Author: Mariah Perkins

Categories
Nonfiction for Issue 5

On Razor Ramon Entering The Ring For The First Time & The Last Time – Brian Oliu

 

If something happens to this, something is going to happen to you, he said, and he meant it: gold necklaces wet from the dunking of a head under water before walking amidst the crowd, the sound of a car either screeching to a stop or beginning to accelerate into something faster—the pacing of coming or going as mysterious as anything in this world where all will eventually be revealed. Of course, we know how the film ends, but we forget it to make ourselves feel more luxurious: say hello to the bad guy is not the line, but it is now—our unlikely hero’s last stand as the smoke rises from nowhere, red carpet and red walls as bodies cascade down staircases like a dropped coin. The way he remembers it must be different: no watching of black and white screens turning to lines of snow, a body face down in a blue pool while blood swims to the surface of a world that no one owns.

We see him walking through a market in a place where he claims he lives—a place more glamorous and spirited than an island of pines, a place where he is allowed to take anything he wants with a swipe of his gold fingered-hand. He bites through the skin of a plum and chews: once, twice. He spits the pulp in our direction—not out of dislike for the fruit, but for emphasis: that this is something that he can do and he will do. How impressive it is, to see someone this bad, with this much disdain—to take something of value and make it worthless simply because it is in our heart to do so, to love and to leave, to be graceful and yet spin in circles, mumbling into the plywood.

If we are to speak of ends cut short, here’s something: while waiting for the bus, I would double girls over and flip them up over my head—shoulder blades resting on the back of my head, arms outstretched like a crucifix, like I am carrying the Lord in the form of a hundred pound teenager: one of the poor ones, the ones with the jeans with words and symbols written on the thighs, pictures I wish I could trace with even just a finger—yet this is where all things are lost at that age: with delicateness, with deliberateness. We are all going to fall some day—the most we can hope for is that we fall forward into something beautiful, something lavender.

Of course, I never fall: she slides down my back and lands on her feet until she asks me to do it again—never a fear of falling, never a fear of death by diamonds, never a fear of sending anyone neck first on the concrete for I am gentle: I am not a bad guy and she will never say good morning or good night or any of those things because there is no time for salutations. She will die on her own without my assistance: the death dropping from within, the first time I saw pale raised lines where the skin has died, as if someone had erased pigment with a broken pencil, as if we are left with nothing but the ghost of someone chanting your name from the tops of ladders.

This counts, and we are shocked: a misstep, a crooked flight, and a disappearance—none of this was supposed to happen. No one deserves this final image of rage, no one deserves a body bloated as if it were found washed ashore on the river, shaking with nothing, the rattling of cuts. I think of you, flat on the ground before your eyes roll back, and I am sorry—you with your thin bones, your thin hair, and my fat fingers, you impossible to pick up from the ground, you flush with the cement, you, sharper than the day you were lifted, chin to the sky.

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Categories
Fiction Issue 5

Interview with the Ghost of Jaws’ First Victim – Meagan Cass

 

What I wanted was to get laid. We had pot, a bonfire, cable knit sweaters. The night was scalloped with acoustic guitar. He was on vacation from a Greenwich prep, tan with butter blond hair, a member of the rowing team. I knew to make myself mysterious, to weave the dunes on the balls of my feet, to trail garments, to play at Little Mermaid years before the Disney version.

Like the sound of a drunk driving crash on the L.I.E. Like a hundred cosmetic scissors stabbing my legs. It took forever.

He’d fallen asleep.

After: men ball pointing my name on reporter pads, on autopsy reports; men in badges hammering warnings to telephone poles; men netting their wives’ roasts for bait; men in small boats wielding long harpoons; men with cold fathers, war stories, advanced degrees, a love of whiskey; men eager to hunt their jerry-rigged Moby Dick. Also boys swimming for merit badges, boys sailing play crafts, boys pretending to be sharks, fins strapped to their backs. The wives and mothers lay on Macy’s towels, adjusted straw hats, watched the sea.

What can I say about what I dreamed, what I would have become? They wrote me flat as a girl on a beach town billboard, bikinied, hip cocked, welcoming men to forget their wives’ stretch marks and winter tweed, their kids’ test scores and fall allergies, their station wagon commutes, their happy hour guts, their weaknesses, their own monstrousness. I was the siren they had to kill off to continue their quest.

Should I tell you I loved archaeology? Would you like to picture me on a plane to Peru, my perfect hair tucked beneath a bucket hat, my purse filled with bone brushes and trowels? Archaeology Barbie?

Call my family in North Hempstead. Tell my mother I was beautiful before the end, my body backlit with moonlight, my long hair waving. Tell my father I actually liked cribbage. Tell my sister to stop plucking above her eyebrows, to be wary of boys from Connecticut.

 

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Categories
Uncategorized

Interview with Kallie Falandays

Hi blog followers. I got the chance to interview our editor in chief, Kallie Falandays, to give you a glimpse of one of the minds behind mojo. Enjoy!

 

Matthew DeAngelis: I’ll start with an easy one. How did you come to be involved with mojo? What has kept you involved?

 

Kallie Falandays: I became involved with mojo during my first year as an MFA student at Wichita State. I started as a reader and I fell in love with reading submissions and discussing which poems should be featured in the issue and why. Composing an issue is sort of like making a mix-tape in that what comes before an after a poem can affect the way it is read, and I want to be a part of that, so I applied to become an editor and, well, here we are.

MD: When you first started at the journal, what was the publication’s mission? How has this changed since you’ve been here?

 

KF: When I started (which was only a year ago), the mission was kind of the same: to publish great works from new and emerging literary voices and to put together beautiful publications (both online and in print).

 

MD: It has only been a year! So when you read a submission, what are the first things that turn you off about a piece?

 

KF: The first thing that turns me off about a piece is lack of detail. I don’t want to read a poem that anyone could have written; I want to read the poem that only you could have written.
MD: And what keeps you reading?

 

KF: It depends on the poem–I like poems that do something interesting with language. Something different. I like experimental work, so I usually keep reading poems that are quirky or odd in some way.

 

MD: I know cover letters are always a tricky aspect of seeking publication. With regards to cover letters, any advice for our readers? What shouldn’t they put in a cover letter?

 

KF: Keep your cover letters simple. Or fun. Just don’t be mean. It’s always cool when you can tell that a reader actually reads your magazine: putting the name of the genre editor in the cover letter is always a good idea.

 

MD:  Interesting info. What types of submissions to you believe mojo should be publishing?

 

KF: I think mojo should publish pieces that push the boundaries. There are so many literary journals out there, that I think it’s best if we publish work that makes us feel like mountains or rivers, whatever that means. It is good to finish reading a poem and want to read it over and over and over again. I hope we publish work like that.

MD:  Has there ever been a piece that you recall fighting tooth and nail for that ended up not getting published?

 

KF: Oh, many pieces! Sometimes we disagree, and sometimes that involves fighting. Although I haven’t physically assaulted anyone over a poem. That is yet to come

 

MD: And if you could change one thing about mojo what would it be?

 

KF: That’s a great question. I would make the next issue a pop-out issue full of handwritten poems and pop-out postcards and stickers. I want something that would be cool to put on my bookshelf. Maybe that’s what we will do next. Maybe something like Nox or Saporta’s Composition No. 1.

 

MD:  How would you like to see mojo improve in the future?

 

I hope mojo can continue to be a publication that showcases great work by great authors. I hope we can gain more readers and I hope we can continue to listen to suggestions that our readers give us.

 

MD: If you were in charge of your own literary journal, what would you call it and why? What kinds of work would you publish?

 

KF: I am! It is called Kenning (www.kenningjournal.com) because a kenning is a compound word (like whale-road) that uses figurative language in the place of a more regular noun. We call it kenning because we try to bridge the gap between page poetry & spoken word. We publish poems side-by-side with sound files of readings & we just started accepting videos, so we will start to publish those as well.

 

And that’s all for us today! Check us out next week for another editor interview as we continue to offer you some of the voices behind mojo!

Categories
Blog

Delivering an Unboxed Pizza with Your Bare Hands: An Interview with Luke Geddes

 

In this mojo blog exclusive, former and future neighbors Luke Geddes and Woody Skinner set out to discuss Luke’s debut collection, I Am a Magical Teenage Princess, but end up talking about Sega Genesis, Tony’s pizzas, and Tolstoy.

 

Woody Skinner:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, so your book gives readers an idea of your perspective on mid-century teenage culture, but mojo wants to know where you stand on the really big stuff.  For instance, which 90s depiction of teenagers is more important today–Twin Peaks or Saved by the Bell?  Don’t sidestep this question with some evasive witticism!

 

Luke Geddes:  I think what this question is really asking is: Kelly Kapowski or Audrey Horne? And don’t try to tell me that a reasonable argument can be made for Jessie Spano, Lisa Turtle, Donna Hayward (Laura Flynn Boyle or Moira Kelly version), Maddy Ferguson, Lucy Moran et al., for every conflict the human race has ever faced–world wars, turmoil in the Middle East, the cola wars, the choice of whether to ask Santa Claus for Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo, etc., etc., etc. can be reduced to this single binary: perky 90s babe or mercurial femme fatale? And it’s a question I must evade. The audience for my book is small enough that I simply can’t afford to alienate either lucrative demographic. Anyway, it’s too hard. It’s tantamount to making choose between Betty and Veronica, and I refuse to do so. Next question!

 

P.S. The answer is Audrey Horne. And Veronica.

 

WS:  So, basically, what you’re saying is that the Sega Genesis is the femme fatale of game consoles?  Are you finally admitting Sega’s superiority to Super Nintendo?

 

LG:  OK, Sega Genesis is the femme fatale in the sense that, like the archetypal noir femme fatale, its surface appearance–slick, black, with sexy futuristic curves–belies the ugliness of its heart: a shoddy piece of 1990s gaming hardware with an affected, instantly dated ’90s ‘tude. Have you held a Genesis controller in your hands lately? Playing any game that requires any subtlety of movement or reflex with that thing is like trying to a deliver an unboxed pizza with your bare hands. Maybe that thing works for your meatheaded Genesis titles–your beat ’em ups, your superficially fast and sloppy platformers, your derivative sports franchises–but compared to the SNES controller which, with its 6 intuitively placed buttons  fits my womanly hands so snugly I feel as if it were born with it umbilically attached, it’s a poor man’s Atari joystick (really–these message board nerds confirm it). I’m afraid you’ve got the analogy all wrong. Kelly is the Genesis: easy, meretricious, trying-too-hard. Audrey is the SNES: timeless, classic, the ideal specimen of its type.

 

 

WS:  Now that we’re on the subject of ideal specimens, I want to discuss the characters in your collection.  While all of your characters are excellently rendered, a couple of the most memorable are not people but appliances:  the enormous TV and Ursula, the sexbot-turned-spaceship-housemother.  Your depiction of these figures raises some important questions.  Should we be more considerate of our appliances?  How do we keep them from taking over our lives?  How do we dispose of them without leading to their tragic demise?

 

LG:  I don’t know how to begin to answer this question other than to say that as a kid I hated the movie The Brave Little Toaster, not because it was bad or boring (though I’m pretty sure it is), but because it made me sad. Also, The Lemonheads’ “Stove” is the most affecting song of the 90s alternative rock/grunge era. Kurt Cobain, Shmurt Shmobain. And isn’t any wonder how many hoarders (not to mention hoarding-based reality TV programs) there are now that Pixar has personified practically everything?

 

Appliances have already taken over our lives, or at least I wish they would take over our lives. Mark Zuckerberg, Google, et al. have the wrong idea about the future; I don’t want to be connected 24/7 to my online social networks via computer-glasses or brain-connected nanobots. I get depressed enough when I go on facebook the requisite 79 times a day, why would I want to be perpetually reminded that everyone else is having more fun than me? I want to blend smoothies in my naval and have waffle irons hinging my armpits. I want my brain to microwave a Tony’s french bread pizza and my nostrils to dispense the freshly grated parmesan cheese. I want to watch Dobie Gillis on the back of one eyelid and read the Mary Worth microfiche archives on the back of the other. That is my ideal cyborg future.

 

WS:  Many of the reviews of your book–which were written by people much smarter than me–have focused on subject matter.  These stories reanimate characters from an array of pop culture forms–comic books, cartoons, surfer movies, musicals, etc.  While more thoughtful readers have considered the thematic implications of this material, I find myself wondering about the logistics of your pop culture education.  In other words, what cable package did your family have when you were growing up? 

 

LG:  This is your best question yet! At one point we had both the extended Time Warner cable package and a decent Dish Network package. Cable and satellite at the same time! I am pretty sure the reasoning was that during this period was that Time Warner lacked both the Cartoon Network and TV Land, yet we had to retain the cable so we could have a television set in every room of the house except for the bathroom. This was the classic era when Cartoon Network was 85% reruns of crappy Hanna Barbera series that only my parents remembered from hazy 1970s Saturday mornings and TV Land was all Hogan’s Heroes, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, etc., not The Hughleys and Friends or whatever the hell they show on it nowadays. Making sure their children had access to these types of programs seemed very important to my parents, and I guess you could say it had more of an impact on my writing “career” than being read aloud to as a child.

 

WS:  You were raised in the Central Time Zone, but now you’re on Eastern Standard Time in Cincinnati.  How has this change affected your television habits?

 

LG:  Well, the biggest difference, Woody, is that when I moved to Cincinnati, I lost my main source for watching shitty cable TV all night, i.e. you and your house, and so I’m sorry to say I’ve watched much less Freaky Eaters and Strange Sex since the move. I’ve always been a big proponent of the Central TV schedule; primetime starts at 7 and is over by 9 or 10, so you can watch all your shows before you go out and not have to worry about catching up later. I’m starting to see the benefits of Eastern, though, but only because I can still make it home in time to watch my shows even when I have a night class. But on the other hand, I find it harder to justify staying up till 11 when I’m teaching at 8AM the next day that I haven’t prepared for it. Let’s put it this way: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the first 15 minutes of every episode of Nashville and I spend a lot of time wondering whether that’s too much or not enough.

 

WS:  Obviously, your collection is thematically anchored by its focus on teenagers, but many of the stories–including “Mom’s Team vs. Dad’s Team,” “Invasion,” “He’s a Rebel,” and “The Enormous Television Set”—slyly investigate familial relationships.  Is this simply an inevitable consequence of writing about teenagers, or have you found yourself—indirectly, improbably–working within the Midwestern tradition of writing about dysfunctional families?

 

LG:  You’re just trying to lend this interview some semblance of seriousness and credibility by getting me to quote Tolstoy, aren’t you? Well, I won’t do it. Suck it, Tolstoy!

 

 

WS:  Archetypes–your book has them.  Is there anything smart you want to say about them?  Would it be fair to say that many of these stories explore tensions between the archetypal and the individual?  

 

LG:  What you said sounds pretty good. If I were forced to add something I’d say that the characters we encounter in the broad cultural landscape are far from “round” or “dynamic” or “deep” and still they retain a perhaps unhealthy but significant meaning and emotion for many, many people. People prefer–often with a passion–one breakfast cereal mascot to another, wear Batman and Spider-Man t-shirts in almost religious sense, tattoo Bugs Bunny or Tinkerbell onto their arms and legs, etc. Yet when it comes to literature, a lot of goons like James Wood and John Gardner would have us believe that the writer must create “real” people–or at least facsimiles of “real” people–in order for characters to sufficiently move the audience. I think writers could learn something from advertisers in this sense; when even the character Captain Crunch elicits an emotional response from the auditor, be it childhood nostalgia or desire or hunger, it calls into question how crucial elements like relatability and depth are to character.

 

 

WS:  Most author interviews have questions on process, presumably because the interviewer doesn’t know what else to ask.  I have now run out of questions, but I don’t want to know about the angle of your pen when you write or the shade of light that leads to the best characterizations.  You like antiques as much as (or more than) writing, so would you be willing to tell us a bit about your antiquing process?  Start with the music selection on the way to the antique store.

 

LG:  Although obviously I am a great fan of 1950s and 1960s popular and rock music, I usually go with something more contemporary, as it’s very likely that the antique mall or show, if it’s indoors, will be piping the local oldies station and I don’t want to get fatigued by that stuff. (I’d like you to imagine this parenthetical aside as a long screed against the dearth of variety on most oldies stations, the decline of the 50s/60s format in favor 60s/70s/80s–or worse, JACK FM–formats, as well as a not-too-subtle boasting of my own superior knowledge of a diverse range of early rock ‘n’ roll music.) I like music that follows the basic tropes of classic pop music–short, catchy, somewhat repetitive, somewhat simple–with slightly more contemporary (or maybe I just mean “punker”) elements–speed, sloppiness, bare-bones recording quality. Add a subtle undertone of kitsch–so long as it doesn’t regress into base novelty and the music retains an overall sincerity–and you’ve got your perfect antiquing tunes. An antiquing mixtape would have stuff from The B-52’s first album, early Blondie, Marshall Crenshaw, Pixies, Beat Happening, Jesus & Mary Chain, Black Lips, The Cramps, Jonathan Richman, and my fave Cincinnati bands Tweens, The Harlequins, and The Tongue & Lips.

 

Upon arriving at the antique mall/show, my process entails plotting out an intricate and carefully measured route so that I don’t miss a single case, shelf, or booth. I could go on about this for pages and pages, so I’ll just summarize by saying that I’ve never gone hunting, never really played any sports or done any of that traditional manly stuff, but I imagine the intense concentration and series of intuitive  observations and micro-calculations (e.g. noticing that certain color combinations in booth decoration suggests booths with more certain potential, predicting how much time to spend in each aisle given the mall’s impending closing hours and my wife’s mounting boredom, pondering the ratio of my desire to a given item’s price, etc.) I bring to antiquing is similar. To witness me antiquing is to see me at both my best and my worst.

 

WS:  You have exactly three hours to spend perusing antiques.  Do you visit a big-box antique mall or a carefully curated mom-and-pop place?  You can’t do both.  Be honest!  

 

LG:  Easy. Always go with the antique mall. I am the explorer, the collector, the shopper. It’s my job to curate, not the store’s. Otherwise there’s no joy in it. The diversity of the mall’s merchandise trumps every time. The antique mall’s messiness, sloppiness, its layer of dust over every square inch–to me these are all benefits.

 

WS:  What shade of light leads to the best characterizations?

 

LG:  The light of the computer monitor as the writer looks something up on Wikipedia.

 

Luke’s book, described by Publisher’s Weekly as a “rewarding and unusual collection,” may be purchased here.

 

Luke Geddes is the author of I Am a Magical Teenage Princess. He is a Ph.D. student in literature and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.

 

Woody Skinner is a recent graduate of Wichita State’s MFA program; he’ll soon be joining Luke in the Ph.D. program at the University of Cincinnati.

Categories
Blog

Review of Bill Neumire’s Estrus

 

Last year Bill Neumire won our staff prize for his poem  “Think of the Mercy of Volcanoes” which appeared in mojo 2 and closes his recent book, Estrus.   The book was released by Alrich Press. Neumire’s collection establishes a speaker in combat.  The central drama of these poems is rooted in a recurrent claim made in the book, “The only thesis against nothing/ is everything.” The poems themselves struggle with whether or not this assertion can be proved. The high moments of the book, such as the poet’s joy in his children, argue for the value and mystery of everything. In contrast, the bleaker poems stress the arbitrariness of the physical world. Consider the closing poem, “the angel of orreries is spinning/ your galaxy, sending an asteroid/ toward your favorite city. Do not worry/ you do not know yet.” By connecting traditional symbols with the horrors of physics, he creates a devastating image then snidely undercuts it by insisting that we find comfort in our ignorance. As the poems oscillate between these two ideologies, the poet deftly threads the depth and agility of the metaphysicals with William’s insistence that one must not only search for the vividness in things, but also create something of value from one’s interaction with them.

The early sections of the book ground the speaker’s ideas in an experienced reality. Rather than praise the physical world, Neumire establishes the industrial complex as an enemy that can swallow the self. In poems such as “It’s the Hour of the Furnace,” “Father is the Factory,” or “My Father at the Bone Factory” one is reminded of James Wright’s fear of Southern Ohio’s industry.  However, the poet’s metaphysical heritage separates him from the deep imagist.  Neumire writes,

    …There’s no sleep

for us since Marx confessed

we can only ask what we can answer:

in a factory that never closes

my father worked until they buried him

in cogs & now I run the graveyard

& pray to the angel of stillness

& dark matter. Some nights..

The strained chain of causality which asserts that Marx’s confession leads to a factory worker’s doom weds the realms of introspection to the image. The insertion of the first person shows Neumire’s ability to expand the image by linking the problem of the industrialization and relationships to the incomprehensibility of contemporary physics. The techniques seem to be rooted in the French surrealist tradition. Neumire establishes causality, then after we get on board with it, he undercuts it by praying to a non-deity (dark matter) which can only be uncaring. The speaker, however, follows this gesture with agency rooted in real action. Later, he collects the junk left over by consumerism and solders it into “a porcupine/ or a man’s injured ego.”  Implying perhaps that the art of creation (artistic or industrial) allows people to bring meaning to the world even if it can only result in an imperfect self.

In addition to the poems rooted in the implied past of the speaker, Neumire’s “Think of” poems add a unity to the book. These poems allow the poet to again clash the ideas that interest him in a series of interesting catalogs. Like Whitman, his lists are founded upon a clever manipulation of the second person. By telling his speaker to “think”, he creates the sort of intimacy found between a mentor and tutee. In “Think of the Bioluminescence You Do Not Emit,” he writes,

        Think of how dull your skin is

        against the dark. How no spark ruptures

        into the evening waving out

        into the antique neighborhood

        of retired engineers & sleepy hounds.

        How many Aprils have you gutted the house,

        sick of what you’ve gathered?

In these lines the agility of the poem is on display. The “think” phrase guides the reader into a command; the repetition of the into’s creates speed for the poem which allows him to leap to a personal question.  In essence, the question of our lack of light becomes one of our worth which, like in other of Neumire poems, he’s happy to problematize, but prefers to leave in doubt rather than outright dismiss.

Taken as a whole, Neumire’s collection feels right for the contemporary moment. The poet’s mastered the immediacy of the New York school but refuses to adhere to the non-chalance of its descendents. Instead, he tackles the question of meaning by using the things left to us in the contemporary era: broken factories and suburbs, scientific miracles, and the tradition of deep philosophical unrest. The miracle of the collection is that he tackles these themes with poems that are immediately accessible, sometimes playful or heartbreaking, but almost always interesting. The collection can be found for purchase through the Aldrich press website: http://aldrichbookpublishing.blogspot.com/ or on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Estrus-Bill-Neumire/dp/0615768261.

–JM