Table of contents.
1. Conquistadora by Olga Tsyganova 2. i made me a woman by Greg Wersching 3. Blue Skies Buckethead by Katy DiSavino 4. [Dago red]. by Brian Fitzpatrick 5. Escalator by Kyle MacKinnel 6. Shreevats by L. Auda Poin 7. The Men in the Mountains by John Shortino (Sicily 1945) 8. 7:43/B&A Discuss the problem by Kirk Larsen
The feral gardens
and tangled riverbeds –
I need them to follow
the bend of our season.
To spring and fall
on the hip of the hill
where staring through
your wakefulness, I found
no loss of panorama.
My want to wrestle
the open road, perpendicular
to your folded silhouette.
Trusting sweetness still intact,
your finger willow tassles
bind me to this land.
I tune a perfect speech
and let you settle me.
by: Olga Tsyganova
i made me a woman
spinning on my bed
binding wool in thirty stanzas
to canopy overhead
my lamplight now low
fixing a belt nailed to the floor
i made me a woman
who told me i was a bore
and took her to the movies
with powderglass in my palm
catching pieces in the fray
of two misplaced ringlets
from her sweet turning motion
that i tried to make stay
her wet eye sparkle i gave her
in prebirth pastel stroke
is tying me down now she
keeps running off on me
when showered in hopefiber thread
she knit me a sock to
sleep in on the floor
then came time to gently put back
miss quick blooming allure
never minding her tiny lamb
hands beating sense into
my dumb wolf song
leaving on the bed i spinning
till i make her gone
by: Greg Wersching
I could see the purple and white of our umbrella and broke into a sprint –
chubby legs pumping hard, though really it was my upper body that was flung
forward – my back half struggling to keep up. In a cloud of sand and spraying
water, I collapsed onto Mom’s towel, crying as honestly and fervently
as only a seven year old can cry.
“Mackenzie, what is the matter?” She drawled, in that gravelly alto
voice of hers, sliding her sunglasses up on top of her head and leaning forward
in her chair so she could catch my chin in the palm of her hand.
“I was all nice an’ warm and then Michael got me wet!”
She said nothing, but I could see the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes deepening
as she fought back a smile.
“I was buildin’ a sand castle and he dumped water on me! Lookit
how wet I am!” I was soaked, from head to foot. My pink one-piece clung
to my plump body, sticky and damp, pressing against my skin and making me itch
to peel it off.
“Mackenzie, do I need to take you to the hospital?”
“N-no.” I sniffled, curling up at her feet on the towel, the warm
cloth roughly rubbing against my knees and elbows. She always asked me that.
She was under the impression that I took minor things too seriously. As far
as I was concerned, being drenched against your will was as big a tragedy as
any. I rested my wet head against her legs, unable to relax for fear that my
brother would return with a fresh pale of water and the intent to re-christen
me.
“Good! Stop snifflin’ and get even!”
“W-what?”
“You have a bucket, don’t you?”
“Yeah. It’s over there.”
“Well go on, fill it up and throw some water on him!”
“I’m allowed to do that?”
“Well sure you are, baby. He started it, didn’t he? So what are
you waitin’ for, Mac? Girls are allowed to do that stuff too. Go and teach
him a lesson.” She leaned back in her chair.
I jumped up immediately, thinking about how exceptionally wise that woman was.
My fingers closed over the heated plastic handle of my bucket, and once again
I found myself running across the sand. The pure frustration and anger that
had fed my tears were now driving me to the ebbing tide. Without stopping, I
let the edge of my bucket drift in the shallows, filling it up as I moved down
the coast towards my tormentor – and my soon-to-be victim. His back was
to me. He didn’t even hear the sloshing of the captured waves in my bucket,
or the giggle of delight that took hold of me as I lifted my pail, upended it,
and doused him. I didn’t stop there, though. I let the bucket fall onto
his head, a caricature of a hat that fell clear down to his shoulders. His cry
of rage resounded inside the plastic helmet I had crowned him with, and mingled
with my own laughter that sounded, at best, malicious.
“’Kenziiiiiiiiiiiie.”
“YOU started it!”
He removed the pail and furiously threw it into the water. I thought for a moment
he might push me, but I was bigger than he was. I stubbornly held my ground,
stuck out my stomach and balled up my fists, placing them on my hips like I
had seen Mom do once to Dad in the kitchen. It was the ultimate gesture of defiance.
He started to cry.
I was pleased with that effect. “You’re such a baby, Michael! Only
babies cry.”
I thought perhaps I heard Mom’s whoop of laughter on the wind, pleased
with the job I had done. But whatever sound it was, the unforgiving ocean swallowed
it whole.
by: Katy DiSavino
We never use my grandpas wooden carvings before he dies
little things of white ash or pine the cheapest woods
little things a napkin holder an apple a doll
pretty things
mommy little things are pretty
his voice is thick cigar smoke it spills out in puffs his hands are open
to my little sister
granddaughter pretty little thing an apple or a doll
grandpas wooden carvings before he dies
little things tabled unpainted dull like fresh ash or bone
little things a napkin holder or an apple in my mothers hand
pretty things placed in a box of cheap pine to turn to ash
his voice is still
stiff in the box his hands are open
my little sister mommy grandpas wooden
no hes just still
I say mother still things are sad
grandpas wooden carvings
little things surrounding him in cheap pine
they burn him thick smoke of ash and bone
and place him inside a little marble box
pretty little thing
my mother turns kisses her eye with a napkin
she looks
pretty
when I was little she was pretty I was going to marry her
now mother I say sad things are pretty
we never used grandpas pretty wooden carvings before
we still don’t
they sit in a cheap box
an apple or a doll its hands are open.
I’ve got an out-of-water suitcase
Packed with umbrellas
I promise, peddle:
Fling to people
Cling to the ankles of clouds
I am a blind dolphin
Riding an escalator
Writhing, a deflating balloon
The rain flows over us,
Black ink from a printing press
Your smile hops mountains
Of Jell-o, beside red
Happiness frogs scatter
Only for an afternoon
In truth, gelatin proof of rain.
by: Kyle MacKinnel
Shreevats was born Delhi-side. Reared by trillionaires. When I met him he was learning physics and shivering, one helluvah tundra distant from his dusty subcontinent. Grad students banged around downtown, screaming “UNION!” I was back from France and fever-cleaved so I kept my distance, fearing his Hindu immunities. Poor Shreevs, once a prince, a Calcuttan cricket hero, now a bright lump of jelly! I still hear his gurgles in the corridor, his Roomie forcing cocaine into his nostrils, screeching, Breathe! Can’t live if you don’t breathe! Roomie often missed the big picture. Shreevats: tortured by the townsfolk, monitored by many-armed gods a bazillion miles from here, forced to live and waddle all ways, forced even to breathe, which sometimes one forgets to do, but quickly remembers. The place where Shreevats sank nights was a prison. He invited me there, where long equations reproduced coolly on his desk. He cracked the door—Roomie wheeled, dragged Shreevats in by his scruff. It wasn’t right, Roomie treating him like a battered wife. Good Old Shreevs, too kind to hurt or maledict, ever. Such a sweet button, as my Gertie once said. Then I caught Roomie whacking him with an iron. I wished I had a gun to end it quick, but there was just a baseball on the dresser. Roomie felt it on his temple. I ran. I don’t see Shreevats now, but when I toss my kid the ball I remember his liberation.
by: Loren Auda Poin
The Men in the Mountains (Sicily, 1945)
The men went into the mountains, but it was not because they were cowards.
They went to the mountains and they left us in town because the carabinieri
wouldn’t kill women or children, but they kill men. I saw them kill men.
When my father, and my friend’s fathers, started to pack their bags, I
asked to go with them to the mountains. My uncle, Salvatore, said I was to stay
in town. “You are not a man yet,” he said. “You are a boy,
and you must take care of your mother and your sisters.”
Our town was near Bronte, and so when the men went to the mountains, they were
on the volcano itself. From the mountain, they said, you could watch the whole
town, which is what they did, through binoculars and rifle scopes. On the day
my father left, the day all of the men left, he came up to my room and handed
me something wrapped in old, dusty cloth; I removed the old pistol and made
the sign of the cross on myself, and my father kissed my forehead and then I
was the only man in the house.
On the first day that the carabinieri arrived, they asked us where the men were
hiding. We told them, “We don’t know,” and so they searched
our houses and made themselves at home. The sergeant who sat in my kitchen said
to my mother, “Your husband, he is a coward, no? He ran away?” and
I walked to my room and took out the secret pistol, and I thought about killing
the sergeant while he slept, but instead I stayed indoors—the whole town
at that time was on a curfew—and then men in the mountains struck instead.
The first night of the occupation, we were awoken by distant gunshots, followed
minutes later by shots outside of our windows. It was a sound we’d get
used to after a few nights, but on the first night we could only sit up and
wonder if we’d find dead
soldiers on the streets in the morning, their blood mixing with the dirt and
coating the road in a deep red mud.
“You, boy,” the sergeant, who had pushed my youngest sister out
of her room, often said to me. He called me “boy” as though he knew
the insult it was to my ears. “You, boy,” he would say, “Why
aren’t you in the mountains? Shouldn’t you be resisting?”
he’d ask, and he would laugh when I wouldn’t answer. This was the
only normalcy there was for months; every day, the sergeant would heckle me,
and I would walk to the market, the old revolver hidden underneath my clothes,
and around ten in the morning, Scapelli, a blind old man, would receive information
about who had died in the night, and by noon we would have fresh water and comfort,
because my father lived.
The sergeant never touched my mother, but the threat of physicality lingered
in the kitchen on afternoons where he would sit and drink his ration of fresh
water; we knew that some of the women had been raped, and even some of the girls,
so when he looked at my mother I was glad for the gun’s wooden handle
against my stomach; however, for the fathers in the mountains, news of the rapes
was difficult to take, and more than one man was found hanging from a railing
in the morning because he had returned to protect his wife’s honor. This
was not to say that the carabinieri were not often found hanging, however; a
few uniformed officers were killed one night, and their bodies left out for
their comrades to find in the morning.
My father returned to town unannounced, unexpected. After all, his wife and
family were relatively safe, and the sergeant never made any attempts at transgression.
But it was then that we learned there was a traitor, and false information was
being given to the men in the mountains. The night of his return, I woke up
to hear his voice from outside, but I did not at that time believe it was him.
After all, he should have been safe in the mountains. But, when I looked out
the window, there he was, pointing a gun at the sergeant; he spoke quickly and
quietly, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. When I opened the window,
he became distracted. The sergeant fired upon him, and my father fell in the
street, his neck pouring blood onto the dust.
The sergeant, you must understand, was a matter of honor. A man who kills
your father at his own home must not be allowed to survive. The carabinieri,
they
did not understand honor, and so, when I cleaned the officer’s blood from
my hands
and went to the mountains just before dawn, they only said that I, too, was
a coward.
by: John Shortino
Woke warm, smell’s new and wrong.
You were still and faint breathing.
I peeled off sheets,
Padded over creaking floor,
Shooed cat off crumpled heap of clothes.
You had one of those shower pens.
I drew a smiley face above the soap dish.
Wrote my name and ‘Thanks’
Next to EGGS, BREAD, CELERY.
B & A discuss the problem.
B: Which is it? That he quakes us or that he eats the turtle meat? Which makes
us revere him?
A: We quake because he eats the turtle meat without hesitation, without looking
around. His dispassionate indifference is signal to begin the enroosening process,
to commence the throwing of the limbs.
B: And we like that, don't we? That he is tenacious? That he could be said to
ooze a sort of impossible-to-ooze form of tenacity, of bite, of candor, of snarl?
A: We do like that. We also like how plumb angry he is. I say plumb because
I'm implying–hoping you hear me imply, but uncertain of your inferential
capabilities–that he travels direct. Anger to anger. No turns. Plumb anger.
Anger dangling from a spindle similarly made of anger. Vengeance tearing down
curtains in rooms that resemble rooms he was slighted in. His anger travels
direct, I mean. The vengeance, though, the vengeance meanders.
B: Good deal of meandering, yes.
A: Not so much that we lose faith.
B: Huzzah.
A: Huzzah.
B: When will he come back?
A: The turtles’ numbers are growing.
B: Will he return to us shimmering and smelling like diatomite and gunpowder
and folio pages?
A: We sit and wait for his triumvirate return atop myriad carnivores, paired
in threes. While we sit, we can wax canonical regarding: his tenacity, his anger,
his eating of the turtles whose numbers still swell, his disappearance, our
waiting, our fidelity, our toes in the water, our waxing canonical.
B: Huzzah.
A: Huzzah.