Illustrations by Rebecka Skogh by John Surico

***

Rebecka Skogh is 31 years old, graduating from Madrid with a degree in Fashion Design and Fashion Photography from Milan. Her illustrations are intricately drawn with a distinctive pop art style, full of colour and pattern. She is inspired by everything, especially culture. She was born in Sweden so she is inspired by their fashion, decoration and style, and of course, living in the Canary Islands means that she is influenced by everything Spanish. The Canary Islands have fabulous fiestas, landscapes, carnivals and colours. 

The Boy in the Vending Machine by Geoffrey Line

He was tanned, dark-haired and hungry, the boy who got stuck in the vending machine. He had an adorable little smile that warmed you like the wittiest kind of greeting cards. Judging by the events that transpired in the train station that day, he was starving and under no adult supervision. If he was, his guardians were guilty of negligence.

He paced for five minutes, for fifteen minutes, for hours in front of the glowing, humming vending machine, a golden display of all the things his tongue and stomach desired. He gazed through its window. Everything seemed by some optical illusion of transparency, so attainable. He was without a wallet. Not even the duct tape kind. 

He pointed his toes, rose to the tips of his scuffed up sneakers so that his body angled and he leaned forward as if he could phase through the glass. He rested there at a perfect forty-five degree angle, still as a yogi. His nose pressed like a pig’s snout on the shiny surface. His lips puckered and spread like those of a blowfish inching up the side of an aquarium. His stomach cried out and he broke his pose for the cramps were so overpowering and he understood then that he must do what he must. He smacked the glass with a big high five palm and pressed the buttons that dictated which chocolates, which gummies, which chips came forward, thinking, that maybe if he hit them in a certain order he would get something free. Maybe there was a kind of jackpot, a lottery, a prize of snacks that would be awarded to a poor kid like him if he got the secret code. He’d heard of children who had such luck before.

But not him. Fat chance. He jammed his fingers against the buttons until he was so mad he was trying to spell swear words with the letters and numbers available to him. F3CK. B11CH. He bit his mouth from the inside. He thought of the gum on the bottom of his shoe, and salivated. He rubbed his knuckles over his t-shirt and against his rib cage. Those thin bones protruded from his torso like a guiro.

Maybe he could tip it. Throw his body at the machine and watch all the shiny snacks tumble down for him and his hungry belly. 

He tried that. 

It didn’t work.

At the bottom of the vending machine, beneath the sour gummies and the caramel chocolates and the light and fluffy chocolates and the nutty chocolates and the chips and and all those things the boy had never tasted, was a flap of metal that read: Push.

The boy pushed it. He pushed it and realized he could get an arm into it and so he did just that. He stuck one arm in and he stuck another arm in and he stuck his head in like a rodent. And he got stuck. The blood dripped down to his brain and the metal opening held him just so, so that at the waist his legs could not slacken but stuck out like a plank of wood. And this was what he looked like to those who passed by: a human paper jam, a boy who had thrown himself down a waterslide headfirst, a boy who dove right into the vending machine.

His legs were getting numb but he could not bend them. They stuck out like those of an exercise instructor showing how to work the abdominals. 

When the men and women came by he had found his way inside. Found his way inside and to his feet but with no other room, he stood, not facing the snacks, but with his palms spread open on the glass. Don’t ask how. He was turned to everyone at the train station, unable to bend, twist, or even grab at the candies behind him.

G3, a backpacker pressed and a Snickers bar fell to the boy’s feet. 

J8, a nurse pressed and bought a packet of sugar free gum.

Please, the boy said. But his cries were muffled and his voice indiscernible. PLEASE he wrote on the glass with his finger in the fog of his own breath. 

A sympathetic schoolteacher on her way to the bathroom nodded so much so that it seemed her head might just rollick right off. I’ll help you, she told the kid. But the glass muted everything. She might as well have been speaking a different language, been on a different continent. A2, she pressed and a chocolate bar fell on his shoulder. The boy rejoiced. He gradually angled his head to the side so that his ear was pressed to the glass. And with his teeth, he opened the wrapper. The act took him time but once the wrapper was off he ate the chocolate as ravenously as he could in his situation. He ushered the chocolately rectangle along with his tongue as if it were a train and his mouth a tunnel.

Thanks he said, and threw the schoolteacher a thumbs up. 

She couldn’t hear him, but she could read his lips. 

Then a busker came and a grandma and a construction worker and a conductor and he convinced all of them to feed him from the food that was accessible from the top left corner which his head was angled toward. A little girl crying so strongly her eyes looked damaged from a chlorine pool didn’t pay the boy any attention and laughed like she’d never seen anything funny at all when the metal ring that escorted the food out at E4 poked the boy in the cheek. 

He was, by this time, stuffed. Stuffed from sugar and chocolate, gummies and sweets, all the wrong things. What a sickly kid. He felt nauseous, and so, heeled over as much as he could in his confined, cubic home. The vomit was torrential. The upchuck fell to the boys shoes and splattered across the candies and plastered the glass. 

Let’s break him out!, a policeman said as he rushed to the scene.

The glass will get in his eyes, a professor said.

It’s plastic, a construction worker said.

Well the whatever, the professor said.

I’ll stay with him, a pastor said.

Let’s break him out!, the policeman said, brandishing his nightstick.

You can’t go in like that, the professor said.

You’d leave him? the pastor said.

Just feed the kid, a lawyer said.

I’ll buy him a chocolate, a businessman said, If he shines my shoes when he’s out.

I got a train to catch, a salesman said.

Let’s break him out!, the policeman said.

Wait! a little girl cried. 

She looked at me. I tried to look away. 

And she said, What are you going to do about him?

 

 

 

Geoffrey Line recently spent two years teaching high school aboard a ninety-year-old Norwegian tall ship turned boarding school at sea during its first world circumnavigation, and facilitated its first integration program, partnering Norwegian youth with Syrian and Eritrean refugees to foster cross-cultural relations during the 2017 Tall Ships Races. You can read more of his surreal fiction featuring contemporary childhood at geoffline.com.

Five Poems by Natalie Stamatopoulos by Natalie Stampatoulos

 

A RECENT LIST OF THINGS TO REMEMBER, AND THEN TO FORGET

1.
TO CREATE A WILDFIRE FROM BRUSH AND PAINT
YOU MUST FIRST REMEMBER SOME INVOLUNTARY
LOVE THAT HAS BROUGHT YOU, AT ONE TIME, TO
YOUR KNEES. REFER TO THE BRUISES THAT ARE
STILL THERE AND BE SURE TO KISS YOUR CANVAS
FIRST. THERE IS NOTHING MORE ROMANTIC THAN
A BLANK CANVAS.

2.
TO BLOOM AFTER RAIN, RECORD YOUR TEENAGE
PAST, THE CONSUMPTION, THE BROKEN GLASS.
PROVE THE PARALLEL UNIVERSE WRONG AND
DRINK UP WHILE YOU CAN.

3.
THE TREMOR IN YOUR HANDS COMES ONLY
FROM AN ACHE OF WHAT YOU COULD NOT
HOLD. REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE LUCKY
AND RICH WITH THIS. EMPTINESS IS THE
DISTANT COUSIN OF BLISS.

4.
CLEANSE YOUR LIVER EVERY NOW AND THEN,
THE ‘IMPURE’ IS ONLY EXCESS FETISH. LONELY
FLAWS KEPT IN CAPTIVITY, IN YOUR BODY. AS
YOU WAIT FOR THE WAR TO BE OVER, CALMLY
SIP ON GINGER TEA.

5.
FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR ENEMY AT LEAST ONCE.
YOU MIGHT FEEL ALIEN IN YOUR FORMULATION
OF LUST AND TOUCH. STAY UNDERNEATH THE
SHEETS. YOUR ENEMY WILL LOVE YOU CLEAN, IN
A BIBLICAL KIND OF WAY, ANCIENT IN AGE. THIS
LOVE WILL BE A MIXTURE OF POWER AND WEAK
KNEES. A LIGHTNESS LIKE A FEATHER FALLING.

6.
EXAGGERATE WHEN YOU SPEAK ONTO WHAT YOU
BELIEVE. KEEP AUTHENTIC TO THE MACHINE OF
YOUR BODY, CROWN EACH EXPERIMENTAL IDEA
ACCORDINGLY. AND AS FOR LOST MEMORIES,
BE SURE TO LEAVE THE LIGHTS ON IN CASE OF
RETURN. THERE’S ONLY SO MUCH PAST YOU
CAN BURN.

7.
IN ONE SWEET DOWNWARD MOTION, DIP YOUR
TOES INTO THE OCEAN. BE THE COOL AND
COMPOSED ONE WHEN THEY ASK YOU,
“WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR THE FUTURE?”

8.
KEEP YOUR SPINE FLAT BY SLEEPING ON
YOUR BACK. DRAIN THE BATH AND WATCH
YOUR DAMP SHADOW MAKE ITS WAY TO BED.
SLEEP IS THE WISEST FORM OF REST.

9.
YOU MIGHT FEEL INTOXICATED BY NOTICING
EYES ON YOU. YOU MIGHT THINK WARMTH IS
AN ORANGE CLOUD IN THE LATE AFTERNOON.
WHEN YOU DREAM OF IT, IT DREAMS OF YOU.
REMEMBER, INTUITION IS JUST THE SOULS
REACTION TO TRUTH.

1O.
THERE IS ONLY ONE LOOPHOLE WHEN IT COMES
TO DEATH: HOLD YOUR BREATH. THE MIGHTIEST
RIVER MAY FLOW PAST THE LOCAL JUNKYARD OR
INTO YOUR OWN BACKYARD. WATER IS A STRANGER
THAT SWIMS HARD. JUMP INTO IT AND EXIST, THERE
IS NO GREATER INFINITY THAN THIS.

 

Ode To The Statue-You

You are everybody’s darling
and I freeze up to mimic you.
For me it’s either early or too
late. For you to love the way I
move, I would have to create a
space for you to sleep and to
wait for me. Most of the time I
am sorry for all of the ways I
want you to change, because
really I cannot get enough of
looking at you, the milk of your
skin, the indents your fingers
make when you hold yourself.
I could go for a glass of you
but I don’t even drink milk.
Really I don’t like it very much
at all. But I’d take a sip of the
way you stand so straight. How
can you pose the same way
each day? I’m tired now just
thinking of it. Remind me again
why I let you go but always
come back? I want to leave you
the way I found you. I want to
change everything about you.

 

zero to confuse you


foggy morning, bad November,
zero lands animistic as you.
0, the ugly ocean @
mid afternoon.
i built a home out of a fishing boat
to confuse you.
the sea salt on your eyelids
reminds you of
youth.
morning stands human
to confuse you.
the aquatic early evening, cosmic,
stay confused.
you had those vinyls robbing you,
your hours at
your neck, conflicted,
confused.
the winter water was
an early nightmare,
so false
but made divine by you,
by deciphering ripe zeros @
mid afternoon.
0, the balancing drunk,
rinse/repeat each morning.
throw in some raspberries,
check the clock,
smoothie’s almost done.
you had that book collection
blushing on the shelf crushing bugs, unread,
0 in your head
left confused.
the sea salt in your mouth,
your youth,
a bruised-lip memory
to confuse you.
you conduct a chilly experiment
in your bed,
dependent at best by
deformed light,
bright thru different windows,
so confused.
your god came pranking at your doorstep,
up thru the water @
mid morning, concave,
confused.

 

TO BE HUNGRY DOESN’T ALWAYS MEAN ALIVE

IT IS THOUGHT THAT AN AERIAL VIEW
OF THE HUMAN BODY
LOOKS LIKE A PINPOINT ON A MAP.
A PINPRICK WISH,
PASTORAL IN A SENSE,
THE CORTEX WRAPS LIKE IVY.
THE DESIGN STARTS WITH A QUICK SKETCH.
TWIN GUTS IN THE UPPER MIDWEST.
BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL THAT EXTRA EAST?
THE MEDUSA INSIDE YOUR BODY?
I MIGHT MEET YOU BETWEEN
HALF-MOON COASTS.
TELL YOU THAT MY DREAMS
CANNOT TOUCH YOURS.
THAT I CANNOT BEAR TO MAKE YOU
THE ONLY ECHO OF MY BLUE BLUE ART,
TO LET YOU PERISH IN THE BLUE BLUE CITY.
I’LL TRY AGAIN TO CREATE HAPPINESS
OUT OF AN EMPTY COUNTRY,
A WHOLE ABYSS
INTO AN INSTANT OF BLISS,
I’LL KEEP HUNGRY-
AND IF YOU SEE MY AERIAL HUNGER
ROAMING THROUGH AN EMPTY FIELD,
AS A DOT ON A MAP,
WILL YOU GO TO HOLD ITS HAND?
WILL YOU FEED IT?
IT WOULD BE A REAL VISION,
A THUMB TACK REFLECTION
OF MY NERVOUS HUNGER
WASHED OUT BY THE CLOUDS,
PASTEL IN THE BLOOM OF YOUR
OPENING HANDS.

 

Like Yesterday

Shedding skin, like
leaving the room, like
drying clay, like yesterday, like
dog hair on the couch.
If love is greater than hurting is greater than
nothing, then what am I in relation to you?
Growing skin, like
getting warm, like
finding shade, like yesterday, like
your lips on my mouth.
If the sunrise is to the sunset as light is to light,
then what does that mean for the night?

 
Natalie Stamatopoulos is a multidisciplinary artist based Elsewhere. She has lived in places like Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, France, and the US (she lives currently in the in-between). Natalie received her BFA from the American University of Paris.

Upstate by Charlotte Freccia

“The bitch is back,” Esther says, and slams a chipped-China mug on the hardwood dining-hall table, sending her coffee sailing.

“Excuse me?” I say, a spoonful of granola-and-milk halfway to my mouth.

“You may have to clarify which bitch you’re referring to,” Pearl snorts, dabbing at the creases of her lipsticked mouth with the corners of a paper napkin. “We know a lot of bitches.”

“You know,” Esther says. “The queen bitch herself. Priscilla Martin. She’s back.”

“Priscilla?” asks Pearl, and drops her napkin onto her plate, over her mostly-uneaten pancakes. “No shit. I thought she wasn’t coming back ‘til next semester.”

“So did I. But I swear to God I just caught sight of her poring over the pastry in there,” Esther says, and gestures with her spoon to the severy. A flick of yogurt flies off of the spoon and attaches itself to Pearl’s wool jacket. Neither Esther nor Pearl seem to notice. I direct my focus to the paper napkin I am tearing into shreds under the table.

“I swear to God. Bitch disappears in the night, doesn’t tell us where she’s going––sends a postcard weeks later saying her parents have sent for her from the Italian Riviera, and then just turns the fuck up back here, out of nowhere. No warning. It’s exhausting.” Pearl sits back in her chair and crosses her arms across her chest, which strains against her too-small blouse in a way she clearly thinks is sexy but to my eye looks more like desperate.

“Exhausting? Don’t see why it should be exhausting. Seems to me that the where and why of Priscilla Martin ought not to concern you, Pearl.” Esther stirs her yogurt vigorously until it is worked into a froth.

“Esther.” Pearl puts her spoon down and looks Esther dead in the eye, her horn-rimmed glasses sliding down her nose. “You cannot possibly understand the mental and emotional energy I expend just breathing the same air as that girl. She drains me.”

“Well––whatever. I, for one, am vaguely happy to hear that she’s back. At least now, we can try to get some answers out of her. When I saw her, just now, the bitch looked thinner and paler than ever, and just about as not-relaxed as I’ve seen her. Italian Riviera, my ass.”

It is fine, it is easy, for my friends to sit and gossip, despicably, endlessly, about the questionable circumstances under which Priscilla Martin disappeared. After all, Esther and Pearl were not the ones who sat with Priscilla Martin’s head in their lap that night that she slit her own wrists with a box cutter, who listened as she cried and repeated in a voice not so much losing as already lost that she’d made a mistake and she did not wish to die. They were not the ones who, wordless, terrified, wiped her tears as they collected in the bags under her eyes the same way they wiped her blood from the bathroom tile They were not the ones who saw their friend, small and helpless, leaking blood and Calvin Klein perfume, a tangle of messy hair and exhausted nerve and torn skin, looking less like a girl than a handful of broken glass on the stretcher where they laid her when they took her away.

Pearl had been throwing up in the toilet in the back of the sculpture studio that night. Esther had been chasing Patrick O’Malley from party to party. It was only me who’d saved Priscilla. Me and the ambulance. Me and the 911 call. Me and fate or coincidence or good timing or God’s sick sense of humor that had kept her from dying that night.

When she didn’t come to breakfast the next day, Pearl and Esther did not ask me why and I did not tell them. The next time I heard from Priscilla, I received a phone call from a restricted number on a Sunday morning and picked up to hear her frail whisper on the other end.

“Henrietta,” she’d said, urgently, as if there was only so much time in which to get the words out. “Listen. I’m fine. Well––I’m not fine. But I will be. I’m upstate. Don’t tell them.”

I knew that by upstate she meant that she was in what would have been called an institution in our parents’ age but that was now called a treatment center. I knew that by don’t tell them she expected me to lie for her until she could do it herself.

Then the postcard arrived. My friends didn’t believe it for a minute. They suspected academic probation, then pregnancy, then rehab. They didn’t suspect the Italian Riviera, but they didn’t suspect the truth, either. I kept the secret under lock and key.

“Well, would you look at who the fuck it is,” Pearl not so much says as announces. A shadow is suddenly cast over my breakfast bowl. My gaze rises from my lap. A hand curls around my shoulder. There is a smell, overpowering and pervaded with the memory of the night I’ve been keeping secret, the night I’d give anything to forget. Calvin Klein. Eternity Night.

“Hello, Henrietta,” Priscilla says.

***

Charlotte Freccia is a second-year student of English, Creative Writing, and Women's and Gender Studies at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where she also enjoys an associateship with the Kenyon Review. She is a winner of the Philip Wolcott Timberlake Award and has recently published poetry and creative nonfiction in Zaum Magazine and Newfound Magazine. Her short story "Baby Teeth" was published by POTLUCK in June 2016. 

 

Poems by Sarah Audsley by Sarah Audsley

Pear

When you whisper pear-
           shaped into her ear
what do you mean?
          Spliced open on the cutting
board, halved then quartered, with
flies buzzing in & around scenting
sweetness, good juice, round orb
reduced to severed parts, you toss
out the core straight into the trash.
Sections go easier into the mouth.
Do you notice the difference? Asian
pear to Bartlett to Bosc?
          A river flows into rows,
trenches of water, feeding the tangled
roots of pear trees being plucked
in the far field.






When My Mother Returns as “X”

She multiplies herself to be every single
living thing: a cloud of butterflies; six calves

grazing in the field beyond the pine; grass
bending to the wind’s steady pressure. She’s

a swarm of bees seeking the dust of golden pollen
hidden in the cups of poppies. When my mother

returns, she is an “X”—marks the spot where she
made me, the hand that never fed me,

imprints my DNA a second time. When my
mother returns, she’s a white moon tipped

over, brimming with milk for a body that’s
not there. When my mother returns, she

multiplies herself to be every form: the breeze
lifting the white curtain; a pink silver-edged cloud

expanding; the night coming on.

When my mother returns, she’s the sweet-bitter
in my mouth I can’t dilute; she swells inside

my throat; she’s the thorny branch from which
birds never fly.




Light Pixels

In the bathroom of the motel, dull lights flicker on the mirror, making shadow-play on your face. You’ve paid for the room for three nights, enough time, you think, to undo something you can’t quite name. Soapy suds take the grease from your fingertips; the fries you ate slipping further along twisted tunnels to fill your stomach. The sound of the television: on mute. The silence you’ve made to block it all out. You were once seventeen (a late bloomer) holding hands on a big blue trampoline under a summer-starry-sky. He was older, wiser, kissing you with some knowledge, leaning into your round-moon body, ready for that first time that can only ever happen once. (The sound of flesh slapping surprised you.) Now, run the water for the hottest bath possible without searing your skin. What did you tell yourself in the doctor’s office looking at a small screen of light pixels? Life was a bright round splotch flickering on the monitor. The movie is still playing. You slip back into water; hiding from the blood coming & clotting. Drink a tall glass of water—or, wait, is it “He was a tall glass of water”? It is only a tiny white pill dissolving under your tongue that fixes. Crickets trill outside. You left the bathroom window slightly open, just enough, but not too much.

 

SARAH AUDSLEY is a freelance writer, poet, climber, and outdoor enthusiast living in New Hampshire's White Mountain region. She is a candidate in poetry in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her non-fiction has appeared in Appalachia Journal and Alpinist magazine.

When Tomorrow Comes by Nikole E. Darnell

The last house in the neighborhood had turned off its lights hours ago. The neighborhood parents had tucked the young ones into bed, and the children dreamed and rested up for another day of learning and life. The world was quiet—the sort of silence that surrounds and consumes. The crickets that had once serenaded the world during the summer had long since vanished. It was November now. Everything was dying.

While the world slept, Sadie sat in the lonely living room armchair, knees pulled up to her chest, arms hanging over each side. She let the bloody hammer slip from her fingers and fall to the floor—the noise was a stranger to the night’s peacefulness. Sadie sucked in her breath and closed her eyes. It was all finally over.

She left the hammer where it lay and shuffled to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of whiskey. Her hands shook as she retrieved a glass from the cupboard and prepared to pour the drink. On second thought, she put the glass aside and drank deeply from the bottle instead. It burned as it went down, but she did not seem to notice—her nerves were too shot. Bottle in hand, Sadie walked out onto the back porch to sit in the cool autumn air. Tomorrow this would be all over the news and she would be hauled away in handcuffs. But tonight there was time for one last drink.

Sadie took a seat on the concrete steps and looked up at the heavens above. The sky was cloudless and clear—a perfect night to see the stars one last time. A cool, nightly breeze brushed her skin, and so she took another sip of the whiskey. It warmed her insides like a friendly hug—and after all these years she did suppose that it had been her only faithful friend. It never judged her or guilted her over her decisions. It had always been there, and this time was no different.

The stars in the sky began to dance as she felt the effects of her liquid friend begin to fill her brain. It must have been barely over freezing outside, but she felt so very warm. Everything was dying, but the cold couldn’t catch her.

The children must have been warm, she thought to herself, remembering how she had left them in their beds. That must have been nice. Everyone deserves to be warm.   

She thought about what the neighbors would say when the police showed up to her door and escorted her from the premises. She imagined their wagging tongues gossiping behind covered mouths and closed doors as they watched her be carted away. Would they even be able to guess what she had done? No, they wouldn’t, Sadie decided with a crooked grin as she took another sip. The neighbors would find out when it hit the papers and the 6 o’clock news just like everybody else. Sadie could almost hear them now—they would claim that she had always seemed a little odd, even though they had casually waved to her on the sidewalk the day before. They waved to her because she looked like one of them on the outside—they knew nothing of what she felt on the inside. They would go on and on about the poor loss of innocent life. They would claim to be her closest friends in exchange for a dance in the limelight.

Friends. Sadie scoffed. They never saw her pain or thought about how tiresome it was to be a single mother raising two children under eight and working a 50-hour work week. They waved to her on the sidewalk because that’s all that they were obligated to do. They never offered to make a casserole or clean the house or take the children for a night. Nobody lifted a finger to help. But if they wanted their 15 minutes of fame, let them have it. It wasn’t anything that Sadie had to worry about anymore.

There were a lot of things that Sadie wouldn’t have to worry about anymore.  

She ran her fingers through her sandy blonde hair. Sadie was tired. So very tired. She hoped people would understand. She tried to be a good mother, honestly she did. But it was all just too much. She finished off the whiskey and sat the empty glass bottle down on the concrete steps. Sadie did not know the exact time, but she knew that it was hours after midnight. Before long, the sun would rise and warm up the earth and bring everything back to life. The neighborhood would wake up, the parents would go off to work, and the children would board the bus and be off for another day of school. She supposed she should call the police before it came. Until then, she was content to sit and see the sun rise, one last time.

Everything else could wait.  

***

Nikole Darnell is a 2017 graduate of Ball State University where she graduated Cum Laude with a major in English and concentration in Creative Writing. She is currently the editor of The Validation and former lead prose editor of The Broken Plate. 

Poems for Driving Away Satan by Guest User

by Jesús Carmona-Robles

Translated by Tive Martínez

 


 

SYMPOSIUM

 

he said there's something wrong with me

she said today is so cold

he said we'd better not travel together

she said nobody ever gonna have your eyes

he said my father's dying tomorrow

she said we were rough fuckers

he said i have some money at home

she said let's meet at the graveyard if it snows tomorrow

he said i know i look so scared and it's true

she said Mexico is a funny place

he said take my hand cause the ground's gonna sink

she said i wore this dress for you

he said my friends read your poems

and took two more steps backwards

she said punch my face

whenever i say ME

he said the airplane was covered of blood in my dream and i couldn't find you

she said he nailed me so hard

i felt like dying

he said i don't like the way you cry

she said moi je t'offrirai des perles de pluie

he said let's go dancing

she said my parents don't wanna see you

he said it's been nine days without sunlight

she said let's marry

he said we need to get drunk soon to make love

she said then i received your text message

and he became so aggressive

he said Satan is the man with a burned face

and he wears a blue suit

she said i love you because you understand the blood

he said i am a virgin and that's why i cum so quickly

she said sorry for telling you all this

he said i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you

she said i don't eat meat

he said my niece wants to know you

she said your penis is huge

he said the night stopped being purple and became black

she said i'm gonna give you my dearest thing

he said nire iraganeko bizitzan

euskaren madarikatu bat izan dut

she said smoke as much as you want

he said i'm gonna miss the flavor of your nipples

she said i wanna have a child

he said the poem is the poem is the poem

she said the virus base is up-to-date

he said you must go to the gynecologist

she said please don't hurt me

he said my friends will never forgive you

she said i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you

he said i've never touched such a soft and sacred hand

she said i'm sleepy

he said i'll be the sun

and i'll be the rain if the sun doesn't light your path

she said just shut up i love you shut up

he said and i'll find another way for you to understand

you are okay

even if the rain doesn't wash away your sorrows

she said i'm not gonna fade

he said this is too much

she said hope you'll never feel the need to kill yourself again

he said i'm gonna break your heart

she said i didn't love him anymore

he said please don't you marry

she said call me when you arrive to your hometown

he said i've never ever felt such a rage

she said so this is what i'm supposed to tell

when people ask me why

he said i'm gonna fall in love with you

she said i don't believe i'm in Mexico

and have only taken six bottles of beer

he said if it goes all wrong i'll cut out to Alaska

to die among the polar bears

she said it's not that bad actually

he said ok

she said it's time to die

he said fuckin' ayahuasca is to be blamed

she said i read all these poems that you write

he said thanks for dancing with me

she said i am rotten

he said our blue mansion

she said marry me

and then get divorced

and then we'll marry again

he said Mexico sucks

she said whatabitch

he said all

            all is said


 

 

 

BIG  STUPID WONDERFUL THINGS

 

I talk to the women I believed to be in love with

in a moment of vagueness

with one other longing I tell them

lies were white loving elusive

as the night's first smile

which is warm and purple only for a moment

look at her she's the woman I love the extended time

the eternal and invisible watch hand

I want to tell them how I learnt

the appetite for killing from your love

those who acted as an artifice

in the steamy days of your childhood

 

There's a knife I handle

all of them must know there's a knife

I receive it in my chest thinking my body

as a lie now and forever

my father saw me crying

and he wrapped my heart in his hands

he is my father behold the way he cries

the way he loses his breath

consider him while I locate in my memory

the laughter of this woman I'm loving

her neck hidden in my father's neck

how I smile I hold the knife and he runs

he runs as I run to love an island surrounded by voices

and clockworks a defeated and conquered island

locate my father see my fear in his fear

the fear I turn into a beast

 

Know in addition that the waiting room is full

nobody can enter please wait outside

I know it's cold outside but there's too many people

not a soul would fit please leave out

I'm taking up five seats

I'm lying all my body down

I am the waiting room I smell like medicine

and my coffee tastes so bad wait in me

inhabit me as the cancer arrives

play in my floor tiles full of footsteps and chlorine

for years now the woman I love is kissing

the disease I invented myself

when I was spore and fungus before being me now

when I could barely move

I know the disease she kisses

but I can't talk

please raise your voice tell her about the night

I almost died I almost disappeared

I mean right now you that inhabit me

as God inhabits dead bodies right now

grab her from her short hair

grab her from her white wrists bite her lips

explain to her how love and hate are braided

in the sharpest end of my soul

and they force me to do big stupid wonderful things.


 

 

 

7754

 

namaste may your light be unrotten

plenty of food in your pantry namaste

nothing to bring you sorrow

you're also the smell of mouths you didn't kiss namaste

the cricket that keeps the beat namaste

of your sobbing at night

you're the lie in the namaste of your friend

who swears not to dope again

but you're at his side searching for the thickest vein

masturbating statues

you're also the smell of orange trees namaste

one woman steps on your face

she spreads oil and honey on her breasts namaste

you like this don't you you do

namaste you're built by your daily writing

in front of your parents

you're an eco-friendly little house

namaste but you're expensive

however there won't be storm tornado conflagration namaste

to reduce you to what you are

rubble uneven ground step-on land

by those who cannot lie

by those who cannot say namaste

i took out my clothes namaste this is my silver light

this is my scream and my riches namaste

this body belongs to my hands only

when i'm alone

feed yourself from my soft flesh namaste lick this honey

which ignites me

it tastes like vanilla and thunder namaste open your mouth

it tastes like this lightnigh bolt which is my solitude

namaste don't you see there are no questions worth asking

who cares

how was my first namaste my father's job

how was my first failed meeting

with drugs don't you see that questions are like kites

in an electrical storm

namaste just dry my body switch on the tv

play some music call for a taxi

don't you see the sunrise

and the world that gives us another chance

7754 chances already given by grandfather sun

namaste grandpa sun thanks for having faith in me

don't touch it i'm gonna sleep you can leave if you want to

 

 

 

Jesús Carmona-Robles was born in Chihuahua, México in 1992. He is the author of two poetry books: TOS (CONACULTA 2013) and Poemas para ahuyentar a Satán (El Gaviero Editores 2015). Along with Luna Miguel and Adrian Martínez, he edited the anthology "Pasarás de moda: 35 poetas jóvenes en español" (Montea 2015) which is a selection of the most representative works of Hispanic American young poets. His translations of Tao Lin, Robin Myers, Lyn Coffin, Ahmed Shamlou, and others have been published in several magazines in Mexico and South America.

 

Tive Martínez was born and currently lives in Spain. Their poems and new poetry translations have been published online in La Tribu de Frida, PlayGround, Electric Cereal, and in fanzines like B/Polar.

 

Crafting by Brittany Bronson

Jenny took me searching through the empty lot behind her old house. The property, divorced from her previous cul-de-sac by a stucco wall, was the only undeveloped land remaining in the complex. It had stood desolate for years, a neglected, suburban salt flat, until one morning the neighborhood woke up to find a water heater abandoned in the center. The next night, someone added a dented washing machine. 

Soon after, the lot was filled with the entire neighborhood’s discarded things.

Many of the items were indistinguishable, with missing or broken parts, but Jenny found what could only be described as an oversized wooden spool. Jenny seemed to think she could turn that spool into a table. She never mentioned needing a table, but she tended to see things for what they could be instead of what they are, had a do-it-yourself philosophy. In college, she took one look at my Mona Lisa afghan and screamed, “Shower Curtain!” Through graduation, the Madonna smiled wryly from our bathtub, soaked up water like museum praise.

After turning the spool to its side, Jenny said, “It could easily seat eight.”

She studied the knobs in the oak, the serrated edges, the large hole through the center the size of a serving plate, then decided she could drape a tablecloth over the top and just remember to not put dishes there.

“But there will always be that person,” I said, picturing my broccoli casserole vanish through the middle.

We trekked through the junk in search of some solution, and when a nearby homeowner pitched a box of scratched records out his window, we realized Tony Bennett wedged into the space perfectly. There was no additional hammering or gluing required, which Jenny interpreted as a do-it-yourself miracle.

So we turned the spool on its side and weaved it through stained couches, over crushed cassette tapes, and through a gate of stainless steel refrigerator doors that reflected the overcast sky and captured clouds around our ankles. We lifted it over the stucco wall, rolled it into Jenny’s old living room until it sat next to her previous dining room table like a recently discovered uncle. 

“Don’t touch anything,” Jenny warned.

Her old house was impeccably tidy because her ex-husband, Tim, cleaned whenever he got upset. I once heard him say, “I swear to God if my mother-in-law calls this house one more time, I’ll clean the fucking grout with a toothpick,” and I don’t think he was kidding around. The last month of their marriage was full of bleach. Empty cartons of it stacked up in the garage like lazily concealed affairs, and all their fights ended ugly, with Tim stripping the sheets for brutal, no-softener washes, then nuking sponges in the microwave to annihilate germs and grease.

I pointed out to Jenny that the spool had left a pair of muddy tracks on the carpet. 

“Oh no,” she said. “He’ll know we were here.” 

Jenny was so nervous about Tim seeing the tracks that she dimmed all the lights and lowered the blinds. “That’s better.”

But Tim just walked in the house through the front door, looking neither surprised by the mess from the spool, nor the presence of his ex-wife breaking into her old, but his current, place. Jenny seemed irritated that Tim entered through the front door, rather than the garage, which when it was their place instead of his, was his preferred entry of choice. They stared silently at each other for some time, which although uncomfortable for me, was some form of lucid communication between the two of them. 

"It will be a table," Jenny said to whatever Tim had inaudibly, but coherently, communicated. She added threateningly, "Soon."

Tim was a small man with a thin blonde moustache that shaded his top lip like an awning, but an awning so thin you still had to lean up against the wall if it rained. His legs were unusually short, as if his knees had grown straight from his ankles just to bypass the drama of shins! I never thought he was Jenny’s type, and after their first few dates, I asked why she was attracted to him. She told me that when she looked at Tim, she never saw that moustache or those stumpy limbs, but a heavily bearded man with flannelled shoulders so broad he had to walk through doors sideways. 

Who was I to judge? Her eternal optimism was admirable.

Recently, I had bumped into Tim at our city’s weekend flea market. He’d been wandering the vintage clothing tents doing some therapeutic lint rolling. There was a petite woman with him, her arms full of leather Hell’s Angel’s memorabilia. 

I briefly mentioned it to Jenny, who was stomping across the spool tracks to smear them. "I'm going to keep it here until I find someone with a truck who can help me move it,” she said.

“My truck’s in the garage," Tim said. "I could deliver it tomorrow."

The whole conflict seemed resolved, but Jenny responded with, "No thanks." 

We at least agreed the table shouldn't stay put, being shamed by all of Tim's fancy furniture, so together, the three of us rolled the spool into the garage, printing a new set of tracks over the carpet that sprouted from the other in tree branches. We brought the spool to a stop next to Tim’s truck so that when Jenny met a different person with a truck, the driver could simply back it into her old driveway and the wooden spool would have a clear rolling pathway.

“Next up,” Jenny said, “Chairs.” 

Jenny dragged me back to the lot, but this time in search of rectangular-shaped items that could contrast geometrically with the table. She described every item we passed with insults about her ex-husband. 

Looking at a yellow bathtub with clawed feet—“Only Tim would clean a tub this ugly.’ 

Passing a smashed-in, thirty-year old computer monitor —“Tim’s moustaches grows slower than this modem runs.” 

No other worthwhile items turned up. As we returned to the house, Jenny frantically recited plans for the spool: “I’ll stain it! A darker tone for the top. Maybe doilies as stencils? Lacy patterns around the foot!” She hurdled over the stucco wall with renewed excitement. The table seemed like a new start for her—a clean slate of cracked and mildewed oak! Back in the garage, Tim stood next to the spool wearing gloves and blue protective goggles, which looked like a tiny ocean suctioned to his face. His moustache puckered out beneath it like a disappointing beach. 

“I sanded it,” he explained.

“Why would you do that?” Jenny asked. 

There was an obvious improvement brought about by the sanding. The wavy edges were smoothed down to fine porcelain, and Tim surfed his bare palm over them without a hitch. He returned the sander, which looked brand new and still had twist ties around the chord, to its thin plastic covering. According to Jenny, he always stored things the way they first came out of the box in the original box they were purchased in. 

Jenny moved through the garage and started opening drawers and cupboards. Her face reddened when she discovered the majority of them empty. 

“Where’s my paint?” she asked.

“It was old,” Tim said. “I discarded it.”

Jenny’s face twisted into an unclear expression that Tim offered a sarcastic laugh to.

“What was I thinking?” he yelled. “You could have turned it into dinner!”

This caused Jenny to storm through the garage opening and slamming every cupboard. She ripped something from the toolbox that was not paint but came in a narrow tube and poured from the nozzle like a thick balsamic glaze. She circled the spool, garnishing it generously. 

“Ta-da!” she yelled. “I love it.”

Tim claimed he had some cleaning to do and marched into the house. He left the door open, and we listened as he narrated the various hygienic states of the rooms:

“Got to dust that fan.

“It’s a giant allergy.

“Dammit these tiles.

“Is that soap scum?

“Fuck.

“Scum.
  “Where’s my Swiffer?” 

Jenny brought her lips a centimeter from my ear and whispered, “I took it.”

“What?” I asked.

“It’s not here.”

Inside the house, Tim pounded on something. Then, the sound was overpowered by high-pitched squealing. Jenny explained that when he got really heated, he bent over the kitchen counter tiles and excavated the dried food particles with an electric carving knife. 

“Go check on him,” Jenny said.

“No way.” 

“He’s perfectly safe.”

Jenny took betrayal very seriously and tended to hold grudges for years, so I weaved carefully through the staged furniture in search of her ex-husband, who, as a result of their divorce, had no lasting ties with me. I was the only friend who gave her my honest opinion about Tim, but there I was, doing her jealous, ex-wife bidding. Signs of Tim’s binge cleaning were everywhere—sheets bleached to the point of yellowing, perfectly even vacuum prints visible on the carpet. I wondered if Tim endured there for hours in a craze, sucking up the shadows of opposing carpet fibers instead of actual dirt. 

The intersecting rectangles ceased at the tiled floor of the bathroom, where Tim stood on a stool cleaning the mirror with newspaper. 

“It reduces streaks,” he explained.

 His proximity to the fluorescent light caused his nose to cast a shadow over his mouth, and I couldn’t even see that moustache, might have easily mistaken it for a densely freckled upper lip. Elevated to twice his size, Tim seemed like the man Jenny might have always imagined him to be, who walked around on an average set of legs instead of his actual shrunken ones. He lowered the newspaper to his side, as if surrendering.

“Does Jenny want to get back together?” he asked. 

“I’m not sure,” I said, although I was fairly confident she didn’t.

“She keeps showing up here.”

Jenny stopped do-it-yourselfing when they first got married. She filled out the wedding registries, helped Tim meticulously unwrap and display the items in their suburban villa, and she enjoyed them for a while—Things! Boxes!—that Tim stored in such a way that Jenny could get those rush of brand-new-feelings more than just one time. But from their upstairs window, Jenny watched that lot multiply into a field of disregarded things, and she fell for it more than Tim, committed adultery on all of their furniture. 

After she moved out, Jenny talked about the vacant lot, spent our weekly happy hour describing the exhilaration she got muddling through it. After witnessing Tim’s woodwork myself, I realized Jenny intended on leaving behind whatever she unearthed from the dirt, knowing Tim couldn’t stop himself from purging the filthiness.

“I think she misses me,” he said.

With sudden bravado, he hopped off the stool and pushed back the shower curtain. 

“Let’s saturate these moldy fuckers!” he yelled. I walked back to Jenny in the thunder of Tim’s warrior chant: “Bleach! Bleach! Bleach!”

Jenny was not in the garage. She stood at the end of the driveway with a young man who wore a backwards hat and crossed his arms over a fraternity T-shirt. 

“This guy has a truck!” she yelled. She hauled him up the driveway and showed him the spool. The guy twisted his hat until the bill faced forward, funneling his gaze toward Tim’s truck. 

“How do you know Jenny?” I asked.

“We just met.”

I nodded. “She is very outgoing.”

“She threw wrenches at my windshield until I stopped driving.”

Jenny yelled inside for Tim to help us transport the spool. The young guy said he borrowed the truck from a frat brother to dump a load of puke-stained furniture into the empty lot. Together, the two men rolled it down the driveway and lifted it into the truck bed, which was littered with beer cans and not nearly as spacious as Tim’s. 

I dug through my wallet and offered the young guy forty dollars.

“You’ve been very helpful,” I told him. 

“Whatever,” he said, but pocketed it.

Jenny had me drive her car while she climbed in the truck and nestled her hips forcefully against the young man’s. Tim watched them depart, and I looked back at him, hoping he would run back to the house with his reduced strides, ignore the spool tracks entirely and call that woman from the flea market. There future looked flawless to me and required no imagination: her in a leather jacket, tiny arms extended and revving an imaginary motorcycle, while Tim circled her in his unique mating ritual, gently rubbing polish over the leather to remove all the smudges. 

What Tim actually did was perch on his tiptoes at the edge of the garage with the goggles crowning his head like a tiara. He looked stupid and brave as he attempted to send across the cement expanse an expression that only Jenny could interpret, but one she never saw, because her peripheral vision was lost after she put on the young man’s baseball hat. 

Jenny and I spent the rest of the evening at her new apartment. The young guy helped us roll the spool through her front door, but he barely crossed into her foyer when she instructed him to, “Leave it there.” He lingered, removed his hat and smoothed down his hair, as if waiting for an invitation. 

“That’s really all you wanted?” he asked.

“Yes,” Jenny said.

The spool rested next to a cast iron coat rack with no bulb or wiring that Jenny planned on updating to a floor lamp. There were half-finished projects were everywhere, and Jenny examined all of them. Not even Tim could have translated whether she was overjoyed or saddened.

“Where will you put it?” I asked her.

“Put what?”

“The table.”

“Somewhere,” she said. “I’ll find a place. What do you think of this?”

She held up a wrought iron birdcage with a beautiful, rusted blemish. It looked Victorian, delicate, and the door was held closed by a twine loop. 

“It’s pretty,” I said.

“It’s a lampshade.”

Jenny held the cage from the top hook so it swirled, suspended, in between us. Would soft light ever fill up the empty space and erase an association with birds? They were the original mavens of crafting, who transcended their evolutionary rivals by bracing rocks between their beaks and hammering into eggs nature forbid them to break until the concealed milk hatched forth.

 

 

Brittany Bronson's work has previously appeared in Paper Darts, Juked, F(r)iction, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. Her nonfiction appears regularly in The New York Times, where she contributes as an op-ed writer.

4 from Acrostic Aspic by Joe Milazzo by Joe Milazzo

Debralee Scott

At the pinnacle where the ladder springs most narrow or
most yellow, in my lily-bedded attending which
is also my affording, there’s this capital-S
special dumpster. It’s kitted out

with the masonry of mustaches and caged light like malice,
stripes of all those silverskin patches where the pajama
jean’s been treated like a bench ratcheted around kagels. (All personality
is memorized.) “Ovens,” a gentrification of garbage says, and gargles,

and all trending ends up in a pickled vaudeville. What about
degrees of learning? Cataracts? Harumphs? Underneath the pollen and pampered
grass and GMO saguaro this dumpster’s fecal espresso has swallowed, I expect
the fumes of throwaway luxury hide some spire, as peroxide as bare legs

rubbing themselves to a fever underneath the hem
of a premature spring’s cardigan. And at that holy needle’s
tip, a campaign sticker, stuck cattywampus to a backpack
casually deforming its hang before it gets up

the gumption to walk its purse away from the likes of my
membership. (Purging or breaking? More like surfing simulated
with a den’s cushions.) And inside that backpack there’s a bus stop,
crowded with the sun that spots itself on tinted windshields,
the action-deprived film behind which the claw-tooth bucket

of an excavator rides a bicycle frame’s weightlessly inverted
hypotenuses into laneless forests of curbs, aerating shoelaces,
solar granite decomposed in the weak acid of pedal steel and fiddle
solos. Here, in this development, mosquitos are cinderblocks of fire ants, mosquito

hawks in the sowthistle a damp coiffure shaken loose by the passing of an
impatiently executive stranger. In these dim and leafy hallways, reflections
are hazmat-ed in acorns, vested in the burlap that says
“in so many words” in just that exact number of words. Five finger discounts

are out of order inside the crepe myrtle’s drawstring bags. Anthropomorphic plaids
climb the sheathing and slash at the caution tape lensing the dumpster’s
psychosomatic cameras. Every step further into the discarded
depths promises a last step: darting, winking, betwixt.

The columns, each a perfect pull, lie dormant, just like sacredness
chalked within its own loop. Arcing is its own two-way traffic, but
estranged, like an android prodigy, from what aching boundaries it still
bewares. (No simile wants to be inside an ejaculation.) Assuming, that is,

that I begin again as I remember beginning:
outside the dumpster’s big body, high above the conductive and
belly-flopping into permitted phyla, standing (gourmet or
gourmand) at a machine yet to return some article of mine within

the ripped demarcations of a hypothetical kitchen.

 

Gwen Wells

My mother added a perfectly civil 1:18 pornstache
to the galaxy’s favorite farm-boy’s head.
            Masculinity is an opera anything
but hygienic; in the empyrean, no inappropriate uncles
    dandle backstage wives. However old he is,
    a boy going rebel
    strives to sprout the Chevrons that manly men
come with. No, let’s reserve the beard talk; waggish
swagger is for princesses. The follicular destiny of beards
is scrutiny, not barrettes or cornrows interning
    in tall and bristly abundance. Allow how a beard is hiding
something to hide the fact of its hiding from us.
            Unless, of course, it gets Biblical
            and we see a beard for a beard.

First we tweezed the electric ulna
right out of our milk-rajah's arm. One of five points
of articulation, a shoulder for a soldier harrowing
joysticks. Along that affirmative hail and underneath
    his incipient drone, we uncharneled his man-cave,
the slot where you’d slide salvation’s junk
            into and free from playtime. Just like I remember
it, a wish in reverse, the big
blast of futanari never unsheathes its instant
    forthwith, because length quests after length.
    This was action, a trick of vinyl twisting
    and us neon extras deboned and all spitballing.
As slow as collectormania Christmas, or as dull
            as Kickstarter documentary sunshine, the last
            crank had to make-do
            with a lever and a sequel of tugs.

Every street-sweeper driver
has a potential for melting, and
every crayon, however honor roll or randy,
    is fixed, likewise fixed to a finger’s hold. Unlike
    dolls, which our American sibling everybody
knows you hug. Ew; gross. This one earliest
experience with the unicum doesn’t
apprentice with a synod . Strip a tubular manhood of what it teases
    and all you’re left holding is the gutless cul-de-sac
    of an airdancer’s come-hither career. A domineering
            imagination may have applied the Dirty
            Sanchez but it’s mom who tattooed the deed.

What did we learn
by watching her watch us as we slurped
up engrossment’s puerile and licorice sagas? The relief
    of flocculent gnawing. The pineal eye
is a chainsaw, so long as its force growls downstairs. Now
I remember, and remembering
    settles the rickety Zen of my hired
hands down. I want a plastic nacre; I want
    a merkin to match
    the drapes. And I want, how
            I want,
    for each little flagellation
            of sublimation
to keepsake one more jeweled filament
            in my shag of distraction
    so vast and
as shallow.

 

Ann Druyan

Emoluments are car batteries and lumberjacks
in time’s pay-per-view event against small towns.
Squatting on wireless, she has to elbow
Google in the throat to tag Yahoo! Answers:

why would anyone care to soap
their windows? Shut-in perfumes sext
her nostalgia with a bouquet of bygone
industries: castile soap and chicory, for instance,
rayon and piccadillies and lamp oil. But
squares queer, brick pavements
stray from the spirit level, birdsong barks
like a Montezuma of dogs.
It’s August.
She can’t remember if she’d left the tape measure
as taut as that, but now the hours chew Beeman's
and maybe it will. Or maybe its graduated
tongue won’t snap back and bridge this money pit.

Dairy Queen breakfast and already the multitools
are in a massive halftime hole. There, —
in the drive-thru under the soft-core stagnation
of catalpa tree beans, three SUVs wait
before she can trade on her novel
nativity for an extra hunk of Texas
toast. One Durango red, one
Escape white, one H2 blue.
Instead of “Have a blessed day,” the busted
Frialator voice on the other end of the box
tells her “We could use your 5s.” Her yuppie
food coupon (yep, while she's at, she’ll be bringing
that back too) is traversed with creases only
an automatic teller wouldn’t
recognize for the crossroads they are.  

In the rumble and across the delinquent
languor that’s running away with her languishing,
she’s knows there’s weight—it’s named
“Here”—that can’t ever be cut. No bloodless
revitalization in coming in through the slide of that ice
cream door.
“Ma’am, here’s your parfait.” Between
track ballast and shiplap, its better to be licked
than lick. Only strangers haggle after
the window weights, and wonder
if sashes are screwed as soon as
you submit to anachronistic handles.

 

Susan Oliver

I say why not
go down dowsing
for the scent of Mr. Sketch.
Or bars where only
locksmiths can score
VIP access
and the stools run analog,
on square waves.
If punch perms
crowd the negronis
and cut off the floor,
I can always thunder
after shells and coins
long into
the subdivided night.

Because freelancing
at this living is some
tumultuous M.C. Escher
shit. Nineteen-fifty
an hour for light
hexadecimal industry.
Specialization clipped me.
I was once a halftone
butterflied in a newspaper,
sprigs of pigtails sweating
the urge of a reel mower.
My dumb head was some
watermelon of a smile
happy for any rules
in my mom’s one
day at a time game.

I can’t mirror myself
now without waiting,
without buffering, without
A joystick palmful
of athlete’s foot
and the acid that I forget
kills it. The brace
on my wrist is one velcro
ass. Conversion lightning,
since its bottled, shouldn’t
it be recyclable? I even
2-D printed that
blue bin, and it
makes me cry,
like WALL-E.

Subreddit
Boko Haram
or the resurrection
of the streetcar
and earn
the scarlet letter
of my “meh”
hand emoji.
My GIFs loop
for Sour Patch
dweebs, LARPing
pirate hoards and
magnetic lasso tools.
My slimed Ghostbuster
walks right
on peppermint planks
that gush over
licorice traffic.
Is that gratification
an IPA? Thank Friday
its Friday, and I need
my Urkel, but tonight
my tastebuds
are totally burnt.

All week it’s phosphor
blocks and plasma dots:
my kaleidoscope
is the atomic clock
downsizing its gears
in anticipation
of an illicit attention’s
DOA. The requested
file is ready. Used
310 times today, OK;
reposting has no ceiling.
This graphic needs
a video. This Taiwan
needs an error message.
This manga needs
a flipbook and this rollover
needs to work.   

But what say someone
pretends, just for a minute,
that the office everyone
shares isn’t
the everywhere
that’s nowhere
anyone’ll ever be?
I’m going ride pulse
of a different ellipsis and
hit the Staples I hate.
At least they have
end cap displays.

There’s a girl there
deserting her grandmother.
She’s dreaming out loud
in Staples, sing-song
wants and wills
in the dog pound
of Post-It Note selections.
A girl promising herself
her diary and all
the secrets she’ll
keep upside-down
where it locks.

Look at her swish
her cornrows.
around. Look at
the way her tween
belly promotes
her brand
or the hair
budding under
her arm.
Look to be
a sister to her
brash sulk. Look
at her customer
engagement
and look how it’s
so random, a song
so much stronger
for being tuneless
and soft. That girl.
She can’t escape
the Hot 100 air
conditioning, or
the persistent link
between her phone
number and her
Staples coupons,
and she doesn’t know it
and I can barely
compute how
or comprehend
why this wreckage
of easy supplies
wrecks me, but
I’m downwind from
her body butter and
I see that girl
surrounded by the
identical bricks
and default tiles
of her fluorescent spirit
and I see that she’s
a Numanoid, too.

 

ARTIST'S STATEMENT: My concern in these so-called “name poems” (themselves contributing to a longer and still-evolving sequence, tentatively entitled Acrostic Aspic) is with the conditions of celebrity as they are lived by non-celebrities, i.e., “you” and “me.” Or: I suppose these poems are all about minor celebrity, as these titles borrowed from the outer limits of fame suggest. Our subjectivities so often cohere in the back and forth between narratives intensely our own and those widespread narratives with which we cannot help but make contact, or which are in constant contact with us. But the latter narratives are so much more easily represented, not to mention “relatable,” while the former remain largely untranslatable. So this self-exchange can never be equal. Still, people live as they live, and their names mean something to them.

Joe Milazzo is a writer, editor, educator, and designer. He is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie and two collections of poetry: The Habiliments and the forthcoming Of All Places In This Place Of All Places. His writings have appeared in Black ClockBlack Warrior ReviewBOMBPrelude, and elsewhere. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, but his virtual location is www.joe-milazzo.com.

Suedehead by Jared Marcel Pollen

Virgil has me thinking about human energy. The idea comes with its own set of
popular depictions and textbook iconography. At times, it seems simple enough to
describe the achievements of civilization using only things (the hanging gardens, walls
of Troy, lighthouse of Alexandria, a wrecked Carthage winking in the dust)––things
made and used before being gathered up into a spent pile, collected by the currents of
history.


Material metaphors like this help, especially when shuttling above the continents at an
altitude high enough to place human development into abstraction. It is a symptom of
this vantage, I’m convinced; one invariably has to confront how brief and perishable our
creations are. Our plane is a form of this energy. My job encourages me to regard the
livelihood of nations as a material thing, something that can be built up, improved upon,
measured in resources. I am surprising myself with the ambition of these thoughts.

Nine hours ago we left the known world, climbing through the cloudscape in hushed
darkness. We’ve past the last longitudes of the west. I try to think of hemispheres and
numbers, somewhere between 25o and 30o. Numbers help. We took a commercial flight
from New York to London, then London to Kiev. A light aircraft is taking us the rest of
the way. Virgil has been sleeping since take off, cross-strapped in his seat. Even in a
dream state he keeps a bored and slack-shouldered expression, the kind of a young man
who regards his elders as having no inherent wisdom or authority. At twenty-seven, he
is an architectural genius, an energy theorist, one whose designs will change the
industry, the caliber of genius someone like myself has to admire. He holds a degree
from a high-profile west coast school. Berkeley, most likely. I think he holds degrees in
a few other things as well. Being employed by a multinational construction company
means that I travel the globe frequently. This is Virgil’s first time outside of the United
States.

The plane sweeps sideways out of a wide arc, dipping toward the undawned horizon
behind us before adjusting rightly into a descent. We fly over snowpacked steppes and
local fields dotted with copses and wheat bales and then later over an expanse of deep
prussian blue. I scan the sea floor below, the less frozen and half frozen waters
runneling between floes that lie still and fissured like continental shale. Their shape is
that of large irregular things, the kind that doesn’t exist in any smallness of nature.

The pilot lets me sit with him for a while. I enjoy asking him questions about the hull
and the reliability of aerodynamics. I make him get technical. Though I don’t
understand, his ease and fluency of jargon places me in a secure and confident mood.

As we level out I wake Virgil, pulling his shade up, the sun a mute burnt flare against the glass. I spot several bay villages, cool-inlets and cliff faces, white-rigged, down-looking––some red-roofed homes and standing cypresses along the bank. He points out coastlines and mountain ranges and small riverside towns and pronounces them badly, Americanly, making no effort at a foreign intonation. The Slavic tongue is difficult to
put on convincingly. There’s something slightly annoying to the fact that he took the
time to look up these landmarks simply so that he could point them out for the brief
moment when flying over them.

From the ground, the Eurasian steppes appear endless, a terrain everywhere slow to
exposure––so flat you feel that if you stood on a can you could almost catch the earth’s
curve. Virgil applies his jacket with a choreographed flourish, a dramatic move suitable
for a dress rehearsal or a performance of war. In his blue jeans and basketweave blazer
he looks as lean and top-heavy as a toothbrush. The outfit matches a photo I saw in his
wallet the day we met, cut from a magazine, a young man in grayscale, leaning on a
shop window, smoking a cigarette and starring off at something the camera can’t see.
The image held a curious warmth. He seems to wear the same expression waiting on the
runway.


Olga is our driver for the weekend, a woman of middle-ish age with soft freckled
features and a limp on her left leg. She greets us each by name. She pronounces Virgil’s
with a rolled V, summoning its ancient texture. I say his name as much as I can––it has
an old-world authority to it that I enjoy, and when matched with his upbringing as a boy
from rural Illinois it takes on an especially American ethos. It sounds like the name of
an early president, a conqueror, a name of revolution and empire. Because it is evening
in Odessa we won’t be able to drive out to the site until early tomorrow morning. Olga
loads our bags into the van, doing so with a grace and dignified struggle that seems at
once to exemplify the hardship and perseverance of all eastern European life.


On the way to the hotel I make benign comments about the weather. It’s not even
supposed to snow here, I say. I try to keep the conversation pedestrian with him, discuss
the news and current events––enough to show him I that I know but without getting too
politic. When we first met he spoke about things like “productive capacity” and
“enclosure.” Yesterday we got into an argument about austerity measures that I was
unfit for. It is difficult when the knowledge of someone so young has already outraced
you. He is a product of the academic module. I resent his accelerated intelligence and
the quickness of his world experience.


We pass squat concrete bungalows and mortar sheds and empty plots and nameless
fenced compounds stockpiled with industrial tubing; yellow flags line the roadside at
odd places along the gulch, suggesting underground work. At the hotel we stick to our
rooms, which are connected by a set of French doors. I review contracts and shop
drawings and keep the television at a moderate volume. I always request a room on a
high floor. One of my favorite things to do when I travel is order food service and eat in
front of the window. Odessa is one of the few cities within the region that remains
untouched by Soviet aesthetics––no mark of forced living or brutal futurism. Its
character is far more Mediterranean: pastel tones and stucco facades, campaniles and
baroque public offices, the Potemkin steps, and a lighthouse fixed to a long breakwater
arm that swings out into a clean dark bay.


Three hours later Virgil calls me.
“Do you feel it yet?” he says.
“What?”
“It’s like homesickness, except its not homesickness, it’s something else.”

“You mean have I felt it before, or if I feel it now?”
“Maybe. It’s here though. I first felt it on the plane. It’s written into everything. In the
streets, in the smell of these rooms. Does your room smell weird too?”


His voice over the receiver sounds like an echo chamber, disembodied and decayed.
There was a proximity to the sound. He was calling from his side of the room. I put
down the phone and listen to him speaking through the wall.


“Its like the feeling you have after getting something you’ve wanted for a really long
time. I remember when I was eleven I wanted this stunt bike––wanted it desperately,
yearningly. I pushed everything else away. It seemed to be the only thing I was working
towards that whole year. On Christmas day I rode it around the neighborhood in my
pajamas as the snow came down. The joy of this consummating experience was
obvious, but there was an emotional undercurrent to it unknown to me then, one of
sudden loss. It was a celebration that concealed a deeper, frustrated longing.”


I picture him on the bike, cruising through wide Midwestern suburbs in long johns and
a coat bearing the name of some Chicago sports team, passing old men leaning over
shovels and windows lit by single artificial candles. The image itself seemed to describe
a kind of sadness.

“That is the only thing comparable I can come up with. It’s like that feeling.”

In our rooms we review bids and site plans and shop drawings and go over the budget.
I will submit my estimates at the end of the week. An architect’s attendance is not
mandatory for on-site inspection. Virgil has come to see the thing he’d sketched in
pencil being raised to a physical reality. He crawls around on his hands and knees,
unfurling tubes of grid paper and then standing on the bed to take an overview of them.
He wears a maroon polo that bears the insignia of a laurel wreath over his right breast;
its gold stitching occasionally catches the lamplight and flares. I use it as an occasion
for conversation, noting its rich history of contest and adversity and success, how it was
worn by emperors and olympians in moments of triumph. The Latin origin of the sign,
he tells me, means victory. I take his word for it because it feels intuitively true.

The building we are inspecting will be the home of TerraCaptial, one of the many
asset management operations currently being established across the region. I envy the
complexity and density of knowledge required for understanding world markets. I know
that Virgil knows, but I have never asked him to explain any of it to me. TerraCapital
has a contracting history with the parent company that owns SENICA, the British
multinational construction agency I represent. Virgil’s design was chosen for its
efficiency and sustainable features. It was decided early in the drafting stage that the
Ukrainians would provide the bulk of the labor, and that most of the crude materials will
be shipped in by train from Russia to reduce costs.

Virgil has noted how corruption is being monitored in other firms throughout the
region. Last year, a French investment company recently installed in Moscow was
deemed a threat to the domestic market and national security, with two separate chief
officers being imprisoned for an unspecified fraudulence. One of them died
mysteriously in prison a week before his trial.


“Old KGB practices are still very much in effect,” he says. “The Federal Security
Agency probably already has TerraCapital on their list. They could be watching us
already.”

Virgil talks about how the eastern republics are handling independence.
“Do you think people here are happier now than they were before the end of the war?”
I ignore this. I try not to give too much attention to what he says. Statements like this
have a way of amounting to nothing.
“You should ask the people,” I tell him. “Go down to the lobby. Knock on doors.
Conduct a survey here in the hotel.”
“Like, in a way our uncertainty about the war became in itself a kind of stability. It
organized us. We understood the pressures and demands and found out how to handle
them, and where and how to direct our attention.”


I try to observe the boundaries of a professional relationship during our time together.
I try not to learn too much about his life or his opinions outside of work, or at least give
off the impression that I don’t wish to know too much. I respect decorum and the
pleasure of distance. And it is for precisely this reason that his candor bothers me. On
the day we met he asked how old my children were.
“Twenty-three and twenty-nine,” I told him. “I think the oldest is twenty-nine.”
“So, they’re old enough that they’ll be able to remember, then” he said, letting this
stand. What was this supposed to mean? I resented the abruptness of this remark and his
refusal to explain himself further.


The way he speaks suggests a need for friction, or discord, as if he desires it on some
existential level. I don’t think of my life as being informed by such needs. The events
that make up my work and life are sufficient. I’m happy with this. That’s the point, I tell
him. He stands on his bed, unmoving. He has been in this position for the last hour,
reading and eating protein bars.


“Some would find such happiness oppressive,” he says, not looking up.


Remarks like this assume a familiarity that can’t be said to exist between us. This is
the first and only project we will work on together. I will never see him again after this
weekend. I don’t want to get to know him in this way. I steer clear of the intimate
thoughts of men in contemplative moments. I stick to figures and math and maps––
concrete things. The building’s cylindrical shape will reduce the wind load on the
structure and provide a natural ventilation system. The decision to place the stairwell in
the center around the bank elevators will maximize space on each floor and provide
greater accessibility from level to level. The greenhouse we will install in the roof will
reduce the total electrical costs of the building by thirty-five percent. There is an
emphasis on efficiency and the solidity of physics in construction. These things make
one feel stable because they don’t require higher flourishes of speculation or
abstraction. They can be sorted out and executed in front of your eyes.


In the morning we drive out to the project site. I found Virgil on one of the couches in
the lounge area, watching the house TV; he had spent all night in the lobby, probably
falling in and out of sleep. I chalk this up to the six hour difference between Odessa and
New York. I also find it difficult to sleep in hotel rooms, regardless of time change. I let
him know I have pills.

In the car he says, “I feel fine.”


We stop at a set of railroad tracks on the far side of town. The train looks pre-war and
is tagged with slogans in a quick Ukrainian scrawl, their messages unknown to the both
of us. I consider asking Olga to translate them. Materials being shipped in and unloaded
excites me––watching a line of linked flatbed cars carrying coils of steel, lumber and
metal crossbeams, and knowing these things will be handled and put to use.
Virgil stares at the rolling cars.
“Human energy,” I say.
“Means of subsistence,” he says.

We stand at the base of the hollowed substructure, circuits of rebar and trellised steel
surround crossbeams and rising concrete monoliths. Virgil holds open a folio of
sketches, occasionally raising his gaze to the unmade landscape with a closed eye, as if
attempting to find a pure angle, or maybe overlaying the scene with a mental blueprint
that gives shape and form and substance to its surroundings. The facade has a fractal
grid design––triangular panels interlocking between ribbons of extruded aluminum. He
conceived the building to have a series of airshafts to create a double-glaze insulation,
together with a system of lightwells in hexagonal formation. At its completion it will
resemble a spiraling glass column that narrows at the top into a bottlenose vault. The
style recalls the work of Buckminster Fuller, the great architect and energy theorist of
the twentieth century.


He seems genuinely pleased by this. It is the first recorded moment of joy on this trip. He asks me to take a picture. I photograph him head on, from the breast up, against the southward wall. From this angle he somewhat resembles a bust sculpture, high- shouldered, a stern but languid and dead-eyed stare with features hard and clean as marble.

Something in his captured expression is disquieting. It is the look of a man who
still has everything ahead of him––the look of someone with no history because they are
too young to have a past.

It has been long enough now that we begin to find ourselves nostalgic for how things
were before the fall in Berlin, but also for the fall itself––all its dramatic pathos and
grandeur and shared elation and sense of a mutual perseverance. No doubt Virgil had
seen the wall come down. He had most likely watched it on TV and seen the same
spectacle as the rest of the world––the candlelight processions and song circles and the
men beating their chisels in incantation and the old women lifted out of her wheelchair
up onto the rampart and that kid of about his age who swung that first sledgehammer
blow to the graffitibombed barricade. I’m convinced the sudden affinity for these
images is not my own. I’m convinced Virgil gave them to me.

The financial district has a holiday silence. On the street, people pass around the
perimeter fence, occasionally looking through slats in the woodwork. Above us hang
windlasses and support towers, derricks and winches crosshatching a low sky. I take an
earth sample for myself, loosening the packed dirt with my heel and scraping it into a
tuna can. I like to collect foundational soil from the different places in the world where
I’ve overseen operations.

“She has a club foot,” Virgil says.

“Who?”
“Our driver. She was deep in snow when we first met her so I couldn’t tell. But I saw
her in the hotel lobby this morning––she took her boot off and was rubbing it.”
“And you say it was clubbed?”
“It didn’t look like a club. It was more gnarled and in-turned, like a claw.”
“And she was rubbing it––in front of everyone?”
“It must get sore, like any other kind of deformity. The cold can aggravate a bad knee,
why not a disfigured foot?”
“I wonder how it happened.”
“Maybe it’s a product of years of nuclear tests––radioactivity. Or something more
sinister.”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it so implausible? Consider the U.S.S.R.’s human rights record. Stalin killed over a
million Ukrainians in the course of one winter.”
“I can believe it. Whether or not it’s true.”


He enjoys this––an occasion to smash my unwitting. A quiet smile draws parallel to
his jaw line, suggesting he is rehearsing some inner monologue, gathering facts and
people’s names for a measured and concise blow. In moments like this, I suspect he is
judging me.


“I’m saying it’s a possibility,” he says. “Consider the ream of experiments the Soviets
practiced on their own people––they built fission reactors close to towns to see how
much radiation people could withstand, they inoculated people with chemical cocktails
to catalogue potential physical advantages and disadvantages, fed them vernalized crop and then starved them to see how long they could go without food. The isotopic decay in the soil beneath this site alone probably has another hundred years before it’s no longer hazardous. For all we know there could mass graves somewhere around this very
city.”

His pace became somewhat impatient, trailing off. He appeared disappointment by this stockpile of violations, as if he had never placed them in such close and rapid arrangement.
“Or it’s the opposite. Maybe it’s a put on and she’s a spy,” I say, feeding his desire for
espionage and intrigue.
“Maybe.”

We discuss concepts and toss around terminology. Architecture has contributed a more
luscious vocabulary to the English language than any other discipline. I want an excuse
to speak the words aloud: crenellation, cupola, cantilever, shell structure, tensile
membrane. Our job in the time we are here is to make civilization more beautiful, I tell
him. He seems not to hear this.
“Superstructure,” he says finally. He builds a silence around the word, as if forcing me
to contemplate it.
“Creativity,” he continues, “artistic expression, family, spirituality: the value we give
to these things rests upon a foundation of labor and raw materials; without which, they
wouldn’t have the meaning for us that they do. A painting is the product of a cultural
surplus. But architecture is the one and only area of civilization where beauty and
production can become the same thing.” In moments like this his voice seems to take on
a trans-Atlantic timbre, like the quasi-British lilt affected by movie stars in the cinema
of the forties and fifties.

We analyze our shop drawings, comparing them with what is before us. Watching a
crude schematic take on real geometric form in three dimensions yields an unspeakable
elation. Zone 6, I say to myself, locating it on the map. “Zone 6,” I say, pointing it out
in front of us. The building will be a welcome addition to the cityscape; its futuristic
design will look good against its neoclassical surroundings.
I’m convinced we are doing a good thing.
Virgil doesn’t have to be here. This makes me think that his attendance is to share this
same rapture. It is one that never gets old. I suspect he quietly feels it in the same way I
do. I never speak these feelings to him.
“Does this job ever fill you with a sense of optimism?” he says.
“Yes.”
“Seeing buildings go up. Knowing people will work, perform tasks inside them.”
“Good to see cranes in the sky, yes.”
“And having made something, help produce the conditions for future human
interaction.”
“Yes.”
“And do you at times feel the distress of this––of not knowing where, or to what end
your efforts and this sense of optimism is being directed?”
“I don’t think in such terms.”


“But it’s more than that. See, it’s a grand and reaching optimism, one that guards us
against despair, despair about the future. We hope for the best, sure, but in doing so we
are secretly and painfully aware of the fact that we feel this way because we have to,
because it is the only positive response we have. It is an attitude we put in place because
we can’t commit to the gravity of our apprehension. That’s why people take to making
jokes at funerals. It is the way we choose to deal with the end of things.”

Perhaps it is because of his midwestern upbringing that he developed a fancy for
architecture. Hours of flat fields and split-level homes and open quartered spaces must
make the simplest pleasure of a tall building into an elaborate fantasy––a fantasy of
power, of big decisions and important people, of global politics and international
commerce. He is from a part of America where such phenomena feel far removed from
the experiences of the everyday. Buildings are in many ways the simplest expressions of
our desires––demonstrative, theatric, attention-seeking, a management of time and
space; they are the first things by which we judge a place we’ve never been to, and they
are the first things to be torn down when wishing to illustrate an opposing desire.

I imagine Virgil crouching under a small steel desk, fetal curled, hands strapped to his
head, the sound of a township doomsday siren and a teacher’s slow guiding gestures. He
never lived through the bomb drills. He never saw the campaign ad of a little girl on a
hillock tearing petals off a gladiolus, waiting to be a noiseless casualty, or heard the
news broadcasts that filled each living room on each hollow evening. It only takes a
moment to recall decades-full of possessed desire and global organization, every success and failure, every intelligent and counter-intelligent maneuver, every treaty, alliance and levering act, every DEW line operator, every transmission and foot of data that could circle the planet; every demonstration and BAN THE BOMB rally, every
tapping and surveillance, every warehouse stockpiled with unused weaponry, every development of physics and its pseudo-scientific offshoots––vaccination scares, fluoride spikes, ape-men super species, miracle crops––the war rooms and underground meetings, the abandoned supercollider beneath Waxahachie, every astronaut and
satellite launch, every gallon of napalm, every Hollywood film and comic book and stand-up comedian, every pathetic speech and late-night prayer, every paranoid fabulist and national fantasy, every angry anthem and longhaired child and apocalyptic couple, every project and collective human exertion gathered together into the stream of this
shared experience. We can forget about these things now because our efforts are spent in new places.

I hand him the polaroid. He opens his wallet and places it next to the black and white
photograph of the man in identical costume, the same I had seen the day we met. I ask
about the ubiquity of this image, what function it serves in his life.
“It gives me a sense of closeness his says. Like the feeling of being home.”
I look at the boots and the blue jeans and the basketweave blazer on the man in the
photograph and then on the man in front of me. The style of dress was popular among a
group of kids I went to school with in London in the 70s.
“They travelled in packs, like a gang,” I tell him. “We called them suedeheads.”


After our inspection Virgil has Olga drive us thirty miles outside of the city proper. He
leans over the center console, speaking to her in the few phatic phrases he’s picked up
since arriving.
“It’s a park. I looked it up before we left,” he says. “I need to see it.”
We break from the highway and follow a slip road through woodshed hamlets and a
small town built up around a single gas station. Curtains of snow drift across the plain,
layered and dense and settling deep into the bluegrey middle distance of late afternoon.
I try to imagine this landscape in a more idyllic form, in the summertime, fields five feet
tall and packed with waves of wheat, setting a golden edge against an aquamarine sky. I
feel somewhat robbed of this experience.

Virgil stands face to face with the sidelong gaze of Lenin’s head, quarter sunk in the
snow, the face bearing a smashed-in nose and veincracks and scuffs around the skull. It
is an elegant carving, authoritative and omnipresent. It lies among the others. The whole
field is a wreckage of propaganda, statues and symbolism, and it is easy to take the sight
on purely material terms, as spent human energy. I ask Virgil why he thinks they are
doomed to exist in such degraded form, as obsolete expression, when they could just as
easily be discarded to a sea-bottom, or perhaps they’re awaiting some new usage––to be
broken down and made into gravel or foundation. What becomes of monuments when
they are no longer useful as waste?


He doesn’t ask for a polaroid this time.


Around us lay half-broken stars and divorced sickles, coats of arms, lopsided effigies,
the image of “the great leader” streaked across the mouth with white paint. The collection seemed like it could be taken as both a failure and a success, holding every projection of hope and grief and all manner of pride and wishful thinking, together with a tender sense of loss.


“These are the discarded monuments among monuments,” he explains. “There is a
garden in Moscow dedicated specifically to this stuff. It’s a tourist attraction now. These
are the ones that didn’t make it. They weren’t exemplary enough to enter into nostalgia
or ceremonial kitsch.”
These parks are a form of longing. Virgil’s clothes are a form of longing.

“We are the last men of history,” he says at last. “You’ve felt it. You’ve experienced
time as an authentic human desire, a material force, an engine of emotion. Your children
felt the last of it. If they’re lucky they’ll retain it. My children won’t. They will live in a
hollow, homogenized time. In the future, past conflicts will be revisited as memorial
relics, like going through a box of photographs of your great grandparents––people
whose situation and fears and longings remain unknown to you.”


I let him continue.


“And the power that these obsolete days will retain is in their aesthetic appeal. When
we are incapable of understanding how things really were, we pile them up by way of
images and referential expressions.”

Virgil offers to take my picture. There is an earnestness to his request. I sense it is not
an activity. In front of us is a patinated monument depicting the glory of the red army;
on its pedestal, a woman in flowing ancient garb, bearing a torch in hand, and inset in the base the image of leaning snowbound soldiers, both vandalized in the republican
tricolor.
He instructs me to stand by the inscription.
“It’s important that it be you,” he says.
I ask him why.
“I need to put a human face to this. And it has to be yours.”
“You want my face, as if you understand anything about me. You stand there!” I put
my finger to the insignia on his right breast.
“It’s your place.”
“You think you know?” I say, ripping the camera from him. “You think you know?”
“Let’s not do this. To be in conflict doesn’t make sense anymore.”
I give the camera back to him and walk over to the base. It seems inappropriate to
smile. I have no wish to keep the picture. I’m happy to let him have it so that he can
receive whatever satisfaction from it he seeks. It seems more important that it be me he
sees when he looks at it, years from now, instead of his own image, with those sad and
still features retained in youth––the marble face and high cheek bones, the dark coiffed
hair pulled elegantly back, the big hands hung on boney wrists, the hunched longish
frame. He doesn’t belong in such a picture. Virgil’s photo already exists, one of a man
from a different kind of world, one he’ll never understand.

On our way back we pass the project site one more time, the low-hanging structure
shadowed and sleeping. Tomorrow it will be higher. It is not yet realized, ready, able to
be worked within. To a passerby, it would still appear an unfinished mass of engineering and crude resource, a display of human energy, easily mistaken for a
rubbish heap.

Virgil had found some sort of end-line in its construction, as if it represented the
realization of a millennia’s worth of progress, discarded systems and failed theologies––
one that required some essential change in nature that would enable us to look beyond
into the clear in order to achieve it. To turn an idea into a universal human truth is a
need we are often unprepared for, full of mourning and pain of growth; at least this is
what I see as I watch him watch a plane climb into a patch of sky above the cityscape
before banking left over the highway lights and stretching far out of sight, somewhere
west.


“I’m going to miss it,” he says.


I’m going to miss it.

***

Jared Marcel Pollen was born in Canada, educated at Sarah Lawrence College in NY and now lives in Prague. His fiction and non-fiction has appeared in The Millions, Open Letters Monthly, 3:AM, and Eternal Remedy, among others. He has also recently completed his first novel.