I used to clean windows—and I’m talking 40 floors off of the fucking ground, just teetering on a platform. The height of the job didn’t scare me though. The people did. All of them. Panting in their cubicles. Pacing through their apartments. Butchering their children. Bonking like their lives depended on it. I cleaned the best I could, but those windows were dirty.
Dylan James is an emerging writer and Ohio University alumnus based out of Columbus, Ohio. He enjoys reading, hiking, and throwing tennis balls to his dog, Bo.
01. fingerpainting art is born from the troubled mind: frantic undressing of the psyche a dip of the fingers into insanity crooked fingers brushing repression the chafing of id against superego your tears smoothen the glide kissing down to your cold little heart (you can feel the warmth but it’s so far away) words breach your defences crumble down, insouciant walls pleasure to pain to ecstasy to hatred to truth chasing the comfort of release it writhes within you like a restrained beast and when you’re tipped over the edge your scream is its roar of anguish catharsis
02. peanut gallery strangers observe behind monocled façades yes, it’s quite interesting, that one pretty pictures, pretty words framed and presented for their pleasure counting down the seconds to your demise that they may finally rocket you into stardom or some farce of it at least because it’s only art after you’re dead.
03. académie four hundred years since the starving artist put a hungry bullet in their head pencil scratch in the margins, inkblot on the skin of the naked verb’s face words like anaphora and alliteration and assonance embroidered upon the fabric of your creation: words put in your cold stitched mouth, long dead and buried in your unmarked grave.
leave me to rot, you beg, let me rest. pennies scattered in wishing wells pay your way to the afterlife, silvers and coppers cold upon your tongue. but still they never let you go, eternal spectacle for the academics. did you know they killed themselves? how sad. but they were well and truly mad, you know. unsurprising.
One day, I will buy a house. I will paint the front door to match the shutters and put rocking chairs on the front porch. I’ll hang a wreath on the door and write my name on the mailbox. I will fill each room with old furniture and every surface will collect pretty little objects. The walls will be covered in wallpaper and hung with paintings. I will dress every bed in a soft, colorful quilt and hang my laundry to dry on a clothesline in the sunshine. I will place expensive candles in the bathroom and light them when guests visit. The kitchen will welcome visitors with the smell of bread and cookies and host endless conversation and laughter.
I will plant flowers everywhere: in front of the porch, along the driveway, under the mailbox, and beneath every tree. In the tall grass behind my house I will scatter wildflower seeds and watch a meadow bloom. Somewhere in that meadow I will nurture a garden filled with vegetables that will grow more bountiful every year. I will find a sunny spot and plant giant sunflowers whose shade will offer relief from the summer sun. I will inspect every tree until I find the perfect strong branch from which to hang a swing. When I feel like flying, I’ll go to that swing and imagine I can touch the sky.
I will stay in that house forever and watch the seasons pass over it. In the spring I will walk through the puddles in my rain boots and smell the new growth of green. In the summer I will tend my garden and always keep a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge. In the fall I will rake the leaves under my trees and gaze at the stars next to the warmth of a bonfire. In the winter I will light a candle in every window, and make cocoa for the children who play in the snow. I will learn the faces of that place in each season and live the annual cycle year after year after year.
One day, I will buy a house and I will make it my home.
Kristi Rolf is a sentimental psychology student from Virginia. Find her on Instagram @kristi_kreme16
“It’s too advanced to be compatible with anything else!” You didn’t make as many friends as you thought, she said. Number crunching hurts teeth, and here’s a standing desk for a standing mess. So get out of your comfort zone and into your rut. The falling leaves me on the cafe floor smiling at myself.
If this state was a woman, you would love her, Nebraska’s flaxen hair tucked neatly behind her ears, flowing over her shoulders and down the curve of her tanned back, you would seek her eyes, fields of green kissed with goldenrod and set in soft earthy skin.
You would tell her how Kansas was flat, Virginia too proper for you, and the Carolinas, those thin-boned twins, all wrong,
but she, perfect. And you two would play, you would catch her thick wrists on a summer afternoon and dance your way into fall, getting caught in the leaves fluttering at her skirts,
and in the evening you would kiss her, drag your lips across the stretching highways of her belly, pausing to enjoy the night’s calm along all the roads and capillaries of her body.
Monica Fuglei teaches at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado. Her work has been recently published in Mason Street, Progenitor, and Caustic Frolic. Find her on Twitter: @MNFuglei
You are trying be author. It hard sometimes. Especially when you splurge on shiny gold typewriter at thrift store—only nine dollars—then find out typewriter needs ribbon. You order ribbon online for fifteen dollars, wait for it by door. You do calculations in head. Have now purchased twenty-four dollar typewriter. Did not have budget in mind for this. World cruel sometimes.
Ribbon finally come, you sit with gold typewriter and not type. Writing award winning novel not so easy as you thought. Maybe you need to write in cafe. People in cafe stare when you load typewriter paper in typewriter and you get embarrass. So silly to think this is solution. Maybe you start smoking while write? Go to store, pick up American Spirit, go home and smoke but do not get work done, simply start get anxiety. Girlfriend comes home, say, “Why are you smoke cigarettes in room?”
You say you smoke to become great author like Irving Hemingway. She say that not author name. You tell girlfriend she stay out your study from now on. She leaves in big huff. Not good author girlfriend.
Or maybe not true. All good author have strained relationship. This may be blessing and you not realize it yet.
Regardless, you begin write book. It called Sour Ass, and it about sad brilliant young writer boy who make lots of sex and also solve mystery, genuis boy who nobody realize is genius until too late. Sour Ass will be big deal someday. New York Time seller. Make it into big movie starring big names like Kiefer Sutherland. You tell nobody, but Sour Ass actually about you. Girlfriend can tell. Girlfriend say Sour Ass perpetuate white male fantasy, whatever that mean. You tell girlfriend she can stick it up asshole. Tell girlfriend to go write own novel. You keep writing, and words flow out like blood when cut.
Friend from college keep get published. You have digital brunch with friend, the only other man from old workshop. You eat omelet and drink coffee, but friend do not eat. He look like he have toothache, because he keep rubbing jaw. You ask, “why tooth hurt, friend?”
Friend say he got in fight.
“Who attack you, friend?”
Friend say, “I live in New York City, where other authors be. You may not realize, but there many other men who author.”
“I do not read,” you say.
“In New York City, you not have to read to see other male author. Male author everywhere. On subway, in cafe, in park. Last Tuesday I was read Old Man Sea when strange boy approach me. I figure he was looking for fight. He wearing glasses and had satchel bag and was reading Jonathan Franzen– important author, very current. He had tattoo on inner arm that said boobie boy. I don’t know what that signify. Maybe he like boobies?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Rippling breasts.”
“Hulking hogans.”
“Fleshy mounds.”
“He sounds scary.”
“Any case, boobie boy says to me, ‘you need to vacate cafe. This my territory.’ I tell him screw off and bite me in my ass. He flip my table and before know it, we are wrestling. Heads locked, arms flailing. We like bulls. Cafe people screaming, running everywhere. Cafe owner screaming, ‘we do not want trouble. Please take fight outside.’ Boobie boy and I keep grappling each other until police arrive and aim guns through cafe store window. We go outside and police hit us and put us in back of car. Eventually let me go for good behavior. Cops say that author fighting each other big problem in New York City. Lots of clashing creative personality. Can turn ugly. Boobie boy sent to Rikers Island for defending his territory. It scary out here.”
“God damn,” you say. You slightly jealous of friend. He may be on daily basis dealing with turmoil and fear that come with being white man who write in New York City, but at least he getting published. Friend always got publish, even way back in workshop. Now he’s big shot. You surprised he even have time to digital brunch with you, his former good friend.
Friend rub jaw some more and say, “Anyway, must go now. Got new story idea for man trapped in prison. I mean, how scary is that?”
Friend hang up and you say to self, “Damn, that’s good!”
You go to write in a bar on yellow notepad because you hear handwriting can be helpful to people trying to author. College people start coming in and you feel nervous because you old man sitting with weird little notepad. Not get much work done. Come home and girlfriend is typing furiously on phone. You ask what she doing. She say nothing. You peek over and girlfriend writing own novel! On cell phone! What a miserable world this is. She look up at you with these eyes like kidney beans.
She asks why it’s bad thing for her to be write novel. You say, “Why? Why!” You say, maybe because this your thing and it kind of feel like she’s jealous. Like she want to encroach or emproach somehow. Like this is spite. Girlfriend get really angry. She get up in your face and spit on you while she talk. She say that you are piece of shit and she don’t know why she started date you in the first place. Say you’re not reliable. Say you are a misogynistic pig.
You say, “Uhh… I am a human and definitely not a pig,” and then walk out the apartment. The air cold and frigid out here. No one around except you, a lone vanilla bean in the night. Girlfriend was your full support network. Emotionally and maybe a little bit financially. Now you’re vagrant white male author—like Jack Kayak. You pull out American Spirit and try to calm nerves but just start choke. Then you set off to the only place you know to go—New York City.
Months go by like children in the rain. Women make fun of you for eating Taco Bell in New York City—but it only ethnic food that your body able to handle. You go on dates with beautiful New York women, only for them say you have tiny overactive colon and that you also have small penis. It brutal. You barely scraping by with monthly five thousand dollars you Dad give you. You once have to sleep on bed with suboptimal thread count, and it cold, and you not understand where life went so wrong.
Jasey Roberts is a writer from Southwest Virginia. His previous work has appeared in Bourgeon Online.
I am stuck between the here and there, the nether that lies in the expanses of space between where I know my own mind and where I don’t.
Stars blink in and out of existence while we are busy with the mundane.
Imagine what we might learn if we were always looking up, staring in wonder at the night sky and dreaming of the beyond?
There are matters in life which cannot be argued:
First, the pressing need to fixate on that which does not serve us.
Second, that we always want what we cannot and should not have.
Third, if there is a god, they have much to answer for.
The endless, inescapable gravity of blind faith, because it is easier to hide like a child than to face the monsters that hide in the darkness.
Their teeth glitter like cursed stars.
You either die fighting them, or live long enough to become one.
Sometimes, perhaps, it can be both, depending on the triangulation of the observing perspectives.
The burden of monstrosity lays heavy on my shoulders, a yoke thrust upon me without my consent and what more can I do to run from it? After all, every unexpected reflection holds a startling revelation:
I was never who they thought I was.
Never, not once. Not even for a moment, not when I was born and certainly not now. I hide, concealing my truth with a broad, gleaming smile. If you look closely, you’ll see that I have more teeth than is necessary. A curiosity of birth, most people think. They never wonder if it’s me under their beds.
They never stop to ask who freed the livestock.
Who torched the grain.
Who salted the earth and dragged famine behind us, no matter where we went.
They handed me their babies with a relieved sigh, never considering for a moment that I was the one who left the gates open. Who allowed the monsters to breach our walls and destroy our future.
After all, monsters have to eat too.
They don’t have the luxury of time, despite being ageless and enduring. They don’t have the privilege of gentle hunger, the kind that invites a late night snack. Theirs is a grasping, sucking need, and sometimes I’ve begun to feel it, too.
A hawk is a monster to a mouse. A human is a monster to a fat lamb. I am a monster to everyone around me, they just don’t know it yet.
My body lies in wait, biding its time for betrayal.
One morning I will wake up and find even more glittering teeth in my mouth. One afternoon I’ll realize that my fingers are growing into talons, and my mind has been sharpened as if by a whetstone. One evening I will recoil from my reflection in the still waters, seeing that horns have sprouted from my skull, bursting forth through skin thin as paper.
There is mundanity in monstrosity, too.
The creeping march towards your own doom, watching yourself become what you swore you never would.
I thought I would die a heroine. Instead, I will die both forgotten and reviled.
Ryann Fletcher writes queer science fiction and fantasy.
Summertime is upon us, and the adventures that follow raise the dead we buried last autumn.
The ghost of leaves once fallen, breathed new life in the breeze that caress our skin— That held our sin in the winter.
Waiting for spring to bless us with abundance, before summer takes the shape of all we forget to remember.
A. Benét is an emerging poet from California. Her work is forthcoming in The Acorn Review and published in The Origami Review. You can, sometimes, find her on Twitter @benetthewriter.
No, listen, we all saw this comin’. The guy was always a quack, even before he started wearing a bill ‘roond his mouth and blowing into a duck call. Painted his garage green and brown. Waddled after lines of hatchlings. Picked fights with grass. Fella died believing, between some combo of ice dildos, Mecury in Retrojizz, and balsa wood wings, that he would overcome mortality. It’s Satanism. Paganism. Ain’t Lutheran, whatever the heck it was.
R. Duckminster Fuller, sir. M.D., PhD.
He wanted to jump off the IDS Center.
Yah. Yah.
Well, I spose we had’r differences. Everyone says some hotshot on-caller-gist is movin’ next door, y’know, Mayo Clinic and all, but it turns out he tinks the cure ta cancer is this two-bit mallard baloney.
Made a lot of noise, okay? You’ve got it in them manilla antelopes, I reckon, we did contact you guys a bunch.
Garage, mostly. Loudest in Carver County, ‘cludin’ Paisley Park.
Heck, various honks. Squeals. A foghorn. A klaxon. Pardon the language, sir, but there was some sorta animatronic contraption that’d blast red light and call Mother Goose a bitch.
Well, I do prefer her to the Brothers Grimm, maself. Kids do, too.
Tough to say, I mean, I’d work a double and know Martha’d prolly get woken up by the twins, y’know, so we had a tight winduh for some shut eye. Then some Chuck E. Cheese meets Howard the Duck weirdo pops up ‘roond midnight every darn night and, respectfully, ya stopped sending a car and talkin’ to the guy, so a fella gets fruster-ated.
No, no. Nothin’ more’n throwing saltines at his siding and postin’ roast duck recipes on the screen door.
Don’t see how m’hobbies are relevant, frankly.
Yah, in fact I do. Deer mostly. Hunted pheasant quite a bit as well.
Waterfowl hunting in Minnesota’s generally a late September to early December type of ordeal, sir. Depends, though, on the DNR and a buncha crap.
October 17th. Which, y’know, yah, is in waterfowl season.
Obtuse? Maybe yer meanin’ mongoose.
Sheriff, just what exactly are ya trying to get at here? I already told ya that Doc Larson was bonkers. A real loon. Died of a broken neck, da paramedics said when they showed up. Dry run for the IDS center. Tarred and duck-feathered himself. Was wearin’ University of Oregon sweatpants with his wings and he left his estate to Aflac, for Chrissakes.
Now wait just a fuckin’ minute, mister. Only rights you’ll find me readin’ is in the Bible, and my owning a shotgun ain’t got no bearin’ on this psychotic, bird-jerker.
I told ya, we wudn’t friends. The noise was obnoxious, but c’mon, you think I’m capable of that?
Oofdah. Buckshot to the chest and spinal column my keester. He jumped off his roof. He was quacking like a whole raft of ‘em, and besides, he had no right to wake up the damn block.
Choke on a fuckin’ worm, buddy, I want my Goddamn lawyer.
Scott Gannis is a retired forklift operator from Minneapolis, MN. He is the author of Very Fine People (Atlatl, 2020). You can parse his neuroses on Twitter @scootergannis.
roll it up into a ball and cover it in aluminum foil and stick it to the end of a metal rod to catch a bolt of lightning. put it down the front of your shirt and press it flat against your skin like a shield. toss it in your mouth, maneuver it between your teeth with your tongue, across your gums and into the back of your throat. let it touch your uvula before you spit it back onto the table. knead it with both hands and your elbows, leave little marks in it with your fingernails. spin it into yarn, knit yourself a sweater and then pull it apart stitch by stitch. wrap it around your neck as tight as possible until you see spots, then unravel it and stick it under your pillow as you sleep. find it in your dreams, hurl it against a wall until it breaks into pieces. put the pieces in a blender, run it without the lid, let it coat your kitchen walls. sit on the cold floor tiles and look at the mess you’ve made.
Salem Paige (they/them) is a twenty-two-year-old poet whose works revolve around the exploration of identity through discomfort. You can find Paige @corpseofapoet on instagram and twitter.
leaning into the uncertainty at some point becomes carelessly running towards harm in the sideways guise of self help and growth. Admirable is the weightless who carries nothing from the before into the ever present now, no
there is no wisdom in the false prophet, but enough mental wellness holistic nonsense can convince even the most devoted they should repent and spend and invest in yourself or, what are you even worth?
I did not know shame before the unpinnable point of charge I have spent thousands in therapy to track down. What I’m saying is the timeline for what I’m told I lost and where I am does not add up. I suspect much
like a True Crime podcast the offending memory thief snuck in and clipped my truths into scrapbook pieces, tossed the remains after ransom-note-pasting letters together to leave behind a threat in place of the truth
so I may never know what I really went through. I have only the grief stained retellings and even Goodwill throws out anything with stains.
the ghost of it haunts my neck and spine Through back to back booked therapies the DPT measures my lean and asks if I was injured and I wish it were so simple that I could point to the moment of impact which changed the trajectory of my mindset and poise
but all of it is decoupage and fodder and Jesus’ business model, I’ve heard there is Salvation after three easy payments; I was drunk when a street Scientologist offered an answer for any questions, all free after one video session, so I solicited
gospel. Is it endless, or a bad string of con artists framing my nerves as fatal capitalizing on gossip and catastrophizing a ceaseless spiral if I don’t sip their snake oil?
I was fine before they told me I wasn’t.
Nic writes in cursive to hide the butchered spelling that would otherwise raise suspicion about their master’s degree in writing. Get to know their work on Poetry-Journal.com @njtpoet
Unstamatic 