Unshod Quills

On the themes of Epitaph and Life Cycle

My Life As a Failed Freedom Fighter

I was one half of the Chinese Dragon;
I forget which end. Nineteen eighty awful-or-other,
walking boot-high by the peace march, falling in
beside my mother and all the other mothers.

We went with banners; chin-up and open mouthed.
I got tangled in the papier-mache head (or
perhaps I was lost in the beast’s cotton bowels)
and stubbed my toe. I remember it blood rimmed, sore,

laced with the throb of embarrassment. Tomorrow,
I won’t go to the demonstration. To me – pregnant, tired
and terrorised by justice, the police seem brighter now
and nobody cares who gets hurt on the hard road.

How To Love An Ugly Woman

So you got yourself a gorgon.
Walked it home via the back lanes.
Under the kitchen strip-lights, you sit

awkwardly. She glowers from behind
a curtain of knotted snake-hair. Folds her arms,
wraps herself in grubby, snaggled wings.

Gazes lock. Your own eyes pop
like deelyboppers, and sweat weeps freely
from your brow. She sighs. Scratches an armpit.

Now, she scans the table: the spilled handbag,
mirror compact, playing cards, crusty make-up.
Madonna on the cover of Hello.

Cocks her head. ‘You know, what this place needs,’
she says, her voice like metal scraping grit,
‘is a bonfire. Got a match? Good. So let’s begin.’

Author Biography

Nikki Magennis is an author and artist from Scotland. She has written extensively in the erotica genre, including novels and short stories, and founded the online zine for literary erotica, FeatherLit. In the past few years she has started writing more poetry. Find out more at nikkimagennis.com

On the themes of Envy, Sugar and Comic Books

Places other than here

I haven’t seen a hummingbird in a couple years
then again I’ve never seen a whale
I’ve watched plenty of movies
and read even more books
yet my eyes are hungry
because there is such a thing as a coral reef
and I can’t see it from my bedroom window.

Bargains

Today I found a sugar packet
it was propping up a small bookshelf
in some shop with the word bargain in the title.
I removed it in an attempt to spruce up the place
but then all the books slid off
and right onto the floor.

I began to enjoy my new treat
as I stared down at the titles,
titles like “When War is War”

and “The Art of Breastfeeding”
after exhausting the sugar, luckily

I received enough energy
to get the hell out of that part of town.

Untitled

I remember when superman became severely depressed
He would sit in his rocking chair
look through the nursing home walls
and wish he was on the other side.

Author Biography

Brandon Alan is a 26-year-old human male. He was born in Fairbanks, Alaska and is now a peripatetic individual of the northwest region of the US. He is currently the storekeeper of a small bookstore and writes in his spare time. Someday soon he hopes to track down all the things he has committed to paper and find a home for them.

On the theme of Life Cycle

Love In the Time of Replacement Bodies

When you and I are cyborgs, will we still
be married? Will we renew our vows
each time we upgrade, click Yes on our unread
Love-EULA? And when we go to space,
brains clad in some as-yet unnamed metal–
or better still, in something named by sci-fi
or comic writer–will our love be affirmed
by whatever authorities govern
such things? I want to propose in orbit,
have the ceremony conducted as
we’re lowered to Mars’s surface by sky-crane,
honeymoon on Titan’s ethane lakes,
which we could do because we’re cyborgs
and still in love no matter the planet or moon.

One Day, Maybe Soon

I’ll get an email. Maybe
a call, but I bet an email
saying my father has fallen
too hard this time and won’t
be getting up again
until the paradise I don’t
believe will ever come
comes. I bet an email
but maybe a call this once.
This is the part of the poem
where I should insert some
list of images from home–
a pre-tied necktie, bric-a-brac
hermetic with personal meaning–
but I don’t have them. My father
is dying and I don’t know what
the inside of his home looks like,
can’t name a single thing he owns
with certainty. The last time
I saw him, we ate at the Chili’s
in Boerne, Texas. I think
it was a Tuesday night.
I know it was 2005.
I drove a U-Haul and he
and my mother and grandmother
ran late to the Kingdom Hall.
As I left, I took a picture of them,
and then of a large dog
leashed in the bed of a pickup.
Maybe a phone call but email
is how I know now that he fell
eleven times in the last seven days,
that one day, maybe soon,
he will fall and not get up again.

System Failures

My father can still balance a checkbook,
will do it five times in a row if my mother
lets him. He can trace the Kings of Israel
from Saul to Zedekiah, explain
the numerology of the End Times
from Daniel to Revelation and back again,
can sing every song Ray Price recorded.
He doesn’t know my sister visited last week,
that I moved to Iowa,
that we haven’t talked since 2005.
If I could, I would spend every day
cleaning the plaque off his nerve endings,
strip them like speaker wire,
re-solder the connections between processor
and hard drive, upgrade his RAM,
all so he could tell me he disapproves
of what I’ve done with my life
and mean it, so he could
walk me through my sinful path,
show where he thinks it leads.

Sonnet for Potential Parenthood

I notice children more now that we are
trying to have one (maybe two)
of our own. I look at price tags more,
at fashion trends. I worry about the flu
and vaccination boosters: whooping cough
is on the rise again in Washington.
My hearing’s more acute. I find it tough
to concentrate (every bang’s a gun
in my panicked imagination) but
we’re trying anyway, employing special-
ists to make our gametes meet (to rut?)
combine, divide and grow (a blastocyst
is what we’re after, and then an embryo
or two and maybe a baby). Ready? Let’s go.

Author Biography

Brian Spears is the poetry editor of The Rumpus and the author of A Witness in Exile (Louisiana Literature Press 2011). He currently teaches at Drake University and sells beer and wine at the Gateway Market in Des Moines under the nickname “The Mighty Malt Master.”

On the theme of Epitaph

Ma Brimley

Weird things going down next door; a mild-mannered tech exec gets kicked out by his pregnant wife and a surly mother-in-law with a rural Montana accent that makes Wilford Brimley look like a pussy. This mother-in-law’s voice is a shot of whiskey, flat as a church pew, cold as a frozen cod. This grande dame means business when she tells the tech guy, “How old arr ya? Thirty? Where’d yer brains go? You got no brains, have you? Thirty years old and you’re a big baby.”

The wife hollers, “This is it! This is it! I’m done!” As I listen I discover the nasty truth. The husband has spilled fish juice in her new 40,000 dollar SUV. A lot of fish juice, she insists, and I envision gobs of semi-absorbed juice trailing along the upholstery as if the vehicle has been taken over by a giant squid.

“Did ya think to double bag? Triple bag? NOOOOO! I’m done! I’ve had it! I’m done!” The wife’s voice is like a film heroine, tragic and hysterical, as she faces the charge of a mad gorilla.

She is weeping with words. She is done. Her husband must go, this man who has spent months slowly but surely hammering things and mowing lawns and hosting parties for nerds who look like they were bussed in from Intel, a costume party reminiscent of a masked superheroes ball, with all the dip trays and stiff pinata games. This big nerd, this tall Irish goombah with his tousled black hair and rosebud cheeks speaks in a calm voice, telling her that they dragged his friend off by the hair. Yes, apparently the mother-in-law tried to pull the husband’s buddy out of the car by his hair because he didn’t get out the first time she asked. It is convoluted, the yelling, the stern oldster presiding over all, and the nerdy husband (who does look like a big baby, Buddha-rotund at 300 pounds in a fresh seersucker button-down) insists they calm down and that he wants his father-in-law’s phone number.

Apparently the mother-in-law has been visiting for two weeks and the husband has swallowed a lot of abuse. He tells her she doesn’t know the meaning of no, and he has done a lot to make her comfortable, and the wife interjects that she has gotten a second job and worked 70 hours a week for four years… well you know, no one really breaks up over spilled fish juice, do they? She’s pregnant and slaved for his schooling, his deed on the house. And the husband is left on the sidewalk as the wife storms in and out of the house and I hear old female Brimley presiding as the daughter tells her, “I’ve got it ma… I’m throwing this mat in the washer.”

And the homestead is secure, with the piles of someone’s belongings pitched under a tarp in the driveway, the disarray without reflecting the disarray within, and all I know is that I am a long way from New York, with these accents and this coldness and these dry summer days, and I am instead where the buffalo once roamed.

Who does this female badder-than-Brimley look like, you may ask?

Joan Didion, of course.

Author Biography

Jennifer Robin is a novelist and essayist. Robin’s first novel, Bouzi, was released in 2000, and her short stories have appeared in various literary journals.  She has performed at Bumbershoot, The Olympia Experimental Music Festival, and  miscellaneous other events. Contact her at jenniferistheone@yahoo.com.

On the themes of Envy, Epitaph, Life Cycle

Mister Bunny Buys a Tractor

And becomes the envy of the town!
Some say he brought upon himself
The wrath of the poor and rich alike
By affording and for-real purchasing
A GIANT RED MOTHERFUCKING TRACTOR!!1!

—What does that wabbit need with a twactoh?
—I heard he thinks he’s a farmer now
—I heard he planted all ten acres in carrots
—How many carrots can he eat before they rot?
—I hewd he wikes wadishes. And wettuces. 

Mr. Bunny rides high in that seat, steering
with the help of an actual human farmer

Wearing that John Deere hat like some kind
          of goddamn hipster, I tell you what

Bunny’s no dummy, he’s got a business plan
He keeps it close to his chest
Banks might not understand his moral objections
to soy and sweet corn
But they have a nose for a good story
AND A CARROT-FARMING BUNNY CAN’T BE BEAT

Baby carrots are really just grownup carrots peeled down
so much that they throw away like half

Baby rabbits are really just grownup rabbits that just got born

BABY TRACTORS are not a thing

Hold onto your money, Mr. Bunny.
Put it in a giant safe
and when the bad guys come
you can drop it on their heads

Mr Bunny Dies

Everyone does, don’t be sad!

Some gravestone ideas:

1.
Here lies Mr. Bunny
a friend to all who met him
and though he’s two feet underground
we never shall forget him

2.
Mr. Bunny
Brother, Husband, Friend, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father, Father

3.
Ring Bell for Service

4.
All Death is expected, and not—
All Death is sudden, and slow—
Under your feet, Mr. Bunny rots—
It’s not like you didn’t know

5.
They told me to prepare to meet my maker
I told them I’d make my meat preparer
They said how on earth will you recognize him?
I said who else wears a suit like an undertaker?

6.
That’s all, folks

What Easter Is Like for Other Rabbits

Mr. Bunny is not an Easter Bunny.
His busy springtime work routine
has nothing to do with Christ.
Still. Easter triggers a lot of deep, pent-up
feelings for Mr. Bunny.
More than you’d think
for an animate ball of lint.
He has an irrational fear of having his ears bitten off.

—Mr. Bunny, you are not made of chocolate.
—I knows it. But I like my ears.
—Mr. Bunny, you have absolutely nothing to fear.
—I knows it. But, it’s my birthday on Easter.
And just like you I’m afraid of getting old
and having somebody put me in a box
and put the box in a basket full of plastic
grass and seed the plastic grass with jellybeans
and say, “Happy Easter! Dust to Dust!”
I mean, think how Jesus feels. Jesus.
—Well, I guess you have a point, Mr. Bunny, about
death and rebirth and renewal and stuff
all happening and fraught with great meaning
all on your birthday.
—See what I mean? If Easter was your birthday,
you might be afraid of having your ears
bitten off, too.

Actuarial Tables for Stuffed Rabbits

Common causes of death of not-yet-owned stuffed rabbits:
Fire in overseas factory
Mishap on slow boat from China
Somali pirates
Other
Truck hijacking
Correct delivery to Walgreens
Correct delivery to toy store
Raffle

Stuffed rabbits owned by children:
Fire
Toilet
Little sister
Dog
Washing machine
Adventure or misadventure

Stuffed rabbits owned by adults:
Marriage (of owner)
Death (of owner)
Lost luggage
Laundromat
Burglaries
Tweakers
Other

Author Biography

Tarin Towers’s work has appeared in various publications, including Eleven Eleven, A Gathering of the Tribes, Exquisite Corpse, The Fray, and American Poetry: The Next Generation (CMU Press), as well as the Pushcart Prize Volume XXIII. Her first book is called Sorry, We’re Close (Manic D Press), and she has also published four chapbooks. You can find more at tarintowers.tumblr.com and @tarintowers on Twitter.

On the themes of Envy, Epitaph, Bras, Sugar, Comic Book, and Life Cycle

Envy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rVIGf0rv88&feature=youtu.be

Epitaph

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL6rnnN17Zw&feature=youtu.be

Bras

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYZZeSS34Tg&feature=youtu.be

Sugar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjf-gV97tIA&feature=youtu.be

Comic Book

http://youtu.be/a-ox6qAQoQg

Life Cycle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5Xu9QBFOK0&feature=youtu.be

Artist Biography

A K Mimi Allin has twice crossed the Pacific Ocean by sailboat, has worked as a climbing ranger on Mt Rainier and has served in the Peace Corps. She holds an MA in Writing from City College of New York. In 2012, Mimi wrote all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in the sand at low tide out at Kalaloch Beach on the Pacific Coast and let the surf wash them away. This winter she performed a 49-day work/rest cycle in collaboration with Haruko Nishimura at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Seattle. Artist website: www.akmimiallin.weebly.com.

On the themes of Life Cycle, Epitaph and Envy

Life Forms

Forgive the stone but not the stick,
the fangs but not the snake.

Weigh the bite and taste the venom.
Measure each vein but not a drop of blood.

Count the hydrogen (twice), compute the oxygen?
Consider the carbon but not the copy?

Why conjugate the 3 but not the 2
and all its tenses of conspiracies,

its theories of present and past perfect,
moisture and light?

Confide in the ancestors walking away from the ocean
but not its progeny flying through endless foreplay.

Trust Eve’s woodish brown eyes
but not her unfed tears.

Forgive this impersonal death
but not its pretentious lie. 

(Again) We Speak in Tongues

I’ve forgotten the humidity of old languages.
New books have dried
and gone out of print.

Nouns like breast and mouth
escape down a receding road,
searching for fluid grammar.

Some evenings I remember the syntax
of moisture and melody, thrust and thirst.
The sound of silk

floating toward a bedroom floor.
Your sigh running sticky
into the fibers of clean, fertile sheets.

Last night I dreamed in French; realized
I don’t know how to translate your kiss,
even if I had a reason to try.

Muse (Transposing)

For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how
we are delighted, and how we may triumph
is never new, it must be heard.
            James Baldwin

You were with Monk tempting
all those black keys
in a semi-dark chocolate room, 13
round tables full of liquor.

You were with Trane, backlit glistening
in the shadows, (bleeding the edge)
shedding thick, dissonant
scales.

You were Blue Note and Black Saint
in vinyl groove goodness,
cotton-spinning hollers and harmonics
into Black art for waiting ears.

You are the moment when a C minor
chord resolves (slow
ly)
into sweat, smoke,
caramelized satisfaction.

You were with Baldwin in a Paris
flat, Sonny’s piano cooking
cornbread and collards.

Now, you are with me in the glare
of an Earl Grey morning.
White-empty walls, blank page, 26
letters full of risk.

Author Biography

Le Hinton is the author of four poetry collections including, most recently, The God of Our Dreams (Iris G. Press, 2010). His work has been published in Gargoyle, Little Patuxent Review, haggard and halloo, Watershed, Fox Chase Review and in the poetry anthology/cookbook, Cooking Up South. His poem “Epidemic” was the winner of the Baltimore Review’s 2013 Winter Issue contest. In 2012, his poem, “Our Ballpark,” was incorporated into Derek Parker’s sculpture Common Thread and installed at Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as part of the Poetry Paths project. He is the founder and chief editor of the poetry journal Fledgling Rag.

On the theme of Life Cycle

Because My Son Cannot Write This

You were someone who
understood him. He stood
Taller—
Wanted me always to send  you
The work he’d done.
When you commissioned him,
paid him for his drawings
by buying him paints and brushes,
well, he was never prouder—
An eight-year-old pride
fragile and exposed.
(The bridge. The pause. This is the blank space in our lives where you chose door number 3—there is a simple woman there, it’s not complex. She leaves the television running;, her kid throws tantrums. Take her to Oprah’s couch , she’ll be fine. The air isn’t clear but it’s constant, she’s as familiar  as your mother, in fact maybe it’s her—and  you were your father for so long.)
Fragile and exposed. Yes—
(FYI: We are still hiding in the forest;  there’s no road to our door; it hurts to breathe
up here; yes, it’s that fucking clear; we are parked in front of the fireplace in sleeping bags, because we get weather here; surviving is our constant. But back to the poem.) 

He was cleaning up his room. No new toys
I warned,  while the old are piled
in excavation heaps , a  landfill on linoleum.
He brought the thrift store bag to me
It  had everything  you ever gave him:
A stuffed animal at his birth,
the last happy meal toy,
what was left of the dried up paints
from that moment you believed in him,
Showed him you understood him to be him.

And I had no words—
I’m not that kind of liar.
How can you tell a child who
loved somebody
He didn’t choose you?

Author Biography

Recent work by Margaret Garcia can be seen in Brain, Child Magazine, Outside In Magazine, The Weekenders Magazine, Huizache Journal, Catamaran Review, among others.  She lives in the remote northeastern corner of the Sierra Nevadas,  teaches college , and hosts an alternative women’s radio show and a book club show on Plumas Community Radio at www.kqny919.org. She blogs at Tales of a Sierra Madre.

On the theme of Life Cycle

River’s Bend

My abdomen is bloated with blood
maybe for the last time. Should I revel
in the numb ache of this fullness?

So much longing has been carried with the ebb
and flow from this river basin:
our babies conceived who refused to be born,
our babies conceived who came crushing into this world.

What happens when the river ends?
Recently it’s been seeping through my pants,
onto the chair, down my leg, onto the floor. I keep trying
to spell the word: exaguinate, ecsagunate, exsanguinate,
and have to settle for bloodletting.

My doctor has three words: global endometrial ablation.
Is that like world-wide elation? Whole earth meditation?
4 different pills, an opium suppository, 3 days in bed, a balloon on fire—
it’s hard to tell.

And when only the riverbed remains, what will I be?
The dry part of a woman doesn’t seem like woman at all.

Author Biography

KMA Sullivan‘s poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, The Rumpus, Forklift, Ohio, The Nervous Breakdown, PANK, diode, Anti-, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in creative nonfiction and Vermont Studio Center in poetry. She is the editor of Vinyl Poetry and the publisher of YesYes Books.

On the theme of Envy

First Kiss

Fuck, I’m drunk.

I don’t remember how I got from my car to wedged between the boxwood and the god damn house. Me on all fours outside his grimy basement window again. His Mother’s basement window. That window is the only thing about his mother’s house that’s grimy. Everything else hospital-cornered and spit-shined. I might be 15 and outside, soaking up dirt and catshit funk. But he’s 33 and divorced and lives with his mother.

That grimy window. I can’t stand watching. I can’t stop watching. I don’t even know who it is that I am seeing yet, but it’s the first time I see Mary Lou. Blonde and long and curls and knots in my stomach, knots through the window, pushing and pumping and blood to this part and to that part, straight to my temples and back to my cunt, and back through the window to a knot of his arm, her leg, his hand, his ass, her hair.

Her hair,

her hair,

her hair.

The knot eventually stops rolling around and gets down to the business of fucking. Missionary. I know this is only their first or second fuck, or she’d be up on her knees and he’d be fucking her from behind.

When it was me and him who first got together, it was me and him in the Winnebago, me and him in the church parking lot. Me and him in the shadows of the back yard, him saying close your eyes. Him saying not yet. Him all lips and fingers everywhere, saying don’t move. Me all raw and electric and new, saying please. Him saying no, not yet.

After a few months,

he took me downstairs.

And he took me downstairs.

And he took me downstairs.

And it was me and him missionary on the waterbed. I was 15 and downstairs meant making love. Indoors meant me and him together forever. But he put a pillow over my face the first time I got too loud and said don’t ever do that again. After that night, I told him I liked it better outside. So he took me to fuck in the graveyard. Like dead folks don’t hear.

Worms and dirt and catshit funk and all I wanted was to sleep. For just a minute. Face down on my arms-crossed pillow. But that was about half an hour ago. I rise up on my elbows and I can’t feel my fingers. Maybe it’s the half an hour of cut-off circulation or maybe it’s the air so cold now I can see my breath. A half an hour and their steam on the inside of the window competes with the grime on the outside for that little bit of window that is left to look through.

In and out of sight, blonde, soft, silent movie curls up and down and up and.

He never fucks that long unless the girl gets on top. I hate getting on top. I hate the way it makes my boobs bounce. He says I look beautiful. I think I look stupid. More than stupid. Boobs bouncing in the graveyard. There’s something wrong with that.

I am starting to sober up. I get back up on all fours. The kind of quiet here, it isn’t natural. Neighborhoods like this are dead. Residential. Civilized. Not like out where I live. Out where I live, it’s all farm houses and apple orchards. People-quiet, but plenty of nocturnal something or others making noise until all hours. Noise you can count on.

The fucking boxwood scratches my arm when I try to back out. That’s when the tears start. I want to know if he loves her like he loves me. That’s why I keep watching. That’s what I tell myself. My tongue crackle-dry and bitter. Tears and snot and sharp. Catshit funk sharp. I belch acid and swallow. If she would just get done, I could leave. Soon as I wish it, she leans forward, swings her leg back and hops off the fuck like she’s hopping off a bike. She puts on her dress. All legs and arms and sunflower yellow. All Girl.

She flips her hair back into a ponytail, and I swear for a moment, her eyes ice blue, they look right at me. Even through the grime, she sees me. I blink my eyelashes cold and hold on to the slowest of my tears. She leaves without begging him for a kiss good-bye. She leaves without even looking at him. She is a God.

The next night and the next night, I come back and I wait. Me in mom’s car in the shadows, I wait.  Just to see Her. Her in Her car, She doesn’t come by, but I sit in the car and I wait. On the third night, She comes back. I don’t bother watching them through the grimy basement window. I just sit outside and I wait.

When She comes up from downstairs, and out to Her car, I follow Her. For hours into days into weeks, I still don’t know She’s Mary Lou.

I couldn’t help tonight but to follow Her home.

I turn off the car.

I have to know She is possible.

Tonight, I learn Her name.

Author Biography

Domi J Shoemaker is an Idaho-born gender flexer whose early writing career climaxed at age 15, writing epitaphs after a string of teenage drunk driving accidents. After 22 years of crisis work Domi came back to writing. While working on a novel with the Dangerous Writers writing group, Domi has had a story published at PANK, landed a gig with Lidia Yuknavitch for the launch of Dora: A Headcase, interned at Chiasmus Media,  and is the founder and producer of the quarterly reading series, Burnt Tongue.