The Spork Blog

From Letters to the Divergents by j/j hastain

Spork — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 02:04:55 +0000

When I was a child, I experienced my first orgasm (I was not alone there, but was with a phantom of you), in the family spa. The spa with a red casing that covered the spa light, making the night red. There, I convexed my legs above me, around the lip of the top of the spa, and submerged my head and body underwater, using my legs as the power to hold me down. I pinched my nose closed with my quavering hands, my genitals pressed firmly against the constancy of the beating jets. This feeling always made me thrash. I would clamp myself under by force until I came. Crimp-like. I never rose for air until I had peaked. After piquant climax, I let myself augment, gently upward for air. The air was so much more richness above me than was there before I had gone under. Ampleness of aroma, texture and temperature, now! In those moments of rich air, post come, I remember envisaging my finding you as liquid-inverse to come in as my future, and take me.

It is true that all bindery scenes smell like pine to me. Gaudy glandular rushes. Luxuriant defecations lucubrating the cells’ previous by way of compression. I know that all of this is why when I read about xems ritual of cutting off the kimono in the night air, I felt like someone else’s muscles were in my legs. Tempting me with more strength from within my own strength.
To be obliged into presence during relatively harsh shifts enforces endocrine ecstasies.

Perhaps the only next was to rest and record beauty.

________________________________________________________
j/j hastain is the author of several cross-genre books including the trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press), anti-memoir a vigorous (Black Coffee Press/ Eight Ball Press) and The Xyr Trilogy: a Metaphysical Romance. j/j’s writing has most recently appeared in Caketrain, Trickhouse, The Collagist, Housefire, Bombay Gin and Aufgabe. j/j has been a guest lecturer at Naropa University and University of Colorado.

bone socket dialects by tara williams

Spork — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 02:25:24 +0000

Bone Socket Dialects

The darkness is bilingual. It mouths flawless exits, our bodiless waltz moving, as on a conveyer belt, toward the door of an empty house. In the voice of a dream, worry sands syllables from tooth to nerve: Will I see you again before I die? A submarine hum softening distance, your grandmother’s question.

Follow it inside the gate. Where rust bleeds from a keyhole, two skeletons grout laughter between bricks in the garden wall; where birds of paradise wire night’s jaws with nothing but orange, fear sends
a cat to the corner of a disappearing oak. If the crows continue to scale the barbed-wire fence, they

will get to where? Knowledge of night is a feeling not even a lifetime can master. Yet we still move forward and the wingless mountain still crows useless confessions and the town still trees us not with bloodhounds or ghosts but with subjectivity—how rain could sound like hunger, how truth muted

memory. Climb down and try to explain this to the person you love. Where children begged with Bibles and knives, a staggering stranger walked as slow as rivers run dry, broken bottle in hand, body carrying bruised skin, cracked lips damming blood. Remember the lines worming grief and rage across her

forehead. Between helping and running, we opted for forgetting. Turned the key and hurried inside. To return to that home we would have to skin the detachment that no longer grows on us, un-imagine the contents within the damp paper towel sent home for my five-year-old hands to open. What was

real is real sometimes. Now the dissection I once unwrapped as I would a gift, finding an eye color of yellow teeth, drops repetitively from my hands, flowering into a scar again and again against the linoleum floor. Eyelids slam shut, and in the darkness of my mind a language houses the echoes of

a waltz, hollow of any syllables except the three in emptiness. In that bone-socket dialect, home clears its throat to call us back, and we will go someday to visit our laughing ghosts and your grandmother’s grave. The past, as you know, is the safest place to live since its nightmares have already been dreamt.

__________________________________________________
Tara Williams lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she seldom wins at bingo and is the weakest link on her trivia team. This is her second time in Spork.

what the prose knows by Stella Corso

Spork — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 02:15:04 +0000

WHAT THE PROSE KNOWS

*

The same nightmare that unites us, awakens us—a long process of continual revision—his first book, a night without armor—who is stalking who—everyone is either cold or sad—as illustrated by Juan Gris—a strange and snakelike syntax—the sidewalk is always changing—girls are terrible dolls with strings—and phantom limbs where phantom leans—CAUTION: may contain nudity—false faces & useful illusions—fun in hotels—the world is very old—each star in its constellation feels alone—how much you should read depends on your mood—or consult with your moon—if you didn’t come to laugh, you will die from enthusiasm—is it the windows that keep you from leaping—lines, nothing but lines

*

Much has been said and there is—a propensity to claim Lincoln—but as a goth I’m claiming him—and as a spirit—I am knifing a hole in the cloud of this tree—and as a psychic I’m despairing—in an orange dress laid out for you and picked by an oracle—an animal that died because it had to—words typing themselves—a message struggling through the wall—some of them demons, some charming—watch out for colors—all dreams are cliché—you will read them in field notes—red lights over Oakland—red eyes over Ohio—a rusty little piglet—pale then red then pale —do we move through the decades or does the decade move through us—I dreamt a swarm of bees—and then an avalanche—this is black eye for pretty

*

As if we could scrape the color off the iris—I, too, have fallen in love with fragments—a disjointed memory—Joni Mitchell, New York City, that orange restaurant—calendula, to be exact, and to be exact is the nature of color—what does it mean to have light—to be lit from within—I have a friend whom I call intoxicating—her energy literally emanates—when she leaves we get sad and don’t know why—when I lose an object I get sad and don’t know why—does the object contain our happiness displaced—an old thought but with new gravity—obsession is funny like that—here is my question—which is sadder, a red balloon or a blue balloon—if you answer both you are like me whose skin is both—and my friend—we look at her skin together as she describes this pain

_______________________________________________
*italicized lines are from ‘Prose Poems’ by Pierre Reverdy, ‘The Marvelous Bones of Time’ by Brenda Coultas, and ‘Bluets’ by Maggie Nelson, respectively

Stella Corso lives in Western Massachusetts where she co-curates the Blue Peter Readings with Alex Phillips and acts as Assistant Editor for jubilat magazine. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Action Yes, Everyday Genius, Tarpaulin Sky, and Dear, Sir.

3 Poems by Nina Corwin

Spork — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 02:49:45 +0000

Once Over With Air Piped In

       Calm they come
                     the Ushers
scrubbed scentless        issuing

directives I eschew but who
am I (insurance poor & fresh
out of band-aids back home)?

Reeking procedure, they wait me up
for measurement. Hiss of air
piped in tick tock too loud by half.

              Out of reach     Examiners play
Touch      & Go with time => Send
       lackeys in ahead to pull down

stretch of paper sheet & hand me gown
gone pale-thin from too many
hot water washing.

Change says they & I change
Tell me bottle needs filling
Say open a vein & be fountain

Spit milksop of history. I spit
(as instructed):
Voila! my trainwreck

              litany.     See symptom checklist =>
       X for yes     initial here & here
       at bottom         sign:

Shall Speak Only As Spoken To.

Now they truss me up
for table ready (or not) & set
for scrutiny.

Doctor of Notes to crack
open the door & go groping.
Stirrups & poker up next on agenda –

Order me spread & I spread.
__________________________________________________________

Eye To Eye

are you my doppelganger
or a piece of glass
(are those)

little MEs reflected
in your eyes or hapless
fish in history’s net

the pupil dilates
drinking sidelong dust
from slats of light

I follow        (dissolving)
       an out-of-whack planet
              tripped up in invisible moons

when substrate binds with enzyme
something catalytic
happens

chromosomes scatter
like bread crumbs
for pigeons

the circle reduced to a lasso of matter
a time-noose a bracelet
of chicken and egg

O second hand        grab me
       and hold on for dearly
              O first hand unclench me

and let me alone

__________________________________________________________

Becoming Mortal Man: The ForeGoing

They will OFFer your ashes at no extra charge.
We will ask for time to cogitate.

An amber valence overcoming. One step
from sepia greets us (a pLUG in

the wall with cord gone off kilter). The man
in the palindrome hat will recommend mahogANY.

Hustle us into a room in the back.
Stealth exit, a side door unDIGnified.

Back in the LOBby, he does Uriah Heap things
with his hands. Obsequious gestures

sidestepping discussion of low cost options
(your elbow digs into my left side).

We will tire of polishing hardWARe. Know the bronze
for no bargain, no throw-in.

Receipt in an unsealed envelope. Lid open –
but subtly. Next stop, the NEEDle procedure.

We will settle on the barebones special. Pauper pine.
The palindrome hat looks ASKance

(Drab as a fool, aloof as a barD). In sum,
the eyebrows have it. All sewn up. And SOon

we’ll be stuck
with the finicky lid. Warped so LITtle

pandoras sLIP out.
We will joke about dumpsters and ice floes.

Our sleep will offEND us.

_____________________________________________
Nina Corwin is the author of two books of poetry,The Uncertainty of Maps and Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Her poetry has appeared in From the Fishouse, ACM, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review/nor, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review and Verse and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Corwin is an Advisory Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and curator for the reading series at Chicago’s Woman Made Gallery. She lives in Chicago, where she is a practicing psychotherapist known for her work on behalf of victims of violence.

4 Poems by Adam Strauss

Spork — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 02:23:14 +0000

Dear Pete Moore I Hope You Enjoy This Dedication

Wow, modest
Feelings have
Decided
To saturate
My cellular
Make-up like
Rad eye
Liner on its way to
Music, a few
Notes, a few
Particulars
Sounding
Pricks on the
Map, routes for
Negotiating possibility.

:::::

Style is
Not going to

The furthest
Circumference

If it doesn’t achieve a
Libratory degree.

A few
Chrysanthemums
Shake in a
Green glass vase.

Dew dissolves
On its way to
Glitter and glare:

A lion
Lightly
Sated by a hare
Looks through
Her full
Intelligence.

::::::::

Of where, plus plumbers and
Memories involve
Plums, porches, crotches,
Backsides forged from denim and
Apple cheeks filling
Each square to its seat.

::::::

In the limbic lick, the
Foreleg as
It stretches
Across the freshet, sexy
Obscenity, such succulent crisps
The starving carnivores eat, carrion
A not particularly
Southern
Comfort, no
Present can
Console that
Past that presence
And I can’t know so
Thus world goes aglow
And what the
Glimmer signifies
Stands at
No less than a span,
Agreement unto anger
An easy moment’s ran.

::::::

Boy at sad, boy at the
Circumference of a tear
As it drips onto
Page one thirty two.
Cynical as a phonograph
Like a maniacal laugh
As it’s perpetually put in its corner
Like a cenotaph
At the most official Modern Art
Museum, belles
Made dumb not through intrinsic
Idiocy rather the
Location, location at
Its most basic
Sense, and surely even the basics
Vary as all-get-out and
Into fullest view.
_________________________________________

Incubation

Her shock, her shells
Out, inters, enters, strides

The high wire then
The live one, trail of

Eggs, arabesques
Dipped in

Gold, sweat from
Orchids lining

The terrace
Fronting the

Palace of almost
All the gods of these

People, if indeed
They are not

Other than
Hallucinations, than gem

Work a wondrous
Prolepsis, party

Favor pretty much
Sums it up.
_________________________________________

Jumpy Jubilance

Why would a heart
Break when it
Can be
Healthy.

I mean
Really Sweet
Pea why?!

Bonked towards
The boxwoods, brindled
Blowhards, I tipped my
Cap, capricious
Monotone
So all’s I
Did was go
Into the zone!
_________________________________________

I Do Not Condemn Myself

I do not know enough about the field to
Speak within its purview.

Solids. Fleshtoned
Cubes. A green
Calyx. Tangerine hued
Radio.

The bits. The
Pieces add
Up. I’m looking down. The street is
Seven stories below.

Roses are selling their vendors.
Some of the most
Superbly seductive buyers are
Getting more than they should for the price.

Some of them
Are repeat offenders.

The tones and
Tangs of
That phrase
A deal renders

Me. I like to think
I’m brims with love.
My penchant for
Gleeful judgment does

Not freak me out
Precisely because
I know every one
Is its myriad limits!
_________________________________________
Adam Strauss has poems out in Witness, Country Music, and the Laurel Review, as well as ones forthcoming in Verse. Too, he has a full-length collection, For Days, out with BlazeVox, as well as poems out in the anthology The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, edited by Joshua Corey and G. C. Waldrep.

Immortality Revoked by Paul Watsky

Spork — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 02:24:14 +0000

Immortality Revoked

I never thought he got away with much,
James Wright, not between a breakdown at sixteen,
likely his bipolar surfacing, then booze, that twisted crutch
on which his chronic symptoms perched to preen
their agitated feathers, reiterated to age fifty-three,
when cancer of the tongue shut him up but good.
Now she busts Wright in this workshop: sentimentality!
Why are we reading this long-dead clown who stood
witness for bugs, empathized with old grasshoppers….their thighs
are burdened, with bitter working-stiffs who drank,
brawled reflexively, finished unemployed, the eyes
of pasture horses he imagined lonely? They stank,
those soppy poems of his, underscored the wasted words
and life. Those golden stones at Duffy’s, merely turds.

_____________________________________________________________
Paul Watsky won the NYU Writing Prize about 45 years ago.

2 AUBADES by Whitney Devos

Spork — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 02:42:23 +0000

AUBADE : A TYPE OF REMEDY

still trying to rub coal out of our pajamas, a difficult light
gropes

the ceiling

a spleenful, you said, enough
to grind down a continent

like sugar

in the morning, the tin sky
unreadable

no one knows if fire will catch today, who will be caught in a mine shaft
whispering

if there’s one song we both know, we better goddamn sing it

there’s a sun somewhere, this waking
says
& no pity left

last night I dreamt in black
& white; our necks were bound

with strips of flannel & sweet-
smelling kerosene

we had children’s bodies
& so licked one another

as if the mouth’s dark
liquid was seed & we were birds, only

we are pinned
to the earth,

raw cotton swung in a dry wind

__________________________________________________

AUBADE : AN EXHUMATION OF THE MIRROR

when the cage is lifted two separate roads appear. though unspoken, it is understood we felt around in the grass as long as drought allowed. I wanted to unearth a face so badly it did not matter the body was not yours. here a story begins and ends; what I recovered was not entirely human. regardless, the desire itself was: to have one memory go uncharred. instead a hideous understanding begins to lodge in my abdomen, another a piece of flint. incisions appear around my ankles. meanwhile you carry on as if we trampled lawns only for a year’s amusement; as though the cracks beneath us will converge into a single prismatic trail, and at the end we’ll make a toast on an old front porch. no, standing at the edge of a prehistoric lake, we learned the Aymara word Uyuni means ‘pen’ or ‘enclosure’. that during courtship male flamingos point their bills to the sky while the female lowers her head and spreads her wings. you told me then a cage is only a kind of bell jar. I understand now how deliberately you’ve misrepresented science, how silent it is not when one crawls out from under the glass.

__________________________________________________
Whitney DeVos lives in a structure somewhat resembling a treehouse. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in print and online in The Southeast Review, elimae, The Destroyer, lo-ball magazine and elsewhere.

Inflorescence by Jay Deshpande

Spork — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 03:17:28 +0000

INFLORESCENCE

I don’t know what’s happening in the north woods
but passion its black fruit you pluck and crawl inside,
feeling in its clutch the power one day meant
to sing and flower inside of your face
like a klaxon. At any rate, I didn’t ring it.
Have you ever felt so close to someone you reached
for the place where your thumb would press
to peel back their skin? Around the table
moralities gather. I’ll stay here, thank you
I am staying here thank you.
Among trees you never release yourself.
You just stay by the water, ghostly plea,
quick glance at the moss. It becomes slowly clear
you haven’t yet found anything you like.
Other things becoming clear. All day
you walk ten feet in front of you
and the human brain is only a conversation.
The human brain is only a conversation
try something different for a change. Someone’s cold lungs
are speaking to me directly now. Somebody’s feet gather
on top of one another to form a sudden cliff.
Every firstborn child named precipice.
I say crawl inside you, and crawl inside you.

______________________________________________________
Jay Deshpande’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Washington Square, La Petite Zine, Narrative, Handsome, Shampoo, death hums, and elsewhere. He is the former poetry editor of AGNI and he curates the Metro Rhythm Reading Series in Williamsburg (metrorhythm.wordpress.com).

1 Poem by John Mortara

Spork — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 02:00:06 +0000

just for today you are awesome

just for today you are awesome and this morning you wear your hands like sparkly gloves. you check them in the mirror. you slip into your feet like silver slippers. today you are awesome and as you walk down the hallway you declare: today the walls will be yellow! by saying it you make it so. today you are awesome and the universe bows to your every whim. the doors in the house swing open in celebration of your being and the old floors say: we are sorry we are wooden. today we can be tile. you are pleased with this. the couch and the television and the coffee table? red red red! red to the dead grass in the yard. red to the cracked sidewalk and red to the snooty neighbors. i don’t care! you exclaim. today i am awesome! and you think of all these delightfully witty quips for conversations you’ve already had. you time-travel back to those moments when you had been certifiably not-awesome and you make everyone convulse with laughter. they look like they are having seizures foaming at the mouth and this makes you very happy.

today you are awesome and when you sit in your now-magenta automobile all the red-green-yellow of the traffic signals combine into a strange shade of brown. in the subsequent confusion you slip through the urban center unnoticed and unbothered. you see your girl/boyfriend and s/he says: today i am not very awesome and you say: it’s ok. i am awesome. let’s go on an adventure! the two of you hit the parkway heading south and trade-off choosing random exits with silly names like ‘Metuchen.’ you do this all day until your car runs out of gasoline and you wind-up stranded on the side of the road. you say to your girl/boyfriend: it’s ok. we are on an adventure. i am awesome and you are awesome by association and i am only awesome for today so we better make use of it. your girl/boyfriend agrees and asks if you might manifest some gasoline. why would i want to do that? you say. at that very instant a glimmer forms in your left eye brighter than a thousand supernovas. you tilt your now-glowing head towards the endlessly dismal pine barrens that border the highway. let’s make use of it.

_____________________________________________
john mortara lives and writes and eats bagels in wilmington, north carolina. he used to live in new jersey. the bagels were a lot better. his website is johnmortara.com and he’s got a poetry project at voicemailpoems.org

3 Poems By Tyson Bley

Spork — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 02:00:04 +0000

YOU SHIT FREAKY SHIT

I’ve always been unhappy about my gym wig promoting
the vague psychiatric meatball underneath.
But my thoughts are willing to assemble an asylum from ozone nails;
I am grateful to the mutant wheelchairs, for the general
setting up of a peaceful, delightful alternate reality in which the
synapses of a gorilla may forfeit their hideous bed-smell.

A boxing glove on a spring haunts on a whim. More importantly,
it attaches to everything. It can be traced back to a larger
diversity of fish green chaos. Pee-colored mattresses ensuing
from abrupt, violent delays in the metropolis, seamless odd-shaped
blood splatter swirling weirdly in graves. When the superhero
insect-fucks the thug, the latter accepts that the former is not
removable – siphoning mauve cancer from ubiquitous pores.

You shit freaky shit while munching on the finger of doom.
You shit freaky shit while staring into the hypno-shower curtain.
_____________________________________________

CRYPTO-SCARECROW

HAL was evil. He was also a sock puppet. I am going
to try and explain why he was evil. As a rule, sock puppets
are evil to begin with; but take a closer look at
what happened toward the end of the movie. Upon
being handled, the nest in HAL’s mind altered,
became excited like gross floss, wriggling and hardening
into skin wound tightly around the handler’s hand.
A swarm of dairy tubes, wet and yellow and busy.

As long as the soul remains unused, its rubber prostheses
may find themselves entangled in airy uncertainty.
And then you become evil.

Because I watched the movie and because I want
to keep my mind healthy and my bowels regular,
I am the only one of my friends who’s into yoga.
Because none of my friends have seen the movie.
Speaking of being ‘regular’: weird shit happens in my
yoga class, and it’s perhaps our master’s fault,
who claims to be so regular as to be holy.
“Normally when beings take a dump,” he told the class,
“flies come staggering in through the stink-haze.
But when I take a dump, birds leak in through
the still, unruffled air.” To prove his point, the yoga master
had yesterday tricked a tree into standing on his mat. It stood
where he had stood, and in fact still was standing. It
looked awkward – and no birds came and perched in
its branches. It stood on buried gas. Roots coiling around
a dead baby troll. Lifting and sagging one inch every minute,
temperamental. A mere composition of weak
nervous tremors was all it was, but still.
Our epileptic crypto-scarecrow is pretty disturbing.
The most morbid part of the session, usually,
is when the local superhero who goes by the (very apt)
moniker Aqua-Chicken, crosses his legs on his mat
and rainbows complexly stain his nutsack.

I am very afraid of germs at our yoga class. There are
four porn actors and one scientist in my class. I make
a point of being surrounded by them at all times. I’ve put my mat
right next to the scientist’s mat. While countless germs incur
serious injuries in a single porn video, not as many
bloat bloody green as in the Large Hadron Collider.
Beasts of the small world: I admit I am jealous of your evil.
It must be a blast. You must find it as fun as party blower blood transfusions.
_____________________________________________

KARDASHIAN YARD SALE

there’s nothing wrong with
an Ephemerol baby training
its mental ice-pick on Mickey Mouse

– watching him go ball-shaped,
fractures in his black drywall

spitting and slingshotting –

any amount of decay tucked around
hot beer-vacating nano-cannons
at the frequency of a broken Santa lamp
and a hoarder’s psychedelic candle

there’s nothing wrong with tearing your sheets
between your legs in front of a specific part of dinosaur
the noisy wart not scary on something like a Kardashian
trying to build their own porno “chair scene”

imprinted on our ears e.g. the demonstrably
nasty tone of the yard sale rectum

a toggle for easier operation

_____________________________________________
Tyson Bley walks dogs for a living. He writes mainly about these experiences. He is the author of Normal Service Will Resume Shortly. He can be located at http://soapstain.blogspot.com/

Global Positioning by Josh Denslow

Spork — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 20:08:00 +0000

Cody and Squid were both on the clock, but Squid had spent most of the night in the cashier’s booth talking to Alicia. Cody figured Squid would never admit that Alicia wasn’t interested in white guys. Though she did seem to put up with him, which was more than Cody could say for himself.
     Squid was scared of his own intelligence so he overcompensated by acting confused all the time. Cody found him tiring. In an alternate universe, the two of them were probably great friends, but here in the real world, Cody took a deep breath and enjoyed the silence of his small piece of pavement in the shadow of a building that had survived the Chicago fire.
     The last ten minutes of his shift were always bittersweet. After midnight, the south side sighed and sunk into an armchair. The streets were bathed in the mist of streetlights and pollution. Other than the whisk of a passing car, the only sound was the thrum of lights in the garage and the low throb of Lake Shore Drive. City silence.
     Leaning against the wall at his post, a slight breeze at his collar, Cody found the only place he belonged. Within the hour, he’d return to his apartment and watch movies until the sun peaked through the apartment complexes across the street. His dad said he needed to stop feeling sorry for himself. But that wasn’t accurate.
     Even parking cars was surreal. People he’d never met, probably never see again, allowed him to enter their most expensive possession. No background check. No driving record. The majority of the time, not even a hello. If he knocked on their door, they’d never invite him into their homes. But inside their cars, he had access to private information. Glove boxes were full of insurance cards, checkbooks, utility bills. Hell, if they wouldn’t allow him into their homes, he had their address and keys. He could let himself in. Cody had heard of such things.
     What was surely the last car of the night squeaked to a stop in front of him. A silver Toyota Camry. A man with no hair got out and waved cheerfully.
     “Can’t believe you’re still here.”
     “Just a few more minutes,” Cody said.
     The man slipped a ten-dollar bill into Cody’s hand along with his key. It was rare to get a tip on the way in, especially one so large, so Cody returned the man’s ballooning smile.
     “Have a great night,” the man said and disappeared into the hotel.
     Cody sank into the driver seat. It smelled like someone who had given up smoking months ago but was scared to be rid of the stale odor. The man had a GPS mounted on the dash. As Cody pulled forward, a woman’s voice proclaimed, “Your destination is on the right.”
     Up the exit ramp of the garage, Cody saw Squid talking to Alicia by the register as she snuck glances at a paperback. Cody hit the gas and idled at the stop sign at the end of the street. He clicked the GPS and saw that the man’s previous stop was less than a mile away on Halsted.
     Squid wouldn’t even notice he was gone.
     Three traffic lights later, Cody found himself in front of a dim Greek restaurant. He watched the remaining employees tuck chairs under tables and fold napkins. He clicked on the radio and a Buddy Guy song bled from the speakers.
     Cody wondered who had dinner with the man. Had they planned to meet again? Or maybe she was meeting him at the hotel later. Cody turned off the radio and selected the hotel address in the GPS.
     He purposefully took a different route.
     Cody tucked the Camry near the exit and waved at Alicia as he returned to his post. She didn’t look up from her book.
     Squid was in the process of locking the key box and storing the time stamp for the night.
     “You leaving?” he said.
     Cody pictured his apartment. “I’ll probably get some coffee first.”
     “I’m going to Alicia’s when she gets off in an hour.”
     “You wish.”
     “You here tomorrow?” Squid pulled out a wad of tips from his pocket and began sorting them.
     “Late shift,” Cody said.
     “I’ll let you smell my fingers.”
     “On that note, I’m leaving.”
     Squid laughed and continued folding bills.
     Cody crossed an empty State Street and stepped into Dunkin’ Donuts.
     Samir was working, his eyes heavy in his smooth face. He had Cody’s coffee waiting on the counter in front of him.
     “Busy tonight?” Samir dumped a packet of sugar in the steaming cup.
     “Average. What happens if I didn’t show up?”
     Samir gave a tired smile. “I’d drink it.”
     “How’s school?” Cody said.
     “Two years and I’ll be a nurse.”
     “I don’t know how you find the time.”
     “You say that every weekend.”
     Cody slid five dollars across the counter. “Keep the change.”
     “You know I won’t do that.”
     “I know, but I have to try.”
     Samir handed him his change and leaned against the counter. “You can always find the time, Cody. If it’s important enough.”
     “And that’s what you say every weekend.”
     Cody nodded as he walked out the door. Samir pulled a textbook from under the counter. He propped his head in his hands and began reading, his back hunched behind him.
     Cody walked down State Street toward the el. His fingertips buzzed. He wanted to get back in the Camry and retrace every place the man had ever been. Through every relationship. All the way to the place of his birth. A life told through global positioning.
     Cody thought about his own GPS, a futuristic lifeline. Maybe he should listen to his dad more.
     A loud voice drifted from the alley. Cody took a sip of his coffee and crept toward the opening. A trashcan overflowed on the curb.
     Thirty feet into the alley, a white guy in tattered pants with a winter cap pumped his arms. “I have a gun,” the guy yelled to someone in a white collared shirt.
     Even though his back was to him, Cody knew the victim was Squid. His enormous head was unmistakable and his parking vest was draped over his shoulder.
     ”Let me see the gun,” Squid said.
     ”I will shoot you!”
     ”I just don’t know how I’m supposed to know you really have a gun there.”
     The mugger shook with rage. “You’re about to find out.” His voice bounced between the buildings.
     Cody could almost hear Squid thinking. Was whatever he made in tips that night worth the chance that this guy might actually have a gun? He was surely thinking about Marvin as well. The reason Cody had this job was because the previous valet had been beaten to death with a baseball bat. Though Cody had heard it was a crime of passion; Marvin’s girlfriend had set him up or something because of an abortion. But Squid would verbally attack anyone who suggested such a thing.
     Cody’s first instinct was to stand and watch. Maybe he was seeing the last thing Squid would ever do. He imagined two small words appearing over the scene, like a movie from the forties. THE END. If Cody did nothing, it would be the end. Squid would probably be fine; just out a hundred bucks or so. He’d show up to work talking about what happened. But Cody wouldn’t be a part of it.
     Instead, Cody tossed his coffee into the trash and took a large step into the alley. He had no idea what was going to happen.


–––––––
Josh Denslow’s stories have appeared in Third Coast, Black Clock, Pear Noir!, and Cutbank, among others. He is a staff editor for SmokeLong Quarterly and an Associate Editor for Unstuck. He plays the drums in the band Borrisokane.

From Brown Thrashers By Hugh Behm-Steinberg (pt 2 of 2)

Spork — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 02:02:27 +0000

Ruby-Crowned Kinglets

Now the lord has restrained me, and I’m the smallest bird, but I’m not afraid of my body because I don’t need my body.

Beneath this building, beneath every street there’s a desert. The dust will rise up and cover us as though we’d never existed.

Every part is a piece, and your hand hovers over it: it takes so long for this to happen you can’t see it happening.

Walk before me, and you will be perfect, a passerine flickering its wings.

And I will put laughter in the middle of your name, and all your words will be nouns.
Your fear will not be in front of you, and the water when it comes.

It comes in different parts of the river – every night a different part. After I am old I shall have pleasure,

I shall dine upon eggs and hover beneath leaves and branches, down the side of a cliff to the desert below.

Then I found out that you were dumping water every night – I was drowned.
But nothing is too hard that time won’t soften, which is a promise so you decided to save it.

And the kingdom of things, it’s so meaningful. As a frame is on fire and afraid of your son.
As a frame is made of water, which is fearless and will not hold anything you want.

Out of the water a pair of eyeglasses, his finger poking through where one lens is shattered.
They are heavily bifocal and reflect the sun. Ruby-crowned kinglets shall be of her.

I will be one hundred years old when I have a son, and my wife will be ninety: I will only spend my winter with him, but he will love us.

I will spend my last ice coins to buy him clothes. We’ll live in the desert, near Joshua Tree.

______________________________________
Double-Crowned Cormorants

When I get older I’ll grow darker. I’ll be calming, I’ll be branched. I’ll sun myself.
I’ll dry out, I’ll preen. If you drink drink some more I say, you’re in the water anyway.

Go deeper into the water. Swim low in the water, with just your neck and head visible, and dive through
it. Until the ice-lid has closed over us, don’t return till the cover is lifted up in the spring.

The world is legal, but its cops cannot be seen. The world is illegal, what side are you on? There’s a law around you. Ease my worried mind. Thriving now that DDT’s been banned.

Starting to stop as on a small boat you pull the oars the wrong way you spin make a whirlpool with your webbed feet. A lung as you dive further under. A loving kindness as you dry out in the sun.

Not resentful, happy. I’ll know what it’s like, I’ll lie there like your son.
It will matter more when you let go. So don’t let go.

_____________________________________
Anna’s Hummingbirds

Visit our yard and I feel blessed. Investigating tangles don’t you want to?
I’m tangled too there’s a lot to check out. One buzzes my head, territorially.

Not ownership but belonging to. Knot the best into your weeks the garden asparagus towering, the artichokes erupting and buzzed by a hummingbird.

One at a time. Might also be looking for earwigs, I bet they eat those too.

I bet they see colors we can’t. I bet they used to have a compass in their heads but they said there are enough circles in the world. We are kin that shininess unmakes certain parts of you we really like that.

You hover over my snoring head you taste my ear I dream I’m spilling pollen everywhere; there’s so much gold coming out of me it’s embarrassing. Don’t be embarrassed, you say, it’s a spiritual process you’re undergoing.

A frozen shoulder in your shirt, I lift the shirt off you; we’re in bed in the afternoon just talking, putting the after in, and they’re working working working. There’s so much bloomland the world was made for sex the hummingbird says

and making things squeek.

________________________________________________
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press, forthcoming December 2012). His poems can be found in such places as Crowd, VeRT, Volt, Cue, Slope, Aught, Fence, dirt, Ditch, Nap, Forge, Swerve and Zeek, as well as few places with more than one syllable. He teaches writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.

From Brown Thrashers by Hugh Behm-Steinberg (pt. 1 of 2)

Spork — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:55:19 +0000

Brown Thrashers

Found in vegetation, in hedgerows, old fields, and wood edges foraging on the ground;
the ground tells the birds I’m still a bride, even before you were born I was still a bride.

I get picked, and picked, and turn right in the dark.
One of us is delicate, one is an ear, one of us is a house with hair growing out of its eaves.

Be more perpendicular have wideawake dreams where you talk and what you say gets hard, for
when a snake is asleep he’s the worst snake in the world, even the worms mock him.

Might as well have a head made of hazel wood, this land is the advertisement for this land:
its farmers work so shamefully hard, brown thrashers echo their cries.

As ghosts and the battery operated beings of the world, there are several others I cannot see long enough to identify, so I’m big again; they make me eat fire again.

Oh babe, I say, I don’t want to die in Houston, unless it’s in your arms;
you say God worries all the time so we don’t have to.

The dogs kiss everyone it’s no big deal dogs open to loving anyone;
it’s a way they undermine being owned.

So my neighbor is having an affair, I can hear her fucking while her husband’s at work;
the yard full of flies: no one’s taking care of the chickens.

Move to the country, from the country to the country, to even more country, to a wilderness, on the coast of it. Then be on a boat, watching a gang of sailfish get liberated by their organizational skills.

What is a song? A song is a long series of phrases, uttered twice, separated by pauses.
My call note is a “tchuck” like a smacking kiss. Oh incredible racket of love!

_______________________________________
Ivory Billed Woodpecker

Some ghost erasing its ghost, whose ghost resists with all its might, being you.
You don’t know you’re doing this. Tell your ghost there’s a river here, can’t you smell the turbulance? Don’t you feel it pulling you?

Rather be a fish than a ghost, rather be a magnolia forest than a ghost, a bottle with a note wedged inside it instead of a ghost.

Is or was one of the largest. It goes away because you killed it it comes back but it hides from you.

Spend your best American money and defend the emotional against the avant-garde who want to sleep with everyone and never have to pay for it.

There are no unambiguous photographs, videos, specimens, or DNA samples from feathers or feces of the Ivory-billed woodpecker but we know its there.

It’s the bottom of the 2nd inning and Kyle Kendrick is pitching against the Florida Marlins.
I say ghost bird and you come to me. I have a lot of faith you can circle nearby even if you’re resisting what I’m telling you.

The spirit is a pole, a teacup, you as you grow old, a fold, an ivory billed woodpecker saying.
I’m here this is what I sound like before they made a cartoon character out of me.

At times primeval hardwood forests cover the earth, and they would never flock,
preferring solitude when peeling the bark off dead trees. Crossing your arms around your purse I got something I want to show you.

We pair for life. I pull the night shift while you sleep. Inhabitants of the forest we live in think we’re crazy, So we go to a psychiatrist, a wolf with a Scottish accent, and it’s great until we find out he’s extinct too.

_____________________________________
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press, forthcoming December 2012). His poems can be found in such places as Crowd, VeRT, Volt, Cue, Slope, Aught, Fence, dirt, Ditch, Nap, Forge, Swerve and Zeek, as well as few places with more than one syllable. He teaches writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.

4 Poems by Nathan Hauke

Spork — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 02:24:16 +0000

Falling is all edges

The sensation of falling

~~Mute in the grass—~~

Thoreau: Nothing in nature makes noise.

Abandoned chicken house in the holler
so contaminated it would have to be burned; then, buried.
Instead, just sits there since the early eighties.
Sweet clover and wild carrot along the road, honeysuckle.
No one says you’re healed, but you want to be.
Addiction cleaves to the few twigs
broken off, floating downstream

Family garden across the river from where we sit
with coffee cups full of whiskey

________________________________
A piece of string in the leaves

Green leak of treatment out of the softening boards
Buoy made from an empty bottle of detergent
Rough strip of moonlight pasted over the end of the dock
Surface tension of the face in the mirror
as you close the medicine cabinet
:: Turn towards the one you love
Before morning light turns your eyes into ash

________________________________
After the parade,

Hank Williams (“I Saw the Light”).
Fiddle stomping goddamn joyful oil spill.
Song about The Civil War, Sun Drop Cola,
“Go seek some happy Northern girl
for to be your wife.” Chorus: “Three cheers
for the Southern girls and the boys ~~they threw away.~~”
Rangy jack pines homesick for your laugh.
Little girl in orange chasing a rabbit across the grass
calls the rabbit by name, but I can’t hear it.
Whippoorwill.

Song for the river Jordan: “Some of these days/ hallelujah.
I’m going to sit down by my Jesus.”

________________________________
Sketch

Loose black sheet plastic
Flapping beneath Aspen little white flowers wasted in extravagance
Pink threads of cloud wasted in broken glass bottleneck
The sweet smell of bread in the air
From the Wonderbread factory the way Thoreau would put his ear
up against the telegraph pole

________________________________
Nathan Hauke was born and raised in rural Michigan. His first book, In the Marble of Your Animal Eyes, is forthcoming from Publication Studio. He is also the author of chapbooks: Honeybabe, Don’t Leave Me Now (forthcoming from Horse Less Press), S E W N (Horse Less Press 2011), and In the Living Room (Lame House Press 2010). His poetry has most recently been published in American Letters & Commentary, Dusie, Peaches and Bats, Real Poetik, Spittoon, Typo, and We Are So Happy To Know Something. Two of his poems, “Deerfield (1)” and “A Surface. A Shore or Semi-transparency of Glass,” were selected to be a part of The Arcadia Project Anthology that GC Waldrep and Joshua Corey are editing for Ahsahta Press (forthcoming 2012). He co-edits Ark Press with Kirsten Jorgenson.

Photoems by Katie Menzies

Spork — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 02:00:48 +0000

Photoem 1

Body \ˈbäd-ē\ is the dancer’s favorite word. Both crude, this mess of matter held in a thin skinned balloon, and yet sickly dexterous. The balloon tries its best to contain the sharp angles of mandible and femur, while also boating the goo, the stringy slop of our cranberry. But this structure of ours also has a thistle equilibrium. The grace of our feet with our head balancing on the wave of a spine

Photoem 2

lungs open their pearly sacs in tunnel of wood ribs. this whale
shadow and light—made by the keyhole of our mouths
when we open the lungs nets, an entire history of sun
is sucked down and irrigated
imagine all the sky in our bodies this very moment.

the tide is low enough to almost walk out to the white
her waves are thin and long, the set
like the glittery lines of crop
perfectly spaced; parallel

The Sun neon cream
The sun an electric cow eye
wincing above the sea farm

surfers weave their cornhusks through the bushels of water
as if they are trying to sew themselves into her

it smells like s moke

a bonfire grave just feet from where I sit
grey-blue topography of dead fire
smells like wood and is beautiful heaped upon the mousy sand
___________________________________
Kate Menzies is a poet, teacher, and writing coach in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her workshops show how writing can be utilized as a meditation. This summer her work can be seen in Gigantic Sequins 3.2.

I Am Thinking Of Starting My Own Religion by Timothy C. Dyke

Spork — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 14:49:21 +0000

The attractive man at the bus stop may best be described as a boy. It is 8:30, Sunday morning. I am on my way to the Sure Shot for a cup of iced coffee, and I imagine that this kid, this young man, is going home from a one-night stand. A tattoo sticks out from the sleeve of his white T-shirt, some warrior design in black. It’s too early in the morning for me to be staring. I stare. The attractive guy at the bus stop is probably no longer sitting at the bus stop by the time I am back in my apartment.
     I lay on my couch. I’m watching the Olympics. It’s still Sunday morning, and there is a large woman who lifts weights. She inhales before she cleans or jerks. Maybe I would be attracted to large women if I were attracted to women. The boy at the bus stop is probably in his twenties. He wears dark glasses. I would guess that a mix of German and Korean flows through his apparent vascularity. I imagine what he looks like when he gyrates at night. I am eating Fritos, drinking dirty brown water from the cup that, twenty minutes ago, contained my iced coffee. The one woman on channel 8 who lifts weights is replaced by another woman on channel 8 who lifts weights. This woman is also large. I am thinking about introducing a cat into my narrative.
     I wonder if I would call these women fat. They can each lift 250 pounds over their heads. The announcer makes clear that this is the event referred to as clean and jerk. This is not the snatch portion of the competition. I do not make these terms up. I am still thinking about the attractive young man at the bus stop. I have memorized his symmetrical face. I have this friend. We met in a writing class. In a story about a sex-addict, she referred to something called the three-second rule. To work his recovery, her character practices this with great devotion. He doesn’t allow himself to look at any object of sexual attraction for longer than three seconds. If he finds his gaze lingering, he closes his eyes and whispers to himself: Thank you, God, for granting beauty to this world.
     I am thinking of starting my own religion. I am thinking that by giving my main character a pet, I could introduce a thread of narrative complication. Perhaps he is not supposed to have pets in this apartment building. Perhaps his neighbor has been leaving cryptic notes on his door about hair on hallway carpets. Perhaps there can be symbolism surrounding the parasitic nature of mites and fleas.
     The second large weightlifting woman barks and falters. Her mouth opens, puckers, and I watch her blow out breath. The announcer reiterates that she has an easy clean, but she fails to get the jerk behind her head. I am fascinated. I watch without negative judgment. I think the announcer says that this second large woman suffers from a malady called Madeline’s Deformity. I consider that this might be what I am writing about: my deformities. There is this urge to masturbate. There is this urge to pierce my own helix or give myself a Mohawk. I imagine myself pulling the T-shirt over the head of the beautiful 22-year-old boy at the bus stop. I decide to call him Ryan. In my fantasy he tells me to get on my knees, and then I feel some weakness for imagining this, so I change my mind and wonder if it is possible to get off while imagining the boy at the bus stop with one of the weightlifting women.
     My deformity. I often fantasize about men in their twenties who have sex with women in their forties. I write two sentences about something incomprehensible. I consider the difference between not understanding and understanding that something cannot be understood. I am thinking about writing my manifesto. I am thinking about justifying the way I am always writing about the act, the processes, of writing. I am thinking about masturbating, but I am not masturbating. I make up lies about myself. I used to be a grill master at summer camp. I used to be really good at Frisbee golf. I once held my breath underwater for 55 seconds. Sharks respect me. In Denmark I had an uncanny ability to order the best item on the menu without ever speaking the language.
     The beautiful boy at the bus stop and the weightlifting women: I watch the Olympics. I almost died once on the back of a dressage horse. I think on one of the other channels there might be a water polo game. Those men all wear tiny shorts. They glisten with wetness. I am 49 years-old. I hardly ever glisten, though parts of my scalp did shine for a day. I got a Mohawk at The Shear Thing on King Street, the shop across from the Burger King. The barber knew what he was doing with his razor blade. My Mohawk floated on a sea of shaved skin, but the haircut is three weeks old, and already the side-hair has grown in enough to obliterate the shimmering result of the Mohawk, the whole strip-of-pelt-in-the-middle-glistening-baldness. The cat is watching me. I like to imagine that I am in control of how I spend time. I like to imagine I can control time. I like to imagine I am in control. I like to imagine. I think I might go into the bathroom right now and shave those side-hair areas. I like to watch reality television. I have never driven an ambulance but I am related to a lung surgeon and a neo-natal cardiologist. I am a Kindergarten teacher. I am a progressive educator. I call myself Mr. Ken in the classroom. I imagine I have taught those who cannot tie shoes to use Velcro instead. I imagine I have saved young lives. I am thinking of starting my own religion.
     I will choose three razors. I used to buy the expensive razors, and I’d use one for six or seven face shavings, but now they lock these up in their own little cabinet, and to buy these razors and their expensive replacement cartridges, you must summon a clerk as if you were buying spray paint in cans or Sudafed in bulk. I buy the cheap razors now: one blade a piece, ten to a pack. It’ll take three cheap razors to give myself a decent homemade Mohawk refresher. There are links between what I pray for and what I would like to forget. I am metaphorically dependent upon the first person pronoun. There are links between my libido and my imagination. Ryan is the sexy guy at the bus stop. There are links between my imagination and my memory. Would it be too much if I said my cat’s name is Karma?
     One time I worked stage crew in a community theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The stage manager overheard me as I made fun of her backstage New Age ramblings. She told me that when I mocked her, I pulsated orange bile from my groin shakra. In my fantasy, Ryan, the bus stop kid, likes it when a woman in a sequined gold halter-top rubs his nipples from behind on the dance floor. She is old enough to be his mother, but she is not his mother. She slips her hands under his T-shirt, and he closes his eyes. She grinds against his backside, his tight little ass. In my fantasies about the beautiful boy at the bus stop, he is always heterosexual. I see him fondling a beautiful, middle-aged Chinese woman with huge breasts. He uses his fingers; she uses her mouth.
     I am not at this moment shaving my head. I am thinking about it. I wonder why the objects of my sexual fantasies are so often young and straight. I wonder why they are mostly Asian. I wonder if this has something to do with some kind of psychological issue for which I should seek remedy. Perhaps there are mechanisms of self-hatred lingering in my psyche. Of course there are. The woman on the television squats in front of fractions of tonnage. This young man named Ryan wakes up next to the beautiful, aging Chinese woman on Sunday morning. He offers to scramble her some egg whites, and she says no thank you. Her gold halter-top languishes on the floor, just beside the bed. She says it might be better if he leaves. She tells him there is a coffee shop down the street, and she says there is a bus stop right outside the door.
     There is a bus stop right outside my door. Actually this is not literal truth. There is a pile of junk furniture right outside my door. In this particular section of the city, the garbage men pick up bulk items on the second Wednesday of every month. Residents on my street don’t seem too specific about the exact date of the junk pick up. I am thinking about starting my own religion. People leave junk offerings on the street all the time. When I first moved in, I thought about what I could find in the junk pile. I’d bring up an occasional chair to my apartment. Now I think less about what I can acquire, and more about what I can give away. I carried a clock downstairs last Wednesday. My mother gave it to me, and her mother had given it to her. It was German, probably made in the 19th century out of cold wood.
     The clock should have been cherished, both for aesthetic and sentimental reasons, but I lived with an alcoholic for a year and a half, and to spite me, he left the clock upside down on the floor while I was at work. Every evening when I returned home from school, he would be sprawled there on the couch, passed out. The television would be tuned to the SyFy channel, and the clock would lean at the base of the TV stand, upended, quivering in mechanical awkwardness. The clock hasn’t worked for years. I became depressed whenever I looked at it. Now it depresses me to think that I removed it from my apartment. I haven’t told my mother. I stare at the space on the empty wall where it used to hang. The guy I used to live with is doing well now with his recovery, but he no longer speaks to me on account of something that happened. I will make up what happened. I will say that on a vacation to the North Woods I became disoriented and swung at his head with a canoe paddle.
     I cannot canoe. I never lifted weights in high school or college. I have flirted with yoga, and ran two half-marathons before I contracted a joint disease on a cultural exchange to the Ukraine. I am attracted to men with wiry chests. I am attracted to men with veins that pop on their lower arms. The woman who wins the super-heavyweight division of the snatch and clean and jerk competitions in the London Olympics is smiling atop the podium as she fingers her medal. Karma is my female cat. She licks herself. I am wondering if I have ever been sexy. I am wondering if that Mormon missionary stared at me the way I think he was staring at me. I am sitting on my couch. I am about to shave my head. I am thinking of starting my own religion. I wonder if my narratives are inherently racist. The Chinese woman who wins the gold medal in the super-heavyweight division looks like a man. I wonder if she is a lesbian. I wonder how many woman weightlifters have sex with other women weightlifters. My mother used to say to me that if you have a pet, you must take responsibility for that animal’s survival.
     I am ashamed that I carried my mother’s antique clock to the junk pile outside my apartment building. I am ashamed of my tendency to find humor in the very existence of Chinese lesbians. Once in college – this would have been years before I came out– I went to a lecture on images of same sex attraction in Qin Dynasty ceramics. I am theorizing that before I could grasp an understanding of my own sexuality, I grasped for some kind of understanding of sexual difference on an intellectual level. I still have no clear grasp on my own sexuality. I still have no clear grasp on images of same sex attraction in Qin Dynasty ceramics. Here is what is confusing to me: if I am friends with someone, and if I dream one night that I am giving this friend a blowjob, am I supposed to tell my actual friend of this dream the next time I see him? I think it is a gay cliché to whine about how young queers do not appreciate Judy and Liza. I wonder what it is like in the locker room of the Chinese women’s weightlifting team. I wonder if they stare at each other in the showers. I wonder if the awkward and adolescent jokes about the snatch competition translate to other languages.
     I am thinking about creating some kind of treatise. I am thinking about making assertions. I am thinking about the attractive kid at the bus stop. In my religion, the essential doctrine revolves around the reality of the ability of fictional characters to change lives. I have never finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I do not need to read books in order to understand their significance. I have never finished The Catcher In The Rye. I have never finished A Confederacy of Dunces. I have never finished Portnoy’s Complaint. I have never finished Beloved. I have never finished Infinite Jest. I have never finished The Handmaid’s Tale. I have never finished any book by Martin Amis. I teach Kindergarten. I have read Goodnight Moon 154 times. I can believe in the transformative potential of men who never existed. I can draw strength from conceiving of the Buddha as a character in a story. I wonder if Jesus masturbated. He must have. He was one of us, rendered in flesh. I wonder if He ever jerked off after the Resurrection. I have inappropriate thoughts about what He might have done with those holes in His hands. Adherents to my faith will be required to read from a list of books I will never complete.
     I am sitting on my couch, drinking water in a used Styrofoam cup. I watch the Olympics. When my invented cat looks at me, I see myself. When I refresh my Mohawk with cheap plastic razors, it is inevitable that I will bleed. Blood will run down my face. I am prepared to look at myself in a mirror and see myself this way. I will dab at my skin with paper towels. My imagined pet will taste my actual body fluid. The bleeding will only last an hour or so. I once read an article about trepanning, the act of giving oneself a hole in one’s head. This will not be the first time I wake up with blood in my sheets.
     There is the weightlifting woman. There is the boy at the bus stop. There is this friend of mine, the one I dreamed of a couple of times with the blowjob scenario. There are piles of manmade junk in outer space. There is the clock my mother gave me that I took to the garbage pile on the side of the road. There is a cat named Karma and stories about stories. One time in college I sat in a large hall and listened to a lecture on Edgar Allan Poe. A woman picked at the scruffs of paper left behind in the edges of her spiral notebook. The professor stopped his lecture to look at her directly. Tension loomed. When he told her to stop her picking, she said that in Wiccan tradition, the cat often appears as the witch’s familiar. There is the clean and jerk portion of the snatch competition. There is this way I touch myself through corduroy. There is the fantasy of hands on the dance floor, the white T-shirt lifting, the hardening nipple. I am thinking about praying to the One True God. I am thinking about the woman on the dance floor, the way she drops to her knees. I am thinking of writing some straight-up, straight-couple porn. The twitching and the hardening, the spurting and the moaning. Oh my God, oh my God. It is so big. Give it to me. Oh my God. Take it deep. Oh my God.
     I am on the couch. I still watch weightlifting. I have regrets. There are things I would like to recant. In my youth at summer camp I called a nine-year-old boy a fag, and he said: what would you say if I told you I had high blood pressure? I am sorry that I made him sad even though he misunderstood the exact nature of my bullying. I am pretty sure he thought I said he was fat. I wonder what kind of man that boy would be today. One time in Amsterdam on legal mushrooms I hallucinated in the shower that I was flying toward the kingdom of heaven. I was naked, and the entire stall lifted up, turned sideways, and zoomed out of the Rembrandt Hotel toward a celestial glow. One time in college I gave a boy, a sophomore, a blowjob during Midnight Cowboy. I am making this up. My deformity. I am thinking of the weightlifting women. This next one is Lithuanian. She must have been so much larger than all her schoolmates. When I shave my head, I know I will bleed. I wonder if this Lithuanian weightlifter was bullied. I wonder if she was the bully.
     My manifesto: I don’t care what you say about me behind my back. I will never go to Greece because I want there to be one place on Earth that can be as beautiful as I imagine it. I will believe things can be real when I know they are not real. When I bleed from the head I will lick my own lips. My shortcomings will not interfere with my sense of what is worth seeking. If I see a beautiful boy at a bus stop, I will not imagine what he likes to do in the shower. I don’t fully endorse this notion that every story has to go somewhere. I think it is worse to be clever than it is to be late. Not everything has to be about something. There is this clock that lies in a pile of junk on the edge of the street by my apartment. There is this woman who squats over a barbell on television. She used to be the only female member of her high school football team. Her brother is a center for the New York Jets. I am thinking of starting a book club. I am thinking of walking into the bathroom, coaxing my invented cat from the edge of the sink. I pick up a razor and stare into the mirror. I need some way to break through. Perhaps olive oil can serve several useful purposes. Karma licks herself as I shine up my head. I will be making a reference to some kind of anointing.


–––––––
Timothy C. Dyke has short fiction in Santa Monica Review, Drunken Boat and Kugelmass. A text/image collaboration with Noah Saterstrom appears in The Spirit of Black Mountain College, a book project published by Lorimer Press. Timothy lives with parrots in Honolulu, Hawaii where he teaches English to high school students. He is working on a novel.

From Brother Cabin By Garth Graeper

Spork — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 02:00:59 +0000

BROTHER CABIN

[October]

this silence
exposes too much
Black Form; I’m in bed
haunted by the lake
the moss, the alps, almost
melting into the solitude
I’d kiss them all
but my body is not so easy
to stay in

°°°

the cabin will not
permit my brother
to go limp, so I
sit alone in the orchard
where a stillness can run
deep through
my veins

°°°

I write starved, wild
with lightness, stalking
through these trees
where my brother slipped
into the glowworms
and horses on the other side
of the lake

_____________________________________________

BROTHER CABIN

[December]

I cook, red embers
glimmering and my hips
very beautiful; in this small
orchard, I could eat
twenty solitudes

noisy with
34 years of water
and beef, I’m ready
to leave this cabin
behind, to lie down, no head
or arms, just Milk Force
streaming downhill
toward the lake

_____________________________________________
Garth Graeper is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, NY, and the author of two chapbooks, Into the Forest Engine (Projective Industries) and By Deer Light (Greying Ghost). Other poems in the Brother Cabin series have appeared (or will appear) in Typo, Handsome, Sixth Finch, Inter|rupture, Bitter Oleander, Leveler, Sink Review, and Sidebrow.

Two Stories by Lily Dodge

Spork — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 16:45:06 +0000

JONAH IN THE WHALE

Jonah is still inside the whale. He never got to Nineveh. It’s not so bad inside the whale. Jonah set up a card table underneath the whale’s ribcage where he plays poker with the little fishes. He stuck pictures of pin-up girls to the insides of the whale. The whale didn’t mind. They don’t talk much.
     Jonah sleeps on the spongy inner belly of the whale. He looks at the pin-up girls. Their skin is a lighter pink than the inside of the whale. Their hair is dry. Jonah hasn’t been dry since the day he left home. Saltwater sits on his lips and in his lungs all the time now.
     Jonah pretends he can hear the waves from so far below the surface. He pretends he is breathing dry air. On nights when the waves are too loud and the air too dry to sleep, he remembers the night they threw him overboard. The water was so cold that it smacked him, hard. As soon as his head sank under the waves the storm went silent.
     Jonah had never been underwater before. In the stillness, he felt his hair floating up over his head. The darkness roared heavy in his ears. Cold stung along the edges of his body. Then the whale swallowed him, and it was warm inside the whale. That first night, Jonah curled up at the back of the whale’s tongue and went to sleep. He dreamed about a pin-up girl named Nineveh wearing a polka-dotted bathing suit. Hers was the first photo he tacked up.
     In the spring, Jonah listens to the whale’s songs and thinks he used to know the words. He beats the little fishes at poker. He whispers stories to Nineveh about how she’s going to die. The little fishes nibble the polka dots off her bathing suit. Jonah loses the nine of diamonds so they play checkers instead. The little fishes win.
     On its way to warmer waters, the whale swims under Noah’s ark. Above the whale and its stowaway, the old man is still sitting there on his wooden ship, watching the sea. There is no white dove coming.



EVE UNDER THE TREE

When Eve arrived, Adam was curled on the ground, blood trickling from a hole in his side. It pooled under him, sticky and sweet like nectar, and stained Eve’s feet when she stepped over his body.
     In her hair she wore a tiny snake, smaller than her smallest finger and green as a new leaf budding. It sang her to sleep with songs that told the names of the stars. On warm nights the stars would fall with a soft noise and land in the dust. Eve suspected the snake of calling them down. She threw them over the walls of the garden, careful and quick so they didn’t burn her hands. The snake whispered, hold them, keep them, wear them in your eyes, carry them in your belly, but they burned too hot to hold onto.
     Adam wept when the stars fell. Frightened, he hid under the branches of the great tree while Eve caught them. The ones that fell to the ground traced their names in the dust as they landed, leaving soot-black mandalas behind them. In the morning Adam dragged his toes through the burnt lines, kicking up inky clouds.
     On the nights when the stars were quiet Eve slept under the great tree. In the mornings the snake cried out the name of each color in the sunrise and Eve woke without remembering them. Adam said red, yellow, pink, orange, but Eve and the snake knew better. Adam thought each creature in the garden had only one name, short and full of consonants. Under a stone he found a soft grey thing he called rat. The snake taught Eve the thing’s other names, names that ran like water, names that felt like fur on her tongue, before swallowing it whole.
     Golden fruits grew on the tree, on the branches too high for Eve to reach. The snake shook them down and they landed at Eve’s feet, rolling in the dirt like Adam on that first day. Their skins were hard and bitter and warm to the touch. Inside each fruit there were thousands of seeds and a baby snake, thin as a hair, curled up tight.


–––––––
Lily Dodge is an Arizona native currently teaching English in Tucson. She has made two cross-country road trips and still doesn’t understand the traffic laws in Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Urbanite, wigleaf, Crack the Spine, and Marco Polo. Find her online at www.lilydodge.com.

2 Poems by Jordan Soyka

Spork — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 02:00:28 +0000

This Is Not A Complete List Of Side Effects

hell is a good excuse for a ladder. goes nowhere. the narrative. depersonalization. just a little pile of fingernails. under your bed, a curve passing through all these points. anorgasmia. pin it down. dream abnormalities.

collapse makes sense. a voice is calling behind me. a hole. with a chandelier in it. feeling warm. drudgery. another sentence. dysphasia. the vanishing point shows more. i don’t know full remission (e.g. depression disappears in spring).

night’s little engines. wrung out. suicidal ideation. ink on my hands. these words can be extinguished with other words. mice nibble watchbands. avoidance. a finite number of singular statements. decreased salivation. paresthesia.

everything is ready now. talkativeness. muscular cramps. but beautiful. intrusive and inappropriate. excessive and unreasonable. the face displayed no discernible euphoria. no way out. vigilance and scanning.

_________________________________________
Ellipses

do it or i’ll think something terrible opened raw scabbed and picked again
pink red
brown pink

only lies create worlds
beginning with stone & somewhere hung above & somewhere glittering
laughing laughing breathing 24 hr help line

maybe i was there maybe suffered
fingered open maybe peeled maybe tongued
down past seeing up
rendering hath severed wonder
filled in filled out and bulging

both a space and a collision

only if it’s safe only if it’s safe counting checking i’ve hit bone
counting checking i’ve hit bone

_________________________________________
Jordan Soyka lives in New Orleans, where he creates rituals and paints his toenails. His work has been published in GlitterPony, > kill author, La Petite Zine, Cave Wall, and The Quarterly Conversation, and is forthcoming in Horse Less Review.

The Push by Anders Benson

Spork — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 21:12:46 +0000

Trisha’s catheter must be relocated every couple of days, or it will blow the vein. If the vein blows she’ll get a hematoma—a black pocket of blood under her skin that could become infected. If too many veins are blown, her home-care nurses can’t give her the fluids that keep her hydrated and the morphine pushes to get her through the day.
     When they move the cath, the clear tape that holds it in place leaves outlines of residue on the back of her hand, grimy oblongs that look like the camouflage of some weird jungle creature. Trisha wonders where the grime comes from, since her hands are never dirty.
     On Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, Connie is Trisha’s nurse. Connie is short and round and always cheerful, which Trisha finds annoying. Nobody should be happy all the time, especially somebody who can’t hold onto a man and turns to Little Debbie for consolation. Connie gabs about her man troubles a lot, which Trisha also finds annoying because she’s never been with a man, never will be with a man, and will die a virgin because she has bulging fish eyes, a deformed neck, and an atrophied, useless body. No man wants to get with a girl who’s stuck in a wheelchair and never leaves the house and is going to die before she’s twenty.
     Trisha thinks Connie keeps getting dumped because she’s a total uggo. Not like Salma Hayek; Salma Hayek is beautiful. Connie and Trisha talk about Salma a lot, and they paste pictures of her up on Trisha’s bedroom walls. In the afternoons, they watch the soaps together, but Trisha is sometimes disgusted with the female characters because they’re either spineless floozies or evil bitches with no real purpose. If you’re going to be evil, she thinks, there should be a purpose behind it.
     One Monday evening, after Connie has left for the day, Brandon comes into Trisha’s room. Brandon thinks he’s in love with Connie, but Trisha knows that’s only because he’s ugly too and could never get with a beautiful girl. Teasing him about it is the most fun Trisha gets out of having a brother.
     “What do you want, skeeze?” Trisha says.
     “Did Connie leave yet?” Brandon asks, ignoring her jab.
     “You know she did. You’ve been in your room with the door open all day, listening to us. You’re just too chickenshit to come in here and talk to her.”
     “Shut up, Trish.”
     “You should, you know. You two would make a great couple. You could have fat, ugly babies together.”
     “Shut up, Trish, Connie’s not ugly.” Brandon’s voice goes up an octave and he turns crimson. “You’re just jealous.”
     “She is so ugly. She’s fat and dumpy just like you! If you weren’t so chickenshit you’d come in here and talk to her, and then the two of you could go to your room and have sweaty fat ugly sex.”
     “Shut up!” Brandon says. “Don’t you talk about her that way”
     “Or what? What’re you gonna do?” Trisha fumbles for her joystick and pivots her chair around. “Are you gonna hit me? If you hit me I’ll call the cops, and they’ll take you to jail and you’ll get butt-raped!”
     “Shut up!” Brandon flees down the hall to his own room. He slams the door, but she can still hear him screaming into his pillow. Brandon has rage issues. He sees a therapist twice a week because of a court order. Trisha thinks it’s hilarious. She wonders if he cries at the therapist’s the way he’s crying now.

///

     At fifteen, Trisha was bright-eyed and hopeful, like one of those Make-A-Wish kids on TV. Now, at seventeen, she’s bitter and lonely and she loathes those ignorant kids who think the whole world loves them because they’re special and not because they’re sick.
     On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Richard is Trisha’s nurse. Richard is a skinny guy with a limp brown mustache that he thinks makes him look like a movie star, but to Trish it makes him look like a circus seal. Richard is a sad sack and can’t keep a girl. Trisha thinks it’s because he’s weak and lets them walk all over him.
     “You should be more assertive,” she says. “Women like it when a man takes charge.”
     “Really?”
     “Yeah, absolutely,” she says, watching him draw up her morphine. “Hey, could I have three cee-cees this morning? I hurt really bad.”
     “The order says I can only exceed two if you’re in extreme pain. You know that, Trish.”
     “Please?” she says. “You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need it. The pain kept me up all night.”
     “Well, okay,” he says, drawing up the additional fluid. With methodical care, he slips the needle into her IV cath and empties the syringe into her vein.
     “You know,” Trisha says, as her body floods with pharmaceutical sunshine, “you should ask Connie out on a date.”
     “You think so?” Richard drops the used syringe iton a little sharps bin.
     “Oh, yeah. She’s had the worst luck with men lately, and you’re a really nice guy.”
     “Maybe I will,” he says.
     “Just remember: assertive. Make it seem like it was your idea, and act like you’ve got everything under control. Don’t leave any room for her to doubt you.”
     With a smirk, Trisha relaxes in her chair, hoping her brother Brandon is eavesdropping down the hall.
     As it turns out, he has been, grinding teeth the entire time.

///

     “So,” Connie says on Friday morning, “Richard called last night.”
     “And?” Trisha says.
     “He asked me out!” the bright-eyed nurse says.
     “That’s wonderful! I hope you have a good time. You both deserve it.”
     “Oh, it’s nice of you to say. It was certainly unexpected. He has a whole evening planned; I never figured him for the take-charge type.”
     “Well, Connie, he’s not as together as he seems. Let him see you as a confident, independent woman. It will reinforce his own confidence,” Trisha preaches, quoting straight out of Cosmo.
     “Of course, Trish. I’m not going to make the same old mistakes this time.”
     Connie is upbeat and cheery for the rest of the day. It makes her extra-agreeable when it comes time for the morphine pushes.

///

     “How was your date?” Trisha asks on Monday morning.
     Connie’s smile doesn’t turn up at the corners quite as much as usual. “We had fun,” she says, “but he was a little bossy.”
     “Oh, he’s just nervous,” Trisha says. “I think he’s been browbeaten by some domineering women, and now he’s over-compensating. Keep showing him you’re strong, and the two of you will get along fine.”
     “You’re probably right,” Connie nods, her mood brightening as she taps a fresh vein on Trisha’s arm. “It really wasn’t that much of a problem. We’re going out again this Friday.”

///

     “I feel like she was sending me these really mixed signals,” Richard says, frowning, the next day. “I tried to be assertive, like you said, but she seemed a little stand-offish, you know?”
     Trish pretends to hesitate before responding. “Richard, I, no, I shouldn’t,” she says.
     “What?”
     “Well, it’s kind of private. If she finds out I told you.”
     “Please tell me. I won’t let on, Trish, I promise.”
     “Well, Connie has some, issues,” Trisha says, the lie blooming from inside her. “Her dad, he was really abusive to her mother, and that’s kind of what she expects from a man. Little girls always go through a phase when they want to marry their fathers, only she never outgrew it.”
     “You mean I should abuse her?”
     “No, not like that. Just let her know you’re the man. You’re in charge. Although, if it comes to it, like, in the bedroom?”
     “Yeah?” Richard leans in.
     “Let’s just say she likes it rough.”
     “If that’s what she enjoys, I suppose I can do that. You’re sure about this?”
     “Yeah, she told me that it totally gets her off. Women share this kind of stuff.”
     Richard nods as though he understands perfectly, which he doesn’t. Way better than the soaps, Trisha thinks.

///

     On Monday, Richard is in the hospital. Trisha laughed aloud when she read the article in the Sunday paper. Reportedly, Connie’s neighbors heard a disturbance late Friday night; first a lot of shouting, then something crashing against the wall. They called the police. According to the official statement, Richard was arrested for sexually assaulting Connie, but the charges were dropped the following morning. Trisha was a little disappointed by that part, though still pleased with her handiwork.
     Brandon did not find it so funny when she showed him the article. He did not find it funny at all, and that afternoon went to Richard’s house and attacked him with a kitchen knife. Then, like an idiot, he ran straight home and hidden in the cellar. Trisha watched with glee from her window as the police dragged her handcuffed brother down the front walk and stuffed him into the back of a cruiser. Their mother was distraught, their father fuming; of course, they didn’t know the whole story.
     Connie comes in late this morning. She seems her usual chipper self, in spite of the traumatic weekend she’s had. She waves a glossy magazine in the air as she walks into Trisha’s bedroom.
     “Seen the latest Vogue? Salma made the cover again!”
     Trish can’t figure Connie’s game, but decides to play along. “Cool, is she inside?”
     “A twelve page interview, with lots of pictures.”
     “Awesome, read it to me.”
     “No.” Connie’s smile drops in a heartbeat. Unlocking the medical cabinet, she selects a fresh hypodermic syringe—a big one. “You know,” she says, “Richard called me from jail. He told me all the awful things you said to him, how you manipulated him into hurting me. That’s why I dropped the charges.”
     “So?” Trisha says.
     “So, you may not have to suffer the consequences of your actions much longer, but the rest of us will bear them for the rest of our lives. Richard lost almost five feet of his lower intestine from your brother’s attack, but you probably hurt him more than Brandon did. And poor Brandon’s eighteen now; he won’t be going to counseling this time, he’ll go to prison. You’ve practically ruined his life.”
     “Like I give a shit about my brother,” Trisha says. “He’s an asshole.”
     “Patricia, you are a liar, a shrew, and an addict. We cared for you, and you played with us like little toys.” Connie turns around and yanks the battery cable out of Trisha’s wheelchair, immobilizing the crippled teenager before she can react.
     Trisha eyes the syringe in the nurse’s other hand. “So what are you gonna do, Connie, overdose me on morphine? That’s murder. They’ll put you away.”
     “I’m not giving you morphine, Trish,” Connie says, drawing the plunger back. “About six cee-cees of air ought to do it. Pulmonary embolisms are a risk for someone in your condition; they’ll assume it was natural. I’ll wait fifteen minutes and call the paramedics. I’ll tell them I was fixing your lunch and found you dead when I came back upstairs. Even if they resuscitate you, you’ll be a vegetable.”
     She grasps Trisha’s wrist and slides the needle into the cath. “By the way, my father was a saint,” she says, and gives Trisha the push.


––––––
Anders Benson lives with his wife in the mountains of western Maine. He has held a variety of occupations including welding and steel fabrication, pet care service, and railroad car mechanics. Anders’s work has appeared in Gemini Magazine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and Soundings East.

3 Poems by Ryan Bender-Murphy

Spork — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 02:00:27 +0000

Pastoral Scene

Like it or not, the suit smells.
Hounds of fire run through forests
and trees squeal without their ponies.
The turnip cannot stall the car, but, by god, we love it.
I fold the parking lot and push the streets
into the oven. I forget they only rise in dreams.
The spines of razorbacks rise into the clouds.
The mermaids do not stand out. But I have the weekends off!
The hills are tripping into the stew.
I want to hold your poinsettia and then tell the ghost story.
What makes a mask fall into a fault line?
What keeps the prison guard from balancing his checkbook
near a Venus flytrap?
I chew a soda can and launch it into space.
I spill my kidneys out of my body—whatever gets the grass swaying.
Your purr exits
something the rabbits are straying from.
That pool beneath the canoe? It’s black-blue.
I hit the off buttons and laugh and laugh and laugh.
A unicorn impales me.

__________________________________________
Upbringing

I had it hard in juvenile crime dramas.
My parents said it was just a phase: exploding
in the alleyway, chipping teeth every time I spoke.
Who would take me to prom? I had bowling balls
growing out of my eyes. I couldn’t pass the driver’s exam.
No wheels: no way to keep living.
The Nintendo days seemed eerie. What controller best fits into my mouth?
I would ask the fortuneteller at Spaghetti Warehouse.
She blinked and beamed
and her breath smelled like plastic. I hated her.
I took the train from my house
and then got off at a movie theater.
Afraid of destinations, I told myself You are the atmosphere.
When a computer stunned me with its spiral screensaver
when the colors changed from purple to dark green to teal
I called my parents and told them My job will be rerouting affection.
It’s true. One day you might chew a mint leaf
and then squat to mouth a doorknob.

__________________________________________
Starting the New Job

In a former era, someone asks me in an interview
what a super-tongue might do.
Maybe open file cabinets, maybe provide coffee for immigrants.
Now: I watch the janitor absorb cleaning juice from a bucket
and rub himself over all surfaces and senior managers. Nobody else laughs,
still slurping sweat off of their hands.
I open my Poptart box, forgoing catered eggs and ham, and read
the instructions for completing a maze.

A co-worker spills coffee on the maze.

Tech support jams a tractor into my keyboard.

My boss tells me how many hands can press into a face
before it looks like something completely different.

During lunch, my body double holds me on a tray
and slowly I descend into his stomach.

_________________________________________
Ryan Bender-Murphy lives in Austin, TX, where he teaches high school students critical reading and writing skills. He tries to frequent the green trails around the city, and, on one occasion, he saw a fox in an urban park. His poems also appear in Anti-, Dark Sky Magazine, elimae, NAP, Phantom Limb, and elsewhere.

Pol Pot by Oliver Johns

Spork — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:46:01 +0000

Pol Pot was dead. Then there was a helicopter, an aeroplane, a scientist, some drugs, some lightning and a video recording of this guy screaming ‘It’s alive. Mostly.’
     Pol Pot was man again. But he felt bad. Really bad.
     The last twenty years or so he had been on the edge of nothingness. But only on the edge. Something wouldn’t let him fall in, he didn’t know what, so he’d been sitting there, his legs dangling over the edge, thinking about everything he’d done in his life while others came, waved and then dropped into the abyss.
     The first four years had been okay.
     He’d had a decent life, hadn’t done much wrong. He’d risen high, met every challenge in the face, dealt with those who turned against him.
     But still he couldn’t fall into nothingness.
     After four years and a bit, a farmer from his country drifted by and called him a ‘monster.’
     ’Sorry?’ said Pot, confused.
     ’I said, ‘monster’,’ the farmer repeated.
     ’Do I know you?’
     ’Not really.’
     ’So why do you call me monster?’
     ’Because you told someone to kill me, monster.’
     ’I did?’
     ’Yup. All I did was farm my land and then you came and took it from me.’
     ’And then killed you?’
     ’That’s right, monster.’
     ’But…’
     It was too late, the farmer was gone.
     Pol Pot thought about what the farmer had said. He knew a lot of people had died because he’d ordered them dead, but those guys, they were all his enemies.
     It was war. They were going to kill him and take his throne. He didn’t want to kill anyone. They were all assholes. They had it coming, opposing him like that.
     Only farming their land? It was never their land.
     Country before individual, always.
     Pot folded his arms, convinced he was right, convinced he was wrong to have even doubted his rightness in the first place.
     Fucking farmers. Of course they’d say it wasn’t their fault.

///

     Another farmer drifted past and called him a ‘prick’. Pot ignored him. What did he know?
     He probably just heard that other farmer giving him shit and thought it’d be funny to copy.

///

     Five years and fifty-three thousand, nine hundred and twenty seven farmers later, Pot’s arguments had been modified.
     At first they’d gotten more extreme.
     It was the worst ever war.
     They wanted to flay him and take his throne and kill his family and all decent Cambodians.
     He was a man of peace. He’d never hurt a fly even if it was right in his face.
     Farmers were the devil. Yes, the devil had split itself into millions of Cambodian farmers.
     He’d saved the country from destruction. But more farmers came and Pot reached a point where his argument could hold no longer.
     It wasn’t war.
     All they wanted was to farm their land. They were farmers. He was a monster.

///

     The scientist put a jacket over Pot and told him he was doing okay, his vital signs were stable and in a few days he could start his re-implementation into society.
     ’I'm not an implement,’ said Pot, taking off the jacket.
     ’Mr. Pot, please, put the jacket back on, you’ll freeze.’
     Pol Pot shook his head and walked out of the lab.
     Outside it was snowing. Pol Pot looked at his surroundings, unsurprised. It was a castle. Somehow, he knew it would be a castle.
     He walked down the slope and onto the path that led into the forest. He was cold, but forced himself not to shiver. After walking through the forest for an hour or so, he came to a road. There was a sign in what looked like German.
     A truck drove past. Pot stuck a finger out and brought it in.
     ’Where to?’ asked the driver, not seeming to care that Pot was naked.
     ’Cambodia.’
     ’You’re in luck, my friend. That’s exactly where I’m dropping my cargo. Hop in.’
     ’I'm already in.’
     The driver laughed, slapped Pot on his thigh and pulled back out into the road.

///

     During the ride, the driver took off his jeans, saying it was too damn hot, and tried to push Pot’s head down onto his cock.
     Pot refused the first seventeen times, but then had a thought. What if this is part of it?
     The eighteenth time, he said, sure, why not?

///

     In Cambodia, Pot left the driver and went into the nearest clothing store to buy some pants.
     He’d decided that being naked wasn’t part of it, and the real suffering would come soon enough anyway.
     The owner of the store seemed to recognise him and started to sweat.
     ’Are you okay, man?’ asked Pot.
     ’You’re…it can’t be…how did you…’
     The man couldn’t speak straight so Pot left some coins on the counter and walked back out into the street.
     No one recognized him on the streets. Maybe they were too busy?
     There were a lot of young people around, perhaps that was it. They hadn’t known about him and had never realised he was a prick.
     A young man stopped next to Pot and spat on the ground in front of him.
     ’That’s disgusting,’ said Pot.
     ’Fuck off, fatty.’
     The young man stared at Pot as if he was going to hit him, then turned and walked off, disappearing into some kind of tunnel further down the street.
     Pot looked at his body. He was fat, but fatty? Where was the fucking respect?
     A brief image of the young man hanging by his ankles, a knife cutting down his chest, an officer declaring a list of make-believe crimes.
     Pot couldn’t help but smile.

///

     No. But, that young man, he was a prick.
     He had no manners, no respect. It was okay to get rid of people like that.

///

     Pot kept walking, leaving the city and finding some trees. It seemed to be a forest, but not a very pretty one. What had happened here then?
     He looked around for someone to ask and saw a farmer.
     No, not him, he thought. I’ll ask someone else.
     But there was no one else.
     Pot forgot about his question and walked through the ugly forest until he came to what he knew to be a burial site.
     The graves were all covered up now, but he’d visited enough times before to know he was in the right place.
     He bent down and started to dig.

///

     Two days later, he’d uncovered enough to see around seventy skeletons. He’d thought a lot about these skeletons while digging and had tried to explain his past actions again. But then he’d thought the other way and told himself, no, there’s no explaining, even if there is an explanation, that’s not how this works. I’ve just gotta shut my mouth and get on with it.
     Pol Pot climbed into the hole and lay down next to the largest collection of bones. Then he spread as much dirt over his body as he could and waited to die.
     With a little bit of luck, this would all be over in a few hours.

///

     A few days later, a young farmer walked past the open grave and saw Pot lying next to all the bones, most of his body covered with dirt and insects. The young farmer jumped down into the hole and slapped Pot in the face, telling him to wake up.
     Pot woke up.
     ’Is it done?’ he asked.
     ’Huh? What are you talking about?’
     ’I mean, am I forgiven?’
     ’What?’
     ’Do you forgive me, young man?’
     The young man nodded, pulled Pot out of the grave and laid him down next to one of the few remaining trees nearby. He told Pot he’d be right back then ran off.
     Pot lay back and smiled. It was a sign.

///

     Four days later, from a hospital bed, after two separate doctors had tried to kill him with an overdose of meds, Pot re-evaluated the ‘sign thing’ and decided that the young man probably hadn’t known who he was. But even so.
     I lay in that grave for two, three days, thought Pot. That’s something. Isn’t it?



–––––––
Oliver Johns moves around a lot and makes a zine called Gupter Puncher, which gets dropped here and there. So far, he’s done Ljubljana, London, Bucharest, Hong Kong, Zagreb and a few others. He knows a bit of Japanese, a bit of a few other languages, but is nowhere near fluent in any of them. Oliver writes bizarro novels as Stavrogin for Zizek Press.

Graffiti Signatures by Cody Todd

Spork — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 02:00:26 +0000

Graffiti Signatures:

haiku stenciled between storefronts along Melrose Avenue:

*
Silhouettes through ice:
I battled Tyrannosaurs
for the bronze-medaled world.

*
Timelessness akin
to a Cyclops doll blinking
mosquitoes away.

*
Waxen effigies.
Take my face. Take every dime.
Mannequin malice.

*
Crazier than light.
Like water, beating itself.
Black face, white face, yours?

*
Banksy One-Thousand:
is an original thought
worth mindless quotings?

*
Mural for Cody:
I am you; you are not me.
We will meet halfway.
______________________
Cody Todd is the author of Graffiti Signatures (forthcoming, Main Street Rag) and lives in West Hollywood. His favorite haunt is the Formosa Cafe, where Lee Marvin is reputed to have set fire to the entire block between Willoughby and Santa Monica Blvd (aka US Route 66). You can find him pacing around the Venice boardwalk to catch his bearings at least once a month. He is also the Managing Editor & co-creator of the online literary journal, The Offending Adam (www.theoffendingadam.com).

Two Excerpts from Silk Flowers by Meghan Lamb

Spork — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 23:09:15 +0000

Red Knit Gloves

She has a pair of red knit gloves. They are the nicest thing she’s ever owned, the only thing her mother ever made her. Her mother spent the entire summer working on those gloves, although she never seemed to make much progress. Most of the summer was spent in her terry cloth robe, the windows closed against the light and heat. They had no central air, so she sat in a circle of electric fans. The fans engulfed her like a little shrine, her damp hair blowing out in a halo of shadowy sweat.
     She’d walk into the room, and her mother would look up as though interrupted. Then she’d go right back to staring out the window, clicking her hands every now and then when she remembered them. When her mother gives her the finished pair of gloves, she is surprised. She puts them on. They share a smile. She feels a sense of safety. Something beautiful can come from barely anything at all.
     Today, she stands in the sunniest spot on the playground, glowing and superior to all the other children. The girls with nicer gloves couldn’t possibly know what they mean. She traces a line in the dirt with her shoe, which is scuffed and peeling on the sides. She does this absentmindedly, but she’s secretly thinking, don’t cross. She digs the line deeper. She pictures herself as a castle, the line as a moat. The red gloves are bright banners that bear her family’s seal. The dirt gets in between her toes. Worms start to crawl up, and she tramples them, smearing their blood on the ground.
     Children loom on the other side of her blood-stained line. They barely know her name, but they hate her. They resent her misplaced sense of superiority. They resent her secretive smile and the way she stands clasping her hands by herself. Who is she, anyway? They too have nothing, but they don’t feel proud of it. They cherish no false sense that something good will happen. On top of everything, she’s ugly. Her hair hangs flat and straight against her flat dumb face, like dead twigs decorating someone’s tombstone.
     She too resents them for their cruel stares. They’re not the same as she is; why can’t they accept that? A pair of boys moves closer. One is tall and lanky. One is small and hairy for his age.
     What’re you standing there for? The tall boy asks.
     Dunno, just like it here, she says. She feels no need to explain herself. She thinks she owns this spot as much as any.
     I mean why are you standing here? He says. The group ambassador. He sees this as a different question. She sees this as a threat. She says, go on. I don’t have anything to say to you.
     I’m not trying to start any trouble, he says, just trying to talk. She shakes her head. She’s learned when people say they don’t want trouble, what they really mean is they don’t know they want it.
     I mean, what I’m trying to say is. The boy trails off.
     The short boy takes over. Your mom is a whore.
     A horror? She says. She knows this word, but not the other. She assumes she understands. She shudders, recalling their house at its worst, with the boxes stacked up, with the mice running loose. Her mother slouched down like a burial shroud in the midst of it all, blankets drawn up around her. The cigarette wavering back and forth on the tip of her lips. It flickers in the fan, but it still threatens to set them aflame.
     A whore, he says, flicking his tongue against his teeth.
     What do you know? She says. Who are you, anyway? You know nothing about me.
     My dad knows the guy who gives your mom money, he says. How else does she got money if she doesn’t got a job?
     They don’t have money though. There’s never any food in the house. The Meals on Wheels woman comes by once a day with her rattling cart, letting a thin ray of light in the room for 15 minutes.
     Why would he give her money, anyway? She asks.
     He gives her money cause she puts out, he says simply. She’s a whore. Your mom’s a whore.
     She gets his meaning now, but still it doesn’t make much sense. Her mother’s pretty, but she wears that faded nightgown every day. As far as she can tell, her mother never leaves the couch except to lie in bed, still smoking in the dark. Even the cigarettes are cheap. Her bedroom smells like burning toast.
     The boys move closer. What we really want to know, he says, is if you put out, too.
     Her eyes widen, but she stands her ground. It’s not her fault. They’re ignorant. She takes her gloves off, just in case. She folds them in her pocket. She thumbs at the delicate grain of her mother’s careful offering.
     The boys take this as a sign of resignation. In a way, they’re not completely incorrect. Like mother, like daughter, he grins. The tall boy moves behind and wraps his arms around her. He holds her in a way that’s strangely calming. She feels so much relief being held in the light, without the stale smell of home, that she lets them continue. The short one mostly just gets close and rubs around on her, which seems like no big deal. He unzips her coat and feels around like he lost something in there. She doesn’t struggle til he tries to rip her dress. It’s her only dress that doesn’t have stain somewhere.
     Let go, she says. The teacher’s going to see.
     He laughs. The teacher doesn’t care. He knows about your mom. She claws at him, and she gets a good swipe at his face. The teacher does see this. He blows a whistle, and the class runs back in line. She doesn’t notice til they’re all inside, seated at desks. Her gloves have gone missing. She raises her hand. She realizes that her fingertips are bloody. She lowers her hand then, ashamed.
     So she goes for months with cold red hands while somewhere, her gloves become dirty. They unravel along the line she dug, their threads sewing into the earth. They fill the muddy moat with red until the snow falls down. Bit by bit the red absorbs each snowflake. Eventually, the gloves are buried under solid sheets of white.



Soldiers

His parents send him upstairs after dinner. He goes to bed earlier and earlier each week. He isn’t bad or anything, that’s just the way they do it. He says, I’m not tired. They tell him, that’s ok, just go play in your room. Go cool off before you go to sleep.
     It doesn’t take too long to learn that cooling off means being quiet. As long as they can’t hear him, he can do whatever he wants. He likes to poke around the planter by his bedroom window, pulling out the wilted vines and braiding rope with them. He hides the ropes under his bed. He is plotting a way to get up on the roof. The houses in his neighborhood are set so close together, he could probably jump off from one to the next. He wants to look in other people’s windows. He wants to investigate.
     He lines his plastic army men along his unmade bedspread. All the rolls of fabric look like hills or dunes. The pinkish sunlight blooms through the shutters like toxic gas, or bombs.
     Sometimes he watches war films with his father. The best parts are always the explosions. He can watch the sounds. That’s what he likes. He likes to watch the color of the sky change. He knows that even the most beautiful land is more beautiful being destroyed.
     He plays the story of a third world war, not just to play it, but to practice how he’ll tell it when it happens. He sees the shadows cast on sand at dusk; the moonlight barely shining through suggests this. He sees the straining of the soldiers as they crouch for hours, barricading themselves in the folds of his own bent knees. He buries himself in the covers, crowned with handmade ropes and hand-plucked leaves. He even takes sips from a flask that he found in the back of the closet. It was empty, but he can imagine what the liquor tastes like from the rusty smell that rises up. It tastes dirty, old, and burning. That sounds about right.
     Someday he wants to document a war. He’ll be a writer or a photographer or something. Just as long as you can open up a magazine, see pictures of explosions, and then see his name right next to them. He wants his name to be on a photograph of bodies. He, the boy who goes to bed before the sun goes down. He will be named by nameless things.
     When a stranger shakes his hand, he’ll see the image of a mushroom cloud reflected in his gaze. He thinks the writers must be braver than the soldiers. It’s their job to know what’s going on at all times. They can’t close their eyes when bombs are raining overhead, when sand is pouring from the sky. They have to keep them open. They can’t miss a moment of the action. Or at least they have to know enough to make it up.
     He fills his head with headline words like axis, launch, attack. Surprise, attrition, loss. Suffer, struggles. Strengthen, stand, regain. The forces, overrun, declare, collapse, defeat, surrender. Soldiers can’t call each other by names because they’d give away their hiding spots. They know what’s going on, but they must speak it in their far-off sounding voices, codes and hints jabbing desperately into a curtain of static.
     When he plays, he doesn’t play with plots or characters. He just lines the soldiers up and lets the scene play in his mind. He hears the bass of bullets growing as they drum into the earth, as bodies catch, flesh hisses, and absorbs them. Most of all, he hears the shrieking. He imagines based on what he’s seen in movies, but he knows that there are things the movies aren’t allowed to show. His father told him. He can hear the screams and shaking through the floor, the howls reverberating through the walls. Glass breaking, things shoving, hitting things. He’s been told he has an active imagination.

     One night the crying of the soldiers overwhelms him. He can’t control the feeling that it’s just a movie, something waiting for the future, or the magnitude of his imagination. He can’t take responsibility. He hears specific words now. Lush, whore. Liar. How? Don’t tell me that. I trusted you. No. I don’t trust you. Bastard. Don’t you think about it. I don’t care. No. That won’t help now. God, it smells in here. Just one more time and then. I swear. Christ. Woman. I don’t think I even know you.
     He doesn’t want to cry. He squints at the nuclear power plant off in the distance, the dark pipes of a pure white smoke. They plume into the bright sky, slowly changing shades. He opens the window. The smell of his mother’s lilac bush clings thickly to the sunset. He thinks about the H-bomb. Wouldn’t it be perfect if a bomb fell on his house, right now? The chandelier chimes in the hallway below. He’ll use the noise to his advantage.
     He ties one end of the rope vine to the radiator and he wraps the other end around his waist. He feels the heat from the pipes running out through the vines, building up in his veins. He eases over the edge of the planter, careful not to catch his shorts on the metal clutch. He’s clinging to the windowsill. He feels steady. There’s an overhang 4 feet away. He tries to swing himself, but suddenly the rope vine feels too hot. The radiator heat unravels through his veins. The liquid in his stomach turns to steam. He breaks his hold. He dangles for a moment, then he falls.
     At first he doesn’t realize he’s falling. It feels like the ground moves up to meet him. Then it seems to happen very slowly, and in waves, like swinging back and forth. He only falls in one direction, but a roaring rushes up into his ears, then pushes down. By the time he hits the ground, he’s in a trance that makes the blow feel soft. He barely even hears the thud, which rings through the dark of his head like a swarm of mosquitoes.

     He wakes up in a bright room in a cast. His mom leans over him and smiles. Her lips look blue and ugly in the light. Her voice is still panicky, training her words into one long shaky sentence. She says, it’s okay, you fell, but on your arm. You were trying to climb out the window, which you knew you shouldn’t do, you know that, but you were alone. I love you. Don’t you know I love you? Do we have an understanding? We were wrong. We thought you were a big boy now. Are you a big boy now? We thought you knew these things. I told you to play quietly until you fell asleep. You were supposed to fall asleep. You weren’t supposed to fall out the window. She gathers her face in her hands.
     His cast is green just like his army men. He asks his mom, where’s Dad?
     She wonders if he really is a big boy, if he’s big enough to hear her tell the truth. She doesn’t know the truth is filled with bombs and hissing streams of smoke, with shrieking sounds and actions like the silencing of bodies and her son, who does know better, is supposed to tell it all. But he can’t even tell her. She says, sweetheart, just in case he isn’t big enough. Sweetheart. Daddy had to go.
     He’s coming back though, right? Not for awhile. He says, when. She says, I don’t know. How could she not know, though. His mother is a bad mom.
     She tries to stroke his hair. Her hands are wet from crying. They just make the strands of hair stick to his forehead. He wishes he could roll away onto his side, but his good arm is pressed up against the guardrail. He is trapped there in his bed, without the soldiers, soaking up the salt inside his mother’s tears.

     He hears the whispering of his mother’s skirt as she moves throughout the kitchen. There are other sounds, of course, the clicking of her shoes, the hissing of the tap, the shuffling and throwing out of certain envelopes. When his mother comes to mind, he always hears the swishing of her skirt. He knows that every movement of the skirt, however gentle, could cling, catch, and snag, could kill his mother’s nylons.
     She’s still getting used to making dinner for two people. Most of the time, she makes too much. Their serving bowls are white along the outside, trimmed around the inside. In the middle of each bowl, there is a pattern of delicate silver dashes. Most nights, between the two of them, they only finish half the food. The bowls sit in the fridge with bits of beef, creamed corn, and runny lines of beet broth, dirty food splashed up around the silver circle. Collecting in the sink, all the dishes are violently stained. To him, the dark stained lines look like slit throats.
     His mother tries her best to make nice dinners. She makes things with cheerful names like Sunshine Salad, Buttermilk Chicken, and Angel Food Cake. She makes too much food because she wants to fill the table. She wants to place a bunch of different colored bowls between them. She wants to fill his belly, fill his face with thoughts that maybe she can speak to.
     He eats quietly. He tries to be polite. The food always looks better than it tastes. The chicken is soggy. The noodles are slimy. His mom doesn’t make them from scratch anymore.



–––––––
Meghan Lamb is a haunted hotel. She doesn’t do anything too horribly disruptive, just billows some curtains and fogs up some mirrors. Sometimes she fondles an exceptionally lovely man with her chilly transparent fingertips. She curates the reading series Dark of the Male, Light of the Female: Women Writing About Horrible Things. (How she does this is anyones’guess.) Her first novel, Silk Flowers, is forthcoming on Aqueous Books in 2013. This makes perfect sense. Many hotels are published authors.

Epistles from the Guild of Lost Angels by Cody Todd

Spork — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 02:00:32 +0000

Epistles from the Guild of Lost Angels

***

Reno is a Woolworth’s that withstood
Judgment Day. The plastic maiden
saw my face, and
the moon is made of bone.
Robotic landscape of the desert.
I grab a mannequin’s severed arm
and scratch my back clean of dirt.
An escalator melts into itself
and whispers: No poem.
I want a theatre
without faces.

***

Everywhere I walk: dolls.
Some broken, others intact.
Puzzled by the pose,
I pick her up by the wig
stitched to her scalp.
Eyes flop open.
Dirt cakes her eyelashes.
She has won in the end, after all.

***

Some necessary logic
draws me to the weapons cache:
firearms for sale, just thirty yards
from the baby cribs. With advertisements
and money, the syntax
gets forever shrinks. Exclamation
marks reign supreme. I could spend a lifetime
here and never spend a dime.
This capitalist, who designed flesh-colored

stockings, only to be trumped by that one
who envisioned them in black. I try this
pair on wishing for the neighbor to spy on me
as I slowly take them off.

***

More than that, I want my palm read
and instruction of some invisible map.
I want tarot card number thirteen.
A burglar alarm,
and then my laughter.
When the rains turn to steam, the paint
on these mannequins—this sisterhood of wood—
peels, cracks and fails. Of what liberty
is this wooden mouth that cannot open, even

when I peel it into a smile
with a penknife?

***

The hydrogen bomb
was nicknamed,
Lipstick Lesbian

by some naval joker.
The moon: when a face
is a face and no longer.

***

Night comes, and all is the milk-white scabs
of my eyes. No hound to shout like a fan
at a football game. No cat to peddle
with its affection and leave me empty
in the night. I play solitaire under
candlelight, and wait for mayflies to fill
these nostrils and two-thousand peculiar
Nevadan bats to swoop in their fine

twilight collective
that ignites me,
until I perish like every star.

_____________________________________________
Cody Todd is the author of Graffiti Signatures (forthcoming, Main Street Rag) and lives in West Hollywood with his Columbian-Afghani bride to be, Starr. His favorite haunt is the Formosa Cafe, where Lee Marvin is reputed to have set fire to the entire block between Willoughby and Santa Monica Blvd (aka US Route 66). You can find him pacing around the Venice boardwalk to catch his bearings at least once a month. He is also the Managing Editor & co-creator of the online literary journal, The Offending Adam (www.theoffendingadam.com).