Crack the Spine
Literary magazine
Issue 148
Issue 148 April 29, 2015 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine
Cover Art by Keith Moul Keith’s poems and photos appear widely. Three recently published books include: “The Grammar of Mind” from Blue & Yellow Dog; “Beautiful Agitation” from Red Ochre Press; and “Reconsidered Light,” a collection of poems written to accompany Keith’s photos, from Broken Publications. Broken Publications also released “To Take and Have Not” in 2014 and Finishing Line Press is preparing “The Future as a Picnic Lunch” for release in 2015.
CONTENTS Marléne Zadig
We Are All So Young and Lively
R. Gerry Fabian
Bluetooth Your Love
Sean Higgins
The Nightshift Sardine and the Sauerkraut Club
Michael Barach May You Be Well
Charles Edward Brooks
The Parabola
Suzanne O’Connell Dinner Rolls
Matthew Vasiliauskas
Abaittor
Marléne Zadig
We Are All So Young and Lively
It took the approaching flavor-tripping/Cinco de Mayo party at the Langley’s to excavate Rod from a cavernous nine-day funk and finally get him dusted off and looking forward to the weekend again. He’d resisted at first, unsettled by the “tripping” aspect of the party—never one to experiment with psychotropic substances—but his wife Kerry had assured him that miracle fruit was FDAapproved, or at least FDA-considered, and was very mainstream because she had read about it in The New York Times. The gathering had originally been conceived as merely just the tasting party facilitated by the tongue-bending properties of a $90 box of fresh miracle berries Fed-Exed from a grower in Florida who sold them over the internet— guaranteed to bind to the protein receptors on one’s taste buds to make even the sourest of foods taste sugary sweet—but when Becky from around the corner pointed out that the date overlapped with several of the early Cinco de Mayo celebrations in the local bars in downtown Mountain View, it was decided over a group email chain lasting several days that they would all wear costumes and include a flight of Mexican lagers on the tasting menu for the party. Then Harry Kim from two houses down had boasted over email that his would be the most authentic costume, as he was borrowing a genuine matador outfit from one of his fellow engineers at BMW who was an ex-pat from San Sebastian, which upped everyone’s game from Party City to Ebay, so Rod now had enough on his mind—including being tasked with arranging the babysitter—to keep him from sinking back down into Week Two of his slump, which was mostly
about how things just didn’t seem as fun now as he remembered them once being. “Does this look right?” he asked Kerry as he donned the poncho which he’d procured at the last minute from the Goodwill in Menlo Park and was not at all authentic. “I think it’s on backwards.” Kerry had opted for the more traditional and boxier huipil rather than the sluttier señorita costumes available in many of the stores, and Rod lamented privately as he fixed his hat that the bodice completely covered and obscured her relatively flat chest rather than hoisting it aloft, and in fact, she looked as though she were wearing a glorified potato sack with fringe sleeves. Doug’s wife, Vanessa, who had once been a cocktail waitress before she married and became a mother, would surely have the slutty version, Rod thought, and he would have to content himself with that knowledge instead. When Rod and Kerry arrived at the party, Kim Langley opened the door wearing a señorita dress as well, and all of Rod’s problems began to drain away from his consciousness as if into a crevasse at the bottom of a canyon, along with—once he had fully chewed and swallowed a flavor berry and downed a shot of tequila as instructed by Kim—his inhibitions. “See? Now when you chase it by biting into a lemon, it’s a trip, isn’t it?” Kim said after she’d offered him a wedge. “It’s like candy.” As he bit into the lemon slice, his mouth was preparing itself to pucker, but as soon as his teeth punctured the membranes of the individual tiny pips of lemon flesh, he was astounded at the impossibly sumptuous sweetness that flooded his mouth, which was reminiscent of lemon meringue pie. It was a warm feeling. If only everything tasted like pie, he thought, life would be grand.
“My mind is blown,” Rod agreed. “Here, honey, they have shots of vinegar! And chunks of raw onion!” “What, I don’t get tequila?” Kerry pouted, tonguing the remnants of her miracle berry out of her teeth. “She can’t hold her tequila.” “Don’t they have red wine? I love red wine.” “Yeah, but I warn you,” Kim cautioned, “it’s all gonna taste like Manischewitz after the berry.” “She won’t be able to tell the difference.” Kerry elbowed Rod in the gut. “Ow!” “I’ll have one of those beers, please,” Kerry requested instead. “Are the kids already in bed? I’m impressed! We always chicken out and leave it for the sitter.” “Sleep begets sleep, so they say,” declared Kim’s husband Stan, who was shirtless under his poncho to show off his carefully curated biceps, which necessarily flexed as he handed Kerry a frosty beer stein filled with lager. “We put the baby to bed in the guest room in a pack ‘n play because he’s a light sleeper.” They called their youngest “the baby” even though he was already two years old, for he was in fact quite small, had not a stitch of hair on his head, and could not yet string two words together. “I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen all the rooms in your house yet,” Rod said, shooting back another round of tequila. “And how many years have we known you guys? Five? Six? We’re always here for barbecues.” “Easy on the lemons!” warned Kim. “The berries are safe, but I’ve heard you can do a number on your stomach if you eat too much acidic food.” Harry Kim and his wife Katie from two doors down arrived just then and kudos were offered by all the others for his tremendously authentic costume.
“You’re the spitting image of an Asian matador,” said Rod. “Wait, wasn’t Cinco de Mayo about a fight against Spain? That costume doesn’t make sense at all, then,” he quipped. “Tequila turns you into an asshole,” Kerry pointed out. “Oh, this beer tastes like honey soda! And not in a good way. Too sweet!” She made a face. “I’m always an asshole,” said Rod. “Lemme try that.” He took the beer stein from his wife to have a taste. Honey soda was an apt description, he thought, only to him it was comforting, the kind of thing you might give to a child with a stomach ache. “I think it was a battle with France,” mused Katie Kim, who also had chosen the señorita look. “You’re thinking of Mexican Independence Day. Americans always get that wrong.” “Let’s try red wine!” Kerry said, to no one in particular, as she watched Rod finish her beer. There were five couples in all in the neighborhood book club that had evolved from discussing books over dinner to just dinner once everyone had started having kids to eventually just monthly theme parties with rotating hosts. Becky and her husband Jon-Jon were always the last to arrive, and presently they knocked on the door. “The life of the party is finally here!” Stan, the host, cried when he opened the door and hugged the last of his guests. Rod came over to greet them as well, admiring Becky’s straw-blond hair done up in braids in the style of Frida Kahlo but without the scary brow. She wore almost the identical señorita costume as their hostess, Kim—white blouse off the shoulders held up by elastic, red satin sash, and black ruffled skirt, but Becky filled it out better and was in fact nearly bursting out of its top. Becky
had the firm, rotund breasts of a teenager, and it was incomprehensible to Rod that she had breastfed three children without any sort of sagginess setting in. He missed the days of open breastfeeding among the wives. “This wine is disgusting!” Kerry called out to the room. “What have you done to my tongue?” There was a sort of fear creeping into her fractured voice, which cracked now in its typically high, breathy tones. But no one was paying attention because at the moment, Becky was unloading a bag of goodies she’d brought for the party. “Bacon, anchovies, olives, pickles—you devil!” Kim said as she helped lay out the items. “We are going to have the worst breath after this party.” “Nope! I brought peppermint Schnapps for that. I hear it tastes like a mint julep when you’re on the berries.” Kim giggled. “‘On the berries.’ You make it sound like we’re doing drugs.” “Aren’t we?” retorted Doug, whose sombrero was wider than he would’ve liked it to be. “I thought these were magic berries, as in ‘magic mushrooms,’” he chuckled. “Doug!” greeted Jon-Jon. “You look like Pancho Villa!” They shook hands. “I think you’re thinking of Sancho Panza, aren’t you?” said Vanessa, Doug’s wife. “Hey, at least I made an effort,” Doug insisted. “What’s with the wife beater, man?” “Hey, it’s our national dress, you know?” Jon-Jon explained. Jon-Jon’s wife Becky tsked. “I tried to get him to wear something more traditional, but he insisted on coming like this. It’s what I get for marrying a Mexican male! So stubborn.” She shook her head and everyone laughed. Then
she tossed back two shots of tequila in quick succession and ate her entire wedge of lemon, including the rind. Guests began sampling the fare willy-nilly, oo-ing and ah-ing over the metamorphosis of tastes in their mouths, the cognitive dissonance produced by the flavor berries. It was a free-for-all, and the guests quickly dispensed with plates and utensils, preferring to alternate from hand to mouth on their way down the table. “I hope you have antacid tablets on hand after all this.” “Of course!” “Hey, we should try baking soda! That’s the basic ingredient in antacid, isn’t it?” “Do you mean snorting it, or eating it?” “I once ate a spoonful of baking soda thinking it was powdered sugar when I was a kid. It was god-awful.” After an hour or so of this, when the effects of the berries had started to wear off, they each decided to go for another berry, except for Kerry, who did not like what had been happening to her tongue. She had made the mistake of trying several foods that she normally hated, and though they were surprisingly palatable on the berries, she was now fretting about how disgusting everything would taste as she burped the essence of it back up the rest of the night once the berries wore off. In particular, she’d been horrified by the oysters, which had tasted mild and sweet on her tongue but just like regular oysters as they slid down her throat. “This is all wrong,” she’d shuddered. “I don’t think I can do this anymore.” “Please?” Rod had asked her, murmuring in her ear. He licked the inside of her ear when no one was looking to taste her ear wax, which had made her
squirm. It, too, tasted of honey, though more like honey lip balm with its solid consistency. “Don’t you want to find out what I taste like later while on the berries? It could be amazing. It could blow your mind.” He then licked her hair as well but was marginally disappointed that it still tasted essentially like hair. “I think it’s gross, these berries. Nothing tastes as it should; everything tastes gross.” Kerry was presently nursing a glass of plain tap water, which she claimed also tasted strange, heavy on the chlorine or some other chemical additive. She just wanted it back the way it was. Once they’d all tried the baking soda—everyone but Kerry, that is—the party shifted from people hanging out and sampling what was on the table to rifling through the cupboards and refrigerator seeking strange foodstuffs and foodlike items to put in their mouths. Stan Langley raided his kids’ Easter baskets on top of the fridge and passed around a neglected ring pop, cherry flavored, though this was the least favorite item of the night so far, too sweet to bear. Toothpaste, Spam, Sriracha, hydrogen peroxide, vodka, lighter fluid—all were eventually suggested and tried by some or all of the guests, at least by swishing the substance in their mouths if not actually swallowing. “We should try breathing fire out back with the lighter fluid!” Doug suggested, peaking out from under his sombrero while sucking on the remnants of the ring pop, which was being used as a chaser after a swig of hot sauce. “Isn’t that dangerous?” said Vanessa, Doug’s wife. Doug shook his head. “There was a kid from my high school who used to do this at parties. It doesn’t take any special training, just don’t blow towards anything flammable.” The guests and hosts seemed to think this was reasonable, so they all shuffled out onto the back patio with the lighter fluid, a
lighter, and a fire extinguisher from the kitchen just in case. Stan Langley filled up the kiddie pool with water as a precautionary measure; it was his house, after all. The first two tries were a bust; Doug, who’d taken off his sombrero, couldn’t bring himself to bring the lighter close enough to the stream of fluid gushing from his mouth, clearly concerned about the potential for lighting his face on fire. But then on the third try, the spray caught an impressive flare quite by accident, though it was not as beautiful a display as it would have been in the circus. The stream shot out straight and down as the fluid fell into the pool in a trajectory similar to a flame-thrower, not up and into the ether as it seems to do at a live performance or in the movies, no ethereal balls of fire appearing to rise and evaporate into thin air. The guests gave appreciative moans of admiration, if not exactly delight, though no one else stepped forward to give it a go. “You know what we should try,” Rod projected onto the patio, drawing out the last vowel with a pointed look and a gesture that explained what he was thinking. The guests responded with an immediate silence, and he received a punch in the arm from his wife. Becky burst out laughing. “No, I’m serious. Come on, don’t you want to know? For science?” “I’ll try it,” Becky said. “So, what, are we all gonna pair off and go into separate rooms?” “Yes!” called Doug, who was hunched over spitting the remnants of saliva and lighter fluid into the kiddie pool for safety’s sake. “Now that would be awkward,” said Katie Kim, “waiting around while everyone’s in adjoining rooms.” “I’ll do it into a cup,” Rod shrugged. “Whoever wants to try it can.”
“More awkward than passing around a communal cup?” Harry Kim mumbled with his eyebrows raised, quietly countering his wife. Everyone was standing still. “I’m game,” shrugged Becky, though she was quite drunk by this point, perhaps a bit more than the others, and the shrugging motion nudged the elastic of her señorita blouse down so that the outer rim of her left areola was exposed. The others who saw were embarrassed for her but pretended not to notice, though the occurrence had the effect of upsetting the party’s equilibrium, of charging the atmosphere and catching people’s breath in their throats the way a heckler does during an otherwise engaging speech. “I’ll go inside and get you a cup.” Jon-Jon and Becky lived across the street from the Langley’s (around the corner from Kerry and Rod), and so Becky was well-acquainted with their kitchen. “I am not going to be a part of this,” Kerry said, swishing the water around her palate in an attempt to speed up the process of things returning back to normal. “Yeah, sorry dude, but that sounds gay,” said Jon-Jon, exchanging a raisedeyebrow glance with Harry Kim. From his position, he wasn’t able to see that his wife’s breast was partially exposed to his friends and neighbors. “I’m out. I’ll take some more tequila though. That cheap shit tastes like top shelf Patrón on these berries.” He moved to get more alcohol from inside, which seemed to break the spell of everyone’s temporary paralysis, and people began to move about on the patio again and disperse. “You would know,” chimed Becky, who also did not know that her breast had slipped out but adjusted the elastic on her blouse reflexively nevertheless.
“It’s optional,” Rod said. “Nobody has to try anything they don’t want to. Did we make anybody try the lighter fluid? No.” There was mariachi music from an mp3 player blaring loud enough in the background through the screen door and the guests were drunk enough that those who wanted to ignore what was being discussed easily could do so. Vanessa, Katie, Kim, and Stan were already wandering off into the yard with a couple of flashlights seeking out dandelion greens and lavender buds to nibble; Doug went looking for earthworms and snails to lick, or possibly to eat if he could work up the courage. As Jon-Jon came out with the tequila, Becky brushed past him to fetch Rod a disposable cup from the kitchen cupboards, and Rod followed her there. Once they left the patio, the conversations out in the yard rekindled to their previous radiance and the party tried to forget they were gone. “I’m a little drunk; I don’t think I can do this on my own,” Rod said to Becky when she’d stumbled into him while handing him a Dixie cup. He pulled her by her sash into the back room beyond the kitchen and laundry area, and she said nothing in response. When they entered the room, a river of light from the hallway briefly parted the darkness, which promptly filled the room again when Rod closed the door. The absolute darkness within seemed an actual thing with heft and weight in contrast to the airy, brightly lit rooms they had just vacated, and when they entered, it seemed to push back as if made of foam or something dark and viscous, like molasses. She did what he’d brought her in there to do, which took longer than it usually would have, and when she was finished, she spit into the cup which she had gotten out for him. By then, their eyes were beginning to adjust to the
darkness, or the darkness itself had thinned, and it was then that they noticed the baby sitting up in his portable crib, which had been partially obscured by a dresser. He stared at them through the mesh barrier. “We,” they heard him say. “We.” He started to suck his thumb. Becky jumped and dropped the cup. “Shit! What’s he doing in the guestroom?” “This is the guestroom? Fuck, I didn’t know; I figured this was the pantry or something.” “Go back to sleep, Charlie. Night-night, buddy, go back to sleep.” Becky patted him on the head, collected the spilled cup, wiped the floor with tissues from the dresser, and pulled Rod out of the room, shutting the door behind them. Then she threw up in the sink in the adjacent laundry room. Rod patted her on the back and handed her a paper towel for her to wipe her mouth. “At least the kid can’t really talk yet,” he said. She took the paper towel from him but shoved his hand away when he tried to put it on her shoulder. “I think you got some on your sash.” Becky looked down and tore off the red satin sash without evaluating it, then stormed out of the laundry room into the kitchen, rinsed out the cup in the sink, and threw both the cup and the sash into the trash can, slamming the lid back down when she was done. The motions reminded him of the passive aggressive tendencies of all his collective former girlfriends from college and beyond and the steady surge of fear or adrenaline which accompanied such displays, the fear or rush that he experienced when he was uncertain whether things might be coming to an end or just getting interesting. Rod followed Becky back out into the living room, mute.
“I want to go home now.” Kerry looked up at them from the living room sofa, sitting there alone with her purse in her hands, fingering the fringe on her huipil. A blue light from the baby monitor resting on the liquor cabinet blipped and caught Rod’s eye from across the room. It was the kind with 4-5 lights arranged in a column to display the volume intensity visually the way mixers do on stereo equipment, though with the loud music playing in the background—currently it was the Gypsy Kings—he couldn’t tell whether the volume of the monitor was on or if it was set to silent. “Sure, sure, honey,” Rod said, “let me just take Becky out back to Jon-Jon. Flavor crystals seem to have upset her tummy.” He put his hand to the small of Becky’s back but she shrugged him off and went out the sliding screen door ahead of him. “What, no cup?” Harry Kim chided as the two emerged onto the patio. “Come on, I was totally kidding!” Rod grinned. “But somebody here had a little more than she could handle, I think.” He made a face to indicated that she had been ill, then looked out into the yard at the spastic beams crisscrossing in the dark from dueling flashlights in the hedges, reminding him of the last time he’d gone trick-or-treating as an adolescent, the girls’ costumes having evolved by then from princess dresses to French maid uniforms, and the wildly gyrating light beams betraying the teens’ anxiety wrapped up in the potential promises and pitfalls of the night. Now, the light bisected bodies and faces out in the yard in such a way as to call into focus only fragments of the human form. “Better get Jon-Jon to come and take her home,” Rod added. “I live across the street,” Becky reminded him. “How did it all taste coming back up?” Harry asked. “I mean on the miracle berries.”
“Why don’t you find out for yourself?” she snapped. “Bathroom’s open.” She turned in the direction of the side gate. “You leaving?” asked Rod. “Tell Juan I’ve got a headache.” She slammed the gate behind her, and Rod saw the blue blips on the baby monitor shoot all the way up to the top inside the living room. Harry looked at Rod, who shrugged. Doug walked up with a handful of garden snails. “Are these the same type of snails that are in escargot?” Doug asked. “I wouldn’t want to accidentally ingest toxic snails.” “We should go,” Rod said, nodding towards his wife Kerry seated inside. “Give our regards to the hosts. Hell of a party.” He left Harry and Doug alone on the patio to head indoors. Behind him in the hedges, he heard a woman’s voice saying, “Try these juniper berries, Kim, they taste just like gin!” “They always taste like gin,” Kim replied. “Gin’s made from juniper berries. Frankly, I’d rather just have the gin.” Inside, Kerry stood up stiffly and walked towards the front door as Rod came back into the living room. “I think the baby’s awake; the monitor’s been going berserk. We should tell someone.” “It’s really none of our business,” Rod said, opening the front door for Kerry. “They’ll figure it out.” Rod inadvertently switched off the living room lights out of habit on their way out of the house as he usually did when leaving an empty room. Through the open blinds in the front window, he could see the blue glow flashing and subsiding intermittently as the darkened living room filled with the indicator light from the monitor the way a movie screen flickers in a theater. Behind him, he heard the voices from the back yard hush and cease
altogether as the guests and hosts slowly turned towards the sporadic beacon shining from within, newly hatched turtles drawn to a shimmering sea.
R. Gerry Fabian
Bluetooth Your Love
Sean Higgins
The Nightshift Sardine and the Sauerkraut Club
The snatchers never went straight to the liquor aisle. No. They wanted us to think that they popped in the 24-hour grocery at 1:00 in the morning for more innocent reasons. They flicked through loose issues of Woman’s Day by empty registers or puzzled over walls of rash creams and itch ointments. They shifted from foot to foot and gave us stockers the stink eye. Tex, the old security guard, didn’t mind the sneaking, though: he let the snatchers dawdle. He'd scoop up loose grocery baskets and follow them out of the side of his eyes. His intuition was usually correct. Snatchers would tuck expensive whiskey or display DVDs into their coats and hustle down the aisle and he'd accost them before they even made it to produce. Sometimes they bolted off. I’d seen them try a couple of times. Tex, graceful for a 65 year-
old with a paunch, would break into a dancer’s arabesque — leg up, arm outstretched — and yank the snatcher down by his collar. “In the 15 years I’ve been security here,” he said, “I’ve never let one go.” Tex had a complicated last name, Tokarczyk, so he bought an engraved name tag with "TECKS" spelled out on the front and clipped it above his chest pocket. No one had the nerve to tell him that he spelled "Tex" wrong. That summer Tex’s wife of 40 years, Emmie, died. The previous February, she found a hard lump on her upper thigh the size of a golf ball. The tests came back as metastasized lymphoma. It was a rare, aggressive type, and she was in the ground by Independence Day. Dave the shift manager passed a card around for everyone to sign after it happened. He offered Tex time off, too, as much as
he needed. "Tecks," I wrote in the card. "I am so sorry for your loss." I was as surprised as everyone else when I saw Tex the night of the funeral. He stood by a wooden crate display filled with Fuji apples, his eyes hooked on a pack of teenagers shuffling toward the pharmacy section. “Hey Tex,” I said. “You okay? Everyone's worried about you.” “Pipe down,” he said. “I’ve got these kids made.”
for lunch?” he asked. He pulled a flat tin the size of a cell phone from his thermal cooler. “Have this instead.” “Sardines?” “Yes,” he said. ”Omega 3s fight cancer." He placed a cloudy jar of sauerkraut on the table next, and squeezed the lid off with a pop. “Sauerkraut helps with digestion." He fished two forks from the cooler and slammed them down in front of me like a blackjack dealer showing aces. "Dig in."
Tex started eating lunch with me
Tex sometimes helped me stock when
every night after Emmie died. Since lunch was at 2 in the morning, there weren’t any places nearby that we could go. We’d sit in the dark little break room and he’d show me pictures of his grandkids decked out in blaze orange hunting gear. One night he scolded me for bringing in junk food. “Why do you have those pop-tarts
things were busy. I worked the frozen uprights, and he’d slip on a pair of textured gloves and stack sticky tubes of orange juice concentrate into little pyramids. “Are you afraid of dying?” he asked one night. I was tossing expired bags of Totino’s pizza rolls into a cardboard box. “I think so,” I said. “Are you?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “You only need to do it once and then you’re done with it. You just get it out of the way.” The snatchers got bolder as the summer wore on. In late July, a methed-out redneck pointed a gun at Christie behind the customer service desk. He only asked for 60 dollars. A couple of nights later, a group of highschoolers in ski masks bum-rushed the liquor aisle, grabbing boxes of wine and magnums of champagne and giant bottles of Smirnoff. “What’s going on, Tex?” I asked one morning over a tin of brislings. Tex brought in extra sardines and kraut to share every night. “We’re getting ripped off left and right.” He shrugged his shoulders and sprinkled hot sauce into his kraut. “Barbarians at the gate,” he said.
The first Wednesday in August we had this goth-looking kid come in
around midnight. He had black contacts in, so his eyes looked like giant pupils. Everyone knew he was trouble right away, and it didn’t take Tex long to tail him once he made it over to the pharmacy section. The kid slinked in front of the shelves with the cold medicine and snatched up a purple bottle of Robotussin. In one quick motion, he dropped it into an open pocket of his black cargo shorts. “Hey you,” Tex popped out from behind the wooden Fuji apple stand and pointed at him. “Excuse me, sir.” The kid blinked a couple of times at Tex and hurried toward the Garden Center exit. Tex sped up behind him. “You need to stop right there, sir.” The kid turned his head. “Fuck off, old man,” he said. “Go kill yourself.” Tex lined into the kid like a Grizzly bear, plucked him up by his coat and threw him down. You could hear the kid’s head pop against the waxy tile floor. Tex just kind of stood there with
his hands open and his face all drained out. He shook his head a little bit and kicked the kid square in the ribs. He sobbed and kicked and kicked again. Dave the shift manager ran up and grappled Tex from behind and pushed him over against the condom shelf. “Take it easy, Tex,” he said. “Let’s take a breath.” Tex was still crying, breathing out in short gasps. It wasn’t ten minutes before the ambulance and cops arrived. Tex and Dave sat in the admin room behind the can machines with the door closed and talked until the shift ended. There’s a little window on the door and I could see Tex shaking his head and wiping away tears. They took the kid away in the ambulance. I hope Tex is doing well. I haven’t seen him since that night, but I’ll think about him when I see a snatcher bolt out of the store with liquor or spray paint or something. I’ll think of what
he said about dying, about how you only need to do it once and get it over with.
Michael Barach May You Be Well
Names like Billy, Justin, Brettski, Evan. Skinny Evan, draped in chains, who’d given his face to octopus night, and like ice kicked from a cup, lay passing out. That this then was kindness, this allowing. And me hammering the dash, plowing through red lights, while, sea-rocked in the back, they mewled the cri de coeur: “Flash your tits! Our chafed pricks are your pearls! Havertown, lower your long black curls!” We crickets sang, we Earls of Wawa, out of the dark dance untouched, and like lava sputtering in our beds, sealed in domes, we traced self-fraught catacombs, trailing butane toward our dreams. We covered ourselves, listened for our names.
Afternoons behind the Skatium, or at Sproul Lanes, our good intentions cuckooed to the edge of damaged light, then fumbled, splat-brained at our feet. High school was a farce. Where was splendor? I screamed at the sides of plumbing vans, grammar fleeting, weed-like, through the streets, and my friends laughed, becoming tingles beneath the town-scab. What girl would talk to us? We sat at desks, while light-years stuffed the vacuum in our ears, and our acne spread. In primeval dread, we levitated, thumb-to-clicker, paternal, persisting on fuzz from late-night porno listings, then trudged to school in the head-space of a squirrel. Havertown, lower your long, black curls. We maintained, hopeless as we were. And from boredom’s tarmac, nightly-roamed—
from Llanerch Diner, whose waitresses, chalked in smoky matrixes, held high the art deco eyebrows they penciled on, carrying clouds of snapper soup-steam; from Eagle Street’s cemetery, strewn with empties, and the Swell Bubble Gum Factory, where we huffed poppers. And then, of course, came Laura G. Crazy Laura. When mad, she’d yank my scruff, spilling, hobbly-wobbly, a bank of pleasure-promise down my unfinished flumes. What was done to her that she would choose to hang with us—hounding her to undress, calling her stupid—we might have guessed. From a bathrobe, dictatorial, even her father’s forearms couldn’t throttle the windpipe of what is irrevocable, which is all the past; a slur spoken
illuminates organs in their wooly submersion, the bodies pulley, crick, and joggle. One is changed. How callous were we? The card games in Bill’s basement we rigged so Laura lost, and like pit-fire, naked, O shadowously, she rose. Then taking the soberest one upstairs she showed him to the blurry world, where wild spars, and gorges spew birds. Me, I was never so sober. Cheek sliding off of skull, and skull slid from chair, I pulled the back way through guilt’s restaurantkitchen-doors, and came out with nothing to show for myself, I thought, but vomit, somewhere proximate, and giant paper heads on popsicle sticks that might have been my friends before eclipsed
behind my planetary bender. Perhaps, in such voids no one can enter, not the self I know, nor Laura G, our best apologies sweep, like garbage through alleys, giving chase. I don’t know. These days snowcrust arranges the morning glitter on the Grange, and the collective, ruinous whisper, little obelisks of pain in baggy coats—high-schoolers, come trampling.
Charles Edward Brooks The Parabola
Along a parabola life like a rocket flies, Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow. —Andrey Voznesensky, “Parabolic Ballad”
“Verdammt noch mal!” the man cried. Plopping down his pen, he sprang up and rushed to the fireplace. Only embers remained of what had been a blazing wood fire when he sat down to work. “I always do this,” he chided himself. “Get lost in my writing and then suddenly find myself shivering.” With unskilled movements, he laid branches of dry Scotch broom on the glowing coals and fanned them with a newspaper. Once the broom caught fire, he carefully added three small eucalyptus logs from the pile on the hearth. The logs soon began to pop and crackle. The first bashful flames gave a purple cast to the man’s Nordic blue eyes and tinted his steely hair orange. Replacing the fire screen, he stepped to the large picture window and peered out into the October night. The full moon lit up the slopes below the house in all their rocky harshness. Halfway down the hill, the lights of the village twinkled in the cold air; at the bottom, those of Vila stretched out into a broad ellipse. On the desk facing the window lay a lined writing pad together with pens and pencils. Two red pottery jugs held a row of dog-eared books erect: the complete works of Mallarmé and Verlaine, various French and German dictionaries. The man sat down, seized a fountain pen, and began to write on the open page. As his fingers formed each word, his organs of speech pronounced it,
sometimes repeating it more than once. Occasionally he crossed one out with the comment: “The music’s not right.” He was composing the last poem—“The Parabola”—in a quartet to be published as The Conic Sections. The other three had already been finished in Munich: “The Circle,” “The Ellipse,” and “The Hyperbola.” Despite the terminology, the poetry had little to do with mathematics. When the village church bell struck four times, he rose hastily and threw more logs on the grate. The blaze was now effusing the aromatic scent of eucalyptus. Settling down in an armchair with a quilt over his legs, he pushed three buttons on a remote control. With a mighty groan, a satellite dish on the roof turned northeastward. The emblem arte appeared in the upper right-hand corner of the wide television screen directly in front of his chair. Glass shelves filled with glazed pottery sparkled in the light from the emerging picture. Most of the furnishings in the living room-cum-study were simple rustic pieces, crafted of oak wood and stained dark. Shaggy throw rugs splashed bright colors on the coffee-brown tile floor. The host of the program just beginning greeted his audience. Ladies and gentlemen, honored viewers: Welcome to Arts & Letters. This evening we’ll be talking about the Symbolist Movement in literature. The man leaned back and fell into a near doze as familiar faces paraded across the screen: a dour Charles Baudelaire as inspirer of the movement, accompanied by a few spoken lines from Les Fleurs du Mal… …Taking his cue from Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé also aimed at a magical use of language… A dapper Mallarmé ceded to a dissipated Paul Verlaine. …Verlaine often chose words merely for their sound, to create a subtle music, a
kind of incantation much stronger than their ordinary meanings could produce… Claudel and Valéry floated by; the script described them as heirs of the great symbolist masters. The dozing man only roused himself when the next face faded in. It was his own. In contemporary German literature the Bavarian poet Heiko Sax is undoubtedly the principal heir of the Frenchmen who created the Symbolist Movement. His poetry achieves a pure musicality rarely equaled in our language. Arts & Letters was able to talk with Professor Sax just before he departed for Portugal on a sabbatical leave. I’m not really handsome, thought the man as he watched himself shaking hands with the host. But I’m tall and fit. Still attractive for a fellow pushing fifty. Host: Heiko Sax, what is it that you try to capture in your own poetry? Sax: A reality different from that of everyday life. One can only hint at this other reality; it’s altogether inexpressible except through art. Host: Your own work has been criticized as lacking ideas and emotion. You’re sometimes accused of preciosity. Is this critique related to your attempt to escape from the humdrum of everyday life? Sax: Oh, yes. Words are what symbolist poets work with, not ideas or emotions. But words already have standard meanings, and these must be transcended if anything new is to be said with them. Poets— The picture on the screen vibrated violently; the speakers emitted loud buzzing noises. …to use common words in archaic senses or coin new ones. Then, too, familiar rhetoric and rhythms must be avoided if— The sound sputtered and died. For a minute longer the images flashed on and off; then they, too, died away. The screen went black.
Heiko Sax threw off the quilt and leaped to his feet. “Verdammt noch mal!” he yelled.
When he woke the next morning, a fine rain was falling. At nine o’clock Maria Assunção arrived from the village and started her morning’s work by scouring the upstairs floors. The man donned his raincoat and hat. “À tout à l’heure, madame,” he called from the front door. A robust reply rang out from upstairs. “À tout à l’heure, Monsieur ’Eiko.” His rental arrangement included the woman’s services. And although her temporary employer knew hardly a word of Portuguese, communication presented no problem, for she had been a guest worker in France. On the six mornings each week when Maria Assunção cleaned house and cooked his lunch, he walked briskly down to Vila, stopped in at a café, and then went home, not quite so briskly, by the same route. Within a week of his arrival, in mid-September, he had fallen into a routine as rigid as the one that regulated his days in Munich. A block away from the Parcas Café, a mild glow spread from his solar plexus to warm his whole body. It was not the exercise that caused it, but anticipation of a scene about to take place.
In the café, the same men were sitting in the same places that they occupied every day at this hour. It was morning break time at the neighboring businesses; most of the men wore work clothes and stayed no longer than a quarter of an hour.
Heiko Sax had hardly sat down at his usual table when a steaming cup of coffee was set before him. “Bom dia,” said the barman in a staccato tenor. “Danke schön,” murmured the customer. After taking a sip of the brew, the German drew a silver case from the pocket of his tweed jacket. He removed a cigar from the case, sniffed it, and put one end of it between his lips. Immediately a hard-faced man with a stubbly beard, perhaps forty years of age, slipped off a barstool. Pulling a cheap gas lighter from his blue coveralls, he lit the poet’s cigar. As he did so, he looked into the older man’s eyes with a vibrant intensity. Not a word did he speak. Heiko Sax nodded and smiled; the gestures were not reciprocated. The man in blue coveralls then regained his seat and exchanged a few remarks with the barman. He spoke very softly, in a mellow deep bass. With few exceptions, the same scene had now been enacted six times a week for a whole month. And in some mysterious fashion, it heightened the poet’s creative powers. For on the few occasions when the younger man had not appeared, the afternoon’s work on “The Parabola” had languished. The German sipped his coffee slowly and puffed at the cigar. Such intense eyes! he mused. The expression “fiery eyes” is hackneyed—I’d never use it in my work—but it barges into my mind every time I see him. All his life Heiko Sax had limited his interaction with others to the strictly necessary. Words, not human beings, were and had always been his passion. Fiery Eyes slid off his barstool and left the café without so much as a sideward glance at the German. His stride was just short of a swagger. The poet emptied his coffee cup. There’s something proprietary about the way he lights my cigar, he said to himself, as though he were planting a flag on me.
Placing two coins by his saucer, he stood up and made his way to the exit. “Obrigado,” called the barman from the coffee machine. Despite the unremitting rain, the street bustled with activity. Fiery Eyes was nowhere to be seen. The poet pursued his train of thought: I’ve always detested it when other people make claims on me. Claims of any kind. But there’s something about the way he does it that doesn’t displease me at all. And he turned toward the center of town in search of a television repair shop.
“Oh, yes,” the proprietor said. “I see what the problem is.” His years as a guest worker at Siemens had coated the man’s German with a Bavarian patina. “I only watch arte and 3sat anyway,” explained Heiko Sax. “If it were another channel, it wouldn’t matter.” “We’ll soon have it patched up,” the shop owner assured him. And consulting a ledger by the till: “Let’s see: One of my men will come up tomorrow afternoon and take care of it.” “Not yourself? I don’t speak Portuguese, you know. It was sheer luck that I found my way to you.” “It makes no difference, sir. He’ll know what he has to do.” Outside on the sidewalk, Heiko Sax felt disoriented; he had wandered about for some time before spotting a window displaying television sets. But at the second cross street, he regained his bearings. There’s the Parcas Café, he realized with relief. Now I’m in business. The rain had stopped. If his pace as he walked up the hill had been the merest jot faster, he would have been running.
The fountain pen moved rapidly along the lines on the writing pad, even with the testing of each and every word. Behind the writing materials stood an ashtray with a cold cigar in it and a thermos flask of Maria Assunção’s strong coffee. From time to time, without raising his head to look out at the overcast sky, the poet filled a red pottery espresso cup and downed it at one gulp. A fire roared in the grate, filling the room with the scent of eucalyptus. A change in the sounds enveloping him jerked the man’s attention from his work. “Donnerwetter!” he fumed. “It’s raining.” And sprinting up to his bedroom, he snatched a few items of laundry off a metal rack on the balcony. Back downstairs, he laid them over the fire screen: four pairs of socks, two Tshirts, and two pairs of underpants. He had barely taken up his pen anew when the rain ceased. The doorbell provided the next interruption. “Good!” he rejoiced on his way to answer it. “It will be the TV repairman.” A man in blue coveralls, toolbox in hand, cleaned his shoes fastidiously on the doormat. It was Fiery Eyes. “Boa tarde, senhor. Venho ver a antena parabólica.” The poet grasped the intent of these first words ever addressed to him by the mellow bass voice, but his inability to reply in the same language frustrated him. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he asked hopefully. Fiery Eyes looked hard at the questioner. “Não, senhor.” “Français?” The saturnine head shook a negation. The index finger of a big hand pointed upward. “You need to get up to the roof,” Heiko Sax deduced. “Just come with me.” A trapdoor in the ceiling of the upstairs hall opened onto the roof. His heart
pounding, the German pulled a chair underneath it and spread a newspaper on the seat. As he did so, he noted for the first time that Fiery Eyes was fully as tall as he himself was. The blue coveralls were a size too small for the frame inside them. Heiko Sax held the chair firm while the Portuguese mounted it and pulled himself up through the opening. He flushed at the contours of taut buttocks rising right before his face. Handing up the toolbox, he inquired in sign language whether he, too, should come up and help. Fiery Eyes shook his head. “Não, senhor.” The poet signaled that he would be downstairs. The repairman made a sign of assent and disappeared in the direction of the satellite dish. The words flowed almost feverishly along the lines of the writing pad. If I understood him aright, he called the antenna parabolic, the writer reflected. The parabola he’s working on up there is hard and metallic—qualities that apply to his person as well. Mine’s a soft metaphor. When the tap of hammering resounded from above, the words traced by the fountain pen became brief sharp bursts of sound. The sustained hum of a drill led to a legato passage in which each word rolled with inevitable logic into the next. As he wrote, the poet’s heart continued to beat at high speed. Knuckles rapped on the frame of the living room door. “Já ’stá,” said Fiery Eyes. “It’s done.” He strode to the television set and switched it on. The arte logo appeared forthwith, together with a host of dancers. Dissonant chords pounded from the loudspeakers. Image and sound were clearer than they had been before the mishap. Heiko Sax rose from his chair, beaming with pleasure. “Excellent!” Fiery Eyes nodded and turned off the sound. The dancers in their prismatic
costumes continued to cavort across the screen, but now in total silence. In the gathering dusk, the light from the television glittered on the brightly colored pottery, imbuing the whole room with a magical aura. The repairman passed his eyes slowly over the shelves loaded with ceramics, the cheerful rugs, the dark oak furnishings. Then, fixing his gaze on the other man exactly as he had always done at the Parcas Café, he made his way calmly to the fireplace. To Heiko Sax, the Portuguese seemed to be moving with an uncanny slowness, accompanied by a faint reverberation of the muzzled music. Still with dreamlike slowness, Fiery Eyes lifted a pair of black underpants from the fire screen and pressed it against his chest. The German caught his breath. The big fingers holding the undergarment closed about it in a fist, and the dark face turned brutally hard. The body stood stock-still, its very stance a threat. The poet’s heartbeat accelerated. In his mind, a thought flashed on with red neon vividness: He’s offering you his love and warning you to accept it…or else! Heiko Sax possessed neither weapons nor skill in the martial arts. He could not escape from the house if the other man chose to stop him. Nor could he get to the telephone in the hall. Even if I could ring the police in Vila, he considered, how could I describe the danger I’m in? He had only one set of tools for coping with the world: words. And in his present situation the words of everyday life would not do, for he could neither converse nor reason with the man before him. Forcing himself to return Fiery Eyes’s gaze, he began to recite lines from “The Parabola”: Du musst lernen, wie die Raketen fliegen,
Wie ihre Trajektorien die Kurven Deines Lebens schneiden; (You must learn how the rockets fly, How their trajectories Intersect the curves of your life;) The poet went on quoting from memory, certain that Fiery Eyes understood not a word he was uttering. But now, if ever, he had to create a subtle music with mere sounds, a music to which the other man’s ear just might be attuned. As he continued, the hard face across from him softened. Without lapsing into a smile, the features lost all trace of brutality. The lineaments of a beast poised to kill melted from the stance. For his part, the German felt the cool aesthetic distance that always prevailed at his public readings dwindle away. The eyes locked onto his, and the verses he was reciting gleamed with one and the same luster. When the last line had been spoken, only the crackle of burning logs broke the silence in the room; the echo of the dance had gone. Rainbow lights from the television imbued the scene with a surreal strangeness. In slow motion, as though carrying out a sacred rite, the poet opened a silver case on his desk and drew a cigar out of it. Deliberately, he passed it back and forth under his nose, savoring its aroma, before pointing it at Fiery Eyes like a scepter. The Portuguese dropped the piece of clothing and extracted the gas lighter from his coveralls. The two men stepped toward each other, molto adagio, lurching and wobbling. For the floor under their feet had suddenly become as unfamiliar as the surface of another planet.
Suzanne O’Connell Dinner Rolls
You would not presume that miniature Parker House rolls would make good companions. But, turns out, they are well behaved and not lazy. They are in fact good conversationalists, very tidy, have friendly personalities, and are easy to travel with. There was a fire once in our town and while the smoke and ash rained down on everyone else, the fastidious little rolls remained brave and perfect, their buns fresh and buttery until the flaky end.
Matthew Vasiliauskas Abaittor
They found his body yesterday, or was it today, they couldn’t really remember. He had been at the abattoir longer than any of them, and suddenly dropped dead while carrying a headless hog. There was something about the way he maneuvered torsos that seemed almost like an art to them. It was all balletic, confident steps through swaying plastic, a slab of meat bleeding and resting on his chest, the only discernable features being his arms that absorbed the pale and pink so that within the echoing chasms the gleaming flesh illuminated the faces of the surrounding workers as if it were a candle. He made it clear he wanted to abide by ritual, and have his limbs and
organs distributed workers of his unit.
amongst
the
They would all get a piece of him, but the question remained who would get the heart? The tests of recollection began, with each person reenacting their most memorable encounters trying to prove their significance in his life. There’s a point, in the blackness of sweat, where figures moving amongst hanging flesh enter the infinite realms of memory, beholden to the perceiver who molds them out of tired blur and extinguishes life and death, creating instead a reality free of time where each blink reveals a new variation on old desires. In the end it was her who proved most worthy, and honestly, there was no one else he would have wanted to have it more.
She wrapped the heart up in brown wax paper, and emerging into the light of day, got in her car and began heading into the wetlands. The bayou possessed a mist, uncertain and perpetual, rolling in all directions, igniting the trees and water with white flames of faded eras still reaching for the legs of passing cranes. It didn’t need to be quiet or still to hear the gasps of the water, for at all times the strain of rolling breath moving through rotted wood and collapsed earth created a rhythm of desperation, panicked paranoia that ripped through the fluttering insects and struggled to escape the web of humidity. When she got to the house she placed the heart into the icebox, its wrinkled mounds magnified under the frost encrusted panes of the glass door. But strangely, as evening descended,
the heart began to glow. It filled the house with the dimness of flickering orange, its language caressing coffee cups and bed sheets, so that the air took on the consistency of liquid, bubbling and holding the rooms in distorted floating reflections. As she moved towards it, she felt the heat. It was a soft heat, the heat of nostalgia, the burning of ideas and sensations where imagination is the tool of recollection and the warmness of familiarity is born of want. He became everything to her in the glow, shedding faded impressions of flesh and transforming into the colors of emotion. They themselves were merely ideas, the certainty of existence evaporating, and all truth lying beyond solidity.
In the evenings she would invite the neighbors over to eat and rest in the beating warmth. The children would raise their arms in the heart light, their shadow creations consuming picture frames and utensils, and from the finger landscapes the memory of the man would fill the darkness with his ignited breath. Years passed, and the home fell into the hands of one family member after another, until they all disappeared, leaving only a crumbling frame and the now rusted ice box. Eventually the box collapsed, and the still-glowing heart sank into the mud. Thick, shimmering light hovered from the spot, and as it spread a crackling static pierced the air, allowing a multitude of faces to melt over one another.
Brightness consumed the area, and the choking rasp of the bayou finally grew silent.
Contributors Michael Barach Michael Barach is the Poetry Editor of Juked and a Program Specialist in the Florida Department of Education in Tallahassee, where he lives with his wife, Brandi. Charles Edward Brooks Charles Edward Brooks was born in North Carolina. He holds advanced degrees from Duke University and the University of Lausanne and fellowship in the Society of Actuaries. His work has appeared in Eureka Literary Magazine, Licking River Review, Menacing Hedge, North Dakota Quarterly, The pacificREVIEW, SEEMS, Xavier Review, and many other publications. In addition to original writing, he is active as a literary translator, working in English, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese. He lives in Switzerland. R. Gerry Fabian R. Gerry Fabian is a retired English instructor. He has been publishing poetry since 1972 in various poetry magazines. He is the editor of Raw Dog Press. He is currently working on a book of his poems. Sean Higgins Sean lives in a brick farmhouse with his wife. They have cats and chickens. He works as a citations submission editor for a research firm, and likes to collect
old nautical maps. His work has been published in Midwestern Gothic, Bartleby Snopes, and The Furious Gazelle. Keith Moul Keith’s poems and photos appear widely. Three recently published books include: “The Grammar of Mind” from Blue & Yellow Dog; “Beautiful Agitation” from Red Ochre Press; and “Reconsidered Light,” a collection of poems written to accompany Keith’s photos, from Broken Publications. Broken Publications also released “To Take and Have Not” in 2014 and Finishing Line Press is preparing “The Future as a Picnic Lunch” for release in 2015. Suzanne O’Connell Suzanne O’Connell lives in Los Angeles where she is a poet and a clinical social worker. Her work can be found in Forge, Atlanta Review, Blue Lake Review, The Manhattanville Review, G.W. Review, Reed Magazine, The Griffin, Sanskrit, Permafrost, Foliate Oak, Talking River, Organs of Vision and Speech Literary Magazine, Willow Review, The Tower Journal, Thin Air Magazine, Mas Tequila Review, The Evansville Review, The Round, Serving House Journal, Poetry Super Highway, poeticdiversity, Fre&D, Silver Birch Press, and Licking River Review. She was a recipient of Willow Review’s annual award for 2014 for her poem “Purple Summers.” She is a member of Jack Grapes’ L.A. Poets and Writers Collective. Matthew Vasiliauskas Matthew Vasiliauskas is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago. In 2009, he was awarded the Silver Dome Prize by the Illinois Broadcast Association for best public affairs program as producer of the Dean Richards Show at WGN
Radio. His work has appeared in publications such as The Newer York Press, The University Of Wyoming’s Owen Wister Review and The Pennsylvania Review.Matthew currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Marléne Zadig Marléne Zadig is a writer currently based in Silicon Valley, California and a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. She occasionally makes beer (only when her 1950s house with no insulation and no AC allows) and very often makes stories—once, a novel, now begging to be liberated from the coat closet. She is also the mother of two very young children who both literally and figuratively keep her up at night. Her work has received an Honorable Mention for both the 2010 and 2011Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prizes at the University of Maryland and can been found or is forthcoming in Sakura Review, Reed Magazine, and Split Lip Magazine.
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