Adrian Slonaker: “Arizona Bound

Arizona Bound

by Adrian Slonaker

Sucking a sepiatone sassafras drop, his mouth vacuumed up vintage flavors as he blinked at a pink suitcase on creaky wheels and wondered whether it was light enough to limbo under the bar of baggage fees since he needed every dollar to launch his midlife move to the Valley of the Sun and harvest a home from a minuscule hotel room in snooty Scottsdale now that he'd lost the weight.

City Brink 55

Confessional Publications by

Laurinda Lind

C o n f e s s i o n a l P u b l i c a t i o n s \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / ----- don’t change what happened but they are a way to wear yourself inside----- l l l l l l o u t a n d challe nge a nyone annoy ed by your need to read your self in what you’re showin g them as if they also might suffer down underneath where it won’t always rise to the surfa ce like dark troubled wate r, like di rty lov e that at lea st is love regar dless of how much it mess es you up while you are endur ing so much joy in secret and also out there in the air

56 City Brink

Claire Telomere, Melody Asleep in the Dark Night Clover Field

City Brink 57

The Clown Priest and the One Who Likes Roller Coasters

by John Baum

Walter Luckdale worked birthday parties as Lucky the Clown, gouging parents on prices because there weren’t many other clowns in the area. When a few affordable clowns showed up, he moved to hospital work which eventually led him to the priesthood. He donated his possessions and settled in as a history teacher at a Catholic middle school in Atlanta, but couldn’t bring himself to give away the red bulb noses and makeup he kept in a green tackle box under his bed.

Father Gallagher was never not a priest, but for a long time he was a member of the National Roller Coaster Enthusiasts Club until he tripped over a backpack while teaching adverb clauses to seventh graders and ruptured a disc in his lower back. He prayed for healing after the first surgery, and believed it would come, but by the third surgery, the murmured prayers did not fill the hole within him where hope had once pooled. Pill bottles gathered in his medicine cabinet. Pain stabbed him awake each morning. He did not give up the priesthood, but somewhere a light had grown dim. His first name was David, but most everyone called him Father Gallagher. His Roller Coaster Club Membership lapsed.

They lived in the rectory with the other priests who worked as teachers and administrators at the school. In the mornings they all gathered for Mass and then breakfast and made their way down the small hill to where the school sat by a creek the city called a river.

Everyone knew of Father Walter’s clowning past, but none knew that sometimes he dusted off the tacklebox and sat at the small mirror in his room, brushing on a ghostly layer of setting powder, sponging on grease paint, and then, after affixing a nose, made spectacular faces in the mirror—grimaces and silent laughter and joy and exaggerated fear, sadness—as if his jaw were double jointed. In his second year of teaching, he surprised everyone and came down from the rectory as Lucky the Clown during field day, but the local archbishop, on hand to bless the events, asked that he curtail the clown activities because they did not seem to be in the best interest of where the Catholic church was at the moment. A couple of decades slipped by.

58 City Brink

Father Gallagher’s back grew worse. Pain knifed his neck and knees and he moved through his rickety days with the help of a cane. Another surgery with a long recovery loomed, but according to this new doctor with the unlined face and straight-shouldered confidence, life would get easier. This doctor did not call him Father anything, just David. Sometimes to lose the title was a long slow breath. David Gallagher, not yet sixty, still felt he was a young man by many standards.

One night in the rectory, Father Walter sat in the common room watching football when Father Gallagher trudged in and sat heavily in a large brown chair. A Monday night game in Green Bay, a snowstorm added a sloppy, chaotic energy to the game, but the fans, bundled and red faced, looked loony with joy and enthusiasm.

After a few minutes, Father Walter said, “I’ve never been to Wisconsin, can’t imagine it’s an easy place to live.”

“I studied for a time at the University in Milwaukee. Fine town, actually,” Father Gallagher said. He tapped a rhythm on the floor with the cane.

Father Walter liked that phrase. Fine town.

Father Gallagher shifted and winced at a lightning strike of pain. He hobbled from the room for a pill.

One of the Fathers died and after those remaining celebrated the requiem Mass and interred the body and shuffled to their rooms in the quiet sadness that followed such events, Father Walter knocked on Father Gallagher’s door. He was holding a bottle of Irish whiskey and wearing his clown makeup.

“Goodness,” Father Gallagher said. “I’ve never seen you with your makeup on.”

City Brink 59

“Another rough night for the back?” Father Walter said. He poured two glasses of the whiskey and handed one to Father Gallagher, propped in bed on a mountain of pillows.

“I’m tired of it,” Father Gallagher said.

“I’m happy to make you laugh,” Father Walter said. “It’s what I do.” He was standing pigeon-toed, leaning slightly with his arm propped on the corner of the dresser. Indeed, he look prepared to break up a Big-Top audience. “But I’ve never heard you talk much about the roller coasters.”

Father Gallagher sipped the whiskey. He said, “I miss the wooden coasters, the classics. Just terrific names: Giant Dipper, Thunderbolt, Jackrabbit. There were moments when you simply knew you’d be thrown clear of the whole contraption, but before the fear could touch you, the ride was over, you were safe, and some kind of exhilaration would seep in.”

He sipped again, tasted smoke and butter, and remembered the quaking horizon from the front car of a coaster hurtling down that first hill.

60 City Brink

Jerry Kirk, We Still Remember the Day the Optimist Came to Town

City Brink 61

An Opening by Shawn Anto

son when the time comes these people who left us for more are going to ask you to pay with your body with your mind pay as much as they feel you owe them.

I was told the harder I close me eyes the stronger wishes would be. me wishes never came true I still loved doing it.

which is to say the ending was never the part that stuck to my skin or the wishing painted a hope I did not possess but start seeding.

you can lie to yourself all you want so many times before they wrap you up and smother. me dad says I’m being tossed into a collection of puppets reminding me the only move left is to accept that I’ve been deceived with the wishing with the wishing with the wishing.

I wake up every night haunted with an idea of debt or I’m making deals with forces bigger than my body I’m lost or I can’t be helped since my actions are incongruous.

but this is a reminder for I will remain intact if I manage light a tiny crack of glinting to move toward, some sort of aperture I see the opening a way out so I linger.

62 City Brink

Assimilation Map

by Shawn Anto

inspired by FOX’s Legion

there is this maze in the desert shaped from laterite and granite

a gigantic web of trails awaits you

fourteen thousand six hundred twenty kilometers long nine thousand eighty-five miles wide

heaving sculpture of helixes and stalemates

You walk. You run. & finally at the end: a house with vegetation

You realize it’s the house you grew up in.

& at once, stands Camael, unsure his gaze locked onto me

Wait, stop for a second Can you see this maze?

Yes Congrats.

this labyrinth you’ve constructed is its own little puzzle, weaving dead end

pretend suffering between a past and the now figured out where you’re headed

engulfing every sleep and wake there is no escape

emerge on the other side of who you thought you were, you anticipate a rush of old-self, welcome to the States.

City Brink 63