Cabildo Quarterly. Issue #5. Fall 2013. Belchertown MA; Pittsburgh PA. Molly T. Bunny 1997-2013. Lolita by Kathleen Ellis I was reading Reading Lolita in Tehran when all of a sudden you looked up from your book on Marco Polo and said I looked like a woman who has just put on the veil. The cat, scurrying past in its mad dash to the kitchen, stumbled over my new invisibility. Kathleen Ellis is originally from California and has lived in Maine since 1977. She teaches poetry at the University of Maine, Orono.
excerpt from All of the Everything by Katie Lattari The Feed is updating and updating, the blue and white colors glaring up into my face from my iPhone. Red notifications, three. The first lets me know that Marley Powell has posted a link to my Wall. I go there and find she has dug up from the annals of the Internet a PSA about underage drinking. Ha. You buy two underage kids some beer and you can never live it down. The other two notifications are event invitations. One is for this coming Thursday – Charles In Charge The Band, Goat Body, and Queen Richard The Second are all playing the annual Boat Show on the Bay, sponsored by The King Wharf at Kingston Street. I RSVP that I will be attending. Always a fun event. Manhood Factory played it about three years ago. Had a hell of a time. Which is always made more intense by knowing that there is a real danger that someone will, being drunk, fall overboard and drown. The event really has it all. The second invitation is to a Slam Poetry Reading at Curley’s Books on Friday night. The girl who works there, Sinead, who I know from buying books there and from dating DeMaris Stephens from Tin Frisbee, invited me. Fuck. That. Shit. Decline. Sinead is nice enough, but slam poetry is not really my thing. Darkened alley blow jobs for my boyfriend are, apparently. I look around the alley he has just left to go back in to the show still thumping away inside Tinder Box. At the very least, I have another possible band name: Darkened Alley Blow Jobs. The Darkened Alley Blow Jobs? I’ll have to ask Griff and Jim. I return to the Feed and see that my mom has posted a link from the Huffington Post website about Michelle Obama, my dad has posted a link to a Humble Pie YouTube video, my brother Dom has posted “X Box broken again. That shit
is fucked.” Interspersed between the family updates I am seeing high school acquaintances, girls I haven’t seen or spoken to in years, holding their babies in Instagram tenors and surrounding their words and exclamation points with emoticon hearts. Everyone is having a baby, or is on their third baby, or is getting married, or is getting engaged, or is having to put their maiden name in parentheses next to their married name, or is changing their Relationship Status, and sometimes, well, baby, It’s Complicated. Sometimes there are too many pictures of you up there with your ex. Sometimes you have to untag that shit. Sometimes you have to banish some pixels. Sometimes you have to Unfriend people. Or block their Feeds because they love the NRA and they love Anne Coulter and they sometimes wonder if Barack really was born in this country like he claims he was and it gets me to wondering, how, how, how do I know you again how, how, how are we friends and then are we really? Are we really after all? But I also see an old friend of mine doing well in a PhD program for Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Washington and he is also a fan of The Daily Show and the hackles start to come down a little. So there is that. There are things that just seem nice. I also see friends from college moving back to their home states after trying out Los Angeles, Miami, after trying out New York and Chicago in those ecstatic and brave couple years after graduation which fizzle fast when you realize you have no money and you feel claustrophobic and subway platforms in Winter are terrible, and they are looking very happy and I can understand that and I think that is very, very great. Go where you are known. Let your loved ones know you, let your loved ones have you and I hope that your loved ones let you know them, let you have them. Why go so far away for? The end of the story is always about going back. We are all of us Dorothys. Just let us get back. What else is there but that. A picture of this guy friend of mine and his sister and their childhood friend I have no idea about sharing a scorpion bowl, smiling, together. Known each other since Pre-K, probably. Someone is posting about getting drunk because it’s the weekend and their job can suck their balls. Someone is posting a meme about the connection between the outgoing Pope and Star Wars. Someone is posting a picture of a grumpy cat using bad grammar. Someone is asking me to sign a petition about worker’s rights in Guatemala. Someone is feeling very, very sad and just wishes she had a boyfriend to snuggle with. Someone is pushing their band’s new record. Someone is pushing their friend’s band’s new record. Someone is warning me that a week from
today is their birthday and all I can think is Who the fuck gives a shit? Someone is ending a status with an uncertain ellipsis. Someone is writing their feelings in all caps. Someone has tagged someone I don’t know in a comment about an obscure French film they just saw. Someone is telling everyone what a great deal they got on their newest L.L. Bean rain jacket. Someone is posting simultaneously to Twitter and to Facebook and so there are hashtag phrases without much utility in my Facebook feed. Someone is posting a video of their daughter’s first birthday party, Dora everywhere. Someone is insinuating that I don’t care about the troops if I don’t Like their latest status update, which is a picture of a crying male soldier hugging his child. Someone is posting a photo of their lips and their neck and on their neck there is a pearl necklace but it is all in black and white. I post this status update; 12:54am: WHEN I GET A CAT SOMETIME SOMEDAY I DON’T KNOWWHEN THAT WILL BE BUT WEN I DO I WILL LOVE IT AND I WIL NAME IT GIANT SQUID BECAUSE THEY NEED LOVE TOO AND I CAN ONLY LOVE A GIANT SQUID REALLY IN CAT FORM JUST BECAUSE O PRAGMATICS LIKE BREATHING AND SCALE AND LIKE WHERE TO BUY THEIR FOOD AND THE FACT THAT I WOULD NEED TO BE LOVED TOO AND CATS CAN DO THAT CATZ CAN DO THAT AND I DONT REALLY KNOW IM NOT REALLY SO SURE ABOUT GIANT SQUID BUT I WOULD NEED IT TO LOVE ME BACK AND THAT IS MOST OF ALL WHAT ITS IS ABOUT It is up for a few seconds when it gets its first Like. Katie Lattari holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. She writes fiction and currently resides in Winterport, Maine.
A Friend Speaks by Bruce Pratt
When I told him that my copy of his first collection had been stolen from my desk, he said, “I am honored by such a theft,” and when I said I replaced it with a used copy he’d inscribed to a famous friend, he said, “Better open on your nightstand than collecting dust on hers,”
was at this point that I was free to lie around watching The Sopranos every night eating popsiand when I stammered the news cles. Maybe I was with June and we weren’t seeing that I’d spied the woman he loved each other at night until her divorce came kissing a man in the parking lot through. I must’ve been with June, because I’d of the Dream Away Motel, only been able to quit smoking by including it in he said, “I am delighted to know my compact with her, a good-faith gesture. The that I have not misjudged her,” popsicles I wouldn’t tell her about, it’s too idiotic, and when my face betrayed every night back and forth to the kitchen, “Now my misunderstanding, he said, I’ll have a red one; now I’ll have a purple one,” “Never allow what you know, sometimes taking two at a time so one of ’em can to obscure what you may learn.” start to melt while I’m eating the other one beBruce Pratt’s novel The Serpents of Blissfull was cause it’s better when they soften up a little. published from Mountain State Press in April 2011. His poetry collection Boreal, is available So this goes on for maybe a week, every three from Antrim House Books. He lives with his wife nights I go to the supermarket and buy a dozen Janet in Eddington, Maine. popsicles until I go there one night and there are no more boxes of twelve, I cleaned ’em out. Apopcylce Now There’s only a box of twenty-four. So I have no by Mike DeCapite choice. I buy the box of twenty-four, I cross the line into the unknown, I buy the all-American I’m walking up Havemeyer when I think——“I’d suburban superhero economy jumbo family pack, really like a popsicle.” Of all things, right?——all figuring, you know, this is crazy but it’ll last me of a sudden I want a popsicle——I haven’t thought four days. And that night I ate the entire box. about a popsicle in forty years. Out of nowhere— —it’s like you’re at the mercy of any stray thought. Twenty-four popsicles, back and forth to the Nixon was president the last time I had a popsi- freezer, now cherry, now grape, now orange, lying cle. But it’s a hot day, I quit smoking——whatever on my back peering over my belly like a seal with it was: “I want a popsicle.” the remote in one hand and a popsicle in the other and the window fan blowing, take a disk So I go to a bodega but they don’t have regular out, turn it over, start another one, and the sticks popsicles, all they’ve got is crazy multicolored con- and wrappers piling up on the table beside the fections part French tickler, part fireworks, or clock with its minute hand going around and those long frozen plastic things that burn the around on this orgy of popsicles, a popsicle apocback of your throat. I just want a regulation old- alypse. fashioned Twin Pop like when I was a kid. So I go to the supermarket, but you have to buy a box. You look at a clock during something like this The smallest box is twelve. So I buy a box of and you realize you’re on your own, there’s no twelve. one watching, no one in charge——nothing preAnd that night I’m lying around watching The vents you from degenerating to madness and savSopranos or something, I eat six of ’em. I quit agery except some voice at the back of your mind. smoking maybe three months before, and you need something to do while you’re watching Probably by the end I was just trying to get it over these shows. When I smoked, I could watch five, with, get finished with The Sopranos and finish six episodes back to back because you’re smoking, off this box so I could close the book on this you’re sort of involved with the action. Cigarettes whole sorry chapter and get on with my life. Nevmake you part of the action, you’re not just lying ertheless, I did eat twenty-four Twin Pops in one there. I can’t just lie there and watch these ass- night. I woke up the next morning with a purple holes for five hours with nothing to do, I need mouth and a rash on both arms. something. And now I know I can never have another drink— Anyway, I ate half the box, six popsicles. And the —I can never just buy a bag of dope someday for next night, because it’s there——again with the the hell of it or an eightball because I’ve got peoTV——I finished the box. ple in town——whatever it is, I can’t do it. I can never smoke even one cigarette without mutating And now, because I did it two nights in a row, it’s into some other type of creature that needs like a little routine. I make a habit out of every- smoke with every single breath. I have to just forthing. So Night Three, on my way home from get about all that and get on with it, just get on work, I stop and buy another box of twelve pop- with what’s left of my life. sicles. I don’t know what my relationship status
Yes, just keep my head down and set off across the tundra. A little wiser, a little older. A little more embarrassed. Because now this is another thing you’re capable of. Another absurdity. You like yourself a little less. It’s like you wash a pet and you see what kind of scrawny abject little creature has been living under there all this time— —it’s hard to feel the same about it, after. But what are you gonna do, get rid of the pet? You’re stuck with the pet like you’re stuck with yourself, so on you go. Mike DeCapite’s published work includes the novel Through the Windshield (1998), the chapbooks Sitting Pretty (1999) and Creamsicle Blue (2012), and the prose collection Radiant Fog (2013). REQUEST FROM THE COUNSELOR by Annaliese Jakimides She wants me to write a poem, an essay, some words for her barn. Not her children, her husband, no, not even for her, the person who has saved me so many times. I wonder whether the barn’s death is what prompts her to cross the clear trammels she has erected between counselor and client. She will not come to my readings, or any social event. Only another death, my son’s, ruptured the rules for a moment: no phone call in reply to my message, only a racing to me, as if she had leapt from one rooftop to another, slid in through some cracks to place her heart against mine, jumpstarting it for all the beats that must follow. Later she slipped into the crowd of mourners, mingling, her sadness as palpable as the sadness she carries for her barn today. Gates swing open, hinges and rusty pins —kindness and suffering tumble into stained hay… varnish of bones… skin of old stories… salt of diligence… and now the wound, always the wound we must work through. Annaliese Jakimides’ poetry and prose has been published widely. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, andher work has been broadcast on both NPR and MPBN.
Cabildo Quarterly, issue the fifth, fall 2013. First press of 1000 copies 11/20/2013; available digitally through both .pdfcast.com and issuu.com. Weekly updates and reviews available at cabildoquarterly.tumblr.com. Michael T. Fournier, fiction/layout; Lisa Panepinto, poetry. Submissions? Yep. Send your previously unpublished stories, up to 3000 words in length, to cabildoquarterly at gmail.com, and/or your several previously unpublished poems to lmpanepinto at gmail.com. Simultaneous = AOK. We’re spreading like a rash: in addition to being available in and around both greater Belchertown MA and Pittsburgh PA (Lisa moved!), you can now find new issues of CQ at Atomic Books in Baltimore MD, Quimby’s in Chicago IL, and through Antiquated Future Distro in Portland, OR. If none of those float your boat, the newest issue is always availale for a buck postpaid --or five bucks for a stack -- through CQHQ, POB 784, Belchertown MA 01007. (This same address is where to send anything for review/consideration, too.) Check out Lisa’s new book “On This Borrowed Bike,” available now through Three Rooms Press, and watch the website for her tourdates. Thanks to everyone who helped out with Mike’s “Monsters of Talk” summer 2013 zine tour: tourmates Mike Faloon & Steve Reynolds and Duncan Wilder Johnson, Chris Dooley and Flywheel, Dave Lawton (whose book Sharp Blue Stream is now available on Three Rooms Press), Bugs Bunny, Papercut Zine Library, Liberty and RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth NH, Dan & Luke Moellering and Courtney Davis, Dani and Emily of Word Portland (ME), Tim, Paige, Powers and Jay, Bryan Stackpole, Megan London and all at Main St. Music Studios in Bangor ME, and Bruce Pratt. Phew! As always, thanks to Bec and Ryan for putting up with us and all this. This issue dedicated to the memory of Molly T. Bunny, a.k.a. Cabildo, 1997-2013.RIP. Enter: Spippy!