COVER: STRING GRID by ALEX EBSTEIN
Alex Ebstein is a baltimore based artist, curator and writer. Her work was recently exhibited at LVL 3 and Manifest Exhibitions, both in Chicago, Il. Since March of 2009, Alex has co-owned and directed Nudashank, a contemporary art gallery in downtown Baltimore with partner Seth Adelsberger. http://alexebstein.com http://nudashank.com
NAP 2.8 YEAR 2 ISSUE 8 FICTION: J. BRADLEY POETRY: DIANA SALIER CUSTODIAN: CHAD REDDEN NAP MAGAZINE & BOOKS INDIANAPOLIS, IN naplitmag.com
WE KNOW THE NIGHT WE KNOW THE NIGHT WELL
WE CARRY IT INSIDE WE CLOSE OUR EYES AND LOOK UPON IT
WE
CALL CHILD
IT
RYAN BENDER-MURPHY JAMES CLAFFEY LEESA CROSS-SMITH PHOEBE GLICK ROBERT DUNCAN GRAY JOEL KOPPLIN MATTHEW MAHANEY MATTHEW SHERLING BRANDON SHULER HEDY ZIMRA
RYAN BENDER-MURPHY
PLEASE GRAB MY CHEST, EVERYONE My stalled introductions at the donut shop do not mark the final days in the history of humankind. Somebody opens their jacket and a nation-state flutters out. Somebody texts their parents on a cell phone and money gathers into the shape of a blood monitor. I cannot glaze the donuts this morning because a raccoon hasn’t been chewing on my head and my manager won’t slap the back of my heart. Everyone here is fat, and I love them all. Everyone’s ankles hurt—they tell me so in the comment box. Every time someone opens their mouth, I insert a donut and they chew through a token of feelings— through what it means to be a mammal standing in the middle of a shopping center. I’d like to think I partially enter their digestive system. The instruction manuals that I read tell me I should create passion in the workplace by providing everyone with a compound sentence or thought. I have given away so many great things trying to do this. One morning I yelled with icing in my fists and a chimney flew out of my belly button.
A RED OCEAN, UPSIDE-DOWN, APPEARS IN THE SKY I take my jet ski out of my school locker and tell my physics teacher, Up yours. I’ve never been about the numbers, and so I go off, skipping the day’s lunch of square pizza, forgetting I have an appointment to buy a vacuum with my girlfriend. What a life, I say, making the hand motion that means “I am finished with it all, finished with everything, muthafuckers,” and I swing my jet ski into the sky, onto the red ocean that slipped over the sky like silk panties. It does not matter the reason for the ocean’s arrival. Or why gravity does not wrangle me back to staircases and chess club meetings. Only that I can feel the waves, rolling upside-down, against my legs. Only that I can feel wished-on pennies stick to my feet as I watch the world, blood flowing to my head. The weather in my hometown must be incredibly uncomfortable:
Skyscrapers look like icicles spiking out of a giant praying mantis’ heart. Where my house stands freezing there is a road that nobody can see because claws are dangling from clotheslines. A face scoots across the cul-de-sac like it has a reason to kill someone. Within hours, everyone is rounding up the local statues. Everything is screaming.
Ryan Bender-Murphy lives in Austin, TX. His work can also be found (or is forthcoming) in Anti-, Dark Sky Magazine, elimae, Phantom Limb, and elsewhere.
JAMES CLAFFEY
ON THE MITCH There’s a book buried at the bottom of Mam and the Old Man’s chest of drawers: Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask. No pictures—at least not nudie ones—only line drawings; more the pity. The bit about chastity belts confuses me something awful. I’m on the mitch from school and told Mam I have a sore throat. Scraping the back of the throat with my toothbrush convinced her. She’s up the village doing the messages, and getting a few bottles of Smithwicks’ Ale for the Old Man’s return from the oil rigs next week, and is going to stop at grumpy old Mrs. Meagher’s across the road for tea and biscuits. I choose a pair of stockings from Mam’s drawer; disappear into the toilet with the “sex” book. The Old Man’s bottle of Old Spice aftershave peers at me from the shelf where the red, yellow, orange ducks perch. I flick the pages and loop the pantyhose over my mickey. It looks like some narrow-necked bank robber. I channel my thoughts into the image of Lorraine Carty’s naked body under me, just like the drawing in the book: Missionary Position. After ten minutes of blazing away at myself on the cold concrete floor there’s a small puddle on the ground. When I remove the pantyhose my mickey is a bluish color and I wonder if I’ve broken it.
This is when I see the small black hairs on the wrinkled skin and decide to grab Mam’s razor and shave them off. I grab the lavender-colored ladies’ razor from the cabinet and remove the bits of hair down there. The sound of the key in the latch makes me jump and I leg it back to the bedroom and stuff the stained stockings in the back of her drawer, making sure to scatter the clothes in the drawer over them. She comes into the bedroom and sits on the edge of my bed. “Do you have a temperature still?” she asks, putting her hand on my forehead. “Oh, you do feel a little clammy. I’ll bring you a nice cup of tea and a marshmallow biscuit. Not like those doughy ones Mrs. Meagher just pawned off on me, God forgive her. It was a marathon session listening to her go on about her poor unfortunate son up there in Mountjoy Jail. Do you remember the trial last year?” “No, Mam.” I snuggle down in the bed and close my eyes. Mam disappears to the kitchen and I take a look at my mickey under the bedclothes. It looks like one of those salamanders in the zoo, all wrinkled and soft. Under the bedcovers I say an Our Father that she won’t discover the ringed evidence of my sin. “..and Deliver us from all Evil. Amen.”
James slipped out of Ireland one night when the moon turned a lonely ball shade of blue. His compass points toward the future; his glass’s bottom points toward the sky; and his bluebird eyes are two wars poignant, flitting for an avocado branch.
LEESA CROSS-SMITH
BACK WHEN EXILE IN GUYVILLE WAS THE ONLY ALBUM I LISTENED TO
And it wasn’t like we were friends-friends, but when he came to the back door I asked him the secret password. He said YOU WILL BURST INTO FLAMES UPON REENTERING THE EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE. His voice, a small fire. And the thing is, there was no secret password. He’d been with a lot of girls – probably in vans and on cold basement floors. In drooping green tents slick with summer rain. He told me I tasted like black coffee and kiwi. I wanted to wear his coat. Late-autumn-leaf-brown, corduroy, vintage or maybe not, reminding me of Neil Young and pickup trucks. He always had candy in his pockets; little caramels wrapped in crinkly gold paper or minty gum that tasted like bright lights, blinking. I called him. His mom had a really pretty Spanish accent that made me want to grow my hair out and run away, searching for heat. He got on the line and said hey I was hoping you would call. I said you were and he said of course. Told me he had a girlfriend but he didn’t care and I said I didn’t care either. Why would I? I smoked Camel Lights. Drove barefoot. Listened to Liz Phair. And before I heard her on the phone, I didn’t even know his mom was Spanish. And I mean, I had no clue he was hoping I’d call.
Leesa Cross-Smith lives and writes in Kentucky. Her work has appeared in places like Word Riot, DOGZPLOT,The Rumpus, and Carve Magazine, among others. She’s co-founder/editor of a literary magazine called WhiskeyPaper. Find her at LeesaCrossSmith.com.
PHOEBE GLICK
ROSE BUSH Excuse me, don’t make fun of my dog. You don’t even know my dog’s name. In my dog’s former life, she was a wedding planner. The bride wore a Sari. The other bride had a mathrock band. My dog and I talked about our future life together. In our former life, my dog lived a lie. She couldn’t walk normally. She couldn’t wait in the hospital. I was feeling ill when I woke up in the rose bush. My dog was naked and panicked. She didn’t mean to yell. In our future life, my dog and I will share a mobile home. Travel around and see new land formations. Broad humps and the way we used to be.
FOODSTUFFS I am the queen of scientific propositions. I break a tooth and spill sap on a habit. For seventeen years there were no new ideas in chemistry. Higher education taught you how to mess up. A drop of iodine was a giant lavender nosebleed. Moving the pen around between swirls of color. Once the police were called when I couldn’t get my head out of the truck bed. Old anxieties juiced their way through my math notebooks. Once there was a monster truck cannonballing down a knotty trail. All those bros from your highschool are drinking cans of Bud. Are swatting mosquitoes in the country. Their girlfriends consider peeing.
Phoebe Glick tweets about the Mexican food she eats. For a section of her life she thought her legs were bicycle wheels. Phoebe scoops ice cream and writes in New York City.
ROBERT DUNCAN GRAY
BEST PART OF THE WHOLE NIGHT Meet me at the taco truck at midnight. They will still be open—the light will look like a chandelier in the fog. A beautiful person will take your order and repeat it back to you in broken English before translating it for the cook. We will wait together in the cold and this will be the best part of the whole night. The anticipation and the sway and the smell of warm tortillas.
TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORT (AGAIN) after Nicanor Parra
To make a long story short, I failed again. The eleventh fingernail and morning lavender with some foreign leaf gradually steeped. The water was too hot. I licked my thumb at the wrong cloud. It was a damn shame. There is elbow skin stored in my cheek and a composure of soup, but still that doesn’t mean there is not a bird curled in a burning bush with your name on it. I think about you every time a dead man blinks. I think poetry might be an active ingredient in second hand cigarette smoke.
I suckered the blind kid again. We pretended to eat vegetables. We ate pills. The Queen of muscle relaxants is at the front door. She will scoop you up. She will dangle you. She will blow kisses toward your dead mother. There are better things we could be doing right now. Roseanne is on again.
SUPERMARKET GIRL
I want to be friends with the supermarket girl with the great haircut.
Robert Duncan Gray is a lover of crayons. He is an editor for Housefire Publishing and stays busy. He makes some music and takes photos and makes paintings and sculptures and little films and eats food. Get down at www.sillyrobchildish.com
JOEL KOPPLIN
ON WHY PEOPLE SHOULDN’T REUNITE OR REMINISCE
I knew you twelve years ago. I knew you five years ago. I knew you then and I don’t know you now. Now you are strange. Hang streamers, drape long fold-out tables in cheap cloth, set out cheap place cards and overturned cups for coffee or lemonade. Make a stage. Set up a podium for some embarrassing emcee. Remind us all that the exits are here and here, that the restrooms are over in that far corner. Make like it’s amazing so much time has come to pass. Make like it feels as though only yesterday, just last week. Make broad but gentle jokes about bald spots. I knew you years ago. Years ago we made an effort to know each other front and back. It was going to be a long engagement, a lifelong thing. Back then you burned an image, carved a place for yourself inside my brain, crawled in to take a nap. And you stayed there. Even after the rest of you vanished. Knowing isn’t so easy to undo. A question was posed to me in a college class I took—what do we do with enlightenment? In other words, what now? Where to? The exits are here and here. In the bathroom I wash my hands and run them through my hair, what’s left, and I turn to leave just in time to see what may be the back of the jacket of your friend, your old roommate from way back. The one I didn’t like very much. When it occurs to me, this recognition, I stand very still,
as though I might blend in. I think if she sees me, all will be vindicated, all of the nasty and disparaging things decided about my going nowhere, about my always having been nobody. All of this true in one moment, one small sighting. So I duck out behind some racks, some shelves, remove my apron, my magnetic name badge. I punch the card and exit through the back, not even bothering to close the door behind me, sorry for nothing. In the streets, men walk with wives, with children—whole families intact, unique and wholly the same as all the others. Mothers strap children into car-seats while talking to imagined company on smart-phones. “Yeah, I know. Can you believe it? It’s not even like we told her that directly, she just assumes.” Impatient vans weave through rows of open spaces, snaking from spot to spot to find the mainline leading out. You’ve been gone a long time.
Joel Kopplin’s stuff has been in places like Metazen, HOUSEFIRE, and Red Lightbulbs. His novella Spaces is now available from Outpost19.
MATTHEW MAHANEY
SECRET OCEAN I’ve found an ocean no one else knows about. A secret ocean. I’ve started swimming in it every day, cataloguing the creatures I see. Some of them are covered in light. Some cannot possibly have bones they look so soft. In others, their bones are more visible than their skin, as if they were saved and lovingly shaped and tended to for hundreds of years, until the day they were placed beneath the scales in perfect patterns. They glide rather than swim, propel themselves forward while all else scuttles aimlessly. They are nothing like us with our slow, awkward paces, our unhappy bodies we struggle to guide safely through the gaps of this world.
TOO BUSY NOTICING It started with apples not tasting right. Fuji, Gala, Honeycrisp. Oysters, artichokes, pine. The doctors all agreed. Your taste buds are just fine, they said, smiling and patting my shoulder. Nothing to worry about. They said stress. They said temporary. There are other fruits, they said. Try some strawberries. Some pears. When I started hearing dog barks as car horns I kept it to myself. Now my bones don’t fit in my body. Lying in bed I hear my ribs stretch and straighten, feel my kneecaps begin to uncoil. After I shower, the space between my fingers has grown a little more, my knuckles inflated and blue. You say you don’t hear anything, don’t feel any difference when I take your hand in mine, but I know this is only because you’re too busy staring at your own hands. Too busy noticing how gray your fingernails have gone.
INVENTORY In my neighborhood there are four churches, two hospitals, and a library. There are also three schools, though two of these are clearly not in use. Their walls have dulled and cracked, and their lawns are overgrown with weeds. I never see any children except during my morning walks through the cemetery, where as many as two dozen are often sitting silently in small circles around the largest headstones. After several minutes, one child from each circle stands and walks away, across the fields and down the muddy street. It’s a game of sorts, though one whose rules I’ve abandoned hope of discerning.
Matthew Mahaney was born in one place, grew up in another, and has since lived in several more. He currently lives in Tuscaloosa, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, NANO Fiction, PANK, and Redivider, among others.
MATTHEW SHERLING
AMERICAN HIGHWAY I brainstorm how the moon could fit in my chest, how many listens of Björk’s “Human Behavior” it’ll take before I turn into ethereal dust. Lately, the quantum idea that anything observed alters in the presence of observer makes me want to call my mother, to run in an enormous field until I reach water, plant a white crabapple and pick off each flower to watch them all grow back.
DESERT two men paint two rocks the color of tomatoes and eat them in a field of sparrows. there is something gray on the ground. the men start dancing and from a distance look like two trees whipped by the wind.  
Matthew Sherling lives in San Francisco, where he likes to create things. He runs an interview blog called Cutty Spot and has just released the first issue of his online lit magazine, Gesture. You can find his work in The Columbia Review, Fanzine, BIRP!, Metonym, Eclectic, and soon in The Believer.
BRANDON SHULER
STILL LIFE TRAGEDY IN SEVEN STUDIES A PROTO-CUBIST She traces Matisse in finger along his spine. “I feel,” she says, “blue.” Bands of dust floating in the room’s evening caramelized sunlight bend and break with her breath. Her pink nipples arc with her sighs. Her pulse patters in a carotid and it’s a half-beat off from his own. “Picasso is,” he says, “for lovers.” AN OEDIPAL LONGING “I double as a sycophant,” she says, as she pours his fourth single-malt. She’s a study in contradictions, at least as he could tell. But he’d been wrong before. Rivulets of fermented sugar are ganging up on him. He breathes deeply and the calm of a meditating, practicing alcoholic overtakes him. The warm tug of intoxication softens her features as a chill February gust blows open the drapes and blinding nimbi of light crown her in a coronal halo. The drapes flutter home and his pupils dilate. The photo-negative void left by the brilliant nova fills from the edges inward. The smell of sex and Pine-O-Pine lingers under a blue haze of smoke and for a moment he thinks of Mother.
AN INTERRUPTION “Sex is the pastiche our lone existences share when one ends and another begins to carry on where we leave off,” she said, as she shudders the last spine-tingle of orgasm from her cervix. Black eyeliner–the ends pointing heavenward in a Cleopatra flourish– melts in lacrimal emissions. Cracked fan blades chase one after the other. They are propelled by blowing wind sneaking in as a lost family cat will returning through an an open window. The blades race in elongated, irregular shadows along the wall. He counts the fourth blade—the one with the chip—each time it passes a dangling extension cord. “Excuse me,” he says. THE ILLITERATE BIBLIOPHILE “I don’t like Jane Austen,” she says. She’s bound in leather, red on black. He skims the poorly written chapbook of her soul with varying levels of disinterest and disgust. She, stuck between Austen and Zola, is taken down on Saturdays to have the dust blown from her cover, while he fingers her pages. This story he holds–he knows every twist and devise. He flips to the greasy and creased pages of his favorite section ignoring the necessity of the story within. “I don’t like being told what to do,” she says. A DENDROLOGIST “It’s called an epiphyte,” she says squinting into a Carolinablue sky. Gray Spanish moss, wind tugging at its edges, hangs in tendrils from an ancient oak. The tree’s limbs are knotted and arthritic from decades standing watch over the Atlantic beyond. Mimosa -filled, champagne-stemmed glasses tinkle over white cloths. Her fingertips and his are close, but a small river of white separates the ends. His left index finger taps an erratic rhythm to the steady backbeat of shoed hooves pulling carriages filled with tourists through a market
district. He tilts his third mimosa back and asks, “Do you mind getting the check.” HOMAGE TO A POET “In a minute there is time” she says, clutching his hand as they walk along the boardwalk. Frisbees thrown into the wind return to young men as old men toss white flecks of bread to calling gulls. A black and white sea folds back as it deposits her power and life on the edge of the continent. His eyes reflect the green of the Atlantic–cold and austere. The Gulf Stream cuts through the corduroy-surfaced Atlantic with warmth and certainty, unlike her. An east wind blows with it the smells of tropical places as the current hits her with its salty oblivion. “I have to go,” he says. THE CRYPTOLOGIST “I don’t want to fight,” she says one chardonnay afternoon. “I don’t have the energy.” The New York Times crossword, the one she always does in red ink, lay in her lap. The sun through the window catches on the blonde down of her forearm. He traces a blue ringlet of smoke with his eyes as it rises into the gloaming of the evening sun. A draft twists the edges and it elongates into an oval, where it breaks, turns translucent, then disappears. He tugs at a nape of carpet with the hand not supporting his head. She looks at him lounged on the floor and resumes her puzzle. He stands and leaves.
Brandon D. Shuler is a Texas redneck more at home shooting birds and chasing fish than spending time in the Ivory Tower. His fiction appears in DarkSky Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, Red River Review, and other places. He writes books about fish and dead Texas literary figures. Brandon is also the editor-in-chief of NewBorder Journal.
HEDY ZIMRA
UNTIL DEATH DO US PART Before I die I will remain calm. Here is the list I am making: Who I don’t want at my funeral: • •
• • • • •
Auntie Carol Feinberg (welfare queen) Her fat loser kids except for the little girl Charlie who is okay, but not her either because she really shouldn’t have any more shit to deal with. The McDaniels who I fucking hate and they listen to J Jimmy Buffett and I know they hate us too--oh, but you feel so bad for the kids. Well fuck you--stay away. Lori from yoga who talks constantly and was not nice to me until we made money. All members of the yacht club. They say Joan looks like Mark. Snarky resemblance discourse. Jill because she’s just had too many funerals to go to in the last 5 years--free pass to skip mine. Big Baby. He deserves no happiness.
Writing this makes me rethink my death and I feel guilty. Not for making the list, but because I should be thinking about how my kids will not have a mother. Everyone talks about how much they enjoy their children, but I hated being a mother once they could talk. They can both see through my thin skin and see how stupid I am. Babies are fine. Nursing a silky fat creature staring up at you with goodness and desire. All I ever thought about was how Joan would be alone and
hungry if I died. She never took a bottle and I hadn’t met Mark yet. They have a father, though. An involved father. Believes he can do no wrong. The father that wanted them both. Who wore me down until I gave him a biological child and he promised to treat them equally. Bullshit. What the hell will it matter anyway? My tits are all withery and the milk is long gone. I am a wonky drunk now. Cooking long dinners so that I can drink a whole bottle (at least) of rosé, which you really shouldn’t judge because it is making a comeback and is delicious. Room 512 at the Westin is cheerless. The bed is downy and the whiteness is so stark I do not sit on it. This is not where I want to die. There is an Eames office chair. Why the hell did I sit at a fucking creaky Ikea chair all those years when I could have bought this thing? The wheels would fall off and two years later I would end up replacing my disposable chair. What pills I have brought with me: 19 Fiorinal 9 Tylenol PM 3 Topamax sprinkles in a milkshake 11 Xanax 23 Vicodin After chewing three chalky Vicodin, I put the vodka to my cracked lips again, trying not to vomit, and the room is spinning. I think Eminem and I would be best friends.
PARIETAL LOBE My world is so small. I already tried walking. Just walking down the street--nobody walks down the street here anymore. Invisibility is elusive. The streets are wide, unemployment is 10% and if I walk I am either an exerciser or a derelict. Dunkin’ Donuts and Walgreens, a grocery store that I always manage to get lost in and traffic lights where nobody expects you to cross. These people driving by think I am poor. Only decent part of my walk was stepping over a Lionel Richie record sleeve. Checking into the fucking Westin to die. I had Jill take Peter today. Said I had a shrink to see in Boston and it was the only appointment I could get. Joan is with her friends and won’t bother looking for me. Mark is in Pittsburgh at a conference, so I am clear for at least three more hours before anyone calls. You are too poor to buy cheap. Who said that? Oh right, Linda from the old playgroup-you can come as long as you don’t go all Jesus on me at the service. No, it wasn’t Linda who said that, it was Jill. Preparation for death is a far more challenging task than one might imagine. Night table drawers must be cleared of all embarrassing contents. Journals must be torn apart and burned. My computer’s hard drive must be removed and smashed and thrown in the Providence River. All evidence of
my obsession is on here and should be burned. Old letters from high school must be thrown into a trash bin downtown. Panties with holes can be discarded as one does not want to be remembered by those. The vibrator that should have been cleaned after each use and could be found by a grieving mother or even worse--Joan. Receipts for purchases that I couldn’t afford and considered returning even after they were worn can now be thrown away. The world is too small. The hiding places are hermetically sealed. McDonald’s was everywhere before I had the chance to get there. With Google, I could stay in a village in Senegal and someone would just find me. Plus I can’t stay off this computer. I spend all day searching for M. Reece, knowing that he hasn’t wanted to see me in sixteen years. I know that he started the triathlon circuit in 2001, so I memorized each one of his race times on coolrunning.com and began running myself. My body had no fire in my run, just my hallucination of M.Reece in front of me, and I am desperately trying to catch him. Some days he steals my appetite, as if he has stolen my food and I am hungry and feeling wretched and my hips become more angular and childlike. I would let him feed me from a spoon. I read every book that he has published and every syllabus multiple times. Joan happened a couple of years after he left. I was wasted all of the time then. Why couldn’t he be her father? Sometimes I think about sending her picture with flax hair and a blank look with a note: Here is your daughter… He would probably only want to fuck her anyway. And know that I was lying. He liked me young.
When I am in an airport, I see women at 40 and I wonder what he thinks of these bodies with iridescent veins and indentations. Worn breasts and bellies that have stretched. Was I the youngest that you ever had? I need to rest my head and that is when I think I am telepathic. Almost. I can’t do this. Shit, I need to go home and cook dinner. Same. Same. Same.
Hedy Zimra spent five years living in China and Hong Kong with her husband, three children, and dogs. She once appeared on the Richard Bey Show. She has an MFA from Bennington and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in swink, Liars’ League, elimae, Lamination Colony, PANK, Specter, and elsewhere.