Tag: across the wire

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

THE SUICIDAL IDEATION THAT SPIKES WHILE CHANGING JOBS

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By Jesse Hilson

I was at a library and talking with a middle-aged woman and made a pass at her. I was telling her movies to watch and books to read. I touched her throat, then said I’m sorry, and are you married? She seemed alarmed but not like she was going to call the cops or anything. I think she gave serious thought to being unfaithful to her husband with me, like she wasn’t hostile to the idea but it made her feel very sad because she felt trapped. Only one other person lingered in the library with us, the librarian, another even older woman who sort of represented the middle-aged woman’s life and sense of propriety. She was pretending to read a book and waiting for us to be done with our conversation and leave.

I’m very attracted to you, I said, as if this fact should knock over everybody else’s needs and upend lives. Vronsky and Anna didn’t wait for the world to cohere around their wants. I didn’t say that at the time but I’m saying that now. This really happened and it’s still happening.

Then I drove her somewhere. It was a cross between LA and the town where I grew up. She ended up disappearing.

I’m the Son of Sam but instead of a dog, it’s a black mold pattern glyph on the wall at the head of my bed, behind the headboard that gets onto my pillows and seeps into my mind while I sleep, gives me hyperdreams. Grand Theft Auto Sadness. Antisocial fantasies in isometric pixel animations. And I don’t even like games.

I couldn’t give my wife a back massage because her back was covered with ink. Less a tattoo than a glossy book cover, like a catalog. For Xmas shopping. I said she had a lot of knots and tried to remember the parallel runways of muscles up both sides of her spine but the printed back ink was confusing me. I felt her big breasts. She kicked me out of the house. I tried to talk her out of it. A baby was walking around the room. It was such a bitter argument. It was forever. A typical theatrical event was happening elsewhere and I drove there listening to delusion-reinforcing music with cryptic lyrics as I used to do in that part of the city. At the theatre thing, which was full of kids because a lot of schools went there, an adult pulled a gun. They talked him into leaving and he was tackled by a tank of a security guard on the front lawn. I went to a concession stand inside which seemed familiar: and I bought three cannabis-infused bananas from the rip-off artist. Right away they got jumbled with normal bananas so I lost track of which ones had the drugs in them. So I ate three and went outside and there was a rock concert with people dancing and the band was playing the hit single from that year “(I Was) Standing In Heaven.” 

The interview they give to welcome new schizophrenics is called the IRIS (Ideas of Reference Interview Scale), and a high score on item 14 indicates that some message of significance has been sent to the interviewee through the media. In the Before Time, usually while driving, awake and not dreaming this time, I did perceive that — Kurt Cobain singing “Yeah” on the car radio meaning whatever random thought I was thinking at the moment I heard that verse of the song was true, song lyrics teased information about hidden Cotard arrangements, death marbled into life — but now it’s as if TV shows and movies and pop radio were daily rushes slipped quietly over the transom of my heavy-lidded eyes in REM aquarium depths. Dreams are safe psychoses (sike-oh-sees), rehearsals of virtual unreality. Wandering around fairgrounds honeycombed with tents and corrals no one wanted you to be in, populated with crooked firefighters, rapists, angry ghosts, disabled childhood friends, all in constant frenetic video game motion.

I am led by spectacle through dream-malls. Stage massive dynamic group-races that absorb me and take me along. Blood trips, voyages that always have some dramatic turning or betrayal among passengers, often family members. Shopping spaces, markets both indoors and outdoors, carve up group attention. An audience waits and peers into my dream-world. Mass media pilgrimages staged for someone, not me, not the dreamer displaced by the spectator’s passive ego. Everything is given a new portentousness, a signal within the dream transmission.

Setting up social media accounts, dating apps, work emails at my house, I had to come up with wifi superstitions to combat the ghosts that prevented multi-factor authentication from getting through. Everything’s combat. And the authentication code only arrives when it’s too late and you are no longer near the device. This is the shield of the poltergeist.

Frustration happened impacting the mood, paralyzed the mood-feeler beyond the actual obstruction causing the frustration. Can’t eat can’t sleep can’t perform simple tasks. The crazy man is a robot with one square task-peg stuck in his round queue-hole blocking a whole string of other later tasks, of all more amenable shapes. I don’t appreciate you setting the extroverted tempo. I have not intersected enough with all of you. Very well. I will take my chances. A noon whistle blotted out all repetitions of your name.

Jesse Hilson lives in the Catskills in New York State. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Rejection Letters, Expat Press, Hobart, Exacting Clam, Don’t Submit!, Bruiser, Apocalypse Confidential, and elsewhere. He has published two novels, Blood Trip and The Tattletales, and a poetry collection Handcuffing the Venus De Milo. He is the founding editor of Prism Thread Books. He can be found on X and Instagram at @platelet60.

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

LOU AND OTIS

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By Ed Komenda

Lou opened the door with a heavy blanket over his head.  I hadn’t seen my best friend in over a year, and it was a relief to see him standing there, cloaked like the South Side’s Obi Wan Kenobi. It was January.  A few days after Christmas.  A dull gray Chicago.  Lou welcomed me into the house:  A rented three-bedroom on 67th, where the temperature was a few degrees warmer inside than outside. Comforters covered the picture window. A blue couch sat at the center of the living room.  On the cluttered coffee table sat a TV remote, a Tambourine, a stack of X-Men comics, an old Ziploc of weed, an empty bag of Lays, a pickle jar half-filled with garlic chunks suspended in juice, a peanut butter jar with a protruding spoon, a two-liter of Coke with one pull left at the bottom, an ashtray with Camel cigarette butts, six or seven nubs of days-old blunts and a tattered copy of Road-side Dog.  The reason blankets covered everything is winter gas bills got too high.  One weekend of heating the place and you were bankrupt.  Lou zipped his body in a sleeping bag and breathed through a fabric air hole he fashioned in the shape of his mouth.  We walked through the living room and into the hallway, where another set of  blankets obscured a doorway.  Lou parted the blankets like a beaded curtain, and we stepped into the kitchen.  It was warm.  All four burners on the gas stove were going.  Lou sat at the table. In front of him sat a bottle of Jim Beam.  Next to the bottle was a tiny puddle of spilled whiskey – an erroneous pour left to evaporate.   Lou poured a shot for himself and took it. He slid the shot glass to me, and I took one, too.  We said little. We traded the shot glass until we felt brave enough to exit.  Lou said he needed five minutes to shower. He left the kitchen and entered the bathroom.  Shower sounds and steam leaked under the door. I rubbed my hands together and jammed them into my coat pockets.  I could see my breath.  The spot reminded me of the country house where I’d been living the past three years. I stapled Walmart blankets over the windows. I kept a space heater next to the bed.  I slept fully-clothed – pants, sweatshirt, socks – with a hood drawn tight around my head.  A heavy blanket on top. On the dead heating vent, I kept a bottle of Wild Turkey.  It was nice to have someone to drink whiskey with.  In the country, that someone was Otis, the fifth man on our four-man lease. He looked like a descendent of Andre The Giant if Andre The Giant grew up roping steer and using Keystone beer to fluff up his scrambled eggs. He stayed in the basement. Tucked in a corner room cramped with warped, musty vinyl, a king-sized bed and computer desk, he chain-smoked Winstons and played World of Warcraft, wrapped in a nest of secondhand blankets. We had a fireplace in the living room and no money for wood. But we worked in the library, and one day Otis returned with stacks and stacks of discarded books. He grabbed a thick history text and tore it in half.  Split it right down the spine.  He grabbed a geography edition next  and tore that in half, too.  I could tell he was well-versed in the art of book disposal.  We stacked the pieces like cords of wood. I crumpled pages into kindling balls, and Otis dropped his own in the ash. He flicked his Bic under the yellow pages, and soon there was fire.  We spent the next week watching Kubrick on couches we salvaged from curbs around town. I was working a library shift when Otis fell asleep during a Cheers marathon. A few embers popped past the metal mesh and landed on the carpet. Smoke filled the living room. A house party regular named Cody showed up and found Otis snoring. “Yo, wake your ass up!” He slapped Otis awake and stomped the smoldering rug. Otis rubbed the crust out of his eyes and peered through the haze. “Shit,” Otis said, “that was a close one.” He cracked a window, shut off the TV and went back to sleep.  Lou came out of the bathroom, slicking his hair back with a brush.  Steam followed him like a fog.  We drove to Chinatown for five-dollar soups. We cruised. Marquee Moon played from the car stereo.  We glided through the dirty slush with no plan, no discussion about what we’d been up to, no talk of what came next. We were full of broth. And we were warm. 

Ed Komenda is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Follow him on Instagram @ejkomenda

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

Leaky Boat

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By Dylan Smith

They put a perfect

Cathedral in my phone 

an endless Barn

gets Spiritual inside 

Wordy Mountain 

Brand New Bible

for every War 

and all its Trees

like an Ark 

Take that apocalypse

out of your pocket  

Google the Word 

Tevah—haha

why not, Put an-

other Endless War

in it, Put all of 

Moby Dick 

in it and

every Name 

of every Tree 

and all that Math 

My phone is a

leak in the Alphabet 

Proof of Space 

I loved your name 

absorbing Light

and Water and

this is the Way

we’ll be told 

our Mothers

are dead

Dylan Smith is serializing a novella-length fiction thing called Crayon Barn Chris and plants flowers for money in Brooklyn, NY.

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

Wrong Currencies

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By Sy Holmes

I stood next to Julia, holding a portion of Lou’s ashes in a Dixie cup. The air was calm, and it was cold, but not snowing yet. We were in a scrubby half-acre out behind Lou’s friend’s house, near Rochester. It was short on views, but my late father-in-law had claimed it was his favorite place on earth. He had hunted deer here. He could sit in his tree stand, drink Black Velvet, and be at peace. No memories of 9/11. No stress from the firehouse. No kids asking him for money. No cops bringing his drunk wife home. Just him, a rifle, a pint, and the deer that sometimes decided to show up. It was beautiful. He wanted his cremains scattered here. 

“Dixie cups?” I had asked Julia. 

“What the hell else are we supposed to scatter him out of, Ben?” 

“I don’t know.” 

I really didn’t. Maybe they made special ash-scattering cups. I had always assumed that was something the funeral home would give you on the house.

“Ben, baby,” she was talking slowly, like I was a kid in her second-grade class, “we’re giving him the best we can.”

“Yeah, I know, but I used to drink Sunny D out of these after church.”

“We’re doing the best we can.”

“I know, babe, I know. He’d just think it was funny too, probably.”

“I don’t think it’s funny, Ben. He’s my father. He’s dead. We’re honoring his memory.”

“I know, I know.”

Lou had been a man dedicated to his college rock. On late-night shifts in the ‘80s, when there was nothing else going on, he’d call radio stations until he became caller number five or whatever and win records. Eventually a couple of them had to ban him. His wife got herself banned from the local Chinese place, the school where she worked as a teacher’s aid, and most of the bars in Queens. His kids had gone to Catholic schools. It wasn’t a bad life, he’d say. I was from South Carolina, which was close enough to Georgia for him, so he always told me about how much he loved R.E.M. Murmur, Fables, and Automatic were classics, of course, but his favorite album was Monster.

 I’d come up to his retirement place – the house in small-town Pennsylvania – on Christmas and sit in the garage with him, listening to it as he got drunk and nodded along. He had the album on a moderately-scratched CD. Some friends I have are all about sound quality, fancy speakers. Not Lou. Lou was a man for the people. If the boys from Athens repeated a couple lines, that was alright with him. He wanted “Strange Currencies” played at his funeral. It felt weird holding him in a paper cup next to a picture of him, young and thin in his FDNY turnouts, CD player ready to go on the leaning folding table.

We were all going to walk around the woods, sprinkle out his ashes, then reconvene for the final goodbye. I split off from Julia and wandered, sprinkling the ashes into a bush here, in some moss there, trying not to create little piles of Lou everywhere. I loved the man. I don’t want to make light of his memorial. It was hard looking at Julia through the trees, trying to do the same thing. I liked to think Lou would think it was ridiculous. I liked to think he was looking down on me from somewhere. It made it easier to cope with the fact that he was gone, and this was all I could do about it.

We all made it out of the trees. There was a tasteful trash can for the Dixie cups. I crushed mine and put it in my pocket, promising myself that I would burn it in our backyard later. Hell, I might take the whole bag back in the car with Julia. Just her and me and the cups contaminated with the remains of her father. I would build a bonfire and hope the HOA didn’t bitch. 

Mikey, Julia’s younger brother, was standing by the table. He was wearing a black suit with a black shirt, a red tie to round it out. He was ready. Ready to play the disc. Ready to inform me that it was time to leave an Italian restaurant. I was in no state to judge Mikey’s fashion choices. I was freezing my ass off, an old down coat over my blazer. When you’re thinking about an outdoor memorial service, you really never consider that no one is going to lug fine wooden furniture out to the woods, or that maybe your dumbass family and friends won’t look like a Brooks Brothers catalog. You never think about Dixie cups and the fact that it isn’t going to be the classiest thing on earth unless you’re mob-connected. It’s hard to fuck up R.E.M., though, unless you decide to play “Everybody Hurts.” At least Lou could have that. 

Mikey pressed play. I was waiting for the feedback. I could almost see Lou, drunk and leaning his head back, tapping his foot, smiling. Instead I got the click and piano riff of the song after it, “Tongue,” the band’s ode to the cunnilingus, desperate yearning, and the pain of feeling like a last-resort lay. As I heard Michael Stipe’s falsetto start, I tried to bury my face in my hands and act like I was overcome with emotion. It didn’t work. I was cackling, man, not a shred of dignity left. 

“Ben,” Julia hissed at me, “this was the song he wanted. I don’t get it, either, but could you stop being an ass for five fucking minutes?”

I’m sorry, Lou, we fucked it all up. I should’ve known. You should’ve known. I hope you’d have done the same. 

Sy Holmes is a writer from western North Carolina. He lives in Montana with other people’s dogs.

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

If we make it through December

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By Sheldon Birnie

Some of the neighbourhood dads are planning a trip out of town to harvest Christmas trees. 

A little jaunt to the great outdoors sounded swell, just tickety-boo. Pocket flash full of rye, maybe sneak a toke or two after the kids run ahead. Good clean fun. Only we got this giant fake tree off my wife’s parents like 10 years ago, when they were downsizing. Seven feet tall, big fucker. I’m spitefully committed to putting the son of a bitch up every year until all it’s plastic needles fall off and it’s just a metal skeleton, or I die, whichever comes first. 

I send our regrets. Leave another one to grow out there in the orderly wilds of southern Manitoba. Maybe next time, I tell ‘em. Sure thing, dudes. Sure thing.

Every year, when we set this big bastard up in December and take it down again in January, we vacuum up at least a cup, maybe two, of green little plastic needles. But it doesn’t show. This thing might as well have come outta the box yesterday, fresh off a boat from China and a transcontinental shipping container ride by rail to the middle of fuckin nowhere.

At least the kids still get a real kick outta setting the thing up. Pulling out the bins of decorations – some as old as my wife and I, some older, even – and dressing the tree. Seasonal tunes playing in the background. The classics. Please, daddy, don’t get drunk this Christmas. I try to soak it all in, but it isn’t always easy. Merry Christmas, I don’t wanna fight tonight. They’ll be grown before I know it, uninterested or feigning so in all this seasonal mumbo-jumbo, and then they’ll be off on their own and it’ll be time for my wife and I to downsize ourselves. If we make it through December.

The tree, I’ve no doubt, will still be standing. An offgassing ghost of Christmases past. Unless we suffer a house fire or sewer backup in the meantime. Maybe I can pass it on to one of the kids, once they’re grown. Keep the tradition alive. Will they still celebrate Christmas, as the world spirals inevitably into climate catastrophe? At least the bulbs burning upon its boughs are LED.

And they do look lovely, late at night when the rest of the house is sleeping, all the lights out but one I read by. A tall dark rum with a splash of coke for colour close at hand. But most nights I’m not reading. No Chuck Dickens for me. I’m just staring at the tree – lights twinkling, sparkling, anytime my eyes tear up – until the morning comes yet again.

Sheldon Birnie is a writer, dad, and beer league hockey player from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. 

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

Tiny

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By David Williamson

The day Rosie was sick and stayed home from school, her daddy stayed too. He worked from his home office and sat in his chair and clicked on his laptop and looked at reports. Every few minutes his hand reached down and ruffled Buck’s golden doggy ears. Automatic, unthinking affection. 

Because he had to work most of the day, Rosie could do whatever she wanted. All morning she streamed musicals on her tablet. When her eyes dried out and started to itch, she switched off her tablet and plugged it into the charging station in the kitchen. 

She pulled a near-full gallon of milk out of the fridge, poured four giant glugs into a plastic salad bowl, squeezed eight seconds of chocolate syrup into the milk, and whisked it up until it frothed. She put the bowl on the ground, crouched on all fours, and lapped it up like Buck would do with his water, but it didn’t make her feel like a dog.

Rosie grew tired. 

Her bed faced the windows in her room, but too much sun came through for her to sleep. It cut chaotic scraps of light all over her bed like the throw-away parts of a paper snowflake. 

She gathered up a thick quilt, her pillow, and armfuls of her stuffed animal friends – Night-Night Bunny, Team Owl, Ogre, Jelly, others – and carried them into the bathroom, lined the tub with them and climbed in. The curtain screeched as she closed it. She lay in the tub thinking about chasing squirrels in the backyard until she fell asleep. 

When she woke up, the first thing she saw was a giant chrome cobra hanging over her. She shrieked, then remembered she made a bed in the tub, and the cobra was just the showerhead. She climbed out of the tub and called for her daddy. He didn’t answer even when she knocked on the closed door to his office. 

She moved like a ghost through the hallways, down the stairs, in and out of rooms.

Daddy, where are you? bounced off the walls. 

She ran back to the office and threw open the door.  Her daddy’s chair was gone. Where his desk should have been was a cardboard box instead, sealed with rainbow-colored tape. 

The insides of her body rattled. She floated through the house again, calling Daddy! but there was no Daddy, and – a thing she hadn’t noticed a moment before – there was no furniture. No pictures on the walls. No charging station in the kitchen. No tablet. A house emptied of everything but her and the box. 

She went to her daddy’s office and picked up the box. The rattling in her body, now a steady vibration. Her fingers trembled so the tape was hard to peel at first, but once she got a corner free, it came off in colorful strips. 

Inside was a miniature stuffed version of herself. She and the tiny Rosie even wore the same clothes: purple pajama pants and a t-shirt that read “Good Vibes Only.” The tiny Rosie clasped a rolled-up piece of paper in her tiny, stuffed-toy hands.

The real, life-sized Rosie unrolled the paper and read the message typed on her father’s official letterhead. 

Dearest Rosie,

I looked for you but couldn’t find you. Just this miniature stuffed version of you in the tub. I looked for you in your closet and in the crawl space. I looked for you in the attic and inside Buck’s doghouse in the backyard. I called your name, but you didn’t answer. I looked for you in the linen closet and the small cupboard where only your little body could fit. I looked for you in the sofa cushions and in the trunk of the car. I looked for you in the neighbors’ houses and under their beds and in their cupboards. I called the police, and they looked for you in the sewers and the woods and the tree forts that the neighborhood kids build. They looked for you at the school and the playground and at the bottom of the pool at the community center. They looked for you inside of wells, as children your size can fall into them, but you weren’t anywhere.

I don’t know how I could have missed you. Why did you leave? It’s been so long. I’ve gone now, still looking for you. I miss you terribly. 

Lots of love,

Daddy

He signed the letter in his official-looking signature. 

Rosie felt too sad to cry. She rolled the letter back up and hugged the tiny Rosie. Then she went downstairs, opened the front door, and walked into the yard. The grass under her feet was soft and fine like Buck’s doggy fur. The giant maple tree with leaves that caught fire in the autumn was now a thick column of knotted yarn. Wisps of batting poked out where the knitted bark came loose. Buck curled up in the corner of the yard, billowy and still. His eyes, hard disks of glass. The neighbors’ houses were enormous downy things that looked as soft as marshmallows. The sky was an unrolled bolt of felt. Clouds of stuffing hung down from fishing lines, and the sun was a bright golden pillow. 

Everything was stuffed except for her body. She felt the bones inside her arms, the tremors running through her muscles. The organs inside her hardened and squirmed as if she were hungry. 

She cradled the stuffed version of herself, lay down on the fluffy grass, and shut her eyes. Moments later she fell asleep and dreamed of her daddy at his desk, clicking away on his laptop, his head, inches from the monitor. His lips muttered words, but she couldn’t tell what he was saying. She called out to him from the doorway, but whatever words each said never reached the other. Their speech came out too softly. Whispers in cotton.

David Williamson is a writer living and working in Richmond, VA with with his family and a whole bunch of animals. Williamson’s stories are forthcoming or have been published in Short Story, Long, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Maudlin House, HAD, and others.

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

I Want to Tell Secrets to the Rhythm in Your Bones

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By Leigh Chadwick

You put your leftover orgasms in a Tupperware container in the back of the fridge while I recycle the night on the futon. I spend the weekend in your weather. It’s good, the sounds you make before breakfast. The sounds after. Outside, snow covers what snow is meant to cover. I dream you dressed in all white on billboards skyscrapers tall. You, all glow. You, a halo covered in snow. You, talking in touch. I always get turned on watching you put the moon to sleep. I’ve got a silly feeling about my silly feelings, so watch me get drunk in your wilderness, fall asleep beneath a blanket of linden, and wake up before my alarm to tell secrets to the rhythm in your bones. I never finish my dinner because your thighs are my favorite dessert. You, the shape of last night’s clothes strewn across the floor of the Comfort Inn. You, the tavern filled with smoke signals. You, the tambourine stuck to my chest while I use my tongue to build a karaoke bar along your ribs. You, the dim lights before last call. You, all hips pointing south as I crawl toward the closest mirage.

Leigh Chadwick‘s most recent poetry collection is Sophomore Slump (Malarkey Books, 2023). 

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

I Ate Around the Loss and Was Still Hungry

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By Joshua Vigil

Gordo pushes a damp kitchen towel into my hands. Shaped like a cylinder, it’s vegan banana bread. He does this every week, ever since we first met. Gordo believes an alien invasion is impending. He says we should eat up. Am I fattening myself for the aliens, or for him? Gordo tosses another bunch of bananas into his shopping cart. Gordo thinks that love is a lie. I tell him friendships are just as deceitful. My pants stop fitting and so I buy new ones. Gordo is a little ghost. A bed sheet draped over his body, thin slits for eyes from which blood drips. I tell Gordo this is the only time I’ve ever enjoyed Halloween, then I have the dentist fix my five cavities—he does this every year now, since the gifts started coming. It’s always the same five cavities. Is he a bad dentist but a good businessman? Once I asked Gordo, Would you still be my friend if I was a capitalist pig? Gordo said he’d marry me right then and there. I was dreaming of squat brownstones in Brooklyn not far from the water. He was dreaming of pigs. I start wearing sweats and only sweats. When I’m not home, Gordo slides the bread through the mail slot. I scoop it, flattened, and eat it watching  the news. The floorboards creak as I hobble past now. The downstairs neighbors say cracks have formed on their ceiling. I tell them mine is water-stained, and what’s the difference? Gordo says the aliens are coming any day. He pushes two loaves through my mail slot. Gordo snaps at me in the car, on the way to the movies, after the movies, in the parking lot, at the potluck. He’s getting evicted. Gordo snapped at me once in bed—this was before, when we were still together. He has anger problems and drops people easily. Will we be friends for the entirety of our lives? Three loaves fall to the floor. I unwrap them, pick at them, leave them for the flies. On the phone, Gordo is terse. He doesn’t know where he’ll live. I ask him if it even matters if the aliens are coming. He snaps—this isn’t a joke, this is my life. I am teaching for the first time this semester. A student kept Mick hostage last year. Another made sexual advances towards Lily. My students look at me with pity. It’s a look I’ve seen in Gordo. His loaves of banana bread pile up and pile up. He says the aliens arrive tomorrow. I should really consider eating more.

Joshua Vigil lives in the Pioneer Valley. His work has appeared in Hobart, HAD, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

His Heart is Like an Open Turnpike

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By Jon Doughboy

Chris Christie gifts Zelensky handwritten lyrics to Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” as “inspiration” while inhaling cold borsht at a state dinner surrounded by dour looking-icon paintings of the geniuses of Slavic history framed in glitzy gold, then burrows inward and downward, like the history of 20th century literature, entering the maze-like intestines of memory, wading through layer after layer of performed selves—the attack dog attorney, the lobbyist, the Governor, the scandal-maker shutting down bridges to crush disobedient mayors and making unapologetic rogue picnic trips to shut-down beaches, Romney’s potential bestie, Trump’s plus-sized lapdog, a would-be sportscaster, and the current long-shot candidate campaigning to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee—Christie is inhaling borsht but yearning in his heart of hearts, brain of brains, gut of guts, for a deep-fried ripper from Rutt’s Hutt, the snap of the crispy hot dog skin, the sun bouncing off dilapidated guardrails and the hot and cracked Clifton pavement, the cool yellow relish, the onion ring grease soaking through the paper plate, the ice bobbing in the red birch beer, and he travels under the Hudson of memory via the ARC Tunnel he aborted but which lives forever in his imagined accomplishments and he’s suddenly a giant, Gargantua astride the Garden State, and he’s bellowing across this armpit of America that he knows and loves and hates and lives and breathes, “It’s my life, it’s now or never,” and who does this Zelensky think he is? Has he ever even heard of Rutt’s? Has he ever swum naked across the Passaic? Has he ever crushed the throats of the Hudson County political bosses? Has he ever won an eating contest against the entire Genovese crime family? “My heart is like an open highway,” he’s singing and all his Jersey brethren join in, a chorus to their beloved big man, from their cars stuck in the Holland Tunnel and idling on the turnpike and speeding on the shoulder of the parkway, and a charm of goldfinches roosts in his cavernous nostrils and violets bloom out of his ears, “Better stand tall when they’re calling you out,” and it’s raining fat beefsteak tomatoes and assorted bagels, “Don’t bend, don’t break, baby, don’t back down,” and with his massive, life-giving hands, he is sowing liberty and prosperity from the Tri-State Rock to Cape May Point, the Delaware River rushing along to his right, the Atlantic eating into the sandy shores on his left, as he marches towards D.C., towards relevancy, the presidency, his destiny—“Mr. Christie, sir, about NATO, as I was saying, are you aware that a single F-16 could…” and the ripper is once again cold beet soup and Bon Jovi isn’t playing and Trenton is 4,700 miles away and Chris isn’t an attorney or a governor or a giant, he’s just a man sweating into his dark suit and getting pricked by his American flag lapel pin under the judgmental eyes of icons he doesn’t recognize, talking about military tactics he doesn’t understand, and singing softly to himself, “I just want to live while I’m alive.”


Jon Doughboy is New Jersey’s Poet Laureate currently completing a writing residency at the Walt Whitman Travel Plaza on the southbound side of the turnpike. Watch him relish his rippers @doughboywrites

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

Drinking At Home

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By Phil Earle

The morning after, I decide it’s over. Making breakfast and doing the dishes at the same time, I say to myself, “Never again.” The baby on the hardwood between my feet pulls a pan from the cabinet and the crash sets my eyes herky jerky. How nice it will be, to be past this eight drink a night prison. How liberating to break the shackles of this routine: drinking and vaping and checking baseball scores, then YouTube NFL highlights, then rearranging my golf clubs. Not Leaving Las Vegas, but Staying in Milwaukee. 

I pick up the baby and hold her. My hand covers her entire back. Middle finger snug between her shoulder blades. A cube of butter collapses in the hot pan. Yesterday I started drinking at 4:37 PM. The headache stabs as feet pomp pomp pomp down the carpeted stairs. One, two, three kids—Where is the juice? Shit. We just ordered groceries but had forgotten the juice. Juice the life blood for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, for smoothies, for everything. The boys amble to the table like it’s a board meeting.

Out the picture window, Beth kneels in the garden. She planted corn and squash and beans and lettuce and strawberries and a wall of tomatoes outside of the garage. Every day the vegetables seem to multiply. The sunflowers grew fifteen feet tall and bowed so far into the neighbor’s yard, Beth had to tie them to the fence with twine. She likes to talk to me about her garden, usually when I am on my phone, ordering vintage band t-shirts or Super Nintendo games, checking the scores. 

I make eggs like every morning: scrambled for the children, fried for Beth, and Diet Coke for myself. Then I am holding the baby in the crook of my arm and bending over to pick up toys in the long grass of the yard. I am up and down the stairs doing laundry. I am taking all the children to the park while Beth works in her office with the door shut. I am up the steps, down the slide. I count to ten thousand, check baseball scores. Check my high school friends on social media. Some have become fascists. A black butterfly flutters up and away across the playground. I walk around the jungle gym to make sure my kids didn’t get their necks caught in the monkey bars. I count to five hundred and watch them swing sticks at each other. They wear the jeans and sneakers and haircuts of older boys now. A strong slow breeze moves around my face. The baby grabs at it. There are cigarette butts below the bench by the playground, and I imagine hitting that smoker so hard that they shit themselves. There are still two Coors Tall Boys in the fridge, I think.

By 4:50 PM, the van is parked for the night, and I drink White Claws in the shadow of the garage door. A ghoul with a stomach like a Chevy rusting and forgotten in a riverbed. Alone for a moment with the heat and the gardening supplies and ripped inflatable pool toys, I commune with the smell of gasoline and my sweat. Then I vape weed, and then the Juul, and then I reset the sprinkler out in the stiff, blanched grass of our yard.  

The boys are busy in the basement and Beth is inside breast feeding the baby when a rabbit hops under the swings, and stops between the lawn chair and the fire pit. I hit the Juul and record the bunny on my phone. It’s big marble eye records me back to infinity. A black butterfly, like the black butterfly from the park, swoops down and lights on me, walks down my arms until my trembling hand sends the butterfly skyward, tottering upward, along the garage gutter, between the power lines, up and up, racing the airplanes to heaven.

“I have to grab a couple things for dinner,” I tell Beth. She wants me to go, and knows how much I like riding my bike, knows how I need my privacy, though it worries her.

On the hill overlooking the airport, a plane comes in, and a plane goes out. What looks like a death ray rotates on the top of the control tower. The panorama is inspiring, then uninspiring as I watch the traffic move down Layton, the smoke billowing from the power plant in the distance. Notice the small plane tooling, remember the Hardee’s I cannot see. The Great Lake I cannot see. I drink one of the White Claws I’ve just purchased but hold it close to my bag, in case a cop is around. 

I have written down inside myself a disappointed prayer: a summation of desperately low bar hopes. I thank whatever god that I will soon be over this, one day. Then Don from work texts me, asking me to cover for him tomorrow, and I fill my belly with White Claw, crush the can and quick open another. A plane comes in. A plane goes out.

Chicken sizzles in the pan with yellow, red, and green peppers. I chop a handful of mushrooms. Then an onion. All for curry. Beth comes down and kisses me. The baby is sleeping. My gut is rotten but I still eat chips and pretzels and dip and sour gummy watermelons at the sink while the chicken fries. I listen to my football podcast. I have another drink in my hand, twin to the one on the workbench in the garage. I move back and forth between them. 

After dinner, I am tired. Beth and the boys play piano in the living room. I lay on the floor and my legs ache from all the standing. I take the boys up for bed and they fight me. I yell at them, want to cry but don’t. Their pajamas are getting too small. Lightning fills the sky outside their window, illuminating the tin Jurassic Park Raptor Containment Area poster I ordered for them off Amazon. I fall into a short narcotic sleep with my arm around one. Then I stumble down the stairs an hour later, or maybe years. 

I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, older now, hair messy in a ponytail, a scribbled self portrait. Then I try to brush away that sick-sweet White Claw smell for Beth until my gums start to bleed. 

I look at the darkened ceiling above our bed. Beth and the baby are asleep beside me. A twist of blanket keeps my bad right foot elevated. I listen to the noise machine hum, the cars ghosting through our neighborhood. I already feel hungover.

Phil Earle works as a fry cook down by the port. His writing has been published at Fence, Post Road, Beloit Fiction Journal, Juked, Hobart and The Millions.