friends. she's married (not to the dude she was engaged to in the story) and has 2 kids now but we talk all the time... 

EE: I'm fascinated by the time you spent working as a ticket scalper. At what point in your life was this? Before/after U of M? Before/after writing The Lone Surfer? How exactly did you fall into this line of work? Were you writing at that time as well?    

DR: My dad got me scalping with him at U-M football and basketball games when I was like 6, and i've just always done it since then. usually just here and there, but in chicago i did it full-time for about 4 years, during the michael jordan era and the bulls dynasty. a lucrative time to be in the biz! i'm mostly retired from it now, but i went to a football game with my dad a few weeks ago, and was just trying to buy tickets for me and him, but somehow ended up flipping a few seats and making 100 bucks in like 15 minutes. made me miss the racket. i want to write a novel about scalpers one day. 

EE: Two of the stories in the collection - "First Snow" and "How I Got Here" - concern prisoners. I think you mentioned once having worked in prisons in the past? Teaching writing? How did that influence you and your writing?    

DR: I've taught at 2 prisons and this has been one of the biggest influences on me in my life. it's really interesting to work with people who are not trained writers and see the magical ways they use language to such unsual, exquisite effect. so prison life has also worked its way into some of my stories. 

EE: Where is writing on your list of priorities currently? Do you have any desire to write more stories or are you focused on a novel?

DR: for the first time in years, writing is #1 again. i've been doing Found Magazine, this american life stuff, and learning how to make movies, but now i am writing a book of personal essays, inspired by people like jim carroll, david sedaris, jonathan ames. i am working with sean mcdonald at riverhead and i have deadlines every 10 days. i have not written this intensively since college (over 13 years) and it is relentless but i am getting some writing done. nothing very good yet, but i trust if i keep writing, something decent will come.

EE: You tour for Found magazine a few months every year. Do you write at all when you're on the road? Or does the sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle get in the way?
   
DR: yes, on the kind of tours we do which are like 57 cities in 62 says it's pretty much impossible to do any writing. but i also plan to write a book at some point about the experiences we've had on the road, because that shit's been crazy!

EE: Do you find much time for reading? What are some of the books that inspired you initially and what are books that have inspired you more recently?  
 
DR: i love jim carroll's "forced entries." i love dean bakopoulos' book "don't come back from the moon." i loved jacob slichter's book "so you wanna be a rock and roll star." miranda july's new book is super legit. loved it. i LOVE this guy named poe ballantine who writes for the wonderful magazine The Sun. mostly i read books by friends and acquaintances of mine, plus i read a ton of magazines and pretty much every article that makes it onto nytimes.com. i wish i had more time to read, though. 

EE: Travel seems to be a constant theme in your life. You're on the road a large part of every year, many of your stories are about people on the road or in transit, and you named your publishing company after a children's book (The 21 Balloons) about travel…why do you think the draw of the road is for you and is it diminishing or increasing? Do you get restless when you're not on the road?      

DR: i love the rush of new experiences and meeting new people of all kinds. i love the American landscape. i even love just plain driving. it's also nice to be home in one spot for a while and get a chance to kick it with the homeys and cool out for a minute, but one fun thing about traveling so much is making friends everywhere and then getting to visit them. i sometimes am eager to get home but then quickly get restless to hit the road again.
   
EE: So it says in your book bio you are, among other things (This American Life contributor, documentary film maker, blah, blah, blah...), a rapper. My daughter's current dream is to go on the MTV show Made and be made a rapper. Maybe you could help her out. Who are your favorite living and dead rappers? And if you were making us a mix tape, what songs would you put on it? (I guess that's sorta the same question, huh? Feel free to answer once.)

DR: here's a few favorites rappers/ groups just off the top of my head, i could really go for hours... EPMD, Nine, Petey Pablo, Public Enemy, Too $hort, Twista, Classified, Buff-1, Ice Cube, Lil' Wayne, Boogie Down Productions, Now On, Athletic Mic League, Atmosphere, Why?

here's a few great tracks off the top of my mind:

dilated peoples "when worst comes to worst"
Nine "whatcha want"
drake "fear" - just heard this and am diggin it.
mc eiht -- "streiht up menace" (eliz, these are spelled correctly)
masta ace "born to roll"
buff-1 "big thangs"
public enemy "get the fuck outta dodge"
i love geographically-specific rappers like petey pablo from north carolina who talk in novelistic detail about the place where they're from. for all the haters, listen to ALL of "diary of a sinner: 1st entry", especially the last few tracks - that shit gets deep!
classified - from halifax, nova scotia - is also amazing.

EE: Okay, last question. I gotta ask, Davy. The Lone Surfer is dedicated to eleven chicks. Dude, wtf?

DR: i know, only 11, right? it's been 5 years since then, so i'm sure there's a few to add. i guess that's for the next book. seriously, those are all people that mean a lot to me and that i've got eternal love for. that's who i wrote the book for. loving them and longing for them is what inspired those stories, so it was only fair to dedicate the book to them.

Amen to that!

WILLIAM BURKE

2009-10-21T17:14:00.000-07:00

NOVEMBER

the quality of a farmer.
is in a bucket.
of feed. in the soil she leaves.
in the family he loves.

ERIN PRINGLE

2009-10-16T22:40:00.000-07:00

ASYLUM

The government removed the lid of the incredible disappearing box and turned over the top hat and punctured the water tank so the patients spilled down the hallways, over the walls, to dry out like toads to be mowed over in the neighbors’ front yards.

Burned were the brochures and poor reviews, and the staff filed into assembly lines or nursing homes.

The ceilings bowed and seedlings grew trunks in the elevator shaft where a suicide of ravens has waited for the end of the world since the beginning of the world.

Patients returned with sleeping bags, teenagers ripped out the light fixtures, and ravens stole what glittered, spoons, and the lapel pins nurses had worn on dresses white as electricity or snow freezing death until thaw.

But the farmers still harvested the field seamed to the back yard where patients had rehearsed living while children kicked back their legs in swings that flew them high enough to see over the wall and barbed-wire vines and into the cornfields, the cornstalks like storytellers that sink ships.

Stories say the person who, with closed eyes, binds the self to a cot in one of the cells will hear the thoughts of the former patient. Not the patient crabwalking across the movie screen, and not even the patient in the government playbills saying funding is lacking—wings closed down—nurses strapping patients to beds because there aren’t enough stagehands to watch the props, these patients, the inmates, the ones with their faces erased as they push lawn mowers over a caption that exclaims Productivity!—as they sit with crossed legs in one of many school desks: Education!—Even the faces' reflections are scrubbed from the glass bellies of washing machines big enough to clean everything but hope.

Those who followed the story’s directions (up the country roads to the town founded on the asylum) but who did not bind themselves jumped down the elevator shaft or became storytellers or gravediggers.

I found not a cell but the room, one large room, with a cot, cot after cot from the dormitory pictures, cots tightly made, erased of the patients in the camera’s flash. Cots in rows across both walls, cots rowing down the aisle to nowhere.

ERIN

And I lay down.

But I remember only waking bound in red sheets. My husband’s handing me the telephone and saying it’s my best friend’s husband, and there’s her name before his voice says it down a thousand miles of country-road telephone wires, and there’s the scream down and up a thousand miles of the body’s wires and that scream it’s still going that scream and this scream won’t stop until I pass back out and wake up on that cot instead of the red sheets under the white comforter I’d bought on sale when she was alive.

God, I swear I went to that asylum and tied myself up. It’s the only story that explains.

HEATHER FOWLER

2009-10-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

BLOOM IN ANY SEASON

He was the lover I took up with time and again. For him, I wanted to bloom in any season, to create a sort of non-annual flowering that that bore the healthy radiance of well-kept perennials, but with more color. In spring and summer, on my thighs, magenta roses bloomed; Gerber daisies covered my breasts, surrounding my nipples. Enormous hibiscus blossoms grew from the crack of my ass and a dappling of heathered groundcover moved from my shoulders down my back, intersecting with an occasional group of forget-me-nots and a scattered dash of bachelor buttons.

I could not hide my color when it sprang out this way. At times, it was embarrassing. I could not go to work naked. I could not wear clothes without crushing the flowers. I could not crush the flowers without watching their wilting corpses seem like bedraggled, ill-used ladies in the evenings, creased with the borrowed age of the weight of cotton or linen or rayon or wool. All day at work, there was the sensation of their petals shifting, growing mangled, twisting and pinching against confinement, being ravished by a cruel invisible foe below my garments, which was my own motion, but the other ladies whispered if something pink or blue popped free, speculated endlessly on my loose living, and only accepted me again when I looked as bewildered as they were, as joyless, wrecked, and tired.

Amidst the other admins there were those with pine needle hair, those with sweet grass lashes, those with any number of variations of plant or water-life entwined with their features. But I was afraid to show my full bloom because they taught me fear already with their jealousy: "You don't belong here," they would say. "You will outwork us," they would whine. "Why are you here? Shouldn't you work where the fancy people are? Go find your own kind." But by fancy they meant trashy. By outwork, they meant upstage.

I came to know that, like social workers, they always meant a worse word than was used, but I looked like them in shadows, in partial views, seated at my desk answering the phone again and again, "Ingenue Enterprise. How may I direct your call? Please hold."

Yes, there were the year-round strangling ivy vines that did not cease from my elbows to my fingertips. The morning glories wrapping around my legs from knees to ankles that seldom bloomed. But when I got home from work each day, in the blooming, in the spring and summers, nearly always, there was the lover. He was seasonal, like fruit, like me.

He had dark brown hair with summer blue tips. His lips fit my fingers perfectly, my elbows, my groin, my face. He came to me most often in April, saying, "I'm back," as if we had agreed that each year he would come just as casually, as if he were a migrating bird to fly south for me, as if I had not cried and pulled my hair out the last time he left, swearing he could rot in hell before finding his way back into my bed, which was soil and cocoa bark, which would be forever closed to him, I swore-- which had been empty but was full again when he arrived-- because he knew how to make a woman wait. He counted on the months between these absences to soften and confuse me, exclaiming, shouting, singing, "I'm back! I'm back," on his return, his refrain always announcing new arrivals like they were the Roman holidays of my lifetime, like I should say something delighted or embrace him as if his last absence were solely an eight month trip to the distracting grocery store of someone elses. For milk. For more flowers. For fresh meat. For good cream.

"You're back," I'd say. "That's nice. Did you want to come tell me I taste like earth and moonlight again? That was last year's line." Sometimes, I'd say, "I'm tired. I'm bored. I've been working all day, and I did not order take-out, boomerang dick for dinner, as far as I know, so why don't you leave?"

He would smile like I had been glad to see him, like I had said something endearing. This was his winsome charm. "I came to touch you," he would say, coming so close to me I felt him brush the flowers, their pistols, their stamens, the thin tips of their petals. I would say, "No," as he leaned closer, but he would keep touching me, which I could not resist, touching me so well that even the bruises on the flowers trapped under blazers and fine button-up blouses all day would relent and freshen.

Invariably, after days of his attentions, I would let him close again, stop sniping, and give him the joy face I knew he wanted. He knew what to do with a woman who blossomed. Sometimes, he sniffed my skin and sighed, touched my flowers ever so lightly, just with fingertips, or shook their blooms between his thumb and index finger to move pollen from one to the others. Other times, he blew warm breath across the blooms on my lower back as if his exhale alone could spread my golden dust, his breath like a sunlit breeze warming my meadows and vales.

"Thank you," I'd say.

"You're welcome," he'd reply.

For months, we would go on making love until I worked, which was when he waited and bathed and did crosswords and cooked himself udon and dreamt his wayfaring dreams--and then we made love again, nights falling softly into days, entranced again with each other, one day after another, until I could hardly concentrate at work, until I could not tell his body from my own, until his hands were extensions of my heart's desire and quiet whispers, until his eyes were the mirror I best preferred to see my own sight by. His body was hard and cold like stone.

Sometimes, he crushed me. Often, "You're blooming," he'd say. "I love that."

Then on weekends, he'd play Chopin on my grandmother's upright piano and make carrot soup and lobster salad. He would dance all night with me, especially through the month of July, me nude save the flowers, him in a light t-shirt and ripped jeans, as we stood in the garden behind the green split-level house where we met, the one I bought from him one day, and where, during the protracted transaction, we fell in love.

Then fall came when my flowers died. I tried to prolong their life, whispering to my skin, "Please. Please..." But they would not stay. The arm and leg vines stayed, but across my body, brown brambles, the texture of branches, a wood like rasp, proliferated. "You are too hard. You scratch now," he would say, packing, picking up the handfuls of shed dying petals from the hardwood floors, lifting them to his face and sniffing, almost nostalgically, before looking back towards the door he tended to walk through. Moments later, he would leave that door and then be gone.

Considering his recent loss, bereft, watching more flowers darken and die on my flesh, I would wish to bloom for him in any season. I would curse him, waiting through the hard, cold months of the rest of the year when the ladies I worked with grew fonder and kinder, strangely seeming to like me more in heart-ache, in dull ache, seeming to know that my bloom had fallen from the bud.

Bolstered by their platonic, nurturing love, I would swear off him and his irrational leave-takings. I would look for more perennial and durably rooted men--those for whom my vines would suit all year long. I would find them. They would bore me. As the months passed I would forget the lover, forget how it felt to have him cease to darken my doorstep, cease to dance with me all night long, hard, pressed close, naked in the yard he once owned and then sold me. I'd curse him for how the ephemeral textures of his stays had thwarted all measure for regular happiness, making all kinds of lists for myself about how and why I would never take him back.

But winter would end and spring would near as the hurts of the last year grew muted enough to numb, though my mental affliction remained, when I'd be virulent with conflict, loving, hating, mild, and dismayed--flying through light spectrums of his defense and his evisceration, alone in my bed of soil and bark, saying, "I hope that sonofabitch never returns! I barely survived him the last time! He doesn't love anyone! Love lasts longer than a spring and summer. Sniffing my dead flowers? Such a pity! Such a shame! I’m still here, damn it! Look at me and stay this time, you bastard! Heaven preserve me from the hard crush of a man who cuts my heart out every year and returns it to me smaller! He is a murder. A crow flock paused on bad numbers! Awful. I never want to see him again! I don’t!"

But I'd be looking out the door he often walked through as April neared, my riotous body hovering near the jamb, feeling the flowers grow and flare across my body to paint me like a carousel of color, like a chorus of effluvium, and feeling their petals whisper and flush across my chest with a new sensual abandon, quite decisively personally unfurling as the caterpillar thermometer on the outer garden wall inched up through the ides of March…when I would hardly remember what he had done. Or that he had hurt me.

Had he hurt me? Yes. And yet, I would crave his hard come and crosswords, his soup and lobster salad, or hands dancing with knives, seasonal lovemaking, and other sharp-edged things. But mainly—yes, mainly, I’d be listening for, "I'm back."

CHANEL DUBOFSKY

2009-10-16T19:36:00.002-07:00

BENEVOLENCE

As she waits for Simon to arrive, she rinses an empty yogurt container, preparing it to hold the salad she has made for their trip. Kate, her roommate, wanders into the kitchen, her hair matted, wearing her bathrobe over last night’s party clothes. She fishes in her robe pocket and watches Claudia pour the contents of the bowl into the clean container. “You know,” she says, after Claudia pushes the cover over the top, “my sister says using those things more than once can give you cancer.” She lights the cigarette she’s found in her pocket and leaves the kitchen.

Once, Simon would have thought this was funny. Lately, though, his eyes glaze over when she goes on about something. She has started filing these stories away in her memory, saving them for when he might want to hear them.

Simon honks the horn now -- one neat blast. She picks up her small suitcase and the container of salad.

The sticky air outside is a shock. Kate keeps the apartment as cold as possible, year-round. When she reaches the car, Claudia pretends to look around in her bag so she doesn’t have to meet Simon’s eyes. “Hi,” he says, holding up his palm in greeting. His smile is weak, like he’s been sick and his strength is coming back to him slowly. They planned this trip months ago, in a fervor that no longer exists. Still, he pulls away from the curb.

Simon changes radio stations constantly. It seems to be an exercise for his hand and not a search for music. Claudia doesn’t stop him. Erratic or not, there’s nothing she wants more right now than noise.

Just outside Westchester, traffic comes to a halt. Claudia rolls down her window. In the far left lane, a car sits, stopped, two girls nearby, one with her jeans too big and slipping down, the other with a tight red ponytail. Drivers cut around them, gazing curiously for a moment before they plow back into their lanes and speed on ahead.

Simon stares straight, eyes never moving from the road, one palm on the wheel, the other on his knee, rubbing the fabric of his jeans so hard he might wear through it. Without signaling, he swerves and pulls in front of the stalled car. Without looking at Claudia, he gets out. She sits, feeling the car shake and jerk from the speed of the cars that pass it. It feels flimsy, like it might blow across the highway.

Simon approaches the girls carefully. He reads true crime novels and watches horror movies. Claudia knows that he thinks women are naturally suspicious. “The car passed out,” the red hair girl shouts, and Claudia imagines it collapsing on its haunches, like a dead dog. “Don’t worry,” Simon says, confidently. He inspects the car as though he knows what he’s looking for, checking under the hood, kicking the inflated tires, sitting in the driver’s seat and wrinkling his nose. He says something to the red-headed girl. Her eyes get big. She laughs. Simon unlocks the trunk of his own car, retrieves a jug of pool colored liquid, and proceeds to pour from it into a place under their car’s hood.

When he turns back to Claudia, she’s not sure how to look at him. This happens often. He’ll be walking towards her from across the street or the supermarket aisle and she won’t know what to do with her face. The redhead is on a cell phone now, her face flushed, smiling. Her friend stands beside her, nodding, looking relieved.

After the girls have driven away, Simon and Claudia stand beside his car. Claudia’s throat feels tight and gritty. Simon’s hair blows across his forehead, and from where Claudia is standing, his eyes are very green. “Please,” he says, not looking at her, “let’s just turn around.”

Later, after he’s driven away, Claudia stands on her steps for a long time, watching the heat of the day sizzle across the sidewalks and rooftops, until the rain comes, another small, unexpected kindness.

CHANEL DUBOFSKY

2009-10-16T19:36:00.001-07:00

THE FUCKERS

The fuckers tumble out of the bathroom like clowns from a tiny car. The girl has these huge tits and dark red hair. She rushes past me, smelling like chocolate. A guy's behind her, holding onto the back of her jeans. He's not good looking enough to have fucked her.

I shut the bathroom door and lock it. I take a long, grateful piss, then I climb into the tub and push the window open. It shimmies back down. I jam a roll of toilet paper under it and light a cigarette with hands that shake.

It's the sucking part of smoking that I like the most, the pulling in, how it's all mine. I don't put the cigarette down. I can see it falling out the window and me jumping after it.

I look around the bathroom for traces of the fuckers-hair, a blob of cum, a used condom. I need to know that it was worth their while. I wonder where they did it. I fucked a girl in a bathroom sink once. She got these bruises on her lower back from the faucet. I felt badly when I saw them, after, but she seemed not to mind.

The fuckers cleaned up after themselves, I guess. I sit in the tub and smoke. It's white and quiet. I can't hear what's going on outside at the party. The shower tile has some crud in it. The cigarette is almost gone. I hold it up to my face and stare into the orange and black part that winks as it smolders.

There's a pounding on the door. It startles me and I bang my head against the wall behind me. “Let me in,” a voice yells, “Come on, asshole.” The door's shaking. I shut my eyes and press my lips against the filter. It burns.

I wonder what she told people about the bruises on her back. I should have known better than to think she'd be here tonight. The sink was her idea. I thought I'd have a heart attack when she got up there, opened her legs and smiled at me. Under the hot lamp, her hair held a million tiny lights.

DAVE CLAPPER

2009-10-16T19:33:00.000-07:00

THE BITTERNESS OF BUTTERFLY WINGS

I seldom go to the university’s various social functions, though I would if invited. I crave that question that inevitably follows introductions: “What do you teach?”

“I’m a Lepidopterist,” I tell the enquirer, a profession I know isn’t familiar to most.

“What’s that?” they usually ask.

"I study butterflies." Men typically change the subject at this point. Most women, however, are either interested or feign interest. They usually ask what got me interested in studying butterflies. I tell them something sort of romantic, testing the waters. If one seems interested in the romance of butterflies, I know that this is not the person to whom I may safely confide.

Just once I met a woman who seemed disappointed in the romance of butterflies. It is because of that encounter that I’m rarely invited to social events.

“Can I tell you the real reason?” I whispered to her. Her eyes, which had begun to wander, snapped back to me.

“Yes, please,” she said in an equally low voice.

“It’s the powder.”

“On their wings.”

“Yes.”

“I love that powder,” she said. I felt that unique vibration created when energy percolates between two people with similar passions.

“Have you tasted it?” I asked.

She blushed and almost imperceptibly nodded. “It’s bitter.”

I grabbed her elbow and steered her to a less crowded room. She didn’t resist.

“The first time I caught a butterfly, I was six. As I clasped its wings between my fingers, I heard something awful, something I’d never heard before. My parents were having sex.”

Her eyes widened.

“The sound so distracted and frightened me that I crushed the butterfly in my hands. It was an Anise Swallowtail. To take my mind off the sounds, I focused on the mess on my hands. I could have wiped it on my jeans as most boys would have done, but the experience would have ended with the memory of sounds of my parents. So I licked the Anise from my fingers. Making sure that I didn’t miss a single bit of the taste of its various parts.”

“God,” she said.

“It was the powder that stuck with me. Other parts of the Anise could be compared to other tastes I’d encountered, but the wings’ powder was unique.”

“Bitter,” she said again.

I hesitated, drew a deep breath. “I have some butterflies in my car,” I said. Her eyelashes moved like moths and I would swear I heard her moan.

Staggering like drunks, we made our way to my battered old Jetta. I removed a satchel from the trunk and selected several specimens. She gasped at each one, but chose a Monarch, that most American of the beauties.

She traced her fingertips gently over its wings and extended her fingers to my lips. I sucked them greedily. She withdrew her fingers, traced them over the orange wings again and coated her own lips with the powder. I tasted them, my heart pummeling.

Several specimens later, as I lapped the emerald of a Queen Victoria’s Birdwing from her labia, we were interrupted. A professor’s wife had wondered to where her visiting sister had disappeared. She was not happy to find her being ministered to by the odd little associate professor with the thinning hair and an unhealthy obsession with bugs.

I never saw her again. I hope to be given the opportunity again to relate enough romantic versions of why I took up Lepidoptery to make it back onto guest lists. I hold onto the unlikely wish that one day I will meet another woman who shares my appreciation for the bitterness of butterfly wings.

BRENTON ROSSOW

2009-10-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

I STOLE TOMMY SCAN'S SHOES

Tommy wasn’t such a bad guy… just unlucky. A month ago eight cops had arrived at his apartment before midnight and busted him for a small bag of weed. Now he was waiting to be deported. We began spending time together.

Tommy was a big guy; a hundred and thirty kilograms plus. His feet were enormous and his wiry hair jutted towards the skyline like the plume of an exotic vulture. He wore cheap muscle tops with a crucifix dangling amongst sweaty-chest-hairs and a bad kimono and kung fu slippers when he answered the door. He wasn’t too shabby on the football field for a man with a belly that hung over his belt. I’d seen him in a cloud of dust going after a fellow, and strange as it was, he carried himself with a peculiar sense of dignity. Not that Tommy was perfect. He pretended to be educated then conducted himself like a hooligan. I remember him telling me a story about the time he smashed the glass case near the elevator in our apartment, stole the fire extinguisher, and took it up on the roof. It was no wonder he got arrested—in fact it should have been sooner. But we all felt sorry for Tommy for getting busted with a small bag of weed. Of course that didn’t stop me from stealing his shoes.

I realized I could get away with it when I saw him pressed against the bars of his holding cell. There was a funny smell about the place as if someone had spilt yogurt on the carpet. Tommy just stood there in his old jeans, running his fingers through his hair.

“I can’t believeeeee this!” he said, banging his palms against the bars. “This is like something out of a movie! I was just sitting in my room thinking about rolling another one when I heard a knock, looked through the peep-hole and saw the night manager standing there. I opened the door for the prick and the next thing I knew eight cops were turning the place over. At first they couldn’t find anything and I thought maybe I’ll get away with it. Then after twenty minutes of searching they found it in one of my shirt pockets and made me pose for a photograph with it.”

“Who do you think ratted on you?” I asked, looking down at Tommy’s feet.

“Oh man! I’ve got no idea… could have been anybody.”

*

The first time I saw Tommy Scan’s shoes, I was sitting at a café opposite the market, staring out at the hum—numb and self absorbed.

“Hey, Simon! How you doing?” he said, vulture’s plume shadowing the sun.

“Hey Tommy, take a chair.”

“You’re not going to believe this. My girlfriend just called me on her mobile, crying and babbling and said she might have hit a beggar on the motorway.”

“What? You mean… as in… ran him over?”

“Yeh, maybe. She said that she was taking off from a tollbooth when she heard a clunk. When she looked in the rearview she said she saw a guy lying face down in the middle of the road.”

“Shit!” I said making a play for my salad. “That’s heavy! What did she do?”

“She called me as soon as it happened and I just told her to keep driving. Fuck it! She hasn’t got any insurance and she might have just imagined the whole thing. She’s been on some pretty heavy drugs since the miscarriage. This is exactly the kind of shit we don’t need!”

“Man, that’s some bad darts,” I said, contemplating whether Tommy and his girl were complete scum.

“Ah, fuck it,” said Tommy. “It’s just one less tramp.”

From that moment forth, I decided Tommy Scan would forfeit his shoes.

Now let’s get this straight. These weren’t any old shoes; bad loafers or goofy sneakers; these were special. In the twelfth century, not long after the crusades, European gents and quazzie-dandies began wearing long-nosed shoes with tight snouts made of silk, velvet or soft leather which were known as crackaws or poulaines. Forbidden to commoners; crackaws or poulaines, sported toes as long as 24 inches which were shaped by whale-bones or horse jaws, then padded with tightly compressed cotton and occasionally chained to the knees.

I knew my shoes, and I knew Tommy was playing for real; 1960’s winkle pickers, soft lemon suede accompanied by a brown cloth nose. They wouldn’t have lasted a day in The Good Samaritans or a trendy secondhand store. They’d have been snapped up by a collector and put on ice, vacuumed, boxed, displayed… who knows, maybe even flirted with by a wealthy socialite. But for God’s sake, not Tommy Scan!

The next day around one in the afternoon I waltzed down to the eighth floor, opened the window near the stairs and fire hydrants, crawled out across the old corroded beams that hung from the side of the building, pulled myself down onto Tommy’s Balcony, lit up a cigarette and enjoyed the view.

“Poor fool,” I muttered, ghosting my way through his open balcony door. “C’mon Scanny where ya hiding your boots?”

They were crushed up against a bookcase, discarded and naked; condomaic-sock crushed against laces; accordion cotton and stained brown.

“You fucking animal!” I shouted, slamming my fist against Tommy Scan’s wall.

I shall treat you with kindness. I shall treat you with care. With Simon you will be adored. With Simon you shall rekindle your elegance and dance in fretted air.

I put them in a little cloth bag, pulled the string shut like the sphincter of a moody Siamese then slid back over the railing, grasped the window and swung myself down towards the stairs.

“Too easy!” I said, scratching my nose and brushing my hair with a pocket comb.

I raced up the stairwell, talcum-powdered till I was gaunt, slid inside my best socks and slipped on my new shoes. Oh my lord! I dinosaured towards the doorway and swiveled on the heel, scissored the snout like barracuda-jaws, picked up my motorbike keys and rode the elevator to the ground. The security guard looked as if he’d been given a half-finished jigsaw-puzzle, then disappeared in the rearview as I put the bike into third. I gazed down at the beautiful blooms that encased my metatarsals and penetrated the rushing air. Life was going to be good from now on—no more stumbling sentences and uncomfortable moments listening to Fergal Sharky with big headphones, staring out to sea. Life would swing this way and that; shield and shelter, indulge and ratify, take me to the brink of good times, slip me amongst the Saracens and porpoise-eaters, pull me up beside a beautiful feline and sprinkle rain across the skin of a lake; light leisure wear, picnic basket emerging from the bright orange cavern of a nineteen sixties Greta-Garbo Citroen.

I put my bike in forth and felt the palm trees close in, opened the throttle and watched the pineapple-sellers melt. Monkey Mountain seemed like a good place. I dropped back to second and roared up the hill, almost took out a banana-boy—giggled—jiggled my keys out—put the stand down—parked up under a ficus tree; bive hive spewing forth glee.

The Ferris Wheel was rusted and monkeys moved about. I skipped over a few rambutan skins, positioned a cigarette between my lips and septum, gummed like a goat and blew white fingers through my nose.

Tommy Scan, Tommy Scan.

I climbed the stairs and admired the foliage. A dragonfly bombed down; bright green abdomen and translucent wings. My calf muscles stung. I kept going till I reached the summit, let out a sigh and admired the clouds. The Tawny Coaster—ghost of the undergrowth—glided between the tentacles of honeydew. I sat on a bench and relished the motifs flecked across the edge of his wings. Up and down, up and down, they went. Things would be different from now on! I rose to my feet and began a jig. The sky was alive with dragonflies moving in all directions looking to get laid before they died. The rain sprinkled down and I realized it was time to go. I descended the stairs and got back on my motorbike, drove to the disco-strip and waited for the sun to fall.

Around eleven, the cool kids began arriving in American cars. I positioned myself on a stool by the door and crossed my legs so the brown cloth nose and the lemon suede began to sparkle. A few kids laughed but most of them were gob smacked as if a tropical spider had just lowered itself on a thread.

“Nice shoes!” said a kid, weighed down by cheap Taiwanese medallions and Gumby gold.

“Forget about it!” I said lurching to my feet; hand over shoulder orangutan-style.

“Shit ess’e!” he said, freckles tickling the end of his smoke-gorged tongue, “let’s get busy!”

He dragged me inside and ordered up a couple of tequilas. We bombed them down and ordered up a couple more. The lights went up and the DJ appeared. The idiot was wearing mauve eye shadow in the midst of prissy gothic bangs.

“Cyndi Lauper,” he said, trying to sound cool, brushing away his bangs.

“How many of you kids know about Michael Layron?” he asked, looking at the crowd, headphones lopsided and cockle-shelled above the ear. A cheer went up and I knew it was time to part the waves.

“How many of you cats know about Michael Layron?” he repeated as girls began to scream.

The bass drum kicked, accompanied by a breathtaking keyboard climb. I leapt into the air and kicked out like a cuttlefish. One of my shoes fired off and hit the ceiling. I spun around in midair and caught it on my shoulder, let it hang for a bit to build suspense, then hit the deck, slipped the shoe back on and came up punching.

I got down on my knees and air-guitared along with Maniac as if I had pebbles in my lap, jumped up and feigned an invisible Samurai sword. People were clapping, cheering, gazing in awe. The guitar cried like a wounded osprey. I walked back to the bar and high-fived my hombre in the cheap Taiwanese medallions, ordered another drink and sat down.

Then there he was… pushing open the door, a beast in a bad-cut shirt. Within seconds his eyes were upon me as he pushed his way towards the bar.

Tommy Scan, Tommy Scan.

I dropped down and snaked across the floor. I knew the layout of the club and within seconds I was back out on the street. Five minutes after I opened the door to my apartment, the phone rang.

“I know what you’re up to you piece of shit,” said the voice on the other end.

“What the fuck?”

“I know what you’re up to you piece of shit!”

“What are you talking about Tommy?” I asked, trying to sound offended and confused.

“Billy saw you coming down from Monkey Mountain you lame-ass queer! What the fuck makes you think you can steal my shoes?”

“What the fuck? What’s this shit about?” The phone went dead.

Jesus! I thought. We’ve crossed the line. There’ll be no going back now. I’ll have to carry a change of shoes in a lemonade bag in case I get wind of him.

I put the phone down and poured myself iced tea, lingered and loosened the hinges of my hatch.

Fuck him! Let him come! Let the fucker come!

I opened my cupboard and pulled out my knuckle dusters, slipped them on and slowly ran my fingers across the jaw. Around midnight I passed out on the sofa. I awoke to the sound of someone banging on the door.

“I know you’re in there you piece of shit!” shouted Tommy, drunken and wild.

I had to think fast. The balcony! Put the shoes back in the cloth bag and stuff them in the gap between the wall and the air-con.

“For Fuck’s sake Tommy, what’s this shit all about?” I asked—sleep-crusted eyelids—casually opening the door.

“Where are they?” he shouted, barging his way through.

“Where are what!?” I shouted, faking pissed-off and confused.

“My fucking shoes! Billy saw you!”

“Billy! That asshole’s as reliable as a turd on a hovercraft!”

“Yeh… right!” said Tommy, looming a hundred thirty kilos, head glistening with sweat; kimono and kung fu slippers, holding a half-drunk beer.

“This is a joke right?”

“No! This is no fucking joke! My dead grandfather gave me those shoes ! They’re the only thing that connects me to him and this world!”

“Shit, I’m sorry Tommy. Look, come in and search if you like but you won’t find anything. Billy’s full of shit!”

His eyes moved about the room like the hands of a tortured raccoon. Over went my piles of clothes in the corner. Open went my cupboard door. Up went the plaster-roof tiles in the bathroom. Nothing!

“You satisfied?” I shouted. “Turning my room over like a pig!”

Tommy stopped, looked at me as if he was going to hit me and then lumbered out of the room.

“Yeh… thanks a lot!” I shouted as he walked down the hall.

“You’ll keep.”

I closed the door and put on David Sylvain, lit up a cigarette and breathed out a nervous cloud.

Shit, this is serious.

I walked outside and retrieved the cloth bag.

7 AM and the alarm clock bit bad. I got up, farted, shit, scrubbed my balls and donned myself in business attire, opened the door and the sunshine poured fine.

They won’t know what hit them! I thought, gazing down at the soft folds in the lemon suede complemented by the cuffs of my well tailored vine. The security guard once again looked puzzled as if he’d almost figured out my riddle but couldn’t piece together the final slides. Then zing….. the motorbike was gone; briefcase in bread basket, weaving between cat’s eyes as I made my way up the road.

I think I saw him when I passed the convenience store. He was gaining in the rearview; flared nostrils and his bad kimono flapping in the breeze. I put it into fourth and the hill melted away, came roaring around the corner at Monkey Mountain where the Ferris wheel hung low, swung wide and sent the monkeys into the trees. Tommy was psychotic and screaming. He came up alongside me and there was no way I could hide the shoes. I slowed down and kicked out but a solitary fist hit me in the neck. The last thing I remember I was gliding off the road, tearing into the bushes, catapulted forward and slammed sideways into the trunk of a tree.

“I knew you stole them!” shouted Tommy, as he parking up his bike. He walked over and loosened the laces, tore them off my heels, spat on my pants and kicked me in the ribs.

“I ought to fuck you up for real!” he shouted, tattooing me with his eyes.

“Be cool Tommy, everybody gets a little crazy now and then.”

“Yeh right… you’re pathetic. You make me sick! My dead grandfather gave me these shoes!”

I didn’t see Tommy after that; I guess he got deported. People told me he started a software company just outside Torquay and married a Filipino girl. Since then I’ve smartened up my game somewhat and shall I say inherited a pair of 1950’s brothel creepers from a Dutch man who’s addicted to the devil’s weed and goes by the name of Clem. Two weeks and he doesn’t suspect a thing. The last time I saw him, he was walking around dazed in cheap flip-flops, ravaged by the rays of the sun.

Last night, they played Maniac again. A girl in purple sneakers came and said hello.

LAURYN ALLISON LEWIS

2009-10-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

WHAT IT TASTES LIKE

When your husband casts you out for skulking around the flat for too many hours in a row, mumbling expletives under your breath and looking at the dog menacingly, you stand facing the door while it snicks closed. You just stand there like a dummy. You replay in your mind the way he smiled almost apologetically while he did it– gently closed the door. The way he wouldn’t look at you fully and hid the grimace that threatens to overtake his face every time he sees you in your Harvard hoodie. He knows what it means: the writing isn’t going well. He’s saving you from yourself. No, he’s saving your marriage. Better, he’s saving you from living with the new, unsettling impression he’s forming of you: angry female writer on the edge. He’s saving the dog.

After a moment you pound on the closed door because you’ve tried opening it and it’s locked–he locked it, and because it’s raining and you’re only wearing the Harvard hoodie and because you don’t have your purse. You don’t really need your purse but there’s a joint in it that some friend-of-a-friend left at your last book club meeting, and if you’re going to be exiled, you want to be really stoned also. The pounding gets your husband’s attention. You tell him what you need when he comes to the door. You tell him through the crack like you’re some college punk from Greenpeace, or a Jehovah’s Witness, or the Census Bureau. He actually locks the door again before going to retrieve your things. He forgets to bring you your coat. He also conveniently forgets your laptop.

But now you have the joint and seventeen dollars. Stellar.

There’s a lot you can do with seventeen dollars. You can walk up the street and buy an umbrella from the store because it’s raining and no one thought to offer you one as you left. The purchase would feel akin to spending seventeen dollars on toothpaste, or clearing out overdue library book fees. Buying seventeen erasers. The spending directive is tabled until after you smoke your jay. You’ll think of something awesome to spend it on then, you’re sure.

And heyhey: looks like your hoodie is lucky after all. How about that! You might have just said out loud, pulling it up over your head and giving the cords a loving tug.

Down the alley is the perfect little cubby for smoking; it’s where you and Kate go to smoke whenever she comes over because your husband gives you two the stink eye if you do it in the house. He thinks you’re corrupting the dog. Kate can’t come all that often anymore, but she brings weed every time. A tiny roof joins two separate garages a few doors down, creating a deep alcove partially blinded by a mature lilac bush. No one can see you standing behind it and it smells heavenly.

Stoned now, you think that going to the library isn’t a terrible plan; you just won’t check anything out today. On days like this one the library exists for you, doesn’t it? The library is a boat in the harbor waiting only for your arrival. It departs the moment you cross the threshold and as long as you keep moving through the labyrinth of shelves, no one can see you. The doors at the entrance of the library are heavy and imposing. You’d like it if they’d ask you for the password when you entered. You know the password. You’d know it if the time came. The librarian at the circulation desk sees the exact amount of your fines flashing over your head as you pass her. It’s one of the things they taught her to do in librarian school. You avoid making eye contact and move stealthily toward Fiction Ka-Lo and Lo-Mc. You pluck out anything that looks contemporary or obscure but nothing holds your interest because you are stoned and suddenly, urgently, have to pee.

After you pee you find Samuel Beckett in the Ba-Bu’s. He makes you feel better about your temporarily cracked mental state. At least yours is only temporary, poor guy. You wonder if anyone ever pushed Beckett out of his own front door. Probably not––women make better muses than men. His muse probably sat naked in the corner of his writing hovel and got blindingly yet quietly drunk. When the writing didn’t go well, she probably sensed it and came over to stand between Beckett and his typewriter, naked. He probably lifted her up by her thighs, set her down on the keys, and fucked his way through the writer’s block. It probably looked like this when they were finished:

hhhhhhLLLGGrrrrttyd**^MMMMmmmmmKKsstredFuckfuckfuckooooooooooooooonbbnbbbnnnbbbfuck. Probably.

Back in the lobby you move, eyes averted, past the hawkish librarian who can see through you. In your periphery it looks like she begins rising from her cushy seat when she sees you. You throw open that huge door like it weighs nothing and break through to the drizzly outside like breaking the surface of water after a deep dive. You take a deep breath. You smell doughnuts. The scent in the air is so thick you can taste the golden grease in the back of your throat. Doughnuts are what you will spend part of your seventeen dollars on. Brilliant.

The Magic Oven Bakery has a sleigh bell over the front door that startles you when it rings out because you are still really high and weren’t expecting it. The guy behind the counter looks stoned too. You ask him for a loaf of raisin rye and a blueberry filled. The loaf he hands you, the doughnut he doesn’t. All out, he says.

But you could smell them frying all the way across town, you say.

Tough, he says: those are for tomorrow.

Just one? you ask. And then you attempt to look at him coyly; you attempt to bat your eyelashes. Our little secret? Flutterbatflutter, bat bat.

No way, José.

When was the last time someone said No way, José to you? You must have been seven. It has the same effect now as it did then. You start to cry almost immediately. It feels really, really good, like giving your eyeballs a bath. You don’t even care that your grandma told you never to cry in public––exposes you to germs. You’re a smart cookie. You know now that tears are sterile, pure as salty holy water.

José! This from a hulking man who just then comes through the swinging kitchen door to hover over your doughnut nemesis behind the display case.

Yeah, boss? says José.

Your name is José? But you’re not really asking. You just want him to know that you’re onto his little game. You want him to know how tacky and insecure you think it is to say one’s own name gratuitously.

José! Why you make this sweet girl cry? Val fangul! Get outta here! Beat it! Scram!

José must know what’s coming because of the way he puts his hands protectively over his rear as he turns from the boss and heads out through the swinging door. The boss promptly kicks José in the ass, leaving a crisp, gray shoeprint on the seat of José’s white uniform pants.

So sorry, my sweet, says the hulking baker. You dry your eyes on the sleeve of your beloved hoodie and look up across the counter to see that he’s holding a rose made of royal icing out to you. It’s pink. Like a parlor trick you’ve practiced in secret for years, you blush the same color. Not to be outdone, when you reach for the rose it suddenly disappears. Poof!

Where did it go? says the baker. When he comes around the counter and pulls it from behind your ear you laugh. He puts his hand on your shoulder and the rose in the palm of your hand.

Come with me. Come right this way. Best seat in the house, and we’ve been saving it just for you. His eyes look sparkly but still you resist. A little.

Come, come. Don’t worry, says the baker.

He holds open the swinging kitchen door and ushers you through with such fanfare and flourish, you feel like there should be a velvet rope and possibly a red carpet rolled out. You feel like a Magic Oven Bakery VIP.

The baker has large hands but his fingers are slender and floury. He brushes the seat of a stool and instructs you to sit. Under the bright kitchen lights you can see that he is younger than you’d originally assumed. He is covered in a delicate dusting of something, possibly flour, possibly powdered sugar. You want to know which. You want to taste him.

Now. Why such a pretty thing make all these many tears in my bakery?

It comes out in a gush: José said I couldn’t have a blueberry filled doughnut. He said No way, José. The way he said it made me sad. I don’t know. Maybe I just needed a good cry.

No such thing, says the baker. His hair is pulled back in a knot high up on his head. Little tendrils have escaped behind his ears and at the nape of his neck. A good cry? No such thing. I think you cry ‘cause you need a little sweet to make it all better, and maybe a hug too. You are an artist…a writer?

How did you…?

He takes your left hand and turns it palm up. There is blue ink between your index and middle finger and also smudged along the outside edge of your hand. Oh. He spins your wedding ring and looks at you knowingly. Oh.

I write too! Now he’s pulling you by your inky hand from the stool.

I write too. I show you. Come!

At the back of the kitchen is a stainless steel walk-in refrigerator. Every shelf is packed with cakes. He takes a small, round, blue one from the shelf: Happy Birthday Joshua! it says in scrolling green script. See? The baker winks at you when he says it.

He is charming, isn’t he? He’s got it down. He’s got your number. You like it very much, being in this small space with him.

Blueberry filled, you say? I wouldn’t take you for the type.

Yes, you nod. But you’re suddenly sheepish. He is a baker but he is also a man–an attractive and charming man, no less. You don’t really want him knowing that you eat doughnuts when you’re sad.

How about instead, I offer you the specialty?

Okay! you imbue your voice with many! many! exclamation points!!!!

Okay. Stay right there. Don’t move. He pins you with his eyes for a moment before turning away. He wants to be sure you won’t flee. He could ask you to undress and roll in Bavarian cream. You’d do it.

Just before the baker returns, the florescent lights blink out overhead and music starts mewling softly from some undisclosed source. You know that song. He’s put on Solomon Burke’s, Cry To Me. Oh my gosh, this man wants to love on you. He wants to undress you and pivot you on his thigh the way Patrick Swayze does with Jennifer Gray in Dirty Dancing. Yes, he does.

He’s holding two demitasses full of espresso so rich you can smell them long before you see them. On top of his head a tiny plate is precariously balanced. Maybe he does this all the time, maybe the bun facilitates the balancing. You laugh.

I like when you laugh, he says.

You laugh some more. He’s brought the plate on his head to rest in front of you and you take it and whatever it is on this plate, you have never seen anything as beautiful.

Buchette delice, this is called, he says.

Yes, please, you say.

What you have in front of you now, it is the epitome of dark chocolate perfection, the apex of butter cream wonderment. Your mother cannot make this, and she is French, and she enjoys baking. To make this took something beyond even maternal love. It took a little magic. First is the velvety layer of chocolate cake, upon which rests a praline butter cream so airy, it might be made of whipped fairy wishes. Shiny-smooth ganache suffocates cake and cream alike. Crowing the confectionary masterpiece is a rosette of butter cream you feel nearly sexual toward. You restrain yourself from bending over and probing it with your tongue as if it were a nipple. When you bite into the buchette delice, you make a noise you’ve never made in public. And the baker leans in and says:

Mangiare bene, piccola scrittice.

Which makes you follow up the first bedroom noise with a second. He could be telling you you’ve got frosting on your nose. Oh, well. Whatever. Say it again, baker.

A new song comes on. Sam Cooke’s, A Change is Gonna Come.

You ask your first question (you’re a scrittice after all) questions are your bread and butter.

1. What is your name?

Augustus, but you can call me Favio.

2. Why call you something so different?

Ah, little writer! Is sexy, yes? Don’t you think? Listen: Faaaviooo.

You think you’ll call him August.

3. Why have I never seen this out front? you speak through the miracle unfolding in your mouth, pointing to it with your fork though it feels slightly sacrilegious to do so.

This is French pastry.

4. And?

And… this is an Italian bakery. Only girls who cry get buchette delice.

“!”

He follows this up with: And only the pretty ones to boot!

Double “!!”

When you throw your head back and laugh he bites your neck, lightly. His hand is holding your hair behind your ear and neck and he is kissing you and ohmyohmyoh. You should go. You should go. You should go but you’re not going.

You say his name: Augustus. You say his sexy name: Favio. Faaaviooo. His hair smells like star anise. And when his finger slips into your mouth, it is sweet. So it is powdered sugar then, not flour. You’re happy to have that settled. And you’re just plain happy. And outside–where you go once you finally gather your strength, your will, and your heart up around you–it has stopped raining. You’ve stopped being stoned. You feel amicably toward the dog again. You take the long way home.

BEN LOORY

2009-10-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

THE PIG

A man comes home from work one day to discover that his daughter has found God.

Are you kidding me? he says. What are you talking about? You were always such a rational person.

***

The members of the family sit down to dinner.

You really think there is a God? the man says.

Why not? says his daughter. Why on earth not? What reason is there to believe that there isn’t?

The man looks at her.

I can’t help but think, he says, that if there were a God, he’d give us some kind of sign.

At that very moment a statue of a pig suddenly materializes in the middle of the dining room table.

See? the man’s daughter says, pointing at the pig. See? See? See?

***

The man’s family bursts into action-- making calls, telling the neighbors, taking pictures.

Only the man does not move from his place. He simply sits there and stares at the pig. After a while, he reaches out and gently touches one of its legs.

It’s perfectly solid-- probably wood-- and made (he thinks) in a rather crude fashion.

The man looks up at the ceiling, half-hoping to see some gaping hole through which it could have fallen. Then he peers under the table for hidden mechanisms, like he read about once in a book on séances.

But there’s nothing to find, wherever he looks, so the man just sits there and frowns.

Then he gets up and goes into the other room and sits down and turns on the television.

***

The days go by. The house is crowded with pilgrims. People from other cities, other lands. They stand in the man’s dining room and stare at the pig. Some claim that it speaks to them; others cry for joy.

But the man just stands there, arms crossed over his chest. He doesn’t believe even a single word.

How can you not believe? all the pilgrims say. It happened right there in front of you!

I believe something happened, yes, the man says. But I don’t know what it was, or why.

The pilgrims regard him with wide, confused eyes. Then they shake their heads and walk away.

***

At night, the man lies in bed with his wife.

Can’t you at least try to believe? she says.

I try every day, the man says to her.

Do you really? says his wife. Really?

Well, says the man, after a while, let’s just say I wonder.

You should wonder harder, the man’s wife says. It would make you a happier person.

The man lies there in silence and stares at the ceiling.

You think I’m unhappy? he says.

***

The next day the man sits at the table with the pig.

All right, God, he says, if you exist, show me one more sign with this pig thing.

And he sits there all day-- waiting, waiting-- waiting for the pig to do something.

***

What are you doing, Dad? the man’s daughter says, when she gets home later from school.

Nothing, says the man.

He looks rather sheepish. He takes the pig off the table and goes into his study.

There he locks the door, puts the pig on the floor, and kneels down right in front of it.

Come on, pig, he says. Come on; it’s just us. Make me believe. Make me happy. Please.

***

Late that night a knock comes on the study door.

Honey? says the man’s wife. Are you in there?

Yes, says the man, but please, leave me alone. I’m in here with the pig.

The man’s wife hesitates.

But we miss you, she says. And also the pig.

You don’t need the pig, the man says, you have God. And I’ll be out when I’m done. I promise I will.

There’s silence, and then the man’s wife walks away.

***

Days go by, then weeks and months, and then, eventually, years. The man’s beard grows gray, and very, very long. His eyes dim, his bones weaken, his muscles atrophy.

The man sits and sits and stares at the pig.

But the pig says nothing, reveals nothing. Nothing, nothing at all.

There’s no sign. No sign of a sign.

And the man grows very old.

***

And then-- finally-- after what seems like a lifetime, the man gives a sigh and stands up.

There is no God, he says, that much is certain. And what’s more, I miss my wife and children.

He turns and walks to the study door, unlocks it and opens it up. The hallway outside is very, very dark. He peers down in the direction of the living room.

The entire house seems strangely silent.

Maybe they’re asleep, the man thinks.

And he starts off quietly down the hall.

Behind him, the pig rises to its feet.

ROXANE GAY

2009-10-16T18:57:00.000-07:00

THE GENTLE APPLICATION OF TWO FINGERS TO THE BACK OF THE THROAT

I know how you like me.

You like how I cut you with the sharp of my bones, when I am barely a silhouette, when my skin is stretched thin and tight around my skeleton. You show me off; I let you. I stagger after you in slutty dresses and high heels even though my back is killing me. When we’re at parties, I stand next to you. I smile. I listen to you say things like, “My baby is looking good. I keep her in check.”

You assume it is easy for me to stay the way you like, that it is easy for me to sit with you at the dinner table and match you bite for bite. You think I can eat bloody steaks and potatoes the size of our heads filled with sour cream and butter, that we can drink two or three bottles of wine and your mother’s coffee cake and I will stay the way you like. After we eat like that, you want us to dance in the middle of the kitchen, surrounded by our dirty dishes, me standing on your feet as you twirl us across the linoleum. I appreciate the gesture but there are matters requiring my attention after we eat. Romance gets in the way.

I see you watch me at the gym. You act like you’re really doing something with 100 pounds on the bench press. You rub your hands together, then straddle the bench. You rub your hands again and lie back, gripping and re-gripping the barbell. When you think the most people are watching, you raise the barbell into the air, hold it, arms trembling, and bring it toward your chest. Over and over you do this, twelve times, and then you drop the barbell back on those metal Ys such that it clangs dramatically.

You don’t fool anyone. While you recover from your exertions, you sit on the edge of the bench, legs spread wide, ogling me. Sometimes you don’t wear proper underwear. I can see that. Your eyes are greedy. You measure and weigh me. You approve. I hold onto the handles of the elliptical, even though my hands are sweaty and it’s hard to get a good grip. I watch the little red heart on the monitor blink every second, reminding me of the beating of my own heart. 144. 132. 156. 129. 164. I think about how much I hate you. I push forward. I get nowhere.

We watch the Discovery Channel together. You laugh and say mean things about the fat people who have to be cut out of their homes and taken to special hospitals to have their insides rearranged. I’m secretly jealous of those people because they have surrendered. Their heads are so big and yet so small, with sunken black dots for eyes, like God dug into the flesh of their faces, made two holes and dropped shiny marbles in. It would be lovely to wash the Discovery Channel people clean. I would be very gentle and kind to them. I would tuck myself into their heavy folds after I covered them in sweet smelling baby powder. I don’t tell you this because you would laugh at me too.

When we first started dating, you grabbed my ass and said, “Baby, you’ve got a lot of junk in your trunk.” You’d laugh like you had said something funny and charming. You didn’t care who heard you. You did it in front of my mom once. That’s why she hates you.

Your mother always tries to feed me, sending baked goods to our house. I tell you it bothers me; you encourage her. You leave her requests and wish lists and every day I get a basket of muffins or a plate of cookies. Your mother has never met a carbohydrate she didn’t like. I inhale the sweet scent of the basket or the plate to feel that sugary air soaking into my lungs. When I breathe deeply enough, I taste the goodness in my mouth. I never give in, not unless you’re around. There is nothing I can’t resist. And the wanting but not having, that turns me on. If you’re late coming home from work and I’m alone with your mother’s baked goods, I force myself to think of you and what you’ll do to me when you get home. That’s why I’m always waiting at the door with a high ball, wearing something sexy.

My co-worker Janelle thinks you’re an amazing boyfriend because you’re attractive. She equates beauty with good behavior. A couple days ago, we were in the break room. She was eating leftovers from home. I was eating one of those yoghurts that are supposed to help your digestion. I licked the spoon and pointed it in her direction. I said, “I’m thinking of leaving him.” She literally gasped. She said, “I won’t hear a word of this. That man is the best thing that’s ever happened to you.” I ate another spoonful of yoghurt. It didn’t taste good. Jamie Lee Curtis is a liar.

You think my life began when I met you. You don’t know I went to boarding school. A girl learns a lot at boarding school— how to use a tampon, how to sneak across campus at five in the morning, how to get a guy from town to buy my friends and I booze. The very last stall in Dunmore Hall’s second floor bathroom was for heaving. It was so designated for the practical avoidance of sitting down to pee and standing up with regurgitated bits of carrot or dining hall chicken sticking to the backs of our thighs.

My best friend Stella showed me what to do after I told her no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring my dinner up. She grabbed me by the hand, took me to the bathroom and swept her hair into a ponytail. Stella was so sexy when she did that. She had a long neck. Long necks are made for such dramatic gestures. Her boyfriend loved leaving hickeys all over her neck. Sunday mornings in the common room, she showed off the pretty bruises that circled her neck like jewelry. We were jealous because our boyfriends left ugly hickeys on our necks.

In the bathroom, Stella filled a water bottle with water from the sink and drank it quickly. She refilled the bottle and drank that water too. She went into the last stall, leaned over, and waved the middle and index fingers of her right hand back at me. She grinned and expertly slid those fingers into her mouth until she reached the back of her throat. Even with her mouth full of hand she managed to make sense in a guttural way. “Just go deep, deeper than you think you can. But be gentle, sweetie. Gentle. Don’t force it. Hold your fingers there until something comes up. It always will. After the first time, it gets easier.”

Sometimes, when we’re fucking and you’re on top of me and my hands are gripping your arms, I think you will break me. I think my body will collapse. I cannot breathe. I like it. You make me feel full.

You bite my shoulder and grunt every time you thrust. Your rhythm when we fuck kind of feels like the elliptical, rolling forward over and over, never really going anywhere.

After I started dating boys, I looked up the caloric value of semen—seven calories a teaspoon. That’s a good thing to know. You are an average lover but when you touch my breasts, you squeeze them so softly I throb violently between my thighs. You like to lick my nipples and suck on them and make sloppy noises. You know how much I love it; I can’t help myself. I get more interested in what we’re doing when you go there. I get wet and I hear you slide in and out of me and you fuck me faster and your breathing gets scary fast and you say, “Shit, baby. You are a hot lay.” You’re always so proud of yourself after you come. I can’t help myself. I like that, too.

I haven’t been to the dentist in four years. Dentists know things and think they are real doctors.

My freshman year in high school, I was chubby—nothing too serious, maybe thirty pounds overweight—but big enough to stand out from the blue-blooded girls I went to school with who were rail thin and wore sizes that defied mathematics. Miss Jay was a math teacher who lived on the third floor of my dorm. One day we were all playing charades in the common room. She puffed her cheeks out like a blowfish and held her arms out to her sides and waddled around the room. I don’t know which was worse—that she was mimicking me or that someone quickly shouted the answer.

Santiago, the boyfriend before you, regularly said I was too thin. This made me love him desperately. I couldn’t get enough of him saying something so kind. He also said he didn’t enjoy being cut by the sharpness of my bones. He’s a man; he got over it. He was a chef, French-trained. What broke Santiago’s heart is that the lovely meals he prepared never stayed with me for long. He felt like I was purging his love. Sometimes, after we fucked, me always on top, because, unlike you, he was afraid of hurting me, he would drag his fingers up and down my rib cage, clucking his disapproval. He’d say, “Querida, eres demasiado delgada.” It sounded just as good in Spanish.

The one thing Stella didn’t teach me was how good it feels to empty yourself. Getting there might be distasteful but it’s a small price to pay. I like to think she wanted me to discover the pleasure for myself. When I’m done, after I’ve cleaned the toilet seat, scrubbed the bowl, sprayed air freshener, brushed my teeth, I am light-headed and a little sweaty. I love to lie in bed with a bottle of cold water, sipping from it slowly. I press down on my hipbones and marvel at the minute details with my fingertips. Sometimes you come find me. There is no way you cannot know what I’ve just done. You lay with me. You rest your head on my stomach listening to my vital organs. I run my fingers through your hair. This is when I love you best.

ERIC BEENY

2009-10-16T18:54:00.000-07:00

SUPERNOVA

11:22 pm.

Domestic disturbance.

Histogram City.

Lower West side.

The address was relayed through a police scanner, which Officer Quota picked up simultaneously on the radio in his patrol car.

Two men, one of them possibly female, were arguing on the front porch through a screen door.

One of them, possibly the one out on the porch, possibly the one outside the screen door, was swinging what appeared to be a baseball bat.

There was lots of shouting.

No other information was available at that time.

Officer Quota, possibly the only one who heard the call, or at least the one who responded to it, arrived at the residence.

It was a small brown house with one front porch, possibly a bedroom inside.

Officer Quota got out of his patrol car.

The street was quiet.

He slid his nightstick into a holster loop on his belt and proceeded on foot to the porch where a man holding a telescope was standing.

The man was whispering something to a silhouette behind the screen door, something Officer Quota couldn’t quite make out from not being as close as he would be in a moment.

The man standing on the porch was wearing a black leather vest over a white tee, stonewashed jeans with a wallet chain hanging from his left cheek pocket.

He was wearing a wristwatch Officer Quota couldn’t assess the value of.

The silhouette behind the screen door opened it a couple times, closed it just as many.

The silhouette, Telli, didn’t seem all too interested in the fun the man on the porch might’ve wanted to have.

Officer Quota got closer to them, enough to hear the man was whispering something to the silhouette, something with his mouth, something he could only say using words.

“Don’t be like this,” the man said. “I thought you’d be happy.”

“That’s not what I want to come home to,” Telli said. “Think of what the neighbors will think.”

“The neighbors, the neighbors. Why do we always have to think of the neighbors?”

“They’re just as much a part of this community as we are.”

“But I’m from the neighborhood — I know everybody. They never leave their houses. They act like we all live on different continents. How can we have a community when no one ever even meets or talks to one another?”

Officer Quota walked up the front steps onto the porch.

He wondered what the trouble was.

“What’s the trouble?” he said.

He tried to sound friendly, like he’d actually be doing one of them a favor by beating or caging one of them up.

“The fuck are you?” the man said, ignoring Officer Quota’s blue or black or whatever color uniform, ignoring the big gold-plated thing stuck over his left breast pocket.

“Officer Quota. I’m a police man.”

“And how can I help you?”

“Actually, I’m here to help you.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Rory from the neighborhood. Why?”

“What seems to be the trouble?”

“You tell me. The fuck’s it look like?”

Officer Quota leaned over to get a look at the silhouette, and it still looked like a silhouette, even up close.

Officer Quota took a shot at the silhouette’s gender.

“He giving you a hard time here, uh, ma’am?”

Telli opened the screen door some, shouted, “Fuck Off.”

She closed the screen door and did up her nightgown.

“Now, there’s no need for such language. I got a call about a possible disturbance in the area, and this was the address.”

“Who’s disturbing who, here? I’m talking to my wife.”

Officer Quota was relieved to know what kind of genitals the silhouette standing behind the screen door had so he could refer to it, to them, properly.

“Why the telescope, sir?” he said.

Rory from the neighborhood looked at the telescope in his hand.

Telli crossed her arms and sighed heavily.

Officer Quota said again, “Why the telescope, sir?” reaching for his nightstick.

A gun went off somewhere down the street, possibly outside, possibly indoors, a small star exploding from the black hole it would leave behind.

Rory from the neighborhood, Telli and Officer Quota jerked down some, and Rory from the neighborhood looked over Officer Quota’s shoulder and down the street.

“Shit,” Officer Quota said.

“I think you got the wrong address, man,” Rory from the neighborhood said, holding the telescope up to his right eye and closing the left, gazing down the street as if he would soon reach the shores of a new continent.

J. BOWERS

2009-10-16T18:51:00.000-07:00

STAY GOLD, PONYBOY

"Honey, when I pass away, just skin me and put me up on Trigger and I'll be happy.”
– Roy Rogers to Dale Evans

My mother and I are the only two in this museum, the lone pilgrims peering at glamorous Hollywood headshots and plastic six guns under glass, pressing buttons to hear tinny recordings of Roy Rogers saying “Howdy” echo through empty galleries. She doesn’t understand why we drove all day for this, why I got church-quiet when we slapped on adhesive sheriff’s badges and passed through the unmanned turnstiles.

We drift from case to case, reading yellowed trading cards greedily fished out of Sugar Crisp and Post Toasties. “Take it easy, that’s my hip pocket,” warns Roy, singing cowboy handsome, as you nip the waistband of his Wranglers like he’s the Coppertone baby. “Thank you for your kind attention,” he says, and you obediently bow, touching your muzzle to your polished hooves. I am memorizing every word, postponing what we paid for—you, the wonderful one-two-three-four-legged friend who carried his cowboy through a million matinees, you, the palomino superhero who made countless suburban children scrawl “a pony” at the top of every Christmas list, you, all the rage. We watched you outfight the Phantom, outrun steam trains, outwit black hat after black hat, while every other scrap of horseflesh on the silver screen stood in the background, boring brown and bay and gray.

But the show must go on, so you do. Roy had you mounted in your famous rear, faded forelegs dangling helplessly in midair, glass eyes and silver conchos glittering under strategic spotlights. They’ve made things as familiar as possible in this strange purgatory, hiring some high school kid to paint a pasture on the wall, scattering hay on the wooden diorama floor. The body of Bullet the Wonder Dog rests at your carefully shod feet, his fake tongue a moist pink slab. The thirty-dollar-a-ticket strains of Roy Rogers Jr. crooning “Don’t Fence Me In” drift through a tightly locked stage door.

“He looks mangy,” says Mom, pointing out the vinyl veins swelling beneath your newspaper-yellow hide. And I press a button to activate a video of Roy Sr. modeling various Nudie suits, white teeth and sequins shining, because I want her to be wrong. I try the door on your display—all the doors, like a bad kid, giggling, nervous under your blank gaze, reluctant to follow my mother past Nellybelle the Jeep, and away. Mostly, we pretend we’re not bothered, buying five-dollar DVDs and kitchen magnets in the Happy Trails Gift Shop, washing our hands of you in the well-appointed public restroom, then wandering dazed into the hot flash of the empty parking lot.

But I’m writing a sequel. Tonight, long after the souvenir ladies pile into their Buicks, as my mother snores in her hotel bed, as the moon rises high over neon signs, I am coming back to you. Sliding deftly under locked turnstiles, lariat in hand, I’ll feed you mothballs with a flattened palm and use Roy’s wax arm to give myself a leg-up. You’ll move slowly at first, shaking dust off your creaking saddle, snorting life back into your moldy bones. We’ll rodeo through velvet ropes and pirouette past the cowboy hat display, leaping the ticket stand in a single bright bound to burst through the waiting doors, into empty prairie and open sky.

There’s a ditch that swells with mud when it rains, so it rains. I will cup your warm nose with two hands, loosen your stitches, help you shed your saddle like so much dead skin. And you will be allowed to rot.

J. BOWERS

2009-10-16T18:48:00.000-07:00

JOHN FORD PINTO

There you are—cantering into frame just after the fanfare and drums of the credits, right behind the titular stagecoach, long before we’ve met the cowboy, or the gambler, or the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold.

They must have tied your mother somewhere off-screen to get you running like that, your mane appropriately windswept, a white patch slapped across your back like a backwards Oklahoma. Or mama might be one of the horses hitched to the coach, her chestnut, brown, or bay rendered nondescript gray by the monochrome film. Either that, or you’re actually a natural at prancing down dirt roads in a town built for cowboys in the movies.

To the untrained eye, of course, you’re living scenery, a random flash of horseflesh only meant to establish that our story takes place in the Old West, that lawless landscape of “Desperate men!” and “Frontier women!” “Rising above their pasts in an America corrupted by violence and gun-fire!” But you’re more than a walking tagline. Embalmed in celluloid, you are eternally accidental—every tail swish or sudden cascade of steaming manure shatters glossy Hollywood illusions, melts directors’ fevered fantasies, reveals the real. Oh, the things I could tell you about the zebra in Swiss Family Robinson! Or the palomino in The Parent Trap, as ridden by Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills!

I spot you again outside the “Tonto Hotel,” chewing the scenery while Dallas, our blonde-ringleted naughty-lady-of-the-night, strides nervously toward the stagecoach that will ultimately carry her into the Ringo Kid’s waiting and manly and Waynely arms. In this scene, you harass a pair of strangely motionless extras decked out in serapes and sombreros, your rump aimed squarely at the camera, like hey America, check out this ass. You are clearly having more fun than John Wayne and John Carradine and John Ford, or possibly all Johns, ever, combined.

I think you’re my new favorite ingenue.

Later, we’re expected to believe that you—or a colt that looks exactly like you—now live in a desert outpost near Lordsburg. While a doe-eyed senorita croons a Mexican lullaby to Mrs. Mallory’s newborn babe, you prance anxiously in the background, ruining this Wild West nativity display. It’s your final scene, but I don’t know that yet. And so, as the rest of the audience coughs into their popcorn and thrills to our heroes’ hairsbreadth escape from bloodthirsty Apaches, I scan each frame, hoping to find you loping alongside the painted warhorses, or playing dead amongst the cacti. I try to care about Dallas’s fifth-act fate, to worry whether Wayne will make an honest woman out of her, or (inevitably) reject romance for a life of blue jeans and baked beans on the open range. I try, but the credits are already rolling.

In the lobby, I wonder if you got a nice rubdown with cactus cloth after your big screen debut. I imagine Wayne gruffly cuffing you around the neck, calling you “Pilgrim” with rough affection. Photo-ops. And then, a triumphant trailer ride to a cozy ranchero where pigtailed girls braid yellow ribbons into your My Little Pony mane. During the drive home, I decide that you spent the 1930s in the rodeo, then passed the 40s as a lesson horse, teaching little buckaroos how to neck rein. For them, riding you was like straddling a leftover scrap of long-gone Western sky—a kind of opening up and out, some forgotten brand of cowboy magic.

I am dreaming of you even now, as I oil my horse’s favorite bridle. Oh, John Ford Pinto, in my heart it’s yours all yours.

AMY PENCE

2009-10-16T18:37:00.000-07:00

CHIGGERS

When I was coming up, what we knew about chiggers we heard through the grapevine: our mothers and fathers, true, but mostly our grandmothers and great aunts. They were the source of that kind of lore. Chiggers, they said, would feast on your blood. They liked, most particular, my Great Aunt Ida would say, the flesh of little boys. The smallest sinners. They liked to burrow in right around the elastic of little boys’ underwear, getting close, close as possible to the family jewels.

The chigger, I now know, know most intimately, does not burrow in under your skin—and yet, those things are microscopic, so you’re not going to see them right away.

The chiggers that bite you are the larvals: these are the children, and they’ll create a nasty bumptious bite and suck the blood out, like through a straw. Devil-red, but you’ll never see them. You’ll never know what bit you until after the swelling maybe two to four days later; and they’ll itch you like a hellfire.

I never did write a sermon on the chigger, but it’s so like the bite of temptation, like that he-man, Devil-May-Care who gets in close to the pressure points, close to where the blood pumps: the collar, the wrist, the waistband, the crotch. And chiggers are stealthy, like lust, and childish, and in the forms of children.

The children are the ones I most worry about, especially the young girls with their short tops showing their bellies, the tiny skirts and slicked-on-over-the-bottom jeans. There were mini-skirts in my day to be sure—but good, right and proper girls did not wear them. My dear wife Pearl did not wear them. Not in these parts you wouldn’t. The girls today are encouraged to truck with evil and to provoke. To provoke lust even in the men in my very congregation, most suredly, and those out in the world. Part of my calling, part of my ministry is to help these girls. I do what I can, when I can.

I did lay once in the grass. I did. I did float there on the banks of the creek. As if floating. There was a girl with me then. I was a teenager, and I will not remember her name. There was the bad moonshine in jars, and we swung out over the creek on a rope, and we hollered. We lay in the grass, our mouths dry, our mouths hungry. But quite rightly after a few days, the chigger bites appeared. Such an almighty itching. And me always thinking, maybe even saying: I’ll never do that again; I most suredly won’t. I fell many times as a young man, lying in the grass filled with chiggers. Until that day I came to know Jesus. The one and holy man I could brag on all day.

Which is what I been spending this one life doing. Which is why I know I will have eternal life. I did put in the appropriate time at the Bible Study School that used to be in Hephzibah, Georgia and have had my ministry both in Tallapoosa and at the Cleaneth Baptist in the nearby county after all that rabble-rousing mess there. I’ve been to South America, in the deepest jungles to grow the ministry. There was scarce drinkable water and natives of all kinds, and I got sore sick from the meats with all those parasites, but I did what I could. Now, as temporary pastor, there’s been a bit of rambling. These past ten months, in particular, I’ve been traveling to new congregations, this time near where my wife’s people once lived. Their pastor is off for the summer in Canada, spreading the word of Jesus. Spreading the word in all the lowly places. I am well-regarded among these fine people, knowing, as they do, my ministry to my church over on West Axes Road the next county over.

Pearl’s father’s relations had a little house right up along Hog River Road. She’d visit there as a girl. A peculiar name for that road, you might say, but part of the heritage of these parts: hog farms lined these old roads. Hog farms, and a few dairy farms; there were sorghum crops and the cotton. It’s a name like that—Hog River—that those new ones— the suburbanites moving in around here—want to change: the names of roads, the layout of the streetways in town. And the businesses: they want to drive out the locals, put in all the chain stores those suburbans are used to. They’re moving in everywhere, coming in from Atlanta or other places across the country. It’s a college town too, and they got Indians from India running the motels and Quick-E Marts. They got Mexicans walking roadside looking for work. But those Atlanta transplants: they have the audacity to put on running clothes and run along the county roads like they’re running in Central Park. Maybe they’re running to Starbuck’s in the figment of their minds.

Every morning, but Monday and Tuesday, I go by on the back road to the church, and there’s this woman I know to be unsaved: she’s plugged in, plugged up, not too young neither, and running near nude on the back roads behind the good holy house where I’ve been preaching these last weeks. Doesn’t back down when I come by—running too far into the road. Testing. Always testing, the Devil.

Last week, I told that congregation about the transfiguration of Jesus, found in Matthew 17. Took that as my opportunity to brag—once again—on Jesus Christ. His raiment of white, and his outstretched arms. Saw, among those listeners—among the good men saying Amen— the girl in the yellow pumps. Got a look at her just before the service, out the side window of the back vestry. Wearing a little blue shift with a yellow ribbon, and the yellow high heeled pumps. Teetering a little on them. A swirl of pale brown hair around her head, a sweet and taunting face. Maybe freckles, hard to say. Legs right up to her rear end. I don’t mind telling you, it’s a rear end that some men would just be begging to put their two hands around.

While she sat listening, and I was preaching, I thought about the kinds of temptation. That savory girl being one of them. And Dorothy, so long ago, being another. The child and the full grown female. Wily and wild, the both of them though they may have the appearance of Christian piety. I did lay once in the grass. And did I float? Did I float out across the grass?

I thought about the forms temptation will take while I told the people gathered in that house of the Lord that there weren’t no way, like Peter said, that Jesus could be on the same plane with Moses, nor that sinner Elijah. You can’t set up tents to all three. It was all retroactive, is what I explained. Elijah was in Heaven on credit, and Moses was a sinner. Jesus is the most holy, best, the Almighty, with a capital A, the one that brought them all into the fold, brought them all through those gates to be saved like children. Like the Lord God, I too am a parent of five grown children, and eight beautiful grand-babies. All infants in my eyes.

I told my congregation that like any parent God is most proud of Jesus, for that is His only son. He is not “one among,” like some people say. God only has eyes for one. For I am like that proud father. I only have eyes for Jesus Christ: one tent; one God. And the good men in that house said Amen, and the girl wearing yellow pumps tilted her head toward me, and I imagined if she were to open her mouth, the serpent’s tongue might come out. Without her being able to help it. That’s the nature of the beast.

My wife heard the calling some time before I did. High school, fact of the matter. Not being one of them whores down by the creek, my wife came from God-fearing people. I did see her straight and narrow back two rows over in Civics class; did not know at the time she would bring me into her fold. Tomorrow, she’ll sing the hymns for Jesus like she always does. A fine singer, Pearl. Last week she sang “Take Time to Be Holy,” and she is practicing, for the congregation’s enjoyment, “The Promised Land.”

You could say it’s been a steep road being with Pearl. Five babies right in a row; and she was strong and tested my strength. Those babies grew up from mewling snot-nosed babies to fine and strong fibers of being. All, I will admit, but Denton and Mary-Beth. Vestiges, I think, when I pray, of the way I erred at the creek. Born, my Mary-Beth, at the crossroads of our crisis—that being between Pearl and me. But we haven’t given up on those two yet.

The solid length of Pearl’s back next to me at night is my reminder not to stray, and to lead all the little girls to the high mark of one like her. During that far-ago time of crisis, Mary-Beth just born, that is when Pearl discovered the truth about Dorothy, my secretary down there in Tallapoosa. Now the very name Tallapoosa can make the sweat run cold on me. The afternoons at the creek down behind the chapel, Dorothy, the slaking of the whiskey, and the way I strayed. Took down those nylons from her body—how they cinched her like a pineapple and when I took them down and laid with her, it was aggravating painful afterwards to be weeping across her wide amorphous body, thinking she had taken me down into that very gate of hell. Her nylons cinched across her thighs, looking like ladders all the way to midnight.

Her unruly smile, and me feeling sorry even while I rammed myself into her. My coming home probably stinking of that whiskey, and Pearl telling me real quiet from the maw of our bedroom to pull myself together fast afore she ran me and Dorothy down in the church parking lot. I started my sobbing right then and there.

Pearl was most right to tell me to fire Dorothy quick, and to get on my knees to pray. We did. We did while Mary-Beth, our newborn, let out a hollering in her bassinet—waking up every last child. All of them at the door of our bedroom screaming while Pearl undulated to the Lord’s calling, telling me to repent, and I rapped my empty head on the bedstead with grief. The bodice of her nightgown was dripping and for some time I thought it was from tears: mine or hers, I did not know which. Later, I knew it to be the milk for Mary-Beth.

There would be times I would find my way to the creek after Dorothy’s departure. She was a country woman, but not proud of what she’d done; there was the one postcard she sent from Chattanooga, and there was me weeping on the banks of that old creek, getting bit by the chiggers every time to remind me. To remind me of the pull of that old life, the misspent life, the one Jesus did not ordain. Thank the Lord, he has saved me, has elected me already, else I would be sore afraid. I mouth in the darkness John 1:12: “Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.”

There have been times, when I’m out spreading the word, in the countryside, or going to see my congregation when I might see some girls walking on the side of the road. Maybe they try to wave me down for a ride; maybe they’re just walking along by themselves. What I do is I tell them one thing, and do another. There’s been more than one occasion when I’ll pick them up, ask them real polite where it is they want to go, tell them to get on in the back, then drive my pick-up straight out past where they’d thought they were going. Down a back road, getting a little lost myself, just to make the point. Just to learn them a little about how they can provoke a man to the kind of violence they might not survive. “All have sinned,” so the Romans 3:23 goes, “and fall short of the glory of God.”

“Hey Mister,” they’ll always say, tapping on the back window. “This isn’t GoDown Road,” or “I thought you said you were going straight to West Axes Road too.”

I stop the car, and I say “I’m giving you a learning, so you’ll remember not to tempt those that would do you evil. For the Romans says, ‘the wages of sin is death.’” Those girls—fat, skinny, black or redneck white—big scared eyes and the surly narrowed eyes—you know they’ll remember that lesson.

I’ve told the story many times, about Pearl. The way she got me going to church, when I come back from the military, a regular discharge to be sure, but still aflame, still flaming with some part of my past that had me drinking and hollering out at too many fly-by-night pool halls and truck stops and joints that would play me the Elvis too long, too slow on those black-as-hell turntables spinning in the juke box.

The way I tell it to my congregation she was a vision—wearing a raiment of white. She came to me at the creek where I was weeping, most sorrowful I was for a life so far misspent. Truth be told, she did come on me at the creek, but I’d been laughing like a hyena with some foul woman, and Pearl had come with her father straight from the church and out into the woods, doing a particular kind of ministry. Rescuing the creekside bums. Her hair in those days—early sixties—had a sassy little flip up at the ends, and when her Daddy raised and railed his Bible over our sick bodies still wrapped up in the blanket, Pearl’s bright head bobbed with curiosity, and though she stood back near some tree clinging to her Bible, I slurred out:

“Hey weren’t you in my high school class down at Bowden?” I stood up stark naked, while her daddy uttered those blessing words, closing his eyes, and throwing his head back, and that fool woman I was with kept on a laughing. When Pearl turned to high tail it back to the car, I saw the ramrod strength of that back—like a man’s. There’d be a way to have her, is what I thought. The rest, like they say, is the history of my remaking, and my saving, and, Lord have mercy, my backsliding.

When I watch her singing to the congregation, I have to put away what she is: the parts of her that sag, the voice that wobbles too far into the next verse. At night, she’ll take off her wig, remove her make-up, leaving on a tight cap. There before me is the face of her father. But I do consider on what she was and what she will be in the Glory of our Eternal Heaven. She is an exacting woman, my Pearl. She wants everyone to be exact with Jesus Christ because we are His brides: both Pearl and me. If my breasts could leak the milk of plenty like Pearl’s did that night, I would want it to happen.

It was the day she was singing “Take Time to Be Holy,” when I grew sore aware of something else, something sinister in the congregation. I’d already seen the girl in the yellow pumps, but there arose from the pews—after the blessing and before my sermon— a mewling sound. Like a hurt animal. It had me spooked, a little irked, and reminded me far back of some other cry I could not capture. When I gathered myself to the pulpit and looked out at the eyes and the nodding heads and the pale finery of all gathered there, I found the source of that plaintive cry. It was a bundle held by a girl so far unseen to me, so far unknown to everyone— I could tell— sitting at the back of the church, near the door. The girl’s face was flattened pie-like and dimpled with pockmarks—she was so plain you wouldn’t have noticed her, short hair the color of a mule, but her expression was screwed on tight, like a lid on a jar. Like there must have been something else underneath. And she held that bundle with great unease, that bundle without words, but sinister all the same.

I commenced to deliver the Word, to correct the misapprehension, of even the disciple Peter, that the Lord Jesus Christ is just one among. Some out there would have you believe, these people, the unsaved, like that woman running down the backroads all plugged into hellfire, that Jesus is a prophet among other prophets: the Buddha, or God forgive those who think it: Mohammed, that terrorist. I tell them that ain’t true. I may dote on all my children. Even my lost ones, which is what I don’t let on about: even Denton, who got divorced, and Mary-Beth who still gives my Pearl some hell. I can dote on them, but there is only one Jesus Christ. He is one above, the Almighty.

While I was preaching the Word to them I noticed that girl, that superstition struggling with the infant: it burring like a soft motor, a machine. I looked at that girl while I was talking and watched the phantoms cross her face.

“Moses would be evicted if Jesus had backed out. For when he was accepted into the Kingdom of Heaven—that one act reached forward and backward into eternity. For didn’t you know that Elijah was in heaven on credit?” I banged the pulpit to emphasize, and my mind swarmed back to all the sheiks holding out their be-ringed hands for money. I looked at the girl with the yellow pumps. I don’t have to suppose I had her in the palm of my hand: I saw her upturned, elfin face, the supplicating eyes. I thought of the banks of the creek, the fiery chiggers.

“Don’t you just know that with the blood of Jesus Christ, we are made pure? We are made pure in his love? We are richer in Christ’s love than the richest sheik in Arabia, driving up in his gold Cadillac. Those sheiks that persecute Christians are rich in wealth, but they are poor—very poor— in spirit.”

“Amen,” the men said, and the women nodded; the thought of Aunt Ida, unbidden, swam up, her hand outstretched, bejeweled like a sheik’s to pull me up where I was in the broom closet, sent there by my father after one of them beatings. Aunt Ida, who showed off her bi-weekly hairdos to my dear mother, her niece, who had neither the luxury nor the money to get her hair done and used those tight pin curls at night. I still hold the vision of my mother sacred, wisps of tissue clinging to her thin pale hair. Self-satisfied, foolish Aunt Ida, a woman I will never forgive. Aunt Ida, who took my hand to pull me from the closet, but laughed when I emerged, covered with the chigger bites. I was hiding those bites from every gaze, but she wouldn't let me. The bites were everywhere around my scrotum, and despite myself, I grew stiff with a strange lust, even as she beckoned. Come look everybody, look at Arvy’s jools.

“They have the riches, but they do not worship our Christ, our Lord and they are corrupt,” I told the worshippers. The baby let out a shrill cry and I felt the girl must have squeezed it to make it sound more human. All the women’s eyes in the congregation cut to that young mother, and my dear Pearl turned in her seat in the front row to look back at her. Yellow Pumps had a smile on her face despite it all, and I went on, thrilled by the errant, and the errors, and lusting for the digging itch of the chigger.

“We bathe, we bathe in the sweet blood of Christ,” I raised my hands, “and therefore, those terrorists, those worshippers of Mohammed shall not have a tent, shall not have tent among one of us!” I let loose with a voice to rock the church from bottom to top. Out into that church, into that chapel they heard my cry. There was most definitely an us and a them. Most sorely and suredly.

“Amen,” the men shouted, the women sighed, and I wasn’t looking to see what made the girl get up and go ahead out into the vestibule. But I was relieved to see her go. There was the final hymnal, but I was too fired up to tell you what they sang. The congregation filed out, and I shook their hands: the men’s rough with the work of their entire week, the women’s tufted with soft householding flesh. I clasped their arms and greeted Yellow Pumps, whose small lips pursed and wrinkled in admiration. The deacons shook my hand, while I watched the tail-end of Yellow Pumps as she made her way to her car. There was every bit of demon in her, yet I knew my words had choked the demon silent for the day.

And yet that other pock-faced girl had waited for me, and the sight of her standing in khaki pants, swaying with that bundle filled me with revulsion. We exchanged pleasantries; I made the offer that we go to my vestry to consult. But she shook her head, seemed nervous standing there before me, maybe ashamed. It appeared she wanted something quick from me, some hasty bending permission to be what she was, what it was plain to see she already was.

Not the chosen, not the elect. I smiled as Christ would smile, and I inquired about her babe. Was the child baptized? Behind me in the chapel, I heard my Pearl laugh among the parishioners. I followed the girl outside. She said her name, but I will not remember it.

The girl stood in front of the church on the sidewalk swaying with the child, her eyes both furtive and frayed. She told me no, the child was not baptized, that the child had been conceived in Iraq, that she’d been sent home, discharged for disobeying orders.

The phrase brought to mind my own brief acquaintance with the brig; the lust and lechery of the typical military man is what had made me go AWOL, however briefly. I looked at her, but I did not feel pity, though I mouthed a condolence, though I thanked her for her service in warding off the beasts of a new terrorism, threatening the very tenets of our Savior, Jesus Christ. But something in me held off from her though I smiled and patted her shoulder as the tears welled in her eyes and spilled down the length of her flaccid face. She was sobbing into the flannel of her infant’s blanket and her words were of I.E.D’s and how there was too much she’d seen. Too many wrongs, she said. She knew too many things she was trying hard to forget. It wasn’t just the prisoners they were hurting, and killing, it was the Iraqis too.

“You mean the insurgents?” I inquired, gently; keeping my hand on her shoulder.

“No…no, no.” It was most clear she was confused, bullet-addled, driving out toward evil because it was what would make her feel better about what she’d done. I squeezed her shoulder and a ripple of pain passed through her. She had already been made frail and her weakness could surely be punctured by Jesus Christ.

I said to her, as in the Romans “if you confess with your mouth ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Come and pray with me, and welcome Jesus into your life, to seek your salvation.” She looked up at me over the head of the child, shifting and straining beneath the blanket, roiling like a worm in an apple.

I could see her mind’s figments would be difficult to break, but her gray eyes—behind thick windowless tears—clung to the hope I offered. The blanket fell from the head and I saw it was a brown child, the hair black and standing on end.

“Let me see the baby,” I said to her. She didn’t relinquish the baby with fear; she handed it over with a dull relief, an acceptance. I held the child up to the sun. Its head wobbled on its stem, then drew up to peer back at me.

What I saw there will be with me until my dying day: the infant’s face was wrinkled up like a walnut. Its eyes were tiny in the woolen head. A bat’s inscrutable eyes. At first, those eyes found my face, my inquiring eyes. I did not utter baby noises to it. I wanted, in the light of day, for it to expose what evil it had wrought on this girl and all the others out there in the world. Its eyes roved to a region unseen, some space next to me; it held something or someone there.
Yet I knew what it had seen: the itching persistence of everybody’s familiar. I felt my groin enflamed by a thousand chiggers, felt most suredly runged by an everlasting and crippling fire. The sand-dirt child had seen my sin, peering right there over my very shoulder. “Conceived in hellfire,” I said.

When she took it back, we had an understanding. The girl’s tears had quieted, and I smiled kindly. I waited on the sidewalk, and I waved to her as she drove away. The child squalled, buckled in the car seat, and I knew they would— neither of them— be back.

Only a few days later, I was making my way to church on High Tangle Road. It was a September morning, too early for the locusts that would take up the afternoon with their angry bleating. Mist spilled out of the hollers on either side of the road. Something of the memory of that brown child, and its moon-faced mother, propelled me to push on the gas. The infidel that sees, sees the infidel.

I saw the persistent female runner ahead, plugged up once again, indifferent to all the ways she was working evil and weaving it into the very texture of the morning. Into this season, and on into the next. I pushed at the throttle of the machine, angry with the passion of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. The fog rose like a garment to show me the startle of her face before the impact of what I could not have foreseen.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: DANIEL BAILEY

2009-10-16T18:12:00.000-07:00

DANIEL BAILEY

DRUNK SONNET 26

I HAVE NOTHING REALLY INSIDE ME TO GIVE
IT’S ALL AN EMPTY ROOM WITH GREY CARPET
I REMEMBER DONATING TOYS AT THE FIRE DEPT.
WHEN I WAS A KID AND I WANTED THOSE TOYS
BEING A KID WAS THE MOST RETARDED SHIT EVER
BECAUSE KIDS TURN INTO ADULTS AND THAT SHIT’S WHACK
I FALL OVER DRUNK MORE THAN EVER NOW THAT I’M AN ADULT
I WANT MY FACE KICKED IN MORE THAN EVER NOW
MOST EVERYTHING STOPS WORKING EVENTUALLY
EVEN THE SUN WILL STOP WORKING, AND MY BODY
I CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING THAT WON’T BREAK SOMEDAY
I COULD RIDE A DONKEY UP A MOUNTAIN UNTIL THE DONKEY DIES
OR THE MOUNTAIN ERODES AND SLAPS FACES WITH DIRT
AND BABIES START SNORTING COCAINE HELL YES

SP: can you describe the situation in which this book was written. by this i mean general mood, writing habits, thought process, mannerisms, social life and anything else you can think of that you now associate with THE DRUNK SONNETS.

DB: when i started writing the sonnets i was living on my brother’s couch. my girlfriend, at the time, had just broken up with me and i didn’t have a place to live anymore. all my possessions were in boxes in a small storage unit. i was drinking a lot of beer every night (mostly bass) and using my brother’s internet to blog and waste time while drinking. i was working during the days and drinking at night. that was my existence. i thought very seriously about leaving muncie and finding an adult job somewhere. fortunately, i didn’t do that. i kept my muncie job working with angry, incarcerated teenage boys. so, i searched for an apartment elsewhere in muncie. while all that was happening, i started writing sonnets on the DRUNK blog. i wrote the first 20 or so while crashing on my brother’s couch. the rest of the sonnets were composed in a word document after i found an apartment in downtown muncie. i wrote them in a word document because i didn’t have internet yet and i wrote the rest of them over a period of a couple nights. my mood during this period of time was one of extreme depression and apathy. i used the sonnets as a way to give my life meaning and purpose. my mannerisms? i don’t know. i probably slouched my shoulders a lot. i cried a lot. is crying a mannerism?

SP: why sonnets?

DB: before writing THE DRUNK SONNETS i had mostly been writing longer, free verse poems (not that the sonnets conform to any rhythm or rhyme), and i felt a little bit exhausted with that method of writing without any constraints. it’s kind of like when you’re playing a flight simulator game and you’re doing great for a while, but after a period of time you sort of glass over and get lost in the endless possibilities of flight or of writing with no line limit or anything like that or wanting to fly toward the shore and just crash there or whatever, being totally disoriented by a horizon with no end. i wanted to write something shorter. i turned to the sonnet. i had always had the attitude that i don’t need to follow in the path of the poetic tradition, that i could carve my own path. i don’t know. that’s dumb. yet, i liked writing sonnets because it was a tradition that i could fuck with and honor at the same time. the fourteen line constraint really helped me hone my ideas and let me express everything with a greater clarity that i wouldn’t have been able to do had i kept on with no finish line in sight. i still wanted to include the whole “poetic turn” in the last two lines. i wanted it to feel “real.” the cool thing about poetry is that there IS so much tradition, so much to look back at and process, something to honor, yet something to use and even abuse, but also love, you know i’m not trying to hurt you, baby, you know that right? the sonnet is the most classic of forms. it’s the most understandable of forms. it is routinely an answer in crossword puzzles. so it’s not like i was being obscure (my next book will be a book of odes).

everything i’ve said in the last paragraph, whatever. i just thought it would funny to start writing poems called DRUNK SONNETS followed by numbers and posting them on the DRUNK blog. so i did. and then i kept doing it.

i originally intended to write the exact number of sonnets that shakespeare wrote (somewhere around 150). i didn’t quite make that number. i felt like THE DRUNK SONNETS came to their own natural ending, like i had reached the end with 53, so i ended it.

and for the record, i think shakespeare’s sonnets are incredible.

SP: describe muncie indiana as a mythical monster, inlcuding its appearance, tendencies, and ways to be defeated.

DB: muncie is a large beast that sits in the middle of a burnt out church picking scabs out of its matted fur, flicking them into the rubble and sighing. it sits with its shoulders hunched low to the earth. muncie exists in a state of apathy and boredom. it takes naps several times a day and only ever leaves the walls of the burnt-out church to find food. if you approach muncie, it will not notice you, unless you crawl into its skin and become one of its many scabs (which happens often [it’s called “living there”]). muncie will never figure out what it wants out of life or what it needs to be happy. muncie needs a lot of love and attention, and fewer scabs. or for the scabs to start nurturing the skin of muncie. muncie needs to be taught to let the scabs heal and to walk out into the sun for a bit. that might make it feel better. and if muncie feels better, then muncie might actually try to fix itself. and i need the monster called muncie to stay alive because that monster taught me to be a monster, in my own way, and that is very important to me.

SP: what writing projects are you working on now?

DB: over the summer i’ve been collecting old poems/writing new poems for book #2. that’s been an on and off process, and i’m probably going to end up with just a chapbook or two or three, one of which would be one long poem entitled HALLELUJAH, GIANT SPACE WOLF. another thing i’ve done recently is record a cd of poetry/nonsense with four of my favorite human beings from muncie entitled DEATHMARCH, in which we read poems over musical instruments and broken objects and cars driving by, etc. i have another idea for a book of poems that i want to write. all i have in my head at this point is that i want to write a book of poems in which all the poems are prayers. i really want to write a ghazal.

SP: truly, is there any way around looking like an asshole on a daily basis?

DB: one way to not look like an asshole would be to stay in and never let anyone see you or even be aware of your existence. i’m tired of trying to not look like an asshole. i feel like if i’m an asshole, i am. if not, i’m not. cool. if i drive down the street wearing sunglasses and playing indie rock out my open window, i am probably an asshole. but it is bright out and i like listening to this band that i am listening to. i like the way these jeans fit, the way they are a little tight around my legs. i don’t care. i like beating this dog with a rolled-up newspaper. hell yeah. you like walking around with you shirt off and showing your tribal tattoos. i don’t care. go for it. you like wearing a shirt that shows a lot of cleavage and downloading black eyed peas ring tones. i don’t care. i believe that there are people in this world who genuinely enjoy the black eyed peas, and i like that. i probably like even more obnoxious things than the black eyed peas. harmony korine is my favorite director. try explaining why harmony korine is an amazing director to someone who “just doesn’t get it,” or to someone who has never heard of harmony korine. i’ve done that. you will look like an asshole, but if you are sincere then you are not an asshole. gummo is an incredible movie and i don’t care what that guy at work thinks. i want to be a part of this world even if it is a world filled with people who look like assholes constantly.

SP: please outline the most awkward moment you have had recently.

DB: i was at the heorot (the best bar in muncie), sitting outside, drinking with a bunch of my friends. i had my back to a rail and i knew my friend shaun gannon was standing behind me. i was talking to a friend directly in front of me. a hand came from behind my head and covered my mouth. i bit the hand assuming it was shaun gannon. i bit very hard. the hand did not belong to shaun. it was a girl i had never met. i tried for several minutes to apologize to her. she just kept saying “it’s ok” and looking around like she was looking for a horse to tape me to and send me into a nuclear blast or at least looking for someone she knew to talk to instead of me or my friends. then she rode off on her fixed gear and whatever. i probably wont’ ever see her again now that i’m in colorado. several hours later we burned an american flag.

SP: what is the best kind of chip or chip-like snakc and why.

DB: i don’t really eat snack foods, so this is tough. i remember having a brand of kettle-cooked potato chip that came from chicago that i really liked, but i haven’t seen that brand in a couple years. i probably won’t see it ever again now that i live in colorado. that was a really boring answer.

SP: can you tell us about how the book came to be published.

DB: the original sonnets had a good reception, so i decided to post the rest of them on the DRUNK blog. i made a post on my own blog saying something like, “if anyone wants to publish these, email me.” less than two hours later, mike emailed me. he told me to take down what i said about “if anyone wants to publish these.” mike wanted to make THE DRUNK SONNETS the first magic helicopter full-length release. that’s basically the story. i’m pretty sure i put the least amount of effort into getting a poetry book published than any poet in recent history.

SP: please tell us one person you love and describe how that love manifests.

DB: i love my friend adam. we worked together for about a year. we went out most nights. he is one of the few people that i can talk to drunk and not do anything badass and not feel like i’ve wasted my night. he is the main person that i plan to never lose touch with after leaving muncie. that is all i can say. also, we have smashed things together. i also answer interview questions about him, which is another way my love manifests.

SP: the best brand of forty is ______

DB: mickey’s for taste. st. ides if you want to get drunk.

BG: i can't let that one slide. if you wanna get fucked up on the quick, you gotta down that steel reserve.

SP: who is one actor/writer/anybody you would like to put into a headlock and hold the headlock for a long time?

DB: i really want to put natalie portman into a headlock, because i’m pretty sure she would become become attracted to me and eventually love me and she’d support me forever with her acting $$$ and let me just do the same shit that i dun been doin’ and she’d probably be ok with me writing a movie and maybe even produce it and then i’d be able to be awesome and be a director like harmony korine or wernor herzog or kurosawa or even that guy that did the passion of the christ. and my movie (film) would make me famous and rich. and then me and natalie portman would have kickass sex in our huge mansion on top of a pile of benjamins and we’d fall asleep together and then in the morning we’d awake together and we’d look out our bedroom window and watch the smoke rise from the spot where we set doves on fire in our plea to the gods of hell yes and then we would commit suicide because we’re bored and don’t really like each other anymore.

SP: if you could plan your next birthday party however you wanted, how would it be?

DB: i would be back in muncie, indiana, with all the people i love, hugging them all at least ten times each, drinking until the sun rose and spoke to us, “why in the hell are you still awake? you have defied my rule of the day and the moon’s rule of the night.” and then the sun and the moon would collide and the earth would be destroyed in the resulting explosion.

but i know that i’ll be across the country, so i’ll have to find something fun to do here.

SP: can you describe something you strive for in writing down anything.

DB: i don’t know what i strive for. i don’t know what i want any time i write something down. honesty? that’s a fucking lame response. for people to like me? a little bit. a sense of purpose? somewhat. i guess after reading all of everything that i’ve loved and watching all the movies i’ve loved and inhaling all the music that has defined moments and periods of my life, i want to create something that has that much power and meaning to myself or someone else. i just want to make something … ahh … i can’t finish this answer … i’m sitting in my apartment and the fan is flipping the pages of my newly signed apartment lease and shaun gannon’s chapbook and ryan rader’s chapbook are both sitting there and i feel like an infant right now, like i’ve been recently inducted into THE HALL OF INCREDIBLE SHIT and this is my induction ceremony. all i want to do is fall asleep in a hammock, bathed in the sun, with a bunch of dragonflies flying over my body, for the dragonflies to look at me briefly and look at my face and maybe my fingernails with the dirt under them and then fly away, for the dragonflies to never look at me again. and then for me to wake up and walk away from that. that’s what i want.

P. EDWARD CUNNINGHAM

2009-10-16T13:29:00.001-07:00

NEO INDUSTRIO ZOIC

By this time the silk fish will have torn up
in the gurgling embers. You’ll be sticky-throating
your food by then. No more baked cod or
boiled shellfish. You’ll collapse one afternoon
and you’ll be carried off by Gila monsters.
The monsters will nestle you into the shape of a
damaged cloud. Smogging toward the laundromat,
you’ll bring with you the Gila monsters and many
pollutants from the earth. One of the Gila monsters
will beg you to reconsider your trip to the laundromat.
The smog is too thick for your ears. Once inside
the public washing machine the Gila monsters will shift
and spin around your cirrostratus. Most of the lizard beads
will peel away from their lizard bodies. Your smog will
absorb every prickling bump—every last lizard bead.
Each of the monsters will dissolve into your bitter shape.
Mouths chewing up the last rain droplets. Your cloud
bones will burst along with your cold inner veins.
You’ll precipitate and then you’ll dry.

JOSEPH MCHUGH

2009-10-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

I HEART HIROSHIMA

Your eyes were rubber nipples that
dripped the milk of unhappiness

and I sucked it from the bottom
of the bottle of your hollows

where your meadows of marrow were
as barren as a scarecrow’s heart.

My eyes were the caps of mushroom
clouds rising out of the country

being vaporized inside me,
every flash of your shape toasted

onto the walls of my mind’s room
where I hid your milk and marrow.

When an atomic bomb finds its way between two people
they together
are history.

ANTHONY NEIL SMITH

2009-10-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

TO THE GUY WHO WILL INEVITABLY LEAVE MY FUNERAL EARLY

Good for you.
I wouldn’t
have been able
to stomach
any more
of that bullshit
either.

BRAD BISIO

2009-10-16T13:23:00.000-07:00

TIME AND SPACE AT LIGHT SPEED

no matter
which direction
or how fast

(7
times around
the Earth/second)

i run

(6
trillion miles
/year)

i will
always be
the same

(180,000 miles
/second

distance from
the horizon.

J. BRADLEY

2009-10-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

ENDOWMENT

When an intrepid nephew
pries open your mouth
like a sarcophagus,
he will ask: How did
she get wrinkles
inside her mouth?

Those are libraries of kisses.
Her teeth trimmed the stacks
like lumberjacks disguised
as librarians.

When you're ready
to learn how to kiss, press
your ear to the earth
and listen.

J. BRADLEY

2009-10-16T13:21:00.000-07:00

DOING IT NORSE STYLE

Before wooing a woman,
tell the band of Vikings
huddled in your knuckles:
take the day off.

Until they wield bouquets
skillfully, you cannot spend
another Monday morning
counting coins of broken glass
cached beneath your skin.

TAD PIECKA

2009-10-16T13:20:00.000-07:00

HEARD

tear me off a restaurant match
and accompany me to my Ohio apartment
you can man the extinguisher
while I burn the bureau brightly
drawers snapping like summertime
in the Spanish air of my youth
I am not a frightened page
but a resentful jealous friar
widely known for the company I keep
and the kerosene flask
nailed proudly across my chest
from that wound I bleed fuel
but you run on perfumed scrolls
souvenirs I once kept secret
crated beneath the hickory
with the hot wind and the airy tide
their kindled ash takes flight lightly
moved by public purpose
to a most displeasing end
my cross and supper spent years ago
whilst a mere
suffragan bootlicker
it’s come down to vaccination
against the potential to regress
through the marriage absconded
and the crackle of a campfire
I bless thee born again
so trust in my scarlet lunacy
for beyond midnight
we will pile these planks high

BARRY BASDEN

2009-10-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

THE LAST TIME I SAW MY FATHER

He looked small tethered to
the oxygen bottle. Hunched
forward in his old recliner, he
stared out the bedroom window,
no Marlboros in sight.

“I can’t think of anything but that
graveyard. My people are all gone.”
I touched his bony shoulder. “We’re
here with you, Pop.” His head twitched
slightly. “It’s not the same.”

WORD OF THE YEAR

2009-10-16T13:17:00.001-07:00

THE ALPHA AND OMEGA OF NOW

2009-10-16T13:16:00.000-07:00

NEUROTICALLY IN ZERO LAND

2009-10-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

SHYA SCANLON

2009-08-13T12:05:00.000-07:00

FORECAST - CHAPTER 9

Forecast is being serialized semiweekly across 42 web sites. For a full list of participants and links to live chapters, please visit www.shyascanlon.com/forecast

(Ch. 8 in THE 2ND HAND)

(Ch. 10 in KEYHOLE)
8

Seattle, during our historically brief but significant dim, reclaimed some of the natural beauty that must have distinguished it to early inhabitants. Or, perhaps more accurately, it was reclaimed by this beauty. The constant stream of traffic, cut back to no more than a trickle, no longer formed a barrier between the city and the surrounding woodland, and a near moratorium on luxuries such as lawnmowers, hedge trimmers, weed wackers and the like, allowed new habitude for the animals, curiosity piqued by the calm, which crawled across the city’s innocuous arterials. They lived in our lawns and under our homes, fed in the untended trees along our streets, and played in the buildings vacated by an industry dependant on excess.

Though it was a tenuous agreement, Seattleites did make some concessions for our new four-legged neighbors, the overgrown yards they considered home, and the moss that reminded us to conserve what little we still had. The state government, in a move arguably betraying a foreknowledge of the blackout, had jumped ahead with it’s Back to Nature® campaign, playing on desperate traces of environmental ideals we’d shallowly claimed, and inside each one of us was kindled, real or imaginary, the stirrings of actual concern. Besides, there were perks. The air, for instance. Long deep breaths free from the smog we’d grown so accustomed to. And the stars. Marred only by the one remaining bastion of brightness – the entertainment industry – the night sky was a city dweller’s wet dream.

After a few hours of searching, stars were beginning to peer down on Zara’s peripatetic pursuit, indifferent. She was losing hope. Not sure if he’d show up again to school, she didn’t want to lose track of this strange brown boy, but the day had drawn to a close and she was getting hungry. Knuckle's? The second the idea crossed her mind she retched. Her stomach was still tender from that morning's Dirty Dog, and besides, she thought, in an attempt to assuage her still unsettled gut, she didn't want to give el Farto company, whose straight A's were still upsetting the curve. She needed something non-violent.

Zara had spent most of the evening roaming around her own south-central neighborhood, where she'd seen Asseem enough to suspect that he too lived. She’d never seen him enter or exit a particular house, however, and so had spent her afternoon tracing a path up and down the streets she knew – and some she didn’t – hoping to catch a public glimpse of her emotionally energetic classmate. But as darkness fell she began to drift westward, drawn downtown by the smell of street vendors, whose booths lined the lanes adjacent to the major vein of Seattle's nightlife. She trotted through Chinatown, staying to the center of Jackson where the starlight lit her path, and watched people come and go from the small shops to either side, the more wealthy armed with flashlights, the poor carrying candles or glow-sticks.

At one point a car made its way past her, stealing her street. It rose up from downtown and people stopped to watch it pass, shaking their heads and snickering. The early show must have let out. Zara watched too as it rolled by, though without any opinion, one way or the other. She’d met people with cars before, and they didn’t seem any more or less interesting than anyone else. Maybe fatter.

She needed food.

The stalls along this street boasted mostly spicy menus, Asian and Mediterranean, Mexican, but as she drew closer to the cinema district, the flavors grew more benign. Their cooks catered to less adventurous mouths. Zara’s preference never took her too far into town, but her belly, on the verge of another rebellion, bullied her past her more familiar haunts, and deeper into a part of town she normally took pains to avoid.

That Zara had spent as little time as possible in the cinema district was a quiet and, I'd wager, unintentional victory for Jennifer and Marshal, who loved cinema, and thus couldn't bear to watch what passed for it those days. It simply wasn’t talked about. Had Marshal, for instance, made a point to point out what was wrong with the sort of high-wire bewitchment that tarnished the silver screen nightly, in Seattle and elsewhere, since the government had gotten its act together and realized it had to deliver some serious entertainment seriously soon before people began to create it for themselves, that is, in the streets, Zara would have been a plumped-up popcorn junky by mid-morning in the day of our disaster. But he was dismayed enough to keep it inside, where he pined away for the Godards and Tarkovskys and bit his lip when "Earth Day 11" was released, all feel-good and well-wishy. If he'd been asked, of course, he would have gone into great detail about what the big screen could have accomplished in such a depressed time, but he wasn't, not by Zara at least, whose only exposure to film was the inexcusably entertaining garbage being projected to replace the population's ability to process what was going on around them. She had no use for it. Had her father been slightly less heartbroken about it, just enough to cause the pain but not enough to silence, he would have spilled his guts and spilled Zara, de facto, right into the impossibly cushy seats. Thus what kept her away from the movies was, at that point, the only thing that kept Zara away from anything, namely, simple disinterest. It was one of the few things about which the young girl had had the opportunity to privately opine.

She marched down Jackson only reluctantly, pushing toward the bright lights of the cinema district wanting only to find food and again retreat eastward. A nice man she knew served a superb miso soup to upscale customers, gracefully letting them over-salt it themselves, and Zara set out to find him. He'd slip her a bowl out the back if she teased him a little, and her mouth started to water in anticipation of the soft seaweed and tofu bits bobbing up through milky clouds of spoon-bothered bean paste.

The bustle of 5th Avenue bled into the surrounding area, and foot traffic flew by, couriers carrying errands, schemers scheming, scammers scamming, and folks generally running amuck. Normal nightlife, in other words. Though perhaps a touch more intense. Zara peered down all the cross-streets as she grew closer, keeping an eye out for her chinaman. Her stomach growled as she passed all the secondary food-booths, those catering to the caterers and to the lower-movie-going classes, and she had to walk by forcibly, remaining strong. The dense smell of grease sifted into her nostrils and made her eyes bulge out both with craving and disgust, while above her head the mind-bogglingly bright lights advertising the night's various cinematic offerings afforded her more visibility than she was used to, and she was forced to note things she normally tried to ignore: the pitiable shape of the food stalls, their total lack of sanitation, and of course the condition of the food itself. This made her decision to continue easier, but made her worry for the condition of her chinaman's addition to this fiasco, which she hadn't seen since he moved his cart down here from its former perch at the top of Jackson, where he'd sold to his own kind.

6th Avenue was more of the same, and Zara walked north, parallel to the source of all the action. She saw faces she recognized among the vendors and customers both, but none she knew well, and it began to excite her, being in such unfamiliar territory in a city she took for granted. She'd been operating on auto-pilot to an uncomfortable degree, and this thought, as it took shape, drove her further northward, and brought back her ambition to find her classmate. Asseem was something she didn't understand. He was somewhere she'd never been. He had things to hide. She recalled him standing before the class, spitting a Eubonic tongue from his mouth to make room for an articulate message that damned its speaker even as it hit its mark. She recalled watching the pencil sharpener, fueled by this, or something inside it, some part of it, gobbling down the pencil until its teeth ground against the little metal end. She frowned then, remembering her own attempt, which ended in unproductive daydreams. What had she done wrong?

Before an answer could assemble itself, her mind was brought to quick focus by a hand against her neck. It was there only for an instant, but the unmistakable sensation of skin on skin lingered as she turned around to see a figure, her size, running back down 6th with a fist of flashing silver. Her necklace. She didn't stop to consider who this might be, whether they might be armed, or that the necklace was worth next to nothing - even to her - but bolted instead after it, turning and running like she was tethered to the little thief. He blew through the bramble of food booths and their patrons like he could predict its motion, and Zara had to swerve in and out, against the grain, bumping into as many people as she passed. But she was faster. Zara's feet found sound placement on the unsure path and carried her closer and closer to the dark bobbing head of her criminal, who cut across the street, back and forth, backandforth, like he was looking for an exit he couldn't find. Zara drew near. But as she came close enough to do damage the kid broke right, heading toward cinema street, and as Zara turned too she was temporarily dazzled by a face-full of speeding photons, doing their worst. It caught her off guard, and she would have had him before he reached the corner but she lost a step because of it, and had to look to lock onto him, a silhouette against the onslaught of ugly light. She bore down on her target again as they neared 5th Avenue, her vision restored and her arms stretched out before her, and she was soon close enough to feel the fuzz of an old wool sweater on her fingertips. But the peace she’d made with the light was only as good as the steps she took toward the end of the block, and when she reached the corner she was caught by a second wave of discombobulation as the scene burst through her pupils, explosive. There were no shadows here. There were bubbling bulbs and fast flashes and neon signs burning unthinkable titles into her eyes. There were people exposed like film against the near-reflective surface of the street. There were too many things to see any one of them well. Her thief had disappeared into complete visibility.

Zara took a step back as her eyes adjusted. Her face burned from the chase, and with the anger at having lost it. She caught her breath and looked around. The first thing she noticed, could focus on concretely, were the cars. Cars lined the street, parked along either side with their drivers standing next to them, ushering people on who lingered too long before them and handing out small candies to the kids who stared with dreaming eyes. The vehicles were kept clean but in varying states of disrepair. Rusted and tarnished with patchy paint. She didn’t normally care very much for these rolling coffins, but to see so many at once was a rush, and she marveled in spite of herself. She stood still, and the flow of people past her was at once frenetic and deliberate, crowds dawdling up and down the avenue looking like they had somewhere to be and that place was here, right now. Mothers were pulling their children across the street and into theatres, and fathers were smoking and smiling and shaking hands, watching their families run amuck.

Zara took a deep breath, noting the unfamiliar trace of exhaust, and stepped out into the teaming foot traffic. She headed north. The buzzing signs above her head projected brilliant blue scars on the vacant high rise buildings to either side of the street, and door after door yawned to reveal the Blockbusting Summer Events they advertised. Fascinated and somewhat nauseous, Zara moved through it all, eyes now open wide, pupils broad and blooming. The exposed steel, concrete, and seafoam-green glass that by some sinister, anesthetic manipulation had been built in the years before the blackout into every single architectural eruption, now stood emotionless before this spectacle, supporting enormous billboards blaring the week’s releases while, from the floors above them, vines cascaded out of windows, cut short before they disrupted the display, withering upward like sneering lips. The city had hollowed out this tunnel to ignore the world around, and it required a muscle in perpetual flex, pushing outward against the impending greenery that had crept so far, come so close to completely reclaiming the region it once defined. The street, she realized, was as free from anything living as it was from shadows. No roots broke up through the sidewalks, no animals – other than human – scurried across the road. No moss. She was being thrown back in time, back to what it must have been to live before. She was vaguely repulsed.

And it made her hungry.

Zara made a commitment to herself to come back and explore this incredible scene further, but decided to commit herself first to sating the hunger that was growing again in her gut. And at this point, she was over being choosy. She dug in her pocket to see how much trouble she could get herself in, and found her resources to be severely depleted. Sigh. The prices posted in front of the booths along 5th were way out of her range, but as she began to reconcile herself to the Dirty-Dog-level fare she’d have to ingest, her eyes wandered and locked on to a fruit stand across the street. Which gave her a better idea.

Fruit was in short supply in those days, and expensive. Even regional crops were heavily protected, and though some farmers grew their own small supply, most orchards were owned and run by the state, which had taken over all food production. To its benefit, all the best farmers had been hired to care for these precious plants, and the produce, though scarce, was always of excellent quality. Here it was no different. The apples shone with pride, and pears, rarer still, peaked out from higher racks, daring you to touch them. On any other street this merchandise was kept under glass, and more often than not, fruit was only found in government grocery stores, where they could be traded for an obscene number of food coupons. It rarely made an appearance at Zara’s house.

She ogled the bright apples eagerly. She rubbed her hands. It was a night, after all, for thievery, and the thieves seemed to be winning. She took a moment to plan her approach.

The fruit merchant was about the same shape as his produce, and his body was wrapped, for no reason Zara could divine, in a white smock that fell down from his midsection to just above his knees, leaving his legs to dangle out like stems. No chance that he’d outrun her. She craned her neck to see in past the pears, deeper inside the stall, but from what she could tell he was working alone, and he walked the length of his booth – about twenty feet – back and forth, sweet-talking the women, pointing out prices to their men, and waving ripe fruit before the children’s faces. She watched his routine, wanting to match his rhythm, and found herself impressed. He was good. So good, however, that he spent just as much time bending over his merchandise, back to the street, as he did face-forward, bringing in new customers. This was too easy. Zara, at first having nearly fallen for this robust, red-faced fat man, began now to warm up for the trespass, picking out things to dislike. His simple, stupid smile, for instance, or the oblivious way he ran his business. She’d grown used to this custom. Criticism would build inside her like a pitcher’s windup, and only when it outweighed the good she saw would she release herself into the task, her decision made, her vector unveering. It was a handicap, she knew. But she just couldn’t bring herself to steal from someone she liked.

Cars crept along between her and the fruit booth, and Zara swerved slowly among them, locking down the fat man’s rhythm, a mini-golf windmill, closing in for the snatch. She readied her five-finger discount. As she grew near, just as she’d planned, the man found a buyer on the far side of the booth, and was leaning across the fruit, reaching for an untouched apple. Zara came in swiftly and saddled up beside the tiered fruit and quickly chose a piece and reached out and that’s when she heard it. A low growl growing under the table. Fuck. The fat fruit man, ears no doubt tuned to this sound, looked up, spun around, and locked eyes with Zara, holding an apple in one hand and a pear in the other. He put them slowly down.

“It’s hard to resist,” he began, “but you’re going to want to put that apple back down, little girl.” He had a high, sing-songy voice and a strange accent, but this did not rob his suggestion of seriousness. Zara held his gaze, and started to slowly back away. She could not outrun a dog. She wasn’t thinking about this. She wasn’t thinking. She continued backwards, almost imperceptibly, and the growling grew.

“You’re going to want to put that back,” he repeated, more slowly this time, as if to match her movement. The family he’d been dealing with looked on, curious, not interceding on either behalf, though the kid’s attention was torn between the crime-in-progress and his apple, still gripped by the vendor, now waving back and forth, indifferent to his little needs.

“Listen kid, just give it up.” The voice was darker now, and the sing-songy quality was all but extinguished. The growls below the table gave way to a short burst of sharp barks, and any moment, Zara felt, she’d be forced to put a face to the formidable noise. At the other end of the stand, the little brat, apple wagging just out of reach and now confronted by the brush of danger, began to cry. The fat man inched farther forward. The barks grew louder.

Zara turned her back and fled.

She launched into traffic and cruised back southward, looking for the alley she’d come through, hoping to cut back to 6th into more familiar territory. The barking was in her ears and on her skin. She could feel it dripping down her back like soda pop. She aimed herself at families and burst through held hands, popping fingers out of joint and parting partners like the sea. She hoped she could confuse the animal, but the piercing barks followed her down the block, the shrill voice of the fruit man above it all shouting for the cops. But where was she? She didn’t have time to look around, just run, and she charged toward the end of the block, deciding to flip left the first chance she got. But the block wouldn’t end. The growling barks were right behind her, and her heels began to tingle, sure they’d be caught by teeth each time one arched back, in line to take another step. She was cursing herself, holding the apple tight, and when she felt her arm grabbed by a sure hand and her body begin to swing around she almost felt relieved, resigned, ready to hand it over and make her way back home. She flew through an open door and heard it shut behind her, shutting with it the dog’s screaming, now significantly muffled, and she closed her eyes, holding out the apple, hoping she wouldn’t be told to apologize.

“You’re Zara, right?” She felt the apple being taken from her outstretched hand, and heard a loud crunch, then chewing. “Thanks.”

She opened her eyes.

ADULT ENTERTAINER INTERVIEW: KAREN REGINA SUPPER

2009-07-08T12:43:00.001-07:00

Name: Karen Regina Supper
Age: 39
Birthplace: Philadelphia Pa
Age lost virginity: 15
Age first started dancing: 22
Age first sold my body for money: 26

SP: what is a funny thing to say to someone when they first wake up? Is it wearing a gas mask then saying, “we need to move fast!”
KS: what was your name again?

SP: what is the best tv show to have on while having sex on a couch?
KS: Talk Sex With Dr. Sue

SP: which of these qualities about me do you find most appealing (or which should i amplify about myself to be more appealing):

A. can almost dunk
B. can grow pretty insane beard that turns red with sunlight (like red red, not orange red)
C. am very polite in the classical sense
D. can perform devastating right hook
E. am good kisser and am always very funny first thing in morning, like when showering

KS: either c or d

SP: write a four line autobiography of your favorite piece of clothing.
KS: my fav piece of clothing is a black, red and white teddy with skulls, hearts, and the words "love" written in the hearts. I always make decent money when i wear it. It fits me like a glove and knows my every move, and it ran away from its former owner to come "hang out" on me

SP: what is your favorite book/who is your favorite author?
KS: The Power of Now, Eckert Tolle

SP: is there any way to avoid being hated by people? if so how? and does it involve randomly handing out cupcakes?
KS: To avoid hate one must be able to avoid jealousy, and females are EXTREMELY jealous. They assume just because I have worked in a brothel that I'll fuck ANYONE, have aids, and am after every man, woman and child on the planet for sex, which is absurd. I have tried to make friends for years in this business and its not an easy thing to do. I just smile and keep plugging away at em with kindness and wish them the happiness they lack because theyre so busy hating on successful women who use their bodies for an income they have little time for anything else, i.e making money at the strip club, etc.

SP: describe the last date you were on.
KS: last date i was on i went to a place called the rainbow springs in ocala and swam and kayacked for the day. It was very serene.

SP: when mc hammer claimed to be "too legit to quit" did you ever question this self-proclaimed legitimacy? and can one be "too" legit or is legitimacy a finite state?
KS: Hey, all i can say it this. STOP. HAMMER TIME.

SP: what is the stupidest television show you watch and why is it stupid.
KS: Brett Michaels' Bus of Love and i watch it as i am dying to see Brett somehow lose his bandana and let the world discover he is indeed completely bald under those bandanas

SP: describe your reaction in full after the following scenario: i just presented you with a peanut butter and raspberry jelly sandwich that i have cut to look like a heart (note, I am smiling the whole time and the smile seems genuine, not diabolical)
KS: I'm a true romantic and i would not only find it endearing, but you'd probably get a blow job as soon as i were done eating it!

SP: make up an afterlife and describe it here (you have to use the phrase "black nipples leaking honey into a blind man's eyes"
KS: Well, the blind man drew his last breath, yet he still felt his presence as a being. He felt himself float up from the hospital bed and thought "well, I'll be damned, the lord intends for me to be blind in heaven? Or maybe I'm not headed there at all? He began to panic. Shortly thereafter, a woman approached him, he could not see her, but he could smell her and she said hello and by her voice he felt she may be african american. She said "fear not, cracker, because the boss has sent me down here to handle your mishap; from now on, you're straight, boo. With that she pulled out a gorgeous set a breasts the poor man again could not see, to wish she gently put one of her nipples into her mouth.They began to emit a sweet fluid, and he drank some. "Now here you go" she said, and put the nipples up to his eyes and began to squeeze them of their nectar like substance. With her black nipples leaking honey into a blind mans eyes, he began to realize he could see again! He gave her 20 dollars, and went on his way,now that he could see, he realized he was gay and saw a REALLY boyish looking angel across the room. After soliciting him, he went directly to hell. The end.

SP: true or false: you used to watch the tv show "perfect strangers"
KS: FALSE. I have never watched it.

SP: LIAR! what is something someone says that immediately precludes having sex with him/her
KS: ...would you like to get more comfortable?

SP: what is an action you perform that symbolically lets another person into your personal life.
KS: Opening myself up to them and offering my friendship. I would say its when i give them my number

SP: is there hope for humanity.
KS: I wish there was, but fear we may have already gone too far to save things. I hate knowing our species is the only one that destroys not only themselves but their world as well, for what? some green paper?!?!

SP: did your parents ever reward you for good grades or did they only get angry if you got bad grades?
KS: i was rewarded for good grades, of course! :)

SP: name one thing you would hand out to the entire world on your birthday if you could
KS: a genie who would provide them with the way for that person to obtain whatever it is that they needed in order to be happy

SP: what is the "douchiest" age for men?
KS: to me its not an age but a male’s cleanliness that makes him "douchy"

SP: when a man cheats on a woman, why does the woman always seem to get mad at the other woman and not the man.
KS: its a primal thing, ever seen 2 female dogs in heat fight over a male dog? And most females get pissed at the man for cheating and often cut the woman a break if she was unaware that the man had a female counterpart, but if the woman was aware she gets angry with the woman because it shows a complete lack of respect

SP: if you could live in a family like on STEP BY STEP, who would you choose as your siblings?
KS: siblings suck; they just make your inheritance smaller

SP: do you ever get randomly dizzy in your kitchen and almost fall, or is that just me?
KS: i get dizzy from time to time if i get up too quickly, but it being a kitchen thing is just you, buddy. :)

SP: would you watch a porno where there was no sex and it was just a guy making popcorn for a girl who was sitting on a couch with a blanket over her legs and then the climax of the movie was when the guy fixes the blanket so it's over the girl's feet?
KS: maybe once, but not because it would turn me on, just to see something so obscure

SP: if you were on a walk and you saw a raccoon and it screamed and glitter came out of the scream, what would you do?
KS: make sure i get more shrooms from whoever i just bought them from

SP: what would be the message you'd write on a decorative helium balloon?
KS: "I'm only gonna fly til i run out of gas, brother"

AUTHOR/PUBLISHER INTERVIEW: ADAM ROBINSON

2009-07-08T12:22:00.001-07:00

sp: give us a brief history of publishing genius press, and the reasons you started doing it (and you can't say pussy because, i don't know, maybe you can actually)

ar: Thanks for asking. You’re the first person to ever ask this. I’ve wanted to do a press forever, I don’t know why, maybe I wanted to just make everyone really like the books I really liked, or maybe it’s due to my tendency to start clubs. I mean, I am forever starting clubs. When I was a kid I would get all the neighbors together and organize things and explain rules, then some other kid would go, “Or we could just all be friends like we already are.”

At first when I started PGP I set up all these meetings with other publishers to ask how they did it, what it takes to do a press. I worked diligently like that for a while “doing R&D” until my girlfriend at the time, the amazing Stephanie Barber, had a chapbook of poems published by Roberto Harrison, who runs Bronze Skull Press and wrote the frightening book, Counter Daemons (Litmus Press). Steph’s book seemed so simple, but so lovely. Ten poems in a staple-stitched book with a red cover and a black inner leaf. So I scrapped all my research and decided to just do these chapbooks, completely ripping off Bronze Skull.

PGP has done 8 books, and like 20 things for This PDF Chapbook, which is a series of shorter works formatted for reading online, at Issuu. Issuu is cool but I don’t think it’s user friendly enough so you can also print out the books, but who does that? I don’t know who does that. Sean Lovelace says he does it at his college there, so I figure there’s one person.

Oh yeah, there is also Is Reads, which started as a class project in 2006 (back when I was doing all the research on how to start a press). That’s the thing where we hang up poems on abandoned buildings and light posts and stuff. Peter Cole, the madman behind Keyhole, started doing that in Nashville and then Poets & Writers wrote about it and now it’s going to be in Hawaii and stuff too. Phoenix. Wal-Mart. That’s it. In a nutshell. I don’t want to go on and on with details about Everyday Genius, the daily update journal. Is anyone even still reading this interview?

sp: please describe an altercation between you and another child, in grade school.

ar: In first grade, while waiting in line at the drinking fountain, I pulled open Stacy’s shirt and looked at her chest. She cried. What a disappointment. I got sent to the principal’s office. I wish I remembered her last name. I had a crush on her until I graduated high school.

sp: when was the last time you got revenge on someone and what were the circumstances.

ar: This guy at work, Ace, taped a box of pennies to the door of the top cupboard of my cubicle and when I came in one morning and opened it, all the pennies spilled out all over everything. So when he walked away from his cubicle later and left his PC unlocked, I sent an email from his account to our boss saying “I did a poopie in my pants so I have to go home, okay hon?” Plus I reset his desktop image to the cutest picture of My Little Pony.

sp: the readers want to know, what's up with your book? what's inside it? will it be fun to read? what is the ideal place to read it? are there reading group notes in the back of it? if not, please provide some here, briefly.

ar: Tell everyone that my book should be out in August. It’s got about 60 poems in it. I’d say they are about 18 lines long on average. I try to use a casual voice in them, sort of like yours a little bit, maybe not as hip, but sort of my own, too. Well, not really my own. I think my book, which is called ADAM ROBISON AND OTHER POEMS, will be fun to read because it has some good lies in it and some good truths. I think it’s the sort of poetry book that should be read one at a time, wherever. It doesn’t matter where so much as how many.

I’m totally going to include reading group notes in the back, as well as a blank page that just says “NOTES” on the top. That’s a great idea.

sp: what is the best kind of author photo? is it, "leaning on a tree, arms crossed?" or perhaps, "at desk writing something, not taking notice of the person taking the photo?" is it something else?

ar: I’ve seen so few author photos that really worked for me. The picture of Lester Bangs in the front of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, in which he’s wearing a flannel pulled open over his belly to show an ABBA tee shirt, is great. He’s in his office there, I think, in front of a stack of records. I also really like the picture of Blaise Cendrars, leaning against a huge stack of books.

My author photo is probably the best. It’s a portrait painted in a classical style by the amazing Shaun Preston. I sat for it. It’s going to be the cover.

sp: are you working on any other writing projects at present? if so, what are they?

ar: I’m not. I wish I was, but I’m not. I would die.

sp: if you could have like, a totally huge sleepover at your house, who would you invite and what would happen at the sleepover?

ar: I’m actually getting tired of drinking! Finally! Well, maybe not really. But for the purposes of this answer I am, so I would invite my best friends from every stage of my life and see if we still clicked. We’d, um, we’d stay up really late, like till 2am, and talk about the story “Teddy” by JD Salinger.

sp: does the efficiency of velcro shoes overcome the social stigma?

ar: Who you fooling? You’re not really thinking about switching over to Velcro – everyone knows you don’t even take your boots off.

sp: do you ever hide in the clothing racks at stores and then grab peoples' hands when they reach in? maybe hand them a copy of LIGHT BOXES?

ar: I don’t. I’m too busy looking at my profile in the three-way mirrors. Have you ever seen yourself from the side? It’s crazy! I don’t even recognize myself. My legs look bowed. I get really self-conscious.

sp: there seems to be (or maybe i am making this up) a divide on the internet between those who like what is called "realism" and those who like, we'll call it, "surrealism." where do you stand. what are your thought s adam robinson?

ar: Well, I think I know what you mean. The boner in me wants to straighten out this term “surrealism” and return it to its proper roots in Satanism, and unpack the term “realism” and claim it for literature that calls into question the things we think are real – but I think I know what you mean and I’m okay with keeping things in quotation marks until the brainwaves coming from the ivory tower filter into our popular lexicon.

I read a story by Paula Bomer today called “An Important Day in the Life of Marjorie Wallace” that I think fits into the definition of the word “realist” (my quotes are meant to indicate the popular term, marked by straight prose where, for instance, the word “tree” denotes “a leafy plant with a trunk and branches”) and it was okay. It has a beautiful and effective conclusion that is worth reading the story for, but to me, the payoff doesn’t seem big enough to rationalize all the work she must have put into writing it. I mean, when the story was over, the sum of my thoughts was: huh. Not as a question or anything, just blank.

And plus, when you write that way – if you make a tiny little mistake, like she does with this clause – “a wonderful February sun falling onto her face” – you risk losing your audience. And mistakes like this are much more obvious in traditional, unmediated prose. Plus, in this story she has the main character, Marjorie, yell at a merely casual friend for not calling her six weeks earlier. I thought, “No one would do that.” So I was basically workshopping this story as I went along, even though I just wanted to read it for whatever reason people read stories. I did the same thing with a Barbara Taylor Bradford book I recently listened to in my car. With “realist” stuff, I always already feel like an expert on whatever a writer is talking about, and I get distracted by matching it up to my own perspective or something. I figure, why bother – unless there is some flat out stunning style to it.

I like Paula Bomer a lot, I think, and I know she’s intentional when she writes this way. I like that she’s sticking up for it. But when you do that other thing – where the language of the story is as essential as the story, and where the story is as essential as an exploded metanarrative, in the sense that it calls into question even the telling of the story, especially the telling (and that might not sound like it’s saying anything but it is) – you’re demanding that readers become familiar with the back or the inside story. When the reader invests like that for a work of art, when he allows himself to become a part of the work, its language and habitat and unfamiliar everything, he is more likely to dig in enough to appreciate it, less likely to discount it, shrug and walk away, as he might with something where he doesn’t “believe” one character would really say that thing, would really note the wonderful sun falling on her face.

I’m not really sure that nugget of theory holds up, and anyway I love impeccable writing, no matter what form it takes. I think my favorite novel is still The Brothers K by David James Duncan, at least in terms of emotional response, in terms of “holy crap, literature is amazareehing,” in terms of tears-to-page ratio. But nine times out of ten I prefer the mind-bending stuff to the “there is meaning in the accumulation of ordinary experience” stuff.

sp: if you could jump on anyone's face, like a trampoline, who would it be and why?

ar: I used to keep a list. I can only remember it had my scoutmaster on it because he yelled at me for being impolite to a foreign exchange student. Now I don’t really hold a grudge. Actually, wait, yeah I recently had violent feelings toward a person who contacted me on Facebook to tell me I had behaved inappropriately toward his girlfriend when we were all standing around on the sidewalk in front of a bar. I apologized and asked could he be more specific about what I did, because it’s not unlikely that my actions were misinterpreted or something. He said, “It concerns me that you need a specific action.” Man, that made me mad, but I apologized anyway. It “concerns” him? What gives, Sam? Did anyone your age ever tell you that something you did “concerns” them? How do you take it? It’s so authoritarian. I guess I don’t take correction well, because I would totally trampoline on that dude’s face.

sp: you live in baltimore. is there any way to avoid being asked for money on the street? one time i was wearing a blanket as a winter coat and someone still asked me for money. i usually give whatever i have but sometimes i just don't want to be talked to. what is your method? are you a starer? are you a, "sorry man" kind of guy? do you explain yourself? do tell.

ar: I mean, sometimes I give some money, a few silver coins, or if I don’t feel like giving them money I offer them a cigarette. Or if I don’t feel like giving them anything I’ll mumble, “Sorry man, I don’t have anything.” Then invariably they’ll say, “Okay, thank you, have a blessed day” and I’ll feel like a jerk.

But a few weeks ago I got mugged and a bottle smashed over my head, and while I was walking away, trying to call 911, this guy asked me for change. I just looked at him with my bloody face and he said, “Oh, okay, you okay?” I didn’t give him a single red cent.

sp: have you ever seen a porno that really disturbed you? if so, what occured in said porno?

ar: When I was in college a Japanese guy I knew, a bass player, showed me some of his collection. It was pretty disturbing. It’s all threatened women stuff over there, I guess, because he said his stuff was the norm. But I mean, it was all about women being chased and stuff. I am for porn in the sense that I think women should capitalize on this economy that capitalizes so much on them, on the form of their existence. But that’s not the only reason I’m for it.

Why is this the last question? I’m scared.

BLAKE BUTLER

2009-07-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

REVIEW OF BRIAN EVENSON'S THE THIRD FACTOR

Twelfth in the order of stories in Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (forthcoming July 1 from Coffee House Press) is ‘The Third Factor,’ which originally appeared in Quarterly West.

And herein, after so much circling, and circling of the circling, of some center, we finally, in concert, enter the void.

‘The Third Factor,’ unlike most any of the stories here, seems to move head-on into that blank space skirted and wormed around at in the earlier avenues of Fugue State’s maze-if still in echo of them thematically, imagistically-and yet still we can not feel.

This story, launched into in the form of a field report, like the previous ‘An Accounting,’ follows a man assigned to follow another man without explanation on a daily routine of recording the subject in cryptic code that he feeds to unresponsive contacts-a routine that bears much of mostly nothing along the way, until the following is violently, inexplicably, adjourned.

The man then, again in circling, takes a new task that leads him into a spiral of unanswerable questions as to the nature of his project, his superiors, his task, and most importantly himself.

In the void, though the language is concrete, its application is mostly circular and functionally vapid (much like the trajectory of Paul Auster’s City of Glass).

At the center of the center of the void, then, we watch, through the eyes of narrator, a film of images played in the movie house where he meets his “contacts”-a film consisting of blurred images that shift in shape and focus, almost becoming, and yet held mostly just out of focus. The narrator becomes transfixed by the film and watches it in loop, finding it similar in texture throughout, but always also different in his recall. “I had the odd sensation of both seeing something for the first time and seeing it again,” he explains, before being driven to leave the film by a final clear but inconclusive image of, simply, a woman (118).

This center image-functionally not important in the outplaying of the story’s jarring and emotionally bereft but also fully displacing chains of events that leave the reader feeling somehow violated by the narrator’s blank and his unreckoning-seems to have everything to say about the loop that this story, and Fugue State in its whole looped winding, seem to want to rub into the skin of those who touch the book.

There is nothing here, not functionally, and yet it is the nothing that is the exquisite lapse, the inexplicable pulse that in its inexplication causes both object and interlocutor to become “increasingly less [his or her]self” 123. This series of loops, made of symbolic logic, minimalist dislocation butted against by turns spare and ornate prose, recurring modes and feelings of displacement, obscurement-in their never becoming, they become.

All that granted, how then, is Evenson so meticulous in his rendering of the blank? What are his tools?

In the context of ‘The Third Factor,’ we are subject to several of Evenson’s most tight-winding devices, the first of which comes from his framing. As mentioned above, the narrator frames what is essentially a recitement of looping, strange behavior that, if played out directly, shown, goes nowhere, has no hold, because it is the blank. In the framing, which ultimately adds a whole outsider layer to the rendering of the blank, a way to pull back and parse via the instrument of the character’s body, we are able, then, to give it credence-to question that character’s sanity, his judgment, the overall texture of his memory and mind.

And yet by leaving those doors open-again, the open doors-the void is dually given terrain and not diminished. The unaccountable search for definitive meaning that plague so many in their understanding of texts, like Evenson’s, that so brusquely nudge the blackest voids, have some room, then, for handholds, for grappling, for doors back into doors-though the heart here is arrayed. The true mortal terror of the moment, of the blurred filmed at any center, is preserved for what it is-a contextless life loop, a hole into a ruin. In the betweening, then, is the writhe.

ARTIST INTERVIEW: CYNTHIA REESER

2009-07-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

1. How important is it to you to feel you're doing something new in your artwork?

Art for me is a continual learning process. I don’t know if that has anything to do with being self-taught, but I always try to push my technical and aesthetic limits in an attempt to develop something new and better. More important than creating something new, however, is to stay true to the images I have in my mind’s eye. I have images that I’ve carried around with me since youth, and most of them are imaginative, in contrast to places that I’ve been or seen.

2. Do you feel you've ever created anything that really captured where you were, at least for that time, fully? If so, please share any memories of the experience.

For me, photography falls into that category. There is something very personal about the way a photographer views place and setting that communicates how a person sees her surroundings. In my photo shoot at the Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, I tried to capture the unique points of the historical surroundings and the industrial environment. That shoot was a lot of fun—I was like a kid in a candy store, snapping photos at odd angles and climbing into places marked “Prohibited” that I well knew were dangerous. I hope the images I captured reflect the fascination I felt with my surroundings, but more importantly, that they speak to the artistic qualities of that environment. The contrast of the natural world with the man-made comes through strongly in that locale; the quality of light seems to have its own presence. So I think my photography is more personal than my other pieces, to a degree—the paintings, especially, draw more from imagination than any sort of personal vision.

3. What would you say is your personal aesthetic or vision?

I think “To thine own self be true” applies here, though not in a selfish or self-centered way. It’s a matter of perception and internal focus—if an artist is not painting what he or she sees, then the result is probably an imitation of someone else’s style. I do think that it is important for artists not to operate in a vacuum. Seeing what other artists are doing broadens the perspective and offers an outlet, if not for support, then at least for the chance to locate oneself within an artistic climate. But when you come back to the canvas or drawing pad, what comes through should be authentic. For artists just beginning, finding a personal authenticity or vision can be a challenge; it just takes attending to your art. Like a writer attends to the page or the screen, coming to it and being present on a regular basis, an artist should dedicate time and attention to developing a personal aesthetic. I suppose I’m at the point where I’m still trying out different things artistically, and so maybe haven’t reached a focal point yet. I’m still experimenting and having fun.

4. What do you feel you've sacrificed for art and what is it you eventually hope to accomplish?

Can I just say everything and leave it at that? In all seriousness, pursuing art for me has been both a necessity and a sacrifice. I am a single mother of two raising children on a freelancer’s salary, so there is a lot of sacrifice involved simply due to circumstance. I have only been painting about three or four years, but when I was just beginning, I had a lot of people telling me that it was a waste of time and would never go anywhere. If I had ever listened to that instead of my own voice, I would probably be a schoolteacher or something (and miserable). I suppose the greatest sacrifice has been that of time, which is very limited. Eventually I hope to be able to secure more projects in the art field and hope that it eventually allows me to travel; I’d like to be doing shows internationally someday. Whether or not that happens is ultimately beside the point, as long as I can continue to create art and develop my technique.

5. Do you think being a woman gives you an advantage or a disadvantage as an artist?

Maybe I’m naïve, but I don’t see my gender as having anything to do with my art. Others might see it differently. I know that women artists weren’t given much consideration until relatively recently in human history. Some of my favorite artists are male—James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Caspar David Friedrich, Banksy, Ashley Wood—but that may be due simply to my lack of exposure to many female artists outside more traditional aesthetics. I like to think that I am fortunate to live in a society that is more accepting and less chauvinistic than that of my female predecessors, however.

6. Whether it's an advantage or not, you're an awesome artist with a lot of depth. I just have one final question if you don't mind. If you found yourself traveling the world doing show after show after show, any resource whatsoever at your disposal, rich beyond your wildest dreams, how fondly would you remember say a scrappy old interviewer from your past with a shared love of art and relatively good hygiene?

Would you like your studio on the 6th or the 7th floor of my mansion? Honestly, if I ever found myself in that position, I’d open up a space for artists, maybe on a grant program, to have time to paint and the studio space to do it in. I’d do something similar for writers, and include a mentorship program. And I would fondly remember my scrappy interviewers.

ELECTRIC SECT

2009-07-07T08:50:00.001-07:00

STAIRWELL BLUE

2009-07-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

BUNKER

2009-07-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

RICHEY PIIPARINEN

2009-07-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

MEMORIES ARE THE COMPASSES THAT CHASE US AROUND

I

It is really, really late and a work night and I haven’t even been feeling unwell. Lights are dim. Colors soft. But then I feel it, again. What, I am not sure really: that kind of feeling you get that is tight and heavy but imprecise and unlovely—that feeling like the stick of a pail you’re trying to wind up. And why and what caused it, this feeling to go off? I am not sure exactly. Things are set-off in us all the time, really. So many associations that run us like batteries buried in the backs of our bodies. Alkaline and suppression, then.

And I say suppression because that’s all you can do with certain things that are seen— these things unlike recipes from which composition, digestion occurs. So what to do with such information? Such sights?

I know. Hang it like a star in the foci of your soul-place. Pray to let it wheeze out despite the fact you tucked it in the spot you trust to keep the trust up. But of course it won’t fade as it is so goddamn undying. Always shining, then, (these things you’ve seen), when you least expect it. Cued like a bitch, for instance, by such innocuous signals as tints of color and effects of light. Like now, per the red wall in the living room sliced by the lamp’s shadow, per this, I know: in me is a place I can not comfort. That I can not make nice. I mean, when a man slips silently into whatever accident has made him open—and has made his eyes taped sideways, and strict. And then you are made to see it…

Well, the case could be made just fine then that the only acknowledgment of it all was you. To make loneliness nothing. But terrible instead.

II

As a kid in our yard behind our house in the city I remember the Labor Day weekends. How the pre-fall summer sat so clear with its temperateness—that sky so great and blue with an expanse holding birds like hands holding peas. The city air shows were that weekend, and we lived near the lake. So each year we had a show in our own backyard. With the mechanical expressions of Blue Angels flying sharp and low, their sounds tailing behind them to give the auditory illusion of torn paper if it was bottled up and amped before being let out to scream. And while beautiful—the precision, this power—I was more than tinily afraid of the noises. And it was then that I’d look for him, for reassurance—a sign it was okay—and there he’d be on the porch looking up smiling at the force overhead. His face made because of reasons similar to the relief I got by finding him there.

But he wasn’t always there. No one is. Rather, he was off a lot. Preoccupied. Like this usually: sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark, his fingers like curled worms around the High Life he raised as rigidly as a slow oil pump pumping. And what he was chewing on I’ll never know, as he didn’t much express himself when like this. Sure, he’d be muttering, negotiating: with his lips moving, and his head either nodding or not concurring with something that’d been stuck inside to grow like a shadow over a long extended casting. But it was all on the inside—this thing. And it took him away like water grabbing tree pieces. So much so, I’d often look at him during these times knowing he wouldn’t notice; yet still, watching only from the corner of my eye so as if to protect myself from the acknowledgment if he somehow did. Growing, then, is hard on those growing up. If only because we increasingly see what we didn’t want to—all along feeling as children through the face of our fathers what it would be like as we got older…

III

He and I went to a baseball game earlier. It was the Indians versus the Red Sox with Roger Clemens on the mound. I remember a Sox player hitting an opposite field liner to right, and an Indian—Dion James—running toward the right field line to make the headfirst catch. The few fans in the old huge stadium stood to clap, and make echoes. Not only because of the actual play, but also, more generally, because of the history of the ball field that lay spread out before us. In fact we all came to strengthen our pastimes, securing us before leaving. Meanwhile, the sun in the air was so bright it shaved the blue off the sky.

They lost 8-2. We didn't stay for the end. He died somewhere around the eighth inning when we weren’t around to see it.

IV

But still, it is not as hard as you’d think to become a man without your father. The path is simple really: you don’t bitch, and you don’t moan about it—and whatever shit and/or hope you have left you just let it rumble undifferentiated under the cover of no one around. And then in that emptiness the fantasies fill in quickly—like the pretending nothing really happened, and that nothing hurts. And as you lay your head out near the night window struck through with city light, you quietly tuck the freeform of stars behind that memory of them whistling out of your eyes and into your reality.

Convention, then, is the path you hope settles when you wake up each morning for the next seventeen years. Within which men become butchers and cops and workers in black boxes melting metal into tubes that thicken the sky with a paramount of importance. Yet it is not simply what we know, rather what is filled within us by what we see before turning away from. And then there’s nothing to do in the meantime but live and bring home the bacon and eat it under lights. And near the steam of our coffee that we sip black to wake us stronger, and pointier. All the while getting cloggy and edgy.

And then eventually that hum we hear is nothing but what is coming up ahead even though we busy ourselves enough to pretend it is back there. And though it is, back there—that pure stone of being crushed so good that nothing in the world could break it down soft—it is here also, creating hints as it rubs and scrapes against the flow of love and will and life.

V

And so per the red wall in the living room I am led to think of him. Remember him. To see his face up at a sky holding birds gliding quietly between the spaces of the jets roaring. And the memory leads me not to cry, but to hold nothing less than that unmuscled fight I must sustain to not so much recognize what’s gone as opposed to where I cannot be headed.

CHRISTINA KAPP

2009-07-07T08:33:00.000-07:00

BIRTH

“I’m calling an ambulance.”

She left, heading for the field at the side of the house. Abandoned and overgrown, the grasses had grown so tall she imagined she could lie on her back in the center of it and disappear. She knew the flimsy smack of the screen door as well as the shape of her fingernails or the sound of the garage door opening when her father came home. As she walked, the sideways casts of her feet flattened the dry grass like a sickle and the angry edges of the upright blades made tiny red cuts on the bare skin of her legs.

She would have liked to sprint, running so fast that her feet lost her body and her bones burst outward like wings until she fell, landing like branches snapped away in a windstorm, but her body was too ungainly for running. She walked, a blue wool blanket over her shoulders like a cape, breathing a heavy, bearish pant, watching her feet under her swing forward and disappear again. The air roared through the high trees like a crowd, which she took as a good sign. In the center of the field she stopped to let a wave crash over her. This one left her wet, with water falling from her eyes and dripping down her legs. Her belly was firm and round as a skull between her hands.

She suspected that God was just another word for gravity.

“Where is he? He should do the responsible thing.”

Her mother’s hands had straddled the soft shelf of her hips. Her father’s knuckles had hit the kitchen table in a fist. The telephone had been brandished in the air like a weapon. She had offered tears in return, but they had not been accepted. Her mother had said, “God never gives us more than we can handle,” but had not clarified whose burden she was speaking of.

They wanted her white again. Swathed in sheeting and hidden from inevitable conclusions. They spoke of other people, people without faces who could make things go away: pain, fear, bad fortune, even unwanted children. Her mother had rubbed her forearm with trim, calloused fingers. “We can help you put this behind you.”

That was why she had hidden herself away. When her belly had begun to speak, she had tucked herself in the closet. A womb inside a womb, she thought, like a little matryoshka doll. She did not have to share, just as she had not shared the boy who had adored her. He had touched her face with his and breathed flowers into her pores and she had drawn him over her like a blanket, a warm and lovely protection from the cold.

Mary had birthed in a barn. There were things like miracles in this world.

“Stop being so selfish—do you realize what you’re doing?”

The air scorched her throat as her furious belly raged again. When she reached the place under the old oak she lay on the blanket and closed her eyes. Her body turned to stone and fire.

Her mind, however, melted back into the air and went home again, where there were napkins on the table and heat on the stove and soft steam in the air. There would be dishes to wash and pots and pans to put away. Her daisy chain bedspread would be rumpled at night and smoothed out again in the morning. In the spring she would dig the holes for her mother’s pansies and in the fall she would rake high the piles of her father’s leaves. Her classmates would smile hello in the mornings and wave goodbye in the afternoons. Time would be given and taken from everyone accordingly, she knew, as the sirens on the distant road were drowned out by her single cry being split into two.

ALAN ROSSI

2009-07-07T08:32:00.000-07:00

HOME IN BILOXI

1.

Her father stuffed years worth of stories into the phone, a sort of begging: how the new dog rode in the golf cart and retrieved lost Pinnacles; how the garage’s rent was too expensive; how the doctor gave him new pills and how he had lost weight and customers and golf balls; how his friend’s bar was bringing them in; how he hadn’t seen her in a long time. Stories repeated as if rehearsed, as if the only ones. She could never tell him no.

2.

She drove to his house on the gulf coast, the ocean at night like flat black stone. The white casino on the shore was like a plastic castle, huge and bright. His house was the same house he had always been in, except now a dog named Pepper jumped behind the fence, barking at her in the driveway. She watched, wonderless. She grabbed her bags. The gulf air hit her face.

3.

He sat on the sofa. She made eggs and French toast for dinner, which is what he asked her to make for dinner. His birthday was in a month. Fifty-five, he said. The last one I saw you at was fifty. She said she remembered. He called her Maybell again. Maria’s fine now, she said. They ate in the family room, his hands grease-stained, his clothes smelling of the garage. He drank a beer, took his pills, stopped talking. His eyes dulled away. She went to the kitchen to clean dishes and then listened to him breathe, shift on the sofa, stand and walk. The house was old and creaked, she had forgotten. Small sounds made her jump.

4.

In her old room, she began a numbered list - number one, number two, number three - and practiced reading it to him. Out the window, the gulf wind unwound itself through the trees, and she watched the water and the casino. On weekends, he had taken her to the beach during the day, the casino at night. She had helped him home. Everyone had seen. Number four, she wrote.

5.

His medication had worn all of him thin. Had they watched Jeopardy? Did they have dinner? Did she know Pepper retrieves golf balls? Oh that’s right, he said. I remember now.

6.

On the beach he brought her to a whale skeleton with ribs like arms, reaching from the sand. The whale had been on the news, a whole summer ago, he explained. He told her to take his picture while he sat inside. That’s gross, Dad, she said. Hey Maybell, he said, smiling. Look here, this. The gulf wind washed saltwater over their skin. Sand skirted over sand. She thought of her list. I wish you were closer, he said.

7.

She packed her car. He rearranged the bags in the trunk. She watched. There was the gulf, there was the casino, there was the house. Remember the time I told you we would shoot the Easter bunny? he said. She shook her head, remembering they had sat on the roof, waiting. You were six or seven? I let you hold the air-rifle, remember? It had been her twenty-two. You thought you were going to get all his candy? You were so excited and happy? She got in the car. I don’t remember, she said.

PAULETTE LIVERS

2009-07-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

MAN WALKS INTO A BAR

Man walks into a bar. No, seriously. Walks straight up to the juke, slams in a pocketful of change and punches in what seems like a dozen Tom Waits songs back to back and apparently in chronological order of their release, because if you’re paying attention you can trace the progress of ruination in that broken chime voice. One of those real thin guys, all cave-chested like he’s been chain-smoking since he was nine, the little treelike twigs in his lungs already shriveled up and shut down, and he shambles over and slumps into the booth katty-corner to yours. Levon says, “Looks like he’s ready to pass out or die, one.”

You were watching out the plate-glass window when he wobbled up on that pathetic bicycle, the kind that makes you think of an old person with joints all loose and stiff at the same time, oxidized diarrhea-green paint job somebody knew was a mistake right after the spray can went empty. Y’all’ve seen this guy riding around town the past week, heard speculation as to where he came from, although no one’s actually conversed with him, far as you know. Shit-green bicycle is how he gets around, certainly no one’s seen him driving a car, no one’s seen a vehicle parked out in front of Mamie’s where you know for a fact he’s taken a room. Not often you see a grown man ride a bike everywhere, not in this town, not in this day and age. This is a town where bicycles are strictly for the entertainment of children, things found by the tree on Christmas morning, not the sole mode of transport for a grown man.

You’d taken note of his sober countenance when he dismounted—not drunk at that point, anyway; you don’t miss much. You elbow Levon when the stranger assaults the jukebox with his quarters. Levon grunts, already three sheets, no surprise, even with the evening young. You’re only slightly behind. But you’re sober enough you’re going to remember it all tomorrow, too bad for you. You’re planning to leave after one more shot, promised the wife, home for supper. She’s near had it, you haven’t told Levon, because— Pussy-whipped, he’d say—then he’d flash the shit-eating grin that’s been getting him laid but never married since junior high. Levon’s got these big square teeth and a wide mouth that splits his face in a way people—male and female both—take as welcoming, first time they see it. Girls always did and probably always will get all hot and juicy for bad boys, but nice girls with daddies in the picture, they don’t get hitched to men like Levon.

Old Slim’s sinking lower in the booth. Beer’s got to be turning warmish. No warning, Levon gets up, skirts the pool table in the center of the room and plops down like a dead weight opposite the stranger. Table legs scoot and wobble and the guy jostles out of whatever half sleep he’s managed amidst the racket of Friday night at Pickers’ Alley.

You can’t hear what’s said between the two, but you register Levon’s grin from across the room and see in Slim’s relieved face that—hook, line, sinker—he’s fallen for it like an ugly girl asked to dance. Stranger making a friend in a town like this isn’t the easiest thing in the world. The fellow picks up a mangy backpack and stands up, but Levon takes it from him and slings it over his own shoulder and leads him to your booth, stopping along to introduce him to Benny and some of the boys. Slim slides in opposite you and Levon sits down next to him and sticks three fingers up in the air, flashes three times, along with his white squares, at Deanne who lines up nine shots on the table before you even catch this new fellow’s name.

Above Waits’s growl Levon yells, “Billy Grundy!” and Slim tips his head towards you with a little half salute. The whiskey’s performing its highest function as social lubricant before long and that kind of banter that’s general and vague and way too personal all at once is gushing around the table and you try to remind yourself of your tendency to blab things you’ll later wish you hadn’t. You don’t know jack about Billy Grundy, whether he’s come to stay or passing through. Levon orders chasers and Billy says his gut’s busting and heads for the head.

That’s when Levon picks up the backpack and throws it at you and says, “Open it.”

You do, because you always do what Levon says, which is one of several consistent complaints your wife has, and you find there what is not unexpected. The cellophane pack of powdered mini-donuts, the thermos of cold thick joe, the Swiss Army knife, the bandanna, the wallet, which you throw across the table. Levon opens it.

“Wilson Graves,” he reads. “What else.”

You see it in the bottom of the pack, about the size of a pound of ground sirloin, wrapped in brown paper. You hand it over to Levon like it’s gold bullion from Fort Knox. He looks over his shoulder, makes a little tear in the corner of the wrapping, moistens a pinkie and takes a dip. Licks his finger. “Grade A,” he says.

“Who made you Top Narc?” you ask, but talking’s pointless. Levon’s disability check has turned him into a cop-show addict; he’s got it in his blood, ferreting out slimebuckets trying to spread their evil love in our town like a pestilence.

“That fat bastard over in Riverton always cuts his with cornstarch. I could identify it a mile away.” Levon’s pronouncement sucks the air out of the place and the bad feeling you’ve had in your belly since that man parked his shitty Schwinn outside nestles in like it’ll stay.

“Let’s just flush it,” you say.

“Last thing this town needs,” he snarls into his beer, like he’s sad to have to share the news with you. And who’s to argue?

Grundy-Graves comes back from the john, slides in, says, “Y’all Tom Waits fans?”

“Don’t you know it!” Levon flashes the grin. “Say, Billy, you hungry?”

“I was just planning to take one of them Pickers’ burgers home with me. Got an appointment with the television in Miss Mamie’s living room later on. That’s how exciting my life is!” Grundy-Graves is too enthusiastic.

“Now we can’t let you eat rotgut burgers when you’re visiting our town,” Levon tells him, “Isn’t that right?” He looks over at you for confirmation and you half expect him to wink. “What say we show Billy what a real steak dinner looks like?”

Before you know it you’re all three standing up, heading out the door to your truck. Maybe it’s your imagination but Benny and the guys playing pool seem to do a stop-motion thing then give a joint nod to you and Levon for what you are now almost certain your best friend is figuring to do. You walk over to the driver’s side but so does Levon and he says, “Here, let me drive,” and you hand him the keys. Grundy-Graves throws his mud-brown bicycle in the back of the truck and he climbs up in the middle between you and Levon.

He’s awfully trusting for a scumbag coke dealer, is what you’re thinking.

The Rolling Fork is high for May, a wetter than usual spring, and Old Slim Billy Wilson Grundy Graves is bouncing along happy between you and Levon, smiling into the dark of Lost Man Road. Levon parks the truck smack in the middle of the bridge and you all three get out and Levon puts an arm over the stranger’s shoulder and says, “This here’s where all of us hung out in high school, after the football game or whatever.”

“Those were the days,” Billy says. He’s almost got a twinkle in his eye, poor bastard, and you know he’s filling in memories he doesn’t own, like he was one of you.

“Hey, Billy, you ever bungy-jump?” Levon says it like it just occurred to him, and without waiting for an answer he’s rooting around the back of your truck. He pulls the rope bag out and starts shaking all the equipment out on the ground, the clamps, grabs, tiblocs, foot ascenders, descenders, crolls, karabiners. He pulls out the tree harness, the brand new one your boss just bought for the big elm job over at the city park, twenty sick elms that have to come down next week.

“That’s no play-toy, Levon.” You put I-don’t-mean-maybe in your voice, but he pays you no mind. Starts dressing Billy up.

“I’m not one for heights,” Billy Grundy-Graves says with a giggle that makes him sound like a ten-year-old girl, but he’s letting Levon suit him up. “This bungy? It don’t feel all that stretchy.” The whine in his voice for a second makes you not sorry for what Levon’s doing.

Levon says, “Oh, you can’t necessarily feel a difference, man, between bungy and plain old rope.” He’s pulling Billy’s dirty bandanna out of his pack, starts wrapping it around Grundy-Graves’s head.

“Wait a minute,” Billy says. “This part of it?”

“Shit yes, man! Makes the rush that much better! You can’t bungy without the blindfold,” Levon laughs deep and sincere like it’s something everybody ought to know. You help Billy up onto the railing, and you can feel the guy’s skinny calves twitching under his filthy jeans. Levon grabs a coil of heavy chain you keep in the back and wraps it around both Billy’s legs, then hooks it onto the back of the harness. Billy’s soft whimpering reminds you of an old rabid dog you once watched your daddy shoot.

*

You want to look at Levon’s face and see a piece of remorse, or something like it, behind the unflickering eyes. When you do finally look, his mouth seems lower in his face than it was just a day or two ago. Lips set like concrete slabs. The two of you sit on the side of the bridge, waiting, dangling your legs like when you were squirts. Levon strikes a match across the scabbed iron rail and lets it fall toward the water, momentarily providing a swath of dim light. After a reasonable amount of time, you both drag on the tree rope. The shrimpy carcass is light, might weigh one twenty, one thirty at the most.

You pull the spanking new tree harness off Billy’s skinny wet butt.

“This equipment goddamn better be dry come Monday morning seven in the a.m.,” you mutter while Levon unsnarls the chain. Levon cradles the body in his arms and lifts it up like a sacrifice to a vengeful god, then lets it tumble back over the railing. He pulls the bicycle from the truck and gives the frame three or four powerful kicks, slams it into the bridge abutment. Streaks of shit-green scribble across the concrete.

“Police believe the deceased struck the abutment with his bicycle while driving intoxicated some time early Saturday,” Levon intones in the melodious announcer voice that usually cracks you up. He gives the backpack over to the dark with his good left arm. The splash is distant, weak.

It’s raining hard now and the Rolling Fork is creeping out of its banks. The bicycle folds into the churning water like walnuts in chocolate cake batter and you’d give an arm or an eyeball, almost anything to crawl home and slide between the sheets next to the warm body of your wife, even if she’s too pissed off to acknowledge that you’ve come back. You’ll sit across the breakfast table tomorrow morning and when the moment is right you’ll stroke her forearm with one finger and you’ll say, “We’re good, aren’t we, Baby?”

PAULETTE LIVERS

2009-07-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

UNWORKABLE

Other than Lyle leaving, the day’s like any other at the farm, writers and artists always coming and going. You prefer being up at the butt-crack of dawn, knocking out a couple thousand words in the absolute quiet. Then you whistle out into a blistering day and plant the tomatoes Lyle left by the spigot. The task was his, but he’s a good enough guy, so you more than happily agreed to get them in the ground for him—the month was only going to get hotter and besides he had the drive from Kentucky to Texas in front of him. Two weeks here and you’re nearly out of undies, so you wash up and drive down the mountain into Maysville to do laundry. You think about the problematic end of the never-ending story you’ve been sweating over, and you think about Lyle hanging in the doorway saying, “Remember, you can always end it with a bird flying overhead or a dog barking in the distance.” He’d sniggered when he said it, and when you gave him that one-eyebrow up, one-eye-brow down look, he said, “No! Serious! Everybody knows that.”

Your tires sing on the fresh blacktop, crossing the Licking River. You suck in that rich new black-tar smell the way only an outlier, a rusticator, a city-slicker-come-to-the-sticks can do.

The Laundromat is empty of humans, but clothes and sheets and towels wave in the faces of the machines humming and thumping all around the perimeter of the room, waiting for their owners to come back. You divvy up the lights and darks and sprinkle the blue soap powders into two separate washers. You spread your yellow legal pads and scraps of papers over one of the tables set up for folding clothes. You pore over the pages you’ve conjured that morning, listening with half an ear for the last spin of the Super Cycle in the Monster Machine.

Two women walk in with crop-chop ’dos in natural gunmetal. Could be fifty-five or eighty-five. Lovers or sisters. They make themselves comfortable at a folding table with eleven-year-old magazines. You eavesdrop a while. Their gossip isn’t juicy at all, but still you manage to miss the slow wind-down whine of your particular machine. Canning. Somebody’s operation. Somebody’s chemo. Who won the big raffle at the St. Boniface Picnic last weekend. You have them pegged as stereotypical old farmwives who’ve given birth to a brood of auto assemblers and overweight disability payment collectors. The old girls had no doubt fallen on hard times after their crusty farmer husbands passed on, the kind of men who know how to spit out of the sides of their faces and appreciate what it takes to produce a really good plate of fried chicken. And the girls couldn’t keep up with the taxes and the farmstead went into foreclosure and they were forced to move into trailers out by the side of the road, hence the weekly trips to the Laundromat.

Just when you have their stories sorted out, the younger one stands up and moves behind the older one and begins rubbing her shoulders.

Scribbling furiously, you scratch the farm. No, keep the farm, and scratch the tobacco spitters. The old girls fell in love back at the bottling plant in ’74. Forced by the economic slump to pitch in and make the family into a double income-earning unit (it had come to be expected, after all, what with women’s lib taking the country by storm), Mavis and Beryle drew uncommonly close there on the line where they sat across from one another inspecting bottles of Ale-8 for uniform fillage. Suddenly Mavis found herself widowed by her husband’s beloved Allis-Chalmers 160, it having turned over on him when he was not three passes short of finishing the mowing on their nastiest pasture. A near vertical slope—Mavis had often demanded he just let it go wild, the broom sedge flopping and waving. When he wasn’t back at the house for the noon dinner, Mavis suspected the worst. She was the one who found him, flatter than a bake board under his big green tractor. She blubbered it all out to Beryle from the pay phone in the hospital lobby. The two had become as close as sisters by this time, or so people thought. Beryle insisted that Mavis not stay that first night alone in the big old farmhouse way out beyond the Licking River. Come on into town, stay at my house, Beryle said, just for the night.

But that first night became a week, then a month. It mustn’t go without saying, Mavis never left Beryle’s little shotgun house in town.

So, yes, scratch the farm, which brought a handsome sum under Jack Mattox’s auction gavel. A Hollywood producer coughed up said handsome sum to turn the old place into a movie set, or just to have somewhere to store his trophy wife. Or maybe it was the Amish who bought it, good cheap land for dairying and cheesemaking and the little willow baskets and rocking chairs and whatever else it is the Amish sell in their charming roadside shops. What matters is that the windfall enabled Mavis to pay off Beryle’s mortgage. She invested the rest in assorted mutual funds, all of which were balanced and didn’t duplicate one another in any way.

Mavis and Beryle could have afforded a washer and dryer long ago, but have come to prefer the Laundromat. The whirr of the machines reminds them of the bottling line and their early love.

You’re polishing the final image of Beryle bending down to kiss the soft wrinkles of Mavis’s neck, when the actual physical Beryle throws her head back in a horse laugh. “Honestly, Mama, sometimes you crack me up!” she informs anyone within hollering distance.

Scratch the bottling plant. Scratch the flat farmer under the Allis-Chalmers 160 and the tear-choked phonecall from the hospital lobby. Mavis’s freckled daughter Beryle obviously favors her dead father in profile, him being a red-headed fiddle-playing Scot with a round nose. How did you miss the tinge of rust in her hair and the early signs of melanoma on Beryle’s fair skin? Alas, her father has gone to the hereafter (maybe it was the Allis-Chalmers, but Beryle was too young to remember him anyway so it has ceased to matter). There is no washer or dryer in Mavis and Beryle’s sad little three-room apartment in town. Mavis’s fiddle-playing husband had taken to drink and slugged away the family income at hoedowns far and wide. No, wait!—unless they do live in the trailer out by the road—which is too small to comfortably hold a washer and dryer—yes, they live in the trailer, having been banished from the family farm (now condemned, out-and-out stolen from underneath them by that real estate tycoon Jack Mattox), a family farm which in its heyday supported the full extended clan of red-headed Scots-Irish but is now a middle-income development for the up-and-coming.

B
Beryle and Mavis would not be caught dead in that subdivision.

You put your pencil down and furtively bury your scraps of notebook paper in the bottom of your laundry basket. You fold the last towel. Mavis nods in your general direction with a lift on one side of her lip that you take for judgment. You sling the basket over one hip and head for the door, passing just inches from the table where the two women sit eating cheese crackers from the vending machine. The heebie-jeebie skeletal Mavis has eaten just one, while Beryle is polishing off the fifth and final cracker. Let’s face it; Beryle is past caring about her midriff. In fact she has not seen her midriff for thirty or forty years. She has not had a date since the night Jack Mattox drove up into her front yard on his father’s big green Allis-Chalmers 160 on a dare, saying he was there to pick her up for the Saint Boniface Church Picnic—insinuating that Beryle was so large she had to be transported on the back of a tractor. All Jack’s disreputable pals jumped up out of the ditch across the road, their faces ripped wide in coarse laughter. In the middle distance you can see Beryle crying there in her new yellow sundress. She’d sewn it by hand that very afternoon to wear to the picnic.

She did not entertain thoughts of young men ever again.

You pass Mavis and Beryle’s table and feel their eyes pierce the back of your head. You hear a swallowed-down chortling sound. They know you’ve been shoplifting their impossible pasts. Their resentment could set your hair on fire.

You struggle through the door with your basket under one arm, hip flung out. Set the little bell overhead to tinkling.

“You come back and see us, honey!” Mavis calls out.

You can’t decide whether Mavis owns the Laundromat and would like for you to patronize her establishment again, or if she is ironically remarking upon your status as the stranger-come-to-town. Her words promise to carry more ominous tones when you let yourself mull them over later that night.

As you stuff your clean clothes into the back seat you look up to see a scrappy starling dart into the eaves of the decaying strip mall. Her babies burst into maniacal screeching. You are almost sure you hear a dog bark off in the distance. Or maybe it’s just Lyle laughing as he barrels southwest down Interstate 40, pointing the nose of his El Camino to the Lone Star.

K. WALKER GRAVES

2009-07-07T08:17:00.002-07:00

THE MAN UPSTAIRS

There is a grieving man named Don who lives upstairs. He is going through another one of his morbid ice cream phases. He hoards tubs of the stuff in an old-fashioned freezer lining the north wall of the bedroom where he sleeps. Three times a day he trudges up the stairs with distended bags from the grocery store around the corner. Mornings I awake to empty containers stacked by the front door in tiny pyramids. I look inside them on my way to the shower. The residues are splatter paintings, mournful and determined. Don is grieving, after all: His pet greyhound Roland was recently murdered by the retarded kid next door. With that in mind, I’ve decided to put the kibosh on the jokey stuff. Sixty-six year old retired fighter pilots who live in your attic don’t find their dairy addiction to be a source of humor, I can tell you, especially if a dead dog is involved. “Pardon me if I take it personally,” he growled when I showed him a New Yorker cartoon last week, hoping to cheer him up.
K

Don wears ragged t-shirts and runs marathons with teenagers in bleak Midwestern states. For weeks at a time he disappears without a word. I ask him why no postcard. He tells me he that he lives to run, and he runs to forget. I tell him that seems tautological, and he pantomimes smothering an invisible person with a pillow. Then he laughs and tells me I’m all right. Sometimes he enacts his war stories on our patio out back. He calls it “O-Dark Stand-up.” Our neighbors the Calhouns pull up deck chairs and heckle him. Their kid is the murderous retard who strangled Don’s greyhound. He watches the show from the shadows of our backyard. It’s like a real live comedy club. “Out of Vietnam now!” Mrs. Calhoun loves to yell. “You spilled your soul in the Mekong Delta!” says her husband. Don really hams it up for them. They think he loves the attention.

K
Tonight I stay up late working on a birthday present for Don. It’s a diorama of our house. My girlfriend Ellie helps out. She is an artist – a miniaturist – and she paints photorealistic pictures of poor Roland on the mini-walls. He looks sinuous and free. We get the photos of the dog from a dusty leather album Don keeps taped beneath the coffee table. Periodically during the night we can hear his trollish footfalls above our heads. “There he goes again,” Ellie whispers, following the sound of his trajectory with her eyes.
K

The next morning we set the diorama on the kitchen island. “Surprise!” Ellie yells from behind a potted palm. Don wipes the sleep from his eyes and shakes his head. “Some ambush,” he says. “But I appreciate the effort.” He walks out of the kitchen into the foyer and instinctively snatches Roland’s old leash from the coat rack. “I know a thing or two about ambushes,” he says, turning to face me. “The enemy has a base camp in the folds of my frontal lobe. Under the cloak of night they ride the light rail down my spinal cord and fire mortars into my gut. But that’s not the worst of it.”

K
I say, “What’s the worst of it, Don?”

K
“I can hear their transmissions to HQ: my heart is a fifty-megaton bomb.”

K
He walks out the front door while Ellie adds tiny shingles to the roof.

B.J. HOLLARS

2009-07-07T08:17:00.001-07:00

BRUTES

They had names like Snarl and Starver and Freeze, and when they got there—the bridge—they began to deconstruct. Removing first their hammers from their belts—then clippers, then claws—the entire hoard snapped at the girding and pounded the bolts away. They howled at the moonlight and smashed fistfuls of fireflies before rubbing the glow on their teeth, smiling.

They moved with the slow clank of ironworkers, and yet they were not. Just children. Just gnashing and pissing and shit-smearing children. B- boys and C+ boys, and boys who batted clean-up during home games. Boys who invented Bloody Knuckles and purpled their fingers with kite string.

Earlier, they’d slunk through the weeds and the thicket, their legs dripping from the thorny barbs. But still, they reached that dismal shadow. The metal skeleton, looming like a skinned monster, quivered and quaked beneath its own great heft.

The boys eyed the bridge—the enemy—and their hammers grew warm and turned light. Tromping, mashing, crowding on the backs of one another’s shoes, they sloshed through the ivy-rimmed puddles. Past the dead cat corpse and the dead dog corpse, and how had these bodies found their way there?

The guttural murmurs of boys who knew hammers, who knew bolts and how to pry them. How they’d watched their fathers work under car hoods for weeks to piece their task together.

They wanted so little: to watch a bridge fall, to watch a car soar into the river.

So they sang and clapped and their teeth glowed green before fading.

They raised their dirty hands and touched the frozen metal, muscling their way to the edge of the ridgeline, to where the support beams had weakened to rust.

There were questions of why and how could they.
And did they know?
Could they comprehend their destruction?
But they knew.
They always knew what to do when they got there.

B.J. HOLLARS

2009-07-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

THE REGATTA

July heat, and the boys leaned against trees, shirtless, and vied for the shade. Throughout the summer, they’d resorted to pushups along the sidewalks and chin-ups on the jungle gym outside of Eldon Elementary. The boys swarmed through the beach days; chewing gum, spitting, bragging about paddling skills, their maneuverability from the inside of an Old Town.

By 2:00p.m.the shore was lined with blue canoes. Paddles placed like crossbones on the inside, and the boats rocked against each other’s hulls. Too hot to bear the weight of the sun before the regatta began, the boys took to chewing ice and sucking popsicles in the shade.

That day, David Foster wore a red swimsuit and reached around to his burned back, felt for the mole that marked him, and scratched. He didn’t know that he’d be dead within the hour; that the mole would prove irrelevant.

David Foster squinted out over the gathered crowd, eyed girls from school—Julie Shepherd, in particular—and took to dreaming. How she might appear peeled out on the hull of his canoe, moon clinging to the dark as he peered down into her upside down eyes from his spot on the bench.

What might he say?

Within minutes, the air horn would sound, and they would race. And as David Foster’s back muscles strained and leaked out of him, he’d think of just the right words to tell Julie. He’d think them as he grunted through the water, as the wayward paddle smashed against his head, as the blackness took him, the water took him, as the red bathing suit gathered shadows from the deep.

At those depths, there are no dreams, just silence. The swirling of paddles far above now muted, the cheering of crowds invisible. The swimsuit would billow, as would his hair, but the motions emitted were not motions that would save him. Jerry Sweiber won the regatta. The others lost. As David Foster’s lungs took on water, Julie Shepherd, much like everyone else, fought to cheer the loudest.

II.

When they found him, they found only a part of him: David Foster’s red swimsuit tucked tight between the cattails and beaver dams. Then came the slack legs and the slack arms and the torso, slacked, and then he was whole again. Spliced back together. Sewn with the algae and seaweed. Drowned and dead, but whole, and found, at last.

Julie Shepherd walked barefoot along the banks of the water. Jerry Sweiber walked beside her. When she glanced through the brush and sticker bushes, she saw the red flower blooming from the marsh.

She had a sharp eye, everyone said so, and could recognize a person by their movements and their shapes.

“Pick it for me,” she begged, so Jerry Sweiber high-kneed it over the thorns and the puddles and bent to pluck the flower.

David Foster had placed last in the regatta. The paddle slammed his head and sunk him deep. He became the flotsam, and the crowd cheered for Jerry Sweiber and the runners-up. Balancing quiet on the lake, the empty canoe remained.

“Pick it for me,” she begged, and so he had: high kneed, bent, plucked. Only there was nothing left to pluck. Nothing to bend for.

Just a body, cold and white. A red suit in the weeds.
A body to drag to the safety of the shoreline. A body to bury. A body to turn inside out for answers. If only the lungs could speak.

“Pick it for me,” she begged. “What are you waiting for?”

But Jerry Sweiber could not. Could not bend, could not pluck, could not untangle the algae from his ankles and his neck. The winner squinted down at the loser. David Foster’s arms carved canals into the mudsand, becoming a little more permanent.

AMY HALLORAN

2009-07-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

AMELIA

Sure I read her biography, but it’s not like I wanted to meet her. I hadn’t spent days with my neck craned, trying to imagine a bird’s eye view of the sky. I liked to look at the ground, and imagine gravity, how it held my sneakers and me in place. I liked to picture myself hanging from the planet by a shoelace, one knot caught in a grommet and the rest of me dangling in outer space. But I wasn’t interested in my position in the stars, I just wanted to see that spot on the ground, between the blades of grass, where I remained attached. Flight was not my curiosity. The details of connection, my shoelace an umbilical cord, was. What stitched me to the dirt? Why did I sleep in my bed? Why did my parents love me even if I said I hated them?

But I didn’t announce these puzzles. Shush! is the tone I took, tiptoeing out the sliding glass door and into long walks in the fields around my house. We live near the old airport, so after school – eighth grade is a cinch and I can finish my homework in homeroom – I walk and walk, long grasses hitting my knees and thighs. I can’t see my feet. I guess this is why I think I might almost fall off the face of the earth.

The day Amelia Earhart found me, I was walking. A man grabbed my hand. I chose not to feel scared, because this man, grabbing me was the exact kind of thing my parents were afraid would happen if I walked alone. I wasn’t about to be a victim of their suspicions, so I just forced any fear I felt to sit, like a dog. Sit.

The man led me to a ragged building that felt more like a radio station than an air control tower. The vanished aviatrix sat at a table, smoking. She wore a black leather jacket, and her leather skullcap was on the table beside a bottle of whiskey. She sipped amber liquid from a juice glass.

“Gin rummy?” she said after the man pulled out a folding chair and indicated I should sit. I nodded. What was I going to say, no?

We played a few rounds. She won. When she got bored of winning, she taught me another game. While it seemed complicated, a series of searches for different colors and patterns that crossed suits, she insisted it was easy.

“It’s simple,” she said. “Just like flying a plane.”

Oh yeah, I wanted to say, like you never crashed. Yet she was in charge, holding me like the hand of gravity. So I kept my mouth shut.

I kept losing.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “I admit it. Flying is not easy.”

Amelia Earhart pushed away from the table and took her glass to the wall of windows. The windows were filthy, but you could still see the shape of the horizon. Grasses went on forever, as if my house and a million others like it weren’t there. As if my school and the supermarket and the mall were nowhere on earth.

“Come with me,” she said, and I followed her weavy walk, ready to catch her when she fell. Guards stood by the doorway, but with one glance from her they stopped looking ready to mangle me. Amelia drained her glass and handed it to the man who had brought me to her.

“Come with me,” she said, and I obeyed. Her hair was red and wavy, and the air around us grew hazy and uncertain as we left the stale stillness of the building. The grasses waved at her, like friends. I followed her, a few paces behind, and suddenly, we were in the dunes, dunes I’d never seen. Drifts of soft grit blew out over the old airstrip.

“Stay here, stay on the edge,” she said. “Watch me walk away.”

The guards were still behind me. I wasn’t going to invite their attention. The woman kept walking, and looking back, to make sure I was watching. I was the knot of a shoelace and she was dangling on my gravity. Finally I almost couldn’t see her, but I caught her winking at me before she disappeared.

I grew hungry. The guards ignored me, and the landscape drifted back to what I knew. Sand settled down, grass grew where it belonged. I walked home. In the kitchen, I put peanut butter on graham crackers. I poured myself a glass of milk.

My parents would be home soon, tired from their days. They were tired of me, and I of them. I could have followed her into the dunes, gone somewhere, anywhere. She had gravity. Life at home, well, was I even living? I felt static. Like an unread book. Like a cottonball in a bag. And yet, someone had come for me. For me.

“You’ll never believe who found me today!” I practiced, and I swallowed my words with a gulp of milk, wondering when I should switch to whiskey.

JOSH KLEINBERG

2009-07-07T08:04:00.000-07:00

CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN BECAUSE

Okay.

So she goes to these places—these parties, bars, get-togethers of friends within whom she is an outlier—she goes to these places, and she gets herself good and lost drunk. Drinks until everything is white space and outside stimuli materialize only when within inches of her. Nobody exists until they give her stupid eye compliments and jacket compliments. Her words all melt into oozy syllables, sentences into oozy flirtations with people she mostly doesn't want to flirt with. Walks home are long, unobstructed paths of desert, with doors and elevators springing up at their appropriate places.

She drinks like this because she has to drink like this, but no one would believe her if she said so, so she drinks like this without excusing herself. She drinks like this because there are 24 hours—fucking hours—in every day, and she can fill at most 9 or 10 of them with work and 8 or 9 with sleep. There's eating and shitting and showering of course, but these do not take up the 5-7 remaining hours per day. She used to take laxatives, to keep her on the toilet all night (skinny, also), but it didn't solve anything. The toilet or the skinny.

She drinks like she does because there are babies yet unborn and babies who never will be, because evolution is too gradual a change for her.

There is a fetal groove in her bed like depressed, wooden footprints at a monk's favorite place of prayer and that is why she drinks like this. She cut off her internet and canceled all her subscriptions but this has only served to keep her out of date in conversation with the other lushes down at Barney's.

She imagines God as a savage Forrest Whitaker, inhaling deeply the rot of burned flesh—sacrificial and otherwise. She imagines God as sleeping off a bender, the phone ringing without pause for days and weeks. She imagines God as an asterisk, and that is why she drinks like this.

J
“The dawn of time was a political action conference in Hoboken,” she says when she won't remember it.
K
“The dawn of time,” she says. “Was a period of popsicle stick log cabins and great, smelly heat.”
J

She says, “the dawn of time is no more or less important than now or this exact moment 10 years ago (we were entering a gas station in Georgia, remember?).”

She says this while holding:

a.) a lighter, which she flicks with diasporic nerves?
b.) a beer can, propped level with her crooked elbow?
c.) a steak knife, flush against her thumb?
Well, which is it?

If you chose a.) then congratulations. You have given her cancer. Sludgy, motor oil-blood for her veins, the works.
b.) is cirrhosis or a car crash, I think. Perhaps just poor health, old age or ill-gotten fat.
c.) the power is in her hands. She will finish her steak or veal parmigiana, rise calmly from the table and speak in tongues until she doesn't. If she so chooses. Or probably, she'll ask for seconds and a drink.

CLAIRE GIROUX

2009-06-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

THE MOMENT BEFORE WAKING

She wrote on a post-it note:
"This is it,
The moment when all our sadness plays
like a tinny piano.
This is it,
The moment when you inhale
before you begin to break."
Flowers have a way of dying
no matter how perennial the experts say they are.

"This is it,
The moment our bodies rise from biblical cells
And gain a span of integrity before retreating."
She was crying one night
"My heart is beating my body apart,"
She said,
"This is it isn't it? The moment when we KNOW?"

"This is it," she says,
"the moment just before we wake from dreams,
When our heads begin to realize where we truly are
And our bodies are still paralyzed in the sheets."
She used to keep a tally of all the disasters she'd heard of.
Of all the dead people she knew.
"A list for God, to remind him of everything he's ever done,
Of everyone he's ever taken away too soon."

SHRIPARNA SARKAR

2009-06-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

EBB

when the glint is fresh

spreading out the soul
is always easy
like taking in
an ocean of stars

although
a tincture of defeat is
what settles in
when their venom is grilled

folded up, then
the ocean is just bitter spit

the inside of the head forgets to speak
or lay cushions in the right places

then
caught in the mesh
and iced
I wait for you to crash
onto my left palm.

LISA CICCARELLO

2009-06-28T07:25:00.000-07:00

AT NIGHT, THE DEAD:

We sing to the dead
the song is a locator.

An intense moment
a small strand of notes.

We are supposed to house the dead in our mouths,
but we let them stay in our throats when we sing.

I am the dead I am the dead
I am the dead. The song I know.

We touch where we sing. We swallow
& the song begins again.

ALICIA HOFFMAN

2009-06-28T07:24:00.001-07:00

VOYEUR

It happened the day I woke unusually early
to take out the dog and the green grass

was steeping still in its wet dew and
the worms were making love in the rich humus

of the raised bed we had built out back only weeks
before, writhing like they were in agony, dying

I supposed at first on this brilliant morning and then
there were more around my toes, as if the whole earth

could seethe with the tumultuousness of love
or, living underground, perhaps they were only

swinging throughout the hedonistic night until
the raucousness ended in utter exhaustion,

strangers stuck sleeping inside one another, glued
side by side in some translucent jelly, their heads

or tails or both slowly sinking back into the soil
as if they didn’t know the moon serenade was over,

or maybe they didn’t care I was standing there, sleep
in my eyes, the dawn lifting like a blanket off a bed.

DONORA HILLARD

2009-06-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

DEVOLUTION

Then it happens. We're no longer locked together with me
calling Sorry to the neighbors. Our ribs soon stop speaking.
Your fingers slip from my mouth.
You fall to one knee to count names of the dead.  
I cut my lips to ribbons, lick the loss.

JAMES DYE

2009-06-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

ODESSA'S PAPERCLIP

A man with horns, scales and a bow
moves around a turnpike like a snail
commanding an army of ants attached to chains
like dogs on the fringe who think they're gods
in a race with a hare named Mike.
They're all part of the fourth Reich.

Seeds surrounding snakes sprout tykes evolved from apes.
They live in a box as children dream of frost on the grass
heath lacing the nests where they get sheaves for his bow
passed pits of spikes, beaks, branches, Christ, ferns
and gems. They chew gum on the hike with the law in
the net made of sheet rock under the stars like war ;

plant a bean to the clouds brushing death and the flint of
ghosts with guts hitch a ride on a life with oblique roots.
The shrikes strike waves, avoid the bees and
smoke buds when they get back to the glades.

RUSSELL BITTNER

2009-06-28T07:17:00.001-07:00

THEY SAY THAT 'ORANGE' HAS NO PAIR

The rest is muddled history
of how some poets try to make
of citruses a mystery
befuddled mistresses mistake.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: SCOTT McCLANAHAN

2009-05-22T17:51:00.000-07:00

Scott McClanahan is the author of Stories just out from Six Gallery Press. He can be reached at: scottmcclanahan@hotmail.com

STORIES

MOVIES

SP: what is something that you do or think in public that makes you look around quickly to see if anyone is watching.

SM: I use the handicapped restroom at work. I tend to be paranoid about someone seeing me sneaking into the stall and judging me about it. This may have to do with my paranoid nature rather than any sort of societal views towards this behavior. I tend to err on the side of caution though. I mean sometimes you’re paranoid, and sometimes people really are trying to kill you (or report you to the supervisor at work for using the handicapped restroom).

SP: why did you write a book and why do you write at all. seems like people like moving pictures better.

SM: I really don’t feel any of this 21st century, post-modern, post structural angst about the nature of writing vs. film (it’s one of those MFA rich kid anxieties). It’s like the difference between lovemaking and oral sex. Writing is like lovemaking—it’s created by more than one. Cinema is something controlled by another.

Besides that, technological art forms disappear over the ages—oral, storytelling cultures remain. I mean do you have any films on BETA sitting around?

God, I’m being too serious with these questions. I need to get sillier with the next one.

SP: would you rather finish a fight with a sweet ass right hook or a sweet ass roundhouse kick. and why.

SM: Well, I guess the answer would depend on if I’m abusing my wife or if I’m abusing my kids. Typically when I abuse my wife, I have no problem unleashing a right hook because she can always cover it up with makeup or call in sick to work. However, when I abuse my children or challenge them to street fights when they get home from school, I usually tend to stick with roundhouse kicks to the sternum. This way the bruises are harder to find. Damn those pesky first grade teachers, sticking their noses into places they don’t belong.

SP: what is something that someone does or says that immediately makes you like him/her?

SM: I tend to stay away from liking people immediately. I tend to take the Woody Allen/Groucho Marx view of friendships--I don’t want to belong to any club that would have somebody like me as a member. These questions are kind of like the —Is the glass half full or half empty—kinda thing.

I think it depends on if you’re drinking or if you’re pouring.

I’m usually too worried about people liking me. And aren’t we all a little insecure at the end of the day?

SP: describe yourself taking a shower as if you are narrating a nature show.

SM: Krikey mate! No wait…I’ll narrate this in a more Sir Richard Attenborough voice…Observe the scottus mcclanahanus, a rare breed, with quite small ears. He showers often with his fellow mammal, The Saminitis Pinkis. Watch the pinkis rubbing his scruffy mo-hawk against the mcclanahanus’s hairy chest. Together they rock back and forth in a strange coupling of lather and kisses, washing and grooming one another in a ballet of pure animalistic instinct.

SP: why are people mean to other people?

SM: I’ll leave you with Iago’s final reply to a question of this nature—“You know what you know homey.” Actually he didn’t say homey—I just added that. However, I think motivations assigned to behavior are silly 20th century, Freudian inventions for attempting to understand the non-understandable. I broke a chair across my kitchen floor three weeks ago, and I have no idea why. I said to myself—“I wonder if I can break this chair?” And so it was.

SP: what is the best way to create a seemingly natural opportunity to do a push up in front of someone?

SM: How dare you ask this question Pink. You’re a real scumbag buddy. You really are. You know I don’t have any arms! I told you I don’t have any arms! But here you are yucking it up. Go ahead and laugh buddy—go ahead. Hah, hah. McClanahan doesn’t have any arms and I asked him a question about push-ups. You’re real clever.

SP: what is the biggest regret in your entire life? (mine is not toasting the bread i just used to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich)

SM: I’m not sure about that, but my biggest regret from the past five minutes is answering a question about physical violence by saying, “Well I guess my answer would depend on if I’m abusing my wife or kids.” Seriously folks, I don’t even have any kids, and my wife is tougher than I am.

However, I would like to take a moment to remind our readers that Scott McClanahan, Sam Pink, and Dogzplot magazine in no way condone child or spousal abuse in any form whatsoever. Arguments are best solved by sitting down and discussing emotions and feelings in a positive, non-violent manner.

I’m also kind of regretting the Saminitis Pinkis/Scottus McClanahanus shower answer. It’s best to keep these interviews on a purely professional level.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: JIMMY CHEN

2009-04-24T17:43:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Chen is the author of TYPEWRITER (Magic Helicopter Press), and maintains a blog and archive of his writing at the EMBASSY OF MISGUIDED ZEN. He is a full-time administrator at a large unnamed institution.

TYPEWRITER

EMBASSY OF MISGUIDED ZEN

SP: what is the perfect breakfast?

JC: This is easy: corned beef hash, with home fries, two eggs over-easy with English muffin and coffee, on the corner of second avenue and Clement street in San Francisco at a place called 'Eats,' where I use to live and before I found out I had high cholesterol. Damn, that was an easy question.

SP: you just left a message on your own answering machine. what is it?

JC: "Why did you do this?"

SP: give us your thoughts on TYPEWRITER. you have to use the phrase "gnarly shit."

JC: There are 75 copies being made of TYPEWRITER. I am slightly nervous for two reasons: 1) that only 11 will sell and Mike Young will have to, indignantly, carry around 64 copies with him throughout Massachusetts. In or around Boston, the concept "Jimmy Chen" will gain a reputation as "some asian from the west coast who slept with 'Mike Young,' that gnarly shit who carries a shoe-box around with his lover's unsold chaps." 2) that I will never be mailed a contributor's copy and will always wonder how it turned out.

SP: what is your favorite online journal and why?

JC: Eyeshot because it's hosted so many great stories for so many years, and because it has a distinct editorial vision without being too attached or self-aware of its style, like the stories and writers are fairly diverse. Many journals fall into one of two traps: 1) they publish the same kind of story, or 2) their discretion seems erratic and/or ambiguous in the stories they publish, with no ethos. Eyeshot has a clear ethos and an open mind. Lee Klein is a well-read mutha-brutha, and I get the feeling he really cares about the stories more than the journal itself.

SP: describe a torture scene you would like to perpetrate on your least favorite writer.

JC: Ayn Rand is forced to stay in the kitchen while she prepares lobster for me and Ben Marcus, who are at a vacation home in Cape Cod outside overlooking the water with our respective snifters of 16 yr. Lagavulin. We compare head-shaving kits and read each other new pieces we just wrote. Ayn Rand, realizing capitalism failed (Atlas Shrugged, $1 dollar bin, Bargain Books) watches us through the window with 'rational self-interested' fury. A lobster escapes and clamps her old pulse-deprived toe, saying "welcome to crustacean nation bitch." She falls and breaks her hip.

SP: write a six line biography of a man who lives in your pocket.

JC: Nippleon Bloom lives in the shirt-pocket of an 'online writer' named James 'Joyce' Chen. Nippleon can smell duotrope from four feet away. James 'Joyce' Chen's heartbeat is equestrian in a 'beating a dead horse' a la submissions kind of way. Nippleon rubs against James' nipple three times a day, the fabric of love. They are the author of USELESSES and A PORTRAIT OF THE PSYCHIATRIST AS A JUNG MAN. They live in Denial, California.

SP: what is the most recent book you read that made you peek out your bedroom window like you didn't know what you were looking at anymore.

JC: SPECIES OF SPACES AND OTHER PIECES by Georges Perec—though that was a while ago, but books rarely make me feel that way. I like books that make me look out the window and go, "Yup, the world does suck. Good thing we have fiction that aims to render it less unbearable."

SP: give us the projected reactions your mother would have to read TYPEWRITER.

JC: That's phrased funny, but I think I know what you mean: my mom would not like TYPEWRITER because of the sexual explicitness and overall negative, albeit empathetic, attitude towards humanity. She likes her fiction the way she likes her movies: involving the middle-aged amorous exploits of men played by Richard Gere.

SP: what are your thoughts on MAGIC HELICOPTER PRESS and small presses in general.

JC: I honestly don't know why people start presses, and I say that with utmost respect. It costs immense time, a good chunk of money, and none of the narcissistic 'glamour' that writers experience with their name attached to something. It's like volunteering. I can only assume these people love literature, one small beautiful unsung poke at a time. I feel this way towards MAGIC HELICOPTER PRESS and all small presses.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: MARY MILLER

2009-04-11T18:18:00.001-07:00

Mary Miller's short story collection, Big World, was published by Short Flight/Long Drive Books in February. Her stories have been published in Black Clock, Mississippi Review, Oxford American, New Stories from the South, 2008 and McSweeney's Quarterly (forthcoming). She is an associate editor at Quick Fiction.

BIG WORLD

http://www.hobartpulp.com/minibooks/index.html

LESS SHINY

http://magichelicopterpress.com/lessshiny.htm

SP: when you are in public and it feels like everyone is staring at you, how do you imagine your body disappearing? does it like, turn to water then sink into the ground? does it explode? do tell.

MM: I never imagine disappearing. If I’m walking, which I usually am, and fast, I handle it by shaking my ass, which is sort of fun until a seven-year-old asks why you’re walking like that and then you feel like an idiot. I think about doing inappropriate things like spitting or picking my nose but I’m too vain and timid.

SP: one time i saw a middle aged woman at the mall wearing christmas socks and the christmas socks made me horny. what is an article of clothing that can make you horny?

MM: One time this boy came over to my house while there was a monsoon outside and he was soaking wet so I had to find him something to wear and he ended up in my junior high basketball t-shirt that used to hang down to my knees and a little swimsuit cover-up type skirt with a flower on it. It was pretty hot. He doesn’t like me anymore, though, so I can’t call him, like, right now to come over, which is sad. Thanks a lot, Sam.

SP: if you took a picture of yourself and then wrote a caption, what would the caption be?

MM: It depends on what the picture looked like. Is it a good picture, a bad picture, or an okay picture? No girl would have asked this question.

SP: what is your ideal halloween costume?

MM: I never, ever dress up for Halloween because I am lazy and the only way I would have a costume is if someone put me in one. A few times someone has and it was always terrible, like the time I had to be the ugliest Spice Girl.

SP: what are some titles for books you would like to write?

MM: I’m no good at titles.

SP: what is your favorite season and can you describe a birthday party that that season would throw for itself?

MM: I like fall a lot because it’s not too hot and not too cold but I also like spring because there are a lot of thunderstorms, like now. I like to lie in my bed in the dark with my window open and watch the lightning (does this make you want to love me?) The birthday party bit is completely outside the realm of my imagination.

SP: how come my roommate never says "thank you" when i cook extra food?

MM: Your roommate is a boy, right?

SP: if i built a big maze by connecting a bunch of refrigerator boxes, what are some rules i should put in place?

MM: For me to navigate your maze, or are you talking about before that, like how should you construct it? That’s your business. I think you should be telling me what the rules are here. Do you always seek input when making up rules?

SP: if i were trying to get you to love me, what would i have to do? is it possible to love someone after he or she pushes you to the ground and laughs at it? how do you repair a relationship in which one member has pushed the other member to the ground and laughed?

MM: Did you just call me “it?” For starters, don’t do that. You would have to not do drugs every day and not be a drunk and have some ambition of some sort, I don’t really care which kind. Also, the pushing and laughing wouldn’t work because I’m sort of uptight and sensitive, you know? I think this would probably knock you out of the running.

SP: describe a really good hug?

MM: Who’s hugging me here? Is it my uncle, the weird one, or is it the boy in my basketball t-shirt? Either way, it would probably be pretty short.

SP: what is one or more behavior(s) that people do that make you quietly think "we have nothing in common"?

MM: Probably when they get really drunk and start playing beer pong and the straight girls start making out with each other on a night when I’m trying to be good and sober, sitting in front of a 60 inch tv watching someone play Mario Kart.

SP: what is you favorite "ERNEST" movie and why?

MM: I vaguely remember Ernest Goes to Camp, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t like it.

SP: do you like me and if so, can we be friends?

MM: You’re pretty cute.

MICHELLE REALE

2009-04-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

STICKY SWEET

The father bends down and whispers to his daughter, who stands, with hands solemnly folded, in line for Holy Communion. Go right out the side door he tells her. She does not register the disappointment she feels, but still, hates to say her prayers on the run. She’ll miss the display of goodness the opportunity allows her, will miss the priestly procession at the conclusion, the go in peace she longs for but doesn’t know why.

Outside in the cold, brilliant sunshine, the father lights a cigarette, and takes a draw that deflates his cheeks so that he looks like a man who is starving. When he throws back his head and exhales upward, she thinks she sees a bit of communion wafer in the corner of his mouth, and she cringes at the thought of the nicotine mixing with the body of Christ.

The father walks briskly and smokes. The daughter’s short, plump legs work hard to keep up with him. He turns around a few times, his smile jaunty, the cigarette smoking itself in this mouth. He squints from the sun or the smoke or both.

The pavement in front of the old German bakery is cracked and dirty. The daughter can see through the smudged glass that they are the first to arrive before Mass lets out. The father throws his cigarette out and exhales as he leans into the heavy door with the rusty bells around the door knob. The daughter breathes in the smoke that trails behind him and imagines what if feels like to be polluted.

The girl is behind the counter. She sees the father and folds her thick, dark hair behind her ears. The father hands stuffed in his coat pocket, points to his choices with his shoulder, laughs too loud. His voice goes up and down. The girl laughs, soft, her mouth pale pink inside, her tongue punctured with a small silver stud.

The daughter stamps her feet on the old wooden floor of the bakery. Her whole body begins to sing a sad song and her fingers and toes tingle. She watches the father and the girl like they are actors in a play. The daughter thinks, that she has said Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad many times. He pays no attention so she isn’t sure if the sound ever left her mouth.

The girl touches the long twisted crullers, the sticky chocolate covered donuts, the plain “old fashions” placing them ever so gently in the white bakery bag. She licks her fingers and begins again. The father stares.

The father is saying something over his shoulder as they leave and the girl stands, head cocked to the side. She moistens her lips, listening. The daughter feels as though days have passed standing in the bakery and she feels hot and itchy underneath her coat.

Father and daughter each carry a bag and walk home. This time the walk is slower, the father’s eyes like hard blue marbles, focused on something far away. The daughter looks inside of her bag and pulls out a donut and begins to lick the cinnamon sugar. She finishes it in three bites and goes for another. The father looks down at the daughter, good navy blue church coat dirty with the tell tale signs of something sticky and sweet. The wife will be pissed. Dirty girl he hisses, swiping at her coat with his big, hairy hands attempting to remove the evidence. Her small breast buds hurt from the pressure of his quick hard slaps, a sensation she cannot get used to. The daughter begins to cry. A memory of shame washes over her like a blush. Your mother will not be happy he hisses as they step over the spotless threshold of the front door to their home. The daughter thinks that is true. She stops crying as she steps inside, her eyes desperately trying to adjust to the darkness inside. It is the only thing he has said all morning that has made any sense.

STEPHEN MILLS

2009-04-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

TO THE BOY WHO CARVED “PUSSY FUCK 'EM ALL” ON THE SEARS BATHROOM STALL

The world has failed you in more ways than one,
perhaps you’ve just discovered we never become
the people in our heads, the ones we made up long
ago, when our triangle lives still fit into the brightly
colored boxes of this America.

We are more alike than you think, Pussy Boy,
even if I like dick. We share insecurities, the love
of blunt language, the passion to spread our seed.
You spend your time in the Sears public restroom
carving proclamations and I spend my time here
reading them, memorizing them, so that I might
sell them as poetry, which you never intended—
more disappointment, I’m afraid.

I’ve never carved anything into a stall,
but I like imagining the way your hand must have
held the pocketknife, the one you probably got as
a Boy Scout, the same one I used to carve my name
in the pine tree outside my bedroom window when
I was ten and hadn’t learned the damage
a wound can do to a tree.

I bet your fingers trembled a little as you carved that “P,”
but relaxed by the time you got to “fuck.” I imagine you
with shirtsleeves rolled, pants at your ankles, sweat
on your neck and palms, but I don’t imagine your cock
and I’m sorry if that saddens you, if it doesn’t fit your
straight boy fantasies that every gay boy is just dying
to suck you off, every pussy dying to be filled.

Mostly I envision your head bent down intensely
watching your craftsmanship, perhaps thinking of me,
the reader. Perhaps you still think of me, here
in the bathroom tracing your words with my finger.
Maybe you smile at the thought of someone taking
you so seriously, immortalizing you on the page,
or maybe you’ve forgotten all about your words
still on the stall wall, until Sears decides to renovate,
and your wall ends up in some landfill where the birds
circle and squawk, never understanding
the loneliness of tight spaces.

CYNTHIA REESER

2009-04-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

ON COMING BACK FROM THE DEAD

consciousness is a gift, uncertain as tomorrow. dreams remembered, looming as the movie in the darkened theater, half-remembered and atmospheric, gone in the piercing of light. transitory as discarded cups and buckets of popcorn. maybe our past lives are in them somewhere, somehow as translucent as they are ephemeral. was it the haunted house in philadelphia or the demon-plagued hallway in florida that finally contributed to the skewed reality between us, so that at christmas we gather in a circle to sing, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

NATHAN TYREE

2009-04-08T15:49:00.000-07:00

WHAT THE CROWS KNOW

The birds, their black wings beating against the dead
current of winter air, mark the spot in their circling.
Moving beneath them we see the redbloodblack smear
stretched out along the pocked pavement and the
artifacts, the remnants of what must have happened.
A fireman without a helmet, works a hose to force the
road clean so that no one will see, so that no one will
learn what the crows know: that we are alone.

BRYCE BAYER

2009-04-08T15:47:00.000-07:00

AFTER THE FLOOD

Last week, the rains left  
mangled umbrellas in  
pieces all over the neighborhood.  
I watched them decay like roadkill 
over the past three days.  
The taut black material eventually  
blows away, and only the crooked 
spidering metal of umbrella skeleton 
remains. But they do not decay, really 
they disappear. Tattered city tumbleweeds 
that roll down, down the block 
and eventually catch in the gutter 
or get carried up to a garbage-nest
in a wheezing grey tree.

JAY SNODGRASS

2009-04-08T15:45:00.000-07:00

DISHWASHER UTOPIA

Dismembered insects
all along the sink basin,
sludge in the caulking you’ll
never get out.
Quick inspiration
to the drawbridge knife,
you go for the sponge.

The ants escape along my arm.
I’m only just dead
to their grief. The world is
unfixable.
I dream it unhinged.

The tide is roaring in somewhere,
you’ll see it. You and your
dish towel stained with blood.

The sponge and its spear points
Makes the new world
an empty wonderland
of Formica.

ALEXANDER YORK

2009-04-08T15:44:00.000-07:00

A GOOD PROFESSION

I was born into a paper suit.
It left muck-black prints
on people’s sofas.

I didn’t like leaving my mark
everywhere I went.

I’m still considering becoming a journalist.

DEREK POLLARD

2009-04-08T15:42:00.000-07:00

PORTRAIT AT THE LAKESHORE, MICHIGAN CITY, INDIANA

You stand over
The grit of the beach
Unbounded
By the pleasure
Of the water’s
Fastness
And your own lightness
In the summer air

Your bathing suit
Is of faded blue cotton
Ringed with yellow
Red and green stripes
Its two pieces
Holding exhaustedly
To your freckled skin

If I could hear that
Same laughter
Of yours tonight
In the cold dark
Of a Syracuse fall
I would weep
For the gorgeousness
Of it and the way
On that afternoon
And always it teased
Out other sounds
From the world
Of noise

A single splotch
Of dark hair lines
Your thigh and a
Brief sleeve of wind
Brushes against
The place of your sex
Exciting first one
Enclothed nipple
And then the other

You are unembarrassed
And even the unfeeling
Sand pinching our skin
In the dying–down wind
Applauds your disinterest
In shame and the lessening
Of our nearest joys

ROBERT JACOBY

2009-04-08T15:41:00.000-07:00

A THEORY OF EVERYTHING

The pennies in the change dish
fund the revolution.

SAM MEIZLISH

2009-04-08T15:40:00.000-07:00

SANDSTORM

There is space between
The sand in a
Sandstorm
Like the gaps between your teeth
And the air between your fingers
There is a whole world between your fingers
I can feel it

AMBER ROSE

2009-04-08T15:38:00.000-07:00

74*

i wanna be
spring leaves
like dinner plates
empty with sun,
of a gun-crazed hand-raised
congregation of sinners who pray,
pay and paint over nail holes
filled fondly, finally,
leaky faucets following,
the leader to the fountain.
at the playground,
a figment of child dreams
i feel and see.

LIGHTBULB MAN

2009-04-06T12:53:00.002-07:00

SOMEONE

2009-04-06T12:53:00.001-07:00

MAN NOT CRYING FOR HELP

2009-04-06T12:52:00.001-07:00

HANNAH PASS

2009-04-06T12:21:00.000-07:00

PICA

He keeps his keys in an empty round flower pot, which sits on a ledge next to his bedroom window. When I reach for them, they make a clinking sound that is low and gritty from the clay. Sometimes I pull the keys out and count them when he is out of the room, but the rim of the pot is narrow so I have to sneak them out vertically. One by one. Today I counted thirteen keys. Yesterday there were twenty. Most of them look like they belong to tiny heart padlocks. The ones you buy from old quarter machines in restaurants with vinyl seats.

“Does it hurt when you swallow them?” I ask him. “When a key goes down your throat, can you feel it?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t know. And really I don’t even do it all that much.” He stares at my face and his skin looks soft and simple like felt.

We are facing each other in bed and our words are going into each other’s mouths but our mouths are not touching. I poke at his belly to see if I can feel something hard like metal but I feel nothing except the feeling that I am ready to touch him lower and put my body on top of his. As I pull the blanket over our heads, he reminds me not to tell anyone. He says he’s very self-conscious and that eating keys is something he would like to quit. “It won’t be easy,” he says. “There are so many of them out there.”

I tuck in my lips and nod to show that I can keep secrets. That this is something I am good at. For my entire life I have refrained from spitting out words that I should or should not have said, like I am sorry or I really hate your casserole.

“I think they might be bad for you,” I say to him when he is almost asleep. “I think this really may be bad for you.”

The first time I saw him eating keys was on my way back from the bathroom, which, if I step outside his room, is across from me through the kitchen. I remember comparing him to an alley cat. Not a scavenger with clumpy fur, but something far more graceful that feels at ease near open windows and likes irreplaceable things that normal people throw away. Before he slipped one in his mouth, he studied it first on each side then brushed off any dust that might have collected from the pot. I was standing there in the bedroom doorway when he finally caught me. Wearing nothing. Watching his throat gulp in the light coming in through the glass.

I wonder why he eats them. I wonder why he desperately needs them inside of himself. “This one is fine,” he might think. “This one will do.” And then possibly, he feels wonderful. Possibly, as one slides down his chest, he feels like there is something extraordinary drifting inside him, gently and synchronized with time. It fits in. Somewhere. And it feels at home. It blends into the walls and among the faces that are hung on the walls. It likes it there very much because it’s just there. For absolutely no reason at all.

Early the next morning he isn’t in bed. The blankets are thrown into an awkward lump next to my feet so I just kick them off the end instead of trying to fix them. I scoot to the edge of the mattress to get a better view of the room and the flower pot and he is staring down at it with a ripped bag of potting soil next to his bare feet.

“What are you doing?” I ask him. “You’re up so early.”
“I filled it with soil,” he says while he pats the top layer with his hands. He doesn’t look at me when he says this. There is a substantial amount of earth everywhere. On the floor. On his shirt. On his legs. And judging by the mess he’s made, he has done this quickly, within minutes, without any consideration of anything at all.

I think of the keys in the dirt and how uneatable they now are. Like something dead and eyeless left on the side of the road that I want to poke with a branch. I tell him to just get rid of them. “Put them in the garbage,” I say while I point to the bathroom. “Just dump the whole thing in there and we can take it out later.”

He climbs back in bed and pulls me closer with his caked hands and I bury my nose in his neck, and this is our way of telling each other how we feel.

It takes him eleven hours before he starts digging holes. I come over after work and he has pulled up every buried key from the flower pot and transferred each one to a sink full of soapy water, which up until now, has never held anything entirely solid. Over the months it’s been encrusted in toothpaste foam. Spit. A place to vomit up indigestible things, like vodka or whiskey or both. I look around the bathroom. It looks like how a bathroom should look. Towels scattered. His and hers toothbrushes side by side in a plastic cup. I stand over the water and although I can’t see the keys through the brown froth, I know that they are resting at the bottom of the sink on top of the drain. I know that someone is going to pull them out soon.