Jackson Browne said these days he's doing more walking than talking, but I want to take it one step further—I want to pour concrete over my mouth, walk into flame, eyes wide and head high and chest out and… goddammit, that’s a lie. I’m sorry.
Let me start over…
When was the last time I cried? Face painted wet under blue skies, pleading with angels.
When was the last time the earth carried me? Caked in dirt and play and promise.
When did I quit trying? That drive from madness, beautiful, into a golden horizon.
When was my mind last quiet? A chorus hopeful even in dream. When was the last time I woke up proud? Don't answer that. When was the last time you could look me in the eyes? Don't answer that.
When was the last time I cried? Heavy-laden, eyes bloodshot and guttural and godly.
I could use a good fucking cry. A cry to drain every drop of sorrow and shame and guilt and horror and echo and void and yesterday and always and nowhere and nothing and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all and the weight of it all.
These days, it's hard.
D.T. Robbins is the author of several books and founding editor of Rejection Letters.
Adam Soldofsky is the author of the poetry collection Memory Foam, recipient of an American Book Award and Telepaphone, a novella. His latest collection, Three Short Novellas, is available here.
The morning his daughter turned seven months old, a vision of suicide overcame Price. While lying in bed he imagined entering the kitchen of their hilltop home, gazing out at the shaved hills of Marin County and pulling the trigger of a pistol raised to his head. He saw his body jerk back against the pantry then fall to the hardwood floor. He watched blood trickle across the floorboards and pool in the kitchen’s northeast corner, as the house tilted slightly in that direction. He observed Delancey rush in, stare at his body without emotion, and dial 911.
Despite how real the vision felt, Price did not own a pistol and had only fired a gun on a few occasions in his youth. He was also too cowardly to kill himself and knew this as deeply as he knew anything.
He rolled out of bed and entered the kitchen. He brewed coffee, cracked a window and smoked a joint. The sun had not yet risen, but its light crested the eastern hills. A thick fog crept just below the trees. Stoned, he turned the shower on and waited for the steam. In the shower, he masturbated. Fully enveloped in steam, he came.
In the kitchen he poured coffee. Cream and local honey. He cut a slit in the top of a blueberry muffin and slipped butter inside. He glanced up as Delancey entered the kitchen and tried to stare at her in a way that he believed to be seductive.
When she noticed him, she could not stop laughing until she disappeared into the bathroom.
Price sat in his armchair and listened to Delancey’s laughter drown into the sound of the shower. The morning was cold, so he walked over to the fireplace and started a fire. He sat back down and sipped his coffee and tried to resist the urge to unlock his phone. His daughter would be awake soon, screaming for his attention. Sitting with her so many hours a day, he found the phone beckoned to him like the pipe or a needle does an addict. It wasn’t just the socials, but the ads, and the news on socials, and the clipped videos—politics and war zones and hurricanes and floods and extreme heat events and fires and plane crashes burnt into minds in fifteen second intervals—that he could not stand to see but could not stop watching.
Delancey hurled open the bathroom door saying she’d been summoned to Tokyo for work at once. She would be gone a week, but there was nothing to worry about, Price would be fine.
Don’t you think you’ll be fine, Price realized she was asking.
Yes, of course, dear, he croaked out.
Delancey disappeared back into the bathroom, and Price, feeling the ghost notifications from his phone, let his gaze drift to the mortar between the bricks of the fireplace. He stared at the mortar and tried to breathe calmly. He’d never thought about how simple the term fireplace was. Fireplace, he said out loud and forced a laugh. How effortlessly simple. Fireplace. Something about it calmed him. Fireplace, he kept saying out loud. Fireplace. Fireplace. Fireplace.
Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His books JADED and QUASI are available from Main Street Rag/Mint Hill Books and Anxiety Press, respectively. His newest short story collection ROLLING ON THE BOTTOM is available from Cowboy Jamboree Press. His fiction and essays have appeared in Wigleaf, Pembroke Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Gargoyle and New World Writing. He lives and writes in Marin County, California.
How to describe that human face the broken neck stolen from its original placesetting and fitted onto a new pair of shoulders. The lowered ears and the narrow mouth and the Aquiline nose of Roman Empire. Crowsfeet around the eyes and a receding hairline and the defined slash above the chin so like a man who is accustomed to barking orders. The sculpture in all can be divided into three parts, the first of which constitutes the form of the face its boundaries and the space it inhabits, another the features, and those which in his own language were called the sentinels of the highest place of the body, in ours the eyes, the third. Of the first the massive borders reach from our shins to a few windowslats short of the ceiling and from ear to ear the width of a human wingspan. The ponderous skull is supported by a pick of a neck which bears a winding slice that looks like a river dividing provinces or a scar that has birthed from the throat of one man an idea—one lopped off then reattached to bodies of new marble as generation after generation lopes on like lemmings into the present. The complexion has tarnished over time from porcelain white to a tawny brown that blotches the chin and cheeks where millions have fingered the blessing of Caesar. The second part the features are encountered in threequarters view and from the peon’s position beneath the head they resolve themselves somewhere to the left and behind. Who hasn’t in their childhood looked up to their father as he placed a hand on the sink gazing out the window or turned away to the faraway distance of Judgment and Consequences as he focuses his attention on the negative space of thought. But the third part the eyes betray the inhumanity of this thing which appears a man but is actually an idea calcified into stone—pupilless cut from slab and undiscerning grey. They understand nothing. They occupy a solid skull focused someplace in the negative space of thoughtlessness (as is ascertained now in our humanity) and at any moment it might snap its supports and roll down on the frail bodies that love it, crushing us. Objective and possessing a thirst for violence that can be slaked no better than a rock that says I’m thirsty.
Josh Boardman is from Michigan. He is the author of the Colossal chapbook series (2024-5), Plantain (West Vine Press, 2018), and the Latin translation project We, Romans (2015). His work was shortlisted in the 2025 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, selected as a finalist in the 2024 Fugue Prose Prize, and his stories have appeared in journals such as New York Tyrant, Juked, and Dandruff Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is working on his second novel and a collection of stories about his hometown.
He is the founder, owner, and operator of Hewes House, an organization with the aim of elevating aspiring writers.
Route 1’s a twisting labyrinth of fast-food franchises, tattoo parlors, strip clubs, and fortune teller booths. It’s got no exit or entrance, beginning or end. I tossed my bread crumbs away. Deadweight. I pray I’ll run into the Minotaur.
Traffic lights bristle all around, a canopy of thorns. Sharkskin sky looms overhead, sharp enough to cut. Below the traffic light, a homeless man’s drowning in an invisible sea, clutching a sign that says, ‘He Has Risen.’ Out front, a rainbow blossoms in an oil slick. Weeds poke through the cracks in the asphalt. Faded like an old dog’s coat, they tremble in the breeze. I admire their resilience.
Across from the man, on an abandoned lot, several teenagers shoot hoops. They waver on the abyss of adulthood. I can tell from the way they move their dreams are still intact. Their hands don’t know what it’s like to struggle in open water. It would be easy enough to walk over and join them. But the gulf of compromises makes this impossible. Besides, their innocence would bore me.
David Luntz – Work is forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, Hobart Pulp, Farewell Transmission, Bruiser, ergot., X-R-A-Y Lit, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david
And God gettin’ all judgy and shit just because Steve got hungry after all that big snake wranglin’.
And where all them kids come from?
Much more interesting story.
Plumbing v. storage.
If God’s a dude like people always say, then he’s wondered at least once in his life about butts and penises, innies and outies, and how not to make a baby.
If God’s a dude then he’s watched porn at least once in his life and wondered if it’s the p or v that’s more important in baby making.
Steve’s a dude.
Steve’s had plenty of thoughts only God knows.
If God’s a dude and Eve was a chick and we’re all God’s children then it’s pretty gross that he wanted to watch his adult daughter running around naked with his adult son in the first place.
Just Steve’s two cents.
Signed
–Steve
Drevlow is EIC & poet laureate of all things BULL/bull. You can check out more of his bull shit at thedrevlow-olsonshow.com or on twitter, insta, face, bsky, & threads @thedrevlow.
On Saturday morning, before it gets too hot on these summer days, the landscaping needs some tender loving care. It’s been raining so much and the grass is growing up: out of control! The neighborhood kid drives the ground-shaver while mom operates the push-roller. She’s listening to Celine Dion on her Walkman.
Jesse Hilson is a writer and artist living in the Catskills in New York State. His work has appeared in Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Apocalypse Confidential, Scaffold, Farewell Transmission, Excuse Me Mag, Expat, Misery Tourism, and other venues. He has written two novels, Blood Trip and The Tattletales; one story collection, The Calendar Factory; and a poetry collection, Handcuffing the Venus De Milo. He can be reached on Instagram at @platelet60 and he runs a Substack newsletter called Chlorophyll & Hemoglobin.
My father said it was nice, nice, that we had a chance to ask
my mother what she wanted a week before she died:
service at the church, no funeral home, ask Gail about the song
about the eagles (we never did), a simple meal, “Bury me next
to my first husband—but not until you’re dead too, Rod—to mix
our ashes,” and then she pointed at me from the bed in the living room,
(ghost bed I’d see long after it was removed) from that quiet mouth
of hell, she said to me “You’re in charge.”
I tried to stop him but my father
insisted on asking, “What do you want to be cremated in
the dress from Ben’s wedding, or the one from our renewal of vows?”
The closet full of seasonal clothes and the duck print sleeping bag
where we placed my mother’s ashes on the high shelf.
What Comes First
There’s no space for warmth here between the double-paned hospital
window and the drive to the gold coast where I lay out a sheet of plastic
and cut out rotted windowsills as the snow hastens and stops
once I’ve made it halfway home from work early. More hawks
than there used to be however harried on their watch, the camel
keeping the sheep, the draft horse eating its grass among the mules.
My wife lets out extended notes of labor and a handful of my shirt
and after twelve hours of it the hospital becomes familiar:
a loved one immobilized in an adjustable bed. Unsure
of the question, I watch my wife riddle a physical
sphinx and come out of it with not just her own life.
Once I get to hold my child, her eyes grey blue, I observe
my mother rising out of the unconscious, bewildered
by her son become a father.
Ben Pease is the author of the full-length poetry collection Chateau Wichman: A Blockbuster in Verse (Big Lucks Books), a poetry-infused Dungeons & Dragons adventure module called The Light of Mount Horrid (Ghost in the Forest Games), the hybrid illustrated edition Furniture in Space (factory hollow press), and a few chapbooks. He is a co-founder of the Ruth Stone House and Sistrum Books.
Charles J. March III is a field medic veteran currently living in Orange County, CA. His work has been put out by Taco Bell Quarterly, Malarkey Books, Back Patio Press, Points in Case, Bear Creek Gazette, etc. More can be found at LinkedIn & SoundCloud.
I remember almost nothing of the 2007 Werner Herzog documentary, Encounters at the End of the World. But I remember this.
“Is there such a thing as insanity amongst penguins?”
Whether Herzog’s hyperbolic nature made him ask, or he was simply bored to tears talking to a penguin scientist, the scene that follows haunted me. The scientist, after a long pause, where he deftly skirts revealing he thinks Herzog is a whacko, answers, “Well, they do get disoriented.”
With morose Catholic hymns as soundtrack, the camera focuses on a penguin turning away from everything it’s ever known, becoming horrifyingly small as it moves farther and farther into the vast inland of Antarctica.
Disoriented, I thought. Better not contract that.
Herzog’s voiceover continues, “Dr. Ainley explained that even if he caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would immediately head right back for the mountains…But, why?”
As a kid—now, too—when I was in a car I played a game. As scenery whirred past, I slung an imaginary ball out into it. My mind was magnetically wed to the ball. And the whole game was having it sail, avoiding objects speeding past, then return like a boomerang, again avoiding what I was unable to see or predict when I “threw it.”
Equally spaced objects, like electric poles, or fence posts, made the game impulsive. And deeply rewarding. I played for hours. On road trips. Going back and forth to the store. It’s what I did.
But why?
Growing up, I often heard about a camping trip when I was two. How, in the shortest time possible, with the adults’ attention elsewhere, I wandered off and fell in a river.
My grandmother dove in the three-foot water and saved me. She’d bring it up sometimes at family events. Turning the room silent. Everyone focused inward as they replayed that terrible memory. But the thing is, I didn’t remember it. Aside from what felt like an irrational fear of water I eventually got over, it wasn’t a part of my identity the way it was for my family.
Instead, my trauma blossomed at Walmart.
I must have been about five. After getting distracted while deciding which VHS to convince my mom to buy, I finally held out a movie in front of me and ran where I thought she was. But she wasn’t there. So, I cried. And eventually a worker called her name on the speaker while I choked on air and salty boogers.
I recalled this often, feeling the emotions as if they were fresh, until college, where, in an Intro to Psych course, I learned tons of people experienced the same thing. Except, it never happened. The professor said researchers convinced gaggles of people into believing a false memory. Google “Lost in the Mall Technique.” It’s fucked up.
I called mom. Did she remember? The movie? The crying? Her name announced throughout the store? The embarrassment? The fear?
No, she didn’t. But we kept talking, and just as the researchers would have predicted, she started to doubt herself. The handrails of her memory turned soft and gooey.
“It could’ve happened,” she said.
I felt unmoored, the bedrock of my identity drifted. If anyone had recorded my face at that moment, I would’ve looked exactly like that penguin the moment before it set off.
One of my favorite pastimes is wishing I’d become something I’m currently not while I was still young.
I should’ve been a mechanic, I think. A police officer. Lawyer.
Now that I’m almost forty, it’s easy to know my tics and proclivities. I can feel the happiness these jobs would have brought seeping through the sheen of disappointment I wear like skin.
“Whatcha doing?” My wife asks, finding me eyes closed and cross legged on the couch.
“Shh, shh,” I raise a palm, imagining myself covered in grease, wrenching under a hood that isn’t mine, dollar signs floating in and out of frame.
I was fundamentally broken as a kid. What made other kids see someone doing a job and think, I could do that, wasn’t installed in me. Skills were what other people had, while I looked at them, mouth open, like an idiot.
I’d love to think it was for the same reason we tell certain people not to rush to college. That I was figuring it out. Playing the long game.
But it wasn’t.
I was scared. Of what every man is scared of.
Do you know what it is?
Lean closer, I’ll tell you:
I was scared I wouldn’t be any good.
I’m in Search & Rescue. I spend inordinate amounts of time looking at maps. The word for this affliction is “cartophile.”
By age three, humans can correctly identify a map. There’s an argument that using images to locate oneself in space is innate to our species. When someone can’t, we say they’re lost. And, there are downright bizarre behaviors and symptoms associated.
First, they panic, experiencing an overwhelming urgency to find something familiar, but failing to utilize available resources, such as maps and compasses, to do so. Instead, they wander in circles. If it’s cold, they don’t build a fire, even if equipped with the tools and know-how. Memory loss is next, events that just occurred being the first to go. And when a rescuer calls out, they rarely answer.
Finding them is a disturbing experience. Based on looks, you’d think they’ve been lost for months, when, in reality, it’s been less than twenty-four hours.
A man I helped rescue once looked me in the eyes and asked, “Who am I?” And when I asked, what, he said, “Where am I?”
There’s a term for these symptoms.
The term is, “disoriented.”
I lied. There was one occupation I saw as a kid and thought, I could do that.
Three Indiana Jones movies dropped in the ‘80’s. In every one, there was an object—an amulet, a skull, an ark—and some idiot who couldn’t wait to touch it and unleash its curses.
I could be that guy, I thought.
“Indiana Jones Idiot” wasn’t in the help wanted ads, though.
So, I continued. With no identity. No future to strive for.
It was a geographical problem, I think.
There’s a line from Kurt Vonnegut about growing up in Indiana. How, having nothing but horizon in all directions was enough to make a person religious. No wonder all my neighbors in Oklahoma eventually run to God. Try living an entire life with no goal post to orient yourself to.
Firmly grasping where you are, where you’re going, it’s the most important, but least recognized need of the human spirit. It’s what is meant whenever we say, “rooted.”
By age twenty-three, I had only ever lived in Oklahoma. I was Godless. Broke. And the only person to make me feel grounded was my older brother. Who’d just been arrested. Facing trial for something he didn’t do.
He’d be convicted of this thing he didn’t do.
And all would go to shit.
I’d leave the State two days afterward. And when I reached another State, I’d leave that one, too.
I was blind. Running without a fear of death. But, despite my efforts, something was imprinted in my soul. Telling me, if I moved in this specific, calculated way, even though odds were low, maybe I could make it.
I would have looked hopeless had you queued Catholic hymns and zoomed in from above. A twenty-three-year-old baby. In a junker car. Hood held down by a leather belt. $240 in the bank. Heading for Alaska.
But even if you caught me and brought me back to everything I’d ever known, I would have immediately headed right back for the mountains.
“The rules for the humans are: do not disturb or hold up the penguin. Stand still, and let him go on his way. And here, he’s heading off into the interior…with five thousand kilometers ahead of him, he’s headed toward certain death.”
This week I read an article about the frillfin goby. It’s not a J.R.R. Tolkien character, if that’s what you were thinking. It’s a fish.
It lives in the intertidal zone. A zone that sometimes looks like ocean. Other times, like land. When it looks like land, the goby lives in one of many saltwater pools that end up in a cup in the rocks when the tide moves out.
Sometimes, a predator comes along. Or, pool levels suggest time might be running out. So, the goby launches itself like a fighter pilot from an ejector seat. It flies through the air. Lands in another pool. And, when it gets to the next pool, it jumps again.
It can make up to six consecutive jumps before landing in open water. All from a mental map it made of the area when it looked like an ocean, before the tide went out.
“Stimming” is a word used to describe certain autistic behaviors. Things like rocking back and forth, repeating words or phrases, or spinning objects. They help stimulate a person. Or control their emotions whenever the world is shitting on them.
I have a word for my ball game.
I’m “locating.”
I don’t believe that penguin was doomed. I also don’t think when I left for Alaska I was gunning toward certain death.
I was breaking a circle. The opposite of what most people do when they’re lost.
Habits bring us closer to who we are. Or shove us further away from ourselves.
Before we turn off the lights at night, my wife always asks, “Besito?”
It means, “little kiss.”
And, every time, I think, here I am.
Tyler Dempsey is the author of four books and the host of Another Fucking Writing Podcast. He lives in Utah with his wife and dogs.
LISA DAILEY’s (she/her) art is a celebration of color, texture, and the beauty of the natural world. A mixed media artist, she brings unexpected elements together to create work both vibrant and expressive, drawing inspiration from the intricate patterns and designs found in nature—whether the texture of a leaf or the colors of a sunset. Lisa’s practice incorporates embroidery, crochet, watercolor, and acrylic painting, and she is always experimenting with new and exciting materials for collage. When not in her studio, she can often be found cooking (and writing a soup blog), capturing life’s little moments through photography, exploring off-the-beaten-path destinations around the globe, or picking up shiny things.
The Vatican’s senior accountant started locking her office door, ignoring emails. Calls. Knocks. From out in the hall, her colleagues of the Holy See heard sobs. Invoices needed to be processed. No one had any idea how much they’d gone over budget, if they’d gone over or if not, how close they’d gotten. When greeted on the stairs, she’d walk faster, graying head down. She’d jet out at odd times, once immediately after coming in and shutting her door behind her. “Boss Macabre,” The Pope dubbed her over coffee with a cardinal, according to a rumor. Dozens of theories proliferated. The HR director prayed for her before every meal. What no one guessed was that the sixty-five year old was months pregnant and suffering a nightly nightmare: Jesus enraged in Herod’s Temple, flipping the tables of the money lenders. Her child was obvious— his Second Coming had been prophesied. She’d never taken those stories seriously, but for the first time in her life, she surrendered to His power. She confided all this over the phone one night with her ex-husband, the con artist, the last person she’d been intimate with over a decade ago. He told her she should be institutionalized. That’s exactly it, she thought. I’ve become institutionalized. Her stomach sank. Then a kick.
Pussy
Wire taped to my chest, I stared at my crotch to avoid looking at the open shirt in the dresser mirror’s reflection. Green boxer briefs with tropical flowers and flamingos on the waistband. The phrase ‘big pussy’ flashed in my mind. Imagining Big Pussy from Sopranos in the mirror instead of myself made it bearable to button my shirt— it wouldn’t be me kissing the neck of my crime boss wife, asking questions about slush funds pumped with funny money over slow jams at Easter Sunday brunch. It’d be some other rat in my place. It’d be Big Pussy. I saw Big Pussy, sauced on a boat, riddled with bullets that never paused for a reload by my towering wife. My dick stood up at the thought. “Wait, what the fuck? Why?” I asked my crotch. My FBI handler, coming in from the bathroom, cleared his throat and tapped his watch.
Cleo
Her jeweled hands passed over the crystal ball like ocean waves. She told me exactly how I’m supposed to die— an infection in my skull after a fall from a stranger’s window. At one point, I asked her how she could be Miss Cleo when the Miss Cleo from TV had passed away. She froze, index finger tickling my palm’s heart line, candlelight painting the maroon of her nails a deep shade, and took a breath of the Nag Champa basement air. She exhaled with a chuckle and, dropping her Caribbean accent, she said, “it’s a persona owned by the company I work for, my dear.” I thought then that I’d fallen for a scam, but she proceeded to lay my life open like the tarot cards she had me shuffle. She knew me better than anyone ever had— every embarrassing habit, every good thing about me. She said I would soon go through tough financial times— this was a couple weeks ago— then yesterday my boss called me into the conference room and told me I was being laid off. Miss Cleo said I’d be falling in love sooner rather than later, which I found hard to believe, until the memory of her dark brown eyes and silky fingertips kept me up all last night. I came back for another reading this morning but the neon sign in the house’s window is gone. I called her company’s 24-hour hotline a dozen times but it was never her, the ladies’ Caribbean accents sounding forced and offensive coming out of them. They all said they were Miss Cleo, but the real Miss Cleo is out there. Not the real real Miss Cleo, but my Miss Cleo. I love her. I need her. I don’t care how I die anymore. I need her to tell me how I’m supposed to live.
Julián Martinez loves Chicago so much, he’s marrying her. Find him @martinezfjulian or martinezfjulian.com.
Spitgum sprawled down the hillside like the shadow of a falling tree. Telescope in their one hand, my walking stick in the other. All along the way they stopped in bright clearings to peer out at the shapes of distant leaves and at the bodies of darting birds, and they asked me a lot of questions. What’s that bird’s name? What tree’s this? My fever blazed and flared in the late morning light, yet I couldn’t believe how clearly I could see. To reveal, to uncover, to unveil, I thought. I put my sunglasses on. Did my best to answer Spitgum’s questions. Dragging the heels of their boots down the hill they had kicked up trail dust and now it settled into hollows of woodbine ivy and wine berry brambles, the air all aswirl through streams of sheer light. That’s when I noticed for the first time how the leaves of certain trees had curled inward, burning a yellowish red. Drought-sick, I thought. Or like a kind of blight. I touched the trunk of a rock oak tree. Identified the call of a wren. Spitgum babbled on and on about nothing. I felt drought-sick too. I could feel the birdsong vibrating in my hair.
Arriving at a ridge halfway down the hill I noticed what looked like a ribbon of wood-smoke rising up from a field just south of the farmhouse. Art was walking slowly down the freshly mowed slope, a five gallon bucket full of tools in his hand. In the other was a plastic gallon jug of water. Alma’s garden gate gently opened in a gust of wind and I scanned the landscape searching for her, tracing the tangle of wisteria vines along the winding road, the tall swaths of summer flowers leaning over stone paths as they dove down and snaked around the farmhouse and woodshed and the garden. A rain cloud had gathered above the sloping fields. Art took off his hat and stopped to rest at the stump of the lightning struck black locust tree, his body no bigger than my thumbnail. I could picture the tree even though it wasn’t there. Apple. Purple. Fountain. Paint. The rain cloud came apart. Art looked up into the absence where the tree had once provided shade. Saw us at the edge of the wood, waved, and walked on. Spitgum led me down into the field and we met Art standing by his van in the shade of the barn.
“Didn’t Hippie just mention something about a fire ban?”
Art looked up from the messages on his phone. His phone is a Samsung Galaxy. It looked like a tiny stone tablet in his hand.
“That’s not a fire, Sunshine. What you see up there is worter.”
“Water? Up out of what, the well?”
Art set his phone on the dashboard with some dark green gloves, then he opened the van’s side door to unload his bucket of tools. “Just west of that well’s a quick-coupler. Like for hoses. Found this cap shot way out into the field. I guess the pipe must’ve burst once I got the water back on.” Art turned to show us the metal cap. It said Rain Bird on it. Spitgum snickered. “First thought was maybe I’d run something over with my mower. But the situation seems more mysterious than that. Look at all thatpressure, Sunshine. Never seen anything like it. Must be something to do with the hydrostatic pressure of the ground. Like at Yellowstone, you ever been to Yellowstone? I hear springs out there bubble up all scalding hot from magma. At least in our case the farm water’s cold. Cool clear worter. Just mysterious is all. A mysterious mist. Looks like we won’t be needing the telescope, Spit.”
“I’m so grateful for the mystery,” they said.
Spitgum and Chris have the same exact smile.
Art looked at them and laughed.
“Anyway, Sunshine — I’ve got to get going in a hurry. Emergency call just came from up on the mountain.”
The van with all its black and blue graffiti shone purple in the barn shade glow. Art slammed the side door shut and handed me the empty bucket. It took me a moment to remember which mansion he meant when he said up on the mountain. Art looked at the sun. Nearly noon. Then he ducked into the dark of the barn.
Spitgum kicked a rock and followed it out into the road. Picked at a runover snake with their stick. I took my dead phone from out of my pocket. The screen was cracked badly, but I thought it should still work. I plugged it into the charger I leave in Art’s van and noticed a giant book on the passenger seat. It was Lumbersweeney’s copy of Capital Volume 1 by Karl Marx. I had no memory of stealing the book. It still had his highlighter in it. Art emerged again with the jug of fresh well water and a plate of microwaved pizza from the night before. The two inverted phases of the movement which makes up the metamorphosis of a commodity constitute a circuit: commodity-form, shedding off of this form, and a return to it. Grease threatened holes in Art’s paper plate already. Spitgum’s shoulder blades rose up into the light like demon wings, or maybe angel wings, and I felt increasingly sick.
“The wren came back,” Art declared. He handed me the jug of water. I took a long drink, and then I pointed up toward the well with Lumbersweeney’s book.
“You’re saying that call is more of an emergency than this?”
“Correct. It’s their furnace, Sunshine. Bad oil leak. And there’s nothing to be done here for now. Those fields will happily soak up all the worter. Let me show you the work I have planned for you at Diane’s.”
Spitgum and I followed Art to the north side of the barn where the truck and tractor had been parked in the sun. I looked up the hill through the field toward the well. The fountain spray looked like a kind of endless explosion outside the farmhouse. Art had leaned several shovels against the truck along with two iron prybars for rocks and two posthole diggers. I loaded the tools into the truck while Art stood there eating pizza. Spitgum had already wandered off again and was looking into the back of my Volvo, their pink skull pressed against Chris’s in the glass. I sighed loudly and wiped the sweat off my face with my shirt.
“I went to Diane’s this morning and marked out where I want these holes.” Art lowered the tailgate and flattened out a piece of paper. A drawing in red pencil of Diane’s yard and house. “About a half dozen holes. You’ll see the red paint in the grass. I also marked the handles of these shovels here for your height. You’ve got concrete form tubes too. Those are in the barn. For the footings of the deck. Just do your best, Sunshine. There will be rocks.”
“Yo, Billy—what’s up with this CitiBike back here? You steal this thing or what?”
I locked eyes with Art through my sunglasses. He shrugged as if to say, What the hell’d you want me to do about it? I’d forgotten all about that bike, the city. The Tarot Card Guy named Calder and all the things I’d taken from Chris.
Daylight glanced off the body of Art’s truck. I went to pick at some rust at the bottom of the tailgate where it joined with the busted light, but stopped myself. Art saw me stop and smiled. The truck was essentially disintegrating, falling apart. Everything was. I almost said so, but I couldn’t bear to repeat the same old endless conversation about chaos and entropy and the truck, its low mileage in spite of the rust, all that salt they spray on the roads in winter and on and on and on and on. My fever deepened like a cave. Entered the bones of my back. I folded Art’s drawing into Lumbersweeney’s book. Art had fixed the busted taillight with some see-through packing tape and red spray paint. I could still see the rock Spitgum kicked into the middle of the road. It was the size of a little dove.
I ran a cold hand trembling through my long wet red dirty hair and decided it was time to lay down in the grass.
Art turned over the empty bucket and took a seat above me.
He chewed on his last bite of pizza. Wiped his beard with a rag.
“You drank too much again last night.”
“You’re the one whose eyes are all bloodshot,” I said.
“That’s just the dust. You don’t see me coiled up under no tailgate.”
“I was fine an hour ago, man. That kid did something weird to me.”
Art looked back across the lawn, chewing.
“I did nothing weird,” Spitgum yelled over my Volvo by the road. “All I did was fix the hater’s eye.”
“I have this fever now, Art. I can’t shake it. The breeze cuts through like November and all the leaves look red. You didn’t even ask if I wanted it fixed,” I yelled at Spitgum.
“You just feel sick because you’re scared,” Spitgum yelled back. “Bill went and betrayed his only brother and now he’s blaming me for the fact that he’s scared and lost and probably just sick from the guilt. Who would our Billy Willy be if not his brother’s half-brother? That’s a scary thought. Enough to make anybody sick. No — I’d come over and unfix your eye right now if it’s what you really wanted. But I don’t think it is, Bill. Pretty sure that would just hurt.”
“Come out from under there and let me see, Sunshine.”
Art nudged my busted rib with the toe of his boot until I came out from under the shade of the tailgate, groaning.
I took my sunglasses off.
“Jesus Christ — it’s an actual miracle. Barely a scar, Sunshine. Did you see your eye turned blue? The right eye’s still green, but the other one went fully blue.”
Art handed me the jug of water again. There was pizza sauce on his dark green shirt. I thought it looked like a blood mark. I drank the fresh water and poured some on my head and then I struggled to my feet to look at myself in the driver’s side mirror. Art was right. My left eye was blue. I immediately new that I liked it. Somewhere in the distance someone stopped shoving tree branches into a wood chipper. I hadn’t noticed the sound, but now I noticed the silence. Spitgum came up from behind me and I jumped. They had Calder’s wizard hat in one hand and a big chunk of green chalk in the other.
“And now, for my third trick, I will make a horse appear out of thin air.”
“Third? What the hell was your second trick?” I demanded.
But Spitgum stepped toward the side of the barn, fit Calder’s hat onto their shaved pink head, and with the green chalk against the red barn they drew another weirder, smaller barn, and inside that barn they drew a large strange green animal and a big green circle with wavy rays of green falling down on the animal like the sun.
“Horse,” Spitgum said, pointing at the horse and writing out the word. Art laughed and clapped. I was going to ask why the green sun had been drawn inside the barn with the horse — but out of the corner of my new blue eye I noticed a flutter of paper pinned under the windshield wiper of my Volvo.
I went toward it.
A letter from Alma.
Her handwriting wide and open and blue:
Hi — I want to write down these things which feel like the harder things before we see each other again in person…
Two black lumber trucks boomed passed the barn. The first swerved violently to avoid Spitgum’s rock, its six tires screeching as it burned marks onto the wavy blacktop road — but the other truck floored it right up over the rock and drove on as if it had been nothing.
I walked out into the road through a whirlpool of dust.
….hesitancy or space coming from my side is most likely a reflection of where I am in the circle shape, and not a difference in care…
Unthinkingly I picked up Spitgum’s rock.
…but my heart is still craving time to untangle myself from him so I can rebuild…
And that’s when I stopped myself. Folded the letter back up. I needed to be alone to read it. I took Spitgum’s rock back toward the barn where their picture had been wiped away already, and in its place Art was drawing a giant green illustration of the light spectrum while lecturing Spitgum with the telescope in his hand.
The diagram looked like this:
“Take this light inside Bill’s telescope for instance — we’re talking about just a sliver of what’s actually expanding beyond the visible eye. Infrared light, ultraviolet light. You want to talk about the mystery, Spitgum? Let’s talk dark energy, dark matter. Almost everything in our observable universe is invisible. Not to even mention space time or the speed of light or how with a serious-enough telescope, these scientists have seen all the way back through the fabric of earth time already. Right straight through to the very beginning of. I just heard it on the radio again today — I’m talking James Webb again, Bill — it’s happening as we speak. A telescope that can capture pictures of First Light.”
Spitgum took the telescope back from Art.
“But that would just be God,” Spitgum said. “You’re saying they took a picture of God?”
“Correct,” Art said. “Widen out far enough and we’re nothing but tiny particles in an unspeakable pattern of light that is everything. Particles of dust. I’ve seen videos of it on my computer.”
From where I stood I could see Chris’s two favorite trees. A pair of sugar maples which always merged into one great giant-looking tree in the window of Alma’s kitchen.
In that moment I wanted nothing more than to know what Chris was reading.
“You know Cain killed Abel with a rock,” Spitgum said, pointing at the rock with my telescope.
“Excuse me?” I said.
Just then Art’s wren landed in a barren patch of grass at our feet.
“Wow — there she is,” Art whispered. “Spitgum, look — she comes back every summer to nest on the sill above my saws. How was winter down in Florida little birdy? Bring us back any plastic from the beach?”
“I wonder, Bill — Do you think bodies decompose more slowly during drought years?”
“What kind of fucking question is that, Spitgum? What, are you threatening me?”
“No, I meant it from a scientific perspective. Seeing as all the worms are probably dried up.”
I experienced a sudden and confusing urge to injure Spitgum physically.
Fugitive. Mountain. Flower. Fist.
Instead I set the rock down slowly, picked up Lumbersweeney’s book, and then I started for the farmhouse.
“Sunshine, wait — I figured you would give Spitgum a ride to the church on your way to Diane’s. My oil leak is in the opposite direction. It’s coming up on noon. ”
“I’m not taking that kid anywhere,” I said. “First of all, Art, I already told you I’m sick. Second of all, just make the kid drive their goddamn self.”
“Ain’t allowed to drive no more, hater. Hence the whole reason why my meeting’s inside a church.”
Barn swallows swooped in and out of the barn, spiraling in the shape of an eight.
The wren wrangled up a living worm. Looked me in the eye. Flew away.
“Sorry, Art. But I need to go find Alma.”
I started for the farmhouse again.
“Wait — I have a deal for you, Billy Willy. Lend me that CitiBike, just this once, and I’ll get your Volvo running again for free.”
I turned back around.
“No,” I said.
“Look, Billy — Art says all your Volvo needs is a starter. That’s kid stuff. Let’s make this happen like a barter. You pay for the part and I’ll be your mechanic. Free labor for free rides on the CitiBike this summer. I’m desperate for a way into town. It’s a win-win-win for all three of us. Just like Marx.”
Spitgum presented their pale hand as if I’d shake it just like that.
“What do you know about fixing cars?” I asked.
“My best friend back in the desert’s a mechanic. Name’s Ever. I helped him here and there, could easily call if I run into trouble.”
I looked over at the Volvo. It looked like a bottomless pit of black dead moon water.
“Consider it fixed, Bill. Seriously. Let’s shake on it. Fair and square.”
Art laughed. Shook his head. Shrugged.
“Deal?”
“Whatever, man. Fine. Deal.”
After shaking my hand Spitgum said, “Ready to see what my second trick was?”
“No,” I said.
They reached out toward my face again and before I could get my hands up to defend myself they’d pulled a ring out from behind my ear. “Tadaaaaa,” Spitgum said. They dropped Alma’s engagement ring into my hand and broke off into a run toward the Volvo. Before Art could bend down to pick up his empty bucket they had already pulled out the CitiBike onto the grass, Calder’s wizard hat like two hands clasped into prayer atop their wild pink head.
“Kid’s a total trip, Art.”
“You got that right. Like the drum major of some kind of fucked up parade.”
“Battery’s still some life in it!” Spitgum shrieked.
Art had leaned over to look at the cover of Lumbersweeney’s book, his head almost upside-down to see it. It’s a dark painting on the cover. I showed it to him. Three men working in an old iron factory, a kind of spiraling white fire burning at the center of it.
“The Forge (A Modern Cyclops),” I read. “By Adolph von Menzel.”
“Looks like they’re working an old rolling mill,” Art said. “I’m guessing for the railroad tracks. See how they don’t have any eye protection? All they did back then was squint. No gloves either. That poor bastard doesn’t even have shoes. I guess some things never change, Sunshine. Reminds me of this old timer I knew back out in—”
“Shouldn’t you be heading up toward that oil leak?”
“Oh, shit. Yes. Thanks.”
I handed Art the water jug. He took a long, slow drink, then sighed.
“Everything returns to chaos, Sunshine.”
“I know, Art. I know.”
“Tell Alma I’ll be back down tonight to fix her worter.”
“Is anything reaching the house?”
“Nope.”
“Alright.”
After shaking my hand Art patted me on the back in a paternal way that actually made me feel a little better. Turning to go I heard the familiar quiet vroom of the CitiBike taking off toward the south, and turned in time to see Spitgum speed off shrieking for the church with my walking stick.
I walked up the slope through the field toward Alma’s well.
A storm had established itself above the mountains to the west, and that fountain beside the well looked like a tower endlessly falling.
Dylan Smith works at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and lives in a shared house with nine people and a Steinway piano the size of a boat.
I put a quart of blackberries in the work fridge to snack on over the next couple days, go back an hour later and toss one in my mouth. Don't even have to bite the fruit is so tender, just squeeze it between my tongue and the roof of my mouth, feel it pop, sweet juice squirting out in every direction, coating the inside of my cheek. Flip it to my teeth to finish the job, chomp once, twice, then get that perfect berry down my throat and grab for another except the second berry is sour, a slightly too firm dud, the third even worse. Fourth, fifth, sixth - sour, sour, sour. The seventh tastes a little metallic but isn't so bad, the texture is right and I have hope when I eat the eighth— sour. Sour, sour, fucking sour. Firm, gritty. By the thirteenth my palette has no memory of that first, perfect berry but I can't stop, the tingle in my tongue demands retribution, solace from bitterness, yearns for satisfaction. The container is low, the plastic of the bottom showing. One sweet berry and I'm done. It doesn't even have to be as good as the first, only needs to provide a glimmer that I can take into the future, a belief that what I'm left with is better than this. Sour. Sour. Sour. I'm not hungry. Wasn’t hungry to begin with. Two left. Please, I think. Sour. FUCK. One left. I pick it up, hold it between thumb and forefinger, bring it to my eye. Solid, deep coloration. A little squeeze— just enough give. I allow my hopes to rise. I have confidence. I run my tongue through my mouth, searching for the taste of that first berry under layers and layers of sour. I place the final berry on my tongue, shift it between my teeth, and bite.
Alex Rost runs a commercial printing press outside of Buffalo, NY
Hi — I want to write down these things that feel like the harder things before we see each other in person. They are things I want to be transparent about before anything more happens between us, things I know to be true for myself but that might affect you if we continue down this road together. I think writing them down will help me understand them and clarify them and even though they are somewhat future-oriented they feel like a future I feel really sure about. I’ll write them out as a list even though they are a little looser than that and tie into each other more than a list format would make it seem.
1. The biggest one of the momentis where I am around heartbreak. I have been seeing heartbreak as this kind of cyclical circle shape and I worry maybe we are on opposite sides of it. One of the most confusing things about Chris being gone is that his hands once felt like extensions of my hands and I don’t understand where they will go now that we’ve broken up. I feel like I am still untangling our bodies. Rationally I understand the absence of his presence but my heart is still craving time to untangle my body from his so that I can rebuild. New love for me would have to be like faint music. But I still want you to experience all you are experiencing from your side and am writing this just so you know that any hesitancy or space coming from my side is most likely a reflection of where I am in the circle shape and not a difference in care.
2. Future Thing #1: Something that started coming up for me with Chris was realizing an excitement I have around exploring non-traditional relationship dynamics. Something I do know about the future is that when I feel untangled from Chris and have found some of those parts of myself I lost I will want to put romantic dating energy toward exploring these different relationship structures and communities. This is in part why things didn’t work between me and Chris. I think non-monogamy really freaked him out and threatened him and made him crazy controlling and jealous which is probably why he cheated on me and now I just feel like I have a lot of healing and exploring to do in this area of my life and have really no interest in falling into another monogamous relationship for the time being.
3. Future Thing #2: This thing is in the intense future and probably doesn’t need to be discussed or thought about too much, which is that after understanding what I want to incorporate from Future Thing #1 I want to experience the stability and excitement that comes from having a more traditional relationship and family. I am talking about kids. I do feel like because God hates women my timeline for figuring this out is short, which is why it feels worth mentioning. Like if I were 27 instead of 33 this would not be in this letter.
That’s all! You now have all the information that I have. I just wanted to set everything out on the table for both of us because I have no interest in having a hint of sneakiness or dishonesty between us now or ever.
Alma
Dylan Smith works at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and lives in a shared house with nine people and a Steinway piano the size of a boat.
I didn’t know what it meant to stick it to the man back in 1987. I didn’t know who the man was. Statements like that can be ambiguous. But I remember Lyle Lovett, his tall hair, the height of a new capitalism. My hair was as long as his was tall as he sang about things he wished he had and what he’d do with them. It sounded as strange as his tall hair looked by 1988. But now, many years later, and understanding who the man is, now that my hair is long gone, I yearned or the simplicity of a riding pony, perhaps on a boat, my boat, which would have to be a really small boat because I am not that kind of man, making my pony even smaller. I bought that pony, because that was what I could afford. I looked up Lyle and messaged him. I figured he might have a boat by now. He texted back, plainly, kiss my ass. I knew what he meant. I knew it was a kinship, of not sticking it to this man.
Thad DeVassie is a writer and artist/painter from Ohio. You can see where he’s been and what he’s up to next at www.thaddevassie.com
Gossiping with Alyson and Alys. Fika, visiting cake. Nobody is Swedish although Nadia is the type of blonde you’d kill a prime minister for. I read the papers and gamble on papal elections. To think of all the beauty and bloodshed, fuck it. I’m lying to myself and others. Artifice in loud terms.
Nadia gives me a jagged hump and I’m on the oozy brink when she starts talking about Irish writers and some esthetician in Palm Springs nicknamed Jack the Ripper. It’s strange how people cling together. Darling, don’t shoot until the subject hits you.
I’m barely awake when you call me Finnegan stately, plump (picnic, lightning). I mock the myths I help create make faces in the surveillance camera. Where we’re headed, where we are halfway down the coast I lost the comic timing, pick up the phone like a cold kiss— yes, Nadia, the fire escape is burning
and I’m watching the deaf republic under a wild pack of stars. I’m thinking about the poet who dropped an electric toothbrush into her cunt and fried my cock. Love after love after love I’m pissing like the Colosseum in full view listening to the pretty tyranny of the wind.
Patagonia Picnic Table Effect
Somewhere between night and the morning after queer shades of future dusk Berluti knot, orange wine, lips like an extra maraschino
we talk about art and Genet and the birdshit on the bench. “You should write a poem about birds,” she says, not knowing I’d sworn off bird poetry
preferring to write poems about petite mort and 21st century malaise clubby androgynous youth, gobs of spit, vape girls, egirls empty theaters and red latrines, Aslan’s pin-ups, lui magazine
desire that isn’t explained, desire with a mouth like a dirty rest stop, Vogue Italia, dressing for the rapture, what it means to be exiled, what it means to be stripped of happiness, what it means to be stripped
like a saint, murder holes, arrow loops, Divine’s funeral, my complete fear of list poems, biographies, throat cancer, my complete fear of Kathy Acker, Trazodone, nightstands, spotlights, Piss Flowers, the exquisiteness
of tiramisu, the slippage between desire and disgust, the foil to her flamboyance, Stabat Mater, my complete fear of Connecticut, the insurance man, the cricket-impresario, tennis elbow, preferring to
write poems about coupling, decoupling, parallelism, lines of influence and what it means to find a rare species, and another, and another — Yellow Grosbeak, Thick-billed Kingbird, a nesting pair of Rose-throated Becards.
Damon Hubbs is a poet from New England. He’s the author of three chapbooks and a full-length collection, Venus at the Arms Fair (Alien Buddha Press, 2024). Recent publications include Apocalypse Confidential, The Crank, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Spectra, the engine(idling, HorrorSleaze Trash, & others. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net.
