A LIFE CAN BE LIVED ON TATER TOTS AND IGNORING hopelessness, which means never looking
in the mirror, the sky, the colored waters
of others’ eyes unless you smell your own
death. Shush. Ketchup is enough luxury
to compensate for heaven. I’m not lazy,
I just don’t believe life is worth enough
to beg for more when no one’s listening
anyway. If you need more, there
are always food trucks, frozen pizzas,
cheesecake in a tub. They all feel close
enough to real to fool the apathetic soul.
This is a calendar life, you may say,
but no one will listen. I’ve tried. The best
you can hope for is mustard for your corndog.
{ X }
CL 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.
IT’S THE MORNING AFTER; the morning of the day that doesn’t move: forever. Stumbling in, blinking from the singularity of prescription white, I can’t find even noise. According to the news it was a spinning wheel (and who are they?), a tragic accident, but they still find ways to blame you. She should have worn a helmet! Gloves. A seat belt. She shouldn’t have worn a skirt so short. They use words like ‘careless’ and ‘victim’ to describe you and your sleep so contagious the whole city came down with your dreams. But I know better. It was a different kind of needle stick—steel and plastic sharp—intent to make it all better like kisses, but no one can prescribe that (lips and breath are too wet for squares of white paper). Now you can’t hero but just sleep and sleep, fallen into a day held fast with the hot pink of princess promises.
Somehow through the weight of all those dreams, the city grows up around us thick as thorns. Your carceral smile is framed now in metal and concrete grown from the asphalt grid, your flesh store-windowed in a mannequin curse. Thanks to Zeno and his philosophy, to Descartes and his grid that is really a net (his hard science that is nowhere/everywhere except against: bodymind boygirl natureman fairytale) no one can get to you. I try, but all I am is blood and skin and teeth and timespace is metered, running. In this universe — the only one we’ve got, babe — time is only one way and we are in it. Outside in the dead streets umbrellas stall against the rain that threatens in drops and pools above, refusing the fall.
Moving always toward (you), I am pierced into place by the infinite steps between one and two. At the center, at absolute zero (the fogged breath between seconds) where you sleep too hard and fast, time crystals into seconds and minutes. Fused into diamond hard pieces the day breaks and reflects us back on us and back. Expecting a battle or at least a cutting through, I brought nothing but edges, but you’ve had too much of sharpness. You lie locked in and waiting for the touch that isn’t needle stick, but soft. Soft enough to slide by and through. Soft enough to erode sleep into the waking even the dead won’t admit to wanting, a heartbeat red and wet and yearning for the pull of mouths that make no promises but themselves. You said words are just a symptom, a phase transition, but verbs move when nothing else will, smoothing over the edges that cut one from one, step from step, piling up the plurals into woods and streams and even suns. Almost there, love. My heart trips over the red syllable: Snow.
{ X }
MELISSA MOORER is a research assistant for the fabulous Roxane Gay and an Assistant Editor at The Butter. Her work has been on the short list for a few awards (Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award (2003) and the storySouth Million Writers (2010)) and published in many luminous zines and journals (LCRW, Hot Metal Bridge, Vestal Review, The Northville Review).
TWO-AND-A-HALF HOURS AFTER THE HEAD-SHAVING, it hits us,
Forty odd kids wishing we were anywhere but here.
No one wants to look in the mirror,
Afraid of what might be looking back.
Little-known fact: We awake five minutes before
Reveille, stumbling in the dark, fussing
With itchy socks. It’s one of many surprises.
The deck is beneath the overhead,
A floor is a deck, the toilet’s the head.
Cool water flows from the scuttlebutt.
There’s a joke in this place, we’re sure of it.
We should be laughing, but our
Lingua franca is still a work in progress.
{ X }
J.G. WALKER is a writer, musician, and teacher who lives with his wife in Colorado. His work has been featured in Oracle Fine Arts Review, Lullwater Review, and Aoife’s Kiss. He is currently trying to create the impression that he’s hard at work on a novel, Visitation: A Novel of Death and Inconvenience. You can find him at odd times on Twitter @jgwalkr or online at jgwalker.net.
“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‘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).
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 }
KRISTINE ONG MUSLIMis 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/
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.
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 }
CL 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.
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 }
KAILEY 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.
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‘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).
I’VE BEEN SAVING THIS STASH OF GASOLINE for a girl
with a lighter like yours. Delilah, let’s burn
the night down and root out the monsters.
Their fur will singe so pungently. The crackle
of flames will engulf the sounds of their incessant
talking, talking, talking. Nobody has to get hurt,
they just have to shut up and get out of our way.
I should’ve lit it myself, years ago, but I thought
there might be something worthwhile in hiding,
watching the moon, whatever it is I’ve been doing
all these years. There may well be, but not for me.
Delilah, let’s hold hands while we lob grenades
into the windows of decadence. Afterwards,
we’ll roast s’mores over the coals and tell stories
about the times we died, our mothers died,
our fathers died, everyone we’ve ever loved,
died. One thing: monsters don’t burn as bright
as the stories say. I’ll bring a flashlight.
I’ve thought this through. You can trust me.
{ X }
CL 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.
![Nephi Grigg, Tater Tots Inventor & Ore-Ida Founder By Gibchan (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 or CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons](https://flapperhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/nephi_grigg_tater_tots_inventor_oreida_founder.jpg)
CL 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.
FLAPPERHOUSE 
