My aunt looks like Justin Bieber.

 When I grow up I wanna be skinny. Not fat like my mom.

I have two really small toes like midgets do.

‡

These gems sparkle from the mouths of third grade students I’ve met this fall. I work with an afterschool health and literacy program that provides poetry workshops for elementary kids, and I am constantly reminded how people become diluted as they age. Children are natural poets—honest, succinct. Their unfiltered nature can be endearing and devastating.  But are they inherently cruel, or more like litmus paper strips, absorbing influence?

e.g. — This baby:

I imagine this baby reared its head through the birth canal with the stank eye.

Last week, an 8-year-old boy asked me if I was “grown.” I find it difficult to call myself a man, considering I still can’t grow a full beard. And yet when I told him I was 23, his reaction instilled in me the fear that  I must  appear as tired as most Wal-Mart shoppers. Today, while I was explaining metaphors, another boy blurted, “You got caterpillar eyebrows. Actually, you got a unibrow.” I froze and thanked him:

1.  It was the strongest metaphor of the day.

2.  I squared out because he hit a soft spot— I’ve worn two eyebrows since 1996 after my peers mistook me for Dracula when I was a magician for Halloween.

I can grow a bold unibrow, but I’m not as free as Frida Kahlo.

As my boyfriend grills salmon patties for dinner, I tweeze my unibrow in the mirror and wonder: Is there such a thing as original sin? Does electrolysis hurt? What is the appropriate age for a chemical peel?

My aunt looks like Justin Bieber.

 When I grow up I wanna be skinny. Not fat like my mom.

I have two really small toes like midgets do.

‡

These gems sparkle from the mouths of third grade students I’ve met this fall. I work with an afterschool health and literacy program that provides poetry workshops for elementary kids, and I am constantly reminded how people become diluted as they age. Children are natural poets—honest, succinct. Their unfiltered nature can be endearing and devastating.  But are they inherently cruel, or more like litmus paper strips, absorbing influence?

e.g. — This baby:

I imagine this baby reared its head through the birth canal with the stank eye.

Last week, an 8-year-old boy asked me if I was “grown.” I find it difficult to call myself a man, considering I still can’t grow a full beard. And yet when I told him I was 23, his reaction instilled in me the fear that  I must  appear as tired as most Wal-Mart shoppers. Today, while I was explaining metaphors, another boy blurted, “You got caterpillar eyebrows. Actually, you got a unibrow.” I froze and thanked him:

1.  It was the strongest metaphor of the day.

2.  I squared out because he hit a soft spot— I’ve worn two eyebrows since 1996 after my peers mistook me for Dracula when I was a magician for Halloween.

I can grow a bold unibrow, but I’m not as free as Frida Kahlo.

As my boyfriend grills salmon patties for dinner, I tweeze my unibrow in the mirror and wonder: Is there such a thing as original sin? Does electrolysis hurt? What is the appropriate age for a chemical peel?

Jo   Cannon is a doctor and short story writer. Her debut collection, Insignificant Gestures, was published by Pewter Rose Press in November   2010. Purchasing information can be found here.

A refugee finds his face has disappeared from the mirror. Lost on a mountain, a fell runner puts her brain into reverse. A traumatised woman realises she can slip in and out of the minds of passersby. In a city where nothing is as it should be, a lone nurse plays peek-a-boo with an abandoned baby.

Twenty five stories about exile and belonging. This first collection by award winning writer Jo Cannon explores what it means to be an outsider. Sometimes surreal, always perceptive, these stories celebrate the unexpected interactions that alter lives.

‘To read Jo Cannon is to enter the world of the displaced, the dispossessed, and to emerge with a new understanding. She writes with integrity and compassion, and her stories resonate long after the final words have been read.’

Zoe King, editor of “Cadenza,” and Vice Chair Society of Women Writers and Journalists

“Jo Cannon’s writing is engaging and thought provoking, with a quirky gentleness in the prose. Her stories gradually reveal strong universal themes that continue to “Ëœsing”â„¢ long after the reader has put down the work.”â„¢

Vanessa Gebbie, editor of “ËœShort Circuit ““ a guide to the art of the short story”â„¢

Last Words is a feature about the last words of a given work: story, novel, poem, essay, instruction manual. I find we often favor excerpting the beginning of a piece of writing; Great First Sentences, etc. Why not excerpt the ends, too (and not just the most well-known ends, Ulysses, I’m looking at you)? I am not really the sort of reader who always jumps to the end of a book, but neither am I the sort of reader who can’t stand for stories to be “ruined” (rather the opposite, it seems to me I read almost exclusively ruined writing).

My only motivation is that I like last words. I like the ends (and non-ends) of things, just as I’m often intrigued by, and favor, the last book of an author. Writing from extremity—-writing written just before death, writing written in prison, writing written in exile, writing written in deep sickness. Writing left unfinished, writing pulled from fire, writing covered in mold, failure. Writing nearest to silence; writing when it is almost, almost, almost over. With over as adjective, preposition and adverb all in one: over as the place “across a barrier or intervening space.” Last words being, then, that intervening space.

In any case, gentle reader: SPOILER ALERT!

(Since today is Friday, maybe this could also be called Pank’s G.O.O.D. Fridays, à la Kanye.)
Continue reading →

Last Words is a feature about the last words of a given work: story, novel, poem, essay, instruction manual. I find we often favor excerpting the beginning of a piece of writing; Great First Sentences, etc. Why not excerpt the ends, too (and not just the most well-known ends, Ulysses, I’m looking at you)? I am not really the sort of reader who always jumps to the end of a book, but neither am I the sort of reader who can’t stand for stories to be “ruined” (rather the opposite, it seems to me I read almost exclusively ruined writing).

My only motivation is that I like last words. I like the ends (and non-ends) of things, just as I’m often intrigued by, and favor, the last book of an author. Writing from extremity—-writing written just before death, writing written in prison, writing written in exile, writing written in deep sickness. Writing left unfinished, writing pulled from fire, writing covered in mold, failure. Writing nearest to silence; writing when it is almost, almost, almost over. With over as adjective, preposition and adverb all in one: over as the place “across a barrier or intervening space.” Last words being, then, that intervening space.

In any case, gentle reader: SPOILER ALERT!

(Since today is Friday, maybe this could also be called Pank’s G.O.O.D. Fridays, à la Kanye.)
Continue reading →

Robert McDonald’s moving poem for Dorothy Allison is featured in the October issue. He talks to us about her influence, the stories that weigh him down, and the things he carries.

1. How has Dorothy Allison influenced you?

I had read Bastard Out of Carolina, or course, and her short fiction, and the essays in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, but Allison’s influence on this work came directly from her reading at the AWP Conference when it was in Chicago a couple of years ago. I was awe-struck by how funny she was, funny and charming and brave–she had this crowd of hipster academics in the palm of her hand and kept them (us) there, safe yet challenged. It was one of the best readings I’ve ever seen. At the same conference, I saw her several times in passing, and I could feel the buzz of her personality from across a room. But she also looked tired, and she was limping a bit, and I remember thinking, “This is a woman who has been through a lot.” This was not long after my sister killed herself, my sister who like Allison was a lesbian, who like Allison had been through a lot of extreme experiences, and who like Allison had a great sense of humor. I wondered what the key differences were–how one person can turn difficulty, heartbreak, and pain into brilliance, and another is weighted so far down by life that she cannot see any other option but death.

2. How does one balance eloquence and reverence and mourning in a praise poem?

That balance, if I achieved it, was accidental. I was going to give a reading at Scott Free’s Homolatte series here in Chicago. I was on the schedule just two or three weeks after my sister died, and I decided to go through with the reading. At first I was just going to read old work, because my heart was too broken and I thought I was too close to her suicide to write anything cogent about it. But Dorothy Allison’s reading was on my mind. I came back from her reading at the downtown hotel ballroom, opened my notebook, and the first draft of this poem poured out. I read it (a slightly less polished version than this) at Homolatte, and I felt very exposed and naked and brave in doing so.

If there’s a balance between these things it was in my determination to mourn my sister and say hallelujah for an art like Allison’s, and try to do these things nearly simultaneously. I think I was also trying to declare that my sister’s despair was not catching, that I would never chose the same way out of the world.

3. What stories have weighed you down?

Personally, of course, the story of my sister, a brilliant woman who was always angry at the world and its failures, at people and their failures, and who could never seem to buck up and get down to the work of making a life for herself, this weighs me down. The story behind that story is my guilt, a very heavy thing, my guilt that I could not ever find a way to convince her that she had options besides killing herself. My guilt that I could never convince her that she was loved, and that if she held on through the bad parts, she’d find even more love.

I think the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives often weigh us down: “If person X had not broken up with me, if my mother had been stronger, if my father had been there in my childhood, if I had chosen this career path, if if if, or because because because”–I think people often convince themselves (I sure do) that we are carrying a great weight, and we cannot see that we have a choice in taking up or laying down that burden.

In a way that is both hard and also thrilling, I do think that the best stories are also things we carry with us, whether that be the Paris of Stein and Hemingway, the world of Middle Earth, the voice of Holden Caulfield, the plot of Star Wars–there are so many stories that have come before ours, and trying to create a new story, whether fictional or just inventing a new path for yourself, has the burden and blessing of all these stories already in your head.

4. What else have you carried?

When I was in 10th grade I had both hermit crabs and chameleons, (actually anoles, but the pet shop called them chameleons) as pets. I thought it would make me cool of I brought them to school with me, and I went through a phase of always having a small live animal on my person. You can make leashes for chameleons out of soft yarn, and safety pin the leash to your shirt. A hermit crab can nestle in the pocket of a hoody. I must add, however, that this did not make me cool, it made me a geeky kid who wore live animals.

I carry a notebook nearly always. And hopefully a pen.

5. How would you teach someone to make emotional armor?

I’m not sure that I could teach that, or have taught it, except in how I have hurt people, intentionally or not. I think emotional armor is akin to a callous. You get hurt, or disappointed, or heartbroken, and so learn to cushion yourself from hurt, disappointment, or heartbreak. The trick really is to teach someone to take off their emotional armor when appropriate. I am much more cautious, defensive, and self-protecting in love than I was in my 20’s and 30’s. This is good because I don’t dwell on small emotional barbs, but I think it’s entirely possible to keep layers of armor between yourself and another. Never letting yourself be open to hurt means never being open to that amazing electric connectivity that can happen between two people. But I am veering into pop psychology.

6. Do you prefer digital photography over traditional photography?

I prefer traditional photography. I am sentimental about the darkroom and what goes on there, and the photographers who made me love the form are all old school: Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, Bernice Abbott, and Nan Goldin, among others.

That being said, I myself never took photos except on the rare vacation or family function until I got an I-phone, and now I reach for it often and love being able to easily snap a photo and through the zap of the Internet be able to share that image right away, and not wait for the film to come back from the developer to see how it all turned out.

A new issue of Barrelhouse rises from the mist and in it you will find stories from Amber Sparks, Aaron Burch,and  Brian Oliu.

In the new issue of Ghost Ocean Magazine, you can find poetry from Susan Slaviero and an interview with Christian Tebordo.

Memorious 15 features J.P. Dancing Bear and others.

Kyle Minor’s Where We Begin is online on the Gulf Coast website.

At Haggard and Halloo, Bury Me With It by J. Bradley.

Everyday Fiction features short fiction from Robert Swartwood.  Hey, he has a book he edited out now, Hint Fiction. Go buy it.

Poetry from Ricky Garni is up at LitSnack.

In the Red Review Review, work from David LaBounty.

The Medulla Review has a new issue with work from Alexandra Isacson, Laura LeHew, Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Eric Burke, Len Kuntz, Eric Beeny, Kyle Hemmings, and others.

Fiction from Mary Hamilton is included in Precipitate. She is joined by Caroline Klocksiem.

Check out these stories from Michelle Reale in the February issue. Sometimes we go through our archives and read things and think, man, we are so lucky to publish the writing we publish.

You can read fiction from Micah Dean Hicks in The Moon Milk Review.

Joseph Cassara writes a love letter to the doctor who performed his rectal exam at The Awl.

Poisonhorse by Brandi Wells is up at Double Shiny. She is joined by Adam Moorad.

Three poems by Megan Falley are featured at Crescent City Review.

New work from J. Bradley at This Zine Will Change Your Life, Six Sentences, and Metazen. Also at Metazen, writing from Joseph Riippi.

A fine triptych from JA Tyler is up at Knee Jerk.