The Bicycle Review
Issue # 21
15 April, 2013
Poetry and Prose by Sirenna Blas, Tori Bond, Rich Boucher, Chris Coleman, Christian Elder, Gary Glauber, Matthew Harrison, Aurelia Lorca, Laura Minor, Rachel M. Newton, Sam Nickerson, Carlos Porras, Bud Smith, R.L. Swihart, Karen Terrey, Kevin Tosca, Claudette Visco, and Kobina Wright.
Original artworks by Zara Kand and John Sokol.
The works published in the Bicycle Review are the property of the authors and artists and may not be reproduced without their express permission.
15 April, 2013
Poetry and Prose by Sirenna Blas, Tori Bond, Rich Boucher, Chris Coleman, Christian Elder, Gary Glauber, Matthew Harrison, Aurelia Lorca, Laura Minor, Rachel M. Newton, Sam Nickerson, Carlos Porras, Bud Smith, R.L. Swihart, Karen Terrey, Kevin Tosca, Claudette Visco, and Kobina Wright.
Original artworks by Zara Kand and John Sokol.
The works published in the Bicycle Review are the property of the authors and artists and may not be reproduced without their express permission.
the Bicycle Review #21
Our mission here at the Bicycle Review has been to present quality contemporary literature and art that is accessible to as many people as possible. In the case of the journal itself, that means presenting it at no cost to the reader. The simple fact is that the Bicycle Review would not have the wide readership that it enjoys if it wasn’t free.
Another part of our mission (My, our mission is more extensive than I thought...) is to try to keep advertising out of art. Of course, this is inevitably more of a preference than an actual possibility. We have to market the journal to people or they’ll lose interest. Or so I’m told. Apparently the “internet savvy” have very little faith in the attention span of people they tend to view as units. I’m not sure that this kind of thinking applies to a journal like this, or to the people who read it.
Nonetheless, promoting doesn’t hurt. It definitely brings in new readers, and if we hadn’t promoted the journal on social media, it would be nonsensical to think that we’d have anywhere near the amount of readers that we do. Hundreds of people read the Bicycle Review every day; thousands and even tens of thousands read us when a new issue or feature comes out. This is due in large part to being able to let the world know when there's something new up on the site.
So in a way, we have engaged in more than a little of what you might call advertising; on our own behalf, and in support of like-minded publishers, organizers, and artists. Still, we’ve tried to avoid descending into the realm of spam, and I like to think we’ve mostly succeeded.
We hope to continue along in this same spirit where the Pedestrian Press is concerned. The books aren’t free, but they are priced low enough to buy and high enough so that we don’t get totally screwed on the deal.
Our first three publications will all be in some form of print (some electronic, others will have graduated to hard copy by then...) by the end of April. Our first publication is a short novel, Squirrel by writer Jay Passer, whose grittily surreal poetry has often been published here. All you can really say about this book is that it’s punk as fuck if you know what I mean.( Okay, that’s not all you can say, but you can read the blurb on the Pedestrian page...) We’re also bringing out two incredible collections: Co, short fiction and poetry by Edward C. Wells II, selected by the author (This is some of Wells’ most far-reaching and challenging work. If you thought it was all over after Beckett, try this.), and The Grand McLuckless Road Atlas, a pack of poems by John Domini, an author best known for brilliant novels like “Talking Heads:77”, “Earthquake I.D.”, and “A Tomb on the Periphery”, whose poetry has appeared in the Bicycle Review since the very beginning. John has been such a strong supporter of this journal from the start, and it has made a lot of difference. Those who have never read John’s poetry, or even thought of him as a poet, will be pleasantly surprised.
All the books have covers that are hand drawn by BR editor Rhea Adri, so each book is also like having a print of an original work of art. Again, the goal here is to expose people to work of exceptional quality while keeping it accessible. Readers have long asked me how they might contribute some support to the Bicycle Review. We tried T-Shirts for a while, but the police beat me up while I was painting on the street, and threw them all in the trash for some reason (No Joke.), which really set us back. In a few cases, some have even made donations through paypal. This kind of thing often felt like bribery to me, though thankfully no one has ever sent money while their work was actually under consideration, and I’ve only accepted it when I really really needed it. I’ve had some periods of what might be termed “severely unstable housing” and plenty of unemployment over the last couple of years. For a good amount of that time I was also struggling with some pretty serious mental illness, which thankfully seems to have cleared up. Keeping the journal going during that time was pretty tough, but in a way it was also one of the things that helped me feel like I had a reason to get up in the morning. So, yeah, that twenty or fifty dollars or whatever that some of you sent every now and then was seriously appreciated.
Anyhow...
Now there is something you can do to support the Bicycle Review: buy Pedestrian Press books. I’m amazed at the titles we’ve managed to piece together so far. When Rhea and I first talked about this, I had no idea what was going to happen. No one had so far sent me a single manuscript at that point, and now we’ve ended up with three that it would be pretty damn hard for me to feel better about as an editor.
In June, Pedestrian will be publishing the Bicycle Review: The First Four Years, an anthology of selected writings and artworks from the first four years of the journal. The long list on this only gets more and more difficult to nail down as new submissions keep coming in.
Pedestrian will also be putting out the coffee-table book of the century, so far: a book of artworks by our editor and curator Jeff Kappel. Dualities is slated for publication in the fall.
Alright, I think that’s probably more than enough out of me. Enjoy Issue # 21. The great writing just keeps coming, somehow. Thanks as always to our artists, Zara Kand and John Sokol, two exceptional painters of our time, whose work pretty much could not be more different.
Share the Road,
J de Salvo
Untitled
We Will Continue To Pretend To Still Be Friends, Share The Most Intimate
Revelations Less And Less, Then More, Then Less And Care For Each Other As
Deeply As We Care For Starving Strangers In Distant Lands And Keep From Each
Other Bouts With High Fever, Pain From Swallowing From Swollen Glands
Chocking It Up To Simply Being “Sick,” We’ll Pick Up Nothing Around Our
Homes For The Other’s Sake Because We Will No Longer Fake A Visit And When
One Of Us Dies Before The Other, We Will Cry And Wail For One Another Tell
Everyone Around How Our Private Worlds Will Spin Upside Down Because You
And I Were Such Good Friends All The Way Until The Sobering End.
Hey girl!
How you been?
Good?
Good.
Copyright 2012 by Kobina Wright
Tipped to the Ear
We laugh with the same teeth and mouth
and sail with the same anger, ships in bottles,
losing our sanity one sandglass at a time--
silent and dumb as the noise of the future knocking.
This is the magnificent story of running things,
screaming bottles and flying tuna fish sandwiches.
This is the broad expansion of horror in two willow stumps:
our ears skimming the underwater saints
for the ship to sink a failed family,
for the failed family to then rise,
each heart undoing its particular gospel.
Copyright 2013 by Laura Minor
The Nun
There was a man calling himself Dr. Louis Schreimer who practiced psychiatry. His real name was Pete. Pam settled on his name randomly in the yellow pages, her hand shaking as she ran it down the imposing list of care givers. Tears fell, blop, blop, blop. The ink smeared.
His office was on 168th street, across from the park.
“Tell me about yourself, Pam,” he said.
Pam didn’t know where to start. She stared at the man, particularly his beard—such a stoic beard. The doctor also had long hair tied back in a ponytail. Pam studied his eyes. Were these the features of an expert? Could she trust her deepest fears and the details of her difficult path to him?
She was stuck. She would be trapped forever, on the verge of breaking down—then, possibly, just back into the hospital. Right? That was it. Maybe a long stay in a ward if she didn’t get herself back on track immediately.
The man tapped his watch.
It made Pam laugh, the man laughed too.
“Paid by the hour,” Pam said.
The man smiled, showed his sympathetic and lovable teeth. “Tell me about yourself, Pam,” he commanded.
It was their mutual laughter that broke the ice. She became an open book. Her doubts and fears and sorrows floated out of her a like boat cut loose from a dock, taken out to the swirling dark ocean, empty of any passengers.
After 55 minutes of listening carefully and taking occasional notes and sometimes even saying, “A-ha”, the man had a suggestion for Pam: “I think we should see each other again, talk some more.”
Pam agreed. He wrote her out a prescription. She made another appointment, leaving his office with a tinge of hope. Out on the street, she went to the nearest pharmacy, slipping the prescription to the girl working the counter.
“This is odd,” the girl said, calling the assistant pharmacist over. “Look at this.”
“What is it?” Pam asked them in worry.
“This is the neatest handwriting we’ve ever seen on a prescription.”
Everyone was a comedian.
They started meeting every Tuesday evening at 7pm.
The beginning. They started right at the beginning. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. As if he was a machine that needed to be fed backstory. Feed the machine your doubts and fears generated from mishap after mishap for the next 55 minutes and the machine will spit out a little update on how you are doing along with a suggestion.
That’s what she needed. A nice juicy suggestion.
“I think you’re making progress,” the man said.
“You do?”
“Yes, certainly. I can see it already.”
The medicine was working well, but he thought it could work even better, “You need to cut back on your drinking.” It terrified her to hear that.
But, Pam was feeling better and the prospect of feeling even better sent off little fireworks inside her life. She agreed to follow his request.
It was very hard, but over the course of a month, Pam weaned herself off the Cutty Sark. She lost a little weight in the process.
“You should be proud of yourself,” he said.
She’d never considered that she should be proud of herself.
The man insisted that she try something radical. He said, “I’d like you to give yourself a round of applause.”
She felt very silly doing it, but she played along. She clapped for herself and watched him as he nodded happily at the sound of her solo clapping.
“Good.”
Pam made a point to get a good look at his diploma on the wall on her way out. It was legit. Have a round of applause for yourself, whatever works.
He suggested that she start to exercise a little. Little walks around the neighborhood. Through the park across from his office. “Get a dog too, that will make you feel better.” It did. Pam felt much better. She didn’t get the dog though. She bought a pair of grey and hot pink New Balance sneakers, a new set of luggage. She applied for her passport at the post office. She was considering Nepal for the spring.
She continued to meet with him weekly, talking openly. In doing so, her life opened up as well. The page on the calendar flipped again. He was able to lower her medication. “I think you should quit smoking.”
“Really?” she almost said but, instead of raising a fuss about it, Pam quit smoking cigarettes. Oh, it wasn’t easy, but two months later, still smoke free—he said, “Give yourself a round of applause.”
Pam joined a gym. She became more concerned with her eating. She cut salt from her diet. She only ate whole foods, nothing processed. “Give yourself a round of applause.”
She stopped allowing herself to be a willing participant in a string of dead end relationships. She took herself off the dating scene, focused more on her own inner peace. Pam got a bamboo mat and began to do meditations in a her dimly lit bedroom while the miniature waterfall statue in the corner changed from soft pink to soft blue to soft green to soft white, the fiber optics setting off pings of deep clarity into her once cluttered and debilitated mind.
“Give yourself a round of applause.”
Pam sold her television set and began to read instead. She sold her SUV, bought a smaller car, an electric car. “Give yourself a round of applause...”
Then he really threw a curveball at Pam, he said, “Have you ever been inside a church?”
“Inside, no.”
“Go in, sit down, listen to what they have to say.”
Pam kept an open mind and went to a few services and couldn’t believe the impact that it had on her. Something she had never considered in the scope of her lifetime.
She went and talked to the doctor about it.
He nodded solemnly and said nothing.
“What?”
“What?” he said.
“What? Why aren’t you giving me a suggestion?”
“The next step for you, is one that no one can point you in. It’s a road that you would have to take yourself.”
“Seriously, what are you saying?”
“Time’s up, Pam.” He said.
Then he gave her the sign of the cross.
Pam became more active with her church. She greatly enjoyed the words that the priest said in his sermons. At first, she found that didn’t relate to her spiritually and that those words were just wonderful motivational speeches more or less that were powerful and could potentially supercharge a person’s stale life. After a time though, she wondered how her life had ever not included the church. She lit candles for her father, who’d been a horrible man and she lit candles for her mother who had been a horrible woman and she broke down again in tears inside the confession booth, admitting all the dark things that she had not even had the courage to mention to her psychiatrist.
She saw him less often, a session every second week. He praised her progress and was happy to hear about her interest in her spiritual side. “It’s a blessing,” he explained, “to transform yourself, even if that means posing as someone who you are not for a while. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“You become that person,” he said. “Pretend to be who you want to be and you will be amazed when you look in the mirror one day and you find that the old self that you hated so much is gone and the new you is exactly what you wanted to be.”
“That’s beautiful advice.”
His suggestion at the end of the session, “You’ve helped yourself so much, why don’t you try to help others a little bit. Give back.”
Pam started to teach. She began to substitute teach at the local elementary school. She also volunteered at the church and helped with some small maintenance things. The food pantry. Dusting. The more she helped, the more that she gave in to the idea that there were possibilities in this world bigger than human understanding. Pam began to feel an immense pull from the hand of God. The more she helped herself and the more she helped others, the more that God guided her towards the correct path of her life.
She went and saw her psychiatrist, she explained about the revelation she had come to. There was no hesitation or fear in her voice. She was here to thank him for all he had done for her. She said, “I have something to say that might surprise you.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve decided to become a nun.”
“I’m not as surprised as you’d think,” he said, smiling.
Pam left his office. They shook hands. Her time under his care was over. The psychiatrist shut off the light and, locked the office. He got in his car and he drove back to where he lived.
At the house, he fixed himself a plate of leftover chicken chow mein from the night before and he sipped a cherry Coke while watching Jeopardy. During a commercial break, he stood up and fixed a bowl of wet dog food mixed with dry dog food and he took a bottle of Diet Coke from the refrigerator.
The man went down into his basement with the bowl and soda. He moved a striped rug and revealed a steel door. He opened it and went down the steps.
As he flipped the switch, another man looked up from the floor. He was bound and gagged, hands chained to feet, all of that chained to a bolt in the floor.
“Got another one, today.”
The prisoner on the floor didn’t even try to speak. It’d been so long—over a year.
The man set the dog food down in front of the prisoner. Then he removed the gag.
“She became a nun, can you believe that?”
The prisoner spoke low, an unintelligible murmur. The man shook his head. He liked being Dr. Louis Schreimer instead of Pete Loomis. Nobody liked Pete Loomis, but people respected Dr. Louis Schreimer. They listened when he said things.
“I like being you,” Pete said to his prisoner. “They follow every command.”
Copyright 2013 by Bud Smith
West of Eden
low live songs
and dead beat poems
serenade
the damned
getting numb
on scotch
blunting impressionable
women
in the blinds
gambling their clothes
and bedding them like
poetry
faking dreams
made of sugar
and driving into madness
in unmarked
machines
carpet crawling
hunting
for sanity
under mustard colored
street lamps
the stars bitch
burn
and moan daddy’s name
holding you
like a quivering knife
in the middle
of town
dancing in dark
ambient whispers
passing between
pine needles
and parking meters
and weak coffee
cutting off those
post coital awkward words
into silky little pieces
and slivers
of nothing
a black cop
shits his pants
grabs a smart phone
and a bad bad gun
death spreads everywhere
in the city of liars
the mountains drum
on the horizon
the big news
comes down
from a busted television set
making cats and dogs
and figments of the truth
this is not
a stick-up
it’s a fuck up
the extemporaneous
diary of a heist
pardoned people
hit the pipe
dream sideways
and walk down
to the private sector
to occupy
the blues
money stinks
at the end of the bar
perverted and
wired on cough medicine
square men on the ridge
of nervous tension
fornicate with
wet dawgs
seven seeds of greed
grow in the immense stomach
fat senators
and other
insipid sons of ayn rand
break down the doors
hard writers
write hard
for christ’s sake
an apple
tumbles down
from the branch
and blanches
in a grove
and babies sleep
Copyright 2013 by Christian Elder
Like Wings on a Man
We were born of different lakes, hands pressed into Indiana, stretched toward Toledo, connected only by a vein that pumps water into our throats until we are the color of our lakes―one of us atop sand dunes, the other at the bay where the carnival lights (blue, yellow, fragmented) glow within the puddles that you have created with each walk in from the lighthouse.
Sometimes, you become an osprey. Born flightless, you have learned to fly so that you can leave the water that chokes you and leaves you stranded. But you never make it far because you do yet not know how to fly for too long over water. Don’t you know there are islands in our lakes? You stay near the summer camp where you went as a kid, and you rummage through rusted trumpets, and torn-leather tambourines, and you throw them into the pile of arts and crafts you’ve discovered in a cabin. One is a sculpture of spare metal parts that a boy once made for a girl. When you’ve grown too tired of flying, you sit among your treasures and dust them with your feathers, laying each piece down, clean and new. But they are just like wings on a man who cannot fly over Erie.
And I grew up with a fish in my hand that writhed for fresh water, but I walked barefoot over crab legs and snails until the fish stopped breathing. I placed it belly-up upon the beach and lay down, stroking the ground beside it, dragging my nails to where the sand is cool and hard.
The tide drained into the scratches, swelled, and when I awoke, there were only skeletons of crabs, and morning sea hawks darkening the sky.
Copyright 2013 by Sirenna Blas
The Aesthetician
Keep your eyes closed -
the pigment is sinking in.
I’m going to tell you a story
but I shouldn’t.
Is it stinging? I have to ask you -
try and tolerate it.
I used to have the sweetest dog.
Now the other eye - hold still.
My boyfriend stalked me –
I couldn’t tell him where I was moving
but I sent one text.
I was drunk
and crying
then I fell asleep.
In the morning –
Let me tell you what I can do for your upper lip.
I take a scalpel - don’t tell anyone -
make your lips like this, see?
Now don’t move.
I opened my front door
and my dog lay on the doorstop
dead. He had shot her in the middle
of the night.
Now pull your lower lip in
like a negative pout. Yes, good.
I just quickly scrape the scalpel back –
I do this for everyone.
No waxing here, the skin is too vulnerable.
You know - he would abuse me,
and once he had the police come
to my business to arrest me
in front of everyone
for hitting him - I only hit him
once by accident
with a golf club
as he got into his truck.
He shot her in the dark and dragged her to the door
and then with his fist he pulled out her heart
and left it on the step
for me to see
what I had done to his heart.
The blood on the fur.
The hole in the chest.
I never saw it. How could I not
see the evil before?
Just like the police told me,
now I don’t drive home directly from work.
I go to a friend’s house
or the movies
first. Why
do we call out
in the dark, Here here
come to me - Come closer,
watch me
bare myself -
There, see how smooth your skin is now?
Copyright 2013 by Karen Terrey
What Happens on a Weeknight
I had a dream
Like a fit of violence
It passed over
It passed through
Forgetting what it did
Once it was done
You lived in my house
Where you rented a room
Six days a week
And kept reminders of things that hurt
In the garage
Between an old ten speed
And the lawn chairs
Every night we ate
Teriyaki chicken wings
At a fancy restaurant
It must have been fancy
It had cloth napkins
Once, after dinner was done,
We set sail across the sea
But something went wrong
And the captain yelled
“All hands on deck
This ship is going down!”
Content we'd soon be making
A new home on the ocean floor,
A strange calm took hold
As the water rose above our heads
After they fished me
Out of the cold water
They almost threw me back
Saying I was out of season
Instead, they just fainted
As I pulled the hook from my hand
And walked off
On my own
The bus ride home
Was long and depressing
Like conversation with
A forgotten relative or misplaced friend
And all the colors speeding by
Melted into muted grays
And unforgiving blacks
A homeless man and I
Got into a knife fight
In a phone booth
It was unexpected
It was quick
And then it was over
Copyright 2012 by Christopher Coleman
In The Shadow of La Cathedrale de Sevilla
“Be careful of the gypsies.”
“Don’t ever take that plant thing they try to give
you.”
“They’ll tell you bullshit, sometimes charging 10
Euros!”
“Ugh, those women are so annoying.”
In the shadow of the Cathedral
the Gitanas, who sell to tourists rosemary and
fortunes,
sweating in crackling blueness.
In the shadow of the Cathedral
the Gitana, named Pacqui with the colored contacts,
who says she wants to learn English,
so she can make more money,
her bra strap hanging from one green thread.
In the shadow of the Cathedral
the Gitana, who complains her feet hurt,
holding silver sandals, useless.
In the shadow of the Cathedral
the Gitana with the dyed blonde hair who wears red,
grinning big, “Federico Garcia Lorca! Federico
Garcia Lorca!
El estudia la langua Gitano. Un grande artiste!”
In the shadow of the Cathedral
the young and skinny Gitana with the pink ribbon
who reads the palm of a man as he talks on his
cellphone:
She gives him a good fortune and asks for two
euros.
In the shadow of the Cathedral
all the Gitanas slap my shoulder and laugh when I
tell them,
“I am your sister:
I am a poet,
I have nothing but my pen
because I have used all the money
my husband gave me on a new dress.”
Copyright 2013 by Aurelia Lorca
Elephant Hunting
i puked in the pew after he said
you have herpes
my mind closed off,
going back to when jim
flew at night to be with me
i remember he got raging drunk,
running around naked yelling
i shot the elephant.
Copyright 2013 by Rachel M. Newton
Recalling the Weight
Bolted to the back top corner
of my garage is a grey steel pulley.
It squeaks a little from time to time.
Sometimes my mind imagines it smiling.
Bolted to the front top corner
of the shed behind the garage
is yet another pulley entirely.
It makes its own song when it hears
pulley number one clearing its throat.
Strung and run through these two pulleys
is a fraying length of grey, cotton clothesline.
There’s a distance of several yards
of wide open sunlight between
the front of the shed and the back of the garage.
Open sky, midday sunlight
of the loudest, most Summerest kind.
Emotional sunlight in which t-shirts dance
like they have a Louisiana ghost twitch.
On the leisurely days when my hands arrive
to hang a load or two of my wet, washed shirts,
the pulleys squeak like baby infant birds
waking up at the end of some Winter.
This story about my clean clothes
swaying, drying on the line in the sun
has been reenacted and retold ad mausoleum
throughout the course of my years
in this house that has lived with me here,
this house that looks just like the picture of the house
in the book of pictures of what houses look like.
The clothesline has quietly, saintily endured
many late afternoons of night-scented, slanting rain
like the rain on the canister of Morton’s salt.
If only my night times were that exact colour blue.
If only I was as smart as that girl with the umbrella.
Now there was a girl who knew to plan ahead.
Me? I never thought to buy some nylon cord
for pulleys that moan and squeal in shadow and light.
When I look close I see the tired cotton recalling the weight;
I can see the tears and rips in the fabric of my line,
the rips and tears in the fabric on my mind,
and all my laundry hangs in the balance.
Copyright 2013 by Rich Boucher
Phantasmagoria in Recoleta
Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1830.
I
A barrio whose historical qualities are overlooked because of the overwhelming shadow looming off of that famous cemetery.
For weeks advertisements have been appearing on the tuffeau of spectacularly engraved buildings for a new show by a mysterious European to take place at the Teatro Del Purgatorio. The bill promises a show that will never be forgotten; one that will change your life.
On this day dense clouds and a drizzle cover the barrio, giving the buildings and parks a lazy appearance.
Men and women, clueless that their destinies have already been chosen, discuss poetry and it's effects on gentrification and war over maté and cigarettes at any one of the barrio's hundred cafes before their big night.
On this gloomy evening too many ornamental gas lamps light the theater, centering a glow on the otherwise dark street. A man slowly plucks a lute in the street attempting to pad the already large crowd; his thick mustache and eyebrows wet with the nights dew. The front of the theater is loud with Porteños clad in dark garb; drawn to the show out of their morbid curiosities. The aforementioned blinding light makes it difficult to see expressions on people's faces; each glance only revealing a sodden mask. Men dressed in dark frocks with bowlers and women in black gowns and veils wait in the dark, damp weather to enter the theater. The brightness of the entrance and the darkness of the crowd create an illusion of Heaven and Hell.
The show is starting. I wade through the shadowed crowd and eagerly pay the 10 peso admission price. One by one we march through the procession and enter the unknown.
II
I get the best seat in the house, one that is front and center, but quickly give it up, and take one that is in the rear, overlooking the crowd, so that an old man can get a better view.
The showman enters and oddly gives us a chance to leave but our curiosities numb our limbs. The European, whose odd dress reminds me of an undertaker, begins the show and quickly people begin to realize that they should have left when they were given the chance; for what is seen cannot be unseen.
Amarillo Garces' red eyes wince as he sees himself drowning in Lago Espejo. Shatze Puente shrieks in terror when her lonely, emaciated, bed ridden body appears to her. The twins Edgar and Rios Ponticelli begin to fight each other because Edgar, standing over Rios' body, a whiskey bottle in one hand, a machete in the other, is shown on the stage. Cries of grief and horror are heard throughout the crowd as our future deaths appear projected in light on a slate backdrop at center stage.
I, however, sit as quiet as a cloud, never so much as letting out a sigh, because my apparition is agreeable. I'm lying down. My room is an Andes winter and my bed— fresh snow. I see myself holding a wife and daughter's hands; grandchildren all around me. I am very old and happy. It looks like I have just got done telling my favorite joke; a magician walks down an alley and turns into a bar. There is laughter and smiles, then it all ends.
III
We exit the theater and flood into the Plaza San Martin; a murky wave staining the white marble floor. People do not leave the plaza, they cannot go home and face their loved ones. Everyone looks like they have just left from a funeral at that lingering cemetery. Save for myself. I quietly leave the crowd and start my walk home; stopping at Cafe Gloria for a late dinner and dance. The showman was right, we would never be the same.
Copyright 2013 by Carlos Porras
Untitled
Something To Pull From In His Arsenal Of Sludgy Liquid High School Memories
In The Mid-West Where Most Settings Of His Written Imagination Played Out
By Professionals In Front Of The Most Attentive Cycloptic Lenses That Spun Back
Youthful Tales Of Humor And Misery For An Audience Of Pop-Cult Disciples;
Forever Embedding Fragments Of Himself In The Mold Of A Generation Of
Youth.
Farmer of a sprouting
brat pack.
Crop unforgotten.
Copyright 2013 by Kobina Wright
Coop
A gutted Winnebago
for coop in a field
once potato filled.
Chicken-wire fence
pens chickens. Hens
peck at clods or lope
from nothing. Rooster,
pomp of black spots
on white, nods a plume.
Blue fighter jets zip
open the sky. Hens
freeze, stunned under
evolution. Rooster
has to be uncertain. We
lock eyes. Cocksure:
the bird has puff.
Rooster wins the contest
between us. I came this way
to ruminate moving this way
or that and rooster plump
as a weightlifter’s bicep
flexes a suggestion: move on.
Rooster is a monument
on a square of ruined earth. Sun
drops. Fence chops my shadow
to bits flung under beaks. Under-
standing, I turn and meet
a copper hen beyond the coop.
She cocks a glance. Bok. Behind
my back, rooster waits posed
magnetic to persuade copper
away from her dilemma:
me. How do I signal No fret,
No predator? Flap hands,
waddle right. No, keep still
instead. All night I’m expected
nowhere, so let the lady make
first move, as ever. I can wait,
rooster. All that’s left to lose
is time.
Copyright 2013 by Matthew Harrison
Lullaby for Girls who still Play with Dolls at Night
“Fee-fi-fo-fum--
Now I’m borrowed.
Now I’m numb.”
from Anne Sexton’s “The Addict”
set sail on oblong serrated apricot Alprazolam ships
in a pale blue Diazepam sky
from one Carisoprodol cloud to the next
marionette limbs bend in an Oxycodone
hoedown (that vicious Vicodin circle),
an opiate opera appreciated from barbiturate balconies
listening to Etodolac etudes
bring on Naltrexone neurosis
plant forensic flags on Amitriptyline acquisitions
(no more ambidextrous Amphetimine acrobatics)
instead Gabapentin gathers nerves gently,
melts them down towards dreaming.
Copyright 2013 by Jennifer Bradpiece
Folded Napkins
If everyone didn’t have a napkin already, this would be much easier. Here I am holding a bundle of about two hundred, I’m ready to fold and place each one neatly underneath a stainless fork, and all I can notice is that someone’s already beat me to it- with the napkins folded in half rather than on the bias. A wholly detestable practice without any sense of aesthetic decency.
A few patrons have already slipped their napkins off the table and placed them underneath their feet. They’re looking to do me a favor, to make me feel important and needed. Most of them are older men in their fifties. Most of them have incredibly big hearts.
The gymnasium is filled to capacity. The lunch tables are lined along the gymnasium’s beige walls. The paint is beginning to chip and I’ve decided to help it along since someone already folded the napkins.
I haven’t got one.
A man in his fifties is waving his fork in the air and pointing to the spot on the table where a napkin should be. I nod and quickly arrive at his side. I carefully fold the napkin on the bias so that one side does not unevenly overlap upon the other. He watches my movements carefully and gives a final nod of conviction that this is in fact the neatest looking napkin he’s ever seen.
I smile and move towards the back of the gymnasium. I haven’t looked at the podium because there’s no one standing there. I feel someone standing beside me- someone I know. His presence is intoxicating and I immediately rest my head on his shoulder. I know I shouldn’t, I know this is entirely wrong, but I do it anyway. He’s got his arms around my hips now and I’d like to devour him. I’d truly like to put him in my bundle of napkins and unwrap him when the timing is more appropriate.
Miss! I haven’t got one either.
I unfold his arms and retrieve my napkins from an unused table. I approach the voice
that belongs to another fifty year old man. This one has got a mustache that looks as if it
hasn’t been groomed for some time. He isn’t waving his fork in the air but he looks as if he’d
like to. He’s watching the someone I know with penetrating eyes.
He isn’t good for you.
But isn’t he?
No. He’s a rotten son of a bitch and I’d like to kill him with this fork.
I nod my head and fold his napkin. The man is still watching the someone I know. Beads of sweat are beginning to drip from his forehead. I take an extra napkin and gently dab at his beads.
I hope you don’t mind.
He’s a rotten son of a bitch.
I place the folded napkin under his fork and point towards the podium.
It’ll be starting soon.
I’d like to kill that rotten son of a bitch.
The woman beside the man with the moustache is shaking her head. She hasn’t touched her napkin. I ask if she’d like another, perhaps one that’s folded differently. She says no, she doesn’t plan on eating a single thing this evening, and continues to shake her head. I tell her it’ll be all right and that the presentation should be starting soon.
Towards the back of the gymnasium, someone I know is sitting on an unused table. I can’t make out his face because of the darkness. The lights continue to dim and a spotlight shines upon the podium. I move towards the unused table and begin to feel intoxicated again.
Someone is approaching from behind. The napkins that are in my hands are torn out of my grip and thrown in the air. As they fall to the ground, the man with the moustache takes his fork and tears the napkins into tiny strips.
I told you he was a rotten son of a bitch.
Copyright 2013 by Claudette Visco
Back into the Box
What will be first—your guess is as good as mine
The iron horse, the horseless carriage, the circus of fleas
we’ve harnessed for all sorts of tricks
I’m sitting next to my stove, eating nuts and berries,
warming myself on something I didn’t steal
Will it also return to the box—or will it consume us first
Anyway, I’ve had my fun and am starting to let go
Copyright 2013 by R.L. Swihart
No
William was on his couch, reading, when he received this text message from Nancy, his older sister: I considered calling, but decided I’m just too exhausted.
William didn’t like to be thought of and not called, especially not by her. He put down his book and reread the message, focused on the “considered”, the “decided”, the “exhausted”. She’s fucking with me, he thought.
Are you in bed? he wrote back.
Yes.
Alone?
Yes.
Are you naked? he wrote.
She didn’t answer, which satisfied him, but he didn’t want to be satisfied, and he didn’t want to be playing this game, either, not even at this level, not even on his own terms.
He looked at his phone and he thought of her looking at her phone and thinking of him. There was no way to stop the memories, the traces, the years and the proximity and the what they had done and not done, the love and the what he had wanted.
Answer me, he wrote, but did not send.
He remembered flailing like a child at barriers neither he nor they had made, walls of what everyone thought she was, and should be, to him. It was not his fault, nor was it hers, and yet she had been fucking with him then, too, acting like it mattered as much to her as it did to him, but never once letting him inside.
When she moved away she must have realized something, in her distance, but he had grown and hurt and come to see all the coquettish rejections for what they were-- inexcusable—and what he saw when she finally said yes, what he saw in the flesh and woman of her when the roles reversed in that terrible and tardy moment of yes, disabused and liberated him. And he hoped that it had broken her.
But he still leans on her when he’s weak or single, because he can, because it’s what they do and have always done.
And she still visits him at night, and they meet in dreams and have sex there like they have for so long, and it doesn’t disturb him like it once did, even though he can remember when her mouth tasted of ash, in his dreams.
The phone, a powerful and alien tool, remained silent in his hand. He wasn’t tired, but he wasn’t feeling as sure as he had been, not as strong. He and Nancy lived thousands of miles apart now, lived their separate, distant lives now, and this was her first attempt at a conversation in six months.
He deleted the Answer me and wrote I miss you, but he didn’t send that, either. He wanted to consider himself a decent man, a good brother.
He put down his phone. Eventually, he picked back up his book, and as he did so he heard the sound his phone makes when he has a new text message—a sportive, optimistic and embarrassing sound he never took the time to change. There was one word.
Yes.
Copyright 2013 by Kevin Tosca
Happy Anniversary
He pointed to the chart of the inverse relationship in our relationship. He drew his finger
seductively along the time horizon. It represented time spent together.
Linear time? I asked.
Time is always linear, he said, can’t be anything but linear. He liked to be exact.
I begged him not to be so literal to which he said, how else would one talk about charts? I asked total hours? Or simply time past?
He claimed that all time was past, his voice annoyed.
I claimed present and future as time. He said we were talking about our relationship not verb tenses. I found it interesting that he mentioned verbs since there were so few of them in our relationship.
Exactly! He pointed at the diagonal purple line.
Is this about sex?
No, he said and stabbed the chart with his finger, time past increased infrequency of sex.
I corrected him, you mean frequency. He preferred to use negative terms to talk about negative things. He did not like to be corrected.
Desire is a complex equation, I said.
It was a simple chart why could I not understand, he shouted.
I asked where was the jagged red line of resentment? How about the scatter plot of
loneliness points across an Adirondack sky? There needs to be a Depression Era plummet line of
communication. What about the empty pie charts of affection? You forgot to diagram the twins
in lovely shades of Venn.
His eyes went dead, that would be a circle, he said. I declared his chart meaningless. He assured me charts don’t lie.
Copyright 2013 by Tori Bond
Modern Romance
From the relative safety of this parapet,
he sees the gray raindrops fall,
slipping down the million black umbrellas
of the common majority. For a second
he envisions it is an army come to free him
from his current burden, the strife
of a gentleman’s wrongheaded resolve,
a sentence of a lifetime of days alone,
furious at being a prisoner in the tower,
with sporadic internet service at best.
She rides the escalator upward
to that familiar third floor department
past the racks full of cotton nighties
and the more conservative flannel offerings.
She finds what she wants beyond that,
a flimsy lace teddy, something else silken
and scanty, the soft wares that her body
fills to alluring perfection. The genetic
gifts she inherited are best seen through
such thin coverings as these, and as she
carries today’s handful to the changing room,
she also knows that these things exist
beyond the ken of her minimum wage earnings.
Still, she changes into each suggestive outfit in turn,
and snaps a few expert poses, the digital camera
held off to the mirror’s side. The megapixels
capture the images well, sensual yearnings or
lustful longings to a world of imaginary admirers.
It doesn’t take much to set him off lately:
the blare of car horns in a rush hour’s entanglement,
the reminder from a lawyer that parole seems
a long shot, the reflection that greets him
off a shiny surface in passing. So this
downloaded vision of pulchritude is a
welcome respite, a momentary pardon of sorts,
a chance to imagine a fantasy of freedom
that takes him outside his celled existence
and into the waiting arms of this young angel
who insists she’s legal. For now, the sound of rain
distracts him not, and he is less concerned with
details, other than those in the zoomed image
on the screen before him, lingerie modeled
so sweetly it must be love.
Copyright 2013 by Gary Glauber
You Ask Why There Are So Many Birds in My Hair
It’s because I didn’t know the names of the birds that gather near the wildflowers, overgrowing grasses in our yard. You spend a lot of time outside, and I spend that time following you, bewildered as you religiously call out species. You brought your barefoot philosophy, ideas as old as chinkapin oaks, from the South. And I had never been the believing kind, grown up among pigeons and smoke-filled towers and littered streets. It’s always gray on these streets.
Gray partridge. White-breasted Nuthatch. Eastern Bluebird. Sedge wren, which breeds here during the summertime, and then they’re gone.
I counter your calls as we walk through prairies I never knew were here. City Methodist Church. Lincoln Hotel. The House of Today. The Aquatorium, once a bathhouse on the beach.
Last summer you were in the southern Appalachian forests because you said you no longer felt connected. Summer tanager. Brown thrasher. Carolina chickadee. To what? I sat by our wildflowers while you were gone, fumbling through an Audubon book pulled from your shelf, trying to name the species that flew in from the southeast. I traced my finger down the pages, trying to match the pictures with what I saw in the air. I was there so long, the birds nested in my hair. You find me when you return from the mountains. I’m quiet, afraid to break the eggs, and I cannot see the top of my head, so I still can’t identify them, but I feel them nesting. You open your mouth to tell me their names but I lift a finger to my mouth and lean into your lap in the grass for you to cup the nest in your hands like a water bowl that cannot be drunk, only meant to show what’s here for you.
Copyright 2013 by Sirenna Blas
Sparks Above the Weeds
I listen to the music soldering the morning to the night,
generously textured by the fireflies rise like sparks above the weeds.
We might never exist in the same room again. Strange--
how everything has a strong grasp up to the elbow.
I do what I can.
I push my bare breasts out at a thief each day.
I steal away to the country roads in magazines.
I pick up the street trash outside my door to remember our little spot.
They, the ones who don’t fall apart,
spark after crises; they dive into the wheel with chore
and create exoduses of ease to charm you.
Kiss me now, in your mudslide to ruin.
This pink shag rug is the closest thing we’ll ever get to
a limbo of rot and lust,
because everyone likes to leave a room
smelling like mayhem.
Copyright 2013 by Laura Minor
The Rejection
Jackie got sexual satisfaction from rejection. It made her
quiver.
Some writers say that's how they feel. They're collecting
rejection notices to wallpaper their bathroom, to line the
bird cages, to frame crookedly over walnut desks housing
Underwood typewriters, etc. But, Jackie often reached
climax from an impersonal form rejection letter: beat that.
When a story was done, she'd take it out of the typewriter,
kiss it delicately, mail it off into the “seeming void.” Then,
she would wait in rapture for her SASE to return with word
from the gatekeepers—the editors.
Mostly, she was alone in the world, masturbating blankly
to the sad confirmation of her failures. She hadn't had
a date with a man in two years. She belonged to three
matchmaker services. Her social media status said,
SINGLE.
One Friday night, she opened an envelope that was
different. It said that her story wasn't a good fit. It wished
her luck placing her story somewhere else. It said … all the
usual things, but, Jackie found herself stricken with mad
euphoric love.
She felt a strange unflinching affection for the form
rejection letter itself. She wanted the form rejection letter
to ask her to the high school prom (even though she was
32.) Jackie wanted to spend a romantic weekend at a bed
and breakfast in the Adirondack mountains. She wanted to
walk along Pesmo beach with it, laughing at corny jokes.
She neatly folded the rejection letter in half, placed it in her
purse.
On the phone, she called Vous Ne Valez Rien, her favorite
French restaurant, making a reservation for two. It felt
good to say that. ‘Reservation for two.”
By candlelight, she smiled behind her glass of pinot noir
at the form rejection letter sitting on the fancy plate. She
called it, “Mi amor,” blowing it kisses. The waiter brought
out the entrees. Two orders of Salade Nicoise. The waiter
asked, “Expecting someone?”
Jackie pointed at the rejection letter. She said, “I don't care
what the world thinks about our love.”
The waiter shrugged.
After dinner, she took the rejection letter out dancing,
clutching it in her hand and rubbing it all over her body
beneath strobe lights on the dance floor. The club was at
capacity. People made room for her though, getting right
out of her way. The DJ dropped throbbing beats. Jackie
threw herself against a carpeted column, grinding against
the rejection letter.
She barely made it to her car, tearing her blouse off as she
tumbled into her own back seat, the rejection letter on top
of her, all over her. The windows of the Pontiac steamed up
like mania. Jackie's pants slipped off, the rejection letter
went inside of her. She didn't tell it to stop.
Afterwards: in the daylight, she felt worse than ever.
Her loneliness grew in a way that she'd never known. It'd
been a mistake to let things “get like that, that quick.”
Cause, it was gone. The rejection letter was gone. It'd been
destroyed in their frenzied passion.
Her cycle lapsed. She missed her period. Then, she missed
the period after that. Never in her life did she wish so
much for blood. In disbelief, she went to the drug store and
bought a pregnancy test, was astounded by the result.
She was pregnant.
For the next few months, she tried to go about her life,
praying for a miscarriage. At the beginning of her second
trimester, she felt a sharp pain in her uterus. That sent her
right to the doctor. There was no more “ignoring the fact
that I'm pregnant.”
When the sonogram tech showed her the scan on the
screen, she burst into tears, relieved.
“Don't cry,” the tech said, “It'll be OK.”
“I'm just happy it's not a typewriter …”
“A what?” the tech said.
“Nothing.”
Jackie didn't write as often. There was a feeling of
dread that possessed her every time she sat down at her
typewriter. But, she powered through the feelings of self
doubt and tried to read drafts to the baby inside of her. It
responded with dreadful kicks. So she stopped reading her
stories to him.
"Oh, a critic," she said, rubbing her abdomen.
As the baby grew, it would kick violently when she even sat
down at the typewriter, let alone when she typed.
When the baby came, as she feared, it wasn't normal. Not
even necessarily human. It was born nearly six weeks
premature with reptilian skin, scaly and dry. Eyes that
were just black orbs with no white to them. Its teeth were
sharp. But, A boy! She took him home from the hospital as
soon as they would allow it, wrapped him a white blanket
as he thrashed wildly.
She named him Editor.
He could not live upstairs. He would not stay in his crib.
He'd tear holes in any fabric or material that she put to
contain him. He preferred the subterranean darkness of
the cellar, and would disappear down there on his own
accord. The sound of the washing machine and the dryer
seemed to comfort him.
All of her personal writings were shredded, the second
she turned her back. The baby found no greater pleasure
than destroying it.
His hisses sent the mailman ducking down the walkway,
though his mail bag was light. Jackie no longer wrote.
She no longer submitted. She no longer received rejection
notices.
Her spot was still at her writing desk. But her Underwood
was gone. Editor had eaten it. Key by key. Then the
mechanisms: the typewheel, the carriage release lever,
the ink ribbon, the feed roller itself. Editor was certainly a
troubled child. In the darkness, he would leave the cellar
and Jackie would hear her child devouring the shitty dime
store novels that she had once loved.
On his fifth birthday, he declined pre-school.
“I know all that I will ever know, mother.”
“Yes, Editor, I suppose.”
“I'm ready to start my own journal.”
Jackie placed the ad herself. With dull terror, she awaited
the responses. It was a quarterly publication. Seldom was
anything accepted.
Editor liked to be fed fish heads and bad writing.
Copyright 2013 by Bud Smith
Capiche?
You’ll rave to your friends about our
delicious, toasted sandwiches
here at Joe Friendly’s Sandwich Shop;
you’ll tell everyone you know
to go to Joe Friendly’s Sandwich Shop
for the best lunch in town;
actually, you won’t stop talking about
the incredible, affordable meal
you had at Joe Friendly’s Sandwich Shop;
you won’t if you know what’s good for you.
If you have any smarts at all, in fact,
you’ll do the right thing here and tell people.
You’ll tell all your friends about our food,
and your family doesn’t lose anyone else;
that’s how this is going to go down, see:
you’ll rave to all your friends about our
delicious and freshly-toasted sandwiches
here at Joe Friendly’s Sandwich Shop,
and then? Then, no one else has to die.
We can end all this right here and now.
We’ve got the best lunch in town…right?
Nod your head twice for “yes”
if you understand what I’m telling you.
Copyright 2013 by Rich Boucher
Untitled
Contentedly Splashing About, Intoxicated With Delicious Ether; An Interior
Designer’s Dysfunctional Vices Skids Off The Jovial Path And Collides Into An
Unmistakable Pulsating Wall When He Smacks Into A 10-Year-Old Boy With His
Vehicle; Airing Not One Dry Thought After Escorting The Young One To A
Nearby Hospital, But Once Turned Away Instructed To Visit A Better Equipped
Facility, He Leads The Trusting Little Fellow To A Reservoir In Gwangju And
Shoots Him Dead With An Air Rifle To Avoid Charges Of Drunk Driving.
Stomp
the spineless fool
with heartless milky logic.
Copyright 2013 by Kobina Wright
Transmutation
She transmuted herself into corporate entity, Blonde Inc. As a pioneer in that particular convention of personhood, many investigated her legitimacy.
“How does one focus their existence into an inorganic concept?”
She thought it curious that the question was always how and never why. She replied, “Litigation and vivisection.”
Copyright 2013 by Tori Bond
Blob
Its image could be anything.
You get the picture. It burns
with atmosphere. It lives, consumes
consumers like cinema, a radiant
blood bag for donors growing
to a mass crave. You stomach it.
To end it you think incineration,
but only a slow freeze will do.
You know, says a cool boy
to constellations. He looks away
from the girl behind the house
in Hollywood. You know,
plenty of people with their right minds
thought they saw things that didn’t exist.
He thinks of what could be, innocent
as crickets in the backyard. The parents
stay asleep. The girl is just there. The star
system implies her. You know, like flying saucers,
the light just right in the angle of imagination.
He turns and takes her in, alert
with a common craving, a blob
soon to be. His monstrous heart beats
in a drive-in B movie. Give in to it,
and you grow with horrifying romance.
And if that is what it is, then
this is just an ordinary night.
Copyright 2013 by Matthew Harrison
Lasting Impressionisms
“You’ve got to come meet him. He’s really something,” My mother's estate sale business had been contracted to do a sale for a well-known local artist and he was all she talked about.
Most people only have an estate sale if they are dead or moving across the country.
But Sam Barber was neither.
His family was downsizing from their waterfront estate in Hyannisport to a modest home down the street from our own.
Knowing the family was still living there, I did not want to go with her to the property—a three-building compound near the Kennedy’s, built from stucco sometime in the early twentieth century.
“I don’t really like when people watch me pick through their things. What if there's something I want?”
My whole family was guilty of it.
I looked down at the plate in front of me. The Crosby house sale a few months back.
The chairs in the living room? The farm house sale last summer.
And the band saw I could hear from my father’s workshop downstairs sounded about as old as the couple who last owned it.
This is how my family came to know the Barbers—a relationship that would span only a few weeks, accumulate seventy-thousand dollars in two days, lay plans to take the art world by storm, and end abruptly amid threats and accusations.
***
Sam Barber bills himself as an American Impressionist. He says he was born in Europe, though I still have my doubts.
Sam Barber’s impressionism uses short brushstrokes and a loud color palette to paint traditional New England scenery. His art is suitable for corporate or restaurant placement, and its lack of tension is soothing to the eye. Nothing too edgy, he paints mostly sailboats and beach scenes.
Sam Barber studied art under Henry Hensche at the Cape School of Art in Provincetown, a school that produced generations of genre painters since its earliest incarnation in 1899. The school’s founder, Charles Webster Hawthorne, even taught Norman Rockwell.
Sam’s mentor, Hensche—born in Germany, which I suspect may be the source of Sam's hard to place accent—encouraged his pupils to adopt his brand of academic impressionist painting. If you were to hold up two paintings, one by Barber and the other by Hensche, you would have to look for the signature to differentiate between the two.
But Sam Barber didn’t need to reinvent the wheel; his works have been in galleries in all over the world—not that he had been showing much art until we came along.
***
There was something drawing me to Sam Barber, even if I couldn't pick through his things.
In elementary school, we took field trips to his gallery. I remembered the vibrant color of Barber’s paintings; up close they were splotches of paint, yet a few steps backward revealed a beautiful woman sunbathing on the beach.
We never saw him on these field trips, though. Looking from the back window of the school bus, someone always claimed they spotted him up in his tower. Sam Barber attained a mildly mythic status in my mind. He was the closest thing to a celebrity any of us knew. He was a master, our own Monet.
“He wants Hannah to model for him for his ballerina series. You should come to the house tomorrow. He paints his shoes green. And he gave me this,” my mother held out her hand.
He had given her a small, plastic magnifying glass tied to some green paracord. Much less practical than the jewelry loop she normally used, she treasured the gift from a famous artist like an heirloom. She hinted that he might have something for me as well.
My mother had talked me up as some sort of musician and writer and an overall kindred spirit—not to mention one with the same name—which intrigued Sam Barber. He wanted to meet me.
He was already involving everyone else in his creative schemes—my mother was to co-author a poetic biography while my sister was to be his muse—and now it was my turn.
“On second thought, I think I’ll go with you to the house tomorrow.”
***
I felt my knees buckling a bit as we pulled up to the house.
Everything was playing out just how I had imagined it would in my biography: The artist Sam Barber took Sam Nickerson into his circle of intellectuals, some of which Nickerson featured in some of his earlier works.
It wasn't a large property, smashed right up against the water, but the geometry of the buildings gave the place a castle-like feel. To one side was the studio, a two floor building large enough to be a guesthouse and on the other was a tower that was visible from beaches miles down the road.
In between them, the main house was boxy with a large door and walls of windows facing the ocean. The property was positioned at a curve in the road. If you weren't paying attention, you could drive right by it. It was a monument hidden in plain view.
My mother opened the door to the house without knocking. Some of her other employees were milling around, toting around model ships and boxes. As she called out for Sam, a thin, graying lady turned the corner, who my mother introduced her to me as Janie, Sam Barber's wife.
“Sam is with the movers at the new house, but he'll be back soon. Lisa, I wanted to ask you about some of these prices—“ Janie followed my mother to another corner of the house, looking rather unnerved about the price tags being placed on her possessions. “I'm not sure we want these types of people just strolling in and—“
I wandered around the house, dodging boxes and furniture to be staged, thinking how odd it was that the great artist Sam Barber was not the hermit I had imagined. And that his wife echoed the same owning-class sentiments as the rest of the neighborhood.
Yet there were cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling and the paint on the walls looked original. It seemed like Miss Havisham's house had turned up in New England. This was more in line with what I had expected; a house too big for an artist, purchased maybe because he felt he was supposed to have one like it.
The front door slammed and a voice boomed from the foyer: “ANGELINA JULIANA!”
It was Sam Barber returning home, speaking with that accent which caught me off guard as I heard it for the first time. Was it French? Maybe Turkish? Polish?
He was calling for his wife, whose name is not at all short for Angelina Juliana. Instead, he found me lingering in between rooms.
“Hello, I am Sam Barber, the artist.”
My mother appeared from another doorway to handle the introductions. “Sam Barber the artist, this is my Sam. He’s the one I’ve been telling you about.”
She proceeded to coax him into spitting out all sorts of outlandish catchphrases, to the point I could tell they had been carefully rehearsed. I had stopped listening anyways. I couldn’t believe what was standing before me.
I had imagined Sam being tall and stern. I imagined him taking afternoon tea clad a paint-stained smock over a well-fitted tweed suit. Maybe a monocle in his eye.
Instead, he seemed almost a foot smaller than I, and cartoonishly rotund. He wore purple suspenders and his geriatric glasses were sandwiched between his tangled beard and a floppy hat. Around his neck was a broken shell tied with green paracord.
“It’s a dove. You see? Like a dove. I find them everywhere, Madonnas too. I’m like Jesus.”
***
At my mother’s suggestion, Sam walked me through his studio, pointing out his favorite works and muttering off-color jokes.
The first floor was filled with the raw materials of his latest work, his ballerina sculptures. For these sculptures, Sam took fallen branches and painted leotards on them, with the smaller twigs forming the dancer’s limbs. The relatively small amount of work he put into them was underwhelming, yet the price tags gave me a start. I was impressed, though, with his loose definition of art—that someone like him saw ballerinas in the trees.
The second floor appeared to be where Sam spent most of his nights. Using chains mounted to the ceiling, Sam hung his bed in front of a small television set. Clothing was scattered all over the floor, while canvases and paints seemed to occupy every surface.
There was a couch painted “Van Gogh yellow,” designed to leave the backs of guests who sat there a different shade. He pointed out some of his favorite works—mostly of his wife or beloved dogs—and some still in progress. This was what I had really come to see and each one seemed like a masterpiece.
He pulled me over to a corner of the room occupied by baskets of rocks and shells. They were stacked on top of each other and stacked on the windows.
“These are my Madonnas. I make them, you see?” He held up a rock, the bottom of which he sanded so that it would stand upright. If you maybe looked hard enough, from one specific angle, you might have been able to see the outlines of Mary sitting as though she were holding something. Sam proudly held up rock after rock. “It’s like they are calling out to me. Here, this one is for you. Tell them it’s a Sam Barber original.”
I took the small white rock into my hand. It came from the beach. I knew because it was smooth and left my fingers feeling like I had just gone for a swim. It was no Pietà, but I could see her in there alright. I stuck her in my pocket and forgot about the study of a garden I had picked out on the wall.
We spent the rest of the day hanging Sam's paintings or pricing out his sons' childhood toys. We set up one room as a gallery, where Sam would sell his paintings and sign prints for twenty-five dollars a pop.
But as the hours dragged on, Sam crept closer to the edge of the pedestal on which I had place him. He had spoken to the police chief about allowing cars to park in the street for what he kept referring to as “The Sale of the Century.” The collection of beaches and boats and Parisian streets on the walls, which were lovely on their own, grew repetitive and exhausting as they filled the room. I tried to imagine how many times these same scenes had been painted by Hensche and all of his pupils.
I caught a glimpse of Sam's pricing chart, which listed prices according to canvas size. It was almost too methodical, too businesslike. On one hand, pricing according to size was completely logical; if you saw painting as a job, you would expect more pay for larger projects, though I had always believed that art was priced according to how strongly an artist felt about his work, or how striking the piece was to it's viewers. On top of it all, Sam's pricing chart was from a gallery show some twenty years ago and the prices were vastly inflated for an estate sale. The poor man had no idea what was coming.
***
On the morning of the sale, I could see the faces of the early birds and the pickers peering through the windows, laying claim to items from the window. Their eagerness to bribe their way inside before anyone else wasn't so encouraging. They were looking for a deal on some buried treasure. These folks were not going to buy any paintings. There wasn't much room for profit in the outdated gallery prices. I had a terrible feeling about the rest of the day.
When we finally opened, I watched all the usual suspects weave their way through the bookshelves and china cabinets, snatching odd bits of Venetian glass or brass. They hardly set foot in the gallery room. A few might have given Sam a quick nod, but most of the pickers were so used to rifling through possessions of the dead that I don't think they cared who he was, as long as his things were for sale.
You may have fooled me, Sam Barber, I thought. But no one else is falling for this.
I watched a few couples stroll through the sale out of curiosity. They would whisper approval at the paintings, but gasp once they saw the price tags. My mother flashed a nervous smile from across the room. I could only raise my eyebrows in resignation. I was dreading the end of the day.
Just before lunch, though, things were looking up.
More folks who had no intention of making purchases came in to marvel at the house. They would step over the threshold of the front door and immediately crane their neck up towards the high ceilings and ask, “So, where is the artist?” Only they didn't just say 'artist'; the 'A' was elongated to emphasize its capitalization and the suffix 'ist' was stretched out to 'east' to emphasize their own understanding of culture.
At first I felt bad for them. I wanted to take them by the hand back out into the parking lot, perhaps sending them on their way with one of my mother's poems or one of my own pieces. Here's some real art, now run along. But I realized that these folks were the precursor of better times to come.
They were proof that Sam's ruse actually worked.
And sure enough, the first painting sold, just as the beach club neighbors were criticizing my mother for Sam's Burger King lunch request. Then another sold. Another woman wrote a check for eleven thousand dollars and walked out with three large canvases. From then on, the floodgates were opened. I couldn't even believe it. Sam was my master painter again. All of his quirks, his deliberate attempts to inspire curiosity in his patrons, seemed that much more justifiable. I started taking notes. I began working on an accent. So this is how it's done.
***
When we finally closed the sale, I looked to see what was left. There were still some books and the model ships remained, but hardly any paintings still hung on the wall. People came to buy art from Sam Barber. Seventy thousand dollars later, Sam was right; it was the sale of the century. And now that we had proven our worth, I was excited to move forward with all our collaborations.
But after the sales were calculated, something again went wrong.
Sam had already negotiated a lower cut for my mother's business than the standard contract, but he was still unsatisfied with the final haul. He accused us of low-balling and stealing from him. He said it was a mistake to have hired my mother. That he could have done it on his own. My mother didn't deserve what she was taking home, he said, before breaking all ties with my family. In his own mind, Sam had never dipped from the limelight. He didn't need to be rediscovered because he was never lost.
***
Needless to say, Sam Barber and I never collaborated and the record will show that he did not launch my illustrious, prolific career. My mother never wrote his book and my sister never appeared in his sculptures. Last I checked, the house had not been placed on the market and the Barbers had yet to move into our neighborhood. Perhaps they didn't have to move anymore, since the world remembered Sam Barber the Artist. According to his website, Sam was getting some of his work back into a few galleries again.
I still keep that rock he gave me. The Madonna. I can still see her in there. It frustrates me to no end that, of all people, a ruthless businessman like Sam Barber—who equates artistic success with socioeconomic standing—has the gift to see the world as one great, serendipitous place where art thrives even in the most mundane moments, while those of us who just want one taste of that world grasp wildly as it sits just out of reach.
Yet to label Sam Barber a fraud based on his concocted identities or his derivative style is to forget how the short attention span of the art market keeps us always on the hunt for the next big thing, how it keeps us from noticing small wonders happening right in front of us each day. I know that if I ever stumbled across some wonderful, subtle truth as Sam Barber had done, I too might invent an accent or paint my shoes green. How could I not go to these same great lengths if it meant keeping the world's attention long enough to share what I had found?
Copyright 2013 by Sam Nickerson
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The Bicycle Review # 22 was edited and curated by J de Salvo and Rhea Adri
