Category: Across the Wire Vol. 4

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 4

3 Poems

By Edward Anki

Mellow Beer Glow

Bullseye

Pricks and Purple Flowers

Edward Anki‘s poetry has appeared in Ballast Journal, JAKE, BOMBFIRE, Rejection Letters, Roi Fainéant Press, The Feathertale Review, Qwerty, The Chaffin Journal, and others. A chapbook of his poetry, Remote Life, was published by BareBackPress (2014). His first full-length poetry collection, Screw Factory, was released in 2022 by Anxiety Press. A former stand-up comic, bartender, and agonized telemarketer, Edward is currently engaged in part-time studies to become a psychotherapist.

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 4

MAGDALENE

By Chloe Aiko Stark

The girls tilled the soil whenever they wove their pricked fingers around the flat collars of businessmen. They kept it warm with their own bodies for ignoble days of burying, poured over with primrose by the good sisters who kept them still. They had never to pay for taking a room, these girls that liked to fall sick in the dead of night, before winter. Whatever had gotten into them needed only to be pressed upon by a strict thumb bearing the reason of the divine and excised, thrashed around the laundry room when nobody was looking. A gown from dull needles stained and swallowed, they would have to learn the hard way. Men that visited and looked straight into them were never clean and held conversation like fools, so the girls tended to their wounds with the skin of their own pallid legs that flailed. Take the animals to a cleaver and see that they do the same.

Hold her hair up while she suffers to please you, she can do it herself in the hall. Her hand slipping down the shaft, the sisters should have taken him out of her. She makes less of herself, expels the taste onto the floor so that he can burn holes into the fabric and she can tear her fingernails across carpeted walls, turn her hands on herself and suppose that she may have to pray some more.

The fences were long and sloughed off the unwanted. They were the only beautiful things on the property, painted white at the end of every year. They covered an overgrown field of weeds and insects that bit death into their prey, the posts were tied taut. Nobody in town had ever to see the ashen face of the home for fallen women, its curtains always drawn behind iron handles. The brick laid without care and dressed in smoke and oil spores. There was a spire that rammed its stake into the skies and a crow impaled by the wing. All of the girls knew the place and went there to see where it tended to happen, where the others had gone once they had made up their minds. 

Drown acts of disobedience in the basin. Wash flesh under hot water until it is tender enough to fall off the bone. Hold a caucus for morality, and then tell the girls that they will never see heaven. Drip coffee over their spent heads and have them give their bodies over while they bleed. The ways of the righteous and the lessons in hell and how to avoid it, how could they when they were already there.

The girls told tales under the covers after the sisters went to bed. They parted their lips to warm milk and rolled its sweet froth over their teeth. They crossed their ankles and wore their arms around bent knees to say where they ran off to when the rain swept over the bank, others conspired through the thin cotton sheets. Feathers were plucked from a swollen mattress and sown into pillows to be picked up by the younger girls and tossed to the ones who were quiet, they tried to draw smiles over their tired mouths. How it was to move through the city when the dark had settled and the winds came soft, what the earth felt like after the rain fell down the sloping roofs. The doors locked after a long walk home just for a slip down the porch to soil their pantyhose. A week of wages out the window. A loose cannon and a letter from the church where some slept hand in hand, angels that they were and would become.

Chloe Aiko Stark is a writer and student.

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 4

Scooters and Other Crushes

  • Post author By
  • Post date

By Joshua Vigil

After she sat me down at the all-night diner, she said she was no longer attracted to me. All humans, Traci clarified. The truth is, I find that scooter out there incredibly sexy.

The electric one?

Yes, the electric one. Though they don’t always have to be electric. She slipped her hand into mine and led me to the parking lot. When her fingers touched the scooter’s frame, she let out an animal sound, so unlike anything she’d ever made for me. And with an unfocused but crazed expression, she said, Do you understand?

The scooter can’t love you back! I said.

I think you’re wrong about that. You’re so wrong.

She dropped to her knees and left her cheek plastered against the aluminum.

Is this about Richard? I asked. Or your Dad?

Traci’s fingers jumped to the cluster of gold acorns that hung from her neck. She worried them in her grip, each of them filled with the ashes of the men of her life. A dead father’s. A late husband’s. 

I think I’ve finally gotten over their deaths, she said. This is what that looks like. 

***

We remained friends. Every so often she sent me photos of scooters she had crushes on. Some were tiny and mechanical, with rust and dents, while others were shiny and expensive, the latest models. I began paying more attention to the scooters that populated our mid-sized city. Down sidewalks I found many cast aside. Years ago, a start-up had come and dropped hundreds all across downtown. Now, fleeced with cobwebs, they stood forgotten. I righted one up, pressing its frame against my leg, and I closed my eyes, waiting to feel something.

***

My date and I were a little drunk, our voices thick and our treads unsteady. She asked me to stop talking about Traci as I flicked the light to the living room on. Had I been talking about her so much? Beside the front door the woman teetered. A moment passed before a look took over her face. Why do you have so many scooters? she asked. Her head swung left and right as she inspected my living room, taking in the sheer volume of scooters I’d amassed since the break-up.

It’s complicated, I said.

She ran through the maze of scooters, asking if I’d bought them all or if they were stolen.

Is it stealing if they’ve been left for dead? 

Are you one of those eco-anarchists?

How do we know they don’t have souls?

The woman cocked her head. You’re joking.

I told her the truth then. That it was Traci’s fault I’d been collecting them. She’s into scooters, sexually, I said, and I’m just trying to understand her.

You want to get back together with her, she said, I understand.

But doesn’t it make you sad? Seeing all those scooters out there? Worse than any graveyard I’ve ever seen. At least in death humans get to rest in privacy.

I don’t think this is just about scooters, she said.

We’re never just any one thing, I said. You’re right.

The woman plopped onto the couch. Her face was pink and oily, and she looked deflated suddenly. In the spirit of sharing secrets, she said, I have a fake ear. She fiddled with her ear until the whole thing came off. A shark accident, she said.

I was still holding the prosthetic when we tried kissing. Our lips pumped and squirmed when the woman said she couldn’t, not with all the scooters staring.

I told her I couldn’t either. Traci, I said, she’s the love of my life. 

***

Are you familiar with yappers’ regret? Traci asked when we met again at the all-night diner. The gold acorns still hung from her neck. 

Neither of us are yappers, I said. We’re the quiet types. 

People assume we live interesting interior lives, but I’m not so sure that’s true.

You fall in love with scooters left and right. 

That’s what I need to talk to you about, she said, and she told me she was done with scooters, that she’d been taking an interest in roller skates recently. 

Is there a difference between roller skates and roller blades? I asked, thinking of the latest trend on TikTok involving one or the other. People flew down the paved hills of my neighborhood dangerously; so many had already died. Like most trends, this one would be over within a week—and what would become of all those recently-purchased skates? Traci, I thought, was here to save them. 

She looked longingly at a pair of skates packed in the front basket of a bike parked outside. I said, Maybe you just have a thing for feet.

Maybe, she said. 

I thought of what awaited me at home, the scooters I’d now have to get rid of. And I thought of what the weeks after would look like. All the skates I’d pilfer off the street. Anything for Traci. When I focused my attention back on her, she was drooling. Her eyes were still set on the pair of skates. You want to save the skates because you couldn’t save Richard, I said, or your Dad.

Look at the way they catch the light.

I stared at the skates, aqua colored, with bright pink laces. The brake jutted from the toe, domineering. And then my eyes returned to Traci, with her dreamy gaze aimed out the window. Faint freckles splashed her face and chest while curls bounced from her head. Her irises twinkled.

I took her hand and pulled her up—she’d never get over their deaths, but I could try my best to help—and I rushed us outside, where I scooped up the skates, Traci screaming beside me, lit up with joy. 

As the skates bounced against my chest, I admired how they caught the light.

Joshua Vigil is a writer and educator living in the Pioneer Valley. His writing has appeared in Hobart, Joyland, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. His chapbook Shapeshifter is out now from Bottlecap Press.

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 4

Johnny Lifeline

  • Post author By
  • Post date

By Calvin Cummings

I get together with this guy now that I don’t drink. He’s my not-drinking buddy. I thought our get-togethers would involve more, but our time together has become more about what we don’t do. 

His name’s Johnny, but in my phone, I’ve got him saved as “Lifeline.”

Last time I was over there, we were sitting on his back porch, not talking, passing a pack of cigarettes back and forth and freezing our balls off. I asked if he wanted to get something to eat. He shook his head.

“You mind if I go get something?”      

He did this backwards nod. Like lifted his chin up. In the drive-thru, I thought about whether this actually meant yes or if it was just an acknowledgement that something was said. Or was it nothing? Are there even words for what it was, or does defining it completely miss the point? 

Back on his porch, unwrapping my burgers, I decided it’s just one of those things that words don’t work for. Like how I feel about him and what we do for each other.

We continued not-talking as I ate, the burgers cold and the fries flabby because I drove the fifteen minutes back up the state highway to his house to eat it with him. With every bite the burgers revealed themselves to be what they really were, not food, because once stuff like that gets cold it stops being food, which it never was, you know what I mean? Like as long as it’s hot, you can trick yourself into believing it isn’t what it is, which is what it’s not, but once it’s cold…

Back and forth between the burger and the boagie, putting it down on the plastic chair’s corner with the ember just hanging off. Shivering, chewing. Missing out on the mirage. But even so, I could never bring myself to pull over into a spot in the parking lot and eat everything hot and crisp and alive because then I wouldn’t be with him. So I went back and ate while he didn’t and we continued doing nothing because that’s our way.

Back when I used to drink, I’d do nothing too. One of the nothing-things I’d do was watch nature documentaries, usually with other people, the roommates I used to have before everything spiraled and I landed at my mom’s. Those guys weren’t like me and Johnny. They could watch a peregrine falcon dive for doves, or a baby elephant get separated from the herd in the desert, or learn about the mushrooms under the ground, how they communicate electronically across thousands of miles of rot-eating foam without needing to drink ten, sometimes fifteen beers. 

“There’s this jaguar,” I told him after I finished the not-burgers, “that lives in Asia, like around Russia, or maybe even in it. And there are only forty of them, the jaguars, or tigers, this specific one. Can you believe that? And they’d never been captured on camera before these guys did it, the documentary people.”

I knew this because I watched the documentary about the documentary, too. The footage of the footage. The men wrapped in white camo, their telephoto lens peeking through the layers and the snow on top of the layers. That’s how I knew that this mythic creature had never been photographed before. That, before this, it wasn’t totally real, just a legend, a story told over and over.

My man hit me with the inverted nod.

“You should watch it,” I told him. “I can’t describe it. There aren’t words. The way it jumped from rock to rock and crawled out of its hole. This perfect thing. So cool.”

I crinkled up my silvery wrapping papers and shoved them into the bag, tossed it under my chair. An HVAC rattled to life and its hum whited out the evening’s other murmurs.

“Just unbelievable. That these things are out there happening and we don’t even know about it—I don’t know, like it’s so cool that it’s out there. I still can’t believe it.”

Another not-nod.

I’m not explaining this right, how me and him are together. Listen: he means more to me than any other person I’ve ever known and is second only to my higher power. I’m serious. If you gave me a button and told me, “Press this button and someone will die. Someone who is loved by someone else as much as you love this man. But, if you press the button, this man who you love will also feel how much you love him for the rest of his life, at all times forever, and the feeling won’t dissipate or grow stale the way all feelings normally do, it will be constant and buoyant and good forever.” If you gave me a button like that, I would press that button in an instant, because not-doing things with him is the only way I’ve found to prevent myself from doing all the other things I don’t want to do, the things I don’t want to do because I want to do them so badly, the things that every part of me, down to my atoms and the humming space within my atoms, sings for. It’s like no matter what, whether I drink or don’t, a chorus of me-particles belts the hymn of beer inside me, in faith and hope and love, convinced of what great things beer can do for me and us and the world, if only we believed. 

But sitting with Johnny makes me think I can learn another tune.

“Yeah, the jaguar looked like how Hot Dog looks when he jumps down from the couch to the floor and then up to the kitchen counter.” 

My childhood cat, Hot Dog. Fourteen years old this Christmas, in just a few weeks. He’s third after my H.P. and this guy. But there’s a gap between my number two and my number three, and it’s a lot wider than the gap between one and two.

Chins up from Johnny.

He feels the same way about me that I do about him, I’m sure, because why else would he let me come over? I come over after work, don’t even need to call him, and he’s always back there, dragging off a 27, offering me a light when I ask. I pull a chair up and we can just be. He doesn’t need to talk when we’re back there. He talks plenty in the meetings, where we met. There he tells us about his daughter and his ex-wife. He talks with his hands, shaking his fingers and stretching his arms out wide, telling us, “If I knew where they were I’d go to them, I’d nail myself to a cross in front of them—no, I’d let them nail me to the cross. But she’s changed her number and my mother-in-law won’t give me an inch.” 

Sure, we could talk about that stuff. But I think he likes that I can take his mind off all that. I like that I can take our mind off it. And so I tell him other stuff.

“These documentary guys, they did one about the ocean too. Apparently we used to be little tiny one-cell guys,” I said, pinching my fingers, “that didn’t even need air to breathe, and we lived off the methane farted up by the volcano pits down at the bottom of the ocean. Did you know that? That that’s what methane is? Farts? And that the whole world used to be an ocean?”

He readjusted how he was sitting, pulling at the crotch of his pants and crossing his arms, an unbroken stare into the fading-to-black backyard.

“We could just split in two,” I said, “and make more of ourselves. No sex. And now we’re made of trillions of these things.”

There were good times, too, he’d told us, when the kid and her mother and him would be at the zoo, usually after only one or two sips from the flask, before he’d completely emptied it and moved on to whatever wine coolers and domestic cans they served from the popcorn stalls. Everything would be coming into focus, the sunshine making its noontime transition from blue to straw-gold, the weather perfect, sometime between Summer and Fall or Winter and Spring, and he’d see a stuffed penguin or snake or something and pull it off the rack and hold it in front of his daughter’s face and say, “You like that? You want it?” and that’s when he’d notice his daughter’s twisted face, these uncertain curves of mouth and eye that she’d turn to her mother, whose face would also scrunch up, like they both had some pain somewhere deep inside themselves that was flaring up, and he’d go and buy the penguin anyway and hand it to his daughter and she’d shyly walk behind her mother’s legs, who might even have been pulling her.

He said he knew it was all his fault, but that knowing this didn’t stop him blaming them for working against him, for trying to ruin his life by always bringing it all up, by feeling things that made him feel guilty. Because it’s one thing to have a problem and another to have someone have a problem with your problem. 

There was some other stuff too. He put his hands on them. He says he’s only been told about it, doesn’t himself remember. And I’m always thinking, like, damn man. Damn. But these are the people who become your brothers when you’ve been where we’ve been.

We don’t talk about any of that now though, not on the porch, leaning back in the plastic chairs, hearing ‘em creak. Pulling our arms into our shirts and rubbing our palms against our ribs. That’s not what the porch is for. 

While I talked about poison dart frogs and bonobos, he stood up and limped to the deck edge and peed through the railing onto the grass. Like our doing nothing, this struck as something I’d do while drunk. But that’s the thing: we weren’t drunk. So it was different. 

I watched his back, his thinness rippling under the plaid. Steam slipped off his arced stream. I worked my hands under my armpits, trying to get back the feeling. My Johnny.

The HVAC shut off and the splat of his piss on the mud became clear. Enough time passed that I started counting the seconds.

“Phew-wee! You been holding it in?”     

He remained concentrated. I fiddled with the name tag on my polo. I work at the TJ Maxx by the quarry. Two months in and I’ve been promoted to customer service specialist. I handle most of the returns. People bring me their used things, stuff they no longer want—things they really should keep given how they’ve been used—or bought by mistake, or bought out of some hope for what the item could do for them, turn them into—expensive blenders, skinny jeans, Star Wars Legos (all on sale)—and I place the things that used to be theirs beneath the counter and run their cards and say, “Thank you for coming in! God bless!” and I mean it, I really mean it.

“The job’s good,” I said to Johnny’s back. “Yeah, the job’s real good. Real good. They think I could move up to management in a year, if I can stay in line.”

He grunted as the stream pittered out to a trickle, zipped himself up, and limped back to me. 

“I know I’ve told you already, but you ever need anything,” I said, “you can use my discount.”

He lowered himself into his seat and lit another cigarette. I had to snap to get his attention for the lighter, but then I did the same. We sighed the smoke out. The HVAC chunked back on.

I don’t know what Johnny does other than haunt this house where he used to keep his family. And now I haunt it too. But I guess it’s better to be a living ghost than just plain dead.

“Yeah, real good over there,” I said. “Real good.”

You might think, How could you possibly sit with a man like that? Did you also hit a woman? I’ve already explained it. You either get it or you don’t. And no, by the way, I haven’t but what does that matter? Would you even believe me? Would you even care?

I’m sorry I’m so defensive. Add that to the list of things you either get or you don’t. Now that I think of it, maybe the difference between you and me is that I know what the Apostle Paul’s talking about in Romans, with the whole “I do not do what I want to do, but what I hate.” I don’t need to hit a woman to know that I’m like Johnny, that we’re all Johnny. Maybe you do. Maybe that’s why you hate Johnny. Because he’s who you’d be if life ever forced you to really face yourself.

“So how are you doing anyway? Me talking your ear off as usual,” I asked.

He adjusted himself again, sniffed, rubbed a finger under his nose at some nonexistent snot, then flung his arm outward, turning and looking at me now for the first time all night, those flood-light lit eyes and expressionless smile, and gestured towards the world, like, “This is how I’m doing, my beautiful, dear friend. This. Here.”

I followed the trajectory of his arm, its cast across the backyard and up to the treeline, where bat silhouettes flickered against the blue-steel of night. A mourning dove called. Wind shushed through the deck railing slats. This could be any time. We could be anywhere.

I flung my arm out too, both of us now holding invisible glasses, raised in an unspoken cheers to another God-glorious day plucked from the jaws of our devourer.

Calvin Cummings writes and lives in Baltimore. His work is featured in or forthcoming from Blue Arrangements, Soft Union, Spectra, Scaffold, SWAMP, and others. calvinthomascummings.com

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 4

Word to the Wise

  • Post author By
  • Post date

By Reza Jabrani

Word to the wise: sober. That’s the word my ex tells me. We’re at the park. I’m drinking sake out of can and offer her some and she says “word to the wise” touching her nose meaningfully “Sober. Have been for three months and so is Judy, so if you think sitting here slurping cheap sake at three pm in the park is going to get you any points with her, forget it.” So I forget it. It being Judy. But I keep drinking the sake. It cost me nearly five bucks. It’s a lot cheaper in Japan. In the Japan I remember. Cheaper in Korea too. I taught in both places for years, chatting up the high achievers, the test-takers, the TOEFL brats. I used to wear a suit and tie everyday and battle crowds in the train and hang out with my boss for mandatory socializing in bars in bustling cities until the wee hours of my twenties. I feel old. The sake doesn’t taste good. My ex smells terrible. Judy looks good. She’s half-Irish, half-Chinese. I cross the park and buy three more cans of overpriced sake. The afternoon heats up. The park fills. I try to hit on Judy. “Word to the wise, it’s going to be a scorcher tomorrow. Maybe we could go to the beach?” She smiles politely, noncommittal. She must have not heard right. My wisdom. My words. “Word to the wise, I heard they’re renting sailboats at the point. I used to sail. Did you know that? Windsurf too. Word to the wise, it’s great for your health, your head. The wind rushing and rushing. It’s beautiful. Judy, did you hear me? Hello? Word to the wise, Judy, word to the wise…”

I wake up hungover and alone. No words come, wise or otherwise.


Reza Jabrani writes coarse prose and crude poetry @coarseprose

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 4

2 Prose Poems

  • Post author By
  • Post date

By Julián Martinez

WD-40

The key was having a harder and harder time with the lock. The lock was having a harder and harder time with the door. The door was having a harder and harder time with the frame. The frame was having a harder and harder time with the wall. The wall was having a harder and harder time with the house. The house was having a harder and harder time with the block. The block was having a harder and harder time with the tenant. The tenant was having a harder and harder time with herself. Her self was having a harder and harder time with her country. Her country was having a harder and harder time with its laborers. Its laborers were having a harder and harder time with their bosses. Their bosses were having a harder and harder time with their bosses. Their bosses were having a harder and harder time with their bosses. Their bosses were having a harder and harder time with their bosses. Their bosses were having a harder and harder time with their spouses changing the locks.

IKEA Bear

My girlfriend didn’t care that the stuffed brown bear in a lawn chair in IKEA was carrying a gun. Our cart is packed, she said, staring forward. Look at that bear, I said. No one in the store besides me was watching it load its pistol, the sneaky freak. We had been arguing over money and each other’s lack of listening skills all evening, so she kept walking when I made eye contact with the bear and broke into a sprint. I’d wrested the gun off of it, both of us snarling, when a salesperson asked if she could be of assistance. The bear plopped to the floor. The gun went behind my back. She was confused. She had no clue how the bear had gotten into the store. Was I sure it wasn’t mine? I blurted, yes, uh, actually it’s an engagement gift. As I kneeled down to pick up the bear with one hand and squeeze it tight, it bit me, pulled the gun free and shot me in the face. It fled on all fours, everything going black. While I was in a coma, my girlfriend built the furniture then took it all with her when she left. I’ve been practicing my revenge on the bear at the local gun range every day. The bear’s probably by the side of the highway in the forest now, making fun of itself for being so fragile and soft.

Julián Martinez (he/him) is the son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants and is from Waukegan, IL. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Hooligan Mag, Little Engines, The Sonora Review and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, This Place Is Covered Head to Toe in Shit (Ghost City Press, 2024) is available now. Find him online @martinezfjulian or martinezfjulian.com, or IRL in Chicago.

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 4

DOORS

  • Post author By
  • Post date

By Craig Rodgers

The phone is already ringing. David wakes at the sound. He turns in bed and looks about in a fog and he reaches for the phone, he presses the screen.

“Mark?”

Banging on the line, some kind of commotion and then quiet. David asks again.

“Mark? Hello?”

Another quiet moment. He starts to hang up when Mark’s voice comes through. 

“I found the door again.”

He says more but the commotion returns, louder now, then click, he is gone.

_____

Mark is nodding off. He sits at his desk with notebooks open showing figures he follows in only the barest of ways. He reads and reads until numbers blur and the lamplight falling across the page takes on a false tone, the light of a stage play, dreamlike and unreal. He stumbles his way down the hall. Shoes clack on tile. He touches his face, he yawns. The bathroom door is open. He pulls it shut at his back.

The tap is modern. He waves a hand at the sensor. Water gurgles and spurts out into a chrome sink. He fills a mug and drinks. Awake now. He shakes his face and blinks. He turns and opens the door.

At first he cannot accept it. The mind reels. A hallway lays out the way but the details are changed and wrong. Green carpeting lines a floor that goes on far longer than it should. He takes a step. Hands hold the wall for safety. The warm paneling is unfamiliar to the touch. He wipes the hand on his pants.

Passages exist where none should. A doorway opens onto a bedroom. Another shows an office of sorts. A library, a den. At the end of the hall there stands a door closed to him. He approaches in slow walk. He leans, wary. Hand reaching out. He turns the knob and pushes. 

The next room is cast in the pale light of buzzing overheads. Long tables divide the space. Racks of cabinets labeled in some other language take up all of one wall. All is quiet here.

He turns. The carpeted hallway at his back is as it was. The familiar bathroom of his home is there beyond the hall. He takes a breath and closes the door.

He opens the door, the same door, onto a bedroom. Sheets are mussed where someone has lain. A television plays but the sound is turned low, figures whispering between bouts of familiar canned laughter like the sound of falling snow.

A voice comes from somewhere near. Growing. He crosses the room to a closet, stumbling, catching himself. The voice is coming near. He crawls into the closet and pulls the door closed. The voice is at once gone. All sound is changed, even the unheard white noise breath of the walls is wholly altered. He opens the closet door.

Ahead is a garden enclosure. Glass walls look out on the world beyond. Houses, a street. A neighborhood entirely foreign. He moves along an aisle of quaffed greenery, ducking or peering over the rows of lush flora. Looking for a door.

At the room’s end is a small shed. Tools inside. Hoes and sheers and rakes. Gloves, seeds. Bottles for spritzing. He stoops to fit inside, pulling the door shut against him in the tiny space. 

He feels the change at once. The humid greenhouse air is replaced with a dry coolness. He opens the door onto a dining room set for a meal. Sweating now. Frustrated more than scared. He checks the phone in his pocket but there is no signal here in this place. He crosses the room to a door.

They go by faster now, searching for anything familiar. Yanking open doors and running to the next. A hallway, an attic, an office, a ballroom. More of the same, with occasional deviations. One door opens onto a stadium vacant of living things. One opens onto a room in pitch dark. He does not test the walls for a switch, instead pulling the door again closed and moving on. Doors and doors. Then.

He doesn’t recognize it right away. The green carpet. The hallway. He stops when he does. Standing, breathing. His body shakes. He resists the urge to run. The phone shows a signal. He moves with a measured pace. Forward. He scrolls and dials. It crackles but it does ring. He presses it hard to his ear. The voice is there, far away. He is in the bathroom now, and there comes a pop like a room pressurized. David’s voice is there, clear.

“Mark? Hello?”

Mark closes his eyes with relief and more. 

“I found the door again,” he says.

But the hair on his arms is standing, his fillings ache in his jaw. When he opens his eyes the door is closed.

David parks in a skid. He is out and crossing the lawn at a run. The lights all show in the house’s every window. Not just the windows, the open front door too. David steps inside. He goes room to room looking. Every door in the house stands open and Mark is not here. He checks again just in case. He calls friends, he asks questions. What could this be, where would he go. Each agrees to come help, even if they know not with what. With nothing left to do but wait for their arrival, David closes the front door.

Craig Rodgers is the name on several books ghostwritten by a gaggle of long dead Victorian spirits.

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 4

The Ever-Present Mr. Small

  • Post author By
  • Post date

By Alicia Ameur

Three-to-close is my least favorite shift. The streets are too dark and empty to walk home alone. I look at the clock and see it is almost closing time. Mr. Small was in the store for my entire six-hour shift. I caught glimpses of him, wandering from aisle to aisle, carrying a shopping basket filled hours earlier with a few loaves of white bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly. He never checks out at my register and, thankfully, tonight was no different. I watched as he timidly stepped into Tracy’s line to pay for his groceries. 

After punching out I search the window along the front of the store and don’t see him standing in his normal spot between the shopping carts and glass. Usually I can keep tabs on him while he watches me work at the register but lose him while I’m in the office closing out my drawer at the end of my shift. 

I edge close to the storefront window, trying to see further out into the parking lot. It is too dark beyond the row of cars parked directly along the entry walk to the store. I press my forehead against the cool window, cup both hands above my eyes to block the reflection of light for a better look, expecting to see Mr. Small on the other side of the glass, watching. 

He is not. 

I scan the parking lot, carefully considering whether a shadow is behind a tree or if it’s just my heightened fear causing an illusion. 

The hair on the back of my neck stands up as the automatic door swings open to the chilly night. I glance around as I walk out the door and still don’t see him. I scurry across the lot to the sidewalk, keeping a careful eye on the tree and its shadow. 

Once I reach the crosswalk I consider which route to take. The quickest is straight up Winthrop, a well-lit, frequently trafficked street. I would have good visibility of the sidewalk ahead, but there are many nooks for Mr. Small to hide. There are also homes on either side and I could knock on a door to get help, or even flag down a passing car.

The longer route would involve a half mile walk on Revere Beach Parkway, and another half mile to Short Beach. Not only is that an inefficient way to get home, there is a section where I would walk alone between the seawall and street with only a flood barrier on the opposite side. But there would be nowhere for Mr. Small to hide other than on the rock armour beyond the seawall. There aren’t any houses for me to run to for help and the cars drive too fast for me to flag down. 

I chose the faster, better-lit route. Only now I must decide whether to walk through the front or back parking lot of Dimino’s Subs. I am grateful to see that it is still open and the lights pool on the front lot, showing no Mr. Small in sight. There is only a sliver of streetlight shining into the back parking lot and I decide to stay at the front. My only concern is that I might be blindsided if he is waiting in the back lot on the other side of the building. 

I walk as quietly as possible, peering beyond the wall, hoping I don’t see him. Once I pass the sandwich shop, I have a clear line of vision all the way to the train station. I stay close to the chain link fence between the sidewalk and train station parking lot. There are a few cars still in the lot, but not a person in sight. 

My eyes dart in all directions. Ears conscious of every sound, listening for the rhythm of steady footsteps. All I hear is the rustling of dead leaves and litter in the light breeze. These sounds startle me into thinking he is nearby, then give me a fleeting, false sense of safety when I realize it is not Mr. Small. 

I think empty ‘positive’ thoughts to keep my panic at bay. There’s nothing to be nervous about, Alicia. He’s never hurt you before, he’s harmless. . . It’s not even a mile, you’ll be fine.

I reach Beachmont Station, and  see him standing behind the bank of pay phones. My heart races and my throat constricts. I come to a full stop, frozen in fear.

I take deep breaths and calm down enough to continue walking. I cross the street and walk past the bakery, hear the crinkle of his shopping bag and the thud of his boots on the pavement. He is walking about twenty steps behind me, his usual stalking distance.

I’m not sure if he understands what he’s doing, following me, a fourteen-year-old girl to work, dance class, and almost everywhere else I walk. Maybe he’s trying to protect me, I think, telling myself lies to tamp my fear.

I think back to ‘the incident’ almost two years ago. On that night, the neighborhood boys thought it would be funny to pull a prank on Mr. Small and tell him I was in love with him. I was home alone with my younger sister. We were watching a rented VHS from June’s Video Hut when we heard loud banging on the front door. As I approached the front hall, I heard Jay, Scott, Anthony, Brian, and T.J. laughing hysterically across the street.

The pounding reverberated louder and louder with each step I took. I yelled out, “Guys, it’s not funny!” The culprit furiously jiggled the doorknob while pushing and pulling the door in its frame, and I heard my sister whimper behind me.

I saw movement outside in the dark. Then Mr. Small’s face peering through the porch window, his hand cupped over his brow to get a better look inside. I stood frozen as his head turned in my direction and we locked eyes. He smiled.

I ran to the kitchen, feeling him watch me as I searched through the junk drawer for the list of emergency phone numbers. I remembered my parents added Natalie’s Restaurant.

I steadied my hands enough to dial the number. The hostess answered after several rings, and the sound of an adult’s voice suppressed my fear. I gave a hurried description of my parents.

Since they were regulars, the hostess knew who I was looking for. When she put the phone down to get them, full terror returned; I was alone in the kitchen with Mr. Small watching my every move. I could no longer stay strong and contain my tears. My shoulders shuddered as I quietly sobbed with my back to the window.

I waited for one of my parents to come to the phone. I focused on the background noise of the busy restaurant coming through the line: plates and silverware clinking, people talking and laughing, live music from the dance floor. People who were comfortable and safe, and at that very moment, I couldn’t remember how that felt. 

After what seemed like an impossibly long time, I heard my mother’s irritated, slightly slurred voice on the other end. Through jagged breaths and sobs, I explained what was happening and begged her and dad to come home. With the same casual tone she used to deny me a ride to a friend’s house, she said that their dinner had just been served. 

Dinner had just been served? There was a man trying to get in the house and she was more concerned with food. I composed myself enough to convince her that this was an actual emergency. She reluctantly told me she would request doggie bags for their dinner and head straight home.

After I hung up the phone, a rush of relief flooded my body, interrupted by a worry: assuming this Saturday night was no different from all the other Saturday nights, it was very likely that my parents had been drinking heavily. If my dad was too drunk to drive, they might die in a tragic car accident, all because I called them to come home early over a situation my twelve-year-old self couldn’t manage.

Even though I feared my parents would get in trouble for driving while intoxicated, I decided to call the police in hopes that they would arrive sooner than my parents. I explained the situation to the dispatch officer and she advised me to take my sister to a spot where Mr. Small wouldn’t be able to see us. She assured me a patrol car would arrive as soon as possible. I hung up before she could say anything else and slowly turned to see if Mr. Small was still watching through the window. 

He was.

I could still hear the boys laughing across the street. I focused long enough to decide that the safest place to hide would be in the living room, which spanned the back of the house. If we crouched behind the sofa, we would be close enough to the front door to hear if he got in, but far enough away to be safely hidden. We held each other tight, crying quietly while we waited for the police or our parents to help us.

The police arrived about an hour later, shortly before our parents. I saw the flash of blue and white lights illuminating the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. I told my sister to stay hidden and went to the dining room window. A couple of police officers stood below the streetlight in the grass triangle across the street. Mr. Small was hiding behind a bush with no leaves. After a minute or so the police got him to stand and walked him to the police cruiser. He wobbled back and forth trying to balance, clearly drunk.

My parents pulled up as Mr. Small was being placed into the backseat of the cruiser. They approached the police officers, walking deliberately enough to mask their unsteady gait. After a quick discussion, the officers drove away. I heard my parents’ laughter as they came up the front walk. I unlocked the deadbolt, my hands still shaking.

I asked my dad what the officers said, and he calmly told me they were going to keep Mr. Small in jail overnight to sober up and let him go home in the morning. They couldn’t keep him because he technically didn’t commit a crime. I wanted to scream at them.  They were so unconcerned about what transpired; didn’t even ask me if I was okay. I was too exhausted to talk about it further. My body felt numb and I could barely stand. I knew any protest would be futile until they sobered up. So I walked upstairs, brushed my teeth and got into bed. As upset as I felt, I was grateful there were adults in the house.

The memory of that night causes tears to well up. I remind myself that thinking about the past won’t help and shift my focus to my surroundings and the whereabouts of Mr. Small. 

I realize I have reached the shortcut next to St. Paul’s Church – stairs leading to a path that crosses over from Winthrop to Bradstreet. If I take the shortcut, I will be home in less than a minute. As desperate as I am to get home, I’m afraid to take the shortcut because the passageway is very narrow with fences on either side.   

I walk the full block around, knowing we will soon pass the house where Mr. Small lives with his mother. I wonder if he will continue following me home or stop at his front door. The closer I get to home, the faster I walk. As I pass his house, I pray he will stop there. My house finally comes into view and I increase my speed to pass the ten or so houses that stand between me and safety. 

I risk a quick glance behind me and see Mr. Small outside his front door, watching me walk away. I break into a sprint, fumbling my keys as I rush to get inside, panicking until I finally deadbolt the door behind me. 

I walk into the cold, dark, empty house, sit on the stairs and cry.

ALICIA C. AMEUR is an aspiring writer, knitter, avid reader and baker, as well as a mother to two adult children, Josef and Amina.  Born in Boston, MA, raised in the Beachmont section of Revere, MA, a suburb of Boston, she currently resides in Worcester, MA with her three black cats, Edgar, Allan and Poe.  She is currently writing a creative non-fiction book to share her and her family’s story with the world.

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 4

You Hate Me Correctly: A review of Cletus Crow’s Phallic Symbols

  • Post author By
  • Post date

By Conor Hultman

Cletus Crow has published a grand slam sophomore book of poems. Phallic Symbols (Pig Roast Publishing, 2024) has absorbed the disciplined formalism of the debut, like sunshine into a stone. Out of that formalism Crow has kept the bare beauty of the senryu, but allowed the verse to unselfconsciously expand into a free verse, occasionally prose poetry, that retains structural integrity and power. Rarely is a word out of place or tossed off. Very often does a poem glow with an unassailable wholeness, made up of atomically graceful single lines. “this is how / vampires / kill themselves”

        These poems don’t disappoint on the title’s come-on, but most often they’re about erotic disappointment. Festooned with phalluses and dotted with anuses, the poet accomplishes that Freudian alchemy of symbolism that draws a pornographic flag of genitalia intersecting, drains all the prurience out of it, transforming sex and its paraphernalia into potent totems of impotence and disappointment. “My penis is a sewage pipe.”

The suffering displayed here is almost always racked across a relational valence. Failed romance, unrequited love, flirting with friends, family history; the self being created across the collection is a group collaboration, a tapestry of every way people can make pain together out of wanting and not getting. “My therapist says / I should clone myself / so I can kill myself / without dying.”

Crow is funny without trying, which is the best way anyone can be funny. Almost every page in Phallic Symbols could make you laugh or cry, could be used as a Rorschach-blot-test-cum-poem. A short one to prove it to you:

     Outrageous Nowadays

     Man offered to buy my old gym socks for $30

     Can you imagine?

     $20 more and we can go see a movie

A whole world created at one glance, like a gay American Hanshan carving poems into a mountain with his penis. There’s a raucous, generous humor there, but it’s living uneasily with a great and knowing sadness. Part of the secret at work is religion, which flits among the poems about pop culture and fantasy. Christianity, a rich tradition of desire and loss and promise, is referenced with a reverence special to good art. “I make meth / with some man named Jesus / who is not God.”

The sequencing of the poems in Phallic Symbols is part of what makes the whole work. It starts with “Hike with Erectile Dysfunction,” where the exterior natural world and the interior world of sexual imagination fuse into a stark naked, frozen noninteractive image. It ends with “Hope,” a beautiful ode as tautology, including desperation and transference in ten simple lines, that function as a reinforcement of all the preceding emotive confusion and as a suggestive imperative line away, an exhortation to the reader to hope, even if the hope is futile and hurts. Between these two bookends are poems about whale penises, the penises of statues, God’s penis, girl penises, Godzilla’s penis, insect penises, penises after vasectomy, mannequin penises, cyborg penises, penis pictures, penis drawings, porn penises, grandfather’s penis, and the Washington Monument (which is, of course, a penis). Rather than brute obsession, Crow takes this material an expands it, goes off on variations of content and concept as frequently as technique. Phallic Symbols is like Apollinaire’s Alcools, or Mahler’s Third Symphony, in that it takes a theme and recreates it at every stroke, fully maps out its potentialities and drops the pen immediately when the next line would be repetition. Love is the most fertile battlefield for such artistic wars, as the above mentioned. “Then comes a night with your penis in / the love of your life.”

Cletus Crow nods subtly to influence when it’s due, Graham Irvin and B. R. Yeager notably. But these poems are all the author’s own. Crow is aware of being a singular voice, alludes to outsider status with grace, as with the poem “Literary Society”: “There are too many words I don’t know. / The poets are coming to kill me.” Phallic Symbols could very well be next season’s fashion, and after that a perennial classic. If you are trying to copy a more intelligent and hilarious style than your own, look no further. But don’t tell them I sent you.

Also, my copy came with a condom with a poem on the wrapper, but it would have to be some seriously fucked up sex for me to use it:

     BDSM

     a whip hands above

     handcuffs on the doorknob

     you hate me correctly

     at specific times

Conor Hultman lives in New York, New York.

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 4

The Dunes

  • Post author By
  • Post date

By Jon Doughboy

The Oregon Coast in the year 2000. The dunes of a new millennium. In the backseat a younger he, high-school dropout, hitchhiking in search of adventure, seeking a sense of purpose, a coherent self, a fine young woman to write poems to and ogle with soulful, sensitive anguish. To worship. The northwest coast of conifer-studded sand, an alien land to the eyes of an east coast teen, child of highways and denuded hills, medians hosting deciduous trees in their death throes, blighted chestnuts and scraggly sumacs adorned with assorted trash. Sprawling condo developments sliding into polluted rivers. George Washington crossed here, no, there, well, also, probably here and don’t forget there. 

NIN is playing. NIN was playing, then. Is playing, now, again, a twenty-three-year-old memory. The girl behind the wheel is singing along and staring in the rearview mirror, locking eyes with him, with the he of then, and singing “I want to fuck you like an animal.” It’s intoxicating, was intoxicating. He was scared. Horny. Aglow in the eyes of someone’s desire. Here is the hangover, still, residual radiation at age forty. But he didn’t like NIN because his friend’s older brother and schizoid drug dealer used to blast them out of waist-high speakers and they had to creep past his room as kids, tiptoeing cartoon spies hung on tenterhooks by his random acts of terror, until they were old enough to creep into the brother’s room to buy an overpriced eighth or take a hit from the gravity bong in a gray mop bucket in the corner, the plastic jug bobbing in it like a maimed apple. 

“I wanna feel you from the inside,” she’s singing, his ride, the owner of the Astrovan, vehicle of choice for rubber tramps and kidnappers alike, trailing rust and coolant and cigarette butts along the Oregon Coast. How did he end up here? Bus from Connecticut to Chicago. Rideshare from Chicago to Billings. Hitching onward from there to Idaho. Three more rides, more drugs, more propositions, to Seattle, then south, some college kids, an old trucker who was obsessed with the lizardmen lying in conspiratorial caves across the southwest on the brink of a mass invasion. Where are these dunes, he’s wondering, was wondering, and the dunes were more than dunes, they were freedom, proof, despite his doubtful parents and even more doubtful teachers, that he could manage himself, handle the world, grab it by the balls and not get shaken loose like stray and feeble lint clinging to its sex-slicked pubic hairs. 

“I want to fuck you like an animal” and he wondered and wonders what it would have felt like, fucking her, being fucked by her. She was thick and young but older than him, nearing twenty so to a sixteen-year-old, mature, experienced. Worldwise, sexwise. Where are these dunes? But her friend in the passenger seat is the one he was attracted to, desirous of. Eighteen, maybe. A fellow dropout, beautiful brown filthy hair, that hippie bounce, crown of leaves and grit and glitter. 

Beyond the dunes, the sea. The Pacific Ocean. He’s never seen it before. Where do the currents lead? How far Hawaii, Japan? What’s beyond beyond? Is Bobby Darin alive and kicking, crooning there?

He’s looking—was looking, the younger him—out the windows, searching for the dunes, avoiding the confident and penetrating glare of the driver. Too much energy, too many hormones, the rush of uncertainty, youth, hope, angsty wonder. He wants to fuck! He wants to feel! Inside, outside. Like a man, an animal, like the ocean eroding the shore. He’s floating above the van—him, the one he’s become, middle-aged, sluggishly juggling debts and regrets—breathing in its fumes, white coolant and burned oil smog billowing out of a pitted muffler, the smoke of a thousand spit-soaked roaches, patchouli, peanut butter, Old English-soaked upholstery. The other, younger him, is restless in the backseat, nervous, looking for the dunes he cannot see, though from these heights, from the bird’s eye of time, they’re clear as day to the older one, undulating beige waves breaking on pine and spruce reefs. His younger self can’t hear the elder version’s urgent croaking. It’s muffled by the passing years. No matter how loud his older self yells. No matter how important or timely his advice. Time is a vacuum. Time is a room, a cell silent save for the click of the door as it locks behind you. Time is and was and will be. 

NIN is blasting. The dunes are coming up. The dunes are here and gone. The lizardmen — who knows? — are thriving in their caves. The sixteen-year-old he is driven on, fueled by lust and pride and fear. The forty-year-old version drifts after him, an irrelevant flutter, weightless as a dream, howling mute warnings from a possible future. Somewhere, somewhen, beyond.

Jon Doughboy is a janitor at the Hrabal School of Embodied Poetics in Prague. Watch him pull some palavers out of the trash @doughboywrites