after a line of Stallings
What started as hers has now become his,
stolen from burnished sands of the past like
all the lost poems wrapped around corpses,
forgotten in fragments he mimics in these
stuttering verses where white spaces show breaks.
What started as “hers” has now become “his”
slipped in innocently (or not) by a scribe’s miss,
the original line unsung in a tomb, black
with other lost poems wrapped around corpses.
The cuts on her skin speak of iron’s sharp kiss
like vellum now scarred by metal and ink.
What started as hers has now become his
excuse for impeding all progress.
He’s combing through history’s waves in the wrack
to find her lost poems wrapped around corpses
as if only her words could undo all this
as if one translation could bring her life back.…
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Despite being written and published decades apart, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Shena McAuliffe’s The Good Echo bear similarities in how each novel breaks the fourth wall in order to engross the reader. While the novels also have differences in this approach (Vonnegut’s work utilizes drawings while McAuliffe’s novel utilizes a father’s dentistry notes where his story is told in his journal’s footnotes), the most notable similarity is that each novel utilizes a first-person narrator who at first seems disassociated from the story but slowly becomes more and more involved. In the case of Breakfast of Champions, the first-person narrator can be interpreted as the author; in The Good Echo, the first-person narrator is 12-year old Ben, the deceased son of Cliff and Frances Bell, who died from a botched root canal performed by his father.…
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Seth Eisen died on Friday, January 18, 2018. Or he did not. There were several possibilities of what occurred that evening. Here is the first.
It was Julie’s fault and his own as well. He hadn’t cleared the evening with her first, so when she, a bestselling novelist with an almost unhealthy love of animals (she had provided hospice services to not one, but two pets in the last year and hired a pet psychic to find her lost cat), was busy, Seth was alone. His high hopes for a relationship to Julie had been dashed earlier anyhow; the long string of solipsistic text messages about her new agent; her belief that her religious sister-in-law’s prayers had caused her Netflix TV deal and a contract writing for Archie; the realization that the chaos surrounding her was not a bug but a feature.…
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i. You find her in the summertime. She is down near the Gulf beyond the highway billboards that offer penitence to women with healthy wombs. She looks like a poppy field with ripped overalls and thin, Georgia hair and you imagine she will taste like the same cigarettes her mother died on. This is a place you’ll only find behind dancing eyelids, fasting on sleep and long-term memory.
ii. You find her later in the showers of early fall, when the harvest moon carries her over the Mason Dixon line. In a dream, you tattoo a promise you both made across your wrists and you decide you will live there. It is not the first or the last crossed-out promise you both will make together. You tell her you love her the same way Gulf waters love their tropical storms.…
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In a recent interview, New York punk poet Eileen Myles calls for men to stop writing. “I think it would be a great time for men, basically, to go on vacation,” Myles says. “There isn’t enough work for everybody. Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books.”
Since the day in 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg popped the tab on a can of pilsner and congratulated himself for having invented the printing press, readers and writers and people who aren’t either have been telling us what we should or shouldn’t read. When one Caliph Omar was asked what was to be done with the library of Alexandria, he was reported to have said that, if the books in that library contained doctrine opposed to the Qur’an, they were bad and must be burned, whereas if those books supported the most important text of Islam, they should be burned anyway, for they are superfluous.…
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Do you remember the days when men loved other men like sons,
or the days when women gave birth in the oceans of California?
The sea children and their tea notes schooling fish songs—
they kept a bath of grapes for paint in elegant professions.
Merlin painted near the sea.
I can’t tell what men love other men like these days,
or if women still give birth in oceans of California.
I can taste this sea in blood teas and floods,
and the grapes come in smaller packages.
They’ve never met a Merlin.
The fog horse and his paladin,
who ran out of crusades,
forgets the sea is paid for.
The insects flay me for suits.
– James Vu…
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Her hair was falling out. She ran her fingers through its lengths, a fistful coming out and dropping to the hungry sink below, the rushing water of the faucet sweeping it off to its watery death. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Fast Forward
Kaida looked up into the sterile light fixture above her. A bee hummed and darted across the room to the window. Kaida was allergic to bees. She hoped to God it wouldn’t come near her. The fan in the corner circled toward her, blowing cool air her way. Her hair fluttered, sending loose strands floating through the air, eventually statically magnetizing themselves to whatever unfortunate item of clothing had enough clingy, dry, static electricity running through it to be forever practically inseparable. …
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