Springgun Issue 8 by SprinGun Press

S PRINGG UN I SSUE 8

Published by SpringGun Press Denver, CO 80220 www.springgunpress.com editor@springgunpress.com Copyright ÂŠ SpringGun Press Contributors, 2013 Cover Art: Andrew Abbott Derrick Mund Christopher Rosales E DITORS Erin Costello Mark Rockswold PUBLISHERS

C ON T E N T F I C T I ON

Stephanie Couey Kelsie Hahn Charles Rafferty M.R. Sheffield

P OE M S

1 10 12 17

Chris Carosi Lisa Ciccarello Lauren Eggert-Crowe Britt Gambino Seth Landman Francesco Levato Susan Lewis Laura Minor Sally Molini Adam Veal

22 23 26 28 30 36 39 43 46 47

N OT E S

STEPHANIE COUEY

BREAD

Remember once you got naked and went in the Jacuzzi with steaming green light? A tattooed muscular boy with a lisp found your bra and wore it and stretched it out, and you beat him with a flip-flop, still naked. You ate pumpkin pie filling out of the can with tortilla chips afterward. You used to be afraid that there was anthrax on the exercise equipment at the gym. When I asked why, you said because you knew that you would place the anthrax there if you hated people enough, and that there had to be someone who hated people enough. It wasn’t at all illogical. You still went everyday, but you said that sometimes you would just stop breathing. Just in case. You used to pretend to fall asleep on couches at parties around 3 am so that you could listen to people talk, people who thought that you were out cold every time and that passing out was just what you did because you were little and drank too much. They usually talked about you, which is why you listened. You told me once that you heard a graduate student say he wanted to fuck you, not literally fuck you, but fuck your mind. This kind of thing was why you would listen and why you were right for listening. You bit his finger at a mutual friend’s fiction reading. He sat down next to you on a sunken orange couch and you asked to see his finger. He probably thought you would suck on it right there in front of everyone. You took it in your tiny hands and chomped. You were my best friend. It blows my mind that jails have cordless phones. I want to be twirling the cord right now, like I had imagined myself doing while I drove the thirty miles past cornfields and various livestock to be with you. I pick at the paint surrounding the glass between us instead. You’re not allowed to pick on your side, but I am on mine. 1

You are holding the phone like it’s the crux of your being. If it weren’t lodged into your yellowing palm, you would lose hold completely and disappear. You breathe against the glass, but there is no cloud. You want to write to me something backwards, but the glass is bulletproof and coated in some kind of plastic film that we don’t understand. I always had the impression that you understood still less than I did, because how could you fuck up just so, every time. But there you are: Kelly Green Jumpsuit, on the other side of the glass, signaling to me on how to use this sick-bucket-colored phone. You dial numbers. You bite your lip. You know something that I don’t. Your voice hits my ear as the chapped mouth behind the glass moves. You told me that there are people that you don’t expect to see but aren’t surprised by either when their faces show up. Of these people, you included Jeff Goldblum and Sid Vicious. You also included my brother, Mitch, who you told me you wanted to grab you by the nape of the neck like a kitten before fucking you against the inside of his closet door. You told me that you imagined he would have a panic attack because he’s fucking his sister’s best friend, but that you thought that the panic attack would be the hottest thing ever and you’d tell him to “Shut the fuck up and bite me, motherfucker.” You said that he would stop breathing, and that would be the best part. I asked you to please stop, knowing that by even asking I would receive punishment. You went on further to tell me that my brother would have the most perfect dick imaginable and that you would like to fall in love with him so you could see that dick every day, but of course you couldn’t do that. “One dick for forever…disgusting,” you tucked your thin legs beneath you on my parents’ porch swing with permanently damp cushions. “It would be like reusing paper towels. Just like the married women in the Brawny commercials reusing their husbands, reusing the towels, reusing the husbands...” 2

It would make sense to say that you were damaged, from a young age, maybe by an uncle or a cousin, but I know that you weren’t. I also know that you were thoughtful inside but tried not to let other people know. I remember when you’d spend the night at my apartment, the first one, in LA, across the street from a Souplantation and a 76 Station. When you couldn’t sleep, you would scrub the grout in my bathtub, or clean the inside of my refrigerator because you said it drove you crazy that way I live. Elbow-deep in dish water, scrubbing lentil curry residue from pots, you would remind me that I am “a fucking slob who never cleans.” Really, I had a gag reflex problem and would be sick every time I tried to do these things myself. You’d be chain-smoking and wearing boxers. For a moment you would look at me, blowing smoke out of your nose in that way that you do because it makes you feel like a dragon, and tell me silently that you knew you were doing something nice. I never said thank you because you never would have wanted me to.

You wished you were a boy. Sometimes you were.

Once, walking down Venice Blvd, past the Helm’s bakery, you asked me if I thought there was something terribly sexual about bread. About the yeasty smell, the way it gets so engorged and needs to swell and rise, and how it has been a staple for life, and how it makes guts twist in hunger to think about. How you can rip it to bits and chew on it hard or suck on it slowly. All of the different ways you can move your jaw just to manage the act of eating bread. How you hold it, and smell it before slicing or biting or ripping. How bread requires two hands. How you lube it up with butter or olive oil or get it hard in the toaster. I said I thought you were taking the imagery too far, but you brushed me off and said you knew for a fact that you weren’t. That all of these things were there. In bread. You said that if I couldn’t appreciate the eroticism to be had in bread that I surely had no future sexually. 3

You said that you liked how my dad looked in his work pants, slender yet chesty. I wondered why I loved you so much. In my first year of college, and your first year of not college, you showed up at my doorstep with Quiznos and ecstasy. You moved all the way from Los Angeles to Boise, Idaho with me. I needed to go to school. You said you needed “to get the fuck out of the traffic and dirt and neo-fascist fashionista fuckheads.” I restrained from asking if you really knew what neo-fascism was, and from telling you that there would also be dirt in Idaho. I was too relieved to take you with me, so I didn’t have to face anything alone. You had the ecstasy in one hand, in a small jeweled box, and a heavy plastic bag of sandwiches in the other. You said we had to decide which one to do because we couldn’t do both at once. The Quiznos would cheapen the E, and the E would make us feel sick from the Quiznos. We rolled the pills between our fingers, tiny, orange on one side, yellow on the other. We decided we should best examine the subs too, since we’d done so with the pills. The sandwiches were identical. “Black Angus on Rosemary Parmesan.” There were sautéed mushrooms spilling out the sides of each. They reminded me of ears, but the aroma of peppery beef and sharp cheddar was wetting my mouth. I begged you to let us “do the Quiznos” instead of the ecstasy. You agreed. The pills would keep for longer. When I bit down hard into the crunchy loaf you looked at me as though to say, “I told you about the bread.” We locked ourselves out that night when you needed a cigarette, but it was warm out. We played invisible hopscotch before the young attendant wearing an Oklahoma Sooners tee shirt and red Vans got us back in. You said he looked like Ethan Hawke, but fatter, and I had no idea whether looking like Ethan Hawke was a good thing or a bad thing. When we went to sleep that night, it dawned on me that you hadn’t said “fuck” in several hours, and that we’d played hopscotch. I felt good. I always sold about four times as many cookies as you did in Girl Scouts. You said it was because my mom loved me more. I said it was because my family 4

was bigger, and also fatter. But my mom probably did love me more. You got in trouble for calling the Samoas Samoans, and I thought this was a stupid thing for you to get in trouble for. You should have gotten in trouble for drawing inaccurate genitalia on the collection envelopes at church, or for stealing Aaron Santos’ POGs and putting them in your underwear. The Samoan thing was an accident. So few things you did were ever an accident. After selling cookies outside of Albertsons one afternoon, we built a fort with my brother you’d eventually want to fuck, and a friend of his. We ate peanut butter Tagalongs off of plates with forks and knives, and we all fell asleep before nine pm in a sugar coma. Sometime in the night, I felt you pulling my hair out of my face. You wrapped your brittle arms around my pudgy middle and hugged. You still smelled like peanut butter. “One…two…three!” You plunged underwater, black hair twirling in the jets of the Jacuzzi. You slipped off your bottoms underwater and struggled with the top. When you emerged, white face and breathless, you said, “There. Your turn.” Being naked in the hot tub would never feel this exciting again. “I want a baby pig,” you said. “You don’t want a baby pig.” You were flipping through a calendar you had just bought at 75% off at the record store called Precious Piggies. You had painted your toenails black. You moved in with me because you couldn’t make rent at the 4-20 house, whose address was 420 on Storey Avenue, with an extra little thing added to the “r” to make it read “Stoney Ave.” “You don’t want a pig,” I repeated, thinking about my carpet. “I don’t want a pig. I want a baby pig.” You rolled your eyes. “Do you think having a sex dream about Marilyn Manson means you have low self-esteem? It was like, a really good dream though.” 5

“Yes. I think that is what it means.” You tossed the calendar aside and looked at your toes. “I’m getting a baby pig.” You got arrested in Austin. You were moving from state-to-state when your probation sentence declared that you couldn’t. You did a few minor stupid things in Boise that you would have gotten away with elsewhere. You needed to stay to wait for things to clear, but you were already too bored with Idaho. I was admittedly gutted when you left so easily. I was used to being abandoned by you in California, when the promises of glittering LA would call you at night, but in Boise we got close. We went for runs down the river, where there would surely be no anthrax, and we would laugh at the sinewy old men, running so much farther than we could. Once we danced with the dean of sociology and his friend who was an Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist. They were in suits and had wedding bands, and threw us around the bar floor. You grabbed my face in your sweaty hands. Beaming and breathing hard, you said, “Now you’re learning how to be a tease. Have him buy you some shots.” In Texas, you got caught using a friend’s license at a bar when yours expired. You had pot and a couple of Adderall on you when they searched you. I thought you would have been taken away for something better than that. We didn’t get a pig, but we got a puppy – a pudgy bean-shaped little thing with a smashed-in snout. Even the shelter didn’t know what breed he was. You wanted to name him Lou because you were currently obsessed with the Velvet Underground again. I told you it would be another week or two before you were obsessed with another front man, so our puppy’s name had to be more neutral. Something that we could like for forever. “Peas,” you said. You stuck your face in his, and let him lick your lips without wiping them off. 6

I hesitated. “Fine. Peas.” In Texas, you were sleeping with a marine, who had a tattoo across his chest and clavicle reading “In God’s Arms.” You were living in Austin because you wanted to hunt down a Texas band with poetic lyrics. You were selling ecstasy, pot, and mushrooms to UTA students, while also working in a vegan delicatessen across from campus. You said pre-med and communications students were the best business. Somehow things added up to you getting caught, and getting taken back to Idaho in a van with barred windows. In spite of myself, I imagined you breathing onto the glass of the van windows, drawing tiny crude genitalia with your pinky finger. “Some guy got executed down the street from here the other day.” You don’t look at me. You press your nails against the plasticky glass. “I know. It was in the news. First execution in Idaho in seventeen years.” “It amazes me that I’m getting free meals here.” “It amazes me too.” “I heard he raped like forty women.” “He got free meals.” “Yup. I had another Manson dream.” “Charles?” “No. Marilyn.” “Gross.” “Don’t you remember that?” “I don’t remember every wet dream you tell me about.” “Well, would Charles have been a better Manson for me to dream about?” I really think about it. “No. No, I suppose not. Classically better looking maybe, at least at one time…” 7

“Yeah, see. Marilyn’s a way better Manson for me to nightfuck.” I shrug. “Agreed. I miss you. Kind of.” You smile and I wonder if your lips will bleed with dryness. “Your lips look like they hurt,” I say. We’re quiet for a moment. “I want to fall in love,” you say. “I don’t think that’s what you should be thinking about right now.” You heard me say it before I said it. To my amazement, you nod. You start to stare at my hands. I wish you could hold them. “I wish I could hold your hands,” you say. I’m startled. “I was just thinking that.” “The first time you came, I… ugh. No, nevermind.” “You…what?” I feel a tickle in my throat. You still stare at my hands before your eyes flick upward. So brown they’re almost black. “I wanted to kiss you. Is that bad?” “You kiss everyone.” You look like you want to cry. “No. I mean like. I really. Really. Wanted to kiss you. Like, really kiss you.” I usually have a smart ass response at the ready, but right now I don’t. “Oh,” I say. “Yeah.” Now you’re picking on the paint from your side of the glass. A young female guard, probably our age, of an ambiguous ethnicity taps your shoulder. Maybe Filipina. You stop picking. You sigh into the receiver. “So the bread in here sucks,” you say. “At least you get to nightfuck a Manson.” “No, I mean…the bread really sucks. It’s like everything I said about it before is just gone. It turns to paste before I can even fuck it in my mouth.” “That’s a shame.” “I still want to kiss you, you know that right?” 8

I hold your gaze for a few moments. “Yes. I know that.” I smile, and you follow. “Do you still have Peas?” you ask. “I couldn’t live without Peas,” I say.

K E L S I E H A H N - N O T C RY O G E N I C S

I’m here at Jerome’s house party out of a mix of pity and a desire to small talk with a pretty secretary from work, and now he has trapped me in the kitchen for a pseudo-philosophical ramble. I’m intent on the gin and tonic in my hand and the vaguely Scandinavian pattern on his baggy sweater. “Let me show you what I mean,” he says, and my eyes drift back to his face. He opens his freezer and pulls out a plastic bag, frost-rimed and tightly wound around something dark. He unwraps the bag to make the contents clearer —it looks like something he might have cleaned out of a gutter. “This is my parrot, Withers,” he says. “He’s dead. This is what it’s like when we die—we’re just dead. We could be in a freezer or the ground or an urn, it doesn’t make any difference. He doesn’t know any better. Neither do we. No joy. No pain. Just peace.” I look more closely, and the shape begins to take on parrot-like qualities. A bramble of claws, a dry slit for an eye. The matted gray detritus could be feathers. “Yep,” I say. “It’s important to remember,” Jerome says. He rewraps the corpse and places it tenderly back into the freezer next to a carton of peach sherbet. The next day, of course Jerome dies. Struck by lightning. Like a freak. I sign a sympathy card with vague condolences. Then word gets around the office that his elderly mother needs help cleaning out his house so she can sell it—he has no siblings, no cousins. Nobody young and able-bodied. So the pretty and, it turns out, soft-hearted secretary sends around a sign-up sheet for volunteers to help with the house, and that’s how I find myself at his house, again, losing 10

another Saturday to Jerome. He never even had time to clean up from the party—crumbs, splotches of spilled drinks, crumpled napkins, nests of smeared plates hidden behind potted plants and under end tables. The cup I forgot on the mantle is still there, still cloudy with my fingerprints. It’s been a couple weeks, so everything is under a layer of dust and touches of mold, and roaches skitter away as we sweep it all into trash bags. Then the pretty secretary puts me on fridge duty, and Withers has maintained his eternal vigil, his testament to the beyond from the inside of the freezer. Withers goes in the garbage bag with the sherbet and all the rest to finally rot in peace. And even with Jerome’s mother in the next room, and even with the pretty secretary hugging her and crying a little every time she walks by, I’m just thinking what everyone else is thinking: Jerome was an idiot. His bird probably was too. Jerome’s mother will not stop wiping her eyes on her ragged old hanky. I catch the pretty secretary in one of her few moments away from the mother and ask what they did with Jerome’s body. He’s in a mausoleum, I find out, and the secretary gives me a look and shakes me off. That’s right, I think. Maybe he specified it in his will, but either way, the mother made the right call. Maybe knowing that would help her. I dig the bird back out of the trash. Later, it will occur to me that Jerome may not have shared his views on death or the parrot with his mother, but that possibility does not occur to me now. I offer her the bird, still wrapped in its plastic. “He would have wanted you to have this,” I say. “He’s like this now, you know?” The mother has huge fake pearls in her ears. They swing forward on the ends of her lobes as she stoops toward the shape in her hands and slowly unwraps the plastic. Her eyes are yellow and slimy as she gazes into the corpse of the bird. She doesn’t seem to feel the cold. 11

C H A R L E S R A F F E RT Y - T H E M A N W A I T I N G F OR T HE L IGHT TO C HANGE

It was a windy morning. High up above the buildings of Stamford, he saw a bit of silvery trash as it winked and sailed, higher than birds, higher than chimney smoke, above the buses and trains and the hundreds of cars that had betrayed them to their jobs, that had gotten them there without accident or breakdown or loss of blood. The pigeons huddled on a wire waiting for the sun to hit them. The smell of the Sound, which was likely sparkling and full of tied-up yachts with seagulls scything at the air, drifted through the streets. It was a faint odor, but unquestionably there. Then the light changed, and he hurried in a crowd across the street and into the revolving doors. Like everyone else, he believed his reasoning was sound.

THE SPILL

At the train station, he chose the chair beside a coffee spill in the shape of Illinois. His train would arrive in half an hour. He had nothing to read as he waited. There were other chairs he might have chosen—the station was practically empty. But never in his life had he sat beside somebody else’s spill by choice. His foot was only inches away. He checked now and then to see if it was spreading. Right away he noticed people giving him dirty looks. They assumed it was his mess—and that he had the audacity to continue sitting beside it. The Styrofoam cup rolled slightly from the breeze of their passing feet beside the Illinois-shaped lake of coffee heavily diluted with cream. Would somebody say something to him? Would he be confronted? He almost wished for it. What a treat for the world to see the slob and his mess connected, to see justice done. It was reason enough for sitting there, for refusing to clean it up. A woman with a mop appeared. She pushed a pail toward him. It had a wobbling wheel that threatened to send her off-course. He could see already that the water was dirty—the shiniest engagement ring dropped into it would instantly disappear. The woman pinched the water out with the ringer, then let a thousand dampened strings hit the floor with a thud. She swirled it around, erasing Illinois from the linoleum. The man had loved a woman in Illinois once. He still thought about her —every day at least—sometimes with desire, often with regret. He wondered if he would erase her memory if he could do it as easily as this woman erased Illinois. 13

The woman with the mop gave him a last and superior look, and pushed the pail toward the other side of the station. Perhaps somebody there had dropped crumbs from a cookie in the shape of Indonesia, where his fiancĂŠeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the woman from Illinoisâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;had lost her virginity in a parking lot after necking with a tourist who convinced her, with surprisingly little effort, to try some of the dog that he was eating.

L I V I N G A B OV E J I M M Y & S H E I L A

Sometimes, when it was quiet, I remembered what my life was like before moving to Cedar Springs. The problem was, it was almost never quiet with Jimmy yelling at the TV and Sheila crying at all hours because Jimmy had called her a whore. Every night, there was the slammed door of someone leaving or someone arriving. I rented the apartment above theirs, so there wasn’t much I missed: the dog getting kicked into quiet, the cursing that followed a lack of tonic for Jimmy’s gin, the incredibly loud and appreciative sex that followed almost nightly. I crawled under the pillow, but the sound of their headboard hitting the wall traveled up through the floor and into the frame of my own bed. I figured Cedar Springs would be quiet. I picked it off a map in the Trailways station—because I liked the sound of it, and because I had enough money to get there. I found a job right away, at The Yellow Leaf. I showed up at the exact moment the owner was firing a busboy for throwing a tub of dishes at one of the cooks. She actually took the apron off of him and put it on me. We had the same name. “No need to even break out the label maker,” she said. Where I came from had become fucked up. Christine had told me no when I asked her to marry me, and I made such a scene crying after her and following her around that her brother came by to where I worked and beat me up—right there in the parking lot where everyone could see. He knocked out the tooth I’d just had filled, and he slashed all the tires in my Ford. It would have taken all the money I had to get new tires, but I wasn’t willing to bet on the rest of the parts. I walked directly from the parking lot to the Trailways station. It was that kind of decision. Sometimes, after Sheila and Jimmy stopped screwing, and I turned off the TV and thought of Christine, I started to cry for the simplicity of what I 15

used to have. Tables to bus all week long, beer on Fridays, Christine on Sundays. It was a pattern I could build a life around. But Christine was a hostess, and didn’t see herself marrying a busboy, and one day, news of her new boyfriend eventually reached me in Cedar Springs. It was Fred—the cokehead manager at Prima’s, where she was hostess. It wasn’t clear whether they were married already or would be soon. I regarded this information like a knife being driven into somebody else. That’s how bad it was. I couldn’t let it feel like it was happening to me. So one night, I was lying in bed, probing with my tongue the socket of my missing tooth, wondering if I’d ever go back, if I’d ever see Fred and Christine walking down a street and have to step aside or tip my hat, knowing that his hands had been all over her. That’s when Sheila and Jimmy started up again. But this time, I did something I’d never done. I banged on the floor three times, hard, to say I don’t like it when I can hear you hitting her. There was instantaneous silence. Then I heard their front door open and slam and the heavy steps of Jimmy coming toward me up the stairs. “You better run,” said Sheila through the floor. “He’s got a bat.” I was left to consider the knife in the sink or the window above that sink —how it could take me to the roof and then to the world—vast and Christineless and waiting to be seen. It was cold outside, and my jacket was hanging on the kitchen chair not ten feet away. But I was already out the window and I never went back. It was that kind of decision.

M . R . S H E F F I E L D - B R I E F I N S T RU C T I O N S

1. Remember to scout a place to dump the baby’s body. Something lush, preferably tropical so that the sun and humidity can do their work on the corpse. You want rich soil composition. You want a place with a lot of insects—maggots are preferred but not necessary. Fly larva, mosquito larva, ants, beetles, wasps, mites; basically, any of your classic saporphages will work. Frozen tundra is a bad choice—ice melts, and if it doesn’t, you won’t be able to dig into it. A canal is bad because some stubborn bodies fill up and float. This is a surefire way to call attention to the body. Under no circumstances should you call attention to the body.

2. When you’re giving birth to your soon-to-be-dead baby at your high school prom, please remember to hitch that $289 dress all the way up and over your hips, your torso, all the way up and over your tits. Otherwise it’s fucking murder to get those blood stains out. Otherwise you’re going to feel super fucking weird next time you wear it—oh no, you’ll say, I must’ve spilled something on it. How clumsy clumsy clumsy clumsy and they’ll know from your tone of voice and the awkward repetition that something is motherfucking up with you. 3. When you’re running from the ballroom at the Hilton, mascara all fucked up down your face and a nightmare of blood and guts and skin clutched in your thin and unlined hands, repeat this, a mantra for baby-killers: breathing in, I am breathing in; breathing out, I am breathing out; breathing in, I am breathing in; breathing out, I am breathing out; breathing in, I am running to the woods 17

with my baby; breathing out, I will strangle her beneath the live oaks; breathing in, this mass of hair and blood is my baby; breathing out, this mass of hair and blood will soon be dead; breathing in, I am not a monster; breathing out, this burning and blood and flesh and hair and searing do not me a motherfucking monster make. 4. Did you remember to scout a place for the body? It’s important to have a good sense memory of where you want to end up, baby face down face down face down in dirt, blood running rivulets carved into skin, dress hitched up hitched up hitched up. 5. I can’t stress enough that the hole you dig with your bare hands, fingernails raking the soil aside, must be deep. It must be deep enough to cover the baby. Deep enough to discourage wild dogs from digging her up. It must be deep enough that the rain will not disturb her, will not float her gentle down a slope and straight into town. Dig with one hand and press the other over your mouth. You can’t afford to make a sound. Those weird, low moaning noises you’re making are more than enough to signal to the world that a crime is being committed. Stop it. Pull yourself together. A baby is a baby is a dead baby is a dream is a thing no one knew of no one saw coming no one will know her name or her genetic structure she is not even a ghost she is of you she is you your dead hair dead fingernails a baby wailing weeping press her face into the dirt press her face into the dirt press her face into the dirt. 6. Stop it. Get yourself together. Wipe your face with the back of your hand. Pull the unspeakable blood-clotted mess from inside you. Detach umbilical cord. I don’t care how. Okay, use a knife then. Teeth. Dig a separate hole. Push these 18

blood-heavy organs into the dirt. Repeat after me: saporphages saporphages saporphages saporphages saporphages. 7. Know you are a cliché. The 17 year old who somehow kept this hidden. Limited socioeconomic means. Bastard background. Remember they will show pictures of you in daisy dukes with your hair piled high on top of your head. You will be beautiful and sexy and 16 in the picture. It will be all over the news if they ever find the baby. Regret the pout to your lips. The dark eyeshadow. Know that these are weapons you’ve allowed to be aimed at you. Know that your throat is as thin and delicate as an egret’s—they’ll say this too, when your picture’s broadcast over and over and over and over and over—how sweet you are, how fragile you seem. How delicious you will be to them. 8. Suck your thumb just for a second. It will help quiet your keening. 9. If you did your work right you are now safe. Listen, no one knew about the pregnancy. No one even suspected. No one is calling the hospital to check how your labor is going. No one will ever ask you about those ridiculous hours that stretched out into something unlike time, something that resembles only the void, an absence and a fullness, the gathering of everything inside you and oh how you strained against yourself, the knots of fabric to bite down on that did nothing to move forward time or the baby from your womb your cervix a ruined kingdom of pain and of pain and of pain—the sobbing so silent it perhaps did not exist except as an idea somewhere beyond who you once thought you were. If you did your work right you’ll never have to tell the story of stumbling from the dance floor. Of crouching over the toilet. Of hiking your $289 dress high high high over your torso, and of the running and the running, of the blood 19

and so much hair you’d been surprised—you’d been born bald, toe-headed, but this wriggling screeching thing had fine, dark hair like the threading of spiders’ webs. And the teeming and the teeming and the teeming of those moments up inside you while you pounded into the dirt. You won’t tell daughters or granddaughters that actually it helps to bite down on something. Ice dribbled across the forehead. You won’t lean forward to stroke to stroke. If you’ve done everything right, if you’ve dug deep enough, just go home and go to sleep. The bleeding will stop shortly.

10. And remember to smile as you get back into the limo. Adjust your corsage. Everything is not a nightmare. Yes, this is all happening at the same time. Regret the tiny cross you left in the woods. Its sentimentality. The truth of it—that it will be used to undo you, to string you up if it is ever found.

C H R I S C A RO S I

Dear Sun Grass Spider,

I am the candle and the heat

Many more will go

abroad the globe

like you hide and seek

a game I play

around the fairy fountain

because the sun resolves because the earth turns death persuades the diurnal fly asleep

by laying its palm

upon the office upon the plot. I leave

L I S A C I C C A R E L L O - W H AT I F DOESNâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T HOLD

when I am captured I wake up at the entrance I find my way back to her & she is standing like a statue in the cleared out space they can not even feel her among them but when she is taken I search for her I have to get to the room where she is locked in a cage a wood cage above the door & she is going to wait until I find her & command her down * she is like a small bird sometimes she can carry me 23

THIS

LIGHT

& sometimes I can get her to carry something I need my shield this instrument this weapon here take the body of my enemy & carry it away here take this song play it with yr harp like a mirror yr harp like a shield yr harp of metal with its metal strings * she parts the mist that lies between us she clears a path through the hands through the jars she clears a path for me that stops 24

the statues that freezes the enemies she is shining the light from the burnt down curtains she is shining the light from the little crack at the ceiling she wants to be helpful sometimes she shines a light & the whole wall comes down she stays still shining the light in my direction but it is only a reflection

L AU R E N E G G E RT - C ROW E - C O N F E C T I O N

Like you, I searched for sweetness in the wrongest places. Bit into what made me sick, washed it down with what made me sicker. Girls walked on bricks to get here. The sun warmed the sugar. Girls left. The bricks cooled. I furnished the table in a song of lemon and you fell quieted. I said I wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t but that meant yes. Noon was a pastry that could scald your fingers. Look: the light is unassuming and lonely. Across the street they are selling egg and flour. It is a foolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s errand. I told the story with a wooden spoon in my hand. Everything I said 26

embarrassed me. Mistook the salted stone for the bakery; the kitchen-work for the kitchen itself. A lit oven awaits the glass it will be given.

B RITT G AMBINO - T HE A NSWERS A RE N OT I N T H E S Q UA R E

I. It will all feel like a miracle again: the way the sun turns blue at Bleecker. Traces of saliva, clothing, eyelashes will be left on these park benches. Concrete is rooted, but wood and steel will always bend and pull a muscle— II. Look how you shed hair on the tiles, how you never clean up anymore. Pastel-colored tissues don’t stop you from crying. You’ve got to fry the pork and listen to the fire. Hold grease with your hands.

T R E A D I N G W AT E R

They shared temporary messed up highlights. Blamed the sheets, the skin that never landed in the trash can. Struck their brains with Northeastern snow, took all the boxes from under their beds, rearranged the lids. The uncomplicated female figures moved from doorway to doorway, pathological. Searching for the rabbit holes in the closets, they were overrun with squirrels.

S E T H L A N D M A N - F RO Z E N M A N

It’s gone forever, waiting for the phone by the phone itself. In my dreams I saw a million lined up, and none rang for me across all that crazy, giant kitchen. Now they’re just some plastic in my pocket. Not trying to cultivate nostalgia, though; I’m just reading through these old post cards for, like, some other reason. Climb some hill and come down someone else, that is one way of mastering your mood. Remembering high school is just another one to try, she said, but we were still living then, then. Always here we are, trying to think up the ending: when I’m me, that’s where I go.

H A N D S A C RO S S W H AT E V E R

I wrote the words, and then you wrote the words, and they were the same, and isn’t that weird. Then my sentence was diabolical, and it did a thing like a cat stretching. Let me say something with regret and doubt, mumbling into my pillow jokes and jokes that someone dies and that’s when we tell them how we must have always felt. I wrote words, and they stretched. My ancestors going on about these machines I don’t understand, and the languages they’re speaking in the beyond. I’m dreaming this by accident. Where were you when I needed you, you guys? Somewhere else, I guess. I’m telling you now.

H OW I S

N OT N IGHT

No really I wanted to tell you I didn’t know how the line could go on in whatever momentum you get from abruptness as such I told you my problems irregularities and nothing consistent no nothing in the name of nature no nothing to see here I wanted to tell you look away from this disaster no don’t be yourself it’s crazy you come home raving the words you heard outside like bursting buds ominous soporific and how it’s not night your hand in the dark any moment now 32

any time soon feeling around yourself the atmosphere you get high Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll come in regalia whispering secrets stubbing my toe on a chair in the dark leaving your room is any of this what you imagined carved out of a headstone colonnades I heard my ribs go back into sinking suspicions I knew when I was older I would cultivate all my jealousy all my love every instance of doubt and upheaval all abstraction in the numbness of all extremities 33

and all bad weather and shortness of breath and gaps in attention forced but abiding as well as all shivers and also what you perceive and also never able to be quiet so oh well I knew the questions passed my house I saw this skunk as my spirit animal the whole concrete establishment where I walk so mediocre also overlooked too and the video footage mostly unremarkable so whatever you ask me hangs in living spaces everywhere I go I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t respond to the mystery crossing my path 34

but photograph it for spectral evidence and keep my distance as ever the water approaches like me closer by fractions we end where we end with no recourse and nothing to be done and your loss is my loss the holy skunk no sign from God in the nothing we go on in like this.

F R A N C E S C O L E VAT O - N O T E S

[ from kaustos ‘burnt’ (from kaiein ‘to burn’) ] is a work based on chance operations (a variation/combination of Bernstein’s Acrostic Chance method and John Cage’s Mesostics) that uses Earth’s Holocaust, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, as seed text, and Leviathan, by Hobbes; Aristotle’s Poetics; Humane Understanding, by Locke; Shelly’s Frankenstein; and Elements of Chemistry, by Antoine Lavoisier, as source texts. Language from the source texts is collected via procedure, then reworked to shape the final poems.

F R A N C E S C O L E VAT O - [ f r o m k a u s t o s ‘ b u r n t ’ ( f r o m k a i e i n ‘ t o b u r n’ ) ] 1 . 0 b 1 6

of the radical principle of water This is something beyond philosophy; the similitude of objects, things desired, blotted and confounded with doctrine, that names are but insignificant sounds, independent of the artifice of signs and necklaces. I cannot describe my sensations, the prospect of my undertaking, this argument drawn from universal consent, misfortune put in probable form, guilty of absurdity as well as fault of art. I had arrived at this point, had become acquainted with theory and practice, this aptnesse to attribute fortune to causes on which there was no dependence at all apparent. It must be possible for the beginning and end to be taken in in one view, to consider how bodies operate one on another; that it is manifestly by impulse, and nothing else, this echo lightning illuminating the lake, a vast sheet of fire.

[ from kaustos ‘burnt’ (from kaiein ‘to b u r n’ ) ] 1 . 0 b 1 7

of the instruments necessary for operating on bodies in very high temperatures Concerning the degrees of lasting, the understanding of an object affecting senses only once, I felt it as it came, this giver of oblivion, a bare explication, an understanding of the terms. The parts of pure space are immovable, which follows from inseparability; motion being nothing but change of distance between any two things; yellow skin, the work of arteries beneath; these luxuriances a horrid contrast with the dun-white sockets in which they were set, these automata, engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles. In play one cannot represent an action with a number of parts going on simultaneously; one is limited to the part on stage, to that which is destructive, or the means of preserving the same. You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement, no member obliged to pay the debt so borrowed, this change from one state of things to its opposite, a necessary sequence of events.

S U S A N L E W I S - R E T RO S U S P E C T

The minutes mocking with their lite choice. How many times have I or anyone (to the swell of strings)? This lap with its tufts, its worn hump, burnt & leaking gleaned fits. This is nothing I agreed to nor amused. Ever surprised, this or another, not pleasing nor its rival (ever vengeful & majestic). Defeated still by syntax + another & another straitened round of crass struggle. 39

What is to be done? Not lean in nor engage, nor predict what cannot be (+ any & all mocked-up moments) or so you essay, crabwise & cobbled, stretched to accept & build or elegize what irks your gimlet I.

T E A R D OW N

THE

D OTTED L INE

For another night visitor, tear down the dotted line. (Never ask is it for sale.) (Never ask where should I hide the body?) Look into my eyes. Do you see Miss Stein’s dog? They say on Tuesdays it turned piranha and ate itself. Meanwhile, you mock the hours, which cower me. The fear of the convert-coward is a toothsome treat for Tuesday appetites. Back and back I circle to Identity and Time (that stormy pair) forever clinched in pugilistic ecstasy. Mark my words, girls, it’s all downhill from here— 41

(so never say please stay.) (Never say take me into account.) For a better answer abandon hope and hey diddley-ho, neighbor. Then take the drive to the forgotten castle where the keyholes canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop keening for their lost complements. (Never say beginning now.) (Never say which means you.) Or critique your pure reason seeking any season dimpled and dappled with drops of salty dewâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

L AU R A M I N O R - L A P D O G S , S H OW Y O U R TEETH

I would not be who I am if not for anthems and the heater-click hover of bartenders who give strange steam to love this late. Let me in without talking so much. My newness really wants to show you how much all your nothings mean. You are aching alone in the frayâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be afraid to do all that we talk of when we belong. I use tonics to soothe the burns of faith, and after seeing the hind legs of evolution, I pretend.

D R I V I N G T H RO U G H

THE

AND

C RU T C H

ROCK

W H AT

I wake up wet and we are dancing under the tusk pregnancies of the Brooklyn Bridge. I eat small balloons of haste because you are the tenure of my dreams, my sadistic old world gossip, and it runs me through like a Bambi mural on a young girl’s wall. It’s 9:50, and you’re still not here twenty years later. We’re down to bare wood and fiberboard, air washed and Tung-oiled and still the borer bees are coming. Let’s make the cut like Roethke in Iowa and howl at injustice and parking lot sand in our frayed coat pockets along with music and secret end chapters in stacked apartments— two lonely bills one in each pocket shoved in like tits at the last minute and my black boots turn, whir with friary rub under the sad paper of your absence. I’m flipping a madhouse over, soloing a champagne bayou. 44

I have enough moisturizer to keep me in New York City; I have my workout and my pink hate. I’m coming undone at wonder, at all these goodly creatures— you fan hot Brooklyn trash, you oaf-awesome hearts, content in watching boas of light pocket the brown buildings the old man and his guitar amp backpack, studded strap, in-ear mic, and a gig black hat. And when it’s silent, he will be missed as the guy playing the most rickety song in the world— to indifference and a silver train rolling, a flood-life of lust. I want to pull out the small pins that hold them together just to catch them in my arms. And in the guru-fog snare of rocketry wave tips spiriting the sea, let your rose and humanity fill with the perfumed lubricant of the ages, and lead with your watery end. I’m not the cavernous love where wars meet to forget. I scream scenic slow jams. I play the desert and Ft. Knox on tires tumbleweeds rolling the dapper suit pockets of Kunitz and I’m not yet done feeding the street with our tuneless hymns— with the food of music and water, of boots and words that listen, of sweet tea that butters your mouth with sad strippers. 45

S A L LY M O L I N I - P R E M O N I T I O N W I T H E XOT I C B I R D S

Getting coffee, go on in tacked to the door of BackBurner Software, grubby orange carpet an unwelcoming welcome mat. Reams of SQL and Java, sci-fi novels stacked near the back of a napworn couch as peacocks mew from the parking lot. Tiny archipelagoes of old creamer float in mugs I Love Mom, FantasyWorks BYTE. The place feels like where mistakes go to re-group, another small business interior as peepshow of who-knows-why. Something in the aftershavescented air tells me this will be my next job, inevitability nothing more than the end result of a long history of curious choices.

A DA M V E A L - G I N KO S I N G E R C O M E T DEMESNE

Fullest water buoyancy, wall-eyed forest basin, â&#x20AC;&#x153;beside vast catacomb Thebesâ&#x20AC;? (153) sleeps the Art Historian. The fungal time depository neither arid nor river, feather parabolic soft, hieroglyph hunter scorches a tender, a clutch of frond knots around feeding & fed fish to the fish, eating the urge to vomit raw the evening oils in past lucent metabolism.

FORBIDDEN PLANET

clavicle stick fermata walking to foothills where the fog collects and one of those high/low wind whistle-moans comes up the undifferentiated black box macro-structure just staggering drunk simultaneously connects to wi-fi & pukes down its chin/chitin-described proboscis culls half buried plastic scraps by precision beachcomber implant

FORBIDDEN PLANET

Demographic pillage and the watery bone/ osteoporetic gene-therapy, a modification against the ill effects of zero-g, the maladaptive reptile dinner theater invites all skin flaps to fold questionably collected fungus & berries & sub-dermal implants but not before the compact mirror/lenses a light dusting of concealed cocaine numbs the points at which CAT scan descriptors generate colorful abstracts: a little node where torso and shoulder connect valves extra air the real air the real good shit

NOTES Andrew Abbott lives in Maine and Spain and is represented by The Robert Fontaine Gallery and Garner Narrative. He wants to be your friend on Facebook. Chris Carosi is from Pittsburgh. His work and critical reviews have appeared in Hot Metal Bridge, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Switchback, Litseen, ZYZZYVA blog, and others. His first chapbook of poems, bright veil, was published by New Fraktur Press in 2011. He lives in San Francisco. Lisa Ciccarello is the author of the chapbooks Sometimes there are travails (Hyacinth Girl Press), At night (Scantily Clad Press), At night, the dead (Blood Pudding Press) & the forthcoming (the shore in parts) (Greying Ghost Press). Her poems have appeared in Handsome, Tin House, Denver Quarterly, Leveler, Everyday Genius & Corduroy Mtn., among others. Stephanie Couey is originally from Riverside, California. She moved to Boise, Idaho at age 21 on impulse, needing less traffic and pollution. She slept on the Love-Sac in a new friend’s apartment before getting her bearings in the city. This is as close as she has ever come to “roughing it.” She will be beginning her Masters of Fine Arts degree in Poetry at CU Boulder this Fall, where she will also be teaching Creative Writing. Lauren Eggert-Crowe is the author of two poetry chapbooks: In The Songbird Laboratory (Dancing Girl Press) and The Exhibit (Hyacinth Girl Press). Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, L.A. Review of Books, The Nervous Breakdown, Salon, DIAGRAM, The Murky Fringe, Interrupture, and Sixth Finch, among others. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is the Reviews Editor of TROP and a founding member of the Roar Shack Reading Series. 51

Britt Gambino holds an MFA in Poetry from The New School. Her work has previously been published in anderbo.com, decomP, The Battered Suitcase, and the blog at Visual AIDS, among others. She is also a contributor at The Sexy Feminist (http://www.sexyfeminist.com) and has taught for 826 NYC, the Brooklyn Brainery, and Gotham Writersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Workshop. You can learn more about Britt at her humble home online (http://brooklynbrainery.com/users/6169-britt-gambino). Kelsie Hahn holds an MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, 1/25, NANO Fiction, and others. She lives in Houston, TX with her husband, Stephen Cleboski. Seth Landman lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is a member of the Agnes Fox Press collective. His first book of poems is Sign You Were Mistaken (Factory Hollow Press, 2013). Recent poems have appeared in jubilat, Jellyfish, Horse Less Review, and Ghost Town, as well as the chapbook A Note on the Text (above/ground, 2012). He works as an Academic Advisor at UMass, Amherst, and writes about fantasy basketball on ESPN.com. With the poet Seth Parker, he collaborates on Tyoyeu (@tyoyeu & tyoyeu.blogspot.com). Francesco Levato is a poet, translator, and filmmaker. Recent books include Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; and Creaturing (as translator). His poetry films have been performed with various composers, including Philip Glass. He founded the Chicago School of Poetics, holds an MFA in Poetry, and is working on his PhD in English Studies. francescolevato.com

Susan Lewis is the author of How to Be Another (Cervená Barva Press, 2013), State of the Union (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming), The Following Message (White Knuckle Press, 2013), At Times Your Lines (Argotist e-books, 2012), Some Assembly Required (Dancing Girl Press, 2011), Commodity Fetishism, winner of the 2009 Cervená Barva Press Chapbook Award, and Animal Husbandry (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in a great number of journals and anthologies, including Atlanta Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, BlazeVOX, Cimarron Review, Fact-Simile, Fourteen Hills, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, Otoliths, Phoebe, Raritan, Seneca Review, So To Speak, Truck, Verse (online), and Verse Daily. She is Managing Editor of MadHat Press, MadHat Lit, and MadHat Annual, Contributing Editor of Fulcrum, and sometimes guest editor of Altered Scale and Right Hand Pointing. Her website is www.susanlewis.net. Laura Minor is a Brooklyn-based writer and singer-songwriter. Her work has most recently appeared in Bicycle Review, Trivia, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Sixers Review, and Lungfull. She has released two critically-acclaimed independent records, and is currently working on a third, forthcoming in Summer 2013. She teaches writing and humanities at the Pratt Institute, and is currently working on a book of short stories in Florida. Sally Molini’s work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Diagram, Denver Quarterly, among others. She co-edits Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com) and lives in Nebraska.

Charles Rafferty has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism. His tenth collection of poetry, The Unleashable Dog, is forthcoming from Steel Toe Books. A collection of short stories, Saturday Night at Magellanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, is forthcoming from Fomite Press. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Quarterly West, Massachusetts Review, The Literary Review, DoubleTake, and Connecticut Review. Currently, he co-directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College. M.R. Sheffieldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, Pank, Fiction Southeast, Monkey Bicycle, and other publications. This is, happily, her second time in SpringGun. Her cat keeps a blog wherein he discusses his rage at his own impotency in an unfeeling world here: whyismycatsosad.blogspot.com. Adam Veal lives in San Diego where he is an adjunct instructor at USD. He received his MFA from Brown University in 2010. He has been published in Conjunctions and Lit Magazine.