your stones are small but i still love you

 

short (10-word) poem in this anthology

this is the fear

© S A M Publishing

five things i like about brandi wells' poisonhorse

1. The narrator gently poisons a companion horse. It doesn't mind all that much. In fact it sort of craves it. And long walks in the forest. Which is frighteningly, awesomely perfect.

2. Reading is for people who like to make the images move themselves. Wells' weirdly-sad-because-you've-lived-this? dreamscape of anthropomorphic anti-Neoplatanism shouts images of violent tenderness that demand Buddha-like absorption and tree-scaling adaptation. As in, "depth." As in, burrowing into the bowels of a lady who lives at the bottom of a cistern might require some special skills. As in caring about something might require eating it. As in, duh.

3. We've all felt like a severed head trapped in a bear's belly trying (with great difficulty) to make an important point to another severed head trapped in the gastrointestinal tract of a different bear who's lumbering around the same backyard. We just didn't know it 'til now.

4. The cruel and continuous torture and subjugation of rats (especially some nifty little harnesses that "squeeze their bodies too tightly, puncturing fur and skin, digging into muscles, yielding only to bone."). Yeah, I know the book's a fable and the rats in it are sort of unfortunate and defenseless pawns relegated to the wreckage of the narrator and poisonhorse's chaotic relationship but last night an actual rat with a tail as thick as a middle finger ran giddily across my shoe as I walked out of my building and I fucking hate them.

5. This:

"If my poisonhorse is a child, we are all children. If we are all children, we are horses. If we are truly horses, we must be made of poison. If our insides are acidic, rotting lumps pressed together and expanding, then we will never have the capacity to love. We are created without the necessary hollows inside and if there are accidentally hollows in us, we fill them with other things before love can take root, swell, inflate, inhabit, control. Because we are aware that love must be crushed. Eradicated."

http://mudlusciouspress.com/nephew/

Poisonhorse by Brandi Wells
a nephew of Mud Luscious Press
August 2012
34 pages

the "alien biological lifeform" in his wife's pregnant belly

review of Scott Wrobel's story collection, Cul de Sac

for a joke to continue to be a real joke it requires an audience that at least sort of gets the punch line

Last Girlfriend, is up at Vol. 1 Brooklyn as part of their Sunday Stories series.

Your dad's dark lips curved like pomegranates

 Patricide: A Romance

[Stolen Plums]

July Short, Fast, and Deadly

bludgeon New York until it bleeds

(non)fiction piece up at Fill Me Up NYC

He doesn't / come to places like this & he can't / come back to Hartford

Went to see Columbians Timothy Donnelly and Sam Amadon read at Real Art Ways in Hartford tonight. A spacially appropriate reading commemorating the launch of Amadon's collection The Hartford Book, and what a cool abandoned-warehouse-next-to-a-probable-crack-den space it was. Donnelly read from The Cloud Corporation and I got dizzy. Amadon's poems were rad (a ceiling light burst during one of them) and I can't wait to break into his book and snort up all of them tonight. During a discussion about process and the artist's decision to remain amoral (which, duh, is why you become an artist or at least so you can have an excuse for stumbling around drunk breaking things), Donnelly explained that "it's my job to try on thoughts," which pretty much sums up everything. I almost drove home after hearing that. Later, I briefly thought about discussing buying drugs in Hartford with Amadon but settled on mentioning Richard Howard's impeccable eyewear and he looked at me like I was insane but at least he signed my copy of his book. A smoking hot girl with dreads who was a hipster version the chick from The Big Bang Theory (of which I've seen 45 seconds) gave me a free Harpoon IPA. That was nice. I looked at her like she was crazy. 

http://www.restaurantsct.com/blog/an-iberian-evening-at-real-art-ways-and-costa-del-sol/

sad clown story excerpt

Walking out of Taco Bell towards the sun-baked parking lot, Gilbert aka Giggles the Magnificent came to the sudden and very uncomfortable conclusion that the shit had come back to bite him. Not the shit he had just taken – that (as far as Taco Bell shits go) had been rather pleasant. A swift exit, minimal wiping, had even given him enough time to fix some inconsistencies in his powder base and rouge lip liner in the mirror before the rhino-ankled fellow in the other stall squeezed out enough toilet children to make room for the most meager soft taco, let alone the multiple Beefy 7-Layer Burritos a man of his impressive girth would undoubtedly crave.

No, these feces were metaphorical, but stunk no less than partially digested Mexican fare from the gut of a type-2 diabetic.

The police (or maybe a concerned diner) had taken the girls, their hair and exposed breasts smeared with white and red face paint, from his car and laid them shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the adjacent parking spot. An officer was recording them with a camcorder while another dusted the passenger-side door of Gilbert’s neon-yellow and ground-beef-pink hatchback with a forensic brush, under the decal that said CLOWNING AROUND HOME CIRCUS, LLC in a curly-cue sans serif. Gilbert stood frozen, deciding whether to retreat back to the bathroom or make a break for the costume shop at the other end of the strip mall, when he noticed the terror-stricken expression of a little boy staring up at him a few feet away, clutching an Incredible Hulk blanket.

This naked, eye-bulging terror Gilbert knew all too well.

“Mo-mo-mommy…” the kid started to blubber. Automatic reflex, Gilbert reached into his pocket and squeezed the water bulb connected via hidden tube to the silk flower attached to his blue and green polka-dotted collar. The flower unleashed a formidable spray onto his face and he staggered back a little, gurgling for extra comedic effect. The kid’s fear appeared to increase and Gilbert realized in hindsight that the squirting flower trick – which was, in all likelihood, causing his lip liner to run down the entirety of his lower jaw, creating a look more cannibal-esque than child-friendly – was probably a bad idea.

“Hey little guy,” he whispered, “it’s only water. Nothing to worry about, see?” But it was too late. The kid screeched, “MOMMMMMMYYYYY!” at a decibel level that belied his stature and the kid’s mother, who’d been filming the crime scene with her phone, swiveled around, glaring, and when Gilbert tried to  demonstrate the flower’s harmlessness he accidentally squeezed his key fob, which caused the car alarm to activate and the cops to snap into defense mode, pistols drawn.

The girls’ bodies remained pale and rigid on the asphalt.

where dead texts go

rIgor mort.Us  

Wheelchair

the man arrives on roller skates with roses in his teeth, grinning bloody lips

EVERY LAUNDROMAT IN THE WORLD

by Mel Bosworth

Safety Third Enterpries, 2012

40 pages

Near the top of the list of reasons why I like my apartment of three+ years are the washer and dryer machines buzzing happily just a few steps from the front door. Not having to cart pounds of soiled underthings two blocks through rain/snow/piss/PCP addicts only to spend 90 minutes in a sauna-sticky Laundromat reeking of cats and drowned in the palpable-in-any-language cheese of  Mexican soap operas is a constant cause for celebration,  from which some would say I’ve never woken. A reminder that at-home amenities are, well, amenable. Then along comes Mel Bosworth’s Every Laundromat in the World and I’m forced to reconsider (leaving my apartment, not carrying bushels of laundry around the city like a clown). The chapbook’s quietly debilitating short poems provide a surprising and keen succession of small-town observational jabs, building with the subdued rhythmic furor of a double-loaded spin cycle. In a musically minimalist language, Bosworth juxtaposes swathes of superficially unrelated commonplace minutiae – a five-year-old photograph of a man with an ambiguous facial expression, the spontaneous singing of a ditty extolling Spam, a vague beep that sounds like a trash truck but can’t be – imbuing the moments with an appealing emotional newness that often gives way to a foreboding intensity. A calm rain forest evening belies thousands of years of unfortunate current events. A recycling bin invites sublime self-annihilation. Ryan Gosling becomes my and every other consumer’s worst nightmare. Seriously. There’s also a bunch of humorously lighter fare (“It’s always funnier when you / masturbate with your mouth / open”), which, if we’re still going with the extended laundry analogy, which we are, we might say Bosworth mixes all his colors and whites with just the right amount of bleeding. But most importantly, Every Laundromat in the World reminds us to look more deeply into the spiderweb forests of what we so unceremoniously have deemed “the everyday,” to give those webs a healthy twist, to see what happens. Don’t be sorry.

[Body wRites]

new issue of Short, Fast, and Deadly

sex scene

His weed is sick, insofar as it creates a foot race between her head and her stomach to see which will disengage from her body first. Right now, it’s dead even. South Park is a blaze of indefinite pixels and the components of the living room – a dusty bookshelf, generic cityscape and Japanese woodblock print posters, something that might be an old fraternity paddle or a snowshoe – are in similar states of blur. She braces against him to avoid feeling like she’s tumbling off a building or maybe just the couch they’re sitting on and he grins, blushes, wraps his arm around her shoulder, squeezes. At some point there’s a crash in the dark hallway and a squint-eyed roommate creature emerges and requires in so many croaks that they remove themselves to a fucking bedroom because the creature has to be up for a fucking conference call in two fucking hours, which means they must have been laughing or discussing something pretty loudly for long time and she doesn’t remember what it was and it doesn’t matter because she’s just happy to have her head placed on a surprisingly comfortable pillow in a room dimly lit by Christmas lights that outline the ceiling. He slumps over a laptop at a nearby desk and she stares at the blue and orange elephant and Celtic tapestries that line the walls, a décor choice she’d normally describe as mid-2000s-poseur or post-post-modern-bro-out, but which now seem to be helping stabilize the substance hurricane pounding the base of her skull. An electronic remix of a George Michael song sifts through the speakers at a reasonable volume and he lies next to her on the bed and they stare at the ceiling until the song changes to a dubstep version of t.A.T.u’s “All The Things She Said.” He starts to apologize for the playlist and she grabs his crotch, rough strokes over his jeans and he pulls her face into his mouth, the shock of chin stubble, whiskey tongue, tongues, her fingers fumbling with his zipper, cupping the once-familiar pulsing heft, him plying at the black lace and the skirt and thong collapsing in one motion onto the Persian-ish rug as she arches away because she’s forgotten that she hasn’t shaved in weeks – she remembers Kandi gushing about the puppy-drool reactions her bi-weekly waxes never fail to engender – but he pulls her hips against his, spreads and enters carefully, mumbles stale heat against her neck, how tight she is and she grunts in agreement – how long has it been since Brian? –  and she wants to add “and wet, too,” but his tongue’s in her mouth, nibbling at her neck and she can smell herself, his sweat, getting closer, her fingers down there, bucking, still coming as he pulls out and releases a meager spattering on the plaid Ralph Lauren comforter. He rolls over and she stares at the ceiling, panting. The pants give way to chuckles and then to flat-out laughter, but it’s like she’s laughing at an image of herself because as the wetness between her legs dissipates she feels herself floating up with it until she’s somewhere near the Christmas lights laughing down at her pants-less self, at him giving her this oddly shy glance, at her rubbing his stomach, saying, “Congrats dude, you just bagged your first lesbian,” at his uhhhh mouth, at her giggling – still more than a little tipsy – and gathering the clothes on the floor, putting them on while he finds his jeans and takes out a notebook and pen from one of the pockets, him (avoiding eye contact) asking, “How does this work, can I, uh, get your number?” as he scribbles Chris, a phone number and what looks like his Twitter handle on a piece of notebook paper, at him handing it to her and her stuffing it into her bra, at her mumbling something contrived like see you around and him lurching up to get a goodbye hug and remembering, “Hey I never got your num –” but he doesn’t finish and slumps back onto the bed because she’s already gone.

one of us will have to destroy this shell

No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear

By J.A. Tyler and John Dermot Woods

Jaded Ibis Press

Released January 13, 2012

124 pages

Reading J.A. Tyler is a hardcore meditative discipline-inducing experience like that grizzled old dude you see in the park sipping from a brown bag and staring at the same chess move for several decades until his head explodes and leaves a pulsing trail of elegantly jarring (i.e. read this 5039403832 times because it’s that good) and unsuspected verbiage leaking onto his idle opponent’s scuffed white New Balances. It might not be the easiest shit to get into and you might not remember any specific phrases once you’re done, but once you’re in you’re sucked in and you will leave scarred – in a good way. It’s like this cumulative dosing of deceptive emotional wreckage that sucks you, all unique-like, into a frantic level of whoa, a story told around a story around a place you’ve never been but where you think you might like to sit down and chill for a while but you can’t because it’s that hot. No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear is no different and no joke, although there are a few of those. The book is “about” maybe some conjoined twins or maybe they were stapled together in some time before time, or something.  And they split. So basically a love story. One of the most wrenching. I know this because:

The words I am using are a scream. The words I am using are a mask. I don’t want to be the mask to your mask. I want us to wear the same mask. I want us to mask the same thing, to be the same mask, to think that when we move our fingers we are moving our fingers.

This us and we that we are or are not anymore.

But it’s also a messed up death-slumber neo-ghostly riot that might make you sad because severed ghost twins is relatively heavy subject matter these days, I hear:

Cradle me in your bones. Cuddle me in the wind of your lungs. Grapple my eyes into your head and bring this back to how it used to be. Bring this back to when we two were one and there was no link between except and everything was a link and there was no wreckage, we were absolute. Go back to there. Be in the past. This one of us two now.

Am I of us the only me that wants this back?

The book has sky-blue pages and flowers and other amazing images drawn by John Dermot Woods – boy in blue hat cunnilingus-lover to a TV goddess sporting disengaged man-mask, Jesus procuring pulsing heart-candy to bystanders, re-entering a mother’s womb to lovingly bomb it in the hopes of relegating past abominations to a more savory unreality – so you know these are no companion drawings but text enhancements, visions within a distinct vision. I stare at these still. People think I’m weird. I think not staring at this book is weird. 

The Natural Order

Walking home from the annual get-blitzed-and-forget-my-breath mixer at the Victims of Female Waterboarding lodge, my father and I heard some dirt talking to a tree. 

It said, “I can discharge you from this cortex, or collect your organs like raindrops with colors to spare.”

I thought that sounded beautiful. 

“That sounded beautiful,” I said, tugging on my father’s Cuckold Klein unlimited edition denim jacket. 

He gave me this look: Your teeth and eyes and maladjusted thyroid are from the left-handed side of the family, meaning, Liquid should be illegal, she slid too fast, or simply, These summers are moot.

So this is what my father did: he went back to Walmart for the fifth time that week, bought a power saw (Only $149.99 – Don’t miss a single Rollback or special offer!), cut the tree down and pissed on the stump.

Then he made me do it.

“That sounded beautiful,” my father whispered while lighting my jacket on fire.

A Place Where Anything Else is Happening

“The nature of death,” my mother said, “is that it lacks a knowledge of good and evil.” She’d thrown my brother’s cat off the bed before I’d woken up. Maybe she planned on me for bludgeoning, too.

“Well?” she asked. I could tell something was different. It had been weeks since she’d mentioned the skin clogging her neck, since she’d tried to burn some misery off her cottage cheese and Smirnoff thighs with her Congolese acupuncturist’s rigid, waspy fingers.

“‘No’ means Jesus. Jesus means type-2 diabetes,” I recited obediently until she let me roll over. 

That was the last time my mother shared her thoughts with me, or anyone else. In the morning she’d run off for good with a pre-bust dot-commer named Alphonse who turned out to be an undercover eurotophobe and a third cousin of the Unabomber. And it would be months before my father immerged from his self-immolated womb of Who’s The Boss? episodes and pity Twinkies from coworkers.

That afternoon, my brother found the cat buried under a very Ellis-esque NO EXIT sign across the street and I don’t want to tell you what it looked like.

We Always Managed to Have the Same Teachers

Carl didn’t see the piñata-bashing club as I cracked him with it on the back of his dome piece, knocking him out for a solid two minutes. And I didn’t see the two massive parental hands that grabbed me from behind and spanked my learing, chubby rump until I apologized to Carl, our non-offensively biracial god and the president. “Crappy birthday to you” is an understatement. Honey-bearded Jesus and George Bush 41 just kept staring at me from behind their picture frames on the plastic, Pine-Sol-colored mantel, and I wouldn’t be getting my new Super Nintendo until the following year, when the only thing anyone really wanted to play with were Stretch Saddam dolls and Branch Davidian Big Wheels. But I would be seeing a lot more of Carl. Until the next time he touched me where it smelled funny.

Fascist-Dogma-Nectar Overflow

Know that it’s not cool to jump off a Subway restaurant. It just isn’t. My brother was neither holy nor insane, so I can’t tell you why he did it.

“I am an IED and this Walmart life is a short fucking fizzle,” was all he kept shouting down to the security guards and latex-gloved sandwich artists waiting to catch him.

Fearing that the slip-of-tongue might cause some friction with a minor fast food butt buddy (and more importantly, a possible decline in sales in the Global Regression aisle), Walmart decided to sue the entire town for malicious suburban redundancy.

We thought we had a pretty decent case until they brought in the Disney lawyers, who immediately started handing out 10-percent-off passes to Space Mountain to the judge, the non-Hispanic members of the jury, and every third octogenarian who promised to buy a Five Dollar Foot-long. That’s when we knew they’d take everything.

Now my brother can’t go to the U2 concert next week because he doesn’t have eyes anymore. None of us do. Just old, raw sockets. It really isn’t cool.

PTSD Is So 2005

Oprah agreed on a fair way to decide initiation, which involves two closed fists and pretending your grandmother’s in the room. The compromise proved to be a big ratings boost in most major markets (except, of course, in Kandahar) and was rated as favorable by almost every viable demographic besides panty-sniffing Japanese stock brokers vacationing in Haiti and bomb-sniffing dogs out on recon.

Honestly, I think it made most people feel a little better about the future: vapid suit-herders could still meditate under clouds of dharma-jizz in obese central-air pumping boxes, highways would still shimmer in the hot afternoons and block complete glimpses of fields, bizarre tension vibes and unprovoked assaults would still be the two most sought-after traits of every washed-up child actor.

My brother came home in August with half a femur and a pull-one-over-on-you Midwestern drawl he got from watching too many John Hughes movies in the hospital. Maybe that’s why nobody argued when he stopped taking his Ambiens and started stashing them away for what we assumed would be one heck of an Alive Day party the following year.

“The least coolest person on TV is more interesting than anyone I know,” he told me while I sponged him down for the last time, his Budweisers raised above the tub like night goggles.