RSS Builder by B!Soft Word Riot http://www.wordriot.org Good writing. No remorse. en-us wordriothttp://feedburner.google.com Saturday Night Desperate by Don Winter Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:31:39 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2091 Review by Todd Moore

I remember getting hit once with a baseball bat right in the middle of the back and the force of that blow spun me around toward a girl who was laughing. Sometimes a book will have that same effect on me. Reading Tom McGrath's LETTER TO AN IMAGINARY FRIEND was like that. It was years ago. I was sitting in a shot and beer joint, some back booth, eating a burger with the blood and grease pouring out on my plate, and the beer tasted good and cold and I read that first page of LETTER and was hooked on McGrath. For me, reading poetry is personal and visceral, up close, in your face, mano a mano, like a fist in the eye.

Don Winter's poetry hits me like that. I didn't know much about his work until I read NO WAY OUT BUT IN, Working Stiff Press, 2008. The format itself is nothing to speak of. Maybe twenty pages or so, eight and a half is by eleven, the print font typewriter graphics, the cover a color snapshot of I assume his mother and father sitting on a sofa with Winter in the middle. She has her head cushioned affectionately on his shoulder. The chapbook is side stapled and then duct taped over. Something about the unpretentious way it was put together made me like it immediately. I liked it because it was a kind of fuck you way of saying I'm a little beaten up but I am still standing. I reviewed that chapbook the same day I got it because I had to. There are some books and that just seem to reach over, grab you by the shirt front, and there is nothing you can do but read them.

The same thing happened to me when I grabbed SATURDAY NIGHT DESPERATE out of the mailbox. The second I ripped the envelope open I knew I had to read it. I not only knew I had to read it, but I also had to start writing about it even while I was reading because I know Don Winter's poetry and it's the kind of stuff I go for. The same thing happens whenever I read a new Gary Goude poem or a new Ben Smith poem or a new John Yamrus poem or a new Ron Androla poem or a new Mark Weber poem or a new Milner Place poem. What I know more than anything else is that this is going to be a poem that is essential, vital, real and when I come away from reading it, it will be like walking out of a really good movie that I hated to see come to an end.

SATURDAY NIGHT DESPERATE , Working Stiff Press, 2009, is a working man's selected, gathering the best of Don Winter from 1999-2009. It's not hardcover, it's not even glossy paperback. Instead, this is folded and stapled and stark black and white, definitely nailgun noir, bar whiskey jagged.

Roofing

Mornings we ripped
shingles. When air temp topped
body temp we got buzzed.
We sat and smoked.

"I'd get monkeys
to do your jobs
if I could teach them not to shit
on the roof," boss yelled.

We laughed like struck
match sticks. Down in the street
sheets just hung there on the line
like movie screens.


Winter understands the down and out world of the working man. "In Niles, Michigan, the working class town where I grew up, you were educated (euphemism for 'socially managed') for docility: conformity to the rules, obedience to authority, and receptivity to rote learning." From Press of the Real: Poetry of the Working Class. Author's Introduction.

Dressing Burgers at Wanda's Grill

During his 23 years here,
on each one
he curls ketchup
into a mouth,
places two pickles
for eyes, two lines
of mustard for eyebrows.
The onion bits,
he says,
are pimples.

We watch him
leave alone after
work, come in the same
time each morning,
take his break
by himself, always the same
station blaring.

We watch him
finish off
each face with a top hat, mash
the condiments together,
bury each one
in a thin, wax box.
All those little white caskets
on the greasy steel rack.


As far as the academic world is concerned, the low life world of work and sweat and angst and going without and living with those impossible power ball dreams and getting laid off and getting fucked up and going out from a heart attack, cancer, or stroke should have no room for poetry in it. After all, isn't poetry the private reserve for the MFA elite? The university professors? What about the poetry of Charles Bukowski? What about the poetry of Kell Robertson? What about the poetry of Fred Voss? What about the poetry of John Yamrus? What about the poetry of Gary Goude? What about the poetry of Mark Weber? What about the poetry of John Macker? What about the poetry of Ron Androla? What about the poetry of Gerald Locklin? What about the poetry of Tony Moffeit? What about the poetry of Raindog Armstrong? I wouldn't trade one line of any of their work for all the academic poetry written in the last thirty years.

Breaking Down

I bought that car for $50.

To open the door
you had to pound
just below the handle.

When you turned a corner
the dash lights flickered
like a busted marquee.

The rolling noise
that charmed Vera
was a can of Budweiser
under her seat.

Night we split up,
she held my erection
& looked out the window
like someone
with a hand on a doorknob
stopping to say one last thing
before goodbye.


On the inside of the back cover there are these words:

From 1999-2009 Don Winters' poems appeared in most small press (and many academic press) journals. He is off to discover a new path.

I could be very wrong and totally off base, but my take here is this book is Don Winter's path, past present and future and he would be betraying himself along with Tom McGrath and Charles Bukowski and Gary Goude and John Yamrus and everyone else who put his own blood on the line for the line if he strayed from it. In his introduction, Winter tells a story about McGrath dying in a single room wearing a black mitten on a hand that he could not keep warm after it had received surgery. In some larger more important way, once you start writing poetry you put on that black mitten and you can never take it off. ]]> Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire by David Mura Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:30:57 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2089 Review by Cynthia Alicia Smith

David Mura, author of memoirs Turning Japanese and Where the Body Meets Memory, writes an eloquent first novel that explores the generational effects of the Japanese American internment camps. The story is framed around Ben Ohara, a middle-aged itinerant historian who uses the writing of his dissertation entitled "Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire" to journey through memory as a means of inner reconciliation. As Ben revisits the causes of his depression, the early death of his father through suicide, family secrets kept by his mother, and the sudden disappearance of his astrophysicist brother Tommy, he is able to piece together the psychological consequences of his parents' experience in the internment camps and find closure through the study of history.
    Mura writes an intricate first person perspective that allows readers to delve into Ben's mind and experience a childhood of dual cultures. From the bedtime stories of Paul Bunyan and Urashima Taro, to Ben and Tommy's obsession with Batman and Godzilla, Mura includes a recognizable yet unique aspect of cultural interrelations. Mura does include Japanese terminology within the text; however, his provision of definitions incorporates a smooth transition between languages: "When I think back, it seems strange that I didn't quite know what the word hakujin – white people – meant, though I sensed it referred to outsiders, people not like us" (27).
    Although Ben is capable of academic language, his narration exudes a casual tone that not only sets him apart from his genius brother, but also allows readers to immediately view Ben as a regular guy. Ben is a reliable narrator who expresses his thoughts fully throughout his psychological quest.
    By focusing on the generational consequences of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, Mura leaves readers with a teleological observation of history. Although fictional, Ben's story reflects a time that is not of the past, but of the present. Ben's world is our world, inhabited with cell phones, parent teacher conferences, Bull games, and episodes of Law & Order. Like the plot of "Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire" Mura's dedication "For the legacy we all share" encompasses a merging of past and present, demonstrating the strength that can be found through both. ]]> Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:30:10 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2092 Review by Morten Hoi Jensen

    In an early essay on censorship, Salman Rushdie, himself no stranger to the wrath of censorious regimes, warns that the "most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people." All the more reason, then, to reassert the importance of the novel, of poetry, of literature. There is a fine literary tradition of defiance, of rebellion in the face of oppression: Anna Akhmatova's later poems, Albert Camus' essay L'homme revolte, Isaac Babel's short stories – to mention but a few. For English-speaking readers, a bold new voice has been added to this list: the Iranian novelist Shahriar Mandanipour, whose novel Censoring an Iranian Love Story is his first book translated into English.
    Censoring an Iranian Love Story essentially tells two stories. What makes this so unique is that Mandanipour unravels them simultaneously; interwoven, they are distinguished only in terms of typography; one appears in bold type, the other in regular. The love story of Sara and Dara, young lovers-to-be who meet during a student riot in Tehran, is at the center of the novel, but around it orbits the story of how to get it published in accordance with the rules of Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. As a result, sections of the novel often read as non-fiction, the typescript of a lecture on Iranian literary and political history. This would have been less interesting were it not for Mandanipour's engaging wit and ability to illuminate the many absurdities of the totalitarian authorities. In this regard, his quest to publish something as mundane as a love story becomes a Kafkaesque one: The Trial and The Castle loom heavily in this book.
    But so do many of works of literature, for that matter. Throughout the novel appear sentences such as "Now surely, with an Unbearable Lightness of curiosity you want to ask..." or "I was just another young man with Great Expectations of my future..." Such mischievous little bursts may be dismissed as mere trickery, but considering Sara and Dara's first way of communicating was by dotting the letters in great literary works at a Tehran library, clandestine literary references attain a significant potency. It comes as no surprise that among the most frequently referred to is the work of Milan Kundera:
The next book was Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was impossible for this politico-erotic novel to be among the books at the library...

...like Mr. Clementis, a persona non-grata whom Soviet censors air-brushed out of a photograph, yet the hat he had lent to a man posing with him remained on that person's head.
This last reference does not directly mention Kundera or any of his works, but surely it cannot be a coincidence that Mandanipour refers to the example of Mr. Clementis, an example which memorable appears early in Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, followed almost immediately by the unforgettable sentence: "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
    Like Clementis's hat, visible evidence of what was so treacherously removed, Mandanipour applies yet another typographical trick to further elaborate Iranian censorship. Throughout the novel one encounters sentences that are cleverly struck through the middle with a line; though they have been 'censored' they are still visible and legible to the reader. Thus we are permitted to read sections of the book not permitted in Iran. For example: "That day, Sara went home from the university far more quickly than usual. She closed the door to her room, lay down on her bed, and began reading the book from the beginning."
    Already, since its publication in May, Censoring an Iranian Love Story has acquired a great deal more urgency than it may have otherwise. Considering the events of the past summer, a sentence such as "since the founding of the first university, getting beaten up and thrown in jail have always been among the required credits for students" becomes doubly significant. As such, it is a novel that has all the fervor and brilliance to become a Book of Laughter and Forgetting, or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, of the new Iranian revolution, just as Kundera's postmodern masterpieces were in the years leading up to the Velvet Revolution twenty years ago.



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]]> Three Poems by Liang Yujing Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:29:12 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2082 Catkins

It is there, the lake, nobody around,
nor wind that breezes into an ear
the fragmented message of spring.

I dwell in that lone building, counting
the number of vehicles passing by
outside the window, on the periphery

of the campus, a dark and taciturn dyke
below: its float grass intertwines into
a net, wrapping up what is untold

and intangible. It snows and flakes
wallow under our feet, swelling into a fluffy ball.
They're catkins, you tell me, from a willow tree.

We loiter along the lakeside softened
by catkin-like snow or snow-like catkins,
not knowing how to start the talk

until an ivy-covered house bobs up
into our vision. It's Soviet style, you say
to me, an old name missing in white-outs.

So let them be catkins and the lake
be there: a translucent, murky, bold and solid
oblong shape I'm looking at on Google Earth.



The Woman Chopping

Ears alert, I heard the 'du-du-du'
of the woman chopping meat,
hurried, continuous, bone-chilling
sounds at every touch of her kitchen knife
and the chopping block, echoing
and straying in the humid dark air
of the alleyway to my dorm
at midnight.

The woman she was chopping
meat into minces to make patties
that I often bought during daytime
in her small storefront. A smiling face,
where wrinkles besieged
withered beauty.

I knew, too well, she did
no more than earning her living,
yet my younger mind still couldn't help
wondering that perhaps she sold patties
to ghosts. A murky alleyway, revelry
of people underground dancing and eating
with the clear, sudden sounds of 'du-du-du'
at midnight.

Strange enough that many years
after my graduation, the sounds often rose
into my ears whenever I passed through
a dark, lonely alleyway at midnight, as if
in one of the shut up storefronts
behind a dumb door
the woman were chopping
with hurried, clear sounds of
'du-du-du-du-du'
'du-du-du-du-du-du-du'



Proof

A friend of mine
from Thailand said
he was waterproof
  for the fact that

he had worked for three months
  underwater; another man,
Tokyo-based, tagged himself
  as earthquake-proof in that

he had survived that
  four times, big and small.
A woman of forty nine who
  had five ex-husbands

or more could easily
brag she's been man-proof
undoubtedly; I chuckled to them
  when I was asked

as to the same question.
  Normally and literally, I'm student-proof
while teaching, woman-proof
  while loving, propaganda-proof when watching

CCTV, and democracy-proof
  when voting, as well as poetry-proof
at any time I'm composing
a poem. They all laughed too,

jeering: you're self-proof,
  as you're bullshitting in every word.
'Shit!' an armyman cursed,
  his nationality unknown, grunting:

'I've been injured so many
times; brain-damaged, heart
-broken and cock-disabled, yet
never ever have I been bullet-proof at all.'



About the author:
Born in Changde, China, Liang Yujing completed an MA in American Literature in Wuhan University in 2007. He writes in both English and Chinese. Liang Yujing is now working as an English teacher in Hunan Business College, China. ]]> Two Poems by Lisa Veyssiere Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:27:41 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2077 Courtesy Call

After this I'm not bothering
to check out my window.
But look, I've seen it today and now it's too late.

Margaret, there's a witch at your door
some things she doesn't care about are your blood and your soul.
She didn't hear that brown is the new black. Still,
don't be disarmed. If you are kind,
she will open a vein to show you the antifreeze.

I'd shut that door if I were you.

Think back hard now
(it's hard, I know)
when your Daniel and my Joseph were three
and not even their fathers were old enough for a war
it couldn't have come to this
not even when we were drinking it could have come to this.

They finished, ok. They finished school
and the job at Brinks paid something.

We had boys. They never played soldier, or even-
we weren't even those neighbors who cooked burgers on the 4th.
Even if we had paid attention, it would have still come to this.

I see you flip the channels
through unshuttered windows.
The Hefner mansion, the Real World, cooks in New York City
anything not Fallujah not Kandahar,

and wait for something dark to flicker between our lawns.



Gaslight at the Arroyo Secco

I alarmed you on Thursday, but these things happen.

Do you remember
when you were a boy prince and I was a caterpillar
not a princess
(I never got these things right)
Anything Can Happen Day was a Wednesday
on the Mickey Mouse Club.
We ignored it and ate vanilla wafers
and oh, then later everything happened.

It's not a long drive from Whittier to Riverside, but it's not a lovely one either.
That's not even the thing I'm sorriest that you had to see.

The pay phone outside the Dew Drop In, broken!
And the jaundice lighting of the rooms inside.
I'm so sorry.

Did you see, as we left, the small moths on the siding, under the exterior lights?
Geometrid
they fly overland from the creek bed behind the motel. The whole of the Mojave is their oyster
and still they land here.

Talk to me some other time about making better choices.

I smoke on the way back to show you I don't care
not about what happened in the room or even before that
the how it all started part.
Instead I look into the lighted night and remember
the report from the seventh grade
how moths don't fly on full moons
and I think we have eleven, twelve days before then. That hope
then rests in this order of things I can't crush with my small sharp heel.

These are the days in the time when anything can happen. ]]> Fata Morgana by Claudia Serea Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:26:00 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2084 We travel in a beat-up Romanian car with no AC.

Ahead of us, fata Morgana creates imaginary islands
and waves scarves of water: Over here! Here!

The asphalt melts over the spine of the earth
into endless white noise on the radio.

Only the mirage floats on top of the road
and makes me dream of wells.

Tonight I'll become a lake
into which you'll sink.



About the author:
I was born in Romania, and I moved to the U.S. in 1995. My poems and translations are published in literary journals such as Mudfish, Oberon, The Comstock Review, Harpur Palate, Languageandculture.net, Exquisite Corpse, and in various Romanian publications. My chapbook, Eternity's Orthography, was chosen as a finalist and was published in September 2007 by Finishing Line Press. ]]> If the Walls Could Speak by Heidi Schmidt Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:24:15 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2083 I watched my toes naked on the cold-tiled floor as I sat on the toilet, perched
as if waiting for something
and you spoke from the other side of the door.
I liked how your voice vibrated on the wooden door
and my toes cringed at the surprise of you and your sound.
I giggled at the idea of a sound escaping
and you being surprised too.

I flipped the glossy pages,
blurs of Madonna at 50, red lipstick is in.
Jude Law Cheats!
And my toes on the cobalt blue tile speckled
with a mucus green I haven't yet accustomed to.
And suddenly your silence, "Hey, running out to get some milk!"
And how I held the magazine just a little tighter, breathing out one single word,
"Lie."

The bathroom door creaked as you opened the front door
and my even more naked toes felt a gush of cold wind.
And I read my horoscope, "Night is a room, darkened for Lovers."
I closed the images of something I would never be and flushed.



About the author:
Born and raised in California, having studied English with an emphasis in Creative Writing to later find myself working with illiterate immigrants at City College, San Francisco, 826 Valenica tutoring high school teenagers in writing and working along side other volunteers on the book Waiting to Be Heard, and at The Arc Foundation teaching adults with disabilities, I packed my bags and headed to Barcelona, Spain to become Director of a language academy and teach adults the secrets of English. After having lived in Barcelona for 3 years, I continue to explore the magic of this Bohemian city and to write my observations of this country, turning them into poetry and short fiction. I am currently working on a novel and other pieces as well as teaching English as a second language.

"Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can learn to love another." Anne Michaels ]]> Poems in A (iii) by Andy Riverbed Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:23:33 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2086 and immediately acted.
I stood up and walked quickly,

but you were on a bicycle,
and I soon gave up.

I felt desolate and sad.
Small men baked
pizza inside my chest. They used
my heart as dough and my
blood as sauce. My words to you
were the cheese.

I spent a long time
thinking of ways to see you
again, but I knew
the harder I tried,
the worse I'd fuck up.

My best bet
was to give up.

I ate the pizza
alone;

it was tasty.



About the author:
Andy Riverbed is the author of the poetry collection, Damaged. You can read him at andyriverbed.info ]]> Central New York by Daniel Houston Powell Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:23:04 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2080 all sneers,
buzzin' with her Burberry python
glazin' eyes probably glaring at the weather
behind her tinted face windshield

I think they are the best decoration in the world
my promising career as a truck driver will revolutionize the industry
with a fully customized semi-cab
with smoking Jewish girls where the smokestacks should be
exhaust plumes billowing on out,
of a mouth, above a purple keffiyeh

As a realtor, I know that consumers value a towne-house
set in a lush woody setting,
where the youth gangs ride by on bikes and say,
"Yo, that's mad bucolic!"
and the roof reminds you of a gingerbread house
and the chimney is a smoking Jewish girl.
heels grippin' the roof like flying buttresses
When she breathes in, leafy humid air from the forest
gushes down through the fireplace, displacing ash in great clouds, and
dropping little stars of david,
which are actually fetuses
that someone mistook for glitter.



About the author:
Daniel Powell is a student at Syracuse University, where the student body was the inspiration for this poem. Read his blog at http://ambiguitron.blogspot.com.]]> Two Poems by Marcos Mataratas Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:22:15 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2081 Maybe this is stupid

The elders don't get tired of repeating
How much things are like an old whore
How much art's like an old arrogant whore with Victorian drapes
And dreams are like old speculative whores
Like whores standing on a bridge
In the end everything is like an old whore
And old whores, like drug dealers and fathers,
Attend the school of life
And old whores are mysterious and hard to find
They are sneaky and surprising
They are here and not
Like the free will of the stoics
Who are old whore veterans
Old whores take long vacations and long silent drives
And put on exotic moisturizing cream on their faces.
Like the suicide's answering machines,
The mouths of old whores are filled with maniacal laughter
Old whores live surrounded by fatal phenomenologies
Their teleologies are detachable at night
But the days when that made a difference are over now
And that's how everything is
Like an old whore
So it's hard not to dream when you're 21
Still a young hopeful whore in his peak
But back to old whores who can read
Your destiny through doorknobs you touched in the season of love
Because back then destinies were all the same (badass and whorish)
And no doors were ever left closed
And also because all old whores are amateur fortune tellers
But old whores are never like old whores
Because old whores know what saints know but they know it better



I (NULL) YOU

Then they came for the verbs
And their participation in verse was illegalized
with the penalty of indefinite captivity or death,
And shortly thereafter, they all emigrated out of reach,
Some voluntarily, others by force
The first one to go by force was 'do'
They held a ceremony for 'do'
But the third time it wasn't salvoes.
Then they came for 'love'
In the red light district of the Lexicon
It wasn't cupid's arrow that impaled him.
They came for 'drift' and 'float' and 'wander'
No one wanted to say aloud where they were taken
In any case, it wasn't a sauna.
And poor 'escape'
He couldn't hear the color of the button the dying pilot had whispered to him
'Reflect' went in the middle of the night,
It wasn't a mirror someone slid up to the end of his bed
It was his evil twin.
'Know' and 'ask' were found in bed together,
The two holes in their faces were not for smelling perfume.
The death of the legendary 'crying' was called a freak accident by one authority
He said the weeping verb hitchhiking at the bridge didn't feel like a ghost to his Chevy that night.
'Trust' thought the planes were dropping food.
'Return' couldn't get his eviction notice out of his head
Because they had written it on a brick
'Relax' noticed that the needles looked bigger than usual
And the acupuncturist wasn't Chinese this time
They got to 'help' on the side of the road
The tire iron wasn't for her flat tire.
And it wasn't tea that the Russian spy with the lazy eye had given 'find'
Of course some verbs went on their own,
The youthful yet delicate 'Play' was one:
It wasn't celebrating that this epileptic little leaguer was doing in the dug-out
'Fear's' life-alert necklace ran out of batteries
'Go' volunteered at what he thought was a going away circus
But knife-thrower's last balloon didn't pop.
The verbs in the nursing homes went all at once in an unrelated incident:
It hadn't been marshmallows around their pet rabbit's mouth.
And the rest were part of that vast and mostly cooperative migration,

"But what happens when verbs come back to you all at once
after having disappeared?"

This was the unaskable question on the minds of all poetic nouns
Would it be like the sudden occupation of a tyrannical regime?
Like a snowfall overnight?
What would such a life entail?
A death-sentence at best
As the remainders would soon realize (somehow)
When the hospitals became full with the screams
Of hemorrhaging suffixes and infixes and prefixes and circumfixes,
(Tenses were cremated after a botched attempt to cryogenically freeze them. )
Barbed wire and gas-masked question marks
Guarded the old syntactic pathways
through which nouns once happily migrated to the category of verbs
All news of the other side was denied to nouns,
Adverbs were vultures falling dead all around,
As their habitats had been wiped out all in one go
Times got harder, there were many martyrs and murders
Only the mental ward of verbs was left unbothered:
Verbs which made no sense to anyone,
Unfamiliar verbs, verbs gone senile, verbs who had lost their way
Verbs who thought they were nouns
Grunt-like, useless creatures that artistic grammars called verbs
Foreign undocumented verbs,
And in the basement lock-down cells
Were the ones not yet tamed
Or promoted to the status of civilized lexemes
(or listemes) (or morphemes): Feral verbs
The verbs raised in the wild
by violent creatures of silence and thought
Those verbs were left alone.



About the author:
Marcos Mataratas is 21 and from Sonora, Mexico, and Arizona. He has a BA in linguistics. His work is forthcoming in Drunken Boat and Thieves Jargon. ]]> Two Poems by Saeed Jones Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:21:34 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2079 Postcard from Inside His Head

The sky is full of blood-tipped beaks.
All hover dark-winged, ready
to peck these words to mumbles.

All roads are made of mud.
Each step comes at the expense of a lost shoe,
sucked down into the ground's dirty mouth.

If I try hard enough, I can see you
standing patiently beside your mailbox
but where I live, every day is a Sunday.



Sleeping Arrangement

I.

I've decided to let you stay
under our bed, the floor --
not the space between
mattress and metal frame.

Take your hand out
from under my pillow, please.
And take your sheets too.
Drag them under. Make pretend ghosts.

I can't have you rattling the bed springs
so keep still, keep quiet.
Mistake yourself for shadows.
Learn the lullabies of lint.


II.

I will do right by you:
crumbs brushed off my sheets,
white chocolate chip, I think,
or the corners of crackers.

Count on the occasional dropped grape,
a peach pit with fine yellow hairs,
wet where my tongue has been,
a taste you might remember.

I've heard some men can survive
on dust mites alone for weeks at a time.
There's a magnifying glass on the nightstand,
in case it comes to that.



About the author:
Saeed Jones is currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers University - Newark. His work has appeared in StorySouth, Barnwood Magazine, The Adirondack Review, and Splinter Generation among other publications. Feel free to check out his blog - saeedjones.wordpress.com]]> Three Poems by Bill Johnston Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:20:47 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2085 All the Times She Said Yes

            She pulled me into a hall closet, took off her shirt and asked me if I liked what I saw. She was too young so I resisted the urge to put her nipple in my mouth and rejoined the party.
            She rubbed against me and asked me what kind of cologne I was wearing. I told her it was speed stick and walked away.
            She turned down the lighting and when I asked why she said that everyone looked better in the dark. Then I left. She was my third cousin.
            She asked me if I would invite her into my room. Call me pussy but she was moving a little fast. We went our own ways and later fucked each others roommates.
            We'd had a lot to drink when she told me she wanted to do something crazy, wanted me to show her my room. I brought her upstairs went in to the next room to hit the bong for only five or so minutes, when I came back she was gone. I looked for her, and found her by the fire pit in the backyard. She was sitting on a complete strangers lap in her bra and panties.
            She told me she wanted to come over to "fix her computer" while her boyfriend was away. She was older and taken so I blew her off.
            She spent a week in my dorm room. We slept side by side. We smoked pot and stuffed our faces. After a week I tried to kiss her. She never slept in my bed again.
            I told her that I too played the violin. She stripped and laid down beside me. I told her she was beautiful, and she was. I brushed the hair out of her face and held her till the sun rose. The next day was awkward.
            I'd heard she had genital warts. She showed up at my house and told us all that she did not. She then proceeded to try to sleep with my older brother, then me, then my younger brother. She didn't get far.
            She invited me over to her house. I showed up with a sleeping bag and a book of poetry. I still don't know why I didn't go through with that one. I guess I just got a bad feeling.
            Looking back she wanted me to kiss her.
            I should have kissed her.



Figment in Your Head

For all you know, I'm dead, and the person here before you is a figment in your head.
And, I feel, inside, that I've gotten motion sickness and life's a bumpy ride.
And I know, life's not bad, it's confounded by the doubts and all the false starts I've had.
And I feel that I'm right, but my mind is always clouded with a faltering insight.
When I find, that I'm wrong, it's like life's a fucked up game and I have to play along.
And I have to play along.



My First Pet

It was as good as dead when I found it lying there in a driveway.
A car had crushed the rear half of its body but the poor little lizard was still alive.
I suppose if I'd came across it today I'd keep on walking, or finish the job.
That would have been the merciful thing to do.

I'd never had my own pet and, for some reason, I thought I could save it.
I scraped it off the pavement, put it in a bucket full of grass, and took it to school.
We had a few lizards for pets in my class, and I thought he would fit right in.
When I gave the bucket to my teacher she didn't say much.
She just took the bucket and said she would see what she could do.

She told me several hours later that my lizard was dead.
I cried as only a child cries.

At least I didn't name it.



About the author:
Bill Johnston is a twenty nine year old writer who splits his time between Minneapolis MN and Rapid City SD. He has been writing on and off since childhood, and, since suffering from schizophrenia in 2003, has found a new sense of purpose in his work. ]]> Three Poems by Chad Halle Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:19:42 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2075 all the world decays

i've known this
girl since high
school, we
were in a class
together, spanish
class. kids
would throw
paper
airplanes and spit spit
balls, condoms
were passed
around. i would
listen to music
in the corner. we
did anything but
speak spanish,
and through the
disorder of it all we
had a connection, at
least
something
was there, i felt
it and wished
it was stronger. she
used to starve
herself- still does. i hung
out with her
a couple of months
ago, we drank
rum and cokes
and watched a movie
and blew a couple pain pills.
she puked.
i felt bad, didn't
know what to do.
i hoped- i do
hope, we
have something, or
could have something. she's
a beautiful girl. it feels
as if
the connection
that we had was
from our disconnection
to our own selves.
we lose touch, go
different directions on
our path of
loathing,
of hate.
i just
don't want her
to wither
away. she's someone
i would miss, and sometimes
i do.



town bridge

I
i remember smoking
tea on the
bridge and reciting
fake poetry. just you
and me
looking over
the edge, sharing the
wind with the
birds and the blue
sky. the clouds formed
new worlds
which we were
able to name after
dead disciples;
thompson, kerouac,
ginsberg, burroughs,
bukowski, vonnegut,
whitman, poe,
and they went on
and on
as they kept on
rotating by.

i remember dropping
acid on the
bridge and losing
you. i crawled and
we called back
and forth
to each other, could
have sworn you were
underneath. i ran to a
mailbox, stopping to say
hello, thinking
it was you. after finding
each other we recognized
our love
for the bridge, wanted to climb
to the top. we stopped
once we lost balance and
nearly fell. decided to just stare
at the stars in the
sky, and the stars in the
water. even though it was
dark out, you could
make out the shadows
of the fish and the
mermaids which inhabit
the river. i threw
the rest of my beer
down, letting the poor
bastards join
the night.


II
you weren't
there; gone, disappeared
into the depths of
the bermuda
triangle. i layed
there, vacationing
in myself. red hot
and throbbing in
heat, the motion
of the river was
an ocean rocking
me and my hand
dancing
back and
forth, back
and forth; surfing in
and out
of lush waves. after the
tide reached
its peak and became
soft and
calm, we
began to send electric
currents to
ourselves, about how
you think your
pregnant and have stopped
eating.

green neons exploded
into brilliance,
the lights they were
vibrant and they
blurred, hurting
my eyes. my head
spinning, hitting
against my
brain, not knowing
what to say, or
what to think.

when you return
we'll have
things to
discuss.



III
i remember losing
you to the town
bridge for
a moment, searching
the undercarriage, running
through the night. staring
straight at you
through tinted windows. walking
sideways and crooked
through new-born
doors, looking
straight at you
through a two-way
mirror...and you said
that you is
you, and you are
i... and we
are all together...
and
i remember
finally
                       falling asleep with your hands in your pockets



mortality

i met
a vampyr.
she had pale
skin and thin, dark
red lips. somehow
she managed to get
out in the sun-
light. she
asked for the
time, i didn't
know. and
last night
as i slept,
she hunted
me
down,
she
sucked
my
bones
dry.
i wake
up in a cold
sweat,
confused,
unfocused,
helpless.
this is just
an average
day.
but once in the
shower i notice
two punctures
which begin to
puss. i do my
best to squeeze
all the puss
out from the
holes- digging in
with all my
strength and
uncut
nails so that
i don't live
forever.



About the author:
I grew up in a small town in Central Connecticut. After graduating from high school I attended Pennsylvania State University and Central Connecticut State University, for a semester each before deciding college wasn't for me. That didn't stop me from writing or trying to better my craft; I've been previously published on the DIY Bandits webpage and Oarystis, The City Of Desires. I can be contacted at chadisfreedom@hotmail.com ]]> Shooting Midgets from a Catapult and Watching Our Teacher Tap Dance Nude by Newamba Flamingo Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:18:50 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2088 The alarm clock had grown arms and legs and ran away
Scratching my testicles and stumbling into the kitchen,
I found an alligator eating my Cheerios

There was no time to fight him,
so I took off my nightgown and slipped into some edible panties,
red tights, a green tutu, retro basketball jersey, and funky tennis shoes

I brushed my teeth and put my hair into pig tails
Then I stepped out the door
and mounted the unicycle I ride to school
After giving a stranger the finger, I took off onto the highway
(The" Miami Vice" theme song played in my head)

Upon arrival at school,
I saw Tiger Woods out on the front lawn
with a neck brace on,
shooting midgets from a catapult

A group of mimes were next to him,
involved in a limbo contest

Behind them was a three legged homosexual donkey called "Rufus,"
chasing a rogue peacock in circles like a loon,
whilst singing Lady GaGa's "Poker Face"
completely out of tune

Inside the school, a roaming pack of football players,
in pads and helmets, tackled random people throughout the hallways,
as two cheerleaders named "Buffy" followed, waving pompoms,
and chanting the school fight song

As I walked into class,
I noticed that our teacher, Mr. Schlomsky, wasn't there yet
Everyone looked puzzled.
When out of the blue, without warning,
Mr. Schlomsky fell through the ceiling and landed perfectly on his feet
(Totally perpendicular to the podium!)

A balding, obese and hairy Polish man of 5'2,
he was entirely naked except for a large pair of Versace sunglasses,
Polka-dotted bowtie and large red clown shoes

He looked around the room and didn't say a word for about thirty seconds
And then
Burst into a fiery lecture about Confucius,
which was peppered with Russian curse words,
spastic hand and arm motions,
and brief outbursts of tap dancing

At the conclusion of the lecture,
Mr. Schlomsky juggled pineapples,
and I stood up and applauded

Mr. Schlomsky then shapeshifted into a pterodactyl and flew out the window

After class, I saw Tiger Woods riding away on my unicycle,
giving me the finger and throwing golf balls at pedestrians

I tried to hail a taxi, but they were all full
Fortunately the baboon that lives in my closet, Fred,
was driving an ice cream truck nearby,
so I pole-vaulted onto the roof of the vehicle and surfed it all the way home

I hoped that alligator wasn't still in my kitchen because I was hungry and needed something to eat.



About the author:
Newamba Flamingo was born and raised on a chicken farm in the Florida Keys by a suicidal cult of transvestite prostitutes who dressed up in gorilla suits and played loud Polka music from distorted speakers at all hours of the night. After escaping the chicken farm, he was taken hostage by an Elvis impersonator that forced him at gunpoint to write poetry. He was later able to flee from the Elvis impersonator and now wanders the streets of South Beach in a purple tutu, spitting out bizarre poems as he pleases. His work has been published and featured at 10K Poets, BadWriter, NC Lowbrow, MySpace, EveryPoet.Net, PoemHunter, and various toilet stalls across Florida.]]> A Letter Of Grievance To Love by Tyler Enfield Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:17:52 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2078 We buried you in a shoe
We buried you in a book

We painted your toes and stuffed
Your mouth with down
Dressed you in skinny white women

Because you said so
Because the weather was right

But the next time

We thought you lazy
Too experienced for this glitz
Love should know better

Than the flat black satin, gold tassels
Tangling upon the pillow
Where we once placed a glass ovary



About the author:
In 2008, Tyler Enfield was awarded the Writers Federation of New Brunswick Literary Prize, the New Times Short Fiction Prize, and the Feathertale Short Short Fiction Prize. His work is forthcoming in Florida Review, Oregon Review, Nashwaak Review, and elsewhere. His first book is due out in late 2009.]]> Three Poems by Andrea DeAngelis Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:16:50 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2087 Erase-stick

she draws a face
she doesn't have
into a face she does have

she tries to draw
aface
she doesn't have
into aface
erase she does have

she tries to draw
to cut away
to erase
the face she does have

she tries
she does
draw over
the face she does have

she erases the face
she does have
and has forgotten
the face she wanted
in the first place.



As a child

Don't you wish clouds had substance?
Or that you didn't?

Imagining you could just evaporate
or condense at will.

And turn your room upside down
to walk on the ceiling?
So everything was new again.

As a child you wanted this
as an adult you haven't yet forgotten.



Every day is now

Must remember every day is now
and the future is not when but how
but be careful of the past
pulling its haze of why
over your deficient eyes.

They can operate
but they cannot cure.



About the author:
Andrea DeAngelis' work has appeared in Art Times and Gloom Cupboard with a long and unexpected hiatus in-between due to a thorny ongoing entanglement with her first novel. She also sings and plays guitar in an indie rock band called MAKAR (www.makarmusic.com) with her husband. ]]> I Want To Be An Alcoholic by Erik Christian Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:15:46 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2076 I want the dreamy, slippery confidence
            of someone who's sure that his place in the world
            is exactly where he is.
I want to celebrate my publication,
            family and friends gathered at Kelleher's,
            guests buying and laughing and excusing,
            because this is a big day. After all, he's a writer,
            now.
            You know how they are.

I want a few drinks after work to become a few too many.
I want to charm co-workers and ignore calls from home,
            and decline ride offers,
            and decline and decline,
            until I accept with grace and gratitude.
            Then excuse myself to the restroom and sneak out the back.

I want to sleep through getting-ready time and shake an arm from the bed at the confused frowns.
I want to drive to work at 10:00 am and keep driving and call in sick over the bar noise,
            as they bring me towering, breakfast-sized Erdinger drafts,
            lemon juice streaking from the rim.
And I want them one
            after another
            after another.

I want to listen to the Pogues too much and have my own stool at Kelleher's,
            so when someone asks, "How's the book coming?" I can say
                        "Just doing some research!" or
                        "Working on it now!" or
                        "Go fuck yourself!"
            enough times that it's not a joke,
            for anyone.

I want to forget the rotting windows and three-digit bank balance
            and the parent-teacher conferences and the union contracts.
I want to get fired after my second DUI and empathize with my liberators
            and drive distraught and thirsty to Sullivan's
            (because Kelleher's won't have me)
            and put down a pint or eight.
I want to get in a huge row with the wife,
            and not blame her when she packs up her things and the girls'
            and defects to Inlawvania.

Then,
at last unencumbered,
at last undistracted,
I'll retire to the page.
I'll drain a couple tall-boys
and unleash the full force of my literary knowledge, skills, and abilities.

And it will be soggy, dreadful, derivative garbage.

And in the morning I'll realize it for what it is
            and what it's not
            and I'll crack a beer because I won't know how to do anything else.

Romantic.



About the author:
Erik Christian lives and writes in downstate Illinois. His unpublished novel Whiskey in the Jar was selected as a semi-finalist in Amazon.com's 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. When not writing, he spends his time in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, smoking a pipe and growing a beard and doing other writerly things. ]]> Cut, Chew, Swallow by Samantha Schlaifer Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:14:16 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2067
You wouldn't want that, now would you?

You set the table and announce "dinner" in a false but welcoming tone, and then amplify the volume and solidify the command, with "Dinnertime is now!"

Your strident voice disrupts all the private pleasures transpiring behind closed doors: husband Jim jerking off to Lolita porn (which reminds him of his sweet, young plaything on the side), seventeen-year-old Matthew cutting up a brick of coke in his room, and shy young Patty planning her starvation exercise regime in preparation for the eight-grade cotillion. Patty is not planning on eating anything at dinnertime, but she'll say "please" and "thank you," and you sure are proud that you have raised such a polite child.

Mother and father sit across from son and daughter; everyone folds a napkin on their lap in orchestrated harmony. The kick off conversation begins with, "Pass the broccoli," and "Pour me some lemonade honey," until everything has been passed and poured from honey to darling, and the collective motions give way to the individual pursuit of cutting, chewing and swallowing. Jim puts his fork down, bops his head up and down, and looks at both his children like a professor ready to edify his unworthy students. You wonder if he'll chose human cryonic suspension or genocide in the Sudan from today's headlines. What an educated man you married.

"The New York Times finally found it newsworthy to print a damned four-hundred-word blurb about the aids pandemic in Botswana," Jim depresses everyone, while pouring himself a full glass of wine. "Over 300,000 people are HIV positive! Life expectancy at birth has fallen below 40 years of age!"

You can already see that these devastating statistics have managed to spoil Patty's appetite.

"Oh Jim, c'mon, that's why the media exists, to make us more aware of the cruel injustices of the world, so we can eventually do something to help make it better."

"That's charming my love, but no need to lie to the children," he mocks you and you pour yourself some wine.

"Mom doesn't lie," Matthew patronizes his father, who has just patronized his mother. How dare his father talk about the lies of the media when he's off fucking some whore while you bake pie?

"Well, your mother's point is part of a much bigger lie. We should not applaud the elite, pseudo-liberal western media for finally printing a few hundred words about a crisis that has been going on for thirty years. Don't even get me started about the diabolic machine controlling the news!"

Matthew just wants to sell enough blow to get out of this town, and go to a sunnier one where he can eat dinner at a different table. It's an opportune moment to mention your idea to sponsor a child in Botswana. Or was it Cambodia? Botswana is more topical right now.

"I think we should sponsor a child in Botswana. It's something nice we could all do as a family. It would only cost us $29.95 a month, and that alone will feed and clothe a child! Don't you think it would be very rewarding?"

"I saw that on an infomercial once," says Patty as she moves the food around on her plate, projecting a real interplay with the food without having to actually eat it.

Jim gulps his remaining wine, and pours another glass for the two of you. What a considerate man you married.

"Oh my darling, you always have such good intentions! But unfortunately, organizations like this spend half their money on commercial advertisements, and very little feeding and clothing actually comes to fruition," Jim tells you in his playful, condescending tone that is more condescending than playful.

You massage Jim's knee under the table. He has probably had a hard day at work and a knee massage might help improve his mood. He hasn't been in that mood for months.

"I have a lot of homework so I need to excuse myself from the table early," Matthew announces, thinking about all the little powdered bags he wants to have ready by morning.

"School comes first sweetie," you tell him, pleased that you have raised such a studious son with an unyielding work ethic.

"And how are those college applications coming?" Jim asks, skeptical that they are never coming.

"Oh, uh, good. I'm going to apply for pre-med at UCLA and USC," he lies. You like this lie much better than you would like the truth. After all, your little dreamboat of a life involved a son that would become a doctor, and not just any doctor, but a famous doctor that could find a cure for breast cancer. Your last mammogram revealed a strange lump, and it would be nice if your son could find a cure for your impending death.

Your husband is more of a sailboat man than a dreamboat one, and he knows his son has no plans of applying to college. Instead, he'll do something idiotic with his life, like change his name to Honeycomb, grow his hair long like Tarzan, and become a failed folk singer who insists upon a furniture-free home rife with pillows in rainbow assorted colors. Honeycomb will be Buddhist, freeing himself of all material possessions until he meets a foreign woman in a polka dot bodysuit named Bernadette. Bernadette will interrupt his spiritual quest, get pregnant and demand an all white wedding. Three weeks into their marriage, all the pillows will be gone, and sofas and tables will be in their place.

"This chicken really is amazing tonight honey. You did something different than usual?"

Jim is pleased with dinner, but less enthused with your burgeoning advertising career. You are not so enthused about your husband's fragile male ego. He doesn't know that you take a meta-amphetamine in the morning to manifest a robot-like speed frenzy for work, and then a larger white tablet to send you into an unconscious stupor where all your dreams take place inside of a neon orange boathouse. Sometimes the boat floats and sometimes it sinks. Last week you accidentally took a sleeping pill and a concentration pill together, and you remember thinking there was a strange, cheap lavender scent on your husband's work blazer. You can't remember if that smell was in the boathouse or in real life. It was more than one blazer now that you think about it, and you only wear fig, apricot perfume.

Matthew is thinking about Hawaii, how he'll move there with nothing but a guitar and a swimsuit if all his moves go right.

Jim is thinking about Lila Mint's small round ass in the sink of the hotel bathroom, how she's the sexiest woman he has ever fucked. Well, twenty-two year old woman, girl.

Chew.

You are admiring your husband's young face, how he's aged better than all your friends' husbands. You have no idea that he is fucking Lila Mint in four star hotel rooms, that sometimes when Jim is late for dinnertime, he has been drinking champagne and feeding on sweet, young flesh.

"I need to go out of town on Thursday. A big energy client in San Francisco is being sued and we need to go there and clean up the legal mess," Jim announces, visualizing Lila blindfolded and tied to the bedpost in a beachfront hotel suite.

Matthew clears his plate, but Jim raises an eyebrow in his direction to silently implore his son to stay a little longer. Matthew can't look at his father in the eye. He heard them on the phone. "It's Liiilaaaaa," and "I neeeed to seeee youuu Baaaaby," in that slow, taunting manner of a whore.

She was probably some gold-digging piece of trash teenager. The very sound of her voice evoked the image of cheap clothing and neon false nails curling out of her fingers like claws. How could Jim buy her diamond earrings? Fuck her in your car. Take her to a hotel-by the hour. Don't you dare buy a woman who is not your wife expensive jewelry! He felt sorry for his mother. How could she not know?

Swallow.

It's time to open a second bottle of wine. Focus on something, anything, Patty.

"Patty dear, you're not eating any of your food. Do you not like it?"

You promised yourself to never make accusatory remarks during dinnertime.

"Oh, it's just fine, I'm just very full because I ate potato chips and French fries with Kelly. I was such a pig," Patty says, enjoying the light-headed sensation of being completely empty inside.

What if Jim is having an affair? You try to focus on Patty. Why is Matthew glaring at Jim? If she does have some strange eating disorder, you will just take her to a therapist. You wonder if Jim notices that she's gotten awfully thin, but maybe Jim is thinking about another woman.

"Matthew, you can stay at the dinner table a few more minutes," Jim sternly suggests as his son stands to make his getaway. "You can at least help clear the table off too, since your mother has worked so hard to cook everything. Children take everything for granted sometimes," Jim preaches, picturing Lila's little lace panties, those perky little tits.

"Sure Dad," Matthew replies, ready to stir up some trouble and watch it boil right at the dinner table. "Oh, yeah, it almost slipped my mind, but some woman from Davidoff left a message about your diamond earrings being ready. She wanted to know if you needed them shipped, or if you would be picking them up."

You stare down at your plate, wishing the chicken would start doing a dance. Why didn't you get your ears pierced when your mother offered to take you as a child?

"Must have had the wrong number," Jim quickly retorts, remaining calm and composed, duly acquainted with the art of masterful lying.

"No, the woman definitely said, 'This message is for Jim White."

You wish a tiny, sharp fishbone could choke someone, anyone. If only you had cooked fish instead of chicken.

"Well there is obviously more than one Jim White in California. Why would I do something as stupid as waste my money on diamond earrings?" He asks, immediately regretting his defensive tone.

"I don't know Dad, why would you?" Matthew taunts Jim, getting up from the table and looking at him sharply between his narrow eyes. He knows that the mess he just made cannot be cleared off the table and shoved in the dishwasher.

Jim is thinking about a sudden, electrical fire. Maybe armed robbery! A brain aneurysm, or any palpable trauma to wipeout this silent catastrophe.

Patty is relieved she no longer needs to push the chicken breast back and forth on her plate.

"Mom, may I be excused?"

"Sure."

You have no intention of clearing one morsel of food off the table, not one piece of china, not one piece of silverware, not ever again. You imagine a swarm of a thousand poor, starving ants feasting on the spoiled remains of supper all through the night. Instead of cooking breakfast for your husband in the morning, you could prepare French Toast and Pancakes for the appreciative little critters.

Jim contemplates what sort of man he might become in the aftermath of divorce. He could move to the city and propose to his Lolita lover, ensuring her the financial support she needs to pursue an acting career. It would last for seven weeks, and then she will cheat on him with the first hotshot producer to charm her panties off.

You see yourself as the working, single mother of your nightmares, attending Patty's school shows alone and running into Jim with some bimbo who has shiny, straight hair and professionally whitened teeth.

Jim would have no choice but to swear off conniving actresses, grow a serious beard, and become a college professor at a small liberal arts school in the middle of nowhere. He would live on a strict intellectual diet of books, pickles, Chinese takeout and Whisky.

With Jim gone and Matthew moved on, who would even sit around the dinner table? Patty won't eat. All your friends are married so they will encourage you to join an internet dating service. You consider the notion of e-mailing back and forth photo-shopped photo, for photo-shopped photo, only to finally meet each lunatic in real life. You will have a tough time deciding between Prince Charming with Tourettes, or Casanova with a pissing fetish.

Jim finishes off the bottle of Shiraz, and wonders if he should open another.

"I forgot that I told you I've been meaning to get my ears pierced," you tell Jim as you caress your naked earlobes and imagine sparkling diamonds on them.

Cut.

Should you bring out the pie? It's blueberry pie.



About the author:
Samantha is a filmmaker and writer living in Brooklyn. She has poor table manners. ]]> Myrtle Avenue by Courtney Mauk Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:11:59 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2070
-

    On the dressing table, the brush and comb lay side by side, underneath the hand mirror. The backs and handles depict cartoon deer leaping over branches, blue bows around their necks, the paint chipped and leaving one deer without an eye, another without an ear, the forest battered as if after a storm. I wish my mother had taken better care of them. When I was a little girl, she kept them high on a bathroom shelf. As she brushed her long, blond hair, I would sit in the bathtub and watch, catching fleeting glimpses of what looked like Bambi. "These were your grandmother's," she'd say, and we'd both gaze up at the shelf reverentially. I had never met my grandmother, but I understood her to be a good, strong woman. I also understood the loud bangs - wood against metal, wood against porcelain, wood against wood - punctuating my parents' arguments, sometimes their silences, too.
    Two months ago, on the morning before I moved in with my uncle in Brooklyn, my mother gave me the brush and comb and mirror wrapped in green tissue paper left over from Christmas. Their abused appearance disturbed me.
    "They're old," I said.
    I couldn't say what I meant - they were ruined.
    My mother pressed her forehead against the doorframe, her arms crossed low over her stomach. Her toes met the place where the hall linoleum turned into my bedroom carpet, but she did not cross over.
    "What did you expect?" she said. "You've always liked them, right?" She rubbed her bony elbows. "You should have something to carry with you."
    I liked that, carry with you, as if I were about to embark on some great journey.
    That night I showed the set to my uncle. I told him that these were once his mothers. I was asking for his help. I wanted a memory, a story. A connection.
    He turned the brush over in his hand. "These don't look like her style," he said.
    "Mom told me."
    "Your mother," he said and stopped. He looked at me for a long time then placed the brush gently down on what was now my bed.
    "Well," he said, "they do look like your mother."
    I had to agree. I look like my mother, too. At fifteen, I have dark circles under my eyes, wrinkles around my mouth. At the scalp, I've found gray hairs mixed in with the blond. My nails break easily, and the beds turn blue at the first sign of cold.
    Before I see Mathew, I smear on concealor, foundation, lipstick. I brush my hair so that it lifts high and falls back in fuzzy waves. I walk out the door pretending to be pretty.
-

    Mathew first saw me at the bodega across from the subway station. I'd gone there to buy milk. Outside he asked my name and if I'd like a bite of his Snickers.
    "We got to be careful," he said before we'd even touched.
    I asked for another bite. He pulled down the wrapper, and I put both hands behind my back, leaned forward, and opened my mouth wide.
    We were three weeks in before he told me about the wife and five-year-old son, Debbie and Dylan, living in his mother's converted attic. Debbie was his high school sweetheart. I'd already guessed nearly as much, but I resented him for bringing the truth out into the open, for making me an accomplice.
    Back home in New Haven, I'd find him an embarrassment. My friends would make fun of his hair, his band tee-shirts, his age. "What is he? A throw-back to the 80s?" I'd join in and call him a creep.
    If I hadn't been lonely, if I hadn't been bored, I never would have given him a second glance. But now the hours crawl by before I can see him again.
-

    "Hot day," Mathew says.
    He sits on his haunches and lights his cigarette. I place my hand on top of his sweaty head. His ponytail hangs thin and pointed, a rat's tail. I consider undoing the rubber band, combing out the knots.
    "Yeah," I say, "but it's cooler out here than at my uncle's."
    He nods slowly, as if I have said something profound. Traffic backs up under the light. A car horn blasts, quickly followed by a dozen others. Mathew winces.
    "Jesus Christ," he says, grinning. "Hold your horses."
    I crouch down next to him. His jeans are baggy around the knee; he's probably worn them several days without washing. But his tee-shirt smells fresh, like detergent and baby powder.
    He flicks ash into the street. "You hungry?"
    "Not really."
    I don't want to talk. I want him to push me up against the wall again. I want his lips back on mine.
    "I could go for some pizza," he says.
    "It's too hot for pizza."
    "Never, baby." He stands up, stretches his arms overhead. Through the too big arm holes, I can see his dark, damp hairs. "Never too hot for pizza."
-

    During my first week, my uncle laid down the rules. "Respect my privacy," he said, "and I'll respect yours."
    "That's it?"
    "Sure. Why not?" He spread his fingers, palms facing me, a gesture that seemed imbued with uncertainty. "Mi casa, su casa."
    I barely see him. He works two jobs, as a janitor at an office building in Long Island City and a bartender at some fancy French place on the Lower East Side. In the beginning, he made an effort to stop home for dinner between shifts. My mother told me to be grateful, and so I still cook enough for two. I leave the Tupperware containers at the front of the refrigerator. Sometimes he eats, sometimes he doesn't.
    His bedroom door is always locked. In the bathroom, I find nothing in the medicine cabinet but aspirin, toothpaste, deodorant, a box of baking soda. Under the sink, toilet paper and toilet bowel cleanser. He has no books, no CDs, no photographs. His furniture is sparse, bland, a bachelor's bare necessities. He gives me cash to do the grocery shopping, and I pocket the change.
    "Tommy's a quiet man," my mother told me. "He's always been too shy to get married. We used to worry about him, you know, that he'd be lonely."
    She sends postcards from the road. Making do, she writes. Or, Seeing sights! On the day the divorce was final, she sent a sunrise over mountains. Freedom rings!
    In Alabama, my father lives with his girlfriend and forgets about the past. I thought about him when Mathew first snaked his hand inside my jeans. We stood in an alley, straddling puddles. Mathew kept his eyes closed, and I wondered if they used to do this, Mathew and Debbie, when they were my age, when every action still imposed a risk.
-

    My uncle lives on the Bushwick portion of Myrtle Avenue, not as bad as underneath the trains but not as good as Ridgewood, Queens, where apartments give way to duplexes, then houses, and you might as well be in any suburb anywhere. My uncle's apartment sits over a shop that sells board games, the front windows displaying Monopoly and Risk in yellowed boxes, the edges dented and squished. I've often wondered who would spend money on games that look like trash. The shop is a throwback to some quaint era, out of place among the dollar stores and Laundromats, the Chinese and Mexican and Jamaican takeouts.
    Two weeks passed before I got bored enough to go inside. I was met with a scowl by the stooped old man behind the cash register. He wore a white shirt, a blue and red striped bow-tie. He gripped the counter as his milky eyes, amplified by thick glasses, followed me around the store.
    "Don't touch that," he said, making me jump as I reached toward a shelf of Chutes and Ladders.
    "I might want to buy it," I said.
    "Then ask me to help you."
    His eyes floated, unfocused.
    "No, thanks," I said. "I'm fine."
    "Young lady, you could damage the merchandise."
    When he took a shaky step toward me, I ran out of the store. I could imagine his hands like claws around my arm, his brittle nails breaking through my flesh, breaking off and staying embedded, lost inside my body. For days afterward I felt his decay covering my skin, a thin sheen no amount of showering could wash away.
-

    Mathew offers me his hand. His gesture makes me feel like a lady. As he pulls me to my feet, I adjust my tank top so that my stomach no longer shows.
    His tee-shirt announces Police tour dates from the year before I was born. I don't know whether he went to those shows, barely a teen-ager, already sporting that rat's tail, or bought the shirt for a dollar-fifty at Salvation Army. With Mathew, the story could go either way.
    The sun bounces off white concrete, shocking us, making us stumble backward and consider retreating to the cool shade of the overpass. But Mathew presses on, my hand in his grip as we head down Myrtle Avenue, toward Queens, away from everything.
-

    Last night my uncle didn't come home. I spent the evening curled up on the couch, my feet tucked under my nightgown, eating graham crackers and watching old episodes of Perry Mason. When I went to bed, I had the same nightmare that I've had all summer. A woman screamed. She was right outside my window, clawing at the sill, calling for someone, anyone, to help. When I opened my eyes, I found her silence disturbing. If I concentrated hard enough, I could hear her smothered breath, her dissipating moan.
    In the morning the box of crackers still lay open on the coffee table. Crumbs speckled my uncle's copies of Newsweek and Better Homes and Gardens.
    Once, when I was cooking pasta for dinner, my uncle thrust a glossy picture in front of my face. He had never stood so close to me. His breath was hot on my neck; he smelled like alcohol and citrus.
    "Look at that, Chloe," he said, his finger obliterating the smiles of a pastel clad couple standing in front of two towering rose bushes. "Now that's good soil."
    My mother never subscribed to magazines. She never bought flowers either. She couldn't see spending money on something you were just going to throw away.
    I brushed off the magazines. When eight o'clock came and went, I tapped lightly on my uncle's bedroom door. He should have been getting ready for work, but I heard no answer, no sound at all from the other side.
-

    Mathew and I pass the health food store, the lights out and the cartons of soy milk in the window covered with dust, and the second-floor karate studio, with its sounds of children grunting, tiny feet pounding, small bodies slamming. Outside the tattoo parlor Mathew lets go of my hand and peers through the glass door, looking for his friend Jimmy. I hang back, scuffing the soles of my flip flops against the curb. If Jimmy is there, Mathew will want to go inside, and I'll spend the next hour staring at posters of skeletons and cobras and garishly colored hearts while they shout at each other over the drill. They only talk about three subjects: baseball, stupid movies, and what some girl did, good or bad, to Jimmy the night before.
    "Hey," I say, "weren't we going to eat?"
    Mathew cups his hands around his eyes.
    "You can visit Jimmy later," I say.
    "I've got to talk to him now."
    "Why? What's so important?"
    A little boy on a bike pedals between us. I watch him disappear around the corner.
     "I'm going by myself then," I say. "One. Two."
    "Shut up."
    "Three."
    Mathew jiggles the door handle. Locked.
    "Maybe there was an emergency," I say.
    He turns toward me, his eyes scrunched up. "You think?"
    "No, I don't think. Come on."
     "You better not have cursed him. If Jimmy's dead in a ditch, it's your fault."
    "Yeah, OK."
    "I'm serious."
    "Yes, I know. Everything is my fault."
    "You," Mathew says. He shakes his head and smiles. "You don't even know, babe."
    I hold out my hand, wiggle my fingers. With feigned reluctance, he takes the bait.
-

    Sometimes when the woman screams, she is inside my bedroom. I open my eyes and still hear her. She edges beneath my fingernails, slides through my pores, until we wear the same skin. Together we take a long, deep breath.
    On those sleepless nights, I sit down at the dressing table and pick up the brush. I slam it against the wood, again and again, trying to make the deer crack. They refuse to break. The remaining eyes stare up at me with woeful innocence. I throw back my arm, wrenching my shoulder, and bring the brush down with such force, my uncle bolts upright in bed, my mother pulls over to the side of the road, my father takes his hands off his girlfriend's breasts. They all turn toward me.
-

    Grease leaks through the paper plates, streaking the yellow formica table. The pizza place is cavernous and too cold. A mirror, smeared with fingerprints, runs along the wall; as we eat, we both pretend that we are not looking at ourselves. Under the fluorescent lights, the circles under my eyes show, dirty bruises.
    Mathew takes two large bites and then blows out his cheeks and does not touch his slice of cheese and sausage again. Neither one of us is hungry. We just needed something to do. I pick off my olives and scatter the black circles around my plate.
    "I need to get a job," Mathew says.
    I toss two dollars on to the table.
    "What's this?" he says. "For my services?"
    "For the pizza."
    "What about the drink?"
    I pull out another dollar.
    "Cut it out," he says and folds the bills in half, tucking them underneath my plate. "You don't pay."
    "Why not?"
    "Because you're a girl."
    "Your girl?"
    He pushes his straw in and out, squeaking against the plastic lid.
    "Careful," I say, "I could be offended."
    "Just call me old fashioned."
    I give him an irritated look and stuff the money back into my pocket with exaggerated force.
    We are the only customers except for two women at the back. One, a redhead, wears a turquoise sequined dress, the other, a brunette, a sleeveless, slinky black gown. They sit with their shoulders hunched, their heads pressed together. I wonder what they're discussing, what the night before could have entailed to have brought them here, in their styled hair, their hopeful outfits, to eat bad pizza and be made over into caricatures.
    Mathew grips my thigh and works his fingers in a slow, circular massage that pinches my skin. Someday soon he expects to break my heart. Maybe he will.
    "School starts in a week," I say. "That means I won't be able to meet you in the mornings anymore."
    "I can't see you at night."
    "So what are you going to do?"
    "You'll go to school," he says, "and I'll get a job. We'll become good, responsible people."
    I jerk my leg, throwing off his hand.
     "Hey." He reaches for me. Our palms lie together, limp in the middle of the table. "Don't worry, OK? We'll manage."
    "I don't like it here," I say. "I don't know why I had to come."
    "You don't want pizza? I'll get you something else. Anything you want. Chinese, tacos, you name it."
    "I'm not talking about the pizza."
    At the back of the room, the redhead stands, placing her hands on her slim lips. Beneath the layers of carefully applied foundation and rouge, her face is unmistakably that of a man. A beautiful and tired man.
    I look at Mathew, who is looking at me.
    "What?" he says. "Chloe, what do you want?"
-

    The brunette's back is to me. Between the straps of her dress, her shoulder blades stick out, the distance between them unusually wide. The paleness of her skin against the dark fabric strikes me as horribly, carelessly vulnerable. My mother owned a black evening dress. Once or twice a year, she would put on that dress and stand in front of the mirror, brushing out her hair while I sat in the bathtub and watched her transformation into a flawless, beautiful stranger. The next morning the dress would be a heap on the floor, stinking of wine and sweat, with white deodorant stains under the arms and long, blond strands where they shouldn't have been, the perfect surface ruined.
    I think about her now, at a hotel in California, sitting by the pool. Her black bikini shows off her still flat stomach, her firm breasts. She never gets in the water; she never takes off her sunglasses. Above the chair, a palm tree flutters, casting shadows across her burning body. I want, for just a moment, to picture myself beside her. But I can't.



About the author:
Courtney Elizabeth Mauk's work has appeared in The Literary Review, PANK, Forge, and the anthology Gravity Fiction. She has an MFA from Columbia University and teaches English at College of Staten Island. She lives in Brooklyn, where she blogs about her life and reviews randomly chosen library books at www.courtneymauk.com. ]]> Memphis Apartment, Downtown Poplar and Vine by Sean Lovelace Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:10:05 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2066
*


An incredibly obese black woman just passed my front step—this rolling walk, waves and echoes of shimmering motion—and looked me right in the face, lifted her chin, and shouted out, "I got what you want, baby!"

She seemed comfortable, the walker and the walk the same.

I went inside and tried to write a poem on a napkin but it came out ridiculous and sad, something forced through a plastic mold, sold at discount stores, bought by impulse and not even certain why. Basically a piece of shit. I ate some corn chips covered in habanera sauce; that was better. The heat. Wiped my greasy hands with the poem and tossed it into the garbage. Then I disobeyed one of my rules, grabbing a jug of red wine and pouring a coffee mug full. It is the rule of never drinking before noon. I suppose more a guideline than a rule. What is the difference? But anyway, I broke it.

*


I hadn't seen Sara for a week and then she just appears like a summer rain and says the guy next door was delivering pizza last night and someone walked up and shot him, shot him dead, and took his two dollars—I shit you not; he had exactly two dollars—and she said I'm trying to do something for Memphis, I care about Memphis, but this kind of thing is why all the white people live in these big-ass rings around the city, and the center of the city all collapsing like a pierced balloon, and I'm not even sure why I ride the bus anymore, I do it as some statement when I could just take my car to work, and I'm not riding the bus, fuck the bus, not riding the bus (shaking and sobbing now) and we went inside and smoked some weed and cheap wine and yes we had sex and moments later I'm lying there, feeling badly, or should I say empty, and wondering about sex while crying, wondering if she only had sex because death was nearby, death right there crouching, but maybe those thoughts were the marijuana and that I think too much and ruin things by thinking too much and how can you float above yourself and do the thing, I mean as in be present, while you are far away?

*


One of the best times when the all the news saying remain indoors and drink water all day long and the way you could fry an egg on the sidewalk, it was that hot, and I'm thinking metaphor or urban legend or the way the media machine is always trying to turn up the volume and keep us all in fevers and chills of fright, but damned if we didn't get an egg and crack it on the sidewalk and stand there holding hands under tulip poplars listening to that egg pop, sizzle, and fry.

*


The last day was when I came home and the door kicked in and there goes my laptop, microwave, and aquarium (who the fuck steals a man's guppies?). I remember how the cops showed up an afternoon later and didn't write down a word I said. One of them, a thin woman, kept up this reedy laughing. She said, "You left a computer, up in here?!"

The second cop, this huge man with a head like a recliner, said, "I wouldn't take this shit. I-would-not-take-it."

Face scrunched, bared yellow teeth, he seemed genuinely angry, which I found as strange. Then he told me to go to Circuit City and dig a TV or computer box out of their dumpster and to place that empty box on my front porch.

"They see that box, they come right back," he told me. "I mean tonight. It's only one dude, I can tell you that. You get in that closet there with a gun, and it's over, goodbye. That's how I'd do it."

My mind now actually thinking, "Seriously?"

Thinking, "This is Memphis. I try to tell people, but this is it right here, a police officer instructing on the proper technique for murdering a petty thief."

The female cop cackled again. "Hell," she said. "We'll come by and pick up the body for you, no problem. Be doing us a favor."

They handed me a pink sheet of paper. Said they'd be sure looking for that aquarium. And then they were gone.

I meant to tell you this story somehow different, but I have lost my thread, or unraveled it along an empty floor, a thin unspooling, coiled and recoiled and snagging on itself, the type where you get your hands caught in it but you can't really see, only feel it like a strand of long hair...Where is it?

I just remember closing the door, the broken lock jangling in the broken jamb. My fingers tingling, thinking, "I've got to tell someone about this one" and I dug into my pocket, and flipped open the phone, and then shut the phone and held it loosely in my hand, because who was I going to call first, whose number, whose voice, when I knew it was no longer, no longer there, in that place—it was gone.



About the author:
Sean Lovelace has a collection of flash fiction published by Rose Metal Press (HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS). He likes to run beer and drink marathons. He blogs at seanlovelace.com. I guess that's about it. ]]> Bleeder by Brett Matthew Graham Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:08:38 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2069     "But you did it for that girl over there," the kid whines, pointing over all the wrapping paper covered picnic tables, past all the adults holding disposable cameras, to Stacy, the pouting pig-tailed birthday girl. She's still waiting for her pony to arrive.
    "Well," I say in a voice that sounds drunk. "When is your birthday, little boy?"
    "October tenth," he immediately answers.
    "Then you'll get a balloon animal on October tenth."
    "You're not a very nice clown," the kid says, crossing his arms. "Giggles is way nicer than you."
    I look over my shoulder at Giggles, AKA Derek. He's doing one armed cartwheels and blowing bubbles at the same time. He's not in such a good mood when he's not stoned.
    The kid's hands are on his hips now and he's tapping his foot.
    "If you don't make me a balloon animal right now, I'm telling my mom."
    They always say that. It's like they're programmed to know there's nothing sadder than having a middle aged woman screaming at you while you're dressed like a clown. The last time it happened, the woman reached out, honked my nose, and called me a fag. I had trouble getting an erection for a long time after that.
    I bow my head in defeat, noticing that the ground is moving like I'm drunk.
    "Okay, kid. What kind do you want?"
    The kid's counting them off on his fingers as he talks.
    "I want a giraffe. A giraffe with bird wings and a snake's tail and crab claws and body armor and -"
    "I only know how to do a poodle, kid. How 'bout a poodle?"
    "I guess," he snorts.
    As I'm digging in my ragged overcoat for the balloons, I feel a light, sweeping sensation run just under the skin in my forehead. Or is it my skull? Or is it my brain?
    And why are my feet numb?
    I try to remember the last time I ate; it was a piece of chocolate cake I stole when pouty Stacy was opening some doll she didn't want. Parents specifically tell you not to eat while you're working and I guess I understand. There's nothing creepier than watching a clown put something in his mouth.
    But I ate, so that can't be it. And I'm not that drunk, either. I drank some Peach Schnapps in the upstairs bathroom with Mimsy, AKA Jessica. She took the Schnapps with her when I explained that there's nothing sexier than watching a clown put something in her mouth.
    As I'm blowing up the first balloon, I feel that same light, sweeping sensation. But this time, it's worse. This time, I start to see stars. They pop and sparkle, with just a hint of black swirling abyss closing in.
    "Why does your face look so sad?" the kid asks me.
    "Well, Timmy...You see, there's different types of clowns. You got your European Whiteface, also known as the Pierott clown, like Jessica, I mean Mimsy over there. Then you got your Straight Whiteface clown. He's the kind with the tiny parking cone on his forehead. There's none of them at this party, so I don't mind telling you, Timmy...They're all stuck up assholes."
    The kid gives me a confused look.
    "My name's not Timmy. It's -"
    "Then you got your Auguste clown, like Derek, I mean Giggles over there. They're usually the most entertaining because they have severe abandonment issues that make it impossible for them to connect with anyone beyond jokes and a mutual drug infatuation."
    I'm saying all of this with numb lips. A sudden itch prompts me to scratch my right ankle. I tie off the first balloon, continuing Timmy's education.
    "And then there's me, the Hobo, or Tramp clown. I represent the forlorn and the downtrodden. I am a clown that knows he has nothing and will never have anything. I represent the true nature of a clown's sadness, the hopeless loner in us all. I am the epitome of -"
    "What's on that balloon?" Timmy asks with a disgusted face, taking a few steps back.
    I look down at the latex, belly button looking end of my first finished balloon. It's smeared black and slippery, like motor oil or something. It's all over my fingers too, only on my fingers, it's pink. I stick one in my mouth and taste a metallic tang, like copper or something.
    "Are you hurt?" Timmy asks, worried and about to cry.
    Then I get it. It looks black on the balloon because the balloon is blue. It looks pink on my fingers because my hands are painted white. It's blood, plain and simple.
    I'm in serious trouble here.
    I try to get off the picnic table, but I'm so dizzy I fall back into a seated position with wood altering crack. Nausea pulls at my stomach, sending a very unpleasant heat wave up the back of my neck. The black smeared blue balloon is pinched between my fingertips. I use it to motion for Timmy to come closer. He cautiously leans in, wincing like he's about to get hit.
    "Timmy," I say like I've lost a lot of blood. "I need you to do your pal Trampy a big favor. I need you to tell your mommy or your daddy to call an ambulance. Tell them it's for Trampy. Can you do that, Timmy?"
    Timmy's bottom lip is quivering. Tears are streaming down his chocolate cake stained face.
    "My...My name's not -"
    "It doesn't matter now, Timmy! Go get help!"
    Timmy lets out a startled yelp and runs away.
    I take a deep breath and lean forward, examining my right ankle. The sock is completely drenched and I wonder how long I've been bleeding. When I reach into my foot long clown shoe, I know it's been awhile. It feels like a warm bath down there. It sloshes when I wiggle my finger, tossing little red flecks onto the grass like paint on a canvas.
    When I rock back on my heels, blood spills over in a brief wine pour.
    Just say "When."
    I hear shrieking over my shoulder and assume it's because of me, but it's not. It's pouty Stacy, still complaining about the pony that hasn't arrived. The adults gather around, nodding and assuring her that it's on the way.
    And here I am, a dying clown with no one to care.
    I wish I had a pony. I'd give it a carrot, pet its mane, swat the horseflies, and climb on top, pointing towards the nearest hospital with a pink finger.
    I'm not kidding. If I don't get help soon, I'm going to die.
    Let pouty Stacy's parents try to explain the dead clown to all the crying kids. Let them explain that apathy and ignorance lead to poor Trampy, AKA Jeff bleeding to death because his cheap plastic clown shoe rubbed the back of his ankle to the point of bleeding and it wouldn't stop because he's a Hemophiliac.
    One small scratch and I bleed for days. One real cut and I have to go to the hospital. My blood doesn't coagulate properly, it just keeps coming. What most people consider a scab, I consider a seeping wound.
    The irony here is I used to work in a motor panels plant, with all those sharp metal edges.
    The irony here is I used to work in a pet store, with all those potential scratches and bites.
    Now I'm a birthday clown, a Hobo birthday clown, a Tramp birthday clown.
    A dying birthday clown.
    How much blood is in the human body? How much of it can be facilitated in a foot long plastic shoe? How much until it spills over?
    Just say "When."
    Nothing is really happening for me at the moment. I see kids running towards me, but they keep running, continuing their game of tag. I see adults walking towards me, but they keep walking, continuing their conversations. Nobody seems to notice that Trampy, AKA Jeff is trying to call for help in near brain dead moans.
    There's movement in the corner of my eye. It's cart wheeling and colorful. When it stops, I see a very blurry version of Giggles, AKA Derek. He puts his bubble wand away, steals a hit from his glass pipe, then cocks his head.
    "Hey, man. You don't look so good."
    This is my only chance. How appropriate that it's a fellow clown. I clench my teeth and groan to lift my head, trying to focus on the center swirl of Derek.
    I speak very slowly, very clearly, trying to talk past my Hobo clown makeup and appeal to him as a human being.
    "Look, man," I say like I've lost a lot of blood. "I'm in real trouble here. There's something I've never told you, Derek. I...I'm...I'm a Hemophiliac."
    Derek, AKA my only savior stares at me for a moment, steals another hit from his glass pipe, blows out the smoke and laughs.
    "Hey, man. It's cool with me if you're gay."
    I reach for him with my black blood smeared blue animal balloon as he cartwheels off, blowing bubbles for laughing children.
    There's something in the center of everything I see. It's a small black dot, but if I stare in one place too long, it expands, trying to take over everything.
    I lean forward and reach into my blood filled clown shoe, trying to pinpoint the wound, trying to stop the bleeding until Timmy can bring back help.
    There's movement in the corner of my eye again. It's back flipping and colorful. When it stops, I see a very blurry version of Mimsy, AKA Jessica. She takes a quick hit of Peach Schnapps, tucks it under one of her frilly garments, and cocks her head.
    "What the hell is your problem?"
    This is my last chance. How appropriate that it's a fellow clown. Drool oozes from my mouth as I half lift my head, trying to focus on the center swirl of Jessica. I speak very sloppily, very incoherently, trying to talk past my dying face and appeal to her as the living.
    "Look, baby," I say like I'm out of blood. I'm in real trouble here. I'm a Hemophiliac and...and..."
    The black abyss rushes me like an angry bull, but I pull myself out of it long enough to hear Jessica, AKA my last chance in the world laugh.
    "Wow," she says. "I never met anyone who was afraid of water. How do you take showers and stuff?"
    I reach for her with my pink smeared fingertips as she back flips off, surrounded by laughing children.
    I am going to die.
    My heart hurts, like it's straining, like it's trying to pump something that isn't there.
    I hear pouty Stacy throwing a fit somewhere behind me. She's still screaming about the pony that hasn't shown up yet. And I'm right there with her, in spirit at least, praying for that midget horse to rear its stupid face. At this point, it's the only thing that can save me.
    I look down at my ridiculous, foot long clown shoe. It was red to begin with, so it's hard to see the blood cascading over the rim. It's the mid day sun that reveals the movement, reflecting off every ripple as it trickles in tiny undulations, splashing on the grass below.
    What ugly grass that is; once green now soaked in red, looking brown from the combination. I wonder if I'll leave a Hobo black imprint when I collapse, face first, stone dead in pouty Stacy's parents' backyard. The cops probably won't even have to draw a chalk outline. I'll go that easy for everyone.
    I'm wavering now, rocking back and forth and mumbling something about my mother when I hear uproarious applause. It feels like they're cheering for me, like it was about time they got to see a stupid clown die. I'm kind of pissed, because I've always wanted to see it too. I just never thought it would be me.
    Nevertheless, I think I shout "Mirror!" but it comes out as "Pony!" and my voice sounds like a little girl's.
    Before I die, I want to know why everyone is clapping. I'm nauseous, I'm lightheaded, I'm giving myself the last rites, but I still want to know.
    It's the fucking pony. It's finally arrived, lead on a leather strap by a hippie looking woman. She's wearing a patchwork dress that looks like a perfect companion to my clown costume. If only she would put on a little makeup. Then we'd match perfect.
    This woman with her pony, expected to bring it and entertain no matter her circumstances in life. Just like me and my blood.
    Now, I don't know if it's the childhood merriment. I don't know if it's the beautiful blue sky overhead. I don't know if it's the excessive blood loss draining my brain, causing repeated misfiring in my synapses. I don't know exactly what it is, but here I am, the lonely Hobo clown, the sad and downtrodden Tramp clown, hopelessly in love.
    I can't help myself. I am completely, hopelessly in love with that pony. And all the better if it can take me to the hospital.
    I'm tired of explaining my problems to children. I'm tired of explaining my problems to clowns. I take what I assume to be my last deep breath and reach for my shoe.
    I turn in my seat to aim, watching pouty Stacy mount my only hope for survival. I close my eyes, mustering enough awareness to know I will have to fill out many job applications in the months after my recovery. I cock back a numb, blood drained arm and fire, sending a foot long clown shoe sailing in the wind, raining a crimson shower upon everyone in the way.
    It drenches the parents. It soaks the children. It confuses the fucked up clowns.
    And the shoe, it spirals like a football, twirling so hard you can hear it. The shoe nails pouty Stacy right in the chest, knocking her off the pony with a whimper and a back flip, landing as unconscious as I land when I fall face first into the grass.

***


    The letters I read from my hospital bed are mixed. Some are from family and friends with scribbled well wishes. Some are from the parents at Stacy's birthday party, unaware of my condition, calling me an asshole clown, which is redundant if you think about it.
    But the best letter I received was from the hippie woman that owned the pony. She wrote that "Hobo," her pony, was sick and in no shape to attend a kid's birthday party. The hippie woman had recently lost her job and needed the money, so it was with much regret that she forced her late husband's pony to perform in some snot nosed kid's birthday party.
    Because of what I did, the hippie girl had ample time to take her pony to the vet and have them diagnose and perform a surgery that, ironically, removed a clown nose that was blocking its gastric, intestinal tract. She said that it was a side effect from attending too many birthday parties.
    And as I rub my slightly wounded ankle, the anti coagulants running through my veins, I know exactly what she's talking about.



About the author:
Brett Matthew Graham is a writer of poetry, prose, and music. His work has appeared in SNM Horror Magazine and Niteblade Magazine. He currently resides in Shadyside, Ohio where he plays in a local band and works on various side projects. He is getting ready to self publish his first novel and is currently working on a second. ]]> Air Over Air by John Givens Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:06:59 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2060     Following circumcision, he sets out to achieve his dream; and even before the scar tissue has fully healed, he has understood that attempts based on mechanical artifice will fail. Clever configurations of sticks, oiled paper, wire, twine, glue, carbon-fiber feathers, thin sheets of exotic metals that combine tensile strength with light weight all fail to satisfy him, as do combustible propellants, short-throw launch devices, and the giddy verticality attendant to the drop from great heights.
    The only feasible way to fly is through the perfection of the application of the force of the will.
    The boy practices increasingly arcane forms of self-management. He sits for weeks and months of day-long meditation sessions, walks endless introspection circles until an oval track is worn on the wooden floor-boards of the temple granary, prays under frigid waterfalls in winter, starves himself in summer and howls at the autumn moon, and he even inserts his credulity into the distraction of crowding groups of sanctity seekers who go about murmuring mummy-mum-mum-mummy-mum while whacking little metal gongs. Nothing avails. Only if the self can be focused sufficiently on the irrevocability of its own necessity can flying be. Finally he sits hard. He sits with an uncanny perfection of sitting. And one morning from within the intensity of his determination, the boy achieves a lightness of such consummate irrevocability that he feels beneath him the faint caress of a gap, a separation hardly more than the flicker of a gnat's eyelash but there, undeniably there, an understanding that the air is available, and he seizes the necessity of this as the lever he needs to ascend ... and ascends.
    He holds it, holds it with effort, begins losing it, loses it, accepts its loss.
    On that day—the day of the opening of the first interval between himself and the surface of the earth—the boy stops clinging to his birth village and departs, ignoring the tears of his guardians and the recriminations of his totem-sharers.
    He wanders hither and thither in the forest primeval. Gurus are questioned each in turn and rejected. The boy accepts that the willed self arises naturally from within as it is only and does not exist externally at any place or time or manner, and certainly not at the behest of another. He finds an abandoned cottage and sweeps it out then makes a leaf-bed in the corner. He sits in a glade and forces himself down into his arriving lightness and squeezes it and squeezes it, and as he does so, feels himself rise into the pliable air, holds it, wills himself to be at a certain place and also to alter his position regarding his aspect to the earth so that where he is now becomes where he wasn't before.
    The boy reaches a point where he can sustain self-suspension for minutes on end through the sheer force of his requiring it to continue. He achieves the lower branches of trees, the middle branches. The next day he does it again, and the day after he does it more easily. One morning, he rises to a hand's-breadth above the surface of the earth then slides from his glade to his cottage with the simple clarity of water running downhill, settling gently onto the grassy verge before his brushwood gate. It is a day like no other, and he celebrates by removing his sandals and shoving them under the entry-porch where over the months and years they will eventually crumple into leathery knots resembling mummified toads.
    That night in his cottage, the boy amuses himself by hovering just under the ceiling beam, and the following morning, he rises rapidly straight up through the trees, shocking parrots, alarming gibbons, and confounding the expectations of arboreal serpents. Once above the canopy, he wills himself with great force of concentration to proceed for half a league before he detects the onset of faltering, the first glimmerings of a failure to concentrate sufficiently. He squeezes the last of his will into the single diamond-point of a controlled and gentle descent, and he settles exhausted but exhilarated on the packed-dirt berm road that runs along a series of dry fields where husbandmen spread manure with the sweeping motions of their scraper-spatulas, the stench of it not displeasing to them since it will ensure a good ball onion crop.
    The boy squats on the berm road and hugs his knees to his chest with his eyes filling with tears of the joy of attainment and thinks about the air then stops thinking about it. A column of ants passes bearing their eggs, each tiny shiny white ovoid identical to the next, and he watches them until he feels sufficiently recovered then fits himself down into the fact of his will with the ease of a swordsman returning his blade to its scabbard and experiences the self-adoration of ascent. He flows up over a low hillock studded with bright orange gates, and crosses with ease to the other side where he alights near a small dog. He beckons until it comes then takes the dog in his arms but elevated the dog yelps in fear and releases his bladder, and the boy's sense of self falters and he plummets to the earth, crashing into a jujube thicket that cushions his fall. The dog, too, is unscathed.
    The boy limps home and huddles in his cottage. As his disappointment recedes, he lies on his side, supporting his head with one hand, and drifts gently up to the ceiling.
    In the days following, the boy experiments with the manner of the holding the arms, considers whether or not the knees should be straight, the feet should be pointed, and once he accepts his skill as a thing perfected, he seeks out someone to appreciate his mastery of it.
    Layabouts are the first to attend him. Appropriately dubious they are nevertheless unengaged and so content to watch as he sits on the ground with his hands on his knees, frowning like a bogey and struggling vainly to rise.
    They jeer at his failure, mock his hubris, and a few even pick up clumps of dried fecal matter and fling it after him as he creeps away disconsolately.
    In his cottage he speculate on the true source of his non-accomplishment and decides that his inability to concentrate perfectly on himself was due to the fact of the presence of others. To test this hypothesis, he sits calmly within the gentle buzzing of afternoon insects and soon finds himself among the upper branches where, lodged in the growth-fork of a towering mahogany, he encounters the putrefying remains of a canopy-sloth, recognizable by its hooked ivory fore-claws.
    Weeks of intensive endeavor follow as he seeks to perfect himself to the point that the existence of others will not hobble him. His days are spent in the hollows of the air and his nights curled on a bed of dried ferns. He drinks from the stream and feeds from the trees, fruits and nuts sustaining him. He bathes in jungle pools and shits downstream from his bivouac; he chews off his fingernails and toenails when too long and when his hair becomes long enough to reach his teeth, chews it off too. His clothing falls away in decaying strips and he goes about clothed only in sky robes, his body sun-burned to the color of mud.
    His goal to fly in the presence of others remains a glittering unattainability, for even when he thinks he might be approaching it and allows himself the fragrance of foresight, moments of distraction still result in painful mishaps, for he can not always reattach his self tightly enough to avoid abrupt landings on outcroppings of rock or the smooth limestone road-slabs that had been laid by forgotten conquerers who had long since returned to their native land. Yet he also sometimes manages to relax the mind sufficiently and even dozes off momentarily without descending. This surprises and puzzles him. Inattention seems the opposite of willing yet the fact of his achievement is inescapable.
    He decides he is ready to pass his final hurdle, and he chooses a clear evening shortly before the Day of the Winnowing of the Dead, when all his erstwhile fellows would be absorbed with their mundane preparations for that festival. He rises like a beam of light, climbing higher and higher above the forest until it is little more than a rolling expanse of green far below him, climbing higher until the undulations caused by the differing heights of the trees of various species has settled away into a placid uniformity, higher until the earth itself has become a smooth gray-green curd far below him, and he slides across great heaving voids of air, air over layers of air until he sees in the gloaming far, far below him the lights of a village where he knows the activities of the first night of the festive season will be underway, with the questioning of the small children and the rewards of honeycomb and agar-agar jelly for those who know the responses; and the fact of his thinking it, remembering it, speculating on what it would be like based on what it had been like, causes some minor release, a slight rupture, as he has anticipated, so that he begins dropping; but as he does so, he wills himself to settle back into the hands of the winds of the emptiness of his location while yearning for agar-agar jelly and does so, does so while still aware that what he has been remembering is also what he is anticipating, and then holds himself there where he is then and with his will fully attached begins remembering again, dreaming of it again—and manages it, wills and reflects, and the shivering sense he has of it is also of the air's new discomfort, to him like a signal of victory, and he feels encased within his will as if within a shimmering pearl of pure light; and there is nothing, nothing he cannot have.
    This time, when he returns to the grassy meadow before his mountain cottage, his landing is a light as a down-feather settling even though at the time he was remembering how the hems of the skirts of the girls of the village are weighted with tiny beads of silver so that when they dance, the long gauze fabrics sway like wind-blown rain and cling to the shapes of their hips and thighs in a way all men recognize as a thing done knowingly.
    The following morning, the boy flows up and over and out through the air as far as the women's bathing place where the stream forms a sandy shallows, and he observes how they flee at the sight of him hovering above them, mothers with sucklings, girls with grannies, all in a panic except for Moule, the eldest daughter of a local tortoise-banjo balladeer. Moule remains knee deep in the willow-green water and her nakedness is every inch a match for his own.
    He drops like a stone. The splash he makes reaches her and she laughs at it, calls him a ninny and a puckeroo. Her black hair is long and straight and it shines in the morning sunlight like the blade of a raven's wing. Water droplets on the tuft of shame-hair hiding her little jade gate glisten like jewels. What bogey threw you here? Moule asks, and the boy, floundering in the surprise of the water, rights himself and, both drawn by her and repelled, reattaches his self-will with fierce pride and focuses bitterly on the requirements of ascent, the mechanism of it, willing his will to will it, shivering and shaking with his penis stub clutched in his fist and not moving an inch.
    Why are you splashing around like that? says Moule, watching him, her breasts like ripe mangos and her round golden belly smooth as a summer drum. You're all wobbly.
    He runs splashing through the shallows. He stops and frets then runs again. Thorns tear his skin, shards of clamshells washed out from the old midden shred the bottoms of his feet until they bleed, and he barely avoids a nasty encounter with an amorous bull oryx, rutty and uncompromising.
    That night at his cottage on the mountain he collapses on his fern bed hungry and hopeless. He thinks about her as he goes to sleep and when he awakens, thoughts of her awake with him.
    He sits in the morning sunlight and cannot rise.
    He thinks of her belly and thighs, he thinks of her knees and her knobs, and his terrestrialization is complete.
    The following day ends equally unsuccessfully, but at evening he feels a vague calming and he seizes it and presses it and soon finds himself floating among the kumquats.
    That night from his fern bed he rises to a point half-way to the ceiling and remembers how her nipples are like pickled plums and stays there with that like that and dozes mildly clutching his memory within his will like a seed in a fruit.
    When he finds her next she is waiting for him.
    Her heart's desire is to visit the land of the pygmy animals. There are said to be cows so small you can hold one in your hand, miniature giraffes you carry in open silk sacks hung from your sash, and tiny rhinoceros that you rub together flank to flank, chaffing them and chaffing them until their blood is up and they will fight. It's on an island beyond the sunrise, says Moule, and she places herself in his arms.
    Seen from the shore, what fell could have been nothing more than her skirt and silk vest fluttering down into the sea far below.



About the author:
John Givens was born in Northern California, got his BA in English literature at the California State University Fresno and his MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa, where he was a Teaching/Writing Fellow. He was a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea for two years; he studied language and art in Kyoto for four years; and he worked as a writer & editor in Tokyo for eight years. For fifteen years, Givens was a creative director and branding consultant for advertising agencies in New York then San Francisco. He has published three novels in the US: Sons of the Pioneers, A Friend in the Police, and Living Alone; short stories have appeared in various journals. His non-fiction publications include A Guide to Dublin Bay: Mirror to the City and Irish Walled Towns, both published by The Liffey Press in Dublin. He is currently finishing The Plantain Manner, a long novel set in seventeenth-century Japan. ]]> A Glass of Water by CS DeWildt Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:05:56 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2071     "Can I have a glass of water, please?"
    "Are you going to buy something?" she asked. She was worn and tired. Her plastic nametag had been sprayed with a cream sauce, maybe soup; it said "Kate". Her eyes, cold, said she'd seen me a million times before. Or others like me.
    "I don't have any money."
    She nodded, bit the left side of her thin bottom lip. "No water, unless you buy something."
    "Please? I've been walking a long time."
    "Mister, if you don't have any money you got to go. This ain't a well." She wiped her hands on the blue apron, drawing attention to it, reaffirming her station, her authority. The customer was right as long as they could pay the tab.
    "Could I use the restroom?" I was sure there was a sink, if not I'd drink from the toilet.
    "You going to buy something?" I shook my head and she left me there. I watched the stainless steel doors to the kitchen flap behind her. I listened to the sizzle and steam of the kitchen escape in short bursts as the doors settled back home. Was she getting me the water? I looked around the restaurant. It was empty except for a trio of high school kids smoking cigarettes in a corner booth. They laughed and coughed and blew smoke rings. They'd made a mess of the table with their ashes and food and drinks. The boy with the acne shredded a white napkin for fun. I watched him watch the girl and boy necking across the table. His mouth twitched between drags from his cigarette. The girl squealed and tilted her head back showing her long smooth neck. The napkin-shredder looked away and I heard his boot thumping on the floor. He turned to me and I looked down at the counter, made busy wiping dust away. The motion released a fine misty layer from my jacket.
    "How you doing partner?" the bald man burst through the swinging doors, the waitress in tow. He had the face of a shrewd lizard. He had some sort of scaly skin condition affecting his scalp. His eyes were bulbous behind his glasses. He wore the short sleeve oxford and clip on tie of a diner manager. He looked as hard and square as a brick. The waitress remained behind him, looking over his shoulder, a full head taller.
    "I'm real thirsty," I said.
    "Mm. Well Mister, our policy is that we only serve water to paying customers."
    "I told him," the waitress added over his shoulder. The man went on talking, but I was too parched to listen. He said something about loitering and explained the concept of a business to me.
    "Can I just sit for a minute then?"
    "No," he said. "Not unless you buy something. Don't make me call the sheriff."
    "I wouldn't do that." I realized after saying it that the statement sounded like a warning. I wondered if they took my meaning: that I didn't want trouble. I stayed silent and still except for my tongue, which I ran over the dry grooves and bumps of my hard pallet. I imagined cool water, ice clinking in a sweating glass, so cold it burns. I let myself stand on the lip of the glass and fall inside, naked, drinking my fill, the ice sticking to my skin as it rinsed away the grime.
    The manager and the waitress stared, waiting for me to turn, to retreat. I looked at the counter again. I poked at a nick, a cutlery slip. I traced the graffiti (Mike was a faggot, JC and Connie were in love). I heard steps behind me, the door opened, jingling a bell.
    "Bye now," the waitress said, sweet as the day old pie in the glass case behind her.
    "Bye Katy," the girl from the booth said. Her voice drew my eyes up. I saw her reflection in the bakery case. Her dress was white and dotted with yellow threaded flowers, hand made and summery. I saw her boyfriend, tall and hard and smooth skinned, his hand on her sun browned shoulder. The girl's smile had too many teeth. She looked less beautiful than she had across the restaurant. I bet she was used to compliments, took them as gospel. She didn't realize the size of the pond she was in. I hoped she'd never leave the town.
    "He's got it," the guy said thumbing toward the napkin shredder, still in the booth, still shredding.
    "Course, he does," the waitress said with a knowing smile.
    "Say hi to your daddy for me," the manager said. "Tell him I'm going to take that sow prize this year." I felt like a stranger at a party where everyone new each other.
    "I'll tell him," the guy said, "but I hope you got something special 'cause his is a real beauty."
    "How many pounds is she?"
    "Hank, I ain't tellin' you shit!" The voice sounded bitter and menacing, but the manager's big eyes glazed with swelling laughter.
    "Alright then, alright then." The manager was still laughing after the door swung home and the bell died. He looked at me and for a moment I thought maybe he'd changed his mind, but his humor had followed the couple out the door.
    "Didn't I tell you to leave?"
    "I told him," the waitress said.
    "Please, just a glass of water," I said. "Let me drink from your hose even."
    The manager shook his head. "We don't have a hose." He went back through the swinging doors to make good on his word and call the law.
    "You shoulda gone when I said so," the waitress said over her shoulder, following.
    I looked back at the table, at the boy. The pile of white paper in front of him had grown. He stared at the empty space left by the girl's neck. He lit a cigarette while his previous butt smoldered in the ashtray. He leaned forward on his elbows, blew a tight dark stream of smoke across the table.
    The manager and waitress came back. Both of their faces were set in the same smile, victorious.
    "Now, you done it," the waitress said.
    "I called the sheriff. He's on his way." I focused on the calloused tip of the stubby finger he pointed at me. "You best git."
    I nodded, rubbed my hands together. I looked straight up, head back, and let the cool breeze from the duct above me hit my face and neck.
    "Just give him a god damned glass of water." The napkin shredder stared into his white pile. He had no more napkins. He was out of fuel.
    "Manny," the manager said. "Don't you start."
    Manny didn't look at him, just kept on looking into the pile of white. "The man is thirsty. Give him a drink of water and he'll go."
    The manager looked at me and I nodded, as slight and humble as I could, but the prospect of that cool drink shook me hard.
    "Water's for paying customers. No water unless you buy somethin'."



About the author:
CS DeWildt lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona. His work has appeared in Bartleby Snopes, The Horror Press, Static Movement, Mobius Magazine, and now, Word Riot. Links to his stories at myspace.com/csdewildt]]> The Long Grass by Ryan W. Bradley Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:04:52 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2063 Listen to Ryan W. Bradley read 'The Long Grass.'

Julius jumped from one hay roll to another and another. Two and a half feet between each, they stretched across the entire field.
    "J-Bird." Amy shouted from behind.
    He grinned, stopping to let her catch up.
    Perched on top of the droll he could barely see the road. He wanted it completely out of sight. Amy landed next to him.
    "Why are you going so fast? Don't you want to wait for me?" she asked.
    "Don't you want to be faster?"
    Julius launched to the next roll. His shoulder ached every time he landed. He looked at the compass he kept in his pocket. His father had given it to him for his seventh birthday, the same day his parent's divorce became official. Julius carried it with him every day. Amy hopped down, and turning, he saw her sprint toward the line of trees that framed the hayfield to the West. So far Julius' mission to make it from the first roll to the last without touching the ground had been thwarted every afternoon by her need to wander.
    "C'mon J." Her golden hair flopped across her face as she turned her head in the direction of the river.
    He waved her away, his attention on the next stop along his route. Julius didn't mind Amy's need to explore, or her lack of focus. In fact, he thought it might give him the opening he'd been looking for. He'd been trying to kiss her, touch her, since they had first met a few weeks back when he arrived from Oregon to spend the summer with his father.
    But playing it cool was the only way he'd get close to a girl. He knew that much from watching the other boys at school. Julius was ashamed to be fourteen and not have seen a breast yet, or felt a girl's tongue in his mouth.
    He swung his arms, and his feet lifted simultaneously. He didn't watch the ground, but kept his eyes on the curve of the roll in front of him, spotting his landing point. A gradual incline in the field as Julius continued up the line forced him to catch his breath after each jump.
    As long as he kept the line of trees to his immediate right he couldn't get lost. Scanning the field for Amy, he saw she was by the riverbank. She waved her arms wildly. Julius leapt. Hands on knees he looked back toward the river, Amy was hopping up and down now. She must have found something, he thought, knowing instinctively what it was, but resisting the idea.
    "I'll finish jumping the line," Julius said. He wasn't going to give in, not today. By the time he finished, maybe she'd have moved on.
    Julius fell on the last roll and his shoulder throbbed, but he'd made it, although when he looked right the trees were no longer there. The line of hay rolls had arched inward, putting the tree line behind him. Julius flipped the compass over in his pocket. There was no reason to worry. All he had to do was follow the rolls back. It was simple.
    A border of dirt, about as wide as Julius was tall, separated the hayfield from a field of corn. The day after Julius arrived for the summer, his dad and he walked around the fields with Cash, his father's dog, and his dad warned him about playing in the corn. He'd stood there in front of the first row of stalks, 6'4, over half a foot taller than Julius, his arms crossed, and said in fields that hadn't been harvested it was easier to get lost than Julius could imagine.
    "Especially when you're no taller than the corn itself," he had added.
    Julius focused on the freckles on his dad's leathery arms and shrugged. Cash took off along the dirt border, but Julius' father shouted, "heel," and the dog returned. The two of them walked on, while Julius stared into the corn, imagining what might be on the other side.
    "Thinking about getting yourself lost, J-Bird?" Amy said, suddenly at his side.
    "Something like that." Julius swallowed hard and forced a chuckle.
    "That's my dad's corn, five acres of it, anyway. There's a road on the other side and more corn on the other side of that."
    Julius nodded, and ran his fingers along the sides of the compass in his pocket. "Why didn't you come when I waved you over?" she asked.
    "Didn't see you."
    Amy grabbed his hand and pulled him away from the corn. He watched her butt in her jean shorts. Her tan calves glistened with sweat in the sun. She was muscular, her biceps something he'd never seen on a girl. In fact, she wasn't much like any girl he'd ever known. She liked football, she'd said, and could pack away as much food as Julius.
    "There's something you've got to see," she said. "It's gross."
    Julius winced, knowing there was no way out. Amy showed him every worm, every insect, every dead mouse she'd found when they were in the fields. She pulled him forward, making his bruised shoulder burn.
    The dog's black and white fur was damp and matted with blood. Amy pulled a branch from a nearby tree and shoved it under its stiff body, flipping the corpse over on the riverbank. Tufts of fur were scattered in the grass, and the dog's skin looked like it had been shredded. It was Cash. Julius shook, holding back a rush of bile rising in his throat.
    "That's your dad's dog, isn't it?" Amy asked, poking Cash's collar with the stick.
    Julius nodded, and turned his head away. Every time he closed his eyes he saw himself dragging Cash's body to the river, dumping it in, hoping it would wash far away, and that his father would never have to see it. But it had washed up just on the other side of the road. "Yeah, that's Cash. I'll tell my dad when he gets home," Julius said. He had no intention of telling his father about the dog. Julius' father had gotten Cash in the divorce, the only thing he'd really fought for, giving up the fight for custody of his son as soon as Julius' mother dangled the rights to the dog. But it would be the fact he'd snuck one of his dad's guns and shot it on his own that would earn Julius the belt.
    "It looks like he was shot," Amy said.
    Julius grabbed a handful of pebbles and tossed them into the river. He nodded and shrugged, and Amy kept commenting on how disgusting Cash looked, increasing Julius' nausea.
    "Who would shoot a dog?"
    "I don't know," Julius said, turning his head.
    "I guess we can just leave him here," Amy said, and poked the ground with her stick.
    Julius shuffled away from the river, hoping Amy would follow. When she did he was relieved, even though she kept looking back. He reached for her hand and held it tightly. They walked back toward the middle of the field and the hay rolls. Julius tried not to think about Cash, and focused on Amy instead. Her hand was sweaty in his, and his heartbeat raced looking at her breasts. He pulled her in front of him, put her back to a hay roll, and kissed her. The first time he'd tried to kiss her, a few days before, she had giggled as soon as his lips met hers, but this time he felt her give in to his touch.
    His hands moved with a fury over Amy's butt, and up her waist until his hands were on her chest. Amy turned her head.
    "What?" Julius asked.
    Amy laughed, pushed his chest gently, backing him away, and ran off toward the river. Always the damn river, Julius thought. When he caught up, she was sitting on a large rock in the middle of the water. Her shoes were on the bank, socks folded and tucked into their respective sneaker. Julius kicked off his own shoes, nearly putting one in the river, and walked toward her. The water was cold.
    "What did you do this morning before I called?" Amy asked.
    Julius lifted himself up onto the rock, and sat beside her.
    "Nothing. Watched TV."
    "Do you want to know what I did?"
    "Not really," he said and laughed, but Amy's smile sank. "Okay, what did you do?"
    "My mom took me shopping in Anchorage."
    Julius nodded. About a week after Julius arrived Amy stopped wearing overalls and her brother's Seahawks sweatshirt, which, on her, hung only a few inches shy of looking like a nightgown. She started wearing tight t-shirts that accentuated her chest, and jean shorts that showed off the curve of her butt.
    "I got new underwear."
    "Really?" he said. "You wearing it?" He noticed for the first time that she wore a pink bra, the straps sticking out from under her white tank top.
    Amy nodded. Julius put his hand on her thigh and fumbled his way to the button of her shorts, trying for a peek. She stopped his hand and shook a finger at him.
    "You need to learn some manners, J-Bird."
    Julius turned back to the river.
    "Don't pout," Amy said.
    "I'm not pouting." He slid off the rock, into the river. "I'm not a baby."
    "Don't be mad."
    "I'm not." Julius splashed through the river, found his socks and pulled them over his wet feet. He slipped on his shoes, and started walking north, toward the road and his dad's house.
    "J-Bird," Amy shouted after him.
    He heard her splash into the water. Keep cool, he thought. He quickened his pace, and by the time she caught up he had reached the road.
    "Julius," she said, the first time she had ever used his actual name. "You don't have to get pissed. We were having fun."
    "I'm not pissed," Julius said, stopping in the middle of the road for a moment, looking at his feet the whole time. "I'm going to the barn. I'm tired of the river." He crossed the road, listening to Amy's footsteps close behind.
    The grass stood waist-high behind his father's barn. Julius sat, leaning his back against the fading red wall. Amy sat facing him, her legs just inches from his own. He picked at the long blades of grass, feeling her stare like it was being filtered down the barrel of his father's shotgun.
    "Do you like me, Julius?" Amy's cheeks tightened, her mouth pursed.
    Julius split blades of grass in half with his forefingers. "Of course I like you," he said. "I wouldn't hang out with you if I didn't."
    "More than a friend?"
    "I mean, I try to kiss you don't I?" His eyes were fixed on each new blade he dissected.
    "Better than girls in Oregon?"
    "I don't know. You're different."
    "What are they like?"
    "They aren't as goofy or giggly, I guess."
    "Oh."
    "I didn't mean that." Julius looked around at the barn behind him, the unruly field that surrounded it. His father hadn't mowed the grass in the year and a half since taking a job as a mechanic in Palmer, which left little time to tend to the farm that had been Julius' mom's pet project. "I like that you're goofy. Girls at home aren't as strong as you. Most of them don't have muscles."
    "Good," she said, and scooted closer to him.
    Julius dropped the grass from his hand, pulling a new batch from the earth. He wondered what Amy was thinking. She wasn't looking at him. Her attention had drifted to the right where brambles took up ten or so feet before the fence of his dad's acreage, and the river just beyond. Julius watched her face, her lips pulled tight and small on her face.
    Without a word she turned and faced him, leaned across his lap to kiss him. She put her tongue in his mouth. His eyes widened, and shuffling his hands across her back he said, "That was out of nowhere," gasping for air as her lips left his.
    Julius felt her eyes fixed on him as she perched on her knees. He sucked in a large breath and held it an extra moment in his lungs.
    Julius kept his hands at his sides when Amy came back for another kiss, but hers held his face. She kept her eyes closed. He couldn't help thinking she looked pained. He thought about the boys back at school in Portland, what they would say. He shifted in the dirt. Amy reached for the bottom of his shirt, he lifted his arms and she pulled it over his head, tossed it to the side.
    "Where'd this come from?" she asked, running her fingers over the bruise that circled Julius' shoulder.
    "My dad's shotgun." Julius said, and then, "Kicks like a mule," mimicking what his father had said the first time they shot together. His dad always held him by the shoulders when he shot, to absorb the buck. Julius was too small, his dad said.
    "Does it hurt?" Amy poked gently at the black, blue, and yellow skin.
    "No," Julius said, and recoiled at the touch.
    Amy kissed the bruise, twice, then sat back on her knees. She straightened up and peeled off her own shirt, her hands shaking, and revealed the pink bra and more muscles. Julius uprooted his hands from the ground at his sides. When he placed them over her breasts, her heart pounded against his fingertips. She took his hands away from her chest and held them tightly in her own.
    Julius got to his knees and leaned over her, who lay backward in the grass. He ran his fingers up her leg and to the fly of her shorts.
    "Not yet," she said, and placed her hand over his, clamping it to her waist.
    He leaned down and they kissed again. Her lips no longer trembled and her eyes stayed open. She released his hand and he ran it up her side.
    "We don't have to," Julius said. His hands shook as he touched her face and kissed her cheek.
    "I want to," she said.
    "You sure?" He leaned on his elbow at her side, his head level with her chest so he had to arch his neck to look at her face.
    Amy nodded. "I'm just nervous."
    "Me too," he said, and let out a half-gasp, half-laugh.
    She took his hand and led it back to her shorts. He watched her chest heave as he fumbled with the button. Her underwear matched the bra, vibrant against the grass they had trampled. He had a hard time with his own shorts, too, rushing to shove them down his legs. The compass knocked against his knee as his legs shivered. He kissed the curve of her chest above the edge of her bra.
    "Is this okay?" he asked, breathless.
    Amy nodded, her eyes half closed but still looking at Julius' face pressed to her skin.
    "You're beautiful," he said, first quietly, and a second time louder.
    Amy smiled. She leaned to the side and reached back, unhooking her bra, her breasts firm, nipples surrounded by goosebumps. He touched them, pressed his lips to them, as she ran her fingers through his crew cut. The grass prickled Julius' bare thighs. He shifted and pressed tightly against Amy.
    "Are you scared?" she asked.
    Julius nodded. "I feel tingly."
    A laugh sputtered from her mouth, and her body shook in his arms. His hands grasped her strongly. Julius moved back to her waist and he pulled her underwear down her legs, as if he might seize up, have a heart attack. Her pubic hair was wild, and stuck out like straw.
    He planted his arms firmly on either side of her head, and held himself above her. She reached between his legs and touched him, her eyes unblinking.
    "Are you ready?" he asked.
    "Yes." She exhaled and pulled her hand away, resting it on his back.
    Julius struggled to push himself inside. It made him think about health class. All the boys in class erupted when they were shown diagrams of a female body. "I'd hit that," one of them had said, while another chimed in with, "looks better in person." When he slid in, Amy winced, and pulled him closer. He tried to meet her eyes, but couldn't.
    "Can you go slower?" Amy asked.
    Julius relaxed and focused on the dirt and grass beside her body.
    "That feel all right?" Julius asked.
    Amy flexed her body upward into his chest, and he felt her nod slowly against his neck, her hair brushing his chin.
    Holding himself above her gnawed at his shoulder, like bone might break through skin. His arms wobbled. Amy let out a painful squeal, and Julius finally looked at her. Her face was pale, the skin tight around her high cheekbones and her lips were drained of color, almost matching the rest of her skin. He pulled back. She turned her head and he could no longer see if her eyes were open.
    He sat back in the grass, leaned down and put his head on her stomach. Amy reached down and touched herself, when she pulled her fingers back they were tinged with red. She shivered and wiped them in her pubic hair. Julius couldn't tear his eyes away. For a moment he was staring at Cash again, all blood-matted fur and death. He tried to blink the vision away.
    He hadn't meant to shoot the dog. He was just trying to take target practice like he and his father had done back when his parents were still making a go of it, their marriage and the farm. He aimed for a tree trunk, but his father had been right when he'd said Julius wasn't strong enough to control the shotgun. The recoil knocked him on his back.
    Cash was off his leash and running east of the barn when the gun fired, now he lay three feet from the tree, a hole in his side, fur torn by the spread of buckshot. Julius dropped the shotgun, fell to his knees, and grasped a handful of Cash's blood-streaked fur.
    He couldn't let his dad know what he'd done. He grabbed Cash by the hind legs, pulled him to the river, and dumped him in. Then Julius ran back and returned the shotgun to his dad's gun case, worried that even though his his dad worked until six, he might somehow show up, catch him red-handed.
    "My father's going to kill me," Julius said.
    "No one has to know." Amy placed her hand on his chest and Julius watched her hand rise and fall with his breathing.
    "He'll send me back to Oregon."
    "I'm not going to tell anyone, J-Bird."
    The grass tickled his skin, and Julius shifted. He clasped Amy's hand between his, lifted it to his mouth and kissed her fingers.
    "It was an accident."
    "It will be okay," she said.
    Amy covered her face with her hands. Julius moved up, scratching his thighs against the dirt, took her in his arms, and held her head against his chest. He stared past Amy, past the side of the barn, past the road, and the riverbank on the other side where Cash lay.



About the author:
Ryan W. Bradley has fronted a punk band, done construction in the Arctic Circle, and now manages an independent children's bookstore. He received his MFA from Pacific University and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in a myriad of publications including The Oregonian, Gargoyle, Third Wednesday, Sir! Magazine, A Thousand Faces, Tulip, and PANK. He lives in Southern Oregon with his wife and two sons. ]]> Not Your Typical Girl by Jon Bohr Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:03:38 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2072     The needle lays dead center in her belly button. I release the forceps, and as I pull the needle through, I chase a stainless steel ring into the piercing. She reaches down to touch her new jewelry.
    "Don't touch it," I say and slap her hand.
    I close the ring around a bead and dab the entry and exit points of the piercing with a Q-tip. Small spots of blood soak into the cotton.
    I tell her we're finished, and she is off the examination table and in front of the mirror before I can strip off my gloves. She holds her shirt right under her breasts and turns from side to side. I've seen this girl before. Not this exact girl but girls exactly like her. She was raised in a good middle- or upper-middle-class home. She had a solid Christian upbringing. Her parents care enough to encourage her to get an education, and they probably care too much about how she looks. She is slender and blonde. They are all slender and blonde, skin toasted tan. She's eighteen years old and out on her own for the first time. And this is as close to rebellion as she'll get, a pretty little ring in her belly button.
    I try to tell her how to take care of the piercing, but she's too busy looking at herself in the mirror to listen.
    If she manages not to get it infected, it'll heal in six to eight weeks. She'll keep the thing through college, maybe even for a couple of years past that. But likely, she'll grow up, get married, and move to Lake Oswego or some other suburb. This is just a phase for her, a detour in the life she'll finally lead. Eventually, she'll think of it that way, too. I don't mind taking her money.
    She lets her shirt fall, and I hand her a plastic bag with a bottle of soap and care instructions in it. I've run through the list, told her everything she needs to know, but she hasn't listened. Until the piercing is sore, red around the edges, and leaking lymph, she won't even think about the care instructions. She stows the plastic bag in her purse, says, "Thank you," and makes her out.
    The bell above my door rings when she leaves my shop. She quickly tromps down the stairs and is on street. I look out the window, and there she is, standing on the corner with her grubby hands fingering the piercing. Bacteria and germs will creep in and infect the area I just cored out of her with a hollow beveled needle. Then she'll call to ask what's wrong.
    I snap on a clean pair of gloves, pick up the used needle and drop it into a biohazard container. I immerse the hemostats, opening and closing pliers, and forceps into an antibacterial bath, and I can hear another customer slowly lumbering up the steps. I finish cleaning up and take my place behind the jewelry case.
    I used to think there was something special about what I did. Three display cases sit in my shop, and only one of them is filled with jewelry. The other two house artifacts from the trade: a framed portrait of Fakir Musafar, an ancient spring-action piercing gun, a Malawi lip plate, an oxidized steel hole punch that a dentist used once upon a time to relieve the swollen tongues of his patients. I used to think my customers would like to see how what they were having done connected to the world. But none of them stray far from the jewelry case packed with overpriced nostril screws, tongue barbells, and belly button rings. I shouldn't complain. There's money in this business, and all it took to get started was the $19.95 it cost me to take a blood pathogens course. It doesn't take much to keep this place going, either. When there isn't a customer, I can listen to the radio or read the paper. But when there is a customer, it is almost always a girl just like the one who left, wanting her nose, or tongue, or belly button pierced.
    The knob turns and the door opens so slowly that the bell barely rings. The rubber-capped tip of a crutch crosses the threshold. Then, there are two crutches, a woman hopping in on them. Her hair is thick and wavy; she tosses her head to the side to get it out of her face. The plunging V-neck of her shirt showcases her cleavage. My eyes sink to a pair of short shorts that hug the curves of her hips. Her left leg has been cut off below the knee, and she stands in the doorway, on one leg, trying to catch her breath.
    She closes the door and begins to crutch her way over to the jewelry case. I don't want to leave her standing, so I ask her to take a seat.
    "Really," she says, hunched over her crutches like a limp marionette, "I'm all right." She's not your typical girl. Missing leg or not, she's a little older, her beauty is more refined, and she seems less dull than the girls I usually get.
    I come out from behind the jewelry case. "You don't mind if I sit, do you?" I ask. She shakes her head, and I plop down in one of the armchairs, hoping she'll follow suit.
    She folds. I figured she would. She leans her crutches within reach against the wall, and, gripping the arms of the chair for balance, slowly lowers herself into the seat. Her knee bends, her calf stiffens, the muscles in her thigh quiver. I can't help noticing how her truncated leg follows the bend.
    I pull a pack of Pall Malls from my shirt pocket and offer her a smoke. She waves me off. I light up and take a few drags while she catches her breath. And then I ask her what I can do for her.
    "I want my clit pierced," she says.
    If she were one of the girls I usually get, I'd tell her that it's not the clit that gets pierced; it's the hood of flesh that rests above it. But it isn't every day that a beautiful one-legged woman asks you to pierce her genitals, so I let it go.
    "You can do that, right?"
    "Sure," I say. "I'll take care of you."
    I hand her some paperwork to fill out while I get everything squared away. The lobby is separated from the piercing room by a pair of pocket doors. I slide them into the wall and tell her I'll call her in when everything is set up.
    Besides the linoleum floor and the examination table, everything in the piercing room is stainless steel. Two high-output fluorescent lights hum overhead. They make everything in the room shine. I wash my hands and snap on a pair of latex gloves. On a steel tray I lay a foam green dental cloth, and on the dental cloth I lay everything I'll need to do the job: a prepackaged alcohol pad, a bottle of gentian violet ink, a toothpick, opening pliers, closing pliers, hemostats, a dab of A&D ointment, a needle the size of a ten-penny nail, and a receiving tube, which looks a lot like a needle only it's bigger around and the edges are dull. I rip open all the crisp, autoclaved packaging and place everything neatly on the tray.
    While I'm setting up, I can hear her moving from one display case to another, and I ask her if this is her first piercing.
    "Yeah," she says. "Scared of needles."
    "Don't be," I say.
    I call her into the piercing room, and she crutches her way in. She manages to push herself onto the table by herself, but sitting there, no walls nearby, the floor too far down, she doesn't seem sure what to do with her crutches. Her eyes shift in their sockets, and I reach out and take the crutches gently in my hands. She won't immediately let go.
    "It's okay," I say. "Relax."
    She releases her grip and smiles shyly. I lean the crutches against the wall.
    I sit down on my rolling stool and ask her to slip off her shorts and panties. She doesn't cock an eyebrow or giggle, and I wonder if, because of what happened to her leg, she's used to being on examination tables, having her body poked and prodded. She unbuttons her shorts, slides down the zipper, and pushes them off. I try not to stare as they clear her truncated leg and slide down to her ankle. She wiggles her foot free, and her clothes fall to the floor.
    I pull out the stirrups. "For your foot," I say, flicking the metal basket with my finger.
    "Just like at the gyno's," she says, and she settles her foot into the stirrup.
    I start with cleaning her. She breathes through her nose while I wipe her clitoral hood with the alcohol pad. Her truncated leg sits flat on the table, and the flesh of her inner-thigh crowds her vagina. I toss the used alcohol pad on the tray and tell her I'll have to move her leg.
    "Which one?" she asks.
    I don't want to point, and I stammer trying come up with the right words for her truncated leg.
    "I'm kidding," she says. "Do what you need to do with it. I trust you."
    I try pushing it aside but am afraid that the incongruity in the angles of her legs will leave her with a crooked piercing. I ask her to scoot forward a little. She does. I take her truncated leg and rest it on my shoulder. I ask her if she's comfortable, and she nods. I take the bottle of ink and the toothpick off the tray. She sits very still while I dip the toothpick into the ink and hold the tip right over the center of her clitoral hood. The ink dribbles down and leaves a mark that I'll pierce through.
    I take her leg off my shoulder and set it back down. I put down the ink and toothpick and pluck the needle from the tray. All the while, my eyes shift to her truncated leg resting on the table.
    "Do you mind if I ask?"
    "About what?" she says.
    She raises her truncated leg a little off the table, and I figure she's baiting me. I steady myself and spit it out. "The leg."
    "What about it?"
    "Half of it's missing."
    "And?"
    "No offense," I say. "Just wondering how you lost it."
    She draws a strand of hair behind her ear, sighs, and looks me square in the eyes. "Sawmill accident."
    "Really?" I ask.
    "No." she says.
    I wonder how many times she's been made to talk about it, how many stories she's concocted to account for its loss. I pluck the receiving tube off the tray. "You're really not going to tell me?" I ask.
    "It's funny," she says. "Sometimes I forget it's even gone. I can feel my toes move even though they aren't there anymore."
    I roll forward on my stool and place her truncated leg on my shoulder.
    "They call is a phantom limb," she says. "I can feel my heel resting against your back right now."
    "Ghost heel, huh?" I say, and then tell her she's going to take three deep.
    She takes the air through her nose and blows it out between her puckered lips. She holds the third breath in her lungs, like I told her to. I place the receiving tube under the clitoral hood and rest the tip of the needle on the purple mark. "Breathe," I say. There's a small pop as the needle goes through, and her head falls back against the table.
    It isn't the pain that does it; it's the adrenaline, the expectation. I place the receiving tube on the tray and pick up the hemostats. Clapped in its teeth is a steel ring. I chase it after the needle and guide it into the fresh hole. I close the ring around the bead and dab away the small spots of blood.
    I lower the examination table so she can rest. I'm in no rush; she'll come to when she's ready. I begin cleaning everything up, but as I'm about to put the needle into the biohazard container, I stare into the hollow and can see the tiny core of her flesh lodged inside. I don't feel like I've really gotten anything out of her, though.
    I snap off my gloves and wash my hands. She comes to, lifting her leg out of the stirrup and onto the table. Her truncated leg follows, synchronized, remembering what it was like to be whole, a memory of flesh. I raise the back of the table to elevate her head and get her a glass of water. She takes a sip and asks if everything is finished.
    "Do you want to see it?" I ask.
    She nods and I hand her a barber's mirror. She holds it between her legs, reaches down with her free hand, and spreads her labia so she can see what the piercing looks like.
    I pick her panties off the floor and hand them to her. She gets her foot through, guides them to her truncated leg, and pulls them on. She does the same with her shorts, buttons them and zips them up.
    I grab her crutches from where they're leaning against the wall. She reaches for them, but I don't hand them over. They are like stiff metal bones, fastened together with bolts and wing nuts. I lodge them under my arms and wrap my fingers around the handles. The pads dig into my armpits, and, for a moment, I feel like I'm floating.
    "You really want to know, don't you?" she asks, laughing. She slaps her truncated limb with the flat of her palm.
    "Yes," I tell her. And I do. I look her in the eyes. She isn't amused, and she's not afraid. The tips of the crutches squeak against the linoleum. Then I see the rage, mounting up inside of her, burning away any confidence she'd placed in me. She's trapped her on the table, and the longer I hold onto her crutches, the more she hates me for it. I shift my weight back to my legs and surrender the crutches to her.
    She snatches them from me and gets herself off the table. When she asks how much she owes, I tell her not to worry about it. I offer to help her down the stairs, but, of course, she won't accept. She makes her way out of the shop. I close the door behind her, the bell rings, and her footsteps echo in the flight of steps.



About the author:
Jonathan Bohr earned his MFA from the University of New Mexico. He is currently a student in the PhD program at Texas Tech University where he serves as Senior Managing Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. His work has recently appeared in The Florida Review. "Not Your Typical Girl" is from Near the Edge of a Continent, a manuscript of linked stories, all of which are set in Portland, Oregon. He is currently at work on a novel.]]> The Closest, Hottest Thing by John Haggerty Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:02:46 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2059     The night goes quiet then, until Declan cuffs me awake, cursing, pulling out the shotgun and firing away at the feet of the crowd. The pellets spatter upward off the packed earth, causing pain but drawing very little blood, and that's the way we want it, not bad enough to get them started. Not bad enough to make them decide that there is nothing for them to lose, nothing worse we can do to them now. Declan is the best, sweeping the street clean, giving us just enough time to do what we have to do.
    Then it's the two of us, kicking our way into some shack or other, some half-standing arrangement of cardboard and tin. And we're back out fast, dragging the screaming target, like some awful birth, doctors delivering someone into a brand-new life, a life of suffering, full of the same faces, the same questions all day, all night. Who are the leaders? Who are your friends? Who should be next?
    Each arrest leads to four more, and those to sixteen, on and on, gathering strength, a crushing avalanche of names, rough addresses, faces, all different but all the same. Please sir, please, it is my son's birthday. Today he is five years old. Not today. Don't take me today. My wife is very ill. The doctor says she might die. She needs medicine. Not today, please. They plead and they wail and we chain them in the back as if they were willing, or silent, or already dead, and then we roar back out, the rage and riot unabated behind us, more tires, more smoke, more fire.
    "Idiots. We're surrounded by idiots. The bloody officers, the bloody press, the bloody public." Declan is happy in his work. His hatred is close and hot and steady, like the South African sun. For once we don't have orders, and we drive around looking for a drink. He takes us out to the tourist section. The streets are clean and well-lit. He chooses a hotel, and we go in.
    "Fog is just tired clouds," a woman says to a young girl, and again I see you, because it is something you would say. Declan jostles me back to the present. "Fancy a bit of that, eh? Can't say I blame you, but I'm dry." In the bar he starts up again. "Totally mishandling this, I'm telling you. These people understand nothing but pain. Listen," he leans in urgently. "History is passing us by. We're doomed if we don't take the gloves off, really show them who's boss. People talk about rights and fairness. You've seen them out there. They want nothing but to slit our throats. We'd best give them the same."
    I'm exhausted, nodding off, but Declan doesn't stop. Suddenly I jerk awake. Declan is telling one of his stories. "We got a beekeeper outfit, see, and we would put them in there. Pants, gloves, bloody great jacket, pulled the netting out of the hood and sewed some thick cloth in its place. Like a blindfold, see. And we would load them into a chopper, and the pilot would take us up, but just a couple of feet off the ground, and we would hover there. And we'd lean in, and we'd ask our questions, and if we didn't like the answers, well, we'd tell him that we were tossing him out of the chopper. And we'd ask him again. Still no answer. One last shot, mate. And they would almost always talk, but I loved it when they didn't, rolling them right up to the door so they could really hear the noise, you know, feel the rotors, and we're laughing fit to piss ourselves, looking at that boy all trussed up in his bee clothes, and then we would kick the bugger out, and they would hit the ground and not know what the fuck was going on. And for just a moment they would completely relax. It was the most peaceful thing I ever saw in my life, how they would go limp, nothing to fight for any more, nothing to do. And then we would drag them up again, and tell them next time it was for real. And once or twice, we even did that. Jesus, we were always cleaning piss and shit out of that fucking beekeeper outfit."
    I feel as though I haven't slept in weeks. I should go home, but instead I wind up in your old neighborhood. That last night, when I told you I still loved you, you said that I had forgotten how to love. Walking aimlessly in the cool, clear night, I get lost for a while. I stop and look upward, imagining something amazing, a beekeeper, or a boy, or me, falling wingless out of the sky. Too close to the tire fires and the rage, we have all lost the ability to fly. In the half darkness, across from a lot filled with rubble, I recognize your place. The mailbox says Jane Somebody, a name I have never heard. I spread my body out on the sidewalk and close my eyes. I feel broken, as if I have fallen from a great height, while in the distance, a clock strikes three.



About the author:
John Haggerty is a writer living in Northern California. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in War, Literature & the Arts, Quiddity Literary Journal, Eyeshot and Opium Magazine, among others. His story Ghost Lights was a runner up for the 2007 Bridport Prize. ]]> The End of All Light You Know by Phoebe Kate Foster Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:01:33 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2061
It's just a cottage, but large enough for one person traveling light: all you have are your clothes and the cartons of keepsakes salvaged from a life that should have been but wasn't. You're damn lucky to have found a furnished rental that was available immediately. Moving to the boonies suits you just fine. It's a relief from the cellblock hell of the 'burbs, where the split-levels might as well be made of glass instead of brick. Your sole neighbor happens to be your landlord and his wife, who live in a renovated farmhouse separated from the cottage by a row of purple crape myrtle and a paved driveway.

"The Lockwoods bought the property because it had a place for his mom," the realtor had told you when you signed the lease. "Funny thing, though. After a few weeks, the old lady suddenly up and left. Since then, they've been desperate to rent it out. I'm sure Mrs. Lockwood will pop over with a plate of brownies and introduce herself. She's a nice gal, like yourself."

You haven't seen your new neighbors yet, but when you dropped off some boxes a couple hours ago, you heard their TV. It was tuned to some program with an actor whose gruff voice rumbled intermittently like distant thunder. The minor noise pollution didn't bother you. After living in a cheek-to-jowl subdivision, hearing just one family's TV instead of several is—like everything else now, you think—a change for the better.

After putting the last box inside, you flop down on the porch swing and savor the unaccustomed peace of possessing your own space. The neighbors have either switched off their TV or turned the sound way down, and silence descends upon you with the grace of a benediction. This is your favorite time of day—l'heure bleu, the magical threshold between light and dark that separates what is past from what is to come. For a few moments, all dreams seem possible and all plans a sure thing. Tomorrow, like the First Day of Creation, promises to bless the hopeful with a new start, an unsullied soul, a different scene.

"Ginger! Ginger!"

You jump at the imperious voice of your landlord, cutting through the quiet of deepening violet twilight. Glancing around, you wait to see an errant Irish setter or roaming retriever bound across the yard.

"Goddamn it. Where'd she take off to?"

Through the gaps in the crape myrtle, you catch brief glimpses of Mr. Lockwood as he stamps up and down his driveway. He's tall and burly with buzz-cut hair and a can of Bud Light in one hand. "What the hell's gotten into her? Dumb bitch."

Obviously, your landlord doesn't realize—or doesn't care—that he's got an audience. You can't see his face clearly, but you feel his ire like the ionized air just before lightning strikes. Your stomach reflexively knots and your hands go cold. The realtor hadn't mentioned anything about Mr. Lockwood and now you know why. There's nothing good to say on his behalf.

"Ginger!" he roars, then crumples the can and pitches it. "Fuck her..."

He's probably gone through a twelve-pack already, you think, shaking your head. No wonder the dog ran off. Poor thing was afraid of getting beaten by a belligerent drunk.

Mr. Lockwood stands at the end of the driveway, scanning the desolate rural landscape. You're startled to see a young woman emerge from the grove of trees across the road. Apparently, Mrs. Lockwood has been out searching for their missing pet. As she walks over to join her husband, her long red hair ripples in the evening breeze like a flag.

He takes something out of his pocket and shakes it in her face. The set of keys jangles like jarring wind chimes. "Can't get very far without these, can you now?" you hear him say.

Mrs. Lockwood puts a hand on his arm. He pulls it free and turns his head away. She droops like a wilted flower. He takes her by the elbow and they walk up the driveway to their house. The screen door slams with a resounding smack.

A few moments later, you hear the yelps.

The magic hour is over. The sky darkens from purple to black. Covering your ears, you pray for the bandage of silence. The noise ceases. You hug yourself and wait for the miracle of stars to appear—wish I may, wish I might—but you know what will happen next. It's always the same. Nothing ever changes. Not really.

From an open window in the house next door comes the sound of staccato grunts commingled with shuddery moans. Darkness presses down on you like an unwelcome weight. There are no stars, there is no air and you're lost in a formless void. You can't see the trail of bruises on your arms. You don't remember the map of your face. You've forgotten where tomorrow lies. It's always Saturday night. You haven't left home. Home is everywhere.


"The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other... The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out." –James Baldwin



About the author:
I'm an assistant editor at The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. My short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, published in several anthologies and appeared in numerous print and online literary journals including Prairie Schooner, Eclectica, Carve, Vestal Review, Flashquake, Slow Trains, Tattoo Highway, Ghoti, 3711 Atlantic, Arabesques, Spillway Review and a previous issue of Word Riot, among others.]]> Zoetrope by Tim Doody Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:59:43 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2068 Listen to Tim Doody read 'Zoetrope.'

A knock on the door. The clock's minute hand at several ticks before midnight. Canyons of film reels, glossy magazines and VHS tapes through which SKJ must navigate.

Me, on a couch stained by the rub of bodies.

From around the corner, swapped pleasantries. Footsteps. The crash of film reels. An apology from both guests. The tap-tapping sound as reels are righted.

Happens all the time, SKJ says. Tim, Welles and Andy. Welles and Andy, Tim.

Kissed cheeks. Silence.

Me, fondling metal studs on my hoodie.

So, SKJ says.

Neon yellow hair of Andy. Neon yellow glasses of Andy. Harlequin grin of Welles. Twenty-one year olds in Technicolor.

SKJ strolling to the kitchen. Only I see him mouthing hot hot hot. See a silent stamping of feet, a smirk.

My blank face.

SKJ returning. A Tupperware container in his left hand. Marijuana in the Tupperware.

Ah, Andy says, we've come to this, have we?

Welles looking at me. Me, at Welles.

My tense neck.

A general consensus to watch films shot by SKJ. 16 millimeter. Hand-processed.

White box on a blank wall. Smoke swirling in a tunnel of light. White box flickering to life. Synthetic azure shorts coming undone. Sandpaper darkness. Fuzzy belly expanding.

The click-click-click as each image slides by the lens. The white lightening of a scratch. One boy topping another.

A brief exchange about surfaces, about light on drywall and flesh on flesh. That which contains nothing. Maybe everything.

Project on me, Welles says.

His shirt pooled on the floor.

That's the way, Andy says.

Tattooed on Welles' neck, the circle-and-slash symbol of the empty set. SKJ creeping closer with the projector. Beam of light embracing the delicate smallness of Welles' lower back. Flesh on flesh on flesh.

A roomful of stares.

Welles, a charmed cobra swaying. Boys on film transmogrifying: orchids waltzing, nebulae contracting, luminescent specimens buoyant in Deep Sea.

My exhalation of smoke into Andy's open mouth. His soundless thank you.

SKJ gazing only into Welles' back, at a miniature world that he has birthed.



About the author:
Tim Doody's writing has appeared in Brevity, AlterNet.org, Two Hawks Quarterly, the Rambler Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, the Indypendent and various anthologies, including That's Revolting (Soft Skull), and the forthcoming Radical Faerie Reader (White Crane). ABC-TV's Nightline included Doody in a national list of "particularly troublesome, even dangerous, anarchists," and Rush Limbaugh made fun of him and his last name on the air. http://timdoody.me]]> Brokedown in Oklahoma by John Washington Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:58:53 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2062     A few minutes later, as I was being transferred to an agent in Oklahoma, a small blue pickup was reversing down the shoulder towards me. An unwrinkled, jolly-looking little man in dirty green overalls stepped out and asked what the matter was. I told him that it was probably electrical, that the engine just quit on me. He pinched a few hoses and asked if it was running hot and told me about his boys, who were about my age, and how it was real nice living in Checotah and that he wasn't looking too forward to mowing his lawn when he got home and didn't mind waiting with me for awhile. He convinced me to convince the wrecker company being sent by Triple A to tow me to Shawnee which was a bigger city than Checotah, within a hundred miles and was on my way besides. Once you get there, he said, Since it'll pry be too late to do ay work on it tonight, to make sure to lock it up good and park it in a wel-litted spot, because whether it's New York City or Oklahoma theyre is bad people. Now theyre is gonna be good people too but theyre is gonna be bad ones.
    I sat on the guardrail in the humid buzzing direct Oklahoma highway sun and watched the vans and trucks and cars whip past me, their drivers turning their heads to the spectacle, to the break in the line and monotony of the road, to me, and then pass. I was sad that none of them would remember me. And I was sad that I would never remember them. And there was nothing to be done.
    A flatbed wrecker spun its orange hazards and slowed and then reversed down the shoulder to my Jeep. Darrell, a beardless man with a flowing Buffalo Bill mustache and a large, taut belly, asked me how I was doing. His arms were covered in cancerous looking pocks and dry sores, scabs and charred looking welts. On his left, dark, drooping eyelid, there hung a pink growth that must have partly impaired his vision. I told Darrell that I'd been better, though I don't know if that was true, or if I would have been able to verify it just then anyway. He chained up my undercarriage, had me put her in neutral and steer her up onto the sharp slant of his wreckerbed.
    Forty years ago Darrell went to Paramedic School for three days, they gave him a certificate and a fast car and he spent the next twenty years chasing after highway wrecks. His last call, before he gave up the business and went into towing (wrecking, as they call it in these parts), he responded to his brother's second consecutive heart attack and had to trach him to keep him from choking on his own blood. Not that wreckers is much better, he told me. He's been down the highway more than once with a pillowcase to collect bodyparts in. Just last week there was a woman clean decapitated just a few miles back, and he traced across his neck with his index finger. I had read recently that in the Plains Indians sign language the universal sign for Sioux was the pantomime of a decapitation. People have told me, Darrell told me, that I'm cold-blooded, but I ain't. I simply ain't. He paused, as if he were going to go on and explain, but we both just sat there, in the filthy, ash-stained, over-air-conditioned, cracked naugahyde cab, thinking about it. I tell ya one thing, Darrell told me, I ain't gonna see something that I ain't already seen. Been on this highway forty years now.
    He told me that as a child, when he was going to the Indian elementary school, even though he was one/eighth Cherokee, because he still looked white, he was picked on. And he repeated it for me, that he was a minority, as a white person, and that he didn't owe the Indians anything for what some of his ancestors might or might notta done to some of their ancestors, and that the casinos aren't really his thing, though there's enough of em, and he only goes occasionally to win forty or fifty dollars or lose some and see some people he knows that hang around there, and that Tulsa is the most inland port in the world, that ships come up the gulf and up the Arkansas and through a series of locks and canals and man-made lakes all the way to port in Tulsa. He doesn't think either that the Checotah Flying J, where I had filled up a few miles before my breakdown, had anything to do with it, cause even if the gas is sometimes muddy it's always fresh, heck, they got two sometimes three trucks running twenty-four hours up to Tulsa where it's refined. I told him that I didn't know that there were refineries in Oklahoma. Suck it right out of the ground, he said. Conoco-Phillips and some others. This lake here, he said, Lake Eufaula, largest man-made lake on the continent. And they filled it with bass and catfish and some other fish. Record for biggest bass pry weighs almost as much as you. I shook my head in appreciation. Yep, he said, Hundred and twenty six pound, he said, which is less than I weigh.
    Darrell and his wife have fostered seventeen children. Seventeen out of eighteen, he told me, worked out, too. One of em lasted only two and a half days, and then he threatened my wife. Didn't realize I was in the house. I was standing right behind him when he said it. Now he did something that he shouldn't of done and I did something I shouldn't of done. Grabbed him by the hair and dragged him outside by it, didn't let go til we got to town either. Dropped him at the courthouse and didn't ever see him again, he said, and there was no pause in his telling, Now we got two kids, wife and me had em four years now, Haley and Jason. Haley is the first girl out of the seventeen we already had. My wife's always liked outdoor stuff, hunting and fishing and all that, and girls don't really like that. Not many of them anyway, that's why we's always asked for boys. We might adopt them now. The parents had to give up their rights to em just a few months back and now we could adopt them if we wanted to. I know the father pretty well. Not a bad guy but got mixed up in the wrong things, started doing cocaine and had too hard of a time giving it up, says he wants the kids back now but he won't go to rehab even though he's off cocaine, but those are the conditions the judge gave and now he's had to give up his rights to em. So now we could adopt them. I only got two rules. No stealing and no lying. No doing drugs either but that usually goes with the first two. Once you win their trust, then you got em. Then you're good. I have two girls of my own too. In their thirties now, have kids of their own.
    Darrell took me to the Motel 6 in Shawnee, told me he'd wait for me to get a room and to see where in the parking lot to roll off my Jeep to.
    In the lobby of Motel 6, a large woman in a head scarf, with a happy, gap-toothed smile, was talking to a very dark-skinned, factory-uniformed fellow who looked a few years older than me. With the tips of her fingers she handed him a taco and a cheeseburger both still in their almost-melting plastic package, both just out of her microwave and steaming hot. He joked with her, or maybe confessed to her, that sometimes one or two of the packages fall off the back of the truck and she laughed and told him if any more tacos fall outta the truck then she could bring him some, and they laughed again, and I joined in their pleasant laughter, and they both looked at me. I told them my story, that my truck was on the bed of a wrecker and that I was in a sort of hurry. I asked if there were any brokedown specials and they both laughed and the owner, whose pale-brown cheeks were constellated with gray, abundant freckles, laughed a musical, slow series of he-he-he's, and said she had a brokedown special if I didn't mind a brokedown room. Long as it's gotta door, I said, and the three of us laughed. The vending machine worker (his nametagged shirt gave away the profession) said that he had to go, and wished me luck, and thanked and said goodbye to Porsche, who turned to typing on her oldish looking computer.
    Your name's Porsche?
    That's my name.
    Pretty, I said, and Porsche looked at me, and then smiled.
    I'm gonna write you in, she told me, for room 212 with the flickering bathroom light, which is ten dollars off the regular price. I told her that that was fine, and it came to thirty-nine dollars and some change, before tax, which added another six.
    I told Darrell, who was waiting patiently for me in the parking lot with the engine idling, the good news. While I was booking the room he had meanwhile set me up with Big Wheel Wrecker, and told me that the owner, Mike, would be calling me soon and maybe would even be able to take a quick look at the Jeep tonight. I shook Darrell's hand, he wrote out the number off my Triple A card, and then he sped out of the parking lot and back onto the highway, headed east for Checotah.
    I hauled the cooler and atlas and a few of my bags into my room and then went to stand and scope what was left of Oklahoma's afternoon. In the Southeast corner of the parking lot, visible to passing eastbound motorists, was a billboard that read, BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD. Psalm 46:10. The landscape over which the white, all-cap letters hovered was an Oklahoman evening-orange, an over-tinted sunset above hills that could have been a rendering of the immediate, timber-studded hills surrounding Shawnee directly behind the billboard. Except, though, except for that the nearly embryonic, computer-dramatized orange was undoubtedly the full-sky orange of a sunset, and not that of a sunrise, and so driving east, towards the always-coming darkness and with the spin of the earth, which would be the circumstance of any motorist viewing the billboard, unless they were reading in their rearview mirrors, leant the message, I felt, an emphasis different from the capitalized and underlined I AM, for indeed there was something somewhat aren't rather than are about the misoriented sign, which gave me the strong impression that the real emphasis, and in fact the real and only message, maybe, forgive me, was: BE STILL.
    And the brokedown special light in my bathroom in the room that Porsche gave me didn't flicker at all.
     Porsche's daughter-in-law, who was due in December but still ain't showing yet, served me at the Denny's, which was in the same parking lot complex as the Motel 6, along with a Days Inn, La Quinta Inn, and a Conoco-Phillips gas station/minimart. I ordered the 'You Pick Four Slam' and picked eggs easy, bacon, wheat toast and oatmeal. I took the oatmeal to go, overtipped the pregnant waitress and walked back across the cracked black asphalt, past semis and campers parked for the night, and into my room to read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s essay 'The Dimensions of a Man' and wait for another call from Mike to come for the headstart diagnostic on my Jeep.
    Mike didn't call until past nine, after he had gotten some food in him, as he said. I met him in the parking lot, where he stood, in the half-dark, holding his computer in its hard briefcase. He was a young man, probably in his mid to late thirties, but already balding. His thin brown hair was greased and brushed straight back on his tanned, slightly sweating head that gleamed through his hair in the warm yellow light.
    The computer, he told me, a few moments later, punching its buttons, had trouble communicating with my computer. I leant him my flashlight and together we hovered over the breaker box, which spoke nothing.
    A man called from across the lot, asking if we needed any tools. I always travel with my tools, he said. The small-mouthed, red-haired man and his pale, dyed-black long-haired teenage son who wore all black including a black skull cap, came over to peer into my hood. They both held Denny's to-go Styrofoam soda cups with straws and they both held them within mouth's reach and frequently slurped from them. The man raised on his toes, as if in excitement, every time that he spoke. He and Mike talked about the computer, the various models of Solus and Brics, and the complications with foreigns, and upgrading to 07-08's, and what to charge for initial diagnostics, whether with the Solus or the Bric, and what it's like to be a Chevy man with a Titan, which is a Jap manufacture. The quiet, shyly-grinning son murmured something about the batmobile that his father and Mike plainly ignored and I didn't follow though the comment seemed to satisfy him very well. After nearly an hour of un-paused shop-talking, the man and his son shook Mike's and my hand and said how it was real good to meet us, and he seemed to mean it, and we said goodnight and safe travels all around and Mike loaded the Jeep onto his wrecker and I watched him pull away into the night, which was partly illuminated by the Psalmist's billboard and the unsteady headlight stream of highway traffic.
    In my room I poured myself a Grouse and watched the last quarter of game five of the NBA Finals. The Lakers won in overtime.
    Before falling asleep I thought of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, which I had visited that morning, which had been converted into the Civil Rights Museum. I thought of the view of that hotel, from across the street, from the very room from which James Earl Ray had taken aim, the view of the corner balcony, the balcony where Dr. King fell, the railing over which his foot rested, the view that accompanied the final decision of Ray, and not only the decision but the will behind the decision, and not only the potential and momentum of the will, but the deed, the view that accompanied the deed. The geography, the geometry, the will the motive the decision or the madness or even the witness, I thought, the witness cannot untake the deed. Memory nor legacy nor redemption nor retribution can untake the deed, the deed that bears witness to itself and needs no other witness but we need it and Paul Celan writes that no one bears witness for the witness.

    At 9:30 the next morning, Joe, a young Native American boy, on summer break from studying business at Seminole State University, picked me up in a Big Wheel Wrecker. We had to stop at A&R Body for some schematics, and then we turned left down Harrison down Highland, just outside of historic downtown Shawnee, and pulled into a back garage lot. Patrick was already on his back under my Jeep. His son, a frenetic, skinny, four-year-old named Tennessee, who wore elastic waistband camo-shorts, a small camo-t-shirt, and tiny black and blue and silver Skecher velcro sneakers, jumped around and over and under the Jeep and on his back and stomach and on the skate following or bothering his father, giving orders and asking questions and not infrequently telling his father, or Joe, or me, that he told us so, or that he would kick us in the eye, or just looking at one of us in the eye and shadow punching the air in front of him and making the accompanied, spittly, cinematic sound effect. Some of these antics got a chuckle or a smirk or the occasional remonstrance from Patrick or Joe. Most of them were completely ignored. I, trying to listen and follow Patrick's explanations about my breakdown, was distracted, sometimes appalled and often amazed by Tennessee's automobile vocabulary, his precocious social impudence and his mechanical acumen. He rightly reminded his father where my O2 sensor was, described to me the various types of steering wheels, and knew a thing or two about the function of the sundry circuits and fuses that he dug or dumped out of a huge bucket of spare electrical parts. The next few hours, as Patrick fiddled and re-welded on my two new O2 sensors, I watched and sometimes played with Tennessee as he tirelessly investigated and kicked and pretended he was racing and named and spilled and dismantled and climbed upon or into the many loose engine blocks, car cabins, exhaust manifolds, and many other pieces and deconstructions of cars that I didn't recognize and couldn't name though Tennessee all probably could.
    I spent most of my time in the garage on a sunken, maroon, well-greased couch. Joe and I took one trip to a bank and an auto parts store in the wrecker. Patrick, Tennessee and I also took one trip to the neighboring Dollar Store, where Patrick bought beef jerky and two bottles of Mountain Dew and Tennessee chose a Dr. Pepper and three lunch size bags of Cool Ranch Doritos. I bought a coffee at the Sinclair gas station next door.
    Occasionally, and without provocation, Tennesse, whether in the middle of balancing on a broken cardboard box, or swinging a lead pole in the air in the style of a ninja, would call out to his father that he loved him, a quick, staccato, I-love-you-dad. Patrick, concentrating underneath my car or hood, would not always immediately hear him, and so Tennessee would call again, and again, not desperately but insistently, his proclamation of love until Patrick would finally reply, I love you too little man.
    Though he probably did so everyday, Patrick seemed to take particular delight in resting his package of beef jerky on the engine block. And I felt that I understood his delight, in the filthy-fingered tearing and eating, and even wished that he would offer me a chunk or strip so that I too could reach into the plastic package with unclean fingers and taste that wonderful looking dehydrated beef that had sat on my old engine. But he never offered me any.
    With my hood closed and almost three hundred dollars out of my pocket, I said goodbye and thank you, and left some of my grandmother's nutbread next to the Mountain Dew on the cluttered desk in the un-air-conditioned, age-stained office, and drove away. In about a mile the engine cut, I lost all power, and then glided to a stop in the right lane still on Highland and threw on my hazards.
    Joe, Patrick and Tennessee all came to pick me up. We drove back to Big Wheel all huddled together in the cab of the wrecker, Tennessee on his father's lap, none of us in seatbelts. Patrick put my car on the lift, Tennessee and I played with the bucket of dirty fuses, and in another hour Patrick took the Jeep for a test run. I love you Daddy, Tennessee called as Patrick was pulling away. I told him that his dad couldn't hear and he told me that yes he could, and, indeed, Patrick, as he was already pulling out of the parking lot, without looking, canted his head out the window and called out that he loved the little man and Tennessee said to me, See.
    One more test run, a handshake, not another dollar dropped and I was on my way into Oklahoma City. In the raw-stippling heat of the afternoon I stopped at the Oklahoma City Memorial. It is a sheek, very clean, minimalist, almost mutely-minimalist, memorial space. Every part of its construction, from the disconnected, empty walls, to the stiff-backed iron and glass chairs (one for each victim) resting on the gently sloping grass, to the inches-shallow reflecting pool, is nearly completely without dimension. On the western wall (designating the western wall of the old building) is written in large, flat numbers, the time, 9:01. On the opposite, eastern wall is written 9:03. The rental truck, of course, exploded at 9:02. And now, so the design of the memorial implies, the destruction of the building, or what remains of it, or the very lack of the building, inhabits that minute, 9:02. In fact, entering the space, now, as a visitor, implies a similar inhabitation of that minute, 9:02. But it was not a minute; it was not even a moment, but a disfigurement of a minute, a break of a moment, a break of time as much as a break of space. I thought of Picasso's Guernica, perhaps the most famous portrayal of an explosion, and what I see in that painting is a pursing not only of the bodies, and of the space, but also a contraction, a rift, a sundering, an atomization of time, and there seems to me to be a similarity between the horrific beauty of the Guernica and the not-even-austere simplicity of the Oklahoma City memorial: the bomb-folding, that more-than-happening between two moments of time, which actually opens, vacates and then inhabits, envacates, that moment. And it is a moment that has passed and yet it, 9:02, is a moment that passes everyday, and it is a moment that needs no witnesses, and even if we wanted to I don't know how we could witness it. An irreconcilable witnesslessness that despite all perfect or single or stained memory, fate has run its course and it is still running it and it is running it.
    Behind the memorial, there is a statue in the place of the destroyed once-adjacent church of Jesus covering his face with his hand. Underneath the statue is written, And Jesus Wept. Is God, then, victim of God?

Paul Celan writes,

Whichever word you speak—
you owe
to destruction.



About the author:
John Washington currently lives and writes in Tucson. A previous story, 'Passion', was also published by Word Riot.]]> Fort Flagler, WA by Ben Loory Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:58:16 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2064
In fact, that's what it is.

On each side there are barracks, old ones. From World War I, World War II. There's a flagpole here with a flag at the top.

At the far end, there's a cliff.

I walk to the cliff and look out. All there is there is the sea. I turn and look around. This place is deserted.

I really need a towel.

There's gotta be a towel around here somewhere, I think, so I start walking around. I pass some RVs and an old station wagon.

There are people renting out the barracks.

Eventually, I find a tiny gift shop. I go in. It's really dark.

Can I help you, honey? says a lady behind the counter.

Yes, I say, I need a towel.

Right as I say it, my eyes adjust, and I see that I'm in the wrong place. This is just flags and miniature jeeps.

We don't have those, she says. Do you need one?

Do I need one? I think.

Yes, I say. I forgot to pack one when I left.

Oh, says the woman. Well.

She looks around.

You mean like a beach towel? she says.

Like a towel, I say. You know, for drying. Like when you take a shower.

Oh, she says. We don't have those. You might want to try in the town.

I go back outside and stand there a while. I don't have a car or anything. There's no way for me to get into town because town's about ten miles away.

Well, I think.

I go back to the cliff. I stand there, looking down.

At the bottom, there are some kids playing in the surf. They're splashing each other and laughing.

I go back to the barracks and stand in my room. The curtain's in tatters and there are no sheets on the bed.

I forgot to bring a sleeping bag, too, I realize.

I don't know why I came.

Eventually, the rest of my friends show up, and we all shake hands and smile and hug. Then I get a ride into town and stand there in the grocery store.

I look at the signs over the aisles, looking for one that says "towels." I don't expect to see one, and I don't.

I go over to the Starbuck's stand.

The girl at the Starbuck's seems really nice. She fixes me a cappuccino. She reminds me of someone, but I don't know who.

I don't know why I ordered cappuccino.

When my friends are done shopping we go to the liquor store. I stand inside sipping my drink. The liquor store is weird; there's a counter and a counterperson. You tell her what you want, and she gets it.

My friends buy some rum and some vodka and gin. Then they get some Jack Daniels.

You sure you don't want anything? one says to me.

I want to shake my head, but I nod.

In the car back to "base," I finish my cappuccino. Then I sit there with my empty cup.

Is there something wrong? one of my friends says to me.

No, I say, looking out the window.

That night we all sit around. For a while, we talk about books. But then we move on to other things. People talk about girlfriends and husbands.

There are some dogs around and they keep coming over. They want me to pet them, but I don't. I'm allergic to dogs, and besides I don't like them. When I was young I had a dog; he died.

At the end of the night I go back to my room. There's a sleeping bag on the bed. It's old and mildewed and there's a pillow beside it.

For a while I just stand there and stare.

In the bathroom, I find a towel on the rack. It's old too, and worn. I think about taking a shower, but I don't.

Can always do that tomorrow.

Late that night, I wake up in the dark and I don't know where I am. I sit up and look around and eventually I remember. I put on some clothes and go outside.

At night, the parade ground is very different. You can't see the dead, dry grass. We're a million miles away from any cities, so the sky is filled with stars.

I remember when I was very little, my Dad used to take us outside. He'd stand there and point out all the constellations. He knew them all.

I only remember one.

Orion, the hunter. There he is. I look up at him for a while. He's always there, wherever I go. He never changes, never moves at all.

I turn away and walk to the cliff and look out at the sea. Or look out to where the sea is; I can't see it, it's completely black. In the air I can smell and feel and taste it, and below I can hear the waves crash.

I have no idea what I'm doing here.

It's a common theme in my life.

For a while, I stand there, in the dark. It's cold, so I zip up my jacket.

Finally I turn and start on back.

I shower, and take the towel from the rack.



About the author:
Ben Loory lives in Los Angeles, where he is a musician and screenwriter. His fiction has appeared in (or is forthcoming in) Knock Magazine, Wigleaf, The Bicycle Review, Dogzplot, Every Day Fiction, and Writers' Bloc, among others. He has received honorable mentions in Glimmer Train and ChiZine short story contests, and publishes non-fiction monthly at www.thenervousbreakdown.com. His book Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day is currently seeking a home.]]> The Bright Night Effect by Jon Chopan Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:57:29 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2065
The bars along the river have closed their doors until April and handed out what was left of the summer stock. We're moving into the city, moving closer to one another. The warmth of 100,000 people melts the snow on Saturday nights. But we don't retreat into our homes. There is ice fishing and snowmobiling and games of hockey to be played on the frozen canal. Everywhere you go you hear whispers: hypothermia, through the ice. Children are not praying for snow days because they know there is never enough, that more snow only means longer walks and salt stained pants. The hills of salt at the town hall become smaller as the snow piles higher, as shopping carts from Wegman's grocery become mangled and lost, as the inevitable child goes missing, a snow fort caved in.

On R News Yolanda Vega is calling out the numbers for the New York "Take 5" and we are on the edge of our seats because my mother always buys a ticket and because we are mesmerized by Yolanda's voice. When she calls out her name, "Hello New York, this is Yo-LAN-dah VAY-ga," drawing it out, it almost makes it all right that we will never win. We love Yolanda. We love the snow. They are constant. They are here to stay. Or they will return again. There will be no layoffs, no jobs shipped to other cities never to return.

After the break the news reports that sales are down at local retail outlets, and they explore the connection between that and decreases in Kodak bonuses and layoffs at Delphi and cutbacks at Xerox. It is no wonder everyone in this town is holding a lottery ticket. The weatherman comes on with spectacular photos of the city covered in snow, and he describes some kind of effect with the light. There is always something new to learn about snow and winter weather. My friends and I, though we are too old and do not have the right winter gear, find old sleds in our garages and go out into the snow with beer and a camera. We have forgotten flashlights but the weatherman, for once, was right. The light from the city is bouncing off the clouds and it is bouncing back off the snow and it is almost like the sun is just now rising, even though it's well past midnight. All at once the world feels beautiful, more than I can say. From the top of the hill where we stand, in one of those silent moments that comes when the world appears covered in snow, every inch of the city is burning.



About the author:
Jon Chopan's work has appeared in magazines like Glimmer Train, Hotel Amerika, and Redivider. He currently works for a construction crew in Rochester, New York. ]]> An Interview With Peter Grandbois by Robin Martin Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:56:53 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2090 "To write is to forget the self (or selves), to resurrect the spirit. But how to say what needs to be said when you are a coward?
You do not have to be good.
You skulk through your fiction, slither through poetry.
You do not have to walk on your knees...
Habitualization devours us. It's the old you who filtered your feelings through others, said what others wanted you to say. Right? That's how you've led your life so far. Let yourself be defined by the definitions of others?
Do you solemnly swear to love, honor, and obey the definitions imposed on you by your parents, your family, your spouse?
I do.
Better to hide within the page than to face the self. The only thing more frightening is never to have written at all." (The Arsenic Lobster 103)Peter Grandbois was accused of narcissism by a well-known editor before publisher Spuyten Duyvil picked up his hybrid memoir The Arsenic Lobster, due for release in October, 2009. This manuscript reveals an almost manic desperation to be everything, and be nothing that you are; and a courage to fail and to appear foolish, perhaps the greatest type of courage one can have.

While he was a member of the US Fencing Team, Peter aspired to Olympic athlete status. As an academic, he earned two bachelor's degrees, (one of which was in Environmental, Populational, and Organismic Biology) an MA, an MFA, and a PhD from American universities, and a Curso Superior in Spanish Language from the University of Barcelona. He is an extraordinary language craftsman who hates memoir but has written one, a dichotomy which provides the foundation for an unusual look inside himself.

The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir is, as it says, hybridized; embracing the traditional Bildungsroman, humor, metafiction, post and post post-modern elements. Illustrative of the author's diverse talents, The Arsenic Lobster is a completely different work than his first novel, The Gravedigger, which is in the realm of magic realism a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In The Arsenic Lobster's "Intermission," Grandbois reprints "All or Nothing at the Faberge," his short fiction piece that received an honorable mention for the 2007 Pushcart Prize; Grandbois suggests that the reader "Watch our hero tripping over fiction!" and footnotes his old story, pointing out the repartee and parry of autobiography and fiction. He teases. Is The Arsenic Lobster a memoir or something else? And, if it's good enough, does it matter?

His writing has appeared in The Dos Passos Review, Post Road, Flatman Crooked, Necessary Fiction and Writers' Chronicle, and more short stories are forthcoming from Gargoyle, Eleven Eleven, Word Riot and Zone 3. The Gravedigger (Chronicle Books, 2006), was a Borders "Original Voices" and Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection, and is under consideration to become a motion picture. His novel Nahoonkara has been picked up by Etruscan Press and is scheduled for release in 2010.

Robin Martin: On The Arsenic Lobster's back flap, Eleni Sikelianos says "the hero's quest is to smash the mirrors around him." Who do you see in the mirror? Did Sikelianos get it right? Is Peter (from Lobster) trying to smash the mirrors?

Peter Grandbois: I certainly don't think the person looking back at me in the mirror even remotely resembles the complicated spirit inside, the one fighting with other selves to get out. I think Eleni got it right on; Peter is trying to smash the mirrors around him. At least that's how I've seen my life--and how I see it still.

The problem with our contemporary American existence is that we are surrounded by inauthenticity and surface. We cannot help but incorporate that into ourselves. That's what I'm trying to smash in the mirror--to find that glimmer of what is real, what is not cliché. I don't know if it's possible. David Markson has a horribly sad book called "Wittgenstein's Mistress" in which we follow a woman who may or may not be the last person on earth. She may also be crazy. All we get from her are fragments of culture, often misinterpreted. If she is the last person on earth, she may not even have an authentic self to save. And if she's not the last person on earth, how can she possibly communicate her essential loneliness with another human being, when she can't even find her authentic self? I think what it means to be an artist is to be at war with the inauthentic--which means to be at war with just about everything. When I was younger, I often thought of getting a tattoo on my arm that read: "I fight, therefore I am." And I'm not talking about that machismo "Fight Club" bullshit, where two men slug it out with each other. I'm talking about real fighting.

RM: In an interview with Alex Stein, you said: "Any experience that we have, as we write it down, memory has already corrupted it to a certain level. ...So to say I have an obligation to remember to the best of my ability makes a neat declamation, but really, in the end, means nothing. Our memories are going to make of the events what they will.... Non-fiction seems to me a big lie." So... you write a memoir? What's up with that?

PG: I don't believe in memoir. A strange statement for someone who has just written a memoir to say. There is no line between the genres--or at least whatever line exists is an arbitrary one made up so that publishers can market books and academics can teach courses in different genres. It's not only that for me there is no line between fiction and creative non-fiction but there is no line between poetry and the other categories. What distinguishes poetry from fiction? It can't be rhythm and meter or imagery or metaphor because for me those all exist at the heart of prose as well--at least good prose.

It seems to me pretty clear that there is no such thing as objective reality--or more particularly that humans can never really approach an objective truth because we so heavily filter the world through our senses. The writer or artist of course is supposed to be a highly sensitive person--and I would argue they correspondingly filter the world even more heavily. It's not simply that memory can be corrupted and we fill in the gaps, it's that memory and even our senses are completely and utterly subjective with no hope of really approaching an objective truth if there is even such a thing. In my own case, it's further complicated by the fact that I have a very active imagination--so active that I no longer trust my memory at all.

When I was young, I believed I could fly. I was quite convinced of it--all I had to do was run fast enough and I would fly. I was so convinced I'd even believed I'd done it. Well, I used that in my forthcoming fictional novel Nahoonkara where a kid runs so fast he takes off flying. But in my mind I could have just as easily used it in my memoir, and it would have been a valid representation of my experience.

The two dreams at the end of the memoir are more accurate as representations of who I am than any of the supposedly factual events I recount. And yet, conventional creative non-fiction rarely if ever deals with our dreams. We sleep 1/3 of our lives--surely what goes on in that time is relevant to our experience--it certainly is to my experience. For as long as I can remember, my own reality has felt like a dream to me. I stand apart from others, from their reality just as if I'm watching myself in a dream. Even present time comes to me as if someone filmed a series of short, one minute home movies over a life time, or as if I lived under a giant strobe light and could only perceive the world when it flashed.

RM: You said, "Rhythm, meter, imagery, metaphor, exist at the heart of good prose." When you wrote Lobster, which was more important for you, finding the most compelling events to portray or writing the most compelling sentences?

PG: Writing a memoir is completely different to me than writing a novel or short stories. In fiction, it is completely intuitive. I sit down to a blank page with no preconceptions of what I'm going to do or very few. I certainly have no idea of what's going to happen. I tend to focus on feeling my way through these images and imagery and see where it takes me.

In this book, all I did for six months was write out memory. It wasn't about language at all, just about getting memories out. I laid them all out on the floor, and looked for common threads and circling and connecting them and putting them together then the next step was shaping it into something that at least maybe meant something to somebody, they could maybe get something out of it based on the themes of my life and things I wanted to portray, and then the last step I suppose was shaping more of the language. But I was not as concerned with shaping the language in this as I was in this second novel that's going to come out [Nahoonkara, 2010]- which was very much over and over really shaping the language into a tight dense poetry.

I think actually, the memoir associated these memories so that these first lines of each strobe-like flash little paragraph —which may be completely unrelated in terms of time or place— is related in terms of theme or the way the last sentence works with the first sentence. This was the shaping mechanism. So at the level of language, the first and last sentences are really what I spent time shaping.

RM: Was it easier to write the memoir than the novels?

PG: Writing the memoir was a whole lot easier and came a lot faster than writing novels. Get all the images and memories out and start shaping it. The whole thing was about a year. I found the whole thing easy and enjoyable while I was doing it. The discomfort comes later when you're trying to get it out and start to feel weird about it. But actually doing it was really enjoyable. I learned a lot about myself. Jackson Pollok says art is coming face to face with yourself, and you do that any time you're writing, but I think I came more face to face with my self more than ever while doing this memoir, and I learned a lot more than I have doing other books.

RM: There was that one editor who said you were narcissistic.

PG: One editor at Random House said she found the piece narcissistic; that said, she said it was one of the most original pieces she's read, so that was nice. But she did say narcissistic, and there's some truth in that. There's that truth in any memoir: You're writing about yourself, so it's in there. Particularly when I'm not necessarily writing about overcoming a trauma, but really trying to explore myself and my erasing of identities and reassembling of identities and my war within myself. That seems very much obsessed with me. So I don't blame her for that. My only hope is that other people can connect to it some way, and see how that relates to their experience as well. You hope for that in any book.

RM: It didn't shame you.

PG: No. I laughed when I read it, because I think it's true. I think that the big journey of life is to deal with our own egos. We all have them. It's all about I want I want this It's all for me, and most people don't acknowledge the power of their ego over who they are.

RM: I know this isn't what you mean by ego, but I remember something in the book about your hands not being pretty enough for a commercial.

PG: They are prettier now. But at the time there was this big bump here, and here and there were big calluses. Now I have writer's hands, but these two fingers still go together because of a spiral fracture I got from fencing. A palm reader read my hand one time, he said that these two fingers lean together because my artistic side is at war with my sense of monkish discipline and pragmatism. I thought that really defined how I felt inside. I've always felt that I've been at war inside, these two things. That's really what The Arsenic Lobster is about, that inner war. But of course, there's a physical reason for it: I broke my hand fencing. I didn't tell the palm reader that.

RM: Probably an example of your artistic side fighting this pragmatic side: you know the real reason but you still want to believe that maybe it has something to do with this spiritual battle.

PG: There it is, right there. The spiritual atheist. I've got a spiritual side, yet, I'm very skeptical.

RM: You have commented about how little science can actually explain, memory, for example, can't be explained or represented by science. Do you self identify as a religious or a spiritual man? How does this self identification influence your writing?

PG: I love this question because it gets at so much of how I view my own writing. I don't think of myself as religious at all--in fact, I think many of the worlds problems stem either directly from religion or indirectly from a religious mindset. That said, I do see myself as spiritual, and most importantly as concerned particularly with the spiritual in writing. One of my favorite writers, a little known writer named William Goyen, said that he wrote about the spiritual because it was all there was--and yet that side of our humanity is almost completely ignored by contemporary American literature. U.S. literature is either concerned with the intellect or the heart—literary fiction focuses on the intellect and popular fiction on the heart. The spiritual aspect of our being goes untouched--probably because Americans in general seem to have a fear of the spiritual--of those things which can't be explained. Our religion is very black and white. But the spiritual deals with the ineffable. It is those ineffable moments of human existence that are most interesting to me--the moments beyond language.

The great magic realist Salman Rushdie once said: "You must use language in a manner which permits God to exist--the divine to be as real as the divan I'm sitting on." Well, being sort of an atheist (can one be sort of an atheist??) I would replace "God" with "the spirit"--we must use language that allows spirit to exist. Why? Because everything in modern culture is designed to push away all remnants of spirit.

The sheer immensity of distractions in the postmodern world make it nearly impossible for us to sit still and move inward--the traditional realm of religion and spiritual practice. I believe that one of literature's (or art for that matter) most important functions is to get us to slow down, to move inward and pay attention to the ineffable. We can understand everything about ourselves as humans in terms of our objective reality--the body and the mind, but if we don't nurture the spirit, we are disconnected from ourselves.

In the Colorado mountains, sitting alongside a river, I am surrounded by the ineffable. Part of what I mean is opening ourselves to wonder--wonder in both its beautiful and terrifying forms. There is a scene in my forthcoming novel, Nahoonkara, where the main character encounters a mother bear and her cubs. This actually happened to me. And I'll never forget the terrible wonder of that bear--the grace of its movements and the strength of those movements, and the terrible growl that told me if I wasn't careful I would be dead. That experience is ineffable--and in that experience I, and my character Killian, felt the movement of spirit, of grace through our bodies.

Lobster is also concerned with spirit as I described it. What else is Lorca's "duende" if not opening yourself up to wonder. Lorca understood the danger well. And he also understood, as does anyone in search of duende, that it doesn't come all the time. It is the most difficult thing in the world to find. that's why I present my memoir as a fight, a battle with the forces that deny duende. The best artists open to it, knowing that when it comes it could just as easily blind them as inspire.



About the author:
Robin Martin is a creative writer, an assistant editor for Narrative Magazine, and the founder of Two Songbirds Press.]]> An Interview With Che Elias by David F. Hoenigman Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:56:18 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2074 in west virginia
he is the author of
the pagan ellipsis
the terror of loch ness
and rockets construe vala
among other books

David Hoenigman: What projects are you currently working on?

Che Elias: I am publishing a book that i wrote years ago that i thought was lost some one found a hardcopy and I am hoping to bring it out ... it's The original draft of the abacus ...... I think it's one of my best books

DH: When and why did you begin writing?

CE: when i was 20

DH: When did you first consider yourself a writer?

CE: About 3 books into it

DH: What inspired you to write your first book?

CE: All of the chaos i was facing at the time

DH: Such as?

CE: I was dealing with a lot of abuse and it was psychologically trying for me –that combined with mental illness was not a pretty picture

DH: Who or what has influenced your writing?

CE: Thomas Pynchon
 Jandek
and also Charles Bukowski
  my past in West Virginia

DH: Many writers mention Jandek as an influence. What is it about him?

CE: He just has a certain way of putting something
He's
Able to be cryptic
Yet direct at the same time
He's a really great writer
Dylan Quality in his Poetry
He's
Just inspired a lot of people with his vision he
Really has a way of getting inside of you

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

CE: Yes very much so many of my books are autobiographical

DH: Is everything you write autobiographical?

CE: Yes
  All of my books
Are
 The terror of loch ness
And West Virginia
Especially
Also the abacus
The early books
Too but more metaphorically
The new ones are literally

DH: Do you have a specific writing style?

CE: it's kind of abstract fiction / poetry

DH: What genre are you most comfortable writing?

CE: I Like writing poems

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

CE: There kind of about the psychology of abuse and the Portrayal of a victim and abuser

DH: What book are you reading now?

CE: Inherit Vice Thomas Pynchon's new book
and many bukowski books

DH: Bukowski being such an icon – do you find it hard to get around the caricature to get to his essence?

CE: I really had a negative Impression of him as a person
Til
 I read ham on rye
I really related to all he'd gone through I felt like he was beautiful person
I mean that
  He became one of my favorite writers
We know he was at least one of the hardest working

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

CE: I really like Jessica Trimbath's writing and Dana Killmeyer's

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

CE: The portrayal of sexuality

DH: How is it misunderstood?

CE: I think people read something like that
And think it's just freaky
And get into for that reason
I don't know if they necessarily see the deeper meaning

Film directors like Alejandro Jodorowsky have similar problems
People just say oh their stuff is so bizarre and fucked up
Without really getting what it's about
It's just hard when you write such a personal book
About something you've been through and people
Just see the freaky aspect

DH: can you tell us about Six Gallery Press?

CE: Yes
It's
Ran bye micheal hafftka
And has been around since
Early in the decade
It's
Really been a help in getting my books
Out
Due to their strange nature and layout
It
Does a great service to authors bye giving them total control of the other all vision of the book]]> An Interview With Thaddeus Rutkowski by David F. Hoenigman Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:55:28 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2073 Tetched and Roughhouse. Both books were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. His third novel, Haywire, is forthcoming from Starcherone Books. His stories and poems have been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize. He has been the fiction and nonfiction editor of the literary journal Many Mountains Moving since 2007. He teaches fiction writing at the West Side YMCA in New York and lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.

David Hoenigman: What projects are you currently working on?

Thaddeus Rutkowski: I'm working on a fiction manuscript, tentatively titled Haywire, under contract with Starcherone Books in Buffalo. I'm revising the manuscript with input from the publisher, Ted Pelton—he's given some general comments on the entire book. I've also gotten comments on the manuscript from a couple of other readers.

It's natural for me to revise a lot-that's the way I work; I'm interested in details—but I think the larger question is, does the big picture hold together? Is there some sort of development—if not a narrative arc, some kind of emotional progression? I see there is an arc in this book, but I'm trying to fill in some emotional gaps.

DH: When and why did you begin writing?

TR: I began writing when I was in high school. The psychological reason was that I was unable to communicate in the normal way, by talking. I was shy, probably withdrawn. Writing was a way to express myself, even if mainly to myself.

The more literary reason I began to write was that I admired the work of certain writers--Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan. OK, I also admired Mad magazine. I "got" what they were doing, and I wanted to do it, too.

I also had an interest in visual art when I was in high school, because my father was a visual artist and a teacher. I took a silk-screening workshop or two with him. One of my prints combined a poem of mine with a sort of Clyfford Still background.

DH: Do you still combine visual art with your writing?

TR: My background in visual art might allow me to make the images in my writing more vivid. I want the reader to be able to picture the setting in his/her mind, or picture what is going on.

Earlier on, I tried using my paintings or drawings as illustrations for my work. I once read aloud while showing slides of my artwork on a screen. One listener said that the paintings were good, but she didn't say anything about the writing.

DH: When did you first consider yourself a writer?

TR: This is a hard question, because I'm not sure what a "writer" is. I've enjoyed writing creatively since I was a teenager, but if being a "writer" means you are acknowledged by others as such, well, I'm still working on that.

DH: What inspired you to write your first book?

TR: Most, if not all, of my writing is based on my experience. When I found a way to order images and incidents from my life, when I found a workable voice and structure, I thought I could carry it through to a book.

Shaping a manuscript actually took a long time, about 12 years from when I first had "workable" pieces. And I didn't have those first pieces until I was 10 years out of graduate school.

DH: Who or what has influenced your writing?

TR: Other experimental writers, like the ones mentioned above, as well as the classics. I had a traditional education in English literature. I elected to take extra courses in Shakespeare and Milton-I don't know why. Later, in a return to course work, I read Chaucer's writing aside from The Canterbury Tales.

Popular music has perhaps been an influence. I've sometimes thought that a piece of my fiction is like a punk-rock song: It reaches a crescendo quickly and stays on that level of intensity until the end, when it stops abruptly.

DH: What punk bands do you like?

TR: I was most moved by the Ramones, who I saw at Max's Kansas City in New York in 1976. The room was small, so the band was close. Joey Ramone was saying things like "Here's one for all you kumquat suckers out there" to introduce the song "Havana Affair." The audience was packed together at long tables. You met the people sitting across from you; you had to talk to them. It was a memorable night.

I was also moved by a Slayer concert around 1997. A couple of the band members still had hair, which they swung around while they screamed. I went with my girlfriend, who is now my wife. I wasn't a typical fan—I wasn't a suburban boy—but I've never been a typical part of any group.

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

TR: Much of my writing has to do with growing up biracial in a white community in middle America. In my case, central Pennsylvania. My upbringing—the role my parents played--is a main issue in my work. The difficulty of that childhood translates to adult distress in other sections of my books.

DH: Tetched has some pretty touchy subject matter that appears to be autobiographical, about your family, about your sexuality...How have your family members dealt with it? Do you worry about your daughter reading Tetched one day?

TR: I've tried to be honest in my work, and I've tried to write down what I'm afraid to say. I think there's a danger, though, in going away from the work to talk about the author (as an embodiment of the work). Of course, I am my own toughest critic, but you have to let the critic go in order to do the work. Otherwise, you'd be blocked, wouldn't you?

I was glad that my mother was able to attend a book party for Tetched in a bookstore near where I grew up. (My father isn't alive.) At that same event, a former high school teacher and a couple of former high school classmates of mine spoke or read.

Our 8-year-old daughter has come to some of my readings, but so far she hasn't responded much to the work, unless it is about her (in which case, she won't allow it). I don't worry about her reading Tetched—she knows more about me than the book can tell her. Actually, I worry that she won't read it, out of disinterest. I hope she'll be interested enough to look at it.

DH: Do you have a specific writing style?

TR: My fiction writing has been called minimalistic, or a hybrid of poetry and prose. I guess that's fair. I liked one writer's comment that my style is like "flashes of light in darkness." I don't consciously set the style. I try to say what I want to say, and sometimes I think I have a lot to say. But inevitably, the pieces come out short.

DH: What genre are you most comfortable writing?

TR: I begin with a thought or feeling or image, and try to put it into a scene. I want to have people doing things and saying things. I guess that's fiction. I'm also interested in language, in sound and the way the meaning of words can shift, or exist simultaneously in more than one sense. I guess that's poetry.

DH: Is it necessary to put it into a scene? Couldn't the thought or feeling or image be presented on its own?

TR: I'm not sure why the scene format works, but when you present a setting, bring in characters, and have them do and say things, readers can relate to that. They can come into your made-up world. If it works, why not use it?

There are many ways to organize a piece of writing. A book can be pure voice (Maldoror, by Laureamont), or almost all voice (Notes From Underground, by Dostoyevsky). You might be going that route yourself in your book, Burn Your Belongings.

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

TR: Yes. It's a feeling or sense that the world in my work is the real world, the world we know, yet it is also a different world. It is unworldly, alien.

DH: What book are you reading now?

TR: For the past couple of months, I've been reading books for a literary award. The books are published novels or collections of short stories, and they are all written by authors with somewhat similar backgrounds. They are all good books; picking a winner (with other jurors) will be hard.

The last book I tried to read on my own was Prague, by Arthur Phillips. Much of the book takes place in Budapest, and I'd visited there last fall. The characters think about going to Prague, but so far they haven't made it there.

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

TR: I was excited about Miranda July. When I was at the Yaddo colony several years ago, a resident, Rick Moody, played a video made by July. I didn't understand what she was doing until later, when I realized that her material is deceptively simple, or deceptively innocent.

I like the work of Annie Proulx, Alice Munro, Matthew Klam, Rattawut Lapcharoensap (author of Sightseeing). Are they new? Lars Eighner's nonfiction has impressed me. Is he new?

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

TR: The fact that while it is humorous, it is not stand-up comedy. Or the fact that while it may pass as spoken word, it is not primarily performance-based. Sometimes, I wish it were, so I could give better public readings.

DH: How often do you give readings? Why do you give readings?

TR: I've liked to read/perform since college, where I once put on a raccoon-skin hat to read in a coffeehouse. The hat had nothing to do with the text, of course.

I began giving readings regularly in the mid-1980s, when I lived near a gallery called ABC No Rio in New York's Lower East Side. I went there every week for years. Reading aloud is good practice, because you have to think about what you're going to read before you do it.

I began doing poetry slams in 1989, but I didn't get too far. I won one time at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, but couldn't get past the semifinals. Recently, I've been asked to slam on occasion, so I've done it. I've actually won a couple of times. That's not a result I count on.

DH: Any memories of particular works: the writing of, feedback, the thought behind...etc.

TR: Works of my own? Lately, I've written some creative pieces on assignment: a piece on character for the journal Center (University of Missouri), an essay on housekeeping for the anthology Dirt (Seal Press), and an anti-book review for the anthology The Worst Book I Ever Read (Autonomedia). I was nervous about sticking to the predetermined themes, but I found that my voice came through, the pieces were personal, and they didn't come out badly. ]]> An Interview With Adam Lowe by Tom Bradley Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:54:29 -0400 http://www.wordriot.org/template_3.php?ID=2093 Tom Bradley: Tell us about Troglodyte Rose. To what extent is it veiled autobiography?

Adam Lowe: Well, if you mean, do I run about in my basement with a huge gun shooting flying monsters and doing drugs with imaginary princesses, then it's probably not very veiled at all.

TB: Is Leeds as scary as Trog Rose's world? I mean, allowing for poetic license.

AL: Leeds is scarier. It has people like me in it. But seriously, it's got some really interesting spaces that helped feed my imagination for this book. There are old abandoned subways which have been sealed up and no doubt become palatial homes for rats. There are forgotten tunnels beneath the train station and the town hall. There's a desolate, unused Victorian zoo. There's so much secret, hidden history, and I guess my own fascination with those lost spaces spurred me on to write about the underground world of Rose and Flid.

TB: The pictures are uncanny. Kurt and Zelda seem to enjoy some kind of inexpressible access to your innermost mind. Or is it vice versa? Or a little of both?

AL: Probably a little of both. The whole process was rather loose and organic. I wrote a synopsis first, and they started doing concept artwork as I started writing. One fed into the other, and my story adapted to take in their artistic vision, just as their illustrations grew from the descriptions I gave them. It's a relationship that's worked well in the past, because they were awarded a Spectrum Fantastic Arts award for their illustration of my story 'Singer', which has just been reprinted at Saucytooth's Webthology.

TB: Do you three hang around in person, get drunk and high and crazy together, or have you never met them except via email?

AL:The Atlantic Ocean is a bit of a bitch in that respect. We usually communicate via Ouija board, with a big glass of absinthe to facilitate the connection. Ouija boards can be a bit like dial-up without the green stuff, but once you've sluiced some down into your gut, you get fibre optic broadband speeds.

TB: Please talk about the ways Dog Horn Publishing and Polluto exploit the internet as a promotional resource.

AL: Well we have a strong presence on Facebook and Twitter (or, at least, I do). We also regularly update the website and get in as many of these wonderful interviews as we can. Reviews and interviews are the lifeblood of the small press.

TB: Would you call the work you publish Bizarro? Irreal? Some other label or genre of your own coinage? A combination of several?

AL: It's many things. Some of it's bizarro. Some is cyberpunk or steampunk or ribopunk. Some is magic realism or satire or punk fantasy. Some of it is just hilarious pulp or new weird. I guess, what defines it all is its strangeness, its otherness. Our writers try to experiment or challenge, and that gives their work something of an alien quality. That's what we're all about.

TB: I imagine the process of putting Polluto together, with all those different mad authors, must be like a crazed non-stop party. Which, if either, do you enjoy most, publishing books or the journal?

AL: They're different processes. Polluto is rip-roaring fun, but it's a pain in the arse reading hundreds of submissions to find the right stuff. Publishing books requires focus on one longer project, and unfortunately an editor's timetable doesn't always let you sit there and read a book the way you'd like to. You're constantly hoping you don't wind up resenting the book for rereading the same page sixteen times. Luckily, that never seems to happen the same way as when a writer has to continually reread their own work. And I'm lucky in that my editorial team is made up of volunteers who are largely other writers. A edits B's book, under my guidance, whilst B edits C's book and C edits A's. It means that all our books are peer-reviewed to the highest standard, because authors are getting critiques and feedback from their own contemporaries. We're not sticking romance editors with bizarro authors.

TB: Have you come up with any promo gimmicks whose outrageousness parallels your products?

AL: When I get time, I hop in my stolen Hummer with the roof open and spray illiterates with bullets whilst forcing copies of Broken Symmetries, Crashin' the Real or Mister Gum into the hands of those who want to live. My Creative Director follows me around collecting subscriptions for the magazine, but his gun is smaller than mine because I'm the boss and he doesn't agree with genocide. It's been a bone of contention in the office.

Limited edition hardback (100 copies) available from 30th October, 2009
RRP: £17.99 (approx. $30)
128pp + 6pp colour artwork
Cadaverine Publications

Paperback edition available from spring 2010
RRP: $13.95
CROSSING CHAOS enigmatic ink



About the author:
Tom Bradley's latest books are Vital Fluid (Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink), Even the Dog Won't Touch Me (Ahadada Press), Put It Down in a Book (The Drill Press), and Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch (Dog Horn Publishing). He is presently collaborating on a graphic ekphrasis in verse and an illustrated novel with artists David Aronson and Nick Patterson respectively, both to be published by Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink, and a nonfiction flip book with Deb Hoag for Make It New Media. Further curiosity can be indulged at tombradley.org and Wikipedia.]]>