Ramshackle Review

Karen de la Bald photographed this cottage on the moors of Yorkshire, England. Her photo In The Graveyard also appears in this issue. See more of her artwork and photography here.

2011-05-29T09:49:00.000-07:00

Between Us
by Meredith Weiers

Between us
there is where
should not be

Meredith Weiers graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and currently lives in southern Maryland. This is her first publication.

2011-05-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

1991

by Jen Knox

Her hair was high and stiff, her body small and slight, and she wore press-on nails that made her helpless to an itch. She could still pile lies then like neat blocks, hide behind them without regret. The shade could dissolve her shadow but when nights grew longer, colder, she’d wake shivering. It was twenty years ago, rubbing her hands, urging blood into numb fingertips, that I realized it was up to me to keep her warm.

Jen Knox earned her MFA from Bennington's Writing Seminars. She works as a creative writing professor at San Antonio College. Jen is the author of Musical Chairs and To Begin Again. Some of her short stories and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Annalemma Magazine, Bananafish, Bartleby Snopes, Eclectic Flash, Flashquake, Foundling Review, The Houston Literary Journal, Metazen, Midwest Literary Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Short Story America, Slow Trains, SLAB, Superstition Review and elsewhere. Visit her website.

2011-05-29T09:47:00.000-07:00

Helene Fjell:

Two Photographs

After the Fire 5 photo by Helene Fjell

Harmony photo by Helene Fjell

Helene Fjell: "Life itself is a project that contains a lot of wonders and mysteries I know nothing about. My main goal is to reach the place where I can feel totally safe and at home in my soul. But on my way I wish to be open for the small moments and the misunderstandings that push me over the edge. In every corner of my way there may be someone or something I can learn from. So I try to stop, as often that I can, and take that with me."

Helene Fjell is a freelance photographer and photo artist living in Oslo, Norway. Educated in press photography, she now works mostly with Fine Art photograhpy and personal projects. She also makes drawings and is exploring graphic techniques including silkskreen, photopolymer and lithography. Visit her website.

2011-05-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

Gabrielle In Arrears
by Bill Yarrow

It’s 10:46 in Shreveport on New Year’s Eve.
You’re rushing to the Ramada ballroom
for an evening of kisses, hors d’oeuvres,
and darkened drinks. Someone honks.
Unnerved, you swerve to the right, side-
swipe a Buick, slide back across the lane,
flip into a ditch. Doctor Claussen warned you
more than once about the consequences of
being distracted. Well, it’s too late to resuscitate
advice now. You should be calling 911, waving
at headlights, flagging down trucks, pulling
your bleeding husband from the car. Instead,
you’re just staring at your hands, as if, somehow,
they were imperious tools capable of magic.

Bill Yarrow is the author of WRENCH (erbacce-press, 2009) and "Wound Jewelry" (new aesthetic, 2010). His poems have recently appeared in Ramshackle Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Used Furniture Review, THIS Literary Magazine, BLIP, PANK, DIAGRAM, Negative Suck, Now Culture, Right Hand Pointing, Whale Sound, and Metazen. He lives in Illinois.

2011-05-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

The Statue

by Nicolette Wong

We have arrived at a shaft of blindness. In the backyard where the birds split and sing, in a thousand directions, against the chalkboard of a dark sky. When the wind burns and embers fall, you reach for the nylon strings to stop my silence.

Tie me up and leave me here, you say. The stone will grow and lose its color in the sun.

No one would see the hanging statue as it fades. Only the scars around your wrists would drift, dark waves of music circling the air. Houses of love; houses of hatred; houses of icicles melting in places you have never belonged.

I tie the knots around your hands. This is how we let it die.

Nicolette Wong is a fiction writer from Hong Kong. Her writing finds its way around the world and she blogs at Meditations in an Emergency. She is in the editorial teams of Negative Suck and Dark Chaos.

2011-05-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

Perhaps A Second Sun
by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

i.
There was no poetry today.
I had dog-eared pages in Autumn Journal
to read to you but you chose wine.
You insisted on telling me its aroma – lemon and berries.
I asked: If you don't have the words,
can you smell the scents?

ii.
I take note of your wise words:
the small liquor details one learnt
must not be rote-memorised and departed as eternal,
universal truths.

Still, remember:
This will all pass, like alcohol eventually evaporates.
You are not that good; you aren't that romantic.
You stole my ripped stockings for souvenirs.
Your bed sheet, every time, is the same blue.

…. You are now the only proper noun I care.

iii.
Morally speaking, one woman's boyfriend
can only be another's nobody. And so I've now returned
to my own home after an afternoon
in your cocoon-shaped room.

When staring at my bookshelves,
I know: my books and yours, with or without inscriptions,
will not bookend together, will never form a conversation.

vi.
The rain outside was peanut-heavy and bright.
We heard it, didn't we, this afternoon? Splashing on the ground.
We weren't imagining. How absurd, I thought
every time there must be a weather event.
Perhaps a second sun will appear in the sky,
if I go to your place again. I can better see your face,
flustered between my stiffened knees.

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is a Hong Kong-born writer currently based in London, UK. She is a founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. More at www.sighming.com.

2011-05-29T09:43:00.001-07:00

Your Ironic Haircuts

by Lucinda Beeman

All my bad men

belong to each other.

My friends light cigarettes

at the windowsill, say

Not Him Again, but I am curious

mostly as to whether you would ride

your bike to me through the rain-

I want to towel you off after. He would

never, not unless I offered to buy him

breakfast and blue eye shadow. Anyway

I like those awful words in ink across

your chest. It was nice and sort of

sexy when you wondered aloud if I wanted

to hit you on the elevator and

in answer I did, hard. That short

sharp sound, your smile. My love you are

nothing if not a good kitten. But he

is a better kitten, blue eyed, and

darling you’re never going to want

me the way he did, or even as much

as you ache for Daisy Buchanan but

that’s okay- I’m happy to call you

Jay if you can manage to make me

die in my way, twice. I’m won’t

to root against you. I also won’t

believe a word you say.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Lucinda Beeman is currently an undergraduate at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. She studies Literature and Publishing.

2011-05-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

Barricada

photography by Ana Moreno

Barricada photo by Ana Moreno

Formed in 1982 in the Txantrea Pamplona neighborhood of Navarra, Spain, Barricada has played over 1000 concerts and become one of the biggest rock and roll bands in Spanish territory. The band is: Alfredo Piedrafita (guitar), Ibi Sagarna (drums), Fco. Javier Hernández "Boni" (guitar and vocals) and Enrique Villareal "the Drug" (bass and vocals). See more of photographer Ana Moreno's work on her blog and flickr.

2011-05-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

Al Ortolani:

Two Poems

The Gift

The old man had this car jacked up in the back yard.

I have no idea where he got it, maybe payment

For some black market job with Uncle Frank.

It was a 1935 Dodge without wheels. One day

Out of nowhere he gave it to me.

He said do whatever.

I couldn’t believe my luck,

So I bought some jet-black paint and brushed it

Carefully under the trees. You really had to look

To see the marks. Then I went down to the junkyard

And worked out a deal with Tommy. I lugged home four wheels

And four bald white walls.

One morning the old man

Took a look at what I’d done, and decided that he

Needed the car after all.

So that was that. But sometimes in the afternoon

When he was asleep after the nightshift,

Mom would help me push it

Out of the driveway into the street. Before supper,

She would follow me back in with a rake, smoothing the gravel

Over the tire tracks.

Performing the High Wire

Before Easter a teacher sent you to the office

where the lady from the Children’s Fund

presented you with a brown package of clothes.

Walking back to the classroom, you hid

the embarrassment of carrying your

New Start in a meat wrapper. You learned early

that a joke at your own expense

put you in command of effacement. As class clown

you assumed a persona, the package like a chair

on the tip of your nose, tight roping an imaginary high wire

to your desk. You swayed above the eyes

of your classmates, teetering

like nothing mattered but the circus.

Al Ortolani is a secondary English teacher in the Kansas City area. His poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, The Laurel Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The English Journal and others. His next volume of poetry, Finding the Edge, is due for publication from Woodley Press at Washburn University this spring. Presently, he is a co-editor for The Little Balkans Review, a small regional journal in southeast Kansas.

2011-05-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

Tony Brewer:

Three Poems

The Cremation of Voices

You’ll wish you had it all back, they say.

But wishing is for wells.

I had a fireplace, and I

reached in and yanked open

the coughing sooty flue.

Men have a history of building big dumb fires.

Driving everyone away from the warmth with heat.

Setting a forest on fire to rebirth it.

Burning Man. Or Hiroshima.

I made mine small, out of history

gone cold: heart-dotted i’s

and decadent initial caps in folded

grade school correspondence,

postcards dense with longing posed as brevity,

hate speeches, Dear Johns.

Birthday cards signed Dad

beneath where Mom had written love.

The taste of blue-tip sulfur behind

my two front teeth washed

down with wine.

The pyre caught and rushed

up the chimney of itself to escape

a box of me I would never see again.

Voices plumed into January stratosphere.

Cinders liberated from storage units of memory.

Attics of denial echoing

like an empty cathedral collapsing.

It’s a miracle no one was hurt.

A shame no one was inside.

The Things That Stick

Dad sits across from me.

His bruised hands hesitate.

Before the tremors

his fingers manipulated pocketknives

and chewing gum wrappers

and drywall tape and mud.

We are waiting for ribs

as he prepares a syringe and insulin.

Rolls the bottle between his hands to warm it

clicking against his wedding band.

He plunges the needle into his stomach.

Quick and practiced like a sniper

assembling a rifle blindfolded.

I was the only one who saw.

It is bearable because he remains

calm as it happens.

We even laugh at how frail he has become.

I don’t have to try anymore

to make my voice sound like his

when he says you just plain fall

apart when you get old.

The silence after the laughter dies

is broken by our waitress carrying platters.

The meat so tender

it slides right off the bones.

Whatever else happens

is happening to us all the time.

Wine Country

A hundred miles on snake-colored roads

clogged with black socks and sandals

trout print Hawaiian shirts

trophy wives riding shotgun

convertibles fast for no guard rail

life by the sip with cracker

palette cleansing chasers.

I was a tourist passing through her

spilling my guts in gravel parking lots

about how my ex-wife done me wrong.

Worrying a buzz down to drivable.

Vultures pin-wheeled in a cloudless sky.

An entire ecosystem devoted to giving

a little taste to entice then off

down sinuous curves of savannah

freckled with Mexicans

bent toward irrigated earth.

We developed a language for enjoying

something more than it deserves:

Take a swig but don’t swallow.

Suck it through purpling teeth.

Swirl it around like Listerine.

Then tilt the head toward rustic

hand-hewn tasting room beams

and pronounce Ah, Tuscany

certain we would never make it there.

Tony Brewer is a poet and sound effects artist from Bloomington, Indiana. He has work forthcoming in Plain Spoke and the anthology And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana (Indiana Historical Society Press). His first book of poems is The Great American Scapegoat (2006); his latest chapbook is Little Glove in a Big Hand (Plan B Press, 2010); and he is one-quarter of the performance ensemble Reservoir Dogwoods. More at www.IndianaPoetryTour.com.

2011-05-29T09:38:00.000-07:00

Motel Row

by Byron Matthews

Check in, never check out!

No laugh's too cheap

for roaches, none

too darkly bought

For any but an eye that looks

out that cabin at the end,

peers through a slit

in humor's shade.

My father fought unpacific isles,

mustered lucky home intact,

but even so could not evade

a last indecency

Of chance, a stray decree: Go

swaddled into deepening night,

dark slump descend to suckling

vacancy.

Defilement disallowed a pet

who fails her perch, lost his wheel,

foul slow burlesque, exits nailed,

piano falling out of tune,

of dignity, of grace.

Where were the heroes striding

from the seats to cry Enough?

Voices mislaid? Forgot, again,

to bring our pillows? A foot to kick

a plug out of its socket?

In the dead floral air in this

last dim room,

truth clicks like a hammer

pulling back, clear

as vodka shimmered over ice:

I toast the inn at the edge of light,

mini-bar, spa tub, amenities galore,

and reliable, ready, oily bright,

your valet there

in the right-hand drawer.

Byron Matthews left Iowa for graduate school in North Carolina, later gave up a tenured faculty position in Maryland to make furniture for ten years in Santa Fe. He lives now in the mountains east of Albuquerque with his wife, a cellist.

2011-05-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

Famille

photography by Quervel Sébastien

Famille photo by Quervel Sébastien

Quervel Sébastien is an experimental photographer from Normandy, France. For more of his work, visit his deviantart and flickr.

2011-05-29T09:36:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Wineke:
Three Poems

how to eat a grapefruit

in the passenger seat sitting
cross-legged. take a bite
to make a tear and then unravel
slowly, carefully, make sure
to keep it all in one piece round
and full so you can use it as
a bowl for the thick white skin
you’ve got to use your fingernails
really dig into it try to get it all
tender-bare, smooth and delicate
stick your thumb in it, pry the rosy
pink in half and make your choice,
peel off the plumpest little juice pillow

and then
when he is speaking his most
passionately

stuff it—hard
into his mouth
so that he cries
out and lets go
of the wheel to
catch the liquid running
down his chin and sticking
to his fingers and the smell
he can’t wash off and though
he’ll make a fuss,
he loves it,
you can
be sure
of that.

remember that time

you leaned
over the couch
to give me
a kiss from
behind as I
was eating my
ice cream and right
when your lips
warm and soft
met my sloppy
mouth
the spoon
jabbed
quick--
into
your
ear
cold and metal,
well,
I did that
on purpose.
I’m sorry it’s just
I get a kick
out of
hearing
you
yelp.

ladybugs

our love motif. flickering like half moons
above our tangled bodies in the park,
landed on my blue-jeaned thigh, you picked one
from my hair. peering slyly from their seats
along the telephone pole as we dug
up the ring, notebooks, you and your shovel
and me in your hat but my boots. and then,
finally, resting on bayou lampshades,
drinking beers in cabins with sam cooke. on
the drive home i found one on your collar.

Jennifer Wineke grew up in Louisiana, was educated in California, and currently lives in Prague, where she works as a copywriter. For more of her poetry, please visit her website.

2011-05-29T09:35:00.000-07:00

By Tongues

by Jessica Bell

My friends adored you.

When you’d pick me up

from school they’d stare

at your eyebrows—logos

of gothism—fake lesbianism.

You were a like a big sister;

rock ‘n’ roll baby!—the woman

they all wanted to be.

You’d invite them over

for afternoon tea.

You’d coax them into talking

about sex, masturbation,

homosexuals; you’d express

insight—laissez-faire

toward the boy who

tried on my school dress.

You’d trick them into

betraying my secrets—the girl

I pashed behind the shelter

shed; the one with epilepsy

who liked to lie and got

pregnant from my tongue.

My friends never knew

what happened after they left.

Jessica Bell is an Australian who lives in Athens, Greece. She's a literary women's fiction author and poet whose debut poetry collection, Twisted Velvet Chains, has just been released this May. Her debut novel String Bridge is scheduled to be published by Lucky Press LLC in November, 2011. A list of published works can be seen on her website, www.jessicacbell.com. She also posts four days a week on her blog.

2011-05-29T09:34:00.000-07:00

Night

photography by Beatrice Belguiral

Night photo by Beatrice Belguiral

Beatrice Belguiral is from Paris, and currently lives in Barcelona. See more of her work on her website and flickr.

2011-05-29T09:33:00.000-07:00

Laura Grafham:

Three Poems

To the Person in the Doorway

Tonight you look lovely,

your stance by the door,
ringlets walking round unsuspecting freckles
that didn't know but to attach to your face.

Structure you have,
the iambic lines of your body
carry you up and firm,

straight and strong
the shutters to your blue

eyes close their blinds sometimes;
open for a few

close shut
the curl upwards of a brown lash or two,
the brow rippling sand dunes,
making the dotted waves of your ginger skin
unsettling, earth shattering. Quaking, though

I just said hello.

Freewrite

I haven't had a sip. I see steam.
Not yet. Until I do
I flirt at the wide eyed little girl,
hand in her pink mouth,
sneakers pointing up from the floor
and out the foggy windows.

Her sneakers have shark teeth on them.
She's cooler than I am.
I don't know why but
the american poetry I read
and the Neil Young they play
are better early in the day;

I read places I haven't been
into rolling scapes
invading the little shop,
crowding red-eye patrons against walls,
the breezy dry grasses doing their thing
in front of me.

The barista with his tribal tattoo
changes the CD and goodbye:
John Wayne and Neil Young vanish.
Now Bjork complains through the speakers.
Icelandic whining and piled high black
hairdos do music. The people grunt disgruntle.
I note the nearest exits.

___________________

I like my land made
not of fire and ice
but of rain and fog
made of misty fabric
that evaporates when it turns corners

A place with piles of wet paperbacks that can't sell
with old Norwegians and Swedes in sweaters
where I can kiss your chapped lower lip,
lick up the blood I made.

I like the land to eke outward,
expanding from the earth's core
up and in, out
eating us up because it can,
not because we want it to.

If I Could Inspire Jealousy

hey, up there, see that yellow light in the window;

it is he who tells the story

the story of the bear and kai-oat-ee

taking the grain at harvest time.

All of our friends came

to the fireside,

see, and they all gathered round,

told me how much they loved your ways

they loved the way your words made magic

at twilight, among the searchlights

and the birthday of your city.

I don't drink beer to escape

but to get it up, get the story up

get the grasses up and active, working.

If my hair were sage brush

damn, would it smell good,

and men would love me, and women would envy,

want my wampum bracelets and belts.

Laura Grafham is a senior English Literature major at Seattle Pacific University. She has published in her school's student-run arts journal Lingua, of which she now is a staff member. Currently, Laura is writing her senior thesis on Leslie Silko’s novel Ceremony. Having lived in the Pacific Northwest all her life, and having worked as a bartender and waitress on Orcas Island in the San Juans, she dreams of climbing mountains in the Rockies. Laura is currently applying to MA programs in the Mountain Time Zone. See graciethebum.blogspot.com for more poetry and nonfiction excerpts.

2011-05-29T09:32:00.000-07:00

Wintersong
by David Tomaloff

to explain this
temptation as if
it were a must

set sail and return
emptier now than
is in fashion

lilac, and blue,
untied, and adrift

the quietest places
in our hearts

don't laugh
as they once did

David Tomaloff (b. 1972) | is a musician, writer, photographer, and all around-bad influence | likes: jazz | hates: jazz | photography: yes | his work has also appeared in publications such as: DOGZPLOT, HOUSEFIRE, the Sixteenth Letter, elimae, Phantom Kangaroo, Ditch Poetry, Otoliths, and BlazeVOX 2KX | see: davidtomaloff.com.

2011-05-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

IIIIII

photography by Kirsten Thormann

IIIIII photo by Kirsten Thormann

Visit Kirsten Thormann's website.

2011-05-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

Repeat After Me

by Rachel Mangini

How do I say how I feel in Portuguese?

English cannot amplify sad. We curl it

into a tiny space. Tuck it tight to contain it.

Give me a word. Make it mean ugly

and messy and ripping my heart out dripping with tears.

Make it mean my head is blown open. My nails feel

good scraping on my skin.

What is the word for full to bursting with regret?

What do you call the sum of this:

one day in Montreal when I smiled in photos, cried in between,

three police cars, one strong rope,

the digits of another man’s phone number dialed twice,

185 miles, me growing smaller in the rear view,

the slope of your back when you sleep alone?

The worst thing is: miraculous.

My body, so much soft flesh, goes on,

needs water, dresses, gets on a bus.

Opens its mouth and says “at the close of the third quarter.”

When what I really want to say is:

The rhythm of your breath is what I fasten mine to.

Rachel Mangini loves to travel, and to bake. Both her husband and her dog can attest to the fact that she is a great kisser. On her blog you'll find lots of things she likes.

2011-05-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

Barry Spacks:

Three Poems

Brimming Bowl

A rabbi may not even touch

a woman's hand.

Blessings, but maybe, with female beauty,

YHWH went too far?

Sex-energy, primal force,

no wonder the world will rush to control it,

create well-behaved

Black Stars.

True lovers say: here, take my eyes,

own them already, already yours,

useless now for anything

but gazing upon you.

Young persons, are you wise enough

briefly to console one another?

(Let this question float away

like a note in a bottle).

Days and darkness.

Water in a sieve.

I want to be a brimming bowl

for the parched and weary.

A Poem Entitled "Sometimes"

Sometimes I lose the word "dialectic,"

but after a struggle I get it back. 

Sometimes I think of lush lives not shared

with Sally, Portia, God-bearing women.

Sometimes I sniff for the attar of glory,

but often that quest proves untenable.

At last I'm the grandfather out in the garden

quietly watching the children at play.

Often I sense a new bud stirring

deep in the heart of a full-blown rose.

The Scholars

I study the scholars rapt in their books in the lamp light,

lost in their research, jotting sudden notes

their faces lit by bronze lamps on the long narrow tables,

the library filled with a massive quiet of knowing.

I want to own every detail of what they’re reading,

memorize names and dates, hold anecdotes

word for word for the mouth of the mind to savor

as I walk again some brutal, lonely road.

Known mainly as a poet/teacher, Barry Spacks has brought out various novels, stories, three poetry-reading CDs and ten poetry collections while teaching literature and writing at M.I.T. & U C Santa Barbara. His most recent book of poems, FOOD FOR THE JOURNEY, appeared from Cherry Grove in August, 2008. Over the years his poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and hundreds of other journals.

2011-05-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

Soundcheck

photography by Marco Masciovecchio

Soundcheck photo by Marco Masciovecchio

Marco Masciovecchio (Italian, b. 1967) works in Rome, and has to his credit several publications in journals and collective exhibitions of jazz music and websites. He has participated in numerous competitions, and is particularly fond of portraiture and the study of details. See more of his work on his flickr.

2011-05-29T09:23:00.001-07:00

Morning Ritual
by Brad P. Olson

For Grace, age 6 months

I want to wake her,
see her smile,
hear her delighted
laugh.
But since I’m leaving
for work,
it’s her mother,
still asleep,
who’d be left
to deal with
the consequences.
So I refrain,
contenting myself
to touch her hand
and caress
her little fingers.

Brad Olson received a BA in English from Brigham Young University, and is an avid BYU football fan. He currently posts much of his work on his website, BradOlsonWriting.com, and his short story Good Fences was published in the Jan. 2011 issue of Pif Magazine.

2011-05-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

Cop

photography by Shlomi Kramer

Cop photo by Shlomi Kramer

Shlomi Kramer is an Adobe Creative Suite Specialist, Freehand advanced user, Mac and Moleskine Geek, OS X Server Specialist, Photographer and Advanced Gardener from Tel Aviv. For more, visit his flickr.

2011-05-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

The Concept of Time

by John Tustin

Rinsing out my daughter’s paintbrush

in the bathroom sink

just now

and she’s pulling

on my pantleg

because she wants the picture

she believes she worked

so hard to create

in her hands

to show mommy

not understanding the concept

that time

makes it dry

and that

not touching what you want

to touch

when you want

to touch it

is sometimes

necessary

if you want that something

to last

beyond the moment

you first

wanted it.

John Tustin’s poetry is forthcoming in Primalzine, Lyrotica, pawpaw, and others. Visit his website.

2011-05-29T09:21:00.001-07:00

Ally Malinenko:

Three Poems

City

When I was a child,

back in that small town,

with crickets and bats

and all the other things that small towns have

I would wake at night

just to sit in the quiet of the living room.

I would worry about someone

or something, a snake maybe, being in the

basement, or the garage

but I would be too afraid to go see.

It’s like that now, too

watching myself roam

from room to room,

in this little apartment,

wondering how we fit

our whole life in here,

each day

without the walls bursting,

without the windows smashing

without the water

flooding into the street.

How have we not run out of air?

Packed on the buses and the trains,

I wonder still

how we can even stand to touch each other

even accidentally.

Power of Names

There is too much power in names, I think.

There is a change the moment the word

shakes loose like a rainstorm,

from your mouth.

Like when I was young and out

past the neighbor’s yard

farther into the woods.

There was broken light and the smell of wet damp leaves.

Dan was there, and we did not tread lightly, he and

my sister and I. We stomped through wet leaves,

wet leaves that belonged to us the way the world

belongs to the very young.

We sang loud,

keeping the darkness at bay.

The snake was there, heavy

and slick, half its body under leaves.

We formed a wide semi-circle

as if coming in for the kill.

Dan held a stick.

I remember my fear.

Is it dead, my sister said.

No, Dan answered.

And we knew, at that moment, it was true.

We had to go forward, a sort of

manifest destiny of our woodland ownership,

the snake lying prostrate through the path,

tempting and begging.

We argued over who would go first.

And then there it was, like a bell,

like a salvation, my mother’s voice,

crossing the distance between my home

and this creature, cutting a swath through the air.

The sound of my name.

And I turned and ran, free.

This is the power of names.

But it works the other way too,

when we are older and I call your name,

the word coming together, shaking itself from me.

As you cross the street you

look back for a second.

And I say it again, desperate

and you nod a little but

you keep walking.

Tiny Revolution

In the dream I had last night,
you appeared in the hallway of my old house.

We had not spoken in a year,
just as we have not spoken in a year
in this life.

And I was so thankful to see you.
Relieved, like when you can exhale
after holding your breath for too long.

And I told you that you should have
called and why didn’t you call

but you didn’t speak, as if there was some law against it.

And then later we pulled back my childhood bed,
moved it away from the wall
and there was a fire under it,

just a little smoldering thing,
hot coals like cherries
ready to pop

but also broken doll heads,
finger bones,
dead dogs,
broken glass jars
filled with dying plants,
rabbit fur
bent rusted nails
split wood,
Venus fly traps,
church pamphlets
seashells,
toy guns
a mason jar of dirty water
pens and paper and ink and paint
and hot wet melting crayons

and right then I knew it was a dream
and that in just a moment from now,
I will wake, and we will still be in the midst of this tiny revolution.

Ally Malinenko has been fortunate to have poems and stories published both online and in print. Her most recent collection of poems, Crashing to Earth, is forthcoming from Tainted Coffee Press. She lives in the part of Brooklyn that neither the tour buses nor the hipsters come to.

2011-05-29T09:21:00.000-07:00

Chinatown

photography by Alessio Di Menna


Chinatown photo by Alessio Di Menna

Alessio Di Menna on Chinatown: "This photo was taken at 9:00 AM, when the neighborhood is quieter and the streets surprisingly uncrowded."

Alessio Di Menna (b. 1987) is an Italian amateur photographer, video performer, and a member of nodezero team, an underground Rome collective interested in music, video and pictures. For more, visit www.nodezero.it and http://www.flickr.com/photos/bl3w/.

2011-05-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

Christchurch Earthquake
by Maureen Eppstein

As I grieve the earthquake destruction in Christchurch, New Zealand, I have been remembering my time as a reporter on The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand’s city newspaper. I worked afternoons and evenings. When no deadlines pressed, I would gaze out my window in the Press Building, which overlooks Cathedral Square. The Press Building is badly damaged, and the cathedral spire in the center of my view has toppled. Rummaging in old files, I found fragmentary notes typed on yellowed newsprint, the small sheets we used to turn in our stories. They are undated, but would have been written in 1960 or 1961.

###

From here, with the afternoon sun through the window, people walking the square are mere silhouettes, with long shadows reaching out towards me. I can sometimes pick out what they are wearing, but they are mostly a pattern of shapes, against the curved lines of the square that isn’t a square at all, but the shape of a cross, with gently sweeping curves of the cathedral grounds in the center. A pleasant curve below me, with its little stone wall, a comfortable height for sitting on. There was a woman sitting there, by the entrance with the knobs on it. She was wearing a cream coat and a bright pink hat. It was a cheerful hat, and now her escort has arrived, and she has walked across the road with him.

Lots of people jump over the wall—it is much more fun than going through the entrance with the knobs in the proper manner.

A little choirboy runs to a bicycle parked against one of the buttresses of the cathedral. He has been to sing Evensong. Now he is joined by two others, three, four—they pour out, shouting and jostling. Neat little grey suits and red caps, schoolbags swinging in the dust. Singing is just part of their everyday living, as much as football and schoolwork.

The right of way by the cathedral is patterned with people coming to and fro. It is the back-lighting at this time of evening that makes the scene so attractive. Sunlight through the plane trees by the war memorial, a golden outline on each figure, long patterns of light and shade.

Silhouettes—the big cross on the memorial, the slender cross on the top of the cathedral spire, the stark criss-cross of the scaffolding round the spire, wrapping it in a blanket while it is cleaned and whitened. The sunlight through the green glass of the tower windows, tall narrow windows with diamond patterns.

###

Delicate tracery of bare branches outlined with sunlight on a winter afternoon. Dew silently falling—streets slowly dampen, although the sky is cloudless. Towards the west, the setting sun fills the sky with smoky pink. Buildings are grey silhouettes, slowly darkening to black. Cheerful red of transport buses the only touch of color.

###

To gather the texture of the square in the rain into a handful of feeling—dreaming out the window, with the rain spattering gently down, and the dazzling light reflected on the road, the long street lamps—white streaks, and the neon signs flashing on and off, endlessly—“Don’t be vague, ask for Haig,” and the white outline is filled up with a rush of red—“Be sure with Trufit,” hidden behind the “Choysa” oval. The “s” in Choysa is a bit wobbly—it won’t last long. The blue bird endlessly getting bigger, and then disappearing in the TEAL sign. “Fly to Australia” fades off into nothingness—it has had it too. The stars go round and round on the Monarch Shoes sign.

The colours of the neon signs are reflected in the pattern of puddles on the road—blue, purple, red, green, orange—vivid and glowing, shimmering in the circles of raindrops.

###

The gentle curve of the street below, with cars swishing round it. Not many now. It is before picture time, and only those with business at this time will be out on a night like this. An occasional bus sweeps into the stop, or lumbers out, almost empty.

The spotlight on the cathedral is smoking, as the rain hits the warm glass. The cenotaph is a black silhouette against the misty light.

Sometimes a black figure scurries across the square to the bus stop, head down, umbrella leading the way. Even the Bodgies [a youth gang] are gone from their usual haunt by the Embassy Theatre.

Maureen Eppstein lives in Mendocino, CA, where she is executive director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Her most recent poetry collection is Rogue Wave at Glass Beach (March Street Press, 2009). Her work has been widely published and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Read more about her on her website and blog.

2011-05-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

Arcadia

photography by Max Malatesta

Arcadia photo by Max Malatesta

Max Malatesta: "I'm an actor, not a photographer. I started taking photographs mainly to observe people. But then something happened. I was fascinated by sense of mystery that the people carry with them. And the question is if we want to unveil it, or if we can add some of it with an artistic point of view. I think the second answer may be the right one."

Max Malatesta (Italian, b. 1970) has appeared in films including Silk, Traveling Companion, and Miracle at St. Anna.

2011-05-29T09:18:00.000-07:00

in my soil

by Sara Basrai

I was naked in the park today
By the statue of a mounted Polish king,
A triumphant man with bronze swords
Surveying his newfound land
-- A mock castle on Turtle Pond.

I followed his gaze not expecting
My skin and experience to slip away
(I thought he was disappointed)
And make a snail’s spiral
In puddles on the ground,

Or within watery ringlets observe
The Age,
The man,
The child,
(the defining heartbeats of my life) fade away.

In time, I raised my head,
And saw a scarf flicker,
Turquoise within silver lines,
A yellow raincoat bend to sow
A paper beaker fly to cranberry lips
And a dog dart golden on the horizon.

I thought the dog smart,
Knees, elbows, angles pumping
In rain tinged with russet bracken.

It was a little thuggish this sudden nakedness
The timing a little off.

I had lists to make. Anguishes to despair over.
But I told myself, the dog, the scarf
Not to rush the rain.
Not that I was in awe of nature
Or the Polish king;

I was simply in my soil.

Sara Basrai is a former teacher from London who now lives in New York. Her move to the USA inspired her to start writing. Her work appears in The Battered Suitcase, a soon-to-be published anthology published by Vagabondage Press, Smoking Poet, Grey Sparrow Press, Protestpoem.org, 34th Parallel Magazine, among others. She begins at MFA in September at National University. Besides writing, Sara enjoys reading, painting and exploring the USA with her husband and two young daughters.

2011-05-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Blair:

Three Poems

Pied

And then there was the student who sat

front row, right in the center. A teardrop

tattooed at one eye’s edge, he never

stopped asking questions and so, over

time, I started to believe in Ecclesiastes--

equating sorrow with an unquenchable

thirst for knowledge. Some students

resented him. Others simply stopped

paying attention as I attempted to

give him answers. Eventually, I had

to apologize for sometimes ignoring his

eager face as I looked out past him.

He didn’t seem to mind. He got that

a lot, he said. Near the end of the semester,

after an hour of Hopkins, a poet

of deprivation, guilt, and praise

few seemed to care for, he stayed

behind while everyone else hurried out.

He wanted to tell me about his

grandmother—the first old person

he’d ever met. At first, he was really

frightened by her red watery eyes

and bumped up purple veins

but then, as he continued to watch

her blotched hands wildly waving out

a magical tale, he suddenly realized

how interesting and wonderful she was,

so the poem we’d discussed that day

always made him think of her and

that’s why it spoke to him, which he

thought he’d let me know. I thanked

him, and after he took his bag and left,

I stood in front of the green chalkboard,

white stubs nestled in a dusty heap

like so many extinguished cigarettes

while a new room appeared in my mind.

Neighbors

Each year, more of the garden

turns to grass as their backs bend

down and arthritis claims their

hands. Yet they are industrious

as ever, rolling out wheelbarrow,

hoe, and rake early each morning

this spring. They work in flannel

shirts and wide brimmed hats

which smother the face in shade,

laboring side by side and apart,

doing what they can manage.

Yesterday afternoon I saw them

with a new bush, its roots still

wrapped in burlap. When they

finally decided just where to

place it, one dug with a

shovel while the other rested.

The spade kept passing, back

and forth, back and forth,

back and forth—til there was

eventually enough space

for a living thing to breathe.

Ravens

again, in the preacher’s yard across the street.

He takes one day off a week, given that the

day of rest, for him, is not. He uses it to

shoot hoops half-heartedly, wash the car,

set the ladder against the house to adjust

the drain which almost unhooked itself

from the eave during the last big storm.

Ravens who peck absentmindedly, going

to and fro, leaving no marks in the grass.

I know I have questioned the whereabouts

of things, the goodness of things, not liked

the ooze flowing out of the pie crust.

The Irises, ragged, have singed tips and

summer is gone. More lines around my

eyes. But it’s not a story anymore. The dust

rolling in behind the closet door, the

way tree branches crowd out the sky.

Jennifer Blair has published in Copper Nickel, New South, Tulane Review, Rattle, and the James Dickey Review among others. She teaches at the University of Georgia.

2011-05-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

Tree

photography by Penny Hardie

Tree photo by Penny Hardie

Penny Hardie lives in Hampshire, England and is a village post mistress and very part time photographer. See more of her work on her website and flickr.

2011-05-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

A Map Is Made of Paper and Measured Lines Both
by Danny Goodman

I trace along the island coast: my father’s birthplace, teenaged vacations, lighthouse where I fell in love. At the end, my fingertip dips into the Atlantic. I pretend it floats.

Danny Goodman suffers from an overactive imagination and unhealthy yet glorious dependence on coffee. He holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans, and teaches creative writing for the Gotham Writers’ Workshop and English for SEO's High School Scholars Program in NYC. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various places, most notably Flatmancrooked, Brevity, Found Press, and Used Furniture Review. A two-time recipient of the Samuel Mockbee Award in Nonfiction, he runs the litblog fwriction, edits the online lit journal fwriction : review, and lives in Brooklyn.

2011-05-29T09:14:00.001-07:00

Alstroemeria

by Amanda Laughtland

Surely these lilies are more fancy
than us both, but please
don't mistake me--I love you

in your faded cargo shorts
and the bike shirt with the hole
over your right shoulder, all the same

as when you join me for dinner
in your red crushed velvet blazer
and black pinstriped pants. I bought

new dress clothes to impress you
and be worthy of the lilies,
to come crinkling through your door

with a cellophane-wrapped bouquet.

Amanda Laughtland is the author of Postcards to Box 464 (http://www.bootstrapproductions.org/postcards-to-box-464) and the publisher of Teeny Tiny Press (http://teenytiny.org).

2011-05-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

Venice

photography by Annie Atkins

Venice photo by Annie Atkins

Originally from Snowdonia in North Wales, Annie spent four years as a designer at an ad agency in Reykjavik, Iceland before moving to Dublin to get an MA in Filmmaking. She is currently working as the graphic artist on period television shows such as The Tudors and Camelot. See more of her work on her website, and visit her blog.

2011-05-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

The Day’s Thin Swim Suit
by Darryl Price

The day's thin swim suit
has once more been casually tossed aside like
a cartoon encrusted food wrapper on a worn
out irrelevant street somewhere in the soulful
west of a dream. It represents the well ordered
world as we want to see it, with erasable,

laughable teeth. And friendly as a ghost our seabird
goes through the pockets hole by hole looking for
the meaning of its own ancient hunger. No one
tries to stop them from coming as one turns easily
into a half dozen. I've been standing here

before I guess. This empty feeling is an unfortunate
home I ran away from a long time
ago still out looking for your foot prints. Why pretend
leaving everything to chance wasn't all about
believing in nothing? We only had a
moment alone to live in like any new song.

I'm pretty sure I've memorized the whole thing weird
bit by weird bit by now, but I don't sing it all
the time to myself like I used to I admit. Oh
let them walk away from the story's sad chapters.
It's what they do best. They've never cared for anyone

not in their shoes. Yeah the little poetry
leak is happening this time in the early morning
hours. Some part of you just becomes wide awake and
nothing ever seems to happen the same way again.
But it happens to everyone if they're somewhat
lucky in life. The problem of course is that

no one welcomes you back from Paradise. They can
see you've been severely beaten about the head
and heart. You could use a touch of the good stuff. You
think maybe you shouldn't laugh at them as they pull
their sails closer to the shore as fast as they can.

Darryl Price was born in Kentucky and educated at Thomas More College. A founding member of L. Jack Roth's Yellow Pages Poets, he has published dozens of chapbooks, and his poems have appeared in many journals.

2011-05-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

Andrea Spofford:

Three Poems

Fault

Sometimes I worry about elephants, how they've been changed by human intervention, how poaching has selectively bred out tusks. I worry about what this will do the environment, to elephant eating habits, to their ability to forage for food.

My friend Kate worries about earthquakes. She watches CNN obsessively, scanning for news about fault lines. She calls me sometimes with information on disasters, at-risk locations, news about Japan. When we lived in California she searched for seismographic data, tried to read the peaks and lows.

The New Madrid Seismic Zone is a fault line near the Mississippi River. There is little to no activity along the fault line, but movement would be devastating. When Kate calls to tell me about the fault, how my house in Mississippi is not earthquake proof, that the structure is likely not attached to the foundation, that the whole thing will just slide downhill, I tell her I will run outside, uphill, and watch everything go. You can't just do what you would do in L.A., she says. While she talks I look up videos of dogs in Japan, elephants playing in a plastic pool.

My life I Was Entirely Distracted
By the Facts, Namely That Time is Going By

—Lyn Hejinian

To be human
assemble a basket
glossy paper something
to tie everything together
a combination of rayon
silk thread yarn tendon
thick and wet.

Collect buttons
an air proof canister
air-raid sirens hurricane sirens
the branches after storms.

Outside a girl walks
under a ladder
the building maintenance
man sways atop
you think
how many days until May?

Count the sand worn into the carpet
the trunk of your car
a tissue crumpled in the front seat.

Sunday

We limped around the house today
you and I both broken
the dog loose and quiet.

Today was windows open
scuffed hiking boots
an empty cup left overnight.

I have not yet done the dishes
the dog is stretched lengthwise
you are asleep.

It is Sunday
soft and quiet
dark outside beyond the streetlamps.

Andrea Spofford currently lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi where she is a Ph.D. candidate at the USM Center for Writers. She is currently obsessed with place, side shows, and shoes and spends much time outside.

2011-05-29T09:11:00.001-07:00

Casa de las Piedras
by Susan Keiser

Too hard a home,
it clings bone-like to
thanksgiving mountain,
red against the pale,
tenacious more than true,
sting-bright, freshly swept
for mines.

Susan S. Keiser’s checkered past includes a stint as a high school English teacher, a docent gig in a museum based solely on the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ongoing commitment to a highly specialized literary marketing outfit and a brief fling as a pastry chef. She also spent years as a bank executive. Her poems have appeared in SpokenWar, Carcinogenic Poetry, decomP Magazine, Orion headless, Right Hand Pointing and The Camel Saloon. She lives in Key West, Florida, and is at work on a novel in which both kudzu and ice fishing figure prominently.

2011-05-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

Laurent Miaille:
Four Photographs

Textured Works- IV

Acrobatic Fishermen

Seul Two

Granitic World- III

Laurent Miaille learned traditional photography fifteen years ago. Two years ago he discovered digital photography and with it new horizons and opportunity for fuller expression. The effects obtained with long exposures of the elements often associated with early morning light can reveal a fantasy world but at the same time very real, suitable for quietness and contemplation. In compositions which tend toward to minimalism, the landscape becomes zen, purified, dreamlike. The square format has imposed itself little by little and suits him perfectly in terms of composition, playing on the symmetries and occupation of space. To see more of Laurent's work, visit his website and blog.

2011-05-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

Comfort

by Emily Severance

I took the chair from the laundry room
so people can no longer relax there
they have to stand or go back to their rooms
your clothes aren’t dry
because after you left
I took them out and put
mine in for twenty minutes
but I’m telling you, that drier must be broken
Besides what’s a quarter to you? You look
rich enough. I need all I can get
for pinball.

Emily Severance teaches elementary special education in New Mexico. She has a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has had poems accepted by Breadcrumb Scabs, Defenestration, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Sisyphus.

2011-05-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

Heather Abner:

Two Poems

Swank Punk Girl

I want to get you a t-shirt

that says Swank Punk Girl

because you’re the only person

I know who could pull it off.

You walk into the room

and immediately I feel like a priss.

Like the sort of girl who used to wear

ballet slippers to school.

You’re hard and practical

like a pair of Doc. Martens,

but the most elegant thing I’ve seen

was when you tied the string

of my tea bag to the handle of a mug

so that it wouldn’t fall in the tea

and get all soppy.

The label fluttered there

near my thumb

like the wings of an origami bird.

And when you leaned back

on the sofa to light your cigarette

I saw one of Gatsby’s flappers

in a black t-shirt and cargo pants

smiling at me

behind the smoke.

From the Silver Cap of My Stanley Thermos

You gave me a Stanley thermos for Christmas that year.

You bought it at Meijer

and there must have been a gift wrapping station

set up near Customer Service

because it was wrapped perfectly,

gold foil smartly creased,

the curly ribbon

silver like the cap of my new thermos,

silver light of a soup spoon you held to my mouth,

silver grit of your hands under my shirt,

silver curve of your arm as throwing a beer bottle,

amber glass breaking,

beer foaming against the wall like sex.

I have to say I was somewhat disappointed.

I had been hoping for something more beautiful.

a bottle of Tunisian Myrrh,

an amber ring

or a jar of whiskey/heather honey.

I had never considered a workman’s thermos

as a possible gift from a lover.

But you said now I could carry soup, or coffee, or tea: orange pekoe

with me

wherever I went.

Because in January you’d be gone

and couldn’t stop by my place anymore,

to warm me up

with a grilled cheese

and soup du jour

from the restaurant where you worked.

I didn’t know then how to appreciate you.

My boyfriend was so unlike you.

He was never angry in love with me.

He never spat out cuss words

like bits of windshield after an accident.

He never gave me a Stanley thermos for Christmas.

He was an exact fold to your rough edge

and I was torn between you.

You unscrewed the cap of my Stanley thermos

and said I could keep anything in it warm for hours.

You said it was unbreakable.

Inside the thermos

there was a paper certificate with a silver gilt edge.

It was a lifetime guarantee.

Heather Abner has a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and an MLIS from Wayne State University. She has published poems in Iodine, Main Street Rag, Rattle, The Atlanta Review, and Nerve Cowboy. She is a librarian and lives in Brighton, MI with her husband and two Miniature Schnauzers, Diesel and Brizo. Visit her website.

2011-05-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

Netra Nei:

Two Photographs

Boys Along the River Seine, Paris photo by Netra Nei

Sound of Silence photo by Netra Nei

Netra Nei is a Seattle-based freelance graphic designer who spends her free time pursuing the art of photography. Having no formal training, her aim is to journal her travels and wanderings through technically straight-forward glimpses of everyday life. She captures fleeting moments, including studies of people and their interactions with planned urban spaces, with geometric compositions, Dadaist black humor and an eye for both the classic and the absurd. Visit her website.

2011-05-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

Tina Barry:

Two Poems

Life of Charlotte

Teenage Bride

The bride wore a white polyester gown with a train that extended out the door of the church and down the block. Years later, she blamed the soiled fabric for the failure of her marriage.

Wall of Icons

A wall of icons can be beautiful if you don’t look closely at the hands. The hands tell stories of too short lives and unrequited love.

Eclipse

The neighbors gathered around the television to observe the moon perform a slow striptease. Having waited so long, the moon wanted its moment in the sun. (The cliché made it laugh.)

Oh, No

For the second time in a week, she opened the bathroom door and watched the comb and brush jump apart.

Tuscaloosa

A pin in a doll’s heart
then one in its foot.
Hot vapor
with its own populace:
The lady at Stop & Shop
with the dead eyes and gray perm.
Your neighbor’s pick up truck
grandpa’s house
with grandpa inside
and a prom queen
wearing a fake satin dress
corsage pinned just so.
Beloved
for its years of service
and unblemished safety record
a Ferris wheel gently rocks
its last riders
then dumps them to the ground.
People laugh
at the banality
of final thoughts.
Closer to the stars
a man finds comfort
recalling the part in his daughter’s hair.

Tina Barry is a freelance writer and graduate student in creative writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. She can be reached at tbarrywrites@yahoo.com.

2011-05-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

Howie Good:

Two Poems

EVERYTHING AFTER THAT

1
There were many empty chairs. There would be even more. The damned were being led through a treeless garden of a thousand sad thoughts. Children and spastics scattered in fright. A little gentleman in a bowler hat searched his pockets for the paragraph he had torn from the newspaper. The murderer, face lit by a gas lamp, whispered, “There’s so much left to do.”

2
Spring had arrived early, then coffins, each covered with a soldier’s greatcoat. The murderer took flight. People crossed the street on their hands and knees.

3
The flowers were hardly open when the rain killed them, the roses, poor roses, ten ragged musicians in distress worrying about what would happen if a cat sat on a baby’s face as it slept.

PASTELS

1
Angels in pink silk shoes decorated with rosebuds wandered through the rooms. It was the house of a hanged man. The cat made every effort to appear elegantly bored.

2
A wheelbarrow of weathered skulls stood off to the side, white in the morning, lilac during the day, orange in the evening.

3
The muse was in the woods. She had handed me over to the firing squad. A blond light pervaded as softly as a piano playing.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011).

2011-05-29T09:05:00.000-07:00

In The Graveyard
photography by Karen de la Bald

In The Graveyard photo by Karen de la Bald

Karen de la Bald lives and works in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, England. Though based in amongst the hills and moors which she finds so inspiring, her work also reflects her extensive travels in the U.K and America. Karen is equally at home with a camera or paintbrush, and her paintings can be seen here. See more of her photographs and landscape photographs.

2011-05-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

Big
by Jack Swenson

My father died in the dead of winter. Went to bed one night and didn't wake up.

I booked a flight, then hitched a ride to my hometown with my father's boss, walked up the sidewalk of the house late that afternoon. At five it was already dark.

My aunt greeted me at the door. Her face was contorted. “I'm so sorry for your loss,” she said.

It was bitter cold the day of the funeral. I didn't have the proper clothes. My father's brother lent me a coat and a pair of overshoes. We sat side by side in folding chairs in a tent at the grave site. My uncle's eyes leaked tears.

That night, left alone with my mother, whom I didn't like, I listened to her laud my father with whom in life she didn't get along. I told her to stop it. My little mother, with big eyes, in her mouse-brown bathrobe, huddled in a corner of the parlor couch.

I went upstairs to my father's den and closed the door. I found the knife in a fishing box in the closet. The box was made out of varnished wood. My father's father had made it.

I took out the knife and unfolded the blade. I had given it to my father for his birthday some years before. It was the biggest jackknife I had ever seen. From butt to tip it was nine inches long. It was bigger than necessary, larger than life. It was the perfect gift.

Jack Swenson was a fan of short-short fiction since years before the terms flash & micro fiction were invented. His motto is less is more. He writes both fiction & nonfiction—often at the same time. He writes about sex a lot.

2011-05-29T09:01:00.000-07:00

Review: Rusty Barnes’ Redneck Poems
by Sheldon Lee Compton

I'm not a poet. Wouldn't know a couplet from a coupling. It's why I rarely talk about books of poetry and even more rarely write poetry, but I felt a stout and strong urge to talk a bit about Rusty Barnes' REDNECK POEMS.

In this collection of fourteen poems, there is much to appreciated in as far as poetic device is concerned. I can recognize that much, but I'll go no further on that topic. Rusty moves as easily from poetry to short short fiction to longer works to editing the writing of others with equal ease and skill.

Here we're pulled into a world of hard people who by turns are aslo looking for nothing more than any of the rest of us – peace, companionship, redemption, and a healthy dose of risk in ultimately seeing these things obtained. At other turns, we're shown with a true Appalachian voice just how hard those edges can be, the misery that can come from falling against those edges as we traverse through the collection.

And at times, Rusty allows his characters to fail at the thing they most seek to obtain, as in "Hollywood Appalachian Noir: A Lesson".

In this poem, the narrator has decided to beat a guy's ass for more or less fucking with his woman, the sort of thing that spreads like wildfire in mountain towns, a virtual heat-seeking bomb of information that makes its way with record speed from the nursing home to the honky tonk.

"...I love my wife and Vaughan, /but with his sweat-thick hair and brandy snifter ways /like having a job and cold green in his pocket, /whiskey he doesn't have to color with tobacco /and
all the white teeth in sweet red gums /he didn't have to pay for on a plan but was born /with. All the teeth in the world won't save him."

And so our narrator makes his move, but there is no hero moment to be found.

"...Vaughan turns round /and strokes my jaw loose on its strings with his hard-/working fist. I am no hand at the arts of mayhem, I fear."

Then in a moment of near metafiction that Rusty manages to pull off without the usual pitfall of authorial intrusion we find the narrator is telling of this encounter after the fact to a cousin as a warning of sorts.

"Soon I am ass-over-teakettle and not even Patrick Swayze /can save me now. Vaughan kicks me into next week, /from which I write this verse. Cousin, don't mess with a /ridgerunner woman."

It's a poem that gives that clear picture of redemption or revenge perhaps that ends, instead, with failure and defeat and then wisdom as a result. And this told through a mix of both lyrical and regional tongue. A strong start for the collection as a whole.

Many of the remaining poems will often move back and forth between this lyrical and common style, but is strongest when we have that in-your-face and matter-of-fact tone such as in "Ode to ___________", where the second stanza starts with both an observation and then confession, all written with economy and that regional voice Rusty has tuned into so well. That voice and this poem is testimony to how clearly Rusty keeps his sense of regional identity in mind and how also well he is capable of sharing it on the page.

"A woman I barely know called /me cowboy tonight. I auto-denied /it; but she's right."

For the most part, the fourteen poems in REDNECK POEMS deal almost exclusively with relationships between men and women, with the exception of two that come immediately to mind – "Cutter" (a father and daughter) and "The Electric Fence" (a group of boys) – which, by contrast, may not fit the overall theme of the collection beyond the idea of relationships and the dynamics within those relationships, but remain powerful even as they stand apart in a collection this size.

At times in REDNECK POEMS, Rusty will write from the man's point of view and then twist his pen and write with spectacular skill from a female point of view as in "On a Miscarriage."

"Outside the piss-yellow moon fucked against the sky. /She thought of the children lost in the night by blood/and by accident and by God. The stars don't twinkle, /she thought. They stick up there out of pure love /or out of cussedness. All those dead babies up there, /she thought. They dare not fall to earth, ever ever again."

This is never an easy task for a writer, to get into the mind of the other gender and especially when tackling a subject such as this, but I feel it is by far the strongest, most honest and well-crafted poems Rusty offers in this collection.

For a chapbook that comes in at just under twenty pages total, Rusty has packed these poems with meat and bone, the hardness of the land and its people, and the heart and heartbreak at core of it all. It's a collection of poems I'll return to frequently just for the joy of a well-told moment in the lives of characters both complex and yet simple in the best ways, and also for the talent in craft that is evident in each line.

To get a look at REDNECK POEMS for yourself visit here where you can buy a print version for a fair and reasonable price or download the chap for free.

Rusty Barnes

Rusty Barnes grew up in rural northern Appalachia. He received his B.A. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in over a hundred fifty journals and anthologies. After editing fiction for the Beacon Street Review (now Redivider) and Zoetrope All-Story Extra, he co-founded Night Train, a literary journal which has been featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio. Sunnyoutside Press published a collection of his flash fiction, Breaking it Down, in November 2007. MiPOesias published his poetry chapbook Redneck Poems in October 2010. In early 2011, Sunnyoutside will publish his collection of traditional fiction, Mostly Redneck.

He is a nationally recognized and oft-solicited authority on flash fiction under all its various names and permutations, and serves on writing conference faculties and panels throughout the country, including recently with Associated Writing Programs, Somerville News Writers Festival, Writers@Work, The Parlor, and Grub Street Writers, as well as their annual Muse & Marketplace conference. He taught composition, fiction writing, and literature for over ten years in New England universities such as Emerson College and Northeastern University. His stories have been translated into Finnish, French, Polish, and Russian. His recently completed novel, tentatively titled “Three of a Kind,” is about northern Appalachia, family and community dynamics, sex, drugs, and not so much rock ‘n’ roll.

If you want to know more, friend him on Facebook, or check through his recent interviews. If you’d like to read his poetry and get poetry-related news, visit Live Nude Poems. If you’re really hurting to know more, you can join his mailing list, and he’ll mail you updates when something interesting happens in his life. In other words, not often. Addresses and information will not be sold, given away, nor beaten from the proprietor’s brain by large men with shillelaghs.

Sheldon Lee Compton

Sheldon Lee Compton's work has appeared in numerous journals including New Southerner, Keyhole Magazine, Emprise Review, BLIP (formerly Mississippi Review), Staccato Fiction, and elsewhere. Most recently, his work was included in Bottom Dog Press's anthology Degrees of Elevation: Stories of Contemporary Appalachia, alongside work from Ron Rash, Chris Offutt, Silas House, Rusty Barnes and many others. He edits the online journal A-Minor and lives in Eastern Kentucky.

2011-05-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

When I Was a Fish
by xTx

The lawyer hasn’t answered me and that’s okay but how long do I give him? A day? Two? A week? I was surprised he had email because he lives in a place where the roads are all dirt and the cars are ponies, cows and horses. I imagine his office has a spittoon, his shoes, boots, his bow-tie a bow-tie, mustache ends turned up and waxed into curls, bad teeth a brown parade barricading his tongue. I will pay him in bounty hunters and cotton. Maybe he’ll send me some smoke signals. Maybe he’ll send me a telegram. Maybe he’ll ask to meet me down by the river. Maybe he will give me my answers while we fish. He will assure me that my father’s estate is being handled properly while bites from trout or bass or catfish bend the tip of his pole. I’ll watch that tip bend with quick jerks. I’ll watch his mouth move in front of those teeth and I’ll pretend that it’s thirst and not grief that’s making me take extra long pulls from the silver flask full of whiskey the lawyer’s been frowning at since I pulled it out of my satchel. Unladylike, but it’s hard not to be something you’ve always been. I lift my skirts up to my knees and let the sun warm my legs. The lawyer’s head jerks like his pole as he tries not to look. He tells me my brother will be in charge of everything now. He says that’s how my dad willed it. The lawyer’s pole continues to arc convulsively and then it holds into a quivering hook that swings right and then left with the fish it now owns. I tell him, “You’d better handle that.” He stands and starts to reel it in. I drink more whiskey and wait to see what’s chosen him.

xTx is a writer living in Southern California. She has been published in places like PANK, Smokelong, Monkeybicycle, Storyglossia, >Kill Author and Wigleaf. Her new story collection, "Normally Special," is available from Tiny Hardcore Press. She says nothing at www.notimetosayit.com.

2011-05-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

Randi Beck:
Two Poems

Perforation III: She and Me

She's the one who won't usually tell lies. Late evening, blue porch, I am passing through bars of lemon-colored light cutting the wood steps as though with tally marks to count this day separate but equal to the one before and the one before; she writes the bills, I the letters; she sees the blue porch for the poetry that it is, and I call the dog inside and lock the door. I'm a collector (you must understand this) of threadbare book covers, of wine corks stained red, of bones of large predatory birds, of galvanized tin, dying plants, collector of dust, collector of everything. She calls me sentimental, and often cruel, and often impatient, selective. To be fair, my voice by now must sound of rattling pills, or a can of loose coins, and it makes no difference (she will not go) whether I write harder, or longer, or quieter, or faster, or more presently, more thoroughly, more disaffectedly, more like boiling water, more like sex. And it is, I suppose, this kind of intercourse, a masturbatory love, or sometimes seduction, or violence, or restlessness, or a kind of perversion. And I will go on loving, despising, admiring until our faces, palm lines, and arteries can no longer be distinguished from one another. Even now, there is her warm hand moving down my arm, a navigation of fingers, newly discovered sound, and she tries to convince me, whispering, to tell you something truer than this.

Parker, Porter, those are women who knew that to light a match is to set smoldering some particle of air, to transform it; they knew the difference between the vulnerable and the vulgar, a long cigarette tapped on the lip of a glass, ash falling, settling like skin and I can never promise her (or anyone) the cement certainty of right and wrong and writing and wronging; ash, after all, is still grey matter at best, and smoke too, and water held in the mouth, moth wings aimed at the light. When the places that once existed, existed still (blue porch, dripping window fan, garlic flowers, snowfakes in the tall grass, tin pail filling slowly with water), those were days I said to her that I could do this on my own, but even those were words she had dropped in my mouth like seeds just so I could hear myself say them. And anyway, it is true that every single thing I write or tell is a carefully punctured egg, drained of viscera, carefully placed in a high nest, carefully built.

So you see, even the empty things, I keep those too.

Mares at Night

Midwinter that year, Oklahoma was frozen at the center; the self-proclaimed “Heart of America” drained colorless under four inches of solid ice, the blood-red clay fossilizing every hoof print,boot track, skidding tire, or misstep; everything dusted over with snow. The twenty minute drive to work became an hour-long trek on empty, near-invisible highways and by the time I arrived it was already dark, everyone had gone home, and the barns glowed faintly yellow and pulsed with the breath of horses and the imminence of birth. Over the course of my eighteen years, I'd trained, ridden, or been stepped on by dozens of horses, mostly ranch horses, but also barrel horses and cutting horses, trail ponies, plow-pullers, cow-penners, fence-chewers, man-haters, woman-haters, gelded colts, stud colts, brood mares, trophy horses, swaybacks, nags, and what they call dog fodder, flag-carriers, carriage horses, police horses, curlies with disease, curlies without disease, horses beaten and starving or spoiled to vice, fearsome and feared, and now, the nameless clone-carriers, the recipient mares. Each breed came with its own set of expectations, the steady Quarters, flighty Thoroughbreds, Belgian drafts, Gypsy Vanners, hot-headed Arabs, air-headed half-Arabs, squirrelly Shetland ponies, and quiet Morgans, and most of them given ill-suited names or names based on general appearance, Red, Old Red, Big Red, Little Red, Socks, Two-socks, Blacky and Snow, Herme the hermaphrodite, Einstein who threw himself down a hill, Buddy who threw me down a hill, and Ms. Knight who was mostly a coward, Big Ben, Jackpot, Penny, and Money in a Glass. No amount of injury or poverty and certainly no human being could hobble me by then or change my mind about where I was going; maybe I was looking for too much at once, to write myself out of an old life, fearing erasure into emptiness, believing in the chafed skin of hard work, or that the blistering cold might burn out any nightmares I ever had about futility, but nothing could prepare my conscience for the approaching task of destruction, just as no amount of snow could prepare my body or the land for the impending devastation of winter, for the fields gleaming pure white even in darkness, the sounds of dying, the cracking of ice and bone

Randi Beck is an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where she lives with her partner, fellow writer Samantha Tetangco. She has had fiction previously published in The Michigan Quarterly Review and The Kenyon Review. Before moving to Albuquerque to pursue writing, she worked as a horse midwife and graveyard waitress in Oklahoma. This is her first poetry publication.

2011-05-29T08:56:00.000-07:00

Flights of Fancy

by Robert Wexelblatt

Looking at old pictures. Here they are. Traces left by reflected light and vibrating air. Shimmering, banal, piercing, but revealing only when we convince ourselves by repeating the word. What we have here is a memory of memories.

Only the visible gives warrant to the invisible, the audible to the inaudible. Tantalized by certain negatives we insist they’re positives; thus the two most fatiguing études in concentration are trying to listen to what you can’t hear, looking for what you can’t see. In the same way, being unwilling to make do with making do means searching out the ineffable.

The art that is common to oyster shuckers, atom smashers, peelers of onions, interviewers, photographers.

Tapes and pictures turn gradually, or suddenly, into these memories of memories: faces written in vanished light, voices that once disturbed distant air. Just re-runs.

See, Mother? I can still can’t write a sentence.

• • •

-So, why did you withdraw?

-Withdraw? What’s that mean? A dignified advance to the rear?

-Cutting yourself off from public life then.

-I never engaged in such a thing as public life. In fact, the phrase sounds to me like a contradiction. Public as in mechanical, as in artificially constructed; life as in organic, also constructed, but from inside. Or maybe I’ve always been what you call withdrawn. An introvert for life.

-You were a celebrity. A huge one.

-That’s a laugh. Say I was known by people I didn’t want to know. I was young and bookish. When I figured it out I stopped doing public readings.

-You say life is constructed from within. Do you mean your, well, your seclusion’s been constructed from within . . . ? You don’t choose to display yourself to others? Society began to disgust you? The baseness of people, the degradation of culture? Cults of personality? Sexuality’s compromises? Universal guilt? The cheapening of politics . . ?

-No, no. Please, don’t stop. You’re as lyrical as Jeremiah. Go on. It’s always fascinating to hear how a lover makes the case against her beloved.

-You think I love the world?

-Well, I’ve only just met you, though I’ve read several examples of your work, which seems to me very good. All the same, yes, I think you must love the world, at least to the extent of wishing to seek it out, to interview it, which is to say, in a certain measure, to preserve the world.

-I interview people, not the world.

-But there’s no world apart from the people who conceive it. Each of us is a world, which is what makes death a serious matter. Isn’t that what you’re after, somebody’s world, the one that would die with them?

-Doesn’t it occur to you that my purpose isn’t to love or preserve the world but to expose it?

-Then you’re out to expose me? Not a pretty prospect. But no, nothing to do with me personally. The lover always wants to expose the beloved . . . . Or is that too masculine a thing to say? You know the phrase to undress her with his eyes? It’s vulgar but sharp. I wonder if we’re going to flirt or talk like serious middle-aged people? More coffee?

-No, thank you. And you can be as masculine as you like, but I’m not flirting. And I resent your suggesting . . . Look, I want to come back to my question, which you’re evading all too well.

-And that was?

-About withdrawal.

-I’m asking myself whether it’s odd that a famous interviewer should be trapped by words.

-Withdrawal? It’s not merely a word. After all, you live way out here. On a ranch all by yourself, like a hermit.

-It’s not a ranch actually. It was one, but no more. And I see people from time to time. I have friends. I’m seeing you. As for my being a hermit, hermits used to talk to angels who sometimes fed them. They prayed. They resisted temptations heroically and strove to leave the world.

-Whereas they are the world?

-Precisely. They were a world. It’s a noble but doomed effort trying to climb up out of it.

-Like a hermit, I said.

-Well, and there’s another word that puts a lens over the camera.

- . . . All right. I admit it. You’re defeating me. Happy?

-Our conversations needn’t be like combat, though many of the best are. Still, my opinion isn’t worth much. I admit that I don’t have many non-functional conversations with other people. Still, it seems to me that this kind of bantering or sparring could be an alliance; I mean we can attack a common enemy, struggle together to the same end—

-That kind of combat usually winds up in bed.

-Only in comedies, not in, say, Plato’s dialogues. I know, you need a serious conversation—and no flirting, remember?

-Serious, yet . . . inconsequential.

-Exactly. So there’s no need to be polite.

-Not if you don’t want to.

-A mind that’s used to conversing with itself doesn’t bother much with manners. Anyway, I don’t know how to be interviewed, lack the knack. So, excuse me. Correct me when I break the rules.

-You’re doing fine. Just keep doing. Now, what about withdrawal which by any name still means an unusually sparse social life, which you admit to. You used to live differently. Ten years ago you moved out here, bought this place. You vanished.

-Vanished? . . . Life sometimes turns people about the way a framed photograph can be set down this way or that.

-But a photograph’s purely passive, a thing. People aren’t things.

-People aren’t passive, that’s true. They’re only more or less passive.

-Then life turned you . . . away? Like a portrait? And what do you mean by life? What happened ten years ago? It seems to me when people blame things on life there are events they would prefer not to discuss.

-Then it wouldn’t be polite of you to inquire further.

-Oh, now I see. I’m to be polite but you’re not!

-The guest should always outdo the host in courtesy. Otherwise she could feel uncomfortable.

-Why are you here and not . . . out there?

-Valéry’s Monsieur Teste is insufferable. Do you know the book?

-No.

-Teste boasts of himself: “I am not turned toward the world. My face is to the wall. There is not an atom of the wall’s surface that is not known to me.”

-And that’s how you feel?

-No. As a matter of fact I disapprove of Teste’s boast, though I admit I can’t forget it. Still, it’s not at all the sort of thing Teste ought to say. Too much amour-propre, even for him—that claim to know every atom, for instance. Worse yet, the remark’s romantic and nobody’s less romantic than Teste. So, either he’s speaking out of character or Valéry was recording a moment of weakness. Nobody deserves to have their character judged only by a moment of weakness, even in literature. Or it may just be a weakness on Valéry’s part; after all, he couldn’t resist allowing Teste a putative wife and a friend to adore him. Why not a dog as well?

-Why are you talking about Monsieur Teste?

-Why not? He too is withdrawn, a sort of hermit. He has no emotions and lives entirely in his perceptions, which he’s at great pains to make precise. By most standards, he’s striving to become superhuman, which is to say inhuman . . . . Maybe I’m talking about how you seem to see me.

-Then, you’re not romantic?

-Ah, the way you fasten on a word. First off, grown-up people are seldom romantic, though they may be misperceived by others who think they are. Or maybe that’s what romance is, a mistake people make about each other, an optical problem. I suppose some persist with the image even after being confronted with the reality. After all, it’s a great age for extending adolescence, isn’t it?

-Is it?

-Forty year-olds in blue jeans?

-Ha. As for being romantic, that’s exactly how your books strike people. Some people at least.

-You’ve heard of incurable romantics? Okay, I’m a cured one.

-What cured you?

-The usual thing. Bitter medicine.

-You want to explain?

-Not really. Talking too freely about yourself is a kind of weakness too. It’s not like judging yourself . . . .

• • •

My profession: from dark room to darkroom.

This is a law: recording tends to displace remembering. The former progresses at the side of modernity, goading it along. Homer wrote nothing down. History in the future will truly be bunk, comprehensively accessible and utterly forgotten. Remember - recollect - recall - it’s on the tip of my tongue - let me look it up - whatever.

Am I being too hard? Distinctions are brutal, which is certainly part of their allure. One of Mother’s secrets was to be alert to this brutality, but not always to avoid it. She would sort of head it off before she scared the wild beast she meant to tame. “Interviewing isn’t war; it’s domestication. That’s why women are better at it.” To make the subject docile requires as much giving in as engineering dominance. Giving in can even be a way of dominating (a feminine wile?). The colt gives in because it is not giving in when it gives in. Giving in as successful seduction.

She once said to me about her technique (how she loved to talk technique!) that one had sometimes to challenge the subject’s point of view but must never contradict it outright. “Let them contradict themselves,” she declared. People are on their guard in an interview and so will be grateful for the space to disagree with themselves. Out of gratitude they may spill everything, thinking they can take it back.

People want space to be complex and deep in. Who opens up in a cell, except under torture? “To interview is not to interrogate. But the aims aren’t all that different.”

Distinctions as the walls of a cell, a cell of forced consistency. No wonder I preferred my camera.

The camera, though, is a cell too, the narrowest. He taught me that, the Italian phrase. “Do you know why it’s called a camera?” Light captured in darkness, revealed in darkness.

“From dark room to darkroom,” he said. “It could be a description of life.”

• • •

-Now, about the two years in prison.

-There’s a hawk. See? Red-tailed.

-In Pennsylvania wasn’t it?

-They can spot a vole from a mile up, but probably not a second vole a foot away. Tunnel vision makes for nobility of action. A fly sees in every direction but only for a few inches. If you’re short-sighted and see too much you’re an insect.

-Why? Why prison? Was it the same as in the book?

-I wouldn’t step over a line.

-Oh?

-Some genius thought of it. Step over that line. A bully’s dare. I mean the physicality of it is arresting. No commitment’s real unless it’s physical. This is how you accept induction into the armed forces, you step across a line. A free act, you see. Democratic and metaphorical. Putting yourself on the line, moving into the line, the front line, the firing line.

-Or giving in, toeing the line. Everybody else took the step, you stayed behind.

-I was scared, of course.

-That’s no distinction. So were they, I imagine. It’s what you do with being scared that counts, isn’t it?

-A philosopher!

-Don’t be flippant. There’s a famous scene in your first book where the young man has it out with his father. A professor, right?

-Of philosophy, like you.

-Of philosophy. They argue about Socrates. About Crito.

-I’m sorry. I hardly remember it.

-Did you have a debate like that with your own father?

-Oh no. Dad wanted me out of the country. He thought the war was wrong long before I did. How could we argue?

-But you didn’t go to Canada.

-Or Sweden. Or over that line. It was a short multiple-choice test: army, exile, jail.

-In the book the father cites Socrates to the effect that the law of the state has to be obeyed or the state would be undermined.

-I suppose I was doing some contrived generation gap scene.

-The son says if that’s all Socrates believed he wouldn’t be in prison inventing civil disobedience. He cites scripture, where Socrates says one must change the state’s view of justice and you can’t do that by either knuckling under or running away.

-Why bring this up? Look, it’s a terrible thing for a son to beat his father in an argument, if he loves him. Forcing him into a corner like that. The father in the book had spent his life adoring Plato, so it’s even worse. For that alone my tin-pot hero deserved a couple years.

-You think so now. Did you think so then?

- . . . Oh, when isn’t punishment justifiable? Tell me, does your daughter, does Emily ever win an argument with you?

• • •

The clutch of breath at the magic syllables of your own name. And the way he said it too: “does your daughter, does Emily.” Formal, stately, forever mine. Emily the daughter, the teenager, Emily the photographer holding up her little dark room, Emily whose individuality he acknowledges without apposition.

I took black and white and also color. Of course the former are the ones that have lasted best. Memories, like dreams, are colorless and sharp.

All my doing, that interview; it was my production, on my head. I read the book, made her read it, whined about getting out of the city, riding horses, seeing sagebrush and tumbleweeds, about the millions of devoted readers who’d love to know what became of him, how keen I was to meet him myself. I preferred the two later books, the ones that hadn’t sold or been turned into movies. He couldn’t help smiling when I told him and that’s probably why I told him, for the sake of that smile. The wish to please others is usually a sly way of pleasing ourselves. Cagey, flattering North American adolescent female with long hair already aware of how a giggle could shatter the wine-glass ego of even a mesomorphic quarterback.

How beautiful his red biplane was. It looked like a big toy. “Used to be a crop duster,” he said. “Picked it up pretty cheap.”

“Take me up,” I begged.

Flight of fancy, but then all flights are fanciful. I still have the dream of rising and swimming with my arms and feet through an ocean of air, slowly, able to talk to those below, unnecessarily bound by gravity, because they refuse to believe it’s not some trick. I never go higher than a ceiling, though there’s no fear of going higher. I know I can, but prefer the satisfaction of exhorting those below, encouraging them to join me. Wendy and the Lost Boys.

Mother said if he said yes, which was unlikely given his reputation, she would aim to get him to talk most about his solitude. She had interviewed a prisoner of war who told her that what kept him from killing himself was the other prisoners. What kept him from killing himself? Was loneliness his glory or despair? Up in his plane, he said, he felt best. Pilots always do. Perhaps solitude is more exquisite in the air, purified, since he needn’t speak to those below, what few there were in that empty land.

The barn had been extended to include a hangar. Horses on one side, plane on the other. Smells of oil and manure mingled as if it were the turn of the century. Teenager that I was, I called the plane “cute.” Surprisingly tiny leather seats. He brushed back my hair before I climbed in and asked if I could perhaps try to sulk a little less. And it was true. I slouched the teenage slouch, pouted with pseudo-ennui. I frowned at him and held up my camera aggressively.

“Cameras steal souls,” he said with a shrug, as though his soul could not be captured or as if he lacked one.

“Bullshit,” I replied. “Let’s get up there before she changes her mind.”

And Mother might have. I had a tough time convincing her, kept looking to him for support, but he refused. Impassive. Nonchalant. Didn’t matter to him. Not his idea.

Mother didn’t like it, my going up or not going up; or maybe she disliked having the last word, the way we both wouldn’t challenge her authority. I took three pictures of her deciding. Close-ups of the furrowed brow, the downturned mouth, the exasperated cheeks. And somewhere in the eyes suspicion, maybe jealousy.

He took me up. I’d never been in a small plane before. The take-off was glorious, but I became unexpectedly nauseated by the first tight turn. We stayed up for all of five minutes. Five minutes over the ranch, the plains stretching toward mauve mountains. It was like laying a baby in a crib the way he set us down. The smoothness of sleep when you’re young, the innocence of one’s first dreams.

• • •

-How did your marriage end?

-What a question!

-Why? Should I be more polite? Should I . . . meander up to the interesting questions?

- . . . I’d like to say she died in childbirth and then I walked back to the hotel in the rain. I’d like to say it was after a short, tragic illness, or that she was shot down in a crossfire while covering a post-colonial war.

-You’d like her dead?

-Yes, I suppose, but in the nicest way, without malice.

-And the truth is . . . ?

-The truth is . . . contradictory, as usual.

-Why contradictory as usual?

-It’s always like that. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. A sentiment that was old before Gilgamesh. Usually men say it and smile at each other and stay with the women they’ve just said it about. I didn’t. We didn’t. Have you noticed that people can make too many demands of one another and, at the same time, not nearly enough? Generally speaking, sex is too expensive, unless that’s the only thing you want.

-So you claim to be celibate?

-Celibacy. It’s not a trait women find attractive.

-Do you miss it, sex?

-I didn’t say . . . Well, all bad habits seem natural to us. Ask a smoker or a thumb-sucker.

-The Bible says it’s bad for a man to live alone.

-So I’ve heard. How about you?

-My husband left me.

-Why?

-For a younger woman.

-Simple as that? A cliché?

-Well, he’s the sophisticated kind. He performed the cliché with irony.

-How did Emily react?

-Oh, she blamed him, then herself, then me.

• • •

Was it true? Did I? I was eleven when it happened. I don’t remember being surprised or blaming. It was hardly abnormal to have divorced parents. The irritating thing as I remember it was that neither tried to spoil me, to win me over, which is what my friends gleefully predicted would happen. That was what I resented, wanting not the presents and treats, but to be the field of battle. There wasn’t any battle. Nothing the least bit stormy. I didn’t feel tugged either way, wanted or unwanted. Dad was the least bit guilty for the least possible time. That was when I scored my first Nikon. I struck while the iron was hot. But the camera was barely enough.

Mother was determined to be strict with me. Life is hard, work is all-important, to indulge oneself is to decay. “Discipline alone can save you and discipline begins with good habits.” By which she meant the absence of bad ones, those bad habits that he wisely said are so natural to us.

Rebellion: taciturnity accompanied by an obsession with photography. One picture would absolve me from having to speak a thousand words. The world, I thought, should be kept at a precisely calibrated distance, and yet would open itself to me, only me. I alone would pierce through it with the eye of a red-tailed hawk. Words penetrated nothing; on the contrary, words were always more or less lies. Barriers and baffles. No one could have been more sentimental about snapping pictures. Or more laconic.

But I really did love his books. I figured a hundred thousand of his words equaled five score first-rate photographs.

So I talked her into asking him for that interview, into taking me along just so I could take his picture. What I suppose I wanted was portraits of the boys in his books, with whom I was in love. I was sure I would find those boys in him. I was certain his face would be a palimpsest.

• • •

-Do you still write?

-Sometimes. A lot more often than I swim, not quite so often as I fly, or ride my horses. One has one’s favorite distractions. It’s beautiful country, isn’t it? Sundown, such a lovely word. Did you like the teriyaki?

-What are you writing?

-The truth, I hope. That’s to say . . . fiction.

-Only fiction can tell the truth?

-I believe people have different tastes in truth, if they have any taste at all for it, which is rare. That’s what I learned at the university.

-What do you mean?

-Each discipline, sometimes each professor, represented for me a different truth, or rather a different path leading to it. I quite liked physics and biology, for instance. But they weren’t my paths. Still, why rule them out?

-May I ask you something?

-What else have you been doing?

-You know what I mean.

-All right. I know.

-Why did you consent to let me interview you?

-Oh . . . I suppose I was feeling like one lonesome old cowboy.

-Emily likes you.

-Really? I’m surprised you say so. She doesn’t appear to like much of anything.

-She’s sixteen. It’s a pose, and it’s beginning to break down.

-It’s been nice having you here. I’m sorry you’re leaving.

-I guess it’s back to the salt mines tomorrow.

-New York is a salt mine. How about Emily?

-She gets to spend the next two weeks with her father. He and his new family are living it up in Maine.

-Does she want to go?

-Ask her.

-I don’t think I’d dare.

-Look, while I’m asking non-interview stuff--do you ever see your ex?

-No. You?

-Ran into him at a wedding last summer. When he bumped into me, spilling his drink by the way, I looked over his shoulder and said, “Excuse me, dear, but I think I see someone I don’t know.”

-Ha!

-Not too bad . . . on the spur of the moment like that.

-Why don’t you turn that thing off.

• • •

It’s odd how little the pictures have to say. Like the ones in people’s wedding albums. Good pictures prompt something, bad ones merely register. Histories versus chronicles. Bad pictures are heresies that seem like orthodoxy. The smiles are forced, the faces strained. Places are not quite times.

It’s almost too simple and that’s what makes me unsure. But there are such hints, like her saying “I guess” that last night, like his calling himself a “lonesome old cowboy,” like his being sorry to see us go, her at least. What did I do while they were saying such extraordinary things to each other when I wasn’t sitting with them? I must have had some sense of it, I’m sure, a thrill of something in the arid air. We were there all of two days. The bathroom smelled of pine resin and soap. What was I doing while they talked? Bathing? Something with a horse? Reading? Was there even a television? I do remember listening to his old records, sixties stuff. But so much of it is wiped out, unregistered. Shock, of course, will do that. Like an explosion that vaporizes the things around it. Whatever things were said when the recorder was turned off, they’re doubly lost.

• • •

-My life is empty. Yours is full.

-Only from a distance.

-You’re successful in the way of the world.

-I’ve been lucky in that respect. And you? There’s still quite a cult, you know. They’re still waiting for the next book. Emily, for instance--

-Oh, my ex-fame. It’s easier to say what makes for success than what will keep us from being defeated by life, which is how I feel. Calling it luck is, of course, a way of saying something while saying nothing, which is the function of most of what we say to each other. Which is all right too. Who could actually bear to live in a Shakespeare play? The strain would reduce us to sucking our fingers in no time. Even poets don’t speak sensibly let alone poetically, not the best ones at least. Most speech is hardly even an act of will. I only think when I write. Unfortunately, it’s easy to write without thinking.

-Unconscious inspiration?

-The id or the muses; either way’s a fancy way of saying luck.

-Emily only believes in pictures.

-The wave of the future.

-Or the wave of the very distant past.

-Emily’ll be all right.

-Yes, I really think so.

• • •

I’m making things up now, but who knows? He might have asked her to stay. Would she have told me that night? Could she possibly even have said yes? Mother acted peculiarly when we went to bed, girlish. We giggled in our room, shushed each other so he wouldn’t hear. I told her how I dreaded Maine and that made her happy. And then I told her that it was obvious he liked her, that he had said so when we were in the biplane. He hadn’t but I wanted to make her still happier and I did. She wanted details. It was like middle school.

We had to go but we could have come back, couldn’t we?

I could see she was afraid of the plane but she insisted. She wanted to go up too. She wanted a ride. Just five minutes before we left. Like me. Maybe so that he would say things to her in the plane, who knows? Flights of fancy.

He agreed. He grinned boyishly. He was delighted to agree.

They circled once then headed west, away from the early sun. I could see the plane going up and up. I had my camera but I didn’t think to take a picture. Before the take-off they both waved to me. I was slouching by the hangar and didn’t wave back. If I felt any dread it was only because I was already thinking of Maine.

I used to focus my lens on adults the way you do on animals whose way of living is a mystery to you. I was only an amateur with laughable pretensions. My goal wasn’t to understand anything but to subdue everything. I did want to steal souls, to rearrange the world, to find without having to look. I was young and lazy and arrogant.

Just the thinnest thread of smoke and I thought irrationally that, after all, it used to be a crop duster.

Physics and biology, two paths that can smash together in a single truth.

I could see that he tried to head back but the long southward bank kept prolonging itself until, unrecorded except in this memory, it turned irrevocably into something else.

Robert Wexelblatt is professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play; his recent novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction.

2011-05-29T08:55:00.000-07:00

Film Noir 8

photography by Stefan Randholm

Film Noir 8 photo by Stefan Randholm

Stefan Randholm on Film Noir 8

Jean d'Anvers is a Belgian actor and model who has worked with some of the best photographers in Belgium, and has participated in several movies and commercials. When he contacted me proposing we did a shoot together, I came up with the idea of a Film Noir based session.

Looking for someone to do the crucial "femme fatale" role, I was overwhelmed with the number of responses. I finally chose Irene Fernández, whose look and acting skills married perfectly with what we were trying to create. Irene is a trained actress and has performed in movies and on television shows here in Spain.

Finally, we had the privilege of being able to work with the international make-up artist Noelia Moreno, who has studied under some of the best MuAs in Belgium.

Location courtesy of Hotel El Fuerte, Marbella, Spain.

This was the most carefully planned shoot I have done so far, in terms of scouting locations and creating visual ideas prior to the shoot. I also felt really honoured to be able to work with such professional people as Jean, Irene and Noelia.

Strobist: SB900 in an Apollo 28" softbox boomed high CR. A Lumopro 160 with a persian blinds gobo CL in the back, for the shadows on the pillar behind them. Fired with Cactus V4s.

See the whole set here.

Stefan Randholm is a Swedish portrait photographer based in Marbella, southern Spain. Combining an engineering background with a strong artistic vein, he finds photography to be an exciting crossroads between art and technique. When working with his camera, Stefan uses light as his craft to set the scene for his portraits. However, the true magic, and the driver of Stefan’s motivation, is to be able to see how the character and personality of the subject is brought to life in the resulting images. Stefan is a people photographer, and takes it as his challenge to make a portrait that brings out the best of his subjects. Visit his website and flickr.

2011-05-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Last Call

by Heath Corlew

She had double D’s. They intimidated me and

she said what a lot

to poke fun at me because

I mumble

and have ADD and space out

and I think

although maybe I’m being paranoid.

But I think

she impersonates me to her friends and

they all have a laugh at me.

So the other night she calls,

says meet me at this other bar.

I know better but I go.

On the way I get a double jack and coke.

When I walk in

she’s on the couch.

I sit down next to her.

You’re looking lovely, I say.

What?

You’re looking cozy? I say.

What?

You’re looking cozy and lovely? I say.

What?

She’s making fun of me.

What a nice change.

I go to the bar and get a drink.

See my friend Joseph.

Heath, he says.

What up, I say. I never say that.

She’s got me all jumbled up.

How’s it going with?

Mary, I say.

She’s cute, she plays soccer.

She is cute and she does play soccer.

But nothing’s happened. I mean I

haven’t tried anything. I don’t know, I say.

I’m not even positive she’s heterosexual.

I sit back down beside her and fuck if she doesn’t

want to play patty cake.

I say I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.

She grabs my hands and lofts them up.

She slaps at them and I return twice slowly

then I stop.

She is having a real go of it now

and yelling encouragements at me

to participate?

I feel like there is a spotlight on us.

My vision goes blurry. The lighting in here

is maddening man, I don’t want

to play patty cake anymore.

What?

This all seems a bit cartoonish, I say.

What?

I clench my drink with both hands. I smile.

Her friend joins us on the couch.

She introduces him. I forget his name.

I try to ignore him sizing me up.

Behind his horn rimmed glasses

and despite his penny loafers

with tassels.

His sweater,

sickly,

tucked into his pants.

Like the candy bar. Heath bar he says

They laugh.

He reaches over to give me a fist bump

but I slink down back into the couch and

fix my eyes on the ceiling.

What does Heath bar do?

Oh a writer, well, he says. So what

have you written, Heath bar?

Your friend is an asshole, I say.

She pretends astonishment. What?

Back to the ceiling I go.

And there they go holding hands,

really rubbing all over each other

and the couch starts to shrink and now it

is more like a love seat. I cross my legs,

lean hard on the arm, examine the texture

of this

curious species of fake plant.

Fuck me. What am I doing here?

She opens one eye. What?

Autonomic nervous system hyperactivity smothers me,

consumes all ability to conjure words.

They get up, still making hand love.

Bye, she says.

The asshole winks. Heath bar.

The British reverse peace sign is all I have to offer

wanting to say nice fucking shoe tassels.

But

not caring to hear what,

Not ever a-fucking-gain.

I’m back on the ceiling, stroking the plant

when Joseph sits down beside me.

I think you just got dissed, he says.

I believe I just did, didn’t I.

At least now you know she’s not gay, he says.

I chug my drink,

get up to get another,

find in all this excitement

I’ve missed last call.

Heath Corlew has an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte. He is currently residing in Asheville, North Carolina where he works numerous boring part-time jobs to support his writing problem. He is 34 years old and was born in Pascagoula, Mississippi.