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Welcome! Our hope at Sunsets and Silencers is to give exposure to art that attempts to locate the beauty and violence of creativity, fearlessly, where art can produce feeling, take on situations where words fail, but where Stories and Art succeed -- move us to silence, take our breath away, enrich our lives. Take a look around our site. We are new, adding more work, and updating constantly. We are currently taking submissions, so if you have something, check out our submissions section.
Featured Work from S&S Vol. 1
"Love Song for the Impossible Him," Poetry by Erin Elizabeth Smith
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.
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.
“Janus Faced,” “Pendulum,” and “Cure for the Malady” Photography by Louis Staeble
Janus Faced
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 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.
"Hendrix," "Light Pollution," and "Midnight Meander" Paintings by James Cabrera
Hendrix By James Cabrera
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.”
"Momento Mori," "I'm Picking up on the Spirit of a Little Girl," "Poesis," "A System of Correspondences," and "Resonance and Ring" Poetry by Leigh Phillips
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?
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.
Float By Beth CoutureFloat Edward goes into his son's room and looks at the fish as it swims in its tank. It is getting bigger. Not in a normal way. It is growing, but much more quickly than a normal fish grows. Every day, it seems, it is bigger. He notices it. They bought the fish on a whim. The cat had run away and the boy cried for hours until they told him they would take him out and buy him a new pet. He said he wanted something that couldn't run away, something with no free will. The boy says things like this sometimes -- things that make Edward and his wife worry about him. The boy wanted a turtle, but when the man at the pet store mentioned keeping the lid on the tank, that an escape was possible, they looked at the boy and shook their heads, and he nodded back at them silently. The fish is bright red with fins that puff up whenever it feels threatened. It drifts back and forth across the bottom of the tank, picking up bits of gravel and spitting them back out again. They have shown the boy how to pinch two or three tiny pellets of food between his fingers and drop them into the tank, have lectured him about overfeeding it. They've told him the story about how a house sitter once killed their fish by overfeeding them. The fish were floating at the top of the tank, bloated and pale, they said. The boy promised he would never feed the fish too much. They watch him sometimes when he doesn't know it and notice how careful he is, how precise, counting out pellets and dropping them one by one onto the surface of the water. Soon they are buying a larger tank. The fish is the size of the boy's fist, round and buoyant, and it bobs happily around the tank like a bathtub toy. Edward watches it every night and wonders how big it will get -- if it will keep expanding and expanding until they are forced to put it in the swimming pool and then set it free in the ocean. He wonders, if it keeps growing, if it will one day try to move onto land. He reads that fish will grow to fit the size of their container, and decides not to buy another tank, no matter how much it needs one. The boy turns over in his sleep, opens his eyes half way and groans. Go back to sleep, Edward says, I'm just checking in. The boy says he's been dreaming about the world being covered with ice. There were no fish or anything, he says. Nothing could swim because of all the ice. Edward smiles, says the word glaciers. A long time ago there was nothing but ice, he says. He wants to tell his son all about the world when it was under layers of thick blue ice, when things still swam, but you couldn't see them they were so far down underneath.
Beth Couture is a third-year PhD student in fiction in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has work published in the Georgetown Review, and forthcoming in the Southern Poetry Anthology’s Mississippi volume, The Southeast Review, Rougarou, the Thirty Under Thirty anthology upcoming from Starcherone Press, and the novel A Language of Now, upcoming from Chiasmus Press. She is also the co-editor of Squid Quarterly, and is the associate editor of the Journal of Truth and Consequence.
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