Mean | Colette Labouff Atkinson

Wife two was a stripper. And sweet, as well. He traded her in for me. To people I don’t know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like that: trading in a sweet stripper for me. Not a homemaker. Not home much at all. Not sweet. More like my grandfather, Jimmy Grieco. Mean. My mother likes to describe the blue-sky day when she bought me a helium balloon and I let it go. I was six. I begged for another. She said, okay, but, if you let this one go, I’m really going to be mad. I nodded, took the string in my hand, held tight, and then opened my hand flat so the balloon lifted and its string slipped up and away. You were never sweet, my mother says.

 ***

In Vegas, a few weeks ago, Jimmy and I sorted photographs in his double-wide just off Boulder Highway. My mother stood on the sidelines. She hates how I ask Jimmy for the hard stories. Tell me about the moonshine. Tell me about the dead kids. Tell me how your mother saved the family by burning down the farm. Jimmy’s crooked finger points to a picture of the family. That was Leonard. He was deaf and dumb. Died at twelve. That was Vincent. The baby who fell off the staircase without a rail. Dead at two. Then there’s his mother, surrounded by her children. She was tough, he says. Tough. When Chicago’s Black Hand demanded ten thousand dollars, she stuffed five grand in her apron, grabbed my grandfather—then five—and took him to deliver the money. That’s all you’ll ever get, she said, and don’t touch my kids or I’ll kill you.

 ***

My grandfather never asks about the first or second wife. I don’t have to tell him that ballerina-fable. He knows I’m three and mean. He knows it for his whole life. His first, my grandmother, was like sugar. He burned her, abandoned her in LA, raced to Mexico, paved road turning to dirt; he ate prickly pear, maybe, on the way to his quick divorce. And, though he won’t tell this story, his own father lived, first, with a sweet woman on a wheat farm, far south in Craco, Italy. He boarded a ship, told his wife he’d send for her, and then fled to New York. And in an apartment on Mulberry Street, he met up with the new girlfriend and they disappeared into their new world. She wasn’t pretty. She was tough. She got busted twice for making moonshine. Her sons loved her. She was mean.

On the Mona Lisa | Anne Carson

Every day he poured his question into her, as you pour water from one vessel into another, and it poured back. Don’t tell me he was painting his mother, lust, et cetera. There is a moment when the water is not in one vessel nor in the other - what a thirst it was, and he supposed that when the canvas became completely empty he would stop. But women are strong. She knew vessels, she knew water, she knew mortal thirst.

How to Cheat at Poker | Carol Guess & Daniela Olszewska

Paint your toenails in the shade of mirror.  Wear open-ended shoes.  Glint with the best of them.  Move to Kansas City.  Pop out of a cake.  Wearing thirteen flavors of frosting.  Your hair teased all heiress-like.

Vouch for the jacks.  When you know someone who knows someone with chips.  Substitute an accent; exaggerate a cough.  Get high and mighty up in the prescription medicines aisle.  Stay in your long sleeves and multiple pockets.  Fold prettily.  An origami made into luck.

Wear photos of strange children in a locket that dangles off-angle. Lean into stranger danger. Take wrong ones to bed. Mornings, demand a pastry case wheeled into your room by a bevy of showgirls. Hide kings and aces in plumes and pasties. Burn anything evidence. Bury the key.

Leave no luck to chance. Change cities and dogs. Tiptoe down stairways and listen, rouged rogue. Get caught up with red hands. Learn faint-sway. Learn slipknot and slideknot. Learn a different lesson from the one they try and teach you.  Make bank.

*

(via diode, v5n1)

This excerpt is from a series of prose poems/flash fictions, How to Feel Comfortable With Your Special Talents, a collaborative work based on the titles of WikiHow articles. 

Endangered Species | Bob Hicok

Very busy sensing there’s nothing down the train tracks except remembering there are only five remaining speakers of Mohave. There might be a loose and rusted spike, a smashed bottle of Bud is likely if I walk long enough into picturing a basketball team of old men and women in a gym in Oklahoma bouncing an orange ball against a team made up of how the rest of the world can’t understand them. Coal trains come through here, taking across the mountains what we’ve taken from the mountains, I think this is like walking over cows while eating a burger, and feel filled up on the empty feeling night is good at bringing to me like flowers before a date. Here, night says, I brought you this bouquet of gone, and it occurs to me these are the flowers of negation the man who spent a night in a foxhole with a dead Viet Cong was handed over and over. He doesn’t talk about that, there’s not a single speaker I know of the language called “this is what it’s like to dig a hole and be alive in your death with the example of what that looks like.” Nor am I the last speaker of the language called “I will too often use crows to express my deepest self,” which it turns out is only centimeters below the surface, now that we’re trying to go metric. The gravel sounds like breakfast cereal eaten straight from the box. If night is crows touching wings somehow in place, stars their eyes and the moon a hole in the patient of crows to obliterate, only the air, with its high absorption rate for dead languages, could speak of this to the past, which I’ve been trying my whole life to get in touch with. So the last speaker of Mohave will soon be sitting on the edge of her bed, noticing for the last time the beauty of cups, the entirety of their existence the honor of holding and giving over, emptying fullness into the empty mouth, and she will whisper a word the cup has heard many times over, and when she’s dead, someone will take the cup away without putting it to their ear to listen to the last, the entire ocean of what is left of a people. They will be gone, the cup taken to a new life full of waiting for water to come. I understand that sensation most of all, feeling there should be something inside me there’s not a word for in English or Urdu or Wichita. In grunt, perhaps, in the language I’ve called “heat this blade upon the stove and press it against your forearm,” absolutely. If languages have to die, kill that one. Every time I walk it down these tracks and leave it, it drags its way back and kisses the neck of my sleep with its teeth.

Blueberry Tea | Gregory Sherl

I usually remember being sweaty. I always remember the soft parts of her thigh, and when my tongue gets numb, I remember how it got that way. We drink blueberry tea in the yard. All of her lips are here. I watch them crowd around the cup. I wear her around town, and everyone focuses on her blue mouth and blue lips. Her eyes, they didn’t drink the blueberry tea. They drank the dirt in the yard; they drank some coffee with just enough cream. We sit and watch the weather. She says It was more fun yesterday. I say Don’t worry, I recorded it. Let me put the tape in. I drag the TV out into the yard. I play the tape of yesterday’s weather. She says The popcorn tasted better yesterday. I say That’s because I haven’t made it yet. The air in front of us feels heavy. Behind us, it’s basically the same air. I open my mouth, and it feels like that.

Hello, you. This is a scrambled mashup of whatever catches me at the moment. The intended purpose of hoarding these odds & ends is to enliven, amuse, jolt, intrigue, & otherwise move myself-- & anyone who may be passing through.

Also, I write here: dirty laundry, & maintain a sex & sexuality-themed blog here: debaucherie. Come visit!