Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Michael Ricketti

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

Ribbon.

Once overturned. the high desert light. thinking the things. again you have breathed. not
specifically. considered. peeling garlic at his table. myrtlewood board. which of you with
child. stalked amid snow covered. a wound ribbon. the realization that these things are done to
people. understanding that we are the last. tell them that we have brought compensation.
deliver. we give no thought to ours. he takes her hands in his hands. is it ours to connect this
violence to bring reasoning to it. when everyone knows. when it is said. seeing how a delicate
balance. distinctions. stuttered images. sound of breath. calm of held breath. question the
killing out to the mist of the edge. because this can not be what you wanted. five simmering.
smoke ribbon road through snow covered. slight course. slight disembarkations. what were you
told and how were you told. fixed gaze. our slight reluctance. walked in the streets. the city.
lights on. off. entwined heads reluctant. above. entwined bodies lithe on the hard shoulder.
held. the need to not be in this place. perhaps what is not understood. to leave the bridge that
carries. all of stories. stories. stories. dreams of stories.

 

Michael Ricketti was born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. He is the cofounder with Sevdiye Ricketti of Kuruçeşme Projekt a community based art and education initiative in Nicosia Cyprus. His work has been published in Welcomat and is forthcoming in Vallum.

March 30, 2021 0 comment
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Long Takes

The Long Take: The Old Man’s Dark Light by Jonah Howell

written by CCM-Entropy

The Old Man’s Dark Light

 

I admit—and I hope I’m not bothering you, ma’am—that I don’t speak your language, but since you’ve said nothing to the contrary, I’ve got a story I’m burning to tell you—or at least to tell someone—that I think, you being a local, will interest you, and which, in any case, ain’t something you hear every day—or at least I would assume not, because it’s something I’ve never seen, and I’ve been all over—and which, even if you have heard such a thing once or twice, is rare enough that it can’t possibly annoy you, although—and feel free to laugh—I don’t precisely know what would annoy you, seeing as you said nothing and, what’s more, didn’t even move when I sat next to you on this bench, even when I could have chosen any other bench in Wilhelmsplatz, really any other bench in Göttingen, as much as any bench means to me, which is nothing, nothing at all, new as I am and uninitiated and without the established preference a local such as yourself might have for some bench over the others, although, as you can tell—or at least you may be able to tell, though I truly have no idea whether you’re passed out drunk or just sleeping or even dead, because we’re not close enough yet that I would touch your neck to check for a pulse, even when, to be honest, I’m burning to do so, for I haven’t touched a neck in so very long, which I don’t mean to sound creepy, but it may be unavoidable—as you can tell, I repeat, I have, indeed, picked your bench for a very particular reason, namely that I must tell this story and that, seeing as I don’t speak your language—or at least not well enough to tell what I have to tell—my selection of listeners is rather slim, perhaps slimmed further by my own nervousness to simply walk up to a perfect stranger and begin to regale, having no way to know beforehand whether he, she, or they would be able, ready, or willing to be regaled in my own language, the use of which, in such an aggressive abrupt, must seem horridly presumptuous even in the best of cases, and much more so when I have no idea whatsoever whether this story of mine is the most commonplace thing in the world for you people or whether it really is as truly mythologically ominous as it seems to me, the ignorant newcomer, or whether it falls somewhere in the middle, in a gray zone that, in any case, aside from all theorizing, may not justify my abrupt and unrequested storytelling, to which, I must say again, I am incredibly grateful that you have consented—or to which, at least, you have not objected—and which, I promise, will be worth any unpleasant surprise that accompanies it if you should wake up, because I have now seen you shudder and thereby know that you are asleep and not dead, a heartening revelation for me because, at the very least, even if you do not hear my story per se, it may produce for you some entertaining dreams, even if you do not speak my language, because my tonal melody, at least, will reach you, and I have been told that the fluctuations of my voice are quite pleasant, although of course I have no way to know if such things carry over into this new place, into this new language, while I assume they must, though I also have no way to know why I would assume such a thing except that it feels right, or that I am vain, which may well be true or, in any case, may well seem true, except that this story, if I really were so vain, would surely focus on me, which it does not, as you will hear (or as you will dream) in a short moment, since, after such a horribly long introduction, I have lost all hope that you will awaken and either listen attentively or tell me to leave, so that I really have no reason to procrastinate further unless I simply enjoy hearing myself speak, which, to tell the truth, I no longer do because every word reminds me of my irrevocable outsideness, of the series of historical and economic and ethnographic events that have led me—by simple human necessity, you understand—to tell stories to an inert body who, until only some moments ago, may as well have been dead, for all I knew, in exactly the same way as—and I thank you, for you have given me, by your silence, the perfect segue into the story I’ve hyped so much—and to repeat, for clarity’s sake: in exactly the same way as the protagonist of my story, namely the old man on the tricycle, may as well have been a ghost, for all I know, which makes—I know, I know—no sense now, so prematurely said, but which will make all the haunting sense in the world in a few short moments, once I have laid the groundwork for his entry, a rather dramatic and mysterious entry that, I regret, may have lost some of its delicious spontaneity now that I have foreshadowed it, although, on the other hand, it will be all that much more tensely anticipated once it arrives—that is, to ignore grammar for a second, once he arrives—and so! I proceed, with no regrets whatsoever, to the groundwork I promised:

I walked along the Weender Landstrasse, with which I’m sure you’re familiar, at around midnight—though I cannot tell you the exact time of any of this, since I have no watch and no cell phone, since I cannot have a cell phone contract, since I’m so new here and haven’t yet amassed the mounds of papers required for a cell phone contract, which sounds like an enormous hindrance, right, though it really isn’t but is, I must say, extremely freeing, not to be reachable, not to be connected, to have the possibility of loneliness, with which of course I need no help, as linguistically stunted as I am, though in any case it’s nice, such a forced immersion in the analog, and is something I’d recommend to anyone, though I still can’t say exactly why, except that it has rendered me…I don’t want to say, “more present,” but rather…more constant, let’s say, more consequent, from one moment to the next, less fractious—ah, and against my horrific digressions I repeat, yet again, that I walked at midnight, a midnight that, though there are streetlights all along the Weender Landstrasse, was dark enough, what with the light rain and the heavy, relentless surge of cumulonimbus clouds, a midnight, furthermore, that seemed even darker to me—not to be, I hope, overdramatic—because of my loneliness, being so newly displaced and so unaccustomed to my new life of relative silence, for which reason I walked with my hood up, a beer—Augustiner, if you must know—in one hand and a hand-rolled cigarette in the other because I wanted—childish, I know; and histrionic, I know, to tell it like this; and futile, I know too well—to seem, for a moment, like a local; and so you can imagine that, with each limb employed and a hood up, I looked as unapproachable as I possible could have, but still not unapproachable enough that this old man—with his wavy white hair and short white beard, in a full black pinstripe suit and matching fedora—not unapproachable enough, I say, that this dapper old man could refrain from stopping his tricycle next to me and saying—in his and, I must presume, your language—, “Would you mind turning the light on?” and pointing to the bulb on the front of the tricycle, to which I, in shame, had to respond, “Repeat that, please”; so he did, this time with more expressive gesticulations toward the bulb, whose switch I attempted to find for a full thirty seconds before my hand landed on a small knob, turned it, turned it further, and around and around as the bulb completely refused to respond, so that, after turning the knob for a minute or two—imagine that, a full minute or two, kneeling in the rain beneath a perfectly functioning streetlight, all the while watched by this tricycling dandy—and hearing several clicks, I raised my eyes to the man in shame and despair—on the verge of crying, if you want to know the truth—at which crucial, hopeless point, despite everything, he grinned at me with the mischievous, arch-browed grin one expects from a demon or a criminal lecher, and he said—and I do really think I caught it, though he may have said something else—, “That’s it!” and sped away with sureness and vigor into the light rain, as though I actually had managed to turn on his light; and, looking back, perhaps I had, although I certainly saw no difference in the bulb, so that I was forced to assume that this old man’s tricycle was outfitted with some type of light that he could see and I could not, which so perfectly mirrored everything that I had felt during our short conversation and during my few but long days here that I drained the beer straight away, finished the cigarette, and rolled another, just to give my hands and eyes something to do, so that they would not display my lostness, my infantile impotence, my glowing blatant outsideness, as I followed after him up the Weender Landstrasse; but all at once my mind…I hate to say “exploded,” but that’s exactly the right word…yes, exploded into recognition, that this tricycler was somehow linked to that famous story of the man who walked into the marketplace on a sunny noon with that redundant lantern in his hand and said that he was searching for God, though what precisely connected this man, with his tricycle and fedora and his mysterious and perhaps delusional light, to that other, with the lantern, escaped me and could not be caught, that is to say I could not connect the dots but had nevertheless felt the explosion in all its revelatory luminescence, so that I became certain that the man had come specifically to me in order to teach me some crucial lesson that, because of whatever personal shortcomings, I had failed to learn, even though I had recognized it, which is, I’m sure, worse than not having recognized it at all because, in that case, I would have no reason to fret and no reason to feel yet more inadequate, yet more external, while in this case, having recognized but not learned, I was only reminded yet again of my fundamental inability to grasp what goes on here, which is to say, my fundamental inability to become anything other than outside, to be anything other than isolated, to see the array of tripwires and lights that—I’m certain—surround and converge on me at all times but which I cannot see or feel except by some deeply buried nervous sense, the same nervous sense that led me to drain that beer and to roll the second cigarette, the same nervous sense that then drove me to put headphones in my ears without connecting them to anything, to pull my hood further over my forehead, and to bury my one free hand—that is, the non-cigarette-laden hand—in my jacket’s pocket, where it fidgeted shamefully with the rubbery underside of a bottlecap, a bottlecap which, for that same purpose, I have kept in my pocket for three days now and with which—I will admit, though it pains me—I fidgeted madly through the first several minutes of this…can I call it a conversation? I suppose not…this narration, let us say, though now, now that we have become somewhat better acquainted—or at least I have said quite a lot, and you have allowed me to rest my hand on your shoulder—I have decided that I will throw it away, the significance of which you surely grasp or, at least, feel in your dream, which I earnestly hope is a good one, though you shudder and grimace with attractively bluing lips, a dream lit by the type of light I was and still am unable to see, or even unlit entirely if those types of lights are bad, a dream, regardless, populated by that same type of old man, the type that posit themselves immediately, for no discernible reason, as mythological, who pop up seemingly out of nowhere with their tricycles and demonic illogic, who make—if you will allow me the conceit—spheres out of circles, so to speak, who illuminate, that is, the realm of illogic that surrounds all logic, for better or worse, and who therefore round out logic itself exactly while they describe, by their very presence, its dissolution, the possibilities beyond, the possibilities open to those who, for better or worse and often better and more often horribly worse, have become at home with outsideness in a way that I still have not learned, although, you must admit, simply to deliver such a lengthy narration to a completely inert body such as yourself is an undeniable step in that direction, try as I might to explain all this away as dream-work or somesuch mystic cop-out, and try as I might to excuse myself by saying that I have simply craved to speak my own language—in so far as I can own a language, which I doubt—, and, what’s more, try as I might to reason through the story itself: Even still—regardless of all that, regardless of everything—the story itself and the fact that I have told it to you of all people, on this of all benches, testify to nothing but, again, my irrevocable outsideness, my incurable loneliness, my steady path to becoming that man on the tricycle or some analog thereof, if, after all, I have not become something akin to him already, which, at the end and bottom of it all, is what I fear: That I may, in only a few long days, have sunken so deep into the churning seas of myself that I won’t be able to swim out, so deep that the only person with whom I can reasonably speak is either asleep or passed-out-hammered or dead, so deep that I will, in fact, begin to see the lights that old man sees—or at least, none being given, that I will create them—and that, in the end, when I finally approach the brink of his impossible, I will see no barrier at all and will simply step off the edge of the cliff, which may be anywhere at any time, and which is—I know; I sense it; I don’t know how—a final movement, a terminal velocity, a real sickness unto death, one that must prove wonderful or terrible or, more likely, an overwhelming—in the harshest sense of the word—combination of the two, for which I don’t know if I am prepared, since I’m not even prepared to speak to someone who isn’t incapacitated, though, of course, I don’t mean to insult you, especially after you have been such a perfect listener, in all truth the perfect recipient of this long, rambling account, at whose end I retain only one solitary regret: That, if and when you awaken, I cannot ask what you dreamed, just as I cannot ask you anything else, not really, so that I must stare down at your violetly quivering, cracked lips with the same straitjacketed stare that I directed at the old dandy as he triked away into the black rain and mist of Weender Landstrasse, weaving into and out of the bike lane as though drunk, and I wanted to call after him, “Are you okay? Should I try the light again?”, for, at the end and bottom of it all, perhaps he was exactly as anxious as me, and perhaps he had only affirmed my efforts because he could not bring himself to condemn them because he saw in my eyes the masculinely restrained tears of all my miscarried communications and could not bring himself to add the one, final blow that would release them, that would unite me with the black rain and the mist and the drenched night and all the inhuman environment against which we each, in our own way, struggled; but of course I could call neither of these things to him, so that I was forced to watch, deaf and silent and helpless, as he swerved on and off the road, to watch as his fedora flew away from his wispy white locks and sailed into a small stream at the roadside before being swept into a rusted storm drain, to watch an old Audi sedan zip by me, blasting techno music, a bottle of pilsner glinting in the driver’s shaky hand, and to watch as they both, the tricyclist and the sedan behind him, swerved more or less blindly, more or less drunkenly, across the splashing black road, like the mating dance of some monstrous species of butterfly, until finally they met, and the dandy sailed, with the same limp fluttering movement his fedora had exhibited only seconds earlier, head-first into the curb, his crumpled tricycle scraping the street in his wake, while the sedan, after coming to a hydroplaning halt, groaned into high gear and fishtailed away into the night as I, my heart split in two and beating in both ears, ran to the old man’s side, my boots sticking slightly in the pool of blood that spilled from the back of his head and ran down toward the storm drain to join his hat—as I ran to his side, I repeat, knowing that I could do absolutely nothing for him, that I had no cell phone and wouldn’t know the emergency number nor what to say even if I did have one, so that I could only watch as his blood swirled against the soles of my boots and press his hand as he extended it to me, its tarnished wedding band searing cold against my wet and numbing palm, and when his hand dropped, limp, onto his pinstriped chest, I only stared out at the empty street, yelled random, indecipherable syllables into the indifferent darkness, then set off for home at a sprint, blood flecks spritzing out from my pounding boots in all directions, flecks that even now are caked into their treads, which I would show you if you awakened, so that you could see my guilt, or the guilt of language itself, or the guilt of time in its eternal reckless dash, and oh how I hope you do awaken, that this blue of your lips does not imply what I fear it does because, my new friend, my only friend, I can do no more for you than I did for my triking dandy, and though I yell for hours in this empty plaza, we’re both on our own here, and I can give you nothing but a concerned look, an extra jacket against the cold, although you have not shivered for some time, which I hope—stupidly, perhaps, but I hope nonetheless—means that you have warmed, that your dreams are full of fire and charcoal, though your once-blue lips have turned pale.

 

 

Jonah Howell lives in northern Germany. His recent work has appeared in Expat Press, Plutonics (vol. 14), and Countere.

 

 

 

March 24, 2021 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from James Kelly Quigley

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

Disintegration

More or less depressed by mutsu apples
and winesap in shrink wrap,
waking up with hair longer than mine
spooled and languid on the duvet,
the barley threshed, the tree burls
burgeoning, autumn’s shameless kiss of vanity
and its slow disintegration.
Things that were still are.
Things that are continue to be.
Yet I know all too well how the end ends,
like a honeycomb crackling
with something more than mockery
at the great white sting-proof suit.
It comes expectantly, too punctual,
but prettier than ever. Turnstiles
bladed with cold, municipal steps
with a touch so plain, so stale it kills.
All the haunts of you, my impeccable mess,
are the embrasures of the windows
of the blissfully dead. Once you were
bigger and brighter and wider than the snow.
Now you make me feel like I’m living
at the edge of the world, hopelessly adrift
in the eyes of the ghost again. My God,
this is pathetic. It must be a love song.

James Kelly Quigley’s poetry has received Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominations. Recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Harpur Palate, THE BOILER, Narrative, Nashville Review, SLICE, The American Journal of Poetry, THRUSH, and other places. He received both a BA and an MFA from New York University, where he taught undergraduate creative writing and was an editor of Washington Square Review. James was born and raised in New York, where he lives and works as a freelance writer. See more of his work at jameskellyquigley.com.

March 9, 2021 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Korellia Schneider

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

A List of Things to Get Me Through this Day

  1. The Oxford Comma
  2. People who don’t like the Oxford Comma, and how those who do are willing to march into righteous battle to defend it, the honor of grammar, and the very fate of the world swaying like grass grown inches longer upon the laurels of summer sunbathing.
  3. Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma”
  4. Moments when thoughts extrude from the brain in such organic stroke of wonderfulness, like beautiful pipettes from a pastry bag in the backroom of a French patisserie. Just because no one else sees the magic does not mean it is without worth of beholding.
  5. All the cans of V8 I could’ve had
  6. That one time when T and I went to the Sendai Aquarium, and we were the oldest ones to meander the halls of watery depths, and I think we still had the most fun. Some of the littlest kiddos could tell just by looking at the fish which ones typically appeared on their dinner plates, and we smirked to ourselves while playing imperfect translators, the most keenly feigned ignorance when we were in need of another inside joke.
  7. The backsplash above the stovetop that aspires to be a Jackson Pollock painting with each new recipe muddled through, each saucepan left unattended and unlidded on medium-high for too long
  8. Caterpillars that play dead when you try to coax them to crawl onto your hand and their naively brave brothers and sisters who know you to be a friendly, warm-blooded twig and hike on up to keep looking for more greens to munch on, to fill their bottomless bellies
  9. Marble cake and the mystery of getting that perfect swirl immortalized in the interior
  10. When it was enough to just sit beside friends on back-aching hillsides and watch the sun go down, then come up again.
  11. The locusts in the trees, their buzz-sawing vocals proclaiming time still of two left feet.

Korellia Schneider is a graduate student and writer living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her work is forthcoming in the Write to Move anthology.

March 2, 2021 0 comment
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FictionPoetryRandomSmall Press

Sawako Nakayasu + Diana Arterian’s To-Read Piles (March)

written by Diana Arterian

Sawako Nakayasu, brilliant poet, translator, and author of the recently published Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (from Wave Books), shares her to-read pile with us this month!


Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, Daniel Borzutzky
Socialist Realism, Trisha Low
The Repetition of Marie, Teresa Carmody
Silverfish, Rone Shavers
The Semblable, Chantal Maillard
Of Forests and of Farms: On Faculty and Failure, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves
Slow Down and Walk: A Conversation, Nadine George-Graves and Okwui Okpokwasili
Letters: The classroom is burning, let’s dream about a School of Improper Education, KUNCI Study Forum & Collective
A Mano / By Hand, Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Invisible Horizon: A Religious Pamphlet, Sibyl Kempson
Electric Sarcasm, Dimitra Ioannou
Underworld Lit, Srikanth Reddy
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Adrienne Maree Brown
Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address, Douglas Robinson
Barbaric Vast & Wild: A Gathering of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present: Poems for the Millennium, Jerome Rothenberg and John Bloomberg-Rissman

 

Glad to be pushing farther into spring, and even have a few books of poetry to read. Wish I had gotten more of these beautiful books read last month, but here’s hoping for March.

– NEWIES –
Natural Birth, Toi Derricotte
Forgotten Journey, Silvina Ocampo (trans. by Suzanne Jill Levine, Katie Lateef-Jan)
There Must Be Happy Endings, Megan Sandberg-Zakian
How to Wash a Heart, Bhanu Kapil
Ellis Island, Georges Perec (trans. Harry Matthews)
Mortal Tales, Sara Nicholson
Further Adventures of My Nose, John Surowiecki
Underworld Lit, Srikanth Reddy
Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition, Lisa Fishman
All the Rage, Rosamond S. King
Curb, Divya Victor
Also a print from Richard Craft’s It Is What It Is: All the Cards Issued to Donald Trump January 2017-January 2021!

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates; Dream of Europe, Audre Lorde; The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson (re-read); The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso (re-read); Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer; Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco; Pigeons on the Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen (trans. Michael Hoffman); Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam; Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi; Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones); Remembrances, Mir Taqi Mir (trans. C.M. Naim); Land of Love and Drowning, Tiphanie Yanique; The Lost Writings, Franz Kafka (trans. Michael Hoffman); After the Stroke, May Sarton

March 1, 2021 0 comment
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FictionPoetryRandom

Diana Arterian’s To-Read Pile (February)

written by Diana Arterian

Flying solo this month, and a little late to boot. Feeling pretty accomplished considering how many titles I got through in January, and excited about the new ones I’ve got my hands on.


– NEWIES –
After the Stroke, May Sarton
The Lost Writings, Franz Kafka (trans. Michael Hoffman)
Land of Love and Drowning, Tiphanie Yanique
Remembrances, Mir Taqi Mir (trans. C.M. Naim)

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates; Dream of Europe, Audre Lorde; The Red Parts and Bluets, Maggie Nelson (re-read); The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso (re-read); Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer; Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco; Pigeons on the Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen (trans. Michael Hoffman); The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women, ed. Dick Davis; Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam; Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi; Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones); Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, Nikki Finney (in-progress); Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison (in progress/teaching); Winter in the Blood, James Welch (in progress/teaching)

February 4, 2021 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Jed Munson

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder

I am feeling mostly groggy,
most beatific, most feelings
To date. I am feeling theory

Failed me where I needed it
Most to counter starlight. So it went
Without saying I lacked the digits to
index every connection that arose in
the haze of my gleaning the cleanest

Image of facefulness. Faith, it goes without saying.
Any which way it faceth. And that might modulate
Behind screens how pixelate spiders across granite

columns, so waves across waves across my summary
Of conundrum in my inner-inner ears (my other eyes)
(Should it concern my medical history, my genealogy
Is borning. Excuse the maladjustment of my disguise)

Say, “It was simple until it wasn’t,
Until we were older than we knew
How to be, and until we grew tired
Of apprehending swiftly our gusto.

Kabobbed on a rising spire, northing polis circumspect
Of being well within feeling out of season.

An assembly of flags bobbing on the canal
Of some great city’s wheelhouse. Our four
Sets of eyes to the beauty unawake though
all finally at the same time openly coordinating
blinks, if not to the idea of to play, then to plea.

The feelings they stood for at war
With the reasons for feeling them. Say “repeat.”

Now repeat after me: Simon says ‘I’.
Aye, aye, Simon, Assurance stutters.
We the people conflate into peopling

For dedications to our untranslatable
Banality of harping on the one string
Of untranslatability, of readjusting bi-
Focals to a many-mooned University
Degree I earned barely by disguising
my skin in Skin. The convenience of
Statement, That. Of a rudder to drape
An arm over, and so the river system,
Hacked Littered Ransomed Headline.

Of whatever rug you pull out the body
Of the concept rolled to white in flour. I’ll be there
In the dump slamming charity tournaments
document preening every letter for any um,
word of prey save one bird of re:lettres, “I”

My lasting intervention the complexion, this:
When spilled my hand into sawdust and rose
Into garage my own steam. The lone packing
Peanut unsure if to cling to the finger offends
its being. Insofar as it does I cry into a pillow
into two muffled languages, knead their fluid
-filled cyst. Insofar as it doesn’t, I assure you,
I’m not crying. ‘I am not crying,’ I somesing.”

Gently, through a two-inch opportunity, in breezes
Tolerance to debase your plotlines. The machinery
Winds down into embryonic respite on the shelves
Into seed-hum from a higher-branched honeycomb
of two-inch opportunities percolating consequence,
mattering more from great heights at global angles.

Leagues away, a personal dispatch among debris
In their motherland : people step out of their cars
And peer ahead at the honks at the peering ahead
to the event. The event : its own vision of concern.

The event the demist
In the clearing street.
We the faceful desist
The somnambulance
Muttering to ourself,
We could have lived!

Jed Munson lives in Seoul. His debut chapbook, Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder, is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse. 

February 1, 2021 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Yong Takahashi

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

Wild Flower

I’m a wild weed
Roaming from field to field
Trampled, plucked, and shred
Reappearing in places unexpected

You hope to change
The flower that won’t be tamed
Planted in your fancy vase, I shrivel
My days more and more dismal

I wait for time to pass
Praying this prison will collapse
Winds blow me back outside
Soaring, my soul flies

I will survive the season
Knowing I live by my own decisions
Always going to be me
Dancing wild and free

Yong Takahashi was a finalist in The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Southern Fried Karma Novel Contest, Gemini Magazine Short Story Contest, and Georgia Writers Association Flash Fiction Contest. She was awarded Best Pitch at the Atlanta Writers Club Conference.
The Escape to Candyland, a short story collection, was published in 2020.
To learn more about Yong, visit: yctwriter.com
All social media @yctwriter

January 20, 2021 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Alisha Mascarenhas

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

Subtlety amid the emergency.

  1. How the body surfaces from exhaustion: light, agile, sensitive as the season.
  2. Stay close enough to your suffering to receive its wisdom.
  3. Open the windows.
  4. Take rest.
  5. Wait generously.
  6. Observe the gradual, intuitive discernment that occurs in relief of obligation.
  7. In case of psychic dispersal, reach through the winds of confusion with a steady hand, and draw a line down the centre.
  8. Anticipate the threshold before you meet it.
  9. Find pause between sensation and articulation: thrum and sigh, supple as an iris, steady as a sunflower.
  10. Investigate the data. Feel the wave beneath the wave. The whirl and swell.
  11. Decide to stay.
  12. Dream deep into the night and seed perception of multiplicities flourishing.
  13. Enable the conditions to give a little more space to what hurts, and keep it company.
  14. Move into the sting when it endures.
  15. Sit still and let your perception dilate.
  16. The compass spins to the sublime in all directions.
  17. Find the erotic measure between the safety and chaos.
  18. Edge to touch the light of your ambitions.

Alisha Mascarenhas is a poet and translator living in Brooklyn. Recent collaborative work was commissioned by Asiya Wadud and supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for the project ECHO EXHIBIT, presented as part of River to River 2020: Four Voices. She has contributed writing to publications such as the Poetry Project Newsletter, Peripheral Review and The Felt, among others. Alisha holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute, and is co-editor of READ: a journal of inter-translation.

January 19, 2021 0 comment
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FictionPoetryRandomSmall Press

Aeon Ginsberg + Diana Arterian’s To-Read Piles (January)

written by Diana Arterian

Goodbye old Julian calendar year, hello 2021. May you treat us even a bit more kindly. We begin the brand new year with Aeon Ginsburg‘s to-read pile! Aeon’s first full-length poetry collection Greyhound came out this fall, and you should definitely take a look. (Full disclosure, I edited this brilliant book.) Here’s what Aeon’s looking to read:

Processed with VSCO with preset

I Got A Monster by Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg
Now by The Invisible Committee
Virtual Reality – Edition Digital Culture 6
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley (with notes by Rebecca Teich)
Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker
Arts of Living On A Damaged Planet edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt
Surrogate Humanity by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora
Indictus by Natalie Eilbert
Without Protection by Gala Mukomolova
Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List Of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen
We Want It All edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel

As for me, you’d think I had a year with endless time considering all the new books I’ve amassed…Still. There are worse things that entering a new year with an ambitious stack.

– NEWIES –
Days of Distraction, Alexandra Chang
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney
The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women, ed. Dick Davis
Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi
Winter in the Blood, James Welch
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
A Fortune for Your Disaster, Hanif Abduraqqib
Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, Nikki Finney
The Red Parts and Bluets, Maggie Nelson (re-read)
Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam
Fierce Attachments, Vivian Gornick
Something Like an Autobiography, Akira Kurosawa (trans. Audie E. Bock)

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates; Dream of Europe, Audre Lorde;  New and Selected Poems, Toi Derricotte; The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso (re-read); Defacing the Monument, Susan Briante; Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile, Tammy Nguyen; Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive, Tinashe Mushakavanhu; Guillotine, Eduardo C. Corral; Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From, Sawako Nakayasu; Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer; Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco; The Essential Ruth Stone, ed. Bianca Stone; Pigeons on the Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen (trans. Michael Hoffman); The Marathon Poet, Åke Hodell (trans. Fia Backström, ed. Kira Josefsson); Life in Space, Galina Rymbu (trans. Joan Brooks); Sonnets, Ulises Carrión; Soviet Texts, Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov (trans. Simon Schuchat, Ainsley Morse); Being Human Is an Occult Practice, Magdalena Zurawski; Notes on Mother Tongues: Colonialism, Class, and Giving What You Don’t Have, Mirene Arsanios; The End, Aditi Machado; Quartet, Claudia La Rocco; Zero Energy Experimental Pile, Alex Cruse

January 2, 2021 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Angela Gabrielle Fabunan

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

Cityscape

As I rest my weary eyes upon the state of this city,
I wonder if I may finally be given leave to leave it.
So often have I dreamt of moving away it seems
a cage to be caught in this grey cityscape, some
black and white movie someone has forgotten
about, and I the lost cat abandoned in the dump.
I wonder if I will ever see snow again or if I will
become loved again, if this heavy note of rain
on a restless sun is all I will ever experience.
I want so much to see other landscapes, wet my feet
in other oceans, feel the salt breeze of other shores.
I am too weary, having loved in this forgotten city.
The peals of the church and the heavy traffic distract,
but my soul knows the perils of what it encountered:
affection turned distant, love turned ill, to illness.
Forgive me, my country, but I want to forget you,
as I have forgotten many things, I want to be done
with you, so I can rest, I want the ordeal to be over,
and yet, I know, the longer I reside here, the longer
the memories take over, and I can’t take it any longer.
Take me to the libraries of books yet unopened,
my story here is done: no backwards look, no longing
touch, no more to save my soul, and may forever
be in the hands of another in the shores of another
place, far, far away from this lonely city that will
forget me, will forget you, will forget us. I dip my
toes in salt water, and it stings, for a moment, to
stay a minute longer. I welcome the sting as I’ve
welcomed all pain into my heart, crucifying me.
But I know my time will come, my place is not here,
and the travel is far, but I will go, I will embark on
a journey, and I will change the feeble rocks of new
earth to the foundations of a building, knowing all
I’ve already left here, all I’m willing to leave behind.
A goodbye which, once uttered, solidifies in the air.

Angela Gabrielle Fabunan was born in the Philippines but grew up in New York City. Her first book, The Sea That Beckoned, was published by Platypus Press in 2019, and her second book, Young Enough to Play, is forthcoming from UP Press in 2021.

December 31, 2020 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Amelia Anthony

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

Ruminations

If the world ends does it matter that I was
on the precipice of something really good here?
Or that I finally cleaned my room last night and folded
all of my clean clothes? I was listening to a podcast,
another one about death and life,
and now I am trying to work up tears
sitting at the kitchen table.
I am thinking about how this is how it
must have felt in Hawaii when they said
that it was going to implode—false alarm.
I wonder, are the Hawaiians better prepared for this right now?
I wonder who I will think about in the absolute final moment,
actually I wonder more who will think about me.
So I hope there is a stats board in the afterlife
I can see how many showers I took, kisses I missed,
or deaths I skipped happily by unaware. Or a score out of 100.
Although I haven’t really been living
these past six months anyways
by lived I mean my life has been boring
but if I have learned anything these past six months
it’s that boring means life is good.

Amelia Anthony is a student and writer living in Providence, RI. Her work can be found on www.ameelsonwheels.com or in The College Hill Independent, The Brown Daily Herald, and Whitehot Magazine.

December 10, 2020 0 comment
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FictionPoetryRandom

Anthony Cody + Diana Arterian’s To-Read Piles (December)

written by Diana Arterian

We’re rounding out this wild year with the amazing Anthony Cody‘s to-read piles. Anthony is the author of the National Book Award shortlisted Borderland Apocrypha. It is so deserving of the honor, and I hope you add it to your own to-read piles soon. Anthony explains the two stacks: “The standing books are books that I am currently studying and looking into more deeply. Essentially, books that I have read more than once and am going more slowly through to learn/teach from and are more static in their rotation. The stacked books are the current books I am reading through at the moment for the first time and I very often ‘burn through’ as a first read before diving into them further later or immediately after.”


Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, Reece Jones
Ecodeviance, CAConrad
Diwata, Barbara Jane Reyes
Temple of Confessions: Mexican Beasts and Living Santos, Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Roberto Sifuentes
Century of the Wind, Eduardo Galeano
Akrilica, Juan Felipe Herrera (trans.Stephen Kessler, Sesshu Foster, Dolores Bravo, Magaly Fernandez, Juan Felipe Herrera)
Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien, Alan Pelaez Lopez
A Year from Today, Stacy Szymaszek
Alphabet Theater, Meredith Stricker
5 Meters of Poems/Cinco Metros de Poemas, Carlos Oquendo de Amat (trans. Joshua Beckman, Alejandro de Acosta)
Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico, Urayoán Noel
Defacing the Monument, Susan Briante
Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, Franco “Bifo” Berardi
precis, josé felipe alvergue
Of Color: Poets Ways of Making, ed. Amanda Galvan Huynh & Luisa A. Igloria
Corpse Whale, dg nanouk okpik
Grief Sequence, Prageeta Sharma
The Grave on the Wall, Brandon Shimoda
Catrachos, Roy G. Guzmán
Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney
Hull, Xandria Phillips
The Age of Phillis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Year of the Dog, Deborah Paredez
An Incomplete List of Names, Michael Torres
under the aegis of a winged mind, makalani bandele
Habitat Threshold, Craig Santos Perez
Xicancuicatl, Alfred Arteaga

I have realized my shelf is quite literally pulling off the wall. I’ll be out of town for a few months—but taking my stack with me with the hope I’ll dig in during the winter break. I may put it on a desk or something a little more…dependable.


– NEWIES –
Pigeons on the Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen (trans. Michael Hoffman)
The Marathon Poet, Åke Hodell (trans. Fia Backström, ed. Kira Josefsson)
Life in Space, Galina Rymbu (trans. Joan Brooks)
Sonnets, Ulises Carrión
Soviet Texts, Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov (trans. Simon Schuchat, Ainsley Morse)
Being Human Is an Occult Practice, Magdalena Zurawski
Notes on Mother Tongues: Colonialism, Class, and Giving What You Don’t Have, Mirene Arsanios
The End, Aditi Machado
Quartet, Claudia La Rocco
Zero Energy Experimental Pile, Alex Cruse

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; Boy Oh Boy, Zachary Doss; A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates; Dream of Europe, Audre Lorde;  New and Selected Poems, Toi Derricotte; The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso; Defacing the Monument, Susan Briante; Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile, Tammy Nguyen; Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive, Tinashe Mushakavanhu; Guillotine, Eduardo C. Corral; Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From, Sawako Nakayasu; Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer; Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica J. Lee; Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco; The Essential Ruth Stone, ed. Bianca Stone

December 1, 2020 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Laura Vincent

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

Enough

Pick me up and fling me into
The sky rattling with stars

As you fly
Let your thoughts fall to the ground one by one
Emptying the cavity
Admiring its spaciousness
So much potential hidden in the clutter
You could put up a retaining wall – a small, cut-glass vase?
Invest in a house plant with glossy wide leaves?
Learn the violin?

No

It doesn’t matter now
The emptier the better
There’s nothing more to say or think
You’ve done it

And frankly

We’re all so relieved

Laura Vincent (Ngāti Māhanga) is a writer from rural New Zealand. Her poetry has been featured in The Spinoff and Peach Magazine and she is currently working on her first and second novel and a poetry collection. She also has a thirteen year old food blog, hungryandfrozen.com.

December 1, 2020 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Sarah ChristianScher

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

THE END

This is the beginning;
the last gasp is the first breath
taken when we crawled from out our salty womb
and claimed the land for our own.

The band strikes the first messy chord,
all squeaks and stutters,
but soon there will be music
thrumming through the bones of the earth

Here is where it starts;
at the terminal point –
what you think of as the last declarative punctuation
is only a question mark that lacks a curve.

Sarah ChristianScher is a poet trapped inside the body of a biologist. Her poetry has appeared in Dark Ink: A Poetry Anthology Inspired by Horror, Like A Girl: Perspectives on Feminism, and Short Poems Ain’t Got Nobody to Love. She has also been featured on the Silver Birch Press poetry blog, Voicemail Poems, and as Moon Tide Press Poet of the Month. To catch a glimpse of Sarah in her natural poetic habitat, find her at the Two Idiots Peddling Poetry open mic in Orange, California.

November 20, 2020 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Lilly Beshore

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

Final Poem, To My Baby in Utero

Baby boy, and I am so glad
you are a submarine in my belly.
For you, the world is bioluminescence
in Tomales Bay. In your short life
you’ve seen a blue moon on Halloween.
You know of no cities being burned down,
no protesters in the streets.
You get to sleep with your eyes sealed,
and move through light and darkness
from your mother’s whale songs she sings
for you. Baby boy, you know of no
climate change or coral destruction.
You are as free as a wild dolphin,
spinning and growing out of
translucent lichen on my heart.

Lilly Beshore’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, The Southampton Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, and others. Her first chapbook, When We Stood, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014. She was born in Jiangxi, Nanchang, China, and now lives in Denver, Colorado. She attended the May Poetry Session at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a graduate of Harvard College.

November 13, 2020 0 comment
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FictionPoetryRandomSmall Press

Joshua Rivkin + Diana Arterian’s To-Read Piles (November)

written by Diana Arterian

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we’re rolling in a little late this month as news kept us glued to screens rather than books. But! Joshua Rivkin‘s poetry collection Suitor is hot off the presses and he shares his to-read pile with us this month! What he hopes to (re)read soon:

Twice There Was a Country, Alen Hamza 
Guillotine, Eduardo Corral 
The Black Maria, Aracelis Girmay
Underworld Lit, Srikanth Reddy 
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, John Murillo
The Unreality of Memory, Elisa Gabbert 
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland 
Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong  
Cleanness, Garth Greenwell 
Middle Distance, Stanley Plumley 

Making headway, but still so much to go. Proud of myself for not acquiring so many new books, considering this stack.


– NEWIES –
4 Brown Girls Who Write, Roshni Goyate, Sharan Hunjan, Sunnah Khan, and Sheena Patel
Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem, Adam Mars-Jones
The Inheritance of Haunting, Heidi Andrea Rostrepo Rhodes
The Fact of a Body, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica J. Lee
Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco
The Essential Ruth Stone, ed. Bianca Stone

– OLDIES  –
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks; Boy Oh Boy, Zachary Doss; A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates; Dream of Europe, Audre Lorde;  New and Selected Poems, Toi Derricotte; The Two Kinds of Decay, Sarah Manguso; The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio; Defacing the Monument, Susan Briante; Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile, Tammy Nguyen; Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive, Tinashe Mushakavanhu; Felon, Reginald Dwayne Betts; Guillotine, Eduardo C. Corral; Borderland Apocrypha, Anthony Cody; Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From, Sawako Nakayasu; Anodyne, Khadijah Queen; Homie, Danez Smith

 

 

November 9, 2020 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from Lindsay Stewart

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

One small errand

When I think of life and death,
I always think
of laundry.
When I visit my twin sister,
she tells me
her favorite pants are dirty
which makes me afraid that she
will die before me.
I’ll likely hear Death’s footsteps
before I see him
although I don’t imagine he has feet
but footsteps, nonetheless.
He’ll ask if we can run a small errand
together before the final heaving
I’ll respond with some
unnecessary question, like
do I need to wear shoes
and we’ll share a smile
before leaving.
Death and I will follow signs
for the dry cleaners
and I’ll understand,
from his slow blink
and open hands,
that this must be the place where I
take stock of my living.
Death will take me to the back,
past the cash register
(there will be no other customers)
He’ll gesture, finally,
to the rotating garment rack
that orbiting automaton
which will be filled with silhouettes
of so many, many people
and all the silhouettes will be spinning,
slowly, with an electricity
that I will understand
I no longer belong to.
We will sit, cross-legged
on the cool concrete floor
the center of the rack
rotating above us. I’ll notice
my breath sounds
beginning to mimic the hum
of the machine,
I’ll shift my weight,
and touch my fingers
to my mouth
because it would be rude to pretend
that I was any good at this
and Death will say, shall we begin
and it will take us hours.
I hope the end will be like
laundry day, but in truth,
I know better
the end will feel like
the last day before the cleaning
when you are looking and looking
standing naked before a cracked mirror
asking your beloved
to wait for you
because there is nothing to wear
and you are not ready.

Lindsay Stewart is from Glen Ellen, California. Her second home is San Diego, where she is currently pursuing a master’s degree in American Literature at San Diego State University. Her work has previously been featured in The Los Angeles Review, What Rough Beast, and Kissing Dynamite, and one of her poems was recently featured on the Poetry Foundation’s VS podcast. She has work forthcoming in The I-70 Review.

November 5, 2020 0 comment
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Final PoemsPoetry

#finalpoem from D.S. Waldman

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

in your prius

let me imagine that we will return here
noonlight generous through the windshield
where we are going    I couldn’t say
and wouldn’t want to

with noonlight generous through the windshield
I’m scared to lean into
scared you wouldn’t want to
this humming quiet between us

I’m scared to lean into
like silver water undisturbed
this humming quiet    between us
every half glance is a wonder  a chance

to disturb the silver water
as delicate as breath
every half glance  a wonder  a chance
the greens of your eyes

as delicate as breath
where we are going    I couldn’t say
[far into the greens of your eyes]
let me imagine that we will return here

 

D.S. Waldman is a writer living on Kumeyaay land, in San Diego, California, where he teaches creative writing.  His work has most recently appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry International, Los Angeles Review, and Tar River.  In 2019, he received two Pushcart Prize nominations and was selected by Ishion Hutchinson as winner of the Foothill Editor’s Prize.  He holds a BA from Middlebury College and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at San Diego State University.

November 4, 2020 0 comment
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Fiction

THE SAINTS OF ALL HOPELESSNESS

written by Sheldon Lee Compton

 

by FRANK REARDON

 

I lit another cigarette and looked at the caked, mud, ash hiding the word ‘Boston,’ in the middle of the ashtray. I thought about home and how it was over a thousand miles away. I could hear the waves of the cold Atlantic Ocean slamming against the rocks a couple blocks from my bedroom window. I could hear my grandmother’s slippers shuffle on the linoleum as she readied the morning coffee. I could hear my Grandfather’s heavy elephant like feet thunder across the house as he got himself ready for his job as head maintenance man at Boston Eye and Ear hospital.

It was like that every day for me. I didn’t need an alarm clock. I only needed them to do what they did every morning. My grandmother raised six children and never worked. My grandpa, he suffered a heart attack, maybe two, but still went to work every day after he recovered. They were both born in 1920 and lived through the Great Depression, and many wars. Regular day to day life was their hope. They didn’t want or need kinks in their routines. It was what kept them alive. What gave them purpose.

They raised me because my dad was in and out of prison on account of being a grifter and a small time safe-cracker. I didn’t know my mom, other than her name was Sharon McGuire. Dad didn’t have it in him to tell me anything about her. I’d sit up at night when I was little crying because I didn’t have a Mom. I felt a pit of loneliness so deep in my chest at such a young age that I’d cry out. Grandma would hear me, run in, sit next to me, and sing a song until I felt better. I remember I used to say, “Sing to me Grandma. Sing to me.” And she would. And after she was done singing she’d remove a saint card from her apron and put it on my nightstand. I had a fine collection of saint cards. Some kids had baseball cards with Jim Rice and Rich Gedman on them. I had St. Francis of Assisi, St. Therese of Lisieux, St Christopher and many others. She told me the saints and Jesus would watch over me and after a kiss on the forehead she was gone. I always felt better, even if only for the night.

It wasn’t until years later when I was twenty that my Uncle Ronnie who was drunk like always told some things about my Mom. When she was younger, she was a red-headed cheerleader. One of the most beautiful and popular girls in high school. Ronnie told me she was destined for greatness because so many people loved her. Ronnie also said, “I could’ve had her if I wanted.” But Ronnie was missing an ear and hadn’t bought new clothes since his hippie days in the late 60s. No woman wanted Ronnie. I never saw him with one either. He went on to tell me that after high school she ended up hanging with a crowd of bikers and soon after ended up hooked on heroin. She eventually met my dad, and they married a year later and had me. Ronnie said, “Your dad thought marriage and a kid would’ve straightened her out, but it didn’t. One night your dad came home and your mom was standing over your crib with a butcher knife. She ended up in McLean, in the crazy hospital.”

I believed the story because I had no other story to go on. I believed anything my dad and uncles told me for the longest time. She did end up at McLean, but what no one told me, and I had to find out for myself from the records office in McLean when I wanted to find her, was that she had bitten off her own tongue, and in a mess of blood, sweat, and hair, she smashed a window and cut her own throat with broken glass. For years I believed she was still a patient. No one told me the truth. She did this when I was five years old. When I found out the truth I started to realize everyone in my family had lied to me about almost everything. Maybe they were protecting me from the madness of knowing the truth, but they did more harm than good. I walked through life not knowing myself because I had lived a life based on an entire series of lies. I told people those lies like they were gospel.

Like my dad. I was told he was always away traveling for work, except he wasn’t. He was in and out of prison for scamming people and robbing. And that was my family, really. Either you worked a shitty job and hid your insanity under a thin veil of skin and booze, or you ended up in prison, or in a mental hospital. It wasn’t long after that I wanted to run away from it all. I quit my job at the meat packing plant, packed up everything I owned in my Pontiac Grand Prix, and drove it all over the country. I’d stay in small towns for a few months and work random short term construction jobs, then I’d pack up and move on to the next small town in some other state. Each mile I drove I’d lock up another lie for good, or I thought. I ran and drove like that for the next ten years, until I started losing hair and hope and finally decided to stop in Minot, North Dakota. A shit hole of a city where I have been for the last eleven years. It took me twenty-one years to let go of it all, even though I never truly let any of it go. It had been an easy thing to do to myself, trick myself into the lies people told me and make them my beliefs.

I lit another cigarette and took a long pull from the bottle of Evan Williams that I had on the floor next to me. I looked at the clock and reveled in the fact that I didn’t have to be at my shitty job as a sales clerk at Bargain Town for another two days. I hated going to that place, but it was the only place that would give a man in his early forties with no skills a job. It was a terrible place to work. I almost hated it as much as the maroon vest, the name tag, and the black sneakers I had to wear.

In the years I’ve been here I hadn’t made a single friend. My life was other people’s lives in the books I read and the movies I watched. My people skills were something to be desired. I’d try to strike up a conversation with a woman at a bar, but they’d ignore me. I’d try to discuss social issues with a group of old timers, but they’d brush me off like I was talking crazy. Hell, even the priests at St. Leo’s snaked their way out of having conversations with me. I went to church every damn Sunday because that was what my grandmother wished for me. I even went to their stupid Theology on Tap nights. A random night during the week where you could bring beer and discuss Catholic topics and listen to their big mouths for hours. No wonder it was “on tap,” you couldn’t tolerate their bullshit without a good buzz.

But I still went, and they didn’t have time to talk to me after or ever? The only person who talked to me was Bettie. She was a prostitute I’d visit once in awhile, and she only talked to me because I was paying for it.

I felt my chest drop when I looked at the ashtray again, and the fear of home set deep in my mind. It had been over twenty years since I stepped foot in Massachusetts, yet I still feared the place. I picked up the phone and called Bettie to escape from my thoughts.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hey, it’s me.” I replied.

“Me who?”

Her not knowing my voice ran through me, “It’s Marty.”

There was a silence for a minute that felt like an hour.

“Hey, baby,” she said. “You wanna meet up?”

“I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner and drinks with me?”

“You don’t wanna fuck?”

“Yes. No,” I stumbled over my words. “I was wanting to take you out tonight. Like a date.”

“It’s your dollar, baby.”

“Pick you up at eight?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the restaurant.’

“The Valhalla at eight?”

“Oh, big spender,” she teased, “I’ll see you then.”

The Valhalla was the most expensive restaurant in town. And it was named that on account that everyone in North Dakota thought they were a Viking or a barbarian of some kind, but I guess we all need our identities. It was no different in Boston where everyone thought they were in the Irish mob, or the Italian mob, or the Jewish mob. Or people in the south thinking they were trailer park Faulkners.

I put on some coffee and mixed a hot cup with a bit of Evan Williams. I didn’t want to be drunk, but I wanted to keep my buzz in the right place and wake up a bit. I took a long shower and scrubbed down with Irish Spring. I shaved my balding head clean, trimmed my beard, and put on my cleanest old pair of Levi jeans I owned, then tucked in a button-down plaid shirt into my jeans. It was the best I allowed myself to look in a dozen or more years.

When I arrived at Valhalla I didn’t see Bettie at first, so I took a seat in the waiting area. A waiter walked up and offered me a drink. “Jack and Coke,” I told him. He nodded and left. I hadn’t had a date in years, and in part it was my own fault. I wasn’t an ugly man, nor was I handsome. Somewhere in-between a Cadillac and a Pinto. I was an economy car, dependable but forever average. I suppose I’d done it to myself being awful with people, always saying the wrong thing. Not comfortable with others, fits of anger or fits of tears. I was a ghost most days to people, but every-so-often, a person would see me like I was let out of the spirit realm for a few seconds. They’d smile at me or say hello. And as quick as I was released, I was put back with the unseen.

The waiter handed me my drink. I thanked him and took a sip. I was going all out tonight. No cheap whiskey, only the finest tonight for Marty Sullivan. I looked at my watch and noticed it was almost eight-twenty. I got up and looked around the restaurant. I couldn’t see Bettie. Only noticed people on their own dates. Each booth holding forever sweethearts sitting over fine steaks, liquors, and wine. Half the people probably already posted photos of their food and spirits on Facebook. I felt let down, Bettie had blown me off, then I looked at the end of the bar. A woman was sitting alone with her back to me. She was wearing a green house dress with small pink floral prints on it. Her dark brown hair was done up. Her right hand twirled a straw in a drink, then she lifted it up to her mouth drank it. After she put the glass on the bar she pointed at the glass with her middle finger like she had no idea what it was like to be in a classy restaurant. For all she knew she was at Arny’s shithole in the wall drinking ginger ales and well whiskey with thirty-year-old people that looked sixty.

I walked up to her. “You look amazing,”

She turned around and looked at me like I was a child. I imagined it was how my mother would’ve looked at me if she loved me, if she wasn’t crazy and dead.

“About time you got your ass here. I was about to fucking leave.”

The way her rough words left her mouth threw me off, it was as if she tossed a live chicken on the bar and cut its head off with a meat cleaver and yelled, “Go ahead, look at me you, you fucking assholes.”

“No,” I said, “I was sitting in the waiting area with a drink. I didn’t notice…”

“You said The Valhalla,” She interrupted, “Did you expect me to show up in fuck me boots and a leather skirt?”

“I’m sorry,” I said to her.

She briefly looked me up and down. “Sit down you idiot.”

I stared into the giant mirror above the bar and saw us both sitting there in the mirror in the best clothes we could afford. Both broken by a world that never cared to ask if we wanted to be broken or whole. It never gave us the choice, but we made the best of it with whatever human glue we could find: books, movies, alcohol, sex, drugs, church, pills, therapists.

“You going to say something or are you going to look at me in the mirror all night like some creepy asshole. I deal with assholes every day of my life. Don’t be one of them, Marty.”

“How’s work?” I asked, and I knew as soon as it rolled off my lips it was the wrong thing to ask her.

“Like I said, Marty, creeps.”

I struggled to find something else to say. I ran through my brain index of movies I had seen and books that I had read for something snappy to ask her, but I couldn’t find anything. All I saw was my dad and my mother in my head. Dad in a jail jumper and Mom dead on the floor in a pool of her own blood. Bettie noticed that I was struggling. Her eyes went from hardened to soft like she understood. She swiveled around on the stool to face me, “Look, Marty. We don’t need to have a deep conversation like all of these cunts sitting in here taking cellphone photos instead of living. We can drink our drinks until it feels right to say something.”

I nodded to her and felt a huge sigh of relief, “But don’t go getting cheap on me,” she said pushing down on my knee, “We’re in a beautiful restaurant. I want top shelf drinks all night.” I nodded again.

Fancy drinks to the both of us were Jack Daniels and Cokes. It wasn’t the best, but it was to us, sure beat the rotgut I drank. We didn’t talk much, but on occasion Bettie would excuse herself to go to the bathroom, and before leaving she’d squeeze my knee to let me know I was with her and no one else could have me. It made me feel good, wanted. I liked the feeling of being owned by something beautiful and angry. It was like being locked in a furnace with no way out. When she walked back to the bar she walked with class, like a woman from an old noir film who didn’t take shit from anyone. She owned the place with Wal-Mart pumps on her feet and a Target purse under her arm. She drank like the men in my family: quiet and full of all kinds of bullshit the second she opened her mouth. I think my need to be quiet made her comfortable. Like she needed me the way I was – silent and ready, like an ax behind glass just in case she needed a way out.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, Marty,” she said.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“Let’s drive out to the plains and sit.”

“Sit in my car?”

“Sure. Ever look at Minot at night from far away?”

“No, but it’s snowing out,” I told her.

“Even better, Marty.”

I didn’t see the need to argue with her. I paid the tab and we walked outside and got in my car. We drove over to The Landing Bottle Shop and picked up a bottle of Evan Williams and two packs of cigarettes. She lit two cigarettes and handed me one. I noticed the lipstick stains on the end of the butt she handed me and I felt like a king to be able to put the stained cigarette in my mouth.

I drove ten miles outside of Minot with snowbanks piled high on each side of the road from the plows. She directed me to a country road. I drove down it and parked. I kept the car running to keep us both warm.

“Turn off your headlights.”

I did and she was right. We were surrounded by a thick and merciless dark on three sides, but in the distance in front of us I could see the bright lights of Minot. The small city where no one gave a fuck about me. Where I had the worst job known to man. Where I had no friends, yet somehow it looked beautiful.

“Looks like hope, doesn’t it?” she said. “Looks like the both of us could start our lives over tonight doesn’t it?”

I agreed with her. I had been running from myself for so damn long and for so many years that I forgot what hope and a fresh start felt like. I had been running through the motions for so long that I forgot what a beating heart needed. It needed hope like a car needed gas. I hadn’t filled it with anything in a decade. I walked, read, watched, showered, brushed my teeth. It was the same thing done every day the same way. I went to work and agreed with people when they shit on me. I never spoke up for myself. I imagine it’s why my mother cut her own throat. No one cared about her, she was no longer a big shot in high school. She was another face in a crowd full of people in a hurry to get to nowhere fast. Or why my dad conned people because to live in the world he made up for himself was better than the world he lived in. A world that didn’t care if he was alive or dead. To feel like a somebody for a man in his position was worth the time he’d spend in prison. I wanted the same feeling, to be alive. I wanted to feel something more than the nothing I felt every minute of every day.

Bettie took a swill from the Evan Williams bottle then passed it over to me. She was wearing a puffy black winter coat over her dress. One elbow on her coat had a small piece of silver duct tape on the elbow to keep it from busting open.

“This will warm you up quick,” she said, looking out at Minot in deep thought.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

She looked at me like she had won a prize on a game show.

“He speaks,” she said with a laugh.

“Wondering is all.”

“Okay,” she said sucking in some wind. “I was thinking about my son.”

“You have a child?”

“I did have a child, Marty.”

“Where is he?”

“In Rosehill Cemetery.”

I leaned back into the car seat and took another long swill from the bottle. I pulled back on it because it burned me deep in the throat.

“What happened?” I asked. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not tonight, okay, Marty?” She said, wiping a bit of water from her cheeks. I dropped the subject and looked back out at the lights of Minot a little more.

We sat there in my warm car parked on a dirt road. The plains covered in a beautiful crystal snow. Small blades of switch-grass poked up through the snow and froze at the ends because of the below zero temps. They looked like magical wands wanting to be used for magical spells. She leaned her head on my shoulder and held my hand like she’d know me for years, much more than a client she screwed on occasion. I took another pull from the bottle and she nestled into my puffy winter coat. “He was hit by a car,” she said.

I looked down at her head resting on my chest, “I’m very sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“His name was David,” she said, pulling back snot, “Davy.”

“What about his dad?” I asked with hesitation.

“He left the second he found out I was pregnant. It was me and Davy until the fucking car,” she said sitting up. “I got up off the porch to answer the phone, then that was it. He wandered out in the street.”

I didn’t know what to say to her so I remained quiet, letting her know it was okay to keep talking.

“I used to be a nurse you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I wasn’t always the glorious hooker you see before you,” She said laughing into the snotty tissue crumpled in her hand.

“What happened? I mean why are you not a nurse anymore?”

“I started stealing pills from the emergency room. Anything to help me sleep on account of Davy, you know? I took a lot. Klonopin, Xanax, Vicodin. Eventually they caught me and I lost my license. I couldn’t get through any job after. Lost a lot of them: waitress at Denny’s, Office Max, Home Depot. I was a zombie, Marty, angry and shuffling through life with no purpose. I started fucking random guys and women I’d meet in bars at a record pace. Figured, yeah…so here we are. Proud to be sitting with me yet?” She asked.

When Bettie finished telling me her story she instantly became the most beautiful soul I had ever met. And not because of what she had done, but the honesty that was pouring out from her heart. I had never met any person who had ever been that honest with me. Not even my own grandmother who sang to me and prayed for me. Bettie, she told me everything I had ever wanted to hear from another person in a few simple sentences. It cut straight through me like a straight-edged razor. Slivers of my existence piled up around us in the front seat. I thought to myself, she must be Saint Bettie of Minot. And together we were the Saints of All Hopelessness.

I didn’t answer her. I grabbed her with my right arm and pulled her in. She fell into my body and remained there with an easy peace in her heart. We both continued to look out into the lights of Minot like it was holy place out of our reach. A holy place we were not invited to because our souls were not pure enough. I told her my story about my grandparents, and my father and mother. How I traveled around the country in a shitty car without a destination in my mind. Driving and running. How I couldn’t stop because I didn’t know what was real and what was fake. How the lines on the road when I was driving told me more truths than any person had ever bothered to tell me. I told her what she said to me was the first time anyone had ever been truly honest with me. How I felt an instant connection to another human being that I had never felt before.

She shut up my story with a long kiss. Her arms wrapped around me. Our battle-scared faces molded together, unable to break apart. I wrapped my arms around her too. I didn’t want it to end, but like all beautiful things it did. The kiss ended and we sat back in our seats. I grabbed her hand, and she smiled at me when I did. The bottle of booze was on the floor. Neither of us needed it or wanted it anymore. The lights coming from Minot seemed to glow a bit brighter. They pulled us in. They accepted the granite of what made us heavy on the inside. Then, at last, they welcomed us both.

***

 

FRANK REARDON was born in 1974 in Boston, Massachusetts, and currently lives in Minot, North Dakota. Frank has published poetry and short stories in many reviews, journals and online zines. His first poetry collection, Interstate Chokehold, was published by NeoPoiesis Press in 2009 as well as his second poetry collection Nirvana Haymaker in 2012. His third poetry collection Blood Music was published by Punk Hostage Press in 2013. In 2014 Reardon published a chapbook with Dog On A Chain Press titled The Broken Halo Blues. Frank is currently working on more short fiction.

November 3, 2020 0 comment
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