Author: Mariah Perkins
Categories
Issue 13 Contributors
Michael Apinyakul is a Wichita based singer-songwriter who also writes poetry and non-fiction. Much of his non-fiction is about what he’s eaten, when it was eaten, how the air felt, and who sold him the food. His songs are about the heart trying to describe itself without naming itself, and his poetry is sometimes about bicycles or his girlfriend or his girlfriend riding a bicycle, but mostly about other things.
Salvatore Difalco’s work as appeared in a number of print and online journals. He is the author of The Mountie at Niagara Falls, a collection of flash fiction. He splits his time between Toronto and Sicily.
KFG is a nonbinary poet, educator, & mental health advocate. As a travelling artist based in Michigan, KFG has facilitated workshops, mentored youth programs, lectured at universities, & featured at mental health conferences across the country. They are currently on a nationwide poetry tour centered around mental health called, “The Unpacking Tour” & have forthcoming publications in Reality Beach & Open Palm Print. For booking or to get in touch with KFG about future collaborations: kfgpoetry@gmail.com
Cassie Garison studies English and Classics at Franklin & Marshall College. She has poems forthcoming in River Styx and Nimrod International Literary Journal, and recently attended writing workshops in Greece.
Henry Goldkamp has lived along the Mississippi River his entire life. Recent work appears in Cutbank, SLANT, Bridge Eight, Blood Orange Review, CRAG, and Permafrost. In 2017, his work was nominated for a Pushcart and two Best of the Nets. His public art projects have been covered by Time and NPR.
Luis Lopez-Maldonado is a Xicanx poeta, playwright, dancer, choreographer, and educator. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California Riverside in Creative Writing and Dance. His poetry has been seen in The American Poetry Review, Foglifter, The Packinghouse Review, Public Pool, and Spillway, among many others. He also earned a Master of Arts degree in Dance from Florida State University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame, where he was a poetry editorial assistant for the Notre Dame Review, founder of the men’s writing workshop in the St. Joseph County Juvenile Justice Center and the Recipient of the Sparks Summer Fellowship 2016. He is currently a co-founder and editor at The Brillantina Project. www.luislopez-maldonado.com
Grant Gerald Miller was born in Memphis, TN. He currently lives in Tuscaloosa, AL with the writer A.M. O’Malley and their son Max.
M.K. Rainey is a writer, teacher, and editor from Little Rock, Arkansas. She is the winner of the 2017 Bechtel Prize at Teachers & Writers Magazine and the 2017 Lazuli Literary Group Writing Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Collagist, 3AM Magazine, Atticus Review, Fiction Southeast, and more. She co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series and lives in Harlem with her dog. Sometimes she writes things the dog likes.
Benjamin Soileau is from south Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Louisiana Literature, The Monarch Review, Gemini Magazine, Bayou, and many other journals, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Olympia, Washington with his wife and son. Reach him at bsoile2@gmail.com.
Zak Worth is an artist based in Wisconsin.
My morning begins with a hooker biting the batteries out of a man’s phone and all I can think is that I haven’t had breakfast yet. The drama moves through my bus stop like a warm breeze, and in a blur of broken high heels and shouting, she dismantles the phone, tossing and spitting plastic to the ground. He picks them up like bread crumbs and follows her up the street.
The bus comes on time and I take my usual window seat. Five blocks into the ride I see the hooker and her John, still yelling, still gesturing into the air, still moving through the city like a two person parade.
Everyday I end up downtown early and the same man grins at me. He parks his truck in the loading zone of a government building. Just a little converted pickup, four cylinders, rear wheel drive. He meets my eye, leaning against the truck, looking for a customer. I work part time, shelving books at the Albuquerque Public Library which doesn’t afford me many luxuries. His feet shuffle as I approach.
He speaks very little English and waves me around to the back of the truck which has been converted with odd hinges and handles. He opens the rear latch like a briefcase in a heist movie. Rather than stacks of unmarked bills, he reveals at least one hundred burritos, wrapped in foil and meticulously stacked and categorized, glimmering like jewels. He runs me through the varieties and I listen for key words. I hear hatch chili, patatas y huevos, adovada, rojo y verde. I get as close to the burritos as I can without touching them, then order two without asking the price. It turns out they’re only $3.50 each.
When I was a kid and begged my Dad for a new toy, I would present him the object in question. He would take it from me, hold it in his open palm, then move his arm up and down, weighing it. Then he’d flick the toy with his finger, listening for density and metal content. As I walk to work I find myself holding the burritos in my open palm and moving my arm up and down. The price to weight ratio is off the charts.
I won’t eat them for another few hours but I feel them through my backpack to know they’re still hot. I get to the library and set my day in motion, shelving two nonfiction carts, a children’s cart, and I handle the book donations that pile up in the back hall. The donations never stop and the elderly volunteers in the basement can’t keep up. I fear they’re burying themselves down there. I only see quick glimpses of them through the ceiling-high stacks of books, like light flickering through a fence.
Today’s donations are boxes of immaculately bound Japanese books and photo albums. Most of the photos are of wedding dinners, where long tables are laid full of exotic foods. For every six people, there is a lobster stuffed with lesser shellfish and posed like a ballet dancer, claws in the air in perfect port de bras. Middle aged men litter every page, red faced and eternally thrusting their whiskey at someone else’s whiskey. They are outnumbered only by brooding, long legged kids. There is an entire album of photos of Japanese horse sketches. Each 6×9 is worn with thumbprints. Someone loved these facsimiles of facsimiles of horses.
Suddenly, a volunteer appears. A shrunken silver haired lady who informs me that once I leave the donations in the basement I am not to touch them again. Then she folds herself back into the musty stacks like a mist.
Lunch break. The burritos are strangely wrapped. Not in the traditional method of folding in the sides of the tortilla then rolling tightly and evenly up the middle; a life skill you improve upon over time, like sewing on a button, talking to women, or filing your W2’s. This man’s rolling technique leaves dimples at either end of the burrito, like little cleft chins. Instead of the doughy first bite, this revolutionary roll lets you immediately get into the filling. I hold in my hand the wheel, reinvented. I don’t dare unfold the tortilla to understand it, for the same reason you don’t unfold an origami crane. You’ll never get it back together correctly. Just enjoy the crane.
The Adovada is juicy and moves from spicy to sweet and then to a radiant heat, like coals dying in your cheeks. The tortillas are charred yet soft. And it’s that simple, just stewed meat in a tortilla that bites clean. A solid, working class number, inventively rolled and sold for a song.
I find the hooker and her John have made it to the library as I start shelving biographies. They’re sitting on the floor, between Charles and Marilyn Manson. They have reassembled the phone and have plugged it into an outlet to charge. They hold hands and smile. A slowly stewed, satisfying day for the two of them and another wrap job I don’t quite understand.
Three boys at St. Lawrence’s Elementary were accused of giving a special needs boy a chocolate laxative as a prank. Herded into the Principal’s Office by the red-faced grade six teacher, Sister Michael Anthony, who had been informed of the stunt by the special needs boy’s father, and told of a terrible night endured by the entire boy’s family, the three pranksters could not contain their laughter. Despite rebukes and threats from Mr. Rice, the military-trained principal, who promised to send them to a boot camp for juvenile delinquents, the boys would not or could not stop laughing. When Mr. Rice asserted that the boy could have died, their merriment redoubled, and they stood in his office bent over laughing and wiping tears from their face as though someone shitting themselves to death were the funniest thing imaginable. When Sister Michael Anthony, standing by silent and flushed as Mr. Rice tried to discipline the boys, could at last take no more, she parted the skirts of her habit and pulled out a thick black leather strap. Back in the day, the leather strap, or black doctor, as it was known at St. Lawrence’s Elementary, served as an intimidating deterrent for students who misbehaved or disrespected authority. Several lacerating whacks of the strap across the palms of the hands could humble any student, no matter how insolent or hard-nosed. But that was then. Such instruments had long since been discarded in the name of more progressive and humanitarian educational practices, and to avoid costly lawsuits. Nevertheless, spurred on by the braying laughter of the pranksters, Sister Michael Anthony set upon them with the leather strap, whipping and beating them with such violence Mr. Rice was forced to tackle her to the ground. When later asked, in her jail cell, why she had reacted so violently toward the boys, all she could say was, “Satan is an active presence in the world.”
I told Penny I was leaving. I had missions to complete. I was a spaceman. I had Mars and one-eyed aliens and large swaths of untamed darkness lying in wait for me. My therapist in all her smug glory said to wait. Penny said to wait. I told Penny to watch my things. She said she would watch my things. I was a hero who did not need things. I rented a long-term motel room on a credit card and I found myself alone in a galaxy of beer cans. Beer tabs clung to my beard like stars. I found an overflowing ashtray and a boiled tongue. Bags of bottles and cans bulged from the carpet while Bread’s Greatest Hits blared from busted speakers. I battled the frontiers of the walls. The abstract impressionist painting above the bed. The mirror was a black hole. I battled the bed, the comforter, sent the ghosts of sheets into the aether. I called Penny in the black of night, and I and relayed my victories, one by one. Penny said I was only battling myself. I made a note to never let her in my motel room. Tell me I am the best body, Penny! You do not have the best body, Penny said. But you are the best of all possible bodies. You do not even have a good body. You slouch like a sad tree. You are too weak to open pickle jars. Your eyes are dead fish. But still you are the best body. The best of all possible bodies. To this day I sometimes spin in the mirror. I breathe in and out and watch my chest rise and fall. I picture my smoked lungs like two little trapped figs. I make smiles with my face. I tell myself I am the best body.
I assumed Penny was a flapping tarp without me, grappling for other bodies to keep her tethered while I was gone. I imagined thin, buzzard-like men who turned all the world’s sadness into jokes, men who lied about their own withering wives, men with bodies whose bodies were not the best bodies. Not like my body. When I called Penny and asked her about her suitors, she said she was mostly enjoying the peace and solitude. She described Netflix series. Cake recipes. She was sewing a quilt. She’d started kickboxing. I said I was enjoying my solitude and the depths of space as well and hung up the phone and slashed at the air with a plastic knife. I made coffee at odd hours.
But soon Penny came for me. I assumed she grew fed up with her suitors passing through like wandering lepers. She found my long-term motel. She fished me out of the bathtub and yanked me from my spacesuit. She said my body was her favorite even though it was a pruned and pickled and pale thing. She knew I had no journey. Nowhere in this life to go.
After Penny fished me, she drove me to support groups and wrote down the gas money I owed her in the ledger of a yellow notebook. She knows I am a cracked vessel, but still she pours words and sounds into me. Her words are lies that range from You are good to You can do everything—anything—you put your mind to, to Everything will turn out okay. Life is its own journey, she says. She tells me I love her. Her words fill me and spill onto the concrete, onto the floorboard of the Volvo, into the grass. Her words soak the couch cushions, stain the kitchen table chairs, flood the bed.
We needed something that was required to love us, so we made a child. When that child grew less dependent on us we made another. And another. I want to strangle them with my love. I fear they resemble me, but not in a best body type of way. I fear they resemble me in other ways. Ways that will harm them from the inside out. My wife tries to put decent food in them while they bang at the table and instead demand things that will kill them. On family outings, I go mute. I straggle behind them at the zoo and pretend to look at animals and read plaques, all the while staring at my family through the corner of my eye. I watch their gaits and clench my teeth. I fear for them. I see them hurtled to the stones below, trampled by Hippopotamus Amphibius or tossed around like stuffed dolls by Pan Paniscus. I see a dark future of flipping automobiles, invisible viruses feeding on their bodies, dark-eyed strangers with bad notions, other humans and all the ways my children will break from the good intentions of others. This earth. This wandering stone. It pulses. It pulses from all directions, blinding my periphery, as if the gods played their prank on me by not making me marsupial, not tucking the children away in safety, in my body, the best body. There is no love more terrible.
By day, I do what the world demands. Penny pokes me with her love when the alarm goes off. I drive in the rain behind lumbering trucks that bounce water in my vision. At work, I put things on shelves in a meticulous order that nobody acknowledges. On weekends, we shuffle silently around the house to look busy while the children wear their hair sleepy. Penny makes smoothies with fruit and vegetables and a brown powder in an attempt to prolong our lives. We renew our license plates. We get teeth yanked from our skulls. We cut grass and trim bushes as necessary.
By night, there are swaths of deep space that yearn for me. Penny lets me go. Every night she kisses me on the cheek and she tells me I am the best body and the most cunning and the fiercest spaceman. I prepare for battle. I drive through the fringes of town. I make one-eyed bartenders brew coffee at strip clubs. I masturbate into paper towels next to sad men in dark booths. I contact people on Craigslist personals. I give them my cell number and let their calls go to voice mail. I rent motel rooms by the hour and I buy whiskey and dump it into the sink. Buy cases of beer and dump the beer in the toilet, can by can. I battle the walls, the tame paintings above the sad beds. I brew all the coffee. I write letters on the motel stationary. I tell of all the breathing that happens in a night, the ceiling closing in. I lie about complex plots with alien battles and ray guns that have me wandering the streets like a bumbling fool, getting picked up by brawny police officers and ducked into squad cars for various crimes I will never commit. I confess all of my sins. I put the letters in envelopes and mail them to random addresses.
Every night I drive home and circle the block where my house sits and wonder what I must look like in there. Me, with the best body. I see food on the table and in the refrigerator and the cupboards. I see children who swarm my knees with their happily pounding, untainted hearts. The children have my wife’s eyes: eyes that pluck at my heart. Eyes that avert to other places like it’s my fault. Like it is my body that hung the planets in space. Like it is my body that holds up this earth. Like it is my body that made things the way they are. I slide the key in the lock and I go inside and my family and I stare at each other and wait, like eyes adjusting to light.