RSS Builder by B!Soft Word Riot http://www.wordriot.org An online magazine publishing the forceful voices of up-and-coming writers. en-us Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:27:38 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1946 Review by Morten Hoi Jensen

Tóibín's last novel, The Master, was an expert portrait of Henry James, but his latest novel may be his most Jamesian yet. Brooklyn, set in the 1950's, charts the growth from innocence to experience, from small-town Ireland to multi-cultural Brooklyn, and is a tender and affecting work, marvelously subtle and deeply moving. Eilis Lancey, as the novel opens, lives a quiet and modest life in Enniscorthy with her widowed mother and older, livelier sister, Rose, whom Eilis describes as becoming "more glamorous every year."
    At thirty, Rose is something of a role model to her younger sister; stylish, confident, and though "she had had several boyfriends, she remained single." Shortly after landing a job with the notorious Miss Kelly, Eilis is plucked – thanks to Rose's connections, it is implied – by an Irish Priest to come and work in the exotic Brooklyn borough of New York City. Once there, however, Eilis rapidly succumbs to homesickness: "it was like hell, she thought, because she could see no end to it, and to the feeling that came with it, but the torment was strange, it was all in her mind, it was like the arrival of night if you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again."
    1950's America is vividly conjured by Tóibín; it's the time of Singin' in the Rain, of an influx of women's fashion, of dances populated by men "dressed in brightly coloured suits with their hair slicked back with oil" and who looked like "film stars." But it is also a time of racial tensions: Bartocci's, the store Eilis works at, announces that they will be among a minority of stores that welcome "Coloured" people. The ensuing tension of the presence of African-Americans in the shop is brilliantly captured by Tóibín:
    As the week went on more of them came and as each one entered Eilis noticed a change in the atmosphere in the store, a stillness, a watchfulness; no one else appeared to move when these women moved in case they would get in their way; the other assistants would look down and seem busy and then glance up...
    When Eilis becomes involved with a short, excitable Italian boy named Tony, the transition from innocence to experience becomes more literal as she loses her virginity and becomes sexually aware of herself. In fact, one of the strength's of the novel is precisely Eilis' expanding consciousness, of her realization of the powers such a consciousness offers her (what people will know or never know, based on what she decides to tell them). "You have changed," Eilis's friend Nancy tells her. "You seem more grown up and serious. And in your American clothes you look different. You have an air about you."
    Eilis Lancey does have an air about her, and it is to the great credit of Tóibín's masterly craft that this young woman, whose situation is, after all, not entirely unfamiliar to us, comes to life so fluently and convincingly, just as she comes to life to herself. Brooklyn is an assured achievement that draws its readers in so that, toward the end, when tragedy strikes, it does so unexpectedly.



About the author:
Morten Hoi Jensen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has studied literature and creative writing at the University of Kent in Canterbury and the University of Miami in Florida. From 2008 to 2009 he was chief editor of Mangrove, the creative writing journal of the University of Miami. He is an associate member of the PEN American Center and maintains a website www.mhjensen.com ]]> Ruins by Achy Obejas Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:27:15 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1939 Ruins by Achy Obejas. New York, NY: Akashic Books, 2009.
$15.95. 205 pages. ISBN: 978-1-933354-69-9.
Review by Trina L. Drotar

    Ruins is Achy Obejas' first novel since the award-winning Days of Awe was published in 2001. Eight years was worth the wait. Obejas has moved from the first person female narrators used in Memory Mambo and Days of Awe to a third person narrator and male protagonist, Usnavy (named after the writing on ships his mother saw), in Ruins.
    Usnavy is a fully formed, complicated character whose struggles with his beliefs, his identity, and the resistance met from friends and family propel this story.
Usnavy was an old man. Not in age so much—he had turned fifty-four that year—but he was born old, his childhood brow prematurely molded into an expression of permanent concern, his gait, even as a youngster, as labored as if he'd been instantly injured on the job, both in spirit and in fact. His pale gray eyes sat in his mushroom-brown face, common and faded, even in boyhood, as if they'd never twinkled or delighted with wonder or awe.
    By opening with a description of Usnavy's face, Obejas focuses on this man as an individual, much like Hemingway did with Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. Like Hemingway's character, Usnavy believes in what seems to be out of reach – the fish for Santiago and the old life after the revolution and before the collapse of the Cuban economy for Usnavy. Other characters have moved on, and both men are referred to as being salao, or unlucky, so the face, especially the eyes, set Usnavy apart from those who flee Cuba.
    The year is 1994, and Cubans have a window of opportunity to build rafts and leave the country, but Usnavy refuses to leave. He still believes in the revolution, which he fully supported many years earlier, even if his family is now forced to eat soup made from blankets. Through Usnavy, his neighbors, and his family, Obejas shows the difficult choices people must make simply to survive. Usnavy is horrified and disgusted to find "a small blanket cut in pieces, marinating in a muddy sauce," yet "it was the only thing in the entire fridge but for a domino-sized pat of margarine and two plastic bottles of soda, both filled with boiled water." In this important scene, Usnavy is certain that his wife, trusting as she may be, must know that it is a blanket in the fridge. Usnavy pulled the pot from the fridge, "tipped the pot and sipped at its edge, drinking in the brown sauce. It had onions and tomatoes and maybe a bit of cumin. It was thick and tasty, with a hint of real beef. But then the blanket pushed up against his lips." Through scenes like this, Obejas not only presents the daily struggle to survive that Cubans, during a time of severe gas and food shortages, faced, but also illustrates the power of the imagination to combat the poverty.
    Usnavy is caught between what he believes to be right and what is expected of him. He hoards supplies at the bodega for the most needy, yet he knows that he should distribute evenly to those who came first. He ignores the fact that his wife, Lidia, fed blanket sandwiches to their daughter, Nena, content only that it was not cat meat. In fact, Usnavy was less concerned that the sandwich meat came from "pieces of a blanket normally used for mopping floors" than he was about the sauce's ingredients having "been illicitly acquired." While it might have been disgusting to him to know that his daughter ate blanket pieces instead of meat, that meant less to him than if the ingredients had been purchased with dollars on the black market. Obejas places Usnavy in scenes that often challenge his belief system and his loyalty to friends and family. When presented with opportunities, often going against his beliefs, to support his family during times of scarce resources, he makes difficult choices.
    Usnavy's home "was illuminated by a most extraordinary lamp. . .made of multicolored stained glass and shaped like an oversized dome, the lamp was wild." Obejas uses this lamp to guide the readers along Usnavy's journey throughout 1994 Cuba. The lamp may be able to provide Usnavy with American dollars to purchase items for his wife and daughter so that they might not have to eat blankets; yet, the lamp is more than simply a way to earn money. It is his dream, his past, his future, and the one item he can't part with. It is closely tied to his identity, another theme that runs throughout this novel. That Obejas spends several pages detailing the lamp and its history speaks to its importance.
    Ruins is a book to be read not once or twice, but several times, because each reading will reveal something that had been missed on an earlier read, just like Usnavy's search through the streets for more lamps. Read it for the language, the story, and most of all for Usnavy to discover "who would admit they'd been fooled by the sheer force of their desire?" because desire propels Usnavy and the other characters, many who leave Cuba and Usnavy behind.



About the author:
Trina is currently pursuing an M.A. in English-Creative Writing at Sacramento State University, where she edits Calaveras Station Literary Journal. She is a two-time recipient of the Dominic J. Bazzanella award for her creative nonfiction. She lives in Sacramento but spends July in Fresno at CSU SummerArts, writing and collaborating with other artists. ]]> Dreaming in Black and White: Wisconsin Noir and the Justified Poem by Michael Kriesel Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:26:37 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1945 This article has appeared in the print publications: Small Press Review, Free Verse, Rosebud, Wisconsin People & Ideas, and Chiron Review.

Crossover poems are increasingly popular in Wisconsin's thriving poetry community: a member of my online writing group is churning out a series of great science fiction poems, pithy vehicles for social comment; my own manuscript of occult-themed verse is making the rounds of the book contests; and at a recent writing conference a Milwaukee poet handed me his latest chapbook, Misadventures of the Paisley Cowboy.
    Then there's the hard-boiled crime genre being worked by Madison area poet John Lehman, who recently published a book of verse noir—Acting Lessons, Parallel Press, 2008. Filled with murky mazes and existential ambushes, the work is in a short form devised by Lehman a few years ago, called the Wisconsin justified poem.
    Looking like cubes of newspaper column, the poems are defined not just by their form, but also by a noir-ish feel and tone. They usually explore Wisconsin topics, are often rural, and at heart "inspired" by Wisconsin winters.
    Here's a taste, from Closed Until Spring:

This is the season of Ed Gein
and Jeffrey Dahmer. Sleep days,
fish through ice, pry firewood
from frozen mounds of snow.
Buy wine at the gas station. Court
darkness. Speak to no one. This
is winter in Wisconsin. Write
horror stories. Embrace the cold.

John Lehman, Acting Lessons

    "They give the impression of a rigid form," Lehman explains, "so that the language within the poem can be casual and conversational...more Midwest, and yes, more Wisconsin. They resemble their larger cousin, the prose poem."


Magic Lunch Box

If you're unfamiliar with prose poems, here's a quote by Louis Jenkins, an acknowledged master of the form:
    "Think of the prose poem as a box, perhaps the lunch box dad brought home from work at night. What's inside? Some waxed paper, a banana peel, and half a peanut butter-jelly sandwich. Not so much, a hint of how the day has gone perhaps, but magic for having made a mysterious journey and returned...the prose poem is a formal poem because of its limits. The box is made for travel, quick and light. Think of the prose rectangle as a small suitcase. One must pack carefully, only the essentials, too much and the reader won't get off the ground. Too much and the poem becomes a story, a novel, an essay or worse...the trick in writing a prose poem is discovering how much is enough and how much is too much." (Nice Fish: New & Selected Prose Poems, Holy Cow! Press 1995.)
    The prose poem has a dual nature, as its name implies. "On the one hand, there's the lyric's wish to make the time stop around an image, and on the other hand, one wants to tell a little story," comments Charles Simic, a former U.S. Poet Laureate. "It must dazzle, and it must also have a lightness of touch. I regard the comic spirit as its true Muse." (The Poetry of Village Idiots, Verse 13, no. 1, 1996)


The God Of Flow

All of the above holds true for the Wisconsin justified poem. But John Lehman cites an additional element—flow. It's what gives poetry its real dynamic, claimed Robert Frost.
    "Most poets break lines by phrases or concepts," says Lehman, "but Frost carries us with his flow from one line to the next, then stops us in our tracks. 'His head carved out of granite O, / His hair a wayward drift of snow, / He worshipped the great God of Flow / By holding on and letting go.' (These are lines about Frost by Robert Francis.)
    "Frost believed we further enhance the dynamics of the poem's flow by stretching the spoken sentence over the line of poetry," Lehman explains. "Frost's famous narrative poem The Death Of The Hired Man is a classic example."


Pulled Around The Corner

The Wisconsin justified poem, unlike the standard prose poem, pays attention to line breaks and their relationship to sentences. It pulls the reader around the corner and only stops movement when the end of a line corresponds with the end of a sentence. In addition, the lines seldom end with prepositions or articles, but with nouns, adverbs and verbs.
    As forms go, it's a soft one. The rules are few and fluid: conversational style, noir tone and Wisconsin topic. Keep it short and justify the text.
    "I think its informality seems particularly suited to the voice of a Wisconsin narrator who might romanticize a little more if the winters weren't so long and so dark," muses Lehman. "The mutterings of someone in a farmhouse kitchen alone, late at night listening to the wind."


Film Noir's Influence

Film noir's a big influence on the poems. "In a way the noir films were not realistic," observes Lehman, "but a kind of theatrical romanticizing of the forties. People enjoyed them partially because they were escapist."
    That escapism sometimes bleeds into a comic surrealism, as in The Nut Bread Murders:

A friend sends a loaf of nut bread that's dense
as a kiln-dried brick. I tell my wife it reminds me
of something my first wife would bake. Is this
a mistake? No, because upon hearing it she
makes me a fluffy coffee cake with a brown-sugar
and chocolate-chip topping, and I deduce there
may be a lesson about women here (how one
can be played against another). So I call my
first wife who asks what the hell I want. Hmmm.
Later, I decide to put her in a novel I'm plotting
as a character out to poison everyone with her
goddamn nut bread while I, the hero, am saved by
a stripper named Brown Sugah. Writing comes fast.
It's February in Wisconsin and I am going nuts.

John Lehman, Acting Lessons


Giving It A Try

As a poet who's muttered his way through his share of Wisconsin winters, the first time I saw the form it intrigued me enough to try it. Eventually I had a short manuscript that won a nationwide book contest, demonstrating the form's appeal even to non-cheese heads (though the judges were fellow Midwesterners, over in Indiana).
    Here's the title poem from that collection:

Soul Noir
I just walk out of the Neon Toad
when this big guy grabs my shirt,
spins me around like a carnival
ride and slams me up against the
bricks. All I see is cartoon stars
but his voice cuts right through.
"Lie to yourself on your own time,
punk." Then I'm on the sidewalk
sitting up and no one's there. It
was my conscience. Bastard finds
me anywhere.

Michael Kriesel, Soul Noir

Soon after I started writing in this form / genre, I came to understand that noir's romanticism also can be viewed as starkly stripped-down realism. Its flavor is similar to the oddball existentialism running through Wisconsin's landscape like a vein of smoky quartz. Maybe that's why the two combine so well. I offer another of my own examples:

Wisconsin Noir
Waiting for the sheriff, Ed Gein forks
apple pie in Plainfield's only diner.
Barns slump like slaughterhouse cows.
At the crystalline heart of the state, Rib
Mountain oscillates: quartz monadnock
tinting our dreams through winter nights.
In the end, spring arrives, green and gold.
The Packers win the Super Bowl.

Michael Kriesel, Soul Noir


Transcending Landscape

The Wisconsin justified poem transcends regionalism by combining a specific form with a specific tone. The form's uniquely suited to the tone of the material expressed. But it's the tone most of all that gives the poems their distinct character—not unlike the dialogue in noir films.
    These poems work the way haiku and watercolor do to capture the mood of a place, expressing the way our lives resonate with our state and sometimes finding In the Middle of Nothing, Greatness:

I pass a sign on Highway 26 that states
Juneau is 5 miles away, Oshkosh 53.
I saw the same sign just ten minutes ago,
but listen, when I check my gas gauge
(then, it had been a little below a quarter)
now, I swear, it shows half full. And there,
around a curve, against the steel November
sky, in a field of cornstalks far as a crow can
see—are you ready—rises an assemblage
of grain elevators more magnificent than
the Cathedral at Reims.

John Lehman, Acting Lessons

    In Sprecher's Tavern Lehman observes: "Living in Wisconsin is a lot like the tavern that sells rifles and beer. It doesn't make much sense but it feels right when you're there."
    That's how these poems work. But how well do they work? Does it feel right? That's the final test...and something only poets and readers and time can decide. The best test of any form is whether the force it contains could manifest as well in any other shape.
    Here's hoping more Wisconsin poets add to this new genre—a form and tone unique to where we live.



Acting Lessons
By John Lehman
2008; 38pp; chapbook;
Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin-Madison
728 State St., Madison, WI 53706. $10.
ISBN 978-1-934795-04-0

Shorts: 101 Brief Poems of Wonder and Surprise
By John Lehman
2005; 96pp, paper;
Zelda Wilde Publishing
315 Water Street, Cambridge, WI 53523. $11.95
ISBN 978-0-9741728-2-8

Soul Noir
By Michael Kriesel
2008; 24pp; chapbook;
Platonic 3Way Press
POB 844, Warsaw, IN 46581. $5.

I'd like to thank Carroll University Poetry Professor B.J. Best for his help in preparing this article. ]]> The Light of Fields by Michael Kriesel Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:26:12 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1940 Price: $5 (includes shipping)
Propaganda Press / "Pocket Protector Series"
P.O. Box 398058
Cambridge, MA 02149

Web Site: www.alt-current.com
Book Information: http://alt-current.com/pp/pp_item.html#the_light_of_fields

Review By: Charles P. Ries

"The Light of Fields" by Michael Kriesel was originally published in 1982 by Jump River Press, Inc. out of Prentice, Wisconsin when Kriesel was just twenty years old. It was one of Kriesel's first books of poetry and gave me the opportunity to visit this writer early in his career. One can certainly see the same careful, spare, almost Haiku quality to many of Kriesel's poems, and one also finds his wonderful ability to extract unique and unfolding metaphors from the heart of rural Wisconsin. I don't think any poet writing today can draw image from the rural farming environment like Kriesel. But what I also found was a young man focused on romance, reflecting on marriage. I often think that first poems are the most personal. They are the fertile ground from which art grows. If one reads Kriesel more recent books of poetry, we see him dancing between forms, extending forms, getting us lost in his numinous meanings, but in "The Light of Fields" we find Kriesel looking around and discovering his world for the first time.

Here is his wonderful title poem, "The Light of Fields": "Wholly knowing the grasses sure / growing // the earth holding green breathing / beings toward morning / against the far dark between stars // and supporting each separate stem / bent away from the sun // Knowing these by the earth in you / deep with the nights of our sleep / and the light of these fields in you / easy I rest in your grain //Wholly knowing these grasses grow / over all death // and the delicate skeletons covered by / green raising past them // I love you / and lie down in your fields // unafraid of grass rising to cover me."

Let me also say this is a tiny book of poetry – just two inches by two and three quarters inches square. Leah Angstman who is the publisher of Propaganda Press calls it her "Pocket Protector Series." This is the seventh in her Pocket Protector Series. And while this book is tiny, it is packed with poetry. This was a wonderful opportunity to visit a writer as a young man and discover that his early work foretold the bright future Kriesel continues to have.



About the author:
Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot, Pass Port Journal and ESC!. He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore. He is a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes. You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/ ]]> An Inventory of Lost Things by Karla Huston Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:25:48 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1941 Price: $8
Centennial Press
P.O. Box 170322
Milwaukee, WI 53217
www.centennialpress.com
ISBN: 0-9797994-1-4

Review/Interview By: Charles P. Ries

Women have a distinct view of the erotic and love's secrets. In reading Karla Huston's new book of poetry, An Inventory of Lost Things, I enter into the ebb and flow of feminine romantic imagination. While not all of twenty-three poems of this collection focus on the heart's yearning, a good number do and comprise the central theme of this eloquently written book of poetry.

Huston approaches her topic from a number of angles. In final stanza of her poem "The One on The Left" she says, "But you can't take your mind off the boy, / barely twenty, going on the rest of his life – / going off for an afternoon at the shore. God knows / what they'll do on the blanket / when it's floated behind the vine-covered fence." And again these lines taken from the closing of her poem, "Your Marie": "You should know her hair was chestnut, / a flag of copper stars glittering / against the curve of her neck / and the strand that kissed her cheek / I knew you'd kissed when she left you / for the last time while her hips rolled / when she walked away / and her breast swayed in dreams / even now the ones you prayed into."

Her book of poetry would easily fall into the category of great chic lit. Huston poems are thoughtfully narrative and carefully designed. There is no spare air in these poems. Each is complete from beginning to end.

I am reminded, as I read this collection, of the seminal book on women's sexual fantasies, My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday. Our two genders reflect so differently on the erotic and on romance. Huston is masterful at understanding the sensual wonder world of the woman. As in this section from her poem "Rewind" demonstrates, "If she could, she'd take the first / bus out of happyland, find her own / little place and read sweaty novels / for the rest of her life. He's weary / of the honey-I'm-homes / and the honey-dos and the honeyed / hams." And again from this section of her poem, "The Plastic Surgeon's Wife": "When they make love, she fears / how he'd like to improve her – / a little lift there, a little tighter there, / fill her breasts with vanilla, / admire the suction in her soul -- / his reservoir, never full."

This is a wonderful exploration of the feminine mind, by a writer uniquely suited to explore this undulating landscape of passion, yearning, and lost things.



About the author: Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot, Pass Port Journal and ESC!. He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore. He is a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes. You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/ ]]> AM/PM by Amelia Gray Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:25:09 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1957 Reviewed by John Madera

1. AM/PM is a slideshow of offstage moments.
2. AM/PM is sweetly sick and madly stark.
3. AM/PM is so many cells to break.
4. AM/PM is a fuzzy nectared bumblebee dusting pollen off.
5. AM/PM is a silent slipping between sheets.
6. AM/PM has hands on its time.
It was still dark, but Terrence's eyes adjusted enough that he could sense the movement of his hand before his face. "Charles," he said. "I believe we are in a small box."
     "Indeed," Charles said, from the darkness. Terrence judged him to be about five feet away, but when he reached his arm out, he touched Charles's knee, which startled them both. The knee was cold and hairy. Charles's knee made Terrence more nervous than the existence of the small box.
    He leaned back and startled again when he touched the soft walls of the box. The thick velvet felt deep enough to sink his fingers into, but he didn't want to know what was down there and instead let his hand rest on the surface.
    Terrence considered the letter he would write to his girlfriend when he was free. He thought fondly of the time they ate cotton candy and she vomited. (AM:30)
7. AM/PM is wondering what the violet stain is underneath a friend's nose and mouthing to your wife, "What the hell is that," and she writes down rosacea, and later asking, "What is rosacea?" mispronouncing it, and hearing her say, "roh-ZAY-sha" waiting for it to sink in like downspout drops into dry dirt.
8. AM/PM is carrying moldy corrugated cardboard boxes up three flights and unpacking the dusty books without anyone to help.
9. AM/PM is telling your husband of course you don't think of someone else when he's on top of you when even then you're thinking of the beefy cashier whose fingers grazed your palm when he handed you your change.
10. AM/PM believes in grace when everything points to the contrary.
11. AM/PM is telling somebody you feel sad about an artist who died recently and they say, "I'd probably like them since most of the stuff I like to look at was made by dead people."
12. AM/PM is learning that the butterfly's powdery iridescence on your fingertips are scales and it needs them to fly.
Andrew's problem with women was that he was analytical and they were always, always emotional. Women made fun of him for measuring out salt and spices when he cooked. Even the ones who never cooked would criticize him, leaning against the doorway of the kitchen as if they knew they shouldn't trespass but teasing him anyway. At the movies they smacked him with popcorn buckets for commenting on an incongruous detail while they were building the stamina to cry. None of it made sense to Andrew. He was very loving, and concerned, and simply knew where to place sadness and fear and anger, so that it could be accessed with great efficiency when needed.
     "It's just you and me, house," Andrew said.
    The house was not so sure. (A.M. 34)
13. AM/PM is seeing a young man with tattooed arrows radiating from his eyes and wondering what he was going to think when he looked at himself thirty years later.
14. AM/PM is bristling at every sound because the scrit scrit of pencil sharpeners, the crackle of crumpled up looseleaf, the bell's tinny insistence, the chair legs' industrial scrape had shaven away any kind of self-control you had before you started to teach.
15. AM/PM jettisons any extra ballast.
16. AM/PM is wondering whether the feeling felt was crimped or cramped.
17. AM/PM likes John Mayer but loves David Ryan Harris.
18. AM/PM is a murder weapon and a suicide note.
19. AM/PM is a man, a hole, and a cover.
And may the women hold their brave faces to the sun as the men become afflicted with a terrible pestilence, and may their flesh rain upon the heads of the chosen people. May their hair clog the sewers of the streets, and their broken bodies tumble into the sea! May their useless fury fail to stir the tapestries in the temple, and may the LORD find solace in their swift destruction! (49:PM)
20. AM/PM is after the fun and games when someone lost an eye.
21. AM/PM is learning leopards have rosettes not spots.
22. AM/PM breathes in with every dig of his thumbs.
23. AM/PM is a biblical affliction.
24. AM/PM is a kit filled with dissecting pins, dissection needles, dropping pipette, iris scissors, probe with angled tip, rigid metal ruler, scalpel blades, scalpel handle, surgical scissors, and tissue forceps inside it.
Olivia dreams that her body becomes pliable enough that she can stretch very thin and cover most of the rooms of the house. Her body is so thin that the bones are clearly visible, and the veins stretch, and the blood has more distance to travel and as a result, the edges of her body are very cold. Reginald opens the front door, removes his shoes, and takes only one step before recoiling in horror at the chilly mass that is Olivia's body, stretched and waiting. In her dreams, she controls every aspect of her life. (43:PM)
25. AM/PM is as symbol as it seams.
26. AM/PM is a ruse to put you off the scent.
27. AM/PM is a masterful display of lighter-than-air craft.
28. AM/PM is tomorrow answers no such thing.
29. AM/PM constellated wonders
30. AM/PM is a cresty wave.
31. AM/PM can't help yearning.
32. AM/PM will stretch and stretch you.
Frances needed a man she could sink her life into. The perfect man, she observed, would like her but not really enjoy her friends, and the feeling would be mutual. She and her perfect man would eventually stop going to their friends for advice. They would eventually see each other only, and one morning, they would wake up to find that they had fused together, just slightly, at the upper thigh. The fusion would not be uncomfortable, and would allow for some level of privacy for each. the days of uncertainty, and annoyance, and misunderstanding, would not be entirely over, but whenever such feelings arose, Frances or her perfect man would simply reach to their thigh area and gently pluck the shared skin like a harp string. (AM:68)
33. AM/PM lifts the anchor.
34. AM/PM is a waking nightmare about a cracked devil in a sleeping church.
35. AM/PM is a tailored afternoon of sharpened memory.
36. AM/PM is painful philosophy within tempting music.
37. AM/PM is tempting philosophy within painful music.
38. AM/PM is the muffled argument that provokes the librarian.
39. AM/PM needs an immediate listener.
40. AM/PM. is a multi-chambered mollusk shell.
41. AM/PM's every command is my wish.
42. AM/PM doesn't care as long as you'll stay.
43. AM/PM is a wind-up key for thinking outside of your box.
Are you growing mistrustful of others? Do you suspect your wife does not actually have cancer? Is every trip to the mailbox and exercise in loathing and remorse? Are your coworkers having trouble finding anything interesting to say when they talk about you behind your back? Do you deeply despise people who possess many of the same opinions and motives as your own? (AM:72)
44. AM/PM rises up from the flashes.
45. AM/PM accuses you of taking the woman's side all the time and then apologizes because it was not true.
46. AM/PM is finding a dead and dried out songbird on a driveway and using a plastic cup to scoop it up, carrying the thing to your home, and pouring it into a plastic bag to bury in the backyard when you return late evening.
47. AM/PM is not finding your way out of a sick relationship, or staying out of a sick relationship, but finding and staying in a healthy relationship.
48. AM/PM is learning that Om is the sound the universe makes, is infinity, or something like that, and not feeling peace in the knowing.
49. AM/PM is what angels might be thinking.
50. AM/PM drives you to wreck and bluing.
51. AM/PM is an eyesight puzzle.
52. AM/PM is a drizzle of balsamic vinegar on leafy greens.
53. AM/PM cries and displays affection in public.
54. AM/PM is forever under the weather.
55 AM/PM does not send emoticons.
Olivia sees a butter knife on the banister atop the stairs. She fantasizes wildly about the ways in which it might plunge into the ones she loves.
    The butter knife makes the entire room feel dangerous. An intruder might not have any desire to stab her until he reached the top of the stairs and felt the butter knife under his hand. Olivia cannot go on until she collects the butter knife and puts it in the sink, where it belongs. (AM:76)
56. AM/PM threatens to press a pillow against your face while you sleep and watch until your arms and legs stop flailing like a dancing marionette.
57. AM/PM is what demons might tinker with.
58. AM/PM is reminiscent of a proverb that says "even in laughter the heart is sorrowful."
59. AM/PM is the whiff of evergreen as she talks right past you.
60. AM/PM debunks myths like the one that says that hair and nails grow after death.
61. AM/PM creates myths like one that says swallowing an ice cube a day will create immunity to seasonal affective disorder.
     "They're gold flakes," Wallace said, reaching to touch them on his back. "Genuine."
    Tess held her hand against the textured gold on Wallace's tattoo. She drew her fingers back. "Are not," she said.
     "Indeed they are. The artist was fantastic. He literally fused the metal to my skin, and I have to get it retouched every five years."
    The gold leaf made a pattern of fish scales across his spine.
     "It's beautiful," she said.
     "You're beautiful," he said, turning his head halfway.
     "Not as beautiful as a gold flake."
    He considered it. "Maybe not. It was a very special process."
     "Must have been," Tess said. She felt sure she would die alone. (79:PM)
62. AM/PM is a do-it-yourself kit to protect imagination.
63. AM/PM is tragic realism.
64. AM/PM is an upper room experience.
65. AM/PM is seeing a woman covered in spots and pointing her out to your husband and he says, "Nice tattoo," and you say, "No, she's a cheetah taking human form," and he says, "You and your wild imagination," and you say, "Yes—wild."
66. AM/PM mumbled some stuff.
67. AM/PM is squeezing its eyes together to help them along.
68. AM/PM is screaming in your face about something you didn't see.
69. AM/PM is rain, wind, and sun duking it out for rule of the day.
70. AM/PM is where the world is dead to you.
71. AM/PM overhears conversations and unravels.
72. AM/PM is always touching something it shouldn't.
They were in love! Carla wore her hair up and Andrew saw everything as a sign. They spent an entire afternoon sitting side by side in a coffee shop, taking more meaning than necessary from the world around them. A man wearing boxing gloves walked down the sidewalk in front of them and they took that to mean they would be together forever. (AM:111)
73. AM/PM is searching through old selves.
74. AM/PM has a headache and wonders when he will stop talking trash.
75. AM/PM boosts the happiness quotient in your life.
76. AM/PM has good relationships with other persons.
77. AM/PM adapts maturely to life's changes and crises.
78. AM/PM is the shiver lining everything.
79. AM/PM is out of service.
80. AM/PM takes notice of nothing and nothing escapes it.
Why does the rain make us feel so romantic and strange? Maybe it's the fact that we are unnatural spectators of it, from inside our homes, and it is a reminder that we have the power to live our whole lives like this, if we choose. It's not the smell of fertile ground kicked up by raindrops, or the slick leaves, or the way we must amplify our voices to be heard over this larger presence. It's the power of the rooftop that makes us want to fuck under it. (AM:82)
81. AM/PM is a word horde like Beowulf or something.
82. AM/PM dishes the dirt while smoking cigarettes.
83. AM/PM gave me the eye.
84. AM/PM is in the park with you.
85. AM/PM is a body of language pushed away by the small world at large.
86. AM/PM had one, but the time ran out on it.
Olivia's whole body shook, not like a leaf but like the tree itself, a deep kind of shudder that only happened at the hands of loggers. A tree feels its deepest movement in those final seconds. She once watched a program on television where a falling tree snapped at the trunk, creating a ten-foot-long catapult that tossed a logger fifty feet into the air. The called it kickback. (99:PM)
87. AM/PM doesn't feel the connection we used to feel together.
88. AM/PM has sunken eyes and invents beguiling excuses.
89. AM/PM is an apricot's tomb.
90. AM/PM is an accusing perfume.
91. AM/PM gives free rain.
92. AM/PM commits nightly idolatry.
93. AM/PM is wasting away from grievances.
94. AM/PM is sweat between sad breasts.
Frances's pale skin felt stretched so thin that if she scratched her face or her arms, she would mangle herself. She imagined the skin would peel up underneath her fingers like lacquer from a table. Perhaps she wasn't drinking enough water, she thought, perhaps she was sleeping too much again. When she slept, she had wonderful dreams. (103:PM)
95. AM/PM is a balmy olive.
96. AM/PM disappears like a stain.
97. AM/PM is a lip of physic foam.
98. AM/PM is unwillingly patient.
99. AM/PM is not going to have it.
100. AM/PM is tapping its canvas-sneakered foot to Megadeth at the library.
101. AM/PM is the junk inside you, the teeth you grind, the bear you cross.
Tess kept a secret: her left hand was turning into a claw. She felt the tendons tightening up in her forearm the week before, and had written it off as the onset of carpal tunnel but the tendons continued to tighten. The feeling spread to her hand, which began to curve like a scythe, the bones lengthening a little and then bending, almost imperceptibly, until her fingers hardened into one immobile point and her left hand was fully a claw.
    Tess kept the secret, but compensated by repeating it to herself. She would lie in bed, curled around her left hand, holding it gently to her knees. My hand is a claw. My hand is a claw. (109:PM)
102. AM/PM is mad about being treated like some charity case.
103. AM/PM is meditative poetry on the unseemly.
104. AM/PM thinks outside of the boxing gloves.
105. AM/PM breaks the rules before it's forced to follow them.
106. AM/PM is that man complaining that pictures fall from their nails on the wall every time you walk across your floor above him.
107. AM/PM is that acrid breather working next to you in the library.
108. AM/PM is a worm snapping around in a child's fingers.
June woke up covered in seeds. They were small, toasted sesame seeds, thousands of them all over her body. She had never been covered in seeds before and it was a strange feeling, like a snake might feel in sand. There was no explanation, as far as she could see, for the sudden appearance of all the seeds. It was a comforting feeling, and June turned over three times in the slippery weightlessness before falling back asleep. (AM:110)
109. AM/PM is spiritedly speechless.
110. AM/PM wants to hear a story about a monster that eats a man and hides itself in the woods.
111. AM/PM is a cake made of soap and water.
112. AM/PM is a furtive clicking key.
113. AM/PM comes home with less judgment than it left with.
114. AM/PM has a stain in its mouth and cannot speak.
One day everyone stopped over-thinking. We started thinking just as much as we should, and not any more than necessary. There were no more misunderstandings whatsoever. Minor disagreements were forgotten, not turned into proof of larger things. Trivial errors of speech or judgment were just as important as items on the breakfast menu: one chose waffles and the other chose eggs and it was a god damn miracle. (AM:120)
115. AM/PM is whatever might have been before.
116. AM/PM is the salvation just after dark that day.
117. AM/PM is a deserted body.
118. AM/PM is a brazen head filled with books.
119. AM/PM lays in its birth.
120. AM/PM read "unfettered clock" when it said "unletter'd clerk."



About the author:
John Madera is a writer living in New York City. His work has appeared in elimae, Bookslut, New Pages, The Quarterly Conversation, 3:AM Magazine, Word Riot, and forthcoming in The Diagram. You may find him at hitherandthithering waters (www.johnmadera.com) and editing The Chapbook Review (www.thechapbookreview.com). ]]> Marlon Brando's Iguana by Daniel Van Thomas Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:24:39 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1928
; this began last night, dreaming it up (jesus knows)
where I'm living in a redbrick studio flat alone in a tex-mex desert
& here comes brando knocking--but bald & fat in this here dream-present
not the fugitive kind or the wild one
but old dr moreau past his prime & phoning it in--
in his sky blue polyester suit & open collar
he says to me, he says:I need you to watch for me my pet iguana

alright?

alright

    so the thing comes walking in, & itsa dragon.

    I mean, this is a huge iguana.

It's man-sized & I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with it,
but marlon's gone fuckknowswhere by the time I even know I have a
question. (this is starting to become like the time I water-dreamed
that a tabby cat with fat eyes wrote the complete works of the bard.)
.anyway.

this chartreuse kimono dragon is prowling my hardwood floors, tail
aswingin, doing that fearful thing where a reptile opens & closes its
toothless pink mouth completely noiselessly--wrst of all, looking
right at you like it plans on eating you (& this thing could) & this
repeated moment of me being a prisoner in my own imaginary loft
crystallizes into the one apex moment where I realize I don't even
have any iguana food. SO.

in my good suit (one)I run thru the desert to the catholic high school
were my sister is having a costume ball, passing by the pink bathroom
for little people which for some reason has a peephole on the outside
& then passing george hw bush giving some sort of lecture for honor
students in a cowboy hat to find my sister, who I think for baseless
reasons might have access to or know someone who otherwise has access
to iguana food. why am I dreaming this?, (I'm asking this not in the
dream but now)

maybe I was thinking about Tennessee Williams yesterday.

& in thinking of Tennessee Williams
    I thought on the Night of the Iguana--
& in thinking of Tennessee Williams
    I thought also on his friend, the actor Marlon Brando--

SO. I pass by the devil at this teenage masquerade (actually I held
the door for him just out of habit) but before I find my sister I
realize I am late for my job which is incidentally serving as an
auctioneer at an ongoing auction of marlon brando memorabilia which at
this point consists of sub-worthless stuff such as his cookbook & for
whatever reason an old high school football jersey (not his) from my
high school that may or may not have been signed by the apparently
lizard-loving man in question but I'm behind the podium shilling these
sorts of things when I get so caught up in the moment of selling a
paperback copy of the merchant of Venice that may or may not have
belonged to brando that I auction off some of his left-over iguana
food without remembering that I need it to feed his massive pet iguana
who is currently residing in my homestead living presumably like smaug
the dragon in the book the hobbit lounging on my own personal mountain
of comfortable domestic treasures

so.

with no real resolution to my predicament,
I go back to my relatively trendy-for-the-desert-anyway bachelor pad &
bodily remove the beast from my floor to its tank, which he takes up
the entirety of, as though you yourself who might for some strange
reason be reading this were put bodily into a large fishtank--but he
says to me from this tank (he says) in this urbane & resonant
debutante voice that there was no need for all that & he could've just
got in himself if only I had asked, & he'll just take that banana I'm
eating, & would I please close the top on the tank on my way out,
thanks.
so I did,
& he just lounges there

like nothing ever happened,

like somesorta storybook

maharajah in silks



About the author:
Daniel Van Thomas is a 24 year old poet, ditchdigger, actor, & ex-deckhand. Outside of barns, radios, & bars, his poems have appeared in the journals Elimae, Chrysalis, & Notations. A child of Kentucky, he currently lives in the Eagle Rock area of Los Angeles. ]]> A Life Spent in What Is Now a Frivolous Profession by Larry McCoy Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:23:54 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1934     It was only three words long. A good radio sentence. "It's show business," the man said. There it was, right out in the open, and here all this time I thought I was in the news business. I had, I swear, started out in the news business and gone about my work almost religiously. Then a woman cut a man's penis off and it got picked up (both the penis and the story), Tonya Harding's ex-husband took care of a competitor, O.J. took himself and all of us for a ride, and the world I had always known got turned upside down.
    I was as guilty as anyone else. These were legitimate news stories, right? I sure thought so at the time. Maybe it was the never-ending, day after day, hour after hour emphasis on them that led to where we are today. "It's show business," the man said, walking through the CBS News, Radio newsroom where he was the new boss and his credo was all that mattered. When you're in show business, you can't be BORING. Ya gotta keep things zippy, sassy and breezy (ZSB). So say Auf Wiedersehen to most foreign stories. They are so lacking in ZSB. Dump'em. What ya wanna focus on is anything involving sex, celebrities, and unrepentant trash of all kinds - white, black, Asian, butterscotch, whatever. That's the real news, or what passes for it, much of the time now on many radio and TV outlets and Web sites.
    With show business as their mandate, editors and anchors at CBS Radio looked to Hollywood. On at least two mornings - when radio has its biggest audience - a lead story was the opening of widely-hyped movies. Is not something really messed up when "The CBS World News Roundup," a distinguished broadcast going all the way back to 1938, starts the day sounding like "Entertainment Tonight?" I had lived long enough to see a serious profession, mine, become a frivolous one. A joke.
    The packaging of fluff and gossip as news may have been inevitable at CBS and other networks because of the lust of many radio station owners to mimic the perky pace and mindlessness of local TV news and to make damn sure their news and talk station sounded exactly like everyone else with that format. CBS Radio's discarding of serious journalism was hurried along when refrigerator peddlers, Westinghouse, bought the Tiffany Network and tossed out its culture. "You can be sure if it's Westinghouse" it was all money, all the time. Quality was no longer part of the equation. The less spent on anchors, editors, freelance reporters, technicians, overtime, benefits, the better. After my boss was sent packing, Mr. Show Business was put in charge, and I was soon out the door too.
    Having never done anything else, I had no way of comparing the changes in "news" to what was happening in other businesses. If I had been a carpenter, hired by a company with a reputation for using the best materials, employing the most skilled artisans and not leaving a job until things were picture perfect, what would have been my reaction when the business was sold to people whose sole passion was how much money could be made and how fast expenses and personnel could be cut? Let's say I stayed on, and we were told to use cheap sheetrock instead of quality cement board as before, to substitute plastic for metal wherever possible, and to not sweat making every joint, every beam fit tight. If I did what the new bosses wanted, would I still be a carpenter? Or would I be something else, even if I didn't know it or wouldn't admit it?
    That question became more relevant than ever when CBS News, Radio introduced the iCast, a "newscast" for Ipod users. In the first iCast, the anchor used the word "smart-ass," ridiculed Wal-Mart employees as well as a professor CBS News had interviewed, made at least two factual mistakes and, suddenly, set loose rock music in a "story" about Israeli shelling of Lebanon. At least one manager claimed the affiliates loved the iCasts. Maybe so, but like many love affairs it didn't last long. The iCast is no more, yet it wouldn't surprise me if the devotees of show business came up with something even worse. Just give them time.
    It's common for geezers in any profession to believe the "punks" who came after them don't know as much or work as hard. A former pressman for the New York Daily News, Frank Amato, says of some of the younger guys there now, "They don't even know how to make a hat," referring to the caps "real" pressmen on the night shift traditionally made from old newspapers to keep ink out of their hair. Charles Oakley, formerly of the Chicago Bulls and the New York Knicks, was asked in a TV interview what he and former teammates Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing talk about when they get together. "How bad the players are today," I heard Oakley say, and he didn't look like he was kidding.
    There are some very good journalists at commercial radio networks and stations today, but their bosses – lovers of show business and buzz – have made it clear that's what they expect to hear on the air. Although it isn't funny, I chuckle when I think about what those who are dispensing trash disguised as information today are likely to say about the "punks" who follow them: "They don't have any standards." No kidding. And whose fault is that?



About the author:
Larry McCoy retired more than three years ago after 45 years in the news business. In addition to CBS News, his employers included ABC News, United Press International and Radio Free Europe. He has written a memoir called "Everyone Needs An Editor (Some Of Us More Than Others. " A collection of his humorous essays on aging will be published soon by Sunstone Press. ]]> Everything's Relative by Kate Jordan Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:23:23 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1926     Growing up, I thought that of all my mother's siblings, Margaret and I were the most alike. Feisty, a little quirky, not quite five feet tall. This was my way of feeling more connected to my mother's family, even if it was through someone else's reflection. I too had been physically isolated, an Army brat living in Europe until I was eight, and then landing in Colorado, not particularly close to any relatives.
    However, closeness can wear many hats. Maybe I don't want to spend my two weeks vacation with relatives every year, but they are a part of me, fellow travelers in my genetic caravan. And there is a familiarity - a loyalty - unlike anything else.
    Over the years I saw Margaret at a handful of weddings and a family reunion. She always seemed different than her sisters and brothers in that European way, wearing flowing bright clothes and unusual sandals. The gap between her two front teeth undoctored by braces, the strange tubes of cheese in her suitcase.
    The last time was at my brother's wedding, six years ago in Santiago, Chile. She came on her own, and immediately after meeting the bride, announced that she was "phony-baloney" - which turned out to be true.

    My mother and her sisters go to Sweden a month after receiving the news. Margaret is feeling fine - she has a portable chemotherapy pack strapped to her side that's giving her no trouble.
    They go shopping for Margaret at the local grocery store, balking at Swedish prices and pantomiming requests for sour cream and celery to clerks who don't speak English. Alongside Margaret's children, they cook long into the night, freezing fifteen meals for when she won't feel up to cooking.
    "Getting sick has its advantages," Margaret tells me on the phone one day. "We're having a ball here. Pretty soon I won't need my Vitamin E cream - the laughs remove all the wrinkles!"
    I want to tell her I love her. That I'm scared. Instead, I say nothing.
    "It's like going to a funeral," Margaret says. "Nobody knows what to say, but just being there is enough."
    My mother stays in Sweden for two weeks. Days before leaving, Margaret becomes terribly sick. The doctors have made some adjustments to her medication and she's in pain. The sisters gather on her bed, talking, until she falls asleep.
    They move downstairs and tell my cousin Anna, who is 24 years old, stories about her mother. How as a child she swung from the neighbor's trees and flung herself off diving boards before she knew how to swim. Jump and ask questions later, that kind of kid. Anna laughs, storing up the tidbits, asking for more from the aunts she hardly knows.
    "I'm not depressed or worried," emails Margaret. "Just didn't think this would happen to me. Don't they all say that? I'm pretty certain we're all going to die and maybe I have a better idea of when, but not really."
    Knowing Margaret is so ill is like seeing her on a rusty old tanker offshore that is making one long, slow pass. I imagine the rest of us on the sand waving madly, wishing the boat would stay a bit longer.
    When my mother returns from her trip, she tells me that on the last night, no one can sleep. She and Margaret sit out on the front porch, smoking. The summer sun has finally gone down and there's a cool breeze coming off the water.
    There, huddled together under a soft shawl, they wrap their arms tightly around the other, skinny knees touching, their short dark hair streaked with gray. They are just a stone's throw from the girls they once were.
    They don't talk about dying.



About the author:
Kate Jordan is a freelance writer in Colorado. Her writing has received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train Press and her articles have appeared in Animal News, Outdoors in the Pikes Peak Region, Stapleton's Front Porch and The Colorado Historian. She is currently completing her first novel. (www.katejordanwriter.com) ]]> Moving the Bed by Shaun El-Ters Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:22:51 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1931     My feet move through the icy water, searching for the soft, sandy bottom. Instead, they scrape against a coral floor. The coral's sharp, uneven edges slice into my exposed feet. Knees buckle from the pain. I struggle to stay upright, above the surface of the water, but the jagged floor digs deeper into my flesh. The water smells of blood and salt. I drop to my knees, now submerged within the ocean's abyss. My arms, thrashing above the surface, grasping at air. My legs, skewered and numb.
    With all my effort, I try to stand again, but my feet slip down, the torn bottoms unable to withstand the pressure. Bleeding, drowning, I give in. Unable to breathe. Unable to escape.
    Sometimes, I would awaken, gasping for breath. Other times, I would calmly arouse, familiar with this sensation. Accustomed to this nightly practice.
    My parents were concerned about these frequent dreams. Said they weren't normal. Forced me to talk to an old counselor from my high school. I did it just to satisfy them, but the sessions didn't help. The truth was that I already was well aware of the dreams' source.
    The dreams, I surmised, were the direct consequence of something that could only be described as a preoccupation, an obsession, with death. Death and dying. Every night before I went to bed, thoughts of the end of my life consumed my thoughts. I imagined myself dying, imagined the fear I would feel during these last moments. I lay in bed, and conjured up the most real and vivid image of my death, a feeling of numbing cold spreading throughout my chest. Each night, the lucid illustration of the end of my life, followed by the trailing darkness.
    As Dave and I drove through Flagstaff, AZ under the smattering rain, I finally admitted to myself that this was the real reason I joined Hospice. The reason for my volunteer work, my "charity," and my car drive with Dave, did not stem from my goodwill or sincere intentions, regardless of how much I tried to fool myself otherwise. The reason, I knew, were rooted in some ill-placed desire to better understand death. People fear what they don't understand, and in some way, I thought surrounding myself with the dying would be the best way to achieve some grasp. By confronting death in places where it so frequently dwelled, I hoped that I could come to terms with its inevitability. And maybe, when I understood it, I could get past it. Maybe then, I thought, the dreams would stop.
    "Well, I just hope it doesn't keep up this way," said Dave, finishing a conversation about the weather that I had long since tuned out. He turned up the windshield wiper, squinting through the sheet of water forming over glass. As he squinted, his small eyes created creases along his face, running underneath his small patch of hair that the receding line had not yet conquered. His small features and soft, whispery voice gave him a feminine quality, countered only by the musty smell of his old cologne.
    "Alice," Dave said as we pulled into a residential establishment. After a moment, I realized that he was informing me about the woman we were helping today. "Her husband has a terminal illness, and has been given about three more months to live. The family decided that they want to be together, so we are moving the bed out of their room to fit the hospital bed and equipment." His speech was very drawn out, full of unnecessary pauses. I found this irritating, but supposed that it was a useful quality to have when dealing with the vulnerable clients of Hospice.
    He looked over at me, gently smiling. "Today, you're helping a couple spend their last moments together in their home. It's a sad thing, but you should be proud for wanting to help." I nodded in reply, but felt a twinge of sadness pinch my throat. He thought my intentions came from a sincere place.
    We pulled up to the driveway of an older, Victorian style home. Dark wooden walls outlined the large windows on the front of the house. Water poured off the pointed roof, which was missing a handful of shingles. We approached the front door underneath an archway, although the holes riddled in its surface did little to provide refuge from the rain.
    Dave walked up to the heavy steel door, banging it loudly with the ornate brass doorknocker. The doorknocker hung slightly off kilter, and shifted as he used it. A moment later, the door creaked open. On the other side stood an older woman, withered and frail. Her white hair hung down on both sides of her face, accenting her cloudy blue eyes and sallow, sunken skin. She wore a pink woven sweater, frayed and faded.
    "Hi, hi, come in," she said, her voice as weak and delicate as her appearance. "Get you two out of that rain." She let out a small laugh before coughing dryly into her hand. As she turned and led us into the house, I noticed her bowed back and short legs trembling with every step.
    Dave and I entered the house. I felt the wave of warm air come around me, but it did nothing to eliminate the chill under my skin. It was not the kind of cold that warmth could cure. I patted my shoes dry on the rug while observing the interior, the smell of cinnamon and brown sugar floating in the air.
    I noticed how Alice had kept the home in very nice condition. Pristine, even. The wooden walls and furniture, both comprised of dark oak, were immaculate. The fireplace cast heat over the room, and the firelight created shadows that danced along the beige carpet. Above the frame of the fireplace were multiple photos, displaying images of Alice and her husband in another life. I never would have thought such an inviting place could be host to such deeply rooted sadness.
    "This is a very nice place you have here," Dave said, thoughtfully observing the room.
    "Thanks, I do my best," replied Alice. "It's not much, but I try to keep it up." She hacked into her hand again, more hoarse than the first time. "Thank you so much for coming out here. I just want you to know I really appreciate this. You two don't have to do this, and I want you to know it means a lot."
    Again, the pinch. Stronger this time.
    "It is our pleasure, Alice," Dave replied, so automatic that it sounded rehearsed. "We know this time can be very hard, and we just want to make things as easy as possible for you and your husband." Dave walked over and put his hand gently on her back, and she gently nodded her head.
    "Let me take you to the room, then," she said, seemingly attempting to perk up. For her credit, she did admirably, but her strain to emanate an upbeat attitude was apparent. She smiled, but her weary eyes revealed her grief. Her sadness did not reside on the surface; rather, it simmered underneath. On the cusp of overflowing, but for the moment contained.
    Alice led us down the photo-laden hall to the master bedroom. The large room contrasted the small feeling of the rest of the house, but was much less inviting. The coziness of the living room gone, and in its place was a single queen-sized bed, sitting in a bulky wooden bed frame. The elaborate design etched into the wood frame was the only unique aspect of the empty and lonely room. Alice did not spend much of her time here.
    "Here it is," she told us. I heard her voice waver slightly. Dave smiled, again placing his hand gently on her back.
    "Shaun and I will go ahead and clear the bed and the frame, and give you and your husband the space you need here."
    We began plotting the best method to transport the large frame down the hall. I could hear Alice in the kitchen, along with the tinkering of glasses. Dave and I took either end of the mattress, hoisting it up and turning it on its side. The flimsy mattress folded in on itself, but Dave and I easily transported it to the truck.
    We returned to the bedroom and prepared to move the heavy wooden frame. The frame was built as one piece, and needed to be moved as such to keep its stability intact. I took hold of one end, and together, we tried to lean the bed on its side. The muscles in my back and arms burned, and beads of sweat formed on my brow. After tilting the structure, we proceeded to lift it. The sharp edges dug into my fingers, cutting into the joints. Together, we stumbled out of the room, rotating the frame so that the ends could squeeze through the narrow doorway.
    As we progressed down the hall, moving the bed took its toll. My arms seared. My hands went numb. I could feel the burn welling in my lower back. Sweat rolled down my forehead, running into my eyes. Pain seemed to spread throughout my body...and I relished in it. I welcomed the discomfort, the sweat, the strain.
    After we finished securing the frame on the truck, Dave and I returned to the bedroom. We took a seat on the bench in the back of the room, exhausted. Moments later, Alice returned, holding a silver tray carrying two glasses of hot chocolate. Steam rose from underneath the layer of floating marshmallows, which bobbed gently on the surface.
    Dave and I took the hot glasses. Thanked Alice for her courtesy. We then all took a seat on the bench, sipping our beverages in silence.
    Dave's phone rang, cutting through the quiet. He excused himself and took the call in the hallway. His absence left Alice and me alone, staring at the vacant space on the floor where the bed once resided. Only a foot separated us from each other, but it felt like I might as well have been in another building.
    "It's going to be strange," Alice said, staring blankly at the window. I looked at her, no doubt appearing more surprised than I meant to at her comment. "I mean, having him here. Walking in the room and seeing the hospital gurney where...the bed used to be. I guess it just makes it all so real."
    "Are you scared?" I asked. When I heard the words escape my mouth, I cringed. With all my heart, I regretted asking the question, wishing I could take it back. Frustrated by the lack of answers I had sought for so long, I had tried to go directly to the source. I was selfish.
    However, Alice just looked at me, and gave me the warmest and most sincere look I had seen from her that day.
    "Yes," she said, her upturned lips creating creases along her cheeks. "I'm terrified."
    "How do you do it? How did you come to accept it?"
    Alice paused momentarily, looking again at the window as if the words she was searching for danced along the other side. "I didn't accept it. I don't accept anything. To be honest, I'm no more comfortable now with this than I was when I was a young girl. It hasn't gotten any easier."
    "So what do you do? How...how?"
    "I put it out of my mind." She returned her gaze from the window to my eyes. Locked them there. "There is really nothing else I can do. I choose not to think about it." Her head dropped. "If I concentrated on his sickness, it would be impossible to enjoy the time that we had together, and all of this...," she gestured with her hands, "...would be for nothing. If I thought about his death, there would be no room left for anything else." She swallowed. "We moved the bed to make room for his gurney, but the truth is that I had to move it out. For me. It was only a reminder of our lives before this."
    Dave reentered the room, apologizing for his absence. Something about a leak at the thrift store. Something about thanking Alice. I wasn't paying attention. Instead, I continued to sit on the bench, replaying my conversation with Alice over and over again in my mind. Contemplating what she told me. Mulling over her answer.
    Moments passed. I suddenly found myself back outside, with no recollection of my journey from the bedroom to the front door. I looked around. The gray clouds still littered the late afternoon sky. The bitterly cold air still made me shudder. I don't know why I expected otherwise, but the shining revelation that made the world a little brighter, a little more colorful, wasn't there. Just a small insight, subtle as a lowering tide on the shore. Perhaps, I thought, this was the nature of the acceptance of death. No great epiphany that grants me full understanding. No comprehension that eliminates and replaces the fear. Just a series of small insights, so subtle and delicate they seem invisible, until one day I realize that the fear and apprehension I held for so long have disappeared. No mass exodus. Just a fading shadow that slips quietly into the night.
    "Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you," Dave told Alice. They stood at the doorway of her home, more like close friends than strangers that met for the first time two hours ago. He put his hand on her shoulder. Patted it. She smiled, a sort of grin, as if recalling an old joke. She then closed the door, and my relationship with Alice vanished, a wisp of smoke evaporating so quickly it could be said to never have existed at all.
    Dave and I climbed into the truck and rode in silence back to Hospice. We said our goodbyes, and I left. Told him I'd see him later, although I had no intention to return. Guilt still lumped in my throat, but I had nothing left to gain from this place.
    As I went to bed that night, the familiar images of death arose again, emerging from all corners of my mind, infiltrating each and every thought. I tried to put them out of my head. They returned. I attempted to focus on distant, joyful memories. They lingered. Maybe it would get easier with time. Maybe, someday, I would forget the fixation ever existed at all. I cleared my mind again, and hoped for dreamless night's sleep.



About the author:
Shaun El-Ters is currently attending Northern Arizona University, where he is an editor and columnist for the university's newspaper, The Lumberjack. After graduating NAU, he plans to defy better judgment and attend Western State University to pursue a law degree. ]]> Nixon Does Jiangxi by Christian Ames Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:22:18 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1924     Ming's wife, Li Pei, is the shirt beater. I asked her not to bother since I knew I'd just end up wearing a wet shirt tonight, but she thought I was just being polite. The Chinese have been washing undershirts in this pond for 4,000 years, but never before the intractable stains of foreigners, and after a long ten minutes, Li Pei walks over and hands me a wet shirt with a sigh, explaining in an exasperated and utterly incomprehensible stream of dialect what I already know. I shrug and smile sheepishly as she waddles away mumbling to herself, confirmed in her belief once and for all that foreigners really do stink. A lone black rooster follows her back down the dirt road, mocking her waddle.
    A few hours later I'm in a black Mercedes, as all government cars here seem to be, honking its way down a wide but crowded street. My girlfriend, Ning, and I are in the back seat, ensconced in the cigarette smoke issuing from our portly driver and the Big Boss seated next to him. Big Boss Tang is one of the top Communist Party officials in this county, with powerful friends in the provincial capital in Nanchang. His star is rising and everyone he meets is eager to impress him with their boundless capacity for ingratiation. He also happens to be Ning's father.
    As we drive through the streets, I notice what you notice in small towns in China: kids playing badminton on the sidewalk using a motorcycle for a net, burning oil drums and random little roadside fires, roosters fighting with dogs over scraps in the alleys, and people, people everywhere, some sitting in the middle of the road doing God knows what, on bikes, on foot, carrying impossible bundles of wood and plastic and scrap iron, the sunburned elderly masses in thick blue pants, giant purple scarves, and knit caps. But I mostly notice the girls. All in knee-high black boots, like Fredericks of Hollywood finally conquered Guatemala, and all screaming into cell phones.
    The Big Boss shouts into his, cigarette dangling from his mouth. In between the shouting, Ning assures me that I needn't worry about the food tonight. It won't contain bleach or sewer oil. "It won't? That's good," I say, a little unnerved. Why it won't is that the restaurant we are heading to is owned by some local Communist Party officials. Their relatives work there. Officials eat there. Therefore, they ensure that only the best, non-toxic ingredients are used. As she explains this to me, I'm a little distracted by my dank, pond-fresh undershirt—complete with stink lines—that I now happen to be wearing, especially since it is the middle of February and the driver has the air conditioning on with the windows open. "Fresh air." You learn quickly that the Chinese love their fresh air as much as they hate their sun. But as the car speeds us through the dusty streets just as dusk mingles with cigarette smoke and the sounds of Styx (bafflingly) coming from the tape deck, I try to focus on the positive: no sewer oil.
    As I stare out the window, face blasted with frozen air and smoke, Ning tells me that the only other foreigner in these parts in recent memory was a red-haired Dutchman who spent two weeks in the next town over. He made the mistake of announcing his intent to break off a fling he was having with a local girl shortly before he was to head back home. Unwise. She already had the drapes all picked out for their little cottage back in Holland, and needless to say, she didn't take the news well. The night before he left town she attempted to Nagasaki him at a local restaurant with a pot of boiling water and a butcher knife. I was wondering why one of Ning's aunts mentioned, with visible relief, that I don't have red hair. Bad karma. Apocryphal or not, Ning's story served its purpose. She gives me the evil eye and lets out a witchy laugh just as the driver swerves around a giant ox in the middle of the road....
    We arrive at the restaurant to the burst of a thousand firecrackers. The last few go off as we get out of the car, the air thick with smoke and the smell of sulfur. A teenage boy wearing a fedora and a track suit kicks the spent pile of firecrackers like a heap of little red snake skins into the street, while the Big Boss strides over towards a back entrance, suddenly surrounded by an entourage that emerges from the shadows. I ask Ning if the fireworks were for us or for him. "It's hard to say," she says.
    As we walk through the restaurant, I notice that one wall is covered with pictures of naked women in various poses. These aren't drawings or ancient paintings like you might be thinking, but full-frontal, soft-porn, glossy-magazine nudes. The wall even has its own diaphanous curtain for those occasions when eating in front of a montage of pink parasols, tiny nipples, and pitch-black 70's bush might not be desirable. This, apparently, is not one of those occasions.
    We finally make our way past the fishy crab tanks in the back corner and up a treacherous, snaking metal staircase to the VIP section. As we enter our private banquet room, led by a dwarfish man with a bramble of curly hair, all decked out in a white suit, twelve people in various states of seed-and-nut spitting arise to greet us. In an instant a man with a bushy mustache hands me an orange before I even have my coat off. Another man with a lazy eye offers me a bowl of sunflower seeds. A young girl, who turns out to be one of the many waitresses, nervously offers to take my coat while staring at my feet. The room is spacious and bright, with a TV and a small space heater in front of a couple of lime green couches and a table that seats twenty. All eyes and smiles are fixed upon me, the giant foreigner, and after a brief but awkward silence, a fat man with a swoosh of white hair and a matching grin shakes my hand vigorously and says only two words to me in Chinese: "United States!" "Yes, United States," I say with a smile. He bellows out a laugh that shakes the room, amazed that I understand him, and for the rest of the evening I have a fast friend, always ready to place some unwanted morsel on my plate.
    Next begins the awkward and baffling ritual of deciding who sits where around this giant Lazy Susan of a table. I make the mistake of attempting to sit down, but Ning grabs my arm and holds me back, and we wait for the underlings and sycophants to work it out, pulling each other this way and that until the pecking order has been established. The mysterious calculus completed, I am directed to sit to the left of the orange peddler with the mustache, two seats to the left of the Big Boss. As one of the few foreigners to ever visit this town, I have been given a position of honor at the table, Ning tells me. I picture the red-haired Dutchman dodging boiling water and butcher knives and just nod.
    The mustachioed man seated next to me is one of the youngest present, thirty-five at most, and looks out of place, like a coal miner on his day off except for the enormous gold ring and watch weighing down his left hand. I almost mistook him for one of the drivers. He leans into the table when he talks, animated but unassuming and relaxed, blowing smoke. He and the Big Boss occasionally whisper among themselves amid the general chatter. He tells me to try the fish head in a low, wispy voice, pointing with his chopsticks at the dead eye. He then tells Ning that he wants to send his teenage daughter to the U.S. to study but needs a place for her to stay. He offers to give us an apartment in Shanghai if we can get his daughter back to New York with us. He says he'll take care of everything, he has one million yuan all prepared for the trip. "Is that enough?" he asks. He'll also give us a house here in town if we want. I'm a little taken aback by all of this, but my mind is already racing: How hard would it be to get a teenage girl to New York? How big is this apartment in Shanghai? And who is this guy anyway? The head of the local triad, I imagine. Ning is polite but unimpressed, as if she's heard all of this before. And I probably look a little too interested in his proposal. I can feel her look. To her relief, his phone rings and the would-be cab driver who hands out houses like oranges disappears into another room never to be seen again.
    The conversation around the table jumps from what to feed your sick pigs to the stock boom in Shanghai and finally lands on Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon remains a popular figure in China—in the Chinese imagination he's a giant in the pantheon of American presidents seated beside Washington and Lincoln. My dinner companions are surprised to learn that many of his countrymen place him in the less lofty company of Warren G. Harding. They never heard of Harding. The man with the lazy eye nevertheless declares, "Nixon will always be remembered warmly because he came to China first. Just like you. You are the Nixon of our town." The laughter that follows seems finally to dispel any remaining foreigner anxiety from the air. Old lazy eye beams.
    A moment later, seeming to sense the change in atmosphere, our burly driver (the Big Boss's shadow) and two other men I've never seen before come over from the kid's table in the room next door. They're in there with the other drivers and the rest of the people not important enough to merit a seat at the grown-up's table. The three of them, standing just inside the doorway, lift their glasses to the Big Boss, muttering a toast in the local dialect. The Big Boss squints and smiles through his cigarette and lazily raises his glass in their direction. He doesn't stand. The three drivers, having made their obeisance, head back to the other room, inaugurating an endless cycle of toasting and drinking and standing and sitting. And drinking.
    Boss Tang ate tree bark in order to survive during the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao's decade of mass insanity that brought China to the edge of collapse. Other members of Boss Tang's family were imprisoned in those days and died broke, broken men. It was then in 1972, in a February just as cold as this one, that Nixon came and secured his place in the psyche of China's own Lost Generation. Like many of his peers, Boss Tang was denied a formal education, but his quick wit and his talent for gambling made him famous in these parts and he flourished. He speaks with a languid, effortless self-assurance, as if he's used to giving orders and has nothing to prove, and like most successful Chinese politicians, he has an air of laconic indifference about him. He knows when to keep his mouth shut—always.
    After a round-robin of toasting directed at him, Boss Tang finally makes a toast of his own. He rises from the table with two other men seated near him whom I hadn't taken much notice of before. He then turns towards me with his glass of Chinese white lightning raised and cupped in both hands and says in his heavily accented Mandarin, "The Communist Party welcomes you to China!" For a moment I feel like a character in a Graham Greene novel swept up in the storms of Cold War and God and CIA. Only now, fifty years later, it all seems absurdly anachronistic and surreal, like re-enacting the Battle of Gettysburg in your uncle's backyard. I raise my glass, thank him a little punchily, and bury my fifth mao-tai, which nearly buries me. I look over at Ning and see in her face that I'm drunk, lost in the warm haze of fish head soup and cigar smoke and the perfume of pretty young waitresses with bad teeth.
    As the drinking degenerates into random volleys of shouting and singing, I notice the TV in the corner is still on with the sound turned down. Commercials filled with shiny blond foreigners selling everything from energy pills to Buicks interrupt the weather report. I take another shot of moonshine and wonder what Dick Nixon would think of all of this and decide he would approve. Just as the weatherman's giant head flashes back on the TV screen, the dwarf in the white suit appears in the doorway. He and his giant perm scurry across the room to whisper something into Boss Tang's ear. Tang takes a long drag on his cigarette and looks over at me without saying anything. I give him an awkward smile and nod. He just stares.
    An hour later, mostly sober, as I follow Boss Tang out of the restaurant, I avoid even inadvertently glancing at the wall of nudes and keep my eyes fixed on the exit ahead. Outside it is cool, dark, and damp, but the air still pulses with chaos and life. The frogs are roasting on the grills. The hookers, bathed in the purple light of a neon sign, stand outside the hair salon across the street. Trucks filled with bricks still bounce down the road, shooting up dust and fumes into the night. The fat man with white hair, face flushed red with too much mao-tai, walks over, bear hugs me and exclaims, "Good morning, Mr. Nixon!" the only English he knows. Everyone laughs, even Boss Tang.
    After handshakes all around, the rest stand and wave as we drive off into the fog, the driver honking his horn and flashing his headlights at every passing car, bicycle, and red-faced peasant. I ask myself how this can be China, the land of mandarins and Mao, screaming Red revolution and tanks on the Square? The Big Boss mashes his cigarette into the ashtray and sighs something to the driver that I don't understand. The driver grunts. Ning is already half asleep with her face pressed against the window, picking out drapes, and I notice that the fresh air has finally freeze-dried my undershirt stiff, all as Styx once again soft-rocks us ahead into the great Chinese unknown.



About the author:
Christian Ames is a writer based in Shanghai, where he is currently working on a novel and a collection of contemporary Chinese poetry in translation. He is originally from New York. ]]> Two Poems by James Yeary Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:21:47 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1958 FAVE

he's got a woody
she's got a bicorneal
fistula

kinetic potential
of his qualms
to a rolling boil

autumnal toll
harvested as
memory's shuffle

tape a quiet
sepulchre all
raccoons' glaucoma

lid est a
sum of sums
fateless

she weeps
like a cyclops
or justice

in its hey
ouch owch
that's okay that's okay



ANAESTHESIOCRACY

    am knees
    am nest
    Kafka burned alive w/ his books
                 :to deem a song "racy"

Banker's ankh:
                  checkerboard expressionism

docked + toggled, censored boats
In a year, I hope we're not
foaming at the lips for PBR
Boots and parka, election day sale,
    come on

               WRITING AS SELECTION

The internet a privilege of writing,
    not people (hear the hoax).



About the author:
James Yeary is a writer and performance artist who spent much of 2008 traveling between the lesser and greater extremes of the Pacific Northwest. He edits the magazine Cloudrag, and collaborates with/as painter and printmaker Nate Orton. ]]> Three Poems by Zachary Whalen Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:21:15 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1949 i found my new typewriter in a dead lady's closet

what a stupid machine.
there's an integral flaw-

no exclamation mark.

and i swear
i looked all over for it.

i found this typewriter
while i was ransacking
a dead lady's closet.
i was going through the pockets
of her dresses and coats,
trying to maybe find
some valuable jewels.

all the pockets
were stuffed with kleenex.

how's that for an obituary?

i suppose we all get old,
and then who has any use
for exclamation marks?
who has any use
even for question marks?
periods probably still come in handy, though.

sometimes,
i feel like i am
stuffed with kleenex.

how futile it is
to try and blow my nose
exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark



cornucopia

i suppose i have
a veritable cornucopia
of distractions
to occupy me.

it's like a circus-
who doesn't like a circus?
though i could always use
a few more unicycle tricks,
contortionists,
nude tight-rope walkers...

last week,
i took the memories
of every pussy
ever
and hung them above
the door frame.
now it's easier to examine
the mechanical components.

one day,
i will crawl inside your pussy and read
a newspaper.

for the time being,
i'm stacking beercans,
one on top of
the other.
it's a phallic endeavour
of mine,
a shaky erection
leaning against
the sun.



municipal

the eternally
overflowing
public receptacle.

gutters steaming:
hiss...
is that the smell
of shit? blood?
day-old coffee.

it's incredible-
the will to piss
and defecate wherever
you will,
and then pray to those
who sleep in
dumpsters.

there are a million
lonely women
who prepare dinner
for nine million cats
while the nameless dogs
know nothing of numbers
and wait obediently-
for what?

are you just
lifting an obligatory face
to your sun?

the traffic is squeezed
into corridors of inertia.
the citizens curse
every daily occurence-

they curse a life
dragging itself
down dead-end streets
and the hand that is waving
from my stoop.



About the author:
My name is Zachary Whalen. I live in Canada and I drink four litres of milk a day because it builds strong bones. ]]> Two Poems by Joshua Michael Stewart Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:20:54 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1950 POME

I want to kiss your pomaceous everything,
lay you on the teacher's desk, and love you
sticky on my chin. Why when you worm
your way into my head do I taste nothing
but cider? When I try to formulate
the mathematical equation for God and hope,
you break me down into my lowest
common denominator: bobbing at your flesh,
biting through your rind. You drive me
delicious; you leave me bruised.
You're a light afternoon snack
that's got me rubbing my belly,
my leather pants undone.
            What's crazy?
You stem from my imagination,
the core of this deciduous affair.
You're fictitious as Snow White,
ripen only when I dream
and yet you keep the doctors away.



HAPPENS TO THE BEST OF US

Bathed in moonlight
the snowman flings
his twiggy arms to the stars,
his sombrero blowing
past the sullen birdbath.



About the author:
Joshua Michael Stewart is the editor of the online magazine Big Toe Review. He has two chapbooks: Ordinary Mysteries, published by White Heron Press in 2004, and Vintage Gray, published by Pudding House Press in 2007. Mr. Stewart's poems have been published in Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Georgetown Review, William and Mary Review, Flint Hills Review, Pedestal Magazine, and Worcester Review. ]]> Alone by Ryan Sloan Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:20:30 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1952 White becomes orange, gray and brown,
And I begin to shiver
With only myself around.

The furnace sizzles and hums
With its heat pulsating out.
As the furnace so long churns,
Its heat touches not my snout.

I sit in clothes, layers three,
From head to toe, and I grasp
The long stare in front of me,
The days of tears and of laughs.

Now, my days are filled with tears
And fears and doubts and dismay,
As I learned my fate last year
That I have left, a few days.

A mistake, I made in trusting,
Led me to be where I am.
I surrendered to lusting,
Now, oh God, I'm ever DAMNED.

As my fate became well known,
I saw what my friends had seen,
And soon, I was all alone,
Because death was upon me. ]]> misanthropic Buddha by Alison Ross Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:19:59 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1959 eats black balloons for breakfast
drinks cocktails made of storms

Misanthropic buddha
gets his zen on
at 3:04 am
kicks the asses of the stars
that are not aligned
karate chops
the moon

misanthropic buddha
makes love to Dante's corpse
peels the layers of hell off his shoe
haunts Che in his dreams
licks fascism with his tongue

Misanthropic Buddha
gets drunk on skulls
drives a nail through Jesus' eyes
(they bleed static
and he cries)



About the author:
Alison Ross has published poetry and rants in various webzines. She is editor of Clockwise Cat. ]]> Laces by Ravi Mangla Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:19:30 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1953


About the author:
Ravi Mangla lives in Fairport, NY. His poetry has appeared in the Tipton Poetry Journal and Boston Literary Magazine. He keeps a blog at ravimangla.blogspot.com. ]]> Two Poems by Savannah Louise Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:19:04 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1954 I am crossing my legs so that they are a triangle, not a pretzel

I am sitting on your floor
You are on your computer
You are typing a message to a girl
You spell everything quick
You don't care about vowels
You are a silent masterpiece.

I am pressing my fingers
Into the carpet I am pretending the carpet
Is a shallow ocean because I am a giant
And when I move around I create invisible tsunamis
That could make very small things die.



An instance in which I get mine

When you are sleeping I will
Put Velcro down your back
And behind your knees
I will also put Velcro on the front of me
I will creep behind you
And I will spoon you very hard.
And when you sit up in the morning
I will be stuck to you
You will be terrified
But you will never find out
Who it is



About the author:
Savannah Louise lives in Minneapolis. She has work at Titular Journal, Theives Jargon, and Dogzplot. She blogs at www.savannahsulks.blogspot.com.]]> Three Poems by Niaz Khadem Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:18:40 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1948 the statues on South 9th

you know, they say there used to be
a house there. just there, behind them.
that's the front porch where they're standing.

they say that they were lovers, but
that is no mere lovers embrace.

some say that it was meant to be
the end. but he held her, and she
held him, and they never let go.

i don't know when they took the house
down. they say it burned to the ground,
and he held her, and she held him,
and they never let go.



on singing

They say that single mothers are the most dependable, and
They say that, for the heart, singing is almost as good as sex.

My guess is that they are correct. Sex is good for the heart, and
Single mothers are awfully dependable. That's why I sing.

I sing for single mothers because it is good for the heart.
I don't sing for sex. That would be unforgivable. They say

That singing is good for the heart, and that single mothers are
Dependable, and they say that sex is better than singing,

But I'm not sure that that is dependable. It depends on
The singing, the mother, and the sex. I mean, hey, it's all good

For the heart. That is dependable. But which is better? Which
Is best? I sing for my heart, and this, it's dependable, that

To sing for a single mother, for your heart, it's better than sex.



fighting words

We'll have the last laugh
Just you wait and see.

The Icelanders, they
Lied to us, but us,

We created the
SUV. Greenland

May still be a block
Of ice today, but

Tomorrow, no one
Knows. Two words Iceland:

Climate change. You like
Apples? How 'bout those?]]> Bartleby's my Brother by Regina Jeffers Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:12:19 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1956 The last job said, "We'll set you free."
I read and see my young son weep.
  
What will a school help you to reap?
What is the use of this degree?
Inside a hotel home we sleep.                            I prefer not to.
  
The training was not terse or cheap.
We eat dry toast - drink weakened tea.
I read and see my young son weep.
  
Why did I leaf assiduously?
Fleeced greens with my identity
Inside a hotel home we sleep.                            I prefer not to.
  
Treated like a street crazied creep
Detained - Restrained - they lecture me
I read and see my young son weep.
  
My mother eased me with her peep.
"Educated fool," she titled me.
Inside a hotel home we sleep.                            I prefer not to.
I read and see my young son weep. ]]> Two Poems by Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:11:46 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1960 THE MOOD IN THE ROOM

Each day when the drapes are drawn
the bright light of the sun
suddenly changes the mood in the room.
The orange in the fruit bowl
looks promising in the light.
It tastes of summer on this winter day.
I savor its taste, seemingly
enjoying two seasons.
In childlike reverie I am dreaming of a
long day of doing nothing at all.
I lay down thinking of numerous
things to do or be.
I like being as one with the sun,
brightening up this room.



THE SPLENDID AIR

The splendid air
filled the forest.
I rested on a tree
stump waiting for
noon. For a while
I slept. No one
bothered me. The
sun brought me out
of my rut. I
hurried out of
the forest to
a road I had
to take with much
regret. Off to
the side of the road
there were naked
mermaids singing.
The huge sun made
my eyes cry. From
the distance I
heard more singing.
The songs were sad.
I felt haggard.
I shut my eyes.
I had enough.
The sound of the
songs made the leaves
fall from the trees.
I was up to
my waist in leaves.
This life was so
sad. My lips felt
like glass slivers.
I bled when I
spoke. The mermaids
stood in front of
me. Their fingers
poked out my eyes
and ripped out my
tongue. I was left
blind and speechless.



About the author:
My new chapbook, Still Human, is available from Kendra Steiner Editions, and my chapbook, Before And Well After Midnight is available from Deadbeat Press and Lulu.com. ]]> If Only by Claire Crowley Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:11:22 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1951 under the full moon sky, tonight.
Consumed with the thought
that I just might want to stay here forever,
and you,
you take my hand to
tell me the best things in life barely last a second, or less.
So I smile, a sad, tragic smile
and close my eyes.
Predictable, this will pass.
This feeling of being
alive and fragile
but bigger than the world
and free
but entangled in you.
The feeling of stomach churning, palms sweating, nervous fidgeting.
Laughter in memories
of late nights in dark places and smiles.
Smiles that let me forget the gaps between us, victims of bad timing.
Tragic, another place, another time. Why?
The glow of the dashboard witnesses
whispers shared with each other, never told
to those that were supposed to be closest to us.
Closer.
This isn't right, guilty conscience.
Somewhere someone waits for you to get home.
And we are in fact, complete strangers.
Complete strangers that complete each other
scary and unstable, but, what is a life of regrets.
You trace my depravation of happiness
down the small of my back
in my wine stained dress
I promise to miss you
when you slip the ring on her finger,
out of my life and
into the darkness
beneath the ripples
of what could have been.



About the author:
Claire Crowley is a graduate of Southern Connecticut State University. Her short fiction has appeared in SNReview and Static Movement ]]> Know Thyself by Elizabeth Crocket Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:10:57 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1955 at the rehab
an older woman
who liked to flash her breasts
told me to be careful
that when she was my age
she began to like Chardonnay
a little too much
but inwardly
my smile was smug
as I knew myself well
and I was strictly
a sauvignon blanc girl



About the author:
Elizabeth writes poetry, haiku and short fiction. She has been published in Roadrunner, Ascent Aspirations, RKVRY online journal, First Thought and more. ]]> Four Poems by Kevin Conder Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:10:13 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1947 Three Musicians

we're blindfolded by light
we're denied the crowds
we sweat when the music's loudest
we're serious as hell when we play
we sleep with girls who drag
hot ashtrays
across our chests

every night a dance
we cannot see
every hour a suicide
every minute the nail
pushes deeper
every second a heartbeat
everything that means anything has been done by now

when we step from the lights we are made invisible and
as immaculate as specters

we hold deep in our jackets
a swarm of tiny envelopes
that help us to stand on rooftops
and spit and watch it fall



On Vocals and Guitar

it's showtime
I play as fast as I can
I run around the stage
as fast as I can
I wear sunglasses to guard against my own glare

I sing songs about death
and the different ways to acquire it
I tell stories
of how every band needs
at least one more dirty woman
I crone and the lights shake
with the power of my voice
I reach out to my legend
but he stays an arms length away

so I raise that arm and perform
so miraculous a solo
it heals every soul that hears it

and suddenly after so many
repeated prayers
it occurs to me that my crowds
are mirrors
that cannot reflect back the music

at thirty
oiled with sweat
I have given so much I am taken

after the show
people wearing sunglasses gather
under the palms

they are whispering
something that must be said
a thing barely overheard
about how ugly I am

and how I can't sing something
about how I'm no longer
the person I once claimed to be



The Drummer

I'm at the back left of the amps.
Even here girls seek me out.
My loves pound their fists in syncopated riffs.
The bitches could never keep time.
They think I am the thousand-mike-a-night-nova
that will die at twenty-eight.
I want more
but let them think that.

I grind bennies
between my teeth to stay awake.
I sit in shadows on stage and off.
When I can sleep I try to sleep
alone. I keep a yellow bulb
above the drums.

They keep coming back.
Wrapping their legs around me opening their arms and hands
wiping rouge over bruises.
They know what matters
is how fast I play.
They know what I cannot pound isn't real.

At the end of the show
I throw my sticks up
to break the light.
They fall in darkness
through sweating hands.
They clatter like fingers. They lie between the drums
and my lovers' feet.
Where I cannot reach them where everything is.



The Bass Player

I'm the human being of the group.
I actually read music.
And the curtain comes up
and this place
is a questionable place to be.
I sweat in the lights.
I shiver in the wind from the amps.
I thumb-slap the fat bass strings.
I have a fur of callous on my fingertips
and my nails will not bleed.

Lord, they worship me as if I were Christ.
Me, who sees the girl with gentle, thick hands
find a vein in her lovers senseless arm.
Me, who from the bottom of a syringe,
throws my head back
and screams through the throat of a needle.
Me, who knows this is Love.

I scatter my powder in a circle at the beginning of the song.
Thank you for thine protection, Lord.
Thank you for thine consolation.

I hold in my hands
all the crosses
where strings lay on frets.
I cut the strings
with wire cutters
and the music still rises like heat.

This is our language.
You have given us this world, Lord,
but the music is louder
than the words
of a man in pain.



About the author:
Kevin Conder lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and daughter. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines such as Quiddity, The Pedestal Magazine, North American Review, 2River View, Snow Monkey and The Pacific Review. Among other jobs, he has taught English to a variety of students from China, Yugoslavia and Russia while living in Stockholm, Sweden. ]]> We Are All Animals by Amanda Montei Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:09:37 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1925     Her hair was matted and her eyes sallow, she knew this, but she didn't much care. The beach was dirty, and she was running her hands through the sand, someone's aged cigarette butt between her thumb and forefinger. Jay wore a heavy suit and loafers and Sophia was more concerned with the cigarette, but when he passed her she found herself saying, "You'll never get the sand out of your shoes."
    Jay stopped. The gloaming shrouded his face like a burka and Sophia could only make out his eyes. Jittery, caffeinated, surprised, he looked to her and said, "I like that. It makes me feel connected." He sat beside her without invitation.
    It was understood that they were both looking for something, someone, and had found it in each other. They took their shoes off and scooped sand with them like children. When they finally stood, they smiled at each other and fitted their shoes, sand still inside them, over their numb and immobile toes, and they walked, their feet heavy, their bodies light.
    After the beach, Jay took Sophia into his loft, high in the sky above the city, and pointed out the bay, sailboats playing in the water. She told him that sometimes she thought in status updates, especially late at night. Sophia is: bored, content, brazen, quixotic, recumbent, neglected. She told him that this phenomenon had a direct effect on her daily attitude. On her overall, actual, in-the-flesh "status." She did not tell him that she felt this way nearly every minute of the day, or that she felt she was slipping into an imagined version of herself. She didn't want to scare him off.
    Now, every day, Sophia thought of Jay as a product, a commodity that she had ravenously and naively consumed. She felt the victim of false advertising. She had thought, when she first met him, that because he tolerated her, because he looked at her like a child, he understood her. She now knew this wasn't true. She also knew that there was nothing worse than loving someone who didn't understand you.
    Every night Jay poured Bordeaux for himself and Sophia drank Nyquil over ice with a maraschino cherry garnish because it was the only way she could get to sleep, although it made her feel common and weak to rely on something so unnatural. She read somewhere that color diversity tricked your palette, so that you think you are tasting something good, even when you are not. Like, for example, when you are drinking Nyquil. This was the reason for the cherry. The Nyquil was blue.
    So they spent their nights this way, and once a week, while Sophia flipped through Jay's leather-bound tomes and found laws that she thought were ridiculous, Jay proposed and Sophia refused.
    You're incapable of normalcy," he said once.
    "Sophia is incapable of normalcy," she said. "Good one."
    He looked hurt and she came to him, the fancy bracelet he bought her jingling on her bony wrist. She held onto it.
    "I want to touch something, do you get that? Not this," she said, holding up her arm. "Something you can't touch. That's what I want. To touch what you can't touch."
    Jay kissed her forehead and went back to his work. She felt very stupid.

    No elephants on Market Street without leashes. This was one of her favorites. She dreamed of one day convincing Jay to buy her an elephant. She would ride it through the city proudly, trampling streetcars and snapping their wires with her bare hands, until she was wrestled off by police and thrown into handcuffs.
    Sophia is: pugnacious!
    In the mornings, Sophia and Jay sat on the fire escape and drank coffee. She felt like a couple of plastic lawn ornaments up there, seething with hauteur. The buildings around them always seemed to be pushing the sky further up and away from her, the Transamerica building piercing the sky like a needle through cloth. She was sitting up there the day after it happened, a little mirror in her hand as she stroked black onto her lashes, and for the first time she felt vertigo.
    Makeup made Sophia feel like a prostitute, but like the Nyquil, mascara was a subterfuge. It quieted the voices, covered the reality. Maybelline Very Black was one of her few vices, and so she allowed herself the indulgence. Her hands shook and that irritated her, took all the fun out of it. Exasperated by the intricacy of the application, she often had the urge to write all over her face with the wand. B ut she thought, just maybe, he might say she looked beautiful. Maybe he'll think I have beautiful eyes. Maybe he'll think I'm born with it.
    "Petty petty pettifogger," she sang to Jay.
    She loved to call Jay a pettifogger. First, it was joke. Now, she meant it. It began when she found out he worked as a prosecutor. This was the day she began falling out of love with him. He suspected the nickname was a slight but didn't know what a pettifogger was and didn't care enough to find out. She hated that.
    "Is it petty fucker you call me?"
    He was clinking around inside and she was chewing the chalky edge of her coffee cup, cursing the artificial taste. She watched the people below but her vision was bad and everyone looked blurry and without end, fading into their surroundings.
    "When I say it," she said, "I picture an old fart." She did not tell him that more and more he was beginning to look like an old fart to her. His rough hands, which she once saw as strong and full of salvation, now felt pedophilic on her legs.
    She had eyeglasses, the fold up kind that come in little metal cases, the kind you buy at the drug store that only make your vision worse, but she rarely wore them. She simply could not justify spending more than $5.99 on eyeglasses. When she first bought them, Jay laughed and said she looked like an old woman. She found this ludicrously ironic but if ever he came around when she was wearing them, she jumped, ripped them off before he could see and played like she had never been wearing them.
    She began to put on her glasses but Jay came out on the fire escape so she lay them down, gave up on clarity, widened her tired, puffy eyes and tried to bat her lashes a bit. Her eyes felt dry and watery, and she couldn't stop squinting. She looked to her arm.
    "My skin is flaking," she said.
    "I'm used to it," Jay said. He opened his paper and smiled, then moved his hand along the top of her hair.
    Before she met Jay, she wouldn't use Downey. She thought fabric softener was just another prodigality. And besides, it irritated her skin. Made her feel tight all over and trapped in her own skin. Before she met Jay, she would rub organic Jojoba Oil on herself everyday. She'd get all greased up, slicked up, and then pat herself dry. She didn't want to look like she was trying. No way. She was just tired of being the boyish girl with her father's eczema.
    Sophia is: trapped in her own skin.
    But Jay needed his fabric softener. She said she could just feel her skin cracking up when she put on a sweater washed in the stuff. Her skin scrunched up and turned rosy and no amount of oil could sooth e her. Jay told her it looked like she had ringworm.
    "It's a Pyrrhic victory," she said. "This Downey thing."
    "You can wash your things separately," he said.
    "You'd rather me smell like Winter Breeze than feel comfortable?"
    "No," he said, dropping his paper. "I'd just rather smell like Winter Breeze than dirt. You want these crazy things when you live in the real world." She followed him inside. She felt lonely and regretted her flippancy.
    Jay was putting his lunch together in his way. It was something she used to love about him. It was always the same. He sliced one-half of a tomato and one-quarter of an onion daintily, stored what was left. He pre-measured his mayonnaise, one tablespoon only. He stowed his cottage cheese snack awkwardly in a Ziploc. She always did wonder how he ate that cheese out of a bag. But all she heard now, as he shoved his victuals into plastic, was that commercial. Your tuna salad sandwich is in it for three hours. But it's going to spend a lifetime in a landfill.
    "That's four," she said. "You just used four bags in under five minutes. Isn't that a little ridiculous?"
    The morning was slipping from her grasp. It was sour now.
    She didn't want to speak this way to him. It was a compulsion. If she didn't say anything now, she might call him up later, while he was at work, and say the same thing. And then, sorry I just had to get out. This was the way it worked for Sophia. It was on television, in the papers, on a sign, for minutes. But it was going to spend a lifetime in her head.
    "You're a little ridiculous," he said, licking his fingers. "Do you want to compare waste? Destruction? Oh, I think you've got me beat after yesterday."
    She vowed to stop using oil at all and to pump her clothes with Downey. Anything to keep him from touching her.

    Sophia sat on the toilet and drank four cups of coffee while Jay got ready for work.
    "I'm sick of hearing about the !Kung," she told him. "I'm sick of hearing professors stumble over the pronunciation. Why does everyone bring up that tribe? Just so they can sound as though they're trying to get their mouths around something they could never understand?"
    She plucked Jay's pumice stone off the edge of the bathtub. It was sea-green but graying with skin debris. She stuck her tongue out in disgust and she wished he could see her.
    Sophia is grossed out.
    She said, "What's so bad about sitting in court that you have to grind dead skin off the heals of your feet?" He laughed. She laughed too but she wanted an answer.
    "Do you think the Mac people are crazy for the !Kung too? I think they're trying to be clever, trying to make some profound tribal allusion by putting an 'i' in front of everything."
    "Baby," he said. "Why do you think of these things?"
    She laughed and then felt serious and said, "These are the things I can't get out of my head, Jay. It's like a freight train."
    "You just can't treat everyone like dumb animals," he said. "People have agency over themselves."
    "I'm not sure they do, Jay." She sighed. "I think it's this fucking class guilt. It's destroying me."
    "I can take it back."
    "What?"
    "All of it. You're spoiled."
    "I know, Jay," she said. "That's the whole deal."
    He pulled back the shower curtain and went for a towel. His skin was soft but it was old, so much older than hers, and she had the feeling that she was speaking to her father, though she had nearly forgotten what that was like.
    "You don't know what your whole deal is," Jay said.

    She followed him into the bedroom and watched him dress. She wanted more than anything to continue what she had started the night before. It was only when glass was breaking, when everything in the apartment looked ravaged, that she felt any sense of decency, any semblance of righteousness. She wished he had not cleaned everything up so quickly. He always found a way to tidy things that made sense to her.
    "I want to go away," she said. "I think we need that."
    "Why are you so restless?" he asked. "What about school?"
    "It's pointless. It's all stuff. 20Useless overuse of stuff. Anything I want to do, it has to do with wasting something, filling landfills. I don't want any of it."
    "Have you ever seen a landfill?" he said. "Why are you such good friends with them lately?"
    With him, she felt she was floundering. Her thoughts were muddled and nothing seemed clear except that she was unclear to him.
    Sophia is: regression.
    "You're going to buy another one, then?" she asked, and he was quiet, going for the door. She didn't push it, she felt too small.
    "Goodbye Sophia Plath," he said, kissing her forehead. He called her this because he said it always seemed like she wanted, really wanted, to stick her head in an oven.
    "I was thinking this morning I want to be a Greek," she said as she walked him to the door. Something light, she hoped, would keep her from feeling unsettled all day. "Is it a sacrilege if they carry you around on a chair and you're not Greek?"
    "Carry you around on a chair?" He was absent, gathering his things. She tried to bring him back.
    "Yeah, you know, they do that. At weddings. Seems anyone who carries around other people on chairs are my kind of folks."
    "Greek is not a religion."
    "Moot," she said. "It could still be a sacrilege. Like racism is a sacrilege. Like doing anything you weren't born into. Faking is a sacrilege."
    "So when you fake an orgasm?"
    "What can I say? I've been a rebel all my life."
    He kissed her forehead again and said, "Try not to stick your head in the oven while I'm gone."
    Sophia is: alone.

    When Sophia felt depressed, she ate a grilled cheese. Used about half a stick of butter, normally, to fry it. That morning, she watched a whole stick melt in the cast iron pan before she realized she had left the paper on. When Jay came home that night, the first thing he smelled when he walked in the door was the nutty smell of burnt butter.
    On her way to school, Sophia walked eight blocks through the Tenderloin to the MUNI. On bad days, she hated anyone who bumped into her, anyone who lay sleeping on the sidewalks, but she always toughed it out. It was an exercise in humility. On good days, she liked the way it felt to watch people being strange. On her walk that day, not long after the sandwich, a homeless man stopped in front of her, bent over, his ass crack in her face, and he puked. Briefly, it felt like a good day.
    She made Jay walk with her once. She wanted him to see the grimy raw streets like she saw them. They walked to Union Square, a short distance, and they saw a man crumpled in a doorway, his arm bleeding, his mouth nursing the wound like an animal. The sucking sounds were audible, the blood fresh, but they both ignored him. There was a weighty silence between them the whole way home. When they got inside the apartment, Jay said he didn't understand why she insisted on walking through such an awful part of town.
    Her bag was heavy with blank notebooks, dead trees. Sophia never took notes. She felt her shoulder blades reach backwards, towards each other, like they were trying to make love. The sun reflected off the sidewalk, smacked her face. A torrid haze hung above her, traveled thr ough her. An unkempt man was coughing and singing something at the same time. His clothes were threadbare, his face and hair weathered and layered with dirt, exhaust, distress. She took off her backpack, resigned.
    "Write a book," she said, dropping the bag in front of the man. He dug through the bag without ever looking up at her, his coarse voice still coughing and singing at the same time.
    She decided she would go to the penitentiary, ask the guards if they could find her one of the people Jay had put away. When she arrived, she found the building smoother than she expected. It was modern, like a museum. It curved and rippled around the corner of the block, hugging itself and the street like a ballet dancer. She sat cross-legged on the cold cement and stared up at the prison. She scratched the dry skin on her left palm until her lifeline bled. She remembered the night when, after she grew shaky in the bathtub, her heart palpitating with the thought of Jay fighting to put people in jail, she came to him naked and still dripping and slapped his chest.
    "They eat like queens there," he had said, grabbing her wrists. "They don't work, the women take cooking classes, they can't take drugs or do anything wrong. It's freedom in there."
    A guard approached her. She wiped the blood on her linen pants, busied her hand in her hair and laughed.
    "My hair must be a mess," she said. "You think I'm a crazy person."
    He said something, but her head was with the wind. It felt unusually loud and strong and pleasingly bitter.
    Sophia is: a crazy person.
    "My husband, he put a child away last week. Fifteen year-old kid who shot his father. For the rest of his life, that kid's in it. And he brought a big screen home yesterday."
    "How many inches?" the guard said, and seemed very amused with himself.
    "Can you just show me one person my husband put away?" The guard shifted his weight. "I just want to see if any of them still smile in there."
    He told her they had no way of knowing that sort of information. She was relieved.

    Some mornings, when the air was still blue and layered with misty fog, Sophia took the buses out to Golden Gate Park. She wandered through the barren trails and roads until the sun broke through the only real greenery in the city, until she smelled her own sweat and felt human again. That afternoon, she carried her surfboard through the city, out to the park, her face worn, her arms weak and tired. On the bus she could see herself in the window and she felt as though everything about her was new, was unknown. Was somehow there upon her without her ever remembering how it became.
    This late in the day, the air felt heavier, thick with exhaust and the smell of garlic and ginger from the Sunset. She liked to see the buffalo, although there were usually only one or two to be found. Today, they had a strange lethargic quality that made Sophia think they were fatally depressed by the smell of the offshore winds, the raw nature that was so close but forever out of their reach. One of them approached her, walked painfully towards the fence, and she felt her heart jump. She wanted him to come near, to touch her face and breath on her, to lick her face and swallow her whole and then his eyes fixed on her and she knew they were listening to the wind and the ocean together.
    But he grew tired of her and took a turn and she walked to the ocean and found her way into the water, where she was alone. The water was icy. Foamy and rough, it was wrestling with her. She climbed on the board, arched her back up to the sky like a yogi, pressed her stomach and jutting hipbones into the wood, the wax, and she floated over a hard wave. She choked. Her technique was bad.
    Her nose and throat were coated with seawater and her eyes and face stung from the salt, but it was only the lapping of the water she felt now. Only the burn in her arms, loud as a bird in her ear, that she heard. The wrestle had become a dance. She pulled herself through the wet, the dark, out into nothingness, and realized that for now, this was all she wanted. She didn't want to go back to the shore, didn't feel like coming out of the oblivion and into the daylight. After all, the sun was breaking through the clouds and it felt bright and bewildering. She could sleep out here, even with the horizon, eyes lost into the tenebrous water, hugging the board like a pillow, and water would fill her up, and that would be fine.

    Waiting for the bus back on Nineteenth Avenue, Sophia saw a semi dragging logs of fresh tree trunks through the city. They sped by her with no origin, no destination, and she thought she could hear her heart break.
    She stopped at a payphon e just outside of the apartment. Her hand stuck to the receiver and the mouthpiece was clogged with something crispy and orange. Jay didn't answer, but she spoke into the silence. We are all animals, she said. We are caged monkeys. Penned in buffalo on display.

     Her note was short: Dearest Pettifogger-- Sophia is: taking her head out of the oven. She left it in the pan with the butter.



About the author:
Amanda's fiction has previously appeared in The Northridge Review and Word Riot. She lives in Los Angeles and is a contributing writer for IAmThatGirl.com.

She is currently accumulating massive amounts of debt to earn her MFA in writing, but it's cool--she thinks writing is the bee's knees. ]]> Expecting by Claire Merle Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:09:07 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1932 him kick and give a little pat in return. We talk in code: 'I'm still here.' 'Everything's all right.' Sort of.
    We are late for the antenatal class. Discussions have started without us.
    'Et vous, Madame Enderson?' Madame Marco asks. 'Que'est ce que vous attendez de votre mari pendant l'accouchement?' What are you expecting of your husband during the labour? Encouragement, support, an intermediary between yourself and the doctor?'
    Yes please, I think. It all sounds great. Alex, are you listening?
    As though in response to my unspoken question, Alex's mobile beeps.
    'I just want him to be there,' I say. 'From the beginning to the end.' Madame Marco nods. Her little Egyptian cat earrings jingle.
    'Long as it's a Sunday,' Alex jokes, checking his phone.
    An overflow of rawness I've come to associate with 'my condition' gushes up through me. In the effort to hold back, my eyes burn like cut skin in the wind. I smile. Madame Marco looks puzzled.
    I think of my mother. Not my mother now – inaccessible, glass of white wine in one hand, prone to inexplicable crying fits – but my mother back around the time she stopped being the most important figure in my life. My father used to say Mum was only interested in being a mother, not a wife, not a companion or lover. Looking back, I don't think she was that interested in mothering either: burnt dinners, damp clothes forgotten in the washing machine, chasing us from the sitting room with the fire poker so that she could watch her soaps in peace, refusing to help us with our homework on the grounds that it wasn't ethical.
    'Depressed adolescent just walked in,' she said one evening to a pal, when I entered the kitchen after nine, wondering what on earth had happened to supper. I was starving.
    She was on the phone. The best bet if you were wondering where to find her. I opened up the oven and found burnt pork chops going cold on the grill. On the stove sat a giant pan of lumpy mashed potato.
    My mother laughed at something, mouth open, head thrown back showing her crooked teeth. Then she glanced over at me and said to her friend,
    'Gotta go. Call you back later.' Her bangles clunked into each other as she hung up the phone. I wafted away the cigarette smoke and held out the saucepan of potato.
    We are practicing first stage labour positions when Alex realizes the class is two hours long. I squat with my back pressed against his stomach. His arms stick out like rods beneath my armpits.
    'Two hours!' he says. 'I could swim across the Channel in less time. I'm not going to have to stay like this for two hours, am I?'
    'I told you it was from seven till nine. Mr. Selective Hearing.'
    'What?'
    'This is another example. You're filtering me out, Alex.'
    'Well if you did tell me, you didn't do it when I was listening.'
    Precisely.
    'Can't you take more of the weight?'
    'Stop pissing about.'
    'I'm not really going to have to do any of this though, am I?' I shoot him a warning look. He shuts up.
    We sit on the floor to try another position. I lean against Alex with my knees wide apart and drawn up towards my chest. Alex puts his arms around my waist.
    'As you breathe out,' Madame Marco says, 'the Papas can push the baby up and over to help it down into the pelvis.' I exhale. Alex begins to huff and puff, exaggerated, like a kid.
    'Come on!' he says to me. 'Breathe!' I squint back at him suspiciously. My husband is very clever. Perhaps he's trying to get off the hook, have me ban him from the birth in a spasm of irritation. Then it wouldn't matter which day of the week I went into labour. He could just turn up after a day's filming, light a cigar and phone all his friends.
    'Well,' he says in French, when we've been through the exercise several times and he's breathless. 'I think we'll need to book two beds at the clinic.'
    'Two beds?' Madame Marco asks.
    'Absolutely. After all that, I'm going to need somewhere to lie down too.' Everyone laughs. Except me. My heart starts pounding. I feel queasy.
    'This isn't something you choose, you know,' my mother said, turning her back on my sourpuss face and the mashed potato. 'You'll see. It's inevitable.'
    'Inevitable is spaghetti bolognaise on a Wednesday night.'
    'If you don't like the menu, just change hotel.'
    'Isn't Dad home yet?' I asked. A provocative tactic, because I knew my father was working late. (And though I was only twelve, I strongly suspected he was up to something he shouldn't be.) My mother's face dropped.
    'As this obviously isn't up to your high standards, and your sister hasn't bothered to put in an appearance, I know just what to do with it.' She snatched the pan from me, slid back the French kitchen door and hurled the whole thing onto the lawn. A large glob of potato flicked up into the air, then splattered on the compact earth of an empty flower-bed.
    I was startled. I wouldn't have been more startled, if she'd just slapped me across the face.
    Next, she began battling with the grill tray, her violent, jerky movements catching the tray on its support rungs. A pork chop fell through. It disappeared into a thick, opaque layer of grease. Another fell on the floor. She still hadn't got the grill out of the oven.
    'Bugger it anyway!' she said. She grabbed the remaining two chops with her fingers and squashed them down into the overflowing bin.
    My shock turned to anger. I'd waited bloody hours for something to eat. I folded my arms across my chest and stared at my mother with a cold, critical eye.
    She lit another cigarette, and turned away shaking her head. Her hair fell into her eyes. Leaning against the sink, she pressed one hand into her forehead.
    Was she about to cry?
    'Sorry,' I mumbled.
    'Oh, bugger off.'
    The words punched towards me, but didn't impact. I'd had the chance to steel myself since her first outburst. A cool shade of disdain tinged my mood. I noted the awful red lipstick smeared across her wine glass; her thick purple eye shadow – almost comical, almost tragic; the fat oozing from those frumpy leggings she thought were trendy.
    Without another word, I turned and left the kitchen.
    'Two beds,' Alex translates, thinking because I'm not laughing like everyone else, I haven't understood. 'So that I can lie down too.'
    'Actually, I got it,' I say.
    I've had enough of all this. If this is what I can expect from him during the labour, forget it, I'd rather he wasn't there.
    I get up off the floor and waddle over to the coat rack where my bag and poncho are hanging. After a pause, where the two other men stop rolling their wives bellies and everyone turns to watch, Alex bounds over.
    'Everything all right?' he asks.
    'Oh bugger off,' I say.
    I hook my poncho over my head and take a moment to arrange it. Then I head for the exit. Alex doesn't try to stop me. So I leave. Down the stairwell. Through the bobble glass doors. Into the night.
    On the other side of the car park is the main road. An occasional vehicle whooshes past. I don't know where the bus stop is. I don't even know if there is a bus that can take me back to rond point Rhin et Danube. I hesitate. The stone beneath my slip-ons is having a grounding effect. Incoming code: two kicks. 'What's going on?' I circle my palm over tiny, invisible feet. 'Sorry about that.'
    After leaving my mother in the kitchen, I lay on my bed battling with the hunger pains. I could have gone down and made some toast and pretended nothing had happened. But I was angry. I wanted her to know I was angry and starving myself was the only thing I could think of to show her. I couldn't understand why she resented us all so much. Nobody had put a gun to her head and forced her to marry my father. Nobody had told her she had to have children. Why couldn't she just make the most of it, or do something about it? It was her life, wasn't it?
    And now, standing in the car park, an inkling of how my mother got to that place creeps over me. It turns out my perfect husband isn't perfect, after all. I have been misled. Or possibly I misled myself. Either way, it is obvious that Alex is going to be absolutely useless in the birth. There's nothing to suggest he'll be any better at changing nappies or getting up in the middle of the night to rock the baby back to sleep. Can I accept this and get on with it? Will one comprimise lead to another?
    Behind me, someone clicks down the concrete stairwell. I turn. It's Alex.
    'Babe?' he says.
    'I think I should go back to England for the birth.'
    'Don't be silly, hon.' He takes my hands in his. He unlocks my closed fists and kisses my palms. 'It's going to be fine. You just have to breath.' It is a desperate joke. I can't smile.
    'Come here,' he says. He wraps his arms around me and draws me in. The baby kicks hard. Alex's eyes smile.
    'I understood that one,' he says. I just look at him. 'He's telling me to behave or I'm going to get into trouble.'
    'You idiot,' I mutter. 'You'll never crack the code.'
    Wind blows through the crocheted holes of my poncho, sending a shiver down my back. Alex wraps his arms around me and draws me in. I feel his warmth and smell the airy scent of his cologne. I press myself closer.



About the author:
Claire Merle lives in France with her husband and two young children. She has previously been published in Literary Mama, and her novel Losing Laura was a semifinalist in the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. ]]> Fishbowl by Melanie Haney Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:06:24 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1930 Like what happened to Slippy, our son says with a grave nod. Slippy the goldfish, Rest in Peace. Alistair sees the world as having grave consequences, for fish, for boats.
    I tell him that the plastic boats in our tub are safe and cannot slide down the drain or turn belly side up as he sleeps. What about boats in the ocean? He asks, and fishes too?
    Through the wall, I hear you clicking through channels and I don't know what to tell our son about watery graves or how fish carcasses smell when they wash up on shore.
    Don't worry about it baby, is the best I can do.
    He's four and from his throne of bubbles he raises his brow at me, and I know that he knows I'm full of it.

***



    We eat dinner after Alistair goes to bed. On folding tray tables, I set our places with purple fiesta ware and paper napkins and then wait for our Chinese food to arrive.
    I know we shouldn't be ordering take out, that we're on a budget, but it's our anniversary, I tell you. You haven't combed your hair today, but I kiss your cheek and tell you that you're handsome when I stand to answer the doorbell.
    We eat lo mien and Kung Pow Chicken and I throw our fortunes away with packets of duck sauce and plastic utensils.

***



    There were things left behind that I would like to have – the soft cardigan I wore in front of the fire, the leather journal I left on the nightstand or the paperback I wasn't finished reading, the ribbon trimmed blanket from the back bedroom.
    But I won't go without you, and most days you won't even shower or put forth the pretense of effort.
    We haven't been back there since Alistair was born. I sometimes wonder if it even still exists or if it has been overrun by mold or dust or if seagulls have broken in and made it their home. It's hard to imagine that it could still be there, without us to open the door and give it purpose.

***



    I'm thinking of getting Alistair a new fish, I tell you in the morning. Alistair grins from above his bowl of Cheerio's, milk dribbling down his chin. I know you don't care one way or the other, but it makes me feel normal to talk to you like you might.
    And then you surprise me with a nod.
    As I load our coffee cups into the dishwasher, you ask Alistair what type of fish he'd like to get and I have to face the cabinets for a minute so that our son won't see me starting to cry.

***



    You proposed to me at the beach, down by the rocks. At a card table covered in a red and white checkered cloth, we drank champagne from plastic cups and watched the tide pull away. We walked down to the wet sand and plucked shells from their watery burials. I brought them back to the cottage with us and placed them on the sill above the sink.

***



    At the pet store, you linger behind Alistair and I. The wall of fish tanks is as tall as the ceiling. Our reflections wobble on the glass and I reach back to hold your hand. I want you to know that you are here, with us, standing in a mall pet shop beneath florescent lights.
    He falls in love with an iridescent Beta and we bring it home in a clear plastic bag.

***



    I remember waving to you both from the screen door. She was wearing jelly sandals that had turned brown from the sand and a bathing suit the color of mango. After nearly five years, the memory of her turning to smile and wave is starting to fade and some days I wonder if she ever looked back at all.
    You're the one who last held her hand, and I know that the memory of her palm sliding away from yours is one you can't escape. Though at the time, it was only a sand castle, and she was only letting go of you to reach for her pail.
    You've told me about the man, down by the rocks where you sat and watched her fill her pail with wet sand. You told me about his skinny tattooed arms and that white t-shirt with the giant parrot head on it. The shirt they found her wearing three days later when they dragged her body from the seaweed. Her name was Madelyn and she had just turned five.

***



    I kiss our sons forehead. He has hair the color of wheat and a creamy complexion. His eyes are hazel and he looks nothing like the strawberry blonde sister he doesn't even know he had.
    It was late July and we had just learned that I was expecting him, when it happened.
    At three in the morning, as I lay awake beside your still body, I have to stop myself from wondering, what if I hadn't been pregnant? What if I had felt up for the walk down to the rocks with you? Could I have saved her? Could I have saved any of us?
    You've told me that the man in the parrot shirt offered you a beer. The scratchy quality of his voice, the black design of thorns twisting over his forearm, his calloused hand, his stubby nails, chewed to the quick. These are the last things you remember and your brain loops back to them, like a skipping record.
    I kiss Alistair again on the forehead and he asks for a song to fall asleep. I can't think of a lullaby, so we sing the ABC's over and over. I stay until even after he has fallen asleep and it's only my voice humming in the dark.

***



    Today was a good day, I tell you after I do our dinner dishes.
    You're staring at the fish bowl and I bend down to see your eyes through the glass. I see you. You see me. We are disproportionate and wavering – and in the slippery flash of a fish tail you're drawn away again. But for that small moment, we were together in the wobbling space between. My knees crack as I stand back upright.
    Be careful with this one, I say and touch your shoulder as I go.



About the author:
Melanie Haney holds her MFA from Lesley University. She has been the winner of the Family Circle Magazine Fiction Award and the Ann Arbor Book Festival Short Story Competition. She has been nominated for a pushcart prize and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Family Circle Magazine, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Blue Earth Review, Eureka Literary Magazine, Relief Journal, The Summerset Review, Quality Fiction, JMWW, elimae and other venues. Melanie lives in Southern NH with her husband and three children under the age of five. She writes to maintain her sanity. Her first collection of stories, The Simplest of Acts is available on Amazon. http://melaniehaney.blogspot.com

]]> In My Office—Now! by D. E. Fredd Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:05:42 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1929     Unfortunately Mr. Hickman is on my case. He thinks it's unprofessional. If I'm that tired, I should go the bed earlier. What if everyone took a nap anytime they felt like it? How long would the company be in business? What would the "suits" from corporate think when they drop by unannounced as they often do? As the senior manager his head would roll.

Memo of October 9th

To: Staff

From: J. J. Hickman

Re: Office Decorum

Effectively immediately workstations are not considered as an extension of one's home. Personal items should be limited to those needed to do the job. Beverages should have a top and kept three feet away from valuable computer and other electrical components. Feet upon the desk, napping or anything other than professional posture will be grounds for a lowered personnel evaluation

***


    If he wants to press the unprofessional behavior button, what about that stupid dog of his. It's one of those yappy things with bug-eyes on the outside of its head. He has a basket for it in his office, but the mutt roams around begging food and looking for crotches to sniff. Phil Nevins says it pees on a table leg in the meeting room.
    The entire sixth floor belongs to the Boston branch of the Marquis Design Group. We're on Horford Street in the Back Bay. The office is laid out like a four-way intersection. At its center is J. J. Hickman's office, our ever alert traffic cop. Each row has four cubicles that radiate out from him in each compass direction. I'm in section "D." The four of us work as a team. We do a lot of magazine work as well as commercial brochures. I'm the farthest away from Hickman, in his blind spot really, so he has to get up and come halfway down the aisle to check on me. The cubicle in front of me is Supria Gupta's. He's got a thing for her so his inspection trips have a twofold mission—nail me for something and check out her cleavage. She nukes her native Indian cuisine in the microwave. The stench puts our break room out of commission for days. That's why I'm forced to pack a lunch, eat at my desk and use the rest of the time to relax. But does she ever get spoken to about the smell or anything?

Memo of November 4th

To: Staff

From: J. J. Hickman

Re: Eating on premises

Effective immediately all food consumption will be done off site or in the break room. This applies to the morning and afternoon breaks as well as lunch. No eating of snacks or lunch will be done at work stations.

***


    We formed a committee and protested to Hickman's last memo. Nothing happened. And why do you think that was? He's so sweet on Gupta that he ignores the odor issue. "The boss is always right even when he's wrong" is what the office motto is. Because of Hickman's Gupta infatuation I now have to eat out which costs a fortune. Sure he's married. He calls his beloved Gwen before he leaves the office and makes those disgusting lip smacks after professing his love. I've met Gwen. She's okay for late middle age, not my type, very talky and a little too thick in the thigh and rear end area for my taste.
    Supria is built that way too, a younger, more exotic version of Gwen. Evidently that's his type. Several times a day he comes down our aisle to see her. It makes him feel powerful to lord his senior manager duties in front of her. He always checks my workspace, looking for something wrong. When he can't, he nitpicks. When's my Edgemere Condo project going to be done? Show him the design draft on the screen instead of printing it out. Toner costs money. I shouldn't take my shoes off. This is an office, not a lounge. And he bites his lip, wanting to say something about the photos on the wall as we have a "don't decorate your cube" policy, but always stops himself.

***


    I began with the company as their "in city" bike messenger. I was getting a Master's in graphic design at night. A year later I submitted a portfolio, and they hired me. A few months after that I got wind through the grapevine of deep budget cut and big time layoffs based on seniority. As the last hired, I figured I was done.
    I work a few nights and weekends at a chain drug store on Boylston Street. I'm a photo specialist. Don't kid yourself; I had no training for it. One morning they took me away from stocking shelves and handed me a laminated badge that said "photo specialist." After sixty days, if no one picks up their pictures, we are supposed to toss them. I usually keep them. It's something to look at while I'm on the john or during TV commercials. They are the usual stupid family shots, cookouts and holiday stuff. Every once in a while something racy pops up. One day I found some shots of a pretty lady about my age who was evidently undergoing chemotherapy. Her head was covered in a blue bandanna and there were big, dark circles beneath her eyes. Two cute kids were with her; sometimes they were hugging her and at others they were standing near a cake. It was somebody's birthday, maybe the mother's, because there was just one candle. It was very sad, but there was a Madonna-like quality to the pictures. This was art, not some dumb weekend snapshots.
    I kept the pictures, got a frame and made a display out of them. I kept them on my desk. This was just before we went to cubicles. I never said anything. People just assumed the array was of my wife and kids. The layoffs came and, even though I was junior to a few people, they got the ax and I didn't. How cruel would a company look in the press if they laid off a family guy whose wife was battling cancer? Someone must have spoken to Human Resources about the photo display because they agreed to allow me to keep them in my cube. I'm the only employee in the entire company with photos hung on my wall. People stop by, nod to the frame and ask me how I'm coping. "As well as can be expected," is my stock reply as I look off towards the middle distance.
    I tell colleagues that my kids are very bright and go to a private school. They stay with my wife's parents way out in Montana, which is why they never come to the office for Halloween or those father-daughter/son deals. I know it's stupid, but so far it has kept me employed at a decent job that's paying me over $95,000 a year during very tough economic times. I'm virtually exempt from layoffs or being fired as long as I'm not a total screw-up. At times I feel guilty so I've considered having my wife finally die, but that would present all sorts of issues. The office is close-knit, and they'd all want to attend the funeral. Talk about painting yourself into a corner.

***


Memo of December 1st

To: Staff

From: J. J. Hickman

Re: Christmas party

Our annual holiday celebration will be held in the Longfellow Room at the Hotel Wentworth on December 13th from 6:00 to 10:00 PM. Wives, significant others and family members are welcome. Remember to drink responsibly and respect other cultures and their beliefs.

***


    I've been toying with the idea of asking Gupta to go with me. I could explain that my wife is in a hospice, and I am so depressed by the circumstances that I don't want to be alone. We could go as friends, maybe rent a limo so we could booze it up. But do Hindus even drink? Anyway an official date might create all sorts of problems so I think I'll just go stag and grind away at her on the dance floor. My main objective is to have Hickman see me with his beloved. She laughs at all my jokes at work so that gives me a leg up. J. J. will be shackled by the fabulous Gwen so his hands are tied. The following week I might even spread the rumor that Gupta and I went back to her place and I stayed the night. All I have to do is tell Phil Kravitz and the word will get back to J. J. faster than if I hired a skywriter.

***


Memo of December 16th

To: Staff

From: J. J. Hickman

Re: Intimate office relationships

Human Resources in Central Office wish me to remind you of their policy (attached) regarding office dating and romances. Pay particular attention to Section 14 paragraph 2 which discusses the deleterious effect a break up can have on office morale. Ninety percent of office liaisons fail!

***


     I only danced with Gupta twice, but that was evidently enough for Hickman to see red. We sat at the same table with him and Gwen. As any gentlemen would, I went to the buffet table a few times to fill Supria's plate. She was very consoling when I told her my wife was near death. I managed a few crocodile tears and got a hug from her. That's what J. J. probably saw. Incidentally Hindu scripture doesn't take kindly to liquor but most drink anyway. Supria likes gin and tonics which I had the bartender make with Bombay gin. She is fun to be around. I sense a funeral on the horizon.

***


Memo of January 10th

To: Staff:

From: J. J. Hickman

Re: Funeral

Our thought and prayers go out to graphic designer Donald Fraley whose wife Joan passed away peacefully over the weekend after a long and courageous battle with cancer. Donald will be away from his desk for a week while he attends to details out in Montana. Management has suggested that anything we can do to pick up the slack on his projects and, upon his return, help him get through these difficult times, would be greatly appreciated.

***


I did go to Montana. It cost a fortune. I thought about Vegas because of cheaper flights on Southwest, but with my luck someone might get wind of it. What a hole. I stayed five snowbound nights at the Holiday Inn in Bozeman watching basic cable. Their brochure touted over fifty vending machines for guests' convenience, wow! I called Supria each night. We chatted about work at first, but then I went into some burial stuff. I attended my grandmother's funeral years ago. I gambled things hadn't changed much so I used that as my base experience. I felt her out about Hickman, and she seemed surprised that he was interested in her. Anyway, I'm sure I don't have to worry about him as a rival. He's twice her age and then some.

***


People at work have been very kind. When I got back there was a huge bagel and fruit basket on my desk. Flowers were sent to the Anderson funeral home in Bozeman as well. They're probably still scratching their heads out in Big Sky country. Supria came over to my apartment and seemed surprised that I'd cleared out all vestiges of my wife. I told her, since I knew Joan's end was coming, I'd done it before she passed because it would be too emotional for me when it really happened. The only things I have left are my office pictures. Looking at my kids gives me a reason to go on.
    It wasn't hard to act subdued and depressed because that's my basic, fatalistic nature. It worked out well for me as Supria and I finally slept together at the end of the second week. It may have been sympathy sex, but it was very good. She is like one of those middle class row houses you see block after block. They don't look like much from the outside, but once you get inside, you're pleasantly surprised at how nicely it's decorated. I thought Indian people might be very conservative sexually, but that is definitely not the case. I told her beforehand that it was five years since I'd had sex in case I didn't do it very well. She was very complimentary.
    It's now very hard for me to see her at work every day knowing how she looks naked. Yesterday she was coming back from her break hiding a cup of tea from Hickman's prying eyes. I got up from my seat, looked over the top of my cube and gave her the "shame on you" sign. She gave me a little breast shake followed by a bump and grind. Wow! We've started sending each other inter-office memos that are quite racy.

Memo:

To: D Fraley:

From: S. Gupta

Re: Future Meetings

Pursuant to our oral conference of May 7th, some details need to be addressed. Recommend further congress to accomplish goals as outlined in missionary statements. Bring manual regarding position papers. I am very passionate about this project and open to suggestions as to how to improve it to our mutual satisfaction.

***


    My kids are a huge problem. Supria doesn't understand why I don't have more contact with them. I thought about telling her that Jimmy caught autism and has to wear a bicycle helmet even in bed. Little Jane is a tiny bit mongoloid, probably because of all the cancer drugs Joan had to take. Supria picks up their photos and says she's dying to meet them. "When can we go out to Montana to see them?"
    Since they don't look like loonies in their pictures, I've decided to go with the concept that my in-laws are very spiteful people and want full custody. That's why I have to keep my part-time job at the drug store. The legal bills are as overwhelming as was Joan's medical care, which I'm still paying for. I get a lot of sympathy sex from Supria. She is a very compassionate person. I really like her. We have great fun together. When we rent DVDs she likes to sing the words to the FBI Warning to different melodies.

***


    I'm not sleeping that well. I don't know how much longer I can keep making up stuff. My house of cards is bound to collapse. I stupidly think each lie will get me out of the fix I'm in, but the stories only add to my getting caught. It's very difficult to keep track of what I tell people. I've thought about making a spreadsheet, but what if someone finds it. Then I'm really cooked. I'm like a gambler who lost $1500 on the first race and maxes out all the credit cards to get it back. Forget winning--I don't want to lose this job that pays very well and now Supria who has captivated my life.

***


    We think that a few in the office might suspect that we are an item, Mary Ann Frobusher for one. If she goes to Hickman, we're done for so I volunteer to be the sacrificial lamb to quash any gossip about our relationship. As planned Supria went to J. J. and pretended to rat me out. She said I was using my personal laptop to listen to radio programs over the internet. She didn't really mind except that my headphones "leaked" the strange music and spoiled her concentration. He came by forthwith.
    "Do you have a laptop here, Fraley?"
    "It's in a case over in the far corner, Mr. H. I'm taking a night course and need it for notes. Is something wrong?"
    "You're not listening to music while you work, are you?"
    "During my breaks I enjoy Tibetan throat chant recordings. It's something that helped Joan deal with her pain, and I found it soothing as well. Sometimes I hum to myself; a bad habit I got into living alone so much. But I'll stop. I don't want to cause any problems."

***


Memo of May 12th

To: Staff:

From: J. J. Hickman

Re: Efficiency

A. The use of personal electronic devices (iPods, Walkman, laptops, cell phones, etc.) is strictly forbidden at the workstations. It would be best if said were not brought into the building. Before work, during breaks or after hours, if you must use these items, please do so in the lobby, at the company picnic table during good weather or your car.

B. Since the break room can only hold eight comfortably I have made up the following schedule. Those in Column A will take their breaks from 9:45 to 10:00 while Column B is assigned the 10:05 to 10:20 slot. Afternoons will reverse that with Column B going first. Any changes must be made through me.

C. It has come to my attention that some of you are using company electricity to charge laptops, cell phones and other electronic devices. This will cease immediately. The administration considers such action as theft of services and appropriate consequences, including termination, will follow if perpetrators are caught.

***


    Needless to say Supria and I are not on the same break schedule. Yesterday Hickman brought coffee cake he says he made and invited Supria to partake of it in his office. A rumor was spread, through my usual channel, that Hindu women do not wear underwear. Supria wore her "well above the knee" denim skirt. After cake Hickman made several consulting trips down the aisle which entailed Supria's getting up and sitting back down again. Each time, after he left, she peeked over the wall and gave me a wink.

***


    Supria stays at my apartment most nights because she has a roommate, and we have very little privacy over there. She keeps her stuff in what I claimed was Joan's old closet and is very insistent about meeting my kids. She has two weeks vacation coming up in July. The office never allows people from the same team to be out at the same time, but she thinks I might be able to make a strong case if I say I'm going to do legal battle out in Montana. She has a cousin who was a lawyer back in India. He can't practice here, but he can give me advice. She wants to help as I've suffered so much. She begins to cry and holds their pictures. Do I have any recent snapshots? My in-laws can't be that cruel to deprive me of photos. When are their birthdays? I am pinned down by her rapid fire questions. I make up a few dates on the spot but immediately regret it because I know I'll forget. She wants to know what Jane likes—books? dolls? video games? There's an American Doll store out in the Natick Mall. She'd love to take Jane there.
    I am drowning in this conversation, so desperate that I switch the topic to her relatives. When can I meet them? She quickly forgets my kids and kisses me. She'd love to introduce me to her family. Her mother's birthday is in two weeks. They always have a big party. Indians love to party. There will be so much food I won't believe it. Her first cousin dated an American. The match ended when he borrowed $2500 for an H & R Block training course then ran away to Daytona Beach for Bike Week. I should be prepared to undergo a barrage of questions, especially from her mother. Her dad never says much and pretends he doesn't know English, but he really does. My clothes are terrible so we'll go shopping to find the right outfit.

***


    It's our Thursday night ritual to watch The Office TV show. Supria identifies with Pam, the Jenna Fisher character, while I play Jon Krasinski's Jim. Mr. Hickman is Dwight in her tableau and not Steve Carrel for some reason. The Indian girl, Kelly Kapoor, is never mentioned except for her being an airhead. I think that casting bothers Supria. After each episode we plan hoaxes we can play on Mr. Hickman, the recharging of computer batteries using company power being one. We then have great sex, dedicating each orgasm to various colleagues and clandestinely putting a red carnation on their desks the following day. This morning Mr. Hickman found a lovely arrangement of three flowers in his coffee mug.

Memo of June 9th

To: Staff:

From: J. J. Hickman

Re: Appreciation, tokens thereof

It has come to my attention that someone has been leaving flowers on the desk of a few employees. On the surface this might seem as a pleasant enough gesture, but it has left some designers feeling left out as they have not been so honored. While I personally revel in nature's bounty, especially the beautiful flowers I have received, I cannot condone any more occurrences. As of this moment such actions, however heartfelt they might be, will cease. Central office has approved the use of surveillance cameras in the workspace, break room and front lobby which will be installed over the weekend.

***


    I tried to get out of meeting the Gupta clan by suggesting that our office romance might well come out into the open. Supria said she didn't care any more. She was tired of pretending to hide her feelings. Many times during the workday she just wanted to hug me to death, hold hands or eat lunch with the same intimacy we do at breakfast and supper in my apartment. She also declared that she'd fallen in love with me. After a brief delay, I responded in kind. The "L" word was later used many times in the bedroom by both of us.
    I've seen movies where one partner says, "There's nothing you can say or do that will stop me from loving you." My gut tells me that, if I come clean about my fictitious family and the reasons I invented them, Supria may never speak to me again. I will lose her and my job. My big lie eats at me. I finally decided to tell her right after we watched a new The Office episode because she's always in a great mood. Just my luck—Jim Halpert drives to New York in the pouring rain and finally proposes to Pam. Talk about uncomfortable silence. I went to make a cheese sandwich. Supria spent time in the bathroom. I could tell she was crying. I didn't know if she was happy for Pam and Jim or sad because I've never mentioned marriage.

***


    On Friday I went to Howie's New and Used Anything store in West Roxbury. I picked up a Claddagh ring for thirty bucks. That night I had to work at the drug store until ten. As fate would have it, it was pouring rain when she came to pick me up. She was in a rather foul mood until I gave her to box. She's wasn't too clear as to what it meant so I had to explain. I went with the right hand design facing inward deal, meaning that she had captured my heart. She wondered why I'd give her an Irish ring; wasn't I saying the other evening how most of my ancestors immigrated from France eons ago. The night and my romantic gesture wasn't a total failure, but obviously she was hoping for much, much more.
    The next day we were to spend the afternoon at her parents' home. I hadn't worn a suit in years, and I knew I'd roast in the July heat. On the drive out to Central Massachusetts we talked. She wanted to quit Marquis Design. I was the better designer anyway, in fact, one of the best the company had. She suggested we move in together; we were practically living as a couple anyway. She knew her parents would object, but she didn't care. She didn't think her parents were happy. It was an arranged marriage. She had been happier in the past six months than her mother ever was.
    I listened. I wanted to pull over and let it all out, vomit up all the crazy stories I'd concocted. It would be painful now, but, like cutting off a gangrenous arm, it might save my life. Yet I kept silent save to nod in agreement to most everything she said.
    I was the only one in a jacket and tie. The older people dressed as traditional Indians do; the younger relatives wore the latest cool fashions from the mall as they kicked a soccer ball around the wide yard. Despite the heat Supria danced with her female relatives. I admire her "let it all hang out" spirit. She could totally immerse herself in the present moment. We went to a baseball game once, a sport she knew nothing about, and within five minutes, she was cheering the Red Sox successes and agonizing when things went awry.
    Evidently she told some cousins about us, displaying and explaining the ring's various meanings as if it were a sacred relic. They later came over with congratulations and teased me with some rather suggestive remarks. One cousin jokingly offered herself as a backup plan if things if I ever got tired of Supria.
    When we began the ride home, Supria was in high spirits. Her parents were against us getting together but not in a strong way. She could bring them around. I kept selecting mile markers up ahead as a signal to confess---Leominster came and went, then I picked the Concord rotary. That came and went as well. Finally, near Walden Pond, I began with the infamous phrase, "There's something I need to tell you."
    I'd rehearsed it many times. I had it ordered in my mind, step by step, point by chronological point garnished with lame excuses. None of that happened. It came out automatic weapon style. I just pulled the verbal the trigger once, and the words shot out. I kept two hands on the wheel, eyes directly on the road and drove. By the time we reached Fresh Pond Circle I was done, and she wanted out of the car.
    "You are a beast."
    "I know."
    "You did it all to keep a crummy job. You hate your job. How many times have you told me that?"
    "I don't 'hate' hate it. The money is good and I enjoy graphic design. And since I've gotten to know you, I like it much more."
    "But all those people who we laid off instead of you. Larry Bayless, Jimmy Auerbach and Peggy Noonan—I was in her wedding for god's sake. And you accepted donations and sympathy cards—how, how—I can't even think of a word to describe how low that is."
    "If it will make you happy, I've been compiling a list like Earl does on his My Name Is Earl show right before The Office. I'm going to find those people, make it right and cross them off."
    "And what about the real woman in the pictures, Joan and her two kids, if that was really her name?"
    "I'll take out an ad in the Boston Globe. I don't know any names. I made them up, but I'll find out what happened to them and make amends."
    "And me?"
    "I'm leaving Marquis Design. I'll go in tomorrow, Sunday, and drop my confession on Hickman's desk. I'll tell him everything. I don't even want my last two weeks pay or vacation time. Donate it to charity. I won't mention you so no one will know that we hooked up."
    "You don't have the guts to tell him or the entire office face to face on Monday, do you?"
    "If you think that would be better or help you out, I'll do it."
    She was twisting her Claddagh ring, trying to get it off. "I already blabbed about us to Shelly in reception so most people except Hickman probably know. Your making a speech is not going to lessen my humiliation one bit. They probably think I'm your accomplice."
    "When you get the ring off, you could put in on your left hand with the design facing outward."
    "Are you proposing? You're actually suggesting, at this very moment, that I marry you?"
    "I guess so."
    "Let me get this straight. You've just admitted that you're a ghoul, confidence man and thief who has ruined countless lives, including mine and then you have the gall to ask me to marry you!"
    "I'd understand if you wanted some time to think about it."
    "I can't believe this is happening to me. It can't be real. This is a joke right?"

***


    I dropped her off at her apartment. She had my key and could get her stuff later whenever it suited her. I spent the evening working on a memo to Hickman and my section mates. I went through a few drafts. I was trying to excuse what I did, perhaps soften the sharp edges of my misdeeds. Around ten I said to hell with it and put forth the facts in a straightforward manner.

***


    Confessions are overrated. I didn't feel any better, worse in fact. I barely slept. The next morning I went into the office, put the evidence on J. J.'s desk and sat in my cubicle one last time. There really wasn't much to clean out—a few pens and my appointment calendar—oh, yes, my photos of Joan and the kids. They'd gotten me into this mess, but I saw no need to destroy them. I'd keep them as a reminder of, if and when things got better, how low I had sunk.

***


Memo Mori of July 19th

To: D. Fraley

From: HR (the Human Race)

Re: Expulsion from the family of man

Having been made aware of your behavior during the past three plus years, we have no other choice but to categorize you as an RA, Rectal Aperture, (asshole in lay man's terms). In centuries gone by this would be an offense punishable by branding or stoning. Alas, in these enlightened times, we can only stand back and enjoy the view as you grapple with your conscience, attempt to look yourself in the eye each morning or find some surcease in sleep every evening. It is also our strongest recommendation that you vacate Boston, the Eastern seaboard, indeed the entire Continental shelf, as quickly as possible. May we suggest Montana? We understand Bozeman's nice this time of year.



About the author:
D. E. Fredd lives in Townsend, Massachusetts. He has had over one hundred short stories and poetry published in several journals. He received the Theodore Hoepfner Award given by the Southern Humanities Review for the best short fiction of 2005 and was a 2006 Ontario Award Finalist. He won the 2006 Black River Chapbook Competition and received a 2007 Pushcart Special Mention Award. He has been included in the Million Writers Award of Notable Stories for 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. ]]> Rejection by Simon Barker Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:05:05 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1961 Listen to Simon Barker read 'Rejection'

"If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water, convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would never accept such odds if there were no lion." Christiaan Barnard
In Heidi's pigeonhole was an aerogram from her mother announcing that she needed a heart transplant. Her heart had been failing throughout her life. Now she could barely make it to the car after Heidi's father took her for hospital checkups.
    My Darling Heidi,
    Your father has persuaded me that I must have the operation. Would you be so kind as to consult Professor Dawes about the current situation? Your father and I have done our best to keep up with the literature but since he retired they have not issued him with a new library card. Please do this for me as my health is not good at the moment.
    Heidi opened her bag, stuffed the letter inside and took out the last of her sample zinc pills. Once a month her mother dispatched these miserable letters. Only cheerful replies were permitted. Normally Heidi asked her husband to ghost write. But lately her husband had not been in the writing mood.

This month an unscheduled letter arrived early. My Dearest, the handwriting was spidery, the specialist tells me I might only have another 18 months to live. However, I am not sure whether I can still trust Dr Mortlock and I have asked your father to arrange a second opinion. What advice did Professor Dawes have to offer? Please don't worry about me. You must continue with your work there in California. Your sister, Gudrun, will be coming down to stay with us next weekend.
    Heidi had not consulted Bill Dawes about the transplant. Bill was the head of her lab and a leading figure in the field of rejection, so leading that he regularly announced to the world that he had solved the problem of donor organs. But just recently Heidi had had a shouting match with him about her project. She'd discovered that Bill was allowing Martina, her rival, to experiment with her mice. She'd called Bill a dickhead and felt disinclined to ask of him any favours.
    Instead she talked to Karl. Karl had been one of Bill's doctoral students. He was still hanging round the lab before heading to Oxford. Heidi had found him slightly distant at first. Whenever she'd complained about Bill's shenanigans he'd said, like the others in California, "I don't know both sides of the story." But over time he'd grown sympathetic. They were the only tea drinkers in the lab.
    "Why does she need a transplant?" he asked.
    "She had rheumatic fever as a child."
    Karl was writing at his bench. He recorded his experiments in excessive detail on filing cards. As he finished the public address system announced a bomb scare. It would be a hoax, but they were still obliged to evacuate. While they milled in the Johnson Centre car park Karl said, "Café?" and they rode into town on his Suzuki.
    "So your mother had kids even with a bad heart?" he asked at the café.
    "Yes, three. Actually no, four. There was one after me that died."
    "Did you know the first transplant was done in South Africa?"
    "Louis Washkansky. In December 1967."
    "How did you know that?"
    Heidi knew because as a little girl the news had freaked her out. The celebrated Mr Washkansky had died within a month and this had encouraged her to fear that her mother would die soon too.
    The café queue made Karl impatient. "Let's go back to my place and have some tea."
    Heidi agreed.
    "What's up?" He asked as he unlocked his front door.
    "Nothing," Heidi said. "Just thinking about death."

"What's happened to you?" Heidi said to her husband when she arrived home. Richard sat in front of the TV with a white crepe bandage pinned at his wrist. He was watching a borrowed copy of sex, lies and videotape.
    "I came off my bike," he said and switched off the set.
    "How?"
    "Someone rammed me. Another cyclist."
    "Were they riding with no hands?" Heidi asked. This was something that had astonished them about California.
    "It was a unicycle."
    "You should drive."
    "I don't have a valid licence."
    "So? Neither do I. Give me a look. Is it sprained?"
    She unwrapped the hand, gently stroked the swelling, then stared at it and became lost in thought. Richard had olive, almost hairless skin. She gave it a kiss. "Did you find out about your dissertation?"
    "I got distracted."
    For the last two years Richard had been finishing his PhD. But since Heidi had brought him to California he'd done less and less work on it. Instead he spent most of his time pirating videos with a pair of old VCRs he'd bought at garage sales. Heidi no longer knew what he was doing. Some confusing correspondence about deadlines had arrived from his supervisor back in Sydney. Richard was afraid to enquire.
    "Did you go to Wal-Mart for my zinc pills?"
    "I'll go now, if you like. I need some more blank tapes."
    "No, don't bother. They probably don't work."
    "Your skin looks better."
    Heidi pulled a face. "Do you really think so?"

Heidi had come to California eighteen months ago in order to get herself a tenured job back in Sydney. Job candidates were spurned back in Sydney unless they came from overseas, even if they'd won the university medal. Like Bill Dawes, Heidi worked on the fundamentals of rejection. Her father had made a career in the same field and had raised her to feel that it was the only one worth entering, at the same time as advising her to choose something easier. She hadn't taken his advice. Bill expressed great esteem for her father's papers. He hadn't read them. In Bill's lab Heidi ran a colony of two thousand nude mice. Nude mice lack T cells and do not reject. They also have no hair. That was the source of the bomb scares.
    When she did speak to Bill about her mother he asked, "Can she fly?"
    The question threw Heidi off balance. "I'm sorry. That just sounded funny."
    "You know what I mean. Is she allowed on a plane?"
    Heidi had a coughing fit. "I can see her in a cape!" she spluttered.
    Bill grew irritated. "Tell her to come here. They've been doing them longer here than anywhere."
    "Except South Africa."
    "Do they even still do them in South Africa?"

Two weeks passed without bomb scares and then on a Saturday night there was a fancy dress party at the Salzburgs' house. Heidi unpacked a velvet dress her mother had made from a Vogue pattern in the 1950s. Richard had bought himself an Al Capone style suit at another garage sale. The dress was very chic but too short. "It'd fit better on you," she remarked. Richard tried it on.
    "A bit revealing, don't you think?"
    "No. It's great. I wish I had your skin."
    "Can't you graft it."
    "If only."
    So Heidi wore the gangster suit.
    In the Salzburgs' living room she collected a bunch of men about her while Richard sat on a sofa and drank Zinfandel from a very large glass until Linda sat with him. "Try to keep your knees together," Linda advised him. She was also from Sydney. She admired the velvet dress. Richard showed her his injured thumb and told her about Heidi's mother wanting a transplant. For an hour or so they chatted about various things, mainly Linda's family. Richard laughed so much he spilled his Zinfandel. Linda insisted on tipping salt on the wine spot and putting her hand up the dress with a paper napkin. At this point her boyfriend crossed from where he'd been spying on them in the kitchen.
    "Is there anything I can get you?" he asked Richard. "A black eye, maybe?" He'd dressed as a buccaneer and he was drunk. Linda sneered. Fortunately a Rabbi arrived—a genuine Rabbi, not a fancy dress one. Ron Salzburg announced the wedding of his son and his son's girlfriend and in the kafuffle Richard's black eye was forgotten.
    On the way home Richard told Heidi.
    "Linda loves making him jealous," she commented.
    "I thought I was being irresistible."
    "Hmm."
    When they reached the apartment she said to him, "Come to bed." She was a little drunk too.
    "You mean come to futon," Richard corrected. He still thought Linda was attracted to him.
    "Why is the front of this dress damp?"
    "I told you. It's Zinfandel." Heidi unzipped him and helped him off with the garment then did a rapid strip tease with the Al Capone suit. Richard thought briefly about Linda putting her hand up his dress. Once they were both naked Richard lay on his back and then the next thing he knew Heidi was on top of him. "So I am irresistible," he muttered to her.
    "I guess so."
    When they'd finished Heidi lay flat on his chest and fell asleep. This was the third night in a week she'd done that. He was woken at 4am by wiggling toes.
    "Care for another fuck?" Heidi asked.
    He put his arm round her and slipped his leg between her thighs. They hadn't had this much sex in years. He thought briefly about Linda again.
    Afterwards, when he was fully awake and back on his side of the bed, he joked about the zinc pills making her want to have sex.
    "It's not the zinc pills," she told him.
    He couldn't think of what else it would be. But he didn't dispute it.
    "Do you want to know what it is?" Heidi said after a minute. Richard didn't have a chance to respond. "It's Karl."
    "Karl?"
    Heidi got up on her elbow and switched on the bedside lamp. She started explaining what had happened on the day of the last bomb scare, how Karl had invited her to the café and then changed his mind and invited her to his house for a cup of tea. "When we got there he told me he wanted to go to bed with me! I was shocked. I told him, 'Karl, I'm not your type. I don't have blonde hair and blue eyes.' And he said, 'But you've got a great body." And I said, 'You don't know that. You've never seen me without clothes on.' Then in the middle of it his house mate came in and started giggling and asked if he wanted her to go out again. It was embarrassing. We walked all around the streets and he kept saying to me, 'Can't I just kiss you?' I told him if it had been five years ago I would have said yes and we could have seen how things worked out, but now I couldn't imagine not living with you so I wasn't going to do anything."
    As she talked Heidi pressed her elbow into Richard's pillow and pinched the skin on his arm. Richard lay on his back and let himself be pinched. He really had thought it was the pills. They were known to make people horny. Within a few days of taking them Heidi had started with the wiggling toes in the middle of the night. But as he listened he realised he'd been mistaken. It had to be Karl. That made sense. Heidi had been seeing a lot of Karl. She'd been having dinner with him because he was the one person in the lab she could gripe to about Bill. Karl had been at the party last night.
    Richard was fascinated, then uneasy. What Heidi was saying made him feel as if he was cramping her style. She called Karl irresponsible because in a few months he was leaving for Oxford. Does that mean you wouldn't have wanted him to leave in a few months, Richard thought. Heidi kept talking until dawn. By that time she felt seedy, but she showered and went to the lab. It was Sunday morning.

At the lab there was another aerogram in Heidi's pigeon hole, this one written in dark green ink, the colour of the dress her husband had worn to the party.
    My Dear Heidi,
    Your father thinks that the operation should be performed by you. He considers you the most brilliant person working in the field. He says he would not trust anyone else. He has had some critical things to say about Prof Dawes. Can you reply letting me know your commitments?
    Heidi went into the lab and read parts of the letter to Karl.
    "The only unassisted surgery I've ever performed is sewing up a football player's broken lip," she told him. She had dropped clinical medicine after her residency to pursue research. Nowadays her operations were all on rodents. The idea of performing transplant surgery on her mother was utterly fantastic.
    "The most brilliant guy working in the field?" Karl repeated.
    "He must be losing his marbles," Heidi said.
    Had her father really described her that way? Even when she'd won the university medal he'd said nothing. No, correction, he'd told her that in the old days they awarded a medal only in exceptional years whereas nowadays they awarded one every year regardless.

Alone in their apartment Richard couldn't stop thinking about Karl and his wife. He attempted to distract himself by working on his dissertation. Then he discovered the borrowed copy of sex, lies and videotape was overdue so he set up the VCRs to make a pirate copy. For a little while he wrestled with his final, final, final draft then gave in and watched the movie as it copied. The sex video guy with his big hairstyle reminded him of Karl.
    He tried cycling to the video store with his sprained thumb then took the car. He returned the tape and borrowed She's Gotta Have It. A guy in a wheelchair rummaging through trash accosted him in the car park. Lost for an excuse he agreed to pack the chair in his station wagon and drive the guy across 101 to the poor part of town. The guy scratched and cursed, claiming he was a veteran and damning the government.
    "Hey, you're on the wrong side of the damned street!"
    "Sorry. Wrong country."
    During the trip Richard felt a strange, nagging urge to unburden himself and explain how his wife was being chased by another man, but the guy gave him no opportunity. Some elderly people watched from a broken sofa on the sidewalk as he struggled to unfold the wheelchair. Without thanks the guy shoved off into the path of an oncoming vehicle.
    "Asshole!"
    Back at their apartment Richard discovered the video store's copy of sex, lies and videotape on the glass coffee table. He'd returned the pirated one by mistake.
    At dinner Heidi brought home the New Yorker and read silently while she ate pappadams and knitted a sweater with a Mondrian pattern. Richard was busting to talk. But she went straight back to the lab. He fretted alone, first over the remote possibility of her getting into Karl's bed some time in the future, then at the fair probability she'd already been in Karl's bed some time in the past then, just before midnight, at the certainty that she was in Karl's bed right now.
    "I was talking to Karl," Heidi reported at 1 am. "He told me he'd get over it." Later on she added, "I guess I'll get over it too." Richard wondered what that meant.
     Heidi woke him at 7.30 am. It was the toes again. Richard's bandage had unravelled. He rewrapped it and they started kissing. Heidi couldn't help remarking to him how nice it was to be desired by someone. She was really in the mood. He wondered who she was thinking of. Then he couldn't get an erection.
    "I must have put you off," Heidi said.
    "Sometimes it just doesn't work."
    "I don't remember this happening before. Are you anxious?"
    "No. I was anxious last night."
    "When?"
    "When you were still out at midnight."
    He definitely couldn't get an erection.
    "Oh, Christ. I know what's going to happen. I'll be good and say no and things at home will be just as bad as if I'd been flagrantly having an affair."
    Heidi got up, showered and left for the lab. Richard sat at his desk and stared out the window at the squirrels scurrying round and round the redwood trunk as if they had Velcro feet. Then the video store phoned about sex, lies and videotape.

If it had been five years ago, Heidi thought. Five years ago she was living in the Kings Cross terrace, pushing herself to finish her medical degree and wondering from time to time whether she'd eventually marry her then boyfriend, Ken, who was pushing himself to finish a degree in movie directing. In the two years she'd been with Ken she had taught him how to ski and he had taught her how to stay up late watching foreign films. That had seemed like a start. But then Richard came along. Richard was a complete free spirit. He worked in a bus depot by night, wrote poetry by day and did not have a resume. Irresistibly he knew nothing of the struggle to achieve in the eyes of distant and critical parents.
    Heidi had gone to bed with him because he had nice skin, and to see what would happen. And as a result she had fallen in love, broken amicably with Ken and ceased being terrified by her career. But then Richard had somehow got it into his head that he needed a PhD. Why? Was it because everyone Heidi knew had a PhD? In any case, trying to write a dissertation on TS Elliot had paralysed him.
    The previous afternoon Heidi had come home tense, after another shouting match with Bill, thinking she might distract herself by watching She's Gotta Have It. Richard had driven to a physiotherapy appointment. She found the two VCRs wired together and the rented video half way through pirating. She switched on the set. A couple danced to jazz at an outdoor birthday party. This turned out to be the birthday party of Nola, the woman who'd gotta have it. Heidi watched as the rest of the movie played out with Nola dancing back and forward between her three boyfriends, refusing to be tied down by any of them.
    The movie over, she went into the garden and rolled back the new turf that the raccoons had rolled up searching for worms. Then without even locking up she walked to Karl's house and rang the bell. She waited, but no one came. After a minute she rang again. She needed to talk. She didn't quite know what she was going to say but she needed to talk. Finally Karl answered. He was barefoot.
    "Hi," he said.
    "Can we talk?"
    "Sure."
    They talked but this time Karl didn't invite her in for tea. They sat on the porch and talked mostly about work. This time she did not have to remind him that her hair was not blonde and that her eyes were not blue.

There was an embarrassing exchange at the video store when Richard returned the legal copy of sex, lies and videotape and asked for his pirate copy back.
    "You ever see the FBI warning at the start?" the shaven headed store owner asked loudly, so the entire store could hear.
    Richard didn't notice the wheelchair guy until he was leaving.
    "Hey, Rich!" the guy shouted. (Everyone seemed to be shouting at him.) "You wanna copy this shit for me?"
    He thrust a cassette box at him. Richard agreed to drive him back to the apartment and supply a blank tape. The video was not something X rated, as he feared, but Rambo III. The wheelchair guy settled in to watch while the pirating ran its course and called for beer. He drank one Corona after another without apparently getting drunk. He insisted Richard drink one with him and Richard felt instantly intoxicated.
    Rambo had set out to supply weapons to the Mujahideen when Heidi arrived home. She looked upset. Richard tried to do introductions but realised he didn't know the wheelchair guy's name and besides neither wanted to be introduced to the other. The volume was up loud.
    "Can you get him to leave?" Heidi asked in the kitchen. "I'm really upset."
    "Hey, Rich!" the guy called. "Hows about another beer?"
    Richard responded by falsely telling the guy that he and his wife had to go to the opera and that he would have to drive him home straightaway. But as a sweetener he added, "We'll stop and I'll buy you some whiskey."
    "I don't need no goddamn whiskey!"
    The guy crashed his way out the house and collided with the trash can in the drive. Heidi made Richard chase after him and drive him home. They did stop for whiskey.
    "I talked to Karl today," she said when he returned. "He really upset me."
    "What happened?"
    "He told me he'd started an affair with someone else. I should have just minded my own business. I was so upset. He wouldn't even tell me who it was at first. He tried to make me guess. I had an experiment so I asked him if I could talk to him later and then when I found him he was talking to Martina. I had to ask if we could go somewhere else and talk in private so he told Martina he'd see her later and she said 'Maybe' and I realised she was the one he'd started having the affair with."
    "But I thought she had her hooks in the Tomcat."
    "No, no. He went back to his wife and kids. So Karl and I walked round and round campus for about two hours with me trying to explain to him how upset I was by him taking up with someone else straightaway. I told him the least he could have done was to suffer for a while."
    "What did he say to that?"
    "He said he just fell for Martina. It's bullshit. A few weeks ago he was complaining he couldn't stop thinking about me and then five minutes later he can't even give me the time of day. Anyway, after two hours of that he went back to the lab and I sat in the sculpture garden and cried all on my own. I felt like I'd just been caste aside, like a piece of shit."
    "Martina's got him on the rebound," Richard told his wife.
    "Oh, great. Now she's got Karl as well as my project. How can he just drop me like that?"
    "I don't know. Maybe he's trying to neutralise your hold on him. Maybe he's trying to make you jealous."
    "Well I feel very jealous! She's such a mousy little person. Why are you laughing?"
    "I'm sorry."

When another bomb scare was announced the next day Heidi wished that she'd stayed at home. The Johnson Centre staff stood in the car park talking but she didn't want to talk. She opened her mother's newest letter. Normally the entire aerogram would be filled, but this time the blue paper was mostly empty.
    Heidi Dearest,
    Your father has had a change of heart and I must agree with him. When I reflect on things I realise that I am getting quite old now and that in my poor state of health it would be wrong to request a transplant. In truth I am resigned. I will persevere with conventional therapies and hope for the best.
    Why had she said change of heart, Heidi wondered.
    I'm afraid your father is unhappy. He has never really been happy since he left Europe and sometimes I think that he would have been better off without us all. But he insists otherwise.
    All my love,
    Mum
    Heidi had never known whether her father was happy. He never sounded happy at home. But she'd assumed he must be happy at work, which was where he spent most of his time. Otherwise why go on? As a young doctor he'd fled Central Europe after World War II. Maybe he had been unhappy for most of his life. At first it looked like her mother had made a good choice marrying someone who was working on a cure—well, indirectly working on it—for something that was killing her. But had it been good? Heidi didn't know. One reason she'd married Richard was that he was not her father, not by a long shot. Her father had a duelling scar above his left ear. Back in the days when he'd been studying medicine students had still belonged to secret societies and had fought duels in the attics of the old university buildings. Richard did not have a duelling scar. Nor did Ken. Was Karl the duelling scar type? What would have happened if she'd gone to bed with him? She wondered about what it would be like to get divorced and stay in California and have her husband go back to Sydney where he would no doubt keep visiting her parents since they seemed to get on with him.
    Karl was away from the lab that afternoon. So was Martina. Heidi had wanted to ask him how to unjam the cell sorter. She flicked through his card index and found a card with HEIDI on it and her phone number. She removed it. There was a card with INGRID written on it, too. Ingrid was another of the lab's postdocs. She guessed there would be one with MARTINA as well.
    Heidi wrote on a blank card:

How To Have Sex:
1. Act sympathetic when woman complains
2. Suggest going to café during bomb threat
3. Invite woman home for tea instead
4. Tell woman she has great body
    Heidi replaced her name card with the one she'd filled out.
    She showed the name card to Ingrid and told her the story of what had happened on the day of the last bomb scare. Ingrid, who did have blonde hair and blue eyes, had a similar story. During an even earlier bomb scare Karl had invited her to a café, then home, then to bed. She hadn't done anything, apart from have a few cuddles, which she considered acceptable seeing as her husband was in Austin and she was a long way from home. Karl had led Heidi to believe that he and Ingrid had had sex. In fact he'd told half the lab. According to Ingrid he'd done the same with Polly, an earlier post-doc.
    "Do you think he does the bomb scares?" Heidi asked.
    "No. He's too chicken."

That evening Heidi watched the pirated tape of She's Gotta Have it since she'd previously missed the first half. At the end she told Richard that once upon a time she used to be like the heroine, who couldn't see why the three men in her life couldn't just be friends. She used to believe that it was none of their business what she did while she wasn't with them, especially if they weren't in love with her. Richard told her that she was right, it wasn't any of their business.
    "But it still upsets people."
    "Yes. It still upsets people."
    "You'll get over it."
    "Yes, I suppose I'll get over it."

Heidi went to bed early that night and had a dream. She was at Karl's house except that it was an operating theatre and she was preparing to transplant the heart of a mouse into her mother. Her mother was lying on the operating table talking about Heidi's piano exam. Heidi didn't know how she was going to connect the mouse's heart. There was no one assisting. But when she opened the chest of the mouse the heart inside was much larger than expected, it was a human heart after all. Her father came into the theatre in a wheelchair and commented, "They're always like that when you open them up. Did you not know?" Then he began watching a Tarzan movie on TV. Heidi wanted him to lower the volume because it was distracting, but she didn't dare speak. Her mother began watching too. Richard made them rewind the tape so he could make a pirate copy. Then there was a bomb scare. Heidi had to wheel the operating table to the elevator. "Come on, Dad, get a move on," she called. But he stayed put. The elevator was made of cardboard and string. It wobbled and scraped the sides of the shaft. Her mother wrote an aerogram and handed it to her. I have complete confidence in you, Sweetheart. But the elevator car began collapsing, the cardboard panels falling in on the operating table. Heidi ran from one to the next trying to stitch them back in place with a surgical needle. But they wouldn't stay. Nude mice scurried from between the cracks. The lift was ascending, she realised. She searched for the down button but couldn't find it. Everything seemed to be getting out of control. Then she woke. It was 4 am.
    "I just had a dream," she told Richard.
    "Was it erotic?"
    "No. I don't think so."
    "Good."



About the author:
Simon Barker comes from Sydney but has lived in Melbourne and California. His writing has appeared in Overland, Fieldstone Review, Eclectica, Istanbul Literary Review, Ranfurly Review, Antipodes and Identity Theory. ]]> Stimulus Package by Sanford Tweedie Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:04:36 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1923
I take the bag by the handles and thank her. We talk nervously about nothing. Her skin is smooth, and I like the way she dips her head as she tosses her hair. I want to invite her in, but I cannot come up with an excuse for doing so. She is thirty years my junior; I do not own a shirt as crisp as hers. We say our good-byes, then I shut the door without turning away.

One evening after she appeared, I lowered myself into the lukewarm water of the tub and reached for the bag. Instead of removing one bar, I held the bag before me and tipped it. The bars splashed, sank for a moment, then rose to the surface again. There they floated, dozens of white bars of blankness. Cells from the very wealthy man began to slough off, forming a film on the water's surface. My penis drifted languidly in the depths below.



About the author:
Sanford Tweedie is a professor in the Writing Arts Department at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. He recently finished GDRtifacts: In the Shadows of a Fallen Wall, a book of essays based on his experiences living in the former East Germany for a year.]]> This Time, With Feeling. by Yaara Sumeruk Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:04:03 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1927 Listen to Yaara Sumeruk read 'This Time, With Feeling.'

He placed his thumb and index finger in the corners of his eyes. He did this when he was tired, or when he wished he could disappear. He pinched his eyes often. As always, he pressed down until his fingertips became moist. This was one of the times he wanted to go further, until the pressure created white, traveling splotches on the inside of his eyelids, but he suddenly stopped when he felt a sharp prick in his right eye. The smallest franchise of the shattered glass he had swept up with his hands earlier, had stuck to his thumb, held on there patiently, and went on to pierce the pink triangle of his eye.
    He looked up at her.
    "Am I bleeding?"
    She took a long time before she raised her head from the magazine she was not reading. With a page suspended half way (a gesture at first intended to make clear he had interrupted her), a foreign sensation - quickly recognizable to most others as guilt - flooded her cheeks like a fever.
    He was crying blood.
    Despite this new sensation, perhaps because she did not know how to name it, or simply because she was who she was, she couldn't help but think that her crocodile tears of a few moments ago were not only inferior, but in poor taste, and so was this silent treatment which he didn't deserve – employed precisely because of her own crying. This was all now an embarrassment; another new emotion this man with whom she was not in love, caused her to feel. The suspended page had become an honest gesture. She was truly shocked.
    She closed the magazine slowly and decided that she no longer understood the world, and had lost her code with which she used to navigate it, or as others would describe behind her back, rape it.
    She pulled a tissue from the tissue box she thought useless in a living room and went to him. Thus began their romance in earnest. Everything before had merely been a bummed drag of a cigarette.
    Her new emotions titillated her. And he was crying blood, for godsake. He definitely was not ordinary. And now she felt the third and final new feeling, regret for having made him feel so terribly, terribly unlike her, and throwing her glass across the room just to prove how different they were, and how glamorous she was.



About the author:
Yaara is a recent graduate of The New School MFA Creative Writing Program. Her short film JUST THE USUAL won the SAB Miller "Life is What You Pour In" competition, and her second short YOU GOTTA SAY MUSTANG is featured on 2010mustang.com. Her nonfiction can be read on JHBlive.com. She currently works for a novelist and screenwriter, conducting research and editing, while working on her own fiction, screenplays and films. She lives in Brooklyn. ]]> A First Time for Everything by Michelle Reale Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:03:35 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1933 game is on. Our old turntable, with the penny taped to its arm for balance, is housed in a stereo cabinet that looks like a sarcophagus. She begins by tapping her foot to the Beer Barrel Polka, but pretty soon she will be full on making an ass of herself to the Pennsylvania Polka.
    My father walked out this morning after a fight with my mother. He slammed his fist on the kitchen table and their coffee cups jangled, leaving small brown puddles like a Rorschach test. I saw dark clouds predicting danger. My little sister nibbled the corner of her toast and kept her eye on the butter knife in case she would need to use it. When I asked her 'what for' she had no answer.
    My father hates polka. We know this because he has often said "I hate Polka!" Then he would hiss, with a tight grimace as if he had just eaten poop, "from my guts." Which is why we are now listening to the accordions and background frivolity on the record. I imagined many happily drunk Polish people in traditional costume eating fat sausages, drinking beer, red -cheeked, slapping thick thighs. "We are Italian, not Polish," my father has said, but my mother just laughs. "Polka is for everyone!" she says, a bon vivant right to her very core.
    Uncannily, my father usually comes back after one of their fights, just as my mother cranks up the music. This is, of course why she does it. She has always prided herself on the special knowledge that married couples have of one another. She has promised that my sister and I will know our husbands in the same way. Usually, when my father returns she is always the first to say "sorry", whether it was her fault or not. That it further enrages my father is a fact my mother has yet to grasp.
    She lights a cigarette and takes a few deep drags, with one hand on her hip. She carefully presses the cigarette into the Pocono Mountain ashtray and swigs from a plastic bottle of diet soda. She begins her dance, her long, thin arms wrapped around an imaginary partner. Her beautiful feet, arched as if she were wearing the heels that make her look like every man's dream. I am hung over from a binge with my friends the night before, something that doesn't register with my mom. When I take a drag from her cigarette, my little sister, still in her nightgown with the sagging ruffle, giggles. I hold my finger up to my lips, shhhhhhhh while the smoke unfurls from the corners of my mouth. "Magic," she whispers, in reverence, loving the secret between the two of us.
    My mother's dancing lasts most of the afternoon though it is punctuated by small naps on the couch. My sister, still in her nightgown, lies between the fold of her knees and sucks on the skin inside her wrist. I wonder where my father is and I try hard to remember details from the morning argument. I comfort myself with the fact that it sounded like thousands that had come before it. The rhythm of the needle at the end of the album sounds like a scratchy heartbeat. It soothes me so I let it skip on and on. I switch on a small light and my sister comes softly into my arms. She rubs her eyes and takes my chin, softly in her small hand. We both look at my mother, who is sleeping, but not in a restful way.
    I take out the big, flat leather world atlas that sits under the cushion of my father's LazyBoy chair. My sister and I lay on our tummies as I turn the pages. The game we like to play is that I turn a page, she points, and then that is where we both will go. I invent all sorts of details, none of them even remotely accurate, of our new location. I do funny accents, and describe local customs and costumes we will wear so that we will not look like foreigners. My sister keeps telling me to turn the page. Finally her finger lands on a place I cannot pronounce which makes me sad. She watches my face. "Will we be happy there?" she asks. I think before I answer her, because anxiety, like a brittle feather flutters in my chest. What I think is a sound at the front door is only my imagination. I glance at my mother on the couch, cigarette butts overflowing in the ashtray. Even in her sleep, her hands are clenched like claws. I listen for the sound of my father's car in the driveway, but hear nothing. I realize there is a first time for everything.



About the author:
Michelle Reale is an academic librarian working in a university in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Verbsap, Dogzplot, Word Riot, elimae, JMWW, Blood Orange Review, Monkeybicyle, Apt, Pequin, Freight Train, Dogmaticka, Laura Hird and others.]]> How to Put a Condom on Your John by Terrell Isselhard Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:01:32 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1936     A girl raises a shaking hand. She has braces but looks far too old to have braces. She's wearing a vest and nothing else under it other than what I assume is a braw. She has a tattoo of a snake on her forearm, and her hair is short, straight, and died black. Her eyes are green, and she keeps licking her lips compulsively as her hand quivers uncontrollably just above her forehead.
    "Yeah?" he asks.
    "What—" She pauses, self-consciously looking around at all the other faces in the room. I wonder if she's thinking what I'm thinking: That everybody in this room probably has HPV—as he told us at the beginning of the class—and this fact is at once uniting and revolting. In the past hour we have all become united and revolted repeatedly. I understand (she does as well) that Chlamydia is not simply a genital issue. You can get Chlamydia in your throat. That's right. Imagine: You've got this little cough; you try gurgling salt water and it doesn't get better. Then you kiss your girlfriend, and then she goes down on you—and guess what? You've just given yourself Chlamydia. We've watched with our jaws slackened and slightly cocked to the side as he has mimed the proper finger movements necessary to loosen up an anus. All the while he was wearing a pair of latex finger slips, which he claimed help to protect the anus against fingernail snags. Is this what she is thinking?
    She smiles, showing her braces, and says, "What if you gag?"
    "Honey," he replies—loosening up his whole body from the hips out—"then you don't become a hooker."



About the author:
Terrell Isselhard holds a B.A. in Cultural Studies from Columbia College Chicago, where he worked as a writing tutor for two and a half years. He has written articles for giveawaytheending.com and Love Chicago, and he also presented his thesis essay at the PCA/ACA 2009 Conference in New Orleans. ]]> Working Late by Eric Beeny Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:01:02 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1935     He pulled a Parliament Light from the pack he kept rolled up in the left sleeve of his tee-shirt and got his Zippo out from his dirty Wranglers.
    He lit the cigarette, got up to go sit at his desk.
    He looked at the clock.
    3:47 am.
    If his wife wasn't asleep she was probably worried about him, and he felt guilty about all the time he'd been spending at the shop, not telling his wife where he was.
    At least when he went out drinking he called to tell her he'd be home soon.
    Mortimer thought about his kids, looking at the pictures of happy people framed in gold sitting there on his desk.
    He wasn't in any of them.
    A bead of sweat began pushing through a pore in his forehead.
    It was like a nine pound infant taking on the likeness of a dew drop made of milk.
    It was like a two-foot-long baby breaking its mother Mortimer's water.
    It was actually an idea which tricked Mortimer into passing this child from the womb of his skull through a vaginal pore in the middle of all the other vaginas embedded in his forehead and into the world.
    Actually, the idea and the bead of sweat were twins, and the idea was that Mortimer should be very careful with this thing.
    He sat down to think hard about how to handle this fragile bead of sweat, turning it over and over in his hands, until it slipped through his fingers and broke into tiny pieces on the floor.
    "Shit," he said.
    He wiped his brow, thinking he'd have to spend the rest of the night carefully building another one just like it.



About the author:
Eric Beeny's poems and stories have appeared in Abjective, Corduroy Mtn., Elimae, KORA, Thieves Jargon, and others. Several e-chaps of his poetry have been published by Gold Wake Press, for which he's recently become a contributing editor. His blog is Dead End on Progressive Ave. (ericbeeny.blogspot.com). He lives in Buffalo, NY. He's 28. ]]> An Interview With John Reed by Robert Lopez Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:00:18 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1944
Robert Lopez: How did you come to ATWAG? It is such a great idea - fearless, provocative, and both reverent and irreverent at the same time.

John Reed: Ah, thanks thanks thanks. Hmm, I think I can manage a pretty wishy-washy, indecisive answer here.

At times, I think of the play as a rejoinder to Henry V. To this day, at the onset of war, Henry is marched out to fill the ranks of the marines with new recruits. It's a misrepresentation of the Henry V, and Shakespeare, and I wanted Shakespeare to weigh in, in his own words, on the war, love and madness that is our age.

At times, I think I wanted to address questions of authorship, of parody, of the literary canon, of contemporary letters in relation to "great" works, and of the creative future we bequeath our children.

At times, I think I'm just a public school kid who grew up in downtown New York City, surrounded by poor artists, punk rock, and language poetry—and stuff like this is how I have fun.

RL: Were you at all apprehensive writing a new play by William Shakespeare?

JR: I confess that my admiration for Shakespeare has been strengthened by this curious debacle, as has my belief that a number of people worked on the plays. Shakespeare borrowed from contemporary sources, contemporary successes, and worked with other writers and actors and backers to get where he needed to be. The proper comparison is to a contemporary writer/director, or writer/producer.

Genius is relatively ordinary to the human genome. Of the thousands of manuscripts I've seen—as a teacher, a student, a writer—far more have suffered from too much intelligence, too much creativity, than have suffered from too little. Of the art I've seen—growing up in the artworld—I come away with the same impression. The crossing of class boundaries, which is often a primary motivation to be an artist, a writer, produces a complex perspective that is contrary to mass market forms of expression.

Right about the time I finished ATWAG, I had this funny dream. I dreamt I was in attendance at some kind of sporting event: maybe polo. It was late afternoon, the first cooling off of a hot day. I was part of a standing audience of intellectuals and petty nobility. (I can't quite put a period to the setting.) One of our party came running out—having just been received by a royal audience—and he reported gleefully, in staccato barks, that the Queen had given him a poop. One of her poops. He held a clear plastic carry case (which, by the way, was identical to the case we use to contain my daughter's pet lizards when we're cleaning the aquarium). It had two lean, firm dark turds in it; one lay partly atop the other, not-quite perpendicular. Everyone mocked the bearer of the turds mercilessly. He took his teasing in good humor, as it was meant. Then the crowd went silent, breath held, as he slowly lifted the case up to his nose, to sniff the Queen's poop. His expression was one of enormous concentration. He sniffed like a connoisseur of wine—committing the sensory experience to memory. Then, the crowd still silent, he passed the plastic tub to the person beside him: with a similar sense of purpose, this person, too, sniffed the poop. And then—the silence settling in like reverence—the tub was passed from one set of hands to the next. The tub was passed gently, like an urn of ashes. And everyone lifted it to their nose, and sniffed it.

RL: The task of putting ATWAG together seems extraordinarily difficult, perhaps even impossible. What was the process of putting ATWAG together like? Did you conceive of the new story first? How did you decide which passages to employ and fool around with?

JR: When I finished the draft for this project, I started cleaning out my files, as is my ritual. I've made a giant mess; I'm too tired to do anything else; and I feel the need to mark an end, and a beginning. While I was at it, tossing old scraps of paper I'd hoarded, I came across a Xerox from college, folded in quarters. One the back: a list of ten major projects that I wanted to write. Of the ten, the Shakespeare project is the third I've published.

I remember talking about the book over the Thanksgiving break of either my junior or senior year of college—I had come back to the city and made the rounds of various Thanksgiving gatherings; the effort was to fashion some personal semblance of family from disparate individuals who wanted nothing to do with each other. Shakespeare was my topic. Lacking the required skills, I talked but didn't work on the project until 2003. Even then, I only drafted one act.

In 2006, walking down the street, the remainder of the narrative occurred to me. I jotted it down. The idea came up in a few conversations (including one with the project's future editor) and, whether or not those conversations had anything to do with anything, I sped through the next four acts.

I had matured enough as a person and an editor to manage the project. And, there was the computer, which allowed me to have multiple plays open at once—and not have to flip through pages. I didn't use any software, but I did use search functions and search engines. I put together the first act, back in 2003, without the use of a computer—and that was not particularly easy. In 2006, I blocked out the remaining four acts (from the six plays I structured the work on: Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Lear, Henry V and Othello); the first draft had plenty of holes and an initial word count of 50,000 words. As I tightened up the draft, and needed specific lines, I used searches more. For footnoting, I used them extensively, which saved a great deal of time. Imperfect as they are, I spent several months on the footnotes. If anyone doubts it's Shakespeare—as a few people have—the footnotes are available at alltheworldsagrave.com, and on my website, johnreed.tv.

RL: How did you decide which characters/plays to use?

JR: I chose the characters based partly on Shakespeare's template—the young prince, the queen, etc.—and partly based on who I thought audiences would most want to see, and mostly based on the narrative that popped into my head when I was plodding along Sixth Avenue. I know this is factually incorrect, but for some reason I have it in my memory that I was barefoot at the time.

RL: The play begins with Iago and Hamlet and while they are recognizable as the Iago and Hamlet we've always known; these characters have new shadings, new motivations, etc. How important was it to make the characters new, yet retain the familiar at the same time? Along those lines, Hamlet's love interest is Juliet, who is having an affair with Romeo. These choices all seem right and I'm curious as to what choices were considered but ultimately left out.

JR: I wanted the characters to be recognizably themselves, but to refresh, recast, respin them.

I did want to deepen the female rolls. I ascribe to the argument that Shakespeare focused on the male rolls, since young men (and less experienced actors) played the female rolls in Elizabethan London. In the Juliet/Hamlet relationship especially, I wanted an underlying psychology of sado-masochism—which fed into themes of senseless violence and war. Gertrude, as knowing, and Lady Macbeth, as loving, makes for the two halves of a character that is conflicted, appealing, and repugnant—and a character I adore.

My Hamlet is "a prince of blood." To me, the added dimension takes easily. Othello, III, iii:
"Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!
"Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars ... "
Hamlet's conscience, guilty, is a driving force in Hamlet's actions—and, in that, he is as much to blame for his undoing as Iago.

My Iago: evil, manipulative and highly sarcastic. Not too different from Shakespeare's Iago, but more justified. He is damaged by war—his deeds might be seen in the light of delayed stress syndrome. His revenge on the Prince—though he is unconscious of it—an act of war on war.

My Macbeth, in the end, has a spine—and one can see how he ended up king. Lear is Lear. The Weird Sisters are the Weird Sisters.

And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I outed. Of course, they were pretty out already. As was Old Hamlet.

I was tempted to leave Macbeth, a la Claudius, Hamlet's uncle. It fit right in. Unfortunately, the relationship added so many lines to the play that I had to forgo the kinship.

RL: The only projects I can think of off the top of my head in this sort of universe would be Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and his Fifteen Minute Hamlet. Are there any others out there you know of?

JR: There are many plays that are rejoinders to Shakespeare: Edward's side of the story, Horatio's side of the story, etc.. Mostly unpublished, with the notable exception being Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. His fifteen-minute project is not a play but a "best of."

As far as I know, as much as Shakespeare has been mucked around with, nobody has done this before.

A million Shakespeare novels—one or two a season—which sends me scurrying to my bookshelf for a quotation:
Take the poetry and the incredible psychological insight away and you have artificial plots that were not Shakespeare's own to start with, full of improbable coincidence and carelessly hurried fifth-act denouements. —Anthony Burgess
RL: What about staging ATWAG? I know there was recently a reading by a company of actors. I was sorry to miss it. Are there plans to put this on the stage? I'm sure there would be great interest.

JR: There have been a number of workshop and University productions of ATWAG—and I'm enormously thankful to everyone who's invested in the project creatively. Donna Devlin and Will Hammond spring to mind. There are workshop productions coming up that I am looking forward to sitting in on. The New York City reading was directed by Terrence O'Brien, out of his American Shakespeare Lab. We had a little talk-back that night, and William Niederkorn, the Shakespeare rabble-rouser from the New York Times, suggested we somehow incorporate the stage directions. I find it difficult to view the stage directions as anything but optional, but his thoughts were edifying to me, since the stage directions are the only thing in the text I wrote entirely on my own. (I should maybe mention that all, or almost all the stage directions we see in Shakespeare are editorial inclusions.)

I'd be honored to have you in a first row seat. Lately, I'd much rather go to the theater than the cinema. There's nothing like a live audience at a live performance.

RL: As the author of three novels, A Still Small Voice, Snowball's Chance, and The Whole, how did you find the process of working on ATWAG compared with writing a novel?

JR: Snowball's Chance, The Whole and ATWAG were all very similar: frenzied adventures. Many full days and every waking moment for three months, or something like that. A Still Small Voice took me years, and required a huge amount of research—and my editorial skills at that time were, at best, fumbling. ATWAG was almost all editorial, and meter.

RL: What are you currently working on?

JR: Tales of Woe is forthcoming from MTV Press. I don't know the exact publication date. True stories that just get worse. Instead of sin, suffering, redemption, just suffering, suffering, suffering. Fifty pages of full-color art. We're talking about a hardback with black pages—all that could change—but I'm very excited. And sickened. It was truly the most awful, despairing thing I ever worked on. Hmm, a little tease up at TalesofWoe.com. A few other bigger projects in the works. I'd love to do something to stir up trouble, just for no good reason at all. Anyone else out there? Hear the bugle? ]]> An Interview With Robert Lort by David F. Hoenigman Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:59:37 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1943 Robert Lort is an Australian writer who has worked across theoretical, fictional and poetic realms inspired by everything from Surrealism to post-modernism to avant-garde music and film. Robert Lort maintains the Azimute website http://www.azimute.org, is a regular art critic for various journals and an original member of the SpeedPoets collective based in Australia.

David Hoenigman: Who or what has influenced your writing?

Robert Lort: I am influenced by a diverse mishmash of things and probably least of all by other writers, I am more likely to be influenced by films, music or art history. I always need to begin with at least a trace of something, an image or concept, then I indulge in a lot of transverse collaging of one media into another, of cause, my work is very visual, like film, but even more so, like the film you could not make. I am fascinated by the images of Helnwein, Hieronymous Bosch or those of HR Giger. I think performance art, particularly the work of body artists during the '70s, which I find intensely volatile and gruesome, can be very lucrative.

DH: What books are you reading now?

RL: I'm currently reading Michel Foucault's "Abnormal, Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975." I find the evolution of the disciplinary institutions of law and psychiatry during the 19th century very fascinating, particularly as it relates to peculiarities and unclassifiable anomalies, many of which still haunt us and are still unresolved, concepts such as plague, hermaphrodites, masturbation, the monstrous etc. Should someone born with two heads be baptized once or twice?

DH: You appear to be conversant with post-modernism, how has that influenced your writing?

RL: Post-Modernism is very much a blanket term used by marketers for what is really a huge diversity of ideas, I don't really think there would be too much consensus. I am only familiar with specific writers, for instance, I maintain the Azimute website which publishes texts concerning the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Guattari's little known short fiction "Sepulchre for an Oedipus Complex" (Déraision, désir) with it's nightmare mix of Kafka and Lewis Carroll is something I keep returning to. As for the influence of post modernism, my work plays with notions such as cut-ups, non-linearity, the fragmentation of psyche, deterritorialization, body becomings, language as flux, language pushed to it's limits. Other writers, like Pierre Guyotat, Kenji Siratori and Jake Chapman have taken the Burroughs cut-up to the extreme, generating the hacked machine code of language, on reading their work one feels like one has to re-learn how to read.

DH: Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

RL: I feel that we are very much living in a dying culture, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker and only recently, JG Ballard have all now departed this earthly world, but what has replaced them? The death of the author has occurred, but not in the sense that Roland Barthes described. I don't think you will find new writers and new ideas in the paperback section of the local supermarket. If at all, it will be buried somewhere on the Internet or rippling through bohemian cafe joints. We are all forced to live in a very plugged-in, virtualized, fractured, hyper-pixellated world. Warhol pronounced that we get 15 minutes of fame, but today, I feel it's more like 15 seconds. I myself have very little time to read. Lately I have been reading books by Carlton Mellick, the key linchpin of the emerging bizarro genre - I really get off on his quirky and surreal, black-humor. Also, Michael Gira's The Consumer I found to be a vicious and amazingly intense read.

DH: How do you personally find and distinguish good writing from bad?

RL: I have a profound way of sensing this almost straight off, of course, genuinely original ideas, something that hits you with the unexpected, catches you off guard, out-smarts you, takes you where you've never been before, makes you stand back and go ouch! I like writing that has strong individualistic character, on the edge, something clearly disinterested in conforming to market genre, hype or imitation. I find Amazon listmania a very lucrative source. I remember reading a CD review of Penderecki's "Matrix 5" which went, "Look, the number of people who abhor this kind of stuff must be several billion. Ignore them. Yes, this is unforgivingly dissonant, elitist, at times physically painful music (as any piece about the bombing of Hiroshima should be), but if you listen and you let it draw you in, it can remind you (or teach you for the very first time) that there are places music can take you, states that music can put you in, that the vast majority of "music lovers" will never understand. But that's okay, there's plenty of PRODUCT out there for them..." Well of course, I own that CD.

DH: What projects are you currently working on?

RL: I have just completed my Desert Island Poems list, basically your 10 favorite poems and why you like them. I have always been obsessed by lists, one of my earliest findings was the RE/Search Industrial Culture Handbook which included after each interview, lists of books and films that influenced each artist. Over the years, many of these artists had piled up extensive libraries of radical material, it was like being able to rummage through their entire bookshelf or CD stack. That led me to rummaging through video stores, crossing out films as I saw them. This was like my first introduction to names like Xenakis, Jodorowsky and Lautreamont.

DH: When you mention Tristian Tzara on your list of favorite poems, you state that Dada was superior to Surrealism – how?

RL: The key innovations of 20th century art were already present in the work of Dada – particularly Duchamp, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Man Ray, Hans Richter... many of which, it is true, followed on with the Surrealists. Surrealism was a regression for many reasons, Surrealism tried to align itself with communism, where as Dada shouted anarchism, Surrealism was tied to the Freudian couch, where as Dada thumbed it's nose, Surrealism was fixated on painterly artwork, where as Dada was more directed towards performance, installations, film and sound poetry, Surrealism was tightly centralized around Paris, whereas Dada was never centralized geographically, Surrealism was a hierarchical members-only club, riddled with expulsions, even Dali got kicked out for, in part, making jokes about Lenin, where as Dada had no rules, anyone and anything can be Dada.

DH: Your writing has been described as "grotesque and heinously dark," yet I am surprised to find you remarkably amicable and funny?

RL: People always say that about people like Tom Waits or Diamanda Galas, I don't think we could approach what we do long term, if we didn't see some sort of perverse humor in it all. I think wit and irony very much function as a sort of trap door or escape hatch. As nearly all poets, apart from myself, write from personal experience, I get some very strange reactions, "you mean you're not normally in a straight jacket?". I guess I can just go out there, feel the textures that are there, but always come back. I can crawl into the darkest and creepiest corners of my mind, see what turns up and report back, I don't have to stay there. I am always just fascinated by what is there, about pushing that little bit deeper, how far does it go? What is beyond that? Of cause, after a few years you get very good at playing the game, like an expert on horror films, who can't get their kicks no more.

DH: What are your thoughts on publishing, have you found it difficult to obtain publishers?

RL: I've had dealings with several publishers in the past, most of which have been protracted and ultimately disintegrated. There are very few radical publishers out there, least of all in Australia, there are few people who understand my work, least of all publishers, I am regarded as too intellectual or literary. I find my work is much more accepted in an art realm, but then it isn't something to be hung on a wall. But, I am hoping to release some new material through selected e-zines in the coming months. I think net publishing is the only way to go, you don't have to compromise to the imperative of contrived market retardation and it's available to everyone and that's what counts.

DH: Can you tell us about SpeedPoets?

RL: SpeedPoets started out, many years ago as a small group of outsiders who started their own open-mic poetry event, much in opposition to the prevailing stultifying outlets. The 'speed' meant that you got up and read a short poem or segment, then someone else, it was very fast paced, so that there was constant change and diversity, a constantly shifting style and emphasis, that kept the attention, nothing could ever be long winded. We always performed with backing musicians, one day someone brought in Brian Eno's Ambient 4 On Land which became a fixture for a some time. Much has changed, some have moved on, but it has certainly grown in popularity.

DH: Henry Rollins once remarked, "...if I heard 'spoken word'. It would be something I'd run the other way from. It just sounds like it'd be pretentious and boring and long-winded and just kind of excruciating." How do you approach spoken word?

RL: I think poetry is susceptible to all sorts of very worn-out clichés; morning afters, lost loves, diary poems, hangovers, the view out my window, sunrise stirrings, Bukowski imitations... so it's actually very easy to subvert, deconstruct and disrupt that flow. To do spoken word well is actually one of the hardest things, what works well on the page, seldom works in-front of an audience, and what works well in-front of an audience, often looks flimsy on the page. The beer fuelled, gritty and dirty loudmouths of performance pub poetry are full of immediate, short and cheap lyricism which for the most part the publishing establishment hardly consider worthy, but at the same time more developed, literary and intricate material will simply fall flat in such a context. Both forms have strikingly different styles, audiences, supporters, domains of influence and spheres of development. Henry Rollins is certainly an intriguing and multi-faceted character, by contrast he's also stated that spoken word, "has more integrity, DIY ingenuity, spontaneity, subversion, lack of rules, and fury in its little finger than most of today's 'punk' bands could muster in their entire rotting carcass," - and that's coming from Rollins.]]> An Interview With Rich Murphy by David F. Hoenigman Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:58:15 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1942 The Apple in the Monkey Tree by Codhill Press; chapbooks Great Grandfather by Pudding House Publications, Family Secret by Finishing Line Press, and Hunting and Pecking by Ahadada Press; poems in hundreds of journals; and essays in refereed journals, including Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture. His books Phoems for Mobile Vices published by BlazeVox Books will be out this June, and Voyeur, the 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award winner, will be out in October.

David Hoenigman: What projects are you currently working on?

Rich Murphy: I am currently working on a few projects.

I am proofing for an early fall release of Voyeur by Gival Press. The manuscript recently won the 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award. I am also proofing a collection of short poems due out in June: Phoems for Mobile Vices by BlazeVox Books. Last month, Ahadada Books published a chapbook titled Hunting and Pecking. The poems are a chapter of an ongoing project, a kind of palimpsest or conversation with writers. I have been busy this past year.

Two essays are forming themselves also. One essay examines the limitations of empathy and the idea of the sublime and explores alternatives to both. The second essay compares Mick Jagger's "As Tears Go By" to Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium" and their relationship to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's understanding of techno-capitalism.

I write poems on a fairly regular basis.

DH: When and why did you begin writing?

RM: I loved words at an early age. In fifth grade, I started a magazine with another student - to show off my wit I suppose. My whole life and education after that (perhaps before that) has been reading and playing with language. As a teenager, I wanted to be a composer. I played the trumpet poorly and thought that was my direction.

By 19, I knew my direction and was on my way with a more mature attitude of a 'long distance runner.' I was determined, disciplined, and patient. For about 10 years, I kept a book of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction going at all times. I wrote everyday, and around year three or four I began sending poems out and some were accepted by small magazines. One early one was accepted by LaBas Magazine, Douglas Messerli's early journal, a few were accepted by Telephone Magazine, Maureen Owen's early publication, and one was accepted by Chariton Review, where Jim Barnes was editor for a long tenure. We are talking in the early to middle seventies if my memory serves me well.

DH: When did you first consider yourself a writer?

RM: I was always careful about that. I thought of writing as a sacred activity though I felt that I was one early. In some ways it kept me focused on the work ahead of me, but I think when I began publishing in small journals around the country, I knew that I must be one now. So perhaps around 23 or 24, I knew that was the name for me.

DH: What inspired you to write your first book?

RM: That is a funny question for me. You can write many manuscripts over the course of 35 years and have many of the poems in each published in some impressive periodicals but not have a manuscript published until later. I can't remember what motivated the theme for the first collection of poems but one of my early manuscripts (1975?) was my response to the transformation of energy that had driven the communal 60's movements into the grabfest of the "Me Generation." The manuscript is titled "Apocalyptic Stupor." Whether this manuscript was my first, I currently don't remember. My early career included at least another half dozen manuscripts, and then I spent the late 1980s working on poems responding to my search for American culture. I named it "Americana."

The writing of The Apple in the Monkey Tree, written in first half of the 90s and published by Codhill Press in 2008, was motivated at first by the use of scientific language by some artists to legitimize their work. When that ax was ground, I examined the shedding of religious mythology (or metaphysics) in favor of scientific theory. I realized that scientists borrow from literature also, a kind of cross-fertilization. (I did end up adopting poems written much earlier in my career to build a chapter for the collection.)

Next, after writing on a number of topics for a while, I decided to write on the politicss of relationships. I was hoping to expose a number of popular myths about family and heterosexual power dynamics. I finished the core of the manuscript in 2001, but continued polishing it off and on over the next half dozen years by substituting poems. I titled it "Voyeur." Overlapping that effort was a new interest in palimpsests and conversing with writers through history.

That has led to a manuscript titled "Stolen Goods" from which Hunting and Pecking by Ahadada Books is taken. In tandem, I wrote poems for a manuscript that has come to be called "Body Parts." I continue to work on both manuscripts.

This long explanation is my way of saying that I think themes that suggest interest seem to emerge in my writing, and I attempt to develop them for myself.

DH: Who or what has influenced your writing?

RM: I remember how important George Starbuck and Derek Walcott were to my endurance. Both were teachers at Boston University's creative writing program when I attended. I was 31. Both were so supportive of my work then, encouraging me to innovate, that I was confident in my direction. My writing back then was layered with a dark humor that brought comments and encouragement. I admired Derek for what he can do with metaphor and George for his sense of humor in his poems.

In order to enter the program I had granted to me an undergraduate degree from BU. I had left college at 20 when I became an autodidact and began my disciplined writing and reading as I mentioned earlier. Rumor back then was that Anne Sexton was the only other student to have been admitted in this way. That gave a boost of confidence that I probably needed. How many years ago was that? 27? And I am still at it.

Just as one can't live in Boston and not root for the Red Sox, one can't live in Boston and write poetry and not have Robert Lowell as an early hero. He was an early influence, as was e. e. cummings, and then Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley led me to Charles Olsen, and he led me to the poets from NYC. Outside the USA, Apollinaire was exciting to me when I was young, as were the symbolists and surrealists: French, Spanish, South American. Octavio Paz's poetry and essays were interesting to me around the same time Yeats was exciting.

I came to love and be fed by all varieties of poetry. When I was young, I was amazed at the politics in poetics, and I noticed how some poets and critics simply couldn't understand other poetics. Amazing! One wonders how that audience member visits galleries or music venues with minds so coarse. I have become inclined to think that different poetics are simply resisted and denied without attempt to acknowledge them so that particular traditions champion their own.

DH: How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

RM: Perhaps because I felt that confessional poetry had run its course by 1971 or at least I couldn't recognize how I could dress up or strip down my life to make it of interest to anyone else, I shifted my Boston influence early until a reader won't find much in my poems that gives voice to my personal life: Moods, attitudes, indirect fullness or limitation of experience maybe.

DH: Do you have a specific writing style?

RM: My work is always growing, so any specific style lasts a short while or at least that is how I understand my situation. That is at least how it has been, and I expect it will continue that way. I do enjoy exploring irony. The reader is so hopeful for metaphor that it is expected and hungered for. When the metaphor is broken down, the reader is left only with aporia and possibility. That sublime occurrence is where I am most comfortable. It is where I dance as Nietzsche's child in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

DH: What genre are you most comfortable writing?

RM: I write poetry and prose poetry. However I have written essays on poetics in the last decade or so and have enjoyed this new territory for its influence on my poetry. The poetry and essays are in a kind of conversation.

DH: Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

RM: My poems are about the process of thinking about ideas or thinking through perspectives, as many as come to my attention while writing. Poetic truth for me is the process of consciousness discovering a new perspective. That may be why metaphor and irony are so important to me. Conventionally, we try to make sense or put things together as in the implications of metaphor. However, I find irony-scape has its way with the conventional thought via chance and atrophy, suggesting that something other than the mind's convention building technique is having an effect.

DH: What book are you reading now?

RM: I am reading The King in the Tree for the gender issues it seems to explore. I am very interested in the degree to which men can empathize with women, or perhaps better put, play out a woman's motives and behavior. I am always suspicious, though I have tried myself.

I also recently watched I Have Loved You so Long, a French film directed by Philippe Claudel that plays down the male and makes a statement about Western women, sisters. The beauty of it is its exploration of limits of empathy in literature and life. This limitation is of great interest to me. It seems to me that learning empathy is a finite thing, limited often by the power dynamic involved and the subtle nature of individual life situations that, ultimately, simply demand respect. If viewers were affected by "I Have Love you So Long" and/or "The Girlfriend Experience," they would be affected by Voyeur when it comes out.

DH: Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

RM: I have been reading Sheila Murphy and enjoy what she is doing. I have also been reading Jonathan Monroe and Rane Arroyo with great interest. These poets are newer to me, and I find them interesting for various reasons. Murphy finds aporia in daily living. I admire that ability. Monroe exposes it in historical understanding. It is fascinating to read him for that. Arroyo understands gender in such an open way. The magnanimous tone in his poems demonstrates his international intergenerational reach.

DH: What is the most misunderstood aspect of your work?

RM: I think that my poems are dense and the density frustrates some readers. In an age of platitudes and jingles, a sound bite itself a sound bite, slowing the reader down, aggravates the quick read of newspaper and blogs and goes along with the aporian reminders embedded in the poems. However, this is a characteristic of the movies, novels, and plays that I most enjoy, the need/desire to read it again. ]]> An Interview With Ottavio Cappellani by Ayesha Charles Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:55:43 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1938     With my demonstrated fascination with Sicily and its' people and my close ties and frequent travels to the island I was advised to read the work of Sicilian Catanese writer, Ottavio Cappellani. Like the island, his work is thrilling, vibrant, beautiful and sexy – he deciphers the language of the land and transcends this into the vivid, multi - layered, innate language of his voice, a voice which is time altering and entertaining in both literature and in sound. I was more than happy to take my fourth trip to Sicily Catania when Cappellani agreed to meet with me. We had arranged to meet at Scenario Pub. Li. Co, the Catanese equivalent of Southbank's BFI. The bar was occupied by what you might call the 'arty' crowd; writers, directors, comedians and musicians – the sort of people you might expect to meet in Ernest Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises.
    When the tall, fluffy haired fully bearded Cappellani entered the bar stroke art centre he was greeted and acknowledged by all of Scenario Pub.Li.Co's patrons. Looking like none of the pictures in his books I could only assume by the attention he was receiving this might be him, my host confirmed that it was. He joins us at our table and after exchanging kisses he orders himself a glass of Prossecco, lights a cigarette and gets into full conversation about the Sicilian song festival Festival della Canzone Siciliana currently taking place, in which he is one of the critics on the panel. Prior to our meeting I had the pleasure of viewing this X factor, meets cheesy fifties song contest live at the ABC theatre. Cappellani is open and chatty, he tells me he is having trouble deciding the title of his soon to be published third novel, he advises me on restaurants to visit and tells stories from his past. He's funny and frank, naturally he is full of witty and comical stories and he interviews like a dream with responses as beautiful and lively as his writing.

Ayesha Charles: How long have you been writing?

Ottavio Cappellani: I think that somehow you are born a writer, maybe the question should be, 'How long have you been a published writer.' There are a lot of writers that cannot get their work published, being a writer has nothing to do with having your work being published or recognised....at least this is my belief!

My first book was published in 1988, a philosophy book called, 'La Morale Del Cavallo,' (The moral of the horse). The preface was written by Manlio Sgalambro, a famous philosopher and theologist in Italy. The publishing company was named NADIR, the same publishing company that published the works of Pietro Toesca, who is considered the intellectual head of the Italian anarchist movement; the publication of this book shut me out of the university world, however I was very happy about this as it gave me the chance to focus on my romance writing, which I believed was something I needed to do if I were to live my career fully as a writer.

AC: How many books have you written?

OC: La Morale Del Cavallo, (The Moral of the Horse) Chi e' Lou Sciortino? (Who is Lou Sciortino?), Sicilian Tragedee, Chi ha Incastrato Lou Sciortino? (Who framed Lou Sciortino?) The latter is the prequel to Chi e' Lou Sciortino.

AC: In general, how long does it take for you to complete a book?

OC: It takes a year and half to have the novel clear in my mind, during this period of time I write nothing, not even notes. I only follow the inspirations and paths that I believe could be useful for me to write the story I intend to write. I then sit down in front of my computer and physically write the novel within three months, at least this has been the process and timing for my published romance novels thus far.

AC: When do you know your book is complete?

OC: There is a point during the writing process where my characters take a three-dimensional form. I see them as though they were alive and at this point they are the ones leading me through fiction. The work is finished when the writer disappears and all that is left are the characters and their stories.

AC: How long did it take you to get your first completed book published?

OC: The first romance novel I wrote in three months, I sent it out to several publishing companies by mail, after a few months I received two positive responses from two different publishing houses and was left to choose between them. It sounds an easy and straightforward path, however there are many difficulties a new born writer must face.

AC: How did you go about promoting your work?

OC: I had the luck of being contacted by an agent from London who was able to sell my first romance novel in 30 countries. I am useless at promoting any of my work, luckily press and event departments of publishing companies exist.

AC: Are there any motifs / recurring themes in your books?

OC: I would say the MAFIA, which represents the biggest literary metaphor of power in all its forms, also the cinema and theatre which represents and stores our general history and forms the way in which we analyse our present. The imaginative world of mafia, of cinema and theatre have taken the place of what in the passed was called the lyric opera; literature, philosophy and theology, a sort of pop that now has the duty of expressing and narrating our times.

AC: Is Sicily a stimulus for your writing? / How important is Sicily to your writing?

OC: Immensely. Sicily is not a geographical region, it's a place of the spirit for its history and position, Sicily is a metaphysic and literary place. It is also a place where feelings, both good and bad are somewhat made extreme due to our heat, our sun, our wine, our food, our men and women, our civilisations melting pot, our sea and for all those reasons that I cannot list, as there are so many. Nowadays I think there are only three literature inspiring places in Europe at the moment; these are London, Berlin and Sicily.

AC: What is your general writing process?

OC: I try to picture a story that could represent at its best all the things that I want to express at that time, then as said above I take a year, looking around, gathering inspirations, reading, watching movies, travelling and then at some point the story anchors itself to something I have deep within myself, like all the pieces of a puzzle taking their position, then that is when I start writing things I never imagined I could write about. In my latest romance work this process has been taken to its extreme, reading it all over again there are chapters I did not even remember I had written - a splendid surprise!

AC: What are your ambitions as a writer?

OC: To be able to discover a literary language capable to work within the cinema without losing its literary depth, maybe in the future, to be able to describe 'this' Europe at the end of its civilisation as we know it thus far. I would also like to be able to sell many copies of my more complicated works, those unsuitable to be published. Also to terminate the Apocalypse, and to pilot a helicopter!

AC: What does being a writer mean to you?

OC: To have upon me an immense responsibility and at the same time acknowledging the fact that this is a responsibility I cannot live without. Being a writer, to me also means that I can have the irresponsibility towards common duties of life, when she (life) betrays me or lets me down, I can take my revenge and anger out by writing. It is an unrenounceable joy, being able to create a world with my writing that can be seen and accessed by many, now and in millions of years to come.

AC: What is the best and worst thing about being a writer?

OC: The worst thing about being a writer is having the sight of a monster, a beast which lives within the writer. This monster has a lucid view of life which affects all human relationships. This monster is called The Writer.

AC: If you weren't a writer what could you imagine yourself being?

OC: A dead man!!

AC: What are you currently working on? / What can Sicily expect from in the next few years?

OC: I am writing a book about Catania, a sort of touristic guide seen through the eyes of the "monster" (writer) mentioned above. On the 30th March 2009 my new romance will be published by Mondadori, [Italy's biggest publishing company] its a story set in Los Angeles in the seventies, the birth of American Indi cinema, it's full of Italian-American names and is called Chi ha Incastrato Lou Sciortino? (Who framed Lou Sciortino?)

In June a romance novel titled Ulisse con Piscina (Ulysses with Swimming Pool) will be published with limited copies. In this piece I make an encounter with mythology that populates my land with the so called "postmodernism". Then, a novel titled Viaggio al Nord (A Trip to the North) is due to be published, in this piece I narrate Scandinavia from the eyes of a man from the "south" [Southern Italy]. Finally it's in the pipeline to create a contemporary western film set deep inside Sicilian inland; a dry land and yellow in its horrific shadows.

AC: Any advice to aspiring writers?

OC: Stop writing and look for an honest job!

AC: What accreditation have you had so far as a writer?

OC: In 2007 I was listed in the 'Reading The World,' a shortlist of 40 books published in the States voted to be the best in the world of the respective year by book store owners and publishers. The year I was listed I was the only one of the forty writers not to win a Nobel Prize. I have also had David Leavitt dedicate a full page article in the New York Times to my second novel The Sicilian Tragedee, in which he states; "[Ottavio Capellani] He is the heir of the great Italian Literature with a surprising intimacy with Shakespeare." His comments made me emotional and gave me so much joy.

AC: What are the perks of being a writer?

OC: The possibility to express whatever you feel, being able to say it in your own way with your own words, in your own time, to the broadest public possible. To have in your hand a weapon, [language and the word] that can be more powerful than the conventional weapon. Also the fact that I can smoke, drink and sleep around without having a "social" stigma, as to writers many things are forgiven!

Many glasses of Prossecco and Amarro later Ottavio Cappellani readies himself to leave, we exchange our good byes and he promises to send me a copy of his third book. My host and I soak up the final remnants of Cappellani and decide that we like him and Scenario Pub.Li.Co very much. My host takes himself to the bar to pay for our drinks and returns placing his money back in his wallet, with the look a father gives when his son does him proud, 'That was on Ottavio,' he smiles.

Ottavio Cappellani's third novel, Chi ha Incastrato Lou Sciortino? (Who Framed Lou Sciortino?) was published Monday 30th March 2009. ]]>