[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_12/Falak.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

HIM annotated in my ancient files

HIM who brought forth teenage hallelujahs

HIM a sly snicker and Brooke Jensen Rainy Night in Georgia

HIM a big man in his soft heart and hard pants

HIM enshrouded in cinema mist of long ago

HIM a working man / rough hands / my boyish bottom

HIM a mad genius with tower piano in Boston

HIM a wiry spider with early dreadlocks

HIM an acid trip and grand experimental novel

HIM a jewel’d jesus prophet in my fever’d imagination

HIM his hands caressing piano bone, caressing me

HIM his hands absolving me and thrusting me to ballet

HIM duet / adagio :me his piano , he my terrible guru

HIM his face and teenage cockin paint by his own hand

HIM high yellow , and imported from White Plains

HIM already gallery ready / baby picasso in his jeans

HIM who might be straight and might be gay , and i would never know

HIM a pimp i met in urban wanderlust

HIM a cocaine king , a slimy trailer park

HIM a ruffled grouse . a fat demanding cock

HIM a methamp marathon , a flight of goingfast

HIM a porno parvenu

HIM a negro army boy down low

HIM and me , and drifting bedroom in Key West

HIM and me , pretend romantic on the docks where jugglers whirled

HIM so hot and me so horny and vice versa

HIM a whiff , a whisper and a never again

HIM agod i saw upon a stage in Cambridge

HIM a flashlit dream who flickered once and reappeared upon the Bay

HIM who wanted me as trophy danceboy bride

HIM whose Georgia hands and Georgia tears did drip across my thighs

HIM who Florida blonde and towering punk

HIM tatoo and passion for dark bird

HIM a running boyfriend and a curse

HIM a bedroom blazed , a spray of ether

HIM in prison soon , and fervid holy ghosting

HIM a cold night alchoholic splendor

HIM a sudden burst of some tremendous mountain fire

HIM forget this breath , forget this foreign feeling

HIM abandoned squat , abandoned sleeping spaces

HIM catburgler,eye of demon,twister

HIM a baseball bat : a childhood raping

HIM crackburgler / widow’s peak and scheming him

HIM the arbiter of what must never be

HIM the sage who set my eye free

The boy who will later be a polo player
wants me baffled and vertical, utterly

in the hallway, monkey-sudden
on a jungle gym. This is deviation:

I had no designs on altitude, knees
flush to the acrylic; all that yellow

was more light than I can speak against.
He talks dirty in diminutives, bears up

under hot water. In a bar on Valentine’s
he’ll write I FUCKED MR ____ on my

shirt. I’ll say This shirt is my evidence.
He’ll say The evidence is wearing it.

in memoriam, J.G. Ballard

During these submission fantasies

 

Rupert Murdoch and the shelf-life of the grotesque.  Studies indicate the public’s identification and disgust with Murdoch, as referenced in privately arranged focus groups on behalf of News International. Most startling is how merely handing out survey sheets provoked parasympathetic responses in 89% of the men-resulting in long-lasting erections-and 72% of women-resulting in vaginal lubrication.  After two such sessions, anthropologists and private investigators traced the movements of study participants-who ranged across a variety of demographics-and found that nearly 90% sought immediate sexual release with other study participants.  Two sidestreets, one off Leicester Square, and another in Shepperton were the sole gathering places for these carnal moments.  These encounters were never repeated nor can we explain them.  Phone records show an as-yet-unexplained impulse for participants to call themselves following the encounters.  Spyware show participants convulsively surfing among tabloids and porn sites for nude photos of Rupert Murdoch, his wife, children and editors-especially scenes photographed in Idaho, perhaps for the sublimely phallic setting of the Rocky Mountains, U. S. of A.

 

RB became increasingly obsessed

 

Changes in facial muscles, along with eye movements, in audiences who were watching Murdoch press conferences and interviews for at least 30 seconds also indicate a marked erotic effect on viewers, despite RM’s advanced age.  More controlled studies of internet users, in which clips of RM were spliced into “live” heterogenous backgrounds, show subsequent traffic to websites devoted to anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, climate change denial, incest, 9/11 conspiracy theories and the murder of Milly Dowler.  In several instances, the most popular Dowler sites crashed under the strain of incessant requests.

 

with the body of the media tycoon,

 

Incidences of orgasm in fantasies of sexual intercourse with Rupert Murdoch.  We provided other study participants with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse.  In certain cases, Murdoch’s face was superimposed on the original partner.  Vaginal intercourse with “Murdoch” proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 3% of men and only 1% of women.  Inexplicably, both sexes complained of nausea at prolonged close exposure to Murdoch’s face during penetration despite marked interest in his nudity in non-partnered arrangements.  Axillary, buccal, navel, aural and orbital modes produced proximal arousal.  Expecting a repetition of Tallis’s classic studies of sexual fantasies in connection with Ronald Reagan, researchers hypothesized that anal penetration would be preferred but male erections proved to be impossible in all cases while women experienced a pre-penetration tightening of the sphincter that made entry by plug so painful as to be beyond the bounds of experimental ethics. Overwhelmingly, male homo-erotic response, even among strongly self-identified heterosexuals, was provoked by the “Murdoch” partner performing rough, even brutal, fellatio on the men.  Female participants found “Murdoch” ineffective at cunninglingus even when their surrogates had professional experience.  Some 86% of women complained of discomfort in their parietal regions during “Murdoch”‘s cunninglingus.  Overwhelmingly, female erotic response spiked when they performed forceful fellatio on “Murdoch.”  Murdoch and “Murdoch” are figures of enormous use-value in society’s need to debase others, thus functioning as a release mechanism for sustained attention, which, if unchecked, can lead to precipitous action against the wise and wealthy, who are fated to be misunderstood.

 

As you know.

 

wizened and sallow, known most recently to the public

 

There was this afternoon beneath a river-red gum tree in the foothills of the Macedon Ranges outside Melbourne, where he had been deposited with his nanny.  They were in a park.  He was five.  On a distant ridge, the predictably implausible silhouettes of kangaroos.  A vision superimposed: the crushed skull of the Lindbergh baby, the flung-open doors of distant mansions, the thick fingers of Bruno Hauptmann.  It is April 3, 1936, in Australia, and the boy is trying hard to understand the way the Earth moves around the sun, the way the Earth moves around its pole, the way different times lattice the globe he feels even now he would like to cradle.  He had laid his hands on the globe in Sir Keith’s office once, covering a continent.  He wants to grow bigger hands, he wants to shrink the globe.  The crushed skull moves down the ridge, the trees hiss in the wind.  Is Hauptmann dead now?  He had heard the inky pressmen laughing.  “Makes you shit yourself, that chair does.”  “And blows you a fucking hard-on, all that voltage, it does.”  He squints, tugs at his clothes, disturbed by the effect of this talk, what it presages, for he is mostly a very clever boy and has inklings.  He wishes he was there or could be, to see a grown man shit his pants the way a baby does-did the baby do the same when it died?  He would like to know.  He would like to ask.  He would like to tell that story to his mates, to show them that he has secrets to dole out, little candies of hard-ons, whatever those are, little volts in the playground.  He asks his nanny if he can feed the kangaroos, and she says, “Sir Keith is returning to his car.”

 

as the object of attack by a man with a shaving-cream pie,

 

It sadly only messed his jacket and did not reach his putrescent, wrinkled, scrofulous, chapped, rectal, empty, needy, criminally age-bespotted, phallis-and-gonad-nosed, droppy-titted, saggy eyed, corrupted, comb-overed, dye-haired pated, Wal-Mart-glasses-wearing, flap-eared, Oxford-educated, violent, disastrous, simulated, superimposed, anal-sadistic, perverted, spit-gathering-behind-his-lower-lip, nose-hair-trimmed, trophy-wife-watching, Rebekkah-Brooks-doting, scummy and miserable and shitful face,

 

a spectacle of his humiliation worthy of repetition

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_12/Cohen.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

When she fucked me we imagined we were fucking other people, like Jane, for example, from our chemistry class, with the soft round calves and the horn-rimmed glasses, with the thin ankles and trembling hands. When I kissed her ear and talked about Jane’s slender wrists, her golden tan, her fingers-fat with yellow tips from smoking packs of Camel Blues-she shuddered. Then I bit her neck and told her about Eva Green and how her legs were so thick that they stretched the seams of denim shorts.

We were bad. She chain-smoked cigarettes. She shaved her hair and dyed mine red. She shoved six-packs of Porter from the drugstore shelves beneath my shirt. I ran. I spit thick chunks of brown and dipped my nose in gasoline. She laughed. We started fires in the garbage bins behind our school. When my mother cried and cursed us, when my father whipped me with his belt, she screamed. She shouted, “Harder,” till her shoulders burned beneath my nails and then she dug her teeth into my taut pink nipples while I licked warm blood from her open wounds. She wanted to know. She said things like, “When you suffer, I suffer,” then she lit the pipe between my lips and watched the opal glass turn green. I said things like, “No, softer,” when she shoved her fist below my skirt and then she pushed her thumbs into the space between my open thighs. Summers, she was darker than the starless nights at Becker Creek. We chucked flat rocks like children, skipping stones along the leafy shore. She stripped me down and watched me twirl barefoot on fallen branches while I saw something ignite inside the flicker of her almond eyes. We were sixteen, growing stronger every summer day, each hour spent sprinting down the dusty roads and egging stucco houses. Oh, we filled our empty lungs just like our fathers filled their empty flasks. We weren’t tired, no, enough was never enough.

poemsNpaint
19 / F / Gay / Single
Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

Last Online: a month ago.
Ethnicity: Klutz and screwball poet.
Height: 5’7′, a plausible lie.
Body Type: A nomnom hoarder.
Diet: It’s odd, the way animals taste.
Smokes: No way. It’s a metaphor for cancer.
Drinks: Coffee, Chai tea, and your hair.
Drugs: No. (Maybe the arsenic in showtunes.)
Religion: God’s a bisexual chick without her own website.
Sign: Of what? Sanity? No.
Education: I read ketchup packets and Western Phil.
Job: In school. I can’t tell why.
Income: Broke. Klutz and screwball poet.
Offspring: Not sure. Raised by family of blame.
Pets: No. Hypothetical cats.
Speaks: English, French, chat, and advice.

When I was 2, to everyone’s horror, I cuffed myself with a toilet seat and made it my subnormal necklace for days. I think I’m like that, now; I believe in the scatterbrain stuck-ness of life. Interpret that how you will. I cook and write and make bad jokes as unfortunate half-brothers to love. I want love?the campy screwball kind from Some Like It Hot?so I’m working toward it. Maybe you’re crazed enough to help? I make up hilarious lies and try to scatter them through my talk like commas. I’m also a poet of overcast days; at 13 I caught blue ink religion and the old-timey song in my off-key lungs. I get the geeky Jeopardy! questions and do well on Philosophy exams.

But I might require some better news, even though there are always frenetic friends or Richard Hugo poems to love. I’m not too picky, but I thought I’d make Oxford or at least learn to care about school by now. University isn’t at all like the movies; I read without literature in my heart. All over the house I find stacks of books I’ve never read, loose chickpeas in the wash. I’m not the most figured-out kind of adult.

But hey?I’m wearing pants right now, and each day at exactly 8:30 AM I try to brush my metaphorical hair. Someday I’ll live in an award-winning home and bake elaborate nomnoms for tea, publish poems and maybe delicious cookbooks on your picky-eater cuisine. You’ll be a book I never edit, a kind of cholera I catch. Sorry I’m online and crazy. Maybe it’s the thing to be.

poemsNpaint?New Message from freehugsv!

Dec 1, 2011 – 3:31pm

Ha! ha! ha! I hear you’re a poet.
Scatterbrained lover, too.
I’m real. I write. I compose
to love. Am I what you lack?

Reading you, you seem so able.
So do you like fun? Do you like liking
A person songlike and brainy as you?
I’m brainy. I am, though I didn’t
graduate from college or a first wet
kiss. Your interests?what? Scat songs?
Compost? Hearing back? I hope to hear
back. I loved love. I hear you. Really,

I’d like to like, to randomly read
your back, your profile…a funny
poetry to love. I hope you’re
interesting. Really. I hope that.
I hope unique reads can be love
to poets. I compose my hope.
I compose and compose. Hope
to hear your scatter-brained song.
freehugsv
22 / F / Gay / Single
Waldoboro, Maine (296 Kilometres)

Last Online: Just yesterday.
Ethnicity: Chocolate-Caucasian desire.
Height: An exuberant 5’1.
Body Type: A Cerebral Palsy poem.
Diet: Okra, beans, and glee.
Smokes: No. (Maybe the scent of a woman?)
Drinks: Bright smiles and herbal tea.
Drugs: I get high off laughter!
Religion: The alchemy of love.
Sign: A star.
Education: The miraculous college of Earth.
Job: Wheelchair choreographer. Officially, I fiddle with words.
Income: A million-dollar daydream.
Offspring: I’m cuckoo; I’d like kids.
Pets: Four philosophical cats.
Speaks: English, Spanish, sexual suggestion.

I step-dance to the animal music of life. I sautee lyrics and poems ’till they burn with passion, sense your soul by touch and grow, like bok choy, a belief in your love. A beanlike beauty who hangs out with myself (most days) and nurtures a fine arts fancy. I like to heal phantom pain and journal the jewel-like genetics of Earth. Interests: elephants, typewriters, travel, hugging Elton John.

Born with a homocreative heart; 22.5 weeks. 1 lb, 1 oz. I’ve heard I’m miraculous. I’ve heard I’m determined. But really the miracle, million-one chance is to be. I write poems and a physical opera on the thrill of my differently-abled eyes. But I’d like to feel the smart of love. I’d like to traverse the pan-romantic world? India,Italy, Mexico. All sequels to your Celtic kiss.

You’ll pique my memory if your hair runs like water, if you bloom on reading foreign books, and most of all if you’re Tori Amos. If you’re not, then be a music I’ll dance to, a pretty vegetarian. Be everybody.

I’d like us to speak a loyal language, suggest books in an ESL of emotions. The bluest butterflies are my favorites. Yours, too. You laugh and laugh and laugh. Message me for colorful wigs, common interests, an antique love. Just message me.

freehugsv?3 new messages from poemsNpaint!

Jan 14, 2012 – 11:33pm

Hello! (Odd dilemma, hope.)
I watched you first. I’m completely
Sadie, never you. Weird
etiquette, calling you hope.

I feel joy by fluke; I logged
a month and a half of ‘sorry’s
in subzero cold. I ran to life?
a silly calling. Your smile
frolicked outside, vibrant.

Passion ate my focus;
seems Cupid is contagious.
I am fascinating, really.
I admire love. I watch
how the world is you.

Jan 14, 2012 – 11:33pm

No lie to your love. Interesting.
I work to fasten your bilingual
smile to summer?guide to
a renaissance nation. I find
and find you in potent life
without the cost of thinking.

But I think cartoonish Canada
is fucked without you. By next year,
beavers and hockey will get beaned
in the teeth by love. I’d like to clothe
you in love. Would you like that?
A sort of art, you and I. I’ll dress you,
tour you with renaissance hands.

January 14, 2012 – 11:33pm

I bum around in school
with no real direction,
except to you. I want
to write in the lilt of you,
not French. Could I be
a scholar of you?

I’d like to learn the tune of you
on the fiddle of your back.
I want to travel outside
my pride of problems —
live on a Caribbean island,
or go to you in Maine.

I guess I grow everywhere,
without a home. I’m hurled
like a ship on a tripped up sea.
I still pretend to know
how to stop.

It began as pushing.  Pushing each other.  In that small room, his room.  So many black faces staring at me, faces from magazines, pages torn and taped to the walls.  Prince.  Michael Jackson.  Mary J. Blige.

 

I admit that I pushed him first.

 

It was snowing outside.  I could hear the students playing in the snow.  So close it was as if they were in the room with us.  They were laughing outside.  The students were white as the snow, but it was like a hundred black faces laughing at me and then whispering faggot behind my back.

 

I pushed him first.

 

He was every boy I could not touch in junior high school.  Especially the boys in the locker room before basketball games, the ones who slapped each other on the back of the head and sometimes even the ass.  So of course I pushed him first.  But he wanted to me to.  He wanted me too.

 

The first time I saw him was at the campus post office.  Stopped in my tracks.  I had to go to track practice.  As I watched him sift through his pile of mail, and then look up at me, and then back down again, I wondered what we would do to each other.  And how.

 

I didn’t know how to suck it right.  He had to show me.  Like my first girlfriend had to show me how to kiss.  I liked this better, his head down there.

 

“I’m never cleaning up your blood ever again,” my friend told me.

“I know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I was crying.

She walked with me to Health Services.

I lied and told them I got in a fight with a frat boy.

No stitches were necessary.

 

His mother was a large woman.  Light-skinned and freckled, with dreadlocks.  There was no real silverware in the kitchen.  Just plastic knives and forks.

 

He was a singer.  I sat in the back of the Chapel and watched.  And listened.  All by myself.  He sang a solo.  “Love for Sale.”

 

They had a new house but no new silverware.  They had been living there for six months now.  We ate take-out food.  Chicken and macaroni and cheese.  They put the plastic knives and forks in the dishwasher.  I’d never seen anyone do that before.

 

“It’s my turn.”

“No,” he said, “I went last time.”

“It’s my turn.”

His mother was asleep downstairs.

“Fine.”

He turned around.

 

I played him a tape of me singing at the Kennedy Center when I was a boy.  I was a boy soprano.

He held me.

“That was my last performance before my father made me stop.”

“It’s my turn,” he said.

I lay down on my stomach.

 

We all sat in the living room.  There were no rugs on the floor.  He called her Mommy.

 

I admit that I pushed him first.

 

The night I met him, it was my birthday.  Nineteen years old.  He sang happy birthday to me.  The next morning he asked me if I was freaking out.  I said no and walked out the door.  Thirty minutes later I was standing in his doorway.  I’m freaking out, I told him.  He held me.  I held him back.

 

His older sister didn’t like me.  Even though he told her that my father was a civil rights lawyer.

“That doesn’t mean a thing,” he told me she’d said.

 

He called his friends “nigger” and his friends called him “nigger.”  “Stupid nigger,” they’d say and laugh.

 

He told me about how his father died in the fire.  Six months ago.  He told me he couldn’t cry.

“It’s my turn,” I told him.

 

A father burning in a wheelchair on the front lawn.

 

I pushed him.  He pushed me back.

“Get out,” he said.

“Please,” I said, crying again. “It’s your turn.”

“I don’t want you.”

I told him that my dick was bigger than his.  That my ass was firmer too.  That I was blacker than he was.

“Get out.”

 

I wondered what the guy in the dorm room next door thought.  And what his girlfriend thought.  They could hear the fighting.  The crying.  But they fought too.

 

At first there was just one single bed in the small room.  We moved another one up from the basement.  We put them side-by-side.

 

His mother looked right through me, couldn’t, didn’t want to know what I meant to her son.  We slept upstairs.  It was a big house.  His sister slept downstairs on the first floor.  With her woman.  Rhea.  His sister didn’t like me but Rhea smiled at me sometimes.  We were both a secret.  Her face was dark brown and she had braces.  She must have been twenty-five.

 

He told me not to tell anyone.   Don’t listen to the gossip, he’d say.  Don’t become the gossip, he’d say.  I didn’t want to tell anyone.  This was our secret.  I didn’t tell my friends.  I didn’t tell my parents.  I told my twin sister.  She cried all the way back from New Haven to her college in Northampton.  In the Porsche she’d borrowed from a friend.

 

“I can’t be your brother and your father and your lover,” he said.

“I don’t want you to be.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes you do.”

 

“Fuck you and your whore for a mother.”

He said it to my face.

I scratched his face.  Hard.

He touched his face.

We were in the small room back at school.  The beds were side-by-side.

 

 

He told me that his friend told him that sooner or later every white boyfriend calls his black boyfriend a nigger.  I told him that I would never call him that.

 

The last time I sang I was wearing a black tuxedo.  I was thirteen years old.   My mother was in the front row.  There was a conductor in front of me.   An orchestra too.   And a chorus behind me.  The whole world was open to me, but the audience was so far away.  I reached out to them with my voice.  To my mother.

 

“Fuck you and your whore for a mother.”

 

He was too far away.  I reached out to him.  To hit his face.

 

He had such long and beautiful eyelashes.

 

She sat in the front row with a tape recorder.  I reached out to her with my voice.  She was mouthing the words.

 

“Fuck you and your whore for a mother.”

 

I sat with her at a restaurant.  It was the summer.  I was leaving for my first year of college in a month.

“I’m not happy with your father, I’m just not happy with your father.”

“Why don’t you divorce him then?”

I said it without thinking.  I said it casually.  I said it with food in my mouth.

 

Standing with my father on the New Haven green.  A month into freshman year.

“Your mother says I was a bad father to you.  She’s leaving me because I was a bad father to you.  Was I a bad father to you?”

“No.”

“Tell her I wasn’t a bad father to you.”

 

“You think you’re black, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Just because you’re from D.C.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Sometimes you talk just like a black girl.  Or what you think a black girl talks like.  It’s pathetic.”

 

Back in the beginning he played Billie Holiday when it was snowing outside.  I would help him fold his laundry.   The beds were side-by-side.

 

In the summer we met in New York.  He was house sitting a friend’s apartment with high ceilings and no air conditioning.

 

My father called from the beach house he had rented for the week with my sisters.  “Come and see us,” he said.

 

There was a mattress on the floor.

 

“I’ll try.”

 

He asked me if I thought he thought I was his last chance.  He picked up a brick.

“You hit me and you cut me and you scratch me and now I’m out in the world and you’re still back there in school and you probably think I think you were my last chance.”

He came at me with the brick.  I ran.  I opened the door.  I ran down the five flights of stairs.  Outside.  I called my father from a pay phone.  I tried to sound calm.

“Come and get me come and get me please come and get me.”

I waited out on the sidewalk.  It was hot out there.  The sky darkened.  The Volvo finally pulled up to the curb.  My father opened the door and I got in.  We drove out of the Bronx.  I was silent.  The air conditioner made a noise.  He was talking about my mother.  Again.

“How could she leave me?” he asked.  “How could she do this to me?”

I started whimpering.  Quietly.

“What’s wrong?”

“How could you do this?  How could you do this?  You drove me to this person.”

He turned his head to look at me for a moment.  He stopped talking about my mother.  He reached out and touched my leg.

I tightened my seatbelt, my stomach in knots.

“Who are you talking about?” he asked softly.  “Your friend you were staying with back there?”

“He’s not my friend, Dad, he’s my…he was my–”

“Hush,” said my father, lifting his hand from my leg, and then pressing his foot down on the accelerator.

 

 

 

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_12/Blackchurch.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

He’s passed out four times so far. I had a go at him for not sleeping well the night before, not eating properly. He answered with narrow eyes. Had a performance to do. Twenty feet of slick black tarp and he still managed to spit blood on the cream coloured carpet. While he was slumped on the incline (the second resignation), I cut a thin triangle from under the bed and replaced the bloody patch. Never leave your DNA if you have any choice in the matter. I had a fleeting thought of keeping the bloody patch, but I’ll burn it. In any case, it seared a string of words into my memory. “From pillow lips a livid stream in languor disembogues.” I’ll have to use that somewhere. I suppose I just have.

I fed him earlier, food I brought with me to avoid the snags of room service delivery. Cuts from a bit of cold, rare steak, a few pieces of bread with Irish butter, some raw tomato and thin slices of red onions in balsamic vinegar and salt. I didn’t want to spike his sugar, but he needed some nutrients. I’ve been dripping bottled water into his mouth throughout. He’ll need a spot more food later, but especially some sodium chloride and potassium chloride when he wakes up to rebalance lost electrolytes. It was hotter in here than we’d anticipated, but I had to close the windows about an hour in. I hate using gags unless it’s for punishment.

When he arrived, he was dressed in a cropped French military jacket in dusty drab, a pair of black piped, high waisted trousers tucked into a pair of hard leather riding boots, a white shirt and black slim tie. I felt vindicated for having chosen military doctor for my look, called him soldier, which made him grin.

His body is surprisingly unmarked, or was. Weeks ago, I gave him a quick formula for muscle building. He’s on week eight of his regime and though he’s arguably undernourished, he wears it well. Wiry muscle structure, visible bones in all the right places. The only very soft spot on him is his mouth. He keeps it that way with a mixture of natural solid oils and a custom blend of scents. His breath smells of it, and cigarettes and whisky at the moment. He’s been smoking the last of his store of American cigarettes, an entirely white paper, no brown filter like their English counterparts. When he’s unsure of himself, he touches the back of his head when he takes a drag, looking down. He swings a leg when he’s sitting on a high surface. I purposely didn’t bring a camera, the Tibetan approach. No matter how much work goes into the positioning and creation of a work of art, it is impermanent. There are only two exceptions, but everyone has to figure that out for themselves.

He claimed I’d reached his limit, but I didn’t listen. I watched instead. I had my hand around his slim, pale throat and told him to keep still. He may have wondered why I wasn’t applying much pressure, probably thought I was just demonstrating control. That was one aspect. I was taking his pulse, actually. All systems steady, eyes cloudy but still sparking. What this signaled was a change of tactics, not leaving him there to let the pain dull and settle into his psyche. Listen, you’re too far into the hole, I can’t let you stay there. He looked at me. I picked up a thin blade and his expression changed. You need the sting. A thin, sharp pain. Ride it back. He licked his lips, eyes clearing. There’s the hunger. On your back. His motion was fluid, none of the jittering he’d had only seconds before. I carved shallow designs, four parallel lines that curled at the ends, zigged and zagged diagonally over his chest, ending on the opposite side, under his ribcage. The result was a sash of bloody calligraphy and he wore it so well I wanted to howl. I led him to the white tiled bathroom and stood him in front of the mirror to show him how beautiful he looked. He ran his hands over them, back arching. After everything he’d been through, everything he’d handled with as much composure as one can demonstrate while they’re screaming, that was what did it. He wept, head bent, and I stared at the muscles shaking between his shoulder blades, put my hand there to feel it. The bloody handprints are still on the sink. I haven’t the heart to wipe them away yet.

I told him to say everything that leapt to mind right there while I cleaned the cuts. After some hesitation, he blurted it all out. It’ll remain unwritten.

When he wakes up, after a feed, we’ll watch Titus and I’ll tint his hair white. Wash him down, make him up, mess him up again. Though not in quite the same way. The first night was Beethoven. The second is Mozart. I brought the latter at the last minute, an afterthought. Such a relief to trust instincts again.

On the way to the train, I’ll buy a new sim card for my phone, a new number. I don’t have his. The Tibetan approach.

There’s that moment, you know, when I’m reading a story and a section smacks me crossways and I know I’ve come across something special.

I’m an animal
of the worst sort–
old, trapped,
but still needing
to go on.

(That’s Norman Savage there, who’s been chronicling hard times and hard living since the 60’s. I’m very proud to introduce him to the wider audience he so eminently, utterly deserves.)

I think of these lines as down payments.

This was back when we still hadn’t figured out the key to living forever, back when all the dumb schmucks about to check out down on Earth would pay to have their minds warehoused in the chitinous skin of those giant low-grav shrimp and lobsters they’d let loose on the moon, in all the new oceans that happened when the craters filled up with industrial rain.

Back in the stupid days, I mean.

(Via Stephen Graham Jones, pulp stalwart and possibly the single most inventive writer I know.)

The stories I chose for the Pulp Issue pay off at rates that would make your local loan shark proud.

Jesus smiles. I turn my gaze to my feet and watch dust clouds form around my steps.  

“I heard you talking back there. You really know how to pull a crowd.”

(That’s Keisha Lynn Ellis there. You haven’t heard of her before, because this is the first story she’s published in the US. A threeway with Jesus Christ and Che Guevera serves as subplot to a story that doubles down on Hemingway and comes up smiling aces.)

Whole stories in their own right, each one. By turns hypnotically somber:

Ollie climbed up into the cab and backed out of the alley, driving as he always did, not fast but not slow either, past the bumper of one of the cop cars with eight inches to spare, past the brick of the building on the other side with a foot and a half to spare, out onto the bright snowy street and back into the rhythm of the route. George Hill, he thought. Dead as clay. Someone beat the everloving shit out of him. In a dumpster like a bag of trash. George Hill who gave me his carrot sticks that whole year we were in third grade. Corduroys and the mud smell of the playground. And the sun is sharp on the snow and the wind can cut your head off if you stand up too tall. When they say that the earth spins, maybe this is what they mean. And no one notices. Look at the cars and the snowplow. Janet Henderson going shopping. None of them has noticed.

(Tyler Sage manages to tweak the conventions of the standard “literary” story into a searing portrait of simplicity choking hard on grit and steel of reality – )

And gut-bustingly funny:

He pulls a small box of chocolate chip cookies from his pocket and presses them into my hand.

“These left over from the election?”

His smile wavers. “Excuse me?”

“Seem to remember a lot of kids walking around with these that Tuesday morning. Some people called it a bribe.”

“Campaigning,” he corrects. He’s gritting his teeth now, but goddamned if he’s not still smiling. “You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to like anyone. But you do have to live on this playground. Think about that.”

( – while Alex Mattingly lands the conventions of a dime-store pulp on an elementary school playground, an idea so deft I was left wondering why no one had thought of it before and excecuted with such precision that I’m damn glad someone as talented as Mattingly was the one).

Likewise, you can’t have pulp without creepy-crawlies:

I fled my cheerful, shiny family for the Bug Man.

(Do yourself a favor and don’t skip to the end of Laura Benedict’s story. Really.)

Nor would you be advised to skip the wrong side of the tracks:

“Watchin’ for those boys,” Marge answered, training her eyes on the street again. “Saw ‘em come by before I was even done with my Sugar Pops. Drove by a second time when I was fixin’ up this heater.” She nodded toward the orange glow. “They up to no good. Uh huh.”

(That’s another pulp veteran, Patricia Abbot, busting us off a chunk of Detroit steel.)

I’d be foolish, of course, to miss the larger world, where the locals are drop-hopping around the influence of America’s own special brand of pulp –

Some time ago in the Wazirate, an Arab city-state similar to the others along the Persian Gulf, a tribeless nomad named Ali al-Mutawakkil began tying brass cooking pots to his feet and went out into the spectral sand swirling under the moon and vandalized the bulldozers and the rollers and the trucks belonging to a company commissioned to build a paved road through the desert.

(How do you use a serial killer to fight a technological onslaught? Ali Etaraz has got an idea or two.)

And you don’t need hardly need more than 39 words to pack in a perfect revenge:

perfect
strangers
leave the bar

(Still not sure how David Romanda pulled this little triumph off. I mean, the words are right there, but still.)

And what kind of pulp doesn’t take a trip to the carnival?

Jacki’s boyfriend, Anthony, a red-faced, muscular punk, stomps along with a bundle of helium “Happy Birthday” balloons. He’s the kind of asshole who wanted a boy so bad he named the girl after him anyway. They bounce lower and lower as they rebound through the crowd, the excitement hissing out of them every few feet or so.

(You wonder how David James Keaton keeps up the frenetic pace. I’m just glad we got us a nice long toke from him here.)

Feel no guilt in your desire, you say? All right:

I cooked up an excuse to give to my wife Leslie and drove down there by myself.  I didn’t bother removing my wedding ring because I was already four months pregnant. 

(Dominica Phetteplace ain’t fucking around, wedding rings or not. Not even a little.)

And the bad guys. Good lord the bad guys:

“You know Greenie’s back,” the clerk said.

“Going to see him now.”

“You walking?”

“Truck’s overheating.”

“I bet it’s your thermostat.”

“I know what it is. I just ain’t had time to fix it.”

“You think it’s a good idea not to have a quick getaway you going to see Greenie.”

“Probably better not to have a vehicle around at all.”

(S. Craig Renfroe Jr. isn’t either. You’ll read this one and be damn glad it’s not you.)

Your job, now, is to get lost in the abandon, clicking the clicks till, sadly, you’ve got to go. In the meantime, you think I can outdo these twelve writers? The hell I can. With thanks to Roxane Gay for the opportunity to edit this spectacular issue and Brad Green for putting it all together, I’m going to stop trying right here, and get to reading.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_11/Keaton.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

 “Every day, it’s a-getting closer, going faster than a roller coaster…
Every day, it’s a-getting faster, everyone says go ahead and ask her”

-Buddy Holly “Everyday”

A man, a woman, and her child, all walking too fast through a carnival. Jacki, a young Hispanic woman with that sweatshirt and black no-pants pants thing going on, is dragging her toddler, Toni, by the arm. Jacki’s boyfriend, Anthony, a red-faced, muscular punk, stomps along with a bundle of helium “Happy Birthday” balloons. He’s the kind of asshole who wanted a boy so bad he named the girl after him anyway. They bounce lower and lower as they rebound through the crowd, the excitement hissing out of them every few feet or so.

The balloons, too.

One particular balloon, just a crumpled bag of deflated silver scraping the gravel behind them, catches every sharp corner and ankle it can, as reluctant as a kid hanging onto a doorjamb.

Surrounded by bright colors, happy families and voices, this group stands out in their manic desperation to get on a ride, any ride.

Toni tugs, tugs, tugs on her mom when a shorter line of bodies suddenly catches her eye. She breaks free to run ahead, and Jacki watches her scamper up to the tail end of calmer family units waiting for some short kid with the audacity to check the height of others. Anthony takes advantage of the distraction to kick the rest of the sagging balloons away in disgust, and Jacki finally turns her full attention to him, eyes blazing in anger.

“What?”

“You know what.”

The kid tries to measure Anthony to get a laugh from the crowd because Anthony is, of course, short as shit. But he knocks the stick out of the kid’s hand and steps up to wait for a carny valet to bring around his car, arms crossed tight.

Ten minutes later, the three of them sit silent in a slow-moving Model-T, riding a rail around a track with no corner sharper than the curvature of the Earth. Toni hangs out the back window to stare at the other creeping cars, and Anthony sits brooding, his arms still locked and pale from loss of circulation. He watches the steering wheel turning on its own. He knew the ride with the shortest line was gonna be the worst.

“Bothers you not driving, doesn’t it?” Jacki finally says without looking over.

No answer.

“Thought so,” she sighs.

“What was that supposed to mean?”

Jacki thinks she hears the squeak of his brain working, then realizes it’s just the wheel brushing his belly.

“This ride sucks!” Toni squawks. “Where’s all the twists and turns?”

“It’s not that kind of ride,” her mother says.

“What was that supposed to mean?” Squeak.

“Where’s the water?” Toni squeaks right back.

“It’s not that kind of ride,” Jacki repeats wearily, on autopilot, sort of like the car, more like those ghost pianos in the westerns that play tired, tuneless carnival music.

“Does it go any faster?”

“Not that kinda ride.”

“Oh, yeah?” Anthony says sarcastically. “Then what kind of ride was it?”

He’s asking about something else, so Jacki answers like something else.

“A calmer, comforting, more realistic one.”

“What are you talking about?” he suddenly wants to know.

“What are you talking about,” she says without the question mark.

“Talking about this,” Anthony hisses, suddenly headbutting the steering wheel. “Is this how it happened? Show me how it happened.”

“Jesus Christ, calm down, asshole.”

Jacki frowns and looks away out on the window. She’s had this conversation way too many times while driving and doesn’t want to encourage him with too much attention. And the idea of this argument in a car that doesn’t occupy his hands suddenly terrifies her.

But he says it again, and now she’s feeling spiteful.

“Show me how it happened, Jacki.”

“How what happened.” Again, not really asking.

“You know what.”

“Anthony, please, not now.”

“Is that how it happened? Him behind the wheel? You on top? Just tell me. Is that how you two crashed that fucking car? Someone forgot to keep both hands on the wheel, didn’t they? Then where the fuck were the hands? That’s why he ended up dead, swinging naked like a chimp from a fucking tree?” Pause. “You’re lucky to be alive, huh?”

Jacki knows he’s not talking about the crash. This is more like a threat. A lot more.

“Just shut up,” she says, throwing a thumb back at Toni. “I’m not talking about this again. Not here. Not again. Not ever.”

“Not ever, huh? You know,” Anthony starts, eyes on the fake road, hands floating over the fake wheel out of habit. “If you two woulda been on this bullshit ride instead, that accident would never have happened. He’d still be alive, you two would still be fuckin’, and I probably woulda never known shit. Would I?”

She says nothing, looking around to the families in the other cars. No one is smiling. And at least two couples have started arguing, too.

No wonder this line was so short, she thinks.

“That couldn’t have been the first time. No fuckin’ way, no fuckin’ way. No. Fuckin’. Way,” he goes on. “That’s what it took, huh? Him to get fucking killed before I found out?”

“Is that why I have to hear about this shit every couple of months? Because you feel you were robbed of your chance to kick our ass?”

“I just want you to admit it.”

“You don’t want me to admit shit,” Jacki turns full on him, furious. “You know how pathetic you sound? You’re not angry because I cheated. You’re angry because he’s dead.”

He considers this a second, eyes lingering on the line where her crotch was devouring her tights. Her clothes always seemed to get tighter when she was mad, even tighten when they were at an amusement park.

“Nah, I’m pretty happy he’s dead actually.”

“Anthony, you know what it is? You’re just angry because you had to fake compassion by my hospital bed, right there in front of Mom and everyone. You don’t think about how I was affected, or why any of it happened, or how someone actually died that day. And you don’t care. You just feel like you were cheated out of a chance to hit somebody. Well, quit fucking whining about it and do something.”

He considers this, hands greasing the fake steering wheel with a squeaky snakebite.

“You can’t stand the fact that what happened to him and what happened to me,” she pauses to make sure she gets the mouthful just right. “Was worse than what you think happened to you.”

Proud of herself, she stops to watch his hands wring his sweat out of the plastic, laughing when he turns it hard left and the car doesn’t do what he wants.

“Actually, you know what?” she says. “The more I think about you, the funnier you get.”

“Where’s the big twists!” Toni suddenly shouts from behind them. “I thought this was a ride!”

“It’s not that kind of ride.”

Jacki looks to the other rides on the horizon, wishes she would have picked any ride but this one. But it’s been “Slim Pickens,” ever since they walked in. And by that, she thought every one of these mutts manning controls reminded her of that hayseed asshole in Blazing Saddles.

She never feels she’s in good hands at a fair so cheap and ugly.

Fair? Or was it an amusement park? she wonders. Carnival? Anything but Theme Park, always hated that name.

“So who was driving?” Anthony says, a bit quieter. “Just tell me that. Please. Then I’ll drop it. Who was driving? You or him?”

“I don’t want her to hear this, Anthony.”

“Twists!” Toni stomps a foot.

“Not that kinda ride,” she says. “This one’s more like real life.”

As if to prove this, Anthony actually reaches for a radio dial on the fake dashboard to drown out the child before he catches himself.

“Are you that fucking stupid?” Jacki laughs, then notices another couple off in the grass with their plastic hood up, the husband hunched over the space where the engine would be. He’s looking all concerned, wife pouting.

“He was driving, wasn’t he? So you fucked him while he was driving?” Anthony says, punching the speedometer sticker once, twice. The car shakes.

“Enough. Three years I’ve been listening to this. I’m not talking about it anymore.”

“Three years and you’ve never given me any answers. I just want to know why you would even think about doing something like that, especially in a car.”

Silence.

“Fucking answer me!”

Impossibly, oncoming traffic seems to be drifting into their lane, and the helpless drivers glance over at them nervously. The rest of the drivers are arguing now, a flurry of loose hands, profanity, and exasperation. One man leans out to eyeball Anthony. Forgetting it’s a ride, Anthony reacts like he would on any road.

“What the fuck you lookin’ at?”

The woman in that car reluctantly restrains her man.

“Keep driving asshole,” Anthony mutters. Then, “Hey, did that motherfucker just cut me off?”

Anthony reaches for a rearview mirror to adjust to check the traffic behind him. He laughs when he sees there’s no mirror, of course, but he’s not very convincing.

Jacki tugs her leggings loose again and leans over.

“Are you losing your goddamn mind?”

“Could be.”

He pulls hard on the fake steering wheel, and it turns out it isn’t completely fake after all. The car bumps against the guide rail, and Toni giggles, finally excited.

“Do that again and we’re getting out,” Jacki warns him.

“No, do it again!” Toni squeals, clapping. He bumps the rail again.

“I’m pulling over so we can talk about this.”

“You can’t pull over, dumb ass,” Jacki says “This isn’t real. None of it.”

Jacki slumps forward, her head in her hands in frustration. The sensation of a dashboard sinking into her chest is strange, but not unfamiliar. Not entirely unpleasant. She wishes it was dark enough to pull up her sweatshirt and feel the cold plastic on her skin again.

Staring at her, Anthony pulls on the wheel again and the car lurches harder against the rail, almost clearing it. Toni is actually clapping her feet now.

“You realize we aren’t in a car, right?” she says softly. “You realize we’re not pulling over on the side of the road to talk, right? You realize this is a fucking ride, right?”

Anthony ignores her and, with two more quick turns of the steering wheel, he finally jumps the rail. Other fake drivers stop punching their dashboards to voice their concern, and some kids even start crying as the renegade Model-T crushes its way through some ratty flower beds, cuts off the line of sputtering gridlock, and heads for the nearest fence. Jacki opens the door and jumps out, pulling her daughter with her.

“Where are you going?” Anthony pleads as they start running. “Please, just show me what you did. Show me on this ride and no one will get hurt, I promise. Show me. It’s safer here. Think about it, this is the perfect place for it…”

Heads crane out of the other cars to watch Jacki with Toni in tow, and Anthony’s car belches and bumps its way along the rope fence surrounding the track.

“Show me what you did!” he yells.

She says nothing, almost running now.

“Stop.”

She still says nothing and gets ready to gather Toni up to run.

“How do I even know she’s mine?”

Jacki is now holding her breath, the only way she can say less than nothing.

Then she stops.

“Did you hear me?” he says, punching plastic over and over and over, fist running red.

“I heard you,” she says. “Nobody’s yours.”

“I know what happened,” he says. “So do you. You’re not mine and neither is she. Tell me I’m wrong. You lied all these years.”

“You’re right. You know what? You’re so good at predicting human nature, you should be named an honorary human being.”

Anthony takes a moment to imagine himself at this ceremony and what that trophy would look like, then he jumps out of the fake car, too. He decides the “honorary human being” trophy would be waist-high and topped with a little gold man flexing a bicep.

Jacki and her daughter walk off the ride, out the entrance, brushing past a man who’s trying to talk the slouching teenager with the measuring stick into letting him on the ride with his dog. The dog is almost tall enough.

That’s when Anthony is in front of everyone at the gate, blocking the way out with a small revolver he’s pulled from his skin-tight jeans like a magic trick. He doesn’t have to look at the teenager for the barrel of his gun to find his forehead like a magnet.

The kid drops his stick. Then, suddenly unarmed and helpless, the kid decides to run. Anthony turns the barrel on Jacki. Toni bites her lip in excitement, and there is an audible cheer from the back seats of the other Model-T’s as the children mistake the action for part of the ride.

Theme park indeed, Jacki thinks.

“Get back in there. Move!” he tells her, obviously trying to sound like the movies. She wonders why he didn’t just shout “movies!” instead.

But past the measuring sticks, real screams are starting. She looks up to see soap-white fists wrestling control from steering wheels and taking every car off the rails. Weapons are flashing everywhere now, snapping free of conceal-and-carry holsters or coming around from behind every back like that bouquet nobody wants. Pistols, rifles, even a buck knife, some jutting through the thin canvas roofs of the fake antique cars as workboots skid alongside in the dirt or sandals flip off and toes dig in like the fucking Flintstones. One vehicle gets stuck on the rope fence, fighting it like a bug strip until another car rear-ends it and flips it free and over.

What do they call this goddamn ride? Road Rage Rehearsals?

Jacki squeezes her face in her hands in disbelief as two men slide over the nearest hood, rabbit punching each other in the face until one of their boots hooks the grill and they wrench their sputtering ride completely sideways with them and disappear into a mushroom of dust.

Then it’s just Anthony, his five-foot nothing blocking out the scene as he walks slowly up to Jacki, then behind her, pressing the gun to the small of her back, and she thinks about how the carneys should use metal detectors instead of rulers.

He pulls up Jacki’s sweatshirt with the egg tooth on the barrel, and as the cold metal sinks into her skin, she inhales sharp and starts to walk.

A gun stashed in anybody else’s shorts would have warmed up by now, she thinks.

Toni’s eyes are positively glowing in excitement. Jacki’s too.

“Do those come with the cars?” Toni whispers.

Her mother says nothing as they march forward. Back to the track.

“Mommy?” Toni sighs, tugging on the leg of her mother’s tights and popping them out of the crack of her ass one last time. She’s trying to make sense of everything she heard earlier from the back seat, some talk about her conception. “Was I born on these rides?”

“Maybe,” Jacki says, still not afraid. She’s never been afraid of anybody that short and wouldn’t start today.

It’s a hot afternoon, triple digits, and the cool kiss of the metal feels too good on her back.

The problem are the steering wheels, she realizes. Ghost pianos and idle hands.

Anthony pushes Jacki to move faster back to the ride. She drags her feet like that silver birthday balloon, and he’s pulling her like she’s pulling Toni when backfires from the tiny cars and their lawnmower engines start popping like bullets, but more like cheap fireworks. He says a line from a movie again, but he fucks it up.

“Show me on this ride or no one gets hurt.”