Category Archives: Flappertising

“What Really Drives You To Drink” – Poetry by Jeff Laughlin

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The Drunkard's Progress, Nathaniel Currier, 1846
The Drunkard’s Progress, Nathaniel Currier, 1846

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 WANT REVOLUTIONS
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.

Here is intransigence, where we are.

Continue reading “What Really Drives You To Drink” – Poetry by Jeff Laughlin →

“Stage Manager” – Fiction by Rebecca Ann Jordan

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GhostLight
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.

Continue reading “Stage Manager” – Fiction by Rebecca Ann Jordan →

“Rules and Secrets” – Poetry by Judith Skillman

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Violin Player to the Moon - Hans Thoma
Violin Player to the Moon – Hans Thoma, 1897

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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JudithSkillmanJUDITH SKILLMAN is 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

Sprocket SchmO’Brien For America’s Bathroom Libraries

Flappertising, Flappricana,

The second ad in our campaign to promote Bathroom Reading features our favorite critter in all of Animalia, the adorable Sprocket SchmO’Brien.

SprocketReads

“Dare” – Poetry by Lauren Seligman

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Flamenco Dancer - Sonia Delaunay, 1916
Flamenco Dancer – Sonia Delaunay, 1916

 

From our Spring 2014 Issue, we proudly present Lauren Seligman‘s sultry, swaggering “Dare.”

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SPLIT ME WIDE OPEN, an egg on the side
of a dish. Eat me alive, attack
without permission. I dare you to
come. Godzilla on the prowl for me. Turn over
billboards, trucks on your way. Take me by
the shoulders, shake me
hard, a natural disaster. Burn down

forests thickened in black
ash so villagers choke. Collapse houses into
the pea green ocean. Do not flash, a lightning
storm, be no mumble of thunder that a midnight
shower can bust. I am a flamenco
dancer standing in an adolescent boys’
choir, exotic in my obsessions and intuitions. I am dark

Poland, fragrant bark on the backyard beech
tree I climbed, crouched in the fork, scars on my
knees the color of persimmon fruit. I am July-hot
Washington Square Park, those gypsy
guitar tunes played at sticky night time, London’s
Cheshire Street stones slicked with moss where I
slipped, laughing on my back. I am veiled

Continue reading “Dare” – Poetry by Lauren Seligman →

FLAPPERHOUSE #1 Now On Sale

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 UPDATE:

The PDF of FLAPPERHOUSE #1 is no longer for sale, because it is now available for free.
Click the cover to enjoy.

FLAPPERHOUSEwhitecover

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“No More Poems About Resolutions,” “A Highly Magnified History,” “When A Poet Wants To Date You,” and “Yelp Review – Total Wine” – J. Bradley
“CRYONICS” – Mariev Finnegan
“The Puddle of Romeo’s Tears” – Luis Galindo
“The Thrill of a Lifetime” – Phyllis Green
“Window Glass” – Mila Jaroniec
“Stage Manager” – Rebecca Ann Jordan
“What Really Drives You To Drink” – Jeff Laughlin
“Rebel, Rebel” – T. Mazzara
“The Root of Everything Arty” – Jenean McBrearty
“Stanley Kubrick’s Shit Happens“ – Joseph P. O’Brien
“The Better Cowboy” – Todd Pate
“Angels Howling in the Trees” – Misti Rainwater-Lites
“Dare” – Lauren Seligman
“Rules and Secrets” – Judith Skillman
“Reach” – Tom Stephan
“Axis Mundi” – Cameron Suey

“Rebel, Rebel” – Fiction by T. Mazzara

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ChargerBe warned: T. Mazzara‘s “Rebel, Rebel,” one of the short stories from our Spring 2014 issue, contains some extremely salty language. But beneath all that salt there’s also tremendous tenderness. 

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for Shawn

I GOTTA GET TO NEW YORK BEFORE 3 AM or Big Meanie, Jimmy Dread, is gonna fuckin stick-rape me with a broom handle and feed my bones to his bulls, gonna cut off my ears and chop off my head. I been driving this route and driving it drifted for two years now, trying to buy the ticket on dad’s ranch house. Buy it back from my sunk-headed Moms. She’s got not a marble left and they’re gonna take the dump from her, she don’t get square with the bank. I been driving this route since Jean Genie bit the big assfuckin farm on it. That’s my cousin, Jean Genie.

Jean died when his box truck launched off this elevated road (that’s Route 17 East to New York-fuckin-Shitty). Jean buried truck and driver in the woods just betwixt Beaver Kill and Roscoe. And that’s Roscoe “Trout Town USA.” Upstate. He buried Jean Genie good too. Fucker was a mess of blood and knotty, greasy hair and white meat and wood and red meat and metal splinters, buried in bark and sticks and branches, cloaked in wet red and steam and smoke and brake lights. Twisted metal, twisted Genie. Twisted sister. Jean Genie. Ziggy Stardust.

I’m carrying a load of H (and some blow on the side). All packaged neat in 50 pound bags of organic flour. Genie still talks to me. I’m the Jazz. It’s something I do. It’s something I do for the Dread. It’s something that’s done.

I’m passing Slaterville Springs, now. Bug zappers zapping and flashing and it’s 35mph thru here so they’re easy to hear over this godawful loud engine. I’m still on east 79. It goes up to 55mph after here and then I’ll be headed thru Richford and past Robinson’s Hollow Road and there’s fuckin nothing out there.

But there is a red Dodge Charger here now and he’s been behind me and beside me and I’ve passed him real careful-like, twice now, and he’s weaving like a motherfucker. There’s drunks at night out here. Small town, not much to do at night. Day too. Not certain if this one’s a drunk. Can’t never be certain of anything, really, Jean Genie used to say. But Dodge Charger keeps slowing and I pass him and then he’ll waggle in my rearviews and he’s in and out of lanes and I lose sight of him around a bend til he guns it and smashes past me, suckin wind and shakin the Bigtop.

You never can be sure of much. Jean Genie used to say black holes was planets that had evolved some species into machines that needed to eat and needed power to eat and they then went off and e’en everything. And it wasn’t like astronomers said and what the hell did astronomers know? They had theories and observations. Hell, we could make theories and observations. We could make observations and theories all we fuckin wanted, but unless they could magic his ass up to the center of the galaxy and let him stick his finger in a supermassive black hole, he didn’t believe in black holes and thought the center of the galaxy must just be filled with unicorn farts and marshmallow fluff.

He always said that the world as we know it was coming to an end and that everything that is just now, even as I say this sentence here, is now the past and everything back then is questionable and every configuration of us was different from one moment to the next. Or some shit like that. I think I said it right. I don’t know. He was a confusing shit and I was faced when he told me that.

Never seen you so faced.

Continue reading “Rebel, Rebel” – Fiction by T. Mazzara →

Teaser #1

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We tease because we love.

“No More Poems About Resolutions” – Poetry by J. Bradley

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Fingerprints In Smoke - Alibi Jones, 2014
Fingerprints In Smoke – Alibi Jones, 2014

According to Factual Science Magazine, the average New Year’s Resolution is abandoned by January 14th, at approximately 11:38 Greenwich Mean Time. So now that, statistically, you’ve probably already given up on yet another feeble attempt at self-improvement– that is if you cared enough to make a feeble attempt in the first place– please enjoy J. Bradley‘s “No More Poems About Resolutions” below. (This poem, along with 3 other poems by J. Bradley, will appear in our Spring 2014 Issue, which you can pre-order here for $3.)

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You learn the metric system
to wear new kinds of weight.

You hold career day
for your lungs, show them
all the types of mines
they could collapse as.

You bend love like a hair pin,
treat zippers and buttons as locks.

There are names waiting
to become bricks; how gingerly
will you walk over them?

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jbradleypicJ. BRADLEY is the author of the forthcoming graphic poetry collection, The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014). He lives at iheartfailure.net.

Alibi Jones For America’s Bathroom Libraries

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As we’ve mentioned before, FLAPPERHOUSE is intensely devoted to promoting the fading pastime of bathroom reading. And today we’re proud to present our first advertisement for this campaign, featuring our lovely spokesmodel, Alibi Jones.AlibiREADPoster