Category Archives: Issue 6

ON SNAPSHOTS by Jay Pastelak

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ON SNAPSHOTS
by Jay Pastelak

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
—Susan Sontag

On Easter Sundays, when we were kids, after mass and before we changed from our Easter clothes, our mother would parade my sisters and me out to the yard and pose us before the forsythia for a photo. Sorry—for a picture. We knew those things that came from a camera were photographs but we called them pictures because, well, that’s what they were: pictures of us.

Later, I’d come to call them snapshots, these little segments of our life, but at the time they were just pictures. They were important to us, but they weren’t photographs. Photographs depicted bigger, important events: the school photographer made photographs because he had those lights and the camera wasn’t hanging around his neck; it wasn’t even in his hand but mounted on what I came to understand was a tripod. That was serious. That was photography. At home, we took pictures.

Everyone takes pictures. My mother-in-law had boxes of pictures from years before, some going back to her early 20th-century girlhood, some older than she. She knew who was who, what was going on, and the minutiae of the relationships between those depicted in the pictures. No visit was complete without a review of the photos, an oral history of my wife’s family back two generations.

Years later, as she was packing to enter assisted living, I acquired a shoebox of pictures no one else wanted: pictures in which no one could name the subject or the event or some combination of important information on the who-what-where continuum. I took them because I like looking at snapshots and I thought I could work a presentation about different photographic visions from the contents of the box, considering myself clever to use family snapshots for the visuals. But when it came time to organize the presentation, I found I couldn’t do what I’d so smugly assumed that I could because the box really only contained one kind of vision. Sure, there was a variety of pictures, and a variety of views, but they were really all the same picture: a person, usually fully contained in the frame, sometimes indoors, sometimes out, sometimes beside a car or in front of a house or by a Christmas tree. Despite the pictures’ various trappings, each was the same: a person modified by an event or an object.

In grad school, I learned about the “Snapshot Aesthet-ic,” pictures in which heads are deliberately cut off and horizons purposefully tilted in an attempt to utilize the “flaws” of snapshot photography, creating an intentionally random kind of photographic vision. Such pictures are formal and completely self-conscious. But the snapshots in my shoebox were informal and completely unconscious. The makers of the photos in my box weren’t concerned with the formal qualities of photography; they were concerned with making sure the person or thing being recorded was safely contained within the picture. My mother would look at her envelope of pictures when they came back from wherever they were “developed” and chide my father if he had accidentally cut off the top of someone’s head or not centered his subject. (He never could seem to get it right.) The random, off-key photos made by people like Mark Cohen would have been completely unacceptable to Mom’s aesthetic. It wasn’t important that the faces were too magenta or the grain from her disc camera partially obliterated details, as long as she could identify the person and the person was wholly in the frame. Despite the conceits of art photography, snapshots are often carefully composed, such as they are.

Other photographs are primarily about observing, about looking at things. And outsiders looking in at something make them. Snapshots, on the other hand, are made by someone on the inside, a participant looking at things without observing them. In a snapshot, there is no objectivity, only partisanship. If photographs act as a fetish for the memory, then snapshots are the ultimate fetish objects. They’re about recording Uncle Henry, not for the purpose of observing how Uncle Henry carries himself or looks when he’s distracted, but because he’s Uncle Henry and we have to remember what he looks like. And hopefully he’s smiling because we want to recall Uncle Henry as a pleasant, even jocular fellow. Even if Uncle Henry rarely smiles, he smiles for the camera.

We’re supposed to like Uncle Henry, so to photograph him in what appears to be a compromising position would be an affront to Uncle Henry. Call it naiveté or fear of upsetting social norms; snapshots have a language based in something other than detached observation. Makers of snapshots, and there are probably billions, don’t care about observation or the objective “photographic truth” of the kind that seems to populate the world of photographic art.

Snapshots can be utterly charming; the best can border on real observation. And yet, I suspect it’s some viewer other than the maker who applies that observation. I culled the most interesting, the most “aesthetic,” the best, if you will, from the box I received from my mother-in-law, but I doubt she would approve of my choices. Mom-in-law cared that “This is Hazel.” As for me, I care mostly about the organization of elements within the frame and that strange sense of dislocation that comes from not really knowing who is who or what, actually, is going on. It’s not that I don’t care the subject is Hazel; I just care less than Mom.

Except, I care when they’re mine.

There are three photos hanging above my desk right now: a portrait of my wife wearing a blindfold prior to taking a whack at a piñata and two Polaroids of my friend Roy, taken in the 1970s. In one, Roy sits in a chair smoking a cigar, holding a Styrofoam cup of beer. Behind him is a pumpkin on a windowsill that appears balanced on his left shoulder. In the other photo, he’s wearing opaque, protective goggles that went with a sun lamp. On the bottom of the photo I wrote, “Roy in the best of all possible worlds.”

The picture of my wife is more serious, a 10 x 10 black-and-white print. But the photos of Roy are SX-70s, taken at parties, no doubt, when we were both a lot younger. They have timelessness for me; when I look at them not only do I recall Roy, I return to that time and all that went with it. And that, I suppose, is the ultimate magic of the snapshot: a way to keep time at bay at least for a little while, a way to hold on. Because photography is not only about looking and remembering but it’s also about proof, and about eternity: I stood in front of that forsythia, I was there at that party, I was. Here are the pictures that prove: I was.

◊

The Images:

  1. My sister Kay and Cathy Christman, c. 1969.
  2. Boys on a street in probably Pottstown, no date.
  3. Christmas tree at my Babba’s house, Pottstown, 1950s.
  4. My father dressed as a knight, Pottstown, late 1940s.
  5. Combat “play” in Korea, c. 1950.
  6. My uncle Joe Pinder fishing in the Poconos, c. 1955.
  7. My sister Kay in front of the unbloomed forsythia, c. 1966.
  8. My parents and me, Millersville, PA, c. 1955.
  9. My cousin Karen, Aunt Dorothy, sister Janee, my mother, Promised Land Lake, c. 1966.
  10. Unknown disaster, no date.
  11. Girl in Sand, SX-70, no date.
  12. Roy With Cigar, SX-70, 1970s.
  13. Roy in the Best of All Possible Worlds, SX-70, 1981.

Jay-PastelakJay Pastelak has been making pictures most of his life. He began painting at the age of eight, and received his BFA in painting from Kutztown University and his MFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He currently teaches digital photography at The Art Institute of Philadelphia. Jay makes art photographs and resides in suburban Philadelphia with his family.

 

 

THE MAGICIAN CONSIDERS HIS AUDIENCE by Grant Clauser

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White-Pigeon-Flying

THE MAGICIAN CONSIDERS HIS AUDIENCE
by Grant Clauser

The first is always family,
living room arranged
around the coffee table
and a Mickey Mouse Magic kit
hidden behind the La-Z-Boy.

Handkerchiefs produce silk flowers.
Three balanced balls become two,
become one, then melt into the darkness
of a palm, a pocket.

Later counting the eyes
in a night club, a firehall,
the late-night train ride home—
he learns to study the difference
between paying attention
and real scrutiny—

the ones who want to see through
the darkness are the enemy.
The others, for whom the darkness
is the comfort of sleep, something
you trust to hold you through silence
and doubt—
those are like his interchangeable pigeons
all cooing the same infuriating note.

 Grant-ClauserGrant Clauser is the author of the books Necessary Myths and The Trouble with Rivers. Poems have appeared in The Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Cortland Review, American Poetry Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and others. In 2010 he was Montgomery County Poet Laureate. By day he writes about electronics and daydreams about fly fishing. He runs workshops at Musehouse and other writing conferences and runs the blog www.unIambic.com.

FALL ON ME by Melissa Sarno

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crowded subway

FALL ON ME
by Melissa Sarno

I’m on a crowded subway, clutching a heavy book that requires two hands not one, but where to place my fingers? On the warm metal pole, or balance, maybe lean, against a door or a railing where the puff of a stranger’s sleeve already peaks through.

I’m lost in rolling sentences, in the rain of words, and I am close, too close, to the tangle of her hair and the backpack strap slapping at my wrists, with my messenger bag smashed between an angry stare and the dull hum of his headphones.

When she comes on, I’m pushed by someone else and then I’m flailing, slipping from the grip of memory where the period had nudged up against a space. I wonder which word had come before it, which might come next, because suddenly the page is a mash of words I have to puzzle together, like the time I lost a fluttering bookmark to the water on the tracks and there went my place.

She talks of the goodness of God and I would mind it if she was yelling, like the others do, but she’s just talking, like we’re listening. She likes a crowded train, she says, and God is still good, and maybe that’s where I’ve found the extra o, the roundness of it, in the sentence I have had to let go of, because the train has tossed me again, and my hands are tight to the crinkled binding of the book, not at the slip-away railing, where they should be, and as I falter, then find footing between one crooked-heeled boot and a tattered shoelace, she says, It’s okay. You can fall on me.

And, usually, I wouldn’t say a word, not so early in the morning, not to someone basketball squeak dribbling, dribbling about the goodness of God but she’s just talking, like I’m listening, just that way, so I say, and I don’t know why I do, I say, Thank you.

You can fall on me, she says again. I’ve got nowhere to go.

Melissa SarnoMelissa Sarno is a writer and producer living in Brooklyn, NY. She studied Communications at Cornell University and received an MFA in Screenwriting from Boston University. After a few years working in television production, she made the switch to children’s media. When she’s not writing elegant prose for preschool toys and games, she writes novels and short stories. She’s currently seeking publication for her first novel and is at work on her second. She blogs at http://melissasarno.com.

IS THIS IT by Sidney Thompson

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baking pie

IS THIS IT
by Sidney Thompson

Jewell

Jewell Young didn’t know what made her son happy anymore. There was a time she did, and for most of his life she did. It was why she was making this pecan pie for him, because such a simple thing had once made him happy, joyously happy, and maybe, just maybe, she hoped, she could come as close to that as she could, the way a happy memory sometimes will. Even when it was a bought thing that Cooper had desired, something she couldn’t make, a bag of army men or a baseball glove or a Swamp Thing comic book, she knew she could find it and make the finding of it her own, likely at a garage sale, last resort a dime store, and for practically nothing. Now, the venture of trying to make her son happy was an impossible trap of high stakes. At some point, it seemed, he’d decided that if Leah was happy, then he was happy, but who in the world knew what could make her happy? A house? What thing could do that? But if somebody was smart enough to figure out what that thing could be, who in the world could afford it? When Jewell lay in bed late at night, feeling alone, with her ear plugs in, Henry already snoring but hardly audible, she sometimes prayed herself to tears.

She crimped the edge of the pie crust with the tips of her fingers. This was what made Jewell happy—sunlight slanting over the windowsill, Henry’s lawn mower humming in place of his Fox News, and dough, plenty of dough. She was actually making two pies, though one she wouldn’t take with her to Alabama. That one she’d freeze for the future, because no one could ever predict when the church might call for a fund-raiser or when you might need to pitch in a pick-me-up at a funeral potluck. Her mother had always kept something on hand in the freezer, and Jewell preferred to be prepared, too. It made her happy to be prepared. She just wished she could think of something that could possibly make Leah close to happy, too.

The problem was that she didn’t know Leah very well outside the horrible facts of her father’s suicide too few years ago, and that Leah’s mother sent envelopes of Ambien in the mail so Leah could sleep. Cooper had only brought her by to meet her and Henry a couple of times before marrying her, and they hadn’t seen much of her since. She was an attractive girl with a very cute body, so Jewell guessed Leah made her son happy in bed before she went out like a log. Jewell hoped so. She hoped her son had plenty of semen, that everything worked every time, and that someday soon, before she got much older, she’d have a grandchild. It was the one thing left in life that she wanted and couldn’t make or find herself, and she was growing tired of waiting.

In a motion that mimicked the pecking of a bird, she collected the strips and pinches of left-over pie-crust dough off the wax paper, then proceeded un-birdlike to roll them together between her hands into a ball and then to place the ball in the oven on the baking sheet next to the pies. She smiled, remembering her mother, who’d taught her this trick. A cookie to go with her afternoon coffee.

 

Henry

Leaving your home vacant, even for a couple of days, required more preparation than what Henry Young preferred to consider. Asking their neighbor to collect their mail and newspapers. Tracking down the timers for the lamps. Of course, mowing the grass, and this was the worst part of it, going around and around the crepe myrtles, all five, six, seven of them.

Twice over the years they’d been burglarized, and whenever he thought of the second of those two times, he always winced from the vividness of his memory. While waiting for the police to arrive, while Jewell waited safely outside in the car, he made the mistake of investigating the house, not expecting that it would be what was left behind and not learning what was stolen that would startle him with disgust—in the master bathroom commode, his commode, lay the foulest of insults one human could possibly deposit for another, and of gargantuan proportions.

That was it. After that, he and Jewell finally anted up and invested in security doors and lamp timers. That was thirteen years ago, not long after Cooper had received his PhD from the University of Memphis, first in the family to be a doctor, and had moved out of the house for what everyone believed then to be for good, the last time, in order to marry his first wife and begin an illustrious career, trying to out-do his old man, as a university professor.

He and Jewell both believed rather blindly, and unfortunately passed that blindness to Cooper, that it was only a matter of time, no more than a semester or two, before their son, their only child, forever a straight-A student, would prove his worth and be promoted from part-time to full-time and be making more money than they ever did after thirty years—Henry as a high-school history teacher and Jewell a middle-school home-economics teacher. Even when it became painfully evident that Cooper would never be hired at any university without a doctorate from a more prestigious university or without prominent publications, that the world of academia was changing, with qualifications increasing, and that he should go back to school to get certified to teach in secondary ed., do what it took, become street smart, he remained stubborn in his self-worth, believing with a religious fervor that eventually others would accept him for who he was.

Struggling with the lawn mower underneath the unkempt branches of the crepe myrtles had left popcorn-shaped blooms clinging to his shirt, but what he was thinking about now was his father’s face, the last time Henry had seen it and could ever remember holding it in his hands.

Henry had arrived at the nursing home cradling a watermelon. His father had had a stroke six months earlier and remained paralyzed down the length of his entire left side, his shrunken left limbs propped on pillows. Though he couldn’t watch television anymore without crying, because it reminded him too intensely that he wasn’t at home watching television, with his dachshund asleep in his lap, he still loved the taste of food, even if most of his food had to be pureed, and he hadn’t had a watermelon once yet that summer. It was that day, after eating watermelon, when his father asked Henry to please shave him.

Henry had never shaved his father before, holding his pallid face and wiry gray stubble, while bringing the razor slowly through.

It saddened him that Cooper had settled down on the coast, so far away. And was a car salesman, not a professor. Was so far away.

 

Cooper

In the amber light flickering through the leaves of the banana trees that ceaselessly and silently undulated at their bedroom window, he could see Leah’s blonde hair fanned across her pillow. He thought of waking her up, but waking her up had never led to sex before.

He eased himself out of bed, and his knees buckled from the hardness of the glazed terra-cotta floor, which by the day was feeling harder and harder to his feet and ankles and hips, as if he’d brought the pavement of the car lot home with him. He moved toward the bathroom with the speed and tentativeness of a senior citizen, and once he’d reached the bathroom and touched the door to the frame, he decided, like a senior and a woman both, to draw his underwear all the way down and sit.

There was great relief in sitting. He sat for a long while, then stood finally to his feet, and this time there was a little more strength in his legs, a little less ache.

He knew what Jimmy Bertella would tell him. That was his sales manager in training, his shadow.  Let’s be proactive, Coop! By God, take control. Don’t let her dictate the goddamned outcome. Whatever she says, ignore it and redirect and you keep going, keep redirecting, until you have to acknowledge whatever objection there is, but after you acknowledge it and show a little empathy, keep going. Objections don’t mean shit. They’re signs of fear about doing what she wants to do, or why else would she be here? Nobody dragged her at gun point to your bed. But if you have confidence, you have control, and she will follow you with the same level of confidence that you’ve got. It’s a habit for people to follow. It’s polite to follow. Do you want to be an order-taker for the rest of your life, or do you want to be a fucking salesman? Cooper, you pussy, make her follow!

He hiked his boxers and gently, very slowly, swept the door open. He was about to start his day the way he wanted to start it and hoped that was what she was up for because that was what was about to happen.

He even absorbed the shock of the floor with a pinch more youth, then two steps into the room, a blow—the bed was void of any wife, docile or not. Then in the kitchen he heard the unmistakable sucking sound of a refrigerator closing.

As he approached the kitchen through bars of sun filtering in through the living room blinds that she opened every morning before doing anything else, he heard, amid various knocks and clatters, one of his favorite sounds, quite possibly his favorite—that rare, happy sound of Leah humming.

He watched her at the cutting board for a moment in her camisole and striped pajama bottoms, buoyant on her tiptoes, before she realized he was at the doorway and stopped humming.

“Hey,” she said, carving the air with a steak knife, “I thought I’d make us an omelette.”

He smiled, and she said, “I don’t know why, I woke up just craving one. And then after we eat,” she said, setting the knife on the cutting board between mounds of sliced onion and cubed cheddar, “I thought, you know, we could go look at that house in Point Clear Stables I was telling you about.”

He hesitated. He didn’t mean to. It was his day off. It was like his day. But he quickly thought better of such logic and nodded with enthusiasm. “Sure,” he said.

“It’ll be fun,” she said.

“It’ll be fun,” he agreed. He met her at the stove and kissed her. She even resumed her humming in his presence.

He understood that her happiness wasn’t definitive. What made her truly happy, feel complete, serene yet ecstatic, like sex with her was for him, was beauty, wow beauty, rare beauty, genius beauty—watching Savion Glover tap dance or Mavis Staples sing or Liev Schreiber act, or standing so close to a Jackson Pollock that you could pick out the nails or buttons buried in the oils, or comfortably at home reading a Cheever or Carver short story, Susan Minot’s Evening, Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, or as on their honeymoon in Venice, walking along the canals and alleyways in awe. He understood that she was in that difficult transitional period of redefining happiness.

Even for him, sex gradually receded into the décor of the dining room. The omelette was in its place, then buttered wheat toast sprinkled, her way, which was becoming his way, too, with black pepper. Then there was the mutual excitement of a bluebird lighting on the balcony railing. And when she turned up Is This It by the Strokes to get ready to their constant up-tempo beat, he appreciated her choice.

Sidney ThompsonSidney Thompson is the author of the short story collection Sideshow. His fiction, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared or is forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Atticus Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Clapboard House, Danse Macabre, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Grey Sparrow Journal, NANO Fiction, Ostrich Review, Prick of the Spindle, Ragazine.CC, The Southern Review, storySouth, TINGE Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Denton, Texas, where he teaches creative writing at Texas Woman’s University and is the Assistant Fiction Editor for the American Literary Review.

Image credit: Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr

 

BALLAD by Patrick Dacey

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Ballad

BALLAD
by Patrick Dacey

OK she’s gone let’s get setup amp cord guitar now this is romantic this is a gift D C G yep way out of tune needs a good tuning can’t remember how to tune just listen listen it all makes sense if you just listen that’s what Miles Davis once said I think maybe it was Mingus turn the keys thumb the E and A and OK we’re in tune music first then lyrics a mix of dark and light of high and low nothing too dark nothing too light it’s her birthday she doesn’t want a slit-your-wrists song and she doesn’t want some loopy gumball sing-along a ballad of course ballad in D too light, ballad in E minor too dark ballad in C C to F to D C to F to G something’s missing C to F to A minor to G that’s it that makes sense there’s a balance there OK C to F to A minor to G for a while and shit the kid’s squawking squawking and hiccupping and that cute-as-hell laugh can’t miss him laugh got to see that maybe take a picture if I time it right though he never seems to do it when I got the phone pointed at him guitar rest camera phone on hiccup and he stops altogether when I get to the doorway looks at me like I’m some creature from Mars wide-eyed scared shitless considering the size of his world for the past ten minutes little stuffed monkeys and parrots and lizards and then this giant indigenous freak from across the river comes stomping through the bush into his perfectly unreal world wanting to strip it bare take him away turn it into a resort which think about it little buddy think about living your first couple years in a beautiful resort no bugs or scary animals just people like your mother all there to serve you while you relax under an umbrella with the sun on your little toes doesn’t that sound nice sound like something you could appreciate later on in life if say you were to make a bunch of money and then lose a bunch of money at the point your future wife is five months pregnant surprise and already has you in a convertible crib on credit without considering the possibility of and we moved all the studio equipment into the garage where mommy says it should be anyway considering I haven’t recorded a thing since 1992 and what was that just a little number called I Do and I Don’t just a song that put her in the cream colored Mercedez she rides into Boston to have lunch with Karen and Odessa and Hilary like they’re the goddamn New England version of Sex and the City like they’re impressed by my twenty-year-old Benz she says I have to take the train in from Haverhill for christ’s sake well at least you have a car and you’re not some poor Mexican walking to work along Route 1 OK OK no sad time Daddy talk I get it come here spit up on my shoulder get rid of those hiccups OK I didn’t mean to bring you down let’s go out to the living room and you can help with mommy’s birthday present there you go buckle you into your little rocking chair and here’s your giraffe Sophie and your winkle and let’s clean the drool off your lip OK ready no don’t squeeze Sophie Sophie doesn’t have the right voice for this kind of song she’s more a Mezzo Soprano not what we’re looking for here OK squeeze Sophie we’ll work around her not like I haven’t had to deal with my share of aggressive background vocalists maybe I can cut her out of the master tape and that cough and that sneeze and don’t cry pal nothing to cry about I’m sure Sophie’s a good vocalist or maybe you’re just not interested in writing a song but if I could afford a present for mommy I’d get one though it wouldn’t even be a present more like a debt and she’d see it in the checking account probably return it claim it’s too extravagant just some earrings or a bracelet I don’t know something to make her feel pretty but what’s more important she’d say me looking pretty or some diapers for the boy yeah no brainer diapers but every once in a while something nice maybe and for the life of me I can’t imagine what we’d do if I didn’t lift your vitamins and formula and those stupid plastic toys well not lift as much as use the sweet Korean girl who runs the self-check line at Stop and Shop claim confusion with the machine tell her I like her green eyes and her hemp necklace but forty bucks for formula organic formula ‘cause it has to be organic or else what you might end up like OK let’s sort of cradle you take off the guitar strap OK get this underneath your butt and put your arms up here on the side and rest your chin there in the curve how’s that better feel better feel sleepy all right sleepy is good this is going to be sort of a sleepy song anyway now what was that chord progression G to no C to F to A minor right then G OK C C C C C fucking A buddy you almost fell out of the strap don’t make that face I know that face all right OK look at me look at daddy it’s smiley-time right isn’t it smiley-time do you even know what the hell smiley-time means it doesn’t mean anything that’s right that’s right keep smiling for smiley-time because smiley-time is a world that only exists in my mind and you won’t ever remember that you used to love smiley-time until you have a baby and then you’ll probably call it something different some inane phrase that gets stuck in your head and you’re walking around thinking about a world where people have smiley-time at some point during the day standing still wherever we are smiling at each other and not with some condescending coffee house how-you-doing smile but a real genuine smile that can crush your heart the way it does when you see true happiness on a person’s face like when they’re on a rollercoaster or sledding down a hill whatever it is that makes them forget about themselves for a few minutes maybe not a good idea to have you resting your head on the wood so back in the rocker OK now let’s get to work take mommy into the past ‘cause that’s what a good song does takes you back in time sets you down next to old friends and lovers well hopefully not her old lovers especially not that Australian dude the two of them out in the wild looking at kangaroos taking peyote can hear that stupid accent in my head picture Greg Norman with mommy’s face in his lap while he keeps saying ‘oy ‘oy ‘oy but what’re you going to do that’s the risk you take with a good song a good song brings you back in time a great song brings you to a place you’ve never been and you feel good being there you Jesus you little bugger you were so relaxed there during smiley-time you went ahead and dropped a load right as I was about to reach the nexus of this song for your mother how it has something to do with our past and present and future and how they can all work so perfectly together if you never think about time at all if you erase the concept of time from your being and just be OK that’s ripe here we go put the guitar down gently diaper wipes a bunch of wipes and all right it’s up your back Jesus how long has it been since you took a dump your mother never keeps me in the loop on your dump cycle we need a dump calendar or an eraser board guess we’ll have to get you in the tub the tub is a good thinking place I’ve gotten a lot of thinking done in the tub over the years of course a lot of that thinking got lost once I got out of the tub because I never remembered to bring a pen and pad into the bathroom with me so let’s clean you up and get a pen and pad and run the water and start thinking of lyrics for mommy’s song all right listen to the sound of the water listen to everything around you that’s music everything’s music have to make sure it’s not too hot too hot and you’ll get that pumpkin head screaming like a cat caught on fire all right me first got you up Jesus I hate the tub I look like a washed-up seal what a body no wonder mommy turns off the lights and my nuts cauterized forty-seven years old don’t want to risk another well not a mistake no you’re not a mistake but well we weren’t planning on doesn’t matter you’re here you’re beautiful you ready for the tub ready for the water OK here we go legs first yeah feels good doesn’t it now your back and your arms don’t worry I got your head I won’t let you go under we’ll just float you around OK it’s warm isn’t it you’re gonna love the ocean maybe you’ll be a surfer or maybe you’ll build sailboats or maybe you’ll be one of those guys who fishes in the summer and smokes dope in the winter and never really minds what happens around him because he’s generally satisfied with his life and doesn’t expect too much and never gets his hopes up and hasn’t a clue why everyone’s always arguing about what’s fair and what isn’t come on pal not in the tub well at least it’s clear means you’re healthy and you’re smiling because you think you got away with something well OK we should get out of the tub not much thinking done after all but it’ll come to us I mean you can’t stop yourself from thinking it’s impossible even wrapping you up in the towel and the tag says MADE IN CHINA and where in China it’s so damn big though you have to think some factory where they’re pumping out towel after towel all day it’s towels or it’s clocks or it’s Elvis Presley key chains whole factories producing Elvis crap and not one of those Chinese kids probably knows who Elvis is or was or how if he didn’t stop in at that little recording studio in Memphis or if he didn’t shake his hips on the Ed Sullivan show or die on the toilet or have this myth about him still being alive and all these whackos visiting Graceland like it’s some kind of church then none of the Chinese kids would even be working the Elvis factory and it might be the only factory in their town so without Elvis they might’ve lived a happier life working a farm or fishing doing something outdoors where the air is clean and no one’s breathing down your neck about printing a thousand of those Jailhouse Rock T-shirts by noon your skin’s soft too soft maybe hasn’t had to take a blow yet except that time you tumbled out of your little rocker but you knew to keep rolling and finally pressed up against the TV stand what’s this spot on your belly spider bite do we have spiders fuck I hope not it hurts when I press no good that’s good probably bitten a few days ago spiders crawling all over the house can’t see ‘em maybe they hide until night come out in packs crawl into our bed down our throats that’s why mommy’s coughing at night coughing on spider legs and what if they’re pregnant what if they’re delivering baby spiders inside us oh god OK let’s zap those spiders out of our minds OK zap no more spiders get the diaper on your onesy your little sweats and how about one of these sweatshirts a little chilly in here right can’t turn the heat up past 64 heat’s expensive if we hugged each other all day wouldn’t need heat at all zip you up looks like you’re ready to get back to work are you ready to get back to work good little smile stick your tongue out make that fart sound all right buddy ballad in C for your mother haven’t written a song a real song since I don’t know when tried to get the band back together but Dan’s a financial consultant and Randy works a farm in Montana and Caesar’s been cleaning toilets at Logan guessing drugs brought him there or maybe he’s off the drugs and that’s why he’s cleaning toilets maybe he’ll be ready to join up again in a year you only really need two founding members who am I kidding you won’t ever know your father the rock star you’ll probably see me as some old know-nothing like I saw my father until I got older and got interested in what his life was like before he started wheezing and coughing all the time and we needed to hook him up to an oxygen tank ‘cause all I knew of him was that he was a finish carpenter he’d talk about staircases and mantles and window trim whatever but later he told me how he dropped out of high school and flew to Madrid and from there trekked through western and eastern Europe and to Egypt and down to South Africa and over to Chile up through Southern America Panama Guatemala Mexico basically travelled the world except Asia said he wished he could get to Asia and I asked him why there were no photographs from his travels and he said because it’s all in my mind it’s for me not for anyone else and I came to respect my father more than I ever had before and then well he died died before he got a chance to see you or even known you were coming said how he wished he had a grandchild all the men in our family, since the dawn of time failing like it’s a birthright to dream big and touch greatness and then crash hard I’m not sure your grandfather ever even went to the places he claimed to visit maybe he was dreaming up a more adventurous past for himself maybe I should too who am I who was I who should I have been for you going to that dark place again try to stay away from the dark if we can so what was the point of right well you’ll see videos of me when I had long hair and purple suits and you’ll think where’s that guy he was famous he was weird he was cool but things change buddy people change and you’re my world now and maybe I dream of getting the band back dream of me and Caesar at the Paradise but I know that’s not going to happen too many mistakes band’s got a bad name I got a bad name put down the booze and coke put up all that dough in a vegetarian restaurant called ROOTS which your mother said was a terrible name and I went with it despite her thinking if it stuck with me then it’d stick with others but it wasn’t the name no one was willing to pay fourteen ninety five for a plate of raw vegetables and even after selling the house and most of my old guitars and pumping the rest of our savings into a self-published memoir printing off fifty-thousand copies and only selling about twenty mostly to your mother’s family with her thinking I didn’t know and a few to collectors of one hit wonders and becoming sort of a laughing stock on the local news during a where are they now segment claiming to have a connection with the spiritual world which I don’t but I thought it might drum up some interest in my music again and maybe kids’ll look up your last name find out who your father was make fun of how I used to look the music I played but you take out the synthesizers and you have some pretty lovely anyway it won’t matter shouldn’t matter ‘cause unlike their fathers and very much like my own father I went for it and I did it and no one can take that away from me just like they can’t take it away from you and I know sometimes I talk down about your mother but she’s been with me through it all rich and poor and she deserves some slack deserves a break and she’s a good mother to you and good woman and she’s still the only girl I know knows how to give a decent foot massage and maybe that sounds like it’s not a lot but trust me it’s hard to meet a woman you can love all your life and when you arrived it seemed to make us love each other even more and I guess that’s the point why it’s so hard to write a song I don’t have any songs left maybe you were my last song and maybe all your mother wants is a deep kiss and a warm bath and to be here with us a family our own little world just beginning.

Patrick-DaceyPatrick Dacey’s stories have appeared in Bomb Magazine, The Greensboro Review, Guernica, Salt Hill, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among other publications. He has recently completed his first collection of short fiction.

Image credit: Liz Davenport on Flickr

 

STORY OF THE MOON and SOLIS DIES by Kelle Groom

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story-of-the-moon

TWO POEMS
by Kelle Groom

Story of the Moon

He held out both arms like someone innocent being
arrested, showed me the long vein for the black panther
he’d wanted, something Vietnam vets got, tracing
his finger along where the panther would go
if there was one. When it rained we went
to Pakistan with pillows soft as cats, something killed.
A boy carried scalding milk in a giant saucer pan, the coffee gone
or cold, a girl throwing flour. A style of font was invented
in the sixteenth century—does Claude Garamond feel
the pretty serifs? What about the white house in trees?
I’m not happy with smithereens, an Irish word, smidirin.
We’ve been covered by sea dozens of times. The base of
despair is speed, but acid brought all the animals
in the house together, sleeping on the floor. I’ve already seen
you here trying to live modestly, the story of the moon
that we are always new. Time was there was a time
on the boat to Inishmore, I grabbed his forearm so I wouldn’t
fall, so I would be pitapat again before the pitchblack blend
of bodiless, before the pippin has more heft than me.
So I would hear the mute letters, the silent e,
be no nevermind. Sailors talked fast, especially the dark-
haired to my left sitting on the lip, in marble snaps.
When they tied the rope to Tranquility, he walked the boat
edge like a balance beam, the gap between the water green,
narrow shaft between the boats, so I grabbed his hand
and forearm too, like a rope in my hand, the muscle of making
one’s way, my hand a matrimonial. Neighbors’ matchboard
tongues pitying the groove my feet make around the lake,
my lake latitude, my hands of the bride and groom and toasts.

◊

Solis Dies

High in the house, I washed a dish,
and out the window
in the night I saw a film of white.
Through the trees’ dark hair,
a girl in a bridal dress.
Another girl in red shorts attending her,
arranging the veil.
And a third girl hidden
almost completely by the trees
except for the shadow of her body,
I mean, her body was a shadow, all darkness
and the flash of her camera.
Then they hurried, as if late,
through the sand beside my house
down to the sea,
no one out on a Sunday night
in winter. But the hands of the girl in red
were urgent to get the veil right,
transparency that I could feel
from behind glass.
It’s January, month of gates and doors,
solis dies, and at the ocean edge,
the sun had been on my face
late in the day. I said hello because
even fire that far away touches me.

Kelle-GroomKelle Groom’s memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a Library Journal Best Memoir, and Oprah O Magazine selection. She is the author of three poetry collections: Five Kingdoms, Luckily (Anhinga), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida). Her work appears in Agni, New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. A 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose, Groom is on faculty of Sierra Nevada College’s low-residency MFA Program.

Image credit: Richard Leeming on Flickr

ONE OF THOSE WORLDS by Steve Klepetar

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One-of-Those-Worlds

ONE OF THOSE WORLDS
by Steve Klepetar

Returning from the kitchen one night, you stumble
into one of those worlds where dogs breathe fog
and foxes roam through orchards near where your
mother grew up, a circular tower house where you
looked out a narrow slit of window to call home
the stars. It was April then, and snow receded slowly
in patches on struggling grass. Sometimes you could
fly then, on webby wings that snared early morning
light. Sometimes you would slither in the mud.
There was always work to do, conspiring with bushes
and trees, colluding with frogs and snails and snakes.
Cold mirrors lay shattered, glinting in dangerous piles.
Spring rain spoke another, older language then.
Streams swelled clotted consonants against your tongue.

Steve-Klepetar

Steve Klepetar’s work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Recent collections include Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications), My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press), and Return of the Bride of Frankenstein (forthcoming from Kind of a Hurricane Press).

Image credit: Neal Herbert on Flickr for Arches National Park

CRITTER CONTROL by Rebecca Entel

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Critter Control

CRITTER CONTROL
by Rebecca Entel 

I hadn’t given much thought to the snake that connected my toilet to the bathroom wall until one July when it split its plastic cap and flooded most of my house. Among other damages, the water buckled the original hardwood floors. It looked as though speed bumps had erupted in my living room. I moved out for months and months, plodding from friend’s guest room to friend’s guest room to temporary apartment. When I finally arrived back on my doorstep in October, house key poised, I found the two nails that held my mezuzah to the front doorpost still there, the very top and very bottom of the mezuzah still nailed in, the body of the mezuzah itself broken off and missing. (If you don’t know what a mezuzah is, trust that this was an ominous sight to come home to.)

I soon discovered—from the strip of wall missing between the tub and the rest of the bathroom and from the splinters I was getting from the brand new floor—that the construction company had left a slew of botched repairs that would need to be re-reconstructed, long into the winter and spring. I’d also had a minor car accident, my respiratory system had been wrapped up by bronchitis for going on two months, and I’d fallen down an entire flight of stairs. I’d somehow made it to the next-to-last step without breaking a thing but then instinctively put out my right hand before landing. . . My arm was casted from fingertips to elbow. I’d been through a break up. I was doing my best to fend off a breakdown. Then came the squirrels.

I should have been more attuned to the ways my life had become a B-grade horror movie and therefore at least entertained the notion that when the scratching started, it was coming from inside the house. But I assumed the squirrels I saw scampering up the mature trees that had been one of the house’s major selling features were up on the roof, and I was hearing their further jolly scampering across to more trees on the other side of the house. In some delirium of denial, I assumed this for weeks and weeks. When I had an inspector in the house to diagnose the construction company’s damage, though, I figured I might as well ask him to check out a tiny peephole I’d noticed above a bookcase. He glanced at it and, without saying a word, presented me with a bouquet of business cards for area handymen.

It turned out several squirrels had chewed and clawed their way to a cozy den in between the roof and the ceiling of my vaulted-ceilinged, picture-windowed office/guestroom (also a major selling feature). The handyman came on a bitter cold day, scaled his ladder, and almost got knocked off by the gigantic squirrels scampering out of their hideaway. Once they were out he replaced the insulation they’d eaten and patched up the soffit they’d made into their door. I called him two days later when I heard the scratching, as loud as ever. He assured me there was absolutely no way the squirrels could get back in, that they were just out there scratching at the reinforced soffit, trying to. He also assured me there was no way he’d trapped a squirrel inside. I hadn’t even thought of that. I broke out into a rare December sweat.

I convinced myself I was assured. I also convinced myself I could scare the squirrels away from that corner of the house by repeatedly activating my louder-than-average garage door. I stood inside by the wall with the peephole, pressing the button of the remote opener over and over and listening to the door rattling up and grumbling down, rattling up and grumbling down. I was still standing there with the opener, my left thumb continuing its button calisthenics, when plaster started spitting down from the peephole. The turquoise paint that had seemed so whimsical on the ceiling now, in chips and dust on the floor, looked apocalyptic. If a creature burst into the house, I decided, I was leaving and not coming back.

Sam from “Critter Control” was the one who found the squirrels’ back entrance. He pointed out that if I came home to find the door to my home boarded up, I would look for another way in, too, right? I opted for his Humane Cage option, and he explained the process. The cages would be baited and set up at both entry points. And he’d come by about every other day to remove the squirrel from the cage, reset the trap, and take the captive to be released far, far away. Each time he picked up a squirrel, he’d leave me a notice.

Well into the spring I’d come home to one of two things. A captive squirrel waiting for Sam to pick it up and leaving me wallowing in what a sorry excuse for a vegetarian it made me to go about my business while an animal darted frantically around its tiny cage on my roof. Or a yellow sticky note on the storm door. Each squirrel removed cost sixty bucks. The notice was printed in such a way that it looked like a receipt for squirrels I was purchasing:

1 squirrel    |     $60
Total due    |     $60

The receipt was only sometimes for one squirrel. I also purchased two regularly. My receipts piled up; my bank account dwindled. My squirrels ran free in the countryside.

Sometimes I couldn’t take the scrabbling of the caged squirrel, and instead of wallowing, I’d call Sam to ask him to come pick it up sooner rather than later. He was always friendly no matter how many times a week I called his personal cell phone. He always came. We got to know each other. He told me his daughter had the same name as me, though “spelled biblically.” He asked me how my mom was doing. He invited me to his house for Thanksgiving.

I became attuned to and obsessed by every tickle of a scratch I thought I heard in the house. Sam came out for the squirrels I thought I heard in the walls of my bathroom—which he diagnosed as bats—and bedroom—which he diagnosed as mice. I took to walking from window to window, watching for possible intruders. Each time I saw what looked like a grey feather boa spiraling up a tree trunk I ran outside to make sure it wasn’t on its way into the house through a new entrance. Once I found two squirrels mating on a branch outside my kitchen window, right by the secret back entrance of the ceiling hideaway. The female’s tail held straight up in the air, triumphantly. I stood frozen and glaring, outraged by their flagrant lack of respect for the tyranny of the cages.

In the meantime the interior re-reconstruction continued. The house found a rhythm of being emptied of its owner and choked with strangers. All of my belongings had to be stacked in the one room that hadn’t been damaged by the flood: the squirrel room. The damaged rooms would then fill up with workers while I spent nights in hotels, shuddering at the thought of squirrels re-inhabiting the space behind the ceiling in my absence. I kept the fingers of my unbroken hand crossed. I came home to more receipts.

Eventually Sam was sure we were done with the squirrels. He took down the cages and plugged up every possible nook and cranny on the outside of my house with a giant caulk gun.

At my final orthopedic appointment, the physician’s assistant showed me the post-cast x-ray of my right hand. She pointed out the thick white scar where the break had been. It looked quite a bit as if my hand had been caulked. “At this point,” she assured me, “that bone is as strong as it was before. It could only be broken by something that would break any other bone in your body.” Imagining that “something,” I felt the onset of a rarer February sweat.

Two years later I adopted a geriatric dachshund named Charlie Brown. He spends most of his time impersonating a hot-water bottle under the covers, warbling more like a dove than a dog. If anyone ever broke into my house, he might lick the thief into submission or possibly accidentally trip the intruder with his ecstatically wagging tail. But it turns out he’s a ferocious squirrel deterrent. Despite being twelve years old, named for a bumbling cartoon character, and the size of a human baby, he does a heck of a job barking his little heart out until the squirrels take their branch highways into someone else’s yard. We’ve since moved to an apartment in a city where we only see squirrels at the park. Other park-goers laugh as Charlie Brown runs from tree to tree with his lungs working overtime—as if it’s all a game.

Rebecca-EntelRebecca Entel is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Her short stories have been published in Madison Review, Joyland Magazine, Unsaid Magazine, Connotation Press, Tiferet Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel and will be writer-in-residence at the 2014 Summer Literary Seminars Lithuania.

Image credit: grendelkhan on Flickr

THE ELEPHANT by Erika Price

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Pink Elephant

THE ELEPHANT
by Erika Price

He got the news in the usual way: via Twitter. At 5:00 am when he’d already given up the prospect of sleeping (the thrum of his across-the-hall neighbor’s Skrillex ebbing into the rattle of the broken refrigerator), his phone silently lit up, providing an oasis of attention.

@scoliosis: Sounds like @brafshu is at Middleheartst in a coma #sad

He sat up, pulled the iPad out from under the spare pillow, and cast its light on his face. He pulled up Facebook. The first post, at 4:26 am from a former high-school peer, Misty Siler.

Soooo sad to hear about @BraffleyShumaker. Our prayers are in your heart!

At first he pulled the iPad away and stared into the kitchen. He remembered the tin of white chocolate cocoa his mother had mailed in a recent care package. He asked himself, just how could a prayer be in a heart? Is that what Misty really meant? Of course, grief could rot a person’s brain. Misty was second in the class, GPA-wise.

He tilted the screen back at his eyes and kicked the covers so one foot was bare. Perfect. He brought his forefinger of his right hand to Braffley’s highlighted name.

The page was awash in recent, well-meaning, and frustratingly vague posts, all prayers and wishes and memories for Braffley. The man asked himself, is Braffley dead or what? Then he found a post from Braffley’s cousin, Veronica.

Hey ya’ll Braffs folks have been too swamped to respond. He is in a stable condition and we are all with him, he’s been moved to the coma ward on the east side please park accordingly.

But still that wasn’t enough information. The man scrolled on, past old teeball playmates and ex-girlfriends and pastors, old neighbors and labmates and fraternity brothers and mystified, concerned internship partners. None of these dipshits know what happened to Braff, the man thought to himself. They weren’t there for what happened. They’re just hangers-on!

It was after five minutes had passed and a sparrow landed on the man’s windowsill that he finally scrolled past all the well-wishers’ non-updates to an old post by the now-unconscious Braffley himself. It was a sepia-filtered, low resolution image of the young man in a bright Hawaiian shirt, holding the camera aloft and at a cockeyed angle with one hand, a row of thick teeth glinting. In the other hand was a perfectly globular drink container, overflowing with a substance both frothy and green. There was a caption.

Ninety days sober! Here’s to big mojito mocktales and never missing a party just cuz there’s booze around! 😉 ~

The man held the back of the iPad with both hands and gently stroked the cool aluminum. This man, this overgrown boy whom he hadn’t seen since sixth grade, he had over ten thousand likes on the most insipid of feel-goodery posts. Were his eyes always blue, or was there something coming off the tiki torches that looked funny in the filter?

The man placed his tablet on the dresser and pulled his watch from the bottom of the key bowl. There was gum sticking to the face; he hadn’t worn the thing in weeks. Keeping time, wearing time had become useless since he’d taken the plunge, thrown out his desk and shelving units and rolled his Pilates ball out of the office and into the spare bedroom of his home.

For the past month, the days had been marked and kept by belly rumbles, faintly muted Skrillex beat drops, and the honking of the Thai delivery guy’s moped horn. No more. The man rolled until his bare, cool feet brushed the ground. He felt the crumbs dig into the webbing of his toes and regarded the burnt-orange sky and the clank of the dumpster in the alley. He went and brewed water for coffee, not cocoa, and thought of the steel-slicing jaw of Braffley.

He pulled into the hospital parking lot at 4:37 pm, swearing at himself and clicking Phil Collins off the local radio station. The man stuffed a few Verde Green Fritos into his mouth, opened the door, crunched his left boot on the snow, paused, reached back into the car to retrieve a mint from the cup holder, and flung himself out.

It was dark. It seemed impossibly late. The man hadn’t planned for early-afternoon commuter traffic, not in this disintegrating burb. He approached the old cement building, which was smeared on its sides with black and grey sooty filthiness of unknown origins. It was too late in the day for visitors. He was sure it was too late.

The man walked past the Emergency Room, through a wide set of doors. A woman screamed at him and gave chase. She approached, in toothpaste-colored scrubs, with a face both stern and impassive. This is the emergency room, she said.

I know, said the man. There was a beat. He said, I am looking for the coma ward.

The woman rapped on her chin with a pen, one of those five-color dealies with the multiple clickers. Okay, she said. You’re going the long way, though.

The man didn’t want to seem like he was uncertain, so he went along. It was important, he was pretty sure, to ape belongingness since he was about to maybe-probably violate the law. He reached the end of the hall and found a small sign made of dark plastic with a fake wood grain.

Rehab ^ (pointing nowhere)
Geriatric <
Burn Ward <
Pediatric <
Morgue >
Coma >
Yoga >

He took a right and found himself in a narrow passage smelling like a biology lab. Remembering the sign, he took a deep breath and held it low in his chest. Then the man was working his way slowly around a dance (or yoga) studio with open windows. He had to take an almost perfect u-turn around the room, full of old women in terrycloth workout outfits, to reach the hall leading to Coma.

As he walked, the man opened his phone. Still no substantive updates on Braffley. A girl the man remembered from Orchestra had posted on Braffley’s wall and tweeted at him. Amanda Sugar.

I remember camping with you and all the other tadpoles on Lake Wannempokka. You were so scared to be away from your mom and dad, you nearly cried. But when the fireworks came up over the cabins and showered you with stars, you stood up and started to cheer. I hope you are okay little tadpole!

The man clicked on Amanda. A poetry teacher now, with a degree from Swarthmore. Seemed legit.

The man reached the ward and found a small gaggle of blonde people gathered around the receptionist’s desk. He waited for them to clear.

I’m looking for—uh. Braffley Shumaker? He stammered.

She didn’t look up from her crossword puzzle for a long time. The man straightened himself, patted his tie. He thought, shit, I should have gotten some flowers from downstairs. That would look much better.

Braffley? The receptionist asked, too loudly. She ran a purple fingernail along a sheet of paper.

I, yes. The man stepped closer and tried to push her into whispering by doing so himself. He’s an old camp mate of mine. Just got in a horrible accident.

What kind of a name is Braffley? She asked. Is that Irish? Is it fake?

She looked up at him. Her glasses were thick; the rims were covered with a bright fish pattern that reminded the man of a children’s book.

I guess it is kind of silly, he allowed.

Five oh-nine C, the woman said. She pointed with a casual flip of her arm, then eased back into her chair. Just over there.

Oh? The man said. He took a step and looked at her desperately. Oh?

Just over there. Five oh-nine C.

The man began to stride. He pushed his posture up, once again. He struggled to remember which position Braffley played on the high school football team. Or was it soccer?

Hey, the woman called, and the man was sure the jig was up.

Yeah?

There’s a guy with emphysema in there, same room, she said. I hope you’re not wearing any strong cologne or anything like that.

Oh I’m not. And I won’t smoke either, ha, ha! The man realized this was the wrong thing to say.

Room 509-C was in a small archipelago of doors, some of which had to lead to closets or circuit boards, otherwise they made no architectural sense. The door was cracked and the man couldn’t hear anyone talking or moving around, so after a good forty-second pause, he let himself in. The window was drawn but facing a cement wall, belonging to another of the hospital’s many disorganized wards.

The old guy with emphysema was on the first bed, but that didn’t prevent the man from joltingly mistaking him for a hyper-aged and very world-weary Braffley Shumaker. His chest rose and fell like a little bird’s. He had many cards, including some hand drawn ones, but no balloons.

On the other end of the room, behind a half-pulled curtain, was, presumably Braffley. The sleeping man looked very little like his beaming, newly-sober Facebook self. His face was flat. Its flesh almost slipped into the fabric.

A monitor and a bag of clear fluid was attached to the left side of his body; where, exactly was unclear, as he was mostly covered with papery hospital bedding. On the table beside his perfectly square head there were many pots of flowers and cacti, plus big cards made of shiny stock, plus stuffed animals and balloons.

The man fingered the ear of a stuffed elephant. It was oddly squishy, like it was filled with microbeads, and, unfunnily enough, pink. It didn’t seem right, giving a recovered and almost-dead drunk a pink elephant doll with a squished-in head.

Uh hi Braffley, he said. I mean . . .

He looked behind himself, at the door.

They always say you’re supposed to talk to coma patients, don’t they? There’s no such thing as bad stimulation, is there? Even if it’s a big ‘what the fuck is this guy talking about’ kind of stimulation? I mean . . . I just mean mental stimulation.

Braffley had tubes in his nose. His hair was matted and looked darker than the man remembered. No one stays blonde forever, except Nordic men and women with extensive stylist budgets. Every other towheaded child or teen fades into a dingy, dishwatery adult. The man had orange hair.

So I’m surprised no one’s here, he said. All these people are writing to you on Facebook. I thought I was gonna get busted for sure.

The old man wheezed, moved a bit, and settled. His machine beeped, but it didn’t appear to be an alarming beep, just a regulatory one.

Security in here isn’t so good. Are they treating you okay? Are you getting enough sponge baths or whatever? I hope . . . do they have a spotter, or is it just one person that gives them?

The man leaned in. Despite the condition of his hair, Braffley smelled pretty good, and not at all like hospital.

The man stood, hovering over the comatose former classmate’s body, for quite a long time. The lights in the hallway dimmed, which signaled the evening shift and the end of visitation hours. If the man tilted his head just so, he could hear a booger whooshing in Braffley’s nose.

When a nurse came in, she let out a sing-song giggle and said, okay! Visiting hours are over! You come on back tomorrow bright and early if you like!

And she threw back the curtain. She was petite with big lips. The man had grabbed the stuffed elephant and was holding it a few inches from his body.

Can I leave this here? He asked.

Of course! The nurse walked behind him and straightened Braffley’s sheets, which were already immaculate. This created a nice barrier between the man and the patient. She took the elephant and plopped it back into its original place. Smiling, she moved forward with tiny squeaks of her Crocs and effortlessly edged the man out.

On the way out of the coma ward, the man made eye contact with a stricken-faced middle-old woman with frosted blonde hair and an ungodly perfect, square jaw. Her eyes were ruddy and streaked from crying, but they were undeniably blue. The man considered going up to her and telling the tadpole story, but decided against it.

Three weeks and four days later, the man was typing up a report while chewing watermelon gum and listening to golf on the television when his phone bleeped several times in quick succession. He flipped his phone over and found that seventeen different people had just retweeted the same message, which had originated from @brafshu.

Hey guys! Offficially released today. Thanks to every1 who visited prayed sent cards and etc. So blessed. The long road begins here.

Then another message popped up.

Special thanks to Misty for those scrumptious butterscotch blast cookies. Reading all your posts now . . . my heart! #happytobealive.

The man checked the replies and retweets but still couldn’t figure out what had happened.

Maybe I’ll never know, he said to his beta fish. Maybe that’s just it. I sure wish he’d post something, though.

He set his phone down and turned the television off. He switched Pandora to a jaunty little Django Rhinehardt station and put the water on for cocoa, a wide smile on his face. Then he returned to work.

Erika-PriceErika Price is a writer and social psychologist in Chicago. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has been featured in The-Toast, Liar’s League NYC, Full of Crow, and others. She writes regularly at erikadprice.tumblr.com

VEHICLES by Leonard Gontarek

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pink-clouds

VEHICLES
by Leonard Gontarek

1

It is a large, pink cloud,
spreading and growing larger,
soft, and saturating everything
this morning. The town,

the smoke ejected curled from
houses, some of the lights
still on, the sycamore limbs,
the bowl-shaped park once

used for skating, now used
for soccer, the day-gray
sky this morning, this morning
after the darkest night in 500 years.

The lit rose of stone paths and outside cats, this morning,
the swirl of fire vehicles, the still and shining, dark river.

2

Be a dictator of the landscape.
There is less guessing, less anxiety.

Leonard-GontarekLeonard Gontarek is the author of five books of poems, including, Déjà vu Diner and He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs. His poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Field, Poet Lore, Exquisite Corpse, Pool, Volt, Fence, Verse, and The Best American Poetry. He has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and has received two Pennsylvania Arts Council Poetry Fellowships. He was the 2011 Philadelphia Literary Death Match Champion. He has edited six anthologies of children’s poetry and is contributing editor for The American Poetry Review. In 2014 he created the first Philly Poetry Day. His website is www.leafscape.org/LeonardGontarek.

Image Credit: Dave Gingrich on Flickr

EARLY GIRL and QUEEN ANNE’S LACE by Megan Denton

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Queen-Anne's-Lace

TWO POEMS
by Megan Denton

Early Girl
for Allie

If they ask you how it felt, say it was like rolling barrels
of yourself to the brim, poised on the edge of Spring—
a delicately fizzy drink. If they ask you how it felt,
tell them it’s the rusty spigot you pass on the way home,
the loose valve in your mother’s heart—flittering about
instead of doing its business. Even in the side yard
that no one mows, tell them that you could sit quietly
for hours with a story you’d never heard. You’d imagine
bombs falling on the house, ones the color of the geraniums
by the front door that’s already gone up into flames.
You painted them hundreds of times, red birds laughing
with their big, old chains messy and burning on the lily cross.
And looking up at them with unpainted eyes, remember
the squealing, bloody Jesus throwing dirt on your father’s floor.
Remember you buried what you could not carry, under boots
and tufts of hair? There now, a tower like grace appears—
this statue of a young girl, where whistling swans have perched
and waited. And you stepping through it almost, almost.
And Jesus, look at you singing to the feathers, all bloodstained
and crippled on the lawn. When they ask you how it felt, say
it was like the gutsy red tomatoes held out to you nine at a time,
everywhere the stillness, the totem, the language of knives.

◊

Queen Anne’s Lace

Love-cars, and lights turned down, gasping
in the August-hot, hungrily, all light—all dazzle,
cat-like, I yearned down from other dust, licked
the plate, the fork, how bright, you might say
on a Sunday, the stove was and the last good kiss,
accelerating. But I remember the rue, the annual
rings, the heartwood, a universe through
patchwork piles, jiggling the doorknob, for a wreath
of wheat and greasy jeans. Queen Anne’s lace was
closed, stopped, chatting. Say you carried it
up a hill, picked through the barrel of sunflower seeds,
the deep green of the smallest flower, a chimney
climbing out of a cottage. Thread, pennies, breath,
a thousand stalks swelling by the roadside,
this pleated baby turns, this smooth-backed knee
bruises, afraid that the petals are falling, soon.

Megan-DentonMegan Denton currently lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee with her cat, Mona, who has no teeth. She recently graduated from The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a BA in English: Creative Writing. Though she has not yet applied for MFA programs, she hopes to do so soon. Her poetry has also appeared in Rock & Sling, Ruminate, and The Sequoya Review. She is an old-soul, grandmotherly-type young person trying to figure out how to be a real adult without losing her sense of childlike jubilation. She has an identical twin sister, a tiny birthmark that looks like a clover, and lots of Earl Grey tea.

Image credit: Peter Dutton on Flickr

Guest Poetry Editor’s Preface

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Juhani Pallasmaa

Poetry Editor’s Preface, Cleaver Magazine, Issue No. 6
by Teresa Leo

Cinematic. That’s the word that comes to mind reading the poetry selections from this issue of Cleaver Magazine—poems with many sweeping and carefully chosen images woven into the terrain of the verse to convey both the glorious and the traumatic. The image is to these poems as perhaps architecture is to film for Finnish architect and writer Juhani Pallasmaa, who explores this relationship in his book The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. He describes “cinematic architecture” as that which “evokes and sustains specific mental states . . . terror, anguish, suspense, boredom, alienation, melancholy, happiness or ecstasy, depending on the essence of the particular cinematic narrative and the director’s intention.”

Pallasmaa is interested in how “space and architectural imagery are the amplifiers of specific emotions,” how cinematic architecture allows the viewer to insert him/herself into the world of the film. He acknowledges that other art forms can have the same impact with place-making. “A great writer turns his/her reader into an architect, who keeps erecting rooms, buildings and entire cities in his/her imagination as the story progresses.” Ideally the experience continues beyond the boundaries of the art, and the viewer or reader becomes more deeply connected to the world outside of the film, the story, the poem—a heightened engagement triggered by the art that spills into everyday life.

In these poems, you will find a similar intent and insistence of place—images that artfully guide and engage the reader, forging a deeper connection with the subject matter at the center of the work. Here there are sycamore limbs, smoke, pigeons, magicians, foxes, orchards, cold mirrors, bombs, knives, geraniums, heartwood, otters, elbows, salt mines, bats, dragonflies, blind fish, sailors, gates and doors, veils, cumulonimbi, hooks, cosmic rocks, lightning, spring rain. Pallasmaa’s idea that “experiencing a space is a dialogue, a kind of exchange” holds true in these poems. “I place myself in the space and the space settles in me,” he says. Place yourself in the space of these poems and let them settle in you, too.

—Teresa Leo, June 2014

leo-photo2

Teresa Leo is the author of two books of poetry, Bloom in Reverse (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) and The Halo Rule (Elixir Press, 2008), winner of the Elixir Press Editors’ Prize. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Women’s Review of Books, New Orleans Review, Barrow Street, Florida Review, Cleaver Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Literal Latté, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Pew fellowship, a Leeway Foundation grant, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships, and the Richard Peterson Poetry Prize from Crab Orchard Review. She works at the University of Pennsylvania.

Image courtesy of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.

THE INSIDES by Brooke Schifano

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Red Kelp, Big Sur

THE INSIDES
by Brooke Schifano

In the train, you listen to a story about a shaman, feet braced against the wall
in the part where you stand on the circle cut into the floor.
If this were a human arm you’d be standing atop an elbow, encased
in fluid and surrounded by the mess of nerves and vessels pushed up
next to you, as close as the satchel of the stranger standing in the middle.
The shaman performs psychic surgery—jams a steel rod up the nostril of the woman
and moves his arm, back and forth, around the cavity behind her brain
and the satchel man catches the grimace on your face as you imagine
a spatula scraping spaghetti sauce out of unfinished ceramic
and want to vomit, or grab his hand and tell him
what you’ve heard.

In the ocean, you were afraid of the otters.
Your foot would slip underneath, catch between kelp stalks,
and the kaleidoscope of fins, claws, and tails would spin and spin and reach
and you’d feel the otter against the skin of your kneecap
tracing the outline with his long black claws as if examining a shell
along the sea wall, ready to pull it off and clutch it
between two paws on his belly. And later he falls asleep tucked into his kelp bed
in the last patch of sun, listening to the hiss and gurgle of the ocean
against the buoy, the fog horn, and for the sound of the land
inside of your kneecap.

In the house, the garage had begun to close on top of the cars.
Your mother called it a ghost, your step-father nodded
the way he’d nod at a child with an imaginary friend.
She drew up the papers to sue the building for denting the top
of her mini-van and for the slight stretch in her spine.
In the lower right hand corner she cited:
Ghost.

Brooke-Schifano

Brooke Schifano is a student at San Francisco State University studying creative writing. She grew up in the redwoods, by the beach, and somewhere in North Idaho. Currently, she lives and works in San Francisco where she passes time on public transit writing poetry on small bits of paper. This is her first publication, but not her last.

 

 

 

Image credit: Dawn Ellner on Flick

STEADY MOVE ITS OWN STILLNESS by Connor Towne O’Neill

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Maarten Baas, "Grandfather Clock", Real time series by Alberto D'Ottavi

STEADY MOVE ITS OWN STILLNESS
by Connor Towne O’Neill

Of the seven septuplets that live in their grandfather’s grandfather clock, only the seventh—the blind one—spends time on the pendulum. While the others spin the balance wheel, study iambs to the slip-and-catch of the escapement, regulate heart-rates to the second hand, the blind seventh pendulums alone. Her weight skews time, oblongs the steady swing. The grandfather who sets the grandfather clock, dead-reckons it against high-noon in Columbia, PA, notices the loss of seconds daily. Using his grandfather tools, he recalibrates to the new-weighted sway of his granddaughter’s blind penduluming.

He speaks softly, silently, to his daughter’s seventh blind septuplet and nods in time to her every response. In his winding he feels the lost seconds return, the plasticity of the moment congeals again. The sight of his seven grandchildren in his grandfather clock are themselves a grandfather’s clock. Now in time with the seventh septuplet, her abiding ride a new metric of time’s keeping. Time passes now and holds to the sun, to the seventh. The six other septuplets feel the seconds mark and slip. But blind on the pendulum’s steady swing, the seventh blind septuplet, in her grandfather’s grandfather clock, feels a steadiness in her own susurrate move. The regulated pendulum no longer losing seconds. The steady move its own stillness.

Connor Towne ONeillConnor Towne O’Neill is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is an MFA candidate in prose at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and is the current nonfiction editor of the Black Warrior Review. He is working on a collection of interviews and stories about time in Columbia, Pennsylvania. Roll tide.

Image credit: Alberto D’Ottavi on Flickr

PORTRAITS OF FRIENDSHIP Oil on Canvas by Ilana Ellis

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PORTRAITS OF FRIENDSHIP
Oil on Canvas
by Ilana Ellis

[slideshow_deploy id=’11008′]

 

These past few years, my work has been fueled by two passions that tugged me between them. The first is that I want to be a painter of great skill. And the greatest skill takes years of continuous training and practice, which I still need. The second is that I want to paint life. I want my works to be so real they almost breathe, and so fluid they seem caught in motion. So when I focus on the ongoing problem of increasing my skill, I often have technical realizations that allow me to see the world as if I have never seen it before. After a few days of being stunned by the overwhelming beauty of everything, I am desperate to capture what I see in paint. Which leads me right back where I started, because inevitably there is something wonderful about the physical world that I don’t yet have the skill to reproduce.

This cycle is what led me to produce my most recent body of work. In these past few months, I painted a series of three portraits: a self-portrait accompanied by portraits of two of my close friends. These paintings are very personal, because they commemorate two important relationships from this phase of my life. And what better way to capture life than to capture my current friendships? I got to honor my friends and express everything that made me care about them while at the same time honing my skills in one of the most exacting and traditional forms of art out there. I love portraits, because I love faces. The human face is unique in its ability to reveal so much while concealing almost everything concrete.

Portraits are very much collaborations between the painter and the sitter, and with these pieces much of the structural decisions were spontaneous. I painted the clothes they happened to be wearing, because people’s daily presentations reveals so much about them. I painted their hair as they wore it. In the painting of my friend Myya, this meant I had to change her hairstyle halfway through the piece. Myya has an eclectic sense of fashion and is always changing her hair. In this case, she left for spring break with caramel extensions and came back with her hair natural. So I altered the painting to match.

I try to strike a balance between the structured and the spontaneous with my work. I am very aware of structure and think it’s hands down the most important element of art—more than idea, more than technique. This is because structure provides a body to house the soul or spirit of the piece. But structure that is too composed often houses dead art, I feel. So I have been training my eye to pick out patterns and shapes from real life that are strong enough to support a piece, so when the time comes to plan a composition for a painting I can trust my instinct and not overthink it. With these pieces I put my friends through a variety of poses until I found ones I liked. When people sit for the first time they are often shy, and this makes their poses stiff and unnatural, something I try to avoid. Once I have the right pose I let my friends talk to me while I work, even if this means they move around a bit, because I want them to be alive in my paintings.

These pieces are studies of reality as much as they are my way of capturing people I care about so that I will always have record of who they are at this moment. For this same reason I am drawn to self-portraiture—you never fully see your immediate self, at least not as clearly as you can see the person you were a year or more ago. Self-portraiture is my attempt to preserve that immediate self. Change is constant, but the present is beautiful and is worth honoring. As I continue to grow and study, I hope I will be able to render life’s beauties and complexities in paint.

  ◊

The Paintings:

  1. Self-Portrait in Profile, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
  2. Myya, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
  3. Elisa, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
  4. Elisa and Liv, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
  5. Helen, Oil on Canvas, 11 x 15, 2013.
  6. Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas, 8 x 11, 2013.

 

Ilana-EllisIlana Ellis has just graduated Williams College, where she received her degree in studio art. She is excited to attend the Florence Academy of Art in Italy next fall, to begin academic training as a professional realist painter. She was recently the recipient of the Frederick M. Peyser Prize in Painting.

THE THING ABOUT A BOAT-IN-A-BOTTLE IS NOBODY STEERS by Erin Peraza

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Ship-In-A-Bottle

THE THING ABOUT A BOAT-IN-A-BOTTLE IS NOBODY STEERS
by Erin Peraza

Two figures sit on the bamboo gangplank jutting off a model pirate ship.

A man and a woman. They aren’t quite to-scale, and slightly over-sized as they are, they can’t explore the cabin space below or stand lookout in the crow’s nest. So they dangle their legs over blue-green silicone that feigns at ocean waves beneath them. Their relationship is more fragile now, contained in glass, than it’s ever been before. She’s a wide-eyed citizen of the world—packs a light suitcase, counts passport stamps—and he’s just grateful to have found a way to get out of town without ever having to leave it.

Time feels different inside a bottle, on a ship, at sea. There’s no telling how long they’ve been inside.

“Balmy,” Faye had said when she first arrived. She emerged through the bottleneck, jumping with two feet onto the hardened-putty ocean. Lance sealed the entrance quickly behind her—he’d grown accustomed to the quiet—gripping the cork like the wheel of a car as he guided it back into place.

He walked Faye across the sea to his pride and joy, his masts and sails.

“It’s modeled after a real English flagship called The Love Nest,” he’d said, trying not to smile.

Faye had held back and appraised the taut green sails, the cannon mouths, the sterile, artificial little barnacles affixed to the hull, before squatting down and propping her forearms on her thighs. A thinking pose, first, and then, a decision. “I think I like ‘em better sunk,” she said.

Lance shook his head. “You archaeologists. You like a ruin more than anything.”

Faye stood up again and played like a tightrope walker on the solid sea, her arms cast out from her shoulders. “Has all this walking on water given you a Christ complex?” she teased.

“I grew up ice fishing,” Lance reminded her. “Walking on water’s nothing new to me.”

When they reached the ship, Lance tossed Faye a rope ladder and said, “But you know, a bottled ship is more or less a sunken one.”

Faye put a foot on the lowest rung. “Because neither one’s going anywhere.”

Lance nodded and they clambered up onto deck.

There’s a certain puppetry in the assembly of these models. Sometimes they call them impossible ships. You slide the pieces in, tissue sails, thread, whittled wood, and you tug them into place from the outside using little tweezers, hooks, needles, and string. You pry and prod until it’s something you’re proud of, and then the cork goes into place.

“It’s sturdier than you’d think,” Lance had assured Faye as he patted a mast. She’d responded too readily, “That’s what I’m afraid of.” And for a while they pretended not to hear each other.

They fashioned hammocks from fishing nets. They stole scraps from the sails, folded them into paper cranes, and arranged a flightless flock along the rails of the ship. They cut string on their teeth and made the kinds of bracelets that kids make at camp. They scaled the masts, danced from bow to stern, and sprawled on the hard water beneath the bowsprit. There, they bathed in sunlight that passed through windowpane first, and then bottle glass, before it reached their skin.

They’re telling stories to each other. They’re laughing.

Then Lance asks Faye if she’s still seeing Mark. Faye asks Lance in return if he’s decided to go back and finish school.

No room for secrets within glass.

Up on deck, Lance is compelled to confess to more. He isn’t leaving the boat-in-a-bottle he says. Not now. Not ever.

“Of course you’re going to leave,” Faye says, dragging her thumb across the lacquered gangplank.

Lance crosses the ship and leans against the starboard rails. He examines the glass perimeter, cleans his fingernails, crosses one foot over the other. Then he turns to find Faye at the captain’s wheel.

“We could try long distance if you wanted,” he says.

Faye grabs the wheel spokes. She likes having something to do with her hands, to ground her thoughts.

“…but I think it’s really for the best that we don’t. ”

“What is this, Lance? Why’d you invite me here?”

“I’m ready to settle down, Faye, whether you are or not.”

“But here?” Faye asks. She glances past the glass enclosure at the looming office bookshelf outside it. Then she gives the wheel in her hands a spin. She wishes that the wood were splintered, dusty.

“You could stay here with me,” Lance adds, uncertainly.

Faye’s hair is braided, like the ship’s figurehead’s, and in her anger she feels as stiff as that mermaid with her carved chest strained toward the sea.

Faye marches across the deck and says, “I know a thing or two about escape, and you’re doing it wrong, Lance.”

Then she’s down the rope ladder and across the sea, one foot after the other, one last time.

Her shoulders are already starting to feel too large for the bottleneck as Faye passes through it. With her feet back on hardwood, she drives the cork into the bottle with the heel of her hand, and she lifts the bottle to her face.

Lance is lounging on the gangplank with a fishing pole.

Faye avoids his eyes, and lets her own rove the ship deck. “Eleven sails to take you nowhere.” She can’t hear what he’s saying, and she doesn’t care anymore, not really, but on the other side of the glass, Lance replies, “Eleven sails isn’t anything more or less than I want.”

He likes how still the sails are, how they don’t need the wind to get anywhere because they’re already exactly where they ought to be.

Faye’s at a dig, in a valley that used to be a sea long ago, but maybe not as long ago as you’d think.

She’s crouching with her forearms on her thighs when she dredges an old copper coin from the earth. It’s a nice find. Good condition. Whole.

But it’s facedown in the dirt, and Faye has to remove it with her brush and her pick. She blows air out her cheeks to clear the dust, and she pries the piece free, wipes it clean against her chest. It’s late, neither day nor night, so she holds the coin out of the shade and into what soft sunlight is left in the valley. That’s the light she first sees the coin’s kingly profile in. His face is so clearly hewn in the metal, like new.

Faye’s still holding the coin when she takes her seat on the bus at the end of the day, bound for the hotel.

She rests her ponytail against the window and sets her boots on the seat across the aisle, one heel balancing on the other’s toe, and the artifact is on her stomach. She studies it. It’s been still for so long now, for centuries, and it’s moving now. Down the dusty road and up the mountain, but it’ll be in a museum exhibit with others like it soon enough.

It’s funny, but lots of things just end up behind glass, and that’s how we learn from them.

Erin-PerazaErin Peraza is a Philadelphia-based writer of short fiction and screenplays. She has had an artist/writer collaboration published in Symbiosis Magazine, and her story “On a Whale Watch, Sober” won second place in the 2014 Phi Kappa Sigma Prize. She was also featured in the Emerging Philadelphia Writers program of LIVE at the Writers House. Erin is currently working on her fiction portfolio, while she works and eats at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.

KENTUCKY SNAKES by Shaun Turner

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Black Rat Snake

KENTUCKY SNAKES
by Shaun Turner

Me and Dorsey worked with Gross Lumber down in the woods behind Viola Creek and we’d cut our share of trees.

In the woods, not even Lloyd Gross cared how many beers we drank. All the loggers—usually men from McKee—would split a paper-bagged six-pack around noon and just relax. A bird-call would echo, and the foliage would brush against itself, and the insects would hum just behind the brush, and we would puncture our cans with a long metal churchkey in a way that felt smooth, natural.

Two years ago, Dorsey was buzzed and he spotted this black rat snake coiled on a pine branch about five feet up.

“If it were a copperhead, it could’ve bit me on the neck,” he said, pulling a piece of line from his pocket.

“You place the snare where they least expect it,” Dorsey looped the wire into a noose. “You place it in the middle of their run.”

To make a good snare, you must become the animal. You can find their signs near to water: the fresh wet scat, the muddy tracks, the light crushing of brush. Once you see one or two of these signs, you can find the animal, know its run.

He looped the trigger to the stake and set the trap. An hour later, threw the dead rat snake into Viola Creek.

“Once you’ve seen the animal and its tracks, setting snares is a numbers game,” Dorsey said. And it was true. We never saw another one.

Shaun TurnerShaun Turner writes in West Virginia, where he is the Assistant Fiction Editor for the Cheat River Review. His fiction can be found in the following great publications: Blue Lyra Review, Word Riot, JONATHAN, and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. 

 

Image credit: Black Rat Snake on Wikipedia

PLATITUDES by Joshua Isard

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Platitudes
PLATITUDES
by Joshua Isard

The only platitude anyone should ever offer is I love you. It is the only phrase that they know is true, that you know is true.

You’ll be fine, you’ll be great, everything will work out—those phrases aren’t meant to make you feel better, only to forget the problem until you’re at a safe distance from the speaker.

The only person who told me the truth was my boss. My boss who puts an away message on his email every night when he leaves the office and once looked at my phone and asked what I do with that glowing rectangle gizmo. He shook my hand, congratulated me, asked if it was planned—and then he said that anyone who doesn’t tell me how hard this is going to be is just slinging bullshit. He said that the happiness getting happier, that’s all true, but the other end, the sadness becoming utter misery, that’s true too.

Don’t forget it, he said.

I told all this to my dad, who’d originally told me I’d be fine, and he said that yeah, that’s true, but you’ll be fine.

Joshua-IsardJoshua Isard is an author and teacher living in the Philadelphia area. His first novel, Conquistador of the Useless, was published in 2013 by Cinco Puntos Press, and his short fiction has appeared in journals such as StoryChord, Northwind, and The Broadkill Review. He is currently the director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Arcadia University.

IT’S THE NOISE YOU MISS MOST IN THIS GIANT NEW WORLD by Henry Margenau

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It's-the-Noise-You-Miss-Most

IT’S THE NOISE YOU MISS MOST IN THIS GIANT NEW WORLD
by Henry Margenau

As soon as Ray’s wife had walked out, all the appliances stopped working, like she took all the electricity along with her. The refrigerator stopped humming and a few light bulbs blew out. The television wouldn’t turn on because the batteries in the remote had died. The angry voices were silent. Everything stopped but the heartbeat of the mantle clock, which ticked away sheepishly as if not to disturb the quiet.

It had been a long while since Ray was alone. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He made a turkey sandwich without the crust and ate it and then decided to go out. He put his hat, coat, and gloves on and called up the stairs, “I’m going,” before he realized what he was doing. When he left, he still closed the door behind him softly.

That was days ago. Since then, he spent most of the time walking. Walking in the park. Walking around town. Walking along the train tracks that hadn’t seen commuter transit in decades and whose ties were half hidden in the embrace of overgrown ryegrass. He passed evenings at the Rail House, drinking and reading, and slept in a rented room across the street.

“Lookie here now,” the man at the end of the bar said.

The paper was spread out in front of him on the bar. The edges had started to curl and there was a wet ring on the right page from his glass.

“The planets are moving away from the sun and each other at an alarming speed. The entire galaxy is spiraling forward and away.”

“Where’d you get that?” Ray said.

“The paper,” the man said.

“I don’t feel any different. Should I feel different? Shouldn’t I feel the speed like on a roller coaster or something?”

The man looked from Ray to the bartender who only responded with a shrug.

“And besides,” Ray said, “the paper’s not the gospel truth.”

“This is not just some scandal sheet. This is the New York Times.”

“My point,” Ray said.

“What the hell do you know about it?” the man said.

The man went back to his drink and Ray went back to his. It really didn’t seem so implausible when you thought about it. He felt it now in his own house, in his own life. Everything seemed like it was getting bigger and farther away. The negative space repelled him so powerfully that it drove him right out the front door.

When his wife left, Ray tried staying home in all that quiet, but now even the thought of it was unbearable. Everything in the house was made for two. Two chairs at the kitchen table, two sides of the bed. Now, the furniture seemed an odd fit for each room. Everything was too spread out. Ray felt too small for the house, or perhaps the house felt too big for him. The house was not just big but vacant, empty. He would have to replace the furniture, no doubt. Get rid of the loveseat and replace it with a few odd chairs here or there.

He knew when she was there, washing dishes and whistling under her breath, doing crosswords in the blue armchair with that constant papery scratch of her mechanical pencil (she was never bold enough to work in pen). He knew it even if he didn’t advertise it. The small sounds you barely hear until they stop making waves, he thought. Now he could feel the difference.

“You want another?” the bartender asked.

Ray looked at his empty glass. Then he looked at his surroundings. The loudmouth at the end of the bar was smoking the stub of a little cigarillo and sipping bourbon in between puffs and staring into space. There were usually a lot of sad characters at the Rail House, down and out middle-aged men, like the loudmouth, who should be home with their families if they had families, older women who sat in twos and threes, cackling and knocking over glasses, and people like Ray somewhere in between. Out the window it had begun to snow and Ray could see his little motel through the gray flakes.

“Not for me, thanks,” Ray said. “I should be getting home.”

He paid his tab and left a few singles for the bartender. It was colder than he thought outside so he wrapped his scarf over his mouth and pulled his wool hat down over his eyes. The thick veil of snow masked most of the foot traffic on the sidewalk. It made the air quiet the way snow usually does and Ray wondered if perhaps he was the only one out walking.  He had just finished that thought when he bumped into someone right in front of him.

“Keep your distance, fella,” the voice said.

“Sorry,” Ray said.

He continued on and, after walking for what seemed like a few blocks, Ray realized that he hadn’t seen a traffic light or an intersection. He looked back but, even squinting, could just barely see the lights of the Rail House sign, a few hundred yards back. That’s strange, he thought, and looked at his watch. I’ve been walking for half an hour. He continued up the street for another ten minutes or so until he came to a light. There was a group of people waiting to cross. Ray tapped the guy in front of him on the shoulder.

“What block is this?” Ray said.

“Clarkson,” the man said.

“Clarkson?”

“Yeah, Clarkson. The sign’s right there,” the man said and pointed.

“That’s the first light after the Crown Motel,” Ray said.

“Yeah.”

“The first light?” Ray said.

“Yeah, the first light. Are you lost?”

Ray thought for a minute. Am I? No. Drunk, maybe. That was it. Drunk as a skunk.

“No, I’m ok. Thanks,” Ray said.

When the light turned green, Ray went to step off the curb and was stopped short by the man who pulled him back by the arm.

“Hey, what are you doing?” the man said. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“Huh?” Ray said.

The man let Ray go, then sat down on the curb and lowered himself backwards off the edge.

“Take it easy,” the man said right before his head disappeared beneath the curb.

Ray looked to his right and saw other people headed down the curb. Some made their way down on their bellies like the man he spoke to and others went forward, reaching their hands down to be helped by someone at the bottom. Ray walked to the curb and looked down. The street was a good five feet down from the sidewalk.

He sat reluctantly on the curb, with his feet dangling over the side. Far on the opposite side of the street he saw people climbing up the curb to the next block, some making it on their own, finding little footholds from the cracks in the pavement, and others being hoisted up on the hands of strangers. Suddenly he felt a foot nudge his back.

“Come on, buddy. Today,” a voice said.

With that, Ray slid forward and pushed himself off the curb. He stood up to dust off his coat and was startled by the sight before him. It was the main drag that he had been down hundreds of times before only on a much larger scale. There were cars and buses as usual, but the street was as wide as a tarmac. People scampered up and down the five-foot curbs on each side, trying to make it up to the sidewalk before the light turned green. Rather than scale the curb again, he walked on the shoulder of the road. The streetlights projected onto the street the tall shadows of the people walking above. A cab pulled over alongside him.

“Need a ride?” the driver said. “You should probably let those socks dry off.”

Ray looked down and saw that he was ankle deep in slush.

“I’m alright,” Ray said.

“Ok, then,” said the driver.

The cab pulled away and merged back into the four or five lanes of traffic. Ray kept walking until he could no longer ignore the people honking their horns and yelling at him to get out of the road. He found an unoccupied piece of curb and made his way up the concrete wall to the sidewalk.

He sat down on a bench next to a forty-foot tall streetlight and let the snow land gently on him. The main street looked the same as it did that afternoon, same newsstands, same bars, but the buildings looked as if their proprietors had added an extra story or two to the top of each. They were set far back from the street as well. The walkway from the sidewalk to the entrance of the post office, for instance, was at least twice as long as when Ray mailed a letter the other day. It was a little after rush hour and people went about their business, helping each other up and down the enormous wall of a curb, walking the hundred feet or so to the front door of a restaurant, like nothing had changed.

Maybe nothing had changed. Maybe it was just that he was only now feeling it, the space he put between himself and everybody else. If he felt it earlier or just more deeply, the distance, maybe she would have delayed her exit, Ray thought. He didn’t know why his life had always carried on so inwardly but, watching the snowflakes and the little life going on around him in every direction, he regretted that it had.

Across the street, directly facing his bench, was the Abstand Building, the tallest building in town even amidst the towering masses in this strange new world. It rose away from everything else around it, alone up there, profiled by the bright lights below, no one to talk to at that height. Ray stared up into the Abstand until the wind became too much and he lost feeling in his brow. The people on the street went about their business, which was something unmistakably separate from his. There was a couple coming down the street, arm in arm, looking for a place to take in the sights, looking much a part of the expanding world around them, and so Ray gave up his seat.

 

Eventually, the center of town began to fade behind him as he walked on. It didn’t seem to matter which way. The night air was so unforgiving that he couldn’t feel his fingers or toes, like parts of his own body were separating off and floating away in contradictory directions.

It was a poignant exit; he had to give that to her. One final clash of voices, hers more than his, and then the purest silence. It was the same silence that Ray had kept until she was gone. It wasn’t malicious. He simply failed to realize that other people aren’t as content in the company of their own thoughts, that other people depend on conversation to reaffirm their own sense of being.

At some point, what felt like hours later, Ray found himself in his neighborhood. Though it was still early enough, the neighborhood was nearly pitch dark except for the streetlights. The houses on the block were set too far into the blackness to be seen from the street and so Ray was alone between the giant furry skeletons of sycamore trees that leaned tiredly in his direction. It was so quiet, he felt like he was the last man on earth. How strange, he thought, that the drink had still not worn off.

When he got to his street there were more ghostly sycamores and as he walked along the block, the streetlights burned out one by one. He could see his house in the distance. Really, it was too dark to see the actual house but he recognized the mailbox and the way the curb broke there.

The driveway had to be at least a mile long now. If it weren’t for the moonlight, the house would have been impossible to see in the distance. As it was, the only thing discernable within the jagged silhouette was the porch light, nearing extinction now, glowing a downcast honey orange. Ray must have left it on when he went out. He couldn’t help but feel like the house was trying to keep him at arm’s length.

Ray surveyed the landscape. On all sides was darkness and, sitting on his porch swing, he felt like he was on an island or his own planet. He stopped the bench to see if it was the swinging he felt or the planet hurtling away through space. Entranced with the night sky, Ray was surprised to hear a barely audible voice in the distance.

“Hi, Ray!”

“Is that you, Wilt?” Ray said.

Wilt’s house was so far away that Ray couldn’t really see it, but if he squinted he could just make out a few small lights dotting the dark horizon like the last embers of a firecracker that had wept back to earth. It wasn’t until he was alone in the midst of the blackness that he realized how sensitive he was to the sound of other people. There was only Ray now, his house, and the moon, bright and big as a serving plate, painting the landscape with porcelain light.

“The universe is expanding!” Wilt shouted.

“What?”

“The universe is expanding!”

“So I’ve been told,” Ray said.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

Henry-MargenauHenry Margenau is a writer from Montclair, New Jersey.  His work has previously appeared in Prick of the Spindle and The Normal Review. He has an MFA in fiction from The New School and currently teaches writing at Montclair State University, Drew University, and Fairleigh Dickinson University.  This is his first headshot.

 

 

Image credit: NASA on Flickr

BELIEVERS by Elizabeth Mosier

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“Believers” was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015
Believers

BELIEVERS
by Elizabeth Mosier

The sauceboat showed up in a bag of filthy artifacts dug up at the National Constitution Center site. To my untrained eye, it was just another dirty dish for a volunteer technician like me to wash, label, and catalogue. But judging from the buzz in the archaeology lab the day the ceramics collector visited, this piece was important, even precious.

The archaeologists believed they’d unearthed a Colonial-era treasure: an intact example of Bonnin and Morris soft-paste porcelain made by the American China Manufactory in the Southwark section of Philadelphia. Corroded and discolored, the sauceboat didn’t resemble the company’s 19 known surviving pieces (sauceboats, tiny baskets, pickle dishes, and stands) exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Tests to determine its chemical structure were inconclusive and the underglaze blue-painted decoration was gone, but the sauceboat was the right shape and bore the right factory mark. If authentic, it was historically significant: a souvenir from the campaign to sell locally-produced ceramics to colonists, which lasted until Josiah Wedgewood flooded the market with cheap imported English porcelain in the testy years leading up to the Revolutionary War.

But history was only half of it; something else seemed to be at stake. As I inked field specimen numbers onto a seemingly endless pile of pottery sherds, the collector toured the lab. He boasted about valuable acquisitions and revealed his inexperience with mending artifacts to a team of archaeologists who routinely put together shattered vessels like a novelist fits words. His tone and swagger reminded me of an English professor who’d once told me casually—not expecting an argument—that creative work is validated by criticism. As if making meaning wasn’t the purpose of writing fiction; as if the point of archaeology was to display objects in a glass case, and not to learn about the people who used them.

Mosier3

With an exasperated sigh, the collector dismissed treasure seekers who hoped against his expert appraisals that what they’d found in Grandma’s attic was worth something. “Believers,” he said. Bingo, I thought. With a word, he’d unmasked himself. Though the archaeologists might never know if the sauceboat was a true Bonnin and Morris, uncertainty wouldn’t change their work. And yet the collector had discounted these cultural stewards, who sift through our soil and process every last seed and bone and bead, who must temper the critic’s urge to curate with the creator’s habit of curiosity.  Believers, indeed: artists and archaeologists will spend our lives searching because the process of searching is valuable.

Like any object, the sauceboat means something different to every person who encounters it. For the collector, the thing itself is valuable, both for its scarcity and its arcanum, the trade-secret recipe for turning coarse elements such as glass and bone and soapstone into fine porcelain. For the archaeologists, the object’s importance is partly its provenience, which provides an important context clue. British-born Gousse Bonnin and Philadelphian George Anthony Morris were in business for only two years; the manufacturers’ narrow production window (1770-1772) helps date other artifacts found in the same strata, on a timeline moving backwards from the contemporary surface to the deep past.

For me, the object conjures Thanksgiving—not my elegant adult remake of the holiday, but the dismal childhood version: my family awkward in dress-up clothing, arguing and blasting aerosol cheese onto Ritz crackers while a turkey roasts interminably, filling the house with the sad smell of sage. My family of origin is my personal arcanum, an alchemy of resentment and grief that rendered me smooth and brittle. Memories are my material; writing is the way I keep myself from shattering.

Mosier1

My point is that we value objects (or not) according to the personal meaning that we bestow. Perhaps it’s sacrilegious to say it, but in the months since the sauceboat’s discovery, I’ve often wondered if the pristine Bonnin and Morris pickle stand on exhibit at the art museum escaped the privy pit not because it was treasured, but because it is absurd. In life as in memory, what we don’t use is preserved intact. But the archaeological record is often created in crisis, with emotion guiding what we take with us and what we leave behind.

I speak from some experience. In six years, I’ve had to empty four houses full of objects collected by declining parents and departed parents-in-law—and though Thanksgiving dinner china was abundantly represented, it never once made any sibling’s must-have list. I gave away fancy serving pieces to the Goodwill in my hometown; I donated dishes, flatware, and pots and pans to the Nationalities Service Center, to help furnish the homes of refugees recently arrived in Philadelphia from all over the world.  For myself, I claimed items with personal value: my mother’s measuring spoons, the wooden doll cradle my father made for me, my mother-in-law’s trove of craft supplies. These small, forgotten things are like the fingerprints potters leave in the clay: evidence of the maker in what lost family members finished or hoped to finish one day.

When my beloved mother-in-law died, the apartment seemed even quieter with the noise of unstrung beads clicking together in drawers, and fat spools of colorful quilting thread rolling from side to side in wooden trays. There were boxes and boxes of fabric still scented with her drugstore perfume and permeated with the sadness of things left undone. Overwhelmed, I emailed my friend Marta Maretich in London, who quilts as brilliantly as she writes. I knew that Marta—whose own fabric stash she describes as “the size of a large, well-fed sow, packed in a plaid plastic bag with handles, the kind you see on the news in Asian refugee situations”—would know what to do.

Mosier2

“What would I keep?” she responded, in a message I read in the wee hours with relief and gratitude. “This is the practical me talking: all pure cottons, all solids, even dull, muddy ones because they make a useful contrast with brights. Anything geometric, anything really vintage. Anything seasonal, because even when you don’t think you’ll ever use a poinsettia print, you find yourself needing one. Orange fabrics are oddly useful in many situations, not least at Halloween. Scraps from things she made for you, because you will use them in your own projects and think of her. Fabrics that remind you of her for any reason whatsoever. Green fabrics, because you love green—there should be plenty in the stash, because undoubtedly she knew you loved green, too.”

It was exactly what I needed to hear to get through the heartbreak of breaking ground. As I worked my way through the fabric, I mourned my mother-in-law, but I felt hope, too. The heirloom quilt I plan to piece together from her remnants will be a rare accomplishment given my meager sewing skills. It won’t be anything a collector would want, but it will comfort my daughters in incalculable ways long after I am gone.

 

Elizabeth-MosierElizabeth Mosier is the author of The Playgroup, part of the Gemma Open Door series to promote adult literacy, My Life as a Girl (Random House), and numerous short stories and essays. She has recently completed a new novel, Ghost Signs. Her website is www.ElizabethMosier.com.

 

 

 

Image credits: Top, Bow Porcelain Molded Sauceboat, England, c. 1765 – 68, courtesy M. Ford Creech Antiques, Memphis, TN. Other images by Elizabeth Mosier. You can also see an authentic Bonnin and Morris soft-paste porcelain sauceboat in the Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection in Gallery 106, American Art, First Floor.

 

FUJIKO NAKAYA, FOG ARTIST by Myra Lotto

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FUJIKO NAKAYA, FOG ARTIST
by Myra Lotto

"Veil", Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, 2014. Photo ©. Richard Barnes, 2014

“Veil,” Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. © Richard Barnes, 2014

On the last Saturday morning of April, my husband and I put our two young children in the car for the hour-long drive to New Canaan, Connecticut. We were on our way to attend the opening event for my aunt Fujiko’s newest art installation, Veil, on display at architect Philip Johnson’s former residence and National Trust Historic Site, the Glass House.

Fujiko Nakaya, or “Fuji” as her family calls her, is an artist working with fog as a medium. As many times as I’ve described her work, I am always surprised by what should be, by now, a predictable reaction of bewilderment. That morning, my five-year-old son was no different:

“But Mommy, how does Fuji make fog?”
“She uses nozzles to turn water and air into fog.
“Can Fuji make ice like Elsa from Frozen?!”
“No, just fog.”

The author's son in the fog at the Philip Johnson Glass House, April 2014.

The author’s son in the fog at the Philip Johnson Glass House, April 2014. Photo: Myra Lotto

Across a forty-year partnership with Mee Industries, a fog nozzle company, Fuji developed a technology and art out of spraying potable water into the air, creating natural water fog clouds that can hover, billow, or flow away in response to existing environmental conditions. Mee’s nozzles are found in grocery store produce cases, greenhouses, and other spaces that need to maintain consistently high levels of humidity. Like most of us, my son had seen this technology many times, but not yet understood it as art.

At the Glass House, Fuji’s Veil shrouds the house for 10 to 15 minutes every hour. The small, rectangular, transparent building vanishes under the cloud, peeking out, disappearing, and reappearing as the fog dissipates. As I approached the entrance, I watched the fog flow quickly past the building, reacting to a strong gust of wind. I shuffled slowly to prevent slipping on the slick walkway as my son sprinted past me, running full speed into the mist.

The adults laughed nervously, responding to our own temporary blindness, hoping not to bump into each other or into the glass. My son’s laughter was of quite a different sort. Once inside, the volume of the fog’s moisture was apparent. Streams of water cascaded down the outside walls, which were mostly opaque. Johnson’s sparsely furnished residence has only a bed, sitting area, dining set, a small service kitchen, and little else. The house, with views of the landscape in every direction, boasts “expensive wallpaper,” as Johnson once called it. Turned white with fog, the space felt suddenly tomb-like.

The Glass House, the surrounding buildings, and the 49-acre property are a mix of contrasting aesthetics. Classical and modern influences combine, uniting the austerity of Palladian architecture with the sculpted nature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape painting. Into this mix, Johnson inserts spare, angular buildings like Da Monsta, completed in 1995, a black and red behemoth, almost cartoonish in appearance, drawing on German Expressionist design.

Veil enters this hybrid landscape as an equalizer, seeming perfectly at home against a natural backdrop or swirling around the foot of a bunker-like, minimalist house with expensive wallpaper. A cloud feels disorienting to the person standing inside of it. Viewed from afar, fog creates a preternatural scene, rolling across the ground as if the sky had fallen. Humorous in either context, Fuji’s fog relies on nature as its ally and ultimate designer.

◊

Fuji’s first sculpture was presented at Expo ’70 in Osaka, the first Worlds Fair in Japan, which was organized on the theme of “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” In late 1968, Fuji was surprised to receive a call from engineer and Bell Labs veteran Billy Klüver, who wanted to hire her as the local coordinator for the Expo ’70 Pavilion.

Fuji had heard of Klüver by reputation. An important figure in the art world, Klüver was director of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Klüver had heard of Fuji as well, from Robert Rauschenberg and David Tudor, who accompanied the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to Japan in 1964; she had been enlisted to help with local performances.

In Rauschenberg, Fuji found a close friend who invited her to his home whenever she was in New York. He loved Japanese food, and with so few Japanese restaurants in the city at the time, she would buy fish at Fulton Street Fish Market, whipping up her own versions of Japanese dishes in the antique kitchen of Rauschenberg’s studio on Lafayette. Rauschenberg, in return, treated her to Texas-style stew with chunks of beef, beans, and tomatoes that had simmered on the stove for hours.

Rauschenberg and Tudor had collaborated with Klüver since the start of E.A.T., hosting press conferences, exhibitions, and occasionally bankrolling the project. As E.A.T. grew, so did its ranks. Performance artist and Robert Whitman and engineer Fred Waldhauer were also founding members; the eventual roster of artists included John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer.

Klüver, a magnetic personality and a person of seemingly bottomless creativity, also became a dear friend. He passed away in 2004, but Fuji still recalls with great fondness how she could rely on him to think with the objectivity of a scientist while still being moved by the beauty of humanistic thoughts and practices. Klüver was a democratic thinker confronting an American art scene very much associated with capitalism. He always operated in the spirit of democracy, where he grounded his aesthetics and his practice.

Fog Bridge # 72494 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

Fog Bridge # 72494 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

E.A.T. was founded to promote collaboration between artists and engineers, providing the research and infrastructure necessary to realize challenging, interdisciplinary projects. The goal was not simply to convince engineers to lend their technology to artists, but instead to find opportunities for genuine collaboration. John Cage described their work as “not about artists and engineers talking; it’s about hands on, working together.”

With only eighteen months left before the Pepsi Pavilion was due for completion, E.A.T. sent their artists and engineers to work on site in Osaka. In subsequent months they made more than 100 trips between New York and Osaka.

Artist and filmmaker Robert Breer, Whitman, Tudor, and sculptor Frosty Meyers designed the Pepsi Pavilion, with Kluver, Waldhauer, and Rauschenberg contributing. Their idea was to build an exhibit encountered through sensory perception. They hoped to overcome the conventional relationship between artist and audience—ending the practice of showing and being shown—by providing a live environment filled with sounds and images where people could form their own experiences. The exhibit would react to its visitors, transforming itself.

The Pepsi Pavilion was designed as a white, spherical, air-structured balloon, with an internal mirrored surface, requiring maintained air pressure, durability, and a strategy to deter vandalism. It measured 27 meters in diameter: the largest spherical mirror ever attempted. In theory, images should appear as holograms in mid-air, just one of a range of optical effects that would occur inside the dome.

Breer designed seven white, dome-shaped moving sculptures, placed on the plaza in front of the Pavilion. Their movement and sound were barely perceptible, but they would immediately change direction when they encountered something. Meyers designed a triangular mirror to follow the sun, reflecting its rays onto the Pavilion.

Early in the design process, the artists decided to shroud the Pavilion with an artificial cloud. Fuji quickly took interest and volunteered to assist. Her late father, my grandfather, formerly a low-temperature physicist at Hokkaido University, left Fuji with relevant contacts at the Department of Meteorology. Klüver immediately put her in charge of the cloud. She began the long process of learning. Was it possible to create and maintain a large amount of natural water fog outside, at the peak of summer? If so, how?

There are many ways to generate artificial fog, but most cooling methods are prohibitively expensive. Dry ice was not feasible with such quantities; it would have posed a hazard, expelling CO2 and attracting mosquitos. Fuji decided it would have to be natural water fog, so she embarked on a search for a fog spraying system, but could only find sprayers to produce a misty rain. The 20-30 micron diameter droplets of water required seemed impossible to fabricate. Although she expressed concerns, Klüver remained optimistic.

In May, Fuji began a series of experiments on-site, using a model of the topography surrounding the Pepsi Pavilion, testing wind patterns via wind tunnel simulation. By June, Klüver had located Thomas Mee, whose company had just developed an artificial fog made with ammonia and chloride, used for farming. Fuji insisted the fog be breathable, so that people could play in it, so she asked Mee to modify his system for use with potable water. Shortly after, her first fog sculpture was realized.

◊

In the decades since Expo ’70, Fuji has produced more than 50 fog installations and performances featuring natural water fog, including 14 permanent installations. Her Fog Sculpture #08025, “F.O.G.” is installed at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, cleverly named for the architect of that building, Frank O. Gehry. Fog Sculpture #94925, “Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere,” is a permanent installation in the Sculpture Garden at the Australian National Gallery, Canberra.

Fog Sculpture #94925 "Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere," Sculpture Garden, Australian National Gallery, Canberra

Fog Sculpture #94925 “Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere,” Sculpture Garden, Australian National Gallery, Canberra

Asked to describe her art, Fuji immediately notes its whimsical nature. Fog conceals features of a landscape, hiding them from sight while also rendering the invisible as visible. She designs her pieces to obscure, like the Glass House, but she is also conscious of what her clouds reveal: the pathway of the wind, the humidity of the atmosphere, and the environment to which her art responds.

Fuji’s art also reveals a prejudice against fog. As a potential hazard to travelers, fog is assumed to be disruptive. It is something to avoid and view only at a distance. Aerial photography of cloud cover is stunning from afar, but up close a picture of fog looks like a photographic error: white, blurry, and overexposed.

Fog Sculpture #08025 "F.O.G.," Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain

Fog Sculpture #08025 “F.O.G.,” Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain

The first time I saw a fog installation in person, I was in my late teens, and throughout my childhood, “fog art” and “fog sculpture” had sounded completely absurd. Language, I later realized, had failed to describe an art so powerful as to blind and deafen its audience, entering the body with every inhalation, covering the skin with a thin sheet of water.

Instinctively, adults do not know how to react to fog, but children do. Those who visit Fuji’s installations are charmed by the immersive, multi-sensory experience. For the young ones, it can be terrifying and liberating. Finally, something they are encouraged to touch, where play is an integral part of appreciating the art. For the grown ups watching them, it is similarly novel.

Veil is Fuji’s second recent installation in the U.S., following Fog Bridge #72494, installed in April 2013 for the opening of the San Francisco Exploratorium. Until recently, few had heard of her work, and with so many barriers of description and access, even fewer could experience or understand it. But following these installations and an extremely successful project at Paris’s Place de la République, titled Fog Square (2013), Fuji is busier than ever as the size of her audience swells.

Social media technologies and camera phones have played a role in popularizing fog sculpture and making it accessible to global audiences. Visitors are obviously enchanted and eager to communicate the feeling of stepping into the fog. But when Fuji visits one of her installations, it’s the children she likes to watch: they are her most ardent fans. She knows that children love something about fog that the rest of us have outgrown. When children step forward, they are delighted by how the fog steps back. They dive in as the fog wraps around them. When they look, it hides. When they chase, it disappears. When they emerge, they’re typically soaking wet, a bit breathless, and flushed in the cheeks. But they are happy, and so is she.

Veil is on display at the Glass House through November 30, 2014.

Fujiko-Nakaya

Fujiko Nakaya is an artist living in Tokyo, Japan. Her sculptures can be found in art museums, parks, theaters, and public squares around the globe. Representative works include Foggy Forest at Children’s Park in Showa Kinen Park, Tokyo (1992), and installations for the Yokohama Triennale (2008) and the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012). In addition to her work with fog, Nakaya has long been regarded as a pioneer of video art in Japan. Since 1971, she has created video artworks based on the theme of communication. In 1972, she co-founded VIDEO HIROBA, Japan’s first video art collective, and in 1980, she opened Video Gallery SCAN in Harajuku, Tokyo, where she organized workshops and competitions to promote young video artists. For four decades, SCAN hosted video exhibitions and international festivals for cultural exchange. Photo credit: Nelson Oliveira/New Canaan News

Myra-Lotto-headshotMyra Lotto is a scholar and teacher living in New York City. She writes about about rural-themed literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, landscape and garden architecture, laboring-class literature, and disability. She has taught courses on British Literature, poetics, writing, and communications at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Her ongoing pedagogical interests involve forming communities to promote learning and employing interactive technology in early childhood education.

 

Videos:
Veil by Fujiko Nakaya at Philip Johnson Glass House, courtesy Myra Lotto
Fujiko Nakaya: Veil. Fog Installation at The Glass House, by Heinrich Schmidt, courtesy VernissageTV
Fog Sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya at Toyota Municiple Museum of art in Toyota, Aichi
Fog Sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya for Dynamo at the Grand Palais, Paris

Image Credits: Wikipedia, except where noted.

TO CATCH THE OCEAN IN YOUR BUCKET YOU HAVE TO POINT YOUR BUCKET TOWARD THE SHORE and HOLLOWS by Susan Charkes

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Bucket by Ocean

TWO POEMS
by Susan Charkes

To Catch The Ocean In Your Bucket
You Have To Point Your Bucket Toward The Shore

remember the time you forgot
that bird’s name? the one

that sings all night if
you’re not listening. you wake

to snow on the lawn: that’s
how you know you missed

your calling. seagulls can drink
sea water yet dragonflies

choke on dragons. words are not
the answer, but they hold it for

safekeeping. mist fogging your
glasses obscures the haze.

◊

orange-peel

Hollows

1.
you would peel an orange in a single long strip, making
a beginning and an end.

2.
to addle a goose egg: coat with corn oil, smothering
the embryo. place it back in the nest:
she won’t know the difference.

3.
blind fish nibble at numbered ping-pong balls
cast into the underground river
whose mouth has never been found.

Susan-CharkesSusan Charkes lives in southeastern Pennsylvania where she is a freelance writer/editor and consultant. Her recent poetry has been published or is forthcoming in, among others, APIARY, Gargoyle, Prick of the Spindle, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She is also the author of three nonfiction books.

Image credit: “Bucket” by  zizzybaloobah on Flickr

GROWING UP by Devin Kelly

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Growing-UpGROWING UP
by Devin Kelly

She is naked save for pink socks, and her pale young behind squeaks as she slides, or inches, down the balustrade. The sound echoes off the wooden floorboards and she imagines a tiny creature screaming in short bursts. She cannot determine if the screams are pained or joyful. All things contain a little of both, she thinks. Twirling, orbiting around the living room, she laughs as only a child can laugh at the midnight hour when her parents are asleep and the dark, turning world seems to house a different sort of life. Pale moonlight filtered in slatted lines across the floor. A painting on the wall of a high-heeled woman in a red dress with legs splayed in mid-dance. She recalls something her dance teacher said just a week ago: “All life is a delicate balance between love and hurt.” She did not know what that meant. Hurt for her was the lingered ache of her red behind after sliding naked down the railing. The crater slowly caving into her chest as the outline of her breasts began to introduce itself. She dances. Music rises from the wood below. She does not know who is playing the instruments. There is the whining yawn of a discordant fiddle. She does not know that someone, or some things, are watching her through the windows, shrouded in the cool polar-patched blanket of the still night. She does not know that the world itself has yawed on its axis, and what strange creatures have formulated around her house to peer and listen and watch a young girl age. They touch her with their eyes. Her skin prickles. She closes her eyes and spins on five pink-clothed toes. A man with a face six inches thin and three feet long scribbles on a pad, using a rubric to grade her twirl. He gives her a passing grade but still shakes his head. The creatures outside whisper amongst themselves.

“With what grace she ages,” one says.

“I want to hold her in my fourth arm,” one says.

“I want to clothe her in my dusted brow.”

Who knows how the demons gaze at youth. Who knows how they creep their thin spindled hands into the fissures between skin and lodge slow and silent into the space between a child’s ribs. But outside they are looking in at this naked child dancing, moving in unfettered whispers in and out of the shadows cast by starlight. Outside they are crying. The tears, hot, damp, big, burn their craggy faces. They say we will spare her. They ask could life be only love without hurt? They say it is our job to make love beautiful. They say we must not spare her. They cry more. They are scared. One reaches his long-fingered hand through the window the way an eel slides through water. Then another. Then all of them. And they reach through the night until they touch her bare skin, then they slip inside and make her older.

Devin-KellyDevin Kelly is an MFA student at Sarah Lawrence College, by way of Fordham University. He has read as part of Lamprophonic’s Emerging New York City Writers Series, as well as at the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival. His poetry and fiction have been featured in Catch & Release, Dunes Review, and Steel Toe Review. He was a member of the 2014 Sirenland Writers Conference, hosted by One Story. He teaches Creative Writing and English to 7th graders and high schoolers in Queens, and currently lives in Harlem.

Image Credit: Lauren Hammond on Flickr

ON THE Q By Tricia Park

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

On the Q

ON THE Q
By Tricia Park

Someone is singing “Rocket Man” on the opposite side of the NQR stop at Prince Street. “I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife; It’s lonely out in space; On such a timeless flight.”

The black pillars stand tall, sprouting like steel trees from the train tracks, holding up the street as the singer’s guitar competes to be heard over a trumpet wailing at the far end of the platform.

Now the downtown train blows its horn, a loud f-sharp, and through my earplugs it sounds like an amplified cello. I look up, expecting to see a cellist somewhere and wondering if it’s someone I know, someone I went to school with. And I think of you and the day you played your cello outside in Central Park and how that brown beagle stopped and wouldn’t leave, holding his owner steadily in place, ignoring every tug and pull to head home. Children and animals stopped and stared the most.

When we were still students, you and I found a shaded spot in the park and played there all afternoon. Young mothers with strollers, laughing schoolchildren, businessmen in suits trudging their way across to the Eastside. It was the first real day of spring and the freshly cut grass smelled like hope. We played Beethoven and Mozart and Playel and Mazas and LeClair, and we played a million wrong notes and a few right ones.

Around three o’clock, a crowd of kindergarteners formed a semi-circle around us, sitting cross-legged with their hands folded in their laps. One little girl, towheaded and bespectacled, sang, “Criss-cross applesauce, spoons in the bowl.” Mothers and nannies waited, standing behind them. Unnerved because we hadn’t expected people to stop and really listen, we became reverent in the light of our young audience’s gaze. We tried harder and even the city seemed to hush, respecting our efforts and the attention of our small guests.

Our fans left as quietly as they came, into the twilight. We’d made about a hundred dollars in those hours and we counted our stash sitting in the grass, gleefully stacking piles of coins and smoothing out wrinkled dollar bills against our knees. Near the bottom of the pile was a note: ‘Thank you for your beautiful music.’

We ate out that night. Drank wine, even. We had some money left over, and as we walked home through Chinatown, we held hands without gloves for the first time since winter. You walked on the outside of the sidewalk nearest to the curb. A delivery man whizzed by on his bike, so close that his plastic bag of food grazed your knee. You turned to cover me and we stopped, my face buried in your chest. You smelled like cedar and bread and you said, Marry me, into my hair.

I looked up into your eyes and wished for the certainty I saw there, shining and hopeful. I felt a thudding but I could not tell whose heart it was: mine, yours, or both.

◊

The wheels of the arriving Q train screech against the tracks. The sound is piercing and I press my earplugs, wincing. It is rush hour and the train is full. I step inside, wedging myself into the car. The doors start to close but knock against my violin case, strapped to my back. I inhale and press against the woman in front of me, apologizing under my breath. She doesn’t reply as she bobs her head in time to music I cannot hear, white earbuds framing her face. The doors bang shut and I struggle to keep my balance, my hand cradling the side of my violin case. As the train races into the darkness, the windows flash like the beginning of a black and white film.

Soon I will arrive at the Fifty-Seventh Street station and climb the stairs up to the pavement. The wail of ambulance sirens will replace the rumble of the subway. I will see my name on the scaffolding surrounding the Hall, ever more surreal for its placement next to a picture of a very famous, very blond singer. I will wave hello to the guard and he will buzz me in through the backstage door, nodding.  I will take the far elevator to the third floor to my dressing room, where there will be bouquets in front of the mirror and dresses hanging from the cool metal rod, like ladies in waiting.

I will turn the volume down on the overhead speakers as the orchestra warms up onstage, muting all its voices, from the low rumble of the basses and cellos to the pealing tweets of the flutes and piccolo. I will begin the small rituals: the careful application of makeup (lipstick always last, the practiced strokes of the brush steadying my hand); the three pieces of dark chocolate; the small diamond earrings my grandmother gave me on my sixteenth birthday.

I will warm up with scales and go through the concerto slowly, methodically, like tracing the lines on a well-worn map. The stage manager will tap on my door, first with a ten minute call, then five. I will walk the dim corridor to the stage door, the train of my gown fluttering behind me.

The door will open, casting a long rectangle of light on the dark floor and letting in the sounds of the audience, rustling and coughing.  The people in the front row will turn and peer in, trying to catch a glimpse before I enter.

I will stand and wait, a thudding in my chest. But this time it will be my heart, alone.

Tricia Park Author Photo

Tricia Park is a concert violinist, writer, and educator. Since making her concert debut at age thirteen, Tricia has performed on five continents and received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. She is the host and producer of an original podcast called, “Is it Recess Yet? Confessions of a Former Child Prodigy.” Tricia has served on faculty at the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa and has worked for Graywolf Press. She is the co-lead of the Chicago chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that seeks to empower women and non-binary writers. She is a Juilliard graduate and received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, Tricia was awarded a Fulbright Grant to Seoul, Korea, where she worked on a literary and musical project. Her writing has appeared in Cleaver Magazine and F Newsmagazine. She was also a finalist for contests in C&R Press and The Rumpus. Tricia has served on faculty at the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa and has worked for Graywolf Press. She is the co-lead of the Chicago chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that seeks to empower women and non-binary writers. Currently, Tricia is Associate Director of Cleaver Magazine Workshops where she is also a Creative Non Fiction editor and faculty instructor, teaches for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and maintains a private studio of violin students and writing clients.

Learn more about Tricia at: www.isitrecessyet.com. Listen to Tricia play violin at: https://www.youtube.com/c/triciapark

Image credit: Brian Flanagan on Flickr

BIRDS / NERVES by Max Bartlett

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Bird/ Nerves

BIRDS / NERVES
by Max Bartlett

There’s this bird.  It’s nighttime, and there’s this bird.  And he’s flying, and who knows how long he’s been flying, because that’s not what’s important.  The thing is there’s this house.  Everything outside the house is dark, and the house is warm and bright.  And there’s a window openSo he flies in.  You would too, don’t pretend you wouldn’t.  But he can’t stop, he has to keep on flying.  Across the room there’s another window open, and it’s dark outside.  That’s it.  Dark before, dark after.  A few seconds of light and sound and heat and after that it’s back to nothing.

He keeps flying.  No choice.  He passes through the other window.

           

29.       She’s in a downtown café with her mother.  Not that you can tell, from the outside.  She looks like the older woman.  Back hunched with scoliosis, left leg folded up on the chair, the useless one hanging limp.  Birthmark on her face, café-au-lait, a burned-on map of nerve endings. They pass a notepad to each other across the table.  Her mother never figured out sign language.

So that’s it? she asks.  He just flies off into the darkness?

Because he doesn’t know, her mother says.  Maybe there will be another house, he doesn’t know.

She stirs her coffee, a half-finished plate of eggs in front of her.  Religion always makes her lose her appetite.  As if they haven’t had this conversation a thousand times.  Her mother toys with the cross around her neck, a nervous habit, displacement activity.

And I’m the bird? she asks.  You think I’ve stopped flying?

 I just wish you had something to believe in.  You should come with me on Sunday.

Worried about my soul again?  Telling yourself I’ll shed my ever-flawed mortal form?

 Don’t be a martyr. 

 

34.       Body.  She knows about body.  Here she is, in the mirror, watching it.  It curves wrong, the spine bent where it shouldn’t.  Her left leg is smaller than her right, atrophied from disuse.  Here’s the scar at the base of her spine, when they removed the tumor from her sciatic nerve.  Here’s the scar on her right knee, her left foot, just under her right breast, just over her left shoulder.  That one stands out, cutting across one of the milky brown spots spread across her body.

Here are her ears, useless, deaf from age thirteen.  Here are her eyes, filmed over with cataracts.  But not blind, not quite yet.

Here are her hands.  They’re fine.  They catch her on the counter and she hits the floor gently as the world spins, a black tunnel closing in.

 

5.         She can already spell better than any other kid in the class, and she knows the biggest word: neurofibromatosis.

 

14.       There is a dead bird lying in the snow.  It is a dark-eyed junco, migrated south to Idaho for the winter.  It is about six inches long but looks smaller, eyes closed, wings and legs folded into its body.  Black head, brown body, white breast, dark and vivid against the snow.  There is less blood than she would have expected.  Thousands of miles of flight, ended by a closed window.

Her mother has told her not to touch it.  She kneels in the snow with a pencil and a pad of paper, carefully sketching it.  She traces the curve of its head, the short delicate tail.  When she believes her mother isn’t looking, she spreads its wings for a better sense of anatomy.  She traces the right wing, counting each delicate feather.  Over the course of her life, she will draw thousands of wings.  The secret she never tells anyone: they are all this wing.

On the ground, the junco looks like it is flying.  When she wraps it in paper and lifts it away, it leaves a silhouette of wings in the snow.

 

34.       She is lying in a magnetic resonance imaging machine.  It is a smooth white tube, turning and shifting above her, taking stock of every inch of her body.  She cannot hear it anyway, but she can only imagine that this machine moves without sound.  This is the twenty-fourth MRI she has received in her life, the sixth since the fainting began.

The machine knows every inch of her, every nerve, every part of her brain.  It is the gentlest lover she has ever had, and she wonders if she can keep any secrets from it.

 

11.       Nerves bring two things: feeling and death.  There are 214 named nerves in the human body.  Neurofibromatosis type II causes tumors, properly called neurofibromas, to grow along the nerves, particularly where they meet bones.  They are especially common in the ears, eyes, spine, and brain.

She has had this explained to her so many times.  As long as she can remember, she has known that, one day, her own body will kill her.

On this day, for the first time, she believes she understands what her body is for.

There are 1,300 nerve endings per square inch in the human hand.  There are 8,000 nerve endings in the clitoris.

Her mother’s church, her church, has taught her for years that touch is sinful.  She believed it, because until this moment her body had only ever caused her pain, and so she has known the body must be evil.  Now she understands that every word of it was a lie.

 

26.       When she draws herself, she always has wings.  Oh, the women in the drawings have better bodies than her.  Straighter spines, better skin, amazing hair.  But that’s just vanity.  They’re all her.  And they all have wings.  Feathered, yes, but not angels’ wings.  In her comics they call them superheroes, but in her mind she thinks of them as goddesses.  Egyptian.  She likes the Egyptians, who worshipped birds and understood, as she does, that there is no difference between body and soul.  That is why they preserved themselves for the afterlife.  And armed themselves, too, because they believed that yes, you can take it with you.

In her will, she has asked to be buried with a gun.  She tells herself she doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but she also thinks she’s owed some answers.

 

25.       She is in love.  Not for the first time, but this is the one that will last the longest.  He is a naturalist, a veterinarian who works in bird conservation.  He would like children one day.  She doesn’t want to talk about it.

Neurofibromatosis is genetic.  She said she doesn’t want to talk about it.

 

29.       Whose house is it?

What?

The house the bird flies through.  Whose house is it?

I don’t know.  Does it matter?

Yes.  What do they think about the bird?

I don’t know.  I guess they’re surprised.  You would be too, a bird flying through your living room.

Do they care?

What?

 About the bird.  Do they care?

 Of course they care.  It could hurt itself, and it’s beautiful, and they’ve never seen anything like it.

 So they care.  And they’ll remember, after.

 Then it’s not God’s house.

 

0.         Something is already wrong, but she doesn’t know it.  Her new consciousness is still unformed, and she is nothing but nerves and body, each sensation lighting up her mind like a power grid overloading.

The doctors say she is probably going to die.  Very few infants born with neurofibromas have ever survived.  Fewer than five.  She was born with two neurofibromas.  One is in her leg, the other in her upper back.  They can operate, but it’s risky.  She’s lucky, though.  One of the surgeons here is an expert, he’s seen this before.  He holds her, shows her parents the places they’ll cut into her.

He is explaining the procedure, carefully, step by step.

 

34.       Getting an MRI means she can’t move for two hours and thirty-five minutes.  Not a muscle.  She can blink, that’s all.  There is nothing to look at or feel.  It is a smooth white tunnel, and she can’t hear a sound.  Just white, and cold metal.  She is a bird lying in the snow.  She is in limbo, devoid of feeling or motion as she awaits judgment.

When the machine is finished, it will tell her whether she will live or die.  In her mind, it is a pair of scales.  Were she Egyptian, Osiris, the heron, god of the dead, would weigh her heart against a feather.  She wonders how a tumor would compare.

 

34.       The body feels pain through nociceptors, specialized nerve endings that detect heat, pressure, and chemical changes.  There are none in the brain.  So she doesn’t feel the tumor growing where the vestibulocochlear nerve meets the temporal lobe, until it begins to cause vertigo, her sense of space distorted.  She falls to the ground and continues to feel like she’s falling.  She crawls across Escher architecture, trying to reach the phone with the TTY hookup for the deaf.  The message from the other end prints off on ticker tape.

What is your name?

 

28.       Name?  She, her, that girl, the poor thing.  She lives in a world of pronouns.  She lives in other worlds too.  Here are the women she has been, in her short but storied career: Canary Woman (artist, 8 issues), Dark-Eyed Junco (writer and artist, 15 issues), Peregrine (writer and artist, 36 issues), The Silver Falcon (artist, 4 issues), Songbird (writer, 6 issues) Eagle Eye (writer and artist, 10 issues), Redwing (artist, 18 issues), Red-Tail (writer and artist, 4 issues), Starling (artist, 13 issues), and Canada Goose (a short-lived Alpha Flight spinoff, artist, 2 issues).

They all have secret identities.  That’s important.  Like her, all her heroes are someone else.  And that begs the question: which one is the real one?  The hero or the alter-ego?  Batman or Bruce Wayne?  Superman or Clark Kent?

Her success comes from an understanding: there is no such thing as a real name.

 

16.       She is looking at a picture of her spine in grayscale, a cutaway showing bone and flesh and nerves.  It is pinned to the wall of the radiologist’s office, and it is the fourth magnetic resonance image she has seen of her own body.  The technician is showing her the neurofibromas growing on her S1 nerve, which passes through her sacrum, at the base of her spine.  It is growing around the nerve, and the pressure is narrowing it and blocking the chemical signals.  This is why her left foot is numb, and it is the cause of her sciatica, the shooting pain through her upper thigh and lower back.

It has grown larger since they last examined it.  It will continue to grow.  If she does not have it removed, she may lose the use of her leg.

So remove it.

If they remove it, they may damage the nerve.  She may lose the use of her leg.

 

 

29.       When she draws herself, she has wings.  When she draws herself, she is a hero.  She has developed a detailed world of these winged women, Valkyries and superheroes and bird-headed goddesses.  They fight crime, and threats from outer space, and fate, and death.

But there are enemies, and they also have wings.  They are messengers.  They bring bad news, births, deaths, disease, pain, and tumors.  They live in the clouds and come to Earth in lightning storms and power lines.  They love magnets.  They seek out neurons and hide inside the electricity of synapses.

She doesn’t talk about whose messengers they are.  There are enough galactic threats for one superwoman to face.

 

34.       She is looking at a picture of her brain in grayscale, a cutaway showing bone and mind and no pain, because the brain is the only place without pain.  It is the thirty-seventh such image she has seen of herself.  For decades now she has navigated her own body by electromagnet.

When birds migrate, they find their way by the Earth’s magnetic field, in much the same way that humans navigate by orienting themselves to the north pole.  They know exactly where they are, where they have been, and where they will be through this magnetic map.  She does the same thing.

The image shows the tumor growing in her brain.  The radiologist is not sure if it is operable.

Pigeons and doves, which are closely related despite their opposing reputations, also navigate by magnetic field.  It is how homing pigeons find their way.

Here is a story from her childhood: When God flooded the Earth, Noah took two of every animal onto his ark and sailed the endless oceans.  But the birds, who were smarter, took to the skies and skipped the ark entirely.  So it was a dove flying by that showed Noah the way to land.

She always liked that story, because it was God who tried to destroy man, and a bird that saved them.

 

27.       There is so much history in her body.  She is an amalgam of every woman before her: her mother’s eyes, her grandmother’s blood, her great-grandmother’s hands.  But she is a flaw, a dead end, a failure of history.  A mutation in the neurofibromin 2 gene, or “merlin” gene, and that is it for the family line.  A merlin, of course, is a kind of small hawk.  She can’t help but feel betrayed by one of her own.

 

19.       She likes comics, because they let her control time.  She traces panels with pencil and ruler, each line another point in history.  She is so many other women, and they are timeless, and they all have wings.  When she is reborn, she says, she will have wings.

 

27.       No children, she says.  Not can’t, won’t.

So he leaves, and it ends there.

 

34.       The doctor sits on a stool in front of her, takes her hand, looks her in the eye.  As the tumor grows, it’s going to start putting pressure on other parts of your brain.  You may experience some other symptoms.  Sleeplessness, confusion.  Your perception of time may change.  It may affect your memory.

She laughs.  It reminds her of another story from her youth.

 

There’s this bird.  He’s flying through this house, and it’s nighttime outside.  It’s so cold out there, and so warm in here.  But he doesn’t stop.  He keeps flying toward the other open window.

 He has to keep going, because he’s following the magnetic field.  That’s how they navigate, you know. They follow the magnetic field, just like it’s a map.  It’s all drawn out.  They can fly for a long time until they reach their destination. 

Birds turn, they circle, they find new paths.  There are other houses.  That’s the secret.  There’s always another chance.

And when he passes through your house, you remember him.  This brief flash of wing and speed as it flies through for only a moment.  The bird is not forgotten.

Max-BartlettMax Bartlett is a journalist, part-time writer, and public radio producer. He has a degree in Journalism from the University of Idaho, and enjoys books about robot wizards fighting space dragons. His literary inspirations include Margaret Atwood, Anthony Doerr, and Daniel Orozco. When he is not creating classic works of art that will probably be taught in schools in fifty years, he lives indoors and mostly sleeps.

Image credit: angela ☾.on Flickr

A MAN AND A NAME and SELF PORTRAIT AS AUTISTIC SKY by Deirdre O’Connor

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

cumulonimbus cloud

TWO POEMS
by Deirdre O’Connor

A Man and A Name

A man fucks a woman, then is smitten by another
with her name. He is like the sky’s coincidence,
never the same cumulonimbi, but always the sky.
He is in the look of the gift horse, the whites
of the horse’s eyes. Together, the man and the woman
inhabit a certain reddish gray
like hydrangea dust in lace at an inn they might have visited;
apart, they live the finest distinctions,
the first-name basis of difference
which hates what it might love.
A name is a tool, after all, a strategy, not a hat rack,
though both have cursive elements, branches and hooks.
Even a name, like desire, can be owned not at all.
Braid against better wishes.
The self is winter’s luxury for the alone.

◊

Self Portrait as Autistic Sky

Nothing I can name, but in perception
there’s spinning. Stimuli in the distances:

suns, planets, moons, cosmic rocks
in transit. Sometimes, almost palpable, blue goes gray;

blue black; black blacker; all the shades of white
go away. The silvers and the lightning

may be forked attempts to reach,
successful feathers.

Precipitation flows through:
much is that transparent, needling.

Some look up to understand,
but I am not horizon-bound.

I do not presume (like looking up words)
there is a book,

though maybe there are boundaries, pages
maybe, something to say it on like me.

Deirdre-O'Connor

Deirdre O’Connor is the author of Before the Blue Hour, which received the Cleveland State Poetry Center Prize and was published in 2002. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Crazyhorse, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Frontiers, Sou’wester, Natural Bridge, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals. She directs the Writing Center at Bucknell University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.

FLYING by Grace Jordan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Flying

FLYING
by Grace Jordan

I was wearing my turquoise suede moccasins. I was afraid they would get wet because I knew it would start raining at any given moment. There was an ominous raincloud making its way down the block.

I decided I needed to leave the city. I packed a small valise with silk scarves and kid gloves and a completely impractical lace shift that I figured could double up as a cocktail dress in case the need should arise for it because after all, you never know.

I carried my red umbrella with the pink beaked duck handle over my head willing it not to break or blow away. It didn’t. Thank you Lands’ End.

I reached the train station and bought a ticket for the New Haven line without a destination in mind. The train left the station as the sky turned a pitch black and we chugged slowly up the Hudson. Expect delays if the tracks are flooded. I prayed to God we’d beat this one way or the other and wished the Hudson Line had rooms with beds like an overnight train. I walked in between cars and my hair clung to my head wet, all in order to see if there was a seat alone. There wasn’t. I sat next to a woman who was highly engrossed in a book about business tax. She didn’t seem too thrilled about having to have a seatmate either as her body language pointed out: shifting all the way to the right nearly smashed up against the glass.

I decided that I’d take the train and stay overnight maybe in Cold Springs on the Hudson. I could weather out the storm there, maybe at a bed and breakfast. I decided it would be fun if the Hudson was a large lazy river so that in the summer time you could float on rafts and the current would take you down past New York City. Country to city and then out, out way out in the ocean floating in the salty sweet. I decided a rainstorm might not be the best time to try out this idea but before I knew it I was in Cold Springs, getting soaked on my walk to the bed and breakfast because I was too cheap to take a taxi—even in a rain storm. Luckily they had one room left.

Before I had reason to question rhyme I put the lace slip on and went into the dining room for a drink. A Dark and Stormy, I requested. The gentlemen all raised their eyebrows and the suburban housewife looked intrigued as she downed what I am sure was her third glass of red wine. I lifted my glass, Bon Voyage, I toasted myself realizing as I glanced down that the slip as a cocktail dress was a magnificent idea. The blue really glistened. The perfect attire for a trip out to sea.

I walked down to the muddy bank in my bare feet and threw the glass behind me in complete abandon. I’d never been one for diving in and so I didn’t. I gently dipped one toe and the current grabbed my ankle sucking me under. A branch, a branch, find a branch, something to float on which was anyway part of the original plan that sounded way more romantic in my mind. I surfaced. I’m not dead popped into my head and then I saw it, the branch that would be my lifeline. I felt my stomach scraped by excess offshoots as I struggled to balance myself around it. I looked to the left and the lights of Cold Springs were missing. It was in pitch black that I was carried down the river, shooting left and right somersaulting around the branch.

This happened for a very long time. I can’t tell you how long because all I know is it was dark and rainy and I was fighting for dear life to hold onto that branch and to breathe and not swallow too much water. Later things calmed down and I realized they would probably stay that way. My eyes swollen with sea water I decided I’d keep floating. Now it would be better. I’d float way out to that salty sea and I’d finally get some rest. I don’t mean that I wanted to die, it really is just that this all came from wanting to relax after such thrill seeking on what turns out was the farthest thing from a lazy river you can imagine. But I found out the hard way which is what most people do anyway and I lived so I figured, chapter 2. I decided I didn’t want to live on land anymore. So I stayed floating on that salty sea for a pretty long time. Unfortunately sometimes the body really does win out over mind. There was this major issue of dehydration. The marvelous fantasy of sustaining on sea life and brine had fallen through and there was no way I was turning into a mermaid. I mused that they were probably rooting for me to die so I could be the delicacy of the week in that mermaid stew we all hear about. I hated to admit defeat and so I just altered my plan. I considered that maybe Mermaids were a myth.

I decided to start flying. Way up and out of the salty sea back to the land where I had come from.

But the wings that grew had different ideas. They decided to fly up and up into the atmosphere where the raindrops glazed my lips clicking my brain on. Why go home? I reasoned. I’d fly. I’d fly to Paris and Venice, Rome, Madrid, Cairo. I’d see the tangled rainforest of South America and the icy terrain of Antarctica. I’d see everything in the world I’d ever wanted to see. So after the bumpy start I really took off, flying as it turns out was the life for me and my body made modifications.

The more I flew the more I really began to resemble something that belonged in the sky. Whereas the sea had rejected me the atmosphere gripped me up, blew wind down my throat and insisted I stay a while. My skin out of necessity acquired a layer of thin down-like feathers. My depth perception really improved. I found that what I once thought necessary to sustain myself was rather frivolous and so I feasted on whatever was available. Even sometimes, garbage. One man’s waste I joked to myself, every time that happened (which sometimes was pretty often). I flew so far and for so long that it became difficult for me to remember what my life was even like before, when I was only a woman down on land.

Time passed. After a while, I began to grow bored as the exotic nature of my travels suddenly became a routine bird exercise. Here in the summer, here in the winter. Flight patterns and such.

I decided I’d stop flying. Start remembering what real life was like again. See what I’d been missing.

When I got back to the city I had a hard time finding a place to stay. It had been ten years. Time flies when you fly (literally), and my friends were hard to find. My apartment building was gone replaced by a new multimillion dollar condominium. I stayed in a shelter the first several nights surrounded by people who spoke a language I realized I now barely understood. I learned it was better to shut up than to share my story. Where are you from? People kept asking.

I found my family. They insisted on doctors. So many doctors, all kinds with probes and lights. They chalked the down up to a hormonal imbalance. They too really didn’t want to hear about where I’d been. They gave me medicine to make me forget. I was lectured—did I know the trouble I’d caused? You eat like a bird now, my mother accused me. They told me I needed to get my act together, I heard them mumbling about me using phrases like ‘bad choices,’ ‘free spirit,’ and even ‘schizophrenic.’ My dad chalked it all up to art college. That was the mistake he kept repeating, that was the mistake.

I dug out the old diploma and got a job as a secretary. I eventually found an apartment. A place with 3 other roommates. My legs became stronger. My stomach readjusted. I whistled and then I stopped when I realized whistling is not a normal thing to do constantly. All of this took so long and felt so arduous that I’d wonder to myself how it had all come down to this.

Slowly and surely the various aspects of my life improved. Within a year I made new friends, I joined a gym, I found a Chinese place I really liked right in my neighborhood. When it rained, I went inside and prayed to God the power would stay on. Sometimes I remembered about the flying and felt a sort of yearning inside. I repeated a mantra. I told myself that that period of my life was, well, a little nuts. Better to forget, not to live in the past. After all, I’d come so far to get back to where I started that by the time I finally arrived, everything had changed.

Grace-Connolly

Grace Jordan is currently based in Harlem, NY. Her poem “The Fool” will be published in an upcoming issue of Black Heart Magazine. Previous publications include pieces in Blazevox, The Commonline Journal, and CC&D. She enjoys traveling and playing ball with her Patterdale Terrier, Spanky. She currently studies through the UCLA Writers Extension and is working on her first screenplay.

 

 

Image credit: Toni Frissell, 1947, on Wikipedia

SCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED by Charlotte Boulay

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

R_Holley

SCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED 
by Charlotte Boulay

that there are whirlpools
in the wakes of stars. Birds run on
at the mouth in different languages
and the horses are lonely: we must keep
mothering the empty plains. Detroit’s salt mines

are becoming saltier every year, and unrelated studies
show that street sweepers are seventy-five percent
more effective when they whirr the curbs in threes.
We’re born speaking a cinematic grammar—

we spend a third of our lives dreaming
in actions and cuts. There are cities underneath
all the cities and streets that can only be seen
from space. The bats are dying!
Caves full of sleeping creatures are slowly

stifling in the dark. Data is breaking out
of computers and staggering down the streets
on shaky legs. Oil is offering an apology. An eddy

off the coast grows larger each day but can’t swallow
our latitude of trash. We’re lost. We’re a piece
of real technology. We’re escaping nothing,
and all we want is to come to the place
where the answer to every question

is yes. To get there we’ll ask a stranger the way—
there will be three riddles, then we must decode
the aurora borealis. O scientists,
bring your white coats

for warmth. We are headed to an open field,
a copse of trees, a hidden den. It’s the best
and worst discovery. It has been there all along.

Charlotte-Boulay

Charlotte Boulay’s work has appeared in Slate, The Boston Review, and The New Yorker, among other journals. Her first book, Foxes on the Trampoline, was recently published by Ecco Press. She works at The Franklin Institute, and lives in Philadelphia.

Image credit: Sol Greenberg for USDA on Wikipedia

HUNGER by Amy Burns

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

hungryHUNGER
by Amy Burns 

I was sitting at my friend Bebe’s kitchen table. She was standing at the counter using a black and yellow handled screwdriver as an ice pick. I was telling her about it while she chopped.

You should have seen her, Bebe. Not a hair out of place. Perfect. I stood by the salad station and watched her until Louis told me that I was down at table three. I mean, I knew I was down at table three. I was staring at table three.

When I tell you that she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, you best believe me. She sat like a picture; real still, you know, with her middle swayed, shoulders back.

Louis shouted at me from the counter. If you don’t pick up three, I’ll give it to Gwen.

I’m going. I’m going, I said.

Give it to Gwen. Like Gwen needed another table. She’d already cycled through her station twice. But me? Oh no, not me. I was stuck with a foursome at table one that had been there since my shift started and a couple at table two making a night out of dessert and coffee.

Anyway, I poured a glass of water, added a lemon wedge and walked to table three.

Hello. Is this your first visit to Brownwood’s?

Yes, she said.

Her skin was perfect. She looked airbrushed.

In that case, if you don’t mind, I’d like to tell you about our specials and answer any questions you might have about the menu.

By all means. And then she smiled.

Bebe, when she smiled I could hardly remember my own name let alone the specials. Her teeth were perfect. I don’t even think they were capped. I couldn’t stop staring at her mouth. She had this extra little pucker around the cupid’s bow and her lips were glossed in a very tasteful nude-colour.

The specials tonight are grilled mahi mahi with a ginger glaze, côte de boeuf served with steamed summer vegetables, lime chicken on a bed of mashed potatoes and butterflied tiger prawns in garlic butter.

That sounds delicious, she said.

Shall I give you a minute to decide?

No. I’m ready.

What can I get for you?

I’ll have the specials.

No problem. Which would you like?

All of them, she said. And I’d like a house salad with extra bleu cheese dressing. And do you have spinach of any kind?

I pointed out the spinach queso starter and the creamed spinach side.

Excellent, she said. I’ll have both.

I didn’t know what to say. I mean, she had me fixed with this expectant stare, not really daring me to question her order, but . . . I don’t know, more like silently asking me not to question her order.

Will that be all?

Yes, thank you.

Would you like to start with the spinach queso?

I’d like it all at the same time, she said.

No problem.

So I took the menu from her and went over to the posi-touch and started tapping in the order. It took me a long time because I had to over-ride the system so that everything would go at once. If you placed an order for say a starter, a salad, a main and a dessert, it’ll automatically put a few minutes delay on each course. Stagger them, you know.

I walked the long way around so that I could check on my other tables, still gabbing, all of them.

Refusing to make eye contact with me, refusing to be rushed. I mean, seriously, Bebe . . . how do they think I’m going to make a living?

When I came through the alley Louis pulled me to the side.

What the hell is this?

Send it all at once, I said.

He took two steps back so that he could see.

Where’s the rest of her party?

I think it’s just her.

Louis shouted to the kitchen.

Hold table three.

He started to walk over.

Well, I mean, I don’t know how to explain it but I felt this strong urge to protect her.

No, I said. Leave her alone.

Nobody comes in by themselves and orders food for four or five people. What’s her deal?

I shrugged my shoulders.

Fine. You’ll be paying if she skips.

She won’t skip.

Fire it up for table three, he shouted to the kitchen.

The house salad with extra bleu cheese dressing was already sitting in the window, so was the spinach queso. Gwen ran the salad before I could tell her to wait and so I decided to take the spinach queso too.

She smiled at me again when I brought the food.

I’m sorry, I said. The timing’s a bit off. I didn’t want it to get cold.

Don’t worry about it, she said.

I went back to the salad station so that I could watch her without being too obvious. She pushed the plate with the house salad to the far right of the table and she put the bowl of spinach queso at twelve o’clock. I folded napkins while the rest of her order cooked.

She sat there with a devastatingly placid look on her face. She looked around the restaurant and admired the paintings, watched the other customers. She seemed genuinely interested in what was going on around her. She looked comfortable, not at all conspicuous. She sipped her water but she didn’t touch the salad or the queso.

When Louis sent the mains the table was crowded, barely room.

I gave her a few minutes and then I went to make sure everything was OK.

Can I get you anything else?

Not right now, she said.

The foursome at table one had left without bothering to ask for the tab. They left two twenties and a ten which covered it, barely. I cleared the table and told the hostess that I was ready to be seated again.

It’s a slow night, she said. You’ve already been cut.

I was feeling pissy at that point, Bebe. It’s a really pissy feeling when you go to work and don’t even make enough to dry clean your uniform, you know?

As I walked back to the kitchen the woman got my attention and gave me the bring-me-the-bill, air signature. I thought, fuck it. But I smiled and got her the tab.

Can I get you a to-go box?

No thanks, she said.

Everything was exactly as it had been placed. She hadn’t taken a single, solitary bite out of anything. I was in a mood by then, a real mood, and I don’t know why but I just stood there. I stood there and stared at that big table of untouched food.

Was everything ok?

Oh, I’m sure it’s all delicious.

She leaned over to me and, I swear I just couldn’t help myself, I leaned over to her. Real close.

There was a time when I would have eaten every single bit of this, she whispered.

Everybody deserves a treat now and again. I whispered too.

It wasn’t just now and again for me, she said. I was fat.

I don’t believe it. You’re gorgeous.

I was morbidly obese.

Well, I said, you can’t tell it. You can’t tell that you were ever fat.

Look closer, she said.

Bebe, I did. I did look closer. I looked into her big green eyes and, I swear, what I saw there liked to broke my heart. All I could think to say was, would you like to see the dessert menu?

She laughed. I was never a sweets girl, she said.

Then she paid and I cleared the table.

 

Bebe was filling a graduated blender with ice, midori, whisky sour mix and Sprite. When she realized that I had stopped talking she looked at me.

Then what, Bebe asked.

Then nothing, I said. She left.

And?

And what?

Did she stiff you?

No.

Oh. And she didn’t eat any of the food?

Not a bite.

And, what? So she used to be fat?

I felt my bad mood coming back. Bebe didn’t get it. I didn’t want to explain.

Yeah, I said. Fat.

People are strange, she said.

Bebe turned on the blender and the noise of the blender made my teeth hurt. She bent close to the blender and watched the green liquid spin. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a different life, a different place. I thought, somewhere in the world there is a place with black-sand beaches and old, grey-boarded fishing boats anchored just beyond the break, sorting the daily catch; rejoicing.

Amy-BurnsAmy Burns holds a PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Glasgow. She currently serves as the Managing Editor for Mulberry Fork Review. She is nearing completion of her second novel and is represented by Lucy Luck Associates. For more about Amy please visit: http://amyelizabethburns.com/

THE ACOLYTES, LIAR, and BOX by Mercedes Lawry

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THE ACOLYTES, LIAR, AND BOX
by Mercedes Lawry

File:George Frederick Watts, Found Drowned


The Acolytes

Somebody drowned the acolytes. They were not wee fellows so it must have been someone with plenty of muscle. Now an emptiness hovers like a bad smog burning throats and lungs. The professionals were involved at once but clearly, their training had been inadequate and they wrapped themselves in their worn bafflement, bowed their heads and retired to their tepid soup. The amateurs were all aflutter with the cleared field and began stacking hypotheses like wooden blocks, a bit too close to the haphazard and thus, doomed to topple. One lone wolf suggested linear thinking but he was chided and threatened with banishment with the buffalo. The soothsayers kept counsel behind their red doors. The clergy blinked and tucked their hands in their billowing sleeves and were as useless as ever. Many felt it was a waste of time to pursue a perpetrator. In the end, there would be no fair elections. Gold would still glitter. The sea would remain a temptation. Winners would crow. Losers would grumble and kick stones in the blackened street. The acolytes were gone and so be it. In time, there would be new acolytes and though they would be well aware of the fate of those who’d gone before, they would take their places willingly and would feel in some corner of their salty souls, deserving of a more fortunate destiny thanks to their enhanced capacity for empathy and devotion and their deeper understanding of the terms of obedience. And for this hubris they too would suffer as would any and all who assumed the role of acolyte for this was how hierarchy worked and there was no wiggle room.

 

Liar

Joseph told lies and everyone knew he told lies and therefore, never believed him. This, of course, backfired on occasion when he told the truth. Gotcha you fools! he’d shout, annoying passersby to no end. Fools or not, they couldn’t banish Joseph or shun him or totally ignore him because Joseph was in charge. It was not an easy job, even for a liar and nobody else wanted it. Joseph had been in charge as far back as anyone could remember – it was so far back, he might not even have been lying on a regular basis. It might, should one with a penchant for psychology or sociology care to explore, be the reason he became a liar. What did it matter, however, for today, in the present, Joseph lied and everyone had to make the best of it. Pants on fire, children might giggle in the privacy of their bedrooms but no one said it out loud on the street, or in the corridors of government or at the state fair, or at pancake breakfasts or the bowling alley, or soccer practice or at the observatory on first Tuesdays, when a surprising cross-section of the populace came to look at the stars if there was no cloud cover and the sky was clear.

 

Box

Judy crawled into the box. I belong here, she thought. She stayed for just over two hours until her bladder perked up. I’ll be right back, she said to the box as she crawled out. After her visit to the bathroom, she felt like a peanut butter sandwich and something to drink, maybe milk if it hadn’t gone off. She considered taking her snack into the box to eat but then she thought about crumbs and the possibility of ants, or worse rodents. She decided the kitchen table was a better idea. She checked the clock on the wall, a cheery apple that she’d purchased at a garage sale for an excellent price. Ralph would be home in 45 minutes. She hurriedly finished the sandwich and rinsed out her glass. She could have another half hour in the box before she had to tuck it into a corner in the basement. Ralph followed a strict schedule and she had no fears he would come home early. Luckily she had taken care of the laundry in the early morning and so it would appear she had had a productive day, rather than been curled up in a box for hours on end. Sure, she’d only use up 50 minutes plus travel time on a weekly basis if she saw a therapist. But this was so much cheaper and environmentally friendly and did not require wardrobe decisions. She had no truck with the notion of sitting in front of some pompous pedant who would ask embarrassing personal questions and probe into her past. She knew what she needed to keep from flying apart in a million pieces like a suicide bomber. She needed a box.

 

Mercedes-LawryMercedes Lawry has published short fiction in several journals including, Gravel, Cleaver, Garbanzo, and Newer York. She’s published poetry in journals such as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice. Additionally, she’s published stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.

Image credit: George Frederic Watts, Found Drowned, c. 1850, on Wikipedia

 

 

COUCH by Jenny Wales Steele

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Jester Hat

COUCH
by Jenny Wales Steele

[?]

It was an okay day. I don’t understand zoos, the appeal. The kids thrill to it, sure, but kids are dumb. My nephew flounced around, did his giddy slash sissy thing. He was wearing his jester’s hat, this idiotic hat with floppy, pointy, velvet prongs, jingle bells on the ends. And his nose was all snotty. I’ve told Clay to put the kid on meds, to put an end to the wacky antics, to dam up the endless flow, flood of snot. But no. He never listens to me. He says, ‘Val, please, please.’ Anyway, the zoo. Polar bears, elephants, funny monkeys. The reek of piss and dung. And the kids saying, ‘Look, that aardvark or panther or llama is going to the bathroom.’ They’re obsessed, scatologically speaking. And don’t even bother telling them that animals don’t have bathrooms. It’s maddening. But we were trying so hard, the adults. Such anguish trying, trying to create happy childhood memories so when they’re old, they’ll have some dumb story to bore the hell out of someone with. So, we were trying hard. That included me. Good Aunt Valerie. As if I’m only that. There’s another self. Selves. Not shallow. Not a cipher.

[?]

No. Don’t switch on that lamp. The dim is soothing.

[.]

So, the zoo. You know how the enclosures always have a door in the back? The door the zookeepers use? It’s always painted to blend in with the phony habitat, a trompe-l’oeil kind of thing. Jungle fauna, a sand dune. Meant to fool, meant to trick. Ocean and wharf for the seal habitat. We watched the seals in their cement moat. Frisky and playful they were. But I was looking for the door. The hinges, the outline. I found it and then, bang!, out came a zookeeper in yellow rubber boots and with a pail of dead fish. That has always, seriously, bothered me. Even as a little girl, on a school field trip, as the other kids hollered and squealed, I looked for that door, and if a zookeeper came through it, I would get this knotty clench in my stomach.

[.]

Anyway, it was an okay day. We picnicked too, in this filthy pavilion. Candy wrappers, smudges of gum. A band aid, yuck. We had baloney sandwiches, but they had gotten all hot on the bus. I worried about that. I worried if potentially toxic bacteria would somehow activate if the mayonnaise was heated to a certain degree. But none of the kids seemed queasy afterward, so I stopped worrying. I was never a worrywart until I became Good Aunt Valerie, until I became this chaperone slash buddy. Since Lily died. Since Clay became a heap of useless.

[.]

True, that is unkind. But what a sloth he is. The kid is too, except when he’s suddenly a crazy maniac. And then in an instant he’s sweet again, a sweetly damaged boy. Girls will love this. He’ll get all the girls, what with his tragic childhood, his mother dead when he was only eleven, uterine cancer, and add that to his looks, he has Clay’s looks, and blam!, girls will swarm him.

[?]

Tea? Herbal as usual.

[.]

Thank you.

[.]

Of course they grieve too. I’m not insensitive to that. But Clay has this kid to raise and he’s got to pull it together. He can’t expect me to schlep to his house day after day to make sure his kid is washed and fed. I let myself in, all cheery and bright, ‘hello, boys,’ and there they are, slovenly louts slumped in these rotten bean bags that Clay bought at a flea market. Gross. And the TV is on, as always. A baseball game. A soap opera with foxy bodies between the sheets, grind and moan, and then a commercial for toothpaste, and Clay and my nephew are totally blank, a bowl of burnt popcorn between them. And soda cans, beer cans. So I have to step in. I say to Clay, ‘Here there are dirty dishes. Do the dishes. Here is soap and here’s a sponge.’ And his kid? A blob on his bean bag and then he’s wild, a banshee smashing things against the walls. That crystal swan my mother gave to Lily for her tenth birthday? Smash! Shattered into a million pieces. I was so sad as I vacuumed it up, as I listened to a million tiny slivers, clickety click click. I was mad too. Mad and sad simultaneously. It should be one word. Madsad. You could add that to your fancy schmancy lexicon.

[.]

Yes, okay, I use sarcasm to shield my bruised soul.

[.]

Thank you. Madsad. It’s funny, and I don’t mean funny ha ha, I mean funny weird, that I was totally aware of being madsad as I poked and yanked the vacuum, as I monitored Clay attempting to make pancakes. Madsad is my coping mechanism. The words coping mechanism are in my brain, written in fancy calligraphy across my gray matter. But what is its meaning? Then I think, how can I wonder about the meaning of coping mechanism while in the midst of coping? You understand the conundrum.

[.]

And then, get this, this is ripe, Clay accuses me of being or of wanting to be pseudo dash wife and pseudo dash mother. The nerve! I’m fond of him and his kid, but only slightly. Clay is, frankly, a bit of a dunce. He’s smart and all, a hot shot architect, but he’s also this dunce. He doesn’t know anything about me. Zip. Zilch. He doesn’t know about STEVE. Capitalized, italicized. That. That situation.

[?]

Of course. The, quote, status, unquote, of our, quote, relationship, unquote. How his mother and slash or his step dash father and slash or his first girlfriend said and slash or did this brazenly hurtful thing to him and that explains why a, his peculiar quirks, plus b, my emotional issues, i.e. my inability to consider the word love, equals c, our current dilemma.

[.]

Hilarious.

[.]

Of course he and I discuss it, but first we have to rattle around with small talk, irrelevant bullshit, miles to the gallon, highway, city, to get to where we meet, the place half way between here and Phoenix, a hundred miles?, petty nonsense until one of us finds a slot in the blah blah blah to insert a cruel or smarmy or cryptic comment, a slot, a gap, to inject poison into. We circle around. That’s how Steve puts it. ‘We circle around.’

[?]

Yes, we’ve analyzed our options. Ad nauseum. Option a: continue our afternoon trysts in cheap motels, cash only if you please so his dippy wife won’t find out, or option b: not continue at all, in other words, we’re kaput. But option b seems ridiculous because yesterday was an option a kind of day, so why have an option b? And then there’s option c: not go kaput and sayonara, but figure out what Steve and I have. I mean, circumscribe it in transparent terms, and also to what to do about the wife.

[.]

I’ve met her. She’s no prize, believe me.

[?]

Anyway, I tell Steve that we’re not getting any younger, we’re not the proverbial spring chickens, as the saying goes, though I’ve never understood what the hell are spring chickens, or why they’re proverbial, and what’s proverbial anyway?

[?]

The point is this: we’re at this crucial juncture, or is it junction?, well, crossroads, in what is or maybe isn’t a genuine romance. Seriously. With Steve, it has been, no, sorry, it is, present tense, a kick, our naughty tumbles, a true blast. And guess what? We went out in public together. We wanted to find out how it would feel to have people looking at us. So we went to a carnival. He convinced me, in his seductive slash goofy way, to go on this utterly scary whirligig that flung us around at a crazy angle high above the ground. How we survived is a mystery. I swear the bolts were loose. Rusty too. But I made no mention of it even though I had extreme concern about our safety, and, get this, I modified the pitch of my scream so it was a joyous scream instead of a scream of absolute terror. This, to me, proves that I am FUN!, capital F, capital U, capital N, exclamation point, and also that I am not unwilling to take a risk, even if said risk is a threat to my life and slash or quality of life. Think about it. We could have been thrown out of that rickety, clatter hyphen clank whirligig, snapped our necks on the pavement, and become instant cripples. The bolts were loose. It was hazardous.

[?]

The tones you use! In shrink school, did you take Tones One dash Oh dash One? This wry tone, with a little edge to it: use with severe words or with mockery. Or use a sappy tone if the words are heartfelt. Ha! Now I’m analyzing you! I’ll send you a bill. Anyway, what you were saying, maybe becoming a carnival ride safety inspector would be an interesting career move. Interesting, but not practical. Not smart either. I mean, where I am now and then jump to that? I’m on the middle rung of the company ladder. The slippery rung of middle management. I’m half sycophant, half authority. I fawn and kowtow to some pouty child executive on the top floor and within an hour I have to admonish some trembling underling because he or she has blundered with the numbers of some piddling account.

[?]

[.]

So, me and Steve. If I’m totally candid about it, one of my main peeves is how obstinate he is. Are he and I only he and I, completely separate individuals, vaguely acquainted, who rendezvous, n’est-ce pas?, sometimes regularly, sometimes irregularly, in a squalid motel? That’s the crux, isn’t it?

[.]

I’ve already told you, she’s no prize.

[.]

Of course I have plenty of flaws. I’m aware of that. I admit, yes, that I have, quote, neuroses, unquote. Isn’t that why I’m here? On this couch? This couch, I’ll add, that needs better upholstery, a nice damask, dark blue.

[.]

Is it? Is our hour almost up? Crap. I have to rush across town to Clay’s house, to make sure he and his kid haven’t breathed their last due to malnutrition, that they haven’t completely melted into those stinking bean bags. Pseudo slash who I am slash not that good aunt slash this self who would rather be sprawled elsewhere anonymous and horny.

[?]

Summary and final think. I’m looking at the door of this room. I’m thinking of the door of Clay’s den. I’m thinking of the door of a motel room. Outline and hinges. And any minute now, any minute, a zookeeper will come through the door with a pail of dead fish, a bowl of meat. We’re all animals, aren’t we? We are. Only animals. Animals who talk and talk and talk and tell fibs.

Jenny Wales Steele

Jenny Wales Steele’s fiction has been published in The Ampersand Review, juked.com, Quay, The First Line, bluelakereview.com, among several others, and she’s been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. A native Arizonan, she lives in Tucson. Visit her website at www.jennywalessteele.weebly.com.

 

 

 

Image credit: Quinn Dombrowski on Flickr 

TOUGH by Geoff Peck

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Tough

TOUGH
by Geoff Peck 

You picture it: fourteenth floor of Walker dormitory. A former wrestler dangles from a window. The one they call Bisonhead has him by one ankle and another ex-teammate, a freshman, by the other. It’s late April in Oklahoma, athletic tape scaling his shins to combat the humidity, but it’s only so long before he’ll start to slip through sweaty palms. He’s the only one crazy enough to try this and that means something. Pride is all that’s left.

This is your father.

He lost his scholarship this term. In two more weeks he’ll lose his dorm and crawl back to Sand Springs to work in the box factory, scars on his palms from fresh cardboard for the rest of his life. He hasn’t been home since high school. The state champion. One hundred fifty-five pounds.

A week after he bends Tulsa Webster’s Randy Sutcliffe into origami for the title he comes home to Mom nagging over the trash he forgot to curb before school. He says sorry sarcastically as he knows how and your grandmother slaps him, hard.

He doesn’t move. Swears he doesn’t even flinch. Can’t let her see. This does not hurt you, he tells himself. This does not hurt you.

Tears gather in your grandmother’s eyes. Her jaw tightens. She does it again.

Bisonhead notes the slippage but your father won’t respond. He enjoys the aerial view: the blackjack oaks, the coeds distant and removed, unaware. He considers velocity.

This is the University of Oklahoma, where the nickname for the football coach is literally The King. The football players get the cocaine and cars, the hundred-dollar-handshakes, but they don’t know the first thing about tough. Your father likes their egos because they look at him, one-five-five, and mouth off at parties—the arrogance of royalty—and it always ends badly for them. Until the night when he and Bisonhead put two in the infirmary, including an All-American linebacker. The King is displeased.

It costs his scholarship. Bisonhead gets stadium stairs.

Bisonhead gets stadium stairs because he’s never lost a match. Because the Olympic team has wet dreams about sending him to Seoul. This has been your father’s plan, too. Until the match he becomes expendable when his kneecap pops off the tendon and bone like a champagne cork and leaves him on the mat reaching for the leg suddenly rendered Dada, a visual so wholly dislocating he submerges into aphorisms: this does not hurt you, this-does-not-hurt-you.

He feels the actual slip, Bisonhead’s palm nearing his heel, and Bisonhead says it’s time. Your father goes limp, lifeless, a boot reeled out of pondwater. He imagines falling, unaware of the daughter he’ll conceive. The little thing he’ll never be quite certain of so he’ll call you buddy, and in a fit of anger at thirteen you accuse him of wishing you were a boy. You see tears gather in his eyes.

He imagined falling. Something he never tells you until you’re home from college for the first time, a fall semester in Fayetteville so frantic you just couldn’t find the time until Christmas. In your absence, you feel his aging, know he’s reckoning with his own mortality, and it makes you consider your own for the first time. Falling. Consumed by opportunities lost. You carry these stories with you, recall them at odd times. A fourth date with a Walton-money Sig Ep who you sense being less than transparent so you step forward, direct a finger between his eyes. “You will treat me right,” you tell him. He doesn’t call again and this makes you proud, the toughness. You imagine this was what the loss of your father’s scholarship had been about—a young woman and an appropriating football player.

And again, after graduation, when you’ve been working for the Department of Child Services in Tulsa and a sorority sister takes a job in Manhattan and invites you to her apartment on the Upper East Side. You’ve never been east of the Mississippi and the city roars through every bit of you, telling you there’s more more more. But that first night she invites over her New York friends, transients like herself, for an aperitif only to snicker at the Okie drawl you’ve never been aware of until then. Blood rushes to your face and you deprecate a laugh, suddenly aware of their handbags and shoes, the Prada and Louboutin that accompany their news-anchor drone, their practiced way of being from nowhere.

During a second drink where the conversation piques and allows you to disappear you find yourself crawling out to the fire escape and listening to the city below, tormented by your inability to suppress these emotions that seem so trivial by comparison—not just the challenge to your conception of self but your daily dose of the real at DCS: the current case of a newborn thrown or dropped or what? from a moving car on Peoria as it passed the Coney-I-Lander.

The fire escape groans and you think of your father, imagine the maze of iron giving way, collapsing beneath your weight and then you’re freefalling into the rush of headlights on eighty-third and first, through Midtown and SoHo and the sweep of the plains to Steinbeck’s red and gray country and an a-frame in Sand Springs where the sweat and grease from your father’s work clothes would permeate the kitchen and mask the smell of his evening coffee. You crawl under the kitchen table and he becomes all boots and denim, his stilted stance favoring the leg with the scar. Soon he’ll move to the garage for his second shift but first he calls out to you, pitching his voice towards your room. Buddy? he calls again, less certain, and his boots turn as the porcelain mug sounds against the countertop. You keep quiet, waiting for him to shuffle across the linoleum, squat low, and draw back the tablecloth.

Geoff-PeckGeoff Peck received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of North Dakota, where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Floodwall Magazine. His fiction and poetry have appeared in over a dozen journals, and in 2013 he was nominated for Best New American Poets. While not on campus at UND, he lives in New York with his wife Meredith.

 

 

Image credit: Scott Swigart on Flickr