SpringGunPress.com / editor@springgunpress.com 450 W. 14th Ave / P.O. Box 48145 / Denver, CO 80204 Copyright 2010 SpringGun Press Contributors Cover: Noah Doely / http://www.noahdoely.com The Man and the Moon, Tintype 11 x 14 inches Courtesy of the Artist
SpringGun V2, N1 Erin Costello Mark Rockswold EDITORS
Poems Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi • Two Poems • 1 Daniel Carter • Three Poems • 3 dawn lonsinger • Three Poems • 6 Tony Mancus • Four Poems • 11 Nate Pritts • Calendar Lessons • 15 Joshua Ware • from Homage…to Creeley • 16
Art Noah Doely • Capturing Spirits • 20
Fiction Sarah E. Harris • Freeze • 22 Kathy J. Lee • from One-Two-or-More Sided • 25 Adam Moorad • from The Surgeon • 28 MR Sheffield • Detainee • 33
Notes on Contributors • 37
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi
The Unfinished Plans of the Body Forehead: A bar of soap the mind is lathering on its washboard Hands: A clutch of five chickens peck at the bare rib of existence Ear: An oyster mushroom plucking the harp of its body Cheeks: Two raw steaks slapped upon the bone-white plate Brain: A local map composed of teeth and zippers Hair: Mess of discarded fans; pinholes of light upon the lantern Mustache: The spool has apportioned a pitiable amount of white thread Nose: A cork, fiddling with the notion of departure Eyes: Perpetual stenographers relaying the tickertape Prayer: The eaves of the house are aligned with blackbirds, which disperse, as the density of their bones lessens until they are tissues on the air – and converge upon the suet of heaven Song: The throat jumps for words dangling like remote fruit upon the branch Dream: A wanderer through columns. A clownfish moves through a slumbering anemone, that calls out – Sister! Before by the current its limbs swept bare
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More Rules I Yosefin should not compare her lover to her dog even if she means to compliment her lover’s loyalty or his compulsion to protect her or his handiness around blind relatives II If when Yosefin is staring into her lover’s face (that bowlful of clean, Arctic milk) she sees her future She should not say, when I am near you the present seems almost meaningless III If Yosefin believes she would forgive her lover anything she need not reassure him in a listing of perverse and grotesque crimes he would be allowed to perpetrate Proving she could easily settle for a monster bearing little to no resemblance to her actual lover IV If Yosefin believes she could forgive her lover any trespass against her she should not muse upon a series of hypothetical perverse and grotesque crimes Getting herself worked up, asking, asshole expects me to forgive him what? And spending forty-five minutes screaming and breaking plates in her lover’s kitchen
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Daniel Carter
Greetings from the Holy Land Behind the glass, backed by a hotel’s paper facade: an idol we made of a box and a hole, a pipe and a bowl. I’ve seen temples crumble, but the postcard says it’s made of stone and Greetings from the Holy Land. Once upon a time he climbed into a tree. Seen from above, only the darks count. Let the blonde and the sandy come to me. We toss out our travels—scribbles on napkins, the way to the beach. We leave out the bits not fit for the father; he returns the whole tale. We owe him only our droppings: motes of dust, scattered black dots. But he takes them in and pours out a stream. Not bearings but the way. How many men does it take to shake out a Pharisee? It’s best—I’ve read— to hold him by an ankle, turn out his pockets, slap his cheeks. Make gold coins fall down. We give him shake, but he returns clean smoke; he never lets a leaf drop stray. Everything floats up, but he never comes down.
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Tower Long married feet in the field of blue, smashed among the other pairs. Between leaving and love, seasons and sleep strung out as sheets—sheets cast in iron, clasped, made illegible and re-forged in the hot wind. The new star surveys, cuts a little from each of our tendrils. Presses one wet to the other and wraps the cut in plastic and foil. Dew condenses; lines wander. So two feet bear a third. So the tail of the serpent turns to a tongue. So stacks flare and fall dark, taken. Graft is a process best undertaken at high altitudes. That summer we split ourselves in the lamplight. The book man fell and spilt his pack. Children played over the waste and made habits of folded newspapers. Each house corner was prayed before. And now the mass in the sky goes flat, grows darker every day. I hung books from a rope and watched water run down their sheets, wash away their lines. A man turned water tower, I kept watch between the empty stacks. Fall’s approach brought down clouds, and the children—crusaders—camped in fog banks and quested for new answers.
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Western Still She’s got pieces. He put her perfect by the highway, her toes dangling off the faded lawn chair. The most marvelous part of the grey motorcar isn’t that he doesn’t know it’s there, but that I took out its beating six-cylinder engine, buried it under the sand, and it kept zooming over the desert, headed for Los Angeles. Peach now, she’ll melt to deep blue when the sun’s gone, sit in the pool of almost-purple, almost lost among the rocks. What he doesn’t know is that a coyote can lose a leg to a trap, but the man with the knife won’t recognize the beast’s limping gait. Las Cruces blew off the map, but cars still pass through the city. No forests here, but a songbird in each stone. So I censored everything. I scrubbed her clean. A perfect worker, blonde and glass-eyed, she’s a catch in painted daisy dukes, and a man with a knife is sure to take her. In his cab, in a parking lot motel: little television or radio says despite unpredictable thermals, they’ll still race on Saturday. I scrubbed that clean, too, and when he laid her on the bed, he thought it felt like home. In the desert: nothing dies. A toad in the dry season learns to love the dirt and finds all my secrets buried there. Boxes are the most marvelous things. Dirt clods are a hobby; the rock formations that bite, black, into the sunset house my real treasures.
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dawn lonsinger
Vanishing Tense Fruits are tweaked to tang like other fruits—tangelo, grapple, jostaberry, plumcot—hybrid rapture at our fingertips. And vegetables are plumped colossal while pixels multiply, scurry like silverfish, then glaze. Kiosks migrate inward. Fumes douse the air. One thesis brandishes cutlery, another cuts. Wires dip down the throat, hood the plosives as connective tissue grows on the sides of buildings. Here, organs seem residual, romantic even. Light is the lake we remember through, jogging our memory with each undulation, our teeth conical and interlocking, our backs momentarily dorsal, no bones, small inconspicuous openings, the dangers glittering & spinal as fluorescent bulbs, the county line drawn over the sutures of our skulls. A dolphin's grayish back blends with the dark of depth, its whitening belly with the bright surface of the sun-laced sea while we stand in the foyer, eyes wet, waiting to be let in where genetics & scanners & peroxide have not yet burned through our bodies, made them transparent as surgical gloves, the heart beating in its gelatinous vanishing tense, the chambered nautilus knowingly curled in on its prehistoric cache, light leaking into its eyes, our arms full of measured solids. In the tampering we are saved, sliced off, repeated, the images & information of our images & information dropped like dollops of cream into our common, cyclopic sense, our faces paper panels spreading like lily pads across surface. We sit at the table dumbfounded by the intimacy we feel with meat, how long we stay with the gristle on our plates. 6
City of Arson My wrists graze the gaskets of the fire hydrant quietly, the bulk and dull gleaming stasis of us both sinking into the grey cake of daylight commerce. Stains of urine and life resident in the municipality. Parking lots carry the consensus, pipes slit with water hidden like bones. We are plunged into the dream of danger, while the flesh-clasps clank so silently the horror, festival glitter dusting the pigeons and homeless. My feet fathom the reservoir the psychic’s laughter echoes in the hospital is never empty, each breath tabulated with escape. Anything, anything to perfect the shapes that skirt our shutters, the eyes that spark with razing. The mayor says— “If we have to light up the whole city, we’ll do that.” It might begin with a small gleaming singe mark in the carpet. Our children have been struck by passing automobiles while playing in water spray. Something flits past the window and though I am mostly a refrigerator of loss inside the seams of me I swaddle the baby of emergency, its mouth lovingly taped shut. My brain is a four-alarm blaze. Every block circles itself. If the valve is opened we will all drown. If it’s tapped we are already burning—
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We know the elapsed entity will make no sound, that the air will drape it over us—
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She Had No Swaddling Clothes Rumor had it everything she birthed would ruin itself with flailing, that such relocation of energy was derelict, lightning in the brain— dangerous impulsive scattering For a while she too feared that what went unswaddled was doomed, that the exposed were the abandoned, that everything might unravel, animals sifting away in forest light as if biology willed it—first darkness, then light, then thinning to zilch. She read that in Tudor times babies were wrapped in linen bands from head to foot for eight months to insure against physical deformity. In her dreams: children fell through the cracks in her floor; Jesus floated out of the manger and back into heaven; hippos ate whatever moved; the ocean was seeping into everything; and her own hands wouldn’t stop growing. So she started to take long indulgent baths, warm water draped over her like flannelette sheets, the world muted and small beyond the shower curtain. At night she played a recording of water sloshing over things, fell asleep imagining every object in its own jacket. When she stepped outside the green gangly sputtering of it all frightened her. Who would care for all this life? Who could reassure it that the sun was a kept entity, would not hurl itself into our laps? She started to sit in her car, engine off, windows up. She was seeking a silence that wouldn’t settle in. She could still see the constant shifting, sudden sparks in branches, the wind through her neighbor’s hair. But slowly it occurred to her— trillium is tucked in, her house huddled by valley and horizon, her brain cozy, weather sheathed in atmosphere, planet in a pool of planets, everything enveloped in a vastness she can’t witness.
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Chaos was okay, and she its mercenary of risk— Then she began to nurse arousal, unfasten sums, and outset flowed like a robe of fire from her kindling eyes, and the landscape heaved and sobbed—
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Tony Mancus For you, Eyesunlady, the conchs and reeds and brassy turtle shells have been blown and dusted further off by intrusion. The planks and masts have turned into crosses and doorframes: a distorted promise of pearly freedom. Their announcement—dearest landmass, you will be bested.
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Given Assent I am not the ravaged land I am not am not your gurneyed tree hand not not not I am not your promised man I am not am not the siphoned gas I am not am not am not your holy arm I am not am not am not your wishes grant break not here now] break not here now] break not now] break break not not now] now here here ye one spilt bird scream and I am not possession in am not am not full go in am not am not my hands dove strained break not here now] break not now here now] go in am one bird split screened shouts in I am not the bailing wire binds me up to in ye break not here I a felled am not am not tree break not beaks now] here break not here now] ye
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Eyesunlady, Your disappearance from pictures is a hat to wear and take away: a variable in weather. Your removal comes all in one swipe. I’ll not wear your fate like a gustblown-open door to my face. The surface shifts continually but it’s never broken or bronzed, never offered in parcels up to the to the hungry god’s-tongue of plunder or dismay. And where the stringsongs play, Norsemen and other seafarers drop to their knees, their horns turn into factories of prayer.
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Red sky at morning, sailors drunk in the flophouse. Red sky at night and the chickenshit captain’s lips flutter at each word he sends down from the prow. What mutiny has he heard in his heart? “How did I get here?” he asks. And his words hold him fast to his position and his hands hold him fast to the spoked wheel. And his red, red heart, tattooed to his chest, is the color of the very sky he’s busy with slipping his ship into.
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Nate Pritts
Calendar Lessons I looked at the day like a problem to solve or a lesson pertaining to my flagging endurance but also I was aware of the hours as a square on the wall - packaged & parceled & already delivered. The minutes misinterpreted, emptied of their thesaurus, a skeleton ticking surrounded by sand. I was deemed unworthy but I grabbed up all the medals. I was told to get lost but I came back with my map. I decided to run when the alarm said act crazy, though my knees were two snow globes, blustery & nostalgic. People line up with questions for the jackets but they’re just blowing steam from the pipe in their teeth. The answers are truly uncomplicated; just look at the billboards. They tell us they know it. Hundreds of visitors drive their cars on my planet & they all look so healthy trapped in metal bubbles. Today I wrote exactly one poem & I wrote it with my eyes down the length of your neck. My desire was carbon, dated or copied, but it broke down eventually. Sometimes what’s most needed is food & sometimes the food is just food & not fireworks. A rhubarb pie is a gift even ungiven. Pretend it’s your birthday again & the thoughts that fall out of your head are pretty or gone. I’ll help you clean up the splatter & save the old napkins. I’ll jump when you say so but not because I love you. It’s what I do every day to prove gravity wrong & to stretch out my lungs. There’s air all around me but I’m ready & greedy. I’m the best argument for staying alive. 15
Joshua Ware
from Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley
EXPLANATORY NOTES I.Termination Shock For Jack Spicer’s Ghost and Rod Smith Jack Spicer’s Ghost ceased haunting EXPLANATORY NOTES years ago. In fact, Jack Spicer’s Ghost ceased haunting anything years ago. The invocation of Jack Spicer’s Ghost in the above dedication is a ploy by the poet to fulfill an unspecified function. While unspecified, the ploy’s failure should be evident, nonetheless, to readers. Rod Smith is a pseudonym for a former lover of the poet; the proper noun Rod Smith is not a reference to the poet Rod Smith. One would think that such a fact is evident if one seriously considered the welldocumented comments made in public by the poet with regard to both Rod Smith and former lovers. Of course, the possibility remains that the reader of this poem will never have met the poet, and even if they have, will never have paid much attention to the comments made in public by the poet regarding Rod Smith and former lovers. The possibility also remains that the poet never made comments about Rod Smith or former lovers in public. The poet once saw the following written on a restroom wall: “I am the ghost of syrup and stingers, Cegeste and fake novels.” The aforementioned restroom wall was located in Cooperstown, NY inside the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.
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Two Temperatures flush in to sandbar form, converge in urban renewal. Watermarks ripple in to liquid speak and economy light. Merge water with water, life with life. Sometimes, the poet begins “in the midst of affairs,” as opposed to beginning “from the egg.” Inscribed upon a plaque at the confluence of the South Platte River and the Cherry Creek is Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s poem “Two Rivers.” The poem ends with the line: “‘If you stay, we will not go away.’” Sometimes, the poet (as reader, and perhaps as writer as well) approaches the poem through mathematical techniques. For example: Merge water with water, life with life.
Merge water with water, life with life.
Merge water 1 water , life 1 life.
Merge water water, life life.
Merge 1 1, 1 1.
Merge
Merge water water, life life.
When one reads the stanza mathematically, the reduced version functions metonymically with the content’s semantic meaning (only if one negates the punctuation, of course). In contradistinction to this method, one can read the stanza’s formal structure as working antithetically to the semantics, in that the line breaks do not “Merge water/ with water,” nor “life with/ life,” but in fact separate them in a spatiomaterial manner. As such, one can read the stanza as a moment of sincerity, or as a moment of irony. 17
Cooldrinagh Memories Char coal men swathed in oil eee dress sing lather one an other with salves, lubricating bliss turned skin. On April 13, 1906, Samuel Beckett was born at Cooldrinagh in Dublin County. During his teenage years, the poet admired Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and thus became obsessed with Thomas Sterns Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Quite obviously, “Char/ coal men” alludes to Eliot’s poem. Both the poet and Beckett suffered traumatic burns as children due to carelessly handling cooking oil around a lit stove top. Samuel Beckett once wrote: “I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent.” Thomas Sterns Eliot once wrote: “Because one has only learnt to get the better of words/ For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which/ One is no longer disposed to say it.” In his younger days, the poet attempted to read Beckett’s The Unnamable. While this information technically falls outside the scope of relevance for this particular EXPLANATORY NOTE, the attempt was an important moment in the poet’s literary life because it was the first work written by Beckett that he could not physically or mentally complete. He found this to be an overwhelming success because, in many ways, the failure was an actualization of the exhaustion that Beckett’s characters experience. In a very real manner, something passed from The Unnamable to the poet; the book became a “flow among others…that comes into relation of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows—flows of shit, sperm, words, action, eroticism, money, politics, and so on.”
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Hippocratic Oath “Bleed bleed bleed bleed” a woman with Persian leeches, drying her insides out. Bury a woman to the waist, the ground will eat her child. The poet cut the following stanza from the revised version of the above poem: Roast yarralyi black beetles in to a fine powder, massage breast armpits pubes. Choke inner breath. Once, Rod Smith was pregnant with the poet’s child but did not inform the poet until after he miscarried. He intended to abort the child before the aforementioned miscarriage occurred because he thought the poet would be an unfit parent. Moreover, he did not love the poet and worried that having his child would mean that the poet, most likely, would remain in his life beyond the extent of their already deteriorating relationship. As such, an abortion seemed like the most logical course of action. The poet agreed, and still does, that he would be an unfit parent. “Our bodies are a pudding boiled”
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Sarah E. Harris
Freeze I keep a pregnancy test in the plastic bin underneath my bathroom sink. I’ve never missed a period, but sometimes I like the reassurance. Last week my boyfriend found it. He said, “What have you been hiding?” He said he was looking for the aspirin, but who keeps aspirin under the sink? My first year of college I read a story about a thirteen year-old girl from my hometown who’d been rushed to the hospital with abdominal pain. When the doctor told her she was about to give birth, the girl’s mother screamed and punched the obstetrician in the mouth. My mother sent me the news clipping in a manila envelope. I thought it might be a card with a check or a gift certificate. Instead, I pulled out the long thin strip of newspaper with a stuck-on post-it note that said Don’t make me a felon. It doesn’t help that the birth control makes me look a little pregnant. I grow a cup size, I gain a little weight around the middle. My boyfriend says, “What’s the matter with that?” He rubs my stomach until I push his hand away. I refuse to wear bigger shirts out of principle. The cupped wires in my bra make red horseshoes I can trace with a fingernail. When he’s not around I cup each breast right where the red wire mark cuts my skin and I try to feel around for “excessive tenderness.” My doctor always asks me if I breast-self-exam in the shower but I tell him no, we’re never looking for the same things. Tonight my boyfriend has promised to take me to Lerua’s where they make my favorite green corn tamales. It’s a small place with lacquered wooden tables and paper placemats but I dress up like it isn’t. I put on heels. When he calls to say that he can’t make it, I pull my curled hair into a 22
ponytail and drive over there anyway. I order twenty of their frozen tamales to take home, and while I wait I look at the crayon-colored placemats the owners have hung on the wall. There are thick-lined crayon drawings of families. My favorite is a bright blue mother and daughter wearing triangle-dresses; a row of birds at the top of the page looks just like six wide m’s. The tamales don’t come out quite as well at home, but I pretend they do anyway. Later when he asks, I rub my stomach, I hum into the phone: “mmmmmm.” One of my friends has joined a performance art group, and last week she called me from Colorado. She was at a public mall about to participate in a “happening.” She said there were a hundred and fifty people, all walking around the shopping centers, and in about five minutes they were all going to freeze in place at exactly the same time. She wanted to be posed with her phone and asked if I’d mind. A minute later she stopped talking. I stayed on the line with her until it was over, just listening. I tried to freeze too but I kept touching my stomach. It’s a thing I do when I’m nervous, like compulsively opening and closing the refrigerator. Every minute those tamales get harder, sweatier. Actually, the clipping my mother sent to me wasn’t about a girl from my hometown at all. I read about it later on the Internet when I was doing a search for “unknown pregnancy.” It is possible, I found out, for women to have their period throughout a pregnancy. It is possible not to show. It happens to about one in five thousand women, maybe. Most of them young, most of them not at all like me. After my friend called from Colorado I looked up the happening on the Internet. There 23
were grainy cell-phone videos of people frozen still, ice cream running down their arms. There were two long-haired women reaching for a hug, their hands just about to touch one another’s backs. I muted the audio so I couldn’t hear the people walking by or the jolt of camera noise. I saw my friend leaned against a pole. I hadn’t imagined her leaning that way. I tried to think there I am, but I wasn’t. I was moving. The next time I go to Lerua’s I eat there at a table in the corner on my own. One glass of water, no lemon. All the test directions say “take three days after your missed period,” but what if you never miss? I take a pen out of my purse and write a poem on the placemat. The poem is a drawing of a prom dress. I color it in with a red ballpoint pen. I never told my mother that story. She doesn’t like Metallica and she doesn’t say “so,” not without something else attached. She says things like “hey is for horses” when I answer my phone that way. The last time I was home she saw Planned Parenthood in my browsing history and said, “You’re pro-abortion now?” I said “no, but I’m pro-planning.” What’s attached is the important part. That was three years ago yesterday. We’re not Catholic, but sometimes I pray to the Virgin Mary. When I do I say, “Don’t let them choose me.” I make the sign of the cross, amen. Right before I met my boyfriend I bought a yoga video combo, one for AM and one for PM. The AM video was the only one I ever used, and even then I pressed fast-forward to the very end. The part I liked was the relaxation meditation—the dead man’s pose. “Lie on the ground, one hand on your stomach, the other on your chest. Feel the movement of your breath,” the tape said, “feel it rise and fall.”
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Kathy J. Lee
Intimate We talk. For lunch, he had sushi at that place downtown—the one that feels like a narrow hallway with the fat chef who has blond hair. I stubbed my left toe on the damn coffee table again, and my editor is finally divorcing that auto-mechanic who hangs her panties from his rearview mirror. They dance. He scrutinizes every curve and twist of her lithe body in its loose cotton t-shirt and pants that end just below the knee. In turn, she looks to him for any hint of a smile or a nod or cock of the head or purse of his lips. We quote classic William Shatner, we lose chess pieces to the dog, and we litter the refrigerator door with fluorescent Post-Its. On Sunday, we had Bobby-and-Cheryl over for white wine and chicken parmesan.
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They touch, taste and breathe grimy bass lines, they grip one another’s skin as sweat slides down the dips and crevices of their bodies. On Tuesday, she called to say that she felt inspired, and they disappeared together into the studio. We share secrets that are no longer even secrets. We purchase ottomans at Ikea. In the morning he grunts softly while emptying his bladder into the toilet that we take turns cleaning. They pull; they push; they move and tire. They use few words. We make love on over-washed navy-blue jersey sheets. He keeps his eyes closed, and I wonder who he’s fucking.
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Longevity A pink little porker—disposed of her baby pudge by year three. Childhood reserve, obedience rankled into deadly adolescent silence and brooding. Then, Motherhood! Over and over and over. Her instinctive love mutates, and her protective impulse is misunderstood. Thus, four beautifully flawed daughters will wear matching blacks on the most anticipated day of their lives.
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Adam Moorad
Patient #1 The surgeon and the patient spend an entire morning removing metal hunks from the patient’s bones. The hunks are grey and shaped like letters neither man can translate. “What do they spell?” the patient asks. “Nothing now,” the surgeon says. “The rest of the letters have already been sliced out. Besides, they spelled nothing together before. And the penmanship was weak.” “Was the text print or cursive?” the patient asks. “Cursive,” the surgeon replies. “But with a lot of mistakes.” “What if the letters made a special code; one you couldn’t decipher. Maybe it could have been cracked, if you tried…” “Those are your bones,” the surgeon says. A sigh escapes his lips. “It’s all your bones that are cracked.” On the patient’s skin, the surgeon’s voice blows like an air conditioner.
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Patient #2 “What do you see inside me?” the patient whispers. “What have you found out?” An oil portrait of a man hangs before the surgeon. The canvas slits like a vas deferens seeking shade in the surgeon’s silhouette.
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Patient #3 “At first it was yellow, and then it turned green. Maybe that’s because I held my eyes closed and blocked out all the light. I could hear it calling out from deep down, howling inside me like a dog for the sun. Later, the hound bawled letters and numbers, and then the names of different colors.” The patient illustrates the effect his condition creates. “When in a Starbucks, caffeinating, drinking something like strange water, it happens: the floor spreads out like shallow surf; the walls extend into frothy sea jaws. Tropical fish surround me; each one has its genus stitched into its gills.” A murmur moves from the surgeon outward, touching every student in the class. “He’s only talking about his soul,” the surgeon lectures. Three students ask three questions: 1. “Is this a joke?” 2. “Is this some foreign infection?” 3. “Is there an effective meditation?” The surgeon silences them all with a swift scalpel movement.
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Patient #4 “The Statue of Liberty looks nothing like the original Statue of Liberty. It’s just a corroded reminder of what has passed.” The patient has spent a fortune surgically altering her body to channel Lady Liberty. “Make me just like the original,” she implores the surgeon, shaking her teary head. It seems like this is always happening, the surgeon thinks. The clouds do their best float around all our different buildings. The commercials cue up for longer commercial breaks. Thirty-minute stories meander aimlessly without any discernable plot. People are sad but hopeful, thinking, behind the grey blinds of cloud, there is a world breathing heavenly breaths that only God has breathed before. Paris Hilton quickly falls out of love, and into a new love. Oil becomes energy; with this energy, we fight.
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Patient #5 “My sex addiction has made all my relationships boring,” the patient says. “And now my prostate looks like this!” His incision opens to the sound of Velcro. The surgeon carefully unfastens the strips with one hand, taking several minutes to complete. His arm is constant, steady, and even. “Who was your first?” the surgeon asks. “She was a Cancer by birth,” the patient muses. “And yours?” Time swallows the surgeon in pause. “I was just a boy,” he says, fastening two clamps to the patient’s pelvis. “And she was some drunken car wreck.”
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MR Sheffield
Detainee So you get in your car and immediately it pricks you asleep, its tentacles of seatbelts entangling you. There are kids in the back or not, also asleep or too young to know they ought to be. There are birds singing somewhere, but if you roll the windows up you can’t hear them. There was an unidentified man outside your window. He left sneaker marks going all the way around your house to the backyard. Was he looking into the sinkhole back there? He left a note on your windshield under a windshield wiper. I don’t know what it said; he wrote it in another language. There is something large and pulsating about the way the air can wrap itself around a person flying bicycle-fast downhill. But maybe your house is on fire? Should you go check? When you get to the rough part of the neighborhood you remember to lock your car doors. You congratulate yourself on remembering. You even remember to lock your car doors before you get to the rough part of the neighborhood so that way you don’t seem afraid or racist or classist or something; you don’t have to deal with someone seeing you click the lock down, with the growing look of apprehension / horror on your face as you drive through the rough parts of the neighborhood where the buildings crumble if you drive by them too quickly. Every character desires something, but I don’t know what’s left for you to want. Do people still use the word covet? Maybe there is something you covet. Maybe you want that bicycle-fast feeling with no locked doors and no AC and no worry that your house could be on fire or that someone could be sneaking into it. 33
There was a woman in your bedroom and she left through a window she broke with her fist. She told me it didn’t hurt to break the window, but it hurt to lie on your bed and look up at the ceiling and tremble through your nightmares. There is something new and improved about you today. I don’t like it. All of this gets to be too much, maybe, and that’s when you feel like you’re an ocean and your blood is some fucked-up tide rising. The child in your bathroom left an instruction manual for a unicycle. You should check it out. I think you have what it takes, really, to construct a thing like that. A thing so ridiculous. How did the child get into the bathroom anyway? No signs of forced entry. Did you leave your front door unlocked? Are you losing it? Here’s a bottle of this kind of medicine and here’s a bottle of another kind, try them both, see which one straightens out the tide of your blood. I’m checking the oven. I think it’s okay now. You can come out. You can come into the kitchen. You can open your eyes. You can unclench your hands. You can look at me. You can feel safe here. You can put down that knife, that gun, that cleaver, that hatchet, that machete, that rifle, that revolver, that razorblade, that bird skull, that instruction manual, that handful of dirt, that steaming tray of food, that canister of pills and that canister of pills as well. You can leave them there on the table. You can regard them with longing. You can be an enemy combatant. You can back away slowly. You can get on your knees, motherfucker. You can put this bag over your head. You can let me try to love you. You can say you’re sorry. You can take a nap in my bed. You can eat that, it’s ready, I think, please try it. Yes, the world is ending. It’s okay to feel perennially culpable. It might even be normal? There was another man outside your 34
window, but a different one, and outside the bathroom window—not the bedroom. He was trying to hoist a small child up, a child with unicycles in her eyes, so maybe she was the same kid as before. I can’t really tell. All children look the same to me. You’re getting into your car, and as soon as you click the lock down you feel immensely sleepy. Are you narcoleptic? Here, have you tried this medicine, or this one? There is a sinkhole in your backyard big enough to swallow an apartment building. Aren’t you afraid of falling in? Doesn’t it just make you catch your breath? What is it about you that is making you look this new and this improved? I know I said I don’t like it, and I meant it, but I can’t stop thinking about it. You shine now. And you’re lemon scented. Quivering in your sleep in the car, sleep driving to the grocery store, sleep shopping for dinner, sleep sleeping in your bed, unaware of the intruder-child lying next to you. I did read the note. It said nous sommes seuls ensemble. I released it from my clenched hand into the wind so it would drift into the sinkhole, but a bird swooped it up tight in her beak to use in her nest. Are you dreaming about sinkholes, unicycles, flocks of trilling birds, shining your weapons, the car trip home from the store, the uselessness of the pool covering over the sinkhole in your backyard, skinny children pushing grocery carts of rotting food, your garden overgrown with weeds, the differences and similarities between weeds and flowers, armies of children falling head over feet over head over feet, your own nagging sense of culpability, the fact that the world is being smothered around you, like a teenaged girl in a horror movie? There will be a woman hiding in your trunk this morning and she will be me.
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Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi was the former poetry editor at The Santa Clara Review. He is currently a graduate student of creative writing at the University of California, Davis. These poems were written for Alan Williamson. Daniel Carter lives in Columbus, OH. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Mud
Luscious and >kill author.
Noah Doely was raised in Iowa and earned his BFA in sculpture from the University of Northern
Iowa. He works with sculpture, installation, and antiquated photographic processes. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally and recorded and toured with the band The Old Scratch Revival Singers. Noah relocated in 2008 and currently resides in San Deigo, California where he is pursuing his MFA at the University of California, San Diego.
Sarah E. Harris has lived in a lot of places, but she currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona,
where she’s writing, teaching writing, and pursuing a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English. Her work has appeared in Quarter After Eight and Suss, and you can see her CV and some links she likes at http://u.arizona.edu/~seharris, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Kathy J. Lee is a graduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) with a B.A. in English
Literature and Mathematics. Currently, she splits her time between the snow-covered mountains of South Lake Tahoe and the congested highways of Southern California. In her spare time she enjoys laughing, snowboarding, devouring newspapers, AcroYoga and rearranging the furniture in her apartment.
dawn lonsinger received her MFA from Cornell University and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in
Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, where she is the managing editor of Western Humanities Review. She is the author of two chapbooks, the linoleum crop (Jeanne Duval Editions, 2007) and The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). Her poems can be found in current or forthcoming issues of Subtropics, Colorado Review, Blackbird, Sycamore Review, Post Road, The Pushcart Prize XXXV, and Best New Poets 2010. She, like most living organisms, has a thing for light.
Tony Mancus lives in Rosslyn, VA with his fiance, two cats, and a chinchilla. He is co-founder of
Flying Guillotine Press and he teaches writing and literature at Emerson Prep and Writopia Lab DC. Some of his work is forthcoming or has appeared in Verse, Fawlt, CUE, Handsome, Artifice, cream city review and elsewhere. 37
Adam Moorad’s writing has widely appeared in print and online. His debut novella, Oikos, will be published by nonpress in 2010. He lives in Brooklyn. Visit him here: http://adamadamadamadamadam.blogspot.com.
Nate Pritts is the author of three full-length books of poems - The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon
Books, 2010), Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press, 2008) & Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX, 2007). He works online with gifted students through Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth & is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N. Find him online at http://www.natepritts.com.
MR Sheffield was a 2010 finalist for the National Society of Arts and Letters Short Story
Competition. Her short story "Sexual History" was published in Paper Skin Glass Bones. She lives with her husband and sister in a little duplex on the bad side of Boca Raton, FL (if it can be said there is a bad side of Boca) with their four cats, goldfish, and a hamster named Jason Voorhees.
Joshua Ware lives in Lincoln, NE where he is pursuing his PhD in poetry and poetics. He is the
co-author of I,NE: Iterations of the Junco (Small Fires Press), as well as the author of A Series of Ad Hoc Permutations, or Ruby Love Songs (Scantily Clad Press) and the forthcoming Excavations (Further Adventures Press, 2010). His work has appeared or will appear in many journals, such as 580 Split, American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, EOAGH, Hayden's Ferry Review, Laurel Review, New American Writing, and Quarterly West.
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