by Sparkleface
by Paula Gilovich
Pictured: Jamie Gaughran-Perez
Enter 27 high school wrestlers.
They will stand against a flattened bleacher. It will be
the beginning of the year, and time to take a picture.
And they will photograph the beginning of year as if
it is the end of year. Coaches will remain
on the side in regular outfits. Their faces
will appear as if they have snuck into the scene.
The boys will be tight or loose in their jumpers, depending
on their luck. They will line up, kneel, make masculine their
faces, their weak shoulders, their hands on knees.
They will invariably have problems.
Things like desperate thoughts against becoming men.
Things like feelings people have told them they feel and they do not.
Things like all their wants that they will not.
Things like all that wrestling teaches them to love that they cannot.
Even when your body lives what you want it to, make sure to keep it far from mind.
Swing into sanctity. Fall into sanctity. Hold someone you don’t know from behind
in competition.
They will falter, make feminine moves, and they will scold themselves
until they drink until they puke on Friday night.
Whatever you can’t remember must be good.
Spotlight on the boy down left. He will be the example.
The truest form, the nearly Adam, the country and
the quest for something god in man.
The boy will stare into the camera light
as if it is the sun and promise to become president.
In a dirty state of mind he will promise to be cleaner,
better. The devil will get pinned; he cannot win.
The boy is a very good wrestler.
All the boys exit, except this one.
This is where our greatest tasks are at hand.
With no one to wrestle.
by Melissa Walker
Pictured: Paula Gilovich
At the place where muck grows on the edge of the lake, the bullfrogs used to croak long low planks of sounds, where now a tadpole may swim by, fat body trailing legs like weak twigs in the water, at the edge of the algae smell is a memory you can never quite get to. A thousand million stars above you, the bikes you never brought, your mom’s best friend’s boyfriend in his trucker’s hat. A roadie, you heard. Your dad who knows where. Just the kids and the moms and the boyfriend. No dogs, no cats no dads. The three girls two boys, and only one pair of each really had anything to say to each other. The others nothing except to say, ketchup please. Or just a strong swift smack on the back of his head, the stun, the silence inside and the look on his face when he turned around. Saving it up, he was saving it up to spend some day in another store where it wouldn’t cost him so much. You caught ten thousand million tadpoles that year. Became brave enough to just catch them with your hands in the water, you reached for their soft slimy skin. It was hard to believe they wouldn’t last and someday they wouldn’t live at all. So you caught them but then there was nothing to do with them, just hold them in a jar, till you hear your mom or the best friend yelling each kid’s name in a list. Hot dogs for dinner. Then may as well let the tadpoles go. Nothing to do with them anyway.
Writing by Catherine Maskill
Pictured: Martin Wall
Whiskey and old
tobacco meet lavender
perfume and the stench
of the disinfectant bowl.
Heavy sea green, pea green
curtains ('the owl and the pussycat
went to sea') thick with dust,
invisible but for beams of sunlight,
which illuminate the mass of debris
floating in the room.
He tells you,
"it's all dead skin".
You don't believe him.
"All dust is dead skin", he says.
You slam your hands
over your mouth.
He laughs so hard
that he needs the oxygen.
Afterwards, you wonder if
he is choking
on all the dead skin.
He assures you he isn't.
You breathe it in, moving
your mouth like a fish.
You feel heavier with every breath.
'They' take an x-ray of his tired, full lungs
whilst early morning
condensation snakes a path
down the grimy glass.
In some places, the stained lace
curtain clings to the window.
Writing by J. A. Tyler
Pictured: John Heckman Wright
Visible me, tap tap dancing, a smile on my face face. Glasses on my face face. Dark glasses making of the world a balled shadow, a fist. Us going away, the drop. You. Because there is a leg gone missing and no one laughs. Where is the thing that we had, your face erased by my face, your head consumed by my thinking. My feet tap tap dancing. My angel smile. My choking up face with kid cheeks and the hair bowl-cut and my hands magic filled. Us and our two kinds of red, and I have already taken your limbs. No one laughing when you try to ask when do we start recording and your face is half gone and it is a picture and not a camcorder. There is no recording. Jump they say jump up and dance and I do, my feet tap tap dancing on this rug that is a mute, my neck a swan, your body disintegrating. Because you stood behind all the things I was thinking and now you are only a portion of jaw. You will be the one losing your face. And I will be tap tap tap-dancing like gravestone beautiful tones, the tangle of people disappearing, the playful bodies that overtake you, the disappearing act. Our invisible, only one leg left to tap tap dance on the bones of them who still exist. Hallelujah. They clever joke and split your clenched face. Hallelujah. No one is laughing. Put the table cloth over your face and sleep. Sleep. We will hear voices and they will be asking us questions. I have the answers. You can sleep. Sleep. Me tap tap dancing. My face face face. Your face gone. My feet feet tap tap dancing. The jump as they say jump, because I will be the one who flies away, I will be the one they say visible to, I am the one they are asking questions of. Dark dark and these glasses. My face face. Feet tap tap tap. They are not laughing, Hallelujah. They get it. Letting go of these invisible hands, so hard. This visible me.
Writing by Justin Rands
Pictured: J. A. Tyler (the one crying on the right)
I’m still lost in the dream last night.
I can’t feel my face.
Something’s changed in me.
I was stuck on the boat with my father and sharks were everywhere.
My father stared off into space and steered and didn’t pay attention to them, or me.
He was lost, and we were lost at sea, with nothing in sight but the water and our death. But he wasn’t moving.
He stood there, one hand steering, the other hanging limply at his side.
His light khakis stretched out with his foot up on the side of the metal pole lining the boat.
Thick beard, scraggly, not trimmed.
Intimidating.
No lifejacket.
I wondered who he was.
My yellow lifejacket was a bit too big for me and I kept pulling it down around my head and shoulders to keep it in place.
I held onto it for dear life.
I could see the sharks.
They were everywhere.
Leaping out of the water sometimes, their gigantic bodies flailing in the sky.
I could hear them whispering.
I cannot speak.
Only think.
I can feel the clouds pressing against my face.
I know I am too small to do anything for myself yet.
I am curious how much longer this can go on.
How we can survive.
I finally started to feel fear.
I finally started to feel weak.
I wonder if this feeling ends, or how I can control it.
My name, what is my name.
It is loud.
Yelling.
I am back here, in this place.
This place is so strange.
Everything is so strange.
I can still hear the whispers.
Why do I have this hat on?
Where am I?
Oh God….
Writing by John Heckman Wright
Pictured: Justin Rands
Over here son. Now smile. But you never do. Just that smirk that seems wiser than you are. How much can you know already?
Someday you will wear a shirt like mine every day, then it won't be special like it is today. Someday when your arms are long and your chest broad, you may not even fit in a shirt like this. You have your mother's features, not mine.
You want to wear the shirt now, you say "Dad can I put it on again?" in your socked feet outside the bathroom in the morning. So I let you put it on. You wear it all day until your mother makes you come inside and put something else on. She's worried that you'll stain all of my shirts. I don't care.
The shirts are not to be celebrated--they're uniforms we grown men wear as we drive to our jobs in the city and back to our homes in the suburbs. We're all playing make believe, son.
My father fought in the War to End All Wars. He killed eight men in the South Pacific. He said "It isn't hard to kill somebody. You just pull a trigger. The hard thing is to live with it." He never talked about the war more than that. You never met him but he was a good man. He didn't talk much, so I don't know all of his stories. When I'm gone, will my ghost remember all the stories I should have told you? Will there be anything in my life worth telling?
My old man risked his life in the War to End All Wars. I work in an office park.
This is the world my father left me. What world am I leaving you, son. What will you be when it's time to wear a white shirt, just like all the other drones, out into the world we call "real." Is there a world for you beyond office parks and war?
Writing by H. V. Cramond
Pictured: Susan Ortha's son
Bury your corn feral
so big hands can never invade,
grabbing stripes and threatening kindergarten.
Cover with corpses of de-stuffed bears,
cavities inverted, fluffing scraped away
floating on warmer breezes.
Add stolen Skipper heads
that refuse to rot
even when Fall comes.
In your third arm, a sword, stirring.
Visit on second Tuesdays, reverently,
dropping tears to knees, diving under
because even your furry, talking fellows
have left you for someone who can see better.
What grows after will be all yours.
Writing by Jamie Gaughran-Perez
Pictured: Melissa Walker
Weak chin, strong nose.
Strong chin, weak nose.
Strong chin, strong nose.
Belly before and after.
Lips before and after.
Breasts before and after.
We go to school, and the prom. We get taller and an apartment or busy or more. There is a lot of buying involved. There is a lot of eating. What would Calvin say?
She’s looking forward and casts a shadow and it is all flat.
There is fading, but further fading halted by contemporary translation. We will find something has been lost. We will keep translating. We will find something that defies gravity. It is beautiful and it is captured and it is also flat.
She’ll wrap the memory in caul fat and fry it.
xoxo
Writing by Sean Lovelace
Pictured: Amanda Marbais
West Tallahassee Community College page 3
Instructor Fleck, PhD.
Art 108 Midterm Exam
22.) Define the term juxtaposition:
You throe one thing than another you end up with a third lose thing that is different that the first two things once the right time passes. Like when I make beer at the house.
23.) Define the term perspective.
I remember I guess I was 12 and my first remington and it said the little book their to clan the gun that the gun was packed in shipping grease and oil clean it good before you go hunting I took it to my grandpa and I say grandpa how do I do this I don’t know much I am 12 to and he put his cigar down and took my remington and walked outside and shot it right up in the air I mean both barells loud and he handed it back to me and said Boy, that’s how you clean a damn shotgun.
· Using the theoretical concepts and vocabulary we have discussed to this point, briefly comment on the four images below. Please be sure to address perspective, iconography, and juxtaposition.
24.) “Sunday B Morning” by Andy Warhol
That is a can of tomato soup. I told you everybody I know eats ketchup sandwiches has that can of soup in their pantree and you said that’s the point exactly that was my favrite class Ok.
25.) “Hard Teachings” by Sven Pheers .
That there a picture a Hummer truck with one of them Jesus fishes on the back. That’s a nice truck. Good winch to.
26.) “Monogram” by Robert Rauschenberg.
A tire stick on a goat. I have seen goats do worst things. We own goats so I can answer this one easy. A goat always wants to go up higher. Our goats always stand on cars and one time we found one on the roof. It clumb up the truck onto the cab then jump onto the roof I guess. We could not get him down so grandpa shot it with a rifle. We cooked it hole in the ground like the Mexicans. That was first time I seen my grandpa fall. He fell after he shot the goat. It scared me OK.
27.) “Sunday Girl” by Robert S. Fleck.
You did this photo? That is cool I didn’t even know you were a big artest. That is Britney Barnes if you want to know her names. I seen her in those same boots. We were all over there fooling around with her mom and drinking beer and Britney spent the whole time out on the front porch. She always stays out there waiting. Then her mom had enough and walked out there in her underwear (she looks awesome in her bra and panties I don’t care she is 30) and she said Britney! Let me tell you something. Your dad was a sons a bitch and he ain’t never coming back! And those ain’t even his boots. Not even near so.
That’s all I know on that photo I mean my perspctive. I am done.
Writing by Amanda Marbais
Pictured: Aden Lovelace, standing in for his dad, Sean Lovelace
Lucas and Jill had been set up but were unsure about the conversation they would have on the drive. Their date destination was a campground-cookout with mutual college friends. Jill had nothing else going on. Lucas thought she was hot. He picked her up at seven, and launched into the strained conversation typical of both new love and transgressive roadside meetings. Jill tried to break the tension with the introduction of a new pack of Altoids.
They drove fast and she expected talk of cars, raucous beer bashes, and guns. Weren’t down-home men a little bad ass and sweet? She was sort of embarrassed she thought this. Absently, she remembered her DVD of True Blood and her couch.
An hour into the drive, she said, “Beards feel nice.” And she felt weird for saying it. She was thinking of beards, down-home, pancakes, plaid blankets, and rugs by the fire. Perhaps the potential sexiness of wild—untamed wilderness was in her head.
Lucas touched his beard, but did not comment. Instead, he said, “Do you like Fraggles?” The reference seemed to come out of nowhere, but still it put her at ease.
She leaned back, feeling a speed of eighty miles an hour in a Lynchian light. She said “Mmmhhmm”, in a slow way, as if enjoying something like a Golden Delicious Apple. Then she realized her sultriness and felt more awkward. “Fraggles are great,” she said.
He said nothing and the loud car suddenly seemed crowded and pinto-like, the road similar to a blue-screen in a B-movie. She resisted their sexual tension and got lost in cheesy puffs, Grandma’s rocker and its ugly billow of boat-patterned upholstry, the way Nips-the-Dog barked in happiness when she carried Beggin’ Strips. She thought of Fraggles—and the innocuous nature of animals and puppets. Their creepiness. Their autonomy. She struggled for something to preserve the conversation. And, she stopped repeating the mantra—I will not be setup again.
He asked her if she would drive. She realized she had nothing else to say, and she settled into the murkiness of her Cincinnati-childhood and floated there thinking of leap years and her Mom’s delivery of her brother. He offered her gum, turned on Sufjan Stevens, hummed and at times he pointed out the beauty of the highway drive.
Writing by Erin Teegarden
Pictured: Evelyn Hampton
the baby rats dart
in between the tracks
the gnats flitter and snap
against the overhead light
and a boy in a bandana hangs
his legs off the platform ledge
and smokes a cool cigarette…
bulbs on a scrolling banner
flash facts: time, date, weather
and phrases like “united
we stand” -- and we stand
clustered below a lit word,
a verb, present tense: CHASE
which is the name of a bank
and also what we do for money.
and tonight i miss someone’s
self-loving hands. tonight i want
to digitally re-master the sound
of crickets beneath everything.
i want to see past the shadow
of my own experience. i don’t want
to be a woman alone, half-stoned
waiting for the red line train home;
i want to burrow back to the squeaky
clean placemats once laid before me.
i want to forget i know how to pose
for a camera flash, forget i know how
to give thanks for all the things
i’m thankful for. i want to remember
being a girl in a pink party dress, a girl
still mastering the teacup grasp,
a girl positioned before the ferns,
before the sunlit window; i want
to be a girl again --small, tended,
miraculous and fascinating; i
want a wide-eyed hand clap
a generous helping --
i want a reason to be recorded,
a reason for recording.
*Poem 321, Emily Dickinson
Writing by Evelyn Hampton
Pictured: Erin Teegarden
Some haircuts are red rooms. You walk around them feeling heavy in your blood. You are in love and you are nobody. Nobody could love you because nobody knows you. Not even the red room knows that you are you. You lie down in the red room and the red room does nothing to have you.
Some haircuts are wolverine kits. They wake up next to you blinking. There are pine needles in them and places where you could sit by a fire. You know that one day they will be too terrible to sleep next to, but for now they are just the soft parts of the forest.
Some haircuts are animations. They ride on motorcycles and get run over. Even smashed on the road they lie like someone has painstakingly drawn them on a computer.
Some haircuts cling to hulls and rocks and bulwarks. They are curl-footed and sessile feeders. With their one eye they live within a calcareous shell and have no true heart.
Some haircuts are just haircuts. They shuffle around in the wind. Their hairs break off one by one, becoming lost in the city.
Some haircuts are a madness, a green scream. They shout, Euphoria and corpses!
Some haircuts are making money. Each has a brain that's racing. The brain's thoughts are like circuits being stamped by a machine. Each hair is connected to a circuit. Inside the brain the hairs are terribly tangled.
Some haircuts are people. They are a little nothing with sky in it, then a cloud, then sky again.
Writing by Sam Pink
Pictured: Christopher Higgs
haha yes ok. i have control over my life in small segments and in between i'm the same thing as a housefly leaving the deepest moon crater to come back home. my dad yells at me after my soccer games because i am a failure and when i get home i pour the water in my water bottle onto some grass because the grass deserves it more than i do. and haha yes ok. yes ok i get braces put on my teeth and take them off and connect them from the tops of my eye sockets to the bottoms and pretty soon the socket holes will be pulled shut. good god it's good to be a slow motion wincer in times when i take my first push out of the deepest moon crater to come back home. yes ok haha how does it feel to be one of the nearly invisible hairs on your back when it gets drowned by my mouth. i bet your tailbone has static at the end of it when this happens. haha yes look at me i have the same haircut as the oldest child on HOME IMPROVEMENT and guess what, i hide a picture of myself in my shinguards good god it's good to be nearly invisible by now. guess what while i was bagging groceries today i almost startled myself with laughter when i went to put a wine bottle in the cutomer's bag and had a nearly irreversible urge to assail the customers child with it. i hear 'BOOM' in my head but haha yes ok guess what that is how i will live and getting through it isn't even a concern. haha yep.
Writing by Christopher Higgs
Pictured: Sam Pink
We seashell seaviolent images reach tiny tendrils to tranquilate tiny human tiny humanity finding humanity tiny and tranquil. Such grotesquery in the seafoam of seadreams and seachanting.
Little fucking humanities, little fucking fivefingerfivetoe monstrosities. How urgent we need to come apocalypse. How urent. How urrrghent, these little whiteskinned organsacks need bludgeoning.
Rumors elongate the livingspace, we seaviolent sandharpies exclamate: eyesockets and mouthsocket blackcavern like mossyside and hygiene the index of afterlife for indexing the mossyside.
Repeat the masterplan, the Master’s plan, the plan to end humanity. First by destroying sandcastles and popsicles and chocolatecookies and sunnydays and family outings and happyways and the most ultimate homosapienugliness: smiling! smiling! Smiling must go, must exit, must soon be eradicated.
These happyfaced trolls lampooning their human disguises. What mockery! What vanity! What upstaging untranquil fasten down the latch of inscantity! My heavens, my opening of the disheveled legions of terrorific balderdash and flamboyantdestructionry.
Eat fire, little human, eat fire!
Writing by Bianca Stone
Pictured: Andrea Rexilius
We have stopped wondering
what to call ourselves
a desert of lapwings
I drive the car down your shoulder out
into the field
stop at your German geothermal plant
to suck up the heat
and I forget our code word
but the seagulls say it over and over
beyond the veil the bikes
are all chained to one another in the rain
the heavy neighbor
with her face like a wheelbarrow
complains about my bottles
the records are arranged alphabetically
the kitchen table opens its extra legs
somewhere something is being scolded
like the first lobster I ever ate
that first took me back to the tank
and lay ten other lobsters on top of me
the heart is boiled in its own ink
I am of course limited
my teeth are the only part of me
that can’t naturally repair themselves
when I look at you
I see the innocuous precipitation
of a miniature storm
raging inside a glass jar
and keep opening the lid
in the dark
to drink
Writing by Andrea Rexilius
Pictured: Bianca Stone
We grew up under the swamp.
When I was alive.
There were insects with tiny red boots.
An insect named Veronica swam inside my mouth.
I had no choice but to extinguish it.
Writing by Kendra Grant Malone
Pictured: Adam Robinson
Lucifer was a sensitive child. In the mornings he was very meticulous with his routine. Clothes for the day were laid out in the shape of the person wearing them on the floor by the bed, all activities timed down to the minute, oatmeal with precisely one spoonful of light brown sugar, six ginger and swift pets on the cat’s head and one on the ass leading into the tail. Lucifer liked to know exactly what he could expect from his tiny world in the suburbs of Florida.
School picture day was not a terribly high priority for Lucifer. However, wearing something simple and chic was of the essence. A simple black turtleneck and khakis, or perhaps a dashing little tailored suit. Something understated and sophisticated was all that was necessary for little Lucifer to feel well represented for the vaults of Benilde St. Margaret’s prep school.
“Mother, what has happened to my black turtleneck sweater?”
“Oh Lucy, I’m sorry sweetie, I haven’t had time to do laundry in a bit honey. Don’t you have anything else to wear for your pictures?”
“No.”
“What about that darling shirt your father sent you from Hawaii?”
“He’s not my father.”
“Lucy . . . “
“Don’t call me Lucy, that’s a girl’s nickname.”
“Lucy, Mommy is tired, can’t we talk about this in the morning sweetpea?”
“I hate you. I fucking hate you.”
“I love you too darling honeybun, goodnight.”
“Fuck you, you are a fetid rotting whore.”
Lucifer sat on his floor, folding and refolding his little Hawaiian style shirt, matching it with different pants in silly little attempts to make it seem dignified.
Writing by Adam Robinson
Pictured: Kendra Grant Malone (on the right)
Delores said, "Tina, honey, get your sister to smile."
Tina said, "Hey, smile Little Big Eyes."
But Caitlyn said, "I can't peowet."
To which Delores responded, "Oh honey."
Nearby, Carl said, "I push the button, hey bingo, end of story."
Repeating Caitlyn, Delores said, "She said she can't pirouette."
Tina said, "I couldn't pirouette when I was your age, Little Big Eyes."
Caitlyn said, "Don't caw me that."
To which Tina responded, "Let's do first position."
Then Carl said, "I'm saying this camera's a beaut, Del."
But Delores said, "Oh, first position. Caitlyn, you know that."
Feeling self-conscious, Caitlyn said, "My dwess is tow."
To which Delores responded, "It's perfect, sweetie."
But Caitlyn repeated, "It's tow! It's tow, it's tow, it's tow!"
Then Carl said, "Yessir, auto-developing. I just push this button. You ready?"
And Tina said, "Caitlyn, do first position, first position."
Carl said, "Say 'modernity'!"
Too late, Delores said, "Oh someone should move that lamp."
Writing by Sarah Eaton
Pictured: Gene Morgan
My mother made my bubble beard in the bathtub. Puppies followed her home, nipping at my dangling toes, attempting to supplant me in the stroller. No one will ever be as fun as she was. I am living proof.
That ukulele was supposed to be my guitar. That cookie jar was mine to break. When she poked my chubby stomach and told me I was getting so old, I could not sleep for thinking of death.
She said we were having pickled pig’s feet for dinner, and we never did. Meat near the bone is the most flavorful. I wonder if she knows.
by Gene Morgan
Pictured: Sarah Eaton (3rd to the right in the blue leotard)
Wish I had juice. Why don't I have juice. And a cookie. Where is mom? Why don't I have a juice in my hand? Nancy is about to eat her fists, and I should have worn tights. I think I'm going to lose a finger like Uncle Chad when he fell into the water ice fishing. I hope my teeth don't chatter. I wish I was inside with juice. I wish there was such thing as warm juice. My mom is pretty. Where is my mom? I hate gymnastics. I love earrings. Tommy farted in class today. He's such a jerk. I can't believe I liked him. I hate him. I wish I had a cookie. It's dark. Lisa's house smells, and I'm glad we're outside, even though I might lose a finger. Uncle Chad drinks a lot of Tanqueray. I wish I had tights on. Lisa has too many cats, my mom says. The kind of cookies we have at home are terrible. I can't believe Jenny likes William. He farted on Tommy yesterday. Tommy is such a jerk. My earrings are beautiful. My legs are so cold. I feel my fingers tingling. I hate the YMCA. It smells like old people. When Uncle Chad used the bathroom in the pool, my mom told him he wasn't allowed to come back. He makes really funny faces. My hands and legs are cold. I think I need to pee. Tommy farted on William, and then he farted on Clara, and then he made a big fart sound while standing in the center of the reading rug. I'm not supposed to watch television after eight. I wonder if my mom is going to bring Capri Suns. I can do a center split and Nancy can't. My mom told my dad that Nancy's mom is a bitch. I love the cookies with the pink frosting. Coconut is disgusting. The YMCA is terrible. My earrings are beautiful. Uncle Chad called my mom a bitch when she kicked him out of the house. If there was a warm version of juice, I would drink a gallon of it. My earrings are probably the prettiest earrings I have ever seen.
Story by Olivia Cronk
Pictured: Sasha Fletcher
Only the sparkled-cool itch of night to go on. Pantry light after it all. Come sip porcelain cups. Come sigh your smoke over the sink of dirty dishes. Come see these slippers go bare. In the backyard, it’s it all. Wear your worries home to Ma. Can-of-soup. Broken handle. Electric blanket. Marigold, junk drawer, a fight in the car, after it got cold, guests gone mad. But then it was just Fall; it was just a little sparkled-cool. Why doesn’t time exist, Baby? I call a squirrel over here to witness. It’s got a second face. Its face is wooden and ribs. It fights me on this. In my wrists is the terrible and utter dream of childhood. One plucks. One steadies forward. Rubbed for the gate. Gulping down. The whole thing is dying grass; dying grass is it all. I forget it all over you, Ma. I am a broken blinker, the oldies station sucked in through the winter. The night goes on.
Story by Sasha Fletcher
Pictured: Olivia Cronk
FATHER
In the morning she was there and she was holding the Polaroid we’d given her and she was holding it and waving it around and she was screaming and we were laughing. Or, I was laughing and she was comforting her. My wife was. But listen it was funny. At some point there was no sound. Her mouth was just open wide.
LITTLE GIRL
I am going to find this man in red and I am going to take him down. Can you tell how I am feeling right now? Look at my eyes. I am going to find this man. My mouth is open wide. It is open as wide as it can be and what this means is that this is how far I am willing to go to deal with this. Can I help you? Are you being helped? I have nothing more to say about this. Will you put me in the stroller? Will we go for a stroll? Do you see how i am fuzzy? There is a reason for this and that reason is a tactical one. I will put the man in red in the stroller. I will take him for a ride. Do you know where we will go? I will tell you where we will go. Where we go will not be pretty. Where we go will be full of ice. And snow. And there will be people there as big as me and they will have hammers. What will we hammer there? Nothing. Not until it is time to hammer. The man in red will explain himself.
SANTA CLAUS
I will rise again and when I rise again you will all be put in a bag and I will carry you away and bury you in the snow where you will all become snowmen and if it ever melts you will learn what it is that I have buried in you and then something will have to be done about that. In the morning I will be asleep. There are several sorts of cookies I want you to learn how to make. Please do this for me. I don’t know how else to say it. I will miss you.
Story by Della Watson
Pictured in a drawing based on a photo on his mother's refrigerator: Matthew Savoca
when the shortstop told us that the FBI kept a file on him and that probably we all had FBI files now, just for knowing him, i wanted to believe it, i really did. i wanted to rearrange my habits around the matrix of being watched. to speak in code, to avoid windows. this is exactly the kind of interaction that drove us all to smoke. everyone, even the coach, who had clearly been the victim of some terrible fire. “you should see his wife though, she’s beautiful.” as if beauty could be earned. and we were trying, showing up at all the right parties, thinking we were meant to feel this way, to hold this daiquiri. meanwhile everyone had a little scar behind the ear or an almost imperceptible limp because one leg was slightly shorter than the other. all of us wearing our character like clothes that had been balled up on the floor for too long. what could you expect from a drunken child in an oldsmobile? i wanted to eat my wheaties and grow a major league arm. i wanted to escape this outfield existence. this waiting and waiting for the ball that finally lands square in the mitt. we nearly went blind staring into that gumball sun. each inning rubberbanding the rest of our ordinary lives.
Story by Matthew Savoca
Pictured: Della Watson (far right)
Everybody painted the barn that day. There was Ma, Paw, Timmy, and Mr. Walsh. We'd been planning to paint it for three or four weeks starting in the beginning of April but didn't actually get started until early May which really messed up my plans because I had decided sometime in February that I was going to leave as soon as Winter broke. I was five years old. Paw couldn't understand why I was so enthusiastic about getting the painting started, which I was because I had decided I'd stay and help so as not to upset Ma. Eventually we did it, over two days – Saturday and Sunday. The picture was taken on Saturday that's why it doesn't look like much has been done. I got paint all over my overalls when one of the cans spilled off the ladder Paw was on. It even got in my hair and we spent all night washing and scrubbing it out. Then my overalls were all messed up and Ma got to working on mending an old pair of mine that she'd been meaning to fix up for a long time, so I had to wait even longer before leaving. One thing led right on to another thing happening and I never did run away that summer.
by Megan Martin
Pictured: Chris Killen
1.
Later there will be laws against it—much later it will be called “cruel and unusual.”
But now, in Britain, in 1348, to the gaggle of boys just hired to patrol the wheatfields with sacks of stones, it’s great fun.
They scout the sky for intruders, race to spot one first—there, that speck, see! A crow swoops down from a cloud and boys chase him in a rain of rocks and whoops and arm-wavings. They chase them all day long like this; never run out of breath.
They watch the wheat grow taller than themselves, then taller than men. The sight of bloodslicked feathers—oh, the boys grow proud, proud: rulers of this kingdom.
2.
A disease has taken flight.
Boys hear rumors from the farmers’ wives that it has been delivered by fleas that nest in feathers, in the fur of rodents. They hear it coming for miles in the crow-caws. It isn’t a game; it’s a war now, except to the boys war is another kind of game. They whoop and cry and wave harder and scream—oh, war is great fun! It is great fun being men!
One grows a headache; another shivers in the heat. I’m going home for the day; the light is too bright to stand.
I grow a knot on my neck; you, a lump in your thigh. We chase the birds harder, scream murder til we can’t breathe. I see you bent over in the tall wheat coughing. But this is a different kind of scream—the kind I feel in my veins.
Your lump grows to the size of a pea; an apricot, then overnight a rotten orange. Your mother sends you back to work where you tell me how it burns in the sun; where I watch it split hot black open with blood while you tell me how everything that erupts from you is blood; how everything that erupts from you smells like death.
It’s true: I can smell you coming, I joke.
I’m going home for the day. The light is too—
3.
First boys don’t return; then they disappear. Each one now has acres to patrol: there are not enough boys to make a difference. They grow taller than the wheat. Crows arrive in droves. The fields disappear under black wings. The boys stand back and watch the numbers reverse—are they boys, or crows? Who is in charge here? They run wild, in all directions—but what are they running from?
On the walk home they watch as bodies are shoved in pits, as pits overflow and are abandoned. They watch bodies being shut up in houses; houses being burnt to the ground. They watch because there is nothing they can do. Bodies are left in the streets (smell of black blood rotting, eyes the eyes of crows); boys leapfrog over them: laughter is what keeps them safe.
4.
But at night I feel fleas crawling softly over my body, burrowing into my hair, making a grave of me.
The farmer tells us too many boys have disappeared: there aren’t enough of us to do the job.
We watch from the road with one boy’s mother as we are replaced by wooden replicas of ourselves: sacks stuffed with straw, eyes and mouths carved into the faces of turnips, hands and feet nailed to stakes.
They lean lifeless against the poles, arms straight out, frighteningly stiff. We remember our boys’ bodies running waving through fields like wind and we remember our screams and our mothers and our fathers and their voices soft in the next room at night while crows pour out of the sky into black dreams.
by Chris Killen
Pictured: Megan Martin (left) with her sister Missy
For Christmas this year, I want a dog and a bicycle at the same time.
I can’t decide which one I want more, so I want both of them together.
Also, the dog has to be cute.
The dog has to be on the front of the bicycle at all times.
If I get a dog on a bicycle this Christmas, I promise I will feed it and pet it and give it
lots of water to drink and not crash the bicycle and hurt the dog or leave it in the
garage to die or anything.
I have thought about a dog on a bicycle a lot.
I have thought about it for at least seven months.
It is all I think about at nights.
I just lie there in bed, thinking about it.
Sometimes it’s hard to go to sleep.
I think this is what ‘insomnia’ means.
In hot weather, we will go out riding.
We will go down the steep hill at the end, and I won’t have to peddle, and the dog will
stick its tongue out into the wind and try to eat insects.
I will call the dog and the bicycle ‘Racer’.
I think this is a good halfway name between a dog and a bicycle.
And when I’m in a store or somewhere, I won’t need to chain up the bicycle because
the dog will bark at any thieves who try to steal it.
Also, when it’s cold weather, I can bring it into the lounge with me because it is a dog
as well as a bicycle and everyone knows it’s cruel to leave a dog outside and mom
won’t be able to say no even if it gets oil and dirt on everything.
Ha ha.
One final thing I ask for is that the dog should be put right at the top of the bicycle at
the front: imagine it is a fairy on a Christmas tree.
I have thought about it a lot, and decided that this is the best place for a dog on a
bicycle, otherwise it might peddle away on its own and escape.
a Wunderkammer theme week curated by Kathryn Regina
Before writers were writers they were boxers, ballerinas and scarecrows. If nothing else, they were much, much shorter. When my friend Darah's husband posted a photo of her as a 9-year-old gymnastics star on her Facebook wall, I thought, did Frank O'Hara take gymnastics photos? Are there little league photos of Allen Ginsberg? Who wouldn't want to see those pictures?
That's why we've devoted the next two weeks to childhood photos of writers. Each of our participants was given the photo of another writer and wrote a short piece based on that photo.
You can expect 2 installments a day for the next two weeks at 9am and 3pm PST. You can also expect adorableness and amazing writing. Come back often!
Kathryn
Images, clockwise from top left: Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath with her brother, William Faukner
Readers, you're in for a treat: For the next two weeks, Wunderkammer will be curated by Kathryn Regina.
Image: L. Marie / Lenore Edman via Flickr
Illustrations by Justin Graham
In second grade I desperately wanted a Baby Alive doll. I don’t remember why-I didn’t play with dolls as a rule-and the only other doll I had ever requested was a Wonder Woman action figure. I had the biggest crush on Wonder Woman/Lynda Carter in the history of girl crushes. Some secret part of me wanted to touch her and change her out of the drab utilitarian uniform of her public life into the glamorous metallic and silky costume of her secret life. Yes that’s right, in short, I wanted to touch and possibly fondle Wonder Woman’s boobies. And that desire hasn’t completely disappeared. To this day when I see her on television hawking mail order contact lens I have this urge to grope her.
But back to the Baby Alive (she never had a proper name; I only called her by her product name.) She was a facsimile of the real thing- made of soft plastic; she had a permanently pursed mouth, ready for a bottle or the plastic feeding spoon full of fake baby food that was included with her. I dutifully fed and bottled her only to realize within seconds that Baby Alive was much too much like the real thing. The food and water that went into her mouth, exited her bottom almost immediately. Now I know that as an adult, this makes sense, but at the age of 7, I hadn’t grasped even the most basic points of Newtonian physics. So it never occurred to me to question what happened to the “food” that Baby Alive ingested. Within seconds of feeding her, her diaper was full of creamy fake baby food, green, if I remember correctly.
I refused to feed her again and, instead, carried her around for a few days out of obligation even though I wanted nothing more than to have Santa Claus take her back to the demented toy workshop from whence she came.
When I no longer felt guilty, I stopped paying her any attention at all and relegated her to the shelves with the unloved stuffed animals.
Even when I see an actual live baby, no matter how cute, my heart does not flop about like some emo boy’s bangs. I don’t make cooing noise and my body continues to run as normal, without the faintest tock of a biological clock. What am I thinking instead, you ask?
Poem in Comments
Image: foundphotoslj via Flickr
Posted at 10:18 AM in Add An Ending, Comment Poetry, Poetry, Theme Weeks, Wunderkammer | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
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