Category Archives: Excerpts

“Map of the Twentieth Century” – Poetry by Samantha Duncan

Excerpts, Flappertising, Flappricana, Poetry, ,
Moonlight in South Texas - Robert Julian Onderdonk, 1912
Moonlight in South Texas – Robert Julian Onderdonk, 1912

You don’t have to be from Texas to enjoy “Map of the Twentieth Century,” Samantha Duncan‘s poem from our Fall 2014 issue. But if you do hail from the Lone Star State, there’s a good chance you’ll eat this poem up like a bag of Buc-ee’s Beaver Nuggets. 

{ X }

YOU CAN STOP IN THE MIDDLE of Interstate 45 and buy a small or medium trailer
                to store any right-brained assertions about the maternal instincts of
                Texas hills. It exists, and wildfires apologize a thousand times
                                to the Sam Houston statue, with whom you

always promise to take a picture, but continue to take that curve going eighty,
                like you’re expecting a hooker holding chocolate strawberries
                around the bend. Every bridge bisecting the road is hard up
                                for cash, and every penny you have is

spent on someone else. Questions cost the same as the courage for vitriol.
                Corsicana could have your long lost esophagus, everything
                inside you is shelled. Mile markers are doctor appointments,
                                the ones you’ll remember for the book,

and all you’ll need is hidden somewhere, or disguised as debris. Faces
                are painted over and not on, the resilience of a
                continuous motion, and there is a green on a tree that has
                                yet to be named. A direct result of

250 miles of a sickly giraffe’s tongue lapping up un-wanton beaver nuggets.
                If you aren’t careful, you inhale a tire off an eighteen-wheeler,
                discarded like the last piece of brisket on a lover’s plate, he
                                always takes too much. Don’t mess with tires.

{ X }

authorSAMANTHA DUNCAN is the author of the chapbooks One Never Eats Four (ELJ Publications, 2014) andMoon Law (Wild Age Press, 2012), and she serves as Associate Editor for ELJ Publications. She lives in Houston, blogs occasionally atplanesflyinglowoverhead.blogspot.com, and can be found @SamSpitsHotFire.

“We Dream Of Our Dead Pets” – Fiction by Carl Fuerst

Excerpts, Fiction, Flappertising, Flappricana, ,
Greyhounds royal hunting - Valentin Serov, 1901
Greyhounds royal hunting – Valentin Serov, 1901

There’s an uncanny dream-logic at work in Carl Fuerst‘s “We Dream Of Our Dead Pets” (from our Fall 2014 issue)– but is it actually a dream? Or could it be an irregular reality caused by galactic cannibalism? All we know for sure is that this surreal little story has burrowed its tiny fangs beneath our skin and we can’t quite yank it out.

{ X }

I DROVE ON THE ROAD THAT CIRCLES THE TOWN where I live, an island of crumbling low-roofed brick buildings surrounded by countless miles of cornfields. Once, three summers before, on a late summer night bordering on an early summer morning, I stood on the balcony of my second-floor apartment and watched the cornstalks in the rising sun, anticipating the brief and unpredictable moment when the new day’s light would make the leaves look like emeralds heated to their melting point and hammered flat.

Since then, I’d been in my car, and a small part of me was starting to wonder why it had always been night.

I took a road into the cornfields. It had recently snowed, and the roads were dark, snowy, icy, and bad. A blurry, white-robed man hunched by the road’s shoulder every few miles. Whenever I passed, he strained towards the car, snapping his jaws and howling, some invisible force dragging him in the direction of the fields.

This made it difficult to listen to my passenger, who reclined in the back seat, smoking a joint and staring at his phone’s glowing screen.

“See, stars form when gas inside galaxies becomes dense enough to collapse,” he said, “usually under the effect of gravitation. But when galaxies merge, see, it increases the random motions of their gas-generating whirls of turbulence, which should hinder the collapse of the gas. Intuitively, this turbulence should slow down the formation of the stars, but, in reality, the opposite is true.”

“Do galaxies collide often?” I asked. “Is this something we should be worried about?” It was nice, for once, to think about something besides the reasons why I couldn’t remember when I wasn’t driving in circles around the little corn-town where I lived.

“It’s very common,” said my passenger. “But ‘interaction’ would be a more accurate term than ‘collision,’ accounting for the extremely tenuous distribution of matter in galaxies.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Meanwhile, galactic cannibalism happens when a galaxy, through tidal gravitational interactions with a companion, merges with that companion, resulting in a larger, often irregular galaxy.”

My car skidded off the road and down a steep hill and rolled to a stop on a farm pond’s black bank. I got out of my car and snow spilled into my boots. The pond wasn’t frozen. I watched icy water lap at my front two tires.

Continue reading “We Dream Of Our Dead Pets” – Fiction by Carl Fuerst →

“Piney and Buoyant, We Wave, Consecrate” – Poetry by Jessie Janeshek

Excerpts, Flappertising, Flappricana, Poetry, ,
Four Foxes - Franz Marc, 1913
Four Foxes – Franz Marc, 1913

“Piney and Buoyant, We Wave, Consecrate” gnaws like a painful memory, and slinks like a forest carnivore– and it’s merely one of the 5 beautifully wicked poems by Jessie Janeshek featured in our Fall 2014 issue.

{ X }

REMEMBER THE LAST NIGHT WE SAW THE FOXES
the herringbone hunter, incense and cups?

The freak accident killed two young ladies
small gobs of white
but you only bit one.

I swallowed allegiance, tried to decry
vomiting mothballs
the size of our crime.

Ours is the darkest
union, a lock.
My default is butchery.
Your faith tastes of bad milk.
I resist symmetry
let dogs lick it off.

{ 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).

“them bones” – Poetry by Emily O’Neill

Excerpts, Flappertising, Flappricana, Poetry, ,
Skeleton of the Chicken - C. William Beebe, 1906
Skeleton of the Chicken – C. William Beebe, 1906

“them bones” is spooky like a voodoo curse, punk like a bloody middle finger, and just one of five fantastic poems by Emily O’Neill that you can read in our Fall 2014 issue.

{ X }

THERE ARE SNAKES IN THE STAIRS
& hens in your kitchen
clucking loving wasn’t
as hard as you made it
& it might be a miracle
the birds don’t end
up strangled & swallowed
by hiss & fang

you flap & crow (stupid cock)
so early to the after-party
& your whole apartment
is women telling me not to stay
is ankle fang & feather & blood & you swallow
your tail like a secret to keep & roll
back down the stairs

I have nothing new to say
about hurt or my heart but
loving wasn’t as hard as sucking the venom out
or spite round my neck, a mink stole,
& the bones of these ugly birds have boiled & dried
so the question grows into how many wishes
arrive with each break

one for death / one for dishonor / one for tassel
shoulders & damask lampshades worn as hats /
one for bon voyage / I hate you / that isn’t a wish,
just a clean break / one for the hissing truth /
the hissing truth you’ll never stomach

if ever you knelt & asked me to tell it
I would grow scales & choke on black velvet, would spit-shine
that idiot diamond before wearing your promise ring,
would walk into the angry sea to drown
before mixing my dust with yours

before snapping a hen’s neck
just to stop that awful sound

{ X }

IMG_1535EMILY O’NEILL is a writer, artist, and proud Jersey girl. Her recent poems and stories can be found in Electric Cereal, Gigantic Sequins, and Split Rock Review, among others. Her debut collection, Pelican, is the inaugural winner of Yes Yes Books’ Pamet River Prize and forthcoming in 2014. You can pick her brain at http://emily-oneill.com.

“We Call Her Mama” – Fiction by Natalia Theodoridou

Excerpts, Fiction, Flappertising, Flappricana, ,
Adoration of the Madonna - Jacek Malczewski, 1910
Adoration of the Madonna – Jacek Malczewski, 1910

When you’re a god, or a goddess, or any other kind of immortal being, death’s cold embrace can be the ultimate– and most elusive– high. Read all about it in Natalia Theodoridou‘s “We Call Her Mama,” one of the many flappy lits contained in our Fall 2014 issue.

{ X }

“IF I TAKE ENOUGH, WILL I BE ABLE TO DIE?” I asked.

She looked at me, with her boundless eyelashes sparkling under the club lights.

“I don’t know, baby,” she said. “No one has tried that before. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Here.” She held out her iridescent hand. I buried my face in her open palm and snorted the golden dust. My heart imploded right then, I swear. And then we danced, danced, danced like the gods that we were, until there was no club, no dust, no Father (Who art in heaven), just her and me, her unworthy, unfashionable, forever moribund Son.

{ X }

We called her Mama. She was no-one’s mother, but she was Mama to us all.

“Come on, boys and girls,” she would say. “Gather round.” And we did. We rushed to her feet to taste the golden dust that fell from her heels. Who was she? She was the joy of life when dying was but a party trick, and she was the face of death when we were sick and tired of living. And who were we? We liked to say we were fallen legends, desperado gods and renegade dreams, but really we were just a bunch of lost children, trying to forget we were immortal, looking for love. And she gave it to us; I don’t know what was in it for her, but she loved us all, and loved us plenty.

Before love, though, there was the drug. We thought it was the fairy dust that would make us into real boys. It almost did, too; the golden drug makes you laugh hard, and fear hard, and hurt as if you were human. But that’s it. Can’t make you mortal.

We all took it for different reasons, of course, but Mama accommodated each of her children without judgment. We were equals in her eyes. She danced with us, lay with us, dressed our wounds and licked the blood hot off our skin. And then, when we were done, when we had gotten what we needed, she let us go.

That’s how I know I’ll never leave this place. I can never have what I need. Continue reading “We Call Her Mama” – Fiction by Natalia Theodoridou →

“Blood Ties” – Fiction by Diana Clarke

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Flower of Blood - Odilon Redon, 1895
Flower of Blood – Odilon Redon, 1895

On one level, Diana Clarke‘s “Blood Ties” (from our Fall 2014 Issue) is a coming-of-age story about an adolescent Jewish girl in New York City. But bubbling below the surface there’s also darkness and mystery and sex– and, of course, blood– all rushing headlong toward an unforgettable conclusion.

{ X }

I CRUMPLE MY FINGERS AS THE CLERK APPROACHES, hiding the red crusted in my nail beds. I can smell the iron, but the clerk doesn’t even turn her head. She’s too focused on an errant coat three rows away. Its unrumpledness signals that it does not belong in the sale room, any more than I belong on the main floor. She approaches the coat, barcode scanner already raised like a torch or a gun, then tags the thick green fabric and drags it away, sedated. Without the weight and darkness of the coat, the retired summer clothes that are past shopping season but still appropriate for the weather outside seem to list from their hangers toward the light. They are a swarm of fireflies, they are road dust rising, they are a dandelion head diffused.

​I rub my palms together, pinch my fingertips, watch my menstrual blood flake to the floor where it becomes invisible. I can never bring myself to wash it off, not when I know they’ll refuse to touch me later for the fear of it. In my neighborhood, Yiddish is like a curtain we draw between us and the rest of the world—keeps us warm in winter, and dark the rest of the year. My mother doesn’t even speak it well, but her gestures are so Jewish that from far away you wouldn’t know it. We moved here three years ago, and in one more year I’m leaving, but for the meantime what I have is not to wash. Rebellion comes in all kinds.

​When I was a child, my mother’s friend Julia would sit at the kitchen table, hair piled on her head and bare shoulders shaking with laughter, remembering how the two of them used to ride the subways, how their bodies learned to bleed together, and how when they did neither one of them wore anything to stop it. “It was the eighties,” Julia would say, turning to me. Years of sun had turned her brown in the deepest part of her chest. “The subways were just us and the homeless people, and even the homeless people sat at the other end of the car.” My mother always shushed her with half a heart.

​I would go back to my room after and imagine the wetness between their legs, how it slicked them then dried till it stuck, how they would have to peel their pants away or shower still wearing them. Continue reading “Blood Ties” – Fiction by Diana Clarke →

“Human Child” – Fiction by Brendan Byrne

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By SJNikon - Sam Roberts [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Worship – Sam Roberts, 2010

There’s a vague but undeniable dread stalking the reader from the margins of “Human Child,” Brendan Byrne‘s story from our Fall 2014 Issue.

{ X }

IT HAS BEEN AN ACHING DAY. The sky heals like a scab, but nothing has split it, and it has never bled an ounce of fluid. Light the first of the evening. My hands ache. Fluxing bone pain which doesn’t dissipate. Rest my elbows on the black metal railing adjacent to the basement stairs. A Japanese guy with coiffed hair and a model’s blank face brushes by, street-level. I think I hear him say, sotto voce, into a phone curled against the side of his skull,  “…other territories… how does it feel there?”

The door jerks towards me: I catch it.  The last of the maggots file out, pawing at coats, extracting packs of cigarettes, demanding lights off each other, howling about the stupidity of associates and lovers. I wait till they’re halfway down the block, then go back inside. Clear the scrap-wood tables of barely begun drinks, kick the chairs and jerk the tables back into some kind of order. I have my head down, starting the wash, when the door heaves and wheezes.

Kid. Small and thin. White-stained hoodie draped, obscuring features. He’s looking at my face in the way people who know you look at you. I straighten up and move down the bar towards him. Just from the way he’s standing, I know I don’t know him.

“Gonna have to see ID, man.”

As I approach, the candle throws up yellow globe light, and I can see the shorn sides of his head. Scraped unclean with cheap razors. I tighten, keep a good deal of the bar between the two of us. I think of the metal bar under the wash.

“Not looking for a drink.” His voice is a slurry of broken things. His hands jammed into the hoodie’s pockets. He hasn’t looked anywhere except right at me. There’s a bunch of things I could say. None of them would ease the situation in the necessary direction.

His eyes are somewhere I’ve never been. “Knowa girl named Kimmie?”

“Don’t know anyone named that, no.”

“Kimmie.”

“No idea.”

The kid leans slightly over the bar. I can see the beginning of lazy slashes of tribal tattooing on his wrists. There is what looks like at first a severe case of eczema on his neck, but as he comes closer, I can see it’s scar-art, created through glass laceration. Thought it was out of style.

And I can smell him. Old puke and new trash. Like one of the gutter punks who camps out in Tompkins Square Park and adjoining streets, but they don’t come in here, they know better than that.

“Said she knew you.”

“No idea, man. Sorry.”

“You’re Aaron.”

“No, that’s not my name.”

His single, simple grin. “Kimmie said.”

“Not me.”

“Aaron.”

“No.”

“Aaron.” It’s a statement. He places both his hands on the bar like they’re dead birds he’s been carrying around too long in his pockets. “She said you knew how to get back.”

“Get back where?”

He thinks this is funny: his face begins to convulse around the slit of a smile. His body is impossibly still, like a caryatid of an unseen palace. Then his neck begins to spasm, and something happens to his eyes. His shoulder twitches, and his head drops as if he’s mid-seizure. I step back, place the base of my spine against the counter behind me. A middle age couple comes through the door bubbling and laughing, talking about the never-removed Christmas lights, calling for two Stella. In the second I look away from the kid, he was out the door, quick-lurching up the stairs. The couple brightly ignores his transit, settling. I pour the beer, take money, give change. Stymie attempted dialogue, “How long has this place been here…” Curve around the bar. Outside. Up the concrete stairs.

There is nothing on the sidewalk except for dog shit, menthols smoked down to the nub, and chip bags, inside-out, gleaming. The sky is wet and swirled with grays, refusing to rain.

 

Continue reading “Human Child” – Fiction by Brendan Byrne →

“This Is the Shaky Phase” – Poetry by Jessie Janeshek

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Flying Fox - Vincent van Gogh, 1886
Flying Fox – Vincent van Gogh, 1886

Jessie Janeshek‘s poetry hums like a death rattle, haunts like hocus pocus, and dances like a pagan priestess. Check out “This Is the Shaky Phase” below, and if you dig that, you can read four more of Jessie’s poems in our Fall 2014 Issue, now on sale for $3US.

{ X }

I MAKE CRISES IN MY MOUTH
    harrowing the cat mask
 
lie down on the table
    jawing contemplate.

 
So you left him in the garden
                or maybe in a hot car.
    He could only come in rain
    jangling sharks’ teeth in my face.

Tomorrow I’ll leave hungry
    rummaging for arrows
    polka dot my toenails                        red under duress.

 
The pink velour is nothing
            but a snakecharm
            or a smokescreen.

                        Take the mask back off
                        bat wings at the window flapping thick
                        at the bright slam of the gate
                        my shadow’s chicken-shaped.

{ 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).

“Street Music” – Poetry by Emily O’Neill

Excerpts, Flappertising, Poetry, ,
Sleeping Princess - Frances MacDonald, 1909
Sleeping Princess – Frances MacDonald, 1909

Emily O’Neill‘s poetry is vicious yet vulnerable, visceral yet cerebral, and completely at home in the Flapperhouse. We’re excited to include five of her poems in our Fall 2014 issue (PDFs currently pre-orderable for $3US). One of those poems, “Street Music,” is below:

{ X }

YOU SHOUT & I OPEN
cunt like a jewelry box:
dancer spinning over wooden toe & inside,
a jeweled egg.  Yolkless.
Glittering.

Inside the egg, another dancer
with hands over her mouth.
Inside her mouth, a bird
on a perch singing needle
song, a cranking tin machine

& the needles are shining brass
& brass is a lie to tell a child
about who stays in charge

& children don’t always trust
like a blind man must & the metal is cold
like a lover rolled over & we know
it will tarnish

on a long enough timeline.  The chain breaks.
The blind man steps off a curb & is not thrown into crosswalk
death by a stranger’s rush. The child pricks her finger on a spindle
& sleeps until she ages past ache.  She will never ask
if the wolves could’ve raised her better
because she taught herself to howl
just fine.

The needles fly back into the bird’s throat & sew a new song;
a sailor sings it from a nest above the sea
& doffs his hat for the dancer’s legs, the dancer’s breasts,

the dancer’s hips spun and barbed like razor wire.  She crumples
under the sailor’s gaze, is discarded.  The egg closes its shining jaws around her,

steals her from what frivolous nothing
the world says she means

& I keep dancing
away from
the cut.

{ X } Continue reading “Street Music” – Poetry by Emily O’Neill →

“ARG” – Fiction by Anthony Michael Morena

Excerpts, Fiction, Flappertising, Flappricana, ,
The Cheerleader - Norman Rockwell, 1961
The Cheerleader – Norman Rockwell, 1961

We’re absolutely giddy to present the first excerpt from our Fall 2014 issue today! “ARG” by Anthony Michael Morena is what you’d normally call “flash fiction,” but we think that’s an inadequate term for this explosive, subversive, wickedly enjoyable story. We think it should be called something like “blast fiction” instead.

{ X }

WE ALL HAVE OUR SPECIAL ROLES TO PLAY. Some of us have cameras. Some of us are handing out leaflets. Some of us are in a van idling across the street, waiting for the right moment. Everything has been planned and everything is going according to plan. We are gathered together at the park. This makes sense.  You would want to launch an alternate reality game in a highly trafficked area. Everything makes sense.

The plot of our alternate reality game centers around the fight between aliens who have infiltrated all levels of society, a cult built around resisting them, and our players. The aliens cannot be recognized on sight. There is no way to tell who is an alien and who isn’t an alien. The distinction between the aliens among us and normal humans will be up to the players to figure out. A player might even consider him or herself an alien. The pretense of secrecy suggests that everyone is being watched.

Everything is set. We have a plot, websites, email addresses, hidden objects, puzzles, codes. The flyers we are about to hand out contain an oblique warning that is actually a clue for where players can find out more. We are dressed in black jumpsuits and riot gear. We are dressed as the hidden threats among us, in Giants jerseys. This park is one of the most highly trafficked parts of the city. Its proximity to subway access and retail markets make it the perfect place to introduce our ARG. Everything is going according to plan. Everything makes sense.

Except for cheerleaders.

Continue reading “ARG” – Fiction by Anthony Michael Morena →