Crack The Spine Issue Fifty-Three January 29, 2013 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2013 by Crack the Spine
Contents Jennifer Mayo Roommates Joe Baumann Porcelain Eric Caulfield Walking Sight Tina V. Cabrera Lash L. Alexandra Deciding to Connect An Essay
Katie Nichol Infidelity Danny Earl Simmons After 40 Days of Fasting Audrey Allen Tennessee
Cover Art “Ecola State Park” by Keith Moul Keith Moul’s poems have been published widely for almost 45 years. Recently two chaps have been released: “The Grammar of Mind” (2010) from Blue & Yellow Dog Press and “Beautiful Agitation” (2012) from Red Ochre Press. He also publishes photos widely. In fact, in 2010 a poem written to accompany one of Keith’s photos was a Pushcart nominee. Broken Publications has just released a full-length collection of poems/photos called “Reconsidered Light.”
Jennifer Mayo Roommates
When the door opens, Jessie doesn't realize I'm sitting at the black dining room table, watching her. I don't think she even wonders why the light is on in our apartment this late at night. She stumbles on the hardwood floor, her heels clacking away like rapid fire. She steadies herself with the doorknob, walking like her ankles are chained together. Her blonde hair falls past her shoulders, obscuring her face as she pulls at the buckle straps of her shoes. The black dress has few curves to cling to and her stockings have a tear at her right shin. She's not used to wearing heels and when she plops them down by the door, she still walks like she's off balance. She sets her purse on the kitchen counter and it caves in on itself before falling over. By the glimmer of the dining room light, she locates the jar of peanut butter on the counter. It's new and she pierces the paper covering with her nails, tearing at it. A drawer rattles as she pulls it open, grabbing a spoon. She stabs the virgin jar and shovels a spoonful into her mouth. "We wouldn't run out of peanut butter so fast if you stopped doing that." She turns around when I speak, jar in one hand, spoon in her mouth. She pulls, but the spoon is a fighter and drags her tongue out with it. She does her best to get as much peanut butter off of the spoon as possible, but she soon withdraws her tongue to savor the overly sweet, sticky substance. "You don't like peanut butter anyway," she says after swallowing most of it. "It's supposed to be for Becky's lunch," I say. "She's already asleep?" She and I both know it's too late for Becky to be awake. "I put her to bed already." She's licking the spoon, trying to clean it as she watches me pretend to look at the printouts in front of me. "Why are you still up?" "How was your date?" I hear the spoon smack against her teeth and she pulls it away from her mouth. "It was fine," she says. "He's nice." "Good for you, Jessie," I say, circling a phone number with my pen. All the papers in front of me rattle off details of various apartments and have pictures that are supposed to entice me. "Does he know about Becky?"
"He has a son, so he said that he understands," Jessie says, leaning against the counter. I can see her calves, tense through her nylon stockings. Her butt is too flat to stand out against her ill fitting dress that would slip down her if there weren't straps to keep it up. The fabric bunches around her waist, dragging it higher up her legs. "Do you think he would be a good dad for Becky?" She thrusts the spoon into the jar again, frowning. "No. He wanted to have sex in the car. Last time I did that, I got pregnant." The next time Becky comes to me and asks where she came from, I wonder if I will have to tell her she was conceived in the backseat of a blue sedan because her mommy didn't have the heart to tell her boyfriend no. "He wanted to have sex on the second date? In his car?" "I told him it couldn't happen in our apartment," Jessie says. "Is it strange for a guy to want to have sex on the second date?" "I don't know. Probably." I go back to the apartments, trying to stare at them and not at her exposed shoulders. "How come you haven't dated since we moved in together?" Jessie asks as she swirls the spoon around in the jar, her long nails scraping the rim. "You're going to contaminate the entire thing with your spit," I tell her. "You said we should start dating because having guys in our lives would be a good thing," she says, her voice rising. She's staring at me, still twirling the spoon in the peanut butter. "You said you wanted to get a boyfriend." I can see the front of her dress rise and fall back with her breaths. "I haven't met anyone and it's kind of hard to get a guy," I argue. "You're pretty enough." "Jessie, I live here with you and your daughter. It's kind of hard to get a guy to date me the moment he finds out." I look down. One of the apartments is near two convenient shopping locations. How lovely. "If you don't want me and Becky around, we'll leave," she says. "I've told you that a million times. If you're embarrassed, then just say it. I'm the one that's the single mother, not you." "I'm going to get a promotion," I say as I get up from the table. The dim light from the dining room casts shadows on Jessie's face and she stops moving the spoon. She squeezes the jar and comes to the table. She's shorter than me, far more demure and feminine. Guys don't care that she's a single mother. They see her move to the backseat of their car, carefully pulling down her jeans while they fondle her.
She has a shy sort of smile, with childish crooked teeth and when I look at her, I want to tuck her into bed just like I do Becky. She looks at all the apartment papers, squeezing the jar until the plastic curls in, making sharp corners where the indents end. "Are you moving out?" "Our lease will be up in a few months. I think we should move into a new apartment-" "Three bedroom, two bath," she reads as she leans over the table. The dress exposes her spine and all its knobby contours. I want to lay my head against her back while running my hand over all of the ridges. She turns to look at me, her mouth open enough that I can see her tongue pressing against a canine. "We should have separate rooms so we can actually bring guys home," I say. She's churning the spoon in the peanut butter and some of it is pushing up against the sides of the jar, piling up near the top. Her fingers are getting sticky, but she takes in such shuddering breaths that I hardly notice the mess. Her tongue pushes against the sides of her mouth, runs along her teeth, as if the peanut butter is still there. She looks like an older version of Becky under the dining room light, except her eyes are piercing and she's wearing a short black dress that doesn't suit her bony frame at all. "What about Becky?" she finally asks, her voice hoarse. "Whose room is she supposed to go to when she has a nightmare?" "Yours. You're her mother-" "But you're like her father." She's leaning towards me now and my foot smacks the leg of the chair when I step back. She's breathing so hard that her chest might pop out of the dress or the seams will split and it will glide right off her, leaving her only in her underwear and torn nylon stockings. There's peanut butter all over the rim of the jar now as she continues thrash the spoon inside of it. "But I'm a girl." My mouth is sticky and dry, my voice as tiny as Becky's when she's done something wrong. Jessie sets the jar down on the table, letting the spoon sink all the way into the peanut butter. "It doesn't matter that you're a girl," she says. One of the straps of her dress slips down her shoulder. "I don't feel like dating if you're not going to date anyone." She licks at her sticky fingers as she lays her head against my chest, letting her chin rest against her collar bone like she's a sleeping bird. She smells of peanuts and the flowery perfume I let her borrow. I wrap my arm around her waist and she moves closer to me, her ribcage expanding and contracting wildly. I'm waiting for the seams to burst, but they never do.
A soon to be graduate from the University of Colorado Denver, Jennifer Mayo is majoring in English Creative Writing with a minor in Communication. She works as a student fiction editor for the Copper Nickel. In her spare time, Jennifer practices the Japanese sword martial art Iaido, plays too many video games, and also enjoys sampling baked goods made by friends.
Joe Baumann Porcelain
The plate would not break, no matter how many times she threw it against the wall or let it fall and rattle across the hardwood floor. Perry sat at the head of the table and watched her, rapping his fingers on the heavy wood and clicking the tines of his fork against his empty plate. “Are you seeing this?” Matilda said, picking up the mother-of-pearl plate, empty except for streaks of runny blood and juice from the steaks that were now wallowing on the ground and slaked with dust bunnies and grime. Matilda cooked but she didn’t clean. She squatted, dipped the platter between her legs, then pushed her hips up and forward as she slung the plate in the air. It smacked against the ceiling, caromed off the wall, and spun in a tight circle with a wobbling sound until it came to rest again on the dining room floor. “Not a crack. Not even a chip. I swear,” she said as she bent over it. She swung her head, strands of red hair catching on her open mouth, and looked at Perry. “Believe that?” Perry licked his lips clean of the hungry saliva that was coagulating at the edges of his mouth, and his tongue caught on the bristles of his mustache, pricking him like the teeth of a comb. “It’s magic, dear.” “Not just magic,” she said, spinning in a circle and heaving the plate like a discus. Her skirt settled against her thighs. “Can you believe how much we’ll save now?” Perry did smile at this. His wife, an excellent cook, was terribly clumsy. Not a day went by that a glass didn’t shatter, a salad bowl didn’t break, a pan didn’t clatter to the floor, bent. “What about your sculptures, then?” he said, glancing at the dog, who had waddled in, sniffed at the steaks, then let out a little yip and carted the larger one off, his drooping jowls already stained with saliva and runny fat. Matilda paused, thinking of her mosaics. She constructed them from the various bits that shattered after her accidents, gluing the detritus of her clumsiness onto mannequins she found in department store dumpsters. Bursting into tears, she ran out of the room, thinking of the loneliness and boredom that would engulf her hands now. Perry leaned back in his chair and scraped the pointed edge of his steak knife against his plate, relishing the squeal of the metal. He was starved. If he couldn’t cut into his steak, he supposed, he’d have to make incisions elsewhere.
Joe Baumann is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he serves as the editor-in-chief of the Southwestern Review and nonfiction editor for Rougarou: an Online Literary Journal. His work has appeared in flashquake, The Hawai'i Review, SN Review, Sheepshead Review, and several others, and is forthcoming in Oblong, matchbook, and Cactus Heart.
Eric Caulfield Walking Sight
Blink colored eye doors Angled oranges in adjacent blues Watered sailor’s ancient presence Runner’s bikes mock the motors And smiled lips trick the muse Red queen diamonds under The purple sphere, across the short lake Auburn lively leaves and red brick messages Is all we can say now, point to higher places Gazed language over scented similarity We are alike
Eric Caulfield is a 22-year old English Major with a minor in Computer Networking; his writing began as isms, but over the years has included poetry, and recently short stories. He has just returned to the US after temporarily living in Leiden, Netherlands, and is excited to continue his writing in Pennsylvania. Eric has embraced the craft of writing as a life-long endeavor, although he’s new, and has only begun sending his work out to publications; he believes this is the beginning of something quite phenomenal. Eric’s fiction looks to express a different perspective to the reader, and to deliver a lesson through his own altered perception, and unique observations of the world around him. He tends to gravitate towards ideas of different realities, to strange entities, exploration of consciousness, and powerful truths that can be found in the most unexpected places.
Tina V. Cabrera Lash Sue sat on the stool next to the shelf for glasses and bottles, and from this angle viewed the length of the bar from the beer taps to the neon sign above the entrance. The barkeep dipped a mug in the rinse for a few seconds, shook off the excess water, and placed the mug under the tap for Guinness. As he waited for the froth to settle, he dipped another mug – this one for Sue, who refrained from asking him to dip it longer than just a few seconds or at least more than once. About midway down the bar Sue’s best friend Jules sat with her back turned, chatting with a stranger. Sue could see only part of his face, the stem of a flower clutched between his teeth. Sue held her chilled glass between both hands and lifted it to her lips. At that distance they could kiss. Sue felt an itch in a place she could not scratch at inconspicuously and so she scooted on the stool cushion towards the wall and then forward again. To her left a glass crashed onto the floor. Beer seeped into the carpet. A guy with a faux hawk backed away from the spillage and sat down at a corner table. She turned to the man sitting next to her. He said, “They don’t call it happy hour for nothing.” The owner of the bar waddled to the closet for a broom and swept up the shards of glass. As he passed Sue, he said, “Nice pants.” She tugged at the corduroy near her knee, reached to scratch the rash just below her hairline at the back of her neck and then nudged her glasses back up the bridge of her nose. The faux hawk guy in the corner guffawed as his two companions embraced and kissed. Sue shifted in her seat and watched Jules’ unclip her hair, the curls cascading down to the middle of her back. The flower now sat nestled above her right ear, the one that had just been held by the stranger’s teeth. The flower lady made a second round through the crowd, her basket holding just a few slightly wilted red and white carnations. Sue avoided her glance as she passed, and the lady didn’t stop to ask. Jules waved Sue over now, pointing to an empty stool next to her. The carnation looked as if it were in full bloom. Sue slid through the crowd keeping her eye on the bright red, switching shoulders with every few steps. At last, she wedged herself between Jules and another occupied seat. A hand sat on Jules’ lap and caressed her leg up and down. Sue turned away and asked for a bag of chips from the bartender, the salty kind with ruffles. Someone sang a song about Daniel…on a plane. Jules introduced the man with his hand on her knee, but Sue couldn’t make out the name. Once she
observed his face, framed by ill-fitting, square glasses, she decided he looked like Clark Kent and so named him Superman. Jules grabbed the glasses from Superman’s face and tried them on. Turning to Sue, she said, “Look at this – these glasses are fake!” Why wear glasses? Sue silently asked. Because I’ve grown tired of my face, he’d say. He took off his glasses and kissed Jules, who returned the kiss. Silly, Sue said to herself, there’s nothing wrong with your face. For a moment, Sue thought she recognized the young man standing near the entrance under the neon sign. He looked like someone she could like. He stared in her direction. Someone she might have liked before. Her lips were painted ruby red, with the kind of lipstick that stays on the lips for a whole day. Though long lasting, they left her lips chapped and cracked. She wore a pale yellow scarf to cover the subtle lines on her neck. The man occupying the seat next to her said, “I like your glasses.” Sue said nothing and wondered what it was about her glasses there was to like. The frames were colorless and fit her face. She removed them and wiped the lenses with the wet napkin that had been wrapped around her chilled glass. She watched the young man from the entrance make his way through the crowd. She turned to face the taps and could see in the mirror that he now stood right behind her. She closed her eyes. She might feel his breath if her neck had been bare. She slowly spun around in her stool, shook the near-empty bag of chips and though she didn’t offer, the young man held out his hand. She took this as a yes and scattered all that was left into the palm of his hand. He licked at it, every last bit. “I like salty things,” he said and asked to borrow the napkin she still held in her hand. He wiped his hand and bits of chips landed on her corduroy pants. He lightly brushed her leg. She watched the bits land on the floor. They would be vacuumed up in the morning along with strands of hair, shards from broken glasses, petals and stems from wilted flowers. By the time Sue looked back up, the young man she once knew had struck up a conversation with Jules and replaced the space left empty by Superman. Rubbing both eyes, she held her glasses for a few seconds and then placed them back on her face. If her ears were conch shells, this young man at an advantage could lean in, and when he did he might hear erotic phrases, musings of a theorist set to violin music, the echoes of a poet’s address. Sue lost an eyelash or two that Friday night at her favorite bar during happy hour. No one noticed – not even her – that one eye had been rubbed too hard and too long. Tina V. Cabrera earned her MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. Excerpts from her novel, short fiction, and poetry have appeared in journals such as Big Bridge Magazine, Vagabondage Press, and Outrider Press. She is a first-year PhD student in English and Creative Writing at UNT (University of North Texas).
L. Alexandra Deciding to Connect An Essay
The candle is competing with dawn’s dewy light through half closed curtains. I’m curled, collapsed sideways upon my bed, hypnotized by the possibilities painted across my laptop’s screen. It sits above me, balanced on a headboard half its size, perched like a confident god, appraising me and my fate. It is the guardian of possibility. Dazed by the drunken courage that pushes me to press the keys, to respond with what I have been holding back for three months, three years, three lifetimes, I can’t stop smiling, blushing, blundering through a moment made of wires and words. I’m a giggly schoolgirl. I’m in the afterglow of a night, nay two, of questions that keep coming compulsively and combatively. Mine and his, back and forth, creating a dancing game of insights the likes of which I’ve never lived before. We know more now than we did during the previous four years combined. Everything is open, everything could be. He presses me, pushes me into the center of the bush I was beating around for the last ten minutes. I say it, it’s so silly, but it means more, “What would you do if I hit on you for real?” There is a silence that is deepened by the dead space in the text window, the flashing cursor line that screams, “Let there be more!” He answers me and stuns us both with a chick-flick level of irony. Four years. Four years he loved me, four years I held him on high, way up and well out of reach. I idolized him and worshipped at an altar turning to flesh before me now, melted by the heat of mutual confession. This is real. This is happening. We are real. We are happening. *** We met writing online, in the distant days when I still did group writing daily, did it like the drug it is and was. They say you never stop being an addict, and it’s true, but you can get busy enough to forget. I write for school, papers and essays and exams and academic reviews. Ideas are written by hand, jotted during class, framing color-coded notes with unrelated marginalia. Later I type; it’s quicker, cleaner, and admittedly mandatory. Sometimes I read him my work, but usually I email it. I need second and third sets of eyes to review, to look for what I missed, for the mistakes that aren’t allowed on the printed page. Mistakes always seem so much more pronounced once machine-measured ink and staples get involved. The night before it’s due, I argue with my printer until it yields, and then methodically, I even out the paper, edge-to-edge, and pierce it, binding the pages in a definitive way, that at a glance, words
alone could never do. But that act, that solitary stamp of metal jaws removes the freedom of a backspace bar or eraser. It’s done, it’s finished, and it can’t be fixed. Sure, I could open the file and edit and print another copy. It’s just a psychological block, not a tangible barrier; it’s all in my head but then, so many of life’s most powerful forces are. *** I keep coming back to the flame and wax. The rosewood colored candle crowning my headboard, atop the cutout of the punk girl’s pierced tongue (engraved with the words “SCHOOL BITES”). It’s a conical candle, though the top was initially flat-ish—indented over time as fire and wick conspired against it. I think mom gave it to me three years before I ever used it. It had this strange marmoreal look to it, blending the rosy whole with pinkish-white swirls. I always remember it smelling like roses but I honestly don’t know if it did. It’s very possible my mind is melding the color with the content. It burnt out months ago, though I refuse to remove or really replace it, given the significance of the nights it lit. Now it is a solidified puddle of wax rung’round with dried rose petals in a wooden base: a beautiful grave for the overflow of all my other candles and the memories melted into each. I’ve played with wax since I was child and still can’t have a lit candle around me without the temptation to toy with it. There’s just something about how warm wax seduces the fingertips. Pliably pleasant without being messy, though it’s easy to go there too: just dip a digit passed the candle’s curled crest, down into the molten lake near its flame and bask in the brief burn that brands you with a second skin. But like the sensation, the smooth pink print is fleeting and peels off with undo ease, just another petal melting into the messier magmatic whole. Where does it really go? From cold and firm to hot and wet over and over again, does the same amount of mass remain, or does the flame’s passion always take something away, something more than the braid it burns? Solid to liquid to gasping breaths of smoke, can a candle, collapsed and wickless, be considered dead, or is it merely waiting to melt again, revived by a lighter’s princely kiss? *** Hinged and metal, a stapler is two pieces that make one; even when bent back and opened up, its insides examined, the pieces stay together. An undervalued staple of the average desktop, it is often addressed with physical hostility, regardless of whether or not it works properly. It is spring loaded, but only decisive when enough pressure is applied. The pressured stapler offers an artificial link between two or more things, papery things. It pierces each and provides a suture to all, creating a new unit. Unlike the stapler, the new unit is one that can be readily undone, a fragile and temporary thing, yet
even if the little metal staple is removed and discarded, the scar of its mark will remain, branding the pages with past intentions. *** I scoffed at romance. It was a ridiculous fabrication of falsehoods and hypocrisy. I had only ever seen a handful of relationships that weren’t drenched in the watered down residue of so-called love. Love: a word without meaning in the west. “Oh my god, I love that movie!” “Wow, I love your new haircut.” “Ha! That’s hilarious, I love you!” Is it any wonder I was so cynical? Every relationship I had ever been in left me scrambling for the escape hatch. I was a wolf, rabid for the hunt but skittering to halt when it concluded with that cage coming down around me, its bars forged of the words “Sure, I’ll go out with you.” All I wanted was to stalk prey, harry the heels, and maybe take a bite or two, but apparently such desires were mutually exclusive from monogamy. I didn’t even like kissing. Some of high school’s most monotonous memories are from the days before I gave up on dating altogether, the days when I sat in the backseat of the car with Johnny, making out and marveling at the wood of the garage. Back then, I ranked my disinterest by the number of random objects I counted while waiting for something to be over. In my childhood church it was windows and pews. During make-out sessions, I diversified: Bushes, garage panels, coins on the floor mats, songs on the radio, the lashes lining his closed blue eyes. *** Is a stapler truly a unifier or is it just a temporary fix to a long term desire? Is the violence of its puncturing sexually symbolic? The staples the children begat from penetration, a parting from one whole into the other, tying objects together in a familial unit? Does the weakness of its used staples when contrasted with its own endurance denote the weakness of one when removed from many? Is a stapler merely an attempt to satisfy a need to repair humanity’s inherent disassociation from one another, like different pages in the same story? Is the temporary fix enough to count? Are pages better for the mistaken marks they bear, the removed staples that make way for new work? Is the fragility and lack of permanence the point? Does importance come from how easily something can be undone, rather than how long it will last? *** The wax crumbs are embedded in my bed sheets, hinting at the source of glazed drips. The stripped staples are strewn across my desk and a hundred sullied drafts. The candle corpse is coated in dust, like the stapler. We still sit with a screen between us most days, though breath-bound words come weekly as well. I write for academia and addiction. It has been sixteen months since a silly girl gained so much more from the forced courage that came with a silly question. More him, more us, more marks—
punctures and burns and the loss of false skins—more openness, more awareness, more words, more questions. I can’t count when I kiss now, but not because I close my eyes. There are still days when I’m a giddy schoolgirl and he’s held on-high. There are also days when I drag him down to face an adult. There are days when we play with passions. There are days when we work to keep the connection. There are days when we don’t stop writing until the dawn of the next. There are days when we still question, curled in the computer’s light. And there are days when we don’t need to ask to hear the answers.
L. Alexandra is a Red Rock's Community College student and professional tutor of eclectic interests who has recently decided to pursue a creative writing degree. Her work has appeared in her school’s literary and art journal, Obscura, its interdisciplinary scholarly journal, Claro, and on VoxPoetica.com. She has been writing for almost a decade now and in that time the act has transformed into something more than a mere hobby. For her, writing ranges from a passion to a compulsion (a fact spelled out most clearly by the necessity of the four notebooks she keeps perpetually at hand). Influenced by Nabokov, Gaiman, Flaubert, and Angela Carter, she views figurative language as one of the most powerful tools at a writer’s disposal and often pairs it with repetition and alliteration to give her work a musical quality. While L. Alexandra started as a fiction writer, favoring fantasy, she has since written academic essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, blogs, flash fiction, and various short stories. Outside of writing, she spends her days talking in excess, over indulging in fiction in its many forms, and clinging to the delusion that she will be able to remain in school forever.
Katie Nichol Infidelity
Now, bug bites; a heaviness brought on by Chinese medicine meant to help her quit smoking. Something similar to sleepiness, something unsatisfying. There will always be more dishes to wash, the girl tells her cat. The cat is licking itself and meowing loudly. Like all cats, she has spent the day killing animals smaller than she. And what of that heaviness? The dining room table scattered with books and papers, a woven mauve placemat set amidst the clutter because even if she eats alone, the girl wants to eat like it’s a meal. The smell of garlic and heat, vaguely wet soil. The incessant repeat of a song about a girl with broken eyes. The girl gets a message from a man who says he is starting to feel paranoid. She thinks about responding, but decides it’s better done only in her head. She sweeps the floor, washes the dishes. When a wine glass breaks, she sweeps the mess into a pile and leaves it there, by the sink, for three days. Then, the man pissing off the ledge of her porch, saying, I’m pissing, I’m just gonna piss right here in the light. The next day she searches the porch, the tree, the sidewalk nearby for proof. A puddle of dried piss crystals or a button. Something. In a corner of wind-blown yard waste, the girl finds a hairnet caught on rotting clapboard. Disgusted, she leaves it there.
Katie Nichol is originally from Minnesota. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Danny Earl Simmons After 40 Days of Fasting
I can walk on water like it’s the gray cobbled path to paradise and hoping to God I find there the eventual pleasing of my father. I can wish the fog yellow, the sagebrush green, the water as warm as the ignorance of what it means to be his only begotten. I can resurrect leaves in trees, make apples grow red in the wake of desire I cannot taste, and watch white flesh fall into a sweet brown rot. I can sweat blood at midnight and mumble conversations he says he hears until torches, kisses and propitiatory pinpricks betray the true nature of his love.
Danny Earl Simmons is an Oregonian and a proud graduate of Corvallis High School. He is a friend of the Linn-Benton Community College Poetry Club and an active member of Albany Civic Theater. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals such as Naugatuck River Review, Avatar Review, Burningword, Pirene’s Fountain, and Verse Wisconsin.
Audrey Allen Tennessee
The clouds coming. The color shift in the sky, the dark impression they leave behind, cutting out space. I want to go somewhere like Tennessee where there’s two “n’s” and two “s’s” and two “e’s”. Where old men beat off twice in a row on their balconies -stubs of cigars nailed in their teeth, big red noses, pores like crates. And they laugh, laugh loudly while rocking, rocking on their grandmother’s chairs – wood like old bones. The sun goes down everyday: Same time, same place. And their eyes turn up to look.
Audrey Allen is a journalist living in Los Angeles. She has more than 15 years of editorial experience and began writing professionally in 1999. She has written for newspapers such as the Santa Monica Daily Press and the Pasadena Weekly. Allen has a versatile artistic background, studying fine art at Art Center College of Design, and dancing classical ballet professionally, touring with Nevada Ballet Theater in 1995.
Visit www.crackthespine.com to review our submission guidelines or to subscribe