Haiku (brain)
Denny E. Marshall
“love her for her brain”
says to friend, even before
turned into zombie
1st Published In Stinkwaves Spring 2014
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Haiku (debt)
Denny E. Marshall
the national debt
puny compared to the size
of the universe
1st Published In Vox Poetica October 2012
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Haiku (plants)
Denny E. Marshall
UFO landed
the aliens are small plants
other plants silent
1st Published In High Coupe February 2013
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Haiku (space)
Denny E. Marshall
the stars
are lonely
so much space
1st Published In Writers Haven December 2012
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Haiku (proposed)
Denny E. Marshall
Jupiter proposed
to the large planet Saturn
now present are rings
1st Published In Kalkion May 2014
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Friends and Neighbors
Terry C. Ley
I am sitting on a little oak chair at the front of the classroom that I share with twenty-five other first graders. Only six of us are now sitting in the oak chairs carefully arranged in a semicircle at the front of the room. We are the Robins, and we are the best readers in the first grade at Manual Arts School. Miss Mary Hoagland, our teacher, will never say that, that we are the best readers. A kind person, she does not want to hurt the feelings of the Bluebirds and the Wrens, the vast multitudes now busy with their seatwork, waiting their turns in the reading circle.
Miss Hoagland takes her seat in front of us, her teacher’s edition of Friends and NeighborsFriends and Neighbors in one hand, a small stack of flashcards in the other. Before we read, we must warm up, like athletes do.
“What,” says Miss Hoagland, “is this word?” She holds up the top flashcard in her stack. It is clearly red. We all know that word, having met it every day this week in our reading circle, but today my hand is the first one in the air.
“Terry?” she says, nodding in my direction.
“Red!” I declare with confidence, though not so loud as to disturb the Bluebirds and Wrens.
Miss Hoagland doesn’t say “Right!” every time a Robin gets a word right. That would become tiresome for both teacher and Robin. Instead, before she moves on to the next word, she hands me the card with red printed on it, a token of victory to hold until the end of our reading lesson.
If learning is partly tactile, then I guess whoever invented those flashcards should get a medal. They are sizeable cards, each perhaps a foot long, with letters large enough to be read from the back of the classroom should that become necessary. But I like them most because they are constructed of heavy cream-colored paper, what I call “vanilla” paper until I learn later to call it more properly, “Manila” paper. I love the feel of flashcards in my hand, substantial and cool, and I crave more, more, more, the pure weight of them signaling my superiority as a reader.
Today, while the other Robins are reading their paragraphs aloud, I examine the cards that I have won: red and ball, look and run. I admire the crisp font in which they are printed, the one that the editors at Scott, Foresman have selected for the stories in Friends and Neighbors. They look exactly the way they look on the pages of the stories we have read this week. I am proud of my observation, tracing with my finger the a in ball, which doesn’t look at all like the a’s we practice printing every day.
I place the flashcards in my lap when it’s my turn to read aloud about Dick and Jane. They have a new ball today, it seems—a red ball—and Spot, their dog, tries to snatch the ball when Dick and Jane toss it back and forth. Spot is a cocker spaniel. I wish I had a cocker spaniel at home instead of a turtle. Turtles are no fun when it comes to playing ball. Miss Hoagland allows me to read two whole pages. She interrupts our reading only to correct our mistakes, and today she sits silently while I read. I am proud.
Too soon our time in the reading circle ends, and the Bluebirds come to roost where we have made such rapid progress. They are behind us Robins. Before beginning my seatwork I hear them chirping for their flashcards, calling out words that we had called out two weeks ago. Sometimes not even one Wren knows Miss Hoagland’s word, and she has to help them. I pity them. There are more Wrens than either Robins or Bluebirds, and they are reading from a different book altogether, one with only a few words on each page. I really feel sorry for them.
Today, for seatwork, Miss Hoagland asks us Robins to do page 16 in our Think-and-Do workbook. Dick and Jane—and Spot!—are on p. 16, too. They’re not playing ball here, though. They’re doing something altogether different on this page, but most of the words are the same as the ones we just read in the reading circle. After I read the directions, moving my lips only a little, I read the page, circling some words and drawing lines to connect others. Where it tells me to copy words like red and ball several times at the bottom of the page, I try to make my letter a in ball look like the one in the book and the one printed in the orderly row of letters that march across the front of the room, over the blackboard, right above Miss Hoagland, who is now smiling at a Bluebird as she hands her a vanilla flashcard.
I love filling in the blanks on the workbook pages, printing my answers very carefully; tearing out my finished pages at the perforations; and placing them on Miss Hoagland’s desk when the Wrens retire and reading lessons end. I really like getting those pages back the next day, too, especially when Miss Hoagland writes something nice at the top. (I like “Good work, Terry!” best. It makes me smile.) I also like taking the pages home to show Mom and Dad, who seem quite happy that I am a Robin, that Miss Hoagland thinks I do good work, and that I like being new in Dick and Jane’s neighborhood.
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The Inspector
Michel Ge
Well first she was digging around in my mouth like she was dissecting it with those barbed scratchers of hers; I felt like she was engraving something into my teeth. She was really focused. I looked her in the eye to see if she would look at me back, but she was intent on my teeth, peering over her blue surgeon’s mask like there was something really important there that she needed to find out. Like she was going to die if she didn’t.
But the only one I thought would die was me. I kept feeling like she’d slip and hook the barbs into the sides of my mouth, or even my throat, and drive them deep down and twist. I was so scared of that. I tensed my legs and splayed my fingers on top of them, arched upwards. She dug deeper and deeper into my mouth, to those flat teeth all the way in the back and the side. She leaned closer and asked me, was I doin’ okay? I think I nodded. Her face was backlit by these glaring lights, like interrogation lights, and I swear for a moment it was someone else prying those hooks into me.
When I walked in she asked me in a cheery Southern voice, was I taking medications? and I told her I took a cream for the oil on my face. Thank you, she said, but thank you for what she didn’t say. She seemed a nice enough woman, anyway. She used the water-squirter a lot, trickling it into my parched mouth, saying okay when she wanted me to close my mouth and have all the moisture sucked out of it like a vacuum. Once it spilled off the edge of my lips onto my chin; it was warm, like blood. She wiped it off with a napkin. Your lips are dry, she said. She sounded really innocent, insistent. I just kept my mouth open because I didn’t know what else to do.
She started scraping my teeth again, but soon she stopped. Now she sounded stern, like she was an old mama expecting something out of me. What do you drink? was what she said. What? I kept saying. What do you drink? she said. Water? I said. Soda? she prompted, but I felt like she meant something else. I kept thinking well I drank with the boys, I drank beer, but that was years ago, so I didn’t say anything. She looked at me and sighed. Look, she said. She got out a little mirror and showed me a dark spot on my teeth. It was really small, like right in the crevice between my two front teeth. That’s a stain, she said. Oh, I said. I didn’t know my teeth were stained. You never noticed this? she said. It wasn’t there before, but I didn’t tell her that. She wouldn’t have believed me. She got it off, anyway. I didn’t see it anymore after that. But she had to use the water drill, and that wasn’t soft like the squirter, it was sharp and it whined as it went. I felt like it was tugging on my teeth, trying to pull them out by their roots. When she moved deeper I thought I’d lose those weak little teeth at the back, for sure. It whined louder and louder. The water drill strayed a bit and it bit into the inside of my cheek. I twitched but she didn’t stop to ask if I was doin’ okay. I stared at her blond neck hair, waving at me as some eddies swirled around it. The whining was pulsating now, going high-pitch low-pitch high-pitch low-pitch as she moved it up and down on a tooth. It was like the ringing in your ears after a bomb goes off. I was afraid my teeth were going to break off, but she kept going. I stared at her neck hair and all a sudden I was stumbling through it, like it was this real tall grass, and it was a really hot day and the boys were all around me and we were looking for a place to set up camp. This is fucking tick paradise, George was saying. The sun was setting behind a rusty haze. Hey Mushroom Head, he said. That’s what they called me, because of my hair. They also called me Chipmunk, because they said I had round, shiny cheeks like one from some cartoon. Isn’t this tick paradise? George said. I don’t get ticks, I told him. Fuck you, he said. I was really hot that day, and all I wanted to do was put my stupid rifle down, and sleep somewhere, not be cussed at, so I told him if God didn’t want me to have ticks, then who was I to complain? You want to see something? George said. He started lifting up his shirt and trying to stick pink patches of skin in my face, all of them with some small dark dot on them. He had one on his ass, he said, which he promised to show me that night. All a sudden there was a white flash and boys were screaming, and somewhere up ahead someone got blown to bits, and all his bits were flying everywhere, and two more boys were thrashing and shrieking on the ground. That’s when they came, emerging out of the grass like a band of hyenas. They had their guns on us. They shot Sarge. By the time we knew what was happening we were surrendering; they were taking our guns, and out from the grass this tall man in all black appeared. The Inspector looked at me for the first time.
She took a poker and started prodding my teeth while the water drill went, closer and closer to the hollow of my throat. I was trying to gag but the way she had her hands over my mouth, her fingers pinning down my tongue, stopped it from working. She was so focused with her drill, stroking a tooth that felt like it had gone loose, the way the Inspector stroked his instruments down George’s thigh while George thrashed and screamed, lashed to the interrogation table, the Inspector tinkering away in his tender flesh. And I was fighting and screaming and she was putting her knee on my chest and pinning me down and digging into my mouth and smiling widely and laughing and it was not her face, it was the Inspector’s, get away from me, GET AWAY FROM ME! I drank, ma’am, I wanted to scream, I drank and that’s why there’s a stain on my teeth, and I only brush my teeth at night, and I lied to mama about not getting a job offer, but I was gone from school for so long that I can’t draw anymore, I can’t, and when the Inspector was done and George was bleeding all over the floor I didn’t help him like I should’ve, I just hid my face in my knees and stopped up my ears—I’ll tell you everything, ma’am, please!
Are you doin’ okay? she said.
The water trickled off.
I couldn’t speak, not even if I’d wanted to. Almost done, she said, like she could read my thoughts. I lay there panting. I found my voice. I need to take a break, I told her. She looked at me, concerned. She was older than I’d thought. Are you alright? she said. I’m fine, I told her. She studied me and nodded, saying she’d be back in a minute.
She was gone a lot of minutes. So I sat and watched Wheel of Fortune, the letters silently appearing while white captions appeared on black strips beneath. A woman had won $28,000, but missed the bonus $50,000 and I knew she would be regretful rather than happy, and it dampened me to think that. Then the commercials came on. There were a lot of cars, and I couldn’t afford most of them. Not that I was poor. I just couldn’t draw anymore; couldn’t go back to school, either—too expensive. I did get that one job offer designing posters, but I told the woman I wasn’t up for it like I used to be. Mama took good care of me, anyway. Only sometimes she talked about the other boys, pointing like they were in the room: the other boys are doing this, doing that. I’d tell her the other boys work at gas stations and lift boxes. You could do that, she’d say. But I didn’t want to lift boxes so I always said no. Then what? she said. Are you going to live here forever? No, mama, I said. I’ll get a job when I’m ready.
The commercials ended and some reality T.V. show started, which I started getting into, but then she was back. Ready? she said, sounding tired. I looked up at her and nodded.
She brought out the scratchers this time. I was glad that my teeth still felt intact, but now she was carving into them like Moses carving the Ten Commandments into a stone tablet. Your gums are bleeding pretty badly, she said. Well that’s because she was knifing up my mouth, I thought, but I didn’t say that. Are you flossing? she said. Yeah, I said. Have you been doing it every day, or maybe missing a few days, she said, like she was listing things. She paused. How often do you floss?
Every day, I said. She gave a small sigh and I felt bad all of a sudden. Are you comfortable on how to floss? she said. She got up to look at some files. I think, I said. You think? I think, I said. I paused for a long time, and said, but if I think I do and I don’t, I guess it could be bad. She made a small laugh noise, like a hiccup. It made me feel better.
You’re going to have to start flossing, she said. I do floss, I said quietly. Your gums are bleeding, she said. Are you sure you’re flossing right? I don’t know, I said. Are you flossing every day? she asked. Yes, I said. She grabbed a floppy plastic model of an enlarged set of teeth and showed me how to floss. Just go up and down each edge, she said. About twenty times. She ran the minty floss string up and down each edge about twenty times.
I sat quietly for a while. She kept looking at me.
Your gums are really infected, she said. I know, I said. You really need to start flossing, she said. I lowered my eyes.
Okay, I said. I will.
She put an extra tin of floss in my gift bag, with the toothbrush and toothpaste samples. Then she let me go, just like that. Was it that bad? the receptionist asked. No, I said. It wasn’t. I didn’t look at her. It was dusk and the sun was streaming through the windows, lighting up dust in the waiting room. I went out the door and into mama’s car, the one she was loaning me. And as I was driving away, just as I thought I was free, I looked over and saw that from behind the window the dentist was watching me. I couldn’t see her neck hair, but I didn’t need to. Because when I passed by, for a second her face darkened, and she gave me a wide, wide smile, a smile that knew all of my secrets.
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The End of June
Abigail Smith
Annie tried ignoring the television in the corner of the waiting room but it droned on, “With an ever-increasing population, and the diminishing resource crisis, projecting is the responsible thing to do. Think Expiry, think SOMS. Help the planet by visiting your local Expiry agency...” She shook her head, clicking her fingers loudly across the keyboard. Behind the desk she typed the names and medical histories of each patient that walked through the revolving door. She was in the middle of processing a file when Dr. Nate Scott leaned out of the back office.
“Ready for the next patient,” he called quietly down the short hallway. His handsome features and hearty charisma had become weathered. Lines ran along his forehead and around his mouth forming a persistent scowl despite his usually kind nature.
“Mrs. Cobb, the doctor will see you now,” Annie said to the waiting room. The woman’s son pulled his 84-year-old mother up from her plastic, blue waiting room chair.
“Let go of me! I’m fine,” the woman barked.
The older people got, the crueler they became. With her son holding one arm and her granddaughter the other, the woman walked through the office door and down the hallway plastered in wallpaper with colorful flowers that no longer grew. Annie forced a smile towards the old woman while avoiding eye contact. Sacrifice One, Many Survive, Annie thought. Expiry’s mantra, shortened to SOMS because euphemisms were easier to sell.
The family disappeared from view. She relaxed; pulling down the high ponytail that had trapped her hair all morning, and scratched the sore spot it had left on the back of her scalp. After a minute she faced the buzzing computer screen now trying to ignore the crying that leaked under the back door. An hour later Mrs. Cobb’s family stepped out of the room. The girl wiped her running nose along her black sleeve. The man’s face strained to keep his emotions in check as he shook Dr. Scott’s hand.
“You did the right thing,” Dr. Scott said.
The man was in his late forties but, as he walked down the adjacent hall for billing, he wandered like a child in a crowded mall. Nate Scott went over to Annie’s desk.
“Nate, I know we’re doing good work, logically speaking. But I still don’t understand how you do it.” He put his hands on the desk and stretched, letting out a small moan. Then he picked up a peppermint fudge piece from the jar of assorted rainbow candies on the counter. Several patients looked up from their outdated magazines as Nate crinkled the plastic wrapper and popped the red piece into his mouth.
“Some days are worse than others,” he said “but you know it needs to be done. We’re making a difference... SOMS” He rolled his shoulders back a few times. “So, how many more do we have?”
“Three. Do you want a break?”
“Let’s just finish. I’m ready to go home.”
Annie watched as each family held hands walking into Nate’s office and came out crying, one member short. On some level Annie knew the Expiry Company had to exist, but that didn’t stop her nails from digging her palm every time she called a name. After the last family moved on for billing, Nate came back to her desk. He glanced around the empty waiting room, leaned down and kissed the top of her coarse, sandy-brown hair. “Ready to go home and print some invitations?” he asked.
“We also need to make the place cards.” The only up side to Annie’s job was working alongside her fiancé. Nate had popped the question last spring while on vacation in the swamp region. Of course for Annie there was no question. Nate was kind, handsome, a young doctor with a big future. “No,” wasn’t an option.
*
Nate set the table as Annie sat on the couch, pulling her apron off. Nate went into the kitchen to grab forks as the show they were watching switched to an ad for Expiry. “Are you tired of seeing your family slowly deteriorate? Is it too painful or too much of a financial burden placing them in an assisted living community? Expiry is your solution. We humanely take care of your loved ones who aren’t able to live on their own, providing a better future. With an ever-increasing population, and the diminishing-resource crisis, projecting is the responsible thing to do. Think Expiry, think SOMS. Help the planet and visit your local Expiry agency for information on projection. You can also visit our websi-” Nate clicked the television off.
“We’re ready,” he said in a cool tone. That brief segment just cost him a pleasant dinner.
Annie sat at the table across from Nate. She threw her napkin in her lap. “I was serious earlier; when I asked how you do it everyday. I know sacrifice one, many survive but all those people... they die in that room. Nobody seems to remember that when they say SOMS.” Nate took a bite the small chicken breast on his plate; how many more times would he need to explain this? “I just don’t think I would be able to do it,” Annie said.
“Annie...” his voice was tired. “More people are dying of hunger every day. The people who I- we help, they’re heroes.” This was the official approach Expiry had trained him with, but she had gone through the same training. Annie didn’t accept this reason then and after countless arguments, Nate knew it wouldn’t suffice now. He tried again, “You know it has to be done. Our world can’t sustain many more people.” He motioned to the desert landscape outside their house’s thick, tinted windows. The world was only swamp and desert now. “We’ll all starve to death.” He watched Annie eat her equally small ration of chicken. Her head bobbed from side to side thoughtfully. He continued, “The Limited Family Law isn’t enough. There are some people still having second children and just paying the fine. We provide a service.” He sipped his water, “Besides, half of the people we see don’t even know what’s going on.” Annie’s head snapped up, eyes narrowed. This notion comforted Nate; the people he assisted were either unaware or else resolved to doing their part in helping the Earth they destroyed. He back peddled before Annie could swallow. “Didn’t you ever put down a dog when you were a kid?”
“You know I did! Snuffles had liver cancer, and was fifteen, but the bottom line is he was a dog. These are humans. Why do people always try to use that comparison? It’s SOMS, people should have to say it. Sacrifice, killing. Dogs and people are not the same.”
“It is the same thing! You have to look at it that way.” A dust storm was kicking up outside. Nate got up and closed the shutters. He picked his next words carefully. “We help put these people out of their misery.”
Annie finished her rations and took a sip of water. Her fingers moved to her bottom lip and pinched. She wanted to argue, but the whistling wind outside cleared away any fight she could muster. “I guess... the families are really the ones who decide,” she said slowly. “We’re just doing a job.”
“Exactly,” Nate said with a little too much conviction throwing out his hands.
“I just... I know we’re doing a noble thing. I just meant to say that I wouldn’t be able to do your job.” Annie bent her head and tucked her hair behind her ear.
“I know,” he said slightly condescendingly. He took her hand. “You’re still an important part of the team. We would be- I would be devastated if you quit.” It was true. He had resolved in medical school to not reproduce, and focus on population control. He used to wonder why anyone would bring life into this desert and swamp world, chiding attachment as weakness. Since meeting Annie he had begun to understand attachment.
“You know I can’t do that.” Annie bit her tongue, still hungry. Even with Nate’s salary, she needed to work to pay for her grandma June’s living expenses. Even with a bachelor’s degree, she couldn’t find a better job than Expiry receptionist.
“I know. Just remember it’s for June.” He smiled his most charming smile and for an instant his wrinkles faded. June had raised Annie creating a soft spot between them. He hoped that would be enough to prove Expiry’s worth.
“Sweetie, I know you’re conflicted, but if this was inhumane in any way, why would the government allow it? Expiry paid for my school, this house, and your ring.” The material comforts were the only things most people had to live for anymore. Nate took Annie’s left hand and swished it back and forth, letting the machine made diamond sparkle under the lights. “These people have nothing else. I just help them get to their final destination a little faster.”
Annie nodded. “You’re right. Sacrifice one, many survive.”
That night the phrase played over in her head. She knew the disaster stories. The world was filled with children who were starving. Annie remembered the first time she heard of Expiry. How uneasy she had been but how excited the rest of the world was. Expiry would allow there to be food for everyone. She fell asleep remembering the lines of people standing with their soon to be projected family members.
Annie was standing in the waiting room when the door to the office opened. She walked inside, thinking she should be at her desk, but her feet wouldn’t turn. She kept walking down the hall until her feet throbbed with blisters. Then a door opened at the end. She didn’t want to go in, but her feet kept moving forward. She had no choice. It was the right thing to do. She walked into the blackness of the doorway.
*
Annie had the next day off. She took the train out of the micro-city. Metropolises were demolished when the riots over food had reached critical mass. Now business’s gathered in micro-cities comprised of ten companies within a square mile. Every micro-city had a ration station that was heavily guarded with steel and guns. There was also an unnaturally bright colored Expiry, a train stop, a hospital protected by barbed wire and a Block Center, previously known as City Hall. The people zoned to the micro-city got to vote on the other five stores. All dwellings were at least fifteen miles from the micro-city, but together they formed a block.
Annie had driven in that day to take the train leaving her micro-city. She was going one block west to see her granny at the Simple Living nursing home. Since Expiry opened its labs seven years ago, patients in nursing homes had decreased severely. Security increased. After the first few extremists tried to bomb some nursing homes in the swamp regions, security increased all over the continent. June was only one of the twenty members in Simple Living but she liked it that way.
“Hey Gran,” Annie called as she walked into the apartment. Instead of a studio, Simple Living gave every guest a one-room apartment in an attempt to make it more appealing.
“Is that my Annie bell?” Granny asked bustling around the corner. June had never accepted her name being Anabeth. She had told her son she would change it if she ever got the chance. Of course, when the adoption papers came through, June couldn’t do it. The nickname endured though.
“With a new seating chart!” Annie and June clapped. They walked into the living room where two glasses of lemonade and some rationed sandwiches cut into triangles had been set out. Sunlight came through the thick glass and opaque green curtains. “How are you?” Annie asked. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come last week. The office has been ridiculously busy since Christmas ended.” She sat across from June, “I guess people aren’t feeling charitable anymore.”
“Well hello Miss Grinch,” June said, batting her granddaughter’s arm. “Don’t be so judgmental. It’s hard work keeping old folks like me alive.”
“Now who’s the Grinch? Even without help, you’ll out-live us all.” She blushed and stuffed a sandwich in her mouth.
“I’m not so sure about that dear.” Granny looked at her wrinkled hands in her lap and let out a sigh. “I spoke with the community’s doctor last week because of some back problems I’ve had and...” More wrinkles appeared on her brow. Whether June’s pain came from her back or her news, Annie couldn’t tell. “I have something called atherosclerosis... it’s not good.”
The sandwich caught in Annie’s throat. She coughed, trying not to choke. June gave her a firm pat on the back.
“What?” Annie’s voice was scratchy and her eyes watered. She looked at Gran, waiting for the punch line to this bad joke. “I don’t understand.” Any sickness was serious now. Annie had contracted pneumonia when she was twelve. She was in the hospital for a week, SOMS floated around ominously. June had kept her safe, nursed her back.
How can I nurse Gran when I can’t even pronounce the illness? “What is that? The nurses didn’t say anything. Wait, why didn’t you call me?” Annie stood up and paced in a little circle. “I could have been here sooner.”
“Genius! If you had come sooner, the sickness would have just gone away!” She paused, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why- this is out of my hands Bell. My arteries are being clogged with plaque. They’re as hard as rocks, and it’s not going to stop,” June finished seriously.
“W-we can do something, right? There’s a specialist we can talk to?”
“Come here.” June motioned for Annie to sit next to her. She obeyed, taking Granny’s hand. “The doctors here are top notch. Dr. Barons has treated enough people my age to know that at this stage, there’s not much we can do. Even if we put off Expiry until the wedding in March, I would be on permanent bed rest.”
“The wedding...” Annie soaked in the features of the aged face in front of her. The dark freckle over June’s left eyebrow, and the way her lips turned down at the corners. “There’s really nothing?” She pleaded.
“Maybe some extreme options, but I don’t want any of it. I’ve had a good, long life. I don’t want lasers cutting me open just so I can squeeze in a few more months and take up more resources.” Her voice shook slightly.
“But Gran...” There were tears in Annie’s eyes. “Don’t do this.”
“Bell, I’m not doing anything. Atherosclerosis builds up over time. Even if I did something extreme now, it would only come back later. I’m almost eighty. That’s plenty of time on this Earth.” June put her arms around her granddaughter. Annie only vaguely remembered her parents’ deaths. It had been early in the food shortages when the riots were bad; their small store never stood a chance. Annie felt a resurgence of old pain. Her heart felt like ash. She cried into her granny’s neck letting the hot tears sink into the soft folded skin.
Annie steadied herself and looked June in the eyes. “So what now? How much longer do we have?” she asked. Growing up in her generation, she learned to attempt calmness in times of crisis. She clenched and unclenched her fists, resisting the urge to scream at her gran to do something. Anything.
“Well, ball’s in your court kid.” June looked away from Annie, embarrassed by what came next. “I want to be projected Annie. I need you to sign the paper work.”
“What? No,” Annie said. “Projection? Expiry? That’s only for people who... who...” who are already dying. “I don’t want Nate to have to do that, not to you. Please, let’s just see how long you’re healthy first.”
“I’m already not healthy. I’ll be in a lot more pain soon and frankly, I want to die with some dignity left. I want to die as myself.” She let go of Annie’s hand. “You know pain does funny things to people. I want you to remember me as I am.” June turned to the desk beside her and pulled some papers out of a drawer. “I would sign these myself, but you know the law still considers that suicide. I need your help.” It was June’s turn to hold tears in her eyes. She had been trying so hard to keep everything inside for her granddaughter, but the fear of what was coming for her was winning out.
“No,” Annie said sharply, taking June by surprise. She stood up, twisting away from June’s reach. “I can’t do that. I won’t let you throw your life away. Nate is a doctor; he might know what do to.” Annie turned in circles, grabbing her purse, her jacket. She couldn’t stand still. “I’ll come back soon. I’ll have answers. We can save you.” Annie kissed her granny’s tear-stained cheek. Ignoring the moisture, she left the apartment.
*
For the next week Nate covered for Annie as she used sick days to search for any ounce of information that might help June. He came home from work and would find her crumpled on the couch. Atherosclerosis hardened the arteries. It usually led to worse things or progressed until the body couldn’t function. June was diagnosed late; her time frame only contained months.
“You have to stop looking at that stuff,” Nate said one night. “Try to think about something else.” He knew the advice was unwanted, but he couldn’t stand watching her rot away on the couch. He took the computer gently from her lap. Annie didn’t seem to notice. He opened a new tab in the web browser and looked up how many resources the average septuagenarian used.
“Look at this Annie,” he said turning the screen. She tried to only move her eyes and huffed when she had to turn her whole head.
“What is it?” She was too exhausted to read more painful information on the glaring screen.
“Statistics. How much it’s costing to keep June alive.” Nate thought that if he couldn’t fix June’s illness, but he might be able to help Annie come to terms with things.
“Nate, this isn’t a logic problem. Trust me, I know she should be dead.” With great effort Annie sat up on the couch. “I know it’s hard for you to deal with, but this is an emotional problem. I can’t wash this away just because some numbers say I should.” She hunched over, rubbing her face in her hands.
When Nate had proposed, Annie ran straight to June’s. They started planning the wedding that night while Nate made them dinner. Every week Annie came back from June’s with a new wedding idea. They planned until it became a monstrosity. Over one hundred and fifty guests, the biggest town hall room in three micro-city blocks, but it made them happy. So Nate let it go on. “I can’t shake the thought that she won’t even stay for the wedding. She’s the only person I have to walk me down the aisle...now she’d rather just die,” Annie said cruelly.
“You don’t mean that,” he said stiffly. “Please just go to bed, come to work tomorrow, and seriously you have to talk to June. I can only take her calls for you for so long.”
“I know,” Annie sighed. “I’ll try to call her tomorrow, maybe the next day... definitely by the end of the week.” She smiled weakly.
Once Annie was in the bedroom Nate looked at the computer in his lap. It listed the same facts about the food shortages and over population that he had heard since high school. In another window there was link after link of the same ad: Expiry information! Expiry is here for us. Expiry is the solution. Expiry, It’s the humane thing to do.
*
The patients in the waiting room shifting the blinds kept Annie distracted. Sunlight flooded the pale green room, and was then cut off as the elderly bickered loudly. She wondered how many patients had asked their loved ones to let them die. She noted an old woman whose daughter was wiping drool from her mouth. Senile, Annie thought, probably for the best. On the other side of the room was an old man dressed in a linen suit. He was reading a book with a fedora style hat perched on his crossed knee. He looked to be in perfect health. On the other hand his daughter had a splotchy red face and swollen eyes. Annie looked down at her list of names.
“Could Mr. Walters come up for a second please?” She bit her tongue. Why? Mr. Walters stood and squeezed his daughter’s hand before approaching the counter.
“I’m Mr. Walters.”
“I’m sorry.” Annie struggled in a low voice, “There’s nothing written under the ‘reason’ section of your form.” She put the clipboard on the counter and showed him the blank box.
Mr. Walters looked taken a back. “I thought that was optional.”
“Oh, it is. I’m sorry. We just, uh...” her thoughts fought to catch up with her intentions. “We hoped people would fill it out to help with, um, research purposes?”
Annie felt his green irises pierce her; her red cheeks gave her away. “Is this a medical or personal question?”
“I’m sorry, never mind. I’m just trying to understand, but of course, you don’t have to say.” Annie’s face grew redder.
He chuckled. “You and my daughter should have just asked me together, would save me some time.”
“I’m sorry, really-” She shook her head.
“It’s fine. You can write that I am going to meet my wife.” Annie raised her head. Mr. Walters continued, “She died six years ago of lung cancer. I decided to wait until my daughter didn’t need me anymore. Now I can finally go see my Jeanine.”
Annie consciously relaxed her brow, hiding her surprise. “Thank you for- you didn’t have to but thank you.” Mr. Walters nodded and walked back to his daughter. Annie called him into the back room half an hour later. As he passed her down the hall, he tilted his hat. Her throat tightened.
That night Annie sat in bed, next to a heavily breathing Nate. Moonlight siphoned into the small bedroom through the slotted blinds. Mr. Walters swam through her mind. She thought about how Gran had stuck with her through her parents’ death, her schooling, and Nate. Annie looked down at her ring. It sparkled, even in the dark.
She can’t leave just before the good stuff. Annie wanted to retain this single ounce of normalcy in a world where signing her grandmother’s termination contract was an act of love. Annie had grown to accept Expiry was necessary. She wouldn’t want to live longer than her usefulness. But Gran is useful.
*
Nate woke to an empty house. There was a note on her pillow prompting him to cover for Annie. He went in to work, telling everyone that she was under the weather again. Annie had never been one to act erratically, which was part of why he loved her. Around ten he stepped out of the office in between patients and tried for the fifth time to call her. It went straight to voicemail.
The woman standing in for Annie was not timely, and clients were often behind on their paper work when Nate was ready for them. The day also brought one of those rare and terrible occasions when he had to project a child.
“Katie, the doctor will see you know.” Nate heard the replacement say. Annie wouldn’t have said it that way. She never called patients by their first names, even if it was a child. Katie’s charts said she had a brain tumor that couldn’t be removed. Nate welcomed her and her parents into the back office. They had been sitting, holding one another for a long time before Nate could attend to them. She was only ten, so Nate knew the procedure wouldn’t take long.
“What do you want your last words to be?” Nate asked Katie.
She looked at her mother, pulling a small key chain from her pocket. It was a triangle with a circle and line in it. “All was well,” the girl said. Her mother’s smile quivered. Nate had heard these last words before. It was usual for people to quote their favorite stories.
He came home from work and sat in his car for a minute, urging his legs to move. When he finally opened the front door Annie stood at the table muttering.
“What have you been up to?” Nate asked without judgment.
Annie jumped, blocking the table from view. “Go shower. Put on something nice. It’s a surprise,” she spoke in short bursts.
“Okay, can I get a kiss, or hello, or something first?” He was not in the mood to be dragged around town trying to save June. He knew her chances, and agreed that Expiry was for the best. Not that he had told Annie this.
“Oh, sorry.” She kissed his cheek. “Now go shower and change. This is time sensitive.”
Nate knew where they were going as soon as he got in the car. Annie drove to June’s at a frantic pace. He placed his hand on her knee every time she began to veer between cars or double the speed limit.
“Can’t help anything if we die,” he said loudly and she slowed down.
Nate and Annie walked up to the apartment door. She knocked until it hurt. June opened up, looking surprised since they never knocked.
“Okay,” Annie said resolutely.
June stood still for a second and then threw herself into her granddaughter’s arms. Nate had never seen her move with such force and purpose. “Oh thank you my love, thank you,” she said.
Annie pulled back a little, “I have one condition though. You have to come to my wedding first.”
June pursed her lips. “Annie bell, don’t try to pull that. You know I can’t wait.”
“I know.”
In the back seat of Annie’s car lay a marriage license and a white dress. They drove to the Block Center talking about all the things they had been planning for the wedding.
“There was going to be a live band, no one ever has live bands anymore,” June said.
“That’s because no one can be a musician for a living anymore,” Nate joked.
They got out and Nate saw that his parents were waiting just inside the Block Center. “Annie called us,” his mom, Shannon, explained. “She didn’t think we would want to miss out.”
Annie got changed in the bathroom. Shannon fussed over her last minute dress while June did her hair. “It’s better than the pictures,” Annie said.
“And to think, we were going to pay someone to do all this.” June barked a laugh that made Shannon laugh too.
There was no aisle to walk down. There were no flowers to hold. The judge stood before Nate and Annie and June and asked, “Who gives this woman?”
“I do,” June said in a strong voice. She hugged Annie tightly and whispered in her ear, “Thank you for doing this.”
“Thank you for everything,” Annie whispered back. They let go. Nate took Annie’s hands in his. They spoke unplanned vows, stumbling to find the right words on short notice. Nate’s spiraled into vows to June.
“I vow to always protect her, from heat and hunger and people. I vow to love her like you would want me to, or really expect me to. I vow to do my best for you.”
*
There was no honeymoon. The next few days they got June’s affairs in order and signed paper work. On June’s last day, Annie sat in the sun filled Expiry waiting room staring at the girl behind her desk. Her arms and legs crossed tightly, her elbow digging into her right knee, as she pinched her bottom lip. Nate wouldn’t be performing the procedure. He had taken a personal day to be waiting beside them. June wore her Sunday best sitting resolutely. Annie barely held it together.
“June Wilson, the doctor will see you now,” the receptionist called.
Annie, Nate and June all rose and followed the doctor to the back room. He was a good friend of theirs, but today he stood taller than usual, spoke in a soft, soothing tone and made eye contact to the point of discomfort. Everything the Expiry training had taught him to do when working with a patient.
Inside the back room was a long, plush chair, with a small, yellow love seat to the right of it. A stool sat on the left. Granny lay back in the big chair. Annie sat on the edge of the love seat, clinging to her hand.
“Now there will be a little pain, but it fades quickly.” The doctor said mostly to Annie. Then he gave his full attention to June, “What would you like your last words to be?” Nate winced. He had said the same sentence in this room more times than he cared to count.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Granny said. The doctor smiled as he dimmed the lights. He took a rod from the side of the chair and flipped a switch. A steady blue beam protruded from the end of it, buzzing with electricity. He leaned June’s chair back until she faced the slanted ceiling.
The doctor reached his hand under the chair and it rose until June’s body was eye level with the people around her. Annie’s arm rose with the chair. Then the rod was inserted through a hole in the headrest and into the back of June’s head. She let out a gasp and squeezed Annie’s hand for a moment. Then the projection started.
The light from the rod danced through June’s mind and streamed out of her eyes, onto the ceiling. The first solid image was of Annie and Nate standing side by side at the Block Center saying their vows. Then it jumped through different visits with Annie. Seeing Annie off to college, graduate high school, Annie moving in with her at the age of ten. Her son’s funeral, Annie’s birth, her son’s wedding.
Tears tore down Annie’s cheeks. She had almost forgotten how her parents looked. For a moment she didn’t think about what was happening to June. She watched her grandmother’s life in reverse. It flashed in figments and highlights, everything that had led June to this moment. The world before the shortages, a huge Thanksgiving feast spread across a table. June’s first day of school, her first words, her first steps. Then a doctor’s office was projected and a flash of white light. Then blackness. June’s hand went limp.
The chair was lowered and the doctor tuned to his chart, giving Annie and Nate a moment of privacy.
“See you later Gran,” Annie whispered, pushing her face into her deceased grandmother’s arm. Nate gently pulled her away and she slumped into his chest. Once Annie had pulled herself together, they were ushered down the second hall for billing. She was absent, analyzing all the memories June had slipped out for her to see. Sacrifice one, many survive.
*
“Mrs. Stellerin, the doctor will see you now,” Annie said to the waiting room. A woman with her husband and daughter walked into the back room. Nate was waiting there, steeling himself to recite the same script and watch the same tears, all in the name of SOMS. Annie understood it finally. There weren’t enough resources for everyone. Even with the laws and Expiry, everything would be gone soon.
|
Case Study of a Teenage Predator
David Ford
1 - Denial
“I’m sorry kid, don’t kill me. I swear I’ll leave and never come back! Oh god, don’t kill me!” A male voice pleaded.
“You know I can’t letcha go,” came the reply. The words resonated through the walls of the dingy squat house, making even the cockroaches tremble with fear.
“You don’t have to do this you know. Please,” the victim said again. He fell to his knees and sobbed. It was two pm on a school day and a sixteen year old boy had come to kill him.
“Why don’ I have to?”
“What?”
“You said I don’ hafta do this. Gimme a reason and I might change my mind.”
“Erm... well...” Darius was sick of this routine. Pathetic men begging to be the one exception to the rules they swore to abide by, but there was something about this one that sent him over the edge. Maybe it was the infected needle marks in his arms or perhaps the stupid tough guy tribal tattoo across his bare chest, but Darius knew this guy had to die, right now.
“See. Everyone says I don’t hafta but when I asks why, they don’ have no answer. I just don’ get it. Why don’t you know what you asking for?” As he said this, the boy raised his pistol up to the man’s head and the man began to cry hysterically. “Aww hell n’aw. Don’ you be doing that to me,”
“Please! I’ll give you money!”
The boy looked around. “Do you think I’m dumb or summit? Have you seen this crap shack? What in God’s name makes you think I believe you got any money? And anyway, you think I care ‘bout your money? N’aw I don’. I think that’s insultin’.”
“But I...” The man didn’t get to finish that sentence. The boy squeezed the trigger into the man’s skull. He looked at the brain matter on the floor and let out the huge breath he’d been saving since he walked in through the door. Then he pulled out his phone, forced a smile and took a selfie with a dead man. He then turned and left without even checking for valuables. He took lives for the thrill that flowed through his body every time he pulled a trigger. For the rush he felt having the power over life and death.
2 - Anger
2:20 pm, he should have been in chemistry. That’s not his bag, wasted far too much time he’ll never get back. What the hell would he need to learn about Nobel Gasses for anyway? He dropped out of school a few months back. He’s got this life now.
When he got back to the safe house, his smile gave away his success. His gang mates let out a cheer and and charged at him with a flurry of high fives, fist bumps and back pats. One of them even lifted him up over their shoulder and bounced around while cheering. He couldn’t have been happier.
“Let’s see that dead SOB, Darius,” said a muscular man in the crowd. Darius took out his phone and waved the selfie.
“Aww, he’s not gon’ bother us anymore!” piped up a tattoo-laden guy in a gleaming white vest, malice heavy in his voice.
“N’aw he ain’t!” replied Darius, a remark which was met with another equally animated celebration from the pack of hyenas around him. The voices echoed around the empty house, shaking the vermin ridden building’s foundations as if it were shivering from the cold.
“Aww heck. Darius my brotha! How ‘bout we getcha fixed up with our ink? Then nobody gonna mess with you in them streets,” one voice said.
“Yeah, our guy’s gon’ love you, Darius. You’re a blank canvas to him,” came another.
“Fresh ink virgin!”
“What? Y’all really mean it?” Darius asked.
“Of course bro. You’re one of us now.”
He felt the warm glow of happiness. With the respect he gained from that kill, he was officially in. A member of the crew. Darius kills to belong.
3 - Bargaining
2:30 pm and there was a stir in the womb of the house. The door at the top of the stairs opened and a presence emerged from the darkness of the portal. The celebrations muted and the toy soldiers stood to attention.
“Darius! I thought that racket was about you. Well done, boy. Come to my office.” The voice of the Big Boss boomed like the roar of a lion. It commanded attention, respect and compliance.
Darius followed him to a room unlike any other in the house. In fact, you’d think the door was an entrance to another building entirely. It was warm and brightly decorated instead of a dilapidated wreck like every other room. Big Boss sat his large frame down in the worn out chair behind the desk, his dark skin sagged at the cheeks over the corners of the grin he was giving Darius. He scratched at the fold his neck was buried beneath and pulled a pair of glasses from the breast pocket of the tent sized cream blazer he wore.
“Darius my boy, you have proved yourself to be very useful indeed. I’d like to offer you a more appropriate reward.” Darius’ heart began to race with anticipation. Maybe Big Boss was going to give him twice the money they agreed. He prayed. “How’s about instead of the cash I promised, I give you your first week’s wages from the job I’m offering?” His heart calmed, gutted.
“I’m flattered, Sir, obviously, but I need that cash, Sir. I really need it.”
“I’ll give you some cash, son, but the job, well the job will be long term.”
“I know but you don’ understand. I need the money we agreed on. I already took a hit in accepting double or nothin’ for this afternoon after not bein’ paid last time and I really can’t wait no longer,” Big Boss was taken aback by this rejection, not used to being told no.
“Darius, think about this for a second. Riding with us permanently offers benefits that money can’t buy. Security, constant work, a weekly pay cheque. Think about it, boy.”
“I’d love to continue working for you, Sir, I’m more than happy, in fact delighted to do the dirty jobs for you and your boys. But I need to do them for one off cash payments, Sir. And right now, I really need to be paid,” Darius said clenching his hands together in an almost begging position. Big Boss looked disappointed but empathetic. Darius knew he had been an enforcer for the mob once too so maybe he understood what it was all about. That he kills for the money.
4 - Depression
3:00 pm. Back on the street making his way home, Darius contemplated the job offer. It’s not that he wasn’t grateful for it, it’s just he really needed the money Big Boss promised him, which was now in his backpack.
He reached his neighbourhood and walked past his old school, kids just beginning to stream out for home. Darius put his head down and blended into the crowd of ants, hundreds of them, all looking just like him. Impoverished, broke, hopeless. The only difference was they went to school in the hopes of better things to come, whereas Darius couldn’t wait that long. He couldn’t wait till he was eighteen only to find out earning a proper living meant at least another five years of squalor because he wasn’t born with a certain surname or in a certain area. He needed to go out and grab it now.
A scrap broke out between a few boys. There might have been a knife, it may have been over drugs, it could have started because one boy stood on another’s foot by accident. Nobody cared though, it was as normal to see violence here on the streets as it was to see it on television. This was a war zone of its own right, a human Serengeti where the herds were only safe if their numbers were greater than those of their attackers. Full on gang warfare. Nobody was immune. He carried on until a couple of on the beat cops sprinted past him into the crowd like some sort of Netflix cop show, grabbing the fighting boys, forced them into an arm lock and smashed them against the nearest wall. Nobody questioned the sheer brutality, the police gang was top of this food chain. Darius noticed as the taller of the two cops frisked a blade from the smaller boy and held it up to the light of the sun.
“Well, what were we going to use this for, boy?” He said, tightening his lock.
“I ain’t gon’ say nuttin’ to you,” the boy replied through gritted teeth.
“What about you then, you like talking or what?” The shorter, more muscular police man said to his captive.
“He said he’d stab me if I didn’t pay him no protection money, officer,” he winced back.
“Gee, Greg. Looks like we’re gonna have to take these boys in for questioning. Looks like we got ourselves some illegal racketeering going on in our neighbourhood,” the second officer said.
“All racketeering is illegal, dumb-ass,” the boy with the knife rebuked. Greg kneed him in the back and took out his truncheon, placing it on his throat and choking him.
“What did you say, boy?” He hit him in the shoulder and he fell to his knees, “You know, power hungry thugs never win! Now get up, we’re taking you boys in,”
The truth - power hungry thugs get a badge and a gun. That way it’s legal. Darius watched as the two boys were escorted out of the crowd and into a cop car over the road. Everybody then turned back to their business as if nothing had happened. Darius shook his head and watched the car drive away, just thankful it wasn’t him in the backseat.
Once the ants reached the ghetto, the crowd fanned out as they went to their own homes. They spread themselves around the burned out cars, the boarded up houses, avoiding the drug addicts and the beggars who used the end of every school day to seek a cash hit out of the pockets of vulnerable kids.
Darius clasped the straps of his schoolbag as tightly around his built shoulders as he approached a shifty looking homeless guy asking everyone for money. He could smell him before he saw him, not surprising since his hair had more grease on it than a mechanic’s overalls. The clothes he wore were a canvas containing the great artwork known as the Stains of the Streets. Darius looked him up and down before they made eye contact. He saw himself in the mans rags, or at least a version of himself. He crept his hand to the back of his jeans and felt the gun resting in his belt. That’s better, he thought, I’m so much better than this loser.
“Hey there son, you got any bills for me? I’ve not eaten in three days.”
“How’s about I give you this sandwich instead?” Darius suggested.
“No thanks man, I’d rather buy it myself. You know for my self-esteem and all that. Five bucks is all I need!”
“Wow, is that all crack costs nowadays? You make me sick, brotha.”
“Just gimme some dough man! I need it!” The homeless man lurched forward toward Darius. Darius quickly jumped back and brandished the gun at him. Nobody batted an eyelid at their exchange.
“How’s about you crawl back into that gutter you came from. I ain’t got no cash for you and your drugs. Got it?” The man backed down. Darius put the gun away and turned back into the urban savannah he roamed.
He actually had three grand inside his backpack instead of the common school books and calculators, but he needed every penny. Maybe to get away from the dangerous corners, the shady characters, the constant smell of burning car parts or the everyday fear that today could be his last. One day. That’s why he couldn’t accept the job. He’d be stuck here forever. Darius killed to escape.
5 - Acceptance
3:20 pm. Darius walked through his front door. Before he had the chance to take his jacket off, he was mobbed again by an even more passionate force than the hyenas at the safe house. His little sister Kelly, barely past his waist in height, still at the age where the cornrows on her head were as adorable as the Disney t shirt she wore or the half grown front tooth in her mouth.
“Darius is home! Darius is home!” chanted the seven year old. He lifted her above his head and then hugged her as tightly as he could. She adored him.
“Wow, you’re getting big,” he said to her.
“I need to get big so daddy can see me, remember?” she answered. Darius gave a fake smile.
“Of course sweetie, but nobody knows where daddy is,”
“That’s why I need to get big, so I can be safe when I go and find him,” the naivety broke Darius’s heart. He remembered when their dad left. He was nine and his mother was pregnant with the girl in his arms. There was a lot of screaming and crying and then he just went away. The last time Darius saw him, he was coming out of a store a few years ago. Darius shouted over and his father ignored him. He ran over and his father ran away, again. If only he’d had his gun then. Then Kelly wouldn’t have the false hope that one day she could be a daddies girl.
“Where’ve you been big bro?”
“Just out,” he said back.
“You shouldn’t leave us for so long, I was worried. You can’t be hurt too, that would be the worst thing ever, Darius!” She said through her cute half smile. “I love you too much big bro,”
“Not as much as I love my little girl,” Darius replied. He loved making a fuss of her.
“Yay!” She squealed.
“So, Kelly, is Mom ok?” His sister nodded as he put her down. Darius stalked over to a room at the back of the house. The buzzing noise always upset him. He took a deep breath as he pushed open the door to a room full of machines and pipes and wires, a writhing pit of snakes whose constriction and venom was all that stood between his mother and her death. She looked frail. He doubted whether she had the strength to open her eyelids. She had leukaemia and could no longer get out of bed, it hurt too much to move. She needed more treatment than they could afford. She stirred however when she heard her son.
“Darius! Oh, Darius, how was school, my son?” she forced out the words.
“It was great. Oh, and I went to the bank,” he lied, sniffing back the tears. “We have enough for more medicine.”
“Oh that’s wonderful. You’re such a good son to me...” She drifted back to sleep.
Darius sighed. His chest felt heavy and wet as the tears pooled at the base of his throat. He’d never cry in front of his mother. She had a fifty-fifty chance of making it through the cancer but medication was expensive. They could never afford it. At home he felt powerless. Out there he could be somebody. He knew he was the only one who could support his mom, and giving up the last years of his childhood was a small price to pay. He stood up and inspected the serpents wrapped around his mother, and then kissed her head and walked out the room.
He heard laughter. Kelly was playing in the other room.
“Darius? Will you come play with me?”
“I’ll be in soon sweetie pie,” he called back. He entered his bedroom and opened his bedside drawers. He picked out his favourite Spiderman action figure and twisted it in his fingers then lay it on the bed to pick out the box Spidey was guarding. An ammo box. It jangled with the bullets inside the iron case. He placed his gun carefully inside and popped it back down, laying his toy back atop it.
“Keep that safe, Spiderman, you’ve always protected me.”
He then stood and walked out to play with Kelly.
Darius kills to survive.
|
Chain Link
Valorie Kristen Ruiz
Friendships formed with hopes of prescription drugs. It’s easy to be around the sick
when a consolidation prize is getting high. Too attached to say no.
Relationships ripped apart by lies of “It was always you.” While lips taste of another’s breath.
Some could be saints until presented with shinier objects.
Dynamic duo split unevenly where one always ends the day in stronger pain. In hindsight,
we knew all along. The signs are always there.
Weeks waste away in ache swearing all’s okay. A single text of “I miss you” boils the molten
core of the volcano, erupting showers of tears and profanity.
Cycle sets up instantaneously, and one choice could break it. Sarcastic speech feeds
pride, but the best revenge comes from living a life free of lies.
|
Demographics
Valorie Kristen Ruiz
PLEASE SELECT THE RACE
YOU MOST IDENTIFY WITH:
1. White
My Mother’s skin color holds more bull fighting Spaniard
than Irish, but is speckled with honey glazed freckles.
Ask her to speak Spanish and you’ll be submerged
into a river of Mexican proverbs and secret tamale ingredients.
“Mas vale malo por conocido que bueno por conocer.”
How eloquently the language of this culture slips from the
lightest of our family, first U.S. born. I’m far from ivory
white, once spent time avoiding the sun in hopes of letting
my color fade. Instead of Victorian royalty I was remarked
as sickly and handed vitamin D. A scrunched up doctor’s face
reprimanded me, “Go outside more!”
2. American Indian or Alaska Native
My grandmother’s mother was raised in a tribe. History
of apothecary through each generation, medicinal agriculture.
It’s hard to recall a time without an arnica rub for inflamed
muscles. A time without tea for anxiety called: Diente de Leon
or “Tooth of the Lion”. Still I resist the idea of compressed
chemical symptom soothers. Instead, I replace pharmacology with
songs of chrysanthemums and Mary Jane because both teach me
to heal alone.
3. Black or African American
Harlem Renaissance! Rag time blues! Tell me my blood holds
counts from Jazz legends. Had I been born during a time when
people were called upon to be humane, I like to believe I’d have
opted for Civil Rights support over playing ignorant bystander.
I once paid a visit to my step-father’s father in Mexico City. Pop culture
magazines created a weary eyed grandfather who questioned how
much time must have passed for literature to feature Black men
on covers. Glossy magazines converted my grandfather to a pacifist.
4. Asian
Easter healers pricked my skin with painless needles and told
me to speak to the flowers for healing. “Drink the water they bless into tea.”
Oriental influences are subconscious in my family. Western doctors
diagnosed me incurable. Force benzos and pain pills while lacking eye
contact. Lifelong crushed opiates are not my desired
prognosis. The term “Holistic Doctor” can bring a slew of opinions
but it comes as a shock when seizures subside and joint degeneration
ceases to persist. Our family reveres Asian history but our veins don’t
hold much in terms of DNA.
5. Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
Mi familia, Ohana. Is more than a blood relation. I find
the dedication to family admirable, though occasionally
debilitating. Women in my traditions have cared for the
family always before their own needs. Never resting. Caring
for others first, but never having someone care for them. Clashing
with their values, my soul hungers for experience. Longs to see
the Sphinx; the sunset of Turkey from a hot air balloon. Is it
selfish to want to live a life my own, deviating from our
900 square foot home?
Hispanic is not a race but a collage of cultures. My mother doesn’t have the answers
When I ask, “Who am I?” or “Where do we come from?” Instead her simple,
“You are what this generation is meant to be.” befuddles me.
The questionnaire holds my gaze, I select “White” because it spells blank
slate, the only choice I feel qualified for.
|
I’m Sick of it All
Ruth Z. Deming
Finding the plumpest cherries
at the grocery store, the firmest
peaches, the freshest baby
spinach, then being asked if I
have my bonus card, and
carrying my canvas bag to
the car, windows wide open
to catch the summer breeze.
How I long to escape!
They’d miss me, certainly,
for a few months, and then
I’d be as forgotten as the
red and gold maple leaf
in its early descent.
From the ATM, I’d take a
bundle of twenties, and
ride the train all the way
to Cleveland, my old home
town. Aunt Selma’s house is
empty, since she moved in
with her daughter.
I’d break through the back door
in the middle of the night, holding
my purple flashlight, and find my
way to the living room. There I’d
spend the night on the fuzzy
gray davenport.
Do you need help? I’d ask at
one of the Jewish bakeries
that are still left. I’d move
around, my apron caked with
flour, in an aroma of
coconut cakes, pecan tarts,
and fresh-baked challah. My
hair would again be black
and they would call me
“Rifka” my Hebrew name.
I’d be young again
free
unencumbered
and spend my nights on
the screened-in back porch with
the rickety steps
staring up at the stars.
And wondering.
Anyone up there?
|
Ruth Z. Deming bio
Ruth Z. Deming, winner of a Leeway Grant for Creative Nonfiction, has had her work published in lit mags including The Writing Disorder, Literary Yard, and Hektoen International. A psychotherapist and mental health advocate, she runs New Directions Support Group – www.newdirectionssupport.org - for people and loved ones affected by depression and bipolar disorder. She lives in Willow Grove, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia.
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Lawn Party
Ruth Z. Deming
The Queen of England
dressed in yellow, is
hosting a lawn party
and so shall I.
Please be my guest.
Out come the picnic tables
spread with tiny cucumber
sandwiches, on whole wheat
bread. The lone maple tree
nods in approval.
What’s a spring party
without lemonade? I’ll
serve it in my pink pitcher
Mom gave me, though at
ninety-two she would
no longer remember.
You’ll meet my mom
along with a dozen guests.
Beethoven will be there
with his wild eyes and
white poodle hair. A silver
ear trumpet will rest on
his table. I do hope he likes coffee,
the Vanilla-Hazelnut
I drank earlier today.
I’ve always admired the
poet Rilke. He’ll sit over
by the forsythia bush,
spiking toward the sky.
I’ll only invite one dead
boyfriend. Not Simon
The Hoarder, but
Christopher. He’ll drive up
in his Mazda truck, brimming
with laughter in his plaid shirt
and faded blue jeans.
You thought I’d forgotten you,
I’ll say, though you left me for
another.
I’ll stand atop a table and
recite through a megaphone:
We’re having a party of the world.
And the bluejays and cardinals, the
tiny little sparrows, will twitter
in approval as they
soar across the yard,
pooping as they go.
|
Ruth Z. Deming bio
Ruth Z. Deming, winner of a Leeway Grant for Creative Nonfiction, has had her work published in lit mags including The Writing Disorder, Literary Yard, and Hektoen International. A psychotherapist and mental health advocate, she runs New Directions Support Group – www.newdirectionssupport.org - for people and loved ones affected by depression and bipolar disorder. She lives in Willow Grove, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia.
|
Ghosts
Julie Ramon
The smell of smoke in hair
reminds us how certain things
can linger after they’re gone.
It will return again after he splits wood.
Each slither he’ll remember later when
he tucks them into the fire. We leave
behind ash and wood of what used
to be. Even the planks in the floor
will speak our names after we’ve past-
our voices like ghosts, and our shadows
like fallen dust from light fixtures.
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Once in the park
Julie Ramon
we were alone under the overpass
tracing graffiti with our fingers. This
was in fall, in the evening, on a day
the moon never left. With tilted feet,
we walked up cement, and you in front,
reached for my hands. At the top, we
crouched down and sat on each other;
there was no choice. Looking down
we said we’d come back here one day,
and remember this moment, the height,
our bodies together, the sound of a train
coming. You placed your warm hands
over my ears There was always a choice,
but we still prefer each other’s heat.
|
Our World
Maria-Jose Villamar
Peter and I planned our great scape. As we arrived to school, the patrols had to go to the other side to enter the building. Our best friends already knew what we were up to so they agreed to help us.
They took our backpacks and put them in our seats. By the time class was starting, we were sitting in our Falcon ready to fly away.
Peter and I headed to Niktapo.
We were two hours away from our destination when the Falcon’s alarm was activated. The patrols had installed a tracking device without us knowing it.
Peter and I took our seats and started driving the plane as fast as possible to escape. He was in charge of the speed and I was in charge of the shooting. We did well until we finally got to Niktapo.
By the time we arrived, our father had contacted the president.
“They can’t be accepted into Niktapo or we will attack your country.” My father told him.
“If you want me to reject them, you must do something. I don’t want to treat them if they were our enemies” said the President.
“Ok, then I’m sending my soldiers to stop them.”
As soon as they arrived, the soldiers confront them.
“Now what?” I asked Peter.
He was walking in circles. I could see his despair. He stopped, looked at me and said,
“The Earth, that’s it”.
We hopped on our plane, the Falcon.
Our last hope was Earth, so we couldn’t let this opportunity vanish.
We were flying down, when suddenly things started to change. Things we had never seen before came across our road. Earth was totally different of what we had known in our planet. We saw deaths, despair. Fear and other horrible feelings were reflected in our eyes.
The people that used to live in Earth destroyed this place. Our planet was living in the future. But Earth was living in the past. So our vehicle started to fail. In less than two minutes, we were falling and there was nothing we could do.
Five minutes later we were under the water trying to escape. We were scared, as we didn’t know the place. Also, we couldn’t be discovered because we were very different than the people living here. Our skin, clothes and way of speaking were rare.
We got out our Falcon as fast as possible with our emergency space suits. We swam under very cold water until we saw an empty harbor
Today it has been 100 years since we landed in this place. We have been learning through all this time how to be more like “them”. The wish of going back to the future, to our home, is greater every day.
By this time, my father’s time in the government must have finished. Also we should be starting University. As we are forever young, I just hope someday, pretty soon we could get back to our world and be happy.
|
Burning What’s Left Of The Castle
Joseph Randazzo
“Tom Brady’s a cheat and still a hero. You believe that about this country,” the fry cook Juglio said to the left of Antoinette speaking over her. “You know what’s crazier Juglio? If Brady didn’t get off, they were only gonna give him 4 games. 4 games? You believe that? Kick him out. Take the food out his pretty mouth,” Marco said to the right of Antoinette, also speaking over her.
Each guy started throwing their hands in the air wasting more time, which, in-turn, ensured Antoinette was going to get yelled at by some bourgeois woman, her emasculated husband and sociopath child that thinks it’s okay to throw boards of wood at the geese. It was another miserable day at the lavish Vanderlay restaurant on the tip of Long Island in Montauk, New York.
Back in her small town of Wasquehal, France Antoinette was a hopeful woman. She heard stories of American writers leaving home for France for a chance to hopefully feel literacy course through their veins. She thought she’d find similar success others did by doing their opposite. Antoinette was not offered the same kindness by America that her people gave to the Hemingways though. To the people she worked with, she had no dreams. She was nothing more than a piece of ass that talks funny and is only okay at setting tables. This broke Antoinette.
In France she always had a smile on her face. She was published weekly in her town’s little paper and the people at church said she was a better writer than Burroughs. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t world renowned or decorated with accolades. To them, Antoinette’s spirit to become an author and leave the farm life made her bigger than Hemingway, Burroughs, Bukowski or Jim Morrison - the rock star who may or may not have a few grandchildren walking around the village.
In America Antoinette was angry and hope died in the land of dreams. She worked 60 hours a week and was often too tired to write. She looked at these fry cooks arguing about sports in disgust. They had fire for this man they’d never meet - someone they’d probably worship if he walked through the doors of this restaurant - but when it came to their own lives they allowed themselves to be on a path that meant certain death in the hot kitchen of Vanderlay. She hated them and hoped they’d drown in their child support bills, or the ocean down the road. More than she hated them, she hated having these thoughts. They inspired her to feel this.
Today was intended to be a better day for Antoinette though. The head manager, a woman who ran the restaraunt for only three months and made four times the pay of most of the patrons filling their stretched out jaws with the overpriced food, was going to assess whether Antoinette was getting a promotion. This meant less hours but more pay. To Antoinette, this wasn’t the best-case scenario but it was an improvement. Now she could write more. Maybe if she is lucky she can buy a better-woven sundress for the summer, she thought.
Antoinette was finally able to deliver the food when the Brady talk died down and she was of course yelled at by the woman. “This Octopus is overcooked miss,” the woman said. “Miss, do you hear me. Excuse me miss.”
Antoinette only heard half her complaint. The rest of it was spent wondering whether a drop kick would send her flying off her seat. She wondered if the husband would think of Antoinette as a hero for this or was he too deep into his Institutionalized Syndrome to notice the good deed? Would he hang himself like Brooks when he realized she would no longer yell at him? Antoinette left when the woman said she’d eat the food anyway. It was a success in the sense that she wasn’t forced to go back and forth from the kitchen to the obnoxious beast.
Waiting by the kitchen window for Antoinette was the manager’s assistant. “Lois wants to know if you’re available.” Antoinette thought that was a silly being the manager should know at all times whether her underlings are able to answer her beckon call but she answered as if it wasn’t a dumb question. She caught herself being negative in her head and sighed again. The country was weighing down on her.
#
Antoinette waited in front of the manager’s desk while her boss, Lois, read a magazine about local Long Island restaurants. She had a shit-eating grin when she made her way to one page and finally put it down.
“What was eet you were looking at Mees Lois,” Antoinette asked politely.
“Look at this page right here,” Lois said. She showed Antoinette what she was looking at. “We are 48 on the list of 100 home caught seafood restaurants on Long Island.”
Lois pushed the magazine to the side, keeping it open in front of Antoinette, and then reached down into a drawer on her desk. She pulled out a folder. It had Antoinette’s name on it. She looked through it and didn’t speak for a bit.
You know I have had fun working here,” Antoinette said. “Theese place ees a blessing. They do not have places like thees where I am from. So luxurious.”
“So I’ve heard,” the manager said coldly as she looked through Antoinette’s file. Antoinette was surprised there was so much written about her. Other than the few moments where the manager yells, “Not to fuck up the night,” she didn’t get the impression the manager knew who she was. Then last week, when she said she is a candidate for a managerial position, an announcement Lois said with a surprisingly rare smile, she was even more surprised. Now there are no smiles - just cold answers and questions.
“Where are you from again,” the manager asked.
“Wasquehal, France,” Antoinette said brightly.
“Oh right,” Lois said. “Thought you were from Spain.”
Lois closed the folder up, stared Antoinette in the eye and clenched her hands together on it.
“This job here. This promotion. It’s similar to one I had as a girl. In three months they moved me from cashier to manager and I ran that place. You gonna run this place like that? Give me a break,” Lois asked.
“Oh yes, yes, yes of course,” Antoinette said. Lois replied with a “good.”
“You gonna make sure we run up this list from 48 to top 10,” Lois asked next.
“Oh yes, yes, yes of course. Thank you so much Mees Lois,” Antoinette said. There were tears in here eyes. Finally, she was going to be able to write more. She thought of all the free time. There were going to be days off. She was going to be able to sleep in a little more. She’d be able to spend some time at the beach.
“Hold on,” Lois said. “I didn’t say you had the job. I asked if you were ready. You say yes. I say no.”
Antoinette didn’t flinch. She sat in her seat quietly. Now her hands were clenched together politely in her palms. Across from her Lois started picking up the magazine. She opened it up and pointed to the number 48.
“It takes a certain type of woman to run a place like this. It’s the type of woman who values success over the menial pursuits of having a family. The type of woman who works an extra half hour so she can pay for an abortion, take a day off to tan, then get back into work and be up everybody’s ass.”
Antoinette still sat quietly. She wasn’t sure what to say to any of this.
“You wouldn’t do that. Some guy who just started making 100k a year is gonna knock you up and we’ll have to foot the benefits. Not happening. At least not now,” Lois said.
“Not now why? Why not now,” Antoinette said.
“I’m giving you a six month trial to smarten you up miss. No raise. No position just yet. Maybe in six months but not now,” Lois said.
She stopped talking and waited for a response. In Antoinette’s head she shifted the thought of the dropkick from Octopus Lady to her manager. She thought of all the short stories she planned on writing and there her dreams went. It was as if the Nazis mistook her aspirations for books.
Antoinette hated Lois but simply said, “Oh yeah, okay.”
The manager spoke once more before sending her out. “Please come back in six months Antoinette. Maybe by then this position will be more suited for you.”
Antoinette asked for an earlier break and her wish was granted. It was a Vanderlay mercy killing. She didn’t feel defeated as much as she felt broken. Hemingway had been in the war but the war didn’t allow him to rot under the scent of overcooked octopus.
It was a chilly night for May so Antoinette grabbed her coat and walked outside. She looked at the beach and walked toward it. She lived in Montauk but didn’t spend enough time on it.
#
The sunshine faded into the distance to make room for the moon. Antoinette sat on the beach without a towel and watched as phone call after phone call buzzed at an unnerving pace. Hell will fight hard for you to burn inside it without any gift or reward. She was afraid to answer for just this reason. What if one of those calls made sense and she gave it another six months?
Back at the restaurant groups of workers, fry cooks, chefs, maitre de’s, servers and the bakers, all came together to spit on Antoinette’s escape. All of them sat there tired, disheveled, underpaid and secretly wishing they could afford to do the same. For whatever reason each man and woman had their reason for staying whether it was because they needed the money or they were too weak to fight off the hells of screaming children throwing temper tantrums at their birthday cake.
On some level Antoinette knew what was going on at the restaurant so she decided against making her return there. Instead she packed a bag from her apartment and made her way to the Long Island Rail Road. The phone continued to buzz and she started laughing. Vanderlay weighed on her and she wondered why she didn’t do this sooner. Now the weight was gone.
The thought of drop kicks were also gone. She thought of Lois and saw this cartoonish sad woman who had one too many run-ins with wealthy businessmen throughout her life.
The train stopped at the Babylon line and she decided to go further. From there Antoinette took the train to New York City and hoped for the best.
|
The Taste of Water
Jeremiah Castelo
You are heartwarmth in winter
You are the wind that rustles
the orange and green ornaments,
delicately clinging
to wooden branches
You are a lonely thought
silently walking
through my labyrinth mind,
barefoot and curious
You are golden silence
at my breakfast table,
the perfect mid-day sweetcake,
and supper’s sparkling silverware
You are the cold swell
my sandy shoreline summons
and the breeze to whom
my beach is betrothed
You are the scent of sweet memory,
the perfume of passionate whisper,
and the aroma of aura’s arousal
You are the dream in between dreams,
the delicate moment before waking,
and the time forgotten before sleep fell
You are love at its most selfless;
A heart whose blood flows
infinite and outward,
A bind unbroken
since time’s conception,
A weave unweathered,
and unwaivering
You are the taste of water,
the sound of melody,
and the picture
of what beauty
dreams itself to be.
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Jeremiah Castelo bio
Jeremiah Castelo is an avid seeker of truth who isn’t afraid to admit he’s been tragically mislead, more than once. His offbeat list of life experiences isn’t one to be found on a resume designed to impress nor on a gravestone meant to commemorate, but is as structural to his writing as his skeleton is to his body. He now resides in the Washington DC area, pursuing missionary and non-profit work through poetic, photojournalistic, and musical means.
Website: www.psalmsandpsychoses.com
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Dig Deeply the Grave
Bill DeArmond
The tyrant raised his glass and addressed those gathered for this special occasion. “Let us recognize the birth of my first son,” he beamed. “He is a noble spirit born into this new haven of grand destiny. He will lead our family and this realm with great vision and humility.”
As the assemblage obligingly clinked their fine crystal in approbation, the boy in his hand-carved cradle stared at his father with strangely cold, steel eyes; the faintest beginning of a smirk hiding behind the infant’s lips.
*****
Not far away in distance but miles removed in opportunity, another boy, wrapped in diapers made from a worn curtain, shivered in the arms of his haggard mother, both too weak to stir from the cold, hard bed. Deserted and destitute, she had survived as best and as long as she could. Life under the tyrant was difficult for even an educated person, let alone this young, single mother. Her sustenance and health care stolen away had rendered her incapable of warding off starvation and disease.
*****
In the terrible silence of the night, ominous clouds veiled the glimmer of the moon, shrouding the land in a cloak of black. Death, descending toward earth through this abyss, thought, “What must be done is better done in this void.”
Death moved silently through the streets, eyes piercing the troubled slumber of those who awaited his eventual touch—their lives as fragile as the strands of a spider’s web.
Pausing at the despot’s house, Death was uniquely torn between duty and conviction, for Death possessed knowledge of a future far more terrible than man could imagine, let alone experience. If Death now took the tyrant instead, would that break the yoke of the man’s oppression of the people, those whose souls had so long been exploited for his gain? Or should he snatch the rich man’s son as an object lesson? Obviously, the offspring was destined to follow in his father’s example. It was the only mode of thought to which the child would ever be exposed, and he would be emboldened by his father’s accumulated power and corrupting wealth?
But Death was not privilege to the circumstances of this fateful decision; he was only a messenger of providence, claiming those souls whose journey was now complete. So, with as much regret as an eternal force could express, Death moved past the estate and onward to the place of poverty and misery.
*****
Death entered the most miserable and desolate bedroom of the most miserable and desolate dwelling in the most miserable and desolate part of the city. There, in repose on a ragged cot, lay a gaunt woman ravaged well beyond her twenty years. She embraced an infant so tightly as to return the unfortunate babe to her womb.
“It’s not fair,” whispered Death. “But then life, by its design, isn’t meant to be fair.”
Reluctantly, Death reached out with arms now glowing vibrantly warm and embraced the trembling woman and child, crossing them into His spiritual realm, rescuing them from the bitterness of this earthly life, while the tyrant and his son slept soundly, unaffected by the sadness surrounding them.
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Clockmaker (V4)
Michael Lee Johnson
Solo, I am clockmaker
born September 22nd,
a Virgo/Libra mix insane,
look at my moving parts, apart yet together,
holes in air, artistic perfection,
mechanical misfits everywhere,
life is a brass lever, a wordsmith, an artist at his craft.
Clockmaker, poet tease, and squeeze tweezers.
I am a life looking through microscope,
screenshots, snapshot tools,
mainsprings, swing pendulum, endless hours,
then again, ears open tick then tock.
Over humor and the last brass bend,
when I hear a hair move its breath,
I know I am the clock waiter,
the clockmaker listens-
a tick, then tock.
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The Monster
Lisa Gray
“Are ye no worried about the monster?”
There was a mischievous grin in Curly’s eye.
Nevertheless I rose to the bait.
“I can’t be worried about something I don’t believe in,” I replied, my city-self rearing an ugly, self-righteous neck.
“It’s no good luck to say that!” said Curly, his normally cheery fisherman’s face suddenly darkening.
“Oh, for goodness sake! Don’t tell me you believe in the Loch Ness Monster?” I said.
His face was sombre.
“I’m driving to Inverness to the cinema, monster or no monster,” I retorted.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” said Mrs. Mackenzie, entering the room.
I was ruder than I should have been to the lady who had offered me the best of Highland hospitality.
“Don’t tell me you believe in it?” I said, incredulously.
Mrs. MacKenzie had seemed so practical. So down-to earth.
“I have seen something,” she said in a soft Highland voice. “But that’s beside the point,” she hurried on as if unwilling to confirm her sighting even to herself. “Yer no from here. Ye don’t know the road. And that road can be treacherous at night with all the bends. And then there’s the mist.” She stopped. “It comes down.” She seemed to be searching for the right words. “Down. Like a grey curtain. To another world.” She stopped as if she’d already said too much. “You don’t know. You haven’t driven it at night.”
“A little mist doesn’t bother me,” I said.
“But at night?” Mrs. Mackenzie persisted.
I felt like saying I couldn’t spend another night cooped up at Mrs. Mackenzie’s Bed and Breakfast but I couldn’t hurt her feelings. After all I was the one who had chosen to stay there.
Drumnatochan. It was the name that had attracted me. I’d been driving down the western side of the loch on my way to Fort William on an impromptu holiday. I’d spent the previous week in a less than comfortable Bed and Breakfast in Inverness and knew the wisdom of searching for a place to stay the night early. I pulled off the road glad to rest from the innumerable bends that had pushed my concentration to its limits. That’s when I saw the sign. “Drumochil Cottage – Bed and Breakfast”. The cottage was set apart from the few others that seemed to make up the small village of Drumnatochan and differed from the others in that it faced directly over the Loch.
It couldn’t be worse than the Inverness Bed and Breakfast, I told myself.
And it wasn’t. Mrs. Mackenzie had welcomed me like long lost family and her son, Curly, a local fisherman, with his curly red hair, ruddy complexion and bantering tone had kept me entertained. I was the only guest. But there had been others. In the past.
“Do you get a lot of business?” I’d asked Curly one long, slowly darkening evening.
“Ay, there’s been a few,” he said. “They stay here hoping to see the monster. Then get annoyed when they don’t and move on.”
“You must have had quite a few through your hands.”
“Ay, ye could say that,” said Curly, laughing, “but you’re by far the prettiest!”
I side-stepped Curly’s compliment by matching his banter.
“That’s not saying much if all you’ve got to compare me to is the monster!”
I thought it was a fair match but Curly’s normally brightly lit face darkened.
“It disnae dae to insult the monster,” he said.
I ignored his respect for the mythical creature.
“Don’t tell me you’re superstitious!” I said incredulously.
“I believe in it,” he said. “I’ve seen it!”
I was about to ask for further details when his mother had entered the room and shot him a warning glance that precluded further discussion. The few local people I’d met had all been the same. They’d tell you they’d experienced something but refused to go further. Fear of ridicule, I suspected. I was sorry. At least their stories would have been entertainment. There was little other entertainment that Drumnatochan could provide. How Mrs Mackenzie and Curly could tolerate living in such an isolated spot indefinitely I couldn’t fathom. All I knew was that after a week in the Highland countryside, I was ready to re-introduce myself to the delights of the city.
I’d enjoyed the drive to Inverness and the film earlier. The sun had showered the loch with its setting sheen and the water seemed to respond in ripples of rapture that ranged the whole length of the loch. There had been only one boat on the loch, the remaining Nessie hunters having abandoned their search for the day. It had been at the far side of the loch and did not seem to be moving. For a split second, as I had taken my eyes off the road, the next bend not yet looming and the last one securely navigated, I wondered if it was a boat.
You’ll be telling yourself it’s the Monster next, I chided myself.
I could see how people thought they’d seen it. The ripples in the loch. The protuberance from the darkened water. It would be an easy mistake to make.
That’s no monster, I had laughed to myself. It’s not moving.
It seemed to be waiting. Waiting. For something.
A bite, I thought, thinking of the fishermen who waited there daily, no doubt glad that the Nessie hunters had left.
For a second I thought I saw a flash from the direction of the boat.
Probably the late afternoon sun striking some metal on the boat’s hull, I thought.
But the advancing bend and the outskirts of Inverness rapidly approaching had swept all thought of it and the idyllic setting of the loch from my mind.
Now it was dark and the drive back bore no resemblance to my former journey. The journey to Inverness had been pleasant and relatively short. Not so the drive back. Each bend, that threatened like some monster waiting to devour me, seemed to come too quickly for my liking. I had never been keen on driving in the dark, my night vision totally unimproved by the vast amount of carrots I had once consumed in my eagerness for a solution to the problem. Now I was cursing. Cursing at every black bend that knew I was a stranger to it, But a greater curse was about to befall me. For, as I circumnavigated a bend that was perilously close to the edge of the road, so much so that I could see the dark water below in the glint of my headlights, it was as if a grey curtain had descended on my vision and I thought of Mrs. McKenzie’s words.
“And there’s the mist.”
Mist was a misnomer. Mist I had experienced. This was a shutter. A shutter over my sight. The road, that had formerly been so visible in the car’s headlights, had vanished like some Kelpie, called home. I could not see the end of the car bonnet, far less the road, though my eyes never left where the latter had formerly been.
Keep focussing, I thought. It will clear at any moment. There was no way it will last all the way to Drumnatochan.
But the mist like some mulish mermaid clung to the bonnet of my car and refused to dislodge itself. I did not know when the next critical corner of the road would appear too late for me to negotiate it and the plunge into the dark, murky waters of the loch would be my fate. My eyes ached from staring into the grey void and, more than once, I felt them tire and lose their concentration so that I swerved skittishly which at least served to wake them up. I felt I had travelled miles but, in reality, I could not have covered more than a few, the speed I was travelling at. This only served to deepen my depression for I knew I had met my match in the mist and, unless the mist relented soon, I would be in real trouble.
For some reason I felt the road was climbing. I tried not to think about the drop. But suddenly the mist melted away mysteriously, and I could see the road ahead. Or a small portion of it. I was not foolish enough to think I had lost it altogether but, I surmised, I had left much of it, albeit temporarily, down there hanging over the loch. My eyes welcomed the intermission and my foot hit the accelerator in a frenzy of freedom. It was as I rounded the first bend that my eyes were dazzled by a car’s headlights travelling on the other side of the road towards me. It was the first car I had seen in a long time and I should have been grateful to know there was another foolish traveller out there like me. But all I could do was curse him out loud for he had blinded me to what now appeared on the road directly in front of me. A box. A large black box. And I was going to hit it. My foot hit the brake with a violent vehemence and I skidded to a stop inches from the contraption.
My heart racing, I leapt out of the car, cursing the careless lorry driver who must have dropped it inadvertently from the back of his truck, and could, so easily have caused my demise. I made up my mind to remove the obstacle from the road so, at least, I would have the comfort of knowing no harm would come to any other loch-side driver. I could not afford to waste any time for, at any minute, another tired traveller travelling behind me might round the bend and plough into the rear of my car. I hurried towards the box but, as I did so, it moved. It moved across the road at a startling pace and down into the shrubbery at the side of the loch. I froze. Had some creature been underneath it? Mrs. McKenzie’s tales of the something she had seen pervaded my mind. It was only my rational mind that told me no monster was the size of a box. Even a large one.
I ran to the bushes at the side of the road and looked down. The inky black water of the loch oiled the small pebble beach beneath. For some reason I pulled back. Then I heard the rustling. A creature was there. Some sort of creature.
It was then I heard the laughing. There was no creature. No monster. It was a practical joke. Some idiot had thought it funny to plant a black box in the middle of the road to stop an unwary traveller. Teenagers, most likely. I should have climbed back in the car and driven off but my teacher training triumphed. No taunting teenager was going to get the better of me! I slithered down the broken, bushy slope and my feet landed on the hard pebbled ground. I made my way along the small black beach, vaguely aware of an empty boat tethered in the bay. I’d find them if it was the last thing I did!
I found them all right. But it wasn’t teenagers. It was Curly. And his mother. And they were laughing.
“I don’t think it’s funny!” I said irately.
Curly’s eyes darkened suddenly.
“You thought our tales of the monster were funny!” he said.
Mrs. McKenzie nodded her head.
“That’s different!” I said.
I could see in the half darkness Mrs. McKenzie was already pulling the big, black box towards her. But why she was picking up pebbles and throwing them in there was beyond me. Perhaps she didn’t want the box blowing away in the night and polluting the waters of the loch. Perhaps she intended returning the next day to remove it.
“Why is it different?” said Curly.
I was getting irritable, longing only to return to my car and even contemplating the miserable mist beyond as a minor inconvenience.
“The monster doesn’t exist!” I said.
“You shouldna say that!” said Mrs. McKenzie, suddenly stopping her pebble gathering and looking at me strangely. “The monster gets angry at people saying that!”
She looked out over the murky loch with a watery eye.
“You’ll have to make it up to it!” she added.
“And how, pray, am I going to do that?” I smirked, tired of the chat and the cold air from the loch, wanting only to return to the drabness of Drumnatochan.
“Ay, praying is one way,” she said. “And sacrifice is the other. Isn’t that right, Curly?”
I swung round. Curly was wading towards the anchored boat in the bay. He delved his hands into it, pulled out the most enormous fish I had ever seen, slit its belly with the knife in his other hand, held it aloft victoriously and started wading back towards us.
“Sacrifice! Life’s all about sacrifice!” said Mrs. McKenzie, wiping a tear away from her eye.
I couldn’t fathom whether she was proud of Curly or his fishing skills. I felt neither. Just an abhorrence at what he’d done.
Curly walked over to the black box and put the fish in.
“Do ya think it will be enough, Ma?” he said.
“A big creature requires a lot of food,” said his mother.
“Ay,” said Curly proudly. “And we’ve provided it with enough through the years, haven’t we, Ma?”
“We sure have, Curly,” she said. “We’ve had a few through our hands.”
The phrase sent a chill through me. I thought of my chat with Curly.
“Ay, there’s been a few. They stay to see the monster then get annoyed when they don’t and move on.”
“It’s not been that great a sacrifice. After all, no body’s been missed.”
The woman’s voice was cold.
Body? The word made me back away. Did they mean body of a fish? Who would miss that?
“Yer just like the others,” she said, staring at me strangely. “You shouldna have mocked the monster! They did it too. And now they’ve made the ultimate sacrifice.”
She turned towards the loch.
“They’re out there! And you will be as well! In this!”
She pointed at the black box and the stones that would weigh it down.
The others?
I swung round, realisation, slowly dawning. Too late.
Curly was inches from me, the metal blade of his upraised knife, glinting even as it plunged into me.
I heard Mrs McKenzie’s voice from afar.
“I told you it wasn’t a good idea. No to be worried by the monster,” she said, as she dragged my slowly sinking body towards the black box.
She meant Curly, I thought.
Curly was a monster. The worst kind.
But, as they both lifted my broken body into that black box, I wasn’t so sure. For beyond Mrs. Mckenzie’s back, far out on the loch, I thought I saw black ripples. And a protuberance from the darkened water. The condition I was in, it was an easy mistake to make.
Yet it seemed to be waiting. Waiting for something.
A bite.
Mrs. McKenzie’s eyes followed mine.
“Ay, ye believe in it noo,” she said. “You’ve seen it.”
“I’ve seen something,” I whispered, as I was lowered into the black box and they nailed the lid on top.
I heard Mrs. Mckenzie’s voice, as if from behind a curtain.
“Ay, they all say that in the end. Ye believe in the monster, noo, don’t ye?”
And, as I felt the black box being dragged towards the loch, a strange mist settled in front of my eyes. A shutter over my sight. I knew I had experienced something. Only one thing stopped me from going any further. Fear.
I heard Curly’s mocking voice, as if from afar.
“Are ye no worried about the monster?”
But I was already on a journey. A road. A road with black bends that threatened like some monster waiting to devour me.
And I was the bait.
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Girl Left Behind
Linda Golden
Inspired by the painting by Eastman Johnson
“The Girl I Left Behind”
Windswept loneliness
Clouds collecting rain
Solace found only on the printed page
Protecting, protected against the onslaught
Tears come anyway
Moving against tides of sorrow
One step at a time, growing
Holding fast to forward
Hills gone from green to gray
Mood moving from hope to despair
Will he come today, tomorrow
Or is the only lovely lonely
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Bibliography
Richard Schnap
Souls pass by me like open books
Carrying stories that long to be read
That sometimes are epics that find no end
And sometimes are fables that fail too soon
A man who lives in his shadow’s embrace
A memoir set down in a long dead language
A girl who’s modeled from a bloodless doll
A fantasy depicting a talking skull
A boy who composes a song without words
A play for one actor performed in the dark
A woman with an empty sky in her eyes
A tale of a bird only dreaming of flight
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Grey Days
Richard Schnap
I watch an old man inching down the sidewalk
His collar turned up against the cold
Past the church with the weathered stone
To the corner bar with the faded facade
There he sits through meaningless afternoons
Spending his pension on glasses of beer
As he watches the news on the overhead TV
That seems to come from another planet
And sometimes I see him whisper a song
Playing on a jukebox buried in his heart
While a teardrop forms in the corner of his eye
As if from some memory he’d sooner forget
But then as the daylight begins to grow dim
He’ll gather his change and rise to leave
Taking one final look at the mirror on the wall
Wondering what happened to the man looking back
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Once Is Enough
Bob Strother
Reba had been clean for two years when her husband Todd brought home the coke. It was balled up in the corner of a plastic sandwich bag and tied off with a yellow twist-tie.
“Brian gave it to me,” he said, his eyes sparkling with mischief. He held the baggie between his thumb and forefinger, waggling it back and forth in front of her like a small, forbidden treasure.
Her eyes followed the coke, a terrible combination of fear and longing causing her pulse to quicken. She tore her gaze away and turned to set the table for dinner. “I thought you two were discussing how to liquidate your dad’s estate. How did drugs come into it?”
Todd shrugged. “We were doing that, but you know my younger brother; he’s always been something of a free spirit.” He dropped the baggie into his palm. “And he knows I’ve never tried anything.”
“Neither have I,” Reba lied—she had to, didn’t she? Todd knew nothing of her former life—“so there’s no reason to start now.”
Todd moved up behind her and slid his hands around her shoulders. He still clutched the baggie in his hand and the feel of it against her skin was almost hot. “According to Brian, having sex after coke is pretty damn terrific. So it’s kind of like a gift for both of us.” He nuzzled the skin of her neck. “How about it, honey, want to try some?”
Reba swallowed. “The lasagna is almost ready.”
“Just this once?” Todd persisted, pressing his lips to her ear. “If we don’t like it, I promise we’ll toss the rest of it. Turn off the oven; the lasagna will stay warm.”
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out. What could it hurt? Just this once? It’s not like I’d even know where to get the stuff anymore. She felt the warmth from Todd’s body spreading to her own. “Okay,” she said, “just this one time.”
An hour later, she lay on her side in the bed, resting her head on Todd’s shoulder, her body still tingling with the last of the rush.
“So what’d you think?” he asked.
Reba let her fingers play over the fine hair on Todd’s chest. “I don’t know. What did you think?”
“Well, the sex was great, but it’s always great. I mean, I liked the feeling okay, but it’s not going to replace Johnny Walker Red for me. Besides, booze is probably a lot less expensive.”
“Uh-huh.” Reba slipped out of bed and pulled on her robe. “I feel the same.”
They chatted over plates of heated-up, slightly dried-out lasagna, and then Reba watched as Todd retied the top of the coke baggie.
“So,” he said, grinning, “should I flush this down the commode like they do on TV when the cops are pounding on the door?”
Reba managed a smile even as her heart stumbled. “I don’t hear any pounding. I think the kitchen trash can is good enough.”
While Todd showered, Reba cleared the table and took the evening’s garbage out to the city-supplied refuse bin. Then she returned to the bedroom, a small package of white powder tucked safely in the pocket of her robe.
.....
She waited a week before dipping into the baggie again—just a little toot to elevate her mood, nothing serious—then five days before the next time. Within three weeks, her meager supply was exhausted. She toughed it out for a couple of days, then sat down with her checkbook. Todd provided her a household budget of three hundred dollars a week—enough for groceries, gas, and a few incidentals, but not much else. How much could she take out and still get by? An hour later, she stopped by the ATM and got a hundred bucks in twenties, then nosed her Accord toward the interstate and downtown Memphis.
The Southside was still seedy—bars and strip joints languished under sputtering neon signs, homeless people camped in the alleys, flanked by derelicts huddled in doorways, eyes vacant but somehow watchful.
Reba parked at the curb next to a two-story brick building with beer signs in the window, and Paradise Room emblazoned over the entrance. It hadn’t changed much in two years, at least not on the outside—same red door, same torn green awning with A Gentlemen’s Club scripted on the sides.
Four years she’d worked here as a dancer: three sets on stage every evening, lap dances between sets, sometimes a little something extra in one of the shadowy back rooms. It hadn’t been all bad. She’d liked it in a way—the music, the drugs, the excitement. Living a life where every emotion was almost too intense to bear. There was a heady quality to that kind of action, but it was also dangerous. You got strung out and burned out. Girls died young, or found themselves alone and desperate with no place to go.
She’d been one of the lucky ones—saw the darkness at the end of the tunnel and managed to break away. She’d cleaned herself up, got a day job waitressing, and, ultimately, found Todd.
So what was she doing here again? Did she miss it—some element of that old life—the euphoric soaring sensation of the coke? She hadn’t wanted those thoughts to reappear. She’d escaped, after all, had a so-called idyllic life in the suburbs. But they’d come creeping out when Todd brought home the baggie of coke, the same way a rat waits for things to get still and silent before it shows.
Reba got out of the Accord and headed for the red door.
The club’s interior was the same as she remembered, dark and musty, smelling of stale beer and cigarettes. No crowd this time of day, a lone bartender under feeble orange lights behind the bar, polishing glasses.
She walked over to the bar. “Is Rusty here?”
The bartender looked her over. “You looking for work?”
“I’m just looking for Rusty.”
He shrugged. “He’s in the back office. It’s—”
“I know where it is.” She found her way past the juke box, down a dimly lit hallway, and knocked on the door.
“Yeah?”
She pushed the door open and walked inside. The bar’s owner—a tall, owl-faced man in his sixties—sat behind a cluttered desk tapping on a laptop computer. He glanced up, gave her a blank stare, and then slowly raised his eyebrows as recognition dawned on his face.
“Fawn,” he said, rising, “long time no see, sweetheart.”
“It’s just plain Reba now.”
“Whatever; it don’t matter. You kept yourself nice. What’s it been, a couple years?”
“Something like that.”
“You thinking of coming back?” he asked.
Reba shook her head. When she spoke her voice was raspy, like sand driven by wind against a window. “I just want to buy some cocaine.”
Rusty raised his palms. “What—you think I’m a drug dealer?”
“You always kept a stash for ... girls in need, didn’t you?”
He stared at her for a moment, then opened his desk drawer, pulled out a half dozen glassine packets, and dropped them on the desktop. “Are you in need, Fawn?”
“I have money,” she said. “I’ve got a hundred dollars.”
“A Franklin won’t buy you much these days; you been out of touch, sweetheart.” He got up and came around the desk. “But, hell, Fawn, you don’t need money.” He stood very close to her, bourbon on his breath, and ran a finger down her cheek—his smile as cruel as an open cut. “The way you look, you never did, did you, honey?”
Reba looked over at the packets, glistening snowy bright under the desk lamp, a siren song in clear plastic. Just this once, they murmured, a sultry rhapsody of promised bliss. She closed her eyes, felt the pulse throbbing hard in her throat, and said, “Not this time, Rusty. Not anymore.”
She turned and hurried from the room.
.....
Reba arrived home later that afternoon to find Todd standing at the kitchen sink, eating a muffin left over from breakfast.
“We have plates, you know,” she said, laughing softly.
“This is more efficient, fewer dishes to wash.” He popped the last bite into his mouth and mumbled, “Where’ve you been?”
“I went by to see Brian.”
Todd turned to face her. “Brian? Why? I thought you didn’t even like Brian.”
“I don’t, particularly, but it was business.”
“Huh? What business could you possibly have with my brother?”
Reba slipped the plastic, twist-tied baggie from her purse and dangled it in front of her husband.
A crease appeared between Todd’s eyebrows. “Coke? Are you kidding? I thought we didn’t care for it.”
“No, you didn’t care for it,” Reba said. She sidled over, slipped her arms around his waist and pressed her body against his. “Actually, I found it extra exciting when we made love afterward.”
A grin cracked Todd’s face. “You were pretty animated, now that you mention it. I suppose you doing a little coke every once in a while wouldn’t hurt.”
She felt Todd’s body responding to her closeness. “You’ve got half your dad’s estate coming soon. We could have sex more often,” she teased, “if you added a couple hundred a month to my household account.”
“I could do that,” Todd whispered, “for the right price.”
Reba smiled, took his hand, and pulled him toward the bedroom.
Trailing along behind her, Todd said, “I guess having a brother who’s a source isn’t such a bad thing after all. I’d hate to think about you trying to buy drugs on some shadowy street corner.”
She clenched the baggie tightly in her palm. “You don’t need to worry about that, sweetheart. I wouldn’t have a clue where to look.”
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Prisoners
Sej Harman
“If only,” she banged, “if only,” again, again, and again rhythmically pounding her head against the mint green tiles till her scalp was numb and bloody. Physical pain meant nothing to her, a reminder that she was alive, though it would fade away, as always.
Nessa’s weren’t dramatic, life altering if onlies: If only she’d worn her seatbelt. If only they’d locked the cabinet under the sink before the baby got up. If only he hadn’t been mad at his brother when he’d hollered for help. No, they were little if onlies—the delicate cuts of a chef creating a duck from a summer squash, or the carver shaping a sweating block of ice to release the beauty of swans for a wedding table centerpiece.
The little if onlies are like that paring knife or that ice chisel in the skilled hands of a great artist, chipping away at some ordinary, less-than-lovely form to create their vision of perfection. But it’s never as simple with the human form. Such if onlies never release an inner beauty that was waiting to be born. No, these whittle away the spirit—slowly killing the soul, sending the signal that what had been visible had not been good enough. Would never be good enough.
If only you’d keep quiet in class, then you’d get better grades. If only you’d lose a few pounds, then the boys would like you. If only you’d do something with your hair, then you could get a good job. If only you wouldn’t dress like a slut, you could be...
The din in her head had become unbearable, overriding the pain in her scalp.
“If ONLY...if ONLY you loved me for ME, for who I was,” she raged, forgetting that no one could hear her outside the hard green cubical of the bathroom. Yeah, who I WAS...,
So, who am I now? She took inventory of the shell she had meticulously carved over the years to reveal her own inner beauty: thin to the point of illness, long hair in shiny curls, plucked and spackled and abraded—packaged summa cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa key from the “right” university...
Deep sobs wracked her body, aching, wanting.
Yes. And still the lonely inmate in a prison of remembered words.
The noise in her head returned, louder the harder she pounded her head in insistent rhythm against the cold tiles.
The police arrived, alerted by a neighbor worried about some odd noise, and found Nessa slumped in the bathroom, her head and the wall bloodied, her wrists and arms bearing old scars. An ambulance was summoned and the EMTs muscled their way into the tiny room. They carefully placed Nessa’s limp body onto the gurney, then wheeled her out to the waiting ambulance. They did not turn on the siren out of respect for the neighbors, though the red flashers were signal enough.
The officers searched the warren of rooms in the old house but saw no sign of forced entry. In the kitchen at the back of the house, they found an older couple, two more victims of a vicious intruder. They were bound and gagged, exhausted but alive. Their hands and feet had been tied to the ladder-back chairs with electric cords, and they’d been positioned to face each other across the cracked red dinette table. Physically, they appeared to be unharmed, though duct tape covered their mouths below terrified eyes.
An officer gently pulled the silvery gag from the old lady’s lips, while a second ministered to her husband. Blood gushed from their mouths as the two sputtered and spat, trying to rid themselves of the gore and catch their breaths. Desperate not to vomit at the idea someone had ripped out their tongues, the policemen worked to staunch further bleeding and remove the cord restraints
The old man was anxious to tell them what had happened, but couldn’t get the words out. The old woman sobbed and gagged, but made no effort to speak. The first officer turned to wipe away the spew she had gotten on his hands and arms, and that’s when he saw it, scrawled in black marker on the discarded duct tape: IF ONLY.
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cage
Janet Kuypers
haiku 3/1/14
this pain in my chest,
pounding, heaving, throbbing, like
it’s traped, in a cage
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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.
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choke
Janet Kuypers
haiku 2/15/14
Trapped, she felt a chill,
like a goose walked on her grave.
She chokes with his touch.
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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.
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A Drowning Boy Visits the House of the Recent Dead
Steve Sibra
Out of a sense of duty, once or twice a year, I return to the morgue.
I walk along the light blue hallways with the dim glow pulling down to the floor like a crushing word of resignation.
As I pass by, each of the corpses sits up on its slab. Gently I put them back down with my kisses.
The most freshly dead are up on the rooftop, eating cold potatoes in the autumn wind.
With my ethereal touch I try to give them reassurance; I try to bring them some sort of comfort or even acceptance, if not closure.
Almost without fail, I fail.
Some howl and throw themselves from the rooftops. I do not try to stop this.
I could not do so even if I tried. I am of a spirit place now where they can only feel my touch if they desire to do so.
I am a drowning boy and it seems that I have been drowning for years. Drowning in that bathtub with the big strong hairy arm holding my head under the flow of water, holding me submerged as I feel my lungs fill with liquid and my life slipping out from underneath me.
I don’t know how long it really takes to drown but I have been doing it for years. I never breathe, my eyes are fixed on the blur of the water — and the power of the hand of my sister’s horrible boyfriend, that power is what I can feel. That and the water filling my lungs.
The water filling my lungs is like someone trying to stuff a live badger into a burlap sack.
My mind is filled with questions about my sister. Is she watching this? Is she trying to stop it? How does she feel later when she learns that this has happened?
Will she stay with this brute?
Is a sincere woman evil if she sincerely loves an evil man?
Eventually my mind wanders back to the cold rooftop and the wailing of the recently dead, who throw themselves off the third story rooftop as if there is some finality to this act.
Everything that is final has already happened. There has been a death. Your death. There is nothing more final than that.
I try to get them to see it as a sort of freedom, as release, as escape. I never tell them what I am going through. I never show them the badger clawing and scraping as the burlap wall surrounds it and the river looms.
I never tell them that there are worse things than death.
Or that most if not all of the things that are worse than death involve being alive.
I never tell them that drowning and drowning and drowning and never reaching the plateau of death; that is worse.
I never tell them that the only thing worse than death is knowing that death exists and knowing that you will never be able to actually achieve it.
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Morocco
Steve Sibra
I was seated in a large, sturdy chair. It was bolted to the floor. There were two other men in the room; they were both watching me. I did not know them, but I could tell by the expressions on their faces that they were waiting for me to speak. And so I did.
“The dusty road that winds its way to the south, on the outskirts of Tangier, is plagued by blind turns, unexpected swoops, and small hills. Ravaged by an overdose of barbiturates, I was careening out of control along this road, driving a 1955 Chevrolet sedan — when much to my dismay, I topped a small knoll and smashed the automobile into a rhinoceros who was standing sideways in the middle of the road. I must have been going nearly fifty miles an hour.
When I came to I was stretched out in the dust by the side of the road. A pair of homeboys from Tangier had come upon me and retrieved me from the crumpled car. My chest was in so much pain I nearly passed out as soon as I awakened. I could feel the imprint of the steering wheel in my flesh.
Lying on my back in the dirt I turned my head towards the wreckage. The car – which I had borrowed from a gullible young woman whom I had met only the day before – the car appeared totaled. Beyond it I could see the supine form of the gigantic rhino. He (or she) was completely still. No movement of any kind. So I guessed that the rhinoceros was also totaled.
I turned my head back towards my two saviors and set about pulling in enough air to speak. My chest was in terrible pain as I took my deep breath.
“Thank you, kind sirs. You have saved my life,” I rasped. “Can you tell me what time it is?” I was able to get this out without bursting into tears or spitting globs of blood. But it was close.
The two silent Samaritans, meanwhile, took one frightened look at me lying in the dirt, and then turned tail and ran across an open field, heading back towards the city, which was at least a mile away. They zigged and zagged as they scurried through the short grass, as if they were dodging rifle shots.” I paused to take a deep breath, then let it out bit by bit, through my clenched teeth.
“Anyway,” I continued, “Somehow I managed to get clear of that mess. I had disappeared into the taller grass before the police arrived.” I was debating whether to continue the story of this particular African misadventure. My audience was two old men in a dilapidated barber shop in Kellogg, Idaho. One of them was the barber but at the moment neither one was trying to cut my hair. I had forgotten which was which.
“The authorities did finally arrive, and I was flat on my stomach in the grass, about fifty yards away, watching them.” One of the men walked over and picked up a scissors on the counter. He must be the one who runs the place, I decided. He made me a little nervous.
“They scurried about the scene, a couple had notebooks, at least one of them was brandishing a rifle. I couldn’t imagine what they expected to find. I remember feeling sorry for the girl who owned the car. She would never see me or hear from me again.”
“Then all of a sudden – I’ll swear to this – the God Damned rhino gave a huge snort and up came his massive head. I about crapped myself, and you should have seen the cops!” I pounded my fist on the armrest of the barber chair. This only served to alarm the man with the scissors, who nearly stabbed me in the ear.
I wanted badly to continue the story, about how the rhinoceros got to his feet, snorted again, and started chasing after the frantic policemen. But I just didn’t have faith in my audience; so instead at that point I shut up and waited for the man to be finished flipping and spinning the scissors around my head, snipping something off here and there.
When the snipping tailed off, I paid the eight bucks for the haircut, thanked the morose looking barber-at-large, and left the shop. It was one of those old time Main Street barbershops which were actually in a basement, with stairs that take you right back up to street level and onto the sidewalk — right in the middle of a block. I climbed the steps slowly, running my palm along the smooth, cool surface of the big brass railing.
I walked down the street half a block to where I had parked. “Hey, Mister.” I heard the voice of someone behind me; I turned around to see the other fellow from the hair cutting establishment – the guy who was not a barber, that is.
He looked at me with a knowing smile. “Thanks for the goofy African story,” he said, “even though it was obviously a bunch of bullshit, it was good entertainment.”
I thought for a moment about the rhinos I had seen in Morocco and Uganda; there were two species, the black rhino and the white rhino. All are headed towards extinction, but the whites outnumber the blacks in Africa by a ratio of about 4 to 1. The one on the highway had been black.
“Bullshit is always good entertainment,” I said, trying to show a genuine looking smile. “And good entertainment is always bullshit. It’s all a matter of how you organize the lessons in your life.”
He stood and stared as I unlocked my car: a pristine, dark gray 1955 Chevrolet four-door sedan, with original interior in perfect shape and chrome that shined like a sunrise over the streets of Tangier. I climbed inside and the 265 cubic inch V-8 engine came to life as I turned the key in the ignition. Slowly I backed from the space, and placed the car in “Drive”. As I pulled away with the motor purring like a jungle cat, I could see the local boy in my rear-view mirror, still standing and staring.
I was pretty sure that by then he had noticed the personalized license plate framed on the massive back bumper of this motorized beast.
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guide
Janet Kuypers
haiku 2/16/14
like all lambs to the
slaughter, I’ll always guide them
to their destiny
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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.
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To The Finish Line
Marlon Jackson
Only a few blocks left until the finish line. And Jason was running, the sweat rolling down his face blinding his sight as his ran. He wiped the sweat off of his face and he continued to go forward. He didn’t think of any prizes, trophies or tales of congrats by the squadron of folks. It was all determination and consistency. The other runners were mostly at the same pace sweating their asses off. The crowd was roaring from every angle within the stand, and the cheers were moderate. Jason felt the pumping of his heart go erratic and as much as he wanted to he didn’t slow down. He continued running and he and his opponents ran unto a narrow turn making a swift right. Three out of the seven runners slowed down. The other four including Jason continued their race. That last block was tricky and now it’s only two and a half blocks left. Jason pushed and pushed. The raging look on his face was fierce and intimidating. He heard the harsh breaths of the runners beside him, running as hard as him and two of them were at the same pace of running. One trailed by a few paces and then the trailing runner suddenly stumbled on his own steps and he fell nearly face flat on the pavement.
The crowd oohed and aahed.
That leaves three.
And they’re moving fast. All three are saturated with sweat. The finish line wasn’t too far now.
The middle runner trailed now and in a matter of moments both Jason and his other opponent outran him.
That leaves two now.
It was only forty yards now with Jason and his final opponent. Determination ran through both of their minds in a frenzy.
They were both dedicated to victory.
Thirty yards left! Who will be the winner? Jason or his opponent! The crowd was holding their breath.
They both ran at the same pace.
Sweat continued running down their faces frenetically.
Right before them less than fifteen yards from the finish line the sun beamed away and then it appeared to be slowly setting. Or the sunrays twinkled way too brightly for their eyes.
There were a few clouds in the sky but neither of them drew were near the blinding sun.
Jason fighting off the brightness of it striking his eyes had wished he wore his sunglasses that he left on the kitchen table right before he exited his front door of his apartment. His opponent continued running squinting his eyes.
A headache arose in Jason’s head and still he ran...but he slowed.
His opponent ran a little past him now. His face squirmed painfully from the sun beaming mostly in his eyes. Jason continued pushing but the headache arose too quickly. He was in a shudder of pain and it throbbed on the left side of his brain. His opponent was ahead of him now...but only five yards away he suddenly went down in slow motion sequence to his knees from the sun rays.
The shine was too bright for him. He couldn’t take it.
Neither could Jason, but by grace he continued running to the finish line. He bypassed his opponent and only one yard left and Jason’s opponent was still on his knees.
Three feet.
Two feet... One... The crowd roared when Jason reached the finish line! His hands were sprung in the air and his mouth was wide open.
He was exasperated...
He was exhausted... And yet still...Jason made it to the finish line.
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stagger
Janet Kuypers
haiku 2/14/14
The crowds around him
stagger, sway like weeds. And he
thinks: let the weeds go.
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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.
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Feathers
Al Ortolani
A mockingbird sat on the topmost branch of a pear.
He had a worm dangling like a horseshoe from his beak.
I stood on the school lawn until he flew, waiting
to register the trademark bars on his wings. Anyone
from the classrooms would have guessed
that baffled by indecision I was lost to dementia, rather
than to an elementary search for truth.
Moments later, I’m almost run down on the highway
by a minivan with Crawford County plates. A friend is driving,
wearing a rain hat from our last canoe trip two years ago.
That night he posts on Facebook from the ballgame.
Cleveland is losing to Kansas City in the bottom of the sixth.
He’s wearing the same hat that he almost killed me in.
He knows nothing of our narrow escape.
When I step out onto the porch, a V of wild geese
honk southward away from the coming winter.
The clouds reflect the lights of 87th Street.
I have stored boxes of journals, poems, rough drafts
of bad novels. I keep them for a rainy afternoon
with my grandchildren. It’s time for them
to find arrowheads, purple thistles, owl feathers.
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My Brother as Salt-Pork
Al Ortolani
Wally claimed
that his cousin Tip had been
shot-gunned a year ago with rock-salt.
He knew the risks of trespassing.
Crane Castle had dirt floors,
dungeons, chains bolted to walls,
adult daughters locked below since childhood.
The bragging rights were irresistible.
Wally and I crept through the hedge
on a Saturday morning, my little brother
an unwanted tag along. The lower windows
were curtained, tight like secrets.
Old man Miller caught us on his roof,
as we boosted my brother to the skylight.
He came up the gravel drive in a storm
of obscenity, his fist pounding nouns
into verbs. Adjectives
flew like spit. Wally and I dropped
my brother, and skipped down the ladder
to the ground, running
for the Girl Scout Woods. We threw
ourselves behind the first limb fall-
my brother limped in last.
He’d lost his shoe. It was wedged
between the ladder and the gutter.
He wiped at his tears,
picking at his one dirty sock.
Even as I ran, I imagined his
trust, the stinging salt.
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Watermelon Farm
Sarah Parfait
Adam pulls out the seat across from Emmett and sits down.
Emmett rocks back and forth in his chair and picks up a small puzzle piece. He examines the shape by rubbing his fingers along the edges and holds the piece close to his face to study the colors. After he’s deciphered the piece he reaches his arm out and sets it down on the right hand corner of the table. He repeats this process with the next puzzle piece.
“So, Mr. Emmett, I have a few questions for you about your Uncle Mitch,” Adam says, reaching into his briefcase and pulling out a photo of an older man and woman locking arms and waving to the photographer. He holds it up to Emmett. “Do you recognize this man?”
Emmett shifts his focus from the puzzle to the photo. He tilts his head. “Hey! Aunt Sissy!”
“You know this woman?” Adam asks.
Emmett resumes his puzzle and places another piece down. “Yeah, we used to play hide the dead cat, but we only played it once. I haven’t seen her in awhile.”
Adam looks down at the puzzle. A whole corner was already put together revealing a piece of a blue sky. “I see, when was the last time you saw your Aunt Sissy?”
He twists and turns another puzzle into place. “Just before I came here.” He struggles to make the puzzle fit.
Adam picks up the puzzle box lying on the table and studies the picture. It was a watermelon farm. “So, Emmett, your uncle Mitch went missing about a week ago. In order to figure out where he went, I need your help on knowing more about who your uncle Mitch was close to.”
Emmett picks up another piece and holds it out to Adam, “Okay, but can you find where this goes?”
Confounded, Adam takes the piece and connects it to an edge piece with a similar shade of green. “Was your uncle Mitch friends with bad people?”
Emmett pops another solved piece into place. “Jerry wasn’t a bad person. He was Uncle Mitch’s best friend. He helped us fix our boat.”
“This Jerry guy, how did your uncle Mitch meet him?” Adam asks.
“He’s the town reverend so everybody knows him. Uncle Mitch brought him to Aunt Sissy’s house one day.” Emmett finishes the blue the sky and works on the bottom left corner where Adam put a piece down. “They liked to go out at night.”
“Do you know where?” Adam asks. He notices a puzzle piece that matches the color of the corner Emmett is working on and hands it to him.
“Thanks, and no, but they did come back acting funny.” He pops another piece in place.
“Funny how?”
“Well they smelled funny and they kept touching each other. Aunt Sissy told them if they didn’t behave like grown men she’d kick them out.”
“Was Jerry and your Uncle Mitch intimate?”
“I don’t know,” Emmett says, popping the last puzzle on the bottom in place. He works on the middle of the puzzle now, but his hands shake.
Adam places his arms on the table and folds his hands. “Emmett, do you know anything about this Jerry guy?”
Emmett shakes another piece into place. “I saw him.”
Adam leans forward. “Saw who?”
Emmett rocks back and forth. “I heard noises from downstairs and I thought someone was being hurt.”
Adam takes out a notepad and pen and scribbles down notes. “Go on.”
Shaking his head and looking down, Emmett puts another puzzle in place. “The noise came from Uncle Mitch’s room, so I checked on him.”
“What did you find?” Adam asks, writing more notes.
“Well, when I opened the door Uncle Mitch was in bed and Jerry was drinking something brown and he wasn’t wearing any clothes. He took a sip of the brown juice and got into the bed, only my knee popped and Jerry heard. He saw that I was spying and he quickly ran to the door.” Emmett puts another puzzle in place. “He told me not to say anything of what I saw that night.”
“Was this a threat from Jerry?” Adam asks.
Emmett’s shaking hands calm and he continues his puzzle. “Threat? No, he told me if anyone heard what I saw they’d lock me up for talking nonsense. I didn’t believe him, so I told Aunt Sissy. But she said I was talking nonsense. Jerry was right.” Only five more pieces of the puzzle remained. “But I didn’t want Jerry to be right, so I told everyone in town. Women gasped and men were disgusted, they thought I was spreading a lie. Uncle Mitch said I was out of control and didn’t understand what I was saying, he thought I needed help, and I here I am.” He puts the last piece of the puzzle in place revealing the watermelon farm.
Adam puts down his pen.
A nurse approaches them. “Emmett, we need to get you to your 3 o’clock therapy.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Emmett brushes the completed puzzle and smiles. “You know why I love puzzles, Mr. Adam?”
“No, why?” Adam asks. He collects his notes and pictures and places them back in the briefcase.
“Because when the puzzle is complete everything becomes clear. Just take a step back and you’ll see what I mean. Bye, Mr. Adam,” Emmett says, leaving with the nurse.
Adam pulls the photo back out and examines the picture. In the background was another man.
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Sarah Parfait bio
Sarah Parfait is currently studying creative writing in Orlando, Florida. She loves writing, reading, and watching films based off of novels.
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Forced Move to a Small Apartment
Robert Laughlin
I had to sell off almost all my books for lack of room.
The ones most recently released and still in copyright were kept.
I should be grateful I can read the others on the Net, now digitized, for free;
I’m not.
I miss the sensory associations that they had,
My books that weren’t swapped for counterparts in code:
The rustle of each turning page,
The musk of paper leaves,
The feel of supple covers lolling in my palms.
I had to move to smaller quarters, don’t you know—a deprivation tank.
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Lightning Louise
Carrie Ives
Louise drops the bomb on the trunk of my ‘68 Fairlane parked out by the river. It was once our favorite spot. I take a swig from the bottle of Jack and scan her face for lies. I thrust the bottle at her and she shoves it away.
Lightning flashes.
“Get in the car, Louise.”
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three...
Thunder crashes.
She starts to cry as she slams the passenger door.
Big fat raindrops hit the top of the car.
The wheels on gravel vibrate the steering wheel. The car’s headlights barely penetrate the hovering fog, and the state highway comes up fast. Tires screech on the wet pavement. I spin the wheel hard to stay in my lane. Gravel peppers the stop sign I ignored. The truck horn blares a warning, his silver bulldog flashes in the headlights. He’s going the other way.
Louise screams as the lighting flashes again.
“Tommy, I want to go home.”
“Where do you think I’m taking you, Louise? Stop crying already. Your face looks like shit.”
The radio drowns her sniffles as Del Shannon sings about a runaway. Her tears and the rain can’t touch me.
“You’re going too fast!”
“Just shut up already! I won’t miss it.”
Tires squall around the corner, but old man Mickles’ mailbox is safe this time.
Maybe I’m not drunk.
“Third house on the right.”
As if I’ve not climbed the trellis to your room every night for the last six months.
My front bumper clips the garbage can and spills its rotten guts across the yard. Louise charges into the rain before I stop the car, her poodle skirt and white blouse clinging to her body. Her ponytail hangs in strings, but the rain masks her tears as she looks back over her shoulder at me from the safety of the porch and her mother’s waiting arms.
Yeah, good night to you too, sweetheart, and thanks for nothing.
Her mother waves to me but I slide across the smooth black leather and slam the door, pretending I don’t see her. I’m tired of playing games with that girl and her do-gooder family.
If her mama only knew how much of Louise I’ve seen, she’d have a shit fit! Precious angel my ass, but she’s not trapping me in a marriage. Uh-uh, no way!
The rain pounds on the roof, heavier now. The Pearson’s mailbox falls prey to my back bumper. The windshield wipers barely work, but I can see the road. I have good tires, and Blarney’s Bar is waiting a mile away. I dig around under the seat for the bottle of Jack.
Where is it? Louise better not have chucked it out the window or I’ll be pissed. No, wait, there it is.
I can almost reach it but my fingers keep slipping off the glass edge. I lean over farther in the seat so I can wrap my fingers around its neck.
Another flash of light blinds me.
The storm is here.
The big 350 engine’s scream drowns the thunder.
I feel like I’m floating.
Rending metal cuts my arm while crimson glass peppers my face. Everything goes black.
A white ceiling stretches above me. Something soft cradles my head. My mother’s roses scent the air. Sunlight beams of amber and blue stream across the room. Soft music plays on the edge of my hearing.
Is someone crying?
My mother is looking down at me.
“He was such a good boy, Marie.”
She nods.
It sounds like Aunt Martha, but she calls me hell on wheels.
“The young are always taken too soon.”
Uncle Joe? He is driving a truck, never at home.
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
The pieces fit together and I rise, lighter than air. People gathered wear suits and dresses. Flowers surround Mrs. Peabody at the piano. Whispers scurry through the crowd.
Can they see me?
I drift lower and then I see it.
That’s my body. I’m in a—in a casket...
The preacher’s voice is muffled as he motions everyone to rise. They file out as I sink into my body.
No! Wait! Don’t close that! I’m not dead! I’m right here!
Louise stands in my mother’s embrace, one hand patting her shoulder as the other clutches at Louise’s stomach.
Louise! Don’t let them do this to me. Louise save me! I’ll marry you. I’ll be a good husband and good father, just don’t let them put me in the ground.
My world goes black again.
Louise? You’re still pretty.
It’s silent.
Louise?
I can’t hear anyone.
Please Louise?
I don’t feel – anything.
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[death comes tiptoeing]
Stefan Benz
death comes tiptoeing.
in small portions. we
consume him. with a
carefully, unchosen grin.
breathe. to choose and
die, to live.
cheers!
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summerlong
Stefan Benz
there’s blood inside the earth you
know.
bleeds outalong the cracks of
self into the womb of time. smells
like bloom&gone. tempts
your heart into a beatthatbeats you-
r soul to bite the bait of
lifelovelasting.
in & over yourhead
you can feel it grasp for the fleshlife
spinning around you looking for no-
thing. dont waste your time blinking
away glorious voidity with eye-
lidsheavier than heartache & the moon
cause heaven’s just summerlong.or
winter. take
a pick
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The Important Blues
Priscilla Pilar Estrada
“Boston police, we got a report of a disturbance on the premise.” They were wearing an important-looking uniform. I looked at the cameras on my monitors and did not see any kind of disturbance. Perhaps, it was an outside disturbance. I pushed my finger on the buzzer, that kind of buzzer that unlocks the side door. I peered at my half eaten sandwich and took another bite of it. The beef engulfed my taste buds. Finally, the two important-looking men approached my desk, wearing that important-looking blue.
“What kind of disturbance was reported, officers,” I ask.
“We received a report of suspicious characters right outside the premise, have you seen anything suspicious,” asked the first officer. The first officer had a hair brush-like mustache and piercing blue eyes.
“Don’t I know you? You look familiar,” said the second officer, his face was clean shaven and looked as if he was born much too young to be a police officer just yet. “I think there’s a warrant out for your arrest,” he continued.
I was astounded and my mind raced to what I could have done wrong. Did I pay that speeding ticket yet? Was it past due? The officers pulled out a pair of handcuffs and spun me around to face the wall behind my desk. The frigid metal chilled my wrists. I heard the young cop walk over to my co-worker, Bob, who was also working the night shift with me.
“Sorry sir, this is protocol,” he said while slapping on handcuffs over his wrists.
As I stared at the wall, the mustached cop said, “Gentlemen, this is a robbery. Hurting you is not our goal, the most pain you will experience is the duct tape being pulled off your face once you are found in the morning.” The imposters proceeded to cover my mouth, eyes, and wrapped the tenacious tape around my head’s parameter.
I was lead down a few flight of stairs, I could tell it was the museum’s basement and that Bob was no longer with me as two pairs of shoes split from mine and my captor’s. Finally, my captor pushed my body into a chair. He fumbled with my handcuffs and pulled my body towards him. Clanging of metal with metal rang throughout the room, the handcuffs snapped shut once more. I heard his steps distance themselves.
I sat in silence. I wiggled my lips in attempt to loosen the duct tape to no avail. I raised my eyebrows up and down. No success. I sat in silence. I stood up but that was not going to happen since my body launched itself back down. I felt around. I was handcuffed to something round and cold. It had to be a pipe. I thought of my beef sandwich and longed for it. I cannot believe that I let them in. The beef taste engulfed my memories. A musty odor filled my lungs. I’m going to be poisoned by this smell. There was a noise. My head instinctively turned. The beef disappeared and filled with the dryness of tongue. My fingers licked the cold pipe. Calm down, ya old buffoon. Calm down for your own good. I twiddled my bound thumbs and thought about the wife that I had waiting back home. What would she say when I didn’t show up in the morning? Would she suspect me of infidelity? She wasn’t that type of person. I was far too retched-looking for her to worry over that sort of thing. How can I pass the time faster?
My eyes were already shut since I took that precaution prior to them duct taping over them. I leaned forward and erased all thoughts from my mind.
“Rick, rick. Wake up.” My head sprang up. It worked. It sounded like my boss.
“Mmm,” I grunted in excited disbelief. As I listened for more, a scorching hotness traveled across my face. “AHH,” I yelled.
“Sorry, Rick, just had to rip the band-aid off,” said my boss. “What the hell happened?”
“We were robbed sir, I’m so sorry. I let them in.”
I let the important blues in.
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difference
Janet Kuypers
haiku 3/10/14
when putting same clothes
on angels and demons, you
can’t tell them apart
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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.
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Bruise and Fire
Taylor Cornell
Everyone has a breaking point in their lives.
“I know what you did,” said the voice. “You won’t get away with this, Amy. I won’t let you. Time’s up.”
I just rolled my eyes and held the phone loosely against my head. The morning calls had just become another routine. Somehow, someone found out my secret. I wasn’t careful enough. The last two weeks this mysterious caller has been threatening to call the police and have me arrested unless I turned myself in. The days had been counting down from 14 and today was the last day.
“If you know what I did, you will understand why I did it,” I replied. “I had to protect myself. Call the police. I dare you.”
“I hope you enjoy prison. Your husband’s death cannot go unpunished.”
“Screw you!”
“You have one hour.” The caller hung up.
My husband deserved what he got. He hurt me for years he didn’t deserve to live. Bruises had covered my body since the day I got married.
Drunken fights and yelling were the norm in our small house. I had put up with his abuse for as long as I could. I waited until he fell asleep that night and packed my bags. I set our home on fire and then fled to my sister’s house. She was aware of the abuse and provided me a perfect alibi. An alibi that thankfully was never needed. No one was suspicious of the fire. Our small home was old so the firemen chalked it up to electrical issues.
Let the police come. I stood up for myself and that’s all that matters. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I curled my dark hair and lined my green eyes with black. If I have to be arrested, then I will go in style.
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Ending a Relationship
Janet Kuypers
1/29/07
my chest heaves feeling
a cold hard rock where my heart
used to burn for you
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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.
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Red Valley
Josh Bennett
The radio chatter began after the bomb exploded.
“Vic Two, this is Vic Four. What is your status?” said the Staff Sergeant.
The displaced terrain sounded like heavy rain on the steel roof of the vehicle. I spun my head toward my impossibly small window. The valley showed no movement on my side. Neither base could see us with cameras in there. It was a perfect place to stage an ambush. I kept watch along the high ridges.
The radio crackled in response. “All Vics, be advised, we are all green.” The Staff Sergeant breathed a sigh of relief as we waited for more details.
“You see anything, Staff Sergeant?” I said. My gaze remained fixed on the valley ridge.
“Nothing so far,” he said.
“I’ve got no movement here either.”
Absent were the sounds of bullets and mortars. Our team condemned the valley from the outset of the patrol. The insurgents had often used IEDs to initiate small-arms ambushes.
I gripped the door handle, poised to defend the convoy. The silence deafened me. We sat motionless, waiting for the true nature of the valley to reveal itself.
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fought
Janet Kuypers
haiku 2/15/14
a thousand wars are
fought in your honor, swinging
battle axes high
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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.
|
6 Feet Under
Tiffeni Crawford
Strapped with a tape recorder and microphone, Michael walked into a mansion style building with a valet, classical music, and glass chandeliers.
“I am here to see Big Al,” Michael said to a security guard.
“Big Al is busy,” said the guard.
“Tell him it’s Little Mikey and I got what he’s been looking for.”
The security guard walked through a wooden door to his left.
He came back a few minutes later signaling to Michael that he could see Big Al.
“Big Al,” said Michael. The room was small and empty except for a desk, two chairs and a phone. The walls were painted eggshell white with Santos Mahogany wood floors.
“Little Mikey, you son-of-a-gun. How are ya?” said Big Al.
“I am doing good. I missed your fat face. Did you get fatter?”
“Hahaha. You’re funny, Little Mikey. You’re lucky you are like family to me or I would kill you.”
“Yeah, yeah, now let’s get down to business.”
Big Al pulled out a large manila folder and a black and white notebook from his desk.
“What you got for me, Little Mikey?”
“There’s a rumor going around that Baby Face Jimmy is talking to the FBI.”
“Are you kiddin’ me? You have proof?”
“I do.” Michael pulled out a black folder out of his leather jacket and threw it on the table.
“What is this?”
“Proof.”
Big Al opened the folder to find pictures of Baby Face Jimmy talking to the FBI. His body language showed him arguing with them but he handed them a piece of paper. Then he was getting arrested.
“This cannot be real. He will never betray us. We are his family.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Big Al pressed the red button on the phone and a tall, muscular guy walked into the room.
“Ace. I need you to take care of Baby Face Jimmy.”
Ace nodded and walked out the room without saying a word.
“Little Mikey, you are a good friend.”
“I wish I could say the same for you.”
“What are you talking about? We have been nothing but good to you.”
“You’ve caused me trouble ever since my father killed one of your men.”
“Well, haven’t we been good to you since?”
“Sure, why not. But I am done with you and this mafia.”
“You don’t want to do that, Little Mikey.”
“Yes I do.”
He picked up his phone again.
Ace walked into the room and stood next to Big Al.
Michael ran out the door and past the line of customers waiting to be seated. He made it to his car across the street and sped down the street with Ace following behind him.
FBI agents stormed into the restaurant.
“You got Big Al arrested?” said Ace.
“Yeah, I did. In a matter of minutes they’ll be arresting you too and charging you with murder and more.”
There was a clicking sound.
Michael closed his eyes.
The gun went off.
There’s a thud.
Michael looked down at his grave.
|
Coming Home
Brittany Kearney
Debris that was left behind by the storm lay scattered haphazardly for as far as the eye could see. She was resting against a piece of driftwood, relaxing after her morning run. The last two weeks had been stressful. Between moving back home and the cryptic phone calls she had been receiving every morning, she was glad that she had today to rest. Other than her morning work out, she planned to do absolutely nothing for once in her hectic life.
Almost right on cue with her thoughts, her phone started blaring Fall Out Boy’s “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark.”Ironic, she thought as she picked up her phone to see the blocked number on her caller I.D. It was 9 A.M. sharp, just like every other day for the last two weeks. “What do you want?” she asked, just barely keeping her temper in check.
“I know what you did, Jordan,” came the response. The voice was clearly being manipulated by some phone app or other such device. Again, just the same as every other day.
“Who are you?” She was starting to lose it, the grip that she had on her anger finally beginning to slip after so long.
“I know what you did.” The response was followed by a laugh that sent chills down her spine before the call was disconnected.
Fourteen days. Fourteen calls. Nothing ever changed. The person on the other end always said the same thing. Jordan sighed, wondering what this was all leading up to.
Still, she wondered what the anonymous caller could be referring to. She’d screwed up many times over the years and she was certainly no role model. With one last glance at the waves on the horizon and one last, deep breath, Jordan stood and brushed herself off. A hot cup of tea and a good book sounded amazing.
She stumbled as she moved to leave, a sharp pain shooting through her side and she was immediately pulled into the past.
“Bitch,” he growled at her.
Her face exploded from the fist that met her cheekbone. She fell to the floor, cowering as he hovered, slinging profanities and insults. The light glinted off of something and caught her attention. She heard it more than she felt it, a slight pop of resistance and wet slice. Her body was on fire, a new life ended before it could begin.
Time had no meaning as she faded in and out of consciousness. It could have been minutes or days before she heard movement and forced herself to focus on the anguished cry that sounded through the room.
“Daddy,” she whispered before she gave in and let the darkness completely envelop her.
Even with the pain, it didn’t take long for her to jog the four blocks back to her house. When she got there, though, something felt off. Roxy, her always attentive Pitt Bull/Boxer mix wasn’t barking at the door as usual and the blinds that covered the window to the right of the front door – her bedroom window – were askew. Stopping at the steps to her front porch, her hands found her hips as she calmed her breathing. Her observant eyes scanned over the immediate area and she felt herself tensing even more. The flowers at the very edge of her garden appeared to have been trampled. The sun shining on her front door highlighted scratches on the lockset that hadn’t been there before, and the doorjamb seemed more abused than usual.
Jordan cautiously made her way up the steps and tested the door knob.Unlocked. She briefly closed her eyes, steeling herself for what she was about to walk into. She slowly opened the door and stepped inside to see Roxy laying on the kitchen floor, gnawing happily on a giant rawhide. “Hey, sweet girl,” Jordan said, her voice barely above a whisper as she caught a slight movement out of the corner of her eye. “Okay,” she said, completely fed up, “why don’t you stop hiding in the shadows and show your face?”
“Well, if it isn’t the prodigal daughter returned,” a slightly nasal, but definitely feminine voice said. “Is daddy’s little girl finally ready to live up to the lies she’s told?”
“Winnie,” Jordan said, turning to face her ex boyfriend’s younger sister. She barely had time to register the scream of outrage as Winnie came flying at her. Jordan side-stepped her and tripped her. Looking down on Winnie’s shocked face, Jordan sadly said, “You tell me this is a lie.” She pulled her shirt up slightly to reveal the six-inch scar on her hip. “Josiah’s in jail for a reason. Now I want you to leave me alone and move on with your life. You can start by getting out of my house and never calling me again!”
|
Family
Tim T.K.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up!” The screaming of the Staff Sergeant moves down the line, every non-commissioned officer repeating the command.
My eyes fly open. I leap to my feet, rifle in hand, and scan the horizon beyond the trench. Marines scatter throughout the tunnel network. One of my brothers in arms shoves me into the sand wall as he sprints out of a makeshift command bunker.
“Masks on!” He shouts the command as he runs down the line. “Ali Baba inbound! Masks on!” The runner jumps from trench to trench spreading the not so good word. He makes his way to the farthest tunnel where the engineers are rigging an old Iraqi weapon’s cache to blow.
I reach into my kit and pull out a gas mask. With trained hands I swipe my glasses off of my face and affix the mask to my head.
I check the two marines of my fire team. Two fresh privates who had only recently completed infantry training. They are both struggling to fasten the straps on their masks. The thunder of exploding mortar shells echoes from the far end of the trenches. One of my men secures his mask as the horizon is filled with rolling yellow clouds. The artillery must have detonated the old Iraqi mustard gas. God rest those engineers.
“Lance Corporal, I think my mask is broken, sir.” One of the rifleman in my fire team rushes to me. He hands over his gas mask.
I inspect the mask, as the mortar shells encroach upon our position. I try to pull the straps loose to inspect them. The clamps have been warped beyond repair. I toss his equipment to the ground and reach around to remove the helmet securing my mask
“Don’t, sir. You’ll—”
“Shut up. You’re mine to command. You’re mine to protect.” Before I can undo the first strap, a concussive force sends me flying into the wall of a trench. Yellow fog fills the trench and rolls over me. The shrieking of the private suppresses the ringing in my eyes.
****
I awake to the sound of someone screaming. It was only me.
“What was that,” my wife asks.
I sit up and look at her. She is pulling herself out from under her covers, her facial features drawn wide.
“It happened again, didn’t it?” Her expression fades and she tucks her lips.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You can’t keep doing this to yourself. Kuwait was over twenty years ago.”
“Not to me.”
She huffs and leaves the bed, then walks over to her vanity. “Look, I know this has been hard on you.” She opens a drawer and shuffles through the collection of prescriptions. “But you need to come realize that you’re home. I’m right here, and your son goes to school in the city. Your family is here. You are here, not Kuwait.”
“I left my brothers there. It’s just hard saying goodbye.”
“I understand it’s a brotherhood. I get that, but we’re your family now.” She looks back at me. “Well, take another one of your sleeping aids for now.”
“I don’t think I want to sleep. I think I’ll go for a walk. Don’t worry about me. Go back to bed. I’ll only be a few hours.” I put on some simple clothing and kiss my wife before leaving.
The bar is only a few blocks from my wife’s apartment. The walk to my barstool has become fixed in muscle memory. A marine at the the far end of the bar looks up when I enter. A smile finds its way onto his dark face.
“Hey, devil. What’s the good word?” he asks.
“Nothing new tonight, marine. Just need some sleeping aids.” He nods at me as I take my seat at the bar.
“What will it be, brother,” the barkeeper asks.
“The usual,” is my response.
“You’re usually here until sunrise. If this keeps up, I’ll have to find a bed for you, grunt.”
I look up at the chuckling barkeeper. He is a big man with a friendly face, despite the scars he’s earned. I nod at him. “The usual.”
|
kindness
Janet Kuypers
haiku 2/17/14
they almost killed me
because I saved lives. That’s what
I get for kindness
|
|
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.
|
Gift from God
Nathaniel Sverlow
Eli was quiet on the ride home from school. His mother tried to start up a conversation, complaining about poor weather and the slow moving cars in front of her, but he ignored her and turned away to watch the rain outside his window.
One block away, Eli could make out his father’s CRV in the driveway. It looked scary in the rain, bloated and grey, like a dead body. His mother pulled up alongside it.
Eli followed her inside. She helped him shimmy out of his jacket and placed it on a hangar by the door. Then she knelt down and kissed him on the top of his head.
“My boy. My beautiful boy. What a gift from God you are.”
She put a hand through his hair. It was still wet.
“Why don’t you run to your room real quick and dry your hair. I don’t want you catching a cold.” She kissed him again. “When you’re done, come meet your father and I in the living room. I’m sure he’ll want to know what happened today.”
Eli frowned.
“You’re not in trouble.” she said.
He looked at the floor.
“Well then, get a move on. You don’t want to keep him waiting.”
Eli followed the foyer into the living room. The hallway that led to his room was a quick left turn, but he could not get there without first noticing his father lying on the couch along the far wall. He had already changed from his work clothes into sweatpants and a sweatshirt, and there was an open bottle of wine and a full glass on the coffee table. The family bible, a thick leather-bound book with gold gilt-edged pages, was opened and propped up on his belly. Eli took the opportunity to slip into the hallway without saying hello.
Eli set his pack by his desk. He dried his hair with a towel then sat at the edge of his bed. He thought about what had happened. He thought about the ball, the rain, the blood, the principal with his twisted, screaming face. He wondered how he would tell his father. It didn’t matter whether it was good news or bad news, his father’s sharp eyes and booming voice easily overpowered him, reducing him from a young man of fourteen to a sniveling, helpless child. Eli knew of only one person stronger than his father, and so he knelt beside his bed to pray.
There was a knock on the door. It was his mother.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sweety. I didn’t know you were praying. Just... well, hurry it along if you can. Your father’s getting impatient.”
Eli nodded. She smiled and backed out of the doorway, closing the door behind her.
The prayer that followed was quick and clumsy and lacked all conviction in the shadow of his father’s impatience. He wasn’t sure whether to ask for forgiveness – though his mother had said he did nothing wrong – or a silver tongue, armed with eloquent, melodic speech and impeccable enunciation. In broken stutters, he instead asked for presence, for divine companionship. He implored the creator of all things, the father of all fathers, to be with him as he said what needed to be said. It was all he could think of.
The living room was darker than before. There was a small lamp lit in the corner where his father had been reading, but most of the light came from the window on the far wall. And, the light had a dead, grey color that made his parents appear as backlit statues looking down upon him. His father stood by the far couch with his mother. He was handing her a glass of wine that looked thick and oily in the low light.
“There you are.” his father said. “Your mother tells me you had a rough day in school.”
Eli stood on the other side of the coffee table. He looked up at his father, such a scary statue with large shadows for eyes and bright, shining teeth.
“I got in a fight.” he said.
“With who?”
“With Devon.”
“Who? Speak up.”
“Devon.”
“Who’s Devon?”
“A boy in my class.”
“It’s Ms. Morehead’s boy.” his mother said.
“Ms. Morehead?”
“You know,” she said, “the skinny blond at the last PTA meeting. The one with all those tattoos.”
“Ah, that’s right.”
They sat down together.
“So you had it out with Ms. Morehead’s kid?”
“Yes, sir.”
His father sat back with his glass of wine. Eli could see his eyes as they fixated on him. They were more terrifying than ever.
“Well, boy, start at the beginning. And, don’t you lie to me. I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“Well, you see...” Eli’s legs began to shake. His words felt as though they had stuck to the roof of his mouth. He thought of the presence he had asked for, the creator of all things, the father of fathers to stand with him. In that moment, he felt nothing of the sort, only loneliness, horrible, inescapable loneliness.
“OUT WITH IT!” his father said.
Eli clenched his stomach to force the words out.
“Y-You see, we were playing basketball, my friends and I, and it started to rain. Not enough to go inside, but enough to make the ball wet and slippery. And, I was doing real good up until then, but I couldn’t get a firm grip, and Andy blocked my shot, and the ball bounced over to the picnic tables where Devon was sitting. We asked him to throw it back, but he got up and kicked it over the fence.”
“And so, you jumped him?” his father sighed.
“No, sir. Andy got real close though and called him a son of an H.”
“What’s an H?”
Eli looked at his mother. Her legs had been pulled up underneath her, and her wine was held at arm’s length along the back of the couch.
“YOU LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU!”
“Well, sir, you see, an H, well, an H is a... it’s a whore, sir.”
His father turned to his mother.
“Can you believe the mouth on that boy? I don’t know why we let Eli hang out with that little hellion.”
She shrugged. “He was always so polite to me.” she said.
“Go on then,” he said to Eli, “what trouble did Andy get you into this time?”
“I tried to get him to stop, I swear. But he kept going. Said Devon’s mother was so skinny she’d have to run around in the rain to get wet. Then Devon jumped up and said Andy was the stupidest, most ugly person that ever walked the earth, and that he wished there really was a hell for him to go to.”
His father shook his head.
“I keep trying to tell you, but you don’t listen, you never listen. You keep putting yourself in these positions... You can’t think but one step in front of you...”
“That’s when I saw it, sir.”
“Saw what?”
“The earring, sir.”
“What earring? What are you talking about?”
“Devon. He was wearing an earring on his right ear.”
“An earring?”
“That’s when I asked if he was queer.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, sir, he- he actually blew me a kiss. Then he says, he says, ‘I always thought your dad looked cute in blue jeans.’”
“He said that?”
“Yes, sir. And, he grabbed himself after that. Between the legs.”
“I always knew that boy was queer.” his mother said.
“Enough. Let him finish.” his father said. “Then what happened, boy?”
“Then I ran at him and he took off. The other guys followed us. I chased him behind the gym. Some of the guys had gone around the other way, and, with the fence right there, we had him cornered. But, I... I didn’t know what to do. The guys kept cheering, ‘Do it! Do it!’ They’d say it over and over again. Someone even pushed me into the circle. But I was nervous and shaky and didn’t know what to do. Then it starts coming down really hard, and we’re all getting wet, and Devon says to me, he says ‘We’d better go inside before we get in trouble.’ That’s when I clocked him. I got him right in the face.”
His father slid to the edge of his seat. The darkness covered his eyes once again, but his teeth were as bright as ever. He set his wine glass on the coffee table. Some spilled.
“What kind of punch was it? Like this?” he said, throwing a jab.
“No. Like this.”
“Ah. That’s called a hook, son. A right hook. It’s one hell of a stinger.”
“It knocked him down anyway.”
“Where’d you tap him? The jaw?”
“The nose.”
“The nose? Holy hell! What a shot!”
“I jumped on top of him after that. I kept swinging. There was blood. There was so much blood. And, it filled the little rain puddles and the cracks on the sidewalk. He had his hands up the whole time. He begged me to stop, but I didn’t stop. When Mrs. Dotemore found us, she pulled me off by the wrist and took me to the principal’s office. She said I was an animal who needed to be locked up. She said I should be expelled.”
“Don’t you worry, honey. They can’t expel you for that.” his mother said.
“But Mrs. Dotemore... she said...”
“Your mother’s right.” his father said. “We have laws against that kind of discrimination.”
Eli turned away. He looked at the window with the dead grey light coming through. He could hear the rain in the distance, but only slightly over the sound of his heartbeat.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, you know? Maybe I am an animal.” he said.
“You did the right thing, honey.” his mother said.
“It doesn’t feel like the right thing.” he said.
“It’s not easy standing up for what you believe in.” she said.
“What do I believe in?”
Eli’s father leaned over the coffee table and found the family Bible. He opened it and flipped the bookmark ribbon back over the binding.
“Come here, son.”
When Eli sat beside him, he pointed to a verse.
“You want to know what you believe in? Go ahead and read it. Right there.”
He handed the Bible to Eli. The way it sat in his lap, the passage caught the light from the window. The passage was Leviticus 20:13. Eli read it aloud.
“If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
Eli looked up at his father. He was smiling.
“I’m proud of you, son.” he said. “God’s proud of you.”
“It says to put him to death. I didn’t...”
“It’s a spiritual death. You killed his spirit. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, the spirit’s more important than anything physical, isn’t it? To a fag. To anybody.”
“Yes, sir.”
When the bottle was empty, Eli’s mother made dinner, and they all sat at the table and ate together. The father made Eli say grace. He closed his eyes, again thinking of the presence he had asked for, the Creator of all things, the Father of all fathers by his side. But, as before, he felt nothing. There was only the loneliness, the horrible, inescapable loneliness. He said the prayer anyway, and it was a good prayer, giving thanks for the food and for family, blessing friends and extended relatives, praying for the safety of others, and finally, asking for Devon to be forgiven his sin. At first, Eli had misspoken and asked to be forgiven himself, but he felt his father’s eyes upon him and quickly corrected what was said. Still, he spoke as if he was talking about himself, as if his name had been Devon all along, and it had been him left broken and bleeding in the rain. By the end of the prayer, Eli was crying. He didn’t know why. His mother put her arm around him, kissed him. His father waited for him to finish before taking the first bite.
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Black Friday
Phil Temples
“Consumerism has a religious day called Black Friday.” —Jarod Kintz
I suppose you could ultimately blame Gabby Chatster. Or the Shopper’s World Club associates who failed to stock enough Gabbys.
It all started that fateful Black Friday morning in the Shopper’s World Club store in West Buckeye, Texas when little Suzie, and her mother and father in tow, rushed over to retrieve the last remaining box containing a Gabby Chatster doll. Gabby Chatster was the hottest new girl’s toy. “It chats, dances, and plays with all her accessories” according to the label on the box. Why, you could even tap the yellow hearts on her glasses and Gabby would talk to you and let you know what you were thinking! Now what little girl wouldn’t lust after something as awesomely cool as a Gabby Chatster? It wasn’t surprising then: of the dozens of boxes of Gabbys stocked on the shelves the night before, only one remained.
Suzie knocked over a little boy holding a Skylanders SuperChargers Starter Pack in her rush to acquire the remaining Chatster, but another little girl named Betty Jo arrived from the opposite direction of the isle and also put her hands on the box. It was a dead heat. The two struggled to solidify their purchases on the box. A fierce tug of war ensued.
“LET GO!” cried Suzie. “YOU let go!” Betty Jo retorted.
“I saw it first!”
“No you didn’t. It’s mine!”
“Hey, hey! Stop this!” commanded Suzie’s father, Raymond, to the two girls. A moment later, Betty Jo’s father arrived, along with his wife and their two sons.
“Hey Bud, your little girl took this doll from my Betty Jo.”
“Clearly, you’re mistaken. My little Suzie got to it first. I was watching them.”
“Oh, yeah? You gonna lie like that in front of my little girl?”
“Mister, I don’t believe I like your tone.”
“Carl, I think we should ...”
“Back off, Deloris! This man is gonna apologize to our little girl here.”
Carl unzipped his jacket down to his waist, revealing a concealed pistol in a holster.
[Shopper’s World Club store policy on firearms: “If a Shopper’s World Club customer has been awarded a concealed handgun license by the state government, Shopper’s World Club will follow the direction of the state. However, if at anytime while on Shopper’s World Club property, that customer’s concealed weapon becomes visible to Shopper’s World Club associates or customers, Shopper’s World Club reserves the right to ask the customer to either reposition the weapon so that it will not be visible, to remove the weapon completely or to leave Shopper’s World Club property...]
At the sight of the gun, Raymond’s wife, Patty, panicked.
“GUN!” she shouted.
The crowd in the vicinity started pushing and shoving. They immediately dispersed. They headed for Electronics. They headed for Sporting Goods. They headed for Frozen Foods. Any department but Toys. One woman in retreat could be heard commenting about “a terrorist.”
A moment later, while the two families were still verbally sparring, three men rushed up from Auto Accessories. All were brandishing firearms.
“Muslims? Where?” one asked, excitedly.
“Whoa! Whoa!”
Carl started to explain, but before he could finish, an obese African American woman came running out from behind a tall pile of K’NEX Super Nova Blast Roller Coaster Building Set boxes and charged at one of the new arrivals. She dealt the man a fierce blow to the back, causing him to tumble into the display case. His finger had been on the trigger. As he went down, he inadvertently squeezed off a round. Fortunately, the bullet missed hitting anyone in the crowded store. However, it did strike two ten-pound fire extinguishers positioned high up on a storage rack at the end of the store.
More shots rang out. Someone pulled the fire alarm, adding to the pandemonium.
The sound was deafening. The ensuing clouds of propellant spread quickly. Mass panic ensued. As a result, hundreds of shoppers stampeded the front door. Before days end, three people would be trampled to death, and over two-dozen shoppers would be seriously injured. Shoppers would abscond with tens of thousands of dollars in stolen merchandise.
“Security. Execute Plan Jehovah. I repeat, Plan Jehovah!” the store manager shouted into his walkie-talkie. The contingency plan called for store associates with firearms training to report to Sporting Goods where they would be issued a weapon. Others were asked to shelter in place. Authorities were alerted to a mass shooting incident with possible hostages and fatalities.
“I’ll be damned if those ISIS sons of bitches are gonna come into MY store and terrorize MY customers,” the manager muttered. The man calmly walked through the haze to his office to retrieve his Remington Model 870 pumping shotgun.
In Women’s Fashions, two young white men pummeled a frail-looking bearded Sikh man wearing a large turban. They were soon joined by an African American youth. “Fuckin’ a!” shouted one of the attackers. They smiled and rapped fists with the young black man, as he joined the two in assaulting the old man. “Ragheads go home!”
In the confusion and chaos, little Suzie was separated from her mother and father, but she managed to escape unharmed with the Gabby Chatster box. A determined Suzie crawled on all fours towards the back of the store. “I’ll save you, Gabby,” she said tenderly to the doll. Suzie was nearly stepped on numerous times by shoppers-turned-looters, darting to and fro, their hands filled with merchandise. On this exceptionally turbulent Black Friday, there were indeed “rock bottom” prices to be had.
Suzie arrived at one of the emergency exits, where folks were constantly stopping to pick up boxes that they had dropped in their attempted getaway because they didn’t fit easily through the door. The logjam caused a surly crowd to begin to form. Suzie dropped to all fours and was readying herself to crawl underneath a fat woman with a microwave oven, when an arm reached out and grabbed her by the ankle. She turned and faced arm’s owner. It belonged to little Betty Jo.
“Hey, let go of me...”
BLAM!
The little fist hit her squarely in the face. Then the lights went out.
To the victor go the spoils.
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Following in My Father’s Footsteps
Raymond Manuel Aguirre
Getting shot in the head must be pretty bad.
But nothing is worse than sitting in front of the TV
for hours, for days, for months and years
like my father did,
where every part of him disintegrated
amidst the intricate plots of crime shows,
amidst the well-conducted overtures of a silver screen lover,
amidst the flames and decapitation of a world on the brink of apocalypse.
Every night, he sat in the couch, my father,
back when he didn’t work.
When nobody gave him a chance to work.
When his English was a badly tuned guitar.
When we needed to learn American
through our hapless Filipino eyes.
In front of the TV, he lost himself in its narratives
then retired at night in his couch without a word.
No words spoken to me nor or to my mother.
Just thoughts, perhaps, that kept getting louder and louder
which not even the TV’s volume could suppress.
He probably thought, as time progressed,
he had all the time, he could make a fortune selling it,
how did he have so much of it when he never asked?
My father never seemed to mind what he watched,
so long as he was watching something.
I, in turn, watched him. The TV was his America.
Watch how we do it, Hollywood said.
We can do it, Obama said.
BMW made us possible to do it, ESPN said.
I keep doing it, Bill Murray said.
Aliens keep coming back to do it, Optimus Prime said.
All this time, my father was the bystander
watching people do shit. Getting things done.
Watching TV was the only thing he could get done anymore.
And then one night, he began writhing in pain.
His asshole, he said, was in pain.
Now, he could not do anything. Not even watch TV.
But at least he had Mom’s insurance
to know that he had cancer.
And days after his surgery, while nursing a dying will to live at the hospital
the TV in the living room was quiet.
I was alone, sitting in the dark, in the same couch
that held my father for a long time.
I turned on the TV, flipped through its channels,
and lost myself the entire night on TNT.
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The Prince and the Ghost
Allan Onik
The witch finished drawing the pentagrams on the floor and blew out the candles. When she left the throne room the prince’s guards followed directly behind her. On the throne Hassib eyed the purple, glowing orb on his scepter. The ghost grew out of the pentagram and formed a cold void that bent the light around it.
“Your hag is powerful,” the spirit said, “to draw from my realm.”
The prince smirked. “The Christians wanted to burn her some time ago. I took her under my wing. In exchange for protection she has been invaluable.”
“Tell me, your majesty, how may I be of service?”
The orb on the scepter was now pulsing and flashing. Tendrils of energy and bolts shot through its’ curves. A drop of sweat dropped down Hassib’s brow. The prince spoke. “My father is lying on his deathbed. In no longer than a few weeks, I will be king of this vast land—stretching from the wispy mountains in the east to the dreary marshes in the west. I will have more power than any soul in this region of the world. I will want for nothing, and will answer to no one. Those who defy me will be struck down, and those who aid me will be given all they could desire.
But some day my bones will thin, and my flesh will sag. The best doctors in the land will try to make me comfortable, and the best mystics will try to bind my soul to my body. But at some point I will have to part from it. I have been to all the conjurors, sorcerers, witches, psychics, and oracles in the land—and I haven’t found the answer to what I seek. Tell me, ghost, what will happen to my soul when I die? Will I visit The Creator, to come back as a falcon or a beggar?”
The room dimmed and the orb’s pulsation increased voracity. “I do not walk in His circles. There are many places for one to go once the body has been dropped. To whisper in His ear one must have the holiest of constitutions, dear prince.”
Hassib began to tremble. “Will I not get to live with Him?”
“Surely not.”
The prince cringed. “Why is this?”
“Your witch has a black heart. For a small fortune your enemies in the southern isles have made an arrangement for your death.”
The spirit surged and the orb burst and shattered. A pulse of purple light flashed through the throne room. The ghost vanished and the prince rolled off his throne, gasping his last breath.
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Private Lives III
the elevated train, Chicago, Illinois
Janet Kuypers
1994
The yuppies pile on the cars in their morning commute. It’s amazing to think that just hours before now these cars were littered, scattered with an occasional bum, or a gang member, a drunk. Just a few hours before this any one of these people would be too afraid to step on this train.
I see two women step on to the car, each wearing full-length fur coats. Now they have to cram into this full car with all these wool coats, I’ll bet they’re furious. It would be so easy to spill my coffee on them. I’ll bet they don’t even know what the animals they killed for this looked like. How many animals would that be? Twelve? Fifteen? Oh, no matter, that’s what they’re there for, just like this train, serving its function, taking me where I want to go.
Next stop. More yuppies pile on to the train. Most stand without a rail to hold. I hear one yuppie girl say to her lover, “we’re L-surfing,” right before the train took a turn. All the yuppie suits trying to keep balance, trying not to fall.
I hear a yuppie boy say, “It’s just like my living room, it’s so spacious.” You’re the life of the party, friend. You’re in your suit, you’ll go places.
I read a sign above my head that says, “Crime Stoppers pays up to $1,000 for anonymous crime tips.”
All the signs above our heads are for graffiti hot lines, pregnancy clinics, drug rehab centers. Signs telling people not to carry guns.
I remember afternoons on the train when homeless men would walk from car to car through the train, trying to sell a newspaper to the people commuting home.
In a few hours, when the yuppies are safe in their homes, with their children safe tucked into their beds, the homeless man will hide home too.
One of the women with the fur steps off the train.
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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.
INTERNET BONUS ARTICLE
VP Race Gets Short Shrift
Rick Blum
Now that the race to pick the presidential candidates appears nearly over, it should be time for Hillary and The Donald to start considering a running mate. Unfortunately, the unwillingness of Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders to throw in the towel will keep their attention focused on accumulating delegates instead of vetting potential VPs.
Since most political pundits tell us it’s necessary to balance the ticket to gain widest appeal – think history-making Obama and very white Joe Biden – each candidate should be looking for someone who not only brings complementary traits to the table, but also is willing to play second fiddle with a smile. (Dick Cheney being the exception that proves the rule.)
So what might the ideal VP candidate look like?
First of all, he would have to be a he. Donald would just find it much too difficult a misogynist needle to thread with a female, running mate. And Hillary hasn’t got the moxie to step out of her poll-balanced box to go all girl, despite statements to the contrary from her campaign.
Second, the VP candidate would have to be younger than the ticket standard-bearers, both of whom are on the precipice of seventy. Ironically, Bernie Sanders, would have been his own ticket balancer, he being the darling of the under-35 set.
Third, he will need to bolster their chances of prevailing in a crucial swing state, which rules out some more creative choices such as NewYork-bredDonald Jr., or one of the Castro brothers – that being HUD Secretary Julian and Representative Joaquin of Texas, not Raul and Fidel.
Finally, the ideal candidate needs to be able to connect with a key voting demographic not currently leaning toward the head of the ticket. Think blue-collar, white males for Hillary, and people who actually think for The Donald.
In normal times, finding the ideal VP would be a daunting challenge for both candidates. In the current circus of a campaign, it is nearly impossible. Which is why I’m offering myself to both front runners.
How can I achieve this seemingly impossible task of being the perfect VP candidate for both sides? Just take a look at my qualifications and see if you don’t agree.
1. First of all, I exude a typical male persona. I do admit to occasional bouts of sentimentality, but never in public.
2. I am younger than both Donald and Hillary (a youthful 67) and can shout What we need is a political revolution! until the cows come home. The millennials eat up that line like it’s Twitter candy.
3. While I currently reside in solidly blue Massachusetts, I have lived in both Florida and New Mexico, enabling me to claim roots in both a southern, swing state and Latino strongholds.
4. Speaking of appealing to Latinos, I’m married to a woman with a distinctly Hispanic maiden name. Hopefully, the op-researchers won’t discover that her paternal grandparents emigrated directly from Spain to the U.S., never stepping beyond our southern border.
5. I’m not Hispanic myself, but I am a Jew. I can bring in the pro-Israel stalwarts, as well as attract the Bernie crowd by channeling my immigrant grandfather’s accent, which is nearly indistinguishable from his Brooklynese.
6. Hillary desperately needs to connect with blue-collar, white males, and my bona fides here are stellar. I’m a former member of the Pulp, Sulphur and Dye Workers union, as well as one-time landscaper and painting contractor. Meanwhile, I can connect with the leftist, egghead crowd for Donald by touting my BA in psychology, which really came in handy during my four-year stint tending bar.
7. Not only did I tend a bar, I owned one. Thus, I can speak eloquently (or not, depending on the political leanings of the audience) about the struggle of small businessmen, who have been squeezed dry by rising taxes and healthcare costs.
8. Topping it all off, I’m in a wheelchair. No other name being rumored for the post could wrap up the much-ignored disability crowd as surely as I could. |
So there you have it. I strike all the right notes to harmonize with both Hillary’s and Donald’s positions. All they have to do is pick up the phone and say, Rick, I need you, and I’ll swing into action. Only one small problem though, I haven’t been enrolled in either party for decades, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to join one now. Look where that’s gotten Bernie.
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