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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.
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MY MOTHER TOLD ME YOU COULD ONLY KNOW THAT ORANGES WERE GOOD IF THEY SMELLED LIKE FLORIDA by Megan M. Garwood

April 19, 2021

At the grocery store, I am buying whole milk and skim milk because I like to put whole milk in my coffee and I like to use skim milk in my Smacks. I am reaching for a gallon jug when I feel someone grab my butt with a heavy hand. I turn around to see a man with little expression pat my rear. I ask him what does he think he is doing and he smiles and tells me to have a nice day. I am scared but also complimented. I am in the cereal aisle now, and I think I deserve more than just Smacks. The boxes are colorful bounty and I am a robber on lookout. I see a toucan who is sledding into a bowl of colorful donuts. It must be Christmastime. I thought it was summer. I feel a hand on my breast. I look down and see bright pink nails, like claws, with airbrushed flamingos on them. She squeezes again and says, honk! honk! Her smile is big like one of those lawyers on late-night TV. I don’t understand, I say, but I don’t think she hears me and says, thanks for the feel. Normally, I would run away, but where would I go? I suppose that is a question I must answer. Instead, I turn to a familiar face that I haven’t seen in a while: Count Chocula, levitating white marshmallows with his mind. It really must be Christmas. Now I’m in aisle three. I promised myself I would not be in three, but I am here, looking at the chocolate bars. I pass the fancy ones because who needs to pretend to want coconut sugar. It is okay. It is for someone else: she’s probably wonderful, and she probably squeezes her own orange juice and maybe she pours it into little juice glasses for her family, but I am trying to make it to the checkout without dying. There are Santa Clauses filled with whipped peanut butter. I pause. There is a Santa filled with marshmallow. I wonder. There is an angel filled with toffee. I feel a hand again, this time on my upper thigh, like it is guiding me into a yoga pose. I look down. It belongs to a teenage boy, acne like volcanos erupting. Tongue out, he pants like a dog. I think this is illegal, and I worry about cameras. I ask him what he wants, and he barks at me and squeezes the soft flesh under my stretch pants and asks what it’s doing there. Now I am sad. I feel useless, and I politely ask him to remove his paw. I reach for the Santas with peanut butter, the Santa with marshmallow, and the thin angel filled with toffee, and I cry a little on the walk to the checkout. I forgot orange juice and I remember that I will never be someone who juices my own fruit or chooses the coconut sugar over the chemical, and I wonder how people do their makeup every day. I decide I am going to do it, I am going to juice an orange, and when I take an orange to my nose to smell for ripeness, I feel a pull at my hair, and a hand dig to the root to fill its fingers with my uncombed mane. I turn to see the hand belongs to the manager of the store, and he tells me that we can’t smell the fruit before we purchase it. I ask him how, then, does one know if the fruit is good without feeling it or smelling it. I tell him how my mother told me you could only know an orange was good after you smelled its navel and it smelled like Florida. His response is to pull my head back hard until I look up to the industrial beams and iron-looking light fixtures and see a little bird tweeting and it looks like it winked, but I cannot be sure because it is so far away, but I would bet on it. So I go over to the cold section, and I bend down to look at the juice selection and someone hooks their finger into my mouth and pulls at the corner until I snarl. I see it is a man in a suit with a nice gold watch and shiny leather shoes like a banker. His eyes are dreamy, and I think maybe I deserve this, so I cock my head, flutter my eyes, and lick his finger, but he says, gross; you’re too old! And I say, I’m sorry, I thought this was what you wanted. And he says nice try but that it was too late for me, and I agree. When I get to the checkout, I smile at the cashier and ask how her day was and she says, umm okay, and I say that’s great, then I say, guess what? I got fired today for being unlikable by upper management. The cashier says, cool, anarchy, and kind of raises her fist in the air.  (more…)

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