COVER BY RUSS WOODS
Russ Woods is a librarian living in Chicago. He is poetry editor and web designer for Red Lightbulbs. His poems are published or forthcoming in Dark Sky, iO, Mudluscious, >kill author and LIES/ISLE. His first book, Wolf Doctors, is forthcoming from Artifice Books.
NAP 2.10 YEAR 2 ISSUE 10 FICTION: J. BRADLEY POETRY: DIANA SALIER CUSTODIAN: CHAD REDDEN NAP MAGAZINE & BOOKS INDIANAPOLIS, IN naplitmag.com
HERE WE ARE AGAIN.
THIS TOWN WHERE
E V E RYO N E WEARS
FANCY HATS! CL BLEDSOE JUSTIN BOND MATTHEW BURNSIDE JUSTIN CARTER LUCAS CELLER JEFF HIPSHER RYAN RIDGE STEPHEN ROSENSHEIN JASON GORDY WALKER BRANDI WELLS LEIA PENINA WILSON
CL BLEDSOE
FIRE
The Fire came while we slept. It danced in the yard, drunk and screaming, yelling lewd things at us, until Henry woke up and threw his shoe at it. The next morning, we couldn’t find his shoe, but there was a rude message burned into the grass. We smelled burning leather, tasted ashes on the wind. We heard slurred voices nearby but couldn’t pinpoint them until the screams came. All of the neighborhood children disappeared, but we figured they were on a field trip. Voices said suggestive things whenever we went outside. Houses and buildings were consumed in a seemingly random progression until we noticed all the bars and adult bookstores were gone and our neighbors with the best liquor cabinets. I couldn’t find my shoes until I saw smoke coming from my closet, but when I opened the door, there was nothing but burnt pumps. I heard a crackling voice offer to perform unmentionable acts on me. We formed committees. We wrote scathing letters and took turns spell-checking them. We still found time to go to the gym which was, strangely, unharmed. It was Henry who figured out we could track them best at night with heatvision goggles from the sporting goods store. A group of twenty of the bravest men set off armed with extinguishers. The last transmission we heard said they’d found a stash of pornography. We never saw them again.
We slept during the days, hung teetotaling signs on all our doors, and pretended we could make sense of the world. At night, we huddled on the concrete floors of our garages, no one speaking, while outside, we heard the whoomph of our neighbors houses, mixed with their screams, the lascivious voices with no shame. We tried going to the aquarium, but the guards almost shot us. We drove non-stop for a week towards the ocean until a wall of flames stopped us and asked if we wanted to go on a date. We headed south for another week, but the wall never ended. Then we drove back to the other coast, and found the same thing. We headed north until the oil in our car froze, but just ahead, we could see the wall, licking at the sky, asking to buy our used panties. We got out and stared. We could barely hear, over the wind, hundreds, thousands of voices. All of them offering sexual innuendo. We sat down and waited for the cold to take us.
OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE TRAMPOLINE I caught the trampoline tuner on her way out of the gated community. She’d stopped to bury the body of Innocence, some poor inner-city youth who’d slipped by the guards, looking for preservative-free food to huff. “I’m writing a song,” she said, “One suburban yard at a time.” “Someone could get hurt,” I said, leveling my .45 at her, firing, and then taking aim. She waited till I ran out of bullets and jumped on me. “You bit my trigger finger off!” I screamed as the blood spurted, ruining my best work pants. “Maybe I’ll make it my new trademark,” she said. “Not if my friends at the copyright office have anything to say about it.” That’s when I passed out from blood loss. *
*
*
I woke running alongside the manicured lawns, their fingers flapping in the breeze. She followed me to my father’s house,
which I never admitted was just inside the gate. I had the doorman slam the diamond-coated door in her face, liked the feel of it, so I had him open it and slam it again. The glass shattered. I immediately docked the doorman’s salary, but the resulting damage to property values woke my father, who appeared with his antique whip, stained red with the blood of long-dead slaves. He flicked it at the trampoline tuner’s throat and at my crotch as punishment for not giving him a grandchild to turn. You should’ve seen the hurt in her eyes as the trampoline tuner dug flecks of silver from the whip out of her moonpale neck and left. It was only later, as dad took me and my sister Tiffy out for burgers and milkshakes and a man stole my potato-rounds that I realized it wasn’t physical hurt in her eyes and she’d been writing that song for me.
SINCLAIR
The dinosaur is depressed. He’s been lying on my couch for hours, stinking like a freshly laid road. Every few seconds he asks me in this voice like decayed science nerds if I think he’s a good guy. “Of course,” I say. “You’re great.” “Even after the cat?” That makes me wince, each time. He crushed my cat Mr. Whiskers under his slimy tail. They say dinosaurs aren’t slimy, but he is. His tail is. Like old lunchmeat. “He was old,” I say. That just sets him off again. The dinosaur is my cousin’s husband. I met him one time at a cookout or something, and he followed me around half the day, laughing at everything I said, even though I wasn’t telling any jokes. “We should be buddies,” he said. “I don’t think that’s something you have to plan out,” I said. “It just happens.” He laughed, so I added. “We’re grownups, aren’t we? Grownups don’t have buddies.” He thought that was the height of humor. I got up from my seat to get a drink, and when I came back, my plate was gone.
He smiled, and there were bits of paper in his teeth. I just sat down and didn’t say a word. He showed up on my couch a couple weeks later. My cousin dumped him for a mammal. “Plenty of fish,” I say. That makes him hungry, and his saliva stains the carpet a dark green which doesn’t go with the décor one bit. “Got to walk it off,” I say. “That’s impossible,” he says, “when your legs fossilized and got burned in some math teacher’s Prius.” “But you have legs.” I point. “Yeah,” he grumbles, “but you get what I’m saying.” He inhales on his cigarettes and drops ashes all over my carpet. “Buddy,” he says, “you don’t know how it was. Fast cars. Women like you wouldn’t believe. Those were the days.” He’s talking about his days in the racing circuit, before he met my cousin. “You should go back,” I say. He laughs. “An old lizard like me?” He laughs again and flicks his tail at a lamp which shatters, spreading glass and debris on the floor. I don’t want to couch anymore, I’ve never been opportunity. He under ash.
kill him. I just want him to not be on my which I’m sure I’ll have to totally replace. a bad person, before; I’ve never had the tells me about his family, long since buried
“Do you miss them?” I ask as the image stirs something in my mind.
“No. They were bastards.” “Well, at least they’re gone,” I say but that sets him off crying again. I tell him I’m going to work, but really I go to my cousin’s house. I hear the moaning from down the street, the steady bovine whoo-haa. I’m not sure if she’s having sex or giving birth, but when I knock on the door, she answers, out of breath, her udders hanging free. “Take him back,” I say. “He smells.” “I know. Take him back.” Her eyes go red and she lowers her head. “I thought cows didn’t have horns,” I say and stand my ground. She starts crying and invites me in, and I discover that she’s alone; she was just exercising. We chat for what seems like hours on her couch. I tell her about the ash-covered parents, the racing days. “He never opened up to me,” she says. “He was all stonehearted and masculine.” “But isn’t that what you loved about him? Who wants some whiny guy always talking about his feelings?” She shakes her head. I stab her in the throat with a tranquilizer. It takes a long time to drag her out to my car, and I can’t fit all of her legs in my trunk. She starts to wake up so I dose her again, even though the guy at the feed store said that
might be dangerous. But what does he know about what my couch is going through? The dinosaur is sleeping on the couch, stinking of old glue when I get home. I push my cousin inside and wait for her to wake up. They’re awkward, at first. Whenever things get too heated, I shoot them both with tranquilizers (I bought six cases) and when they wake up, they’re so groggy they’ve forgotten what they were arguing about. After several hours, their memories are so shot from the side effects, that they can’t remember anything but the good times (every so often, I go in and remind them about the good times. I make most of them up, because, frankly, they were a very boring couple). Finally, they fall in love again. I buy them a one-way ticket to Madagascar. They leave. The cleaning crew is already waiting. The movers are right behind them with a new couch. Sometimes, my cousin and the dinosaur send me postcards, usually asking for money so they can come home. That’s never going to happen. They’re happy, in Madagascar. I’m happy. On my couch.
CL Bledsoe is the author of the young adult novel Sunlight; three poetry collections, _____(Want/Need), Anthem, and Leap Year; and a short story collection called Naming the Animals. His story, “Leaving the Garden,” was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South’s Million Writer’s Award. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 5 times. Bledsoe has written reviews for The Hollins Critic,The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, Prick of the Spindle, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. Bledsoe lives with his wife and daughter in Maryland.
He blogs at Murder Your Darlings, http://clbledsoe.blogspot.com
JUSTIN BOND
SOMETHING REMINDED ME OF WHAT I WANTED TO TELL YOU It was the trash collecting in the fence along the expressway looking almost like a roadside memorial to a terrible accident or a dead princess, which can sometimes be the same thing. But you are not a fence, though some days we are two cars turning in opposite directions at the same stop, and I fight the urge to jerk the wheel and accelerate into the smooth expanse of your gleaming side just to remind you I am capable of it.
Justin Bond’s work has appeared most recently in Kindling and StepAway Magazine. When he was born in Oklahoma in 1980, Jimmy Carter was about to get clobbered in the presidential election, but neither one of them appeared to have any idea at the time. Currently, Justin lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Get off his lawn.  
MATTHEW BURNSIDE
ESCAPOLOGY
*roll a d20 1-2
3-4
5-6
7-8
in your mouth the stubborn stir of birds, their battered wingbeat birthing dust. your clipped tongue in straightjacket embrace. his tall blue kiss in a dark room suckling wasps through cellophane straws / lose half a childhood sneeze not & the closet will cloak you. sneeze & the closet will spit you out like rotten teeth, like wet rat tails. your fleeting faith in cartoon logic: so long as you don’t look down the floor won’t fall out from under you / roll again in the land of broken shoe lace tin can hills the orphan collectors ascend to hunt, thirsty with cigarette eyes. haunt anything with residual color, suck pale breath to gray the secret world. soil your sheets & keep this fingernail tally on your stomach lining / lose the remaining half of a childhood careen your bunk bed into the clouds, sail safe & sound for now. sanctuary of a child’s game & imagination’s arrow / move forward
9-10 your mother in the nuthouse, her wrists raw from plastic cutlery. her growing shriek a bag of bolts slow-emptying into a blender. the kingdom of her once sharp lullaby overgrown with thorned poppies & tangleweed. how she uses a brick to slaughter all those moths regressed from butterflies in the night war. but for one split second her frail mind solidifies, snaps back into focus, her love pierces thru the infected walls: “none of this was your fault...none of this will ever be your fault” / level up 11-12 teenage runaway! better off on the streets than in the orphan factory (a) the subtle art of disappearing, fading forward, sliding out of the scene into fake Hollywood backdrops. (b) the not-so-subtle art of fucking fire with gasoline genitalia. (c) strict diet of addiction, alcohol or your mother’s pills. (d) minor sublimation to taunt the wounds, petty crime skateboarding & graffiti / choose one coping mechanism 13-14 your father’s funeral. a scab in your mind making mud of memory. too soon to pick off so remain stuck in the muck of adolescence / lose a turn 15-16 college. pyramids crumble & black clouds overhead. the sidewalks slash your bare feet. even though the dragon is dead his ghost still haunts the skies. any sunlight that touches you is scarring. sell your bed that still smells of his scales & sleep on the floor / move back
17-18 gaze in the mirror & gasp at the stranger with your stolen eyes - sunken like the years - & every inch ravaged by the atomic bombs of youth. tired of suffering the fallout, consider forfeiting / game over or continue? 19-20 all your life you’ve built up this fortress. all your life this fortress has never been strong enough. someday when you least expect it you come to find your hate has gagged on all its pretty shiny hopes of escaping reality, & what is left is what was there all along, crushed quietly underneath the thick shell of ruckus & rot, tucked beneath the glinting knives of memory longing to be sterilized: forgiveness for the obsolete beast. you look down at your daughter underfoot flapping her arms with the quickening hope of hummingbird wings & know she will be clean, she will be pure / with the game already won, drop the dice & look down to find a floor there to catch you
Matthew’s work appeared most recently or is forthcoming in kill author, PANK, Juked, elimae, Contrary, decomP, and Danse Macabre, among others. He is managing editor of Mixed Fruit, an online literary magazine (http://mixedfruitmagazine.com/). Beginning in the fall, he will be an MFA fiction candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
JUSTIN CARTER
2 poems from Trill (Reality Hands, 2012)
SURFSIDE BEACH
Last week’s beach party turned deadly but tonight we swim naked in the Gulf, try not to think about guns. I want to wrap you in seaweed, you say. That seems weird, I say. Waves crash like bullets. Salt & blood. Salt & lime, silver Patron waiting in Dave’s kitchen. Touch me like you want to touch me, like tomorrow is my Promethazine overdose.
THUNDER
I get lost in snowstorms, or I would if there were snowstorms. December in Texas. The coffeeshop plays that really sad Tim McGraw song for the third straight day. Things like to resist change. December in Texas is lukewarm coffee. Is Codeine Fiend on repeat. Is rain you never notice until it stops. The driveway is wet & you say did it rain. You realize your blood has stopped pumping. You realize clouds are made of vapor. You realize the cover for the Geto Boys’ We Can’t Be Stopped is really Bushwick Bill with a bullet hole in his eye. Life is fucking scary. I want to address this now. I want to undress this now. I want you to know something: my heart is like James Harden’s beard, wild in the winter.
Justin Carter is an MFA Candidate at Bowling Green State University, & the author of one chapbook, TRILL (Reality Hands, 2012). His work appears/is forthcoming at decomP, The Good Men Project, Revolution House, & other places, which can be found at his never-used blog: http://thewateriscontaminated.tumblr.com.
LUCAS CELLER
YOU CHANGED YOUR FACEBOOK STATUS AGAIN you changed your facebook status again and one more time (you wished this was eternality) at a recital screaming everyone else wanted to sound pretty but coughed uncomfortably - uncomfortably, you can sleep 1. outside a window besides your lover’s home 2. under a firing rocket in a heat resistant suit 3. on your mother missing you but instead threw a hammer at your dog to feel how power felt, guilty only later - you are turning into stone and like it.
PUDDING HELL
boredom is like moving through an enormous pool of your most hated pudding flavor. you cant even eat your way out - it makes you nauseous. it’s like hell but worst than hell. real hell steals your hell’s ideas.
and there is no escape. the pool is infinitely deep, infinitely long and the person that was in charge of materializing an exit got lazy and instead went to get a root canal the day he was supposed to work -
it’s that boring. you remember a greek god that was condemned to pushing a boulder up a mountain for eternality. you feel that if the greek gods had invented pudding, they would have undoubtedly utilized it.
your life is horrible - it’s like a loud droning that just doesn’t stop. it has no off button. you remember wishing for greater things - you once imagined a giant snow cone falling towards you with an incredible trajectory you wonder how you managed to find yourself in this enormous pool of pudding - if you have taken a wrong turn somewhere, or have been given wrong directions. if you lend yourself in, you’re unsure. currently, you are wiggling your limps, starving, almost to the point of eating the now most likely spoiled pudding. you hope for that shooting star you once saw in a movie but are too afraid to open your eyes. however, one day you will escape - you will find a way out of that villainous pudding. you will return home - you will drink one beer, watch several reruns. you will sleep till noon, wake up - make coffee.
you may consider going to the park, going to the movies, or calling an old friend. you will consider a lot of things. but instead you go to the grocery store - you will buy a whole cart’s worth of pudding. you will go home. your old friend will call you. he wants to make plans. you tell him you’re busy, hang up and then proceed to eat your seeming endless supply of pudding with a sedated pace of a sloth, sitting in your recliner, watching reruns, on occasion masturbating with acute apathy. you have become lost, my poor friend. you will realize how much you miss the days trapped inside that pudding pool.
I Wish I Were A Dead Body
I wish I were a dead body - I imagine a foamy substance dipping off my face. Somewhere around me will be a misleading murder weapon. Surrounding me, 14 neat stacks of cards and 71 dollars in pennies. The cops on the scene will be thoroughly confused - Someone will be responsible for counting all the pennies. Another will ‘hooray’ finding the misleading murder weapon. The ‘murder’ weapon is a bat with exactly 7 nails hammered through the wood. The forensics team will find significance in all the numbers. I don’t blame them, it seems everyone finds significance in numbers nowadays Written on the bat is the forged signature of Babe Ruth I imagine David Lynch getting involved somehow, like he will perform my autopsy, surrounded by a pack of wild Alaskan Huskies. Some high-ranking official will fire David Lynch and the man responsible for getting Lynch involved in the case. Everyone will lament the glory days of police work. It will be a sad day indeed. When my case is reopened 20 years later, It will be discovered that I was actually David Lynch. I will break headlines. I will be famous for ~1 month.
Lucas Celler once wore an oversized trench coat. He had rings on every finger. Several cell phones. Often, famous dictators appear in his dreams. Last night, Hitler tried to melt him with one thousand intricately placed mirrors.
JEFF HIPSHER
THE END OF RETAIL
After middle school when our muscles finally caught up to our bones We grabbed our brother, by the arm in a grocery store, in Virginia somewhere. And we said something about leaving town. He’d take the house. The cul de sac. And he’d look after them. He’d fix the fence. And mow over the flowers. And he’d hold it for us. That spot. Should we ever come back. Should the city be too loud or expensive. We interrupted everything. Sank ourselves deep into a calm town of sidewalks. We tell him this then let ourselves out through the clear sliding doors to stand in the cart return looking up into the gibbous phase of the Kroger sign. Its loud white rocks. Its whole cold ocean.
Jeff Hipsher is the founding member of the artist collective The Gold County Paper Mill. His work has previously appeared in or is forthcoming from Forklift Ohio, iO Poetry, Dark Sky, Caketrain, elimae, The Alice Blue Review and others. In 2010 he recieved an honorable mention in Sarabande’s Flo Gault Poetry Prize. in 2011 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the head editor ofCatch Up ( www.catch-up.us ), a journal of comics and literature.
RYAN RIDGE
from 22nd Century Man
INTEGRITY
INTEGRITY IS LIES. I know because I’ve seen a brain before up close. If you told me that you had a wounded blue jay that was content to convalesce under your care in a nice cage then I would say you are just as insane as I am. My black eyes are blue. I don’t drink alcohol and only occasionally drink blood. Leon Trotsky is the capital of Mexico. I’m made of money. But I’m not a machine. I’ve never seen a woman of a certain age change the pants of a woman twice a certain age. When hovercrafts land on the beach you know you’re fucked. Everything’s interrelated. I haven’t purchased a petroleumbased spot remover for a long time now. I shot my camera with a gun. I am so random. I am the mistress of Peter Jones. Speaking of evil, governments are necessary but often out of touch with the realities of the average taxpayers. I don’t have a pet. I’m fed by water and light. It bothers me that I’m boring. I don’t know anything about mirrors or snakes. God is ominous. My grandmother was from Antarctica. She was a very cold person. Human beings are scavengers, feeding off of the left behind scraps, which is why humans fear rats: rats are competition. I don’t have any integrity because I’m bad with math. I’m bad at math because I don’t have a boyfriend. Yes, it’s true, I’ve seen it all. Cold brains. A funeral parlor on television. I don’t think my love has a website. The results of my latest structural analysis say I am solid as vodka on the rocks. Drink and be drunken, and spew, and fall, and rise no more, because of the sword which I will send. Like Elvis some things never die. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a cat, spending my days sleeping. If I could get an
animal small enough to transport in my coat pocket I would get one. I wish I was by the ocean with the wind in my hair. I wish someone loved me and wanted to be with me. My girlfriend always thinks something illicit is going on. If I had a dog I would name it Buck. I find hope in the Salvation Army. I am fascinated by the changing color of leaves in the fall. Once, a long, long time ago I was catheterized. Like Helen Keller I’m a miracle worker. There are many things I could do without. Facts. High tide. Language. Change. I am a shrew. I don’t partake of sugar. Now I’m just being facile. I correlate everything I experience with previous information. I’m known for my intense dislike of interviews and PR. The Last Supper was my first communion. The best advice I ever received: saw the chair in two, then put the halves together to make a whole. An island is nowhere without a captain or a boat. I am not above surveillance. I am sure I am sure. We grow up and everything becomes so beautiful and devastating. My point is a point of departure. Stars moving one direction are blue stars and stars moving the other direction are red. The number before one is how I feel. I have doubts. I chew tobacco. Everything is mass produced. I look at the American flag and feel more American. I stand here in awe. I come correct.
[Note: This piece was generated by posing the questions from Padgett Powell’s Interrogative Mood to a trio of internet chatbots: Cleverbot, Brother Jerome, and Sensation Bot respectively.]
Ryan Ridge writes and teaches in Southern California. His story collection, Hunters & Gamblers, was published by Dark Sky Books in 2011. In 2013, Mud Luscious will publish his novel(la) American Homes. His most recent book (a limited edition chapbook) Hey, It’s America is out now from Rust Belt Bindery.
STEPHEN ROSENSHEIN
SUNSETS
It’s time to get real about sunsets. I find each one is a bit less impressive. Rise or fall, it’s the same star the entire time. The range and temperature of colors is due to atmospheric variations and man-made pollutants. Yet no one writes poems for the ozone, for the industrialists and their belching smokestacks. The sunset is framed by the angle and refraction of light off of objects. Yet the toothy glow provided by the mountains, the golden mirror projected by the ocean, the darkened stillness afforded by forests, are all robbed of credit on a daily basis. Sentiment comes from hormonal secretions, a series of chemical reactions as old as single-celled organisms. Still we plant our praise squarely on the crest of the dissipating horizon. Furthermore, without the sunrise dragging itself out of bed and over midday, the sunset is impossible. However, we prefer to remain safely asleep, the sunset being more convenient. We seem satisfied to take the sunrise for granted and praise the sanctity of the sunset. I say it’s time to get real about sunsets.
Stephen is originally from Seattle and a recent graduate of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at San Francisco State University. He was a former editor of Fourteen Hills Literary Magazine and Small Desk Press. His translations and poems have appeared or are due to appear in The International Review, Sazmidat Literary Magazine, Emerge Literary Magazine and Cold Noon.
JASON GORDY WALKER
80
The girl smashes a mini-fan against her wall, waking the old man who lives in the room below her. She has to deal with first-world problems such as meatloaf for dinner, boys who are her own age, and a lack of cellular service, but she isn’t as phased as she wants you to think, so after the mini-fan is completely destroyed, she will lie on her bed and draw pictures of you in gangsta form, your baldness hidden by a flat-bill cap that is embroidered with an A for Arnold, your first name, and your pants will sag past the wrinkles in your butt, the looseness of your biceps hidden by sleeves that reach past your elbows, before she relaxes into a shallow sleep that is filled with visions of life in 1945 or whenever the hell you were her age, and she will awake with the sudden realization that she has been a hypocrite this entire time, that she actually is interested in boys her own age—despite the fact that she finds a large number of years appealing in a man—and you wouldn’t know what to do if you knew that she had been thinking of you as an attractive, mature pimp for several weeks now, but, if you were somehow able to have read her mind before she had this self-revelation, you would have gone for her without paying any attention to age or detail because you are such an isolated, wish-thingswere-still-like-the-old-days type of burnt chicken, that you’d have no choice but to kill off the girl’s imitation innocence and change her life for better or for worse, but this will never happen, you have no insight, and even if you did you would never convince the girl’s mother, who has spent the last four years raising her alone, that you are the man her daughter needs, that your oldness is nothing but a number, an even one that is divisible by ten.
Jason Gordy Walker is an undergraduate student in creative writing at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. His work has appeared in The Legendary and Sleet Magazine.
BRANDI WELLS
HANDS INSPECTOR
The breasts grow onto the palms of my hands It is difficult to touch things. Always, these mounds of flesh in my hands. It is a numb feeling. Like wearing many layers of gloves and knowing that underneath the layers of gloves my hands are very, very dirty and dry. Knowing that moisture is not soon coming. Knowing pores will continue their drying process, their shrinking process, until they are no longer capable of absorbing any sort of liquid. No longer capable of expelling sweat and waste. This is a nervous feeling: an inhibition. Whenever I leave the house I wear gloves so no one will see But I worry there will be instances that will require the removal of these gloves. Someone will need to inspect my hands. It will be a hands inspector. They will be certified and will have the necessary tools to inspect hands. Remove your gloves, they will tell me and then they will hold my wrists so I cannot withdraw my hands and everyone will look at my hands. Oh my god, everyone will say and they will reject me. We all reject you, they will say.
I PUT THE LEGS INTO A FOOD DEHYDRATOR I cover them with barbeque sauce because barbeque sauce is an important part of my culture, a part of my heritage. I grew up in the south and here everything is barbeque. Everything is pork. People wear shirts with smiling pigs plastered across the front. People zest pigs to create ham dust. There is nothing more volatile than a pig that’s just been zested. They hide in corners and squeal if someone goes near them. They could bite entire hands off and no one could really be angry, because, FUCK, you just zested the poor thing, you bastard. Everyone I know has a secret barbeque recipe or they know which restaurant serves the best barbeque in town. Hobos carry bottles of barbeque sauce in their underwear and they will pull the bottle out and hold you down and force you to eat the sauce. And you will think it is goddamn delicious or you will say that or they will do other things. But the legs shrivel up inside the food dehydrator and the barbeque sauce dries too much to flavor the meat.
Brandi Wells is Managing Editor of The Black Warrior Review and Web Editor at Hobart. She is the author of Please Don’t Be Upset (Tiny Hardcore Press) and Poisonhorse (Nephew, An imprint of Mudluscious Press). Her fiction can be found in Salamander, Mid-American Review, 14 Hills and many other journals.
LEIA PENINA WILSON
GRETEL DISROBES OR HOW GRETEL LEARNS TO BE A BETTER SAMURAI 1. gretel gets a sword. gretel’s sword is a katana. if you didn’t know a katana is the best sword. gretel wanted a claymore truth be told but she was barely strong enough to lift it let alone wield it. though the katana was a satisfactory enough weapon indeed. it was clean and neat. gretel appreciated neatness. 2. gretel’s sword feeds on people. gretel’s sword usually eats blood well because it’s a sword. what else are swords supposed to eat? her sword was usual in that respect. she called her sword “hija” because everything needed a name and she thought it was cute. gretel thought about names. about her name and why she was called “gretel.” she wondered what power it had. 3. gretel pulls her hair back. fastens it with a flower pin. only wears a kimono. there’s nothing under gretel’s kimono.
4. gretel removed her brain to examine it. without her brain gretel had a difficult time thinking. she gave it to hansel hoping he’d have some thoughts on its shape—its color why there were so many little wrinkles and why it was so smelly. hansel told gretel how smelly it was. gretel angered. gretel unsheathed her sword. gretel swiped. 5. gretel attacked a village today. the village was helpless. the people fell. gretel didn’t kill the women or the children because she was sexist. gretel thought there were more appropriate things to do with women and men than kill them. 6. gretel is covered in something red. gretel is probably covered in blood. some men in uniforms pop out of the bushes. gretel is red. gretel is surprised. the men grunt-laugh then grunt-laughgrunt. they say: did you get away from your squad? the men think bad things about gretel. they think bad things with gretel without her permission. this makes gretel angry. she stares/glares at them. they move closer.
the men move closer to gretel. gretel isn’t sure she likes this distance between them but still they move closer not understanding the silence. lightening fast—gretel throws her vagina at them. gretel’s vagina cuts into their flesh. now they’re fleshy because of gretel’s vagina. her vagina is good. her vagina is a ninja-star—a shuriken. her vagina digs into his left leg his right hand just above his kneecap. the men hurt. are hurting—hurted. arrgg! the men stagger. gretel walks over to them—no longer threatened if she ever was—annoyed and interested in their sounds. she kicks in the first man’s face. his face crushes. his face squints. gretel squints. there’s red in her face—splash back. she smirks. the man collapses in two into his own body into the pain. he’s doubled over. gretel smirks teeth. she burys her foot into his face and rubs. feel good? gretel spits out. she rubs some more. gretel unsheathes her katana. gretel disrobes.
Leia Penina Wilson is not very cute but she’s super smart. What she lacks in hotness she makes up in word slithery. She also likes to drink. Leia is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama and an assistant editor for the Black Warrior Review. Because of the combination of those two things she drinks an awful lot.