Sunsets and Silencers - Latest Blog Entries

"Whatever Happened to What’s-his-name?" Flash Fiction by Norman Waksler

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:16:00 -0500

"Whatever Happened to What’s-his-name?" Flash Fiction by Norman Waksler

Eddie B. was stunned when the pop star Megan Megan named him the father of her baby to be. Eddie B. was a mechanic in the small Massachusetts city of Leominster. Megan Megan was everywhere on TV and tours. As far as Eddie B. could remember, they’d never met, never mind fucked. Eddie B. was in his balding late thirties with a fast food gut and in-debt eyes. Megan Megan was a blonde twenty-one with a washboard stomach and a hard little ass, fine legs and a mouth like a lipstick ad. Eddie B. thought her singing was screechy, but god, she was a hot little piece. Eddie B.’s wife, Phyllis, after three kids and fifteen years married, was pouched out here and sagged there, so, yeah, maybe during one of their less frequent these days fucks, he had fantasized about Megan Megan after seeing her dance and sing on the tube, but as far as Eddie B. knew, that wasn’t how babies were made.

“It was like a dream,” Megan Megan announced to the assembled media, “that you remember in the middle of the night and forget in the morning. But I know it was Eddie B. who works as a mechanic in Leominster, Massachusetts. I’m not ashamed of a one time thing, but I never want to see him again. The baby will be mine, just mine,” patting her perfectly flat abs between her low rider jeans and her high rise tee shirt.

Phyllis was furious. “How could you sleep with that little slut? When did you meet her? Was it when you said you were going out with the guys, and instead you were getting into that little whore’s pants? You’re going to pay for this, Eddie B. I swear. My brothers’ll kill you, if I don’t kill you first.” Followed by tears that were not quite as painful as the prospect of a beating from her very large brothers who ran the family lumber yard and had really rotten tempers anyway.

Eddie B. denied up and down that he ever had anything to do with Megan Megan, omitting to mention the fantasizing, since he didn’t think it would help matters at all. “Look. Number one. When the hell would I have had a chance to meet a star like that, and number two, why the hell would a girl like that want to screw a guy like me? I mean, come on, Phyllis, use your goddamned head.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why would she say so if wasn’t true? You’re a lying sack of shit, Eddie B.”
Eddie B.’s teen aged kids were upset and confused, not knowing whether to be mad at him for cheating on their mom, or impressed that he’d actually gotten it on with the totally sick Megan Megan, though they couldn’t figure out why she’d want to have anything to do with their dad who was OK, but, like, falling apart already.

“Who is Eddie B?” asked Entertainment Now!, “Who is Eddie B?” asked the buzz sites, the bloggers, and the ezines. So the media mobs descended on their little house in Leominster to find the answer, then after Phyllis kicked him out, on the garage where he worked, shouting questions and ignoring his denials, interfering with the other mechanics and generally keeping work from getting done.

Not that the other mechanics minded. “Oh, sure, I knew Eddie B. was a stud from way back,” said Louis J. to the camera. “He always had a hot babe hanging on to him.”

“Eddie B.” said Ralph P. “You never know about a guy. You look at him and you’d never think a babe like Megan Megan would have anything to do with him. But still water, you know.”

The boss was less than happy with the constant interruption. “Eddie B. You better take some time off till this shit dies down. Did you really fuck that sweet piece? You’re one lucky guy.”

That was the attitude of all the guys that Eddie B. knew, and he couldn’t help noticing that there were women who looked at him differently now, like he had to be a real stud to have gotten it on with Megan Megan, and maybe they wouldn’t mind trying whatever it was he had. But Eddie B. was too tired and confused and annoyed and discouraged to want to take advantage of his chances, though he thought it would be good revenge on Phyllis if he could.

Without a home, out of work, avoiding the lumberyard brothers, Eddie B. had a thought — he’d go find Megan Megan and get her to admit the whole thing was some kind of crazy mix-up, that somehow, maybe she’d passed through Leominster and seen the garage and found out his name and just decided to put him on the spot instead of whoever had really knocked her up.

It took a day on the library computer among the many million Megan Megan hits to learn her location in Florida. A long bus ride brought him to her town, and a long walk took him to the gate in the wrought iron fence surrounding her twenty seven room mansion where a pair of broad and brawny guards said, “Private property bud. Move along.”

“I’m Eddie B. I need to talk to Megan Megan.”

One of the guards ducked into the gate house, checked a photo, came out and said, “Right. Eddie B. Miss Megan Megan has taken out a restraining order against you. You can’t even be in the same county she is, so you need to go back where you came from or we call the cops.”

Eddie B. could’ve cried from the injustice of it all. “But she’s got to tell the world it wasn’t me.”

“She doesn’t have to tell anybody anything, and you’ve got ten seconds to depart, or else.”

“At least let her come out and look at me. She’ll know we never met.”

A cell phone appeared. A finger tapped 911.

“All right, all right. I’m going.”

Sitting with a cup of coffee in a diner in the small town center, Eddie B. tied to figure a way to sneak into the mansion and confront Megan Megan. He fantasized black clothes at night, picking the lock, disabling the alarm, tip-toeing up the stairs to enter the suite where Megan Megan slept on her famous circular bed, her fabulous blonde hair spread around her sweet face. He shook her gently by the shoulder in some silky material. Her eyes opened suddenly, staring at him in alarm. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s just me, Eddie B. I just need you to tell the world I’m not the father of your baby-to-be.”

With no hurry at all, Megan Megan turned away, reached under her two pillows, pulled out a small silver automatic, and pointed it at him. “Oh shit,” said Eddie B, as he imagined what the next morning’s headlines would say

Norman Waksler has published fiction in a number of journals, most recently Storyquarterly, Madison Review, Chaffin Journal, Edgar, and Epicenter. His most recent story collection, Signs of Life is published by the Black Lawrence Press. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For a nice picture of his Cairn Terrier, Glennis, as well as further information, see his website, Normanwakslerfiction.com.

"Strip Show" Poetry by Sara Lier

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:07:00 -0500

"Strip Show" Poetry by Sara Lier

First I’ll take off my scars:

the long one on my arm like stripping

tape from a fresh paint job,

the burn scars like picking up

pennies on the street.

Eat them, I’ll say,

and the front row’ll open their maws

and snap down on the skin-history I throw

between their teeth.

I’ll unscrew my uterus like a lightbulb and take out

my hairs one by one, first between the legs, then up

to the eyebrows, scalp. I will stand

bald and markless, and the crowd will coo.

Wait, I’ll say, you’ve seen nothing

yet. And I’ll pop out

my eyeballs: 1, 2.

I’ll put them in a paper tube

with cellophane stretched over each end

and shake them to a beat.

Meanwhile I’ll remove my nose

and set it spinning like a top.

My ears I’ll detach and wear

like bracelets. My feet will come off

with a little more difficulty--

I’ll have to sit and pry

them one at a time. The toes’ll wiggle the way

they say a chicken does if you cut off the head.

I will remove my own head

to demonstrate the connection.

Gentlemen, the mouth will say,

my final act. Somewhere

a gramophone will click on

with a swanky song, and I will hold each

breast like a brass knob

and I’ll part my ribs like French doors

swinging open. I’ll untie

my arteries with one pull, easy

as shoestring. The crowd will cock

themselves forward to see,

but my heart will plop out, splat.

Indecent on the floor.

Behind it there will be a room with white curtains.

There is only one person sleeping there.

Gentlemen, I’ll say,

and the curtains will blow in the wind.

Sara Lier is a student living in New Jersey. Her poetry has recently appeared in Inkwell Journal, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Conte, So to Speak, and Cloudbank, where she received a prize for the best poem in that issue. In addition, she received Brooklyn College's Academy of American Poets prize in 2007, and one of her poems was chosen by the academy for an anthology of prize winners from the last decade. She is currently looking for a publisher for her first chapbook collection.

"Moon 2" and "Moon 3" Photography by Eleanor Leonne Bennet

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:48:00 -0500

"Moon 2" and "Moon 3" Photography by Eleanor Leonne Bennett

Moon 2

Moon 3

Eleanor Leonne Bennett has had her photography exhibited around the globe in galleries and published around the world in magazines such as Dot Dot Dash (Australian), Alabama Coast and Alabama Seaport (USA), The Guardian (UK), Revolution Art (USA) , The Big Issue In The North (UK) , and RSPB Birds and RSPB Birdlife magazines (UK) . She is the winner of the UK National Geographic Photography Contest 2010, The World Photography Organization's Photomonth youth award 2010 , The February 2011 winner with Nature's Best Photography, Winston's Wish 2011, Papworth Trust, and has also won three National Art contests.

"Love Song for the Impossible Him," "Binghamton," "On Being Erroneously Called a New

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:27:00 -0500

"Love Song for the Impossible Him," "Binghamton," "On Being Erroneously Called a New Yorker Again" Poetry by Erin Elizabeth Smith

Love Song for the Impossible Him

after Millay

It was when he held me

on the street corner

as we broke for our separate homes

in late November –

that same month I always fall

in love. There wasn’t the itching

of cold in Mississippi

as there had been

in all those other states,

just the strange warm promise

of my cheek on his chest

and the quick cling of hands

before we crossed that street.

This sounds like another poem

about a man I used to know,

engaged now

while I am married

to neither,

those two hard-backed men

I could never turn to more

than brief stanzas, fleeting night

dreams of rabbit holes and

shabby ladders.

Drunk in his car, one night,

I tell him to follow me

up the dark stairs.

I broke somewhere

when he said No. The simplicity

of denial and the small-hearted

rage of skin

that needs bedsheets and the tossing

sleep that follows.

That New York love made over

again in the Deep South,

where the cicadas are nothing

like the upstate thistle

but sometimes they are promises

made in heat, enough

to break the loneliness

of coffee and morning television.

How easy it is to remember – him

on a stool in the windowless dark

of afternoon bars

while the bourbon carmelized in ice,

and my knee kept brushing his

again and again

in that improbable space

between us.

Binghamton

On April 6, 2009, a gunman opened fire on a center

where immigrants were taking a citizenship exam

in downtown Binghamton, killing thirteen.

It’s not hard to remember

her through the television

snapshots – the congressional

church on Main looking out

along the strip of chicken

joints and the red brick high school.

Everything needing

a good scrub from the salty

winters, industrial closings,

her sad desire to be reborn.

A thousand miles away,

and everyone’s saying her name

like I never left, like she is sitting

on my porch again,

fingering the mimosa she killed

in its clay pot. I can almost touch her

even here, in this Southern city,

where the bushes turn twenty

shades of pink in February

and the deafening grey

of the rainy season is but a bluster

of winter and then the pirouetting spring.

It’s as blue today in Mississippi

as it was that September in New York

when the great cats of those buildings

skinned themselves to ash.

I stared out my window that day too,

looking at her in the backyard,

the thistle crinkling violet on the green.

A cat rolled and rolled in my garden,

turned up its newly brown body

and hopped the fence.

That’s most of what I remember of that day,

and I look at my own cats,

chasing each other in and out

of my car’s tires and wonder if this

is how I’ll see her now—

the vested police with their long guns,

a blockade of lights and firearms.

My one loved city reduced

to headlines, her proximity

from New York. And me so useless

and distant, wanting nothing

but a home to cradle her in.

On Being Erroneously Called a New Yorker Again

It’s not that I don't want

your palate of hill, roughed up

autumn color. I would take it all –

the stones in the dried Susquehanna,

the candy sunsets and all the slow turns

on the dark drive to Ithaca.

I would take the closed summer rinks,

the children clung

on the necks of carousel mares.

Stretches of surprising cows

and corn and the barns

long sunk into themselves.

Take the imploding

shoe factory, the starving doors

of IBM, the remains of the Art

Theater, its five years of ash.

I’d take the terrible pink

of that retirement home

and scrape it to its bergamot beginnings.

Wash the arena windows

until they shone like dimes,

dress all the bandages

on the heels of you, my city, and lullaby

the mounded snow to spring.

But I inherited another story –

dimpled palmetto forts, the dignity

of Southern dead, songs about cars,

cornbread and cast iron. Where I’m from,

we do not believe in New York,

but still, I’m Wendy,

sometimes, in her bed,

staring into the sad black

of a story that is no longer mine.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of the books The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011). Her poetry has previously appeared in 32 Poems, The Yalobusha Review, New Delta Review, Water~Stone Review, Third Coast, Crab Orchard, and Willow Springs among others. Erin holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi and is currently a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee.

"The Canyon Sleepers" Fiction by Donelle Dreese

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:39:00 -0500

"The Canyon Sleepers" Fiction by Donelle Dreese

The Canyon Sleepers

From behind a narrow oak tree, Mary Ann peered down into the forest canyon at Jordan. He had fallen asleep on a bed of damp, crumbling leaves. Her vision adjusted to the distance and she observed the canyon as it grew crisp with lines and shapes as darkness fell over the landscape. Jordan's eyelids flickered in his fitful sleep, and she knew that he would not wake anytime soon.

Less than a year ago, she had moved to a new city. Near her apartment there was a broad stretching park, Redleaf Woods, not far from the airport. On the park’s wooded trails, she walked a thick path in the summer months, when it seemed the trees had been in bloom forever, and she often heard the roar of airplanes taking off a short distance away. The sound always gave her a rush in her chest. She imagined herself as a passenger, free to explore, to go anywhere in the world. What she really wanted was to experience the certainty of space and vastness, the expanse of the ocean, and far-spreading cornfields, or the desert. But the undergrowth in Redleaf Woods made her feel claustrophobic, as if the plants and vines wanted to push themselves from their soil beds and wrap around her ankles so she couldn't walk or run away .

Mary Ann thought that Jordan loved her to the degree that he hated her. He wanted to give her everything, it seemed. He wanted to buy her anything she wanted, to show her the farthest corners of the blue world, but then, he wanted to hurt her as well, and his cruelty was dark.

In a way, Mary Ann understood this. It reminded her of how she felt when she went to Niagara Falls and stood inches from the railing, peering over at the quiet, white arc of water that plunged into a deep, rocky oblivion. The current foamed and flowed; it carved and sliced a yawning river canyon spinning with jade and emerald whirlpools. There was something silky and sensuously alluring about it, yet it filled her with such incredible horror that she never went back.

Perhaps her actions were coming from that same place where fear and attraction live. That day, after the visiting the falls, she had decided to go to a nearby shopping plaza. While there she had bought and assembled a basket of gifts for Jordan. She thought she would surprise him at his doorstep, bearing fruits and flowers, to recreate that sense of spontaneity that was such a thrill when they first fell in love. If he wasn’t there, she would wait for him and hand him the basket of gifts as he walked in the door.

She fantasized about his face, how he would look shocked, then start to smile, and maybe he would run his fingers over the satin cloth of the purple négligée that blossomed from the basket. It was a two-hour drive, so she hurried through the checkout line and left town, stopping at a windy gas station on the outskirts of the city. She drove south through first sun, then an autumn storm, then the darkness, which had freshly fallen when she arrived at Jordan’s apartment. Mary Ann sat in the car for a short while and stared blankly at his front door, which she could clearly see from her vantage point on the other side of the street. She saw herself on the street, or one much like it, many years ago walking, elbows locked with her lover whose abuses she mistook for love notes. She still felt ashamed for her devotion, how she stayed even after he put his fist through her bedroom window.

In the passenger’s seat of her car was the gift for Jordan, a basket filled with his favorite nonperishable foods, a bottle of Brandy, dried strawberries, macadamia nuts, a candle, matches, and the deep purple silk négligée folded up and tucked into the side. As she gathered the basket and arranged its contents, she heard a door slam, then another. She looked over at the parking lot and saw Jordan had come home, but he was not alone.

In the streetlight, she could see that the woman wore a brightly colored orange scarf around her neck, a color Mary Ann would never wear. Some keys faintly rattled as she watched the woman give the overnight bag to Jordan to hold while she unlocked his door. Mary Ann had choices. She wanted to think this time before reacting.

Her legs and hands shook violently and the adrenaline in her body made the porch lights and headlights from other cars passing by explode in front of her. She kept saying to herself over and over again, I've been asleep, I've been asleep.

The fury lingered through the evening hours. She felt justified in wanting to wreck Jordan’s life . But soon, this feeling began to transform into a quiet resolve, cooling the shock and fever inside of her. She took her cell phone from the glove compartment and dialed his number. He didn’t answer, though through the window of her car, Mary Ann could see that his front room lights were on. Periodically, she saw shadows behind the curtains, moving like ghosts.

On one dialing his voicemail picked up her call, and she left a message saying that she was on her way to see him. Perhaps she wanted to give him a chance to send his houseguest to a hotel, but more likely, an angry part of her wanted to make him panic. She imagined him nervous, a concerned look on his face, a distracted demeanor, the portrait of a liar.

When she pressed the OFF button on the cell phone, something unexpected came over her, a monstrous and singular calm, almost resembling joy, like the unimaginable hope when the eye of the hurricane is overhead. The darkness outside contrasted the lightness that was slowly growing inside of her. She hoped it wasn’t fleeting or some false euphoria created by a part of her mind trying to escape the shadows of what she knew to be true. She was, if nothing else, self aware. When falling into an abyss, not only was she aware of the fact that she was heading south and that it was going to hurt, but she could usually determine the rock strata and wind velocity on the way down. But, just because she knew these things didn’t mean she could stop the fall. She looked up from the steering wheel, her cheeks still wet with tears, and stared firmly into a streetlight. With all of the hurt she too had felt in the relationship with Jordan during the past tumultuous year, she had not made this choice.

She started her car and pulled on to Interstate 95 to head back north.

By the time she was half way home, she ate nearly all the food in the basket she had bought for Jordan. She left an apple and a bag of pine nuts for lunch the next day. Mary Ann watched the highway lights flicker by in the darkness, and she wondered if she would ever make this same drive again – would she find herself at this place again, in the middle of the night, eating her love from a gift basket.

When she arrived at her apartment, it was four in the morning. She went into the bathroom and slipped on the négligée she had taken to wear for Jordan. She poured a tall glass of the brandy and held it in the air watching the brandy swirl in the glass over her head. Mary Ann sat for an hour, quietly sipping, running her fingers over the thin, polished surface of the négligée. She didn’t know what to think of Jordan, or the night’s events, which began to take on elements of the surreal, though still tangible. She went to bed for an hour but couldn’t sleep, wondering if she jumped to an awful conclusion too quickly.

She felt betrayed. She felt detached. She felt liberated. She somehow knew that the path she had been walking was going to lead to this clearing. She knew it had to. She had this feeling; it was like cool water running over a hot wound.

In the early evening of the following day, she went for a walk along one of Redleaf’s woodland paths covered in warm, mustard, autumn colors and she lifted her head high to breathe in the air . She almost didn’t go. She knew that if Jordan were to look for her, this is where he would look. He would be wondering why she didn’t show up at his apartment last night after she made the phone call. He would see her car in the parking lot at the trail head, but all she thought about was how the sky was cloudy, but not dark, fresh but not cold, moist but not humid. The path led over a small stream canyon, with a bridge bonding its sides in order to cross its width and the dwindling tributary that once must have been something. She still dreamed of seeing the Grand Canyon.

On her walk, Mary Ann heard the familiar sound of a thundering jet lift from the runway carrying passengers to their hopes or hassles. The engines echoed loudly, but rarely could she see the planes through the trees. She imagined in her head the fire blowing from beneath the wings and the plane’s nose cocked upward, pushing through gravity with stunning force. She thought of Jordan and how he was with her the first time she flew in a commercial jet, when they had taken a trip to visit friends in Arizona, how she wasn’t scared, but rather very curious.

Maybe they would go to the Grand Canyon. Maybe there is some way she could look Jordan in the face and not see the shades of warning: red, the color of blood, the color of brandy and apple, the purple négligée, the orange scarf. Maybe they were already there. In mid-thought, the explosion startled Mary Ann, but she never saw the direction from which it came, headlong into the narrow canyon of Redleaf Woods. Private planes had crashed in Redleaf before, but only once before did a jet of that size pummel through its trees, too long ago, long before she lived near the park.

Later that evening, as close as he could get to the crash site, Jordan knelt in the bottom of the canyon next to the small stream that held a few pieces of crash debris. Mary Ann knew he would come to look for her.

It had been easy before she saw him, and felt his energy, as she had always felt it so many times before, that familiar dark rumble of distant thunder. Mary Ann felt her skin tighten and her ears become sharp and hollow, like the two times in her life when she heard a voice in a room say her name, generic and plain, but her name as surely as she heard the clock tick or the dog take a deep breath in his sleep. But there was no one there, and the voice was not one that she recognized. She watched Jordan by the moonlight that was streaking through the trees. She wanted to speak, but she knew she would see honesty if she remained silent behind the trees. In the distance, she could hear the firemen, policemen, airline officials and investigators hardening themselves to do their jobs. She wondered if Jordan thought she had been hit by the plane while hiking.

Every now and then, a thin blade of spotlight cut down through the trees passing the orange tape that outlined the site and bled into the water lightly gurgling over small, round stones. She could see the moss growing on the stones, and the dead pine needles that gathered had exposed the roots of trees. Jordan’s eyes seemed to turn blurry with grief. She thought that whatever he had been running from, in her, in himself, in the world, was there in front of him now.

Perhaps he thought if he loved another woman he could get away. Maybe he thought that if he worked all day that he could avoid it, that he would be too tired to face it. Maybe if he told enough lies he could make a world where those lies were true. His masks would protect him. Mary Ann’s body was filled with an incompatible mix of disgust and sympathy, resentment and adoration. She wondered if he felt responsible, not because of all that he had done, but because of all that had to happen.

A faint glimmer of light from the eastern horizon filled the forest with thin black shadows. He fell asleep there, a child on a bed of pumpkin-colored leaves. Mary Ann quietly crept down to the bottom of the canyon and sat on a rock near his face, swollen and in pain. She didn’t wake him. She didn’t say anything. She only thought, how are we going to clean up this disaster? Mary Ann closed her eyes and imagined herself in the middle of a wide, golden stretch of prairie where the blowing grass whispered as the stems stroked one another. In the distance, she vaguely heard the rescue crews discussing the crash a good distance away. Jordan’s eyes were dark underneath, sunken in. She closed her eyes and rested her head back in the curve of a tree trunk behind her and thought of the Grand Canyon, how everything but the sky diminishes in its space. She had heard that seeing the Grand Canyon could strike an inexplicable awe in a person, but she wanted to see it for herself someday. She wanted to leave this narrow ravine that smelled of smoke and gasoline. Even though she couldn't see the trail, she pulled herself away from the tree trunk and started walking. She had a sense of what was ahead – a steep hill, branches scraping her face in the dark, a high probability that she would get terribly lost. Looking straight down at her feet with her boots pointed forward, she kept walking.

Dr. Donelle Dreese is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Northern Kentucky University. Donelle had her work published in numerous magazines and journals including the Journal of Kentucky Studies, Appalachian Heritage, Terminus, Gulf Stream Magazine, Organization & Environment, andISLE: Interdisciplinary Study in Literature and the Environment. In 2008, her chapbook of poetry, A Wild Turn, was published by Finishing Line Press, and in 2010, her book of environmental writing, America's Natural Places: East and Northeast was published by Greenwood Press. Finally, Dreese’s second chapbook of poetry, Looking for a Sunday Afternoon, was published in 2010 by Pudding House Publications.

"Behind the Burlesque," "Bless You," and "Cyclops" Fractal-based Digital Art by Terry Wright

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:32:00 -0500

"Behind the Burlesque," "Bless You," and "Cyclops" Fractal-based Digital Art by Terry Wright

Behind the Burlesque

Bless You

Cyclops

Terry Wright lives in Little Rock, Arkansas and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. His latest chapbook is Graphs (Kairos Editions, 2011). More of his art and poetry can be seen at his web site: http://wrightart.net/. Terry believes his sunrise can beat up yours.

"Wreckers" Fiction by L.B. Sedlacek

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:28:00 -0500

"Wreckers" Fiction by L.B. Sedlacek

Wreckers

It is unlucky to start a cruise on Friday.Most of Key West is three to four feet above sea level. Bobby raised his glass, clinked it against mine. He slurped down half his beer before wiping his chin and lips with a gnarled hand and pointed to the sunset. An orange hue gleamed against the windows and dripped down the glass in a humid haze.

“Those are great, aren’t they?”

I held my hand in the air and waved at the bartender. “Two more over here, Owen.”

Bobby drained the rest of his beer and dropped the bottle on the table. He grinned and rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt. His arms were deep brown and muscular. He had a wide neck and skeletal legs that he claimed helped him move quicker when he was on deck. I was half his size and everything about me screamed scrawny. Bobby would always say I was the brains and he was the brawn, that’s what he would tell the newbies anyway.

Disaster will follow if you step onto a boat with your left foot first. The sunset was evaporating quick; a faint red glow fanned out across the ocean. I looked at the giant palm fronds swaying in the breeze.

“Wind’s picking up, Bobby. We may have more of it come morning. What do you think?”

Bobby fingered his beer bottle wrapping wide fat fingers in a fist. “Ah, you’ll get used to it. That ain’t hurricane wind by any means. It’s just an ocean breeze. It gets colder this time of year especially on Halloween. Less humidity hanging in the air. Besides, we’ll be underneath it.”

A silver coin placed under the masthead ensures a successful voyage. I nodded and grabbed the check. I pulled my wallet from my sport coat and threw a couple of tens and four quarters on the table. Bobby picked up a round squat glass and set it down on the bills. The glass was ridged like a pumpkin and was crammed full of Parmesan cheese.

“You ready to go, Clyde?”

I pushed back my chair and nodded to the bartender.

Bobby said, “See you tomorrow, Owen.”

Don’t look back once your ship has left port as this can bring bad luck. We stepped out on Duvall street and surveyed the crowd. Most were tourists. There were still a few locals plowing down the streets in flip flops or barefoot back to their homes, shops, or hang outs after watching the sunset. A couple of people hollered, “Hey Bobby.” Bobby yelled back and waved. His fingers were bent and he could not make his hands go flat. He claimed it was from an old bar fight injury. Owen told me it was from years of fishing in the keys, and holding his hands too long in the same position.

I pointed to the last glimmer of the sunset. “Water’s getting black, Bobby.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s not that far to the pier. I have the candles.”

I sighed. “Sure. Okay. Maybe we can get something to eat afterward?”

Bobby chuckled. “Beer didn’t fill you up? I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t eat any of Owen’s cooking either. Some folks say his food’s been around almost as long as he has.”

Starting a cruise on December thirty-first is bad. I buttoned my jacket and shoved my hands in my jeans, pulling my lips up into a pseudo smile. It was the end of the month. October thirty-first. It was four hours until midnight.I followed Bobby towards the pier where the Moravian Vista was moored. It was my boat, a massive steel barge with cranes and computers and all the latest in treasure hunting equipment.

A naked woman on board will calm the sea. In the heyday of America’s merchant-marine traffic in the middle nineteenth century, ships would crash into one of the key’s coral reefs. The corals were almost invisible even on sunny days. The Moravian Vista was a wrecker, a bottom feeder of shipwrecks. My warehouse sat near the eastern end of the island and was crammed full of furniture, guns, and sometimes gold, silver, pearls or diamonds. We would always try to locate the rightful owner’s relatives and give them first shot at reclaiming the goods before we would hold our monthly auction and offer up our spoils of the sea to the highest bidders.

Bobby’s pace picked up as we headed into Mallory Square past the main cruise dock. With finds like the Isaac Allerton, the Santa Margarita, and the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, shipwreck salvage had become big business in Key West. The Nuestra Senora de Atocha had proven to be the biggest find so far with silver, gold and jewelry worth approximately four hundred million dollars.

Pouring wine on the deck will bring good luck on a long voyage. Bobby tossed a quarter in the air. “Your turn to call it, Clyde.”

I sighed. “Tails.”

Bobby caught the quarter and slapped it on his arm. “Heads, it is.”

I grimaced and rolled my eyes, careful to make sure Bobby didn’t see me. He was the best navigational guide for the waters and the reefs I could find and he wasn’t afraid to put on a scuba suit and crawl around on the ocean floor. The crew of the Moravian Vista believed Bobby to be the toughest man they’d ever met. Bobby soaked up their bravado. He was their good luck charm.

We stopped at the end of the pier. The reflections from a couple of streetlights bounced off the water.

I flipped my collar up around my neck and pulled out two candles. “Where do you want these?”

Bobby pointed to the fisherman’s table at the end of the pier. “Right there will do.”

The candles were white and tall and the kind that most people used on their dining room tables when having company over for dinner. I lit both candles and let the wax drip in two spots about a foot apart. When enough wax had dripped, I set each candle in the melted goo until the bottoms took hold and they stood up by themselves. Bobby reached into his pocket. He handed me a picture. The photo was black and white and placed in a cheap gold frame. I set the photo between the candles. Bobby knelt in front of the picture, his head at eye level. He closed his eyes and hummed. I pulled out a bottle of red wine and popped the cork. I poured it on the pier and tossed some over on the deck of my boat.

I looked at the picture, into the eyes of Bobby’s wife. Every month with a thirty-first day, Bobby dragged me to Owen’s Bar, and then to the pier, where we would take a moment to remember her. She’d never shown an interest in boats, but the one time she took a tour with Bobby, she’d slipped and fallen overboard and her body was never recovered. Bobby’s third or fourth fishing vessel had been called Princess, his nickname for her. He’d worked on another one later called Dana, her name.

I was interviewing him at my warehouse the morning the news hit about her death. Bobby spent the rest of the morning explaining to me, a landlubber from Iowa, the things I needed to know about ships, sailors, and the sea. My favorite advice was to avoid red heads when going to the ship because red heads brought bad luck.

Every time we set sail, the night before, I would be up all night. My crew would visit me at my townhouse along with my full head of red hair. They also made sure I knew to never start a voyage on the first Monday in April because it was the day Cain slew Able, that a stolen piece of wood mortised in the keel would make the ship go faster, and that a dog seen near fishing tackle was bad luck.

I picked up a hook from the fisherman’s table and picked at the candle wax. I tapped Bobby on the shoulder. “You bout ready to go? It’s getting late.”

Bobby looked up at me and shrugged his shoulders. “Yep. Guess so. The guys will be coming by to see you soon, won’t they?”

I grinned and said, “Yep. But I’ve got one for them.”

Bobby stood and blew out the candles. He put Dana’s picture inside his shirt. “Yeah? What?”

“Never say the word ‘drowned’ at sea.”

Bobby bit his lips and scrunched his mouth. Finally, he said, “Yep, Clyde. You’re getting the hang of it. You might end up at the sailor’s Fiddler’s Green after all.”

I slipped the candles in my pocket and shook my head.

L.B. Sedlacek's short stories have appeared in publications such as "Literary House Review," "StoriesThatLift.com," "Bovine Free Wyoming," "Monarch Mysteries," "The Outer Rim," "Silver Moon," and "Duct Tape Press." Her poetry has been published in "Assisi Journal," "Down in the Cellar," "Audience Magazine," "Song of the Siren," "Aoife's Kiss," "Poesia," and others. L.B. also hosts "Coffee House to Go," a podcast for the small press.

"The Big Bang" Flash Fiction by Michael Hart

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:25:00 -0500

"The Big Bang" Flash Fiction by Michael Hart

The Big Bang

For a moment there is calm. Cocktail conversations align in arrangements. Solitary fits of laughter orchestrate into arpeggios. A brisk autumn breeze turns still. The flat October air takes the floral scent of May. Time is stoned. In a burst, their lips meet, and in an instant there's a cosmos shaping somewhere between this synapse. Electrons and nuclei form into atoms, the soft glow within closed eyes. Flares of light reveal particles, drops of color. Laughing under sunshine on long celebrated avenues—in Paris, Rome, Santiago, Tokyo—hand in hand on black sand beaches, on summits overlooking verdant valleys, on lawns under weeping willows. They are following the shadows of their branches, dendrites with endless paths, and when one ends, there is another within an easy leap, a gentle skip between boulders on a stream. They whir and glide, ebb and flow, sway onto stages of productions grander than ever imagined. Productions with cathedrals, palaces, rooms upon rooms, characters entering and exiting stage, serenades and symphonies. The universe expands, expands, expands and the endpoints become little beacons, billions of light years away, stars in lonely corners of the midnight sky. Between them, vast, eternal space. Their lips part to discussions of stocks and office politics and goose bumps rise as the mercury falls. They look around and space contracts, contracts, contracts, until the endpoints are flickering bulbs slowly burning out.

Michael Hart works as a writer and editor while pursuing a graduate education in psychology. He resides in Louisville, Kentucky, where he feigns a keen taste for bourbon and tries to make sense of horse racing. His stories have been published in Diverse Voices Quarterly and Fiction at Work.

“Not Moving to the Suburbs” Poetry by Callie Worsham

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:24:00 -0500

“Not Moving to the Suburbs” Poetry by Callie Worsham

Not Moving to the Suburbs

My professor tells his lecture hall,

“Sometimes death is easier than

breaking up.”

When your lover is dead

you don’t wonder

what they are doing now

or if they’ve moved on.

You can’t be jealous of the dead.

Something tells me

my professor’s never lost

a loved one to internal bleeding,

arm filling with fluid,

158 units of blood

being pumped through

a body with both stomach and intestines

exposed to the salty, humid air

that chokes the family

and friends.

I’d rather my loved one was happy,

living in the suburb,

quietly watching his children grow,

falling in and out of love.

Maybe then I wouldn’t think about

how he gets to sleep this all away

while I’m stuck here

being jealous of the dead.

Callie Worsham is a graduate of the University of Michigan. She received her B.A. in Creative Writing and currently works as a copywriter in Syracuse, NY. Her work has been published in Skive Magazine, Xylem, and The Michigan Daily.

“False Vacuum” and “Pax Atlanta” Poetry by Alyse Knorr

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:21:00 -0500

“False Vacuum” and “Pax Atlanta” by Alyse Knorr

False Vacuum

Other ways to go:

Heat death, Big

Freeze, the girl lifting

her shirt up over her head,

moonlight on her blue bedspread,

feeling the loss before

it has happened— these are

our cosmic guarantees,

we are talking about

the end of the world here

and the answers out here get

thicker and thicker dearest

life as we know it

after you is impossible

Pax Atlanta

Fruit everywhere.

Pears rolling under my father’s

car, apples dented by the asphalt,

bouncing into the high grass

of our lawn. I watch

my mother’s black pumps

pop small yellow balloons.

It is hot outside, and around

the overturned gift basket

are black slivers of worms baking

on the driveway.

II.

I never know the woman’s

name or the color of her eyes.

She is always taller than me,

with dark hair and a wisdom

in her body. The baby

she is birthing belongs to us,

together. The baby

she is birthing is ours.

Alyse Knorr is currently the assistant poetry editor of So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, based out of George Mason University, where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry and teaching undergraduate English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Minnesota Review, elimae, Dark Sky Magazine, and The Avatar Review.

"God Trace" Poetry by Flower Conroy

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:20:00 -0500

"God Trace" Poetry by Flower Conroy

GOD TRACE

“ I will make something of you both pigment/ and insecticide. Something natural, even red…” —Brenda Shaughnessy’s Still Life, with Gloxinia

Eve pressed her gun

to your shoulder. A white whiskered dragon

clawed up from her thin jeans, sank

its milky talons into her ribcage

while her machine stirred

below your surface.

Its hum conjured: a crushed hive

or a boot’s breaking of a book’s binding.

You struck a match, lit a Lucky Strike, inhaled smoke

as if breathing in the dust of an angel then offered

it to her. She took it between her patent leather lips

& continued stitching flesh tapestry with fluid thread.

Buds of dew blossomed, blood pooled

from the emerging tattoo. With a rag she smeared red

across your arched back’s sun starved skin.

With her mouth she smeared red

across your famished mouth.

I could no longer watch through the basement

window. I relinquished—your image embedded

in my mind, a stain. I crossed

the streets, sought the sanctuary of my car.

Eve’s branding of your back; Eve crying out; Eve

forwards & backwards; Eve’s dragon dancing.

The car engine vibrated against the cold.

Chattering breath, exhale of ghost.

I drove without destination; passed a bill-

board that promised: Jesus Saves. I marveled

how the difference between a cross & a

crucifix was a man; how the difference

between sacrifice & sacrilege

could be dissolved into suffixation: & ultimately,

how one difference may make all the

difference. Like if it were one degree colder

there’d be the possibility tonight

for indifferent snow.

Flower Conroy’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals including Serving House Journal, BlazeVox, Saw Palm, American Literary Review, Psychic Meatloaf, Cliterature, and others. She is currently an MFA student at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her collection of poetry, “Escape to Nowhere” is forthcoming from Rain Mountain Press.

Moving Home Fiction by Rick Maloy

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:11:00 -0500

Moving Home Fiction by Rick Maloy

Moving Home

Here he comes, the pig-faced runt. Weaving through the tables. Hands waving over his head. Capped teeth gleaming in that punch-inviting smile.

“Hey-hey, Travis Rutledge,” he calls from about thirty feet away. “Been a while.”

The full name shout-out. Catch any agent or casting director in earshot. He only does it so I have to yell it back. “Glen Carletto,” I say, standing up. “Great to see you, man.” Have to stoop for the thumb-grip handshake, chest bump, and shoulder slap. “So, how’s life at the top?”

“Cappuccino, half-caf,” Glen says to the approaching waiter. He grins and sits. “The top? Got the wrong boy, dude.” He unrolls his setup, snaps the napkin, spreads it on his lap. His face tips skyward. “Is this a fuckin’ day or what?”

He's right. It’s December, but warm enough for an outside table at Dreams on Sunset. The humming lunchtime crowd is shirt-sleeved and bare-legged, sucking up the unobstructed SoCal sun. Empowering, blinding. Three-hundred-dollar sunglasses sit on every rhinoplasty. Coconut sunscreen mixes with mesquite-grilled entrees and fried sides. The delicious smells are making me insane. “Gotta give you credit, Glen,” I tell him. “You’re great at remembering to call me Travis.”

“Not that tough, really. You look way more like a Travis Rutledge than a Malcolm Spong.” He wobbles his head and blinks fast. “Malcolm Spong. Holy fuck. First time we met in New York I told you that name was toxic. Remember? Said it sounds like gettin’ a hard-on.” His fist pops up from the table. “Sponnnng.”

“You’ve done that one to death. Okay?”

He shrugs and sits forward; bites his lower lip; rat-a-tats fingers against the edge of the table. “So, what’s so secret and important you couldn’t tell me on the phone? You up for something good?” His thumb pumps at his chest. “Don’t forget to put in a good word for your friends.”

“I’m finished, Glen. I need money to go back east. Figured it would be harder for you to say no if we were face to face.”

He tips his chair onto the back legs; drags fingers into his shiny black waves. His face crumples. “Christ…again? Didn’t we go through this a couple months ago?”

“I didn’t ask you for money then. Now I need it.”

“So get a waiter job. Do some substitute teaching. Save up for a few months, then go. Don’t do this to me, man.” He swivels his head side to side, looks at anything but my face.

“I can’t. I can’t do any of that stuff. My car got repossessed. Yesterday.” I lean closer. “Don’t make me go through this shit. We go back a long way. Just front me five hundred and wish me luck. And don’t tell me you don’t have it.”

“Dude, I made nine grand out here in six years. How do you figure I have five hundred for you?”

My head is shaking the whole time he’s talking. “This is me, Glen. When we were trying off-Broadway, you were the unemployed guy with his own apartment, nice clothes, the right haircut. All of it.” I tap a finger on my front teeth. “Even these. Your Wall Street family’s floated you since I’ve known you. Play poverty for a different audience.”

He knits his fingers together, stares at them like I’m not even there.

I stretch across the table, grab his wrists, and pull his hands apart. “Would I ask if I wasn’t desperate? And did you even hear me, douche bag? They repossessed my car. No way I can work in L.A. without a car.”

“Take cabs.” He tugs his hands free and backs away. “Or get a job near home.”

His cappuccino arrives. We stop talking until the waiter/actor/screenwriter leaves. Glen frowns into the over-sized cup as he stirs in three packets of Splenda, one after the other.

Getting nowhere. My hands ball into fists under the table. Looks like he’s going to have to hear the worst part. I only want to say it once, so the words have to come out slow and clear. “Glen, I have no home. I was living in that car. Only dumb luck that I was there when the guy hooked it, or I wouldn’t even have my stuff anymore.”

His face goes blank. “What?” Lips still apart, he tips his head forward and peers over the top of his wraparound Oakleys. “You mean like…living?”

“Living.”

Stirs his cappuccino again, scraping and dinging the spoon. Each ping hits like my head is inside a cathedral bell. I want to sweep the cup off the table, watch it explode on the stone terrace. He lifts it with two hands, blows on the whipped cream. As if that’s doing anything. Moron. After a couple of slurps, he peeks at me over the rim. More like a squint. He clatters the china onto the saucer, pinches away a foam mustache, and smacks his lips. “Best cappuccino in the fuckin’ galaxy.” One eye closes about halfway. “How tall are you? Six-five?”

“Little more. Why?”

His eyes widen. “Don’t you drive a VW?”

“I do… Did.”

“So you’re telling me you were living in a Volkswagen Beetle?”

I lean toward him. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

He sits back and sweeps a finger at me. “How’d you sleep?”

There’s a puzzled look on his face. Could be a smirk. Got this guy by nine inches and sixty pounds. Nothing more I’d like right now than to backhand him into a coma and leave an IOU in his wallet. “You’d be surprised how much room there is when the seat’s taken out. More than enough space for a sleeping bag. Pretty comfortable, really.”

“What about bathrooms, showers, stuff like that.” He’s still eyeballing me.

“Friends, girls’ apartments now and then, gas stations, dorms at Pepperdine once in a while. Lots of places.”

“Sounds terrible.”

“You should try it for a while, you trust fund piece o’ shit.”

He doesn’t smile.

“Lighten up. I’m kidding. But to be honest, there’s something…I dunno…liberating about it. I kinda understand why the homeless don’t want to go to shelters. Life on your own terms. With the car, rain and cold weren’t a problem, and I liked waking up wherever I wanted. Felt like an adventure most of the time.”

“And now?”

I’m not telling him I woke up sitting on a toilet at the bus station this morning; everything I own – sleeping bag, small suitcase, and a garbage bag of clothes - in the stall with me. “And now the adventure’s over. All of it. So I’m asking an old friend for a little temporary help.”

“Thought you were doing okay?” He’s clinking that goddam spoon again, flicking his eyes between me and the cappuccino. “All those commercials you did. They had to pay good. What happened?”

“Are you really in this business nine years?”

He frowns at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you should know what happened. I got typecast. I’d give my portfolio to casting directors, and they’d barely open it. ‘Oh yeah, the Noxzema guy. That was nice work,’ or, ‘So that’s where I know you. You’re the Albertson’s guy.’ Then they shove it back and say something like, ‘I don’t see you for this part.’ I haven’t done anything but dinner theatre for over two years. And I only made big money on Noxzema because it was nationwide. That was four years ago.”

The piss-ant doesn’t say anything, just keeps eyeing me. I flop back in the seat, try not to sound angry. “My financial history is pointless bullshit. I’m tapped. Whatever I made is gone. And I haven’t even read for anything in months, so nothing’s coming up. If you slide me five hundred, I can get back to New York and get myself right. I’ll send it to you in a couple weeks. A month, tops. How about it?”

“Wow. Noxzema was four years ago?” The words are soft, distant. His eyes wander, then land on me again. “How old are you now?”

“Thirty-one.” My chest gets light. It’s like someone else said it. Sounds like a number that should have some life-in-motion stuff behind it.

“That’s still plenty young. Hell, I’m thirty-three.” He shakes his head. “Why the fuck you wanna go east in December? You’ll freeze to death after living out here so long. At least wait until spring. And I wouldn’t even go then. There’s way more work out here. Who knows? Maybe something’ll come up.” His eyes run up and down at me. “You got that John Wayne/Clint Eastwood thing going. Maybe that’ll be big again.” His face gets a pained look. “You can’t just quit. Actors don’t quit.”

“This one did.” Need to go for the close again. “Please, Glen. I need the five hundred, and I need it today. You’ll get it back. I swear.”

“Sorry, man. I don’t have it.” He shakes his head, bunches his lips to one side of his face, stares at me.

“How about three hundred? That’s enough for me to take the bus.” Found that out this morning while I was strolling around the bus station, playing a frustrated traveler.

“No hundreds, dude. I got nada.” Another noisy sip of his cappuccino. “Have you talked to your folks?”

“They turned me down.” He doesn’t have to know I never called them. “Said I’m a man now. Pay my own way. Tough love, I guess.”

He shakes his head again. “Shit, that’s cold.”

We both lean back; say nothing; look at each other; don’t look at each other.

“Okay. No problem.” I push away from the table and stand. “Gotta take a squirt. If the waiter comes by, order me a refill, will you? Diet Coke.”

“Actually, I gotta get going.” He checks his phone and starts to get up.

My hand on his shoulder pins him in the seat. “Hang for two seconds. I’m gonna kill some more time here, and I don’t want to lose the table. I’ll be right back.”

“Just hurry, okay?” He rolls his eyes. “I’m already late.”

After using the facilities, I stroll out the front door, past the terrace where he’s slouched in the chair, flipping his bell-clapper spoon. I walk backwards down the sidewalk, wave my arms over my head. “Glen Carletto,” I yell, big smile on my face.

He snaps upright in the chair.

“Thanks for the drink, you no-talent jerkoff. Lunch’ll be on me next—”

His spoon helicopters past my face and clangs off the door of a black 911 Carrera. Makes a ding in the paint shaped like a fingernail clipping.

“That’s my car, asshole!” some guy shouts. Glen sinks into the chair as the guy stomps to his table. He’s going to be down more than five hundred just touching up the nick in the paint. Good. Lying scumbag.

Got no place to go, other than the bus station. The thought of rejoining that hygiene-challenged collection of bottom feeders doesn’t wow me, but my things are there, in a locker. I’m anxious one of them will figure a way to break in before I work this thing out. That stuff’s all I have right now. I want to see it; touch it.

The fact that it’s almost an hour’s walk doesn’t bother me, until I get dizzy after about ten minutes. Haven’t eaten since yesterday lunch, and someone my size burns through a ninety-nine cent burrito pretty fast. A bus stop bench keeps me from having to sit on the curb while the fuzziness passes. I rest my forearms on my thighs, hang my head between my knees, kick myself for not sticking Glen with a big meal.

Popping lights begin to fade. Focus gets clear enough to start creating the script I’ll recite to whichever parent accepts the call. Don’t want to ad lib, so I improv the scene out loud, right there at the side of the road. Thumb touching my ear, I talk into my pinky. “Mom? Dad? Let me start by telling you I’m okay. My car was totaled in an accident yesterday. Yeah, hit and run. Like I said, I’m pretty much okay, except for a sprained back. I’m having a little trouble walking, but they tell me it’ll pass in a month or so.”

Sounds pretty good, so I stand to practice my limp, work on some more dialogue.

“Since this is going to keep me from working for a while, what I’d like to do is come home and convalesce with you guys. With it being Christmas and all, it’s a perfect time. My only problem is, of course, I didn’t foresee this possibility. I haven’t put away enough to get another car, keep paying my rent, and pay for the airfare home. So if you can swing it, would you please buy the ticket? One way is fine. I’ll pay my way back here.”

No caring parent could turn that down. I hobble down the street, look for a pay phone. After a few blocks I find one, pick up the receiver, but put it back. Not ready yet. I do some jigging and facial exercises, then a little head-rolling, the stuff I always do before going on. Okay. Big breath. Action.

The operator comes on. “Collect call from Malcolm,” I tell her and wait for someone to pick up in Old Tappan, New York.

My father says he’ll accept the charges. “Hi, son. Malcolm, huh? Haven’t called yourself that in a while. What happened to Travis?”

“Dad,” is all I can get out. I see my old room, the bed I was too big for by tenth grade, T&A posters, little league trophies, fat PC monitor on the desk. “Dad,” I choke out one more time and look up at the sky.

After a career in financial services, Rick Maloy began writing full time in 2004. His stories have taken first (2007) and second (2008) at Florida First Coast Writers' Festivals. Other works have appeared in Stone's Throw Magazine and Deadpaper. Rick and his first-and-only wife, Ann Marie, live in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL while the rest of their clan freezes in the NYC area.

“Janus Faced,” “Pendulum,” and “Cure for the Malady of Time” Photography by Louis Staeble

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 17:28:00 -0500

“Janus Faced,” “Pendulum,” and “Cure for the Malady of Time” Photography by Louis Staeble

Janus Faced

Pendulum

Cure for the Malady

Louis Staeble is from Bowling Green, Ohio which is located in the northwestern part of the state. This location is ideal for trials of identity. The photographer catches the seam that rips between rural and urban, historical and the impoverished present. In residence with a wife and three sons, Louis seeks the solace of an image sodden brain, comforted by the sentiments of past lives.

"The Dry Seekers" Poetry by John Buckley

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 08:03:00 -0500

"The Dry Seekers"

Poetry by John Buckley

Over unleavened prairies we whisper,

Destitute riddles in search of a sphinx,

Random jacks left by the hand above.

Splintered raincoats stuck to our thighs,

Antelopes rampant on linear carousels,

Onwards we lumber, exodized, humble.

One foot sets forth, one sets forth a foot,

The other drags renegade mussels behind.

We are the fishers apostate, rinds of men.

Wouldn’t you like to swim for a little bit?

Wouldn’t you like to dance in the water?

Ladies glimpse and prance for a little bit,

Eyeing the dolphin who plays with the otter.

Trafficking motes near folded bazaars,

Bandannas laden with dustbowl risotto,

We lick turtlebeak lips, suckle starfish.

Straggling eastward pickled by twilight,

Following savanna-bound ashen shadows,

Runic in wanderlust, pruned of a lullaby,

See how we go, pricked by tales of a windmill

perhaps on the next hill, a sputtering pip

in livers grown lavender, loamy, unhomed.

Born in Flint, MI, raised in the Detroit area, and ripening in California since the fall of 1992, John F. Buckley lives and works in Orange County with his wife, teaching at local colleges and chasing the poetic dragon. His work has been published in a few places, one of which nominated him for a Pushcart Prize.

"The Roses in Toalah" Fiction by Micah Dean Hicks

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 07:59:00 -0500

"The Roses in Toalah"

Fiction by Micah Dean Hicks

In Toalah, a small town in Arizona close by Interstate 40, the old men gathered in the hot dairy bars under whirring fan-blades, spat blots of tobacco into empty coke bottles, and talked about Bryan Long. They'd been watching him through the window glass of barber shops and gas stations and talking about him all his life. Bryan was the tallest man they'd ever seen—ten feet—and they argued about whether he was a giant or not. But they all agreed that whatever he was, Bryan wasn't good for much.

Bryan lived with his mother down a dirt road on the edge of town. The house was unpainted and loose shingles flapped on the roof. Inside, the ceilings sagged with water damage and there were holes in the floor covered over with plywood and thin carpet. This morning, Bryan got out of bed, squeezed into his old clothes, and came into the kitchen. His mother gave him a box of granola bars and a piece of paper with directions on it, a hotel under construction. Today, he would try being a carpenter.

He drove to the hotel in his green Dodge. When he'd first gotten the truck, he tore out the seats and dented the roof up. People saw him driving around Toalah with one arm hanging out the window, two fingers on the stick, and knees shoved up against his chest.

At the hotel, they gave him a belt of tools and showed him what to do. He carried the sheet-rock panels lightly, but was clumsy with them and broke several to powder. He fumbled with nails between his big fingers, and falling against a new door frame, he tore it loose from the wall. He was fired before lunch.

The next morning, he got dressed again and came into the kitchen. His mother was smoking. She handed him a package of cold Pop-Tarts and another address. Today, he would try being a plumber. His boss had him digging ditches for water-lines, and Bryan had to get down on his knees to use the pick, but things were going well. Then, walking across a yard, he stepped into a hole and felt something crack in the dirt under his shoe. Water came welling up, and he was sent home.

The next morning, his mother woke him up and sent him to the sawmill. For hours, he caught planks of raw lumber coming off the belt and stacked them. They didn't have any gloves big enough for him, so he wrapped oil-rags around his palms. Even so, at the end of the day his hands were shredded with splinters. Three times, he turned too fast and hit one of his coworkers with a board, and he got into two fights—the second man needing an ambulance. At the end of the day, he was called to the supervisor's office, dropping his shoulders and wrapping his arms around himself like a buzzard to get inside the close office. The supervisor, a small man, grinned at him and finished a cigarette before he spoke. He told Bryan that he'd done great and said he'd see him back again tomorrow. Bryan's hands stung on the steering wheel the whole way home. He told his mother that he'd been fired. She left in her car, and he didn't see her the rest of the night.

When he got up the next day, she was waiting on him again. “Go see your uncle Ricky,” she said. “Tell him his sister-in-law needs him to give you a job.” Bryan nodded and got his keys. The truck wouldn't start at first, but he got it after a few tries.

The highway going out to the Long's ranch swung through the desert, a thin gray stripe of asphalt dipping in and out of black, yellow, and white nodes of rock. Soon, Bryan came to a billboard with a picture of Ricky's wife on it: Welcome to Toalah! Home of Martina Long, Miss Arizona 1993. Ricky had one up on every road going into town. Marti's face grinned back at him from the sign, put up fifteen years ago. She was gorgeous, even now, and he liked seeing the billboards. With her soft face hanging over the road like a cloud, she seemed even bigger than him. Aunt Marti had always liked Bryan. Maybe he would get her to ask Ricky?

There were work trucks parked all up the long driveway to Ricky's house, Long Contracting on some and Toalah Landscaping on the others. It may as well have been the same. Ricky Long owned almost everything. Bryan parked, squeezed out of his truck, and walked up the hill. The house was red brick, long and low. Workmen were everywhere and backhoes groaned, finishing a trench that went all the way around the house. It was a moat sixty feet wide and twenty deep. Men with ladders passed rosebushes down to each other and planted them along the bottom.

The front door was propped open, so Bryan scuffed the clay off his shoes and stooped through the door. Thankfully, Ricky had high ceilings. “Uncle Ricky! Aunt Marti!” he yelled.

“Back here,” Ricky said.

Bryan walked into the kitchen. Ricky stood against the counter fixing himself a cup of coffee. Sheetrock dust speckled his thinning hair, beard, red shirt, and jeans.

The old men clicking their dominoes in the coffee shop always thought of Ricky this way, covered in dirt and dust, tiny black eyes and rows of gray teeth. He was always going somewhere and doing something. It made them nervous.

“You want something to drink?” Ricky asked. He handed Bryan a can.

Bryan's big hand wrapped around the metal, covering it in his fist, but he didn't try to open it. “What's Aunt Marti up to?”

Ricky dropped his cup and spoon in the sink a little too hard. Bryan winced.

“Hell if I know. We got into a fight, and she left this morning. I'm stuck here with all this,” Ricky waved at the window, “and don't have time to go find her ass. Hey, you want to make some money?”

“Yeah! That's what I came to ask you about. You need me to help with the ditch?”

“It's a moat.”

Bryan looked out the at the yellow backhoes stiffly dipping into the dirt. “Why do you want a moat?”

“This is just the first one. I'm going to have more. Everything that's mine is going to have one of these around it. Why not?”

Bryan nodded. “So you might have a job for me?”

“I doubt it. Unless you want to go find Marti and bring her ass home. I'd give you some money to do that.”

“Go get Aunt Marti? What if she won't come?”

“Then, make her come. I'll give you a few hundred dollars.”

“Do you think she's still in Toalah?”

“Where the hell else would she be?”

“Would you have a regular job for me after that?”

“We'll see.”

Bryan thanked his uncle and went back outside. Already, the workmen were laying lattice down along the sides and fitting the roses in tight clumps. Bryan turned the key and tapped the gas until the engine turned over. Rockabilly came wailing out of the speakers in an explosion of static. He still had the coke in his hand. He picked at the tiny tab, but couldn't get his fingernail under it. Frustrated, Bryan squeezed the can too hard and it split open. Coke spewed over his shirt.

“Goddammit.” He reached out the window and threw the can into the back of the truck. Tonight wouldn't be too bad. He had money coming to him, so he could afford to buy a few drinks. He hoped Marti wouldn't give him any trouble. He didn't know what he would do if she did.

Laughing without making sound under their ball-caps, the old men would remember that night for years. They saw Bryan in every bar in town. He drank glass after glass, won games of cards, and with those clumsy fingers even threw darts. He took in liquid like a refinery. He ate ice chips by the pitcher-full. The old men, clearing their throats, said it must have been a trick to keep him sober, but not all of them believed that. He was a giant of drink, and that night Bryan had fulfilled their hopes more than he ever had before or ever would again.

Six hours later, he'd been everywhere in town, but no one had seen her. He kept driving, the road getting darker as he slipped away from businesses and streetlights. A few more miles would take him down past the truck stop and out of Toalah.

He saw a glowing pink smear on a hill up ahead: Sweete's Cabaret. He pulled into the club's drive and parked. All the cars in the lot were candy-stained in the pink lights, and something breathy drifted out of the speakers under the eaves. The doors were black glass. Bryan crunched across the gravel, pulled open both doors, and stooped inside.

There were two pudgy bouncers standing in the front room, both of them stopping to stare at Bryan when he came in stinking of beer, but clear-eyed. A topless brunette with black stockings and a tattoo on her back leaned over the front desk arguing with Mr. Sweete about her schedule.

Bryan paid, and the girl seated him on the edge of a side stage that wasn't being used that night. He ordered a pitcher of beer and watched the girls. The stage would flare blue when a new performer came out, then die back down to pink. Lace and glitter shimmered on bras, thongs, and garters in the stage-light, an oil-slick of neon colors.

The stage went blue again, and Bryan watched. Coming out, the woman was tiny, delicate looking with small arms and shoulders. Bryan's mouth went dry. From his seat in the back, the woman looked small enough to cup in his hands. She wore a black tank-top and thong, came strutting out to something slow and sad sounding. Her hair was dark and swept down over half her face. She dragged her hands up the sides of her hips as she walked. When she raised her head and looked out at the audience with those big eyes, Bryan knew.

Sweete's voice came over the loudspeaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, her first time appearing on stage and only at Sweete's, former Miss Arizona, Toalah's own Martina Long!”

Bryan was up before Sweete had finished, pushing through tables and chairs on his way to the stage. “Aunt Marti?” Standing on the stage, she was as tall as him.

Marti eyes got wide, but she grinned. “Bryan!”

“I've been looking for you,” he said. “I came to take you back home.”

She pushed him back toward an empty chair. “Sit down, nephew,” she said, but smiled at him. It was her teasing smile. He'd been seeing it forever.

He sat down at a table next to the stage. The music got louder and faster, and Marti started working up the edges of her shirt with her long fingernails. She pressed against the pole and rocked her hips into it, the shirt bunching her hands and coming up, up, up. Her eyes stayed on Bryan's the whole time.

When she finished her routine, she came down off the stage and sat on Bryan's lap. He tried not to look at her breasts, the sweat beading on them and the way they moved when she shifted into his lap.

“Bryan!” She put an arm around his neck. “It's good to see you!”

“Aunt Marti, what the hell are you doing? Ricky will kill you.”

She frowned. “We're not going to talk about Ricky right now.”

“Fine. What are you doing? You don't work here, do you?”

Her fingernails were resting on his neck, and Bryan shivered. “Wouldn't that be something?” She laughed, the same laugh he'd been hearing since he was a kid. “No, I'm just cutting loose a little. They wouldn't let somebody my age do this full time. Not when they've got all these young, pretty girls.”

Bryan started to say something a few times, but stopped. “You're prettier than anybody, Aunt Marti” he finally said.

She hugged him, her body painfully warm through his shirt. “You're sweet. And handsome.” She stroked his neck with her fingertip. “You should probably drop that aunt stuff, or it's going to be weird when I give you a lapdance.”

Bryan nodded. She pressed back against him in the chair, his body cupping hers. She stayed on his thigh for a while, but Bryan squeezed her legs and pulled her into the center of his lap. She ground down on him for the rest of the song, kissing his cheek and getting up when it finished. She looked over to where the club owner was watching them and told Bryan that he was going to have to pay her. Bryan fished through his wallet and found a twenty, glad that he still had one. “I need to take you home. Ricky's paying me to come get you.”

“I'm not ready yet. If you're still here when I get ready to leave, I'll let you take me.”

For the next few hours, Bryan watched Marti move through the club. Other girls came up to him, but he barely saw them. He tried to map every line of her body in the candy-colored light. Everyone there knew her from the billboards and wanted a lapdance. She obliged them, pageant smile glowing in the pink light. She went back on stage four times, always looking right at Bryan.

When the men in the dairy bar remembered this over their empty glasses and full ash trays, they didn't talk about it much. Ricky would ruin anyone who brought it up. She'd set out to hurt him that night, and she'd done it. If they weren't already in love with her, they loved her for this.

At three in the morning, the club closed. Bryan took his aunt, now in blue jeans and a Sweete's Cabaret tank-top, out to his truck. He took a bucket out of the back and stood it mouth-down on the floor. “Sorry,” he said. They got in. His elbow stuck out into the passenger side, and she wrapped her arms around his. They left the town and drove out into the desert toward the Longs' house.

Everything was black around the truck. The road came rushing up in the headlights like water. The stars were thick over their heads and the moon hung low in Bryan's mirror. Marti was so small, she barely took up any space in the corner of the cab. The bucket rattled under her when they hit a bump, and she held onto the door handle.

“I'm sorry I have to bring you back.”

“Why are you?” She leaned against his arm.

“I need the money. This is the only work Ricky would give me. After this, I'm hoping he'll hire me for a real job.”

Marti sighed. “He won't. Not after the thing at Sweete's gets around town.”

They drove in silence for a little while. Bryan remembered a side-road coming up that went to an empty lot. “Do you want to get out and stretch for a minute?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Can we, Bryan? I'd like that.”

Bryan turned off the road and parked the truck. They were on the edge of a bluff, and the desert swept out black and empty in front of them. They got out. Bryan sat in the dirt in front of the truck and stretched his legs out straight. Marti stood beside him, his head resting against her waist. He breathed in her shirt and remembered sitting in her lap when he'd been a kid, the same smell of soap and sweat and skin.

“Why don't you leave him?”

She slid against him, and Bryan eased her into his lap.

“I think I have to practice a couple of times first.”

His palm covered the top half of her back. “Is this practice?” he asked.

“Yeah.” She started playing with the buttons on his shirt. She put her mouth against his ear. “I've always liked you, Bryan. You're a good-looking kid.”

“What do you like about me?” he asked.

Marti pushed her hands through his hair, linked her fingers behind his neck. “I like how big you are.” She squeezed his shoulders hard. “Someone like you could do anything.”

Bryan thought of the sawmill. “No, I can't.”

“Name one thing you couldn't have if you wanted it.”

He took her waist in his hands. She squeezed the back of his neck, his body folded around hers. She pressed kisses all the way across his mouth. Bryan was astonished at how small she seemed this close to him, like a bird cupped in his hands. His palm stroked her hair and back, her face pushing into his neck. He helped her get the tank-top off again. In the dirt in front of the Dodge, Bryan eclipsed her on the rough surface of the bluff so that she couldn't see or understand anything but him.

They were slumped against the front of the truck when it started to get light out.

She stood up and straightened her clothes. “We should go.”

Bryan nodded.

They got back out on the road. Pretty soon, the billboard came up again.

“I hate that thing,” Marti said. “It doesn't even look like me anymore.”

“To hell with Ricky.” said Bryan. “Come stay with me.”

“I can't do that.”

He took her hand. “You can,” he said. “I'll be with you.”

“I don't know.”

They pulled into the Longs' driveway. The backhoes and work trucks were gone. There were no workers. Ricky's truck wasn't even there. Bryan and Marti walked up to the house. “What is this?” she asked. “Are those roses?”

The trench was murky in the early morning light. Bryan could barely see the thorny tops of the rosebushes in the bottom. He stuck his foot down to remind himself that it didn't have water in it. “He said it's a moat,” Bryan said. “To put around what's his.”

Marti shook her head. “I need to get the hell out of here. Let me get some things.” Bryan followed her through the quiet house, listening for the sound of Ricky's truck outside. She filled a duffel bag, locked the house behind them, and they got back in the truck.

She was fidgety the whole drive out toward his house. The sun came in bright through the back glass. Bryan held her knee. “You're doing this.” A quarter mile out from his house, they saw the first work truck.

Ricky had three crews working on the house. One group of men were re-roofing it. Another group trailed long extension cords inside, patching the floor and ripping up the filthy carpet. The third group angled their backhoes into the yard and were gouging out another trench. Ricky saw them driving up and waved. He directed them to park where they'd be out of the way. After Bryan killed the engine, Ricky opened Marti's door and pulled her into his arms. He kissed her cheek and squeezed her against him. “I see the nephew fetched you.”

“That was an asshole thing to do,” Marti said, but Ricky just laughed.

Bryan saw his mother and walked over to her. “What the hell's going on?” he asked, yelling to be heard over the roar of equipment.

“I sold the house to your uncle,” she said. “He's going to fix it up and let us rent it. It's still our house.”

“No it's not. It's his house. Look at the damn flowers!”

“I see them. I think it's lovely.”

Later, the old men would remember that day, how they'd heard about the roses. They were across the street watching everything from an old Volkswagen van before Bryan and Marti ever arrived. Once Bryan got there, they remembered the night before when he was a giant in the bars. They saw how Bryan looked at Marti across the yard, and how she stared at the ground with Ricky's arm around her. They rubbed their hands together behind the van windows, licked their teeth, and smacked their old knuckles into their palms. Bryan could beat Ricky if anyone could. They watched Bryan walk over, Ricky swallowed in his shadow. They saw Ricky reach for his wallet and press a ball of money into Bryan's hand, then Bryan walk back out to his truck. They drove away before he did, bending their mirror up so that they wouldn't have to see him.

In the months afterward, Bryan kept trying out jobs, but he didn't go to his uncle's house. He saw roses start small in the trench outside his window, then crawl up the lattice, and eventually latch their thorns into the siding and begin dragging themselves up the house. He saw their long fingers reach up to cover his window.

After this, the old men met in their diners and gas stations, their barber shops and cafes. They spat into their cups, hit the tables with their fists, and swore at Bryan Long. Outside their windows, rose leaves were staring to cover the glass. One of them said that Bryan could have stopped all of this, that he was made to do it. They nodded and packed their mouths with tobacco, and were quiet. They knew that he never would.

Micah Dean Hicks is a master's student in the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. His work has been accepted to over a dozen journals, including Shady Side Review, Brain Harvest, Prick of the Spindle, Tryst, and the Smoking Poet.

"Stout Braised Short Ribs" and "Irish Car Bomb" Recipe by Brad Johnson

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 07:55:00 -0500

"Stout Braised Short Ribs" and "Irish Car Bomb" Recipe by Brad Johnson

Stout Braised Short Ribs

Ingredients:

1. Beef short Ribs 2 lbs.

2. Large white onion (diced)

3. Celery Stalks 3 (rough chop)

4. Whole carrots 2 (rough chop)

5. Garlic cloves 4 (minced)

6. Rosemary Sprigs 3

7. Salt and Pepper (to taste)

8. Butter (as needed)

9. Your favorite stout beer, I like Guinness (2-3 pints or enough to cover the ribs ½ way)

10. Water (enough to cover the other ½ of the ribs)

11. Pressure cooker

Method

1. Place pressure cooker over medium heat, no lid, and melt butter

2. Once the butter is melted add the celery, carrot, garlic, and onion and cook until soft. Here is a good place to add a little salt and pepper

3. If your ribs aren’t cut into portion sizes small enough to fit into the pressure cooker go ahead and cut them while your vegetables are cooking.

4. Once the vegetables are soft place the rosemary, ribs, and beer in the pot adding the water last.

5. Lid up the pressure cooker and turn the heat up to medium-high. Let the ribs cook from 25-35 minutes.

6. When the ribs are finished pull them out and save the liquid. S

7. Strain the liquid and use it for sauce.

8. Serve the ribs and sauce over some mashed potatoes and enjoy the rest of your beer

Irish Car Bomb

In a pint glass

1/2 pint stout beer (I like Guinness)

In a shot glass

1/3 Bailey's Irish Cream

1/3 Jameson Irish Whiskey

1/3 Kahlua

Drop the shot into the pint and drink, quickly.

Brad Johnson is a classically trained chef and culinary rebel. His knowledge of classic French technique is often shunned in favor of his deeply rooted passion for Southern technique. Brad has built his reputation on food that is familiar yet unique as well as his trademark for never being ordinary. Brad is also the author of "Kitchen Conversation," an irreverent look at food and cooking.

"Hendrix," "Light Pollution," and "Midnight Meander" Paintings by James Cabrera

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 07:46:00 -0500

"Hendrix," "Light Pollution," and "Midnight Meander" Paintings by James Cabrera

Hendrix

Light Pollution

Midnight Meander

James Cabrera lives in Lexington, KY and has embraced art as a passion his whole life. He received his B.A. from Eastern Kentucky University and is currently a secondary History educator. James is a non-traditional artist in the fact that he is self taught and is inspired by various types of art such as surrealism, impressionism, and has himself labeled his approach as “Enjoymentism.”

"Flowers" and "SoClose" Paintings by Courtney Jasiulek

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 07:38:00 -0500

"Flowers" and "SoClose" Paintings by Courtney Jasiulek

Flowers

SoClose

Courtney Jasiulek is an artist and art teacher residing in Northern California. She studied fine arts at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Imitation Fruit, Redivider, Poetry Motel, and Left Unsaid. She continues to paint, write, make books, and is currently working on a teaching credential in art.

"Momento Mori," "I'm Picking up on the Spirit of a Little Girl,""Poesis," "A System of Correspondences," and "Resonance and Ring"Poetry by LeighPhillips

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:19:00 -0600

Memento Mori

They say I’m dangerous, but my chest is full of blackbirds. When the 21 guns go off, the cloud of wings scatter over the flat plains of your body. My grandfather’s purple heart beats on my nightstand. It taught me the two-step of metronomes. All the old fishermen sunk their hooks into my heart. I’m going down. Morning wraps its thick lips around the girth of grace. My hips follow into yours, motion grinds its song. Mourning has its grace. Slow dance, my grace. My morning, out of time. My hips are open in the morning, gentle as vapor. See, I’ve found out how to boil. One time I had this slant of sunlight, and in it, I found a few certain pages. The poem goes “arm, elbow, wrist.” The poem goes “reach.” I cut my tributaries off at the stream. I know how to commit to forgetting. I french kiss the shores of Normandy. I’m engaged to asphalt in Vermont, Massachusetts, even Iowa. I’ve inherited a heart that beats the royal we. Grandfather was shot in the knee. He tells me this when it rains sometimes. I hold rainwater in my backside. Where I live right now, everything curves. A half note bent in two, pressed between speakers of stereo. No one has asked about the end of my body. Beauty was this thing we locked in early twenties. I’m going to start collecting orchids now. Some say, will you? I say, the frenzy of birds. See how they all leave the tree at once.

I’m Picking Up on the Spirit of a Little Girl

A megaphone full of bees swarm the violent tongues of sex. My Electronic Voice Phenomenon says, keep waking until the walking stops. Every day I find a new way to pray, though I never close my eyes in sleep. I talk to my mother like she’s in the room now. I say, meet me in a Catholic place where the water makes new limbs. Mine ache so I think I might have been amputated in a future life. Everything’s a phantom. With night vision goggles, you can still see the handprint of my ex trailing down my backside. I press my pen into the table and the Jehovah's Witness on the corner screams. All the letters she ever wrote are in a landfill, spawning nests for sparrows. Swallows hoop my skirt of sleep. I don’t know what that means, but I can tell you about the electricity here. Electromagnetic frequencies and the voices time records. If I push my finger down this wall and taste it, I’m tasting you. I forgot to mention the waves. It all comes in waves. I am thirty and my face looks like Aunt Helen. In the photograph, her face collapses into the lips I wear to sing. I crawl naked across the carpeted floor, grade a paper, call that spring. Don’t let me forget the waves. There was this headache blowing a tumbleweed through a silent apartment. I was not alone. I was not alone. Because mother always said, be happy. She started as a fox. She stopped at the end of song. Girl asks, are you complete now. Girl says, I’m Pluto with 3 known moons. There, a revolution starts with death, begins with song, with sex. I just wanted to pass through a wall one day and tell you. Is anybody with me? It’s cold in here. At least, I think so. Don’t you?

Poesis

There is this firedoor between myself and losing her. On the other side, I can see a beautiful fool, letting a man grind into me. Fucking is forgetting here. I am not there, but I am wildly, awkwardly here. Ask me about the impossible. I will tell you about how I fell out of a tree in spring. Every branch draped me until my limp body sang unconscious across the limbs. Light saved me. We dilate. Even the moon sweats me into you. Every conversation sways its broken couplets. When you move your sentence forward, I echo in the sound that bird bones make when they shift on a powerline. Listen hard. I am talking about dancing, but we never dance. We are writing ourselves through a pinhole camera. Every angle, rich with the grains of shapelessness breathed. I am chipping at my breath now. I want to show you how it’s possible to live. Sunday kisses the inside of each wrist, says, “I’m glad you made it.” There is this ripple. Keturah wrote a rain as lovely as her name. I have no tattoos because it’s impossible to forget like this. Everything is under skin, the most permanent you you’ll ever know. In me, there is this shell of girls: one is falling through the tree. One fell out of time. One is dipping the last carnation into the earth. The last, crying in art history because she is a new sky. Didn't you know? New skies bend the obvious over the side of sleep. Bend me over, I’m getting off. Are you waking? I want to start walking to a certain lake with a name like a poem learns rain. Cows have one stomach with four compartments. I have four chambers, in each the old and new blood of me contracts. Michele says, “it is so full of history. There is sadness. There is happiness. There is art.” I want to visit Havana someday, too. I am falling down a tree. Are you? I don’t want to fall into you like an accident. You are not an accident, I wrote. A garden. I am lonely for a garden. A child sits with his mother. The flowers, he murmurs. The flowers.

A System of Correspondences

Yesterday flowers so fast the spring opens itself like an odalisque. The green plains of body collapse on body, in nude we green. Yesterday flowers. So fast the color oceans, I ocean myself. Flowers fell past. Tomorrow, pouring into. Tomorrow you'll flicker so fast. Tonight I'll fall through the family tree and into the bedrock, bones written for sleep. Tonight I'll turn the light off and tree a name, branch its syllables onto my pillowcase. No one is naming the name. I'm actually tracing subway directions to the corner of "Somewhere She Is Standing" and "Not Enough Light." I remember how to be alone more than I remember you. It is possible to forget how to be a slut, and even whimper while you're doing it. Remember the firedoor between my skin and organs? Me neither. It burned in the fire. I imagine my next so full of nostalgia, like cement in knots for trees, hardening around a heart and arrow. I will so be there, once I stop choking on this peach pit. Here, I am telling you about my city in the bedroom night. The expressway to my God. Here, I write my mother dead letters in the air, postmarked by careful mediums. They tell her what I had for breakfast, how I put all the blue flowers to my lips. I believe in softness. Like this. Liquids today. I tell her how to whole my hard. For hold. How haiku held. Old. I try to make a poem that is cold, silvering within a white heat. Shivering in the road steam. She says, you really know how to love, love. You follow through the through. And she writes, "I miss you so much my skin is cracking" and I write, "panim d'fanim: face in face." Dear mother, blue eye to my brown: she passes me in and out. The diaphanous talespin of the candle, running its tongue along a dark spine.

Resonance and Ring

"Resonance," she reaches. "Ring," my hand to her. "You are the ripple of water in stone." "The cool wet underside of stone, your palms." "Stone, you in my water." Who verbs the angel. "Look to my clouds and count your face." "Sheen of a face on the eye, iris mirror." Hand flat to hand. Iris, my mirror. "Iris, my mentor." Arrive at my chest: "I pass this language through." I bend to wind. You follow. We wisp, twist air around our fingers set to the frequency of hair slipping south on a pillow they can't hear: you and you, the we of you, the "only" to the "connect" you we. "Meet me in a place where edges grind soft." Breath. "We'll take the hours, put to tongue." Beat. "The edges of things, drift a house." Bone. "The warm basin of my breast set to rise." Breathe. Where the plaster comes down with a kiss and dust in an eyelash is battered by risk: we are back to two stones, one water, concentric circles summer the shimmer around bore, wading legs dragged to deep, "you will find me one inch beneath your finger kiss to surface lake." Oh: look at my lying here, I am under here. You look like conversation set to fire. Under here, the lights, the lights. Come: my eyes have never been so clear. Look at my face it has never been more what you wanted, translucent, the light of fish. Flush my face and it opens to you in a word. Sunlight pours my eyes come to touch. "This flower is a door." Look at my face, the light of fish. "Everyone opening in your hands.” The word. You angel. "I've got the light my stomach collects, petals in your backside." I may be beautiful here in the way of you.

Leigh Phillips’ work has appeared in Squid Quaterly, Connecticut River Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lodestar Quarterly, Fringe, and Vox, among others

"Cosmic Blessings," "Eternal Abode," "Knowledge and Bliss" Paintings: Acrylic on Canvas by Priyanka Gupta

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:07:00 -0600

Cosmic Blessing

Eternal Abode

Knowledge and Bliss

Priyanka Gupta comes from Kolkata, India, also called the 'City of Joy' for its people and the passion with which they lead their lives. This passion has undoubtedly found its way into her own conception and expression of the colors of life through my art. A graduate of San Francisco Art Institute, Priyanka Gupta spends her time between Kolkata and California. She has been exhibiting her works in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and India since 2004. Some of her notable exhibits have been her solo exposition at the Academy of Fine Arts and Chitrakoot art gallery in Kolkata and shows at Stanford university, Togonon Gallery, Market Street Gallery and the Triton Museum in California. She has also been invited to participate in the Florence Biennale ‘09. She has received wide acclaim for her paintings and received reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle, Santa Clara weekly and Mountain View voice.