Pterodactyls were not marsupials, as scientist Edward Newman once theorized. But we like imagining them as prehistoric mall-rats whenever we read “Anthropogenic,” one of four poems by M.A. Schaffner from our Winter 2015 issue.
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THERE WAS A TIME WHEN PTERODACTYLS FLEW around the atrium through the fountain
that spurted up three storeys in the mall.
This shows it was never about just shopping
but the seafood crisis and thermal drafts
emanating from the first floor food court.
No, I can’t imagine what it felt then,
torn from oceanic vistas and plains
as vast as half the planet, as the roads
that tie one outlet plaza to the next
in a necklace of the world’s great wonders
then hung around its winged serpent’s neck.
Our own necks swell each day. Our collars shrink
to match the slow contraction of the time
allowed for empty spaces on the maps.
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M.A. SCHAFFNER has had poems published inShenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Poetry Ireland,Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19th century.
From our Winter 2015 issue comes “The Broken Arch,” Reshad Staitieh‘s brief but powerful snapshot of two young brothers trying to survive in a treacherous land.
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“WHY WASN’T SHE HOME?” His brother says.
“Who?”
“Auntie.”
“She’s going to meet us later. Just be patient, Little Man.” His dry throat scratches.
Diyam hears small toes scraping at linoleum and imagines trails of dust left in their wake, like the slim tails of comets.
“Gret… Guhr-ee… Greet? Gree-ting-es?” Esam reads.
“Greetings,” Diyam calls from the freezer.
“Greetings. Fr-om? From. Stooloo-is?”
“Saint Louis. Greetings from St. Louis.”
“St. Louis. Yeah, got it.”
“Do you?”
The restaurant sign promised buffets with “well-known” dishes. It’s been three days since they’ve eaten. He hoped there would be pie.
His stomach rumbles.
There’s a room in the back of the diner, storage or a freezer. It is the tenth like it in two days.
“Yeah, I got it.” Esam answers after pausing and taking a short breath. “It doesn’t look anything like it anymore.”
“What doesn’t look like what? Be specific.” Diyam speaks through the steel doorway. The generators died, and the cold is gone. There is nothing left but heat.
“The gateway.”
“You mean the arch?” Diyam corrects. He scans the room. He smells mold and knows with well-honed instincts that food is nearby.
William S. Marriott and his spirit hands, circa 1910
“Ghost-Sick Jarvis,”E.L. Siegelstein‘s supernaturally funny contribution to our Winter 2015 issue, is an excerpt from his novel-in-progress. And while it makes us want to read the rest of the story right freaking now, we think it also makes for a very satisfying episode all by itself.
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IT’S LIKE NAILS ON A CHALKBOARD. Kind of.
There’s no sound, but I feel it in my inner ear, a rasping, sickening sensation tugging on all the tubes, nerves, veins and what-have-yous in the back of my brain. Or like a dentist’s drill, if you could somehow remove the actual sound and leave only the way it makes you feel.
This will be accompanied by quick flashes. An image. A phrase, or a word, or just a fraction of a word. Like a vivid dream you forget as you wake. The memory of a memory.
And along with this, a feeling. Sorrow. Frustration. Regret. Joy. Pride. Contentment.
That’s what it’s like to talk to the dead. They don’t appear standing in front of me or anything like that. And they sure as shit don’t like to talk in clear, no-interpretation-needed, complete fucking sentences.
My name is Jarvis Chumley, and I’m a goddamn medium.
Yes, that is my real name. It’s English, fuck off. I started hearing the dead when I was fourteen years old. Nobody else in my family can do it, though my Aunt Nigella claimed to be psychic. She died in a car crash when I was six. My mom, too. Same crash. Anyway.
Being a medium is not the easiest way to make a living. I’ve got a storefront in Astoria, Queens, which I share with another medium, Ivonne, who is a charlatan. There’s also a massage parlor in the back, where you can get the massage therapist to masturbate you if you leave your cash on the table and ask for the full service. No, I’ve never done so; that’s my place of business. All relationships concerning it must remain strictly professional. Also, I can’t come when the girl’s ancestors are screaming at her through me from beyond the grave.
It’s Friday night and I’ve got one last client before turning the place over to Ivonne. She does great business with the late-night drunk crowd, while I have every intention of being part of that crowd. The client is a fat Italian man-child with thinning hair, and I know he wants to speak to his mother even before she starts nattering in my ear. He looks at the door to the massage parlor – GUARANTEED RELAXATION & TRANQUILITY, it says – before looking at me.
“Are you the medium?” he asks.
“Sure am,” I say.
Our little sitting room is decorated in the traditional storefront-psychic style: a lot of silk, crystals, a weird plaster hand sculpture. The Italian man-child’s name is Tom, and as soon as he walks in I feel the presence of what has to be his dead mother making me want to spray my lunch all over my customer.
Capture of the Maid at Compiegne – James William Edmund Doyle, 1864
The 2nd of Jennifer MacBain-Stephens‘ 5 poems on Joan of Arc featured in our Winter 2015 issue is “Siege of Compiegne,” a lyrical look at the Maid of Orelans’ dramatic and scandalous capture.
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EVEN ROCKS BETRAY YOU. Chucked from above, split over silver fish helmets scampering up the wall. Not burned, stuck in the walls, keystones have nothing else to look at. So they smirk at dead bodies. When the talisman reads Joan’s transcribers’ notes it is already too late. The last group to leave the bar, the battlefield leftovers, eyes speak Guillaume de Flavy: traitor. His party trick of locking the gates behind everyone flayed facial skin. Joan’s last act in the Hundred Years’ War was meeting dirt with her face. Butcher men, sour men, like to pull things off of other things. Once, a blood orange spectrum of battering rams against torsos and teeth assaulted dusk’s skyline. Now the pillaging of tendons ends. Joan found a higher, abnormal light, put it in her pocket. No diseased white matter. She knows her molecules will burst at a million degrees. She waits, tied up. Meanwhile, enemy thighs squat, break bread over beef stock. Crush the crusts into the juice. God is too small.
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JENNIFER MacBAIN-STEPHENSis the author of three chapbooks: Every Her Dies (ELJ Publications), Clotheshorse (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and Backyard Poems (forthcoming, 2015). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared in public place in Iowa City. Recent work can bee seen / is forthcoming at Dressing Room Poetry Journal, The Blue Hour, The Golden Walkman,Split Rock Review, Toad Suck Review, Red Savina Review, The Poetry Storehouse, and Hobart. For a complete list of publications and other odds and ends, visit JenniferMacBainStephens.wordpress.com
IN NEW YORK CITY, A SCULPTOR TAKES FRIDA KAHLO to see Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. In the first section of the film, an artist sketches a face and is horrified when its mouth begins to move. He erases the mouth, but it transfers itself to the palm of his hand.
Frida feels for her own lips with the tips of her fingers, but her mouth has disappeared. She rushes out into the lobby, pursued by the sculptor. He finds her holding a jumbo bag of popcorn, shoving the popped kernels into her mouth as fast as she can. She chokes, but continues to fill her mouth.
The sculptor pulls the bag away. It bursts, and popcorn fills the air. Frida is sweating. The sculptor pulls out his handkerchief and wipes her forehead above the unibrow that so many men find so appealing. He wipes her upper lip, with its faint black moustache.
Frida is nearly panting. I need the taste of salt on my tongue, she says by way of explanation.
Art and artists are always making us look at models, but in “Both of Djuna,” from our Winter 2015 issue, Angela Enos & Joel Enos make us look through the eyes of a model who’s looking at art, and artists, and how they look at models. And art. And also maybe themselves? There’s a lot of levels to navigate here.
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IT IS ALWAYS MORE INTERESTING TO BE A MODIGLIANI than a Sargent. The artist’s model thinks to herself as she sits, unclothed, on the wooden chair as their eyes all perceive and speculate and adapt her pieces and parts. It’s the interpretation itself. The act rather than the actual. Or is it actualization? Actualism?
Not for the first time she wonders if her inward view is more or less intense a gaze than that of those who view her from the outside. She’s sat for this particular group before. But today there are more of them than usual, new faces, new adaptors and interpreters. She rarely allows herself to ruminate, while sitting, on the many ways she will eventually see herself though someone else’s eyes. But with so many new eyes upon her this morning, she can’t help herself. I must distract myself from the distraction of anticipation.
So she looks back at them.
The young one with the wispy mustache that isn’t quite there won’t know any better than to be realistic. He’ll document every line and crease until he’s pushed me into a hard middle age. He hasn’t yet learned to take liberties with the canvas. The fear of being incorrect leads to harsh premonitions about my life.
The one that looks like a sea captain, with the cap on to shade his eyes, he’ll paint with period flair and later realize that he’s made me look like a snapshot of his mother from before he was born. I’ll like it, even though it won’t be me.
The academic, the one with the accent– Belgian? Germanic? From parts uncharted of Meso-Britannia? She cannot imagine him existing outside of the geography of this studio. He’ll paint me truly and honestly, with the angle of my nose unflattering and the curve of my waist in precise brushstrokes. It will not be beautiful, but I will recognize myself in his work, even through his fingerprints in the oil.
There is only one woman other than the model in the room. She sits away from the other artists, her easel not part of the half-moon cluster around the model’s stage. The model knows that this woman will work quietly on her own in a cloud of honeyed tea and turpentine in china cups. I will never see her work, but she will thank me at the end of the pose and disappear even faster than I do.
And perched on all of the easels, whether clustered or not, are her cousins. The two-dimensional women all share certain familial characteristics in the shape of their mouths, the protrusion of ears, but they are all distinct individuals. The model feels unsure whether any of her cousins are actually a representation of her self. But she knows the women on the easels are inarguably the girl on the stage. They are all Djuna in this moment, before signatures and initials have been scratched onto their surfaces and varnished into permanence. My part in this process is questionable. I am at best muse, but I might not be art myself.
Centipede – St. George Jackson Mivart, from “On the Genesis of Species,” 1870
Sometimes domestic life can be as unsettling as a pipe full of creeping centipedes, as Juliet Cook shows us in her wry & visceral “Domestic Mini-Horror,” one of two poems she contributed to our Winter 2015 issue.
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WHY AM I SUDDENLY GETTING DOMESTIC roaming charges while talking on the phone with my mom
who lives fifteen minutes away?
Why am I crowded by too much normalcy,
with not enough uncanny ghost wings
flying underneath my sheets?
Who tossed my streaks of clairvoyance
all the way down into the damned garbage disposal?
Whoever you are, this won’t last forever.
If I concentrate hard enough, I can create
my own onslaught. I can shiftily rise myself
out of that slimy, dirty hole.
Centipedes will start maneuvering up
out of that disposal, dripping red,
but still crawling.
Our Winter 2015 Issue is home to a number of wicked buildings– like “Poison House,” one of three deliciously eerie poems contributed by Cassandra de Alba.
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WOOD PANELING SO DARK IT’S ALMOST BLACK. Vines that grow when your back’s turned,
greedy for more noxious air, the shimmer
of purple-green haze in all these rooms
empty in the middle, edged with low,
plush furniture that might conceal
knives, jeweled cages where snakes
and lizards lie with one eye half-open.
Heavy curtains on the windows,
blood-red velvet you’re afraid to touch.
Old-fashioned light switches,
two buttons, and none of them work.
When you get the nerve
to force a curtain open, you’re greeted
by a wall of foliage against the glass,
stalks and leaves twisting toward you,
away from the sun. A bird
caws once, then goes quiet.
You let the curtain fall back into place.
The noise of the house, silent at first,
seems to grow and grow –
a rumbling whistle like a teakettle
seconds from boil, a clicking
of mandibles or molars, a little voice
that whispers from every corner
all the secrets your loves
thought they’d kept from you.
M.A. SCHAFFNER has had poems published inShenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Poetry Ireland,Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19th century.
FLAPPERHOUSE 