The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Goes to Infinity – Odilon Redon, 1882
2016 was certainly a very weird, very dark section of time-space, so it’s no surprise that a lot of the weirder, darker pieces we published here this past year attracted so many eyeballs. The 10 most-viewed pieces on flapperhouse.com in 2016 were…
#10. “Doodlebug” by Emily Linstrom is a haunting tale about a family of monstrous immortals hiding out in “a part of London even London has no recollection of…” (From our Spring 2016 issue.)
#9. “How Emma Jean Crossed the River” by Shawn Frazier is a powerfully gothic short story of a woman on the run from the Klan, from our Winter 2016 issue.
#8. “artemis”isone of five sizzling poems that Monica Lewis contributed to our Fall 2016 issue.
#7. “The Invention of H.P. Lovecraft” by Shay K. Azoulay is a fictional–yet, perhaps, plausible?!– theory on the origin of the influential horror author, from our Fall 2016 issue.
#6. “Mothers and Demons and the In-Between” is Janelle Garcia’s haunting flash fiction about creepy monsters & the perils of parenthood, from our Winter 2016 issue.
PRAYING FOR LIGHT while pooping in the dark outside a car approaches
people often anger in an inverse proportion to their true faith
& faith can’t help but support absolutely everything
just as G-d’s footprint must be too big to see realists don’t think
they are just sub-conscious statisticians trying to be helpful
so what is eternity without thinking beings forever trying to understand
the end of time the bottom of the sea no toilet paper?
IWANT TO TELL YOU A STORY. Or maybe
a memory. When I was a child I built
forts out of couch cushions and
ratty blankets. I packed food and
flashlights and books and stayed
quiet so no one would find me. I
stowed away stacks of coins, beaded
necklaces, love letters and diary
entries- things I needed to protect,
or to hide.
Overnight the clips would snap.
Blankets would lose their footing
under boxes. Holes in my fortress
would appear, and I’d be revealed.
I sat exposed, in the middle of my
ruins, wondering what I did wrong.
{ X }
I built a fortress in my body out of
words and cement. Incantations
reinforce walls composed of
affirmations. Graffiti scars my
intestines like stretch marks—
remnants of damage left before the
partitions went up.
A city of memories hum in a
molecular cacophony.
The blueprints of my body are filed
away for safe keeping. Memories are
currency, we exchange one for
another.
To get closer or to pull away.
To heal or to harm.
{ X }
“Would you ever consider memory
suppression?”
“Is that possible?”
“Maybe. Through therapy, or trial
drugs, or shock treatment.”
“You’d be willing to damage your
body to clear your mind?”
“I’m just asking would you do it.”
“I don’t think I have any memories
I’d need to suppress.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
{ X }
You kiss my knees to part them and
whisper “what are you hiding?”
You outstretch your hand and enter
without a map.
Once inside, you search through my
blueprints, in nooks and valleys,
down short hallways to scale, for
what is bitter on my tongue.
How long will you stay now that
you’ve opened the vault?
Do you see yourself, anywhere, in
the city of memory?
Families, and all the complicated emotions they can make us feel, are all over our Fall 2016 issue — like in M.A. Istvan Jr.‘s richly-detailed & deeply affecting poem “Visiting Elizabeth.”
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{ 1 }
THE LAST TIME I SAW MY SISTER, ELIZABETH, was the last time my dad did. It was 1999,
upstate at the city hall in Poughkeepsie
for one of those CPS-supervised visits.
She was three at the time. I was fifteen.
Grandpa drove us up there from Beacon—
me cramped each way on my dad’s lap
in the backseat, holding back as usual
garbage bags and disgust, the stench
amplified by Grandma and her Yorkie.
{ 2 }
My dad said he needed cigarettes first
and to drop us at the corner gas station.
He had me hold the brown-bagged 40.
He was off beer and Grandma was eyeing
from the junkyard Mazda, hand-brushed red.
“Mike,” Grandma yelled as we passed.
I followed my dad pretending not to hear.
“Mike! Don’t forget the camera, the book.”
I went back for the disposable Kodak
and the coloring book with wax crayons.
Beside a tree in the park close to city hall,
my dad took swigs of his King Cobra malt.
Looking around nervous in a Newport cap,
he dribbled down his fresh-shaved chin.
He wanted helping swigs, but I said no.
He asked me to carry what was left.
My face the answer, he resisted at first.
“You got baggy pants, boy,” he reasoned.
But I knew enough not to be in city hall
struggling to keep my sloshing sweats up.
Either the fantasy of the plan or thoughts
of how the sloshing would ruin the beer
had him give up the fight. In the snow
next to a bench he buried it. To the eyes
of a passing suit I said, “Gotta keep it cool.” Continue reading “Visiting Elizabeth” – Poetry by M.A. Istvan Jr.→
IN THE CURIOUS GENEROSITY OF DREAMS I am talking to the ghost of Mary Oliver
about what to get the kids
I don’t have
for Christmas
while leaning on the sink,
and although I could not repeat a word of what we said to you
because maybe it was just the form of talking
and maybe there are some secrets
my brain will keep,
in talking about it to you now I suddenly remember a wooden dock,
warm pond water, the cracked
yellow toenails of my uncle who is dead.
Which is to say my uncle who is gone, which is
to say my uncle
who never
existed, which is
to say
my uncle who is gone.
My uncle who never existed
lives on in phrases like A long important poop,
in the cloying distinction between like and such as;
in the distinction between such as and such that;
in the distinction between a pay check and one gasp of air
in a long belt of gasps;
in the distinction between comfort and the cunning
self-deception that keeps you
from meeting the eyes that stare you
down from the inevitable disappointment of your dreams.
Enough distraction.
Three ropes tethered the neck and wrists of my uncle to a tree stump,
while his brothers pulled at his ankles as at fishing nets
trying to heal his back.
Kids only understand the medicine of pain,
how a new success of suffering gets
it over with;
the splinter dug out with a needle,
from the hand held out as if to test the rain,
as if to receive a coin under
whose sharp skin sleeps
a lightless room of chocolate.
We interrupt our regularly scheduled dark weirdness to bring you some poetry about family & love. Please enjoy “Ode to a Man Who Says Motherfucker Twice as Much as Any Motherfucker Should,” one of four heartwarming poems contributed to our Fall 2016 issue by our new Poetry Consultant, Jeremiah Driver.
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BLESSED ARE THE STORIES OF STRENGTH: the car
Aunt Delores lifted off your pinned body;
The contest of pulling recurve bows for poundage,
That you won annually until Bo Jackson
Pulled the measure to the arrow’s end;
And the gentle barters of broken ribs with Uncle Alex.
Blessed are the stories of folly: the man,
With short permed hair who couldn’t swim
So he walked the pond’s depth and reached the bank,
Gasping; the kitten, your wife named Lucy
Whose testicles dropped and you christened Lucille Balls;
The bell-shaped lampshade, with a pink floral pattern
That you put on your head, the fabric balls dangling –
Above your muscle shirt – as you blew the camera a kiss
With wadded lips for a picture that still makes your sister laugh;
And the lyrics to Good Night Irene that you sang, standing
Over Uncle Charlie’s drunken body after it settled on the ground.
Blessed are the raindrops that fell hard enough to drown men
Who couldn’t laugh and dripped from our noses
As we shook hands – two motherfuckers in a horse trailer.
When Grandpa said a guy would have to be queer and have a cast iron stomach to eat pussy,
You said well then, you’ve got three queer brothers! Bless be all our brothers.
Blessed is the elbow and fist that stopped quick,
Level with your shoulder when I told you
In the hospital parking lot, that your brother was dead.
Blessed be all the motherfuckers.
“The Extraordinary True Story of the Unmother Who Substantiated Darwinism” is one of 3 phenomenally flappy poems by Jeanann Verlee in our Fall 2016 issue. To read two more of Jeanann’s poems, plus unforgettable work by 15 other excellent writers, you can buy a copy of FLAPPERHOUSE #11 in print or PDF today!
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IT STARTS HERE, YOU, your swelled & untapped breasts, those plump orbs of goldhoneymilk spewing, spsssssssing, everywhere, like a good summer sprinkler, spsssing & spsssing, drenching your clothes, unending, & soon you tire of changing & resign to the same cream colored dress, reeking the dank sourbitter, & milkclots dot the toes of your galoshes, which fill & overspill, & in your wake, a stream curls its way past your feet, past the curb & the corner grocery, past the bank & the pub & the overpass & beyond, & soon everyone is waist-deep, & behind you the neighborhood cats lurk & sip, & further beyond, lambs & tiger cubs, puppies & their bitches, all lapping up the bounty, & humans too, infants, yes, & men, hundreds, thousands even, on hands & knees, face-down in the riverbed of your milkstream, lapping like work dogs, lapping & drooling, & the river rises, surges, you are the witch of The New Mississippi, carving fresh earth with your brilliant milkfountain, & the chickadees dance in it, & ducks dip down & under & back, & now, too, the fish have gone mammalian & they swim & feast & harvest their fingerlings from the dirt stir of your royal milkbed river banks, & too now the dolphins & sharks, sea-stressed, milkfed, lunge & thrive in the new ocean of your teatmaking, & so, too, cherry blossom roots adapt to suckle nutrients from your ground seep, as do the dogwoods & sunflowers & lilacs & honeysuckles, the fir & pine & weeping willow, & of course hogs & chickens, water buffalo & giraffes, amoeba & ferns, & eventually even the clouds learn to parcel your offering to the sky & rain it down again where whole ecosystems transform to your nurture, & children of all species dance with tongues wagging to catch the milkfall & you, barren as a stone, spill & spill & spill & spill & this goes on & even when you try to die, scientists team with engineers who team with doctors who team with politicians & orders are drawn to keep alive your pulse & spigots because now you are crucial, obligatory, the food of all things, the world’s sustenance, the girl who bloomed.
FLAPPERHOUSE 