Baby Lawn Literature, December 2015

Lawn

Issue 3

Volume 1

December 2015

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EDITORS ASHLEY BACH RAKIM SLAUGHTER

DESIGN ASHLEY BACH

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Poetry 

SPUDS by Helen Shay…………………………………………....page 7



The New Ophelia by Helen Shay………………………………..page 8



A Certain Look by Donal Mahoney………………..…..……….page 9



Christmas Badass by Rebecca James………………………..page 10

Prose 

Any Portion by Mitchell Grabois……………………………….page 12



Bruised by Mitchell Grabois……………………………………page 14



Looks Like Wally Fay by Allen Kopp………………………….page 18

Contributors’ Notes……………………………………….……….page 21

SPUDS HELEN SHAY

Treatises and documentaries endlessly record Ted and Sylvia’s eternal triangle.

One overriding moral to emerge – never ask your husband’s wannabee-mistress to peel the potatoes. She’ll only go

down the garden instead to entice him with dirty pommes de terre.

If only Mrs Hughes had tried, ‘Sit down, sister, put your feet up’.

A girly kitchen chat. ‘Men! Don’t they do your head in?’

But that wasn’t Sylvia’s style.

She threw down the marigolds and thrust the knife at her rival, commanding, ‘You! Taties! Do!’ Cat fight mash for the man who could tin-opener both of them out of a canned life.

And all the while, Ted stayed out, picking the broad beans.

THE NEW OPHELIA HELEN SHAY

Lizzy Siddal, a shop assistant who became DG Rossetti's mistress and later wife, modelled – mainly in a bath of cold water - for John Everett Millais' "Ophelia" (now in the Tate Gallery). She was an artist herself but died tragically (from a mix of illness, depression and laudanum possibly leading to suicide).

He wants me,

my real life merely fatal.

fading into the elements, "garlanded fantastical",

But look again, beyond

sinking.

the gossamer dress and red hair clawing at water that won't hold me up.

I've been stuck in this bath for days,

See me instead, as if emerging -

on loan to this "artist",

an unexpected Lady of the Lake.

who sees only the image

on his canvass.

Not "Goodnight, sweet ladies", coughing consumptive

Even at night, I don't dry out,

from days in this tub.

back in my own master's bed.

Not model-wife and victim.

I'll be an old master myself one day.

Reverse the image you see,

Gallery-hung for a hundred years,

of the woman in the past.

then on a thousand birthday cards or tasteful notelets, left blank

Then, out of Pre-Raphaelite

inside, for your own message.

divinely decadent bathwater, look again. See me instead

There I'll be microscoped, A5 enveloped, still fading into those elements, dying in time, to preserve in art, a femme more fatale than

rising.

A CERTAIN LOOK

DONAL MAHONEY

Some things you can’t undo.

A remark, perhaps, you can retract or try to with an explanation.

But a certain look can burn forever in the mind of its observer, a missile you

never knew you launched.

Maya Angelou was right.

Some folks can’t recall

years later what you said but they remember instantly how you made them feel.

CHRISTMAS BADASS REBECCA JAMES

Kris, Nicholas, whatever your name is, Bring me a badass, somebody who isn’t afraid to get dirty

but knows how to clean themselves afterwards.

He’s respectful, but he knows how to flirt, and he flirts by keeping his hands in proximity to my hands for happy centuries, and when he does touch, he takes my body like communion.

Forgive my heresy, Santy.

Let him have a penchant for raising hell, granted that he put out the flames at the end of the night.

Let him make the most out of everything.

Have him feed the coal you gave him to my furnace.

Give him a sense of humor, Willing to make a snow angel, but no matter what the angel has horns.

ANY PORTION

BY MITCHELL GRABOIS

I’d never been to Hooters, never had any interest, maybe because my wife is largebreasted, but I was at a conference and a bunch of guys wanted to go.

Looking for scratch paper, Gus rips a page from one of Darlynda’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs. He figures she keeps them as a form of masochism, as she is hipless, flat-chested and plain.

The scenes change, your image mutates, yet beyond all the black and white and shades of gray, is vulnerability, and a sadness that transcends circumstances.

At that time I was trying to be more social, less of a loner, so I feigned enthusiasm as we

walked from the convention center to the restaurant.

Gus is no more attractive than Darlynda, with unruly reddish hair and a gangling walk.

The world is full of containers—bathtubs, closets, motherhood, childhood, Mason jars, pyrex tubs with snap-on lids that slide onto refrigerator shelves, but nothing holds us forever. Ultimately we escape our bonds.

We waited a while. When the waitress arrived, she was small-breasted and had a black eye. I wondered how she got the shiner. When she took my order, we made eye contact.

Now fifty, Gus knows they’re headed for ugliness—he only hopes they get there tardy, as he always did to school.

Nothing’s so trite as life and death, but disease in all its variety is novel, disturbance flagrant in its drama.

After a while I went to the men’s room. The waitress was in there sobbing, her mascara a mess. This is the ladies room, she protested. Actually no, I said. I motioned at a urinal He still remembers Darlynda in second grade, hanging from monkey bars, a cute little sparkplug despite her buck teeth.

In a moment the waitress was crying on my shoulder, telling me about her abusive boyfriend. I’m a psychologist and people know it, even if they don’t know it, so this kind of thing happens to me sometimes.

This Victoria’s Secret model has dark eyes and a midriff smooth as ice, more appealing, Gus is sorry to note, than any current portion of Darlynda.

After a while I helped her clean up, and she left. I unzipped and pissed.

Still, he recognizes that a fashion photographer with an airbrush could probably make Darlynda sparkle as she had when they got married, three decades earlier on the shore of Lake Michigan, near their hometown of Windchill, where winters are more brutal than fate.

I returned to my table, where the other men were drinking beer and laughing loudly. Five minutes later, the waitress brought me a plate of hot wings I hadn’t ordered. On the house, she said quietly. I don’t like hot wings, but I didn’t tell her.

BRUISED

BY MITCHELL GRABOIS

Loretta once escaped from the hospital, assaulted the clerk at Hightower Pharmacy, threw all the cheap lipsticks on the floor because she was jealous of Tiffany, another patient on her ward, another revolving-door schizophrenic who was having an affair with the psychologist whom Loretta was also in love with.

The Statue of Liberty rose before me as I climbed from steerage, as I would later climb subway stairs to my job in the garment district.

The psychologist despised Loretta because of her chronic ugly sneer and her penchant for assaulting ward staff and other patients.

The green statue in my blurry vision was a monster I’m talking about Loretta Goates, psychotic daughter of Bert the Bruiser, the nineteenfifties’ wrestler, like the ones my son would create in the movie industry.

Andre the Giant’s secret lover (neither ever came out of the closet).

At that point I’d never even seen a motion picture but later, here was my son, making monsters. He horrified me. I wanted to get on the boat and go back.

Andre, a Frenchman, surprisingly cultured, was the only one who could dominate Burt the Bruiser, make him a Submissive, not in the ring but in the giant round bed Andre had custom made.

I shrunk from the statue. Some burly Italian pushed me forward onto Ellis Island.

When Burt the Bruiser was in the hospital dying, he didn’t know that his nurse was the daughter of Cowboy Bob Ellis, his chief rival in the ring and a homophobic, who taunted him and insulted him nonstop, much more than was needed for the drama of the Detroit Olympia, known simply as “the Old Red Barn.”

I fell and tore my only pair of pants, already worn, frayed and dirty from riding on top of the train from Rumania to the ship in France.

Alice Dougherty (her married name) looked down on Burt in the grimy charity ward bed, all shriveled and jaundiced and, like her dad, mocked him: What a bruiser you are! A toddler could take you now.

It was not a graceful entrance to America. It was, I later learned, Chaplinesque. I was, like Chaplin, a tramp with a funny hat.

But then Alice was ashamed and went to church to confess.

The Statue seemed to tilt and fall over, like a special effect in one of my son’s movies. It was only me, sick. I was sentenced to quarantine for eight weeks, already a criminal, and I hadn’t even done anything.

But she had left her post without permission and, when she returned to the hospital, the head nurse fired her, despite her teary protests.

LOOKS LIKE WALLY FAY

BY ALLEN KOPP

“Did you get a good look at the man?” Officer Miggles asked.

“Oh, yes,” Miss Dragonette said.

“Can you describe him for me?”

“Well, he was kind of heavy-set without being what I would call fat, if you know what I mean.”

“So he was moderately overweight?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Did you notice anything else about him? The color of his hair?”

“He was wearing a hat so I couldn’t see his hair. I would imagine it would be dark, though. Underneath the hat.”

“How tall was he?”

“Rather on the tall side. About six feet and one inch, I’d say.”

“What was he wearing?”

“A long brown topcoat that came down to his ankles. Cashmere, I think.”

“Cashmere?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Can you tell me anything else about him?”

“He was wearing a brown tie with little yellow birds on it, like parrots.”

“All right. How old would you say he was?”

“If I had to guess, I’d guess late thirties. Thirty-eight or thirty-nine.”

“How would you describe his face?”

“Well, let me think, now. He needed a shave. I did notice that right off.”

“So he had stubble on his face.”

“Yes, dark stubble. The color of the stubble on his face was what made me think he would have dark hair, even though I couldn’t see his hair because of the hat he was wearing.”

“Can you tell me anything else about his face?”

“He looked like that actor in that movie about the woman with a spoiled daughter

who shoots the woman’s husband.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am.”

“I know! It was Joan Crawford!”

“So, the man looked like Joan Crawford?”

“No! It was a Joan Crawford movie. The man looked like one of the actors in the movie.”

“Do you know the actor’s name?”

“No, I can’t think of it offhand. It wasn’t the playboy who was Joan Crawford’s second husband and it wasn’t the first husband, either. It was the other man. The one in business with Joan Crawford’s first husband.”

“Okay, ma’am. I don’t think we’re making much progress here.”

“I remember now! His name was Wally Fay.” “Whose name?”

“The man in the movie with Joan Crawford. The name of the character he played was Wally Fay. I can’t think of his real name, though. It’ll come to me later, I’m sure.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t much help.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Can you tell me anything else about him at all?”

“He was in another movie where he played Paul Newman’s brother.”

“No! Can you tell me anything else about the man who fired the gun?”

“Paul Newman was married to Elizabeth Taylor and he had this brother they called Gooper. I suppose that was a nickname, though.”

“I don’t need to hear about a movie.”

“Gooper was married to a coarse fat woman named May. She and Gooper had a lot of little kids, and Paul Newman’s wife, the character played by Elizabeth Taylor, didn’t much care for them because they made so much noise.”

“That won’t help us to catch the man we’re looking for, ma’am.”

“Well, I’m trying to remember! I’m cooperating with you. It seems the least you can do is be patient and polite.”

“I’m sorry if I seem impatient but I don’t need to hear about any movie.”

“Where was I? Oh, yes. Paul Newman and his brother Gooper had a rich old father who didn’t like anybody in his family. Well, the entire family was gathered because the father had just found out he had a fatal disease and the two sons—especially Gooper— were worried about who was going to inherit the estate. It was in the South, somewhere.

Mississippi, I think.”

“Okay, that’s enough about movies. Can you describe for me what you saw the man do?”

“Well, I was just walking along the sidewalk, minding my own business, on my way to buy a new pair of shoes. I heard a commotion in the street and I stopped to see what it was. I saw a bunch of police cars with flashing lights. It seemed to be something terribly important, but I didn’t know what it was.”

“Then what happened?”

“A bunch of people had gathered along the sidewalk to watch, but I stayed back.

That’s when I noticed the man in the cashmere coat come out of an alleyway.”

“What made you notice him?”

“He just stood there, looking very dignified. He wasn’t trying to elbow in to get a closer look, the way the other people were. He just looked straight ahead as though in a trance or something.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, after all the police cars had passed with their lights going, I saw the big black car of the governor. I could see him in the car smiling and waving—I recognized him from his pictures—and I knew then what all the commotion was about. All the people were trying to get in to get a closer look at him.”

“So you didn’t know until that moment that the governor was going to be visiting here that day?”

“No. Why should I?” “Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you watch the news on television?”

“Never.”

“Go on.”

“When the car carrying the governor came about even with where I was standing on the sidewalk, the man in the cashmere coat took a few steps forward.”

“Toward the car?”

“That’s right.”

“Then what did he do?”

“I looked away for a moment and that’s when I heard the gunshots.”

“How many gunshots?”

“Three, I think.”

“Some of the people screamed or ducked down as if they thought they were going to

be shot, but I wasn’t afraid because I saw where the bullets came from and I knew they weren’t directed at me.”

“All right. Then what?”

“After the man fired the shots, he just simply disappeared.”

“People don’t disappear.”

“I know they don’t, but that’s the way it seemed to me. He was there and then he wasn’t.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“The governor’s car stopped and all the police cars stopped and everybody was running around trying to find out where the bullets came from. There were more people than ever now crowding around to get a better view. You know what people are like.”

“I suppose I do.”

“Well, the police spotted me standing on the sidewalk and, well, I guess it seemed to them that the bullets had come from about where I was standing, so they asked me if I had seen anything and I said I had and that’s when all these questions started. Can I go now? I’m feeling a little shaky after all the excitement.”

“It seems you were the only one who saw the man in the cashmere coat.”

“Yes, that’s because I was the only one standing back where he was standing. Everybody else was crowding toward the front.”

“As the only witness, you’ll need to make yourself available for further questioning.”

“Please, I’d rather you kept me out of this, if you don’t mind.”

After Office Miggles took her name and address, Miss Dragonette continued two blocks up the street and stepped off the curb between two parked cars. Looking around to make sure she wasn’t being observed, she took the gun out of her purse and threw it down a storm drain from which could be heard the sound of rushing water.

Satisfied that she wasn’t seen, she snapped her purse shut smartly and crossed the sidewalk to a store window where two high-fashion female mannequins in fur coats stood side by side. She looked into the face of the mannequin on the right and returned the artificial smile. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to make your acquaintance,” she said before continuing on her way.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES *In order of appearance*

HELEN SHAY Helen Shay is a writer from northern England who writes and performs poetry, with work published in magazines including ‘Stand’ and online by such as ‘Poet and Geek’. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Met University (Distinction awarded), then tutored

by Michael Schmidt of Carcanet Press. Her joint poetry collection with American poet Bee Smith ‘Binary Star’ won an IL Convivio international prize. She’s performed in the past with Uncommon Denominator, a multi-ethnic women’s group, and solo such as being a guest poet at Glastonbury Festival Poet’s Tent (with mud stains to prove it). She teaches some crea tive writing at University of York CLL. In addition she is a mother and lawyer.

DONAL MAHONEY Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, Missouri. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications, including The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Tribune and

Commonwealth. Some of his work can be found at eyeonlifemag.com REBECCA JAMES An aspiring poet/documentarian, studying at the University of Pittsburgh. The is her debut I n print.

MITCHELL GRABOIS Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over eight hundred of his poems and fictions appear

in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for work published in 2012, 2013, and 2014. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. He lives in Denver.

ALLEN KOPP Allen Kopp is a technical writer and lives in St. Louis . His work has appeared in Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Temenos, and The Legendary, The Storyteller, Conceit Maga zine, Danse Macabre, Hoi-Polloi, Sunken Lines, and The Bracelet Charm.