the c o r duroy mtn. vol 3.
From November of 2008 until December 2009 Greying Ghost Press published 45 works of poetry and prose through The Corduroy Mtn ., an online literary venture. In an effort to make the material easier to access, Greying Ghost has decided to publish all 45 pieces in three ebook volumes. This third volume collects the contributions of Sean Lovelace, Matt Leibel, Brandi Wells, Carl Annarummo, Audri, Sousa, Vaughan Simons, David Peak, Brooklyn Copeland, Noah Falck, Ben Segal, Sasha Fletcher, Rich Ives, Len, Kuntz, Shaun Gannon, William Doreski, & Jared Wahlgren.
The Corduroy Mtn. Archive Vol. Three May 2012 Published in conjunction with Greying Ghost Press www.greyingghost.com
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30
The Company Physical Sean Lovelace
I had to run on a treadmill and breathe into a hose. I felt like Skywalker, after frozen on an ice planet (and excised a monster’s arm to escape) but before he kissed his sister. When he was floating in that cylinder/aquarium. (Aside: George Lucas appears to hold a fetish for amputating arms.) They took blood, other fluids. They rubbed a chalky blue patch onto my forehead. I had to eat salts and urinate into cups decorated with roses. I had to engage in dynamic, multi-step processes, on an elevated carpet. They said, “Cut the dead wood!” and other encouraging words. They studied my enzymes, my catalysts and voids. They studied my thoughts on paper. They researched my muscle mass, vinegar status, and ceramics. This took days. They showed up at my cubicle; eyes glaring like Light Sabers. Handed me a binder of blue vowels. They said I drink too much. They said my kidneys were the size of telephones ringing in the night. My heart a fucking Fender Bender. A Pacific Northwest Experiment Station. Finally, after crunching numbers, after pre-writing, writing, and post-writing, after slide script and script slide, after consulting with a Nobel Laureate over Kobe beef and MasterCard, they developed a comprehensive plan: I must quit smoking! But I did quit smoking; I quit smoking years ago, when my lungs were ripped away-the long November, the Tuesday my wife left, and took away my only son. “Oh,” they said, wrinkling their noses. “Then get back to work.”
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31
We
Matt Leibel
We were hungry for knowledge, so we started eating magazines. We were the makers of planes, of trains, of octagonal wheels that crunched as they turned. We stole Australia from a man who’d been keeping it captive inside a shoebox, and then replaced all the kangaroos with men in kangaroo masks on pogo sticks. We hiked down into the canyon of crayons, on the hunt for the elusive, endangered mauve. We started receiving secret, coded messages from the Devil. (But this was less exciting than you might think. The messages were mostly in the form of the Devil giving himself reminders: buy special dog food for Cerberus, pick up spare cape from drycleaners, check the markets for the latest price on Souls, etc.) Trees grew to the height of clouds. Inside the trees we built elevators. We piped elevator music into the elevators. The trees were tormented by the sheer banality of it all and ejected us from the elevators in anger. We climbed to the moon. It turns out there’s a temperature gauge on the side of it where you can cool down or heat up the universe; we turned the dials and ruined yet another Florida summer.
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32
The Greater Good Brandi Wells
When he was bored, my older brother used to rape me. No, I’m kidding. But if that was true you would think I was fucked up. I am fucked up. I have never patched a hole in my jeans or jacket. I just keep wearing them that way and pretend I don’t know the hole is there. If anyone points it out I act embarrassed and say, “Oh, I didn’t know that was there.” I have a stuffed mouse whose ears have been reattached eight times. I know it is eight times exactly because each time I thought my mother was hurting him, pulling the needle through his head and then the bottom part of his ear. I would lay on my bedroom floor for hours afterwards telling him that I loved him and that his surgery was for the greater good.
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33
Untitled
Carl Annarummo
Through the darkened clouds and then through a zigzag of turns, a bolt of ride-lightning, pink at the peaks never to be seen through the hole in our window. The roof was more of a sponge. Without the services, some call them utilities, we all slept at the kitchen table abutted to an oven. In it there’d been set a fire that had since extinguished. I poked one of the mustaches to my left and motioned for him to break off some more wood from the gutted backroom. If I go, you all come, too, he said. So we all said ok as we huddled in the backroom, under blankets, to the lightning and the leaky roof while the mustache took a sledgehammer to a useless stud. That’s when we heard the crackle and turned and saw the pale orange of an engulfed oven. The mustache dropped the wood and said, that solves that, and we all headed back to the kitchen where it was warm. That’s when the storm was turned off and all you could hear was what was left of the streets’ residue circling the drains.
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Martyr & Pistol Audri Sousa
She is some perverted red mystic, straddling the demarcation line, the shallow dividing river of wrinkled graffiti hardened into concrete. flecked with half-exploded petals and white carbon. she stands placental and raw with having, the vagaries all exposed, a thousand mute promises bound tight in the membranes of her cells. between curled fingers of smoke at the #103 bus line she fills her strange bones with carbon. insects are waterwalkers and she learns their secrets by morse spasms of wing and pixel. around the corner, inches from dead houses of godheads bearded with ivy, a sarajevo rose unfurls hard with carbon. deadly blooms on solemn cobble. with arctic eye and cigarette fire coaxed to bend, she is quietly makingbeingsayingdying. ringing with phallic carbon. she leans against a telephone booth and has all the ways of the mevlevi, basically stranded on urban battlefields among hungry saints. she recycles dead cells and wades into rivers thought too acidic to ford. rose resin rises. risen.
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And This Room In Monochrome Vaughan Simons
Don’t bring a torch. You won’t need it. I have furnished us with a single, swinging light which will provide us with quite enough shadows to stare each other down and out inside this featureless room. I have decided, decreed, determined that you can interrogate me in black and white. It will be a learning process, because I am turning from colour to monochrome even as we don’t speak, even as we sit here and growl under our breaths like caged and discontented tigers. In the hush, our hearing is assaulted by the constant sound of thought cogs grinding their sparks into the passing memories on our factory assembly lines, processing one after another. Pass, seal, package. Pass, seal, package. Fail. Reject. Write the questions and leave them on the table in front of me. Better still, write them on the table itself. Scratch them into the embittered, tired wood with that shard of frosted glass you’ve been carrying around for just such an opportunity, the one you’ve kept wrapped in tissue paper and ferreted away into a secret inner pocket as if it was a precious gift from some long departed lover. Now. Shine the light in my eyes and I promise to tell you truths, more or less. If you listen, I can tell you so many complete and complex truths that your ears will pop and block just like they do on those dead and tired, dead tired evenings when you immerse yourself in the lukewarm bath water and slowly mouth a wish to stay like that forever. Knowing that, knowing my plan for this overheated night, surely you can’t still be wishing for me to pull the plug and wake you from your drowning reverie, can you? First question, then. Ask it in a whisper, with a smile. Go on.
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Staying Warm David Peak
He was pretty sure he’d read a fairy tale once-no, a folktale-when he was younger, about a mother with a starving child. Or maybe it was Inuit folklore. It’s important that they lived in an igloo-the mother and her son. The mother had beautiful brown skin, beautiful black hair that hung to her waist. It kept her warm in the winter. But her child, her son, was starving. They had no food. The cold had killed all of their food. They sucked on shards of ice to stay alive but it only made them colder. They fell asleep each night to the sound of their chattering teeth. One day the mother plucked the hairs from her head, one at a time, each as strong as rope, and weaved them into a net the shape of a squid’s head. When she was done she was bald and she shivered. The skin on her head was pale, dotted with black pores, where the roots had held deep. She went to where the ice ended and the water began, dragging the net behind her, humming to herself. It was night. The moon rippled white on the water. She cast the net of hair and caught a whale, dragged it home by its tail, thrashing, moaning, leaving a slick trail of shined ice behind her. Inside the igloo, they pried open the whale’s jaws, working together. They climbed inside where their laughter echoed and rang. He pretended they were living in a cave. They stayed warm and feasted on the soft beds of pink krill in the whale’s belly. They breathed through its blowhole. They used the base of its tongue as a pillow. The whale died slowly. The cold kept its body from rotting. In the spring, the yellow sun melted the igloo, the ice, the cold. They emerged from the whale and ate its flesh, still laughing. The mother’s hair had grown back. Her son thought she looked beautiful. This is how he remembered the coldest winter of their life. As a fairy tale. No, a folktale. But he was so young then. How else could he?
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Dash #20
Brooklyn Copeland
Where I am overwhelmingly only my shoes and suitcase. I am sounded out in a made-up nation’s bath time pidgin: aloe vera... ivory... ivoire... Arrival mirrorwise leers a leer not surprisingly only a twentysomething can.
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38
A Dream Including More Than Wet Hooves Noah Falck
Tonight the wind is Lithuanian as she closes her eyes and runs her hands over the dark hairs of her left leg. Snow falling outside. I hear the creek kissing through her first dream beneath a bridge that becomes a congested road of elegant buffalo. I feel her leg twitch, the pricking hairs, and think of the buffalo holding traffic, their wet hooves kicking dust onto the windshield of someone’s neighbor.
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Mrs. Van Pelt’s Class is Not Coming to the Assembly Ben Segal
A Allison’s all covered already in those black and purple welts that make you fear her father. That girl’s got the reasons so nobody bothered to ask why. The how is she buried herself alive and left a note we didn’t need to read. Willie got told his mouth was too big for his head one too many times, so he just opened up. He ratcheted that jaw right open & mawing wide. He wrapped his upper lip right over the back of his little head and kept going, kept pulling back his front teeth ‘til they came up square against his bottom ones. What a clattering! What a clattering they made! Those teeth of his racketing on and on like a sewing circle. Melissa’s mother fed her piecemeal to the wolves until she was nothing left but a concept. Well, a concept hasn’t got much in the way of meat, so those hungry wolves ate her mother too. Darryl had his bones removed one by one and replaced them all with electric eels. Boy could Darryl dance then! Til them eels stung him death, then he flopped around the floor like a third-rate break dancer. Then them eels died too. All those other children are only xeroxes, cut out real careful from their cardstock and pasted up in their chairs. Mrs. VP, she does their homework every night in 20 different hand-writings. Well, so none of them have to get held back. But come on, they’re not about to walk to any auditorium! And Mrs. Van Pelt, her arms would just get tired out carrying them.
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When I Wake Up I Am Going To Bury You In A Parking Lot Sasha Fletcher
i asked you where all the birds were going i didn’t ask it but i thought about it. we were outside in the yard and the clouds were eating each other. now is the time of our peace and quiet you said that is a thing i will wonder about for all of my days now i lay me down to sleep is another one now is the time of our peace and quiet and then we all went to bed.
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41
The Truth About Cowboys Rich Ives
Little Nonsense had a pig bank. His cowboy wallpaper was all dirty except where Little Nonsense couldn’t reach it with his curious fingers. Golda the Goldfish spoke to Little Nonsense at night when he was sleeping. She said, “The ineluctable transmutations of radiance conceive the imminent potential for repetitious psychological injury implicit in the predictable performance of ordinary rainbows.” So Little Nonsense put on his bear shirt and trudged over the crusted snow to Porcupine River to see if Weasel Eyes wanted to play Elders Making Big Farts and Boys with Ants in Their Pants and roll little snowballs into big snowmen. But Weasel Eyes had gone trapping with his father and Little Nonsense played Big Angry Grizzly Putting His Foot Through the Snow instead. Every evening after chopping wood, Little Nonsense would wait for the lights to come on in the houses down in the valley and he always counted seven. Then he would ask his grandpa for a shiny penny to put in his pig bank and most of the time his grandpa would give him one. Once when Little Nonsense harvested vegetables almost all afternoon, his grandpa gave him a nickel with a buffalo on the one side and an Indian on the other side and Little Nonsense did not put the nickel in his pig. Instead he scampered over to Golda Goldfish’s watery little home and listened very carefully and heard, “Lo, but I have missed you these four and twenty hours of tortured waiting and I do not know but that I shan’t be forthcoming with oceanic wisdom of the sort you might at this very moment be expecting. But if you make a serious commitment to careful listening and thoughtful intellectual processes, I may still be persuaded to apply myself.” Little Nonsense nodded. He was getting sleepy. Perhaps he had already
fallen asleep. And still Little Nonsense had not solved the problem of what to do with his curiosity, so again he put on his bear shirt and trudged over the snow to Porcupine River. Still no Weasel Eyes. So Little Nonsense played Sad Little Black Bear with Something Smelly Sticking to His Bottom all the way home. Then he got out his buffalo nickel and used it to scrape one of the cowboys off the dirty wallpaper and he looked right into the hole where the cowboy had been. “Tell me a story,” said Little Nonsense. He was getting sleepy again. And the missing cowboy did. It was not a happy story and Little Nonsense remembered all of it. Which made Little Nonsense very happy indeed. Even if the truth about the missing cowboy was still missing from the dirty wallpaper. Even if Weasel Eyes was never again to frolic and cavort freely due to the strange and repressive behavior of his father on that very same day next to the miserable melting pot of snow by the fire in the lean-to on Porcupine Creek. Even if the buffalo nickel was too small to plug the hole that would soon grow more apparent in the cowboy’s depressing story. Even if Little Nonsense had dreamed all of it, every little bit. So Little Nonsense thought about that and woke up. And Little Nonsense dreamed about that too and woke up again. And even if he never woke up at all.
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The Repairman Len Kuntz
Both fathers-step and biological-were mechanics, could tear apart an engine and put it back together blindfolded. Both smelled like axel grease and soap that was sharp but not strong enough to disintegrate the oil stains beneath their cuticles, their fingertips which would rub my cheek and pinch my neck when they’d say, “You’re gonna be someone someday, I know it.” And here I am, a surgeon. Inside opened-up chests, I put down my hands and I hold my weapons. I can fix everyone else’s heart, it seems, but my own.
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And The Sun Was Nowhere To Be Seen Shaun Gannon
A man stands in the middle of a yard holding his daughter. Her face is buried in his soft chest and her mother stands to the side, arms folded. The mother is not crying. Her face is a round clump of dough with no expression kneaded into the pale mass. The daughter is mumbling something only the father can hear. Her voice quavers, cracks, drops out. She is not crying. The father has his meaty arms wrapped around her, and his mouth is a tiny crack with only its wrinkles betraying a frown, and his eyes droop and beg to be closed, and he is swaying side to side, and he is not crying. The mother shuffles her feet, drops her arms, stares at the grass, re-crosses her arms. The daughter reaches a hand out to her mother. The mother does not move. The girl mumbles again. They are not crying
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Flagpole Dream in December William Doreski
The sky and earth make one shade of gray that sinks in like the news of a parent’s death. My dream life woke me early. I attempted to erect three flagpoles, suitably Freudian, so I might fly the flags of Canada, the UK, the US. Proprietor of a guest-laden mansion perched atop a bluff overlooking a sun-streaked wash. I let the pride of ownership enlarge in me to include the entire view out to sea. If I could raise those flagpoles I’d inspire the allegiance of trees and rocks and brisk little whitecaps, but someone had bent the prongs at the foot of each pole, prongs that fit holes in small cement footings. Even in my dream I laughed at this phallic failure, so crude Aristotle would excise it from his study of the drama as unsubtle, lascivious, crude. Now in the unkempt waking world I use the winter dawn as mirror not of mood but of erasure, that casual dismissal of lives more poignant and directed than this. How can I nail one fact to the next except with vulgar instruments? Pity flagpoles lying flat on the lawn, pity the monochrome winter landscape, tabula rasa of the last forty years languishing in memory, the coldest but most orderly of abstractions, loyal to anything but the self.
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45
Credo
Jared Wahlgren
Far from the candy mold that divides into sections like a dim theater. Far from the afar, afloat in some drab curtained home, where cold plays from a gramophone. Near the singer, the linguistic lingers in my mind before the rest. Nearer to the obstacle course, I signify the sounds of hounds at night, I prefer the light.
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