Matt Thomas, whose short story “The Saints That Burn Crosses” appeared here in 2006, has expanded that story into the novel, A Breach in Death.

Two different infographics that I found interesting: 19 Emotions For Which English Has No Words and Tsundoku: Illustrated Definition of a Book Lover’s Problem.

I’m not too much of an outliner presently, apart from making general notes, but I’m still fascinated by the practice of making them. Here are the handwritten outlines of authors like J.K. Rowling, Joseph Heller, James Salter and Jennifer Egan. (And other authors whose first names do not begin with J.)

Here’s Bill Murray on saying goodbye to Gilda Radner. I liked this a lot.

Vol. 1 Brooklyn talks Travel Chapbooks and a Sense of Place with Courtney Maum, Aaron Gilbreath, and Bart Schaneman

At Gadling, Rachel Friedman wanders through Northeast Portland with Cheryl Strayed.

Finally, at Guernica, Katherine Rowland interviews Claire Messud “on the fluidity of sexuality, the intersections of art and selfishness, and her most recent book, The Woman Upstairs.”

Be kind to each other, and see you next time.

Notes From Elsewhere is brought to you by Sara Habein, who doesn’t pretend to be the first to know anything.

INTERVIEWS
An Interview with Kristina Marie Darling by Lightsey Darst

FLASH FICTION
We Walked Through Mansions All Summer by Frances Badgett
Family Tree by Ira Dawson
Patterns of Flight by Gabrielle Hovendon

STRETCHING FORMS
Recorded Music by Andy Peyrie
Marriage: A Math Lesson Plan by Caitlin M. Smith

POETRY
These are my best gifts: by Logen Cure
I Try to Remember it All but Forget by Matthew Harrison
Taste by Ryan Swofford
I know what I will tell you when I see you in church by Eszter Takacs
Portraits by Mihaela Tudor
Three Poems by Bridget Waldron
IT COULD BE DUSK by Jules Wood
Brief Reflections on the Post-Apocalyptic Moment when We Will Have to Love Robots by Matthew Yasuoka
Impatience by Ali Znaidi

LD: How did you find your way to this form? When you did, did it just run away with you? What, for you, marks off one project distinctly from the next?

KMD: I became interested in fragmented forms because of what they allow the writer to leave unsaid. When I was much younger, I used to write lyric poetry in the most traditional sense. But it was so difficult for me not to seem lofty or clichéd. Once I started writing footnotes, glossaries, and other types of marginalia, there was no turning back. I loved that these forms leave space for the reader’s imagination, allowing them to take part in the work of the poet.

LD: You note your sources at the end of the book—Petrarch, of course, and Anne Carson’s Sappho. What’s the role of source material? Do the poems find their way to sources or vice versa? If it’s vice versa, to what extent do you see yourself doing a kind of creative research? I’m wondering to what extent there might be a thesis. . .

KMD: I feel like all poetry arises from the writer’s life as a reader. I think of poetry as a conversation, in which the poet appropriates, revises, and recasts what has been said before her. But with Petrarchan, there was more of a “thesis” than with my previous projects. I love Petrarch’s work, but it’s so problematic for me as a female reader. His writing, perhaps more than any other one person’s work, has been associated with the male gaze, the silenced beloved, and various master narratives about what love should or ought to be. Petrarchan is my attempt to reconcile Petrarch’s sonnets with my enduring interest in feminist reading practices.

LD: What’s the ratio of satire to adoration? Let me explain. Sometimes I find myself swept away in the romance of the writing, in the beautiful objects you create (like Appendix B here—swoon), but other times I suspect you’re satirizing the desire you tease (as in the love story, with its precious details—”his hands seemed fragile, even delicate,” etc). To what extent can you simultaneously indulge and expose a desire?

KMD: I feel as though this is part of the human condition. Don’t we all have desires we wouldn’t necessarily choose to have? I’m very interested in representing this type of internal conflict through form, technique, and literary allusion.

LD: Twenty-first century love. Discuss.

KMD: It’s terrible, just terrible. I always satirize Romantic literature, and the nineteenth century in general, but I feel a certain attraction to that time period. Things were so much more clear cut then. What with male feminism and empowered women, it’s the rules of love just aren’t clear anymore. I’d love one of those Emily Post style etiquette book that tells me exactly what to do on a first date, a second date, and every date thereafter.

LD: I have to ask about your name. To be a Darling—how does that change your relation to such writing advice as “Kill your darlings”?

KMD: If anything, my name has taught me to remember that nothing is sacred. I’m a pickup line waiting to happen, after all.

LD: Talk about hysteria.

KMD: In Phaedrus, Plato argues that love, madness and art are one and the same. They frequently intersect and blur into one another. I think there’s some truth to this. For me, all art arises from a kind of hysteria. And it’s strange that hysteria is gendered in the way that it is, since most of the art that’s produced, even now, is made by men.

LD: I’m guessing Emily Dickinson is deep in your reading, but I could be wrong. What’s your greatest influence from the traditional canon? and outside of it?

KMD: Although Emily Dickinson is wonderful, I’m more of an H.D. kind of girl. I love that she treats the poetic image as a catalyst for the reader’s imagination. So many of her poems depend on the reader to actively speculate and assign meaning to different facets of the text. For H.D., it’s the reader who actualizes the poem, and this idea has been extremely influential for my writing practice. My greatest influence outside of the literary cannon is Victorian fashion. I once worked on a collaboration with a fashion designer in New York City. He would create objects in response to my poems. Once he even made pair of turkey feather pumps that were just beautiful. Working with him was great because I was exposed to images, texts, and materials I would have never normally encountered.

LD: Some offbeat questions—
Pink or blue?

KMD: Pink. With ruffles.

LD: Vampires, werewolves, or zombies?

KMD: All of the above.

LD: Where is paradise?

KMD: The Yaddo mansion.

About the interviewer:

Lightsey Darst writes, dances, writes about dance and other arts, and teaches. Her books are Find the Girl and the forthcoming DANCE (both Coffee House Press). Her poetic work appears in Typo, Spork, and Diagram. Her criticism is online at mnartists.org, The Huffington Post, and Bookslut.

About the reviewer:

Danuta Hinc (http://danutahinc.com) holds an M.A. in Philology from the University of Gdansk. She completed three years of postgraduate studies at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences under the direction of distinguished Professor Dr. Maria Janion. She is a Lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she teaches Professional Writing.

Hinc is the author of To Kill the Other, (Tate Publishing 2011) the fictionalized life story of one of the 9/11 hijackers. In the extensive research related to her novel, she formed close relationships with people from Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, and came to believe that the future of humanity can be saved only through a drastic shift in the paradigm of socio political engagement.

Hinc has published short fiction in the Little Patuxent Review, The Muse, Litteraria, and numerous features in the newsletter of the Polish Library in Washington, D.C.

She is currently working on a fictionalized memoir, Angels in the Forest, which is based on the life of her grandfather, Józef Król (Joseph King) and World War II. She is also working on a collection of short stories based on people and events in her family and the history of 20th century Europe, titled, Europe Without a Name. Hinc lives in Ellicott City, Maryland.

Related links can be found here: http://www.pw.org/content/danuta_hinc

About the author:

Caitlin M. Smith is a twenty-six-year-old living in Boston with a degree in both math and creative writing. This story is her most successful attempt to merge the two fields, as well as her first published piece. Caitlin works in publishing where she is known for bringing in pies on March 14th.

Review by Susana H. Case

In a way, Every Possible Blue, picked up as part of this year’s AWP stack with its eye-catching composite of blue art, porcelain and tile cover, is a perfect collection of poems for me, with its allusions to art and New York City life. As a New York poet married to a painter, I was particularly interested in what Thorburn had to say and how he would say it. If some of this is ekphrastic poetry, it’s ekphrastic poetry on LSD, and as such, its ability to be interesting is ramped up.

Some of the collection is just plain funny, as in his satirical treatment of the use of the word “like” in quotidian conversation in “And Nadine was Like”: a flea that hops from dog to dog. And Wendi / was like, ‘Cherubic’ is just a nicer way to say ‘fat.’ And not all of the poems are set in New York; as Thorburn points out in “The Red Studio,” he is at a table where ‘pain’s not pain, / it’s only bread.

The author is skillful with words in this second book, as in his playful lines, Between the Age of Enlightenment and the age / of thirty, I lost my way. (“Now is Always a Good Time”). He reminds us there’s a hell in each ‘hello’ (“Kitty Nibbled the Ficus, Granny’s got her Rain Bonnet on”—one could be entertained just reading the titles in this series). The sound of the poems is masterfully attended to as well, as in neat as a pleat / in my new blue suit (“Men Swear”).

Part of the well-crafted nature of these poems is the attention to visual detail; color, yes, many blues, but more than color. He’s the square silver camera / that takes all this in. (“Hokkaido Photo”) And despite the blues in the poems (the title a reference to Bonnard and the last few words of his poem about Bonnard, “Still Life,” these are not “the blues,” but rather a music considerably more up-tempo. There is a jazzy resonance in this collection that makes the reader feel she is in a different time period when it was possible to borrow Max Beckmann’s tuxedo. And not all poets could impertinently ask, Where / did your nose ring go, and the years?” (“What Happens when I Try to Talk about What Happens”, a title which wordplays, I presume, on the Raymond Carver title).

In this longer excerpt from “Self-Portrait in Secondhand Tuxedo,” the poem in which he’s in Beckmann’s shiny at the elbows outfit in one of Beckmann’s figurative pieces, though Beckmann would have argued against the label, ironically a self-portrait (so typically Beckmann), he pays multiple homage to Beckmann, stuck at the club because, he concludes, there’s never a fire, / no, never a fire escape when you need one:

And here’s young Günter slouched at the bar, cheek
to cheek, sawing logs. And Magda with her teeth
out and Uncle Otto with a hiccup, they clink

hardly room for me to pull up a stool
in this last corner I’m shading in: my antsy hands,
my waistcoat pooching out over my waist.

Beckmann reappears in “Stanzas in January,” drowsing over a cloudy beer. Some poems are easily sly, as in “Le Déjuener sul l’Herbe,” where Thorburn muses:

…But no one’s
stopped to worry about poison
ivy, deer ticks, grass-stained

pants or elbows, and surprised
as I am to see them, I see no one here
seems surprised to see me.

Anyone can / can-can. (“Triple Self-Portrait”). Maybe, but not anyone can create poetry like this. “Triple Self-Portrait” breaks its three parts up in interesting ways, in the middle of thoughts: To join them you must be lucky / and dead. And: Soon it will be winter, time / for Florida. The device renders otherwise mundane thoughts intriguing.

Thorburn writes, Only the ATM gives us / exactly what we want.” (“Men Swear”) But this collection did give me much of what I want as a reader of poetry—a pleasurable and stimulating interlude and a new way to think about the possibilities for poems about art.

About the reviewer:

Susana H. Case’s Slapering Hol Press chapbook, The Scottish Café, was published in a dual-language version, Kawiarnia Szkocka, by Poland’s Opole University Press. She authored the books, Salem In Séance (WordTech Editions) and Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press). 4 Rms w Vu is forthcoming from Mayapple Press.

an amateur poet threw     away
all the metaphors
that were crackling in the
bowls of his brain,

& opened a fruit stall,

but metaphors, stubborn
abound in his stall
against his will

About the author:

Ali Znaidi lives in Redeyef, Tunisia where he teaches English at Tunisian public secondary schools. His work has appeared in The Camel Saloon, Otoliths, The Tower Journal, streetcake, The Rusty Nail, Yes,Poetry, Shot Glass Journal, Ink Sweat and Tears, Mad Swirl, Unlikely Stories: Episode IV, Red Fez, Carcinogenic Poetry, and other ezines. His debut poetry chapbook Experimental Ruminations was published in September 2012 by Fowlpox Press (Canada). He also writes flash fiction for the Six Sentence Social Network—http://sixsentences.ning.com/profile/AliZnaidi.

they aim
between pretty and plain:
a mole to mar the complexion
a cute sack of fat ringing the hips

most in-between stings as the memory and sound of
her girlfriend admitting she would leave for any forward man
like it’s easier to sink as sediment in the mold she was meant for
hot but cooling fast

and her apartment is spotless, it smells of boiling water: the girlfriend trails delicious cheap grease: in a man’s apartment her smell is a promise

prettylike
is ideal, it is the comfort spot
the birthmark bleaching a circle of plump skin white, not brown
just enough to be: not enough to be:

and the room is in white
complementing the receding-red lips, paintinglike
and the low-hanging sun augmented by black factory smoke:
diffused through the sky,
it could be dusk

and the women run naked in the parking lot, touching each corner, and the men pretend they do not watch from the window, and the women pretend they do not want to watch from the window
their transitioning eyes

About the author:

Jules Wood has moved a number of times nearly equal to her age, most recently to Singapore (they’re on-again, off-again). She studies cognitive science and English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also serves as managing editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review.

Review by Gabino Iglesias

Dalkey Archive Press’ French Literature Series had somehow slipped under my radar until recently. Luckily, a burgeoning obsession with the Benoît Duteurtre’s work lead me to the series and to my first foray into it: Jacques Jouet’s Upstaged. Since Dalkey Archive has a pronounced academic slant and never fails to put out interesting literature, I was expecting an entertaining read punctuated by an essay or commentary. That’s exactly what the book delivered.

Going Out to the People, a play written and directed by Marcel Flavy, is only a couple of minutes into the second act when there is a knock on the dressing-room door. Actor Nicolas Boehlmer is finishing his cigarette and getting ready to go on stage and keep playing rebel leader Théodore Soufissis, so he distractedly invites whoever knocked to come in. A few seconds later, Boehlmer is stripped, gagged, and tied to a chair. The man responsible is dressed for the part and quickly makes his way to the stage, replacing Boehlmer and bringing chaos and confusion to everyone in the play. Later, the entire night is recounted by the assistant director, who informs us the stranger has been nicknamed the Usurper and wonders about the motivations for the attack.

Short, fast, and funny, Upstaged is a narrative about identity, an exploration of the politics of art, and a strange homage to the classic sentiment that the show must always go on. Because the narrator’s voice is engaging and the humor is concentrated in less than 70 pages, this is a light read that makes for a great treat between larger works. However, there are some elements that readers should be aware of before digging in. For example, as translator Leland De La Durantaye explains in the book’s very informative afterword, Jouet was part of Oulipo, a French group of authors who wrote fiction using constrained writing techniques. The result is a story that leaves every important question unanswered. This lack of resolution might not be for those seeking fiction that provides closure. Also, the author puts touches of politics and sex into the narrative, which only serves to amplify the number of possibilities and obscure even further the Usurper’s motivations.

While a sexual encounter, tension, violence, and mystery are all bubbling at the surface, there are a few smaller elements that make Upstaged an enjoyable read. A great instance is the attention given to the alteration of the play’s timing, which causes a disruption in the actors’ psyche and speaks volumes about the importance of both practice precision and the ability to improvise on stage. Also, memory plays and important role throughout the narration, but one that is overshadowed by the fact that no memory is anchored in knowledge.

Ultimately, Upstaged is as much about theater, recollection, and politics as it is about the aesthetics of Oulipo. There might not be a satisfying conclusion, but learning why there isn’t one just makes the reading that much mysterious and engaging.

About the reviewer:

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth (Eraserhead Press) and a few other things no one will ever read. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

a slick liar’s tongue,
the charm of a petty thief,
ribs like a junkyard dog,
a space on the other side
      of an ampersand.

I want you to have them
       & have them &
                    have them,
               please;

they & I are
           for you.

I used to carry
       secrets like
   marbles in my mouth;
           I laugh without choking.

You know to hold a piece
    of an infinite heart without
                   asking it
                          How much?

About the author:

Logen Cure lives in Texas with her wife. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Big River Poetry Review, Sundog Lit, and Educe Journal. She is the author of a chapbook, In Keeping (Unicorn Press, 2008). She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

It was part of his world
This capsule of sequential times,
Since there was never nothing else between a and b,
the drawers with carnival masks,
A feast of disguised breakdowns,
Or spoiled ups by fearful looks
So that he could emerge from polished ways
To split to an end imperfect facades;
I loved him with imaginary wings.

It was part of me
To push open windows toward limitless ends,
And edgy crevices beyond our loving nothingness,
So he loved me
with imaginary warm winds.

It was part of ecstatic coming and going
To feel naked, move naked
And chase naked thoughts along the mirror,
So I loved myself
With imaginary touches of fingers,
His,
Damped in warm painting oil.

About the author:

Mihaela Tudor is from Romania, but currently she works as an English lecturer at University of Hail in Saudi Arabia. She previously published flash fiction on www.orionheadless.com (“The Rhapsody of Thoughts”, 6 November, 2010) and in The Battered Suitcase on www.vagabondagepress.com (“Les Reveries d’ un Promeneur Plus Solitaire”, Spring 2011, vol. 3, issue 4). A poem (“Summer return”) has been recently published on www.everywritersresource.com/poemeveryday/%20.

And down again, down, the basement. Abandoned bottles and empty crates, old tackle. A steamer trunk splayed open, lace spilling out. To the side, hidden almost lost, a final room. We squinted and entered, saw it together in one breath—the dank cobweb hell of shackle dug into the wall, cuffs still attached. Two sets of large, two small. And screws, three maybe four inches in diameter. We backed away, turned and our faces met with spiderwebs.

On the road again, the farmland a green blur. The top down on the blue Mustang, we whipped around curves and through pastureland. The sun set without remark and we held the secret between us, and kept our eyes forward.

About the author:

Frances Badgett is the Fiction Editor of Contrary Magazine. She has published work in Toe Good Poetry and Dead Mule School, and has work forthcoming from SmokelLong Quarterly and Grey Sparrow. She has just completed her first novel, Pale Mother and, a glutton for punishment, she is working on a second. She lives in Bellingham, Washington with her husband and daughter.

About the author:

I am currently an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. My poems have appeared in elimae, Full of Crow, ILK Poetry, and Utter. I also have poems forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Phoebe, burntdistrict, and Barn Owl Reivew.

Review by Michelle Moore

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word . . . plastics”—this line from 1968’s iconic film The Graduate spoke to a growing awareness of “plastic” as a metaphor for the phoniness and materialism of postmodern American culture. This metaphor may be on the decline, but the concerns it represents are even more relevant today, and the poems in Lynn Levin’s Miss Plastique, her newest collection, explore this tension between the authentic and artificial that now more than ever complicates our lives.
     From circus freaks to tot-pageant moms, Levin’s characters struggle to define themselves in a world that often values the superficial. In “Eddie Pratt as Himself,” after a photograph by David Graham, cross-dressing Eddie grows up in a world that “was a school / where [he] had to write: I will act like a man / 100 times on the blackboard”; now an adult male posing in “bustier and panties / redder than salvia,” his choice to reject love in favor of self-exposure is an act of defiance that also renders him a casualty of the society that produced him (18).
     In the sestina “Action Hero,” Levin explores a young couple’s dysfunctional relationship—she with a spending addiction, particularly to plastic action toys for their son, and he with a fascination for monsters, making them a fitting couple and a tragic one, destined to view things differently but each necessary to the role the other plays, as evidenced in the poem’s finale, where the couple, Tim and Jo Beth, must spend

a lifetime trying to appease demons, and their strength is spent paying daily tribute. Still, brutal history can change its heartbeat. Tim and Matt laugh together reading tales of silly monsters. Yet when Tim speaks of divorce, Jo Beth weeps and yells, “I love you! Don’t leave me!” He sighs and gets no farther than the front door, walks back through the hordes of plastic.

Matt enjoys spending days with his dad, who doesn’t yell that much at him. Tim has the heartbeat of a model father. He hopes monsters can change. He wants nature to be plastic. (7)

With these last lines, the end-words repeated throughout the sestina (plastic, spend, father, beat, yell, monster) undergo some subtle changes in meaning: active “spend” becomes the capitulating “spent”; hostile “beat” becomes caring “heartbeat”; the “plastic” of credit cards and cheap toys becomes an empty substitute for the kind of plastic capable of being shaped or changed.
     Levin also explores femininity and female bravado with characters who present themselves as bold, confident, and sexy. In the title poem, for example, femme fatale Miss Plastique marvels that plastic explosives—“something that looks like bread dough” and can be wrapped like bubblegum—might also be used to entice her enemy to “Take me into your mouth. Taste me.” Her “stiletto / heels, Garbo hat, [and] lipsticks” are merely a weapon, but for self-defense as much as anything else. Her affinity to plastic explosives (they, too, must be “handled /with care and can explode / at any moment”) results in a sexual awakening, a recognition of power, “a self-love / [she] never knew [she] had,” and she longs both to share this revelation with another, even an enemy, and to be the catalyst of such awakening.
     In “Lilith at the Cosmetics Counter,” the “baby killer! man raper!” from ancient folklore and Hebrew legend, contemplates “some ego first aid,” perhaps “plastic surgery . . . in good time,” until she “detects a whiff of sabotage” in the cosmetics-counter saleswoman who entices her with a store credit card and the possibility of transformation; but Lilith “glance[s] in the high-def mirror” at “the wilderness of her face” and decides that “fate was a bitch / but it was her bitch. / And that was the beauty of it” (47, 48).
     This penchant for self-preservation occurs in other poems as well. The speaker in “The Hitchhiker” recounts how the “good old boys with honest mud on their jeans” who used to “pick [her] up in their beat-up chariots” culminate in the sleazy Tom Wise, with his “skullish face, dead tooth, watery eyes.” He offers her a ride, even though she “didn’t even have [her] thumb out,” and the next day, “reek[ing] of Aramis” and “simper[ing] around his brown incisor,” asks for her phone number—“Don’t worry. I just want to give you a buzz. / I won’t bite you . . . unless that’s your thing”:

     Afterward, I feared I’d see Tom Wise
pulling up beside me, idling at a light.
     Was spared that, but I remember
the pine-tree air freshener dangling from his dash.
     the bluebonnets blooming outside his safety glass. (21)

Here, Levin draws a distinction between the car, the pine scent, the safety glass, all manufactured items, and the sanctuary of the natural world beyond. The speaker intuits the threat behind Tom Wise’s seedy attempts to woo her, the serpent “bar[ing] his torqued tooth” from the confines of a car instead of a garden.
     When the speaker in “Faux King in the Parking Lot” has sex with an Elvis impersonator, she doesn’t rationalize her actions or hide her willingness to give it up to a man whose wife (what else?) doesn’t get him and whose retort to her comment about never sleeping with happily married men is, “Then you ought to sleep / with your husband.” She simply explains that “his thighs were hot / and the side of the car was cold” (5), her stark description of the event suggesting that she, like the speaker in “Hotel Paradox,” has learned to settle for “half portions” although she “craves / the whole poison” (31).
     Throughout this collection, Levin uses the theme of “plastic” to model, expose, and explode the constraints against living authentic lives in the face of artifice, both in society and in ourselves. In “People Get Used to Just about Anything,” she presents this struggle as part of the human condition, suggesting that “If, like him, [we] ate rats in a sideshow / [we’d] make it look easy, too, with white bread/ and years of practice” (36), even as we long to “abandon[n] / [our] thirst and [our] hunger” (“To a Lamprey,” 38).

About the reviewer:

Michelle Moore earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College. She is the author of The Deepest Blue (Rager Media, 2007) and Longing for Lightness: Selected Poems of Antonia Pozzi (translation; Poetry Miscellany Press, 2002). She currently teaches writing classes at the University of Akron.

1.
On your first date with a robot they will ask you if you are a 1 or a 0, while watching you eat your chicken carbonara, in some cheesy retro diner, with floral wallpaper, hanging like banana peels from the white plasterboard.

They will think this is romantic like a seventh-grader on their first date at McDonald’s wearing their flyest Yu-Gi-Oh T-shirt. They will tell you, I’m saving this moment to my hard drive not my ram and I’m backing it up to the cloud.

2.
Neurological researchers today have concluded that the forest fires that start on our brains, when we hear our cell-phones ring, are the same forest fires that flicker, when we feel love for another person.

Thus, it will be easier to love them than we think.

3.
The first time you smile at them.

They will react like Wikipedia at its first party, where it did three lines of cocaine and two JAGER BOMBS, pressing the random article button like its fingers were eyes in REM sleep and it just can’t stop dreaming.

This is because they cannot break your smile down into ones or divide it by zeros. They will say.

Doesnotcompute

Doesnotcompute

Doesnotcompute

While attempting to compute what it means to feel like a decomposing beam of sunlight interred in the soft loamy soil of a prayer.

In the morning they will say, Google tells me that I like you.

4.
Learn to love motherfucking dubstep.

Because robots will not say, I love you. They will say, I wub you, and Skrillex will write the wub songs of a generation.

At high school proms, they will stutter-step-stop-stutter waltz to the throbbing beat. Trying to imagine how it feels to have something pushed and pulled through you to keep you alive.

5.
They will press their audio sensors to your chest and wonder why keeping you alive is so noisy. Their lives are silent like hybrid cars.

6.
They will want to make love to you.

It will hurt.

A lot.

They have smoothed their rough edges into a razor. They are steely and unyielding, brimming with static.

They will ask you if it feels good. You will lie (that hasn’t changed) and say that it feels amazing, when really it feels like having an unnecessary root canal on your naughty bits without anesthetic.

It will feel more like love than anything else has ever felt.

7.
Lying together underneath the sky spill painted black by the miasma of human progress choked from the throats of factories centuries ago. They will remark that 200 years before you could look-up and see stars. All the places god had pricked himself, while sewing together the universe. You will say that that sounds beautiful and wish that you could see them.

They will tear open their chest cavities. Show you the twinkling indicator lights and diodes and constellations that spell the word life beneath metallic skin.

They will apologize for this act of beauty. And in this moment, you will finally calculate the distance between love and circumstance, which is found in the numerical value 42.

About the author:

Matthew Yasuoka is an Aquarius and likes writing. He has never broken a bone. He has broken hearts. He is Sorry. This is why he writes. You can find more of his work at myasuoka.tumblr.com

The needle vibrates on some kind of spinning material. The air is cut by sound, shot through a tube, and tenderly transfixed to wax. The violence is minimal, or at least microscopic – a tiny needle gouges a revolving surface that has space for a certain amount of grooves.

How was it so simple to record a sound? The machine simply captured what was already in the air. Vibrations. Yet we confuse like with like, vibrations with feelings, wax with plastic. A surface soft enough to be carved, allowing for a notch that holds the vibration in place.

And after the number is finished, there will be a scratchy addendum, an unplanned for yet pertinent coda. The playback’s needle scratches the circling disc, embedding a record of its use, an unintended sound to be remade and replayed, and replayed.

The Record’s Purpose

It wasn’t a long gone relative’s voice that I wanted to regain, but a stranger’s lament, someone who might be a hundred miles off but who still touched down at my very address, note for note, word for word.

The recording filled an empty space, and thus was used to plug a hole. But it was the kind of repair that provides cover while still allowing for the occasional drip; a leak that penetrates barriers. It can be heard on the other side of the door.

The song lets us imagine what is going on over there, or how we would like to bring that noise into the room. The sound of this record playing alternates with the sound of the factories, the sound of cars, and other mechanical sounds, spinning at their relative speeds.

On the Car Radio

From the car’s tiny speaker, certain songs reverberated in his juvenile ears. During this moment in time, he was regulated to the back of the station wagon. He had already heard some of these songs, but the car’s acoustics anchored their history. In the confined and speeding space, he realized how good they were.

Storrow Drive is one of the city’s expressways. It runs by the Charles River, about four lanes of 1950s modernism. It usually meant, as he sprawled in the back of the station wagon, that they were on the way to the airport. Right there, at that section at the end of Storrow Drive, before they got on the elevated highway and went down into the harbor tunnel, that’s when “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones came on, circling around and expanding the scene, conflating the song with the back of station wagon with Storrow Drive.

When someone else makes all the choices, sometimes it’s better to only have a few choices. The punch buttons on the car radio were programmed to the few AM stations that played the latest hits; one selection fading out, only to be picked by another signal. It was only his mind, fresh and malleable, that located a specific moment for a song that was to be, from then on, endlessly looped through the city’s wires.

Revolutions per Minutes

America is getting old fast, faster than other empires that took century long strides until their thousand year bulks were rearranged or collapsed. America’s history is speeding by. Ever since America turned on those fast machines–the turntable, the radio, the computer–it has been on the lookout for the new, for the latest thing,

The speeding car with its top down allows luxuriant hair, that youthfully taken-for-granted accoutrement, to wrap around a neck, glide over a cheek, cover an eye. The radio, at this time of night, is itself an open window, pulling in far-flung signals, sounds usually obliterated during business hours. The foreign broadcast paradoxically compliments the speedy erasure of local miles. The car and the radio rush into the unforeseen future.

Despite its unblemished packaging, the new is never flawless, just as youth leans towards the naïve, the uninformed, if not actually grasping an open mind. The kids sneak out late at night once their elders are dead to the world, aiming to find, if not a new planet, then at least their own corner. Their spaceship is about to land on a hot star where a demon-angel mounts the bandstand.

Lost 45s

Somewhere, in someone’s front yard, next to a garbage can, is a box of 45rpms. I saw it one morning on my way to school. They were in a cardboard box, hundreds of them, in naked rows deprived of their paper sleeves.

The discarded box haunts my nearly accumulated pile. How was I able to walk past it? The haul, as usual, manifested the substantial weight of any box of vinyl records, and the sleeveless records, all crammed together, would have flopped around in the flimsy box like a chaotic plastic toy. So I left it sitting on the curb.

Year after year I consider my loss, until finally, through out-of-pocket expenses and self-financed research, I realized that they were discarded Juke Box singles. Perhaps there was nothing in there but the most redundant top ten hits. But what else? The collector inevitably lives with the regret of leaving something behind, even as they gather up the rest.

Songs We Will Never Hear Again

The song is on repeat, on an electronic device or played through the body’s circuits. We repeatedly play the desired selection–the song of the moment. It is practically an irritant, something we can’t get out of our heads, filling what’s available when we aren’t exactly aware–a string of nonsense lurking behind every significant thought.

Other songs have nothing to do with repetition, insistence, the limited program; they evade the confines of the mind and the market. The moment of delivery is ephemeral: In a foreign city, you are keeping a close eye on the meter when a song comes on the taxi’s radio. It will be a one-off performance, after which you can describe the feeling, but not the structure.

These encounters are “wispy”, the opposite of traumatic, yet equal in mnemonic weight. They are, as with music in general, melancholic. Something has been lost that was never really there; the signifier is untraceable. We have to go by what is unverifiable. But the memory remains; the blank has a location.

The Fade-Out and The Skip

An engineer, ever so slowly, lowers the volume. The song doesn’t end at once, but dissolves into fizz. Somewhere, unseen and unheard, the action continues. It’s taken for granted that the musicians stopped, ended the song, and then life continued beyond the microphone.

This studio technique came about on the spur of the moment, an easy solution to the tedium of endless takes, a trick obvious to even the most inept technician. In fact, someone is right now turning down or switching off your heartfelt song.

But how should (or does) something end? The engineer can only impose a provisional structure on a reality that often comes far short of resolution. We prefer to wish for an orderly fading out of one subject that is elegantly transitioned into the next phase. This assumption is easily defeated by the flaw, the unplanned-for possibility. The damaged record skips, endlessly looping a phrase that insanely mocks any pretension of finality.

What’s Going On

The songwriter wanted to address A, an old girlfriend, but B was listening closely, letting the message go straight to her heart. Or the songwriter was speaking to a whole community, the audience, while you were rocking ten thousand miles off. But perhaps the distance is relative, a matter of yards, while still constituting the impasse. How was that possible when everyone was rocking?

The vinyl was like a lozenge that you swallowed for a taste of that other world, that area of the city where you stood out like a sore thumb. If you listened closely you might feel it, sense it, but you weren’t there. To go over there you would need some kind of insulation, the bubble housing of a car or a friendly guide. This is where you found the kind of music that relied on a hardscrabble stage, a torn curtain and a razor.

We went over to her uncle’s house, an apartment on an old run down block; a roomy turn of the century family apartment, now given over to the sparse furnishings of a single gangster, not exactly poverty-stricken but far from opulent; a second-hand couch with a discreet lamp hanging over a cabinet stereo. As photographs of her uncle and his gun were passed around, “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye was spinning on the turntable.

Get Down Tonight

Instead of a stage, the performance emanates from a booth. No one is yet sure if this constitutes performance. Records will be played and people will dance. If it’s not a performance, then are the dancers an audience? We came to listen to records and to gawk at the audience. This was a new kind of performance and with the aid of technology, artist and artifact were flipped; the recording was played live, blending the here and now with the then and there.

But nothing is ever any one thing, or precisely not what we thought it was later on. The songs said: You should also get on the floor. You should take it to the limit. You should get down tonight. You danced with a group, you danced with a partner. What could be more natural than dancing with a stranger, intimacy nothing more or less than a practiced move on the dance floor?

People have been dancing forever and will go on dancing, but any specific ritual has a designated time and place. In this time (the timeframe of these words) we exist in a marketplace of trends, of products that build momentum or disperse. The discothèque that she found herself in, at that exact time and place, was distinguished by its mirror-bounced shards of light, by its illuminated dance floor, by its potent sound system. A song caught her ear and she sidled up to the DJ’s booth, taking note of the song’s spinning title.

Cassette (A small plastic case that contains recordable tape)

When they distributed the product they forgot about, or seemingly neglected the fact that the machine had poked a loophole in the contractual marketplace. Two (or more) corporate interests collided, and all that was left to plug the hole was an advertising campaign; propaganda that cynically solicited “social responsibility” in relation to the machine’s obvious potential.

But recordings had long ago lost track of their origin; an actual voice, easily identified, was nevertheless cut loose and transplanted onto something you carried home and placed on a shelf in your house. But now you became, with the thin and portable tape, responsible for programming; you were involved in production.

Now, the recording could go everywhere. The playback was for your ears only. Or the mix came into the street, settling on a shoulder. Either way, in your private ear or in our public space, the cassette’s playback was a kind of accoutrement, a fashion accessory. We saw you hunched over and privately absorbed in the miniaturized world of your Walkman, or we winced when you walked by, the boom box expanding the confines of your privacy.

How To Make a Mixtape

You play DJ, a radio disc jockey without advertisements. You are a non-commercial programmer with a limited signal. At first you spend hours at the turntable, scattering vulnerable records around the room. Keep the songs in your head and know where to find the songs, the imagined numbers (your favorite selections).

Now you must build your system, allowing not only for playback but for the manufacturing of objects. The results will not be live, but a playback, so you can rewind, erase, start over. Take your time and find the right song. Eventually, you will come to recognize a sympathy between two types, two or three artists, more than one diverse composition.

You are now able to make a compilation that dispenses with categories and catalogs. Use the machine to tailor the mix of your homemade radio. By slightly rewinding the cassette tape with the tip of a pencil, subtracting a fraction from where you left off, you can create a low-tech cross-fade. The segue will become your creative pursuit.

When the Product Lost its Form

Thomas Edison invented something, but had little idea of what it would be used for. He might have buried his playback machine if he knew all the so-called aberrant and deviant styles that it would not only encourage, but foster. Edison, the whiz kid, was nevertheless unable to establish a patent on everything popular.

Eventually, even the packaging became an integral part of the form: a cardboard square inscribed with graphics holding a flat circle of black plastic. Its tangibility was taken for granted. We could hold, study, ruminate on and learn from the record’s jacket; we could idle in shops leafing through racks, picking up loose strands of information that we hadn’t yet paid for.

In our current future, it is not the inventor of household products who shifted the economy, but a theoretician grasping an abstraction. The uses of the code would not be instigated by the consumer, but would be applied by a practical scientist, someone who could recognize a purpose in the theory. This altered the structure of the song, as that part of the product became invisible, something directly incorporated into the machine, a binary code that was prone to the side effects of being compressed into a microbial dot. But despite the robotic directives that disallowed a fondling the product’s conveyance, songs still basically worked through the congeniality of the earth’s atmosphere. They still came at us through the air.

Crashed

Late at night, the feverish machine continues compiling and spewing information, behaving like a brain yet utterly lacking any sensual comprehension. This brain is blind, isolated in an artificial network, responding to exterior prompts, stimulating but unable to stimulate itself. It is a warehouse, holding massive amounts of the most plaintive and heart-wrenching songs, cleverly reducing them to easily transportable files, yet bereft of any aesthetic appreciation except by way of the baseline statistic.

Late one night, when the over wrought and sentient operator is urging further dilation of the machine’s bladder, pushing the machine into more or less private and/or well-explored cubby-holes, the computer is caught in a snag of corrupted code and begins furiously spinning towards a lost goal; its purposes have been frozen and it begins a reverse consumption, biting into its database, leaving its bits without wings. The music has not only stopped, but has vanished under the weight of a soundless crash.

On the other hand, all that information is still floating around somewhere in its objectless form, cut loose from strict ownership, waiting to be funneled into the proper receptacle and once again set loose. I went to one location or another, picked up loose strands, things cut loose, treasure at the bottom of the bag and rebuilt my symphony.

Collections at 20,000 feet

You play a game where you will be dropped on an uninhabited beachfront that is shaded by swaying palms, and even though you have misplaced your shoes, your favorite records will be there to help pass the time. You start looking for an electrical outlet.

The box of records is heavy enough to hold an umbrella steady during a typhoon. The vinyl records resist mold’s taint, but the cardboard covers dissolve. Your fantasy shifts tactics, and now the entire infinite collection is housed in a handheld device, something you can shove in your pocket as the airplane quickly plunges to its final destination.

The interminable long haul fight replicates a prison’s special deprivation, yet the handheld device is now able to spin out the entire history of Jazz as the polar caps slowly shrink. You are not only armed with the top ten, but with the bottom one million out-takes and false-starts. When you have landed in your lifeboat, you are still a few tunes short of absorbing all of Louis Armstrong’s releases, ’58 through ‘64. You sight a freighter on the horizon. If you able to gain its attention, it may come to the aid of your failing battery.

About the author:

Andy Peyrie is an autodidact who started writing to ameliorate the boredom of some of his paying (yet nevertheless unmonitored) jobs.

This tree is where my father hung himself when I was 12. His purple, foaming face is etched on the back of my eyelids, permanently. The branch he jumped from was taken by the wind a few summers ago, its absence reinforces the fact that Dad is still gone.
     This tree is where my brother hung himself when I was 19. My mother owns this image, as I was at school. The way I watched her wither, I assume she saw the purple and foam. Three up from the bottom—the thickest one, my brother’s death branch.
     This That one, way up high above the rest, sitting by itself, that’s my branch. It always has been and it always will be. I am its bitch. I am the bitch, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it, especially me. I just have to figure out how to get up there.

About the author:

Ira Dawson will be a senior at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. He is majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing. His work has previously been featured in the literary journal Forte. You can find more of his work at http://iradawsonwordsandthings.tumblr.com.

Review by Art Edwards

I approached The Cost of Living, Rob Roberge’s third novel and first with Other Voices Books, with the hope I approach any novel with a substantial rock and roll backdrop. As a rock novelist three times over, I’m always looking for reasons to get excited about this underrepresented genre. Every time I see a writer my age focusing his energies on some futuristic alternate reality, or domestic milieu, or bloodsucking tale with nary a Stratocaster in sight, I think, “Come on. You had ‘Triumph kicks ass’ written on your Mead spiral notebook just like me.”
     Roberge does not disappoint. Bud Barrett, the main character of The Cost of Living, is a songwriter-guitarist years removed from his success in the Popular Mechanics and dealing with the baggage of a dying father he loathes and a mother who killed herself years before. You might expect all this unresolved emotion to lead a rocker to some tampering with drugs, and Bud obliges by getting down and dirty with pills and needles and anything else he can get his hands on. As much as the rock element of the novel drew me in, it’s Roberge’s rendering of addict culture—and the specific way addicts unwittingly destroy the souls of those around them—that makes The Cost of Living such a compelling read.
     Take Bud’s relationship with Simone, a bald, wigged, sexy bartender at a club hosting one of the Popular Mechanics’ early shows. The attraction between the two is palpable, and they eventually find themselves alone in the damp walk-in cooler.

I kissed her inner thigh. Her skin was warm. My knees were cold and wet, the water having soaked through the patches on my jeans. I felt like I could spend a long time kissing anywhere on her body she asked me to. I left my head in her lap and felt the hypnotic rumble of the freezer’s motor vibrating the chair and Simone’s legs.

The pair’s budding romance hits a snag Bud runs out of opiate, and he asks Simone to help him break his pinky in order to score pain meds. Roberge writes, “The amp clunked on the floor when I got my finger out from under it. The fingernail ripped halfway out and dripped blood.” Simone regrets having had any part of it, which Bud can’t allow himself to understand.

I looked down at my splinted finger, wet with bloodied gauze. I held it up. “I’m the one who got hurt here.”
     “No,” she said. “You’re the one with the broken finger.” She tossed her cigarette out the window. “You’re not the one who got hurt.”

The price for Bud’s addiction becomes Simone’s broken heart, and just about everyone else’s he touches.
     Bud also did a number on his band. I imagine the Popular Mechanics as Wilco-like in style and level of success, but with two distinct periods in its history. Bud is the primary creative force of the first period before being thrown out for addiction issues. I love the scene when Bud rejoins the threesome and they try to navigate the political terrain of their reunion. Ground Zero is the Bud-penned song “The Problem with Drugs,” which a currently sober Bud doesn’t want to play despite it being one of the band’s most popular tunes. He says, “I haven’t requested anything else. I’m playing everything people’ve suggested, and I haven’t tried to push anything of mine you guys wouldn’t want.” To which drummer Jack retorts, “So you’re more important that two thousand fans a night?” As a guy with a history in rock bands, I can picture too well these little skirmishes for power and leverage. Roberge has clearly done his time in the practice room.
     My main gripe about The Cost of Living centers around Roberge’s need to oversell the drama in Bud’s life. Every time he has sex, does drugs or hurts himself, the situation is so over the top it’s actually less compelling. Bud and his mates take drugs in random bunches—Vicodin and heroin and pot and Ecstasy and speed—often at the same time. Likewise with sex, Bud can’t just be in love with a woman but must penetrate every orifice in every possible way to show just how far his passion stretches. Finally, and most unrealistically, whenever Bud damages himself physically—a frequent occurrence in TCoL—all commonsense injury gets bypassed for repeated, brutal, cringe-worthy maiming. This melodrama pull me out of Bud’s real pain: being driven to emotional and spiritual ruin by his inability to escape his dependency.
     To focus too much on this is to miss the achievement of The Cost of Living. Roberge has written a painfully realistic look at a rocker grappling with his own broken soul. You’ll shake your head every time Bud reaches for OxyContin, and cheer as he fumbles toward a meaningful life.

About the reviewer:

Art Edwards’s writing has appeared in The Writer and Writers’ Journal, and online at Salon, The Collagist, PANK, JMWW, The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown. He is currently shopping his third novel, Badge, and working on a memoir.

                                The gas bill
for nineteen dollars and eleven
cents with evil, or-else rhetoric
a gas company in Seattle -

loyal, clean-rain green city -

still mails eight years later to my new
place in Massachusetts. The address
of my old place on the shaded street
up the hill behind

                                 the hospital. It was
Something Place. My three six and one
nine digit passwords, each needing one
number and upper-case letter

for getting money for paying money

I forgot to pay. For opening my email,
for opening the suitcase once more
to hunt my travel bag. And either
I got the suitcase

                                         one birthday
or stole it from the Seattle roommate.
In any case, it’s nice. Hey, that still red
bird on some flora behind the fence

is not a robin is it? Because seldom

do details of such nature flood back
to me. Last time Hurricane Isaac struck,
was I a teenager? Hard to say. I recollect
strong winds

                                                 and traffic
in swishing red smears but not my where
or when. I must have been too little, unable
to grasp the scope of evacuations. I pined
for fries, toy heroes, bathrooms.

The perfume of the person who passed

unseen this afternoon lingers, coy spiced
reminder, but does little for my nostalgia.
I whiff a recurrence of antique springs
in the abstract, and that is

                                                  about it.
Crayola blooms and chirrups, gazeboes
in bowers of bliss or whatnot in a medium
old town with frequent cows and colleges.
Aging opaque films:

pollen on curbside cars, parking-lot

Sunday markets. See, my window’s down.
The breeze has an air of crisp significance.
The road has no lines. I make turn after turn
and getting back

                                         in my mind
is no simple matter of turning around.
When I pissed at the rest stop my piss
misted my legs. I wiped the seat clean
for the next guy traveling, nevertheless.

I have not littered yet. I have plans

to eat barbeque po’boy bisque and shoot
nine-ball and sleep in the backseat outside
this dark hotel. I’m getting on. I remember
my favorite song when seven:

                                                           Dust
in the Wind. The wispy sentiment of loss.
I stared at passing cars often, leaves. Also,
I liked to pogo stick up the long tar-and-chip
driveway counting the amount of bounces

needed to make the sun go down.

About the author:

Matthew Harrison lives in Massachusetts. His writing has recently appeared or will soon in Gargoyle, Atticus Review, Ping-Pong, The Saint Ann’s Review, Kitty Snacks, and elsewhere.

I’ve been practicing the art of forgetfulness.
A weekend forcing memories out with brain cells,
drowning in bathtub gin, words words words tumbling out of my mouth
Without a soul to catch them.
So I went home with nobody and nobody came home with me.

Socrates, your noble lie is fading fast.
Gold and silver aren’t melded within my soul.
Instead: creaking hinges, rusted copper, twisted iron.
But base metals conduct heat just as well if not better, brother.

Neuropoetry

My memories have solidified.
Wood floors and paneling, the ghost of an armchair. Dirt in a dry mouth.

A former best friend, or: a cigarette shared. A porch swing. A train we took across the country one summer.
White teeth like dinner plates.

Houses I once lived in sit perfectly formed in my mind, growing dusty and sending echoes rattling through my skull.
Nightmares grow heavy, slide down my spine and settle at the base to float in translucent membranes, some still glowing with fear, others sleepy with use and old age.

Your words—the heat of you—
Melting my ribcage, dripping slow honey into my chest.
Like sticky salt in an open wound.

Your hands like two twin ghosts on my skin.
A bottle of white wine, the first time we kissed.
A ceiling fan is the way your body fit with mine.

Holy Thursday

For Valentine’s Day you gave me: bruising kisses in a bathtub. Fast, unromantic lovemaking, the candles I placed on the rim of the tub knocked into the water by our elbows.

A sonnet: you told me my hair was looking too blonde. I looked tired, you said. Stop wearing so much mascara, and was that the only flannel shirt I owned?

Your hand on my waist felt like the answer to the things drunken boys yell from cars, things that twist your insides and string your blood tight, like violin strings.

About the author:

Bridget Waldron is passionate about strong coffee, Jeff Goldblum, and the Oxford comma. She currently lives in East Lansing, MI, where she’s studying English lit and editing and publishing.

If you haven’t seen it already, author Maureen Johnson has garnered a ton of attention for her “Coverflip” project, in which she invited people to redesign book covers as though they were written for the opposite gender. It’s an interesting study in how we react to certain visuals and how that relates to a book’s marketing.

In Word Riot author news, Quinn White has a book of poetry out through Dulcet Dancing Girl Press and Studio, My Moustache. Her poem, “Whale Rescues Stranded Motorist,” appeared here in February.

I enjoyed this a lot: J. Robert Lennon on that troublesome writing advice, “Put your ass in the chair and write:”

Here’s the correct way to advise somebody: Love them. Respect them. Know them. Read their stuff, understand where they’re coming from. If they’re your students, talk to them in class and during your office hours. Ask them how it feels when they can’t finish something. Ask them how it feels when they can. Help them get at their obsessions.

PS: If you have been productive lately, Paper Darts has a short story contest that closes May 15th. Say, do you have something ready that’s 800 words? Elliott Holt is this year’s judge.

An interesting discussion: Aimee Phan and Julia Fierro discuss the tenuous balancing act between parenting and writing. (I know those feels, maaan.)

I also really enjoyed this interview with essayist Chloe Caldwell, over at BookTalk Magazine: “You Get Good at What You Do.”

Caldwell’s book, Legs Get Led Astray, was published by Portland small press Future Tense Books. Here’s Laura Stanfill talking about the State of Small Press in Portland. Dig it.

At Slate, author Claire Messud talks with her editor, Robin Desser about the writer-editor-publishing relationship.

In other news: Harper Lee’s agent sounds like a total jerk.

Finally: Now that Universal Studios is adding Diagon Alley to their Harry Potter theme park, my daughter may very well explode with happiness in the event of our visiting it.

Until next time!

Notes From Elsewhere is brought to you by Sara Habein, who doesn’t pretend to be the first to know anything.

via Wil Wheaton (@wilw) “@TheBloggess look what I just saw in the airport! (Sorry about your neighbors.)”

Since it’s been awhile (okay, a long while), we have lots and lots of newsy bits to cover, and a fair amount of Word Riot Author News. Let’s get right to it.

Mel Bosworth, whose short story “Sunderland, Massachusetts” appeared here February 2012, has a new site reviewing small press titles, appropriately called The Small Press Book Review. 

Oblong Magazine has recently featured the work of  WR Fiction Editor Kevin O’Cuinn, with his story “Telescopia” in Issue II. Past Word Rioters Len Kuntz and Tom Sheehan featured in Issue I. Kuntz’s flash fiction story “Center and Fringe” appeared here in 2010, and Sheehan’s “Milan Carl Liskart, Coalman” was published here in 2011.

Former WR Fiction Editor Timmy Waldron has an excerpt from his unpublished novel A Sad Little Happiness, “All My Lovers Were Liars Too,” now appearing at Serving House Journal.

In other news: Here’s an essay by Fiona Maazel that I really, really enjoyed: “A Crack in the Darkness.”

It’s been about a month since Roger Ebert died. Here are 20 of his “Most Epic Movie Pans.”

Emily Temple at Flavorwire has “10 LGBT-Themed Novels Every Student Should Read.”

I liked this: 30 Things to Tell a Book Snob by Matt Haig.

Scout Books and Future Tense Books have made some beautiful book-babies together.

Usually “This Week in Misogyny”-type stories make me sadly shake my head, but this essay from Deborah Copaken Kogan actually made my jaw drop.

It’s career suicide, colleagues tell me, to speak out against the literary establishment; they’ll smear you. But never mind. I’m too old and too invisible to said establishment to care. And I still believe, as Carol Hanisch wrote back in 1969—when I was having my then three-year-old feet forced into stiff Mary Janes—that the personal is political.

At The Guardian, Elif Batuman writes about “Life After a Bestseller” and also asking Jonathan Franzen for some weed.

Tabitha Blankenbiller writes about an odd book-signing with Cheryl Strayed at a Costco: “I thought I was just coming down here to sign stock—no one told me it was an actual event signing.”

GalleyCat has some book promotion strategies that actually worked. They also have a nice roundup of music to listen to while writing, if you’re the sort who likes to have music playing while doing so.

At HTMLGiant, Bethany Prosseda says “I don’t “get” poetry readings.”

I don’t necessarily agree with her, but yes, sometimes there is an accessibility problem when it comes to poetry.

If you’re looking for some writing apps for Android devices, here are some suggestions.

Finally, here are 100 Books that SHOULD be Written, art by Tyler Adam Smith. Includes James Joyce, This is What I Meant.

Until next time.

Notes From Elsewhere is brought to you by Sara Habein, who doesn’t pretend to be the first to know anything.

STRETCHING FORMS
Three Prose-Poems by Amanda Deo

SHORT STORIES
Keith’s Week by Kyle Brown
Get Down with the Sickness by Thomas Kearnes
Love, Rose by Missy Roback

POETRY
The Mermaid Rejects Your Story by Jessica Rae Bergamino
Ode to Stephen Graham Jones by Heather Foster
December, California by George Korolog
Satisfaction by Erik P. Kraft
SCENES OF INSOMNIA by Conley Lowrance
Poem at the End of the World by Jason Michael MacLeod
The King of His Lawn by Brice Maiurro
grown up (cause I know what coffee means) by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
the landfill electric by Daniel Woody

About the author:

Maddy Raskulinecz is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill now living in Takoma Park, Maryland. Her writing has appeared at Thought Catalog and Moire Mag.

I fixate on the small-perfect hairs aligned on your scalp and finger bang myself to sleep. In my head I haze you as part of your initiation to be in my body. There’s a puddle of ceiling that seeps through a mattress & leaks into a possibility & thank God we’re still young. My hands arch intensely to a composition of my functioning body and an ex’s mixed cd.

WE WOKE UP LEAN

I smoke gently on your chest. We were careful not to wake the kids & goodbye with a handshake & my skeleton is trapped with your universe inside. I grew up in the living room & hatched during the delivery of us but no one cared. Your heart sounds like spokes spinning. It isnt breaking; it isnt even close.

BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE ANYONE

We hit a fox the night after you get arrested. The headlights are wet with SHIT HAPPENS. You catch my shaking hands from shattering your teeth. I cradle the fox and hold her like four years of it won’t happen again, then strap her into the car seat and drive on.

Monday is the real beginning of the week, and that is why this story begins there, and that is why Keith’s begins there, too. Monday was the bottom of the hill and the rest of the work week was spent ascending to the top of Friday afternoon. In between was a week of pushing paper, saying yes sir I’m sorry sir, building files, saying yes sir I’m sorry sir I’ll fix that right away, tearing apart files, running around the thirty-eighth floor, calling lawyers, poking accountants on the shoulder saying excuse me but is this figure correct is this supposed to be a comma or a period, sitting in a cubicle at a desk without a nameplate, listening to one side of a dozen business calls just beyond the thin cardboard partitions, paying attention to detail, skimming, and at the end of the day hardly remembering anything that had happened.
      But all of that had yet to begin. Keith woke up at 6:27am after hitting the snooze three times. He gently rolled out of bed so as not to wake his wife, showered, shaved, placed two slices of wheat toast in the toaster oven, poured and sipped on a mug of coffee with some milk and two teaspoons of sugar. When the toast was toasted, he buttered and smothered the crispy bread in grape jelly. He sat eating and staring blankly at the light oak tabletop. When he finished his toast, he stood up, yawned with a stretch, and made himself a to-go cup with the rest of the coffee.
      Keith’s wife made an ugh cavewoman noise when he kissed her on the cheek and said goodbye and Love you. Even though both of their work days began at nine, she never had to fight the gridlock to the city because she worked at a small local law office and slept in until after Keith left.
      Keith bent down into his car and banged his knee on the steering wheel. He tried to remember where his wife had gone the day before. Adjusting the seat, he turned on the car, changed the radio station to sports talk radio and then to an FM classic rock station, and took a sip of coffee from his to-go cup. Keith backed out of the driveway and began his 75-90 minute commute. It was going to be thirty-five miles of gingerly tapping the accelerator and quickly pressing the break. There’s nothing express about it, he would tell his coworkers and they would nod and say, You said it.
      During his commute Keith would do what he thought of as meditate, his attempt to think about nothing. Whatever accounts, projects, and numbers he was going to have to deal with and remember, he tried to erase from his mind. He imagined anything that crossed his mind floating away from him on a sea of infinite nothingness. He didn’t think about his bosses, about his mortgage, his car payments, the engine light, the in-laws, the family his wife wanted to start, the trouble they’d been having conceiving, the upcoming doctors appointments, the little boxes he’d have to check, the uncomfortable questions that he’d have to answer—he didn’t think about any of this on his commute, and if one did cross his mind, he put it on a boat and floated it off past the placid horizon.
      The first thing Keith did after entering his skyscraper and walking past security was walk into the bathroom and spend a good fifteen minutes working out of him what his coffee had loosened up. He joked to himself that this was his favorite part of the day and he imagined joking to his coworkers and them agreeing, You said it.
      After his bowel movements, the day both crawled and flew by. Sometimes it felt as if he could hear each tick of every second of every minute of every hour, while other times five o’clock would suddenly strike and Keith would rouse out of his daze and start packing up his files and clasping shut his briefcase. On his commute home, he would idle along in his car trying to erase all thought.
      Most days he returned to the sound of a television turned to low volume and smells of garlic and meat roasting. Sometimes the microwave would be beeping and he’d hear its door pop open and clank shut as he changed into a t-shirt and jeans and found his house shoes. This Monday, however, when Keith walked into the house, his wife was pointing a gun at him.
      “What the fuck were you thinking?” she screamed and added, “of course you weren’t thinking. You weren’t thinking at all.”
      Keith tried to say something but only managed to make a sound high up in his nose as if he were trying to clear his sinuses.
      “Don’t even try to explain. It’s over. It’s all over, and now I’m going to end it for you, for all of us.”
      “What—”
      “Karen came clean, Keith. Karen told me everything. I don’t see how you could fuck—I just can’t believe it. I freaked out. I’m freaking out now. We were going to have kids and you go and fuck it all up. You fucked it all up. You’re just a fuck up and I’m done with it all I’m through with everything, with you, with everything.”
      Keith’s wife motioned with the gun for Keith to walk into the bedroom. There he found Karen face down in the bed with a fresh red glaze of blood pooling on her back and oozing onto the sheets and dripping onto the floor. If it weren’t for the blood, it would have looked like Karen was just a stomach sleeper.
      “Get in bed with her.”
      Keith stood with his mouth open and he made another nasally squeal.
      “Now.” Keith felt an object dig into his back.
      Keith obeyed and slid into bed, careful not to disturb the dead body on the other side.
      “Spoon her, you pig.”
      Keith scooted a few inches towards Karen’s body but was careful not to get near the blood. He made another high pitched whining noise. Keith looked at his wife and opened his mouth, but before he had a chance to not say anything, she shot him in the chest.

Tuesday

Tuesday is the most boring day of the week. Nothing ever happens on a Tuesday. The same was true for Keith. He set to work as normal: the numbers, the yes sirs, the adjustments, the building and tearing apart of files, the calculations, the algorithms, the overheard phone conversations, the muffled coughs, the office hum.
      A passing coworker said to no one in particular, A light day today.
      Keith made a mmhmm noise with his nose, cleared his throat, and didn’t say anything.
      After lunch Keith found himself without any work to do. He could have asked one of his bosses for something to do, but instead, he got a drink of water from the water cooler. He walked to the water cooler, filled a paper cup with cold blue water, sipped, and topped off the paper cup. He lazed back to his desk, sat, and began his meditation earlier than normal. He sat and sipped on the cold water from the thin white paper cup and allowed all thought to evaporate from his mind as he stared at a point in space just beyond his partition.
      The end of the work day arrived and men and women packed files and papers and contracts and laptops and chargers and pens and pencils into briefcases and bags. They made sure to pack everything securely so that there were no surprises when they went to unpack everything the next day. They put their desktops to sleep and tucked their three-hour office chairs under their desks and filed out of the office to the elevator and down into the street and eventually to their homes. If any had passed Keith’s cubicle and noticed him slumped over, they didn’t say anything to anyone or assumed he was just resting his eyes. An office custodian found him in the same position around 10pm with his head in a puddle of water and when Keith did not wake up, the man called 911. When the paramedics arrived, there was nothing they could do.

Wednesday

Wednesday, Hump-day, half way home. If it weren’t for being one day after Tuesday and one day closer to Friday, Wednesday would be the most boring day of the week.
      Keith went through his morning routine and climbed on to the merry-go-round to work. While meditating, he lost his focus and found himself staring at the traffic that sped past in the opposite direction. Keith wiped his mouth. At the next exit, he turned around and joined the cars speeding away from the city. Keith flew. He felt like a superhero.
      He landed in the driveway just in time to catch his wife before she got into her car for her short commute. He grabbed her, pulled her close, and gave her a longer, more passionate kiss than he had ever kissed her or anyone else ever.
      “Call off,” he said.
      Keith was filled with desire, a perverse lust he had not felt since puberty or perhaps never. For the first time Keith found himself wanting to do something different.
      “Let’s fuck all day,” he said. “What’s that stuff? Tantric sex? You know, what Sting does. Let’s have sex all day. Let’s not leave bed all day. I want to stay inside you all day until I pass out from exhaustion. I want to have a sex marathon. Just like Sting.”
      Keith did not know that a marathon was 26.22 miles and that they can be run by the world’s best in just over two hours. He did not understand the concepts of practice and pacing. He had not run at all since high school, and while not in bad shape, he had let his gut grow with overeating and beer-drinking and a sedentary office job. His body was unprepared to be thrust into a marathon, sexual or otherwise.
      Beginning with a sprint and not letting up, Keith stripped his wife and turned her around, bent her over the edge of his recliner and began humping her with the fervor of an unneutered dog and before ten minutes passed he had finished. Keith was determined, however, that on this day he would not simply stop, roll over, and fall asleep. He wanted to try all five of the sexual positions that he knew of: missionary, cowgirl, reverse cowgirl, doggy, and what he called lotus. He checked off doggy from his mental list.
      During his second wave, Keith lasted almost a half hour. Better, but he still had not checked off all of the positions. With hardly any time to cool down, Keith lifted his wife up, turned her around, and lowered her down on him. He began to thrust his hips up and he did not stop for a very long time.
      He found a mightiness in his third erection. He felt invincible, filled with adrenaline and infinite power. He felt like a superhero. Penis Man. He laughed the thought away and flipped his wife over and looked into her eyes and said, “We’re going to make some babies. We’re going to fucking make some babies.”
      Keith made it past the fourth hour on that third erection. He was an unstoppable force. He was not pacing himself and he was not pacing the force with which he pummeled his wife. She was writhing and near insanity but she did not want him to stop. She had no idea what had happened to Keith, but she did not think about it and welcomed his new passion. Keith began to think of himself more and more as a machine and not as a superhero. His human body began to harden and cool and his muscles ceased to send his brain any signals of pain or pleasure. Keith’s existence condensed into a simple, repeating thrust.
      But machines are not meant to last forever, especially when they run out of fuel, and Keith would have been better off being that superhero with infinite energy and life. After her thirty-eighth orgasm, Keith’s wife felt his weight upon her. She did not notice whether he had come again or not, but she was so dazed, deranged, ecstatic, and exhausted that she couldn’t notice anything and she rolled him off of her and fell asleep in a tingly euphoria.
      She woke in the dark. The clock radio read 10:12. She was both amazed and annoyed that she had slept so long, but she felt great and full of energy. Next to her she stared at Keith’s naked, sleeping frame. Oh, he worked so hard, she thought. He needs a vacation. That’s what he really needs. She smiled and slapped his ass and said, “Let’s get some dinner, Stud.”
      She went out into the kitchen and decided on making a quick meal of spaghetti. She smiled, Keith loves spaghetti.
      As the water boiled, she went back in the dark bedroom and tousled Keith’s hair, trying to gently wake him.
      “Keith, honey, I’m making spaghetti. It’ll be ready soon. We probably shouldn’t eat so late, but we’ve earned it. You’ve earned it. Let’s wake up and eat, honey.”
      Keith would not wake up. His wife grew frantic. She flipped on the light and a lump jumped up in her throat when she saw his ivory blue skin. She shook him violently, hit him, slapped him. She put an ear to his cold back but heard no thumping. She scrambled to find her phone and dialed 911. There was nothing the paramedics could do.

Thursday

Thursday, almost Friday but not quite. Still there is a growing excitement in the air and Keith felt it. Soon it will all be over.
      Thursday’s routine was more or less the same: waking, cleaning, breakfast, coffee, goodbye, ugh, commute, radio, traffic, meditation, poop, relief, numbers, calculations, phone calls, yes sirs, cups of water, adjustments, building, tearing apart, yawning, coughing, sorry sirs, organizing, packing away, commute, traffic, meditation, driveway, hellos, kisses, dinner. The main different in Keith’s Thursday routine was his trip to the corner liquor store where he bought a case of his preferred American light lager. And like a child anticipating his presents on Christmas Eve, in his giddy excitement of Friday so near, Keith let himself have a few bottles before bed.
      Smiling with the thoughts of his Christmas morning, Keith walked to the corner and into the store and lifted a case out of the refrigerator, placed the case on the counter and opened his wallet.
      As he handed the clerk his money, gun shots fired and a voice yelled, “No one moves and no one gets hurt!”
      Keith stood there and didn’t move, still holding the twenty dollar bill out to the clerk. The clerk had already ducked under the counter, grabbed his shotgun, and come up firing.
      The clerk was both panicked and not a good shot. He failed to hit the masked man who had begun to run out of the store and down the street, but he had blown off the top left corner of Keith’s head. Blood rolled down Keith’s face and his body. After an uncomfortable amount of time upright, his body collapsed like a two hundred pound sack of potatoes. On its way down, Keith’s head slammed into the counter, spraying his brains across the counter, flying on to the clerk’s face and into his open mouth. Keith’s arm that had been outstretched, struck and dragged the case of beer to the floor and the fall had broken some of the bottles. The beer seeped through the cardboard and mixed with the pooling blood and the soft, warm chunks of Keith’s brain.
      A bystander in the back of the store had called 911 as soon as the first shots were fired. The police, fire department, and three ambulances rushed to the corner liquor store, but there was no way for any of them to put the soft and slippery puzzle pieces of Keith’s head back together.

Friday

Finally, Friday. The tension in Keith’s shoulders began to loosen. His morning bowel movement in the lobby restroom moved easier than normal. He sat smiling on the toilet. He sat smiling in his three hour office chair. He sat smiling through lunch. He sat smiling as he took a call from some of his bosses who requested his presence in their board room.
      Keith smiled at the clock. Only an hour left. Today really flew.
      He only recognized about half of the bland, grimacing faces. One of those faces said, “Keith, have a seat.”
      “We will not beat around the bush. It’s come to our attention that you’ve not been working up to the standards of this company. This company cannot afford to have its employees miss work and not call off without any explanation.”
      Keith opened his mouth to say something, but one of his bosses waved a hand and continued.
      “Not only were you MIA on Wednesday, but we observed that you took off early on Tuesday, as well. We have no records of any requests for that time off. Because you have put in several years—”
      “Seven years,” clarified another boss looking down at a sheet of paper.
      “After seven years, we’ve noticed that you haven’t done anything that has given us alarm, but we have high standards here and we expect that from all employees.”
      “From the top down.”
      “Yes, from the top on down. If it were me missing one and a half days of work without giving any notice, I would be fired. If it were any of us on this side of the table, we’d be let go. So I am sorry but we must let you go, effective immediately. You will receive two weeks’ severance.”
      Keith opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again.
      “You can pick up your last paycheck at HR, and your severance will be delivered via courier.”
      Keith’s heart jumped. He was so happy that he began to dance as he left the office. He even tried to click his heals but only managed to kick a partition, lose his balance, and fall to one knee. But he popped back up, gave a salute and Fuck you to his three hour office chair, and raced out of the building. He sped home, beating the rush hour traffic. He was flying over 90mph, stretching the car as fast as she could go. He let the wind whip through the car, and he hooted in excitement with the loud roar. After exiting the expressway, he slowed down but could not stop smiling. He couldn’t wait to start his life over. I’m going to do what I really want to do, he thought. I don’t know what that is, but I am going to do something I really want to do.
      Keith rolled through a stop sign turning right into his subdivision, and his Toyota was t-boned. The SUV that was speeding home from an early Friday release smashed into the driver’s side of Keith’s car, crushing him, severing his head from his body and throwing it down the road and into a gutter. The eyes in his severed head stared unblinking at the late afternoon sun.

Saturday

Keith slept in. It felt good. He woke and found his wife making a late breakfast. He washed the bacon and eggs and toast down with coffee and orange juice.
      Keith itched throughout the day. He bounced from foot to foot, squirmed in his seat, and sweated when he held his wife’s hand. They went to the mall. They shopped for nothing in particular and bought some ice cream and sat in the food court eating it. Keith thought about beer and then about whiskey. He licked his lips and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
      The day inched along.
      “No, I don’t need new shoes, mine are fine, they last a long time, they’re good shoes. I buy good shoes and I don’t need a lot of them. They are not falling apart and they are still comfortable. I like them. You know I hate shoe shopping. You know this. They never have my size.”
      After the mall, the handholding, the ice cream, and the new shoes, Keith and his wife went out to dinner at a chain restaurant that advertized low-carb meals. They had a catchy jingle and Keith hummed it to himself while they waited to be seated. He hummed off-key.
      He ordered a beer. He was not on a low-carb diet. He just wanted a cold beer. What he really wanted was a shot of whiskey, but he looked at his wife and thought maybe he would get some whiskey later. Beer was fine for now.
      Keith’s wife looked at him. He looked at and then sipped his beer and then opened his menu. She looked at his beer and then at her menu. They read items from the menu as if they were learning how to read. The Bistro Burger? The crispy chicken salad? The charred Cajun filet? Keith sipped his beer and scratched the side of his head.
      The meal passed in spits, spurts, and sputters. The steak was hot and crusty and juicy and bloody. Keith order more beers. Keith asked his wife if she was sure she didn’t want anything to drink and she opened her mouth and shook her head.
      “So I’ve got to go to the doctor on Monday,” she said.
      “Yeah?”
      “Yes.”
      “You get to miss some work. Lucky. I should get a check up, you know. Make sure I’m in good health. I’ll wait until I find a new job, though. New insurance. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”
      “I know, but the doctor’s appointment.”
      “No, I’ll wait. I feel fine. Say, you want to go out tonight? I want some whiskey. I haven’t had any whiskey in a long time. That sounds really good right now.”
      Keith’s wife wiped her mouth and said, “No, that’s okay, but you go.”
      “A whiskey or two. Maybe another beer or two. Nothing much.”
      “That’s fine.”
      “It’s been a long time.”
      Keith’s wife dropped him off at his local bar. He assured her that he would walk back and she can call it an early night if she wanted. He said he wouldn’t be long. Just some whiskey and a couple of beers.
      The bartender poured the shot and then pulled a beer for Keith. Keith looked up at the televisions that surrounded him with sporting events. One of the televisions had a commercial for the chain restaurant where Keith and his wife had just eaten. He began to hum the jingle again.
      He ordered another beer and another shot and he felt his head loosen from the rest of his body. From the top of his head to the bottom of his feet, he felt a warm tingling that was very pleasant. He started talking to others around him and to the bartender. He started buying shots for the others and for the bartender. The bartender in turn gave Keith free shots and free beers. Someone started playing songs on the juke box and Keith began to sing along, quietly at first, but with the encouragement of the other patrons, he began to belt out the words at the top of his lungs. People cheered and bought him more shots.
      After the lights turned on and the bartender wobbled and shouted last call, Keith shook his hand and said he better get going. Keith turned his back to the bar and tripped getting down off his stool and hit the ground like a two hundred pound sack of potatoes. No one seemed to notice. The other patrons filed past him, some tripped on him, one stepped on Keith’s hand but didn’t notice.
      Eventually after he cleaned up and put up the stools, the wobbly bartender noticed Keith’s dead weight on the floor.
      “Oh, buddy. Time to go home. It’s okay, I’ll give you a ride. I know you’re close by. Boy, you sure put on a good show tonight. Great for business, bud. You should start a band.”
      The swaying bartending nudged Keith when he was ready to leave, but Keith would not budge. The bartender splashed water on Keith’s neck and on the side of his face. Keith didn’t move. The bartender tried to lift Keith up on his feet, but Keith was a dead weight and far more than the bartender could lift. His body fell back to the floor with a muted thud.
      The bartender considered his options. He could leave Keith there to sleep it off or call the cops. He didn’t want to do either. If he let Keith sleep there, his boss would kill him. If he called the cops, Keith might get in trouble, and he didn’t want that. In the end he called 911. The paramedics tried many things: stomach pump, adrenaline, chest compressions, mouth to mouth, but there was nothing they could do.

Sunday

A day for rest. Keith woke with a terrible headache. He could feel his temples pulsing. He was sweating. He made the mistake of standing up, and this made the pounding intense enough to cause his stomach to somersault. The toilet arrived just in time. There was evidence around the toilet that this was not his first trip there. Dark chunks of food and bile and whiskey and beer wafted an awful smell and made his stomach somersault again. His guts would not stop contracting and he felt like he was going to die. He said a little prayer, Lord please let me die, please let me die, please let me die. Lord, I don’t want to live. Please, God, kill me now.
      He crawled, sweaty and putrid back into bed and tried to fall back asleep, but the vibrations that rattled his body kept him from rest. All he could do was lay on his side, close his eyes, and try not to move or think about anything at all.
      His wife came in the bedroom and said, “It’s noon, honey. You sleep this off while I go to my parents. I’ll be back by five or six. Karen called and she’s going to come over for dinner tonight. So if she comes to the door later, please answer it. Thanks, love you, bye.”
      What felt like days passed. The doorbell rang. Keith emitted a noise from his nose and moaned, “Go away.”
      The doorbell dingdonged again and then a third time. Keith crawled out of bed and almost fell over.
      “Just a minute.”
      He opened the door for Karen.
      “Did I wake you, Keith? Sorry. Your wife home?”
      Keith shook his head.
      “I’m sorry. I was bored. I’m early. Say, you look like shit.”
      “You said it.”
      “You want some aspirin?”
      “I’m full of it.”
      “I know what you need,” Karen said. “It’s absolutely the perfect cure for hangovers.”

About the author:

Kyle Brown writes fiction and poetry. He graduated from Purdue University with a BA in English. His work has appeared in Wandering and Spork Press.

She asks what he’s working on. He tells her it’s about the surface: a treatment of paint, photography, and more paint—but, really, it’s about the conceptual premise, he says. Still, it’s got a bunch of naked women. He has no time to talk, says he has to get back to work.

She calls the next day—Jersey City to Berlin—and asks if he’s made progress. No, it depresses me, he says. There’s no light here; it’s grey and raining; my apartment is too small. He rushes her off the phone.

2. Duchamp

The fountain was never installed at the show. He’s best known for something that never happened, he says. They stroll around Inventing Abstraction; admire Marcel’s painting on a painting on a painting the most. It’s ahead of its time, he says, and she agrees. The piece looks so different from all the geometric, institutional MoMA. Outside, he takes random photographs: buildings; cabs; the back of her head. She pulls him through the two lions into the library, his first visit. There are rows of lamps, books and readers. He’s not interested. He’s most attracted to decay, and shoots a broken phone booth tucked in a corner.

3. The Work

I want to read you a draft, she says. Something new. He listens to the first half and tells her to stop. He can’t listen anymore, right now. He has to get back to work. There’s no time, he says, and rushes her off the phone.

4. O’Hara

Days go by and something is emerging, he says, but doesn’t want to show anyone yet. Not until it’s finished. The work should be a philosophical expression based on logic, he says, that when presented will stop a viewer’s brain, because they cannot figure it out. This is a rare artistic moment, difficult to achieve, he adds. He has to get back to it, and rushes her off the phone. She can’t figure her attraction to him, it has no logic. She thinks about Frank’s Oranges and Mike’s Sardines. When she tries to call later he doesn’t answer.

5. The Work

He’s showing at an important art fair. It’s a chance for people to see the new work. It’s taken three years to arrive at this moment; he started long before meeting her. She’s on edge while he’s there, hoping the work sells. He texts. Paintings are selling. By the third day he breaks even. He’s angry, hates being sold off, bit by bit. You’re a princess, he yells. It’s like living in an art factory, on the line, he says. You don’t know what it’s like for me, he yells. She has no answers; says she has to go.

6. Steiglitz, O’Keefe

Steiglitz discovered O’Keefe. They made it work in New York, although there’s myth in the blurred rendering of them. Who needed the other more? One wealthy; one poor. We made it work in New York, but in a city made of fantasies we didn’t create a myth for ourselves. I would have liked that though. There can be no equilibrium between artists, I’ve decided. Days later you write Sorry I’ve been out of touch. I need more space, you write. We’re three thousand miles apart. Take all the space you want, I write back, letting go of the filament between us. What connected us was the work—your work—I suppose. For much of anything else, there wasn’t enough time.

Carol Deminski

Carol Deminski’s stories appear or are forthcoming in PANK, Dogzplot, Metazen, Foundling Review, The Northville Review and elsewhere. She’s on the web at http://cdeminski.wordpress.com. She lives and writes in Jersey City, NJ although not always in that order.

A Bavarian named Frank tells them the history of each beer. Zofia films from the corner. After each history lesson they drink the beer in question. It’s not long before they ask Zofia to say cock and then pussy. They ask her which word she prefers. She says cock. Zofia has a Slavic accent. Jill asks Andy which he prefers. Andy gives her the duh look, then says pussy in his Utah accent.

* * *

They arrive in Bavaria, a city called Regensburg. Frank takes them to beer halls, of which there are many. They order stein after stein of Bavarian beer.

Jack tells Jill he was expecting German beer songs. Frank tells them he knows one. It goes:

und wir ziehen die Bayern
die Lederhosen aus

There’s not much to it. Zofia pipes the loudest. They sing it in the beer hall, then outside the beer hall all the way to the stone bridge. They sing und wir ziehen die Bayern die Lederhosen aus over and over.

* * *

At the world’s oldest sausage stall twelve men in Bavarian hats cook sausages. Jill gets two. Andy Jack & Zofia get one. Frank gets one. While they eat the ancient sausages on the ancient stone bridge, Frank tells them about Emperor Friedrich II & the ice dam & the 19th century bazaar. Jill wants to know more about the bazaar but Frank has told her all he knows.

Jill looks at Jack. Jack shakes his head. Jill goes ahead anyway. She says Frank do you know if we can find a witch? Frank laughs, says yes I know where you can find one.

* * *

The witch does not wear a Bavarian hat. The witch wears a cowboy hat. He makes his own jerky. He lives in a black hole with three broken bicycles. He has pictures of horses on the walls and a collection of belt buckles on a shelf. His wooden table is covered in ash. An army of empty beer cans leans against the wall. The witch is a wild west Bavarian.

* * *

Frank does not go to visit the witch. Zofia & Andy do not go; only Jill and Jack. Frank told them it was a trap. Jill didn’t care. She thought he meant a tourist trap. She had plenty of money. It wasn’t a tourist trap. That’s not what Frank meant.
* * *

Jack looks into the eyes of the Bavarian wild west witch. The witch leans into Jack. The witch creaks his leather trousers. Then it is all silent. The witch puts his hands on Jack’s head. He tuts some. The tutting puts Jack in a trance. And Jill too. Their heads bob up and down at the same time.

* * *

Frank & Andy & Zofia go back to the Bavarian beer halls. They eat a big Bavarian meal and wait for Jack and Jill. After three hours Frank shakes his head. He says he can guess what has happened. He tells Zofia and Andy they need to check the hotel. The hotel is near the Bavarian witch’s black hole.

Frank shows the receptionist a picture of Jack and Jill. He asks if they checked into the hotel. The receptionist is a big bald man with no neck. He looks Frank up and down. Then he looks Zofia and Andy up and down. He shuffles some papers, says Ja. He gives them the room number, 333.

The lift isn’t working so they trot up the stairs. Andy knocks on door 333. No one answers. The door is open. They walk in.

The room smells of lemon. A large vine twists out the window. They find a bible on the bedside table. There’s a pink slip under it. The pink slip reads: diagnosis—broken crown.

About the author:

Marcus Slease was born in Portadown, N. Ireland but moved to Las Vegas at age 12 to become Mormon. He is no longer Mormon or a resident of Vegas. Recent fiction and poetry have appeared in: Banango Street, Coconut, Forklift Ohio, Monkeybicycle, Everyday Genius, Spork, NAP, Dogzplot, InDigest and others. His latest books are the novella The House of Zabka (a bizarro postmodern fairy tale from Poland) http://deathlesspress.com/ and a book of modern lyrical ballads from South Korea entitled Mu (so) Dream (window): http://www.poorclaudia.org/index.php He lives in London and teaches English as a foreign language. He is working on his first novel: Lucy Queen of the Pirates. Stuff happens at The House of Zabka: www.marcusslease.tumblr.com

Six-feet-nine in my slippers, I carry that benched-by-life aplomb that is characteristic of tall men severely handicapped at basketball. A Futurist with a Ph.D., I get a morbid kick out of David Letterman—the guy who does surveys at the Plaza Mall out front of Rayguard’s. People assume he’s his namesake/lookalike until they realize he’s minus ironic zingers, but by then he’s captured most of Rayguard’s wants (…).

We spin through dark matter at 7500 MPHeartbeat. Having a face like Dave is a license to print money, doing surveys. Linda doesn’t own that kind of luck, she has me—a Futurist thirty years her senior—and meets our needs from the Avon Calling Call Center by pestering people for phone orders.

Avon has this fresh deal now where you can create and name your own cologne or perfume. Or even devise and christen a bottled scent for, say, your cat, dog or goat. Linda complains regularly about the capped incentive program, and crawls into bed. This is our life these days, before the real Dave makes us drowsy, and we sleep.

Jealous April arrives, toppling power staffs and telephone poles and much, much more; betraying our trailer oasis. Linda calls “the dervish trouser of wind” (my Futurist take on last week’s cyclone): “The Michelle Obama left-cheek whiz-by.” We pack what’s left into the car to live a stretch with Linda’s father.

First thing I find out at Keith’s place is that his Long Island Iced Teas are stronger than New Zealand’s. Keith, who is five years my junior, doesn’t believe that being a Futurist has a future. “Which doesn’t mean,” he says, “that the world’s going to collapse any time soon. No, my friend, it’s going to wait you out until it finds you rottin’ in your rollin’ chair, until your chin drops to your chest and your brain explodes and you shit your diapers one final time—then curtains. The best revenge? A career at Sears. Where else still believes in lifetime pensions?”

I don’t know what medications Keith mixes with his drinks, but the cat-box moments zip past my ears like tracer turds right and left (…). Plus either someone upstairs is taking their first few plugs at blowing a trombone, or a couch is being slid across the floor with urge. Behind the bathroom cabinet doors, I half expect to find Sean Penn on a fact-finding mission.

We gather ourselves for a night of lumps on the pitted, pull-out mattress. “Tell me,” Linda says. “Tell me everything … Or I’ll tell you.”

About the author:

Eldon (Craig) Reishus entertains a growing, less intimate circle under the Alps outside Munich. This year he has work published or forthcoming in Word Riot, Black Heart Magazine, Embodied Effiigies, Whitewash Dreams Magazine, B O D Y (2 pieces), Subtopian, Misfits’ Miscellany (3 pieces), Knee-Jerk Magazine, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. He is an all-around print and web media pro, and the German-English translator of numerous films and book. He originates from Fort Smith, Arkansas. Visit him: www.reishus.de

Blue light pierces the dark. It hurts your eyes. Your head, it’s been hurting a while. You squint at the blue. Three a.m. Call the number, leave the same message. Where are you? It’s late. You hug your pillow to your chest, cry into the flannel. I’m tired.
     In the kitchen the vials are lined up neatly on the table. He always makes you wait.

Three-thirty. Call again. You said you’d be here. I need to go to sleep. Your king-size bed is an insult. You flip the phone open and shut, open and shut. He went to a club in the Mission to help a friend set up audio equipment, said he’d be back soon. And then it was eleven, and then it was midnight. And then he had to wait for the club to close so he could get his gear back.
     At four, you call again. The message box is full.

Four-thirty. A wooden squeak in the hall. Footsteps, quiet, he’s trying not to wake you.
     He has excuses; he always does. His cell phone battery died. He was just playing Trivial Pursuit with some people. He gives you a cheap scented candle from Walgreens, as if that makes up for it. See, I didn’t forget you.
     You want to throw the candle at the wall, but you’re too exhausted. Just give me the shot so I can go to sleep, you say. I’m so tired. Please, just give me the shot.

You’re careful and neat. You disinfect everything. You have your own red sharps container you deposit the used needles in. But you don’t trust yourself with the needle. Your hands shake. You tried it once, but you couldn’t even break the skin, you felt so hot, so faint. I need your help, you’d said. He resents your weakness, thinks you should be able to do it yourself.

You remember the first time you went to the clinic, the beautiful, expensive view of the San Francisco Bay, and how you thought that view was supposed to temper the desperation that hung in the air like fog. Couples together, tense with hope and pain. Or maybe that was just how you felt. At the end of your visit, the staff took a Polaroid of the two of you, pale and grim.

This much you can do: Poke the needle into the vial of water, draw some up and insert it into the vial of powder. Tip it from side to side, agitate slowly like you’re processing film. An experiment, something you might have done in eleventh-grade chemistry, Mr. Chasse’s class. He was obsessed with swine. He drew pictures of them on the blackboard: Einswein, Frankenswein, pigs eating in the school swineteria. The guy was off his rocker.
     Tap the glass lightly, get rid of any bubbles. This is where you falter. You’re afraid you’ll inject an air bubble and die. I’m ready, you say but he’s not, he’s in the living room watching the History Channel. Just wait ‘til this is over, he says, and you wait. That’s a good night, when you get the shot before he disappears. Before he goes to the Safeway on Market for ice cream, and forgets his way home.

Your feet in stirrups, the ceiling fluorescently white. Cold metal inside you, your abdomen cramps. Tears pool in your ears and you wonder if life can possibly grow in such emptiness. A song about flowers growing in a garbage dump. You close your eyes and hum the melody.
     He was late to the appointment, arriving by cab. You came here alone, embarrassed. My husband and his sperm will be here soon. You’d waited at home until ten-thirty — get up, we have to go — but he wouldn’t. The clinic across town, the parking difficult. You couldn’t wait. He’d come home at sunrise. He’d had an asthma attack, had to go to the 24-hour Walgreens. Had to drive a friend home, she had too much to drink. Whichever, you don’t remember. I thought you were dead, you’d said, turned away, tried to sleep. Now he drives you both home and you stare out the window, still crying silently. You want him to ask how it felt in the exam room, so you can say it felt awful, it felt sad, unnatural, cold, but he’s angry you left for the clinic without him.
     At home, you close the bedroom door, crawl under the covers. You drift among clouds dark yellow and gray. Cars crash around you in pieces. You fucker, they scream, you fucker, not waiting for me. Why do you think I wasn’t ready to go? Something smashes against the door. Shoes. No, heavier. In bed, your body jerks each time something hits the door. You curl into yourself, afraid, wondering how this is upsetting your body, undoing the procedure you just had. You cover your head with the blanket to escape the noise, not understanding the degree of his anger, not knowing where it comes from.

The two of you talked about having a baby for years, but the time never seemed right. Now you’re forty, running out of time. You wanted to start treatments six months ago but he kept stalling, and you didn’t know why — if it was fear, or something more.
     You don’t tell anyone about the clinic. No one knows what you’re doing. You don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up beside your own.

Once in a while, you have a good day. He’s home, and present. You watch a movie together, play music. He’s funny and boyish and you think This is the man I know and you feel something like hope growing inside you, a crocus pushing through dirt.
     But the next day, everything turns again.

In September, nothing happened, not even a viable egg. This time, October, you have three good-sized eggs. You wait.
     Two weeks later, you get your period, right on the dot. You are alone when you begin to bleed.
     The clinic recommends only three tries with IUI. Three strikes, you’re out. After that, you can try IVF, if you can afford it. You cannot. Artificial insemination is not cheap. In vitro is out of reach.

Thanksgiving. Just the two of you. You’ve postponed the next round of injections for a month. Exhausted, you need a rest.
     You make a small dinner, nothing special: frozen turkey pot pies, dessert, wine. At five, he’s still sleeping, snoring. His head beaded with sweat, the rest of his body dry. You can’t wake him.
     You have dinner by yourself. You think of your friend inviting you to her Thanksgiving party, Oh, thanks, we already have plans.

December. Nothing changes but you.

The Internet tells you everything you don’t want to know.
     A cigarette lighter can last a long time, or be spent in one evening. A Chore Boy can be used to scrub pots and pans, or used as a filter. A ball-point pen — use it to write grocery lists, or remove the ink cartridge and it becomes a pipe. These things, you’ve already found in the apartment. Random, everyday items that don’t call attention to themselves. They’ve probably been here for months.
     The rose is what breaks you. It is tiny, red, doll-sized, not an inch long. When you find it in his desk drawer, you can no longer deny the truth.
     A love rose, a small glass tube encasing a tiny fake rose. It is sold as a cheesy romantic gift. Remove the rose, it’s a crack pipe.

Her name was going to be Rose. Your grandmother’s name, your middle name. Three generations of Roses seemed nice, had a sense of tradition. There is so little tradition in your life, nothing traditional in your marriage. If you had a boy, you might have named him Miles or Jules, but you always thought you’d have a girl, if only because you wanted one so badly. To right the wrongs, to fill the hole. To be the mother you always wanted, to be the girl you never were. To be the friend, the confidant, the giver of advice, of solace. To hold her and say “I love you, my sweet girl.” To say it freely, say it often, not wait ‘til she’s in college and you’re in the hospital, the first of many stays.

You hide things well. You learned, at an early age, how to lie, to cover up. Stiff upper lip. Tough New Englander, all that.
     You’ve been practicing for this moment all your life.
     You confide in a few friends who live far away. No one else needs to know.

In time, you leave him.

For two years, the vials stay in a box in the kitchen closet. You shut them away, try to forget they’re there. And then one day you reach back, behind the ancient Jello boxes, soup mixes, gummy bears, and retrieve the box. You examine the tiny, doll-like glass tubes, each one filled with white powder, hormones extracted from menopausal women. The powder will expire soon. You wish you could sell the vials — they were expensive, you need the money — or donate them, but it’s illegal. A controlled substance. You throw them in the trash, the tiny bottles clinking like champagne glasses.
     You keep the sharps container. You don’t know why.

He’s somewhere in LA. He calls you sometimes, the middle of the night. You sold me out, deserted me. So selfish of you. To leave him when he needed you most.
     Other times, he pleads for another chance.
     Sometimes you answer, sometimes you let the machine pick up. You never consider changing your number. You want to know he’s still alive.

The needles bore into the back of your neck, a hundred cat claws. You take deep breaths — in, out — and grip the chair back. We’re almost done, Diego says, jackhammering away. I think you’re gonna be happy.
     The tattoo tells your story now, the story of how nothing is what it seems. Most people will never see it. But if you lift your hair up, you’ll expose the small red rose, the beautiful scar. And if someone asks you what it means, you might tell them.

About the author:

Missy Roback’s fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review and Stymie Magazine, and has been short-listed for the Poets & Writers’ California Writers Exchange Award, among others. She is a Ucross Foundation fellow and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. “Love, Rose” is from her current project, a novel in stories called The Sky Ride. www.missyroback.com

About the author:

Emily Franklin is the author of a novel, Liner Notes (S&S), and The Girls’ Almanac, a collection of linked short stories (William Morrow) as well more than a dozen for young adults including The Half-Life of Planets, a YALSA Best Book of the Year nominee. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Mississippi Review, Small Spiral Notebook, Carve Magazine, Monkeybicyle, and Brevity among others.

He knew the owners’ names from the answering machine. “Hello stranger, you’ve just missed Jennie and Marv. Please leave a message after the tone.” It was the sort of upbeat, tangy voice you’d expect from a woman who owned a house with beach-facing bedrooms. People seldom left messages, but when they did Bern liked to play them again and again. He listened for clues as to when Marv and Jennie would return, if they’d retrun—he’d started to hope they wouldn’t. Sometimes, he called the machine himself. He had left “thank you” messages on the tape in five different accents.

When Nicole returned from her swim, Bern scooped her up into his arms and onto his knee.

“What you want to do today?” he said.

Nicole wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I don’t know. Same as always I suppose.” Her eyes were red with saltwater. She has sand stuck to her elbows.“Same as always” in North Cove meant nothing. They couldn’t go into town because they might get recognised. But they didn’t need to go into town. They had everything they needed. There was enough food in Jennie and Marv’s basement to see them through two more months.

Nicole slipped off Bern’s knee and went off to shower. He knew she was too spooked to be near him just lately. Every day she said, “I thought these people went on holiday? How much longer can we stay?”

Bern couldn’t answer that. You took a house when you found it, and skedaddled when your luck ran out. That’s how it had always been. But this one was different. They’d been here four weeks and he felt like a proper homeowner.

A dog barked outside, somewhere further up the beach. The sound was picked up and wrung through the sea winds and the waves. Ben thought about tides, and the phases of the moon; about wax and wane. It was hard to keep track of time in such a place, even with calendars and clocks. Dunes cascaded and changed shape.

The dog stopped barking. Bern stroked his hand across his face. He took his coffee outside and sat on the doorstep. High above, oblivious, ever-hungry, the gulls swam through air like kites.

About the author:

David Mohan is based in Dublin. He has been published in Necessary Fiction, Word Riot, Opium, Contrary, elimae, Flash International magazine, The Chattahoochee Review, New World Writing and Used Furniture Review. He has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.

My apartment—the living room especially—had the air of a shrine. Upon every wall hung the portraits I’d taken over the last decade. Some were friends, some lovers; most were strangers. You entered my apartment and eyes, eyes, eyes besieged you. You sat in the recliner and felt ghosts watching you. Axel had said he felt he knew everything and nothing about me all at once. You sat with me on the couch but could not forget the faces captured under glass. I took a staunch pride whenever someone, usually a man, entered my home for the first time and gaped, baffled at my collection. This was my work, the best thing someone could know about me.
      Dad scrubbed the countertops in the kitchen. He’d been cleaning the room for two hours. “It’s a damn shame I have to do this for a grown man,” he said. While he scoured and washed, I retired to my office and worked on fine-tuning my next piece. I’d been daydreaming of the finished image since my hospitalization. My parents understood these things, why the apartment was never clean, the bills forgotten: I was simply not a practical man.
      “Max, this time you have got to keep things tidy,” Dad called, running water into the sink. “What do your friends think, walking in here?”
      “I’ve scared all my friends away. No one invites the town whore to afternoon tea.”
      Dad said nothing. It was foolproof, this gambit of mine. Whenever my parents broached an unpleasant topic, I threatened to reveal a fact from my sordid personal life. They shut their traps every time. Knowing I had the ultimate trump card—HIV—securely up my sleeve empowered me like electricity zapping down a kite string.
      He appeared in the doorway, wearing powder-blue rubber gloves. He was a short man. The years of smoking and working in the sun had weathered his face. It was difficult to believe he was barely past sixty. I’d been preparing myself for his death since second grade, after his first heart attack.
      “What will you do for money?” he asked. “Your next paycheck won’t be as much.”
      “Ask Mom to meet me at Wal-Mart.”
      “Don’t you have any money left? We took you up to that bank.”
      “Producing and submitting work requires money, lots of it.”
      “I don’t see the sense of a hobby that costs more than it pays.”
      “It’s not a hobby, Dad. Please stop speaking from your ass.”
      “I’m going to take your car through the car wash down the street,” he said.
      “I’ll be here when you get back.”
      “I brought the want ads. Look on the coffee table.”
      “Everyone knows the best jobs are only listed online.”
      Dad drew into himself, as if he were a turtle I’d threatened with a stick. “Your car needs a good wash, Max. That bird shit can ruin your paint job if you leave it on too long.”

“I think you’d be perfect,” Brooke said, lifting a quesadilla to her mouth.
      “Sweetie, you know how I feel about that sort of photography.”
      “What am I supposed to do? Take him to that asshole at Sears who treats everyone like cattle?”
      Brooke had insisted we meet for lunch at one of those odious restaurants with portraits of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe plastered on the walls. I had the day off from the bookstore, and Brooke had devoted herself to Dexter since leaving her job at the county facility for disabled children. The infant sat snuggled amongst fuzzy blue and yellow blankets inside the stroller.
      I gazed into the parking lot. Two teenage girls approached the restaurant, each clicking keys on their cell phones. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “I’ll have to consult my psychic friend.”
      “Please, Max. You’re fucking awesome. All those bitches on Facebook post pictures of their kids like it’s a fucking contest. I want mine to makes theirs look like shit.”
      ”Well, I do love making other people look like shit.”
      Brooke’s eyes glimmered. “Is that a yes?” she asked. In mock exasperation, I threw down my fork. It clattered against the plate. “Yes, my dear. I’ll make your son look like a work of art.”
      “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
      I held up my hand to silence her gratitude. Contented, Brooke returned to her meal. Even as she ate, the smile didn’t leave her face. I should’ve drawn out her begging for my services; once that had been settled, there was really only one thing left to discuss. We continued in silence until she blurted out the question: “Isn’t your appointment with the AIDS doctor this week?”
      “Wednesday.”
      “At least you don’t have to haul ass two hours to Dallas.”
      “Yeah, I was shocked we have doctors here in town who specialize in my little disorder.”
      “Will you start taking pills? I read somewhere they give you pills now.”
      I looked at Brooke and shrugged. She took a bite from her quesadilla, didn’t pursue the question. There was so much she didn’t know about the life I lead outside of our gossip sessions and discussions on dating tips. Every secret you keep from a loved one removes him from you one more space as if both of you were trapped in a demented game of musical chairs. One day, you look around, and that person you loved so fiercely has vanished. That was why Brooke knew about my diagnosis; I couldn’t think of another person in my life I wished to possess the information.

I often stayed signed in to my various chat programs while I fiddled with new images on the computer. I only chatted with the handful of friends I’d managed to make since my reluctant return to the Tyler gay scene. I’d festered in my hometown for six years. Once, after a heated and sexually shameless chat, I impulsively saved the transcript of our exchange and filed it away. Several months later, I read the file and was stunned at how moronic I sounded. Since then, I was far more careful initiating relationships that required typing.
      Axel, that beautiful college boy from Denton, was an exception. We encountered one another the way gay men so often do: while surfing websites featuring nude pictures of members and a chorus of requests for “no drama.” Despite this rickety start, our chats soon became charged with an intimate vibe. True, more than a decade in age separated us, but we spoke as equals. We discussed ideas, aspirations and occasionally secrets. He had a cousin in Tyler, and when that cousin had announced his wedding early last September, I’d invited Axel to spend the night. I had no idea what our evening might entail, but I presumed sex would drop by, like the irritating neighbor on a sitcom. I was not disappointed. But once he returned to Denton, we fell out of touch. Even our online chats ceased. I was as much responsible for this as him, of course. As the days since our last contact accumulated, it became easier to regard that splendid boy as an aberration, someone bound to disappoint if held too closely.
      The night before my doctor’s appointment, Axel messaged me. I forced myself to hide my surprise, not wanting him to know I’d missed him. We engaged in stilted small talk a few moments, each of us apologizing for not keeping in touch. My heart thumped with optimism: perhaps those wonderful conversations would resume. But I first satisfied my curiosity.
      Why did you message me tonight? I wrote.
      I don’t know. I was just thinking about you, I guess, he replied.
      Would you want to meet again sometime? I wrote. Embarrassment washed over me. I wanted to see this boy, but he couldn’t know how badly. And, of course, I was sick. During his wedding visit, we both snorted far too much cocaine and had sex every moment we could. We hadn’t used condoms. I knew from Dr. Tolleson that HIV incubated for around six months before symptoms appeared. What if Axel was already sick? What if I had killed him? What nonsense. The only reason HIV developed into full-blown AIDS is if you couldn’t afford your meds. I lived in America, not Ethiopia. I may have greatly inconvenienced Axel, but I hadn’t killed him—just like the bastard who infected me hadn’t killed me. Grudges kill people, I believe that.
      I could handle this, I told myself. Stay calm and just keep typing.
      I’m kind of busy right now with school and stuff, he wrote. But yeah, I’d like to hang out with you again.
      Do you still have my number? I wrote.
      Axel and I chatted for nearly two hours. He told me about his classes, his bizarre professors, his misgivings about the ambitions of the typical college student, which he assured me he was not. I forgot all about my work, but I didn’t forget about how drastically things had changed between us. Perhaps it would be best, I thought, to keep our future contact limited to cyberspace. I was about to suggest this when Axel posted a question that made me blink in disbelief.
      Is something wrong, Max? he wrote. You seem really distant.
      I stared at the monitor. This was the reason I wanted Axel in my life: I didn’t have to tell him things. He simply knew.
      I’m fine, I wrote. Call me soon. I want to hear your voice again.

Dr. Hastings’s office was on the fourth floor of an ugly white building a few miles from my apartment. Brooke had offered to join me, but I concocted some flimsy excuse I couldn’t even remember anymore. I knew that the other patients waiting amid back issues of People and US magazines were not necessarily HIV-positive. Dr. Hastings treated a spectrum of “infectious” diseases. Sick to death of reading the latest on Angelina Jolie, I watched these patients, tried to deduce what ailments had brought them here. One woman seated opposite me was morbidly obese and held a brass-handled cane erect between her massive thighs. An old man took labored breaths, an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. A mother and her teenage daughter sat arguing in hushed voices below a television bolted high on the wall. My thoughts drifted back to my grandmother. She’d been sick and her departure from this earth was cause for gratitude, not grief. At least she would never know I carried the mark of one who chose pleasure before safety.

I lived between two equally impressive Wal-Mart stores. One was no closer than the other, so Mom always held a tiresome debate with herself over where we should shop. Today, she declared the one on South Broadway boasted smaller crowds and lower prices. In the checkout lane, hauling my items onto the conveyor belt, I prayed this would be the last time I needed my parents to pay for groceries. Mom chattered about the mother of a former classmate.
      “What do you need this for?” she asked crossly, holding up an issue of People magazine featuring the headline World’s 50 Sexiest Men. She flipped through the magazine, clucking disapproval.
      “Mom, just put it back in the basket,” I said. “It’s no different than Dad and all those Westerns he buys.”
      “Those are books, Maxwell. This is toilet paper.”
      “Fine, put it back on the rack.” I glanced at our checker, a young woman with acne scars and an unkempt nest of ash-blonde curls. She stared at the two of us while she absently scanned items and tossed them in plastic bags.
      “Son, the money doesn’t last forever,” she said. “Your father and I will be retiring soon, and you know what that means. We’ll all have to live on a budget.”
      “I know, Mom.”
      “Why don’t you try for a job with one of the picture places in town. You know, you could take pictures of weddings and parties and—“
      “I’ll pass.”
      “You gotta get your nose out of the air. There are plenty of opportunities here in town better than that damn bookstore.”
      “I like the bookstore.”
      “You like it because it’s not real work.”
      “Mom, it’s time to pay the cashier.”
      The girl behind the register gazed at her calmly, as if there weren’t three other shoppers fidgeting in line behind us. Mom withdrew her checkbook from her quilted-patchwork purse and asked the total. When the cashier told her, she whistled loudly and fixed me with a withering stare. “I hope you know other boys your age don’t require such things.”
      “I suck. I know. Thank you.”
      “There’s your problem right there, Maxwell. You never could control your mouth.”
      I’m going to fuck him and there’s nothing you can do about it. You raised an assassin. You gave birth to a monster.
      Then, swiftly like a traffic light switching to green, Mom began an airy conversation with the cashier about how the price of produce, especially bananas, had shot up since her last trip to the store. They laughed and exchanged humorous predictions on when this price gouging would end. Watching Mom, so friendly and approachable with this ugly Wal-Mart woman, cold flames of resentment sparked into life. I wanted to scream loud enough for all the cashiers and customers to hear: “I have AIDS! I let some stranger fuck my ass and now I’m going to die! And I’m her son!”
      Instead, I loaded the last of the bags into the shopping cart. I thought about how much of this food might spoil, go bad because some days I simply forgot to eat. In the parking lot, we said curt goodbyes and I pushed the cart toward my ratty, rusted car across the lot. A frigid wind slithered beneath my loose jacket. Winter came early that year.

After eleven that night, the phone rang. It must be bad news, I thought, before seeing Axel’s name. I blurted out a greeting and simply started gabbing, not waiting for a hello. Finally, he managed to cut in, laughing at my enthusiasm.
      “I saw this filmstrip in philosophy class I think you’d like,” he said.
      “What was it about?”
      “It’s kinda hard to explain. I think its basic point was that all religions were designed so this really tiny minority of people could control everyone else.”
      “That’s not a new idea. Karl Marx was writing about that over a century ago.”
      “I’ve never read him,” Axel said.
      “I think I have a copy somewhere. I’ll let you borrow it.”
      “When?”
      It was one thing to renew our correspondence online. It was quite another to actually call on the phone. But meeting again, face-to-face …
      “Well,” I said, my voice even, “I’ll leave that up to you.”
      “It may be a while,” he said. “Maybe sometime over Christmas break.”
      “That’s not too long a wait. We’ll be naked before you know it.”
      He laughed. I’d forgotten how that airy, almost feminine titter entranced me. I realized I would do anything to watch this boy laugh again, right in front of me. No phones, no computers. All I had to do was stay calm.
      I did want things from life, from God. I wanted Him to stop me. I wished to be struck down like a redwood swaddled by a spring storm.
      “I really had fun that night,” Axel said. “I hadn’t—I didn’t know what to expect.”
      “It’s understandable. These online things usually go to shit.”

“Did I tell you I saw Kathy’s mother at the mall?” Mom asked.
      I shook my head, chewed slowly.
      “Kathy is some kind of team leader for her company now. What on earth do they make? Goddamn it, she told me what Kathy did, but I just can’t remember it…” Dad spent this entire monologue with his eyes trained on the nacho plate, like a child hoping the teacher won’t call him.
      My parents took me out to eat so often because they feared without these meals, I might not eat at all. Their suspicion was not entirely unwarranted. They preferred the more intimate restaurants in the city, not the chain outlets where raucous bars reigned supreme. That night, we ate at a Mexican place called The Sweetest Senorita. Mom and Dad split a large plate of nachos while I ate what I always did wherever we went: a cheeseburger and fries.
      “Kathy was sort of a bitch,” I said.
      “I thought you liked her.”
      “That’s the reason I liked her.”
      “Oh, Maxwell, sometimes you just talk in circles.” She waved her hand as if a fly buzzed closely; her feeble attempt to banish my contrariness.
      I bit my cheeseburger. The beef was raw, the lettuce wilted. The food churned and disintegrated in my mouth. I watched my parents, Walter and Meredith Archer, pick at their nachos. This, I knew, was what my future held. More days of financial woes, more isolation, more meals with two people who likely wished, at least sometimes, that I would simply disappear.
      “Babe, when is your dentist appointment?” she asked him. “It’s in my calendar, but I don’t remember.”
      “We can check when we get home.”
      “Maxwell, would you mind calling us later tonight and reminding us to check on that appointment?”
      “I have AIDS. I’m HIV-positive.” I stared at the space between my parents, but I could still see their faces fall, the animation drain from them. Their eyes grew distant and soft, like those of a newborn. Mom brought her hand to her chest as if winded. Dad bowed his head. He’d lost the courage to look at me.
      “What did you say, Maxwell?” she asked.
      “That’s the reason I got thrush. My immune system collapsed. I’ve already been to a doctor.”
      “How on earth did you get that…that…? How on earth?”
      “Well, Mom, it appears I bent over for the wrong bastard.” The explanation sounded just as delicious spoken as it had in my head. She slapped both hands on the table. In an urgent rasp, she said, “Just what the hell might that mean, Maxwell Henry?”
      I looked into her eyes for quite some time. She was pleading with me: please, son, not this, on top of everything else. Not the sickness, too…
      “Medicare and Medicaid are going to cover everything,” I said calmly. “The doctor said I don’t even need medication yet. Everything is under control.”
      “But Maxwell, what are you going to do?”
      “Well, I’m going to finish this burger even though it tastes like shit. You’re going to finish your nachos. You’ll go home, and then I’ll go home, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
      Mom leaned back in the booth, shallow breaths pulsed through her body. Dad still hadn’t looked at me. She jerked her head a few times, smoothed the napkin in her lap, and picked up a soggy nacho. Strings of gooey cheese stretched from the plate. We finished our meal in silence and departed the booth. I tried to think how I’d describe this meal to Brooke. As always, my parents paid, so I tossed out a few dollars for the tip. Our waiter had a nice ass; it was the least I could do.

About the author:

Thomas Kearnes is a 36-year-old author from East Texas, now living in Houston. His fiction has appeared or will appear in Spork, PANK, Storyglossia, Word Riot, Eclectica, The Northville Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pedestal, JMWW Journal, Night Train, Parting Gifts, Adroit Journal, The Ampersand Review, A cappella Zoo and numerous GLBT venues. He is a columnist for Flash Fiction Chronicles and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He has two fiction collections appearing later this year: “Pretend I’m Not Here” from Musa Publishing and “Me Love You Long Time” from JMS Books. He throws like a girl.

II
             She slips a garter belt of fog down from her waist, & lets each thread disperse across my crowded face. As I breathe in her humidity, she reveals her black shoes that thrum, softly, beneath the table. With the motions of an enamored cat, she sighs through the doorway—refracting across the empty bed.

III
             Each morning, with leaf-like persistence, I return to the arbitrary contours you have engraved onto the sheets. I dream you still wear expressions of seduction that you stole from silent films. But now, you’ve left me burning paintings in the air—unable to recognize hallucinations.

About the author:

Conley Lowrance began writing poetry after an aborted career in punk rock. His endeavors in writing led him to the University of Virginia, where he recently received his BA in poetry writing. His writings have appeared in publications such as Gadfly, Counterexample Poetics, The Virginia Literary Review, and the Last Romantics. His poetry is include in the forthcoming anthology Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke from Tupelo Press. Currently, Conley works for tattooed women in a local soul food restaurant and spends large portions of time grooming his four cats.

a geology professor told me about the trash situation she was from somewhere i don’t remember she said you americans your waste it’s not like this in europe she would say things like in europe in other places on the other side of the atlantic etc but never where really

she told me you americans you throw out everything everything is in there there is sofa hair table harmonica celery button refrigerator nails grass motorcycle drywall fiddle cigarette litter diaper glasspane stepmother sabbath july freedom credit family north korea you know etc

she said when these things combine they mix they create chemical reactions toxic radioactive compounds chemicals emerge methylene chloride ammonia benzene toluene naphthalene so much this liquid this venomous ejaculate gallons in millions nowhere to go but down in our soil

so much infiltration and massive seepage through soil that you build underground
canals channels trenches you just reroute the flow of liquid the black rivers of fecal wax
the menstrual rivers of smegmic sludge till the trenches are full then you bury them and
put a golf course on top what do you think those hills are

About the author:

Daniel Woody lives in Chicago and studies Anglo-American Literature at Northeastern Illinois University. He writes mostly fiction and is currently at work on a novel.

A university art gallery, a rambling
speech about his obsession
with Goodwill, his first time
in Kentucky. He isn’t graceful.
There’s a bit of a skittery charm
in his dimples, his southern twang,
the boyish brag of a bike wreck.

But when he reads,
he’s a gingerbread Jesus—
each story, each preface,
a gospel, his skin poreless,
bronze buttery leather—
his hands a dove
beneath the worn book’s spine.
The Adam’s apple soft, barely obvious—
his fumbling um, a throbbing
hypnosis in a perfect throat.

In the Q&A, he says he’s a streak
writer, can finish a book in six weeks.
I imagine meeting him mid-novel,
mid-hotstreak, in the grocery—
he’s only left home out of hunger—
and I tell him Come over.
I’ll cook. You write. And it happens
and he loves me fast and deliberate—
like he writes—and gorgeous—
and suddenly we’re in Texas,
chasing zombies, riding mustangs,
and stopping sometimes to make love
in tall grass, to dip water from rivers.

I want every day like this, tangled up
in his willowy limbs, on my back
on a buckskin rug, the soft bow curve
of his hairline, his brow—
even his bones are beautiful—
and he turns to me, tucking his black
satin hair—like the mane of a dark
and wild horse—behind wood spoon ears,
and he says, Girl, you got a heart
like Texas. And his eyes twinkle
blackly like fruit on a thorny vine.

About the author:

Heather Foster loves Dwight Yoakam on vinyl, whiskey, and Texas hold ‘em. She lives on a farm in west Tennessee and teaches at Jackson State Community College. She really loves handsome fiction writers, bless her heart, and sometimes she writes odes to them. Her poems and stories appear in PANK, Anderbo, Monkeybicycle, Weave Magazine, RHINO, Metazen, The Lumberyard, and Mead: The Magazine of Literature & Libations.

Say caterwaul. Say polyglot. Say cathedral.
Say words you have forgotten.

Say thank-you. Say forgiveness. Say grace.
Say them in French, in Mandarin, in the open.

Say them to feel them, each word a pyre of breath.
Say microbe. Say micron. Say Micronesia.

Say Jupiter. Say Andromeda. Say Vermont.
Say your name. Say into this hot wind.

Feel the long glides and fricatives,
the alveolar of florescence

as your tongue grazes teeth.
Ours are the final mouths. The final lips.

Say near. Say nectar. Say neck.
Say last. Say leaving. Say light.

About the author:

Jason Michael MacLeod, winner of two Academy of American Poet’s prizes and an Atlanta Review International Publication Prize, has appeared in journals including The North American Review, Mason’s Road, Dos Passos, and The Vermont Literary Review. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and writes and teaches on the coast of Maine.

the greatest trick
the devil ever played
was convincing the world
that Mick Jagger
was anything but
a stone twerp

About the author:

Erik P. Kraft is an award-winning children’s book author and illustrator. His YA novel, Miracle Wimp, was chosen as a “Book For The Teen Age,” by the New York Public Library. He draws the comics Chicken, You’re The Greatest! (which is not actually about chickens) and Cats In The Alley, and writes the blog/narrates the podcast Too Many Chickens! (which actually is about chickens).

he waters his garden
he trims the weeds, he
pillages his dynasty with
the blades of a lawnmower that roar like
the armies of his backbone.

he
is the king
of his lawn.

high ruler of
this kingdom
and he surveys
and he makes the decisions
and he brings his
portable radio out with him
and listens to what
the rest of the world is so obsessed with,
listens to
what the world is doing
as he stubbornly becomes
a gargoyle
serving and protecting his people
of which
he hasn’t any.

but you can tell
by his beaten-up
wife-beater
and his pristine blades of wet grass
and the dying look in his eye
as he watches you walk by,
that he
is the king
of his lawn.

About the author:

Jessica Rae Bergamino lives in Seattle, where she is an MFA candidate at the University of Washington. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Delirious Hem, Reed Magazine, and elsewhere.

The leaves are as hesitant
as my heart can make them,
“do not fall,” I say, but they
dream of the beautiful
starkness of their forfeit,
forgiving everything,
absolving the world, a
confessional of root and vein.

The winds consider these
things, the relinquishment
of sin and the purpose of
letting go, licking the nearly
barren trees without judgment,
their gusts, tonguing the
peeling bark in a last kiss.

About the author:

George Korolog lives in Woodside, California. He works in the left hemisphere of the world with a right hemisphere brain. Somehow, he makes it work. His poetry and flash fiction and non-fiction have been widely published in over forty print and online journals such as Word Riot, Forge, Punchnels Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, Blue Fifth Review, Poets and Artists Magazine, Red River Review, Poetry Quarterly, Connotation Press, The Chaffey Review, Riverbabble, Grey Sparrow Journal and many others. His poem, “From Tending Sheep to Confusion on the Amtrak 10:50” was awarded second prize in the 2011 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest. He was a runner up for The 2012 Contemporary American Poetry Prize for his poem, “Soul Stone.” He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is an active member of The Stanford Writers Studio. His first book of poetry, “Collapsing Outside the Box,” is was published by Aldrich Press in November 2012.

but no
they will share a bed
and he will cook her breakfast
and she will pretend to be asleep
and they will dress up for easter
they will kiss for the photograph
they will make love for the anniversary
they will become one giant couples costume
and they will die in the same grave
every night
never alone, always lonely
scared and humbled by the suburban dream
the flipping of channels in the den
and the children out back with the dogs
as under the same roof they live separate lives
cell mates in parasitic symbiotic cacophonous unison
and each morning the ring wants to fall down the drain
the pictures want to break
the flowers in the yard want to die
and they make love like puzzle pieces
they are two halves of a half
two holes of a whole
they are drowning in the ocean
of sincere misplaced trust
and the opulent reflection
of someone else’s sunshine
on their shallow lake
their handshake
contractual agreement
their non-violent shotgun wedding
two lives
wasted
feeding off the other’s
oxygen

for scheduled leisure
I’m trying to study
alright, maybe this
history paper is
a bit too bitter with
so many eyes stealing
past glances here.

About the author:

Shazia Hafiz Ramji lives in Vancouver, BC. Her poetry has recently appeared in splinterswerve, Otoliths, Counterexample Poetics and CV2.

Flavorwire has photos of  16 authors as teenagers. Look at that Allen Ginsberg grin!

Happy Wednesday, everyone. You’ve made it this far. Would like some reading material suggestions?

Do you remember your first library card? At GalleyCat, they have the story of the Chicago Public Library looking for photographs. My first library card is still my current library card, believe it or not. I kept it in my wallet for years, and when I moved back to where I grew up three years ago, I just had them reactivate the card. And then I had to pay 45 cents in late fees for Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith, which I’d checked out my senior year of high school.

April is National Poetry Month, if you were not already aware. Perhaps you’d like to watch David Tennant recite Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare? Of course you would.

One more GalleyCat link: Here are some free Virginia Woolf books. Woolf died March 28, 1941.

At Tin House, Roxane Gay interviews Love is a Canoe author Ben Schrank: Wants and Needs:

RG: You note that readers often adhere to their training. How do you try to break your training, both as a reader and writer?

BS: Well, I can’t. I was trained that feeling sympathy for characters isn’t crucial to a book’s success. I can’t shake that as a reader. I’ve since learned that sympathy is important to others so I can break training by attacking that issue intellectually, and I suppose I do try, both as reader and writer. But when I read for pleasure, I’m reading to see what the writer can pull off. I don’t care if I like the characters or not. Think back toDay of the Locustby Nathanael West or Faulkner’sSanctuary. Did you love the characters in those books? That was never the point.

Finally, The Sustainable Arts Foundation is accepting applications for their Fall 2013 awards, should that be of interest to you.

Until next time!

Notes From Elsewhere is brought to you by Sara Habein, who doesn’t pretend to be the first to know anything.

Brain Pickings has more about Nina Katchadourian’s book spine poetry.

Hello, one and all! My kids are home on Spring Break, so I almost forgot what day it was. Luckily, I am not a big literary link slacker this week, and I have plenty of reading material for you to peruse through the weekend.

First up, if you’re a bit behind in your Word Riot reading, can I suggest two favorites from the last issue? I really liked, if “like” is the right word, The State of Women: August 26, 1920 by Tara Gilboy. Also: David Foster Wallace was Wrong: Why John Updike Mattered and Always Will by Art Edwards.

…which segues nicely into David Abrams‘ post:  In Which the Ping of a Basketball Changes My Life Forever: John Updike’s Rabbit, Run

Strangely, the only Updike books I’ve read are Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich. I enjoyed them, but haven’t gotten around to any others.

This post is a month old, but I do what I want: At The Millions, Emily St. John Mandel talks about the exciting unusualness of  “Drinking at the End of the World: Lars Iyer’s Exodus.” His writing does sound interesting, but I definitely related to the following introduction:

Setting the matter of inevitability aside, the sea of expectedness can wear on a person. Books arrive on my doorstep almost daily. Almost all of them are perfectly competent, writing-wise, and all are heralded by their respective publicists as something excellent and truly unusual. The books arrive faster than I can read them, an ever-rising tide of padded envelopes. Of the ones I do find the time to read, I write reviews of perhaps one in 10, and it isn’t because the other nine are of such shattering brilliance that I find myself dumbstruck.

It’s because competence isn’t enough. Like almost every other reader I know, I am always searching for books that aren’t like other books. I want to read the books that aren’t standard-issue anything.

 

But then, I usually end up reviewing the books I feel are “fine enough” anyway because I have sense-of-completion problems.

I’ll just tease this link by saying YES.

Do you enjoy comics? Do enjoy paying what you want? Well, then, Warren Ellis has a suggestion for you: THE PRIVATE EYE: Leaving Comics Publishers Behind.

I really liked this essay at The Nervous Breakdown: “Blood Eagles” by J.S. Breukelaar:

And he turned out to be a fox, which doesn’t hurt. And everyone else in the workshop was young and brilliant and pretty too, and mostly under thirty. There were a couple like me, on the wrong side of forty—a sartorially inked raconteur, a charming Navy vet—just as sweet and fiercely talented as you please, none of them respiratorially challenged. All babes.

The place was crawling with babeness. 

Crawling with babeness! Ha! Apart from that though, it’s an interesting exploration of illness and priorities and a good time.

Also at TNB: Jessica Anya Blau conducts the Six-Question Sex Interview with Gina Frangello. I dig it:

For young women in the 80s and 90s, both in the mainstream culture and in the punk/Goth/grunge movements, there was this certain message that it was sexy to be messed up, to be borderline sick, heroin chic. But if you, god forbid, were really fucking sick, then you were invisible and erased, outside the bounds of sex. So I think the overlap of that… the fact that I was kind of obsessed with death, and I was kind of sick, and like so many young women I’d mainly brought my sickness on myself in various ways…I was fascinated by the interplay between the visible and the invisible in terms of the feminine body.

Speaking of sex (and who isn’t), how about Sam Lipsyte explaining how to write about sex? It’s… hard.

Finally, maybe more authors should do this: Shannon Barber‘s “The Care and Feeding of This Author.”

See you next time.

Notes From Elsewhere is brought to you by Sara Habein, who doesn’t pretend to be the first to know anything.

(via Sebastien Millon)

Since I’m learning to my way around Feed.ly, I accidentally marked most of my internet-reading as “read,” and I once again felt like a dinosaur when it comes to adapting to new technology. However, Feed.ly appears to be the best replacement for me once the death of Google Reader arrives in July. Still grumbling about that.

And yet! We still have plenty of links I’ve come across that might be of interest to you.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s Neal Pollack talking about having to roll with the publishing punches, particularly when you’re no longer a $100,000 advance type of writer.

Maria Popova‘s Brain Pickings continues to have great posts. Here’s one on creative people’s notebooks (a subject I always find interesting), and A Visual Timeline of the Future Based on Famous Fiction.

And speaking of  The Future!  Black Balloon Publishing is looking for “the weird, the unwieldy, and the unclassifiable” for their Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize.

At The American Reader, here’s Vanessa Veselka on “The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why It Matters.”

And here are more good thoughts on the latest VIDA count, this time from Erin Hoover at The Nervous Breakdown, particularly on what we should do next.

Finally, a funny story with photos at Amalah: Go Home Deodorants, You Are Drunk.

See you next time.

Notes From Elsewhere is brought to you by Sara Habein, who doesn’t pretend to be the first to know anything.

FLASH FICTION
A New Space by Caitlin Barasch
Toll by Colleen Kiely

CREATIVE NONFICTION
The State of Women: August 26, 1920 by Tara Gilboy
This Lingering by Kelly Miller

STRETCHING FORMS
I Lie In A Way That Knows Me by Parker Tettleton

SHORT STORIES
Me and My Sister and the Bear by Owen Clements
The Unreliable. by Edward Mc Whinney
Grady George–Man of the Hour by Jim Meirose

POETRY
The Mermaid’s Lament by Mckendy Fils-Aime
Confession by Emily Maloney
NO ONE GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE by Bradford Middleton
Sphinx by MF Nagel
Litany For The Waning Moon by Emily O’Neill
[24] by Randolph Pfaff
wraith by Danez Smith
Flipped A Canyon Upside Down, All I Got Was A Dripping Mountain by Claire Williams
Two Poems by Monika Zobel

About the author:

In 2011 my third novel, Badge, was a finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association’s literary contest. I am a frequent contributor to The Writer, and my writing has or will appear in Salon, Writers’ Journal, The Los Angeles Review, Word Riot, The Collagist, PANK, JMWW, Pear Noir!, Bartleby Snopes, The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown.