Archives

SONATA by Daisuke Shen

April 30, 2021

For a long time now, all sound has been damp. Wrapped in mildew, white-fleeced, everyone’s voices turned to mist. I am the only one not contained within this quiet—me, who has always wished to be, more so than anyone else; me, the girl who could never stop singing.

I had tried all of the tricks, of course: stuffed my mouth with lagan scrounged from sea beds, weaned off of proteins and greens, hoping to become weaker. Yet the avalanche of notes poured out of my mouth like sludge; my crazed melodies frenetic and pinched as sand fleas.

The silence started two years ago at that strange rehearsal, where a man wearing a blue silk scarf played a piece on the piano outside of M. Franco’s cake shop. None of us had ever seen him before, nor seen a piano that size. We held our breath as he positioned himself on the bench, his fingers stretched and hovering above the keys. Perhaps this was the one we had been waiting for. Because of my incessant singing, I stood toward the back of the audience as I always did. 

He began to play a symphony familiar to all of us, though there was something sinister to it, I realized—he had ripped away its flesh, plunged his fingers into its insides to rearrange the notes. Why did no one else think the mastication of this piece to be sinister? But everyone was amazed, unable to look away. 

Even through my warbling, I heard the piano cry out as the man wrung its felt throat dry; its strained screams contorted in his hands into the softest lavender.

Long after he had strapped the piano onto his back and taken his leave, everyone continued clapping until the world was wrapped in static. Even their bodies became muffled, less opaque, dipping into one another’s on the street.

I, however, absorbed the piano’s grief. If people regarded me with contempt before, they now term me traitor to this town and its silence. I reside in a grey room in a grey building they have built underneath the ground, with just enough light that I can see the pen with which I write this letter, the only comfort that damned sonata that I sing again and again, as if I can be the one to save it.

Read More »

SOMETHING IS KNOCKING by Sean Ennis

April 29, 2021

Grace and Gabe, after saying something very cutting—Grace, not Gabe—have gone to visit her parents and I am home with the dogs, in the shower, flooded with the memory of a woman I once slept with who kept demanding, “Look at me! Look at me!” It’s not, like, eudaemonic. 

Then the dogs are going crazy. Something is knocking. They get very protective of the house when I'm in the shower. I don’t hurry.

And let’s be real clear: the dogs we rescued from the shelter? Did not rescue us. We do the nice, expensive things, and they basically hang out with their small, furry demands.

And let’s be clearer still: what Grace said about the séance I hosted being “poorly attended”?  I was not alone. 

I decided to wear the Yves Saint Laurent La Nuit De L’homme. Recently, I’ve been favoring the John Varvatos Vintage, but the Saint Laurent is Grace’s favorite and I miss her. Her friend, Colleen, once told me, “You don’t talk much, but you always smell good.”

It’s Meredith at the door, the woman who tried to kill Gabe. That’s not fair. The accident was three weeks ago, and he has stopped complaining about his bruised spleen. The hood of her car is still dented, and she is holding a plate of cinnamon buns, my favorite. She says, “I knew you were home.”

In the living room, I’m rethinking her. She has the familiar, submissive demeanor of someone trying to get off drugs. The logo of her jeans is outlined in rhinestone, and good God, they are bootcut. She sits inexplicably in the chair possessed by Grace’s dead grandmother. 

“Did your family leave you?” she says.

“Permanently? No.” I say. “Or rather, none of your business.”

“You have pretty eyes,” she says. “Are they real?”

Notice, she does not apologize.

Read More »

LIZARD BLOOD by Alisha Wexler 

April 28, 2021

Tuesday I wake up damp with a clenched jaw. Dirty towels on the ground reeking of mildew. Why do people record their dreams? Dreams are trout in bare hands—let them slip free! Mine are so generic anyway. I pluck out my teeth one-by-one like daisy petals. He loves me, I say with blood pouring down my hand, he loves me not. I move on. I weasel out of New York lease. I get out of bed. I go into the bathroom. I put on the clammy moist bikini hanging over the shower rod. I lay by the kidney-shaped pool in the backyard.

I’m still in Arizona—the McMansion in the Sonoran Desert. It’s the house I grew up in that my dead mother left to me. I’ve been here a month. By now, I should have renovated the house. I should have listed it on the market. But for who to buy? The houses in the neighborhood are still boarded up and owned by banks. Occupied by squatters. No one’s moving in. I should have signed the deed over to my stepdad, Neil. But I’ve done nothing except lay by the pool.

My friend in New York texts me: WHAT is even in the Southwest suburbs?

I reply: Pools.

This pool is where I had my first kiss. It’s where the Mormon girls in my neighborhood baptized me by holding my head underwater until I felt the walls of my lungs vacuum seal together.

I lay across slabs of sandstone, basking in the sun. Lizards join me: geckos and horny-toads.

When my dead boyfriend was alive, he called me reptilian—an ongoing joke that I hated. He first mentioned it when he saw how freakishly long my tongue was, then in passive aggressive jest about my short attention span. Sometimes he mentioned it when he heard my croaky morning voice, and once when he noticed the yellowish green of my eyes. Mostly, he said it when I was cold. I resented this. Being called ectothermic—associated with cold-bloodedness.

In the Sonoran Desert, the children are playing in the cul-de-sac and the teenagers are overdosing on Fentanyl. I take a deep breath of air polluted with endocrine disruptors. Yesterday I parked behind the drug store and watched a malnourished coyote lap up roadkill. Today I see the sun glittering like chrome sparks off the pool’s little wakes. Everyday, I get up and drive twenty minutes to the nearest Starbucks just to hear someone tell me “good morning” and remind me I exist.

***

Wednesday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

At noon, Neil comes over to check the chlorine levels, filters, and pumps. He circles the perimeter, skimming out leaves and drowned moths. “The Little Guy is broken,” he tells me. The Little Guy is what he calls the suction scooter that scours the pool like a bottom-feeder.

The older he gets, the deeper his voice becomes. I now hear the Oklahoma drawl he suppressed for years. Though, he’s not “old” per se. He’s only sixteen years older than me. I run the numbers in my head. Married my mother when he was 24, she was 47, I was 8. Oddly, the older he gets, the younger he looks. Maybe it’s the relief of my nutcase mother being in the ground, maybe it’s his even tan, or just the glow of new sobriety. He’s got those angular lower abs that gesture toward his dick. Had he always had those? I can’t believe my mom made me call him Daddy.

I dog-paddle to the narrow part of the kidney and rest my elbows on the lip of the pool, letting water dribble out of my mouth.

“Neil,” I say, “the jackrabbits are committing suicide.”

“I don’t blame them.”

“I’ve run over several on the road underneath the arroyo. They hop out into the middle and just sit there. I swerve, they leap in the same direction. Splat!”

“Don’t swerve. Jackrabbits seek thrill. They play chicken. You just go straight at ‘em and they’ll jump out of the way.”

I think about games of chicken. Two fighters racing toward each other only to surrender at the exact same time, pull out in the exact same direction, collide anyway. Two cowards who die without dignity.

That night I wrote a letter to my dead boyfriend.

E,

Are you one of those people who see animal instincts as omens or warnings? You know, how in apocalypse/natural disaster movies the first sign of things taking a turn for the worst is always strange animal behavior? I’m one of those people.

This is why I left Arizona years ago. There were animals—animals everywhere. I’d walk out my front door and see roadrunners darting down the sidewalk. I saw coyotes sniffing through the garbage. Late at night, I’d pull into the driveway, headlights beaming onto cottontail families as they scurried out of the lawns. Their habitats: the sage, saguaros, and brier, were being torn out and scorched to the ground to lay down concrete. New roads paved. The foundation to build bigger but weaker houses; ugly houses with confused architectural styles. This isn’t to say that the animals “sensed” an economic crash, but it was a sign (more literal than symbolic) that something was about to change.

I wish you could smell my skin now: coconut and chlorine. Maybe I don’t shower enough. I am so tired and sun-drunk and regular drunk. I drank a lot of tequila. I ate a lot of Xanax. Perhaps I’ll see you in Hell very soon.

Until we meet again,

B

***

Thursday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

Another friend texts me: Damn the desert’s a VIBE

I reply hell yaaa and swat a wasp away from my thigh.

U working on anything out there?

No. Just vibing.

When the sun sets I drive to Starbucks and take the road under the arroyo. A jackrabbit is there, as always. I charge straight at it, as Neil advised. It doesn’t jump away. My heart swishes around my chest like a squid in a small net when I feel the crunch under my tire.

At night, Neil calls to tell me that my yard is infested with scorpions. It’s nice of him to help out as much as he does, I think, considering he’s a gold digger who didn’t get the inheritance he married for. I feel an odd responsibility to take care of my dead mom’s cowboy gigolo widower. I’ll give him money, but I’ll never give him this piece of shit house.

I go outside with a blacklight. He was right. I see scorpions glowing fluorescent blue—too many to count—they’re crawling on the ground and wriggling up the walls. People who don’t believe that there is pure horror in this world have never done this: gone into the desert night with a blacklight.

***

Friday I wake up, put on the damp bikini, lay by the pool.

The least serene day of the week: band practice. A death metal band plays in a garage up the street. There are guttural shrieks and heavy base. Boys squealing like injured pigs—various patterns of the words:

GUT

FUCK

CUM

SLUT

CUNT

PUNCH

It ends with them repeating:

INSIDIOUS

INSIDIOUS

INSIDIOUS

I roll over onto my stomach and untie my bikini. A lizard is back. He doesn’t flinch. He holds his head regally high toward the sun.

I jump into the pool and hold my breath. I wonder if I can stay down long enough to feel the walls of my lungs kiss like they did the time I was baptized.

I imagined New York, slinking into bed when my boyfriend’s body was still warm. I swung my leg over his leg, braided my knee under his knee, my ankle over his ankle. He said he felt the night’s chill soaked into my skin. His was burning feverishly. We lied there entwined, regulating each other’s body temperatures. Morphing into one another. Yin and yang. The next night an ambulance flashed lights over our unmade bed. Ripples of blanket and sheets looked like the waves of a red hot sea.

I emerge from the water’s surface and gasp. I climb out of the pool and offer myself to the sun. I turn toward it. I indulge in it. It warms my lizard blood, and when the wasps come buzzing, I’ll shoot my lizard tongue twice as far as my height and eat them. Later today, I’ll find a way to numb my lizard brain. And when I no longer like my lizard tail, I will chop it off and it will grow right back.

Read More »
Read More »

TWO-IN-ONE by Genta Nishku

April 26, 2021

That summer, the water in that city ruined my hair. After every wash, the same refrain: clumping and matting. A whole bottle of hair conditioner later, and I was at the dim-lit bar. A man gestured something at me with his eyes, while outside, the awkward artist typed his number in my phone. We’ll meet for lunch, he promised. The warm air made disassociation easier, even if the drinks were weak and the conversation hard to follow. I’d get drunk at home, I decided. Then the traces of the day would fade, present and future melting together, like the sky and sea whenever we’d take the long road to get far away. There are too many nights and not enough conclusions. Nothing ever happens for me, I told him, but what I meant was, I don’t let anything happen. If you remember what I said about your eyes, I’d ask him, please don’t tell anyone. It would betray my reputation. Later, the complaint about the water would become an ice-breaker. Who hadn’t had an experience with unsatisfactory water? All the papers talk about conditions of possibility and I refuse to look up what it means. What’s the use? The conditioner detangled my hair. I kept it wrapped in a towel—color’s up to your imagination—and I stood by the window. A woman at a window makes the story worth reading. It recalls the folktales of our childhood. In one of them, the woman fashions a body, her body, out of rags and hay, with tree branches for limbs. A branch arm sticks out, waving goodbye forever.

Read More »

HAZARD by Nicholas Rall

April 23, 2021

Ethel and Edith tried to keep their eyes open, resting in a square of brownish dying grass; an empty lot. There used to be a family who lived there, and I could see the kids play in the driveway from our window, until men with big, yellow machines tore it down and it stayed like that until the girls took me with them. They’d been in the neighborhood for a few hours, walking through about half the state of Florida, staying close to the interstate. Usually they could get a ride but not that night, and it was time to rest.

The area they found themselves in was hidden in the woods next to the interstate; the kind of place you don't remember, until an image of a dozen houses, smothered, overtaken by weeds, comes to your mind later after a bad day at work, a nightmare maybe, lingering residue from a trip through Florida you took a few years earlier.

They were drawn to his truck, a red Ford Ranger from the 1970’s, which was in perfect condition and probably inherited from a recently dead relative. He hadn't had enough time to neglect it, to let it rot into one of the other rusty clumps in the neighborhood—at least not on the outside.

Unknown to him, I'm sure, the girls watched as he walked to the curb and climbed into his truck. They thought they might find something useful in his garage or, at least, a shady place to rest. The garage door was busted, unable to lower all the way, leaving about a foot and a half of space open; just enough for the two of them to squeeze underneath.

Below all the tangles of the Earth, that old house might have had a scabby, reddish brown, rusted roof. Maybe it was painted a pale pink, and a tiny, concrete slab of a “porch” was the last thing your feet would touch before you entered through the ripped screen door. I don't remember.

The girls were disappointed when their eyes adjusted to the light. Only a set of six rusty metal racks lined the walls stacked mostly with empty buckets, car cleaning supplies, some oil, degreaser, and even a few broken garden tools, which had to come from somewhere else; somewhere that could sustain a real garden, not just thick, untamed weeds. The floor was cluttered with pieces of machines, unorganized in damp cardboard boxes—junk and not much else.

Nothing was of much use to them, except a large, navy tarp that was a little dirty but only with dust and leaves. Ethel found it crammed inside a brown bucket, and they’d be able to use it to protect some of their belongings, because it might rain soon. It was just after eight in the morning when they entered the man’s garage; it would rain soon… The tarp was thick, industrial grade, so they figured maybe the man worked in construction or did when he was younger. It certainly was an improvement over their current method of protecting their belongings which was to wrap everything in any plastic bags they could find; sometimes this included trashcan lining from cans inside gas station restrooms.

They sat in the man’s garage to cool off, until the sun finally went down. That summer held a record for years as the hottest in Florida, but even on an average year there was wet heat in the air—the kind usually only produced at dry cleaners, only the pleasant hint of fabric cleaner was absent. Instead, this air smelled like it had expired.

The girls walked all night, and they needed to rest now, for a few hours, until the man came home or until they woke up. They laid on their blanket  in the corner of the garage and vanished beneath the skyline of boxes.

“How long do you think he’ll be gone?” asked Edith, “he’s probably at work, huh?”

“Yeah, he’s probably at work, where do you think he works Edie?” Ethel wondered.

Turning from her side, Edith laid flat, staring up into his garage ceiling.

“Bucket Factory,” she replied, “and he’s in charge of those little plastic pieces that go on the metal handles…”

“Yeah,” Ethel replied. “Yeah I think that's right.”

I don’t remember a time before the heat … At first, I thought we didn’t have electricity because of how much I’d sweat, even though the man would crack the windows just a bit. I could hear the hum most then, and sometimes they even got into the house—the bugs. He would kill them, so I always protected them and hid them in my cup.

Maybe the house was air conditioned, but he never turned it on. Anyway, there had to be power coming from somewhere because I do remember watching the TV; a small black square placed on top of his dresser. The room had a light green carpet and a big bed. I remember the bed; it had tall white beams on all four corners and was raised enough to where I needed his help to get on to the top of it. The man had a stack of tapes, a dozen or so, but he never brought home new ones. Every once in a while, I’ll remember when I see an actor from one of the tapes on the TV, but I can never recall their names. I think I dreamt them up now and then, but there’s one I’d always look for that was my favorite … A woman, who was a scientist or vet, and her daughter living in Africa adopted a baby gorilla who was being hunted by poachers. When I can’t sleep I think of that movie; a jungle, and the sounds and smell of the jungle help me sleep. Usually at some point in the night, he’d turn off the tape and that’s when I would use the buzzing hum to fall asleep, which was usually more soothing than the movie.

When the girls awoke, light no longer shone in from the gap of the garage. With no way of telling time, they assumed they had slept for at least twelve hours. After gathering their things, they crawled through the black slit they entered. The man’s truck was back; windows rolled down, the cab was not cluttered like his garage—empty with nothing but a few of his crumbs on the floor.

“Looks like it can’t be too late, everyone’s still up. I hear sitcoms coming from that house, so it’s only about seven o’clock,” Ethel observed, standing in the same spot of dead grass she stood in outside of the man’s house hours ago.

“Yeah, I bet he just got off work, just pulled out his dinner from the microwave,” Edith replied as she walked back towards his house to the front door.

“I’ll ask if we can borrow the keys.”

A few weeks after her seventeenth birthday, Ethel had inherited some land that a second cousin of hers was impatiently waiting to hand over, and he had just informed her that that if she did not officially claim the land by the end of the month, he’d trade it to a friend of his for cattle. Part of her was fine was this, as something about living steady in Nebraska made her sick. Edith, born in the same hospital room just six months after Ethel though, figured her best friend  should  be the one to pocket the money from the land. They both liked walking and staying in new places each night, which could only be better with a steady amount of money, so she pushed the two of them through the South.

I heard something that could only be possible in a dream. I have to be dreaming because the man was right beside me, holding me. I felt his chest moving up and down against my back, as his hairy arms wrapped around my stomach … I had never seen anyone else in the house besides the man, but, when the girls walked past the door, I wasn’t scared. I was sure I was asleep. Maybe I should have been scared, but I wasn’t.

A soft buzzing just above my belly began and spread through my body… I knew they’d leave—I wished they’d take me with them. I closed my eyes, focusing on the buzzing outside until Ethel gently rubbed my cheek with her thumb and then lifted a finger to her lips, “Shhh.”

I was small enough then for her to carry easily, my chin sat on Ethel’s shoulders, and with hand over my eye I peeked through as the movie continued on the screen. Edith took the pillow I’d been using and pushed it down onto the man’s face, as the bugs began to hum louder than I'd ever heard before, welcoming me outside into their world.

Ethel, she was the first person I remember who felt real. She was tall, pale, with a thin face and light grey eyes. She and Edith both were frighteningly skinny, with bones showing through that never should.

She sat with me down in the cab of the man’s truck, playing with my hair, which was longer than hers. She pulled her fingers through one greasy, knotted tangle at a time, asking me questions in the same gentle way in which she unraveled my hair, but I had no answers for her, not even a name.

Soon, I heard the front door shut and Edith climbed in the passenger seat, as she vaguely smiled at me, handing me a garbage bag full of a couple of my toys and clothes she could find around the house. I smiled back but her dark, long hair was in her face, covering her eyes. When she wrapped her hair up with a tie she slid off of her wrist, I could see her light blue eyes. Darkness dripped from them, and I was not sure if she was a boy or a girl. I had only seen teenagers in movies.

Ethel drove through the night, as I rested my head against the glass window. I tried to listen to the wind; warm on my face, sneaking through a crack, not uncomfortable but pleasant and calming. We stopped at a gas station for a map. The girls asked me if I’d like to help them find our way. I did. I could not believe the lines and landmarks on the paper turn into real places, and I loved hearing Ethel and Edith talk. I stayed up with them all night just listening and directing a turn when needed, until my eyelids got so heavy they shut down. I woke up to the heavy orange light of the earth and glimpses of cars and trucks of all shapes and sizing speeding past me in every direction.

The truck screeched into the gas station parking lot. Ethel firmly held my hand and led me through the glass, double doors to use the bathroom and find some breakfast. I grabbed a Fruity Pebbles cereal bar, chocolate milk, and some peanuts.

Mesmerized by the blue and grey eyes that seemed to understand everything before them, I could feel their lives overshadowing mine. They didn't act like the teenagers on the tapes.

The concrete beneath his truck was cracked and dry, laid years ago but never maintained. Every few hours they came across long smooth stretches though.

“Do you think this is a good engine?” asked Edith.

“No … I don’t think so, not really,” Ethel replied with both hands gripped around the leather wheel.

“Yeah,”  agreed Edith. “It sounds weak ...” She paused for a minute.

“How many days do you think it took to build this whole truck?”

Ethel replied instantly, “Twelve days for the frame.”

“How long do you think it’s gonna take us to get to  your cousin's house?” Edith asked, resting her head against the glass.

“About a day, should be there by tomorrow around this time.”

“God I fucking hate him,” Edith groaned.

Ethel smirked. “Maybe he’s not so bad now. We won’t have to stay long.”

I ate on the curb below the pump, while Ethel fed the truck its breakfast. The sun made her hair glow tangerine. She caught me looking and let me know she thought that my hair was pretty and would be even prettier if I let her brush it, but I still did not let her.

The hidden insides of the man's truck were rotten and started to smell. The wheel began to shake in Ethel’s hands, spreading throughout the entire truck. The stink became suffocating. Ethel pulled onto the side of the road along an endless wooden fence. Soon a thick, black smoke rose from the engine, high above us.

A grey-haired, serious woman hauling a horse trailer pulled up, with six noses peeking through the metal grating. She told Ethel how we could scrap the truck. Ethel drove a few more miles and the truck died next to a field with one cow. On the other side of the field a thousand giant plastic tubes were being stored.

The bugs sounded a lot like the ones from where we came; squally and screechy. Edith and I played tag and hide-and-go-seek in the tubes. Focused, as quiet as possible, trying to hold my breath in the darkness of the thick, black plastic, I turned my head towards the opposite end, to scout the other direction, and Edith appeared out of nowhere. I froze, nearly falling off the edge, which had to be a 30-foot drop, but she grabbed me in time. She knew how bad she’d scared me because she held me for a long time before we climbed down.

That night we stayed in a marigold motel that was long and had one wooden door everyone had to come and go through. The inside looked like one long hallway with a thousand doors on each side, each a different shade of rust.

The owners were an older husband and wife, and did not want to rent out a room to Ethel. They said she was too young, but she insisted she was eighteen and eventually, they believed her.

Now I can only imagine them as people, mostly with faces like mine  but they had such sluggish attitudes and so they seemed to me to be actual slugs. I can actually remember, once the night attendant checked in, the two of them sliding their way down the hall, passing us as we entered our room, squeezing into a hole at the end of the hall, half the size of their thick, slimy bodies.

The motel sat next to a highway where the air was much drier than where we had come from. I could still hear the bugs, louder actually, and I hoped that they were following somehow.

We walked across the parking lot to a dusty green building that had a plastic man, on its roof, with a mustache and chef’s hat holding a pizza, larger than all three of our bodies combined.

While we sat on the bed, the television showed Kentucky commercials. A man screamed “Sale! Sale! Sale!” in front of a thousand cars. I knew he was nervous.

I took a warm bath, and fell asleep in Ethel’s oversized jacket. When she took the jacket off to wrap me in it, it was like she took off her shell and bones protruded out stretching her skin. I slept at the foot of the bed, curled up into a little ball. I had no trouble falling asleep once the air conditioner began to buzz. As the cool air flooded my nostrils and into my head, I dreamt of Ethel, Edith, and myself in the truck, driving through the night. I followed the truck from high above in the sky, flying with thousands of other round little pink bugs, buzzing…

A knock on our door woke me. Edith  didn’t move but Ethel shot up, and, as she saw me looking at the door, she rubbed my head until I fell back asleep.

The next morning, she told us to be very quiet getting ready because a priest had fallen asleep outside our door. She said the owners (the slugs) probably called him because we looked like we needed help. We saw him lying on one of the pillows in the motel lobby. Ethel lifted me over his body into Edith’s arms, and I saw a sliver of his face. His beard was white, thickest at his cheeks, thinning the higher it went. He tried to sleep like I did, in a little ball, but his long body formed a scribble.

With the money left from the truck, Ethel said we could buy bus tickets to Nebraska.

We walked for hours to get to the bus station, but I didn’t care. I loved it. I saw things I didn’t know the world had. I hadn’t known there were so many kinds of cars and so many people. Some people were eating hotdogs outside of a big white church and I ate so many I got a stomach ache. We got some bottles of water and marched on to the Hazard Greyhound Station—nothing was wrong with it, that was just the name of the town, a mining town. Edith said her Dad used to watch a funny show about some boys in Hazard but that it was nothing like what we saw.

Maybe the smoke from the man’s dead truck seeped into the sky and made everything in Hazard tinted by a shadow and much worse than TV.

Edith sat with me while Ethel bought the tickets. At first we were the only people in the station, but soon another bus dropped off a load. Some stayed and waited for another to carry them off, but some were supposed to be in Hazard. Ethel came back and told us our bus to Nebraska arrived at 3:00 a.m.

The girls agreed that they’d rather explore the town than sit in the Greyhound station for 16 hours. I was relieved because I wanted to walk more and I was disappointed to be going on the bus already. Edith was very interested in the mountains. They didn’t look how I’d imagine mountains in real life because they were not as tall as I thought they should be. She wanted to go up into them and explore, but Ethel shook her head at the idea. A small second hand store was across the street, and Ethel motioned us there instead.

I had walked off over to the videotape aisle, looking at all of the covers. The man only had about 12 or so tapes I had watched over and over again, so I never knew anymore existed. I was mesmerized by a cover with a plane crashing into the ocean but lost all interest in the tape when a deep voice echoed from the opposite end of the aisle.

It was the priest who had been asleep at our door earlier. Today, he was serious with determination in his voice. He began to walk towards me, so I ran to Ethel, checking out at the front. “You! Just stop, for just one moment please stop, I need to talk with you…’’ he called to us.

I hadn’t had to say anything, so maybe it was on my face or I was holding her wrist too tight, but she knew something was wrong before she even heard his voice.

“I’ll talk to him, okay? I know him… Don’t worry,” said the cashier, whose name tag read “August.”

“Father, what’s the matter? What’s going on here?” August called down the aisle, “Why are you bothering these kids? I have some leftovers … Father, have you eaten lunch? Go wait in the break room for me, I’ll be in in five.”

August scanned Ethel’s final item, “I think he’s just a little hungry.”

When I saw that priest again, alarms went off in every part of my body, but Ethel knew how to turn them off. She calmly finished checking out, and she led me outside where Edith was sitting outside on the curb smoking a cigarette. Ethel gave her a look, just a slight look, and she joined us, as we quickly walked away from the store back toward the mountains…

“You think he’s even a real priest? asked Edith. “Probably,” Ethel replied. “God’s looking for us maybe, maybe he’s trying to take us straight to heaven.” This made them both laugh for a while, and it made me laugh too.

Ethel asked if I’d like to hold her bags, and she said it was my job because she knew I could keep them safe. She had picked out some clothes for me. I walked between them. They looked like opposite sisters.  Ethel always wore white, light colors, blonde hair, but not yellow; sort of like dead grass. Edith, dyed her hair black, always wearing dark layers of clothes. She always said that was her real hair color, usually with wide open eyes and her tongue out past her chin because she knew I never believed her.

Ethel said, "We should probably go walk in the woods for a while.”

It must have stopped raining right before we got in because climbing up the hill covered us in mud. When we got up to the top, Edith put a little dollop of mud on my nose. I thought she was being mean until she giggled.

I helped Ethel and Edith set up the tarp from the man’s garage. The air beneath the trees smelled clean and safe... Once we were set up and sitting on the tarp, Ethel and Edith started telling me how much fun the bus would be, how the two of them met on the bus when they were just a little older than me, and how they would walk to their stop together. Every morning, Ethel played with my hair again, and I fell asleep to a mix of their memories and the sounds of all sorts of things moving in the woods. Soon I could hear all the other bugs, waiting for me.

Ethel tried her best not to wake me up, but as soon as I heard the man’s voice I clung to her, unable to look behind me. I pretended to be asleep. I knew the man would take me away; I knew the priest would take me back to the heat, to the expired air. I knew I would somehow end up back in the man’s house, even if he was not there. I would be there alone, in the heat, but this time in silence without even the comfort of the bugs … This priest, I was sure, had already convinced the girls that I was much better off in his care, and I became angry at them for becoming so easily convinced. I began to plan my escape into the woods, until I heard … laughter, comfortable laughter. The three of them were already making light of what was a misunderstanding.

The priest, dropping all sense of authority he tried to present earlier, explained that the reason he had been chasing us around Hazard was to beg us not to move there. He said they just could not take anyone in, that there was a waitlist for jobs for people who were born in the town and there was simply nothing for us there.

Ethel explained our issues: on our way home from spending the summer helping our grandmother on her farm in Florida, Ethel’s faithful truck of 3 years, her first truck, had finally “crapped out” on her, most likely due to the strain put on it at the farm.  It was okay because our father had just promised her a new car for her senior year.

My memories of him are mostly from Ethel and Edith keeping them alive. They actually kept in touch with the priest for a few years, giving life updates grounded mostly in truth with the addition of a fictional grandmother in Florida, but he hasn’t written back in about five years. Edith thinks he’s dead but Ethel’s not so sure. Sometimes the idea of taking a family road trip back to Hazard comes up but it just hasn’t worked out yet.

We spent our remaining hours in Hazard under the care of the priest. The inside of his home had a shaggy brown carpet that stretched through all the rooms, bordered by walls, pasted with orange wallpaper with faded brown stripes. In the living room, he had a big box of a TV and a collection of tapes—even more than I had at the man's house. I injected one into the machine about a lamb who wanted nothing more than to be eaten by God.

I watched the lamb travel the world, trying to prove it’s worth to God, sitting between the girls on the priest’s tan, leather couch. It was well worn. It must have been passed down to him. Everything in his home seemed like it had always been there—maybe God had built it for him? I’ve never gone to church, but the man back in Florida used to pray and read me things from the bible. This priest said he had not held a service in over six years because most of the people in Hazard had shifted their faith from God to something else, though he never explained what. Ethel later told me her mama loved God more than her, which is why she left…

The bus station’s light was almost green; unnatural and flickering. Ethel checked us in, and the station was full tonight with a few dozen people who lined the blue plastic coated benches, some greeted the priest by first name. A few people had already boarded; one man looked like he was a professional bus rider. Soon it was time to leave and the girls asked me to pick a seat, so I led them to the middle of the bus, where its engine hummed the loudest.

As we pulled away, the three of us looked out the window. Outside the station, the priest had gathered a handful of people from off of a bus coming from Arizona, begging them to avoid Hazard as a potential place to settle down.

When we finally arrived in Nebraska, we went straight to meet Ethel’s cousin to claim her land. Sometimes in the beginning, he’d come over for dinner, but they never talked much. They could never click, so they stopped trying to.

They sat at a rotting wooden table in the grass, in the shadow of a less rotted barn—the barn we lived in for a month before we could afford to build a traditional house—signing what needed to be signed.

I was drawn over to the dirt. Inside of a big plot of dirt surrounded by 20-foot-tall mulberry trees, I could hear something moving beneath; a new kind of buzz.

As I began to dig in the earth, each clump was dense with white worms—more worm than dirt. They were beautiful, not the typical limp earthworm, but these were powerful, fat, white worms. I called the girls over, soon, the three of us were in a trance.

The worms circled through the dirt like dolphins.

Read More »

THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER by Gabrielle McAree

April 22, 2021

Dad has the emotional range of a runt-sized peanut. He hates the internet, roundabouts, tap water, trash collection, anyone called “Jerry.” He doesn’t trust directions and believes the government is listening in on his conversations. Dad grows a four-inch beard as an act of defiance, because it looks nothing like his driver’s license picture, and swears off technology. His collection of gray hair disappoints him, so he buys an electric blue Camaro. 

***

When Dad turns 63, I pick up a cake from the store. Half chocolate, half vanilla to curb his untreated bipolar disorder. I remember to be vigilant, but Dad counts each wax candle with the tenacity of a bored mathematician. 

“You’re not good with numbers, Darby,” he says. 

He’s joking, but my face turns the color of ripe tomatoes. When I forget a candle, everyone laughs at my dereliction, my stupidity. “I studied theatre,” I object, my voice two sizes too small. But my claim is futile; my siblings have PhDs attached to their names. I don’t.

***

I screw my eyes shut as Dad slams cabinets and drawers, looking for his checkbook, his car keys, his wallet, his readers. We search behind potted plants, between freezer meat, amidst his collection of coffee mugs, below the kitchen sink. His things are nowhere and everywhere, scattered around the house like an expert game of Where’s Waldo. 

“I’d lose my head if it wasn’t attached,” he says. His self-hate is camouflaged by Dad Humor, the color of sunshine and imported silk. It is impossible not to love him. 

Dad finds his checkbook in his coat pocket. His keys in the cupholder. His wallet in the washer. His readers in the pantry next to the peanut shells. Everyone laughs the same choked, plaintive laugh, but we actively fail Dad as he sinks into an amnesiac-sponsored abyss.

Dad is a renowned surgeon. He’s been saving lives for thirty-plus years—one appendectomy at a time—but he forgets his cellphone on the charger and can’t remember to take the dogs out. Their hoarse barks cut through glass. Why can’t I remember? Dad asks, gluing his leathery hands to his eye sockets, rubbing his skin an unforgiving red. He gives the dogs extra treats to counterpose his laxness. All is forgiven. 

I bury myself in books I don’t understand. 

“Why can’t Dad remember?” I ask a cashier clerk, the expired tub of animal crackers, oblivion. Surely, there is an answer. 

“There’s an answer for everything,” Dad says. “It’s good you’re pretty, Darby.”

 I read and read and read.

***

I go local for college and save Dad money by commuting. On Sundays, we sit in matching gray, leather chairs by the fireplace. Dad tells me about his sister, Jenny, who joined the Peace Corps and changed her name to Loki; his favorite dog, Hamish; how he regrets: not joining the Army; not competing in triathlons; not taking Sami Gates to his senior prom. 

“Getting old sucks,” he says. “Your regrets look like a grocery list. Cheat age if you can, Darby.” But he doesn’t tell me how. 

Dad takes a party platter of vitamins—collagen, crocin, retinol, magnesium—and drinks a glass of red wine before bed, toasting to the vestige of his youth.

I look at myself in the mirror for traces of him and keep the water running so he can’t hear me cry. I am older every day and can’t afford to feel better about my relation to mortality. I don’t have money for distractions. 

***

My sister sends her wedding invitation in the mail. She’s marrying a guy from medical school, Mark Something. Mark Something believes Dad has early-onset Alzheimer’s. I’m not asked to be in the wedding party, but my other sister, the dentist, is maid of honor. My brothers, groomsmen. Dad asks why I don’t have a career. He says, “Maybe if you had a career, you’d be in your sister’s wedding.”

Dad pays the wedding tab with his American Express Black Card, but forgets his suit at home, so I drive back in rush-hour traffic to retrieve it. He can’t walk down the aisle in his Notre Dame jersey and orange board shorts. 

Dad’s collection of ex-wives sit in the last pew, in chronological order. Throughout the service, he turns around to look at them, the physical representations of his life, decade after decade, each a nod to his impermanence. Gloria, Dakota, Macie, Rebecca, Lorraine. They agree Dad is a good man, he just couldn’t remember things they wanted him to remember. They all signed prenups, so Dad keeps his cabin in the woods, his 13 acres, his Camaro. 

***

When I’m nine, I learn that everything dies. Humans, insects, rats, nature, inanimate objects. At first, I don’t accept this. I cry into Dad’s lap, staining his favorite corduroys. He strokes my hair while lecturing me on biology, science, The Lion King. We’re at my sister’s softball practice. Dad lets me sob, hysterically, without shushing me. 

He says, “Forever is boring, Darby. Imagine paying taxes forever.”

***

At 66, Dad is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Mark gloats. My siblings strategize at the kitchen table without me. Dad gets a catheter two months later. He wants to drink Irish whiskey and sleep. I listen to his stories. I am all his children, his wives, his friends. I cover him in thick blankets and empty his urine. When Dad dies, he leaves me the electric blue Camaro, the log cabin, everything. My siblings hire an attorney. A letter arrives, postmarked before Dad’s death. It reads: Darby, you were always my favorite.

The next morning, I lose my keys.

Read More »

HOW THE WIND DOES BLOW AND BLOW by Kevin Grauke

April 21, 2021

If you’re smart, don’t ever let Claudette Aarons catch you reading anything, not even a magazine, because if she does, she’ll for sure say, “You know what you should be reading instead of that, don’t you? You should be reading Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind.”

Don’t ask her how come, because she’ll tell you how come for an hour. And don’t lie and say you’ve already read it, because then she’ll expect you to discuss it forevermore. And don’t ignore her, either, because she’ll just take that the same as if you’d asked her how come. Your best bet is to simply cross the street as soon as you see her coming.

Nobody in town, not even Claudette’s own daughter, has ever bothered to read it—mostly out of pure orneriness, probably. Regardless, everyone still knows its story backwards and forwards, since that’s all she’ll fill your ear with whenever the wind happens to kick up, which is pretty much every day that ends with a ‘y.’ Yes, the wind does blow and blow here in Yonder, and it blows because there’s not a goddamn thing big enough to ever slow it down—not any buildings taller than a telephone pole, not any trees that qualify to be called as such, not anything. It’s good for the windmills drawing up water from the aquifer for the stock tanks, and it’s good for the wind farms that’ve turned the land north of 20 into some strange Martian landscape, but it’s not good for much else. In the summer, it huffs and puffs oven-hot up from Mexico (or Old Mexico, as Boyd Pinkston, who probably remembers Pancho Villa, still calls it), and in the winter it screams icebox-cold down from the North Pole. No matter the season, by the end of the day your skin is liable to feel rasped raw. And at night, while you’re waiting for sleep and dreams to come, it just keeps on whistling its lonesome blues beneath your door until the sun finally comes up, usually to roast you alive before you’ve poured your second cup of coffee.

As bad as the wind can be, though, it’s never as bad as Claudette’s favorite book would have you believe. Written in 1925 and set in the 1880s, it tells the story of a young woman named Letty, who was forced to move from the green fields of Virginia to a ranch just west of Sweetwater.

“Can you believe that?” Claudette says, all bug-eyed. “Of all the places that Dorothy Scarborough could’ve moved Letty to! Just west of Sweetwater! Letty even mentions Yonder a few times!”

Some folks say that Claudette’s been like this—just as crazy as a bullbat when it comes to the wind—ever since she was a little girl. Other folks say it’s only been since a tornado south of Archer City flung her fiancé’s truck into a Dairy Queen like so much trash. But even that was a long time ago.  

“They made a silent movie based on it, you know,” Claudette will continue. “It was one of the last MGM made. Lillian Gish played Letty. Can you believe that? Lillian Gish!” Everybody except maybe Boyd Pinkston has to pretend to understand why this is a big deal. “They filmed it in the Mojave Desert, though, not here,” Claudette grumbles. “Those Hollywood pinkos couldn’t handle the real thing.”  

Letty is eventually driven so insane by the wind, Claudette explains, that she kills a man and then commits suicide by running straight into a dust storm. 

“What’d she do, suffocate?” asked Vance Wickersham once. “That seems like a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? She’d’ve really had to work at doing that, seems like. There’s lots easier ways.” 

“But it makes sense how that other part could happen,” Claudette shot back. “The killing part, I mean. Because, I swear, sometimes the wind just makes you want to mow everyone down with both barrels.”

Though most folks smile and nod their heads when she talks like this, nobody knows what the hell she means exactly. Sure, when the wind makes the traffic light down on the square rock and creak on its wire late at night, it does have a way of making you feel like a lost and lonely soul, especially if it’s long after everybody else has gone home to bed and you’re standing there all by yourself, but that’s nothing that a few beers can’t usually fix. Regardless, everyone with a lick of sense knows to steer clear of Claudette whenever a dust storm or a blue norther is fixing to howl and churn into town, because it’s a known fact that, thanks to her Daddy, who raised her like a boy since he was cursed with five daughters and no sons, she may be even more of a deadeye shot than Zell Wylie, and that’s saying something. Zell, after all, once shattered a bottle of Pearl with a shot fired from two hundred yards. Kid Gillespie hadn’t even been expecting it. He’d just happened to been drinking in the gravel lot of the domino parlor when Zell decided to take aim at it for no particular reason. Had Claudette been there, she probably would’ve taken the shot from fifty yards further away, seeing as how she’s never been one to shy away from a challenge—and plugged it, too—just as long as Kid held his hand steady, but now he’s got Parkinson’s tremors so bad that he can’t even play 42 anymore, not without scattering dominoes every which way. These days, all he does is stand around and watch, usually with his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans to keep them flapping about like broken-winged doves. 

Read More »

DYLAN KRIEGER in conversation with VI KHI NAO

April 20, 2021
VI KHI NAO: Your bios over the years read like a poem: “Dylan Krieger is a transistor radio, a poet, a performer, a repository of high hopes from hell, a pile of false eyelashes growing algae in South Louisiana, an automatic meaning generator writing the apocalypse in real time, a divining rod of ungodly proportions.” Where and when in your life are you not a poet?DYLAN KRIEGER: Over the course of my life, poetry has slowly permeated more and more of my speech, my encounters, my rituals. There are fewer and fewer places where I am not a poet, places poetry doesn’t touch. I increasingly communicate in poems to the people closest to me. I used to think editing required a different mindset than writing, but I’m not so sure now. My inner editor is pretty wild sometimes, and I often make myself write when I’m not feeling particularly “inspired,” so my experience doesn’t always fit the stereotype of cautious editor vs. reckless inspiration. It’s difficult to draw a hard line. I have trouble telling poetry, “No, you can’t access this part of me.” I have very few boundaries with poetry.VKN: Why is that? Why do you have few boundaries?DK: I feel that, if I were to give poetry a hard boundary, I might be limiting myself as an artist. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t topics I just find dull or unappealing to write about, but when it comes to exposing my life to poetry (and vice versa) in new ways—when it feels scary, like exposure—I find it helps me grow creatively and try new things I otherwise wouldn’t have.VKN: What is dull and unappealing to you?DK: I usually find descriptions of physical places boring, though they’re so obligatory in novels. I also find cliches boring, but I often try to work with them anyway, to change them slightly and make them new.VKN: What is your favorite cliché? Or bad pick up lines?DK: It’s hard to pick just one, but I think my favorites are the ones we accept as normal in the day-to-day, but when we look more closely, they’re so much stranger than we realized. When I wrote my first book, Giving Godhead (Delete, 2017), I was obsessed with challenging Christian cliches I found disturbing but also sort of kinky, like being “used” by God, asking him to “come into” you, etc. I wanted to play up the creep factor by taking them out of the touchy-feely sermon setting and altering the spelling of words like “come” so I could showcase these phrases as I’ve come to know them: an extremely suspect tool of psychological “seduction.”VKN: So would you say that making them new—clichés that is—say a full pitcher of water sits next to an empty glass of water and turns its nose and says to the glass, “where have you been all my life?”—Is that how you make them new? Or do you have something else in mind? When you say “make them new”?DK: In Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse, for example, there’s this jokey title, “what doesn’t kill you...will eventually.” It’s sort of a deflation of the hopeful cliche a reader might anticipate from hearing the original phrase before. And it usually gets a laugh at readings, but it’s also very sad, almost defeatist. I think Soft-Focus rides that line between comedy and tragedy, perhaps a little more vulnerably than my other books.VKN: In your Kenyon Review interview, you declared that The Mother Wart is “by far the most autobiographical book” you’ve ever released. Is Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse now the most autobiographical? Why is it more vulnerable?DK: The Mother Wart and Soft-Focus do both have deeply personal (autobiographical) themes. In The Mother Wart, I went “edgy” by sharing those personal experiences through the framing of the controversial Church of Euthanasia. But with Soft-Focus, I felt so internally exposed that my primary concern was avoiding a tone of solipsistic wallowing in self-pity about chronic pain. I wanted to pay attention to relationships, not only because the interpersonal challenges of being in pain all the time can be heartbreaking, but also because staying by someone’s side and honoring their needs is often all we can do for their suffering. Pain is naturally isolating, so I strive not to forget “those who take care.” VKN: A lot of your titles from this collection exist as two word combos: “nymphone home,” “blushing biopsies,” “basal burn,” “dylan downer,” “meat/maker,” “dentist’s diagnosis,” “sisyphean surgery,” “tension tending.” Did you also want the words not to feel isolated? To see their “coupling” through? Was it done intentionally—like a gym buddy, but for words and language? Do words help each other through the pain of existence?DK: I really like that interpretation; I find two-word or longer titles’ dynamism and capacity for “play” more interesting than one-word titles. On the other hand, I heard a writer once point out that if a title is longer than two words, it’s usually reduced or shortened to two words in common speech. I’ve found that to be true with my own book titles, so two words is a sweet spot. But lately I’ve been experimenting with really rambling, long lines you wouldn’t expect to see as a title. I get restless and can’t help but mix and match the loneliest words to see what they do to each other in close quarters.VKN: Could you give us an example of such rambling?DK: I just revisited one such poem called “autopsy reveals lasting marriages mostly composed of sharp metal in a theoretical vacuum.” The longer form opens up possibilities for parodying news headlines and other kinds of writing, but also for setting the tone for the rest of the poem. It’s a bolder kind of trumpeting for what’s to come than most titles, which I like. VKN: I accidentally misread your poem’s title as “autopsy reveals lasting marriages mostly composed of sharp objects in a thoracic vacuum.”DK: I think that also works! It could almost be a prompt: “Write what you think lasting marriages are composed of.” Anyone could give it a try. VKN: Going back to The Mother Wart, that book is about taking deliberate steps not to give birth. But with six books released into the world within three or four years, you are chronically gravid with books and language. To reference Russo and the de-motherhood in its repulsion and attraction, when you give birth to books, do those philosophical and political impulses also enact such binary for you? Or is it different?DK: I imagine physical birth as a culmination of anticipated intimacy, but sometimes releasing a book doesn’t feel that way (and I assume physically giving birth sometimes doesn’t either). I often feel very distanced from the poems in a book by the time it comes out, like looking at old pictures, a different version of myself, with all the varying degrees of affection and embarrassment. So the binary of repulsion and attraction is there, but there’s a sense of remoteness from the original environment and from the feelings that originally gave rise to the work. VKN: Which child is your favorite of your five children (if you had to be a partial mother)? DK: I’m a fickle mother. My youngest is always my favorite. I’m constantly trying to overcome that layer of distance (from writing to publication) by unleashing new work into the world while I’m still saturated in it. I think that’s why I send poems to my closest friends now, sometimes right after writing them. VKN: Is that what you are currently working on? Or are you referring to Soft-Focus?DK: Of my first five books, Metamortuary would be my favorite. But I think Soft-Focus is more focused (ha), and it has less of that “old photo” distance, since I wrote it more recently. The title of Soft-Focus, like the poem you mentioned (“blushing biopsies”), is something of an oxymoron, or at least an unexpected pairing—one element being pretty and dreamy and the other being brutal. I’m very excited about this book, but I am even more excited about my works in progress, which is encouraging—hopefully I’m still improving. VKN: Is that the child that is divided into four parts?DK: Yes, Metamortuary and The Mother Wart are each divided into four parts. I wrote them back when I was neatly outlining manuscripts before starting them. I would write all the titles before writing a single poem, almost like a list of prompts that I could return to if I ever got stuck. It really helped me at the time, but I’ve used that strategy less and less since writing Soft-Focus.VKN: Why are you using that strategy less and less? Speaking of pairing, since your work is both mythological and biblical, which two biblical figures do you think should date each other? And why?DK: Hmm, wow. I love this question. I’m gonna go real satanic and say Eve and the snake should date. Adam seems boring. Adam gets friend zoned. VKN: He is boring? What is your definition of boring? And, why Eve and the snake? Aren’t they already dating?DK: I thought their relationship was never official like that, but maybe that’s open to interpretation. I just think Satan gets a bad rap in the Bible and I’d like to see him get laid in paradise. Sounds like a good plot twist.VKN: What is sexual pleasure for a snake? Giving Godhead is pleasure for god, but what is the equivalent for a snake? DK: I think that’s what is so enthralling about religious texts. God is sort of this amorphous cloud of power, but he also appears as a man. There are angels that are just wheels of eyes, and then angels that look like men. Sometimes Satan is a snake, but maybe he’d be an angel of light in bed. One can dream. Ha. VKN: Of course. Your work does not shy away from sex, from the profane, from the grotesque, from the sacred. What is sacred for you, Dylan? Something that has not been tarnished by fundamentalist Christianity?DK: For a long time—when I wrote Giving Godhead, for example—I would have said I didn’t hold anything sacred. And I still believe it’s good for our sanity to question what we hold sacred and whether it’s actually helping us or anyone else. But now, I can look back and say that a lot of my anger toward religion was rooted in the fact that it wasn’t holding the same things sacred as I do. It treated relationships and even people as expendable, if they didn’t believe or conform to its behavioral standards. So, now I’ll admit it: I do hold non-hierarchical, mutually respectful, intimate bonds sacred, and I think major religions often undermine those relationships to uphold their hierarchies. VKN: When I read up on you for this interview, I found a Dylan Krieger who plays men’s basketball as a forward.DK: Did you see the Quarter Life stuff? It’s this short-lived TV show where the main character was a writer named Dylan Krieger. I never saw it, but reading about it made me feel...watched.VKN: I haven’t seen it, but I am glad you are the main character in Quarter Life, that your name could live elsewhere. I think poets who write poetry and play basketball can be an exciting, contagious theme (Natalie Diaz). Are you athletic at all? Do you play any sports? I have never met you in person before, but based on your poetry and your poetry readings, I think you would make an excellent hockey player! Puck and punk!  DK: I don’t think anyone in my life would assume I was athletic, but I actually did love to play softball and soccer as a kid. I had fewer opportunities to play organized sports because I was home-schooled, but I had a pretty steady “backyard baseball” ritual with my dad—at least until I got old enough to pick his brain about philosophy and music history instead. If I had been raised even 50 miles north of South Bend, I would have been in Michigan—close enough to Canada that hockey probably would have been a part of my childhood.VKN: Your work deals with the mother theme a lot, and your father theme might be God, but have you thought about devoting an entire collection to the father theme? What is your relationship with your father like? Based on some of the interviews I read, I was under the impression that your parents don’t read your work. Would you ever write a collection just for them, with your parents being your ideal readers?DK: I actually started writing a novel last year that I wound up abandoning for a poetry project once the pandemic hit. So far, the novel is basically a mix of auto-fiction and speculative fiction, and my dad and I are the main characters. Since it’s prose, I think there’s a better chance he’d read it and enjoy it. In many ways, I’m thankful that they usually don’t read my poetry, because it gives me more room to talk about my childhood without it feeling like a confrontation or personal attack. VKN: I can understand that—the desire for freedom and anonymity from parents. Why did you abandon the project? Is the novel form too verbose? If your work had to be censored, which institution or structure would you desire that censorship from?DK: My problem with the novel form is the planning it requires, paired with my limited attention span. Poems are usually the perfect length and intensity to grab and hold my attention. It’s difficult to sustain that intensity for an entire novel, and I’m not sure if you’d want to, but I always end up sounding like a poet anyway, even when I write prose. When it comes to censorship, we actually tried to get some negative press for The Mother Wart by emailing major televangelists, warning them that the book was pro-abortion satanist trash that they should condemn on their programs. We were aiming for getting that “(no such thing as) bad press.” I wouldn’t mind being censored or condemned by the/a church. But I’m just one little poet, and they’re age-old institutions, so I don’t think I am considered a threat. 🙂VKN: I am sorry you haven’t been censored properly! It would have been an amazing publicity stunt. You have been published by a variety of presses (never one twice). How do you find homes for your work? And how did you find 11:11 for Soft-Focus?DK: It’s really been different every time. With some of my presses, I had gotten an introduction and an invitation to submit. With others, like Delete and 11:11, it was pretty much a cold submission. But with 11:11, I do remember Andrew reaching out to me over social media with very heartfelt condolences when one of my friends died, and I remember thinking, “This press seems like good people.” They also make impressively detail-oriented, visually striking art. But the “good people” part is more and more important to me these days. I want to work with people I trust who also share my vision.VKN: Andrew is very lovely and awesome, isn’t he? I love his intensity. Why is the “good people” part more and more important to you these days?DK: It only takes one bad experience with publishing to make you think of it differently. When I was younger, I was so desperate to get my work out there, I truly would have signed a contract with anyone. It’s good to become more selective than that—to really think about what you want to say and how you want your work to look and exist in the world. Finding a press you can trust is so instrumental to that process, because it’s a collaboration—and a far more involved one than just passing a notebook back and forth. I rely on other creative people so much to bring my poems to life, and I try to stay very aware of how much trust is involved in that kind of collaboration.VKN: That is wise, Dylan. I really love the cover and table of contents in Soft-Focus Slaughterhouse. (I wish more tables of contents were this exciting!) I know Mike Corrao, 11:11’s in-house designer, designed the book. Can you talk about the design component of it, and is there a favorite poem of yours from this collection? One that you return to again and again for comfort or peace of mind or momentum of creativity? DK: Thank you about the design! I love what Mike did, too—especially with the table of contents. The overall medical theme was his creation, but I selected the jaw bone as the cover image, since that’s the nexus of my pain condition, and I thought it was a haunting image all by itself like that, centered and enshrined. As far as a favorite poem goes, I like returning to “love is wanting to die together” and “spectrum sensitive.” They’re both poems with a glimmer of hope, whether that hope resides in finding the ultimate romance or simply feeling sensory pleasure so intense it might balance out the pain. I’m glad this kind of nuance made it into the book, alongside and in contrast to the sense of defeat pain brings. VKN: So, for the readers—if they were to chew on something while reading your jaw book, what should they eat? I get the impression that you love breakfast/diner food, but what would be a good meal to go along with your book? As they are consuming your work that deals with chronic pain, what is something they could chronically consume as well—to be in conversation with you and your poetry?DK: Maybe this is too literal an interpretation, but I’ve gotten a lot of responses to the poems like, “Wow, I have TMJ, too,” so if you’re one of those people, go with a softer breakfast food like shrimp and grits. I think bruxism and TMJ symptoms are more common than we realize; I just happen to have a very bad case. My official diagnosis is “anterior jaw dislocation with reduction.” I can actually swing my jaw out of joint, and I have nerve damage in my scalp and extremities that makes touch unpleasant sometimes, but I luckily don’t have limited mobility (yet). The condition can be aggravated by tough foods like crusty breads, though, so stay away from those—if you share these issues, that is.VKN: Do you edit your work heavily, Dylan? DK: I self-edit pretty heavily, but I don’t have a trusty sidekick editor like some of my writer friends have. Maybe that’s a level of trust I haven’t reached yet.VKN: Would you like one? If there is someone from history that you could always have access to, editing-wise, whom would you choose? DK: If we’re going for a dead poet, I might say Mina Loy. She would give me the weird word, the unexpected word. It would lift me out of predictability—that’s how I imagine the power of her influence. VKN: You can accidentally write limericks or metered poems. Are their other accidental talents of yours we should know about?DK: It’s true; I think I have an almost compulsive proclivity for ending poems in song. Even if they’re not otherwise in meter, something tells me to end that way. I’m not sure if my other talents are as unconscious/accidental, but I did grow up singing, harmonizing, and sight-reading music a lot. As a friend once said, a “musical demon” lives inside me and comes out in my poems to make music out of words. VKN: Do you think it’s a result of being home-schooled and raised by musical parents?DK: Yes, I’m sure I would have still loved music even if my life had been different, but the way it turned out, music became a sort of bonding ritual. Sometimes we fought over it (I was always too loud and my sister was always flat, according to my mom) but music made intuitive sense to me, more than math or science or history or even language at that point. Making language into music eventually seemed like the natural evolution of that intuition. VKN: I want to end this interview by asking about this poem: “love is wanting to die together.” Where and when did you write it? Where were you in life? What provoked it? And, what do you think about love poems? Should we all become “proverbial flowers” to be pressed by two pages of a book? I love how its opening—“eyelash to eyelash”—evokes intimacy before “unembarrassed” reverberates it.DK: I was actually extremely single when I wrote this book—which might be surprising, given the number of love poems in it. Chronic pain is one of many particular predicaments that can make us feel “hard to love,” so the prospect of deep personal or romantic intimacy is related to my self-perception as a “spoonie.” In the context of chronic pain or illness, love might look more like a physical therapy session than like an epic romantic adventure. I’ve always thought choosing a partner is kind of like choosing a family member—it’s that day-to-day, mundane level of closeness—and there’s something so bittersweet about the notion that the best possible ending is dying together. Love poems might seem overdone historically, but it’s just one of those topics, like death, like sickness, like pain. It never goes out of style, because it still haunts us.
Read More »