Too much anthology by Bud Smith

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TOO MUCH —Tales of Excess—  Essays, Stories and Poems

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Edited by Chuck Howe

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Copyright 2014 by UNKNOWN PRESS   All rights reserved. The writing in this anthology is used with permission of the writers, and the writers retain all rights to their work. Nothing may be reproduced without permission of the writer or publisher, unless the work is being quoted in short critical reviews or interviews.

edited by Chuck Howe cover by Erin McParland proof reading, and additional   editing by Emilie Rappoport   layout, interior design by Bud Smith

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ISBN-13: 978-1500216771

ISBN-10: 1500216771

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! Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows w h a t t o o m u c h i s a l l a b o u t . Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to

everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too

much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. Dedicated to everyone who knows what too much is all about. D e d i c a t e d to everyone who knows what too much is all about.

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CO NTENTS   !   13

Intro: Why Too Much  Chuck Howe

Full Becomes Empty  Meg Tuite

Buffalo Bob and Honey Dipper   Michael Gillan Maxwell

Poems  Dave Roskos

Please be Anonymous  Elynne Chaplik-Aleskow

Duke and Jill Stories  Ron Kolm

Just Keeping Shit Real Yo  Misti Rainwater-Lites

Shake Shoot and Squeeze  Gus Sanchez

Not Mother  Ryder Collins

Light and Doors  Sophia Sturges    I Need   Ron Burch

Poems   Puma Perl

Shite  John Saunders

Party Like an Animal  Robert Vaughan

Fat Woman Socializing  Melanie Page

Poems: I and V   Bekah Steimel

The Rube  James H. Duncan

Because I Love Her  Jack Leaf Willets

too much  Irene Stone

Under: A Sestina   Janice Bevilacqua

Beaten  Julie Allen

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E 233 rd Street  Junior Charles

107

Lost in the Matrix Again  Michael Gillan Maxwell

111

Chapstick Chick  Christina Hart

114

Dear Sarah Selecky  Trevor Dodge

118

Queens in Pieces  Senia Hardwick

121

Finances  Jeremiah Walton

127

Overfull: Bile and Cider  David S. Atkinson

131

Too Late  Misti Rainwater-Lites

133

Date with the Purple Haired Guy  Tracey Lander-Garrett

139

Drink More  Michael J. Hall

142

Frankie Comes in Hollywood  John Saunders

144

Resting on Three Legs  Gabriel Richard

158

Sleeping with Creepy Jesus  Ashley Perez

160

A Series of Unexpected Endings  Ted Jackins

176

Poems  Heather Dorn

204

About the Authors

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“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

-Mark Twain

Why Too Much?

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Chuck Howe

I had one cigar left. I decided I wasn't going to smoke it. I was going to quit for real, cold turkey. “I'll just smoke pot every time I want to light a cigar,” I thought to myself. Sure that this was a great idea. So I packed my big party bowl full and took a big hit. I left it on the table right in front of me. After smoking weed of course I wanted a cigar, so I took another hit. Of course after smoking more weed I really wanted a cigar, so I took another hit. Before capping it off with my old dutch guilder to put out the cherry, I thought I should probably take another hit. I picked up my guitar and started playing. After playing for a bit I found myself reaching for the cigar. “Dammit! No Chuck, no cigar for you,” I said to the air. I finished off what was left in the bowl. I packed it again, for the next time I wanted a cigar and left it out on the table. I was starting to get really high, so I picked up the guitar again. I played for a good long while but soon found myself desperately craving a cigar. Instead I lit the bowl again. I went outside to do some yard work and maybe get

my mind off of smoking. I picked up some random sticks and threw them over the fence. I felt like I accomplished something. I should celebrate, with a cigar. As I walked inside, I saw the bowl on the table and remembered that I wasn't smoking cigars anymore, so I took another hit. Now I was really high and really wanted a cigar. Another hit.â&#x20AC;¨ I tried doing sit ups and push ups. Again, once I finished, I just wanted a cigar. I finished the bowl and packed it again. I had gotten sweaty after the yard work and the small work out, so I figured I would hop into the shower. After the shower I really really really wanted a cigar. So I started up the new bowl, but it didn't help at all, so I smoked more, and more and more. Then I repacked the bowl again, and smoked more. I was so high that when I moved my foot a little, I jumped out of my chair thinking it was a snake. Finally I was so high, that I forgot why I was getting so high and just smoked the cigar. That is the story of the time I quit smoking cigars for three hours, and the day I decided to put together an anthology of stories of excess.

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Full Becomes Empty   Way Before It Should   Except For Credit Cards

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Meg Tuite

Excess: Wake up and think of all the shit I am supposed to do. Then lightness creates space for the profusion of paranoia that invades me. Today I have nowhere I have to be and no one to see. Yeah, a truckload of beers the evening before. Endless phone calls to bored, unhappy friends. The line of the night? “What the fuck did he say?”

Surplus: Closet: 99 t-shirts, 10 pairs of Allstars, 44 pairs of jeans/corduroys, 5 pairs of shorts, 3 pairs of flannel pj’s, 6 Victoria Secret fantasy separates, crotchless and silent, 66 pair of underwear: boy shorts, bikinis, thongs, battered, 2 bathing suits, 1 dress never worn, 13 bras from pumpkin orange to just another beige day, 16 belts: only 2 ever worn, a pile of socks holed or wholeless: 2 pairs of sandals for work, 1 pair of heels that sit back on their haunches all proud of their girlness, yet have never throbbed before an audience.

Plenty: cat food, dog food, cheese, milk, 22 IPAs, bread, tortillas, eggs (outdated) and nothing that worries me 15

when I count the rows of IPAs.

Intemperance: Sister doesn’t drink. She smokes pot. Pot = healthy choice, Beer = death. Sister's eye color the depth of two ripe tomatoes. Tomatoes count the number of times I go to pull another beer out of the fridge. Her tomatoes smile at my spidery beets. I am as simple as a can of soup. I drink and smoke pot. I believe everyone should sustain at least one vice. Sister shakes her head and whispers to friends that I am fucked up. She doesn’t tell them she smoked so much weed that she sees two of each of them and peed her pants three times. The walls are talking to both of us.

Abundance: I meet a girl I love who loves gin. She is happy when I come to her house. She asks what I drink and has her husband pick up the six-packs. We get wasted and she calls him ‘Treasure chest’ and keeps asking if he is angry. He seems non-committal. His eyes flicker with a vision of this scene that has replayed over and over for who knows how many years. The look in those eyes is not unfamiliar to me. She has me try on slinky dresses. Replace my hightops with high riding stilettos. It is all, ‘I get you,’ and ‘every moment is its own,’ and ‘tomorrow is a goddamn rubberband.’ The next morning someone has peed in the bed. We try to discern if it smells like dogs or cats. She laughs when I promise her it isn’t human.

Remainder: I open the mailbox and pull out the piles. ‘Vogue’ is dumped into the garbage. My husband orders endless magazines that wither my time and proclaim images that will never haunt me. I spare his motorcycle zines from the dump, but anorexic girls are swallowed up !16

into receptacles of waste and disappointment.

Lavishness: I don’t dream of fur coats and sports cars. A Jaguar pulls up along side me at a stop light. I look over at a bald man with balls the size of high-rises. He nods at me. I know he plays golf. I want to tee off on his hairless head. I want to spray paint his sports car into a high pink blush that any ‘Mary Kay Cosmetic,’ representative would orgasm over. I would like to use the ‘fur’ on his chest, back and genitals to coat Mel Gibson for the winter.

Bellyful: Yes, I say every morning. I will run 6 miles. I will go to the gym. I will do 200 sit-ups. I will expunge every bit of liquid that has pillowed my stomach. I stare at the ceiling. One of my cats scratches the abdominal apparatus that I bought on my last birthday. He uses it to sharpen his nails. I check my tummy and tuck it under the band of my elastic pajama edge. I know I will kick it. I make plans in my head. I walk out on my porch and the sun is that girl I knew in high school who hated me, made me sweat like an athlete. She was brutal, scorching and relentless. I will not run today.

Extravagant: I check my bank account. It is leaner than the spare change in my car ashtray. I pull out credit cards. Yes, I can go to New York. Yes, I can go to Chicago. Yes, I can go to Boston. I book them and send flowers to my Dad for his birthday. I notice one of my cats is howling a deep regret and jumping in and out of the kitty litter box every few minutes. Oh, shit. I am despondent. I love my animals more than anything. Can I afford the vet? Fuck it. I pull out the Care Credit card. There seems to be a card for anything that circles the circumference of my lack. 17

Buffalo Bob   and the Honey Dipper

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Michael Gillan Maxwell

The morning started out like any other, but my heart sank with dread as I heard the Honey Dipper wind down through the gears, chugging and heaving its way towards the Ranger Station. A crushing sense of doom and despair descended upon me as I watched it round the final bend, pass through the gate, and pull into the service yard where it groaned to a halt outside the bunkhouse, hissing and steaming like a dragon from Hades.   The Dipper existed to service the outhouses in the District campgrounds, pumping all manner of human excretion, toilet paper, baby diapers and other random objects from the toilets.  “You're on dipper duty this week,” the foreman barked. “Take one of your Navajo boys from the Ship Rock Reservation to ride shotgun with you.”   I picked Junior, a bull rider on the rodeo circuit who was easy to get along with.  Buffalo Bob drove the Honey Dipper. The embodiment of a cowboy straight out of a folk tale from !18

the American West, he was lean and wiry, of indeterminate middle age, but definitely old enough to be grizzled and crusty. We rumbled from place to place maintaining the campground privies, as he regaled us with outlandish tales from his past.   We were at the last campground before lunch. Junior plunged the nozzle into the pit. Buffalo Bob goosed the gas pedal on the Honey Dipper and the pump went into high gear. It whirred and whined and the hose sprung to life with a thick slurry of sludge surging through it. Junior struggled to maintain his grasp on the twisting, vibrating hose. The tail of a greased alligator would have been easier to hold onto.   Things flowed smoothly until the pump faltered, stuttered and wheezed like a cat coughing up a hairball. The hose jerked as something the size of a baby's head was sucked into the orifice. It traveled up the interior of the hose before stopping at the coupling where it completely clogged the flow. The hose looked like a python choking down a chicken.  “Shut it down!” I yelled.   Too late, the hose broke free from Junior's grasp and exploded at the coupling. It writhed and twisted like a serpent with its head cut off, spewing shit in all directions before Buffalo Bob threw the lever and cut the pump.  Junior stood bewildered and covered with excrement, still cradling his section of limp hose. The fecund stench was overpowering. I choked and gagged, pulled my bandana up and adjusted my rubber gloves.  “What the fuck is that? Get that thing out of there!” Bob said.  I reached in and pulled out a soft, mangled spherical object, dripping with chocolate colored goop.   19

“It's a friggin' grapefruit!” I said. “Goddamn campers! Can't they read the signs? Nothing but toilet paper in there! I can understand tampons and condoms, but grapefruits? C'mon!”   “Let's finish 'er up boys,” Bob said. “ It's lunchtime and I'm starved. I’m gonna eat a whole hat full a' them chili dogs!”

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! Untitled   !

Dave Roskos

“I can’t quit smoking. Know why? I have four other personalities who smoke. Yeah, I got four other people inside me who smoke. Sometimes I catch one trying to light a cigarette when I already have one lit. That’s how I know they’re there.”

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The AMA Kid

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Dave Roskos

Midway in my life’s journey I awoke on a stainless steel gurney, pulled the IV’s out, left against medical advice. Didn’t get invited anywhere anymore, not even to funerals. Boiled my future in a bent spoon burnt with soot.

! There is no climate control in hell. ! I will not be back here asking for another chance.

The lights of understanding have gone out. The line breaks are broken. the last words, last rites, spoken, performed; perfunctory, with ritualistic familiarity & ease. !22

The Poets Are Busy

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Dave Roskos

The poets are busy drinking themselves to death

metering out their breath in blurted drunken whispers muttering about imagined injustices vespering volcanic through tears elegiac in front of the liquor store at 6 a.m. the street lamps flicking out the metal mesh doors rolling up a pint bottle procession passing across formica countertops into coat pockets

if the poet had something to sell he’d hock it

make a crack pipe out of foil to parch spent lips upon

get a grip or be gone

WKCR

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Dave Roskos

my arm is still sore from the last time I shot up & it was over a year ago. I enjoyed being alone in a room w/ the radio on, sinking it into a vein & seeing the blood register, rapidly filling up the works with red wonder, & then SLOWLY pushing the plunger back in, sometimes with a rush, but always the warmth of the heroin spreading throughout my body !24

in a wave, the eyes opening & closing, the dreamy nod of a cadaverâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; as Phil Shapp jabbered on so soothingly, reassuringly. no matter how down & out ya got you could tune in & be healed & educated By Jazz.

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Please Be Anonymous Elynne Chaplik-Aleskow   My sister Linda and I each separately went into the bathroom we shared with our other two sisters. We had to weigh ourselves before we left the house on our dreaded journey. We would allow ourselves to be tortured before we would divulge our weight. When I celebrated my sixteenth birthday, the number of pounds on my driver’s license was what I weighed when I was fourteen. I would not change that number until I had to make up a new number when I turned twenty-one. Linda and I were desperate. We were sugar addicts who wanted to be thin. We tried every diet imaginable. On the newest fad liquid diet that had women watching pounds melt away, I gained weight. I cried all day after weighing myself, having been totally committed for one week to liquids for two meals and a healthy dinner. Linda struggled as well on frozen dinner diets. Nothing worked for us in the end because even if we lost a few pounds, we eventually succumbed to binging on our favorite sugar treats. And for some reason, the universe would never allow both of us to be successful in dieting at the same !26

time. One day Linda and I had a heart-to-heart. I could barely say my thought out loud. “I have read about something. I am not sure we will have the courage to do it but I don’t know what else we can try.” Linda was cautiously watching my facial expressions as I spoke. “Have you ever heard of Overeaters Anonymous?” I barely whispered. “Yes,” Linda replied in an even softer volume. She lowered her eyes. I thought she was going to cry. Here sat two sisters blessed in so many ways except for the family genes that determined the route and result of everything we ate. We were beaten by our cravings. Sugar had won. Our resolve had collapsed.  “Tell no one,” I said. “This is our most private secret.” We nodded to one another and before God that we would never tell a living soul what we were about to do. The next Saturday, I asked my mother if I could borrow her car to go to a movie with Linda. I did not like lying to my mom, but I felt we had no choice. I had researched OA and found that meetings were held at a hospital thirty minutes from our home. We easily found parking on the street. I turned off the engine. My sister and I took deep breaths and sat for a moment. “Do you really think we should do this?” Linda asked looking at me, her older sister, for guidance. “I don’t know what else we can do,” I answered gently. “I just don’t think we have a choice anymore.” I felt so protective of my sister. What was I getting us into? 27

We opened our doors and both slowly got out of the car. We walked up the hospital sidewalk and entered through the door leading to the reception desk. We let others in line go ahead of us so no one would hear our question.

When we were alone at the reception desk, I put my face close to the receptionist’s so she could hear me in my softest voice. “Excuse me. Can you please tell us where Overeaters Anonymous meets?” “Room 506,” she answered. “Take the elevators behind you.” Linda swears that she then looked both of us up and down and smirked but I never saw it. When the elevator opened on the fifth floor, Linda and I were frozen yet somehow disembarked. For ten minutes we tried to find room 506. The hospital layout was very confusing. When we finally found it, it did not look like an OA group meeting inside but rather a hospital staff meeting. With courage, I walked to the door and opened it. The entire room became silent and turned toward me. In a whisper I asked the person sitting closest to the door, “Can you tell me where Overeaters Anonymous is meeting?” And in the loudest volume a human is capable of p r o d u c i n g , h e a n s w e r e d , “ O V E R E AT E R S ANONYMOUS MEETS ACROSS THE HALL.” I told Linda I was sure that every staff member in that room looked me up and down and snickered. Linda and I turned around and crossed the hall. We entered OA and sat down. It did not take five minutes to !28

know we had made a huge mistake in coming there. The members of this Chapter were hard core sugar addicts with life experience way beyond ours. If we were headed in that direction, we were nowhere close to being there yet. I took my sister’s hand and we excused ourselves as being in the wrong place. In the car, we looked at one another with relief. “This may be the motivation we needed,” Linda said. We drove to the movie theater and intended to have no popcorn or candy. Not possible.

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DUKE AND JILL

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Ron Kolm

Duke and Jill do drugs. They live on the corner of Avenue A and 10th Street, in a mostly burnt-out building. Duke is originally from Wisconsin. Jill is from Wisconsin, too. They don't have much else in common. Bad things keep happening to them. Their best friend, a junky, rents a truck from a company on Lafayette Street, backs it up over the curb, kicks in their apartment door, and takes all their stuff. The TV, the stereo, even their beat-up sofa. He knows they'll be out, getting loaded in a neighborhood bar, trying to score some coke. In fact, they’re waiting for him to show up with some reasonable blow. Duke is pissed. He buys a gun, a .38 caliber, used, but still workable, from a guy he knows on the street. Duke and Jill don't fight much the next couple of weeks—she doesn't trust Duke not to shoot her if the going gets too hot. So things chill out for a while. One night Duke is sitting around getting loaded. In that condition he hears a banging on the hastily repaired door. He gets his gun and tucks it into his belt, and opens the door, unbolting a newly installed double-bar police lock. !30

The guy at the door turns out to be a friend, a member of a crypto-punk band he likes a lot. Wow, you got a gun, the friend says. Yeah, but it's not loaded, Duke replies. He points the gun at the ceiling and pulls the trigger. The hammer clicks. I just keep it around to scare Jillâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;keep her in line, he laughs. Actually, I got it to blow away the scumbag who stole our stuff. If I ever see his ass in the neighborhood heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gone. Man, let me see that thing, his friend says, excited by the unusual toy. He points the gun at a boarded up window and pulls the trigger. The hammer clicks again. He giggles and aims the gun at his temple. Deer hunter, he says, and pulls the trigger. A bright flash of orange sound bounces around the nearly empty room, stunning Duke and momentarily blinding him. After the police leave, Jill calls all their friends to tell them the news. She has to shout to be heard above the sound of Duke vacuuming the dried blood off their shag carpet.

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DUKE AND JILL HAVE A PARTY

Ron Kolm

The rent was going up. Someone had died in their apartment. It seemed like a good time to split. So Duke and Jill packed their stuff and moved east, to Avenue D. They decided to have a party to celebrate their new place. Duke bought a couple of six-packs and some bags of chips, and Jill made dip. Duke also borrowed some tapes from a buddy. Mostly Latin-type dance music. That was about it. They put out the word, and maybe twenty people showed up. Brought some bottles, and a generous amount of reefer. There wasn't much conversation, because, really, there wasn't much to talk about. Everyone just sat around getting loaded. Jill’s old boyfriend, Arnie, was there. He kept his eye on her and, when Duke disappeared into the next room with a young thing, they got together. The party got wild. Everyone took their clothes off. Jill took pictures. Everyone agreed that they were having a really good time. So it was a real bummer when, later, the developed rolls of film got mailed to Jill's mother by mistake.

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JUST KEEPING SHIT REAL, YO

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Misti Rainwater-Lites

I had just left my husband of three years for my boyfriend of one week. I was a single white woman struggling to survive in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I felt like there was a conspiracy against me because of my racial heritage (Swiss Scottish Irish French Cherokee, mostly) and my lack of people skills. I showed up at work drunk a few hours early one morning because I needed to send my boyfriend an apologetic e-mail. My boss didn’t understand. I was fired a few days later. The universe was fucking with my shit and I didn’t appreciate it. “What’s going on?” my boyfriend asked, calling me one night from Oakland.  “Oh, I just watched ‘8 Mile’ three times in a row. I’m gonna watch it again,” I said.  “Uh. Is that a good idea?”  “What do you mean? It’s a great movie and I’m feelin’ it.”  “I saw it once with my son when it came out two years ago. It’s okay. But why would you watch that or any other movie four times in a row? That doesn’t seem healthy.”  “Oh wow. You aren’t fuckin’ around. You seriously disapprove. 33

Look, it’s like this, yo…it’s rare that I stumble across a film that resonates with me as much as this one does. I’m thinkin’ of writin’ some raps, you know what I’m sayin’?”  “Okay.”  “We come from the same place, me and Eminem. Well, I’m a native Texan, as you know. But Wichita Falls is eerily similar to Detroit. He’s white. I’m white. He lived in a trailer house. I lived in a trailer house. His mom is a flake. My mom is a flake. People made fun of him and his boss bullied him. It’s like we’re cosmic twins. How hard can it be to rap? I’ve been writin’ poems and shit for years. I just need to start rhymin’, dawg.”  “Misti, you’re scaring me.”  “Damn, I thought you would be excited for me. You’re in Oakland, California. Don’t you feel the gangsta vibe? Shit couldn’t be more real than it is in O-Town. But this shit in Albuquerque is pretty goddamn real, too, and I’m feelin’ it like a ton of bricks. Tryin’ to find a job, maintain, prove myself to all the haters. It ain’t nothin’ nice, yo.”  “I’m flying in tomorrow night. I was going to ask you to pick me up from the airport.”  “I’ll be there. I’ll have at least one new rap to share with you. It’ll be fun! Don’t worry, dawg.” The ending to this anecdote is bittersweet. My boyfriend didn’t dump me. As a matter of fact, he married my insane ass. But I never wrote a single rap. I still think there’s a conspiracy against my kind.

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SHAKE, SHOOT AND SQUEEZE

Gus Sanchez

Somewhere between the fifth and sixth shot of tequila, I realized I had a real mess in my hands. A drinking contest? Why not, right? I was going to prove to a group of college-age strangers, and to an establishment that served shot after shot of tequila to an underage drinker, that I could pound booze better than anyone in that room, alright. It was a stupid idea, yes, but stupid ideas were always the ones to be best entertained, if you asked me. And this was one really fucking stupid idea. That night, at a bar in San Diego, not only was this a bad idea, but this was the night I graduated into full-scale drunkenness. It was a state that I would stay in for the better part of a decade. I was in San Diego to attend the annual College Yearbook Organizations conference. Every year, yearbook organizations from colleges in the US and Canada attend a massive conference to meet with industry leaders (read: publishers and other vendors), attend workshops on the latest techniques and tools of the trade, and meet other yearbook organizations. The workshop on a new layout software called Adobe PageMaker was something I was mildly interested in. I would attend the conference with 35

Laurie, the Editor-in-Chief, and Mark, the Photo Editor (also Laurie’s boyfriend, later her husband). The registration fees, hotel, and airfare all paid for by the college. We would spend five days out in San Diego. The plan was to meet fellow colleagues, and learn valuable skills that would help us improve our yearbook.  We didn’t learn shit, because we didn’t bother to attend a single day of the three-day conference. Instead, we lounged by the pool, rented a car and drove up the coast, and enjoyed the weather. If the university ever found out the fraud we committed, there was no doubt the university would expel us. After a couple of nights, Laurie agreed Mark and I should have a night to ourselves. Not that either of us would have minded her company, but she must have sensed that Mark and I wanted a boy’s night out. After a few days and nights of being on our best behavior, we wanted to taste the San Diego nightlife. I had met Mark the semester before, and it wasn’t long before he and I not only became good friends, but drinking buddies. Mark was a stone-cold drinker, a guy who could hold his booze. All this before he turned twenty-one. A couple of locals mentioned a bar near the San Diego State University campus. A college bar, they told us, so we’d fit right in. Problem: I was underage. I could walk into any bar in New York City and not show any ID, but I wasn’t sure I could get away doing the same in sunny, laid-back California. “Don’t worry about it,” Mark said. “Worse comes to worse, we’ll find another bar if we get carded where we’re going. If we get carded elsewhere, we’ll buy a 12-pack at a convenience store and hang out by the pool.” !36

The bouncer at our destination stopped us at the door. He sized us up, taking his time. “You here for the event?” he asked. Of course, we agreed. He gave us each a neoncolored wristband and pointed us in. The bar was teeming with college-age excitement on a weeknight. To one side, a gaggle of frat boy types were hopping around like speed-addled fools to House of Pain’s “Jump Around.” Above the U-shaped counter at the center of the bar hung a banner that read:   “TEQUILA TRIATHLON: SHAKE, SHOOT AND SQUEEZE!”

“What’s a ‘tequila triathlon’?” I asked Mark. An evil grin erupted across Mark’s face. “Something you’re going to take part in,” he replied, as if the decision weren’t mine to make. He gave me a crash course on the fundamentals of a “tequila triathlon.” You shake a pinch of salt from a shaker onto the fleshy flap of skin between your thumb and index finger and lick the salt off. Then, take a shot of tequila, and finish off by squeezing the juice from a lime wedge into your mouth. Tequila wasn’t my drink of choice at all. I’d done a few shots, without the salt and lime, now and then. Beer and vodka were my go-to drinks, with a little Jack and Coke tossed in for good measure. I did a couple of test shots, and declared myself fit for drinking duty. I had no doubt I’d win this completion, the object being to shake, shoot, and squeeze as many shots of tequila as possible. Some of the contestants the master of ceremony lined up looked like pushovers. Serious lightweights. The only questions needing answers were how fast I could down as many shots as possible, and 37

who’d play for second place. As the only out-of-towner introduced in the competition, I was greeted with polite boos. I’ll play the heel, I thought, I’ll antagonize my opponents. “I’m from New York City; I’m used to being drunk and functional by 9AM!” The MC obliged with some verbal volleyball of his own, but it made no difference, I was going to bring all the attention to myself. There was an air of boozy anticipation in the bar as the MC explained the rules. Shake the salt, do your shot, squeeze your lime, and tap the counter to signal you’re ready for another round. The bartenders lined ten shots across the U-shaped counter, a shaker of salt to our left, a bowl full of lime wedges to our right. Mark, standing behind me, was doing his best impression of a sleazy promoter, playing up my drinking abilities to everyone around him. He wasn’t unlike Bill Murray pimping a gullible John Candy against those female mud wrestlers in Stripes. Mark was even taking bets that his man was going to drink all other opponents under the table. “…and ladies and gentlemen, please, NO BETTING ALLOWED!” announced the MC. That doesn’t deter Mark whatsoever. “Contestants! Are you ready?” we’re asked. We’re ready, but I was having my doubts. What the hell was I getting myself into? I could have come to my senses and walked out of the bar, but I had a role to play and a contest to take part in. “Shake, shoot, and squeeze!” And we’re off. It didn’t take long for a few of the contests to throw in the towel. One threw up on the floor. The first two shots tasted awful, and I was beset by a flash of regret. But there !38

is this weird reverse logic that takes place when you’re drinking something that tastes bad at first. In time, you get used to the taste. You even begin to like it. The salt and lime are helping. I was in a rhythm, pinching the right dash of salt, savoring the lime juice exploding in my mouth. The crowd was cheering the boozy triathletes on like we were prized thoroughbreds, thundering across a liquid Churchill Downs. The MC is calling the action with breathless excitement. After shot number five, the din of the crowd had begun to lessen. I couldn’t hear the crowd for some reason, but I can hear myself breathing, as if I were wearing a covered helmet. That first lightning-fast jab of nausea landed a stinging blow. My head was shaking. Both my hands were on the counter, palms down. “You okay?” Mark asked, patting me on my shoulder. No, I’m not okay. I’m taking long breaths, to keep that growing wave of nausea under control. “Listen, if you want to quit, just say so, okay?” He can see I’m in a little distress. “Give me a cigarette,” I whisper. This is my “Cut me, Mickey!” moment. One long drag, and it awoke me from what soporific, nauseous spell the tequila had me under. Suddenly, I can hear the room buzzing again. Pearl Jam is playing through the loudspeaker. Alive…oh! I’m still a-live, yeah, yeah! I-I-oh-oh, I’m still a-live, yeah-yeah! Perfect. Shot glass filled, I answer the bell for the next round. And the next round. And the next. Shot number six…shot number seven…shot number eight…shot number nine. Ten drinkers, now down to four. “Quitters!” I yell, slamming both fists on the counter. I’m getting dirty, 39

glassy-eyed looks from the other three chumps I need to beat to be crowned Tequila Triathlon Champion. I hadn’t realized Mark was drinking just as much as I was, which was a bad thing. He was our ride, after all. I do another shot, number ten. The taste of agave, the tartness of lime, that metallic bite of nausea, and a steady stream of saliva, all these begin to fill my mouth. I turn towards Mark and give him the thumbs up. With all the booze he’d been consuming, he was as straight as the horizon on the Pacific Ocean. I light another cigarette, this time taking longer to inhale. I rapped my knuckle on the counter, signaling to the bartender that I want another shot. Everything started to slow down, and not in a good way. I shook the pinch of salt onto my hand, the pinch sprinkling everywhere but between my thumb and index finger. The shot goes down, but just. The lime juice squibbed down my chin. My hands were shaking as I flipped the shot glass upside down. Shot number eleven. I picked up my cigarette from the ashtray, forgetting to flick the long stream of ashes. I turned to Mark, who betrayed a panicked look. I closed my eyes…

! !

I woke up the next morning with my mouth tasting like cotton balls and puke. I should have been in a panic – how the hell did we get back to the hotel in one piece? And why wasn’t I dead from alcohol poisoning? My hangover hurt, but I managed. A hangover cure of water and coffee, to re-hydrate and awaken me would do the trick. Followed by a large everything omelet with extra bacon and four slices of rye bread to settle an angry stomach. Mark and Laurie met me at the restaurant downstairs. !40

She was shaking her head, disapproving of her two boy charges’ late night boozy romp. “We should go back there tonight,” I declare. “Not after what you did,” Mark replied. What I did, after closing my eyes, was vomit all over the bar counter, fall backward off my barstool, throw up once again, this time on the snakeskin boots of the MC trying to pick me up off the floor, and get tossed out onto the street by a pair of bouncers. “You’re sticking to Cokes all day and night, understood?” There would be many more nights like this to come. Nights when I was falling down the slippery slope into full-blown alcoholism. One day, it all ends: you figure out when enough is enough, when you’re no longer trying to drown something either down or out of you anymore. When just one glass of small batch bourbon on ice will satisfy the urge to enjoy a drink for the pure pleasure of it all, and nothing more.

NOT MOTHER

! ! !

Ryder Collins

There’s no one to see about this desire to be the evil stepmother. The hater has no one to talk to because the parents stopped talking to her after her final freak-out; she’s an only child and will never know the love of sisters (but she has seen it/will see it & her life will never be the same); her ex-boyfriends surround her & the more ex they are the more they hate the closer they live… We all know the less they hate the further they move away: if they are far far away they think they love her again & their wives cry or finally give up & pack up the bags & kick them out. Except for that one. You. That one is the one the hater wants to step-mother the childrens for. She wants to step in as mother after the xanex-wife packs her bags & pills up because the ghost has finally let her in on the secret that her husband’s immune. The ghost sings to xanex-wife as she sings in the shower; she sings, he’s a cold-hearted snake and the ghost sings back, helpless, helpless, helpless.

Her husband’s immune, immune to it all – the love, the hate; the wife’s love/hate, the hater’s hate/love. The husband passes it off as between the two. The hater wants him to choose. She wants the ghost to step in. She wants a deus ex machina or some shit, she wants to be evil step-mother, evil queen cos that’s the only Disney role she saw herself in (that & Thumper, but that’s just another way to say sex-crazed) since Cinderella and Snow White were too twee & too perfect & too innocent & sad; & the 15 year old girl’ll come down for breakfast, she’ll be all ready for school in her hip 15 year old way with leggings & mini-skirt & indecent (according to high school standards) tank top not too concealed under a cashmere cardigan, & she’ll see the hater & she’ll say, You’re not my mother. It is her gut reaction. It is not cool or hip & she knows this & this makes her even angrier & she’ll stand there while the hater hovers with pancakes behind her ready for the plate (all of a sudden she’s made chocolate chip pancakes!) and there’s a loaf of the step-mom’s best bread in the oven. The kitchen smells like home & the teenager smells like teen spirit. She smells like Ouija boards & corroded batteries; like red vines & orthodontia; like candle wax & masturbation. She does not sit down; she does not back up into the fry pan of flapjacks either. The teenager says, I’m not gonna eat anything you ever make. The teenager’s smart in the way of fairy tales & mythos. Smart on an unconscious level mostly. Plus, she saw Pan’s Labyrinth and she’d screamed at the girl not to eat any of that banquet.

The step-mom says nothing. She just flips the chocolate chip pancake in the pan to waft the aroma forward.

The teenager says, Not. Fucking. Ever. She backs up into the step-mom; she wants the step-mom to drop the fry pan, to make a mess all over the clean kitchen floor. She knows her daddy hates a mess. She knows her daddy, or at least she thought she did. It doesn’t work. The step-mom’s got super hater reflexes. She grabs the teenager’s arm with her free hand; she hisses, Just you wait.  She twists the girl’s arm in an Indian burn. She forces her to sit down. The step-mom sits at the table. She spatulas a pancake onto the daughter’s plate. She says, Eat. The teenager just scowls. Like all teenagers everywhere. The step-mom says, Just you wait. You’ll go to college soon. She hands the girl the butter; she hands the girl some syrup. She says, Eat, eat. She says, You’ll gain the freshman fifteen. You’ll be all chubby & stressed & the acne’ll be popping out all over your t-zone & your hair’ll be all lank & you’ll come home for the holidays & I’ll be here. The girl doesn’t eat; the girl doesn’t look up from her plate even. She doesn’t seem to be scowling anymore, tho. The step-mom smiles. The step-mom says, I’ll be here & your adorable little half-sister bundle of joy just born a couple months before’ll be in my arms. The step-mom reaches over and cuts a piece of the girl’s pancake & puts it her mouth & chews. Yum, she says. 44

There is silence. The step-mom says, You’ll soon be replaced. The girl’ll go to school with an empty ache; the stepmom’ll eat all her pancake up. The hater does have some hate in her. It is not all her neighbor’s hate that’s projected out. The hater hates that she’s never been allowed normalcy, intimacy; that when a man loves her the farther away he seems to get. Well, actually, he doesn’t seem to… all of a sudden he’s promoted and asked to re-locate for his job or someone in his family dies or he wins a trip or something happens that makes him hop on a plane, a train, even a Greyhound or a steamboat (once a submarine) and he goes far far away… She’s never been allowed her own family. She’s never been the matriarch; she’s never been pregnant and watched her belly swell and stretch. She’s never made bread for a fetus inside her. She’s never watched her own belly slowly proof over nine months; the spongy yeasty thing expanding, forming. She’s never cussed like a sailor as a head and then a body pushed its way out her; she’s never held the swaddle & smiled at the man she’s just cussed out; she’s never cut up hot dogs into tiny pieces because of choking hazards. She’s never flown a kite or jogged slowly next to a child on a training-wheeled bike or cussed a bitch who let her dog get too close to her toddler. The hater’s never jogged, anyway, but still. Still her hate manifests in fantasies as most hate does for the peeps who have no way to change things. (The three sisters can change things but the hater doesn’t even know they exist; if she’s whispered about around the bonfires, they are only whispered about when the embers 45

have cooled and all of the children & most of the dogs & some of the gerbils are asleep.) She is evil step-mom in more ways than one, without even trying it seems in her fantasy. She’s putting on first one and then another black silk stocking. Her breasts are black bra-ed and she is twisted elbow and hip, ribs nicely accentuated as she attaches the thigh to her garter clip. She’s got her leg up on the bed; she’s already done one. The bedroom door’s slightly ajar… perhaps the ghost. She’s sweaty and cussing, but you can’t tell that from the hallway. From the hallway, the stepson looks and looks. From the hallway, the stepson overtakes the stepmother’s fantasy. From that long hallway, the stepson peeps and in peeping the stepson overtakes; the stepson shows the stepmother that again she has no power. The stepson coup d’etats her fantasy; the stepson eats her up with his eyes through that door someone (something?) left ajar. The stepmother’s watched again and again. The stepmother bends and bends, trying to connect that little clip to the slippery silk of her stocking. The tiny ribbon that keeps the clip from ripping the stocking keeps slipping. She’s fumbly fingers & twisted ribs & heaving bosom & it is the cliché bosoms straining against the black silk in the stepmother’s frustration that catches up the stepson. The stepson sees why his father left his mother. The stepson absorbs the curve of this hip & the cut of the knee & the thrust of the breasts underneath the black silk and the stepson wants to touch & the stepson puts his hand to his penis & the stepson thinks Oedipus and the stepson fantasizes that he goes into his father’s bedroom and he takes those garters and rips the stockings free; that he pushes his new mother onto the bed & buries his head in her breasts and what color are her nipples? and 46

he has never seen live-living nips and then he thinks of his father and thinks of his mother and then doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think of either because theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve both been replaced and how.

LIGHTS AND DOORS

! !

Sophia Sturges

The morning began like many before. I was tired from staying up too late, and coffee was already brewing in the kitchen. The kids were awake too. I loved hearing their pattering feet and sleepy voices. They were only quiet when they were asleep. The TV was playing an obnoxious children’s show, but I didn’t notice things like that anymore. Selective hearing is a skill parents develop to prevent insanity. I made breakfast for everyone, and asked him again if he could listen to the song I stayed up to record the night before. “I don’t have time,” he said. We ate in silence. He grabbed some things to bring for lunch and headed out the door. The back door slammed, and then the garage door. I heard his car drive away. I turned off the light above the kitchen sink. I played with the kids. We talked and listened to each other. I asked them to please not slam doors. I explained about the time their aunt lost part of her pinky in a door. They solemnly agreed. The sun was shining, so we were drawn outside. One drew shapes with sidewalk chalk on the cobblestones. The other caught bugs and put them in his bug house. I pulled weeds and sprayed vinegar on the !48

remaining roots until my back hurt. The yard smelled like a salad. I drove the older one to preschool for a few hours. The younger one stayed with me, and we played with little plastic people. I did dishes and laundry, while she sat on the floor and colored. We ate lunch and read stories.   Days always passed by quickly. Preschool was almost over. On our way to pick him up, we had to stop at the grocery store to get things for his birthday party the next day. He wanted an Iron Man party. We bought a cake and snacks. The younger zoomed around in a grocery cart that looked like a car, and when we finished, we rushed out. I drove my van up to the door. The ladies made eye contact with me and spoke importantly into their walkietalkies. The double doors opened, and one of them brought him out. He was little, so she boosted him up into the back. Then she smiled and waved, as the door clicked shut. Mission accomplished. I felt like we should be playing spy themed-music, but we were playing John Mayer. This was my John Mayer phase. We asked him about his day and chatted all the way home. I snuck the bags and cake box inside with us. Then, I called their dad to fill him in on the details, but I got his voicemail. He didn’t call me back. We didn’t talk much these days. Neither of them took naps anymore, so we played all afternoon. There was some more TV time as I made dinner. This time I did not hear the car drive up. The garage door slammed, and then the back door. There was a pattering of feet and excited voices at the reunion. That always made me smile. He walked by and hung the keys on a hook by !49

the pantry. He walked over and turned on the light above the kitchen sink. I asked him how his day was. He was tired. I asked him if he could listen to my song that night while I was at work. He said he would try. I told him about my to-do list for the party on my way out the door.   I returned at 11 pm. The house was a wreck. He was on his computer. I asked him what happened. He was annoyed, so I asked him if he listened to my song. He said, “No, not yet.” I cleaned in silence for an hour, putting things away, doing dishes, and mopping. I turned off the light above the kitchen sink. I looked at my list. I had too much to do, so I asked for help. He complained that it was his free time, and he should be able to do what he wanted. He said, “Why do you always have to do so much for their parties?” I asked him, “Can you please just put these goodie bags together? I think I’m going to be up at least another 2 hours.” He said, “That’s 2 am! You endanger the kids by staying up late all the time! You won’t be as alert…” But he relented, and asked me what he needed to do. “Can you glue these Iron Man pictures to the fronts of the bags, and fill them with the candy? I couldn’t find very much Iron Man themed stuff, so I had to improvise.” He sighed. He continued to play his game. I walked away. A little later, he said he was going to bed. I walked over to the table, and Iron Man was glued to 10 bags, but the bags were empty. I went downstairs and said, “We need to talk.” He said his blood pressure was too high to have a serious talk. The door slammed in my face. I stood there for a second, not sure if I should force a needed conversation, or make sure that everything was !50

done for the party the next day. The conversation seemed like a lost cause, so I slowly climbed the stairs. I walked through the empty kitchen and turned off the light above the sink again. I finished decorating the dining room and making appetizers by myself. I thought about how happy he would be to see all his family and friends.   And then it happened. It came on suddenly. I finished everything, sank to the ground and started to cry. I felt exhausted and defeated. These were not gentle tears, but a blinding, flooding stream of tears that ran down my face and soaked my shirt. My heart hurt. When had I become this person? I didn’t recognize myself anymore. When did I lose my voice? Why had I stopped talking? I felt like my soul was dying. When had I stopped demanding more for myself? The tears kept falling. Was this the sort of life that I had imagined for myself as an adult? Would I be proud to know someone like me? I cried harder. I felt pathetic and alone. I was so disappointed in myself. I stumbled to the couch and collapsed under a blanket. I paused to gulp air, and tried to calm down, but I lay there feeling terrified. I realized I couldn’t see a future with him anymore. I had spent my entire adult life with that man, yet I couldn’t imagine what we would talk about when the kids were grown and had moved out of the house. I didn’t see us as old biddies holding hands in the coffee shop. I had better conversations with strangers. We had no intimacy anymore. Was this the relationship I wanted? When was the last time we were happy together? My future was suddenly uncertain, and that scared me. What would happen to the kids if I started working fulltime? Who would watch them? I cried again at the thought. Could I get a job that would support us well enough to live on my own? I couldn’t bear the thought of !51

working full-time at the job I had before. I hated it. Could I get another degree? Change my profession? How could I work and go to school at the same time as a single mom? How would we manage sharing the kids? The racing thoughts broke my heart again. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know the answers, but I did know that I had been doing too much, for too long. Unconsciously, I was trying to find the courage to leave, to be alone. I wanted a divorce.

!52

I NEED

! !

Ron Burch

You come to my place asking for money. I ain't got any, I say. You stand in the open doorway of my apartment. You are thin, pale. Your habit has consumed you. You have sores and you rub your arms. You wear a dirty white tshirt and torn jeans. Your blond hair looks like straw that sat too long in the field during a hot sun and your once beautiful green eyes are faded as if turned down by a dimmer. I need some money, you say again. You rub your arms like you're making a wish. I don't have any more to give you, I reply. I've been giving you money for years, I say. Every time you come here, I give you something. I've been doing this for years, I say. We've had wrinkles grow in those years like tree rings, that's how long it's been. I need money, you say. I'm not sure you even know what you're saying. You just say it. By rote. By need. The heart needs to beat and I am the blood. You don't talk to me any other time. You don't come here to sleep. You don't come here for sex. Or to eat. Or to watch tv and talk about how lame the commercials are or why that scene in the movie was funny as you once did. !53

You don't come here to drink all my liquor and to throw up in my sink. You don't wear my old gray sweatshirts in the morning and drink cold coffee because you can't wait to warm it up in my small microwave. I have tried many times to help you. Rehab and AA. Doctors and shrinks. But you fuck other men, you fuck strangers, as if to get back at me for trying to help. You only talk to me when you need what you need, when you come to my door and knock and say, I need. I went to a shrink a couple times myself because I needed to talk to someone about this situation. The shrink cost me more money than I wanted to pay. He stated I was co-dependent. I said what the fuck does that mean? He said I was part of your problem. That I was keeping you in the state that you are. I told him that no one else cared about you. That if I didn't help, no one else would. Your family has cut you off for all the things that you have done. But he said I was part of the problem. And before I left, I almost took a swing at him. He told me he didn't think we should see each other again. I agreed. I want to give you warmth and comfort. I want to take you in my arms. I want to shield you from the pain that you put me through and for some strange reason even though we have never been in a relationship or have had sex or have been friends since childhood but merely because we shared a place, a time, and I care about you even though I do not know sometimes why I do. I need money, you say to me again and I do not know what to do at this point. I don't know what to do anymore so I say that I'm sorry and I close the door. And I stand there and hear you eventually shuffle across the slanting porch and down the crooked steps, disappearing behind the bloom of the only red jacarandas that light up this !54

blighted street and I hope that my decision will help you fix your way but deep down I know and I'm sorry, yes, I am so sorry that it won't.

! !

!55

DRIVING THROUGH THE BRONX   WITH BUKOWSKI

! !

Puma Perl

Looking for Lou’s Café. Boston Road’s a wide street lined with body shops, car lots and garages, I’m finally close to my destination following a series of wrong turns, crossed lines, circles. Rain, fog, five o’clock December darkness, my night vision’s shot, car fumes reek like dead raccoons, defogger’s broken, dull blades scrape the windshield loudly and ineffectively, but I give little thought to my safety or to my questionable ability to navigate the barren Bronx landscape, strangely deserted on this Saturday afternoon.

I think only of Bukowski. Bukowski on the Vernon overpass, broken gas tank, wires dangling against his leg, fucking Bukowski and his freeway life, Bukowski !56

in my head, I’m writing like Bukowski, I’m driving like Bukowski, going to the track like Bukowski, and I don’t even go to the track any more and when I did it was nothing like Bukowski, but in my whore of a memory everything is fucking Bukowski, my voice lost in Bukowski, I don’t even think like myself whatever that self is, and even when I’m lost in the Bronx in the rain in the fog driving past donut shops, I assume I will somehow arrive at my destination exactly on time, which I do, head straight to the back of the bar as if I’d been there before, change my shoes, remove my hat, and smile since I don’t look so bad after all, probably better than Bukowski did, driving on the Vernon Overpass, with his dangling wires and broken gas tank, Bukowski and his freeway life, me and my New York streets, running reds, barreling through yellow lights and stop signs. Driving through the Bronx. Driving with Bukowski.

!57

CHLOE’S ASS (with a big thanks to Courtney Love)

Puma Perl

Chloe flips her blue plaid schoolgirl skirt into the air Big Mike snaps at her perfect round ass, Mary’s full gorgeous breasts, Rosabella’s silhouette, and me and me and me,

and me, I am forever orange. Russian legs planted on Aida’s shag rug as coca leggy Latina sisters carve pork roast, race like happy colts eating guava paste, smoking Kools

I was cute before I left home, now, cheek to cheek with rock goddesses, my skin folds, Chloe calls me Mommy, I zip camera case into motorcycle leather, bus ride through Chinatown, pearls roll under our feet, slip through our fingers, discolored by regret and lemon juices.

!58

I walk fast and think faster, my eyes tell stories you can’t understand. Karma calls your name at midnight. Pray to your Gods, not mine, shoot contrition into collapsed veins, recite poems to the lonely doorman, betrayal laced with cum shots and pussy opens like a broken umbrella, spokes chipped and snarling, and me, and me.

I am forever orange, whispering secrets into your deaf ears. Karma awaits us beneath violet streetlights, commanding go on, take everything… take everything… take everything…

! !

!59

CHER’S FAT ASS

! !

Puma Perl

I lean against the sink in the small crowded bathroom at Fat Baby on Rivington Street.

! Big Mike draws dragons on both ass-cheeks. ! Are you tracing the cellulite lines? I ask. !

Not exactly, he answers seriously. He is wedged between the bathroom door and my ass in the dimly lighted room and is wielding the Sharpie as best he can. His legs are probably starting to cramp and my stomach is still in knots from yesterday’s medical procedure.

Or maybe it’s the fact that I will soon appear in motorcycle leather, bra, garter belt, thong, and fake dragon tattoos in front of a room of lower east side hipsters who were born the year I did my first heroin shot.

Also, I forgot my wig cap because we were arguing about therapy and sexual compulsion while I was packing up and I know that my wig will fall off when I hit the floor.

!60

Somebody fucked with our CD, the band members begin unloading in the middle of our set, I lose both my earrings, we dance to the Dictators’ version of I Got You Babe, legs, stomachs, and all, he chokes me to death, my wig falls off, he picks me up and settles it on my head so that works, then drags me off the floor and dumps me on a settee. Finally, I’ve found a good use for these stupid lounges.

The three people who were actually paying attention tell us that we’re “fearless,” a word I hear more and more often.

Later, I wonder aloud at the meaning of it all, would I be called “fearless” if I was still a young hot chick or is it another way of saying “damn, you got balls but I wouldn’t do it!”

Of course, they wouldn’t do it, says Big Mike, because they’re fearful. They’re the opposite of fearless.

I disagree. Not everyone shares our sensibility. There’s an element of overcoming fear simply by performing at all. The stutterer who shares his work is every bit as courageous as the aging rock star (in her own mind) taking off her clothes.

He accuses me of existentially disassembling every compliment instead of accepting it. I respond that he is an intellectual snob incapable of taking in alternate viewpoints without regarding them as argumentative and we are fighting again.

He becomes conciliatory, I reject his condescension. We !61

call a truce long enough to get some sleep. In the morning, he apologizes for being argumentative and promises to dump it on his therapist, the one who is treating him for his sexual compulsion and boundary issues.

Sexual compulsion. Boundaries. Bodies. My ass. We could begin again, but we have to get to Kingston tonight. There will be ample time to resume that argument when we return.

!62

OBSESSION

! !

Puma Perl

I have no room for this obsession. I am already filled. The craving demands space. Heat pushes common sense and coordination aside, leaving behind a trail of broken thoughts and smashed coffee mugs. Yearning, longing, obsessed with photos of your cock in sepia, on yellow sheets. against the blue wall. you send me videos, you’re jerking off to my picture, I send you more photos, rings on my fingers playing with my pussy, wanting only to crawl across a rug !63

to your cock waiting for me always waiting

I can’t work thinking of your round balls tasting your first drop of cum I am Kim Basinger in her pencil skirt stiletto clad legs against her office wall, 9 and 1/2 weeks later I don’t understand why she left

My desk chair is wet if I open my pants the room will reek of pussy You message me, that’s all it takes, I squeeze my !64

legs together and cum just enough to breathe and begin again

!65

SHITE

John Saunders

He rolls to the edge of the bed falls on the stained brush pile, carpet burns his knees, his head a ball of flame, his nostrils like raw meat, crack night of blur and bliss another day pissed and missed as he sweats under the shower, memory a tangle of hallucination out of which no sense can come. He drip dries in the bathroom plots today’s scam, tonight’s trip.

!66

PARTY LIKE AN ANIMAL

! !

Robert Vaughan

I couldn’t get up. My head felt like it was nailed to the wall, and the pomegranate that I’d tried to eat was shredded all over the ground. I swear, I will never, ever party with any animal again. The reindeer turned us on to some beverage that they’d laced with magic mushrooms. Tracy said it tasted like if you were to drink your own urine. It was warm, not unpleasant, but nothing happened for some time after we’d finished. And since reindeer are sort of shy and they can be cliquey, we felt ignored. So we split. We came across these gorgeous beasts that the police were riding for crowd control. They had saddlebags full of locoweed, so we had Benny distract the cops by taking off his clothes and streaking through the snake house. Meanwhile, Tracy and I chowed a proper kilo of dope. Those horses are so generous, and got really goofy when we started talking smack about the po-po. We laughed so hard we nearly shit our pants. I was a little jealous that they could. We stopped for an afternoon wine to take the edge off. An entire nest of bees joined us. Bees just love booze, and we shared the whole bottle, ordered another at their !67

insistence. They dive-bombed us with tales of honey, and Pooh. Then they asked if they could show us their favorite thing. We followed them to the riverbank, where they showed us how to lay back on the ground, arms akimbo. The capuchin monkeys are trippin, seriously. They shared these bark bugs with us, strange little creatures, tasted like Krackel bars without the chocolate. Tracy really got off on them, but I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. So, they shared these millipedes, and demonstrated how to get off by agitating them so theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d sweat a certain poison and then you hallucinate. Fantastic, it worked so well, my face fell off. Last but not least, we shared some rice wine with a certain group of elephants who were in the village. They went berserk, wreaking havoc on the town. The folks ran and hid near the river. This was about the time I fell and could not get back up. I have no clue what happened to Tracy, she disappeared with one of those monkeys. Benny told me, later, that the elephants stole some of the rice wine casks from the villagers. Shady.

! !

!68

FAT WOMAN SOCIALIZING

! !

Melanie Page

As a fat woman going to a party, the first thing I make sure I do is find one other woman who is fatter than me and plan on hating her all night. A party is a place where we make our first real social contact with people we’ll see again, so whether I’m going to a birthday bash or a work thing, I always make sure I have methods to remain pleasant. A pleasant atmosphere really helps me as a fat person, meaning the room should always be at a darn-near crisp temperature or I start getting wet in my folds. I also have an exit strategy for leaving as fast as possible if I embarrass myself. For instance, I have a way to sneak out of smelly bathrooms if I eat too many cream-based foods and get cramped intestines. No, I won’t tell you how I do it. As the night goes on, my feet have yet to hurt, which is good, and I notice the woman fatter than me has taken her shoes off, drank too much, and is now kissing younger male colleagues on the cheeks. She has certainly crammed her weight into her dress; the necklace also is strained, and it looks like the beads might pop off and kill all those around her. It’s like watching a bad dancer dance with abandon, and thinking about it makes my intestines let off !69

a bubbly sound, gas busting around corners inside me. I’m relieved when the fatter woman stops grabbing and kissing people and heads to the dessert table. The dessert table--that table I’ve been avoiding with scientific precision all night to avoid smelling and seeing the recently baked cookies and pastries: mint brownies, chocolate chip cookies with orange zest, pink-frosted cupcakes made with chocolate and jalapenos inside yellow cupcake papers, a swiss roll with caramel-flavored liqueur, slices of mocha cake each with a chocolate-covered espresso bean on top--these are the confections I’ve heard people describe and moan about all night. All night I’ve been smiling and pretending to remember names, but in my head I keep saying, “My body is a temple, not a dumpster” to keep myself from getting too close to that table and snatching desserts without thinking--it happens. Watching the fatter woman at the dessert table makes me feel in control, better, and I decide to talk to her, the woman I’ve decided is fatter and should be hated, so I can introduce myself and see who the hell she thinks she is. She turns around and I see crumbs stuck to her lipstick. “I’m being a little naughty,” she says, and I can see from the evidence on her plate that she’s not on her first, but her second piece of cake. She is, indeed, an utter porker. Really, she has a terrible affliction, and I feel blessed that I know how to control myself, so I get my own piece of cake, one that is certainly smaller than hers (and one cookie), and put these things on my plate. Then I feel drawn to the mint brownies, so I cut one in half and pick it up directly off the serving knife and put it in my mouth. So, there.

!70

! ! !

Bekah Steimel

Down to the nub to the filter to ash to the bottom of bottles wasting nothing but my life

! !

!71

Bekah Steimel

Does it get any better than this a slick gray morning the pills surging through my blood the pot fogging up my brain I hope my death is on a rainy day but not this one

!72

THE RUBE

! !

James H. Duncan

Their first mistake, I believe, was that they chose a destination wedding. Third-world nation or not, Jamaica is no place to invite elderly relatives. Even the young and strong have feverish nightmares about wild Jamaican cannabis parties that end in missing limbs and hurried letters home for more cash and top-shelf prosthetics. I felt they had lost their minds somewhere in the wedding process, and I confirmed this notion when they invited me to go to their wedding—to be in their wedding—me, unemployed, save for what freelance gigs I could dig up, and a barely functioning alcoholic to boot. This was bad thinking on all fronts. And how was I to afford such foolish opulence? Oh no, I couldn’t, but they offered to front the entire trip as a loan. My heart said no, but my mouth said yes. I was still young enough then to accept a tropical vacation with few strings attached, not knowing of things like Ague fever and modern polio pandemics in places like Cincinnati and Syracuse, much less the Caribbean. Yet, as irrational as I felt they were, I also loved them dearly and so I agreed. Not one month later, the pilot came on the PA and announced that the plane couldn’t land in Montego Bay due to some two-meter wide pothole in the middle of the !73

runway, and the local air authorities refused to let anyone else land. The news took a second to sink in. I’d received a freelance check for a book I’d ghostwritten days before and had been keeping the whiskey industry afloat ever since, downing one airline travel bottle after another. But the news sobered me right the fuck up. Horrified gasps filled the air as we commenced flying in a wide circle along the northern shore of Jamaica, and the pilot said we would continue to do so indefinitely. You could smell the cold sweat that broke out in the cabin. Even the flight attendants looked stricken and unwilling to leave their forward galley to go out among the restless passengers, now muttering among themselves about how the hell a pothole developed on a runway without anyone noticing until now. I told the woman next to me that it was quite possible and that the only way they’d discover it was if the flight right before us tripped up and took a nosedive into the asphalt, which would take days to clear out. She didn’t reply, visibly shocked by the proposition. Many of the passengers held the same incredulous beliefs about this sudden pothole story that was going around the cabin, a rumor started by some drunk asshole or another, but nobody could do a thing about it. After we circled over Montego Bay for the fourth time, one of the attendant bells went off. A second and third sounded before the appearance of the older attendant, a shorthaired brunette who walked down the aisle with curt steps like a boxer’s left-right jab. They wanted news. She had no news. One passenger demanded another whiskey sour, but she said she couldn’t serve any more drinks since the cart was locked up and they still had orders to stay in landing positions. A collective wailing rose from the !74

cluster of vacationing Maryland rednecks behind me. The attendant nipped it in the bud, saying we could get the call to land at any moment, but she didn’t believe it and neither did we. Things began to get very chummy between the strangers crammed back in coach. People who had almost nothing else in common aside from a vacation destination now had an angle and a common enemy, a dangerous thing when mixed with booze and claustrophobia. Even so, the men in the row behind me shared every foul joke they ever heard, and they did so loudly, braying like mules. The two women across the aisle began to worry about their children who were waiting for them to land, and they swapped pictures of their generic blonde-haired, dead-eyed broods. Thankfully, nobody spoke to me. I didn’t feel good about this trip before I got on the plane and I sure as hell didn’t feel any better about it now, being just sober enough to be appropriately nervous about our chances and just drunk enough be have that nervousness devolve into rank paranoia. All I wanted was to be back in San Antonio, on solid ground, and to walk up to Winston’s Pub right as Charley the barkeep unlocked the doors at 10 a.m., settle on my stool, and begin drinking one-dollar Lone Star beers, the pride of Texas, and forget the hell all about this trip. The hissing PA system overhead snapped me out of my daydream, and the pilot came back on the speaker. The crew in Montego Bay could not fix the pothole and we were heading for Kingston instead. I felt sick, and a communal groan echoed through the cabin. The resort was an hour’s drive west of Montego Bay. Kingston was at least five times as far to the southeast, with no direct highways through the mountains, only shoddy one-lane !75

roads and twisting, rutted jungle trails full of suspicious farmers and Bay of Pigs veterans who never went home. I told both of the women next to me that we’d have as much luck charting a leaky rowboat to take us around the island as we would finding a bus that would safely make it through the mountains in any reasonable time. They looked petrified, which almost made me feel better. I don’t know why. It was a dick thing to say aloud, but at least it was the truth. The men behind us began to gripe loudly about the Kingston detour, but they followed it with another joke chased by more cruel, anxious laughter. It was a camaraderie that unsettled me—laughter tinged with angry personal jabs at the passing flight attendants, who looked like sheep lost in the deepest woods searching wildly for their missing flock. And when we started our descent toward Kingston, things took an ugly turn. We were not allowed to approach the gate since none of the geniuses in Montego Bay alerted the Kingston airport that they were rerouting flights through the capital city. We were the first to arrive, much to their surprise. They greeted us with military jeeps, rifles, and sirens, and I suddenly imagined myself rotting in a Jamaican prison. The pilot announced that we were unable to move by order of the police, and since we were almost out of fuel, he had to shut the plane down right there on the tarmac. The lights went out and the air hissing overhead stopped. An uneasy silence ate at us as we sat in the dark, waiting. Some prayed, but I knew God wasn’t listening. Even the Devil didn’t want anything to do with us now. People slid their window shades open, which made things worse with all the direct sunlight pouring in. It only !76

took ten minutes for the temperature to rise to profane levels. The flight attendants met another round of drink demands with a smart remark. One man with a missing tooth and a three-year-old girl on his lap called her a bitch. Pretty soon someone’s full-sized bottle of rum started going around, and in fifteen minutes it was empty, so they started in on another. Where these bottles were coming from I had no idea, but I wished I had one, although I wasn’t about to get friendly with the Hatfields and McCoys back there. I started to feel real edgy by then and considered locking myself in the bathroom, but the line for that was at least seven people deep. Finally, another drunk with a shaved head wearing an Old Navy t-shirt stood up and demanded to see the pilot. He barked that if the pilot didn’t do something, he was going to go up there and “knock his fucking teeth out.” The moment he said it, I knew we were all done for. It didn’t take much to bring down the fist of American law enforcement on rebellious airline passengers these days, but for Christ’s sake, this wasn’t America anymore, didn’t he know that? Anything could happen here. They could just load the plane with ten-thousand banana spiders and let us scream till our throats gave out if they wanted. What the hell was he thinking? Not two minutes later, the doors opened and an even thicker, hotter burst of air rolled through the cabin, followed by a stream of Jamaican police officers with machine guns aimed and ready. As suspicious as they were of Continental landing a plane unannounced at their airport, they didn’t hesitate to side with the crew members who radioed in for a little crowd control. They gave the drunkard who made the threat an option: he and his wife could begin their Jamaican vacation right then and there !77

and enjoy an all expenses paid trip to a windowless prison cell, or they could be shot to death in front of their family members. They chose wisely and exited the plane in handcuffs. It calmed everyone down, and I mean right the fuck down. Nothing shuts up an American like a cocked and loaded third-world gun in their face and no embassy in sight. Nobody said a word for another half hour until the pilot announced that the police were allowing us to refuel and take off. He didn’t say to where, which started a bellowing panic until the flight attendants urged him to explain. It seems, pothole be damned, we were going back to Montego Bay. This news did not help to ease anyone’s freak-out, but we refueled and rose from the tarmac nonetheless. The flight back across Jamaica to Montego Bay had none of the rambunctious, romper-room atmosphere of the Kingston jaunt. We were a flying morgue full of yet-to-bedead stiffs. In almost no time at all, we were descending again, and all hands silently squeezed armrests to brace for the great, thunderous impact. The pilot reminded the crew to sit down and prepare for landing, but they were already strapped to their seats as if the doors were about to get ripped off by a drunken vengeful God, letting in the hurricane winds of death. It was the smoothest damn landing I had ever experienced. A cheer went up as we slowed to a stop at the end of the runway, but I felt no such joy. I wasn’t here for pleasure, and even my attempts to make this a business trip by sending article propositions to magazines had all failed. Forget it; I had the feeling now that survival would be reward enough. !78

The customs agents were stern but fair, and they hustled us through with almost as much efficiency as their police did in Kingston. Get in the country, spend your money, and get the hell out—the ethos of banana republic capitalism. I went straight to the tiny airport bar and had two double rum-punch cocktails while the rest of the wedding party that had flown down in on this particular plane gathered to wait for the shuttle bus to the resort. I slammed the last of my drink and joined them. We had three chipper twentysomething couples, two elderly women on the groom’s side, and me—sweating whiskey, rum, and fear through my cheap tropical shirt. I looked to see if there was a soda machine around, hell, even a water fountain, but I had no such luck. Save your money for the casinos and trinket shops, and we have plenty of pretty women and clinics for you as well said the eyes of the armed police guards roaming the front of the airport. Indeed. Then the dirty white hotel shuttle pulled up and a short, nimble man jumped out, introducing himself as Donovan. He happily greeted us to the island and began throwing our bags in the back of his shuttle with wonton recklessness. This was our man, the only one who knows the way to the safety of our resort rooms. We loved him. The couples began boarding and Donovan began to count us, ticking his thumb as he did so. Then he put a sweaty hand to my chest and gave me a dire shake of his head. “Oh no, mon, so sorry. This shuttle she only take eight, and you be nine.” “Well Jesus, I’m not staying here. Can’t I sit up front with you?” “No seat,” he said, stepping back. Lo and behold, there wasn’t, just a lump where some !79

sort of second engine or colossal spare tank of gasoline seemed to rise up like a camel’s hump where the seat should be. It was hideous, but I’d ride it if it meant getting away from this airport. I was just about to propose as much when he began to wave at someone behind me, another skinny Jamaican fellow leaning against a beat-tohell 1990 Ford Escort wagon. Donovan went to speak with him, and then came back. “You will go with LeRoy. Leroy will follow us.” I took one look at LeRoy and knew if I got in his car, I would never see the wedding or civilization again. My organs might—liver and kidneys and lungs sold on the black market—but not me. But I had no choice. The shuttle was already lurching ahead and pulling away, so I threw my two bags in the back and climbed into the front passenger seat, on the left, remembering then that they drive on the other side of the road here. Of course they do. LeRoy punched it and we began to sway through the free-for-all traffic of Montego Bay. The place was thick with hotels and gift shops. It looked like Virginia Beach and the Jersey shore fucked, gave birth to a demented resort-town baby, and that baby threw up all over the coast of Jamaica. He honked at some fat tourists crossing the street ahead of us while offering to sell me the finest weed I had ever smoked (which, even being in Jamaica, I highly doubted). I declined; I wanted to keep my wits about me for the moment he veered off the highway onto some jungle road where his friends would leap up from the fronds and flay me like a Bluefish with a machete. But then ol’ LeRoy reached under his seat and handed me a miracle—an ice cold bottle of Red Stripe. I couldn’t resist, and he opened one for himself too. The very sight of him driving through the maddening fog of traffic with a beer in !80

hand, honking and swerving and gunning the engine, I couldn’t help but like it just a little—okay, a lot. You’d never see a sane man do that in America, at least not inside city limits and not for too long if he did. This was Jamaica though, where anything goes. I figured, Hell, I might be a dead man already, so why not enjoy the ride? LeRoy certainly didn’t seem to mind. I finished my beer in three pulls and he handed me another. We zipped past the last cluster of cheap fast-food joints before the long stretch of seaside highway, and LeRoy pointed out a Kentucky Fried Chicken. “Dat is where de rich folk eat…you rich?” “There?” I asked. “No, not me, man. I’m flat broke, don’t even have enough to get home. Honest injun.” “Aaaaah-ha-ha,” he chuckled, “you funny, mon.” “You ever eat there?” I asked, trying to keep the topic on anything but me and my wallet. “Nah, never. Rich folk,” he said with a grin. “You rich folk gotta remember sum’tin’…never leave de resort, okay?” “Oh?” I replied, playing the fool. No shit never leave the resort. “Why is that?” “You never know who waitin’, mon. You stay on de resort, you have fun, you drink de Red Stripe, you get laaaaaid, you be jus’ fine.” LeRoy began to laugh heartily, and then he stopped himself. His face turned as stern as a Quaker on Saturday. “But rememba one t’ing—do not go in de wata at night, o-kay? De people wait for you in de water at night, pull you unda de waves and take your hotel key.” His eyes were so solemn and sane that I couldn’t help but shiver. I was about to open my mouth to ask him something when he veered wildly off the side of the road, !81

stopping short at the edge of the thick jungle. The road was empty now, just us, and I thought this was it, but LeRoy nodded at a thatch hut with a wide window that was set back about twenty feet from the road. He said, “Gimme three dollas American, o-kay?”  “Sure thing, LeRoy.” This was no time to argue. I made a show of only having a few singles on me, but he winked at me anyway and slipped out of the car. I thought about running all the way back to Montego Bay, but seeing how people drove in this nation, I knew I’d likely get run over by a seven-year old in a rumpled, rusted Toyota, or worse, a plane diverted to the highway because of another damned pothole. I pulled a Red Stripe out from under his seat and drank half of it by the time LeRoy returned. He held about fifteen Red Stripes in his arms and dumped them onto the floor, wrangled two from between his feet, and we toasted each other to a fine afternoon drive to the resort. I double fisted for a while, then took one at a time. We made a show of out-chugging one another as we sped violently down the two-lane highway along the coast, passing roaming goats and women carrying large loads of laundry on their heads. I discovered LeRoy was a fan of boxing. We discussed a few fights we had each witnessed, with his adventures sounding much more impassioned and crazed than any regulated event I’d attended. Two fights he saw even ended in death, which he spoke of in hushed tones as if the men who organized the fights and later hid the bodies might overhear him from the racing Escort. We passed a Bally’s Resort and LeRoy warned me never to go there, as that was where the fat Americans went, and that the good hunting grounds for wink-winknudge-nudge was at my resort, but I’m sure he told that to !82

all of the rum-drunk tourists. But I long ago realized I would indeed make it to the resort in one piece and that LeRoy wasn’t a bad fellow after all. And when we finally pulled in to the resort’s driveway, somehow only moments after the shuttle full of wedding guests arrived, I made a show of tipping LeRoy with a twenty-spot. His eyes narrowed with knowing amusement, and he just laughed as he pocketed the bill and handed me one more Red Stripe before he pulled out of the driveway. I pounded it in the driveway of the resort and hucked the bottle across the street into the jungle. When I stepped inside, the other wedding guests chattered about their boring, air-conditioned ride and were eagerly checking into their hotel suites, beautiful little four bedroom houses with their own maid, cook, bartender, pool, and Jacuzzi. Free drinks all week, 24-7 service, beach access, nightly parties and bonfires, anything they wanted at any moment. Paradise. Damn right, LeRoy, never leave the resort. I thought that I should have given him a fifty, but I remembered I wasn’t employed and nipped that idiocy in the bud. Someone announced that the bride and groom would meet us soon, the desk clerk finished with the elderly couple in line ahead of me so I stepped up and gave my name. “Oh yes, Mister Duncan. You have a room in the Jamaican Skies Motor Lodge, much cheaper, saves you much money. It’s just a short walk down the beach, and you are on the ground floor, room 118. They can check you in when you get there, but your room might be unlocked already. So many keys get lost this year. No, sir, no bar there, but we have a cash bar here you may use. No, sir, no pool there, but the ocean is very cool at night. Have a nice day, Mister Duncan.” !83

Because I Love Her

! !

Jack Leaf Willets

the bar closes we have drunk the world dry heard all the songs we are high as hell we will not care about this till we crash way into tomorrow

right now we are 40 percent proof a mixer a concoction of our dreams and lies and truth

right now we are gold we are skin and blood and bone

!84

right now we can make it

we make it to a room rip and tear clothes slam against walls

we are naked hot melting like white cold dust falling on hot rail tracks

we kiss so hard our mouths bleed

we taste her lipstick my beer

I suck powder off her chest itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cut clean with her sweat

she licks !85

the remnants of cocaine from my fingers and looks at me that way gives me that look a look that could mean love me fuck me kill me marry me just let it be me

I taste all that she is drink her up in one final shot a last order call for her body and soul

we drink from each other drink together and this crazy ball of blue and green !86

spins so fast it is on hold it pauses just for us

death canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t touch us now we are fucking fucking it away like a lame row that you forget as soon as you touch

it is so real itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like we are acting out a scene

as the light breaks she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen we are still stuck together in a wreck of flesh and love and we do not know how to get any higher so we come down.

!87

too much

irene stone

there’s an old lady named iris apfel. more than an old lady, really, she’s sort of a fashion icon for those of us in the know. although some other old person once said “more is more and less is a bore,” it was when it was repeated from the lips of that rare bird iris that i heard it, understood it, and filed it away for future reference. more is more, and less is a bore. it passes from my lips so often that it means everything and nothing. a mantra, really. more is more, less is a bore. i love more! that’s the thing about being a libra, though. we’re supposedly just able to balance everything, see both sides, measure and weigh facts and figures and persons carefully but really all the libras i’ve ever known have no control over those scales, which basically swing back and forth wildly. everything or nothing, because it’s just too hard to decide either way. more is more, also when it applies to less. all of which is to say that “too much” is a familiar concept over here. and yet, there is one area in which i have always excelled at moderation. i was twelve when i smoked my first cigarette, thirteen when i smoked my first joint, and !88

then fourteen when i started dabbling in other drugs. and by dabbled, i do just mean dabbled. i drank to get drunk sometimes, but mostly i drank because other people were drinking. i took drugs because i wanted to gather experiences, but mostly because other people were taking them. some might argue that it was too much for a person my age, sure, but it was never really too much for me.

during those blooming years and all the ones that followed, i continued to dabble. i never became an addict or an alcoholic or did things i would later deeply regret while under the influence. i’m lucky, then, that my brain wires function correctly in regards to drugs and alcohol, that i can do them, enjoy them, and then spend months or years or the rest of my life not thinking about them until the next time they’re around. some people’s brains don’t work that way, more is not more, it is too much and then never enough, and it ruins their lives. in a way that seems natural, i have always managed to surround myself with the sort of people for whom too much is never enough, despite my own built in ability to control myself in this regard. maybe it is nature. one of my beloved grandfathers is an alcoholic addict deep down to his core, even though he quit drinking and smoking when i was an elementary school babe and hasn’t touch a drop of booze or a cigarette since. many other relatives have struggled with drinking or drug use in a much less dramatic way as well, but these are stoic people, and while many of their lives were ruined for a time, they weren’t ruined forever. it’s nothing that ever killed anyone i’m related to, let’s just say. when i started to become a person, roughly during my !89

teenage years, i began picking and choosing these sorts of people to make up my group of friends. i wasn’t aware of it, or it didn’t start out that way. initially, these were people like me who just enjoyed the same terrible/ wonderful riot grrrl and punk bands and shows and exploring abandoned buildings and also getting drunk or high and hanging out because that’s what you do when you’re a teenager. sometimes we didn’t get drunk or high, just hung out. sometimes we drank seven cups of coffee on the nordstrom’s balcony. sometimes we ate 99 cent chinese food. sometimes we went to shows and danced. sometimes, just sometimes, we also got drunk or smoked a joint or ate some pills. it didn’t seem dangerous, obviously in part because we were teenagers, but even now, looking back, it still doesn’t seem all that dangerous. and it wasn’t - for me, because of my brain. but for many of them, it was. it wasn’t long before myself and many of my friends took divergent paths, my sometimes to their always. by the time i graduated from high school, i was still just a sometimes alcohol or drug user, never anything that serious, and many of them were just junkies, on their way to an overdose that would kill them. and if that overdose didn’t kill them, the next one would. junkies always die, by the way. sometimes i ask myself, why do i know so many dead people? why do i know so many people who died of a drug overdose? what curse happened to fall on teenagers in san diego in the middle to late 90s? and don’t say drugs, obviously drugs. somehow that doesn’t explain it, i’ve never met a single other person my own age who had so many dead friends, except for the people from my own teenage circle who happen to still be alive. i’ve !90

encountered people from all walks of life and none of them have had this same experience. my little circle, it was just touched. or maybe i was just very good at making friends with a very specific type of person. the worst of the deaths was one of those “happens in threes” you always use to reference celebrity deaths. three of our boys died in the summer of 2001 and it’s true that they weren’t teenagers anymore then, but barely. the first of the three was my friend nick, who in high school had been my boyfriend and confidante and partner in very minor league crime. i was gone to san francisco before he started doing heroin, i didn’t even know that i should have been trying to save him, but i would have tried if i had known - not that i think it would have helped. he was on and off drugs for a couple of years, had a good six months clean, and then one day he and dave decided it was a good idea to start back up again. nick was in the bathroom for long enough that dave should have known, but dave was high, too. nick died. a month later, fern died, poor sweet fern who was so much a part of nick and who, like the rest of us, could not understand how to keep going without him. and then dave a little while later, i can only assume clinging to heroin in the last few months of his life out of guilt about the death of his dear friend. god, nick. that killed a part of my heart. my first friend dead of drug overdose, and one so important to me. still today, of all the dead people i’ve known, nick was the one i knew most intimately. a year later my friend kevin, disgusted that the most recent summer of deaths had done nothing to stop so many of our other friends from using, decided to teach everyone a lesson. in a manner of too much unto itself, he went to a garage sale and purchased a bike, which he then !91

rode from san diego to santa cruz, where he then caught a ride in a van with some hippies to berkeley and my apartment. i think it went something like this in his brain: “if i can just get on a bike and ride it to the bay, they can stop using heroin.” of course, i agreed, at least in theory. but one is not the other, and no one else is like kevin. i remember he was laying on the floor of my apartment and that my dog, just a puppy then, could not get enough of his smell. “it’s bad,” he said. he was referring to his smell, but it applied to the subject at hand, too. kevin didn’t save anyone with that bike ride, except for maybe himself. maybe a bike ride up the coast wasn’t inspirational enough, or maybe the drugs and their underlying disease were too much, and no one could free themselves. i wouldn’t say my friends started dropping like flies after that but as i look back, i mean, it’s an apt enough analogy. three boys in the summer of 2001. a girl friend the next spring. somebody else a year later. the following fall, someone just wouldn’t wake up. god, it went on and on. and it is, in fact, still. last summer was the summer of 2013 and one more person died. she was a model. getting back to me, now. looking back, it’s easy to see that drugs have informed my life in a way that nothing else has, although if i said that out of context you’d probably take it to mean something else, that i took too many, but i mean it in the way that it has touched so many of the lives of the people who have been in mine, and that watching the various struggles and slow declines and deaths has turned me into the person i am now. every morning i wake up and make coffee, drink it in a rush, run out the door and off to work. i’m usually !92

forgetting something, but hopefully i remembered to walk my dog and turn the stove off. constantly late for work, constantly rushing. you know what i do for work now? no, you don’t, but i bet it’s gonna make sense: i work with people in recovery. investigating, intervening, counseling, listening, and a lot of worrying. it’s not that fun and i can assure you that i am underpaid, but it feels right every day, and i feel good about it. although it took hundreds of people to get me here, there was one who in the early days of this job made me certain that the switch from advertising to here was the right idea. as i fumbled through the first few months of a huge learning curve, he held my hand figuratively and gave me lots of literal hugs. he’s a doctor, an alcoholic, someone twenty-six years sober, a surfer, a smiler, and he is one the gentlest firm people i have ever met. i’ve never seen him say an angry word to anyone and yet, he’s really good at making people own up to being full of shit. life lessons, he’s full of them. since i’ve known him, he’s been dying. his liver is useless after all that ridiculous drinking, even if it took more than two decades of sobriety for it to start faltering. he’s been on a wait list for a new liver for a while, and it’s always getting closer to becoming a reality. when i met him they said two years, that was a year ago. six months ago, they said a year. in december, they said he’d get it in may. last month, he was moved to first on the list and they said next month. that’s march for those of you keeping track. and then this month, february, his liver just started shutting down. if you don’t know, the process by which a person receives an organ from someone else is extremely complicated. first, a person has to get sick. he or she then !93

has to be examined by a committee which will determine his or her eligibility to be allowed to wait for an organ. once listed, it’s not necessarily first come first served. patients on a waiting list are assigned a score that indicates how urgently a new liver is required to keep them alive and this score is reevaluated as necessary. patients with acute liver failure, who it is determined might die within a week, are moved to the top of the list. fair enough. and yet, even being at the top of a list doesn’t ensure that a liver viable for your specific body will be available when you’re there, waiting for one. and sometimes, too, the fact that you are having acute liver failure eliminates you from being a good enough candidate to receive a new one. fair enough, but complicated. this man, this good man, this man who i think deserves a little more time to keep doing good things, probably doesn’t have any more time. but it’s not up to me, and apparently whoever it is up to doesn’t make those decisions based on people being good. unless something sort of miraculous occurs, a week or two from now he won’t exist on this plane. he won’t exist on this plane because of too much, even if he has spent more of his life a model of abstinence than a poster child for drinking your life away. it’s not fair, but what else is too much if not unfair? there’s another lesson here. sometimes more is more, sometimes it’s too much. and sometimes, 25 years later, too much can still kill you. be careful.

!94

UNDER:  A Sestina

! !

Janice Bevilacqua

Johnny lugs her, a droopy stuffed doll, into the ice cold shower, with the phone curled

under his chin, ready to call 911 if the overdose won’t reverse itself so she will no longer be blue

and just near dead, but become real again. And it happens; bile and shower at last spew forth, zigzag down

catching the dye of her dress, rainbow rivulets swirling onto the tub floor. Spinart, she thinks, but cannot

articulate, and everything around her is soggy, impressionistic and dyed. Even his eyes are aqueous,

about to spill over with henna, hues of nutmeg. Things start coming back to her: in a lucid flash

she knows he bought her this dress today for no reason other than love-in-the-air, some charming hullabaloo !95

and the extra bucks that never made it to 59th Street but stayed skittish, longing for the dealer, curled

up in Johnny’s pocket. This morning, wind cycled my dress into a small tornado: its skirt jerked and flew up, down

and betwixt her knees. They held hands all the way there where they would stock up on what they cannot

not afford, along with chocolates and a notepad to jot down the great ideas that bubble up from an aqueous

high, awash with possibility. Elusive as watercolor, the concepts pop like snapshots caught without a flash:

the ones that promise money - or never crashing - or to fix their relationship - are the first to be scribbled down.

“I want more,” she says, something like oatmeal gummed to her lips, and Johnny is disgusted, smooshing curled

strands of vomit down the clogged drain. She looks out of the small cube of window. The superman-blue

sky peeks through eyelets of the lace curtain and her Technicolor canvas deconstructs itself from that aqueous

oeuvre. Colors split, box off from one another and the sun stabs her vision like the camera’s flash

has been switched ON and the world is a black-and-white !96

fractal, natural light yet something her eyes cannot

! !

bear. “You just fucking died,” Johnny says, his hair drenched, locks of it pasted to his forehead and curled

and she privately wishes they would stay like that – he looks boyish and it fosters memories, an aqueous

recall of a girlhood spent nursing six-packs in the parking lot of the movie theater, downing packets of blue

Pop Rocks: just enough to keep her satisfyingly wrecked and blissful and blushing; but flash

forward to when the rapture, the heaven, the believing that everything is perfectly perfect just cannot

! be sought or shot or railed or smoked or boiled down. !

“I’m sorry,” spills out in a bubbly arc from her pink waterfountain mouth. Strings of her own hair are curled

about her face, some trapped between her teeth. No matter how hard she tries she knows she cannot

ever convey to Johnny in what titanic ways she loves him, reading his face: “This time she really blew

it.” He is sick over having to revive her again and again and again, the iteration of drawing her out of that aqueous

near-death. Johnny is tired and he vows to himself that !97

from this wretched moment on, he doesn’t care: as down

she dives, when she is drowning in mucous and letting Death sponge-bathe her – even then, he will flee in a flash.

With his arms wrapped around her wispy frame, she steps out of the tub. “Wasn’t my life supposed to flash

before my eyes?” He smiles, “Gypsy girl, it’s because you have not lived enough. Angels just cannot

take in those who are short of what they are supposed to do here.” It makes sense, but her wonder stays curled

in enquiry and she momentarily sees that she has lived her entire life punctuated; hunkered down

into a comma here, someone’s apostrophe there, a twisted fetus embracing itself, loving growing inside the aqueous

warmth of its mother’s innards, yet craving to surface for a first peek at the world’s green and blue

and terra-cotta. She misses that aqueous gore, peels down her doused dress. The quivering mirror’s

flash is a riddle. From the bedroom doorway: “Get sleep,” he says. As if it was easy. Sleep she cannot, but wriggles

herself into blankets: a still-life – or born – curled into a question mark, waiting to be pushed out of a blue run-on.

!98

BEATEN

! !

Julie Allen

There was a girl who could bake and bake could she, Baking cupcakes, cookies, and pies with glee. The fillings, the frostings, and the crust she would score, Keeping those with a sweet tooth begging for more

She learned to bake from her granny from scratch From the age of 5, there was love in each batch With delight and passion put into each recipe For friends, for co-workers and for family

Word soon spread of her delectable delights All of a sudden her skills reached new heights She baked for parties, showers, weddings and more And suddenly one day, there was a knock on her door

!99

Her friend Jack, his girlfriend and a bag of green Why this was the biggest bag she’d ever seen Now listen, Jack grew herb as well as she baked Smiling, he asked her, “Now what would it take?”

For her to bake brownies with the best herb in town To give out medicinally and help those all around “I’ll give it a whirl, I have a recipe” said she Just give me the herb and I’ll make brownies happily

2.5 grams per serving, or an ounce of dank works well A grinder and filter, and then all will be swell Some butter, some cocoa and some sugar for taste Topped with chocolate frosting, there will be no waste

With a recipe in hand she began her confection Each ingredient measured out with the utmost perfection The butter and herb will simmer to liquid green Then be poured in the batter to make it all gleam

Oh how the batter looks good, so creamy, and so yummy Only a teaspoon would satisfy the crave in her tummy She dipped her spoon in the rich chocolate cream More than a teaspoon, though it would seem !100

! That’s okay, she thought after one more spoon full They were delicious, chocolaty and quite wonderful People will love them and they will help people, too To rid them of pain and things that make them blue

She pondered on this thought as she texted her friend With an hour of Abba, Facebook she grinned But suddenly it happened she felt fuzzy and tingled And in the mood to try to find someone to mingle

She texted some more, but found no delight In the words that she typed, they did not sound right They made no sense, all gobbilygooky Her friend will surely think, she’s gone all “cookie”

“Oh, no” she thought, then “oh well, what the heck” Wait a minute, Gaak! She was gonna get sick Her lower back flaming, her stomach was queasy Her feet grew numb, and her balance uneasy

Her vision, a mixer twisting and turning around Her head was as thick as a cookie dough mound Her mouth was as dry as almond flour !101

And a watery chocolate appeared after an hour

The chocolate river projectile freely flowed Into the porcelain goblet abode What is happening to the normal me… She thought she was dyeing, as she could not see

Her legs gave out and she could not walk She phoned her friend, but she could not talk Rambling and bumbling and stumbling about Trying to form words, afraid she’d been found out

Embarrassed and vulnerable, she knew it was the pot She tried to be cool, and act like it was not She’d had some fish earlier in the day A target for blame, yes, that’s what she’d say

With her blanched head aching, she could finally rest On the cooled rim, her recipe knew best Slowly she drifted in to a dream like state That only a baker’s dream could make

! !

!102

E. 233 rd Street

Junior Charles

It was actually a surprisingly nice part of the Bronx. It is almost in Yonkers, but still very city. The train was elevated over the street, so there was a constant feeling of dusk even at noon. I went to this one neighborhood, centered on the Burger King for about two years. There were all sorts of ethnic deli’s and restaurants and markets. I would have liked the neighborhood even if it wasn't the hot spot to buy cheap weed.  The first place we would buy pot was Lad’s. It was a typical little market, but they didn’t have too much on their shelves. There were two old men playing dominoes outside, and it seemed a very friendly spot. The young Jamaican behind the counter was always friendly, and gave good counts. It didn’t seem that anyone went in for anything else. We would always park at the Burger King, and Lad’s was right next-door. We’d hop right back on the Bronx River, to the Saw Mill and we’d be there and back in an hour.  One day I parked at Burger King and walked over to Lad’s. I was alone that day, usually some one would at !103

least ride shotgun. As I crossed the parking lot to Lad’s I couldn’t see the Dominoes players. As I got to the door I saw a bright orange sticker reading “Closed by Judge’s Order.” I walked back to the car feeling rejected, when a man with huge Dreadlocks, smoking a joint, came up to me and handed me a business card. It simply said “School Supplies E. 235th and Westchester Ave.” He pointed to a dark store down a dark street.  I walked inside the door with the school supplies sign above it. The store was empty except for a Snapple case with 5 bottles in it, a bullet proof glass wall with an ugly mean looking bald dude sitting at a register behind it, and a cup with 15 pencils in it with a sign that read “10 cents”.   I walked to the glass, and asked if he had dimes, the business card still in my hand. The guy asked me to pass the card through the slot. He stamped the back and passed it back. It was a simple Approved stamp. He reached into a small duffle bag and pulled out a bunch of tiny bags. He told me to always bring the card with me. I paid the guy and left, never to return.  A friend from back up in Westchester turned me on to a record store. It was right across the street from Lad’s. I had seen it, but I’d never been in. I parked at the Burger King, and ran across the street. There was loud Reggae blasting from giant speakers as I walked in. They had every great reggae album I had heard of and many I hadn’t. The store was pretty well stocked, and a guy was buying an album as I walked in. I waited for him to leave; looking around at records, then went up to the counter. “My buddy told me I might be able to pick up here.”  !104

”Who be sending ya' now?” he answered with a thick Jamaican accent. I told him my friend’s name, since he had said he had hung out down here a bit. “Oh, You a Westchester boy. Whatcha be needing?” He had a friendly smile, and I felt better here than I had anywhere down there. He pulled out a Videotape case, and pulled out the bags I needed. “I’m always here, but if I ain’t just say you know Sam. What they be calling you?” I told him and then left. I checked the bags when I got home, and it was a great count for the Bronx.  I went to Sam pretty exclusively for a year. Occasionally we would get something good up in Westchester, but Sam was old reliable. I even ended up buying a few albums he suggested. He was about my age, and we chatted every time I was in. My hour-long trips had become hour and a half long trips.  One day I had gotten a lot of some really nice home grown. It was the best I had up to that point. I bought as much as I could, and one day I figured I would take a bit to Sam. I was telling him about some of the homegrown, and he had never tried any. I pulled into Burger King from the back actually passing School Supplies the way I always did, and as I parked I could see a flashing light up on the street. There was a crowd directly across from the record store, so I went and joined them. You could see the whole front glass of the store was broken. There were police cars and ambulances clogging the street and the sidewalk in front of the store.  I asked some of the watchers what was happening. A pudgy woman answered that she heard some mean !105

looking bald dude, and a guy with huge dreads had shot and killed everyone in the record store ten minutes ago. I turned back to my car, and went back up to Westchester,â&#x20AC;¨ never again to get off at the 233rd exit.

!106

Lost in the Matrix Again:

Consumer Madness   and the Zombie Apocalypse Michael Gillan Maxwell

I just returned from my mailbox. Saturday is a light day. There are only four catalogs. On any given day, it’s not uncommon to find a half dozen catalogs, and more as we approach the holidays. I wonder to what extent this may actually be keeping the US Postal Service afloat?   I must admit, I’ve wondered how I ended up on so many catalog mailing lists. But then again, considering how much shopping I do from catalogs and from the internet in general, it should come as no surprise. Just about every active consumer in today’s economy ends up on multiple mailing lists. It’s almost impossible not to. All you need to do is subscribe to a magazine, fill out a warranty, register a product, enter a contest, carry a mortgage or auto loan, use a credit card, give to a charity, have a baby, use a retail store charge card, register to vote, send in for a rebate, belong to a supermarket loyalty club, or purchase anything from a catalogue or online. If you do any of these things, forget about it, you’re on someone’s direct mailing list. Unless you’re a monk or in an institution, that covers most of us in 21st century America. !107

I’ve done all of these things so I’m on a diverse group of lists. So much for my fantasy of going underground. Companies rent or sell these lists to other retailers who are searching for new consumers for their products. Even a casual internet search puts you in the crosshairs of internet search engines. That’s how you end up with so many whacky ads showing up on your Facebook sidebar and your web browser.  Even though I like to think I’m doing my part to help bring our economy out of recession, there are times when I wonder if I’m contributing to the destruction of the rain forests with so many paper catalogs filling my recycle container every week. Sometimes the sheer volume is a little much. People don’t write letters much anymore, and nearly all of my bill paying is done online, so most days my mailbox is filled with nothing but catalogs. It can be a little vexing. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. They make marvelous reading material in the bathroom where I do most of my heavy thinking and profound intellectual work.  This is not really a new phenomenon. Going as far back as the late 19th century it was possible to purchase nearly everything you needed to survive from a catalog including food, clothing, shelter and even a mail order bride. From 1908–1940, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold more than 75,000 homes through their mail-order Modern Homes program. You could buy a kit for a complete house ranging from $425-$3,000, which is about what it might cost you to buy a garden shed today.  Now you can do it all online. All you need is an internet connection and a credit card. It is consumerism run amok on steroids, but I am an unabashed internet consumer and certainly not the only one who is attracted !108

by the ease and convenience. However, I could do without those annoying live chat boxes. “No I don’t want to chat! That’s why I’m shopping from home on the internet in nothing but my underwear !”  In Buddhism, desire and ignorance lie at the root of suffering. By desire, Buddhists refer to craving pleasure, material goods, and immortality. If consumers are jonesin’ for that, then internet commerce certainly fills that need.  One catalog I got this week advertises “nothing you ever needed but everything you want.” That about says it all. From another catalog, it’s possible to purchase such other items of necessary esoterica as a genuine brass periscope from a World War II German U Boat, a “Faithful Freddie” Royal Navy Submarine Binnacle for $6000, Japanese Admiralty Signaling Searchlights for $3,000, Italian Air Force Long Underwear. (I guess I never think “air force” when I think of Italy. When a country produces the quality of wine they produce, who needs an air force?) This catalog also offers dozens of Swiss Army surplus items, which are of superior quality. I can see why the swiss Army has so much surplus to offer since the country has been neutral since 1515 and their last armed conflict was a brief civil war between the Catholic and the Protestant cantons which resulted in about a hundred casualties. Instead of waging war like the rest of us idiots, they invested their time and resources inventing cool stuff like Ricola and Swiss army knives.  Other catalogs in this week’s mail offer a men’s leather shearling coat for $3,000, a beaver fur felt stingy brim hat for $800,(who actually wears beaver hats anymore?) shirts for $200, an English pub sign for $1500, an Allied Victory Sidecar Motorcycle, a wireless Pavlovian canine trainer, a variety of haunting zombie !109

statues and zombie garden gnomes. Still other catalogs offer classes like Defense Against the Paranormal for Men and Women and the Zombie Apocalypse workshop.  If you’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt and adventure travel is your thing, then why not take the 14 day Mongolian Horse Trek, or if your bucket list’s gettin’ a little low, how about Around the World by Private Jet ~ a 24-day journey to five continents by private jet for $72,950? What’s not to love?  Yesterday, I got the ultimate catalog crammed with dozens of “must-have” items that you just can’t live without! Now you can have your own kitchen hot dog roller. Nothing handles a hangover better than a couple of gas station grade roller dogs. What about a flask that holds a gallon of your favorite libation? How can you say no to a pair of zombie flamingos for the front lawn? But wait! There’s more! You’ll be the envy of the neighborhood with your very own Zombie Apocalypse Tactical Tomahawk & Kommando Survival Tools and nothing settles an argument faster than a One Million Volt Zap Baton Stun Gun! And who can live without your own personal Backyard Tiki Bar~ on sale now for only $499?  Hold on a second ~ let me get my credit card …..

!110

The ChapStick Chick

! !

Christina Hart

Present day: I sit here, applying my ChapStick before I get comfortable enough to start typing away at the keys on the keyboard, putting words together to try to make sense of all this. I can’t possibly start something if my lips are dry. The idea of ‘too much’ has never struck a chord with me. I tend to think- the more, the better! Maybe it’s because I might be a little overindulgent by nature, when it comes to nearly everything. Why have one Milano cookie when you can have six? Why have one bowl of cereal if you can eat the whole box? Portion controls are absurd to me. They’re enough to fill a two year old. I could discuss several things here. How about the time I ate so many peanuts I seriously considered if it was possible to overdose on protein? How about the fact that I have so many tattoos that some people think I’m a lesbian? I’m not. How about when I first plucked my eyebrows I only had half of them left? Too far? How about the time the little boy I babysit ate so many oranges he had to go to the emergency room? I didn’t know it was possible to overdose on Vitamin C. But my brother did eat too many carrots when he was little and he !111

turned orange. You can’t make these things up. So yes, when it comes to overindulgence, I know it. I know it all too well. But the one thing I’d like to focus in on here is my obsession with ChapStick. It started out with the classic ChapStick. Then I got more adventurous and moved on to Cherry. Strawberry? Yes. Apple? Oh, hell yes. Since I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten a little wiser to the good ones vs. the bad ones. I prefer girly ones now that smell good and make my lips smooth like a baby’s bottom. Well, that’s weird. Maybe just like a baby’s skin. Baby Lips. Cake ChapStick, Limited Edition (try it). Softlips (with shimmer). You name it, I’ve probably tried it. Now, they say your lips should be naturally moist, right? Well, I blew it. I’ve overused ChapStick to the point that my lips feel chapped if I don’t apply the ChapStick every thirty minutes or so. And when I apply, I go overboard to the point that people ask me “what are you doing?” I look at them like they’re insane. Obviously, I need ChapStick. Obviously. Now, when I think about it in a deeper sense. I wonder, do I really need ChapStick as much as I think I do? I lose them more often than I buy them. On any given day, I have a go-to ChapStick, and several back-ups for when I lose my go-to. Now, it may sound absurd, but it seems perfectly healthy to me. Why would I want my lips to be dry? Are you serious? I’ve come to realize that the obsession with ChapStick means more, much more. It’s a safety net for my lips to land on. It’s a little piece of something to hold on to, something I know won’t go away. Sure, I fear my lips will get chapped. But is it something more? Is there something more behind the fact that I overindulge in nearly !112

everything, including almonds and Lindor chocolates? Maybe I just prefer having more to having less. Maybe it’s because of the time I live in. The area I live in. Maybe it’s because my ‘problems’ aren’t really that problematic. Maybe I’m greedy (which I hate to even think). But who likes to admit something like that? I think of myself as a giver, as someone who lends an ear or a shoulder whenever someone needs it. If someone lost their ChapStick, I would give them one of mine. I like to think that everyone has their little obsessions, their little ticks. Everyone has something unique that they overindulge in or use to excess. Food? Alcohol? Drugs? Sex? Cigarettes? Is it that bad if I were to be stranded on an island and one of the things I’d need to take with me is ChapStick? Is it that strange? So what is this preference to overindulging? Does it have to do with an addictive personality? Does it have to do with fear of being without? What is actually in that ChapStick that makes me think I need it so much? Is it all psychological? Physical? A little bit of both? As I sit here, with my ChapStick next to my laptop, I look at it and wonder.

!113

DEAR SARAH SELECKY,

! !

Trevor Dodge

Honestly, I think you wake up way too early some days to send out these writing prompts to everyone. Or stayed up too late the night before. You’re attractive, and by that I mean many people would probably find you attractive. I’m not speaking for myself when I say this. I’m not attracted to you. At least, not in the way most people who are attracted to you probably are. I’m not harping on this to be a perv or weirdo I swear. Regardless: You are up late sometimes, Sarah. We all are. Being up late for lots of reasons, but let’s just go there. Let’s go there and say—I’m sorry, gosh—it was because it was a late night in the bedroom. Later than you wanted it to be, but you both kept going. I mean, it was probably good and everything and it wasn’t a bad time at all, but it just went a little longer than it should have. Okay, maybe a lot longer. I don’t know for sure, obviously. Your partner has already come, maybe even a couple of times, and you’ve already come, maybe also multiple times, and yet it continues. Later and longer than necessary. Neither of you knows why. There isn’t a problem, nor should there be, and when you do finally !114

decide to stop, your partner doesn’t hesitate or mutter or do anything besides simply slide over. And then there’s the big exhale up to the ceiling and the finger-drag across the place of skin where it always gets dragged (sometimes it’s not even a drag, but a pat, or a rub, or sometimes not anything at all), the visceral cue that declares it’s over and it’s time to go to sleep. And so you close your eyes and—this is way too assuming, I know, and I’m sorry—you never fall asleep first, you cannot fall asleep until you know your partner has already fallen. Even if you were right there on parallel glide paths where it could have just as easily been you that fell first, the fact remains that you didn’t, that you weren’t truly in unison, and you hear your partner take that big deep clearing breath that sets in before the air switches channels, from the nasal passages and downshifts into the back of the throat. And the rumbling starts. Your partner’s face, body and feet all pointed totally away from you, and then that feeling sets in, sharp and fierce, that you are now alone in your pre-sleep state, that you’ve not so much been abandoned here (not at all, actually; remember the finger-drag? The non-finger-drag?), but fuck oh dear does that word capture a lot of how that feels. Am I close? To be the last one asleep after the session runs longer that you needed it to or—dare I say it? Sorry!—wanted? To wonder why your partner isn’t awake with you now, when the blood has stopped pounding in your thighs like a headache, after it’s receded back to wherever headachy blood goes, left to not worry or question but simply wonder how it’s so easy and fluid to just be done like that, after all the time and energy you both summoned from seemingly nowhere (or maybe it’s the same place the blood lives?) to go the extra duration, how all that seems !115

to be totally gone, but not in a lonely, forlorn way, but in a way that yet still is indeed gone nonetheless. What I’m one part asking and the other part saying is that the drift off to sleep isn’t an easy one? Maybe this is compounded by the fact that so many people (again, not myself; you’re way too skinny and put together) would undoubtedly find you attractive and like to go a long session or two with you. And that while your partner is long gone into slumberland, you are left to consider your own awake-ness, to try and remain still so your partner can stay sleeping. But somewhere inside you, there’s a place and piece of you that wants them to roll back over and start it all again, to mainline the experience as straight-up, too, no foreplay, right to business again, the grinding again, to say in some obviously crass but nevertheless imperative way that cannot and will not stop. Because when you do finally drift off to sleep, you aren’t so much spent as you are exhausted, and this is something you’ve done entirely to yourself despite the fact it was triggered by someone else. You know what I mean. You wake up foggy-headed the next morning—this morning, maybe—and stumble back into your regular thoughts and try to invent yourself into the new day, try to catapult yourself past the previous evening that was all delightful and everything but somehow landed awkwardly —not badly, awkwardly—and the end result is to concoct, compose, and broadcast something to those who know you that is markedly substandard, that isn’t your best effort, but yet is still undeniably you and yours. That’s how I feel looking at what you’re prompting me to write today, Sarah. “Write a scene that involves a woodwind instrument and an orange sports car.” I’m trying really hard not to say you are mailing it in with this !116

one, because you’ve been where I’ve been, where we’ve all been. Getting on with it can be both the easiest and hardest fucking thing in the world, like going extra sessions with someone who you are totally dialed into and want nothing less than to breathe in every molecule of oxygen in their body. To breathe in and never exhale. To always feel your entire being past the edge of bursting. Piccolo Lamborghini, then. See you in a week.

!117

QUEENS IN PIECES

! ! !

Senia Hardwick

I remember laying tangled with you for hours, thin arms wrapped around each other's waists, spilling piles of promises until they stained all our sheets. I remember drinking until the rage dulled to a constant blanket rather than a searing lament. Towards the end I preferred the drinking to lying with you. It was reliable, I got off consistently and was asked nothing in return. I replaced intimacy with lying in separate rooms in our own worlds. When the needs rose in me I didn't turn to you. You had your own place, your own commitments, people who needed you. I didn't particularly need you by that point, I wrote up my own synthetic self. I only stopped when the tension became too great, and then I’d fall asleep sated but unsatisfied. When we stepped down from our spheres there was so much unsaid. You wanted to be loved and touched, taught, guided, mothered and fed, and I was not truly capable of any of those things. I wanted to inflict myself on you, to be an affliction. Something one bears witness to. I suppose I was, but never enough. It never felt enough. Somewhere !118

within me, I wanted to fully become that other thing, my own silhouette, a hazel-eyed stranger who knew you and my life, but was not me. I thought of it as stronger than I was, able to bear the lamentations and cruelties that I could not. I powered it with drink and violence, the vitriol having turned black and viscous inside my body. I shook with it, huddled over on all fours, choking on the gelatinous filth. I tried purging myself of it- forcing the darkness out of the slits in my shoulders, but I only ended up winged with dripping void.

! !

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Oh it's definitely worn offâ&#x20AC;? we decided, as we giggled over the golden dawn we had discovered. I tied my sneakers with a smile so wide I was almost laughing. We didn't need anything aside from each other, two 7/11 burritos, a pack of cigarettes for you, and a bottle of wine for me. You pointed out that the fire hydrant across the street had witnessed the civil rights movement, and in that moment I thought you were so brilliant that I shoved you against a mailbox and kissed you until we were short of breath. I could feel the flush of your excitement through your clothes or had told myself I did, but pulled back, remembering it was not appropriate to take your shirt off in public. This angered me as it was technically legal, but my rage was quickly forgotten. We had our whole lives ahead of us, and the sins of the past were exactly as they were named, in the past. We could put aside the schism growing between us, put aside the accusations, put aside the now broken ice tray I !119

smashed against the fridge door instead of calling you a whore. You tugged my hand as we staggered up the subway stairs. I was dead set on riding all the way to Coney Island and back, a three hour journey round trip. Somewhere along the way I drank the entire bottle of corner-store sangria. You stood in the far corner subway platform, smoking a cigarette you had rolled yourself. I watched the tendrils of smoke curl around you, convinced it was a form of higher mathematics. You nestled next to me on the subway, still smelling of tobacco, but for once I didn't care. When we reached the first Manhattan subway stop we recognized that we were, in fact, still tripping balls and should return home.

! !

III

When I visited you upstate I'd leave dark ruddy bruises all over your throat and decolletage. The novelty of everything changed our limits (somewhere along the way I stopped liking when we'd sneak into changing rooms at department stores and you stopped liking the feel of my teeth on your skin). There was an idea of ourselves as new people together. This concept that if we both worked hard enough we would become new people with new skins and new eyes that shined brighter than before.

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FINANCES

! ! !

Jeremiah Walton

"Police are not here to protect you. They are here for social control, and protection of property."

! -Choking Victim ! ! Hello everyone ! How are you all doing? ! Allow me to introduce myself. !

My name is Money. I am a piece of fabric that controls your life

I figured you'd like to meet the inanimate object that dictates how you measure success

! That must mean that I'm pretty damn important ! !121

I have an ego that out matches that of any poet

! There's more poetry in a dollar than in starvation. ! That's about as poetic as I'm going to get. !

I wanted to let ya know how I'm doing. I am a million bucks, the winning lottery ticket!

You guys really make maintaining a high self esteem easy for me.

! The constant attention gets me going and excited! ! (Pause) ! I've traveled the world round 1000s of times ! too many times to count !

and almost everyone relies on me to hold your pieces together.

! You might as well re-name me Atlas. ! (Pause) ! Have you met my big brother Barter? !

He hangs out with the anarchists and home bums. He is a bad mother fucker. Has a bit of a drinking problem since he fell to the wayside.

!122

Though, I'll hand it to him. He can play on other's vices better than I can.

He can turn one cigarette into two joints and then trade one joint for a pack of smokes. He's up 19 smokes and a joint at that point.

! How far in life will that get you? ! I am a vice that can purchase you friendship, ! love, ! mercy. !

There are a couple of my brother's trading posts left cross the United States, but I've bought in on most of em.

It pissed him off soooo much. It made my day. I love seeing him get angry.

! (Pause) !

I remember at one point, some stupid kid kept using Sharpie to write "I am a piece of paper and I control your life" on parts of my American body

! I found that to be extremely offensive and degrading. ! First of all, my bills are made of fabric, ! at least in the United States, ! !123

so kid, do your research before uncapping your whine-y Sharpie

! Bur it's not just that! !

I'm also made of various minerals and metals. Pocket change is important to.

How else would we drive the homeless away? Throw em a couple dimes and give em the finger.

Go home, watch tv, fuck or get fucked, eat a warm meal, smoke a cigarette, and go to sleep knowing you helped out another human being today!

! And that, ! is enough justification to never do so again! !

It's the rational part of me that I try to embrace when I'm not already embracing myself.

(When was currency invented? Figure out money's zodiac sign)

Other than those valid details, I don't really have a problem with the kid writing that on me.

! I mean, it is accurate, regarding the extent of my control. ! How much did you spend of me on living today? ! How much was necessity?

!124

! I am here mostly for convenience purposes ! so if you own a lump sum of my body, ! you don't have to get off your ass. !

I love over hearing prayers to be blessed with more of my body in your pocket. It makes my quarters jingle in anticipation of another gun point bank robbery.

! People stab each other in back alleys over me regularly. ! Purses are snatched, bank accounts tapped. ! Books are written about how to manifest more of me. !

O, and those starving artist types, those annoying bastards, I can't help but mention them,

they bitch about me constantly, whining "monetary drive has become sooooo consuming! Can't you see it?"

Well, here's my middle finger to that. Every time you spend a dollar, you're helping me hold keep that "fuck you" erect.

! (Pause) !

Observe my jaw line gnawing on culture, watch the beautiful decay between my teeth.

The 21st century is so beautifully decadent in my name! !125

! So beautifully green! ! (Pause) ! O, and on another note, ! to you silly anarchists, ! keep flinging Molotov at my name. ! No matter how easy I burn, ! I'll be around till you humans go extinct. ! Upon extinction, reminders of my body will gather dust, ! until all bones of myself rotted, ! and I'm gone too. Absurdly vanished. ! But at that point ! I'll already have probably found myself irrelevant. ! Until then, ! love me. ! I love the way you do. ! ! !126

Overfull: Bile and Cider

! ! ! No one came. !

David S. Atkinson

Frank and his girlfriend sat in the reserved student center room with the honor society banner and all the ordered snacks. He'd even put on a button up shirt. Slacks. Sitting there dressed up, Frank never got dressed up. The girlfriend was sort of dressed up too. Long brown hair combed straight, wearing a homemade dress done from a fabric store pattern. Black with little white polka dots. Domestic. She tried to be domestic at least; she wanted to be. He met her in a group of party friends, the life before. Now was the new life, though. She wanted that, wanted to support him doing things. Degree. Career, whatever that was supposed to be. The honor society was supposed to be part of that. The new life. He'd given in; he was going to do things their way. Somehow, he'd gotten to be president. That meant he had to do certain things. This meet and greet. Introduce the society to new members, even though he'd only joined !127

a few months before himself. Reserve a room. Order chips and dip, spiced cider, from the limited campus catering menu. Nasty tricolor flour chips and oily orange-ish cream dip. Thenâ&#x20AC;Śno one showed.

No one showed even though messages had gone out with the envelopes announcing people's admittance to the society, congratulating them. Not even the other officers showed, the only other people who ever came to anything. Well, one guy showed. It was the older guy who always tried to hide that he wasn't fifteen years younger, the treasurer. Had on a tan plaid suit for some reason, fresh haircut so bad he looked like a cancer patient. Wasn't there to mingle, just check up. Told Frank all sorts of things 'he' needed to be doing to run the society. Never offered to help with a thing. One new member did show up as well. The fat kid. He'd been in a class with Frank one time, but then he dropped. It was a tough course and the professor wanted to make sure students were ready before getting started. Gave a pretest the first day. He said he couldn't officially give an entrance exam, but you wouldn't pass the class if you failed the pretestâ&#x20AC;Śeven if you did. Just so we all knew, were clear. The fat kid's mom called the university to complain. A kid in his twenties and his mom calls to bitch for him. Then he dropped. The professor told them all about it later. Even later than that, the fat kid was the only new member to show up at the meet and greet. They sat there in uncomfortable silence, the fat kid eating chips and dip, both him and Frank having expected a party and not being !128

prepared to carry conversation alone. Then, even the fat kid left. Those were the only two guests. Frank and the girlfriend sat there with the chips and dip, with those pitchers of spiced cider. Cups and paper plates for a hundred. None of that was any attraction, apparently.â&#x20AC;¨ They sat silent, looking at the clock. Frank was pissed, disappointed. The girlfriend just smiled pretty, playing at fifties housewife like she dreamed of. She wasn't supposed to have to say anything and she was sticking with that. "It's four," she finally did say. Frank had booked the room from two to four. That's how long the meet and greet was supposed to go. When no one showed, he'd had to keep siting there and hoping people came. After four though, he could finally bail. It was a disaster anyway. "Let's go," he muttered. "What about the refreshments?" she asked, pointing at the table where all the crap was. He shrugged. "Leave it. Campus catering will clean it up." God knew Frank didn't want that stuff. Her eyes shone suddenly. "Let's chug it!" Why not? He was sure she meant the cider as opposed to the chips, so why not have a chugging contest? It was a fitting thing to do, given how things had turned out. Sitting there like he was supposed to had been stifling. Appropriate to do something a little deviant, defiant at having been conned. They each grabbed a pitcher of spiced cider. He hated spiced cider, but campus catering only offered one or two juices, just like their chips and dip sucked, so there was no normal apple juice evenâ&#x20AC;Śmuch less beer. They poured the pitchers into a bunch of the plastic cups that were going to !129

waste. Might as well use the things. Then they could just slug one cup back after another. They did, then the girlfriend vomited into the wastebasket next to the table holding the snacks. Seemed her stomach couldn't hold an entire pitcher of cider. Frank wasn't doing much better.â&#x20AC;¨ At first, Frank worried someone would get pissed about vomit in a student center trashcan. It was campus, after all. Frank and the girlfriend just left, though. It didn't seem likely someone would bother to figure out who'd reserved the room after finding the puke. Anyway, he could just claim she had stomach flu. That was normal. Frank didn't puke, but as he sat in the passenger seat with his stomach full of an entire pitcher of spiced cider as the girlfriend drove him home, he wished he had. He'd never felt that nauseated in his life. It'd just been too much.

!130

Too Late

! !

Misti Rainwater-Lites

I celebrated the eve of my fortieth birthday in a cheap motel room in Eagle Pass with my boyfriend, throwing back Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola, listening to my boyfriend’s Carole King cd. Carole King was singing, “but it’s too late, baby, now it’s too late” and I believed and felt every fucking word. True, I was in love with my boyfriend and I felt like he might be in love with me. The sex was good. That’s always exciting. But I was living in exile in a Texas border town, my five-year-old son was living with my parents a few hundred miles away, and I felt like a pile of dog shit. I had two divorces behind me and several college hours but no degree and no discernible job skills. I’d been receiving disability checks for depression and anxiety for a couple of years. There were a few books out there with my name on them. Big fucking deal. I was a failure. February 17, 2013 I woke up in the bath tub, shivering, covered in vomit. My hands shook as I showered and washed my hair. My boyfriend was sleeping in the bed. I discovered a puddle of vomit by my side of the bed. I got in bed and stared at nothing and wallowed in self-loathing until my boyfriend woke up and wished me a !131

happy birthday. “Man, you got crazy last night. You started crying out ‘Bill’! I thought about helping you out of the tub but the bathroom floor was covered in vomit. You scared me.”  “The last thing I remember was toasting Carole King with the bottle of Jack Daniels. I cried out ‘Bill’? Oh shit.”  “You didn’t do anything with Bill when you were in San Francisco, did you?”  “No. We kissed a couple of times. I told you about that. I don’t know why I cried out his name. I can’t drink Jack Daniels ever again. Crazy is right.” I looked in the mirror. There was still vomit in my hair. “Forty fucking years old. I should just kill myself. God, I suck,” I muttered. In lieu of suicide I had sex with my boyfriend. Then I took another shower.

!132

THE DATE WITH   THE PURPLE-HAIRED GUY

! !

Tracey Lander-Garrett

Years ago I had met this guy with purple hair out at a goth club. He had just gotten out of the Navy and had been a photographer for them, or something. I don't know. I was drunk; he was cute, we kissed a little and exchanged numbers. We'll call him Billy, since I've long forgotten his name. Billy and I talked on the phone for two weeks, great, long, interesting conversations. I was into him. We made plans for a Saturday afternoon, a trip to a cool cemetery to take photos. He confessed that his hair was not really purple, that he'd just sprayed the purple in the night that I'd met him, and that normally his hair was bleached blonde. Then, on the Saturday in question, Billy calls and tells me that he can't meet me; he's run out of gas in his mom's car. He's in his mid-to-late twenties and runs out of gas. In his mom's car. This does not register with me as a red flag or warning signal. He asks what I’ll be doing that night. Going to the goth club, I tell him. We get off the phone. Then he calls back an hour later, while I'm in the !133

shower. He leaves a message saying he’ll be at the club that night with a friend. Cool, I think. Then Billy calls again, and I pick up. He tells me he's going to the club. And I say, “Yeah, I know, I got your message.” “Oh, yeah, I just wanted to make sure you got it,” he said. This was back before text messaging—back when you would call and call a person until they answered. Or something. It seemed... endearing? Anyway, I go to the club. I'm wearing my best school girl outfit with a white button-up, black skirt, knee socks, with my blonde hair in braids. And there I am, realizing that I'm not 100% sure that I'm going to recognize him. It's been over two weeks, and I was drunk when we met, and we didn't make any plans where we'd find each other in the club. So, for the first hour I'm at the club, I’m hanging around in the lounge nearest the front door, and a guy with bleached blonde hair comes in and I think it's him. Something about his nose, slightly upturned, his eyes, which in retrospect might have been slightly buggy, looked familiar. I consider approaching, but then a stacked blonde in black vinyl sits in his lap and he gives her a kiss on the cheek. Well, that's clearly not him, I think. It's been an hour, and I haven't recognized him, and I'm bored. So I give up. I go and dance, get a couple of drinks, and then I see the same guy again, next to this pillar where I like to dance, the same place where I met Billy two weeks before. It must be him, I think. I dance up to him, and I ask, “What's your name?” He says, “What's yours?” I tell him, and he smiles. It's him! I give him a kiss on the cheek. !134

The music is loud. He waves me close and says in my ear, “I've got to go pee, I'll be right back.” That’s awkward, I think, but I say… “Okay, no problem,” and wait. And wait. And he doesn't come back. Fuck him. I'm having another drink. Screw that guy. So I have another drink. Or two. By now I've lost count. The music is loud, I know the songs, I’m dancing, and there he is again by the fucking pillar. So I go back over to the pillar, and I put one arm on each side of his head and put my nose up against his nose —and a stacked blonde in vinyl grabs my arm and looks like she's trying to bore holes through my face with her eyes. So I say, “I'm sorry, is this your boyfriend?” And she says, “Yes!” and so I say, “My mistake,” and I just walk away. Was it the wrong guy? No! Billy chases me down, finding me standing in a blue-lit alcove. He says earnestly, “I don't even know that chick!” Well, by this point I'm a little drunk—actually—let's be clear: I'm wasted. But Billy apologizes. He says again he doesn’t know the girl. We go to the downstairs dance floor to talk or whatever because he is hiding from her. So we get downstairs and somehow—yes, I don’t really know how—we end up kissing. And there she is again, the blonde, grabbing his arm and trying to drag him away. He tries to hide behind me. Because I am drunk, I think that it will be a good idea to “talk things out with her.” I take the young lady aside. “He says he doesn't know you,” I explain. “We've been together for two months!” !135

I go back to Billy and ask if she has hallucinated a relationship with him. “We work together. We fooled around, once, but I told her I don't like her like that. She's a psycho! I told her I was coming to the club to meet you!” “You should go talk to her,” I slurred, leaning heavily against a wall. “But I want to stay here with you. I don't want to talk to her.” “You should go and talk to her.” He goes. There are many gesticulations. She looks angry. He shakes his head a lot. Then he comes back. “She's leaving. Without me.” “So that's good right?” “Well, now I don't have any way to get home.” So here’s where you’re thinking: Wait a minute. So they work together…fooled around...He claims he wanted nothing to do with her...and told her she was psycho and such, but had her drive him to the club? AND this is the same girl I saw him kiss on the cheek at the beginning of the night when I thought it wasn't him? So, there are perhaps three possibilities: One, he tried to get the two of us together, to see if he could finagle a situation where the two girls wouldn’t mind one another. Two, he wanted to meet me so badly that he asked the girl he'd been seeing for a ride, but then tried to hide it, thus the having to go to the bathroom and never coming back. Three, he is just the dumbest moron ever put on God's green earth. At any rate, the blonde comes over to me and she says, “Have fun supporting him then!” and dramatically whirls off, exiting the club. Billy now begins worrying about how he's going to get !136

home. “Look,” I tell him, “if you understand you're not going to get laid, you can come back and sleep at my place.” “Did you drive?” he asks. “No, I took the subway.” “How much does it cost?” “Two dollars.” He then turns to the dance floor, and borrows money from a random stranger on the dance floor— — for the two dollars for a subway ride. Fast forward. We get to my apartment. I have a futon that I sleep on. No extra bed, no couch, no sleeping bag. So I tell him he can sleep on the futon with me. As we're both passing out, I notice that his clothes smell vaguely... moldy. It's the barest whisper of mildew that comes from leaving your clothes in the washing machine too long, but then drying them anyway. If I were more sober, I'd kick him out of the bed, but all I want at that moment is sleep. The next morning, in my hungover state, the feeling of another body in the bed next to me isn't unwelcome. Our limbs are entwined. He kisses my neck. I stretch against him. And then he says, “I have an eight inch penis,” and reaching into his pants, asks, “Do you want to see it?” “Um, no, that's okay. I think I'll wait?” I pull away and sit up. I can't believe he's just asked me if I want to see his cock. What is he thinking? Was he kidding? I'm hoping to embarrass him a little—hoping he'll apologize. “Eight inches sounds a little too big,” I say. “Would you say it's thin or thick?” And he reaches down into his pants and grabs himself. Why is he grabbing his cock again? “Don't you know !137

by now? I mean, I'm not suggesting you do... that. Maybe I should leave the two of you alone? I can leave the room for a few minutes...” "No,” he says, “that's okay.” But he keeps massaging it. “Are you masturbating?” “I'm just trying to get it a little hard.” “That's okay. Really.” Subtext: Please stop.

And then he says, “Okay, now do you want to see??” And I yell, “NO!!!” He laughs, and stops playing with himself. We make small talk. Eat some cereal. Gesturing at my tank top with his spoon, he says, “Nice cleavage.” I say, “Thanks.” “Ever have a pearl necklace?” he asks. Now this boy talked to me on the phone for hours. For hours, in the two weeks before we met up again at the club. We talked about books, about movies, about his father who had died. There was nothing, nothing at all that could have prepared me for this behavior. Regardless, without missing a beat, I respond, “Do you mean have I ever owned a necklace made of pearls, or are you asking whether I’ve ever had someone come on my tits?” Shortly thereafter I insisted he leave, and he borrowed $5 from me to catch the subway and the bus back to Jersey. And he called me the next day like nothing happened.

! !

!138

Drink More

! !

Matthew J Hall

I wake up in the corner of the front room, naked, cold and sick. Too sick to consider what it is about my type of drunkenness that insists on leading me into this same corner for every blackout. My head feels like it has a red-hot band with a pulse strapped around it. I peel a burnt out cigarette stump from my face and reach for a box of matches. Its contents spill over the carpet. The shaking is always at its most stubborn when I wake up in the corner. The day is grey and dismal, yet the sun is still more than I can handle. I close the blind and try to think. Which of course, is far too an ambitious and altogether fruitless exercise at this point in the hangover. The floor I have climbed up from is wet. I can't remember the last time I drank without losing control of my bodily functions. A strong smell of urine is everpresent but only ever noticeable during these desperate moments. My conscience is sobering up. I can feel it inside. A growing uneasiness that will soon develop into impossible proportions. I need to drink some tea, so as to regain a stomach fit for drinking. Hot tea with plenty of sugar. Blood drips into the empty tea canister from an !139

already cracked and infected thumb nail that had torn as I unclipped the lid. The half empty Tequila bottle stares at me smugly from the sideboard.

"What the hell are you waiting for?" It jibes. "Don't start." I mutter, while gripping its neck with an unsteady hand. Take-away wrappers, wet clothes, spilt ashtrays and various items of crockery make the couch an increasingly hostile resting place. I'll take a drink and tidy. Make things better. Shape the place up. I place the bottle in between my legs, the sight of my shrunken genitalia reflecting off the TV screen makes everything worse. The cold glass feels good against my skin but is little compensation for my current predicament. I flick the bottle lid. It makes an unrealistically loud thump as it hits the carpet. The pulse in the band around my head quickens. I will soon be sick and need to act accordingly. I belch and groan. Lean forward and breathe in the fumes from the bottle. The smell twists my gut into a spasm of screaming failure. Incomplete images from all my dry periods flash before me. I can feel the sweat rolling down my torso and hear the many platform announcements from all the times I have tried to run away. All the times I should have jumped in front of the train instead of into it. All the times I have alighted onto a new platform only to find the same foot stepping in front of the other. All the way to the bar. The corner store. The bottle. The hangover. I add yet another carpet burn to my face, bruise my foot, twist my ankle and scream bloody murder, all without spilling a drop of Tequila, as I trip on the broken coffee table in a rush for the bathroom. My muscles are twitching all over. The floor feels as though it were made !140

up of a thousand angry lice. A sure sign of things to come. I'm in no state for facing all those eager hallucinations. Standing up requires much more effort than I have anticipated. Once upright, it takes all my concentration to stay that way. Steadying myself on the door frame I force my emotions into submission. I don't need to think about what I have become. Nor the people I have shunned. I cannot allow myself to picture what my son is doing in this moment. I don't need to hear my wife's bleeding heart. Or my Mother's worry. What I need is to drink, puke and drink again. My knees creak in protest on their way down to the tiled floor. I lean on the toilet and take three sparing sips. Blood rushes to my head as I hang it into the bowl and wait. My belch and groan echo inside the stool. It stinks. I dry heave. I tip the bottle upright against my teeth and close my throat. Swill the clear liquid around my mouth then breathe it into the back of my neck and the opening of my lungs. Mucus, bile and stomach lining sputter over the offwhite porcelain. Then I spew freely. The Tequila burns like hell on the way up and tastes stronger than it did going down. I know I can hold the next swig in, so I don't waste any more time. By the sixth or seventh my hands start to settle. In amongst the bile and bits of stomach lining, I'm sure I can see little pieces of my soul swimming towards the cistern. I drop the empty bottle into the bath-tub with the others, stand over the toilet, empty my bladder and flush it all away.

! !

!141

Frankie Comes in Hollywood

! !

John Saunders

Hi Honey, hard day at work? – relax, let me get you a beer. Thanks love, No, the day was pretty routine – got three shots finished – a threesome in a garage scene we started yesterday. Wow, the smell of oil was ghastly and two blow-jobs after lunch, mundane enough- still I’m worried about my performance. It’s the rubbers. I can’t get into the mood. Lights and sound ready, the Director calls action and I get flustered, can’t put it on, can’t keep plank. I need more rehearsal time – you know, get into character.

Don’t worry Frankie, it will come right. Can I help maybe? !142

Do you want to practice after dinner? We have some in the bedroom. No Honey, I took them this morning, used up my studio supply. Babe, I’m tired, this job is wearing me out. Maybe we can cuddle up on the sofa, watch a DVD – hey, do we still have “The Sound of Music”?

!143

Resting on Three Legs

! !

Gabriel Richard

It had been about ten years since the last time he had babysat. Since Hal couldn’t remember the name of that two-year-old, just the realistically dull circumstances concerning why he had sat with a toddler on the couch for two hours, watching On the Waterfront, he went ahead and called that child Big Fly in his mind. That was pretty stupid, but he was tired. Dull cretin laughter followed the words Big Fly. It was as good as any other name. Since it was only a little past six, the early morning light coming in from the kitchen was a very gentle, fuzzy grey. It wasn’t seeking out victims. It wasn’t cracking bones. But its voice was clear in all the stillness outside. Gonna burn those eyes right out of them sockets, buddy boy, yessir. Hal wasn’t in the mood for voices. They didn’t make him feel crazy. Free passes, he argued to himself, to anyone who had gone this long without sleep, put up with as much goddamn stupid delirium from others as he had endured, and still managed to fit in several beers, two full packs of someone else’s cigarettes, a rousing game of Life that turned violent near the end, and several shots of a flavored vodka. He couldn’t remember the flavor now. It !144

might have been gummy bear. The bottle was in pieces in his friend’s backyard. Too many flavors of vodka these days, he thought. It was getting ridiculous, and he felt even more ridiculous for fearing change at thirty-four.

“Wait,” he said, more or less speaking to Jay in his highchair. “Not thirty-four.” He had positioned the child’s highchair in the extremely cramped kitchen, and then sat in a turned around chair in the adjacent dining room. This allowed him to watch the kid, without having to actually move. “Not thirty-four,” he repeated, hoping the words would add some moisture to his cracked, sore lips. “Not for another three weeks.” This weather was murder, except that murder tended to be more interesting. This was a drawn-out kind of thing. It would make him aware of every second in which he thought he was very possibly dying. Over and over again, he had to think about how cold it was in the house. Mick’s family apparently didn’t believe in turning the heat on. Again, he tried to see his breath, but it was hard to trust what he saw. Something was definitely intruding on that. “I guess you’re not going to go back to sleep?” He lit a cigarette, and felt behind him for an ashtray. The child smashed his fists on the highchair’s tray, rolled his eyes, and giggled like a drunk, who had just picked up drinking and laughter. Jay was now the maniacal lord and ruler of the household. Mick was passed out down the hall, in either his bedroom or the bathtub. Jay’s mother, aunt, and grandmother were out getting beer. And what would hopefully be some sort of actual breakfast. Unfortunately, the breakfast part was unclear. They !145

were definitely getting beer though, and he wasn’t sure if he was okay with that or not. It wasn’t like he needed help getting to sleep. Two good chairs were in the living room. Recliners. Fucking recliners. Jay smashed the tray again, raised his hands to run them through the rapidly-growing assortment of black hairs on his head, and then brought them down on the tray again. He was chattering away, years of distance stood between him and things like social anxiety. It stood to reason that he would be up and alert. He was the only one in the house who had slept for more than an hour during the night and early morning, so it made sense that he would be the livelier one between them. He really hadn’t stopped talking at all. Hal didn’t have a problem with that, beyond a little envy. He also didn’t want Jay’s mother to still be on his mind. This didn’t seem to mean a thing to his mind though. Parts of it were stubbornly and whole-heartedly committed to going their own way. Jay’s mother had a name. He just didn’t want to say it. He didn’t want to make things worse than they already were. He buried his face in the hand that was holding the slow-burning cigarette. Jesus. Fuck. He couldn’t remember her name now. Well, he realized, he could, but he was getting it mixed up with Mick’s other sister’s name. They looked a lot alike. Both were chubby, both had dark hair with disorganized blonde streaks, and both were under the goddamn age of twenty-five. The sister wouldn’t have been so bad. Jay’s mother, if he remembered correctly, was nineteen. “I’m a pitiful man, Jay,” he said, moving his hand from his face to the left temple. “I shouldn’t even be !146

here.” Jay stopped banging on the tray. He looked very serious all of a sudden. “I should be up north.” He took a long drag, flicked some ash into the ashtray on his right knee. “I should head out west.”  Jay stuffed a couple of cold chicken fingers in his mouth. This didn’t stop him from trying to talk again. “Somewhere several hundred miles away. He coughed, and that somehow brought him crashing down. “Somewhere with a, a,” he paused and drew some sloppy circles with the smoke to form the word he was searching for, “a higher, uhm, maintenance of some kind.” The scream Jay let out was a laugh, a precursor to crying, or just a scream. He was a cute kid. “Yeah, you know what I mean.” He yawned, shook himself a little. “What the hell is your mom’s name again? Brittany? Parker?” It was a precursor to crying. He built up to it by making loud, fussy noises. Mick would have known, but the son-of-a-bitch, the meanest drunk in late-night history, was fast asleep in either the bathtub or his bed. He remembered Mick’s very long speech on the twohour ride from Richmond, to wherever the Christ they were outside of Charlottesville. It must have been a speech he had given a few times before. Speaking confidently was not one of Mick’s strengths, and there had definitely been a polish to the way he controlled most of their conversation heading to his house. “This is just something I tell everyone who walks through the door,” he said, when they were stopping at a liquor store near his street. “I’m glad to finally get you !147

over for boozin’ and a good ol’ fashioned Feast marathon.” “Yeah, of course. Should be awesome.” “But, and, man, I don’t think this is you at all, but you know how I got sisters, right?” Jay screamed. He was crying now, and Hal had made up his mind of what to do about it. Lifting a body that had taken it upon itself to be moved slowly, he got up, crushed the dead cigarette in the ashtray, and walked towards the child. It was understandable that just lifting his feet, the way normal people did when they were normally walking, was even more of an ongoing obstacle course than getting up. The weight might have started in his eyes, but it had extended to the rest of his body like a slow-burning virus. Nine or ten dollar microwave dinners were piled up on the stove. All of them had been heated up several hours before. This was more of Mick rewriting his one-man show on the fly. The dinners were a few small moments of pure hilarity, to break up the tedium of one backbreaking scene of terrible tension after another. Shirtless, screaming at his mom and sisters, Jay sleeping through it all in the next room, Mick had gone ahead and cooked those dinners, two at a time. He ate a little from one, threw it in the general direction of everyone, and staggered off down the hall. A handful of corn and peas pleased Jay immensely. He clasped one at a time in his fist, stuffed the whole fist into his mouth and devoured them that way. “We all set, muffin man?” Jay flung his head back as he stuffed a single corn in his mouth. His giggle had a long, weird roar to it, bouncing along a couple of distinct pitches. Honestly, it was kind of adorable. Jay had chubby !148

cheeks that were going to follow him around for a long time, monstrous, alert blue eyes, and a round, extremely expressive face. He bore a slight resemblance to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, which was Hal’s definition of a cute baby to begin with. He smiled, and put a hand on the kid’s head as though administering a blessing. “Go in peace then.” He turned, and went back to the table. He noticed an unopened beer. That it was the last one was likely, but since more was on en-route, he took it anyway. It wasn’t like he was crossing a foreign threshold by having one at this hour. “I don’t even know where you guys keep the coffee,” he said to Jay, sitting down and popping it open. It was going to be a kick him in the stomach, with its warm, bitter taste. “And I have no desire to even try and look for it.” The beer brought its leg back, and swung hard. Listening and eating, Jay watched him attentively, gratefully, making random noises while he ate. Brittany was the one he liked. That was it. Parker was the slightly older one. The nineteen year-old with a kid, a weird lisp, a body that he had to cruelly admit was more lumpy than curvy, and what was roughly an IQ level one stage above ambrosia salad. Humiliation at every turn for every single time he thought about her. God would have to decide later on whether or not to cut him a break. Just have this whole thing become the byproduct of old age, insomnia, weed, crisis management, and drinking. Mick at least made him feel better about his own means of settling down for the night, with half a bottle of whatever took him by the hand on the way home from work. Of course, that’s exactly how an alcoholic would justify a bad habit that soothed like a pair of shoes with a !149

gypsy curse on them. The bottoms would never wear out. They would never cease to be comfortable. But the wife and kids would die in a car accident. Or something would come along to snap the legs in two. His ex-wife had been right years ago about the women he preferred to bother. Most of them were big on brooding, dark hair colors, and an attic of the mind that went on for miles. Boxes of emotional damage filling every square inch of the uncertain floor. She and Brittany in the same room would be like pitting Mabel Normand against a Maury regular. Funny and strange, yeah, but someone was going to die. Or the universe was going to pull its own lips over the rest of its head, rather than let things get out of hand. He shook a little at the sonic boom that interrupted him. Jay was back to hysterics. The jolt was a little more painful than last time. His body punished him for almost springing out of the chair. Sleep in its most permanent, death-like form sucked in the air, and then breathed the poisonous aftermath across his face. It was an electric fan that wanted to be a hurricane for a day, a panic attack that thankfully didn’t last long. “Hey, hey, hey.” He did what felt and probably looked liked a horrible two-step shuffle, extended his arms, and did the stupid shuffle again. “What’s all this then?” It got him to stop screaming. Bright red tones had already meshed with the pink under his teary eyes. He jammed two fingers into his mouth, yelled, took them out, and banged on the tray. Obviously, the peas and corn had been played out. All the entrees for the dinners were the same, so all the side dishes were the same, too. All it took to get Jay to start sobbing again was that !150

quick moment without human attention. Cute kid, yes, but his act was limited. “Aw, come on, baby blue boy” He went back across the entire span of his love life in about four seconds. It wasn’t very thorough, but that was the most strenuous workout his memory was willing to give him, so he took it. He took it, and he tried to see if there was a pattern for falling backwards, and then back up onto his feet, for the women he tried to rush into marrying him. “None of that crying business. Life’s not that bad.” The way his mind felt, he didn’t think he even had a memory anymore. Most likely, Jay wanted a friendlier face, or at least a more familiar one. They had gotten along pretty well last night though. “I mean, uhm,” he paused to let himself be gripped by the need for nicotine, the only stimulant at his disposal besides the shock of warm, awful beer. “You’re white, you know, and, uhm, you’re a guy, so that’s neat.” Jay didn’t think it was neat at all. His crying went straight into another, much higher pitch. “You know, in terms of how profoundly unfair the structure of this country is, uhm, set up.” What the fuck? Jay just howled, and never took his eyes off him. “Yeah,” Hal agreed, sighing, “It’s too early for a discussion of commonplace social injustices.” The really funny part of the babysitting gig was in how quickly and eagerly he had volunteered for it. Outside with Brittany and Mick’s mom, Parker had gone to her room to text someone in private, the last of them continued drinking and chain-smoking, in the eerie glow of a morning sluggish and relative quiet. Brittany and her mom started talking about leaving the house to pick up a !151

few things. Brittany wanted to go alone, her mom wanted to come, and there was no one to watch Jay. They bickered about this for a couple of minutes. Parker was apparently not an option. Hal broke it up by offering to look after him, thinking at first that he would have done anything to stop yet another argument in this house. Jay screamed, hiccupped, put a fist in his mouth and kept sobbing. Christ, he was probably teething. “What do you need, buddy?” He did the stupid two-step shuffle with the arms extending at the end again. “Want me to smash myself in the head with a frying pan?” Whatever Jay was trying to express, it certainly had the right pitch to match its urgency. “People seem to like watching me get hurt, so, I don’t know, if you’re down with it.” When he had nominated himself to babysit, Brittany and her mother exchanged a look. Brittany then shrugged, smiled, thanked him, and put her hand on his for a few moments. The human contact part was a surprise. Trying not to move his hand for those five seconds left him feeling even more tired. His hand was still gnawing the hell out of his fist. It had to be teething. Quickly, he searched the kitchen for something. Brittany touching his hand had given him a moment of spiritual electricity that he had been thinking about ever since. Her hand was warm, and it would have been welcome to stay on top of his for even a full ten seconds. “Let’s see what we got here.” The kitchen was small. There really wasn’t a lot to look at, so he started checking the drawers and cupboards. The object had to make a noise, and it couldn’t hurt too much. He needed the last of his brain cells for the big, upcoming birthday. “Just hang !152

in there,” he asked, over the sound of Jay crying with a little less of that shrill banshee thing that babies were so good at. He started singing “Freefalling” in a voice a little too loud and far too off-key to do Tom Petty justice. One of the cupboards had an opened package of pie plates.

He was jabbering again, but everything he mumbled had a hint of a threat that he could start crying again. “Here we go,” he took one of the pie plates out, and put the rest back. He knew exactly what one of these sounded like when it came into contact with the human skull. Hoping it would calm him even more, he waved it around in the air. “Here we go, man. Here we go.” It kind of, sort of worked. He took the hand out of his mouth, fell to complete silence, and watched him intently. When he was Brittany’s age, he wanted to compile mix CDs for any woman who would even look at him for more than five minutes, but his heart inevitably belonged to a very specific type. “Dig this,” he told Jay. He smacked himself in the head with the pie plate, and put on a big show of making it look like he had just received an uppercut from a wrecking ball. “Gah! Dammit!” The smile that broke out across Jay’s face was huge and instant. Physical comedy maintained its legacy for another eon. He struck himself again, throwing himself back against the stove, and knocking over some of Mick’s stone-cold microwave dinners. “Ow! Jesus, God, the agony!” Jay giggled, and stretched his arms out. This trick had worked with the other baby he looked after so long ago, and it had worked with both of his younger sisters. It would be nice, he thought dimly, !153

smacking himself in the head, groaning and staggering towards the high chair, if one of his sisters would remember that sometime. With both arms still stretched out, Jay shrieked with laughter, grabbed fistfuls of Hal’s hair and tried to gum his forehead.  When he was Brittany’s age he wrote plays, assumed all of them would be published on the bright streets of Richmond. He read more, fell in love easily, and didn’t apologize for his romantic ideal. He pulled himself away from Jay. “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” He put a hand on Jay’s head. “How about these apples?” He raised an elbow into the air, and brought it down a couple of inches away from Jay’s head. He shrieked again at the sound of the elbow smacking into the palm of the other hand. This always went over with kids, so he did it a few more times, and threw in a few over-the-top rasslin’ grunts, too. The ex-wife had embodied that romantic ideal. She had probably known that within seconds of meeting him in someone’s Queens apartment on Halloween. Jay reached out to him again, and Hal took every hamfist swat from the kid as though it was a heavy blow. He snapped his head back every time. His neck cracked painfully a couple of times, but he had momentum on his side now. He stepped back, grinned at Jay, and sent him around the moon a few times with a Ric Flair strut and a “Wooo.” This kid would probably rip the tray right off that chair right now, if he could. He definitely wanted to get out, knock the front door off its hinges, and go on to rule the world. Fuck it, why not? It took him a moment to figure out the damn highchair, but he got it after a moment of deep !154

meditation. Holding a baby had never been hard for him. Years of practice helped. Jay was a little big to be held, but Hal knew for a fact that the kid couldn’t sit up on his own very well, and he was still mostly crawling. It wasn’t a big deal, really. He felt confident that his arms could hold out for a few minutes.  A morning like this was good for taking things in small, metal health care-approved increments of accomplishment. He jostled Jay in his arms a little, as the kid squealed and flailed his sausage arms around. His hands couldn’t stop making fists, which seemed to amaze him. That was going to be his personal victory for the day. Miles and miles of disaster, and constant personal risk were waiting for him up ahead. Small victories in adulthood would only seem greater in scale than something like his hands becoming something entirely different, when he balled up the fingers, and squeezed them into his palms. God, please don’t let it turn out to be true that babies are psychic. Mick wasn’t going to be up for a while. That was fine. They needed a break from interacting with each other. It had been like that since high school. Since Mick had moved back in with his family a few months ago, they didn’t get together in Richmond as much. The change to his routine had bugged Hal a little at first, but he found that he had gotten used to it pretty quickly. Maybe because they were still the same people they had been fifteen years ago. It was easy to let go of old, familiar things, he was finding. Even easier to let go of things that tried to get a fresh spark talking. The time between irritating change and adapting was shorter than it had ever been in his life. His reaction to that was his reaction to everything right !155

now. That the next time he sat in a comfortable chair, he probably wasn’t going to wake up for a few hours. With Jay in his arms, it was easier to stay awake. The ache in his arms sent an unvarying, strongly-worded message to his eyelids to get with the program. It wasn’t that falling for Brittany, crushing heavy on her, whatever it was really called, was the real problem. It wasn’t even that he was lonely. No more than usual, anyway. Looking ahead as best he could, Jay trying to whisper various secrets of the universe in his ear, he saw a morning of weird flirting, probably all in his head, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and embracing the coma that was going to suck him into outer space, as soon as he sat down. By now, more light was coming in through the kitchen windows. It still looked to him like a different planet or alternate dimension, when he peered through the grimy glass. Later today, possibly tomorrow, it would be time to head back, finally unpack, finally clean up that goddamn bedroom, and pretend he was ready to start looking for work again. A couple of interviews were already in place, thanks to very casual friends, so at least things would have the impression of proactive movement. “Come on, tubbs.” Jay was starting to wear down the reserves in the unimpressive muscles of his arms. “Let’s go sit on the couch. I think I saw The Godfather on the DVD rack.” He responded by grabbing a fistful of hair, one of the clumps sporting a thick, grey patch, letting it go, and pressing both palms against Hal’s face. “Yeah? You dig on Pacino? Big Robert Duvall fan?” Jay mumbled something, brought his head to rest on !156

Halâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shoulder. They moved to the living room. Brittany and her mother would be back soon. He put Jay on the couch, got his cigarettes and warm beer from the kitchen, and killed the warm beer by the time he came back. It twisted that lined his stomach for a moment, but the feeling passed. The DVD was in. Jay was leaning forward, pummeling the fabric of the couch. Ten years ago? This would have been a pretty good morning. Then there was the sound of a car coming up the long, country driveway. Hal lit a cigarette, and made sure Jay was sitting up comfortably. His body felt as though it was getting closer and closer to a supernova. That strange kind of fuzziness. Everything was in place for some kind of scientific process that involved the universe exploding, putting itself back together, and making do with the fact that some of the pieces had failed to survive the sweeping, heartless march of progress. It didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bother him presently, but it might lead to a panic attack, after he woke up later on. He could envision several different things happening with Brittany over the next few hours.

! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

â&#x20AC;Š !157

SLEEPING WITH CREEPY JESUS

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Ashley Perez

Creepy Jesus looks at me when I sleep. Well, more like an agonizing stare. Creepy Jesus isn’t your typical crucified Jesus; rather, he’s a white guy in robes who just happens to be hovering above a stormy ocean with golden light exploding out of his head. He has a piercing stare and the picture of him is stapled to the wall that I sleep against. It took me a long time to get used to sleeping below Creepy Jesus, but it really was the best place to sleep, considering the options. I’d just moved into my friend’s family’s home because I had nowhere else to go. I was in the middle of high school and had officially run out of other living arrangements. When I first moved in, it was supposed to last two weeks. I am writing now, sitting below Creepy Jesus, almost ten years later. At first, I slept on the couch in the living room. There is a stuffed pheasant that is perched over the kitchen doorway, covered in cobwebs, next to one of six nonworking clocks spread throughout the room. I am not bothered by taxidermy but this one disturbs me mostly just because it took me so long to figure out what it was. I never wanted to look at it too closely. I finally had to ask one of the house inmates—I call all ten of my housemates !158

inmates—while he was busy painting a mural of space on the side of the house. My friend’s family home was the kind of home where a lot of people came through. Some stayed for a few days, some stayed for months. They were all family, and then there was me: a complete stranger save for being the friend of the granddaughter of the woman who owns the house. In the ten years that I have now lived in this house, my sleeping place has been moved a lot. I have slept from couch, to floor, to cushions on the floor, to bed, to makeshift bed, back to couch. Nix the couch when one of the inmate’s schizophrenia emerges and it is not safe to sleep in the living room for a while. Back to bedroom under Creepy Jesus. I feel safe sitting under Creepy Jesus. Not because he is Jesus and I am religious. No, I have mixed feelings when it comes to religion. I feel safe because it is the most remote point in the house that one can get while remaining inside. It is in the room in the very back, in the farthest corner. There is a former alcoholic, a former speed addict / alcoholic, and a current sociopathic drug addict alcoholic that add to the noise of a house that has seen too much. The noise starts at 5 or 6 am and doesn’t stop until after 11 pm. I have lived with this noise for the 10 years I have been here. The degree of loudness and craziness has varied throughout the years. I often wonder why I stay until the reality of it comes crashing: I can’t leave. I am stuck in this corner, under the stare of Creepy Jesus. He doesn’t mind that I don’t add to the noise. !159

A Series of Unexpected Endings

! !

Ted Jackins

I sat on the dirty thrift store couch drinking bottom shelf burgundy from a plastic tumbler. My stomach growled somewhere beneath the dim fingerpicked refrains of the Nick Drake album spinning on the stereo. I hadn’t eaten anything in two days since my last paycheck had run out and the stale pizza I’d fished out of the dumpster behind my building had been like a drop in the bucket. None of this would matter once I managed to get my nerve up. I raised my glass in a trembling hand and shut it all out. I had been falling into this hole rapidly for over a month now but in a way it had all been a long time coming. I imagined all the clichés people would be saying in the coming days about how I had everything going for me. I had a great job, a nice apartment, a girlfriend who seemed perfect for me, and a daughter who was a total daddy’s girl. They would also have to mention the other side of things, the other side of me. How I was really two people and the other version always came out of the shadows when I was drinking. How the drinking had been escalating over the last year and a half. How it had caused many of the people around me to begin keeping their distance or else I had cut ties with them out of fits of !160

increasing paranoia. I didn’t trust anyone anymore let alone myself. Anyone who pointed out that I drank far too much was cast out or else left on their own accord. I drained the tumbler and struggled to my feet for another glass. If I was going to get through this I was going to have to push myself well past the point of fuck it. The gallon jug sat half drained on the kitchenette counter next to a small shopping bag. I needed what remained after this final hit to wash down the contents of my final shopping expedition: three large bottles of aspirin. I poured from the jug and stared through blurring eyes around the room. On a shelf overlooking the empty refrigerator was a line of emptied whiskey bottles all accumulated in the three months I’d lived in the apartment. They stood stiff as statues as monuments to my unraveling. Many of them had been shared on hazy evenings with my girlfriend, Lisa, in between tokes of her medical grade weed and rounds of sex. Throughout the course of our short time together I’d say we were sober collectively a total of five hours tops. The rest of the time we were brutally hung over or in black out mode. Lisa had come into my orbit two months before I had moved to the apartment via a personal ad I had placed online in a fit of loneliness (of which there were many as my inner circle dwindled). She, too, had kept her distance at first and we only met face to face once before the move. My phone calls following the meeting either went to voice mail or just rang endlessly. Over time I stopped leaving messages and then chalked it up to another loss and didn’t bother calling. That would all change when I received a job offer in Durham and for a brief moment my luck seemed to be !161

turning. I sent her an email in one fleeting moment of impulsiveness telling her the good news and expected nothing. My phone rang almost immediately after total silence from her for some time. This was the beginning of her weak excuses that I would completely overlook in the name of loneliness. Despite my cynicism I tend to exist blissfully unaware of how I am being fucked over by most people. Everyone has a fatal flaw and this is my cross to bear, as they say. She muttered something about having lost her phone during the time I hadn’t heard from her. This didn’t account for the fact she had my email address and a house phone but I was in too good a mood to smell the bullshit. Only later would I discover that in that wilderness period she had gone on a date with another guy, gotten sloppy drunk and totaled her dad’s car on the way home which led to a DWI. Even that news wasn’t enough of a red flag for me to slam on the brakes. All a lonely drunk wants in a potential mate is someone to provide company who also likes to drink. Lisa would supply both in spades. I had drained the tumbler of the final hit while standing at the counter lost in thought. The room had fallen silent as the record’s final acoustic strums faded from the stereo speakers. I just stood there a few moments, drunk, and watched as my cats took turns chasing a spent beer cap across the floor. There was no way to tell which night it could have been from. I had been drinking alone again as Lisa began distancing herself again as my depression grew more pronounced. I had to borrow money from my grandmother in order to pay the rent for the month because I had drank away the check that usually went toward bills. I picked up the bag of aspirin bottles and the jug and slumped back down on the couch. !162

I had moved into the apartment the week after my daughter, Abigail’s third birthday. Before that I had taken up temporary residence in the guestroom at her grandmother, Lauren’s house outside of Raleigh. It was a miserable existence living there for the brief period that I did but I managed. This was easy to achieve given all of the connections to pot and various pills I had around the city. Either way, I was happy to get out when I did even if I was rushed into the whole endeavor before I had even gotten my first paycheck. If you ever want to experience the true definition of awkward then move in with the parents of your most recent ex. I hadn’t been moved in to the apartment three hours before Lisa arrived. What had previously been a standoffish attitude when we were face to face was now replaced by blatant flirtation to the point of exaggeration. She grabbed my hand in the grocery store parking lot one minute and laughed extra hard at my attempts at jokes the next. If I had been of a clearer mind at that point in time I would’ve seen that these details seemed to heighten the more I offered to pay for things. I was just happy to have a girl look at me the way that she was and wore blinders to the rest. Chinese food and Fat Tires gave way to our first kiss and there was no looking back, for better or worse. The first aspirin bottle was uncapped in my right hand as the jug of burgundy sat in my left. The pills rattled as my hand shook with a combination of nerves and alcoholic tremors. I was drunk but not quite drunk enough. My vision blurred from tears and intoxication as a deep sigh ripped through me sending chills down my spine. I had tossed back the pill bottle without a second thought and now replaced it with the jug being sure to take the biggest gulp I could manage. The capsules swirled around !163

in a sea of red rotgut and I gagged hard as I struggled to swallow them all. I briefly wondered how every other suicide case managed to get through these final moments. Did they over analyze every movement or did they care so little that they just went for it without a second thought? Every time Abigail came for a visit went as it always had since I split with her mother, Vanessa a year earlier. I strove to be on my best behavior during her stays and remained sober throughout. Once in a while I might have a beer with dinner but even that was a rarity. If I felt especially depressed or anxious I fought hard not to show it. We explored the neighborhood together and took in a number of movies on Tuesdays when the nearby theater would charge half price for admission and snacks. For a brief moment in time it felt like things were finally going to be okay in my life. I’ve always had a gift for selfsabotage, though. It was second only to my gift for selfdelusion. I have never had a driver’s license in my entire life. Most guys long for that day when they’re sixteen when they can finally hold that bit of freedom in their hand. Then again most guys are overwhelmed with confidence and don’t have unprovoked panic attacks over the tiniest of reasons. All through life I’ve had to rely on other people to give me rides anywhere I needed to go but now I lived in a new town where I didn’t know a single person. This led me to buy a bike with my first paycheck not to be swallowed up by bills and other responsibilities. I used it to trek the half hour to and from work every day during the coldest part of the year in a town I knew next to nothing about. I swear it rained every single time, too. If I managed to get picked up by Lisa or my only local friend, Rufus, I would be home in ten by car. !164

After a particularly rough ride home I would need that drink more than anything in the world. I had never nailed down grocery shopping but I kept the fridge stocked with beer at all times. The larger paychecks following my time collecting unemployment meant that I was carrying home the strongest imports the local supermarkets kept in stock. After a year of Mickey’s I relished the chance to down the finest lagers. I was like a junkie who is used to the usual local stepped on shit finally coming into some pure China White. The buzz was otherworldly but the hangovers left me like a dead man walking the following morning. Lisa treated hers like she had been doing this shit her whole life. Plenty of mornings I would sit, sick, on my battered couch and watch as she groaned beneath the sheet she wore like a makeshift bathrobe and fetched a fresh beer less than an hour after sunrise. A few hits from the bottle later and she was her perky self again. It didn’t take me long to go from watching this home remedy of sorts take place before I was joining her and I’ll be damned if it didn’t work like a charm every time. Our morning beers finished and the coffeepot switched on we would return to the bedroom to tear into each other for an hour. Only afterward would we begin to talk about food, usually as we passed a one hitter on the edge of my bed with the afternoon well upon us. The cat bowls were both filled with enough food for a few days as I moved the portable stereo into my bedroom and shut the door. The melancholy opening chords of Pet Sounds filled the room as I downed another bottle of aspirin between swigs of wine. I was swaying in place as nausea began to stir within me. The first crack in my perception of who Lisa was showed up a month into the relationship. After a !165

particularly rough day all around I felt depression slip its bitter fangs into my mind. Turning to Lisa for support via a mid-afternoon phone call found her grow suddenly distant and uncommunicative. Being raised in a household of Buddhists all she offered was that I should chant. She then made some excuse to get off the phone and that was that. I wouldn’t hear from her again for three days. Over time I began to miss work on a regular basis either because I was too hung over or because I passed out and slept through the alarm. On the days the latter happened I would slide from beneath the blankets at noon and go have lunch alone in a Chinese buffet I had found in the neighborhood. Then I would return home and sleep for another six hours usually aided by the Xanax and pot Lisa kept me supplied with. My energy was steadily slipping away but I was usually too fucked up to notice. I laid my head on the pillow as ghostly voices swirled around me singing that I just wasn’t made for these times. I had always had a natural flair for the dramatic. I was breaking the number one rule of suicide by overdose: I was on my side. As my eyes fell heavy as gravestones, then shut, I remember managing one last clear thought. I don’t want to die. Thanksgiving was spent at the home of Lisa’s parents in a small town just outside Chapel Hill. I had been in charge of beer and had fought my nerves over being around her family and friends by getting silly drunk well before the food was on the table. They were practicing Buddhists and a huge shrine occupied the space in the living room usually reserved for a television. They kept the enormous flat screen in the guest room where Lisa had been living since leaving the abusive boyfriend she’d been with for five years before me. The details of that !166

relationship were a constant source of discussion throughout the evening but I was too gone to feel awkward. At times it was almost as if I was spying on a dinner party rather than actually attending one. Later that evening, with the food gobbled up and dishes stored away, Lisa and myself rode back to my apartment in her friend David’s car. I sat in solemn silence with belly full and head swimming in a sea of booze and smoke from the glass pipe making its way through the car. Lisa and David spoke feverishly but I felt removed from the situation via chemical overload and a creeping sensation flooding the back of my thoughts. David didn’t come upstairs when he dropped us off but he promised to pick Lisa up in the morning after I left for work. A few more beers were consumed and then we went to bed. I wasn’t alone beneath the covers but somewhere in me there was a sense of disconnection even then. When you’re drinking and swallowing any drugs an alarm clock going off at any hour is always a shock to the system. I could’ve slept for twelve hours and it still wouldn’t have been enough but somehow I forced myself up and biked through the rain and wasn’t late. Those mornings seemed to slide by in slow motion. The passage of time between clocking in and that first cigarette two hours later seemed to take years. I called Lisa to make sure she had been picked up as planned. Everything was as it should be and I slipped back inside to continue the workday without much incident. By the evening as I slipped out of my protective gear in the locker room all I wanted was to get home and drink the beer that was leftover and pass out. I still had the long trek before that could happen and I was exhausted but somehow I managed it. !167

I carried my bike up the steps to my apartment with intense struggle, every inch of me drenched and every muscle aching. Opening the door I found my apartment cleaned top to bottom and a note on the fridge telling me it was the least she could do. Opening the fridge I found all of the beer gone and immediately forgot all about the nice, neat appearance Lisa had left my home in. I was livid but I never let her know it. I suppose that said everything about the state I was rapidly toppling into. Too terrified of being alone to admit I was angry about something she had done and yet so dependent on chemicals that the lack thereof was all I could think about. I snorted some Xanax and took a hit of some weed I had left in my room but it did nothing to quiet the rage boiling underneath. The three days following my overdose came to me in brief flashes. Flash I’m panting and soaked in a sea of sweat. Flash I’m vomiting blood and my mouth is throbbing. Flash My phone is ringing somewhere far away. Flash I’m pissing myself. Then came either the best thing or the worst that can occur following an attempted suicide: I woke up. There was no clear memory in my head of just what I had done. In my mind I had simply gone to bed the night before and then woke up with the mother of all hangovers. The only thing was I didn’t remember drinking the day before, either. All I knew was my mouth and throat were completely dry and shredded and every single muscle was throbbing all at once. My stomach was turning rapidly and !168

my head weighed a ton. Then I tried to stand and found myself toppling into the closet door. The only way I made it through the darkness of my bedroom to the door was by leaning against every available surface and finally crawling on my stomach. I felt the sickness rising up into my mouth. â&#x20AC;¨ I found myself holding onto the bathroom counter for dear life as I stared at the stranger looking back at me in the mirror. There was dried blood caked in the stubble along my chin and when I opened my mouth I discovered a green and purple bruise down the middle of my swollen tongue. Later I would be told the overdose had brought on at least four separate seizures during which I had bit down on my tongue. My mouth felt like sandpaper and every sound seemed to echo. Eventually I made my way through the trashed living room and found my phone somewhere in the rubble. I had twelve missed calls but this bit of reality didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem to register with me. If you asked me now why I chose to call Vanessa, my ex, instead of sending for an ambulance I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tell you. Something in that moment told me that she was the only person level headed enough to help and I was too out of my mind to recognize the severity of my situation. As soon as I heard the beep for her voicemail the tears came in heavy streams as I sobbed through swollen tongue and tried my best to explain everything that had happened. I was standing by the sliding glass door leading to my porch as I hung up and movements from downstairs caught my eye. Looking down I saw the reason there had been no answer: there was my daughter, Abigail walking hand in hand with Vanessa along the sidewalk. Vanessa was glaring at me while little Abbie looked straight ahead. She had several reasons to be angry if she had let herself !169

into my apartment. Number one was the fact I had never told her about Lisa or that I was even dating. All of the evidence she needed to figure that out was scattered around the apartment. Add to that the fact that there was also plenty of evidence of my escalating addictions laid out for anyone who walked in to see. I sighed and unlatched the door to let them in. I was in no mood nor the physical state for an argument. I waited with steadily diminishing patience for them to walk in but this moment didn’t arrive. I briefly thought of Lisa and how she was sleeping at this very moment completely unaware of the events unfolding in my home. We had been drifting apart at a rapid clip over the last month. All of it coming to a head during an awkward gift exchange on Christmas day only a few days earlier. She had appeared distracted the whole time and turned her face away when I had tried to kiss her before giving a clearly rehearsed speech about how she wouldn’t be able to come over as much. Then we passed each other our presents: I gave her a box of books I’d made note of her mentioning an interest in and she gave me a set of pots and pans. The writing was, as they say, on the wall. Well, how did I get here? The next thing I knew I was making my way down the stairs by slowly sliding down them as I leaned heavily against the banister. There was a faint ringing in my ears getting louder and then more distant. Standing in the walkway of my building I didn’t see them anywhere but I knew they couldn’t have gotten very far. That’s when I heard Abbie’s giddy voice and turned my head to see her running around the playground. Vanessa was sitting with her back to me on a nearby park bench. I was staggering towards them on stiff legs clad only in a sweaty t shirt and !170

pajama pants in the brisk December air but a dry heat flowed throughout my body. The moon watched over me with disapproving eyes. After a long battle with my motor skills I finally found my hand gripping the back of the bench and I slumped down to sit and watch Abigail play. For a brief moment I even smiled and felt the darkness that had clung to every moment before this one lift. All of that went away in an instant as I glanced over to say something to Vanessa only to see her jump up without a word, call the child to her before moving away from me as fast as they both could. Abbie didn’t even look back to acknowledge my presence. I felt like a ghost. The tears rolled fast and hot down my cheeks and were immediately cooled by the brisk winter breeze. I knew there was no use running after them and found my way back up the stairs moving as stiff as ever, my head swaying on my shoulders. The ringing sound returned in my ears louder than before as I pushed the door shut behind me. I felt in the pocket of my pajama pants and realized my phone had rang three times in the last twenty minutes and now it was ringing again. I answered and heard the voice of the person who wouldn’t even look at me a second ago. “Don’t even say it. I’m coming back downstairs,” I said. “What are you talking about? Where have you been,” She sounded as confused as me. “Don’t act like I didn’t see you downstairs. I’m on my way if you’ll actually talk to me this time,” I spat, bitterly. Vanessa was telling me that neither she nor Abigail were downstairs and in fact they hadn’t left the house for the three days since I stopped answering my phone. At !171

first I didn’t believe it but then a shiver went up my spine and I knew things were very wrong. My mind was racing through a swirling, black sea and I began to sob incoherently again. Eventually she told me to sit tight and she would dispatch her mother, Lauren, to take me to the emergency room at Duke University Medical Center. The thirty minutes it took for her to arrive and help me walk down the stairs was the longest thirty minutes of my entire life. The emergency room was filled even at this early hour but they still got me back to see a doctor almost as soon as we walked in. I did my best to explain what was going on but my swollen tongue made it difficult. They took turns examining it with puzzled expressions and handed me paperwork. I was still drifting into bouts of confusion and crying fits. In between my temperature being taken and blood drawn I fielded phone calls from friends and family who had gotten calls from Vanessa who then passed Lauren’s number to them. I did my best to recount what I could for them despite struggling with speech. Some of them I hadn’t spoken to in several years. Every call ended with I love you and it was as if no distance had ever existed between us. When times of crisis arrive you see people as they really are. Eventually the doctor assigned to me came back into the room with my test results under his arm. His brow was furrowed and as he spoke there was an anger in his voice that was unexpected. He started asking me about the large amount of aspirin in my bloodstream and when I responded with confusion his anger only increased. I wasn’t playing games with him. I really didn’t remember taking the overdose at that time at all. He began !172

questioning every visible scar on my arms and hands. Eventually he ordered an MRI to make sure I hadn’t suffered brain damage along with everything else. From here on out Lauren became increasingly quiet and eventually left my side entirely.

I was admitted within the hour and by lunch time my dad was there without my mom. He would remain in Durham with me for the next two months. He didn’t bring up the fact this was all a suicide attempt until half of that time had passed. I don’t blame him for that and whether it was a mix of denial on my part or not it took me several days to finally admit it myself. The first person I divulged this to was my Vanessa. Her own mother, Lauren, hadn’t even told her as much. Lisa only visited once during my entire stay in the hospital. Like the phone call that had preceded it the visit was brief and extremely tense. I glossed over why I was in the hospital but her tone gave me the sense she had a good idea what happened. She said she’d let herself into the apartment to check on the cats but that visiting me wouldn’t happen. When she turned up in the doorway to my hospital room and interrupted a visit with some friends I was surprised. She glared at me before handing me back the key and giving me the usual advice to chant before leaving without a goodbye. When she ended the relationship later that night during a second phone call I was less surprised. It would be the last time Lisa and I would ever speak. On New Year’s Day I was deemed physically healthy enough to be moved from general medicine to the psychiatric wing. They moved me across the increasingly chilly campus in a wheelchair and I found myself in a !173

much larger room than the one I’d left behind. My neighbor in the facility, Scott, introduced himself immediately. Scott was a heroin addict who was here because the voices he frequently heard had told him to yank the steering wheel away from his girlfriend when they argued while leaving a drug dealer’s house. She was still in a coma on the other side of the campus and Scott was now missing several fingers. Not a day passed during my stay that he didn’t try to exchange numbers so we could party when we were released. I always politely refused. I was the only one to truly take to group therapy and art projects on the entire wing. I felt stronger every day both physically and mentally. A week went by and my psychiatrist asked me to pick the day I wanted to leave. “Friday feels right,” I said. It was snowing that morning as they came to draw blood for the final time. I hadn’t been able to sleep that night out of a mix of excitement and anxiety and was sitting up in bed writing. It had snowed the night before and everything outside my window was blanketed in a soft, white glow. I was nervous but I utilized that energy for packing my bags. When I heard everyone moving around in the main room I moved out my door for my last breakfast and morning check in with these people I’d come to know in my worst moments. When I announced I was going home that day it was met with applause. I responded by smiling softly and for the first time in years I felt I had a reason to. Dad arrived around noon and we filled out my release papers. At some point Scott took me aside and made one final attempt to get my number. This time I turned him down with a little more confidence in my voice and he !174

almost flinched before patting me on the back and wishing me well. Most people who had been through the things I had over those last few weeks would’ve wanted a drink and a snort more than anything. All I wanted to do was hug little Abbie, eat real food, smoke a cigarette and sleep in my own bed and that’s exactly what I went and did.  I’ve been sober for four years.

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2-XL Knowing

Heather Dorn

When I was six I had a 2XL-Robot who sang me riddles and made me choose a button on his belly (and do so wisely) because if I was wrong, he’d sure let me know so I tried to memorize the cartridges: The Basic’s of ABC’s “Triceratops has how many horns?” he asks.   And I know it must be three because of the tri like the cycle   that spins me around the apartment parking lot. I press ‘A’ and my robot beeps, “You must have a computer brain or something because you are correct!” I’m always correct and when I’m not   I try it again until I remember the answer: “Fish swim in schools.” I wonder if they learn math or only marine biology. I want to be an octopus or a mermaid. An octopus only   because of the eight arms. I could always use another hand to hold something. I would choose !176

a calculator, dictionary, telephone, chapter book paper, coloring book, crayons, and the 2-XL Robot. He would help me get all the answers so that I would never feel the sting of being wrong. A President serves for 4 years at a time. B.   I press B. He says, “Your fertile little mind   has answered correctly.” I hope he’s pleased. His flashing red eyes say he is. I practice being right with him and he says: “I like human contact.” I want to be the most right of my life.   My mom will look at what the teacher wrote   on my report card and I hope she will be impressed. 2-XL mumbles   a corny line and says, “I’m sorry but robots   think that is a funny joke.” I push his buttons, say, “2-XL,   teach me everything you know, and save me from not knowing which Greek goddess whooshed the Moon through the night sky.”   He says, “It was Selene” and I cry for not knowing this already. How To Get An “A”

Four months of cough syrup and my chest was still swimming. A new bottle costs a co-pay and I pay it thinking this will be the thing !177

that makes me better.

I have stopped using the measuring cup. I can tell the tablespoons by feel. One tongue and a half is the dose and it coats my throat as I sink into my bed to watch the ceiling spin. I have done this day again and again.

In the morning I will go to class hacking in the hallways and napping my lunch. I can’t eat anymore. I figure I’m just out of shape. I don’t notice that I’ve lost weight. I go home and read myself to codeine sleep. There is no time for food or poetry. There is school and there is cough syrup. Soon I must stop

between classes. I am out of breath and can’t walk down the hall without sitting. I can’t walk up or down stairs. I’m embarrassed to be. In my mind I am a blob. I tell my body to suck it up! Stop making me look bad! I can’t wait for the codeine sleep to slip me away. I can’t remember

things anymore. I don’t know my phone number. I drove over a curb. I almost hit the Stop sign. I sat at the daycare staring at the clock for 4 hours in a rocker waiting for an opening. I don’t know what I was thinking! !178

I had papers to write! Projects to prepare! There was no time for rocking! I had

no time for anything. The day the doctor told me I had heart disease and that my heart was failing me my husband drove me to the hospital to be admitted. In the waiting room I sprawled my body across the chair and table sinking to the floor before they sent me to the financial office and then to see the doctor and a wheel chair

to scoop me to my room. When I was stable with flowers lining the windows talking about pacemakers instead of a transplant I asked if I could have my schoolbooks.

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Hell-Raisers for: Misty

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Heather Dorn

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) - e e cummings

We will read psycholinguistics to each other in the car, like those Februarys before.   In the Texas sun. We can roll the windows down. You read to me   for 15 minutes. Then I’ll read to you. If we fall asleep we won’t get to class, so hit my arm if I drift off. But don’t hit it hard like when I wore socks with sandals. Sitting in Theory,   drawing Cixous’ “paper penis” in the margins of our notes, we laughed like 6th graders in sex ed. We hardly remember what she says about writing   coming from the body. But it’s the end   of the week. Grading 100 essay questions   or 25 research papers. Sometimes  White Russians that give 2-week hangovers.   Sometimes rescuing a mistreated traffic cone.   Giving him a new home. Or buying a convenience store potato. One they just had   !180

sitting there, not ordered ahead of time   or anything. Sometimes yelling   at red lights to change who they are fundamentally and testing the plastic wall files hung outside each professor’s door that tease “UNBREAKABLE” underneath. If you read 300 pages a night, something will break. We patch it with pizza – or beer for the brave (it’s a school night). Whiskey for those past beer. When the weekend comes, someone might pour vodka so we can dance one like a stripper,   the other like Bill Cosby, until the dawn gets tired and falls down on us and we are covered with light   and blankets and given rations of throw pillows and South Beach burritos.

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Switch

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Heather Dorn

I throw a rusted training wheel down my driveway. It has been three hours and I toss the red curve of metal again. My arm is shaking from the weight of my thoughts. I don’t know if I can keep throwing but my brain won’t stop either. There are too many ideas flying so I try to focus on a few. One weekend I plan my entire semester course. Every reading,   assignment, handout, copy. The next weekend, I can only think of how wrong I am how I need to do more research, how I shouldn’t have told that woman I didn’t want to hold her baby. I start to think that people want me to trip. I don’t like the way their eyes watch my mouth. I don’t like the way I cry because of cheap long distance. I wonder if I should be allowed to even be? If maybe I should drive off a bridge or hit a mountain. I take the dose the doctor prescribed and the Seroquel drags me into night, nail marks clawed down my headboard. !182

There’s a blackbird in my brain

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Heather Dorn

and he flits at my prefrontal cortex, and he tells me my executive functions are not functioning. He tells me I can’t remember my phone number. I get paranoid and can’t decide if I should scoop him out like ice cream or let him incubate like an egg. He bats at the back off my eyeballs and I break my brother’s lamp into chunks of glass crashed clear to the end of the drive way. I hear my blackbird squeak and whistle while I try on bathing suits you are nothing you are nothing nothing no thing and then he swarms to my medulla, makes my legs buckle so I fall in the fitting room to the orange carpet. There’s a blackbird in my brain and he eats my hypothalamus !183

so I can’t sleep. My neurotransmitters are birdseed. There’s a blackbird in my brain that tells me to stand up straight. Shoulders back. To take bread to the park. Feed me! Feed me!  He wants my gray matter on toast. He wants me to laugh too loud in front of my friends. He wants to hear me say it – the secret to young eyes and insanity or finally let him free with a knitting needle.

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Selfie #1

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Heather Dorn

I wear my bunny pajamas while I swing my feet beneath me on the elliptical machine. It’s too cold in my room to take off my hooded bunny ears  even though they cover my eyes now. I can see in the mirror across from me my nose is pointing like a traffic cone 55 more articles to read, my eyes peek red like a stop light my eyelids are fat and falling down, my mouth is yelling past the stop sign I’m late. My feet are moving me nowhere in a hurry.

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Selfie #4

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Heather Dorn

The woman in the commercial can finally talk to her daughter who lives ten states away. They cry on the line over how their connection is so clear. I’m in bed, my pj’s spaghettio-stained and ready for the washer. 12 missed calls I let myself miss another. I’m in bed crying for their connection and clear conversation. I straighten my tiara, try to stop tearing because the phone won’t stop ringing, head buried in my hands face smeared with blots of mascara and red wine.

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Selfie #5

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Heather Dorn

I study by writing out the answers to all ten essay questions. Then outlining each to memory. I will not be forgetting anything this time. I will write ten introductions ten times. This will be enough to memorize them. And I do memorize them all. I break the bell curve and people call me an asshole without knowing it was me they call me an asshole. “Some asshole,” they say while we get a drink at the fountain on break, “Some asshole, messed up everything!” I smile slide my tongue through the water like a snake, because this wasn’t part of the plan but I don’t mind it.

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Electrical Outlets For: Charles Simic

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Heather Dorn

Why are you so distressed little outlets of the world? What do you see?

Is it a mother lion, eating a tourist who cut in line? Is it the bitterness of lemons? Is it

your electric mother with your wet uncle Steve, setting hotel curtains on fire?

Is it the stream with the broken beer bottles floating over oil-slicked fish and rocks?

Is it a gulf of plastic, a sky of coughing smog, guns for kids, pretzeled car engines, cut forearms, dead lungs

and do you mind if I shove these prongs in your eyes now?

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Selfie #7

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Heather Dorn

On Facebook, I unlike a picture of an otter with glasses that I liked yesterday. What if people see I liked the picture and question my sincerity for animal rights? What if they think sweaters on cats are over the line but dogs are ok? What if not dogs? What if they say we shouldn’t even keep dogs as alarms or help with farm work. What if I should give up meat too?

! That’s too much. !

I like the picture again. What if they see I liked it? I unlike it. What if they see I unliked it? I wonder why I ever got involved with this radical otter. Who put the glasses on him anyway?

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12 Honest Thoughts   on Graduate School

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Heather Dorn

I. Ramen noodles go 5 for a dollar and can fuel up to three hours of grading. For writing a dissertation you need protein. Try the cafeteria chili. It’s not bad. But like everything at University, it stains you.

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II. I have spent more on my schooling than on my car  house and computer combined. I still owe most of this money. I wonder if Burger King is hiring PhDs?   !190

III. Stop replying to the whole listserv even if it is to tell people to stop replying to the whole listserv.

IV. I hate my exams in the way I hated my thesis, but more passionately. Like my exams killed puppies.

V. I don’t think I could get IRB approval to kill puppies.

VI. No, I don’t know when I’ll be graduating.

VII. Not that kind of doctor, mom.

VIII. My research takes me to the Internet to glean sources from my favorite bloggers’ bibliographies but I end up searching on Google for more information on bees. I am a bee amateur and they scare me – how they float, not fly; how they swerve and bend toward me. I hate them and how ugly they become attacking. I love them for their fuzziness and willingness to die for a lay. Some of them anyway.

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IX. When the man-student stands in front of you with disrespect and a suggestive smile, throw him out of class. Tell him he can come back when he knows as much as he thinks he does.

X. Do not volunteer for the conference. It’s a trap.

XI. No, I can’t go out tonight. No, I won’t proofread your paper. No, I don’t feel like that meeting went well. No, I cannot move; my entire body is rigid because my brain has been set to boil.

! No, I don’t know when I’ll be graduating. ! XII. Ramen noodles come in a variety of disciplines. One for every major. 5 for a dollar. Dr. recommended.

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Curiosity Takes a Selfie

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Heather Dorn

The rover Curiosity took a selfie on Mars. But the angle is totally so she doesn’t look fat. And she probably uses filters. And were those duck lips?

Anyway, she’s on an important mission. Shouldn’t she be taking this more seriously? And how narcissistic does she have to be? She probably has a really low self esteem.

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Big Brother

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Heather Dorn

I used to think a camera I couldn’t see was following me, long before reality tv, when I crossed the street on the way home from school, it hid in the tree and judged the way I walked and how I carried my books. It judged the way my head tilted and how clever I was with the crossing guard. It recorded my grades and the smoothness of my blinks and the way my fingers closed when I waved, like Queens.

Today a woman at the grocery looked scared at the amount of corn I was buying. She went home and told her sister about my irresponsible purchase. The NSA has seen me sing Britney Spears with my cat and swear at Solitaire on my computer screen. I search the stacks of dirty laundry in my room for hidden nanny cams and I won’t take off my sweater because I don’t like my elbows. And who knows who might see me?

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Ballerinas Don’t Eat Cheezits

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Heather Dorn

There is a clock as tall as my father that tells me what time it is supposed to be. The pendulum falls like a drip and ticks right and left and right.

Sometimes my stair steps trip me and my legs tumble like laundry clothes until I hit the hat rack by the front door.

I once asked for a toy in the grocery after being told not to ask for a toy in the grocery. I went straight home to my room, no ice cream. I felt the loss as one would any close friend. It sometimes still hurts.

There is a snake who looks scary but isn’t. He twists his life around my own. We go to the fences behind the apartment buildings where the trains rattled through and I push my snake in the boy’s faces !195

until they screamed for me to stop. I am mad that the boys put grease on my leg.

From the upstairs room where I sleep I once watched my father come home and I waved not remembering it was past my bedtime not remembering I was meant to be lying down. Mr. Roboto had come on the radio. I had to dance. I was six. He roared up the stairs and shook me back to bed.

The earthquakes shake everything loose: pictures, pans, Atari controllers, hair, sweat, Pepsi bottles. They are bound to break. And I am bound to step on them.

I get stuck in the bathroom and the tile floor feels like icy pops and I am crying because my father says he doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know if he can get me out, and he knows he canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fit macaroni and cheese under the door.

I sit at the top of the stairs and hear dad snap mom into the chair, I hear her cry and fire from his mouth and she apologizes for being a person. She pretends she never shook. She pretends concealer fixes the marraige.

My mother drew us while we played in the living room floor. I was eager to see the way she formed my lines, how she made my shape.

My father was asleep. !196

My brother decided that he wanted to have his way and if he couldn’t that he would bang his head   into the ground until he passed out or bled.   My mother held his head for hours.

The earthquakes shake everything loose: phone numbers, forgotten birthdays,   fishing is for boys dad says and go do something with art instead.

Ballerinas don’t eat cheezits dad said   and so I put them away for a week.   Or it may have been an hour. I put the idea of dancing in my bottom drawer, with fashion model.   Flat. The pendulum drips and dad tells me   to sit up straight, I’m more attractive that way.

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Thanks to the Gideons

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Heather Dorn

One night, crying and smoking in the hotel bathroom,   with the shower running steam onto the mirror,   and the fan whirring insomnia, I got an idea for a poem about death and rain.

I had no paper with me, so I took the Bible from the top drawer of the side table,   and wrote over the first three sheets   with a hotel pen until a thin page tore

then I wrote some more and put it back for someone else to find. I was giddy with the thought of someone mad or intrigued or even laughing at how bad my lines were.

Since then, I have used most hotel Bibles   for self-publishing. Sometimes I mark out words,   leaving only the ones I like, to create found poems, sometimes I go to the verses I hate, asking for stonings,   or slavery, or killing

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your kid, and mark them in red, note them   in the front: “turn to [page x or page y],”   sometimes I wrap the Bible in a poem, like the first time, with smoke and thunder and drooping eyes that can’t

stop thinking. Or sometimes I just read the book of Ruth. Imagine what it means for altruism, and put the Bible back in the top drawer tired, remembering that women have always been resourceful.

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Sparklers

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Heather Dorn

spit fire in the air and my four-year-old arms waved violently through crowds of sweat and beer hot dogs and cut-off blue jean shorts worn by teenagers who were too old for sparklers and swiped Budweiser when the adults weren’t watching

witches’ wands we waved them at each other threatening the adventure of an injury jumping back and feeling disappointed there was no burn !200

when the real fireworks started we huddled on the stoop secretly wishing for some spectacular Boom to take off an eyebrow or a finger to replace the summer heat that seemed to suck the electricity from the air

but nobody bled and soon the fireworks were gone the sparklers gone the beer gone the teenagers gone behind the parking lot fence and people stumbled into their apartments for the night

I ran up the stairs skipping steps as the nightly routine started below yelling crashing crying the door slammed and I looked out my bedroom window my dad stumbling across the parking lot to our car and the excitement rumbled in my belly

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Therapy

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Heather Dorn

My brother lived in blue walls, with a blue ceiling, and blue sheets, but the padlock was silver.

When we went to see him during school breaks he would sit staring out the window at nothing or freedom or the squirrel that stole acorns from the common yard.

I hated going to that sterile place always feared someone would find me out and drug me make me stare at the common yard and sleep locked in slow motion blueness.

When I got too upset !202

mother would palm me half a valium and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d melt into the plastic seat my brain fighting and wait for visiting hours to end.

Then weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d drive home mother drinking a beer to take off the edge the median moving closer and farther away.

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About the Authors:

Julie Allen is an Illustrator/Artist living in Brooklyn, NY with her cat, Phoebe. You can check out her custom hand painted guitars at Juliakay.prosite.com David S. Atkinson is the author of "Bones Buried in the Dirt" and "The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes" (EAB Publishing, spring 2014). His writing appears in "Bartleby Snopes," "Grey Sparrow Journal," "Interrobang?! Magazine," "Atticus Review," and others. His writing website is http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/ and he spends his non-literary time working as a patent attorney in Denver. Janice Bevilacqua is a freelance writer and poet with a BFA from Brooklyn College. Finally published at the age of 37, she was inspired and euphoric, however apt to the theme of this anthology, quickly slipped into the pits for a while only to emerge again and squeeze out another work. In addition to staring at the ceiling in Brooklyn NY, Janice is an avid lepidopterist, runner, and mother of two butterflies, Jack and Juliana.

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Ron Burch's first novel, Bliss Inc., was published by BlazeVOX Books; Aqueous Books is publishing his flashfiction collection, Menagerie, in 2015. He lives in Los Angeles. Please visit: www.ronburch.net. Elynne Chaplik-Aleskow, Founding General Manager of WYCC-TV/PBS/Chicago and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Wright College, is a Pushcart Prize nominated author. Her stories and memoirs, which she has performed throughout the country and in Canada, are published in over 30 anthologies. http:// LookAroundMe.blogspot.com Junior Charles is dead. He killed himself after George W Bush was awarded the presidency by the Supreme Court in 2001. He thought he would be better off. He may have been right. He is survived by a parrot, Trey, that may live another 50 years, or so his current caretaker was told. Ryder Collins has just escaped the Dirty South and still likes it dirty. She has a novel, Homegirl!, available from Honest Publishing Press, and a chapbook of poetry, Orpheus on Toast. Some of her work can be fount at bignotherngirlgoes.blogspot.com Trevor Dodge is the author of two collections of short fiction (The Laws of Average and Everyone I Know Lives On Roads), a novella (Yellow #10), and collaborator on the writing anti-textbook Architectures of Possibility. He lives in Portland, OR and also online at www.trevordodge.com. !205

Heather Dorn is getting her PhD in English from Binghamton University, where she works as the Assistant Director of the Binghamton Poetry Project. She has been published a few places but with the best acceptance rate on her blog "Facts About Neuroplasticity" at http:// heatherdorn.wordpress.com. She lives with her eight pets, three children, and one husband. Sometimes, she still thinks about going back to school to be a mermaid. James H Duncan is the founding editor of Hobo Camp Review, is a book editor with Writer's Digest, and is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Darkest Bomb (in Lantern Lit, Vol. 1 by Dog On A Chain Press), Dealing With the Devil in the Middle of the Road: New & Selected Poems (Hobo Camp Press), the upcoming Berlin (Maverick Duck Press), and a collection of short stories titled The Cards We Keep. For more, visit www.jameshduncan.com. Matthew J. Hall is an avid reader and writer of poetry and short fiction who lives in Bristol, England. You can read more from and about Matthew on his blog, www.screamingwithbrevity.com where he regularly shares his creative endeavors and highlights the work of those he admires. Senia Hardwick is a poetry and fiction writer. Her writing explores the transmutation of memory and nature, and the bizarre possibilities of human extremes. Read more at seniahardwick.wordpress.com.

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Christina Hart has self-published three books with many more to come. She has a BA in Creative Writing and English from Southern New Hampshire University. She spends her time applying ChapStick and thinking about the mysteries of the universe. Chuck Howe (Editor) is a writer/musician from Westchester County, New York. His book of short stories, If I had Wings These Windmills Would be Dead published by the Unknown Press is available on Amazon. His stories have appeared in Uno Kudo Vol. 1 and 2, as well as the First Time Anthology and he was an Editor for Uno Kudo Volume 2 and 4. His novel, Destiny Unbound, is tentatively scheduled for a winter 2015 release date. Ted Jackins is the author of the poetry collection When the World Was Black and White through Scars Publishing. He is currently at work on a collection of "retail haikus" and a prose poem novella. Also a musician, he lives and creates in a small town in North Carolina. Ron Kolm is a member of the Unbearables and an editor of several of their anthologies, most recently The Unbearables Big Book of Sex. He is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin and the editor of the Evergreen Review. Kolm is the author of Divine Comedy and Suburban Ambush. His papers were purchased by the New York University library, where theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been cataloged in the Fales Collection as part of the Downtown Writers Group. Tracey Lander-Garrett teaches in the English Department at Borough of Manhattan Community College !207

and plays Dungeons & Dragons in her spare time. She's had work published in Connotation Press, Brooklyn Review, Electric Windmill Press, and others. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with too many cats and her husband (who does not have purple hair). Michael Gillan Maxwell is a writer and visual artist in the Finger Lakes Region of New York state. Maxwell writes short fiction, poetry, songs, essays, recipes and irate letters to his legislators. Melanie Page is the creator of Grab the Lapels, a review site for women that you can Google and also follow on Facebook. She coordinates virtual book tours for authors and teaches the occasional college class. Ashley Perez lives and writes in Los Angeles, CA. She was recently told that she writes good stories and has a foxy butt. Puma Perl is a widely published poet and writer. She is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections, knuckle tattoos, and the recently published Retrograde, (great weather for MEDIA press. She was the co-creator, co-producer, and main curator of DDAY Productions. Her newest venture is Puma Perlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Pandemonium, which launched at the Bowery Electric in 2012 and brings poetry together with rock and roll. As Puma Perl and Friends, she performs regularly with a group of excellent musicians.

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Misti Rainwater-Lites is the author of Bullshit Rodeo and several other books of fiction. She resides in San Antonio where the weather is crazier than she is. Gabriel Ricard acts and writes short fiction, poetry, scripts, reviews, columns, novels, interviews, essays, and more. He is an Editor with Kleft Jaw, the Film Editor at Drunk Monkeys, and a Featured Contributor with The Modest Proposal. He generally spends his time in Virginia. Dave Roskos is the editor of Big Hammer magazine & Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books. He lives in his home state of New Jersey, and works in Human Services with MICA consumers. Gus Sanchez is the author of the blog anthology, Out Where the Buses Don't Run. He is currently at work on his first novel. A native New Yorker, he now lives in Charlotte North Carolina with his wife and daughter. Find him at: www.outwherethebusesdontrun.com John Saunders was born in Co. Wexford, and now lives in Co. ffaly. His first collection ‘After the Accident’ was published in 2010 by Lapwing Press, Belfast. His second full collection Chance was published in April 2013 by New Binary Press. His work has appeared in various print and olnline journals. He is a founding member of the Hibernian Poetry Workshop and a graduate of the Faber Becoming a Poet 2010 course. He was shortlisted in the 2012 inaugural Desmond O’Grady Poetry Competition and is a 2014 Pushcart Nominee. !209

Bekah Steimel is an internationally published poet living in St. Louis. Her pastimes include flirting, drinking whiskey and making people uncomfortable. Find her in Gutter Eloquence, The Legendary, The RPD Society, Rock Bottom Journal, Sinister Wisdom, and more. Visit www.bekahsteimel.com. irene stone is a writer born and raised on san diego's beaches. she lives there now, with her tiny dog, buster. Sophia Sturges has been published for blogs about health, technology, and general life observations. She one day hopes to write a book that is rejected by most bookstores and libraries... Perhaps a children's book? She lives in the Twin Cities with a Frenchman, and two precious little people. Meg Tuite's writing has appeared in numerous literary journals. She is the author of two short story collections, Bound By Blue (2013) Sententia Books and Domestic Apparition (2011) San Francisco Bay Press, and three chapbooks, the latest titled, Her Skin is a Costume (2013) Red Bird Chapbooks. She won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from Artistically Declined Press for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging (2014) written with Heather Fowler and Michelle Reale and is currently working on a mixed genre collection to be published in late 2014. She teaches at the Santa Fe Community College, lives in Santa Fe with her husband and menagerie of pets.â&#x20AC;¨ Her blog: http://megtuite.com

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Robert Vaughan’s writing has appeared in hundreds of print and online journals. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His story, “Ten Notes to the Guy Studying Jujitsu” was a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award 2013. His story “The Rooms We Rented” was a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award 2014. He is senior flash fiction editor at JMWW and Lost in Thought magazines. His chapbooks are Microtones (Cervena Barva) and Diptychs + Triptychs (Deadly Chaps). His first full- length book is Addicts and Basements (Civil Coping Mechanisms). His blog: www.robert-vaughan.com. Jeremiah Walton graduated high school spring 2013, and hit the road hitchhiking the following fall. He is founder and manager of Nostrovia! Poetry, and Books & Shovels, a traveling bookstore and publisher. He writes for the dispassionate and Gatsby's Abandoned Children. Jack Leaf Willetts is a full time writer & part time superhero. His work has been published by Kerouac's Dog, Finding The Beat, Pill Hill Press, PoV and Railroad Poetry Project. His ramblings can be found on Twitter @JLeafWilletts

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