Cabildo Quarterly. Lucky Thirteen. Summah 2019. Cape Cod; Bangor ME. We need more parties in the USA. To Dive Inside by Margarita Serafimova
To dive inside one another there, where our bodies are liquid. A stone of sadness is weightless inside me.
Margarita Serafimova was nominated for Best of the Net 2018. She has published three collections in Bulgarian. Nick by Luke Kuzmish
Nick's bedroom was less than a football field's length away from the train tracks he let me read his journal when we were just kids
he found trouble keeping sleep with the regular interruptions
the rush of the locomotive's body, rocks being kicked, train whistle screaming, dinging railway crossing lights and bells he lived there long after that journal entry eventually, soundly he slept
it all just kind of became a part of him and his dreams were never stopped or divided by things great or small
Luke Kuzmish is a new father, recovering addict, software developer, and writer. His first full-length collection, Little Hollywood, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2018. Donkey Breast by Ama Birch
Marfa, Texas is a land on the brink. It is on the brink of the desert. It is on the brink of nothing. It is the land of the unknown and the unknowing. It is where the desert meets the asphalt. The cactus and aloe meet the eye. The grass meets the wind. The color is straw. The sand is loose, and the people are tough, tan and leathery. Living in mint and periwinkle mobile homes on the side of the road and next to the dried river bed where they can gaze out at a road that leads to nowhere and nothing except the sound of wolves and braying animals in the night with cylindrical mountains coming out of the ground. I sat on the porch with the weathered slats of wood beneath my bare feet. I rubbed my feet on the smooth wooden planks with the slight shimmer. The pitch spaces between gray slabs are imperfect and the rows are dusted with sandy colored dirt. The yellow dirt swathes over the planks like a slow rough sandpaper leaving the surface between a dull and a shiny gray. The wind chime makes a tinkling sound of glasses toasting. The stairs are butting against colorful tiles; the perfect squares of the maroon, beige, and orange terra-cotta walkway leading up to the dirt parking lot in front of the humble shack that we slept at last night. The morning light strikes the wind chime on the porch. Tickling the light of the air as the multicolored glass rods strike each other gently creating a single a trickle of sound. The light passes through them forming circular rainbows on the porch. I sip my coffee and take a bite of my thick toast covered in fig jam. I take a bite of the watermelon next to me and put the pink slice in my mouth. It is tasty. The juices run down my cheek. Then you say to me it is time to hit the road. “Into the nothingness,” you say. “The car is packed, and all we need, all I need is you.” The tinkling of the glass with grains of sand and light hitting the windshield speeds up this moment. Then it slows down when we close the doors. There is peace as you turn the ignition key to the 1976 blue Nova. The sun beats down on the car and a layer of sweat forms between my legs and the leather seat. We roll down the windows. As the car accelerates, the crumble of the ground is heard, and the wind blows through our hair as the car hits the asphalt and the ride becomes smooth. It is so smooth it feels like we were sliding on black ice. The rainbows in the asphalt shimmer. The glitter is dazzling. “Can you give me my sunglasses?” you ask. “Sure thing,” I say. The buildings are like boxes lining the road. Boxes upon boxes that are stacked on boxes with vast amounts of space and desert between and behind them. Floating boxes with square color
tinted windows. The windows emit light in a brilliant array of transparent hues. The lights are light pinks, light yellows, and light blues. The sun’s rays pierce the glass and come to an abrupt stop as they shade the ground with color. The buildings stop and cacti emerge from the ground on both sides with short grass that is green, yellow, and brown coming up from the sandy earth. Mountains made up of thin tubes are seen in the distant. Aloe shrubs appear here and there. Dusk is coming. The light begins to change as the sun begins to move towards the horizon. The time floats like a ship in the middle of the ocean. I see it: An apparition or a dinosaur or a cowboy; a real life floating mirage in the middle of the desert— in the middle of this road to nowhere. It can’t be. How can it be? What can it be? An alien? You slowed down. “Why?” I ask. You don’t speak. It is like you know. You do know. You don’t want to know. How can you know? How can we know? We slowed down. We are gliding on the asphalt. We are skiing along the road. Some tumbleweed drifts past us. The cowboy gets bigger as we move forward. I drink some water. I am thirsty. I am so thirsty at this moment. Parched, dry mouth. I cough. What to say? As if I can speak if I want to. I cough. A rainbow light reflects off your dark green tinted sunglasses. We look at each other. We know. It is time. The cowboy is getting bigger. I keep drinking water. I am so thirsty. The horse is so small. The person is so big. We get closer. I say, “That is no cowboy.” You say, “That’s a donkey.” I say, “That’s a woman.” She says, “Vamonos, Vamos a ir hermosa criatura!” The cowgirl strokes the side of the donkey and then whispers in its ear gently stroking its side. There are multi-colored glass bottles hanging from the cowgirl’s waist. Her face is an orange-brown tan color, and its texture is like leather. It is shiny, but she is not sweating. The donkey is under her weight. The donkey is strong. She has bundles attached to the donkey’s hindquarters. The glass makes a clanging sound as the donkey moves forward at a slow pace. We keep driving. We don’t really stop gliding. She raises her head and looks at us as we drive pass very slow. She smiles. Her smile is blinding. She nods, and then she slides her hand over her donkey's mane. “Me llevara a la luz de la luna!” she says. The spiky hairs on top of the donkey’s head blow in the wind as we pass her. She whispers in the donkey’s ear, “Jenny.” I am so thirsty. You are sweating. The sun is setting and the sky is a mixture of magenta, blue, and white. There is no one else around. I see a teepee off in the distance. The tink-and-twank of glass bottles hitting each other is heard as we move towards another point in the far distance that we couldn’t see from here. When night falls, the moon becomes big and bright in the sky. The shadow of the mountain can be seen in the distance. We pull our Nova to the side of the road and wrap ourselves in blankets. The Nova is the same color as the sky. We sleep in the backseat of the car. In the middle of the night, I hear a wolf howling. I pull you closer to me. You kiss me gently. We rub noses. We caress each other under the stars in the dark. You grab my breast. I hear the tinkling of glass. The cowgirl on the donkey passes us traveling in the moonlight. Her shadow is in front of us again. I hear the sound of the tinkling glass bottles and their greens and blues glow in the moonlight. I feel the donkey’s heavy burden as the donkey stands strong. The cowgirl is playing a trumpet. A solo to end all solos plays in the wind. A piercing cry in melody with the howl of a wolf. I am so thirsty. You kiss me again, and we drift off to sleep under the white light of the moon wrapped in blankets and dreaming of beds made of straw next to lakes that reflect the moonlight. You cry a tear, and it glistens in the night. I am so thirsty. Bray. Cough. Bray. Cough. Bray. Ama Birch has been published by Autonomedia, A Gathering of the Tribes, Vail/Vale, Les Figues Press, Ali Liebegott, Vitrine, Insert Blanc Press, CalArts Creative Writing Program, and the State University of New York Press. She lives in New York City. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Ben Stein
On my palm a soft white stone carried home from Lake Ontario. Henry barks at the sharp edge of twilight behind the garage.
Ben Stein's work has appeared in Cabildo Quarterly issues 2 & 8. His chapbook, Springtime and Important Things to Remember is available from Red Flag Poetry. He is a member of the notorious Bass River Snakes, and he sometimes writes about public policy for Policy Matters Ohio. He lives in Cleveland. Lucky by Katherine Sinback
Senior year. My friend Liz and I bubbled with the excitement of an all-night parent-free party at our friend Jerry’s house, complete with a keg on the back patio. I met Jerry through a series of small-town alternative-kid connections when my fellow senior friend Liz and I decided that we were too cool for high school. We preferred the company of our elders, the barely adults who had graduated high school the previous year and were stuck in our redneck suburb of Washington D.C. They meandered through service industry jobs, were taking a gap year, or upping their GPA in community college so
they could transfer to a real school, preferably one far from home. Liz and I were already applying to college, planning to be roommates if we both got into our first-choice, U.V.A., but we didn’t mention our plans to Jerry. He was forever trying to convince us to stay in our hometown with him. “I like it here. It’s cool.” Jerry lived with his parents out in the country on a winding road that snaked from the cookie cutter subdivisions in town. His dad, a police officer, granted permission for the party on the condition that nobody drive drunk and the festivities remain in the basement where Jerry had a bedroom and a den all to himself. The party fell on the night before Thanksgiving so the friends of Jerry’s who had gone away to college were invited to mingle with us, the young and the restless. An early snow started to fall and my friend, Liz rejoiced that she wouldn’t have to drive us home in the snow. Even better she wouldn’t have to monitor her alcohol consumption. I, the perpetual shotgun rider, guzzled beer with my usual abandon, even more so because I felt intimidated by the college kids. When Liz and I hung out with Jerry he joked about us still being so young. Children. Babies. But Liz, Jerry, and I were united in our underagehood. His dad had been the one to actually procure the keg. Strangers, or the more we pumped the keg and watched beer froth into red solo cups, merely friends we hadn’t met, streamed through Jerry’s front door. The new friends stomped down the stairs into the basement. One guy caught my eye. “Hey, he looks like an evil Ryan MacDougal,” I said to Liz. “Oh yeah, totally,” she said to me then yelled across the party, “Hey, Evil Ryan MacDougal!” Liz was already in what Jerry called her Joan Rivers phase of inebriation. Her voice, loud and grating and her filter nonexistent. Ryan MacDougal was a classmate of ours, the nice-guy popular boy with swirls of blond hair always perfectly mussed for optimum dreamy-ness. His brown-haired doppleganger at the party, wore a Bauhaus t-shirt and a coy smile. Evil Ryan MacDougal heard Liz’s yell and came over to introduce himself. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.” A few hours later Liz, Evil Ryan MacDougal, a small group of revelers, and I relocated to Jerry’s room to listen to The Church album. I wasn’t yet so drunk that I couldn’t stand, but as we listened, and laughed and Evil Ryan MacDougal refilled my cup, I started to feel the unmistakable droop of heavy eyelids, my limbs turning leaden. Too many cups of beer too soon. Only ten o’clock and already I was feeling the pull of the corner of Jerry’s room, which I had staked out as my spot to crash once the party wound down. Slowly I slid to the floor. I sprawled onto my stomach, nestling my cheek into the scratchy tan shag carpet. Liz poked my shoulder. “Get up! Get up!” “Just resting my eyes,” I slurred as my eyes fluttered shut. The voices in the room were a pleasant background chatter. I would rejoin them as soon as I’d slept off some of the beer, I assured myself. I had slept off a too-fast intoxication a few times in the last three months since I had discovered the pleasures of alcohol. The world of drinking had opened to me thanks to my other friend Mary’s twenty-one-year-old boyfriend who kept us stocked with Wild Turkey and Milwaukee’s Best. I had a brief dalliance with Jeff, the twenty-five-year-old roommate of Mary’s boyfriend. It was a relationship born of proximity, Jeff ’s lack of a driver’s license due to too many DUIs, and Mary’s need to have a friend join her so that she could make out with her boyfriend in the dumpy, spare townhouse he shared with Jeff. Having an older not-quite-boyfriend did have benefits. In a pinch Jeff picked up a six-pack for Liz and me with a pointed joke, “You’re just using me for my I.D.” “You’re just using me for my body,” I shot back, trying on a smart, sexy personae that was so far away from my true self that even he laughed. “Yeah right.” Or maybe he laughed because I had never let our makeout sessions go beyond the heavy petting stage, never let his hand wander inside the waistband of my jeans. I hadn’t yet made the leap into the world of adult sex. And Jeff, the Jheri-curled lead singer of a heavy metal cover band had surely ventured there and beyond. He didn’t pressure me. He broke off our very casual hook-up-based relationship shortly after he learned my true age. Seventeen. When I admitted I was a virgin, he grew cold. Our final night together, he rejected my advances and advised me to wait until I met someone special to “go all the way,” as he delicately labeled sex for my virginal ears. Sometimes good guys don’t wear white. They wear black Iron Maiden sweatshirts with ripped sleeves and saggy faded Levi’s. They sing Bon Jovi songs and give good advice while waving off what would have surely been one of the most half-assed blow jobs in the history of oral sex. In Jerry’s bedroom, the swirl of voices grew quiet. I drifted off. I sunk into the scratchy weave of the carpet. I was tugged back to consciousness by the press of hands. Hands rolling me over from my stomach to my back, hands on my hips, fingers pulling at the neck of my sweater then moving to the crotch of my jeans, rubbing, fingertips fumbling with the button on my jeans. My eyes blinked open. The room was empty except for Evil Ryan MacDougal. The Church played on the stereo, eerie jangly music: Sometimes when this place gets kind of empty/Sound of their breath fades with the light/I think about the loveless fascination/Under the Milky Way Tonight. “What?” I said, my mouth still slack with sleep. He didn’t answer. His face was pointed in concentration. My jeans were a little tight, his fingers slippery and the button unyielding. The door pushed open and a giggling couple spilled in. I was too stuck in a fog to speak. I was drunk. I thought he was kind of cute. We had been flirting. I liked making out with boys, enjoyed the dance of flirtation as beers loosened our tongues and we led each other to hidden nooks of our parents’ suburban houses to make out. Since Jeff, the twenty-five-year-old, had dumped