Category Archives: Excerpts

“The Awl” – Fiction by Dr. M Leona Godin

Excerpts, Fiction, Flappertising, Flappricana, , , ,
The Death of Marat - Jacques-Louis David, 1793
The Death of Marat – Jacques-Louis David, 1793

Dr. M Leona Godin puts a comically megalomaniacal spin on the history of braille in “The Awl,” one of the many flappy lits you can find in our Summer 2015 issue (available online via Amazon and Createspace, or at independent brick-and-mortar stores like Bluestockings and St. Mark’s Bookshop).

{ X }

I HAVE HEARD OF THE DEATH OF MARAT. Marat was, they say, dotted with ugly holes in his skin that oozed and gave pain. He only found relief in the bath, so that is where he stayed. With his writing table hovering above the surface of the water, he took the names of traitors and wrote them on his Guillotine list. He was stabbed by Mademoiselle Corday, a girl who hoped to stop the madness. David, ever the sycophantic whore of the revolution, bathed the scene in a holy light, forever casting the mastermind of the REIGN OF TERROR a martyr in the gullible eye of the viewer. Once again, the eye deceives the mind!

Now my professors paint me a rebel because I dare to teach a writing system that works better than that of poor old father Haüy. So much for progress. These petty pedants wouldn’t recognize progress if it bumped them on the back of their heads. Ha, bumps, that’s what we’re talking about! You would have laughed to see me point at them in my tribunal and say, “You are all no better than a lot of Oedipuses and I, like Tiresias, warn you to reconsider your folly!” They did not like that at all. Not at all. Sighted people have very fragile egos!

How can they not see that nothing man creates is perfect? Fine tuning—even the most magnificent instrument—is always possible. Consider the organ. With each new great one built, the air pumps more efficiently, the levers glide more smoothly and the stops are placed ever more precisely. There is something divine in progress. Perhaps even God is a tinkerer? One could wish for some improvements. Hear me Lord, my suggestion for the next version of Man: please make the eyeball a little less delicate. It seems a very important organ to be so vulnerable. Or else make us humans less clumsy…

My father was a saddler,
A sad saddler was he,
For I, his little boy,
Would be a saddler too.
Sitting at my father’s bench,
I took the awl in hand,
The awl missed its mark
And found my eye!

Continue reading “The Awl” – Fiction by Dr. M Leona Godin →

“Terrible Fish” – Fiction by Dora Badger

Excerpts, Fiction, Flappertising, Flappricana, ,

Halloween-card-mirror-2

From our Summer 2015 issue, Dora Badger‘s “Terrible Fish” is a dark yet empowering tale of vengeance, as well as a handy guide to scrying and other kinds of mirror magic.

{ X }

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

 -Sylvia Plath, “Mirror”

NATALIE KNOWS DOZENS OF THE LEGENDS, hundreds of the tales.

If you say “Bloody Mary” into the mirror three times, or five, or thirteen, or maybe spin around when you do it, she’ll appear behind you wielding a knife. She’ll show you your death. She will kill a member of your family.

She isn’t obsessed or anything. They’re just fun to think about, even if most of them are utter horseshit.

Paint one side of a clear circle of glass with black paint. You’ll want four or five coats, until you can’t see through the glass. When it’s dry, write your words of power in white paint around the outer circumference of your black mirror. Now you can use it to see the future. Now the mirror has to answer your questions truthfully. Now you can see the face of your one true love.

Many of the stories and superstitions conflict with one another. Natalie loves how they stretch down the centuries and scatter across cultures. She collects and sorts the contradictory stories, thrilling to each sharp edge, sifting the shit to find the silver. 

You’ll need good reflexes for this one: face a mirror in a darkened room. Say “Blue Baby Blue” three times. The baby’s weight will fill your arms. He’ll scratch you once, he’ll scratch you twice, growing heavier each time. Chuck him in the toilet and flush — fast! — or his mother will appear on the third scratch. You’ll try to run, but by then Blue Baby Blue’s weight will pin you to the floor. Oh! I forgot to say, you’d better do this one in the bathroom.

The crowds are larger with each dead child. The parking for this one is a real pain in the ass. Natalie knows it’s selfish and hateful to think that way, but she just can’t help it. That’s okay. She’s been working very hard to accept unpleasant truths about herself.

If she had fought him from the start, maybe none of this would have happened. At the very least, she wouldn’t have felt responsible for so much of it, felt the weight of that responsibility crushing her even as fresh terrors stalked innocents in the dark.

Cover mirrors after a death so no one has to worry about Ugly Mourning Face. Cover mirrors after a death, or the deceased’s soul will be distracted from Heaven by its own reflection. Cover mirrors after a death so the spirits living within won’t turn your misery to their advantage.

Grief makes everyone hard to look at; any dead who are so easily diverted from the afterlife deserve to be trapped in mirrors; and Natalie’s been through so much horror in her life, she’d almost welcome mirror demons.

Natalie stares into her rearview and thinks: Come on, then. I dare you.

Nothing happens, of course. Continue reading “Terrible Fish” – Fiction by Dora Badger →

“Spanish Donkey / Pear of Anguish” – Poetry by Jessie Janeshek

Excerpts, Flappertising, Flappricana, Poetry, ,
The Rotting Donkey - Salvador Dalí, 1928
The Rotting Donkey – Salvador Dalí, 1928

“Spanish Donkey / Pear of Anguish” is Jessie Janeshek at her flappiest– deliciously dark, sardonically surreal, twistedly sensual– and it’s merely one of four poems she contributed to our Summer 2015 issue, currently orderable online via Amazon and Createspace, or purchasable at independent brick-and-mortar stores like Bluestockings and St. Mark’s Bookshop.

{ X }

TEENY HUMILITY COMETH TO ROOST
and try on a red pleather miniskirt.
      Nothing elaborate in our small universe
                we don’t expect to feel better
        but we have a web presence
                and our hands smell like new pubes
                and yeast after sleep.

Witness humanity
   fixing our uterus
   our lagging muffler
                                when we give the dolls hooves
                                and make them little sweetmeats.
                                We lap the raccoon blood

 

when we break from the we voice
    our blue glands kitschy
our kidneys managed.

                            The purple star horse’s
                               charming joints creak.
                            He unfolds over us
                               cock unwieldy, piss-poor.

Then science gets interesting
    séances in jars.
We’re mad. I mean crazy
    though angry applies

                                our sex a systematic
                                   contagious compromise.
                                I rub your face off of
                                   the triple-braid bride’s.
                                I think I hear you coming
                                   but it’s just the sheepdog.

{ X }

jessie janeshek headshotJESSIE JANESHEK‘s first book of poems is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). An Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Writing at Bethany College, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. She co-edited the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008).

“Scarecrow” – Poetry by Kristine Ong Muslim

Excerpts, Flappertising, Flappricana, Poetry, ,
Scarecrow - Candido Portinari, 1959
Scarecrow – Candido Portinari, 1959

What you see is not what you think, and what you don’t see may prove deadly in “Scarecrow,” one of two poems by Kristine Ong Muslim in our Summer 2015 issue (available here, here, here, or here).

{ X }

IT IS A HUSK, and although it wants nothing from you, you develop an urge to remedy its emptiness, to scrunch stuffing as far as you can down its throat in order to fill its belly with what you believe is the cure for its supposed hunger. All this time, its lanky frame gently sways, not necessarily buffeted by the wind. All this time, you mistake its lopsidedness for a lack of balance, its momentary teetering for hesitation. It is not in you to imagine that it may be a little off-balance because it is giddy with happiness. And because you find it bereft of the accoutrements you associate with a comfortable life, you deem it to be somehow in pain. Because you find it empty, you elect to have it filled. Downwind, you hear it tinkle. Sometimes, it rustles—a soft rustling sound you associate with the brittle bones of the emaciated and the deprived. So, you think and think of ways to heal what you perceive as its maladies. In the meantime, you ignore the smoke coming out of the wooden slats that line the shed, you ignore the wailing bestiary in the barn.

{ X }

KristineOngMuslimKRISTINE ONG MUSLIM is the author of several books, the most recent being We Bury the Landscape (Texas: Queen’s Ferry Press, 2012) and Grim Series (Wisconsin: Popcorn Press, 2012). “Scarecrow” and “The Fugitive” will be collected in her forthcoming book Black Arcadia from the University of the Philippines Press. http://kristinemuslim.weebly.com/

“Placenta” – Fiction by Ned Thimmayya

Excerpts, Fiction, Flappertising, Flappricana, ,
Newborn Baby on Hands - Otto Dix, 1927
Newborn Baby on Hands – Otto Dix, 1927

“Placenta” by Ned Thimmayya is a magnificently grisly story from our very bloody Summer 2015 issue, which is available here, here, here, or here.

{ X }

HANNAH SAT IN THE WAITING ROOM, spring green walls and stacks of magazines her only– very cold–company.

In her mind, she carried her stillborn nephew, eyes squeezed to cracks, hands tiny and untried, the umbilical cord vascular blue and looped three times around the child’s neck, tight as spool and thread.  They surgically removed the placenta minutes after they extracted the lifeless blunder-of-joy.

The procedure to remove the placenta was necessitated by a placenta percreta.  The placenta had embedded itself in the uterine wall and–by virtue of its dazzling, opportunistic veins–had penetrated to the bladder.  There the placenta’s long fingers threatened to violate the mother’s internal organs.  The doctor said he’d never seen such an invasive case.

{ X }

“Who didn’t cut the umbilical?” he yelled, arriving at the scene of the stillbirth and snapping everyone’s own private colloquy with the situation.  His words were a show; the child had died in the early stages of labor.

According to him, one such accident constituted heartache for all involved.  A series of stillbirths in his ward translated to lifelong professional consequences and personal guilt.  An entire year of frequent stillbirths, occurring beyond the hospital and even across international boundaries, formed the salient health question of his time.  Since it was this last and most prominent challenge that he faced, there was no shame in his individual ignorance.  His sense of helplessness in the path of death, however, could not be softened by the unanswered questions posed in peer-reviewed journals and obstetricians’ conferences.  Fatal compressions of the nuchal cord–an umbilical cord characterized by at least one full loop around the baby’s neck–had once been so rare.  Which drugs had come into fashion since the trend?  Were there alterations in birth practices that coincided with the upsurge of fatalities? Continue reading “Placenta” – Fiction by Ned Thimmayya →

“My Body, So I Know It” – Poetry by E.H. Brogan

Excerpts, Flappertising, Flappricana, Poetry, ,
Cain - Lovis Corinth, 1917
Cain – Lovis Corinth, 1917

Body art gets Biblical in “My Body, So I Know It,” one of two very flappy poems by E.H. Brogan featured in our Summer 2015 issue available here, here, here, or here. And if you’d like to hear a recording of E.H. reading this poem, click the Soundcloud player below the text!

{ X }

I MARK MY BODY SO I MAY KNOW IT.
God marked Cain from Abel to tell
the difference, and he made us, so this
seems not insane. You may even know
how similar we all look, of one image,
god-damned & god-shaped. Who can blame
His confusion? Our world is His warped mirror.

I chose my tools: bars and ink.
God is Light and I used the first
to create holes all over and let
Him in – as He would say, illuminate me.
I used the ink more topically, to color
up what parts of me called for
more decoration, facts of His design:
swirls of fractal math change from lilac
through to teal in patterns, while creatures
He designed march on me like the Ark
in dual tone, black and white: giraffe,
and fish, lizard and lion.

But His best invention is the Word.
I make my skin the page.
I am always writing.

I mark my body so I know it,
can find it easy, in a glance.
No other vessel has marks like
I’ve laid on mine. A thousand cuts
in all directions and each one lets in
another crown of blessed Light.

{ X }

image1E.H. BROGAN is a graduate of the University of Delaware with a B.A. in English. She has poetry in or forthcoming from Star*Line, Cider Press Review, Bop Dead City, and others. She blog-runs and co-curates for Kenning Journal. Her house is built of books. Tweet @wheresmsbrogan for more.

“Leaving Wisconsin” – Poetry by CL Bledsoe

Excerpts, Flappertising, Flappricana, Poetry, ,
Is Your Life Sweet? - Lygia Pape, 1996
Is Your Life Sweet? – Lygia Pape, 1996

“Leaving Wisconsin” is one of five wry yet poignant  poems by CL Bledsoe in our Summer 2015 issue, which you can order online via Amazon and Createspace. Copies are also available at fine independent brick-and-mortar stores like Bluestockings and St. Mark’s Bookshop.

{ X }

THERE’S A HOLE IN MY SOUL THAT
can only be filled by corn
syrup and processed sugars;

the sticky things comfort me.
Preservatives keep feelings
from festering while sitting

on some cobwebbed shelf. I don’t
know when the hotpockets will
reach bottom but I’ve got to

keep pouring them down until
they do. Otherwise, how will
I ever climb out? You don’t

understand; if I lost weight,
people would just want to screw
me. And then, where would I be?

{ X }

HeadshotCL BLEDSOE is the author of a dozen books, most recently the poetry collection Riceland and the novel Man of Clay. He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

“Difficult Questions” – Fiction by Zain Saeed

Excerpts, Fiction, Flappertising, Flappricana, ,
Wounded Man - Ilya Repin, 1913
Wounded Man – Ilya Repin, 1913

When a man jumps into your car pointing a gun at your head and asks how much your life is worth, what’s the correct answer? Find out by reading “Difficult Questions,” Zain Saeed‘s short story from our Summer 2015 issue.

{ X }

WHEN HE SAID HE DIDN’T WANT MY PHONE I WAS DISAPPOINTED, not because I’d kept an extra phone in the car just for days like this and men like him, but because I realized this was going to be one of those days. I was going to remain stuck here on this little street with a gun pointed at me while I pled theatrically for my life and probably be about two or maybe three hours late in getting to the stock exchange depending on this man’s experience and current life situation. I was especially annoyed because I’d already used two out of my three monthly “I got mugged by a man on Tariq Road” excuses and was saving one for the day after Ahmed’s birthday. And now this stupid man had gone and ruined everything.

“Please don’t kill me, please don’t! I’ll do anything,” I said through the still rolled-up window.

“Unlock the doors gaandu.”

Fuck me. He was a Clinger and a Swearer. Three hours easy. I made a mental note to apologize to Ahmed. I then unlocked the door and he came and sat in the back, gun pointing at my head.

“Now drive!”

“Of course of course, sir. Where to?”

“Just drive.”

Fucking aimless person.

I began to drive. He took his mask off and lowered the gun, pointing it at my butt so as not to be visible to the people that would get to work on time, lucky bastards. He looked about 19. Clean-shaven, puffy eyes, probably six feet tall, wore camouflage trousers. I wanted to ask him what war was on, but I felt he wouldn’t get the joke. Or maybe he was caught up in too many to tell me which.

Continue reading “Difficult Questions” – Fiction by Zain Saeed →

“Her Goodies Are Her Own” – Poetry by Kailey Tedesco

Excerpts, Flappertising, Flappricana, Poetry, ,
Little Red Riding Hood - Gustave Doré, circa 1867
Little Red Riding Hood – Gustave Doré, circa 1867

Our Summer 2015 issue features a few fairy tales with feminist twists, like “Her Goodies Are Her Own,” Kailey Tedesco‘s sassy & sensual spin on Little Red Riding Hood. It’s just one of three very flappy poems Kailey contributed to FLAPPERHOUSE #6, now on sale via Amazon and Createspace,  or at fine independent brick-and-mortar stores like Bluestockings and St. Mark’s Bookshop.

{ X }

LITTLE RED WASN’T LITTLE
when she found apple-
blood in the cup of her
bloomers. She said don’t
call me little and don’t call
me red. What big breasts
I have, risen like yeasty
loaves. Big bad wolf
cat-calling all night,
claiming his pickle will rot
when she won’t let him put
it in her basket. Only she can
stroke the edge of her hood,
alone with the altruistic moon.
She’ll let it down when she says
it’s time, and don a little red sheath,
sequins groping beams of light,
as she skips past granny’s and howls
into a sap-stained forest of her own.

{ X }

Headshot UpdateKAILEY TEDESCO is currently enrolled in Arcadia University’s MFA in Poetry program. She edits for Lehigh Valley Vanguard and Marathon Literary Magazine, while also teaching eighth grade English. A long-time flapper at heart, Kailey enjoys hanging out  in speakeasies, cemeteries, and abandoned amusement parks for all of her poetic inspiration. She is a resident poet of the aforementioned LVV, and her work has been featured in Boston Poetry Magazine and Jersey Devil Press. 

“Summertime’s the Time for Torture / Time for Torture’s Summertime” – Poetry by Jessie Janeshek

Excerpts, Flappertising, Flappricana, Poetry, ,
Summer Play - Lee Krasner, 1962
Summer Play – Lee Krasner, 1962

That glisten you see on our face is only partly perspiration from the summer heat; it’s mostly from the joy we feel that we once again have the chance to share some wickedly spellbinding poetry by Jessie Janeshek. “Summertime’s the Time for Torture / Time for Torture’s Summertime” is just one of four poems she contributed to our Summer 2015 issue, currently orderable online via Amazon and Createspace. Or, if you live in the New York City area, you can pick up copies at independent brick-and-mortar stores like Bluestockings and St. Mark’s Bookshop.

{ X }

TAKE PLEASURE IN HUNGER
    these fat summer nights
          stretched out over Owl Lunch.

We’re glass figurines. We use autocorrect
      to tell fortunes, the glut.
Theft gives us pleasure, everyone drugged
mornings no better, slow monsters.

 
Is this a coffin or is it your bedroom?
          We box your left hand
          tie it with black ribbons.
Your doll has an orange topknot
          her period clear, totipotent.

      The computer’s delighted we’re members
      but the world stops when we leave
      the lipstick’s cap off.

 

Author’s acknowledgment: The phrase “slow monsters” is from a poem by one of my students, Julie Bromyard.

{ X }

jessie janeshek headshotJESSIE JANESHEK‘s first book of poems is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). An Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Writing at Bethany College, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. She co-edited the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008).