Goddard Distro #4

DISTR O #4

EditorE En Chief –

Clint Newton

Cover Art by Tanjello

13 WRITING PROMPTS FOR DEPRESSED MOTHERFUCKERS

1. Craft a list of superstitions you don’t currently have. Try incorporating some into your superstition routine.

2. Write a values statement for an imaginary therapist’s office and leave them an enquiring voicemail.

3. If they won’t take you off their mailing list, you don’t have to take them off of yours: Submit something last-minute to the college ten minute play festival, even though you’re technically still on medical leave.

4. Name all of your toes. Form a peer support group. Give them unsolicited advice.

5. Try writing a story out of order. For example, you could give up on a project before you even start it.

6. Manifest the positive with this simple exercise: Take a recent journal entry and replace each word with its exact opposite.

7. Write a haiku about your white Honors English teacher who told you that it doesn't matter how many syllables haiku have as long as they can be said in one breath.

8. Invent an illness and diagnose yourself with it. What is your bedside manner? Think about the girl who takes your blood and how she pretends she’s a completely different person every visit, even though you went to high school with her younger brother and you know her name is Abby.

9. If the gremlins in your bones were selling cereal, what would the ad campaign look like?

Bonus: Which one is the sexy girl character?

10. Compose the liner notes for the album your imaginary garage band put out during your Performatively Dark and Angry period. Who are you thanking and why?

11. Fill a hat with the names of all the people you don’t want to think about when you’re masturbating.

12. Pull out all of your chin hairs and shape them into poems that can be said in one breath.

13. Stare vacantly into space until a spirit takes over your inhuman husk and starts typing for you. Get medicated in time for the press junket. Take all the credit.

-Julian Schauffler

Gender Identity, Fog

You are soft but are perceived as rough You exude existence from your pores and you are loved Time doesn’t make sense to you as you float through this never-ending

Blind to time

Blind to Beauty

Your own Beauty

You wish to no longer be perceived (rough or otherwise)

To not exist in a mortal form Humanity

Aurora Flynn

Psychosis

I heard a whisper in the dark of the night. “Come with me” the voice muttered softly. Suddenly all around me, the world filled with noise. There was a deep and heavy pounding, screams and cries of animals and the heavy pounding slowly turned into the feet of a stampede followed by the sounds of feet marching in time. Then there was a chanting. The chanting was quiet at first and it was difficult to make out what was being said, but in time I realized that it was in a language I did not understand. A language I had never heard before. The marching continued as the sounds of the stampede faded into the distance. Around me, trees began to grow. My room had previously been dark filled with the light of the moon and I then heard the chirping of bugs and the marching continued in the distance. I became cold and there was a breeze. In the breeze I again heard the whisper, “Come with me” the voice said, this time louder and clearer than the last. “Come with me, Come with me, come with me, Come. With. Me.” The voice got closer and louder with each passing breath until finally the voice shouted, I could tell their voice was straining, “COME WITH ME” The sound echoed off of mountains in the distance. The sounds of marching halted and the stampede ceased. There was no longer the chirping of bugs and the voice rang in my ears for what felt like an eternity. And then, as if somebody snapped their fingers, I returned back to my reality. I was back in

my bed. The forest around me disappeared and the sounds were all gone. It was silent in my room, in my bed, it was almost unnerving. And then I heard it. I heard the voice again. I almost yearned for the feeling I got from hearing the voice. And there it was. Off in the back of my mind. “Come with me”

Aurora Flynn

Visiting Shadow

You’re over there. Dark and mysterious. I do not know you. I think. Perhaps I knew you once. Maybe I know you still, but with everything that has occurred, it seems unlikely that I wouldn’t remember you. You oh mysterious one. You. You. You. I see you now for what it’s worth. You’re sitting there in the corner unassuming and vague. Your hair is dark and your skin is pale like the early moonlight. Holding a book. We sit. We sit together. We sit apart. We sit. I swear I knew you once. I’ve certainly seen you before, but you claim “I am not from here” with your eyes. Hazel and gray. I walked away and then back and away and back. I get this sinking feeling in my gut that there is more to the situation than meets the eye. Your keen eyes peer up from the book occasionally and see me pacing back and forth. Sitting down and standing up.

should be. You make me anxious. It’s your eyes. Your eyes make me anxious. Can you look down at your book, please? Actually, no please don’t look down at your book, I feed on your gaze. I require all of your attention and yet none of it at all. Can you look at me, but make it look like you’re looking at your book? Is that possible? You’re making me anxious. Those damn eyes. Those hazel fucking eyes. You’re making me anxious. Look at me. Look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me

Stop. Go. Stop.

Continue with your book and ignore me, but do not ignore me, please. I am pleading with you to give me all of your attention. I need to be seen by you. I just can’t know. I cannot know that I am being seen by you, which is why, again, I ask that you read your book, but don’t actually read your book and instead, you peer up, with your magical distinct eyes. You’re still making me anxious. I asked you not to look at me, your gaze is frustrating. I want you to stop, but please don’t stop. Never stop. I love you dark and mysterious. Those hazel fucking eyes, staring at me while you read your book. Dark. Mysterious. Vague like the moon on a Wednesday night. Look at me, please, but don’t look at me, please.

I am anxious. You make me anxious. I feel restless, unsure of what my next steps

Link to music by The ZYG 808

The Mindy-Bindy Man

Step a corner, dryway

Step again your foot is falling asleep

Step you pause, something is written on the wall but the light is too low to read it

Step again step step

Breathe in and remember wet cold air, remember living on the cloud mountain

Step step step

In the machine room there are many people, cheerfully together now

In the machine room you can walk away from the machine room

The hallway outside the machine room is smiling even more than in the machine room, in the hallway outside the machine room there is only the idea of the machine room

The idea of the machine room is better than any cloud mountain

The cloud mountain would always be better than where you were before

You go down the hallway outside the machine room and wait in the waiting room. It is green in there.

The clock ticks briefly in the waiting room. It is a good place to wait until you wait too readily and start to remember the cloud mountain

The cloud mountain was where everyone was talking to you and you could talk back. The cloud mountain was where breathing felt like something you didn’t even need to

notice. The cloud mountain didn’t ask for your bones

You are waiting but now you do wish you were in the cloud mountain, the idea of the machine room is cloying and sweet like a tin of dead cookies, you remember

The cloud mountain

Picking up a clod of the earth and eating it like an apple

The apples in the cloud mountain tasted like dirt

The dirt of the cloud mountain tasted like apples

The apples on the cloud mountain tasted like apples And the dirt tasted like dirt Still, it didn’t ask for you

Maybe you are always going to wait Maybe the waiting will drag you in your chair backwards to the machine room Who knows what the machine room looks like when the sun has set you didn’t bother to wonder

You wish you had bothered to wonder more before you went into the waiting room

It is past the hour and you are waiting

You are not waiting for a rebirth of wonder

You are waiting for a return to the cloud mountain

You are waiting for a kettle to boil and scream at you

You are waiting for hunger to eat itself

You are waiting to grow faint and return to the cloud mountain

You are waiting to forget the cloud mountain

When you stand up, you are there

You are back there

It is the middle of the day in the village square

The carts have their arms wrapped around their cows

The windy-grindy man plays a song

Far and wee

Like the machine poem

Is this the cloud mountain or the machine room

Is the machine room bringing you back to the cloud mountain

They didn’t tell you it could do that

But you wouldn’t put it past them

You heard rumors even

The mindy-bindy man’s hip likes to take a nap after lunch

If you walk away now, it will only take longer for him to reach you But you are afraid to step closer And reveal that you are in the machine room

The mindy-bindy man holds up his lantern–you forgot yours at home, you must have–and asks you a question with his mouth

What are you staring at

You weren’t staring but now you are

The mindy-bindy man was not somebody to walk up to when you were younger

The mindy-bindy man wanted you to mind your own business

While he turned his dials and handles in the window

The mindy-bindy man is walking across the stones to you

You remember being a child and taking too many rocks

And the mindy-bindy man telling you to mind

You still had your fistful in your mouth

And they dissolved into sticky before you could explain

The mindy-bindy man is very very old now

He walks with a jolt, like his hip is surprised to be asked this of him at such an hour

His hands are knobblier and findier, and they hold the lantern high enough to burn your eyes

What are you staring at

You walked past the mindy-bindy man’s shop every day

And stopped looking in it all together

Instead you imagined what was in the shop based on every time you had walked by it

And looked at what you were imagining the mindy-bindy man was doing

His lantern would burn your hair if he got any closer, and then he walks so close and then through you, and then he isn’t there at all

The sun has come out, and the windy-grindy man smiles at you, he always remembered you In the cloud mountain every bell rings at once

By the time you remember it the ringing is over

So then, how does it hold true I speak with men that you know these words are mine whose bitterness does not haunt me that they come forth from my font they are lost as the blind fawn and bleed unto unwilling pages sniffing their way; enraged

O! How you meet me here Burning cigarettes through toothless mouths wherever we may be, a brief connection as their grasp fades into ash a pause, a silence, as their eyes dig deeper into their sockets a resolution as fathers forget their sons

Julian Schauffler

I speak with men

who have a slim grasp on reality as they seep onto margins as spilled ink into the between I speak with men though I fear they are machines we gnaw at brittle seams

O! artificial, hollow dreams

Who’s words are those and who’s are these

are you true in your intentions, are you wholly honest with me?

I read of man those rantings that prattle into infinity with no discernable difference between the earnest word and the generated; tear your hems away

Though I am a scheme of flesh my loose clothes an algorithm there are parameters to my systems I occupy a portion of this plane

Clint Newton IV

Memory

I don’t remember the things that once were Nor will I remember the things that pass Remembrance obsolete in the modern era What is remembering but forgetting tomorrow

Nor will I remember things that come to pass I do not remember the things that once were

Aurora Flynn

As we discussed hand injuries I recalled a film or maybe a book in which a surgeon’s hands were injured. It immediately took on a mythical quality in my head. Sort a contrapositive of Achilles’ heel - a body part is a source of ultimate strength until its use is lost. What canonical work could contain this great image? It came to me. Rachel

Dratch hands Chris Rock a pan of cookies directly out of the oven in Robert Smigel’s The Week Of starring Rock and Adam Sandler. I’ve been leaving glasses in different places.

Jesse Catherine Webber

Muse

Maybe I'm just a muse, maybe that's all I'll ever be.

I’ve never been enough, they care to lose, it’s just not meant for me.

The thought of prosperity doesn't inspire, if we are not changing the world. Our dreams coming true are my only desire, I'm like the spark that lights their fire. But I’ve never been enough to kill the booze or change their lack of conviction.

They say I'm just a pretty girl who will sit down and listen.

They like my aesthetics. Both alluring and enigma. But not for my genetics. That's the power of stigma.

When my heart has broken from the pain of this truth, Everything in me needs to be rekindled like I've lost all of my youth.

I wish you never took my crown. But now I have nothing to lose.

As I walk away without a sound you will realize what a pretty girl can do.

Nicole Upchurch

‘Woven song’ by Olafur Analds prompt

By Kestral Bossard-Kruger @kestral04 on insta

Sweet rain dew drops

I sleep quietly, like a lamb. I’ve dreamt about sleeping like this, peaceful without the twisting knives of pain In my calves, Forcing my eyes open when i’m about to fall softly into dreamland. I dream in metaphors now, but not ones so easily understood, Twilight highway chases in our hiace 1997 van

Am i missing home or the new joy thats parked in the driveway of what i used to call a home?

I’ve spent too much time spiraling on the concept of belonging lately,

And am content for now to settle, soft and womblike

Into the awaiting arms of my love.

Kestrel Bossard-Kruger

If you’d never been down there, you would not be able to distinguish the sump hole from the concrete. Enough dishes to run two restaurants fill the bowed shelves

Basement

I feel no remorse when I spit on your floor, beams rotten and rusty from the decades old hole in the shower wall.

At first glance down the steps, you only see a dirt floor and a door broken off the hinge, hanging the lights flicker in an uneasy rhythm

A pile of paint older than me occupies the back corner

right next to the breaker panel the one without any grounds.

A botched nest of pvc, copper pipe, coax, comm cable, and dc lines runs over my head

Irish lace hangs heavy in every crevice.

in what used to be the coal bin.

There are terrariums long dead, sitting on top of the kiln that never fires rusty pruners, unusable, presumably from lockjaw.

I’m pretty sure my cat’s skeleton is down there buried beneath your hoard after all you said the bones were good.

Clint Newton IV

Photo Provided by Jesse Catherine Webber

I know your pain.

I know your story.

But this time it’s not a mystery.

It’s not his story.

I’ll rewrite history.

It’s her story.

Nicole Upchurch

We are born womanly and feminine, that's what makes us motherly. Harvesting our emotional sensitivity, isn't that lovely.

When we look into innocent eyes, we want to heal all of their wounds.

We can't stand to see them cry. We just want to see them bloom.

10,000

I come as one, but I stand as 10,000. Standing on the shoulders of Maya.

Doing something outside myself like Ruth.

Gentle as a bomb like Frida.

Like Betty I am speaking my truth.

Nicole Upchurch Butterfly Effect

I learned this from before my time. Before my existence, through my descendants it’s embedded in me.

We remain persistent. An on-going cycle. A butterfly effect.

Like the moon we go through phases, but we haven't given up yet.

Every day bringing the waves to the shore. Although they run away they always come back for more.

We don’t give up. We remain tough. This is what my grandma told me, in a dream.

We were on a beach but as hard as I ran I couldn’t catch up to her. But looking into her eyes was enough.

Decoding Afterlife

Memories: Bartholomew

Nicole Upchurch

Speaks I see red then green then green then blue then orange above the table. Your mother was deeply regretful. I see a series of animals: a cat, a zebra, a buffalo, a whale. Your great aunt never ate Swiss cheese. I see ten different people dancing in a circle, none of them have any fingers. Your grandfather was secretly very good at chess. I see a

mannequin wearing six different shirts and four different jackets, but no pants. Your grandmother's cousin did not like his wife.

Jesse Catherine Webber

Bell Hooks

You are where I’m from. But I never knew your name. Not until you were in the grave. My family never respected your fame. Although we are the same. Our blood, sweat, and tears hit the same soil.

We climbed the same trees.

We saw the same things. The bluegrass scraped both of our knees.

You could have taught me so many things.

White supremacy doesn’t talk about a black woman's work.

But that is exactly how I met you.

Nicole Upchurch

Art by Tanjello Orange Sky

She halted the crank and in the silent pines the static hummed.

Lost to all, not even cultural radiation. How’s that mom? Even you couldn’t find me here. Do you remember when I was a girl and the river took me and the dog chased the banks and barked and all hope was lost. I remember, mom. I remember drowning. The feeling of dying breathless like breathing the air of a glass cellar, breathing it again and over again until becoming the air and being trapped in a place never entered.

And then you came. Just like that, sudden, and I wasn’t dead anymore.

The road carried on in front of her, passing the bus-stop. Coming from a place and heading towards another. Neither was known to the girl and she dare guess the destination of the road or where from it had come.

After a time the static died back into the silent dark needles and the hungry sky. The girl swung her feet and played at the dirt. She looked up and rolled her eyes.

I mean c’mon! Try a little! You used to be a beautiful thing. You were so many things, often and always. You reflected. She played at the ground. She squeezed the plastic bus-stop bench. Try a little! Her scream died in the dark, dark needles. The purple trunks leaned in and for a moment the sky was smaller.

Coward.

The girl picked up her legs and sat on them. She rose her fingers to the glass bus-stop walls and traced the ancient junk graffiti.

You chose this? The pines are beaten silhouettes in your goddamned glow and you chose to illuminate this instead? The portentous, the solemn in their grave. Bloated hiving minds writhing inside decayed bare mechanisms. Creations of a ponderously amazed species, incited into awe by foul attempts to ward power, to find hearts of their own. She spits on the glass and lowers her feet to play at the ground.

Don’t you get tired, you fool? I am just asking you to try a little. Over and over again, I cannot ask it another way. Do you mistake your foolishness for bravery? Your hunger for bravery? You are a mistake, you are not what you are. Try a little!

From the road a sound is nearing and the pines and the hungry orange sky lean on it. The girl pauses and then speaks again.

Bright above, clear across the statue pines, the sky awaited in its perpetual arduous orange. In the remote bus-stop, lodged below the grim and orange, below the damp and slender pines, a girl wondered. A tiny chin and tight closed mouth, angled up to the contrived and damned belligerent sky.

Don’t you get tired?

But nothing gave witness to the girl. Just her, all alone waiting.

You are just a hungry thing and hungry things don’t change. They die but they do not change.

She turned the hand crank on the radio and thought of turning the tackle. Reeling in lures under the morning’s indigo sky.

Before you were greedy. She laughed but the sky ignored her.

Bravery is not inexorable. Value is a personal endeavor and you found a hollow and you bound yourself in it. Come from your hollows and change goddamnit! The noise builds on the remote road and the world trembles in it.

Coward.

A bus is there, loud and profuse. Streaming gasoline breath, convulsing in the road. The glass bus-stop walls ring with it. The metal beast rests at the bus-stop, releasing air-brake squeals and powder smoke. The windows are glowing orange, hungry like the sky. For a heartbeat the girl sees her mom through the window, arms crossed and waiting in a bus seat. The girl makes to call out and then doesn’t and the vision is gone. The bus shifts and pulls away, weeping smoke trails. The girl sits cross-legged on the plastic bench. The ancient graffiti around her like signets. The purple trunk trees lean back and the hungry orange sky burns above her.

Don’t you get tired? She says. Don’t you get tired? All that hunger and none left for me. Can’t you see it is killing me.

The girl sits at the bus-stop, small and cross-legged beneath the purple trunk trees and the dark, dark needles. Alone beneath the hungry orange sky.

Uncensored

Andrew Moore

Art by Tanjello

As long as I can remember boys didn’t like me slender.

So I live my life uncensored.

I am not the center, I just don’t want to pretend or have to defend my body's gender.

Nicole Upchurch

Water my roots with my own tears,

And hold my head high despite the weight of the world.

Self love

Self love is stronger than their words. Even when it hurts I know my worth.

Nicole Upchurch

Bloom

But every time I try to climb

Out of the hole they keep digging me in, I lose the will.

They call me insecure

Because I love myself.

As if they pick me up when I fall,

Or they didn’t push me in the hole I am living in,

Where I tend to my own wounds,

To be heard

It’s always that you look great.

Never your words spoke to me.

They wonder why I always post my face.

Just to be heard.

Or why modeling wasn’t for me.

I am more than just a pretty little thing.

I have a voice, In a condescending world.

Nicole Upchurch

Big World

Funny how such a big world can make you feel so small.

They don't notice me at all. But I still stand tall. Even if I have to crawl.

I will not fall.

Nicole Upchurch

I can grasp what they couldn’t reach with their angel wings supporting my feet.

Nicole Upchurch

I am from galaxy skies

Moss covered floors

CoAon candy clouds

Eclipses and more I am from a daydream

Leading you in Drowning in me

Save yourself

Be free

I’ll consume you

Is that what you want?

Why aren’t you scared?

Lurking in the shadows

My nightmares are real

Genetics

Our genetics play a part in what we hold dear in our heart.

Our DNA transforms through emotions and feelings throughout our bloodline. Something within my ancestor’s souls wanted a change. But they couldn’t attain it. Maybe that goal lies within me.

Do you see through This exterior?

Truly me

Exactly as I seem

And you accept it

Won’t let you regret this

Hold me close

Hold you sMll

Don’t let my evil

Emerge for thrills

I’ll keep it contained

Is that what you want?

Won’t let me push you away

How long will you stay?

The lights are illuminaMng

Stuck on tracks

Staring into a train

You hold steady

Through the sick and the pain

Who even are you?

Where are you from?

Galaxy skies?

Do I look that dumb?

That was a fumble

No intenMon to insult

You didn’t have to love me

Is everything my fault?

Finally threw it all out

And you picked through it

Like a raccoon in a dumpster

Looking for food

I’m sorry I'm

A liAle rude

But you keep accepMng

I hope it’s not a game

Or a trap

I’ll be honest

Trance Toothman

Painting the Floor with

Whoopi

Goldberg: $1.50

Become Three

Times the Dad with Dan Hedaya: 75 cents

What About Cream Cheese? with Dennis Quaid: $2.10 For All of the Last Domains with Jean-Claude Van Damme: $1.15

When Each Flower Loses a Petal with Eric Clapton: 31 cents

Jesse

Catherine Webber

Untitled By Kayla Frances Murray

God has dipped her brush in the ocean after painting the clouds

milk bath, ripcurls

curled tendrils, milk teeth

Oceanid Clymene is holding it all up before the birth of Atlas and the Birth of Venus

shows women come out of their shells naked cunts are too real to show unless it benefits the masses

pearls of wisdom are calcified sediment

death of choice –why are we roaming here if not for celestial embodiment to float in the sea during a storm go against the current wring ourselves out and scream

Phaius

By Kayla Frances Murray

fragrantly murmur

like an orchid’s aroma

fertile winter

soft sun

coax my brown tendrils

grow climb

The pro mpt toni ght is Sha dow itself may reso lve into bea uty <<< <--||| |/ the thing about thing tree--

anaesthetized against ---if |\\/ how S itself tself _____\

umbrella above the rain and drops fall if itself tself t if it is rain train if itself tself S resolve repeat reduce 3rd third tself in The pro

mpt

tonig

ht is shad ow; itself may resol ve into beau ty mys elf

Irene

Shadow Itself May Resolve Into Beauty

SIMRIB

B.M. Iris down down down repeat resolve third I can't from itself

This is hard. mutton, cube, cave, tself, orange, ---train rain vain perpendicular to the plane break of main attain the leastt

The prompt : tonight is shado w itself (may resolv

e): into beauty Into beauty Bridges across myself thru and from-_/ tree one

Jesse Catherine Webber

Art by Tanjello

A World

A world where greed for more than need is valued more than human life

Cut down trees less air to breath that’s a need for human life

A world where we should love while we’re above

Yet hesitate and wait until we’re 6ft beneath a pool of mud

A world where children children’s dreams should matter

Instead they’re shattered the culprit trauma leaves them tattered

A world where we should give our neighbors helping hands

But racial divide fuels loss of lives which is something I’ll never understand

A world of killing and cold so chilling violent for just the thrilling

A world that’s here

A world that’s now

A world I see and wonder how

Why can’t we love and live in peace

A world we help and feed those who are in in need

A world where we can all succeed

Our wildest dreams we could achieve

A world with hearts that would forgive

A world with good deeds without motive

A world with love that’s the world in which I want to live

Ryan Ewing

The Caverns of the Heart

Long ago, we formed glacial movements and maxims my porous lime – your clean slate collided so tenderly with patience and virtue, so no one could see us grow together, we pushed flats into hills, into ranges into hollows.

When the rain came it washed clean the sedimentary glue between us and dripped - all the calcium from our bones that stark and deadened white chalk stained those once strong walls and we began to fall apart over moments, over fears

Then, abruptly, the ceiling gave and dust choked out the last bulbs of hope and boulders crashed into each crevice to scar each of our sides dynamite, baby, dynamite.

what good intentions we had now the glazed rocks still drip our mineral love down, and splash memories onto fault lines and erosion left a space so vast that copper stills hide there and delinquents with hammers test fate

and the Jones’ got married there last spring

and the whole town danced in the space between and the sun rose a hundred feet above the void

and in my cavernous way, I still love you -Clint Newton IV

i feel like the mean little fairy in the mean little fairy tale like the kid in my french class who did always pass technically je vais manger ton bébé

i feel like i imagine myself as the evil creature the upright citizens rally against me they learn love and honor and the american way and i get to be burned

i feel like i say i feel like too much

i feel like every time i let a poem go on too long i sound like my dad

i feel like i’m overthinking this

i feel like bus stop poems have a high success rate maybe because i write so few of them

Julian Schauffler

DISTRO

Photos by Jesse Catherine Webber