I
Sex with you feels like survivor’s guilt. What were we but two figures at a bar sharing a gentle kiss and a Molotov Cocktail? I run my hand down your back like a train derailing off its tracks. This exchange of ecstasy will ripple chaos into this city—our city. When your lips touch my skin a trigger is pulled, a body hits the pavement, a splash of blood arcs in streetlamp glow. Two beings like us are not meant to feel passion—at least, not together. Every time we fuck we sacrifice a city block. Let’s call this what it is.…
...continue reading
I saw Sibyl with my own two eyes, and when I said to her, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to forget.”
I want everything that makes me different from the half-remembered snapshots in the attic stripped from my bones. I want to be born old and die a baby, as I forget, day by day, my entire life. I want the coroner to hold my hand. I want to ask a question and be amazed by the answer. That is what she meant.…
...continue reading
Even the cats were skittish. They normally couldn’t be bothered with whatever was going on in the house, where they looked down upon their owners, or so it seemed to Claire. Now they watched Claire and her mother more carefully and started at the slightest noise.
Claire sensed that there was something amiss. She was only twelve, and sometimes didn’t think she knew enough to trust her suspicions.
Tick, she thought. A mark in the notebook in her head.…
...continue reading
It’s mid-morning the day before New Year’s Eve. You’re running post-Christmas errands. Circling for a parking spot so you can exchange a book at Powell’s. You head down to the North Park blocks where you’re usually lucky and grab a space between Davis and Couch.
The edge of the park is muddy, the grass trampled, so you walk in the street toward the meter. A skinny man, body taut as a bow string, is walking past the playground. He has straggly brown hair like a disheveled halo and he is yelling, “You bitch. You fucking whore. You cunt.” That t is like an axe chop, and the force behind the words makes your chest tighten, but there are plenty of people who walk around raving these days.…
...continue reading
I got naked with a bunch of old men and tried to figure out how to wash my booty without insulting anyone, and that pretty much sums up my trip to Japan.
Everything that happened in those two weeks happened in the public bath. The furtive glances, the failed attempts to blend in, the unfamiliarity and the discovery and the bafflement and even the necessity of it all. I was in Japan for Calvin’s wedding, and I was in the Kyoto bathhouse because after three days of sweating in ninety percent humidity, lugging a thirty-five pound backpack through streets and temples and shrines, and sleeping in parks and train stations, I smelled worse than nattō.…
...continue reading
Bruce Bauman, an instructor in the CalArts MFA Writing Program, released his second novel, Broken Sleep, last year on Other Press. Chronicling both the individual struggles and tense interrelationships between several family members (via several shifting perspectives), it’s a humorous yet heartfelt saga that touches on several themes, including the search for identity, the uncertainties of religious devotion, and the quest to fulfill one’s purpose in life. In this first episode of Cover to Cover with . . . , Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Bauman about the book, as well as the processes of writing and teaching, what it’s like having a visual artist as a spouse, the importance of music, and the 2016 election, among other things.
– Bruce Bauman…
...continue reading
The first few seconds were always the best. Before consciousness fully returned and he remembered where he was. The Caged Man couldn’t say how many times he’d awoken to see the cold black bars, water bottle and bucket. It had to be over five hundred. When he’d first arrived, he had kept a careful count. Then one morning he realised that he’d forgotten the number. It was probably better that way. Time was relative and it was heavy enough without needing to remind himself of how long he’d already been there. Sometimes it got to him, the boredom. On those days he would bang his head against the bars and scream at the dim room beyond until he felt faint and collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut.…
...continue reading