Spittoon 2.3: Get back better on

Spittoon

Volume Two Issue Three Get back better on Fall 2012

www.spittoonmag.com

ISSN: 2166-0840

Fiction Editor Matt VanderMeulen

Poetry Editor Kristin Abraham

Creative Nonfiction Editor Berly Fields

Front and back cover art by Eleanor Bennett: Front: Smoke. Digital photograph.

Back: Get back better on. Digital photograph.

This issue, Get back better on, is dedicated to the victims and survivors of the summer 2012 Colorado wildfires and the Aurora, Colorado, shooting.

Table of Contents

Lisa Zimmerman

poetry

Envy

1

At a Café on a Saturday Morning

2

Ethan Tinkler

fiction

Fragments: surrogate intimacies

3

Stephen Thomas

fiction

Three Jokes

7

Trish Parsons

poetry

This is a whirring, blurring instance of mania

9

swoop

10 12

Tendai Mwanaka

fiction

LAUGHINGS OF THE MAD DOG

Gregg Murray

poetry

Instances of Graciella Tabling Ceviche 24

Tiffany Morris

nonfiction

When the Ceviche Was Off

25

Parable of the Birdcages

26

Route 1

27

Special Section: Featuring Art by Eleanor Leonne Bennett Artist Statement digital photograph

mixed media, digital photograph

30 31

emerging

32

ice

33

feather on bone

34

pathways

35

Jeff Mark

nonfiction

Too Tough for Tetherball

36

Tony Leuzzi

poetry

from “Cadae: The Pi Poems”

41

Brent House

poetry

Augur of Surfaces

42

JosĂŠ Luis GutiĂŠrrez

poetry

Water Music

43

Jewel Beth Davis

nonfiction

Clothes Encounters

44

Will Cordeiro

fiction

The Process

48

The Amateurs

50

gardenia

51

tattoo

52

tarot

53

Favor, or Holiday Edition October 1997

54

Madill

55

Recreation

56

Brandi

57

James Claffey

Jeremy Benson

Contributors

fiction

nonfiction

58

Spittoon 2.3

Envy Lisa Zimmerman

Not blue but green eyed and splintered.

Sweaty hands and pricked fingertips.

Why is your sister crying?

Moist violets sizzling under the heart and the broom of the mind perpetually sweeping, sweeping.

You thought this would be easy— one part death, one part jamboree.

If only it could be wrenched free from its bone-lock on fire somewhere else, a far continent and nobody getting burned or burning.

If only you didn’t care about all the young poets twirling their red and yellow cocktail umbrellas, tongues of fire above their heads as if they were apostles.

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Spittoon 2.3

At a Café on Saturday Morning Lisa Zimmerman

with a line by Jane Hirshfield Between the vintage feather hair clips and the cocktail list and the beer list and the invisible grocery list in her wallet a woman says “Guess what? I’m failing.”

And there’s just no accounting for the sadness that followed me awake from the dream to coffee, to prayer, to the droughtdrenched fields back there in the dream, some horses, nothing to eat though they grazed, heads just above the dead gold grass, their soft lips, those ancient teeth.

I know that hope is the hardest love we carry.

You asked me if I slept well. You said today you felt better than you’ve felt in weeks.

Winter comes and goes, undecided.

2

Spittoon 2.3

Fragments: surrogate intimacies Ethan Tinkler

Catherine She turns up in the margins and line breaks of the poems the Statue of Buddha writes. She’s his muse, somehow, though he doesn’t believe in muses. One story, not about her, or himself, begins I met the cartographer at Elise’s party and immediately liked him, which made it hard, later, to sleep with his wife. And it’s true—the way the statue feels about her, though he’s never slept with her. That part is not true, but he knows her husband and wouldn’t want to cause him that kind of humiliation, although he finds it odd that his conscience would allow him to cause his own wife that kind of humiliation. There is one poem about her—about something she told him she wished she’d said.

She sits next to the Statue of Buddha at a poetry reading, and she shifts in her seat; her body is beautiful, and she moves it as if she knows it is beautiful, and the Statue of Buddha quietly jots down some notes that will allow him to finish a piece he began two years ago—a piece he started writing after talking to her about paper airplanes: She wondered what they were called before there were airplanes—how people visualized them, the way we see nose, fuselage, cockpit. What did they see?

The piece was not about paper airplanes. It was not about her.

Jessica The Statue of Buddha sees her walking down the hallway with Burke, talking, laughing, and thinks he’d like to be walking next to her. But then I’d have to listen to her, he thinks (she is brilliant and analytical and speaks rapidly, using words like systematicity and pedagogy in conversation), and walking next to her, he wouldn’t really be able to look at her, which is what he likes to do. He wants people to see him with her—to wish they were walking with her instead of him, just as he wishes he was with her instead of Burke—wishing he was making her laugh like that. If he were walking with her, the next time she saw him, she’d smile and in that moment—that glance—they’d share something that was only theirs.

3

Spittoon 2.3 Tinkler, Fragments…

Deb She has no husband anymore and the Statue of Buddha wonders if she looks at him, a husband, though someone else’s, so close—right next door—and thinks of trashcans being emptied, lawns being mown, air conditioners put into the basement. A paycheck untainted by the smell of courts and lawyers and bitterness and failure. The statue wonders if, because she has lost hers, she’s figured out how to keep another; if, because she lost hers, she can sense his wife letting him slip away right next door—if she knows how little it takes to make a spouse leave—to make a spouse stay. When she talks to him, he imagines she would tell his wife, watch out. keep him close, though as a sororial caution between women or a threat, he wouldn’t be sure.

It could be so easy, the transition, the statue thinks. A conversation on the sidewalk in front of their houses. A casual invitation for lunch or a glass of wine or a beer. It would be during the summer, when the statue is off. She looks like she loves the summer: sunlight and breeze in her long brown hair. The statue likes that she keeps it so long. Working in her garden in denim overalls, she is the spirit of summer. It wouldn’t take much, he thinks: a laugh; a touch. She could catch him.

Ellen The Statue of Buddha is the same age as her oldest son. She lets her guard down around him. I could take my husband and kill him, she says. For dying on me and leaving me in this. What she means by This is life alone. She says the Statue of Buddha is like her girlfriend and laughs. He’s not offended. He’s learned not to complain to her about his wife. She will not hear it. You’re lucky to be married, she says. Look at me. And she laughs again. When she hugs him it is the warmth of childhood.

Susan Somehow the Statue of Buddha has her clipboard. She must have lent it to his wife at an athletic association meeting. Her name is written in black marker across the top and when the statue sees it, he sees her, which helps him, because he only uses the clipboard, filled with disciplinary referrals, when things aren’t going well— when his students are unruly. He pictures her and wants to touch her hair.

4

Spittoon 2.3 Tinkler, Fragments…

Whenever she sees him, she makes a small circle with her palm on his back, between his shoulder blades, as if through this small friction she wants to generate a spark. It means more to him than it does to her: he wishes his wife would give him even this small contact.

It strikes him, talking to her, that she is the perfect height for him; she doesn’t have to lift her face, just her eyes. This makes him want to dance with her—to whisper something in her ear.

The S of her spine is graceful and organizes her body, which the statue would like to touch the way she touches him: a hand on the small of the back; a leaning forward to kiss her cheek, his lips accidentally brushing her hair.

Robyn The waitress saw that she was pregnant, but couldn’t see her miscarriages; couldn’t know how long she and her husband had been trying. About how, even though she knew she wanted a child, she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to lose one more.

The waitress talked about complications with her own pregnancies, which must have been ages ago. About the confluence of small and rare evils that almost cost her her life.

The Statue of Buddha knew that the waitress thought he was the husband, the father, and he let her, and it felt like that. There. In the diner, after a work-related obligation. The Statue of Buddha keeps that thought like a gift: that in one person’s version of the world, he belongs to her.

Teresa The way she looks at him is the way he wants to be looked at: a look like breath on his skin; a thought; the beginning of a story.

Melanie It’s summer. When she slides her hands under the hem of his shorts, and pushes the material away from his knee, the gesture seems so intimate. His leg between her hands, she moves it from side to side, puts a hand on his calf and straightens his knee, her other hand resting just above it. Does it hurt to bend it? The Statue of Buddha is forty. This will be the beginning of women touching his body, under his

5

Spittoon 2.3 Tinkler, Fragments…

clothes, in places only his wife had before. He would even have a female doctor for a time, who would call a nurse to stand in the room with them when she checked him for a hernia. She’d wear rubber gloves, the doctor, and a stern-face, as would the stocky, gray-haired nurse guarding against accusations of impropriety. It would not be as enjoyable as he would have imagined—his testicles in another woman’s hand.

The X-Ray technician, Melanie, positions his leg for three different exposures, asking questions about his knee, his life. Is that comfortable? Does it hurt when you walk? Where do you work? Is it as bad as everyone says? Have any big plans this summer? And they start talking about his children. Her hands are soft on his skin, and so is her voice. She’s been trained to put people at ease—to get them to relax around medical machinery and the smells associated with discomfort and indignities.

The knee would become his “bad knee;” an annoyance he would get used to. The Statue of Buddha would resent accumulating minor aches and symptoms of age and disrepair, but he would feel more and more at home with these women—nurses, technicians, therapists—who would lull and calm him, touch his body tenderly, ask, how does that feel?

Elise The Statue of Buddha wonders if he would have found her as attractive if she hadn’t told that story about having performed topless in a burlesque show. How there’s a trick to getting tassels to rotate in opposite directions. How, in one part of the show, she came out on stage wrapped in yards of fabric like a giant scarf, from her neck to her ankles, and did a sort of striptease by slowly unwinding. It doesn’t matter that she’s a lesbian. The Statue of Buddha feels that he could be in love with a lesbian (he’s not sure his wife isn’t one)—that if he were a woman, he’d be a lesbian—and not because he’s a man and can only imagine touching a woman’s body. The Statue of Buddha finds some small reason to fall in love with every woman he meets.

Quickly and guiltily he looks her body over as if part of him believes that’s what it’s there for—that because she was a dancer, she lives her life putting herself, her body, on display: a moving sculpture to be taken in, enjoyed. She’s flat-chested and angular: bony shoulders and pelvis. Still…

When he reads a story she wrote, he knows. He knows he could be in love with a lesbian—that if he were not a man, she could love him.

6

Spittoon 2.3

Three Jokes Stephen Thomas

Things A handsome man sees a beautiful girl at a party. He sits down on the floor across from her in a hallway. The man really wants sex. The beautiful girl wants sex a similar amount. Cultural things are at play. The handsome man touches the girl’s instep with the toe of his shoe. She is twenty-one. He is twenty. They know each other from work. They go back to his place. They drink extremely cheap red wine on his couch, they make out on the couch. Physical things are at play. The handsome man wants to fuck the beautiful girl right there on the couch. The beautiful girl spills wine on the floor and the handsome man says “Leave it” and they go into his bedroom and fuck several times.

All That Company Two lovebirds are nesting in bed after returning from the monument. Their faces are painted with tears.

“Listen,” says the female lovebird. “If you should find yourself without legs, and the soup of you is falling out, and the water level is rising, and you call out, and no one answers, and there is a moment when you still have control—will you do something for me?”

The bathtub’s tap is dripping onto the rim of the drain in the next room. It is an hour before dawn. The bed glows with their heat. On a nightstand beside the bed are scented candles, a tin of coconut oil, and two small black Logitech computer speakers, and on the floor beside the bed is a large black Logitech subwoofer.

7

Spittoon 2.3 Thomas, Three Jokes

Baby A young couple are talking about having a baby.

“I think I’d be a good father,” says the guy. “But I’m not sure that’s a good reason to have a child.”

“I can think of worse reasons,” says the girl, and her eyes are dewy and dreamy.

Four months later they’re seeing each other for the first time. The girl tells the guy that after they “broke” she didn’t get her period for over two months.

“What are you saying?” the guy says.

“Nothing, I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re telling me. Could you be crystal clear?”

Tears well up in the girl’s eyes. “It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway, would it?”

“Oh my God,” says the man. “It might have!”

There’s a panel in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis where the little girl is at her father’s office and suddenly they find out from the radio that Iraqi MIGs have bombed their city, and the very next panel shows the father running down the stairs into the street shouting “Let’s go home now! Your mother must be terrified.”

Let’s go home now. Your mother must be terrified.

8

Spittoon 2.3

This is a whirring, blurring instance of mania Trish Parsons

I’m sorry you haven’t got any legs to walk with and you can’t come meet me on the sidewalk heavy with the snow that we might lay in but, truth be told I know where your legs are.

You left them between pages in your bible, nestled in the gospels, where you were made to sin.

You left your legs in an attempt to live righteously, but, honey you still have your arms, you still have your hands, and oh sweetheart you still have your mouth you still have your tongue.

9

Spittoon 2.3

swoop Trish Parsons

This is the problem— we hardly come down from these hungry skies where listening is— a glass to the wall.

Static unrest is all that is heard and peering through spaces between doors reveals movements like syrup— conventionally uncompromising. (anxious breaths illuminate caught in the air like caught in the act) Stories have no grip— it’s hard to fit pieces together hard to see anything other than damaged lives— so far from this height.

We swoop down with heavy wings, hoping to mend

10

Spittoon 2.3 Parsons, swoop

(desperation despondency despair) We see what the dormouse sees burrowing in the ground is only blinding and slipping away behind clouds is only hiding but how is it that even pleasure is failure when you live on the ground?

11

Spittoon 2.3

LAUGHINGS OF THE MAD DOG Tendai Mwanaka

The critic’s fodder is such that you will hear them one after another saying that the writer should “show”, not “tell”, a story. I suppose it should then be known as storyshowing, not storytelling… How can one show his own death? I feel one should only have a ruminative mind, a mind seething with images, a mind made up of small kindling and a living conscience. Their story would play at the boundary of their self reflexive despairs. They would tell their stories: stories that are fantastic pointing fingers.... straight, strong, complex, a compass arrow pointing south. One has to tell a story as if it’s something that hasn’t been told before, as if it’s unknown, unacknowledged, unrecognised. The telling should be doors that open and converses.

The doors are the cul de sac meanings in the story. One has to tell a story from roads inaccessible, words unbidden, lines untold, juxtapositions untried....

Ok, I stop it! It could happen in those far-off strange lands but surely not in our beautiful green island. They should simply keep their cold wastelands to their own minds or to themselves. We will keep our own warm beautiful island garden. No, no, no. Never ever here, no, it will never happen here. “Not in our lifetimes, no.”

“Ha ha ha he he...”

There is a difficulty with those of the two-legged kind on how to start telling a story, especially if it’s a true life’s story... A collage of phrases strung together with bits and pieces of meaning, of their own life’s story, is not good enough.

“Not with our kind no, no..., no..., no...”

“Ha ha ha he he he...”

Everything, no matter what it is, we start by laughing it off. “Ha ha, ha.” And if you can show a story then telling a story is the laughter’s country. Laughing things off throws one into the fray. The risk is that it might touch the eye of the censor.

Telling a story becomes a problem here. Simply saying these things introduces consequences where there was none. I know that you think we are incapable of this..., of telling a story, that we don’t have the source of this jellied laughter in our beings, are we really incapable? You can’t even imagine a cat playing poker at that.

It doesn’t seem to go with you; does that seem to go with you? “Ha ha ha he he...”

12

Spittoon 2.3 Mwanaka, LAUGHINGS OF…

As if you should know how we laugh, how dogs laugh, especially how I laugh myself.

We even laugh at your funerals, after all, it’s none of our business.

“Ha ha ha he he ja urri-uii- ii..., so funny ha ha.” But how do humans laugh? One’s laughter, like misery for the humans, is seeing hopelessness and futility in their own laughter. Humans!!

So funny...ahh, so funny the world that I see in my glittering eyes. But can an eye see itself? How come I know that mine are glittering yet the muse have sung about how they never saw the whites of their own eyes..., and how about those that glitters? My mind seems to take over and give facts the colour yellow, the yellow glitter in facts, in eyes, too. That old fool could only cuss, “all that glitters is not gold.”

“Ha ha ha..., some glittering nonsense, those ones are so funny.”

So funny the world that’s been there since I started laughing, it’s so funny. I have started laughing and laughing since those two-legged creatures started making these sad..., abysmally sad episodes. “Have you ever seen anything so sad?”

“So...oh, so funny, ha ha ha he he ja?”

I used to think that they are so stupid, so incapable of the deeds they were now reveling in, with an insatiable hunger. A hunger to do again and again, a hunger..., “Ha ha ha he he ja..., such hunger!” As if they have gone crash, crash, crash..., and landing, imploding! They stand on their two legs and see what they are doing right now! Just look at it! Just look at that!

“Ha ha ha” “Tshki tshki tshki..., aha so sad.”

There is this one. He must be the head of this family..., and do I have to say my family? “No! No, no, no, never!”

Is there any need for us to swear, is there?

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Spittoon 2.3 Mwanaka, LAUGHINGS OF…

Never! Never ever! Never! I have never felt I belonged to this family. About him...; he is way past the age that runs and runs yet he seems to be young..., in fact an infant at that. I am not the one who is saying this. Please don’t assign it to me, because he said that himself; that he is a young-old man, or old-young man. I suppose it’s between these two..., old-young or young-old, man or maybe the two in one and the same place..., person..., maybe…

“Ha ha ha!”

It’s just as well it is word play or it could have driven the be-Jesus down my spine.

Just think of that... Young and old, Old and young. Young and old, old and young..., the rhyme of those contrasts..., polarities..., the madness too. Ahaa-a! Ok, to bugger with the shivers..., those be-Jesus, too. Let’s muse about the other side of this coin.

Well! Well! Well! It’s that Well..., with water creaking out from every pore to no particular direction at all..., those waters! Those waters..., in which we sense something..., otherworldly..., something, something..., something nether worldly.

“Ahaa..., ha ha ha.” To describe such a simple thing we could go to such lengths, but hell, come to think of it. “Ha ha ha.” Let’s think about it ahaa..., just awhile like an offish thought, after all we shouldn’t deny the intellect such offish pleasures.

It could really get to be true; that he was incapable of calling his mother’s name, always smiling and smiling, crying and crying, cooing and cooing like an infant that he was..., like the dove..., that he was, was he not? It’s even truer when one looks at the things that he does whenever he tries to show how little he has aged... As if by this show he would unconsciously be prolonging ageing or maybe his reckoning of the fact that he was old. Show in itself is protection! Protection, yes..., but from what? Why would we need protection? “Ha ha ha.”

Protecting one’s self from confronting the inevitable reality. “But is there a need for us to build high walls around ourselves.” Reality sometimes stinks..., pinpricks..., this bloody reality, the bloody hell it is.

See what the Berliners did to themselves, and they learned it the harder way, I should think so. The Israelites are at it, again, like the Germans, building their own walls, not only physical walls. Ok, let’s dibble a bit with the facts: It would cost them over 2 billion dollars at Qalandia which is the gateway between Ramallah and the East Jerusalem. The wall’s width is between 30 and 150 metres. These are just facts, but the deeper meaning is trying to know how it feels like, I mean the wall, how it smells, what it does to the one who is encased inside it and the one who is 14

Spittoon 2.3 Mwanaka, LAUGHINGS OF…

looking at it from the outside, what it does to your head. You may really need to walk through it to really understand it, but if you are Palestinian you need a permit to get through it to be in Jerusalem. There is also the emotional wall to talk of that both Israel and Palestine has to deal with. That physical wall also takes shape even in the streets of Westbank and Hebron, where some streets are exclusively reserved for Israelites. It also reminds me of the old Salisbury during UDI period, which was an adopted form of apartheid South Africa where in the First Street, blacks were not allowed to walk in. Apartheid South Africa had its own versions and to a lesser extent, it still has the walls in the streets of a free South Africa.

“I won’t talk of ‘in the minds of a free South Africa’, Ha ha ha, humans can always hide things that well, don’t they?”

Walls have always been enacted to protect humans from alien invasions; in fact they built walls to surround their fragile beings against the harsh affront of the reality. There is always too much self-indulgence in pity when they lock themselves inside those walls.

“Ha ha ha..., so many words leaping from this tiny shell..., such reasoning!”

Ok, I now agree, let’s ask the minds that be. And my anti-civil self silently protests; Don’t trust the experts, they know too little of everything else and too much of a particular thing.

“Ha ha ha he he ja.” And let’s give first preference to the Prophets of psychoanalysis. Freud! Freud! Freud! There was that time when man thought he was God, god, a demiurge…, and created his own godhood clustering... Jung, Laing, Marcuse.... I will resituate Freud’s Dora into this. I don’t know whether I have to buy into the repressed sexual fears that deprived that upper class Viennese girl of the use of her limbs (what limbs Freud?).

“Ha ha ha ha!” Limbs?! It all started with Freud and here is the landscape of his own thinking or psychosis. He believed that childhood sexual inhibitions influenced future human behaviour. Just that small statement, Freud, and I won’t allow you to repress me here; surely you can’t let me hang forever in your phallic stage. I would have to ask your grave, if anything, whether children, do feel, at all, sexual?

“Ha ha ha...” I have since told you that these fellas are quite dangerous. They should simply suffer the same fate that dogs have always suffered from..., death,

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Spittoon 2.3 Mwanaka, LAUGHINGS OF…

dying..., by hanging, maybe that. Ok Freud, I want to believe you, say had you talked about food..., maybe, maybe that this dog didn’t have enough food in its teens. That this dog had gone through harsh treatments when it was still a cub.

That this dog...; that, its mother had died when it was still young and that it had taken it the harder way and enclosed itself off. This stuff is believable Freud.

Believe me fellow, it is!

So we now have some reasons for building high walls around ourselves and wallow unchecked in this terrible inner field of self-disgust and recrimination? His fellows were even a lot more ingenious at building the walls that Freud had first enacted.

Jung discovered, “the unconscious as an essential source of creativity and mental archetypes as the source of myth, dream and art...” And, I couldn’t refrain from laughing at the Jungian inspired psychological dimensions...and the madness too.

The; Sensing-Intuiting, Thinking-Feeling, Extroversion-Introversion, JudgingPerceiving paired dimensions and madness. It’s a big stroll in the psychological park with a lazy afternoon sun red in the sky. “Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool. Yes sir, yes sir...”

You know that old old clang and old Marcuse intoned about, “sexual desires and instincts as impulses which influenced human society...” “Ha ha ha.” And just listen to the gospel of isolationism from Liang. “We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material worldmad even from an ideal standpoint, we can glimpse but not adapt. We are born into a world where alienation awaits us...” Oh no, no, no, drivel! Drizzle, drizzle..., those showers..., those effervescent March showers and the beautiful sun shining on my back. Day dazzle, night noon, shower-shine, and to listen to this cold-cold blustery front, aha...a, drizzle, drizzle, those showers shinning against the setting sun..., and raining upon this rolling world.

And, Liang continued, “...we are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system...”

“Ho, Liang, ho...ha ha ha.” And, he couldn’t stop. “...alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.” Phew! And, he called that, “The politics of experience”. I will not try to cross swords with you Liang for I am too small and you are, were, a Giant of your time. Only one question suffices, fella ...or two.

“Who, then, isn’t alienated, fella and why are you complaining? How about us dogs?”

Ok, fella, and I couldn’t help the third aiming..., and questioning, “How about this mad dog?”

16

Spittoon 2.3 Mwanaka, LAUGHINGS OF…

Someone is saying these are the laughings of a very mad dog? Maybe there are, but isn’t madness an extreme form of alienation and the mad of your world could even think that madness in method results in absolute genius because it is always a reservoir of surprises. But, by the way, who would say he is normal..., and then, I suppose, he isn’t, in any way, at all..., human; but, maybe a mad dog like this one.

And another take! Philosophers! Descartes! Russell! ..., and their own godhood clustering...

“Oh, no, no, before I get my teeth into this fleshy sensorial rich meat... but my top tooth is already sinking into the flesh of my lower lip...and on a lighter note, did you know that for all his genius, and in his lifetime, Freud couldn’t afford a pair of Suite for himself.”

“Ha ha ha hee...”

So, I welcome you all into the Cartesian fantasy. How did he know he existed? How do you know that you exist, yourself? Yes I am asking you! “Why these questions, in the first place, fella..., what was the motivation..., what are you trying to achieve?

Ok, I stop the questionings, but...” Let’s hear him out though.

“I, myself, did exist since I persuaded myself of something.” So, you see to this fella, it was only a matter of persuasion. Don’t suppose I am laughing because this is not a laughing matter, in effect, I am mind boggled. I should not have asked you how you, yourself, came to know that you were alive..., or that you existed to the boot.

The question, the answer to, defeats me. But, would you please stop whinnying about that stupid standard contrivance of you being the mirror of yourself. It’s too shallow and naive, after all, what mirror will you be using? So, Descartes persuaded himself and moved from France to Stockholm, Sweden, and there he lived until when he persuaded himself again to die in 1650. He was quite persuasive to provide such beautiful analogue to death...and to his life, too. His employer, Queen Christina of Sweden, liked to start her philosophy lessons at 5.am, and so, he caught the cold and died. But, how did he come to know that he was dead when he was dead? Perhaps he could have mused, I, myself, did die since I couldn’t wake up for another of those lessons with her royal highness... Is it royal meanness? But well, his grave speaks great volumes about his death...and his existence, too. Over six months of ice covered caps, 5.am in the morning, walking on top of this ice..., this ice mountain..., this icy feeling... No, no, no, ok. It’s all too wrong a premise and this story has gone dangerously so wrong. I will have to slow down the pace of my thoughts in order to think about the story..., and to think about my thoughts...

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Spittoon 2.3 Mwanaka, LAUGHINGS OF…

Come off it fella! Enough of this philosophical unreasonableness!

We were talking of that family which I never felt I belonged to. There is also a wife in this family but I wouldn’t talk about her. She is a barren desert. Ok, she has got the poise, the fantasy...pregnant beauty, and she swells. I have pulled aside a bit of her sheet cover, not to show her body here, but maybe to show the patterns on the sheet. But, the only problem is that she doesn’t participate! Yet she gets eaten from the inside. And it’s because she doesn’t have the magical arc... She is a blind spectator watching a game she has never heard of, never conjecture, in her stupid harebrained numbskull..., beautifully coiffures, and head. She is so boring and deathly uninteresting. Ahhh... but I am not interested in knowing what type of a creature that’s eating her. You should know that. Are you interested? But death is much more interesting...

Questionings! Fears! Danger..., a dangerous thing, death is. It is so profound a thing, and for all that but for whatever purpose..., or measure, I don’t know. Maybe that’s why we should be happy with death.., it’s the only way to realise fear creates freedom. Here we are talking about the seeds, a hazy beginning..., the future, and the start of a new life cycle. “Ha ha ha.”

I wonder why they all want to go to heaven but do not want to die yet death is such an interesting idea: DEATH! But is it laughable too? D…., I want to laugh so I would have to stick to this ageing, yet so young, vocal, articulated, too-degreed head of this family. Here, I am talking of a trunk-full of them..., them papers, them degrees... “Ha ha ha.” Some white harvests with a little bit of colour here and there giving essence to this idea..., and to this idea alone.

He gave birth to sons, not with this wife, not with the first one but maybe alone...And there were so cruel to him; they couldn’t even allow him out of the prison to go and burry his only kid who had died. So, in order to spite them, he decided to adopt the whole country as his sole child after fighting them out of his country.

“Ha ha ha he he ja...”

Just like that! His country... That’s another paradox but such a ridiculous one, but could this have been possible? As if one already believes it. Talking of possibilities

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Spittoon 2.3 Mwanaka, LAUGHINGS OF…

talking of terrifying possibilities..., and you are talking of collecting the sun into your palms. Do I hear you saying? “You are mad!” And my inhibited self protest silently, It can’t be done.

Really!

“Ha ha ha he he...aha.”

Full hands filled with that glittering beauty..., and would you try it, yourself? Ok, just thinking of it..., dreaming about it. Doesn’t much depend on what we dream in the secret of our secrecy? Wool gathering! Wool gathering through the unparalleled intricacies, nooks, crannies, storms, streams..., and labyrinth of this beautiful thought.

So engaging, so laughable too, isn’t it, ah.

But that’s the truth, and I would have to ignore those questionings forming on the unzipped surface of my brains. I would have to say it’s the truth he caused to exist, for moderation’s sake, fellas. Sons he looked after, afforded some kind of enlightenment, and cultured them in the truly traditional way. I said it is the truth he caused to exist. And they were such a happy family; it’s also a truth he caused to exist. I would have to allow for that too!

It now gets interesting. When those sons came off age they started being themselves and thus they started living up to what they believed in. I personally don’t see anything laughable about that, do you..., yourself, I mean, as long as they maintained their identities and distinctiveness? After all, assertiveness needs no crashing but channeling. It needs fostering delicately! It can lead to fulfillment. It can lead to creation. It can lead to life and if it’s tempered with, it can lead to the precipitous destroyer mentality. Assertiveness is an every minute growth..., every day growth..., every age growth..., every generation growth; it’s like a cancerous growth. It is naïve and hypocritical to suppose that one could prevent such a growth.

“Ha ha ha he he...”

He is a fool. He has the soldier’s mentality. He couldn’t, for his life, accommodate this new extremity..., which was just an adjacent difference. Because if he were to 19

Spittoon 2.3 Mwanaka, LAUGHINGS OF…

accommodate it, it could mean those upstart youngsters were discarding to the winds of change what he had come to think of as the truth. Ok, this time I would have to delve in. I would have to use my imagination and the tools of fiction to invent my own truths here.

What is the truth? What really is the truth? “Ha ha ha....” I would have to let the truth writes itself then, not the other way around. As if I should know what criteria one could have used! From what perspective would one observe and pronounce something as the truth? What really is the truth? Doesn’t the truth have a feminine character, like giving birth? Questions! Questions! Questions! “Ha ha ha...” They explode! But can the truth be expressed in words? Words! Words! Words! “Ha ha ha...” Maybe that’s the key. Words are a hunger to know the truth. Words name that which didn’t have a name. Words scatter things into the telling like the wind to the sea’s salt. Words endow power. Power! Power! Power! “Ha ha ha...” Power begets responsibilities. Maybe that’s the truth really..., the irrationalities and irresponsibility of the powerful, but what do words achieve? Confusions! Disguises!

Vagaries! Aha! And everything gets pretty incomprehensible..., maybe unknown, maybe that’s the truth exactly...the unknown.

But it is our minds that help us in creating the truth that we really want to embrace. “Ha ha ha..., ha ha ha- a..., ha ha ha..., he he ja.” But what is the truth, really? Dillydallying with Pilate’s right to questioning, once again. Ok, I give up!

Please would you offer me a dishful of water so that I could bath my paws?

“Ha ha ha...”

Pilate could built walls to protect himself from the truth..., the reality of his time, even though the mountains were singing a different tune altogether, Pilate ignored them..., the songs of those mountains..., aha-a, those songs...uu...u. I won’t rein in my imaginations no, no, never! Maybe he thought that since they were still young they didn’t have to have their own opinions, after all they were his blood and bones so they had to exude the same inner inspirations as his. But, is genesis effective from the inside-out or outside-in, how about the environment...and the artefacts that surround us? Is it that which we can take inside which moulds us, or it is that which we reject, or it’s the workings of polarities on each other? How about our imaginations, fantasies, dreams, aspirations..., inspirations or is it beyond all these archetypal promptings. But, aren’t we tool, blood and flesh, bones and will..., and we only need the word that speaks in us! Words! Words! Words! “Ha ha ha...” How is it that my teeth are already biting into my own words? So, once more, into that old old swallow...and that old refrain again!

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Spittoon 2.3 Mwanaka, LAUGHINGS OF…

“Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool...” “Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.”

“One for my master, one for my Momma, one for the little boy who lives down the lane.”

In the beginning there was a song and that song had words..., and with the guidance of that song's words we grew, we evolved, we separated. “Ha ha ha...” To hell with the above self-hypnosis for he has the final say on the kind of destiny they had to pursue. “Ha ha ha...”

It’s just that same old line again..., the same old reasoning..., those same old justifications. I started laughing at this family-some crazy lot because whatever they were doing booted the hell out of me..., all the way, and back. “Ha ha ha...” I said all the way and back, “ha.” I really had to laugh.

Not to be outdone, those young stupid opinionated ones stood by what they thought was the right thing to do. To them, there was no reason, not even a thinly plausible one they had to be puppies to their father, especially on something they had to decide on their own. Isn’t that which we are forbidden to do always so irresistible?

We do things; in fact, we badly want to do them because someone is saying that we mustn’t do them. Maybe it’s this drive to prove these people wrong. Oftener than not we succeed where nothing else has succeeded before and thus we create new expectations for the future generations. Does this story sounds mighty familiar with what you have heard of before..., maybe..., maybe it’s the same story that is making me laugh my lungs out, blowing them refreshingly out. Maybe it’s the same story that is emerging from the crucible of specific political struggles. No? Maybe it’s the same story emanating from all these political invectives.

“Ha ha ha...”

The father, not to give an inch to the wishes of his blood and bones..., and there goes the madness. Have you ever seen anything so funny?

“Ha ha ha he he ja urri..., ha.”

He started killing his own children as if it really were that delicious an activity, like some predator on a mission not because he was hungry. Was he on a mission as such or had he gone the maddening way? He kills because he hates it. He kills 21

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because he loves it. He kills because he just breathes it. It’s not a matter of consumption rather it is an act of war, not survival, no, no. He knew he either had to let them do whatever they wanted in his body, or alternatively, he had to eat them, and by so doing, eating himself in the insides.

He is now an anti-thesis to the actual function of the predator. There is only a voice commanding him; chomp, lift, eat, eat, and it’s his own voice. He is a vulture eating its own flesh, founding a garden of silence. A sad anxiety, insanity, adrenalin addiction, desire for power..., a desire for personal power..., a desire to equalize everything on a certain basic level plain and formulae. There is no mercy; a world revived by the mercy of his breath, no, there is no mercy. He just couldn’t join them but rather swallow them like some mad chicken cocking open its own eggs and suckling the juice. It’s his blood and bones, and the mad chicken’s juice as well, and who the hell has the right to question him about that or on a lighter note, the chicken about its own eggs?

All right, let’s look at it this way; how could one so educated, young yet old, or is it, old yet young..., wise, educated, too degreed, man, listen to his children who still have tender milky noses? They should simply shut up! How on God’s green beautiful land could such a thing be heard of..., how so? Ok, it could happen in those far off strange lands but surely not in our beautiful green island. They should simply keep their cold wastelands in their own minds or to themselves, and we would keep our own warm beautiful island garden to ourselves.

No, no, no. Never ever here, no, it will never happen here.

“Not in our life time.”

Surely he doesn’t have to vow by his mother’s name. He would surely invoke her and he would do that and you know it’s a name that he would call forth with awful associations. He had promised us, never again, to call her forth from her place of eternal banishment. Never again to inflict that kind of pain on the sea’s weeds..., not his mother again, never! But, he still invokes her. And it doesn’t matter that his mother was white when he was black.... No, it doesn’t.

He is now an aberration..., a brutal monstrosity... He is inhuman! But, it’s all an abomination to him...and a beautiful thing to him, too. There; he slaughters another one and another, and another... “Ha ha ha...”

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He is deaf! Deaf to the moaning cries of those he kills. Deaf to the mourning cries his henchman kills. Deaf to the silent breathings of a deviated mind and deaf to what his bitterness has become. Deaf to the anathema he has re-created. He doesn’t need to listen and hear..., why would he hear it? His mother never listened to anyone and the whole country had to go to war. He doesn’t even have to hurt himself by remembering. Oh, how unutterably hurtful it is to remember. Oh, how dangerous it is to listen. Oh, how unutterably beautiful it is not to think. He has made a pilgrimage into his innermost world. He doesn’t want to get out anymore because it’s inside where he can only find freedom. He is now eternally trapped in his own dream state.

Oh, by the way, how many will be left by the time he is through..., considering that he is still so young..., so very, very young. It’s so sad.

“Ha ha ha he he ahaa...aa, ha ha ha he he ja...uuu.u.

So very funny?

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Spittoon 2.3

Instances of Graciella Tabling Ceviche Gregg Murray

There were of course several before the dish was discontinued. In the first a neoclassically-trained pianist was “up there” obliterating the fourth genre while Graciella processed the order. For certain comfortable dead I shall not disclose specifics. Sufficient I hope to say that revenge is not always best served cold.

Another time the ceviche itself lacked comportment. Not a few of the guests were beset by its foul language and lack of visible remorse. Graciella was thrice interrupted in her perorations of apology by guests who were to quote a line cook “bat shit crazy.” I am loath to discuss the so-called “Meal of Lamentation.” Round after round was stirred up in the kitchen with haste. The sous-chef was recalcitrant when aggressively second-guessed about his “ceviche-infused tour.” Graciella displayed formidable acrobatics in delivering the fare. She was fortunate to have use of all eight arms as she floated through the watery expanse. A gargling pallor filled the rooms. But enough of this. There were many startling instances and I haven’t the time to enumerate. Perhaps most interesting of all in the final analysis is that customers demanded in no uncertain terms that ceviche be put back on the menu immediately.

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Spittoon 2.3

When the Ceviche Was Off Gregg Murray

It wasn't lit as sparsely as you think. The moon's hernia not as painful as it lurched like Quasimodo through the poplars on the horizon line. Inside, the restaurant did not heave collective collapses in expectation. The pallor of the waitstaff's manner, as they passed the heaping legions back to be scraped and washed, not as sickly, not as sullen. I'll allow that the patrons' weary faces showed disappointment and disillusionment, but showed it to a lesser degree than what you describe in this account. The ceviche, it is true, was not up to, didn't even vaguely approach, "snuff."

Not by the house standards. But the proverbial band played on. And Graciella, full of both resource and savage need, did indeed take to the bagpipes for whatever cumshaw she could scrape, assaulting them with "squalor and misuse," as you have written. Yet here you overstate, miss a generous target. In the music, in its pining heart, you can hear the renaissance of ceviche from its dungeon of ash, hear how it regains its manic composure. Soon it will flit by the eyes of the many-sided moon.

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Spittoon 2.3

Parable of the Birdcages Gregg Murray

He set the stacks of Franklins in the three wiry birdcages and set the three wiry birdcages on the lemon Chesterfield. He crossed his arms and looked thoughtfully at an incorrect timepiece in an adjacent room. A black fedora slipped into his eyes, smudging the gentle sweat along the line of his messy bangs. But for that, and a pair of comfortable house shoes, he was naked. He placed a telephone call to an elderly inmate and wrote an enigmatic poem before pushing the rattling couch into highway traffic. This is that poem, but I am not that man.

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Spittoon 2.3

Route 1 Tiffany Morris

The bus stopped in front of a church I'd only visited twice. It was the one that my boyfriend, the churchgoer, had stopped attending a few years ago, citing vague reasons related to politics. I liked it because it was pretty on the outside, all stone and stone-faced statues of saints. The inside was dusty and moody, which I figured was a necessary aspect of piety. It didn't strike me as a particularly wedding-sought building, but today, outside, a blonde bride was beaming as she rested her head on the groom's shoulders. Her unfaded summer tan offset the glow of her dress, which hung like frosting tiers off her thin frame. From the sidewalk, little boys on their way home from school watched the new couple, looking skeptical. Their thoughts must have been far from the idea of the future, concerned only with the weekend's promise of turkey, pumpkin pie, and a rainbow pile of cash from good-natured relatives.

A silver-haired man walked past them and stepped aboard the bus. He gestured to the wedding spectacle and said, "another one bites the dust." The bus driver chuckled as he closed the doors. I pulled my book-heavy purse onto my lap. He glanced at the seat next to me but didn't sit. Fine, then, I thought, putting my purse back down. His right hand grasped a grocery bag full of half-dead flowers. I tried to identify the type, but could only see fading raspberry petals peeking out from the beige plastic.

"Next woman I marry," he said to the driver, "is going to be a woman I hate. Then I'm going to buy her a house." fig 1.1: He, archetypal male, drinking beer in his toolshed. His sexually repressed wife weeding the garden with a little too much force.

Wiping sweat off her face with dirty-gloved arms. The smiles in their wedding photos strained. Lucky girl.

To my left, an older lady's voice creaked. "Jody," she said, "that isn't what this is about." Her hair was dyed red with what could only be cheap dye. Probably, I realized, the same dye I use. Ah, humility.

I gazed past the shoulder of the bus driver, peering through the windshield. For a moment, I didn't recognize where we were. My fingers tingled with excitement, as if the bus had somehow routed itself to another city in those few seconds. The French call it depaysement. If there were an English word, I'd insert it __________ (there).

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Spittoon 2.3 Morris, Route 1

"Jody, it's not a big deal," the woman with red hair barked.

"No big deal," said the driver to the silver haired man, almost at the same time. I pictured old sliding weight scales, wondering when these situations would tip into the territory of urgency. I glanced across the aisle. A blonde middle-aged woman was staring at me, her expression blank. She had been doing that from the moment I stepped on, and I had been consciously averting eye contact with her. Damn it. I looked at the person next to her, a fashionable girl, busying herself with texting.

"It's different if it's real, true love," said the bus driver to the silver-haired man. The bus crossed the intersection. Yeah, I thought, I guess that's always the difference.

Red was getting increasingly upset. "Yeah, and what if I get evicted, Jody? Where will I live? Will you give me a home? No, you won't." fig 2.1: Red, going up to Jody's apartment with her belongings in garbage bags. The slam of Jody's door echoing through the hallway. The other people in my section stared ahead, not shifting in their seats in irritation or discomfort. I did. I kept listening, wondering if Jody really was going to talk to Amanda in 9C to confirm that Red couldn't legally give her a key. fig 2.2: Jody, walking angrily up to the apartment. Harsh toned words with the building manager. Jody seemed like the kind of woman that would have "words" with someone, I decided. fig 2.3: Jody, being lied to because Red knew that she would steal things from her apartment if she had the key. That Jody. The Goofus to everyone's Gallant.

The silver-haired man steadied himself as the bus pulled up to his stop. The bus driver said, in parting, "That's what they say about love, you have to see through the person and still like the view." I liked the idea of literally transparent people.

Fig 1.3: Invisible people with intentions scrawled in white ink. Seeing plains and fields and quiet city neighborhoods through the windshields of their skin. I tried to remember the vistas I had seen in former lovers, figuring out how I might have mapped bus routes through sidelong glances and furrowed brows. I would have to map all those curbs I walked like tightropes. Red angrily shut her phone. The silver-haired man stepped off and waved from the sidewalk. The fashionable girl said into her phone that she was leaving for Toronto tomorrow afternoon, so she couldn't make it. Fig 3.1: Departures and arrivals thrown up on digital screens like graffiti. Landing into an axis of amber lights. I'd only been to Toronto once, but I felt the sharpness of missing it. If I had been able to see the view through someone there, I'd have saved myself a few weeks of aggravation and $600 in return airfare.

I pulled the string six stops early to get to the nearest convenience store. The bus lurched to accommodate my stop. I walked off, making sure to thank the driver.

Outside, the sidewalks were familiar, verifying that I had not left the city. The 28

Spittoon 2.3 Morris, Route 1

close-to-winter wind was cold as it danced through my hair. The dyed-red strands blew in front of my face as I watched the bus pull out and drive past me. I glanced into the window, where the now-quiet silhouettes of people were left with the problems of what love looks like and what makes something a big deal.

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Spittoon 2.3

Special Section: Featuring Art by Eleanor Leonne Bennett

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Spittoon 2.3

Artist Statement Eleanor Leonne Bennett

I take a great deal of my images close to home. The girl under the ice in emerging is a self-portrait, and I was freezing at the end of taking the photos. I had made the water run over the twigs for about three days before climbing inside to take pictures. I had to make sure my camera wasn’t getting soaked, which was difficult, seeing as the walls around me were created from water.

Feather on bone was a recreation of an image I had taken two years previously. It is mixed media, created from the remains of a fire and a feather, about a reincarnation of energies and a lost property becoming positive in its death.

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emerging Digital photograph.

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ice Digital photograph.

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feather on bone Mixed media, digital photograph.

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pathways Mixed media, digital photograph.

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Spittoon 2.3

Too Tough for Tetherball Jeff Mark

I was eleven or twelve the first time I went to summer camp alone. I remember a tetherball court by the parking lot where the boys would gather each morning to slap an orange ball around the loosely-rooted metal pole until its string coiled taut and the game was won. I was a boy, so I was there too. But I didn’t play. I didn’t violently slap the ball in any clockwise or otherwise direction; I watched. And of course, there was this one kid who always won. The king of the tetherball court.

The alpha ball-beater, who would stifle any challenger with wild swings that would send the ball in a jutting diagonal over his opponent’s head, or bound it with velocity straight at their face. All bloody noses resulted in an unobstructed whirlwind of his spinning ball until he won. His morning camp athletic maelstrom.

And not a one of us said it, but we admired his game. We idolized him, a mini Michael Jordan, a bronze statue outside of his home court with veined realistic arms and vacant space in the carved out bronze pupils of his eyes.

Our admiration of him increased as one by one, each boy played, and each boy fell.

It was Romanesque; he was a Gladiator.

Okay.

I know my borderline sexual admiration of a probable block-bully’s tetherball game is as fantastical as it is outrageous, but you have to understand, in a few years, I wouldn’t be able to fit into the shoes I was then wearing; and this is important in a guy’s life, whether they want to admit it or not. (Every guy has a tetherball hero who creeps up behind him, fakes a punch, and makes him flinch. It’s the reason we pack into gyms and pretend to not look in the mirrors).

I was the only kid at camp who didn’t challenge him. I didn’t think I was tough enough for tetherball. This is perhaps something I should look into; but at the time, rather than take my chances at a broken nose or shame in dodging his cyclonic ball’s orbit, I pretended I was his manager. There, in the grass, watching, I pretended that I represented him. The alpha male’s omega escort. In my imagination, I sat there with a briefcase protecting professional contracts and exercise regiments. In my daydreams, as the thudding echo of air-filled rubber pounded from his fist, I imagined him accepting awards, turning tear-filled, to me.

Hugging me. Thanking me for my guidance over all those years. I was his caddy, his supportive wife. I’d like to thank God, and Jeff, he said, from the highest platform with a gold metal tapping against his segmented abs. I was in the back of every photo, the same proud fatherly, managerial, spousal, brotherly, best-friendly, he-couldn’t-have-done-it-without-me-and-he-knows-it smile on my black and white 36

Spittoon 2.3 Mark, Too Tough for…

red darkroom developed face. I was at the table of press conferences; I held him back when a contender and he almost came to blows after a sly comment by the soon-to-fall beta. I was Rocky’s Mickey. Bruce Wayne’s Alfred. Milli’s Vanilli. I was the good-game pat on the ass. The quintessential proud parent. I was an eleven or twelve year old moron.

And we never spoke: Alpha and I.

At the camp, there were counselors in their late teens who, because of religious predisposition, parental persuasion, or court recommendation, watched over the campers and assisted them in the array of activities on schedule each day. Melody’s reason for being there had to be the latter. She was too hot to be anything but bad.

Prototypical in the most serious of senses, Melody inspired Pavlovian learned behavioral response from all of the chaps in attendance of the camp that summer.

The girls, generally, thought she was a bitch.

She was blond. Acme bought blond. Her straight damaged hair ran smoothly down her back to her couch-cushion seventeen-year-old ass; her bangs curved and molded like a hairspray-hardened wave over her forehead to tip touch her plucked perfect eyebrows.

Her jean shorts gave us all sighs for thighs.

Her developing bosom our nightly bunk bed burdens.

Her daily newly colored nails our tortured cat o’ nine tails.

Melody.

Christ.

I wonder what she’s up to now.

That year at the camp we were to take a field trip to Washington D.C. The elaborate Capital, rich with its free museums and capital crimes. Back then, DC was an urban wasteland, largely forgotten by fanny-packed imperialists sun-soaked on the National Mall. Even more calamitous than rounding up and shipping a hundred kids to Washington, was the camp’s concept of how each camper would get to choose his chaperone.

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Spittoon 2.3 Mark, Too Tough for…

A foot race.

Strewn throughout the adjacent woods like so many church-going, or parentdemanding, or judge-gaveling hormone enriched sown seeds, the counselors sat awaiting their sprinting little minions, who would join their group if they were fast enough.

The boys all lined up, clenched their butt-cheeks, and stared into the woods at the path that Melody had just walked down with Mayday, a male counselor with a woodsman’s beard and halitosis. Every boy, tough or not, intro or extraverted, pancake fat or welfare skinny, thought of nothing more than to run as fast as God inspired, to get to Melody and join her majesty on the field trip. We were all aimed that way. Noses running. Hearts beating. Blood flowing into every available open space. To the death, we were racing for her. Melody.

Looking around, I noticed that all the boys were sizing each other up but avoiding eye contact. Although it was commonly understood that Melody was the concubine of our collective desire, the District’s Columbian New World, if you like, not a one of us wanted to outwardly express the sacrifice of limb we’d be willing to give in order to be in Melody’s field trip group. The least manly thing you could admit to was admitting the manly things you’d like to do with a hot girl. So we all played it cool.

But when that gun went off, there was a violence not written about in the most graphic Civil-War-sawing-a-leg-off-without-anesthesia accounts. The boys were at each other, scratching, pushing, punching, tripping; but all, running. Running with heads tilted back, whistled hysterics emanating from every throat. Arms pushing through the vacant air like breast-stroke swimmers hoping for purported propulsion. Dust kicked up in great nebula. The ground shook. Behind us, the girl campers all stood watching, a little sad.

Testosterone with great velocity, we boys were African gazelles bounding across the plain to be devoured by our lioness. Each with the cry in our throats: eat me first.

And I was in front.

My ridiculous sprint perhaps just minimally more haphazard than the next fellow, I bounded along, and they bounded behind. With an unobstructed view of the entrance to the wood, and Melody beyond, in front of me, I dared not look back at the carnage. I dared not peak at the tangle of boys fighting to get to me. It was my turn to be on the pedestal. I was Darwin’s latest evolution, a fish jumped and running. I was the envy of every boy at the camp and I was the happiest I’d ever been.

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Spittoon 2.3 Mark, Too Tough for…

Entering the woods, having secured a sizeable distance between myself and the pack, I could see the pavilion ahead where Melody and Mayday sat, looking as if they’d been interrupted, on a picnic table. And between me and her were strides of space receding to zero.

Suddenly, my mind was at the Lincoln Memorial; my arm was around the small of her back and hers balanced comfortably on my shoulder; we gazed at Honest Abe as indifferent as if we were looking at the heads-side of a penny. We were at the Smithsonian, laughing at the phallic space shuttles and letting the freeze-dried space ice cream dissolve on our tongues. At the White House, we asked tourists who spoke foreign languages to take our picture through pantomime. I let her cry on my shoulder at the Vietnam Memorial and we raced wet together in the Reflecting Pool, scaring away the ducks as we splashed by. In my mind, while the rushing green trees blurred by, I thought the DC grass as soft as cotton, as Melody and I lay together, her chemically stiff hair itching against my cheek.

Back in the foreground, my sweaty sternum darkening the cotton of my shirt in a vertical line, I was ten strides from Melody when we made eye contact. Her blue eyes and mine. The smallest distance between two points being the courage enough to prove distance small. She looked right at me, for the very first time.

And I fell.

Purposefully.

Face first face plant into the tangle of wooded roots across the forest floor. That one look, and I comprehended something for a fleeting moment that I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand: that a lot of girls are a pain in the ass, but some wield great power. Some can dictate your motivations. Some, once there, never leave your mind. Some make your blood run cold. Melody’s blue stare and I was a flopper; I took a big old dramatic dive. There’s no way I could run up to her first.

The stampede approached me, the vibrations of their menace emphasized by their recognition that I was down, the race leader after all laps spun out and down.

I managed to get up after only a few passed me, and knowing I had not completely squandered my chances with Melody, in recognizing the mortal foolishness of my intentionally errant footfall, I ran on the rest of the way, the final ten strides to my faux-bride. There, she didn’t even pay attention to the other boys who had got there first, nor to those who were catching up. Her clipboard still empty of names, she leaned down to me, looked at my scraped palms and sung spring-sweetly, “Jeff, are you okay?”

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Spittoon 2.3 Mark, Too Tough for…

And I said, “Yes. I want to go with Mayday.”

I don’t know why. But every man every where understands.

Mayday turned to me and smiled, his teeth millimeter thick with yellow-green film, and said, “Cool.”

In Washington, I walked around with Beard-Need-Breathmint, while the Tetherball Hero and his fastest friends got to peek at Melody’s ass while she gawked up at the Washington Monument.

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Spittoon 2.3

from “Cadae: The Pi Poems” Tony Leuzzi

Of course not said the militant mouse: ambivalence is a door to destruction if not the— and the only thing worse than that would be decadence.

Of course not said the subtle cat for he agreed or disagreed and might have made his feelings clear but yawned with one eye closed, then slept.

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Augur of Surfaces Brent House

Hold onto midnight & nothing except rain will come down in clean white sheets smelling of pine needles & whatever happens to be blooming in the understory of saw palmetto wiregrass & the awn leans toward curves established long ago with peregrinations of carts horses staggering upon the dimness within the surface tension the loam broken between the ruts driven through these hills in a long black night wind wail the night alone & lonesome eternity near & in a crowd sheds not a tear for late at night the north wind blows redemption south toward the darkness of nevertheless there is considerable interchange between pain & explanation in the acts in the word wood traces lineage & sooner or later God is gonna cut sharp shimmering darkness leaves the fault bound by gravel & the foundation of a bed be lost in a profusion of blood & desire an accumulation of water pulling under the darkness splattering depletion under treadbare sin.

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Water Music José Luis Gutiérrez

And so the rain becomes this refrain for voices now silent that goes shhh.

The heuristics of weather loom green’s vertical acres.

A mind’s wildering enterprise is how water high-fives other water in its descent and improvises a fugue ocean, how a drab chorus of scrubjays finds and hones the hidden diatonic from twigs, bottle caps and the larval scraps.

This sight of robins spearing wormholes reminds me how local an occurrence terror can be.

Sometimes it’s hard to live and not feel besieged by breath, by the air we inhabit into blood.

This place we’ve learned to call home where a timeless rain is falling.

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Clothes Encounters Jewel Beth Davis

I look into the three-way mirror at Macy’s and my eyes widen. My beautiful body that I work so hard to keep in shape has betrayed me. I say aloud, “There’s a small person living in my stomach.” It’s humorous but not really. I am now that person in the movie “Alien” who had an entire person inhabiting his abdominal cavity.

I’m looking for a dress for my niece Anna’s Bat Mitzvah. I try on a black silk strapless that two years ago would have looked breathtaking. Now, my stomach looks like I’ve been gestating for six months. I’d wanted to become pregnant for twenty-five years and never had. Now, I look as though I am, without the kid bonus.

Why has my body suddenly taken on this strange shape?

I try on a lovely blue satin form-fitting column dress, another style that always flattered me as my curvy silhouette looked great in clothes that hugged it. Now, I resemble a stuffed blue sausage with a protruding growth.

I’d danced ballet and jazz most of my life and maintained a slender, muscular figure, even up to the age of fifty. Now, in my mid fifties, it’s all still there. I’m still working it. Except for one thing. My stomach.

I try on six more dresses at Macy’s, each more unflattering than the last. I keep looking in the mirror thinking it’s a hoax, that if I look enough times, this anomaly will disappear. I’d been counting calories for the last three months. I should be losing a pound a week. Nothing. I eat NO junk food. I don’t drink. Still, I’ve been stuck at 152-154 pounds for a year. Last year I was 142-146 lbs. What’s the deal? I should be a cool 130-135 pounds.

Listen to me, Body! You’re a freaking digestive Benedict Arnold! You are not behaving in a logical or just manner. Why don’t you just leave? No one wants you here. Well, that’s a bit exaggerated but the stomach has to go.

I purchased Spanx foundation garments for my MFA graduation in January. I’ll have to root those out before I pack for the Bat Mitzvah in Atlanta. Foundation garments. What a load of hooey that is. They’re girdles. Why can’t people just be direct? You have a huge stomach. You need a girdle.

“Is everything all right in there? Do you need anything?” the sales woman calls through the door.

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Spittoon 2.3 Davis, Clothes Encounters

I must have been voicing some comments out loud. I’m getting more unbalanced every day. Yesterday, I lost my balance, tripped over my own feet and fell hands first onto a bunch of pebbles and the center of my palms bled. One of my students asked me if the marks were stigmata.

“Fine. Just fine,” I respond in my sanest voice, smiling into the door. “Be out in a minute.”

“Take your time,” the saleswoman replies.

Bite me.

I re-try two of the dresses. Both are empire waists; both are floaty. One is white with a black silky tie encircling the bodice and falling straight down the front. The other is similar but is black with gold and silver flocked velvet. They are beautiful dresses that don’t look great on me. Despite that, they look better than anything else I’ve tried on. Macy’s is having an 80% off sale and they’re only $20 each so I buy them both. If, in some parallel universe, I lose even five pounds, they’ll both look great.

This shouldn’t be happening to me. It should be happening to all those people who eat loads of lard-covered fries, greasy burgers, chips and Dunkin Donuts mochaccinos with donut sticks. Why must my body be treasonous just because I’m over fifty? And what’s this about a stress hormone Cortisol? I don’t feel bad enough already but now I have to feel guilty about having too much stress, which causes the bulging around my middle. That’s insane. And I have to worry about this subcutaneous abdominal fat causing heart attacks and cancer.

My gynecologist told me that she didn’t lose her stomach until she came off the antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. She’d had a really bad marriage and even worse divorce so she had to take psychotropic medication. But now she’s better so she stopped taking it and her stomach flattened right out. Well, goodie for her. I can’t come off my anti-depressant. The last ten years on a new medication have been the first time I’ve ever felt capable of handling the stresses of everyday life. I feel balanced and I’m not plunging myself back into a deep depression to lose my stomach.

A few days after my shopping battle, I sit at my friends Marsha and Ben’s dinner table. Our eating has slowed and I talk about this story I’m working on.

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Spittoon 2.3 Davis, Clothes Encounters

“So why am I writing about my stomach? Why do I envision an alien living in there?

Why does it bother me so much?” I say to anyone who will listen. I spoon more chicken chow mein onto my plate and pickup my chopsticks.

Marsha’s mom, Evelyn, is ninety-seven. She eats silently, not participating in the mealtime repartee. Her wrinkled face falls in soft folds to her chin. She’s been experiencing some memory loss and it’s difficult to know if she is actually mentally present. Then, she says something softly.

“What? What did you just say?”

“Nothing,” she says. “It’s not important.”

But I know it is, so I hoch at her until she gives.

“I said that it’s important because Marsha and I had babies in our stomachs but you never used it for what it was meant.” And she just sits there in her chair, a small grey haired woman, her face a blank slate.

There it is. So simple.

I am so bothered by the way my stomach looks because I’ve never had a child. The end. Finis. What more is there to say?

“But I’m probably not right,” Evelyn says.

“No! You’re right!” I’ve been screwing around among the trees while Evelyn, though she can’t remember who I am from visit to visit, identifies the forest.

I feel betrayed, by my body, by my age, by science, by society, and especially by the marketing mavens of this country. They’re the ones, men mostly, who created Cortisol, liposuction, Spanx, size zero clothing and the diet industry. I don’t care what the commercials show, I bet Jenny Craig is really a man.

We know too much. That’s the real problem. About science, exercise, medication, health issues, weight loss, plastic surgery, and psychology. About everything. All this information isn’t doing us any good. And it’s making me even crazier than before. So we’re living much longer but with fatter stomachs, heart attacks, strokes, wrinkles, fake boobs, cancer, and best of all, Alzheimer’s and HIV. The truth is, I feel betrayed by my own choices and lack of them. By the child that never came to me. Where are you little soul? Why have you stayed away? This feels 46

Spittoon 2.3 Davis, Clothes Encounters

too empty for me to look the way I do. How can my stomach be so filled up with nothing in it?

What I still want to know is, who is the alien being in my stomach and how do I give birth?

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Spittoon 2.3

The Process Will Cordeiro

“You are the inner life which you depict,” the director from Germany had said, and then for weeks said little else while we observed him smoke. The actors by mutual arrangement carried on, rehearsing an awkward adaptation of Der Process, until off-book. When they’d begun to sleepwalk through their lines, the director rushed on stage: “At each repetition you must choose anew the gestures you compose.” It was understood my role as understudy was simply to take notes and observe, preparing to inhabit the character of K., but to live as if within the actor’s skin as well, so that no one could distinguish us apart. Therefore, I shadowed the actor to his house one day, studying the careless method he used to hang his ties and rumple his bespoken clothes, his pose of splaying on the couch to clip his nails, the shrill baby-voice he used with his African grey parrot. The bird, I guessed, would become someone’s inheritance one day: perhaps destined to a niece in Romania or Belorussia who would puzzle at its vocabulary. The actor let it eat a seed-mix with blue raisins and rosehips off his tongue. I began to wear double-breasted suits and part my hair. My eyesight blurred with a slight astigmatism until I, too, required glasses.

Rehearsals went on and on, each one longer than the last. When the actors demanded to know the date opening night was scheduled, the director said, “We act for ourselves alone. The characters will outlive any definition you might impose.

Our role is to interpret, endlessly to interpret.” The actors grumbled in the green room that no critical moment would arrive, no applause or condemning judgments.

I seduced the actor’s girlfriend at a bar, and we made love. She was surprised to find that my apartment had the same décor as his. “My boyfriend,” she admitted, “hasn’t been himself lately; he’s been working way too hard. I’ve barely seen him. I think you’re more my type—you’re not afraid to just hang, you know, to be yourself.” Two weeks later the actor found a note stuck to his door, a flimsy prop door that led nowhere.

Meanwhile, I started feeling sick: something was eating me up inside. I felt hungry all the time. I joked with the lighting technicians that I might be pregnant. I wanted to take flight from my problems—that is, from my own problems as well as those of my double. The actor who played K. said that he felt sick, too. This could be my chance! Finally, I took his place on stage. As I opened my mouth, my jaw flipped back, unhinged. On cue, a tapeworm poked its head up and enunciated my lines.

The others went about their business, beaten down, not missing a beat. The director appeared unruffled; he squawked encouragement to the worm. No, the director had 48

Spittoon 2.3 Cordeiro, The Process

dissolved into a wreath of clouds—poof!—into a puff of smoke-rings. The voice I heard was that old parrot’s now.

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The Amateurs Will Cordeiro

You’re hitting the nail on the head, the nail in the coffin. You’re nailing it good.

You’re hitting the spot. Can you spot seven differences between these two pictures?

People thought the gray, the gray matter was highlights in my hair. The cherryblossoms paparazzi in a flash, an up-skirt of the wind. The mirror-room in the swinger’s club reflects a tangled web. You’ve coined it a reliquary—that jar your milktooth’s in, afraid some fairy would trade away each bone at night. Anything in excess is attractively carcinogenic. Exuberance is beauty. We confessed every stain upon our hearts as if we planned to rage under a disco’s blacklights.

Hammerlock us on a sweaty mat, knuckle us under to the tune of abrasive faceplants, still the do-nothings among us could do nothing about the fact that the world’s biggest truck-stop along I-80 ran out of Bugle’s corn-chips. Alas, that stumpy little man who stammers never listens. I ran a marathon and a magnet over your disks. Now they’re as untranslatable as bygone jokes of the Yiddish theater. The results have been delivered in an anonymous brown wrapper, with the name Pegasus charged to your card. When you remarked that our hang-ups were now hang-overs, did you mean to say that we’ve matured? The maid wants her tip, wants you tipsy, wants to trip out in the tepidarium topless while you titillate her again. She’s done up; she’s overdone; she wants to do it over and over. Yet the ruin of ruin is flower, is weed. The instar pupates, like gardens unfurled from the bilgewater of a flooded cemetery. And the sinkholes stink. There’s a kink in my straw.

I must become someone else to tell you what I did. I must tell you, someone, what you did to myself.

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Spittoon 2.3

gardenia James Claffey

With purpose, relentlessly back and forth, the brush sweeps the grass cuttings from the flags, her hips sway: an afternoon garden dance. The begonia by the door flushes an impatient hue, its energy sickle-scented mythic. In the sun she finds comfort in the wooden handle’s rotation, the narrow lines ribbed a thousand times, hands grooved to a familiar shape. The bottle on the hall table migrates from the liquor cabinet all on its own—she has nothing to do with that, she’ll later tell the guests. By then the cut blooms will have just the slightest wilt, the evening breeze blowing bedsheets billowed on the washing line’s threaded length. Perhaps she’ll act like a character in a Tennessee Williams’ play, all sweaty and inviting in her wrapper dress, the one with the gardenia blossom printed in waves, cigarette smoking into closed air, Van Cliburn on the gramophone. Perhaps.

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Spittoon 2.3

tattoo James Claffey

She wakes undone, body bathed in sweat, bites from his mouth on her torso. She repeats the words: I am not afraid. I am not afraid. Frantic, she searches her body for the words, nowhere to be found. Her two eyes, glassed with tiredness, the rolls of sweat come off her in waves. The dream was terrible. Crashed through a windscreen. Broken body. Couldn’t survive. No way. Weary, she makes her way to the kitchen, moonlit and cold. She pours a glass of red, sips and attempts to decipher the maze of the dream. What if he strapped her lightly with his belt? She longs for structure, for order, for enlightenment. He seems a reasonable man. All the signs are there, the eye contact—direct and unnerving. A flood of energy, the way she hopes he’ll undress her, the way he works the lab, scientifically. For now, back to bed, and in the morning she’ll go to the local tattoo place. Intricate work, along the inside of the ankle, curved and slender as the branch of a willow tree.

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Spittoon 2.3

tarot James Claffey

The underlying card is death—change, transformation, upheaval. Cross that with so many sevens, magical, dreamland someplace. A shattered bone; femur held in place with stainless steel implants. Sea crashes against a sloping cliff and someone scurries about below, telling me to take the same path as they do. A girl with a Scottish accent has brought me to this place. I am unsure whether she's a lover, or not.

In the night, the night, the clouding over of bare sky lends the place the look of a lunar landscape. Fellow travelers are unknown to me, strangers, other dreamers brought to the same locale, given no choice. Moving away from the shore, moving from the issue bursting from earth, moving in the direction of the horizon, somewhere between the ripples and the feeding fish. Second to go, the shock of siblinghood, one man's murder, a brother with a cleft palate and three fingers on his left hand. "It's really, really pretty," the Scottish girl says, with a laugh, as the silver flickers over the sea. She has a reputation—short hemmed and sassy—centered down the middle of the page. Does she know the world she's entered into, or is her rogue/brogue too thick to make a difference? Over there on the slimed rocks—an old man whose pajama pants are frayed nerves—the sheen of motor oil flickers bluegreenorange.

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Favor, or Holiday Edition October 1997 Jeremy Benson

And here, this kid comes to me, at my desk in the back of the class, my desk, humbly, he comes to ask me, me, if he can borrow my LEGO catalog, Max, with beady eyes, this bowl cut, heavy, this way of jutting out his chest the way brats do when they need to save face after a tantrum, he saunters over and asks to borrow my catalog, the one I snuck from home, snuck out to browse for silent reading. And I let him, beyond my distrust I hand it over, because he asked nicely, for once, and because I know his name is really Miles, and his dad is really his step-dad.

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Madill Jeremy Benson

My homeroom teacher in 7th grade liked to introduce herself by saying, "I'm Ms. Madill, as in Mad and Ill!" Quickly adding, "But I am neither of those...!" Later in the year, she brought in clippings from the newspaper about the upcoming Star Wars prequel. I half doubted she had seen the originals, and her current event seemed like a vain attempt to appeal to a younger generation. She taught orchestra, and in my first semester I had her for choir, too, which she taught with a woman who had more hair on her upper lip than all the boys in 7th and 8th grade combined as long as you exclude the Caddy family.

From what I remember, she disappeared that summer. It wasn't like she had announced her retirement or had moved to a different position within the district.

Some said she had actually gone mad, others said she had fallen ill. Really she was just gone, without explanation, a handful of irreverent puns and a new orchestra teacher in her stead. Within days of the new year we forgot about her: we had gym class to dress for and blossoming bodies to notice. It was 8th grade, after all.

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Recreation Jeremy Benson

She stank like raw potatoes. She'd open her math book and little leaves would fall out on the desk; she'd lick her fingers and gather them back up, stuck on her finger tips, her eyes watching like a prairie dog for the teacher or a snitch while she tucked each flake back into page 105, or 210—some fraction of 420.

Meanwhile James was going on and on about George Harrison and the Beatles, whether they were better than Elvis. That was always the debate in the classroom—the principal would stop in and argue for Elvis. We all knew it was the Beatles. Though Mr. K. only ever played Dave Matthews Band.

James was a fifth-year senior when I was a sophomore. For years after he graduated, I'd run into him across the counter at all the places that didn't require clean urine samples: Burger King, Jimmie John's, the ice cream shack up the street from the school. Eating fast food in that town was like walking through the park during lunch hour, with pick-your-poison clouds hanging to branches above clumps of AWOL students. Each time our eyes would catch like we knew each other, but rarely we'd ask, “so what's up?” Just give me my munchies, I'd think.

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Brandi Jeremy Benson

A girl once told me she wasn't going with me to homecoming after all. Instead she went with her on again/off again boyfriend. That was cool with me—when they prayed at lunch they had the same speech pattern: requests for wisdom and health held up by a skeleton of "Lord willings" and wrapped in "We ask that you just..." skin.

When I think about her I think of stairwells. Our voices echoed, we smiled (lots of smiles). We went up and came down.

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Spittoon 2.3

Contributors

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Spittoon 2.3

Lisa Zimmerman’s most recent collection is The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press). She has a chapbook of short poems forthcoming from Mello Press.

She teaches at the University of Northern Colorado.

Ethan Tinkler teaches Creative Writing and Language Arts at Atlantic City High School in New Jersey and he feels lucky that he loves his job.

Stephen Thomas’s website is stevethomas.org.

Trish Parsons is an English major at the University of Wyoming. She collects the “what a fool” stares she gets when she tells people this.

Tendai Mwanaka is a Zimbabwe native whose books include a poetry collection, Voices from Exile, (Lapwing Publications, Northern Ireland, 2010), and the novel Keys in the river: Notes from a Modern Chimurenga (Savant books and publications, July 2012, USA).

Gregg Murray gives a warm, hearty escucha mente to the rabid clusters of infighting. The vrai ceviche, the one called Borges, the errantry pak. He is an assistant professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College and has work forthcoming from LEVELER and decomP magazinE. Information about his doings can be found at gregorykirkmurray.com.

Tiffany Morris is an emerging Mi’kmag writer from Nova Scotia. She has been previously published with The Blind Hem, Yellow Medicine Review, and Red Claw Press, among others. She can be contacted at tiffany-morris@hotmail.com.

Jeff Mark is a Professor of English and Creative Writing and is the Director of the Creative Writing Certificate Program at the Community College of Philadelphia.

His fiction and poetry have been published in online and print form. He lives in Philadelphia where he fields form-rejection emails from agents who think his first novel, Into the Everything, is “not for them,” and shrugs, as it was published in 2011

by Punkin Books. Email him at jeffmark138 (at) gmail (dot) com.

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Tony Leuzzi has written three books of poems, including Radiant Losses, which won the 2010 New Sins Editors' Prize. BOA Editions will publish Passwords Primeval, Leuzzi's interviews with 20 American Poets, in November 2012.

Brent House grew up in Necaise, Mississippi, where he raised cattle and watermelons on the family farm. His chapbook, The Saw Year Prophecies, was published by Slash Pine Press.

José Luis Gutiérrez is a San Francisco poet. His work has appeared in Spillway, Eratio, Margie, Letterbox, DMQ, Verse Daily, Citron Review, Otis Nebula, Jet Fuel Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, and is forthcoming in Reunion: The Dallas Review, Spittoon, Prick of the Spindle, and the Mutanabbi Street Anthology published by PM Press.

Jewel Beth Davis is a writer and theater artist who lives in Rollinsford, NH. She is a professor of Writing and Theater at NHTI-Concord Community College and an Artist-In-Education with the NH State Council on the Arts. She earned an MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, in addition to her theatre degrees. Her creative nonfiction and fiction has been published in 23 literary magazines including Diverse Voices Quarterly, which nominated her story for Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2011. Website: http://www.jewelbethdavis.com/.

Will Cordeiro’s work appears in Fourteen Hills, Crab Orchard Review, Flyway, Copper Nickel, Sentence, and Harpur Palate. He is grateful for recent residencies from Blue Mountain Center and ART 342.

James Claffey hails from County Westmeath, Ireland, and lives on an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA, with his wife, the writer and artist, Maureen Foley, their daughter, Maisie, and Australian cattle-dog, Rua. He is the winner of the Linnet’s Wings Audio Prose Competition. His work appears in many places including The New Orleans Review, Connotation Press, A-Minor Magazine, Literary Orphans, and Scissor & Spackle. His blog is at www.jamesclaffey.com.

Jeremy Benson tells lies, writes stories, and invents objects that already exist. He edits Fortunates and AEROGRAM.

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Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 16-year-old internationally award-winning photographer and artist. Her photography has been published in Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC News Website, and on the covers of books and magazines in the United States and Canada.

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