call and response

an excerpt from “The Mayflies”

One afternoon on the first day of winter, I walked out the door. It was spring, I called out to someone. My ladies came running. It was the hottest day on record and I was on the street. I was crossing over.

The bridge traffic was stopped. Red light, green light, winter light, silence. I returned to my vortex, reverent. I was situated on the riverbank, looking at my wristwatch. It felt useful to keep track. My ladies were there, covered in whispers. I could hear bits of conversation: But I thought you knew…

I was pitched forward by a sudden crash, and it was there, on the edge of a gentle submersion, that my mind gave way. It was simple. I looked out over to the other side of the river and was drained of the future.

The river churned its mud below the blue bridge. I was down. It wasn’t the motion of flight. There was nothing to get away from. I was there, at the riverbank. I placed my hands in the river.

–Sara Veglahn

Sara Veglahn is the author of Another Random Heart (Letter Machine, 2009), Closed Histories (Noemi Press, 2008), That We Come to a Consensus—a collaboration with the poet Noah Eli Gordon (Ugly Duckling, 2005), and Falling Forward (Braincase, 2003). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals, including: Conjunctions, Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Trickhouse, and Bombay Gin. She served as the poetry editor for Art New England and as the associate editor for the Denver Quarterly, and has taught writing and literature courses at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Denver, and Naropa University.

No Eye Deer

“What if I took my balls out right now?” I asked.

“What if,” said Karen.  Poor Karen.  “You bored?  Acting out again?”

“It’s just a question.”  She is indubitably correct.  I am bored.  Acting out.  Applying scorched earth tactics here.  No one deserves this.  Except maybe Karen.  “I think I have a nose bleed.”

“Shut up,” she said.  There was a pause like a sighing dog.  “Look at those fucking kids on the bridge again.  I swear I’m getting a pellet gun.  Is that right?  Wait.  Maybe an air gun?  What the hell do I mean?”

“You mean a blow gun.  Like a prehistoric hunter.  A big piece of bamboo that you put a rock into and fuck some animal up.”

“That’s bullshit.  Hunting?  I’m talking about murder.  I want to kill those kids.”

“Are you serious?  Then I think you’ll need poison-tipped darts.”  In an expression of the result, I put my hands around my throat and stuck my tongue out.  I rolled my eyes up into my head and realized how nice it was to keep them there.  I started feeling a dull pain and had to stop.  “I totally fucked up my eyes, I think.  I can’t move them right.”

“I told you, stop acting out.  Go yell at those kids.  Get their pot, if they have some.”  The neighborhood kids always sat on the bridge, dangling their feet over the water in some vaguely macho way, smoking joints and cigarettes and making out.  Karen absolutely hated it.  I have no idea.

In the first place, the kids were decent kids.  They didn’t do break-ins or torture the cats or any of the nasty things you might imagine kids doing in a rural lake village.  In the second place their parents were total racist boors.  But these kids seemed to have some love in them.  They looked at the stars, and they didn’t laugh when someone puked.

I got up slowly, trying to keep the cat from jumping off the couch, to no avail, and slipped on my Super-SR slip resistant shoes.  They had never been useful to me except as an expression of my paranoia.  I pushed open the screen door and procrastinated my way across the lawn toward the bridge.

Simple things.  The oil drum trash can that no one has ever emptied.  The styrofoam airplane caught in the tree for three years.  The smell of mud and frogs.  I see the kids try to hide their joint.  They care a little.  Not enough to throw it away, but enough to cup it, which I appreciate, that I’ve become an authority figure just by lingering on this planet.

“Hey, what do you call a deer with no eyes?” I ask.

“Is this a joke or a riddle?” one of them says.

“What’s the fucking difference?”

“One makes you stupid.  The other is supposed to teach you something,” is his reply.

“Did you make that up?  Where did you read that?  Did a teacher tell you that?”  I have shocked even myself with my seeming commitment to this cause.  To any cause.

“What?”

“What do you mean what?”

“What do you call the deer?” they want to know.  I can’t help but look straight down the shirt of the 16-year-old girl sitting on the bridge below me.  Her bra is too loose.  I get so sad at that moment thinking about being trapped in bodies, but it quickly turns sexual and I have to concentrate on the smell of the frogs to curb my pedophilia.

“I have no eye-deer,” I say.  “Let me bum a cigarette.”  I haven’t smoked for eight months, but this is not a sign of the apocalypse.  The boy-child reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a dented something with a white filter.

“Blow in the end so you don’t get any in your mouth,” he says.

I examine the recessed filter and contemplate the meaning of the empty space.  “Do you both live on Sycamore?” I ask.

“I do.  She lives up the hill a little bit.”

“My people have lived here for generations,” I say.  This is a total lie.  I moved here ten years ago.  I have no people.  No people who speak of me as one of them, anyway.  I look at the girl.  Her blouse is has small horizontal stripes of orange, brown, yellow, and blue.  In my day it would have been considered retro.  “Has he fingered you yet?”  No response.  “I won’t tell anyone.  I can tell you how to do it right,” I say to him.

They are unperturbed.  I expected more.

–Alex Phillips

Alex Phillips is an Assistant Professor and Director of Assessment and Curriculum Development at Commonwealth Honors College.  His poetry and translations have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Open City, jubilat, and in Ted Kooser’s newspaper column American Life in Poetry.  His chapbook,  Under a Paper Trellis, is published by Factory Hollow Press.

Palatial is the Compass That Shall Usher Us In

Approximated in charcoal on paper

thin as drizzle on a marathon, you want description

to be molting, animalesque—a mandate

counting down to perplexity

Acquiesce to joy!

The blue jay I describe

simply moves away from itself

No anchors!  No conscription!

No transactions disguised as traffic!

Ask if there’s a castle on the hill

Ask if there’s a hill on the hill

Is lettuce on the table still a description?

Ink’s ruined everything passes through our papery house

The sun of visual experience passes through our papery house

-Noah Eli Gordon

Noah Eli Gordon is the author of several collections of poetry, including Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series and subsequently chosen for the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

In this city, you must travel a long way through excavated streets and detours, past the skeletons of new towers and their glassy forbearers, to find yourself at last in the old town. I suppose there are a number of ways to go straight away: in a car, solitary and anxious, or by the arithmetic of bus transfers, forgiving the trespasses of fellow riders. You may pedal madly up hills on a bicycle, dodging corrupt paths, battling the hostile gravity of the world. Were it Venice, or some sunken town amid the rising ocean, open to you by a lattice-work of canals, there would be no better entry to the old town than by a slowly rowed boat. But here, the sea is kept at the side, seldom invited in.  Travel in any vehicle of your fancy, but know there is only one way to truly arrive in the old town: by foot. You must walk tall through the empty lots where demolition’s wood-splinter perfume infects your lungs. You must wade into the tide of strangers and disappear with the undertow. You must face your reflection in proliferating mirrors: chrome, shop window glass, faces, in phantoms blowing down alleys and dissolving in manholes. How you must temper your instinct to linger where a bell tolls, or where the ignorant machines achieve their hum. On this walk, you must convince others that you are one of them, a common traveler, who, with purpose if not grace, advances steadfast toward his destination. Dalliance on colorless streets is sport for lunatics, or young lovers. It is indeed a long walk, but the distance is not as tasking as the spirit, the filter through which you see the streets, always looking past the materiality of things, of people, into some other portal where their suffering is kept. What piper leads us here, to pass as strangers, to step from the street into imagined destines and back again? The people heave and growl as they birth their being in the forum of the streets, and the streets writhe and shift—their calculus governed by the ministers of order. You will find me where these two collide, dallying forth rudderless, lost, mad even, you may think, for I go down aching, expiring streets possessed by a spirit any good soul would exorcise. Alas amid the busted sidewalks, the sullen facades, I amble toward the perigee of my desire. Hidden among the ruins, I wait for the rarest of all birds to roost in the abandoned factories of the old town. I have only until nightfall to see them, a sad deficit were it not for the symphonies they conduct in the dark.

-Daniel H. Presnell Jr.

Daniel H. Presnell Jr. produces text, images, and sound. He owns and operates Incomparables Industries (print editions) and Feed & Seed Records. He currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

Here are some links:

http://www.feedandseedrecords.com/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/incomparablesindustries/

The Dinosaur Dreams Its Colors Into View

That there could ever be

a blue that shines so well

into a yellow! The blue and

the yellow all suddenly a new

kind of color. What are

the children doing? Are they

working on that maple tree?

So much here can’t be

said just yet. A person has to

feel something to believe it.

If a person has a face

it could be very hard for

that person to imagine

having another face.

Does anyone understand

anything? Two benches

are two people. Words are

kinds of special to any

body. The wall is full

of flowers, all kinds of

prairie flowers. Hope

is a smell more than

anything. (It smells like

hope and it is a quick

smell.) The most beautiful

honesty can’t decide

which way she wants

to go from her home in

the country. “I need eggs

and the library” she says.

What is a person to do

with all the time. Talk dirt

into the ground. Shouting

is banned in some

countries. A whisper

is a gesture in kindness.

People are just people

and people love them

nonetheless.

–Amanda Nadelberg

Amanda Nadelberg grew up in Boston and graduated from Carleton College. Her first book, Isa the Truck Named Isadore, won the 2005 Slope Editions Book Prize. Recently, her poems have appeared in Octopus, Notnostrums and Ploughshares. She currently lives in Iowa City and attends the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

You can find more of her work here:

http://slopeeditions.org/isa.html

Changing a Lightbulb

after Cortazor

This is the ladder, your first steps into the height. There are no apples. There are no angels, there is only broken shadow and socket. Now, as you un-turn, with fingertips only, listen for the sand. It is sand from the ancestral beach where all families of glass are blown. A beach where dinosaurs are continually struck by lightning. Continue swiveling the blown-out bulb from its golden threads (save for use in the darkroom) and hand it to someone. Next time you change a lightbulb, have that person with you. At five feet above the floor, in a room where many lightbulbs have been changed before, you will be overcome to sing the old time gospel ditty, “Oh tiny, tiny filament, jiggling, jiggling loose in thou rounded house of milk, how dost thou in His ceiling residential covet insects to their demise like a siren?” The moon will be staring at you through the window, but pay no mind. Do not look down, use the eyes in your shoe to find the bottom rung. Place the old bulb in the dish of pears. The new carton of bulbs are sleeping close by. Unwrap the new born from its onion skin pajamas and ascend the same ladder previous. Using your musical hand, insert the threaded end up into the unthreaded beginning. Turn gently in the direction of sunrise. Because you left the switch on, God’s echoing equation should be singing. Squint and descend.

—Stephen Lindow

Stephen Lindow took an MFA from Univ. Mass-Amherst and has taught four years of middle school. In spring he’ll teach english in South Korea. He is working on his first book of poems and will begin extensive exploration of Toronto’s storm drains in fall.
“There is no good nonsense without sense” —-Gertrude Stein 

an excerpt from “Sleep Suite”

The Eleventh

Two huge cops. They were waltzing in the street chest to chest. Hands clasped. Their care for each other showed white in their tremendous knuckles. The drunk tipped the bottle of wine through the sun into his mouth. Bright red with the sun in the green glass. With his red mouth the drunk said something to his friend. His red tongue lied limp and naughty on the bed of his lip. They both laughed richly and seemed a part of everything more or less. Not isolated from it.

A dog trotted by with human feet. It was profane. The sound of slapping it made. In the bushes also profane was a cat who sat upright against a tree like a man, his arms framing his round belly, his hind legs crossed in the dirt before him. She and I were watching. We may have been the only ones who saw them. A crow on a branch slept. A crow! Sleeping! It was so sunny, so hot. Babies were smiling at parked cars.

Robbie crossed the street far away. His head doesn’t seem huge until you are far away from it. He sings about a girl named Lacy. Everybody knows who Lacy really is. Each girl in the audience wishes she had somebody singing about her and calling her Lacy, many wished it was Robbie himself singing. Those are not my words. They are the words of a girl. I went to see him play and searched the faces of girls for some indication of the thoughts behind them. The day was bright and Robbie looked very bright. His hair was like a new penny. He was alone and out of sight and going about his life, and it was definitely him, and neither of us called out to him or said anything because there was nothing to say out in the sun where nothing separated us from everybody and we didn’t feel the panic of something that we once took as solid pouring out, just bleeding out, while we quite deliberately did nothing to stop it.

Nearer, right near us, an older Indian man crouched near the curb. By the abundance of pigeon droppings it was evident he was reading the pigeon droppings. It was not even in doubt. Another Indian man approached him and said something angrily in another language. Something like, “must you do this in the middle of the day?” A day. A night. This is not a distinction only noted by people. Ask the cat sitting like a man. But a beautiful day is such a specific possession, each to each person its own precious sorrow.

It takes no critical thought to move from a general statement to specific incident. This is the first lesson of how to speak to people intelligently. The second is only tell the very best dreams. Three to four a year even if your dreams obsess you. Or else people will think of you badly, even eventually your lover. This was not a dream. I told that to her expecting her to say something like, “how do you know?” because she has always to state a rebuttal to what I say. She only sat on the chair in the sunny kitchen drinking a tall glass of water so slowly she was also breathing in and out of it. She was far off, farther than Robbie was when we saw him down the street. Her fingers pushed grains of salt on the tablecloth and the sounds of her breathing and her throat swallowing were huge in the kitchen. Someone hammered metal bars or sheet metal down the street.

There was a dog with human feet and two cops waltzing. People sitting at tables on the sidewalk were laughing. Who can blame them? Huge cops waltzing is the kind of thing that makes some people feel it isn’t foolish to keep looking, that it is even-money everything is not already determined. Others shared the joy similar to when somebody shows you a shirt that terrifies you on the hanger but when you put it on you feel beautiful and that opportunities for enhancing your pleasure lie in thousands of ordinary places. Going from specifics to law, that is the hard thing. Going from a beautiful day, a sunny beautiful day, to anything else— don’t be retarded. Before she was even finished drinking her water there was the sound of fabric tearing and something dripping on the floor. Every object in the house glowed without shame. We slept through the rest of the sun. She stayed in the kitchen. I was in a deck chair in the mudroom.

—Jason Daniel Schwartz

You can find more of his work here:

http://corollary3.blogspot.com/

Jason Daniel Schwartz lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.  His stories have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, in a chapbook on Corollary Press, and in a few other places.