Issue #15: Quirky Love, Table of Contents

So we may be a bit behind on the Valentine's Day curve, but we never liked to follow the crowd. And seriously, this issue is even more quirky and romantic than usual.

Enjoy! Oh yeah, that's Editrice Liz on what we assume is our cover photo, unless it proves too shockingly quirky for you all.

Frozen, Ryan Day

Clot, Graham Tugwell

Earth, Too, Beau Johnson

The Good Daughter (Never Burns Down Anything You Can See), Kristen Hamelin Tracey

Dinosaurs, or something you feel will find its own form, Calvin Fantone

Full Frontal Optimism, Malea Grubb

High and Inside, John L. Stanizzi

The Language of Trees, John L. Stanizzi

A Natural Selection of Motherhood Poems I Will Not Write, Tim Pfau

Lesson, Gale Acuff

Ernestine wears the red-sashed taffeta dress, Grace Marie Grafton

Nest, Eggs, Space, Grace Marie Grafton

The Hand of Jack The Ripper, Ricky Garni

Savage Water, Ricky Garni

Two Poems, Robert Laughlin

We Regret, Rory Margraf

Poem About the Orangutan, Adam Lizakowski

Contributors or Potential Suitors

Editrice Note: From Toucanlandia, With Love

Poem About the Orangutan, Adam Lizakowski

I have so many sleepless nights and I am worried about you,
you are very intellectual:
the poet, the painter,
the sculpture and discoverer,
looking for a place to hide from human sight,
only the rivers, the forests, the mountains know
your life. You cannot hide your heart,
wearing an orange robe, Da Vinci

 You are my love from the hidden Islands of Borneo

you cannot image how important you are to me,
from which the sun your eyes got the divine sparkle  
which melt the ice of my heart,
with lips so soft to kiss.

You are the world dreamer but you do not dream

about kings and queens
you dream about an animal kingdom
where you and I could be one.

Contributors or Potential Suitors

Gale Acuff has taught English in many universities in the USA and China. His poems have appeared in dozens of journals, and he has authored three books of poetry. He now teaches in Mianyang, Sichuan, China.

Ryan Day is from Chicago. He currently lives in Madrid, where he writes and teaches. His work has been published in Spain and the US.

Calvin Fantone received his BA in Creative Writing from CSU Long Beach. He is currently earning a teaching credential in order to drop some knowledge on high school kids. When not writing, he can be found daydreaming about flying, time travel, friendly monsters, outer space, and dinosaurs.

Ricky Garni is a graphic designer living in North Carolina. He is presently at work condensing a 700 pg manuscript of poetry into a seven column 40 page book of lines: Buttterscotch Zero.

Grace Marie Grafton’s new book of prose poems, Other Clues, 2010, was published by Latitude Press (rawartpress.com). Her new chapbook, Chrysanthemum Oratorio, is now available from Dancing Girl Press. Her poetry has won first prize in the Soul Making contest (PEN women, San Francisco), in the annual Bellingham Review contest, and was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poems recently appear in Volt, Edgz, Prism Review, Ambush Review, poem2day.blogspot.com, languageandculture.net and poemeleon.org.

Malea Grubb resides in Raleigh, NC and earns her living as a professional ballet dancer with the Carolina Ballet. Outside of her life onstage, Malea can usually be found either reading or writing. Her first book-length poetry collection, Runaway Train, was published in April 2011 by Altus Publishing. Her short fiction and poetry pieces have appeared in numerous literary and commercial magazines including Short Fiction Library, Bard, Scifaiku, Poet’s Ink, Yippee Magazine!, and Teen Ink. In addition, Malea is a regular contributing writer to North Carolina’s Triangle Diversity Magazine.

Beau Johnson lives in Canada with his wife and three boys.  He has been published before, in the darker, seedier parts of town.  However, it is on Tuesdays that he and his family travel back through time in an attempt to correct that which once went wrong.

Robert Laughlin lives in Chico, California. He has published 250 short stories and poems, and his novel, Vow of Silence, was favorably reviewed by Publishers Weekly. His website is at www.pw.org/content/robert_laughlin.

Adam Lizakowski received his BA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago. His lates book of poems is "Pieszyce Meadows" (2010) published in Poland. He has won numerous awards for poetry, including  bilingual book of poems titled “Chicago City of Belief”  (2008) was chosen by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Polish Division as the book of the year

Rory Margraf is an emerging poet and writer who is very close to throwing off the shackles of the English department at the University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in Heavy Hands Ink, Volumes Seven and Eight and he has much more collecting dust on various editors' desks. He hopes to continue his newfound success with fresh pens and a little help from good ol' Arthur Guinness.

Tim Pfau travels, reads and writes full time. His poetry has appeared in Canopic Jar, Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, Poefrika, The Gold Man Review, mixed media shows and won several contest prizes. He serves on the Board of the Oregon Poetry Association.

John L. Stanizzi’s books are Ecstasy Among Ghosts, and Sleepwalking(www.antrimhousebooks.com.) A former New England Poet of the Year (1998), his work has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, Passages North, The Spoon River Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Connecticut River Review, and many others.   John teaches English at Bacon Academy in Colchester and at Manchester Community College, where he was also the Poet in Residence.  His new book, Dance Against the Wall, will be out later this year (2012).

Kristen Hamelin Tracey lives in New York City and works at an online education start-up. Besides The Toucan, her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Foundling Review, Bound Off, and The Raleigh Review.

Graham Tugwell is a writer and performer of Irish distraction. His work has appeared in over forty journals and he has lived his whole life in the village where his stories take place. He loves it with a very special kind of hate. His website is grahamtugwell.com.

A Natural Selection of Motherhood Poems I Will Not Write, Tim Pfau

A fossilized queen ant, the size of a humming bird, was found in Wyoming. I once lived there too but didn’t meet them all. Still, I’m certain that there are none so large living today. I suspect that’s her fault. Carelessness around mud or fresh volcanic ash, (I looked it up. It was Greenriver mud.) is never a good idea and can have dire consequences, a perspective is probably not shared by small mammals the size of hummingbirds.

A brown spider, larger than your nostril but smaller than my eye, has a web in a corner of my garage. I call her Arachnida nervousa because she’s quite aggressively guarding an egg sack. We just wave when we pass, me with my hand, her with both front legs. I remember reading, with the same clarity that I remember reading poems by William Stafford which he never wrote, that baby spiders eat their mothers. If memory serves her, she could clear that up for me, but so will passing time and attention, in both cases.

The chances seem good that someday, like wild dogs with an aging zebra, my grandchildren will run down and devour a slow moving relative, probably an old one. Their own pups will play with the bones, enjoying each other, the sunshine, rolling and yipping in the bright dust.

Family and friends circle around me. Most are stable and reliable planets appearing in the sky every couple of weeks. Others blaze by with excitement in orbits like comets’, always a surprise. Where I was going with this is that not every bright light in the sky should be trusted without carefully calculating its path. Where I landed with it, again, was the realization that I am not the Sun. My wife is. All of us spun to her at some time or another and keep hanging around. I suppose that means I’m Mercury, hot, and close, serving as a celestial short stop, catching the fast ones before they get through. Sometimes, my back hurts.

God and dandelions are both immortal but dandelions are much easier to see.

Editrice Note: From Toucanlandia, With Love

We missed Valentine’s Day. Sorry. We bet you missed us, didn’t you? You had no one to cry with and instead had to pretend each book on your bookshelf was a different potential lover. We mean…um, no, that’s not what the editrices did on Valentine’s Day. Well, maybe Editrice Laura, seeing as she has about 74653 Doctor Who books on her shelf, and Doctors have a pretty consistent track record of being hunky in a nerd sort of way.

Anyway, damn shame we’re late to the party (fashionably late, as always), since as we were slamming this issue together we realized it had a theme. Now normally, we decide on the February issue’s theme in advance, but as you might be able to tell advance knowledge is not our strong point anymore. But it does appear almost everything in this issue converges like a correctly-done calculus equation on one theme: Quirky, quirky love.

 
Now you say, ladies, you have this on the brain because you’re both in quirky love affairs (though, as documented tirelessly, not with each other because Laura would choke Liz to death with a freakishly long blond braid in about three weeks. She may do so anyway because she thinks Liz needs to stop writing about our love lives in the Editrice Notes, and then Liz says, “you’re not the boss of me!” and then crying and raging and broken pencils and boxes of make-up chocolate ensue). Point taken. But…but…seriously. Handwriting experts love Jack the Ripper. A poet loves an orangutan. A mother loves a giant pulsating blood clot. People have wild sex on a parallel Earth. Love sets stuff on fire. A writer tries to impress girls with bad poetry…oh wait, haven’t we heard that one before? Well, and dinosaurs. Wait, we’ve had that too. Can’t imagine who fell in love because of dinosaurs (cough cough LAURA cough cough).

Prepare for a deluge of questionable behavior and questionable compliments, such as “The pimple on the side of your nose, it’s too cute/To hide beneath that mineral powder.” (Again, nothing new. Editrice Liz hears that every Wednesday.) And let us take this opportunity to remind you that we love you in a way only two girls and a gender-confused Toucan with an otherwise excellent sense of balance can love.  If you are the submissive type (which we really didn’t need to know, thanks), send us a piece of dominant writing at thetoucanmag@gmail.com. To make sure your token of affection isn’t too out there, check out our guidelines at www.thetoucanonline.blogspot.com And you can love us in your own special way by becoming our Facebook fan. We post lots of fun random stuff on our page, and we’ll almost always give you a poem of the week.

Now back to playing video games and ukuleles, and pretending we didn’t just write about our love lives in the Toucan again. Do you know these people? Neither do we.

Yours ‘til the chocolate chips, Liz and Laura, Toucan Editrices

Frozen, Ryan Day

I’m sure I’d make a fabulous anything more or less... Roller derby queen, Magician, chef, secretary, senator, professor of law, truck driver, limo driver, hedge fund manager (whatever the hell that is), lemon picker, bicycle mechanic, commercial producer, sign creator, sign holder, actress, waitress, psychologist, agent of some variety, inventor of flavors, film director, kindergarten teacher, gardener, farmer, seamstress, plow-woman, forger, professional soccer player, amateur harpist, vegas dealer, reno dealer, accountant, salsa instructor, pilot, sheep skinner, designer of boots, translator of languages that I’d be endlessly willing to learn...

I work. Don’t get me wrong. I work everyday. I smooth the surface of ice, which, for those who don’t know is water with all its molecules slowed way down. I make its surface smooth by driving over it in a giant machine. I drive a zamboni across the patterns made by circling blades and clear the slate. Everything is icy eventually, when it slows down enough. I cross out the lines made by the meantime, the incidentals of our largely circular motions.

“Carey!” yelled my boss, who everyone called Silver on account of his hair, over the loud sound of the engine. Everyone called me Carey instead of Carolina. I spelled it like a boy would because I don’t like the look of two consecutive r’s.

I cut the engine.

“Ever been bit by a kangaroo?”

I started the engine again. He liked to interrupt my work with needless questions, generally related to which animals I had or had not been bitten by. I once, after no few beers, told my coworkers a story about being bitten by a lama. They all thought I was talking about an animal, a llama, which is spelled with a double l, a fact that unfortunately is indistinguishable through verbal language. Truth be told I was bitten by a person lama, like the dalai, though not specifically him. I didn’t correct their misapprehension.

What happened was, I was walking down the road in my little town of Rolling Meadows. I was walking to work, because I don’t drive. I like to walk long distances. I like the feel of my feet on concrete and the thick gray smell of the Chicagoland air. I like birds. There are crows everywhere here. They say crows can talk, which seems obvious, but I’ve never heard one speak English. They have their own squawky language. So, I told them the story much in the way I’ve been telling you, and it is about here that they interrupted me. And by the way, no, I have not been bitten by a crow.

“Jesus H, Carey, get to the point!” My boss, Silver, he doesn’t like meanderings, which strikes me as odd for someone who owns an ice skating rink, or lives on a planet for that matter. When he’s frustrated, which he was just then, his eyes flutter like a butterfly’s wings. “No one cares about your frigg’n walk to work.”

So I skipped the part about the way the wind sounded and the magenta sheen on the fresh little oil slick and the way the texture of the leaves in the park looked like an alligator’s skin in the distance. Did you know they make boots out of Alligator’s skin? That strikes me as odd, but I suppose if people do it, there must be a reason, no?

 “So where did the llama come from?”

 “The road.”

 “This ain’t the Andes, Carey.” His eyes were extra fluttery. “There aren’t just llama’s walking down the road.”

“There was at least one lama walking down that road that day.”

“And it bit you?”

“He bit me.”

“How do you know it was a he?”

“I could just tell.” I thought it was strange that he would wonder how I would know the difference between a man and a woman. This was before I was aware of the single and double L dilemma. “He looked me in the eye. His jaw quivered. He took my hand, and he bit.”

Ever since that day, they always ask me:

“Hey, Carey, ever been bit by a Rhino?”

I haven’t, so, I shake my head and start the engine so that I can continue driving around erasing the marks that people have made in the ice.

Truth told, the only animal that’s ever bitten me was a human one, but I like the guessing game, so I don’t end it. I’ve never even been stung by a bee. I remember a friend was once, though. This was in college. Before the accident. He, Sasa, was a boyfriend I guess you could say. We liked to kiss, and to lay in cool grass wrapped in each other’s warm sticky arms. And we liked to talk. He told me that if you could keep your mind completely still, if you could freeze your thoughts, that you could control everything.

We were laying in the grass when he told me that. He said, “Carey, I think if you can slow it all the way down, smooth the zipping and zooming into a dull buzz, you could do just about anything.”

“What zipping and zooming?” I asked.

“What are you thinking right now. Quick, tell me without thinking.”

 “That’s impossible.”

“What?”

“To tell you what I’m thinking without thinking.”

“Try.”

“I’m thinking that I’m wrapped in the arms of a complete freak.”

He giggled in that way that made his eyes shimmer like gum wrappers.

“And I’m thinking I like it.”

He closed his eyes and sat up real straight. “Watch.”

I watched him sit there, still, breathing. His stillness made me calm. A little bee buzzed around his nose, but he didn’t move. I was nervous as it landed, but still, he didn’t move. I saw the bee flex its Charlie Brown sweater abdomen and push the little needle point that extended from its southern extremity into the bridge of his nose. He winced, but didn’t move. He wanted to be a teacher. I think he would have been a good one. I was going to be a baker. We were going to buy a house. I would wake up early and kneed dough, fire up ovens, drink coffee and smell wholesome things as they changed from sticky globs to chewy loaves. He would come home after class and we would walk around the city. We’d spend summers near water that was the perfect temperature. Brisk enough to wake you up in the morning, but warm enough to bath in for long stretches. We’d sit together and be as quiet as we could, so as not to be heard by anyone or anything that might want to stop us.

We’d hold hands a lot. Sasa worried sometimes it might be too much. “You shouldn’t be defined by things that are external to you,” he’d say.

“I’m not a thing,” I’d say.

He squeezed me around the waist and whispered, “Then what are you?”

I wasn’t sure.

*

I was driving over the ice after a grade school hockey match.

“Hey, Carey!” I stopped the engine. “Ever been bit by an antelope?”

I couldn’t picture an antelope. I started the engine.

*

I could be a surgeon, or a painter. I have steady hands. I could be a picture framer, or a basket weaver. I could be a barista. I love the smell of coffee and the people who spend their time basking in its smell. I could be an upholsterer of classic furniture. I love the rounded wooden feet and nubby gold rows of granny couches. I could be an astronaut. I love quiet places. I could be a carpenter. I like the texture of wood shavings. I could pick garlic. I could make wallpaper. I could be a pirate. I could be a priestess. I could plant things in the ground that would grow.

*
“Hey, Carey!” I stopped the engine. “Ever been bitten by a sea lion?”

No one realized how strong the river’s current was, or else we would have told him not to swim. I would have told him not to swim. If only he could have slowed down his mind enough to control that fast water.

“Hey, Carey!”

Clot, Graham Tugwell

She was Love. 

And when all things were taken from her, when all joys diminished until they died altogether, love sustained her.

She was Love.

*

Light through the lampshade was twilight rose, and it made that place such cosy safe, and by the bed she sat and told him of The Cat with Envelopes for Eyes.

“And what did the Cat say?” she asked.

“Mhugh... Mmmhugh...” came the reply; slurred, laboured.

“That’s right— the Cat said ‘Meow! Meow! I’ve got a delivery for you!’ And the Cat jumped into her lap—boing!” –she nipped him playfully in the belly- “and the old lady reached down and slowly, carefully opened one of its eyes... and what was waiting for her inside?”

He crowed with delight: “Hweeeheeees!”

Wishing she could hug him harder she said “Yes! That’s right, she found sweeties and the old lady ate them and they were the most delicious sweeties anyone had ever tasted and she never, ever knew worry or sadness ever again. And the Cat with the Envelopes for Eyes went home—”

“Mmmhugh! Mmmhugh! Mmmhugh!”

“Yes— Meow! Meow! Meow! Home to the Upside-Down Kettle! And he got into bed, so pleased with all his deliveries, and he said: ‘Though I’m different to other cats, still I’ve found my place in the world.’ And all the villagers loved him; their kind deliverer of needful things.”

She looked at him and smiled. “That’s the story for tonight.”

“Moh!” he said, “Moh!”

But she waved her finger. “Ah-ah-ah! Time for sleep! Night, love.”

“Nhugh,” he replied. “Luh... hyoo.”

And she laid him on the plastic sheeting, kissed him goodnight and went downstairs to wash the blood off her hands.

*

His name was Jeremy Hale, but all the other children called him... Clot.

And she could see it hurt—a light dying in his eyes, silently he’d hide himself away, only to emerge an hour later, bloody and torn where he tried to claw the stuff away.

He was three days old when first she saw it; an angry red spot between his shoulder blades that mushroomed into a flat plate of bloody-coloured flesh, extending from neck to ribs and risen, slightly, from the skin.

Holding him in her arms she watched that fleshy redness creep like frost on glass.

“Benign,” the doctors said, and they cut it away—a quick slice severing and no harm done. “That’s the end of that,” the doctors said, grinning, nodding, showing her the door.

It returned three days later, a coating of raw flesh growing faster than before and though the doctors frowned and cut and pared with scalpels and knives, wore down the nerveless stuff with emery boards and pumice stones and astringents and solvents, by stages it stole across her child’s back, torso, arms, legs, and face.

“He’s in no pain,” the doctors said, “Life limiting, perhaps. Life threatening... no, certainly not.”

By the age of six every part of him was covered in a thin but thickening layer of bloody, clotted skin.

And that was the name the children gave him.

*

Growing, thickening, it chafed; he could not freely move his arms or legs— always there was fresh blood where his thighs rubbed, crescents of it under his arms. It restricted how far he could turn his head, how wide his mouth could open.

“Scared, Mammy,” he’d mumble. “Scared.”

“It’s okay, love, Mammy’s here.” She rocked him through that long night when the Clot first covered
his eyes, first crept over the sides of his mouth, first began to fill that space.

Don’t fight it,” she whispered, “Don’t fight it.”

(“Porous,” the doctors said, unwarmly. “Discomfort, yes; injury... unlikely. Physical, at least.”)

She held him as he laboured for breath, shuddering, retching upon the mass rising like dough upon his gums and tongue. At dawn exhaustion softly took him and left her a cracked and hollow thing. She sat, head drooping, filled with nothing but love.

“Mammy’s here... Mammy’s here...”

*

Steadily, the Clot thickened, layer by layer.

And painlessly it bled; with such constancy that he slept upon plastic.

Softly she’d tap his collarbone to get his attention and she’d find herself shouting, clipping each word:

“Don’t move, love. We’ve to do your eyeholes today,” and with the point of a knife she’d carefully cut deep, sloping holes in the Clot and so give sight back to her son.

And the stuff over his mouth stretched in such a way she knew he was smiling.

She knew he was smiling

*

His hair had never been thick and when the Clot rose from his scalp it swallowed that scattering of rust. Running her fingers over his head she could see hair suspended in layers of pink wax.
“Can you feel this?” Fingernails traced the area where eyebrows should have been.

Stroking the blurred patch over his ear she whispered “Tell Mammy, Jeremy—” but he just looked through those deep eyeholes and slowly, slowly ground his head from one side to the other.

Knowledge was a hollowing thing: the Clot was growing thickest over his skull.
Over his face.

*

And the night she read him The Cat with Envelopes for Eyes, that was the night when, in the small hours, she woke, and rising saw him in the doorway, a rose of red in dawnlight, his hands reaching out to her.

And deep within, dull under layers of Clot, came a rolling, wordless rumble that lay her heart on ice.

She took him by the shoulders, whispering “What’s wrong—Jeremy, answer Mammy—”and the warm Clot slid under her hands—

His lips were pink shadows: “Mhummm... mhummm...” he said, “Fheeeee... whroannnnnnnnnnng...”

The last words she ever heard him speak.

Dull that gurgling deep again, and sleepwalking, he slipped away, stumbling sluggishly back to his room. She watched as he slowly lay down upon the plastic sheeting.

And the smear of blood he left upon her palm was a growing cold.

So, is it going to keep growing? Click here to read more!

Clot, Cont'd.

He’d turn towards the sun when the Clot was thin; feeling the warmth of the rays he’d giggle hands held up and fingers spread, the sunlight making the Clot a translucent pinkness, the digits a blur of black within.

But now the Clot has grown so thick he cannot lift his head and all his fingers have been melted in a lump. Upon the shadowed doorstep he sits, silently running his pulpy mitten-hands over a bloated, hairless head.

She watches, listens— his voice a murmur, bubbling wordlessly deep within. Talking to no-one. Listening to no-one.

Increasingly now his steps were faltering, ponderous— from time to time contact with a sharp edge or a hot object left a wound, but if there was pain he gave no sign. Mostly he sat upon the lawn or the carpet or on side of the road, his head bowed to watch the ground through layers of Clot, watching it as if nothing else could ever hold more wonder.

The Clot— taking him away from the world layer by layer.

Taking him away from her.

*

Light through the lampshade is an anodyne blush, and it paints the room in clinical cold. She sits on the bed, pleading with him.

“And what did the Cat say, Jeremy? What did the Cat say?”

Laid out on the bed, he turns the featureless meat of his head away from her.

“It said ‘Meow’, Jeremy, ‘Meow! Open me for a present!’”

But rocking softly on the bed he made no sound.

“And what did she find inside?”

He made no sound.

“Jeremy, what did she find? Please, you knew this. Please, for Mammy.”

Just the sticky crinkle of plastic as he rocked back and forth.

“Please...”

She kissed the warm and bloody coating upon his face and wept, and it made no difference to him, no difference at all.

*

She stopped making him wear clothes. Nothing would fit; nothing would pass over the spongy thickness of his limbs or close upon the swollen throat.

But when the first snows fell—she insisted—a scarf, at the very least, and no argument.

“Are you cold?” she asked him

Unhurried, his head turned from side to side, a millstone grinding.

She threaded a scarf in the space between jaw and shoulders.

He protested, slowly, weakly, silently.

“Oh I know. I know. Mammy’s fussing.”

She pulled it tight. Watched fluid swarm, bulbish, between layers of Clot.

*

Bumbling, soft and bulb-limbed, he stumped, stooping, through snow and the children gave him a new nickname—the Big Red Snowman—as round now, as swollen, as featureless. And he’d sit by the gate or the foot of the wall and they’d throw snowballs at him until they grew bored with his silence and went home.

And when snow melted and blossoms came, still he sat, hands pawing the pebble-crumb blankness of his face, stroking the curve from forehead to chin again and again and again.

And gurgling without words in the depths of him...

*

They were relentless.

Screaming, waving hands, she ran towards them, the horizon a thundering wire, her son motionless, and the birds took fright, clattering into the air, carrying slivers stripped from the weeping cracks of Clot.

She gathered the scraps they dropped, held them— watched red bead between her knuckles.

And his head was a globe of meat— too heavy for his neck to support, that trapped the last threads of a scarf she had to be cut free.

Sitting in her chair, she waited for the wheeling, calling crows to return.

*

What woke her?

How did she know something was wrong?

Something called her from her bed, led her across the bluelit hall to his bedroom.

Where she found him.

What was left of him.

Squatting cross-legged in his nest of plastic, pulpish arms slung to his sides, paddle-hands open-palmed, his swollen head thrust back so the neck is a straining bend of meat, fat and red and glossy.

She whispered: “Jeremy...”

And she sees... from throat to crotch a ragged crack with thick rind edges, pink and fleshy; between— the deep red cadaver darkness of an emptied body.

In the night, like a rotten fruit, her son had split open.

And her heart is a breaking hope, a full-tongued taste of iron in the wet of her mouth— come home to me— be free—be finally free— and she pleads to see her son, born again, washed back to her on a slick of blood, smiling, perfect, and after all these months to see his face again, unblemished, undamaged by Clot—

And with nothing to stop him saying: “I love you, Mammy. I missed you.”

But there is no blood.

No sluice of viscera.

And no Jeremy Hale waiting for her.

The red darkness holds nothing save for the scraps of bone and cartilage the Clot could not digest over those slow devouring months.

With frantic hands she grabs the lips of the fissure, forces the dry husk apart—screeching, the thin meat of the red neck puckers, gives way— breathes a dust-cloud grey and white into her hair, her mouth—she is covered in the stuff—

For eleven months Jeremy Hale had been screaming, locked inside the burning Clot as it digested him, layer by layer, screaming as his tongue and teeth dissolved, as it carried him mindlessly back and forth, as it sat with him in the shade and gurgling, worked upon his meat and bones.

Until finally there was nothing left of Jeremy to feed upon.

The Clot starved, shrivelled, cracked.

Died.

“Jeremy—Mammy’s here —”

“Jeremy!”

She dug; she clawed in that foul-tasting powder—

Love was bursting to dust under her pawing hands—

Love was running through her fingers, all her love and life reduced to flecks of bone, to desiccated tissue, dry and fragile like the withered wings of moths—

Emptying; everything in that room emptying.

All her love leaving her, forever.

“Jeremy.... Answer Mammy...”

“Answer Mammy.”

“Please.”

She was Love..

Earth, Too, Beau Johnson

We’d been waiting, both of us.  As we did, we had sex in every conceivable position we could think of, in every orifice exposed.   This is what you did when the world was on the ropes.  Once you procured enough food for the two of you to survive, that is.  Security comes into play as well---something strong which is as easily defended as it is to run from.  After that, well, what was there really?  Books, I suppose.  No computers though, not anymore.

It was a Friday when it happened, at just after six p.m.  One moment the sky is a clear and vivid blue; the next an infected bruise.  From out of the bruise comes a planet, and I cannot help but think of the womb.  I shudder as I watch the phenomenon, a chill running through the middle of me as darkness first falls then reigns.  Looking up, slack-jawed, I take in the planet which is all too similar to the one it now faces.  Random thoughts erupt in my head, a billion ideas I never come to voice.  I had the answer, however, and long before we were told the truth.

A parallel Earth, they said, in the weeks and months which followed---one that contained the same atmosphere as us, the same moon, each responsible for the initial quakes which rocked both planets those first few hours.  No shit, I thought, but this was before the war.  Quite efficiently, it sums up the human condition rather nicely---though ahead in mind, each of us always a step behind.  I mean, who of us cannot handle the truth once it is presented to us fully, with every angle bare?  The majority?  I cannot say, not for sure.  The minority sounds much more plausible.  What I believe is one step better.  Why Roswell?  What was the point?  The Endeavour Protocols?   Even the truth about the Oswald Principal proved more timid than devastating once it was allowed from the box; the only thing ever giving it power being their choice in choosing to keep it from us.  And all of these, each of them, are but drops in a bucket if you really wished to sort the mess.  And why?  Because ours has never been to question.  Fuck.  I could punch a wall.

“And you still think we can find them?”  That was Jenny, about a week after we’d met.  She was direct, no nonsense, and on about the other members of the resistance I’d been separated from.  It’s right, too, the way she is---the only attitude to have if you wanted to live.  At times she reminds me of a girl I dated in high school, but only in the way she looked; black hair just as dark, green eyes large and wide.  Their attitudes are what separated them, and for the better in Jenny’s case.  I honestly believe I would be dead now if not for meeting her.  

 “We’ll pick up the trail,” I say and pull her close.  “One more night here and then we move.  If I know Chuck, the breadcrumbs will be hard to miss.”  We were staying in a suburb, one of many I had squatted in since the war began.  This one was nicer than most, belonging to an older couple long since gone.  In the room was the bed on which we lay, a long short dresser with a mirror on top to the right.  To our left, tight against the wall, was a treadmill, dusted from lack of use. Beyond it stands another dresser which atop sits a TV.  The TV was dark, silent, and had been since our power had been taken away.  An Electro Magnetic Pulse was what they used, and they used it exactly when they said they would: twenty-four hours to the minute Hitler refused surrender.

She looks up at me then, runs a hand along five days’ worth of growth.  “We have to finish this,” she says and then straddles me.  I agree, and as she runs her hands through what hair I have left on top, I enter her.  Later, in another room, I find her crying in a chair in the dark, a lone candle by the door the only light to see.  Her legs are tucked up under her and the only clothes she wears is a red sweater she has stretched to cover her knees.  “I think I’m pregnant.”  Jenny says, and like the day the other Earth emerged, another billion ideas go off in my head.  I do not speak.  I only go to her and hold her and begin to cry myself.

A parallel Earth, yes, but an alternate one as well.  This is what they kept from us, prior to finding out for ourselves.  Where your Earth’s Allied Forces prevailed, ours did not.  With Normandy lost, Hitler continued his assault, the unthinkable occurring three years to the day our histories diverge; when the Reich managed to take it all.  Every Jew destroyed, he turned his attention to the black man and from there has ruled our planet as President for more than sixty years.  How?  As alternate as your planet is from us, we are the same in some respects to you.  With Hitler winning the war here, his scientists were free to continue their experiments in earnest.  Done, they gave him what he required to rule longer than even a God could comprehend.  And speaking of God, I’d like you to know I now believe he exists---and that he has the best damn sense of humour this side of Jersey!  I mean, take your President for example---Obama.  That shit is priceless!  And the Jewish contingent your world holds?  Can you imagine the little’s man face when he found those things out?  Oh, to be a fly on the wall then.

Not all of us conformed is what I’m saying; that pockets of us around the globe formed a resistance against his tyranny and had been fighting for equality since the second World War ended; my father before me and he before his.  Besides your President’s heritage, it is this which causes my belief; that we fought and fought and in the end were not left out to dry.  Your world, as inverted as it is to our own, coming as it did---this more than justifies what I’ve been taught.

“You ready?”  I ask, and Jenny looks to me from her horse.  She is wearing your colours; your red, white and blue.  Below her hips sit her guns, loaded and at hand.

“As I’ll ever be,” she says, and not for the first time.  It is a line of hers, and one I have come to know quite well.  The road to D.C. will be long, but from here it will be a straight shot into the heart of the city.  We hope to meet up with you there, and hopefully you will know us for who we are; that from our resistance to yours, we both want the very same thing.

Like a rabid dog, Hitler deserves to be put down, no matter what existence he resides in. I look forward to the ways your world will come to fuck him in the ass.

The Good Daughter (Never Burns Down Anything You Can See), Kristen Hamelin Tracey

People in Leyden still remember, if they are old enough and happen to think about it, the day that Lou Jefferies and her Homecoming date set fire to the old gazebo. It was an accident (or so they said), the pair of them still drunk after the Homecoming dance, not noticing where they discarded their cigarette stubs. When they were found by the local fire department, shivering on the banks of the duck pond in the town park, laughing hysterically, Lou was wearing a long dress shirt and not much else. Her blue silk dress had gone up in flames with the gazebo.

And the library in Leyden still has a microfilm of the October 26, 1963, issue of the Worcester Herald, which contains a copy of the Leyden local section, the one whose front-page article described the fire. You can even see a photo of Lou as she was then, after someone had gotten some clothes onto her. She's broad-nosed and short and freckled, and still laughing. And that's what Ruth Grady always remembers most about looking at that picture with her sister Laura when they were teenagers (right after they finally heard the unexpurgated version from a drunken uncle, the version where the dress burned): she remembers the wide-open smile on Lou's face.

These are the other things about Lou that Ruth remembers from her childhood: That she married Bart Teller and was known as a Good Mother. That she served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches after school, no crusts, instead of Oreos or celery sticks like the other mothers. That she was plump in a welcoming, soft kind of way, and would hug you to her pillow of a bosom if you skinned your knee, which Ruth was always doing when she climbed trees in the backyard with Lou's younger son. And that Ruth once fooled around with the younger son after her own Homecoming dance, strictly second base things, when she was too plain and awkward to get a date, and he too pimply.

And Ruth's father still has the Homecoming Queen crown that Ruth's mother wore to dance with him that night, the very night of the fire, just eight months before he went off to Vietnam. It is packed away in the small basement of his house in Leyden, which is evenly divided between the possessions of dead people and the discarded paraphernalia of Ruth's father's career as an encyclopedia salesman, which took up the majority of his time until twelve months ago, when his wife died.

And people in Leyden still wonder about Bart Teller, with whom Lou settled down, long after the ashes of the fire had settled, and for whom she raised two fine boys and a strange frail girl. They wonder if he knew what kind of a woman she was. They wonder why he died, although they have some theories, chief among them:

that he had speculated some cash, a lot of cash even, and failed. That would explain the inheritance, which was lower (or so it was rumored) than you might have expected, and would explain the cheapness of the funeral and in particular of the casket, which everyone could tell was just pine.

that he had been dallying with one of the shop girls, coarse lasses who worked behind the register at his pharmacy, and had been caught by Lou and been so terribly ashamed of himself that he literally couldn't stand it. Though people felt this was much less likely than

that he had found out about Lou and some man, for whom she'd been planning to leave him and ditch the kids. That he had simply been in despair over losing the woman he loved, but that he accomplished one thing by his heroic death, which was to persuade – nay, force – her to stay with her sons.

And the oldest Teller son, who found his body, still remembers the smell of the garage when he walked in, which was like rotting pumpkins. He does not, so clearly, remember Bart's face the way it was at that time, purple and distorted, with a gray tinge at the Melanie-Griffith lips, but he does remember, because it was closer to eye-level, the shape of the urine stain on the crotch of his father's nicest gray wool trousers. He does not remember a note, but that's because there wasn't one.

And people in Leyden are still surprised that Ruth's father and Lou are engaged so quickly, though not as surprised as Ruth, who is also angry. They're not so surprised that they won't come to the engagement party, but they're looking forward to gossiping more about it later, by email (for the savvier of the older generation) or by phone or at church. They're not so surprised that they're not happy for the recent widow, but they wonder what he's thinking, when his first wife was so beautiful, and Lou is so decidedly not; though of course that doesn't matter much, when you're nearing seventy, because no one is beautiful then, and even his first wife, particularly during the last stages of her lung cancer, was no treat to look at either, after all these years on earth.

And Laura, who lives just a few blocks away with her husband and sons, still thinks Ruth is silly to be so angry about this. Why should people be in love after nearly fifty years of marriage? If Ruth's marriage had lasted longer than two years, she might understand that it's more about partnership than love. (Which Ruth thinks is more a coping mechanism than a philosophy of marriage.) If Ruth lived as close to Dad as she did, and saw him day in day out, she might realize he was a handful and Lou's practically a heroine for taking him on. Basically, Laura thinks Ruth should see the whole thing for what it is, a marriage of convenience, or loneliness, and not for what it is not, her business, or some kind of personal betrayal, or evidence of a grand affair, the long-sought explanation for their mother's lifelong melancholy and Bart Teller's mysterious suicide.

And Ruth, who drove up from New York by herself this morning and will stay the night with Laura before going back home tomorrow, is still tempted hourly by the Nembutal zipped into a side compartment of her purse, which was acquired wholesale from a kind friend. Yes she once kicked the habit, and no it has not completely died after the kicking, no, but simply laid down its head in wait. Yes she would like to get through today without any chemical help, and no she's not sure she can. She tells all this to Laura, who thinks she's being a damned coward and should hold her shit together for once in her life.

And Ruth, who's now managed to hold down her real-estate job for four years, which is a record for her, is a little insulted by this comment. She is insulted, also, by the fact that Laura doesn't seem to be thinking at all of their recently departed mother in all of this – let alone their father, let alone everyone else in this town, who knew their mother, and knew how beautiful and kind she was. Rather everyone is shaking the hand of Lou Teller and kissing the cheek of Lou Teller and beaming happily at the periwinkle-colored blue rinse of Lou Teller, and no one says, maybe she is the reason for this family's unhappiness.

And yet Ruth still doesn't take the Nembutal.

And the older generation of Leyden who are guests at the Grady household are still consuming Heineken and pigs-in-blankets the way they did twenty years ago. And many of Ruth's contemporaries do likewise, because they have always been there in Leyden, and are used to living by Leyden's ways. Instead of Heineken, Ruth and Laura drink from one of the lonely bottles of Yellowtail Chardonnay; the nicer rosé that Ruth had brought up here from a Manhattan wine store disappeared hours ago. They see their father taking a beer, another beer, another. The tenseness of this passes from one of them to the other not by anything as concrete as a word, or even a look, but, because they are sisters, by a bodily tremor that travels through each of them like a wave.

And Ruth's most genuine plans and the plans closest to her heart still tend to fail, such as her plan to give her dear father a toast, because though she is angry he is the last person left on this earth who welcomes her unconditionally, and he is therefore her home. Nevertheless, because of the Chardonnay perhaps, or because she didn't eat before coming here in a sad recurring attempt to punish herself for not being loved by her ex-husband anymore, or because her anger is of a type that stifles, rather than shouting, she cannot do it. Instead she breaks down, sets down her glass, and excuses herself to the bathroom, running away from all the people with their uplifted half-empty green bottles, their wrinkles, their strangely sympathetic faces.

And Ruth's father still drinks too much, even with Lou around, and he still likes to sing old songs when he's drunk, songs he learned when he was a soldier. That's how Ruth finds him when she gets out of the bathroom (where she did not, whatever Laura might think, take the pills that she desperately wanted to take, but instead called her sponsor and cried a little more): he's singing. “I love my wife yes I do yes I do,” he hollers, terribly, winking at Lou. “I love the hole she pisses through. I love her tits-diddly-its-diddly-its, and her nut-brown arse... hole... TOO!”

And the people of Leyden who have gathered in the Gradys' living room are still talking about it, when Ruth and Laura emerge from tucking their father into bed – where he looked up at them, at Laura who was never angry about Lou, and at Ruth who still has not forgiven him, and said to Ruth, “You always were the good daughter.” They're talking about their host and what a hero he was, back in the war days, and how you have to make allowances. And they're talking about Louisa Jefferies Teller, and how something about her always drives perfectly fine men over the edge.

DINOSAURS or something you feel will find its own form, Calvin Fantone

“Peter, you’re finally here.  Finally trying to make it as a writer.  You’re gonna write a novel.  A wonderful, amazing, beautiful, fantastic, award winning, best selling novel.  It’ll make it onto the New York Times suggested reading list and then be part of Oprah’s book club and you’ll be sitting on Oprah’s guest couch on TV in no time.  You deserve a pat on the back,” I say to myself.

I lift my arm and pat myself once, twice, and a third time on the back for some extra solid encouragement.  I’ve been doing this every time I sit down at my desk to write for a few weeks now.  The reach of my right arm has increased considerably; I don’t have to use my plastic back scratcher anymore to reach the hard places.  That thing creeps me out anyway because whenever I use it, I imagine a little plastic man walking around without an arm.  He might come into my home and get angry when he sees me scratching myself with his severed plastic limb.  Then he might try to have his revenge by taking MY arm.

I really can’t afford to lose an arm right now.  I need it to write my novel.

The little plastic man will probably bring a little plastic weapon from his little plastic arsenal that he keeps in his little plastic house, a fork or knife maybe, the kind you can buy in bulk at the supermarket for picnics.  I don’t think I’d be able to fight him off though.  I’m not a very confrontational person.
 
I am sitting in my CHAIR OF CONTEMPLATION.  I want it to sound like it’s something you’d find in a superhero’s base like the Bat Cave or the Fortress of Solitude.  I wanna feel important, powerful, superhero-y, like I’m sitting in a chair that represents great justice.  It was on the sidewalk in front of my neighbor’s house on trash day a few years ago.  It looked so lonely there.  It was the only thing that wasn’t inside of a trash can.

“Don’t worry chair,” I whispered.  “I can’t promise you much, but I can be your friend and I can give you a nice home.” 

It’s been at my desk ever since.  I like to sit in it and think about things and think about writing about those things and think about whether or not those are things I want to write about in my novel. 

It gets confusing. 

When I can’t think of anything or when I can’t write about anything I’ve been thinking about, I like to play with the lever that adjusts the chair’s height.  Up and down, up and down, up and down like that game I used to play with the other kids at church where one of us would squat and another one would stand and then one of us would squat and another one would stand.  It’s sort of like that except it’s just me and CHAIR OF CONTEMPLATION and nobody else. 

I don’t really have any friends that aren’t inanimate objects.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer when I was seven years old in the second grade.  Didn’t know what kind of writer I wanted to be but I knew I wanted to impress girls.  One girl to be exact.  Her name was Janet.  She sat in front of me and I spent most days watching her twirl locks of her hair with her fingers like a fork in spaghetti.  She liked to read Hardy Boys books and chew grape bubble gum.  One day I had enough courage (or stupidity) to pass her a note with a terrible poem I had scribbled out for her.  It went something like this:

            “Roses are red,

            violets are, in fact, blue.

            I hope you know that my

            biggest crush is on you!”

I watched her write something on the back of the paper.  I was excited because I thought that maybe she would feel the same.  Maybe we would grow up to be cool teenagers and go to cool formal dances together, and drive around in my cool car.  Then we would grow up some more and be adults and have a wonderful outside wedding on a cliff over the ocean with only our closest family members and coolest friends.  There would be those food people carrying those appetizers with funny names, horse dwarves, horse doo-eee-uuu-vuh-rees, orz-doov-rez, or however you say the name on platters that look like UFOS.  Only aliens could come up with a name like that for food.  There would be a cool wedding band doing covers of the cool songs we used to dance to when we were cool teenagers and people taking pictures with their portable picture machines of our supermegaspecialawesome day. 

Ah, young love.  So exciting.

Two minutes later, Janet passed the note back to me with the words, “LEAVE ME ALONE YOU CREEP,” written on it in huge letters.  She scooted her desk forward across the carpet as far as she could to get away from me. 

That day, I learned that my poetry does not impress girls.

I used to watch a lot of news on television when I was little.  My mother would sit on the couch in her nightgown every night while I tried to do homework in the other room.  She would yell, “Peter! Come look at this!” whenever something interesting came on.  We’d watch Dateline and 20/20 specials together about the harmful effects of different foods, animal testing, natural disasters, sheep cloning, sexual predators, the secret invasion of our planet by aliens from other galaxies, and dinosuars.  Investigative journalism at its finest.  Maybe I could write about things like that in my novel.

I’ve found that writing a novel has given me more strength to stand up to people.  I’ve taken to threatening them with it.  I was talking to a friend about her plastic surgery and she told me that I should consider having work done on my whole face.  I told her, “Careful, or you’ll end up in my novel.”  Another time when a guy in a lifted pickup truck cut me off on the freeway, I rolled down my window and yelled, “I’m writing you and your stupid truck into my novel, asshole!”  Another time, I got into an argument with a bartender because he cut me off half an hour before last call.  I gave him my meanest glare and said, “You’ve made a powerful enemy on this day, Jim.  You’ll pay for this dearly . . . in my novel.”

My CHAIR OF CONTEMPLATION is becoming kind of uncomfortable now.  Half an hour of sitting here and I haven’t gotten any writing done or had any solid ideas yet.  They’ll come to me.  They’ll come to me.  They’ll come to me.  I just need to concentrate.  Maybe I should write a novel about back scratchers.  Maybe I should write a novel about a chair.  Maybe I should write a novel about a chair with feelings.  Maybe I should write a novel about love.  Maybe I should write a novel about aliens.  Maybe I should write a novel about my mother.  Maybe I should write a novel about Dateline: To Catch a Predator.  Maybe I should write about existentialism.  Maybe I should write a novel about dinosaurs.

 
YES, I think that may be it.  DINOSAURS: A Novel.

Full Frontal Optimism, Malea Grubb

Flaky croissants with more than 11 grams of fat
In a wicker basket. They get damp from the
Chilled bottle of Riesling that I brought to
Impress.

I like to watch the ducks. I like it when they quack.

The pimple on the side of your nose, it’s too cute
To hide beneath that mineral powder, hiding your
Irish freckles. You ask for a napkin, but they’re
Damp.

I like to watch the ducks. I like it when they quack.

The polyphonic ring of your phone, of course. Don’t
Answer it, please, I’ll make a wittier joke, or maybe
You wished I’d bought a rose from that peddler for
You.

I like to watch the ducks. I like it when they quack.

They migrate after summer.

High and Inside, John L. Stanizzi

That stuff I used to smoke
would render baseball new
and fascinating and notably odd.
 
No irrational stress about
who won or lost;
just those little guys on the TV,
 
dressed so strangely
in their tights and knee socks,
scurrying around willy-nilly,
 
scampering left and right,
waving clubs,
and throwing a ball around
 
against a backdrop
of high dazzling lights,
and crowds of people.
 
The whole scene was
gloriously nonsensical.
I’d turn the sound off
 
and then sit there smiling
with amused consternation
at this silly, complicated ordeal.
 
It was summer –
the blazing fastball of heat lightning,
the bat crack of thunder,
 
and me, clutching my knees to my chest,
alone in the hot night,
high and inside.