Cabildo Quarterly. Issue #8. Summer 2015. Belchertown MA; Pittsburgh PA. Immune to Indifference. After phone party by Ben Stein It’s Sunday and warmer than it’s been in weeks warmer than it will be for who knows how long (the weather man on the radio says rain turns to snow after noon) and here I am flaky -skinned busted chair moved into the hall to haul to the dumpster popcorn in the carpet for the cats to sniff this room smells like a fucking primate house and where the fuck am I supposed to fucking sit fuck it this poem gets written standing up.
Ben Stein’s writing has appeared in the 2nd Hand and Cabildo Quarterly. He runs Open Books, a not-for-profit education and publishing venture offering personal wrtiting workshops to people with limited access to educational services. Find it here: www.facebook.com/RoughCutPress
Voices by Jes Skolnik I get asked a lot these days what it was like the first time he pried my mouth open and I spat his words out, when he crept into my spine and stacked me straight like they always try to get you to sit in church. What I usually say is predictable: that I simply faded away to make room for him, barely aware of the mist until it had barred me from my own body entirely. That it was painless and simple and that once the door was open it just never closed. Girls like me, hardy farm workhorses, aren’t supposed to be delicate in any way. We’re not supposed to secede from our stocky, fecund bodies. Our bodies make houses and children, bread and hay. We are callused. Most people seem relieved when I describe, in dramatic detail with a lot of eye-rolling and hand-fluttering, that my role in this whole thing is entirely passive. They want it to be true. It makes sense that way. A news story about one of my Manhattan appearances begins with mention of my “dark brow” and “thick waist,” but goes on to praise my scent (wisteria, violet and lily, carefully distilled), my choice of frilly, high-necked garments with just enough décolletage. Do not think I have not chosen these accessories by accident. Do not think I am not lying about this whole thing. *** The events of that day as they actually transpired begin before sunrise, that thin film of sleep dissolving from the surface of my body as if at the end of a long journey from the bottom of the ocean. In my dreams I had been a tangle of limbs with her with my breath south and stuttering, with blood singing in the balls of my feet, wet mouths, sirens both, one long tremble. My hands in her hair, hers in mine. I have been told that this is how you are supposed to feel about men. The weight of men touching me is a dead stone in my stomach. The sick of men touching me is hot bile in my throat. The weight of men touching me is Clarence in the barn loft a couple of years prior to that morning in my ear like a dog wanting something from me that I could not give. I gave him a pretty painting of it with my lips and teeth and legs and he seemed not to know the difference. How can you not see that I am not even here when your hand is in me, I said to him silently, but men don’t read your eyes. My father said Clarence would make a good husband. That he would be stable, dependable. That I would not starve and that he would not beat me. I couldn’t argue. Who would? She was at her father’s tannery that morning and I bore the foul scent of the place to see her hip propped against the till, god, that arch. She was all jumpy shoulders: “Have you heard about the Fox sisters in Hydesville? Have you? It’s so close, it’s so close! Have you heard about the knocking? We’re not supposed to talk about it but I think it’s real, I really do.” Her voice dropped and she leaned in, balling her fists up. “Charlotte, you should come over when everyone’s at night service. Tonight! We’re going to try to talk to the spirits. I might have
the gift! Everyone’s always said I’m sensitive.” If you’re so sensitive, I thought, why can’t you feel me shaking right next to you. But instead, I said, “I’d love to.” *** There were seven of us there: Anna, of course. Clarence, Emma, Elizabeth, Hazel, Albert, Carrie. Our entire school class, with the exception of Ned Wright, who everyone agreed smelled bad and was cruel and sulky and was always referred to by his full name as if there was another Ned in town (there wasn’t), and the Berry twins, Tom and Christine, who were both lovely but who couldn’t keep a secret by themselves and especially couldn’t keep one when they were together. We were all hovering around sixteen. “We’re too old for this,” said Hazel, who was beautiful in a very sharp way and who looked even more generally taut since she suddenly shed her baby fat just last year. She was chewing on her lower lip and she looked slightly less sour than usual. She kept folding and unfolding her hands, which all belied her excitement. “The spirits are not a game.” Anna was lighting candles around the perimeter of the living room in a slightly haphazard fashion – she’d just put them on any surface she could find as opposed to forming a proper circle, which, to hear Pastor Wood tell it, was how any evildoer worth his salt over the shoulder summoned up ghosts or demons. Clarence had a hand on my knee under the big table the rest of us were seated around. I let him keep it there, thinking about my father’s words. “How do we start this whole thing?” Emma was resolutely practical, wonderfully so. “Is there a song, a chant?” Anna rustled down at the head of the table and bowed her neck. The illumination of her cheekbones made her look soft like a rabbit, smoothed out the angles in her face that made her look like her mother, who had died in childbirth and who had reportedly not been the kindest of people, though nobody wanted to say that because she was dead. Her father had told me once when I ran into him on the road between our houses coming home from town with his walk sideways and his breath reeking of grain alcohol that he thought Anna was a tiny phoenix, that God’s providence had allowed her to escape the husk of her mother’s body and that we were all better off for it. Tiny phoenix: those were his words. I’d been trying to puzzle out their truth for months. When I asked my mother, who had been close to Anna’s mother, about it, she said: “The world made Martha Winston hard. The world does that to a lot of us.” That statement was not a puzzle at all. “We come to this table on this night to lower the veil between the living and the dead,” Anna intoned in her best rounded-off Pastor Wood impression. As schoolteacher and pastor, a slight but commanding, respectful presence, he was our best model of authority. “Spirits, bless us with your presence! Bring us word from the realms beyond! We come to you with open hands, we come to you in supplication.” She was making it up as she went along, despite the buoyant confidence in her voice. Anna didn’t use words like supplication in her daily life. We barely knew what it meant, though it sounded right when she used it, sounded like a Pastor Wood word. My cheeks were hot. Why were my cheeks hot? I was looking at her collarbone and the ringlets clinging to her neck and thinking about dreams. Clarence looked at me sideways, and I tried not to look at Anna and just Anna. Glanced around the table and took in all of our familiar faces, the range of expressions from skeptical to near-laughing and back again. It suddenly felt very cold in the room. My cheeks still burned. It was completely silent. “Spirits!” said Anna, again, a little desperately this time. “Spirits, join us at this table of goodwill!” Nothing. “Spirits! We call on thee!” That’s when I felt it rising in my chest, near to bursting, and this booming voice issued forth from my very own lips. “WHO CALLS ON THE DEAD?” Carrie and Emma started giggling. Clarence’s mouth fell open. Albert said: “Charlotte?” How did all of this go? I tightened my body, rolled my eyes back in my head, swayed a little bit: “WHO CALLS ON THE DEAD?” I’d never been one to make myself the center of attention. When the church did passion plays I’d hide in a cluster of fellow Israelites; once during the stoning of Jesus on the Cross I lobbed a particularly large chunk of rock that caused the Cross to topple over with Jesus (played by Ned Wright) on it by accident and it had been mortifying. Here, in front of just my friends, it felt safer, but still: what was I doing? Anna blinked at me. “Um,” she wet her lips with her tongue and swallowed, “Who, uh, goes there?” “THOMAS JEFFERSON,” I nearly yelled. He was the first dead man I could think of from history class. I had thought fleetingly about yelling “JEREMIAH MURRAY,” the local barber who had been trampled by a runaway horse, because he was really the first dead man who came to mind, but I didn’t know anything about him except that he was fat and well-liked and that the horse had actually been his own. Dead men can speak. Dead women get spoken for. Emma’s giggle got louder, while Carrie’s faded. Clarence craned his neck toward me but removed his hand from my knee. “I AM COME TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT THE DEV-
ILS OF SLAAAAAVERY,” I said, my voice rising and getting prouder. We’d always been a little smug about that sort of thing in New York State. At that time, I’d never actually met a freedman, but I’d been born just after the Civil War ended, leaving a swath of exhaustion and devastation even in some Northern towns, and it was all anyone could talk about: the proud, righteous North, always on the side of justice. The Devils of Slavery seemed like a safe thing to lecture on. Emma’s giggle had died. They were all turned to me with so much attention. I felt drunk; I’d never known I was so good at lying. I’d always thought I was one of those people whose faces betrayed them no matter what, that I’d only gotten away with the things I got away with because people were too polite or too delusional to bring them up. A loud and sudden CRACK!, and the table jumped. I nearly toppled my chair over, I was so startled. I had been lying my teeth out, but I had not made that sound. I did a quick survey from the corner of my eye, and everyone else looked just as drained, just as pallid, just as amazed. Hazel was solidly staring at me. She looked like a tiny fox, all sharp chin and cheekbones, her hair with its sheen of copper that only showed when light fell on it the way the candles shook now. “Dear Jesus God in Heaven,” she said, “have mercy on u—“ CRACK! The table had moved a full inch at least this time. “Us,” Hazel repeated. “Us, us, us, us sinners.” Her slatted, dark eyes shimmered with delight. “MY SPIRIT’S ARRIVAL ON THIS EARTH BRINGS WITH IT MUCH DISTURBANCE,” Thomas Jefferson said through me, as a late and somewhat obvious explanation, though I had no idea what presence actually might have stolen into that room. Albert was grinning, and Anna had clasped her hands beneath her chin, elbows on the table, leaning forward, greedy for more. I fainted. Not for show – I really did. Fell right off my chair, one foot splashing into Master Pepper’s bowl, barely disturbing the hound himself snoring next to it (he had been with Anna since she was a child and would go for long spells without motion at all; we often had to check to make sure he hadn’t expired). My hair unspooled, my skirts up around my waist, gone awry, gone away. This was the way it truly began. Jes Skolnik is a contributing writer to Pitchfork, The Media, Rookie, Flavorwire, and other sites you may or may not have heard of. They live in Chicago and play in the band Split Feet. 'Voices' is the introduction of a novel-in-progress.
Beyond Center for E.K. by Erica Vega I undress you, climb into your body, euphoria in your center yer marigold face, the dark with without shadow a light buds. the sun close at a distance, see what you’re saying: It is dawning somewhere & dusking else. Erica Vega holds an MFA in Creative Writing and currently teaches English at Elgin Community College in Illinois. She continues work on her novel.
Ann Arbor, Michigan by Richard Katrovas The effects of early-onset Alzheimer’s began innocuously; data anchored to his very being—address, telephone number, grown children’s names and the names of their spouses and small children—suddenly dislodged and drifted over the horizon of phonemic clusters by which they were determined. Sometimes they returned immediately, sometimes well into the night as he laid shuffling images of intimacy he could no longer name at will. “Sarah,” he would whisper, assuring himself he could never forget the name of her beside whom he lay for thirty-eight years. They’d met as kids at school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Second-generation Greek, she’d lived Greek at home and American English in the rest of post-war Ann Arbor. His first days at school had been the most humiliating of his life; composed of many second-generation Americans, mostly Greeks like Sarah, but also Germans and Irish, the class had laughed as a chorus when it became apparent how little English he understood or spoke. Sarah didn’t laugh. She befriended him, taught him. A few years later they were married. He’d stopped thinking in Czech in his mid-teens, and did not hear the language, except in snippets, for over thirty years. He was American through and through. He cursed and loved and laughed
American. Yet the language of his childhood never left him. He dreamed intermittently in Czech all his adult life, and such dreams were troubling, for in them he was foreign to himself. Since the bouts of forgetting, the Czech dreams had been more frequent, intense, and even frightening. Recently, Nazis had barked on the margins, barely comprehensible as Germans until the intense, vivid dream of three uniformed men dragging his mother and older sister into the other room. “Sarah,” he said to his sleeping wife, shaking her arm gently, “Sarah,” he repeated as she rolled slowly, heavily towards him, “I have to go back.” “Okay, darling,” she answered, still sleeping. They arrived on a Saturday in late June. They exited into storm from the smaller Delta jet they’d transferred to in Frankfurt. There was a bit of rolling thunder and sheets of rain, but not nearly the violence of most summer storms in mid-West America. Jerry Han became Jiri Hanzlik as he stepped into that weather of his early childhood, and descended the wet stairs to the slick tarmac. His older cousin had taken him to a small town near the Polish border, and from there they had trekked by various painful means to a village near the still smoldering Dresden, through Leipzig, up into Hamburg and from there to Copenhagen, from where they sailed first to Portugal, then New York. Then the bus ride to a thoroughly American, loveless but protecting great aunt in Ann Arbor. He and Sarah attended the University of Michigan, then took over her family’s quite successful restaurant. “Please take us to the Evropa Hotel, through Mustek,” Jiri stuttered a bit in a language he’d not actually spoken in decades. “Jerry, I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you speak Czech since we were kids,” Sarah beamed. “I’d forgotten how beautiful you sound.” Jiri had indeed avoided occasions requiring that he speak the language. The two or three times he and Sarah had happened upon couples one or both of whom were Czech, he’d always made very clear, as subtly though unequivocally as he could, that he did not speak Czech. Once, at the restaurant—for some reason the entire faculty of the Slavic Studies program at the university were particularly fond of Greek cuisine—a fellow chattered to him in Slovak, and Jerry answered cheerfully and succinctly, but completely in American English. When the young professor asked him, through chuckles and sips of scotch, why Jerry had not answered him in Czech, almost identical to Slovak, Jerry had responded quite off-handedly that he didn’t speak Czech. “But you understand perfectly!” the jovial Slovak had blurted in English. “I didn’t say I can’t,” Jerry had calmly responded, “I just don’t.” Nothing and everything seemed familiar on the ride from the airport. The landscape, a bit tamer than what he recalled, a bit thinner, seemed to have retained its subtle hues and delicate geometries. But the garish ads on the side of the highway seemed from the other world. For a moment, he forgot where he was, and squeezed Sarah’s hand, and she knew what he meant. Terror filled him as he gazed upon a Mars Bar ad whose caption was in Czech. This was definitely not Ann Arbor, Michigan, and as Sarah gripped his hand and stroked it, he knew with absolute certainty that he was on a road from the Prague airport to the heart of the city of his birth and early years. He relaxed his grip, and so did she, though she continued to stroke his fingers all the way into town. “Zastavte!” Jiri shouted, and the startled driver halted the Skoda cab in the middle of the packed intersection, then slowly, nervously edged to the far curb. “Jerry?” Sarah said in a low voice as her husband rolled down the window, angled his head out, and gazed up. “Mam hlad,” he breathed to her. “What?” “I’m hungry,” he repeated. “What is that building?” she asked with a gentle urgency. “Ma maminka, ma sestra,” he answered, then, “I wanted to help, but the soldiers had guns...” “Jerry!” she half shouted, “why are you talking to me in Czech?” The fear in her voice registered to him, and he reached into his pocket and pulled from it a wad of crowns they’d exchanged for at the airport, and paid the incredulous driver much more than the fare. They got out and the driver rushed out, too, to retrieve their luggage from the trunk and push off before the old fellow realized how much money he’d thrown away. They’d packed lightly for the weeklong stay, and after staring up a long while at the dirty-orange stone building, Jiri dragged the large suitcase by a cord; its tiny wheels squeaked and scraped over the still-damp pavement. Sarah totted the smaller bag with little discomfort. “I wonder how far we are from the hotel,” she said, worried that he had no idea where he was. “Three blocks straight ahead, then we turn left and go about half a kilometer,” he answered, staring off. “How do you know this?” she asked, considering how young he was when he’d left. “My cousin worked there. I used to take him lunch,” he responded, then, with hardly a pause, “He always shared his food with me. He was like a brother and a father. ‘Petre, I would yell up the elevator shaft…” “Jerry!” Sarah yelled, putting down the suitcase and grabbing his arm. “I don’t understand you!” “Proc?” Jiri answered, perplexed. “I am not speaking loudly enough?” “You’re speaking Czech, Jerry!” she almost screamed. “What do you mean?” He said. “Darling, you’ve been speaking to me in Czech,” she responded, gently.
Jiri became frightened. This woman who appeared familiar was telling him in English that he’d spoken to her in Czech. What is Czech? He paused to ask her, then said, “Sarah,” then again, “yes, Sarah. What did you say?” “I said let’s hurry to the hotel.” “Where’s the hotel?” “Not that far,” she answered, gripping his arm with desperate affection. “In the next block. We turn right.” “I’m hungry,” he announced. He’d not eaten on any of the planes or in the airports. “Let’s get settled in,” she said, “then you can take your medications and we’ll eat. What would you like?” “Dumplings and pork with sauerkraut.” “What is that?” “What is what?” “What is that you said in Czech?” “I think I would like a hamburger,” he mumbled as they shuffled towards the hotel, and the suitcase squeaked over the damp sidewalk on its worn runners. They checked in and took the elevator to their room, which, upon scanning it, Sarah found adequate. She was bone-weary, having slept little on the L-1011 coming over, and she knew that though he’d kept his eyes shut most of the flight, Jerry, too, had slept little. “Jerry, let’s try to get some shut eye before we go out, okay? We can eat someplace nice in the evening.” He nodded slowly, wearily, and began undressing, and so did she. He awoke sweating. The room was not his room. The woman beside him belonged there, but he could not recall why. He splashed water on his face in the dark, ran a washcloth over his skin, and got dressed. He looked in his wallet at his driver’s license, and, yes, he was Jerry Han from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was very hungry. He could read the words on the money, but he didn’t know why. He left the room quietly. In the elevator, he pressed PRIZEMI, and arrived at the lobby. The clock above the front desk said 8:52. It was a little bright outside, so at first he wasn’t certain if it was morning or evening, but none of the people in the lobby had morning eyes, and some sat at the small bar off the lobby imbibing. He was hungry. He was Jerry Han from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he was married to Sarah, and he was hungry. He wanted a burger. “Know where I can find a burger, fella?” he asked a young guy by the large sofa in the middle of the lobby. “Nerozumim,” the kid answered, looking away, distracted by a lovely female sitting at the bar. Jerry knew that the kid had said that he didn’t understand, but he wasn’t sure how he, Jerry Han, knew this. “Where can I buy a burger?” Jerry asked again, and the young guy was visibly startled. “There is a McDonald’s restaurant on Wenceslas Square,” the kid replied, and Jiri was happy to hear this, for he recalled running once across the Square with his school mates, Ivan and Jitka, but then Ivan and his family were no longer in the building where they had lived, and Jitka, dear Jitka… He exited the hotel and strode left with an assurance he felt but did not understand, down a street that was not in Ann Arbor, Michigan, into several languages, two of which he understood, and among the people casually chattering them to one another as Jiri passed through and around pairs and small groups on the busy evening sidewalk. On the Square, two gypsy men asked Jiri in English if he wanted to change money. “I changed at the airport, thank you. Could you tell me where the place is I can buy a hamburger? I forget what it is called.” The befuddled men glanced at one another. He looked and dressed like an American. He spoke Czech and could not remember McDonald’s. One of them pointed behind Jiri to a small sign that was a field of yellow on which was scrawled a red “M.” The gypsies scuffed away, and Jiri walked toward the sign. This was McDonald’s. He and Sarah drove through McDonald’s after U of M football games. Where was Sarah? Who had won the game? Whom had the Wolverines played? Why was he walking instead of driving through? These people did not look like folks in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He stared at the large menu spread the length of the service area, over the heads of the workers, none of whom had dark complexions, and he saw that everything was written in Czech, and he began to sob in terror, and sat down at a table and held his face in his hands and wept for several minutes. A tall, skinny, pimply boy in a McDonald’s uniform, including a paper hat, touched Jiri on the shoulder and asked softly if he was well, and Jiri nodded yes, and said he was very hungry. Then Jerry composed himself, wiped his face with the white handkerchief Sarah always placed in the back pocket of his pants after washing them, and rose. He stepped up to the counter and ordered a Big Mac, large fries, and a chocolate milkshake. He ate quickly, and tried to think of nothing but the food before him. Finishing the sandwich, he still had half his fries left, so went back to the counter and ordered a double cheeseburger. He finished this quickly, too, and the fries and shake, and was sad when he was through eating because now he would have to think of other things, things he could not put in his mouth and enjoy. He walked back onto the Square. It was illumed quite beautifully, he thought, especially the National Museum on whose steps he and Jitka would play on Saturdays in spring. He walked towards the statue of Vaclav, and recalled Svaty Mikulas when Jitka’s father and uncles would dress as the devil, Svaty Mikulas and an angel to roam evening streets with similarly garbed trios scaring and delighting children. They always finished their cavorting at the statue. He wanted to go home. It was dark now, and he would have to go home. He was there in twenty minutes. The door was locked, which was not right, so he put his shoulder into it and it sprang in-
ward toward the stairs, and he climbed the steps in the dark. He tried the door; it was locked. He knocked on it, first lightly, then with authority. The door opened, and a woman not his mother or sister stood there in a yellow nightgown. Her skin was very dark, and her hair was long and wavy black. “Who are you?” he asked. “Are you police?” she asked evenly, stoically. “You are gypsy. What are you doing here?” “You must be drunk. What are you doing here?” Jerry was quite certain that there were no gypsies in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and stared at the dark, hard-featured woman quizzically, and, inexplicably, she stared back at him. “I ran away,” he told her. “I heard them screaming, and I could not bear it, so I ran away.” The woman stared at him, expressionless. “Father told me I would have to be the man of the house, but I couldn’t stop it. I hid behind the big chair by the window.” The woman shifted her weight from one foot to the other, placid. Jiri wondered if Jitka would know what happened to his mother and sister. “Dobrou noc,” he said politely to the woman, and climbed one more flight of stairs. He knocked on Jitka’s door and stood a long while. He knocked again, and a light snapped on within. The woman before him was Jitka; certainly it was she. The features of her face, even her hair. “Jitka,” he said to his best friend. “Who are you, sir?” the puzzled old woman asked. “Jiri, I am Jiri Hanzlik. Remember? We played on the Square. Our mothers were friends.” “Jiri!” she exclaimed, and reached across the doorway to grasp his arm, “I thought you were taken away with the others.” “Peter took me to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in America.” “I don’t speak English, Jiri, please…” she said as she sat him down in her small living room, which appeared to Jiri as it always had. The couch was the same. The framed picture of a sailing ship on the wall above the couch was the same. “I just ate. Have you seen Sarah? She wasn’t at McDonald’s,” he continued as he seated himself where Jitka’s mother always sat in the evening to do her darning. “Jiri, I said I don’t understand English. Please…” she repeated a bit louder, assuming his hearing was a little off. “I hid a long time, you know. Until the war was over. I ran to Petr, and he hid me in the basement. He shared his food with me, and then he took me to America. He died, you know. He died quite young in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That is where I live. I live there with Sarah. Have you seen my mother?” Jitka was perplexed. It was Jiri. But something was clearly wrong with him. He spoke strangely. “Jiri, they were taken to Terezin. It was where many were taken in the beginning.” “I’m an American. I’m an American. I’m an American.” Jitka understood. “Yes, of course you are an American, Jiri.” “I am Jerry Han. I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I am married to Sarah. We live in Ann Arbor, Michigan.” Jitka understood the gist of what he was chanting. Something was terribly wrong with this man, this man who’d been the boy she’d played with everyday of pre-War pre-puberty. She remembered him quite well. She and Jiri would play on the steps of the National Museum almost every Saturday, that final spring, and pretend they were famous actors. She even possessed a photograph their mothers had had taken of Jiri and Jatka together, sitting on the steps between their flats. Her family had always been open-minded. She picked up the receiver of the telephone and called the police. Perhaps they could help him Richard Katrovas is the founding director of the Prague Summer Program and the author of seven books of poetry, a novel, a collection of stories and two memoirs.
Daybreakage by Ellen Sander sea smoke upriver, streetlamp dims, the very last star drowns in something brighter sun, moon snarl warm winds chill winds circle, seething hawks feast on carrion poison frogs rasp the treble clef dew on sharded jade of eyes shuttered my house appears in another part of my life daylight opens tea falls from steam a trickling arc the door whines the hasp clicks I don't dare look what passes for passage misses the cup scalding my arm Ellen Sander, a pioneering rock journalist of the sixties, is the author of Trips; Rock Life in the Sixties, poetry broadsides Craters and Autumnal and the chapbook Stand of Herons. She was Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine in 2013 and 2014.
Cabildo Quarterly #8, first press of 1000 copies, 1st August 2015. (This quarter = six months.) Michael T. Fournier: publisher/fiction; Lisa Panepinto: poetry/organization. We’re always looking for previously unpublished contributions (simultaneous always OK): fiction of 3000-ish words to cabildoquarterly@gmail.com, and/or 3-5 new poems to lmpanepinto@gmail.com.(Please don’t send .pdf ’s -- they’re a huge pain in the ass to format..) We have a webpage, too, where you can find all sorts of rad stuff: cabildoquarterly.tumblr.com. We’re also on the Facebook. Back issues are available for a buck per/five bux for a big stack. Send well-concealed cash to Cabildo Quarterly Top Serious HQ, PO Box 784, Belchertown MA 01007. So since the last issue, Mike has done 28 readingsin 24 towns from his novel ‘Swing State’ (available on NYC’sThree Rooms Press -- as is Lisa’s book “On This Borrowed Bike”). Suffice it to say that there were and are so many great writers, bookstores, labels and people to thank that this tiny little space just isn’t enough. Thanks, all, who put me up/put up with me, held a reading, bought food, spread the word, and helped out. It’s amazing to be part of such a thriving community. Special thanks to Sir Mike Faloon for an awesome week on the Check Swing tour (and all the sandwiches --no turkey!) and, as always, to Bec & Ryan for putting up with it all. Until next time, in Watt’s words, start your own band, write your own book, paint your own picture. And oh yeah: Listen to Dead Trend!