Christ Feeding the Multitude – Artist & Date Unknown
In our Summer 2014 issue (currently available in PDF form for $3 US), our old friend Jeff Laughlin has two viciously funny and deeply incisive poems about poverty & other job-related miseries, excerpted from his fantastic new collection Life and Debt. We’re very flappy to present one of those poems, “Lunch,” below.
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OH WHAT WONDROUS STORIES AWAIT THE MASSES– oh counterculture, lie down next to each of us
band us together under avarice-torn skies
as we rip to shreds our love of the moment.
This sandwich belies the true ideas of the gods!
Tuna fish! Tuna fish! I hearken to the days when
only seven of you would have fed 5,000 of us.
Now I am still hungry after devouring you whole.
Do you remember when we got an hour? I gave
lunch up for overtime long ago—when the air
was still clean and soda cost fifty cents and oh
when the myth of raises weren’t so horribly stale.
When the old guard still worked here, we drank
all day and cavorted with women all night, but
some of them died and others disappeared, say,
have you heard from them? I miss their candor.
They would never have taken these benefit cuts.
No, they would have painted their faces and boldly
attacked with blind rage! No matters of money or
heart can destroy the will of those ineffable beasts!
Send us the treasonous, venomous lying horde of
office-workers! We’ll crush them, hands wrenching
raw neckbone, blood streaming down our arms, but
I need a ride to the bank first, please, I have overdrawn.
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JEFF LAUGHLIN writes about the Bobcats Hornets for Creative Loafing Charlotte & about sports in general for Triad City Beat in Greensboro, NC. His 1st book of poetry, Drinking with British Architects, is riddled with mistakes but available free if you want it. His 2nd book is Alcoholics Are Sick People, and If you ask nicely, he’ll probably give that to you too. Contact Jeff on his seldom-used twitter (@beardsinc) or email him (repetitionisfailure @gmail.com). He likely needs a haircut.
The very first paper copy of FLAPPERHOUSE #1 is now for sale in a silent auction!
Email your bid to FLAPPERHOUSE at gmail dot com. Highest bidder as of the stroke of midnight on August 1, 2014, will be mailed this historic piece of Flappricana.
Chat au Clair de Lune – Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen, circa 1900
Anna Tizard‘s “Other Side of the Fence,” from our Summer 2014 issue, shows us the world through the eyes of a feline figure with a curious past who traverses the boundaries between the mundane and the magically macabre.
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“I SWEAR IT WAS ONE OF ‘EM, I SWEAR.”
“Nick. It’s a misty night. Come on.”
“Nah, nah – it was her mist. I saw it rise. She’s a shape-shifter, I’m telling you.”
“Yeah. Just like that frog the other night from the pond at number six. Right idiot you made of us, getting caught in that hedge! I’m still picking thorns out of my sweater…”
The voices faded, muffled by the mist as I eased through a gap in the fence and shuddered the woody grit off my fur. Fences: most human folk just see barriers, separating devices. Opportunities, gaps, hidden places, perhaps a high viewing post; these are the fences held in the eyes of cats, immortals, and perhaps those two chasers back there, human by the look of it, their eyes widened by a preternatural curiosity.
If there was still a trace of my own mist clinging to my back legs, I wouldn’t have known it. I was too distracted by the sponginess of the grass beneath my paws, the newness of it all. The lowness of the twilight sky, a blanket of slate-grey with just a glimmer of blue and pink in it, swallowing everything into itself. To sniff the air was to have those colours wash through me, the scent of rain one and the same thing as my anticipation, and that first pinch of hunger.
At the tremor of those clumsy footsteps behind me I scattered up a tree, startled by my own agility, until those booming voices moved off, still bickering. For the first few hours of my life as a cat I didn’t test out my new dexterity but sat tensed as a watchman over those rows of rectangular gardens as the shadows unfolded themselves like some ancient leather-bound book falling open over everything.
This is the way I have learned to remember it, running a claw over the past. At the time I didn’t have enough experience of old books, blankets, or even humans to see it quite that way. But age and experience can help you piece together what was violent, fragmented, nothing more than imprints in the mud quickly filling up with rainwater.
What little I did know at that time spun back to me soon enough, though, shivering the very dew off my back as I dug my nerves deep into the branch beneath me.
In a dark, clammy alley near the intersection of loneliness, ignorance, violence, and lust, there’sDylan Jackson‘s wry yet tragic tale, “The Virgin,” one of the many flappy lits included in our Summer 2014 Issue.
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SOMEONE GOT SHOT. Or, rather, many people were shot during a single incident. Some of them died, while others, despite varied injuries, managed to survive for the time being. He didn’t know where or when the incident took place, but from the little he could glean of the broken news report coming over radio in the front of the cab, Boneface knew that somewhere, people may have been as sad as him. It didn’t matter though. People die, just as more are created or brought into the world every day.
He hated getting out. Though, if it was a matter of necessity, it was reserved as a task carried out under the veil of night. On this particular evening, Boneface had found himself in want of a woman. This would be his first. After twenty-five years of unintentionally chaste living, the decision to procure intimacy had come almost as suddenly as he was sure to upon the initial encounter.
All evening he’d been sitting alone in his apartment—as he’d done nearly every evening of his adult life—pondering what it must feel like to be touched by another human to whom he bore no direct relation. The inspiration had come from nearly three hours of scanning through the titles of pay-per-view pornos that he couldn’t bring himself to purchase. It was less a matter of finance, and more an issue of pride, as his mother, and executor, would be the one to receive the bill. He’d made that mistake before and found himself wildly aroused, only to be met with deep embarrassment and shame the following month. Tonight though, he knew which mistake to avoid, and which new mistake he would forge. Continue reading “The Virgin” – Fiction by Dylan Jackson→
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