Unshod Quills

Poems on America and Somewhere Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond.

Old America

The angel above the fountain had not yet descended
when the upstart, carved, brownstone facades
on the new uptown square had begun to decay.
My grandfather might have seen him pitched into place,
so clumsily genteel, Santayana would have smiled.

Gentility outgrown, he wears the stigmata now:
chipped wing, hollowed robes, broken nose,
eroded face and hands
kissed into being
by spray on stone.

With little left to guard, the boughs
that shaded him are gone:
a few leaves drift in the basin
or mold themselves to his sides…
transients, from a place still green,
leaving a lacework of stains
on fragile stone.

Now the upraised palm
that was meant to hold back time
yearns
for its bodiless perfection:
mottled fingers
weathered away –
and he, a fable
in this treeless square.

Faraway
(Ann Arbor, 1968)

Often he used to wonder, after a sleepless night,
why he should gaze down from the attic window
watching the sun burn the mist from October streets.
He knew that the contours of the small city
would never emerge as he dreamed ‑
although the dream shifted from morning to morning:

A winding street on a small hill, pale, stuccoed facades
arching over rough colonnades,
dark women leaning from darker windows,
casements pushed open, refracting the light …

A long shady boulevard lined with clipped trees
and clumps of round tables with neat checkered cloths,
a couple embracing, old men playing chess,
an accordion’s whine floating over slate roofs …

These never were his, but only, each morning,
the grid of straight streets in his own wooden town.

*

But those streets were kind to him, hiding their lines
with a ragged flourish as veils of leaves
cast a mottled aureole of yellow and red
over drowsing cars and peeling front porches
where slat swings hung from creaking chains,
and the tinkle of wind‑chimes climbed
into the sparrows’ cries, into the beat of their wings,
and even the year’s threadbare fashion had glamour:
unbound hair floating over bare shoulders,
ripple of cotton, swish of tanned legs ‑
he was not clever, but still he looked,
and sees these things now,
and sees these things now…

Author Biography

William Ellis received his Ph.D in Literature from Boston College, then taught humanities at Vanier College in Montreal. He has retired after  seven years as the Senior Foreign Expert of the English department at Sichuan University. There, he offered courses in Western Intellectual History, Art History, European Literature, and Canadian Studies. He was awarded the Sichuan Province Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. He is now backpacking around the world for a year with his wife, Denise (Chen Yu).  He is the author of The Theory of the American Romance, an Ideology in American Intellectual History, nominated in 1989 for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize. His poetry has been published in Mala, Chengdu Grooves, and Unshod Quills.  Contact info: elliswa@hotmail.com.

Photography by Eva Steil on the topic of America. 

Please click image once and again to see largest size.

You and the Navy, Full Speed Ahead - self portrait - Eva Steil - on America

Minda and Wulea Pino, Christmas - Eva Steil - On America

Doors Music - Eva Steil - On America

Artist Biography

Eva Steil is a Las Vegas photographer. She wants her work in your gallery. She can be found on Facebook. Eva was the featured artist in the first issue of Unshod Quills (June 2011)

On the theme of Red Shoes.

Artist Biography

Yolanda Mora was born in Madrid, Spain in 1973. She studied Fine Arts at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. Writing and painting since  childhood, Yolanda’s motto is “Art Saves Lives.” Co-editor of the internet magazine THE STOLEN POEM, she currently is preparing an exhibition in Madrid, and a text-based exhibit alongside the world of John Rossi that will be shown in Ohio, USA. An extra on movie sets, Yolanda also enjoys the museum Reina Sofía in Madrid. She currently is at work on her fourth book of poems.

a sonnet on the theme of Fire.

Canine Noir

Let’s call you a bullet that healed what it hit.
And this dog knew some tricks, like how to play dead.
Used to sleeping on a torn up, lonely dog bed.
But the shot fired medicine that helped this dog sit.

From laying to upright, because it was bit.
This dog heard the truth of what the gun said.
A dog knows the hardest color to see is blood red.
And this dog’s heart grew so large, it no longer fit.

It goes without saying this dog released a howl.
You’ve replayed in your mind how this dog licked the gun.
You remember the way you and this dog snuggled close.
And though pained and oft crying, this dog just can’t scowl.
So you’re waiting to hear how this dog’s dog day is done.
And you’ll be waiting, she’ll be waiting, til this dog’s final dose.

Author Biography

Jillian Brall is a writer, musician and visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She co-edits the journal Lyre Lyre.

Short fiction on the theme of Fire.

Splinters

The worst of the summer crunch is over. I milk menial tasks all day, hide in the cool dark opera basement sending dirty texts, sneak a nap in the seat of the forklift, write stories in my notebook. For us year-round carpenters the crescendo builds to opening day of the opera season, and then we try to do as little as possible for only 40 hours a week til the end of August. Today’s busywork was to clean up the backstage deck, dispatching rusty debris from welding projects; old hardware; cracked, abandoned staging to our dumpster or to the trailer we will empty at the Santa Fe dump.

I grab a wood platform that’s been baking in the sun. The black paint is coming up in scales. It is heavier than I expect, as I pull to lift it I feel an ugly, sliding pinch in the palm of my hand. I freeze, knowing. I look, it’s worse than I expect. A black sliver of plywood is buried deep, about four inches long, an eighth of an inch wide. More than half is stuck in the heel of my right palm. The pointed end of the splinter is pressing against my flesh from the inside, making the skin protrude, but it doesn’t puncture all the way through. It’s so deep the black wood disappears from view inside my skin.

I try to pull it out with my fingers but the splinter does not budge. It’s pounding, pain travels down my forearm, louder and louder. My palm is swelling, turning red around the spear of wood. I bite the end of the splinter trying to wrest it free with my teeth. It doesn’t move, but the external part of the splinter snaps off, leaving the rest lodged. From the metal first-aid box mounted on the shop wall I retrieve the tweezers. I wipe them clean with an alcohol pad, then approach my boss, the master carpenter, whom I cannot stand. He’s a complete dick, but he’s a volunteer firefighter, I assume he has some medical ability, so I thrust my hand heel-forward to him, my fingers curled in.

“Can you help me.” I say matter-of-fact.

His thick mustache twitches at me, annoyed. He looks down at my hand and squints.

“Oh, wow.”

“Can you pull it out?”

He forgets he hates me too and shakes his head. “Nope. You’re going to the clinic.”

I get excited; I get to leave work, out of the blazing sun and into an air-conditioned room, probably get a vial of painkillers –these occupational clinics love to dole out narcotics. Another carpenter drives me to the workers’ comp clinic.

The doctor takes one look at my hand and goes “Jesus Christ! And it’s painted, too. Shit!”

“Just trying to keep things interesting. I know you’re sick of sprained ankles.”

Every summer the opera absorbs hundreds of college apprentices for the season, and we try to break as many of them as possible. This summer so far there’s been 112 injuries. I am 113.

The doc tells me she is going to have to cut the splinter out. I nod. I chat with her and the receptionist, make jokes: my survival tactic. She cleans my hand, the pain dances up my neck and forehead. She cuts a hole in a little blue paper-cloth, drapes it over my palm, I sit on the medical table, legs dangling. I watch with deep interest as she slices open my palm with a shiny scalpel. The skin parts like a sigh and blood seeps out and I am fascinated, when suddenly I feel very hot and dreaming that I am in Manhattan walking down a crowded sidewalk and everyone passing me says my name over and over again. Next thing, I’m laying down on the examination table with a cold wet cloth on my forehead, completely soaked in sweat. My hand is swaddled in an enormous bandage. The doctor laughs.

“I passed out?”

She nods. The doc shakes a plastic vial, making a high rattle. My splinter, saved like a relic of the cross.

I have a penchant for fucked-up splinters. Last time I was free-lancing, doing a carpentry project for a friend. I got a splinter in my right index finger, deep. I tried to pull it out with no luck, and showed it to Beth, who shivered and looked away. “We gotta take you to the hospital.”

“No, I don’t have health insurance.”

I pulled my Leatherman from its belt-sheath and tried to pull the splinter. It was stuck in the meat of the muscle, so much that I couldn’t bend my finger.

“Try it, just yank.”

“No,” Beth was horrified. “I’m gonna puke.”

“I can’t afford the hospital. I can’t deal with registering for indigent-status at the emergency room. It will take forever – this hurts!”

I thought of Killian, who sprained her ankle rollerskating. Our friend, a vet-tech, snuck her into the animal hospital at night and took an X-ray. Luckily her ankle wasn’t broken. I got an idea.

“Let’s go to Holy Holes!” Our friend Calliope’s piercing and tattoo studio.

“Dude, that place is cleaner than the hospital, they have scalpels and forceps. Besides, Calliope will love it!”

Calliope positively reveled in the yucky and perverse. She was an undertaker by trade, and often said without irony that she was on her last life. Blood and guts were of the corporeal world, which she was finished with, she was unflapped by any aspect of the human body. She was thrilled when I presented my swollen, impaled finger to her. She whisked me into a piercing room, sat me on an ancient barber chair, rustled through the vintage medical cabinets and pulled out cotton swabs, gauze pads, iodine, green soap, forceps, scalpel and bandages. She placed it all on a stainless steel tray. She tried to attach forceps onto the protruding nub of lumber in my finger. My whole body jolted.

“Want a Valium?” she asked. I nodded as she reached into her purse. She put on latex gloves and tried again to wrestle my splinter. It wouldn’t budge. The doorbells jangled and she left me to attend to a customer. The Valium kicked in. I giggled, even though it killed.

“I’m gonna have to cut you open a little, ok?”

“Fun. Are you psyched?”

“Umm-hmm.” She bent her head over my finger and sliced. I swallowed a groan.

For two hours Calliope and Wilton, another piercer, took turns trying to get a bite on the splinter in between piercing navels and eyebrows. Other friends came by the shop – Matty and Jen gave it a try too. In pain-delirium I gave it a go when Calliope left to pierce a nipple. I managed to clamp the forceps down on the splinter, and clicked them shut. “Wilton, Wilton!” He came running in with Beth, who had stayed out of the room, feeling ill.

“Look, I got it…pull the fucker out! Pull it!” He yanked, it didn’t move. I howled.

“Harder!” I hissed.

He pulled again, heaving his big shoulders back and I felt it pull free, my own little Excalibur, my little jesus-relic. Blood gushed and Calliope high-fived Wilton, bandaged me up and kissed me on the lips. “All better.”

I read about this bowhead whale caught near Alaska by Inupiat fishermen. They found a piece of 130-year old harpoon stuck in the whale’s flesh. Imagine carrying around something so old and painful inside of you for so long. My friend Kris had cancer everywhere in her body – she told me she knew it was because of the way she metabolized anger. She didn’t die of cancer, she died of suicide – she wanted the choice before the cancer took that away too. Choice is everything.

I’ve held so much anger inside of me, so much sadness. When I was younger I walked through my days spraying sadness like a shotgun blast. As an artist it was expected, to just explode in front of everyone. Creating and destroying in fits and bursts. Some called me angry. They judged. People saw I carried a blackness thick and cancerous inside of me so they stuck theirs inside me too. Like a Spanish bull with all of these broken lances riddling my back and ribs. Plenty of people cannot carry their own darkness, they try to sneak it onto your back. They didn’t understand, it was just grief; it was murder and sickness and loss, and loss. For what exploded out of me I buried ten times more deep inside my skin, all swole-up and festering.

I went out into the desert alone and by the light of the waning moon I pulled each splinter free. Lightning struck the forests and the dry crackling flames engulfed the mountains, who were begging to burn. Ponderosa pines love fire, it’s like sex for the trees, the propagation of a species catalyzed by heat, but people are afraid. It threatened towns and the opera and the national laboratory – all the bullshit, the collected hate of the human race with a half-life of 100,000 years buried in steel drums under tarpaulins. The christians call it rapture but they too woke up at home, feeling angry, abandoned. Ash peppered down on Santa Fe, people kept a packed bag next to their front doors. Can you outrun burning hatred? Festering anger? It is a cleansing fire, a destruction to fertilize creation. I cried to the cholla, the sage and the lonely sad coyotes yipping in the night. I dropped my splinters on the thirsty ground. I still feel the scars, they hurt sometimes, but I am free, I am free.

Author Biography

Cooper Lee Bombardier is a visual artist, illustrator, and self-taught writer and performer. He was raised in the South Shore of Boston. His visual art has most recently appeared in group shows like Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, NM; the 2011 National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco and the forthcoming ‘zine Faggot Dinosaur. Cooper’s writing has appeared in many periodicals, most recently Pathos Literary Journal, and Original Plumbing; and the anthologies The Lowdown Highway; From the Inside Out, and Trans/Love. He is currently based in Portland, Oregon, where he listens to the trains all night.

America

My tongue worries the edges of
a very small piece of America.
I have a puzzle piece in my mouth,
it is blue and red and won’t fit anywhere.

I can feel the edges against my teeth,
and the softening of the thick cardboard.
It will be swollen when I spit it into my hand.
This puzzle will never fit together now,
and I consider swallowing it.

I am afraid of choking, so instead, I hold it carefully
between my front teeth, lifting the edge of the
laminate with my tongue.
I close my eyes and can see how the puzzle
should look, how it won’t look, how it looks
on the box it came in.

Author Biography:

Wendy Giles Ellis Lancaster County, PA Reader, writer, backyard muse & eccentric knitter. contact: wendy.g.ellis@gmail.com

Poet Stephen Caratzas on the theme of “Red Shoes.”

Paris: The City of Lights; Amsterdam: The City of Red Lights

I’ve been thrown out of better countries
let me tell you – and you know what they
say about the French? It’s pretty true.

I mean this guy nearly had an aneurysm all
because when I was buying my ticket for
the Eiffel Tower (they sell them by levels,

you know, how high up you want to go, etc.)
I say: “All zee way to zee top!” And for
emphasis I open my eyes wide and strike

an Emile Zola kind of pose. Fucker threw me
out. But I digress. Now Amsterdam – there’s
my city, and a city just made for people like

me: crude, sexually er, curious, shall we say,
liberal, free-thinking. Hey, I’m okay with two
women want to get it on together – so long

as they allow a buncha guys to watch, that is.
They have everything there and they flaunt it.
Recollect a fine young woman, called herself

Monique (in quotes). My GOD, she murdered
me without half trying. And that was before
I even set foot in her room! I’m walking by, see,

with a goodly lump of nice hashish in foil in my
right-hand pocket, minding my own affairs,
checking out the sights if you catch my

drift, and there she was! Sitting in her window
on this high-backed bar stool kinda thing backwards!
and munching on peanut M&Ms with a bored pout

that almost made me cry. She takes one look
at my face all lit up like a pinball machine and
knows she’s made her bundle for the night.

So, we negotiate a price, set the timer, the
whole routine and while she’s getting ready
she’s asking me where in America am I from,

do I like baseball, etc. etc. and then she goes:
“Who are you weeth?” Who am I with? And
a little confused I say Baby, I’m with you!

“No, no,” she laughs – beautiful laugh – “Who are
you traveling weeth?” Oh, that – I’m here solo:
museums, hash, pot, museums, that’s about it.

“Isn’t that a leetle boring?” She makes that
pout again. And steps out of her scuffed red
pumps. And I say: “Oh, no, not anymore.”

Author Biography

Stephen Caratzas is a writer, musician, and visual artist living in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Unshod Quills features Portlander Riley Michael Parker, musing on the themes of America, somewhere never travelled, gladly beyond and fire.

Five Killers –

on the theme of America

Riley Michael Parker - Alcala - ink and pencil on paper on "America"

RODNEY ALCALA

One of the most interesting American cases, Rodney was a contestant on The Dating Game in the midst of his career as a rapist and murderer. Had he been a known serial killer, I’m sure it would have been the television event of the year. The footage, available online, is difficult to watch. In the context in which he is now known, his actions are very creepy and his words telling, but he actually won the game, was selected that evening as the bachelor worth dating. Seeing him laugh, obviously having fun, is the most discomforting. We like to think that killers are nothing like us, but in truth they are, just like us, because they are all just people. Broken, wicked people, yes, but people first, people who crave fame, and try and get onto game shows, and laugh, and flirt, and make art, and have friends, and help build their communities, and believe wholeheartedly in the right to pursue happiness, if not so much the life and liberty bit. People. Always people. Often white. Often men.

Riley Michael Parker - Bundy - ink and pencil on paper, America.

TED BUNDY

The chameleon. Ted was so good at killing people that it seems as if it happened by grand design. He was handsome, charismatic, and intelligent, all in an incredibly average way that witnesses could never seem to describe with any clarity. He had no sense of guilt. The man was arrested for or suspected of several of the murders that he eventually admitted to, but was so good at covering up his tracks, and, eventually, at physically escaping, that it seemed at one point that he would never be brought to justice. He eventually died in the electric chair, but didn’t understand how he ended up there. The concept of this man is so frightening and so unfathomable that he has inspired just as much comedy in the art world as he has horror, with several of the works based on him described by reviewers as “hilarious”.

Gein - Riley Michael Parker - pencil and ink on paper, America

Ed Gein

Having only killed three people, Gein is possibly the most famous American killer of all time. Gein was obsessed with his mother, and after she died he decided that he wanted to be a female; that he wanted to be like her. His main approach to fulfilling this need was the creation of a suit made from women’s skin, skin that he stole from bodies he dug up in the middle of the night. Gein made masks, a lampshade, even seat covers out of human skin, and kept several preserved body parts. The man had several heads in his home, including the heads of two of his victims, both middle-aged women, and a skull on every post of his bed. He has been the inspiration for so many Americans, including writers, filmmakers, visual artists, americana pop musicians, and quite a few murderers. There’s a good chance that you have at least one piece of art in your house, whether it be film, or literature, or a picture in a magazine, that would not exist if Ed Gein hadn’t murdered women and desecrated human remains. As awful as it is, I would bet money.

Riley Michael Parker - Fish - ink and pencil on paper, America

“ALBERT” FISH

Known as the “Werewolf of Wysteria” and “The Brooklyn Vampire,” Hamilton “Albert” Fish was a child murderer and a masochist of epic proportions. The man would stick needles into his groin and leave them there, and he swallowed objects to cause himself discomfort. Most notably, he was a cannibal. After being apprehended, Fish proudly described his cooking methods to anyone who would listen. You can google them. They are grizzly.

Riley Michael Parker - Gacy - ink and pencil on paper, America

JOHN WAYNE GACY

Gacy strangled and drowned young men and teenage boys, thirty-three in total. Most of these boys were hidden in the crawl space of his house, with a few more buried in his garden. He was a charitable man, a friendly figure, well-liked, and he was known to perform as a clown, a character named “Pogo”. Once in prison, Gacy made a small fortune selling clown paintings, and even painted a portrait of punk rock icon GG Allin (born Jesus Christ Allin), which later became the cover of one of his albums.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Riley, on “fire.”

IN THE HOUSE WE BUILT FROM COFFINS

In the darkness there is a woman in black panties, topless, sockless, with a pipe in her mouth that has never been smoked, her hair unkempt, unruly, but long and beautiful.
In the darkness there is a woman with three sons living inside her, not infants but full-grown men, dressed in pinstripe suits and black overcoats with buttons made of ivory.
In the darkness there is a woman hanging, strung up for talking back to her mother, her dress with unlit candles fashioned at the bottom, turning her from a woman into a chandelier.
In the darkness we are miserable, and so we bring the fire.
We light the candles.
We take up smoking.
We burn the things that remind us of the darkness.
In the light of the fire we see things that frighten and amaze us.
A brother once thought missing walks among us, the boy now mute, a blade stuck in his mouth and out through his neck. We ask him what has happened and he tells us, with ink and paper, that he had taken up sword swallowing to impress a woman, but in the dark someone mistook him for choking and attempted the Heimlich Maneuver.
An uncle who we thought was shrinking has grown to twice his original size, his body now bent over, the man walking like a horse, beatle boots on his feet and hands, wearing a pinstripe suit like any other worthy gentleman. We all ask him for a ride, and he takes us, two at a time, around the estate, kicking and bucking for the sake of excitement, proud to finally have a place in our hearts.
A son has become seven sons, the men huddled together, all immaculately dressed, their hair, black as night, all parted in the same place, their eyes, unblinking, identical wells of eternal depth. We ask them how long this has been going on, and together, the seven shrug.
Sisters in pointed hoods and nothing else.
Cousins naked, holding knives.
Snakes and shotguns and men like bats, antlers, mustaches, fingerless gloves.
An uncle who has become a room.
A mother who is down to fuck.
A father who is now a demon, his head that of a goat and a wolf mixed together, with wings of dark feathers spanning several feet, his black jean pants torn at the bottom from when his feet turned into hooves, and as he hovers a few inches off of the ground he spits leeches from his jaws, and maggots, and mice, and he looks us in the eyes, somehow he is able to focus his attention on all of us at once, and he invites us to be like him.
In the light of the fire we see, finally, the purpose of darkness.

___________________________________________________________________________________

On the theme “Somewhere Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond.”

BACK HOME

We were lost in Noble, a town too small to be lost in, looking for her mother’s house. She hadn’t been to Oklahoma in eight years, maybe nine, it was hard for her to say for certain, and since then her mother had moved twice.
I said, “It doesn’t matter how many times she’s moved, we just need to find her now,” but she was upset that the woman had moved at all, that the town had moved on without her, that the place where she grew up practically didn’t exist anymore.
She said, “None of this looks familiar.”
I said, “Should it?”
“Of course it should. I grew up in this goddamned town.”
We took our time driving through the neighborhoods, me looking for her mother’s house and her looking for herself as a child, trying to place memories with the streets that she had done her best to forget. She would almost speak every so often, just a soft little yelp as she would start to share something that had happened to her, or something she had done, but then she would stop herself, unwilling to validate the memory by acknowledging it out loud.
I said, “Is there anyone besides your mother that you want to try and see?”
She said, “I think I’m the only one I know anymore without a baby or a meth problem.”
I put my hand on her knee.
“Well it’s never too late to catch up.”
She said, “Yep,” but kept looking out the passenger side window, uninterested in sharing a smile with me.
We stopped at a local burger shop to get a soft serve and to ask directions, but when we got to the counter she wouldn’t let me give them the address.
“I spent my whole life here,” she said. “We’ll find the damn house.”
With ice creams in hand we got back in the car and I rolled down the windows. We were burning too much gas as it was and I didn’t want to run the AC anymore. It was a wet heat, not what I expected from Oklahoma, and our ice creams went faster than the station wagon, her eyes looking at each and every house as if it held everything she was looking for, but we couldn’t even find her mother’s street.
“There,” she said. “Let’s stop at that yard sale.”
If she hadn’t of told me it was a yard sale I would never have guessed it on my own. I didn’t grow up in Oklahoma, lived in Connecticut my whole life, but the lawn was how I had pictured all of the south to look like — parts from old cars, dishes and clothes in haphazard piles, two grizzled women sitting in a lawn chairs, smoking cigarettes and drinking sweet tea. We got out of the car and began to look through the women’s wares as they talked to one another.
“…the boy didn’t even stop to help her up, just kept on drivin’.”
One of the women, the younger-looking of the two, the one with strips of dark color in her white/yellow hair, was telling the other a story, smoking for dramatic effect.
“Christ… How did they catch him?”
“Well, that’s the thing, they didn’t.”
This other woman, the older-looking one, dressed in a pink sequined sweater and stretch pants, just glared at her friend, practically begging with her eyes for the lady to finish the story, but the stroyteller, the younger one, was relishing this control she had over the conversation, obviously practiced in keeping other old women in suspense. I tried to ignore the women, took to looking at a box of old VHS, just a couple of comedies from the era of Chevy Chase and Steve Martin, a Looney Tunes tape and the first half of Lonesome Dove, but I kept an ear turned to the conversation. My girlfriend just stood and stared at them, uninterested in subtlety.
“Damn it Betty,” the older of the two women said, “are you gonna tell me what happened or ain’t ya?”
“All right, all right,” she said, pretending to be burdened, “I’ll tell you. So the fella, the Johanson boy for those of you who showed up late,” the woman looked at both me and my girlfriend to let us know that we weren’t eavesdropping, to get it across to us that we were as welcome to her story as we were on her lawn, “was so guilt-ridden from hittin’ the girl, so upset from killin’ a little teenage nobody, and then, worse than that, for speedin’ off like a coward because he was too afraid of going back to jail, well, he got so down on himself that he…” the woman quieted, leaned in, added a quiver to her voice on purpose, “that he went home and strung himself up in his parents’ garage. God’s honest, the boy took his own life to stay out of jail.”
The woman leaned back, trying not to smile, obviously pleased with herself for having this information, pleased with the way that she was telling us the story, how well she was pretending to be broken up about it.
“Yep, killed himself,” she continued. “The mother found him the next morning, swingin’ from the rafters. And here’s the kicker,” she leaned in again, “the child he hit didn’t even die, didn’t even really get hurt, just a little scraped up, and she didn’t tell her parents about it either, worried that she would get in trouble on account of sneakin’ out in the middle of the night. The only reason any of this came to the light of day, the accident and all, was because the boy had a note in his pocket that said the whole thing, even about the girl. He’d recognized the girl he hit and still didn’t stop. I mean, the boy was a coward three times over.”
“Was his name Scott?”
The two women looked up at my girlfriend, their faces twisted in confusion as if she were speaking a foreign language.
“What now, honey?”
“Was the guy’s name Scott? The Johanson boy you mentioned, the one that hung himself, that hit the girl, was his name Scott?”
My girlfriend had told me about Scott before, not a boyfriend of hers but the boyfriend of a close friend all through high school. He was funny, if I remember right, and a bit reckless, the catalyst in a lot of her stories about being young and out for trouble. He was the one who first took her to Oklahoma City, there to see some band he had made friends with, her first concert, I think, held in a country western bar that had been taken over by what would pass for punks in the South, her and her friends having to sneak in the back because the lot of them were five years from the drinking age.
“No,” the older woman said, the one in the pink sequined sweater, “his name was Michael. Michael Johanson, Tom and Marsha’s boy”
“Wrong Johanson’s if you’re lookin’ for Scott,” the other one said. “That would be Bill and Cindy. Their boy hasn’t been around in a while. Last I heard he cleaned out their bank account and went off to Florida with a black girl.”
“Puerto Rican.”
“Like it matters.”
“I’d bet money that he’s in jail. That damn kid couldn’t seem to stay on the streets for more than two months at a time.”
“And he has at least three kids.”
“From three different women, no less.”
“Never had a job though.”
“Not unless you count stealing from his parents and sleeping half the day.”
“Well,” my girlfriend said, “I guess I haven’t missed much then.”
The two old women stopped their banter and looked at us for the first time with interest, first at my girlfriend, then me, and then our car, then back at the girl.
“You from around here, sugar?”
“No,” she said, trying her best to smile, “I don’t think I am.”
My girlfriend showed the women the address, the younger one gave directions, and I bought a romance novel off the older one just to be polite.

________________________________________________________________________________

On the theme “America.”

WE LIVE IN IDENTICAL HOUSES

My wife is a brunette, and you can’t quite say for certain, but it’s possible your wife is blonde. In the summers our children are best friends, but only because they can’t drive and we don’t have the time to take them anywhere, but at school they are strangers at best. Your daughter has told you this, and you told me. My daughter never talks about your daughter, even in the summertime. We have boys too, one a piece, both brunette. Your son once beat up my son in the locker room, over what, neither will say, but for two months a year they stare at the same television, throwing grenades, racing cars, jumping on the backs of turtles. Our wives drink themselves silly.

In the summer, we have barbecues. Your wife, now a redhead but possibly a blonde by birth, makes chicken macaroni salad, and my wife, the brunette, can’t cook anything worth a damn so we bring booze and ribs for the grill. We always cook at your house because we have the dog and your daughter is allergic. Your daughter has braces latched onto big teeth, and straight brown hair, and freckles, and no breasts to speak of. She is funny to compensate, but no one in your family ever laughs at her jokes, hoping to discourage her from being anything but pretty. Her straight A’s amount to next to nothing in your eyes, because good grades are not what it takes to find a husband, and you want your daughter to take after your wife (the woman has never even had a job, not as a teenager or anything, and though you sort of hate this you wouldn’t have it any other way).

In the autumn months my wife always returns to the life of a teacher, our last name scrawled on a white board above a page number, a homework assignment, a due date. She failed your son the year she had him, or moreover he failed himself, but your wife talked my wife out of it so that your boy could keep playing football. On paper he got a C+, but still, you hold a grudge against the woman. She is thin with small hips, has bags under her eyes, but she is pretty. She is an angry woman, not at anything in particular, just in general, usually out to pick a fight and always out to win. We get along best when there’s something to distract us, but I hear that’s how it is for everyone anymore. The sex is irregular at best.

One autumn, a few years ago, your wife made a pass at me. It was early afternoon, and I was home due to weather, and your wife was in her bathrobe on the porch, looking at the mailbox as if it were a hundred miles away, obviously afraid of the rain. As a gentleman, I took your mail up to your door.
“Come in,” she said. “Let me make you a cup of coffee.”
In your kitchen she served me a slice of cheesecake and a cup of re-heated coffee, and she smiled at me fiercely, like there was money in it, and when I looked down her robe was open. Your wife has breasts that look to be just over a handful, only a bit soft, hanging fairly low, but her stomach is flat, her thighs decent. Your wife has brown pubic hair, but this proves nothing. Some women are blondes and brunettes all at once.
I said, “Thank you for the coffee,” my eyes still on her chest.
Your wife said, “Maybe I can interest you in some dessert,” as if she had forgotten about the cheesecake.
I smiled and touched her cheek, then let myself out.

In the beginning of winter we put up Christmas lights, always on the same weekend, keeping each other company, yelling from one roof to the other about this and that, complimenting and teasing each other back and forth. We take pride in our display, take pride in appearances. Our wives buy each other presents, our daughters always get roles in the paegent, and we sit together, husband wife husband wife, me next to yours or you next to mine. Our sons stay home, living their shared life of electronic nothingness, but in separate rooms in separate houses.

In the winter we celebrate our children, both of yours born in February, both of mine born in January, their birthdays running in the shadow of Christmas. My son never wants a party anymore, has been against them since he was only six or seven, and both of our daughters have moved from a child’s party to the sleepovers of an adolescent, and so our winters are not what they used to be, but once, long ago, it was all one big party for us, a reason to drink and get together, to laugh, to confide in our friends and neighbors. Now, after the new year, we will nod to one another if we catch each other outside, or wave, or ask a meaningless question that we don’t care to hear the answer to. Once in a while we will mention a beer, but we almost never get one.

Every spring you lease a car, and I buy something new every three or four years, always a truck, not exactly out preference, but more for appearances. I spend my days with men, telling them where to dig, what to build, and you work with women, selling the houses that I bring into being. On the surface we need each other, but the truth is that no one needs either of us. I did not invent the structure, and you did not invent the sale, and both of our wives are the type to remarry if we passed away. They have never said such a thing out loud, but everyone knows it’s true. Sometimes it feels as if my wife is simply waiting.

On spring evenings we watch the same shows in nearly identical living rooms, drink the same beer from different bottles, call our wives the same nicknames. We are so similar, you and I. We never knew each other when we were young, but it feels like I grew up with you the way our kids have grown up together, but we keep to ourselves more and more with each passing year.
Now and then, if we find ourselves in our respective back yards at the same time of night, the two of us will sit at the fence and talk about our day, or sports, or what our children have been up to. Once, on a night like this, you tried to tell me something important.
You said, “It never feels like I’m me anymore. I look in the mirror and I see my face, but it doesn’t mean anything. I feed the kids, I house the wife, but I have nothing, and I used to feel like I had everything. I don’t really have a family anymore, because none of them will even talk to me. Anymore I feel like I am just a means to an end, like I am a necessary nuisance, a side character in my own life. Do you ever feel that way?”
I took a drink of my beer, looked up at the sky.
“Not really,” I said. “It’s not everything I thought it would be, but it gets me through.”
“Yeah,” you said. “I don’t really know what I meant by that anyway,” and then you walked back to your house, went inside, shut off the kitchen light.

__________________________________________________________

Author Biography

Riley on Riley:

Riley Michael Parker is a cat inside a fox inside a wolf inside a cabin in a forest hidden in the pubic hair of a beautiful (if only pale and kind of short) woman with big grey eyes more like switchblades than anything a woman should have, and this woman is in a coffin in a fox inside a wolf disguised as an old man drinking gin and tonics in the bowels of a sinking/burning ship so far from shore that there is no point in even trying to swim.

Also he is a writer, filmmaker, and visual artist living in the Pacific Northwest. His first novel, A PLAGUE OF WOLVES AND WOMEN, is available starting 10/19/2011 from Lazy Fascist Press, and he recently edited the epic story and poem collection NOUNS OF ASSEMBLAGE for his own publishing company, HOUSEFIRE (available now).

Chloe Caldwell on the theme of Red Shoes.

DRG's Red Shoes for CC - Photograph - Posie Currin

Dead Red Espadrilles

When I wore red shoes I was a pill head. I loved pills. Pills put things at arms length. What was I putting at arms length? Nothing interesting. Everything interesting. Depends on how you look at it.

When I wore red shoes I had red eyes.

When I wore red shoes I drove a red car. A Jetta. Stick shift.

When I wore red shoes I wore a bright red coat and kept my pills in its pocket. It was puffy and short and it was from The Gap Outlet.

When I wore red shoes they were closed toe espadrilles with an ankle strap and I got them for twenty dollars or so from T.J. Maxx.

Sometimes I parked the red Jetta and slammed the door, wearing my red coat with red lips and glossy red eyes and red toenails and red shoes. I’m an Aries. I like red. When I wore red shoes I wore red lipstick and probably looked like Courtney Love.

When I wore red shoes something was missing in my red heart so I swallowed orange and white and blue pills.

When I wore red shoes I moved to New York City. When I wore red shoes I moved to Brooklyn and I hung up a plastic shoe holder and my brother made fun of it. The apartment was all shoes and books.

When I wore red shoes and moved to New York City my boyfriend and I broke up over the phone as I was walking to K-Mart at Astor Place to buy a towel. I called my boyfriend an alcoholic and he called me a pill popper and we were both right.

When I wore red shoes I also wore a zip up Paul Frank sweatshirt. It was navy blue with red hearts all over it. I lived in this uniform for the month of June: Red espadrilles. Black leggings that stopped midcalf with lace. A short jean mini-skirt over them. Hanes white v-neck t-shirt. Heart sweatshirt. Girls used to stop me on the street and ask where I got that red heart sweatshirt.

When I wore red shoes I had a red dress that was too big for me on top and I safety pinned the straps together.

When I wore red shoes I listened to the song, “Red” by Okkervil River: Red is my favorite color, red like your mother’s eyes after a while of crying about how you don’t love her.

When I wore red shoes I met a guy with burgundy hair and I took the gray line to his apartment and sat on his bed with the blue sheets in my red dress with the safety pin and red shoes with the ankle strap and snorted brown drugs.

Where do these things go. These things that mean so much to us. That sweatshirt. (It shrunk too small.) That person. (He hung himself.) Those shoes. (They fell apart.) That summer. (It ended.) They all died.

Author Biography

Chloe Caldwell is a non-fiction writer from upstate New York. She drinks coffee all day out of a “Write Like A Motherfucker” mug. She has been published in The Rumpus, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and The Sun Magazine. Her first book is forthcoming from Future Tense Books. (www.chloecaldwell.com)

Artist Biography

Posie Currin is a Portland based artist. Her work was featured in the June 2011 issue of Unshod Quills.  (posiecurrin.com)

Transubstantiation in America

We were everywhere, sent from here, sent to there, left to fade after the war.

What did you do, coming home from the wake? Did you lay down in the sun, asleep in the eel grass, creeping toward a mourning of that night, a pregnant future, dry light driftwood on a beach under the darkness of a new moon?

We drink hurricane lanterns inside your pink wax, touching each others terracotta dust, glitter and disco feeling the soft inside of cracker lips lumbering towards the west with a change of substance.

I begged that you trust your memory, unlocking the door to let me in from our close distance.

I came like a dwelling wound, eyes removed by the lamp in your iridescent space, I came home from the war, bandaged in your skin.

Author Biography

Mark Brunke lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Alternative bio: Handy Johnson is a pinko communist infiltrator poet going all-Roy-Cohn into the Hoover-hole of America.