Archives

KNIVES by Sean Hayes

September 16, 2024

I was gonna be a salesman. I took an elevator up to the third floor and followed signs taped to the walls with directional arrows and Trajectory Marketing Demo printed on them. They led to an office with an open door. There were guys with hair gelled, cut, buzzed, or combed into all different shapes wearing oversized suits and ties, the kind that’d only been worn to funerals. My hair was shaggy again and I was wearing my beat-up Christmas slippers, Nike sweatpants, and my Arc’teryx fleece riddled with cigarette burns like I was some weird spotted animal. I just

FLORIDA MAN by Bridget Adams

September 13, 2024

THE MAN SITTING ON MY COUCH HAS OBTAINED HIS ALLIGATOR HARVEST PERMIT Yes, it’s true! We haven’t fucked yet but soon you’ll be crouched in the greased dark of a velvet panhandle midnight, your rifle pointed squarely in the center of an alligator’s long flat head, between the ridges of its eyes. The animal’s body looks like a topographic map, bone-hard hills and valleys laid over with skin too tough for bullets at anything but close range. “Alligators are really hard to kill,” you say, and I want to give the curve of your ear one long lick as you

DAVE FITZGERALD RECOMMENDS: Mike Corrao’s ‘Smut-Maker’ and Mike Kleine’s ‘Third World Magicks’

September 12, 2024

I was cruising down I-70 aimed at Lawrence, Kansas when I got the email offering me a regular feature here at X-R-A-Y – part of a new “Recommends” series inviting me to draw on the deep backlog of reviews I’d already contributed to Goodreads, and pair them with new pieces exclusive to this site. Naturally I was flattered, and accepted right away from my fake-fancy hotel in the heart of the KU campus, already thinking about the pleasant symmetry of the timing. That is, I was in Kansas for the Inside the Castle 10th anniversary celebration, and as fate would have it,

PATATINA by Rosalind Margulies

September 11, 2024

My boss is a dog and today is the dog’s birthday. Okay, not really. I like to say that my boss is a dog, but it’s just one of those things you say to make it easier, you know? But it is her birthday. The dog’s name is Patatina, which is Italian for little potato. The dog’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Bianchi, are Italian. I’m from India or at least my grandparents are. And Patatina is a Papillon. (Patatina can also mean pussy. In case you were wondering.) Here: Lake Oswego, 15 minutes from downtown Portland but several income brackets

MIRACULOUS AND UNPREDICTABLE AND PERVERSE AND UNKNOWABLE: An Interview with Shannon Robinson by Rebecca Gransden

September 10, 2024

Primeval forces threaten to invade the worlds of Shannon Robinson’s short stories. Wild presences haunt suburbia, and folkloric figures surface as manifestations of deep-seated anxieties. For the collection The Ill-Fitting Skin (Press 53, 2024) Robinson presents normal life in all its complexity and confusion, where Mother Nature shows her claws and mythic creatures bare their teeth. This skin is pregnant with dread, imbued with the surreal, and, like a serpent, ready to shed and transform. I spoke to Shannon about the book. Rebecca Gransden: What is the story behind The Ill-Fitting Skin? When did you conceive the collection and

YOU WORK IN THE WORST DINER IN EXISTENCE THAT’S ALWAYS OPEN FOR BUSINESS by Avitus B. Carle

September 9, 2024

Where the brown leather stools and chairs suction to the patrons’ skin until they bruise. Where the tables wobble and the menus are always sticky and the food listed changes every day. The bar is slanted and the floor dips and your uniform remains the same except for the endless supply of toothpicks you carry in the pockets of your apron. Where you are the only employee. Where food cooks itself. Where you can gaze at a new apocalypse just outside the window every time the bell that hangs over the door sings a brand-new carol and a new customer

JESSE HILSON RECOMMENDS: David Kuhnlein

September 5, 2024

Jesse Hilson recommends…David Kuhnlein Decay Never Came (Maximus Books, 2023) The text of this chapbook is less than forty pages long but it can’t be read in a hurry. It can’t be gobbled up like a small package of black licorice. Slow down and take in each line one by one. You are now reading at the slowest setting of the necro-metronome. The book’s title is Decay Never Came, suggesting that a jump into a different, longer timescale is required to get what the poems are doing, with the risk that even then this could not be possible. A

CONGRATULATIONS by Graeme Bezanson

September 4, 2024

After work I met Alexa because we were trying out the idea that we could be just friends. Together we walked to Barnes & Noble where they were having an event for Dan Dashiell, author of a celebrated sad novel about a dying husband who spends the last month of his life teaching his wife how to cook the family’s favorite meals. Every chapter is a different dish and life lesson. Alexa knew Dan from the internet and I think they read together once, before he became a successful young novelist. Also I believe he was at one point fucking

EIGHT QUESTIONS FOR MIKE TOPP by Sabrina Small

September 3, 2024

A memory of my interview with Mike Topp, which I forgot to record, and then turned into a pseudo-transcript, at which point I solicited interjections from the artist. The first thing I tell Mike Topp is that I didn’t realize who he was. That I hadn’t done any homework beyond reading his tweets and a few poems on Hobart. I tell him his name is so gay it approaches drag, so I was picturing a young gay dude who had watched a lot of Warhol films and revered Peter Sellers in Being There, a practicing naif, a retro naif even.

TRANSMISSIONS: The Collidescope Podcast

August 30, 2024

Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts. Rebecca Gransden: Does the podcast have a mission or manifesto? George Salis: The Collidescope Podcast has the same mission as my online literary publication The Collidescope. The goal is to shine a light on neglected literature and celebrate uninhibited creativity. Art for art’s sake rather than something commodified and packaged for mass consumption. To quote from my site, “We love to see the mental fireworks of a writer wrestling with their imagination, with language itself.” A good deal of the stories, books, and authors on the show are those