Cabildo Quarterly. Issue #5. Fall 2013. Belchertown MA; Pittsburgh PA. Molly T. Bunny 1997-2013. Lolita by Kathleen Ellis I was reading Reading Lolita in Tehran when all of a sudden you looked up from your book on Marco Polo and said I looked like a woman who has just put on the veil. The cat, scurrying past in its mad dash to the kitchen, stumbled over my new invisibility. Kathleen Ellis is originally from California and has lived in Maine since 1977. She teaches poetry at the University of Maine, Orono.
excerpt from All of the Everything by Katie Lattari The Feed is updating and updating, the blue and white colors glaring up into my face from my iPhone. Red notifications, three. The first lets me know that Marley Powell has posted a link to my Wall. I go there and find she has dug up from the annals of the Internet a PSA about underage drinking. Ha. You buy two underage kids some beer and you can never live it down. The other two notifications are event invitations. One is for this coming Thursday – Charles In Charge The Band, Goat Body, and Queen Richard The Second are all playing the annual Boat Show on the Bay, sponsored by The King Wharf at Kingston Street. I RSVP that I will be attending. Always a fun event. Manhood Factory played it about three years ago. Had a hell of a time. Which is always made more intense by knowing that there is a real danger that someone will, being drunk, fall overboard and drown. The event really has it all. The second invitation is to a Slam Poetry Reading at Curley’s Books on Friday night. The girl who works there, Sinead, who I know from buying books there and from dating DeMaris Stephens from Tin Frisbee, invited me. Fuck. That. Shit. Decline. Sinead is nice enough, but slam poetry is not really my thing. Darkened alley blow jobs for my boyfriend are, apparently. I look around the alley he has just left to go back in to the show still thumping away inside Tinder Box. At the very least, I have another possible band name: Darkened Alley Blow Jobs. The Darkened Alley Blow Jobs? I’ll have to ask Griff and Jim. I return to the Feed and see that my mom has posted a link from the Huffington Post website about Michelle Obama, my dad has posted a link to a Humble Pie YouTube video, my brother Dom has posted “X Box broken again. That shit
is fucked.” Interspersed between the family updates I am seeing high school acquaintances, girls I haven’t seen or spoken to in years, holding their babies in Instagram tenors and surrounding their words and exclamation points with emoticon hearts. Everyone is having a baby, or is on their third baby, or is getting married, or is getting engaged, or is having to put their maiden name in parentheses next to their married name, or is changing their Relationship Status, and sometimes, well, baby, It’s Complicated. Sometimes there are too many pictures of you up there with your ex. Sometimes you have to untag that shit. Sometimes you have to banish some pixels. Sometimes you have to Unfriend people. Or block their Feeds because they love the NRA and they love Anne Coulter and they sometimes wonder if Barack really was born in this country like he claims he was and it gets me to wondering, how, how, how do I know you again how, how, how are we friends and then are we really? Are we really after all? But I also see an old friend of mine doing well in a PhD program for Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Washington and he is also a fan of The Daily Show and the hackles start to come down a little. So there is that. There are things that just seem nice. I also see friends from college moving back to their home states after trying out Los Angeles, Miami, after trying out New York and Chicago in those ecstatic and brave couple years after graduation which fizzle fast when you realize you have no money and you feel claustrophobic and subway platforms in Winter are terrible, and they are looking very happy and I can understand that and I think that is very, very great. Go where you are known. Let your loved ones know you, let your loved ones have you and I hope that your loved ones let you know them, let you have them. Why go so far away for? The end of the story is always about going back. We are all of us Dorothys. Just let us get back. What else is there but that. A picture of this guy friend of mine and his sister and their childhood friend I have no idea about sharing a scorpion bowl, smiling, together. Known each other since Pre-K, probably. Someone is posting about getting drunk because it’s the weekend and their job can suck their balls. Someone is posting a meme about the connection between the outgoing Pope and Star Wars. Someone is posting a picture of a grumpy cat using bad grammar. Someone is asking me to sign a petition about worker’s rights in Guatemala. Someone is feeling very, very sad and just wishes she had a boyfriend to snuggle with. Someone is pushing their band’s new record. Someone is pushing their friend’s band’s new record. Someone is warning me that a week from
today is their birthday and all I can think is Who the fuck gives a shit? Someone is ending a status with an uncertain ellipsis. Someone is writing their feelings in all caps. Someone has tagged someone I don’t know in a comment about an obscure French film they just saw. Someone is telling everyone what a great deal they got on their newest L.L. Bean rain jacket. Someone is posting simultaneously to Twitter and to Facebook and so there are hashtag phrases without much utility in my Facebook feed. Someone is posting a video of their daughter’s first birthday party, Dora everywhere. Someone is insinuating that I don’t care about the troops if I don’t Like their latest status update, which is a picture of a crying male soldier hugging his child. Someone is posting a photo of their lips and their neck and on their neck there is a pearl necklace but it is all in black and white. I post this status update; 12:54am: WHEN I GET A CAT SOMETIME SOMEDAY I DON’T KNOWWHEN THAT WILL BE BUT WEN I DO I WILL LOVE IT AND I WIL NAME IT GIANT SQUID BECAUSE THEY NEED LOVE TOO AND I CAN ONLY LOVE A GIANT SQUID REALLY IN CAT FORM JUST BECAUSE O PRAGMATICS LIKE BREATHING AND SCALE AND LIKE WHERE TO BUY THEIR FOOD AND THE FACT THAT I WOULD NEED TO BE LOVED TOO AND CATS CAN DO THAT CATZ CAN DO THAT AND I DONT REALLY KNOW IM NOT REALLY SO SURE ABOUT GIANT SQUID BUT I WOULD NEED IT TO LOVE ME BACK AND THAT IS MOST OF ALL WHAT ITS IS ABOUT It is up for a few seconds when it gets its first Like. Katie Lattari holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. She writes fiction and currently resides in Winterport, Maine.
A Friend Speaks by Bruce Pratt
When I told him that my copy of his first collection had been stolen from my desk, he said, “I am honored by such a theft,” and when I said I replaced it with a used copy he’d inscribed to a famous friend, he said, “Better open on your nightstand than collecting dust on hers,”