Crack the Spine
Literary magazine
Issue 190
Issue 190 May 19, 2016 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2016 by Crack the Spine
CONTENTS Luke Otley December Dreaming Lauren Lara Steve Luria Ablon
The Old House
My Sister’s Doll
Abby Caplin Dishwashers
Andrew Bertaina Due North
Dylan Taylor
Dues and Don’ts
Lisa Harris
Three Women
Taylor Han
A Mixtape for Ana Carrete
Luke Otley
December Dreaming I dreamed a dozen dreams with my knees brought up propped against the steering wheel, my bladder taut, same as the tiny boy bladder I nursed under superman pajamas. Little shorts, true blue and bent at caramel knee, my rabbit tucked safe between forearm and chest, tight to my rib cage then brittle as a sconce shell, and eyes screwed tight against the expedition from the warm opened like a sunflower underneath my rosy worried chin. And how strange it isa foreign sea my adult dreams appear to me visions
images so clear, familiar and yet unknown, like language pock and twanged 'cross pots boiling stock off goats' bonesI watch myself: head bowed, hands bent tending seriously to eggs, broke and scrambling in their wrought iron run bespeckled with puck holes and flaking with rust, a light perspiration to the brow, a tight-lipped but set slight smile overseer to my methodic movements. My dreams are fluid, adaptable, for one day through my window pane (steamed a little in the corners) a rickshaw rides clattering, the next une petite fille
bustles her bicycle through the nettles that line the ally, careless in the failing day to the leaves brushing her skirt, stained deep violet by fallen blackberries.
Steve Luria Ablon My Sister’s Doll
First remove the doll’s arms, swivel arms like wishbones hard to break. Legs are easier snapped from their ball joints, then pausing to admire the dismemberment, my medieval transgression, each limb attached by rope to a horse, and what will my sister say when she finds Eloise? Will she now never walk into my room, never take my toys, never sit so beautiful while I pick my nose but there will be jail for me. I buy a new doll, in her ermine coat, tell my sister Eloise is studying abroad, Jasmine has taken her place.
Abby Caplin Dishwashers
I’m standing at the sink on Thanksgiving, scraping food scraps into my friend’s recycling can, the conversation repeating all over America— How much food do you need to clean off, and should you rinse before loading the dishwasher? All over America, rinse-believers like me raise their brows as dinner dishes covered in creamed corn get crammed into racks. I scrub, in rolled-up sleeves, the already drying mashed potatoes and congealed meat, the cornbread heavy
with soaked-up cranberry runoff, the hardening finger paint of pumpkin pie. I care that she will open her clean dishwasher to find bits of spinach and beige threads of turkey annealed to her glassware, last year’s meal which I chipped off with a fingernail before setting the table. But I follow her instructions, do a bad job of rinsing. This is not your house, I tell myself. At her sink my fingers slide between the prongs of her forks, intimate with fourteen pairs of lips.
Andrew Bertaina Due North
Hello Darling, I hope this letter finds you in good spirits or something approximating them. I’m going to try writing this again from the perspective of someone who is very sad. I’m not very sad. I’m constitutionally unsuited for it. Whenever I feel myself getting sad I take a drink of bourbon, or go for a stroll in the woods and try and identify birds based on the racket coming down from the cathedral of white pines and spruce. I know next to nothing about birds, but listening to them distracts me from whatever troubles me. It slows me down in a way, connecting me back to old animal instincts, which have nothing to do with feeling sad and everything to do with staying alive. I am happy to report that I am staying alive. If you walk due north from the cabin where I’m staying you’ll find yourself at a trail head with a wooden square shaped sign. The sign details the unique flora and fauna, and extols the virtues of some local landmarks. Some years ago, during the Civil War, someone fired a canon and some other ephemera. Keep walking north and it tells you that you’ll eventually reach the top of Grey’s Peak. To the east, according to the sign, is a waterfall, which is named after an old Native American tribe that used to live here. Traveling west leads you back around to a different trail, which loops back and connects with the original trail. If you head south you’ll find yourself back at the cabin, which isn’t named after anyone. I travel west most days, around the loop trail because it pleases me to
have the deviation turn into a path that comes back together. As you might guess, it helps me to cope. Stranger still though, at least to my feeble intellect, is how much sense the signs make. Go here: see this. I take a great deal of pleasure in knowing that east lies a waterfall. Life, as we both now know, is closely related to well-labeled signs. Once you’ve chosen a path it gets rather hard to deviate. If you start out heading east, chances are, you’ll wind up seeing a waterfall. Head north, a mountain. And if you head in opposite directions, as we did, it’s unlikely you’ll meet again. And yet, it’s entirely possible that while traveling east you will tumble down the hillside, spraining your ankle in the process. In which case, you will not see the waterfall. Or, you will only see the waterfall that lives in your dreams—the Platonic idea of a waterfall, which, when you come right down to it, may be more interesting than the waterfall itself. I say this not entirely to bore you, though I admit that is at least a part of my intent. I say it because it seems strange to me that we’ll never see each other again, when months ago, even a year, we’d have said that we’d know one another for the rest of our lives. In life’s infinite branching of circumstances it’s hard to know if this outcome was inevitable or not. That is to say, I’m not sure whether we slipped off the path and sprained our ankles, or whether this was the path all along. Perhaps we are on a loop trail, and we will recur in one another’s lives.
Do you know if we will? Does God? Could we ask him in prayer? I think not. Even if he exists, such troubles as ours lie even beneath the birds of the field. To believe otherwise would be a form of pride, which is the greatest of the sins. Of all the things that you said to me during that year that we spent together I remember a particular moment most acutely. We were sitting at picnic table, eating sandwiches from a local shop. A hornet was menacing us. I said we should abandon the sandwiches, knowing that we were beat. You laughed warmly and said, “That’s exactly what I thought you’d say. You’re always willing to give up.” And you were right. Look at me now. I’ve given up on nearly everything. I’ve given up on us, on you. I find it so much easier this way. I started a novel, but I’ve given that up as well in favor of this letter. Snow started falling this morning, think flakes from a grey sky. They lie heavily on the dark branches of trees. I hope that it snows for days, drifts climbing the trees and the side of the house. I want to look out and see nothing but white, as I sit here, thinking of you, not thinking of me.
Dylan Taylor
Dues and Don’ts If you take the hair of a sheep and weave it together you have fashioned a scarf. If you take locks of human hair and fashion it into anything, you get a restraining order. Humanity is funny that way. Ray eats cereal every morning. Ray uses milk, real, whole milk. Ray’s wife Julie is pregnant. When Ray and Julie have sex, milk leaks from Julie’s nipples. On a particularly exuberant afternoon, a perfect droplet of Julie’s breast milk falls from her nipple. It descends slowly, unmarked by the writhing Ray, into his open slack-jawed mouth. Ray vomits violently skywards. Julie questions every instance of oral kindness she has bestowed on her husband. The baby kicks, the record skips, and the handle on the toilet sticks. Once, a big rock hit the Earth and shook it like an Etch-a-Sketch. Why don’t more people look up and think, “65 million years ago, shit, we’re due”?
Lisa Harris
Three Women 1. Eleven days since the wedding—eleven inches of snow—eleven kinds of happiness. Sylva has let go of the past and stepped into the present. The doctor told her she did not have to take the prescription, did not have to go to the hospital, and did not insist on her changing. His bedside manner was hands off, and Sylva’s nature was to pretend. The symptoms worsened, so she took the prescription to the drugstore and bought the medication. Each pill cost $130. The pills, dispensed in allocations of eleven, were small and dark green. They might as well have been emeralds. Sylva used her credit card: $1430. After swiping, the clerk asked her if she wanted cash back. Sylva shook her head no. The pills were so tiny to cost so much. One hundred eleven people attended the wedding. The parking lot was icy. The sky a purple black. Beneath the starry sky, Sylva felt heaven at her back. Each time she looked down, the vertigo returned. Mother of the groom. No one noticed she had left the party. At the library four days later, Sylva returned the eleven books that were overdue: 5 mysteries, 2 philosophy books, and the other 4 were realistic fiction—whatever that means. She had finished all of them except the book on happiness, which made her weep. Sylva had choices to make: an MRI? Believe in UFOs? Call the DMV. The acronyms made her heart race. The disease is an acronym too, but she has
forgotten which letters. She decided against the MRI and took up crosswords, began to believe in UFOs. Her friend, Alice, phoned to say no matter what she will stand by Sylva with her decisions and her pain. Sylva hears love across the old wires that she imagines hanging from wooden T poles. Ancient form of communication, phones with land lines. The future is the next minute and the next minute and the next one. The moments line up the way people do for food or movie tickets or to pay their respects at a coffin. The future must be a color—but Sylva is not sure what that color is. Cranberry? Black? Sapphire? Or is it the darkest green, the color of the pills? Sylva looks down at her Timex. It is 11 a.m. She puts the wristwatch to her ear and listens to the comfort of the ticking. She lets the ticking lull her into sleep. If anyone had been sitting with her, they could have watched her eyes moving back and forth in REM sleep. Her eyes, skittering like mice across a kitchen floor. The wedding. Holiness surrounded her son and daughter-in-law in an aura of cool blue ice. The tears. Laughter. Sylva looked out the open door while the couple was showered with rice and saw 11 blackbirds, sitting on a wire. Pharmacology is an ancient study. Birch bark holds the wisdom to make aspirin. Indigo makes the best blue dye. Dried chamomile flowers, brewed for 4 minutes, help Sylva sleep when she steeps them into tea. Each green pill costs $130. The newspaper she is reading tells her that the most effective way to sell a product is to include a soundtrack with a child’s laugh on it. Her medicine is so unusual it is not advertised on TV.
A year has passed. Sylva is still living. She continues paying for the dark green pills, and she is not worse. This is a miracle, the doctor says from a safe distance behind his desk. Her first grandchild is born with 11 fingers and 10 toes. The extra finger is on the baby’s left hand, beside the pinkie, attached at a right angle. The doctor wants to remove it. The mother is recovering and has no opinion. Sylva’s son agrees with the doctor, but Sylva does not want them to remove the finger. To her, it looks like a very slender wing on a tiny angel. 2. Susan Smith married Aloyisius Farberstein when she was 24 years old. Part of her attraction to him, because she met him on Facebook, was the photo of him with his long slender nose and his improbable name. Back up for a second. Susan found Aloyisius quite by chance on a pop-up friend request. They had two friends in common. You know how that works. Two of the friends listed were people Susan knew in the most tangential way: Audrey Meiner tuned her grandmother’s piano, and after her grandmother passed and Susan inherited the piano and moved it to her small house on Clay Avenue, Audrey continued to tune the piano there. It wasn’t that she and Audrey were unfriendly, but all they had in common was the piano and an occasional brief conversation about her grandmother’s African violets. “They were abundant and beautiful. She was so gentle with them, wasn’t she?” Audrey would say. And Susan, who missed her grandmother, her African violets, and her silent wisdom, would nod. “Yes,” she would say, “she was kind to plants and animals. She kept fresh catnip for Tillie, she pruned her azaleas with care, and she never killed the pine beetles that patrolled her woodwork and window trim.”
Susan had brought Tillie, the orange tiger, to live with her; and she had included the African violets, covered carefully with tissue paper when she moved the piano to Clay Avenue, but neither Tillie nor the violets made it. Tillie stopped eating. She did not bother to go to her water bowl and use her little pink tongue to lick water from her bowl. She no longer sneaked the occasional lap from the African violet bowls. Instead, Tillie put herself in the bay window where the sun came regularly and watched the birds arrive at the feeder. She didn’t mew or pant. She just faded away. The African violets’ roots refused to drink their water, too, and so ultimately, what Susan had left from her grandmother was the piano and her memories, a dead cat and withered plants. The other friend that Susan had in common with Aloyisius was her former boss, Lester Burgundy, a one-dimensional well-dressed narcissist who didn’t like Susan any better than she liked him. But of course, in situations of power, the person who has it wins. Susan deduced quickly that this man, Aloyisius with the slender nose owned a piano and was likely to be a member in some organization, Rotary or on the board of a some organization with Lester. She remembered clicking the button to accept him as a friend. She remembered the first message from him on her Facebook page. He had typed, Have we met? I don’t think so. Would you like to over coffee on February 2 at 5:30, Starbuck’s at the corner of DuBois and Branton? Susan surprised herself, and she found out later, him, by saying yes. Susan grew up in Pennsylvania, and so February 2, which is a normal day, like any other, for many people was sacred in a corny way for her: Ground Hog Day. Bill Murray’s movie had made it a nationally known event, but prior to that, it was limited mostly to a small town in Pennsylvania. Susan had no idea
where Aloyisius was from, and she knew it was one of the first things she would have to ask him. She believed, and she thought she was right, of course, that where you came from was imprinted on you almost as if it were a genetic code. Traits came from the geography, desire and repugnance were modeled in the tedium of daily life. She entered the Starbuck’s and spotted him immediately. They got their coffees, sat at a table near the recycle and condiment area, and talked about Lester and pianos. Then Susan asked him where he was from: Binghamton. And then he corrected himself, Well, really the triple cities—Endicott. That could work, she thought. It wasn’t Pennsylvania, but it was close enough., just twenty miles north of the state line. I wonder if he has a nickname. Aloyisius is quite a mouthful. As soon as she thought it, she came up with one for him, not that she would use it at first, it was too personal and somewhat silly, but it was hopeful, and after her grandmother’s and Tillie’s deaths and the African violets’ refusal to take in water, wishes were what she had left, and here he was, with his long slender nose, his odd formal name, and the potential for Wishes as a nickname, uttered under her breath the first time she kissed him on his neck. 3. Zelda watched the television interview with Alex Grant and John M., the famous movie star. “John,” Alex began, “do you have any secrets, any ghost, any skeletons in the closet?” “What do you mean, ‘ghosts,’ Alex?”
“Ghosts, John. Chimeras, angels, demons—friends who have left the world as we know it and have ascended, been dissatisfied, and descended? Or perhaps, died, but never left this earthly plane?” John was having trouble reading Alex’s tone. He looked deeply into the lens of the camera. Lucky to be an actor, he thought. When all else fails, look deeply into the camera, that’s what his acting coach at Yale had advised. “Yes, I have ghosts—some I have chased for decades, but never caught.” Zelda felt an aching tingle along her jaw and then at the back of her head. She felt a twinge at the tip of her tailbone. She turned off the TV, feeling unsettled by John’s deep stare into the camera. It felt as if he were looking right into her, not a TV camera, and it had unsettled her, right before dinner, too. She could smell the eggplant parm that she had spent the afternoon preparing. She walked into the kitchen, turned on the oven light, and stared into the oven, watching the bubbling tomato sauce and the melting cheese. She turned off the oven light and walked to the picture window that faced west-south-west. Who are my ghosts? For that matter, who are my friends? The clouds outside her window took on shapes: an old boyfriend’s face; her long dead cat, Chippie; the dagger she had used to hack back her neighbor’s encroaching raspberry bushes. She had gone at the bushes with the same misdirected anger she had used to destroy the felt board at church when she had been put in the storage closet in Sunday School for being bad. She turned from the window and returned to the galley kitchen. She turned the oven off, but put the oven light back on. Then she filled the teakettle, spun
the knob on the stove to ignite the pilot light, and walked out on her deck to await its brittle whistle. Now the sky was dark, the clouds were thick enough to block the moon, and she wished she had put on a sweater. The dark night, the TV interview, and her imagination led her to see the faint outline of people’s faces in the leaves, to hear the breeze as if it were a conversation from the great beyond. Then she heard her father’s voice, as if her were standing beside her, even though he had been dead for more than thirty years. “There’s no such things as ghosts, Zelda.” And then he laughed. “Except for me.” She knew that if he were a ghost, he was not the only one, so if there was one ghost, there was more than one. He had become one years before he died— a fixture really. He sat in his chair at the end of each day, his light off--tapping his fingers on the side table. In anyone else, this gesture would have conveyed impatience, but in him, it revealed despair. The longer Zelda thought about it, the clearer it became to her that impatience and despair were cousins once removed. The screeching sound form the kettle startled her. She hurried to the kitchen, flipped on the overhead light, sprung the whistling lid open, and grabbed her sunflower mug. She felt impatience and despair, and somehow, that made her giddy. She seemed to be fleeing from her own life while she was making a cup of tea. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she yelled. She flung the words at the windowpane and through it, at the night. “It’s just hot water and a tea bag you’re after, you ninny!”
She reached up to the top shelf and brought down her herbal tea— dandelion to cleanse her raucous liver and her overused kidneys—or Chai tea to stir myself up even more? Two thoughts struck her: she wanted the stars to come out and the moon to shine; she wanted to fly to Australia and track exotic birds.She flung the box of dandelion tea into the recycle bin. She ripped open to Chai tea envelopes and brewed herself an extra strong batch. She poured the hot water over the two bags in her sunflower mug, set the stove top timer for 4 minutes, and practiced breathing to calm down. The timer went off, beeping annoyingly. She threw the bags into the compost tin and headed for the den. When she rounded the corner, she was startled by the room being filled with a could, hovering in front of the fireplace—it had a very standard cloud shape, oblong and dense, with scalloped edges. She reached into the air to try to grab some of it and was repelled by the dampness that she could not hold onto. The light switch--I must get to the light switch. She found it with ease, flipped it on, and the cloud evaporated as if it had been vacuumed up by a giant Hoover. Directly in front of the fireplace, there was a damp spot on the rug. The light went off, but she had turned it off, and there was no thunderstorm on any other reason for the electricity to have failed. Zelda stopped. Next she walked over to the wall switch and flipped it again. The wet spot had disappeared. Zelda’s hands were shaking. What’s happening here? She returned to the kitchen. It was filled with smoke. What had caught on fire? No, it is not smoke; she corrected herself. It was fog. There was a tapping, thrumming sound, like her father’s misconstrued impatience, his realized despair.
Taylor Han
A Mixtape for Ana Carrete Sound check. One two One two. Can you guys hear me ok? I made this for, or more likely because of Baby Babe. Endorsement of the form brought to you by random Tuesdays and breakdowns of the comical sort. Formatted incorrectly phonetically improvised and (stop fucking around) trying too hard to manufacture relevance based on alt-lit readings given by girls who are out of my league. I didn’t really want to come here and I didn’t ask you to lead me to this land of hostile think tanks and ink barbed arrows flying through forests of capillaries. I was too busy swerving to avoid reverb and urgently reading the good books minus The Good Book praying for spires to be built and funeral pyres spilt in the chambers of my heart. Arguments held in the/ with the/ by the mirror ended up being weird conversations with the old me. Please. I need this. Which is why I made this.
Track lists and closed fists I’m ready to find out what stopped the clock in the back of my head and what time it is. I just really need to know how to find due north in the context of poems. (I made this for, or more likely because of Baby Babe.) No. I made this for me, so please Press play.
Contributors Steve Luria Ablon Steve Luria Ablon has published four books of poems: “Tornado Weather,” (Mellen Press), 1993, “Flying Over Tasmania,” (Fithian Press), 1997, “Blue Damsels,” (Peter Randall Press), 2005, and “Night Call” (Plain View Press) 2011. His work has appeared in many magazines, including The Cafe Review, Main Street Rag, Off The Coast, Dos Passos Review and Ploughshares. Steve is an adult and child psychoanalyst and an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Andrew Bertaina Andrew Bertaina currently lives and works in Washington, DC where he received his MFA in creative writing from American University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in: The Threepenny Review, Hobart, Literary Orphans, Fiction Southeast,Eclectica, Prick of the Spindle, Big Lucks, Whiskey Paper, Manifest-Station, Journal of Microliterature and elsewhere. He is currently a reader and book reviewer for Fiction Southeast. Abby Caplin Abby Caplin’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Adanna, Burningwood, Forge, The Healing Muse, OxMag, The Permanente Journal, Poetica, The Scream Online, Tiger’s Eye, Tikkun, and Willow Review, and several anthologies. Her poem “Still Arguing with Old Synagogue” was a finalist for the
2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award. She is a physician and practices Mind-Body medicine in San Francisco. Her website is http://abbycaplin.com. Taylor Han Taylor Han is a literature and writing studies student at California State University San Marcos. He hopes to continue on to get his MFA later in life. He also hopes the whole writing thing works out, since he doesn’t have any backup plans. Lisa Harris Lisa Harris, MFA, Bard College, writes poetry and fiction. Her novels, “Allegheny Dream” and “Geechee Girls” (Ravenna Press, ’13 and ’14, respectively) have won awards from TAZ, The Author’s Zone and Bright Hill Press). Her fictions has appeared in The MacGuffin, The Coe Review, ginosko, and Phoebe, to name a few journals. Luke Otley Luke Otley is a roaming poem composer and small-time thinker from Cornwall, UK. Some of his poems have found snug homes in literary journals. Others remain lonely on toilet walls, in waiter’s notepads. He currently writes in Western Australia, and is working on collating his first collection. Dylan Taylor Dylan Taylor is a university drop-out who slings cheap coffee to cottagers and builds dry stone walls in Canada. When he is not working he is spending his wages on tickets to Virginia to see his Fiancé and Emerson the best duo on the
continent. He has work published in Blotterature, the Kentucky Review, The Lost Country and decomP.
Visit www.crackthespine.com to review our submission guidelines or to subscribe