Cabildo Quarterly #7

Cabildo Quarterly.

Issue #7. Dead of winter 2015. Belchertown MA; Pittsburgh PA. So Mr. Spipperson, what have you done to find gainful employment since your last signing-on date?

Orchids

by Hedy Habra He potted spring flowers, forgot to water them.

On my canvas, purple veins drip oil on draped Cattleyas Yesterday I saw him running, mist flowing from his breath.

He stopped, came to me, flowers whirled their twisted stems.

My feet stumbled on the icy snow, I stared at the muddy footsteps, took a longer way.

Transparent, I drew rainbows with silent steps over the frozen sheet.

Hedy Habra is the author of a poetry collection, Tea in Heliopolis (Press 53 2013), Finalist for the 2014 International Book Award, a short story collection, Flying Carpets (Interlink 2013), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention in Fiction and Finalist for the 2014 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Short Fiction; and a book of literary criticism, Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa (Iberoamericana 2012).Her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies.

from The Snapshot Of The Global Marathon Man

by Joe Mayers Foreword from the Author of THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN You know the story. How this goes.

How I am decades ago and an intern with SI and the Global Marathon fails us. How nothing gets written, then. Then, time. How I lie then. How I am carrying on. How its 2014 and I take to the Global Marathon again. For SI. As the single greatest feat of human endurance attempted, ever, and in the present. As though you might catch its passing out your window. How I am violating the journalists’ code of ethics in this, then. Then, canned.

Fired. Or resigned. How I lie then. How I am going on. How I am going gone. How what follows is THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN and goes “Rockroom” – “Legs” – “Seasick” – “Legs” – Etc..

How I should like to thank the copy editor for saying, Again.

For saying, From the beginning and quickly.

Yours, The Author Foreword from the Author of THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN Yes. I make up nearly every bit of it.

Or, the chief, saying: There’s very little I can say. The author’s made clear violations of the Journalists’ Code of Ethics.

Or, some smartass from some Post, intellectualizing: In fact, what this sad, if complex, rehashing has done is plagiarize history.

Or, the same or some other smartass, later: The work, the author: both have been adulterous to a temporal stamp.

Or, the copy-editor, having it as: A failing to move forward. A failing to move past the snapshot of the Global Marathon Man. A failing to move past, ever.

Because the Global Marathon runs in the 90s. Because, there, I fail in telling the Global Marathon, its Man, to myself, even. Because my career follows that internship and succeeds and yet repeats that initial failure and relentlessly, that choked rendering a’gurgle, ever. Because the Global Marathon Man clings. Asthing-to-be-shown-and-told.

No. Because the other way around. Because to it I cling. Because it clings me. Because I am stuck in the Global Marathon, its Man. Because I am an aging Jonah in some god-whale. Because I am saved or sheltered or digested or consumed in failing to render the symbol of my surroundings.

Because all these failures lie, The Author Foreword from the Author of THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN This is what THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN looks like.

When I learn that I got the internship with SI, I encounter a terribly beautiful lover. Two ships at sea sort of thing except we aren’t lost but elated, and long entwined, our long bodies, till there is sun, again. In it and gold, the terribly beautiful lover asks me to write the terribly beautiful lover, in the way an artist might render the terribly beautiful lover in soft coals, to draw the terribly beautiful lover, in words, right there, on the spot, while the terribly beautiful lover peels pale body about the sofa.

I write the terribly beautiful lovers’ half-hidden teeth tucked behind a half-open mouth in clacking alliterative quartetlike-lines and can go no further. And the terribly beautiful lover isn’t even smiling.

You can’t hold still enough, I say. I can only make you up.

The terribly beautiful lover agrees.

And if I cannot move forward? If I cannot foreword? If I cannot imply a certain speed, a passing speed, an object passed, the fixity of a thing running? If I cannot foreword this snapshot, foresee this snapshot? If I cannot see this snapshot?

Like a lust, lingering, and a line through the lip, undoubtedly?

Yours?

The Author Foreword from the Author of THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN This is what THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN looks like.

I am an intern in the 90s and the Global Marathon Man tells me his eyes know not where to turn and might well jelly in their holes.

Yours, The Author Foreword From the Author of THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN I’ve scotch-taped some pages to my body to stand before the bathroom mirror and get a good look.

They scratch and halve my bellybutton, find the nipples with the corners if I tremble atop the stool.

I’d like to thank the copy-editor for wrapping me so.

With my arms raised above my head, I tell the copy-editor that I grew hair in one pit long before the other.

And then the face, off, too, but starting with the other side.

THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN goes: “Rock Room” — “Legs” — “Seasick”—“Legs” —etc. . . .

I mean to try yoga atop the stool before the mirror with the scotched pages, for the reading, and I’d like to thank the copyeditor for finding the right music and instructional videos. With the same breath, I’d like to apologize to the copy-editor for the failure. Though I keep a keen half-eye on the level, it’s tough to find a center.

I compose the early goings of THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN in order, as I go along. In the television piece, you hear me say of seeing it.

With the tape wrapping done so efficiently by the copyeditor, steam does not penetrate or melt or mould the pages one bit. And the shower’s really cooking. I cannot see my or the copyeditor’s hand before my face. The bathroom door I keep cracked a foot, two, mean to particularly temper the mirror’s sweating and the tape’s sweating and so the page’s sweating and my own. I mean the clarity of the sauna atop the stool. A pertinent note can find its figure in the mirror’s steam till the copy-editor can get ahold of a more permanent medium, and the roar of the hot water might reveal anything.

I’ve not been showering. The pages. Though I’d like to thank the copy-editor for helping me try to get there, for helping me try out the variously sized trash bags of the assorted brands with the slashed head holes so I could hold the pages in place, showering. Another failure, and I’m getting filthy. Who’d know such a comprehensive plastics’ allergy on the sensitive skins of the torso?

In the bathroom mirror, THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN goes left breast, right breast, left abdomen, right abdomen, left pit, left wing, spine, right wing and then down the back, counter-clockwise, a slow spin. And I’ve only enough upper and readable body to get through “Legs.”

I cut the steam and light candles and, running in place atop the stool, the shadowplay resists interpretation alongside and in light of the pages. I should like to thank the copy-editor for purchasing the incandescents and LEDS thereafter, and the forty-watt and sixty-watt bulbs and neons from the bar windows and the blacklights. With a sick look at my own smile in the mirror in the light of the latter, I tell the copy-editor of all the dreams in which my teeth fall out.

The way, say, sixty-five percent of them end happily enough with implants.

Outside, THE SNAPSHOT OF THE GLOBAL MARATHON MAN makes a kind of farmer’s tan and the looks of locals tell me I’ve failed to tend my garden and that I’m a smelly freak. I should like to thank the copy editor for reminding me that the scotched story’s only legible before the mirror and that the body’s but a draft anyhow. With my hands reaching for the sunscreen I tell the copy editor I fear, most, perhaps, dying slow in some ever-night from vitamin D deficiency and to get a hold of a very bright and precise flashlight.

It throws light upon the pages exceptionally. And far. I should like to thank the copy-editor for saying, Let me try it from the porch.

For saying, Across the street. For saying, Let me get further, and still flashlighting the mirror and the pages. For saying, Further, still. For saying, barely, Can you hear me?

Who’d know there might be a half-mile line through backyards and holes of tire-swings and crooks in wood and plastic and metal jungle gyms and the hard unrelenting angles of this house and that house and cracks in fences and sheer night shades drawn but nothing and still pulled blinds and half-pulled blinds and particular corridors of darkness in others’ homes for the flashlight to find so precisely, a slow criminally disturbing line for the light to find my midnight house, ultimately, a line for it to find the mirror and the pages and my body there to cradle its ricochet atop the stool?

I should like to thank the copy-editor for reigning me in, finally, from blocks too far to hear, for saying, What do you see?

—the Author Joe Mayers is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah where he works as managing editor of Western Humanities Review. His work has appeared in Juked, decomP, DREGINALD, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere.

If My Mother Was Sorry

by Sara Emily Kuntz The bus stop was on a dangerous corner so I drove you to school every morning.

You never liked waking up early, and you liked it even less now, but I couldn’t see the changes in your body. How the hand-me-down pants barely fit your growing hips. How the baby fat of your belly was being eclipsed by your budding breasts. I had to focus on the road.

Get you to school, your brother to preschool, and then the treacherous drive home – every telephone pole a temptation, every stone wall so inviting, the headlights of every passing car a beacon to drive into. I just wanted to leave, be free, but blocking every route was the images of my babies, and how they couldn’t live without me. Should I be sorry I missed your puberty? Shouldn’t you be thankful I kept myself alive?

Sara Emily Kuntz has a degree in writing from the University of Pittsburgh and is an MFA candidate at Carlow University. As an enterprising copy shop employee she self-published ten single poem mini-books, as well as a small run chapbook. Sara lives in Brooklyn with a big grey cat.

Manager’s Door

by Constance Renfrow Boss’s men are coming to the manager’s door. Their leather gloves and broad, prison-tense shoulders wide, expanding, filling the cin-

derblock halls at the back of the store. Dad’s got my head held down, his hand ripping at my hair, the weight of his shin pressing into my spine—his spy under the door.

“How many of ’em?”

“Can’t see ’em—the angle’s wrong.” I start writhing with my shoulders—gotta shift position, gotta get my hands back close.

He shakes me hard, grinds my face into the cracks in the cement; my skin starts to shred away.

“Get off me!” I jerk up but he knocks me back down— yells, “Look harder! How many guys?”

“Maybe five—let me goddamn look and maybe I can tell you better.” He relents. Shifts his weight and I force my arms up from underneath, prop my chest up on the metal cuffs. “Oh yeah.” I laugh it. “Yeah they’re right outside, Dad.” My thigh shoots with pain again and again from how he kicks it, screaming fuck fuck fuck.

“What’re we doing in here?” I finally spit out, through grit teeth, asking it for the first time since Dad took off running, pulling me down the stairs, down eerie basement halls. Locked us into the manager’s office, pushed me down to the floor. Had to say it. “We were supposed to meet with Boss.” We’d been halfway to seeing him, just left to wait, been told to browse the shelves— not that Dad trusted me much to just look around anymore.

Cuffed me on the car ride. Don’t steal shit from them, and he’d knocked the rearview back into place. Don’t want to owe them nothing. “You told them you had what you owed.”

The door bangs—the industrial metal charging up an echo that surges into the crumbling walls. Right in my ear.

“Fuck!”—this time it’s me. And I find my legs, scramble up. Together, for once, we recoil from the door that’s still pounding under one thug’s fist.

“C’mon, you gotta unlock me.” Thrusting the cuffs out— wrists exposed, red, torn, warm skin and empty slicing metal. I show these to him—the compassion approach.

“I gotta do nothing, you ungrateful piece—” “What’s your excuse this time?” From behind the door.

It shudders again, steel howling like cop sirens, and outside the jeers start. “You think you’re safe?” “We’ll bust through.” And then: “Make this easy on yourself, Callum. Pay up.”

Here’s where Dad falls silent. That’s Pianowire’s voice— distorted through the inch of metal in between, but yeah, that’s authentic Pianowire humming in through the door.

“How much did you lose?” I ask, my one still-good eye narrowing—the other just swollen that way. If Boss’s second in command is outside the manager’s door, well, Dad must’ve lost worse than he’d said.

He kinda just snarls at me.

“Look, Boss likes me. Says I charm him.” Here I deepen to a growl. “Maybe if you tell me one goddamn time why you’re not paying up,” and now I shrug, lift the cuffs—be supplicating. “I could get us out of here.”

Now Dad’s the one with his ear pressed into the drainage grate in the floor. Reigning under the door. “With your pretty boy good looks, right?” He sneers at me. Notes the pallid face scraped red against the black hair clumped with dust against the bruises. “You’re not charming your way into a prostitute’s pants with your face all fucked up like that. You got shit to offer.”

“Thanks.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

So the banging starts up again, a pounding that hurts our teeth to hear, to feel, to think it's a temporary substitute for our backs arms torsos. “You got one chance to get out here, Callum. You and Ray,” Pianowire says. “But Boss doesn’t mind the other option.”

“I’m on your side!” I shout, loud enough to be heard on the other side of the door. “Get ’im, Pia—” I yell so hard it gasps away from me, slamming with fingernails in my throat, my head coming against a steel edge of the manager’s desk. I grasp at the nameplate when I fall. Adam Kadez, it says.

“Shut up” roars into my face—Dad’s spit flecking at me, dripping, gnashing with his teeth. He points Adam Kadez’s stapler at me. “You make another sound—” “You alright in there, Ray?” And when I don’t answer, “Ray.” Pianowire commands it and the others—five maybe five gotta be more than five—start up so it’s Ray Ray Ray Ray—reverberating against the door just like one key hit over and over and over with the hammer.

“We’re gonna get you, Ray.” Dad’s got his hand clamped down over his mouth, pushing hard against his teeth—that maybe he’ll push them out and save Boss some trouble before too long. But right now it’s my blood on his chin and through the fog that came in—the red dripping in between the eyelashes, the lids, that’s being blinked away— there’s something like regret crusting his eyes.

“Dad, they’re getting in.” Numb and groggy, my throat

isn’t opening to breathe. Taunts outside have stopped have stopped telling me who they need me to be, today, in this cage behind the manager’s door, a part of the manager’s desk. His nameplate sending letters into my brain: KDAAEAAE. It’s screaming from the door handle into my eye sockets.

Dad throws the stapler in the gap between my shins where the rips formed in my jeans months ago. “I didn’t hit you that hard,” he says, Ididn’thityouthathardgetup.

My feet are still alive. AAEAAEKKZ. “That’s’n obnoxious . . . noise.” Slurred it.

“You better find us a way outta here,” he says, he says, “They’re not gonna help you.” My something—nameplate—waves to the vent like in the movies, the air ducts like in James Bond.

“Look,” I think I say, “Maybeyoucan,” breathe, Ray, “getoutthatway.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you” and then “in front of me.” I feel him push into me, into my numbed-out shoulders, I feel it happen to the surface but the whole remains untouched.

“Noble,” I get out, or maybe “covering your ass.”

“Ha,” he tosses the ha out on the tiles, glances back at me—“I don’t like leaving loose ends.” Looks back to where I’m breathing, bruising. Clangs the vent open. ARKAAEDRAKK—it’s in the lock now, the sound jamming up through my nose, piercing into the corner of my eye, under the skin.

“Aakk!” I cry, dropping Adam Kadez’s name to the floor. Press the heel of my blanched hand up into my eyeball. Dad makes a noise like he’s strangling a girlfriend.

“Get up there.”

“You’regetting too fatforthis.” Scowl it. “It’s whatyou keep me around . . . for.” And I push his arm flab and tell him I can’t jump up that he’ll have to give me a leg up that stability is going to be a challenge. “I didn’t hit you that hard,” he says again, he says it like a question again.

But he holds out his hands and gives me a boost, pushes my foot up until my knee scrapes the vent and bruises the yellow back into purple. My hands grab at the sheet metal siding, the cuffs sounding like a prison break, press against the vent paneling to build force, to cause my back to tear, my shoulders to rip the muscles from the bone, the sinews to haul me up into a space that's mostly black and chemicals and AAAAAEKKKKKZZ—still coming from the door.

“The door,” I crack out to the vents. “Door.” “Dad.” “You know they’re getting in.”

“I’m coming,” he yells up from down in the office. And he’s good for it, knows how to climb into vents, done it a thousand and three times. “Keep going—don’t need you holding me up.” I listen to him, roll my arms forward forward heave my chest forward shoulders forward pulling my thighs and boots behind, but I feel them pulling me back like my feet don’t want to leave the manager’s door behind, don’t want to be stuck in a vent behind the manager’s office, in the walls of the hardware store. I crawl and breathe, squirm ahead and breathe. This is what Dad gets you into. Air vents and ducts too small, nothing you can sneak out of—just ooze and melt and hope your blood doesn’t stain the paint, your T-shirt.

KKZZDDZZKK. It’s like a clang, muffled from two distances—I hear it before me and behind me.

See the sound enter through the slats on the vent—a covering in the hall. Gottagetowarditgetting—gasp once—close.

My hair touches the vent covering and I know I should be seeing the hallway, the cinderblocks that built the basement, should be seeing men with fists and tense shoulders but I see nothing only all the leftover DeWalt drills and crowbars, power cord. And the manager’s door swinging on its hinge, the doorknob on the floor.

And it’s Dad who’s yelling, been pulled from the vent, screaming that, “The kid’s in the vent. If you want him, Ray’s in the vent. Just help him before Boss gets him.” And then, soprano, “he got hittoohardwhoknows if he’s okay.”

And that’s Pianowire humming that they’ll get the kid in the vent, the kid lost in the walls. But that first the manager wants his office back—has an appointment to keep. Boss is coming to the manager’s door.

And through the vent I see him, Adam Kadez, Boss, we’re in his office.

“Boss!” Dad whimpers when the first hit cracks, and shuffle back, back to opening we climbed up, to see the manager, to see him telling Dad that payment isn’t a choice, that when debts come due everyone gets what’s theirs. I see him splintering my dad, I see that Dad bruises just the same as me.

And when he’s done with the one on the ground, Adam Kadez picks up the stapler Dad threw on the cement. Replaces his nameplate, sits down at his desk, and clicks, clicks a few staples free. Says aloud, “We said we’d get you, Ray.”

Beneath my stomach Pianowire pounds on the vent, thudding into my ribcage, beating with my heart. A wrench or a boxcutter thudding against the underside. Some of my redness spills through the metal seams, oozes into the office.

“The creditors have come to collect,” Boss says. “Bad thing Callum doesn’t know how to win at cards.”

Gotta push, gottapushforward, gotta open the grate at the end.

“But good for him I always liked you. Counted on that.

Bet on that. Bad thing he doesn’t win when it counts.”

The hallway’s just there, just below, past the grate, and I throw my cuffs against it, gotta get out gotta run and— aaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEKK KKZZZZZZZZ and I’m falling writhing no time to land in anything other than a heap outside the door and I crash with limbs in too many places and blood and bruises on top of them.

AAAEKKKKKZZZZZ shrieks the DeWalt in Boss’s throat and spit and mucus and blood are pooling in the hollow of his collarbone and the drill’s in Dad’s barely clenching hand and Boss’s head is in shattered bones.

But I’m not broken, not collapsed just yet, and lurch to fight, to use my fists, to find a power cord to wrap around Pianowire’s stunned stupid throat.

“Get the fuck away, you shit,” Dad says, and maybe it’s to Pianowire, who’s still got a crowbar like a murder weapon.

But Dad would have had more respect for him, would have spoken nicer with more respect, and he knows I can find it in me to run.

Constance Renfrow is a New York--based writer and an editor at Three Rooms Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Denim Skin, Petrichor Machine, and LitroNY. Seed Faith

by Angele Ellis I lay in bed on late-seventies Sunday mornings, half-hearing the crackle of my boyfriend’s clock radio.

Oral Roberts promised miracles from Seed faith! while sperm battered my spring-form diaphragm.

Reverend Oral begged for an avalanche of envelopes to raise a sacred mountain from the Tulsa plain.

At base camp, his nine-hundred-foot Jesus waited, tapping a giant sandal into Oklahoma hardpan.

I dreamed of lucre watering the Christian world— lush and drunken, like a golf course at midnight.

Angele Ellis’s work has appeared on a theatre marquee (after winning Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ G-20 Haiku Contest in 2009), in journals and periodicals (including GreySparrow and Pittsburgh City Paper), and in anthologies.

Sumi-e with Dory

by Anne Witty The dory laps the water like a thirsty cat, making eager small noiseswater on wood creaking oar leathers boots squeaking against wet floorboards.

Unseen in scrolling fog, a heron croaks and beats heavy wings, I drift away the morning on a pale scrim veiling island firs -- rockweed hissing on the rising tide, the painter’s patient brush inking watered black and gray onto fog as thin as rice paper.

Anne Witty lives and writes in mid-coast Maine, where she recently completed an MFA in poetry. She works and plays as a museum curator, maritime historian, poet, musician, organic gardener, and sailor of vintage wooden boats.

Cabildo Quarterly #7, dead of winter 2015, First press of 1000 copies, Groundhog Day 2015. (This quarter: ten months. A new record!) Michael T. Fournier, Seals; Lisa Panepinto, Crofts. Online hoo-ha updatedweekly atcabildoquarterly.tumblr.com, where you can find more work from all the poets herein and CQ-related tour dates, news, and whatnotb. Additional print copies of this and/or any/all of our six back issues are available, for a buck each or five for a big stack to PO Box 784, Belchertown MA 01007. Subscriptions are available at the same rate. For publishing consideration, please email 3-5 poems to lmpanepinto@gmail.com (no .pdfs, pleas -they’re layout and tumblr murder) and/or stories up to 3000 words to cabildoquarterly@gmail.com. Simultaneous submissions are okay. Mike’s new novel “Swing State” has been released by Three Rooms Press -- he’ll be doing some readings in the near future. February 3rd is at RiverRun Bookstore with Tim Horvath and Sarah Gerard, 7 pm. Sarah and Mike share another bill February 6th at Arlington Centered in Arlington MA (with free tequilla!), 6-8 pm. West Coast dates in March are still being confirmed, but it’s looking like 3/14 at Blackbird Studios in Las Vegas, 3/18 at Adobe Books in San Francisco, 3/20 in San Pedro CA, and 3/21 in Los Angeles. Then 4/10 in Minneapolis for AWP with a crazy bill I’ll announce as soon as I can, then THEN a big East Coast run in May/June, and then then THEN some Midwest stuff with thee Mike Faloon. Phew! Again: subject to change, so check the aforementioned web page. New issue for the May/June dates will be a doozy. Thanks for reading, and, as always, thanks to Bec and Ryan for putting up with us, and this. Listen to Dead Trend!