The Move
by Carolyn Abram
Walter remembered the previous couple as round and undulating—the furniture stuffed to the brim and mattresses crowning upwards. This time, everything was square. The couch and chairs were in cubic sections, laid out at perfect right angles to each other. Men streamed in and out of the entrance, carrying boxes, corners, hard flat screens.
Two of the men struggled to turn a shelving unit through the narrow entryway without puncturing the wall. Walter tried to recall the limitations of physicality. A time when he’d had form and stood in doorways the way these men did, leaving voids of space all around them. Nothing came back. A wind rippled across the threshold; he fled to his favorite crack in the ceiling. Walter didn’t like open doorways, open windows, open invitations to come inside when all he wanted was to keep everyone out and himself in.
“Michelle,” the man called, “the movers want to know where the bookshelves go.”
Michelle bounded into the room, “Small ones in the bedroom, tall ones in the living room,” she looked directly at the mover and nodded at him until he nodded back.
Josh and Mish, a constant racket of shushing noises. They wore shoes that left acrid scuffs in the hallways, shed layers of clothing as the day progressed, exposing their hard skin. Even their bodies seemed less rotund, more sleek and angular. How faddish, Walter thought. He no longer remembered the fads of his time living in the house. He’d long ago stopped counting seasons or couples. They gritted their teeth and heaved the sticky windowpanes open; turned the hot water spigot to fill their buckets; swept and vacuumed and mopped and polished.
Walter fretted. Walter panicked. Walter hid in the broken doorbell in the attic. Its tinny echo hid the screams of the layers of dust being sucked up, the strata of grime being squeaked off the windows, the tarnish and dirt being ferreted out, exiled. I’ll remember you, Walter thought, people are only temporary.
Walter was exploring the cotton candy pourousness of the insulation beneath the floorboards in the attic. The fiberglass was oddly unyielding—like being inside a salt crystal. Hollow reverberations jarred him out of his miniature cathedral. He had no choice but to go observe.
Sex, Walter remembered, as the sheets hung over their naked bodies, rippling in concert with the smacks of skin. Walter no longer felt even a phantom pang of flesh, just annoyance at the inevitable crescendo of noise and distress. The window was open and a warm breeze wafted menacingly through the room. A fallen strand of hair tumbled across the expanse. The feet of the bed chiseled, thrust by thrust, into the floor beneath. Indelible ink on someone else’s belongings.
The house was being reassembled under their rule. Kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom, office. One room left vacant. The room was the one where the pockmarks of an overeager hammer had been patched but then sank into the wall. Even layers of paint couldn’t hide the slight ridges. Walter loved pushing against these canyons, feeling their citrus catch. There was also the dust-dried postage stamp that had slid in between the shelf and the wall in the closet. The room was left to Walter, it seemed. Still, it was vacuumed top to bottom, and empty boxes were left flattened in one of its corners like heavy flags.
Walter considered his options. He watched, followed, learned the treads of their shoes and the folds of their jackets. He spread himself over the leftover imprint of a duck-shaped appliqué in the bathtub. Michelle ran the water and for a moment Walter was in heaven: heat. Heat was a rarity. Rather, the contrast was a rarity. When it was summer it seemed it had always been summer and the whole house swelled and suffocated. When it was winter it had always been winter and the house shivered and tucked itself tighter. The cool tub overwhelmed by the hot water was brand new and familiar at the same time.
“Oh wow,” Michelle said. Walter wondered how she was talking to him, but then she turned her head and called out the door, “Josh, get in here.”
She pointed as soon as he came in, “Do you see that?”
He shook his head.
“There’s like, what are those things called, it’s a rubber ducky, you know, so you don’t slip in the tub. Do you see the outline?” she pointed again.
Josh turned his head, hair so sharp and close-cut it didn’t even change direction. He squinted, “I guess so.”
“Isn’t that funny? I guess someone must have scraped off the decal but the glue stayed.”
“Yeah,” he nodded gravely.
Michelle watched him for another few seconds, but Josh’s face didn’t transform to mirror her elation.
“Okay, you can go. I have shared my discovery,” she waved him away.
Walter wanted to attach himself to the metal rivets on Josh’s pants. They looked smooth and intriguing. But when he followed Josh, he was usually forced to watch more destruction: the light fixtures replaced with stainless steel behemoths, layers of polyurethane and dirt stripped from the molding, dingy brass doorknobs discarded and the fibers of wood beneath them brushed and blown away.
Michelle poured some sort of soap into the tub; Walter felt the long-forgotten pressure of a sneeze. She took hold of a bristle-brush and began to scrub. She was trying to erase the evidence. She was trying to undo so much history. Walter hated her. He burrowed into the faucet, sensing the rust inside would not be there much longer. He embraced each droplet of water before it moved on to the sloshing beneath.
Michelle liked to lean against the doorjamb and stare into Walter’s room. This, he understood; doorjambs had an almost nutty flavor hidden in their layers of paint and right angles. He wondered if Michelle could taste it too. He felt the house expand and sigh, good naturedly, making space inside. This worried him.
He started simple, seeping himself into the floorboards and the water pipes, tugging and clanking and moaning in the evenings. The problem was volume. They were always listening to something. They talked and they sang and their screens talked and sang. At night, he tried to wait till they were nearly asleep, watching the disturbed rustles of blankets and covers. They thumped their pillows, rolled towards and away from one another.
“I’ve been sleeping terribly since we moved,” Michelle said at breakfast.
“It’s the stress,” Josh said, “Plus this house sounds like it’s falling apart.”
“House settling,” she took a sip of her coffee and looked at the walls around her.
“Maybe we have rats,” Josh looked down at the table, at the words on his shiny tablet.
“Oh that doesn’t help.”
In the exploration of the peculiar tackiness of the traps Josh laid out, almost electric in their bite, Walter was sure he’d lost several days of haunting. When he returned to their bedroom, they had plugged something into the wall. It was emitting a sort of noise. Ocean, Walter remembered, the word building and crashing like the noise of the thing itself. He lost entire nights ebbing with it, thinking about a wide expanse of sea. Salt. Stinging. Sunburn. Something wonderful had happened to him there, he was sure.
Every morning, when they shut it off, Walter would worry he’d somehow accidentally left the house. He’d rush to rediscover all of his favorite spots, cobwebs in unreachable corners, his attic doorbell, the postage stamp and dent in the wall, the strand of spider silk hanging from the ceiling of the closet in his room. These were his benchmarks. When they were gone, he would have lost.
Walter hid in the outlet in the bedroom. The window was open; even the screen had been removed and this made Walter nervous. Josh and another man—older, but with a similar face—hauled a large metal box into the hole, blocking the outside. Each of them glistened and grunted. Josh wiped the back of his arm against his brow. He steadied the box as the older man closed the window above it. He snapped something in against the sides of the window.
“Okay,” he said.
Josh released the box, stepped away as though it might catch him leaving.
“Plug ‘er in,” said the older man.
“My life is about to get exponentially better,” Josh said.
The prongs sunk their teeth into the space Walter was occupying. He felt a rush of dizziness as contact was made and a satisfying shock of electricity leapt out and snatched Josh’s hand.
He snapped his hand back, “Fuck,” he said.
“Old house, old wiring,” said the other man.
“Fucking fuck,” Josh muttered, “One more thing to worry about.”
He stood up and flicked the switch on the box. Walter felt the current pass over him, hum and shudder the box to life.
Cool air flowed out into the room. Josh stood directly in front of it, eyes closed, face relieved and slack.
“One thing at a time, son,” the man clapped Josh loudly on the back.
Walter hated the box and its duplicates throughout the house. Their growls reminded him of the word monster. It changed the quality of the air wherever it was. Only a few places were left unsullied.
When Michelle walked out of the shower one morning, the mirror was fogged. “GET OUT” was written across it, rivulets of water running off the edges of the letters.
“Very funny,” she snorted, shook her head, “I’m done, I’m done.” Then she raised her voice to call out, “Your turn.”
She held out a finger and drew and heart through the center of the mirror.
Hmmph, thought Walter. He ran himself across the grooves in the steam created by Michelle’s finger. It was comfortably smooth, with pulses of water droplets every now and then. Small consolation.
Joshua came into the room, towel around his waist. He surveyed the mirror, smiled, reached out and traced an arrow through the heart. He turned on the fan, shaking his head. The whir ate away all of it.
GO AWAY, the mirror said.
“Josh,” she called out, “if you have some problem with me taking such long showers could you at least talk to me about it, because passive aggressive notes are not helping.” She listened to the scuffling beyond the door, “Go away,” she mumbled to herself, “idiot,” she reached out and wiped the mirror clean with the side of her hand.
Josh opened the door, “What are you yelling about?” Steam swirled and Walter rode the eddy up into the ceiling.
She leaned close to the mirror and opened her eyes wide, pulled something out of her lashes, “I wasn’t yelling. The shower. I wasn’t even in there for that long.” She blinked a few times at herself.
“Who said you were?”
She turned towards him, pointed to the mirror, “You did. You left the notes.”
Josh furrowed his eyebrows, raised his voice a bit, “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“The mirror. Have you not even noticed my little messages back to you?”
“The hearts? I noticed. It was cute.”
“So why are you heckling me about the shower?”
“I’m not.” He rocked the door back and forth. The hinges squeaked and reverberated from shingles to foundations.
“So why the notes?”
“What notes?”
She stamped her foot, “You are impossible sometimes.”
His tone shifted, “You woke up on the wrong side of bed.”
“Fine,” she turned back towards the mirror, “Forget the whole thing.”
“I’m not going to leave with you all mad at me.”
Their voices echoed off the tiles, Walter remembered the word headache.
She shrugged.
“Mish,” Josh jiggled the doorknob, looked at her dripping reflection. His face softened.
She picked up a comb and attacked the ends of her hair. “Will you at least own up to the mirror?”
Josh held up both his hands, “I give up, okay?”
She sighed.
“Here,” Josh closed the door behind him as he stepped into the humid room. He took a bottle of shaving cream off the counter and sprayed it into a hand towel. He traced something across the full expanse of the mirror. Michelle kept combing. He cranked the shower back on.
Walter bounced in the puffs of steam that poured out of the showerhead. It emerged slowly, but with greater clarity than any of Walter’s messages.
MICHELLE = THE BEST, the mirror said.
Walter skated across the surface of the letters. The shaving cream clung so closely to the fabric of the glass, anything Walter wrote would pale by comparison.
Michelle smiled. Josh put his arms around her.
Walter submerged himself in the toilet tank, where he could hear nothing but the faintest trebles of their voices, soft and cooing. He always enjoyed the toilet tank; it brought back vague memories of swimming, of being submerged and new and bright. It had the added benefit, for whatever reason, of clogging the toilet, which wound up costing several hours in overtime for the plumber.
They were painting his room. The paint was yellow, it filled him with memories of salivation. The sun was streaming into the room and Josh and Michelle were blasting music and singing along at the top of their lungs. The sounds echoed and were absorbed by the walls.
Michelle wore a cloth cover over her mouth. A shame, she was becoming prettier, as though something about the house was softening her, like she was ripening. Peach, Walter remembered, soft and luscious and immersive.
Sometimes when Michelle was sleeping Walter poured himself around her face like a mask, feeling the smooth grooves of air hugging her nose, the slight tickle of her eyelashes, the rougher terrain of her lips.
The entire floor was covered in plastic spotted with yellow boot prints; Joshua kept stepping in the paint tray.
“I am some kind of klutz today,” he said, though Michelle seemed not to hear him over the music. He pushed his roller back and forth over the dent in the wall; the wet paint made it even more noticeable.
Walter trembled, sending small ripples across the paint tray. Moving things required focus and energy. His work was going unnoticed.
Michelle climbed up a stepladder to reach the awkward corner above the closet. The drifting pendulum of spider silk and the face on the postage stamp watched from the other side of the wall.
Josh spun a dial on the speakers and the noise softened, “Babe, you shouldn’t be on that top step, I think.”
“Don’t be silly. That’s just those crappy plastic ladders. This one will be fine.” She leaned and raised her heels to stand on her tiptoes. The far leg of the ladder copied this motion, rising slightly off the ground. If she leaned a little more, if Walter just added a little more torque, she would slip and fall. He hesitated; it seemed so drastic. Before he could recover and push on the lifting leg, Josh had put his painted shoe on the bottom step, weighting it.
“Jesus Mish, the whole thing was about to tip,” he snapped.
Michelle looked down and pulled her shoulders up to her ears.
“Okay, you don’t have to say it, just come down,”
Michelle rolled her eyes, drawled, “You were right. I should be more careful.”
She stepped down and Josh smoothed her hair, leaving yellow prints along her scalp. He kissed her forehead.
Vomit, Walter remembered. He wrapped himself around the strand of cobweb, waited.
He started slamming doors. If they were both home they would jump, turn and stare at each other, then burst out laughing. He tried to slam more, ones where the windows weren’t opened, where they couldn’tblame it on a draft. He knocked over picture frames, anything precarious. They fought about the piles of dishes—Josh left them by the bed, Michelle in the office—about the cheapness of the frames for their wedding photos.
“This house is not safe,” Michelle surveyed one day, “Too many corners.”
This made Walter optimistic. But then, just when he thought maybe he could turn them against the house and the house against them, they learned to shut doors as they moved between rooms. They bought doorstops. Walter vented his frustrations by clanking harder on the water pipes. The plumber came back; gooey layers of insulation were added, thick and deafening as honey.
Apparitions were difficult, and consuming. Required good timing. Walter felt certain he didn’t usually have to resort to this. He waited for the full moon, constructed himself as visible and ghoulish across the threshold of the bedroom. Joshua washed his face, turned out the light, walked out of the bathroom towards his room. Walter braced himself for a scream.
Joshua squinted at him and walked straight through.
Walter remembered what it felt like to knock a fork over his metal fillings. Remembered the twinge of knees scraped over hard red earth. Joshua paused, shivered, crossed into his room.
This was a mistake he tried not to replicate. Touching people overwhelmed him with sensations of pain. He would need to retreat, recover his strength. All the hard work of haunting would have to cease.
Joshua climbed into bed. Told Michelle that he thought his vision was getting worse. He could hardly see a thing once he took out his contacts. Michelle murmured something. There was the rustle of bed sheets, the bunching of their bodies in the center of the bed.
Josh said, “Jeez, I guess it’s really getting to be winter, glad you warmed up the bed for me,” The quilt rose and fell with their breathing.
Walter banished himself to the darkest corner of the basement, between the cold concrete wall and the hot water heater. As he curled around the curves of the water tank he thought briefly of Josh, folding himself around Michelle in the dark, then of the house, folding around all of them, containing them, keeping them safe.
Once he felt his strength returning, he made his rounds. The broken doorbell in the attic had been touched. It had been picked up and left on top of a new pile of boxes; Walter could taste the whorls of greasy fingerprints left on the chimes. His room had been filled with furniture. In its closet, the postage stamp looked at him mournfully. It had slipped slightly—Walter realized the closet had been painted too—and a corner was now visible beneath the shelf. The cobweb had been painted into the ceiling, the faintest scent of yeast accompanying the small bump it created. Walter was losing. He had maybe already lost. They were stronger than he’d anticipated, more mulish. The house seemed content. Beyond content—it was buzzing with life and energy. Not you too, Walter thought.
The sea sounds were gone. Walter fluttered in the draft streaming from the closed window. Something severe. Something to fix all of it. To get everything back to normal. If he waited any longer the house would forget him entirely.
Michelle’s hand rested next to her lips on the pillow. Walter coiled himself around it, felt the hard nails and their rough-hewn edges. The skin was dry; he could slide into the cracks without yet touching her. Maybe he could get her to understand that she was unwanted. He should have tipped the ladder when he had the chance. He wrapped the coil tighter, spinning through flesh.
She sat straight up, looked down at her hand. Walter felt woozy.
“Oh,” she cried out, doubling over.
Walter rushed to the outlet under the window to recover.
“Joshua,” she screamed.
They left immediately. They had even packed a suitcase.
Walter was rolling around in the pilot lights on the stove, enjoying the tiny rumble of flame when the lock clicked and the door fell open.
Walter sighed; he’d allowed himself to think maybe they had gone for good.
They carried something. They brought it to his room, laid it down in the miniature bed. Baby, Walter recalled suddenly. He molded himself to the dent in the wall, but couldn’t get a good view of it.
They left it alone for a little while in the afternoon. Walter hovered over its crib, trying to recall when he had last seen something of this type. None of the couples before this had had babies.
She opened her eyes, looked straight up at Walter. Walter felt like he had a head and a body and a face again, and like she could see all of it. She yawned and her curled fist leapt into the air, passing through Walter.
The same shattering hum, but different somehow. Words long obscured floated from him. Beauty. Innocence. Daughter.
“Oh,” Walter thought, “I had a family, once.”
She blinked rapidly, her mouth opened and a wail emanated from it. She had the same force as a vacuum cleaner, but in the other direction. Michelle rushed in, followed by Josh. “Shhh, shhh,” she said, scooping the baby into her arms and pressing her close, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
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Carolyn Abram welcomes your comments on The Move at ceabram[at]gmail.com.
photo by tim ebbs.
Living Record
by Amelia Whitcomb
I once heard someone on a radio program say that sound was “touch at a distance.” It made me think of the ritual of listening to a record, a ritual that is as much about touch and feeling as it is about what is heard. It is a sensual process far removed from the antiseptic scrolling of an iPod playlist.
There is a totemic idolatry involved in vinyl worship. The large, shiny black discs are captivating in their anachronism, possessing an unwieldiness that defies our techie zeal for the minuscule, earning collectors a degree of throwback, hipster cache. Gripping onto the taut cardboard square of the album or feeling the vinyl’s cool sheen gives a sense of ownership that escapes today’s era of ephemeral mp3’s. Sometimes the object itself becomes more valued than the music it contains: I’ve known a few record collectors who have purchased an album for the novelty of owning it rather than out of any love for the artist. The very process of listening to a record reinforces the fetishism, each step taking on the reverence and theatricality of a Japanese tea ceremony.
This ceremony begins with selection. Hands caress album covers in a musical séance, raising the spirits of memory. In one album, a boy and a girl lie tangled together on a bed of record jackets, clinging to each other to keep out the geographic distance that will soon divide them. Another contains the chill drizzle of a Vancouver morning, its grey melancholy brightened by colorful splashes of oil paint. A naked solo dance party erupts out of one, and ends with a sprained ankle and a lot of embarrassing explanation. A grandfather’s spontaneous off-key aria is lovingly tucked away in the folds of another, a dried flower pressed between liner notes.
Once the album has been selected, the record needs to be prepared for listening. The disc is pinched out of its crevice in the album jacket and extracted with care. If it’s a new album there is the added pleasure of peeling back its plastic wrap and undressing it with adolescent eagerness. If it’s an old record, the enjoyment comes from a fussy familiarity, eyes doting on vinyl skin in tender scrutiny of new scratches or imperfections, lips blowing dust gently out of grooves.
The record balances between thumbs and index fingers as it is placed on the turntable as an offering. Hooking the metal arm under a knuckle, the needle is craned over the spinning record and nestled into a groove. It’s important to be gentle but not hesitant. Too heavy or too cautious of a hand will cause it to skip, bump and scrape across the record’s surface, releasing a jarring jolt of discord. When the needle is gripped in revolution, the speakers fill with the crackling white noise anticipation of pre-song. Soon, a voice is scratched out from the shallow depths of the vinyl channel, coaxing out a croon or igniting an explosive fuse of noise depending on the album.
Records are finicky. Unlike a CD or mp3 playlist, which can be fast-forwarded, rewound, or played on endless repeat at the touch of a button or flip of a remote, the songs on a record have to be physically skipped by moving the turntable’s arm to the next musical groove. For an album to be heard in its entirety, it is necessary to flip it over by hand. This creates a symbiotic relationship between the album and its listener: in exchange for devoted attention and care, the record rewards its servant with music.
You can hear a record’s history. Time is embedded in its grooves like the rings of a tree. A brand new album has the crisp clarity of youth. As with any voice though, over time this freshness is lost, replaced with the gravelly timbre of age. You can easily tell a well-loved album from another: favored songs become overtaken by static, the pitted and worn surfaces causing them to skip or catch. Like a tattooer’s gun, the needle inscribes every listen onto the record, transforming, and degrading the sound little by little. This is what lies at the heart of the appeal of vinyl, an appeal that goes beyond simple nostalgia or antiquarianism. The appeal of listening to a record is in the recognition that the experience is very much a fleeting moment, and by participating in this moment you are slowly and incrementally destroying what you love simply through the act of loving it.
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Amelia Whitcomb welcomes your comments at a.luddite[at]gmail.com.
photo by kalleboo.
Where Are They Now?: The Lives of Rock Stars
by Kyle Hemmings
NO WAVE SCI-FI
Taylor Gritch and Betty DeMonica, members of the 90s grunge band, Rufus Puked Again. The two are married with one child. (B. NYC, 1956 and 1952, respectively.)
They live in a Connecticut townhouse with Caravaggio reproductions and a strange hum at night. (Behind the walls?) On weekends, they travel to NYC to record their long awaited reunion: The Angst of Trogg, a concept album about a teen age mutant with a spongy heart and other worldly sex drive. He dies in the arms of his girlfriend, an over dose of Red Lava, the newest club drug. His last words: Love me for what I can never become.
In Starbucks, they sign autographs and talk with college students who ask Taylor opinions about Hesse, The early Stones, the latest rumors about Iggy Pop. Betty is promoting her new line of chi chi dolls that can recite the lyrics to their songs in five languages. In a restaurant on Avenue B, he complains over a dish of sushi that he’s not getting enough, and this is zombifying his creativity. A two foot chi chi doll stands next to a bowl of avocado salad, flashing brown eyes staring at him. Betty sticks a chopstick through a mushroom and says Imagine if I pulled this from my vagina. He says he would like to live there, no need for shade. Turning his head, he now hears that strange hum again: the doll’s battery is running low. Your love, Trogg, is the shape of a beautiful freaky mushroom that grows under autistic glass, says the doll.
HUMBLE BIRD BEGINNINGS
Benny C. Simms, Levitt Howls of The Cold War Jerks, part of the first wave British invasion but never got significant A.M. airplay. Broke the charts with 1969’s The Nuclear Grouse Kit, and again with 1972’s Nothing Ends Well. (B. Liverpool, England, 1946, 1948, respectively).
Winter, 1963, holed up in a three room flat without hot water, or phone service. They piss out windows and laugh when they don’t miss the heads of working women. In stained undies, Benny hums Howlin’ Wolf’s “Ain’t Superstitious”. Levitt, smoking last night’s stub, comments on the two queers next door, rolling on the floor. Last week, he raped a girl from Bristol, but claimed it was the other way around. He never comes out on top is his defense. Because of a lack of female fan base at home, they give each other hand jobs at night, or hold each other in bed, imagining the skin of the other as softer. They draw crayon portraits of their parents on walls. They all have open mouths and deep beady eyes. A gig in Germany pays off. In three years, they hire a full-time songwriter, fire the bass player, a loose cannon who sells some badass speedballs and whose body is never found. At the Helsinki Freedom Is Love Festival of 1973, girls throw their underwear at the stage. But Benny’s gastric varices are killing him from the Hepatitis C, and Levitt’s been acting erratic from an undiagnosed Clap. Back in their suite, across flower-themed walls, their shadows mime intricate and sordid love stories.
WHITE ACID SUN
Little Eddie Gainsville A.K.A The Singing Pumpkin. Ex-frontman for the 60s/early 70s underground psychedelic band: They Hung Zorro, Didn’t They?. Compared in songwriting genius to Arthur Lee and Brian Wilson. Institutionalized several times with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, attributed to daily LSD intake. Was found sitting in a elevator stuck on the 13th floor, with Gainsville, singing the words to Norwegian Wood. Between hospitalizations came out with 1986’s critically acclaimed solo album titled Blindman’s Bluff, which featured Gainsville playing steel-string acoustic guitar, supposedly produced by Neil Young under an assumed name. Gainsville credited with coining the term “fribble,” from the title of an early 60’s hit—Don’t Fribble Me, Mama (as in don’t play me for a fool). As of 2002, Gainsville’s younger sister, Chastity Case, an opera singer, was granted custody of the homeless musician. (B. 1949– Selena, Texas.)
I trawp intaglio. Five tempos at a time. Cunnilingus with jeepsters. She said she was from a farm in Arkansas. You saw What? Wolves in the night sound like hollow bodied guitars. Twang. Then she sang me my own words to Don’t Fribble Me. She walked frizzy-haired naked out of the motel into the holy wafer of the sun. She said, Jesus, Pump, you got a beau/ti/ful voice, the kind that sends skinny girls down the drain. We both took a hit of Heavy Weather. She left to live longer, probably balling space aliens without tear ducts. I swear it’s true, Texas. Whenever I think of groopies under my bed, like Rita, I walk on mini/moog. I trawp intaglio. I cry electrik undoing. My broken Spanish heart on my mother’s side.
But when Lu/cin/da goes glee, I will write a song that is and isn’t about her.
When we meet on the Road to San Pietro
You’ll be barefoot, words like poppy seed.
And I’ll be carrying the dumb weight
Of a man taken for dead, but could be me.
And although every time is the wrong time
We meet on a slip of time,
That incredible moment,
Young enough to believe
In the soft core of this world, you see.
It hates.
It hates.
It hates.
I trawp intaglio. Five tempos at a time. I cry memory goo. My ceramic swans have cracks. They never speak out of tempo.
COOL WHITE FENDER
Wendell Wasermann, rhythm guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. Played in many 60s Garage and 70s Pre-punk bands. Most famous hit was the instrumental “Yo-Yo Girl,” on which he experimented with electric sitar simulation,(actually before The Yardbirds did this). Some recorded jams with Jimmy Page and Peter Frampton, then, of Humble Pie. His fame faded in the 80s, but a 1996 reunion with some members of No Time for Charles, won back some of his old fan base as well as making new friends. (B. Dixel, North Carolina, 1946-2009).
In the 60s, you left wolves under the beds of women who couldn’t quite howl as loudly as your first hooker when you were 13 and some small change. On stage, you smashed your guitar, a white Fender, into the amps, to impress an Italian film director you knew was in the audience. Instead, he casted The Yardbirds and from then on, you had to beg for a cameo appearance in any glitter girl’s life. They say Ali McGraw turned you down. You were about to give up the guitar, actually, any electric instrument that could mimic the bottomless wail of the human voice.
In the 70s, you balled soul-eyed chicks, soft, ironic pout, for whom the world was a camera. One of them spread a rumor that Twiggy had gotten fat. You informed them that Twiggy went bankrupt.
And the only girl who ever loved you refused your offer of twin live-ins, unhitchable stars. She said she wanted someone more stable, someone whose life she could have partial control over. Like a volume knob, you said, and walked out.
This woman, married with two distant children, a younger husband who grew up on smooth peanut butter and Mork and Mindy reruns, still keeps tabs on you. She watched you, looking so silly at your age in pumps and Elvis-tight pants, croon along with a nervous contestant– an old Beatles tune in a surprise visit on Idol. The song was Nowhere Man. The audience loved you, applauded you for giving that girl, barely out of her braces, some very strong support.
And that night, the woman who would never live with you, quietly informs her husband that she will not shave her legs. “Pagan,” her husband mutters, as if the correct answer to a Jeopardy question: Name a five-letter word beginning with P and meaning to have no religion.
We’re out of peanut butter, she thinks.
She turns over, shuts off the light, entering some distant fog of past, where Nowhere Man and Never-Here Girl spread themselves thin, become the words to each other’s song.
BRIDGE OF SIGHS
Martha Taylor-Graves, former member of the Motown vocal trio, Tall, Dark, and Girl. (B. Detroit, MI. 1944).
At age 56, dropped by Motown, spurned as a solo act, the big shots, the club owners, said a carbon copy of three singers, all named Diana. A disastrous duet with Brian Wilson. “I never was a surfer chick,” she will later say in interview. Sitting in a club with some new polished guy, she’s recognized and asked, “Oh, are those real eyelashes, darling?”
So she’s standing on the footbridge arching over the river that separates her old school from her old house. She didn’t ring her momma that she was coming over for a visit. Imagine if mama looks out her window, even with one bad eye, and sees her child staring back at her. But Martha didn’t come here today to look through windows or to apologize for marrying a white man who turned out to be like any other man or at her mama’s request will sing 1964′s smash hit, “I Never Want What’s Good for Me.” No. She came here today to throw her life over a bridge.
But for now, she’s rehearsing the fall, head first, the ripples radiating towards the edge of all runny desire, the reflections of children playing hopscotch, running with Paper Mache airplanes, a man in tuxedo presenting her and the other two Tall, Dark and Girl members, the Best Music Award of the Year, then the plaque falling from her hands, sinking underwater. She wants this question answered: Can I start over? Can I come back as someone of my own choosing, a singer of sultry man-eating lyrics? Can I be reborn as someone better? Yes, what a condescending way to put it. Tell me this isn’t all there is.
Martha Taylor-Graves, who once had a voice of capable of spilling honey and weaving silk, a body lithe and affectionate and breakable, who once had the ear of the most thin-skinned and ethereal virgin from slum-slutted streets, this Martha Taylor-Graves, who was told by so many people on the way up that she would never make it if she didn’t sleep with the right people and didn’t take the dressing room at the far end of the hall, the one reserved for starlets on the rise, but always second bill to groups like Kissing Cousins or to comeback divas like Amanda “Baby Face” Drake, Martha Taylor-Graves can’t swim, she can’t swim to save her life, and whatever lies at the bottom of Iron-Bound River is something that hopefully will help make her rise with grace and float and float, higher than the stained glass windows of Jesus and His sheep, higher than her momma’s ricocheting Sunday School hymns, those long days of sticky fingers behind robes, bird-like voices that will later sing for Sweet Mary Janes.
Stable, someone whose life she could have partial control over. Like a volume knob, you said, and walked out.
This woman, married with two distant children, a younger husband who grew up on smooth peanut butter and Mork and Mindy reruns, still keeps tabs on you. She watched you, looking so silly at your age in pumps and Elvis-tight pants, croon along with a nervous contestant– an old Beatles tune in a surprise visit on Idol. The song was Nowhere Man. The audience loved you, applauded you for giving that girl, barely out of her braces, some very strong support.
And that night, the woman who would never live with you, quietly informs her husband that she will not shave her legs. “Pagan,” her husband mutters, as if the correct answer to a Jeopardy question: Name a five-letter word beginning with P and meaning to have no religion.
We’re out of peanut butter, she thinks.
She turns over, shuts off the light, entering some distant fog of past, where Nowhere Man and Never-Here Girl spread themselves thin, become the words to each other’s song.
SHAKE, SPIDER, SHAKE
Jason “Spider” Samuel-Wells, of the Gothic rock group, Barterwaithe, their album, Betrothed to Clarissa reached the top ten on English charts. Samuel-Wells remains a cult hero in certain parts of Europe, wrote the soundtrack to the movie Kiss Me While Still Twilight, was seen occasionally checking in at Keith Richard’s rehab clinic in Switzerland. (b. London, 1958?-2010).
After the flop at Glastonbury, he started to see things in doubles, blebs and blurbs, but still used black eyeliner in his MTV videos. One artist was courting the London scene, making posters of Spider looking ill, color splattered against a wall of faded Linear Notes to Silas Marner. “The tumor is getting larger,” said Dr. Wu, reading the Cat Scan results, tapping the left occipital part of his own head. Wu sometimes talked about his single mother, an opera singer from Hong Kong, who admitted being a lesbian by the time her son finished med school. Can words wheeze? Spider thought. “And lay off the smack!” said Wu, staring at an X-ray–lungs, white shadows, deep transparencies into nowhere.
Wu referred to the “crepitations” at the base of Spider’s lungs but last week he called them “crackles.” Wu hated rock n’ roll, said it was pretentious and disruptive of alpha brain waves and Spider refused the experimental surgery he mocked as beta not.
He changed his name, wandered around the country, taking odd menial jobs, a clerk, a vet’s assistant, a printer repairman. He met a girl from Northumberland, still hurting from a boy toy who took off like a prize goose. She recognized Spider without eye shadow. Much younger than he, energetic as the girls who danced topless at his concerts, she promised to take care of him after he said “I’m spent.” She had no concept of time, Spider thought, how things are promised then discarded. But he could see his whole life, beginning bar, start repeats, to the last measure. At night, in colored magic markers, he wrote the same sequence of numbers across the bedroom wall. It resembled a social security number.
“What is it?” asked Penny Ann, sitting up, breasts pressed to knees. “It’s my time signature, ” he said, “who I am. It reminds me how many whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighths and sixteenths, until there’s no time left at all.”
Unsteady on his feet, he struggled back to the bed, fell, and never woke up. It happened in no time at all. It happened in less than a 4 beat whole rest. A slip of time. It happened as if nothing ever happens at all. Really.
?
Kyle Hemmings is the author of three chapbooks of poetry/prose: Avenue C (Scars Publications), Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), and Amsterdam & Other Broken Love Songs (Flutter Press). He blogs here.
photo by DrBachhus
CELEBREX ® (Celecoxib)
by Paul David Adkins
When Three Dog Night wrote Celebrate!
they knew they’d sell the rights,
would dance to the music
dance to the music
down to the bank.
They couldn’t know
instead of Cadillac or Vizeo
their music would introduce the inhibition
of prostaglandin synthesis,
decreasing activity of cyclooxegenase-2.
Nice to hum that little ditty
on the road to Shambala
without a wince or limp.
To open, close your hand
easily as your father’s
when he cupped a new quarter
in his warm palm
just for you.
?
Paul David Adkins grew up in South Florida and lives in New York, a rare species of reverse snowbird.
Photo by Rosemoo.
Blowing in the Wind
by Mike Berger
Vinyl discs spin out
scratchy melodies;
songs of a different era.
Songs of gloom and doom,
and songs of hope and peace.
Dreary songs of violence
and the human condition.
Melodies of the eleventh hour.
Lyrics laden with fear;
words about the bomb. Songs
of war, brutality, and anguish.
Softer words of unfulfilled desires
harsher words demanding the
end to war. Resurrecting the
dove of peace.
Looking back, what has changed
in the last fifty years?
Answers are blowing in the wind.
?
Mike Berger is bright, articulate, handsome and humble.
photo by Sara. Nel
The Man Who Was Fire
by John Grey
At first, red tongues flicked his face,
his chest, his limbs,
like salivating beasts.
But then he burst, hot and bright,
and flame flung itself outward
like escaping through
the opened doors of fire.
His blazing body whirled and tangoed
to the sizzle, bubble, pop, of its own music,
then suddenly fell as life went one way,
weight, the other.
It slithered on the ground like snakes,
naked and clattering.
Eventually, he was smoldering ash.
Spectators stamped him out.
The man who was wind came by
and scattered him.
?
John Grey is an Australian born poet and US resident since the late seventies. He works as financial systems analyst. Recently published in Xavier Review, White Wall Review and Writer’s Bloc with work upcoming in Poem, Prism International and the Cider Press Review.
photo by gordontarpley.
It’s Easy, Adam, Like Breathing
by Kelly Jones
Sitting on a cliff, smoking cigarettes and waiting to come down
off the mushrooms we had eaten,
you look at the lake beneath us,
tell me that you’re scared of drowning,
as your friend had done.
He accidentally jumped from a cliff
onto a submerged rock, in shock
sucked in water and never resurfacing.
Heat lightning or hallucinations light up the water below us.
I run my fingers through your hair,
tell you not to worry, that you can stay above it.
How, you ask.
It’s easy, I say, just float and breathe.
You’re right, you agree, just float and breathe….
But I was wrong.
A few years later your lungs collapse as you sleep.
No way to float away from that,
you can’t breathe when it’s your body that you’re drowning in.
?
Kelly Jones lives in New Orleans, an MFA student at the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. Kelly’s work can be found in Main Street Rag, Knock Magazine, and Cold Mountain Review. Kelly also enjoys improv, biking around, and attempting to play the accordion.
photo by Abeeeer.
Letters
by Valentina Cano
To hold your name
should not conjure up
days of stifling suns.
It shouldn’t mean hands
that fold themselves
over and over
like obsessive handkerchiefs.
Your name shouldn’t be a red dot
blinking in some warehouse,
warning of an open door.
I should feel no spider crawl,
hairs gluing and ungluing
themselves up my arms.
No.
Your name should be flour or sugar.
Substantial. Spotless. Filling.
It should carry the taste
of a lemon drop,
rolling and moist
on my tongue.
?
Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time either writing or reading. Her works have appeared in Exercise Bowler, Blinking Cursor, Theory Train, Magnolia’s Press, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19, Precious Metals and will appear in the upcoming editions A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal, Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle, Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary Journal, Super Poetry Highway, Stream Press and Perhaps I’m Wrong About the World. You can find her here.
photo by cynthiacloskey.
Switching Trains
by Richard Fein
A jerking stop, doors open, passengers exit and enter.
And there she is. It’s been years.
But there she is on the station platform.
Oh, it’s her, that gait, that face, definitely her.
Somehow, someway our paths cross yet again.
We must have been traveling on this same train,
maybe even in this same car all along,
or at least from Atlantic avenue where I first got on.
She’s passing by my window, headed toward the Flushing local,
head down, walking slowly and alone—she’s alone.
She turns, lifts her head.
We’re eye-to-eye through the window yet she doesn’t notice me.
Am I so absent from her memory?
But then again I’m not expected here nor is she.
Yet here we are almost together one more time.
I could run out now and change lines,
for she’s walking slowly with head down,
and she’s alone, all alone—like me.
Yes, I could run out now.
Or I could sit here and let the doors close.
Choose,
the certainty of 86th street my planned terminal point
or 42nd street and dare for serendipity.
The doors are still open, but not much longer.
Choose.
?
Richard Fein was a finalist in the 2004 Center For Book Arts Chapbook Competition. He will soon have a chapbook published By Parallel Press, University Of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been published in many web and print journals such as Southern Review, Foliate Oak, DROWN IN MY OWN FEARS Morpo Review, Ken*Again Oregon East Southern Humanities Review, Morpo, Skyline,Touchstone, Windsor Review, Maverick, Parnassus Literary Review, Small Pond, Kansas Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Exquisite Corpse, Terrain Aroostook Review, Compass Rose, And Many Others. He also has an interest in digital photography and has published many photos. Samples of his photography can be found here.
photo by Ryan Vaarsi.
Hurry
by John Grey
You’re in such a hurry to write.
You can be late for life
but not for poetry.
You’re destined to write.
Your imagination needs company.
Only pen on paper
will stay up with it
when the rest of time is sleeping.
Speed. Destiny.
No regrets
for all the stuff you’ve missed.
What’s life anyhow?
Can’t write about it when you’re doing it.
You deny yourself things.
You deny yourself people.
You’re a merciless as you need to be.
You don’t even stop to laugh.
Or to cry.
There’s death out there somewhere.
There’s everything anyone person can create
if every moment is devoted to their passion.
If they don’t waste a moment.
If they don’t speak.
If they don’t eat.
If they don’t love.
The end of it all doesn’t let up.
So why should you.
?
John Grey is an Australian born poet and US resident since the late seventies. He works as financial systems analyst. Recently published in Xavier Review, White Wall Review and Writer’s Bloc with work upcoming in Poem, Prism International and the Cider Press Review.
photo by Jamiesrabbits.