Book nerds have written thousands of words musing upon the significance of the dead seagull in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” We’re not sure if the dead seagull in Samantha Eliot Stier‘s “The Hole” (from our Fall 2014 issue) is also supposed to represent a dichotomy between old and new art, or something like that– but we do know that we never get tired of reading this delightfully daft story.
{ X }
WE MEET IN A HOLE IN THE SAND. There’s also a dead seagull in the hole, but it’s a big enough hole that we don’t step on it.
He had seen some kids digging the hole earlier, he says, so it was silly of him to fall right into it. He was jogging, he says, staring at the sun as it sprinkled his eyes with little flash-pops. When he looked forward again, he couldn’t see where he was going. That was how he’d fallen into the hole.
He says he twisted his ankle but it will probably be fine. He reaches for my hand, but first I want to bury the seagull. I pull sand with my fingers until the seagull is covered. You can still see one of his feathers sort of sticking up through the sand, but I leave it like that, a grave marker.
What if someone else falls in the hole? I ask.
He shrugs. I say we should probably fill the hole.
But that would take too long, he says. Instead, we gather seaweed and circle the hole, so people will see it. The tide’s coming in, he says.
He hobbles along next to me, asks where I’m going. If I’m not too busy, he says, would I be willing to help him distribute his CDs? He’s a musician, and his musician name is Lion. He leaves his CDs under people’s windshield wipers and in their mailboxes. He says people love his music so much they give his CD to their friends and family. He has Fans, he says. Lots of them.
Moonlight in South Texas – Robert Julian Onderdonk, 1912
You don’t have to be from Texas to enjoy “Map of the Twentieth Century,”Samantha Duncan‘s poem from our Fall 2014 issue. But if you do hail from the Lone Star State, there’s a good chance you’ll eat this poem up like a bag of Buc-ee’s Beaver Nuggets.
{ X }
YOU CAN STOP IN THE MIDDLE of Interstate 45 and buy a small or medium trailer
to store any right-brained assertions about the maternal instincts of
Texas hills. It exists, and wildfires apologize a thousand times
to the Sam Houston statue, with whom you
always promise to take a picture, but continue to take that curve going eighty,
like you’re expecting a hooker holding chocolate strawberries
around the bend. Every bridge bisecting the road is hard up
for cash, and every penny you have is
spent on someone else. Questions cost the same as the courage for vitriol.
Corsicana could have your long lost esophagus, everything
inside you is shelled. Mile markers are doctor appointments,
the ones you’ll remember for the book,
and all you’ll need is hidden somewhere, or disguised as debris. Faces
are painted over and not on, the resilience of a
continuous motion, and there is a green on a tree that has
yet to be named. A direct result of
250 miles of a sickly giraffe’s tongue lapping up un-wanton beaver nuggets.
If you aren’t careful, you inhale a tire off an eighteen-wheeler,
discarded like the last piece of brisket on a lover’s plate, he
always takes too much. Don’t mess with tires.
There’s an uncanny dream-logic at work in Carl Fuerst‘s “We Dream Of Our Dead Pets” (fromour Fall 2014 issue)– but is it actually a dream? Or could it be an irregular reality caused by galactic cannibalism? All we know for sure is that this surreal little story has burrowed its tiny fangs beneath our skin and we can’t quite yank it out.
{ X }
I DROVE ON THE ROAD THAT CIRCLES THE TOWN where I live, an island of crumbling low-roofed brick buildings surrounded by countless miles of cornfields. Once, three summers before, on a late summer night bordering on an early summer morning, I stood on the balcony of my second-floor apartment and watched the cornstalks in the rising sun, anticipating the brief and unpredictable moment when the new day’s light would make the leaves look like emeralds heated to their melting point and hammered flat.
Since then, I’d been in my car, and a small part of me was starting to wonder why it had always been night.
I took a road into the cornfields. It had recently snowed, and the roads were dark, snowy, icy, and bad. A blurry, white-robed man hunched by the road’s shoulder every few miles. Whenever I passed, he strained towards the car, snapping his jaws and howling, some invisible force dragging him in the direction of the fields.
This made it difficult to listen to my passenger, who reclined in the back seat, smoking a joint and staring at his phone’s glowing screen.
“See, stars form when gas inside galaxies becomes dense enough to collapse,” he said, “usually under the effect of gravitation. But when galaxies merge, see, it increases the random motions of their gas-generating whirls of turbulence, which should hinder the collapse of the gas. Intuitively, this turbulence should slow down the formation of the stars, but, in reality, the opposite is true.”
“Do galaxies collide often?” I asked. “Is this something we should be worried about?” It was nice, for once, to think about something besides the reasons why I couldn’t remember when I wasn’t driving in circles around the little corn-town where I lived.
“It’s very common,” said my passenger. “But ‘interaction’ would be a more accurate term than ‘collision,’ accounting for the extremely tenuous distribution of matter in galaxies.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Meanwhile, galactic cannibalism happens when a galaxy, through tidal gravitational interactions with a companion, merges with that companion, resulting in a larger, often irregular galaxy.”
My car skidded off the road and down a steep hill and rolled to a stop on a farm pond’s black bank. I got out of my car and snow spilled into my boots. The pond wasn’t frozen. I watched icy water lap at my front two tires.
“Piney and Buoyant, We Wave, Consecrate” gnaws like a painful memory, and slinks like a forest carnivore– and it’s merely one of the 5 beautifully wicked poems by Jessie Janeshek featured in our Fall 2014 issue.
{ X }
REMEMBER THE LAST NIGHT WE SAW THE FOXES
the herringbone hunter, incense and cups?
The freak accident killed two young ladies
small gobs of white
but you only bit one.
I swallowed allegiance, tried to decry
vomiting mothballs
the size of our crime.
Ours is the darkest
union, a lock.
My default is butchery.
Your faith tastes of bad milk.
I resist symmetry
let dogs lick it off.
{ 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).
“them bones” is spooky like a voodoo curse, punk like a bloody middle finger, and just one of five fantastic poems by Emily O’Neill that you can read in our Fall 2014 issue.
{ X }
THERE ARE SNAKES IN THE STAIRS & hens in your kitchen
clucking loving wasn’t
as hard as you made it & it might be a miracle
the birds don’t end
up strangled & swallowed
by hiss & fang
you flap & crow (stupid cock)
so early to the after-party
& your whole apartment
is women telling me not to stay
is ankle fang & feather & blood & you swallow
your tail like a secret to keep & roll
back down the stairs
I have nothing new to say
about hurt or my heart but
loving wasn’t as hard as sucking the venom out
or spite round my neck, a mink stole,
& the bones of these ugly birds have boiled & dried
so the question grows into how many wishes
arrive with each break
one for death / one for dishonor / one for tassel
shoulders & damask lampshades worn as hats /
one for bon voyage / I hate you / that isn’t a wish,
just a clean break / one for the hissing truth /
the hissing truth you’ll never stomach
if ever you knelt & asked me to tell it
I would grow scales & choke on black velvet, would spit-shine
that idiot diamond before wearing your promise ring,
would walk into the angry sea to drown
before mixing my dust with yours
before snapping a hen’s neck
just to stop that awful sound
When you’re a god, or a goddess, or any other kind of immortal being, death’s cold embrace can be the ultimate– and most elusive– high. Read all about it in Natalia Theodoridou‘s “We Call Her Mama,” one of the many flappy lits contained in our Fall 2014 issue.
{ X }
“IF I TAKE ENOUGH, WILL I BE ABLE TO DIE?” I asked.
She looked at me, with her boundless eyelashes sparkling under the club lights.
“I don’t know, baby,” she said. “No one has tried that before. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Here.” She held out her iridescent hand. I buried my face in her open palm and snorted the golden dust. My heart imploded right then, I swear. And then we danced, danced, danced like the gods that we were, until there was no club, no dust, no Father (Who art in heaven), just her and me, her unworthy, unfashionable, forever moribund Son.
{ X }
We called her Mama. She was no-one’s mother, but she was Mama to us all.
“Come on, boys and girls,” she would say. “Gather round.” And we did. We rushed to her feet to taste the golden dust that fell from her heels. Who was she? She was the joy of life when dying was but a party trick, and she was the face of death when we were sick and tired of living. And who were we? We liked to say we were fallen legends, desperado gods and renegade dreams, but really we were just a bunch of lost children, trying to forget we were immortal, looking for love. And she gave it to us; I don’t know what was in it for her, but she loved us all, and loved us plenty.
Before love, though, there was the drug. We thought it was the fairy dust that would make us into real boys. It almost did, too; the golden drug makes you laugh hard, and fear hard, and hurt as if you were human. But that’s it. Can’t make you mortal.
We all took it for different reasons, of course, but Mama accommodated each of her children without judgment. We were equals in her eyes. She danced with us, lay with us, dressed our wounds and licked the blood hot off our skin. And then, when we were done, when we had gotten what we needed, she let us go.
On one level,Diana Clarke‘s “Blood Ties” (from our Fall 2014 Issue) is a coming-of-age story about an adolescent Jewish girl in New York City. But bubbling below the surface there’s also darkness and mystery and sex– and, of course, blood– all rushing headlong toward an unforgettable conclusion.
{ X }
I CRUMPLE MY FINGERS AS THE CLERK APPROACHES, hiding the red crusted in my nail beds. I can smell the iron, but the clerk doesn’t even turn her head. She’s too focused on an errant coat three rows away. Its unrumpledness signals that it does not belong in the sale room, any more than I belong on the main floor. She approaches the coat, barcode scanner already raised like a torch or a gun, then tags the thick green fabric and drags it away, sedated. Without the weight and darkness of the coat, the retired summer clothes that are past shopping season but still appropriate for the weather outside seem to list from their hangers toward the light. They are a swarm of fireflies, they are road dust rising, they are a dandelion head diffused.
I rub my palms together, pinch my fingertips, watch my menstrual blood flake to the floor where it becomes invisible. I can never bring myself to wash it off, not when I know they’ll refuse to touch me later for the fear of it. In my neighborhood, Yiddish is like a curtain we draw between us and the rest of the world—keeps us warm in winter, and dark the rest of the year. My mother doesn’t even speak it well, but her gestures are so Jewish that from far away you wouldn’t know it. We moved here three years ago, and in one more year I’m leaving, but for the meantime what I have is not to wash. Rebellion comes in all kinds.
When I was a child, my mother’s friend Julia would sit at the kitchen table, hair piled on her head and bare shoulders shaking with laughter, remembering how the two of them used to ride the subways, how their bodies learned to bleed together, and how when they did neither one of them wore anything to stop it. “It was the eighties,” Julia would say, turning to me. Years of sun had turned her brown in the deepest part of her chest. “The subways were just us and the homeless people, and even the homeless people sat at the other end of the car.” My mother always shushed her with half a heart.
I would go back to my room after and imagine the wetness between their legs, how it slicked them then dried till it stuck, how they would have to peel their pants away or shower still wearing them. Continue reading “Blood Ties” – Fiction by Diana Clarke→
There’s a vague but undeniable dread stalking the reader from the margins of“Human Child,” Brendan Byrne‘s story from our Fall 2014 Issue.
{ X }
IT HAS BEEN AN ACHING DAY. The sky heals like a scab, but nothing has split it, and it has never bled an ounce of fluid. Light the first of the evening. My hands ache. Fluxing bone pain which doesn’t dissipate. Rest my elbows on the black metal railing adjacent to the basement stairs. A Japanese guy with coiffed hair and a model’s blank face brushes by, street-level. I think I hear him say, sotto voce, into a phone curled against the side of his skull, “…other territories… how does it feel there?”
The door jerks towards me: I catch it. The last of the maggots file out, pawing at coats, extracting packs of cigarettes, demanding lights off each other, howling about the stupidity of associates and lovers. I wait till they’re halfway down the block, then go back inside. Clear the scrap-wood tables of barely begun drinks, kick the chairs and jerk the tables back into some kind of order. I have my head down, starting the wash, when the door heaves and wheezes.
Kid. Small and thin. White-stained hoodie draped, obscuring features. He’s looking at my face in the way people who know you look at you. I straighten up and move down the bar towards him. Just from the way he’s standing, I know I don’t know him.
“Gonna have to see ID, man.”
As I approach, the candle throws up yellow globe light, and I can see the shorn sides of his head. Scraped unclean with cheap razors. I tighten, keep a good deal of the bar between the two of us. I think of the metal bar under the wash.
“Not looking for a drink.” His voice is a slurry of broken things. His hands jammed into the hoodie’s pockets. He hasn’t looked anywhere except right at me. There’s a bunch of things I could say. None of them would ease the situation in the necessary direction.
His eyes are somewhere I’ve never been. “Knowa girl named Kimmie?”
“Don’t know anyone named that, no.”
“Kimmie.”
“No idea.”
The kid leans slightly over the bar. I can see the beginning of lazy slashes of tribal tattooing on his wrists. There is what looks like at first a severe case of eczema on his neck, but as he comes closer, I can see it’s scar-art, created through glass laceration. Thought it was out of style.
And I can smell him. Old puke and new trash. Like one of the gutter punks who camps out in Tompkins Square Park and adjoining streets, but they don’t come in here, they know better than that.
“Said she knew you.”
“No idea, man. Sorry.”
“You’re Aaron.”
“No, that’s not my name.”
His single, simple grin. “Kimmie said.”
“Not me.”
“Aaron.”
“No.”
“Aaron.” It’s a statement. He places both his hands on the bar like they’re dead birds he’s been carrying around too long in his pockets. “She said you knew how to get back.”
“Get back where?”
He thinks this is funny: his face begins to convulse around the slit of a smile. His body is impossibly still, like a caryatid of an unseen palace. Then his neck begins to spasm, and something happens to his eyes. His shoulder twitches, and his head drops as if he’s mid-seizure. I step back, place the base of my spine against the counter behind me. A middle age couple comes through the door bubbling and laughing, talking about the never-removed Christmas lights, calling for two Stella. In the second I look away from the kid, he was out the door, quick-lurching up the stairs. The couple brightly ignores his transit, settling. I pour the beer, take money, give change. Stymie attempted dialogue, “How long has this place been here…” Curve around the bar. Outside. Up the concrete stairs.
There is nothing on the sidewalk except for dog shit, menthols smoked down to the nub, and chip bags, inside-out, gleaming. The sky is wet and swirled with grays, refusing to rain.
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