Spittoon 2.4
Spittoon
Volume Three Issue One Toujours Spring 2013
www.spittoonmag.com
ISSN: 2166-0840
Spittoon 3.1
Fiction Editor Matt VanderMeulen
Poetry Editor Kristin Abraham
Creative Nonfiction Editor Berly Fields
Front cover art byOtha “Vakseen” Davis III:Veils of Carnality (40 x 30). Oil & Acrylic.
Spittoon 3.1
A Note from Our Fiction Editor: Spittoon selected no fiction for this issue. We are currently accepting quality experimental and left-of-center fiction submissions for the summer issue (to be released June 1).
Spittoon 3.1
Table of Contents Kelly Lynn
Thomas Four Seasons in The City
nonfiction
5
Jess Stickler
Science
poetry
9
Kirk Pinho
from Good Advice
poetry
13
Chad Parmenter
Captain America Picking His Reincarnation
poetry
17
Laura Kochman
from The Bone and the Body
poetry
18
Erica W. Jamieson
Coffee Riders
nonfiction
20
Special Section: Featuring Art by Otha “Vakseen” Davis III Artist Statement
23 24
Misplaced Virtue
Acrylic & Water Color
25
Toujours
Acrylic & Oil &Water Color
26
Solitaire
Acrylic
27
Primitive Lust
Acrylic & Water Color
28
Elegy
poetry
29
Disobedience
poetry
30
Nicholas Grider
Rescripting (#2)
poetry
31
Lisbeth Davidow
Who Wrote the Book of Love?
nonfiction
34
Brian Baumgart
Three Shes
nonfiction
43
Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.
Spittoon 3.1
Contributors
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Spittoon 3.1
Four Seasons in The City Kelly Lynn Thomas
The City at Night Cars race down the street, race each other, break the speed limit, break the speed of sound. Light shoots from a thousand guns, faster than 186,000 miles per second, faster than 300,000 kilometers per second, faster than the accelerated bullets that come with the light and kill twice as easy, twice as quick as the daylight’s normal speeds. We do not slow; our velocity increases in proportion to the number of variables used in the equation. Streets reach the point of relativity; they shorten, dilate, contract as they expand with the universe. We move with them.
Stars rotate, rotate, spin, spin, spinning in the black-velvet sea above, peering down, keeping pace, keeping rhythm while music dances, charms, whittles away the seconds that are minutes that are hours. We fly around the fire of our hearts in the night that never sleeps, never breaks; we make patterns in the smoke that curls, creeps, slithers up to the sky, tickling at the spinning stars until the light and heat evaporate into the universe. The city is not a closed system, the world is not a closed system, but the universe is a closed system and the galaxies revolve around each other and the earth revolves around the sun and the city revolves around the earth and all the energy is conserved, saved for the night because it burns more, needs more, craves more. Daylight is absorbed, stars absorbed, galaxies absorbed, because the wind moves like lightning, late summer lightning, booming thunder, crashing, tearing, ripping the veil between here and there, now and then, they and she, you and I. Owls fly contorted vectors above us, snaking, diving, searching. In the day they are slow, sleepy, they sit with themselves and wait until their moment. And now they find their moment among the rushing sounds and streaking light and they strike, strike. Their prey is not nocturnal, it is ruled by the sun, the sun is slower, and the owls strike and their prey never has a chance in a million years that are compressed into one night, one hour, one minute, a second that tells the difference between life and death.
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Spittoon 3.1 Thomas, Four Seasons in The City
When the sun peeks from the other side of the earth streets relax and relativity disappears, returning normal space. Light slows to 186,000 miles per second, 300,000 kilometers per second. People, cars, owls, collide with the brightness, losing the fluid of the banished night. The city winces as it folds out and slows down. Owls limp back to their nests, we trudge home, separately. I wait.
The City in Spring The sounds of water penetrate. Rain fills the city, floating refuse and the remains of old lives down the streets, and I am here, walking through it. Melted snow rushes off into storm drains and sewers, and the richness of its coursing consumes me. Droplets from the sky come down in alternating rhythms. They push and pull at the air. The water runs off my face and clings to my hair. I feel it running through my veins, trapped, looking for escape.
The smell of earth rises as the water falls. Dirt, the dead of winter. There is no green in the smell. Tires cut through the layer of wetness between rubber and asphalt, swooshing under the cars they carry. Feet splash into puddles or hop around them. The wind joins in noiselessly. I let it wipe droplets from my face so freshly fallen ones can take their places. I force one foot in front of the other. Movement. I follow the sound of water as it falls, rushes, splashes. Summer rain cleanses, refreshes, renews. This is not summer rain. It is melted snow, melted beauty, disappointment. I wade through it as it falls all around and runs beneath me. I let it run through me; I am transparent, I am a rain ghost. Water absorbs normal city sounds. The people, the cars, everything is muted, pushed down into another place, another time. Skyscrapers climb to meet the rain clouds, leaving the people down below alone and unprotected. We walk together between the world of water above and the world of water below and we do not speak. I will the water sounds to push everything from my mind, but water takes the shape of its container, and my thoughts float in the storm drain run offs, battered by the rushing flow. The rain stops. It is dark already and the chill wind blows harder to fill the empty space between the puddlesbelow and the clouds above. Without the rain to keep
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Spittoon 3.1 Thomas, Four Seasons in The City
them down, my storm drain run-off thoughts float back up to meet my eyes. I look up at the clouds, imploring, but they are merciless.
The City in Summer A warm summer breeze drifts in with the sun, drifts in through my hair, across my skin, lifts up my shirt and sweeps across my back, whispering songs of withering flowers and blooming flowers and petals fallen to the ground, crushed beneath feet that do not watch where they walk. The daylight crowds the night, banishes the night, vanquishes the night, and fills the city with light and the thoughts of 300,000 people moving through its black streets on their way to and from the edges of passion and boredom and potential.
But the city is silent, and it does not speak, except to absence. What thrived during the night, illuminated by starlight and the moon, fueled by speeding bullets and whirling fires, dies in the overwhelming yellow-white, hot air of the day that swells in my throat and kills the words born of love and lust in my lungs.
The City in Autumn In the thick heat and cloying sweat of early Autumn, before the leaves turn to goldand amber-shaded rainbows, I walk, as I always do. Here, Summer dies in fire and latches to the broken concrete sidewalks until Winter pries it free and floods us with fire’s bane. I thought about becoming a Buddhist today, becoming lost in this fire, in meditations on calamities and conundrums, becoming wise beyond my years, the years that built me up and tore me down, but I hold myself back, because to let go could, perhaps, mean the destruction of each word I’ve carved from stone with bleeding hands. Here in this city where my heart lies is everything I strive to distance myself from and everything, every one, that I crave, need, search for, desire.
The heat sticks to my back, clings to my feet, and nothing is sadder than knowing it will die, it will end, except maybe the silence of fruit withered on the vine. Synapses
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Spittoon 3.1 Thomas, Four Seasons in The City
spark with electricity, and haltingly I remember the name, the touch, the face of another long gone, myself a rain ghost from another time, another season. The memory dims next to the yellow flames in the sky, and the high blue calls my name and for now, for a moment, the rain leaves the Autumn City unsoiled in her love affair with distant moons and dirty streets. A September breeze finds me where I hide between ancient buildings built to impress, intimidate, scare, control, and separate. The breeze is a creeping chill, a harbinger of the heat’s demise, Autumn’s death in fire and ice. It cuts through my shirt, finds my skin, leaves me alone again, unsettled, unknowing, unwavering.
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Spittoon 3.1
Science Jess Stickler
it’s night on this street overrun by trees, a
bridge, a city lit from inside, shining
city, warm, a fog, the shoreline
littered by scuttling crablegged animals
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Spittoon 3.1 Stickler, Science
Someone is laughing— at you, with you, what does it matter. Just stay down. Find someone who lives in a small town and goes your speed. Stupid animal you stupid little girl you— can’t stop killing all her mothers. In every city, in every town. Flanks and hocks of animals split open. Roads and fields, rivers full of God laughing at you. Your prayer every night is thank you, thank you, thank you. Because that night, no one really died.
Dear, dear wounded
animals. American bison, how I love your beautiful stupid eyes. How I love how every day hope leaps blazing and eager.
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Spittoon 3.1 Stickler, Science
Try a little of this rain. Try a little of my mercy. Keep
falling and smiling and laughing and trying. Try now my
hands. Try now my silence. Try now my lost book in
winter. Try a little more of this how long how gone.
I forgive you. We were
kids. We were broken.
Weren’t we.
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Spittoon 3.1 Stickler, Science
hope leaps blazing and eager— I hate you— this book is your book been written in you— seawater— kelp like marrow and the taste of soot from fire what burned through us all
her screaming horses, my screaming horses—
I take snow back. I can— like horses, arcing branches over roads, and my stories—
You cannot tell them anymore.
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Spittoon 3.1
from Good Advice Kirk Pinho
IV As long as you know what carrion – cat, rabbit, eastern box turtle – is stuffed in the meat locker, flutter, Southpaw. Every part of you, no matter where you are, is literally always touching the sky. Grow your shadow like a lilac then hew it back into a lilac. Lilac lilaclilac. Pit bull curls up like a pine cone, snores. Has pit bull dreams of fog, dead cats, gunpowder. Wuffles.A frog ribbits in a new year under mud. There are fewer places in the world where there are feathers now because as goes the light, so must we go.
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Spittoon 3.1 Pinho, from Good Advice
VII Well aren’t you a spicy little meatball this morning? Who’s my pretty little hysterectomy? But who said you could wide-awake the ersatz crocodile? I don’t remember saying you could do that. Who said you could take the sun as periphery? What was it that Rilke said about beginnings, their violence like cadavers? Put away your switchblade, Southpaw. Because Daddy says so.
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Spittoon 3.1 Pinho, from Good Advice
VIII Be the marginalia in the schematics for the world’s first neutron bomb or the thumbprints softening a boy’s scapula, Southpaw. You cannot be both, so I suggest the former. Drink not the whiskey. Eat not the broccoli. Hold not reverence for all the dead boys, their fingernails made of sand. The map will lead you to them along tar-patched roads. Bring pretzels to the funerals, a couple mid-grade bottles of Merlot. Be not leery or afraid of mountain passes, the permafrost. There are still plenty of reasons to glow: the cicatrix; the old man painting gardenias, swigging brandy; the mastodon bones in the museum staring back at us as if to say, Be not the ephemera. Extinction is complicated.
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Spittoon 3.1 Pinho, from Good Advice
XII All your friends say treason. I say softly, blueberry muffin. All your friends say fuck. I say fuck. All your friends say paradigm. I say paradigm. [babybaby everything is flames babybaby everything splits the iambs into ghosts] All your friends say hairline fracture. I say political prisoner. Wayfarer. Expatriate. You found me drunk under the blood moon. All your friends say gagged. I say blueberrymuffin.
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Spittoon 3.1
Captain America Picking His Reincarnation Chad Parmenter
Not to come back as me, or some future superhero found in a rocket from his home planet, his enemy the bad economy, his weapon some dumb ray like The Debtonator, no, or as an ordinary citizen, shadowed by heroes like me, heterolexical, retrosexual, relaxed as animals. No. Not as any of the animals—lion means sleep and be diva to safari jeeps; even army ants act badass but “act” is them; that’s from Ant Man. Maybe something made of nothing but strength—a bunker. But Invisible Girl called me a shield with a smile, and this is about real change. That’s what souls do. So let me be the Red Skull. His roads did nothing but diverge. His face was an eraser on fire. Whenever I saved the world from him, I told myself better to rein in hell, but his word balloons got the thickest ink, and his escapes made flames yellow all the pages I only turned blue. But I am like him—frame of a Fatherland. Now write me to life.
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Spittoon 3.1
from The Bone and the Body Laura Kochman
The connection between hose and spigot tight seal of door and doorframe I am missing the order of things oysters packed in a bed one kidney tight against another curled inside a shell a nose wedged into the chimney and one foot poking out the window The water moves higher or I walk in to my waist or I was already in the sea and I emerged at the base of the pier where the Whale Bone Man spends his days in conspiracy with the wood beams picking out splinters as though brushing out a tail
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Spittoon 3.1 Kochman, from The Bone and the Body
The spray hose coiled out back behind as though nesting a boundary becomes the space within it
wrapped around a body or a house
I have been a line drawn
down by the water
I have turned the water on to clean the sand from between my solid toes I wrap the water around my solid form to occupy the space to create a space to occupy these deathless places
the tenant
The nest uncoils Or I have pulled it apart I have pulled it apart
the door I walk through No
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Spittoon 3.1
Coffee Riders Erica W. Jamieson
This is how I picture my dad: in his second hand Caddie, the seat set low and back, one hand languishing at the top of the steering wheel, a cigarette jeweled between his fingers, a cup of coffee cooling in the center console. Like peanut butter and jelly, bagels and cream cheese, Ginger and Fred. Coffee and cigarettes.Cigarettes and Coffee. You couldn’t have one without the other and better to have them both than forgo either. I never smoked. And once upon a time I loathed coffee more than anything in the world, more than having green-striped Adidas when red was required in ninth grade, more than my curly hair, my parents’ divorce, my brother’s illness. Growing up, coffee stained the avocado-colored Formica in the kitchen. Bits of crushed coffee grinds lingered, forgotten about at the baseboards just underneath the bottom cabinets. Crunchy and granular under my bare toe, coffee to me was insidious. It was like sand at the beach on a windy day. It got into everything and everywhere. I’d get into my dad’s low riding Caddie, cigarettes burning through the air, the windows up and sealed and we’d stop for coffee. It didn’t matter where we were supposed to be heading—his house, school, my house, a friend’s, the movies, the mall— we’d stop somewhere for coffee. These were the days before joint custodial care. I lived with Mom. My brother temporarily installed at a care facility. I went for coffee with Dad. His wife in permanent residence at their home with her kids. Time of day was inconsequential to my father’s need for coffee. We’d stop on the way to school, 7 a.m. and freezing cold in December; we’d stop after dark, the library closed, two chapters still to read; we’d stop on any given Saturday or Sunday. If I got into the car with him, we stopped for coffee. And we didn’t just stop for coffee. We traveled for coffee. Like a journey in a parched dessert of fast food joints, I know this place for coffee,he’d say. We’d take off in that old Caddie. Neil Diamond on eight-track and we barely spoke. He’d say, What’s going on? I’d say, Nothing. A few minutes later he might say, Everything OK? I’d answer, Yeah. We’d drive and drive and drive and drive and drive. We’d go miles out of our way for a good ol’ cup of Joe. My dad was that old New-Yorker-corner-dive kind of guy. We could end up on the east side or down river as easily as we could rural Michigan or halfway to Chicago. At some point we’d come upon the place he sought. He’d turn to park the Caddie in a lot at a Denny’s wannabe with a name like Mae’s or Ray’s or just Coffee lit up in
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Spittoon 3.1 Jamieson, Coffee Riders
neon. He’d call out to the waitress. Babydoll? Bring me some coffee and a slice of pie for my little girl. The waitress, always the same, hair tied back in a net, wearing an overly starched uniform, would say, Sure, darling, or raise the coffee pot in her hands like a secret handshake that my father understood to mean On my way. I didn’t drink coffee back then. I barely ate the pie. Held prisoner in that smoky old Caddie as we drove into the night, city by city, coffee was the scourge of my existence. Inexplicable like my dad.Messy and tasteless. We’d stay long enough for one refill and the pie. Then the silent ride home. Pulling into the circular driveway at my house, his old house, my anger congealed to a force that couldn’t be reckoned. No, I don’t want to do my homework at your house. No, I don’t want to have dinner at your house. I’d been to his house. Coming in first thing, he’d pour himself a cup from the cold carafe of coffee made sometime earlier. Heat it up in the microwave or directly on the electric stovetop. We’d sit at the kitchen table. We’d still say nothing. He would look at his coffee. I would look out the window. I could see the pool he built into which I had remained steadfast in my refusal to swim. Or I’d weather a glance at the fridge adorned with my stepsister’s science awards, her brother’s report cards, their photographs. His wife, their mother, stayed in the other room and watched the television unless he called to her, Babydoll? Want to heat me up some soup? Tapping my fingers or reaching for chocolate, I’d wait out the coffee, the soup, the time until I was released and returned. In the years in between then and now, thousands of miles from my torturous suburban days of coffee haze, I fell victim to ubiquitous green awnings and advertising. I stepped into my first Starbucks and grew to crave coffee. That first sip, beginner’s coffee—grande nonfat Latte with a shot of hazelnut, please—was like falling into a pool of warm reverie. Old wounds had graced unpredictably with age. It was like I was home. I became known by coffee order at four Starbucks within a mile radius of my house in any direction I chose to travel. My kids learned to get dressed early for school because on our way, we’d stop. I’d bribe them with sweet treats, mad-lions, and kids cocoa. I’d negotiate with them: If the line ran out the door, we’d try the next Starbucks. I promised not to make them late for school. At least not too often. I became obsessed with coffee. I became that person who would hijack my kids and drag them out for coffee before and after every activity. My kids got used to doing their homework at the small round tables at the Starbucks on Pico and Veteran. We collected celebrity sightings: Lisa Kudrow at the Starbucks on Wilshire and Bundy. Billy Baldwin at the one down on National by the freeway. Pamela Anderson in
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Spittoon 3.1 Jamieson, Coffee Riders
Malibu. I’ve since settled into an espresso habit, all my own: double shot, dollop of foam, please. I’ve outgrown dive joints and have become persnickety among chain coffees. I consume only beans freely harvested, espressos hand drawn and coffee slowly poured over. I am a coffee connoisseur and the prodigal daughter returned coffee master. Maybe there was magic in that dark brew. I think about it, as I’m watching the kids, older now, across the table from me sipping their decaf lattes or chai teas. I think about the fact that now we have this. My dad and I, because when I see him, when I visit back in the Midwest, we slum for coffee. When I return for holiday or school breaks and walk into his house, pictures of all the children, steps and grandkids, adorning the mantel, one of us smiles, one of us says, one of us asks, “Coffee?” Leaving the ruckus of family gathering behind, we point his Caddie caffeine-wards, east bound, looking for a good ol’ cup of Joe and a slice of pie. We are the coffee riders.
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Spittoon 3.1
Special Section: Featuring Art by Otha “Vakseen” Davis III
Spittoon 3.1
Artist Statement Otha “Vakseen” Davis III
As a creative mind, the arts have played a major role in my life from a young age. I grew up overweight, so I wasn’t always the most confident. I never really had a voice until I grew older. Sometimes you can’t find the words to express your innermost thoughts and feelings and art always served as that emotional release for me. Art and creativity tend to play the role of my therapist and help me maintain sanity in this crazy world. The paint brush is my weapon of choice these days as I create mixed media paintings using acrylics or oil with water color. It’s never been my intention, but red, black and white always seem to be a common denominator in my pieces. I didn’t even realize this until a friend brought it to my attention. I’ve alwaysloved the dramatic contrast and power that black and white images create. At the same time, red is so sensitive. Red is intense and one of those colors that automatically demands your attention. The combination of these three elements allows me to create so much depth and emotion so I guess I’m just naturally drawn to them. I’m invigorated by relationships, feelings and emotions. I’ve always felt they were God’s greatest creation, so my work tends to evolve around women and their natural allure. Women are very emotional beings so naturally they allow me to channel various energies through my work. I guess for a man I’ve always been rather in tune with my feelings and emotions, so I want to suck you into my world, even if it’s just for a brief moment. I want my work to captivate the viewer’s senses.
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Spittoon 3.1
Misplaced Virtue.(24 x 18)Acrylic & Water Color
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Spittoon 3.1
Toujours.(24 x 18)Acrylic &Oil &Water Color.
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Spittoon 3.1
Solitaire.(24 x 18)Acrylic.
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Spittoon 3.1
Primitive Lust.(20 x 16)Acrylic& Water Color.
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Spittoon 3.1
Elegy Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.
Take my hand pulled through another moment’s trembling over and lived differently
to the top of the stairs where Gloria Patre the smell of mown grass washed out behind
us as we shoulder the world too loudly as moss beneath flowering dogwoods or alarm
that we are here at all toward the bedroom stumbled into the weight lost in your bathrobe
come the son thrown in full sight of didn’t want to see her stopped held the handrail
I said Mom against her neck for the time being underbrush pushed up the forest floor
more than a restless body turned on the mattress found what backs away moves near
if we should die between sweet basil and felt cold the boy I was hidden behind
the garden wall to be left alone that you should recover your breath's final tumult—
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Spittoon 3.1
Disobedience Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.
What there was didn’t cross the stretched evenings within us, fear of half-light hummed ourselves away, the color of an apple or the faint promise of dying, all the pacing of our troubled parents wore through pushed our ears to listen, our first sparks of faith as though night brings only that bright vista of grass a shove away from the window’s ledge—
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Spittoon 3.1
Rescripting (#2) Nicholas Grider
constantly reorganizing don’t even have to say it no May stroll bracket no straw hat someone else’s memory say it with words, say it with this silence: parts and labor you say you don’t understand people made out of knowing how the good life empty surveillance empty head illness as metaphor metaphor as lifestyle miles and miles of the same thing knowledge, hold still mid-afternoon midnight hour, sobbing in the sedan
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Spittoon 3.1
you say, you say waste not want not
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Spittoon 3.1 Grider, Rescripting
knowledge, stay put try to say don’t say tell me Oxford and velvet personalized astronomy miles and miles of constantly reorganizing what a lifestyle is what’s being a person again miles and miles of the same thing you say you want to arrive prepared to part lips press flesh linger keep it down to a dull roar the gloves never come off your tongue never sleeping doves, the knowledge personal tilt and grimace restricted to halts and prompts you would apologize you weren’t adequately prepared the good life stay-at-home scientist adjusting constantly adjusting
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Spittoon 3.1 Grider, Rescripting
keep your feelings to yourself the past is now, is not faces turned, heads minus eyes and ears the circus comes to town miles and miles of public knowledge the surface scuffed and dull, and constantly and not much else to see here subtraction by being alive still after being lost still late, call it night call Ms. Manners light the lights you can’t say you’ve arrived but you recognize the noise arrested an ocean of arrested public knowledge constantly rehearsing yourself, if such a thing still exists
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Spittoon 3.1
Who Wrote the Book of Love? LisbethDavidow
Chapter One You’re the fiercest boy I’ve ever seen, the tallest one in a rambunctious swarm. You make two fists, pivot your feet and swing your elbows wildly. The other boys back away. You lower your arms, but keep your eyes on the boy you want to punch. Standing at the top of the stairs, waiting for the Hebrew School bell to ring, I keep my eyes on you, your curly brown hair, straight nose and square jaw. All I know about you is that you’re a year older than I am, you go to a different elementary school and you’re strong. I like strong boys. At ten, I’ve already had a crush on a few. I’m strong, too, and fast. But you’re not just strong. You’re not afraid of anyone or anything. The bell rings. I turn my gaze from you, but the arrow has struck. I might as well tumble down these stairs and land dazed at your feet. Chapter Two Stationed in the busiest corridor of our junior high, a traffic monitor strap draped across your lanky torso from one broad shoulder to the opposite narrow hip, you keep other kids in line. I walk towards you, all of me folded into one question: Will you say hi? Even if you do, you would never be interested in me. The boys who fought over me in fifth grade now call me a beanpole and a carpenter’s dream—flat as a board. I catch your eye as I pass you. You don’t say hi or smile, but you nod. At least you know I exist. Chapter Three A bunch of us—eighth grade girls and ninth grade boys—sit on the beige carpeting in my girlfriend’s house watching teenagers do the stroll on American Bandstand. I sneak peeks at you on the couch next to my girlfriend. The two of you have a song:
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Spittoon 3.1 Davidow, Who Wrote the Book of Love?
“Let it Be Me” by the Everly Brothers. I’m beyond jealous. You bend down to kiss the back of her neck. I get weak from my belly to my throat imagining what it would feel like if you did that to me. I have a song with you, too: “It’s Just a Matter of Time,” by Brooke Benton. I tell my diary every night that I believe deep down someday you will be mine. Chapter Four We’re hanging out in the street in front of my house. You’re sitting on a branch of a maple tree, sulking. I don’t know why. You broke up with my/your girlfriend a couple of months ago, and you told your best friend that you might ask me to go out with you. But you might also ask someone else, which drives me crazy. I tell you to come down from the tree. You repeat what I said word for word, in a high sing-song voice, like I’m your mom, nagging you. I’ve gotten under your skin. I hope that’s good. Chapter Five You’re sprawled out in a big, red leather chair in another friend’s furnished basement on a Saturday afternoon. I walk by you. You grab my hand and pull me onto your lap. I act like it’s no big deal, but inside I’m screaming. You kiss my cheek and then my lips. The whole time, I’m wondering if my kisses are okay, or if you’re about to change your mind and get up. We kiss until my jaw is long past tired. Chapter Six We’re standing in my kitchen on a hot night in July. We’ve spent tonight and every night since school let out making out on a low, wide, stone wall, hidden by trees, at the far end of a neighbor’s driveway. You reach into your pants pocket, take out your silver ID bracelet and toss it onto the yellow Formica kitchen table. “You might as well have this,” you say, as though you’ve given up some fight you’ve been having with yourself. I feel like I’m dreaming about someone else’s life. I pick up the cool, metal chain and put it on. It dangles from my wrist, but it doesn’t fall off.
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Spittoon 3.1 Davidow, Who Wrote the Book of Love?
Chapter Seven Six of us are crammed into your mom’s Nash Rambler, which you’ve borrowed for the night. You’ve parked it on a neighborhood side street. I’ve been demoted to the back seat, right behind you. You’re mad at me. You think I was flirting with a boy in my sophomore class. You don’t believe that I was just being friendly. I’m miserable, until I look into the rearview mirror and see your sad brown eyes looking back at me. Next thing I know, you’ve swung open my door and we’re on our knees, clinging to each other on the grass next to the sidewalk. One of your hands holds the back of my head; the other presses my ribs into yours. Hot tears cover my cheek. I realize with a shock that they’re not mine. Chapter Eight Johnny Mathis sings “Wonderful, Wonderful” on the hi-fi. We lay on the sage green Queen Anne couch in my living room, our legs intertwined, tongues in each other’s mouths, our pelvises moving against each other like they have minds of their own. A strange spasm ripples through my body.I jump up from the couch and run into the kitchen. You run after me and ask if I’m okay. I notice a small, wet stain on the front of your pants. I describe this weird sensation I just had. You say you don’t know what it is. We go back to the couch. I sit on your lap and rest my head on your shoulder. I want to curl up and disappear inside you, somewhere below your rib cage, and live there. Chapter Nine I’m babysitting for your niece, sitting at your oldest brother’s kitchen table, holding the baby in my lap while I give her a bottle. You pull up a chair to watch. It’s like we’re practicing for when we’re married and have a baby of our own. It will be perfect, even though Isometimes want to talk about things you don’t, like whether or not there’s really a God, and you say “I don’t like when you talk like that.” It’s not that you aren’t smart. You get good grades, especially in math and chemistry. You just don’t like English, my favorite subject. But that’s okay. I can talk to my girlfriends about stuff like that.
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Spittoon 3.1 Davidow, Who Wrote the Book of Love?
Chapter Ten We’re drunk, lying in an upstairs bedroom at a friend’s New Years Eve party. We have all our clothes on, like always. You’re on top of me, telling me through sobs how much you love me. I open my legs and imagine what it would be like to have you inside me, even though I could never let you do that, even if you asked me to, which you never would. Even though I have unzipped your fly, felt the shape of you and the surprising softness of your skin there; and you’ve asked me, (much to my embarrassment) after sliding your hand up my skirt, why my underpants are wet, I could never go all the way with you. You would lose respect for me. I would ruin my reputation. And my parents would kill me. Even when we just sit next to each other on the porch steps at night, my father puts his headlights on bright when he drives up, like he’s trying to catch us doing something wrong. Not to mention what he would do if I got pregnant. But there’s no point in worrying about that. You never even ask. I’m not that kind of girl. Chapter Eleven We see Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass, set in the late twenties. They’re madly in love, like us. They make out in her living room and then jump apart when her mom comes home. We laugh and nudge each other. The only problem is they want to have sex. Her mother tells her that nice boys don’t respect girls who go all the way, and his father tells him that he better not do it with Natalie because he could get her pregnant, and then he’d have to marry her, and he couldn’t go to Yale. He tells Warren to do it with another girl, a slutty type, which he does. Natalie is beside herself. At the school dance, she begs him to do it with her, but he won’t. She goes so crazy she has to go to a mental institution. By the end of the movie, she’s not crazy anymore. She comes home and right away goes with two of her girlfriends to visit Warren. He’s a rancher now. He’s wearing overalls, and he’s all sweaty and dirty. He seems both happy and sad to see Natalie who’s wearing a big white hat and a white dress. A pregnant Italian-speaking woman in a frumpy dress shows up and stands next to Warren. She’s his wife. She’s pretty, but nowhere near as beautiful as Natalie, who pretends she’s not heartbroken to see Warren married and the father of a little boy who’s sitting on the kitchen floor, playing with a big wooden spoon. Natalie picks up the little boy. He fingers her pearls, and you know she’s thinking she wishes he was hers and Warren’s. When they say good-bye, Natalie tells Warren she’s going to marry someone else. They both admit that they don’t think about being happy anymore. I
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Spittoon 3.1 Davidow, Who Wrote the Book of Love?
hope you can’t hear me crying. But then I hear that you’re crying, too. That’s good. It means you hope nothing like that ever happens to us. Chapter Twelve A car engine idles outside. I’m sitting on the round arm of the red velvet chair in my living room, facing away from the chair and towards you You’re kneeling in front of me on the hard wood floor, your arms around my waist, your eyes closed, your mouth moving slowly across my lavender lamb’s wool jewel neck sweater. The scent of Woodhue by Faberge surrounds us. Your mouth reaches the spot where my Maidenform bra comes to a soft point. You whisper, “Is this where it is?” I nod. “In my whole life, I’ll never know anyone like you,” you say before you leave to join your friends in the idling car. Chapter Thirteen I count the days until you come home from visiting cousins out of town. Your first night back, you pick me up at my house in your father’s green Chevrolet station wagon. The Shirelles sing “Baby, it’s You”onthe radio, but you don’t harmonize with them the way you usually do, so perfectly I could die. You drive to my old elementary school and park the car on the empty blacktop. We climb in the back to lie down. I unbutton your light blue oxford shirt, which looks great against your tan, nearly hairless chest, and put my hand on your warm skin. I wait for you to pull me towards you, but you don’t even look at me. I ask what’s wrong. You say nothing. I ask again. Your face is shut tight. You take me home. I beg a mutual friend the next day to tell me if she knows anything. She says I have to promise not to tell you that she told me, but you met a girl in your cousin’s town that you like. I nearly buckle up and fall over. The problem is, she says, you think that if you could like another girl, then maybe you don’t love me anymore. That’s impossible. You’ll get over her and come back to your senses and me.
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Spittoon 3.1 Davidow, Who Wrote the Book of Love?
Chapter Fourteen We’re fighting in front of my locker because the girls who have crushes on you, and there are a lot of them, flirt with you, and you flirt back. I grab your shirt sleeve as you walk away from me. It rips. You get mad. Your basketball coach comes by and balls you out for not being a gentleman. I feel guilty that I got you in trouble. Chapter Fifteen I don’t even look at you when Ipass you in the corridors at school. I find someone else nearby to talk to in an animated way, or I say hi to someone right in front of or behind you, like I’m excited to see some long lost friend. None of that seems to faze you. You’re going out with a girl from a Catholic high school. She’s pretty and big busted and probably lets you do whatever you want. I have a new song: “End of the World,” by Skeeter Davis. Chapter Sixteen You come home from college for Thanksgiving weekend and ask me to go to the movies. I say yes. You take my hand in the dark theater. Your hand feels big and smooth, like always. You take me home afterwards and come inside. We don’t talk much, about the movie, or President Kennedy, who just got killed, or my new boyfriend, or your new girl friend, if you have one, which I’m sure you do. I don’t want to know. You say you better go. You stand up. I do, too. Then you put your arms around my waist. I close my eyes, lean the top of my head on your cheek, and put my arms around your waist, like we’re getting ready to slow dance, except there’s no music and we aren’t dancing.I can feel your breath on my hair. Chapter Seventeen You invite me to come to your college for spring weekend. I’m thrilled. You must still have feelings for me. I pack my nicest skirts and sweaters, but the day I get there, it turns hot. I need cotton, not wool. The weather and my clothes are the least of my problems, though. You ignore me the whole weekend. You get drunk, laugh with your fraternity brothers, who don’t talk to me either, and flirt with a tall, pretty brunette. You’re still distant on Sunday morning, like you can’t wait until I
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Spittoon 3.1 Davidow, Who Wrote the Book of Love?
leave. The whole way home I feel like you punched me hard in the stomach, and I don’t know why. Chapter Eighteen Your graduate school and my college are in the same state. You drive over to see me one day. We go for a ride. A bumper sticker on your car says, “America, love it or leave it.” Nelson Rockefeller is your favorite politician, and you hate hippies. When we get to the river, I spread a blanket on the grass. We lay down. You point to a faint spider vein on the outside of my right thigh and ask me what it is. I shrug my shoulders. You’ve just made me feel like the most unattractive person in the world. Chapter Nineteen I work for a publishing company. You work for a chemical company that manufactures napalm. You call me out of the blue and invite me to spend Labor Day weekend with you and your old fraternity brothers at somebody’s summer house. I say yes. There’s no way you can hurt me anymore. I’ve lost someone far more important than you: my father. And I’ve finally lost my virginity, to a poet, one of those hippies you hate who like to talk about the meaning of life. The house is full of people who talk about how drunk they were last night. Igo for a walk in the woods and smoke a joint. When I come back, you ignore me. One of your friends tells me not to feel bad, that this is how you treat women, even your girlfriends, even the nicest ones. By midnight, you’re stumbling around, a beer in each hand. “How did you get so fucked up?” I ask. Without looking at me, you say, “Get the fuck off my back.” On the way home on Sunday morning, we drop off one of your buddies and hang around his messy living room. Loud enough for all to hear, you say, “Why don’t you go into the other room and take your underpants off? I’ll be right there.” My face stings with insult, but I’m determined not to let you see how shocked I am. I raise my eyebrows and look at your friends like do you believe this guy? They laugh, with me, I think, and at you.
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Spittoon 3.1 Davidow, Who Wrote the Book of Love?
Is this really how you treat women? Or have you lost respect for me because I no longer seem virginal? “Don’t ever change your modest ways,” you wrote on the back of your high school graduation photo. I thought you were urging me never to become conceited, but maybe you were referring to my sexual reserve as well. Has my braless top, long hair and marijuana smoking spoiled my image for you? Even if it has, Warren would never talk to Natalie like that, not even on that night outside the school gym, when, in her red satin flapper dress, she pulled him onto her in the back of his car, begging him to have sex with her. “Don’t do this…you’re a nice girl,” he said over and over while she moaned, “No, I’m not. I’m really not.” Do you ever wonder what would have happened if we had made love when we actually loved each other, if I had been less modest or if you had been less honorable? Would we have become so close it would have been harder for you to move on? Or would you have thought less of me and left even sooner? Maybe I should be glad we never did it. It’s one thing I didn’t give you. When you drop me off outside my apartment, I don’t look back as I get out of your car. “Thanks, anyway,” I say and slam the car door behind me. Chapter Twenty We’re both married. We each have a child. I haven’t seen you in fourteen years, since I slammed your car door in disgust. A video arrives in the mail from the girlfriend whose neck you kissed while we watched American Bandstand. She thinks I’ll get a kick out of this. I’m not so sure. It’s a reunion of your high school class. I hope you look terrible, and/or that I feel nothing. I pop in the tape. You enter the room. You’re still in good shape, and your hairline has barely receded. But your upper lip is tense. You look uncomfortable. Then you sit next to a friend who says something that elicits a high-pitched laugh. You close your eyes and jiggle your broad, still articulate shoulders. I remember that laugh, and I remember those shoulders. The old desire stirs. I eject the tape and send it back the next day. Either I am a hopeless masochist, or I’m too stubborn to acknowledge something else you said on your graduation photo: “Things change. People change.”
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Spittoon 3.1 Davidow, Who Wrote the Book of Love?
Chapter Twenty One I’m fifty and you’re fifty one. My mother tells me over the phone that my brother bumped into you at a party. Breathless, like she’s handing me an award, she reports that you were excited to see him, that you introduced him to your wife as the brother of your first love. I see you smiling broadly in a dark suit as you shake my brother’s hand, put your other hand on your wife’s back (what does she look like?) and tell her who this man is and, by inference, who I am. First love? The words, as sweet and simple as an old doo wop ballad, knock on my breastbone. I stiffen against them at first, lest they inflame the old injury beneath. Is that how you sum me up? The phrase seems so facile—the way I felt about you all those years: falling for you, longing for you, drawing you towards me, claiming you, losing you, hanging on to you beyond reason, has always seemed heavier than love, more like an embarrassing obsession. Still, I have to admit: I like that you think of me that way. Splendor in the Grass may not have been our movie—you were never as wistful as Warren on his ranch, nor I as serene as Natalie driving away from him in the final scene; and yet, the words linger in my mind and roll over my tongue until they glide down my throat and settle somewhere below my ribcage. After a while, they no longer interfere with the rhythm of my breath.
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Spittoon 3.1
Three Shes Brian Baumgart
Her birthday, and she held brownies she was bringing into the office. We both heard the loud pop followed by the tinkling rain. But it was blue sky overhead, and the rain fell only just around the corner, just beyond view. She, my wife, asked, Did you hear that?, though it was obvious that I had by the way both of our heads lifted like rabbits in a field after a gunshot. She went inside after I assured her it was OK, that she needn’t worry. Another she, a girl this time, maybe nineteen, held her hair above her head as if she were about to lift herself from the ground. This was around the corner, and the rain had been glass, though now the shower had ended. She ambled back and forth from the driver’s door to the back door, looking inside and then looking up, as if she too had heard the rain and wondered where it had gone. Fragments of glass surrounded her feet in iridescent puddles. On the other side of her car was a van, large and looming, punched through the passenger side of the girl’s car. The third she— another teen, almost too similar to the second—leaned against the van’s white door and smoked a cigarette like this was just so natural, an everyday thing. She could have been an advertisement. And this is where it went wrong. I left. Reversed away from the accident. Turned around. I can’t quite explain why it was I had to leave. There was no screaming, no wrenching of metal, no flames or spilling gasoline. There were two girls I didn’t know. One pacing. One casually smoking. There were other onlookers. I even saw a man on a phone, probably calling an ambulance. He didn’t look frightened, but perhaps a little tired. After all, this was not quite eight in the morning. But still I left, though the word fled might be more accurate. I had no responsibility there, I’m sure of it. All was taken care of. So why did I go? And why did I feel so guilty? At first, I thought maybe it was the second she, the girl with her hands in her hair. The frantic pacing, the look of confusion, something that made me think she could cry at any moment, something I couldn’t deal with right then. It surely wasn’t because I didn’t need to be there. That only came to me later, when I made excuses to myself. Maybe the third she got to me, the way she didn’t seem to care about her van or the accident. And, yes, her nonchalance irked me. But that wasn’t it either.
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Spittoon 3.1 Baumgart, Three Shes
If I had to put it on something, some little thing that made me do what I did, I’d have to say it was that popping sound and my assurance to my wife that it was all OK, that even though I knew something was wrong I could tell her it was nothing. Something about the way I soothed her, my wife, the first she, took away my power to do anything. I hadn’t protected her from anything of consequence to us—the loud pop or the raining glass. I hadn’t kept that away. So when I had a chance to do something, to help perhaps, I fled. Three shes without me—and none any worse off.
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Contributors
Kelly Lynn Thomas reads, writes, and sometimes sews. She can often be found with a large mug of tea and has a strange fascination with the television show Bones. Read more at kellylynnthomas.com. Jess Stickler grew up outside of one of the smallest rural towns in Michigan, where she still lives. Her work has appeared as part of the PEN Poetry Series and elsewhere. Kirk Pinho writes poem things when he’s not editing newspaper things, covering political things, teaching English things, or raising a newborn daughter with his fiancée. Find more poem things at hellokirkpinho.com. Chad Parmenter received his Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. His poems appear in numerous venues, including Best American Poetry, Harvard Review and Black Warrior Review. His chapbook, Bat & Man: A Sonnet Comic Book, is available from Finishing Line Press. Parmenter is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Luther College in Iowa. Laura Kochman’s work is found or forthcoming in Artifice, Sixth Finch, CutBank, and others. Her chapbook is forthcoming in 2013 from dancing girl press. Erica W. Jamieson won the 2012 Gypsy Sachet Award for Letters & Biography. Her work has appeared in SELF, Lilith and Switchback among other journals. She still travels for coffee, Contact her at ewjamieson@gmail.com. Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.'s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Pleiades, Sukoon, Typo, and other journals. He teaches Literature and writing courses at Webster University and Florissant Valley Community College in St. Louis, MO. Nicholas Grider is an artist (www.nicholasgrider.com) and writer whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Conjunctions, Caketrain, Vector, Lumn, Flag & Void and other publications.
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While music has played the driving force in his business career, Otha “Vakseen” Davis III’s passion for the arts has served as his key to sanity in the fast-paced entertainment industry. Drawing inspiration from women, emotions, music, and the African American experience, his mixed medium acrylic, oil and water-color paintings on canvas have been sold to collectors and art enthusiasts throughout Los Angeles and the Southeast region of the U.S. While he’s only been on the art scene since January 2012, Otha has had a month-and-a-half solo exhibition at the Emerging Art Scene Gallery in Atlanta, and showcased his art at Los Angeles’ Noho Art Gallery, Norbertellen Gallery, Stay Gallery, Larabee Sound Studios, The Key Club, Media Temple Studios, The Alexandria Hotel, M. Bird Salon, and the Holding Co. Studios, among others. His art has also been featured in over 12 literary art magazines. To view more of Otha’s work, visit Vakseen.com. Lisbeth Davidow’s work has appeared in various print and online publications. Her essay, “Separation Anxiety,” was nominated to be included in Best of Creative Nonfiction, Volume 2. She also co-wrote Ryan and Angela, an original screenplay, for Universal Pictures and edited and assisted in writing Women in Family Business: What Keeps You Up at Night? She lives with her husband in Malibu, California. www.lisbethdavidow.com. Brian Baumgart directs the Creative Writing program at North Hennepin Community College near Minneapolis, where he also teaches and curates a reading series. His writing is available elsewhere, too. For more: http://brianbaumgart.efoliomn.com/Publications
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