Everyday Genius

Ben Hersey

2012-01-27T15:06:00.001-05:00

Excerpts from The Autograph of Steve Industry

Who was the last person went to the mall with you?

Memba when all the malls were ranches? You’d be in Medford, it’s November and your sweatpants are tight and you have the elastic anklets pulled up to just under the knees and everything is bitter off the Mystic River and all that bitterness is making your face cave in, cave in, cave in like so much shattered stain glass so that your jaw is scaffolding against, like a, a Canadian goose’s idea of a scab? So you go in the mall all horny over fake-girls with maybe five bucks in your sock. Ranch days, baby. Shit changed after the Galleria started and the Square One and those other cathedrals up Rt 1.

Every time I get to the mall, I’m there with everyone I’ve ever known. Nostalgia, the pelt. One time I saw Richard Simmons at the Galleria Mall. This was right around the time it opened. A lot of people were there and the light was both woodsy daybreak but also so urban neon. Just being there felt like it was WSBK-TV 38 Boston but higher, like when the future used to seem like a snake’s mouth gagged with frosting – that you had to walk through. He was screaming and glistening, a small mongrel far off, but from where I was I couldn’t understand a word. I remember being dressed in black and green vest, which was unusual for me. Earlier in the day, Marissa, a Goth girl I worked with (Sbarro’s) told me “green was my color…definitely.” Her voice was still vibrating in my chest. I was on the second level watching Richard Simmons motivate people on a platform in the distance. I had a job at the mall and I was on break. The feeling of being packaged into my own afterlife was strong and not really unpleasant. I wanted to cup a mannequin’s breast over the way I was feeling. My mind was still hard at work (I didn’t know it then) censoring my body. When the shutdown was made official, three months later, (my girlfriend, Tara, got pregnant) (abortion) I quit and didn’t go back there for a decade. Truthfully, no truthfully, the reason I stopped going to that mall back then was that I found myself going further and further up Rt. 1 to get to where I needed to go, to be who I needed to be.

Name three things you do every day:

1. All profits go to Dunkies. Slurp the battlefield mucus and the coffee sauce of the God-jet directly into my mouth and brain. Complete amputation. Gore.

2. The present complexity: highway falcon-owls fully committed to the parent debt of lost causes remain high up. Car insurance or enjoyment squirt? Blow out the particles of flavor at the trusted attendant. Drive off for hours.

3. A death experience during my afternoon pause. Place a scratch-ticket in the part of me that thinks and searches for phrases. Pluck the winner and blow.

What websites do you visit the most?

www.snakesandchainsfortats.tatts, www.followyourdreams.words, www.findingadeepermeaning.com,www.dietsinfreedom.snar

www.yourprivatereasons.mork, www.dictionary.no, www.mortgagessuckmyballs.everyday, www.getoffmyasswife.now,

If you were a character in a horror movie, would you survive?

Snakeskin masks at Pet Smart on the brain as I overheard the other day a guy on the 104 in Malden say “immateriality of the phalanx.” “Immateriality?” Are you serious? You have to be some serious kind of ass-wad to incorporate that kind of bullshit into your day-mare. Sealed ass-holes begging to take a shit, that’s what that is. That’s my horror plot.

I think about killer’s being smarter than even having to use words like that (or any) but instead their words just are what a word means.

What a murderer whispers into your dying ear:

“Doobie doobie do.”

Or: “Sha-do da ding dong a ding a ling a lang. Sha-boomp ba bon, a ding a ling a lang.”

Life is a cock-sucking dream. With regularity: me skipping school going to the Do-Wop Diner in Malden and eating the whole Ted Williams Grand Slam Breakfast.

The voice of a murderer in every open and motioning mouth.

A killer’s mouth with the voice of my grandmother’s even though the gloves the killer wore would belong to a goalie with a number one jersey and lighter pads. I’m irritable today.

I just waited twelve days between the last sentence and this one. I paid special attention today to the misuse of verbs by the band at band practice. Gardenhose was tightening his bass drum and said he had dranken twelve beers last night. Looking back at this business of horror movies and killers, dying must be like that, the lick of illuminated aluminum, baby. Death is a cracked verb.

Were you afraid to go in the ocean after you saw Jaws?

Eventually, I figured out that the bowling alley was a much better destination for lovers. I’ve loved many a woman candlepin bowler in weekend jeans. Saundra’s were acid-washed and showed off a couple of tight black-diamond butt-cheeks that made my lower back hurt. Hard to look like a strike machine lead singer when you got those power trips dancing to your left. I was crime-dog drunk and when I’m like that a woman’s energy goes triple-dimensional. Next thing I know she’s talking to me from within me: “I like the way you creak.” Sorry, what? “Your jacket. It creaks when you sit there. Good sound.” How she heard it, no idea, but it does not matter. Love had arrived. Lovers have to be in love when it’s time to love, no time for chitchat. I’m So Drunk is the ultimate love song. To Saundra, from Steve:

Animal candy,

Sugar basted – cookies,

There’s a ghost - at the bar (I always point to myself when I sing that)

And I’m trying -- too hard!

I’m so drunk!

I’M SO DRUNK. (2X)

Good enough for her,

she just left – with a beer stain on her shirt.

Double entendre

Her name was Saundra. (Depending on where we are – I point the mic at the crowd here)

Have I see myself – since yesterday?

I’m so drunk!

I’M SO DRUNK! (2X)

I love you baby!

Ben Hersey is a writer and performance artist living in Northampton, Massachusetts. He has an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, CO. He will be on tour with Heather Christle in late February/early March of 2012.

Amanda Ackerman

2012-01-26T22:05:00.000-05:00

Human Time Poem: It Will End When It Ends, And Then This Changes

There are two men and two women, but this does not matter because they are all just one person, cycling. There are many forms of time, like ancestral time, a day or year on each planet, like how long a day really is if you measure the earth’s rotation differently. He wants to sleep with her and her, both of them. The women don’t want to compete. One of them takes the other one’s hand to show solidarity. This is not hostile. Their hems touch. There are cycles within cycles, and worlds within worlds. A man sits so wide. It became a tired and axially misarranged knot, everything was stuck, when the women could no longer turn into the men, and the men could no longer turn into the women. They are mythological. Time is supposed to be their masterpiece. Someone says, tearfully, “I did it because I was desolate. And because I was desperate. I’ve seen the future, and it does not end. Until it ends. It will end when it ends. Then this changes.” One of them says, “I want to buy my body back. My body wants to buy me back. I/body wants I/body. It does not want to buy.” Each of them decides to travel to the four corners of the earth to take up residence, the two poles and the opposite ends of the tropical equator. They bring buckets, they take off their hats, and mythological creatures are never self-censoring when they begin to disgorge profit and unnecessary constraint. In the center of the center there is a flare that is neither dull nor still.

Amanda Ackerman is the author of four chapbooks: Sin is to Celebration (co-author, House Press), The Seasons Cemented (Hex Presse), I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck (Insert Press), and Short Stones (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press). She is co-publisher and co-editor of the press eohippus labs. She also writes collaboratively as part of the projects SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and U.N.F.O. (The Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization), whose collaborative audio text project Explanation as Composition was recently featured at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Ella Longpre

2012-01-25T12:16:00.001-05:00

Poet Tongues

A scripted dialogue for Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion

JD: Jasmine, growing at the garage of the house of my girlhood. The flowers were heavy, hanging from limp bushes. We had to guide them with white trellises. I used to climb up the back trellis to sit on the roof and watch the street through the orange tree, smoking cigarettes. Not many cars went by. When I was old enough, I went for drives instead. But jasmine doesn’t grow along the highway. Once, I passed a Pinto with a steaming engine, and a sign, “Will be back.” A little further down the road, a young woman and a little boy. The sweat was visible under her arms, and he carried with him a wooden stool. I stared at the way he held the stool as I passed them. I’ve lost the scent of that bush by the garage. But I can recall it like no other taste or smell, and could tell you about jasmine.

HST: Sitting in his hotel in Cozomel. The jasmine came in through the walls, the whole building was built with it. He’d lay on this rickety cot, sharing a cigarette with a bed bug the size of a Boston terrier, needing to get the fuck going. But the lazy cloud of light hung over his room in a sticky fog with the oppressive jasmine.

J: That’s you, the “him.”

H: It could be.

J: It could be “he,” “I,” “you,” “we,” “they,” it’s always you.

H: Like you.

J: The story comes out of the voice, and the clearest voice is mine. I make a bad decision and lose the voice, lose the story.

H: Bad decision?

J: While you’re writing. The good ideas you have that ooze through the afternoon at your desk to become major problems.

H: You should get a program on your computer for a fist to jump out of the screen and punch you when you are about to make such a mistake.

J: Actually, I try to write my first drafts on real paper, with some kind of ink, right in front of me, to touch and sift through. Even on a typewriter if I have to.

H: I didn’t take you for an old fart.

J: Poets used to write their lines with their tongues. Then, smudgier ones with drippy fingers. The saddest invention is the invention of the pen, because now the words don’t come from our bodies, they come from some other place. Who knows where they come from?

H: Yes! he shouts. I am so glad you said that. Fuck! The word is no longer us, we are no longer the word! We’ve become part of this whole writing process, part of a mechanism of writing, as if we’re pulling the words out of the air, or from a script, from a source of predetermined meaning, and not out of our guts and throats—like we’re a press, a machine, churning out what someone else authored. I want to write “Snakes!” on this floor, in red, with my ass.

J: My god.

H: Don’t you? he shouted.

J: Ha. I mean, I’ve heard these things.

H: What things have you heard?

J: The way you walk into rooms, a low voice. Boastful, like you have the walls of the universe in your belly. Your voice fills these rooms. Then you destroy these rooms. You extend your acidic tentacles out into these rooms and gather every lamp, every dark corner, every splinter of a chair, to your gaping blue mouth, and you gobble them up. So then you have these rooms in your belly, too. Underneath your crusty, flappy brown jacket. And then, what you spin out of the contents of your belly! Long, voluminous, luminous threads, wound from strands of poison that could pierce a man’s nostrils, or his thigh, and fill him with words that could crush his lungs. Words that could crush a coffee cup sitting next to them on a table. And at first, the man is terrified—he can’t breathe. But then he finds he is breathing new breath. And you, your hulking figure leans back in your chair and has a good, long laugh.

H: Jesus, Joanie! Oh, the whale fat of my soul! I want you to do more talking.

J: What I want is for you to gather that purple afghan up to your chin, look out that window and think about whatever it is that you’ve never let us read. Then I could talk for hours about your face.

H: I’d rather swallow a fire that’s consuming a box of screws, screws crusted with lead paint sucked from your dead grandmother’s fingernail polish. You want everybody to be still. You eat still, silent rooms to taste their silence.

J: And you eat them just to chew them up. Like cud.

H: Chewing tobacco! I love spitting them out. I can’t stop spitting them out. I’ll spit them into the air and catch them with my waistband, a cartoon clown with oversized pants.

J: Here, take that tobacco of those rooms and roll me a cigarette with it, I’m dying to smoke.

H: That lamp. Do you see that lamp?

J: No. Where would it be if it were?

H: There.

J: I see.

H: There’s a lighter by the base of that lamp, there. I would love to sit and have a smoke with you, Joanie. Joanie D and me, having a C. Let’s sit on that roof you used to hide on as a girl, with the jasmine. My god it’s been so long since I’ve held that fibrous, bountiful stench in the hairs of my nose.

J: Nothing moves behind the orange tree. On a day like today, it’s so quiet. Everything is distant, you can hear the thoughts of strangers as they walk by, if they would walk by.

H: Yes! Yes dammit.

J: They’re so heavy, their thoughts. You can hear the suffering of the world.

H: If I could hear the thoughts of the world, I’d shoot them into the sky for us all to lay eyes upon. Then we’d be in on it. You might say, free.

J: But I wonder how we could be free with all those messages pressing down on us. New strata of sadness in the atmosphere.

H: For us to investigate, for us to know!

J: Ha! To lock us down in a vice.

H: To embrace us, to be fucked. To fuck so hard until you can’t tell who is being fucked. The words—the words you want to touch—and yet you shrink away from them!

J: Not my words, the words that hold too much, I want to touch my words on the page.

H: Fuck the words. You’re worried about being separated from the page, that beige emptiness. That’s what you love.

J: Get your fucking boots off my roof.

H: I’ll smear my boot shit on your roof until you tell me some words that don’t come from your own body. You have to take them in through yourself from the outside and then belch them up, or you’re just spitting up untruths.

J: I’m sorry, but there’s no method to the way I spew my thoughts.

H: There is, there’s the method of never giving yourself to anyone but yourself. You have no great loyalties!

J: And where are your loyalties? In your faxes and telegrams, your packets of reds and joints wrapped in pouches of tin foil? Drugs wrapped with gold ribbon.

H: His voice becomes breathy and he says, I put on every skin of this earth. I put on the dirt, I put on the moldy sand and all the fish shit that sits at the bottom of the ocean, I put on the boring blue carpets of office parks and vacant linoleum church halls, I put on bingo balls and bongo bags, I put on every ugly and mundane and brilliant shining jacket of this world. But you. Even when you walk through someone else’s house, you wear your own skin. You’re ripening in it, and you taste yourself. I’m rotted, and you are so mellow.

J: Mell-lell. Mellooooo.

H: Mellon mellow, mellow mellon.

J: Yellin. Yellow mellow. Well-oh.

H: That fucking song played on a jukebox in Vladivostok as I sipped my final 10c glass of vodka.

J: That song played on the record player the last time I made love to my first great love.

H: What a fucking stupid ass song.

J: There you go. Did you put something in the tobacco.

H: Just a little mary jane, for flavor. He exhales.

J: Why do you keep narrating your speech, like that, like a sportscaster?

H: It's the addiction. To ESPN. Haha!

J: Are you just so used to fictionalizing yourself?

H: You mean that all of my writing is thinly veiled autobiography. Sometimes, I don't even veil it. Again, like you.

J: But each time you do it, you're putting a distance between you, number one, and your self, number two.

H: How do you mean, he grumbles.

J: You talk as if your voice has no body, just a fist. Or like your body is always thinking.

H: Jesus, Joanie, are you kidding me? Jesus fuck. My voice has no body? Of course my voice has no fucking body. He pauses. But a writer never has a body, anyway, to start with. A reader has no… concern for a writer's body--

J: I'm not interested in a reader, here. I'm not talking about writing. I'm asking you about your fucking body, man, and your voice.

H: My voice! My low voice that occupies space only to fill it with words.

J: Your voice that is a projected void! An extension of your gut, a voice that hungers!

H: Bullshit. At the end of the day all I am is a pile of words. And that's all you're interested in. You don't want my body, you want me to have one so I can write about it, and you can absorb more of my words, lay your flat palm on more pages.

J: Your words? Your fucking words? You don't understand. I don't want anything to do with your words. I've never cared about your words. What about your chest cavity, your jaw. I own your body, I love it so much.

H: You crazy bitch, you can't own something you have no responsibility for.

J: And you do? You offered your body up to the earth and the sky and I fucking grabbed it.

H: My body.

J: I know your body, I know what you drink. We come from the same time and place, don't you see? We both gravitate toward the sun. Tepid, fetid humidity, baking rotted orchid nectar into our skin.

H: No, no-- you might want the sun to photosynthesize your inborn misery into writer juices, but I follow the sun to find the sand, lifted by the wind. I've only ever wanted to be flayed by the wind.

J: For whatever reason we rise, we emerge.

H: Sometimes, an open empty well will unsettle you.

(Silence.)

J: You're not even shaking.

H: I'm gonna roll another one. Dig?

J: Sure. You know, I can almost hear the blues coming on over the PA.

H: I told you, you are so mellow.

J: Mellow can be swell you know?

H: It isn’t the blues, by the way. This is the last jazz song they ever played before God invented the blues.

J: Christ, your face is a pallet of shadows in this twilight.

H: Look at your arms. If we stitched cheesecloth to your fingertips and your elbows, I think you could glide.

J: If I could glide, I would glide over you.

H: Ha! Ha. We’ll see, Joanie D. We’ll see.

Ella Longpre lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. She works in a library and makes music in the band dust savior. Some of her writing can be found in NOÖ Journal, at Flying Object, on Futurepoem's blog, and in old magazines. Her fiction has appeared in Dinosaur Bees, and her poems have appeared in Summer Stock.

Kristen E. Nelson

2012-01-24T18:15:00.000-05:00

Home, still

i. Place

When you brought me to your home for the first time, I knew the mountains and the grandfather Saguaros. I found my ocean from the top of those mountains. I looked down and felt small. Winding roads. I was dizzy.

ii. Weather

There is no such thing as weather; there is only heat. Heat that destroys Quick, Easy, Moisture. I never felt mortal before this Heat. “I am walking on the sun,” I said. You said, “Wait for the rains.” They came and smelled like sex, and I understood your love of the creosote desert. I reached for you in wet desperation. You made me wait a few more days. My city was instant gratification, but we were in your city now.

iii. House

That first time we fought, I hated you more than anyone has ever hated. I hated you more that afternoon than any other moment since. I ran to the guesthouse, sat on the floor, and tried to decide who was safe. I sucked the strength out of those old bricks. I sucked the tree roots that were destroying those old pipes into me from below. I didn’t lock the door, but when you tried to come in, I held up my hand, pushed it towards you, and kept you out. A few months later when you ripped up the guesthouse carpet without a facemask, it was not the mold that sent you to the emergency room.

iv. Person

Our neighbor, now my friend, confided that he used to call you “The Bulldog” and me “The Nice One” before he knew our names. This made sense. This older man saw some of my favorite parts of you. Your fierceness. Your protective nature. Your passion. Your wrinkled forehead. Nice was all he saw of me. You were the only one allowed layers.

v. Sky

I am traveling farther and farther away from you, Love. There is more distance now than there has ever been. “I miss you” is so much smaller than this. You hover over me like a thunderstorm threatening. But there is comfort in the things in the sky that are loud enough to make me run for safety. The clouds and their ominous warring.

vi. Other House

I visited you in that other house. The one with the murals. You snuck your small, scarred hand into mine, and I remembered: you love me. You smelled exactly the same, and I noticed before you pointed to them that you were taking better care of your feet. I have heard “I love you” since that night. I have laughed at love with parts of lovers still inside me. Not because I didn’t believe their sincerity; I did. She loved me the best she knew how. He loved me the best he knew how. He loved me the best he knew how. She loved me the best she knew how. And so on.

Kristen E. Nelson writes cross-genre texts. She has recently published work in Tarpaulin Sky, Trickhouse, Cranky Literary Journal, Quarter After Eight, In Posse Review, and Dinosaur Bees. She is a founder and the Executive Director of Casa Libre en la Solana, a non-profit writing center in Tucson, Arizona; a curator/editor for Trickhouse and a production editor for Tarpaulin Sky Press. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Goddard College and teaches English and creative writing in Tucson, Arizona.

CAROLYN ZAIKOWSKI

2012-01-23T22:08:00.001-05:00

THIS (#1)

The truth has stumbled home and she’s tired, gone to sleep. She’s hapless and mediocre. Who comes next? Apathy? Stains? A dance to mark the dissolution of the town at midnight? And all this time we knew—the reservoir’s always been coming whether or not we want it, whether or not our land’s been bought. Let’s hide our steeples and get out of here. The dust is riding along the field’s tops, just as the old men promised. The trees are broken right down the middle. This is not an appropriate game for children. Send the children to Salem. We’ve got bills to pay with the fine grease of our bodies, we’ve got to chop the trees correctly if only for the dignity of what we used to cradle. Let the water come or let it wait. It doesn’t matter, for we all plan to be ghosts here anyways, sulking in wet beds, tapping our neighbors with clay in the night.

THIS (#2)

Late at night J teaches me how to gamble. You’ve got to look at the mud on the track, he says. What’s the weather like? Where’s that cloud hanging? How big’s the jockey, how thick are his calves, and what’s he got on? He teaches me about all kinds of differentials while drinking a certain kind of beer. Listen, he says, there are so many things to take into account. He writes a long list with a tiny pencil in all capital letters. He never learned how to write in lowercase. The beast could die, he warns. You might never see it coming. The track could have glass shards in it that they never told you about ‘cause not one person on this earth is honest. Do you understand me? Never forget: when the bell rings, everyone’s watching. J takes me to a bridge in New York and says, Look. That’s where the bombs will fall someday. He says, we won’t be anywhere near there when it happens, because I know a thing or two about running. I can run on any kind of surface or layer. Even one that’s atomic. I'll grab you up when it happens, put you in my sidecar, so don’t you worry about anything, I’ve got all the numbers and their respective cards in my pockets. This country’s not going anywhere, not without me, he says. Not if I have anything to say about it, and I do. Just look at all these numbers. At least one of them is the answer. You have to win someday, it would be impossible not to, as long as you kept trying and never died. And he pulls all the paper and guitar picks out of his pocket, lays them out on his linty palm, leans in, and asks, Right? and says, Right.

THIS (#3)

J’s fake wife is on the stage again. He says, she’s the goal. That’s who you should be, might be, in time. Although it will be hard considering your heavy load in some places and your flat emptiness in others. You're just, well, listen—it’s hard to be beautiful when you’re a poet, he warns, you can’t have everything. It's hard to be beautiful when your straining is so clear. J’s fake wife shakes her jewelry and smells like wine. She says things like Come here baby, but no one even knows who she is talking to, and everyone wishes she is talking to them. In reality she’s talking to nobody but herself, who she is stranded within. Yes, like her, J says.

THIS (#4)

Now, if you'll remember, I met you at a hospital. You were very large and I had just arrived four seconds prior. You said, I’ve waited a long time for you to marinate enough to be alive. You’ll get bigger like a man, you said, no matter what your genitals. One day you’ll be bigger than a man, and then you will populate even me with your stories. You were right. I am as large as a sun and my words arrive just like I did, darkly and in the snow; by foot—very thirsty. More thirsty than any of my masters. Shiny and downwards like a sieve. I couldn’t have told you that I’d always known all this—I was too small then. But now I am a person, detached and sated, so far from tender.

Carolyn Zaikowski's fiction and poetry, as well as her critical work on feminism, veganism, trauma, and language, has been published widely. She is also the author of a novel, A Child Is Being Killed (Aqueous Books, 2013.) She holds and MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University. Find her at http://www.liferoar.wordpress.com.

Nathaniel Otting

2012-01-20T00:04:00.002-05:00

FIRST ONLY FLYING OBJECT FESTIVAL OF
for Robert Kadis

On the 20th of January, Lenz
walks through The, maintains,
No, she is the Robert Walser.
Fewer, it was raining on Lenz.

Further, I passed by a cobbler's
workshop, which reminded me
of the poet Lenz, a genius, but
unhappy, who learned to make,
and made, shoes while his soul
and spirit were unhinged, wrote
the Robert Walser of The Walk.

On the 20th of January, Lenz
disappeared. Either Lenz
disappeared or the 20th of
January did. Did Lenz or did
disappear. No: Lenz was
lacking, no rain. Of lawn
after morning: No Lenz.

Of lawn after morning: Lenz.

Well, then there was walking, on
Lenz, all around Lenz, past Lenz,
Lenz walking through the Lenz.
There was more walking, by Lenz.

Lenz, walking, January, the 20th,
probably January, probably Lenz.

Lenz, probably walking, on January, no,
lacking January, past January, the 20th.

Why not walking on January, why not on the 20th,
why not walk through the January to reach the 20th,
why not January on Lenz, no. No January. No Lenz.

For: only mountains, mountains, mountains, mountains.

Let January equal the 20th. Let the 13th fever. Let Lenz.
For object, read flying. For first, read only. For if, read of.
January, Lenz, 20th, Lenz, 19th of centuries, 20th of Lenz.

Nathaniel Otting is writing THE WRONG BOOK (1913 Press,
2013) for Emily Pettit's GOAT IN THE SNOW (Birds, LLC, 2012)

Ruth Lehrer

2012-01-19T00:34:00.000-05:00

Wishing Ill on People

Really, it’s not that general
Really, it’s mostly specific
for a good reason
with a fine line
between vengeance and spite.
I don’t wish they would die
No, really I want something
more drawn out
like a landscape
with lots of layers
You think you’re done
with the sheep
and then you see
the watching wolves.
Really, like that
but more painful.

Ruth Lehrer is currently reading restaurant menus.

Ngoc Doan

2012-01-18T00:32:00.000-05:00

AT THE END

of the season
some other love affair
alike, you’d say
you’ve always loved
autumn

or in comparison
these mosquito bites
over bodies
itch

for nuisance and pleasure
it has rained

in our mouths
we’ve held it
the tip of it

we’ve work

reverberations, mur-
murs/ the walls
to apprehend

footsteps
of man apart

we do not have
conversations

Ngoc Doan is reading Joseph Massey's At the Point.

Olivia Valdes

2012-01-17T00:31:00.000-05:00

God Talk Dance Craze

God is giving a graduation speech. He is clutching a decoupage tissue box. When God cries, 18th century goats scale the cliffside of his throat. I feel sorry for God until everyone else does. I am not unlike God, though I doubt we could ever be friends. He does not pride himself on his dearth of Confucian wisdom, which he disguises by alluding vaguely to Dionysus. God figures, as long as it ends with an –us. God is not fooling anybody. Everyone wants to go to prom with God. Upon observing God, I first think iron focus!, then community service. God and I both know the question on everyone’s mind. When he was young, God would not even touch a plate of chicken nuggets, and now, look at these peaks and valleys, the stubborn color scheme of sky, those mysterious Eskimos, all the unintelligibly foreign maps.

Olivia Valdes is reading your mind, and also The Facts of Winter, written by Paul Poissel and translated by Paul LaFarge.

Andrew Leland

2012-01-16T10:30:00.002-05:00

Spit in the Lock

and the knob turns. I don’t have a biological son, I have a dog.
He notices nothing. A biological emergency
isn’t as fun as a spiritual one. A capon of regret
is preferable to a soupçon of desire. A plate
of brown rice with seasoned beans, steamed veggies, and a stainless cup of tahini sauce.
This is the shampoo I use to wash my hair a-mornings.
This is the computer I use to write games that I sell
for money to buy yeast for my bread.

How do you make yeast at home?
Float into your sheep’s warren mooningly, morningly, warmingly,
balls bound tight
in the gauzy ballet dancer’s big bundled package.
Fill their troughs with hämmertaschen and bloat.
Computers that working poets use,
not like yours. A swelling breast
at the malls of New Jersey completes the final steps required
to become official “Sister Malls” to the malls of Mérida.
A soupçon of desire goes on sale there.

I like my garbage adulterated. Try,
but don’t try so hard
that you resemble one of those fractally self-satisfied Berkeley undergrads standing indoors
at graduation in a dark auditorium standing in a permanent California autumn,
fluent and white in Spanish, tenth in their families to graduate,
minds ringing with recent theses, a chorus onstage,
genitals scrubbed and bundled in affordable underwear.
Dust still caked on the numbed nubs where their tonsils hung.
The memory’s ice tray is reasonably cluttered,
well organized and coated
with an agreeable amount of fuzz,
a productive mold like penicillin
grown over the whole shebang.

Some of them are vegan,
others have bellies full of chicken and cheese.
Congratulations! Sam puts his tongue in Sarah’s
mouth and his hands grab her bottom and her tongue
goes into his mouth and her eyes
have never been open. I want her
to grab his wang through his gown
but she won’t. Just kissing, her
hair tied behind her head, her
belly full of couscous and squash.

Andrew Leland is reading Tres Tristes Tigres.

Neila Mezynski

2012-01-13T00:02:00.000-05:00

Girl In Two House

She live in two house. One of them nice other not. One day she went out. To the store. Find if she was there maybe in the bread or carrot island. She was not either. Forlorn she not be crystal clear in her seeing of those other things, about. Lettuce or turnip probably more in the fudge way. Leafy. Cocoa. Bean. She asked the shopkeeper if he knew her in the biblical sense not but in the knowing way as in does she look like Marilyn or Toulouse or someone of that eek. Finding a way out he looked looked at nothing in particular, her in particular. She want not to be in two house but one was the place he was there too listen to her play piano violin, doesn’t matter play listen listen play. All day sit feet listen. Mac. Don’t talk stick foot in mouth sweat turn strange pink lie leave fast no time for to listen to the sound. Don’t watch she won’t go her way then. Where. Listen.

Girl In Two House II

She play all day all day she play piano too. Don’t ask for much don’t need. Only. Listen. Bob. She play and enjoy for to. No proof. Outside not look inside. Happy. Feet to bask. Need herself her instrument. Chopin. Confound kitty nice smile lemon cake some chocolate for Johnny I, 2. Pretend is all. New house. Tipover dream, lots to think then be. No never mind he don’t vant she do plenty smelly fish in little pond big. Her. Go visit carrot lettuce man for quick mindless answer while spraying. Come home be nice smile play some piano for to listen. Foot baskin. Call her Toulouse, she’ll stay long. No remorse. Keep nice one give you torn. Okay. A hard time, you too? Me me. Plenty of fishy waters. Crystal clear when she do good piano playin.

These selections are from Yellow Fringe Dress, an echapbook from Radioactive Moat Press (Jan 2012). Neila Mezynski is the author of Glimpses from Scrambler Books, a pamphlet from Greying Ghost Press, echapbooks from Patasola Press and chapbooks from Folded Word Press (Feb 2012), Mud Luscious Press and Deadly Chaps Press.

Mary Wilson

2012-01-12T00:01:00.000-05:00

MICHAEL

The more specious bits of carbon on his shirt–front (Michael’s)
otherwise aglow with nothing (that is, clean) delivered Michael

from his need to state the proper shirts of things, which he admitted
(Michael) to his kids were varied—one of them in blue with specks

of yellow one of them in red beneath a picture of his father
(Michael’s) and the little one in diapers hugged the banister along the stairs

when Michael, suddenly with wings or he imagined leapt up
and absorbed the little one, the nervous-father Michael

in his arms and flushed and scolded, Michael
speaking in parental tones, which out of context may have sounded

like the clucking of a nervous mother, absent from the picture
(Michael’s) and by means of this heroic gesture, Michael

saved the little one from falling into colorless disaster
and his shirt–front (Michael’s) swelled with pride

Mary Wilson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is working towards an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University. Her poems have appeared in Gobbet, Digital Hamper and (occasionally) her blog: www.lean-to.blogspot.com.

Joanna Howard

2012-01-11T00:03:00.009-05:00

In Absentia

Someone had gone missing and didn't want to be found. The path to the embassy curved between short, plump palms. I adopted a quick pace in the shadows, and kept an eye over one shoulder. Through the open door, a costume party unfolded down the stairs. The footman announced the names. I slipped in unnoticed on the commissioner's arm in the beaded ensemble of Salome.

Who knew who was who? I watched them file in. An inventor arrived on the chime of the clock in a white coat and wig. He brought with him a mechanical doll who swayed up out of a giant tapestry bag, and wafted just out of his reach. She attracted the notice of the finer set with her long neck and careful gaze. As long as I watched her, she held her character. I know that later that night, at the buffet table, she emptied a sugar bowl onto the head of a new lover while across the room, her escort, brooding, soaked his throat in rum punch. The things we do to each other!

For my part, an artful diversion began when the bigger band, in striped jackets, took the stage. In the pause, the dancing guests held their position in an unlikely tableau, shortly, before the muted horns gave over to a thundering continental swing. Partners exchanged across the patterned tiles. The Sheik snatched up my hand, and we took the floor. He had a firm grip, the kind of legends. His eyelashes, darkly lined, beat softly against the hem of a perfumed head scarf. Eau de cologne. He led toward the terrace doors, and out into the moonlight.

Briefly, I felt I had been drawn into something legitimate and sweeping. I came this far to unwind the mystery, though I can't imagine why. That's hardly the way it should work. Still, I wanted to hear what he had to say. I suspected I had already failed at his native tongue. If he was guilty, he didn't want to confess.

Sarah Schwartz

2012-01-10T00:03:00.000-05:00

Technopastoral

I.
My happiness is so slow, close
to petrified. Sentiment
is sediment. First and leftover.
Never the thing, grown or seen. Groan or seed.
My astonishment at matter
what matter can not contain.
I am not ashamed to be a decent carrier,
a seedling vessel, a skin-shy iris.
Mouth, I said humble.
Rush pink rush.
Creep aster.

II.
Is there anything to be read in the shooting
star columbine. Shooting columbine. American vetch.
We have all been locoweeds. We have all been trailing
four o’clocks. American vetch. To my mountain lover,
I am sorry I am stuck with this heartleaf bittercress.
Uninterrupted days of bricklebush. I once called myself
a difficult flower, not having the name for the flower I am.
No nodding onion, no sweet cicely, no wild candytuft.
Call me red pussytoes. Call me death camas. Call me bastard toadflax.
Sing wild cosmos, if you can.
If not, just sing American vetch.

III.
We come out of the backcountry to the news,
this sad music of the world. Bombing at a summer camp.
A teenager murdered his parents, threw a party.
Out of my guzzling window, the sun bounces down
to touch peaks. The glazed Tetons
are still rolling, credits of a summer daydream.
The grass just won’t learn to self-destruct, as we have.
I am not speaking for anything but my skin
in the cricket-swept air. Just these two eyes
awash with the continual surprise of Parnassians. Yes,
hold your hands that way, bound. Wildflowers abound.
I am yellowing as this meadow, dusted by our tires.

IV.
On the path that eyes have deemed beautiful,
traffic sputters in the snow. Red tracks are not, after all,
blood marks, do not necessarily lead anywhere, probably
signify buried flows of water. What fish feed there?
At Lake Solitude, a man seems to be pointing his camera
in my direction, the sun still a spotlight, even at this height,
in this heightened quiet. “There’s a mean cloud coming,”
she says to my weight-hunched back. There’s a cold lake
not waiting for us. Rippling, a sparkle set. “We are all tourists here,
except for the bears.” What would it mean to belong here?
To have made a home from sapping sticks?
Have I belonged anywhere yet? She wants
more vistas, more sun, more shade. She wants
what will unfold in her design. Language works
at a distance, cannot enter. The true lake of solitude
has not yet been seen, will not be named.

Sarah Schwartz is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Brown University. Hailing from the Midwest, she has spent the last five years displaced, first on the West Coast, and now on the East Coast. Find more of her critical and creative writing at www.thestraddler.com and www.masonsroad.com, and forthcoming in Catch Up and Sun's Skeleton.

Evelyn Hampton

2012-01-09T00:05:00.000-05:00

Revision

Jim is no longer a character in a story I have written—I have liberated him from obscurity and now he is transitioning to a new form in the manner of larvae, adolescents, and souls.

I’m finding I’d rather be surrounded by the possibility of Jim than concocting the reality of him. Now I look at a cloud and wonder how he is doing, where he might be. When I come out of the theater after seeing a movie, blinking and not yet acclimated to my life, I wonder whether I might catch sight of him half-formed, a Jim still partly a fiction, like a ghost with real hands leaning against a building, smoking.

I also have this sense of Jim when I wake during the night to go to the bathroom. I think that he is there, or part of him is in the kitchen, sitting in a chair; not on it, but inside of it, inhabiting its upright shape with shifty, transitional qualities. Jim, in this condition, is like a language that is dying.

It is possible for one who is transitioning to a new form to become old before the transition has finished; to die, even, in the midst of becoming something different. Then it is like acid rain—Jim oozes out of the air above a corporate office park and falls onto the chassis of the world. Or Jim, the protoplasm that’s left of him, migrates toward a different transitioning object and lodges within its folds, complicating its density with soul.

Recently my father had a cyst above his eyebrow lanced. Within was a tuft of hair, two tiny fingernails. A twin. A Jim.

But I think I like Jim how he is now, a possibility. I can listen to the wind and wonder which of its decrements are him becoming less and less himself. When a cough comes out of a room where nobody is, I can think of Jim instead of my own death. In this way Jim has begun to function like beauty—possessed of changeable so intangible qualities, visible while shifting his even more desirable qualities out of reach, reminding me that desire can never achieve final satiety, is always only partial, half-achieved; the other part, like Jim, transitioning beyond reach, assuming that’s what he’s doing, that he hasn’t simply gone to sleep, or, I have mentioned the possibility, died. “Beauty dies my death for me and makes me see it”—Jim said that before I allowed him the freedom to become, if he transitions that way, a green ray.

I read about the green ray yesterday. When the sun sets in perfect atmospheric conditions, with no land mass for many hundreds of miles and no moisture or atmospheric pressure, you have a good chance of seeing a spot of green the color of a Mr. Yuck sticker where the sun has just set. It’s brief, lasts maybe a second. Then it becomes someone else.

Evelyn Hampton is the author of We Were Eternal and Gigantic (Magic Helicopter Press) and Lost Body Projected (Mud Luscious Press). Her work has appeared in many places and is forthcoming in New York Tyrant. Visit her at lispservice.com.

Gene Kwak

2012-01-06T00:24:00.000-05:00

One In The Cylinder For An Occasion Such As This

Gun to my chest, I admit, okay, it wasn’t the wisest to mention, mid-coitus, to Bobbie Ann that her little pride of Yutan—Charley Rose—was starting to really shape out in the back end; that those gymnastics and tumbling classes had really firmed things up. This bad decision made worse because Charley Rose wasn’t my blood; had been pulled away from her own father some six years ago because he had turned just such an imaginable offense into action. Bobbie Ann screaming to me that, at fourteen, Charley was starting to get a fair shake on things, starting to untwine herself from the ugliness that life had bound her up in. I shook my head and nodded, naked, that yes, of course, it was a stupid thing to say, but how else was I, thick in the rear end of Charley’s own similarly-shaped mother, supposed to respond, in half thrust, when the words Charley Rose and gymnastics and butt came from the lips of Bobbie Ann? Only later did I realize that she was referring to Charley Rose’s hang ups uttered to her mere moments before I’d come in and pulled Bobbie Ann upstairs, not having seen her for three days from an out of town work stay, and tearing a rabid one into her bottom flesh pocket. I hear a hollow click, click, click and realize that either Bobbie Ann is great at proving a point, or she’s biding her time, trying to find the right one.

Gene Kwak is from Omaha, Nebraska.

Daniela Olszewska

2012-01-05T00:23:00.000-05:00

the trouble w/empty containers

before going to bed, you spray all yr friends w/glue made out of hooves + horns. they die quick but painful deaths. you spend the night dreaming that you’re snorkeling in the gulf of mexico + meremaids are giving you high-fives w/the bottoms of their mermaid tails.

you wake up to find that every previously empty container in your apartment is now sprouting a new friend: teacups, bags from the grocery store, the mopwater bucket, that plastic lining of what used to be a vanillacherry-scented candle, pill bottles leftover from last year’s breastbone surgery, some of late aunt susan’s striped + polka-dotted hatboxes, yr bellybutton (the first time in yr life you wish you were an outie…), a doll carriage, a cracked piggybank + a purple suede purse yr dad sent you on yr brother’s birthday (b/c, lately, he’s had a really hard time keeping up w/things like who was born when).

most of the new friend heads have mouths, the mouths whine that they are thirsty from the toes on up. you can’t see any toes. or even arms. the new friends w/mouths claim their toes are welded to the bottoms of the previously empty containers.

you spray these new friends w/what’s left of the glue made out of hooves + horns, but you don’t really have enough to do any damage. now the new friends are angry b/c they get that you’re trying to send them into an untimely but quick but painful grave. the new friends start listing all the problems w/yr body + yr home décor.

you feel the beginnings of a panic attack coming on. you curl up in the cabinet under the kitchen sink + call up yr stepmom, who is a psychic + a dentist (though these talents never get used simultaneously). yr stepmom says not to worry, that something similar happened to her back when she was in her mid-twenties, before she married yr dad. yr stepmom tells you to get out of the cabinet + pack up like you’re getting ready to run errands. she tells you to remain calm, to make steady eye contact w/ the new friends, but to refrain from speaking. she says try not to even listen to them, if you can help it. once you get out of the building, she says, get on the anonymous FBI tipline + tell them that there are terrorists residing at yr address.

this sounds like a reasonable plan, except for one small detail. you ask yr stepmom but what about the new friend growing in yr bellybutton. yr stepmom, who’s an outie, sighs + tells you that there are some problems best discussed between you + yr real mother. so you call up yr real mother, but she just gives you the same advice about making calm eye contact + tipping off the FBI.

Daniela Olszewska is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Citizen J (Artifice Books, forthcoming) and cloudfang : : cakedirt (Horse Less Press, forthcoming). She sits on Switchback Books' Board of Directors and serves as Associate Poetry Editor of H_NGM_N. Daniela is pursuing her MFA at the University of Alabama, where she teaches creative writing in conjunction with The Alabama Prison Arts & Education Project. Her piece arrives from the Gene Kwak wheel

Ally Harris

2012-01-04T00:15:00.002-05:00

THE IMPOSSIBLE LOVE OF THE HUMAN-HANDED SPARROW

But that face death has never proper greeted you, curious pet. The drooling heat, that
lampy branch that bocks the pane, literarily ad nauseam the beckoning finger closest
come. Wring still your wrists despite whatever what it does to you, that 50-pound canary
dead on your heart, botching efficiency reports in the spring balm that oils the window
in little handfuls. Still, the day, old diorama, child’s plaything, useless without the proper glass to see it under. So, to work: maintain a healthy lack of paranoia. Get along now but perhaps don’t always. Rearrange that rainbow wig of light into a halo.

Ally Harris is a recent graduate from the Iowa Writers Workshop and has poems at Diagram, Tarpaulin Sky, Sixth Finch, and the Agriculture Reader. A chapbook of poems is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.

Jon Papas

2012-01-03T00:14:00.000-05:00

Tuxedo Extreme Unction

“at the mall there was a séance / just kids no parents / then the sky filled with herons” – Kanye

We mash dribbly candles on the hoods of Kia Sportages,
lipstaining ankhs onto pastel mall-maps, throwing
cans of peppermint bark and snow globes at dome lights
to set the mood, to call ghosts among crashing glass and chocolate.

Yards of pretzel dough inscribe the circle. Universal remotes
and pipe wrenches clamping the entrance doors shut. We cut down
the Cajun-Asian sign from the food court and use the plastic saxophone
as spirit trumpet. Five-color Wii hand straps bind us together, the interior

of the circle covered in spilled black cherry Fribble. The manager
of Abercrombie and Fitch lies unmoving in the center, a catalog
covered in sweet pea bath gel stuffed in his mouth. The youngest
kneel in milkshake clapping muffin trays together, showering

the corpse with Build-A-Bear hearts. Us kids know the truth.
No one ever matures. They just taint and harden. Pure and hot
is what’s for dinner. Close up the mall with us inside so all
the parents draw close. We’ll have a sacrifice like you

read about. The skylight ceiling goes dark with wings.
Talons bottlecap across the roof, the younglings covered in milk
speaking heron with human tongues. The devil rides the ring-road
in Oakleys and a lime-green windbreaker. Ragtop. Mall-squatter.

This ends in new world, and a Le Baron crinkling beneath
a typhoon of fryer grease. The manager augured into a spaceship.
The toddlers shepherding the parents with lawnmowers,
golf carts, drinking Julius. The sixth-graders clamp their thighs

to their ankles with vise-grips, the third graders their hands
to the Macy’s jewelry counter. Barcodes sewing lips shut.
Open ourselves up and read out the pattern of truth. Smash their
cheekbones with PlayStation controllers. They will hear the truth:

we step cracks, we break backs.

Jon Papas is a poet living in Boston. His work has appeared in We Are Champion, OCHO, Willow Springs, and PANK.

Katie Jean Shinkle

2012-01-02T00:27:00.000-05:00

When Holding You Isn't Enough

Our Father has his head in his hands, he is weeping into his hands, he is rubbing his eyes with the back of his gloves riddled with fiber glass and wood splinters and mud mud mud and wiping his hands on the backs of his pants that we cannot tell are jeans until much later when our Mother has to cut them off of his legs because they are melted and singed and gristled on his body and he is laughing laughing laughing and weeping weeping, he is weeping when we enter the room. Mother is holding him like a baby, cradling his head on her chest like a frothy infant, they are a uroboros together, wedded in weeping and laughing, they are both weeping and both laughing and speaking softly and Father is filled with soot and ash and smoke and mud and dirt and stink and now Mother’s dress is filled with soot and ash and smoke and mud and dirt and stink and Father’s hair is standing up on end and matted and there is a smell of burnt hair on everything, burnt wood on everything, burnt garbage, sweet like animal flesh, on everything everything. He is yelling now, he is yelling and kicking the blankets on the bed and the sheets are getting dirty and the comforters are dirty and all of the blankets and he is kicking the blankets off the bed and he is soiling every surface, the only clean part of his person are his eyes where he was wearing goggles that could not withstand heat as evidenced by the warp in the middle of them. We are told to go away and to come back and to go away and to get back here by our Father and we shut the bedroom door and take turns putting on the goggles and making faces in the bathroom mirrors, faces with one side completely black, fried, bubbled, uneven, sunken in and shattered.

Katie Jean Shinkle is Managing Editor of Del Sol Press, Assistant Poetry Editor for DIAGRAM and current Nonfiction Editor of Black Warrior Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Staccato Fiction, dislocate and BlazeVOX, among others.

Stephanie Barber

2011-12-30T11:52:00.003-05:00

some end of the year haiku for everyday genius

the end of the year
reminiscent of its start
swollen with the words

the end, here with words--
all worded up like the start
of this year, 'member?

this day reminds me
of a day just like this day
one year earlier

this last day last year
right here on the internet
also held in words

the words first and last
like worlds still undiscovered
waiting together

long thin greasy hair
surrendered mortality
the very last day

let's just admit it
sometimes negativity
is just the best choice

underwater dive
like in the glassiest springs'
tunnel to new year

sunshine city beach
with parades for joy and hope
in the coming year

Stephanie Barber recommends Jeju Island.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Adam Robinson

2011-12-29T11:46:00.001-05:00

Trying to Read a Poem

I'm trying to read a poem by a particular poet. Any poem of his will do, but I can't remember who it is. Here's what I know about him:

He's male. I think he's British. I think there is an “A” in his name, though maybe not the first letter. I read a poem by him once, it had perhaps three stanzas, and I liked it. Perhaps he is from the late 19th century.

I'm pretty sure he isn't A.E. Housman, although I often confuse Housman with almost everyone. I thought his “When I was one and twenty” poem was by Hardy. I like that poem in spite of the fact that it makes fun of youthful conviction, which is a mean thing to do. Kids have to make their own mistakes, even in matters of love.

And anyway, how old was Housman when he wrote it? No more than 37, which is when he self-publishing it in his book, A Shropshire Lad.

Self-published! See, the manuscript was rejected several times. This I know from Wikipedia, where I also learned that the book's success is due in part to musicians who set melody to the words.

But I cannot think of a way to effectively Google, “Who is that poet I'm thinking of,” so instead what I'll do is wander attentively through the writers who spring to mind, and perhaps by the end of such mindfulness I'll connect to the one who is on the tip of my tongue.

Inexplicably, I can never remember the actor who plays in The Prince of Tides, Nick Nolte. It isn't that I confuse him with Gary Busey; that's dumb. And I have a very good knack for remembering the names of celebrities. And I like Nick Nolte and admire him as a great actor. But that I always flounder when mentioning him is a true thing.

This is not a problem that I typically have with this poet. It's only been a couple days that I can't remember his name. Prior to that, though, I may never have tried.

I can't remember why I read that poem of his. Perhaps it was for a class, though I doubt it. My poetry education is bad. It is regrettable. In the course of earning my MFA, I purchased fewer than ten books of poems for my classes. One of the books was an uninspired anthology. Most of the poems were American, light verse. One of the books was about the various forms available, with explication and examples. One was Robert Pinsky's The Sounds of Poetry.

The most ambitious syllabus, for a class I ended up accidentally not registered for, included collections by Anna Swir, Yusef Komunyakaa, and a couple others I can't remember. I have them on my shelf but I have not read them. I've read that Plath poem, “Daddy,” like four or five times. “You do not do you do not do,” but I don‟t really like it. I only say this to show what my poetry education is like: we never once read it in school, anywhere.

There are four of us lined up at our desks at work. The Chinese guy is watching soccer on the Internet. The guy who once offered (in a friendly way) to fellate me at a happy hour is reading a copy of The American Organist, which is in fact a glossy magazine. The guy who's dog just came down with Hodgkins Lymphoma is working diligently. I'm wearing my friend's pants and trying to think of a poet. These days, working diligently consists of sliding a mouse around on a small pad.

Efficiency means you barely move your hands as you type. I have grown distracted, so I Googled “poetics.” Aristotle is not who I am trying to remember, but it is fun to let the Internet think for you. I do it all the time.

I tried to read “Daddy” again. Couldn't. Where will I stop next on this adventure? Might as well look in on Hardy, as I confused him with whom I confuse who it is I'm trying to think.

“The Darkling Thrush” includes the line “In blast-beruffled plume,” which wholly justifies my day. But the poem doesn't smack of this day, June 29, 2010. It's hot outside, and sunny. Maybe the guy I'm trying to remember is very Catholic. I'm tempted, as I throw words on other words, to scour the contents table of some Norton Anthology, but it is too soon, too soon.

Yesterday I copied into a notebook that hammock poem by James Wright. The one where he describes his surroundings with lines like, “The droppings of last year's horses/Blaze up into golden stones” and concludes, “I have wasted my life.” It is extraordinary.

Perhaps now I will try to find out what Harold Bloom thinks about that trope. Nothing, apparently. At least, not from my cursory research. However, in Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds 9 (sheesh), Bloom does reference Wright's statement that Fernando Pessoa is “the true heir of 'our father Walt Whitman',” though it isn't clear if Bloom is referencing Wright's statement in terms of Whitman or Pessoa.

And at any rate, who is William Duffy—aside from the guy who owned the farm that brought James Wright to such crisis? I know his name. It's right there in the title of the poem, which, okay, is “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, MN.”

It's cool when poetry things happen in the American Midwest, as opposed to New England. But probably, after New England, then San Francisco, the middle states are the US's most poetry-concerned. William Duffy, it turns out, was a pretty awesome dude that got chastised for mentioning prostitution to his middle school students, and ran a poetry magazine with Robert Bly called The Fifties. He wrote rejection letters that would make Lee Klein, the Eyeshot editor proud, saying things like, “Your poems remind me of false teeth.” I got this from a website with the URL, RobertBly.com, and if you care about poetry or friendship, you'll look it up right away.

In the Sewanee Review, James Wright's first book was compared to Keats, and Wright decided then to quit writing poetry. He didn't though.

Which reminds me of that chestnut from Rilke about a poet being a person who must write. I've always hated that. Flannery O'Connor said a writer is a person who can write, and that makes more sense to me.

I am no closer to remembering the name of the poet whom I want to read now. This net is too wide, perhaps, so I'm resigned to using “British poet” as my search term. He is not there. He is not Blake or Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth. He is not Rosetti, though I ought to read her. Why not? Her name is Christina Georgina Rosetti, she must be good.

I like her. I like how those people back then used to make points. I mean, arguments. There are four stanzas in “I watched a rosebud.” In the first, the speaker watches a rosebud bloom. In the second she watches a bird's nest with anticipation, but the birds orphan the eggs and they don't hatch. In the third, the conned speaker breaks the branch and nest from the tree, but in the fourth stanza she feels bad and reflects “what if God,/Who waited for thy fruits in vain,/Should also take the rod?”

Rosetti factors in Nicholson Baker's fantastic novel, The Anthologist, but my elusive poet doesn't come up once. That is odd, because Paul Chowder, the protagonist, prizes rhyme most highly, and this poet has complicated rhymes all over. Slant rhyme and end rhyme and all that.

My friend Joe just emailed me a new version of the song, “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” this one by The Dirty Projectors. I emailed him back about what I was doing, and that I was getting frustrated. I've been Googling all willy-nilly for a while but without result—except to learn that Bruce Springsteen may be the greatest Catholic poet.

Joe named my poet in two guesses, though. At first he said Browning. I've not read Browning, at least not that I can recall. Or, in fact, I recall reading Browning as an undergraduate student, but it would be impossible for me to name one of his or her poems.

How exciting, though, to have the mystery solved, and to be rewarded that all my clues were accurate. And how great to have a friend to help in the chase.

That, I think, is the best part. Poetry ought to happen with friends, and all of these, they are my friends.

Adam Robinson recommends this performance by Meredith Monk and Theo Bleckmann.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Melissa Broder

2011-12-28T06:05:00.002-05:00

Death Letter

I was a blues singer and then I died, wait
that isn't true I was never a singer.
I only know the art of the shadowside
because I am dead. The blues don’t just burst
from a river; they tunnel slowly out
of head hells. You need to have a big hurt
before you sing the insides of a melon.

A spirit is said to choose its muscles
and I picked mine down to the eyes. No one
would pin me for a tambourine; I never shook
in waking hands. I won't be a singer
in my next life either, I will only
feather my hair. A foxhole prayer
for second lives is let there be no songs.

Melissa Broder recommends this video of GG Allin on Geraldo in 1992. RIP GG.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

DeWitt Brinson

2011-12-27T00:35:00.003-05:00

Poetry Is Dead

Abraham Lincoln, the poem, set the slaves free and did that really well. George Washington, also a poem, set America free from the wicky King of England, King Fancy-pants. Saint George and Mister Lincoln were nice to each other and never used swear words. Because they were poems, they are both now dead.

People on the road to death are on the path of poetry. Gandhi is an important dead poem. He freed the Indians and South Africans from the King of England, King Fancy-pants Jr. He knew he’d be a poem and wrapped himself in a sheet of paper from the get-go. He was starving, a lot.

See, poetry is so freeing. Poetry is the opposite of kings and their royal family. Poetry is a dead thing.

One day Desmond Tutu will be a great poem because he freed South Africans from Apartheid. Obama will be the first Black Mr. President poem. Obama freed us from having only white presidents but try as he might, he could not free us from having only male presidents--he left that for some other poem. Look in the mirror, is that poem you?

Albert Einstein won a poetry prize for having the best hair. Einstein is already a poem but he’s not a well understood one. Most poems are actually not well understood.

It doesn’t matter if their poem is understood. People don’t matter as much after they are dead but they mean more.

It is important to know that poetry is dead. It is even more important to know it is dying.

Somewhere out there is a new poem dying.

Look in the mirror, is that you?

DeWitt Brinson demands you read "Kindergarten pupils tell us how to cook a turkey" by he kindergarten students in the classes of Miss Briskey and Mrs. Geise from The Daily Item. Miss Briskey and Mrs. Geise are teaching the poetry movement of 2025.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Camilo Roldan

2011-12-26T10:20:00.001-05:00

Camilo Roldan recommends this video by Brandon Downing.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Joseph Young

2011-12-23T00:11:00.012-05:00

[click image to enlarge]

Joseph Young recommends "Thinning Carrots" by Peter Nadin.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Annie Guthrie

2011-12-22T00:53:00.002-05:00

I want my face on top your face
so I can cry on it.

disillusioned with puppeteering
I climb inside your body

which you hold like a theory,
and try the numbers.

to find the estrangement counterfeit:
see mine eyeball greasing yours

Annie Guthrie recommends Monica Mody on realpoetik.com, who she found out
about on montevidayo.com, which is how she found out about this video.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Heather McShane

2011-12-21T00:04:00.001-05:00

G: Volume 8: Page 386

“The Gregorian calendar interferes with laissez faire,” claimed Alan Greenspan. He theorized the establishment of this calendar, with its extra day in February every four years, increased the likelihood greeting card sales would exceed expected growth every fourth year, thereby giving a false impression of Greenpeace’s importance in the world, given that Greenpeace enticed potential member-contributors by sending them blank greeting cards and asking for charity money in return. Greenspan said, “All businesses use Gregorian calendar dates,” adding, “the government establishes these dates, and the extra day every fourth year is the ultimate government interference in economic affairs.”

Images, all X-ed out, of Greenpeace greeting cards flashed large behind Greenspan as he presented. A big, black X across a jumping whale, belly exposed. A big, black X across a clapping seal. Greenspan said, “There are businesses that could use that extra day in February every fourth year, but as it is, we can’t change history and, for example, make George Washington a Greek god. We need statues of real heroes. We should look to Greensboro. Greensboro, North Carolina, manufacturing and petroleum marketing center, named after American Revolutionary War officer Nathanael Greene. Greensboro. You may ask yourself: What about the extra 26 seconds an average Gregorian year in Greensboro? Well, the people of Greensboro don’t have their heads in the clouds. Greensboro. Insurance, electronics, furniture, textiles, all things that Americans need.” Greenspan paused for effect as an X-ed-out school of fish swam on the wall behind him.

“Remember the 1990’s? Economic expansion? Of course, this was after the explosion of Greenpeace’s ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985. Do any of you remember that? How much influence do you think I possibly had on anything?” An X-ed-out beach with a sunset.

Heather McShane recommends "When He Holds Out His Hands, Bees Stream from His Fingertips" at ucity review.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

xTx

2011-12-20T00:57:00.001-05:00

Things You Find on a Train

It’s a black man’s birthday. No, I did not give him head. It’s not like that. Sure, we rode the subway. Yeah, we talked. I ate a bag of Fritos, the kind you steal from a kid’s lunch bag. He had a piece of chicken, rotisserie. Don’t get all racist. He had got it from this other friend of ours we’d left back on the 27th St. platform who had been practically gnawing on the carcass groaning about how he couldn’t finish the thing and ‘just please take it’ and handed my friend the legthigh he’d cavemanned off with a grunt. When my friend took the meat the guy said, “Happy birthday, Kemosabe!” I asked, “What the fuck is a ‘Kemosabe’?” and that’s when the train came and I didn’t get an answer, just a shaking head full of chewing chicken corpse grease smile.

The black man with the birthday. Well, we rode that train with our food. Lamenting lack of drink. He wiped his hands on the bell bottoms of my jeans. Then wiped his face. We liked making people look at us. His birthday sounding behind everything: a jangly song. Lots of bell sizes, lots of tripping and falling clowns. I did not think about anything underneath his clothes but felt it coming close, the place in me that wants that.

The train sped. Filled.

He makes me laugh, the black birthday man.

I took some pictures of him with my cell phone. I have this app where I can add shit to the pictures: mustaches, animated sparkles, hearts, animal snouts, etc. I took one of his pictures so handsome and ruined it with a pointed birthday hat. When I showed it to him he guffawed so loudly and abruptly it scared the lady across from us. That’s when I broke. We were so high from our together, the birthday, the subway food, phone apps, our salt mouths, the clackety-clack of the train. From the way he was working his hands I could tell he was wanting to drown me. Not like that. Don’t take it that way. You need to know him first. I understood and head-butted him to bleeding. Matching unicorn bruises gashed Y-shaped cracks. Only one person stepped away then. The car was crowded. Nobody wanted to upset the solid of the space. Everyone was afraid to lose. But not us. We had nothing to.

When our stop came, the black man, his birthday a vein between us, and I, lifted our riot from the seats. Always one to upstage, I chanted a yell, “Kemo-sabe! Kemo-sabe! Kemo-sabe!” and he looked at me as if he were seeing stars for the first time. I kept it up even when “Shut up stupid bitch!’ even when, “Fuckin’ crazy ass shit!” even when he “Stop! I’m gonna piss myself!” because his laughing was so warm and long and I kept wanting it to come. I knew love right then. And, maybe I did give him head later. Maybe that was inside a package with a big bow and bright wrapping. Maybe that ride broke something that had been waiting. The pieces of it scattering on the filthy metal floor, me there on hands and knees picking them up, too important to lose.

xTx recommends "Once, We Were (Not) Troy Davis And Then We Were Something Else" by Roxane Gay over at The Rumpus.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Elizabeth Glass

2011-12-19T00:50:00.001-05:00

Powerful Things Can Happen in Driveways

My dad proposed to my mom in her driveway. My sister lost her virginity in a driveway. And I, well, I lost something else in mine.

It was a sunny afternoon—perfect weather. The kind songs are written about. A happy blue sky, puffy white clouds, low humidity, temperature hitting the 70’s for the first time of the year. Everyone was outside. Kids squealed and played. Teenagers walked, laughed, and listening to iPods. Old people sat on porches, smiling and calling to one another across streets and alleyways.

I had my car on lifts. I had never worked on my car before, but before my buddy Dave shipped out to Iraq, he showed me how to change my oil. I was anxious to try it. It had been a nasty winter, but today was the day: My first solo oil change.

I called some friends, and a couple of Dave’s buddies, to come over that evening for celebratory beer to toast my new success as an oil changer.

I was still under the car when Victor arrived. Victor Woo, a big hulk of a guy, Dave’s best friend. I heard him coming; he was hollering heydy and all the old people and kids.

I tried to hurry once I heard Victor, so that I’d be done by the time he got there, but I was still under the car, tightening that last bolt to the oil pan, when he walked up the driveway.

“What’cha doin’, girly?” He belly laughed then slammed his arm on the car.

Victor was built like a sumo wrestler, and when his arm hit the car, the car shifted and started slowly coming off the lifts. He didn’t realize. I didn’t, either. But then, little by little, the car eased down on me and in spite of all in the neighborhood stopping what they were doing and coming to Victor’s cries, it happened.

I could hear the kids crying. The parents and old people came over to help. The teenagers even took out their earbuds. Everyone tried to lift the car off of me instead of pull me out from under it until it was too late and I was pinned. And then my life seeped out of me as the car pushed further onto my lungs.

And then I was gone.

But I also wasn’t. I didn’t do anything particularly good in life, so I can’t “go on to the light.” But I didn’t do anything bad, either, so no hellfire and damnation. So I hang around my driveway.

It’s interesting to see, over the years, what has happened in it. A woman told her husband she was pregnant. Years later, that baby told his fiancé he was enlisting. Lots of scraped knees, some first steps, bold kisses, and pivotal conversations in between, and since.

And one day I’ll do something either so good I’ll go on one way or so bad that I’ll go another. In the meantime I just wait. And watch.

Elizabeth Glass recommends Harry Crews on Writing Part 1 on YouTube.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Keith Nathan Brown

2011-12-16T00:48:00.001-05:00

Adjacent

GO HOME! yelled the jesuit priest over the jukebox as she sprawled
across the pool table. While the failed poet on the barstool told of the

time an army of troubador ants came with a summons. And—at the
standoff—filled with rage and lament she screamed, and screamed on
for the chardonnay!

scream at the door
oh what a wailing

night hours fading, the ceiling becoming a darker mirror of
the music and a screeching
soprano that

won’t stop or someone will you please tie a rope across her ordinary
treatise of welcome. As with all of us: Welcome. Ideas, sifting on the
desk, discarded limbs and disembodied entities wait for a donor from the
waiting list, to adopt from jars of volatile radiance along the cryptic rack
of emotions while screaming—oh scream on—Scream for chardonnay!
kick in the door, oh kick Kick In

apparently, she is not concerned for the door

The poor door Give her the chardonnay It is of no use to you Your knobs
of brass and deadbolt are no match for this vapor on the rack, waiting to be
released like a storm into skin A balloon of skin inflating to the point of—
oh yes Oh Yes—Scream on for the chardonnay!

Ah, strange life enflamed
It is bizarre to have a body

To be a body To be in bed To be not asleep

she ... a fretted instrument of unstrung emotions;
and a sick piano-tuner he is
to want her love

she, so undesirable
he, so desiring

on the space, on top of our space: Your face, on the pillow drunk and
laughing at the noise upstairs, when you said,

‘It is beautiful, isn’t it? Our wants and our needs’

Your breath reeked of cigarettes. I turned and moaned into your

armpit, ‘Sleep . . . I need to sleep,’ and you turned without speaking but the
reply came pink as a salmon.

Keith Nathan Brown recommends "Free Architecture" by B. N. Landry at >kill author.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Sarah Levine

2011-12-15T00:22:00.001-05:00

Herman at the Circus

I fantasize about setting mother’s hair on fire.
At the circus, in summer when the air is sweet,
peanut shells in pocket, watching the elephant
flick flies off her ears. Aprons in wind.

She creates a great wind just by breathing.
Gentle soldier with thoughts of the sea and
how it doesn’t matter like kissing someone when they’re asleep.

I wish I could take it back.
But awe is too big for my body and no one seems to notice
for somewhere a child is being shot from a cannon
and a field mouse is caught in the teeth of the three legged mutt.

Sarah Levine recommends "Jean Adler" by Rachel Glaser at Barrelhouse Online.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Lori D'Angelo

2011-12-14T00:41:00.002-05:00

Buried Treasure

Clive Wilkins was picking his nose when he found a diamond in his left nostril. It even came with a tag attached.

The tag said: Diamond in the Rough.

He took the diamond, wrapped it up, and gave it to Melody Owens, the woman he had left for someone better. The better woman had since left him.

Melody took one look at the diamond, then him, said, “Oh, no, I couldn’t take this.”

She gave it back to him, and it returned to being just a wad of snot—cold and slimy in his disappointed hand.

Lori D'Angelo recommends "The Smoker" by David Schickler in The New Yorker. Lori blogs about stories she likes at http://readwritethinkdiscover.blogspot.com/

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Hiroshi Shinoda

2011-12-13T00:33:00.007-05:00

HaHa

That city in Africa
where everyone started laughing
one by one
and they couldn’t stop
no one could stop laughing
even to eat or drink
or breathe
I read about it
and dreamt it last night
they couldn’t eat or drink or breathe
and they couldn’t stop laughing
one by one
that city in Africa
died
and the silence
came in the night
and swallowed it up
that city in Africa
when the laughing stopped
everyone was gone
one by one
but in the dream all I could think
-- the dream last night --
was
where?

Hiroshi Shinoda recommends "How to Eat an Oriole" by Anderson Holderness at>kill author.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Andrew Worthington

2011-12-12T00:17:00.004-05:00

harry potter as a sex guide

i may have used the harry potter book series as a sex guide

harry was often brooding throughout the books
he had issues such as mortality and the fate of the universe that were worrying
him
but i wonder if his lack of sexual excursion may have also been a large reason
for his brooding

an asshole killed his mother and left a mark on his forehead immediately
thereafter

i read the more romantic sections in "goblet of fire" over and over again
he even had a kind of hot date to the yule ball
but he just broods the whole time about cho chang
and then he kind of kills her boyfriend
or at least he feels responsible for his death

he is always too busy to bother

and the end of the series he kills voldemort
after coming back from the dead

and then it jumps forward 19 years
and he must have had sex because he has kids
and he probably has a nice house
and a yard
and he takes care of it
maybe even with muggle landscaping equipment
and ginny has a garden
and maybe even takes care of it with muggle landscaping equipment
but they might just use magic for all of the yard work

Andrew Worthington recommends Tim Peter's "My Voluptuous Delusion" at The Rumpus.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Summer Robinson

2011-12-09T00:33:00.003-05:00

The Oranges

I knew something was wrong when the pregnant woman from work wanted to eat dried oranges out of a potpourri bowl. We circled her in the break room, leaning over the speckled counters and doing our best.

It was lunchtime. A few girls from accounting occupied the table nearby. They all wore blue cardigans and with the tips of their pink fingers played little games with their pearled ear lobes.

The boys from legal staggered in and out.

We were admin. We worked for execs.

And now the leanest among us was expecting her first child and cupping a bowl of potpourri like two handfuls of cold sink water.

"I don't see why not," answered one of us.

"It's just oranges," said another.

"It'll make you sick," said Craig, who was opening the fridge.

"It's just oranges," the pregnant woman repeated as if she'd thought of it herself.

Craig, who we called "The Salesman" even though he was an attorney, pried a can of Red Bull loose from his pack on the private shelf. We called him "The Salesman" because of the way his hair formed a smooth weft on top of his head and then curled into bunches at the nape of his neck, and because the suits he wore appeared flammable, elastic, underspent.

That's not to say I didn't go home with him. We all did.

Craig set his energy drink on the counter the way you might throw half a muffin into a crowd of pigeons on the street. We scattered, not trying very hard, while Craig eased the decorative air freshener from the pregnant woman's grip.

"It's got chemicals," he warned her. But she would not relent.

By the time of her first sonogram, she kept a dish of autumn spice as a snack on her desk. Craig left protein shakes and bottles of Smart Water, which she never drank. Craig paged the pregnant woman sometimes twice a day with small requests. He used officewide intercom. She always went.

I began to fear for her hostage as the cravings became more numerous and more intense.

At lunch, she scooped religious candles from their narrow jars before sucking clean the long wicks. The faces of Saint Elena, Saint Therese, and The Virgin of Guadalupe piled up in her recycling bin.

It was after Craig repainted his office from taupe to robins egg that I found her chewing on a tack.

The day the pregnant woman's husband came to visit, Craig carried around a miniature football for effect.

In the days that followed, he paged the pregnant woman not over intercom, but with a bullhorn instead. He later installed surgical stirrups on one end of his desk.

Eventually, Craig was dismissed and when he left, the pregnant woman, moments from deploying an emergency fire extinguisher into her mouth, leapt entirely into the cardboard box he was using to haul out the paper weights and silver pendulums and wood frame degrees laywers decorate their lives with. The pregnant woman looked enormous in the box and -- like the man reeling beneath her -- happy again.

Summer Robinson recommends "Running" by Michael Kimball at Housefire.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Christopher Cheney

2011-12-08T00:59:00.006-05:00

Love Poem

The nightgown didn’t become translucent until the fifties.

My mother was born in the fifties. The first nightgowns

we see are usually our mothers. When I was born

my mother was told I was dead. Sometimes when

I’m touching a nightgown I think what if I were dead

this entire time, and death was getting up early

kissing my fiancée and shooting hoops in the park.

I think death is taken too seriously. Real ghosts

aren’t translucent. Real death is a private school

in Connecticut where we are all the headmaster’s sons.

Where we cut class and get stoned in the woods.

The forest is translucent when the moon is above it.

I guess, the forest can be a real badass sometimes.

Like when it swallows a man and wears him like a babydoll.

To honor something that’s not there. To bed with it all.

Also to be in a nightgown completely alone in Amherst,

Massachusetts. Now that’s translucence. That’s also love,

Or at least what’s left for us.

Christopher Cheney suggests "Untitled Poem" by C.S Ward appearing in Flying Object's "It's My Decision" series.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Beau Golwitzer

2011-12-07T00:11:00.002-05:00

Someone Put the Tank Upside Down

Someone put the tank upside down. The tank was put in the town’s square to commemorate veterans of the first war, or perhaps it was the second. There was a plaque that went up on a wall next to the tank which listed which war the tank was to be a commemoration of, but a long time ago someone stole the plaque. It’s hanging on someone’s living room wall now, as we speak, or maybe someone’s using it as a platter to serve food upon. In other words, someone out there, the thief of the plaque, is using the plaque in a way not respectful. And now the tank has been turned upside down. Perhaps it is the same person, although that seems unlikely. No one can remember which war the tank is supposed to commemorate and neither can anyone rememberhow long ago the plaque was stolen. The color of the plaque is also long forgotten. The tank is tan and it is upside down, laid on its long unused turret. The tank, upside down, loses all of its power, both real and commemorative. The tank, upside down, elicits only pathos. But who among the people in the town might have turned the tank over? No one in this town owns the kind of machine, we’re talking about a crane here, more or less, that might be able to turn the tank back to its proper side. Cranes are mostly long gone too. It has been a long time since anything was built. And it’s unlikely that some piece of strong wind was responsible for turning the tank over onto its long unused turret, and it is unlikely that a giant did it as well. It is equally if not more unlikely that a rival tank flipped the tank onto its back. Every time I walk by the tank I want to reach out and turn it back over, but I don’t have the strength. I have so little strength that barely past the tank I have to collapse onto the ground and fall asleep. Now we fight wars with unmanned vehicles. Someone in a desert far away from where the bombs are dropped directs the plane from his or her console. This is the kind of time we are in. How will we ever commemorate such activities? The soldiers won’t be soldiers anymore and they won’t come from any place in particular. We’ll hold silent parades during which down our Main Street will float these menacing, unmanned craft, menacing due to the lack of people driving it. But of more concern to me should be this tank which has been flung over. It seems only a redeeming sort of storm might fix what’s gone wrong here.

Beau Golwitzer recommends the rants of Eddie Pepitone, to be found at eddiepepitone.com.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Amy Butcher

2011-12-06T00:54:00.001-05:00

The Subtle Way

The girl had an earwig problem. The bugs slipped underneath her apartment door while she slept, and when she got up in the night, she heard first one crunch and then another. The bugs made her queasy—their pointed antennas and disjointed bodies. So she asked him, not knowing who else to ask, to help get rid of them.

“I read about this trap,” she said, because she had—this trap that involved a hollowed broom handle and a bottle filled with soapy water. The idea of the trap was this: the nocturnal bugs would crawl into the handle at night, favoring dark and shallow places, and when she woke she would tip it upright and the bugs would fall into the water. They would die there, just like that.

“I’ll make it for you,” he said. It was July and the town was hot. Anything to do seemed like something.

Together they walked to the hardware store. Inside, he knew exactly which aisle to go to. He went there and stood touching things for a while, picking up first one cap and then another.

“We need something to jimmy the bottle and pole together,” he said.

He decided on one—a small, rounded piece of plastic—then picked up a hollowed pipe and walked to the counter. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said, and he took a Coke from the chilled refrigerator beside the register. “I’ll get this, and I’ll drink it, and then we can rinse it out and fill it with soapy water.”

It was his efficiency she liked—the subtle way in which everything he did was with purpose. He made more sense when he did things than anyone she’d ever known. She was not this type of person—she made risotto with white wine and peas, and bought organic tomatoes, and owned not one but two iPods: one for running and one for general use.

Still, there was something about him, and back in her apartment as he fastened the plastic nub to the pole and finished the contents of the soda bottle, rinsing it out carefully before screwing it on, she thought this again. She watched the way his hands moved, slow and with purpose.

“There,” he said, and stood back to admire his work. “In the morning, you’ll have to tip it. You’ll have to grab it quick and tip it. Can you do that?”

“I can do that,” she said, because the bugs didn’t mean a thing anymore—they moved fast but they were small, and she could get rid of them, she would get rid of them, and she would show them both just how simple things could be.

Amy Butcher recommends "Virga" by Deanna Benjamin at Brevity.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Glenn Shaheen

2011-12-05T08:16:00.004-05:00

Women Injured in Combat

All flags up slowly poles who knows
the planes break flattened a horizon or two
there there are ends or non ends or reboots
plain airs no jets do speak a voyage to land
and countries where language is a roiling market
audio do birds fell by thunder other bang
mother are we drinked on striped starts
too no ends bruised arms bruised backs to
basics picking out or up or picking nickels
iron when shouted come from below street
only look we through window cops true ice
cream men how fire fighters netted in safety
so beddings music trust a certain volume
then become a tactic grocery speakers or
inexpensive applestuffs mistrust in public
hum make believe not deeply thought them
and we or we’re nobody ready to maim irons
nickels calciums bonely flashed music from
speakers made of paper a medal in closet
metals closely flags do illuminate at night
music a button away pull one does go through

Glenn Shaheen recommends "An Editors' Slush-Pile Meeting at the Backdoor Review" by Laurie Ann Cedilnik at The Rumpus.

Meghan Lamb

2011-12-02T00:02:00.003-05:00

Phillip Glass

I feel like I’m forgetting who I am
I fell in the tub and I couldn’t get out for an hour

I fell and I saw my life flashing before me
My life interpreted through bits of light and blurs of blue

And distorted wind chimes and I couldn’t get out of the tub
Til I recalled the name of that Einstein Beach man

It is not Phillip Glass
It is certainly not Robert Altman

It is glassy though
Fragments of memory glinting around me

I count my fingers and I count the flecks of dirt beneath them
And I try to count the microscopic things I cannot see

Meghan Lamb recommends Very Beautiful Women, an eBook from Pangur Ban Party.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Megan Kaminski

2011-12-01T00:02:00.001-05:00

3 Poems

Dear tourniquet, dear overbite

why not sit still for a moment and quiet too
these are places to wait inside
nails scratching under wardrobes
long hairs in sinks shadows cabinets
toweled under beds not hotels just places
teeth sink into long arms linger before
touching the switch
add another notch to the weathered chaise
leave some for the boneman the baker

***

Leave matches on the counter
spread hands wide across. We’ll make
due for the time on time
plus half, laundering sentences
country accents for consumption.
Lay your coat on the sofa;
there’s more time for leisure
than you imagine. The fire burns
slowly allows for shadows,
recollections smoked onto skin.

***

Dear night, dear misplaced images
blanketed silver singed crystalline
cold I gather icicles sew flack jackets
encase late night wonderings
parks shadowed sharply street-lit
dear avenue if I follow floor me
carry me and my lost children
wordspent gangrened unburied

Megan Kaminski recommends Issue 5 by the Dusie Kollektiv.

(For December at Everyday Genius, contributors were asked to recommend something elsewhere on the Internet.)

Jack Boettcher

2011-11-30T00:49:00.001-05:00

from Theatre-State: The Minister of Corporate and Regional Diplomacies and The Minister of Diminishing Public Expectations

Wrought-iron grillwork locked down the vaulted windows spaced across the pastel-pink façade of the wall outside Stone’s recently renovated office. Spermaceti wax candles—perhaps holdovers from Stone’s maritime period—burned in each window, a throb of weak flame over the vines spilling off the sill. Janus greeted his new friend The Minister of Corporate in the doorway of Stone’s office.

“What does he want with you, Janus?” the Minister said.

“It has to do with my work. He wants me to prove certain things that are still shadowy, life and death sort of things. Principal Stone has high expectations and I am learning how to deal with that.”

“You said it,” said the Minister. “He wants me to help him solve the problem of time. He keeps talking about some Mayan mumbo jumbo.”

“Yes, he certainly has a Mayan fetish of some sort,” Janus agreed. “Do you know if the Maya were ever active in what’s now Costa Sita?”

“I don’t know. That’s a good one. Well, good luck. Oh, and Janus?”

“Yes?”

“It’s about Katydid. Do you think she likes me? I’d like to be her road manager. Magnetic I mean.”

“I’m not sure,” Janus said. “I find it difficult to understand Katydid. I can’t seem to get the facts on her. As for whom Katydid fancies, I’m not sure. But I do know that several of The Crudes are said to be competing for her admiration, and that some old-style dueling is involved, with pellet guns.”

“Well, I’m not scared of any Crudes.”

“They are not to be feared. Just use your wits and avoid sudden encounters. I hear they chew qat and can become unpredictable and aggressive.”

“Well, thanks for talking to Katydid for me. I really appreciate this, Janus.”

“I didn’t say—” Janus was saying, but the Minister had shuffled back into the melee of the noonday hallways.

The office had widened, broadened, and doubled in size, and it was now a sunny open-air courtyard bound by a colonnade of skinny vine-spiraled pilasters. Scrawny roosters pecked at inedibles mistaken for feed around a sputtering hacienda fountain, atop which whipped the olive-colored, red-starred Costa Sitan flag. The flag of a much older regime. Water grass thrived in the basin; tropic breezes sidled through. Old men in military regalia loafed on the iron benches, reading eroding Spanish newspapers. Janus couldn’t read the dates. Physical Stone sat at his desk at the far end of the courtyard, brushing a set of magnets. Hologrammatic Stone studied the moisture-warped bookshelves of the library on the wall behind the colonnade, the shelves crowded with yellowed hand maps of the central jungle and old oversized typewritten manuals on kleptocratics, the monopolization of infrastructural support sectors, and how to train your mercenaries for effective nocturnal mobilization of a capital in the hands of state protectionists, as well as one or two silk-bound books of famous dreams recorded by Costa Sitan figureheads through the ages—minor prophesies and such.

“Who are these men, sir?” Janus said.

“Deposed generals from former, and let’s say less popular, Costa Sitan regimes,” Stone said. “They want nothing from you, and only a little sanctuary and companionship from me, in exchange for which they’re providing invaluable consultation to your very own Ms. Denton, TX as she plans your Homeroom lesson.”

“Yessir.”

“Janus, Katydid?”

“Sir, what?”

“No rush. Can’t rush love. Just remember the advantages a trainable heir can give to the scientist, who must toil upon this earth at the slothful pace of methodologies, noting futile quanta as the limits of his mortality approach at ever more hurtling speeds of perception. Such an heir would have your brains, Janus, and Katydid’s—should you choose to marry and share your lives and genetics—Katydid’s chutzpah.”

Janus scribbled Stone’s advice regarding heirs in the margins of his notecards. Only the sound of Janus’ frenzied scribbling and the long, fluid exhalations of cigar smoke from the ex-generals interposed upon the pauses between Stone’s questions and instructions. Janus heard the occasional shuffle of a rooster or the rustling of a newspaper reporting from some brutal regime now reduced to a general’s nostalgia, then the faintest patter of the hacienda fountain through the choke bloom of the grasses.

Jack Boettcher is the author of Theater-State (Blue Square Press, 2011).

Jamie Iredell

2011-11-29T00:01:00.000-05:00

JUAN RODRIGUEZ CABRILLO AND MY SEXLIFE: AN ESSAY

The Kumeyaay Indians of northern Baja and Southern Alta California—in the area of San Diego Bay—first encountered Europeans on September 28, 1542. Most of the natives ran away, frightened (smart?), at the sight of the strange people and their boat. Those who remained intoned through signs that news had come to the coast from inland that other men like the Spaniards who landed by sea had already reached them. When Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s men remained onshore for fishing, within time the Kumeyaay began shooting arrows at the intruders.

In Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s diary, he writes that he landed on the California coast in the Santa Barbara Channel and met Pimungan Indians. A señora, chieftain of many pueblos in the Pimungan’s matriarchal culture, stayed aboard Cabrillo’s ship for three nights. Through signs, the Spaniards learned from her that in the land’s interior there were many more pueblos and much maize. The native woman had heard reports of other bearded and cloth-clathed men, likely from Hernando de Alarcón’s expedition up the Colorado River Delta. These “heathen” offered Cabrillo and his men their tamales, which the Spaniards called “a good food.” These same people, the Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra, founder of California’s first Spanish Missions, would later call gentiles, lazy, uncivilized, to whom he brought God, measles, syphilis, guns, and coarse cloth. The Pimungans brought to Cabrillo fresh water, fish, and wood. In return the Spanish Captain gave to them clay beads.

Sixty years later, on November 11, 1602, Sebastian Vizcaíno sailed into what he would name San Diego Bay, for the feast of Saint Didacus was nigh. The men built a hut and the Carmelite friars sang mass. The Kumeyaay again paid a visit, geared for war. Vizcaíno reported encountering an old woman who approached, tears streaming her cheeks. Perhaps she foresaw the continued arrival of these pale men and their big ships, and the destruction of her culture. Perhaps she had been told of the white men who had come sixty years earlier. Maybe she had even been there, just a little girl, when Cabrillo offered his clay beads like a god.

In 1992 the United States Postal Service issued a twenty-nine cent stamp in honor of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo.

A portion of California Highway One is called the Cabrillo Highway, and runs between Santa Cruz and Watsonville. A girl I had met at school in my sophomore year of college turned out to be from the Santa Cruz Mountains, near my hometown on the shores of the Monterey Bay, where the Spaniards had established their colonial capital, where today their settlements are the cities of Monterey and Santa Cruz, and I offered this girl a ride home for winter break. First we stopped at my family’s cabin in Squaw Valley, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where we curled together on the floor in front of the fireplace, watching South Park. I was too shy to do much more than kiss her. After a week back home, with her calling me, and me making mad dashes past the redwoods up Cabrillo Highway from Monterey to the Santa Cruz Mountains, I got her back at my parents’ home surrounded by oaks while the folks were out of town. There we stripped naked and touched each other the way naked people do. We could have been native Californians, and in a sense we were: we’d both been born there. One night afterwards, when I kissed her, she said, We should really stop. I said, What’s wrong? The fog was thick. She said, I’ve gotten used to kissing you, and I have a boyfriend, you know. This was, as they say, news to me. The house got too hot. When that boyfriend called, that very night, and she turned away from me, her ear to the phone, I snuck out of that sweaty house and rushed Cabrillo Highway all the way home at ninety plus. I haven’t been in the Santa Cruz Mountains since.

Jamie Iredell lives in Atlanta and teaches at Savannah College of Art and Design. He is the author of two books.

Andrew Borgstrom

2011-11-28T09:08:00.001-05:00

Violet

Violet in our light even turned. Violent is our light even turned. In now. Our under light. Light in given heat turned. Even violet even now. Turned under rot now even done. Violet is our light even now turned. In side. Our under rot. Light is given heat turned. Even veiled even now. Turned under, rot now, even done. In now. Now our worms. Our under rotted. Under now done even rot. Light is given, heat turned. Light is given, heat, turn. Is now. Given is violent, even now. Her even and turns. Turned under rotted now, even turns. Even vent even now. Violet in our light even turns. Even violent even now. Now on worms. Turned under rotted now, even turned. Under now done, evened rot. Rot our turns. Now, ours, worms. Even veiled, even now. Done ours now, even. Violet in our lighted even, turned. In-side. Ours under rot. Light is given, heated turns. Even vent, even now. Now over worms. Turned under, rotted now, evened turn. Inside. Side in done even. Our under rots. Under now done even rot. Rot overturned.

Andrew Borgstrom lives in the desert.

David Peak

2011-11-27T00:59:00.000-05:00

Shape of a Ribcage

On the bridge I watched a man-sized bird balance a row of neatly-lined human skulls, stopping a beat to beak at the white worms wriggling in those empty sockets, those of nose and eyes. The bird craned low its long neck and pecked, inspected, pecked, one-by-one down the line, each time stopping a beat to admire—or maybe consider—the neatly-lined rows of teeth.

The bridge is a suspension bridge suspended between two bluffy cliffs, deep-down bottom dropped out, a body gorged, belly rusting with the broken-down bodies of bombers, Second World War or something thereafter. Weather blazes a backward trail, blazed and baking sun a setting, a shadow fanning imprint in the mud, or an impression of the weight of extinction. The crushing shape of a ribcage.

History impresses its weight on the spine of the scoliosis codex. Each passing day a new layer of skin spans over the redraw, a new dead layer of skin to tusk at shed exoskeletons. And each passing day is a lesson: how to mask the crippled limp; withstand the concussions of trench warfare. Curled into the center is all our tension, suspended—the cardinal point of free fall, from which to make our leap.

David Peak lives in the middle of the woods where he collects and cleans guns. He frequently deletes his blog at davidpeak.blogspot.com.

James Chapman

2011-11-25T09:58:00.002-05:00

from This

She keeps the Absolute in her eyes, and the Absolute hovers around her. So she can walk out of the city of flowers into the desert wearing no clothes at all, and men don’t interfere. All are welcome to look at her body, because her body isn’t anything, her body was discarded by her husband. White as jasmine, devoted to my name, wild, she scares men away. Her love is stronger than their eyes.

She's my wife in her heart, she crosses the desert alone, in pain and naked, passing between stones, singing to me. “Why don’t you show your face?” She begs the birds and the silkworms, the monkeys and the fiery sun, “Where is he, my Spek white as a book, sky-inhabitor?” She has me confused with an unknown god, my unreachability has given me divinity in her blood, she feels my divinity as pain.

Each grain of the desert finds the dune it belongs to, and each dune helps in holding up the sky. She passes between a dune of heedlessness and a dune of anger without climbing onto either. She settles her body into a dune of permitting, which sighs to feel her back against it. Written in the sand are words that never blow away, right where everybody can see them, STUTTER, CLUMSY, MISTAKE and the words have a single heart drawn around them all, and the heart is beating.

She sings At this very moment you might appear.

You said my face was like a sacrifice to God. But I don’t love this god. He taught you to snare women, as he snared you. He taught you to forget women, as he’s forgotten you. He taught you to ignore the pain you cause. Then show me how to sacrifice my pain to your naked idol. Show me how to crucify pain, beautiful Spek.

What does it mean that you’re “seeking”? where do you need to go? My pain is everyplace you can look, my pain is in the bowl of the sky, a broken sky falls on every head. There’s noplace you can go that my pain won’t gaze at you, begging you to kill it. If you walk into the future, my pain is there. If you walk into the past—but the past, before you appeared to me, was all ease and beauty. Will you infect that beautiful sky too, Spek, will you desolate even what I remember?

In my fragile heart you live raging, a black god killing creatures who gaze into your eyes. In my evil heart you live as an attributeless miracle, you sing light from your indescribable throat. I dreamed of my hands reaching for your light, and you woke me, Spek, by stopping my heart.

I could have been a mother, whispering sounds to a believing face. This is a mistake, isn't it, singing these words to your absent eyes? I should create a new song instead, a song of sobbing, a song of a vibrating heart, and give it to anyone who uses his ears with love. I could have married an unworshipping man with a face like flowers who would dance with me as I danced with him, who'd feel no guilt at my name’s joy. This is a mistake to speak these words to you, you who won't dance, you with absent feet, you who are all name, only name, Spek.

Shedding my song you wouldn’t listen to, shedding my eyes you looked away from, shedding my dancing that didn’t move you, shedding my opinions that bored you, shedding my awareness that didn’t warm you, shedding my body that couldn’t keep you, shedding my mind that didn’t interest you, shedding my heart that was invisible to you, what is the container for this pain, and what would this pain have me do now, without a self and without you, Spek?

My mother grieves because her daughter is damaged, is distracted, sits talking about a man’s eyes and hair, his voice and words, and his absence above all. She tried to teach me to protect myself, even when I was small she warned me against this. Now she’s furious at my beloved, who has demolished all her teachings. Will you still teach me, mother? Show me how to hate Spek, the way you do?

For others, it’s like you don’t exist. They don’t know you, they're free and lost. So they don’t understand what’s in my eyes. This darkness here, it’s a picture of you, it’s the dark watcher within me, the black ball at my center. This little black object, source of my pain, I would not give this treasure away to anyone. But I'll give it to you, Spek, to rub its perfume on your body.

I touched your body and before I could say “How strong, how soft, how vulnerable, how radiant,” how this and that, you'd already become a million Speks in my blood, and another million in my heart, and a million million in my mind. You may abandon me but I have no shortage of you. Did you know you’ve been singing me to sleep at night, and waking me in the morning, Spek strong and soft?

If I lie here long enough I'll forget you. I can’t possibly think of you every moment, this can’t go on. If I lie here without you I'll dissolve, and the blob remaining won’t be a girl, it won’t know how to miss you. If I lie here I’ll evaporate, and rise on ninety different breaths of air, and join that cloud there, and drift across the earth. But even as vapor I’ll still know you when I see you. I’ll fall on you as rain, Spek, I’ll soak you to the skin.

My heart is too full. If I met you now, like this, there'd be no room for you. If we ever merged together, how would there be space on the earth? We'd have to find another place to stand, a place without pain, we'd have to become formless, an idea, a banner with a symbol on it. We'd have to hide in the space between the seconds of time, or we'd crowd everybody out, Spek, the way you’ve crowded me out of my own breath.

I know you're married to a god. You're following your Christ to the edge of time. Your goodness and loyalty have helped you flee the filth of my body. You married the father in heaven, you love the son on earth. But what about HERE, in my head, in this infinite world of invisible images? Will you hold me in your arms here, at least? Will you marry me here? Our wedding will take place hidden between two atoms. Nobody will know, nobody will see. Out of the whole vast plain of earth, our marriage will be the size of a small jewel-box, the size of my mind. The honeymoon will hide here, within me. Here in my head I can give you Saturn for your ring. Here are no boundaries, here we span the ends of the universe. Here in this other place, in this hidden place, Spek, let us kiss.

James Chapman will live in New York a while longer, drop over while you can. His most recent novel is "The Rat Veda."

J. A. Tyler

2011-11-24T14:19:00.000-05:00

Noah Remembering the Things He Doesn't

Noah sees himself as a child and the child is one of those children violent and swinging from branches and this is when there was sun if there ever was sun because Noah’s memory is clouded with images. Noah’s memory is a gravestone in a cemetery where a pick-up has backed onto the head and now the stone is halved and what is underneath is no longer a body but remembering how bodies used to be. When Noah was a child the children were all about decapitation and sorrow. When Noah was a child there was rain unstoppered from that liquored-up sky. When Noah was a child there was no ark, because Noah had not yet built it.

Noah has no sister and this is why: To make a sister take parents in rows of two and put them together facing one another and move them up and down and wait for all the other moments in the world to happen. To make a sister crush her like a sandwich where one thing goes on the top of another on top of another on top of another. To make a sister exhaust all the boys with running or monkey bars then wait an eternity for the movement of the world to slow. This is why Noah has no sister. Noah has no sister because of these and all the other things.

Noah is a man who is building an ark. Noah’s muscles are hammers and Noah’s mouth is nails spit out. The rain is coming down. When Noah is out and up on the ark that is half-built, the rain is happening and in it he hears himself telling himself to build an ark. In this way it doesn’t come from any god or from the sky or opened up out of his own mouth but instead from the rain and the way it falls on his partially constructed deck. Noah’s eyes are saws that trim stolen and found wood to length. Noah is a man because he is building an ark or in spite of this ark building. Noah is a man because the rain is coming down and there is no one else for it to come down upon.

Noah has in his half-built ark a garden that will house plants already soaking up the water though they are only seeds and are showing no green. All the green that was leaves has turned gray via missiles, has turned gray via screaming, has turned gray with all the violent moments that were threaded together to make Noah’s neighborhood a firestorm, to make Noah’s house an only image, to make Noah a man building an ark in the rain with a garden by himself. The seeds that Noah plants are children. The seeds that Noah plants are sisters. The seeds that Noah plants are men and memories. Women. The seeds that Noah plants in his garden on this incomplete ark are nails and hammers and saws. Muscles and memories and images. The seeds that Noah plants will always be drowning in coming-down rain. Noah makes a garden, Noah builds an ark. These will be Noah’s new memories, even in this rain.

J. A. Tyler’s most recent novel Girl With Oars & Man Dying is available now from Aqueous Books. For more, visit: www.chokeonthesewords.com.

Rachel Levy

2011-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

I Now Enjoy The Taste Of Boiled Potatoes

I’ve been up to so little lately; however, preparing food takes time. It is hot here. I shower frequently. The heat has dulled my mind and character, but awakened in me the instinct to migrate north. Only the very young and the very old are at risk (that is what the authorities report). But measured against the old, I am very young. And measured against the young, I am very old. I see no way out of this paradox. In any case, there is only the weather to talk about. The old highs are becoming the new lows (that is what the authorities report). Listen, I’ve decided to consolidate my vocabulary. (You still haven’t answered my question. Why else does the thesaurus exist?) There is no distance between instinct and fear, but the distance between parsley and dill is absolute. That is the simpler science and so it is more perfect. Today I am generous; I feel like a teacher. It is possible to sweeten the flesh. Please, follow my lead. Boil water. Add celery, carrot, parsley, pepper, nutmeg.

Rachel Levy is the author of a chapbook, Necessary Objects (forthcoming, Ghost Ocean Press). Her prose can be found in places like Drunken Boat, PANK, and NANO Fiction. She lives in Boulder, CO, where she teaches and studies writing.

M. Kitchell

2011-11-22T00:00:00.001-05:00

The ordinary hallway is an oddly discordant use of space When blocked off, its full length operates in memory as a recollection of the absent movement. But in use, only a part of the hallway serves for the passage of the figure. The figure passes through the hallway never directly in the middle, towards the entrance or exit at the end. The end, which exists as negative space rather than positive space, is not functional, only present. Hallways are always uninhabited.

X X

The hallway walls index the difficulties exposed in the building. They are set too far from the body. When using the hallway, hands fail to brush the side-walls. The space between the hallway and the body is too distanced.

M. KITCHELL is the editor & publisher of LIES/ISLE and Solar Luxuriance. He is a contributor to HTMLGiant. A collection of short narratives, Slow Slidings, will be out in 2012 on Blue Square Press. He lives in San Francisco and daydreams about endless labyrinthine architecture and ghosts.

Andrew Borgstrom

2011-11-21T00:00:00.000-05:00

Yellow

Yellow even level, level or worms. Yelling evens levels, level our worms. Even veiled evens now. Level evens veils even levels. Level even veiled even leveled. Or rotted. Worms or rot, more silence. Yellow even levels, leveling is now greeting. Evens violate evening, now silence. Levels even violate, even level silence. Level even vent even level. Or rots. Worms or rotting means silence. Even now even violate. Veiled even is leveled evening, done. Evens vote, evens now silent. Now or whispering. Level even veiled even light. Even vent even now silent. Veils even in lighted silence. Even veiled even now. Levels evening veiled evening levels. Level even votes even level. Even violates even now. Veiled evening in lighted evens, done. Even vented even now. Leveled even vents even levels evening done. Or rot. Rotted or turning, turning even, done.

Andrew Borgstrom lives in the desert.

Taylor Jacob Pate

2011-11-20T00:00:00.002-05:00

a million afternoons

trouble was: 6:53am & i didn’t know how to get back to potsdam. i’ll show you which train to take. she blinked. we closed the door on the party & stepped into sunday, empty berlin. it drizzled blue dawn. when was the last time you were in america by the way? 10 months ago i visited my sister in new york, she buttoned her pea coat, other than that, it’s been 2 years. i touched her lip, then the small of her back, how’d you get those rain drops stuck under your skin? we turned a corner. ~~if there had been tread on my sneakers, they would have squeaked on the wet pavement.~~ sometimes i can’t remember the words to my favorite song, she took my hand. the train station was across the street. i pulled her from under the awning, we belong in a movie, & let my nose rest on hers. take this line all the way to the end. i lit a lucky strike, i wonder if my dad ever felt this way, i hope so. we walked down our own flights of stairs & stood facing each other from our platforms. i’m less than amazing, you know? she jammed her hands in her pockets, her irises retreated to ovals of white & dark blue halos. i think i’d like to be in love with you for a long time

Taylor Jacob Pate is the author of shoegazers and the editor of smoking glue gun magazine.

Sean Kilpatrick

2011-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

Shucks About Everything

Yoursex is adjustable according to level of terror.

To take the factory out of saying, to dismantle the mind by returning topeople’s earliest output and to construct of that study root cognitions free ofcontemporary abstraction and cliché, to relieve the constriction of condensedverbiage into less popular contents, breaking by syllable until the recomposedthought has reached mystical apertures between purpose and sound, the ideogramand glyph dumb on the page point without decision, simplistically, but felt.

If a poem could start breathing new paths with its own arrangement, grow eyesfrom multi-fractured narrators in the same take, a suction of stationary vowelmade component within.

What semiotics lifts the creature angry from its bleating, changes ourinstincts?

The movement seeker protects consumption. Informed by loss consumers advertise.To blunt definition, omitting surface from emotion, to narrowly avoid Catholictechno, elaborating smog for America, equitably sappy, adolescent,progressively sweltered, a family gets particular about neighborhood. Teenagersinvest satanic swagger, determine guilt by evolution, because months cost. “Mydick finally became huge on my twentieth birthday.” Compared to taxesunsubstantiated, safety the upshot, a parent will kid their mugger. It could bea vast percentage of relatives who say private troughs spill glue.

Mandatory economics shovel the passage right to martyrdom. An unctuous puttingof birth cords in the wicker. Students of hapless fact cantankerouslyunspecified by the hinder they suck. The faculty budget killed a door. What’son the docket for disease? Usurp a type of equivocal hygiene. Bodily handbooksconduct scars to meaning, ultimatums of pubic liposuction. Superficiality fortit sex in classrooms while aging. Through some bubbles you see girls you lovedwith scripture in their names. Some you never touched without the policenearing all shrunk and esteemed.

Restricted voluminous to self-injury, big wounds as small media (imagined andphysical, masturbation causes tinny choleric grip, quivering cancer glide,plague to the third degree, bionic gimp moves).

Accumulate by mistake, love too young, gloaty religious violence, an attempt toretract all the awkward coitus with each phrase and only creating more.

Squirt 100 percent confetti – the drip you drop, the slip you slop. Spatterduring group. Mess improves stanzas. Dowse your iodine with place. Freeze apoem until it’s ready for submission. Some go in your ear. Cake the home,romance and powder, bathe in people’s kids.

Get a lid of sag round your play, a slurpy for quotes.

Wrangle filth a cleaner purpose, step loudly into ninja clothes.

Existing is a plenitude of health and hostility, of sickness and pleasantries.

Sticking your arm inside a radio to chew the skin harmonious, break into songat the sight of chemicals, walking glib between genre fondled kinds of plainfor transvestite sayings, arrival toward meaning through fracture becausemeaning is such a limp chemical implied stochastically. People shit their ownmeaning in beautiful ways. Survival is the perpetual flaw of our vocation asanimals. After all cadaverous humpings drolly laughed through. People could diewith such spuriously delicious adjectives.

I am an arsonist when I smile. I think thinking is murder. History is a sillyfetish sometimes. But I like history too, because I have some. All this godstuff crowds the orgasm. Baudelaire masturbates like someone with a brokenmother. He finds a weapon to carve people out of their separate hibernationsfrom god. Baudelaire is god.

A short history of drive-by shootings via the height of each assassin.

Nothing your labor produces has significance, how freeing, the smooch oftorture, the necking dreads.

Sliced aphasic for meaning, words fail the brain - a grand disease disguised asitself - click into vacancies fondled and huffing tune, are punished further,grope the cleft adoringly reset by frictions circular and droned, rabid andnuanced.

Clapping your hands on other people’s hands until human similarities combustcreams nannies pile in the closet.

The world outside your bed keeps growing. Beneath the covers your cuticlesrecede. Cold plumbing welters your infections.

Everything is a job without instructions. Everyone is a boss whose piss becomesyour vision.

Nightmares linked endlessly preposition to preposition, the comma asperpetrator, the right ten seconds of trauma the same as ten million.

Risk your prose as purple or bleed so stupid everyone hides.

Pretension means you write.

To write like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1owrlQlLExY

This:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLOy4_tzXHY

The fragment is a halo for music only your skin can spoil.

Go past your bandages, regardless.

That there is edification in the art itself is a perverse lie. Gut the singerof this song.

Study process how a corpse smells.

The cluck dumb telling of your vice all willy nilly.

The costume that fears itself.

The king scalped by his crown.

Say fuck yes after every line or admit you are asleep.

Revision of revision, you edit when you blink.

Inkling for the Tarot as porn.

Cacophony bares little beyond cacophony: yikes and good.

The consonant as vehicle of hate to pace typing. Alliteration works duringscenes of castration or disembowelment. All that is allowed is disembowelment.

Marginalize your tinker.

Don’t write to be digested.

Be alive worse than anything.

What you conjure while giddy places little connect.

The world ain't your business. Breathing ain't your business.

To search assward for yesterday’s supper using a blowtorch for light and tolive in the resulting wet maze of tubes.

You didn’t have enough grins tied to your birth. You found a pencil and stuckit in your importance.

People study to be lawyers.

You are glitter succulent for page.

You’ve got microcosms in your stammer.

Blown eventually through a tube of hair.

Poets lick their gravestones, deserve less than gravestones. Poets for theorder of their own mass grave.

I have a second prostate blanking soot behind my eyes.

Shucks about everything.

Sean Kilpatrick's firstbook, fuckscapes, packaged with anexcerpt, Stab Pyramid, of acollaboration with Blake Butler, is forthcoming Dec. 2011, from Blue SquarePress.

Nikkita Cohoon

2011-11-17T00:00:00.001-05:00

THE DARK IS COLD AND THE WIND HAS A FACE

I want to write a poem

about the way Winnie noses

her way into the first wind

of the morning,

the thrust of scent

that defines everything around her.

She noses the wind

she has defined this place

can account for strangers

for things unseen

for the angle of your missing

and the basil that has tipped on our patio

and the smallest things I could say

in the room of (quiet).

And everything shifted. This was not a spurring this was how it began. The smallest moments of clarity all begin with an “and.”

And in the room of quiet we made small lights of our fingertips. Words never entered there, only the things that have always existed. The skin on my lips is dry and I can taste cinnamon where the new flesh is exposed.

The smallest is this:

everything you can’t fit

in a ring box.

It is also mulled

and simmered

so the aftertaste

has its own voice

left untested.

(It floated by on the nicest Tuesday.)

And. There was our blanket

but our feet neither dry nor warm

we had to accept the chill.

Our mittened hands have slowed

they do not make the same sounds

do not carve homes into lovers’ bellies

or press the wrist until it glows white

with the pressure, instead

stay still in our laps

don’t flinch when flakes melt on knuckles and palms.

So I signed them--

not in any known language

but my fingers moved into shape--

I remember when cross-hatched lines filled my vision

how I saw them as the equation for everything.

What I learned of edges and their permeability.

I cut the proof.

My edges soaked with the loss.

Carve here

then kneel

where the plaster crumbles

at the base of the alter.

I let the shadows

have their say

I could have piled

so many things here.

I watch Winnie extend

beyond her own space

& consider what I should

be filling my time with.

And like I had before

I pictured

what I could not say.

I spread my arms

wide to make room

for the visions.

With connections, I could

show every one, thing

without a word.

Weeks later the after-image

still burns.

I looked into yesterday,

but mostly into oncoming Tuesdays.

And her arms stretch farther

to fill my place.

Nikkita Cohoon’s poems have appeared in elimae and The Bridge. Her artwork has appeared in Dear Camera Magazineand Mid-American Review. She is the online editor for Black Ocean.

Robert Kloss

2011-11-16T13:23:00.001-05:00

from The Valley below His Black Mountain

And so your mother lay bleeding and pale in the tangledsheets and the women in their bonnets and house dresses before her crossedthemselves and muttered prayers unto her soul as you red faced and drippingannounced yourself wailing into the world. And your father called from hissorrow that he could never again gaze upon this woman, nor could he again nameher but with a strangled sound, and when with his moansand gnashing he commanded her taken away they wrapped her and carried her inthose very sheets, blood matted and sticky with viscera, fly gathered already,to the edge of what was considered the yard. And so too were all images andpossessions of this woman carried in bed sheets to the yard and set afire. Ofthis woman there now remains but a single marker; and one may find some remnantof her stone, even now, if they understand where the pasture once lay. And yourfather regarded you from the edge of the room, you the last vestige of thislost life, and he said unto his sister, “What shall I do with this one?” andonly after some consideration did your aunt say, “I will tend after him. I willtend after the both of you.” And how in the brief years to follow your aunt wascarried off in a fever and then your father was himself compelled to the soil,his blood misted before the plow and into the mysterious overgrowth his hiredman fled with the woman your father wed to raise you, to instruct you, whoseimage you carry even now within your mind as “Mother,” and so it was youtoddled into the dust and lay upon this man and when they found you againstyour father, in the full gaze of the sun, they said you were “red with [your]father.”

Robert Kloss is the author of How the Days ofLove & Diphtheria (Mud Luscious Press/Nephew) and The Alligators of Abraham(Mud Luscious Press, 2012). He is found online at rkbirdsofprey.blogspot.com.

David Peak

2011-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

Cavity

Born of the same womb,

Some warped ovum

Twins in tissue, equal parts

blood and tonsil

A brother kind, lungs healthful

Arms malformed—a blue-faced horror—

The eater: wrangled freak

Black-cord monster

Mother husk, her dying

Wish for a total terror death

David Peak lives in themiddle of the woods where he collects and cleans guns. He frequently deleteshis blog at davidpeak.blogspot.com.

Andrew Borgstrom

2011-11-14T08:24:00.002-05:00

Red

Red even done. Rot even done. Even now even now. Done now over even. Red now evened now. Even violence even now. Now now. Done now, over even. Even now even veiled. Now over worms. Even even. Now worms. Even evened even. Violence in our loss even now curved even. Even violence even rot. Now rot. Now over rot. Now always rot. Always loss always worms always always. Now over rot. Over vent even rot. Even vent even now. Red venting even now even done. Now our worms. Even veiled even now. Violence is our level, even now, curved even. Even violence even now. Even over worms. Now over worms. Now over, worms. Done over now, evened. Now ours, worm. Over vented, evened rot. Worms over rot means silence. Even vented even now. Even now.

Andrew Borgstrom lives in the desert.

James Pate

2011-11-13T00:00:00.000-05:00

Pig Beach

The noise in the pig. The pig in the noise.

The time for pig time.

The end of the start of pig time.

The time of the pig thorn.

The mouth drooling in the heart of the pig thorns.

The heart drooling in the shape of the pig.

The hour of the pig light. The arson in the pig dark.

The noise of the pig in the human head.

The noise of the human in the pig head.

The pig fever in the human brain.

The pig light in the human eye.

The pig eye in the dark staring.

The lemon of the pig. The glory and run-off of the pig.

The pig wall alone on the human beach.

The human sand pink and the pig wall burnt.

The human hand scurrying in the pig night.

The mouth drooling in a human night.

The hour of the pig hour.

The hour of the blood drool.

The hour of the pig drool slipping from the light into thedark.

The pig eye staring down.

The human eye staring at the pig eye stare down.

The human spew in the pig head.

The human dark in the pig light.

The peeled lemon of the pig. The hour of the pig lemon.

The crown of pig thorns on the pink sand.

The beach light bright in the pig eye.

James Pate has been published in The Black Warrior Review, TheCream City Review, The BerkeleyReview, Action Yes, Rhino, and La Petite Zine, among other places. He is also a contributor to www.montevidayo.com. He lives inShepherdstown, West Virginia.

David Ohle

2011-11-11T00:10:00.000-05:00

Daddy's Home

Jerry’sDaddy, looking half dead, sat in the kitchen smoking a Camel and sketchingcomic faces on a napkin with a stubby pencil. There was quite an odor abouthim, mostly of sour, poorly washed clothes. A thin white paste leaked from hismouth. Jerry sat at the far end ofthe dining table. “Where have youbeen?”

“All overthe place. Don’t worry aboutthat.”

“How didyou get into the house?”

“Thebasement window. I was careful, I was quiet, I didn’t want to wake you up inthe middle of the night. I scraped myself, but don’t worry, I don’t bleedanymore.”

“Iassumed you were dead.”

“It’s anassumption, Jerry. You never knew this, but at times I had to rest. I came here, a familiar place. I stayedin the basement. I’ve got a little niche back there in the corner.”

“That’scrazy. What’s that white stuff you’re drooling?”

“I don’tknow. It just started happening a few years ago. I know it smells bad.”

“Whydon’t you bathe? I’ll take you upstairs. You can get into the tub. I’ll giveyou some soap.”

“Theleast bit of water on my skin burns like acid.”

“Right.I’m sure it does. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“I’llhave a sip or two. If I drink too much I get animated…. What kind of coffee dopeople drink these days? Is it still Maxwell House and Folgers?”

“I getbetter stuff. It costs twice as much. It’s organic.”

“It’swhat?”

“Organic.”

“What inthe shit does that mean?”

“Theydon’t use pesticides on the coffee plants. They don’t treat the beans withchemicals.”

Jerry’sDaddy watched him pour three scoops of beans into his Braun grinder and heldhis ears when it was turned on. “Jesus Christ, what is that thing? Cyclones in Hell that don’t make thatmuch noise.”

“It’s anelectric grinder. You buy the whole beans and you grind them yourself. Ittastes fresher.”

“Have wegone to the moon yet?”

“We have,yes. In 1969. Where the hell have you been?”

“Fantastic.I knew they would. How old is Kennedy now? He must be eighty or ninety.”

“He wasassassinated.”

“You’rekidding.”

“InDallas. A little guy with Cuban sympathies shot him dead in his limousine. Thetop was down.”

“Somebodyshot Kennedy? Hard to believe.”

“What amI going to do with you? This is a small place. Just a kitchen, a tiny parlor,one bedroom and a bath upstairs.”

“I said Iwould stay in the basement.”

“Thebathroom is upstairs. You’d be going up and down all night.”

“I don’t needa bathroom. I’m dried up. Kidneys don’t work.”

“That’sinteresting, Daddy. Here’s yourcoffee. I’m taking you somewhere, a facility where you can get some help.”

“I don’tneed help. I’m fine.”

“Whatwill you eat down there, slugs? Roaches? I’m taking you somewhere. Let me make a few phone calls.”

Jerryfished an iPhone from his robe pocket and spoke into its receiver: “SocialServices, Geriatric.” He looked intently at the little screen for an answer.

Daddypointed at the iPhone. “What in the hell is that?”

Severalsocial service geriatric sites had scrolled up and Jerry wasn’t payingattention. “What is what? I’m busy looking something up.”

“Don’ttell me they’ve got little bitty televisions now. Why did you talk to it?”

“It’s atelephone and it’s also a small computer. It gives me information about thingsto do with you. Right now it’s telling me to call St. Vincent’s, which it sayshas a good reputation.”

“I readabout them in Popular Science, thelittle computing machine of the future you could hold in your hand. No wires.Dick Tracy had a wrist phone. It might have been a radio too. I don’tremember.”

Jerrysaid, “Fifty years, Daddy. You’ve been gone that long.”

“Was I.…?What about your mother? Whatever became of her?”

“She diedin eighty nine. Cancer of the colon.”

“I betshe suffered. I’m sorry I couldn’t be with her. I wish I cared more, but I lostall my feelings when I moved on. Physically, mentally, nothing there.”

Jerrypunched in the number for St. Vincent’s and waited for an answer. “I was withher,” he said, spite on his fleshy face. “I took care of emptying her colostomybag and trying to talk her out of taking an overdose of her pain pills.”

“I’mguessing it wasn’t fun.”

“Itwasn’t…. Hello? St.Vincent’s? I’m calling about a situation I’m having with myfather. He’s been gone fifty years and now he’s back and he needs care. Areyour services free?”

“I’m notgoing there, Jerry. Think of something else.”

Jerryshushed him with a finger to the lip and listened for awhile with his ear tothe iPhone. “I’ve already thought about this for a long time, in case you cameback. I can’t take care of you. It’s way too late. You’re going to St.Vincent’s.”

Daddytook a small sip of coffee. “Did you ever hook up with a woman and getmarried?”

Jerrypressed the End button and slid home the cover of the iPhone. “The damned placeis closed three days a week. They won’t be there till Thursday. I got arecording.”

“Didyou?”

“Did Iwhat?”

“Find awoman and get married.”

“No, I’ve been going it alone. It’s noonalready. We’ve got to make some kind of arrangements.”

“I’mliving the dream. I couldn’t be better. I don’t need any arrangements. I toldyou that, didn’t I?”

“I’llcall them back on Thursday.”

“Son, areyou religious? Do you belong or go to any church? All that Heaven and Hellshit?”

“No. Idon’t believe any of that.”

“Let metell you, I’ve been to Hell.”

“Ofcourse you have.”

Jerrybegan to make a sandwich. He took sliced ham, mayonnaise, yellow mustard and aleaf of lettuce from the fridge, placed them on the kitchen counter and droppedtwo slices of split-top white bread into the toaster. “Go on, Daddy, tell meall about Hell.”

“Thefirst morning I woke up there I felt more rested than I had in years. My bigsurprise—there wasn’t enough fire to roast a marshmallow. The place thatterrified us had burned out long ago and a cool drizzle had turned everythinginto a slimy black tar, still warm enough to burn your feet, but that’s it. Isaw familiar faces right away, friends from home. They were in single file,pushed along by the Devil’s trustees, on their way to one of several Hell-basedfactories for a long, steamy day of work. There were two Hells, one for womenand one for men. A river of boiling plasma separated them.”

“I thinkSt. Vincent’s is the place for you. Good priests, good nuns. They’ll treat youwell.”

“I’m notfinished with Hell yet, Son.”

“Allright.”

“Therewere a few children to be seen, mostly males, idling their way througheternity, too young to work, too old for Limbo. There were no clouds, tobaccoor animals. And the condemned ate half-cooked flesh soaked in mother’s milk atevery meal. People were trying to distill whiskey down there. They were goingto call it Deep Shaft Bourbon—Bottled in Hell, but you can’t make good whiskeywithout corn. And for corn, you need good water. The Styx doesn’t have it. It’seighty feet under the ground. It gets every drop of toxic effluent from theCity.”

“Is thatit, your treatise on Hell?”

“It’s myreport. I was there. Look, I’m going down for a nap. I can’t hold my eyesopen.”

Daddystruggled up from the table without help from Jerry and shuffled to thebasement door. “Good night, Jerry.”

“Daddy,it isn’t noon yet.”

“Oh,don’t worry, it’s dark enough in the basement.” He opened the basement door.“Don’t try to raise me in the morning. I’ll be sleeping in.”

“Allright.”

Daddy stepped onto thebasement stairs and closed the door behind him.

David Ohle lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

Ark Codex 0:5:4

2011-11-10T18:07:00.001-05:00

(Click image for larger view.)

Ark Codex 0 is a bookforthcoming from Calamari Press.

Stella Corso

2011-11-09T00:30:00.000-05:00

Variations on Celluloid

Any is a good occasion

to linger in the red

light seat

Overstuffed

officials mapping faces

of early giants

Estate angels

with fresh lime

less

like an orange

peel

Subtle, but with such

spirit

I always leave

something on the plate

she says,

Even if

it’s just a bite.

Stella Corso teaches in theWriting Program at Umass-Amherst. Some of her recent work can be found in Tarpaulin Sky, and collaborative poemswith Alex Phillips are forthcoming in the PeacockOnline Review. She is currently an Editorial Assistant for jubilat.

Darby Larson

2011-11-08T00:30:00.000-05:00

Sh.

"Room uh happy pie," Tink uhs. "Chair sosolo," Flit plies. "Flier rain fly ump," Tink fews. "Enoughcrying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh," bear skin rug says to Flit. "Kiocry," kios Flit. "Kio Flit," fluts Tink. "Happy sap drapingmurble bulb," Flit nuks. "Campy calm four blunks," rugs Tink."Mulch mulch mulch," mulches Flit. "Smells like a happy pie inthis room, a pie with berries of a sort," spider in the corner says tobear skin rug. "Soft fos so fto," Tink oses. "Ket yer blanketsblunk," Flit roses. "Sill win dows pie haps," roses Tink."Spinner for the corder," Flit falls. "Skinner and sumrugs," jules Tink. "So solo chair sung and and," andlyands Flit."That chair appears soft and useful," bear skin rug says to spider inthe corner. "Come calm gum go," Tink flits. "Shappy shap throatswith happy me," Flit tinks. "Browner," keyes Tink. "Murchymulk in back your jars of you," Flit softlies. "Tst tst tst tst tsttst. Tst tst," circles Tink. "Can you believe the rain melting down thewindow?" spider in the corner asks bear skin rug. "Closeted close myclubs and clor color closal," Flit opens. "Hook ook! Ook!" looksTink. "Hreak ckreak and murky solo chair in hear me," creaks Flit."Mufs on rain and me you creak us," Tink qualms. "Wonce fainralls and me and you Tink us," Flit kets. "Enough crying. Sh. Enoughsh crying sh. Sh sh sh. Enough crying sh. Sh. Shenough cryingsh. Sh. Enoughcrying. Sh. Eno sh ugh crying. Sh. Enough cry sh ing. C sh r sh y sh i sh n shg crying crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough screaming.Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh sh. Enough crying.Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crawling.Sh. Enough crying. Sh sh sh sh sh sh. Enough enough crying crying sh sh. Sh.Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough," bear skin rug says to Flit."Shtopsh shcrawlingsh!" Tink kinks. "Sh. Lanky blunk hereuwrapped and rain rain rain," Flit confs. "Cry cry," irms Tink."Halm clappy chair me crawl soft wrop," urks Flit. "Happy gieclosed and," Tink guhs. "Brown chair cher," Flit plinks."Flit is happy enough it seems. Does it seem to you? Here are somequestions? Are we answering you?" spider in the corner asks bear skin rug."Cry cry flier cry rain fly creak ump," Tink lookilews. "Kioskerlump it cry some gummy sub," skers Flit. "Kay ef," flubs Tink."Drippy sap lappy room," Flit cunks. "Clam calm clam calm calmclam," culs Tink. "Much much," fetches Flit. "Toes fossyfossy fto," Tink blows. "Kiln yer kets tunk," Flit knows."Shrilly dows does you you you," does Tink. "?" bear skinrug asks spider in the corner. "Spider lake and rug for it," Flitfills. "Bare bear ber ser cher nr r," ehs Tink. "Pie,"happilies Flit. "Come calm shay a frin," Tink films. "Lap happyhappily hap shop," Flit throws. "Brown room sill win," eyesTink. "Blankets should calm this. I believe this room will seem sparklierwhen the windowsill lets in enough light for Tink and Flit to romp as theyought, and for me to remain cornered and for you, bear skin rug, to remainmurky and like a blanket dropped on the floor," spider in the corner saysto bear skin rug. "Opesed closen jars open chars chers," Flit lies."The windowsill should blanket a calm room for us," bear skin rugsays to spider in the corner. "Plt thlp fltp plth flth thlth. Thst,"cls Tink. "I am toe counting these Tinks and Flits of ours. Ten each, fiveper," spider in the corner says to bear skin rug. "Reseted loose whyflubs and color pleath," Flit pens. "Will they seem to youchair-sit-on-able soon and off my soft though murky backside for a time?"bear skin rug asks spider in the corner. "Look lOok loOk looK," Tinkblinks. "Share cher char chair shit sit," wits Flit. "Enoughcrying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh," bear skin rug says to Flit. "Rufblenkut photo phold it," Tink thinks. "A browner, calmer, creakierroom next time, could we find a lesser one next time rug?" spider in thecorner asks bear skin rug. "And me and you Tink us," Flit touches."And me and you and me and you and I and Tink and Flit and you and us,"Tink feels. "And you and us and me and us and you and you you you you TinkTink Tink Tink Ti," nks Flit. "U," us Tink. "F," s Fl."iTin," k T.

Darby Larson is the author of The Iguana Complex (MudLuscious Press 2011) and irritant (Blue Square Press 2012).

Andrew Borgstrom

2011-11-07T02:00:00.000-05:00

Blue

Blue listened under even. Bent level under even. Listened in silence turned even now even done. Under nowdone even rot. Even vent even now. Blue even now turned. Level even veiled,even listened. Under now done evened rot. Evened veiled even now. Listened issilence turned, even now even done. In now. Silence is listening even now, evencurved even. Turned under rot now evened done. Evened vented even now. Now onworms. Even now, even now. Done over now evened. Under now done, even rot. Nowover worms. Done over now even. Even veiled, even now. Rot over turned. Evenbent even now. Vent even now turns. Even vented even now. Now our worms. Bentlevel until even. Even veiled evened now. Now our worm. Turn under rot nowevened done. Level even, veiled, even level. Even veiled even now. Veiled even,in light evening, done. Evening veiled even now.

Andrew Borgstrom lives in the desert.

M. Kitchell

2011-11-06T10:13:00.000-05:00

Instructions for Entering the Empty House

1. Build the house.
2. Empty it out.
3. Open the door.
4. Walk into the house.

M KITCHELL is the editor & publisher of LIES/ISLE and Solar Luxuriance. He is a contributor to HTMLGiant. A collection of short narratives, Slow Slidings, will be out in 2012 on Blue Square Press. He lives in San Francisco and daydreams about endless labyrinthine architecture and ghosts.

Peter Markus

2011-11-04T00:30:00.000-04:00

Boy on Boat, or What This Fish that He Fished Up Was (anexcerpt from a book-in-progress, In a House In a Woods)

One day the boy on his boat on this lake fished up a fish upin his boat but the fish, when he fished it up and when he looked with his eyesat this fish, this fish, he could see, it was not like most fish: this fish, itwas half fish, half bird, is what this fish that he fished up was. Where itsside fins should have been there were wings where these fins should have been.And its mouth, this fish mouth, it was more of a beak than it was a mouth. Andit had feet, this fish did, that were three toes clawed and that this fish,when it was fished up out of the lake and when it was reeled in and when theboy held it up to the sun's lightfor his eyes to see it, he could see that this fish, it was part bird, partfish.

What kind of a fish isthis? the boy said this in his own head. This fish is just as much a bird as itis a fish.

What, the boy thenthought, should I do with such a fish?

It's not a fish, theboy thought. I come out on the lake, I row out on this boat, to fish for fish,the boy heard his own voice say.

What kind of a fishhas wings where its fins are meant to be?

He held the fish up inhis hand and spread its bird wings out for all to see.

There was no one elsethere to see this.

There was no one elsethere to hear this.

What you would haveheard had you'd been there is this.

I was born a bird, iswhat you would have heard this fish say next.

I was born a bird, butall my life I knew it in my bird's heart that what I was meant to be was to bea fish.

I said as much to thebird who was my mom.

I said as much to thebird who was my dad.

I did not want, likemost birds do, to leave the nest to learn how to fly.

We lived in a tree notfar from this lake.

In this tree, in ournest, you could look out and see the lake.

From a bird's eye,when the sun shined down on it, you could see down through the blue of the laketo where the fish swam in the blue of the lake.

You'd think I'd likethe blue of the sky but the sky was too much for me to be a bird in.

I knew I could get toknow the blue of the lake.

No bird can live solong so that they get to know the blue of the sky.

So once when I learnedhow to fly, I took flight and I flew to the lake.

I walked down to the lake's edge.

I took my bird's beakand I poked it a few times in the mud down at the edge of the lake.

Then I walked in.

I walked in and Iwalked on the lake.

The lake held me up.

The lake would not letme sink.

Let me swim, I said.Let me be like the fish who swim in the blue of the lake.

It was then that I sawthe fish.

I heard the fishbefore I saw the fish.

It swam up from thedark blue of the lake and it took me up in its fish mouth.

It swam with me in itsfish mouth down past the blue of the lake.

This was a big fishwith big fish teeth in its big fish mouth.

But this fish it didnot eat me.

This fish it was hereto save me. To make me who I was born to be.

Fish eat fish.

Big fish eat the fishthat are not so big.

Since when do fish eatbirds?

You see? I am not abird.

I am a fish.

Or I am part bird,part fish.

The big fish that tookme in its mouth and swam with me down past the blue of the lake, it spit meout. When it did, when I got spit out, I came out the way that I am now.

Part bird, part fish.

I am half the way towho I am meant to be.

The boy looked downand on at this fish, this fish that was not just a fish, this fish that hadwings where its fins were meant to be, this fish that had clawed toes, thisfish that could talk and that told this tale that I too have just told to you,and this boy, at this fish, he just looked and he shook his head at this fish.

I don't think so, thisboy said.

I think you are hereto try to trick me, the boy said this to this fish.

Trick you? How would I be here to trick you? Trick you to dowhat?

But the fish, it didnot hear what the boy might have said next. For the boy, what he did next was,he took this fish, this fish that was just as much bird as it was fish, and hetook this fish in his boy hands, he raised this fish up to his own boy mouth,and he bit off the head off of this fish.

What was left of thisfish in his hands, the wings where the fins should have been, the clawed feet,the tail that was the tail that was the tail of a fish, he threw all that wasleft of this fish back to be with the blue of the lake. And when he did, whenhe spit out from his mouth the head of this fish, when he rubbed his hands tobe free of this half bird, half fish, this fish, the whole of what was left ofthis fish, it turned back to be what it was born to be: a fish that did not flyin the blue of the sky, a bird that swam in the lake.

***

That night, the boy in his sleep heard a sound, a tap tap, aknock and a knock, that woke him up from his sleep. It was a sound that camefrom the front door. When he went to go see what was there to make such asound, when he pulled the door so that he could look out at the lake here atthe edge of the woods, he looked out and then he looked down and it was when helooked down with his eyes that he saw with his eyes the wing of what he knewwas not the wing of a bird, it was the wing, the boy knew, of a fish.

***

Out on the lake, the next day, a fish jumped up and it flew,like a bird would fly, out of the blue of the lake and up to be with the blueof the sky, and when it came back down it flopped like a fish would flop whenit is fished up to be in a boat.

The boy took this fishby its head and he held it in his hands.

Good fish, the boysaid to this fish.

No, the fish said.Good boy.

And then this fishjumped back up. It jumped back out. Out of this boy's boat. Out of this boy'shands. Back to be in the blue of the lake. Which is where fish that are born tobe fish are born to be and breathe.

Peter Markus is the author of the novel, Bob, or Man onBoat, as well as three books of short fiction, the most recent of which is WeMake Mud published this September from Dzanc Books.

CAConrad

2011-11-03T11:59:00.000-04:00

(Soma)tic Poetry Exercise

& Poem

MINDING THIRST

--for Jamie Townsend

Watch weather report for heavy rain. On the day before, drink NOTHING. No beverages of any kind. Eat no soup or broth. Eat only steamed vegetables with softnoodles or bread. Wait forrain. Set your alarm to wake inthe middle of the night, and then sit by the window peering into the dark skywith binoculars. Think about yourfirst memory of being thirsty. Take notes, go back to sleep.

Wait for rain. You are still not drinking the next day and you are very thirsty. When rain arrives sit by thewindow. Close your eyes, take yourpulse, hear the rain, feel your blood. Imagine that the water you hear coming to earth will never touch yourlips, can never quench the dryness that is your mouth. Were you ever so thirsty that you werein pain? Open your eyes, takenotes.

Go out into the rain. Lie on the ground. Lookinto the sky through binoculars with your mouth open. Drink DIRECTLY from the air while watching the streamingdrops fall onto the binocular lens. Open an umbrella and take notes to the beating of rain. You are a drought that is cured. You are a body sponging back yourlife. Shape your three sets ofnotes into one poem or three.

QUA THIRST

I was thirsty in

1976 on our way

to a bicentennial picnic

35 years later we

eat burritos

become sad

tears of the cook

got into the riceand beans

most afternoons weepy

priests eat here

mourning their cocks

mysuggestion of

castration upsets

everyone who fail

to consider

my concerns

KNOLL THIRST

bread asks

body to hold its

measurement of worth

crane my

neck back and

forth on telephone

glance at suit of

cards for their

sharpened edges

skid marks of

fatalcrash

visible formonths

there it is

oh my god thereit is LISTEN LISTEN

I’mgetting a tattoo of

your face on my

ass to show

you everytime

you say goodbye

NECRO THIRST

it’s hurting

me get out of

my house if you

don’t hate death as

much as Ido

fuck you and your

smugBuddhist calm

alchemy of thorns

from kindintentions

it’s none ofyour

business ifI trick

the doorman into

thinking I’m

his wife he

wrote my name

in aheart as

though I didn’t

ask him to

CAConradis a recipient of a 2011 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is the author of ABeautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012), The Book of Frank (WaveBooks, 2010), Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), DeviantPropulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet FrankSherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010).The son of white trash asphyxiation, his childhood included selling cut flowersalong the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. Visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

Kira Clark

2011-11-02T00:30:00.000-04:00

EITHER WAY IT’S TERRIBLE

Here is how it happened.

There was a loud noise,

a bang, and

then a birth.

The paper mill does notclose.

The paper keeps on coming.

White blank paper hangsover me

like a puppet sky thatclips my head

from time to time.

Failure is not escapable,but

he sees someone else in themirror now,

after fresh air andpublication.

It is the loneliest thing,

dying, and also theloneliest thing,

watching someone die.

He says his wound hurts,

the bone.

Sit up, I say.

The changing of the sheets.

The changing of the life.

The life not changing everbut ending.

The T.V. helps, thewesterns.

I buy him a horse, but

the sickness is already aherd of

crazed horses, galloping on

and towards and above hisforehead.

Pushing the pads of myfingers,

into his loose and hangingflesh,

my hands dancing on snow.

Collapse, collapse.

Helpless in that

I cannot enter him,

and create an area that

is not pained.

Kira Clark is a fictioneditor at Housefire Publishing in Portland, ORand a musician. Her work has been featured in some things, most recently in theupcoming issue of >Kill Author. She enjoys overpriced beer, cats, typewriters,letters, and vintage coats. She does not like dancing or the sun. If you wouldlike to receive a typewritten letter from Kira, please email MsKiraClark@yahoo.com.

Andrew Borgstrom

2011-11-01T00:30:00.000-04:00

Orange

Orange rot and now given even. Over rot as now given even.Rotted on turned. And now done. Now or worm. Given in vented even now. Evenvented even now. Orange vented even rot. Rotted even now turns. As silence. Nowor worms. Given in veiled evening now. Even veiled evening now. Rot over turnedturns even done. Or rots. Turned under rot now evened done. And now done. Nowover worms. Done over now even. Now on worms. Or rotted. Worms over rotted means.Given in vented even now. In now. Vented even now turning even done. Evenventing even now. Now our worms. Even vending even now. Vending even done innow given. Even vendors evened now. Now on worms. Or rots and now given evens.Vented evening now turning evening down. Even vented even now is now given. Rotover turning. Rot even now turning.

Andrew Borgstrom lives in the desert.

Laura Bandy

2011-10-31T00:30:00.000-04:00

I'm worst at what I do best
"Smells Like Teen Spirit" debuts on MTV, September 10, 1991

Rolf hands me a beer. He's cheating on me

with my best friend, but I don't know it yet. Rolf is myfirst

love. Mick is Rolf's best friend. Mick is in love with me

but I don't know it yet. The Coors can is warm

and I think how beer doesn't taste very good. That willchange

but I don't know it yet. Rolf's mother in bed with satinsleeping mask

and "Sounds of the Beach" on repeat. I will dateRolf for two years and never

meet her, but I don't know it yet. Rolf is wearing a child'sHawaiian shirt

that half covers hisframe. He is the first of three men over 6'8" that I'll date, all just

taller than my father, but I don't know it yet. His fatherleft money on the table

for pizza before leaving. He's got a tumor in his gut like asailor's knot

but we don't know it yet. Rolf loves boats. When his fatherdies

in six months, Rolf will row his father's boat out to themiddle of Lime Lake

and sink it, almost sink himself, but we don't know it yet. Mickthinks

we should spend the money on nitrous. He buys oversizedballoons to speak

in squeaks before really sucking it in. After inhaling eightballoons, I will stop breathing

for a minute, but we don't know it yet. Rolf says theballoons make it a party

and we need noise, so he turns on the TV. Next week watchingBarney Miller

and cleaning his gun, he'll fall asleep and his brother willload it. Rolf will wake up

and shoot Wojciehowicz but we don't know it yet. I want towatch 120 Minutes

and the boys bump into each other reaching for the remote. Iwill sleep

with both of them before morning, but we don't know it yet. Amusic video

on screen from a band we've never seen and Rolf turns it up.The singer mumbles,

screams, we're transfixed. Mick asks What's he saying? but no one knows it yet.

Laura Bandy is from Jacksonville, Illinois, home of the Ferris wheel. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at The University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, she is at work on a poetry manuscript entitled Chicago Anthology.

Daniel Crocker

2011-10-28T00:30:00.000-04:00

South 55

It's like it always is

everything looks the same

especially in Arkansas

She said she'd follow me to

hell, but through this land

where everything is yellow

This is mud

This is dead country

This is a wife pregnant with spiders

You call and

ask where I'm at

Memphis

I once laid a red headed

bartender at the Peabody

but I don't tell you that

It was good

Coming from Nashville

you want to meet at

such and such an exit

and like always

I do

You touch my hand

at the Waffle House

before handing me

my ticket

your mouth is dry

a crushed diamond

I know your skin

the spiral of

freckles on your left shoulder

If it killed me

I didn't notice

You want me to follow you home

but I'm not going home

I can see you smiling

in mirrored glasses

several states behind me

If I can't think of

anything pretty to say

about it

I'm sorry

and two days later

we're lying in bed

me and Mississippi

too afraid to touch

we open the window

watch the thunder storm

until the whole damn state

falls asleep

I listen to the breathing

thunder

your breathing

the awning outside

looks like a bear

in the dark

If it killed

I've always been

a miracle at forgetting

even in this dark country

even in this year of cancer

even with all of this

I come back, Mississippi.

Daniel Crocker teaches at St. LouisCommunity College. His newest collection of poetry, Like a Fish, will be available from Sundress Publications inOctober of 2011.

Chad McCaa

2011-10-27T16:23:00.005-04:00

Love at a Party

I’m working a thirtieth anniversary party, bartending again.The DJ plays mostly oldies. The Casinos are on.

The anniversary couple wears laurel wreaths on their heads.They dance stiffly inside a flimsy circle of partygoers, smiling at each other.The song changes to “Love is A Drug” and the guests give a collective whoop andslap each other on the backs. Women hang on men and everyone does littledances. On the upward parts of the melody, I think of my empty house.

The party dwindles and I watch faces as people hug eachother and make long goodbyes. The variety in faces is enough to keep oneoccupied for long stretches: the small wrinkles in lips, the determination ofeyebrows and the thrill of large teeth, the small freckles on this woman’sforehead and the ring of gold in this one’s eyes, a man with the face of aFranciscan monk, another a gunslinger. Faces contain intimate knowledge, secrethates and loves, if you pay attention. I have known murderers by their facealone. One communicates one’s true self entirely without speaking. No one canlie.

There are still some young people here, twenty couples orso, drinking heavily. I smile and make drinks robotically, counting mymovements: arm down to scoop ice, up to pour, insert straw. When people look mein the eye, I show them that this is only a temporary job.

Then, the girl comes.

Will you keep my purse back there? she says. But her facesays, won’t you take me forever, bartender? Won’t you take me to your emptyhouse? We can love each other. We can find out what we really are.

Wordlessly, I tell her yes. I tell her that things arechanging at this very moment, that something is happening at this party.

She walks away, looking at me over her shoulder. She winks.I can’t help myself. I leap over the bar and run to her. I grab her shouldersand turn her towards me. You know me, I say with every small frantic movementof my eyes, every blood cell in my cheeks. I kiss her.

Suddenly, I’m being grabbed around the collar. I’m punchedand kicked. Falling hard on the floor, I look up, see a young man standing overme. His face is futuristic, a space-craft pilot’s face, handsome and dark andbold as bullets.

That’s my fiancée bud, he says. Who the hell are you?

I wipe blood from my lip. I’m the bartender, I say.

Who? he says.

She’s mine, I say, struggling to my feet. She told me. Themusic has stopped.

You’re crazy, he says, balling his fist. I’ve loved her foryears.

It’s a lie, I say. I’m sorry, but I know these things. Hesneers and pushes me back to the floor.

You think love ain’t real? he says. Is that it? He punchesme again and again.

I don’t speak, but I try to show him, as I feel my teethcrack and my nose break, that I know for sure it is.

Chad McCaa (last names rhymeswith "obey") lives in Port Gibson, MS. He studied fictionat The Center For Writers at USM. He has published next to nothing, butstays up late, working on it. Check out "All Day Long Blues," aseries of short videos documenting the rural South, forthcoming in November on Youtubeand elsewhere. Hopefully.

Andrea Kneeland

2011-10-26T10:05:00.001-04:00

Love Hotel

“Oh-tay-ah-rye wa,” she says, “doe-koh dess kah.” She clicks on the link, listens again, repeats. When she takes her headphones off, she can hear the man in the next apartment, still having sex, still loudly, with his hugely pregnant girlfriend. She puts the headphones back on and practices some more. “Oh-tay-ah-rye wa.”

She is going to Japan this year. Her suitcase is already packed, stored just next to her front door. She will attend a sumo tournament. She will visit Tokyo Disney. She will eat ramen every day. She will stay in a love hotel.

She is fascinated by the love hotels. She stops practicing and listens to Rachmaninoff while she browses through room themes: alien abduction; Paleolithic era; Hello Kitty s&m; prison ward; chapel; elementary school; ancient Egypt. She clicks on “boxing ring.”

She was not at all interested in Japan before she met Hyde. Even when she was with Hyde, listening to him talk about Japan incessantly, she was not interested.

She didn’t really like classical music, either.

But after their most recent break-up, which really does seem to be their final break-up, after she threw that plate at his face and it broke against his arm, resulting in twelve stitches, after their screaming match in the hospital room and after he told her that if they stayed together, he would really and truly kill himself. After all that, she started becoming more interested.

She’d thrown away every physical piece of himself that he’d left behind: all of his clothes, his DVDs, his protein drinks, even her own sheets that they had lain on together. But she hadn’t cleared her browser history. It was still filled with 30 second clips of Japanese pornography – mostly girls who looked no older than twelve being caned by masked men in three-piece suits. And a Pandora station filled with Rachmaninoff; Schuman; Liszt; Mozart.

She curls fetal on her side and removes her headphones, puts the laptop on the floor. Her neighbor and his girlfriend continue to scream like crazy people. She wishes she was young and stupid enough to simply obliterate herself, to dress up like a schoolgirl and let men beat her for money, to destroy herself swiftly and decisively.

But she is not young enough anymore; she is almost thirty-five. Her life options are becoming more and more closed off. She sees a great blackness ahead of her, a great tunnel of it, closing away to an ever-narrowing center. She can only destroy herself slowly and deliberately. Obliteration will take forever.

She has never cared about anything. She still doesn’t, but this, right now, is something to do. She imagines checking into a love hotel alone, spreading herself out on the bed, impaling herself with plastic sex objects from the vending machine, Ravel blasting from the hotel speakers, sending videos of herself to Hyde. She imagines how much he hates her, imagines him associating that hate with the things that he loves.

Andrea Kneeland's first book, the Birds & the Beasts, is forthcoming from Cow Heavy Books. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently Wonderfort, Camroc Press Review, Gigantic, Barrelhouse, Vinyl Poetry, FRiGG and mud luscious press. She is a web editor for Hobart.

Jacob S. Knabb

2011-10-25T08:59:00.000-04:00

Studebaker

I have never been able to describe the way my father’s voice sounded with his nose full of blood as cars passed us on the interstate. I was just tall enough to see my reflection in his belt buckle. I remember being in the dirt on the side of I-65 and watching him crouch to get a closer look at the new dents in our overturned Studebaker, the rear wheel spinning slowly to a stop above us. He ran his fingers over the crumpled quarter-panel and said he was leaving us soon. He wiped blood from his nose with the back of his hand and told me an accident is something that can't happen. To my mother and to him. To me. Someone who has never been in your life—somebody who is the main character in their story too—can come along and hurt you. Just like someone had hurt our Studebaker. And maybe they didn’t even see you until the last minute. And maybe you had been waiting for them all along.

Jacob S. Knabb is the Editor-in-Chief of Another Chicago Magazine, the host of the literary variety show "So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel?", and a part-time photographer. He is a graduate of the Purdue Creative Writing Program and teaches composition at University of Illinois Chicago. His current obsession is composing a novel one line a day over at Twitter (which you can follow at https://twitter.com/#!/lineadaydiary).

T.A. Noonan

2011-10-24T08:56:00.001-04:00

Opticks // Covergirl

In a very dark Chamber, Newton records a round Hole,

the Shut of a Window, a stick in the prism’s surface.

This is where to keep the mouth. Inside, behind teeth.

No voices of blackwood, of Africa, of left-handed

Fender or clarinet. Nothing escapes. But more than mouths,

he worries about patellae. They float, you see;

bones shouldn’t float. Is not Light a Body to be kept

in perspective? It is, after all, a house of order —

architecture in Holga filters, in bilateral, radial,

helical symmetries. Everyone is a shut-in here.

I am not welcome with my repetitions. My opaque

lack. Only white metalline Bodies need apply. He sees

through my locked jaw. That tendon connecting

tongue to cleft to cervical spine. Somewhere,

a Polaroid shudders at the thought of latex.

T.A. Noonan is the author of The Bone Folders (Sundress Publications), Petticoat Government (Gold Wake Press), Darjeeling (Ahadada Books), and Balm (Flaming Giblet Press). Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Verse Daily, Phoebe, RHINO, specs, Harpur Palate, Superstition Review, and many others. Currently, she lives on Florida's Treasure Coast with her husband.

Rachel Yoder

2011-10-21T10:53:00.001-04:00

We Didn't

In February, love month, cold month of snow-cased love, we didn’t. Not in the bed, nor on the couch. We didn’t standing up, in the stand-up shower, or sitting down, in the sit-down tub. We didn’t late at night, as the TV played on the mirrored wall. Didn’t in the morning, when no-colored light sat on the windowsill. We didn’t even as our bodies, invisible and warm, rested beneath the feather duvet. Those days, those nights, it felt as though we moved within the carcass of a great animal, a maroon cavern so large we could not comprehend—and we didn’t, not even in that sweet-blooded darkness, we did not.

He thought we shouldn’t and so we didn’t. We didn’t because we wanted it too much. Didn’t because we already had too much. Didn’t because doing it was how we had once called forth dark waves. I still remember the tide of rushing horses, their frothed manes, how they rode in and rose quickly, how their wet bodies moved and spilled. They screamed horribly but were so beautiful, so soft to touch.

We boarded a plane to Florida because we longed to be who we were not. We touched each other’s hair. We shrugged off our heavy clothes. We rode in the back seat of a black sedan to Naples, and the carpeting in The Ritz was older than I had imagined it would be. The bar had colored bottles and people were laughing and smoking, tilting drinks, coldness on the insides of their throats, leaning in with their legs crossed and uncrossed. They talked and their words became layers of sound. They were real live people. This seemed so strange to me. He curved his arm around my shoulder as we passed through.

Don’t look at them, he said. Just don’t look.

We didn’t in the stiff white sheets, didn’t on the balcony, didn’t even though his father was paying for the whole thing, the flights and the hotel, but we didn’t care, and we didn’t. We didn’t do it as ants crawled up and down the legs of bedside tables. Didn’t do it as the sway-backed tide slid toward night.

We didn’t later, in the hot tub, lit from beneath. Didn’t as the water moved in our faces. Didn’t as we spoke of doing it, as we spoke of our love, as we imagined we would speak of that very moment after years. We didn’t together, but he did alone, in the warm water. It was salty and smelled of chlorine. I watched his face as he did it, memorized shadows and the shape of his skin. The palms. The darkness. The cots by the pool. The metal fence. The dark spots on the concrete. We weren’t unhappy. We were something worse, a black-and-white photograph of the first sunset you’ve ever seen.

Rachel Yoder edits draft: the journal of process, a publication which features stories, early drafts, and interviews with the author (draftjournal.com). Her writing has appeared most recently in The Collagist, The Sun Magazine, The Rumpus Women Anthology (Paper Internets, 2010), and is forthcoming in YOU: An Anthology of Essays in the Second Person (Welcome Table Press, 2011). She lives in Iowa City and teaches creative writing in the community. For more info visit www.racheljyoder.com.

Elizabeth Ellen

2011-10-20T07:58:00.000-04:00

Careful

In the museum she was careful not to think of the man once. On the third floor she became separated from her party and stood a long time before a small black and white photograph, a self-portrait by a young woman whose name she did not recognize. She made a quick walk around the room hoping to find other works by the woman but there was only the one: a single image of the artist upside down, her face and breasts exposed and consuming the frame of the picture. Nothing else in the museum was as interesting. The artist’s blonde hair and pale skin were illuminated in a manner resembling Hollywood stills she had seen from the 30s, Carole Lombard or a young Dietrich, maybe. The title of the photograph was long and contained the word “angel” and the woman felt in agreement reading it. It was hard to imagine the artist otherwise. Next to the photograph was a small box containing a brief biography, a few words detailing the artist’s death, her fall from a New York building at 22. The woman paused on the word “fall.” She scribbled the artist’s name across the museum brochure along with words for a poem that would not be about him.

This was on the seventh of July. Three days earlier the woman had followed her dog into the closet for the duration. She had brought with them supplies: Milk Bones and Swedish fish, a bottle of water and three mini bottles of various brands of liquor: Crown Royal & Red Stag & Bailey’s. She had explained to the man several times her disenchantment with holidays and now there was the added grievance of her dog’s anxiety.

She was reading a book about teenagers in a small Texas town. Once you remove yourself from all social networking sites, she had told him, you realize pretty quickly you were never not alone. The man had not disagreed. The man had sat on his couch and read a book last New Year’s Eve while she had spent the evening taking photographs of herself in varying states of undress in the snow and sending them to him electronically.

She was considering the construction of a pool. She had dreamed its existence taking up the entirety of the backyard. In the book about Texas teenagers they disrobed on diving boards, swam unclothed. The woman knew a handful who would. She imagined their bodies illuminated by the pool’s light while she sat on the side smoking with the dog.

She set the timer, positioned herself naked the length of the diving board, her back arched into the nothingness between board and water. She was careful not to think of him. She held her face blank, expressionless; a state she had practiced, meditating on the word “fall.” Beneath her in the frame two teenagers were visible. He was unable to recognize himself in them either. Only the dog offered flashes of familiarity, panting and anxious in the grass out of focus. He stared a while longer, reopened his book.

Elizabeth Ellen is the author of Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense) and Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix (Rose Metal Press). She will publish an anthology of her work - Fast Machine - through Short Flight/Long Drive Books before the end of the year.

Iris Ann Moulton

2011-10-19T11:32:00.002-04:00

Short Story in Nine Parts.

I. It is somewhere rainy and lush. Everyone’s t-shirts are dirty. There are irreconcilable halves of bumper stickers stuck to cheap cars. There are not very many roads in.

II. There is only one house of note, in which most everything occurs.

A. The house is stoic and grappling.

B. The garden is polite.

a. It is very easy to grow here.

b. Research: what is bougainvillea? And also: where?

c. Many of the flowers have bright bushy heads, like puppets.

C. The entry way is splotched carpet.

D. Something intended for keys now catches spare change, movie stubs, rubberbands.

a. Keys are still lost.

III. The woman has fox-colored hair down to her nipples

A. Sheer T-shirt

B. White

C. One cigarette

IV. A man comes in. We do not know if it is the lover or male relative. He knows a lot about paying bills but also her T-shirt is sheer.

V. The lover says something that reveals he is a nice guy most of the time, but that everybody makes mistakes.

VI. The woman thinks something that makes her unforgivable to any reader.

A. Are we the woman or the man? the reader will ask.

VII. Draw attention to the cigarette ash, as it becomes very important here.

A. It is long and it burns with no help.

B. She must be distracted by something, or otherwise lost.

C. The ash gets on the carpet and contributes to spots

D. The brand is cheap and burns too quickly.

a. It must be a fictional brand so as to avoid her being associated with: cowboys, punks.

E. The lover says nothing about the cigarette ash, nor does he smoke, which indicates they will not last much longer.

VIII. Something happens outside to break the tension, which by now should be like water threatening the drain.

IX. She says the name of a certain flower. He touches something that is not her.

Iris Ann Moulton was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she studied English Literature and Anthropology at the University of Utah. She now lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where she is pursuing an MFA and works as the co-Editor-in-Chief for Beecher's. She has most recently been published in Fugue, Everyday Genius, elimae, and appeared as a featured writer for the American Short Fiction web exclusive series. For more: irismoulton.com

Kim Chinquee

2011-10-18T09:56:00.006-04:00

Historic District

She tried to be mindful, cooking up her rice, but she found the bang above distracting. Bang, bang, bang, and she imagined a bedpost, a wall. A man in haste, that man who had followed her from the gym late at night. It was just across the street when she used to live downtown, and she still sensed the wring of his hands, felt the veil over her head, the pow pow pow of a TV show, how he'd done that and then stuffed her and then dumped her. The flow of him stayed with her, but she couldn't define his face, whether he had a long nose or a short one, whether his eyes were dark or blue. He didn't use his lips. She remembered some white teeth, but it could have been a vision, her closing her eyes and imagining snow, a wedding, her wings.

It was Saturday night and she'd seen the guy who lived above her in the courtyard with a skinny girl in sandals, her long dark hair, her dress so short and her thick cosmetics made her look like a scream.

She put in a set of earplugs. There were sets on the counter, in the drawer, on the desk, on the bookshelf, by the sofa. Sometimes she found them on the floor, in corners. She'd leave them, and suck them in the vacuum.

She simmered the rice, put the sprouts in the steamer, checked the stove. The tilapia was crisp. But she'd lost her hunger, and remembered writing in her journal something her therapist and the other people told her, to be mindful and just eat.

She tried to smell the food, but she smelled fire, hay, the place she couldn't move yet—where she also couldn't yet see, feeling the prick of the dry weed. She pictured one big flame, just stuck in the heat of it.

She looked out the window. Down two floors was the courtyard. Benches. Flowers. Trees. Big and round that had been there for centuries.

Kim Chinquee is the author of the collections Oh Baby and Pretty. She lives in Buffalo, New York.

Chanel Clarke

2011-10-17T08:12:00.000-04:00

To Duel in an Empty Field

At dawn, we wanted

to come forth

on horseback with pistols,

but we couldn’t be

bothered and stayed in bed.

We needed to see

each other feel the day

ease into evening, lips colder

as the darkening hour made

our breath visible again.

Stay in your leather,

beautiful. Keep your wool

if you need it.

You are what you are,

one of us might say out loud,

and it wouldn’t matter who

because we would have made

peace with our symmetries

by then, and we wouldn’t care

so much about the noise

warming our skin. We could

nurse the noise into music.

After all, forgiving the body

is a matter of survival.

Sing wherever you are.

Be percussive, ridiculous, and brave.

Chanel Clarke is a Poetry Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. Her poems are also forthcoming in Bayou, Anti- and Intersections.