J. Bradley is as talented as he is prolific: His surreal yet poignant work has appeared in scores of publications, and we were immensely flattered to include four of his poems in our Spring 2014 Issue. We posted one of those poems (“No More Poems About Resolutions”) back in January; now we’re very flappy to present “A Highly Magnified History,” “When a Poet Wants to Date You,” and “Yelp Review – Total Wine.”
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“A Highly Magnified History”
Chairs strain to support
the weight of want.
Mannequins shed felt
and wood, leaving sundresses,
blouses on skeletons;
they refuse to flap against
the artificial air.
“When a Poet Wants to Date You”
The mortuary sits on the coffee table,
nondescript. You think the cover
would be made of his skin, her skin.
He slaps your hand for accusing
his love of hemophilia;
the wine never clots.
“Yelp Review – Total Wine”
There are shelves of organs waiting to be pickled with special occasions. Pick a name like a rose to clench or to cast into fire, water, or wind. Pick how you will revise a memory, what desert to costume your tongue with; forgiveness is something you can never drown in, no matter how hard your lungs want it.
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J. BRADLEYis the author of the graphic poetry collection, The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014). He lives at iheartfailure.net.
The spiel of a dotty, highly-caffeinated, eerily chipper employee at an absurdly morbid vacation ranch is the basis for Phyllis Green‘s “The Thrill of a Lifetime,” one of the many flappery lits in our Spring 2014 Issue.
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WELCOME TO YOUR FIRST DAY OF VACATION! You’ll have the thrill of a lifetime. We have 36 acres to explore and there are yes, 36 of you SOOOOOOooooo you each begin with a whole acre to yourselves. Just you and those gorgeous gleaming yellow backhoes! Yes you will be trained to drive a backhoe, first thing we’ll do. Now you all look great in your hazmat get-ups! All I can see are little men in white coats-oh oh! And white pants and white foot coverings! Of course the ladies are all in white too. And let’s not forget the little tikes on vacation. All right! Now, you all okay with those plastic helmets? Remember, ask one of my assistants if you are the least bit unsure of the fit or feel. We want everyone comfortable. There is pure mountain air filtered into those protective headgears and rest assured we have not had one accident over someone not being able to breathe or getting hysterical or anything like that. They are perfectly safe. There will be no odor for you to worry about, just pure fresh mountain clean air going into your precious lungs because that’s how we do things here at the Rocky’s Ranch, your ultimate vacation. We promise big results, a truly happy week of exploration and lots of fun party things planned for the evenings. You’ll love this unique vacation and want to come back every summer! Guaranteed!
Now let’s get down to business and not waste another minute. Hope you all had a delicious breakfast? Good! Wasn’t that bacon crisp and tasty? During the morning you’ll have a coffee thermos in case you are a coffee addict like me. And you little kids who look so excited to be driving those huge and I mean huge yellow backhoes– well we have a lemonade thermos for you tikes. So everyone will be hydrated, right?
Let’s take a look at your graphs. Everyone pull out the graphs. See the 36 acres, and can you all see where your own particular acre is? If not, hold up your retriever (make sure the sharp point is not pointed at yourself!) and my assistants will come by and show you your specific acre.
Now we have marked what you may locate on your acre. Besides the usual cantaloupe rinds and peach pits and other things folks throw away in their garbage cans, there are treasures here. In Acre 1 for instance, that is where the darling little Tacy Jones’ body was tossed in a dumpster and deposited. Now most of Tacy has been found, all except for her two eyeballs. And her parents are willing to pay big bucks for either one or two eyeballs, and then there are the collectors and they really have big bucks and don’t forget the horror museums that are popping up everywhere, they have millions to spend. So who is on Acre 1? Raise your long-handled spike, that’s your retriever. Okay, that looks like Johnny Kacinski. Johnny, you find an eyeball or two and if they belong to little Tacy– oh and we do have a DNA lab right on the grounds here– then Johnny, you are going to be rich! Yes, folks, let’s give a cheer for Johnny! Continue reading “The Thrill of a Lifetime” – Fiction by Phyllis Green→
A cloud of “unspoken violence” hangs in the air above Tom Stephan‘s “Reach,” a poem which resides in that alluring and mysterious locale known as the hotel room. “Reach” is just one of 19 very flappery works of literature that you can read in our Spring 2014 Issue, now on sale for 3 measly American dollars.
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I REACH ACROSS THE BED And keep reaching
Sheets like virgin dunes
To where you should have been on the shore I could not see.
The hum of guitar strings
Or violins
Or sympathetic sitars
with a bit of wounded care
I strain across vastness and you are never there.
Is there some key that unlocks you?
In the golden light of cheap curtains
In plastic hotels and crunchy pillows
Some hidden lever to move our lives together?
I packed the room today
Sat at the edge of the bed
Listened to the shower drone overlong.
And you are naked and wet, and at my side, saying are you ready—
Yes, I’m ready.
The air is thick
Industrial cleaner and bleach
And unspoken violence
You dress for the execution; I will fire point blank into your heart.
We toss the keycards on the floor
and shut the door behind us.
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TOM STEPHAN is a Texas native who has spent a little time being a bit of everything: teacher, actor, playwright, writer, traveler. When he’s not doing any of those things he’s living in Austin and eating well. He has a BA in English, an MFA in Acting and has a curious collection of hats and suspenders.
“Angels Howling in the Trees” is a sketch from an American girlhood in the disco era, from the barbed yet soulful pen of Misti Rainwater-Lites. It reminds us of a clip from some punk rock Wonder Years where bitterness & nostalgia roll around on the carpet pulling each other’s hair. It’s also one of the many multi-flavored literaries you can read in our Spring 2014 Issue, available in full for 3 bucks.
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IN THE HOUSE IN THE TOWN THAT WASN’T SEYMOUR or Bridgeport but somewhere in between, somewhere forgettable, another ugly bump in the Texas road, Merissa slept or did not sleep in a canopy bed in a bedroom she shared with her baby sister. One night Maternal Grandmother was visiting and she was sleeping with Merissa in the canopy bed but Merissa kept getting out of the canopy bed and tiptoeing down the hallway and getting into bed with the mother and the father. Maternal Grandmother would come get Merissa and bring her back to the canopy bed and Merissa was restless and unhappy but didn’t know why. Merissa looked out the window from the canopy bed and saw the trees in the backyard and she could hear angels howling tangled in the black branches. The angels voiced the despair she was too young and mute to name.
“Will the angels always howl, Ava? Will I always be searching for the warmest, most hospitable bed?”
“You are cursed, niece. I hate to be the one to tell you the truth.”
Buddy Holly was on the stereo and The Newlywed Game was on the television and Merissa was in love with John Travolta as Tony in Saturday Night Fever and when she played house with her least favorite cousin, Sonny’s big sister, she learned what it was to be female because the cousin pretended to be talking to John Travolta, Merissa’s husband. Continue reading “Angels Howling in the Trees” – Fiction by Misti Rainwater-Lites→
Luis Galindo‘s “The Puddle of Romeo’s Tears” is our favorite kind of heartbreak poem: bitter yet playful, melancholy yet comic, graceful yet naughty. And it’s but one of the many savory slices of lit you can read in our Spring 2014 Issue, on sale for just $3.
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WHY DIDN’T YOU RETURN MY HOWLS Last night
Under the moon’s silver chains
And pink undergarments?
Were you busy? Were you washing
Your hair in the tears
Of half-assed Romeos
In the unrequited evening?
I was there
Under your balcony
Wearing a green snake-skin
suit that I bought
from the Our Mother of Holy Agony
Thrift store on the corner of
Mistake and Trust.
While standing there
And howling, I could see
The sign of the manufacturer
Of the fire escape under your window.
Stamped into the cold dark steel:
Dirtyfuckinglie, Inc.
I stood there for hours with
A love poem I had written
The night before on a napkin
From our favorite Chinese restaurant.
I had planned on reciting it
To you, at midnight
But it was too late.
You were
Not There
You were
THE WINDOW GLASS IS TEXTURED WITH DIRT. My eyes settle on smears of leftover Windex in between squished bugs. Wonder if everyone sees the world through dirty glass. Wonder if everyone knows there’s always glass. I consider going outside for a moment but then remember my halfheartedly molting sunburn.
Shelley wrote something about the painted veil, what was that?
That wasn’t this.
Go clean your room, my mother said. No man wants to marry a slob.
No one gets married anymore.
Don’t be silly. Everyone gets married.
When we were together I never got a ring
or a tattoo of your name
but I still feel you next to me when I smell cigarettes or touch leather
maybe that’s why I don’t wear my jacket or smoke.
Who are you going to die with?
Pinpricks of stars dot the expanse of black sky. It’s quiet.
My cigarette tip illuminates the invisible street.
Last summer we looked at that sky, you and I
we lay on our backs on the bike trail and when you put
your hand
under my sweatshirt
my heart
ricocheted violently,
pinpricks of stars,
like air holes in a dark
box that someone keeps
their pets in,
and looks inside
from time to time
to check if we’re alive.
Cameron Suey has been one of our favorite storytellers for several years now. His tales of horror and dark fantasy have filled our heads with some of the most deliciously terrifying images our minds’ eyes have ever seen, and we’re eternally grateful to him for that. We’re excited to present his story “Axis Mundi” below, as well as in our Spring 2014 Issue.
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CAPTAIN ELISHA DRIFTS BACK TO HER BODY. Sedative fog curls around her edges for a long, liquid minute before she remembers she has eyes to open. Lids slide across her sclera, a syrupy-sweet motion that tingles her spine like some small secret pleasure. Her forearms feel hot and then cold, as catheters spit the next layer of the wakeup cocktail into her blood. Already, the induced euphoria’s fading, shepherding the last of the delirium and confusion away to be replaced by a conscious, knowing glee. They’ve arrived.
Her new stateroom smells of wood and leather, warm aromas painted in crimson and deep oak hues. The armchair creaks as she moves, and smartbands retreat into its folds like startled snakes. The catheters slip from her flesh, spraying a thin mist of skinbond to cover their tracks, and constrict away into the arms of the chair.
Her vision drifts to a far wall, her eyes looping on a pleasing swirl in the burlwood, where Mithradates projects her feeds in layers of soft amber light. The most important detail rises to the surface in pulsing cobalt: No one has followed. Right up until their unscheduled departure, no alarms were even raised.
Now the slip is over, only a few hours passed, and the slick ebon needle of her new ship, the Mithra, drifts above the ecliptic of Gliese 667C. Mithradates maps the bewildering orbits of the neighboring stars and the six rocky planets around 667C, adjusting for any local eccentricities since the stellar event. The third star, a dull red coal, squats at the center of a tangle of scorched planets. Elisha waits for Mithradates to find any sign of their quarry, but so far she only sees the purples and oranges of worlds and moons.
The nausea arrives as she scans the display, inevitable postslip vomit rising up at the back of her throat. A small basin of burnished silver extends on a silent pseudopod, awaiting her purge. Everyone must sleep during the slip, and only Goetsch claims to have conquered the purge. Elisha could have asked Mithradates to confirm, to see if it’s just more bluster from the mission’s XO, but she’d rather let the man keep his boasts.
With a twinkling of glass bells, a white dot appears in the orbital map, then another. The Odin, and the Yggdrasil. The ghost ships, in the shadow of the third planet. Elation rises up in her, along with something else. Elisha leans into the gleaming mouth of the basin and gags before her throat unlocks to spray a hot foam of sweet pepper bisque, her last meal before their covert flight from Terrapin Yards.
As she blots her lips with a soft cloth, the remains of the first slipprobe from the Reclamation Society appears on Mithradates’ map. Closer in, trailing the orbit of the third planet, it’s just a few hundred thousand kilometers from the Odin and the Yggdrasil. It reads as a scattered cloud of pinprick fragments in the readout, the slip engine still bleeding weak exotic energy signals even a few weeks after the probe’s demise. The second probe, following hours after and launched at great risk of detection, had been more circumspect. From a high and silent orbit, it brought back word of Odin and the Yggdrasil, their distant silhouettes barely visible in the shadow of the dead world.
If there were still survivors aboard, separated by more than 900 years of cultural and technological drift, they would need to be approached with cautious grace. Her spine crawled with excitement at the thought, as if the universe had unfurled to give flesh to her dreams.
When they had told her about the probes, she’d thrown every ounce of social capital she had to get the Reclamation Society’s nomination, abandoning the last of her studies. She’d been the one to propose the theft of her mother’s ship, the Mithra, and she and Goetsch had arranged to patch the ship’s entity, Mithradates, in secret. In the end, they were the only possible crew. She bent and twisted the world to deliver them to this moment.
More sounds, ringing steel this time, as Mithradates tells her the rest of the crew are awake and ready to begin. With his new software, he vibrates with excitement, almost as eager as her to begin. A third tone, hollow wooden chimes, and Mithradates paints new information in the air above the Odin and the Yggdrasil. Her brow furrows. The numinous excitement that suffused her since her selection fades into the background. She leans closer to confirm what Mithradates is showing her.
Around the great sphere of the Yggdrasil drifts a cloud of objects, an accretion disc of ablative armor shrapnel from a thousand years of micrometeorites, drifting screws and abandoned tools, and corpses. Thousands of frozen corpses, lashed by ropes. Loops and whorls of the dead sketching glyphs and geometric shapes drift around the ghost ship, held close by the Yggdrasil’s gentle gravity.
Much like literature’s most famous chronicler of the Flapper Age, Jeff Laughlin has quite a flair for zeitgeist-capture. In his poem “What Really Drives You To Drink,” Jeff examines the darkness and sadness that plague us– drinkers and teetotalers alike– and he does it with great elegance and wit. You can read this poem along with other fine lit in our Spring 2014 Issue, now on sale for just $3.
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I. OF COURSE, WE ALL WANTREVOLUTIONS with piano loops playing behind us
driving us to the light of salvation.
We all want the moments of dreams,
caricatures of our destinies; we want
model-sizes of us writhing against evil.
Yes, we ache for sustenance beyond
substances, data ahead of information,
a wealth of armies, breaching battalions.
We want the lines between injustices
ruptured, to rip thousands of tears in our
oblivious brain-skin and sensibilities.
We want to be buried in beautiful
graves, our thoughts and actions resting
non-anonymously but not autonomic.
Above us, floating, are the souls of everlasting
life, their bombastic screams louder than
the empty bottles they hurl at us blithely.
Just out of reach, the albatross, the overt
and countercultural masses; all that lays
here is middle-ground, pain, and sincerity.
Ghost Light on Stage, Photo by Jon Ellwood (c) 2014
Rebecca Ann Jordan‘s “Stage Manager,” one of the short stories from our Spring 2014 Issue, has a delightfully waggish voice, though that doesn’t diminish the eeriness lurking in its wings.
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EVERY THEATRE HAS A GHOST. Ours has three.
“Stage Manager is a thankless job.” This was from Stage Manager, the man I was currently apprenticed to. “Director gets artistic credit. Actors get the glory. And everyone loves the beautiful set, the lights, the costumes.” He shrugged thin little shoulders and tore purple spike tape with nimble fingers. I was a good head taller than him, with his faerie-red hair and green eyes, and I didn’t yet know the art of tearing spike tape without a pair of scissors, tucked now in my pocket like a rumble knife. “Most people don’t even know there’s such a thing as Stage Manager.”
“So why do you do it?”
“Well,” he said, “someone has to.”
We ate lunch at 8:35 exactly. A chocolate muffin, hot chocolate, and a carton of Cherry Garcia to split. It was his idea. I had no complaints.
“Do you know we have three ghosts in Smothers?”
I didn’t really want to know about it. Nightmares really liked me. “Oh really?” I wanted him to like me, too.
“Yeah.” His pixie eyes lit up. “One is an unwed bride, haunting the stage in her wedding dress because her fiancé jilted her.” I highly doubted the first place a bride-ghost would go would be Smothers Theatre, but I nodded anyway. “The second is a crying baby. You can hear it sometimes, wailing on the catwalk.”
We were back in Smothers, sitting down on stage and alternating between spike tape and ice cream. “You ever heard it?”
“Me? No. But I’ve seen the bride.” He grinned. “The last one is my favorite. The Stage Manager.”
I laughed. “The collective ghost of all the managers jilted from glory and appreciation?”
“Something like that. I usually lock up. First to arrive and last to leave…” He ripped the spike tape and raised it, a toast to me, and I followed him as he eyeballed its placement. “You can hear him clapping.”
I tucked the finished tub of Cherry Garcia under my arm and grabbed the opposite end of the spike tape as he strolled to stage left. “You’re so full of shit.”
Stage Manager smiled. “You’ll see,” was all he said. “You can lock up tonight.”
“No thanks.”
“I mean, I have to go work on Millie.” The other play he was managing. He was determined to get as much opportunity to be forgotten as possible. “Here.” He tossed me the keys.
Maybe I would get one of the stage hands to stay with me afterward. Unfortunately, I believed in ghosts.
Judith Skillman‘s poetry soothes and spooks us, often at the same time. We enjoy her work so much that we’ll be publishing one of her poems in each of our first two issues. Here’s “Rules and Secrets,” which will appear in our Spring 2014 Issue, now on sale for just $3.
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THE MOON RISES FULL OVER, constructs its premise of light,
followers, hangers-on, into August.
Glints in a tree, its hunger for clothes
left from the first two who fled.
Moon-sultan. Wicker baskets fixed
just so inside the house, where sleepers lie.
This gift of reflection—how long the breath
of lemon balm, cut, exhales & inhales
through an open window.
What was fresh is sullied.
A man and a woman discuss philosophy
in a bedroom, in fluorescence.
Insinuations. Institutions. How many days
left in the domain?
The moon continues south over sleepers.
River harbor colors of stones.
This month passes like a dream into the season
of gathering. The lemon will rise like the sun,
the schools will fill.
Moon of corn, of don’t-tell. Perfection-moon, rimmed, haloed, dogged.
Moon of not playing the violin with a newly-haired bow.
Of never being good enough to live in the body
that continues to die.
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JUDITH SKILLMANis the author of fifteen books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Northwest Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner. Visit her website at JudithSkillman.com
J. Bradley is as talented as he is prolific: His surreal yet poignant work has appeared in scores of publications, and we were immensely flattered to include four of his poems in our Spring 2014 Issue. We posted one of those poems (“No More Poems About Resolutions”) back in January; now we’re very flappy to present “A Highly Magnified History,” “When a Poet Wants to Date You,” and “Yelp Review – Total Wine.”
J. BRADLEY is the author of the graphic poetry collection, The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014). He lives at iheartfailure.net.
FLAPPERHOUSE 