SpringGun Press / editor@springgunpress.com Copyright 2012 SpringGun Press Contributors Cover: Zachary Scott Hamilton // www.zachabstract.blogspot.com // www.blackmonsterzine.weebly.com
SpringGun V3, N2 Erin Costello derrick mund Mark Rockswold Christopher Rosales EDITORS
Poems Lisa Ciccarello • 5 Poems • 1 Michael Flatt • from absent receiver • 6 Kit Frick • from Day Bleaks Suddenly • 14 Joseph Mains • from Dark Mirror • 19 Matthew Sadler • 3 Poems • 22 Amy E. Vorro • 2 Poems • 25
Fiction Shay Belisle • The Fish • 28 Kelly Dulaney • Heat #2 (interruption) • 29 Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes • A Man in his Kitchen at Night ... • 32 Matthew Treon • Ground Down and Dirty • 36 NOTES • 40
Lisa Ciccarello At night:
for MC Hyland the bridge is a stone curve as dark as the night. You could fall a long time before you knew what you were falling into. I did not want you to know I had the child. I did not want you to know where I hid it. The child has the mouth of a cat & mewls in the dark. The bridge is a cup & a simple sort of doll. It is not worth it. The child has the mouth of a cat & the eyes of a cat & he sees clear into the dark & makes the sound of an animal. Yes, the moon is fading. Yes, I hear him cry. The bridge was a steep price to pay, but I paid it.
1
At night:
all—we down to bed—we pattern against the wall—tightening— consequence of this action—we swift to moon—circle—away from the sleep—we faint weight in the throat of the night—we—thread in the brick—sheet smoke feather smoke smoke of the breath & the paling smoke—we—lift where we barely stand—knees to back— a safety
2
At night:
He said campfire but he meant the blanket on yr back. Cover/a cover. What body was this when I hid it from you? I play shy so you can push— as clear as I come. He said summer but he meant to lie down on the stones with someone else. There is nowhere to turn from what follows: this part where I play a girl. This part where I bend the hair back. Part where nobody thinks about the hair at all.
3
At night:
I had a language it was all eyes & c. & c. a cut tongue you couldn’t keep up so I steered you south & souther went & you picked a smaller girl than me. Shouldn’t’a brief talked or left the fifteens got something to say gonna dig it up out of the ground sick little root strange little lamb without & without: touch yr knees to yr back girl O time to rise
4
Mobile Pastoral Strategy:
The problem is a long time after the grave I can’t tell the bird from a snake, the deer from the sheep, the sheep from the ibex, the ibex from the griffin or the horse. & when the bird & ibex join to make a leopard I know I am defeated & sit down in the snow. Now they are going to tell me about the diadem. Now they are going to make me guess the animals all over again.
5
Michael Flatt
from absent receiver
then cut from my sleep your willowbark kindling, bluishly burning my voice from my name.
a flame the size of a flame again. what a shimmering golden slip. a city with a better-than-60-mile glow. twice widowed, once lost. I predict diameter, I predict zero. tell me what you heard in my voice the day the sky became a crushing continuously spelling us out. gaps between reflections and referents where an edge becomes a bludgeon. plenty of injury, plenty of names.
break your routine and try to start smoking. why don’t you hear me, perched in the chimney, breathing the soot and coughing up soot? open the flume in the form of a lilt. then follow the mailman, tracing his steps depositing matches for trailing children. find them left on your step, the spark in them spent. then watch out your window steeples collapsing the bells sounding hollow as zero in zero.
6
so I can sink my nettles into your sheep bleating, Sleep, Sleep. no one believes in safety, finally. fog constantly rising between us. deer tick between my wrist and thumb. this is why I drink again. I can pretend I’m real. what a sensitive line of trees. they seem to feel every breeze. my tire swayed to a lazy stop in the median, pretty far from my car. Wake up, she said. This isn’t Snooza-palooza. that’s why I stopped again.
7
what bleeds from his sun, the severed neck? love or spit or laughter and death or tears or milk or open space or the fluid of eggs or eyes or bitter longing stares and champagne giggles or brand-name water or naiveté and platelets and kite flight ecstasy and leaf vein blood and grout scum or mother’s milk and grape jelly or natural ink two car lengths of green and drunken departures and seconds by the second pinkened cereal milk even-flashing neon sign. and pine needles and sap the subsequent syrup and a child’s feigned fear? BOWLING.
BOWLING. BOWLING. now we know.
8
our unwed mothers tread in the
milk
of their first moment together. such remains the case until we are suitably wed to the stones that bore us. the diminutive concourse of silence. what if I adjust my shelter to this nomenclature? what fires the bluish aspect of this
attempt? (delay)
the sound of her snore still anyway, it is prone, scant the twist destroys people’s everyone terrains slam like clouds the worm of the we that is in at the end of the lie, let it make our ears ring one last acoustics inlaid, the clock’s face 9
inlaid, the clock’s face inscribed with the phrase her clay-soft turn
the film negative figure finding its third dimension
10
tuned to a choke of actuality, I have to imagine the Sabres
in another sudden-death situation. the word “want” also means in this desert state nobody she stares the way I knows what that means. stare at my desire for the love of God. which has become another overtime. open. I’m not anywhere when the Rangers score. spacious. the rusted bell in the backyard. the pedestrian the skyline in the distance. mall, on a bright day. the pants torn at the leg. and me. panhandlers, sandals, scented candles. he ruffled her hair until ruffling her hair that night we saw a fight meant nothing, roll to blows. the opposite of smoke. someone could have remove myself with the least of grace. been hurt. No cops! I think maybe one said. it’d be better we didn’t stop
11
to believe in something. it. we didn’t care. but I look at the sky and nothing stops moving.
12
(reverb) give the sound a chance to develop. I was proud of every note, the seeds I’d pulled from fruit. but your plume has always been that of a smoking barrel. God fuck the entire.
13
Kit Frick
Hunter’s Moon (Blood Moon)
You can scan the package instructions. Before you watch them burn. Understand it’s not viable. To do as you’re told. Understand there are limits. To your possible. You must cross them. You must master the art. Of rancor. Slap a smile on, bide your time. When told to forgive, give a nod. Bat your lashes when advised to forget. Please tell us how you identify. Hunter / fox. No tell / tellall. Accuser / accused. All of the above. You must address the following questions. Does heat still rise. After death. Does heat still rise. On Mars. Who would you rather. Date, dump, fuck. Your answers can and will be used. Against you. For ill. This test is the whole shooting match. Lock, stock, barrel. The test is: release the safety. The test is: how much blood.
14
A special full moon appearing in the fall, after the Harvest Moon. The Hunter’s Moon governs the night sport, casting bare light on base urges.
Terminator
To avoid an anxious muddle. To evade overflow. You must inventory. The stuff of your life. Collect your thoughts. Gently. Give them labels, form sides. Sort the sallow from the florid. Halve the lucent from the dark. When cerebrally divided. When binary terms applied. String the cord. Between hemispheres. Let the tightrope split the sides. Now’s the time. To test your limits. Now’s the time to walk the wire. You’ve always known. Atmospheric peril. Your mettle. How to fall. First the left foot, and then the right. First the left, and then the right ...
15
The line dividing the illuminated side from the dark side of the moon. Here, everything reduces. Categorically.
Lake of Time
You must take on Old Man Chronos. The task outrageous, yet. Cards stacked against favor, and still. All in on the insurmountable. All in on lotions and creams. Your mission quite simple: go back, resist. You must furnish a relic—something survived. Place it on your mantle to serve as a guide. Note its fortitude, weathering delayed. You must emulate. Must calibrate to the cause. You must apply lotion. In the morning light. Smooth away wrinkles. Smooth away time. Smooth and smooth until it becomes undeniable: the mission is infeasible. When hope wanes, when consumed by doubt, consider October. We turn back the clocks. This modicum of mastery. How possible it seems. To turn back and then back and then back.
16
Unremarkable in its regular features, on “Lacus Temporis” it is always the third Sunday in ordinary time.
Lake of Solitude
Stop right now. Stop and ask: am I not at a critical pass? Your life a litany of shopping bags. Mail stacked for weeks. Ask: isn’t it shameful to live this way? Consider the upshot —erasure anxiety / another shot. Ask: why ask? You must allow it. Albeit unease. Your life a palimpsest for a brand new life. Love the laboratory. Allow the procedure. Open wide, say ah. As the drug kicks in, envision yourself in a parking lot. Brand new hair cut, brand new face. Keys in your hand to a brand new Dodge. You are: impossible to recognize You are: unknown. Walk ten paces to your convenient parking space. Your heels tick the tarmac. Rest your cup on the roof. In this life, you drink chai. After complete eradication. After everything annulled. Your life reset and starting up, starting up.
17
“Lacus Solitudinis”: no stranger face than the one staring back.
Super Moon
You must visit the grocery. Stock up, stock up. Head to the wine cellar, storm cellar, bomb shelter. You must fill each crevice: pink beans, navy beans, hominy. Cans of Campbell’s soup. It’s time to think clearly. Time to cipher carefully. Stakes high, ante upped. Gather what you can, siphon below ground, below the storm’s broken steering. Until panic sated. Until full and round. Until enough.
18
The full moon at perigee (large, bright, dangerous)—harbiger of “natural” disasters, or a scare story cooked up by the blogosphere?
Joseph Mains
Selfportrait as Not Dead Yet
My hair is wet sweet with the rot of heavy flowers. I’m not here. This isn’t happening. She said I like seeing you cold like that. I am at the center of a pile of dead things. Look in to the strung roses. Breasts sag rabbits die foul death all around flowers buzz around my head I am perfectly composed. My body as plume & excess—here:
19
Studio Apartment
Whole month long a cityscape blue a yes and month left the hands yes the hands. Parts they hook parts they melt the steal the hunger and vanity of the hands. The nose can taste the cityscape blue and eyes in you. Radio broken. Made soup used wine all the time all the times were birds who always flew home on sailors or alone. All the sparrows they fly home in the night and this night please leave the light as they’re homing
20
Bisbee Blue
Pith-swing. Shoot yard wolf apples. In my hand & shirt I’m leaving. In league with a haunt-shadow. Bell jar. Pink angle arcking the range. Of all the yeses in the sky just pick one slowly. Or honey dripping from your voice.
21
Matthew Sadler Removable Parts
Stomach again car exhaust swallowed by the ounc e and a half counted on two hands escaped into sleep where dream cars tormented idling: the engines purr
me in their
with nowhere to go the houses sit there in their slots (all of them) and everything smells like people
22
Everything Smells Like People
The headache machine
gouging out the
!yes!
of the future
rocking the mint taffeta while theaters absurd themselves with reality while wars bloom like the flowers we turn into drugs and the stains reek of old spice power guard while the sheets are interrogated by the thread
23
By the Thread
Blood baths fast dinners love so crazy when they tell you the truth you are breaking and my money’s on the butcher
fasts before bacon jokes
cops and robbers play tag but
He smiles so sweet as he hands you your chop knows the variable
and nobody
x until the chef serves it up still beating while inside we bleed until cut the walls all over everywhere so thin
24
Amy E. Vorro Letter Head
Should we call me a cat’s toy poor tired mouse? Wound, rewound, rusty key wrench thumb flat on my back back back. Click grind. How we see me… that’s not quite it – a double-breasted bauble a mailbox slit rammed with letters, ink seeps from my nose and collects spreading over plains to pool between our legs. We won’t extend one finger, probe an envelope licking line on a brief paper kick – not for old time’s sake or even a bubble of gas, a laugh. We, fog of loose’d pages a sigh, leaves that never hit the ground. Wet boats sink paper melts from our mouth. We are the page, slicing each pad of the fingers I own. I, the whole hand, open wide (ever willing) and grope. 25
“That’s what you say if you want to get cleaned”
(from ‘Home Remedy’ by S. Carey)
I’m taking the car into town That’s what you say if you want to get cleaned. Blue bucket That’s what you grab for the water. Shit in a box and light fires That’s just what you do. You do. No water – diesel heat you do. Up is where you go when your half went south for summer. The mountain’s where you go to kill the chickens. The mountain’s where you go to smoke your loans. And there is sun and sun and twilight and sun but not a single hamburger. No sushi, just guns. Cocked and ready. Aim. Alaska. 26
Shay Belisle The Fish
We are at a restaurant overlooking the sea waiting for a world-famous sunset to bathe us in the electric oranges and reds we’ve seen on posters and postcards all over town. My mom and I scrape black and green olive meat from stone pits with our teeth and sip wine slowly. When the fish comes—whole on a large silver platter—its eyes are shrunken and sunken, staring at us. “Life is like a fish,” my mom says as she picks some white meat from transparent bones with her fingers. “One day you’re swimming along and the next day someone’s picking at your carcass.” We laugh, a little at first, but it builds like a symphony. We laugh so hard we can barely breathe. I don’t even notice that the sunset is less than spectacular until it is already dark and the fish is nothing but eyes and bones picked clean.
28
Kelly Dulaney
Heat #2 (interruption)
—hands as hard as peach pits and in them objects arranged—ornament over structure—to denote tendernesses. Ribbons piled on pins: that is for remembrance; and scissors: that is for thoughts. And three flat hairs, sooty and long, plucked from brush bristles.
Aza like a cat on the floor twists her hips and simpers and crows. The
hairs smell of Rei and oranges; the hairs taste of Rei and ash. Rei, who binds her hair into twin whorls over the nape of her neck and submits her split ends to the sharp arms of Aza’s scissors—who does not smile and who rarely whimpers if bitten, unlike the other girls. Aza braids the three hairs into her heavy bangs and her clavicles grow hot. Rei who does not love her, who like a bad mother prefers the first-born son. Aza unravels the ribbons.
Bared teeth. Fingertips given to the maintenance of others’ fine things.
Aza will point her nails like knives into empty spaces and will clutch.
Shoulder over shoulder Aza rolls over the carpet ‘til she itches and ‘til her
arms rise up plump in red rashes and ‘til her head hits the door and makes the sound of a thumped pink melon. Sounds seep under the door. Aza listens. Aza smiles.
“I never said that you should feel one way or the other,” Rei is saying. “I
am not the king of you.”
And Kurran, Aza’s elder brother: “You wouldn’t know how to feel.
It isn’t your nature.”
“What—feeling?” A pause, then the swish of a sleeve and the circling
scent of citrus. Aza tongues a horned tooth. Rei’s breath is weighted. “You 29
are beyond upset.”
“She’s—”
“Yes,” Rei says. “She is.”
Kurran invariably sleeps belly-down, kicking into mattress coils
during angrier dreams and otherwise drooling into his sham. His arm would catch Rei, were she to share his bed—catch her and keep her. So Aza cords his pillow with nickel needles and does not sleep, smirking instead in her own bed at the unlit ceiling, its untextured sheen.
He comes into her room before dawn with bloody eyelids,
cheeks, lips and sputters like one of Aza’s broken dolls. His fists cuff air and he finally manages, “My face!”
Aza titters and mimics a pout.
Kurran watches her mouth and sparks into a wordless rage. He is not
in her bed and then he is—he hooks her hands, upends her, wrests her into a chokehold. Aza keens like a beaten cat. He chuffs into her face and the odor of charcoal powder perturbs Aza, reminds her—Rei’s hair like warm water and her absence of weeping—and she lets her limbs fall limp in her brother’s grasp.
He drops her. He wipes his face. “You try to take everything of mine,”
he says.
No eyes, no ears: Aza ignores him.
Kurran swallows and coughs. “Rei said that—”
Scissors open-armed mean only to cut and Aza’s palm seeps sweat as she
snatches them up in it and flings them at Kurran’s face. What Rei had said 30
in humdrum inflections: “Do you always let your sister have your pretty things?” And Aza all-glib had repeated the words to herself in rising tones.
The scissors snag on her brother’s shoulder when he turns his head
from her assault. They fall to the floor. He picks them up again. “These were my mother’s,” he says, and his voice has the sound of pouring sand and tuff. “These belonged to my mother!”
Aza glowers—says, “Mine as well.” All the time her teeth peeling out of
her mouth like beaks from an eggshell and she holds out her empty hands—
31
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes
A Man in his Kitchen at Night, Among Other Things
He’s definitely spotted me. I press my head to the faux-brick siding and dig my toes into the gravel surrounding his apartment building. Think of green lizards to add a certain flavor to my skin.
“Genny, why did I just see your parents dropping into my garage?”
He lives on the first floor, but there aren’t any bars on his window. He leans out of it, only two feet from my head, to ask me this. It’s not that I’m thrown by the fact that he knows my name. I finger my pink enamel locket with its cursive inscription. Too dark for reading.
“They’re looking for a parking spot,” I shout, a bit gaily, considering.
His garage is underground, the hatch at ground level. You can drive down the ramp and park, but only if you live there. My parents do not and no one, after opening the garage hatch to uncover the unfinished but obviously inhabited
basement
of
his
building,
hung
with
dusty
boxing
memorabilia, would mistake it for a public parking space. But my parents are in a special place right now.
“They’re leaving momentarily,” I tell him, moving my torso fully into
the window. I feel that if I am able to block his view of my parents with my windblown cheeks and arms akimbo, he will stay inside rather than going out and trying to speak to them. I’m an adult but I find myself in these sorts of situations often. My parents are very delicate and must be protected at all costs.
“Fine by me as long as they’re really leaving,” he grumbles at
the oven. His kitchen is brightly lit, decorated with fine sensibilities; an oil 32
painting, a vintage lamp, but from the way he moves in it I can tell he lives alone. Several jars of vinegar and spiced oils cluster on the counter top next to shallot skins and asparagus trunks. A man, proud of his cooking abilities and certain that these will not threaten but rather enhance his inherent machismo.
I realize as he turns away that he is naked under his ruffled apron. I realize
this because at the same moment I see his buttocks and find that, due to the stoutness of his legs, they are larger and lower then I would have preferred. When he returns from the other room he wears gym shorts under his apron. I can’t tell if his actions attempt seduction or he forgot what he wasn’t wearing.
As expected, I’m getting a little frustrated with my parents. Instead
of keeping their suitcases in the car and driving up the ramp, they insist on carrying them out of the garage one by one and stashing them behind the various statues and potted plants on the driveway. This, I gather, occurs so that my father can push their rinky-dink fuel efficiency up the ramp with the car in neutral. They think they’re making less noise.
At precisely the same moment and emblematic of the current course of
events in my life, my mother asks me, “I forgot the cat? Should I go get him?” and the man in the kitchen asks me, “Are they almost done or would you like to come in?”
“Oh for Pete’s sake,” I whisper to my mother. The cat is the whole reason
we made this venture into the city—so that it could see a veterinarian and why my parents were forced to use this inexplicable parking spot. My 33
mother’s head and shoulders protrude cheekily from the hatch. “Of course you have to get him!” I tell her.
To the kitchen man, however, I say, “I might come in. And thank
you so much for asking.” My mother has pulled the hatch over her head but her eyes remain visible. She uses this position to give me a very exaggerated wink. I use the hatch to step into the kitchen through the window.
“What are you cooking?” I ask him, after a moment has passed
in which the only thing that happens is that we look at each other.
“This,” he says proudly, extending the skillet which contains
the shallots and asparagus I previously alluded to.
“You’re using sherry,” I say, pointing to the bottle on the counter but
also to the air, indicating I don’t need the visible evidence to alert me to his choice of de-glazer.
“It’s certainly not a brand for drinking!” he laughs heartily, like
an elderly golf player or member of a Sousa Band. An unexpected break in character. Remiss, I say nothing.
Further unhinging the situation, he asks, “How’s your family doing?”
returning to his thick urban accent and unhesitant sincerity.
They’re fine,” I say, eager to remain uncommitted. “Let’s go to the other
room.”
He heaps some sliced white bread and white flour tortillas onto his plate.
We go into the other room and sit on the couch. After offering me some of 34
his food, which I decline, my stomach stuffed with a rather dry duck confit from a nearby food stand, he begins unbuttoning my shirt. My parents continue to make a huge racket outside and I am unable to concentrate on his sensitive, well-meaning advances. He is handsome, after all, in his squareheaded and stocky way. I always wear shirts with buttons.
The couch has pushed itself up against my back and he has pushed
himself over me, kissing my neck. I stick my fingers into the grease left on his dinner plate and trace too many limbed starfish on his forehead.
“Are you coming, Genny?” My mother asks through the window.
Back in the car, which barely has enough room for us, our suitcases, and
the cat with its ridiculous plastic cone collar, I reflect on the evening. The cat weighs over 18 pounds and drools when he purrs, creating little antiseptic snot puddles wherever he sits, which is my right thigh currently and often. On the freeway, the city kind of slides behind us, as if confused, a little tipsy maybe.
Before I left, exiting as always, through the window, he said. “You know,
you can stay here with me. You don’t have to go with them.”
“Yes, I really do.” His asking is just more proof of how little he actually
knows me.
35
Matthew Treon
Ground Down and Dirty
Robbie came home with one of those plastic-wrapped flowers, the kind he’d usually hustle off this homeless man downtown for a couple hand-rolled cigarettes. I was sitting on the living room floor, where I’d been watching most of an all day sci-fi movie marathon on TV. So far I’d watched the second two of the Back to the Future movies, Body Snatchers, Mimic, and was just starting Event Horizon. Robbie walked to the kitchen, pulled the glass tube off the bottom of the stem, poured the little bit of water it held into the kitchen sink, and used a screwdriver to carefully tap the curved unopened end till it broke. Usually he’d just throw the flower in the trash, but that afternoon, before the sound of a flicked flint and the smell of cooked baking soda, I asked him if I could have it.
“What you want a pink flower for, fairy boy?”
“Not for me. For a girl.”
“Oh, got your first girlfriend, huh? Huh? Yeah, bout time. I was beginnin
to think you was growin up to be a gravy boat.”
I tried to respond, but at twelve years old I was easily
tangled up in innuendos. “Uh, uh—”
“Don’t hurt yourself. I’m just fuckin with you. Who’s the lucky lady? It’s
that girl from school you’re always walkin home with, ain’t it? Yeah, she’s cute.”
I looked away because I didn’t like him talking about Laurie. Turned
back to the TV set.
“You callin up the tongue operator to dial ‘oh’ on the girl’s pink 36
telephone yet? Or at least lettin her give you a hand throwin a little salt on her strawberries? Or have you started wining and dining yourself in the bathroom every night?”
The movie came back from commercial. A giant tendril-y spaceship
surrounded by darkness. I tried to watch, tune Robbie out, hoping he’d leave. But he sat down on the couch and kept on.
“I’m tellin you what’s what, boy. Flowers are nice, but you gonna have to
go down. You spend an afternoon with your face between her legs, her hands on your head, let her run her fingers all through your hair, she’ll be yours for sure. She’ll love you.”
I turned around, grinding my teeth, and saw Robbie sitting there with
his fishhook smile.
“But here,” he said, throwing the flower on the coffee table, “have the
flower if you want it.”
I had my first wet dream that night. My face in Laurie’s lap, staring
between her legs, a place I’d only ever glimpsed before on TV. But I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at or what to do while I was there, and so I just sat with my face between Laurie’s legs, her hands on my head, and stared—my stomach pulling at the inside of my skin. Laurie moaned and moaned in a voice I vaguely recognized as borrowed from somewhere else. It felt like a black hole was raging just below my stomach, like there’d be no escape for a single piece of my own matter. I was certain I was going to die. Then the violent friction of my inward collapse came to a sudden 37
halt and reversed direction. I woke up convinced I’d pissed the bed.
Most young American boy’s pick up your run-of-the-mill sex-isms at an
early age—I’d throw the occasional “go fuck yourself” or “this blows” around on the schoolyard, just to try it on for size—because you don’t really have to know what those words mean in order to get them right. I mean I wasn’t exactly sure what one did when they went to fuck themselves or blow something, let alone someone. To me they were just phrases we said to sound tough. And you didn’t have to worry about getting called out on it because most everyone else knew as little as you. At least then. And while I can remember my mother being oddly clinical and descriptive when the day came that I asked her where babies come from, I just didn’t get it. I mean really get it. Till that moment.
I laid there coming to grips with what had happened to me in my sleep,
using my sheets to wipe the alarming stickiness from my leg, and I realized I suddenly knew more about the world than I ever thought possible, had gained access to an unprecedented amount of knowledge I had no fucking clue what to do with.
That morning I put the flower in my book bag and walked to school.
I saw Laurie in class. I stared at the soft looking skin on her shaved legs jutting out of her denim shorts—see, I hadn’t ever really taken notice of the fact that girls at school were even starting to shave their legs before that day—and I felt the urge to go up to her and apologize for dreaming of her in that way. I wondered what she would think of what had happened. But I said nothing. I just continued to sit and stare at her from across the room. 38
We walked home together after school the way we usually did,
but it wasn’t the usual way we walked home together at all. Suddenly conscious of every word out of my mouth, and worrying what she’d think of everything I said, I said hardly anything at all. And the flower, petals already torn and smushed between my books, stayed in my bag.
39
NOTES
Shay Belisle is originally from Maui, Hawaii where she grew up eating mangoes and bathing in an outdoor bathtub in a ginger thicket. She has traveled much of the world and currently lives in Berkeley, CA where she works as a personal chef and is a degree candidate for her MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College. Shay is also a visual artist and the Creative Nonfiction Contributing Editor for the forthcoming issue 14 of 580 Split. Her work has been published in various literary journals including Generations Literary Journal, Forty Ounce Bachelors, The Writing Disorder, Write From Wrong, MOJO & Mikrokosmos. You can read more of her work at http://shaybelisle.wordpress.com. Lisa Ciccarello is the author of three chapbooks: At night; At night, the dead; and the upcoming Sometimes there are travails. Her poems have or are forthcoming in
Handsome, Clock, Tin House, Sixth Finch, H_NGM_N, Interrupture, Saltgrass, Poor Claudia, and Corduroy Mtn., among others. Kelly Dulaney lives in Colorado. Her work has appeared in Abjective, Caketrain and Titmouse. Michael Flatt is the associate editor for Counterpath. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 1913: A Journal of Forms, The Destroyer and 32 Poems. His review of Amy King’s poetry is forthcoming in Colorado Review and his article “Too Red a Herring: The Unattainable Self in The Unnamable” appeared recently in Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui. Kit Frick’s poems have recently or will soon appear in places like PANK, Conduit, DIAGRAM, cream city review, and H_NGM_N. A 2012 “Discovery” / Boston Review semi-
finalist, Kit is currently Poetry Editor for Salt Hill and is an Associate Editor for Black Lawrence Press, where she edits the small press newsletter Sapling. Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is an MFA candidate and graduate teacher at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in NANO Fiction, Pank, Echo Ink Review, Mary: A Journal of New Writing, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Titmouse and elsewhere. She is the fiction editor of Timber Journal. Joseph Mains was born in the Sonoran desert and lives in Portland, where he co-curates the reading series Bad Blood. Matthew Sadler is the author of The Much Love Sad Dawg Trio (March Street Press, 2011) and Tiny Tsunami (Flying Guillotine Press, 2010). His work has appeared in Poetry East, Passages North, SpringGun, Versal, Indiana Review, and other literary magazines. He is currently an Assistant Poetry Editor
at Versal. He lives and teaches in the Detroit Area. A recent transplant from Texas, Matthew Treon lives in Boulder, Colorado where he studies fiction in the MFA Creative Writing program at The University of Colorado. He is a music journalist, a staff writer for The Marquee magazine, teaches at the Boulder Writing Studio, and is currently working on a twelve-volume non-fiction project titled Drinking Methanol: The Obscured Tommy Johnson and the First Blues Faustian Bargain. Amy E. Vorro lives and works in Palo Alto, CA. She holds an MFA from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.