Tag Archives: Fall 2014 (#3)

“Chicken Sandwich” – Fiction by Rebecca Ann Jordan

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Chicken Parts - Frederick Sommer, 1939
Chicken Parts – Frederick Sommer, 1939

The dotty narrator of “Chicken Sandwich,” Rebecca Ann Jordan‘s contribution to our Fall 2014 issue, just wants to make the world a better, pink-slime-free place. All that’s standing in her way are McDonald’s corporate interests… and those pesky demons in her blood. 

{ ONE }

ONE WEEK AFTER GETTING MY NEW JOB AT MCDONALD’S, I go to the doctor because it hurts to walk. I’m told I have an in-grown toenail, and I need surgery to fix it. It’s going to be a death sentence; it’s dead winter in Colorado, I live alone and I have no social life except for my mom’s occasional calls and now my coworkers too, and after the surgery it’s going to be two months of recoup time, during which I will not be able to walk on my foot except to go to and from the bathroom.

{ TWO }

After a day of feeling sorry for myself, I think maybe I should pick up one of those old dreams that used to haunt me. I could sew, once upon a time. I Google the only fabric store in a 50-mile radius and drive an hour down a dirt road and pull up into the driveway beside a ghost-town lemonade stand. In the distance there is a fence, presumably with cows behind it. Lunch break done, I drive back to work without getting out of my car.

{ THREE }

Maybe with my last days I should try to change the world in a small way. This has never occurred to me before, but the impending two-month death has me thinking clearly. I have never been the lucky sort, but “You’re up, kid,” says the manager (whose name is Reba and who I think is a lesbian), because the fry cook dies suddenly in his sleep. I guess it’s not hard to do if you fall asleep in your car. I notice immediately the pink slime that the media is having a heyday about: the unnatural chicken parts. It’s a responsible choice for the earth, so I decide to turn vegetarian.

{ FOUR }

I try a hand at my hobbies again. With my first two weeks of wages I buy a digital camera that can do a bunch of things I’ve never heard of. I spend my lunch hour wandering around the parking lot photographing broken bottles, as though it’s some metaphor for the state of the world or my broken toenails. Speaking of toenails, they’re victims of the camera too, at night in my bathtub, with the camera strap dangling in the water and my toes on display against the tile wall.

{ FIVE }

I start getting rejection letters. The camera gets a time-out in the trunk of my car. I leave it there indefinitely, just in case.

 { SIX }

I join a local meet-up for vegetarians. We eat hummus and carrots, which somehow reminds me of snapping off dirty toes. There is a baby-faced man named Arnold who whispers something about a co-op. I don’t know what a co-op is, but I’ve never been interested in group sex.

“Now,” says a teeny little woman of 60 years, “let’s talk conversion. You’re new, so just watch, but feel free to chime in. What we want is to show the world about the horrific crimes that happen when we eat animals.”

“I work at McDonald’s.” I say this to prove my ethos.

Instead they all begin to scorn the sort of people that enable places like McDonald’s.

I second-guess my decision to be a vegetarian.

 { SEVEN }

“I want a chicken sandwich with fries.”

I overlook the fact that fries have not exactly been outlawed by the FDA yet, but they can still kill you, like everything. “We’re having a special,” I lie, “on Big Macs.”

“Oh, I don’t eat beef,” the man with the stiff hair and stiff tie says. “Just the chicken sandwich, please.”

“No. I don’t think you understand. It’s cheaper with the Big Mac. I can take the patties off.”

“What I want is a chicken sandwich.” I think this man hates me, but doesn’t he know I’m trying to save his life?

“Please, please buy the burger.”

The man leaves. Apparently Reba thinks I show promise because she lets me keep my job in the back, where I don’t have to talk to anyone, just keep plopping pink slime onto the stove.

 { EIGHT }

McDonald’s is open until midnight. I trudge through the snow at one in the morning. The parking lot has been cleared by salters but I put my boots down where the grass used to be and where the crystalline snow now is, because it gives me immense satisfaction to make my mark, like the satisfaction of breaking tiny bones.

I don’t know why I never noticed this before. On the balcony above my unit and three units to the left, there is a woman who is naked from the waist up. She leans over the balcony, smoking a cigarette, and her hair is curlier than mine. She probably gave up trying to tame it when she hit puberty. I think, with the moon behind her like that, wouldn’t she make a great photo? I run back to my car on the tiny bones and find my camera in the trunk. When I come back the glass door slides closed, and I can’t see inside because it is so damn bright out with the moon. I go into my apartment and run a bath. Continue reading “Chicken Sandwich” – Fiction by Rebecca Ann Jordan →

“Cold Duck” – Fiction by Joseph Tomaras

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 carverFor decades now, hundreds of short fiction writers have been regurgitating the esteemed Raymond Carver– but as far as we know, none of those writers has dared to do so the way Joseph Tomaras does in his story “Cold Duck,” from our Fall 2014 issue.

{ X }

– THIS ONE TIME, I WAS SO DRUNK…

– How drunk were you?

– I was getting to it. I was so drunk, the next morning I vomited up Raymond Carver.

– As in just one story, what we talk about when we talk about whatever, or the whole fucking Collected Works?

– No, not his stories or writings or whatever. I vomited up Raymond Carver.

– How the hell? He’s been dead for 25 years.

– How the fuck should I know? I was that fucking drunk. He was totally alive when he came out of my mouth.

– Was it, like, a tiny Raymond Carver, like that tiny Elvis character they used to have on SNL?

– Fuck, no, I wish. Full size.

– How the hell did he get out of you? How the hell did he get into you?

– I already told you, I have no fucking idea. It was just one of those nights. I didn’t really get any sleep, and when the sun was rising, I could tell I was going to yak. Couldn’t even get to the toilet, just had enough in me to roll onto my side and face the edge of the bed so I wouldn’t choke on whatever the hell was surging out of me. You know when you’re really vomiting so hard that you have to keep your eyes shut the whole time, and it feels like you’re giving birth out your mouth like, fucking, fucking, uh, Kronos vomiting up his kids, the Olympian gods, that’s what it was like, so I didn’t see what it looked like when he was coming out. It did kind of feel like I was getting jabbed with fingers, elbows and knees from the inside, though.

– Did you at least get any decent writing advice? Continue reading “Cold Duck” – Fiction by Joseph Tomaras →

“Meeting” – Poetry by Jeff Laughlin

Excerpts, Flappertising, Flappricana, Poetry, ,
Love and Death - Francisco Goya, 1799
Love and Death – Francisco Goya, 1799

“Meeting” is the pièce de résistance from Jeff Laughlin‘s yet-unpublished poetry collection “Life and Debt.” Also available in our Fall 2014 issue, “Meeting” is a screaming sigh from beneath the hefty weight of love, work, and death.  

{ X }

I.
IT’S NOT THAT I DON’T BELIEVE IN LOVE,
only that I compare it to working.
The action item list reads identical:
–That careening of blood through
the walls of the heart marking the
time you did it right the first try.
That’s enough, just that one on the
list convinces me that nothing is
different, nothing is that moment
more than anything else could be.

II.
To clarify the following, too:
I have loved and lost and lived
a million lives. I have lived in
the margins– those college-ruled
maniacs trapped me there from
the start. And I will die there,
with no work grinding my bones
and no laborious thought in my
hawkish mind. I will die without
comfort or love, but not regret.

III.
Folly of endeavor, folly of light,
prayers for the uninitiated who
just learned to work. Folly of fall,
folly of man, a layer of ice upon
the next worker who mentions he
is on sick leave. Folly of summer,
folly of synergy, a weigher of soul
and reciprocity delivers the memos.
Folly of function, folly of form, we
are not ideas we speak into the void. Continue reading “Meeting” – Poetry by Jeff Laughlin →

“Just Another Evening” – Fiction by Dusty Wallace

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photoOne of the most bizarre pieces from our decidedly bizarre Fall 2014 issue has to be Dusty Wallace‘s giddy flash of Python-esque absurdity titled “Just Another Evening.”

{ X }

THAT FUCKING ALLIGATOR stretched out on the nine-foot Steinway in the center of the stage was really distracting.

I nudged the guy next to me, “Do you see that?”

He looked offended at the interruption or maybe he was just worried I’d creased his penguin suit. “Yes. Mr. Nakamura’s agility makes Chopin’s Minute Waltz look simple.”

He was probably right. But who the fuck cares about Chopin when there’s an alligator on the piano? And why were me and this posh motherfucker the only people in the theater?

“Perhaps because you’re naked,” said Posh Motherfucker like he’s reading my mind.

Wait a tick… I’m naked. Naked. That explained the draft, but not the alligator.

Mr. Nakamura stopped playing, standing to face the auditorium. “Would you two please shut the fuck up?” he shouted. “It’s hard enough playing with this fucking alligator on the piano. The last thing I need are two disrespectful assholes running their mouths right in the middle of the waltz.”

He sat back down at the piano, cracking his knuckles, and picked up exactly where he left off.

When he hit the last note Posh and I gave a standing ovation. I clapped with such enthusiasm that my penis slapped back and forth on my naked thighs and it sounded like three people applauding.

“Like I give a fuck,” Nakamura said, ambling off stage.

“Well, it was nice seein’ ya,” Posh said.

“Wait, aren’t you gonna give me a ride home?” I asked.

“Why would I do that?”

“I’m naked. I don’t even know how I got here.”

“You find yourself in this position often?”

“What? Fuck you,” I said.

“Good luck finding a ride,” he said. “Maybe you should ask Eric.”

“Who’s Eric?”

Posh pointed to the stage. Only the alligator was in sight, still stretched across the old grand. “You don’t really expect me to…” I began, but when I turned around Posh was gone. Continue reading “Just Another Evening” – Fiction by Dusty Wallace →

“The Hole” – Fiction by Samantha Eliot Stier

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Seagull - Ben Kerckx, 2014
Seagull – Ben Kerckx, 2014

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.

They had told me to be more careful, and I know they would be mad if I went with this man, but I will tell them he had kind eyes, that he helped me bury the seagull. Continue reading “The Hole” – Fiction by Samantha Eliot Stier →

“Map of the Twentieth Century” – Poetry by Samantha Duncan

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Moonlight in South Texas - Robert Julian Onderdonk, 1912
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.

{ X }

authorSAMANTHA DUNCAN is the author of the chapbooks One Never Eats Four (ELJ Publications, 2014) andMoon Law (Wild Age Press, 2012), and she serves as Associate Editor for ELJ Publications. She lives in Houston, blogs occasionally atplanesflyinglowoverhead.blogspot.com, and can be found @SamSpitsHotFire.

“We Dream Of Our Dead Pets” – Fiction by Carl Fuerst

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Greyhounds royal hunting - Valentin Serov, 1901
Greyhounds royal hunting – Valentin Serov, 1901

There’s an uncanny dream-logic at work in Carl Fuerst‘s “We Dream Of Our Dead Pets” (from our 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.

Continue reading “We Dream Of Our Dead Pets” – Fiction by Carl Fuerst →

“Piney and Buoyant, We Wave, Consecrate” – Poetry by Jessie Janeshek

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Four Foxes - Franz Marc, 1913
Four Foxes – Franz Marc, 1913

“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 headshotJESSIE 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” – Poetry by Emily O’Neill

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Skeleton of the Chicken - C. William Beebe, 1906
Skeleton of the Chicken – C. William Beebe, 1906

“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

{ X }

IMG_1535EMILY O’NEILL is a writer, artist, and proud Jersey girl. Her recent poems and stories can be found in Electric Cereal, Gigantic Sequins, and Split Rock Review, among others. Her debut collection, Pelican, is the inaugural winner of Yes Yes Books’ Pamet River Prize and forthcoming in 2014. You can pick her brain at http://emily-oneill.com.

“We Call Her Mama” – Fiction by Natalia Theodoridou

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Adoration of the Madonna - Jacek Malczewski, 1910
Adoration of the Madonna – Jacek Malczewski, 1910

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.

That’s how I know I’ll never leave this place. I can never have what I need. Continue reading “We Call Her Mama” – Fiction by Natalia Theodoridou →