haiku (ask)
Denny E. Marshall
Alien craft lands
Not in peace and not for war
Ask for directions
1st Published In Stinkwaves Summer 2014
|
haiku (frontier)
Denny E. Marshall
Space not the final
Frontier, recently like the
Forgotten frontier
1st Published In High Coupe February 2013
|
haiku (leader)
Denny E. Marshall
UFO landed
Said take me to your leader
Wife was not happy
1st Published In Writer’s Tribe Review December 2012
|
haiku (printing)
Denny E. Marshall
End of time is near
Plan to continue printing
Said the editor
1st Published In Beyond Centauri October 2012
|
haiku (sign)
Denny E. Marshall
Worn roadside sign says
Unlimited dreams ten bucks
All nightmares are free
1st Published In High Coupe May 2014
|
Sentences (halls)
Doug Draime
All his friends are
murdered in the halls
of justice
|
Our House of Mirrors
Doug Draime
for Gracie
Our eyes meet
We turn our eyes away
Our eyes meet again
We both smile shyly
We turn our eyes away
Everywhere we turn, there we are
It’s our house of mirrors
The mirrors are not distorted
You are what you are
I am what I am
The earth works like this
The sea reflects the sky
Eternity works like this
Like a mirror inside
|
Nailed
Liam Spencer
“You’ll make it work.
You’re as tough as nails.”
She complimented
With the sound of a smile.
She doesn’t recognize
The long nights and cheap beers
The lonely meals
The tears for life passing by,
Sidelined and recovering
From yet another surgery
From yet another work injury.
The poverties and fears
Of sleeping on concrete
Yet again.
The sleeping on the couch
To fool oneself
Into feeling like
There’s a someone
Sleeping beside them.
The longings and whinings
The turning to distractions
In order to make it
Through yet another
Day of nothing.
The being nailed
Into a whole life
Of nothings.
|
Song
Liam Spencer
As the song says so strongly,
But for different reasons;
“Don’t say you love me...”
Especially not
As you
Are about to
Go back
to your husband.
|
Volumes
Liam Spencer
I found myself staring
At the phone
Which would always
Show your name
As your text or call
It speaks volumes
and makes
my day worthwhile
Even as I know
It won’t chime or ring
your name again
and, thus,
it now screams
louder than ever.
|
Uncle Ralph
David Sapp
In 1940, Uncle Ralph
drove his father’s team
over rolling, Ohio hills and hollers,
through lush, green days of alfalfa;
timothy, wheat, oats grew in his boots.
On cold spring mornings,
there was only the quiet
horses huffing misted breath,
the occasional jangle of harness.
In 1941, Uncle Ralph
drove his Ford coupe, coughing
to a stop, up into the front yard,
and robbed the battery for the radio
as there was no electric that month.
Bombs whistled over Pearl Harbor;
sailors gasped under Oklahoma’s belly.
It was still a wonder to hear
far off voices through a wooden box,
the far off stomp of polished jackboots.
In 1943, Uncle Ralph
drove a truck for the army,
when all was olive drab, sticky crimson,
stark, black and white photographs,
a relentless cacophony of artillery and boots,
hauling ammo, rations, men
for generals and Roosevelt, gears panting
over the Apennines, kicking Mussolini
up the muddy boot of Italy.
In 1944, Uncle Ralph
drove his fork home, so the story goes,
sitting on a corpse, eating his dinner,
a Nazi uniform, his tablecloth
(Hitler, the maître-de), a German
boy with familiar eyes and mouth,
his breath and jackboots still,
scuffed, askew. Was he obliged
to drive his bayonet home?
In 1945, Uncle Ralph
parked his truck in Florence, a spot
beneath Brunelleschi’s duomo dome;
he conquered, sipping cappuccino,
the Arno, the Palazzo Vecchio;
he climbed Giotto’s campanile
to gaze upon his mountain sojourn;
he gawked at Michelangelo’s naked David,
a bootless young man resembling him,
stone lungs rising still with breath.
|
Brief Biographical Information
David Sapp is a writer and artist living near Lake Erie. He teaches at Firelands College in Huron, Ohio. His poems have appeared in The Alembic, The Chattahoochee Review, The Cape Rock, The Licking River Review, The Hurricane Review, The Bad Henry Review, Meat Whistle Quarterly, Red Cedar Review, RiverSedge and elsewhere. Additional publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior; chapbooks, Close to Home and Two Buddha; and his novel, Flying Over Erie.
|
form
Janet Kuypers
haiku 3/1/14
if we’re cast in stone
I’d watch your form forever,
frozen by your side
|
|
Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.
She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.
She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org and chaoticarts.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images.
Since 2010 Kuypers also hosts the Chicago poetry open mic at the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).
In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), the three collection books from 2004: Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the shutterfly ISSN# cc& hardcover art book life, in color, Post-Apocalyptic, Burn Through Me, Under the Sea (photo book), the Periodic Table of Poetry, a year long Journey, Bon Voyage!, and the mini books Part of my Pain, Let me See you Stripped, Say Nothing, Give me the News, when you Dream tonight, Rape, Sexism, Life & Death (with some Slovak poetry translations), Twitterati, and 100 Haikus, that coincided with the June 2014 release of the two poetry collection books Partial Nudity and Revealed.
|
Young Siddhartha
David Sapp
A small statue of Buddha,
the lad, Siddhartha Gautama,
sits cross-legged on my desk,
his smile serene;
however, my prayer wheel stopped
spinning when I dwelled on this:
Siddhartha, the prince, wanted
for nothing and saw nothing,
his smile serene behind tall,
gleaming, palace walls
at the foot of the Himalayas,
where the air was cold and thin,
until, on a stroll, he felt
the soil of his kingdom beneath
his feet, rather than smooth,
colorful tile, thick, rich carpet,
until his desire to comprehend
an old man, a corpse, a beggar.
At twenty-nine, Siddhartha left
his princess, sheer silks and gold
bangles sliding on her hips;
her serene smile, her lips,
her dark nipples, the color of earth
and dates, would not keep him.
Siddhartha left his infant son, Rahula,
after dubbing him “little fetter,”
wriggling karmic manacle,
no bliss, no enlightenment
in the curve of her arms,
his son’s serene smile a tether.
At thirty-five, after six years
and two gurus, his empty ribs
unsatisfied with ascetic life
(Was all that near-death necessary?),
and knowing, however hobbled, he could
return to his father’s sumptuous table,
after forty-nine days and nirvana –
finally, no crying baby –
Siddhartha found his serene smile
under the leaves and figs of the Bodhi tree,
the Buddha, an open, white lotus
floating above the mud. And yet,
the Buddha did not return to his wife, his son.
It occurred to me, now twenty
years older than the Buddha,
perhaps Siddhartha was simply
a naïve and foolish young man.
Oh, what an exquisite flaw!
My smile is serene.
At eighty, the Buddha concluded,
his smile still very serene,
he mastered the shackles of his samsara,
the endless, dizzy spin of birth and death.
Maybe, just maybe, Siddhartha
might have gone round again.
|
Brief Biographical Information
David Sapp is a writer and artist living near Lake Erie. He teaches at Firelands College in Huron, Ohio. His poems have appeared in The Alembic, The Chattahoochee Review, The Cape Rock, The Licking River Review, The Hurricane Review, The Bad Henry Review, Meat Whistle Quarterly, Red Cedar Review, RiverSedge and elsewhere. Additional publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior; chapbooks, Close to Home and Two Buddha; and his novel, Flying Over Erie.
|
The Calling
Kristen Welker
It’s as if I was a damned siren
and you, a deaf sailor.
Dear Boy with the missing
ears, if only you could see
my lips are stained of blood,
golden hair nothing but rags
of yellow skin.
I find it easy to lure
your lethargic soul by bare
body in the moonlight and
eat you up, but I want to lull
you to my waters.
Once I almost had you.
Hands at the edge, chin
extended. Your palms
slipped and sent a skinny
skull spiraling.
Murky water flushing
through eroded teeth of the
last boy who did not listen.
Bubbles escaped my mouth
as I swam back.
I could’ve grabbed you
didn’t you see? Silly boy,
listen to me. Surely I will perish
if I do not charm your ear.
|
Count your Blessings
Eric Burbridge
This was the second wave of thunder, lightning and torrential rain in the last half hour. I cut our speed to half the minimum and the wiper motor screamed while it barely cleared the view. The flat stretch of I-57 left the Accord, even with new tires, hydroplaning close to the rumble strip. I should pull under the next overpass and wait, but the semi behind me was way to close. Caroline and Carmine were glue to their tablets oblivious to the dark swirling clouds headed our way. I guess I shouldn’t complain they’d been fussing back and forth since we left. They promised if I took them along to deliver their great grannies car to their uncle they’d get along. A major task for my nine and eleven year old granddaughters.
The wife rejoiced when we backed out the driveway. “I love you, traveling mercies, be careful.” She said.
To think we wanted a daughter, but ended up with three boys.
What a blessing considering old age and kids mixed like oil and water.
The car rocked when the wind smacked the driver’s side and that snapped the girls out of their device induced trances. “Slow down, granddad.” Debris flew by in the horizontal rains. The semi ahead wobbled and slowed to a crawl; golf ball size hail pelted the hood and roof. The noise was deafening. I prayed for an overpass. Suddenly, a roaring wave of air pressure spun the car and tilted it to the limit.
Tornado!!!
I hit the brakes as it headed for the trenches on the roadside. The girls screamed when we tumbled and the car became airborne then landed upright wedged under an overturned tractor-trailer.
It was a miracle my vehicle didn’t flip when it spun!
“You okay? Carmen...Caroline?” I loosened my roller coaster grip on the wheel and turned around. Their eyes were bucked, tears frozen on their little faces. “You okay?”
They nodded and whimpered. “We’re okay, granddad.” I sighed and rested my head on the wheel. Thank God for seat belts. The downpour continued and for the next ten minutes we sat in silence.
My heart slowed and I cleared my throat. “Now you see why I stay on you about those seat belts, right?”
“Right, granddad.”
I hoped the trucks tanks hadn’t ruptured. I hit the button and the window dropped without a sound, no odor of gas or diesel fuel. I couldn’t open the door more than a foot. “OK, ladies we’ll have to climb out the window. I think we’ve got enough room to get on top then we got it made.” I hoped anyway. “Okay?”
“Okay, granddad.” They whimpered.
“You’re my girls...we’ll make it.” I had to get out of the potential death trap. “Carmen, climb out and see if there’s enough room for us to follow. Okay?”
“Okay.” She was out and on top faster than I thought. I forget their kids. Caroline followed. I hoped their weight wouldn’t further dent the roof. “Come on granddad, you got room. There’s a car behind us, if it moves we can get out.” I squeezed out the opening onto the roof and followed them across the trailers side. The drop to the ground hurt my knee, but we were clear. The girls ran over to the overturned tractor and peered through the windshield. “There’s a lady in there.”
“Wait a minute.” Before I took a step, they climbed on the door. Their little arms struggled and finally swung it open.
“She’s woke, granddad!” Carmen screamed and entered the cab. When I looked in the young driver smiled, a grateful smile, but she was in pain. She shuffled around the console and prepared to climb out. Sirens and flashing lights approached and maneuvered through overturned vehicles. The sky started to clear when the black clouds continued northward. I prayed for those in its path. The road was full of walking, but injured miracles. As we went vehicle to vehicle we didn’t see any fatalities. Amazed and proud I observed my granddaughter try to comfort others especially those with smaller children. Complete strangers fell in love with them. That warmed my heart and made me proud, but I lacked the energy to stick around too much longer. Most vehicles were operational; the majority of the damage from flying debris.
I forgot about the cars behind ours. I waved for the girls to come back. I knew they’d say I walked to slow. “Stay with me I’m going back to see if those cars trapped behind us can be moved.”
“But there’s more cars pushed over by the cornfields,” Caroline said. “They might need help.”
“OK, ok, but we see about us, then we help, got it?”
“Ok, granddad.” They said, disappointed.
“It won’t take long.”
*
The sun’s rays poked through gray clouds with the heat and add humidity. Several people pushed the vehicles behind us back out from the wedged trailers. A tow truck pulled up and the heavy set driver aided the others. Thank goodness their cars started. “Wait here ladies, now I can move the car.” I backed up over wood and metal debris I feared would blow the tires. It didn’t, but my heart went out to the truckers who’d be stuck for God knows how long. They watched first responders with their wreckers move the over turned vehicles. We backed into the mile long single lane of traffic that meandered around debris and other vehicles. The situation brought out their concern for others. They wanted to stop and help everybody.
“I like helping people like those firemen.” Carmen said. “I want to do that when I get old.”
“Old?” I asked.
“Not as you, but you know, older.” They laughed.
Traffic loosened up and after they cried and murmured to stay longer we headed for our destination. The worse circumstances bring out the best in a few people. I’m grateful my granddaughters are among that blessed crowd. I thought about the dents in the roof, but I was thankful the hail didn’t crack the moon roof. This car is a gem my son will appreciate. And, looking further on the bright side; it’s not everyday you get to see kids demonstrate their aspirations. They aren’t such brats after all. I grinned when I saw their little heads together sound asleep. Enjoy the peace and quiet, Andy, they’ll be awake soon.
|
fog
Janet Kuypers
haiku 3/10/14
fog envelopes me
it’s a thick, powerful force
that doesn’t let go
|
|
Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.
She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.
She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org and chaoticarts.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images.
Since 2010 Kuypers also hosts the Chicago poetry open mic at the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).
In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), the three collection books from 2004: Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the shutterfly ISSN# cc& hardcover art book life, in color, Post-Apocalyptic, Burn Through Me, Under the Sea (photo book), the Periodic Table of Poetry, a year long Journey, Bon Voyage!, and the mini books Part of my Pain, Let me See you Stripped, Say Nothing, Give me the News, when you Dream tonight, Rape, Sexism, Life & Death (with some Slovak poetry translations), Twitterati, and 100 Haikus, that coincided with the June 2014 release of the two poetry collection books Partial Nudity and Revealed.
|
Thaw
Jack Daniel Miles
The old man and I drank coffee together every morning at 7:20 am, ate dinner at 4:30 pm. We kept to it every damn day for an entire season—I had rented a cabin in the wilds for the winter. Alone time was work, good work, new work, old work, work I had to learn, relearn. Food, firewood—hunt, chop—eat, live—survive. Sabbatical, reformation, something. Escape from a world that had lifted me from reality, planted me in a high-rise, cursed me with endless lovers, generated a fractured self, and driven me to cherish my loathsome goals. The envy of devils had sustained me, propped me up, and let me fall. Envy had become jealousy, had become resentment, had become what I deserved. I withdrew into obscurity to escape my addiction to Hell.
The old man showed up at my rented doorstep on my first morning in the cabin. He said, “I walk by this cabin every morning and every evening.” Then silence. He did not offer his name. Was this a question? He appeared inquisitive rather than confused. He had a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder and a tattered canvas sack tucked under his belt.
My brain wavered; I was baffled. He was either crazy, friendly, or a real life Bear Claw Chris Lapp—that old Robert Redford movie, Jeremiah Johnson, was my dad’s favorite; probably saw it a hundred times when I was a kid. I decided that I did not care. My life had attained no worth up to that point. Therefore, its removal from this world would have proved no loss. “Coffee?”
“Reckon it’ll save me a couple miles.” His voice was slow country. He edged past me toward the wood stove. I plugged in my shitty coffee maker and chucked in a few scoops of some garbage-brand coffee, both of which I had bought at the general store down the road.
I had the door open less than a minute; it was long enough for the temperature in the cabin to drop noticeably. It became a struggle for the meager fire—I had built it with a bit of kindling I had found under a tarp on the front porch—burning in the cast-iron beast to get the cabin back in the tolerable range. I did not care, though. I figured a memory of cold might relieve me in the worst moments of my eventual perdition.
The old man’s beard was defrosting; he shed his layers by the stove. “Been a while since more’n just coons and such gave any interest to this place. Yep, save me a couple miles.”
It took me a second to figure out what he meant by, ‘save me a couple miles.’ “So you walk to the general store for coffee every morning?”
“Yep.”
“Why not buy a can of coffee and a cheap machine next time you’re there, save yourself a hell of a lot of trouble.
“Ya know,” he said, eyeing me cunningly through heavy, gray eyebrows, “You must be one of the brainiest motherfuckers I ever met. Don’t suppose I ever thought of doin’ that.” His raw sarcasm surprised me—I gave a small, lopsided smile. I deserved the abuse.
“I don’t think brainy is the word for what I am. So why do you do it? You know, walk,” I paused thoughtfully and scrunched up my eyes a bit in curiosity, “wait, how far’s your place from here?”
“About two and a half, three miles; maybe more, maybe less.” I poured us each a cup of coffee; kept it black.
“You walk, even with this weather, five miles each way, to get yourself a cup or two of coffee?”
“Yep, twice a day, mind you. Like to get dinner there, too.”
“You do have a kitchen, right? A stove, electricity, or whatever?” What about lunch?
“Yep. Suppose it’s a pretty nice kitchen, got everything most folks need, except for people. General store’s got people there. No community in my kitchen at home. Lunch? Eat lunch home most days. Usually a bit of whatever I can kill on the way back. Sometimes carry home a few biscuits from Loraine down there at the store, too. Don’t always find a lot, a few rabbits here and there, but I make due. Got some deer meat in the freezer at home. I like goin’ twice. Yep.”
I finally sat down across from him at the table. Silence settled in, and I was okay with that. The whole thing was a little odd.
After a time, the old man grabbed the pot and poured another cup, topped mine off, then sat back down. “What ya reckon sounds good for dinner tonight? Tuesday’s Lorain’s got liver’n onions, cornbread, such, at the store. I know you don’t have none of that, but I guess you’ll come up with somethin’, you know, smart bastard that you are.”
The old man stood up, went to the stove, and started reassembling his elaborate winter defense—I watched. Layer, coffee, layer, coffee, layer. “Well, I’ll be back over ‘round 4:30. If I got any whatever left from lunch, I’ll bring it with me, add to the pot, so to speak.”
He picked up the coffee mug I had provided him, nodded, shook the last drops out over the floor, and stuffed it in one of his coat pockets. I did not protest—it was not really mine anyway. He then re-slung his rifle, tucked the canvas bag back in place, and said, “Gonna need more wood, bring ya ‘n ax when I come back. Dead trees mind you, dead trees,” and walked out with about the same amount of mystifying fanfare with which he had arrived.
I was less bothered by the whole thing than I likely should have been. It was either the start of a horror movie, or a boondocks “Dinner with Andre.” Although, at that point in my life, I would rather have been murdered than eat French food and be forced to wear a coat and tie ever again.
I wanted to drive up to the general store and ask about the old man, but I could not. I had taken a taxi from the airport, had it stop at the general store on the way in and went straight to the cabin after that.
I had very little with me: my hunting gear, which had been in storage since my dad died, winter clothes, and whatever paltry supplies I had picked up at the general store. It was going to be a figure it out or die kind of winter. I would have wagered die.
The old man kept to the 7:30 am, 4:30 pm schedule up until the thaw began. Our conversations often consisted of a great deal of silence. I quickly found out his name was Paul, I told him my name was John. He said, “So, you’re a smart son of a bitch and a liar.” I told him he was right on at least one account and then told him my real name. I had instinctively felt compelled to lie about who I was—I had no longer wanted to be who I was.
On a fair day, toward what I figured was the middle of April—there was only an old wind-up clock in the cabin, I had dropped my cell phone in the trash at the airport, and I did not dare turn on the TV—the old man, Paul, showed up at 7:30 am as usual but in less winter armor. “I walked up to the store this morning, just to let folks know I wasn’t dead, you know, since they hadn’t seen me in a while.”
“Shit, Paul, what time does that place open?”
“Early enough, most the time. So, where you goin’ after today?”
“What do you mean?”
“Today’s your last day rentin’ this place. Think you’ll go back to the big city, back home; hell, maybe look for a new home, new job? Yep, probably need a new job. Gonna have a hell of a time of it.” My bowels loosened and I felt the blood drain from my face.
Paul chuckled slightly, smiled a half smile, gestured his coffee mug at me. “I ain’t got much, but I do got a TV, son. Lawyers worked things out for ya all legal-wise, huh, kept ya outta prison, sent them other boys up the river, as they say. Obvious you still tryin’ to get things straight with yourself, though. That’s why you come here, right? Not just to run away. Can’t run away from yourself, but you already know that. Well, I imagine you’re gettin’ shit figured out; seem to be. You done all right here over the winter, I imagine. Didn’t die.”
Hear you and them other boys fucked a whole buncha folks real bad, folks want your head, think you escaped justice, folks wanna know where all that money got to. Don’t suppose you really even know for sure, do ya?” He looked halfway up at me from his coffee mug and wrinkled up his brow so that those bushy eyebrows seemed to go halfway up his forehead. The universe paused for the briefest of moments as his eyes bore into me, then his entire face relaxed and he began reexamining his mug, “Nah, didn’t figure so.” He seemed pleased, from what I could tell.
Folks at the store asked about you. Told ‘em you’re pretty smart, you’ll do good running the place; told ‘em I trust ya, ‘cause I do. Ernie had a heart attack ‘fore the cold set in, won’t be comin’ back to the store. The crew done all right by me over the winter, but gotta have someone with a brain to run things now the seasons comin’ back around. Suppose traffic’ll be pickin’ up through here again.”
It was similar to the first day Paul had invaded the cabin—we were immediately drinking coffee together every morning and eating dinner together every evening as if God himself had predetermined it. Now I was running the general store. It just was—no other scenario existed other than this, no other possibilities. This was truth. “You own the general store?”
“You can have the cabin, you’re the only one rented the damn thing in ages. Suppose I’ll tell Ernie’s wife to not worry about tryin’ to rent it out for me no more, take it down off that computer mess.”
“You mean the internet? You own this cabin?”
“You’ll have to walk to work for now; don’t have a car to lend ya. Alright, I’m gonna do dinner at the store tonight; suppose I’ll see ya up there in the morning.” Paul stood, left his mug on the table, slung his rifle, nodded, and headed out the door. I threw a couple more logs in the stove, poured another cup of coffee, and looked out the window at the newly visible traces of life peeking out from beneath the melting snow.
|
Jack Daniel Miles Bio
Jack Daniel Miles currently resides Gainesville, Florida, with his wife and daughter. Jack is a writer, multi-instrumentalist, and volunteer educator.
|
I almost got Caught
Ariel Nichols
It’s been two whole weeks since I have been getting these strange calls. How could they possibly know what I have done? How can they link me to those “strange” deaths? No one knows I am a creature of the night, but what if my secret did get out? Suddenly the phone rings, I am hesitant to even answer... I pick up the phone and say “Hello” they respond with “I know what you did” and then abruptly hang up.
I run to my cold dark bedroom and shuffle around to turn on the light so I can pack my things and leave town. Thinking out loud to myself I say, “I need to change my number, leave no forwarding address, leave town and figure out a way to get these calls to stop before the police catch up to me!” I quickly finish packing and rush down to my car. I throw my bags into the trunk and get in the drivers seat. I sit there and ponder for a moment of how things could have gotten this bad. I hear faint sirens in the distance, could they have found my victim from the night before? I act quickly and turn my headlights on and zoom down the street. I can see the sirens flashing in the distance.
As I see these flashing lights my instincts tell me to turn down a dark street and turn off my headlights and car. So that is what I did, I watched 6 squad cars zoom past and they sure did seem in a hurry. I sat and waited until I didn’t hear any sirens and then I turned my car back on and quickly speed away. I didn’t dare drive past my apartment for I knew they would catch me. I get on highway 85 toward Forest Grove Oregon; with hopes I can restart and hopefully not get caught.
My phone rings one last time and it’s not the same caller as before; it’s my mother.... I think to myself “she hasn’t called me in years.” I quickly answer; she says calmly “Hello dear, the police are looking for you, they have some questions they want to ask you, so please go to the police station. I am begging you please I don’t know what you did but you’re they’re number 1 suspect.” I politely say, “Okay mother I will go into the station and answer their questions.” She hangs up the phone, and I pull over to the side of the road.
I have two choices and I better choose wisely. I either go in lie to their faces, or run and have the possibility of being caught. With such a dilemma I have to act not only quickly but I have to think about how I am going to get away with it. I think about my poor mother, and then I realize I do have to go in and answer their questions with hopes they won’t figure out it was me. I quickly get off the shoulder of the dark highway and get off then turn around to go towards the precinct. My heart is racing; I am getting sweaty what if they don’t believe me? What if they book me on circumstance?
I arrive at the station to give my statement, and all I can think of is what if they catch me. I arrive at the large front desk, and give them my name and tell them I am here to give my statement. A detective peeks his head around the corner and says “Ah yes come with me please.” I follow the detective to his desk. I tell them I don’t know what happened to the people; we were all at a party, and that’s the last time I saw them. They collected DNA, and told me to wait for the results and if I am cleared I am free to go. The detective comes back two hours later and says “Well you’re all cleared to go.” I sigh in relief and walk out thinking to myself, I got away with it!
|
guide
Janet Kuypers
haiku 2/16/14
like all lambs to the
slaughter, I’ll always guide them
to their destiny
|
|
Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.
She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.
She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org and chaoticarts.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images.
Since 2010 Kuypers also hosts the Chicago poetry open mic at the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).
In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), the three collection books from 2004: Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the shutterfly ISSN# cc& hardcover art book life, in color, Post-Apocalyptic, Burn Through Me, Under the Sea (photo book), the Periodic Table of Poetry, a year long Journey, Bon Voyage!, and the mini books Part of my Pain, Let me See you Stripped, Say Nothing, Give me the News, when you Dream tonight, Rape, Sexism, Life & Death (with some Slovak poetry translations), Twitterati, and 100 Haikus, that coincided with the June 2014 release of the two poetry collection books Partial Nudity and Revealed.
|
Tending a Child’s Garden
Terry C. Ley
You, too, my mother, read my rhymes,
For love of unforgotten times;
And you may chance to hear once more
The little feet along the floor.
Robert Louis Stevenson |
Sometimes I accompanied my father when he went to some of his customers’ homes to collect overdue accounts. He ran a Standard Oil filling station throughout most of the Depression and all of World War II, a time when businesses in Cedar Falls, Iowa, were accustomed to extending credit to their neighbors. For whatever reason, however, some customers did not pay their bills promptly, and, after payment was overdue for several months, Dad had to knock on doors.
I did not accompany him to those doors, of course. I sat in the car, often reading a book. I would sometimes rather listen to the radio, but Dad insisted that would run down the battery, so I read or watched the birds or just waited.
One summer evening after supper, we drove to a house on the corner of Ninth and State Streets. Dad went to the front door, his account book in hand, where his customer met him and invited him in. Whether Dad emerged later with a payment on account or not, I do not know. I know only that he brought a book to the car when he returned.
“This is for you!” Dad said as he handed it to me. Perhaps the customer gave him the book in partial payment. I do not know. I was not accustomed to claiming any booty from such trips, so I must have been pleased to receive such an unexpected gift.
I could tell from the frayed cover that others had read this book before it came to me. Later, certain blemishes on the inside verified that first impression. The fact that the book was used did not make it any less valuable than a new book to me. I have always been interested to see how many dates are stamped on the inside of library books, delighted to find how large a community of readers has shared the book in my hand, how many other hands have turned its pages.
I studied the cover of this book: A Child’s Garden of Verses by someone named Robert Louis Stevenson. A book of poems it was! I liked poems all right, but Mom usually read stories to me, stories like Raggedy Ann and Andy, Amber, and Comrades of the Saddle. On the cover of this book a girl in a yellow dress and a butterfly in a garden invited me inside. During Dad’s next house call, I explored the inside of my new book. I liked the way the print lined up along the left margin, a capital letter standing boldly at the beginning of each line. I liked the wide margins, the generous white space on those pages. The illustrations captured my imagination immediately, black and white line drawings of children from another age enjoying things that I too enjoyed: walking in the rain, swinging, watching the stars, playing with boats and trains and toy soldiers.
Although I could read many of the poems in the Garden myself, I coaxed my mother to read my favorites to me over and over again at bedtime. Although she may have tired of them, I grew to love them like I loved my favorite songs. Soon, without effort, I had memorized some of them—learned them “by heart,” a phrase I have always preferred—and recited them as Mom read them aloud, duets inspired by Mr. Stevenson.
How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
and
A birdie with a yellow bill
Hopped upon the window-sill,
Cocked his shining eye, and said:
“Ain’t you ‘shamed, you sleepy-head!”
and
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head,
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.
Since then, that Garden has traveled with me to Cedar Rapids and to Auburn, Alabama, sometimes living in boxes and trunks in hot attics, sometimes standing among other books of verse on my bookshelves. Time has frayed its cover even more, separated the pages from the binding. The first four pages are missing altogether, and others fall out each time I open the book.
Downsizing often means getting rid of books at our house, and I enjoy giving them to friends or to the Friends of the Public Library for their annual sale. But I shall hold onto the Garden for as long as I have half an inch of shelf space to call my own. That book—and my mother—invited me to find joy and comfort in poetry, surely one of life’s gifts to me.
|
11880610, art from Wes Heine
once, i was waiting
Peter Halliday
once, i was waiting
to read those words:
yours.
a print that filled
a heart (hardened and hurt)
with powerful passion.
once, i was waiting
to hear that voice:
yours.
a conversation that revitalized
a mind (murky and muddled)
from dilapidating doubts.
once, i was waiting
to feel that touch:
yours.
a sensation that captivated
a soul (selfish and sick)
with looming love.
i was waiting
for you— once.
|
New Moon
Richard Schnap
She arrived at my door
On a starless night
From a home that was
More like a prison
Asking for shelter
And a meal of some sort
Promising to repay
Me with pleasure
I was only thirteen
And only knew love
From the pages
Of cold magazines
So when the time came
And she offered herself
I thanked her but
Turned off the light
|
Richard Schnap Bio
Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.
|
When the Shadow Woke
Richard Schnap
It could have been when
I learned that my father
Had an affair during
World War II
Or it could have been when
I discovered the vodka
My mother kept hidden
In a drawer
Or it could have been when
I first read the diary
Where my sister described
Her abuse
But it was probably when
I began to have nightmares
Of a house setting fire
To itself
|
Richard Schnap Bio
Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.
|
Leafspring
Gregg Dotoli
late winter silver sun
falls on the high oaks and land
gently awakens its children
green baby buds wake and stretch
to the soft notes of a SpringSong
natures unbroken promise
warming our cooled hearts
chilled by mercurial winter days
leafspring zing
the annual élan
|
The Beer
Dene Williams
It was a beautiful sunny Sunday. A couple of my college buddies and I decided to get together, drink some beer and play some cards. The problem was, you can’t buy beer on Sundays in Nashville, TN. Well being college students, none of us were from Tennessee. We quickly found this information out once we got to the store. After realizing that we wouldn’t be drinking any beer with our card game, we proceeded to my house.
One of my college buddies informed me that he saw a quart of beer in my den, for real? I responded. Get it, put it in the freezer. We sat down and patiently waited while the bottle of beer began to get cold. We talked and laughed, anything to keep us from thinking about what we all were so anxiously wanting for. A glass of beer.
Finally, the beer had gotten cold enough for us to drink. I couldn’t wait for that cold beer to slide down my throat. We poured up six cups of beer equally and made a toast. This beer didn’t look right to me; it was a little darker in color. I drank colt 45 for years, long enough to know what it looks like. I put the cup up to my nose. This certainly smelled like pee to me. I quickly put my cup back on the table. Pushing the cup away from me. I said, “I’m not drinking that; that’s not beer, that’s pee.” My college buddies all insisted that I was tripping. Saying that it was beer, that it smelled and taste like beer, that it was just a little flat. I told them, that I didn’t care how flat it was. I wasn’t drinking it. They took my cup of beer and split it between them. I made the choice to not go with the majority. As badly as I wanted beer that sunny afternoon, I had to go with my gut.
The next morning, I was getting ready for class. My uncle asked me if I knew what happened to this bottle of pee, that he had in the den? My face blew up, as I blurted out the biggest laugh you’ve ever heard. My uncle asked me what was so funny? I told him the story about the my college buddies and the beer. This was way too funny, because I told my college buddies, that the bottle of beer was pee, but they wouldn’t believe me. Well my uncle just confirmed it.
When I got to campus I couldn’t wait to tell my college buddies. No one wanted to accept the truth. They insisted that it was beer. I am so very glad, that I have lived to say, that I have never drank, any of my uncles pee. However, I do know five other people who have.
|
The Solicitation of Tom W
Doug S. Haines
Between job interviews at the few remaining ad agencies willing to return his calls, Tom W squeezed in a two o’clock meeting at St. Andrew’s on 42nd. It wasn’t one of his usual spots, but he needed the pick-me-up to compensate for a morning filled with disappointment.
After introducing himself from the podium at the front of the room, he told his fellow alcoholics how he’d lost his job. A few people snickered, while others cringed. He then told the story about how he backed over the family’s beloved and aging Golden Retriever, Milo, and how his two beautiful daughters, now seven and ten, still found this act unforgivable. He spoke of how his wife gave him “plenty of chances” and how he blew them all. And when he was done speaking, the room full of strangers thanked him for his honesty and courage as he took his seat between the old guy with the twitch and the young woman with the burn scars. He greeted both with a smile. The old man gave a sort of head nod, which may have been involuntary, and the young woman turned her head away and fixed her eyes on a poster of a weary marathon runner nearing the finish line. The caption on the poster read: Almost There!
In true A.A. form, the coffee was stale and the people damaged. Tom W felt right at home in his metal folding chair, though it creaked under his weight. Meanwhile, a nervous woman in a blue floral print muumuu read the Tenth Step from the Big Book, and Tom W tried to pay attention. He hated the Tenth. His life was an utter cesspool, which made his Daily Inventories a torturous procedure. But like all secret societies, A.A. was full of seemingly ridiculous rituals and their unquestioned repetition, and Tom W, in his desperation, tried his best to abide and follow the program.
* * *
In the subway, after his last interview of the day, two trains passed before him in a clash of light and sound that rattled every cheap filling in his head. He shuddered at the thought of another month on unemployment and then reminded himself to be thankful for the few blessings he had left. He felt broken—shattered, even. He wanted a drink and he wanted it bad. He began to sweat. Clearing his throat, he choked momentarily. If only he could be that lucky—to die suddenly—anonymously. He scanned the platform, found a place to sit, and waited for the next train.
He was short and stout, almost perfectly round—middle-aged and violently bald. His hairline had long since receded, now taking up residency in thick patches along his back and shoulders. This retreat, along with everything else that made him feel inferior, had given him a crippling fear of his own repulsive nudity. The idea of dating seemed so far out of his reach that he wondered how he had ever gotten Vera to fall in love with him in the first place. Though her figure was no longer what it once was, he knew she’d have no shortage of suitors, all better looking and more successful than he was. The best he could say for himself was that he was now six months, two weeks, and three days sober. He found pride in this fact and often thought that he should wear one of those signs around his neck that read: 199 Days Without an Accident. One more day would make an even 200—a milestone. And that was the point: it was all about One Day At A Time.
But weren’t those days supposed to get easier? Instead, every day he felt like he was dragging an anchor up a steep hill through a hailstorm of fear and failure. The anchor kept getting heavier and the hail more piercing. Quit focusing on the negative, he told himself. So what if your wife left you and your ungrateful kids despise you and nobody in this lousy town will hire your sorry tail to save your worthless godforsaken life? At least you’re sober. At least you’re making an effort. Get through today. Tomorrow is 200. Almost There.
As he waited for his train, he tapped out a rhythm on the armrest of the bench. This was a nervous habit he’d developed as a child. The tune was always the same, the theme from the old Dick Van Dyke Show. It used to drive Vera crazy. As he tapped out the finale, he caught sight of a discarded classifieds section with a personal ad circled in thick red ink: Got Herpes? Me, too! Sometimes love hurts. He had to laugh. He thanked God for His sense of humor. Surrendering one’s self to a Higher Power was an important part of the program, even for non-believers, and Tom W was willing to try anything. He liked to think of his life as God’s favorite sitcom, a comedy based around a bumbling protagonist who never won but always entertained.
The station rumbled as his train pulled up and eased to a stop. He gathered his leather-bound portfolio folder and boarded, loathing public transportation almost as much as job interviews. The irony: an advertising executive who could no longer sell himself. Twenty years in the business, a bookshelf full of awards, and the genius behind some of the best-loved ads around had all been torn down by one drunken Christmas party and a moment of inappropriate behavior caught on some jerk’s camera phone.
It had happened sometime after polishing off the second bottle of scotch, a twelve-year-old single malt if memory served, though the rest of the details remained blurry. Of course, thanks to the Internet, he had put together the majority of the missing pieces. It went like this: Tom W, 2012 Northeastern Regional Advertising Man of the Year, for some unknown reason decided to “motorboat” the seventy-something-year-old wife of the chief CEO of the prestigious Bullock and Sellers Agency. The pictures went viral via the advertising community and were linked to the grossly popular YouTube video: Fat Man Motorboats Grandma!
With over a million hits in the first week, Tom W became the wrong kind of famous.
Still, if you asked Vera or his daughters, killing Milo was worse.
* * *
On the train, he watched a young woman making her way through the car. Mid to late twenties, long dirty-blonde hair, a little curvy for his tastes but cute and casual. She wore a clingy orange and blue sundress and she carried a clipboard as she engaged various passengers in conversations, occasionally getting signatures. What was she selling? He tried not to judge her solicitous behavior as she made her way toward him. Their eyes met. She approached.
“So, would you like to do your part to save the planet?” Her tone was upbeat, her smile pleasant and distracting.
“Uh, excuse me?” He was buying time, trying to think of something clever.
“Would you like to do your part to save the planet?” Again, she smiled.
“Um, no, not enough to join Greenpeace or anything. I’ll be lucky if I can save myself at this rate.”
She laughed and playfully patted him on the chest. He flexed involuntarily—as if he had a shot with this girl. She continued her spiel, and he nodded with envy for her passion.
“Do you ride the train to lighten your carbon footprint?”
“Uh, no. After my third DWI, the state decided to lighten my carbon footprint for me.” Something about her put him at ease. He felt a swagger that had been absent since his last drink.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Her eyes glazed over with a touch of pity, or was it concern?
“Yup, before that I drove a Hummer that ran on rain forests and puppies.”
It took her a second, but again she laughed and patted. “Very funny. You’re mocking me, aren’t you?”
“No.” He paused. “Well, maybe a little.” He did his best to smile. Though he knew she was only flirting with him to make the sale, his confidence grew.
“Come on, wouldn’t you like to save the polar bears?” she asked. “I mean, their habitats are, like, melting and they’re facing extinction in our lifetimes.” She dug through her purse to retrieve a dog-eared photo of a pathetic-looking polar bear, more brown than white, as if it were spoiling in the sun like a piece of fruit. It reminded him of the dog he’d killed—poor Milo. The dog that hadn’t died right away. The dog that whined all the way to the twenty-four hour vet clinic before finally being put down. Those sad eyes going blank in an instant.
“My God, he looks like I feel,” Tom W said of the polar bear, and gave the girl a wink which he immediately regretted.
She looked at him as if he were a curiosity.
“Look, I wish I could help,” he said. “I really do, but I’ve actually got a pretty serious vendetta against polar bears. In fact, they’re my sworn enemies.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
He made his face look stern.
“How can you hate polar bears?” she asked.
He felt like she had to know he was messing with her again, but she took the bait.
“One killed my cat in a knife fight, and I’ve never gotten over it.”
She laughed, again. She ran her hand down his left arm, lingering at the wrist for a few seconds before letting go. He trembled.
“You’re pretty funny, aren’t you?” she said.
“I have my moments.”
“I bet you do—hey, I don’t normally do this, but I kind of have a weird thing for guys like you.”
“Do you mean distinguished and charming or bald and rotund?” His smile, he felt, was boyish and playful. She was definitely flirting. He didn’t understand why.
“Can it be a little of both?” she asked.
“Wow, that is weird,” he said.
He thought about his own daughters, much too young for dating now, but it was only matter of time before they’d be flirting with old, fat men on trains. A horrifying thought. Surely his girls would have better taste. Then again, didn’t women always go for men like their fathers? Perhaps it was good that his daughters hated him—for their sake.
“I bet you have a hairy back, don’t you? In the gay community, guys like you are called Bears,” she said.
“And what about in the straight community?”
“I don’t know. Can’t I just call you cute?”
“So, you’ve really got a thing for bears, polar or otherwise?”
“Yeah, I guess I do.” Her blues eyes lit up. “My name is Amber.” She held her hand out in that dainty way of girls who grew up believing they were princesses, and Tom W took it like a gentleman and kissed it lightly. Her skin smelled like mangos.
“Of course it is. I knew you were an Amber the second I laid eyes on you,” he said. “People call me Tom.”
“Nice to meet you, Tom,” she said as she did a kind of bow and curtsy thing with the hem of her dress. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“Well, this might sound kind of crazy. I don’t know you or what your plans are for this evening and all, but would you like to grab a drink with me?” Her eyes drew him in. Everything else drifted away. The train, the other passengers, the meetings, the ex-wife, the kids, the dog, and even the failed interviews all got lost in the moment.
Tom W started to speak but hesitated. His sobriety pulled him back. The whining of the dying dog echoed through the hallways of his mind. Vera and his daughters’ faces, cruel and full of hate, just like the day he moved out, flashed before his eyes. He looked at the girl in front of him, and somehow she appeared different. Was it innocence or something else? Whatever it was, he knew he couldn’t do what he wanted to do. He gathered himself.
“Sweetheart,” he said, his voice shaky. “You have no idea how much I’d like to have a drink with you, but unfortunately I have to pass.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “Maybe some other time.”
Even Tom W was shocked by his words. She didn’t seem like a girl who got turned down often, certainly not by guys like him. In fact, he was probably her first. She shrank under his rejection, and his heart mourned the loss, but it was a matter of self-preservation. She thanked him for his time and disappeared into the crowd with her clipboard and convictions, the tight- fitting orange and blue sundress etched into his brain. He envied her and despised himself.
* * *
That night at his ten o’clock meeting, he introduced himself as “Tom W” once again and told his story. He spoke of the wife, the kids, the dog, the career, the girl on the train, and of polar bears. Tears ran down his cheeks, and his nose began to run as he made his way back to his seat. They thanked him for sharing. They always thanked you.
|
Doug S. Haines Bio:
Doug S. Haines earned his MFA inCreative Writing from the University of Memphis. In 2013, he was the Senior Editor and majority contributor on the nonfiction book about sustainable living from Texas Review Press, RESURRECTING TRASH. His collection of short stories,THINGS I PRAY I NEVER FORGET, was a semi-finalist in the 2014 Elixir PressFiction Award and a finalist for the George Garrett Fiction Prize. Mostrecently, his work appeared in the 2014 issue of SLIPPERY ELM. He teachesEnglish and Creative Writing at Fayetteville Tech in North Carolina.
|
As I Contemplate
Marlon Jackson
Though it was only spring time the high temperatures indicated that it was going to be a hot week. Joggers made their way on the sidewalk and their concentration was on focus and on point. The stores were still closed although a few of them were 24 hour bodegas. The time was five a.m., and I’ve just walked the last ten blocks on the street and on my way to the hotel where I stood at. I was contemplating life while I walked and the last ten blocks. What to do? How to do? Or what’s next? I write a lot from time to time and mostly its words I can’t express verbally. Sometimes it’s essays, journal entries, poetry, even just my mind poured out on paper. On the sidewalk across the street from the hotel was a divider elongated on either side of the street expanded down and or up. There were benches and I decided to walk across the empty street to the benches and I sat. Across from me on the opposite side of the street sitting on the benches were two homeless men. They were decently groomed and even from the distance, I’ve observed based on their facial expressions. I thought about walking to them and sitting beside them but I ought not to. I’ve chatted with homeless men before, though it’s been awhile. I’ve felt what I believe they felt...like being alone. Sitting here on these benches beneath the dawn’s slowly brightening sky I’ve realized how well that silence is golden. And about life and certain issues of my past until present, thinking is good. Not too hard but well enough to understand some of my surroundings. The world is a fine place, like Ernest Hemmingway said. And fighting for it is obvious. But engrossing our own self and then each other with goodness can wonderous and vigorous, if we keep up the strength of what we’re intended to by grace. And somehow that’s one thing to contemplate deeply about. Especially what’s going on currently and so frequently daily everywhere, all around.
|
Peeping Tom
Michel Ge
Perhaps he is lonely. It would be the easiest thing to say if she were to come down for a snack and see him, standing there in the kitchen with the radium-green oven clock, the door unlocked behind him. It is certainly the most obvious explanation, but he does not feel the thickness that lonely people feel; he feels indifferent, and, thinking about his loneliness, he derives a vague sort of pleasure, without knowing why, except that perhaps it is an adaptation.
He does not know what he will do when, or if, he enters her bedroom. He imagines standing over her bundled catlike body, her room smelling of fruity perfume with brightly painted walls, her covers rising up-up-down, up-up-down with her breath, and then what? What does he do? Rape her? He does not want to rape her. In all likelihood he is going to stand staring in the dark, unable to see her face, yet knowing it is there. The thought is exciting and stressful at the same time, the way one feels before a performance.
Perhaps that is it—the explanation: how she plays her violin. Each night he is her only spectator, studying her through the gap in her curtains, her buttery skin, her downy hair trailing past her shoulders. The violin has some significance. If she were to play something else—the oboe, for example—he would have stopped watching her long ago. Perhaps, in the hallways, he would stand by his classroom between periods and let his eyes trail her after she passes by, but only on occasion, and mostly he would sit in his chair clicking his pen and playing blitz chess on his computer. He does not think about it, but at one time he played violin, as a young child, in a different school, and he was terrified of it. Not just that he might break one—he treated them like pottery—but also that the violin’s wire-taut strings and the darkness in its hollows held some kind of secret, a secret that it would not surrender to him because of who he was. He was afraid of playing in front of others, alone, so that the slightest hesitance or imprecise fingering would be heard, loudly and painfully, for all to hear, and that they would judge him for who he was. After high school he put the violin away and forgot about it, so if it is the cause for his watching the girl, it is subconscious at best. Perhaps he is simply lonely.
His eyes are adjusted to the darkness and he sees the shape of a table, of chairs, a darker gap that is the living room. He eases over. Small, shiny pillows lie scattered on the floor. One shelf holds dusty, embroidered books, and small porcelain figure are aligned on another. The house is quiet.
Step by step, each one probing for floorboard noises, he enters a hallway, coming upon a staircase from the back. He feels his heart in his fingertips. He wonders what he will do as he stands over the girl, and wonders if he is a bad person. He would have been fine watching her from outside, he thinks, but she stopped practicing and he cannot reason why. He decides he is a bad person but starts up the stairs anyway.
A door opens. A light flicks on.
His pulse spikes and he retreats, pressing his back to the side of the stairwell. The light is butterscotch. He stands very still. He hears soft feminine footsteps pad down the hall. He is breathing slowly, steadily. Another door opens. After a time a toilet flushes and the light flicks off and it is quiet again.
He waits, then eases his way back into the living room, the kitchen, and outside.
He finds her in the store. She stands there on her phone, secretly browsing the desert shelf, even though nobody is watching, except for him.
“Hello Anna,” he says.
She does not hear. His voice is too soft.
“Hello Anna,” he says again, louder, closer.
“Oh. Hi! Mr. Bernstein.”
“Are you well?”
“Yes Mr. Bernstein.”
“How’s school?”
“Good, Mr. Bernstein.”
He smiles, asks the new-school-year questions. What is her favorite class?—Science. (Of course.) Which is giving her the most trouble?—History, although she doesn’t really know yet, and it’s hard to say at this point, but Mr. Cronin—
“He’s tough,” he says, nodding softly—
assigned twenty pages of reading on the first night, and she’s worried about the class, and already stressed, though it’s a bit early to make judgments.
“You’ll do fine,” he says. “Remember your topic sentences,” and she fake-laughs, but does it well. “Are you still playing violin?”
She makes a drawn-out, strained, conscientious eh, looking off to one side. She looks surprised, as if she’s never told him that she plays violin before (she hasn’t), but the information is well-known by now, ever since Tommy Jones wrote an article in the school newspaper: UNDERCOVER GENIUS? ANNA VAGIN PERFORMS AT WHITE HOUSE. “I mean, I guess,” she says. Her eyes are pale blue and wide, neither afraid nor angry.
“You guess?”
She looks uncomfortable.
“How do you like being famous?” he asks.
Her dad glances around the corner and sees her. He wears a bowler cap, and is short, with a wizened Stalin face (so Mr. Cronin once remarked, when they were drunk the Friday after parent-teacher conferences). Mr. Vagin looks up at him, grunting. “Hello,” he says. “How are you.”
“I’m well, thank you,” he says. “I was talking to Anna about her violin.”
Mr. Vagin stares uncomprehendingly, as if he doesn’t understand English. Then he chuckles. “Hahaha,” he says. His voice is low and raspy. “Thank you.” He puts a hand on Anna’s back and brings her away. He does this with his left hand, the hand that once worked the strings, two fingers now warped sideways from arthritis.
When they are gone he walks absently through the store. He picks up a few packages of Ramen. There is too much air-conditioning. The tiles are clean like in a hospital, and a generic song mumbles overhead.
The checkout clerk is a bald pallid man who sanitizes his hands between each checkout. “Paper or plastic today?” he asks. He is gay. He—Anna’s old teacher—indicates he would like neither. He walks out holding his Ramen.
In the fall it is chilly Monday night football games. Anna is not there (Mr. Vagin is not that kind of father) but on occasion he sits up in the back with Mr. Cronin, whom he refers to as Bill. He talks to Bill sometimes about Anna. How is she doing, is she well, that sort of thing. Bill is not permitted to disclose her exact grade—“not the exact number, per se”—but one time when he visits Bill’s room for lunch Bill lets slip that “maybe the digits don’t add up to 8,” which can mean a few bad things, and many worse ones. Bill only shrugs in response. “ ‘s why I don’t teach math,” Bill says.
He sees Anna a few times in the hallway, between classes. Once she is with a boy, not necessarily kissing or hugging or holding hands, and they are not even side by side, only moving at more or less the same pace, and he isn’t jealous, just sees this from his room as they pass by the window, and looks away when she sees him looking. It turns out they were only in the same group for Mr. Cronin’s World War I project. That is why he was never jealous in the first place. Days later she is with another boy.
Fall entrenches itself into the air, and the trees become skeletal, and pumpkins sprout on porches and lawns like a strange, bulbous fungus. At night through the gap in the curtains slivers of Anna shout at slivers of her parents, who sometimes (her father) stand there, stonily displeased, and other times (her mother) shout back three times louder. He seldom sees her play violin, and when he does, it is hurried and mechanical, though not necessarily careless. Sometimes he hears crying; whose, he does not know. “She’s a tough case,” Mr. Cronin says. “I really don’t know what else to say.” Is it that bad? he asks. Two years ago she had a B in his class, more or less the same in history. “I don’t know,” Bill says, sighing, leaning back in his chair, which exposes the lap of his pants, folded into an erection-like arch, something that his pants always do, that is a running joke maintained by the student body. It is not an actual erection (as Bill frequently rants when he is drunk), and now both consciously ignore it. “It’s not that she isn’t bright,” Bill says after a moment. “It’s not that at all. She’s the smartest damn kid I’ve ever had.”
—but she’d been held back a grade anyway, which is the unfair thing.
“I don’t see why they do it,” is all Bill can say. “Girl plays violin, history isn’t her thing—why do this to her?”
She is with the other boy more and more. They eat lunch together. They walk together to each other’s classes.
One day he is in his room, his legs up on his desk, playing chess, when he sees them talking by the lockers opposite his room. It is silent except for the scroll and click of the mouse and the water-noise of students in the hallway. The locker-sized window by his door gives him a plain view of them talking. He sips his Sprite. The afternoon announcements beep to an end. It’s a cool autumn afternoon, sunny, a ripe time for being outside. He sips again. They are still talking. He captures a pawn, a satisfying clattering noise. Outside, the trees are silently agitating. He is down a piece but he stalls and his opponent loses on time. He finishes his Sprite and tosses it into the recycling bin. He gets up, stretches, gathers his keys, his phone, and steps out into the hall. He sees Anna when he steps outside, a comfortable day with the autumn chill perfectly balanced by the sun’s heat. She sits on the bike rack, scanning the roads. The buses are gone. So is the boy.
He goes over. “You look worried,” he says.
“I missed my bus.”
“Do you want a ride home?” he asks Anna, and realizes how that sounds, and is about to take it back when she says, “Umm, no thanks.” He goes away a few steps and looks back. “Well check with Mr. Nelson,” he says. The principal. “And call your dad. Do you want to use my phone?”
She shakes her head. “Thank you,” she says again.
That night there is the loudest argument they have ever had, loud even from the window, loud even from the sidewalk. She is crying and her mother is crying. Her backpack is slumped by her feet, like a ruptured organ, papers and notebooks spilling over the floor. The violin is there, too, in her father’s hand. He is red in the face. All of a sudden she is angry and she is jabbing fingers at him and she is pushing at his chest and then a roar, a crash, a splintering noise. For a second everything is quiet. From the window he hears the faintest sound of a last, pitiful chord. A scuffle and a door creaks open and Anna runs out into the darkness.
He knows the creek she runs to. The soil is soft and moonlight glitters off the black water.
“Anna?” he says.
She stands up quickly. She does not recognize him.
“It’s I. Mr. Bernstein.”
“What are you—” she says. She does not sound like she has been crying. “What are you doing?”
“I saw you running.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I have to go. Thank you.”
“Anna,” he says. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She watches him. He realizes how he must look—tall, backlit, standing. He crouches down. “Your father tells me you’ve been arguing.”
She sighs.
“Is it about the violin?”
“I need to go. Yes. I have to go Mr. Bernstein.”
“Anna, it’s alright.”
“Please. I need to go.”
“Anna,” he says. “Do you want to talk about something?”
She tries to step around him but he moves to block her.
“Is it the violin?”
“Yes,” she says with stale courtesy. “Please, Mr. Bernstein.”
“I played violin once,” he says, compulsively. “I regret ever letting it go.”
“Thank you. I enjoy playing my violin.” She is breathing heavily. He sees the shape of her head swell up and down.
“Your dad—”
“Don’t talk about my dad!” she shrieks. “Why are you always around me? You fucking pervert!”
He recoils and she flies off. To where he does not know. He suddenly feels very clumsy, and hurt. Standing there looking down on her, he was not a pervert. He felt nothing stir inside him but grief. But now that she scatters dovelike away, he starts to feel what he feels when she plays violin; he looks after her almost with malice. It is only for an instant and he recognizes the malice and abolishes it. Then he feels like his stomach has clenched shut and will not open, like the world is gray even in the colorless dark.
In health class videos it is quoted as “a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” When Anna suicides, few notice, including him. Her once-lover, weeks later, walks around with another girl. As for him, he thinks she is merely going through a stage, much like puberty, a mood swing that will pass. And in anticipation of when it does, he buys a violin and takes it to her house.
Mr. Vagin opens the door, disgruntled.
“Yes?”
“Good morning.” He speaks with a lowered face. “I heard Anna needs a new violin,” he says. “I want to give this to her.”
“She does not need your gift.”
“Will you please take it?”
Mrs. Vagin watches behind. She is paler than normal, stricken, like something that haunts the house.
“Thank you.” Mr. Vagin starts to close the door. “No.”
“May I please see her?”
“No. She is not here.” The door slams shut. There is no rattling chain, no deadbolt clunking shut. That is it.
When he hears she has been found on her bedroom floor with a scarf around her neck, some part of him is relieved that there will be no investigations, no Mr. Nelson (whom he refers to as Dave) coming down to his room to inquire about a report of sexual harassment. For the most part, he sits at his kitchen table late at night, after grading his papers, with a cold diminished mug of tea, and listens to the silence. He sends the Vagins flowers, but he does not think it makes much difference, and he apologizes to them in person for having mistakenly tried to give dead Anna a new violin—he apologizes frankly, flatly, refusing to act tragic. He attends her funeral, standing in the back, at times envying the eulogist. He visits Mr. Vagin again and sits in the study while the wan light of Sunday afternoon filters inside, talking about little in particular. Their conversation lulls often and he hears the silence everywhere. It is a silence he has never heard before. At home he pulls bow across string of the new violin, letting it screech, his fingers cold and numb and forgetful shambling over the fingerboard, trying to remember songs he once knew, all in an effort to drive the silence away. But when he straps the violin back into its case, there it comes again, seeping back in around him. During class in the mornings—some students sit solemnly, having heard of the tragic death of Anna Vagin, but most are simply tired, and are not thinking about her, not that they would have cared anyway—he awakens his computer and plays cheap music, radio music. As it plays they sit hunched over their morning writing assignment, and the classroom is filled with the sound of pencils scratching and the music, and there is no silence. During these moments he sits, his hands folded in his lap, his expression blank. He loves to watch things grow.
|
Janine
David Nelson Hilliard
A local author wrote a book about experiencing tragedy in life, leaving her old life behind, doing a poorly planned exhausting walk, and then finding happiness and success in my home town. This story is about someone who had a somewhat similar arc in her history.
Prologue – Girls were never easy for me. Me -short, bad complexion, non-athletic, no social skills. First sort of girlfriend in grade school, first kiss was with someone who was convenient for both of us. There was no spark.
In high school I ended up with a sometimes / long distance girlfriend towards the end of school. For me, her main virtues were a large chest and physical fun. Either because of cruelty or lack of attention on my part or inevitability, she dumped me. Horrible at the time, good in retrospect.
After high school, I went to Portland State College. Note College. That was what it was when I was there. I was back about ten years ago and it looked like the bathroom hadn’t been cleaned in the intervening forty years.
For awhile I commuted from parents’ home, but later moved into a series of hovels with a series of roommates. At that time PSC was largely limited to four buildings, including the former Lincoln High School. While I was there, the old buildings and apartments were being torn down for I-405, urban renewal or college expansion. You could gamble on which would get the building in which you were living. There was no official campus housing as far I know.
After being dumped by my former girlfriend, my social life was limited to school buds, some going back to high school, and girls who were friends, most of whom did not appeal to me.
My drinking and drugging started fairly late. Like many college students I largely lived on burgers, beer and pot for awhile. I fooled with some other stuff, but was never interested in injection drugs.
Enter Janine – This was around 1963 or 1964. Crazy story, I don’t remember a lot, it’s been almost fifty years during which I’ve only talked to her once for a few minutes. I can’t give any sort of coherent chronology or meaning to what happened to us, I probably couldn’t have even then. Some fragments:
I met her when she was working in a hamburger joint close to college. Beautiful and friendly, so I took a chance and asked her out. She had black shoulder length hair, pale freckled skin, delicate features and a trim figure. Her beauty was natural with any clothes and only lipstick for makeup. I later found out that I was taking classes from her father.
Here is what little that I can remember:
The hamburger stand, I think it was Amel’s or some such, was a local gathering place. I think that at one time a guy from my high school, Brian Cole, who was later in the pop group the Association was one of the gang. He died of an overdose. An old guy who was about the age that I am now held forth on how the seaweed cure had fixed all his ills. The cook called me Maynard G. Krebs in reference to the Bob Denver (pre-Gilligan’s Island) who played a beatnik in the TV program of the time “Dobie Gillis”. In turn, I called him Archie, as in the teenage comic book character. Another employee at the place was known as “Birdwoman” because of her thin figure and bulging eyes. She was reputed to be easy.
One time while asleep in the cheap dungeon basement where I was staying a guy came in and asked where his wife was, referring to Janine. Was she really married then? I don’t know.
While helping her up onto some bleachers, she commented on my strength. I felt great.
While driving somewhere she leaned over me to adjust something. I copped a feel and she gave me hell. Asked how I would like it if she grabbed my dick. I didn’t tell her I’d love it.
At one point, I was going to drive her to her parent’s house when she insisted I let her out on the streets of Portland. Later a cop visited me while I was working a summer job out of town to ask me about her rape. Jumping Jesus. I never got any details. Later she drove down to meet me at a summer job in Gold Beach. It seems that it was around July 4, 1964, my nephew’s birth date. Not much happened while she was there, but the hotel owner raised hell because there was a girl in my room.
She once asked me about my idea of a wholesome girl. I foolishly said the first thing that came to mind – blue eyed blonde. She told me off because her adopted sister was American Indian. She could go from friendly, sparkly, funny charming to cold and angry on a dime. In her happy moments, she mugged, did jokes and accents. I remember her asking me if I’d love here if she were seven feet tall. I don’t remember my answer, but I do remember being charmed.
At one point I suggested that she might have been unfaithful. She invited me to feel her vagina to show that it was cold and had not been used lately.
Somewhere going to or from her house, I believe at her suggestion, I had sex in a car for the only time in my life.
She asked me to bed one time early in our relationship and I suggested that we wait. Idiot.
She invited me to a Ukrainian folk dance and I turned her down. I was bereft of curiosity about other cultures and rather churlish.
Afternoon delight was interrupted by landlady of house in Goose Hollow which was to be torn down for I-405.
The time I got crab lice, I couldn’t think of another source. She was extremely insulted when I suggested that they came from her.
During the time that we were sort of together, she stayed at different places, most of which I did not know, despite nominally living with her parents. One time she stayed with my parents.
My parents liked her, but my mother wondered if she was on drugs. I doubt it.
I got along well with her family and the two of us plus both sets of parents had a pleasant dinner together.
While at a movie, a fellow that I know tried to sit next to us. We moved away. The only real significance is that the fellow’s name said in the right sequence is obscene.
Why these reminisces? Emotional moments stick in our memories. I always wonder when someone is asked what he was doing at 3:00 on June 22, he is expected to have any idea what was happening then. We forget almost everything. As an example of something memorable, I was visiting another woman at her parent’s home while their dog persistently presented an erection to all assembled. We all studiously ignored it.
After I graduated from Portland State and went to U of Oregon, I returned to Portland and gave her a call. She totally dumped me with no reason given. I had hoped during the rare times that our relationship was working that we could eventually be married.
As I said, I have no coherent story of our relationship. From my side, I was so pleased to being with a beautiful exciting girl; I lived with the instability of our relationship. I felt so lucky that she would be my girlfriend – if indeed she was. I was something of a dateless wonder – not attractive, not interesting.
After Janine, my other relationships were unsatisfactory, but not as weird, until I met Sally, a beautiful blonde that likes short guys. After Janine, it was Joan, a fix-up by my sister. We got along fairly well, but we had an unspoken disagreement about the priority of sex and marriage. While at my first graduate school, I had a very short liaison with an older woman who was experimenting with heterosexuality. Soon thereafter she was a committed lesbian. The next one was the Midwest Baptist Virgin, who had a crush on me. I did not treat her very well, particularly after I met Sally.
By the time Sally and I met, we were fairly settled in life and after a very short, completely drama free time, we got married, and lived a mostly happy, occasionally grumpy life thereafter.
Exit Janine – For the next twenty seven years, I neither heard from nor thought much about Janine. Life went on and we moved around the country.
Reenter Janine – We moved to the Portland area in 1997 in order to cash out our California house and help my aging mother. After we first moved here, I thought she might still be living in the area and I began to think about her occasionally. At some point, I determined that she lived in Seattle with her husband, but I did not act upon the information.
When her father died, I would have gone to the memorial, mostly to see her, but I had a conflict.
When her mother died three years ago, Sally and I did go to the memorial. After looking for an old woman resembling my memory of Janine, I found her looking very young and very good. She was somewhat gaunt with graying hair and darker skin than I remember. I introduced her to Sally, but she introduced me to no one. We had a brief, civil conversation. Neither one of us mentioned our prior rocky relationship. She asked if I was still teaching, so she must have known something about me after our last painful conversation. I told her how good she looked. Later Sally told me that she was not so impressed by her looks.
Up until a few days ago, I had mostly put thoughts of her behind me, but then I decided that I needed to record what I knew of the mystery woman in my life. I originally wrote to an address I found under her married name to ask why she dumped me. The letter with obvious changes:
Dear Janine –
I’ve become somewhat reflective about my past recently, partly because many people close to me have died. I think that you knew______. He went a couple of years ago from cancer. Another friend of mine that you may not know, _____, went the first of this month from ALS.
Given that introduction, I proceed carefully. After I went to U of O, I came back to Portland called you and you cut off all contact with me. Maybe I should know why, but I don’t. Forty-nine years later, you probably have no remembrance of the occasion. My request or imposition is for you to tell me what happened. Feel free to be blunt if you know what I’m talking about. You don’t owe me an answer and I don’t expect one, but I’d still like to know.
We are doing fine and I hope that you and your family are doing well.
Sincerely, David Nelson Hilliard
That came back “no such address”. I tried another letter under her maiden name. I got a card from her whole family to Sally and me with an answer to my question. She said that a past trauma from another part of the country caused her to leave her memories behind to restart somewhere else, but while that move did not work out exactly as planned, she did start her family in a new location. She said that I was a friend that deserved an explanation for what had happened.
This is an example of why we should be careful what we ask for. Her letter caused me a lot of grief and wonderment:
What part of the ups and downs of our relationship was caused by the earlier trauma?
I did not think that our relationship was ever “friends”, but maybe it could be now.
She let me think for almost fifty years that I had done something wrong; however I now know that she had her reasons.
What was the effect of her move on other people?
Given the time it took to get her response, was this something that was carefully considered for diplomacy and maybe even have been a committee response?
Did simply moving out of town magically heal her trauma? Was there therapy? Were there bumps in her new relationship as there were in ours?
Why was her response family to family instead of person to person?
Even though I could not have a partner better than Sally, digging back into the past has been very stressful and depressing for me. I will get past it, and I don’t see pursuing anything else about this episode from the 1960s.
Janine’s letter made me feel bad about my bitterness, so I wrote what may be my last communication with her.
August 28, 2014
Dear Janine –
Thank you for that kind and thoughtful letter. I had carried hurt and anger around for a long time, but I want to let it go. I am so sorry that I did not try to understand and help you with what you were going through, I assumed that your departure had something to do with me. I should know that it is usually NOT about me. I wasn’t much of a friend. I tell people that I have no social skills partly because it is true and partly because it lowers expectations. If we can stay away from our dark places maybe we can be friends again.
I’m also sorry about your experience with UW. Those were the days of ridiculous gender discrimination.
The address mess ups were based on bad public information. I knew that you were a ______, but the second letter I sent (not to your return address) listed you as _______. The first to ________ was returned saying no such address.
Because I am now a writer (foreshadowing), I am going to give you a chronology of why I asked you that question after 49 years. I am sorry if my question sent you to a place you wanted to forget. I hope not to do that again.
If you have the patience, here we go.
First there are the horrible things going on around the world always and the death of friends and family, and war criminal George Bush as background.
We returned to Portland in 1997 after wandering around the country for close to three decades. I tried to hook up with some old friends, mostly unsuccessfully. Of course you were a major Portland connection.
After spending thirty or forty years involved with complex computations, I switched to almost totally physical work – volunteering at a state park, hiking, snowshoeing and a little running (more foreshadowing). My unused brain is turning to mush.
Around Christmas 1999 Sally’s mother died in a car crash with Sally’s brother driving. Her going back and forth across the country to Detroit put quite a strain on me, not to mention her. I started to write fiction with lots of deaths, homicides and suicides. I had hopes of gaining from my author sister’s coattails, but her mysteries were never popular enough.
In 2011 we had a great high school reunion at McMenamin’s Edgefield. I spent much of the time with the high school golden boy – all metro football, Purple Heart, and a swell guy. After being a total loser in high school, I was finally cool. He was dead in a couple of months. I am relishing my role as a Portland Old Boy, I am not saying consarn it yet, but I worry about teenagers and have grown a disreputable beard.
At this point, we need a little levity. If you remember the dinner with _____ and his then wife Terry (they had a difficult divorce – she is / was an alcoholic –he got diabetes during the proceedings), we said that if we were only charged for half of the dinners, we could leave a big tip. We were and we could. We were celebrating an award he received for a weight that fell on him while he was on stage in high school.
I joined the foreshadowed Portland Old Boys a few years ago and give speeches from time to time. It satisfies some of my need to continue in show business from the time I wrote and developed software.
My father’s health declined rapidly when he was 70. I was 70 in 2013 and I have some of the same problems.
We are now up to 2014. I was working in the park with my asthmatic 81 year old mentor (he has over 20,000 volunteer hours and is legendary) and wondered what we would do when we were unable to continue hard labor. He did not have much of an idea, but I said I wanted to write again. Little did I know at the time?
A little while later I picked up Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Wild’ from the book store where I volunteer. I found the book very depressing for me because of her journey from trauma to success and happiness through challenging and exciting experiences. Compared to her, I’ve done nothing, and nothing has happened to me. Digression – there are ways that ‘Wild’ parallels your story, at least in a good way I hope. The book is the proximate cause of my deep funk, but there are the other factors. So my challenge was to accomplish somehow, the three things that she did. Do a grand physical event, write, and face the past and see what of significance has happened, good and bad.
The physical part up in the air because of joint problems. I have written a lot and have two short stories appearing soon in small literary journals with subscriber lists that would probably fit in your living room. I hope to find a local mentor to help me either do a novel or a book of short stories. The question to you was part of the facing the past. I have written several partial memoirs on different aspects of my life. A couple feature ‘Janine’ and many memoirs and fiction have ‘Duke’ and ‘Sally’. Note the initials. Those that are intensely personal are written by “David Nelson Hilliard” and all names are changed.
You now have the story of whining and introspection by someone with a wonderful life, set off by a book.
As Paul Simon said, “Still Crazy After All These Years”.
The Best To You And Your Family, David
We come full circle from a story about a woman in the 1990s that escaped from her past to a better life, and then wrote a best seller about it, to a woman who did much the same thing in the 1960s, but without the book.
|
ME
Marc Carver
Let me stare into your eyes
I wouldn’t be looking at you
you see.
I want to see me
but through you
just to make sure
just to make sure i am still in there.
|
Not so good
Marc Carver
The woman from New York
told me that in New York
you could be nothing too special
because there were so many clever people
genuises around every corner
you were never quite as good as you thought you were.
I got the feeling she was trying to make a point
telling me I was not as good as I thought I was
but what she didn’t know
was that I knew I was no good
and I had always known that.
|
The Open Eye
Allan Onik
Ashton prized his collection of books. Many were rare and valuable. Some were banned in their time. Also, a number of them were highly sought after by collectors who would part with a sizable amount of money to obtain them (and, like Ashton, would sometimes part with the law in their pursuit of them). On a custom bookshelf, Ashton’s collection of books spanned the entire outline of his Manhattan apartment’s walls. One book, called “Morals of Epicetus, with Simplicus” was worth thousands and dated back to 1694. Another, bound and titled “Document 597” was written by an ex-CIA agent and spoke of the many covert (and classified) assassinations that occurred around the world as a result of U.S. efforts during his employment. There were only 16 copies of “Document 597” in the world. The book derived its name from the starting number of the classified document the agent wanted to reveal, and the purpose of it was to throw the intelligence agency into upheaval.
Ashton looked through his antique rimmed glasses onto the pages of a book titled “Scalpere Saltare,” written in Latin (in which he was fluent) and consisting of the medieval torture methods of a particular king’s high executioner. He was currently on a page that involved stretch racks and pliers. Grotesque yet fascinating, Ashton thought, I never realized a body could be manipulated in such a way. It’s enough to warrant the popping of a bottle of champagne. Ashton stood up from his vintage, leather armchair and headed to his kitchen for the drink. He heard the buzzer ring for his door. Another customer probably, Ashton thought. He was the premier hunter and supplier of rare books in the area.
He walked to his door, looked through the eyehole, and stifled a groan. Standing outside was a skinny old man in a black suit, holding a black umbrella. Ashton studied his face. You’re always somber, aren’t you, Dagmar? He thought to himself as he opened the door. Well, I suppose it makes perfect sense. Dagmar looked up at him when the door was opened.
“I want the Auschwitz camp log written by officer Hoke,” Dagmar said.
“No, I told you I don’t have it,” Ashton said, “It was burned in the 60’s by the British government.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“I’ll give you 70 thousand and not a penny more, I just want it before you give it to that fool Gottfrid.”
“Gottfrid’s not getting it and you’re not getting it. It’s gone.”
“Ok, 80 then.”
Ashton hesitated. “90.”
“I’ve got my checkbook right here,” Dagmar said.
Ashton fumbled back into his apartment. You’re the fool, he thought, you’re about to pay 90 thousand for a false duplicate. Ashton walked to a corner of his bookshelf that stood next to a window overlooking one of the city’s streets. Across the street was an abandoned, boarded-up building with a homeless man leaning against its outside wall. Ashton looked at him drinking from a bottle in a paper bag as he got his duplicate of the book. He’s always there, Ashton thought, he’s survived for a while. And so will I. Ashton returned to his door with the book. Dagmar had already started writing the check.
“I appreciate this,” Dagmar said. “My collection is nearly complete. I hope to someday have all the officer logs from Auschwitz, and then I will start working on the other camps. I suppose you could help me with that.”
Ashton handed him the book and took the check from his outstretched hand. “I’d prefer not to.” he said, “It’s too risky hunting for them. I can give you some names that would be willing to help for the right price though.”
Dagmar shook his head. “I’ll only use you. You’re the best, and I trust you.”
“I have to go,” Ashton said. He shut the door. Damn Nazis, Ashton thought, thank god for the Russians. Of all your days squabbling with the petty ideologies of your broken gang, when have you ever found real substance? Your leader was a power hungry hoax, and your life in his army a lie. He headed back to his book and his drink.
Later, Ashton was making coffee when the buzzer for his door rang. He put on a robe, walked to the door, and looked through the eyehole. A man stood outside the apartment wearing glasses and a brown trench coat. Ashton thought: He’s government. What’s he doing at my door? He opened the door. The man looked up at Ashton. He held up an FBI badge with his photo on it.
“I’m agent Briggs,” he said as he folded the badge back up and put it into his inner coat pocket. “I heard you were quite the collector?”
“Yes.”
“You got a lot of books in there. I like to read too. Ever read Alfred Bester? He’s fantastic.”
“I read mostly nonfiction,” Ashton said, “is there anything I can help you with?”
“Yes. The Bureau’s looking for a book that’s in circulation, but its nothing you’ll find in Barnes and Nobles. It’s rare and illegal. We’ve already burned 15 copies and there’s one more copy somewhere, probably somewhere here in the Big Apple. Mind if I look around your place? It’s just routine, nothing to worry about. We’ve been going to all the known collectors in the area and...”
Ashton felt as if his face had been hit with a mallet. “Yes, I do mind,” he said, “I’m busy.”
“I’m sorry to trouble you but there’s nothing I can do. We’re checking everyone.”
“You’re not checking me.”
“I can give you some time to get dressed if you want. I know it’s early.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“Do I need one?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll be back in 45 minutes. If you’re not here when I get back, I’ll place a warrant out for your arrest.”
Ashton shut the door on him. He felt his temples pulsating like tiny jackhammers. He just thinks I’m eccentric, Ashton thought, he doesn’t think I have Document 597. Ashton scanned his bookshelf. He walked the perimeter of his apartment. Where is the damned thing, he thought? He found it on a bottom shelf next to his couch. Then he placed it into two airtight storage bags and stashed it in the upper compartment of his toilet. It’s the safest place, Ashton thought, it never crosses anyone’s mind that a rare book can be safely stored in a person’s shitter. Ashton walked to his leather chair and sat down. When 45 minutes passed and Briggs didn’t show up, he figured him for late. After two hours he decided something was wrong. After three he tried to calm himself. He did this by drinking himself to sleep.
Later, Ashton took a walk on the streets of the city. In his inside pocket he carried a silver-lined PP7 pistol with an ivory hilt. It had been custom made for him by a gunsmith in Nigeria. Once, Ashton displayed it to a book collector named Walten.
Ever used that thing? Walten had asked.
A couple of stray dogs and a prostitute, Ashton had replied.
I’ll never understand you, Ashton. You need a shrink. Now, for that new book I need...<>/TD> |
When Ashton returned to his apartment there was a business card stuck to his door with scotch tape. The card read:
Jed Summers
Psychic Readings
234-573-6972
Ashton took the card off the door and looked on its back. A message was written in pen. Call me it read. Ashton put the card in his pocket and headed into his apartment. He picked “Scalpere Saltere” off of a coffee table next to his chair and walked across his room to a section of his bookshelf, putting “Scalpere Saltare” back in its place. The ending had intrigued him. It involved different styles of executions, including sawing and dunking techniques.
The next day Ashton sat in his chair reading a new book. It was titled “Atheism Logic,” by an author named Earl M. Humphrey. Ashton was reading with vigor. His current page read:
| ...And so there is no doubt that the psychology of modern man compels him to cling to its belief systems in the same way that a baby clings to his favorite toy. The toy provides comfort, stability, and even a healthy dose of entertainment. The same can be said of the mind virus that has followed man since his dawn. The belief of magical beings that look over us, tempt us, harm us, punish us, or kill us is an absurdity to those who have not been brainwashed since their earliest stages of cognitive functioning... |
Ashton put the book aside and took out the business card he’d found on his door the previous day. He dialed the number.
“Thanks for calling, Ashton,” said a man on the other end of the line.
“This is Jed?” Ashton said.
“Yes.” Jed’s voice was quiet. He seemed at ease.
“You need a book?”
“Yes.”
“Ok. What type of book, then.”
“It’s rare. I’d like you to meet me if you don’t mind. I can pay of course.”
Ashton got out his book and pen. “What’s your address?” Ashton asked.
“2236 Franklin Way. It’s east of the Trump Towers in the Franklin apartments complex.”
“When do I meet you?”
“Tonight at seven if you don’t mind. I have customers before then.”
“I’ll be there,” Ashton said. He hung up the phone.
Ashton continued his reading of “Atheism Logic.” Scintillating, Ashton thought on his current page:
| Twelve monkeys typing on typewriters have the same cognitive functioning combined as one adult human writing his life story in a manner to produce religious following. The adult human may find his fancies are based not on reality, but on acute paranoia of the unknown. It essentially has the worth of the monkey’s mindless bashing of the key types due to the ridiculous nature of its constructs. It contains the worth of a mix of jumbled letters, all vying for a spot amidst the hypocrite’s beauty pageant. |
Later in the day Ashton found his way to Jed’s apartment. He knocked on the door. A short, stocky man in a collar shirt and kakis opened the door and greeted him.
“Hello, my name is Jed,” Jed said, “and you must be Ashton, the book hunter.”
“Yes,” Ashton said.
“Welcome to my place, and thank you for coming. Sit down if you want.” Jed led Ashton to a brown couch.
Looks like an ordinary apartment, Ashton thought as he sat down. Jed sat in a chair across from him.
“I need a book,” Jed said, “it’s a rarity.”
“And you’re a psychic?” Ashton asked.
“Yes,” Jed said, “I have extrasensory capabilities, so you can call me psychic.”
“Can you read my mind?” Ashton asked.
“Not like you could read a book. But I can determine some things.”
“Like?”
Jed stood up and placed his palm on Ashton’s forehead. “You’re on a dangerous path. Tread lightly. Look closely at your surroundings. Before this life, on another plane, I see you in a forest. You see only one tree. It is a leafless tree—barren, wasted. You do not see that which is around it.”
I could have done that, Ashton thought. “That it?”
“For you.”
“Ok. The book details, please.” Ashton took out his pen and book.
“The book I need contains details of the star alignments around the time of the death of Christ. The data available to the populace now in relation to that time has been hazy at best. The book is being sold in a bookshop in Rome with a seller that doesn’t know its value. The name of the book is ‘Nascita Del Sole Di Morte.’”
“If you know where it is, why not get it yourself?”
“I would be recognized instantly and the seller would refuse. Those with certain faiths do not take kindly to practices I perform. I’m known in many religious circles.”
“What’s your bounty offer?” Ashton asked.
“I’ll give you this,” Jed walked to a desk behind him and pulled out a large, black stone about the size of a baseball, and it was shiny and perfectly round.
“What’s this? I accept only cash,” Ashton said.
“It’s a black crystal.”
“I’m sorry but I can’t do the hunt for that thing.”
“If you’d like, a pawn shop would give over ten thousand for it. Here, I’ll also give you this.” Jed took a golden sphere out of his pocket.
“Another stone?” Ashton asked.
“Yes, it’s pure gold. Turn it into a pawn shop to pay for your travel expenses.”
“How much is it worth?”
“A few thousand. You also have to include its craftsmanship in its worth. Should be enough to get you there and back.”
“I’ll accept that,” Ashton said. He took the sphere. “I guess I’ll be going now. I have everything I need.”
“Remember what I said. You have to be careful. Something doesn’t bode well, though I don’t know what it is.”
Give me a break, Ashton thought. If I believed in your delusions, would I be doing this at all? “I’ll be fine,” Ashton said, “I’ve been doing this a long time. Piece of cake.”
Jed’s words echoed in Ashton’s mind as he left the apartment. When I get enough money, Ashton thought, I’ll leave all these crackpots behind me.
Ashton read “Atheism Logic” on his plane to Rome:
| The snowball of delusion continues to pick up size on its roll down the hill of religious concord. No man of science can deny the snowball’s fallacies, and no man of religion can deny the snowball’s hopeful constructions. The pagans had not one snowball, but many (All of which are now melted in a sunlit bath of reason). |
Two men dressed in robes were sitting ahead of Ashton.
“We’ll start the prayers on Monday,” one of them said.
“Singing first, then prayers,” said the other.
“I’ll call the bishop, he’ll want to hear from us,” the first one said.
Somewhere on the plane a baby was crying, which made Ashton want to tear his eyes out.
Ashton dropped his bags off at a hotel and began walking the streets. He saw a homeless child dressed in nothing but rags. Later, he passed a man playing a mandolin. The man looked serene and hopeful. He had a glass jar with some coins in it, but Ashton refrained from donating.
Here we are, Ashton thought when he found the bookstore he was looking for. The name of the store was “Libri del Dio.” The store was dusty, and the books looked old. A man sat behind a counter who looked to be in his seventies. He wore a white beard, and was dressed in loose, white pants and a tunic. “You speak English?” Ashton asked.
“Yes,” the old man said.
“’Nascita Del Sole Di Morte,’ please.”
“It’s not for sale.”
“I can pay you well.”
“Astrology books are only for heretics and witches. We keep all astrology books under lock and key. They are not to be sold, looked at, or touched. Only preserved.”
“I’ll give you this,” Ashton said. He took the golden sphere out of his pocket and held it out in his hand. Ashton had decided not to pawn the sphere too early. He originally thought he’d keep as a token.
“So Jed Summers sent you,” the old man said. “Jed’s eyes can see in the dark, but how can you see the cosmos in a blink? No one can. Jed’s vision is but a grain of sand in the Sahara.”
“The stone plus ten thousand U.S. dollars. Right now, in cash. It can be yours,” Ashton said.
“Don’t trouble me anymore,” the old man said.
Ashton left the store. I’ve been dealing with these fruit loops so long, I don’t know what to do with myself, he thought. Soon it will just be my books and me. Damn that old fart. If I lose my reputation before I get enough money, I’ll be through. Jed’s not going to be happy. Ashton had some time to kill before his flight back to New York. He found a brass bench in a nearby park and further read “Atheism Logic”:
| The religious populace may claim that a god is present that is almighty, powerful, all knowing, and emotional. He may be vengeful, full of wrath, loving, or forgiving. Some may say man is made in the likeness of god, yet this contradicts god’s very theme. If he is to be omniscient and all-powerful, it is contradictory to assume that he has the emotions of mortals—with all their faults. An entity such as this must have no rationale, no psychological hindrances. |
A church bell rang in the distance. Ashton knew he was only a few miles from the capital of the Vatican. The Pope was probably walking in his chambers. Maybe they will pray, Ashton thought. I’ll save that for my deathbed.
Ashton returned to his apartment building. He walked up to his door and turned the doorknob. Funny, Ashton thought, I thought I locked it. He entered and was smashed on the top of the head with a wine bottle. The bottle shattered. He fell over, his head spinning.
“Where is it, cocksucker?” Briggs said. “I know it’s in here.” All of Ashton’s books lay ripped and strewn about the floor. His safe had been blown open with explosives. His couch was overturned and his blinds were torn from his window.
“Don’t have it,” Ashton said.
“Wrong answer.” Briggs kicked Ashton in the ribs. Ashton felt something crack.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ashton said.
“I’ve been to everyone else. Everyone talked, cooperated. All your buddies, even the Nazi talked. None of them have it, so I know it’s you. The Bureau’s serious about this one. I’ve been told to do whatever’s necessary. No leash on my neck. Tell you what, talk now and you can keep your teeth. No dentures needed.”
“Ok, I admit it,” Ashton said. “I have it.”
“Where?”
“It’s in my toilet.”
Briggs walked into the bathroom. Ashton heard him open the top portion of his toilet. “I’ll be damned,” Briggs said. He walked out of the bathroom with the book, and Ashton took the PP7 out of his pocket. When Ashton shot him, the back of his head splattered against the bookcase behind him. Shit, shit, shit, Ashton thought, what to do now? He licked his arm, which was coated with a mixture of blood and cabernet. I’ll have to call Walten. Walten’s collection was in the countryside near Albany. He owned his own estate, and his own library. He also had the resources to fix many problems. Ashton had relied on him in the past, and he used Ashton to tweak his vast collection. Ashton picked up his phone and dialed.
“Walten here,” Walten said.
“It’s me,” Ashton said.
“Ashton, a pleasant surprise.”
“I need your help.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I just killed a fed.”
Walten paused. “Christ. You’re fucked.”
“Nothing I can do?”
“You’ll have to get out of the country.”
“But they probably have me red flagged,” Ashton said.
“I can get you some false papers,” Walten said, “but I need you for a hunt in return. Meet me at my place. I’ll give you the details.” Walten hung up. Ashton headed out the door.
The gates in front of Walten’s estate opened for Ashton’s taxi. The house itself was larger than the White House, and was surrounded by many acres of woods and green space. It was a Victorian house, at one time owned by a wealthy oil baron. When Walten’s butler opened the door, he escorted Ashton to Walten’s library. Ashton highly respected the collection. Walten had obtained many priceless books, all laid out in pristine condition on cherry wood shelves. The library itself equaled the width of a small house and contained antique furniture and reading lights. A few minutes after the butler left, Walten walked in carrying two glasses and a bottle of scotch.
“Ashton, you’re in deep this time,” Walten told him. “I thought you might want something to drink.”
“I do,” Ashton said. He poured some scotch and began to drink.
“I’ve got you a fake passport, a fake license, new social security card, and pretty much everything else you need for a new you. It’s not guaranteed though, you can’t just kill a fed and expect to walk away clean.”
“He would have had my balls if he took me in,” Ashton said. “It wasn’t a light book.”
“I don’t want to know,” Walten said. “But I do need you for one last hunt, then you can deal with things however you see fit. You can move to Paris if you’d like—tap into some of your overseas funds for a while. I’ve got one more book I need. It’s in Russia, in the dead outskirts 100 miles north of St. Petersburg. You’ll have to hitch a ride up there. It’s a small village. Looks like its still in medieval times up there. Anyway, talk to a gypsy named Drelsna. She’s got the book.”
“The name of it,” Ashton said.
“‘Expositus Oculus.’ In English that means ‘The Open Eye.’ It’s a parallel of sorts to the Bible. Only one copy in the world. My sources tell me its very enlightening. This’ll be the last one for me. You’ll finish my great collection. You’ve helped me a lot, Ashton. Though if I could get you something that’s written it would be a doctor’s script for some anti-psychotics.”
“What’re you wasting your time with that religious garbage for?”
“You’re a cold fish, Ashton. Find me the book as a favor.”
“It’s the least I can do,” Ashton said.
When Ashton arrived in St. Petersburg he got his bags and took a taxi as far as it would go. After reading on the plane, he was now on the last page of “Atheism Logic”:
| ...The defected of the population fail to support the logic of creationism. Why would a higher power create beings of vice, dereliction, or misfortune? The rationale of a human can be subject to inconsistencies when not placed properly within the scope of the scientific method. Already the faults of such documents as the Bible and Quran have classified them by some scholars as artifacts of modern mythology. Man has ruled the earth for two million years, and his questions are still unanswered—though the truth is staring him in the face. |
“This is as far as I go,” the cab driver said as he pulled to a halt on a dirt road surrounded by a grassy, open plain. “I’d suggest you don’t get out. If anything were to happen, you’d be a goner. No one’s coming out here to get you.”
“I’ll be fine,” Ashton said. He paid and stepped out with his suitcase. He began to walk. His leather shoes were not made for long walking, and his feet began to hurt. He began to sweat. The sun was setting, and sky was turning purple. He could see woods far on either side of the dirt road he was walking. I hope there are no wolves around here, Ashton thought, Walten can be such a pain in the ass. Soon a green pick-up truck started up the road from behind him. It was a dilapidated truck with wooden beams creating its sides and its back. Three gypsies sat in the back wearing brown and white rags. Ashton waved it down. “I have money,” he yelled. The truck stopped. “American dollars,” he said.
One of the gypsies waved him onto the truck. She had only three visible teeth and her hair was frizzed.
Ashton got in back. The stench, he thought, smells like something died back here. Soon they reached a small town composed mainly of a few straw huts. What caught Ashton’s eye the most was a large, stone tower about four stories high that stood in the back of the town. The tower was crafted in a unique fashion with a spiral edge that reached its top and came to a point with an inverted cross tipping it.
Ashton got off the truck. “I’m looking for someone named Drelsna,” he told the gypsies as they left him. “Ever seen her?” He was beginning to feel thirsty.
“She sits in the sky,” one of them said, pointing to the top of the tower.
Walking toward the tower, Ashton passed a goat stepping in the muddy ground. I feel like I’m in wonderland, Ashton thought. Where’s the surface of the rabbit hole? The setting sun had disappeared behind some clouds and the sky, which was now orange, displayed a dim full moon. Ashton got to the door of the tower, and a small man wearing a cloak opened it. He was wearing a hood and his face was concealed in shadows. “She awaits you at the top,” he said. Ashton began to ascend a spiral staircase. There was no railing, so Ashton made sure to lean towards the walled side. This place is creeping me out. Just got to get the book and leave, he thought. He got to the top floored level and opened a door. A woman in a dark robe sat at one end of the room. She was wearing a black robe similar to the one worn by the man who opened the door. She was also much better groomed than the other gypsies. She had long, black hair and green eyes.
“I need a book,” Ashton said, “Expositus Oculus.”
“We’ve been waiting for you,” Delsna said.
“The man who sent me will pay anything you like. Just ask, and I can arrange it.”
“Only you may have the book,” Delsna said, “It is yours for free. The stars say you are destined for it, and this is no accident.”
“Sounds good,” Ashton said.
When Drelsna left the room Ashton assumed she was getting the book. He heard a click when the door shut. He waited a few minutes, and then tried the knob. It was locked. Oh god, Ashton thought, what’s going on? He walked to the far end of the room and something caught his eye. It was a small, black book. Ashton read the inscription. “Expositus Oculus,” Ashton thought, it’s here.
After two weeks of being locked in the room he read the whole thing. It was all that kept his sanity. A pulley brought food and water up to the window of the room, and he defecated in a bucket in the room’s corner.
After two years he memorized the book word for word. It spoke of ancient times, the origin of life, and spiritual matter. It regarded evolution, but Ashton noted that the book dated back far before the birth of Charles Darwin.
Ashton’s nails were black and cracked from scratching at the door and one day one of his teeth fell out. It was black and rotten. I believe now, Ashton thought. His suit had turned into rags. He walked to the window of the tower and looked out. He didn’t see anyone. He felt completely alone. The last page of his new book reverberated in his mind:
| The lights in the heavens, with their signs, can only be seen by those who choose to see them. They are there, with their guidance for the earth, and its inhabitants—its beings of light. Every touch by these beings creates a ripple in the cosmos. Every vision by these beings changes the cosmos, and its many dimensions. The sixth day is the day of the great unification, for nothing in the cosmos is separate from another. This was created for good. |
|
predator
Janet Kuypers
haiku 3/10/14
after trapping them
for years, they now have me trapped.
now they’re predators
|
|
Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.
She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.
She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org and chaoticarts.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images.
Since 2010 Kuypers also hosts the Chicago poetry open mic at the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).
In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), the three collection books from 2004: Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the shutterfly ISSN# cc& hardcover art book life, in color, Post-Apocalyptic, Burn Through Me, Under the Sea (photo book), the Periodic Table of Poetry, a year long Journey, Bon Voyage!, and the mini books Part of my Pain, Let me See you Stripped, Say Nothing, Give me the News, when you Dream tonight, Rape, Sexism, Life & Death (with some Slovak poetry translations), Twitterati, and 100 Haikus, that coincided with the June 2014 release of the two poetry collection books Partial Nudity and Revealed.
|
A Million Red Tickets
Jeff Nazzaro
We called him Moneybags. It was sarcastic. We called him Moneybags because his pants were always stained, his shirt half untucked, and he drove this ancient Saab with like 170,000 miles on it that he thought was awesome but we knew was a piece of shit. He was our old boss, the Convention Services Manager at the hotel we worked part-time at in high school. We set up tables, chairs, and AV equipment for seminars and weddings. Moneybags made sure everything was in order. He was strict, too, the pencils on the notepads had to have the hotel logo facing up, the left point of the cocktail napkins flush with the top of the notepads, the mini rolls of Wint-O-Green or Spear-O-Mint Life Savers all turned the same way.
It was sarcastic, Moneybags, but also, whenever he made us work a graveyard shift, when there were, say, two weddings on a Saturday night and a stamp- or coin- or baseball card-collecting show all day Sunday and the ballroom had to be turned over—he would buy the beer.
He was the manager. It didn’t matter that he was just a few years older than we were, or that he had a wife and kid. It didn’t matter he lived forty-five minutes away in a one-bedroom apartment when we lived with our parents in houses whose value had appreciated twenty-fold since they’d bought them in the late sixties, or that we’d be off to college in the fall while he stayed tied to the whims of hotel management and the economy. It didn’t matter that he got fired for reasons we never knew. We never thought we’d see him again.
Moneybags was looking for workers. We thought it was hilarious bumping into him in the middle of the mall. He asked us what we were doing, if we were still working at the hotel (we weren’t), and what our plans were, while we made fun of his stained pants and untucked shirt, same old Moneybags. And then he asked us, me and my friends Hop and Noah, wanna make some money?
We hardly ever went to that mall, but there we were in the bustle of the atrium by a giant bench-ringed planter, talking to Moneybags not two minutes after my dumb agoraphobia joke. Right away Hop and Noah said no. They stopped laughing and sort of backed away, but I said, doing what? Moneybags said, it’s easy. Doing what? Hop said, let’s go. Moneybags said, moving a little furniture around, it’s nothing. No way, Noah said, let’s go. How much? I said. I can probably get you fifty bucks. Probably? For how long? Where? Doing what exactly? Hop and Noah tried to get me to leave, but Moneybags pleaded, come on, we really need the help, and finally, I’ll get you stoned, the time will go by like that. I hestitated still. There’s a party after I’ll bring you to, Moneybags promised, more dope, beer, probably be some hot-looking girls there, and I had nothing to do but spend another Friday night with Hop and Noah, hanging around, shooting the shit, all night sometimes. Hop at least liked to talk about things, Noah just seemed to take up time. He’d take it, abuse it, and he’d do it on purpose. He’d laugh as he’d light one more cigarette at four in the morning, daring you to kick him out of the car. You’d try. He wouldn’t get out. You’d plead. He’d sit and smoke and occupy the passenger seat with his fat body. Noah was fat. Hop was getting fat, too. Get some exercise, make some money, it will be good for you, Moneybags said. Moving furniture. It was work, I thought. Something to do. Pocket money, dope, beer. I never would have imagined willingly following someone like Moneybags into that kind of situation, but there was the money, there was the dope. Once we’d been incredulous that someone like Moneybags had been our boss, the way he talked, the things he said, but for me this sudden offer of money evened that out, and finally I said I’d go. It was a whim. What else did I have to do? I wanted to go. It would have been a lot easier just to leave with my friends, but I also liked being free to make my own decisions, to be the owner of my own ass, so to speak. I sure as shit didn’t own anything else in the world. And I wanted the extra money, the pot, the beer. I wanted to meet the kind of girl who’d be at a party with Moneybags.
And then Hop and Noah were gone and I was alone with Moneybags. All negotiations over, I followed him out of the mall, my boldness gone along with my challenges and point-blank questions. Now I just followed, somehow bashful when he asked me in a lowered voice what I’d been up to since he’d left the hotel. Not much, school, was all I said. I asked if he found guys that way all the time. There are always guys willing to work, he said. Just go up and ask them. We stopped at a supermarket on the way to the furniture warehouse. He bought us Cokes. Standing in line he reached over and grabbed a pack of Marlboro reds off a metal display rack and slipped it in his shirt pocket. A man came over. He wore a white shirt and tie printed with Spam cans. What did you just put in your pocket? he said. Me? Nothing. Yes, you did. I saw you take a pack of cigarettes and put them in your shirt pocket, the man in the white shirt and Spam tie said. Moneybags dipped his fingers inside the pocket and pulled the cigarette pack halfway out. What, these? These are my cigarettes, he said. He looked the man straight in the face. The man looked back, then he said, Don’t come in this store again. Whatever you say, sir, Moneybags said. Outside, he laughed. A little five-finger discount, he called it.
We stood in the warehouse parking lot beside the Saab, smoking a joint. I saw the loading dock of the furniture warehouse and a couple of panel trucks. The building went on and on. I tried asking Moneybags about the work, but he just passed the joint back and hissed through held breath, it’s nothing, it’ll go by like that. I thought we’d load up the truck, then take a drive, deliver a couch, go back and do it again. It didn’t sound too bad. Soon I was stoned and half my Coke was gone. Then I was deep in the warehouse, a dark, cramped space crammed with plastic-encased sofas, love seats, recliners and ottomans. I was introduced to my partner, JosŘ, who, if he spoke any English, didn’t speak any to me. Moneybags was gone. Then my Coke was, too. My mouth got so dry I couldn’t swallow. There were seven hours to go. Seven hours in the dim, dusty heat. Grab an end of a sofa, sweaty hands sliding on plastic, thrust a knee up, catch the frame on your shin, stick a hand up and under to get a grip on the nappy fabric, rips the skin; bend and pull, back through the labyrinth of furniture like an unnavigable losing Tetris board that never seemed to reset or open up. Then hurry back for the next piece. No matter how much furniture JosŘ and I lugged to the front, when we waded back in it seemed exactly the same.
Everything was fucked up and it wasn’t just the weed. The weed actually helped justify the supreme strangeness I felt to be thrust into this odd place, charged with these odd tasks. Granted I felt that way a lot when I smoked weed; hell, I felt that way just walking down the street sometimes, but I always felt it when I started work at a new place. I felt like that for the first three months at least at the hotel, and again every time I had to set up some new room, or even use some unfamiliar configuration of tables and chairs. The supermarket I went to all the time with my mother growing up felt like another planet the first few weeks I stood at the end of the checkout line bagging the groceries of strangers, forget about mopping the floors. I used to love getting sent outside to fetch the shopping carts. Even in the rain with the poncho on it felt more normal.
I zoned into the work. There were order slips with strings of numbers and letters, descriptions of styles and colors, an endless stream of notations to decipher. Or were there? After the first few orders we filled it just felt like an endless surplus of sofas displaced and never any added room. I thought each stick of furniture moved would somehow equal added space and elapsed time, but all I got was more tired, my throat drier and the old wall clock somehow hadn’t budged. The strangest thing was that even as time reluctantly dragged its ass along I didn’t see Moneybags again. It was just JosŘ and me sweating in the dark, shifting, shuffling, grunting. That’s the ticket, he started saying, and I was so grateful for the vernacular I started saying it, too. It became a joke between us—the ticket for each order, the solution for another successful collaborative furniture maneuver.
The ticket. JosŘ got me thinking about World Ticket, this printing company I’d worked at the summer after my freshman year of college. What a disaster that was. The college, not the printing company. World Ticket was just down the street from this furniture warehouse. Talk about feeling strange. That was another planet in another galaxy. I worked there with Noah. His father’s old army buddy was the general manager and he got the union to vote to let us work for the summer without joining. I assisted a printer named Jimmy Reynolds who was in his late-50’s and looked like he was stuck in the late 1950’s. He kept a pack of king-size Chesterfields rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt, and almost always had one going. I didn’t know anyone else who smoked filterless cigarettes, but he said it was about loyalty. That and he collected the coupons inside. He told me once all the stuff he’d traded them in for over the years, including a black-and-white TV and a slew of limited edition Ronson and Zippo lighters. He’d worked at World since it opened in the 50’s, joining the union and doing whatever they needed around the shop while learning the printing trade. He did lots of different things, but every summer his main job was to fill the million-ticket order for General Cinemas. He held out an ordinary ticket, like you got at high school football games or whatever, and said, this is it, the classic red Admit One. This is what I’m printing. The order calls for one million tickets. You are going to help me fold them into bundles, box them, and label them to ship.
You had to place a roll of tickets on a bobbin and then feed the tickets through a series of spindles. Then you used the foot pedal to run the tickets through, folding them into rectangular bundles. Jimmy showed me. Speed is the key, he said. You have to find the right speed. It’s a matter of touch. Start off slow, till you get the hang of it, but not too slow. You go too slow, forget it, they won’t fold right, and you’ll be here all night. Too fast is worse. You go too fast, you rip the tickets. Only a ticket taker should ever rip a ticket, he said. Then he ripped a ticket. He sped the machine up until the strip of tickets ripped. This will happen, he said, even given optimum speed, but when it does we have a special industrial-strength high-tech solution. Then he reached under the machine and produced a roll of Scotch tape. He taped the ticket back together, and kept folding. I couldn’t imagine getting a Scotch-taped ticket at the movie theater, but somewhere in America a ticket machine at a General Cinema would spit that baby out.
I tried folding tickets. Jimmy watched. When I had a whole bundle folded, he showed me how to shrink-wrap it, then I placed it on a metal table and went back and folded more tickets. Fold a whole roll worth of bundles first, then wrap them, then at the end we’ll box them up. I’ll be in there printing more. I used to print these then come out here and fold them. Sometimes I still do. Then I box them up, stick the labels on, and wheel them down to shipping. I like it that way. It all becomes automatic after awhile. I’m like a well-oiled machine, and I don’t just mean the Brylcreem. I could do this shit in my sleep. Don’t get me wrong, kid, I’m grateful for the hand. Gives me a chance to get home at a decent hour for once. That overtime is a double-edged sword, I’ll tell you that much. I said, isn’t it optional? He laughed. It’s negotiated, which is kind of the same thing, he said. I asked him if they had ever gone on strike, and he said no, they didn’t really have to, and the operation was too small, anyway, that with a handful of untrained scabs management could keep the place going at ninety percent. The only thing he remembered was a few times back in the seventies when all that union busting shit started taking off and management tried squeezing this and that out of them, that the guys got together and decided they were going to follow every rule in the shop, no matter how ridiculous, no matter how far behind it got you, so say you were working with a certain ink and you didn’t have a respirator, or the safety goggles which you weren’t going to wear anyway had a scratched lens, you didn’t do anything until you had the proper equipment, or you stopped everything and changed the belts on a machine because it had been eighteen months or whatever. Everything by the book. It was an old trick. He said cab drivers in Paris do it when they have a beef. Everyone drives the speed limit and makes only legal turns and lane changes and whatnot and the next thing you know the whole city is fucking gridlock. They’d call us in for a meeting about the slowdown and how the safety regs are guidelines only but that we have to get the work done, then we’d hit them with our beef over starting an hour earlier or whatever. It worked more often than not.
I feel like I’ve spent my whole life chained to these machines in some way, Jimmy said. Printer to cutter to folder to wrapper. You’re doing great, though. It’d be even faster if you had another guy to wrap them and box them up, but this way it breaks up the monotony a little. That’s what I was talking about before. I’m in there printing, I’m out here folding, I’m down there boxing, I’m working, you know, making something. And then I said something stupid to Jimmy, which was, why do they even need tickets at all, why not just pay the money and go in, why buy something that’s basically just a red little piece of money?
I saw his face change and I thought he was mad, but he stopped what he was doing and looked at me. I paid off my mortgage, have my daughter about to graduate from private college up at Bowdoin—they didn’t even take girls there until ‘71—and my wife never worked a day in her life outside the home. I am very, very proud of those three things right there. So if I’m not making anything else, I’m making that. I’m telling you, but I work and then I get paid, same as any other guy, so it’s my concern, right? And this will probably sound pretty corny, but I think about stuff like this. He took over folding the tickets. Talking and folding. What am I making? Nothing until some kid like you steps up and lays the cash on the counter for one of these million red tickets. So in a way I’m putting that guy’s ass in the seat, and that makes the movie a movie. Ain’t a movie without asses in seats, am I right? And once that happens it can become part of a memory for some kid, he kisses a girl, maybe he cops a feel, maybe he ends up marrying her. Neither of us knows what goes on in that dark theater after one of these things gets sold, and that’s the point, it’s private, but maybe the kid goes home and slips the ticket in the corner of the mirror over his dresser, you know, by the Ace unbreakable and the Old Spice bottle. That’s what I’m making. And you, too.
He left me there to fold tickets. I suddenly loved having a hand in the production of the things, and as I worked the pedal with my foot, guiding the bundles with my hands, I thought of the people who would be trading their cash for the tickets and the tickets for a movie. And folding those tickets I felt the same sort of feeling I remembered feeling whenever I left a movie theater, stepping out of the dark and air conditioned cold into a warm, sunny day, pumped up by the feeling of being a part of something, something we all shared. Jesus, it was corny. And then I laughed into the din of machines and thought about what Jimmy had been saying and what I had been thinking and thought, Admit One: what was it anyway, a ticket or a confession?
I wanted to tell this stuff to JosŘ, confined in that tight dim space with him all night, but our conversation remained limited to that’s the ticket and sometimes okay, boss. So World Ticket was making movie magic, and they also did the tickets for the Bruins and Celtics. Noah helped a ticket cutter stack tickets for the Woods Hole ferry. But where in the scheme of things was this dingy furniture warehouse? Nowhere. A stopover on the way to some guy’s fat ass occupying a space for watching TV.
We’d been at it for three hours straight and my mouth was so dry I could barely speak. I still hadn’t seen Moneybags. Was he avoiding me, thinking I’d try to bail, make him drive me home? I had no idea if I’d even get paid. What if he tried to give me a check and the thing bounced? What could I even say? The weed had worn off and all I felt was exhaustion. JosŘ and I lugged a sofa to the dock and they sent us to the very back of the warehouse for end tables. We hadn’t even been back there yet, but somehow we found tables, stacked inside each other on top of a stack of recliners. When we lifted the first table, the second came flying off the top with it. JosŘ and I, joined at the yoke all night, maintained our hold on the first table, but he pulled left and I pulled back and somehow that second one crashed down edge first into my right instep. I felt nothing at first and JosŘ took the first end table, leaving me the second. After two steps towards the loading dock I stopped. The pain was so bad I was sure my foot was broken. I put the table down, sat on it, and took off my shoe and my sock, half expecting to see fractured bone jutting out of the skin. There was nothing, no swelling, not even a red mark. I sat for a minute while JosŘ waited. Then shouts of hey, what the fuck you doing back there, jerking each other off, where are those end tables? I put my sock and shoe back on my throbbing foot and we took the tables to the dock. Then I demanded a drink of water before they could give us too much shit.
Moneybags must have been off on a delivery, or smoking dope somewhere, laughing at me. There was a water fountain by the office. I limped to it. I had to press down hard on the button and then a thin warm trickle of metallic tasting liquid hit my lips. It was the best I’d felt since those first hits of pot chased with slugs of cold Coke, and I would have killed any motherfucker in the place for that trickle of water. I had a cheap jackknife with a thumb notch I kept clipped to my belt, and once I’d had my fill of water and JosŘ and I got a new order, I marched to the sofa, unclipped the knife, flipped open the blade, slipped my hand up and under the plastic, and sliced a foot-long gash through the back of the thing. Then I folded the knife closed, clipped it to my belt, and grabbed an end. What the fuck? JosŘ said. What the fuck what? I said. Okay, that’s enough, he said. Good, it’s enough, I said. It would be, too, when whoever delivered the thing had to deal with the problem and whoever was behind this whole shady operation lost a little precious profit. Fuck ‘em. That end table could have taken my whole fucking head off and they would have delivered me to a swamp somewhere and no one knows a fucking thing.
I don’t know how I fell for this shit to begin with. I don’t know how I didn’t just get dumb Moneybags to get me stoned if that’s what I wanted. How did I get myself into this situation? There’s no way I did it willingly. But who would believe that? If I told the whole story, even to Hop and Noah, who’d been standing right there—hell, especially to them, they’d say I did it of my own free will. If Moneybags had lured me with dope and money into some kind of sexual violation I might have had a shot at convincing someone, but even then I would have at least had to have been under eighteen, and probably a girl. Luring me into labor with money? I could hear Hop and Noah laughing already, and for a paranoid moment I thought maybe they’d even prearranged the trip to the mall with Moneybags, led me there for him to leap out and throw a net over my head, then duck out with their cuts. But didn’t I need the cash? I was a long way from finishing school, if I even went back, and my father was starting to charge me rent on top of being a general pain in the ass. I had to do something. You’re always forced to do something and I was always somehow hanging around with nothing to do—at the mall, in Hop’s living room, Noah’s driveway. And yet there was always something new to fuck it up—a new job, new school, new nagging sense of obligation.
Back to work. The summer after I worked at World Ticket, I got a job at a place called PrinTTech. Hop went to the same private high school as the owner’s son and got us both jobs. They did a lot of plastic membrane printing for the automobile industry, computer companies, stuff like that. Started in the early seventies. Non-union all the way. Hop told me that. He said don’t even mention it. They told you that when they interviewed you, he said. I was never interviewed, but I guess he was. The owner owned a parcel of land in North Carolina that he would move the company to the second even a losing union vote was taken, and everyone knew about it. Hop worked in the offices upstairs all summer while I worked for a printer named Bobby Kopaczewski.
I liked Bobby. He said call me Bobby Coke-and-Pepsi. He reminded me of a younger version of Jimmy from World Ticket except he sometimes bitched about liberals and welfare and he never talked about his life outside the shop. He smoked filtered cigarettes. He printed on vinyl sheets. My job was to collect the freshly printed vinyl sheets as they emerged from the press on a conveyor belt, grabbing them by the edges and placing them on wire racks to dry. I sat there a lot just waiting. Sometimes a sheet came down the conveyor belt and Bobby walked down and picked it up himself and studied it on his way back to the press. Then I’d wait some more. The time dragged so slowly when there was nothing to do. There was a Dominican woman named Rita doing the same job as me at the next press. She did finishing work during down times, punching product from printed sheets, but no one gave me any work to do. I brought in a Harper’s magazine I had, rolled it up and stuffed it in my back pocket. When there was a lull I took it out. Bobby came down right away. What’s that, a book? he said. A magazine, I said. What’s it about? he asked. I don’t know, nothing really, I said. Put that away, he said, they won’t like it. Who? I never saw anyone but him and Rita and Billy Trammell, the printer at the next press. Anyone, Bobby said. There’s always someone watching around here. I remembered Jimmy at World Ticket telling me I better watch myself because I wasn’t in the union and the guys wouldn’t like it if the friend of the boss or whatever was goofing off. Then the black guy, I forget his name but he was the only black guy that worked there and he was the shop steward, caught Noah on one of his extended smoke breaks in the bathroom, even though you could smoke on the floor, and came around to me saying, your friend fell asleep in the shithouse, your friend fell asleep in the shithouse. Noah told me he hadn’t been sleeping, but I could imagine him taking a snooze on the crapper. Come up here, Bobby said, I’ll show you a good book. So I stuffed my Harper’s back in my pocket and while Bobby got the print job just right, I thumbed through his collection of Hustler magazines. I love that one, Bobby said, looking up from his work. That girl’s from Berlin. Do I make you hard as German steel? it says.
When Bobby was printing good and the sheets were flowing down steady and wet, my nose and throat would start to burn from the ink. I looked at the ink can one day and it said the stuff was a known carcinogen. It said, this stuff causes lung cancer, so wear a respirator. There was very little ventilation in the shop—a couple of big fans in the wall, but they were never even on. I asked Bobby one time if they gave him a respirator to wear, a mask. He said no, and that he wouldn’t wear one anyway. I told him the guys over at World Ticket have to wear them. That’s because they have a union there, he said. Don’t need no union here, he said. All they do is take your money and don’t give you anything but stupid shit about wearing masks. I said, you ever read the side of the ink can? It says, this shit gives you lung cancer so you better wear a mask. He lit a cigarette and said, so’s this. There were two large presses in the room. Bobby called down to the other press. Hey Billy, you getting lung cancer down there? This kid says we’re all getting lung cancer in here. Billy Trammell popped up from under his press, coveralls half off, biceps bulging out of an oil-stained tank top, gripping a large wrench. He had narrow eyes over high cheekbones and a hooked nose, with a cascade of shoulder-length, dirty blond hair. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He said, lung cancer? Yeah, I’d say so. I asked them why they didn’t join a union. It seemed like a better idea than lung cancer. Billy said, yeah, right. Bobby said, sure thing. What about job security? I said. I got my job security right here, Billy said. They can’t fire me because I’m the only one who knows how to fix this press. This thing cost a hundred grand. Yeah, but are you fixing it or fucking breaking it over there? Bobby said. There were parts on the floor and tools. He turned to me and laughed. He knows once he fixes the thing he’ll be stuck to it printing. Plus, every time he puts it back together there’s a part left over he doesn’t know what to do with it. That’s right, Billy said, and when I get enough of those parts I’m going to make my own press and start my own fucking business. Keep dreaming, Billy, Bobby said. I have work to do.
My foot felt better but my back was killing me and my eyes burned from the dust and squinting to read order slips in the furniture warehouse’s dim light. I snuck back to that bubbler every chance I got but the dryness never left my throat. Two hours to go. What was I going to do? Hop and Noah would be graduating next year, but though I started at the same time they did I still had less than a year of credits earned. Too much fucking around. I had hinted to Jimmy at the end of that summer about staying on at World Ticket, finishing folding the million ticket order—I left at 850,000—maybe learning how to print. He said, I told you my whole dumb story and what did you say? You said what’s the use? Okay, maybe you see through it, maybe you see around it, I don’t know, but you see something, and whatever that is tells me this isn’t for you. It ain’t for everybody. You have to find what’s of value to you and find a way to do that. My daughter gets it. She’s going to be a psychotherapist. She says to me, Daddy, I love you, I respect you more than any man I know, all that, but I could never do what you do all day. I have to work with people, not machines. What’s the difference? I thought, but I didn’t say that to her, Jimmy said. He said it to me, though. I went back to school, had one good semester, and then fucked up again. Now what, community college? Noah already has a sales job lined up through his father. Hop is applying to graduate schools in Boston and New York. They’re kicking back right now, drinking beer and watching the Red Sox on TV and I’m lugging couches in the dark.
The owner of PrinTTech took the whole company to a Sox game one summer night and as Bobby and I settled into our seats in the back of the center field bleachers, cradling our beers, waiting for Roger Clemens to throw the first pitch, he said to me, see, no union shop takes everyone to a Red Sox game because they have to spend the money on the stupid union. When they shut the beer taps off after the seventh inning stretch, Billy Trammell broke out a pint of whiskey and passed it around and sometime before the game ended got in an argument with the owner’s son. I had no idea what was going on, and didn’t care, except I thought Billy was a tough son of a bitch and would destroy that rich prick if it ever came to it, even if the kid had been some kind of prep football star or something. Hop was right there, but all he said was it started over some dumb argument and Junior just laughed in Billy’s face. Then Billy said something like, well you’re not the boss yet, so I’m going to tell you to fuck off to your face while I still have the chance, and Junior got pissed. Then it got heated. I may have been scared of Billy, but Junior sure as shit wasn’t. He didn’t see the tough guy with the big arms working the wrench, he just saw the buffoon, like Lenny and Squiggy or something. A buffoon whose ass he would one day own.
On Monday morning they fired Billy. Met him at his press with a cop, Bobby told me. We were eating lunch at one of the picnic tables by the parking lot. They were paying him to print off the thing, not fix it, Bobby said. The fact that the thing kept busting didn’t help him at all. They both were fucking useless. Bobby laughed. He said, I got a skill. I can print. But even if I could afford one of those monsters, where would I put it? My basement? Billy was the best printer this place had, but he had an attitude. I used to kid him that he broke his press on purpose, or took it apart just to put it back together like in auto shop with some old motor because he was bored with printing or something. Maybe he did. I got a skill, but even if I could work every press in this place and fix them, too, I’m not stupid enough to argue with the boss’s kid. You think I don’t know there’s an army of kids at Essex Tech right now training to do what I do? We’re all disposable.
We walked past the roach coach on our way inside. The owner of the truck saw Bobby and said, you still owe me for that chili. Bobby said, I told you, it gave me diarrhea and I ain’t paying you for it. I’ll see you on Friday, the guy said. When we were inside I said, you don’t have to pay for stuff right away? He gives you a tab, Bobby said. Shit, what do you think the company does to us every week? You’re not going to pay him? I said. Fuck him, the big stiff, what’s he going to do to me? I don’t know, he’s pretty big. Bobby said, you go around being afraid of every guy who’s bigger than you, all you’ll ever do is be afraid. Maybe that was my problem. I kept thinking, if anyone comes and asks me to stay on, I’ll stay on. They never did. In the fall, after the high school kids went off to college, I got hired back at the hotel Convention Services, setting up tables and chairs again.
When ten o’clock finally rolled around, I was too beat to be happy, but it felt so good just to get the fuck out of the warehouse, to step onto the parking lot, feel something different under my feet, get into Moneybags’s old Saab. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had gone like: get an order, get the furniture into the truck, drive the truck to the address, deliver the furniture, get the person to sign the form, go back and do it again. Confined to that dark, dusty warehouse wrestling with the same pieces of furniture all night like some dumb brute, no conversation even, had wasted me, and when we got to Moneybags’s friend’s house, I slumped down into the couch, one of the exact same models I’d been battling all night, my body inseparable from the thing. Moneybags brought me a beer and I drank half of it in a single drink. Recognize that sofa? he said. You should see my place. Automatic inventory reduction. Then he got the bong. It was just a plastic tube, open at both ends, with a hole in the center for the bowl. One end of the tube was the mouthpiece, the other the carburetor. You placed your hand over the back, sucked smoke into the tube and then took your hand away so the smoke rushed into your lungs. Moneybags was excited about it. He showed me how to do it. I wrenched myself up and took a hit. And then I was back on the couch, my body crippled, with whatever was left of my brains blasted out the back of my skull in a rush of carbureted smoke.
|
Antiques Red, photography by Kyle Hemmings
Islam beyond the Quran: The Color of Water
Kevin James
Like countless others I remember the collapse of the Twin Towers as though it happened yesterday. I was president of the FDNY Islamic Society at the time, which filed suit against the fire commissioner to add an Imam to the Department’s chaplaincy. I had swapped tours to poll-watch for a Muslim City Council candidate since it was primary day, but instead found myself standing dumbstruck amidst the ruins of lower Manhattan that morning. By evening I had chaperoned the remains of a deputy fire commissioner who was a co-defendant in the lawsuit.
About a week later a fire marshal who lost a dozen members of his old firehouse questioned me at work about the Quran’s role in the attacks. His manner was respectful but I felt defensive, and responded no, Islam was a religion of peace. Later, my oldest brother did the same. Unsatisfied with platitudes, he confronted me with Quranic quotes that promoted violence against non-believers.
This led to my own questioning of traditional Islamic sources. The Islam that appears in today’s screaming headlines was not the Islam I found refuge in 35 years ago. Like debating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, it seemed pointless for me to approach the Quran as God’s word without first examining my own anthropomorphic presupposition of God. Only then could I hope to assess the Quran as an incubator rather than an incinerator for peace.
I searched for a vantage point with which to resolve my crisis in faith. This led me to revisit the Quran’s conflicted phenomenal and political nuances that enable violence and oppression. Not seeking to play favorites among rogues, I found parallels in America’s historical consciousness. I needed a clearing where religion and nationalism could be jettisoned for a social solidarity forged from science, public reason, and human need.
Rolling Up My Boots Again
I still remember my first multiple alarm as a probationary firefighter in Ladder Company 12 in Manhattan. We wore heavy hip boots when we went out on the rig, which we kept rolled down below the knee during non-emergency travel. Part of our daily routine consisted of going out for groceries shortly before lunchtime. We were on the way to the market when one of the firefighters saw thick black smoke bellowing from an occupied tenement. When it became apparent we had a working fire in progress, the lieutenant shouted “roll’em up, we got a job!” It was the call that threw us into action, with all its intense, life and death urgency.
But after 9/11 “roll’em up” became a call to reflect, and left me struggling once again with the demons of doubt and identity I closeted when I came to Islam. Belief had become integral to my self-esteem, and I sensed that despite the best of intentions, my deep emotional stake would use confirmation bias and motivated reasoning to cherry-pick facts for a foregone conclusion. I sought an approach beyond Islamic apologetics that respected the authenticity of Muhammad’s experience yet questioned my presupposed infallibility of the divine.
I wrestled with Hegel and Heidegger as well as Mulla Sadr and Mahmoud Taha for answers, sometimes struggling through only a page or two a day. But in trying to cast the mote of projected preconceptions from my eye, I knew that I would never be able to sneak up behind my consciousness with that very same consciousness. Nor would I ever be able to circumvent the embedded and embodied experiences that invariably colored my world. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, I realized I could only find in the Quran what I brought to it.
My efforts led to understanding the Quran as an organizing principle and source of wisdom that neither proved nor disproved anything, but coalesced around subjective lived experience. This yielded fresh insights into the holy equilibrium of Quranic verses that characterized Islam as a mediation, as a ‘middle way’ that enjoined ‘those who think’ to listen to the word and follow the best of it, and as a step-by-step revelation absolutely contingent on interpreting events that evolved in real time rather than as a repository of absolute truth.
Joseph Conrad quipped, “the man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one.” Given the Quran purports prophets as products of their environment, Muhammad was no doubt constrained by the mote of his social milieu. So rather than trade one interpretation of the Quran for another, or imagine what Muhammad experienced on the furthest horizon of his world, I sought to emulate him by steadily pushing the boundaries of my own. To see through the eyes of Muhammad meant making ablution in the waters of forgetfulness.
With What Does Islam Begin?
My father quoted Marx with passion and vigor. I daresay a spectre haunts America – the spectre of Islam. Not the political Islam that parades Quranic dogma as a winner’s narrative for tyranny, but the phenomenal Islam from which all belief, politics, and the Quran itself emerged. This is the Islam that begins and ends in the individual, where the command ‘Be!’ confronts an ‘it’ that is all me.
The Quran’s clearly articulated recognition of its own allegorical and foundational aspects called me to an ongoing mediation between primordial vision and cultural norms. This led me to examine Islam as the ground zero of pre-linguistic thought akin to the Tao that can’t be spoken and Dasein’s ‘Being-in-the-world.’ After concluding there was no escape velocity from the virtual gravity of solipsism’s singularity, I began to connect the dots.
Socio-economic forces now shaped claims to truth and justice, not the divine. Just as Citizens United exposed how Capitalism ruled under the delusion of democracy at the altar of markets and margins, Caliphates ruled under the divine right of violence from texts only they could interpret and enforce. The social evolution that helped dispel the Dark Ages now threatened its return. Like the Wizard of Oz, the political will to power spoke its dialects of fear and control behind curtains of certainty wheresoever one turned.
Whether apperception, misperception, or perlocution, I came to believe the Quran arguably reflected Muhammad’s questioning of the status quo from a primordial perspective he experienced as the presence of God. But in consecrating momentary vision into a political achievement, the Quranic architecture for requiting evil became an evil itself. The Islam inclusive of all thought from which Muhammad spoke truth to power devolved into a power that sought control over all thought and speech.
The Islam that began as a noesis without a name became a name without noesis, while the Quran that began as a noetic artifact cannibalized its genesis. Elites used the authority of tautology to divine vicegerency that effectively crucified phenomenal Islam to the cover of the Quran.
Whereas my father spoke of workers alienated by fetishized commodities to the extent that a Capitalist would sell you the rope with which to hang him, I saw parallels to Caliphates who fetishized the Quran in a way that alienated believers from voice and perceptual faith.
The Faculty of Islam
At the outset, neither East nor West comes to the banquet of unity with clean hands. From the self-gratification of power each indoctrinates citizens with the myths that hold heroes and martyrs in its thrall; both result in symmetries of violence projected into the retinal blind spot they call truth.
Yet it became apparent to me that Muhammad saw Islam as an innate operative capacity shaped by the reciprocity between inceptual thought and the world writ large. In a narrative related by Abu Harair, Muhammad asserted that all children are born with a natural disposition (fitrah) of Islam, but his parents convert him to Judaism, Christianity, or Magianism.
Muhammad comported with the Quran’s alethic faith that drew me to Islam in the first place, where our natural disposition sought truth and rejected falsehood prior to any social imprinting. I found further support for a faculty of Islam in verses that characterized Islam as a religion of truth and described accordingly the generic qualities of Muslims who prefigured Muhammad.
I discovered a marked example of cross cultural parallelism in phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s use of “natural attitude” to describe our innate capacity to question and believe. Surely Husserl would find merit in the Sufi metaphor of Islam as clear water that takes the shape and color of its container.
As I poked and prodded the Quran and prophetic traditions, I was struck by the way Muhammad insisted on Islam’s epistemic grounding in human perspective. The inspiration of I am as my faithful servant expects me to be grounds God in anthropomorphic projection. My goose bumps from the muezzin’s call to prayer no longer descended from heaven but were embedded and embodied in feelings from lived experience. Even if you can walk on water, your feet get wet.
I then came across Merold Wesphal, who noted that as human beings we can never encounter God “face to face” but only through an “earthiness” invariably informed by body, culture, and language. This gave me a perspective of a Prophet who self-consciously expressed meaning from within the milieu of the Arabic terms and culture that grounded him.
There is no God but Your God in Dualism’s House of Mirrors
It became clear to me that just as Citizens United severed the jugular of true democracy by deigning human status to corporations, endowing the Quran with divine status aborted individuated free inquiry. With God’s word encapsulated as the ultimate authority, the self’s sleight of hand concealed its ‘earthiness’ as the Quran’s true source of political power.
Since Muhammad made clear his mortal nature, a nomological Quran as God’s literal word poses the greatest threat to a regenerative, self-actualizing Islam. Rather than emulate his vision quest by seeking inspiration for our own, we defame Muhammad by outsourcing meaning to ruling elites and wannabes. In mockery of Quranic appeals to question the empty naming of inherited norms, critical thought abdicated the throne of reason to political Islam’s five pillars of fear, oppression, rigidity, coercion, and elitism.
Given that no finite mind can discern omniscience in dualism’s house of mirrors, such unrepentant self-worship dams the Quran’s agnostic-existential currents behind the hubris of narcissism and conceit. Thus begins the slippery slope that ends with God’s self-anointed ministers of truth exploiting text to unremorsefully execute apostates and dissidents. Followers of Jihadists who derive sanctimony from their power over life and death forget Abraham’s test to his tyrant interlocutor as to whether he could also make the sun rise from the west.
I saw that the corollary to the unlettered Prophet who could neither read nor write lay in the men and women who heard, recorded, and compiled the Quran. Out of intellectual honesty I could no longer ignore that all meaning, power, and effect in the Quran were amplified by diverse perspectives such as class, lineage, and gender.
I appreciated the full spectrum of subjective and objective thought captured by Nietzsche’s there are no facts only interpretations and comedian Bill Maher’s you are entitled to your opinions but not your facts. The word God alone signified highly subjective meanings that exposed language’s inherent ambiguity.
When I bore witness to Shahadah’s “no God but Allah” I instantiated a God particular to Muhammad’s phenomenal experience. But as the dialectic of language presupposed an absolute universal grounded in the Prophet’s particular intention, “no God but Allah” merely privileged my own personal concept of God, filling an already overcrowded idol temple rather than probe the entropy of awareness.
It became clear to me that the Quran’s many syntactical gaps required readers to interpolate meanings in a way that projected their own God into the Quran. There is no lack of irony that Jacques Lacan’s objet petite a - the projection of unconscious content into an ‘other’ of one’s self – finds perhaps its greatest expression in Allah and the Quran.
Reliquary or Heuristic – Will the Real Quran Please Stand Up?
I came to understand the Quran as a repository for multimodal perspectives that illustrated the tension between phenomenal experience and intersubjective meaning. The Quran’s epochal character lay not in my projected preconceptions but as an epoche for understanding the topology of projection. The synecdoche of G_d invariably reverberated between noun and pronoun in my own cephalic echo chamber.
I acknowledged consciousness’ contingency on content wherein the gravitational pull of dark matter invariably shaped contingent worldviews. Appropriately called the Unseen (Al-ghayb) by the Quran, if all the world’s oceans were ink we could never exhaust the words written from the black hole of our inmost content. But in contrast to the testable theories informed by Cern’s large hadron collider that continually questions dated understandings, a presupposed Quran as God’s word reduces it to a crucible that merely smashes rocks together and names the sparks truth and light in perpetuity.
Operating in the transparency of experience, heuristic bias projected a parallax view of me serving a God I created. Whatever comforts of illusion this mirror image provided me, 9/11 gave me a sobering account of its catastrophic social consequences. I urgently needed to go beyond a reliquary Quran for an approach that encouraged ecologies of critical thought.
George Pal’s sci-fi classic The Forbidden Planet captured how even Robby the Robot and space age technology fell before the Id, Dr. Morpheus’ primal fears projected by a technology that caused an advanced civilization to self-destruct. I related it to America’s Id that metastasizes geometrically with each new war on terror. Michel Foucault proved prophetic with his insight that the real enemy is the fascist in all of us that loves power and desires “the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” I found special significance in the Quran’s assertion that the condition of a people will not change until they change that which is in themselves.
Transference to the Dangerous Shapes in Trojan-Horse Translations
Martin Heidegger deemed transference to the Id “the most dangerous shape,” where one can surrender and dedicate one’s life to an “other” that is greater than itself “piece by piece and limb by limb.” Evidenced by Heidegger’s surrender to Hitler’s Nazi party, neither secular nor religious world views are immune.
I saw the epitome of dangerous shaping surface in radically different translations of the Quran published by the King Fahd printing complex’s less than a decade apart. In contrast to the temperate tone of Yusuf Ali’s 1989 version, the freely distributed 1998 Hilali-Khan translation struck me more as a handbook for misogyny and world domination than a religion of peace. In an essay aptly entitled “Corrupter’s of God’s Word,” UCLA Islamic Law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl characterized the 1998 version as a “Trojan-horse translation” laced with hate-filled rhetoric directed towards women and other faiths.
My interest in the 1998 version piqued post-9/11 after speaking with a firefighter at a Rockefeller Center fire prevention demonstration. He related that earlier in the week someone handed him an elegant looking copy of the Quran gratis, but after reading the first few pages he promptly dumped it into a nearby trash can in disgust.
After painfully reading it cover to cover, my journey in Islam would have likely reached a similar end had I not previously encountered the earlier Ali version along with translations by Muhammad Asad and Marmaduke Pickthall. Although I question the censorship of third Caliph Uthman’s burning of variant Qurans, this version of the Quran would kindle well alongside Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Henry Ford’s 500,000 reprints of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that informed Hitler.
The Social Consequences of Anthropomorphism
Carl Jung saw the Quranic narrative of Moses and Khidr as symbolic of the transformative process one undergoes in dropping social conventions in arriving at self-knowledge. I see the parable as a double entendre for the dangers of anthropomorphizing God.
Briefly, Moses and his servant resolutely sought the junction of two seas. They forgot a fish they were to eat on a rock that “took its way into the sea and disappeared from sight.” Moses retraced his steps, only to find Khidr at the juncture, a being with direct insight into God’s will. After a series of incongruous events in which he admonishes Moses to patience, Khidr finally explains the divine motives behind his acts.
Jung saw the two seas as symbolic of the intersection of unconscious and conscious, while the fish represented Moses’ latent individuated ‘other’ projected as Khidr. But I see the question of the parable’s intended meaning as highlighting the risks inherent to the gap between textual intent and social consequence.
For example, one of Khidr’s incongruous acts consisted in killing a seemingly innocent young man, which Khidr later justified by the grief he would have caused his pious parents. While the summary execution may signify individuation to some, to those predisposed it provides a license to kill in God’s name. The ambiguity in meaning affords a gap for the fascist in us all to masquerade in the shadow of the divine. Thus the wisdom of another tradition that warns if you meet the Buddha on the road to enlightenment, slay him!
I realized how ambiguity created profound conflicts for a text revealed in real time. The Quran became increasingly more strident after Muhammad fled Mecca for dear life. Where one verse states there shall be no coercion in matters of faith, another calls for slaying non-believers wherever you may find them in the face of military threats that confronted the fledgling Muslim community. In light of the Quran’s occasions of revelation and its confession that there is a time limit for every message, it became clear to me that a religion of truth demands that reason trumps dogma bound to time, place, and circumstance.
You are your very thought...
Parts of the Muslim world affectionately deem Jalal ad-Din Rumi’s poetic insights into scripture, the Mathnawi, as the Persian Quran. I believe Rumi captured the primacy of perspectival thought when he uttered “you are your very thought - if your thought is a rose you’re a garden of roses, if it’s a thorn you’re but fuel for the stove.” I saw you are your very thought as the proverbial lampblack that illuminated heaven, earth, and even the Quranic ‘face’ before which all things perish.
Hegelian scholar Quentin Lauer noted that “what God reveals to man in thought is as much revelation as what God reveals to man in Scripture.” I found support for Lauer in Quranic verses that reveal an immanent God closer to you than your neck vein, in a God that veils itself from all human being that must reveal through inspiration, and that when you remember God, God remembers you.
I later discovered that Hegel drew on Rumi in developing the dialectics of negation and affirmation. The dynamic structure of ‘no God but Allah’ now assumed an intense, personal import for me against the political agency of theocratic Gods.
Fidelity to a religion of truth and the middle way required respecting beliefs as Islamic due to organic understandings contingent on lived experience rather than State approval. From Rumi I saw that the prerequisite for working through the infantile disorder of sectarian violence required decentering the Quran as an unreflective authority that always, already reflects on first sight.
...God said,
“The world is a play, a children’s game,
and you are the children.”
God speaks the truth.
If you haven’t left the child’s play,
how can you be an adult?
Without purity of spirit,
if you’re still in the middle of lust and greed
and other wanting, you’re like children
playing at sexual intercourse.
They wrestle
and rub together, but it’s not sex!
The same with the fightings of mankind.
It’s a squabble with play-swords.
No purpose, totally futile.
Like kids on hobby horses, soldiers claim to be riding
Boraq, Muhammad’s night-horse, or Duldul, his mule.
Your actions mean nothing, the sex and war that you do.
You’re holding part of your pants and prancing around,
Dun-da-dun, dun-da-dun...
From Rumi’s “A Children’s Game”
Forbidden Truths in America’s Effective History
During the incipient stages of American involvement in Vietnam, I read about the exploits of Marines and told my father I wanted to enlist when I was old enough. Without a moment’s hesitation, he said he wouldn’t let me come home in a body bag so Texaco could drill in the Gulf of Tonkin. He prescribed Perlo’s American Imperialism, Burchett’s Vietnam: The Inside Story of a Guerilla War, and essays written by the most decorated Marine of his era, Major General Smedley D. Butler.
I learned how Declaration of Independence ideals veiled the forbidden truths behind our lust for natural resources, new markets, and cheap labor. Among predominantly Muslim populations, America’s cold war struggle for strategic oil reserves exploited the Quran’s polar tensions between tyranny and human rights. Yesterday’s Gulf of Tonkin became today’s Persian Gulf and Straits of Hormuz.
History taught me how the CIA subverted Iran’s self-determination by imposing the brutal Shah, which paved the way for the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini to seize power. In today’s contentious negotiations to constrict Iran’s uranium enrichment, it seems more fitting for America to first apologize to the Iranian people for facilitating the rise to power of an equally oppressive regime. Otherwise we assert an impoverished moral authority belied by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Iraqi citizens sickened by the depleted uranium of American smart bombs.
Around the time I became a firefighter we armed the Taliban against the Soviet Union, who later turned those same weapons on American troops. Lured by the promise of a pipeline to access inland oil, we negotiated with the Taliban in the months leading up to 9/11 despite their oppression of women and basic human rights. I imagined the fate of America if England had armed the South during our Civil War to secure cheap cotton, despite their own ban on slavery.
And in 1985 we turned a blind eye to Sudan’s military dictator Jaafar Numeiri after he publicly hanged the 76 year old socialist religious leader Mahmoud Taha for apostasy. Taha’s sole crime: opposing Numeiri’s harsh imposition of Shariah law after Numeiri made a personal choice to stop drinking. Symbolic of the deep-seated hypocrisy that stokes mistrust and violence against the U.S. abroad, America would have condemned Numeiri had he executed a Jewish or Christian leader. But with the scent of oil in the air Reagan welcomed Numeiri at the White House scant months after Taha’s execution.
Taha lived Dr. King’s words that he would rather swing at the end of a rope than live under tyranny. An unsung pacifist on par with Gandhi, he worked for self-determination against colonialism within the contours of Sudan’s ethos. Both student and critic of Marx and Hegel, Taha epitomized Muhammad’s exhortation to seek knowledge from cradle to grave. He sought the very social reforms as those the U.S. tried to impose on Iraq after Gulf War II. Notably, Numeiri was ousted from power and Taha’s sacrifice commemorated as Arab Human Rights Day despite U.S. inaction.
As America intermeddles in Syria’s internecine warfare, we conveniently forget sticking our head in the sand when it suited our oil strategies to let Iraq gas Kurds and Iranians. We also whistled Dixie when the Irgun terrorized Palestinians to establish Israel under the banner of Zionism akin to the genocide of indigenous Americans marketed by Manifest Destiny.
Forgotten, too, is our own use of chemical weapons in Vietnam. Memories have now faded of lush rainforests despoiled by Agent Orange, and its pernicious effects on Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers alike. ‘Better dead then red’ was the slogan back then, which was somehow supposed to assuage the American conscience assaulted by televised images of children burned alive by Napalm or point-blank summary executions.
Yet correspondence from Ho Chi Minh betrays the utter absurdity of the war. A New York Times op-ed by Tuong Lai revealed that after fighting alongside U.S. troops in World War II, Minh wrote to President Truman seeking an alliance that we ignored. This, despite expressions of admiration for the same Declaration of Independence ideals that America disastrously waved the flag for in Vietnam.
Major General Smedley Butler and the Marine Corps Enforcers
America’s imperial diplomacy recalls Major General Butler’s comments prior to his death in 1940. He decried American adventurism, and gave a firsthand account of how the Marines provided military muscle for Big Oil and other corporate interests to go abroad unmolested. He called war a racket and even compared the Marine Corps to Al Capone’s Chicago rackets. Placed in the context of Blackwater’s antics in Iraq and the U.S. backed Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, Butler exposed a mercenary savagery that conspicuously operated off-camera on par with the barbaric acts of cruelty Jihadists openly air.
I saw convergence between crew-cut generals serving plutocracy and bearded ideologues exploiting religion as a rallying cry against foreign incursion. Given that America continues to partner with functionally apartheid and fascist states, chickens will come home to roost and innocent lives lost so long as the corporate lust for profit underwrite violence, oppression, and the denial of self-determination.
The abject living conditions of large Muslim populations belie the false dichotomy beneath the ‘clash of cultures’ rationale for hatred towards the West. The violence in reaction to mockery of what Muslims hold sacred drill deep into to the colonialism that drained natural resources, propped puppet regimes, and used a straightedge to draw artificial borders that exacerbated conflicts among indigenous peoples.
I feel it grossly unfair to blame the oppressed for acting out against perceived oppressors when large swaths of populations cope with depression due to the lack of basic needs such as food, shelter, and medical attention. Can we express surprise at ritual burnings of the American flag when barefoot children skim oil from puddles of water to survive along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border? How long can we ignore the raw hatred of civilian populations living in constant fear of mini-9/11s from drone strikes that kill innocent civilians and poison their land with depleted uranium?
Defining the Elephant in the Room
I began to appreciate the Quran’s mode of progressive revelation that presented truth as process akin to Hegel’s assertion that truth was a result rather than a freshly minted coin. Verses repeatedly emphasized how mortal prophets emerged from their cultural milieu to present argumentation within the language and norms of their audience. I saw an analogue with Hegel’s recipe for persuasive discourse wherein we must penetrate the opponent’s stronghold and meet him on his own ground; no advantage is gained by attacking him somewhere else and defeating him where he is not.
Abraham’s encounter with astral phenomenon illustrates how the Quran presents the temporal nature of truth. He first espied a star and deemed it God, then the moon, and finally the sun. When the sun sets below the horizon, Abraham awakened to the limits of perspective for attaining the absolute.
Since heuristic bias invariably colors one’s objectivity, mutual expression and recognition become key elements for addressing social concerns. In contrast to Jihadists who destroy sacred signposts of antiquity, the Quran articulated respect for differences in ritual expression as indigenous to nations and tribes. Hence its admonishment to revile not what others hold sacred.
While the parables of Abraham and Moses represent individuals coming to truth, I viewed the contemporary conundrum as achieving consensus among diverse parties. How do we fuse the horizons of Saudi Islamofascism and Taha’s social-Islam; America’s parasitic capitalism with inclusive participatory governance?
Quranic scholar Farid Esack points out there can be a marked difference between the way scripture functions in the lives of believers apart from clinical assessments. I take Esack and Hegel to mean that obsolete norms must be allowed to evolve from indigenous perspectives such as Taha’s The Second Message of Islam rather than imposed from without.
The Quran’s dynamic structure as a progressive revelation lends itself to leveraging such social evolution among predominantly Muslim populations. Just as Thomas Jefferson called for revisiting the U.S. Constitution by each new generation, the Quran repeatedly questioned blind obedience to past generations with facts on the ground. A religion of truth can no longer function as a religion per se but as a de facto science that recognizes its answers as tentative and testable. Only then can Quranic appeals to reason and Muhammad as the seal of the prophets be properly contextualized as points of departure rather than celestial orbs in the night sky.
The Original Position: A Messianic Opening without a Messiah
In law school I learned about John Rawls’ ‘original position’ and this seems a good place to begin dialogue. Conceived as a thought experiment to address fairness in social policy, Rawls felt that agreements reached after stakeholders already knew their social status were inherently unjust. His original position forced diverse stakeholders to use public reason to achieve consensus from behind a veil of ignorance where participants were shorn of the power relations acquired from morally irrelevant traits such as race, gender, and creed. I found comfort in a footnote where Rawls cited Taha and his student Abdullahi Ahmed An Na’im to illustrate how secular and religious aims could be reconciled.
I was later struck by the writings of Jacques Derrida, who wanted to rethink social relations from a messianic opening sans Messiah. Egalitarian discourse would operate within the finality of an event that could never be anticipated rather than an imaginary Rapture or Paradise. The Quran hinted at such discourse in Surah Ash-Shura (Consultation) by bidding Muhammad to bring about equity in mutual viewpoints in the Asad translation.
Yet it seemed to me that the major import of original positions and messianic openings lay in inculcating empathy for others rather than mere thought experiments. This comports with early Meccan verses that called on Muhammad to show care for others based on his experiences as an orphan alongside others that chastised him for ignoring the sincere inquiries of a blind man while trying unsuccessfully to persuade an influential Meccan.
The Dalai Lama exemplified such openness with his willingness to abandon Buddhist tenets when contradicted by scientific consensus. He accorded respect for a neuroscience that increasingly shows we are hard-wired for temporal causality as one among many traits that enhanced human survival. Indeed, whereas the God we project into the Quran exercises its universal power each day, the constituting self seamlessly originates and recreates reality in the event horizon of each moment.
I can never transcend the transparency of experience to peer into the cutting-room transformation of chaos into competing Bayesian odds that predict, project, and correct. In order to legitimate political action, therefore, the Islam contingent on perceptual faith needs to cabin projection for prediction and correction to reach consensus. While individual beliefs call for Constitutional protection so long as they don’t hurt anyone, social cohesion demands policies forged from debate and demonstrable proof.
Philosopher-activist Alain Badiou termed this process “truth procedures;” my father would tell us to ‘jump in the pit and match the wit’ at raucous dinner debates. Only then can we hope to overcome the cognitive dissonance expressed by the five blind men who defined the same elephant differently based on touch.
To the extent that the Quran heralded a religion of truth, its relevance needs to be tethered to the way we process information as diverse operants. Not unlike Hegel’s ladder for coming to truth, the Quran calls on believers to think for themselves based on insights accessible to reason gleaned from history and natural phenomena. Muhammad likely recognized this when he supplicated “show us the facts as they are.”
Given metaphor’s role as the building blocks for knowledge, the Quran’s dynamic, temporal character present it as a metaphor for truth rather than an immutable truth. I saw that cohesive political action was contingent on every singular voice much like the birds seeking Attar’s legendary Simorgh who, unbeknownst to them, their collective shadow constituted the very creature they sought when they flew in formation.
The Infidelity of Self-Identity versus the Singular Death
After understanding Islam as a constituting consciousness, I saw the apostasy inherent in self-identity such as Sufi, Sunni, and Shia. Respecting the authenticity of Muhammad’s vision need not be mutually exclusive against collaborating to meet the contemporary social challenges posed by wealth disparity, climate change, and sectarian violence.
Taha foreshadowed the Arab Spring by advancing democratic reforms and women’s rights in the Sudan. Armed with the insight of his The Second Message of Islam, Taha saw the Quran’s dormant humanist currents as springing clauses that would overcome force and coercion at the proper time. In an age of dirty bombs and escalating sectarian violence, that time has come.
Whatever one believes, the rewards and punishments of an afterlife have proven an abysmal failure in this respect. Having spent one too many tours at the Cornell Burn Center listening to the screams of burn victims undergoing skin grafts, I cannot entertain a merciful God imposing hellfire on anyone for an eternity.
Tribalism and exceptionalism offer no exit either. Whether stars and stripes, crescent and star, or six pointed star - no matter how well articulated as manifest destiny, the word of God, or the chosen of God - flags epitomize land and ideology as more important than people and need. In The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy provided a sobering admonition against the myths that drive war and violence:
| Generations of citizens and militants, of workers and servants of the States have imagined their death reabsorbed or sublated in a community, yet to come, that would attain immanence. But by now we have nothing more than the bitter consciousness of the increasing remoteness of such a community, be it the people, the nation, or the society of producers. However, this consciousness, like that of the “loss” of community, is superficial. In truth, death is not sublated. The communion to come does not grow distant, it is not deferred: it was never to come; it would be incapable of coming about or forming a future. What forms a future, and consequently what truly comes about, is always the singular death... |
Nancy’s singular death forced me to rethink radical finitude as a touchstone for the sanctity of life. Between the denialism of magical thinking and the nihilism of radical finitude lay Nancy’s ‘being-with,’ the basic human need for community in sharing the pain and ecstasy of being singularly alive. In ‘being-with,’ the will to meaning that stands helpless before the endless span of time when we are beings unremembered can take refuge in the simpliciter of Be! and it is.
As I absorbed the impact of Nancy’s thought I toyed with a refrain from Jimi Hendrix:
If six turned out to be nine, I would not mind;
If the Kaaba were round not square, I would not care;
No one knows what I’m talkin’ about; no one knows what I mean;
You will never believe as I believe, nor will I believe as you;
I’m the one who’s gonna die when it’s time for me to die,
So let me live my life the way I want to.
Social Solidarity beyond Scripture
Implicit to an Islam contingent on perceptual faith rests the fecundity for actualizing all faiths beyond scripture. This comports with Chief Luther Standing Bear’s insight that after all the world’s religions are expounded in fine books with finer covers, each and every one of us will have to ultimately confront the great mystery on our own.
I read in the Gospel of Thomas that Jesus was not concerned as to whether the flesh was born of the spirit or more miraculously the spirit of the flesh, but with the marvel of such wealth making its home in such poverty. The Buddhist parable of the raft then came to mind. After fording the rivers of turbulence and uncertainty, the sage advised the novice seeker to cast her raft ashore rather than carry it on her head for the remainder of the journey.
Through love, the late Sufi Master Javad Nurbakhsh arrived at a place where no trace of love remained. So too with texts. Whereas scripture addresses relations between human beings and the unseen, the ongoing task lies in nurturing and refining those very relations in real time lest we tote weighty tomes on our back like the Quran’s proverbial donkey. Rather than type people as for or against, why not view their visage as a mirror instead?
Righteousness in Furtherance of Social Justice
Hans Gadamer opined that an omniscient presence must rely on the infinite reference points of individual consciousness along its circumference. This made sense to me, for how else could a God who could not feel pain and joy dispense divine justice to beings who did not ask to be born. Jewish oral tradition posited compassion in the new day that dawns when you look in the eyes of the person before you and say “this is my brother” or “this is my sister.” Given the closeness of DNA between Israelis and Palestinians, this may literally be true.
Thus, the truly just will recognize the sobriquet of ‘Chosen’ as a weighty responsibility to be earned through acts rather than conferred by DNA and ontopology. Only then can a lasting example be set for the rest of the world by applying ‘Never Again’ to all people and refusing to steal the land and dignity of Palestinians due to an accident of birth.
Those seeking fidelity to Muhammad’s way will swallow the draught of anger as prescribed by the Prophet rather use the tyranny of violence against every imagined slight. They will do no harm nor return harm for harm, and follow the Quranic prescriptions of speaking to others in the most kindly manner, repelling evil with that which is better, or simply walking away from the hurtful conduct of others.
Aspiring martyrs will realize there is no short cut to paradise and renounce taking the life deemed sacred by the Quran. They will sear into their hearts that the murder of one person is the same as killing all humanity and fear taking on the sins of the murdered like Cain in the Quran. True martyrdom will eschew headlines for altruism in the ultimate self-sacrifice of living to serve God by improving the material conditions of all people.
And just as former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali refused to step foot in Vietnam to fight an unjust war, the truly righteous will forsake ritual for human rights. Whereas I continue to find meaning in prayer and fasting, I will refuse to make Hajj in Mecca so long as Saudi Arabia executes apostates, criminalizes dissent, and allows uncovered school girls to burn to death out of a misogynistic modesty.
But there is no easy formula for social solidarity other than toiling shoulder to shoulder and toe to toe towards a society that builds the capacity for equality, pacifism, and human rights. This invokes ‘being-with,’ in using finitude and self-reference as touchstones to empathize and walk in the shoes of others just as the Quran commanded Muhammad. Failure to do so will cede any hope for community to a wasteland of depersonalized political identities that consume us all.
Finish Planting the Tree...
A 1973 NYC Board of Ed photo grabbed my attention this spring when I finally sorted through items salvaged from my mother’s home in Red Hook after Hurricane Sandy. Despite not having a coat, she glowed in the December air at a tree dedication for Martin Luther King in front of an elementary school where she taught in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Marian Anderson and Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, were in attendance, and the hope reflected in their faces reminded me of Muhammad saying that if you are planting a tree when the end of the world comes, finish planting the tree.
The photo sent a shiver of pride up my spine and I began to truly appreciate what a remarkable person my mother was. Her activism did not emerge from some academic or ideological vacuum, but through a lifetime of sacrifice and struggle. At a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in many states, she married my black father against the wishes of her Jewish parents. Her family doctor went so far as to warn her that she would develop a brown stripe across her abdomen if she had children. Yet here I am.
Her father had a wry sense of humor. He sent her to Sunday school so she would learn why Jews were discriminated against. She sold trees for Israel as a youth, but regretted it when she learned of their treatment of Palestinians. Then she planted more trees to commemorate black heroes such as King and Malcolm X during the turbulent 70’s.
Mom nursed my father through the trauma of World War II at the hands of redneck shipmates as well as German U-boats. She stood by him through four children, Jim Crow, the betrayal by so-called comrades during the McCarthy era, and ultimately Alzheimer’s to which he succumbed. And whether my brother wore a yarmulke, my sister went to Sunday school, or I embraced Islam, she loved us all the same and in her wisdom let us each find our own way.
I recalled her simple, heartfelt lines written on the fly outside a Brooklyn detention center housing South Asian detainees post 9/11. After marching more than a mile in the blustery cold with a bum knee, billboard, and too many stents in her arteries to worry anymore, she read:
WHAT DOES UNITY MEAN
| Does unity mean going back to the Joseph McCarthy period when fighting for desegregation in a Brooklyn school ––– where the fast classes were “lily white” and the slow classes mainly minority students ––– meant a visit from the FBI and a lost job,
When helping tenants fight their landlord meant a visit from the FBI and a lost job,
When speaking out for Peace at a rally during the Cuban Missile crisis meant a visit from the FBI and a lost job,
When being a shop steward during a strike that was lost meant
Visits from the FBI to a series of jobs, and being fired over and over with 15 minutes notice,
When one’s friends and relatives were afraid to visit if one were a community activist for fear they would lose their government jobs,
When Civil Rights, the Human rights were violated over and over.
Unity to me means:
Working for Peace
Working for Understanding and Friendship among all people
Working to see that people in our country and around the world are free from want ––– that they have adequate food, clothing, shelter and medical care
Working to see that the Civil Rights, the Human Rights of all people are protected regardless of race, religion or country of origin.
That is why we are here today. That is why we will continue to rally and be active until these goals are met.
Jeanne S. James |
Jump in the Pit and Match the Wit
The Christian community betrays its own rich spiritual existence when it clings to pictures, or defines itself by the ideas of an imperfect original community, or fixates on the sayings “of the actual man himself.”
— Gary Dorrien, quoting Hegel in Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit.
I took Dorrien’s take on Hegel as equally valid for a historical Islam that kneels before the Quran and Prophetic speech rather than discern relevancy and truth in real time. Although Hegel wrote from an undernourished Christian ethnocentrism, another Dorrien quote of Hegel captures the essence of any religion of truth as the dynamic self-determination of reason: Religion is for everyone... Religion is the manner or mode by which all human beings become conscious of truth for themselves.
American agnostic Robert Ingersoll went further to address the power relations that inhibit reason: When a fact can be demonstrated, force is unnecessary; when it cannot be demonstrated, an appeal to force is infamous. In the presence of the unknown all have an equal right to think.
It seems to me that the ongoing moves in so-called democracies and religions of truth require dissolving winner’s narratives in the waters of public reason. Natural and man-made catastrophes kill innocent and sinner alike, where sinners are invariably defined by winners. As the late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe noted in a 1994 interview, “There is a great proverb – that until the lions have their historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
Tao, Dasein, and Islam are birthrights for all regardless of borders. The promise of Quran and Constitution lies in their human capital with all their flaws, warts, and restless dispositions. Prioritizing living relations over accumulating things dead, overcoming the myths of markets and martyrdom all demand an open market of ideas free of coercion. And when conflicted interests barter for social goods, promote the good and mitigate harm in a level arena where stakeholders must jump in the pit and match the wit on merit.
The original version of this appeared online in issue 620 of The Black Commentator on September 10, 2015:
http://blackcommentator.com/620/620_islam_beyond_quran_james_guest.html
|
Kevin James biography
Kevin James worked as New York City firefighter and supervising fire marshal from 1981 to 2002. He collaborated with elected officials and NGOs in passing the first ‘fire-safe’ cigarette legislation in the United States. He was accepted into the Revson Fellows program at Columbia University after retiring from the Fire Department in 2002, and was one of several American Muslims profiled in the 2002 PBS documentary Muhammad, Legacy of a Prophet. He was accepted into Columbia Law School in 2004, during which he interned with the Center for Constitutional Rights as an Ella Baker Fellow where he assisted in finding legal counsel for Guantanamo detainees. His major writing credit focused on Mahmoud Taha, a Sufi religious leader who was executed as an apostate in the Sudan in 1985. Mr. James graduated from Columbia as a Stone Scholar in 2007, and attended the 2011 White House Iftar Dinner hosted by President Barack Obama during Ramadan.
|
Luv u 4eva
Anthony J. Langford
Mark is tall, dark and handsome and only months away from leaving his teens behind forever. Sophie is small, stunning and blonde and much sought after, yet despite her poise and cultivated constitution, is still only fifteen (and two thirds).
There was no hiding their coming together. Instant communication shared the moment of their first kiss (from multiple angles) thanks to flashing phones illuminating the dark corner at the party. She’d been dead sober. He, not so much. He didn’t learn of her actual age until several days later, after she had tracked him down. All she’d had to go on that first night was his name. It took some initiative. And cunning. When Sophie wanted something, she got it. And if she couldn’t, she’d find someone to make it happen.
She may have been young yet it was a fact that came too late for Mark. He was in, he was smitten and he was obsessed. She looked eighteen at least and was undoubtedly smarter than he and most of his mates. Make that all of them.
‘I’ll love you forever,’ he said often.
‘I love you too baby,’ she would reply though somehow knew that it wouldn’t last. She had her entire life ahead of her. She would marry someone more sophisticated, someone with more prospects of prosperity than an apprentice mechanic. For now, that bad boy had a car, was heaps of fun and sexier than a slicked up soapie star. Even sexier!
They’d done their best to keep it from her parents by limiting certain connections such as Facebook (but not Instagram) and texting rather than wall posts and late night phone calls.
A few weeks back, in the privacy of his car at a McDonald’s car park, things had become so intense that had it been winter, they could have drawn pictographs on the windows.
‘I can’t. I can’t,’ he said, referring to the age difference.
‘I’m not talking about doing it,’ she said, ‘but I want to have some fun with you okay?’
‘I’m actually being serious. I could go to jail. Besides, I respect you too much.’
She slapped the seat, ‘Oh my God!’ Her friends were expecting a story of passion.
He slipped away from her, attempting to regain his breath. It wasn’t easy. ‘We’ll have plenty of time in the future for fun sweetie. I want to do the right thing. Your parents will find out eventually and I don’t want them to hate me. I’m gunna be a part of your family you know.’
‘I won’t tell. I promise.’
‘I know babe. Maybe not you. Someone else.’
‘What are you saying? That I’m going to tell everyone?’
‘No babe. I just mean... trust me. This is the best way. I really want to! But I gotta do the right thing, you know?’
She whined to her friends, especially Taylyn who was the only one of her group to have actually done it. She also had the hots for her boyfriend’s mate, Joseph. So when the opportunity arose for the four of them to get together on a Friday night (both girls said they were staying at the other’s place) they went for it.
Mark’s car is black with really shiny hubcaps. She doesn’t know the make or cares. It’s loud and fast and everyone looks at them when they drive past. They cruise the Inner Western streets. Occasionally they yell out at people. They laugh. The music is loud. The car is fast. The lights are bright and colorful. It’s a great time to be young isn’t it? All four share their experiences with their network via their phones, including Mark. What’s the point of being cool if you can’t make your friends jealous? Lol!
They hit the drive through bottle shop. The girls buy cruisers. Well, Mark is compelled to buy them but it’s obvious they’re not for him. Joseph buys a cheap six pack of beer. ‘I’m gunna need all six bro.’
Mark says, ‘Don’t worry mate. None for me. Don’t wanna lose my license.’
‘Ah you can have one bro.’
He turns to Sophie. ‘Nah. Gotta do the right thing by my girl.’ He runs his hand through her blonde locks. Her eyes shimmer back at him. He’s got it good. If only she wasn’t so young.
With an hour Taylyn and Joseph are getting it on in the back. Sophie keeps looking back at them. She’d take a photo of the action is she wasn’t so annoyed. Or jealous. Or something. Sophie is supposed to be the leader of their group at school, yet Taylyn is going to be the one with the story. Mark hasn’t lifted a finger! She stares at him with accusatory eyes.
‘What’s up babe?’
She shakes her head and looks out at the cars they pass. She opts to flick through her Newsfeed.
Mark doesn’t understand her change in mood. What’s wrong with girls? So confusing. He can’t talk to Joseph, who had his hands full, so he opts to text his other mate and see if someone can work out her problem.
Thirteen seconds later his car drifts into the next lane, clipping the back of a Ute, which spins to the left. It happens so quickly no one can do a thing but be spectators in their own horror scene. Mark ploughs into the Ute. The cars are briefly entwined in a plot-less ballet until Mark’s car swipes the gutter, sending them up into the air and smashing into an iron fence that surrounds a car dealership. The crushed metal drops to the pavement, passenger side down.
The Ute is hit by one other car and remarkably, others manage to brake in time. Debris decorates the road like toddler’s art.
Somehow, no one is killed, other than blonde Sophie, still clutching her phone, whose section of the vehicle received the most intense force of the impact.
The couple in back will eventually recover, though will never be the same, yet it’s Mark who is most injury free, left only with the memory of his true love and decades to ponder the true meaning of ‘doing the right thing.’
|
each of you carry
one body each
Janet Kuypers
Started 4/18/15
four of us
would carry
one of the
dead bodies
to bring it
to the fire pit
the guards
saw this,
stopped us
“no no no,
each of you
carry one
body each”
then they
showed us
how to
do it
you see,
you take
a stick
put it
under
their neck
and drag them
behind you
like
they were
a rag
or
a piece
of garbage
this is
what they
taught us
|
 
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ poetry feature “Rap Sheet” (Cfs) live at the Cafe Cabaret at Cafe Ballou in Chicago 6/19/15, with the poems each of you carry one body each, uncuffed and printed, Entering Courtroom 101, Vent, and only option is fighting.
|
See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ poetry feature “Rap Sheet” (Cps) live at the Cafe Cabaret at Cafe Ballou in Chicago 6/19/15, with the poems each of you carry one body each, uncuffed and printed, Entering Courtroom 101, Vent, and only option is fighting.
|
Download these poems in the free chapbook
“Rap Sheet”, w/ poems performed
live 6/19/15 at Cafe Ballou, in the Cafe Cabaret (Chicago)
|
Download these poems in the free chapbook
“Rap Sheet” Expanded Report,
with long versions of poems (and a bonus poem) in her “Rap Sheet” show 6/19/15 at Cafe Ballou, in the Cafe Cabaret (Chicago)
|
|
Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.
She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.
She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org and chaoticarts.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images.
Since 2010 Kuypers also hosts the Chicago poetry open mic at the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).
In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), the three collection books from 2004: Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the shutterfly ISSN# cc& hardcover art book life, in color, Post-Apocalyptic, Burn Through Me, Under the Sea (photo book), the Periodic Table of Poetry, a year long Journey, Bon Voyage!, and the mini books Part of my Pain, Let me See you Stripped, Say Nothing, Give me the News, when you Dream tonight, Rape, Sexism, Life & Death (with some Slovak poetry translations), Twitterati, and 100 Haikus, that coincided with the June 2014 release of the two poetry collection books Partial Nudity and Revealed.
|
American Hero
John Kojak
“Get up,” her husband told her. “The last shuttle is leaving in a few minutes. If we don’t go now we’re going to miss it.”
“Good,” she thought. Why would she want to pretend to smile and wave as her only son was being sent off to war? She couldn’t bear the thought of what might happen to him over there. Every day the television showed things getting worse. There was fighting everywhere, in places that made no sense to her, Fall-u-jah, Kir-kuk, Bagh-dad. The names sounded like nightmares, and they were.
Now, the day that she dreaded most had arrived. Her son was about to ship out, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Her husband, her friends, and even her son had tried to console her. They kept telling her that everything would be all right; that Michael would be OK. She wanted to believe them, but she knew it was a lie.
“You don’t want to miss Michael’s ceremony do you?”
“Ceremony celebration,” she replied morosely, as she looked down at the invitation that was folded out on the bed beside her:
The Honor of Your Presence is Requested at the
23rd Infantry Battalion
Deployment Ceremony Celebration
On Sunday, November 2nd, 2003 at 1100
Fort Carson, CO
She was in no mood to celebrate, but her husband knew that his wife would never forgive herself if something happened to their son and they were not there to see him before he left. They had to go. He reached down and grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her up off of the bed. “We’re leaving now,” he said.
She was almost catatonic, and could barely stand, but he held her up as he shepherded her out of their room and to the elevator. When they reached the lobby of the hotel, the large automatic glass doors slid open and she could see the long white shuttle-van idling ominously in front of the hotel. A thin, tired looking old man with a face like an ancient apple stood sullenly next to the open cargo doors.
“Got room for two more?’ her husband asked.
“If we don’t, we’ll make some,” the old man said.
The van was filled with well-dressed, happy looking people. Some were holding on to red, white, and blue balloons, and others held small American flags. All were wearing smiles.
“Suck it in folks,” the old man said to the others as he ushered the slightly built, stern looking man and his wife, a dark, tightly wrapped bundle of raw emotions into the van. It was a warm fall day and most of the other passengers were dressed in light clothing, but not her. She was dressed in a thick grey winter coat with a long brown scarf wrapped tightly around her neck. She wore sunglasses, and pulled the collars of her coat up to try and hide her anguish racked face, but it was no use. There was no hiding her pain.
As they climbed on board, the young woman sitting next to them saw the distress that the man’s wife was in. “Is your wife alright?” she asked as the cargo door slammed shut.
The girl was young and frail looking, but she was wearing a thin gold wedding band on her left hand. He knew that she would understand, “Our son is deploying to Iraq today, and my wife is very worried about him.”
An elderly black woman sitting behind them leaned forward and placed a grandmotherly hand on his wife’s shoulder, hoping to comfort her. “My grandson is shipping out today too, child. So I know how you feel.”
She had heard that before. That people knew how she felt, but they didn’t. “How could they?” she thought. This was her son, not theirs. She had devoted her entire life him. To protecting him, to keeping him safe. She wouldn’t even let him play football, for Christ’s sake. But now he was being sent someplace where people were going to try to kill him. And even if he was lucky enough not to get shot, not to get blown up, even if he didn’t die, he would still be under the constant threat of death. She was sick of people who thought they knew how she felt. How could they?
“Don’t worry,” said a Hispanic woman sitting in the back with her two young daughters. “My husband is also being sent to Iraq. But I know that god will protect him, and I’m sure that god will protect your son as well,” she said as she made the sign of the cross.
“Yes, thank you.” the husband replied.
He knew that they were all going to the same place, and that everyone in the van must be suffering in his or her own way, but they all seemed to be handling it pretty well, under the circumstances, except his wife. He could see the concern on the other passenger’s faces and felt that he should try to explain to them why she was so upset. “It’s just///he is our only son, you see? He is all we have.”
“I hear you,” the Hispanic woman replied casually. “I don’t know what I would do without my husband.”
He knew he shouldn’t say anymore, but he could not stop himself from trying to make her, to make them, understand. “Yes, but if something happens to your husband at least you will still have your children. You will still have a reason to live. What does a mother do if she loses her only child?”
An angry eyed middle-aged woman who had been sitting quietly in the back quickly spoke up. “Are you suggesting that your wife is suffering more than the rest of us because her son is an only child?” she asked in a scornful tone. “I have two sons who are deploying overseas, and I can tell you that I am not suffering half as much for each of my kids, I’m suffering double!”
The husband knew that he had crossed a line, but couldn’t stop himself from trying to make them truly understand. “I’m sorry,” he told the woman. I wasn’t trying to suggest that you don’t love your children as much as we love ours, but at least if one of your sons dies you would have the other one left to comfort you. That’s all I am saying.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed into tiny slits and her lips tightened as she told him coldly, “Yes, but if one of your children survives you have to go on living, you have to go on suffering. If your only child dies you don’t have to go on. Do you?”
“Ah, horseshit,” a large man sitting next to the driver said in a low country drawl. “These are grown men we’re talking about. They don’t want us crying for them. They know what’s at stake. Believe me. We raised them to do right, and if serving their country is what they want to do then we need to respect that.”
The other passengers nodded in silently agreement with the man, but not her.
“So, lady,” the large man said as he turned to speak directly to the grieving mother. “You should stop crying and start grinning like me—because before my son died he told me that he was the happiest that he had ever been. He said that the guys he was serving with were like his brothers. He told me that he would do anything for them; even give his life, because he knew that they would do the same thing for him. That’s why I am not upset that he’s gone. Hell, I don’t even think of it that way. I still see him everywhere. He’s in those little American flags ya’ll are carrying; I see his face every time I see someone in uniform, he’s part of this country now, and he will be forever. He’s an American Hero.”
The women suddenly stopped crying and looked up at the man. All of this time she had been trying to find some way to make sense of the fact that her son might get hurt, maybe even killed, but nothing her husband, her friends, or even her son, could say had made her feel any better. But now, after listening to this man, she felt a sudden strange sense of relief. If someone who had lost his son could be this strong, surely she could stop crying and find the courage to accept the fact that if her son did get hurt, even killed, he did so serving his country alongside the brothers that he had always wanted. He would be a hero, he would live on forever as a symbol of freedom, it was all beginning to make sense—until the frail young bride sitting beside her whispered, “I don’t want my husband to be a hero.” The girl’s words hit the woman like a bullet. She didn’t want her son to be a hero either.
As the shuttle van pulled up in front of the Army base, the woman, who had not yet spoken a word, took off her sunglasses and looked directly into the eyes of the man whose son had been killed, and asked, “Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that your son lives on as you say?”
The smile that had filled the stoic man’s face began to harden, and his eyes suddenly filled with tears as he appeared, at that very moment, to realize that his son was really dead. Dead and gone forever. His lips quivered and he opened his mouth as if to speak, but instead unleashed a guttural wail of such agony that it sounded like the cry of a father mourning the loss of a thousand dead sons. The other passengers were shocked by the large man’s sudden outpouring of grief and hurriedly exited the van, but she stayed. She understood his anguish. She knew his pain. After a few moments, she reached out and touched him gently on the hand. “I know,” she whispered before climbing quietly out of the van. As she stood in line with her husband to enter the base, she looked around at the faces in the crowd. Most looked happy, some proud, some even looked excited. She could see that they didn’t understand, they didn’t know. “How could they?” she thought. If they knew, they wouldn’t be carrying balloons and waving little flags. They wouldn’t do that if they knew it would be their son, or their daughter, who would be the next American Hero. The End.
|
kill
Janet Kuypers
haiku 2/16/14
they tried to kill me
but I survived. Lucky me.
But, what have I won
|
|
Janet Kuypers has a Communications degree in News/Editorial Journalism (starting in computer science engineering studies) from the UIUC. She had the equivalent of a minor in photography and specialized in creative writing. A portrait photographer for years in the early 1990s, she was also an acquaintance rape workshop facilitator, and she started her publishing career as an editor of two literary magazines. Later she was an art director, webmaster and photographer for a few magazines for a publishing company in Chicago, and this Journalism major was even the final featured poetry performer of 15 poets with a 10 minute feature at the 2006 Society of Professional Journalism Expo’s Chicago Poetry Showcase. This certified minister was even the officiant of a wedding in 2006.
She sang with acoustic bands “Mom’s Favorite Vase”, “Weeds and Flowers” and “the Second Axing”, and does music sampling. Kuypers is published in books, magazines and on the internet around 9,300 times for writing, and over 17,800 times for art work in her professional career, and has been profiled in such magazines as Nation and Discover U, won the award for a Poetry Ambassador and was nominated as Poet of the Year for 2006 by the International Society of Poets. She has also been highlighted on radio stations, including WEFT (90.1FM), WLUW (88.7FM), WSUM (91.7FM), WZRD (88.3FM), WLS (8900AM), the internet radio stations ArtistFirst dot com, chicagopoetry.com’s Poetry World Radio and Scars Internet Radio (SIR), and was even shortly on Q101 FM radio. She has also appeared on television for poetry in Nashville (in 1997), Chicago (in 1997), and northern Illinois (in a few appearances on the show for the Lake County Poets Society in 2006). Kuypers was also interviewed on her art work on Urbana’s WCIA channel 3 10 o’clock news.
She turned her writing into performance art on her own and with musical groups like Pointless Orchestra, 5D/5D, The DMJ Art Connection, Order From Chaos, Peter Bartels, Jake and Haystack, the Bastard Trio, and the JoAnne Pow!ers Trio, and starting in 2005 Kuypers ran a monthly iPodCast of her work, as well mixed JK Radio — an Internet radio station — into Scars Internet Radio (both radio stations on the Internet air 2005-2009). She even managed the Chaotic Radio show (an hour long Internet radio show 1.5 years, 2006-2007) through BZoO.org and chaoticarts.org. She has performed spoken word and music across the country - in the spring of 1998 she embarked on her first national poetry tour, with featured performances, among other venues, at the Albuquerque Spoken Word Festival during the National Poetry Slam; her bands have had concerts in Chicago and in Alaska; in 2003 she hosted and performed at a weekly poetry and music open mike (called Sing Your Life), and from 2002 through 2005 was a featured performance artist, doing quarterly performance art shows with readings, music and images.
Since 2010 Kuypers also hosts the Chicago poetry open mic at the Café Gallery, while also broadcasting the Cafés weekly feature podcasts (and where she sometimes also performs impromptu mini-features of poetry or short stories or songs, in addition to other shows she performs live in the Chicago area).
In addition to being published with Bernadette Miller in the short story collection book Domestic Blisters, as well as in a book of poetry turned to prose with Eric Bonholtzer in the book Duality, Kuypers has had many books of her own published: Hope Chest in the Attic, The Window, Close Cover Before Striking, (woman.) (spiral bound), Autumn Reason (novel in letter form), the Average Guy’s Guide (to Feminism), Contents Under Pressure, etc., and eventually The Key To Believing (2002 650 page novel), Changing Gears (travel journals around the United States), The Other Side (European travel book), the three collection books from 2004: Oeuvre (poetry), Exaro Versus (prose) and L’arte (art), The Boss Lady’s Editorials, The Boss Lady’s Editorials (2005 Expanded Edition), Seeing Things Differently, Change/Rearrange, Death Comes in Threes, Moving Performances, Six Eleven, Live at Cafe Aloha, Dreams, Rough Mixes, The Entropy Project, The Other Side (2006 edition), Stop., Sing Your Life, the hardcover art book (with an editorial) in cc&d v165.25, the Kuypers edition of Writings to Honour & Cherish, The Kuypers Edition: Blister and Burn, S&M, cc&d v170.5, cc&d v171.5: Living in Chaos, Tick Tock, cc&d v1273.22: Silent Screams, Taking It All In, It All Comes Down, Rising to the Surface, Galapagos, Chapter 38 (v1 and volume 1), Chapter 38 (v2 and Volume 2), Chapter 38 v3, Finally: Literature for the Snotty and Elite (Volume 1, Volume 2 and part 1 of a 3 part set), A Wake-Up Call From Tradition (part 2 of a 3 part set), (recovery), Dark Matter: the mind of Janet Kuypers , Evolution, Adolph Hitler, O .J. Simpson and U.S. Politics, the one thing the government still has no control over, (tweet), Get Your Buzz On, Janet & Jean Together, po•em, Taking Poetry to the Streets, the Cana-Dixie Chi-town Union, the Written Word, Dual, Prepare Her for This, uncorrect, Living in a Big World (color interior book with art and with “Seeing a Psychiatrist”), Pulled the Trigger (part 3 of a 3 part set), Venture to the Unknown (select writings with extensive color NASA/Huubble Space Telescope images), Janet Kuypers: Enriched, She’s an Open Book, “40”, Sexism and Other Stories, the Stories of Women, Prominent Pen (Kuypers edition), Elemental, the paperback book of the 2012 Datebook (which was also released as a spiral-bound cc&d ISSN# 2012 little spiral datebook, , Chaotic Elements, and Fusion, the (select) death poetry book Stabity Stabity Stab Stab Stab, the 2012 art book a Picture’s Worth 1,000 words (available with both b&w interior pages and full color interior pages, the shutterfly ISSN# cc& hardcover art book life, in color, Post-Apocalyptic, Burn Through Me, Under the Sea (photo book), the Periodic Table of Poetry, a year long Journey, Bon Voyage!, and the mini books Part of my Pain, Let me See you Stripped, Say Nothing, Give me the News, when you Dream tonight, Rape, Sexism, Life & Death (with some Slovak poetry translations), Twitterati, and 100 Haikus, that coincided with the June 2014 release of the two poetry collection books Partial Nudity and Revealed.
|
this page was downloaded to your computer
|
