When You’re The Homecoming Queen’s Best Friend by Candace Hartsuyker

You’ll grow up white trash in a tin can trailer, surrounded by beer bottles and dogs with torn ears and starving eyes. All the other girls in your neighborhood will complain about their swollen ankles and pregnant bellies and twist cords of Sour Patch Punch Straws in their mouths, suck granules of sugar from their fingers.

You’ll wish you could see your name in the yearbook, bright as a string of Christmas lights. Instead, you’ll be on the float like a servant, holding the homecoming queen’s dress so it doesn’t get dirty. Everyone will see that you’re not a princess or a duchess; you’re just the homecoming queen’s best friend.

On the float, the homecoming queen will beam, pearly teeth shining, wrist flicking in a princess wave, plastic tiara like a wreath of stars on her head. You’ll stand to the side, ready to grab her in case she loses her balance on the rotating float. You’ll feel like furniture, like a dusty ottoman shoved in a corner unnoticed.

You’ll think about how you’re the one who let the homecoming queen copy your homework so she wouldn’t fail biology class. And that’s when you’ll shove the homecoming queen, watch as she falls to the blacktop below. No one will notice that you pushed the homecoming queen; they’ll only notice that she fell.

When the school nurse arrives, no one will notice the missing tiara, plucked from the homecoming queen’s head. They’ll be too busy comforting the homecoming queen who will be sopping her tears up with the hem of her ballgown dress.

Safe at home, you’ll take the scratched, plastic tiara from out of your purse and try it on, smile like a stretched-out rubber band.  You’ll keep smiling, even as mascara and blush run in a slurry down your face, mouth sludgy as an open wound. And you’ll say to yourself: everything’s okay now. You got what you wanted. You’re not just some girl. You’re somebody.

Candace Hartsuyker has an M.F.A in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and reads for PANK. She has been published in Cotton Xenomorph, Heavy Feather Review, The Hunger and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter at C_Hartsuyker.

Nine Years by E.S. Fletcher

That long ago, nursing pillow hugging my body, a little one suckled in the odd hours of the night. The house silent, partner and pets perhaps dreaming of each other. During those marathon feedings, the early days of this arranged marriage when we were getting used to one another, books kept me company, prevented me drifting into the blackout sleep of the overtired.

Of those middle-of-the-night companions, I most recall Dervla Murphy’s Eight Feet in the Andes. It had been recommended to me by a woman I’d met while traveling in Guatemala—one of those brief, insignificant connections that still leaves its mark.

The book, a journey of the author and her nine-year-old daughter trekking with their mule in the rugged wilds of Peru, made me marvel. How I wanted to hand that confidence, that inner resourcefulness to the silky being curled against my breast. But it had only been a few years before that I’d found anything resembling such moxie, traveling alone to Guatemala where I stayed in comfortable if modest posadas, a plastic card ready to buy my way out of most trouble.

How do you give your child what you, yourself, do not possess?

It had only been a few years prior that a daykeeper read my Mayan horoscope. He looked me in the eye and said, “Don’t be afraid. Fear is a blocking energy.”

With those words, I had broken down in tears. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t felt afraid. Fear resided in every cell of my body. It had nearly kept me from traveling outside the country. Kept me from using my voice. From being seen. It had grown in me like a tumor that needed excision.

Yet fear wasn’t something you could surgically remove in one go—it required a slower process, a shrinking, so as not to damage all that was good. Within that year, I would return to Guatemala to study with the man who’d told me not to be afraid. I would begin my lifelong clearing of fear. I’d released enough of it to risk bringing a new being into this broken world, trusting my own imperfections to be a good-enough mother.

Nine years have passed since those hazy nights in the rocker. Neither my daughter nor I have the mettle to trek through the Andes with little more than our wits. In that, I have spectacularly failed. I have a child afraid of houseflies and new foods, a child who, like her mother, lacks the temperament to sleep in a tent on stony ground. I have my regrets. But what if the books we read heal the inheritance we leave for our children? I hold out hope that something of that story’s boldness leached into her milk dreams.

E.S. Fletcher holds an MFA from Hamline University. She has twice been a nonfiction finalist in The Loft Mentor Series. Her writing has appeared in The Literary Bohemian, Sea Stories, Confrontation and is forthcoming in Leaping Clear. She writes and teaches yoga in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Twitter: @esfletcher

The show never begins by Mark Danowsky

The show never begins

We’ve been here before. This same venue in Delaware. There are two rows of seats facing the stage, red velvet curtain to the glossy floor. A lesbian couple arrives with two children. They ask if we can read to their child. You say you’ll do it. You’re handed a book. You start to read but the child is distracted. You try to engage the child. The one mom says the child knows the book well because she helped write it. The mom says there’s no need to explain the book just to read it. You ask the couple if they wouldn’t mind if we move seats so we can sit near them and the child for the show. This time, an old man gets up grumbling about our involvement with the couple and leaves the show. This time, we move seats. This time, you keep trying to engage the child. The show never begins. 

Mark Danowsky is Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

Shaped Like Swans by Cathy Ulrich

Shaped Like Swans

The sad little dictator’s father dies unexpectedly. The sad little dictator is unprepared for such responsibility. He lives alone in the castle on the hill. The barricade is concrete and eight inches thick. The sad little dictator looks out from the highest window over the barricade. He smokes stubby cigars that smell like burnt banana peels. His footsteps echo on the hardwood floors. He orders expensive rugs and walks on them barefoot. He listens to Elvis Presley on the turntable while he smokes his stubby cigars. When his advisors come to him with news, he tells them you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, taps ashes into the weave of the expensive rugs, and they back out of the room, nodding and nodding and nodding.

The sad little dictator begins an affair with a woman from town. She is beautiful in the way that women from town are. Her hair is thick like thunderclouds. The sad little dictator’s mother was a woman from town and beautiful in this same way. He remembers how her eyes would narrow and blink when his father brought him to see her, how she would say my boy.

Do you love me, the sad little dictator says to his lover. He is smoking one of his cigars, pensively puffing the smoke out the window. He meets his lover in a hotel room every other Thursday afternoon. The hotel lays chocolates on both pillows, folds the hand towels into the shape of a swan.

What would you do, says the sad little dictator’s lover from under a pile of white sheets, if I said I didn’t love you?

I would have you killed, says the sad little dictator.

His lover says nothing. She has three children and a husband with large hands. Sometimes she bakes bread with the window open; she listens to sparrow song.

The sad little dictator says: Well?

I love you, his lover says.

The sad little dictator doesn’t like washing his hands, but he likes the hand towels folded like swans. He unwinds them while his lover dresses, drapes them over the edge of the rumpled bed. Outside, a car is waiting — two cars, one for her and one for him. The sad little dictator watches his lover go to the first car from the hotel room window. She never looks back wistfully; he would like for her to look back wistfully.

When the sad little dictator returns to the castle on the hill, he orders his advisors to order the head of housekeeping to order the bathroom maids to fold all the hand towels in all of the sixteen bathrooms into the shapes of swans. He orders them to have a pair of high-heeled shoes delivered to his lover’s home.

He puts a Dean Martin record on the turntable, he listens to Sway. He wipes his hands on the lap of his wool pants.

The sad little dictator receives a message that his lover has run away with her husband and three children. The message uses a code known only to the sad little dictator and his ancestors and the codewriters themselves. The sad little dictator has never met any of them; the sad little dictator never will. The message says, in code, fled. The message offers to hunt down the fleeing lover and her family; the message offers to make examples of them all. The sad little dictator lights a cigar, listens to Frank Sinatra.

His advisors ask what he would like, outside of swan-shaped towels and high-heeled shoes sitting toppled outside the door of an empty cottage.

Fly me to the moon, says the sad little dictator, and his advisors nod, nod, nod.

The record skips on the turntable, and the sad little dictator holds the coded message in his hands, thinks of the fluttering of his mother’s small feet as she dangled above his head, how his mother’s feet were, he thought, like birds, how he and his father watched until the fluttering slowed and slowed and finally stopped.

When Cathy Ulrich was a maid, she folded the toilet paper to a point, but the towels just went on the racks. Her work has been published in various journals, including Rabid Oak, Adroit and Puerto del Sol.

Interwoven Foliage by Susan Triemert

It was the last image of my father, taken at a reptile zoo in the middle of Florida. I continue to search the photograph for whatever I may have missed. As if I’d overlooked a charcoal-coated osprey lurking behind a branch or the jagged shell of a reptile egg rubbing against my father’s shoe. If I look close--squint through the fingerprint-smudges and past the tired edges--I might find what’s not visible to the naked eye. The scaly auburn bark freeing itself from a longleaf pine; or the delicate, lavender blossoms of the beautyberry. And by that shrub, spot the speckled wings of a swallowtail, a native butterfly slurping up its sweet nectar. Further back, notice the interwoven foliage: the firebush and spiderwort and silver buttonwood, tangled, strangling out the light.

I’d once committed to memory what the picture captured: the way my father pitched patches of leaves to the alligators, dark and menacing, like a harbinger of his death. Had memorized the way a bevy of dazzling and vibrant peacocks appear to be closing in on him. Perched precariously, he was, between light and darkness, life and death. Weeks later, he’d be gone. I continue to scan the photograph, expecting new details to emerge. Hunt, too, for what the photo could never reveal: my father’s inner dialogue, what he was most proud of, his biggest fears. Had it been to die? Had it been to leave his family so soon?

Susan Triemert holds an MA in Education and an MFA from Hamline University in St. Paul, MN. She has been published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Cheat River Review, Crab Orchard Review, A-Minor, Evening Street Review, Pithead Chapel, 101word stories and elsewhere. She lives in St. Paul with her husband, their two sons, and never enough animals. Twitter: @SusanTriemert

Signing your life away by Thad DeVassie

A young attorney arrives at my father’s house now that his law office is limiting visitors per social distancing protocols. He unloads a stack of papers filled with empowering decisions – last will and testament, multiple powers of attorney.

Don, a gentle fossil of a man who has known my father for forty-seven years, is here to serve as witness. Oddly, it is our first acquaintance.

At the circular dining room table, the attorney explains the documents in painstaking detail. My father interjects his own lawyering, attempting to interpret in layman-speak what my brother and I comprehend. The lawyer is polite and patient. He is on the clock.

My eighty-year-old father stops the attorney at the Do Not Resuscitate clause to clarify how resuscitation, should he choke or some obstruction occur, sending wrong signals to a caregiver, requires an addendum. He reads aloud specifics he had the attorney insert.

I catch a side profile of the attorney. The part in his hair, disheveled toward the crown, suggests he rolled out of bed and chose the business casual route. This isn’t a shower-first meeting. I wonder what his billable rate is, if his firm charges full rate for travel, if he’s gunning for partner.

My brother wears his standard-issue Harley Davidson t-shirt and coordinated orange and black ball cap. His beard is working toward ZZ Top promise; his Crystal Gayle waterfall of hair down his back, meticulously sectioned by rubber bands into a ponytail, reveals greater progress. He’s speechless throughout this procession yet upholds the definition of menacing. I notice the attorney avoids eye contact with him, locking eyes with me whenever possible.

As my father completes a recitation of his inserted DNR clause, he gets choked up, pleased with his own act of legalese, perhaps staving off a premature curtain call. He is, after all, part of the vulnerable population. My father and Don sign papers. My father has been orchestrating this moment for weeks, giving us updates along the way – the logistics, purpose, parties involved. Somewhere along the way I assumed we had a bit part in this play. And now I can't tell – is this a comedy? A tragedy? Are there hidden cameras?

Don and the attorney get up to leave. My father pops to his feet. There is a comingling of thank yous and glad-handing among the three actors. There is chatter about sidestepping probate and the noteworthy work accomplished this morning. My father speaks of his desire to orchestrate an encore presentation for my mother at her memory care ward. I remain seated, my eyes affixed on their hands, the all-too-close camaraderie of exceptionally pleased adults, and all I can think of is this pandemic, social distancing, the countless handwashing memes pouring over me. How strange to be a witness to this important tactical execution, of papers notarized, and to be in the company of these men, some of whom I might never see again.  Thankfully nobody reached for the doughnut holes at the center of the table, but the paperwork, in the event of an untimely death, has been notarized.

Thad DeVassie's work has appeared in numerous journals including Unbroken, Spelk, Lunate, Ghost City Review, 50-Word Stories, FEED, and Barely South Review. His chapbook, THIS SIDE OF UTOPIA, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. A lifelong Ohioan, he writes from the outskirts of Columbus. Find him online @thaddevassie. 

2901 Philadelphia Cove by Damon McKinney

        Sometimes the curtains were blue. They didn’t notice though, blindness struck them immune to the worldly objects. Their eyes weren’t milky, missing, or disconnected. They still saw but the light couldn’t reach their heart anymore. At least that’s how the occupants described their condition.

The curtains shifted colors from blue to deep golden red, mirroring the setting sun.

        The house sagged. A depression, an indent, wallowed out in the middle of the parlor. They didn’t notice. Pins and needles, static, white noise washed their legs, that buzzing of nerves from sitting too long. And yet, still, they walked. Room to room, pounding along worn carpet paths. Or stumbling after too much afternoon wine.

        Noise crashed against the walls. Scratching, vibrating, pillow talk soothed their ears. Voices they thought long gone caressed their memories, music held their rapt attention and commercials played in the distance. Yet they were deaf to the world outside. Misery and loneliness found no place in their home.

        The curtains were blue.

Damon McKinney is an Indigenous writer from Oklahoma and a graduate of the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. He has a B.A in English with a Minor in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in JMWW blog, Equinox, Fancy Arm Hole Series 1, and Knights Library Magazine and JHHF Review. He is the former Associate Editor for Likely Red Press, a former Contributing Editor of Fiction for Barren Magazine, and the Managing Editor for Emerge Literary Journal.

She Used To Be Someone Else Too by Jason Schwartzman

It’s late and the bus is still an hour away from this small town in the northern neck of upstate New York. I’m outside on a bench—inside there are pinball machines no one is playing. We start slowly. I ask if she’s sure the bus will really come. “It will,” she says. She sees I’m on my laptop and tells me the Wi-Fi password to the coffee shop next door. She takes out some cigarettes. On some days she has to choose, she says, cigarettes or food.

Voices come through on her walkie-talkie. Taxi drivers. She tells me how bad everything is in the town. How her taxi drivers used to be engineers. They used to be CEOs. How everyone is in decline, “including me.” But she also laughs. She is sad, but she is more happy than sad, I would say.

One of the voices belongs to a man named Steve. He is one of the drivers. Or he is her husband, I can’t tell.

“Bye, my love,” she says to Steve.

I keep becoming invested in these little stranger interactions. I can’t tell if I’m just searching for something to spice the vacant hours, or if it’s because of something larger, my real life turning into a wasteland where unknowability and drama and color are flowers that no longer bloom.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” she says to Steve. 

“Taxi driving is where they can hide,” she says to me, not without sympathy. Now that they’re no longer engineers, no longer CEOs.

She used to be someone else too, she tells me in between drags. Used to study anthropology. Now, she is hiding. On her days off, she says, she doesn’t come here, where we are.

“Otherwise I’m just bus lady. Taxi lady.”

On her days off, she doesn’t want to be these things. Her walkie-talkie keeps ringing, almost every minute. When we’re talking, she lets it ring longer before she presses the button to receive the call. In the parking lot, our conversation accelerates into increasingly personal territory. I tell her I think I am in decline too — she said it so I can say it. We are talking about things maybe we wouldn’t talk about if we knew each other better.

“What is your name, by the way?” she asks.

The bus will be here soon, but before it comes, Steve shows up. He comes from around a corner so I can’t see if he is coming from a taxi or he’s just there to keep her company during the graveyard shift, to share a cigarette. I like the idea of that, of Steve speeding over for a few drags with his wife, this lonely corner a little less lonely. We all talk for a while and then Steve leaves. He heads back around the corner, and when the dispatcher starts talking about him, she still never pivots to a “we.” Then she mentions an ex-girlfriend, though maybe she dates men too.

I end up appreciating the ambiguity — that all I can puzzle out of them is their fondness for each other. Then the dispatcher’s walkie-talkie starts ringing again and I throw my backpack over my shoulder. As the bus pulls up, we wish each other nice lives.

Jason Schwartzman is the senior editor of True.Ink, the revival of an old pulp & adventure magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Narratively, Hobart, River Teeth, and Human Parts, among other places. You can find him on twitter at @jdschwartzman. His website is jdschwartzman.com.

By Any Other Name by Evan James Sheldon

Jimson tied herself to the train tracks and waited to feel the vibrations. She figured there wasn’t any better way to get a sense of impending death. To feel it in your chest, starting as a thrum and moving to a buzz, would be the only way to know it fully. At least that was how she imagined it. A lot of people she knew had died; she wasn’t going in unprepared.

            A man came, wearing a long cape and a top hat and he twirled his moustache deviously. What are you doing here? This is my spot. Jimson laughed at him. He was funny, being a cartoon and all. Weren’t cartoons supposed to be funny?

Move along, Jimson said. There’s plenty of track and I was here first. She grabbed a loose bit of rope with her teeth and tightened herself down. 

            The cartoon man swore and swore, and twirled his moustache so furiously that the end became frayed like a cheap paint brush. Jimson wanted to rip it off and create some fake rock paintings of spaceships or one of those geoglyphs of a giant hyena that you can only see from the sky, something hidden unless you knew exactly how to look.

            A cartoon lady arrived, she had rope burns on her arms, but they were healing. What the fuck is this? she said, gesturing to Jimson.

My name means poison, Jimson said. No one knew what to do. 

            They all turned and watched as the train, like a pinprick, like an ever-expanding black hole, appeared on the horizon pulling them toward the inevitable.  

Evan James Sheldon is Senior Editor for F(r)iction and the Editorial Director for Brink Literacy Project. You can find him online at evanjamessheldon.com. 

Time For Change: Poetry & Art by Ron Howard

Whether we are moving

toward or away from our soul

is the acid test

of mankind’s state of civilization,

its smallest common denominator: me.

My blackness knows it is time to fight

I feel my blackness taping its hands,

exercising, getting in shape

to ensure it passes with distinction

the anticipated tests along the way.

My humanity knows it is time to unite,

oppose people in power

who control by dividing the multitudes

through racial myths based on contempt

for others surrounded by casualties

and pain, determined to survive, even thrive

along with the next wave of warriors

proud to stand together

to change the world for the better for all.

If there is a neck to be choked

be it on the body of racism

whose demise will help free

white people who accept the demands

of a myth, which to be kept alive,

requires that they hide

        their fear

                their guilt

                        their shame

                                their humanity.

Ron Howard is a photographer, painter, poet and the current President of the Manayunk-Roxborough Art Center (MRAC), an art and humanities center in Philadelphia, which hosts many SVJ events. Along with his talents as a photographer, visual artist and writer, and his appreciation of the arts, Howard has brought his non-profit organizational development and international institution building skills to the MRAC. He was Chief Operations Officer for the Opportunities Industrialization Centers International (OICI) for more than thirty years and served from 2004 to 2007 as the organization's Acting CEO, prior to his retirement in 2007. The global OIC movement was started in Philadelphia by Rev. Leon H. Sullivan.

THE MAYOR WAS THERE ALSO WITHOUT A MASK by Sean Ennis

Right before lightning struck, something crackled in the kitchen. We were going to go to the protest then we didn’t go to the protest, the weather. Our neighbor is a cop with a pretty nice singing voice. We hear him when he takes out the trash. We cut down the holly bushes and now the branches look like some medieval defense mechanism, but there’s a better view from the hammock. We’re definitely going to the next protest.

We went to the next protest — and where does the time go? — and a racist tried to start some shit that the guy who taught my son chess finished. Good for this town, some of which tries hard. The police chief said, “I’ll take a meeting with anyone” though this whole thing was meeting-like, and his goofs had beaten up a guy not that long ago right in the highway whose name I should have looked up. It’s June in Mississippi and it’s not clear if my son will ever go to school again, but we thought this was educational.

At home alone, I have cookies — that I baked — for dinner. Mind you, the fridge is packed, the freezer is full, and the pantry is stacked. Standing in the heat has killed my appetite. Still, I can hear them down at the bandstand, the long line of concerned citizens who wanted to air their grievances into the microphone.  But there were people noticeably absent. My son’s teachers, that would have been nice. It’s hard for me to say what’s important these days.

Deplatforming is a word I just learned and some stranger on Twitter is having the worst night of his life. Our dogs are playing and it’s really just a fight with no teeth. The new puppy, whose dreams I am now a part of, has found a toy that belonged to a dog we had to have euthanized, defeated by blindness and probably undiagnosed cancer. His old ghost has reappeared, wagging, though is unwanted.

About The Author

Sean Ennis is the author of CHASE US: Stories (Little A) and his flash fiction has recently appeared in Passages North, Hobart, (mac)ro(mic), Tiny Molecules, and BULL Men's Fiction. More of his work can be found at seanennis.net

We Can’t Go Back: Interview with Mishka Shubaly

We Can’t Go Back:

Interview with Mishka Shubaly

Rob Kaniuk: Mishka, you put a lot of art into the world (books, articles, music). Are your creative pursuits goal oriented, a compulsion, or is it just work?

Mishka Shubaly: The answer is yes. We talk about doing it for the love of it, writing for truth and for art and for redemption. Sadly, sometimes you’re just writing for rent. But I’d argue that even writing for rent is worthwhile. There have been many times where I was doing a record review or a little think piece or Yet Another Update On My Sobriety and thought “this is a waste of time” and then come out of it with new insight. I’ve never had that happen when I’m making a spreadsheet or something. Writing is still the best job worth hating.

RK: Dylan said of songwriting: “It took me a long time to get to do consciously what I used to be able to do unconsciously. It happens to everybody.”

Do you struggle in writing where it used to flow freely?

MS: Fucking Dylan, man. I hate when folks quote him these days because it feels like we’re rolling around in our parents’ vomit... but the truth is that his words are still pertinent because he’s so unfairly gifted (and because so little has changed in race relations in the US since he wrote ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol.’) Yes, absolutely, I struggle in writing. I was talking to a writer yesterday about how to get that crucial first draft down. I ran her through what I think is the best way to get it done. When I got down off my soapbox, she said “Wow. So that’s how you write?” And I was like “Hell no, I hardly even write anymore and when I do, it’s in the worst, most scattered way possible.” I think when you’re a kid, you believe writing will save you from the human condition. As you get older, you realize that writing can make life more livable but that the only cure for the human condition is death.

RK: Are you telling me writing won't save us? You ruined my life a little bit right there. To follow that up; we share similar views on the dangers of hope. Is it all hopeless? Do you place hope in anything today?

MS:How can I redeem this... Yes, Virginia, writing will save you. But it’s not a binary. You don’t scrawl your way through some depraved tome, write the greatest two words in the English language-- THE END-- and then you’re transformed instantly from Lowly Sinner to Hallowed Saint. Writing has saved my ass again and again and again. But it’s more like your life is a leaky boat. Writing is not a brand new boat. But it is a shitload of epoxy and fiberglass. Writing can help you patch that leaky boat enough that it will stop leaking, maybe even enough that it may feel a little bit like a new boat. But writing is not a new boat. There is no new boat. And on the subject of hope... I think the only danger of hope is that it will keep you tethered to this earth, which is to say it will keep you alive. But I think it’s good to have hope, even necessary. I mean, that’s how I feel right now after running and petting my cat and drinking too much coffee.

But if you really want a Super Nintendo for Christmas and you hope and hope and hope all through October/ November/ December and then don’t get one Christmas morning, are you a jackass for hoping? I don’t think so. That hope probably buoyed you up those three months before Christmas. If you force yourself not to hope and then you don’t get a Super Nintendo, well, you still feel disappointment. Maybe not as much, but this life is not about sparing yourself pain and disappointment. This life is about feeling the good feelings-- love, hope, closeness, forgiveness-- with no fear of pain and disappointment. So I guess right now I say yeah, give in to hope, let it flow through your tired body. Do I put hope in anything today? Nope, not really. There’s an infinite list of bad things I hope don’t happen, but there’s not really any positive things I’m wishing for. But then, my life is pretty sweet already.

RK: Okay, now that we’re all depressed about not getting the SNES for Christmas and writing won't save us, let’s talk about how your life maintains its sweetness: the new book, Cold Turkey. First of all, congratulations.

Can you tell us why Cold Turkey is important to you. Who is this book for?

MS: Cold Turkey is actually a great example of what I was discussing earlier-- how writing gives back to you, whether you want it to or not. Cold Turkey is an audiobook about how to quit drinking and stay sober without AA or rehab. I did a little PR session with Audible before the book launched and they coached me how to talk about how I wanted to give back to the community and help people and so on. That’s all bullshit. I had zero desire to write the book and wanted very much NOT to write the book. I agreed to do it for two shitty reasons: because I needed the money and because I selfishly never wanted to have to answer another email from someone in crisis about how to quit drinking. However, once I got into it, I realized both that I had a lot to say on the subject and that I cared deeply-- not just about the subject or my experience of it, but that I cared deeply about anyone and everyone trying to get their shit together. Life is frustrating and sometimes you can convince yourself that you’re a shittier person than you are and then thank God writing proves you wrong.

RK: I made it out of a similar hole and sometimes I struggle with regret and shame. In the movie On The Waterfront, Brando said, “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.”

It seems you made the best of it, but do you ever feel like your time with drugs and alcohol robbed you of your contention?

MS: Yes and no. We would all love to go back and rewrite our pasts, even those of us who aren’t addicts and alcoholics. And we’ve all read those corny sci-fi stories where someone goes back in time and steps on a butterfly and then Hitler becomes president or whatever. Here’s the thing. Or here’s a couple of things. You can’t go back. I can’t go back. We can’t go back. We can only move forward. You are currently the youngest you will ever be. The only meaningful question is “can I be a contender now?”

Human beings are great at magnifying the negative and obscuring the positive. Maybe you were hungover and missed work on a day during which you would have been hit by a car and paralyzed. We don’t know what could have happened and we can’t know. We obsess about that time we missed hitting the lottery by one measly number… but we instantly forget all the times we should have been run over by taxis, buses, ice cream trucks, etc. It’s useful to recall the bad shit that could have happened to you-- that should have happened to you-- but didn’t.

At this point in my life, I’m not just grateful that I’m sober, I’m also grateful that I was a fuckup. Living as a penniless alcoholic for a long time taught me empathy. And it’s given me a lot of other skills that come in handy from time to time. And I’ve made a career of writing about the mistakes I’ve made... so thank fucking God for those mistakes.

RK: Amen. Thank God for those mistakes. Okay, let’s shift to something more serious: biscuits or cornbread?

MS: Oh man, that’s tough. I think I’m going to go with cornbread. I do love a good biscuit, though. I had English muffins this morning that were handmade by a friend and they were out-of-this-world good.

RK: I agree. A bad biscuit is better than a dried up cornbread, but good cornbread is undefeated. Before we go, I want to give you the floor. What is important to Mishka Shubaly? What’s on your mind?

MS: Nothing cosmic or deep! I need to snake the drain on the sink, I need to change the cat litter, I need to apply for a bunch of grants to keep my head above water here. I guess this is where I plug the new record? I just put out an EP on band camp called “I’ll Be Gone.” People are saying it’s the best record I’ve ever done. You be the judge: https://mishkashubaly.bandcamp.com/album/ill-be-gone

Mishka Shubaly is a bestselling author, a writing teacher, a cult songwriter, a road dog on house arrest, a shipwreck survivor, and a clue on Jeopardy! His most recent work is the audiobook Cold Turkey: How to Quit Drinking by Not Drinking

Forsythia by Kathryn Weidener

Forsythia

by Kathryn Weidener

Sunshine melted the ice on the bees’ front porch this morning and my beekeeper emailed to ask if I’d seen any activity around the hive since the weather had warmed up. Warmed up? I’ll admit this is a whole lot nicer than it has been, but any bee that ventures forth today will not find anything worth visiting. Little chickadees and sparrows were hopping around in some of the larger clusters of forsythia earlier today. As one landed on a stem, little puffs of snow would fall below and another bird would fly out setting off small avalanches revealing their still brown stems.

Jane clipped forsythia on New Year’s Day to force it to bloom in her dining room for the annual seed ordering party in mid January. Surrounded by glossy seed catalogues eight friends spent a gray Sunday afternoon planning their flowers and produce for the next growing season. Pages turned and decisions made to purchase: beets, broccoli, kohlrabi, lettuce, peas, radish, tomatillos. Why not venture into new crops? Everything looks so hopeful and green. From the windowsill the wanton yellow arms of forsythia called us to believe in spring.

The week before Valentine’s Day I clipped my own forsythia and on Valentine’s Day my husband brought home a lovely bouquet of mixed cut flowers. I deftly split it in two and added color to our bathroom and the kitchen island. The new flowers put the forsythia to shame. It took nearly two weeks before I saw specks of yellow on the brown stems. But they bloomed for my birthday. I posted it on Facebook.

The seeds were delivered to Jane’s house the first week of February. At home snow fell from the sky and ice filled the streets. It took a week before we could gather for seed sorting. We had all saved junk mail envelopes to take our share of the loot. Ever tried to actually separate 300 seeds into 40/40/20% piles? The least experienced gardener got the envelope with the planting directions.

As I got off the plane at LAX I could smell the warmth. Even through the car exhaust the scent of jasmine was in the air. Year round something is always in bloom. My granddaughter, Allison enjoyed discovering different flowers on our walks to and from the park. The next time I will be there at the end of April she will have a new brother.  In New Jersey, the forsythia will be in full bloom.

About The Author

Kathryn Weidener is a professional storyteller and has been telling tales all her life. Her publishing credits include arielchart.blogspot.com, US1 Worksheets, Hobby Farm Magazine, and Sandpaper. A BA degree in Communication also led her through careers in social work, accounting and ESOL tutoring.She is the current matriarch of a long lineage of NJ farmers and gardeners. She and her husband lived an 1839 farmhouse on the Raritan River for 18 years and currently reside in Princeton, NJ. http://www.njstorynet.org/kathryn-weidener

Bad Diet by Kenneth Pobo

I told my husband Sam that drinking bleach, even in small amounts, was a dumb idea.  He snuck it, got sick but so far has lived.

Sam is like Neptune.  He can be quite chilly and distant.  Still, on his few better days, there’s something grand about him, larger than life some might say.  I’d like to find a telescope into his soul.  Neither of us believes that we have souls, but still.  I’d like to see.

Sometimes I tell Sam that we must eat better.  We both hate every vegetable.  My friend Nancy asked “How are you still alive?”

I don’t know.  I’m here.  I’m queer.  And I’m eating Good’s Potato Chips right now which truly are good.

Sam and I fight about music.  He dislikes Marianne Faithfull, the greatest singer ever born who sounds like someone opened a box of razor blades in her throat.  Sam says that sounds unpleasant.  One time he threw a corn cob at me during dinner.  I said I loved the early Bee Gees.  He didn’t apologize but he did offer me a napkin.

We may get divorced or we may live vaguely ever after.  We water ski and picnic--he will stay in a drenching rain eating a chicken leg without seeking shelter.  I admire that.  I also admire how ants build their hills.  I build my hill everyday.  It won’t last.  What does?

About The Author

Kenneth Pobo has a new book forthcoming from Assure Press called Uneven Steven.  His chapbook, Your Place Or Mine, was published in June 2020 by the State Poetry Society of Alabama.  His work has appeared in: Hawaii Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Mudfish, Philadelphia Stories, and elsewhere.

Explosive Orchids by Susan Triemert

When the brown beehive of hair bobbled my way, I knew I was in trouble. Up until then I’d been dodging adult attention: the stares, the hugs--some clumsy and loose, others rib-crushing and breathless. The coned hairdo belonged to Mrs. Leitner, my kindergarten teacher. I did not expect to see her here. She had always yelled at the class, screamed at me. When I could not back away any further, she said. “It’s time to say goodbye to your father.” Up until then, everything had been dull and fuzzy, as if peering through rain-soaked glass. When she grabbed my wrist with her bony, taloned fingers, I was jolted into awareness. Could now see detail in the path I was being dragged: the ironed creases in the men’s trousers, the glint of a penny someone must have dropped, the suntanned tint of shiny nylon-ed legs, and the wrinkled up kleenex Aunt Linda had been dabbing at her nose, now held limp by her side. Could hear the priest’s booming voice, “too young to die,” the whispered condolences, “heart attack,” the nervous laughter from my older cousins, hear “he was only forty-two, ”and “those poor girls.”

I was now six feet from the casket, and Mrs. Leitner was not letting up. All I could see was the tip of my father’s nose, the same nose everyone said I had. Same eyes. Mouth, too. Some said I shared his sense of humor. Others his mischievous side. Suddenly, the smell of the peace lilies and orchids were explosive and spun me back into a cloud of dizziness. Or was it blissful oblivion? I dug my heels into the ground, though the shag carpeting was slippery and my patent leathers couldn’t gain traction. Skidding on a patch of ice, it felt--with no rail to grab onto, no support. I shifted my hips, stretched out my arms, grasping at the air for balance. I didn’t say to Mrs. Leitner what I wanted. Didn’t say: This is the last place I want to be. My father’s dead face is not something I want to remember. Didn’t say: No one invited you, so why are you here? Didn’t say: No one in my family even liked you, especially my father. Nor did I say: When you die, I will never attend your funeral. Instead, I drove my heels in more, made divots in the carpeting. Floated back into my safety net of distraction and escape, back where none of this had happened, where everyone was alive and well, where my greatest worry was whether I received an “A” or an “A-”on my spelling quiz. I was not moving forward, not here, not for my former teacher, not for anyone. There was one more similarity she may not have known. Stubborn I was, like my father.

About The Author

Susan Triemert holds an MA in Education and an MFA from Hamline University in St. Paul, MN. She has been published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Cheat River Review, Crab Orchard Review, A-Minor, Evening Street Review, Pithead Chapel, 101word stories and elsewhere. She lives in St. Paul with her husband, their two sons, and never enough animals. Twitter: @SusanTriemert

Nathaniel Kennon Perkins interviewed by Rob Kaniuk (Schuylkill Valley Journal) about WALLOP: A Novel (House of Vlad, 2020)

You just released Wallop, hell yeah! You put out a lot of stuff (books, zines, podcasts). Do you pursue your art as a compulsion, is it goal oriented, or something else entirely?

Thanks! Mostly I just like to make stuff. I like the process, and I like the feeling when it’s done. I feel like I spend so much time at my job dealing with bullshit that sitting down and creating something is the most meditative and relaxing thing I could do. Lately, I’ve also been realizing that maybe I make art because it’s the only part of my life that’s actually within my own control. If I’m writing/recording/drawing comics/working with wood/whatever, then I am practicing being self-sufficient and autonomous.

Of course, that all changes once a book gets to the publishing stage. Brian Alan Ellis at House of Vlad is a great editor, and I’m grateful for for all the work and thought that he put into Wallop.

But I have more ideas for projects than I’ll ever have time to make, so in that way my art is a compulsion. I’m always trying to catch up to myself. My writing is goal oriented, certainly. I have at least the next three or four years worth of projects planned out.

Tell us about the book a little. How much of the novel is autobiographical? Are there any characters you feel closest to?

Parts of Wallop are autobiographical to a degree, or at least heavily informed by experiences I had. My friend Jacob and I did spend two days hitchhiking from Denver to Kansas City, and once we got there, there was a drive-by shooting. Our other friend did get put in handcuffs after he chewed through police caution tape with his teeth. There are a few things like that. When I was writing the first draft, I took big chunks from my personal journals.

It’s all fiction, too. My life isn’t boring, but it doesn’t follow a narrative structure. What I like about fiction is that I can take all these ideas and events and just create a a set of feelings that exist around them. I write essays, too, but most of the time I hate how the essays come out. I feel like I always end up trying to make some sort of declarative statement in them. My non-fiction is less lifelike than my fiction. In fiction, there’s no statement to be made. There are just feelings and things that happen, and the reader gets to figure out for themselves what things mean or if they mean anything at all. So, in that sense, Wallop is 100% true.

My favorite character in the book is Lauren, the protagonist’s girlfriend. Like the rest of the characters, she’s a little bit out of control, has substance abuse issues, makes bad choices, is fucked up by her past. But she’s strong, too. Or she’s learning how to be, at least. I think she’s quietly funny, rolls her eyeballs all the way out of her head at the pathetic men around her. Of all the characters, I like to think she has the best chance of coming out the other side in one piece.

There are so many good writers out there going unnoticed; who do you follow that we haven’t heard of?

I don’t know who’s heard of whom but here are five writers that deserve more recognition than they currently have. I think they’ll get it, too.

1.     Bart Schaneman – I don’t think there’s anybody right now who writes about identity of place in the West and Midwest like Schaneman does. His characters, even when they do bad things, are so respectable that you can’t help but root for them.

2.     Naadeya Haseeb – Manic Depressive Dream Girl (Maudlin House, 2015) was excellent, definitely influential to me as far as broadening my understanding of the possibilities inherent in unorthodox short novel structures. I haven’t read any of her poetry, but I’d like to.

3.     Steven Dunn – If you haven’t read Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016), get yourself a copy right now. Like, open a new tab in your browser and order it, then come back and finish reading this interview.

4.     Adam Gnade – A ton of people have read and loved his non-fiction book, The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad (Pioneers Press, 2013). It’s a good book, but his novels and “talking songs” are what really shine.

5.     Bud Smith – I don’t know Smith personally at all, so I feel a little weird saying this. But F 250 (Piscataway House, 2014) and Work (Civil Coping Mechanism, 2017) have influenced my writing and thinking to such a degree that I feel like none of my books would exist if I hadn’t read them. Of course, Smith’s getting a little famous now. Come to think of it, I suspect that all of these writers have more readers than I do. They should be recommending my books.

De Niro or Pacino?

It’s a hard choice, but De Niro. He’s made more bullshit for sure, but Taxi Driver is a favorite. Sometimes you gotta bet big to win big.

Allen Iverson’s “we talkin bout practice?” speech just celebrated 20 years; what’s more important to you: practice or the game?

Larry Brown indicated that practice and the game are the same thing. At least, I think that’s what he was trying to say. What do I know? In his 2010 novel Person, Sam Pink comes back to the refrain, “It feels like practice.” If Pink is saying what I think he is, then he has a different view on practice than Larry Brown does. I think they’re both right.

In the movie Inherit the Wind, Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) is scolded by Matthew Brady for using foul language. He responds: “I don't swear for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. We've got to use all the words we've got. Besides, there are damn few words anybody understands.”

Do you ever feel constrained by language or find difficulty communicating in your writing?

I wish I was better at writing about nature and landscapes. Every time I read Edward Abbey or Gary Snyder or Paul Theroux, I’m at once deeply moved and profoundly jealous. I don’t have the language to translate onto the page the power and emotion of a beautiful place. Or even an ugly place. I probably swear too much, too.

I mentioned earlier that you put out a lot of work. Do you want to mention any of your other projects?

I have two previous books out: Cactus (Trident Press, 2018), a short novel, and The Way Cities Feel to us Now (Maudlin House, 2019), a collection of short stories.

I’ve been producing issues of an ongoing literary/comics/personal zine project for the past ten years or so called Ultimate Gospel. There’s an audio arm to that as well, an online radio show called Ultimate Gospel Radio. The radio show is mostly just music and spoken word recordings that I like.

For the past three years, I’ve been running a small publishing house called Trident Press. I’ve been lucky to work with excellent writers, editors, and artists.

I’ll give you the floor here. What’s important to Nate Perkins that we haven’t discussed? What’s on your mind?

Justice for Breonna Taylor now.

Purchase WALLOP:

https://houseofvlad.bigcartel.com/product/wallop-a-novel-by-nathaniel-kennon-perkins

About The Author

Nathaniel Kennon Perkins lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he works as a bookseller and publisher at Trident Press. He is the author of a short story collection, The Way Cities Feel to Us Now (Maudlin House, 2019), a previous novel, Cactus (Trident Press, 2018), and an ongoing literary zine series, Ultimate Gospel. His writing has appeared at TriQuarterly, Noncanon Press, Berfrois, Talking Book, Keep This Bag Away From Children, decomP, Pithead Chapel, Timber Journal, Potluck, Thought Catalog and American West, among other places. In 2014 he was the recipient of the High Country News’s Bell Prize.

About The Interviewer

Rob Kaniuk is Creative Nonfiction Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

Double Feature

by Rob Kaniuk 

“Know what movie that’s from?”

“No, Marty, I don’t. Why don't you use your own words once in a while instead of quoting the Coen brothers all day?”

Then Marty would tell me the movie and say, “you haven't seen that? Are you kidding?”

I’d have to tell him that I did, but don't remember all the quotes. This happened every day at work.

Truth is, I used to get as high as Jesus in Rio and watch movies. When I got my shit together, got clean, I’d revisit them with no idea how I knew the storyline and ending already. I’d call them predictable when my wife asked how I knew the storylines to all these flicks. I was a genius. I could figure out a plot in 10 minutes.

Then Netflix asked me if I wanted to watch Team Foxcatcher again.

I never watched this… why would Netflix pretend I watched The Office dude, Mark Ruffalo and Baby John Cena roll around in singlets. What’s his name?––Tatum––yeah, Channing Tatum. I never seen that. I know I’m about to watch it because I used to work with a guy who was hired by DuPont to dig indiscriminate holes along the perimeter of Foxcatcher Farms, looking for ‘CIA surveillance.’ I remember when the story broke on the news. It was 15 minutes from where I was living. Damn right I’m watching that.

After Baby John Cena and Steve Carrell started doing coke in the helicopter, I realized Netflix wasn’t pretending. I had seen it. I was in the middle of an oxymorphone disassociation when I saw it last. Delusional, hallucinating. On the edge of overdose. Everything feels like a dream when you take enough morphine. Not at all like the warm blanket of oxys or percs, which is the high I was chasing (with the wrong derivative).

The realization ruined the movie all over again, because now I was clean but all I could do is go back in my mind and count the other movies which I had now seen twice. Two completely different experiences, of course. Some of them I remember seeing high but couldn't tell you a goddamn thing about. Like Scarface. I’d seen that flick 20 or 30 times. Every time with an eight ball of coke. I know all the stupid clichés and that Tony dies, but I didn't know if I actually liked it. I watched it again. Besides the first half hour of the movie (bearable, at best), where Tony gets to Miami and starts making moves, Scarface sucks. I got clean and realized not only Scarface sucks, but Pacino sucks. Whoo-wah! That’s right. I wouldn’t cast Pacino in a biopic about Pacino. He’s a Whoo-wah! actor, at best.

When I watch a new movie now, I fall asleep the first time and try to guess where I left off. I usually figure out after watching ten minutes at a time before I fall asleep again. I have wasted a lot of money on 48 hour rentals.

Now when Marty quotes a movie and asks the same question he always does, I respond, “Yeah, Marty, but I was either as high as a giraffe’s asshole, or I fell asleep.”

About The Author

Rob Kaniuk is a union carpenter who loves spending time telling stories to his niece and nephew. He is also Creative Nonfiction Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

REMEMBERING A NEARLY FORGOTTEN HERO

[This Cover Story first appeared in the Schuylkill Valley Journal’s Fall 2017 issue.]

     While sculptures all over our country are being moved, removed and, in some cases, abused, people in the City of Brotherly Love have come together to install a new statue.  A recent addition to the bronze population of Philadelphia is a monument in the likeness of Octavius Catto.  Of all the statues in the city, this (at long last) is the first to represent a specific named person of color.  The dedication of a memorial to this man is not simply a case of affirmative action in public art.  Catto, who lived from 1839 to 1871, was a teacher, orator, civil rights activist, community leader, and even a star baseball player.  Octavius Catto accomplished all this in the short lifetime allotted him before he was killed by an assassin’s bullet at the age of 32.  The recognition is well-deserved and long overdue.

     At age 15, Catto was a student at the Institute for Colored Youth, a school on Lombard Street in Philadelphia.  Five years later he was teaching math and English at that school.  In 1861, Catto became the alumni association’s first president.  His leadership extended to the local branch of the Equal Rights League, the first national organization established (in 1864) for the promotion of human rights, especially the right to vote which was denied people of color.

     The quest for civil rights began long before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s.  In 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to cede her seat on a bus to a white rider in Alabama where blacks were expected to move to the back of a bus in deference to white riders who would sit toward the front.  Nearly a century earlier, Octavius Catto helped write the bill of legislation to provide people of color access to Philadelphia street cars, a law that was passed in 1867.  At that time, Philadelphia public mass transit consisted of privately owned horse-drawn streetcars.  Many of the owners did not allow people of color on the streetcars at all.  Some would occasionally condescend to permit a black person to pay to board.  That person would be relegated not to the back of the car, but to the front platform, an exposed position on the car subject to spattering by dirt from the street as well as dirt from the horse.  

     Access to public transportation was necessary to give people an opportunity for jobs that required travel to a work site, a right basic to daily life and to earning a living in the city.  In March of 1867, after many unsuccessful attempts, the bill Octavius Catto helped to write was passed to make it illegal to deny streetcar access to black passengers in Pennsylvania.

     There were restrictions to overcome in terms of recreation as well.  Catto led the struggle to have the baseball team he founded, the Pythians, compete against white ball clubs.  The appeal to have the Pythians admitted to the National Association of Amateur Base Ball Players was known to the delegates as “Catto’s proposal.”   Unfortunately, the association refused.  

      On the other hand, the efforts of the Equal Rights League finally met with success in 1870 when Congress passed the fifteenth amendment to allow black men to vote.  But legislation is only a step toward effecting social change.  The 1871 mayoral election in Philadelphia pointed at the disparity between legislation and reality.  There was major strife in our fair city at the time of the 1871 election.  Local Democrats were resentful that their hold on the city might be broken by black voters who were likely to cast their ballots for the party of Abraham Lincoln – Republican.  Rioting and violence erupted to discourage black voters from exercising their new right.  National Guard troops were called upon to uphold the law.  The Fifth Brigade, a black division of which Catto was a major, was among those called to duty.  On his way to brigade headquarters, Octavius Catto was shot and killed for the cause he had fostered – martyred to that cause after its apparent success.

     The idea for this memorial began more than a decade before the current controversy over statuary in the United States.  This project was twelve years in the works.  With the support of former Mayors John Street and Michael Nutter along with [then] current Mayor Jim Kenney, the Catto statue has finally taken its place.  The memorial was dedicated in a ceremony at Philadelphia’s City Hall on September 26, 2017 before a large, enthusiastic crowd of citizens, including several of Catto’s descendants.

 
    Sculptor Branly Cadet was chosen by a committee of artists to design and fashion the memorial to Octavius Catto.  Earlier, Cadet had sculpted the twenty-one foot statue of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the first of New York’s African-American congressmen, that stands in front of the New York State Office Building.  Another of Branly Cadet’s works is the Jackie Robinson statue at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.   

      The Octavius Catto sculpture is at once grand and finely nuanced.  The face of the statue shows both determination and dignity.  The sculptural gesture is a total-body gesture, ambiguous with a dash of desperation, a smidgeon of supplication, a pinch of impatience, a flicker of frustration, and an ample amount of appeal to the humanity of humanity. You can almost hear Catto saying, “Why not simply respect one another?  Is that really so difficult?”   

About The Author

Mike Cohen hosts Poetry Aloud and Alive at Philadelphia's Big Blue Marble Book Store. His articles on sculpture appear in the Schuylkill Valley Journal in which he is a contributing editor. Mike has memorized a good deal of his poetry, having found that while some poems should be seen and not heard, others should be heard and not seen. It is a constant struggle to keep them sorted properly and to keep poems that should be neither seen nor heard out of the mix. Constant companion, cohabitant, cohort, and confidante, Connie, keeps Mike and his poems from getting off-kilter. Mike's wry writing has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Fox Chase Review, and other journals. His poetic presentations feature humor and drama against a philosophical backdrop. Look for him at http://mikecohensays.com, on YouTube, and in his book, BETWEEN THE I'S as well as the forthcoming collection of poems and short tales, BETWEEN THE SHADOW AND THE WALL.

References

https://whyy.org/episodes/monuments-in-philadelphia/  -  Marty Moss-Coane interview with DAN BIDDLE and MURRAY DUBIN, authors of Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America, and PAUL FARBER, artistic director of Monument Lab and Managing Director of the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities.

http://www.phillytrib.com/news/sculptor-reflects-on-octavius-v-catto-statue/article_74327f2a-4034-5b72-b590-befe2a3e2ccb.html

http://www.phillytrib.com/news/city-unveils-design-for-octavius-catto-memorial-statue/article_d86a293c-8e0a-5e78-b2a0-0bef5d959888.html

http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement

http://www.ushistory.org/catto/chap8-analyze.html

http://www.sfchronicle.com/giants/shea/article/Oakland-sculptor-s-statue-captures-Jackie-11110655.php

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Equal_Rights_League

Behind the Eight

by Chris Cocca

The kids next door have names like Jess and Jordan. Jayden. Jalen, maybe.  Something with a J.  20, maybe 21, same age as my wife and me when we met in college, but Jess and Jordan work.  We’re not that much older.  We found this house a year ago and bought it for the nursery because Heather was still pregnant.

It’s the last house in the row, ten blocks west of center city where our folks grew up but don’t go, ten blocks from where they think things have gotten bad.  Things can get bad anywhere, I try to tell them, and they tell me not to get like that, they’re just looking out, just worried.  The neighborhood is quiet, mostly.  There are small dogs in the alley, Mr. Johnson’s, they bark at the Moldonado kids who seem to live in tank-tops and on scooters.  They’re seven, maybe eight. Mr. Johnson, his house starts the next row, has a little garden with petunias and wax peppers.  There are five more houses between his house and the street, a valley of dishes and antennas, then the bar and grade school.  The Moldonados are Italian, and Johnson is a prick about their runny noses and the sweat stains on their clothing.  He says they’re secret Puerto Ricans.  The Js don’t hide their contempt for Mr. Johnson, facsist dick, they call him, motherfucking racist.  Old bigot, I say, when we talk over the waist-high fence between our yards.  Sometimes we walk our dogs together, my Australian Shepherd has a thing for their sleek pit. We walk past the bar, the school, our dogs piss on sycamores that line the boulevard in and out of town, on high grass growing through the spaces in the pavement.

Heather and I can almost always hear them, Jess and Jordan. Radical politics, mostly, loud sex once or twice. Since last night it’s eight-ball, nine-ball, maybe snooker. Resin balls cracking, dropping in pockets, rolling in plastic tubes towards the front. 

Our doors both have windows, their curtain is black, a signal, I think, when I’m being like that, to all other pirates, you can parlay here, we can talk about shit, underground hip hop and hardcore, we belong to the Industrial Workers of the World, we occupy more than space, we live rent-free in the brains of our landlords and bosses, you belong, too, and so on. Our curtain, new since the miscarriage, is white.  There's a TV in their front room, but we have new furniture that matches our walls and trim.  The loud breaks and rolls, the laughing when Jayden scratches on eight, when Jalen or Jordan or Jess smear blue chalk on their face, those come from the other side of our dining room wall, where we have antique pecan chairs and a table and hutch with good glass and china.

We sit in the living room and hear their TV and we talk about our day and how we're depressed. Heather’s sick this week. I hate my job, talk about quitting. The cat buries herself in the fringed needlework pillows that match our new sofa.

"I think they got a pool table," I say.

We should move the pecan set downstairs and bring up the TV. That way we can eat and watch cartoons and Cheers like we used to. That way we can crash upstairs on old couches and smoke and play pool and 8-bit Nintendo with games from the 80s. We'll put action figures in the hutch and put our china and glass in the coal room. In the spring we'll watch baseball with the windows all open even when it rains.

These things won't happen. I don’t say them. We are young professionals.  The house is still an investment.  Heather starts to cough. The cat lifts her head and sinks back in the pillow.  Cars strobe light from outside through the curtain.  Heather coughs again, interrupts whatever I was saying. 

“What’s that?” she says.

“Nothing.  I think I’ll go to bed.”

Upstairs, I still hear them.  “Jesus, Jordan,” one says, “get your nutsack off the table!”

“It’s like I told you, brother. One way or another, we’re all behind the eight.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Cocca's work has been published or is forthcoming at venues including Hobart, Brevity, Pindeldyboz, elimae, The Huffington Post, O:JAL, Rejection Letters, Mineral Lit Mag, and Perhappened. He is a recipient of the Creager Prize for Creative Writing at Ursinus College and earned his MFA at The New School.

Producing Poetry During This Prolonged Pandemic

by Cathryn Shea

The word “write” and its gerund “writing” do not fully embody the physical and mental machinations involved in actually creating a thing conveyed in blocks of letters, punctuation (or no), and white pace that purports to be poesy. I prefer to think of the process as “producing.” I could even use the word “birthing” but that’s a bit much and also too exclusive of half the human race. Why I’m hung up on this idea of producing poetry right now is because I’m feeling like all the attendant aspects of my usual routines and modes of creating are unattainable. At least hampered and cordoned off by social distancing restraints. Even if restrictions are lifted, my world feels cautious and contained within new boundaries. My writing (ok, I’ll use that word for convenience sake) is not flowing well right now. I feel like I can manage bits and pieces, fragments, and scribbles in my notebook. Even on the computer the words do not spill forth as smoothly and profusely as they did before this novel coronavirus hit the planet.

Also, every week my calendar alerts me with a scheduled poetry group, reading, or workshop that of course has been canceled: bi-weekly San Francisco “Monday Night Poets,” monthly “Tuesday’s Child Poets,” monthly mentor group with Tom Centolella at Gaby’s (where we also potluck!), monthly book group, quarterly solstice free-writing group. Then there are the one-offs: submission round-table at Francesca’s house, April workshop with Rusty Morrison, May workshop with Jane Miller, July Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. All cancelled. I’m not trying to show off here. I’m sure every person involved in a poetry community is experiencing the same shock to their social networks and calendars. Although I’m grateful for Zoom and Facetime, and even Cisco Webex, these online tools don’t cut it as a replacement for the real in-person interaction. This period of isolation has dampened my production of new poetry. I am sure that many poets are not experiencing a dearth of new work like I am but I’ve been struck by how many of my friends report that they are not writing right now either.

What about actually putting pen to paper? Or fingers to keyboard?

I’ve been spending a decent amount of time revising and playing around with older stuff, but like I say, not producing fresh new poems. Since I’m having trouble with new work, I’ve come up with an idea based on the cento poem that has helped me put together some interesting pieces.

I take a stack of poetry books and chapbooks and quickly page through them one at a time landing on a random page where I pick a line or a phrase. I furiously write these down in my notebook, not paying any attention to meaning and certainly not editing. Then I take this pile of gibberish and work on it as if it were clay. I change everything so that no line or phrase is the same as the original. I am not going to attribute this “work” unless I find that I have indeed plagiarized. The idea is to make complete changes. The results are somewhat like magical realism. The lines and stanzas are disconnected but lend themselves to being glued together somehow. It’s like a game. I’ve noticed that this has helped me get going again in small ways.

What to do about all the groups and events?

Transition to Zoom, et al. Well, my regular groups have insisted on continuing, sometimes sporadically, taking advantage of Zoom and Google Groups typically. We post our work to our newly created Google Group or email it ahead of time and then have a Zoom meeting to discuss our feedback. This turns out to be fun to see everyone, but somewhat unruly. And exhausting. It helps me to try various methods of responding. Screen sharing your piece isn’t smooth for everyone. Sometimes I print out poems and write on them and then make comments. I definitely print my own poem so I can write notes on it while people are providing feedback. I’ve noticed that I’m sharing old work more and I’ve been revising a lot. I’ve even done some pretty extensive reworking and I think the results are half-way decent. This is good since I’m not producing a lot of brand-new stuff. Certainly, no new poems ready for prime time sharing. Yet.

Take a break. Marin Poetry Center, the area-wide community of poets that I belong to, has a Summer Traveling Show where we read in groups at libraries and a few other venues around the San Francisco Bay Area. This year they have asked members to pick with whom they want to read virtually and then to upload a recording of a few poems. I might just skip this year. I’m feeling overwhelmed. I still have time to decide though. I also bow out of some of the Zoom meetings and sometimes skip posting my poetry to the new Google Groups. I try not to ghost, and let people know if I am skipping. I realize I’m involved in possibly too many “groups.” But I love the community of poets.

For me, making a game out of producing new poetry seems to be the best trick. This is definitely the most fun with the most revealing and surprising results. I also find that formal poetry methods are more appealing right now since to me these are like games too. Otherwise, there is always the possibility of going down the rabbit holes of pandemics and politics.

About The Author

Cathryn Shea's first full-length poetry book "Genealogy Lesson for the Laity," is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press of Portland, Oregon in September 2020. In 2019, Shea’s fourth chapbook, "Backpack Full of Leaves," was published by Cyberwit.net and her third chapbook, "The Secrets Hidden in a Pear Tree" was published dancing girl press. Her second chapbook, "It's Raining Lullabies" is also from dancing girl press. Shea’s poetry has appeared recently in New Orleans Review (web feature), Typishly, After the Pause, burntdistrict, Permafrost, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @cathy_shea.