Is there anything more disappointing than waking up in your mid-30s and wondering what the hell happened? Suddenly, you have a family, children, a mortgage, and a job that, despite your best efforts, is starting to define you. Your sensible car is in perfect order. You have a retirement account. Where’s the punk you used to be? What happened to all those bad decisions you made in your 20s?
I was completely amazed at my good luck at having found such an attractive, interesting, sexy, and thoughtful man to build a life with.... Or so I thought, until the other night when Jason tearfully and drunkenly confessed that he and one of the female housemates, Melissa, had slept together on and off for over two years, almost since he joined the household. At first he said that it ended when I moved in, but after I pressed him for details about the affair, or whatever you call it, he broke down and confessed that one night last month, while I was out of town, she came into his—our!—room at two in the morning and “one thing led to another.”
In her debut young adult novel Rani Patel in Full Effect, Sonia Patel takes us back to the era of faded box cuts, high-top Adidas, and gold chains as thick as your wrist; to the era where hip-hop reigned supreme and rhymes flowed out of boom boxes like water down Moaula Falls.
It wasn’t Michael Gerhard Martin’s stories in the collection Easiest If I Had a Gun that wooed me as much as it was his crisp, visceral writing. His narrative constructs are alluring and beg to be unpacked, analyzed, and savored. Without apparent ego or bias, he transcribes the thoughts, memories, and dialogue of his characters as they struggle to navigate the mundane obstacles associated with living as lower middle-class, white Americans. This theme—the white man’s struggle—is not new. Yet, Martin manages to bring to the subject a fresh voice and a macabre sense of social conscience.
I began as a fiction writer, naturally drawing from my childhood as my mother had told it to me, working hard to bring her stories to life through scene, dialogue, and sensory detail, pacing them as mysteries. The memoir that many of these fictionalized stories eventually became is better, I think, because I didn’t start out writing memoir, trying to “remember.”
When Mike and his family move, just before his freshman year, Mike starts high school in a new state and begins to forge some tentative friendships. But Victor, also low on the totem pole in terms of the high school hierarchy, seems to have a personal beef with him. Mike tries to lay low and mind his own business but Victor’s attention is unsettling...
DREAMS OF THE CLOCKMAKER an original radio play by Sean Gill performed by Kelly Chick produced by Grace Connolly Recorded Performance, full text, and an interview with the author by Grace Connolly Read Sean Gill’s script: [pdf-embedder url=”https://www.cleavermagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Dreams-of-The-Clockmaker-Script.pdf” title=”dreams-of-the-clockmaker-script”] …
There are two kinds of important reader: the one who hates you, and the one who understands you.
When I write, I come to the page knowing that someone will probably hate what I produce. In fact, I count on this. As I work, I read each sentence as though I am my own worst enemy. Zadie Smith says to “try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.” That means that every adorable turn of phrase—everything that I thought was so smart—gets bullied out of the final copy.
Yoram Kaniuk, an Israeli novelist who died in 2013, was the kind of man who tells jokes as he's dying in the hospital, even when he has no voice, when there's a respirator thrust through an incision in his chest. His humor is at times bitter, biting like Sholem Aleichem's pogrom narratives, descending into sullen anti-prayers: “cancer, like Hitler...is a messenger of the Lord.” In this respect, Kaniuk's Between Life and Death, published this year in English, probably most closely resembles Christopher Hitchens' Mortality. A sense of the meaninglessness in so much of life, of banality in death, pervades both authors’ stories. Kaniuk rages and rejoices, but sometimes qualifies these outbursts by settling, like Hitchens, for a tone of ambivalent irony, communicated in prose thick with vibrant images and cumulative sentences.
Dear June, I had an abortion last spring. I was very sad about it, but do not regret it in the least, for many reasons. I decided not to tell my mother because she is a fundamentalist Christian and completely anti-abortion. But, thanks to one of my cousins who knew my then-boyfriend, Mom found out a few days after I had it. She actually came to my town—I work about 100 miles away from my parents—to have a big fight with me about it, and we did. In the intervening months we have sent emails and letters back and forth, most of them from her with short responses from me.
WHO ARE WE, WHEN WE TRAVEL IN BURMA? by Judy T. Oldfield I reached up, scratched the side of my nose, and out popped my brand-new nose ring, falling down to the tile floor of Yangon’s Bogyoke market. Squatting down,…
To make a book about school shootings stand out among an influx of young adult books about the topic takes skill and in her new novel The Light Fantastic Combs delivers with detailed characters and a unique premise. Told from several different points of view, the novel covers the span of a few hours across multiple time zones as a new day starts and a nationwide school shooting epidemic begins.
Had The Birds been written from the perspective of another character other than Mattis, a dim-witted near forty-year old, it probably would have had a different title—The Lumberjack, maybe, or some other word that references one of the major events in the novel. But that’s the point: the perspective, usually in third person but sometimes slipping into first person, is Mattis’ and thus the story is his. Although often the characters in a book share the same events, they do not share the same story; for that, as Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas shows brilliantly in this moving novel, depends on the way we see things, on the importance we give to those events we share. For Mattis, the most important events in the novel concern the birds.
Dear June,
Last year my husband died after a long illness. About a week before Carl died my closest friend, “Hepzibah” (ugliest pseudonym I could think of), who has known both of us for over twenty years, decided that she had to tell me how she and my husband had had a “torrid but short-lived” affair about seven years earlier. “Short-lived,” it turns out, means five months, and probably the second-worst five months of my life, when I was having painful cancer treatments and had no idea how things would turn out. I told Hepzibah, among other things, that she’d picked a hell of a time to tell me. She replied that it was just like me to pounce on irrelevancies. She never actually expressed any remorse or even regret over the affair during this conversation, just said that she thought it was important to clear the air – not the greatest way to put it while my husband was slowly drowning from COPD and gasping for breath. Anyway, I was not about to mention the issue to him since he was, you know, dying.
Canek Sánchez Guevara’s 33 Revolutions is a prayer of a novel with a single liturgical refrain and a retort (of a kind) to the giddiness emitting from the American-Cuban travelsphere. Not since Reinaldo Arenas has a Cuban literary voice arrived on American shores with such beaten madness, and sense of personal desperation. Sánchez Guevara, who died last year at age 40, was the eldest grandson of revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. His mother, Hilda Guevara Gaesa, was Che’s oldest child; Hilda’s mother (also Hilda) introduced Che to the Castro brothers in the mid-1950s. (It’s worth remembering that the American literary public became enamored of Arenas after his death, too.)
Madness is synonymous with insanity, but to be “mad” one doesn’t necessarily go crazy. One might be mad at society, a world of socially imposed rules that stifle the imagination or measure people according to economic usefulness. Rage against a world in which a multicultural, mostly impoverished majority are controlled by a corrupt, wealthy minority could be defined as a type of “madness.” In such a state, the individual’s warped mind drives him to fantastical plans for revenge, deep wells of anguish or panic, brothel-filled nights, petty crimes, thoughts of suicide, kidnapping, and imagined love affairs.
Dear June,
My mother, who died about two months ago, left me a letter directing that I take her ashes and scatter them over the Pacific because she has very happy memories of her time in California before she met and married my father. My husband and I, and all of my three siblings for that matter, have always lived in New England, where she and my dad lived until his death in 2009. I have not told anybody about this letter, which was written only to me. Before she died, I had never made any promise of any kind about what to do with her ashes. In fact, she never said anything to anybody or made any provision of any kind for what to do after her death.
Claire Rudy Foster's short story collection I'VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE made its official debut just this week from KLĒN+SŌBR Interventions. It's a tight collection with six stories' worth of addiction, struggle, pain, and grit. Foster's critically acclaimed short fiction has been nominated for an AWP award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Best of the Web award. Foster will be giving her first public reading from the collection at The Alano Club of Portland this upcoming October 22nd.
You’re in another anonymous suburb at an undistinguished hotel on a Tuesday evening, traveling for work. After a day of meetings, you’re finally free to visit the hotel bar for a burger and a beer before you do it all over again tomorrow. At the counter, you take a seat two stools away from a middle-aged man in fine trousers, a white shirt, and a wide, loud tie, drinking something brown on the rocks. The man’s exchanges are first cordial, but then stretch into tall tales that make you fidget in your seat, and finally become oddly compelling, even touching. Just as the bartender calls for your last order, the story winds to a shimmering conclusion, leaving you with an unexpected sense of hope, of the power of persistence, of the redemption of art. That’s the feel of reading Mezz Mezzrow’s classic 1946 memoir, recently republished by NYRB Classics, about his life as a jazz saxophonist.
As I plan to write a review of Donald Quist’s fine debut essay collection, Harbors, I follow the stories of two more black men shot and killed by police officers and know that, statistically as a white male, I will most likely never be positioned to fear the same fate. I write while growing increasingly concerned about my nation’s frenzied and ugly presidential race and about the increased acceptance of hateful speech in everyday conversation.
What is the statute of limitations concerning how long one is required to keep unwanted kitchen appliances that were received as gifts from dear friends and relatives?
My apartment has a small kitchen and, while I do like to cook, I do not have space for mixers, juicers, bread makers, tortilla presses, pasta makers, tomato mills, french-fry cutters, electric indoor grills, gelato machines, panini presses, R2-D2 popcorn makers (yes, I’m a Star Wars fan and I did receive one of those for my birthday), egg cookers (what happened to using regular pots and pans for eggs?), french press espresso makers, or coffee roasters. I don’t want to appear ungrateful or ungracious, and yes, I have dropped occasional hints: What fun! My own 9-tray vegetable dehydrator! I can’t wait to find space for it so I can serve up some home-made bok choy chips.
Spanning three volumes, which are available separately or as a single collection, March covers key years of civil rights leader Lewis’s life and the battles for justice he experienced firsthand. The writers skillfully frame the overarching narrative of all three books as Rep. Lewis reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement during President Barack Obama’s historic inauguration in 2009.
In this collection, Karen Craigo continues to question the sanctity of the body in an imperfect world. Studying relationships, motherhood, the body, and the garden, No More Milk blends the sublime with the everyday in a raw and honest sense of awe, baring truths in considered lines and controlled imagery.
The narrator and protagonist of The Invisibility Cloak—the first English translation of a novel by acclaimed Chinese writer Ge Fei—is not an inherently likeable person. Cui sees intellectuals as mainly full of nonsense. He is also quick to play the victim, blaming those around him for his misfortunes. But it would be difficult to read this novel without at times empathizing with the narrator. His wife left him, he’s living in his sister’s crummy apartment, and the only real solace he finds is in sitting in the dark, listening to Beethoven on CD.
My neighbor, Ira, isn’t a bad guy. He loans me his lawn mower from time to time, and his kids and mine are in the same class at school. His problem is that he is a world-class name dropper and a liar, and he just can’t seem to help himself. He just got back from Italy, and—wouldn’t you know—he had to tell me all about his private audience with Pope Francis, the new Lamborghini that he has on order, and the way the Italians marveled at his high school level Italian. They could not believe, he said, that he was not a native.
In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Williams has pared away all but the essentials. These very short prose pieces are novels written in miniature, pocket epics and cryptic parables etched on the head of a pin. Most are not more than two pages, some are a single paragraph, and a few are just one or two sentences: simple, even stark, yet weighted. The sixty-first story, “Museum,” for example, is one rueful sentence: “We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested.”
There is always a cruel sister. There is always one more beloved than the other. There is always a stronger who kills the weaker, in life as in the murder ballad “The Two Sisters,” versions of which have circulated for centuries across continents. The older sister cannot help being the uglier, making her the murderer.
I forget to butter the skillet, so my egg spreads
like pond scum, and it’s filmy and stuck, and the smoke alarm
goes off, and it rings in my head the way gunshots do,
and I’m parched and sorry, so I pull the sun from my hair
in penance, and I slap my face with my largest ring turned inward, and I touch
the skillet with the tip of my thumb, and I wait
for the blister, and that’s the place the black widow bit me
in preschool, so I had to go in the ambulance, so I had to get the shots
that scared me, so my father kissed it better, but even now
my hand catches fire when I think about spiders,
and I toss my breakfast in the sink, and my kitchen fills
with steam, and it’s those muggy days in Houston, so I worry
someone might peek in the window, see me dancing barefoot
on the linoleum, shrieking for help but not wanting any.
The dining room windows of Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers beam light onto the last cars in the lot—a pale-blue Pinto, a red Camaro, and a gray Buick Riviera, floorboard littered with Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and Earth, Wind and Fire eight tracks. The Buick’s mine. I’m the manager. In two weeks I’ll quit to go back to college.
I squirt hospital-sweet cleanser over gluey catsup congealed onto the salad bar Formica, scraping with my finger through a rag. Then I head to the kitchen, snack on the last batch of fries and try to balance cash against receipts. Eighteen-year-old Fat Danny washes dishes and sixteen-year-old Nina mops.
on a cramped ship
headed toward Ellis Island.
Fog, fog horns for a
lullaby. The black
pines, a frozen pear.
Straw roofs on fire.
If there were postcards
from the sea there might
have been a Dear
Hannah or Mama, hand
colored with salt.
I will come and get you.
If the branches are
green, pick the apples.
When I write next, I will
have a pack on my
back, string and tin.
I dream about the snow
in the mountains. I never
liked it but I dream of
you tying a scarf
around my hair, your
words that white dust
was triangle &
the sayings of an
apple full
of iodine. what
was told before the
kiss. has a toad
swollen at
a word
of divorce? elegy
no cry again
for the coming
coming nights, no
no, no, quickly
quickly as a rain
rinsing a
dress made
from ash
—the second coming
of judas—how are
you, mr. xylophone? have
you got some
new mallets
for this old
b
old
body?
What should I remember, what release? My mother’s hot hand in mine as she was dying.
My dog’s heart stopping. I felt it.
My arm under her belly, my cheek on her spine—two quick beats
and that was all. But certainly not. I fell on her dark fur.
My mother’s breathing was harsh; she seemed like someone else.
I sat by her and listened. I knew she was dying. I knew
she was not theres—my head hurting, my hand
losing feeling. Don’t die now, I thought.
I wanted to at least shift my purpose and practice. Since I was living in Japan and studying Asian art, I started by painting images of kimonos, of figures wearing kimonos; I took photos of models in kimonos, wearing geisha or kabuki makeup. These exercises soon seemed appropriated and hollow and I realized I needed to be making objects themselves, that I was no longer interested in the pictorial representations of things. At the same time, I wanted to create things that were abstractions, that is, non-objective. Does that make sense? I wanted to be creating things where the process and materials were more important and evident than their subjective objectness or narratives. I wanted, ultimately, to create something not representing something, but actually being something, as physically as possible.
everyone in the cathedral
is a song
living as voices in the corridor
it takes too much
remembrance
to see their countenance
saunter into history books
In love, we are passengers—his take. We had been talking about how people change us. He is standing by the white boards, and I’m sitting in the chair I always read in before students show up for the last class of the night. Out the window, the sunset makes the sky into a ripe plum, but I do not point it out this time. He has jumped to explaining that our understanding of the physical world is not intuitive. We react to forces that we ourselves imagine. Here is the scenario: I’m on a merry-go-round. The friction draws you in. He draws in red on the white board. Then why do I lean out? I stand and move to his side to face the board. Look, he says. All the new vocabulary I’m learning could be its own prose poem: fictitious force, centrifugal motion, normal force. Whenever he gets to talking like this, I see a country sweeping out before me, and I have never traveled there, but it could very well be a place to make a home. Once, he said that I should have been a scientist. Tonight he says, Everything wants to go straight.
It began in August. By December it was done. All he remembered, afterwards, was the freckling of light on the living room couch where she drew him down on the few occasions he went to her house. The home was on the outskirts of town, few other houses surrounding it, and she didn’t seem to care where he parked, didn’t care whether he walked in plain sight to the front door, didn’t care that her husband wouldn’t be home from work until after dark. All he remembered, afterwards, was how one afternoon she told him there were ants in her kitchen sink, asked him to spray them with a bug spray, which he did. The next day, then, by coincidence, his wife informed him there were ants in the basement of their own house.
When the sun sags into the damp puddle
At your paws and
The wind in unison sings a last song
A misty mountain in the sky
Unpacks its jaws
Opens its scarlet mouth
And exhales the last foggy breath
Before the sunset ruptures,
For you to emerge round
And windy from a dandelion stub
Something of you is deposited already
In the salt of the evening
Every room is safe and dangerous. Ghosts squirm into action and wander, reenacting what made them ghosts. Words spoken in an empty room reverberate, returning to the speaker. In Medieval times people had only one space for everything. I, the bedroom, am nestled within a house that is nestled within Seattle, a subtle city. No sun comes through my two windows, only a frozen gray sky, a giant’s sigh or a sad exhalation.
I wore my grey dress to the funeral, the one with the scratchy sleeves. My tights had a hole under the knee that got bigger when I poked my finger into it. The coffin was closed and I wondered if Nancy looked like she was sleeping in there. There was a single white rose lying on top. I didn’t even know they made roses in white. A skinny lady with a stern face and a hat played the organ while everyone stood up and sang. I didn’t know the words.
For years beyond counting, she lived far under water among the green things, their shine like that light before the storm comes above ground, as if seen through the veins of a new leaf, held close to the eye in a time so distant that its tale must have been whispered in her ear by a voice she no longer recalled how to speak back to. She’d look, in daylight, at the angles of the rocks that jut up from the sand below, whose bottom she was afraid to find. She’d float over the sunken ferns, the stems many-leaved and waving, watch the fish nestling there whom she called her scaly sisters, their shared kin as much a mystery to her as her own name. She thought that the moon, when it came, rose from and hovered a little above the surface of the water. That surface was the sky she knew. She’d see her hair drift ahead of her, the color of a tongue after it’s licked an apple for too long, though apples were things that she forgot, every day, except one.
CAUSE
by Matthew Gellman
Nearly 37 million people are living with HIV around the world. The bird has a wet, satiny throat and thrusts his red song into boys. Some are under the age of fifteen. 2.6 million,
they say. Feathers in their bloodstream. Not enough branches, nor living trees, nor roots.
In 2014 alone, an estimated 2 million people were newly infected. 220,000 under fifteen. Charts say they saw red. They titled the bird’s song “Antiretroviral.” Only a few are lucky
to hear it. The bird keeps singing. The bird will be singing in 230 rooms this hour.
Suicide was his breakfast cereal, his tuna sandwich, his pasta primavera, his aperitif. Thinking of it got him through the day, and it came punctually.
He regularly tried to kill himself, and I encouraged him. My agenda was not so malignant, or so callous as it may seem only at first glance. I had a larger purpose, though in fairness the sacrifice was his alone.
Attempting suicide was an avocation. In this sense, my encouragement was only salutary. If he ever succeeded, the project itself would terminally suffer. It was his ineptness that made him so invaluable, recommended him so very highly. Not to mention his doggedness despite the failures.
In the beginning it’s just him and the silence. In the old college library, the wind pushes fraying leaves through the crevice under a door towards the center of a labyrinth of stacks, finds him crouched watching her read over a bottom row of books, her skin the pink of magnolias, her hair a mess. When she looks up he pretends to scan the shelf in front of him and she goes back to reading, enabling him to stare again, and this repeats several times until she straightens, circles the row to where he kneels searching for her face between National Security and Immigration and Man, The State, and War, and when she says something he startles, momentarily distracted by the book she's holding, but then recovers and asks her: Want to grab a beer?
he best way to remember is to be born again
completely, slick with red and heat,
til the cord is cut and the body stilled into awe.
At trial, the mind re-buries itself,
memories stacked like silver fish.
One last drink for every hurt to carry.
One for his hands, one for the knife,
one for the hot pulse inside you
as body met body against the wall.
A lawyer would never argue his real fear
is of being done in prison by men
the way he did you.
Instead, the mind tries to forget.
Safens itself inside morning drives,
fog burning across a lake,
the gentleness
of smaller things.
Because we swim small in a twinkling expanse, we should cling to the icy crystals of fact: The screech and gouge might last for decades, but hardly forever. The smash won't topple individuals so much as dance through generations. The Earth itself has weathered metaphors far more titanic. And it's unlikely the lower animals will sense climate change at all!
Someone came up with this image.
It was during the me-too chinwag after Mass
And it was a mother’s voice.
Later, I thought alone
In my hull:
What sort of submersibles
Are we at home then, in Ohio?
By the day after the storm, the owner of the bar where I worked had fled the city, leaving me in charge by default. I kept the place open, mostly to serve those volunteers clearing the muddy streets of wreckage; I refused to take their money, because I’d always hated the owner.
This far downtown, there was still no electricity, so I improvised my own mood lighting. By one-thirty on the morning in question, the candles along the bar had burnt down, hissing and sputtering, to pools of molten wax in their dishes. The last drinkers had left; I was spending an idle moment at the liquor shelves behind the bar, rotating the bottles so the labels faced outwards, when I heard the front door open again. “How goes it?” I said, eyeing the pale blur of the visitor’s reflection in the nearest fifth of whiskey.
The man paused on the doorstep, huffed into his palm to check his breath, and then shook his jacket straight. Ignoring the bell to the side, he gave a stout knock.
A girl opened the door. “Hello?” She had a wide, serious face and the kind of long straight hair that fell like a shower curtain
“Hi,” he said brightly. “You’re Angel, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I have heard so much about you. I’m Chris. I’m picking up your mother.”
“I know. She’s been getting ready for hours.”
“May I come in?”
Peering out the window of the small, high-ceilinged room where schoolchildren once hung their coats, I see nothing but corn running a mile to Grandpa’s woods, the new ranch house of the city people and, across the road from that, Uncle’s Clarence’s farm, which my wife still wishes he had left us. The barn is falling in. We saw the first little breach in the roof appear. “Uh-oh,” my wife said as we drove by.
I thought we’d go with the other recruits to Ping Pong, Mahjong, or Sing-Along, but we get Mail Room. Stay here until you work things out, He says, then leaves with the Key. Mother’s not intimidated. Sits down and smooths her skirt. What have we here? Form letters for every person on earth, explaining what happens—not why. Sign on the wall says a few will get their letters while most, poor fools, do not, but even if yours slips behind the mailbox or falls into a flower bed, its contents hold true: You’ll marry that man in the blue suit. Your brother survives the crash, but his right arm doesn’t. Baby for you, you and—yes, I’m serious—you.